Lookin’ For Clues

Allow me to begin by saying this post will likely piss a few people off.  I’m not saying that to be mean; I’m merely stating a fact.  Then again, writers are always going to piss someone off–it’s the nature of the game.  You tell a story, said story is read, and someone take umbrage with what was conveyed.  I only say, in that instance, take it up with Stephen Fry.

That said, onward.

I spend a lot of time on the Internet.  I would say, “Way too much,” but then I don’t have much of a life, so I need to hang out somewhere, and the corner drug store no longer exists.  So I see a lot of people in different areas of the virtual world.

I also hang out with a lot of writers.  That’s because I’m in the process of becoming a writer–or, I should say, I am in the process of becoming a writer who is not only publishing, but being paid to do so.  I hang out with other writers for the chance to network, to be able to find out what’s happening in the publishing world, to get a few tips here and there, to make myself a better person at this craft.

Now, I will also say I can be a pain in the ass.  I can be snappy (not bitey; that’s a velociraptor), and I’m sort of a lazy git.  That last I admit to freely.  If there’s something I don’t want to do, I’ll put it off until tomorrow, and then tomorrow again, and again . . . and keep doing this until I have Harold Hill knocking on my front door wanting to know what the hell is going on.

But there is one thing that absolutely drives me nuts, and I can’t help myself about this, because it’s the way I roll.  Let me set the scene:

I’m in a “room” on line, hanging out.  I’m doing something: maybe writing, maybe looking something up, maybe playing a game.  And then someone types the following:  ”Hey, I’m writing a (place genre here) story, and I need a name.  Help me out.”  Or, a variation of that:  ”I’m writing a (place genre here) story, and I need the name of a town.  Who’s got one?”  And the best, one that I saw the other day, “I need the name of a town.  Who’s got one?  Has to be the name for a town that’s not too big, and not too small.”  Being the smart ass that I am, I was sorely tempted to type, “How about ‘Goldilocks’?”

There is something that come to mind when this happens.  Harlan Ellison, writing a piece that eventually ended up in his collection, The Other Glass Teat, described the frustration he went through concerning a script he created for a TV show, and how it finally came out.  Needless to say, he was not a happy man.  One of his biggest peeves had to do with some of the actors finding it difficult to read some of their lines as written.  Or, as he said, “They’ll say, ‘I can’t read that line’.  You’re an actor, goddammit!  You’re paid to read lines.  Find a way!”

We are writers.  We are purveyors of words.  We make them dance for us, and to our tune, and if they get out of step we show them how to do it right.  It’s all about our imagination, and how it is present to others.

So, Dear Writers, how is it when you come up with great ideas that end up becoming even–we hope–greater stories, why you no can come up with simple names?

Particularly when it’s so easy to find them?

If you are reading this–which, I hope, there are a few–that means you are on this bit of technology known as the “Internet”.  And that also means you have access to something called “Google”.  Now, being an old fart, I can remember when, if I needed to look something up, I hopped in the car and headed off to the library.  I did that when I started my novel Transporting.  I needed information on stars in the Hyades Star Cluster, and then I needed to know how to calculate orbits for planets that might be able to hold life.  I spent weeks looking this stuff up, because once I discovered the things I needed to calculate orbits, I had to figure out how to do the math.

These days, when I need to do that, I bring up my solar system modeling software, and a couple of sites I have bookmarked on my browser, and I’m ready to make magic.

When I want to find a name, I start hitting baby name sites; Baby Center is one I love to use because it offers other suggestions for names similar to the one you’re looking at, but there are tons of sites out there.  You can even look for names based upon region: like if you need an Hindi name, or an Italian name, or . . . you get the point.  It’s there all there, and by typing in something, you find it like that–more or less.

And for towns . . . well, now, I almost always use Google Maps to find things.  Then again, I typed in “town name generator” and came up with this in like two seconds.  And this about five seconds after that.

“But, Ray,” you say, “I’m writing a fantasy, and those won’t work for me!”  I understand, and feel your pain.  So I have three little characters that will change your life.  You ready?

D&D

See, gamers, in particular D&D gamers, have been coming up with fantasy town names since the 1970′s.  And gamers are just like writers, in that they get stuck for names at times.  That means there are, again, tons of fantasy name generators out there, waiting for people to find the name of the next village that’s going to be burnt to the ground by some angry, misunderstood dragon.

But if you don’t need “tons”, how about this one?  Not only do you get towns, over to the left . . . yeah, fantasy names.  Have at it, my friends.  And remember: if gamers had discovered a particular genre–and they have, trust me–they’ve created internet generators to make their lives a little easier.

And if you’re doing something that’s a little more science fictiony–do I really need to say it?

