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. 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? Okay, so I'm kind of conflicted here. It's Day 2 of NaNoWriMo and I'm well ahead of where I've been in the past. I have reasons--explained below, for those who wish to know--that it's that way, and I'm really glad about it. The story is also coming out better than I expected--though not as well as I would wish--with relative ease. Yet I've now set my expectations and baseline so high that I know I won't be able to maintain it. Here's what I mean:
My first three chapters are written (that's about ten percent of the story in terms of chapter length, but my word count is at 8,300, which means that it's about twenty percent to the NaNoWriMo goal). I took a day off from school yesterday and wrote through the morning and into the afternoon. It was by no means a high watermark day of writing output--during my retreats, I see 8,300 by two o'clock, with hours left to crank out more text--but as far as a NaNoWriMo experience, it's more than amazing. In fact, I'm essentially done with the first five days of the project. That's really encouraging. I owe a lot of this to having spent three or so hours--maybe even more--in outlining what was going to happen. And though there are tricky decisions about how to make the story behave, particularly in the later chapters, I feel like I wrote pretty much what I was expecting to write for these first three. It also has helped a great deal that I'm intimately familiar with the story of Hamlet, so as I'm writing the chapters (they roughly match with each scene from the play), I can reflect on what I know each character is supposed to be thinking or feeling--inasmuch as it's known through the play. It's been kind of fun to reinterpret, for example, Hamlet's first soliloquy in the play as an older millennial sitting in an LDS chapel and trying to sort out his feelings. I've relocated some of the parts and ideas from one scene to another, as needed by how I'm telling my version of the story, and I keep finding myself throwing in small quotes from the play because it's both an homage and an inevitable output from my familiarity with the source material. It's just…what it is, I guess. And that actually leads to where I'm most disappointed in my writing. Because I'm trying to keep the story moving along, I'm not spending much time wordsmithing. This is always a tension between my desires: I want to write a lot, and I want to write beautifully. They are not--for me, at least--compatible desires. I can only have one at a time, and as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, that means I have to write a lot. The solution to getting both of what I want is to rewrite--a lot--to get the prose to really sparkle. And that's the thing that I struggle to do more than anything else. It isn't that I haven't tried. I can't tell you how many times I've printed out another copy of a story, or hummed up the computer with the manuscript on the screen, only to feel a crush of despair that keeps me from moving on beyond the first paragraph. I legitimately try…and I seriously fail almost every time. So, while I'm enjoying what I've written for NaNoWriMo thus far (it being the second day, of course), it's not exactly good writing. It's not, at least, the kind of prose that I wish I could spontaneously create. It reminds me of John Milton's description of Shakespeare's writings: "They easy numbers flow…" And that's the thing--we don't know how much editing Shakespeare put into his work (the whole "never blotted a line" praise is rubbish, and we know this because there are vestigial pieces of Shakespearean process within the plays), but his end effect is one of effortless writing. Even Milton, whose poetry transcends so much of what's available in English, visibly strains to make the poetry work in some places. Shakespeare is graceful, like a Michael Jordan on the page. It just…comes to him. It is, of course, foolish (and wrong) of me to try to compare to Shakespeare, for lots of different reasons. But I'm dissatisfied with how well I do things on my first try. Maybe that's why I write so many rough drafts: I'm trying to write better the first time so that I don't have to rewrite more often. This seems like a plan that could maybe work, but it's likely the longest way around possible. At any rate, my quick update for the beginning of NaNoWriMo is a positive one: I'm off to a good start. Here's hoping that I can start merging my two desires together and getting a good start into a good rough draft, one that I'm not sick of by the end of the month and one that I'm actually proud to share. If you wish to read the book as it comes out, I'll be updating it (as much as I can) daily here. This is the link to chapter 1. I hope you enjoy it. In Mark Edmundson's Why Write?, he talks about a lot of stuff. In fact, I've already chatted about him (and in other places, too) and how he's a really good writer and I love the way he writes and thinks. Even though I finished Why Write? back in February, I've decided to reread it is a decompression from Paradise Lost and because I still don't want to start Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows just yet. (Lots of reasons for that, not the least of which comes from the fact that I want to keep using my new pen, which I can't since I'm reserving the last few pages in a different reading journal for HP #7.) Edmundson is clearly a fan of Milton--he alludes to him a couple of times in the first twenty pages alone, which is a fast way of a writer getting me on her (or his) team--but he isn't focused on the prophet-bard, which is the perfect way to finish up a heavy read like Paradise Lost.
