Counting Out Time

If you don’t write, but you spend all your time thinking about what you’re going to write, is there a word count?  A great philosophical question, if you ask me.  But you don’t have to ask me, because I’m telling you–

Not really.  But it certainly feels that way.

I’m in the next phase of writing, which is doing a lot of thinking about what I want to write.  Camp NaNo is looming, and I’m working out the plot in my head.  It’s not easy, ’cause even if I do have a good start, I’m nowhere near where I need to be to start on a story.  But give me a few more days and I’ll have something.  I know I will–

Maybe I’ll even have a title.  Damn you, creativity.  Damn you.

So yesterday was a lot of thinking and playing.  I’m going over 747 designs, because I love doing that stuff, and I never realize just how many different layouts there are–and how few airlines actually use them these days.  But an Airbus 380–oh, jeez, those things are incredible!  Too bad I can’t use one, because . . . oh, I totally could, since they were around before 2011.  But I don’t want to go there, because I have my big airplane, and I’m going to stick with that.  Don’t get greedy just because you want something that’s going to look fantastic.

Then again . . .

(There’s a simple reason for using a 747 and not something like an A340-600.  It’s called, “Having a dramatic scene,” and there is only one way to pull it off.  Though . . . never mind.  I’ll figure it out.)

No matter:  I’m in design phase.  I’ve got my brain cooking and I’m coming up with things.  Next comes the writing down of things, and that will probably take a full two weeks of my times.

Then comes the writing.  Oi.

I’ve set my goal as twenty-five thousand words this time.  I’m thinking to do this as a start, then maybe finish things off come November, cause adding fifty thousand words and bringing my novel to seventy-five or eighty thousand words would be a good novel.  Yes, I know:  NaNoWriMo is suppose to be for “new work”, but in the words of one crazy person I used to know, “I make my own rules, NaNo!  You can’t tell me what to do!”  At least I write . . .

I have a condo to design today as well, and maybe work on another building.  I’m finding it easy to figure out how to write scenes if I can actually see something on my screen, and not necessarily just in my head.  I have Annie to blame for that, because she made me do that!

Speaking of Annie . . . last night my dreams were insane.  I was wandering about Paris looking to assassinate someone–no, really, I Was a Teenage Hitgirl.  Wearing Gothic Lolita outfits, too, which didn’t make me stand out too much, but apparently no one seemed to care, because I wandered the street and looked cute as hell–and ended up smoking someone, not sure who, but I totally did.

What was different about all this was at the start of my adventure I sent off a message to someone, and when I got back to my computer they replied to me, not in the handled I’d sent my message to, but with their real name.

The reply?  ”Our love must be unbound.”

Sometimes my dreams surprise the hell out of me.

 

Land of Confusion

Put another tick in the “completed” column.  Fantasies in Harmonie pulled into First Draft City, found a good hotel, and decided to shack up for a while, ’cause the diner across the street has damn good coffee.

It was a good afternoon of writing, and since I said I was gonna finish that story, I was for sure gonna finish the sucker.  Two thousand, six hundred words later I was finished, and it was a good thing.  Not because it was finished, but because my mindset had changed drastically over the last week, and where I had been pretty down on both myself and the story, as I wrote the final chapter I returned to the conclusion that while the story might not be down and dirty, smoking hot dirty porn, it was pretty good fantasy erotica, and I could give myself a pat on the back for completing another story.

‘Cause if you don’t know, completing a story is pretty much as important–if not more–than starting one.  And if you’re gonna start one, you better finish it, love.

Fantasies in Harmonie is not only finished, but I’ve got it out to a couple of beta readers already.  Yes, Cassie is quick on this one, because it’s a pretty clean story–you know what I mean–and after a couple of edits and a cover, I can work the world of smut with this beauty.  Maybe it’s not as good as a story about programming the girl next door to be your perfect sex slave, but it’ll be good.

With that out of the way, it means I got–let me check the big clock . . . a little more than nineteen days before Camp NaNo is in session.  Which means I need do to research.  It means I need to build my world.

