Lots of tweets and social media posts are showcasing the major personal events of the past decade. I threw together a quick list myself, but thought that it could be worthwhile to go through with a bit more detail. As far as I can remember, here are some of the interesting things that happened in the twenty-teens.
2010 The decade began with me and a fellow teacher doing a short film Winterim. (Winterims will be brought up in each year for the simple reason that they're actually something different in my otherwise pretty consistent teaching career.) This was my second year at the school, but the first year as a full-time teacher. By the time March came along, my second child was born, which was a different experience than the first one--having a wireless baby was new and exciting. Not only that, but the delivery wasn't as hard on my wife, which was great: I couldn't understand how women could have more children when I saw how badly it hurt my wife to give birth our first. With Number Two arriving, I comprehended that births usually don't lay up the mother for a solid week. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of hospital stuff that year. Son Number Two had a condition called hypospadias, so he had to have a minor surgery along with a circumcision. Not only that, but Son Number One had his third--and, thus far, last--heart surgery to correct his tricuspid atresia, which consumed the entirety of June. At the time, we lived in our townhome, which fit our family just fine. We kept going forward with work and school (I was taking night classes to get an endorsement in history). I began work on what I thought would be my magnum opus, Writ in Blood. This would consume my writing for a couple more years. Come August, the curriculum I had taught for the past two years shifted a bit, pushing the 10th grade toward a broader swath of history. Instead of going from middle ages to the Victorian era, I now taught from the Italian Renaissance up to modern day. This shift was (so far) the biggest change in my curricula that I've had to adjust to. I'm glad that we did, as I much prefer what I teach now. Still, it was one of the biggest changes in my career. Just before Thanksgiving Break, the school moved buildings. We went from a refurbished bowling alley to a custom made school. Though I've moved rooms a couple of times since those days, I am happy to report that we haven't had to move the entire school again. That's a relief, I must say. 2011 I started this year teaming up with the same teacher as the previous year. This time, we did a Garage Band Winterim, where we set the kids up in small bands, had them compose a song, and then perform it for the parents at Winterfest. This was fun, as it gave me a chance to play the guitar more than I normally do, and the students did--for the most part--a really great job. Most of this year is pretty unremarkable, save for a couple of things. One, I pressed on with Writ in Blood, which remains one of the books that I'm most proud of, despite the fact that it was flatly rejected during submissions and rather ruined when I went back and tried to tinker with the thing. The second is that this is the year that I deeply studied World War II. That gave me a whole new way of seeing this monumental event, which is something that I try to transmit to my students every year, even now. I believe we went to Disneyland this year for the first time with our oldest. He loved it to pieces. 2012 Thus began one of the biggest pivots of my life: I taught the Harry Potter Winterim to nine students. Then, with them, my wife, and my coteacher, we flew out to Orlando to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The class was inexpressibly impactful, and it ended up changing not just how I viewed the book series, but sent me down a path I never expected: I started playing quidditch. This came about because we learned how to play with the Winterim, but the enjoyment of the sport led to creating an actual team. I joined the Crimson Fliers during the summer of 2012, which I pursued for four years or so. I still love and deeply miss quidditch, in part because of its connection to such a special experience (the Harry Potter Winterim specifically, but Harry Potter more broadly, too), but also because the people I met during quidditch are some of the most remarkable human beings I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. It's a scar--one that will likely remain with me for another decade. I continued working on Writ in Blood as I finished up my history endorsement. Back then, I would go to class on Saturday mornings, take three hours of notes, eat a high-calorie, low-cost lunch at Burger King, then slam out a chapter or two at the UVU library before heading home. I really enjoyed this, as it allowed me time to write. By this point, I had stopped teaching three sections of Socratic Seminar and instead had things like mythology or two sections of creative writing to help round out my teaching day. That sort of flexibility remains with me to this day, meaning I have two sections of Socratic 10 and two elective classes of different stripes. The election of 2012 was a divisive one (aren't they all?) and it was the first time since '08 that I was more than just dimly aware of politics. Because I'm Mormon (you know: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), there was, I think, an assumption that I'd be voting for Mittens Romney; I didn't. I think about that election a lot--how the GOP tried a nice guy approach and was soundly defeated, so they went with the most vile they could and won--and how the world might be different had Baseball Mitt had taken the White House. At the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with Agent Orange. 2013 This Winterim saw me making comic books with the students. Like almost all of the Winterims of the decade, I taught with another teacher. This time, it was the art teacher, who's also a big comic book fan. It was a fun experience, but in the aftermath of what 2012 had done for me, it wasn't particularly memorable. By the time 2013 rolled around, I was pretty established in my career. There was a reputation at the school to maintain, plenty of stuff to keep me busy, and the addition of our third child--another boy, bringing our family to its full allotment. I turned thirty that year, which meant a lot to me at the time. I think the idea of having finished my twenties with every goal checked off save one (being published) was significant. I think this also gave me a bit of an existential crisis, as I didn't really have a lot else to try to do. Not that this year specifically stands out to me, but I should point out that every year, Gayle and I went down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, both during the summer and again in the fall with the students. We had family vacations of all different sorts, though I'm hard pressed to remember what we did each year. I do know that in the fall of 2013, though, I got a new assignment: Teaching the Shakespeare class. I remember this specifically because I sat with my newest son on my lap, reading Twelfth Night aloud to him as he slept. It was a pleasant experience, to say the least, but it was all in preparation of teaching the Concurrent Enrollment English 1010 class with a fellow teacher at the school. So it was equal parts preparation and pleasure, I suppose. The Shakespeare class was greatly enhanced by what came around at the end of the year and beginning of the next. Over Thanksgiving Break in 2013, I left the country for the first time: I took a short trip to Paris to better prepare for Winterim 2014. This was surprisingly impactful to me, and I rely on my Parisian experience whenever I'm teaching my students about Les Misérables or French history--especially the First World War. There's something profound about being in the places where history happens, and I'm hopeful that someday--not that I've any idea how it'll happen--I can return to Europe and England. 