Writr

I read Robert McKee’s book Story very recently, and have been playing around with the stuff he talks about. It’s a very mechanistic view of writing and the nature of story, and it’s primarily aimed at script writers, causing the prose novelist in me to scoff and say that’s fine for a screenplay because it’s a mechanistic art, versus the more artsy fartsy internal nature of prose.

Which of course is utter bollocks. But still, his view of the importance of outlining and setting up value charges in each scene robs the art of romance for me, so historically I’ve resisted it and gone for the method Stephen King outlines in On Writing - look at it as though you were a paleontologist unearthing a dinosaur, you dig in and find the spirit of the story. These two forces in my head battle constantly, my left brain wanting the clarity of an outline and my right brain wanting the spirit and romance of the more adventurous seat-of-the-pants approach.

So I’ve settled on more of a hybrid approach with the latest story. It’s to be a sequel to Kidnap over Dyra!, but this time I’ve written it straight as I did with Kidnap, before breaking the first draft down into scenes on 3×5 cards, throwing some scenes out and dropping others in, and eventually winding up with a full outline running to about a thousand words - the story itself will probably run at around four and a half thousand, and the thing will end up on Lulu just like Kidnap.

On Lulu, but not only there. I’m going to do a full rebrand of Daily Flash Fiction, primarily because it’s an awful name that sets up all kinds of false expectations in readers (specifically that it’ll be daily). I still don’t know what to call it, and the old domain will still go there, but instead it’ll be a base for serial fiction as well, sort of like Mike Stackpole’s serial fiction experiments. And the old Flash fiction will stay up there as well, possibly with an explanation.

On not-writingy-stuff news, I’m learning PHP in the hopes of being able to get a better day job, and I’ll probably play around with category-specific templates to separate the stuff in more of a clean manner.

So I haven’t been blogging because I had to do a degree, but now that’s finished so I can get back to something akin to regular bloggerizing. Hooray!

After completing the first draft of March of the Titans, I promptly renamed it to Rise of the Titans or possibly Titanomachy, depending on whichever suits me better - mainly because of a white history book of the same name that I wish to avoid confusion with. I can assure you this novel will have almost nothing to do with racial homogeneity.

So how’s the second draft going? I’m glad you asked.

Nearly finished now, running up to the final chapter. Also planning to write a novella I plan to give away to help promote it - it’ll feature most of the same characters, except younger and in a totally different setting.

There is now a daily flash fiction blook available - more info and a buy link here.

So I’m approaching the end. All of the pieces are in place, we’re in the midst of the final battle, and strange lights have started falling from the sky. Or those might just be a delusion on the part of Our Hero. He’s been through a lot in the past months after all.

Looks like it’s going to be below target, but I already think I’m going to have to add a few chapters to flesh out some secondary storylines, including a very important minor character (for one of the major characters if not the plot as a whole) who’s dropped in the middle of the novel. Might be some shuffling too. But for all intents and purposes I’m nearly done.

So what does this mean? It means the Daily Flash may well be coming back at some point fairly soon, depending on prior commitments. I’m at least going to get a few in the can fairly soon so I can make a start. That’ll keep me going until the novel’s been edited and added too. I plan on fixing the main mistake that led to me dropping it in the first place - scheduling. I’m going to get about twenty or thirty in the can before I start blogging again, so I can get around problems I had last time (flashes turning out to be more involved short stories, for example).

I’m also editing a short collection of the current stuff up there for a lulu book. Which should be fun.

I noticed something today in my writing as a common habit: I’ll sometimes reconsider writing as opposed to doing something else (i.e. procrastination - curse you, Doom Legacy!) - but that this always happens at a specific number of words: I tend to choke at two-fifty to three hundred words, then again at a thousand, then again at two thousand.

It’s a weakness of mine, and something I need to work around - though really the only option is to insert butt in chair and keep hammering away at the keyboard until I’m past the choke point. What I’m going to try now is that, on off days, I’ll aim for five hundred words, because in all my previous attempts, I have never managed to write something comfortably in exactly five hundred words - my scenes always tend to be either 2-300 words or a full thousand.

Had a minor block earlier this week and last week, methinks because I’ve hit the middle of the book (see the word count, yay!) - it’s the hump of the bell curve if you like, still setting everything up for the finale but it’s not quite done, and a part of me is getting tired (as I know what’s going to happen and I just want to get to it).

Technorati Tags: writing, writing fiction

Right, I got a lot done on the new novel today, as you can see in the bottom right, or right here. It’s bubbling away quite comfortably, although there are a few bits in the later half which I’m as yet uncertain as to how they’re going to work.

Also, I made a new page called Bibliography, which contains links to all of my books to date and where to buy them. Admittedly there’s only one at the moment, and that’s a very short lulu collection of short fiction, but soon it will be joined by a short lulu collection of very short fiction! Hurray!

