Spokesbear

The Writing To-Do list for 2010

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in July’s to come); those who’ve been following the blog for a while might remember the 80-Point-Plant for Awesomeness that resulted from last year’s state-of-the-union style gutcheck. Usually I’m pretty quiet about the results, but after reviewing my issues with last years list I’m going to go public with the writing portion of the process this year. It’s somewhat long. Sorry about that. If you want to skip it, I promise there will be more cat-sitting stories tomorrow.

Some thoughts on the list before we kick off:
     – There’s a large amount of background work that goes into the decision of  what to do with the next six months, much of which focuses on what I want from writing and particularly mistakes or poorly executed goals I put together over the last year. The original version of this post saw a rather extensive catalogue of the thinking, but I cut it back in the interests of not making this any longer than it needs to be. If you’re really interested in getting up-close and personal with the darker goal-setting patches of my psyche, I can do so in comments or a future blog-post.
     – One of the things I’m putting more effort into over the next six months is running some form of publically accountable metric to keep me on-track. Most of the time it’s going to be limited to an footer at the base of regular blog posts, but once a month I’ll post the full to-do list with updates and things crossed off the list.
     – The assumptive wordcount-per-day needed to achieve the following is about 4,000 words. This was picked because it’s achievable, but just outside what I usually manage when I’m focused on writing. Part of the goal over the next six months is to rebuild the routine I’ve let slide of late.
     – The two most identifiable problems I’ve suffered from over the last twelve months have been succumbing fear of failure and a tendency to focus on “what comes next” rather than working towards specific goals that feed into the wants and desires that keep me writing.

The To-Do List for the Remainder of 2010
_____________________________________________________

Part One: Novel Projects

1) Finish Black Candy
A hardboiled detective novel set in a futuristic Brisbane where the spirits of the dead form a hazy cloud in the sky, the military government utilizes vast ghost-generators to produce electricity, and the hero partakes of the latest party drug that rewrites the user’s gender and DNA. I’m currently trying to reconcile the ending I’ve written with the world-building that precedes it, and I’m pretty sure one of them needs to be massively changed in order to make things work.

Cool Stuff: Corpses floating in med-tanks; scary men named Rabbit; coffee; really big generators; its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine; more noir; more hardboiled; a main character who actually likes his job.

Current Status: 12,020 words into the current draft (effectively going to be a 1st draft given the scattered I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing approach of the previous draft).

Goal for August 31st : Finish the first draft (90,000 words). That’s 2000 words a day, on average, plus a whole lot of plot-fixin’ that needs to be done. In theory that’s eminently doable, especially with large chunks of wordcount being reworked from the previous draft.

2) Finish Claw/Fey Fatale (Miriam Aster Novella 3)
The original version of this was written when I thought of the Aster series as a “monster of the week” detective concept rather than something with a definite arc and end point (hence the discarding of said draft back in August of ’09). There’s a lot of that version that can be salvaged – I don’t see the core concept changing – but I’ll need to do a lot of reworking and add in a B-plot arc to give it series continuity.

Cool Stuff: twisting the knife in the perpetual agony that is Aster’s love life; talking cats; a sorcerer working out the back of a Chinese take-away; the return of Anya; monsters made of kitten foetus and love.

Current Status: Re-reading the previous draft to figure out what can be salvaged.
Goal for August 31st: Put some thought into the new plotline.
Deadline: TBA after talking with Alisa at TPP

3) Draft Ghoul Moon (aka the Swashbuckley-Wahoo!-Lovecraftian-Ghoul novel)
In Brief: Swashbuckling fantasy set in an eldritch city hidden beyond space and time, where a mortal hero is teamed up with a half-immortal ghoul sorcerer to determine who is killing off the immortal nobility. I signed up for the QWC’s Year of the Novel course with Trent Jamieson back in January under the assumption that Bleed was almost done (ha!) and Black Candy would be easy to revise (double ha!). There have been dribs and drabs of work getting done around other projects, primarily in response to writing exercises in classes, but it’s starting to hit the point where it’s a hindrance not to have it more substantially developed.

