All Hail the Spider Queen

Well, isn’t this an interesting start to the week?  Actually that happened last night when I was working on Fantasies in Harmonie, and I started working things out in the initial scene . . . then again, maybe it started with the dreams last night, which were very bizarre.

Lets get this in order, shall we?

First off, I didn’t think I was going to write a lot last night.  I thought, “Yeah, did five hundred words last night, maybe do the same tonight.”  Right.  So I started writing after I got some information out of my ideas file and put into the current project.  I looked at the layout of the cabin, and started in with a question asked and answered.

I had no real idea about what was going to be in the scene, what was going to happen, and yet, the moment I started writing I didn’t feel as if I was going to need to search for words.  I knew what would happen, and I didn’t need to go into a lot of discussions about the why of being in the cabin–that’s probably left for tonight–but rather I wanted to show the ladies together as a group.  It doesn’t get simpler than that.

So I have the set up, the witty banter, the insinuation that one of the women is into My Little Pony fan porn (we’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Flutershy”), the unsaid feeling that something isn’t right with one of the characters–it’s all there.  It’s getting things set up for the big bangs to come–no pun intended.

I know tonight the words might not come out as easily as they did last night, but it felt good to be creating again.  It’s a silly little story, but so what?  It’s my story, and I feel for my characters.  Maybe you’ll feel them, too, when you read this.

As for the dream–hey, lets spend some time with this madness now . . .

Of late my dreams haven’t been that important.  They’ve been there, but nothing that has stood out, nothing that made me wake up and think, “What the hell was that all about?”  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my semi-waking moments, but it’s been nothing like the dreams I had last year.

This time, though–let me tell you.  First I was out shopping, and no big deal there.  I was in a modest skirt, sandals, tee shirt, the sort of thing one wears on a warm, sunny day.

That somehow transitioned to ending up in an adult clothing store, and I was trying on this black latex mini dress and boots combo, and the girl who was waiting on me was pretty much drooling as she watched me in the mirror.  She kept calling me “Spider Queen” for no reason that was then apparent–

Then I was back home, and I was with someone I know, and she was having trouble containing herself.  At one point she says, “Take me, Spider Queen,” and before you can say “Metebelis III,” I’ve got six arms and I’m doing some rather strange and kinky things to my friend, who is more or less mumbling “I love you” between moments of ecstasy.

I mean, what the hell?  Me, the latex clad Spider Queen?

Maybe there’s a story in there–

Early to the Cinema Show

I was tired last night and thought with nothing going on today I could sleep in.  I was wrong:  up at five forty-five with nary a bird in sight to wake up as the sky brightened.  There are times when I do wish I could sleep until nine in the morning and crawl out of bed refreshed and ready for the world.

Screw that:  I’m up.  The world will have to deal.

This week has been a combination of getting Her Demonic Majesty published and uploaded to various platforms.  With the exception of some tweaking here and there, it’s a done deal.  With that out of the way I’m onto the next big thing–or whatever passed for that.

As I told someone last night, my day looks like this:  I blog (doing that now), then I start work on an article.  I know what I’m going to write, it’s just a matter of writing, editing, and submitting to the website.  And doing a bit of research while it’s going on.  I figure that’ll take most of my morning.

Then it’s time to make the story.  Going back through the milestones on my Author’s Page, I see I finished Suggestive Amusements on 24 March.  It’s now 18 May, which means I’ve spent two months getting my novel ready and published, and I haven’t been working on anything new.  As may be said in Glengarry Glen Ross, “A, B, W.  Always.  Be.  Writing.”  Of course, I’ll won’t be told to stay away from the coffee, and I already know Blake’s name . . .

