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. 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. 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. With the middle of the month already almost upon us (for as lethargic and mind-numbingly slow as January moves, February always progresses at a pleasant--albeit frigid--clip, for which I am thankful), I thought I'd give a quick update about War Golem, my World War I-inspired fantasy novel about a combo team of soldier-and-golem who fight in the trenches. This year has seen a shift in what I'm trying to do with my reading and writing--an attempt to find a balance, as it were--and so I've spent less time generating new content (like this essay) and more time in editing what I've already written. In the case of War Golem, the book itself is 31 chapters long, meaning it would take me a month to edit the whole thing if I knock out a chapter a day.
Unsurprisingly, I have not finished this current draft of the book. However, I am close. I have six or seven chapters left to go as I've been slugging my way through my first book to ever have had this much effort put into it. What I've done differently than in the past* is fill in a spreadsheet with the information that I'm trying to keep track of in this edit. Continuity details, such as locations, timing between events, and even the color of the golem's eyes (which change, depending on her mood) have been documented. I include a notes section that's supposed to help me keep in mind some of the stuff that I'm thinking about, as well as a section that tracks what I begin and end each chapter with** to keep me from repeating myself. I also include a synopsis of the chapter--when I'm done, I can read through only a couple thousand words (max) to see the whole shape of the story--and a section for "on-page" characters and those mentioned in the course of the conversations. In other words, I'm trying to be more organized in my approach to the edits this time. I don't know if these tweaks are going to help me become a better writer, but at least--thanks to this spreadsheet--I know what's going on in my book. --- * I'm always tinkering with how I write a novel. I have some foundational pieces that I try to put into play, but every single book has come out slightly--and sometimes greatly--different than what came before it. I don't know if that's a sign of fiddling or grazing to find the right fit, or if it's a natural exigency of the process. However, I do want to note that I got the words grazing, fiddling, and exigency into the same sentence, which is not--I submit--a normal thing to see. ** I mentioned this a couple of years ago (almost exactly two, to be precise) that I've found satisfaction in concluding with how I began. I took this to War Golem, where I begin and end the chapters with a word or image that's the same. I haven't read the book qua a book, so I don't know how effective it is. I did, however, decide that, in its sequel, War Golems, I would take a phrase or word from the ending of the previous chapter to incorporate into the beginning of the current chapter, thereby threading the story together with similarities. I prefer the first style to the latter. ==== 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! One of the cardinal rules of editing is to cut. If you're Stephen King, it's a minimum of 10% (and, looking at some of his books, it makes me wonder if he always follows his rules, or if some of his books could have been even longer). I don't know if Brandon Sanderson does the same thing, though the sizes of his tomes are…considerable.
In fact, when you hear the word "edit", it gives the impression that cutting material is the primary purpose of that phase of work. The movie Mad Max: Fury Road is (rightly, I think) held up as a fantastic piece of cinema. According to this article, the movie had over 480 minutes of footage that needed to be culled, cut, reduced, ignored, omitted, or skipped. From that much footage, a two hour movie is made. That's what I think about when I think of editing, but it's not a perfect parallel. The writing version of that can sometimes be considered the times that I've pressed "backspace" (twice in that last sentence alone), or when I follow a particular path and then delete the paragraph or sentence or phrase because none of it is working. These nonce-edits aren't like a film, where the camera starts, the scene begins, and then a mistake happens--a line is flubbed, an extra misses a cue, a prop malfunctions--and that adds to the grand total of film that has to be edited. I can only guess how much of the 480 minutes was useable to the editor, a woman named Margaret Sixel--who did a fantastic job, by the way--but I'm pretty sure it isn't even close to 100%. However, if Sixel ended up with, say, 240 (the idea that 50% of the shots are usable somehow) minutes of worthwhile film, that's still cutting the raw useful material by another 50%. That is a lot of work and a lot of effort to reduce the story down to its barest necessities. Yet, even with an example like that, I find myself incapable of taking out hardly anything in my writings. I'm about a third of the way through my third serious pass through War Golem, and I'm only adding. While I might find a phrase that can be tweaked or tightened, I'm always in the process of addition. Some of this is coming from my original process, where I tried to keep the story tightly focused on the main character and what was happening directly to her. I didn't want to put any extra words in the first