Her Demonic Majesty is a done deal. Yesterday morning I started to prep the novel for upload to Smashwords. When I mentioned to a friend that I was “thinking” of uploading the novel just to see if it made it through the Meat Grinder, she was like, “What’s keeping you from doing it?” And she was right: there was nothing holding me back. As she told me, “Girls shouldn’t fear!” Which is good advice to anyone who is fearful what they are doing is shit, but it struck a chord with me, because . . . there’s always fear.
Without further ado I set up the file and uploaded it, once again expecting the meat grinder to take a long time, and gaining great surprised when I was through the process in less than five minutes. So here it sits on Smashwords, waiting to get sent out to other selling locations.
What about Amazon, you say? Good question. In the afternoon I started the upload to the Kindle Store, and just like with Smashwords the novel and cover were through the conversion process in about five minutes. I’ve received notice from Amazon that the book is “live”, but when I try to find it, nothing appears. I had this happen with Kuntilanak, where it took about a day before it started showing up on the Amazon pages, so I’ll wait until tonight before sending off messages to the Amazon people.
So here I am, three stories published, and this being my first novel. I feel–well, relieved, actually, because I can move on to other things now. I was thinking up a building design last night, one I need for a story, because while I’ve seen the building in my mind, I haven’t actually seen it as it should be. It’s something I want to get done, even if I’m not starting on that particular story for a while.
What I need to do is get the word out about the novel. I need to pimp it a bit. I’ve done a bit of that already, but I want to get more going. I don’t expect it to become a best selling, but a few dozen would be a gas. It’d be even better if it were a few hundred.
We’ll see.
One thing I’m going to do is do a give away, and there will be an interview. When I mean “interview”, I mean something probably strange and unusual, since I myself am strange and unusual. Also, I want to have fun, and I think I can come up with something that’ll fit that bill. I’ve done the author’s interviews many times before, and while they were good, they seemed . . . well, they could have been a little more light hearted. So something to else to put into my sights.
It’s finished, and with it a year and a half of my life that started at a minute after midnight on Nov 1, 2011. All because someone told me I should try NaNoWriMo, and that if I did, I’d be able to finish–
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.
The month of WirMovember is finally behind us, and it seemed that if, for some, it could have lasted a few more days. Last night I saw friend after friend post up on Facebook that, yes, they’d reached their fifty thousand words, and they’d won! Yah! How much did they reach their fifty thousand words by? 50,023. 50,102. 50,048 . . .
You get the idea. They made it across the line, and I gotta give them props for it, because nailing fifty thousand words in a month isn’t always the easiest of things.
Which brings up a couple of conversations that occurred last night. One was with The Muse—yes, she was around last night, mostly wondering what I was going to do next, as by “next” she meant, “You aren’t going to spend all your time trying to model space stations in 3D rendering programs all the time, are you? I thought you were a writer.” Of course she’s correct, I am a writer, and I can prove it—
We were discussion the frustration that comes from being creative: how people around you don’t understand what you do, how you work in a vacuum, and how you have to spend so much time waiting for something to happen. For example, how do you get people to buy your self-published works? Or how long do you wait for someone to get back to you, letting you know that they’ve bought your story, and in another few months you’ll see your words appearing in print?
It’s not a lot of fun to be in any of these situations, not really knowing what to do next, and what’s going to happen if it doesn’t come. You keep pressing on, in either case, but sometimes the very act of pressing on is a killer, because you feel a bit more isolated each time something doesn’t happen.
There’s very little you can do about it, too, because writing is pretty much a solitary sport. Yes, you can hang out in cafes and clubs and write away—I’ve done that, and I actually enjoy it—but you’re still on your own. You don’t have cheerleaders standing behind you yelling, “Go, Cassidy, Go, Cassidy, get that next two hundred words . . . Yaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy, Go!” Not gonna happen, at least not in real life.
But herein lies the rub: if you don’t write, and keep at it, you not only get rusty, you get worse. And this brings up the second, very short, conversation I had last night . . .
It was really a pop up IM while I was on Facebook, and it was from a friend, a fellow NaNoer, who said she’s been torn apart by another woman simply because my friend had forwarded the opinion that you have to write every day if you want to become a better writer. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was insinuating that writing was a skill as much as it was a talent—which, if you know anything about any creative endeavor, that’s absolutely true.
I saw a quote pop up last night from Clive Barker, a few words of wisdom that he was offering from one writer to a whole lot of others. It’s short, it’s sweet, and there is a whole philosophy in them:
Writers write. That may be an obvious thing to say but [it's true]. There’s no such thing as a potential writer, there’s only somebody who is doing the thing. It’s like saying you’re a potential boat builder. No, you’re a boat builder when you’re building a boat.
Stephen King pretty much offered the same advice. If you want to get better, you gotta write. Think of that creative portion of your brain as a muscle, and then think about what happens if you work it on a regular basis: it develops, right? The reverse is also true: you sit on your ass and do nothing with that muscle, it atrophies, it becomes weak and useless.
Where do you get your writing work out? Places like . . . here.
