Category Archives: writing

Second Pfizer Dose

 

Yesterday, now about 23 hours ago, I received the second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for COVID-19. I count myself extremely lucky that workers in the health care industry, though I do not directly interact with patients or people receiving care, I am eligible to get the vaccine. I have to say that my employers and my union have done an excellent job providing care to our members and patients while protecting the staff and workers throughout our facilities.

As far as adverse events I seem have suffered quite few. I took the day off from work and that was the right call. By late afternoon I experienced muscles aches and possibly a fever but nothing more than that at the time. I was still able to get just over 1000 words down on my novel and attend the virtual meeting of my writers’ group.

This morning I awoke to a minor headache, enough to be annoying but not enough to compel the heavy-duty migraine medication or that I remain home. In about fifteen minutes or so I will leave for work, I am among the few that are working in the office versus working from home, and I expect today to be fairly routine. In one week, I should be at full immunity and be able to relax a little while mourning my dear friend who passed from this pandemic last year far too soon gone from our lives.

 

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5 Quick Thoughts

 

1) My current Work in Progress novel is rapidly reaching the completion for the first draft. I am currently at 97 thousand words and the story is likely to land between 101 and 106 thousand, then onto the revisions.

2) Resident Alien the SciFi show on Syfy has been pretty entertaining. Quirky characters, fun premise, and a fantastic performance from Alan Tudyk as the extraterrestrial marooned on Earth and masquerading as a doctor is amazing.

3) A deep concern for all my friends and everyone in the massive state of Texas.

4) I get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday and I urge everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they are able.

5) Ted Cruz once again displays that not only does have zero concern for the well-being of anyone not in a position to help him but that his intellectual capabilities are hamstrung by his selfish desires and wants. A competent villain would have used the crisis the forge a facade of ability and caring to propel them to greater political power but Cruz is incompetent as he is cruel and spineless.

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Re-Reading Dune

 

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new copy of Dune on eBook and began a re-read of the science-fiction classic. It had been decades since I last read Dune and while the major contours of the plot were well-known to me one of the things that took me by surprise is the out of style point of view.

Writing prose comes in three major points of view.

1) First Person, where the narrative is told directly by the character. The story is literally narrated by the protagonist. It’s a very intimate with every word being the character’s own. It’s also very limited as you can only see and hear what the character sees and hears.

2) Second Person, this takes the form of ‘You see this’ and so on. It is very rare as a fictional point of view but has been used here and there though it never works for me and always kicks me out of the story.

3) Third Person where the prose drops the artifice of a narrator and the prose is told from the viewpoint of observation outside of the characters,

Third person subdivides into three more types.

Third Person Objective, this is best thought of as a ‘like a movie.’ The point of view is outside all of the characters’ inner thoughts or lives and while we can see and hear things around the character we can never see into the characters’ heads.

Third Person Close, here we have a point of view that takes its tone from the character and even present narrative bits with the same biases and observations as the character. Looking at a factory with a close third person view where the character is an environmentalist may present the scene as despoiled and ugly while the same factory with an industrialist character may be presented as vibrant and thriving. This is the point of view most in style today.

Third Person Omniscient, this is the ‘god’s view.’ The point of view can be whatever the author wants. Close to the characters or even inside their minds hearing their thoughts and it is applied to whatever character the author needs. This is the point of view of Dune and it used to be used a lot more often than it is used today. A danger of the third person objective is something called ‘head hopping’ where the point of view switches often and frequently between various characters and this is very true in Dune. Two characters in the novel will be having a conversation and the Herbert will fly between the unspoken thoughts of both back and forth. To me this is jarring and makes the scenes difficult to emotionally engaged with as I have to keep shifting mental gears to follow the oscillating points of view. Mind you this point of view is a fairly common one decades ago and its disuse is more of a matter of style than narrative rule. However, because it is a now nearly an archaic prose approach it has put some distance between me and the book.

 

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The Unused Gun

The Unused Gun

I am on twitter but not gifted with prose that is pithy or witty my tweets die lonely deaths in the vastness of the internet. That’s fine. I read and share a number of great tweets and threads so I get value from it.

Yesterday in response to C.C. Finlay’s tweet about Game of Thrones and how the ending was so botched it made him indifferent to re-watching the series I answered with a couple of tweets one of which actually got engagement- shocking.

In writing there is the concept of Chekov’s Gun, it had nothing to do with the fiery is miseducated officer of the Enterprise but rather the Russian playwright who advised that if there is a gun on the mantle in first act it must be fired by the third.

