It’s time to update the progress on putting together my short story collection–which I still plan on self-publishing before year’s end, less than four months from now. Ho ho.
Although I haven’t winnowed down the final group of stories I expect to have at least twenty ready to go. As of today I have five in a state I consider complete so I’m about 25% there. The remaining stories require everything from light edits to Maybe In the Next Collection.
The five completed are:
The trio of Chicago 8 superhero stories. The tone in all of these is very silly:
The Cobalt Sensation
The Chicago 8 vs. Armageddon
The Chicago 8 vs. Time
Plus:
Cervidae (Lovecraft homage)
Slice of Life (light modern day SF fare)
I’m now mulling over the next two or three to edit and then I’ll dive back into one of the unfinished stories to really get the ol’ creative juices flowing in the lead-up to National Novel Writing Month in November (also I’ve always found the idea of ‘creative juices’ kind of gross. What are they even meant to represent? It sounds like something you’d buy in a can).
I’m still thinking about a good title for the collection. I remain partial to 10 Pairs of Shorts or something similar. When I look over my body of work there is not a lot of Grimdark material so the light tone of the title shouldn’t be in conflict with the tone of the majority of stories. Even the horror stories are often more whimsical than not, even when people are getting killed. Especially when people are getting killed.
There’s a thread on Broken Forum about dreams titled “Last night I dreamed…” After the inevitable quote from The Smiths the thread has become a storehouse of dreams that range from the banal to the predictably bizarre or disturbing. I thought it might be interesting to adapt one or two into short stories. Dreams lend themselves well to the format as they tend to be fragmentary experiences that are either short on narrative or lacking it entirely.
After requesting submissions from the dozens of dreams posted, I went with the two that were suggested and will be working on them over the next month or so. If the results are promising I’m contemplating an entire short story collection using the same idea of pulling together dreams and adapting them as short fiction. I’m sure someone else has done the same thing already, as any decent idea has been worked and reworked countless times. But what the heck, I’ve never claimed to be original and the idea intrigues me. I may even have a few of my own dreams that could lend themselves to this kind of project.
By the end of the year I am planning on having my 30+ short stories all bundled up into one lovingly handcrafted and self-published volume. Freed from the dictates of a publisher I am able to follow my own whims when it comes to book design and so on.
Today I was thinking about possible titles for the collection. If all of the stories were of the same genre it would be easier but they run the gamut from fantasy to horror to (laughably bad) science fiction to speculative stories that would work nicely as Twilight Zone episodes.
Still, the majority are horror stories or ‘weird tales’ and I love alliteration and word play, so I came up with this:
Tales of Madness and Macramé
I like it but it sounds like a murder mystery set in a knitting club. Not a bad idea for a story, though.
Then I thought I could take the number of stories, cut the number in half and voila:
16 Pairs of Shorts
I kind of like this. A good number of the stories are lighter in tone or deliberately comical so this could put the reader in the right general frame of mind.
And now I realize I am blanking on the other titles I’d come up with so I’ll end this here and edit in my other semi-finalist choices when my brain deigns to remember them
What better way to conclude an evening of spamming posts to my blog than to provide a summary of my current state of writing or SOW as I like to call it (starting just now).
I have divided my writing into four categories, each more daring and fancy than the previous!
Category 1: Blog and forum posts Status: Firing on all cylinders
I do this sort of writing every day, without effort and often without thought. Whether it’s posting the latest online gaming bargains on Broken Forum or lamenting my inability to float in water on this here blog, this is the one category that is never wanting for output. Each in its own way helps improve my fiction writing, too, by either simply exercising the writing muscles that may atrophy otherwise or through communal efforts like National Novel Writing Month.
Category 2: The Ferry (2009 NaNoWriMo novel) Status: Like a slow ship steaming along a lazy river
I am slowly working through the second draft of my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel The Ferry. My intention is to do some work on it every day and have it self-published with a decent cover before the end of the year. I will start work on another novel sometime this year, as well.
Category 3: Short stories olde and new Status: Like a car that sat all winter and you wonder if the battery’s dead but hey it’s not, so you may actually get somewhere
On the olde side I am working on cleaning up 30+ short stories with the intention of putting them together into a single volume to self-publish. I have no set timeframe on this and the stories vary in terms of work needed from minimal to ‘maybe this should be buried in the back yard if I had a back yard’. I am also working on new stories as I think of them, as long as they don’t distract from my novel writing. Unless the stories are so super-awesome that they simply must be written. Yeah.
Category 4: Writing exercises Status: Uncertain
I have participated in writing exercises on and off since my days as a callow youth in college when I wrote bad poetry (my specialty) right up to having my own website devoted specifically to the task (which started out nicely but collapsed when I could not keep up the silly pace I had set out for myself). As my last few attempts to gather like-minded people to participate has met with middling success I haven’t done anything of late. I’ve decided on a new approach, which is to semi-regularly challenge myself with a particular exercise, complete it, then invite others to do the same and if they do, more to share and if they don’t I’ve already done my bit on keeping myself challenged and engaged.
It’s been just over a month since I completed my project for National Novel Writing Month 2012 and I’ve had enough time to assess what worked and what didn’t and put together some thoughts on the contest itself.
First, let’s look at my overall performance in the four NaNoWriMo’s I’ve participated in. I have a 50% success rate:
2009: Finished novel The Ferry in 21 days.
2010: Stalled at 17,210 words on expansion of short story Low Desert.
