Category Archives: writing

2023 A Personal Review

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The year, as we in the west number it, is coming to a close and that is a time for reflection. This year has seen triumph and tragedy in my personal life, much like the years that preceded it and that will follow.

In January I began the world building work for my next science-fiction novel, a dystopic and cynical story set on the corporate cities of Mars under the thumb of a once brilliant billion now degenerated into madness and paranoia. With it set only a hundred years into the future that required lots of research and planning to keep from making myself appear too foolish. This month also saw a dear friend of nearly 40 years struck with a terrible wasting degenerative neuro-muscular disease.

February saw the released of a pair of films that I thoroughly enjoyed, Megan a fun take on the killer doll cliche and Cocaine Bear which delivered precisely what was labeled on the tin.

In March I continued the work on my Mars novel and endured the lackluster Antman and The Wasp: Quantum Mania and the even less enjoyable 65 but was treated to the spirited and fun Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

April saw the historic event of a former President of the United States charged with crimes and his party lash themselves to the mast of his sinking ship. Sadly, nothing in the intervening 8 months changed and they remain devoted to his insurrection and criminality. April was also when I began thinking seriously that the time was right for someone to revisit the werewolf as presented in 1941’s The Wolf-Man with particular attention to the fascism in the subtext.

May was a birth month, a celebration if you wanted of my own and the experimental scene I wrote for a very vague and unformed concept of a werewolf novel. After its reception at my writers group and with their encouragement I continued on past that scene and unwittingly started writing a novel without a prepared outline.

In June I watched Asteroid City a strange almost poetic film nearly devoid of any traditional plot and yet strangely compelling. All world building work ceased as the werewolf novel took over all of my creative CPU cycles.

July was a very good month for movies with the release of Oppenheimer and Barbie both film outstanding in their quality with resonate themes of deep importance. My sweetie-wife and I finished the TV series Silo and agreed it had been a waste of time and talent as had Marvel’s Secret Invasion. It was about this time that I began to seriously consider that my unplanned novel was not going to crash and burn and might actually get finished.

In August The unplotted novel passed 40,000 word and my sweetie-wife and I discovered the delightful Australian murder/comedy series Deadloch a real hidden treasure on Amazon Prime.

September witnessed the passing of that dear friend diagnosed in January and once again the hard terrible lesson of life is that it ends. The movies of this month, A Haunting in Venice, and The Annual secret morgue of genre films, did little to mitigate the sadness of that period.

With October I became confident enough in my werewolf novel to reach out to a former editor and pitch him the book. He expressed an interest but also cautioned I would need a pen name for it. The Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage enrollment started and the day-job became more stressful and busier but work on the novel continued.

November was a pleasant month. Two enjoyable features at the theater, The Marvels and Next Goal Wins provided comfort cinema, the annual sf convention LosCon provided friends and geek infusions as well as seeing to completion of the novel first draft.

That brings us to December, I closed out in theater film watching with the fantastic Godzilla Minus 1, abandoned the series The Crown as the Charles and Diana story held little interest for me, and turned my manuscript over to my darling sweetie-wife for her red pen of corrections.

As I said at the outset, 2023 held triumph and tragedy and now onto 2024.

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The First Draft is Complete

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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.

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General Catchup:

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Posting here of late has been quite sporadic for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the current novel in progress has consumed most of the creative CPU cycles in my brain. Perhaps the fact that I am ‘pantsing’ the book, that is writing it without a pre-created outline means I need more synapses on station or perhaps because it is my first novel length horror project, or some other reason, it’s been front and center of my brain for weeks. Either way there has been creative output toward the blog and more in the direct of these Family Value Fascist werewolves.

Secondly, we have entered the busy season at my day-job. The non-profit healthcare HMO I work for get very busy from October thru January as this is the yearly ‘open enrollment’ period of member’s with Medicare to enroll, disenroll, or make changed to the Medicare HMO coverage. Overtime becomes plentiful and work takes up loads of hours.

Still, this weekend, after shifting my working on Friday to 7am until 4pm, my sweetie-wife and I sped up to L.A. and enjoyed the weekend with the Los Angeles Area SF Convention, LosCon. This year I did not participate as a panelist, but enjoyed going to panels on writing, movies, and technology. In the evenings there were room parties, lengthy discussion and I ended each night in the lobby with a soda, my laptop, and the final chapter of my horror novel. Which I completed on Saturday night.

