Making Friends

Revision, or rather, rewriting of Cold Blooded continues. Yeah, this is what I'm going to be talking about all the time for the foreseeable future, so buckle up, buttercup.

A new hurdle has presented itself, in that I need to know how to make friends. That is, I need to characters to become friends within the next, say, 20,000 words. Which, now that I say it, is a lot of words, and I should be fine. But there's still the how. I can't make friends in real life, how am I supposed to make them in fiction? Basically, Des, my main character, has recently met another character, and they need to reach a certain level of trust by the Midpoint.

But, like I said, I have about 20,000 words to get there. So let's focus on the here and now. I'm currently writing a scene in which the ice cream shop is featured on an episode of some show on an ersatz Food Network. To be honest, I don't know if this part is going to make it to the final cut, but I'm going to act like it is until that decision is made.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

So listen, I'm sort of famous now.

I mean, not like, really. But kind of.

Here's what happened. I wrote out a story, a true story of a local murder, not something I made up, and I sent it to a popular true crime comedy podcast. And my god, they read it. They read words that I wrote, and those words were heard by several million people.

And now, all I can think is that I want more of my words to reach more millions of people. Guess I'd better get that novel finished.

So what's stopping me? Mostly me.

For a First Effort This Feels Kind of Last Ditch

NaNoWriMo is over. Thank God. Did I reach 50,000 words? I did not. Is that okay? I guess.

My actual novel, the space story Wandering Star, ended at around 25,000 words. Not a good sign. Basically, I suddenly knew how it was going to end, but not anything else that happened before that, so I metaphorically steered that ship straight into the ground and brought it to the end.

Then I limped my way up to just past 34,000 by adding to a story I left unresolved three years ago, and then writing/starting several short stories based on some of the numerous writing prompts I have saved. My plan was to make up the 20,000 words I needed by writing at least 1,000 words on 20 different prompts. In like two days. One of which was Thanksgiving. So that was easier said than done. I think I ended up doing three different prompts, two of which are more or less complete little stories, and one of which is still in progress. It keeps taking turns I wasn't expecting and I'd like to see where it's going with this.

The Trouble With Triangles

Am I writing a romantic subplot?

I'm certainly not trying to. But it sort of seems like it's heading that way. Even though I'm trying to stop it.

Help me.

My resistance fighter chick is starting to get very touchy-feely with my space cop dude and I don't know what to do. I don't know if I can make her stop. She is very stubborn. Oh no. I can see where this is going. It might be inevitable.

Oh no.

This is not meant to be that kind of story.

Lost in Space

NaNoWriMo is underway and my god I am not prepared.

I told myself I wouldn't get behind again. I'm already behind. I've got all these ideas and somehow… no words.

Well, not no words. I have a few words. Some of them are ridiculous, and therefore, my favorite words.

Case in point, this piece of inspired literature:

The Captain of the Corps was a man of about fifty, with an authoritative moustache. Men would follow that moustache into hell itself. His name (the man, not the moustache) was Reginald Shepard. His friends called him Reg. His subordinates called him Captain. His moustache called him home.

Fucking amazing.

Forget About Details and Decisions Now

NaNoWriMo starts in less than a week. Am I ready? Not remotely. Am I going to dive into it anyway? Absolutely.

I'm going to pants the shit out of this novel.

For those not "in the know," pantsing is writing by the seat of your pants (a phrase which also makes no god damn sense). You have maybe a vague idea of plot, or a few characters, and you make up the whole damn thing as you go.

My plan for this year was to create a beautiful and full outline. Clearly that is not how I roll.

Bumps in the Night

Urban legends. Something lurking in the dark, that will snap up bad children, lest they learn to behave.

That's why there are cannibals on my spaceship.

They're an urban myth, or whatever the spaceship equivalent of "urban" is. Eat your vegetables or the cannibals will get you. (Joke's on them, due to the impracticality of livestock on a spaceship, everything's vegetables.)

