Having looked over more of the stories that I plan to gather together into a collection I’ve concluded that meeting my self-imposed deadline of year’s end will require winning the lottery so I can devote all my time to writing, a miracle on the level of something that would make for a snazzy short story or some combination thereof.
The main problem is that although I have a lot of completed stories, they are not finished. Most are first drafts and a number of them are rough first drafts or simply reflect a level of writing quality that I feel falls short of what I am capable of now. Why toss a bunch of mediocre stories into a collection? That’s not going to make for good dust jacket quotes. “From the author that brought you the so-so collection 10 Pairs of Shorts comes his latest average novel!”
Instead of mildly freaking out about this as I once might have, I’ve adopted a more sanguine attitude. The collection will continue to be worked on regularly but I’m no longer going to pressure myself with the arbitrary deadline of December 31, 2013. Besides, everyone will be drunk that night and won’t want to read, anyway.
Going forward I’m going to work on the collection at a more relaxed pace, dive back into the next draft of The Ferry and start doing the prep work for my NaNoWriMo 2013 novel, which will, I promise*, be a spectacle to behold.
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!