This is the real paradox. You have to keep writing to get better. After a while you’ll build up a body of work—but what do you do to get it out there for people to see? There are no easy routes to any of this, for if you write every day, you’ll end up with a lot of stories—stories that want to be published.
All you have to do after that is convince someone to publish you.
I write every day. If I’m not working on a story, I do posts for my blog. I’m very good about this, because I feel the five hundred or more words I write every day allow me to work on my craft. I need to come up with new posts, new ideas, new titles every morning. This is the process I use that allowed me to grow, to become a better writer.
To work out at the gym, so to speak.
This doesn’t mean I’m slacking with the stories. When speaking with the Muse, I told her what I’ve done in the last thirteen months, from the start of NaNoWriMo 2011, to the end of NaNo 2012. When I started working out the numbers, it was a bit surprising to me, even though I’m the one who wrote all of the following.
It worked out like this:
Her Demonic Majesty; novel, 86,000 words. Echoes; novella, 21,000 words. Couples Dance; novella/novel, 52,000 words. Transporting; novel, 45,000 words added to complete story. Diners at the Memory’s End; novel, 54,000 words. Replacements; novelette, 12,000 words. Samhain in Transition; novelette, 9,600 words. Kolor Ijo; novel, 69,000 words.
With the exception of the first novel everything else was written during 2012. Adding up those numbers, I’ve written about 349,000 words. If I throw in Kuntilanak (novella, 25,000 words) and Captivate and Control (novelette, 10,000 words), then I kick that total to 384,000 words.
When I kick in the blog content . . . I always strive to do five hundred words a day. Sometimes I go over (like with this post), so the word count average is bumped, but for the sake of not getting too crazy, I’ll say I average 550 words a day.
So thirteen months would be 395 posts, but there have been some double posts, so lets say I’ve completed 400. The math is pretty simple: I’ve published about 220,000 words for this blog since last November. Probably a little more, but I’m not going to take the considerable time necessary to look at every post to get an exact total. That’s just crazy.
What is my final count? 568,000 words for the last thirteen months. What does that look like in real life? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was about 257,000 words. Stack a couple of them together, and when compared to what I’ve written, those are still short about fifty thousand words.
Then if I add in my other stories, you could throw a Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on top of those two Order of the Phoenix novels, and that would represent just about everything I’ve written in the last year and a half.
Has all that writing made me better? Yes, it has. I’ve become better at researching, I know how to use my skills much better, I know how to watch out for things that can hurt my writing, and I’ve sharpened my editing skills.
You have to write every day to get better, to develop your skills, to understand your craft. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but you need to get that in there. And keep at it until you finish what you’re working on—
I mean, no one ever sailed off on just the keel of a boat. And no one who ever called themselves a writer sent out unfinished stories.
Get to work on that boat; you have some travelin’ to do.
It’s near the end for the Crazy Train. Today is the last day that people will enough the days and nights of literary abandon, and either hold up their arms in confident victory, or curse the fact that, once again, they didn’t make their goal for one reason or another.
Either way, you did what you wanted for this ride. The real truth is, what are you going to do next?
I have some interesting feelings concerning NaNo. It’s always good to have goals when you’re writing, because if you say, “Oh, I’ll finish this when I finish this,” then you may just find yourself hanging out on your computer–or however you write–putting down a word here, and a word there, and thinking, “Oh, yeah: this is good” . . . and five years later you’ve got twenty thousand words in the bank. You’re finished. Maybe not in the time frame you’d imagined, but you’re done.
Take it from the voice of procrastinating reason: if you write one novella every few years, reaching your goal of becoming a published writer might not only take a bit of time, but you might want to consider how slowly those payments are going to reach you.
I’ve said before that a story will end when it ends, that it’s difficult to say, “Oh, thirty thousand will do this,” when you’re putting it together in your head. Maybe once you’re putting chapters together (as I do), you’ll get an probable idea of how long a story will run, but getting the exact number isn’t possible until you’ve seen you word counts for chapters, and you can start doing some Nate Silver-style number crunching.
This is what I did with my NaNo Novel: once I saw the average count for my first ten or so chapters, I was able to see where the total was heading. I started out saying that the story would probably run sixty thousand words; by the time I was a couple of chapters into Part Two, I revised that to sixty-five thousand. I ended up at sixty-nine thousand, which means I’m happy, because it’s not an all-too difficult chore to get the count up over seventy thousand, and make the story a bit more presentable to a publishing company, should I decide to send it out instead of self-publish the work.
The issue I have with NaNo is that is sets your novel up as something that you must do with a certain word count by this date, or . . . well, the “or” is rather nebulous, but it leave one with the feeling that you’ve lost something. People who write all the time know this isn’t the real way of the world, but you still see people come onto a forum and announce in a somewhat dejectedly post that they’ve failed, that they aren’t going to make their word count.
Well, whoopty do. If you’re looking at this as a contest, and that you had to reach that fifty thousand word count otherwise you couldn’t treat yourself to ice cream today, then yeah: it’s gonna bum you out. If you look at it as, “Okay, I’m at forty-five thousand, but I’m going to need another thirty to finish this off, I’ll jack that out in the next couple of weeks–”, then you’re on the right path.
