All articles in category: "Comics,Writing"
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Where my mind keeps slipping deeper to
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Meanwhile, at the Seattle Hall of Justice
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December, I write a book
I neglect this poor, sad blog far too often. Our relationship has spanned ten sometimes loving, sometimes hateful years to date. It was meant to be a venue to encourage me, once upon a time, to write more often. The practice of writing, be it journal style, like your typical blog, or actual fiction work, is the same for me as my relationship with this site. I sit and plan and scheme and maneuver and plot and outline and rebuild and restructure and outline and design some more, creating a sweet and wonderful shell (even if you, my current handful of readers, never get to see it). All you see is my once or twice annual “I WILL WRITE MORE!” post.
But then work happens.
Or gaming happens.
Or a random spurt of fun personal business happens, or, the not-so-fun business, of the personal variety.
Or, more likely, the next great shiny thing places a choke hold on my already deficit attention span.
That’s all going to change, barring any catastrophe on the scale of death, dismemberment, swine flu, porcine encephalitis, or a fictionalized version of the year 2012 suddenly arriving to snuff us out like a summer blockbuster’s box office after the first week of release. I’m not going to say I’ll post a lot more to this blog.I’m going to be (trying to) writing a book.
I’ve been working out notes, research, plot & story details, and character details since the beginning of this past summer. I’ve had the functional guts of the story in various forms since around 2006, and out of all my ideas this was the most plausible for me to write, as far as the old motivation factor goes. There was a major problem, though, in that I was totally and utterly stuck on the motivations of one of my central characters. Arguably, this character is my main character. There was simply a gap in the midst of their story, on how to traverse their motivations and actions that for the absolute life of me I couldn’t even begin to grasp. All of the other characters in the story all but write themselves in notes, outlines, and in my mind.
This character, though, distrusted me and wanted me to fail. Which, considering the character, was sort of appropriate.
During a bus ride and breakfast with Andi at the end of August the loose threads of the story that had been bouncing around my head finally coalesced. We were discussing theoretical responses to various zombie outbreak scenarios, which somehow wandered into my explaining some reading I’d been doing on a few ideas of quantum physics. That all kind of merged into a s’more of an odd idea after breakfast at a diner at First & Denny in Seattle, which finally closed itself off in a perfect knot of threaded realization. I don’t honestly remember the one single thing that Andi said which did it. It may have been all or none of it, or something I saw looking out the window of the bus. It was the actual light bulb moment, and the character’s entire life just plopped itself into my head, with that annoying motivational gap gone. It was so simple that I was kicking myself for not seeing it before. Discussing quantum entanglement and my own memories of how crap relationships immediately after college-age could be turned out to be the perfectly logical stew to cement what I’d been stuck on. Who knew?
Andi has been itching for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writer’s Month) to begin on November 1st, 2009, and so had I. But… we’d almost certainly manage to drive each other bonkers if we took it on in a serious fashion at the exact same time. She’s starting on the official November 1 date. I’m going to start actually writing draft on December 1. Which works out, since I still need to wrinkle out some character specifics and a lone tiny dangling plot point for the middle third of my story. Mine is probably (if my guesses bear out) going to run in the neighborhood of at least 140,000 or so words upon completion, which works out to just over 300 printed pages of 450 words per page.
I’m either insane and setting myself up for disappointment, or I’m insane and… we’ll see.
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Making the impossible plausible
“Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.”
– Rod Serling.
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Many to go
“Gary Farmer was about to end what had been a horrible week.”
That’s the first line of the first draft of the first chapter of it. Two thousand, three hundred, fifty words, for that chapter. I’ve already gone back in and given it a few once overs, but I’ll need to be a fair bit more merciless. My wife had a fantastically cogent editor’s eye, so I’ll be asking her (thanks, honey!) to go over it as well. It’s actually rather funny as an aside–my editorial advice for her is often, “Try expanding this, how about this?” trying to encourage her to flow with ideas and to try different ways of looking at things. That sort of help. Hers, for me, thankfully, is to reign me in, or else I’d spend a page describing a bagel or some damned thing.
I have a program I’m keeping notes, timelines, outlines, character information, and plot points on as well. I added a ton of material to it, and again, for like the ninth day in a row, I’ve found connections in my own story that I hadn’t quite realized were there already. This thing is almost–almost–feeling like it’s writing itself. I have a rock-solid idea, down to almost how the “visual shots” if you will, would look, for the first three and a half chapters, and rock solid breakdowns in my head for the first five or six chapters. It’s a five act story, and I have a rock solid flow of events and character from end to end in my mind and in my notes. It’s honestly the most ‘together’ any one idea of this size has ever been in my head.
