Category Archives: Writing

Entries where I talk about my writing: stories, novels, general creativity.

Writing Update #whatever part 2.3

I’ve been updating my LiveJournal account regularly with what’s going on with my writing, but I haven’t been updating over here, and I know that there are people who read this blog but not my LiveJournal. So to help clarify things for my LiveJournal readers, my blog readers, and me, here is what’s going on lately with my writing.

  1. First of all, my NaNoWriMo novel, Fred, Again, is going along very well. Out of 50,000 words, I’ve written about 38,000. Only 12,000 to read the official NaNoWriMo target, and possibly 10,000 or so after that to reach the end of that story. I’m considering what I’m writing right now to be the rough draft for an actual novel, and it’s the first time I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo where I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the novel all the way through, without getting fed up with the story and the plot and so on. More on that in a bit
  2. And speaking of NaNoWriMo, there was an article in yesterday’s Vacaville Reporter about local participants in NaNoWriMo, featuring humble ol’ me. There’s even a picture of me. I’ve written to the reporter and asked if I could use the photograph on my person website, and was told to “go for it”, since it would be considered fair use and the photographer in question has no qualms with it. Check out the article here.
  3. A couple of weeks ago I sold my short story, “Who Remembers Molly”, to The Harrow. This is a pretty significant milestone for me, because it’s the first “serious” story I’ve sold, and the first of my “Mollyverse” stories. On the other hand, the timing is a bit ironic, since I’m on the cusp of changing my writing focus entirely. Again, more on this in a bit.
  4. Yesterday, I also received an e-mail from the editor of an upcoming anthology focusing on retellings of urban legends, asking if I would consider offering them “Who Remembers Molly”. Naturally, I said “Yes!” after first clarifying all the contract issues with the editor and with The Harrow. You know, I’d never thought I’d have to face that kind of quandary. It was frustrating in its way, but also really, really cool. And this makes my fourth acceptance this year, which makes five overall, which, to me, means my writing career is really starting to take off.
  5. Oh, I also got a rejection from Flesh & Blood for my story “Indications”. No hard feelings on this one, of course; the style wasn’t a match for the magazine. And in light of the four milestones above, this one rejection just pales in importance to me.

This is my fourth year doing NaNoWriMo; I did it the first time in 2001, skipped 2002, and then I’ve been doing it ever since. Each year, I’ve reached 50,000 words. I’m told that there’s a “second week hump” which is part of the process; during the second week of NaNoWriMo, apparently most participants lose their drive, their energy, their love of the project, and find that writing is much more of a chore than ever. I honestly can’t say I’ve ever experienced this. Sure I have my lulls, but I’ve never had a problem just charging on through. I hadn’t even heard of the “second week hump” until 2004, when everyone I knew was talking about how awful it was, and I found I couldn’t relate.

That isn’t to say I was enjoying everything every step of the way. I remember really enjoying writing Unfallen, my 2001 project; however, The Road to Gilead was rarely much fun, and last year’s The Outer Darkness was mostly just misery. I take out Unfallen and The Road to Gilead every few months or so, renew my resolve to sit down and finish them and make them publishable, write a few hundred words, them thrust them back into a drawer for another few months. The Outer Darkness, I think, will languish permanently in a forgotten corner of my hard drive, never to know the touch of a red pen. I liked the characters and the setting and the plot, but not enough to ever want to revisit them again.

This year’s project, Fred, Again, though, is different. I started at midnight on November first, with no idea of what I was going to write, who the characters were going to be, or what the plot was going to be. I had a title, though; I’d put out a call to all my friends on LiveJournal and in the real world asking for title suggestions, and said that the person whose suggestion I liked the most would get to be killed in the manner of their choosing. I got so many great suggestions, though, that choosing just one was impossible. I chose Fred, Again as the title, and killed off that friend in the first chapter and made her an important plot point. For each subsequent chapter, I’ve been using one of the title suggestions, and killing off the person who suggested the title in that chapter in a manner they choose. Actually, it’s been great fun, and apparently my friends have enjoyed their virtual deaths, even the one who got tossed into a wood chipper.

I have weird friends. Go figure. I love them.