I’ve done NaNo two years in a row because I want that challenge of getting a novel out in thirty days. I’ve “won” both times, but NaNo isn’t the end. I edited my last NaNo Novel and sent it out, and I’ll get around to editing this one and doing something to get it to “my fans,” however crazy that sounds.
November isn’t a beginning and ending, all conclusive. If you’re writing, then you’re jumping on the Crazy Train to pound out a story, get that first draft, and then either kick back for a few days before you pull back into the station–or jump off somewhere so you can hoof it to a nice diner for lunch with some friends, and miss all the hair pulling and frantic moaning that comes from trying to sprint your ass to that fifty thousand word finish line.
It’s not about the finish; it’s about moving forward all the time. It’s about thinking of your next project, be it a story to edit, or a getting a submission ready, or writing something new. It’s always about what’s next–
NaNo 2012 is over. Not in the sense that, “It’s over when I say it’s over!”, but in the sense that about ten PM last night, I typed “The End” at the bottom of the last chapter of my novel, and that was that. Everything that’s been said is said, and it’s time to move on.
The novel is finished, there’s no more writing to do . . . and I’m feeling a little lost at the moment.
When I started the chapter last night, I was feeling a touch weepy. It wasn’t that I had written some heartfelt prose about my characters that left me an emotional shell–no, nothing like that at all. It was more the realization that I’d come to the end of the story, and I had maybe a couple of thousand words to write, and there was nothing more after that.
After finishing the chapter, and the novel, I felt pretty good. It’s always a good feeling when you finish writing seventy thousand words into the computer, and there’s a bit of a rush that hits you like a soft breeze on a warm spring days. It’s a good feeling, and you close your eyes and take in the wonder that is life–
But come the next day–which, if you’re reading this, is now–you start thinking about what’s coming next. You have editing ahead of you. You start having thoughts about if you’re going to send your story to a publisher for consideration, or if you’re going to try and self publishing–with each having their own particular issues one needs to hurdle.
But the biggest one comes–well, it comes about now . . .
What’s next, Sunshine?
I have an idea for a story brewing; hell, I have a few ideas brewing. There are a couple of things that are pulling me towards writing–but there are also a few things that I want to finish up before moving on to something new. I mean, it’s great to have a slush pile, but as we know in Northwest Indiana come winter, you gotta clear that slush, or you’re gonna track it into the house. And right now I have maybe three projects I should get out and get published, but to do that I have to set aside time from writing new material . . .
It’s one or the other, kids. You gotta do the work, you know?
Doesn’t mean I can’t do other things like prep work while I’m editing a story, or getting it ready for publication. But I have realized that I need to keep at this game, because as much as I feel like I may be spinning my wheels, I also feel that I’m gaining ground. This isn’t something I’m doing for a hobby, it’s something that I’m working towards as a career. Doing it as a hobby is fine, but why not do it for a living? There are worse jobs, right? Yep, there are, because I’ve worked them.
It’s never a question of what you’re doing, it’s what’s next? What do you want to do? What are you going to work on? Keep it going, baby, ’cause someone just might be waiting for that story you got bouncing about in the back of your brain–
I am one chapter away from completing my NaNoWrimo 2012 Novel, and while I am not possessed by the same feelings I had last year, I’m glad it’s almost over. Another novel into the slush pile to be edited and submitted. Which reminds me: I have to chase after a publisher today, because they’ve had my manuscript for six months and I’ve heard nothing from them. Whatcha gonna do, buddy? Let me know, please?
In the mean time, something popped up last night that set my poor brain to thinking. The original meme wouldn’t allow itself to be copied–why, I don’t know–so I just made a copy, because I can:
Okay, Boromir, considering you’ve been telling us what one does not simply do for years, we have to assume you’re the voice of reason. But in this case, I’m going to have to fill your body with arrows once more, and cast your dead ass over the falls, where it will be devoured by fish.
‘Cause you’re wrong.
I’m not trying to do a Chuck on you, because I have a ways to go before I rise to his level of excellence. But if you’ve followed this blog for any period of time, you know I’ve got my opinions, and from time to time I’ll throw them out and see if anything not only sticks, but leaves an odor.
Here’s the thing: writing is easy. It is. Just sit down and do it. Doesn’t have to be a lot; maybe a hundred words–which qualifies as “flash fiction”; maybe five hundred, or a little more–like this blog post; maybe a thousand if you’re feeling good. As I’ve said before, if you write five hundred words a day, you’ll write a novel–
In time.
Therein is the kicker.
Writing a novel is a lot like the formula for creating petroleum: dead animals and plants + huge amounts of pressure + lots of time = Black Gold, Texas Tea. You have the same ingredients for a novel: your characters and world are the dead animals and plants you throw into the mix; your plot is the pressure you apply; and time be time, because that’s what you need to not only create a first draft, but polish it into a luster that will blind mere humans.
Wash, rinse repeat: there’s your novel. Pretty simply, huh?
The hard part is doing it every day. That’s where the whole “writing a novel” thing sort of falls apart. Hell, lets go it a few steps further: you have to write it every day, then set time aside to edit it, then edit it again, then give is a nice polish, then find someone to try and publish it. All of that is part of the novel experience.
