Hey all, I've been doing a little work on a new radio thing involving a few favorite hobbies. Role playing games and video games. Link can be found here. Look for Gamer Corps.
As far as fiction writing, I am doing a little bit of that. Not much as I would like, yet there never seem to be enough hours in the day for it anyway. I will say that it is shaping up very nicely. Might even be able to share a little everyone here soon. I will keep you posted on that.
And, i should get back to writing now. Wanted to make a quick post, let you all know I'm not dead. ;-P
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Oooh, a new shiny...
So, again I have gone and started something else. Well, more like started a project again. It is a modern day fantasy, with mystery elements and a thrill or two. Hard-boiled, yet not about a private eye. Not a rip-off of Dresden Files, though I love the series and wait for the next book with bated breath. And I will admit that this current project was inspired by Butcher, it is something that I believe is different enough to not be just a rehashing of those books.
Read an amazing article of the detective story, written many, many moons ago by Raymond Chadler. He was arguing that the detective story IS worthy of being well written and respect from critics. He goes into a short history of the genre as a whole. I recommend it. Called, A Simple Art of Murder and can be found here.
Read an amazing article of the detective story, written many, many moons ago by Raymond Chadler. He was arguing that the detective story IS worthy of being well written and respect from critics. He goes into a short history of the genre as a whole. I recommend it. Called, A Simple Art of Murder and can be found here.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
A curse of the "Oh shiny..."
Well, I think I have a problem.
No, I DO have a problem. The curse of the magpie's "Oh shiny," mentality. While I was editing my fantasy novel, I started to read a noir sci-fi. I picked it up after reading a list of sci-fi books and series that other sci-fi and fantasy writers said were good. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for over a year and I just picked it up today. When Gravity Fails is an amazing book so far, and I was sad to hear that the author, one George Alec Effinger, died many years ago and there are only two other books with Marîd Audran in it.
But, the problem is now I have started to go back and re-work a sci-fi noir piece of my own. At the moment, this is a story based on a setting in my mind on the planet Mars. Yes, Mars. I have a real love of the red planet. It has nothing to do with Heinlein's adventure stories or Burrough's. Something in my mind has grasped Mars as the location for the desolate, the broken and castoffs of Earth. I would love to share more yet it is my rile not to share to much, least I tell the story and don't want to sit down and write it.
I think I will continue this story for a time. I do know that there is a real reason for the "Oh, shiny," mentality. At least, it makes sense to me. It is a way for my mind to get out from under the burden of failure. You would think a writer wouldn't worry about that until later. One of the biggest fears for many writers, me being one of them, is the feeling that if I don't finish anything then I won't fail at anything. I can sit on half completed products and think that I will get to them in time.
There are two ways to deal with this, at least for me. One is to push through when I have that magpie moment again. Something I tried to do with this fantasy story that I think might languish a little longer on the back burner. The other is to re-read the story Snows of Kilimanjaro. It is all about a writer who gathers and gathers things together and NEVER writes anything and dies.
The idea that I could die before anything of mine gets published is something that will motivate me. Though it is a very morbid way of thinking and looking at things. But, that is jst how I am sometimes.
No, I DO have a problem. The curse of the magpie's "Oh shiny," mentality. While I was editing my fantasy novel, I started to read a noir sci-fi. I picked it up after reading a list of sci-fi books and series that other sci-fi and fantasy writers said were good. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for over a year and I just picked it up today. When Gravity Fails is an amazing book so far, and I was sad to hear that the author, one George Alec Effinger, died many years ago and there are only two other books with Marîd Audran in it.
But, the problem is now I have started to go back and re-work a sci-fi noir piece of my own. At the moment, this is a story based on a setting in my mind on the planet Mars. Yes, Mars. I have a real love of the red planet. It has nothing to do with Heinlein's adventure stories or Burrough's. Something in my mind has grasped Mars as the location for the desolate, the broken and castoffs of Earth. I would love to share more yet it is my rile not to share to much, least I tell the story and don't want to sit down and write it.
I think I will continue this story for a time. I do know that there is a real reason for the "Oh, shiny," mentality. At least, it makes sense to me. It is a way for my mind to get out from under the burden of failure. You would think a writer wouldn't worry about that until later. One of the biggest fears for many writers, me being one of them, is the feeling that if I don't finish anything then I won't fail at anything. I can sit on half completed products and think that I will get to them in time.
