I mentioned the idea of DeviantStories back in October, and since then I've decided to switch the name to ArtStories here on the website. Not because of copyright or anything (though I imagine that there might be complications if I ever earned money off of these stories--something that gnaws at me but I'm choosing to ignore), but because I think it's a better name overall and more clearly explains what I'm trying to do.
Anyway, this essay isn't an update on ArtStories as much as it is a quick behind-the-scenes of where my first completed ArtStory came from. If you're curious about the story itself, it's found here, or you can visit the ArtStories section of my website, where there's a PDF for easier reading. I would recommend reading the story before reading the BTS, as there are spoilers…I guess… See, the first sentence of a short story is supposed to be something that hooks the reader, that sets up what's to come. And my first sentence really does that, I think: "When Randen first started his career as an artist-murderer, he never thought that his mother would be the inspiration for what would make him so well known." I mean, I tell you how it's going to end right there. How can we be talking about spoilers if the first sentence already tells you how it's going to be? I mean, the rest of the paragraph points out that he has all of the standard earmarks for being a sociopathic killer, so the ending really shouldn't come as any sort of surprise. Still, as I was writing the story, I had this weird feeling like it was easy to forget that we're reading a story about a murderer. I don't know if that's true--I can't ever read this story as anything but my own; I'll always know how it ends, what the purpose of each moment of the story is for. So the experience of reading through it is always a process of rereading, for me. It will be interesting to see if people forget where it's headed by the end or not. I think it's fair to ask why I would feel compelled to write a murder story when the image behind it is so benign. And I think that's why it worked for me. When I saw "Duckie", there was nothing about it that seemed sinister or intimidating. I mean, that is one happy duck. But what stood out to me was the number written on its chest. PrismoTheSmoke writes that the project came about as artwork to be sold during a Rubber Duck Festival. The artist's design was to show off how different media can make for different effects. For me, seeing a black and white drawing of a duck with a number across its chest, I had to wonder what the other numbered ducks would look like. And, since it's in black and white, I couldn't help but think that it almost looked like the numbers were written in blood. At first, I thought of it as a cop story: Lewy and Hutch, two grizzled detectives, find this numbered rubber duckie as a type of calling card and score counter--it's the two-hundred-eighty-first murder of this kind…and that's when I petered out. First of all, I don't really know how detectives work, aside from what I've seen on TV shows and movies. Also, how incompetent would Lewy and Hutch have to be to let a guy get away with almost three hundred murders? (In fact, part of the reason that Randen picks specific numbers for his forty-odd duckies is because I wanted to use the number from the picture without having to march through massive quantities of death. And, since it was order 281 that inspires Randen, that's why he uses that number, rather than it being sequential.) So I shifted the narrative from the pursuers to the perpetrator. Coming up with Randen (which is simply "Branden" without a b) was easy, as the news is replete with incels of his type. I'm not particular sensitive to people who view violence as the way to deal with life, so there's a callousness toward him that I couldn't help but include. What humanizes him, I think, is his mother. Their conversation--which takes up a fair portion of the story--is one that I think any parent or role model has with a charge who is feeling directionless. I've worked through these sorts of questions with former students before--though I usually try to get a better grasp of what she (or he) is after before dispensing my (probably erroneous) advice--and there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, if anything, Mama Anderton was doing the best thing she could in the situation. It's not her fault that he wanted to graphically murder a coworker and photograph the mutilation. She probably thought he wanted to, like, recreate "The Last Supper" but with rubber duckies, poor woman. I wrote the entire story in a single sitting, which is really the only way that I can write short stories. Coming back to them after being away is very much having let the iron cool and then bringing back the hammer. I've a couple of other ArtStories that I've attempted, but neither of them ended in a single sitting--the story was either too big or too ill-defined for me to finish--so they continue to languish on my hard drive. Maybe they'll come back a bit later, who knows? The last bit of "Where did this come from?" has to be traced to the fact that I'm reading a short story collection by Stephen King. I feel like the best part of the book so far (and I'm two-thirds of the way through) is the title: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. A couple of the stories have taken strange twists, and there's plenty of weird situations--as you might expect from a King story--but nothing has really struck me as 1) scary (I've yet to read a scary book, though I've read quite a bit of horror lately), or 2) that memorable. Nothing against King; short stories aren't my favorite, I guess. So there is a bit of irony that I'm putting "Duck, Duck, Death" onto my website and trying my best to write more short fiction. Well, that's about all there is to the behind-the-scenes. If you've read the story and this much, I want to thank you for devoting enough of your life to reading over four thousand of my words today. That's mighty fine of you, and I do appreciate it. I started off NaNoWriMo strong, and I finished strong. With only a handful of essays written in November because of NaNoWriMo, it's kind of strange to be jotting down a couple of thoughts about the experience instead of hammering away at my Hamlet reboot.