I means I need a title.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me right now.  Not that I need to spec out the school, or the teachers, or the students, or the curriculum, or . . . well, any number of things.  No, the thing that bothers me now is that I don’t have a title.  I have an idea and the bare bones of a plot, but I don’t have a title, and just like Harlan, I’m strange about starting without a title.  I did that with Kuntilanak, because I really had no idea what to call it before I got all original and named it after a creature in the story.  Since then I always have a title so I don’t have to go and rename the Scrivener file once I’m about ten thousand words into this thing.

However!  Part of the story takes place aboard a 747-400, and while doing one of those magical things called a “Google Search”, I found the Seat Guru site.  While my plane will be a charter flight, I have an idea of what a current 747-400 looks like, and I can–what’s that word again?  Oh, yeah:  Imagine.  I can imagine what the inside of my place will look like.

If I get too crazy I may just model my plane in 3D–

I’ve done worse.

Whispered Conversations of Nothingness

Made it through the long weekend without incident.  Weather was cool and rainy, and there wasn’t a lot of eating.  I don’t have relatives in the area, so I stayed home.  The new week continues onward, as does life.

I was going to write yesterday, but you know how you get distracted by one thing, and you can’t walk away from it because it’s so shiny?  Yeah, it was like that yesterday afternoon.  I was working on a design for this school that will play a major part in a story I’m developing, and the more I put things on the map, the more real the place became.  Not to mention it takes a long time to put walls in place, and set up and model buildings, and lay down paths . . .

You get the idea.  Getting a world built is a lot of work, and there are times when that work gets in the way of something else you should do.

Still, there’s always time to write, and I was going to–until my right eye started burning about seven-thirty last night–

I get this every so often, where my eye will get irritated by something (still have no idea what I did), and then it waters and burns, then it starts to gunk up, at which point I have to clean it out, only to have it enter the same cycle about fifteen minutes later.  I’ve tried to write before when that happens, and it’s harder than hell to do anything when you’re wiping at your eye every two minutes, or you can’t even see out of it because it’s nearly closed up with something leaking out of one corner.

So I gave up trying to write.  I really gave up trying to do anything, because it was far too hard with my eye as it was.  Therefore it was time for bed . . .

I shouldn’t say I gave up on everything, because I was running a scene through my head, and I wanted to work out what a couple of characters were saying.  This is something I do, taking the part of my characters and working out dialog which, in turn, will help me with a scene and with what’s happening at some point in the story.

But this scene wasn’t for something that would appear in a hypothetical story a year from now.  Oh, no:  this was something from a few years down the line in the history of a couple of characters.  This was a talk between two women, in private, sitting in a pavilion on the edge of a small meadow as the sun is sinking behind them.  It’s quiet, they’re alone, and they’re discussing a subject one of them knows well–

Death.  And how one must sometimes kill.

I sat there in the dark, on the bed, feeling the cool outside air trickle into the room, hearing the light patter of rain on the stones in the back yard, and I worked out their conversation.  I spent maybe fifteen minutes taking their parts, talking out their feelings, their ideas, their concerns.  I knew who their were as I spoke, and as I started to lay back, I was still speaking one of the character’s parts, my voice growing softer as my eyes started to close . . .

It’s not every night you can take your characters to bed with you.  At least you’re never really alone at night when you’re a writer.

Stretched Out Before the Future

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writers, its that we’re a stubborn, yet fearful, bunch.  We’ll get into a project and stick to it until the bitter end–and then, when the end is in sight, refuse to let go of the creature we’ve spawned.

Over the last year I’ve noticed that there are two things that seem to scare writers the most:  research and editing.  Research has always been a friend, and editing is slowly becoming a welcomed roommate.  But why do these fill our hearts with fear?

