Saturday Scenes 01 - Such failure

It's time for Saturday Scenes. If you don't know what that is, check it out here.


I initially wrote this as the prologue for a novel I've been working on intermittently. It works basically along the premise of, what if a James Bond-like spy had lost his mission and the megalomaniacal madman had succeeded in dominating the world. It alternates between flashbacks to that failure and its immediate aftermath and the present day, years later, as the spy attempts to start up a rebellion to overthrow the madman's regime.

Here goes:

PROLOGUE - THEN
Richter made a slight sniffing noise. 

“You reek of failure,” he said, his voice barely more than a grunt.
Small fires crackled around the room, a two level cylinder with rings of computer banks around the walls. Control consoles belched out smoke, blackening the walls. The plastic frames of the monitors above them curled. There was an office off to the side, now smashed, the desk within overturned and burning. The walls were riddled with bullet holes from the gun battle that had just ended. Richter stood in the center of it, this ruined cathedral of technology. His body broad and tall, exuding the energy of victory. Richter, who had just murdered billions of people and brought civilization to its final gasp, took in a long breath but didn’t smell the reeking, acrid smoke.

Behind him, Reid Erekson stood, barely. On a normal day, Erekson looked typically heroic. Dark hair, intense eyes, chiseled jaw. On this day, his hair was matted to his head with sweat and grime. A thick line of red cut across his forehead and down his left cheek. His square jaw was bruised, slack with fatigue. Two of Richter’s thugs held him up, his bruised and broken body supported between them. His left leg was broken, a shard of bone sticking through the skin of his thigh. It sent burning tendrils shrieking up through his body with even the most minute movements. He stared at Richter, hatred hotter than his own pain. 

Richter was a fine form. He stood out from the destruction around him. Somehow, his clothes didn’t look rumpled or ruined; his crisp, pressed suit seeming impossibly immaculate. Even the strict part of his slightly-graying hair was unmolested. The man was impeccable, in both form and attitude.

Erekson wanted to tear him in half for it. 

“Nietsche said that man is something to be overcome,” Richter announced, pacing slowly. A show of ego for Erekson. “Today, I have done so. I overcame all the prejudices, all the silly wars and squabbling, economic nonsense.” He turned back to Erekson. “I overcame you.” 

Erekson spat blood on the floor at Richter’s feet. 

Richter let out a small chuckle in response. He got close to Erekson, his hands cupped before him. “The world is mine, now. Clay to reshape as I see fit!” 

He spread his arms wide in the air. On the surviving monitors, red pools spread across an animated map of the globe as the satellites fired their deadly payloads. Richter’s computers had carefully calculated load sizes, wind currents, trajectories, to spread destruction across the greatest area. There was no escape, not even the wide, empty plains of Africa. The United States, for so long such a powerful, envied nation, fell first and quickly. Across the oceans, the other powers, China, the United Kingdom, the Russian Federation, all began to glow red on the screens. Erekson knew that in each of those places, human beings cried out in fear and pain, huddled together in their final, sad moments.

Just before the pain finally caused his exhausted mind to shut down, he thought of Lauren, of the last time he saw her. He thought of her standing at the door, watching his car back down the driveway. She had that look on her face, the one that silently asked, “Is this the time you won’t come back?” She had that look on her face every time. Erekson’s heart screamed at the irony, clawing at his own collapsing consciousness. She grew smaller in his mind, and everything disappeared. 

Richter watched Erekson lose consciousness, and chuckled again. “Get him to the infirmary.” 

His men hesitated, looking at each other in confusion, then at Richter. Why not kill him? 

“Get him to the infirmary,” Richter repeated, slower and more forceful.

The two men merely shrugged, and hauled Erekson out of the room. Richter turned back to the map, now nearly covered in red, and thought about his new world. 

Around him, his staff sprang back into action, putting out the last of the fires. Others began to reboot the failing computers. The sense of victory in the room was palpable to all, but Richter had gathered his people carefully - they got down to work immediately, eagerly. These were no mere thugs and workers, they were followers. They believed in what they were doing. They knew, like Richter, that in order to make the world a better place it had to be cleansed. 

Richter watched one of his followers work on something under the console. The man sat up straight and reached over and hit a button marked ‘reset.’ 

And he had to smile at that.

Gender equality, you say?

This picture was posted on my Facebook timeline:

(Click to enlarge)

I think that's pretty important, especially after my last post. Sort of like the next logical step. And I have to admit that, as with the last post, it has a sort of "oh, duh" quality to it.

And I have to admit, also, to being somewhat hesitant about it. And here's why: I don't feel that violence against women is ever justified. I've never hit a woman, I often feel that men who do are to be loathed. The flipside of that is that the characters in my novel are predominantly in the military, so violence is going to happen to them.

So as I'm going through it and changing the gender of a character here or there, the problem becomes that many of them are injured or killed in violent sequences. And I feel bad about that.

