Some of you have commented on how slow the progress bar is moving lately. Just hit a couple of really busy weeks is all that’s really happening. And I’ve had some freelance art jobs that I’ve been trying to tie up before deadlines. I should be good to go full steam again after this week. The deadline for the book looms, and I have friends who are already planning their trips to the grocery store in order to have fruit rotten enough to throw at me should I fail to finish the book and/or reach 200,000 words. Just FYI, I’m about 25,000 words behind schedule.

But the good news is that I’ll be house sitting for part of July. That will give me a place to retreat to for a week and a half. I also did some design work in exchange for a weekend at a condo south of here. Those two retreats will hopefully give me the time and distance to finish Nethermore.

I’ve been reading Scott Meredith’s Writing to Sell and have been learning (or re-learning) some great concepts.

What’s the difference between a story and an incident? An incident is the telling of something that happened. A story, according to Meredith, is a series of events that are causally connected in which a character has a problem, tries to solve the problem and fails, but in the end conquers the problem through his own resourcefulness.

For example, I’m going to recount a “story” in two ways. The first will be an incident, and the second will be a story.

Incident

One time we were driving from Salt Lake to Idaho Falls late at night and the Suburban threw a tire and there were sparks flying and everything when the axle hit the pavement at 65 mph. We waited around in the cold and the snow and finally a cop showed up and took us to Malad.

Story

I stole the Suburban in Salt Lake and managed to get it just past the Idaho border when it threw a tire. The vehicle tipped backward and to the right, throwing me against the strap of my seatbelt, and sparks lit up the night as the axle ground against pavement.

My heart beat faster. Adrenaline shot through my veins. Rather than slam on the breaks, I tapped them a few times as I pulled the Suburban to the side of the freeway.

There I was, twenty five miles from the nearest town on dark stretch of freeway. I was alone with nothing but a shoddy stolen car to shield me from the elements. I’d left my coat at the airport when I’d ditched it to keep people from grabbing a positive ID on me. Otherwise, I would have left the car and walked the 25 miles. Cold or not, I wasn’t going to get caught dead with a stolen Suburban because the stupid thing decided to go bad on me.

Outside, the wind was blowing. I rubbed my hands together, took a deep breath, and braved the cold to see if I could find the tire. With luck, I might be able to reattach the thing long enough to get it back to the podunk town . . . if I could even find an exit close enough to get the vehicle off the freeway and get headed in the right direction.

The snow reflected moonlight. It made it a little easier for me to see the track where the tire had rolled away off the side of the road. I headed in that direction. Already, my feet and arms were getting cold. I started into a jog. Better to get this done as fast as possible. Besides, the jog would warm me up a bit.

That’s when I saw the cop pass by. I turned and watched it flash its lights. It pulled over to the side of the road and shone a light into the stolen Suburban.

I ducked off the side of the road. Maybe he hadn’t seen me. But chances were that he had.

The story would go on to make things worse for the character. Already he’s away from civilization, the cops are onto him, and he doesn’t have a coat. The problem gets worse and worse with each thing he tries to do to fix things until in the end the problem is solved, whether he evades the police, learns his lesson, or changes his name and ends up farming in the Scottish Highlands of Idaho.

The difference between the story and the incident is the experience that the reader goes through. An incident is little more than an anecdote, like something you would read in a letter from a friend. It’s cool to get some news, but you’re not experiencing it as if you were there. In the story, the character’s problems suck you in, creating tension, and then giving you—the reader—a release of tension when the whole thing’s done. Vicariously, you are there, and hopefully the resolution will give your an endorphin release worth the time you spent reading the story.

In other news, I found a very interesting article last night about Chronic Deja Vu. Again, this is the type of news story that puts my story-making brain cells into overdrive.

Also, if any of you are interested in seeing firsthand how a published author writes a book, take a look at this post over on Brandon Sanderson’s blog. He’s writing a novel called Warbreaker and posting chapters of it as he goes for his readers to comment on. This is a great way to see an author in action.