Tag: fiction writing

So Far Beyond

Today, I believe, is the twelfth day of March, 2017. I hope my calendar is correct but sometimes I lose track of time out here. Days are full of possiblies, or possibilities. Are we going the right way? Are we lost? Will we survive? Will anyone ever know what happened to us? Will anyone care?

Possibly.

Possibly yes, possibly no. We don’t spend much time discussing these, at least not with vocal voices. I spend time discussing this in my head as I slowly cover new terrain. I think, no one else has probably been here before, before correcting myself, no, others have been here. They just left without a mark.

I correct that, too. They left a mark. I can’t see their mark. I don’t know where to look. I may have just stepped over it, a realization that makes me pause to take in the surroundings.

It remains unstable underfoot, made worse from overnight dew slicking down every surface. Frost and ice hides in some shadows. At least sunshine is showing early today, promising us the chance of warmth and light, and a day without slogging through rain.

I feel alone out here. Given the right place and moment, I can look back and see how far I’ve come. Other times, I’m just lost in the landscape’s details.

Sometimes my thoughts distract me. Songs of my youth entertain me and become backdrop to meandering questions about where I’d lived and who I’ve known. Corollary questions emerge about what happened to those people and what they became like after they grew up, assuming they reached adulthood, maturity, and aren’t dead. So many things can kill us. We are fragile. A few degrees warmer or colder can be dangerous for food, water and air. Then, others will kill us with guns, knives and other means to address their woes, fears and angers. Yes, we’re fragile. I wonder, too, what they thought of me, and if they ever look me up or try to find me. I’ve tried to find a few of them. From that I’ve learned, we are a large population and many of us share the same names. To find more information, someone always wants paid.

Sometimes the sounds of others out here like me impinge upon my awareness. We’re all out in space that’s new to us but others have often already been here. It’s tricky, messy and confusing. Shambolic. Yeah, I’ve already walked around those tracks. Time to move on.

Move on from what and to what are constant nags.

I took up this life. This is on me. There are no others to blame except those who encouraged me. “You can do it,” they told me. Maybe they were wrong. It’s time like this that I wonder if perhaps there are millions of Fates up there, spinning out the lines of our lives as we respond to their threads and wait for them to cut us free.

Enough of this. Time to go write like crazy, at least one more time. That’s the only way I’ll ever get out of here.

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Where Do They Live?

Just as I had to address “What do they wear?”, I’m now addressing, “Where do they live?”

My Travail and other intelligent species have evolved far beyond my initial glances. I can liken it to glancing at a cat and thinking, “Oh, look, a cat.”

What’s the cat’s sex? Male.

Does the cat have a name? Yes, we’re calling him Meep.

What color is Meep? Um…Meep is a ginger, a blotched tabby ginger with broad swirls on his side, white whiskers, amber eyes, pink nose.

Good. What’s Meep doing when we first see him? He’s sitting on the fence. He’s displaced a half foot of snow from the fence top. No other snow is disturbed so he must have jumped up there from the other side of the fence. Flurries swirl around him but he’s not forlorn looking. He looks relaxed and in command. His attention is fixed on something in the pines, something that I can’t see or hear.

Does he get along with the other cats? Meep doesn’t trust other cats and goes on instant alert, ready to warn, fight or flee, when another cat approaches. He prefers to warn them away. If they attack, he will fight back. Fleeing is the third choice. He considers it the smart choice but knows from practice that fleeing is better as a theory because other cats will chase him. So he stands his ground until the situation is dire.

I’m going through this with the Monad, Sabards, Milennial, Humans and Travail, especially the Travail. Part of that is because I already did a great deal of this with the Humans, but also one main character is a Travail, and their part of the story and activity is told through his point of view. This has forced me to delve into the Travail history, social structure, architecture, behavior, agendas, sex…everything known about Humans on Earth is required to be known about the Travail.

They have a complex structure. Their names end up reminding me of Russian naming conventions out of Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. But I didn’t want to just slap some Human expressions — or cats or other animals — onto my other civilizations. I wanted them to be unique.

They’ve responded to the challenge. I argue with myself about changing the naming convention and simplifying them for the reader.No; the book, the characters and the writer in me all resist this. Screw the readers. I think it was James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon) who said, “Let them catch up, if they can.” Okay.

Another big challenge was how and why did this species develop the technology to advance into space? Why did they want to go into space? That forced a deep dive into their history, as well as the history and development of other races.

It’s all challenging, daunting, and intriguing. It all builds the novel far beyond my first glimpses of it. That’s how it often goes. When you pursue a destination, details, paths, choices and accidents emerge that you never anticipated. Thinking it through enervates me as brain cells cry for mercy but afterwards, I sit in pleased satisfaction with what’s been developed and written. Each plot arc has its own beauty that touches me.