There are two ways to deal with this, at least for me. One is to push through when I have that magpie moment again. Something I tried to do with this fantasy story that I think might languish a little longer on the back burner. The other is to re-read the story Snows of Kilimanjaro. It is all about a writer who gathers and gathers things together and NEVER writes anything and dies.
The idea that I could die before anything of mine gets published is something that will motivate me. Though it is a very morbid way of thinking and looking at things. But, that is jst how I am sometimes.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Editing...
So, I have a about a hundred pages of this fantasy written. It isn't complete, yet I find that most of me doesn't want to keep going with it and my mind keeps wondering to other projects. I took some time and now I'm going to focus on the editing thing more!
I have to if I want this to be in any shape for publishing down the road.
I find that using another color pen is the best for me, since when I go to re-write it and I use a black pen, my mind skips over half the corrections. And, using red is something I have always seen as the best thing to stand out on a black and white manuscript.
So far, I have 15 pages of the thing done. I am just hoping that I don't have a "ohhh, shiny" moment and go off to start re-writing the story from the beginning once I hit page fifty or sixty. I shall keep you all posted...
I have to if I want this to be in any shape for publishing down the road.
I find that using another color pen is the best for me, since when I go to re-write it and I use a black pen, my mind skips over half the corrections. And, using red is something I have always seen as the best thing to stand out on a black and white manuscript.
So far, I have 15 pages of the thing done. I am just hoping that I don't have a "ohhh, shiny" moment and go off to start re-writing the story from the beginning once I hit page fifty or sixty. I shall keep you all posted...
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
And, then I had a thought...
So, been working on the manuscript for a bit. And, I think I have run out of steam a little. I have a little over nine thousand words. I had already added a little from a previous edition. The big question is if I should add more and therefore, KNOW I will get over the eighty pages. Or, keep going the way I am going and just write?
Friday, March 18, 2011
Goals
Been writing more of that story, which is good. Yet, it makes me think about where I want to stop and let that editor go at it. There are all kinds of advice that run through my head and there are two points that come close to it, I think.
One goal while I was in school was to get to fifty pages by the end of the semester. I was going to CSULB and taking a creative writing novel course. The prevailing wisdom was that if you could get the story to fifty pages, then it had a chance to be a real and true novel. Yes, the scenes might not all be there and the writing might be horrendous, yet it was a good goal for me. (It was also a way to thin out some of those who thought that this would be an "easy" class. I took the class many times, mostly because I had far to many units from previous schools and was trying to take advantage of working on a novel in these classes.) It was pretty easy for me to get to fifty pages. Yet, the semester would end and I would go off and forget my manuscript to work on something else or to knock off the writing for a few days. (THAT is also the subject of another blog. Hopefully I remember to come back to it.) So, when school started up again, I would need to find a new project.
The other goal was from something I read by Terry Pratchett in The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature. He talked about something called a "Draft Zero." This was the draft no one saw, only he did. And, the main goal of this was to get the manuscript to eighty pages. Once again, not everything was where it should be or well written, but the meat of the story was there. Once that was done, he could start in on a actual "First Draft" and start the editing process.
I think I might try for the full eighty pages. Once that gets done, I can start at the beginning again and at least attempt to edit the thing.
There is one thing that does come to mind though. Since I have been working on this for many years and the drafts have built up and built up, do I really need to get to that eighty? Should I stop sooner? Or should I even keep going longer? What if I hit eighty pages and I don't want to stop? What if I keep going and this "Draft Zero" is actually something like two hundred pages? Granted, that might not happen, but I am a writer and love to play the what if game.
I suppose I will keep going until I think I have reached the end of the story. Whether that is at fifty pages, eighty pages or even two hundred.
Until next time...
One goal while I was in school was to get to fifty pages by the end of the semester. I was going to CSULB and taking a creative writing novel course. The prevailing wisdom was that if you could get the story to fifty pages, then it had a chance to be a real and true novel. Yes, the scenes might not all be there and the writing might be horrendous, yet it was a good goal for me. (It was also a way to thin out some of those who thought that this would be an "easy" class. I took the class many times, mostly because I had far to many units from previous schools and was trying to take advantage of working on a novel in these classes.) It was pretty easy for me to get to fifty pages. Yet, the semester would end and I would go off and forget my manuscript to work on something else or to knock off the writing for a few days. (THAT is also the subject of another blog. Hopefully I remember to come back to it.) So, when school started up again, I would need to find a new project.
