Ian Rennie's writing Journal

16 tons and waddaya get? Published.

2009-11-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

365 tomorrows published another story:

http://www.365tomorrows.com/11/08/the-company-store/

I'm fairly pleased.

after a while, you're running out of the forest again.

2009-11-02T20:24:00.000-08:00

2 days into the novel and it's going...

well.

So well, that I'm a little scared. I've done twelve thousand words in two days, which is far above my average. I wrote three and a half thousand of them today, meaning it's not just a first day burst (one of the fun secrets of nanowrimo is that you get two first days. You get the one after it just turns midnight, and the one the next morning when you wake up).

The plot is holding together. The only character in danger of changing at the moment is the Captain, who may not be as much of a bastard as he needs to be. In my head he looks just like the prosecutor from Law & Order UK, I'm not sure if that's a good or relevant thing.

At least half of what I've written is stuff I'm happy with, and the other half is stuff I can whip into shape.

I'm cautiously optimistic. Or optimistically cautious. One or the other, or the third, which you are.

Oh, and that thing about thousand word segments? Yeah, all but one of them has gone over. The longest is 2400 words.

lines and lines and lines and lines

2009-10-30T21:49:00.001-07:00

I just finished up the chapter by chapter outline for War Poets.

I'm starting to get quite excited for the project.

:)

how to write a novel in 30 days...

2009-10-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

...without going (too) mad, without it eating your life (much), and without ending up with a fifty thousand word chunk of terribleness you can't bear to look at let alone edit.

well, that's the idea anyway.

I can't say I'm an expert here, although this is my fifth try and I've managed it each time before (sort of. The Callow ended up way longer than I thought it would be, but I managed sixty thousand words before December 1st). I have, however, picked up a few tricks that work for me that I think could work quite well for other people too.

1) don't think of it as fifty thousand words. An essential part of not freaking out when it comes to project management is breaking the task down into little chunks. Fifty thousand words is a lot. Too much. When I think about writing fifty thousand words (actually, I usually think of it as sixty, for reasons I'll come to later) I break out in a cold sweat. The trick is to change your frame of reference. You can write two thousand words, right? If I were to say to you "Write me two thousand words before the end of the day and I'll give you this lovely puppy*" you could write me that 2000 words, and you'd do it with a smile on your face (mainly because of the puppy). 2000 words a day is 60,000 words by the end of the month. I'm a dreadful wordcount watcher. I have to fight my urge to check wordcount every 6 minutes to see how much more I've got to do. This year I've built my novel's structure around wordcount. Each segment should be 1000 (or a little bit more) words. Thus I'm not writing 2000 words a day, I'm writing two segments, and 30 days from now I'll finish the last two and be done with the whole thing, the end.
2) write every day. every day. It's awfully easy to think you're a bit ahead and you can catch up later. It's awfully easy to think you've got too much to do. It's also a murderer of productivity. A day off from writing takes you out of your groove. Even if you don't write much, even if your pattern is for huge writing binges, write something every day. If you've got time to check your mail, you've got time to lay a paragraph down. November of last year was a really horrible month, for reasons I won't go into. I wrote every day precisely because of how easy it would have been to not write every day. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it's how it felt.
3) Don't worry. Time you spend worrying is time you don't spend writing. If you're character is in a plot hole, don't spend an hour selecting the best shovel to dig him out. If necessary, move on and write the next bit, or a later bit, or something else. Writing that will give you the idea you needed to fix the earlier bit, and you can go back at fully strength, rather than gnawing away at yourself with the refrain "this is SHIT, this is SO SHIT, I'm a fucking HACK and everyone HATES ME" running through your head. Write what you can, come back to what you can't.
4) It's not your family's fault. Families tend to be understanding of nano-time, but there are occasional points where you're trying to work out how to make sure the sword of Ravengate gets to the top of Shard Mountain in time for it to be found by the protagonist and the last thing you need is someone asking you to unload the fucking dishwasher. Don't snap at mothers, wifes, girlfriends, or roommates. Do what they ask, then retreat back to your room. By the way, the Sword Of Ravengate was brought to the mountaintop by cultists of Beth-Shanna who wished it to house the spirit of their Unspeakable Lord. The ritual failed... or did it?
5) Alcohol is not your friend, as much as you think it is. Caffeine is your friend. Alcohol makes you more daring, but it can also make you sloppier. Caffeine gives you a sharper edge, even if it can also lead to you feeling like you were buried in a litterbox by one of the cats.