pass--and that ended up leaving some areas threadbare. The result of that was that I have to write in what was vague or unclear before. Character motivation is clarified, the world is sharpened--the book, I think, is getting better. But now I'm bumping against the sagacity of many, many writers and editors who are keen to cut and trim. I don't have a problem with that, at least on a conceptual level. There's a necessity to editing things down to a more manageable length. Yet I struggle to feel like I'm doing my book any favors by bloating (is that the right word?) the text. This isn't to say that I empurple the prose or wander on tangents. So far as I can see, I've already chosen the scenes most crucial to the entire book. So why do I feel I'm doing it wrong when I don't cut out more of my 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! It was August of 2016 when I decided that I needed to dedicate more time to my writing. I decided on this particular format--something low-key, low-stakes, and easy to check off as part of my daily habits--because I thought that, if I'm "publishing" (in loose sky commas) my thoughts on my blog, it'll help to build an audience and provide a motivation for me to keep going. Later, I shifted over to my website in order to keep new content there and because I feel like having a backlog of my work there is a good idea. After all, if someone is interested in repping me, it'd be nice for them to see what I make, the kind of contribution I provide. Plus it shows a range of my thinking--though whether or not that would be beneficial to a potential agent's decision or not is anyone's guess. Additionally, I get to add the words I pound out in the evenings at home to my annual total, which is well on track to hitting almost 600,000 words this year. Though there's no value to a large word count, it helps to remind me that I can write a lot, even if I don't know how good the writing is.
All of this is to say that I think there's a lot of good that comes from my daily writing. I don't want to be writing tonight. During the past couple of months, I've relied on my edits for War Golem to give me some of my word count and, as a result, let the habit of daily work slip. Getting back into that groove during the month of October is really important, though, because I have NaNoWriMo coming up in thirty days and if I'm not used to slicing out the time in my office, it'll be a lot harder to accomplish writing a fourth novel-in-a-month in November. Nevertheless, the gravity of the large glowing rectangle in my living room (as opposed to this smaller glowing rectangle in my office) is powerful. The allure of video games, the second season of Stranger Things (it is October, after all), or a rewatch of some of the movies that I've borrowed/purchased lately--they all roil about during the time at the keyboard. If you've read much of my stuff in the past few weeks and noticed that there's a tendency toward more vacuous thoughts, that's part of it. I'm not fully here. And here's why: I've recently been bumping against the idea of what these essays are supposed to accomplish. This isn't to say that I don't like writing them, but instead asking what they can do. I'm no David Sedaris or Chuck Klosterman: I don't refine my craft of non-fiction writing so that it's particularly memorable or profound. While I may strike on an interesting idea here or there, I don't put any effort into polishing my essays. I don't even run a spell-check on them (which, as everyone knows, is less necessary with a check-as-you-go feature turned on in Word), so it's not as though I'm giving out professional level writing here. In other words, I write a lot, but I don't rewrite at all. I mean, I've finished my work on War Golem, which was no small thing, but aside from that, I haven't finished a real revision on a work in something close to eighteen months, if I had to guess. There's a finality to finishing the process of putting an edited manuscript into the computer, but aside from that emotional release, I'm not gaining any noticeable progress in any of my writing (save the word count). I've toyed with the idea of throwing up an old essay, then have an edited version afterwards. I've done a little bit of that in the past, but there's an old Patrick Rothfuss blog that does that very thing much better than I would (he is a better writer than I), so I don't think that's worth my time. Plus, who wants to read the same essay twice? I don't (obviously--otherwise I would edit them). So I end up feeling a strange tug between needing to create more content and refining that which I already have. Sure, there are times when I really want to express my ideas and I'm willing to put the time into doing so. For the most part, however, I find myself sitting down to write, not because I want to, but I feel a pressure that means I have to. Is that a bad habit? ==== 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 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! I've missed the steady output that these daily essays afford me, but I found that my bandwidth has decreased (unsurprisingly) since the summer ended. My days are long during the first couple of months of the school year, since I stay after school to coach my students for the Shakespeare Competition that will happen this weekend in Cedar City. (Which reminds me…I still have to talk about my experience at the Wooden O a month and a half ago….hmmmmm.) I also am more tired because I'm teaching and my kids require attention sometimes. Also, video games.