Thought One First off, I definitely made a mistake in my choice for my Yellow Passport assignment this year. (For those not inclined to follow a link, this is a chance for me and my students to find something to work on--an area that we wish to see changed or improved--and make it a new habit during our reading of Les Miserables.) I decided that I needed to get over my aversion of editing, so I've busted out War Golem for yet another passthrough. This time, the goal was to reduce the total words by ten percent--the arbitrary number that Stephen King decided on with his writing and, therefore, has become The Rule™ ever since--in the hopes of being less scary to agents when I start soliciting again. The thing with this process, however, is that it's rather painful. Not because I'm totally in love with all of the words that I've written, but because they're the words I wanted for my story to work. That's why I picked them in the first place. Now, sure, there are always areas where I worded things strangely, repeated a phrase, or somehow left things somewhat messy. That's a given. And that's the stuff that I'm trying to squeeze out of the manuscript. But it's a difficult process. I find myself counting out words to see if a rewrite will scrape one off; I dread the feeling of having to rewrite a section, because I'm confident that I will be adding to my word total. To this end, I've been reading each chapter, sentence by sentence, backwards. This works for me on a couple of levels: One, it strips away the context. I'm not involved in the story; I'm not stuck in the experience with the characters. Instead, I can look at the sentence and ask myself if it's doing what I want it to do, or if there's a way to improve it. Most of the time, it's fine. And, honestly, thus far (I'm on chapter 13 out of 31, though I skipped the first chapter because that's always the one I'm looking at, which makes me discouraged (as that's also the one that agents have looked at the most, and still found nothing to interest them) and so I wanted to come back to it at the very end of the process), editing this way has been helpful. I've yet to add words to a chapter, and though there's no way I can get the book down to 90,000 words, it most definitely will be below 100,000 words. Fantasy novels are allowed to be longer than other fiction, but I've tried really hard not to let the book get too large or out of control on that front. Much of what I want to say I've left out in the first place (another reason, I wager, why I'm not finding a lot of fat to trim from my manuscript). Though this has been a good thing, overall, it's making it harder for me to know what I mean when I think about "good writing"…and that's a topic, I think, for another day. I kind of need to get on with Thought Two Rewriting a Shakespearean play in novel form is a strange experience. I find snippets of the original creeping in--phrases or images that plant themselves in my mind and grow fruit on the page, as it were. Sometimes I'll think about a particular character detail that happens later in the play, but makes more sense to include it in the chapter I'm working on. Other times I'll find myself turning to Shakespeare to point me toward the plot again, lest I get distracted by some detail or other and lose track of where I'm supposed to go. On that front, writing my NaNoWriMo novel has been really enjoyable: I'm able to reexperience Hamlet and even put a specific interpretation on the story that fits my retelling, even if it distorts the original. That is surprisingly freeing, which I think comes because of the quasi-sacred feelings I have for the play. The inhibitions of worship are unmoored from me as I go through this story. Unfortunately, I didn't put the time and effort necessary into properly outlining the novel. Or rather, I didn't do it the way I've done it in the past. The issue with this, you see, is that I've had to do a lot of tweaks and rewrites to the outline as I went along. This is not unusual--I rarely end the exact way that I originally anticipated when I first started outlining the book. However, I normally jot down those chapters on notecards--just little 3x5s that I've collected over the years--so that when my story starts to follow its own version, I can chuck out the chapters that I don't want any more. Because I outlined on a single Word document this time, I've had to renumber the chapters four or five times this November, tweaking when one event happened in comparison to another, or fusing two chapters together--whatever the case ended up being. That meant that I ended up spending a good portion of time doing a tedious chore that, if I had simply used notecards, would never have happened. (And while I save time by typing, I have a notecard app that would have let me do the same sort of thing digitally as what I do by hand.) Not only that, but the combination of my time with War Golem and then with my reading journal and then my NaNoWriMo…well, I was feeling pretty tapped out, to be honest. My first couple of days were really effective--I took a day off from school, it was over a weekend, and it pretty much was wonderful. Once I got into the grind of school, commuting, editing, and trying to write…well, it wasn't so wonderful. In fact, some of my most embarrassingly bad writing is (I think, anyway) now up on the website under the 2019 NaNoWriMo section, almost all of it done when I simply wanted to get my wordcount done for the day. Speaking of the wordcount, I did "win" NaNoWriMo with 50,080 words total. The novel still needs three or four more chapters--some of them fairly large--to finish off the story. That means I'll probably pick at it and throw up a chapter or two as I end them. It also means that I don't really know how to hit wordcount targets, though I can surpass them. Thought Done It's nice to be finished. I dropped over 1,200 words into this essay, which is a fun muscle to flex that's been languishing a lot this past year. I'm glad that, at least for now, I can say that I'm back into something resembling a writing groove. Here's hoping it stays that way, ya? I have a love-hate relationship with short stories.
Back in high school, I took an entire class that was nothing but short story analysis. We'd read one in our thick textbook anthology, then talk a bit about it for a day or two, then move on to the next. In my AP English class, we would do a similar thing--though we read more high-brow short stories (Hemmingway, you know, or something like)--with plenty of analysis about symbolism, color-coding, or allusions tucked in. For my science fiction class in college, we had The Science Fiction Century (an anthology that still sits on my shelf to this day, near 2041, a book I bought in 1992 and have kept so that I can read it in another twenty-two years and see how far--or how close--we are to the predictions of my childhood) that provided the fodder. Looking through my own writing folder, I have been fiddling with the form for over a decade, with most of my short fiction coming out when I was still in college. There are maybe twenty or so stories from then, some of them quite short, many of them incomplete. I have, in other words, some experience with the form. But I've shied away from short stories a lot nowadays, and not just in my own fiction. I have a book called Dangerous Women that has female protagonists in the short stories, as well as Songs of the Dying Earth that has, I guess, songs or something about Earth as it dies…? I haven't ready anything from that one, so I don't know. I have a zombie anthology, and a Stephen King book called The Bazaar of Bad Dreams that has been enjoyable enough. Of course, looking at it this way, it seems like there's a lot of short fiction in my house, but the truth is, it's probably only four or five percent of my total book ownership that's in this form. And I think I have a reason why… They're short. Yes, I know, that's the point. But in terms of what I want out of a story, about getting to know characters and be immersed in their world, the short story doesn't really do that. The focus is much wider in novels, the view bigger. Also, since I write fantasy fiction (most of the time), there's so much world-building that short stories really strain that "short" appellation when I try to develop the world. Another reason? They're too long. When I sit down to write during the school year--for essays such as this one, for example--I have enough mental energy and patience to write a few hundred words, maybe a touch over a thousand. On rare occasions, I can hit a thousand and a half. (This is, incidentally, one of the hardest things about NaNoWriMo for me: It's just out of my typical range.) So, when I sit down to write a short story, I don't have the mental energy to simply write it and be done all in a single go. I have to write it over the course of multiple writing sessions. This is unfamiliar and uncomfortable to me, as I'm used to putting in as much time as I can and then wrapping up the writing and going on with my life. A short story demands a bit more time than I can usually afford to give in a single sitting. In fact, with the first DeviantStory, I found myself losing focus and interest as I entered into the 3,000 plus word count. I didn't want to stop--I've started, stopped, and not returned to two other DeviantStories--because I wanted the story done, but I also didn't want to continue because I was tired. This uncomfortable "not-quite-right" feeling to the stories makes me dislike them, but, at the same time, there's a lot to commend them. Their size allows me to have a single idea, explore it, and then set it aside. I could--if I ever bothered--use them to improve my editing, putting me into a better practice with that side of writing that I tend to neglect (mostly because I hate it). As far as reading them goes, they tend to only require a half-hour's time, rather than the greater commitment of their larger brethren and sistren in the novel format. And that's why I say that I have a love-hate relationship with short stories. One of the ways that I help fill my creative well is by flipping through DeviantArt. The website showcases artists from around the world, with a lot of really interesting styles and approaches. (There is--unsurprisingly--a lot of weird stuff on it, too, so discretion is advised.) Professionals and amateurs alike use the site to both bolster their own work and be part of the larger artistic community. Not being particularly artistic (I have my cartoons that I doodle, and I like to use my Surface pen to draw during church on Sundays), I don't add to the website anything substantial. Instead, I just look.