There. Advice. Probably bad advice.

Good luck to anyone foolish enough to be nano-ing this time around.

*puppies not available in all (or most or any) areas

war... war constantly changes

2009-10-28T17:02:00.000-07:00

a truism of any historical drama, and especially war films, is this:

A historical drama is more about the time it is being made in than it is about the era in which it is set.

To a greater or lesser extent, this is true about any war drama you care to mention. MASH was about Vietnam, Apocalypse Now was about the psychological fallout (the horror, the horror) of Vietnam. Platoon was about the craziness of the eighties. Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List were about the debt Spielberg felt he owed the respective protagonists.

A historical piece of fiction, especially a piece of war fiction, is a big chunk of now.

So why am I writing one?

A couple of reasons. First of all, I feel a curious connection to the first world war that I don't feel to the second world war. Not to the causes, but to the sacrifice. It's always felt to me like the Great War was the last of the old gung-ho Give Johnny Foreigner What He's Got Coming To Him expeditions: the last war of a generation and a mindset that honestly believed sayings like "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". The last war, in other words, that didn't take full account of the range of what I like to think of as Bastard Tactics made possible by developments in weapon and transport technology. As such, I feel connected to it out of sorrow for a generation of young men on both sides who were told that climbing out of a trench and walking slowly towards a machine gun was a solid strategy. My maternal grandfather was one of those men. It's nearly a hundred years ago now, but it's as recent as a man who held my mother in his arms.

The other reason is that, in the United States at least, almost nobody remembers the first world war. It's an ingrained part of British cultural heritage (thanks, oddly enough, to Ben Elton, Richard Curtis, Mr Bean and Gregory House), but it was a war America was only in for a year, right at the end. If pushed, the moderately educated would remember the Lusitania, but the horrors of Ypres and the Somme were something that happened in another country to people from another country. As such, it does not live particularly well either in American collective memory or in American popular culture (which are, let's be quite honest here, very close to being the same thing. For those who would accuse me of cultural chauvinism, the exact same thing can be said about British collective memory and popular culture).

The pop culture Second World War is teeming with superheroes, colorful fighters, and everything that Hollywood and the House Of ideas can throw at is. Captain America punches out Hitler while the Fighting Yank storms across battlefields. Billy Zane and Eric Stoltz aboard the Memphis Belle drop bombs with deadly accuracy while Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt both make moves against "the arch-enemy of the world".

You don't hear much about super powers in the first world war because it doesn't feel entirely suitable. Honestly I feel the same about the second (which is why I agree with David Brothers in his write up of a recent DC comic where The Flash goes back and shoots nazis for various reasons best left forgotten), but especially about the first. I wouldn't have written, nor would I want to write, a book about costumed strongmen running out of the trenches and Giving The Boche What For. Such powers as are in this book are small, albeit with potentially large results, and are wielded, I hope, by men, not four color cut-outs. The morality isn't four-color either. it's easy to paint the second world war as a war against evil, because, as David Mitchell rightly said, the other side had skulls on their uniforms. The first world war was a lot less well defined when it came to saying who the baddies were, or indeed where the enemy was to the average soldier.

If this book works, and I hope it will, it will be morally ambiguous, realistic without being dark-for-the-sake-of-darkness, and ultimately gripping.

Ten years ago, I was rehearsing for Journey's End, a first world war play by R C Sheriff what everyone who cares about good drama or accurate depictions of war should see. It's been filmed a number of times, most recently in the 1980s for a TV adaptation that starred Jeremy Northam, but see it on stage if you can.