We are creators of worlds, that is what we do.  I don’t mind helping people out; in fact, I enjoy it.  I also enjoy getting help in return.  And I think it’s important to maintain that network we have, so we can help each other grow, and become better, and work towards the goal we all have of seeing our words read by many others.

But, please:  when you do a general shout out about needing a name for a bronze dragon with a drinking problem that lives in the land of Holltin and is very fond of raspberries, I’ll just say, “Puddintain”, because, hell, it’s just as good as any other.

What’s that you say?  You don’t like that name for your dragon?

That’s too bad.  It’d be really nice if there was an easier way to come up with dragon names . . .

The Future Now

First, a couple of quick notes.  Number one:  today’s post is number 293, which means there are seven more before I get to number 300, and that means I have to write something special.  Sure, no problem.  I can do that.  Number two: the first anniversary of this blog is coming up, though that’s an even trickier proposition.

The very first thing I posted here happened on 13 April, 2011, but it wasn’t much.  In fact, it really wasn’t anything.  Then I didn’t post anything until 29 April, and that was–well, lame.  So 30 April is really the first post where I sat down and did anything worth while.  So I’m somewhat conflicted about when I should have my anniversary party.  I may just forget 13 April ever happened and wait until the end of that month.  We’ll see.

So, here we have it . . . I’ve finish my own white whale, and what am I gonna do?  I got asked that by the Muse, you know:  ”What’s you’re plan now?”  You can almost hear that tone in her voice, the one that’s telling you, “You better have one, or it’s back to slaving in the IT mines that you hate so much.”

See, that is my ultimate goal:  to get out of “working” in IT altogether and spend my remaining years making some kind of income of the art of slapping words down on a page and getting people to actually pay to see said words. I’m not asking for big, big money, though that’s always nice.  But, hey:  if I could get by making fifty, sixty thousand a year, I’d be happy.  If I could make one hundred thousand a year I’d be happier, but I’ll worry about that when I get my first royalty check.  (In case anyone is wondering, I’m actually made about $52 off my writing last year.  It can only get better, trust me . . .)

What is there to do?  As I told The Muse, I’ve got the follow:  I’ve got one long story that I could sell, but it needs a lot of polishing; I’ve got another longer story that’s almost a novel, and with a little editing I could probably get it up around forty five, fifty thousand words and make it one; I’ve got my NaNo Novel, Her Demonic Majesty, which needs another pass to get nice and shiny; and I’ve got Transporting, which is really three novels, and which I promised one of my readers I won’t look at that again until at least May.

That is a lot to work with.

Really, this next week is an easy one.  Get out the spreadsheet; get on the internet; look for publishers; add names to titles; write queries.  That’s it?  That’s it.  I got it; I’m gone.

This is the truth of the matter:  if I’m not selling this stuff, what good is it doing me?  I mean, I’ve had a few people read my stories, and I’ve gotten great responses.  They are also writers, and that makes me feel even better that they consider my work to be worthy.

It’s time to get that talent out there.

Today is Travel Day, back to The Real Home.  This weekend I’m probably doing taxes and blogging–and maybe doing a little writing, ’cause I’ve got an idea.  So I’ll have plenty of time to get started on the next phase of my writing life.  And next week I’ll get my letters ready to send out.   And you know we’ll I’ll send them–

Because what sort of writer would I be if I didn’t tell everyone here about it?

The Future Past

So, some time around 8:10 or so, local time, I stopped saying, “I’ve got this book I’m writing . . .”  I stopped saying, “I’ll finish this one day . . .”  I stopped saying, “Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow . . .”

It was at that time I put down a bag of bricks that’d I’ve been carrying for twenty five years, and said, “Hey, that wasn’t’ so hard.”

I finished the first novel I set out to write.  I finished Transporting.

One scene was all I had to write, and I had a pretty good idea about what I was going to say, because I’ve had all of about a week to realize this was coming.  I started working on Chapter 46 on Saturday, and it’s been one day after another, boom, boom, boom, so knowing I was going to end it last night was no big surprise.

I decided I was going to do it in my own style.  Needed a nice, long turn to keep the mind occupied, so I went deep in the well and loaded up the full YouTube recording of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  Right there, I had 44 minutes to get it done, and the moment the the piece started I was away.

And it was so good.

I wasn’t in any zone; well, maybe the Twilight Zone, because it felt a little surreal to realize I may have actually started this novel listening to the same music back in 1989–on vinyl, no less!  But I wrote.  I had it set in my mind as to what I wanted to say, and I said it.

Like some cosmic synchronicity, as the music was coming to an end–and believe me, I know that particular piece extremely well, not only having owned the recording since 1974, but having heard it played live twice–I was at an end for the writing.  Just yesterday, about the time I was getting lunch, I figured out just how I wanted to end that particular scene, but it wasn’t until I had that last bit written down that I realized, “My character, being the smart ass they are, would probably say the following, because they’d get off on annoying the hell out of the locals.”  So as the grand finale blasted out, I got the words in, I dated the material–since this scene was being written like a journal–and . . . that was it.