Because of that habit, I noticed that some (very few, in my honest experience) of the pieces of art feel like they're a snapshot in the middle of a story. Among the pencil sketches of hands, yet another Fursona, fanart from the latest Netflix hit, fractal art, and anime characters of sundry shapes and sizes (and clothing options) lurk the occasional piece of art that has a sense of momentum, of dynamism, of being part of something greater than just a practice. These little snippets of a broader story sometimes make me wonder enough that I've decided to start writing what I call DeviantStories. I've so far started three of these (with only finishing one), each one coming from a picture that I spotted, favorited, and let germinate in my brain. One is a picture of a couple in a truck. Another is a cloaked person in an autumnal forest. Another is a mother hugging her son after giving him a bath, or a father helping tie his son's tie. The point is, I see potential for more than what's on the screen or in the frame and then want to explore it. This has been harder than I expected. I can sit down and weave some thousand words or so into an essay and feel content enough with what I've written to send it out into the world. It's not the best way of writing--it certainly doesn't teach me about anything more than nonce editing, for example--but it's what I've the bandwidth to complete most days. When it comes to fiction, however, I expect more of myself…enough that I think that I should probably polish, edit, and improve the original product. Not only that, but my original product as an essayist tends to be a single-shot (that is, I sit down, write the thing, and then I'm done). While there are exceptions, those tend to be because of scheduling constraints--I start an essay, need to do something else, and come back to it--than because I have to let the idea fully form. In a lot of ways, the point of writing the essay is to help form the thoughts. The point of writing the story, however, is to tell the story. And, for some reason, I feel like I'm doing something wrong if I can't get the story out in a single go. I rarely write chunks of chapters--I push through until the chapter is as long as it's supposed to be, only stopping when I've finished that scene. This matters with the DeviantStories because I'm not really adept at seeing the image, "hearing" the inspiration, and then completing the project. It's a lot harder, in other words, for me to put down the story this way. All that being said, I have finished one of the three that I've started. (It was inspired by the picture that's at the top of this post, made by PrismoTheSmoke.) I do feel like I need to read it over before adding it, but I think it's fair to say that, every once in a great while, I'll be posting a piece of short fiction on the website instead of an essay. When possible, I'll add a small behind-the-scenes of why I picked the story, what stood out to me in the picture enough to want to put the words down, and any other thing that strikes my fancy. Who knows? Maybe I'll get practiced enough at this that someday I can look back at my short story collection and feel something like a flash of pride. Maybe. I mentioned before a bit about a new idea I had whilst returning home from the Utah Shakespeare Festival. There's a bit of an impetus to that idea which I'd like to jot down. If you'll indulge me…
Not only have I finished teaching Hamlet (for the twelfth consecutive year), but I just watched the USF version of the play, too, so Hamlet is on my mind much more than is normal…for me, that is. I mean, the play is always there, floating around the periphery like a ghost. As I rolled up I-15, watching the yellow-streaks of dead wild grass on each side of the freeway, I found myself caught up in the contemplation of what resonates so much with me about Hamlet's story. Clearly, my life does little to parallel his (thankfully), so it isn't necessarily about the events of the plot. His depression, and description of it (found in Act 2 scene 2), are huge; they connect me to him in a pretty tangible, important way. But there's something about the story itself that's enjoyable, albeit a touch illicit. I found myself wondering if the story--not just how Shakespeare tells it, which is untouchably sublime, but also what he tells--is viable if it were updated. I know there's a Hamlet version coming through Hogarth Shakespeare, but that doesn't hit the bookshelves until 2020. Okay, that isn't so far away now, but that puts an extra pressure on me to get my version written before I see what Gillian Flynn does (and how much better it will be, I'm sure). So I began to recast the story that takes place in the same small town I created for my homage to It, a fictional central Utah town called Noah. (I have been working on this town for a number of years, trying to understand what stories actually reside in it. We'll see if my version of Hamlet fits.) I began by picking names. It's a hard balance that the Hogarth books don't always strike, one of familiarity without appearing like a direct lifting from the original. I don't know if I did it well enough, but I decided to make my Hamlet go by the name "Dane Amleth". This is a bit on the nose, but I'm hoping that, once I really get to meet him, the character will feel enough like my own creation to warrant the name. Where did it come from? Well, Hamlet says (5.1), "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," so that's pretty straightforward. The last name isn't just a relocation of the H to the end of the word; Hamlet is a retelling of a Danish story about a man named Amleth. It's as much an allusion to the source material as it is playing with the Shakespeare. I struggled to figure out a good name for Horatio, who I decided to make a best-friend-that-happens-to-be-a-girl, eager to explore some dynamics of their relationship that aren't as apparent in the play. When I think of Horatio--the Hufflepuff par excellence--I think of how he's instrumental in keeping the music, as it were, of the play going. I wanted my Horatio to maintain the H in the name, but the only girl names that start with an H that I could come up with were Helga and Henrietta, neither of which I liked at all. I asked some of the girls in one of my classes about it, and they reminded me of Hailey and Harmony and a couple of others. Eventually, I landed on Harmony, as that's what Horatio provides throughout the play. And, since he confesses (5.2) to being more "an antique Roman than a Dane", I gave her the name Harmony Roman. Claudius turned into Clawson, Gertrude into Jenny, and some more nominal shifts transpired as well. I'm most proud of Ophelia's name, which originally means "help" or "aid", when I decided to give her a flower-based name (an allusion to her fascination with flowers just before she dies). I discovered that Gwendolyn means "white", and I had already decided to make her middle name Rose, so Ophelia became "White rose"--Gwen Rose. Names settled, how would the story work? The entire play is kicked off because of a supernatural moment--the arrival of the ghost of Hamlet's father. For me, I wanted to avoid the supernatural*, if only because I wanted to make it more contemporary. So I shifted