But now, yeah, my butt’s numbness informs me that time has passed. Mocha remains but it’s cold, cold, cold, with a skim of clotted chocolate like small clouds dotting its surface.

It’s been an excellent day of writing like crazy. Time to chug the mocha, take a walk and prepare for the next session. The words are already bubbling up. Were it not for my numb rear-end, I would pursue them.

But the words will keep until tomorrow, and another day of writing like crazy.

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A Dark & Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

My psyche has been talking to me for the last few days. With some reluctance, I recognized what my psyche was telling me. Being a stubborn soul, I preferred ignoring my psyche for as long as I could. Yet, I’d come to a fork. I could continue to the right, along the path I’d been following. I already knew that was rocky. The going was treacherous and uneven. When it comes to writing, following a treacherous and uneven path is mentally and emotionally exhausting, especially if you know that following the other path would be a smoother journey. But —

Exceptions exist. But, the other path was the one my psyche was telling me to take. But the other path didn’t directly relate to the novel I was writing.

Yet it did; I needed to know what happened with Phileas and Brett. Generally, I knew Phileas is a highly respected scientist. Working for a major corporation, she led a team searching for the latest God Particle, a project known, with matter-of-fact drama, as the God Particle Search Project. Significant progress was slow, so another project, private and personal, the stuff of her childhood dreams, drew her.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Phileas first read those words when she was two, but once they were read, everything was changed. ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, by Madeline L’Engle, was the first book she read more than once, and in fact, went on to read a dozen more times. By the third time, she knew all the words and didn’t need to read the book, but settling into bed and opening up a screen above her face soothed her. Being in bed and secretly reading under the softly glowing faintly blue panel was cozy. It was a romantic escape for someone who was otherwise ruthlessly determined, logical, practical and mathematical. In fact, it was a dark and stormy night on Castle Prime, while visiting, when the weather control system in one of the domes malfunctioned, that crystallized the epiphanies that initiated her turn toward her personal project.

It was a dark and stormy night. 

For me to understand what happened with Brett and Phileas, I needed to know more about Phileas and then learn about what happened with her and Brett. I knew many basics. Brett had a son. He didn’t know he had a son. The son, Kimi, had been illegally conceived.

Kimi worked for Phileas on the GPS Project. Brett was a fourth-waver, inhabiting newly terraformed planets on the corporation’s behalf to prove it was safe. Kimi’s ‘fake’ father had manipulated the genetic maps related to Kimi and Brett. The systems had caught the errors but flawed results ended up reversing the maps so the systems thought Kimi was Brett and vice-versa. That’s the basis of the first novel, ‘Returnee’, available on KDP.

While writing ‘Returnee’, I established that the systems thought Brett was Kimi. What I didn’t establish but I knew was that as part of that, Phileas had inadvertently taken Brett when she thought she was abducting Kimi. She took Kimi, along with the rest of her team, because she’d traveled into the future. While in the future, she’d learned things, and now she was covering her trail, and attempting to keep others from following her path – because she knew, in science and technology, that major discoveries like hers rarely happen without like discoveries being made elsewhere.

The result was that the GUFIN virus was created and brought back from the future. And this is where the next novel, ‘Long Summer’, (the work in progress) comes into play. To know what happened with Brett, Phileas, the GUFIN virus, and the Travail, I had to know what happened when Phileas abducted Brett and wiped out his knowledge of what had happened.

And that’s what my psyche was ordering me to do: write that out so I fully understood it. Naturally, I had to write it out in story form, because I think in story-telling form when I’m writing fiction. So, thinking about Phileas and her background, and her literary hero, Meg Murry from ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, I was able to begin:

It was a dark and stormy night.

As I knew, the first line is actually homage to another novel — and Snoopy, of course, loves it — but once I wrote it, Phileas leaped to life.

Time to shut down and call fini to another day of writing like crazy. No words were written in the novel today, but so much progress was made.

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Mysterious Writing

Writing sometimes seems like such a mysterious process. It used to deeply mystify me as I would apply the questions, the who/what/why/how/when melange that flavors fiction and struggle forward.

Not so today, this week. I sit down, open up, read a bit of what’s written and resume. I guess I’ve trained and ordered my mind to ‘think like a writer’ and create fiction. But this book is coming along so seamlessly, I worry that perhaps it’ll be thin and bland. I wonder, if it’s easy writing, is it poor story telling? If it’s easy, is it too predictable, too simplistic? Yet, I enjoy it.

It might be that I’ve been reading wonderful fiction, having just finished The Signature of All Things and now progressed two thirds through My Brilliant Friend. I’ll often end up editing books because they’re written in passive voice, or they tell and then show, or the reverse, at any rate, displaying a need for editing. Not so with Gilbert and Ferrante’s books. Ferrante especially creates such a sense of people and place that I’m inspired.