Sometime this afternoon I’ll start in on Fantasies in Harmony, and get the words going on that.  The pieces are all together, the project is set up, and the map of my mind–if there is such a thing–is inside the document ready to show me the way.  All that remains are to take whatever words come into my head and get them into the computer

While all this is ongoing I’ll have the music playing.  Since getting up this morning I’ve have a live version of The Cinema Show playing, a recording from 1978 of one of the last times Genesis played the song in its entirety before moving the instrumental bridge into a “Greatest Hits” melody they started with In The Cage during their 1980 Duke tour, and played throughout the Mama Tour in 1983.  Yeah, doing this keeps me awake, it keeps my mind running at something close to nominal speed–and it’s enjoyable.  Plus, I hate silence.  I work in it enough that I like to have sound around me when I’m home.

Lurking in the back of my mind is the notion of what I should publish next.  I said I was going to do four things this year, and I’m going to try just that.  One down, and seven months to get three more out.  If I keep things nice and short I should be able to do that–after all, I only need editing and covers and proofreading and a few other things–

I’ve got the accounts, so the hard work is out of the way.

Melding of Minds

When there is no writing, then it’s time to write, yeah?

That was me last night.  The novel was in the can, so to speak, and up for sale.  No more to do there, so what’s next?  As someone may say to me, “Shouldn’t you be writing?”

I’ve spoke about doing this erotic fantasy story just for laughs–and money, don’t forget the money–so I figured, what the hell, might as well get my project started.  That meant firing up the Big Scrivener and setting up the story.  I do this all the time; it’s become second nature for me.

Therefor the project was created, the story named, and . . . well, this is where it gets to be fun.  Most of the time I’ll start plotting things out just a bit.  By “plotting” I mean I set up chapter cards and put some meta data on each card to give me an idea as to what’s going to happen at that point in the story.  It’s not like I’m deciding at that point what’s going to happen right down to the moment, but it’s a good way to figure out the main focus of the scene.

This time, though, I wanted to try something else.  With one of the recent updates of Scrivener came the ability to import mind maps into your project.  I’ve played with FreeMind, which is a great mind mapping tool, and I like using it to see if my ideas for a story–or, like the first time I used it, for a new chapter–are going to work, or if they’re way off base.

A few weeks back I decided to map out Fantasies in Harmony because I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to make any sense.  So I did a couple of hours of thinking through what I wanted to in the story, and mapped the action out.  When I was finished I had a story, more or less, in mind mapped metadata.

Given that I had a mind map, and given that I could import that into Scrivener, I was curious to see what would happen.  I mean, if it didn’t work out well, I could always delete stuff.  So I found the Import option, selected Mind Map to import, and hit the Okay button–

All sorts of stuff appeared in the document:  lots of note cards with nothing written inside.  I was a bit confused, so I deleted everything and tried it again, getting the same results.  I’m expecting to see the visual map in my document, and here I’m getting all these note cards–

That’s when it hit me:  every card corresponded to an idea I’d placed in my mind map.  When I imported the map, Scrivener broke out every idea and turned them into their own scene–so now, if I wanted to elaborate on those ideas, all I had to do was write up what actually happened.

I’d just opened up a whole new world of possibilities for doing my stories.

All those notes have been moved under the scenes I was creating.  Given how Scrivener compiles scenes, I could actually write everything in short scenes and put it all together in the compile.  Which I’m considering doing–

Hey, I can have my fun while writing, can’t I?

Expiration Infinium

First, the great news:  Her Demonic Majesty is up on Amazon this very moment, so if you want a copy, go snag her here!  It took some fooling around, but she’s up and live.  If you buy it and like it, please leave a review.  If you buy it and don’t like, please leave a review and I can try to do better next time.

Now, on to the not-so-great . . .

I spend time on Facebook.  Some times I’m there to chat with friends, sometimes to play games, other times just to see what sort of insanity is passing for real life.  It can be a place of bad information, where if you posted as a fact that taping swiss cheese to your genitals for a week would release enzymes into your blood that would help you lose weight, someone would re-post it with a, “Yeah, this could work!” tag line.  It is also a realm of memes, both good and bad, some funny and others not so much.

I happened to check my home wall yesterday and came across a meme, one with a upset looking character in the picture, and the wording explaining everything:  ”I’m still pissed they canceled Firefly.”