Not only that, but NaNoWriMo starts on Friday--which means that there will be, again, a dearth of nonfiction essays, though my website has my NaNoWriMo story, posted as I finish each chapter (which will be about 32 chapters long, at this point…so, ideally, they'll come out one a day, rough and raw but (I hope) readable)--so having a pep talk from Edmundson every day is going to be a good thing for me. I mean, I'll probably finish his book before I finish mine. Nevertheless, starting with momentum will help me. I hope. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because he writes how there are, essentially, two types of overcoming the wall of writing: Over or under. He says that the caffeinated, slam-your-head-against-the-keyboard kind of writing will get it done, that the writing will come by going over the wall. But the kind of writing he advocates is writing under the wall, tunneling beneath it. This is done, he says, a myriad of ways, including meditation and some sort of ritual or routine. Sharpening a half dozen pencils, he says, may be it for one writer, while a walk around the backyard works for another. I don't write with pencils, and my backyard is filled with chicken poop, so neither of those will work for me. And I got to thinking: What is my ritual? I realized that I don't have one. I mean, sure, I have routines that, when I have my druthers, I get to do. Those usually involve my writing retreats, where I don't have anything else on my plate but writing as much as I possibly can. And, even then, that's not the ritual--that's going over the wall, not under it. Sometimes, when I've been writing long enough, I get a kind of writer's high, one where I feel dissociated and so absorbed by the words that I hardly recognize the world around me. Those are times, I think, when I'm flying over the wall--better than either climbing or burrowing, I daresay. But, for the most part, writing for me is very much a scaling process, working with words to clamber to the top of my thoughts by the bottom of my page. So I'm thinking about what I may be able to do to try to change that. The reason is straightforward: I don't much care for my writing style. Oh, sure, I get a good line in once in a while--whatever my other shortcomings may be, I am smarter than a bunch of monkeys slapping at a keyboard, and we all know how even they will get Shakespeare, if given enough time--and sometimes I even put down something with a worthwhile weight, a burden of the soul that can only come through words. But it's a blue-moon chance, something I'd like to improve. In other words, how can I write better? Maybe it's by writing under. And if Edmundson is right about this being one of approaching the wall contemplative, carefully, respectfully--as opposed to full-speed, anxiously, violently--then I need to figure out a way to get to that spot. But, because my time at the keyboard is limited, I think it's fair to say that I need to know how to get there faster than a mosey. What, then, should my rituals be? Well, I haven't figure that far ahead. It isn't music--I have plenty of music that I like that kind of gets me ready to write, but it's unreliable at best, and has diminishing returns. I don't think sharpening pencils will really be right for me. Maybe some sort of mantra? Something that I type that isn't about the words but the action, the movement of the fingers on the keyboard without worrying about what it's supposed to say? Something really affirming? I don't know. I'll have to think about it. I do know, however, that it has to be done in a way (or in a place) where I don't get interrupted. Nothing quite like a call for dinner to shock me out of that tunnel. And then I've nothing but dirt to breathe. I'd rather not die that way. 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. As I've mentioned sundry times before, I visit YouTube frequently, usually for content whilst I do the domestics. Usually it's not a particularly profound or moving experience--especially when it's simply wondering whether or not I really want the ability to fly like Superman--but there are always surprising moment that catch me off guard.
