365 tomorrows published another story:
http://www.365tomorrows.com/11/08/the-company-store/
I'm fairly pleased.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
after a while, you're running out of the forest again.
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.
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.
Friday, October 30, 2009
lines and lines and lines and lines
I just finished up the chapter by chapter outline for War Poets.
I'm starting to get quite excited for the project.
:)
I'm starting to get quite excited for the project.
:)
Thursday, October 29, 2009
how to write a novel in 30 days...
...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
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
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
war... war constantly changes
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.
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.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Preparing for the month
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
HULK IS THE DRUNKEST ONE THERE IS
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.
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.
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