The last couple of panels of the convention were of only middling interest to us and so we left about 2:30 pm to get home to San Diego. Once home we settled on simply microwave meals and watched the new Doctor Who special.

All in all it was a good weekend and today I start the corrections and revision to ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point.’

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November is National Novel Writing Month

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National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, has started and loads of people have enlisted in their attempts to write 50,000 words on their project by November 30th.

50 thousand words is not an obscene goal. It’s 1667 words per day, every day. It’s tough but certainly doable. I am not participating in this grand global goal not because I do not believe in it but because I am already eyeball-deep in my current project. I did once attempt to do a NaNoWriMo. It would have been a science-fiction novel about the survivors of a crashed passenger liner. It also would have been written without an outline. That novel crash and burned as completely as the doomed starship after less than 10 thousand words.

Still, NaNoWriMo is a good thing. For many writers the temptation do anything but write is quite strong. There is always something else that needs to the researched, there are tone boards to construct, characters to devise, locals to investigated online, so much that prepares you for the writing that is not writing. Making a public commitment to NaNoWriMo help some over that hump between planning and plotting and what is the hardest part of writing, butt to chair, fingers to keyboard. (Or pen to paper, or voice to tape. There is no one correct way to wright.)

So if you have committed yourself to this endeavor, may your words flow like wine, may your plot not clot, and remember even if you don’t hit the goal, writing itself is the victory.

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Crunch Time has Arrived

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By ‘crunch time’ I do not mean heaping bowls of nautically ranked golden squares containing unimaginable quantities of sugar but rather the time of year when at my day-job the work overflows, overtime is authorized, and I often work six days a week.

I work for a non-profit HMO in their Medicare membership division. Each year from October 15th thru December 7th people on Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or change their Medicare Advantage Plans so loads of applications and roll into our HMO during this time and that translates to loads of work. It’s good, I am paid well, represented well by my union, and being a non-profit I feel pretty good about the services my HMO afford these Medicare recipients. I sock my overtime money aside and use it for frivolous treats.

This year it is even more of a ‘crunch time’ as I am on the final stretch for completing the first draft of a horror novel. One written without an outline. As of the writing of this post I am sitting at about 73 thousand words. I expect the piece to land somewhere between 80 and 85 thousand. At one thousand words or so per day that means 7 to 12 writing days to wrap it up. Looking back there is less spade and reconstruction work that I had expected when starting the ‘no outline’ adventure. There is some rework to be done, some scenes to be rewritten but no major points of conflict or retroactive continuity to correct. I credit this feat to my decades of running tabletop Role Playing games, where there is never an outline that survived contact with the players and the need to make sure that nearly everything fits together coherently is fairly great.

In short I shall be busy during November, but not unhappy.

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The Thematic Failure of ‘The Savage Curtain’

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If you know anything of the original Star Trek series episode The Savage Curtain, it’s that it is the one with Abraham Lincoln sitting in space.

Of course, it’s not the real Lincoln but one created by aliens from Kirk vision of Lincoln. Soon Kirk, Spock, and a couple of ‘good’ historical characters are engaged fighting with ‘evil’ historical characters, some from real history as with Lincoln and some from Star Trek’s future history. The aliens are curious about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and has created this contest to learn about these concepts. (Really, a forced pit fight is a terrible experiment, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.) After some loses Kirk and Spock win the fight and the baddies run for the hills with the aliens drawing the conclusion that ‘evil’ when forcefully confronted runs away.

Really Star Trek? That’s you conception of evil, that it is something that is cowardly at heart? Was that the result when the fascists were fought tooth and nail over every damn kilometer of Europe? That when ‘forcefully confronted’ that fled?

This is back in my head because as I am writing a novel populated with evil werewolves instead of the more popular sexy ones it has gotten me thinking about the nature of evil.

It is not that evil is more cowardly. I think one of the defining aspects of evil is that it is inherently selfish. It considers its own wants and desire above all else. it considers others as resources to be used, exploited, and discarded not as people in their own right.

In my novel this has raised its head among the pack of werewolves and it’s something to consider when viewing tragic, evil events in our all too real world.

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Three Weeks

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Next month in National Novel Writing Month when many people set out on the ambitious trail to write 50,000 words on a novel between November 1st and the 30th. I once tried this and failed miserably. Nor will I be going at it this month, but I fully support and encourage anyone who does.