2014 This was the Winterim that has the largest effect on me, followed by the World Wars Tour (2017) and my first Harry Potter (2012). I and a dozen or so students flew out to England and had a literary tour. We visited the big tourist sites (and sights), including the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus. But we had special additions: Seeing John Milton's grave, visiting Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's grave, and the Harry Potter backstage museum in Watford. We saw the Eagle and Child (where Tolkien and Lewis would meet and talk about their fictional worlds that have made such a large difference in my life), Cambridge, Oxford, and many other places that will always live on in my mind as foundational. It was truly a remarkable experience. With that sort of a high, it was difficult to return to the normalcy of 2014. I had finished Writ in Blood sometime between 2013 and 2014, and having spent over three years on a single book, I decided to no longer try to write sprawling behemoths. Instead, I began what is my normal way of working, which is to make a novel that's between 50- and 100,000 words. The first experience I had with that was writing Chelsea Washington and the Pathway of Night, my only attempt at a young adult novel. I'm still pretty happy with it, at least in terms of what I was trying to accomplish, and it really helped set me up with the idea that I can start and end a novel in the same year--in this case, it only took a couple of months. My experiences with quidditch continued apace, and I went to Quidditch World Cup 7 in South Carolina that April. It was wonderful to see so many committed athletes, to try to play better than I had before, and to go through something that I never thought would be a part of my life: Sports. Despite going to England for nearly two weeks, I'm pretty certain we went to Disneyland this year. I know we went at some point around here. Strange to say, it's kind of hard to remember. I do know that it was at the end of this year--right before Thanksgiving, I think--that a couple of important things happened. One, we decided to move out and rent our townhome, thus allowing us to save a bit of money with which to--we hoped--spend on a newer, bigger home. The five of us were feeling a bit cramped. (Also, my calling as Elders' Quorum president had been eating away at me and this would get me out. It's selfish, I know, but that's the truth.) Two, I self-diagnosed myself as having depression. It came about slowly, as I realized that what a lot of people on Twitter were describing was similar to my own experiences. Once I realized that I have some sort of chemical imbalance in my head, a lot of my life started to make more sense. I didn't do anything with this information, per se, but it was an important start. 2015 Winterim this year went to The Lord of the Rings, which involved not only studying the text closely, but having the students try to pull a Tolkien and invent their own languages and secondary worlds. It was pretty fun, and I know that I enjoyed it. Much like the comic book Winterim, however, it hasn't stuck in my mind as strongly as some of the others. This year saw me and a coworker joining forces to tackle the Shakespeare class again, which was necessary because I'm still without a Master's degree. Still, I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in this way, with the texts being the foundation for the different styles of writing that we were teaching the students. Quidditch World Cup 8 happened (again in South Carolina), which I attended with my team. It was fantastic--the Crimson Elite finished 18th in the nation, which is no small thing, in my view. It also marked the last time that I was to play a tournament with my quidditch friend. I retired from quidditch some time between 2015 and 2016 (I don't remember when, exactly). I don't regret that--it was sweet while it lasted, but it couldn't remain. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it. Living with the in-laws was far from an ideal experience, but it did help the way we'd hoped: We were able to get some money saved up for our own house. While we were basement dwellers, my oldest son turned eight, which meant that he decided to be baptized into the Church. I hadn't really anticipated it happening in my in-laws' ward, but my wife and I bought the townhome in January of 2008--eight or nine months before the housing bubble popped. That slowed down our ability to move on from "Old Place" (as we now call it). That summer was a new chapter (lol, pun) in my writing, as I finally mustered up the courage to ask my wife if I could abandon her for the better part of a week to have a writing retreat. I went in the middle of June and wrote most of what I later called Conduits. I wrote 34,443 words (I made a spreadsheet that kept track of the numbers) and had at last figured out how I can best work: Highly focused, in a single place, where my responsibilities can't reasonably be split in any other direction. Since then, I've had numerous retreats, all of which having done a great deal to help my writing along. Oh, and I also started my annual NaNoWriMo tradition this year, too. 2016 This Winterim was really great for me, as it was a chance to teach about dinosaurs. I teamed up with the biology teacher and we had a great time talking about dinosaurs, having the students come up with their own museum layouts, and learning about the terrible lizards. We even visited St. George for a day or two to see some dinosaur-related things, and we got lost in the Nevada desert with a bus full of kids. We made it home all right in the end, and it was a great adventure for us all. By the time spring rolled around, our renters were ready to move on and so were we. We sold our townhome and, with the equity (not much, but some) from it, we were able to move into a much bigger home. New Place (as we call it) is where we still are, and where I'm writing this now. Our first summer in New Place was a busy one, as we moved in on the fifth of July. We had a lot of settling in to do, as well as adjusting to the new commute we'd have every day. Not only that, but I used a week or so right before we moved to go out to the cabin and have a writing retreat. It's become a staple of my summers, now. By the time November came around, Gayle and I were preparing for another European trip--packing bags, making sure we knew where our passports were, getting schedules settled--and then the election came. It's fair to say that I was much more attentive to the entire thing, and the feelings I had about the election are still raw. We had started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack during our move, and so there was a sense of optimism that I'd been harboring for a few months. When the election came out with Clinton having over three million more votes yet still losing the presidency, I had a really hard time believing that America was on the right track. I've yet to change my mind on that. 2017 The World Wars Tour was supposed to be a really powerful and profound experience--and, to an extent, it was--but there's always an issue with time. We spent far too much of it traveling from one place to another, rather than really soaking in what each place had to offer. I definitely would do the tour differently if I had a chance to try again, but the trip wasn't a disaster by any means. It was, as I've mentioned before, an incredible experience that changed my life. Walking through a death camp, through a battlefield, through a museum of collected artifacts, of talking to a man who saw his own father die on the family room floor because of Nazi shells…it was unforgettable. My Shakespeare classes were changing again--we were doing a "Stage and Page" version of the class now--but other than that, there really weren't a lot of big things going down. My writing continued, with some weekly progress in the form of my creative writing classes, though without any sort of progress on the publication front. I'd finished a couple of other books, though I was still reluctant to edit them in any sort of noticeable way. Then summer came, and I brought my writing group along with for a writing retreat. It was very successful--in that month, I wrote over 77,000 words--and it also brought into the world War Golem, the book that I think is the most prepared for some sort of publication. (Whether or not that ever happens is unknown--doubted by me, believed in by most everyone else.) That summer was also remarkable because it was a Disneyland year. I remember this fully, as I got to visit an old high school friend who lives in California. We had a great trip with the Mouse and my friend, including a visit to Blizzard Entertainment campus and seeing some of the neat things they have there. On the way home, I picked up a copy of It from the Barnes and Noble in St. George. That book, as any frequent reader of my essays knows, has also fundamentally changed my life. 2018 I had originally planned on doing a Shakespeare Winterim, but it fell apart at the last minute and I ended up needing to dust off an old one and resubmit it: Thus I taught, for the first time, a repeat Winterim. Ironically, it was the same one that I'd taught my first year--now almost ten years before. The Video Game Winterim was really enjoyable--we played VR games, students invented their ideas for their own video games, and I blew their little minds with some light theory. I wouldn't mind doing that one again, though not for another year or two, methinks. I'd prefer a fresh crop of students--no double dipping. This year marched along in pretty familiar strokes. We did manage to go to Moab for a family vacation during Spring Break, which was a lot of fun. My second son decided to get baptized. My wife and I kept teaching; I kept doing the things that I'd normally do (going to LTUE in February, for example, as I've done every year since the beginning of the decade--I guess I should've mentioned that in 2010, yeah?). One thing I started doing differently in 2018, though, was writing in my reading journal about the things that I thought about whilst reading a book. I don't do that with all of them, but getting into that habit meant a lot. When summer came around, I decided to reread It, this time with pen in hand. Some of my most honest and profound personal thoughts came because of that experience, which is why I love It. I had my writing retreats--solo (56,000 words) and as a group (33,000 words)--and pushed out War Golems, the sequel (it has a plural on it, see?). I haven't looked at the book since I wrote it, but it's never too far from the back of my mind. I'm still not certain how I feel about it, which is probably a good thing--it's not settled, as it were. One remarkable thing about 2018, however, was that I was accepted to a special training at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I went there with a coworker and had a fantastic experience. I saw much of the city, the monuments, and the Library, as well as some time in the Folger Shakespeare Library and I got to handle original, 17th century copies of Paradise Lost. It was definitely a highlight of the year and of my whole life, honestly. 