Nethermore

Hit 31k on the new book. I should be about halfway done, but it’s hard to tell. When I hit revision time, I think 25k will be about halfway. I habitually write a ton more than I really need. Darn exposition. I’m trying to learn how to dramatize more and tell less.

It’s feeling pretty good so far. I’m excited to go back through and revise it and add more structure to the story, but being able to make stuff up on the spot is really the way to go sometimes. The characters, especially the side characters, are so much more interesting when I create them as they’re needed. I’ve had to rewrite a few times, however, when I didn’t like the first side character I placed in a certain spot. The second time at it, the characters turned out really fun.

There are some interesting things I’ve had to do due to the fact that I had no outline to speak of when I began this book at the beginning of the month.

For example, I’ve cut a lot of stuff already when I notice that I’m straying from the preconceived story in my head.

I think being able to reign the story in a bit has come from the experience I had writing Nethermore, which was written mostly without an outline and wound up being a train wreck because I added every little deviation and tried to make each one make sense within the plot, which royally messed up character and pacing.

So, I have a little bit better idea now when I’m straying too far. The little deviations can be left and dealt with in revisions. The big deviations would muddy up the whole recipe and cause huge swathes of rewriting. Here’s to hoping I’ve learned my lesson on that and can move toward a more coherent first draft.

There a lot of days where I feel like what I’m writing is utter drivel, and I have to keep telling myself that I can fix things after the fact. A sculptor has to have material to sculpt from. Right now, I’m creating that material: the base, the underpainting, whatever you want to call it. Sculpting—revisions—will come later.

If I fixed everything as I went, it would be like painting a painting to completion in 1 inch by 1 inch squares, including all the nitpicky details and without having drawn the thing beforehand. It might be an interesting exercise but the fact remains that the painting’s still going to look weird when it’s done. (Which, again, is what happened with Nethermore.)

My friend Shawn asked me the other day if revision is something “pretty darn essential to being a writer.”

I’m afraid it’s pretty darn essential. Unless you’re .01% of the writing population. And it may not be so much rewriting everything, but a combination of rewriting and revising. But sentences are deleted, some are added or changed to create better clarity, scenes are added or deleted to make the story fill out better, etc.

Rewriting used to scare me to death! Until I started looking at novels as sculptures and saw in my writing group that all the published writers are not only good writers but also good REwriters.

In other news, I went to the midnight showing for Twilight with my wife and a group of family and friends. My review: it was a faithful adaptation of the book. Best part of the movie: insertion of music by Muse: Supermassive Black Hole. Best part of the night: seeing my wife get very excited to see the movie.

Last night after work I wound up at Costco with the intent of meeting my wife there.  We’ve been without a TV for two or three weeks now since my brother-in-law moved out of the basement.  We’re not big TV watchers, but we do have a Wii, and you kind of need a TV in order to get the video game fix.

I wound up waiting for about an hour, and even though it’s Costco, I can only do so much looking, and I’m wandering around wishing I could do some writing.

But wait!  They’ve got laptops here with usb drives and Notepad on them!  I picked the laptop with the most discreet location and a good view of the nearby employees.  I plugged in my thumb drive and wrote about 800 words in twenty minutes.

Not a bad output, considering.  I just wish I’d thought of it earlier.  Maybe I should start writing at Costco every night.

It’s time to start updating frequently again after a long absence.  Things have been crazy!  Since I last posted, I’ve gotten married, become a step-dad, moved to a new city, started a new job, and started my next novel.  Life has given me one crazy ride, and I’m still getting used to things.

Couple items of note.  In February, Shawn Boyles and I started a web comic, Rocket Road Trip, about the crazy adventures of a family of monster hunters.  We originally wanted this to be a cartoon.  (We had been writing cartoons at work for the previous year before this and wanted to create a property that was all our own.)  And the cartoons will be forthcoming…when time allows.

I’ve also had quite a year so far insomuch as my writing goes.  I finished Nethermore back in April or May.  It clocked in at 175,000 words and was a bigger train wreck than my first novel.  I actually didn’t even get to the end fo Nethermore.  It was just getting way too long.  I’d started the book at the wrong point, I’d added way too many characters, and I kept changing the characters’ motivations.

After consulting with the wise members of the writing group, I ended the novel with something along the lines of: "And then the vampires flew in from the west on the winds of unforeshadowed happenstance.  One by one, the main characters either died of surprise or were eaten by the vampires.  Then the vampires turned on each other until not one thing moved or breathed or spoke in the land.  In the end, all that is, and was, and ever will be succumbed to death and madness.  The End."

The advice of my writing group was to be finished with Nethermore and go back to it at another time.  I’d learned all I could from it, and it was time to start something new.

I began my next novel a few weeks later, and within days, I met the woman I would marry, and as many of you know, being engaged sucks up a lot of time.  I didn’t get much writing done, but I did gather notes and scenes for the next novel.  Last month, I outlined the entire thing and now have a stack of 3×5 cards waiting for me to sit down and write.

For Nanowrimo, I decided not to write that novel.  Several friends had suggested that I play to my strengths and write something short and quirky, with the idea of a younger audience in mind.

And so I’ve been hard at work on my middle grade novel, which–if I continue on at the same pace–I’ll finish this month or early next month, depending on how long it is.

I’m experimenting.  The new novel is a free write, and I have to sometimes reign myself in to stay focused on the story at hand, but I’m getting some of the most creative and fun scenes and characters that I’ve ever created.  I go back and massage out the glitches when this mad dash to finish the thing is over.

But in the meantime, I’m enjoying myself immensely.