Oh, and I would say, take one of those and turn it into an ebook, if only because you’ll have to learn the finer arts of formatting (knowing your em-hyphen from your en-hyphen is a gas!), and setting up chapter links, and creating a book cover that doesn’t look like a fluorescent hot mess that your cat hacked up in the corner after a night of eating chipotle hot wings and catnip. It takes time to get right–maybe a couple of days of sitting with a copy of your story and playing the formatting game–but it’s worth it, because it will teach you how to format your story for anything.
Submitting your manuscript is a must, however, because you’ll learn how to create a submission package. While said package can make your bowels churn like you’re preping for a colonoscopy, but you need to push through that angst. Push on through, realize you can do it, and become stronger for the effort. It’s scary, but so is jumping off into the deep end that first time. Then you do it, and hell: it’s so much fun you do it again and again.
One does simply write a novel. And edit it. And polish it. And send it out for the yay or nay to follow. It’s a lot of work, but anything is if you give it enough scrutiny. Maybe times I’ve said writing is a job, and if you take it all the way to the logical end, then it could become a full-time one that gives you more than a feeling of satisfaction that you’ve created something incredible.
If you believe that there is more to writing a novel than gathering your research and proceeding with the steps above–perhaps you’re spending too much time talking about how it isn’t easy to write a novel, and it’s because you’re busy watching TV, or spending time complaining about elections, or just complaining about how hard this whole writing this is for you. It’ll probably do no good to tell you you’re wrong, because you’re already made up your mind–such as it is–and trying to convince you otherwise is likely futile.
Tonight the part of the winning NaNo Artist will be played by . . .
Well, more than a few people I know.
This is the point where the rubber leaves the road and people fly–or, if you’re trying to sprint through twenty-five thousand words to make your goal, more likely a crash and burn. But it’s The End, more of less. You open the verifying, put in your document, click OK . . . and it comes back and tells you you’re a Winner!
I’ve been doing very well. I hit my fifty thousand a week ago. Tonight I’ll clear sixty-five thousand, and if my numbers aren’t lying to me–since I don’t follow Faux News, I don’t expect “make me happy” math from them–by the time I finish the current chapter, and complete the Coda, I’ll end up with about seventy thousand words of novel goodness.
I feel all beat to hell.
Remember how, like twenty-five days ago, I said that NaNoWriMo was not a sprint, but a marathon? I feel as if I’ve run one for real. The body is sore: there’s been a constant pain in my left shoulder, and at the base of the neck right above that area. I’m constantly clearing my throat because, for some reason, I don’t feel as if I’m drawing a good breath without something getting in the way. I’m back to getting to sleep at midnight, and waking up at six or six-thirty.
I’d love to get some rest, but I don’t think I know what that is these days.
There’s been hundreds of reasons why this has been an emotionally draining month as well. So many things, too much pressure . . . and the constantly hope that one day I look in my inbox and find a message from Harper Voyager waiting for me, but the fear that, as I approach Day 60 of the Great Sci Fi Cattle Call, it’s not going to come to fruition, and I’ll need to start over.
The distractions I keep falling into are there for a reason: it’s to keep me from thinking too much about things that aren’t related to writing.
The fear here is that one day I’ll awake and discover that I’m not as good as I believe, that my writing is just drivel, and I’m wasting my time . . .
Gotta keep reminding myself that it isn’t about quitting, it’s about failing. You can recover from failing; you can pick yourself up, dust off your clothes, picked up you hand bag, and head off for the next appointment with possible greatness. It’s true that you can’t fail if you don’t try, but if you don’t try, you’ll never find out if you’re going to win.
At the beginning of last year’s NaNoWriMo, Jim Butcher published this post on his blog. For me, NaNo was more of an experiment than anything else. I’d started novels, but I’d never finished one, and NaNo was more about seeing if I could actually do the later. I did, by a great margin, but part of the reason was stumbling upon Jim’s post a few days after it was written.
I’ve always been a “kill your dream” sort of person. I’d get neck-deep into something and say the hell with it, I’ll come back later and deal with it. And that was it: death takes another, and probably not the cute Death, either, but that mean old bastard with the sickle. I didn’t give a shit because that was me, and I was busy thinking about another dream to crush.
There was a quote from W. C. Fields’ that, at that time, gave me all the support I needed for my dream crushing: ”If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” And I thought it was a good philosophy, because it’s not always possible for everything to work out the way we’d like.
That was then, and these days I’m a different person.
Here’s what I say now: fuck you, Fields. That shit was easy for you to say, because when you said that, you’d already arrived in Hollywood, driving a Duesenberg and holding $100,000 in your bank account. That means you were already made, baby, and that makes it easy to piss on the aspirations of others–
Ain’t got time for that. I gotta move Forward. I gotta keep trying.
The NaNo front is sort of quiet. I remember this time last year, with most people in a thanksgiving coma by about four PM (which, by the way, is not caused by the tryptophan in turkey meat, but by the amount of crap you pound down your gullet. Just ask the Mythbusters), the few people who stumbled out to the NaNo group on Facebook were crying for sprinters, because they were behind. As for me, I ended last Thanksgiving with a word count of 83,625, and finished the novel the next day–which would be, today!