2019 That brings us to this year. My Winterim was on fantasy literature, so we got to go to my wife's happy place, Evermore, and I got to enjoy a lot of time in some of my favorite pieces of literature. Both this year's and 2018's Winterims saw me teaching by myself--there wasn't time to pull someone in on last years, and this year's didn't need another set of hands--but I still had a good time. It was not, perhaps, the most incredible experience I've ever had, but not everything has to be. One of my writing group friends suggested that we pool together some cash and rent an Air BnB for a winter retreat, which we did at the end of January. It was successful, despite being shorter than I'm used to, and I finished up a NaNoWriMo book, as well as worked on a novella I've been picking at for over a year. I ended up with just over 15,000 words for the day and a half of work. A surprise came our way when my wife was offered a slightly different teaching job for the fall of 2019. Instead of teaching six classes of eight grade science, she would only teach three classes and spend the rest of the time as a teaching coach. She decided to go through with it, despite her reservations about the new administration at her school. Summer saw us at Yellowstone National Park--which the boys in particular loved; I liked it, despite having conjunctivitis--as well as a couple of writing retreats (75,000 words between the two) getting some of my novella-project taken care of. The new school year started without me teaching creative writing for the first time in almost a decade, as well as a CE class and a Shakespeare class--separate this time. It has been a fairly straightforward year, though the decade has treated me differently than I had ever anticipated. Never would I have thought that I would be a world traveler; not on a teacher's salary--and, strangely enough, I only went because I'm a teacher. My family has blossomed and continues to grow. My oldest now comes to school with me (he's in 7th grade). I have written over 1.7 million words since I got married, with the vast majority of those being written in the last decade. The one great regret--the largest failure of my goals and thoughts about the future--is that I'm still unpublished. I know that everyone has a different path, a different journey toward being published. Knowing that, however, doesn't really take the sting away. I do hope that I can change that…though I don't know how I will. I'm not really sure what the future holds. For now, it's enough to look forward with some hope, some trepidation, some familiarity, some newness. In short, there's a life in front of me. I now only need to go and live it. Goodness gracious. Well, 2019, I'm really okay that you're leaving. What a year… That isn't to say that some great things didn't happen: They did, and I'm proud of some of what I've achieved in the past dozen months. Still, there was a lot of stress, strain, and sadness that came with the passing of time, and seeing those woes recede in the rearview mirror is fine by me. I can only hope that they don't pursue me into the new decade. Goals--Made, Lost, and Won As I was staring down the barrel of 2019, I wanted to try something different in terms of my readings: I wanted to reread all of Shakespeare's works, as well as go about my reading habits differently. I wanted to spend a lot of time reading certain books, with less emphasis on my nonfiction writing. I also hoped to finish writing some shorter books. Let's see how I did on these, shall we? Shakespeare reading: This one will go down as a definitive brick on my road to hell, as it was made with the best of intentions and was promptly glossed over. I honestly blame 1 Henry VI for being a fair slog that I'd just seen the previous year at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Some of Shakespeare's plays can come up again and again without growing stale. The first part of Henry VI is not one of them. It took me a fair amount of time to read through that one, so though I'm finally in Richard III, it's rather frustrating to be sitting at the end of December and only have six plays finished. Yes, I'm going more slowly because I have pencil in hand as I'm roving through the pages, but that doesn't change the fact that, if given a chance to sit and read some of the Bard, I'll probably find something else to do with my time. This isn't because I don't love Shakespeare--obviously--but because reading his stuff is a lot of work. I usually come home from work having already put forward a lot of work, so the idea of picking up some "light reading" at the end of the day usually means not picking up The Norton Shakespeare. I did acquire quite a bit of Shakespeare-adjacent things, including Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt, Richard III: England's Most Controversial King by Chris Skidmore, and Shakespeare's First Folio by Dr. Emma Smith. My Milton and Shakespeare library grows apace, much faster than my attention span, lamentably. Reading Anew: I had planned on reading one book per quarter, pencil in hand, with an eye toward becoming a deeper reader--as the previous year I ended up reading quite widely. There's nothing wrong with this goal, save my lack of will in completing it. Persuasion by Jane Austen failed to charm me, and I ended up having a really rough time trying to finish the book. With that taking so much longer than I anticipated, I ended up skipping out on whatever else I had planned--though I have read some more in Somme, which is immensely sad (the book, not the amount I've read)--and going back to my default of reading whatever snatched my fancy for the nonce. The pending Harry Potter Winterim, however, did put a monkey-wrench in my summer plans, as I realized that, by mid-July, I would have to start my reread of the entire Harry Potter series. This I did, reading the first three books in the delightful illustrated version, then the final four in my old Scholastic editions, all of which were carefully marked up from the last time I taught the class (back in January 2012). I finished Deathly Hallows a couple of weeks ago. That six month reread ate into the time I might have otherwise spent on the other books I was planning on reading. I'm disappointed by this failure, if I'm being honest. I wanted to broaden my deep-reading skills, but I was flustered by the first choice going so far awry. I still want to read a philosophy, a piece of fiction on my To Be Read pile, and a history book. I still want to improve my reading base. So I may try the same sort of thing in 2020, though appropriately tweaked. And, while I'm on the subject of what I read, I'm going to throw down the list of completed books right here, mostly as a way to remind myself what I finished this year: There are a couple of books I'm missing, I think, which would put me up to about 75 total titles this year. Some interesting (to me) notes: Numbers 48-52, 69, and 72 are unpublished works. Crimson Hands (number 52) is one that I read from a friend in the writers' group. The others are all books that I wrote over the course of the year (more on that below). Other interesting things include that I have absolutely no memory of what Kids These Days is about; it took me a while to remember what Skeleton Keys is; Mother Tongue is an absolute blank in my mind. While I can conjure a couple of thoughts about most of the things on the list, these are some that I don't even know what to think. I also had duplicate readings--not just the normal ones of Les Misèrables or Pride and Prejudice, which I read every year with my students--of things like Why Write? and It. (In the case of Why Write?, I finished it in January, then again in November.) As a matter of blasé interest, I also kept track of my comics, video games, plays, and movies that I enjoyed this year. 1. Fellowship of the Ring I rather doubt this is an exhaustive list. Also, there are still a few days left of the year, and I need to finish watching the Harry Potter movies. In other words, I've another five titles to add to this. I think it's safe to say that I consumed about 100 titles, though how I counted them is rather arbitrary: I counted individual seasons of Upstart Crow, but didn't include any of the Invader Zim or Animaniacs cartoons that I listened to as I shuttled the kids hither and yon during the year. Still, this gives a good sense of what I'm willing to devote my time to, if nothing else.