As I said later on Facebook, “I had already written ‘The End’ before I started.”  And that was true.  When I’d set up the scenes in Scrivener, I’d decided this would be the last one, and had set a “The End” then and there.  So no need guessing, no need thinking I needed more.  That would be it, and no more beyond that point.

I didn’t need to worry about that; everything was right and good at that point, and the tale was told.

I saw my Muse before I started writing and told her about what was going to happen.  She was happy:  no, I think, “ecstatic” is closer to the actual expression.  Either way, my Muse got me to where I am today, though she’ll say, “This is all you, Ray.  You did this.”  Yes, I did, but there was help in ways people can’t imagine.

At least I don’t have to pistol whip my Muse around, because, above all other things, she knows writing makes me happy.

I am very happy now.  Can’t you tell?

 

 

The Future Uncertain

Well . . . maybe it is.

Penultimate is here–or was.  I was working the next to last scene for Transporting last night, and I kept at it.  It took time, mostly because I allowed myself to be distracted by something that I should have known better about. The moment I put that nonsense to the side, the writing took off.  Which was a very good thing, because in the end, a scene that I didn’t think would take too many words to get out of the way ended up running 2,145 words.

It came out pretty well, very well, indeed, because this was another scene I’d seen many, many times throughout the last twenty five years.  What is really strange is how this scene has evolved.  When I first thought of it, it was suppose to be really downbeat–and it was suppose to be the end of the novel.  That’s it, fin.  Then I realized that, naw, that sucked.  It might fit within the context of some of the things reviled in the novel, but it wouldn’t be very logical.

So I changed it.  And changed it again.  And after a couple of further revisions, I ended up with want I wanted last night.

It’s suppose to be about the future, what might happen for a couple of my main characters.  Instead, when I think about it, it’s not all that much about uncertainty as it is about any relationship:  will it work?  How will things work out between us?  Are there going to be issues?  I don’t bring any of that up in those very words, but you get the sense that, through the eyes of the character doing the writing–because this chapter is all in first person–they start out worried about the direction of things, and by the time you reach the final sentence, you get the feeling they are going to sort of kick back and wait to see what happens.

It goes back to something I’ve heard time and again:  ”You don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring you, that’s why it’s so great.”  That’s such a good line I may use it tonight when I write . . .

The Last Scene.

Yes, it has come to that point.  It has come to where I’m about a thousand or so words away from the end of this journey.  And all it’s taken is about five weeks.

Five weeks to put to rest the labors of almost twenty five years.

And here’s an interesting little factoid:  in five weeks I’ve written around 41,300 words.  So in order to finish my novel, I’ve had to write one.  Or, I should say, I finished the last novel of the trilogy–which this will be–by writing about 40% of the story.  And that’s always one of those things that amazes me, because it doesn’t seem like I do a lot of writing every day, but in the end, when I figure out my word count for the novel and the word count for the blog–it adds up.  Yesterday was about 2,800 words.  Today will be . . . who knows?  But for anyone wondering how many words they should write, all I can say is, write until it feels like you are done.  Then, tomorrow, write some more.

The future may be uncertain, but if you write every day, eventually you’re going to get to the end.

It’s what we do after that really makes the future worth while.

The Future Goodbyes

Before I start, I want to give a shout out to my first hit of the day, from Malatya, Turkey.  Now, I’m guessing the hit probably came from İnönü University, but I don’t really know.  I have to say, they have good taste in my posts–though the title might have thrown them.  Anyway, As-Salāmu `Alaykum, brothers and sisters, and enjoy the site.

So, where are we?  Ah, yeah.  Transporting, and what I was saying would be the Big Sadness.  Third scene of the last chapter, and it was one that was designed to be another goodbye for one of my main characters.  Needless to say, writing it went well.  I had thought I would start loosing it, because when I’d through it out prior to writing I’d gotten pretty weepy.  Yeah, I do that:  sue me.

But when I began writing, there was no weeping, little sadness . . . it was as I usually am when I write, which is totally focused on the writing when I’m writing.  Yes, I had my little distractions, but I was finished after two hours, and I was just a couple of words over 1,800 when the dust settled.  And those were 1,800 very good words, because even though I’d ripped through those words pretty fast, I knew what I was going to say, and I’d known it for a few days.  Hell, I’d know it for over a week, because I’ve played this scene out in my mind time and time.

It all comes easy when you keep seeing it.

