Tag: series writing

Tying Up

I finished another chapter. Serving like a flare in the night, it lit more of the final stages of the novel, Good-bye, Hello, and the Incomplete States series. Seeing those pieces, I re-arranged one chapter and wrote the beginning of another. As I wrote that, the segue off a previous chapter appeared. This was the opening to the final final piece. I laughed at the phrase even while I juggled pieces in my mind and saw it all come together with the ending already written. A chill thrilled me as I read the pieces. So satisfying and fun, visiting this world and these peoples, and all their myths, technology, travels, and adventures. They move into this last phase with hope, but I write with bittersweet inevitability.

It’s been a fun journey with these concepts, and narrowing the focus of the concepts into a tighter and tighter frame. Once again, revelations and realizations surprised me. These mostly involved Kything, Kything, who began as Professor Kything, named in honor of the term from A Wrinkle In Time. Kything was not who they thought.

Kything was not who I thought.

There’s more of him still to be revealed to me. The revelations and patterns remind me of a difficult Sudoku. After wrestling with logic and patterns, hunting for the final solution, a key square was just completed. With it came the insights to finish the puzzle.

Even as I think that it was a wonderful day of writing like crazy, I’m beginning to grow sad, because I see this marvelous journey coming to an end. Yes, a lot of writing remains, and then the the editing and revising marathon begins, but those are different skills, with a separate satisfaction to them, than the unbridled creative flow of raw writing.

I feel a quiet chuckle as I realize, this feeling I have is just like how I feel when I’m finishing reading a good book.

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The Character Mix

Philea’s voice remains strong. She retains control of the story boards, dictating what’s going on. I’d prefer some shortcuts so I can finish the novel (and series, Incomplete States). 

Not going to happen. The characters know what they want to say to convey the scene’s meaning to them and how they want the scenes to portray them. Kanrin is straightforward when he speaks and pragmatic in his actions, but likes to keep his speaking to a minimum, letting others fill the gaps. He doesn’t ask questions, but wait for people to volunteer insights without being prompted. He knows that many people like to give their opinions, and within these opinions are some aspects of the truth, or enough to give him direction. His story telling tends to be direct and shorn of observations. He’s also very patient.

Handley is more scattered. She tends to do free-association streaming of thinking and interaction. She gets angry at people and hold grudges without sharing why with them. She’s also troubled more than the rest by the entire series and its concepts. They don’t make sense to her, and even while she experiences them, she’s attempting to either rationalize them or reject them.

Meanwhile, Pram has become more physical, aggressive, and belligerent. He’s also awoken to the awareness that he was used and that most people don’t consider him a nice person. Yet, is it really him? Or are his interactions being manipulated to drive him to a specific end? Impatient to be free of the circular complications, he’s always asking the others for information.

He also knows from his external memory that he wasn’t always like this, but he’s trying to unwind the cause and effect to better understand how and why he changed.

Because of his experience in Returnee, Brett is more philosophical about the situation and open to ideas about what might be going on. His experience taught him that systems and perceptions can’t be trusted, and that we often only have a sliver of the available information. Brett is also a rememberer, able to recall and understand his other life-experience-reality-existences with greater clarity than the rest, giving him deeper insights into the struggle they’re all enduring.

Richard, another rememberer, is less talented as a rememberer than Brett. When it comes out eventually that Brett is actually Richard’s replacement, Richard becomes bitter and sullen. He wants the others to want and need him, and is desperate to do and say things that will raise his esteem.

Then we have Philea. A scientist in most of her life-experience-reality-existences, she’s the most intelligent of the group. Her intellectual prowess (and technological breakthroughs like her time-traveling machine, Wrinkle), enhanced her value as a target for the organizations, species, businesses, and other entities who seek to master and control the forces that this group have encountered.

Although Philea isn’t a scientist (or engineer) in her current incarnation, her thinking style and logical expression remains similar, but less practiced. Fleeing and jumping the Wrinkle as hostile forces close in and try to take them, her new experiences awaken greater insights in this part being written now. I always knew and respected this piece existed, and that it would come to be written at the right moment. That moment seems to be now. Her revelations awaken the group to greater depths of involvement and complexity.

Still, I was surprised with her introduction and references to Kything. While writing like crazy during the past week, I wondered how this was all going to tie together even as I typed and edited it. Philea dropped the reveal on me at the end of yesterday’s writing session.

Good to write all that up. Permits me to think through the craziness and reassure myself that I’m keeping up with developments.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Episodic, Hyperlink, Mash-up

I’m enjoying writing the Incomplete States series. I have worried about its structure and my style, until I came across the term hyperlink used to describe a form of novel.

Eureka! That lifted my bloody spirits. Until then, I was cringing over the shape and my methodology. People won’t like this, I told myself even as I answered, so fucking what, and acknowledged, you can’t please every reader, and reminded myself, I’m writing for myself as a reader first, and this is what I like.