Interesting thing is that I only wrote 1,476 words for last Thankgiving, meaning I didn’t make my daily total. I sort of made up for it by writing 3,063 words on Black Friday, and putting the End on the last chapter. I know that’s not going to happen today–I’m likely going to stick to my schedule and do my two thousand plus, and still finish up on Sunday or Monday, but it’s now a question of whether I’ll be sitting at sixty-five thousand words at the end, or hovering close to seventy thousand. Right now the numbers tell me sixty-five, but we’ll see.
When I’m not nose-deep in the computer screen writing–and dealing with the pain in my neck-shoulder combination, which was brought on by all this writing–I’m thinking, and having strange dreams. Last night was no different, because the sucker was all over the place. At one point I went on stage with The Who, sometime in 1972, to sing Going Mobile with Pete–which, if you know your Who History, was never performed life. Really, you had to be there: it was pretty smokin’.
There was another point where I found myself reading minds, and one of the said mind readings was of a friend who apparently did a lot of his vertical fantasizing around female superheroes, and their . . . powers. There were a lot of faces I recognized because I do know more than a few female superheroes, but there was one that really surprised me, because when the image of the Phoenix came up, said person wasn’t Jean “I’m Always Coming Back From the Dead!” Grey; it was the image of one of my characters–
Who would probably like that comparison, were she a real person.
Audrey Dahl, from my Transporting series, is one of my favorite characters. She’s crazy–and not always in a good way–she’s geeky, she’s bright . . . she’s got powers out the wazoo. She and her Psychic Twin, Cytheria, are the two most powerful “Talents” in the world I created for the 32nd Century, and they are well aware of this fact. So do a lot of other people in their government, which is why if they ever decided to go rogue and start killing shit, someone might try nuking them from orbit–it’s something I point out in one chapter of the first book, where Cytheria indicates that The Ripley Solution would likely be the only way to take them out if the government decided they needed to shuck this mortal coil as soon as possible.
Isn’t all powerful, but the list of things she can do is impressive. She is a telekinetic, which means she can throw very large things at you with her mind. She can also levitate, which is sort of scary, because she’s afraid of heights. She can not only read minds, but she can get right into your mind and do some pretty crazy thing. Oh, and she’s a pyrokinetic, which means when all else fails, she can throw fire balls at you–or big ass streams of fire, for that matter.
Sounds very Phoenixy, right? The only difference between Audrey and Jean is that Audrey isn’t a ginger, she’s blond, so she’s really more of a non-slutty looking Emma Frost. Good thing Emma was never the Phoenix–oh,wait . . .
And there’s an unwritten story–yeah, I have those. The plot is Cytheria and Audrey accompany a Home Office diplomatic team to a world that isn’t associated with their empire, so they can conduct trade negotiations. Things go considerably sideways, and in order to get their people butts out of some serious shit, the Psychic Twins need to power up and lay some hurt on the bad guys. (Oh, and Cytheria can do many of the things Audrey can, though she can heal herself very fast because she had biokinesis, and her primary offensive power is cyrokinesis, so you may begin the Fire and Ice jokes at any time . . .)
In face, they enter the big battle by floating down into the fight, and while hovering above the streets like super-heroines without boob windows, Audrey yells at the troops she’s facing, “Have a little Phoenix Force, motherfuckers,” and rains fire upon their screaming butts.
You may ask, how does she know these things? How is it she knows about comic book characters from the 1970′s? Because that’s where she’s from. And she–well, sorta she–was also a devote of comics, so when she gets to the future and discovers she can read minds, and fly, and throw fire . . . yeah, ends up digging the hell out of it.
Just imagine her at San Diego Comic Con. Fan boys and girls would be dying–maybe literally.
What was my dream telling me? That I’m in love with female superheroes? That I ripped something off and I should be ashamed? That I need to tell more of Audrey’s tale, and have people draw fan art of Cytheria and her whipping ass?
Let me get my Indonesian horror novel out of the way–
No turkey today for me: it’s duck all the way. Not a big eater of the gobbler, but love a duck slow cooked on the grill, so that’s where it’s at today, taking advantage of what will likely be the last 60 degree day for some time. Then eat, rest, computer time–I have some programs I want to check out–then writing.
Back to the NaNo, which is down to its last four chapters, and may inch over sixty thousand words tonight if I’m lucky. The wordage tells me that I may, just may, hit seventy thousand words when this is over, which is a good thing, because that puts it in an area where I can shop it in a lot of places if I go that route.
So all is good there. Just get through the holiday–or as Rocky called it, “Thursday”–and move to the next day, which will not involve shopping. Stick your Black Friday where the sun is non-luminescent: I’ll be here.
This is, so I’m told, the day to give thanks. Okay, thanks. There you go, I’ve done given them. I know what I have thanks for, and what I don’t–
There are a number of people on social media–and you know what social media I’m talking about–who like to put up pictures of stuff from like the 1960′s and ’70′s, and ask, “Hey, Like if you remember this!” or “Like this if you remember how great your childhood was!” or “Like this if you weren’t stoned on heroin by the time you were in college.” Okay, maybe not so much that last one, but you know what I’m talking about.