In Game of Thrones a great deal of narrative time and energy was consumed having young Arya Stark but one of the faceless men, assassins able to take on the appearance of others in order to complete their missions. The audience followed Arya through trials, tribulations, and near death as she acquired these skills. This is the gun on the mantel.

And yet at the end of the series this mystical ability played no part in the resolving of any major plot element. yes, it allowed Arya to get revenge on people and Houses that had wronged and betrayed her family but in the central plotlines of ‘Who will Rule Westeros?’ or ‘How will the Threat from the North Be overcome?’ the years training and leaning this talent proved worthless.

In their mad rush to complete the series the show runners trampled one of the most quoted and most valued pieces of writing advice and the gun stayed on the mantel.

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One Last Act to Perform

 

I’m quite pleased with how my WIP in coming along. Last night I completed Act 4, the character is now isolated and under official sanction if she continues the investigation but the truth compels her onward. I have one more act to write. If Act 5 comes in around projected sized my first draft should land just shy of 100,000 words.

Once the final act is completed, that’s another 2-3 weeks of writing, then I have a few major revisions to implement and a serious decision to make.

When I first conceived this novel early on in the backstory, I had two major paths to decide between in how things worked. I went with path B now as I near the end I cannot for the life of me remember why path B was the superior one and I have to consider that possibly it wasn’t and part of the revisions should be putting everything on A. It would not be a ground up rewriting, its direct effect on the plot in fact is rather minimal but I find it terribly frustrating that I can’t recall the reason for my decision.

Oh well, the good news is that the characters and the story are progressing very nicely and I’m pleased with the overall effect. We’ll see if beta readers feel the same way.

 

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76,000 Words

 

My work in progress, currently titled as Murder on the Bellerophon, has reached 76,000 words and I am expecting that the finished first draft will land between 95,000 and 100,000 words. My published novel, Vulcan’s Forge available wherever you buy books, was a slim 80,000 words but at this moment I do not feel that the current WIP is in need of any serious cutting.

I am also happy to report that I have written my way through what I expected to be the most difficult sequence in the novel. When I outlined the book, my intent was to tell the tale from a single viewpoint. I think with mysteries it is best to restrict your viewpoints as much as possible. However, in the planning I developed a sequence where a character is chased by an angry mob and it was simply impossible to have my protagonist present. A part of me dreaded this essential plot development while not having my point of view right there. It is the sort of scene that can easily be boring if told via another character’s flashback or worse yet watched by the protagonist on a monitor. Surprisingly when I actually reached that section, it rolled on with the same ease that the previous chapters had.

I have a few more scenes that will be written this week and with those Act 4 will close and I will swing into the novel’s final act. Then will come revisions and editing and then the beta readers. There is always more work to be done.

 

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On Killing Your Darlings

 

There’s an adage on writing that says you must ‘kill your darlings.’ What it means it that you must be ruthless in your editing. That scene, that sub-plot, that turn of phrase that you can’t believe you wrote, that you love to read and admire, if it doesn’t belong, if it leads the reader astray, if the spoils the pacing, then it must be excised out.

While I have had a brushing encounter with this concept, I can’t say it has ever really hit me hard emotionally.

My novel Vulcan’s Forge was adapted from a novella version of the story. (A novella was far too short for what I wanted hence the book that is now out in the wild.) The novella ended on a particular line, a turn of phrase I thought perfectly summed up the character’s emotional arc. ‘I still dream of Pamela.’ But when I was doing the edit on the novel about half a page from that final line the story ended.

Yes, I really liked that line it was the point and objective of the novella but it no longer fit. That last half page vanished from the manuscript and I did not hesitate or look back.

The entire post credit scene thing that Marvel Movies love to do came about from a similar situation. The Original Iron Man was supposed to end with Star going home and have that encounter with Fury but in the editing the filmmakers instinctively understood that ‘I Am Iron Man’ was the end of the story. Under normal condition that extra scene would have been discarded much like the deleted scenes of Lewis in hopsital that would have ended the film Robocop but Marvel Studios need to promise and tease The Avengersand so the post credit scene tradition was born. Before that these scenes often called buttons did occasionally exist but held no plot meaning but were mere bits of fun such as the ‘cursed monkey’ after the credits of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

The real lesson of kill your darlings is understand your story, know what fits, what is essential and what is not.