Really?  After ten years you’re still pissed?  Please, give it rest and watch your DVDs one more time to relieve whatever angst is gnawing at you, though chances are good you’re still gonna be pissed in 2023.  Maybe you can get together with your friends and hold a “Still Pissed Twenty Years Later!” convention–you know, to remind all the other pissed off people you know that your darkest moment was the day Fox put the ax to your greatest show evar.

Fandom is a strange thing.  I will admit to being a fan of several things, and I will even admit to getting right down to the point where I could recite even the lamest point of trivia for my favorite forms of entertainment.  But when things went away, when they ended on a good or bad note, when things were left hanging because some suit looking over a spread sheet said, “This show is eating up too much revenue can it and put on wrestling in it’s place,” I’ve also sort of went, “Okay, what’s next?” and moved on.

Ah, but there are some people who just can’t let go, who are gonna be upset when something they love ends.  Just last week we heard about how Charlaine Harris, she of the The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels that became True Blood, was receiving death threats from fans upset she is taking their Sookie away.  I remember the forums soon after Farscape was canceled, and Bonnie Hammer got C-worded about a thousand times.  And I’ve suffered through years of the sordid tales of raped childhoods because The Phantom Menace was release–or, worse yet, because Gredo shot first.

As some omnipotent alien once said, “All good things must come to an end,” and these days if it’s a television series, or a movie, the only way that’s gonna happen is if there’s money to be made by doing so.  That’s what happened with Star Trek:  the demographics were underestimated, the the first movie was made, didn’t do what was expected, and someone went, “I got an idea–”, the second move came out, and the rest is history.

That didn’t happen with Serenity.  There was a very loud and boisterous fan base that snapped up DVDs, and the studio thought, “Hey, they want a movie, maybe we can make something off this.”  And the movie was made, and that’s when it was discovered that while the fan base was loud and boisterous, they weren’t as large as was hoped, and that was the reason there wasn’t another movie, and there hasn’t been another series–and likely will never be.

Sometimes you have to let these things go, because they were good in their moment, but when you want to see them again, as they were, a decade later, you’re going to have something that will never live up to the expectations of the fans.  Say Joss doesn’t want to make another billion dollars with super hero movies, and decides to ruin Nathan Fillion’s and Morena Baccarin’s careers (as he said he’d have to do when he was on Reddit).  So everyone comes back ten years later–oh, wait.  Two characters don’t, ’cause they’re dead, and if you know where Joss was going with the story, Morena Baccarin doesn’t have to worry about long term contracts, ’cause she’s going belly up soon.  Simon and Kaylee are probably knockin’ out kids, and do you want those rugrats on a ship, ’cause we all know how well precocious kids and space ships get along.

No, you’re not going to have a continuation of what left the air ten years ago–you’re gonna have a reboot.  Let the childhood raping begin.

It’s never a happy moment when something you love goes away.  But nothing last forever–and if it does, thy name be The Simpsons, which is still on television because it’s a money maker for Fox.  Everything else goes the way of dusty death, and I’ve even planed out the end of some of my stories–

Though it would help if I could get them started first.

Idealand

Inspiration can come from the strangest places, and ideas generally follow.  This weekend I had time for a lot of both, since I’m not doing a lot of writing, and this free time has my brain in “creativity mode” for the most part, so strange things come of these things.

I spent a lot of time designing a house.  Not just any house . . . this was something I did for my Annie, my friend and–well, it’s complicated, as they way on The Book of Faces.  (That could be a title for an episode of Game of Thrones, where The Imp looks about for the leather-bound document that is a list of all the whores he’s bedded . . .)  We talked about things past, and I mentioned that I could using one of my new programs to create an image of a place that is one of her favorites.  Since I was going to do this anyway, I didn’t wait for her to say “Yes”, and just started in on my work.

As with anything creative, it took time.  But by yesterday afternoon I was finished, and she was happy with the outcome.  It was then we started discussing our own characters, and how they would fit into a story, and how . . . well, we’ve had this conversation before, and the problem always comes down to taking characters that were created for one world, and putting them in another.  How is this done, and more importantly:  how do you keep them interesting.