Nonfiction Writing: This has absolutely decreased this year. Back in 2018, I wrote over 625,000 words. Between my daily essays and the journaling I did, I estimate that about 395,000 of those words were nonfiction. And, though I've still a couple of days to add to the number, my current (not counting this essay) writing levels are these: Nonfiction = 213,000; fiction = 281,000; total (including editing and worldbuilding) = 520,000 words. I'm almost a hundred thousand words behind where I was yesteryear. My fiction output is upped (281,000 in 2019 versus 230,000 in 2018), but my overall word count is lower. In terms of my goal to write less nonfiction, I definitely achieved that. I missed it, however. I really enjoyed putting my thoughts down for all dozen or so readers to see. I liked having the ability to sound off on whatever it was that ate at me, to say nothing of the satisfaction of having written over 600,000 words in twelve months. That's not a small amount of writing, and I feel like it's definitely been a part of my life that I should reincorporate. However, as I look at those estimated numbers, I remember why I decided to ease off on the essays. I've written over a thousand of these things now, and even more than my NaNoWriMo projects, they are abandoned. I don't reread them--heck, I don't even look them over once before publishing them. They're all rough drafts. And, with the exception of the memoir about Shakespeare, I don't think I mind them being anything more than what they are. I'm okay with them being just sketches that never turn into paintings. They're lumps of slightly formed clay. That's fine. The issue is, I've spent hundreds of thousands of words honing my nonfiction writing. I can slap something together with precious little thought and still have it make a bit of sense. This comes because of all of that practice. If I had my druthers, I would want to see that much commitment to my fiction writing. I want to be a fiction writer, not an essayist (and, having read quite a bit by David Sedaris, I know that the expectation and competition in that genre are far above what I think I can attain). I have to put the time in writing fiction if I want to improve how I write fiction. Which leads me to the last goal I wanted to write about… Fiction Writing: I completed a lot of projects this year. I've talked about them before, but in case you've forgotten, I wanted to write a five-novella book that feeds into a novelette--almost like an Avengers-lite, a way of getting to know five characters well, then see them all come together to solve the bigger problem that they were all experiencing (to one degree or another) in their own way. But I had some lingering issues to take care of. The first was my 2018 NaNoWriMo novel, Theomancy. Of all my NaNoWriMo books, this one is perhaps the only one that I'd like to see again--though when and in what way I don't really know. I tend to write an idea, then, if it didn't work, abandon it in favor of something else. So I don't know quite what to do with Theomancy, save knowing that I did like the world, even if (as always happens) the wheels fell off by the end of the story. Theomancy, however, wasn't finished in November of 2018. I let it hover on the edges of my mind until January was about to start. See, in January 2019, I had a winter writing retreat, during which time I decided to finish the NaNoWriMo novel. So while I technically started Theomancy in 2018, I finished it in January 2019. So that's one project done. I've also been working on my horror novella, Mon Ster, for quite a while--a couple of years, in fact. Through some luck, some moments of worthwhile writing, and continual pressure, I finished it in the summer of 2019. That makes for two completed projects. Last school year, I had the opportunity to write each day for about fifty minutes. The goal was, with the rest of the class, to write 50,000 words on our projects by the end of the semester. I spent a portion of that time channeling a couple of different sets of inspiration: At that time, I was playing Resident Evil 2 remake and enjoying that survival-horror-and-hunt-for-clues kind of story. I had also listened to Mr. Lemoncello's Library with my kids, which was using reading, books, and authors as the fuel for his own puzzle story. Having been disappointed in a recent Shakespeare's Secret, I decided to write my own, Shakespeare-inspired puzzle story. Basically, think of The Da Vinci Code but with Shakespearean clues, and you have Raleigh House. Tonally, I think it could have been a bit tighter, but as a love-letter to the Bard, I think it went pretty well. I worked on that one all of second semester, finishing it sometime before school ended (if I remember correctly). That makes for three projects done. Once the writing season (read: summer) was in full swing, I set down the aforementioned novellas-into-novelette story. This required hours of careful plotting, copious note-making, and plenty of revisions to the outline. It's easily the most complicated project that I've tried to do. In my typical way, I wanted to start my first summer writing retreat by having a clear idea of what to do, but not a single word down in the actual writing. During that retreat, I managed to write the entire first novella--about 32,000 words of it--with a bit of time to spare. This was exciting and unexpected, and meant that, though the entire story still had thousands of words to go, I had accomplished something toward it. I count that as the fourth finished project. With the time off from school, I found a way to weave the second novella into being. It wasn't easy, as writing at home is no problem when it's quiet, but as I have three boys, quiet time isn't particularly abundant. (Maybe that's why I like writing on Sundays so much; the children aren't running in and out, friends aren't over, and the entire day is more sedate.) Nevertheless, I had a goal of finishing Novella Two before approaching the next writing retreat. Days before I left for the family cabin, I finished it. Fifth project: Done. When it was time for my second writing retreat (the first was with my writing group; this one was solo), I managed--despite coming down with conjunctivitis--to write a 29,000 word novella. Thus I completed a sixth project. After that retreat, the reading really kicked in, to say nothing of the family vacations that ate up the remainder of the time. School resumed, my attention fractured, and I spent almost none of my writing time in the Novella Story. (I managed to squeeze out four painful chapters--a third of the project--but haven't touched the thing since the end of September.) However, November came, and with it, the desire to retell Hamlet in a modern setting and without the poetry. I started Elsinore Ranch on 1 November, finished the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words, and left the story incomplete. At the same time, I started an edit of War Golem to go along with my goal to improve my editing skills. That took up a fair portion of November and December, though I did manage to finish that edit before Christmas arrived. I call this one my seventh writing project of the year. That's not the end, though. Despite having left my retelling alone through the majority of December, just this past week saw me again picking away at it. I conjoined some chapters, cut out some of what I thought I wanted, and focused on getting it done. With little fanfare, I finished Elsinore Ranch yesterday (28 December). It took a lot--and I can't say that it's all been worth it--but I did complete eight projects in 2019. Yes, you can quibble about the merits of short stories, novellas, and novels, but I feel like each one of these projects is different enough to appreciate them the way I did here. The quality of the stories varies widely, as do the subjects and characters. Still, finishing this many works in a single year is nothing to be ashamed of. My word count may be smaller than before, but I think that I've done something remarkable. Next Year's Goals For that, I don't know. I could perhaps postulate some things, but this essay is already creeping up on 3,200 words, which is far too long for a cold winter's day. I'll end it thus: Just as this year marks a highwater mark for project completion, I'm hopeful that this next decade will see--somehow--a change in my writing career as a whole. I can, at least, hope. More than one person (meaning, I think, two) has told me that I would really like the BBC program Upstart Crow. Since the winter break started, I came down with a gnarly cold that has kept me doing precious little: A couple of the days were so bad that I didn't have enough energy to read or play video games, which, if you've ever tried those activities, are not particularly high-demand on the energy front.
