Putting Plots in a Pile

I didn't do a lot of writing in August. Writing adjacent, sure.

What I did was read through my vampire novel-in-progress and list out what happened in each chapter and each scene. The purpose of this was to have a nice, easy to skim summary of the plot, because there are some scenes I need to rewrite. See, they were just hastily chucked in there as a means to an end. I needed to get from Point A to Point C and something had to be Point B. Just things like, I need this character to learn this piece of information, and these characters need to be over here for this next thing to happen. But I don't much care for them, so they're going to be changed. And I just wanted a nice overview so I could see how each change would cascade and affect later scenes.

So that was August. I mean, that was a few days in August.

But on to September.

2022 Goals

I haven't done much writing thus far in 2022, and so haven't had much to blog about. So I thought that today I would instead look ahead, and talk about what I'm hoping to do this year.

Revisions
As you're surely aware by now, I have a lot of first drafts lying around. They're never going to go anywhere if I don't polish them up. I have a couple in mind to work on.

• Cold Blooded: An urban fantasy novel about vampires, murder, and ice cream. Its recently written second draft changed some major plot points to move it closer to where it needs to be.
• The House at the Top of the Rock: A horror short story (that might expand into a novella) about a ship's small crew, betrayal, and the dark secrets of a seemingly abandoned island.

Untethered From the Dock

 All right. I've taken a nice little break, and I'm back.

Have I made progress on my vampire novel? Hahahaha! No. 

I have, however, had another idea. Probably more of a short story.

So here's what happened.

I was listening to a song. This song. And I said to myself, there's a story idea in this somewhere. I'm just not sure what it is. And then it occurred to me, after hearing the song, I don't know, 20 more times.

Trying to Make a Comeback

Would you believe that I fully thought I had posted something in September? I'm not sure how I've gone from twice a week to every other month, but here we are. 

I know a lot of it is due to my lack of motivation to write. It's hard to talk about the projects I'm working on when I'm not making any progress on them.

Then, at some point, I went from working on a series of projects to slowly slogging away on just one. I've largely stopped working on other things because I'm supposed to be writing this vampire novel. But then I'm not really working on that either. See, working on lots of different rough drafts actually got me somewhere, because it was just writing. It didn't have to be good. It was just about getting words on the page. But with Cold Blooded, I'm writing for an actual audience who will actually read it with their actual eyeballs. So it has to be… perfect. I can't just go down a rabbit hole of a plot tangent, because it might not work out, I'll have to backtrack and fix everything, and I'll have wasted my time. So I'm making an outline of all the scenes before I sit down and write anything. But it has holes in it. And I don't know what goes in those holes. So I stare at it and wring my hands and I don't do anything. 

And it doesn't help that old stories keep getting stirred up in my head.

• A show about a coastal town where weird things happen makes me want to fix my 2012 NaNo novel about… a coastal town where weird things happen.

• A song about a soldier home from war almost inexplicably gave me an idea for my 2014 Camp NaNo YA novel about an evil carnival.

Add to that a new idea that I'd like to tackle for NaNoWriMo this year, in which I remedy a gross injustice perpetrated by reality itself. That is, a series of deaths under mysterious circumstances that never found a satisfying explanation. The official story is that there was no sinister meaning behind them, but I believe otherwise. They have to mean something. And so, through the power of fiction, I intend to base a story on these deaths, and create a narrative around them that means something. 

So yes, that means I'm setting Cold Blooded aside for now. Just for a little while. I think it will be good. As illustrated above, I always get ideas for the story I'm not working on. 

And maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to post more regularly while I embark on this new project.

I'll see you… soon?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Triumphant Return of Steve

This post is unique. It may not look it, but it's very different from anything I've ever done. It was written entirely on a smartphone. That's right, I've finally joined everyone else in the future.

You know, Fifty Shades of Grey was written on a BlackBerry, I've heard. And look how that turned out.

I certainly type a lot slower using this tiny keyboard, so I'm not going to be using this all the time, but it's a little something different and... what's the adjective form of novelty? Oh. It's "novel." I'm an idiot.

Well, speaking of novels, I guess, I might as well tell you all my upcoming plans.

Well-Contained Plots

Bottles. Great for cramming messages into. Also great for stories you want to keep contained.

That's right, we're talking about bottle episodes, or bottle movies. Or bottle stories in general. Terrarium fiction, I once said. You take all your plot, characters, and conflict, and you stick them in a confined space and sit back to see what happens.

Bottle stories are not necessarily bound to the bottle. There is nothing keeping the action there. It just happens to all take place there. Personally, I think it's more interesting if the bottle's been corked.

Nothing in Particular

I just watched the 2012 movie Upside Down, and it made me think of one of my stories from a few years ago, The Shattered World, in that it involves worlds that are strangely connected and dubious science. Definitely what I would call fantasy and not science fiction. Maybe I should revive that story and give it another chance. Maybe for Camo NaNo in July. Or maybe I’ll do something new. I don't know.

What would you like to see, all five of my readers? What kind of challenge would you like to see me tackle? I have a few things up in the air at the moment, in various states of completion, but I'm not above shelving them and starting something new.

I would have written this post hours ago, but I got distracted reading a story that proved to be much longer than expected. I literally spent hours on it, even as it got later and later, because I really wanted to know how it all turned out. It was a very dark and bleak story, but my god, was it good.

I want to write something like that.

Alice in Uni-Land

This post is up very late. Let me make it up to you. Here's a story I wrote last year for a prompt I got off of r/writingprompts: "Alice and wonderland but from the perspective of a university student doped up on caffeine and a massive lack of sleep."

A little something to entertain you with.