Editing is something that seems to get the better of us each time.  I read it a little today, when someone asked, “When do I know my novel is perfect?”  One might as well say, “When can I let my children go out into the world?”  For some people that answer is always, “Never,” and they hang onto their rugrats like they were bars of platinum–at least until they realize that they’re thirty-five and spend entirely too much time on the “Kawaii Crossplay” website, and maybe it’s time to throw their ass into the street.
Perfection is a will-o’-the-wisp:  you’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist.  Or, better yet, for my science fiction writer friends, it’s like getting to 1c, the speed of light.  You can get close, closer, closest; you can get to .999999c; you can push those engines all you want for decades, but you’ll never hit 1.0c.  Not gonna happen, at least not in this universe.

You can edit and rewrite and re-edit your story all you want, but in your own eyes, that sucker will never hit the level of perfection you’ve set for yourself.  You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to get it to where you’re finally convinced you can publish it–right after this last polish–

I look at editing like I look at action scenes:  I try to keep it as short as possible.  Try to get the story where you want it during the first draft, get rid of the typos in the first edit, clean up the story, plot holes and all, in the second, and go over it again to make sure you have things right.  Let someone else look at it, then edit again where needed.  After that, get it out to a house for a look-see, or start formatting it for self-publication.

It’s time to put it in the street.

Then there’s research . . . oh, my.  This seems to scare writers more than editing.  (If a sampling of a few ebooks is any indication, there are a lot of scared writers out there, ba-da-boom!)  I love research, because this is where you learn stuff.  Even if you think you know everything there is to know about a subject you’re going to weave a story around, you’ll find something new that’s gonna surprise you.  I had this happen when I was writing Her Demonic Majesty, and the bit of information I discovered when I was about seven chapters into the book helped change an important scene for me, and developed how the MagicPunk City of Chicago should feel.  What I found was completely unknown to me, but not anymore, since I have that information bookmarked in the Scrivener project.

Take all the time you want for research–up to a point, that is, because if you stretch research out for too long, you’re still looking for that level of perfection you’ll never find.  That final bit of data is keeping you from the real thing you’re suppose to do, and that’s write.

Wouldn’t want to be accused of shirking your duties now, would you?

One Line, Two Line, Blue Line, Green Line

World building is a wonderful thing, because you never know where it’s going to take you.

If there is one thing I love about developing intricate stories, it’s world building.  For my unpublished Transporter series, I created some fourteen hundred years of history to play in, and began thinking about how I got from Point A to Point Z.  For Her Demonic Majesty I kept my action local to Chicago, but I imagined it as part of a huge conurbation known as The Pentagram, and it became necessary to build some terminology and rules around magic in the world.  Lately I’ve dug into building viable world around other stars, and then integrating them into stories–such as what I did in Diners at the Memory’s End, where I built a system around a K Class star so I could have an interesting couple of paragraphs in the story.

I’m getting into some world building for a story, something revolving around a couple of characters another person and I created for a game a long while back.  I’m trying to pull them out of one universe and put them into another, and it’s involving a bit of brain work, because I’m having to change everything.  Not that changing everything is a bad thing, because I get rid of a universe that essentially turned your characters into a form of fan fiction, and I put these characters into a world that they own.

I’m all about owning.

One of the things I have is an idea where my kids from Europe–where the two main characters are from–fly over to Boston, where they’ll attend a private school somewhere close.  So, they fly out of somewhere in Europe and head to Logan Airport, after which . . .

That brought up the question:  how do I move a gaggle of kids from Logan Airport to some super private school out on Cape Ann?  Well, there are buses that could do the job, and originally I thought about that, but then I started using the Google Maps on Logan and–what’s that?  It’s a train station!

See, I wanted to get my kidlettes to Salem, and from there I could take them by bus to Cape Ann, because trains are cool, no?  Sure.  Only one problem:  the train outside the never goes to Salem.  It stops at a rail-head about ten miles north, far short of the Witch Capital.

See, though, this is the age of the Internet, and all one has to do is Google “How to get from Logan Airport to Salem by train,” and you’re catapulted into a world where answers are there for the taking.  Like the one that said you have to take the subway from the Airport over to the Government Center, then catch the line to North Station, and from there you’re on your way.