To try to gain some sort of mental/physical/emotional/spiritual recharge during the break, I decided to try out Upstart Crow. (I used a free trial membership to the BBC's Amazon affiliate, BritBox, which I cancelled once I was done with the show.) This was a very wise decision, as it vastly improved my mood--it kept the sickness of my body from wearing down my too-temperamental emotions. Normally, I'm not a fan of laugh-track comedy shows, though I have a bit of a soft-spot for niche British comedies (as I'm still a fan of 'Allo 'Allo, which takes place in Nazi-occupied France and was a part of my childhood). Still, I figured I could give Upstart Crow a chance, what with it being on a free trial anyway. There's a lot to commend it. The writing is funny and satirical, with a couple of running gags throughout the whole show that I particularly enjoy: Shakespeare will often remind us all that Robert Greene "hates my gutlings"; every time Shakespeare has to commute from London to Stratford, he makes lengthy rants about the poor transportation service that is copied and pasted from most people's experience in the Underground; many of the shows are based around his plays, with some of the random, extraordinary, or downright bizarre moments being used as a way to further the plot, often with wry observations about them, culminating with a "Hang on. Hang the futuck on!" as a note that Shakespeare has cottoned onto something; the characters will comment on how Shakespeare uses language, particularly some of his (now) famous phrases, and remark how they don't make sense or they can't really see how they would ever catch on. I think what really works for me is that it is irreverent, crass, and critical, while at the same time, thoughtful, well-researched, and comes from a place of love. There are moments where modern-day interpretations of Shakespeare's works come out in lengthy analyses, all delivered with an ironic twist that made me laugh until I coughed. There were plenty of genuine Shakespearean lines--some said by Will himself, others by the rest of the cast--and there were plenty of jokes about the times that made me laugh because of the research that I've done on the Elizabethan times. I think it's fun, too, because Shakespeare is a mixture of success, competency, arrogance, shyness, and good intentions. There's plenty of conversation in the world of Bardolatry about whether or not Shakespeare was faithful to his wife. I kind of think that, men and society being what they were at the time, Shakespeare probably thought of his family, for the most part, as a hindrance to what he was doing in London. Upstart Crow, however, incorporates the family dynamic really well: Anne Shakespeare (formerly Anne Hathaway) is a major player, and Will goes from London to Stratford-upon-Avon (in the aforementioned commutes) frequently. This gives him a connection to his family, and though he has his own desires and urges and flaws, he truly cares about his family and his wife. They only really play with the possibility of Will being unfaithful in one of the stories, and it works really well--in fact, it's my favorite episode, which is the last one of the third season (not counting the Christmas special, which is now the only version of A Christmas Carol that I will probably ever want to watch). At this point, if you're reading along and thinking, I might have a go at that show, then, since Steve is such a fan, then I'll put in a spoiler for this next bit. See, as this season finale came along (called "Go On and I Will Follow"), I was able to rather predict the ending of the story: Hamnet Shakespeare, William's only son, died when he was only about 11 or so. In the episode, a lot was being made about Hamnet and his confirmation, which led me to know (or, more accurately, guess) that Hamnet wasn't going to survive the episode. I was right: Hamnet dies while Will is away, and he comes home to a bereaved family. This works in the context of the show really well because the stories have woven the homelife with the worklife in a way that makes the characters feel like his loving--if strange--family. Will doesn't feel like an absentee father, despite being somewhat disconnected from the lives of his family, and so the grief that rocks them is really profound. And, when Sue Shakespeare, his oldest daughter, asks him if he truly believes that Hamnet is still alive, that there's an afterlife, William answers her (I think) honestly, "No. I don't think there's anything else." That is a bone of contention within Bardolators (we really don't have a lot else to do, honestly), as some people think that he's fully Protestant, others that he's a closeted Catholic, and yet others that think he's a nihilist. (The late Harold Bloom says of Hamlet (whom he closely identified with Shakespeare) as being, like himself, "Of a gnostic sect of one.") I don't know what Shakespeare believed; I don't know how much of him is in the plays or poetry. But I get a pretty strong sense that he's interested in people here and now, not what we may be on the other side. As a result, this response is really potent. It stakes a particular claim about Shakespeare--as do a number of other instances--and I think it strengthens the show as a result. Now, the thing isn't perfect; the production values are pretty small, and though they do a great job with the material, this is no Game of Thrones style TV. Sometimes the jokes a touch predictable (the running gags have that as a point against them as well, yes?), and they can sometimes feel a bit too shouty for my taste. Also, it's not easily available here--though I will be poking around to see if there's a Blu-ray collection that works in the US--which is sad. On the whole, though, it's well written, funny, thoughtful, touching, and a brilliant love letter to the Bard--to that upstart crow, as Robert Greene once wrote, who changed the world. I love it. It's no secret that It has been one of the most important books I've read in recent years. I first picked it up in the summer of 2017 and have read it each summer since. The reason why is complicated, and though I think I understand why It matters so much to me, I always feel my explanation is lacking. I've written a good 40 pages by hand about It as I've done my last two read-throughs, so I don't know if I really want to retread that ground here. Suffice to say, It moved me in ways that literature almost never does, and certainly not horror.
Lest the complications aren't clear, I should point out that, normally, I try to avoid books saturated in violence, swearing, and explicit sex (though I've more than a fair share that break from that norm). It's something that I've often thought about, but I'm no closer to understanding the permissiveness of my base impulses when it comes to literature or video games, but if it's in cinema I'm instantly disinclined to watch the thing. Example: I thought The Joker looked…like a movie I wouldn't really want to see, probably (I don't much care for the Joker as a character, especially stripped of the context that comes through the dichotomy of Batman); when I learned that it was rated R, I decided it wasn't for me, based simply on the rating. And then there's It. The first film came out in 2017 (that was one of the reasons, incidentally, that I started reading the book, since I couldn't see the allure of a horror movie and the trailer of It gave me nightmares for three days), but it took some time before I finally decided to watch the movie. I was, as a matter of fact, pretty impressed with that film. The score was fantastic (I love the theme song for its mixture of whimsical lightheartedness and menace; I think it's brilliant), except for all of the screechy violin parts that are part and parcel of a scary movie, I guess. The CGI wasn't particularly frightening, but the practical stuff--especially Bill Skarsgård's wonderfully rendered Pennywise--was enjoyable and the story remained surprisingly faithful to the source material. There are abundant questionable things about that book that they skipped over--in part due to time, and in part because of that whole part in the sewer is just…nah. (Oh, and I'm going to be talking about plot points that are nagging at me from here on out, so if you're interested in the films or book and would prefer not to have spoilers, then that's cool; I won't hold it against you if you close the tab and do something more uplifting than read about a horror movie.) However, though there were plenty of changes from the book that I was kind of disappointed in, the turning of Bev's character into a damsel in distress