Six years ago, I was discussing ideas for a superhero series with each volume set at a different point in history, and I came up with the bare idea for this (Full credit here, the universe was a shared idea from myself and a very talented man called Zach Dotsey, and I owe him greatly for sharing his ideas and listening to mine).

More than ninety years ago, Toby Granton stood on a rooftop in London, about to make a leap in the dark that would lead to his world becoming much more dangerous and much more important.

On Sunday I will start to write.

Preparing for the month

2009-10-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm taking part in National Novel Writing Month again. This makes it the fifth year out of six that I've done so. In 2007, I was in England for half the month, and without easy access to a reliable computer. I tried to make up for it by writing in January and February (I was planning on completing a novel for my wife for Valentine's day), but it didn't work out. The artificial external restriction of November wasn't there, and I was too forgiving of myself in missing the deadline.

This is what's most worthwhile about NaNoWriMo for me. The fact that so many people are doing it at the same time - starting at the same time, and ending at the same time - makes it much harder to quit. I have horrible self discipline, and having something external to keep me on task is a wonderful thing. If I make it as a proper writer, one of the things I'm most looking forward to is deadlines, proper "do this by four weeks from now or you have to give all the money back" deadlines. They will scare the pants from under me, and that's what I need. Creativity through structure is how I thrive.

The community helps as more than just a deadline, too. I went to a kick-off party on Friday, and the sheer wonderful range of people united by a single interest was incredible. Men, women, from all walks of life. People from the first half of their teens and the second half of their fifties, into science fiction, fantasy, manga, contemporary fiction, comedy, all united by one thing: they were going to write a novel in November. There's nothing like that enthusiasm for keeping you going. There's nothing like a community to make you a better writer.

I'm hopefully going to attend some write-ins during the process. I think this coul end up being one of the best things I've written.

I'll do a post closer to the time about the novel itself. I just wanted to enthuse about the process for a bit.

HULK IS THE DRUNKEST ONE THERE IS

2009-03-17T06:58:00.001-07:00

I'm not doing too well on this writing blog thing, am I? Might be because I just haven't written much lately. Non writing life is hectic in a dull way I won't bore you with.

I've been having ideas but not been sure what to do with them. The Jack In The Green sequel keeps stalling, and I think part of that is that I don't see the incentive to write it at the moment. Other things I'm having ideas about include trying to do a different take on the "fun" superhero thing (Basically, I wanted to do a comic about a superhero who essentially beats up bad guys in costumes and has adventures, then thought about how to make that possible with a semi real world setting without it either being GRITTY GRITTY GRITTY or "hey, let's entirely ignore reality". I think I figured out something that works). The problem with having superhero ideas is that I don't have an artist to work with. I work best when I know the artist who will be doing stuff with me, and at the moment I don't have anyone to work with.

So, if you're an artist interested in doing some projects together, let me know, I have some ideas that I think could work brilliantly.

published again

2009-02-17T05:48:00.000-08:00

365 Tomorrows did another of my stories here. Which is nice.

That said, I think I'm going to have to broaden who I send stories to. Even with the flash fiction, I think I could and should be sending them to as many places as I can, and I've fallen into a bit of a complacent "365 will like this" mode. I love 365 tomorrows, and I'm glad to have been published by them. I just want to have been published by lots and lots and lots of places.

something new

2009-02-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

I've been vaguely dicking around with my twitter account, and I thought I'd try something. Twiction. 140 character stories. Apparently there's already a website for them at http://www.twiction.net but at the moment it's a blog sort of in search of a community.

Oh well, this could be fun.

woot! woot! That's the sound of publication

2009-01-22T22:04:00.001-08:00

two nice things for today:

1) 365 tomorrows are going to publish another of my stories. Yay!
2) 365 tomorrow did one of my stories as a podcast! Double yay!

stupid better ideas, or better stupid ideas

2009-01-22T14:32:00.000-08:00

Reasons to be irritated: I was most of the way through plotting the follow up to Jack In The Green, needing only to write up the chapter by chapter plot when a better idea whacked me over the back of my head. An idea so much better that I'd have to go through and change pretty much everything. So now it's back to the drawing board.

