Category Archives: writing

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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A Strange Little Idea

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep an idea sparked in my head for plotting stories in a visual manner. This is not about discovering or working out the plot beats to a story but rather finding a way to show them visually as a potential tool for analysis and revision.

Using a spreadsheet, the idea would be to assign each chapter a value positive of negative for how the events in that chapter have impacted the protagonist for good or ill. Things better for the character would be a positive number and things getting worse would be a negative one with the size of the number reflecting just how much better or worse the event was.

Then these values could be graphed with the X-Axis being the chapter numbers and the Y-Axis the event values. This would produce a line going up with ever ‘good’ turn in the story and descending for every ‘bad’ one. The sections could be further labeled with the acts to see how well the written matches against the expectations of structure.

I’m going to make such a graph after the first draft of my new novel is completed and see just what it tells me, if anything. This idea may be a waste of time or it may be a new and valuable tool. We shall see.

 

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Thinking About Stakes

When crating fiction a common bit of advice to ‘raise the stakes.’ This is a suggestion of magnify the penalty for failure for the protagonist making the eventual success or failure that much more impactful for the reader or audience. However, this is usually or at least often interpreted as threaten more lives, make the potential explosions larger, the potential death toll higher but that is too simplistic a way to think about stakes.

In franchise material there is what I call the ‘Bond Effect’ where each adventure has to have more on the line than the previous adventure. Very quickly the writers find themselves in the situation where Bond has to save the entire world, from nuclear annihilation, a murderous madman with a secret orbiting space station of death, what have you, and once he has saved the world saving it again has less entertainment value We know there is never going to be a Bond film where the world dies, not even the 70s got that bleak so the combination of an assured outcome and devalued victory makes each world save less thrilling until they become boring. For this effect magnified beyond look to the UK program Doctor Who where the stakes have been repeatedly raised to the entire universe sometimes destroying and recreating the universe as their climatic conclusions.

What all this misses is that stakes are most potent when we are emotionally invested in them. Setting aside the ‘save the world or universe’ trope the protagonist is they fail should suffer deep emotional coast and or loss. This is a lesson well learned in dramatic fiction and too often not in genre stories. Marvel studios did this particularly well in a couple of films, notably Captain America: The Winter Soldier where after saving the world we got to the real stakes for Steve Rogers, saving his friend Bucky Barnes from Hydra’s mind control and Captain America: Civil War where the world was never in danger but rather at its heart it is the friendship between Steve and Tony Stark that is in danger and in that story ultimately lost. The cost of failure is the emotional damage to the characters, these are very high stakes that are intimately personal and emotionally compelling for the audience.

It’s easy to craft plots with larger and larger death star threatening planets and entire star systems it is harder but more satisfying into dive deep into character and find the thing that matters most to them as a person and make us the readers and the audience share in the terror of losing that thing. Then you will have stakes that really matter.

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Twilight Worlds: The best of New Myths Vol 2

One night I watched an episode of the Original Series Star Trek and the Enterprise arrived at a planet that was nearly identical to Earth. Of course, the production’s very limited budget and the period’s limited special effects capability forced the creators to use such gimmicks to meet the demand of a weekly television series, but it sparked a thought What might cause an identical Earth to be discovered?

This moment of inspiration led to my short story A Canvas Dark and Deeppublished in NewMyths.com issue 41 and now re-printed in their collection Twilight Worlds: The Best of New Myths Volume 2.

Available December 15th, today, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble in both eBook and physical editions, Twilight Worlds represents some of the best and most imaginative stories published by NewMyths.com and I am deeply honored to have A Canvas Dark and Deep included in this anthology.

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Steady Progress

So, even though this annual Medicare enrollment is the busiest I have seen in six years and that is creating tons of overtime work at my day-job I continue to make progress on my next novel.

This week, since the overtime is optional and the stress of it has cause my psoriasis to flare, I have reduced my hours back to the standard 40-hour week. I am quite happy that when I laid out my plan for this novel, I made my daily word count goal a mere 1000 words per day. Many days I surpass that target and since October when I started there have been just three or four days when I failed to meet it. This demonstrates the importance of modest goals.

When your goal is modest you will achieve it more often providing a psychological boost and a sense of well-being while if you make your objective too ambitious then frequent failure can provoke despair and senses of failure which hamper meeting the goal again and creating a feedback cycle that ends in nothing being achieved.

I could have easily set my goal at 1500 words per day. That’s a level I have consistently achieved before but knowing that the busy season was barreling down upon me I went with a more modest target and because I did, I feel good about my achievement and the work in progress is actually ahead of schedule.

My calendar shows my plan was to hit 46,000 words out of an estimate 80,000 by this Friday and as of this morning I am currently at 45,000 words.

My method may not be for you and your writing style but I find an outline, a sensible goal, and a reasonable amount of butt in chair and fingers to keyboard yields consistent results.

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