It’s so funny how all this came into my mind, and finally got me to do something long like this, just from staring up at the monorail tracks downtown, one day. A particulary nasty “What if?” scenario popped into my head, and that was it. The story was mostly just there, instantly. I had originally actually (quite deliberately) set out in my head to structure the story around the monomyth of Joseph Campbell, almost as an exercise. Oddly, the more I work on this the more it further and further at least feels like it’s deviating from that. I can’t complain, I suppose.
Another funny thing, about this story. I had ideas for six other stories that I had been nursing along. One was a comic book story (for a limited series, or graphic novel). The others would have I think worked best as novels. Three are all part of one larger story, basically telling a larger story of a long running rivalry. The others are relatively standalone, matters of geography notwithstanding. In the creating of this story, I realized that three of my four main characters really, to a “T”, were actually either secondary or lead characters from the other stories. Those stories were, I think, the strongest of all the ones I’d been nursing and procrastinating over across the past years. This story oddly I’ve realized is the hub of my entire weird little mythology.
I had excuses to not write much before, based on the fact I worked absurd and nearly punative hours for previous employers. I don’t, anymore. I have no excuses. My break is over, and I’m writing now. By the way, yes. I’m writing a novel. I wonder if I’ll be able to create at least 5-7 chapters (out of about… I’m guessing 37-40 total, based on what I have planned) by the end of March…
Edit, 10-22-09: Yeah, this form of the book is pretty much toast. And lost, thanks to a lost Windows install. No appreciable loss.
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My plans for the weekend.
No, really:
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
– Isaac Asimov.
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I’ll tell ya.
The theoretical physics of establishing and crossing through a traversible wormhole are seriously messed up. And thats just from the standpoint of establishing a wormhole from point A to point B, let alone using it to move backwards or forward in time. Don’t even get me started on the idea of a cylindrical universe, either.
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What if there was a big hole in the ground?
This Saturday I need to go to the library (first time ever, in Seattle) for books with clues on the following if possible: launching of smaller spacecraft from within a space shuttle in zero gravity; the exact and precise speeds of the Earth’s rotation on it’s axis, the speed of the Earth’s rotation around the sun, and it’s relative speed of travel through the Universe itself as space keeps expanding (as in, standing on the corner of 5th Avenue and Union street, I’m not only moving as the Earth spins, but as it orbits the sun, and I’m also moving on a broader scale as Earth inexoribly moves away from the center of the Milky Way. Of course, the Milky Way itself is moving, so I’m moving on what I believe is a 4th dimensional axis, but three dimensions is probably already overkill.); and a book(s) that will give me a clue of what would happen if I instantly made a 70 mile wide, 70 mile deep, hole in the surface of the planet right along a North American coastline. I predict lots of unpleasant crap, in the form of earthquakes, the ocean spilling into the hole in pretty horrific fashion, causing global tsunami conditions, and general unpleasantness for everyone living around the hole. But I want to be scientifically accurate, mind you.
I also need a good reference book on police or FBI tactics for stakeouts. As in, what they really do in the modern era; not just sitting in a car staring at a strip club smoking cigarettes waiting for their perp. Let’s say it was to hypothetically stake out the hole in the ground.
No, I’m not being deliberately weird. This is serious business.
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What I’ve been up to and scheming about lately.
Mainly of late, trying to see how I can squeeze lots of people, a forlorn romance, a space shuttle, a jerk of a boss, idealistic visions of the nature of science, faith, humanity, and time, a nuclear bomb, monomyth, crazy action sequences, 120 hours of reality, and a dog into the end of the world is serious business. The hell does that even mean?
Writing. Seriously.
Beyond that, living life in Seattle with my wife. Hating myself for being a communications shut-in. Realizing that I found out where I lost approximately 20+ hours per week of my life (hint: the evil soul-sucking previous employer wasn’t at fault for that one! It was all me! They stole the other 20+ hours per week of my life due to mismanaging everyone’s time ((lol–double parenthesis!)), however.) Things is good. I want to be a daddy someday. I want to go on tour someday. I want to find it in myself to stop laughing at the comical morons who duke it out endlessly on Wikipedia over trivial, stupid crap (but like a proper trainwreck, I can’t look away from the usual suspects–I am filled with bile and laughter at once). I want to see the sunlight again someday.
Wait, that’s right, on the sun bit–Seattle. Crap. Note to self as well, need to go to the library.
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I want to write…
…but I have a stomach full of nice sausage, rice, and beans. And
saga continues here on ‘s LJ. She’s like a volcano, every 48 hours she has to spew some shit in the air. -
fiction length
What’s the longest length fiction you’ve ever written? I’m curious for either word count or page count.
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