Reasons to be delighted: it really really is a better idea. A new character, a new voice, possibly even a new love interest (or at least a frisson). The book will be a better place with this in it.

Jacks and Queens

2008-11-25T20:18:00.000-08:00

Nearly done with Jack In The Green. Just the last chapter to finish.

Then again, it's been "just the last chapter to finish" for coming up to a week now. Momentum died a little at 50,000 words.

I'm just tired, and this hasn't been a good month for personal reasons.

On the plus side, I wrote fast and I think i wrote well, and I already have the idea for the sequel, The Queen of the May. Not sure if I'll hold off and write that next year, or say the hell with it and do it now.

Time will tell, I suppose.

in between the micro wrimo and the pico wrimo

2008-11-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

so yeah, it's NaNoWriMo.

As is now traditional, I'm writing. Aja and I came up with the idea for a supernatural romance novel called Jack In The Green. It's about the Green Man, and I think it will be pretty good. Started it yesterday, hit the 5000 work mark at about midnight last night. Looking good.

long time...

2008-10-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

every now and then, life gets between you and your writing. I've still been writing, I just haven't been blogging about it. Did some stories I really liked lately but also had some dry patches.

Next month, I'm taking part in NaNoWriMo. I'm not expecting greatness, but if it gives me the carcass of a novel in a month, I can skin and dress it after that. It's going to be based on an idea Aja and I had ages ago, a fantasy romance about the Green Man.

I wrote a lot of the outline today, I think it could be pretty good.

gods, new and old, small and large

2008-09-16T19:33:00.000-07:00

doing a series of short stories that deal with the gifts of the gods. After I wrote the first one, Aja said she wanted to see others about the gifts being wasted. I like that as an idea and I want to combine it with the idea that there should be no such thing as an entirely positive gift from the gods. There's a Cranberries album (I think) called Equally Cursed and Blessed, and I think that in narrative form these two aspects should be the same thing. A god only gives you misfortune to see how you rise above it. A god only gives you power to see how you waste it.

that's because gods are bastards

that's because gods are us.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

scary things

2008-09-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

wrote another story, one that Aja said was "awesome and scary"

and now I'm thinking about scary things.

I've never been good at writing truly frightening stories, or at least not stories that I find truly frightening, because the things that actually frighten me are things I don't want to think about. However, when I do try to frighten I have a couple of simple rules.

Monsters aren't scary. Big strong demons that kill aren't scary.

What's scary is what people are willing to do if they don't think anyone's watching or they don't care if anyone's watching, or if they like it when people watch. What's scary is seeing something horrifying, truly disgusting, the kind of thing that is called "inhuman", and understanding that the person who did it was genetically almost exactly like you, was raised in a household fairly close to your own, in a culture fairly close to your own. The most disturbing thing is when the monstrosity comes from someone entirely, completely human.

Because that's the ultimate fear. Both of the ultimate fears.

The first fear is that someone you have always known and always trusted could turn on you and do these terrible things to you.

The second fear is that you could turn on those you love and do these things.

The first is a reflection of the second, and its scary because civilized feelings are learned. Underneath them is an animal who has evolved cruelty and creativity as survival traits.

Zombies and vampires aren't scary because they're monsters. They're scary because they were human. Werewolves aren't scary because they're wolves, they're scary because they were men.

The most terrifying thing we have ever experienced is a human being with the inhibitions turned off.

You wake up in the middle of the night to the sight and smell of blood. Something is dead in here, and there's a killer in the room. Is it more scary if you're next, or if the killer is you?

That's where good scary stories should be. Not the terror from outside, but the voice in the back of your mind.

ooh! ooh! other thing!

2008-09-11T16:46:00.001-07:00

website is now up and running.

http://irennie.com

writer's block... of course.

2008-09-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

and wouldn't you know that as soon as I've started blogging about this I get writer's block?

it often happens and it's one of the most annoying facets of writing. There's a lot in writing you have to work at and put time into, but very little that you can force. This is especially true of flash fiction, where every word is a limited commodity. Ideas have to be strong, clear, and expressible, and when you're not sure of the central concept, this is tough to write.