Anyway, I love writing Fred, Again, and I would even if I didn’t get to kill of people I know while writing it. I can’t wait to finish it, and then to start revising it. Rationally, I know that the thing to do is to finish it and then set it aside until NaNoEdMo, but there’s a part of me that’s just quivering with the need to finish and revise. And this leads me to a bit of a quandary.

See, Fred, Again, while containing elements of horror, is primarily a work of comedic fiction, and apparently a pretty funny one. And several people have told me that my humor and comedy fiction are actually much better than my serious horror. However, the serious horror is what I’ve considered my “real” writing. On the other hand, I really am enjoying writing Fred, Again, and the process of writing it has sparked ideas for other novels in the same vein and even for comic fantasy stories, and I’m finding that I’m much more eager to write those — kind of chomping at the bit, really — than, say, complete the second draft of “Hollow”, a horror story which I think has potential but which has felt more like an albatross in many ways than a creative gem.

God help me, I wonder if I’m destined to write comic fantasy and horror? Are novels like Fred, Again and stories like “An Interrupted Nap” going to be my forte rather than hard core works like The Road to Gilead or “Hollow”?

I still have fun with my “Mollyverse” stories, though, like “Burying Uncle Albert” and “The Winds of Patwin County”, though I think they could be… funnier.

Funnier.

There, I said it.

I’ve been taking this writing thing far more seriously over the past year (well, actually, sixteen months) than I have over the rest of my life, and it’s been paying off in terms of acceptances and editorial interest. I suppose a shift in writing focus was inevitable.

So, I suppose, break out the funny hats and the clown feet. After Fred, Again, Cthulhu has a date with the Capulets and the Montagues.

More Fred, Again

I’ve posted the first part of Chapter 3, “A Swing Session with Death”, in Fred, Again. In my own mind, this part isn’t as strong as the previous entries. I’m finding that it’s awfully hard to write good funny stuff consistently. How can writers like Terry Pratchett and Craig Shaw Gardner and Mark Twain keep it up for the entire length of a book?

Actually, I suppose that if I weren’t rushing through this to meet my daily word count for National Novel Writing Month (and I’m already a bit behind — hopefully I can make it up this weekend) I could probably make this work much better. I remember that when I was writing “The Unrevealed Tort, Revealed”, which is just over three hundred words long, it took me quite awhile. It’s a bit of a nonsense piece, but I think it’s funny; but I struggled with it for a long time. I knew I couldn’t repeat myself, I knew that each joke had to be unexpected, but coming up with funny, unexpected stuff line after line after line, even in such a short piece, was just plain difficult. It was a good learning experience, though.

And Fred, Again is turning out to be a good learning experience as well. I just hope I learn from it.

I’m beginning to reconsider my writing goals and direction. In August 2004, I made the conscious decision, after thirty-six years of just noodling around, to take my writing very seriously for a change (it was a good idea; since then I’ve published three short stories, for a grand total of ten dollars), and I sketched out a long-term plan which had me finishing up The Road to Gilead by now and starting work on a series of short stories and novels all developing the Terassic Cycle.

Instead, though, I’ve found myself writing a number of stories that take place in the “Mollyverse”, and publishing primarily humorous pieces, and not getting anything at all written in the Terassic Universe stories. Whenever I sit down to work on The Road to Gilead, my interest factor just sort of vanishes. I’d rather be doing anything at the time than writing. I force perhaps a few hundred words out, and then save it and go watch reruns of Family Guy.

It’s different when I’m writing either Mollyverse stories or humorous stories; I have a lot of fun when I’m writing those, and the words usually seem to just flow (and sometimes they don’t). So I think I’m going to put the Terassic Cycle projects on hold for awhile, and focus on these things. And I’ve been told by several people that my writing is strongest when I’m doing the funny stuff anyway.

So, you may see Fred, Again (or some heavily rewritten version thereof) on the shelves long before you ever see The Road to Gilead.

Anyway. That’s all for now. Go back to reading Fred, Again.

That writing thing

A few months ago I sent my story “Who Remembers Molly” to an on-line magazine of speculative fiction. They liked it, but wanted revisions. So I made some revisions, and sent it back about a month ago. I hadn’t heard since then, so today I sent a query, and almost by return e-mail I got a response from the editor who said she really liked it and that she wants to buy it for their January edition! I am ECSTATIC about this. Even though, as Jennifer reminded me, this is my third acceptance this year, and my fourth overall, this is a very significant milestone for me, because it’s the first of my “Mollyverse” stories; as another on-line friend of mine has pointed out, this is like someone “buying into my vision”, and that really means a lot to me.