The other goal was from something I read by Terry Pratchett in The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature. He talked about something called a "Draft Zero." This was the draft no one saw, only he did. And, the main goal of this was to get the manuscript to eighty pages. Once again, not everything was where it should be or well written, but the meat of the story was there. Once that was done, he could start in on a actual "First Draft" and start the editing process.
I think I might try for the full eighty pages. Once that gets done, I can start at the beginning again and at least attempt to edit the thing.
There is one thing that does come to mind though. Since I have been working on this for many years and the drafts have built up and built up, do I really need to get to that eighty? Should I stop sooner? Or should I even keep going longer? What if I hit eighty pages and I don't want to stop? What if I keep going and this "Draft Zero" is actually something like two hundred pages? Granted, that might not happen, but I am a writer and love to play the what if game.
I suppose I will keep going until I think I have reached the end of the story. Whether that is at fifty pages, eighty pages or even two hundred.
Until next time...
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Word Count/Page count update and other randomness...
So, I started a new project a few days ago. And, I already have 5,000 words of it done. One reason it is coming so easy is that I have been working on this thing for a long time. And, I think I have even taken the J.R.R. Tolkien approach to writing. It has been written that he started the LotR novel--
(Yes novel, it was suppose to be one long book and not broken up into sections. That is one reason why many find Two Towers and Return so hard to get into, the novel was chopped up by Ballentine because they thought no American reader would read a thousand page book about elves. Oh well...)
--about four or five times. And, each time he felt like he couldn't go forward any more, he scrapped the whole thing and started fresh. Many writers I know would say this is insanity and would scream at Papa Tolkien and say, "You can re-write it man! Just keep going forward. Or revise, don't scrap it." Yet, he was a linguist and not a creative writer.
Where am I going with this? Well, I have been working on this for years and years. For a long time, I just wrote and wrote and then re-wrote and re-wrote. Yet, there came a time when I couldn't anymore. I went on to other things, yet this story was in the back of my mind. I also let some people read it and when I got their feedback, it helped. Yet, I still felt like there was something missing.
So, I let it sit on the back burner and went to grad school. Worked on a completely different novel and that one is now in a contest. And, I feel that after having gotten into steampunk, I realized that was missing from the story. So, I started again, last year. And I got maybe fifty pages in and it stopped flowing. So, I tried to revise and re-write. Nothing.
And I shelved it and moved on to other things again. Now, it burst back into my head while I stared at the blank page of my computer screen. And, for the past few days I've been riding that wave. I know that the dreaded fifty page mark is coming in...and with the way things are going, I might reach it soon. The fifty page mark is something I learned in a writing class. If you can get a novel to fifty pages, then you have something that can sustain itself. I know it can sustain itself, I am simply hoping it will continue on past those fifty pages, even though I know what is suppose to happen in the story.
Only time will tell.
(Yes novel, it was suppose to be one long book and not broken up into sections. That is one reason why many find Two Towers and Return so hard to get into, the novel was chopped up by Ballentine because they thought no American reader would read a thousand page book about elves. Oh well...)
--about four or five times. And, each time he felt like he couldn't go forward any more, he scrapped the whole thing and started fresh. Many writers I know would say this is insanity and would scream at Papa Tolkien and say, "You can re-write it man! Just keep going forward. Or revise, don't scrap it." Yet, he was a linguist and not a creative writer.
Where am I going with this? Well, I have been working on this for years and years. For a long time, I just wrote and wrote and then re-wrote and re-wrote. Yet, there came a time when I couldn't anymore. I went on to other things, yet this story was in the back of my mind. I also let some people read it and when I got their feedback, it helped. Yet, I still felt like there was something missing.
So, I let it sit on the back burner and went to grad school. Worked on a completely different novel and that one is now in a contest. And, I feel that after having gotten into steampunk, I realized that was missing from the story. So, I started again, last year. And I got maybe fifty pages in and it stopped flowing. So, I tried to revise and re-write. Nothing.
And I shelved it and moved on to other things again. Now, it burst back into my head while I stared at the blank page of my computer screen. And, for the past few days I've been riding that wave. I know that the dreaded fifty page mark is coming in...and with the way things are going, I might reach it soon. The fifty page mark is something I learned in a writing class. If you can get a novel to fifty pages, then you have something that can sustain itself. I know it can sustain itself, I am simply hoping it will continue on past those fifty pages, even though I know what is suppose to happen in the story.
Only time will tell.
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