I really like how the first volume’s beta version emerged, and I’m happy with the third volume. Number four is in progress and is coming along well.

A sharp reader will noticed that I skipped over number two. Volume two was the first one written. As Thomas Weaver noted in comments to me during some of my postings, most writers start out in the middle. That’s certainly what I usually do, and I did with this concept. I was definitely walking across a dark and unfamiliar room when I began writing it. It ends up as the most complex of the four volumes, with the greatest aspects of hyperlinks. Therefore, it worries me the most. But when I read and review it, I don’t come across anything that I want to change. An outside editor might have another view of that. Hell, come on, we know they will.

It’s not something to worry about now. Right now I’m giddy with satisfaction over my progress.

Guess what time it is? Yep, got my coffee. It’s time to write like fucking crazy, at least one more time.

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Monthly Changeover

A new month has arrived. Hello? February, already? No way. Time continues to accelerate in an unseemly manner with months passing like weeks and hours flashing by like minutes.

I hypothesize that we each have time particles at a sub-atomic level in ourselves. Their interaction with others’ time particles and those embedded in other matter form how we perceive and use time, and how time treats us. We adhere to agreed standards for simplicity’s sake, but time is more personalized than realized. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it, at least for today. Someday, someone a lot smarter than me will figure all this out, and our thinking about time will undergo a monumental shift. For now, it’s one of those, we can’t make out the forest for the trees sort of perspective.

With the new month comes chores that rotate around the month’s arrival. Besides flipping over calendar pages, reviewing business plans, goals, and dreams, I also back up my writing work on something external that’s placed somewhere safe. While floppies of the five and a quarter and three and a half-inch varieties were used in the past, I moved on to zip drives, CDs, and now, flash drives.

Reviewing the month, I’m pleased with my writing progress, but I’m astonished that it’s taking so long to finish this quadrilogy, Incomplete States. I seem to be adding a new volume every few months; this week I was contemplating a fifth book in the series. Reining myself in, I sought ways to incorporate these new ideas into the fourth book being written. We’ll see how it goes. It’s not like the series is a raised garden bed, where everything must be contained. My motto is generally, write like crazy, and let the words go where they flow. I’m a trifled concerned; if I keep adding volumes like this, I’ll end up with something that rivals the Wheel of Time for the series’ length.

Now it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Incomplete States

Care for a cigar? I’m offering because I feel like a proud father. The science fiction trilogy, “Incomplete States,” became a quadrilogy today.

I felt like changing it to a quadrilogy was a prudent move. The second book in the series was over seven hundred pages and one hundred seventy thousand words. I think it’d be kinder to the reader and easier from a sales and marketing perspective to break it up into two books. So, with a little work, it was done.  One book is three hundred pages, and the other new book is three hundred forty-five pages.

The fourth book’s beta draft is coming along. It’s one hundred sixteen pages, and about thirty thousand words. Between the four books, then, almost twelve hundred pages have been written. I don’t write fast, but I write consistently, and I persist, and that’s the result. I wish I did write faster; there are many other projects I want to begin and finish.

Life interferes with those plans. Exercising and eating is required, along with socializing, house-cleaning, running errands, and so on. I’m pleased with my progress, though. Of course, all of this is the beta draft, so it’s all still fluctuating, driving toward the conclusion. Once they’re all finished, I’ll have a draft, and the next phase of work will begin.

Cover ideas are rising, though. That’s not always a sign that the end is in sight, but more that I’m contemplating the end.

It was a good day of writing like crazy. The coffee drink is long gone for a change, but my ass is annoyed by being in a hardwood chair without padding for a few hours. Writer’s butt is literally a pain in the arse.

Time to stop, go for a walk and enjoy some sunshine, and think about what what to write next.

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And I’m Writing, And I’m Writing —

And I think of things that I’ve overlooked that need to be added, and events that would surprise the reader, and recognize that I want to add it to the story, but it doesn’t go in this book, but actually, OMG, the end of the second book, so it leads into the third book. I’m halfway – only halfway – through writing the first book. The second book is written but needs some wiring changes. The third book – I hadn’t thought about a third book before, but it started blooming like a volunteer posy. Am I supposed to uproot the thing?

No, because my writing excitement gets the better of me. But the series’ evolution forces more work upon me. The excitement becomes almost paralyzing, because I stop to let the evolution flow in. Sitting still in a sea of external noise and activity, I can look down the long tunnel through the rest of the first book, past the second book, and into the third book.

Now, here’s the tricky part. I can see and hear these events. They must be captured in words. More than that, I need to navigate unseen scenes that bridge now and then, and find the words, pacing, nuances, etc., to bring it all home. I love this part of thinking and writing. I feel all those wires connecting and gears turning. Illumination falls on new aspects and spreads. This is the essence of art, writing, music, and physics, for me, to think, to see, to think more to understand, and see more. It’s an unwinding coil without beginning or end, a Möbius strip of existence.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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