2011: Stalled at 5,073 words on expansion of short story The Dream of the Buckford Church.
2012: Finished novel The Mean Mind one day early.
The Ferry started life as a short story that started growing into something that might have become a novel had I not abandoned it in 1993. Which I did. When I picked it up in 2009, I dusted off the unfinished beginning, fixed it up a bit and continued from where I’d left off, following a rough plot outline I had written down in my head. The headstart allowed me to finish early but I’d have finished early regardless, as I wrote the thing in a blur. Something else that contributed to an early and easy finish that’s important (as I’ll explain in a bit in reference to 2012’s entry) is this: The Ferry is a straightforward story. It takes place almost entirely in one location with a small group of people and is spread over a mere 24 hour period (less, actually). The entire narrative is as direct as it could be. Things happen as they happen. There are no flashbacks, no subplots, no back story. It’s a monster movie waiting to be filmed (please write or call if you are interested in purchasing the rights. Unless you are Uwe Boll. No, even if you’re Uwe Boll. Maybe especially if you’re Uwe Boll).
2010 was a noble attempt and the short story (originally titled “Hello?”) lent itself to expansion to novel-length. The problem there is I had no real plan on where to take the story beyond its short story roots. I tried writing it with the same kind of narrative directness as The Ferry but ran out of steam quickly.
2011 was a repeat with a different story but with the additional complication of the story being complicated. The short story hints at complexities existing between the waking and dream worlds and I intended to flesh this out but eventually it felt like trying to untangle the cord of your earbuds before getting on the bus. You can either untangle the cord and miss the bus or get on the bus and try untangling the cord as you slosh around against all the other passengers standing around you. Neither option is optimal, so the real solution is to untangle the damn cord before leaving home. Or in terms of NaNoWriMo, spend some time before November plotting out the story, even if you end up deviating from what you’ve planned because going into NaNoWriMo with a complex story and little to no outline to guide you is like going into a dark cellar without a lantern. You will be eaten by a grue.
Which brings me to 2012’s effort. Did I complete the objective? Yes, I wrote 50,000 words. Did I finish the story? No, it did not reach an actual conclusion, unless you consider the last scene a particularly obscure ‘What if?’ scenario where it is left to the reader to imagine the rest of what happened. Unlike 2009 I am not happy with the effort this time. There are parts of The Mean Mind that work very well. The opening third of the book flows well and I was fully engaged with the story in the first few weeks of November. But while I actually had a plot outline this time (having learned from 2010 and 2011) it became clear that this was not going to be a slim 175-page novel. Sure, it also wasn’t going to be a Steven Erickson-alike that would bend the shelf it was placed upon but I soon realized there was no way I would complete NaNoWriMo unless I did some serious compression with the story. Long scenes were reduced to lines, characters were brought in quickly and sketched minimally, ciphers to be detailed later. The plot jumped with a kinetic energy that was not invigorating but maddening–like reading one of those Reader’s Digest condensed novels (what an awful idea those were) that had been further chopped in half again. You know how a lot of people complain that some of Stephen King’s books are too long? Imagine IT or The Stand being 200 pages in length. They just wouldn’t work.
That’s how The Mean Mind felt. By the time I passed 50,000 words I was relieved to be able to stop writing and put it aside. I haven’t looked at it since. I will, eventually, and if I like enough of the skeleton I may try adding flesh to its bones.
But going forward I will make sure that my next NaNoWriMo effort (and I will do it again, unless I’m hot and heavy in the middle of something else) a trifle, something suitably shallow or pulpy, where the pace is brisk, the characters broad and the action worthy of Michael Bay. Or maybe even Uwe Boll.
No, not even Uwe Boll.
Or to put it more simply: I’ll keep it simple. And the story will be better for it.
It’s been weeks since the last update but I continued to toil away on my novel, completing it a day early with an official word count of 50,050.
I give you my tiny jpg award picture:
Woo!
In 29 days of writing I had:
21 days when I wrote over the 1,667 minimum (most was 4,545)
2 days when I wrote under the 1,667 minimum (1,013 words and 12 words, respectively)
5 days when I wrote 0 words
1 day where I mucked up and forgot to add an entry but was probably around 1,800 words
Although I met the requirements of NaNoWriMo the novel is still unfinished and is a structural mess, though at least it’s not a structural disaster. In hindsight I think it was too ambitious to fit within the constraints of the 30 day write-like-a-madman format but there’s enough in there to make a rewrite (eventually) worth pursuing. And it helped reinforce the habit of writing every day (I believe I would have skipped fewer days if the requirement had only been to write and not to a minimum word count to stay on track).
Overall I’m pleased to taken part and to have won but The Mean Mind will be tucked away for now while I go back to finishing up The Ferry.
The dreaded start of Week 2 of NaNoWriMo is underway.
I have worked in the introduction of the main villain, which amounts to a story within a story. While this section will end up being trimmed (it has some repeated details from Ethan’s early experiences with the power) for now it has added 4,545 words, bringing the total to 17,113. That gives me a buffer of 3,777 or slightly over two days. I like that.
I found myself unsure where to take the story next and only wrote 12 words tonight. This would put me on pace to finish the novel in 2021, which is a bit late.
But I did do some good thinkin’ and believe I’ll be ready to jump into a more fruitful writing session tomorrow.
I’m moving into uncharted territory now. Starting with only the barest outline, the characters are now being introduced and I’m finding out just what the heck these people are all about. It’s exciting!
