It occurred to me the other night, as I was trying to drift off to the land of story ideas, that I haven’t been using this blog the way I had intended when I started it. Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time keeping it updated regularly.
When I started this it was in the spirit of giving those without this desperate need to tell stories an idea of the day to day workings of the writer’s mind as well as what all went into creating a work of fiction. Not that my way is how all writers (or even most) go about it but it would at least provide readers with a glimpse of what mental gymnastics at least one writer does to make a story transition from weird voices and pictures in the head to an enjoyable (hopefully) adventure for many to embark upon.
In that spirit, then, I am going to begin using the blog in the way I always intended. Beginning right now.
My current main work in progress (WIP) is, of course, Across the Veil. I have “completed” (as completed as the first draft is going to be) the first three chapters and am currently working on chapter 4.
The first three chapters have introduced Liam (protagonist), Laura (his wife), Evan (his son), Marty (his biological father), Bev (Marty’s wife), and Judas (the antagonist).
I’ve managed to do a bit of foreshadowing in these chapters and have hopefully set up Judas as a creepy yet intriguing sort of guy. Chapter 2 ends with a bit of calamity (the first two chapters are linked on this page over there on the right and are, as far as I remember, pretty dang close to the “final” first drafts I’m working with). Chapter 3’s sole purpose is to introduce the antagonist and set some stuff up for later.
Today’s task is to finish up chapter 4. I’m about halfway through it and have introduced yet another main character, Julie, and am about to introduce the final two main characters. Yes, I know, nine (I think it is) main characters are a bit many for one story to follow. No worries, however, since at least one of these nine will not make it out of chapter 4 alive. Couple that with at least two or three fading into minor character status and I think the number of characters will become quite manageable.
If I do manage to finish chapter 4 today I may even try to get to work on the dreaded (but anticipated) chapter 5 but I don’t hold high hopes that I’ll get too much of that done today. We shall see.
I really need to get better at updating this thing.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is twofold. First, it’s to serve as a venting point for me so that I don’t keep annoying my Facebook friends with my ranting (although it’s quite likely that most of the people who will read this will be my Facebook friends anyway). Second, it’s to demonstrate that any reading a writer does is good reading. Even the bad stuff.
I must preface this post by saying that I’m torn. On the one hand, I don’t want to mention the book or author by name because I think he could be a really good author given enough practice and learning of the craft. On the other hand, he’s put the book out as “published” and, so, has left it open to public review (good or bad). Sometime during this rant…er, post…I will decide if I am to name the book and author.
What the hell. The book I will be analyzing (not too in-depth) is The Unsuspecting Mage. It’s Book 1 of The Morcyth Saga by Brian S. Pratt. Just do a search on Smashwords for “Pratt” and select this one. It’s a free e-book (I wouldn’t recommend buying the paperback unless you find a dollar one on Amazon because the author charges $14 and up for paperbacks). This covers me so that anyone reading this can read it and judge for themselves. :)
The premise of the book is Landover-ish in that it follows a person from our own time-space continuum into a fantasy world. James, the protagonist, is a senior in high school and has no idea who’s brought him to the world or why he’s there. Don’t worry, the author doesn’t spoil that…it apparently takes seven books to find that out.
The main things I remember about the first quarter to half of the book are James eating, entering the fantasy world, eating, travelling, eating, sleeping and eating. Seriously, I think Mr. Pratt was quite hungry when writing the beginning of this book because he spends an inordinate amount of time explaining what the character is eating.
James, of course, can do magic and is quite fond of throwing rocky projectiles enhanced by magic as a makeshift bullet. He is instructed by a magic book that mysteriously disappears and doesn’t show up again. I really expected the disappearance to play into the plot somehow. It didn’t. So far, at least. That’s okay, I suppose, because apparently all the rules it gives for doing magic are bunk even though it is a “very important” book.
James travels a lot, prodded along by some weird little creature who acts as a plot device (and at one point dresses as Mickey Mouse) to move him from place to place. He meets up with a street urchin, Miko, who essentially acts as a way for James to explain things to the reader that don’t really need explaining.
