Category Archives: writing

Irrational Authorial Annoyances

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Sometimes, because I spend a lot of time bending words and phrases to my will, things annoy me that I suspect flow past others unnoticed.

Last night I was reading a non-fiction book on WWII’s aerial bombing campaign when such an event occurred.

The author has just explained to the reader that when a bombing crew were briefed on what appeared to be an easy assignment with minimal chances for danger this sort of the mission was called a ‘milk run.’ That is all well and good. In the computer game 50 Mission Crush I had already encountered the phrase and always welcomed a ‘milk run’ as I tried to complete the requisite 50 mission tour of duty.

After educating the reader on what a ‘milk run’ was the author, going on about a particular mission, then wrote ‘The milk run curdled.’

I was so annoyed that my sweetie-wife in the kitchen heard me and asked what was wrong.

A ‘milk run’ is a thing, it is the noun of the sentence and ‘milk runs’ do not curdle. Milk curdles, but milk runs do not. I get what the author was going for and with a minor bit of reworking they could have achieved the effect that they wanted. Something along the lines of ‘On this run, the milk curdled.’ See? In that phrasing the curdling is applied to milk which does curdle not to a bombing mission which does not.

I am shocked that this clumsy and terrible applied metaphor not only survived the author’s first and following drafts but the editors through it also passed.

It is the following morning and this freaking sentence is still annoying me.

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Bits and Bobs

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Not a lot to post this morning as I awoke with a low-grade migraine. Not enough to keep me home but strong enough to require medication and to screw with my focus.

Sunday evening I stayed for the evening in a hotel as San Diego Gas & Electric had a planned outage for our condo complex that may have lasted several hours while I would have been asleep. Without power my CPAP machine will not function, and I would sleep terribly and so would my sweetie-wife due to the return of my snoring.

Also Sunday I discovered a non-fiction book I just had to read, Shot From The Sky: American POWs in Switzerland. Allied aired crew in Switzerland has fascinated me since I learned of the topic in the later 80s. This book had first-hand accounts of life while interned by the ‘neutral’ Swiss.

The Wolves of Wallace Point my Idaho werewolf novel is coming along. I have just passed 63,000 words and should need only another 17 to 25 thousand to complete this draft. This week I should transition into the fifth and final act with still only a vague and hazy sense of how to resolve everything.

That’s all for now.

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What I Have Learned ‘Pantsing’ a Novel

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When I first started this current Work in Progress, I didn’t even recognize it as starting a new novel. I had a vague concept for a theme exploring the often-forgotten subtext of 1941’s The Wolf-Man that the werewolf could be a metaphor representing fascism. A scene occurred to me, and I sat at my keyboard and banged it out, without any real solid idea where in this possible story the scene might take place. I read to my writing group and got back very strong very favorable responses with several expressing that they wanted more of the story.

So, without outline and only a vague sense of where this might go, I just kept writing what happened after the Nazi biker had been chased from the local working man’s bar. Soon a couple of chapters had been written and a structure for an entire tale formed in my mind. I had a very loose idea of what key events might occur in the five acts, my preferred story structure, and I began keeping a document just listing the characters because inventing them on the fly made it far too easy to forget details of the minor ones. I figured that if I reached 20,000 to 25,000 words then there was a decent chance the project would not implode, and I might get a complete novel of 80,000 to 90,000 words out of the process.

I am about to close out the 4th act with nearly 64,000 words composed and the 5th act ready to rumble. The manuscript will be finished, and it had been quite the learning experience.

I have learned to trust my instincts.

Several major characters and plot developments have occurred on the fly. At the time these people or events appeared on the page their importance and the way that they illuminated the theme in my mind wasn’t obvious until much later. The ‘gut’ feeling about the characters has yet to fail me.

I have learned that all I need is the next waypoint.

This is not to disparage the outlines of my previous works. My published noir science-Fiction Vulcan’s Forge required a detailed outline because noir is twisty and mysterious and so while in any particular section the characters and the reader may be blind to the reasons things are unfolding as they are, I needed to know that and only an outline provided that clarity. But something not as twisty, like a horror novel about a pack of werewolves in Northern Idaho, all I required is knowing where I was going a few thousand words ahead.

I have learned that being lost is not the end.

Several times I have been writing the scene in front of me, knowing where I roughly wanted the act to end up, but at an utter lose what needed to happen between those points. Instead of stopping and outlining a clear path I have discovered that so far as I write solutions reveal themselves. Sometimes the answer came while writing and other times just before sleep, but they came, I just needed to trust the process.

I do not know how I will write my next novel, but I am richer for having ‘pantsed’ The Wolves of Wallace Point.

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Nope, Not Going to See the New Exorcist Movie

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I have just read a review of The Exorcist: Believer and it confirmed precisely what I feared, and not in the good horror movie kind of way, about that sequel.

Minor Spoilers for The Exorcist: Believer

Apparently in the climatic exorcism scene the ritual to cast out the demon this time is a multi-faith exercise involving various Christian and Non-Christian faiths because as one character had stated ‘it doesn’t matter what you have faith in as long as you have faith.’