One MBTA subway map later, and I see they’re right:  take the Blue Line to the Green Line, and from there you’re off to the train station, and from there you’re off to Salem . . .

So now I had my kids on the way to Salem, where I was going to put them on buses for the trip out to Cape Ann.  So I’m looking at the area on Google Maps using satellite view, and–what’s this?  This line cutting through the woods?  Why, it’s a train track.  So back to the MBTA site and after a quick check of the train schedules–yep, there’s a commuter train that head out to the cape.

Which gives me other ideas . . .

Not only do I love world building, but did I mention I love the Internet?

It can take me to so many places I’ve never been, all so I can others along.

Turn Left at the Oort Cloud

Yesterday I mentioned that I was gonna do some schoolin’ today.  I don’t know if I should say schoolin’; more like a helping of griping that seems to come from me now and then.

But, you know, it’s fun.  It really is.  And maybe, in the end, someone will scratch their chin and go, “Humm, that Cassie is a smart woman,” instead of what they normally say, which is, “Who does this bitch think she is?”

Enough.  Moving on now . . .

As I hung out on the social media yesterday, I saw the usual presentation of books from people who are in the same position as me, which it trying to sell their wares and gain an audience.  Nothing unusual there, and I can understand wanting people to see what you are writing.  I may do the same.

But then, I see it, the synopsis for a story, and it goes like this:  Earth had dwindling resources, but hey, there’s a Super Earth in another system a few light years away, so guess what?  We’ll pack up everyone on Earth, turn it into a wasteland while we build our ships, and then rocket off to our new world!  I almost said, “Liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh ur-tze,” when I saw that, but then realized I was thinking of another universe.

It’s not like I have written about this before, but as John Crichton might say, “Okay, for the 89^th time . . .”  It goes like this:  if you’ve the ability to travel light years from one solar system to another, you are not going to run out of resources.  Because if you can move eight billion people from one planet here to another planet ten light years, or more, distant, then you can damn sure mine resources in your own system–which is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run.

A planet might have a limit to what there is to offer to several billion people, but once you’ve gotten to where you can get about space with few problems, then energy from the sun, or finding mineral-rich planets and asteroids, or finding water, becomes freakin’ child’s play.  Compared to flying sixteen light years to 40 Eridani A–which may or may not be the home of Mr. Spock–getting a light year out into the part of your solar system where all those cold, icy comets roam is simplicity squared.

I know what’s going on here, though:  you’re looking at a classic example of what is known in some sci fi circles as MacGuffinite.  Alfred Hichcock coined the term “MacGuffin” as a device to move the characters and plot along, but that would have no actual relevance to the story.  MacGuffinite is the magical element that’s going to get the people in your story to decide, “Hey, space travel is great, lets pack up the plantation and head for Canopus and find us some sandworms to ride!”  And in the process you eat up Earth and leave it behind, and no one lives there anymore ’cause . . .  well, ’cause.

I mean, I could blame this on Joss Whedon, because he “used up old Earth” before heading out to The ‘Verse, but we know science makes him cry, so I’ll give him a pass.  But for you other science fiction writers out there, listen up:  you don’t have to leave home to find goodies.  In one of my series I more or less blew up Earth, but that doesn’t mean the Solar System is deserted, because hell, people, you got plenty of places for people to live, and a whole lot of resources to pick from to keep life going.

It’s called trying to keep it real, and it’s one of the reasons if you have a story with aliens showing up asking for water, you should just blast their asses, because they’re lying their little gray butts off.

Sure, it’s fiction . . .

But it doesn’t have to be dumb fiction.

Genrely Me

If you write, you tend to write certain stories.  I don’t, for some reason:  I have a published horror story, as well as one of erotica, and I’m getting ready to publish something that’s science fiction.  But most other writers I know do; they write romance, or science fiction, or paranormal, or young adult.  They get into their groove and go with it–

Assuming they know what that groove actually is.