Anyway. Details forthcoming.

Another Zombie Entry

I’ve barely done any writing at all over the past couple of weeks. In fact, I don’t think I’ve written more than a few words since I finished up “Joe’s Salvation”. It’s not that I’m giving up on writing or anything; quite the contrary. I’ve decided that I just wanted to step back, take a breather or two, think about what I want to do with my writing and where I want to go, and just sort of relax before diving nose first into NaNoWriMo.

During that time, I’ve been working hard on my website; those of you who ever swing by my front page may have noticed a few changes; I’ve developed a whole new theme engine which is date-driven, so that when November 1 rolls around, the theme will switch from my Halloween theme to my NaNoWriMo theme. When Advent rolls around, an Advent message will appear (developing the Advent function was fun, since Advent falls on no regular day; it’s the Sunday closest to November 30th, so it could be the Sunday before the 30th or the Sunday after). I’ve written a library of functions which lets me manage and update that cool menu bar on the top of my page really easily, without having to update the JavaScript every time and make sure I get all the right niggly little details in all the right places. And I’ve completely rewritten how the database calls are done in the “library” section; this is one of those things that won’t show up at all for the casual visitor, but it simplifies my life on the back end quite a bit.

So I’ve accomplished my website goals. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll actually start putting some thought into Fred, Again. Or, possibly, not.

It's here!

Today my contributor’s copy of Shimmer arrived! Holding an actual print magazine with a story in it with my own byline is… Well, it’s an awesome feeling. Naturally I took a picture of it:

Yeah the quality’s not so hot. Sorry about that.

So I’ll be bringing this with me to writers’ group meetings, to church meetings, and so on. I just can’t help but show off.

Writing Update

Today: 923 words written on Terassic Cycle outline. Essential questions linking Unfallen to The Road to Gilead have been answered.

Also about 50 words added to “Hollow”.

And about 100 words written on a new short called “Tristan Among the Fishes”. Written in crayon on construction paper because I needed a change of venue. I would have written more and possibly finished the story but I got caught up in an episode of Nova about the sinking of the battleship Yamato at the end of the Second World War.

And, see, this is why I had such a hard time focusing in college. I’d see a show like that and think, “Whoa! Now I want to be a military historian!” and give up all of my previous plans to be a veterinarian.

Worked at home again today because my lungs blow. Or, rather, they don’t. Asthma bites. Anyway, so I continued the process of reworking the fundamental architecture of our content delivery software. I also messed around some with my personal website, fixing up some stylesheet issues and adding a “Reading” section because I know that everyone in the world wants to know what I’m reading and what I’ve read. Everyone. It occurred to me to test my site in Internet Explorer today — I’m a diehard Firefox user and won’t touch IE with a ten-foot IDE bus if I can avoid it — and I discovered it looks pretty shabby in IE. The fonts just don’t translate well. Well, it’s not my fault if IE can’t render cascading style sheets properly.

Oh, and then I had supper. Yummy.

Writing update

So, 769 words yesterday on The Terassic Cycle outline. It’s a lot more complex than I had really thought about at first and I’ve been spending much of this time paring down on some of the plots and themes to make everything consistent and believable. I’ve had to drop a number of the cooler ideas because they didn’t make sense in context.

Also: ponderations on “Hollow”, but no words written. Also some ponderations on “The Divergents”, which is a story that won’t leave me alone.

I was sick yesterday so I worked at home, and had a surprising amount of downtime. I spent much of that time revamping my personal home page at mossroot.com. I suppose I could have spent that time writing, but this revamp has been a long time coming.

Why can't every day be this productive?

2,114 words written on the outline to The Terassic Cycle. Doing that was fun; I did some interesting research into the Black Death and into the causes of the First World War. Lots of threads in this story, and I’m still working on how to tie them all together, but I’m optimistic.

And I’ve finally begun the rewrite to “Hollow”. About 500 words written on that today.

Nothing written on The Road to Gilead, though.