Answer:  nothing is easy.  Trust me, I’ve done this.  It’s not easy.

Of course, Annie is tenacious.  She pushes, she rocks, she roles.  She knows if she can get me to thinkin’ enough, I’ll come up with something.  And it was while this “Something” was going on that I hit a Eureka! moment.  So I told her, “I gotta go grill, but I’ll be thinking,” and with that I was off to the back yard to start cookin’ and get thinking.

See, something crept into my head when we were talking–something that I’d thought of a few weeks back when I was working on an old story idea.  I’d imagined some organization that is sort of one part Illuminati and three parts Crazy Secrets of the World investigators.  And what if . . . what if they know about things that only one in half a billion people can do, and when they find one of these people they do what they can to get them trained before . . .

Never mind the before.  I had a kernel of world building growing, and I didn’t want it to go stale.

Needless to say, when I told Annie what I had, she was happy, but she also had questions; apparently she didn’t realize that building a new world doesn’t happen while you’re trying to keep your Italian sausage from burning.  But I have something here.  I have an outline in my head.  And I even . . .

I have a map starting.

Oh, yeah.  It’s that sort of days.

It would be a lot better day if work wasn’t making me do things–

Harmony is Me

More than a few writers have not only accused of being a plotter, but of sometimes overplotting my work.  I have heard from a few people, who will remain nameless, that I have moments when I get too deep into the story and end up spending a lot of time doing something called “research”.  You know:  that thing you’re suppose to do to make sure you get things right?

I first started hearing this in October, 2011, when I was prepping myself for NaNoWriMo 2011.  I had a few people telling me, “Don’t do that!  This is NaNo:  you just write!”  However, that wasn’t how I worked, and I needed to get a few rules in place prior to getting word into the computer.  Hence, there were a few people who began saying that I was doing it “wrong”, that I wasn’t really following the “rules” of NaNo, and whatever I was going to write probably wouldn’t be that good, anyway.  (Just as a side note:  I heard many of the same things prior to NaNo 2012, with one gentleman even going so far as to say that anyone who did any plotting would end up writing “formulistic crap”.  Well, I never!)

Of course, the nay sayers are still working on their novels from 2011–maybe–and I’m in the last stages of getting mine self published, which means . . . well, it actually means nothing.  It just means I’ve stuck to my plan to not only write, but to publish one way or the other, and that’s what I’m doing.  Maybe what I’m putting out will be crap, but it’s my crap, and it has covers.  You can’t take any of that from me.

Where is this going?  Straight into my next story, trust me . . .

Last night I was, among other things, looking for a place to put my cabin for my next story, given the way-too original title of Cabin Fever.  The idea is for my trio of literary lovely to spend a week in a cabin writing, and then have strange things happen to them, after which–well, you can imagine.  Or not.

In a way I need to know everything before I start writing.  Even something as inconsequential as the location of a cabin might not seem like a big deal, but I have to know where it’s located.  There might no be more than an off-hand remake about where the cabin is, but it’s a touch that I use to ground my story–sort of like how when De Niro played Al Capone in The Untouchables, he had the place that made Capone’s silk boxer shorts make the same for him to wear while filming.  You never saw them, but it was a touch he wanted.

I knew I wanted to have the cabin in Indiana, and I wanted it to be close to water for some reason.  So I looked at sites concerning state parks, trying to figure out which ones had cabin rentals, and then found those places on Google Maps so I could really see the places.  It was a bit of a search, because while some places sounded great, they didn’t look that way.  I needed to have something that fit just right . . .

Then I found it.  One of the state parks that had cabins, and was bordered by a river, and had lots of room–room for a lone cabin, a strange cabin, where three ladies could find their lives changing in very different ways–

And as soon as I had the location, I had the new title:  Fantasies in Harmony.  As I told another writer, you’ll see how that works at different levels.

I spend too much time on my stories?

You have no idea.

 

 

Oh, and it’s my birthday.  Happy me, yay . . .

Backwards to the Summit

A year ago, something strange happened.  I wrote this post.