The story itself is not bad. The execution, however, leaves a lot to be desired. It took a while to get used to the third person, present tense delivery but that’s workable. Except for when the author accidentally slips into past tense. There are a lot of instances of two tenses within the same sentence.
This book would have benefited a lot from either a paid edit or even a few fresh eyes from a critique group. This book has shown me what I already knew: If you’re going to self-publish make sure someone other than you has read it through for grammatical, spelling and logical errors. No book should be made public with a line that ends “asked questioningly.” Nor should any book hit the masses with apostrophes used in pluralizations (only happened a couple of times but it was within a page of each other and made my hair hurt) or tags after every snippet of dialogue.
This is in no way a condemnation of self-published books. On the contrary, by reading more self-pubs, I’m hoping to find those gems that just haven’t made trad pub. This is not one of them, however. It was, however, a very valuable learning experience for me in just how much rampant errors will jar the reader from the story no matter how good that story may be.
And if Mr. Pratt, or anyone who knows him, reads this know this: I am not saying you’re a bad writer, just unpracticed. And for the love of all that is good in this world, please have multiple people read your ms before publishing it.
That goes for everyone who puts pen to paper or pixel to screen in the name of entertainment.
</rant>
Well, it’s December 1st.
That means that NaNoWriMo is officially over and I would like to report that I succeeded this year. That, despite the many demands on my time and cognitive powers, I wrote over 50,000 words on my fantasy novel in 30 days. I would like to relish in the fact that the words came pouring out of me and the pages filled, almost of their own accord, before my astonished eyes. I would like to gleefully complain about my fingers still smoking from the fires set by the friction between them and the keys of my laptop. Fires doused only because they could not stand up to the copious flow of blood running from under the nails.
I would like to report all of that. In fact, I would love to report all of that and more.
But I can’t. That would be lying.
The fact is, however, that NaNo was, once again, a resounding failure for me. Well, not so much a failure as a glaring neon sign that proclaims my proclivity for not maximizing any “free” time I manage to get between family, sleep and school.
My name is Todd and I’m an unorganized procrastinator. There. I’ve admitted it before the world. Or at least that small segment that actually reads the sporadic drivel I sometimes get the gumption to post into the aether of the internets.
Part of my tackling of that problem, though, is also one of the reasons that I can’t consider November a complete epic fail of writing. I’ve been investigating different organizational-type software programs over the years to see if any of them could help me, someone whose idea of being organized is knowing what pile something is in, put some semblance of sanity into my novel writing process. For NaNo I figured I’d give yWriter another try.
I must say that I’m quite impressed by this little piece of freeware. I’ll give the program the more extensive review it deserves next week when finals are over but suffice it to say that it meets every need I currently see for my own writing process. That includes seamless integration between laptop and PDA, my two main writing tools.
Beginning next Thursday, the 10th, I’m going to try to fully integrate yWriter into an iron-clad writing schedule. You may want to follow along; it could get very interesting.
Oh, and the fantasy idea is still kicking strongly in my head so there may still be hope for that novel.
Okay.
So, yeah, NaNo starts in a week and I have (tentatively) decided I’m going to go with a fantasy novel that’s kicking around my gray matter. This, of course, leads to a sci-fi novel trying to elbow its way to the front burner.
So now I’ve got my brain, convinced that I’ve been granted a miraculous gold nugget, trying to shift from plotting/writing the fantasy novel to exploring this sci-fi story. It will be one heckuva story given enough time to develop but it only came to me in the last day or so. I already determined that I’m not a pure pantser and, therefore, probably cannot plot enough of the sci-fi novel to do it justice in November. But it’s a great story with compelling characters.
Did I mention that NaNo starts a week from today?
I’m hoping that my brain will settle for plotting the sci-fi on the side while hunkering down and writing the fantasy for NaNo glory. If that doesn’t work then I’m setting up for certain failure (again). This is the same sort of thing that happened last year. I ditched the original plan to tackle a great idea that came to me the night or two before NaNo. In the light of the pressure of multiple thousands of words a day that story didn’t look so great somewhere around the tenth of November.
I’m sure the lesson I need to learn here is to stick with my original plan but that’s easier said than done when a story is crying out as loudly as the sci-fi one is right now.
Let’s hope it turns out to be a lesson learned.