One such moment is in a Passion of the Nerd video about the Toolbox Fallacy. The whole video is great--though there is a loud swear in it from one of the videos that the narrator is analyzing, so beware if that sort of thing bothers you--but it was the ending that was particularly striking for me. Starting at about 6:30, he says: [… A] lifetime spent failing would still be a life better lived than the one in which I never got started. For some reason, this hit me really, really hard. I mentioned a few days ago that I was struggling with keeping the desire to write fiction alive, and that I'm rather unhappy with my writing output. I even wrote that I wasn't certain I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year since my writing well has been dipping dry. A couple of things have happened since then: One, I saw Hamlet at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this past weekend, which got me thinking about how I would go about retelling Hamlet (in a similar vein to the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which I wrote about almost three years ago). The entire time I drove, my wife asleep in the passenger seat and my son contentedly fiddling with an iPad, I put pieces together of what could be a story of the prince of Denmark if it were to happen in central Utah during the twenty-first century. The story spark was hot enough to lead me to outlining ten notebook pages worth of summaries and is pushing me toward using this idea for my NaNoWriMo project. Two, I saw that video. I've received a couple of rejections for my War Golem query, and most of those I sent off queries back in March haven't gotten back to me--long enough that I can assume a "no reply means no". This has been quite hard on me for lots of reasons, not the least of which because I'm not confident that I'm doing the right thing at all. That is, I don't know where the problem or disconnect is. Is it my writing? My idea? My choice in agents? My query? There are lots of variables, which makes me uncertain and that uncertainty leads to a lack of confidence in what I'm doing. But the video helped change my mind--at least, to a certain degree. I need to recognize that I will always be torn about spending my time pursuing writing: I don't think there's a way that I could not feel at least partially guilty about using my time in that way. It's part of how I'm programmed, and though I'm trying to rewrite my code, there's a potential for going too far…a problem that isn't really the point of this essay, so we won't worry about it for now. The takeaway is that I'm going to assume that I'm doing something quite selfish and have to learn to deal with that. However, the narrator of the video is right: Writers write, and if I don't at least try to do that, then I've lived a lesser life. Socrates is famous (for lots of things, but also) for saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I've abided by that concept for quite some time--probably right around the time I was on my mission and I started thinking more deeply. Perhaps as early as my senior year in high school. Of course, I've made a lot of intellectual missteps, misexamined plenty of things, made faulty assumptions that proved erroneous…in other words, I've failed at examining my life plenty of times. But I still try to understand the world better, to comprehend myself better, to examine existence better. I need to stop fearing failure and expect it instead…and that is something that I've failed to do for a long time. 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. 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. Three and a half years ago, in April of 2015, I woke up one Saturday morning with an idea in my head. It was, as near as I can recall, a vestigial dream, but there are enough components of the story that I clearly gained inspiration from Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and XIII for part of it. The story--which, as is often the case for me in these little sketches, was only supposed to be a short story--was about a woman named Jarah who was in the midst of a battle on a massive plain. It began like this:
Jarah looked her final pupil in the eye and said, "Remember, child: The Gods are under our control." Thinking back on that morning, I'm pretty sure it was that opening line that made me curious about the world my subconscious cooked up. What does it mean to control a god? I kept writing the story, letting it unfold in my imagination as my fingers moved. Backstory, rules for the world, and motivations began their slow simmer as I finished. (If you'd like to read it, warts and all, it's available here.) I shared the story with my writing group, curious to see how they'd respond to it. To my surprise, it was mostly positive, with lots of questions about what else was in the world beyond what I had shared. Since I was only writing this story as a sketch, I didn't have any answers, but the premise has stuck in my head ever since. "Theomancy" is a story about controlling gods as "summons" (like in the Final Fantasy video game series) and using them to battle each other in theopolemics ("fighting of the gods"). The main character, Jarah, is one who can control the gods, so she summons one to do her bidding, having a battle on a massive scale. If you've read any of my fiction (including the free copy of an old book, also available on the "Sample" page of my website), you'll quickly see how much I like big things. It's probably part of the reason that I love dinosaurs so much, too. In Words of the Silenced, giants roam the land and have to be defeated by humans who've lost their minds but, in return, have magical powers. In both War Golem and War Golems, the protagonists ride inside an enormous, sentient, magically-powered robot