I had a conversation with a writer friend of mine a few days back, and they were trying to figure out the genre for their story.  Now, lets get this out of the way:  they write science fiction.  But when they were looking at all the sub-genres that are offered for self-publishing, they found there were–well, it ain’t just science fiction, let me tell you:

 

FIC028000 FICTION / Science Fiction / General
FIC028010 FICTION / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure
FIC028070 FICTION / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
FIC028040 FICTION / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies
FIC028020 FICTION / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction
FIC028050 FICTION / Science Fiction / Military
FIC028030 FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera
FIC028060 FICTION / Science Fiction / Steampunk
FIC028080 FICTION / Science Fiction / Time Travel

 

Sure, you have “Science Fiction, General,” which could be your “regular” science fiction, but what about the rest?  I think about my Transporting series, and where it would fit in that group.  There is time travel, but it’s not really time travel fiction.  It’s hard, but not what I’d call Hard Science Fiction.  There’s action, but not something that would fall under FIC0218010.

Truth is, my Transporting stories are character driven, and all the sci fi trappings are sort of grist for the mill.  Stuff is just there because in that future, who cares about how a warp drive works, you get in the freakin’ ship and go.  I’d probably file my stories under “General” and be done with it.

The problem we have here is that if you don’t have your book in the right spot, it might not sell.  Sure, your story might be about something happening at the end of the world, but is it “Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic”, or is it “Action & Adventure”?  Or is it something else that’s not there?

A question also came up at the same time:  what is this “New Adult” genre?  I had to look that one up as well, ’cause I had no idea.  Come to find out, it’s for people “From their early twenties until about the age of thirty.”  Are we talkin’ people who have crawled out of the Valley of Young Adult, but whom aren’t ready for Full-on Drama?  Or is this another bullshit grouping so publishing houses and pigeonhole a writer’s work more efficiently?

I remember Stephen King once saying his agent was worried he’d get pegged as “a horror writer”.  I’m certain he wasn’t saying that for very long, however, because that horror kept the money rolling.  These days, however, with self-publishing in full-swing, it’s not so much being pegged, it’s finding the damn peg to hang your story upon.

The writing game is hard enough without having to think about what sort of story someone says you’ve actually written.  As it is, some writers just scatershot their stories into a genre and hope for the best.  Others do their research and select that which they think is best.

Me?

I just write.

You’ll know where to find my work.

 

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 . . .

Mobi Dick

Falling back to the famous opening line from Shoot and The Mist (which King admits he stole from Shoot), this is what happened:

Last night was Formatting Night at the casa, and it was time to play with the Table of Contents.  Almost every ebook needs one, particularly if you’re hawking a novel, and you want your readers to jump to chapters quickly.  I’ve done this for Kuntilanak, and I started playing with it for Her Demonic Majesty.

I discovered quickly, however, that while you can set up a text file in Scrivener for you ToC, you can’t link to things as you would in Word.  That functionality simply doesn’t exist.  But wait!  After doing some research using this strange tool that a lot of writers seem to be unaware of called “Google”, I was reminded of something Scrivener does, and that’s compile your documents into epub and mobi formats.

For the less and tech savvy out there, epub is a common ebook standard that’s been around a few years.  The other format, mobi, has been around even longer, and is what’s used by Kindle.  When you compile into either of these formats, if you have things set up right, you’ll build your Table of Contents automatically.

With that being the case, why not give it a try?

I decided to try out mobi, since I could shoot this straight up to my Kindle Direct account when the time came to complete this magic.  So I selected a few things to test this out, and . . .

Wait a minute.  Since you need a way to see your ebook before it becomes an ebook, I needed a little tool for that.  I downloaded Kindle Previewer from the Kindle Direct page, so once I had my mobi file, I could pull it up and “read” my story.  Great!  I get that on the machine, then I start the compile . . .

Oh, wait.  In order to compile anything as a mobi, Scrivener needs to know where you store your KindleGen program.  KindleGen lets you convert files that could be ebooks into mobi format, and even though I’m creating a mobi file, Scrivener wants to know where this magical program resides on my computer.  Which meant I needed to go and download that–

I have all the tools in place.  I selected my text, click to Compile, say I want mobi, and do it.  A few seconds later–success!  I have a mobi file!  It was that simple.