DRM. Three letters that mean the world for the proliferation of e-readers.
Digital Rights Management. It’s what “protects” the e-books you buy and keeps you from copying them. It basically tells you where you can read your e-book once you make the initial decision. You want to read it elsewhere, buy another copy for that device. Not very consumer friendly.
Imagine going to Barnes and Noble and getting a paperback off the shelf. You go to the checkout and buy it. They ask where you are going to read it. “I’m going to read it in my chair in the living room,” you say. “That’s fine,” the clerk replies, “But we’re going to have to insist that it never leave the living room. If you want another copy, for the bedroom or whatever, you’ll need to buy a copy for that.”
I don’t know about you but that exchange would leave me flabbergasted. It’s my book once you take my money! If I want to read it on the toilet, what business is it of theirs? Same thing goes for e-books. If I buy an e-book and download it to my laptop, I want to also be able to put it on my PDA so that I can read it in the doctor’s office waiting room, in line at the store, at the mechanic’s, etc. I don’t want to have to buy a different copy based on how portable I need it to be.
I can understand the whole not wanting to sell one copy and have 1,000 people end up with it for free thing. But, really, how is that a different issue from one person buying a paperback and loaning it around town? Are they going to start policing that too?
I’ve basically ignored e-readers because of this stuff, telling my wife that I wasn’t even going to think about buying a dedicated reader until the DRM issues were ironed out.
Google may be pushing the industry toward that end with the launch of Google Editions in the first part of 2010. It will be Google’s e-book “store” which will digitally warehouse around half a million titles, many of which they have from their whole Google Books scanning project. They are, however, trying to set up to allow publishers to sell new e-books through it as well, for a fee amounting to 37% of the receipts.
It will give web browser access to the books; rather than PDF, ePub, Kindle Edition, etc. If your device has a web browser, it can access your book.
It sounds to me, based on what I’ve read, that Google is merely selling access to the book rather than the book itself. Kind of like a 24-hour library where you can look at the book anytime you want for the small initial fee. I’m not sure if that approach is the best way to go but it’s surely a step in the right direction (read: a step away from restrictive DRM).
It will be interesting to see how this changes the landscape of e-publishing, if at all. I know I’ll be keeping my eye on it.
Alright, let the lambasting begin. This assumes that anyone really cares whether or not this blog is updated at all. 
It’s been pretty hectic for the last few months what with little league, attempts at summer calculus classes, changes in major, etc. So, now, since I’m officially majoring in something writing-related (Technical Communication and Knowledge Management), I won’t feel as guilty if I do my noveling as well as journaling that whole process right here in front of the whole internet.
Also, I wanted to freshen up the blog in the hopes that it will do for me this year what I hoped it would do for me last year: Make me accountable and more motivated to actually win NaNoWriMo. If you’ll notice, I’ve put up a LARGER word count reporter. This will make it easy for any of you folks out there to see whether or not I’m making good on the challenge.
So, anyway, yeah, I’m all signed up for NaNo 2009 (tmacy). This year’s novel will be a fantasy that’s been kicking around my head for the last 3-4 months which is tentatively titled “Magic’s Death”.
Oh, and, I’m back from the dead, too.
I will try and blog a bit more in the couple of weeks before NaNo and then every day during NaNo and maybe then I’ll be in the habit and actually make this sucker informative.
We shall see.
It is fitting that the day dawned overcast and a bit rainy here in Dallas today. The news I read this morning brought that same gloom to my heart.
David Eddings is dead. Torak’s teeth! Eddings is dead. He was 77.
My first serious attempts at writing were in the fantasy genre. This was because of the authors I read and admired at the time (junior high and high school). Terry Brooks for his ability to bring a Dungeons and Dragons type of sword and sorcery world to life in epic proportions in The Sword of Shannara and its follow-ups. Piers Anthony had the sort of humor in the Xanth series that appealed to my early teen self.
Then there was David Eddings. I’m convinced that the reason I hold the view of characterization that I do today is because of the characters I met in The Belgariad and The Mallorean. He wrote that first purely for money. Tolkien was riding high with his series (I didn’t list him as an early influence because I never could finish his books until later.) and Eddings saw fantasy as a way to, for want of a better term, make some “easy” cash.