And by soon I mean after I’ve written March of the Titans and finished editing a short story.

Which probably won’t actually be very soon at all.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the concept of transformation. In my early years I found the concept frightening - Doctor Who or the Daleks never disturbed me, but I could never watch the old Hulk series with Bill Bixby turning into Lou Ferrigno - I think it was the idea of letting something out, turning into something new, that upset my innate need for stability. But then, desirable transformations didn’t upset me at all - my favourite piece of childhood entertainment was, after all, called Transformers.

But as time has passed this fear has turned to fascination, until now I derive much joy from seeing different forms of transformation, be they into monsters or superhumans or anything else. I think that’s why, much as I love the western superhero tradition, I spend so much time watching eastern heroes like Kamen Rider - when the hero goes into battle, he literally transforms into his alter ego - rather than being the same person in a spandex suit, he gains new strength and new abilities and, in some cases, literally a new body.

I think this love of transformation is also what attracts me to writing fiction and stories - in the end, every story is about a transformation, be it a transformation of characters or a transformation of a world. Even if the hero or heroine awakes to find their experience a dream, they seldom walk away unchanged.

Personal Development, a recent interest of mine that precipitated the creation of my blog Hifelacking, is a further symptom of this deeper interest, and perhaps deeper need. I’ve been listening to a lot of Tony Robbins stuff lately, and he often talks about change itself taking only a second, something that reminds me of David Hume’s Bundle theory of the Self - the notion that a person is not an identity, but a loosely aligned collection of perceptions and experiences, and that identity is made up from these perceptions. All this means that we are all transforming from moment to moment, shifting being that only perceive a single identity.

Which is pretty cool.

I’ve been journalling for a while now, but only started doing it regularly fairly recently after reading “The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self” (Julia Cameron), particularly the bit on Morning Pages, bits of splurge that you’re supposed to write every morning. I have been doing them on my Mac, writing in Journler, but I find workingon my mac a little too distracting, at least for my early morning self - even with something like WriteRoom.

In an moment of Serendipity, I saw this article over at paper journals. Specifically this quote interested me:

Make sure there are no distractions while you write. That means no television, no people talking to you, zero interruptions while writing. If you can’t find a quiet place, put some headphones on and drown out conversations around you. It’s so important to eliminate distractions if you really want your journal to be a big help.

So I’m reminded of my interest in paper. Form tomorrow, I’ll go back to my paper Moleskine journal and start in that again. It’s not like a generally need to go back to previous journal entries anyway, although re-reading them is often fun.

So I came to a realization the other day abot the nature of fantasy. Well, okay, not a realization per se - that implies it’s some sort of authoritative truth, and this really isn’t, more of a… well, a new belief.

Previously, I had always seen ‘Fantasy’ as a genre, insofar as any can exist. After all, it has it’s own unique set of conventions and oddities and specialized writers. And yes, all genres are really a construct of booksellers to make it easier for people to pick out books they want to buy, but I thought there was still something in it.

But then I started reading more historical fiction - most notably Bernard Cornwell - and realized that, well, most fantasy is just historical ficiton about things that didn’t happena dn people that never existed.

And a lot of my favourite books do this to, but with different genres: like Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, which is a tense political thriller. Granted, a tense political thriller set in a place that doesn’t exist and with a dash of magic thrown in, but with a little retooling it could work in almost any setting.

Which is a pretty important realization for me. It also read to the realization that I’m not a ‘fantasy author’ - indeed, no-one is - but instead I’m a thriller author who uses fantasy in his settings and plots.

Ooh…

So I’ve started reading The Novel and it’s surprisingly okay. Not blowing me away, but that’s just because the actual word by word writing sometimes falls flat on its face and has numerous typoes. But that’s to be expected when I’m… well, typing something.

But it’s not horrific, aside from the first two chapters. It’s well structured, leaving me a neither a nervous wreck nor sending me to sleep (which the first draft actually did at points - it was so high tension for the most part that when I let the tension off I fell asleep).

Must do some more work on the Daily Flash I’m currently engagin in a touch of brinkmanship with it, writing a post and then editing and posting it the next day. It’s not ideal, as things won’t work if I fall ill or something. So my plan is to write a hojillion flashes (well, fourteen) and get them in a post queue. Two a day for a week should do it, and should also provide an interesting challenge.

So I’ve been looking into values for personal development a lot lately (detailed over at my other blog HifeLacking), and I hit on something - values and value conflicts are perfect for characterization. If you make a list of a character’s values and then look for difficulties, you can then throw them into a situation where their values contradict one another and watch the fun start. Or pain, if you prefer the term. But pain can be fun when watching a character.

Oh gods, I think I’m turning into George R.R. Martin…