I know I’d said I was going to be sad and all, probably even during the writing of the scene, but in the end I wasn’t.  When I write erotica I’ll get asked, “Doesn’t that bother you when you write it?  When you’re getting, you know–turned on all the time?”  Sorry folks, but I rarely get turned on by my own writing while I’m writing.  Writing, as I’ve mentioned, is hard work, and when I’m trying to find the right words for the right mood, it doesn’t matter if I’m talking about quantum physics or the proper technique for using a sex toy on a woman, I gotta stay focused.  Call it my curse.

Not to see it won’t affect me later, particularly when I get around to the edits.  But I was okay after the wordage came out.  Nary a tear.  I hope it isn’t that way when others read it.

The scene was, as you can gather from everything I’ve already written, a goodbye to one of my main characters.  I have a lot of those, it seems–particularly this character.  In this story there’s a couple of goodbyes, more or less.  Or you might say there’s a goodbye followed immediately by a hello, if that makes any sense.  It does make sense when you view it in the context of love, which is why the hellos and goodbyes are occurring.

One of my stories, Echoes, is about this character and their brushes with love as well.  Those brushes didn’t turn out as well as the ones in Transporting, but then it concerned different times and different places.  And when I wrote Echoes, I was in a very different place, emotionally.  A lot of things were happening to me at that time, and it appeared on the page.

Transporting isn’t quite like that, but what came out of me during this writing of this novel was, to say the least, a touch traumatic.  It shows in places, and when I get to editing those parts, I’ll probably do a bit o’ polishing to make them seem a little less rough, because that’s how they came out.  I mean, if you wanna talk tough personal times when you’re trying to write a novel, the first hundred thousand words of Transporting are those times.

The question is going to become, however:  when the novel is said and done, are the goodbyes going to stop?

Am I going to find some new hellos to make it all worth while?

The Future Sadness

Sunday has come and gone, and for the most part it was a lot of sitting and being distracted, and trying to roll out words of wisdom when I wasn’t busting down the interstate at 80 mph, heading down to The Undisclosed Location.  It makes for a long day, and it makes for an even longer weekend when both Saturday and Sunday are like that.

Second scene of Chapter 46 of Transporting, and I got into something very, very sad.  I knew it would be sad when I began writing: in fact, I knew it would be sad probably . . . fifteen years ago?  Which was about the time when I first came out with the intimate ending for this scene.  Yeah, at least fifteen years ago.  But, then, the original ending I had for the novel was even sadder, but didn’t make a damn bit of sense, so I canned it.  If it don’t work, then don’t use it, right?

Still, I had to write this in bursts and fits.  First off, I started in on the scene just after lunch.  Got about 700 words into it, but I stopped because (a) had to get ready to travel, and (b) the computer was acting flaky, and who knew when the damn thing was going to lock up and keep me from saving my magnificence?  So shut down the story, saved it off to my external source, and proceeded to head to the center of my state for another week of soul-sucking.

So, when I arrived at The Undisclosed Location, I got back into the scene.  Which is to say I started writing while dealing with a few distractions on the side.  Or a lot of them.  It happens, trust me.  One of the distractions–well, not really a true distraction, but something that held me up–what I had to dig into my many time lines and find a date.  Yeah, I have a lot of dates, and in this case I once, long ago–maybe ten years ago?–I sat down and wrote down the time line of the four major characters, and thought of major points in their lives that could be turned into stories.  What?  You never did that?  I did.  I’m crazy, what can I say?

I found the time line, then I moved it into Scrivener, and formatted it, and saved it off.  All so I could have one line that one character used to explain something to another.  Not quite the three days Robert Heinlein and his wife spend working out an orbital calculation on butcher’s paper so he could write one line in one paragraph of the story Space Jockey, but it took time.

The scene was sad; no getting around it.  One of the main character has gone through kinda semi-hell up to this point–at least in the last couple of chapters that’s true–and there is something he never got to do, and wants to do it . . . but it’s never going to happen.  They’re told what’s happened, why it happened, and why he’d not going to get his wish.

And as the character walks out the door, they lay some Doctor Who on the other character, upon whom the quote is pretty much lost.  It’s a good quote, and in of itself sad as well, and it was something I came up with only last week, and I was damn lucky to remember it last night.

Tonight:  third scene of five for Chapter 46, and it’s going to be very sad.  But, in order to get to the promise of happiness, one must travel through the despair, and that’s what this character is doing.  It’s a damn shame the writer has to take the same trip, over and over and over in their head.

Why do I do this to my characters?

Mixolydian Mode in 7/4 Time

Saturdays are, by their very nature, very different for me.  It’s not a day of rest, though I sure as hell try to turn them that way.  Most of the time I’m up and running at 6 AM, and if I’m lucky I’m through with everything by 3 PM.

And then it’s time for–you guessed it!  Writing.  Well, my story writing.  I always try to do the blog in the morning, because I’m a view whore, and I figure most people will get their notices telling them I’ve got something new to say.  Even if it is the same old crap over and over, it is, at least, new crap.

