It took not an inconsiderate application of willpower to not dance around my desk at the office yesterday. For the last two days, actual forward progression on my Work-In-Progress, a novel of ghostly cinematic horror, has been halted while I reverse engineer backstory. I had reached the point where mysteries laid out in the text and bedeviling the characters would begin to be understood and their origins revealed, but because I was ‘pantsing’ this story when I wrote those mysteries I did not actually have the answers and explanations in my head.

Now, I do.

The last two days have been working out from what is known and what has been hinted at, the full shape of the story, why it all exists in the manner that it does, and just what the scope of the dangers truly are. This isn’t entirely ‘pulled out of my ass.’ Some of this I suspected as I wrote the novel but other bits I knew I was leaving for future me to solve, and now present me is future me, and I am so happy with my solutions that dancing was nearly irresistible.

As is so often the case, once that clarity is obtained, a full understanding of not only character and plot but theme and subtext as well, a new and better first line came to me. I don’t need a whole new first scene but now I have the sentence that opens the novel: After the summer of 1984 Dave Ludendorff never again lived a charmed life.

Paramount+

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My current Work in Progress (WIP) is the first novel I have written entirely by the seat of my pants, or less crudely, organically, without any sort of outline to guide me.

When I started the manuscript, I knew a few key things. I knew I wanted to write a story about supernatural occurrences tied to silver nitrate motion picture film, that there would be some sort of ghost involved (my favorite horror genre), and that I would be using a fictionalized version of San Diego’s Ken Theater.

I had planned to create an outline for this book, but before I had completed much research, I felt my enthusiasm flagging, and waiting on the research would likely kill the project. So I dove straight into it with just those elements in my head and a very vague notion of how to make it work in a five-act structure.

Now, some 73,000 words into the project and with the end, if blurry, in sight, the experience has been interesting, particularly with respect to the characters involved.

I have a host of diverse characters—gay and straight, white, black, Asian, young, and old—but it’s two that have caused the theme to leap forward.

Dave, the protagonist of the novel, is the white gay man who owns the independent Kensington Theater, which he inherited from his father, along with a sizeable passive income that allows him not to worry about such banalities as a regular day job. Dave’s father always acknowledged his son’s sexuality with love and acceptance. Dave never faced serious bigotry, even in middle or high school during the 1970s. He has never wanted materially or even emotionally for anything essential—in effect, a charmed life. Dave pays this back by not only being accepting of others who walk a different path but also by making sure his theater is an open and safe place for misfits, geeks, oddballs, and the socially different, particularly during the midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Terrance, originally introduced to further the cursed film plot, has developed into a gay character with a quite different backstory. His family did not have the financial resources that Dave enjoys. Adding to the troubles is that Terrance’s father believed in socially dictated gender roles for men and found his sensitive boy a terrible disappointment, which turned to outright hostility at his son’s preference for men over women as sexual partners. Terrance’s mother, retreating from an emotionally distant and abusive husband, left her boy without the affection children desperately require. By his teenage years, Terrance had already begun self-medicating with pot and beer, and in his aborted college attempts, he discovered harder drugs and attempted to fill the emotional void in his heart with anonymous sex in public parks and bathrooms. In order to cover his emotional wounds and project an acceptable self-image, Terrance became a person expert at putting on a public face, making him an excellent salesman.

While Dave thrives in and fosters community, Terrance has none and suffers from silent isolation, making him easily manipulable by the supernatural forces unleashed.

The themes that have arisen organically from the writing are the importance of community and that we are not just who we choose to be but also what the world has made us. I wonder what other new things will appear in the final chapters and the coming serious revisions.

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So, I have posted that the ‘E’ on my keyboard turned bad and I lost a couple of weeks of writing, first because that letter is so required in English and then by waiting for the repairs to be completed.

When I got the laptop back, I thought I had regained the forward momentum on this novel. The scene I was in the middle of when everything went off the rails I completed easily, setting up the next twist in the story.

And then my creative sailboat became becalmed, and I was stuck.

I knew that I had to switch to the antagonists of the tale. At this point in the narrative, there were two groups of them, not working collectively and with goals in opposition to both the protagonist and each other. However, their deficit of knowledge left me puzzled as to either group’s course of action. My fingers refused to write the next scene because my brain refused to tell them what it was.

Now, some writers deal with this by jumping ahead and writing some other scene in the story, and then they backfill the bits in between. I can’t do that.

One, since I am ‘pantsing’ this to the extreme, I don’t know what the future scenes are, much less what to write in them.

Two, I have never been able to do that writing out of order trick, even when I have a detailed outline that provides the future scenes. As a writer, I need to experience the scenes as they happen in the text. This greatly informs how I write and how the emotions of the scenes impact me and, hopefully, the reader.

Friday night, after I affixed my CPAP mask to my face and climbed into bed, the answer flashed into my head. The next morning it stayed with me, and I told part of it to my sweetie-wife as we did our 2-mile morning walk by the San Diego River.

Yesterday I began writing the scene, and the words flowed freely from my brain to the keyboard. Sometimes, all you need is a little time.

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Monday, I got the call from my local Apple store that the repairs on Colossus (my MacBook Air) had been completed, and the laptop was ready to be picked up.