Most books written just for the pay have that stink about them. The stink of greed killing the artistic process. Not so with Eddings’ books. The world was thought out so fully and the characters so well developed that these books were destined for greatness. In fact, Lester Del Rey told Eddings that he had written a classic. I would have to agree with that assessment. It wasn’t until years after I read Pawn of Prophecy that I learned that Eddings’ wife, Leigh, had just as much to do with my beloved series as David did.
I came across this interview with Eddings conducted in 2006. Of course, the interview was handwritten and faxed since Eddings didn’t use a typewriter, let alone a computer.
David, you are now rejoined with Leigh. Know that I would not have the view of crafting all fiction I have today without your influence. For that, and the many wonderful hours questing from the farms of Sendaria to the exotic lands of Mallorea, I thank you. You will both be sorely missed as we vainly attempt to fill the fantastic void left by your departure from the world of active writing.
In this communication I shall endeavor to ostend that multisyllabic formulations of patois are infrequently indispensable.
Whew! Did y’all need a thesaurus to read that sentence? I sure needed one to write it and it took me ten times longer to write than if I had just said, “In this post I will demonstrate that big words are rarely necessary.”
There was a point to that monster of a sentence. Did it improve your respect for my intellect? Or did it make me sound like the yammering fool I felt trying to sound smart?
I’d wager it was the latter. It flies the red flag with “smart people don’t have to try to sound it” emblazoned on it.
Many beginning writers fall into this artsy, purple crap of seeing who can come up with the biggest, most obscure word that means “crap” or “sit” or “chair”. Hell, that describes a lot of my writing from my high school years. In those days a thesaurus in my hand was deadly enough to the English language to be illegal in 48 states and immoral in the other two. I massacred our poor language daily.
I never was convicted, however, and I’ve changed my murderous ways. Now the only time I’ll write any sentences like the one above is if I’m being silly (sometimes it’s a good exercise for me to do “artsy fartsy” writing to get my juices flowing) or proving a point (or if I’m dead tired and for some reason it sounds good to me, kind of like a late night infomercial).
What I learned in the intervening twenty years or so, and what serious beginners learn to help them move away from beginner status, is that the art of writing is not in choosing the fanciest word. It’s in choosing exactly the right word for the situation you have.
You don’t want your characters “explicating” when they should be explaining.
You don’t want them “verbalizing” when they could be talking or speaking.
Don’t make them “utilize” when they need to be using.
There are dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of similar examples I could come up with but I really don’t feel like it right now and I’m sure y’all get the idea anyway.
Sometimes the smaller words pack more emotional punch, anyway. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? We want our readers to forget they are reading a wholly fictitious tale that we poured from our heads and into their laps (the whole suspension of disbelief thing) and experience whatever emotion we are trying to convey on whatever page they are reading at the time. The more time your reader spends thumbing the thesaurus the less time they have for reading your book and that ends up a death sentence for your writing with that person.
The only time that modern writing should use pretentious language is if it’s an important character trait or quirk or if the writing is farcical or satirical in nature. As I said it’s fun sometimes to be silly with a thesaurus in one hand and a fake “modern English-speaker” ID in the other.
How much of our writing do we really want others to view as silly, though? I beseech every writer, please put down the thesaurus, unless absolutely necessary, and feel the right word. Chances are that the vocabulary you already possess contains the word you are looking for.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sure both of my readers are disappointed in my extended absence but I was busy passing a couple of classes, failing one, scrambling to set up summer classes in order to make up for that spectacular failure, and making sure, successfully, that I would have to bump out my self-imposed first draft deadlines. All of this and the duties of a husband and father, to boot.
It’s enough to make you want to clap someone upside the head when they complain (as I once did, as a young fool) that their life is too boring.
Anyway, on to the point of this post.
Part of what little down time I selfishly stole for myself I used to bask in the nostalgia that is ST:TNG. The show aired during some of my later formative years, ages 12-19 or so, and is considered by many to be the best Star Trek series ever (there is still a blood-feud between the ST:TOS camp and the ST:TNG camp on this).