I didn’t there was anything out of the ordinary about that post.  In fact, I dashed it off early in the morning before heading off to The Hole That Was My Job, located at The Undisclosed Location.  I was up early because I was having trouble sleeping, probably because of the cold that was developing that day, and would remain with me the entire month of May and well into June.

I popped it off, went to work, then went to dinner.  When I returned home and fired up the computer, I checked my stats–

The post had seen over two hundred views, and that day ended up becoming the most on-site views I’ve ever received.

I’ve tried hard to figure out what it was that drew all those people to my website.  I don’t think it was the tags, or how it appeared on Google, or even the subject.  The reason for the popularity is puzzling, because I’ve written far better posts than that, and they’ve had to go begging for hits like an out of work bicycle messenger who hocked his single-gear speed buggy for meth and is now hovering above the rocky bottom.

It’s strange how things like that happen.  You can bust your butt over something that you think is going to set the world on fire, and the collective sighs of a tiny group of readers can be overwhelming.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are those things you dash out almost as an afterthought, and your fans lose their shit in rapture-like ecstasy.

Stories are like that.  You put your heart into something that seems to speak to you in special ways, and it seems the indifference is suffocating–then you have some fun with a story that’s not meant to be taken too seriously, and you watch the money roll in.  Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen with my next story, but the way things work in my life, who knows?

I started putting my next story together last night.  Right now the title is about as original as it gets:  Cabin Fever.  As in, “I gotta fever, and the only prescription is hot women having sex!”  It’s the sort of simple title that can catch an eye, though it seems as if there are way too many cabins with fevers on Smashwords, so I’m going to need to rethink my approach.

I have the names of my characters, and a short outline of their lives.  It was while I was playing with this that I discovered something about the Scrivener Name Generator:  once you have your selected names in the “short list” box, you can transfer that list to an existing card or folder, and then play with the contents as you see fit–or even append the name at the end of a line currently being written.  That’s a function that I’d not played with, and now that I know it exists, when I need a quick name, and I throw it in and create a character card for that person at the same time.

This is how I go about getting a story ready:  I develop, I do my research, I lay things out.

And then, when I’m ready . . .

I see to things really get laid.

Blessed Be the Cabin

Blessed Beltane, Happy May Day, Good International Workers Day . . . whatever is getting you in the right frame of mind today, I’m there with you.  At least I’m trying; I spent the better part of a couple of hours writing code with the payoff of getting two items to come out in the correct order on a report.  Can I get a “yay”?  Yay . . .

The 1^st of May is the traditional beginning of summer, regardless what they might say in America, where we make our own holidays to keep from making the Commies happy.  It’s a time of change, a time of transitions, a time to make a new start.  It’s a good time to go around and leave goodies for your friends and neighbors, though I’m tired of the kids around me playing in the street and looking at you like you’re some kind of idiot when they decide they won’t get out of your way.  So no goodies for you . . .

Here I am, however, at the start of summer, and I’ve no project ongoing.  My novel is being reviewed, and the final edit awaits.  I likely won’t see it back in my inbox for at least a week, so I’m in the process of cooling my heels on the writing front.

But I can’t.

Last night I sat around and wondered about what I was going to do.  I pulled up the idea file and started puttering about, thinking about the things before me.  I looked at the story I want to do for Camp NaNo July, my little erotic fantasy that will take its place among the Smashwords elite.  I looked at it and thought, “What can I do?”  And the answer was, “Build a cabin.”

It’s like this:  the story takes place in the middle of nowhere, with three writer friends deciding a great way to spend Camp NaNo July is to go out and actually rent a cabin, and spend the weekend writing.  At some point during this endeavor, something magical happens–literally–and the writing degenerates into . . . well, I know what happens, you’ll have to buy the story once it’s published.

I found an open source floor plan designer and started in on my house, because if there’s one thing my precious Annie taught me, it’s that you sometimes need to see a design before you can imagine the stories there.  I designed the cabin, put in doors and windows, added a kitchen, put in the furniture, added the sofas and the beds–

The scene is built.  Now what?