But maybe something is lurking down in the lower decks. Something with a craving for meat. Something just waiting for some unsuspecting victim to wander too close.

Pulling the World Back Together

Sometimes I reread my old stories. Even riddled with plot holes and bogged down with self-indulgent nonsense, they're not half bad.

Today, I read a short story (10,000 words) that I wrote for Camp NaNo back in 2016. It was a vaguely steampunk world that had been shattered into separate continents that drifted through… space? The science wasn't really a high priority. Anyway, the landmasses were reconnected via cable-car sort of systems that spanned thousands of miles, and the story follows a small town sheriff on the last continent to be connected to the others. He has to deal with the influx of tourists and troublemakers and all that kind of thing.

And it was really good and I never wrote an ending.

Launching Myself Into Space

I'm not going to finish Cold Blooded by the end of the year. It's just not going to happen. I accept that.

I don't want to abandon it entirely, but the time is coming when I have to start planning for NaNoWriMo in November. Sure, I could be a NaNo rebel and write a revision for the month instead of something new, but I don’t want to do that. Largely because I like the absolute freedom to write meandering crap and self-indulgent bullshit during NaNo. I don't want to get hung up on trying to write a "good" second draft.

This year's meandering crap and self-indulgent bullshit is probably going to be the yet-unnamed space story I was messing around with last year. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that decision yet. I can't keep track of what I've been saying, especially going so long between posts like this.

Going to the Mountain

Where have I been? Not writing, unfortunately. Mostly just watching Fringe.

Here was my plan. Spend all of 2019 getting Cold Blooded smooshed into something that people could actually read, and then spend 2020 trying to find people to read it.

But here we are. It's mid-August and I have very little to show for it.

I very much want to write this book. Or rather, I want to have written it. But I just don't seem to have the motivation or the discipline to do it.

I know I need to sit down every day and write. I know it. But what do I do? Play games on my phone and watch TV. Just passively absorb entertainment rather than actively creating something.

And why? Why, when I want to write this book, do I sabotage myself instead?

I'm Pushing an Elephant Up the Stairs

I'm back. And post Camp NaNo, too.

Initially, I had set a 10,000 word goal for the month. It seemed reasonable, a nice chunk of words to get Draft Two started.

But I got busy, and just… unmotivated, so I dropped the goal down to 5,000. Which I succeeded at writing. Not as nice of a chunk, but words are words.

And it was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I thought that with my Draft One experience, and my handy new outline, the words would just flow and form a bigger, better version of the story. Not so. My 5,000 words were an exhausting slog through exposition and world building. You know, the boring shit I hate. I skipped a big chunk and didn't even introduce one character when I was supposed to because describing how the ice cream shop was set up was the most tedious piece of drivel I have ever attempted. There has to be a better way.

Falling Much Further Behind

I've had some sequel ideas lately, which might not seem super helpful right now, but it's actually helping me figure out how things should happen now, so they can happen a certain way later.

The downside of looking ahead is that I'm realizing just how many words I need to write and it's looking more and more impossible. To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with…

Assuming a finished length of 80,000 words, which is basically the low end of acceptable, that means a major structural beat occurs roughly every 10,000 words. So the first beat, The Inciting Incident, where shit starts to get weird after all the "normal world" set up, happens 10,000 words in.

I'm Writing a Book, I Swear

With the holiday and all, I kind of forgot I was supposed to write a post. So, sorry it's late.

I have commenced with the rewrite of Cold Blooded. I've been changing things from the first draft, right from the get-go. So some of the same things happen, but they happen differently. I think it's better?

Right now I'm in the midst of The Setup, the piece of world-building that occupies the first 11% or so, where we meet our main character and the normal world he lives in. And then we're going to shake it up when we get to the Inciting Incident at the 12% mark. But first we have to get there.