for the six boys to rush off to save was…disappointing. Like, majorly disappointing. Let me step back a bit: One of the things that the first It movie absolutely nailed bang on was the chemistry among the friends. The way that the Losers' Club fuses--and why they come together--is one of the primary reasons that I love the book. I've written about this before elsewhere, but it came crashing in on me (again; this time, it was whilst reading Les Misérables) that there's no shortcut to getting genuine buy-in from an audience: We simply have to spend time with the characters if we're going to care about them. They can be foulmouthed and neurotic (Eddie, anyone?), but so long as we can start to understand where they're coming from, we can go along with their story. By showing us a character's past, traumas, difficulties, and resolve--to make us care about the characters--we have to be able to see the character fully. And, as far as writing goes, this sort of experience only has weight if the book does, too. (This is another problem for a would-be professional storyteller like myself, as aspiring authors have even worse odds of making a debut if the book is too long--a topic that I'll have to return to at another time.) In the case of It, the book allows the reader to spend a summer with the self-proclaimed Losers' Club, to get to know them and their trials in intimate (and sometimes excruciating) detail. This gives a lot of heft to the kids' section of the story. The movie allows this to happen because the chemistry of the actors is spot on, and I honestly just thrilled to watch them go through the experience. It: Chapter One captures--as best it can, all things considered--the reason why I'm drawn to It (the book). But It: Chapter 2…is lacking that. Oh, yeah, the characters are still there--and the casting choices for some of those adults was impeccable (Eddie, anyone?)--and they're going through really similar sorts of things. But the adult cast didn't feel…genuine. That's probably too strong a word. They did pretty good jobs, for the most part, of feeling like grown-up versions of the kids… …until it got to Ben. I know that Ben Hanscom goes through a major physical change with puberty and all that--he goes from the pudgy kid to a buff guy over the course of nearly three decades. It wasn't that young Ben and old Ben don't really look at all alike. He just…didn't fit. Every time I saw him in one of the shots, I thought, Yeah, he doesn't fit in here. His relationship with the others feels the least connected, too--and that comes from narrative decisions. Ben's time on screen is significantly lower than everyone else's (I thought, anyway), and that was fine with me. I'll have to chew on it some more, but I didn't like Ben--at all. And that's sad, because I really like his character. The quiet, shy bookworm who feels like retreating into his own head is the best way to spend a summer? Yeah, that sounds about right. Here's the thing: I remember reading somewhere that Flynn Wolfhard, one of the main characters in Netflix's Stranger Things and Richie Tozier in It, was having a hard time getting his work with It: Chapter 2 done and Stranger Things. I'm not sure of the details, but the point was there was some conflict. I remember thinking, That's weird. He's not really in the new one…is he? After all, though the book snaps between the present and the past with a fairly regular groove, the films don't take the same approach (just like the miniseries, as I understand it, which I own but haven't watched yet). Wisely, the split the story into the two distinct chunks that allow the audience to see first what the kids did, then what the adults did, to stop Pennywise the Dancing Clown. However, It: Chapter 2 requires a bit of retconning--which is funny because it shouldn't be necessary for a movie that's based on a single novel to have to do that sort of thing--to get some of the memories that the adults had lost back into place. Therefore, there were a lot of moments where the child actors needed to be back on set. Every time the Losers' Club was together again, I was happier. Those were the moments that I paid to see--the kids. When I watched Chapter 1, I felt it was too short because I wanted to spend more time with the Losers' Club. (Ironically, the second movie is almost three hours long, which means that the two It movies are actually longer than the TV miniseries that's so beloved by so many.) I wanted to see them build the clubhouse, to smoke themselves into the distant past, to relax and be kids together. It was really great to see that happening on screen, so getting another (albeit weaker) dose of that action in the flashbacks was appreciated. Don't get me wrong, though: There were some great nuances for the grownups, too. Perhaps the biggest one was having Richie crush on Eddie. I thought this was a good move, especially considering the way the movie opens with the death of Adrian Melon (in both the film and movie, he's beaten almost to death by homophobes before being eaten, in part, by Pennywise, if you recall). Sure, Richie's straight in the book, but the way that he and Eddie bounce off of each other, the way they tease each other, has a flirtatious undertone that really serves the film well. It also introduces one of the really important themes of the book--that Pennywise is only a monster; it is the hatred in humanity that is the real horror--and though the film doesn't try to put too much emphasis on the point, the ending with Richie on the bridge, carving in the letter E, brought a thematic closure that felt natural and fitting. There's a bit of a running gag throughout the movie about how Bill Denborough's books all have unsatisfying endings that felt a bit meta. This is a problem (I guess; they say write what you know, after all) with some of King's fiction: He frequently has writers as main characters. Bill ends up being King's stand-in for a lot of the story. (He has Bill stand up for commercial fiction, for example. In the film, to drive this point home even more, Stephen King cameos as the pawnshop broker who sells Bill Silver for three hundred bucks.) And the ending of It has some problems. There are a lot of problems, actually, and the movie sidesteps the biggest ones and lands in others, instead. Essentially, the question of how to stop a town from being haunted is one that the book and film are asking, yet the answer ends up being somewhat underwhelming. (Hey, at least there isn't the Turtle in the films.) King writes with such a hyperrealism that it becomes somewhat jarring when the mystical takes place. Pennywise operates off of a soft magic system that also follows Brandon Sanderson's Zeroeth Law, save it being applicable to horror: Err on the side of SCARY. So Pennywise has certain limits that we as readers can't anticipate--which, of course, heightens the fear--but it also means that when it comes time to end the story, Sanderson's First Law (scroll up on the link above) comes into play: We don't know the magic system well enough to understand how they're defeating It. Honestly, the film does a slightly better job of establishing the rules that will be needed to defeat Pennywise, if only because cinematic storytelling has ways of imbuing significance in objects (like the tomahawk that, I accurately predicted, would end up saving the day against Harry Bowers) or phrases more pointedly than novels tend to. The result of this is that, though there are some unexpected detours, we get to the same kind of ending that I rather kind of expected: They have to rip out the clown's heart. Okay, so the spider thing is less kitschy in the 2019 film than the '90s-era made-for-TV miniseries, and it honestly looks a lot better to me than what I imagined as reading the book, if only because having It just be a giant spider is a bit of a let-down. Seeing a multi-legged Pennywise, complete with his frightening makeup as he moves around the inner sanctum was a satisfying experience. The movie decided not to blow up Derry--which very well could have been a financial decision, rather than anything else--and I wonder at that. Derry is a character in and of itself--not as potent as a character-location as, say, Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, but at least as important a character-location as the river is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--and letting Mike drive away from it, the spirit of It exorcized at last, is fitting…but also kind of disappointing. I think there's a lot to be said about how Derry can't really exist as it did when Pennywise is no more, because Pennywise