The point is, I don't have as much strength of will and stamina to sit down and bang out a thousand words--of whatever worth they may be--on top of everything else. Not, at least, if I want to get any editing done. It's one of those "I can only do so many things before I snap" deals: I want to improve my writing, but I also need to improve my editing. I can't do the latter if I don't do the former, but if I do too much of the former, I'll never get to the latter. It's the Ouroboros of being an author. In this case, I finished up my work on War Golem, the first in a (currently) duology, yesternight. It was a bit of a surprise that I got that done, since there was an entire scene I had to inject into the last chapter, so it wasn't just a matter of typing up the edits I'd made in my manuscript. It took some emotional momentum, and that was hard to muster after the craziness of everything I had to do. Nevertheless, I soldiered (pun…it's a book with soldiers) on and finished up the thing. It sits at a pretty 95,369 words. Fewer than the 100,000 I didn't want to reach, but about 5,000 more than I was expecting. When it comes to my editing process, I tend not to extract too much. I think it's an arrogance on my part--an unjustified belief that what I push out is already in pretty good shape and I just need to tweak it here or there for the book to work. The fact that I haven't been picked up by an agent may put paid to that idea. Still, I tend to finish an edit having plucked and picked at the sentences and paragraphs, rather than striking out a large swath of work. I tend to write subtly--things that don't seem to matter in earlier chapters have a large bearing in the later ones--which makes it hard to cut out anything. Sure, there may be a paragraph--or as much as a page--that needs to be trimmed, but I don't find myself thinking, This whole thing has to be rewritten. If a book has that many problems, I abandon it for a different project. No one is paying me to perfect a book, and if I'm not passionate enough to fix something I broke, I don't want to spend time fixing it. Now, I realize that isn't how it works if I want to be a real-life author. I know that staying focused, writing a lot, editing more, and keeping the broader vision in mind is what I need to do. But, let's be honest: There are relatively few perks to being an amateur (used in its original sense as well as its common one) author, and being able to abandon a project without feeling guilt is definitely one of them. Am I capable of changing myself so that I'll be able to work through broken books later? I don't know. I have no compelling reason to find out. Anyway, the point is that I'm only editing these superficial things. Maybe the stories don't need to be rewritten in substantial ways. Maybe I can tell a story well enough that a handful of continuity errors, spelling problems, or smatterings of solecisms can be red-lined out and the story will be fine on its own. Or maybe not. Who knows? It's true that I've had a couple of people read my book--my brother is heading toward the end of his read-through of the first draft of War Golem, and another one of the writers in my group has knocked out the entire novel--so there are people who can point to large-scale issues. So far, however, they've been mum. They've pointed out some issues which I've tried to address, but on the whole, the story seems to work for them. Maybe I have too-generous of alpha readers. So all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I haven't written a lot because I have spent a major chunk of time editing. The con is that I'm out of practice for the daily essays. The pro is that I'm less irritated by editing my own stuff. This is a new development for me. Maybe it's because it feels like I'm making progress. Maybe it's because I no longer write back-breaking novels that are over 300,000 words, so editing is less daunting. Maybe it's because I'm maturing as a writer. But whatever the case, I didn't find myself hating/dreading the time I had to spend in the manuscript. Finding a sentence and tightening it up was, in particular, an enjoyable experience. I wonder if I should try to apply that to War Golem again, giving the book another pass… …nah. I'm not going to worry about that. Instead, I need to focus on the sequel, War Golems*. Hoo-boy. It never ends. --- * I originally titled the first novel War Golems. Then, when I realized there was a sequel in there, I decided to change the first book to War Golem and the second to War Golems (a la the movies Alien and Aliens) because I liked the subtlety (see above) and because I wanted to make a conscious choice in the way the books were titled. As an additional tweak, I made sure that War Golem, being the first book, has only one word titles for each of its thirty-one chapters. War Golems, as the sequel, has two word titles. I don't know if this sort of nuance would be something I'd get to keep were I to be published, but I thought it was clever. Now I've told