What I will be doing is completing the first draft of The Wolves of Wallace Point, my The Wolf-Man subtext inspired werewolf novel. While I have written horror in short form before, quite a few short stories, and I even wrote an entire 90-page screenplay for a horror movie, this is the first crack at doing it in novel form.

As I have posted before this is also an experiment in writing without an outline. I started this project with only a single scene and very strong sense of the theme I wanted to explore. Characters appeared when they walked onto the stage revealing their nature to me. I had considered that if I reached 10 or 20 thousand words then there was a pretty decent chance the project would not sputter out and die but reach an ending.

Yesterday I crossed 70,000 words and fully expect the project to come in at around 80 to 85 thousand. That’s three more weeks at the leisurely pace I am currently doing. So, if I don’t crash on some unseen rocks, I’ll have the first draft completed in 3 weeks, just before I go north for LosCon, a Los Angeles Area SF conventions.

I know the draft requires revisions. Another crack as the battle between the werewolves and the bikers, a better detailing of the pack and who is in it. (Now that I know precisely who that is.) And a little more establishment of some characters and their inner turmoil but frankly it is not a lot of revision. There is very little in the first 30,000 words that is in conflict with the following 40 thousand. The act structure is in place and functional. It is almost as clean as if I had been working from an outline.

What a surprise.

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Spooky Season — Interrupted: The Pigeon Tunnel

Apple TV+

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A few days ago, the latest episode of KPSA Cinema Junkie podcast appeared on my iPhone naming documentarian Errol Morris and his latest film ‘The Pigeon Tunnel.’ The title meant nothing to me, and I let the episode sit unplayed. Then YouTube offered up to me the trailer for The Pigeon Tunnel which is an extended interview and documentary about bestselling author John le Carre.

John le Carre is the pen name of David Cornwell. Cornwell worked for British intelligence with MI5 and MI6 during some of the most consequential years for the west then went on to under his pen name craft some of the most compelling realistic espionage fiction ever composed. I consider spy stories to exist on a continuum with Flemings’s James Bond at the fantastical end and Le Carre’s George Smiley at the other. The Spy who Came in from the Cold, both the film and the novel, are perfect representations of the Cold War’s cynicism. Well, with all that there was no way I wasn’t going to watch The Pigeon Tunnel.

This documentary/interview, comprised of footage of Cornwell speaking, dramatic recreations of events and fantasies of his life, and brief clips from film and television adaptations of his works mine three rich veins from its subject.

One is the man’s life itself, his abandonment by his mother, his criminal conman father, his alienation at elite British schools, and how betrayal weaves throughout his existence. It’s a fascinating study of how events and environment shapes a person.

Second is his work and like within the UK’s intelligence community, particularly during the period when it was learned that Kim Philby, a man who had reached some of the highest positions of trust in that community, had for the entirety of his career been a Soviet agent.

And finally, there is also discussion of the craft and art of writing with glimpses of how Cornwell sees himself, the process, and the meaning of writing.

This film, which could have been dry and disinterested is instead compelling and as irresistible as its subject. The only reason I did not watch it all in one go is that I started it too late and on a work night I must get those seven hours of slumber. This thing grabs you, not with overly dramatic recreations of escapes and dangers but with the quiet reality of human drama and the pain of merely existing.

Beth Accamando interview is well worth the listen and she follows it up with a talk with two of Cornwell’s surviving sons, giving us a peek into the filmmaker and the family of a man that is forever fascinating.

The Pigeon Tunnel streams on Apple TV+.

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Past Me is an Ass

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Because the current novel in progress is also my first experimentation in writing a novel without an outline, I have now discovered what other writers already knew, that past me is an ass.

AS my main character has interacted more and more with the local crime family that are also werewolves past me saw quite clearly that there were division and factions with that pack of wolves. Both Darryl and his sister Diana were up to something, and events that transpired were part of a scheme with a goal in mind.

What is the scheme? What is the goal? Well, that’s a problem for future me to work out.

I am now future me.

There remains about 15 thousand words, give or take a couple of thousand, left to compose before I hit the end. It is really crunch time for the main characters and the author. Darryl’s plot and Diana plan, which may be the same thing or may not, is about to come to fruition. Provided I can figure out what it is these two evil asses are up to.

So far it has been beneficial that this novel is being written from a single first-person point of view. The main character hasn’t been let in on the conspiracy so I haven’t had to detail it out but I am laying track before a rushing locomotive and I need to work out the curve before it takes me over the cliff.

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