the murder of Dane's father from a poisoning in the ear (horrible way to go) and made it a hunting "accident". (To help move the conspiracy, I made Polonius (Paul in my version) the sheriff of the town, who's corrupt enough to help cover up the murder.) Technology will play its part in letting murder speak with its own "miraculous organ" (2.2). And so I went. It took a couple of hours to figure out how it would work. I took a notebook page, drew a line down the middle, and then summarized the scene of the play on the left hand side. (This was the easy part; though there are summaries enough online, I didn't really need to worry about using anything but my brain to put the pieces in. Yes, I'm bragging--it's, like, the one talent I have and I'm proud of it.) I then tried to craft the story on the right hand side, scene by scene, shifting and changing whatever was necessary to get the story into shape. I then turned that into an actual outline in a Word Doc, giving myself a solid paragraph for each chapter. That process I finished yesterday, filling out about ten pages and over thirty chapters to retell Hamlet. I've decided that I'm going to try this out for NaNoWriMo--a bit of a frustration, since that's still three weeks away and I'm eager (!) to get writing it now--in the hopes of getting it done before the "official" retelling arrives in January. My concerns on how I feel about my NaNoWriMo projects still stand: Will I care about this story once 30 November shows up? Will I cringe to think about it? I don't think it'll change my feelings toward the source material: My first NaNoWriMo project was a sci-fi version of Dante's Inferno, and I still love that poem. Of course, I don't love Dante like I love Shakespeare, so the worry of ruining something is real. Nevertheless, I'm hopeful that it will be an enjoyable thing. It makes me happy to think that I have a writing project that I really would like to do, even if it is only saying what someone else said, except different. After all, that's how Shakespeare worked. --- * There's a bit of irony there, as my first finished foray into Noah is a monster/ghost story that's entirely supernatural. Maybe this will change…but I don't think it will. I've been toying with the idea of skipping NaNoWriMo this year. This is illustrative of one of my personal quirks: When I do things once, if they're successful, I feel it incumbent on me to keep doing that thing. Oftentimes there's no harm. For example, I always wear a Spider-Man tie on Fridays when I teach classes. Sometimes, I have work but no classes to teach on a Friday, and I honestly have qualms about wearing a polo with the school's logo on it instead, as if I'm breaking some sort of promise by choosing different fashion.
In the case of NaNoWriMo, I have completed four short novels thanks to the event. That, to me, is a successful thing. Now that I've done it four times, I feel as though that's part of what I'm supposed to be doing with my time. There are, however, complications to that thinking. First of all, I don't have a story prepared that I'm willing to invest in. Without some careful planning, I know I won't be able to write my way through November. I need to lay out conflicts, characters, world building, and plot points, generate my notecards, and basically do all of the hard ground work before 1 November or else I won't "win". (Winning, of course, is a personal matter--there's no prize or anything for having done it, save the feeling of accomplishment.) The second hold-up I have comes from the realization that I never want to look at a NaNoWriMo project again once I've finished it. Why should I? I mean, it's usually an agony to get those final 10,000 words, and the idea of returning to it makes me cringe. So I have four completed short novels, not one of which interests me enough to want to work on it. The NaNoWriMo experience is more of an etude than anything else--an attempt to improve Writing (generally) rather than to get writing (a product) out of it. Thirdly--and this relates to the second close enough that it could almost just be a subset to it--I have a project that needs to be handled in small chunks, as I'm still poking at that five-novellas-in-one thing. So, while NaNoWriMo is an ideal time for that sort of writing, I don't want to poison my feelings toward the novellas and feel like there's no reason to return to the one I wrote throughout November. And that leads to the fourth issue, which is that I frustrate myself a lot when I'm writing in NaNoWriMo. Not in terms of "aggh, this story frustrates me so much! Why did I choose to write it?" sort of frustrate, but instead, more of an "aagh, why am I writing so little? I can type faster than this, I can write faster than this! Why can't I be as committed as I am in July with my cabin writing retreat?" This issue is one that is fairly specific, I think, and it undergirds one of the areas of pride that I've tried to extirpate for a while now and I've yet to get much progress on. I can, if conditions are just so, write a lot of content in almost no time at all. Both June of last year, and the June/July months this year, with my two writing retreats, saw me generating somewhere in the neighborhood of 118,000 words. That is a huge amount of writing (and some editing) for a single month. Some writers have a goal of a thousand words a day: During my writing retreats, I get more than that an hour. I can spend four days at my cabin and walk out having written more than many authors write in a month--or, in some cases, in years. (And, yes, that's where I get really prideful about my so-called writing abilities. I have to remind myself that, speed notwithstanding, if the words themselves aren't any good, the quantity is irrelevant. That's the part that I don't like acknowledging…that's the reason I don't like editing; it reminds me of how far I have to go, of my insufficiencies.) So when I get to NaNoWriMo writing, I get frustrated that it's such a struggle for me, despite the fact that I know the situations are different. I'm dedicating a lot of time and energy each day to my work, my wife, my kids, my life--I'm not sitting in the woods like a hermit, tapping things out as quickly as I can while muttering to myself about plot holes. November isn't July. And, even if my average words per hour is only 1,000, then I'm still looking at fifty hours of work, all of which has to be interwoven through all the slaloms of living. And yet… And yet, whenever I think about writing NaNoWriMo this year, I don't want to simply let it go. Part of this, I think, is a paranoia (or, maybe, latent realization) that I'm losing my fiction-writing groove. Unlike previous years, I don't have a creative writing class wherein I give students (and, fortuitously, myself) a class period each week to work on their writing. (In the past, my second semester creative writing class would have three days of writing per week--which is three hours more of fiction writing than I've done in a month, basically.) That sliver of time was enough to keep my creative writing itch scratched. Now that I don't have it, I feel that I'm likely to lose whatever edge I'd honed over the years. So, why don't I just write some fiction now, instead of writing this essay? Well, if