in order to fight wars. In my NaNoWriMo 2017 story, The Colony, large alien creatures swarm through a space colony, eating people up. I'm also a fan of Pacific Rim and its sequel, Rocket Monster Punch Punch 2, and movies like Rampage. In other words, I like big things getting smashed. The Hulk is my favorite Avenger. In short, I like the contrast between very small beings resisting--though sometimes unsuccessfully--larger ones. It's natural, then, to see how "Theomancy" would interest me. It's pretty much the concepts of Magic: The Gathering and the Final Fantasy series, but with my own spin. Small, insignificant beings taking control of large ones sounds like the kind of story that would easily come out from someone with my particular interests. That has not been the case. I decided to turn "Theomancy" into a novel, with a lot of different ideas all thrown together. I wanted people who controlled the gods to have their sexual orientations shift as a way of "paying" for the magic they wielded--an idea I scrapped in large part because it wasn't making a lot of sense and it felt…wrong. I also thought of this world as being one where I tried my hand at the grimdark fantasy subgenre, with lots of, as Horatio calls them, "casual slaughters" throughout. What would it be like to kill off characters as cavalierly as Joe Abercrombie or George R.R. Martin? But I couldn't really handle that idea as set out, so I made the souls of dead people traverse through an afterlife of sorts, only to be reincarnated later. The could remember their past lives and it helped them know what to do with each iteration. There was going to be some catastrophe in both the mortal and immortal realm that the characters would have to solve. Topping all of that, I threw in easily over a dozen characters--each one designed to be a main point of view character (until she or he died, which would happen to most of them)--who would forward different experiences of the world. A merchant, a desperate father, a priest, a queen, a rogue…the list went on and on. The idea was to make each character our view of the scope of both sides of the conflict, all while pushing toward a climactic ending. I wrote out notecards--my version of an outline--for almost all of that book. It took a couple of months, chipping away at it, before I finished that part of writing. And I didn't like it. Now, that's the perk of writing outlines: I can see almost immediately what is or isn't working for me. I want to write a story that I'm interested in, not just one that I feel obligated to tell because I'd put some effort into it, and I thought that I would gain interest in the story as I uncovered it. No such luck. The story lacked cohesion, the characters didn't inspire me, and I couldn't really see myself dwelling in a grimdark world for what likely would have ended up being years, as that probably wouldn't be a good mental health choice. I abandoned the project after maybe seven chapters, the characters left in various stages of being killed and/or in great peril. And though there are parts of that world that I still like, almost all of them can be found in the ideas of the short story. I'm glad that I gave up on "Theomancy", as it cleared space in my brain to invent the world of War Golem and its sequel, which are both some of my favorite books I've written. That being said, the idea of a person controlling gods never really went away, and the past year or two has seen me trying to resurrect the idea somehow. A new version was written about half a year ago, with a good six chapters and an entire outline crafted…but I didn't like it. I changed Jarah from being a woman controlling gods in the middle of a battlefield to a woman who has been reincarnated in order to fix the world she accidentally broke. I shifted from a mage-warrior to a fantasy-style Batgirl, a woman with great combat skills, cool gadgets, and gods hanging off her belt. I also shrunk the gods, which goes against my desires to see huge creatures beating the crap out of each other (and the buildings around them), but gives me more flexibility for how I want the story to unfold. Anyway, after at least seven false starts, I think I may finally have the version of Theomancy that I'm willing to tell. I have little time: NaNoWriMo starts on Thursday. But I'm hopeful that I will be able to get an outline hammered out--at least thirty chapters long, as that will give me all I need to ensure I hit the coveted 50,000 word goal of the writing challenge--and move again (for the first time) in the world I've created. If you'd like to read my other two years' projects, or watch as I add a single chapter, day by day, to this year's NaNoWriMo story, feel free. There's no editing done with any of these--they're crafted and published as-is, complete with spelling errors, typos, and continuity problems--so realize that it's more like looking through a person's sketchbook than their finished artwork. Still, I'm excited and hopeful that it will be a worthwhile exercise this year, as it has been in the past. I've done three NaNoWriMo novels in my life so far. The first one was a retelling of Dante's Inferno, the idea being that, if I enjoyed that story, I'd use Purgatorio and Paradiso in subsequent years to write a trilogy of The Divine Comedy. Of course, I wasn't simply telling Dante's story with a modern twist: I put the whole thing in space. If you think about it, most of the old mythologies and religious stories have a fantastical element to them already. Shifting from fantasy to science fiction is a relatively small step. (Part of this is inspired by a book, one I haven't read yet, on my shelf called Ilium which is a space-version retelling of The Iliad, though it refers to Homer's poem, so it's not a straightforward approach.)
