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.