there were an easy answer to that, I don't think you'd be reading this essay, since I'd be working on the fiction. The it-makes-sense-to-me answer is that writing fiction and writing non-fiction are separate skills, and the former has been much harder for me to tap into lately than the latter. I write a boat-load of words in my writing journal, which makes up the bulk of the words I put into each month's total. I still non-fiction write more regularly than I fiction write. That muscle, as it were, is atrophied. And maybe that's why I'm nervous about NaNoWriMo: A runner who hasn't so much as jogged is likely to be leery of taking on a marathon. And NaNoWriMo is a marathon of sprinting. So, maybe I'm right in saying "No more" to NaNoWriMo. I guess we'll see. Twice a summer, I go up to my family's cabin to have some quiet in which I can write. I go once with my writer group for three total days, then again by myself for four. This year, the group and I went up during June, with my personal one finishing up this past Saturday. This year's efforts yielded about 76,000 words in a new project that I started with the group in June. I have a plan of writing five novellas, with the major storyline weaving through all of them, then culminating in a final, larger novella/short novel that puts all of the pieces together. The goal is to have a slightly different reading experience, one where there's a sense of familiarity and interconnectedness with hints of a broader world. (I wrote about its inception here, so feel free to check that out.) So far, I have completed three of the five novellas. These are each twelve chapters long with an "after credits" sting in the form of an epilogue. This isn't just a pop-culture reference to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does--I'm specifically thinking of how the stories in the MCU interconnect, influence each other, and work in tandem. Though the MCU has its share of flaws (which, I hope, I'm not emulating), it has some extraordinary payoffs (particularly in Endgame) that make for some remarkable storytelling. However, to get there, it has taken over a decade and twenty-plus movies. I don't have that kind of patience, so I'm trying it out this way. I like to worldbuild quite a bit before launching into a project. I create my WikiDpad (highly recommended software, by the way--once you get through the rather unintuitive learning curve, it's a great asset) of the world, tossing in images that I've found that are inspirational or similar to what I have in mind. I jot down how the magic system works, what the politics is, how religion affects the world, and anything else that strikes my fancy. For this project (tentatively called The Shadowed World, but it isn't as grim or dark as a name like that implies, so I'm sure I'll change it), I had to have an immense amount of pre-writing planning. Normally, I sit down with a notepad, a pen, and an idea. I write out what the character wants (I try to focus on the character as much as possible, a misstep I made in Raleigh House, my Shakespeare MacGuffin book, and part of the reason why I didn't think too highly of my efforts on that one), what the antagonist wants, and any other important characters. I get the characters' goals to interfere with each other as much as possible. Then I turn to my notecards and write down what each chapter has happen in it, checking off the goals that I wrote on the notepad. Once all of those goals are taken care of, my story is essentially outlined. I can look at the notecards and estimate how long the story will be (most of my chapters are between 1,700 and 3,000, so I usually go with about 2,200 words per chapter and multiply that by how many notecards I have). That process wasn't going to work for this one. For one thing, I was working on it during the gaps at the end of the school year, which is much easier to do on my computer than carrying around a bunch of notecards. Secondly, the world was so new to me, I needed my wiki almost constantly--which, again, is on the computer. Not only that, but I'm always looking for new (and, I hope, more efficient) ways to outline a story. At LTUE 2019, I went to a panel that talked about how to enhance my outlining process. It was…unintuitive, though I could see why the writer did what she did. Additionally, she has written quite a few books in relatively little time, which shows that her process can work (for her, at last). Don't forget, I still hate revisions, so the idea of working more carefully through the story beforehand--of making better outlines--is appealing, as it lessens how much I have to revise later on. So, for all of these reasons, I decided to try a new format for my outline. I opened up an Excel spreadsheet (not a Google Sheet, since, of the two, I'd much rather work with something that isn't online-dependent and works more reliably…plus I pay for the 365 subscription, so I should at least get my money's worth, ya?) and, using my newly-developed love of Dungeons and Dragons, I created a grid that gave me ways of generating unique characteristics that still revolve around the world I made. This gave me a quick way to randomly throw possibilities together (I used a d8 and whatever number I got, that character gained that specific attribute), which I then modified and massaged as necessary. It provided a chance to make a lot of characters really quickly, and from them I went through and selected those whose characteristics most interested me. As I had invented four new races to go along with the humans on this world, I made sure that I had one representative from each as the protagonist of each novella. I figured this would give readers (plural, because maybe two people will ever read it) a sense of the different textures and points of view, while also giving me diverse ways of telling the stories. Then I had to set out what each character's arc was, with a separate sheet for the individual, just to keep it easy. I color-coded them so that, at a glance, I could tell how each one was connected to what I had. Then I made a fresh sheet that has twelve cells set aside for each chapter. This took the place of the notecards, giving me a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish in each one. As I worked on them--and there were a lot of rewrites at this stage--I tried to include important characters and overlap with bolding, italics, and notes to myself. I repeated this process for all five of the novellas. During this process, I had to ensure that there was that aforementioned overlap--after all, the point of telling the story this way is to make it feel like there's a cohesive, unified world. To that end, I created a sheet with the story connections. Each character has four (minimum) touchpoints with every other character. For example, Zelkie starts off her book trying to pickpocket someone in a crowded city street. Zelkie fails, in part because the would-be victim notices her. Zelkie's target is the main character of the fourth novella, and one of her experiences is noticing that she's almost pickpocketed by a strange little creature. The reader (I hope) will recognize that as Zelkie, though for the other character, it's just one thing that happens during her day among many others.