Yesterday was a busy day for me as well, because I was judging a local science and engineering fair for junior and senior high students, with winners going onto the State Competition, probably held just down the street from where I work.  Some of the stuff I saw yesterday was very good; some was so-so; and some . . . you wonder what their science teacher was thinking when they were told to enter.

And there was one student, a very nice, self-admitted goth girl, who I engaged in all things supernatural, vampiric, role playing, and who had the nicest, gothyist necklace.  (Gothyist?  Is that a real word?  Is now.)  I would have actually liked to have gotten to speak with her a little more, because when I started talking, “Vampire, the Masquerade” . . . yeah, those dark eyes of hers lit up.  I do love doing that.

I finally found my way into my story, and let me tell ya, friend, that was some tough writing.  I don’t know it is these days, but I seen to be searching for the right words all the time these days, and where once I was burning through 1,100 words in an hour, it’s more like 1,500 in three.  But, when I’m done with those, I don’t need to do a lot of editing.  It’s good, it’s really good.

I also seem to get distracted a lot of late.  And then I get bored.  I don’t know where the hell my head is sometimes.  But I will say that a lot of times, it seems like it’s on the novel.

A perfect example is I was getting closer to the end of the scene in Chapter 46, and I needed an ending.  It was probably one of the things that was slowing me up, because I was imagining the end.

A bathroom break was in order, so I headed over the Zee Master Bath, sat down, and inside ten seconds I had the ending to the scene.  See good things do come to you while you’re sitting on the pot.

The scene finally ran 1,702 words.  I could have been geeky and deleted one word, then said, “Hey, I got the Enterprise’s registration number down!” but I didn’t do that, so I’ll settle for that of the Pegasus–which, since I was on a planet that’s in orbit around Mu Pegasus . . . whoa.  That’s even chiller.

And during the writing of said scene, I’m looking at the chapter scenes–I can do that because I keep Scrivener in split-scene all the time–I realized that something I wanted to say in the next scene, it was going to need its own scene.  Oi.  So I added that to the mix, gave it a title and date, and saved it off.  It’s not like I wasn’t not going to write this, but it needed its own scene card, and now it has it.

Needless to say, my day ran until midnight, and when I finally get to sleep I have crazy dreams.  They didn’t make any sense, other than I was getting hit with rubber hose a lot last night, so when I arose this morning, I felt as if I’d gotten those beatings in real life.  I mean, damn: I was sore.

I need some cuddling.  And not a cuddler in sight.

Guess I’ll just have to write some more, then.

Orbis Terrarum Commotus

I know this seems strange, because I’m usually sending this out in the morning, during the day, when the sun is usually warm and there isn’t all blackness and rain outside.

But I’m writing now as, come morning, I’ll be off to judge a science fair for middle school kids.  And while, within these pages, I might feel the urge to crush the hell out of someone once in a while, when it comes to kids and science, I’m a real pussy cat.

Unless you get lazy–then I crush you like I was The Doctor asking if you realized how meaningless your life actually was.

I’ve been writing since 10 PM.  I’m sleepy, but I had to write.  I was in Chapter 45 of Transporting, the last chapter of Part Four . . . and it’s finished.  I started with a very difficult scene (and I’m very glad I didn’t try to write that last night), and moved into a few other smaller scenes, then–like that, it was finished.

Really, it was that easy.

Chapter 45 turned into something I didn’t expect:  a lot of words.  It ended up 6,211 words, and here I thought it might not run more than three thousand tops.  I told you I’m a wordy bastard.

But it felt good, all the time I was writing, it felt like it should.  Maybe it wasn’t always the same words I imagined, but I think I got the feel I was looking for, and that’s very important.

That chapter, those scenes: I’d seen them in my head for 25 years, and I knew the words in my mind for the same amount of time.  I felt everything, and the way I decided to end the chapter–yes, I know how I’ll start Chapter 46, because I’ve “talked out” that scene, and once you’ve truly spoken in your character’s voices, then you know what they’re going to say, and it’s each to make them say those same things to others.

Here comes that strange feeling again; the one that says, “It’s almost over.  You’re almost done.”  And it’s there, because I now hear it whispering in the back of my mind.  This is that point I never thought was coming, and for this story, I think I’m actually going to feel something.

See, most of the time when I’ve finished a story, it’s sort of been, “Yeah, okay; so what’s next?”  And then I’d look for the next story to write.  I’ve been doing that since the end of July, and I’ll likely do it some more this year–and, I hope, next.

In other words, the end of a story as always come as a bit of a anti-climax.

Not this time.  When Transporting ends, it’s going to feel like I’ve just swept a whole part of my life away that’s been sitting there gathering dust.  And while I might start looking for another project, I’m also going to be getting this story set up in trilogy format.  Three books for the writing of one:  ain’t I a nice guy.