For pretty much all of September I have been unable to work on my novel during my lunch hour as the ‘E’ key on the keyboard had been behaving rather badly, enough to totally disrupt any writing. English has the nasty aspect that ‘E’ is the most commonly employed letter making it, in the case, the most commonly irritating. With every sentence possessing words either without ‘E’s or having far too many of them, I found it impossible to achieve the state of mind that let the creation of the world just flow from my brain to the document.

So, after getting the call in the morning I spent my lunch hour driving from work to the Fashion Valley Apple store. Luckily, I live and work in Mission Valley so all this transpired within a few miles, and I retrieved my laptop. However, with the lunch hour nearly exhausted I got no work done that day.

Yesterday proved to be a better day. Nearly 800 words completed during my lunch and the flow state, despite my apprehension that the interruption has killed connection with the story, had returned.

Perhaps this forced break in the writing of a novel without an outline as my roadmap has turned out to be a blessing from the muses. In the interim a few elements have fallen into place as my brain continued imagining and working the story. Some of the character’s backstory is now much clearer in my mind, the solution to a thorny problem, how will the character discover a hidden cache of vital importance in his place business is now in sight, and the central question of the story has appeared before me.

It has become, once you set aside all the horror, the ghosts, the evil cult of wealthy people, a story about two men, both gay, both in their early thirties but for whom life has been very different. One raised in an accepting environment and exposed to a wide library of arts who was never made to be ashamed of who and what he was. The other man subjected to emotional abuse and isolation from his homophobic family pushing him into a life of desperately seeking acceptance but unable to give it to himself, spiraling into a life of meaningless encounters and substance abuse. The supernatural events of the story challenge both men to ask who they really are.

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One of my most productive writing times is during my day job’s lunch hour. I eat a fast lunch, usually a microwaved single serving meal, and when that’s done, spend the rest of the hour writing on my MacBook.

I can get anywhere from 800 to 1200 words written, and because I use my iPhone as a hotspot not a byte of that writing passes through my employer’s corporate network. (Call me paranoid but I am a firm believer in keeping all personal data off an employer’s network.)

This week is proving to be frustrating in more than one manner.

First off, I have come to some conclusions about the plot with very serious implications and great dramatic potential, but they require that I really work out the backstory elements that in my writing by-the-seat-of-my-pants, I haven’t yet considered.

More impactful is that the key for the letter ‘E’ on my MacBook is now acting up like a frustrated two-year-old. Sometimes, quite often really, it doesn’t register the strike, and I end up with a word missing one or more Es. Other times it gets stuck, and I am suddenly confronted with a long string of the most used vowel in the English language.

I have an appointment on Saturday morning to have the machine serviced, but until then my productivity is taking a serious hit. Yesterday I managed a mere 200 words as my stream of creative thought was constantly interrupted while I inserted or deleted Es in various bits of text.

This will not be a long period of hampered writing, and I still have high hopes that the first draft of Cult Movie (working title) will be completed by the end of the month.

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One of the challenges in this current novel I am writing, created because I am “pantsing” it—writing the entire thing without a preplanned map or outline—is that I know certain things need to be solved, but the manner of that resolution was utterly unknown to me.

For example, the cultists who have set the plot into motion started everything some 52 years before the novel opens in 1984. Their actions, plots, plans, and objectives are buried in that history and drive the major action, both physical and supernatural, of the story. That’s all well and good, but for the protagonist to come out ahead—to defeat their plans—he has to first know and understand them, and he is way out of date.

There never was going to be a Bond or comic book-like scene where one of the bad guys takes the time to explain everything to my protagonist. That’s not this type of story, and it is not my style of writing.

I knew this problem existed, and in previous books I would have solved the trouble at the outline stage, having worked out a method that served the story, the character, and my own sense of plotting—but not when I am pantsing it. I started the manuscript with only the vaguest idea of precisely what was happening and why, much less any conception of how the “good guys” were going to get clued in on it.

Now I have completed Act 4 of 5, and I really, really need to answer that troublesome question.

And the answer came to me yesterday. It arose naturally, organically from events and backstory I had created along the way. There are details to be worked out and much establishing to do in the revision stage, but the shape can be seen, and it had been there for chapters and chapters—but it took me a good long while to see it.

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While I had hoped to get writing done at last week’s World Science Fiction Convention, the stress of the unhappy events made that nearly impossible. Oh, I managed to complete a scene I was in the middle of with an additional 600 or so words written during one session, but that was the sum total of my writing during the five days.

Yesterday, back at my day job, at lunch I got down 800 words on the next scene, and I can feel the narrative moving again. With this act nearly completed and only one act remaining, I can see the end of the manuscript, and I should reach it before September is done.

That leaves a lot of work yet to be done on it, though. This is the only novel that I have written by the seat of my pants, no list of characters and their traits, no outline showing all the major events, I just sat down and started the thing with scarcely any idea of where it was heading. That means that there is a lot of ‘reconstruction’ to do once I reach the end. For example, I now have a much clearer concept of the story’s themes, community being one of them. The communities that betray you and the ones that defend you has emerged as an element of the plot. It is also about outsiders to the wider culture and the insiders, and how that dynamic puts pressure on the individual. All of this I had no conception of when the first words hit the page, and now the revisions much strengthen and elaborate on these ideas.

Still, with luck and determination, I may have a completed novel ready before the end of the year.

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