Should I? As I said, these are characters who are in the military, and it is absolutely an action/adventure novel, so violence is part of the quotient here. I feel an awkward guilt over it, and I'm not even sure that's justified.

In the end, I think I'll be okay - it's not like I'm going out of my way to be extra cruel towards these female characters. I'm putting them there because I want to be inclusive, even though that awkwardly means that they're included in violence.

What say you?

UPDATE: I'm going to post a few responses that I've received.

Jessica: Important questions to ponder. I think if the violence they suffer (and dole out) is equal then it's ok. Still tough though because of how prevalent violence against women is. I would encourage an author's note perhaps that offers a trigger warning?

Nichole: see, in the context that you write the stories in, i don't see it as an issue, because it's not like you deliberately write about women getting assaulted without defending themselves. these women are enlisted in the military or something very similar and get into situations where they are likely to be involved in some sort of violent combat. your female characters are usually rather badass and are more than capable of defending themselves.

Masha: I always understood the phrase "violence against women" to not just mean what the words say, but to refer to a specific set of behaviors where women are targeted because of the uniquely vulnerable position women occupy. For example in domestic abuse, or in cases of rape.

I don't think there is anything inherently more wrong in a man attacking a woman, than a man attacking a man. But when he does so in a context when his violence is not judged, when his violence is seen as acceptable, because of attitudes people have about men and women- "she asked for it" or "she belongs to him" or "he cant help himself, he is a man and men cannot control themselves after all" it becomes something different. It's not just the violent act itself that is wrong, it's the context in which men feel justified in taking out their rage on women, free from blame.

Martin: I think as long as your violence isn't consistently driven by gender then the violence itself in the narrative shouldn't be a problem no matter who it's against.

Karen: Seems to me that violence is part and parcel of being in the military, in a combat situation. Women in combat? They're going to get wounded, maimed, killed. It goes with the job.

Sound off in the comments if you agree or disagree. 

Of Women and Refrigerators

(Image: stock xchng/jumelle)

A while back, I went to my friends on Facebook and said, "I want to create a strong female character. Where do I start?"

The best response I got was the simplest: "Create a strong character. Then make it female."

I mean, whoa, right?

I felt stupid for not having thought of that initially. But, of course, it's totally true. And when I began working on "Weirdo Company," I knew that the Davis character was going to be a major focus and I wanted to make sure that I never made her a victim - that she was always proactive in these adventures - even though to some extent, bad things have to happen to her and she will suffer through emotional crises.

Yes, she's the newbie. She's inexperienced - but we quickly find that she's capable. Throughout the 10 parts of the serial, Davis crisis is whether or not she belongs in this group, not whether she can cut it. I felt that was important, that her competence was not the question - it was whether she felt this was the right direction for her life and her career to go in.

Later, as her romance with Colin 'Rhymes' McCollin blossoms, one of the things I wanted to tackle with the characters was the concept of someone "needing to be rescued." And because I was actively trying to make Davis a "strong female character" that meant I had to struggle with how to explore that dynamic both in the context of a (fairly) light-hearted action/adventure setting and also by not ruining the Rhymes character by doing to him all the things that have been done to women characters throughout the years.

And the question seemed simple enough: Why does she "need" to be rescued? Why does anyone think that she does? And what does it to do her relationship with Rhymes if she doesn't?

One of the things I hate about TV shows is that many of them seem to build drama out of the "will-they-or-won't-they" concept - A romance between two characters who may or may not end up together. Think Ross and Rachel on "Friends." But what always bugged me about that show, and others, is that oftentimes the two characters will finally get together and then the writers simply have no concept of what to do with them. Because the entire relationship so far has been built on suspense! 

I didn't want to fall prey to that trap with Davis and Rhymes, either, and I think strengthening their relationship was key to that. Ross and Rachel went through an aggravating cycle of getting together and immediately breaking up, but I was far more invested in the relationship between Monica and Chandler on that show. Two people who fell in love and went through trials and tribulations without any of the immature nonsense that Ross and Rachel went through. Instead, their problems were all about figuring out how they would move forward together. 

In my mind, that's a much harder drama to get correct. It feels easier to go the Ross and Rachel route because it generates quick and easy interest. And it's a tried-and-true formula. 

And I'd much rather that Davis and Rhymes be more like Monica and Chandler. Their troubles are about learning what the other is capable of and sticking by each other, not about me trying to drive a wedge between them to manufacture drama.

I'm very happy with how Davis turned out. Is it all perfect? No. There's probably a couple of parts in some of the earlier stories where I slipped up with her, but my own journey as a writer and writing her as a character continues. In writing the "Weirdo Company" followup, I included a scene in which Davis is injured and is then upset that Rhymes doesn't get adequate justice for that act. I've decided to remove that scene, or at the very least, alter it to remove that part of it. On a technical level, it all works. But I think in doing so I betrayed the character and my goals in writing her. 