This is the sort of shit that really annoyed the fuck out of me in bad storytelling and crappy world building.

As I have said in other posts, I am not a person of faith. I do not believe that there are any supernatural beings, gods, devils, demons, or ghosts. That doesn’t preclude me from enjoying a good piece of fiction that posits the existence of any along those lines. For the sake of a good story, I can give you all sorts of impossible things. The human body is a very complex and intricate machine easily broken and turned lifeless by any number if little chemical reactions gone astray but I can much my popcorn and lose myself in a good zombie movie even while knowing that re-animated dead are an impossibility.

When a storyteller or filmmaker resorts to the ‘it’s the person’s faith’ that makes the magic and not the myth or lore of the world, the story loses its power and its meaning. If a vampire is repelled by a cross than in that world that setting I want the blood of the Christ to be what causes evil to flee and not the ego of the person wielding the religious iconography. When angels come to Earth, bringing the war in heaven here as they battle over a child’s soul, I want to answer to come from Christian myth not some misplaced ‘noble savage’ appropriation of native American faith. When Catholic priests confront a demon and with ‘the power of Christy’ compel it to leave that tells me we are in a world of Christina lore and myth. All I am saying is be true to the rules, lore, and myth you are using for your tale and do not water it down for a mass audience seeking to not offend anyone.

In the Hulu television series Reservation Dogs, the mundane world and the mythical world of the Native American co-exist. Some characters are shocked when the spirits of their ancestors appear to them and others seem to live in that liminal space between those two worlds, but throughout the series the world is simply presented as it is and as it is believed in without any muddying of the waters about ‘it doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you believe.’

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I Need A New Name

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As I have previously mentioned I am currently writing a horror novel about werewolves in the far north of Idaho. The process is going surprisingly well considering that is also an experiment in writing a long form piece of fiction without my traditional outline to guide me. In the five-act structure I have adopted as my preferred story framework the first draft of The Wolves of Wallace Point, I have reached act 4 and haven’t yet struck the shoals that might sink this enterprise.

I have reached out to an editor that I am on fairly decent terms with and expressed that the novel could be finished soon and if they were interested heading out in their direction early in 2024. The reaction was favorable but with the caveat that given my previous novel was seriously science-fiction and a commercial train wreak it was likely that this book and subsequent horror novels would require to be published under a pen name.

In my traditional fashion of being overly concern way ahead of the need I find my thoughts returning again and again to the idea of a pen name.

What sort of name should it be?

Something wild and obviously crafted for the cover? Something to honor family members who helped me along the way? Something that places it near the front of an alphabetical list, so the book is near the front of any horror section in a bookstore? Something unique as to stick in a shoppers memory?

So many considerations and I have no guidance in how to proceed.

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This and That

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There were no posts on this blog last week because I took a week off to do nearly nothing. The busy time for my day-job is fast approaching, the team I work with had lost several members since the last Annual Enrollment Period for Medicare Advantage plans that bodes for loads of work & overtime, and I decided on a staycation at home before the flood hits.

I did work on my werewolf novel. The book has now passed 50,000 words and I suspect that there are about 35,000 left before I complete the first draft. It has been an interesting experiment and experience writing a novel without an outline. I did take a moment after a couple of chapters at the start to jot down on a single page the five-act structure and possible major events in each act, but even that thin plan had been altered as the story has progressed and characters appeared and influenced those around them. Because there was not much, or any, planning and plotting prior to prose production I am finding that there are a few elements that will require corrections. For example, my fictional county ‘Wallace Point’ will have to move further north in Idaho and that will alter the reference to the surrounding counties and towns. Still, I am quite happy with the results so far.

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The Werewolf Experiment Continues

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My work in progress, an un-outlined novel about werewolves in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho has reached or nearly has reached the half-way point.

I am aiming for a novel from 80,000 to 90,000 words in length. Yesterday the total word count for the project passed 40,000 as I wrote the unfinished chapter 12.

As I have laid out in earlier posts, my approach to this novel is quite different, starting with a scene that I had no concept of where it might belong in the story and spinning out from there. While there is no formal outline and certainly nothing like the monstrous ones I have produced in the past for other novels, there is a single page document laying out the five acts and very rough plot points that might occur in each of those. But even that is subject to inspirational and sudden change. Last Friday as I reclined in the dentist’s chair while they implanted a socket in my skull for an implanted false tooth a new understanding of the story’s third act, the one I am currently in, came together in an epiphany.

I am unsure of the market for this piece. The genre I am aiming for is horror, modern, real-world set but with fantastic elements horror. Currently there are a lot of werewolf type stories out for people, but an awful lot of the prose ones are romances, with commanding ‘alphas’ as dominate, sexy leads and that is pretty much the opposite of what I am trying to craft.

This work is in theme much closer to the subtext of Siodmak’s The Wolf-Man with a commentary on fascism and how that brutal ideology can be seductive. My werewolves, discarding the discredited ‘alpha wolf’ theory for the junk science that it is, is focuses on wolf family dynamics, transforming these werewolves into ‘Family Value’ fascists. That’s a lot of political weight to carry in a horror novel but I firmly believe that stories have to be about something more than plot and horror needs more than gore.