Alice stared down at her biology textbook as the clock ticked its way past 2am. The evolution of lagomorphs blurred into a puddle of text and diagrams. It grew bigger and muddier as her head dropped ever closer to the page.

She jerked awake and reached for her notebook. But it wasn’t there. Her dorm room had vanished as well. She now found herself in a forest, and she wasn’t alone.

Into the Void

All right, where are we at?

I'm alternating randomly between coming up with new ideas for the next draft of The Long Road and writing pithy nonsense for my romantic comedy. And amidst all that, I'm wondering what I should do for Camp NaNo in July.

So I have a lot going on. I'm multitasking, by which I mean I'm doing several things at once, but none of them particularly well. I need some kind of structure, some kind of schedule. But that's just not working for me right now. Right now I'm just writing when I want to, and not writing when I don't want to. Not efficient, but better for stress levels.

Me being me, instead of focusing on all the things I'm already working on, I'm going to talk about what I might want to do for Camp NaNo.

Just Write

Well, I dropped down to one post per week, and there was no rioting in the streets. I'm not sure anyone even noticed. And that’s fine. I know my content's been a little underwhelming as of late. I'm going to blame it on work. Basically, my schedule got all switched around, and I've been given new responsibilities. It just exhausts me. So I'm sorry my writing regimen has sucked lately.

I think I need to think more about seriously publishing. It's the goal, after all. Now, the rom-com I'm writing right now will never be seen by human eyes, so obviously I'm going to have to do some new writing.

But what? The age old question. What do I write?

They Raise Their Towers to the Clouds

This week I'm coming to you live from the deep dark woods. Where yes, there is internet. It's the 21st century, guys.

I had an idea about a story, where there was a model, and an overdose, and a guy who was trying to unravel… something? It seemed like a really good idea, but when I thought about it later, I couldn’t remember why exactly. I had the basic idea, but I'd lost the spark.

This is why you write things down, kids.

Playing Games

I haven't written more of my rom-com, and that's okay. Everything I've been working on lately has been full of deadlines. First it was NaNo in November, then it was that serial story I had to add to every week, then it was Camp NaNo in April, where I felt guilty every minute I wasn't trying to revise. I put all this pressure on myself, then I start to hate the project I'm working on because I have to work on it.

I know, I know, if you want to be a "real" writer, you have to treat it like a job and write all the time, on a schedule. But see, I have a job. Writing is supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be my escape. Yeah, sure, I want to get something published one day, but not at the cost of despising the finished story for all it put me through.

That said, I have had several thoughts about this rom-com, and the sorts of things I'd like to see happen.

Going Home

I woke up with a thought in my head about an industrial revolution. I have no idea what that pertains to, but I have a feeling it was a holdover from a thought from yesterday. This is why you write things down, folks.

In other, more writing related news, I'm… writing a romantic comedy. It goes against everything I stand for, but there it is. I wrote six pages of it the other day, just trying to get the setup out of the way. See, there's a particular situation the characters have to be in, where most of the action happens, and I needed to get them there. So the beginning is a little awkward and kind of "why would you make that foolish decision" but I can fix it later.

I know I said a few weeks ago that if I wrote this rom-com, I wasn't going to blog about it. But now I am, because frankly, I don't have anything else to talk about. I don't want to talk too much about the overall plot, because I'm afraid it's going to sound stupid, and then I won't want to write it anymore. Which would suck, because it's shaping up to be a fun little story.

Getting Distracted

I'm trying to focus on the project at hand, but I keep getting distracted by an idea for a romantic comedy, of all things. It's invading my brain. It's from a picture I saw on Facebook of a Tumblr post that was a picture of a craigslist ad. So it's come a long way to reach me in the first place.

But I'm not going to write it.

Not now anyway. I have a revision I'm supposed to be working on.

And I'm kind of torn on the whole thing. I think it could be a fun story. But there's a big part of my brain that is wired to reject things like that.

A Proliferation of Portals

I've been watching 11.22.63, and spoiler alert for the first half hour, there's a portal. Not anywhere that would make any sense, it just is. And I'm only a few episodes in, but it’s not explained how it got there. In true Stephen King fashion, I suppose. Sometimes, weird things just are. I mean, in From a Buick 8, there's a portal to a hell dimension or whatever inside a car (I think, it's been a while since I read it). He can get away with it. But can I?

To be honest, The Long Road is really shaping up to be some kind of homage to Stephen King. The weird town with the sheriff is very Desperation, whether I meant it to be that way or not.

And that's where we run into trouble. There's a fine line between "inspired by" and "a rip-off of." You don't want to be on the wrong side. Especially if you hope to eventually publish something, which I do.

So on the one hand, I might be able to get away with giving no reason for the portals and reality jumping. On the other though, I kind of want to have one. It's seems kind of cheap to just say, "It's happening, just because."

What do you think? Would you want a reason to eventually be revealed, or can you accept a mystery with no answer?

Today's post is a little short, because I don't have much time. I'll see you Saturday.

The In-Between

I love liminal spaces. You probably know that by now. Those places between other places. The thresholds. The doorways. Places neither here nor there. That moment between today and tomorrow.

Somehow or another I found myself reading about hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, that is, the transitional periods of falling asleep and waking up, respectively.  Essentially, your brain doesn't always go smoothly from one to the other. It gets a little murky and mixed up, and gives you this liminal state between the two. And then I read about false awakening, where you think you've woken up, but you're still dreaming. The whole dream within a dream thing.

Me being me, I take some run of the mill mental phenomenon, and ask myself what kind of adventures could this lead to. I mean, a doorway's a doorway. Not just a link between asleep and awake, but maybe also a link to somewhere else. I've mentioned hypnic jerks before, that twitch when you're on the verge of sleep, like you've nearly fallen and caught yourself. But where were you falling to?