is Derry. The town is more than just its haunting (hunting) grounds, it's a manifestation of the evil that he represents. And maybe there's something else about how Derry feeds Pennywise…and Pennywise feeds Derry. The first part is pretty straight forward--Derry's children (usually) are being fed to the monster under the ground. That's a feeding. But it also has the implications that it's the hatred and fear--the inhumanity of the citizens of Derry--who respond to Pennywise, too. They're human, yes, but some actually get possessed by Pennywise through the course of the book, allowed in, as it were, because they like what they get from the evil that he emanates. The second idea, however, is the concept that good can come from evil. This isn't something that's particularly explicit in the text, and it's explored even less in the second film, but the adult Losers are anything but. They're all successful, mega-rich people who've built a fantastic life outside of Derry--forgotten, unwanted Derry. The only Loser who doesn't have a seven-digit bank account is Mike…the one who stayed in Derry for his adult life. None of them has kids (a point that's brought up but isn't really explained by the ending of the book). It's almost like the evil that they confronted in Pennywise when they were eleven years old had the benefit of putting them onto a path that would led to immense success later on--though at a cost. I don't know about this concept--that from evil comes good--but it's certainly everywhere in my life. Not just in a horrorbook (King's words), but in Paradise Lost and my own religion. So maybe that's some of what is so difficult for me when I grapple with It. My wife most definitely doesn't understand what I get out of this book. The movie was gruesome and had so much more profanity than I was expecting (though, in all honesty, if a monster dancing clown was trying to eat me, I think I probably wouldn't be using my squeaker language; still…it was excessive); it had shocking and uncomfortable moments, as well as head-scratching ones (what was with the music change when Eddie was getting puked on? So weird, right?) that make the film unsettling for other reasons. In other words, it (and It) goes very much against my normal expectations for what I want in the fiction I consume. I'm not a complete prude, but I have some standards…almost all of which are flouted in this franchise. It is, to put it in yet another way, not something I ought to seek after. And yet. Yet I keep returning. I know there are more reasons, some of which are so intense and personal that I don't know if I'll ever write them anywhere other than my personal notebooks (which, in no small part, have become treasures of my soul that would be one of the things that I would try to save if the house were burning and I could only grab one thing). But the fact I return stems, I think, from the way that this story--this grotesquery--touches on things I've chosen to believe in as being of supernal source. I'm not saying God inspired It by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that there is more to the book than a sewer-lurking clown. (I talked about another angle of this same issue here.) Did the two films manage to capture it? Some. Not all. And that's good, because that means there are reasons to approach the story in the three ways available (film, miniseries, or book) and try to glean as much as possible from that variety. As far as the movies go, I can think of a couple of ways that they could have tightened the story a bit more, given more context for the decisions of the characters. On the whole, though, I think they do a pretty good job with it. The decline of American readership is an alarming trend to a bibliophile like me. Some of this is proactive preoccupation: I'd like to think that any future work of mine would make it into a world that was interested in reading generally, thereby giving me a chance to find a readership specifically. However, there are some things that indicate to me just how sparse reading is--or, perhaps, how oversaturated the market is with potential offerings is.
Have you ever seen one of those "By New York Times Bestselling Author" tags on a cover? Sure you have. What about how they come by that topic? You ever wonder how that title comes about? Well, there are lots of differing opinions on the idea (as a quick DuckDuckGo search will show you), mostly because there are behind-the-scenes tricks that publications like The New York Times use to generate the lists, plus all sorts of gaps in data (like how BookScan only accounts for about 80% of tracked sales). The whole thing is a mess, but to arrive on the list, you have to sell a couple hundred books a day for the week in question. In other words, if you can get about 3,000 copies sold during the time frame, you'll be near the top of the bestseller list--possibly even number one. On one hand, this is kind of encouraging. Only 3,000 people? That's not too shabby, especially in comparison to the enormous quantities of books that mega-bestsellers can boast. For example, over 44 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were sold in its first year, which means that Rowling was selling about 5,000 copies of the book per hour throughout that time frame. Surely my book could garner about that many in the course of a year or so, right? Right? No, probably not. Most books don't become bestsellers, for lots of reasons that are immaterial to my broader point. While 3,000 in a week seems pretty doable for an author, it really isn't. Obviously, or else bestsellers would be more frequent. Sadly, many authors don't earn out (that is, earned back enough profit to cover the amount of money the publisher paid to the author via the advance), and the vast majority of writers are still paying for a mortgage and being as financially prudent as possible (paying for healthcare in America is still criminal, the ACA notwithstanding), lest some hiccup come along and mess things up. Writing a book almost never turns into being published; a published book almost never turns into a full-fledged writing career. That's the reality of it all. I write all of this as a quick summation of some of what's been kicking around the back of my mind lately. Regardless of how well I write, the odds are incredibly small that I will ever be able to do anything beyond dream of being published. Yes, I can continue to query (most agents are closed to submissions through most of December, in part because many, many writers use their New Year's Resolutions to submit to agents, so the field actually becomes more competitive during the early months of the year), continue to write, continue to edit, continue to improve. And without that work, the odds drop from "incredibly small" to "will not physically happen"--if I've no story to sell, it wouldn't matter if an agent wanted to buy. There's something simultaneously liberating and disappointing about this realization. I can't set goals that are so fully dependent on others' choices. I can't expect or hope for a bestseller status when I don't even have a book out. It's on me to rearrange my goals and expectations more than just a bit. What should they be? I honestly can't say. We've a touch over two weeks left in the year, so it's definitely a good time to take stock and consider what I hope to gain out of 2020. But I'm now at a point where my writing looks less and less like what I imagined it would be…and I'm uncertain how to adjust my imagination to fit in with my reality. After all, that's why I write fiction--I write about worlds that aren't what I have to deal with. That's the joy of the creative process. My imagination, it seems, can conceive of all sorts of weird things (like the idea of women fighting in trench warfare, which has caused many readers all sorts of pause), but I can't really imagine a way of attaining the dream that's walked with me since I was in the single digits, to say nothing of imagining that thousands of people actually want to read what I've written. So maybe that's my 2020 goal: Try to figure out what my writing goals and dreams are. In case you missed previous explanations, I do an assignment with Les Misèrables every year with my students. I call it the Yellow Passport as an homage to the paper that Jean Valjean has to abandon in order to live a better life. It comes to represent the problems he had in the past which hold him back. It's essentially a new year's resolution, but in November and December, plus it's a school assignment, so the kids who want to have a good grade are actually going to follow through.
