Short changed

I've been working on a couple of short stories recently, as it seems a good way to fail fast and try out new things. I don’t know if short stories are actually publishable, but they’re good practise, they’re a great challenge and they spark my imagination in a way that I know is time limited. Short stories get into the myriad ideas on your mind, and allow you to put them down on paper where they’re locked down for the time being and out of your brain.

Short stories also perform another function for me: they get me writing. I don’t need to do many of them, but sometimes they are a great way to get something off my chest if I have some emotion buzzing around, or if I’m not feeling in the mood. Most importantly right now, they seem to prime me. My fingers are typing, and my ‘writing brain’ gets switched on, or gets back in the groove and I can go back to my main story.

The idea, and it seems to work more often than not, is that I’m kind of jump-starting my fingers-on-keyboard mode. I’ll get to the typing and not worry about getting it right the first time, or a perfect start, or finding the best way to segue from where I've left something (chapter/page/line) to where I want it to go.

I’m also working on a book series at the moment… at least the planning of one. It’s in a type of genre that I’m not used to doing, but it feels like it’s going to be a fun project and I intend for it to be pretty much ebook only.

In fact it isn’t just in one new genre for me, it’s in two genre’s. Why? Because I've written short stories on those genre’s and I think it’ll be fun to mix to two of them. The story won’t be a comedy or a pastiche. I’m really going for broke on these. The funnest thing is that I want them to be relatively quick reads. I want them to be fun for the reader, and I want them to be in the 45-50k range. So yeah, I have some specifics.

At this point in time, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bones. Heck, there isn’t even a lot of bone on the frame. But the genre means that I have to start from the end of the story and work backward to make sure everything fits in. That’s a challenge I haven’t encountered before. I’m looking forward to understanding how the series fit together (loosely planned at 6 books), and then getting down to things and working out how the first book fits together.

This is a completely backward way for me. I usually start with a premise, or most often find myself writing what seems to be some part of the middle of the book and I keep going until I stop and need to figure things out. The ‘why’, ‘what’ ‘who’ and a lot of the time the ‘who’ question pops up. It isn’t a logical way to proceed either. I am aware of this. Sometimes I’ll start with an actual beginning which is quite nice.

But starting from the end? That’s weird. It’s another skill that I know will come in useful on my other stories, but right now its necessary. The series will be way too much work and stress to try to do it any other way. There are a couple of more firsts involved with this, including that this is the first thing that I’ll have written something purely for the ebook audience. If it somehow gets picked up by a publisher, then so much the better, but then again I may win the lottery. It’s probably along the same odds of probability. I’m cool with that.

This isn’t about worrying about finding an agent and shopping around and dealing with contracts. Heck, for a first time author, if I even get a $5000 dollar advance, it would be a minor miracle. I figure that if the book does halfway ok, I’ll be doing ok on the first book and better on the second, etc etc. Nobody jumps into book 3 without checking out books 1 and 2 first. And if they like book 1 enough, they’ll probably give the second book a chance. Hopefully I’ll have learned enough by book 2 that it’ll be a better story. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m not too worried. I still have to finish the story I’m working on, and then I have to leave it alone for a while to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes. The way I figure, the difference between the book I’m working on and the series I’m planning will be enough of a change to feel like something completely now.

It will be something completely new. It will be stretching my wings. It will be longer than a series of short stories, but it won’t be some big horrid saga stretching millions of pages. I’m not ready to go through that again. I need to get better with using fewer words.

And like the Cylons, I have a plan. The first three books will be written, edited, proof-read, covered and everything else before I put the first one up. I want the first draft of book four done and in the bag before I even consider talking about book one getting out there. If I can get the first three ready, and if book 1 takes off, and if by some type of improbable set of cosmic circumstances people notice it, buy it, and want to read more whilst telling their friends, then I need to be ready to serve them more. That’s the plan.

'Gotta long way to go.

The Wall

There’s a story I began a long time ago. I really liked this story. It details the beginning of a now pretty much dead genre called Cyberpunk. I wanted to know where the whole thing came from? How did the world end up as messed up and dystopian as your typical world? And more importantly, I wanted to tell the tale of people, because at the bottom, middle and top of every story, it’s usually about people. It’s what we’re interested in. Of course, the where, how and when is important. It frames the conversation, but if there’s no real who, then the whole thing is an exercise in world building a world without a population. That’s… not as fun to read as you may think. When’s the last time you read of a dead world without someone to witness it, or someone who will be affected in some way?

So I made it about some people. These people, these characters? They didn’t care about the birth of Cyberpunk. They wanted to stay alive, they wanted to make it. The bad guy was just doing something so logical, it wasn’t even bad to him. It was necessary. Appropriate. It had to be right in his (gender neutral usage) context.

So I have three main characters, all heroes in their own right. They’re interesting, and fun, and they all have their own hangups. The thing is, I don’t seem to be able to move the story on. I've been looking at this thing for the last two weeks wondering how to progress from here. I've been getting around it by getting the other projects up-to-date, finishing my short stories that I put up, and generally not stopping the whole writing thing, whether it be editing or something else. but I’m not writing. I’m not creating. I’m not doing the thing on the big story, the one that should be holding me tight. So again, I’m reaching out and trying to figure out how to do it.

Eventually I’m going to end up writing what’ll probably end up as pure crap for a bit, just to get into the swing of things. I don’t want to do that. Or maybe I’ll have to accept that this is the cost of starting a story and then leaving it for so long. Maybe there just isn’t any good way of getting into it, and the only way to go back to the story is not think about cutting it up, moving it around, peeking around plot points or fixing the characters or understanding motivation, or whatever I think may help in the end, but to put my fingers on the keys, type out whatever awful phrases or concepts are rattling around in my mind and just get it down.

I can’t go back to the phase I was in when I lost myself in the words and knew exactly what the next chapter or sentence was going to be like.

I guess that’s why the whole process of drafting and then redrafting exists. But I’m mightily tired of going to the same place and not knowing how to move it forward. You can’t fix something that hasn’t been written yet.

Which kind of brings me to my current dilemma: instead of doing what I’m telling myself to do, why am I still writing about doing the writing instead of actually doing the writing? Beats me. But if I knew all the answers, this blog would never have been born. I think it’s time to give this particular wall the death of a thousand keyboard cuts.