And my god, is it boring. I don't like how it's going. I don't like how I'm writing it. I kind of hate it. It's not fun and wacky and exciting like this story tends to be. It's just bullshit exposition. Here's a ice cream shop. Here's how it works. Here's some weird flavors.

Until We Have Faces

I nearly forgot to write a post this week, as my days off have been spent playing with larger scale murder than usual. I just got the game Plague Inc: Evolved on my computer and I'm trying to wipe out humanity with fungal spores. Mankind is surprisingly resilient.

So anyway, writing and stuff.

Camp NaNoWriMo starts on Monday. I'm super excited. Yeah, I realize I've been struggling with this dumb story for months, but I'm starting to feel it again. I've got my main character back in my head. He had become kind of nebulous and faceless (I’ll get into that in a second) and it was hard to actually get him to be in the scenes. But he has coalesced back into a solid form, and is behaving like a human (or nearly human) again.

A Glimmer of Hope

Guess what?

I have had the most important breakthrough in the nearly three year history of Cold Blooded. I have done something I feared I would never be able to accomplish.

I named my god damn town.
Here's the stupid thing:

Every time I tried to come up with a name, something popped into my head, and I said, "Yes, like that. But not that, because we can't call it that." Well, guess what, kids. We can call it that. And we are calling it that.

Names Are Hard

The July edition of Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up (in—plot twist—July) and I, of course, have started thinking about what project I want to do. My intention at the beginning of the year was to start brand new, short projects, as a break from toiling with my novel. But I haven't been doing a lot of toiling lately. In fact, the main thing I've been doing is fucking around. Every now and again I'll write down a thought that may or may not fit into the narrative somewhere. Things like, "Do vampires take fall damage?" and "How do we feel about accidental murder?"

So I think maybe I should use Camp NaNo as a kickstart to the actual novel writing, with the hope that daily word goals will get me going. The issue is that I was hoping to have a full outline before I started actually writing, for once. Which I do not yet have.

The Story Continues?

Sequels.

You might say, "Why are you talking about sequels when you haven't written a first book yet?" Because I like to get ahead of myself, that's why.

When I first imagined and wrote the rough draft of Cold Blooded in 2016, I was adamant about one thing. There would be no sequel. This was it. There was no other place for the story to go.

But. I may have been wrong. See, I have all these ideas that I thought of between the rough draft and now, that I thought I would integrate into the next draft. But a lot of them, well, there's just no place for them. I can't make them fit into this plot I already have.

What Does It All Mean?

I started this post like two weeks ago. Sorry it took me so long to finish. I've been busy.

So last time I mentioned Theme as part of the Holy Trinity of storytelling, along with Plot and Character. (This wasn't my idea, I got it from K.M. Weiland.)

Since the past two posts revolved around plot, and then character, it seems appropriate to tackle theme today. Trouble is, I don't really understand theme.

It's one of those things that make high schoolers hate English class. You can't just read a book. You have to deconstruct it, figure out all the symbolic subtext, and then write an essay on the underlying theme. It's this nebulous thing that seems pretty subjective, but your English teacher assures you that there is a right answer.

The Name Maketh the Man

I'm working on stuff, I swear. I'm just not making a ton of progress that would be exciting to hear about.

I've done a little bit on plot stuff since last time, mostly I've been figuring out character stuff. Like giving them names. And faces.

So in my rough draft of Cold Blooded, I gave the serial killer a name, but it only mentioned once, kind of after the fact, and I kept forgetting what it was. So I've given him a new name and started to figure out his place in the story.

The vampire hunter never got a name at all. Until now. And just by giving him a name, I've started to understand his background, and where he's coming from. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's all a big mess of pieces, but once you snap a couple into place, you start to see where the others go around it.

Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.

Breaking Through

That's right, I'm still alive. I told you I'd be back in April sometime.

I really haven't gone anywhere, there's just been a lot going on. Not a lot of time or brain power for creative pursuits.