you about a book that you've never read. I hope you feel edified. ==== 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 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! I wrote one essay during June, deciding to dedicate the mental energy necessary for slapping one of these daily writes instead toward my War Golems manuscript. Every day, I tried to edit at least one chapter. With thirty-one chapters, it was guaranteed that, unless I did two on one day, I was going to finish on 1 July. What ended up happening was, during my first writer retreat in June, the one with friends, I didn't have the extra time I needed to edit the manuscript. One day I tried to make up for it, but then I missed--in other words, despite my best efforts, I was still a chapter behind, all month long. "Easy," I can hear the strawman say, "you just make it up the next day." "Go away," I can hear me say to the strawman, "you know naught of what you speak." The process of editing has slowly become more refined for me. I'm now at the point that my pages aren't a complete mess (most of the time), as I've learned how to account for how I want to work on the manuscript after the redline edit. As you can see in the picture, I have in-line editing wherever it fits, striking out unnecessary or incorrect words, shifting parts of a sentence about, and--this is the important part--using circled numbers to indicate what needs to be added but won't fit in the single spaced lines. You can even see a page that has an entire change to a scene. I used to write "add detail" or something equally useless to my manuscripts, shifting the onus of rewriting to when I was at the computer, making my changes. I no longer do that, save when I'm without my notes and can't remember the actual detail I need. Instead, I find empty white space and fill it up with the additional scene. This goes a long way to making me feel less overwhelmed when I sit down to approach the manuscript again. In terms of that step--going from redline to computer--I haven't done that in over a year. The last book I did that to was Conduits and, after having a beta reader read through it as a whole entity, rather than a chapter-by-chapter response as my writers' group does, I realized there were quite a few changes needed and I didn't want to do them. So I moved on. Now I'm at that step again. I've made some changes to it that will help the sequel I just finished writing (for example, since this is the first book, I've gone through and made all of the chapter names a single word; in Book II, each chapter name has two words). Since I now have two unfinished books, there's a temptation to hold off on any large changes to Book I until I've slapped Book II into a more logical shape. But I'm also feeling almost brave enough to want to start the agent hunt. And that puts me squarely in the conundrum of the next step. It is really hard for me to want to query anything. I simply don't have the confidence in my product to be anything that someone in a position to help me get published would want to read. Yet, at the same time, I really wish I had a manuscript out there. It's the only way that I can come closer to the goal of being published: So long as the manuscript sits on my desk/hard drive, it is an impossibility of me getting an agent and having her shop it around--and that's not a hyperbolic impossibility, it's just the nature of reality. So here I sit, on my son's 5th birthday, trying to convince myself to do the hardest part: Writing a query letter. I did this sort of thing for the Utah Shakespeare Festival Wooden O Symposium (to which I did get accepted!) and so I figure that this is a good way to slap down a first draft. Therefore, without further ado, here's the first draft to the pitch and query for War Golems (although I'm thinking of doing a Ridley Scott thing and have the first book be War Golem and the second War Golems, see, because it's a sequential thing, singular and then plural…okay, enough procrastinating, here we go): Pitch: Cori defeats her former best friend as she tries to end a pointless war while keeping her war-machine golem alive. Query: War Golem takes place in a world embroiled in horrendous war where massive war-machines known as golems are used--but only as support creatures. In the nasty mire of the trenches, Cori Nettleson decides to use her golem, Channa, as an offensive weapon instead. Okay, so it needs work.
I guess that's part of my next step, too. Back in August of 2016, a coworker said she wrote every day. I was inspired to take up the same concept for myself and resurrect my languishing blog. After a while, I decided that I really liked coming up with a topic and writing for a spell. It made me feel "writerly" and also increased how much time I was in my office--an emblem of my wife's love for me. After getting some positive feedback (for the most part) from people enjoying my thoughts, I decided to relocate the blog to my personal website, where I'm currently posting each day's work.