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Some of My Work

Some of My Work

What role do movies play in shaping culture? If you were building a culture from nothing how could movies help you shape the people and their attitudes?

These are two of the questions explored in my SF noir novel Vulcan’s Forge. Set on the distant human colony of Nocturnia which is isolated and without any external contact, Jason Kessler chaffs at the colonies pseudo-Americana society that he helps shape with carefully curated mass media while fascinated by the tawdry, forbidden films banned from public or private viewing. When Pamela Guest sweeps into his life offering unrestricted access to these pleasures and more Jason is drawn into a web of lies, crimes, and conspiracies that shatters everything he thought he knew about his home.

Vulcan’s Forge was released the first week of the global lockdown last year but copies are available everywhere and signed ones from my local bookseller Mysterious Galaxy.

Remember when in the original Series of Star Trek because the budgets and the technology were so limited to produce the show how often the characters encountered ‘duplicates’ of Earth? I certainly do and that inspired for the question, how could a duplicate Earth exist? What might that mean? The result of that speculation was my short story A Canvass Dark and Deep which was published by NewMyths.com and is reprinted in their anthology Twilight Worlds: The Best of Newmyths, available in both ebook and print.

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Structure is not a Straitjacket

 

When I planned out my current novel in progress, I made the minimum target for the word count to be about 80,000 and as has become custom for me I plotted the story out using a five-act structure. I very much like the more detailed approach that 5 acts gives me over the more traditional 3 act where the second act seems rather loosely defined.

Given 5 acts that would make each one about 16,000 words long, longer if I move towards the 90,000 words possibility.

So, earlier this week I finished act 3 and moved in act 4 where things spiral out of control and here are the sizes of the acts written so far: Act 1 16,200, Act 2 16,600, and Act 3 32,700.

Wow, that 3rd act is massive and of course I was aware of it as I wrote it. So much happens as the murder investigation digs deep and uncovers elements that the characters could have scarcely imagined much less expected.

Am I panicking? Am I going back and looking for massive cuts to bring that Act down to a size more like the first two?

Nope.

Structure tells me where the story is going and what sort of elements are required to move it forward it is not a detailed diagram that with exact word or page counts. Now, this is an early draft and when I dive into the first revisions I will be looking to see if I leaned heavily on exposition, covered the same ground more than once, and other elements that I would be looking for anyway but I will not be looking to ‘force’ the Act down to match the others. Variation, even when one act at twice the size of the others, is not a reason to panic edit. The Act structure is a guide not detailed instructions and when a reader picks up your novel, they do not see the structure, they see the characters, the troubles, and the moral quandaries. If they see the structure then the story has failed.

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Good Riddance to a Rubbish year

It is the last day of the year for 2020 and in just a few hours we will begin the first year of a new decade. I need not remind anyone that the year 2020 has been an unholy trash fire with few redeeming elements.

Personally, my year started off fairly well. I was optimistically looking forward to the publication of my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge from Flametree press and in February I spent the day with a dear friend at Disneyland pre-celebrating that novel’s release.

Early March saw me nervously preparing for my book launch event at the unparallel book seller Mysterious Galaxy, and signed copies of my novel are still available there. Then the world shut down.

Lockdowns, first here in California but very quickly across the country and around the world as people scrambled to deal with the emerging global pandemic.

At my day-job the staff were quickly given computer systems and monitors and sent to work from home while I volunteered to be one of the few office-working staff. We weathered the transition well and while there were bumps and issues, we continued to meet the needs of our member/patients and unluck so many people in worse situations fully employed. The wall calendar at my work where people record their upcoming time off still displays March 2020.

Vulcan’s Forge launched in the first week of lockdowns and naturally the sales were hammered like Thor beating on Thanos.

In June the pandemic took my dear friend of 40 years. We shall never see his like again.

Ealy fall I submitted a proposal for a second novel to my editors who professed great excitement at the story but the publisher, working from the pitiful pandemic slammed sales numbers of my first book declined any more novels from me.

That book that is already 60,000 words written and I’m quite happy with it so either through traditional publication or self-publication it will very likely see the light of day.

November brought the election of a sane non-corrupt man to the office of President of the United States and we can begin the very long process of rebuilding our nation’s reputation.

The final month of the year gave us not one but two vaccines utilizing new technologies to fight this scourge that had killed more than 300,000 thousand in America, 1 in every 1000, and so we have reason to see light in 2021 but that new dawn is still faint the there is much darkness to endure before we are warmed that that new day.

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