Now I write, that’s what.

I have that bug where when I get these ideas I have to act upon them.  With nothing to do right now I feel a bit lost, and not in an Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 way.  I feel like I should do something, because when I’m home at night I feel like I’m without purpose.

I feel I should write, because that’s what writers do.

So the hell with Camp NaNo July, I gotta write this sucker now.  I’ll get my thoughts together, give my characters names, determine my locations, and crank out the story.  Oh, and I need a sexy writer’s name, ’cause I’m thinking it might not be a good idea to put this out under my name.

Then again, why not?  This story could be like a milkshake–

It could bring the fans to my front yard.

 

Cascading Realities

Another chapter down, another step closer to publication.  Tonight there will be the largest chapter of Part Three, but this one is clean, it’s good, and I don’t believe I’ll have a lot of work ahead of me.

Tonight will be a good night.

I had a little talk out last night about the fears I was feeling, the ones I spoke of yesterday.  That’s pretty much past now, because why dwell on it?  The novel will sell, or it won’t.  If I’m going to freak over the fact that the hard work will amount to nothing in return–that’s the curse of every creative project.  The world is full of people who’ve been ignored by the Honey Boo Boo crowd, and given that most people these days feel that entertainment is too–what’s the phrase?  Oh, yeah:  Hard to Understand, don’t expect to see trends change anytime soon.

So keep on keeping.  It’s what keeps the dream alive.

Speaking of dreams, I’m already thinking about what comes next.

I have two works lined up that could be ready to go by the middle of the summer.  In June I will write something for Camp NaNo–yes, I’m going to find a cabin and hang with my gurlz while I write tales of sexual depravity–but the rest of the time can be spent on editing and ebook formatting.  While I want to keep the new material coming, I need to get the old out, least they just sit there and sing Pictures of Lily while I stare at their unpublished goodness.  (If you know your Who, you’ll get the reference.  If not, just ask.)

Replacements I’ve just finished editing, and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to get it out.  It’s one of the stories I have on tap to publish this year, and it could be a quick, easy turn around for me because of the length.  But there’s another I want to get out as well, and it’s been waiting in the wings for a year to see the light of day–

I’m talking Couples Dance.

This strange little novel was something I sent out almost a year ago, with no comments from the publisher beyond asking to see the full manuscript.  I’ve contacted them a couple of times since then, and there will be a third time, after which I’m going to put the ball in play and get it ready for my own publishing attempt.

Being a short novel I can sell it at novella prices, and being that it’s erotic horror–is that such a thing?–that could make it even more of a draw than my other stories.  Yes, I’m already thinking marketing, because there is sex inside, but there’s also a couple of visits to the library, and not to do the hot looking girl in glasses on the shelf where Poe is kept.  This means the people looking for hot, non-stop sex will have to take a break a read a chapter where someone is tortured–

Oh, did I say that?  My bad.

Anyway, the road trip continues.

Looks like I’ll be pulling into The Stanley next . . .

Swirling Skeaming Desires

Today has been one of those days.  Between idiots on the highway–including someone who nearly hit me even though I was hard on the horn to get their attention–and idiots at work, I’ve had distractions up the yang, and getting into the blogging grove has proved difficult at best.

There was also the issue what what to say.  I had something to say this morning, but like my ba-lance, I lost it and having had time to find it.  My life seems to go in these directions these days:  distractions on the road, distractions on the job, distractions on the internet.  And now I have to deal with road construction tonight–oh, goody.

I worked on the new chapter for Replacements last night, and the brain was dead:  far deader than zombie Amy Pond.  I was writing, I was getting the ideas out, I was making the scene–but it was coming so slowly.  I’d do fifty words, then I couldn’t think, so I’d read a little.  Then another fifty and it was time to look for music.  Went like that for two and a half hours, and in the end I came close to my thousand words, but just like light speed, I didn’t make it that far.  A gallant effort, but I had to sigh when it was over because I felt I’d let myself down.

And yet . . .