Because of that ever-increasing complexity, chronology became important to me. To that end, I created another sheet that, again using the color-coding I'd set up, showed me where and when each major event happens to each character. This prevented me from having a character show up in one place when they should have been somewhere else at the same time, or travel too fast from one point to another. Interestingly (to me, at least), I wasn't able to really conceptualize what this sheet would look like until I had written the first novella. Zelkie's story--written in its entirety during my first retreat with my group--ended up being the chronological backbone of the story. This made sense to me, because I was able to consider what I'd written as official canon, thereby giving me something to hang the rest of the stories on. During the month between my retreats, I dabbled with the second novella. I was hoping to finish it during that sabbatical, but I ended up only completing five or six chapters before I returned to the cabin. As a result, I wrote the ending of that second book during the first day of my retreat, then dedicated the remaining three days to finishing the third novella. I've only been home three days or so, meaning I haven't bothered trying to start the fourth novella yet, in part because I'm doing a different project (this one for school) that's using up a lot of time. Oh, and I'm writing this thing, instead. In terms of the actual writing process, this is one of my least productive retreats as far as word count goes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--I needed to get a certain number of chapters done (I finished 19, I think) rather than just pound out a bunch of words, as I've needed to in other years. But what was frustrating was an unexpected confluence of results. See, I'm trying to give each novella its own narrative texture. Book I has a character that kind of breaks the fourth wall and has a really dry, egocentric view of the world. I wrote it in first-person present, giving the novella an immediacy that I really liked. Book II is written in a more traditional third-person past, limited omniscient narration voice. This was easy enough to fall back into--one of the reasons it was a good choice when I started this one--and I think is part of the reason I was able to finish the second half of the novella in one day. But this third one…I made the mistake (maybe) of putting it in third-person present. This is hard for me to maintain--combined, I probably spent an entire hour of the retreat deleting a past-tense verb and rewriting it as a present-tense conjugation. The constant errors slowed me down a lot, and one of the reasons I love these retreats is because I get to write consistently, constantly, and fully. I don't have to stop and slow down for anything other than food and a potty break. So the constant editing frustrated me. Oh, and then I woke up part way through the retreat with conjunctivitis--courtesy my oldest kid--and so I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to get treatment so that I could beat it quickly and get on with my life. That distraction sucked a couple of hours from my retreat that I never got back. Still, I finished with my goal intact--to complete the third novella--and I just need to figure out how I'm going to put together the next one. So, on balance, I think it was another successful writing summer. After it's all said and done, I wrote 625,552 words this year. That, I submit, is quite a few. Over 625,000 to be precise. In fact, I wrote more than that in total, since I didn't count work-related things--typing up assignments or emails--or my social media posts, which would add a fair bit. I'm probably looking at an additional 20,000 words or so, if I had to guess, but since I'm already approximating the numbers that are in the total, I figure it's okay to err on the conservative side. I took some surprisingly meticulous notes on what I wrote, with the monthly breakdown as seen below. (Yes, I included this essay in the calculations, in order to make it as complete as possible.) There are some clear takeaways: June and February were, by far, my most productive months. The former is hardly surprising: June saw me taking not one, but two writing retreats to my family's cabin. There I wrote for upwards of eight hours a day. The most productive day of the year was actually 28 June, when I wrote 18,220 new words and edited an additional 250 words. The next closest was the day before, when I edited about the same amount, but wrote 14,268 in my novel and then an additional 1,500 words in my reading journal. That day, then, is one of the most important days in the year--to go along with my trip to D.C. and some of the other significant things--because that was the day when I understood myself in a way I never had before. I was writing my journal in response to It, by Stephen King, and I only stopped writing what I did because my hand was hurting. So though the day saw over 16k words, those 1,500 are probably some of the most important--to me personally--words that I've ever written.
February being in the second place is a bit of a shock, though. What, I thought to myself when I saw that, did I do in February to put it so high on the list? Digging back into the details, I remembered that, over the Valentine weekend, I went to LTUE, where I wrote about 22k words of notes throughout the different panels. That gave the shortest month of the year a massive boost. Combined with some pretty steady revisions and consistent essay-writing, and I came in with almost 70,000 words. While it isn't close to June's 121,000 word month, it's still an impressive total, methinks. Third place goes, unsurprisingly, to November, where I was committed to writing at least 50,000 words. Combined with everything else I typically write, it's almost a given that I would get so many words typed up during the eleventh month. Now that I can sit on my nest-egg of 625,000 words, I'm free to wonder what the value is and what I'm shooting for next year. I had a goal to write three novels in 2018--I failed at that goal completely. I didn't even finish two. I also wanted to get half a million words, and that I definitely accomplished. So what should I do next? Part of me just wants to keep on--I always have a book sitting on my shelf that needs to be edited. I have desires (fading embers of desire, maybe) to get out there and submit War Golem, though I'm not at all confident I've done enough work to really shop it around. I want the goal for what comes 365 days from now to be something that requires my effort and dedication, but isn't cripplingly large. Much like how I'm trying to figure out a new reading goal, I also need to figure out what my new writing goal is going to be. Here are some givens: I want to keep writing daily essays. However, I have an internal clock/expectation that I need to hit 1,000 words minimum before I turn it over to the internet. Perhaps I should chill out on that one? Allow myself to write a little less non-fiction so that I can focus on what I really care about? Here's a possibility: Regardless of how many words I put down, I want to write some fiction every day, on top of my essays. Another possibility would be to eschew the daily essays and insist that I write, say, three times a week, but it's always a specific amount of time--maybe twenty minutes or thirty. I could also figure out what I want to do with my edits: Every finished new chapter needs to be matched by an edited chapter. In fact, now that I think about that, I kind of want that to be part of my goal: The year of 2019 will be the Year of Editing™. That I'll finish editing Ash and Fire and return to War Golem so that I can make it as good as possible before shifting into its sequel, War Golems. That sounds good… I guess we'll see. All my words for the year are done. What else is there to do but to sift through the morass and see if any of them are worth putting out into the world's stage? Wish me luck. Okay, so maybe the title is slightly misleading: I don't really know how one would go about writing a Superman story. It's clear that, at least cinematically, the Man of Steel remains one of the inexplicably toughest nuts to crack. And in a world where two very well-received movies include a talking tree and a sentient space raccoon, we can't chalk it up to the tired trope of "no one can relate to a demigod like Superman" as an explanation.