So maybe this is just a zone contrived from writing the third book in a series (which gives me intimacy with the characters) and reading writers I enjoy. After thinking about the matter, I’ll not worry myself about it. Take it for what it is, a blessing, a luxury. Perhaps it’ll end in a day, an hour, a minute. Just write like crazy and see where I end up when I’m done.

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And

And

Alone

In a coffee job

Sipping coffee

And

Thinking

And picking up the virtual pen

And opening computer files

And finding the threads of thought

That came out during the walk

And remembering

Where I left off

And calling out characters

And listening to their words

And writing their dialogue

And spinning scenes

And imagining the story

And organizing the flow

And conjuring plot arcs

And editing the words

And polishing the scenes

 

 

And falling into the book

And forgetting all other moments

And not hearing

Anything else

And not seeing

Anyone else

And reading

What I’ve written

And looking for

what comes next

Is the best part

And

There’s always more

 

 

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The Writing Like Crazy Process

The writing like crazy is structured and unstructured, crazy and sane. Really, it just is. Such tautalogy is extremely helpful, isn’t it?

But it is what it is (there’s that help again). Originally structured to shift me from the real world’s insanity to the pleasurable world of writing and editing fiction, the process was all about release. Let me go, job, wife, cats, house, bills, stress, frustration, whatever. Take me away, writing.

The early days began as an after work period. Go somewhere in the house and write. That didn’t work too well, and I blame me. I couldn’t stop myself from falling into normal home routines and thoughts. I initiated a program to go somewhere else and write. Armed with a Z4 pen (my preference) and black and white marble composition notebooks (I was always alert for notebook sales), I usually ended up in a coffee shop, where I would have coffee. Coffee shops were tested like bath water until the ones that worked just right emerged. I was traveling for business often in those years, so I would often write in airplanes and airports.

But my hours and routine were iffy. When home, I often ended up writing only on weekends (at Printers Inc), by getting up early. That wasn’t enough, so the program was expanded to an extended lunch hour at work. Testing the process, I discovered that walking improved my writing mood, so I parked about a mile from the coffee shop and walked. In 1999-2000,  I could be spotted in San Mateo, California, walking to a Starbucks. As my company moved its office to Shoreline in Mountain View, I drove to downtown Mountain View and used that Starbucks. Meanwhile, I lived in Half Moon Bay and walked each Saturday and Sunday morning to La Di Da. After moving to Ashland, Oregon, in 2005, I began walking the town to coffee shops. The marble composition books were replaced by laptops.

In those days, I set a word count target, and I tracked it meticulously. There was no pay it forward, no credits and debits. 1,000 words needed to be reached each day, every day. Even if I did 2,000 one day, 1,000 was required the next day. I never let myself off that hook.

With each refinement, I learned more about myself and my writing process. I discovered I was an organic writer, writing with scant mapping or outlining. I found that writing like crazy was critical. Writing like crazy meant that I shoved aside thoughts of grammar, facts, punctuation, and sometimes even point of view and character, and just rode a wave of words rushing into my mind. Then I’d go back and fix it all. When I stalled, I learned to create snapshots to find direction. Snapshots were just exploratory summaries to help me find understanding of the character(s), setting(s), plot, concept, story line, whatever. They were generally not meant for reader consumption, except for my reading.

Learning and evolving fortunately continued. I learned to ask, why, why, why did this character do this or that, or this or that happened, along with the corollary matters of when, what and how.  I saw how I told and then showed the same thing, how I tended toward passive writing, how I enjoyed run on sentences and became more mindful of them – when editing – but how, becoming aware of them, fixing them were folded into my writing like crazy process. I learned what I really enjoyed reading by critiquing others, good and bad, for my own enjoyment, and then shaping my voice to be what I most enjoyed in those books, and I threw the reading doors open to all genres and authors.

I’ve always ‘written in my head’, phantom writing, where I see or hear a scene or the developing story. I found how to harvest the essence of those moments and pick them up and put them into the story. I taught myself to be unafraid to revise and edit as I wrote, discovering that fiction writing was much more like creating a painting then it was like writing an essay. And I encouraged myself to have fun.

I no longer have a daily word count. They’re not needed and I often find myself writing several thousand words. The shift to writing mind is much easier now. I can pick up the story line and where I was quickly in my mind and typically pick up where I was with just a few moments of thought.

I’ve written a number of novels, but haven’t published but two. They’re both recent after wearying myself with the agent/publisher route. Each agent had different requirements, and that tedious process drained my joy and optimism, as well as savaging my writing time. So, fuck it, I’ve gone the ebook self-publishing route. I don’t have great expectations, but I won’t be a fraud and claim it doesn’t matter; it does. But, just as with the writing process, and most of everything else I’ve done in life, I’ll keep trying, keep working on it, and I’m confident, I’ll continue progressing.

Now…time to write like crazy, one more time.

 

 

 

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