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Of Parallel And Duplicate Earths

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For its season Finale Star Trek: Strange New Worlds revisited one of classic Trek’s most used budget cutting tropes, a world that looks exactly like out real world. This time instead of a parallel Earth that somehow evolved the exact same continents the justification was a settler colony obsessed with 20th century Earth cultures. (hmm, sound like my book. Same idea deployed for different reasons.) As ‘parallel’ Earths go this was a pretty decent justification and really just there to allow for backlot and location shooting instead of expansive and expensive set construction.

It did get me thinking about those old episodes where the Enterprise discovered a planet exactly like Earth but lightyears distant. It was while watching an old episode of classic Trek that I had one had the idea of writing my own parallel Earth short story.

The possibility of a star system evolving in a doppelganger version of out own is absurdly improbable and the answer to that ‘why is it there?’ question formed the central conceit of the story A Canvas Dark and Deep. Which sold to the fine internet magazine NewMyths.com. You can read it here in their archives.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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More Thoughts on Star Trek Strange New Worlds

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As I write this, we are one episode away from the conclusion of Season 2 of Star Tre: Strange New Worlds. This season has brought more episodes that swung at new things and new styles than season one, a crossover episode with an animated Trek Series, and the franchise’s first foray into musical territory, while also exploring the deep dark of some of their characters.

The series remains straddling the two worlds of television, being both episodic with each episode pretty much a self-contained story but also with one foot in the saga format as events

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

from previous episodes reverberate both in plot and emotion for the characters.

The series is Canon breaking. The events and experiences of the characters cannot be reconciled with the depictions first aired more than 50 years ago. I am fine with that. The nature of televised story telling has changed dramatically over the last half century and what was acceptable writing and plotting in the middle of the 1960s would never fly for today’s audiences. I would rather the series creatives break Canon and continuity in the furtherance of good character development and story revelations that commit to slavish devotion to a Canon that wasn’t adhered to even during the original broadcasts. There are of course limits. A story that requires that James Kirk joined Starfleet because he was on the run as a serial killer would be a Canon breaking event far too great to accept but having original series characters meeting people that in the first broadcasts that they had no knowledge of. No big deal if the final effect is to tell a good story.

The entire cast continues to deliver stellar performances. (Pun intended, fully and without regret.) The storylines give most of them more to do than any series airing in the 60s would have dared. This season’s treatment of Jim Kirk has felt more in keeping with the original character than his guest appearance in season one. It is quite pleasant to see some of the more supporting characters from the original series getting a deeper backstory and more emotional exploration than they received originally. Spock’s stories seem to create the greatest conflict with ‘Canon,’ but I remind you that even the original series couldn’t make-up its mind on what exactly was the truth. In the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before he refers to an ‘ancestor’ that one married an Earth woman and later this is simply ignored to make his mother human. Having Spock explore and experiment with allowing his human side to be expressed more freely may be a Canon violation, but I find it fascinating.

The characters I am most interested in and have the greatest emotional attachment to are Dr M’Benga, La’an Noonian Singh, and most of all Christine Chapel.

La’an, torn between her nature, button-downed and controlled, and her desire to be more open, expressed in her solo in the musical episode but contained within Christina Chong’s performance well before that is emotionally powerful.

M’Benga and Chapel’s traumatic war wounds are touching and heart rending giving each of them far deep characterizations that the original series ever allowed. While the war itself was explored in the series Star Trek: Discovery, which didn’t quite work for me, I am thoroughly enjoying the exploration of war’s lasting effect on the people forced to endure it. Like Frodo they carry wounds that will never fully heal.

One more episode to go but since this is a not a season long story but a series of interconnected ones, I do not feel that the finale is as critical to the whole season as it would be for another series. So, I can render a judgement without episode 10 and I am enjoying the series even more than I had during season one. In my opinion the best Trek since the original.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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July Was Not Productive Month

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Writing-wise I could have had a better month. It fell off the cliff with the flu that struck me down July 6 and remained as a powerful and painful cough through the 21st. In addition to the days spent at home sweating and coughing the illness robbed me of all opportunity and motivation to sit at the keyboard and keep working on this strange non-outlined werewolf novel.

Then once the flue had departed and the cough subsided to a mere annoyance, dental issues raised their troublesome head. Some of these had started in June, a need to remove a bridge, extract a tooth and cap another one had at first seemed fairly straight forward. However, the temporary crown kept falling off, making eating a challenge, and when it came time to affix the permanent crown, that failed a new crown needed to be fashioned, setting me back two more weeks. That would have been trouble enough but new jaw/tooth pain on the other side of the mouth caused additional worries and examinations which luckily concluded yesterday with a clean prognosis.

All in all, July saw little progress on the novel with the working title The Wolves of Wallace Point but there was some.

The manuscript currently stands at 32,000 words of a projected 90,000. The second act is about to close with the showdown between a gang of neo-Nazi bikers and the pack of werewolves that lord over this small, isolated Idaho mountain town.

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