Category Archives: writing

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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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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