Maybe it was the complexity of the scene that thwarted me.  Though my story is sort of science fiction with borderline erotic elements, it isn’t screaming sex.  It’s all about the characters:  one who becomes so obsessed with doing something that she literally takes over someone’s life, and another who wants her own relationship with the main character, and has pushed the relationship into a new direction.  There is a lot happening between these two people, all of which is coming out in these new chapters, amounting to about three to four thousand words of character development.

In trying to get the information right, I’m having to think about what I need to have them do, and that means thinking about their actions.  They aren’t looking up from the Scrivener file going, “No, I’m not wearing that!” or “Are you kidding?  I’m not going to make her suck my toes!”  No, it’s all in my head, and I’m working hard, though a haze of semi-exhaustion, to drag it out of my brain and kicking it out through the tips of my fingers.

As I’ve said, it’s a lot of work, because writing is work.  If you want to do it right, you have to do it right.  I spoke with a friend today, another writer, who said she’s going through a number of calculus calculations because there’s something she needs to do that she wants to do correctly.  I know that eventually she’ll get it all right, but there’s another example of someone doing the work needed to do it the way that is best.

Maybe I shouldn’t be hard on myself.  Maybe I’m doing the best I can with a head full of stuffing after getting up at five AM and spending two hours on the road to go from home to hole and back.

That doesn’t mean I won’t do the work.

Nor feel bad when I don’t do as well as I feel I should.

 

The Fictional Facts

Back in the 1960′s, when I was growing up and my best friend was the local library, I spent a lot of time reading.  Since I began reading at a fairly early age, a lot of the fare I enjoyed was adult–and most of these books were science fiction.

I admit I’m a Child of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.  At the time I began reading the era was dying out, but some of those writers were still around, and some would remain with me for decades to come, though they would have written their last stories, for the most part, by the 1980′s and 90′s.  It was a glorious era, filed with inhabited planets in the far corners of the galaxy, robots insane and otherwise, huge fleets of spaceships preparing to do battle . . .

Sure, it was all wild as hell, with writers coming up with faster than light drives, and hand weapons that could turn a man into vapor, shields of energy, dark aliens waiting to eat us alive:  if they could dream it, they would write it.  The majority of the writers had little in the way of a scientific background,  but there were authors who knew their math and engineering, and would often bring that knowledge into play when writing a story.

One of the most famous example of this was Edward E. Smith, aka “Doc” Smith of Lensman and Skylark fame.  Smith had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and worked in the food industry before becoming a writer.  Robert Heinlein wrote about how he and his wife once spent three days calculating a orbit change so they could get one one line in a story right.  (When later asked by someone why he simply didn’t use a computer, his reply was, “My dear boy, it was 1948.”)  Issac Asimov had a BS and MA in chemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry.  They weren’t the only ones, but what they knew tended to show up in their work.

With science fiction, it’s important to create your world and set your rules.  E. E. Smith knew that a lot of the stuff he wrote was too incredible to ever be real, but he wanted to create incredible stories, and didn’t care that the science was pure Handwavium.  (Look up the trope “Lensman Arms Race” and you’ll see some of the stuff the Doc pulled out.)

Back in the Golden Age, writers could do just about anything and get away with it.  These days, we know more about the universe around us; we know there are certain kinds of space drives that just won’t work as we’d like (I’m looking at you, Bussard Ramjet); we know how genetics works; we understand evolution better; we have a better knowledge of engineering.  There are some things that we know just won’t work the way we want them to work if we write about them in a story.

Does this take away from a story?  Or does it even prevent us from writing them in the first place?  Has technology and a greater interest in science mean there are stories we can no longer write?

This was true even one hundred years ago.  Certain things that had been accepted as fact in the early 1800′s was known to be bullshit by the 1920′s.  The trick here is not to throw a lot of stuff into your story that is just going to be crap science; the trick is to keep things tight with science that’s a good as it gets when we’re dealing with real things, and for the stuff you gotta handwave, keep the rules constant.  The Mote in God’s Eye was a good example of this:  the world was extremely real, with only a couple of things that were pure fantasy.  But, the rules for those items were kept consistent, and there was no instances where something that couldn’t have happened did.