I did manage to set a goal for Camp NaNo of 5,000 (a meager amount, but whatever), and I've just finished with 5,028. So, I've accomplished something. I wound up with two short stories revolving around portals to a sort of shadow dimension. I watched Stranger Things finally, and it's infiltrated my brain.

But the real goal was to get my mind off of my vampire novel, in the hopes that ideas for it would come when I wasn't trying. So there I was, last night, 40 words short of my 5,000 word goal, and I find myself working on my novel outline.  The distraction seems to have done the trick.

I still have all these subplots I'm not sure what to do with, and random scenes I'd like to incorporate, so I'm not in the home stretch by any means. 

Changing Direction

April is nearly upon us, and with it, Camp NaNo. If you're not familiar, it's a diet version of National Novel Writing Month. You can set your own word goal, write a short story, or a script, or a revision, or just… whatever really.

So I could use it to work on my revision of Cold Blooded. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not giving up on it. I just need to work on something else for a little while. I find that I get lots of ideas for stories when I'm not working on them. It's like when you're trying to remember something that's right on the tip of your tongue, and it suddenly comes to you when you stop thinking about it.

Organizational Challenges

Where have I been? Well, that's a valid question.

I've been mucking about with this revision of Cold Blooded for… quite some time, with very little progress. Well, little visible progress.

I have a plot outline… outline. Or a template or whatever. I got it from Helping Writers Become Authors. It has all the plot points and everything, and where each major event is supposed to happen. Okay. Super. I have some of my plot points, from my rough draft, stuck in there, where they feel like they should logically go.

But then I have all these other things, and I have no idea where they fit. 

Quietly Plotting

I've been reading lately, instead of writing. And yet, it's still helping. I've been at a standstill regarding Cold Blooded, completely devoid of ideas, until I read something completely unrelated. I read John Green's Paper Towns, which is a young adult novel that has nothing to do with vampires, or murder, or ice cream. And then I couldn't sleep because new ideas for my book kept popping into my head. Now, I'm in the midst of Jim Butcher's Storm Front, which is the right genre, but I had a random idea about interpersonal relationships that has nothing to do with the supernatural elements.

I'm not sure why this is working, but I'll take it.

I can watch tons of TV and movies, and maybe I'll think of random plot ideas I'd like to write one day. But I read one book, and it's like it cracks open an artesian well of creativity. Issues I've been wrestling with suddenly have answers. Like, it doesn't clutter my brain with extraneous ideas, it focuses the ideas I have.

So that's where I've been.

I haven’t had much to report, and just saying the same nonsense over and over doesn’t make for good entertainment. And at this point, I don't think anyone is reading, so I haven't felt compelled to keep creating content that much.

I'll see you, I don’t know, sometime.

I Reject Your Reality

I don't write nonfiction.

On at least two occasions, someone has said to me, "Oh, you're a writer? You should write my tragic real life story." And then I have to find a nice way to say that I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in the confines of reality. That's not really my kind of thing.

What I really want to say is that their story is not interesting to me, and I don't want to write it. But that makes me sound like a dick. So I just have to awkwardly try to convince them to drop it.

I don't want to write a story that's about a real person who is then going to read the story. That's way too much pressure.

The Great Scene Excision of 2019

This is what I'm looking at right now.

 

It's every scene in Cold Blooded, or rather, in the rough draft NaNo abomination that is going to become Cold Blooded. I took my list of scenes, and starting putting notes on them, determining the fate of that scene. Then I color coded them, because colors are pretty.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Step One is complete. I have broken the rough draft into 41 scenes, or scene-like entities. Technically, "Scene" 41 is just all the extra nonsense at the end, but I've been putting in section breaks at each scene change, so I can jump straight there, so Scene 41 is just where I would go if I want any of that.

So I have 40 scenes, really. Some are long, some are short. Some are probably several scenes crammed together, while others are just random events. But they're all broken up and catalogued. Now comes the tricky part: Figuring out what to keep and where to put it.