I've been thinking about the cinematic universe (called the DCEU) where a movie as significant and important--despite its flaws--as Wonder Woman can coexist with the mix of weird decisions and bizarre character motivations as Batman v. Superman. And though Justice League was fine (I'm not a particularly difficult fan to please when it comes to movies, in case you haven't noticed), and I purchased the Blu-Ray and expect to get to watch it soon, I'm not enamored of it. I've wanted to return and see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse more than I've wanted to return to Justice League, which isn't really that big of a surprise, considering who's writing this, but the difference is I actually have Justice League in my house and could put it in and watch it… I digress. What I'm getting at is the idea that Superman is hard to make personable, relatable, or intriguing in our post-9/11, post-2016 election world. In other words, we're in a time where our culture has created a new identity for itselves, one filled with bitterness and anger, outrage and injustice. What could Superman possibly have to say about that sort of thing? Well, a lot, I think. In some ways, the Last Son of Krypton is more crucial in our cinematic discourse than we might believe, as he's a ought to be the example of what the United States has been for the vast majority of Superman's existence: A genuine superpower. So, if I were to write a Superman movie (I'd say movie, if only because then I'd have the free reign to tell the story without worrying about continuity or fitting it into a broader mythology), I think that's the angle I would take. I wouldn't necessarily pull for the comics--in part because I don't know as much about current Superman continuity than I do some of the Golden Age stories, which probably wouldn't work for the purposes of such a thought exercise--though there are pieces of the video game series Injustice: Gods Among Us that I think makes for an interesting starting point. Here's my pitch: Make it a comedy. I mean that generically, which is to say, classically. Though there are lots of parts of the comedic structure that we'd have to ignore for simplicity's sake, I would pull on two specific aspects of classical comedy: The story is a process from social disarray to social cohesion, and I would incorporate people from all levels of society. Okay, so a quick step backwards. Have you read The Divine Comedy? It's the story about a poet named Dante who wakes up one night in a dark wood and then is invited to pass through the three potential eternities of the Catholic afterlife, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante begins having lost his way and is forced to go to the worst of all possible places, Inferno, in order to determine the greater good of his theme--namely, God's justice. It's best known as the repository of the first of the three books, Inferno, which is filled with all sorts of horrible punishments and gruesome images. When you read The Divine Comedy (which you most definitely should), you'll be hard pressed to put our modern definition of "comedy" onto it. It's not funny; it's comedic. There's a difference. Superman would need to do the same thing. Dante is a superman in Hell, mostly because he still has a corporal body and the rest of the shades do not. (At one point, they notice that he casts a shadow, which gets the shades furious with jealousy.) He is capable of leaving Hell, which the spirits of "Adam's wicked seed" can't do. In other words, he is far above them in ability, capacity, and authority. Kal-El is the same in our context. At the beginning of the movie, Superman is at the height of his powers--not quite at the level Grant Morrison will put him, but still pretty impressive. There is near universal acclaim for what he's done, including having defeated Doomsday, rebuffed an alien invasion, and managed to avert catastrophic climate change. He's feeling pretty good about himself: Lois and he have a good relationship, his mother is content and enjoys his weekly visits, and his life as Clark Kent is also going well, with some accolades for his journalism. All of this is the first five or so minutes of the movie. We can have some cool montages of him saving the day--and smiling every time he helps people out, whether it's the vintage cat-in-the-tree or stopping of a mugging--and get the sense that all's well in the universe. Then there's a mistake. Lois and Clark are having lunch in Metropolis. Clark is saying, "This is good, you know? After all we've been through, it's nice to have a simple meal together." An explosion happens across the street. Superman, of course, protects Lois and the entire diner from the blast (quipping, "That's what Superman can do" or something along the lines of him being somewhat cocky about his abilities), then zips over to save the day. It's a weird alien robot that he's never seen before--but who cares? He's Superman! He begins smashing things and moving at superspeed and doing the sort of cool action we associate with superhero movies. Though there's been some damage, Superman has taken care of all but one of the robots. A crowd gathers, cheering Superman's success as he approaches the wounded being. This one he wants information from. Grabbing the creature, which wraps its claws around his wrist as Superman hefts it into the air, Superman asks, "Where do you come from?" "I bring a message," says the creature. "What's that?" "Despair." Slow-motion effect as Superman perceives what the creature is about to do: A massive explosion tears through the robot. Superman can move fast enough to save everyone who's nearby--we just saw him do that a few minutes ago. But not when the robot holds him in place. Superman looks down at the claws holding him back, then up at the creature as he recognizes what's about to happen. The entire block disappears in a massive explosion. (Yes, this is similar to the moment in Batman v. Superman, but with one crucial difference: Superman tries to save everyone--which he totally could have done had he wanted to in the Snyder film--but can't. That's really important.) Superman is left with only the portion of the robot that he'd protected with his hand, a silver disk that glows with a pink light. Superman looks around, dismayed at what happened. He, of course, is unscathed, but there are dead people all over the place, as well as countless wounded. His ears are still ringing and he's a little out of sorts--mostly because he can't believe he made such a grievous mistake--and he's understandably upset about the whole thing. Then he sees Lois, under some rubble, bleeding from a head wound. He's by her side immediately, scanning her body, certain that he can hear her heartbeat. A moment of relief when he sees that she's still alive. Without hesitating, he flies her to the closest hospital. "Where are the others?" asks an ER nurse as he takes Lois from the Man of Steel. "Others?" "We heard the explosion. Where are the other injured people?" explains the nurse. "You didn't only rescue this one, did you?" asks someone else, flabbergasted. Superman stalls: He's being confronted with his selfishness and not doing all he could do. He leaves and heads back to the area of the explosion to try to help, but those who are there tell him he's "done enough". Injured at the rejection, he flies away to return to the hospital, this time as the boyfriend, Clark Kent. There, the doctors tell him that they can't really give him much information--privacy of the patient and all that--but that Lois is in a coma. Clark is a bit of a wreck. He feels immense guilt at having been suckerpunched by the robot, he's anxious about Lois, and, when he comes in to work, he is shocked when Perry White accuses him of plagiarizing an award-winning article. At the same time, who else should show up in his life than Lana Lang, his old high school sweetheart. She surprises him at work and asks him out to dinner--which he reluctantly accepts. During the meal, she flirts pretty heavily with him, enough that he feels that she's being inappropriate. "My girlfriend is in a coma," he says, rising from the table. Lana does, too, saying, "Then she won't know about this," and wraps Clark in a tight hug and kisses him full on the mouth. A person in the restaurant snaps a picture on his phone. Clark pushes her away, then says some sort of mumbled, "Good to see you, Lana," before rushing into the night. Angry at all of the injustices that are heaping on him, he heads home to Smallville where he can chat with his mom, Martha. There, he explains how frustrated he is and his mother actually laughs at him. "Sorry, Clark. I don't mean to make you feel worse. It's kind of funny to me that you're finally feeling what we always feel around you: powerlessness." Martha sighs and rubs his shoulder. "Some problems can't be defeated with your fists, sweetheart. You'll pull through, of course. Lois will pull through--you always do. But all the strength in the world isn't enough to turn back time. You'll have to wait." For a man who can move faster than light, this isn't an easy proposition. Needing to blow off some steam, he steps out into the cool Kansas night, staring at the sky. Then he squints. He's seeing something approach. Instantly, he's in his cape and boots, soaring toward the anomaly. At last, something he can do. Just as he's about to break out of the atmosphere, he hears Lois whisper his name. The possibility that she's revived pulls him to a stop. Unsure if he should investigate this anomaly or return to Lois, he hesitates long enough that the spaceship he'd spotted from Kansas can fire at him. A space battle ensues, complete with robotic drones and Superman frying stuff with his heat vision. The thing is, the robots are cutting him--making him bleed, though being in space means that he's receiving the Sun's radiation enough that the wounds don't stick around--but he's still shocked that he's getting physically injured by the attack. At this point, Lois' heartbeat begins to fade--a frequency that he's specifically tuned into for just such an occasion--and he begins to panic. He has to get back to Lois before she dies, but every time he tries to retreat, the robots knock him back. Realizing he needs to outmaneuver them, he tries to fly around the planet, only to be blasted out of the sky by a massive beam from the mothership. Superman wakes up in a crater, dazed and confused. He tries to fly, but finds himself too weak to do anything except for rise up a few feet before crashing to the ground. He has landed in rural China--he can tell because a bunch of confused Chinese farmers are staring at him with shock. Far from home, his powers diminished, Superman now has to figure out how to get home. And, what's worse, he can't hear Lois' heartbeat anymore. … And that's where I'll stop for now, since the essay is gone on too long and I want to do something else with my day. Stay tuned to see if I can finish how I would write a Superman story. === ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! In the past month, a couple of important things have happened in my writing life: 1) I finished my second "Sunday Journal"; and 2) I "won", for the fourth consecutive year, NaNoWriMo.