Cool Stuff: faction warfare; fencing; The Duke of Viscera and the Viscount of Entrails; people swinging on chandeliers while wearing fancy hats; things fluttering behind the curtain of darkness just outside the city walls; an entire city that stands apart from the rest of the universe by devouring moons one after the other.

Current Status: neglected and causing guilt. I hereby give myself permission to neglect this book without guilt until Black Candy and Claw are done, after which it can occupy my full attention.
Deadline: End of Year

The other long projects that, baring other circumstances, I’d really like to get done in the next three years:

– Fracture/The Glorious Death of Doc Mosaic (pulp hero serial killer police procedural; possibly in space; Status: Moderately detailed plan put together on the flight to and from Adelaide last year)

– Hello Kitty Gasmask Girl (sequel to Black Candy; Status: 2000 words of intro and a rough list of ideas and cool things to insert)

– Slow Fall (Bored Oscar Wilde-esque character engages in escapades on a decadent generation ship slowly falling into a black hole. Status: Poked occasionally while I’m waiting for the concept to settle into place)

– Red Rain (Zombie Noir detective novel. Status: Waiting for me to get the noir out of my system so I can be sure I really want to write it)

– The Shoe Store Suicides (Mosaic narrative about shoe stores, the people who commit suicides in front of them, and the employee who objects to their choices; Status: Big list of ideas, no writing as yet)

– Crow Boy War (Downside Novel I abandoned in 2008 due to not knowing what I was doing. Status: About 40,000 words of draft, some of which may be salvageable)

– Gothic: A Love Story (YA urban fantasy novel with Gothic overtones; Status: 7500 words plus planning)

– Miriam Aster Novellas 4-6 (second series of books follow-ups to Horn/Bleed/Claw should we want to keep producing them; Status: Rough plan pitched to TPP)

– The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga (Expanding the short story which appeared in Dreaming Again; Status: In need of research regarding Piracy and life at sea in the time period)

– Masked Wrestlers of Mars (A Barsoom-esque tribute to Mexican Wrestling Films; Status: Opening image, plus a rough plan developing)
_____________________________________________________

Part Two: Short Fiction Submissions

Submission Status: There are currently 7 submissions out there, although one has been out for over a year and is old enough that it should be trunked anyway so we’re going to call it six instead. Of those 6 stories there’s only one that’s old enough to have seen most of the markets I regularly submit too. This is a slightly better situation than I thought I was in – it appears I have been getting my butt into gear after all those blog posts where I was freaking out about not doing enough short fiction – but it needs to be better. My personal comfort zone in terms of the number of finished stories out and submitted lies between 15 and 20 active submissions, which means there needs to be fifteen to twenty stories given my reluctance to simultaneously submit (even to markets who are open to such things).

I have a fairly large folder full of stories in various states of completion, so I’ve gone through and nominated fifteeen of them as “2010” projects that will need to be finished by the end of the year. They’ve largely been picked because they focus on things I want to get better at (third person POV, writing particular genres), or because they’ll get me used to revisiting worlds I plan to revisit in novel form one day, or because they’re sufficiently different to the types of stories I’ve been writing in terms of themes or voice that they’ll help refresh my palate of writing tools. All title are working titles and subject to being replaced. Stories marked with an asterisk can be swapped out of the list for another idea as long as the reasoning isn’t “whim” or “I’d like to write that story more.”

The Short Story To-Do List

The Moloch Alley Stories
After I put together the Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi for the Shimmer Clockwork Jungle Book I ended up brainstorming a bunch of things I wanted to do with the voice and world of the story.

     – The Gallows Magus and the Queen of the Winter Seas (Empire hires a magical assassin to kill the mermaid he fell in love with as youth. Hilarity ensues. Status: Partially drafted before hitting plot problems)
     – The Sabres of Moloch Alley* (Mostly this is just a title and a rough idea about the protagonists; Status: Unwritten)
     – The Legions of the Red Sand (An attempt at secondary-world fantasy using the Australian outback as the basis of the setting, with French Foreign Legion influences. Status: Unwritten, but plenty of pre-planning and the voice is more-or-less settled upon)

Downside Stories
I’ve been meaning to write more stories set in the world of Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven for two years now, but I’ve always set them aside because they never synced up with the impulse that made the first story fun to write (basically: what happens when you put a fairytale hero in a cyberpunkish setting). They’re starting to hit now-or-never status in terms of whether they’ll get done, so they’re on the list.