Now I have something to dream about.  And dream I will.

Because by this time next week one of my dreams will likely have come true.

Galactic Love Charms

Something I’ve noticed: when I don’t have very vivid dreams, I sleep better.  At least that was the case for last night.  The previous two night, I’ve had crazy, vivid dreams, and I wake up tired and spend the day fighting to stay awake from the git-go; last night–I know I had a dream, but I couldn’t tell you what it was if I had to.  All I know is I feel fine this morning.  Can’t say for sure what I’m going to feel like at 9 AM when I’ve been in our warm, stuffy office for ninety minutes, but right now, I’m pretty much good.

That was a phrase I used a bit last night:  ”Are we good?”  Was back into Transporting last night, and got in two small mini-scenes, all leading up to The Event, and it was a lot of system checking and watching things happen, and by the time the 866 words were gone I was almost at the point where I needed a couple of hundred more words to describe something big–but I was just too tired.  So I left it, saved it, and at some point late tonight I’ll get down another five, six hundred words, and find myself that much closer to the end of Chapter 45–

Which, surprisingly, is almost 5,000 words long.  That is a number I never expected to see.  I always thought this chapter would be a quick one, maybe a couple of thousand words tops, but here I am, inching up toward the top end of a short story once more, and I figure I’ve got another thousand or so before it stops.

That chapter is about love.  It really is.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it’s so long, because I have a lot to say about the subject.  Or so I think, because that’s the way my mind works.  It’s all about love and finding it and sharing it . . . having it for those very close to you.

I can write about it, but the reality is I know very little about it.

If I think very, very hard about it, I can say I’ve been in love–actual falling down, crazy in the head in love–four times.  It’s a good feeling, it really is.  It’s a feeling that makes you feel on top of the world one moment, and the very next you want to jab pencils into both eyes and run off into the woods to be eaten by bears.  Or is that my bi-polar state speaking to me, and I’m just confused?

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell, because love does make you insane, and as a famous hotel owner once said, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”  We go right up to the edge of out of our head mental, and when you’re truly in love, one will find themselves in moments when they decide to go all Thelma & Louise and drive right over the edge, straight into the abyss.

Why does one want to put themselves through that?  I wonder, I really do.  Because I don’t like feeling mental all the time.  I don’t like feeling like my spirit is going to three or four different directions at the same time, and the center simply can’t hold, man, it just can’t.

And then I find a moment where I have my moment of clarity, and it all makes sense.  I embrace what I’ve taken to be my special moment, I hold onto it tightly, and I keep it close to my heart.

I then live another day, because I want that moment to come again.

Transporting is a love story.  Yes, it’s science fiction, but love is an undercurrent running throughout the entire story.  One of the characters nearly dies because of it–what do I mean, nearly: they do die, but they come back to life just like one of the X-Men.  Why does that happen?  Because they love someone, and they put themselves in a position where, in order to help that person, they suffer beatings and concussions and broken bones to save the person they love from something that has–well, it’s something that had hurt them for more than a decade.  And they succeed.

I’ve been in that position before.  I’ve been where I’d burn down the world if it meant saving the person I love.  I’d go Godzilla and stomp everything in sight to keep that person safe.

If it meant to die for that person . . . yeah, go the extra mile, you’ll feel better in the end.

It’s out there, the crazy love that makes you insane to the point where you need to be locked up.  It’s in my story . . .

And . . .

Looking For the Sunlight

For a person who does nothing most of the time, I seem to have a very interesting life that isn’t all that interesting.

Allow me to explain:

My personal and professional life is all a lot of crazy.  I mean, if you ignore the whole, “I’m bi-polar” part, there are just insane things that seem to happen to me.  Of course, a lot of that insanity is of my own doing.

In therapy I’ve been told not to worry about the things over which you have no control, but even now, years after I dropped out due to a lack of health insurance, I still do.  Oh, sure:  I’m a lot better than I used to be.  I used to be a complete mess.

Yesterday was just a nutty day.  I spent some time obsessing over the dream I described yesterday, even though I shouldn’t have.  I worked my way through a day of boredom at work, where just sitting down seem to suck at your soul so hard you just want to lie down and sleep forever.

Then I got home and . . . well, now.  Lets just say that I’ve had better times.  I felt a little bit of loneliness, and this developed into something that could best be described as a touch of heartbreak.

Still, though, I wrote.  The last couple of night haven’t seen a lot of output on Transporting, and the brag I made last week that I’d seen the novel finished this week–as I like to say, don’t believe the hype.  Particularly your own.

I did a mini-scene within the last scene of Chapter 45.  This is the only part of the novel where I do this, mostly because I’m shifting point of view between three different people–and coming up I will add, for one part, a forth.  Before you say it–no, it’s not confusion.  If you find it confusing, you have issue with comprehension.  There; said.