There always seems to be a rush to some nostalgic time in a person’s life where they talk about how cool it was to run around outside barefoot, or having your parent yell out the backdoor that it was time for dinner, and no one hovered over them while they played. (Oh, and for the meme going around that the people born in the 1950′s and ’60′s were the last to play out in the street: come to my neighborhood. You’ll be surprised.)
One thing you should know about the past: it wasn’t as great as you remembered. There were a lot of interesting things that happened back in them days, but compared to today–naw, I’ll stay in the future.
Sure, you had hand cranked kitchen appliances, and rotary phones, and maybe a TV that was the size of a Buick–but the chances are also good that you probably grew up for a while without air conditioning (as I did), and if you lived in any part of the country that had brutal summers (in other words, everywhere), there were probably more than a few times when you couldn’t get to sleep because it was 80 degrees outside, and the humidity was 85 percent, and there wasn’t a breeze in sight, so you laid there and suffered, hoping you passed out from exhaustion very, very soon.
It wasn’t always easy to make a long distance call; I can still remember my mother having to get an operator if she wanted to call her parents in Florida, because those long distant direct dial systems weren’t always working. And if you wanted to call someone overseas, you usually went through an operator, and then your call was routed through an undersea cable–as happened with the first international call I made in 1989. The echo was fantastic, let me tell you. These days, I can pretty much call seventy percent of the world while I’m driving down the road if I know the number.
As for that huge TV: three networks, plus a couple of local shows if you happened to live near a city big enough to support them. For the longest time in the Chicago area, it was CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN, WTTW, and WFLD–or, Channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 32. You watched what they gave you, and you were happy–mostly. And none of those stations ran twenty four hours; leave any station on long enough, and that damn Star Spangled Banner was gonna blast you awake at some point.
Oh, sure: go ahead and bitch about there being nothing on TV, but I can get my favorite shows out of the UK six hours after they were broadcast there–or faster, if I hop on my computer and look for an upload of the episode. If you can’t find something to watch across eight hundred channels, you’re not trying.
Speaking of computes . . . when I was growing up, they were either something you saw in science fiction, or they filled a room and pumped out enough heat to cook today’s dinner. When I went to school to get my degree in computers, I was on of the first lab techs to rule the roost when we got out own computer–an IBM Series-1. We had the Model 3, with 32 kilobytes of memory to run our COBOL and RPG programs. Yeah, you heard me: 32k of memory. Kept that a year, then moved up to an IBM System 34, with 64 kilobytes of memory, 128 megabytes of hard drive storage, and enough tools to make your programming experience a sweet one. Yeah, baby: we were cookin’ with gas!
Today I fire up my laptop, connect to my wireless router, and I’m working here, in the cloud–from whence this blog post cometh–and chatting with people all over the world. I can take it with me and work just about anywhere. I have access to as much information and as many cat pictures as I can handle, and if I want to see what the city I’m writing about looks like, I can call it up on a map and get ideas for a story–as I’m doing with my NaNo Novel this year.
Science and medicine . . . if you forget for a moment that you might not be able to pay for treatment, if you can, you’ll probably beat most most stuff that’s out to get you. As a child I was often afflicted with parasites of the lower intestine, and it wasn’t pleasant. My daughter has never had to worry about that. Most of the time you can get something to help you with illness by going to the story and buying it over the counter. If you have high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, or depression, you can get something to help with that.
When I was a kid, if you had something with one of your organs, you were gone. Today, we have transplants. I was still getting tuberculosis tests until the fourth grade, and since I always came up with a false positive, I’d have to go off and have a chest x-ray, just to be sure that my lungs weren’t bleeding out on me. My daughter only knows of these things through school–the same with polio and smallpox. We haven’t figured out how to cure everything these days, but in the 1960′s, a lot of things that could kill you back then are only bad memories today.
I am a huge geek when it comes to space, and the 1960′s was a good time to be alive if you followed anything in orbit. But I also remember reading in school science books that, as far as anyone knew, it was possible there were canals on Mars, and those clouds covering Venus could hide a huge, planet-wide jungle filled with dinosaurs! Then the Mariner space probes came along and spoiled it all . . .
As are the other planets–and smaller bodies, too–in the solar system. We’ve visited every planet and taken pictures of them and their moons, we’ve sent probes to comets and asteroids, and in a few years we’ll have our first look look at Pluto. We’re discovering planets around other stars, sometimes with the help of amateurs who are given access to data collected by the larger scopes, or by data from orbiting satellites–or even using their own equipment. To paraphrase a line from Goodfellas, “It’s a glorious time to look at the cosmos.”
Believe it or not, there are a lot of things that are far better for people in terms of how things are done socially these days, than they were when I was a kid. In the 1950′s and 1960′s, it was hard to vote in some places if you were black; if you were a woman, getting an abortion or contraceptives were difficult, impossible, or illegal. Some states didn’t allow people of different ethnicities to marry. And if you were LGBT, you damn well had better stay in that closet–or else.