With the mobi file in place I started Kindle Previewer, loaded by file, and–there it was!  My test book, all nice and . . . well, not exactly neat.  The ToC was a mess, but this was due to how I named things rather than something Scrivener did.  But things were in place, and the pages looked great . . .

That was when I noticed the page count:  1,452.  What?  What is his insanity?  It seemed that when the mobi file was created, all sorts of pages that I can’t see were created, and this led to this incredible page count, rather than the 72 pages which should have been.

Obviously, there is something I did when writing that brought about this issue.  That means more investigation and research, and more testing.  But when the time comes, I’ll have this book made.

Oh, yes, I will.

In the Glen of Semi-active Awareness

Oh, such is the aftermath of sleeping with the Luna Moth.  I make it through the night without waking at some ridiculous time of the morning, but the next day forces you to deal with the hangover for many, many hours.  It’s never fun; in fact, it can be a dangerous thing when you’re out on the highway surrounded by idiots–as I’ll be this afternoon.

At the moment I’m trying to analyze business intelligence software–always a fun thing–and write this.  I’m sort of failing at both ends, because my body is revolting against me, saying, “No, you can’t make your fingers move that way, because it feels funny to us.”  Also, these companies don’t want to give me a quote on their software:  the want me to try it first.  I don’t want to try it, I just want to know how much of my money you’re going to take.  There is no “try”, there is only, “How much, Bunky?”

Since I didn’t write anything last night–I was on Skype with my therapist, and by the time that was through I was inching into ten PM territory–I did polish up an old game review and sent it off to the guy who’d asked me about them the other night.  Yes, I found some errors; yes, I did rewrite part of it because it felt very clumsy in some areas.  Mostly I rewrote things because I know how now to tell the same tell better, and I want to see things looking nice and shiny before I send them out into the Interwebs again.

One of the things I’ve seen over the years is how good some of the stuff I wrote three, four, five years back is today.  It’s not perfect, but it’s readable in a good way.  I still get ideas across; I still manage to make the right points; I still manage to let what passes for “my humor” present itself upon the page.

What I’m saying it the writing was good, and it was something of which I am proud.

In fact, I was just looking over another review I did in 2011, and while there are a few issues here and there, I have no problems with it.  Sure, a clean up is in order, and I might have to correct something were I to republish it because a few things have changed since the original publication, but it’s not as if I need to perform massive triage to get it presentable.  It is . . . good.

If the two reviews I sent in are deemed worthy, them I’m probably going to send a few of these other things that I penned.  I’m also looking and publishing some–wait for it–new articles, because I’d once made the promise to do so, and I should follow through, should I not?  I was even looking at some research material because that’s what I do, even if I don’t want to write.  But since I likely will, the reading came in handy.

The plan is to finish Suggestive Amusements this weekend or early next week–but that doesn’t mean I won’t write something else in the meantime.

After, every little bit helps.

Walkabout in Isidis

Finally, I’m getting down to the blog and writing.  It’s been a busy morning, and it looks like it’ll be an equally busy day . . . well, busy is a relative term.  Busy is what I make it of my time, and I should do something besides Facebook games and wasting time looking for strange things to research.

It was sort of like that last night when I was doing my time in Chapter Sixteen of Suggestive Amusements.  I’m trying to find things to say about Valley of Fire State Park, and that led me to thinking about points west of Las Vegas that one might want to visit, or live in, if they were to blow that pop stand known as Sin City.  That meant getting into Google Maps, and searching and looking, and my time became one of spend five minutes looking and imagining  and one minute writing a paragraph or two.

The writing went quickly, however, when I was writing.  Though I had a Scrivener crash in the middle of the story and had to pick up where I’d left off–and thank you, Scrivener, for saving as you go along so I didn’t lose anything–it was still smooth sailing as far as getting out what I needed to get out.