Now, however, I'm on the cusp of a new summer and I have ambitious plans to maybe actually try a little harder to perhaps begin to commence the possibility of one day in the future getting to the point of almost starting the hunt for an agent. I have written--outlined or completed--almost 17 novels since 2004. I have nothing to show for that except a large word count and a swollen Dropbox. If I really want to make that reluctant step back into the submission/query/rejection game, I will have to find time to do what I like to do least of all my writing: Editing. I've talked about this before, so I don't have to go into too much detail. Still: I hate editing. The thing about the process is, once I'm in the story, it isn't too bad. I can pick things out that I'd like to change, switch a piece here or there, and generally find ways to improve the book. But what I don't do is rewrite much--if any--of the story. I mean, I tweak a chapter here or there, maybe trim some fat in the descriptions. I definitely look for continuity errors and try to fix them. But rewriting? Not so much. The thing with that is, it makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. I don't have enough confidence that I've done it right the first time around, but I don't know if there's something really large that would necessitate a complete revision. Having, essentially, broken Writ in Blood by tinkering without rewriting, I'm leery of jumping into a story and ending up with a mess on my hands. I think part of this comes from my consideration of how precious my writing time is. I don't get to sit down and hammer out ten pages a day. I don't write full-time (though I have some delicious moments whilst at the cabin where I can devote entire days to that very thing), so I feel like, if I'm going to write, I need to write something new. This is a problem when it comes to editing, because it doesn't feel like writing. If I remember correctly, Brandon Sanderson's brain lets him edit for a few hours a day after writing all day, as the editing process doesn't take the same mental energy and he can move through it without feeling tapped out. I'm not so fortunate: I almost always feel like what I've written is rubbish, so seeing what I've written again drains me even more than the writing does. And that leads me to my hiatus. I'm going to take the month of June off of writing daily essays. This isn't to say I won't write essays, but I'm going to dedicate the time that I normally would have devoted to something new to something old, instead. This isn't as large of a sacrifice as it sounds: I'll be gone from home for a couple of weeks throughout June, and July will see even more departures. I doubt I would have had a steady writing schedule anyway. That's all one. The point is for me to level up my editing abilities. If I had put as much time into editing my novels as I have writing these essays, I would be in a different position as a writer. I don't know if I would be a better one, necessarily, but a different one. And I think it's time I figured out what that part of my work ethic can create. I want to see myself succeed, if only in commitment, at improving my editing skills. Wish me luck. I talked about how I'm excited for the sequel I'm writing this summer. I'm also excited that I'm excited about it. And though some of the other books I've plotted were interesting, I felt as though I knew the story well enough through outlining that I didn't have the same drive to see what the book looked like in its full(er) form.
And that's led me to think about my writing process. I have a lot of words written this year. According to my ever-handy (and, all things considered, fairly accurate) spreadsheet, I have written just shy of 250,000 words since 1 January. That…is not a small number, especially since we're not even out of May yet. Most novels that are released in mainstream format are fewer than that. As I've admitted before, I'm not convinced that I have many good words. Sure, I write a profound thing here or there, but much of what I've turned this website into is a mental vomit arena. I throw up some of the things I'm thinking about, far too often switching into a quasi-journal mode in which I document recent events. And though I try to make these things as interesting as I can, they're always as "interesting as I can but still have it be only the first draft, 'cuz I ain't rewriting this" kind of essays. Having gone through, at least perfunctorily, the entirety of my essay writing career--going all the way back to my first essay on Metal Gear Solid 2 on the eve of the release of Metal Gear Solid 4 in 2008 (ten years, yo)--I can comfortably assert that what isn't trite is likely supercilious and what isn't that is worse than I thought it was. It's me being harder on myself than might be necessary, with the occasional acquiescence that I've written a good piece here or there (though none springs to mind at the moment). In a lot of ways, the best part about this writing is that it's keeping me writing. There's a mechanical side to it that I think is useful. And, since I often have a lot on my mind, it's the place where I can think best, albeit not always the clearest. And now I'm at the point--again, having recognized how much rewriting I have to do if I want to get any of my books off of the ground--where I think these essays are doing more harm to my writing prospects than good. That isn't to say that these are bad to write or that I won't do them anymore. Instead, I think I may need to redirect this nightly work ethic into fifteen minutes of editing. I'm not convinced I should do this. With the summer so close I can taste it (graduation is this Friday at my school, and I only have two days of training next week), this might be premature. I could, conceivably, write in the morning right when I get up, do some exercise (hahaha, lies to myself are the funniest lies), eat, read, spend some time with the kids, and then, in the evenings, before I plunk myself down to play Overwatch, I have to edit. That could be a successful recipe for many of the days this summer. But I don't know if I'm going to obsess over writing my essays every single day as much. I don't want to skip out on office time--in fact, after having done this for almost 20 months straight, I don't think it would be good for me to break that habit of daily writing/rewriting. I don't know. I'm still mulling it over. I've noticed a distinct lack in quality of thought and writing here in the past few weeks. That could have to do with the fact that I'm always out of sorts with the end of the school year (which definitely felt rushed this year; I don't feel like I got to say my goodbyes the way I normally do). I have a small but supportive group of readers who, for whatever reason, like to read what I'm thinking, and I'd like to maintain a…consistency, I guess, for them. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll move away from the daily essays. Maybe I won't. Just thinking out loud, here. |
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