It’s not quite perfect, mostly because you’ve still got idiots roaming about who are scared of all the the stuff in that last paragraph, but it’s getting there. Just about anyone can get married regardless skin color, and people are becoming far cooling with gays being allowed the same. It’s going to happen everywhere, and in time the anti-marriage equality people will be a bad memory, just as were the people against people of different ethnicities getting married.
LGBT people are becoming far more a part of life than they ever were “back in my day”. Neil Patrick Harris is pretty much a household name; Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow are all over TV; George Takei . . . oh, myyyyyyyy. Enough said.
It’s not a perfect world for LGBT, but it’s a hell of a lot better than things were before Stonewall. How many people my age remember Rock Hudson’s life, spelled out in the same fashion as Neil Patrick Harris’? No, you don’t. People didn’t know about his life, because coming out as a gay man, in the 1960′s, would have destroyed him as an actor. We don’t remember much of his life: we only remember his death.
I don’t look back. For me, there were a lot of interesting things that happened, too many to recount, so many that shaped me. But I’ll never post something like the picture of a cassette tape and say, “Remember these? Like them if they remind you of a better time!”, because all I remember was when the damn things were eaten by your tape player, turning Benny and the Jets or Bohemian Rhapsody into some gibbering, fever dream creature straight outta Lovecraft, and your normal reaction was to curse loudly, eject the sucker, and toss it in a bin or, as I often did, out the window of your car as you cruised down the highway going sixty.
Forward, I say. Let the past collect dust, and keep it there to use as a reference–but don’t kid yourself that it was super fantastic adventure time . . .
That’s coming on in twenty minutes. And if you’re busy on the computer, DVR it.
NaNo grinds on. I’m over fifty-five thousand words, and to say I’m going to his sixty-five thousand is a forgone conclusion. With ten thousand words to go–or there about–I can finish up by Sunday. I felt good about the writing last night, with the chapter flowing very nicely. I was also using the Document Target function in Scrivener to hit my goals, and to push myself a little–as in, once I hit my goal, I see the counter for another hundred words, then I hit that and set it for another two hundred words . . . Yes, those programs can help you move along, and get to those word counts that you want to hit.
It was just a quick vision, not a real dream, one of those things that comes to you in the hinterlands between sleep and awake. The things that came to me . . . well, it was food for the story mill.
It was a woman, walking through a desert. She was in a long coat, and her face was wrapped to keep the dust out of her face, and goggles to keep her eyes clear. The sky was dark, the sand red, and in the distance there was a city, rising up beyond the rim of something–maybe a ravine, maybe a crater. The woman stopped to take in the vista, then unwrapped her face–and smiled.
That was all I got before I woke up.
Some time back I had a dream about a woman who was also a mecha pilot, and probably a Muslim as well. It was an interesting dream, because there were things happening in the dream I didn’t expect. Since that dream, I get something like a little nudge about the story, but not much beyond that.
The vision that came to me, however–it was related to this story, and to the character.
For some reason I’ve thought of Mars these days, probably because I’ve always found the place interesting. And with Curiosity now there, more is going to come to light about the Red Planet. I still have my copy of the Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Sands of Mars, with the famously now-wrong-after-all-these-decades line, “There are no mountains on Mars,” because we know a lot better these days. The Mars I know these days is not Barsoom, though someone has taken the opportunity to place Barsoom on today’s Mars, which is a very cool thing–though I’m damned if I can find the link right now. Woe is me.
Perhaps this is the direction my next story is suppose to take: a tale of struggle upon a Mars that looks slightly terraformed, or maybe with people who have become transhuman, and for whom walking upon the surface without breathing apparatus isn’t that big of a deal. It’s possible it’s both. I don’t know at this point–
First, lets give credit where credit is very much due: the idea for this came from a post on Ink Out Loud, another great blog about writing and how it makes us, the writers, feel. Go check it out, and follow.
The Test came about because, lets face it, most novels and movies end up being sausage fests. Look at some of the books that don’t pass The Test: Lord of the Ring trilogy, eighty percent of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond stories, a lot of the Golden Age science fiction I have on my book shelves, damn hear all of the Dirk Pitt stories . . . and on and on.
When you get into movies: forget about it. The original Star Wars trilogy fails like a boss. Fight Club–are you kidding? Since the LotR novels failed, it’s a given the movies failed. And when you’re speaking of the most popular movie of the summer of 2012, you have to put a big “F” on The Avengers because when did you ever see the named women speaking to each other? (Though I have to laugh when it’s pointed out that Hawkeye has the least screen time, gets brainwashed by the Big Bad and is in need of rescuing, shows the most skin–evening doing a butt and boobs pose in official promo material–and runs like hell when shit is about to get serious–therefore making him the Strong Female Character of the movie.)
Well, then . . . what about the stories you’re working on?
Reading the above post today started me thinking about my current NaNo Novel, Kolor Ijo. Actually it got me thinking about all my work, but since I’m cranking away on this novel at the moment, it came to mind. I began looking at the story, and the characters, started thinking about who says what, and came to the conclusion–
It fails.
Why does it fail? Well, lets look. One, I do have more than one named female character. Two, there is a conversation between two of the women–in fact, the entire chapter I worked on last night was all about Indri and Sari having a conversation.