In my own stories I have things that are pretty much handwavium, that likely can’t ever happen in real life.  But, for those things I keep the rules consistent.  I try not to pull things out of my butt that will violate my universe to the point where it implodes, and, at the same time, concentrate on the characters who are the real stars.

After all, if I wanna make my television the star of my story, I’ll rewrite Videodrome.

Q1 and Done

It’s the end of the month as we know it, and I feel fine, save for the soreness in my legs.  Too much time on my feet, too much time laying on a bed that hurting my calves for some reason.  Or maybe it’s me:  maybe my weight is pressing down on my lower extremities and causing problems.

Last year this time I was lamenting over writers, people who usually make things up for a living, being unable to make up the names of towns and people.  I read this post over last night, and was struck by the fact that most of the people who I’d written about don’t seen to write these days.  When I joined a few writing groups on Facebook back in 2011, it seemed as if there were  hundreds of people posting about what they were going to write, what they were writing–and then, how they couldn’t finish what they started.

Today, those same groups seem to be inhabited by a few dozen hard core members, and a few dozen more people who flit in and out when they decided to pick up their book and get back into The Great and Not So Loving Game.

Writing wears you out.  I managed to edit two chapters of Replacements last night, maybe twenty-seven hundred words total, and when I was finished I wanted to write something new, but couldn’t.  I was starting to nod at the computer, and trying to crank out anything that would have made sense wouldn’t have made sense at all.

In his March 30 blog post, Neil Gaiman offered a few simple words for writers:  ”Write.  Finish Things.  Keep Writing.”  Sure, you’re thinking, “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Last Cybermen!”, but at one time he was just like everyone else, working hard to get into the biz.  He’s now in the biz, and he still works hard, only now he does it full time, whereas most of us need another job to play the bills.

My biggest problem was always finishing things.  I’d jump into a story with both feet, burn through ten, twenty thousand words, and then–nada.  I’d get disappointed, depressed, defeated:  the story before me had to be crap, so why bother?  It’s not like anyone’s going to read it . . .

I’d say that’s a mindset that it not just unique to me; I’m almost certain there are others out there who end up feeling the same way.  I even get that feeling still, only it starts kicking in about forty-five thousand words into a novel, and it screws with me until I’m about ten to fifteen thousand words from the finish line.

And then I find the strength to make my way to “The End”.

I’ve told people I know that one of the reasons I keep a blog, one of the reasons I write every day whether or not I have anything interesting to say, is that it keeps me thinking, it keeps the mind going, it keeps me writing.  Without it I might not ever bother pulling out a manuscript and doing anything with it, and just become another of those left by the Writing Wayside.  That’s not completely true, but I do feel as if my blog keeps me anchored and focused on my goal of becoming a full-time writer.

Back on December 1 I detailed what I’d written up to that point over the course of a year and change.  At that point, with everything from the end of 2011, and all over 2012, I’d calculated I’d written approximately 568,000 words.  What I should say is that I wrote and finished that much, because I don’t consider the story worthwhile if I haven’t finished it.  During 2012 I started a story for someone, got about five thousand words into it, and then put it away, because what I was writing wasn’t me; the story didn’t feel right.  And to have went on would have meant doing something that I wasn’t going to enjoy, or take from the work any pride.

Since I wrote that last post I’ve written another novel, and blogged every day.  Suggestive Amusements ended up running just over seventy-one thousand words, while the blog has averaged about five hundred fifty words a day for 121 day, or right at sixty-six thousand, five hundred fifty words.  Add all that up, and at the end of Q1 (the First Quarter of the year, as we call it in the business world), I’ve another 137,550 finished words added to my total.

Plug in the numbers from before 1 December, 2012, and we have a new total:  705,550 words.  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner!

Yes, there is marketing and editing and getting a great book cover, but the above is the real heart of the issue:  writing and finishing.  You wanna walk that walk, you gotta do diligence.

You gotta write; you gotta finish; you gotta write some more.

Which reminds me–

I got some writing to do.