I was plowing my way into Season 4 (out of the total 7) when it occurred to me that I wasn’t just relaxing and enjoying a blast from the past. I was studying. Studying my craft, no less.
See, what I figured out was that the main reason, in my opinion, that ST:TNG has such staying power is its characterization. This didn’t really surprise me since I’m a big believer that strong characters can carry weak plots and ST:TNG, for all its juicy goodness, has its share of relatively weak plots sprinkled in with the beautifully original, creative ones.
Part of this characterization is, of course, the dialogue. The writers took full advantage of a wide variety of species and gave each of them a distinct speech pattern. This makes it easy, even without visual cues, to tell which character is speaking. Even more impressive, to me, was the ability of the writers to distinguish each of the main human and humanoid characters by speech pattern.
Whether it be Picard and his Shakespearean, King’s English or Troi with her soothing, dulcet tones and comforting choice of words or Riker with his “John Wayne of the 24th Century” affectations or Data and his “just this side of monotone” glorified machine language (the obsession with precision and accuracy kind of remind me of Asperger’s Syndrome on steroids); each of the main characters (I haven’t even mentioned Worf, LaForge, O’Brien, the Crushers and a host of others) is easy to pick out even with eyes closed.
So, I’ve been able to justify being a little selfish by chalking up my ST:TNG watching to the study of dialogue. Kind of like taking a tax deduction for business expenses for the gas to drive to the post office because one of those twenty envelopes carried business correspondence. That’s legal, right?
Anyway, back to studying.
I think today I’ll post one of those pretentious “I’m gonna teach y’all how to write” blogs. This isn’t because I’m a master of the craft. Far from it. It’s also not because I know more than anyone out there. There are at least thousands (probably more) who know more about writing than I.
But this is one of those muddy areas that trip up beginning writers and where, by giving my own examples, I can either help those falling on their faces in this particular bog or someone can comment and show me the light and clear it up for me if I have it wrong.
So it’s either a pretentious teaching blog or a seriously confused cry for help blog.
Let’s find out which. 
A lot of beginning writers are confused by books they read which tell them that every page should have tension and conflict. Usually they take that to mean that someone needs to be getting killed, maimed or at least bloodied a bit on every single page. Even when a child and parent are having breakfast? Of course not. But that situation can still have tension and conflict.
“Tension and conflict” doesn’t necessarily mean high tension and conflict. What the books are saying, and rightfully so, is that every page should move the story forward. This can be a shootout, characterization, dropping clues, etc.
For instance:
“Hey, Bill.”
“Howdy, Ted.”
“Whatcha up to?”
“Just gettin’ some money.”
“Crazy weather we been havin’, huh?”
“Yep.”
If you read all of that, I commend you. No tension, no conflict. Let’s inject some:
“Hey, Bill.”
Bill turned from the ATM and barely avoided letting a grimace show on his face as his boss approached. He got enough of that haughty gasbag during the week without having to deal with him on the weekend. “Howdy, Ted.”
“Whatcha up to?”
I’m at a friggin’ ATM, you idiot, what the hell do you think I’m doing? “Just gettin’ some money.”
Bill tried his best to convey a tone that would push Ted away faster than a gale from a hurricane. There’s no way he wanted to look into his boss’s face after what he’d found out on Friday. The fecal matter would hit the whirling blades on Monday but Bill wanted it to be a complete surprise and, so, had to make nicey-nice no matter how much it made him want to vomit.
“Crazy weather we been havin’, huh?”
“Yep.” Why wouldn’t he go away? Bill had to suppress a vindictive smile as he thought about just how long Ted’d be going away for come Monday. Served the bastard right.
Granted, this isn’t my best work, or the best example in the world but I think it shows the difference between small talk for the sake of small talk and small talk involved in a scene that moves the story. The first example gives the reader nothing to care or wonder about. The second, at the very least, makes the reader wonder what Ted did, what Bill found out. It’s also more obvious exactly how Bill feels about Ted (plenty of conflict in that relationship).
So, basically, we’re just trying to make sure that every page is integral to the story. No page gives the reader a good reason to stop reading. Of course, you could write a James Bond book and just alternate sex and violence every page.
I’m kidding. Really, I am.