Most of the big assignments I give I've done myself (I have a drawing that I made of Satan for Paradise Lost, and I have chunks of Hamlet memorized, for example), and the Yellow Passport is one that has helped me a lot in the past. Thanks to this assignment, I hardly spend any time at all on Facebook (and I do mean that; I think my grand total a week is maybe an hour, and I've found the only reason I keep the social media site account active is because that's how almost everyone who reads my work knows that I've posted something new). And, though my temper isn't permanently banked, I have improved my interactions with my kids thanks to the Yellow Passport. As I mentioned in the second essay I linked above, I'm doing an edit of War Golem with this year's Yellow Passport. I really do want to get over my editing phobia--or disdain, I suppose? Okay, so yeah, there's a bit of a tangent on this, bear with me: Editing is a blessing of a process. Vocal editing in the nonce is a nightmare--stumbles, stutters, misstatements, and other verbal faux pas will mar a lot of what a person might actually be saying. Yes, there's the advantage of intonation and body language, but there's an irretrievable aspect to speaking: What's said is what's said. You can't go back and tweak and twist and turn. Impromptu speech is a one-shot attempt. In writing, however, there's an opportunity to revise, reshape, revisit, and refine. There's a way to make what's said into something you meant to say. Editing allows that to happen. This is something that I'm gaining as I work through War Golem. I'm given a chance to improve what I've done before. So how is it editing my book again? Well, I think I need to do more research on how other writers edit, now that I have a pretty good grip on how to write. I say this because the process of getting words down on paper is something within my scope. Since college, I've completed over a dozen novels, with a grand total of over 1.6 million words. That doesn't count my short stories, poetry, or abandoned projects, nor does it incorporate my nonfiction writing (stuff like this essay). That's just from completed novels and novellas. That is no small amount, I daresay, and it shows that I know how to get words out. As I've continued to work on new novels, I've streamlined the storymaking process, which has led to a more careful approach to the stories I tell. In my early days, I had a character and an idea and a world and the shape of an idea of something that I wanted to pursue. So I would "pants" my way through--"fly by the seat of my pants"--the book, following that particular day's bit of the story as it came to me. I rarely spent time staring at the blank white screen, but I didn't always know exactly what to have happen next, and I found myself heavily influenced by the most recent thing I'd read or watched--if I'd seen something scary, I would incorporate a monster attack for some reason; if I'd been reading Rainbow Six, I would add in a hostage situation--whether or not that addition would help the story. After I spent a solid three or so years on writing Writ in Blood--still my longest book, even after some serious edits took it to just below 300,000 words--I decided to try something different. I wanted to write more than three books a decade; I needed to write shorter stories. Not short stories, but shorter stories. I started looking at different ways of increasing my output, and I realized that a "fix-it-in-post" mentality was part of the reason that 1) Writ in Blood was so long (I would recognize a problem with the plot and, rather than fix it, I would invent some reason why it was supposed to be that way, which only added to the length of the novel, rather than improving it), and 2) why I hated revisions. They were the deficit spending of writing: I was pushing my in-the-moment problems to my future-self, rather than dealing with them when they showed up. To that end, I began a more rigorous style of outlining. It has been really helpful to me in a lot of ways, not the least because it means that I'm "writing" the book before I actually write it. I can see problems more clearly--that is, an early decision on a certain idea can be shown as flawed simply because I can see the entire story at a glance. That means that my outlines are edited and revised as I go along. Once I lock in a scene by writing it, that becomes the new canon, which means that I can tweak my outline rather than worry about remembering the change when it becomes important later on. By editing the outline--which always changes as the story is composed--I feel more confident that what I've written is what I want to see. In many ways, I write the first draft by writing the outline. Then I write the second draft by actually writing it. Upon finishing the novel, I give it a few months to cool off before I reread it, as if it's an entire book--notes, perhaps, but nothing super specific or line-by-line. Then I go, a chapter a day, through the book and change things. I add details, take away superfluity, and rewrite parts of scenes. The advantage of that is the work of changing the story is done there and then--no kicking the can of responsibility down the road. After I've put those changes in the computer, I have, historically, called it quits. I'd query a little, get rejected less than I queried (most agents don't respond, which technically counts as a no, but feels less concrete), and then move on to the next project. But the Yellow Passport has--I think--changed that. Because I was trying to set an example for the students, I made sure to work on my editing every single day. It was not always easy--in fact, it usually wasn't--but it was immensely helpful. Not only was I trying to incorporate a new habit (the point of the assignment, really, as it's an assignment they're supposed to work on for 24 days straight), I was also seeing my book in a different light. See, the Yellow Passport goal I had for myself was to reduce the grand total of words in War Golem from 101k to 90k. (It only took a couple of days to realize that was unrealistic, so I tweaked it to below 98,500 words, which could happen. I mean, stranger things have occurred.) To do that, I had to start trimming the fat. However, as I mentioned before, I saw that I was actually pretty happy with almost all of the words that I put into the book. Yes, there were some unnecessary adverbs (which I use sparsely (ha! Irony!) for the most part because I try to pick stronger verbs in the crafting of the story anyway), and plenty of passive voice to strike out, but on the whole the story is what I wanted it to be. This has led to an excruciating experience of trying to squeeze the metaphorical blood from the stone--or, in this case, unnecessary words from the draft. I heard of one author who writes all morning and then, in the evening, he takes a Sharpie to his manuscript and excises all but three sentences per page. This is madness to me, and it points toward a worrisome lack of belief in one's abilities. I have plenty of imposter syndrome feelings, but one thing that I don't doubt is that I am the writer of the story and that means that I get to decide what that story looks like. I can weave a worthwhile sentence into the story as I go, if necessary. No reason to assume the worst of my past self. My experience revising War Golem has been a net-positive one. I'm running into the climax of the story--and there may be more tweaks and edits at the latter stage than others, as it's a tricky part of the novel--but on the whole I'm feeling that this has improved my novel. More than that, it's given me confidence that I did, indeed, write the book I meant to write when I started it a couple of years ago. It feels, in other words, like I really am polishing the book, rather than just "editing" the book. The habit of editing has been instilled in me, if only a little bit…though I should confess that the very first day of not having to do the Yellow Passport I skipped that night's work on it. I guess I still have some room to grow. Writing is a weird business--and I don't mean, like, on the financial side, wherein a person hallucinates stories and then convinces people to pay to read them off of the pulped remains of a tree. It's weird because one never really knows where or when lightning strikes, why an idea will come to a writer (or won't), or why a story will catch on with readers. Certainly I have little control over any of those, yet they're all necessary components for writing a book.
However, just because I'm not in control of those things doesn't mean that I don't have the occasional experience with these particles of writing. Today is a great example: Out of nowhere--absolutely nowhere--as I was brushing my teeth, I thought of the title of a book. (This doesn't usually happen to me, as I tend to struggle with titles (or find passingly sufficient ones that don't do a whole lot besides name the book) and I almost never start with one. Instead, I tend to come up with a concept for the world or a character, then develop story ideas from there.) As I was scrubbing away at my mouth bones, I thought, Letters from late-capitalism. That's an interesting idea. I poked at it a bit further, trying to devise just what my brain meant by these specific words in this unexpected order. Then, the weird part of my brain that sometimes does this sort of thing perked up and puked out a couple of additional words to go along as a subtitle: A novel of essays. Or, an essayist novel. A novelist essay. Now, to be fair, epistolary stories are not new. Dracula, as those few who've actually read it know, is epistolary. So is the majority of the New Testament. The Color Purple (which I haven't read, sadly) is epistolary, as is The Screwtape Letters (which I have read, but it's been a long time and I had to use Dr. Google to help jog my memory). So there's plenty of these types of stories, ones in which the story is unfolded via letters sent back and forth, or snippets of newspapers and journals keep the narrative moving. In fact, now that I think on it, Bruce Coville's Diary of a Mad Brownie is another great example of the form. So when my mind conjured the 'novel of essays' idea, I knew that I was trying to think of a modern version of epistolary novels. And, in many ways, this format is one that has become rather natural to me. I've written now over a thousand essays (or close to it) over the years, and I've written over 1.6 million words of fiction. What better way to fuse what I've done than to turn my essaying into some sort of fictional story? Sadly, though I have the device for the story, I don't know what it would be. I don't know what the title means, aside from the obvious, and I really couldn't even begin to guess why someone would want to read it. But, hey, two out of the three weird parts happened today. So I guess I can't complain, right? |
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