It’s strange, because as down as I was feeling when I started writing, I was picked up by the mini-scene.  It’s about love, and wanting to share love, and there was something in those 675 words that lifted me.  Maybe it was because the mini-scene is written in first person, so the feelings that came out–I can hear them in my own voice.  Not my writer’s voice, but the flat, Midwestern one that can be hard on the ears at time.

I was tugging at my own heartstrings, looking for answers that I already know, but continue to ask.

Then it was off to sleep and into dreamland, and a second night of vivid dreams that have no meaning, but have something to tell me . . .

It was one long dream, I know that, and the gist of it was me, on my own, taking people into the future so they could be save from a huge disaster that was coming.  The thing is, people knew this disaster was coming, and they knew I had a means of “working around it”, but they thought it better, for the most part, to blow me off.  Fine, you don’t want to be saved?  Die.  See if I care in the morning, you figment of my subconsciousness.

The thing is, there was one person in particular, one person who I needed to save, and I couldn’t find them.  I seemed to spend a lot of the dream searching throughout this grayness that the world was becoming, and I couldn’t find them.

That is, until my mobile phone rang, and there was a message:  ”Come and get me.  I’m waiting.”

I never got to find out where they were, because I work up.

In a way, the dream sort of mirrored my novel.  Because it’s about a disaster where people can be saved, only its going to be a very complicated thing.  Still, it’s something one of the main characters in Transporting has to do.  It’s not because they want to; it’s because they have to.

Because for so long in their past live, they did nothing–not even for themselves.

It’s all about stepping out of the shadows and into the light.  It’s about feeling warm and happy and comforted.  It’s about putting the past behind and looking toward the future, and accepting what’s coming.

I’m almost there.  The novel is almost done.  What’s tomorrow going to bring?

Damned if I know.  But I know it can be better.

 

Down and Out in Dream Country

I’m up early.  I would rather be sleeping for another twenty minutes, but such is not the case.  Actually, I’ve been up since about–lets see, it’s 5:07 AM now . . . since about 4:30.  I have my coffee, and I’m typing away–as you can see–but I know it’s going to be a long day.

I’m awake because my dreams have torn me asunder, and sent those pieces flying.

Yesterday started as another long, boring day, and ended up with me being a little on the down side as I returned to The Undisclosed Location.  I was in some dire need of human touch, but it wasn’t much around.  So that didn’t make me feel any better.  You know how this goes: it’s like those VH1 “Where Are They Now?” specials where they disclose how someone’s life ended in a wild orgy of drugs, sex, and way too much rock and roll.  My life is sort of like that, save that there are zero sex and drugs, and I don’t rock out as hard as I used to.

You take what you can get, I guess.

I eventually found some people to chat with, and this made me feel better, and I found the strength to get back into Transporting.  I didn’t write much–642 words for the mini-scene that makes up the last scene of Chapter 45–but I wrote, and I believe I wrote well.  It was a nice, little mini-scene, and right now I’m going for “nice” rather than, “lots of words”.

I also moved one chapter in my story, Chapter 25, which had been the first chapter of Part Three and is now the last Chapter of Part Two.  That makes more sense, because the last scene in that chapter ends with what one could consider a cliffhanger, and since I’m looking at breaking the novel into three, it works nicely.

Also, Chapter 25 was huge:  11,116 words.  Moving it to Part Two–or should that be “Book Two” now?–boosted the word count for that prospective novel.  Like thus:

 

Part/Book One:  104,812
Part/Book Two:  99,276
Part/Book Three:  62,440
Part Four/Book Three:  28,938

 

That kicks my second book up to 99k and change, and currently puts the third book at 91k and growing.  As I said yesterday, it works out great.  It makes a lot of sense, and it’s just a matter of pulling the parts out and setting them up as their own books, giving them a title–which I sort of have, as each part was given its own title–and editing them.

With that out of the way–bedtime.  Yay!

What a mistake that was.

Sure, I need sleep; we all do.  But once I was there I was in the middle of Dream Hell.  I would say Sim Hell, but I am neither Kei nor Yuri, and Kevin J. Sleet is not my dream lord.  Either way, they were hard.  Very hard, and very vivid.

For once, at least part way through, I was my normal self.  And it seemed like there was a woman I was trying to help get to somewhere–which happened to be the end of the novel she was writing.  And we walked, and climbed, and ascended stairs, and fell of cliffs a few times, and even ended up having to steal a car and drive it over some crazy landscape that one could never drive a real car.  But in the end I got her to the end–

Only to find myself back at the start helping out another woman do the same.