ONE The first is interesting to me from a personal point of view. I haven't journaled my life since I finished my mission. I wrote religiously (ha) in the four volumes that covered my two years of service. This was done quite poorly, when I look back on it, as I did a horrible job of preserving the cool stuff I saw and did, focusing on boring minutiae that relied on too much on me remembering what the deuce I was trying to say. Since then, I've rather avoided journaling. I don't know why--as a writer, you'd think that would be a natural impulse--but it took many, many years before I wanted to write personal non-fiction. In fact, maybe that's part of why I took so long to start writing personally: I considered what little writing time I had as sacred and devoted to the fiction I was writing. While that's still a thing--I have a limited amount of bandwidth and writing non-fiction/personal essays eats into the amount of writing capacity I have (hence the reason I stopped writing personal essays during the month of November)--I have moved into finding other ways of squeezing in more writing. One of the reasons I resisted journal writing is that I like having things in one place. I have all my digital writings--these posts as well as every novel I've written since college (the high school files are all gone, lost to the floppy-drive-era past)--are all on Dropbox. If I write something at home, then need to finish it at school, it's as easy as logging into the cloud. While imperfect--digital is not as permanent as we'd like, though analog has its flaws, too--it's a system that works for me. So when I was gifted a blank notebook that was interspersed with Shakespeare quotes and illustrations inspired by Shakespeare's plays--a gift from my wife, who bought it from the Folger's Shakespeare Library when she went to Washington, D.C.--I realized that I needed to use it somehow. After all, that wouldn't be very nice of me not to use a gift she'd thoughtfully picked out for me, right? I began taking the notebook with me to church, writing some of my thoughts (and, occasionally, notes from the speakers) in the small green notebook. I soon decided that it was immensely cathartic, as I felt I had a place I could write absolutely anything on my mind. It was entirely personal, and since I have some of my most honest moments in church, it seemed a fitting decision. Like all things that get into my mind, I became obsessive with it, going so far as to haul it with me to the priesthood sessions of General Conference to try to write some words in the dim light of the stake center. This wasn't because I wanted to write profound notes or anything; it was simply because I didn't want to miss a week of writing. After a good year and a half in that journal, I finished it out. Fortunately, I had a blank journal from a student who had given it to me as a gift at the end of the school year. It had a quote from Hamlet ("The readiness is all.") and my name engraved on the front. Therefore, it was another Shakespeare journal. I finished that one exactly one year and one week after starting it. Knowing that I was coming to an end with it, I picked up a new pen (one of my souvenirs from my own visit to the Folger Library in D.C.) and a Shakespeare-themed notebook from the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Tomorrow will mark my second week writing in that notebook. It makes me look forward to going to church…which probably isn't the most religious or holy of reasons to feel that way. TWO NaNoWriMo is a crazy time. I've now written four books for the "competition", each one totaling just over 50,000 words. Lifetime, I'm at over 210,000 words on their website. As of this writing, the entirety of Utah county has written over 13 million words, as self-reported on the website (which I think is pretty awesome, as well as showing just how many people want to participate in this event). Anyway, I both love and hate NaNoWriMo. My first year, I retold Dante's Inferno as a science fiction story. The second, it was a book called Cloudfarmers, a steampunk story I wrote for my wife (who still hasn't finished reading it, lol). Last year, I wrote a book that takes place in my "sci-fi universe" where I've based a couple of larger novels (not the Dante rip-off one, though) in a book I called The Colony, which was basically Jurassic Park but in a space colony. (Of the four I've written, The Colony was probably the best structured one.) This year, I finished Theomancy (though I haven't technically finished the story, yet; I'm about four chapters from the end, I think), a fantasy book where goddesses and gods are summoned to the planet to do the bidding of the characters. Mostly, they punch each other a lot. The thing about NaNoWriMo is that I'm never passionate about my book. In fact, I deliberately pick one of the "I've always thought I'd like to do a story about this, but when would I have the time? It's not my biggest interest!" kinds of books that I cook up. It's important, I think, for me to have it be something I'd like to have written, but not necessarily a book I'd like to reread. That way, I don't feel guilty that I never edit the books. In fact, after I write them, I tuck them away and refuse to look at them again. The weird part of all this is that I've dedicated, probably, nearly a hundred hours for a book that I don't really want to read and didn't have a passion to write. So, why bother? It's not like it's a real competition: It's a support community that wants to help people sit down and do something that they would not otherwise do. Would I have written novels during November? Yes. Would they have been Theomancy? Nope. No chance. (I'm in the midst of trying to write a real horror novel, tentatively called Mon Sters and it's one that's received the most interest and positive responses from my writers group over almost anything else I've ever done…so I don't want to screw it up.) I don't even know what book I am writing, now that November is over. It's kind of a haze. So what's the point? Why do I do it? I think it's to show myself, continuously, that I can write when I don't want to, I can push if I have to, I can make a deadline if I try. While the stories are never as good as when I write bigger novels (the stuff I get done in the summer is better writing, longer, and written in fewer days…so go figure), it's a reminder that I can't assume I'd be able to balance my real-life work and my fiction writing if I were a published author who still taught full-time. My mind doesn't work that way. I can turn around with 50k words in a month…but I know they aren't necessarily good words. That seems like a rather negative conclusion, but for me, it's a good thing. I've long given up the idea that my writings will be the way that I provide for my family, at least at the level I'm at now. Yet every time I finish another novel (counting this one, I have completed thirteen novels and written a great deal more of incomplete stuff), I feel like I'm one step farther along. Even if the step is wobbly, it's one that shows movement. If nothing else, it shows that I can do hard things. So, while Theomancy is hardly the best thing that I've ever written, it's a good thing that I wrote it. |
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