     – Never Fall in Love With a Dead Girl (Started writing this a while back as the Soldier Boy & Dead Girl Molly. It’s still looking for a plot; Status: Partially drafted)
     – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crow Boy (Follow-up to Clockwork, Patchwork, Ravens written from Rose’s POV; Status: Opening drafted)
     – Number One Crush* (Heist story using one of the Downside gangs as the victims. Status: Untouched and in need of a title that doesn’t reference a Garbage song)

Ghoul Moon Stories
These occupy the bottom of the list because they’ve had the least thought put into them. The goal is twofold: explore the setting I’m planning on using for the Ghoul Moon novel above, and figure out how to write sword-and-sorcery.

     – The Street of a Thousand Spices*
     – The Six Deaths that plagued Festival of Carrion*
     – The Duel You Cannot Win*

Stories utterly unconnected to novel projects

     – The Unicorns of Suffragette 3 (There are unicorns on a space station. The Goblin King objects to this. Status: About a thousand words and growing)
     – The Exodus (A small outback town in quarantined after a glowing pillar of light starts calling people into it. Status: Partially drafted, but needs a point beyond the initial concept)
     – The Birthday Party (Luck as a trade good. Status: Partially drafted)
     – Untitled Egypian Mummy Story (A guy finds out the girl he’s dating was possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian mummy fifteen years ago. Status: About 1200 words in)
     – Trainspotting* (A bunch of people are called upon to haunt the ghost of the last train after the lines are shut down. Status: Partially drafted, but in danger of becoming a rehash of old themes. Also needs a better title)
     – Pickets, Memories, and Tethers (Ghost story that’s been kicking around my files since Clarion. Status: Mostly done)

Current Partial Story Drafts Sitting in the Future Projects sub-folder: 73 and change (I’m not counting the files that consist of fifty first line exercises or titles in search of a story)

_____________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 12/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

Talking to the Spokesbear About Recent Reading: The Lathe of Heaven

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

“You read The Lathe of Heaven?” To his credit, the Spokesbear manages to say this without making it sound like an accusation. Of course, he immediately proceeds to sniff the cover like one of the drug dogs you see at the airport, which kind of undoes his momentary attack of self-control. “You don’t like Le Guin and you’ve had that book sitting on your shelf for six years without reading it. What gives, dumb-arse?””

“I don’t like Earthsea. That’s not a condemnation of her work in its entirety.”

The Spokesbear made a nervous coughing noise in the back of his throat. “People will kick your arse for not liking Earthsea. You know that, right?”

“I’ve locked the door and taken the phone of the hook. I can drag the shotgun out of the in-case-of-zombie-apocalypse kit if we need it.”

“Sure.”

I fidgeted as I made coffee, uncomfortable under his stare. “Fine,” I said. “It’s short. I need short books. I promised myself I’d read 104 books by the end of July, most of them written by women, and I’m falling behind.”

The Spokesbear doesn’t look convinced. “That theory doesn’t work so well when you don’t like the book, kid. You have to *want* to read things.”

“I liked Lathe of Heaven.”

He sniffed the cover again, pulled a face like he’d discovered a stash of rotten eggs instead of literary cocaine. “This? It’s had a bookmark living at the end of the first chapter since your first attempt to read it back in 2006.”

“Well, I liked some of it.”

“Some of it?”

“The last half.”

He gave me a flinty look. I’m not sure how he managed that, given his eyes are plastic beads and designed to give the impression of cuteness. Call it a quirk of his character, the stern thread of iron beneath his floppy exterior.

“Look,” I said. “It’s a slow starter. It got better, when I gave it a chance.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Better how?”