In my retelling, I have Dante (who started out with a different name, but it was so obvious to me who it was that I switched his name partway through) waking up in a spaceship, headed to a mining colony. He'd fallen asleep at the wheel and, though he tries to land safely, he ends up coming down roughly enough that he wouldn't be able to get off the planet. Besides, he figures out pretty quickly that something dark has been released from the mines beneath the planet: Violent creatures have abducted most of the colony, dragging them far underground. He meets a guy named Vick (the stand-in for Virgil) and together they try to get the colonists back. On the way, he comes across a bunch of alien monstrosities that are loosely based upon some of the punishments of hell that Dante describes in his poem. I also used some of my memories playing the Visceral Games video game, Dante's Inferno, as another way of manipulating the source text. The intrepid duo work their way through my revisualized version of hell, including finding a cadre of safe colonists who are in a surprisingly nice section of the underground (my shout out to the Virtuous Pagans who populate the first circle of hell in Dante's poem) and creatures whose feet look like they're boulders--an allusion to the Prodigal and Miserly in circle four--and so on and so forth. By the end of the retelling, they've blown up a lot of alien bodies, saved some "souls", and accidentally loosed the hive-mind's controller from the bowels of the planet to attack whoever may still be on the surface. I even ended the book with the word "stars", just the way Dante did. In terms of ideas, that's fun. I don't know if I'd call it clever or even interesting, but it was fun for me to focus my energies into twisting a story that was already told. It's also my way of acknowledging one of the greatest writers in the Western Canon in my own, nerdy way. When I finished--as is always the case with NaNoWriMo--I was exhausted from all of the writing I'd done. I decided to coast for a while as a writer and I definitely didn't have any interest in pursuing a sequel at that point. The next year, I wrote a steampunk-style novel for my wife (which, so far as I can tell, she still hasn't finished…oh, well. It's the thought that counts). That one you can read here. The year after that--last year, as a matter of fact--I wrote a novel that takes place in my "PRISM universe", for lack of a better title, where the science fiction elements were already established in a book I'd written the year prior. It was easy for me to adapt what I already knew about the world and put it into a story where people were eaten by creatures that were almost like dinosaurs. It's as close as I've come to a dinosaur story. This one was also enjoyable because I used the Four Corner Opposition style of writing to make the story have a stronger sense of philosophical continuity. If you want to read more, it's right here. This year, I'm thinking--but haven't decided, since it's still a month away--that I should write a retelling of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Not only do I know that story better than I know The Divine Comedy, it's also a better story. For all of Dante's abilities, he wasn't interested in showing a lot of character growth. His poem goes from set piece to set piece--not a bad way to write a poem, honestly--but it meant that there isn't a lot of plot to go around. Not so with Paradise Lost. The structure is enjoyable, with an en medias res beginning and a lot of intrigue between what Satan tries to do to Adam and Eve and how high the stakes are. It's a great way of telling a timeless tale, so I'm thinking of adapting that for myself this year. I went ahead and sketched out an outline of about 800 words already, again shifting the setting to outer space. There are parallels to Inferno, if only because Satan's fall at the beginning of Paradise Lost and Dante walking off of the path in the Dark Wood have strong similarities. Also, malevolent aliens who like eating people is another piece that's the same between the two. Nevertheless, I'm thinking that it would be fun to walk Milton's path, seeing things through twenty-first century eyes. Besides, Milton couldn't get mad at me for making Paradise Lost fanfic: He wrote Bible fanfic and it turned into the greatest poem written in the English language. Surely he wouldn't begrudge me for having some fun with his story, right? Right? ==== 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! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
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