This happened three times, and on the fourth . . . you know my gender bent self is eventually going to show, because it does.  I looked a little like Karen Gillian for some reason–maybe it was the red hair, maybe it was the knowledge that, as of this morning, she’s been replaced in the TARDIS–but there I was, very cute and looking for someone to come along and help me . . .

And no one showed.

No one appeared to help me through my journey to get my novel finished.  All by my lonesome.  Over hill and dale, up the same stairs I’d climbed many times, through shattered landscapes: I did the same trip, but without anyone by my side.

This girl was all alone.

When I finally reached the end, instead of the building I’d led the others to, there was a black wall.  And a voice that said, “It’s about time you got here . . .”

I woke up at that point, and decided it was time to get to the day, and to this blog.

It seems like it’s a damn hard trail I’m walking, full of long hours and loneliness.  But it’s the one I chose to walk, so I can’t say I didn’t ask for it.  I only wish I knew if the voice I heard at the end was that of my Muse:  that would have made the entire struggle very worth while.

At least I would have awakened with a smile on my face, rather than the feeling that sometimes the trip can be too lonely to bear at times . . .

The Proper Application of Wonder

If you’re reading this, you know what I’m going to tell you:  come home, write, so many words written, novel is at this point, yada, yada, yada.  Yeah, you know the drill by now, don’t you?

And, yes:  that’s what I did, because that’s what I do, because there isn’t really a lot more for me to do day in and out these days.  It’s a matter of pulling up Transporting, getting into Chapter 45, and adding words to the last scene–in this case, 1310 or there abouts, which brought the total up to a somewhat mind-numbing 283,711 words.

Yes, I know it’s big.  I know it’s huge.  And trust me:  I know publishing houses don’t want to look at anything that big.  It’s like you have this incredibly strange thing in your hands, and you want someone to take it off your hands and show everyone how wonderful it is, but no one will touch it because it’s a tad too large.

So after hearing the mantra of “It’s too big” again a couple of times yesterday, I was feeling a little down.  Sure, there were other things that were making me feel down as well, but that was starting to add to the downness I was feeling.

So what to do, man?  I mean, I have this story that I need to tell, that I’ve waited for so long to get out, and now . . . I’m told that it’s never, ever going to see the light of day.

There have been a few suggestions asking if I could split the story in two.  And the answer is no.  I would make the story feel a little disjointed, and each book would still run about 150k, which is a nice chunk of reading material, and the upper limit of what some people are telling me is too big.

So what the hell was I going to do.

And then it hit him, just like, in my own David Chappelle moment:

Trilogy, bitches.

And that not only make sense, but it’s very easy to manufacture.

It’s like this:  Transporting is currently divided into four main parts, and a last part that’s a coda.  The first three parts are very stand alone; the fourth part is an extension of Part Three, and it is all the new material I’ve added since the end of February.

Since this is all in Scrivener right now, I went in and started ticking off and on boxes on each scene so I could see how many words were in each part.  And the numbers were very reviling:

 

Part One: 104,812
Part Two: 77,044
Part Three: 73,556
Part Four: 28,296

 

And when you see the numbers like that, then you realize it’s very close to a real trilogy.

Now, given this schema, Part Three and Part Four would become one book, with the Part Five coda tacked onto that.  Part One and Part Two would be stand alone novels.  Of course, Part Two looks like it would be a little short, given that Part One and Three would inch well over the 100k point.

However . . . each part ends, more or less, in a way that sets up the next–with the exception of Part Three, which more or less has something happened that justifies Part Four happening.  The one thing I could do to keep that feeling going would be to take Chapter 25, the first chapter of Part Three, and move it to the end of Part Two.

Especially since Chapter 25 ends as such:

 

And, just as she’d planed, Liberator settled to the ground just at the last part of the chorus of Asu e Tatchidaun was sung. Audrey, still in the pilot’s chair, turned to the crowd, raised her arm dramatically and sang, “Sou shiawase ni naru tame ni, umareta kara . . ..”

Tommy sighed. “Well . . . I suppose that could have been worse.”

The Invasion of Sadalbari Prime had begun.

 

In fact, moving Chapter 25 makes sense were I to leave the story as one big novel.  Since it’s in Scrivener, I’m doing it now . . . see how easy that is?

There it is: the plan people are looking for when they ask, “So, what are you going to do to get this huge, ugly beast published?”  And there you have it.  Trilogy.  Each one a separate entity in of themselves, each one very individual and separate, because that how I originally wrote the damn thing.

And the great thing is I already have it written.  Part Two might need a few things added to it–in fact, I can think of a few things right off the bat, like a meeting with the Ministry of Science that I’ve always wanted to expand–but I’d have about 25,000 words to play with to bring it in line with the other Parts–

Or should I say, “Books”?

I’m feeling good right now.  So excuse me as I sit back, light up a cigar, and have an A-Team moment–

‘Cause I love it when a plan comes together.