Today I hope to finish the chapter.  I’m guessing another thousand, maybe fifteen hundred words, will do the deed, then I can focus on the penultimate chapter, which is going to bring in someone who’ll help set up the final chapter.  Maybe three or four thousand words there, then another three thousand or so for the last chapter–yeah, if I still on this schedule, I’ll find myself writing “The End” about this time next week.

Then on to my next masterpiece.

The things left to do now is get a synopsis together for the person I’ve asked to do a cover for Her Demonic Majesty, then do one last edit on that, and then . . . hell, what then?  Probably write that new chapter for Replacements and give that story another edit while I wait for the cover.  If I like the cover, then I could ask the same person if they would like to do another . . .

Then I have my story I want to do for Camp NaNo in June.  What was something I though of doing as a joke has really grabbed me, right to where I’m doing character sketches in my head during my spare moments of clarity.  I know the players, I know who they are and what they do, I know the setting . . . I know the transformations and the sex.  Oh, yeah, baby:  I can even see the bad cover I want to use.  Come to the woods to write, and just watch what happens . . .

Today, though, one of the things I’m looking at on the Internet is Mars.  Why?  I woke up this morning with a vision of someone in a pressure suit standing on an open plain, staring at something that looked like low mountains in the distance.  There was a sandy red hue everywhere, and since I know my Solar System, I could only imagine the scene was somewhere on Mars.

Why was I having this?  No idea.  These things do happen.  But since I had that image in my head, I had to look for my maps of Mars, and once I found them I ran across something interesting:  Isidis Planitia, an impact basin in northern Mars.  To the west is Syrtis Major Planum, which is a huge shield volcano.  I’m not saying this is what I saw in my dream image, but it seems so close.

Is this a vision, a scene, an idea?  Is this something I’m suppose to develop?  Or am I off on a strange tangent once more?

As soon as I know, I’ll let someone know.

 

Desert Rising

It’s a lazy Saturday, with the weather gray and rainy.  Perfect sort of day for staying in and writing . . . which was my plan anyway, but at least the weather is cooperating.

I surprised myself last night.  I didn’t get into working on Suggestive Amusements until about nine-thirty, and when I did begin writing I was tired as hell.  But I began Chapter Fifteen, and it was as if a second wind of creativity hit me.  There were thing on Google Maps I needed to look up, and I needed to work through a couple of ideas that were swirling about my mind, but it didn’t slow me up that much.

By the time I finally hauled myself off to bed, with my eyes threatening to close at any moment, the novel was eight hundred words closer to the finale.  I didn’t feel like I had to push myself to get the words written–if anything, I wanted to keep going.  I knew I wouldn’t get a thousand in, but I knew I’d get close.

There’s a thing about using Google Maps to look around where I’m writing scenes, and that I look at the places where my characters are going, and I can see what they look like, I can feel the environment around them.  I’m writing about the desert, a region with which I’ve had limited experience, because I don’t call visiting Las Vegas in 1992 and driving out to Hoover Dam the best way of gaining experience with being in the middle of hot, dry nowhere.

Still, even though the whole time I was in Vegas it was close to one hundred and twenty with about twenty percent humidity every day, I loved it.  It was the first time my sinuses cleared since about forever, and there was something pure and clean about being in the heat.  Not the humidity:  the hell with that.  It’s one of the reasons I stay inside during the Chicago summers, because there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re walking in steam room every time you go out to check on the mail.

Two of my main characters in Suggestive Amusements are from the desert:  Keith from Las Vegas and Elektra from Alamogordo  New Mexico, and given that Erin’s first conscious moments took place in the middle of ancient Iraq, I guess we can put her in the desert dweller column as well.  All of this means hitting the maps, doing my research–and looking up stuff on things happening in Mesopotamia eight thousand years ago is fun!–and imagining what those places look like is a creative exercise everyone should try at least once.

But I’ll soon leave the desert behind and move back to an alternate Chicago, and deal with the rainy humidity in that story, and probably not go on desert walkabout for a while.  Maybe the mountains after this, or another country.  Then again, I hear the waters on Mars are great this time of year.

All I gotta do is terraform the planet and it’s all good, right?