“Rule of three,” I said. “Conflict between two characters, no matter how intense and meaningful, becomes far more interesting when a third character is introduced to take sides and provide contrast. Plus Heather gives a personal stake to the philosophical conundrum at the core fo the book. And the second half of the book has dream-diving alien turtles. You can do no wrong with dream-diving alien turtles.”

“Turtles trump the considerable metaphorical depth of the first half? Really?”

I sipped my coffee. “Really. Turtles are fun.”

“You really wouldn’t be an SF fan if Star Wars hadn’t come along, would you. Style and fun trump substance in your head.”

“Not entirely. I mean, if that were true, I would have liked the remake of Star Trek.”

“They’re going to take away your geek badge,” the spokesbear said.

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I finished my coffee, pondering the book and the conversation.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I think the dislike of Earthsea has more to do with the person who recommended it to me than the book itself.”

“Teacher?”

“Ex-Girlfriend.”

“Which one?”

I gave him a name. He listened, shaking his head.

“If that were really true, you’d dislike Angela Carter.” The Spokesbear looked smug. “Is that checkmate, dumb-arse? Can we stop talking about the book and go back to work now?”

It was. We could. I did.

Cold Cases: Thinking Out Loud

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , , , , , , ,

Okay, to start with, Michael Moorcock talks about the genesis of the Dorian Hawkmoon books over at the Tor site. I mean, seriously, why are you still here?

Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s.  I totally dig the idea of this anthology, but I’ll admit that all of my initial ideas will be bloody hard to pare down to short story lengths (unless, of course, I finally break down and write the 1920’s zombie story set in Tahiti I’ve been threatening to write for four years now, but Alisa at TPP is quite adamant in her hatred of zombies so it’s probably not the best starting point).

♦

Okay, fair warning, the following entry is rambling and scattered while I think through a specific problem related to the project du jour. If you have no real interest in writers thinking out loud, I suggest going back and following the Moorcock link above. I mean, it’s Michael frickin’ Moocock. The man is awesome.

I still have my right molar, freshly canaled after Wednesday’s trip to the dentist, and for the time-being I am free of the antibiotics and anti-inflammatories that induced last fortnight’s lethargy (although my gum’s still infected, and they may return). The rental inspection is over, I’m slowly coming to terms with my decision to stay in the flat rather than move when my lease is done. I’ve fretted about the various ways I can make enough money to not die over the coming months, although I’ve yet to come up with a solution beyond “write more, apply for more jobs, and pray.” I have considered doing the washing up and decided against it. I’ve read a bunch of things. I’ve talked myself out of three separate projects that have absolutely nothing to do with getting Cold Cases finished, nor getting Black Candy finished after that. I’ve finally sent off submissions to all the places I’ve said I’d send submission too. I’ve re-watched an entire season of the Gilmore Girls while scribbling notes on scrap paper. I have been scolded by the spokesbear. I have argued against his scolding. I have lost the argument.

I think I am, officially, out of distractions.

Which probably explains why the Cold Cases rewrite is officially underway after rebuilding the opening scene yesterday. It only amounts to a thousand words all-up, but my original aim was only three paragraphs and there’s a lot of alternative openings there should I need them in a few scenes time.

I’ve been thinking about openings quite a bit for the last few months. Personally, I blame Samuel Delany’s On Writing, in which there’s a strong argument for openings that follow a location/situation-and-action/affect structure. Fiction isn’t a film, Delany says, and the tendency to open stories with action – say, a character opening a canteen and pouring out the water – lacks impact when it’s unsupported by setting elements that give a context to that action. Setting enhances the data a reader has to work with, making each action more definitive and meaningful, but more and more people start with the action because we’re learning the structure of a story from film and television where the setting details are signified automatically as part of the medium. It’s near impossible *not* to betray setting elements when you point a camera at something, so the focus can go on the action; prose hasn’t got that ability, so the context comes first.

And to be honest, I can’t really argue with that. It’s remarkably solid advice from someone who is far smarter than me when it comes to the field of writing. And that scared the ever-loving crap out of me, because every time I sat down to work on something and I didn’t follow the setting-through-affect structure my subconscious has another tool to batter me with and make me give up. My subconscious is good at picking up on things like that, and if ever that was a writing rule worth learning it’s this: all writing advice becomes counter-productive when it gets in the way of getting stuff done.