However, when I get to Number Three, that’s where things get shaky. See, the conversation is about a murderous spirit, and the why for these murders goes back to something one of the women’s father did when they were in the military twenty years before. Since they are marginally speaking about a man, it sort of fails.
Then again, they were speaking about killing ghosts and the whatnot as well, so I can score a plus–yeah?
I’m not worried about it, because given the places this story goes–and considering the characters–the few times I can get a couple of women together to discuss something besides the XY’s they know isn’t easy. Then again, I seem to do pretty well on my stories:
When I look back at what I’ve written in the last year–or twenty–I’ve been very good about having female characters in my stories. Transporting have seven named female character and two male, and the women talk about things like saving a planet, making love in a sub-dimension of reality, and showing a person what their planet looks like from orbit while Rocket Man plays in the background.
Echoes and Diners at the Memory’s End use many of the same characters from Transporting–as well at a couple of added ones, all women–and their discussions tend to be about things other than women. In Echoes, in fact, you have something along the reverse of The Bechdel Test, where I have two men talking for a long time about a woman.
What of the others? Couples Dance almost fails until the very end. Captivate and Control fails, only because there are two characters in the story, a man an a woman–and they’re talking about some stuff that you may not think of as romance, but whatever works, right?
Her Demonic Majesty: six named women, three named men, several secondary characters of both genders–and at one point I have four women talking about gargoyles and how to blow up a building. Yeah, that sucker passes by with eyes straight. And when there is a discussion going on about relationship, it’s between two of the women about their relationship. No boys allowed, ’cause it’s icky.
Some people may wonder if something like the The Bechdel Test is needed. If I look at my current story Kolor Ijo, and then got back to the story that first featured these characters, Kuntilanak, I see that The Test is pretty much dead. Does that make either stories bad? No. And if I want to push it, Kuntilanak did have more than one named character, and in a way two of those characters did speak about something other than guys, so–there win there.
But I’ll tell you why something like this needs to be looked at. It’s because you still have pantie stains like Frank Parlato, Jr., an editor for the Niagara Falls Reporter, who told his film critic Michael Calleri of his feelings for being a manly man, and how he wouldn’t have ever let his sons see any movie that had Strong Vagina as a lead. (By the way, when I create a band, I’m calling it Strong Vagina. Taken.) It’s because you still have people who believe that movie goers won’t watch a film unless it had “two white male leads”. It’s because there are a lot of people around who think Don Draper is the man because he’s a true believer of “Two C’s in a K“.
It’s because it’s the second decade of the 21st Century, and a writer reduces women to a stereotype in their stories at their own risk.
As for me? I just write what I know. And I know women are amazing.
There usually isn’t anything important about 18 November–though Jim Jones and a few hundred of his craziest followers killed Congressman Leo Ryan on this day, then decided to make the phrase, “Drinking the Kool-Aid”, part of our lexicon, even though they were drinking Flavor Aid–but for me, it was another day of work, fun, pleasure, and writing . . .
It’s also the day that I pushed my story, Kolor Ijo, over the fifty thousand word total, thus winning NaNoWriMo for a second time.
Two for two, so to speak. I won this last year, when I wrote Her Demonic Majesty, and now again this year. Do I get extra ice cream now, because I’ve written over one hundred thousand words in two consecutive NaNos? I mean, I should get something, right?
It’s actually a bit interesting. Demonic Majesty ran eighty-six thousand words after the final edit. Kolor Ijo is going to run about sixty-five thousand words, so ad it up and–yeah, one hundred and fifty-one thousand words written within thirty days over two years.
In terms of production, I’d have to say November has been my best. Though I’ve not finished the current novel, I will, and it’ll join my growing collection of literary masterpieces. The urge to write more stories is there, but something’s missing–
I want them to get out there, to be found, to sell, to be read.
More than anything, I want to be read. There is a feedback loop in this business, where you do something, have other people take it into their mind, absorbing it, then sometimes telling you what they thing of your effort. Sometimes it’s a good reckoning and you feel great about what you do. Other time they go on about how you suck, and you can either wallow in misery over it, or kick it away and move on.
I’ve had this conversation with others, weighting the “exposure versus publication” values, deciding out what you want to do with your body or work. I’ve been writing for a while, though most of the time I was spending my time putting stories together, then throwing them up on a website for others to read. Sometimes there was feedback: most of the time, there was none. When you’re posting your work for free, feedback is your currency, so if no one has an opinion on your work, you’re not getting paid doubly so.
Now I have two novels created during the month of NaNovember. One is out being considered for publication, and the fingers are so crossed it makes it difficult to write. When I’ve finished Kolor Ijo, I’m likely going to self publishing it, though I may just send it out to a few houses as well. There is a reason for self publishing, however: I have to ebooks stories out now, and perhaps this new story will draw people to my others.
2012 was about the writing, getting better at my craft. 2013 is going to be about getting noticed, getting out there, getting published. I can write all the stories I want, but if they aren’t seen by anyone, did I actually write them? Do they actually make an impression on people if they are sitting on a hard drive somewhere, unseen and unloved by anyone save me?
Money is nice, but I want people to enjoy my stories.
Maybe by the time I’m finishing my third NaNoWriMo, I’ll have at pleasure.