This doesn't mean that nothing can be done while you're blocked. When the ideas aren't flowing, you can still edit, review what you've written, send submissions out, blog uselessly about how much writer's block sucks, and otherwise keep the juices flowing until the ideas come back. This stuff helps with the creative process, because it's thinking about ideas without having to strain at thinking about ideas.

Which doesn't make it suck any less when you hit the wall and can't see where to go.

slogspot

2008-09-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

wrote two more stories. One last night and one today at work.

The one last night was a bit of a mess, more ideas than a full story, and the ending sucked, but the concept was good. maybe I just need to go back to basics on it and take the parts I liked about the idea from a new side.

The one today worked, and was neat. It was inspired by reading Warren Ellis babble about haptic technology (tech that lets the sese of touch be synthesized, I'm probably not explaining it well). Aja (my wife, for those who don't know) says she liked it. She has a fondness for my stories that involve relationships.

The second one, "Heartbroken", is pretty much complete. I'm probably going to give it a spit-shine, then send it somewhere. That's a tradition I should get into: each friday, gather up what I wrote during the week and send it on its merry way. The more I keep at it, the more chance of something getting published.

New site, new weblog, same old Ian

2008-09-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

I'm setting this up to be my writing blog for the new site, a record of what I'm writing, what I'm having published, or just general thoughts about writing.

So I should probably introduce myself. You probably know at least some of this. There are far too many websites on the Internet as it is, so you're probably only reading this if you

1) know me
2) read a story by me
3) saw me ranting or babbling about something or other somewhere else

or

4) got directed here by mistake.

I'm hoping to integrate this site with the currently-under-construction http://www.irennie.com which should have the answers to some of this, but let me give the quick version here in case you came across this by accident.

My name is Ian Rennie, I'm an Englishman who is (depending on exactly when you read this) either sucking the last few breaths out of the dog-end of his twenties or stepping into the fresh light of his thirties and wondering what happened to being young. The evidence of that last sentence to the contrary, I'm a writer.

But then, everyone says they're a writer. What it tends to mean is "I think I'm creative and I had an idea for a sitcom once" or "there are thirty pages of a novel on a folder on my computer I haven't opened since 2005". There's a scene in the movie Orange County where someone pitches the TV show they're writing at a party: "It's ostensibly about vampires, but really it's a metaphor for the break up of post world war one Germany. Only, you know, funny". That's writers.

So I should be more specific. I write primarily science fiction. I've written short stories, comics, and novels. Thus far only the short stories have been published. I'm working on that. I've been really into flash fiction this year, ultra-short stories of around five hundred words or less. I think I've written about fifty this year, which isn't bad. Of these, I've had five published on http://www.365tomorrows.com and submitted others elsewhere. I also write novels, in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, and young adult fatasy. I'm putting together ideas for a fantasy romance novel called Jack In The Green.

I'm putting this journal together in part as a mnemonic so I can keep track of what I've been writing and where I've been sending it. I'm putting together the website for pretty much the same reason. This will also help me nag myself into submitting a story a week to at least one publication. The worst that will happen is rejection letters. That and drunk rants about the talentless bastards who get published when I don't, and how they're not fit to pay my bar tab, etc, etc. I'll try to keep those to a minimum. A minimum of zero.

I also want to talk about writing.

Until this year I hadn't had anything at all published, and I primarily write for myself and my wife's amusement. I electronically published a graphic novel a few years back, but that didn't really count as I made no money off it and did it really just to tell the story. That said, I've always wanted to be able to support myself by writing, and so this year I'm going to try and actually get properly published. I've made a start with short stories, and now I'm going to step into the slightly scarier field of shopping around for an agent and a publisher and all that jazz. I'm going to try and write up what luck I have, if any, here.

Anyway, this has probably gone on long enough for a first post. Hopefully I'll update soon, unless the inevitable happens and I entirely fail to update this journal, leaving it as yet another headstone in the blogging graveyard, buried under pure white unused potential.

Always end on a happy note, that's what I say.