Part of the reason this has been bugging me in relation to Cold Cases is the way it reflects Raymond Chandler’s preferred approach to an opening passage. I ransacked the small pile of his work that seems to have taken up occupancy on my bedside table last night and ran through the first paragraph of each, taking them apart in an effort to figure out what it is I liked about them and why they worked. The random sampling I came up with was pretty setting-intensive:

It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aledis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home. (Farewell, My Lovely; Raymond Chandler)

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars (The Big Sleep; Raymond Chandler)

The housewas on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Knoll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra-cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leading downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming them. (The High Window; Raymond Chandler)

The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart. (The Lady in the Lake; Raymond Chandler)

Moreover, when you start reading a whole bunch of Raymond Chandler openings in a row you start to notice a series of scene-setting tricks coming out again and again. The locking-in of time, season and weather that occurs in the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep tends to occur within the first four paragraphs of most Raymond Chandler books; ditto the kind of assumed local knowledge that occurs in Farewell, My Lovely. Only once in six openings did Chandler open with a character rather than a location, and even then the location is still mentioned by the end of the first line:

 The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lenox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other. (The Long Good-Bye; Raymond Chandler)

To be fair, there’s a good reason for Chandler to break his pattern in this one. The first chapter of The Long Goodbye is essentially one long set-up for the rest of the book, establishing the friendship between Marlowe and Lennox that’ll provide a stronger context for the action when the mystery kicks off in Chapter Two. I spent a lot of time pondering that yesterday, prior to writing, and I’m pretty sure it contains the kernel of thought I needed to get out of the drafting-paralysis that set in after reading Delany’s book. Because once I slotted context into the tripartite structure he advocates instead of setting, things start to become a little clearer.

The opening paragraphs to the first Aster book, Horn, is almost pure context without any real setting details included. It largely gets away from it by being a riff on the more obvious Chandler-esque traits I noticed back when I first started reading hardboiled fiction:

The phone call came at three am, about a half-hour after the body arrived at the morgue. It didn’t wake me. I don’t sleep well, not anymore. I used to work Homicide back when my life made sense and insomnia’s one of those bad habits I picked up on the job, right up there with the cigarettes and the tendency towards one glass of gin too many. It’s just another little twitch to remind me that my body doesn’t pay attention to the lies I tell myself about the past. (Horn; Me; You can still buy it over here if you’re interested)

I suspect I get away with this kind of white-room set-up of the story because Horn is shamelessly meta-textual in its approach. At it’s core the book assumes a kind of familiarity with hardboiled/noir tropes and the tropes of unicorn fiction, and I didn’t necessarily want people to be starting with a clear image of the setting so much as a clear idea of which genre the story was situation in. It’s an easy narrative trick to pull (easy enough that I probably wasn’t conscious of it when I wrote Horn), and it probably explains why I keep getting into discussions with people about whether Horn is set in an American or an Australian setting*. Without situating the reader within the reading expectations associated with the Hardboiled genre the revelation of what killed Sally Crown at the end of Chapter One doesn’t have the same effect.

Cold Cases is a different book to Horn in a lot of ways, but the biggest is that it doesn’t revolve around the kind of bait-and-switch of genre traits that defined the first book. It’s still merging fantasy and hardboiled, but that merger isn’t the driving force that makes me want to finish the story the way it was in Horn. Which is probably just as well, since I doubt it’d work a second time (primarily because I tried, back when I made my first attempt at the sequel, and it fell flat). This time around the backdrop that’s providing a context to the action is largely Aster’s backstory and that’s a lot harder to set-up.

Yesterday was a day of experimenting with that. Still not sure I got it right, but at the very least I’ve got an idea of how to determine whether it’s doing the wrong thing once the rest of the manuscript forms up. And that’s as far as this train of thought goes before my head starts hurting and the spokesbear cracks the whip once more.

*Australian, for the record, albeit filtered through a noir lens with names changed to protect the city I based it on.