Because I'm past creating a "strong female character." I'm just working on a strong character.

It's the economy (of words), stupid!

(image: stock.xchng/id_charlz)

You don't realize it, but there are a lot of words you don't need in your novel.

In my earlier post about writing the Weirdo Company serial, I talked about focusing more on actions than descriptions as one way to keep the word count down and keep the plot moving swiftly.

But, there's more to economy of words than just that. Even in describing actions, you're going to run into superfluous words that are going to bog down your sentences. What are these junk words? They're pretty simple.

Boot up your word processor of choice and go to the "find" function. In the search field, type in "then." How many times did it come up?

Searching through just the first part of my new Weirdo Company novel, the word "then" appears 34 times out of a total of 15,159 words. That might not seem like much, but trust me, "then" is a word you can get rid of without really missing it.

Here's what I mean:

But then her eyes snapped open, big and blue and whip-smart.

Or, we can just say:

Her eyes snapped open, big and blue and whip-smart.

The effect is subtle, but it works. The sentence is punchier. To the point. 

Of course, sometimes "then" is useful when describing a sequence of events. As with all things, consider this on a case-by-case basis. Don't just obliterate every usage of the word on my say so. But make finding these junk words part of your editing process.

You'll be surprised by how much you don't need "then" or "seemed" or lots of words that end in "-ly." 

Breaking up is hard on the keys

(Image: stock.xchng/milan6)

I don't think using real conversations I've had to help spruce up my dialogue is a bad thing. I do it all the time. I'm not talking about taking whole conversations and changing the names. Occasionally using a phrase or sentence someone actually said can help make your fake conversations feel more real.

In my current case, it's also helping me tap into the emotions I'm trying to evoke in a particular scene. Today, it's a break-up between two characters who were in a romantic relationship.

Now, this scene had always been part of the plot of the novel - it's one of the motivating factors for one character's actions in the rest of the novel. Jacob Kent gets dumped by his girlfriend, Rachel, and in his sorrow makes a fateful decision. But I've littered it with bits and pieces from a couple of real breakups I've been through, and at least for me personally, I think it helps sell the emotions of the characters.

They say "write what you know," and in this sense, I think that phrase is true.

Here's part of the scene in question: (Keep in mind, it's still a first draft)

“Hey,” said the voice on the other end. Kent’s voice. 

“Hey,” she said. 

“You wanted to talk.” 

“I did,” she said. “You can probably guess…” 

“Well, no good conversation ever started with, ‘soooo we need to talk,’” he replied. “Historically.” 

She chuckled. “That’s accurate.” 

Then she let out a long sigh. She could feel the tears coming. She could hear his breath catch on the other end of the line. 

“You’re dumping me,” he said. It wasn’t a question. 

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “It’s just…” 

“Just what?” 

“You’re not... here.” 

“You did call me on the phone.” 

She closed her eyes, hard, trying to seal in the tears. “You’re wonderful, Jacob, really, I want you know to know that,” she said, voice cracking. “But… You’re so distant. You can’t ever tell me anything. It’s been nearly a year, and for all I feel, for all the good times we’ve had, I feel like I’ll never really know you.” 

He said nothing. 

“I’ve tried for months to get you to open up to me,” she said. 

“You know my work is classified.” 

“I’m not talking about your work,” she said. “I know what you do. I know where you go for days at a time. But I want to know what you think. What you feel. And I can’t keep going like this. I can’t keep dating you and feeling more and more like it’s just work.” 

“Do you love me?” he asked. 

She blinked. The tears streamed down her face. “Yes.” 

“Then why does it matter?” 

“Because it’s not enough. Not for me. Not anymore.” 

He said nothing. She sobbed. 

“Please don’t do this,” he said quietly. 

She wept. “I don’t want to,” she said between racking sobs. “I don’t! But you can’t promise me you’ll change, can you?” 

He said nothing. 

“I didn’t think so,” she said. She pressed the phone against her hot cheek, running her other hand through her hair. She gripped a handful of it and squeezed, feeling the tug on her scalp. But it was impossible to distract the tears. They kept coming. 

For a long time, neither of them said anything. 

But then he said, “I don’t want to hang up the phone.”

In writing fiction, even fiction as fantastic as something involving magic or aliens or mythical creatures, the concept of verisimilitude is key. If the reader can't get involved in the story, if some part of it doesn't ring true or real to them, they may give up.

I can't say that I often aim for deep philosophical truth in my writing, or even real emotional resonance in many cases, but I do want the reader to be engaged. That means that for all the fantastical, ridiculous things that are happening, it has to seem like it could really happen to these characters, and that the characters respond to these events in the manner that they should.

And one way to do that, as I said, is to draw upon my own memories and emotions. If it's real to me, the chances are someone out there can relate to it and it will feel more real to them.

So what if it happens to involve zombie Franken-dinosaur assassins?

Current Soundtrack:
"Dark Void" by Bear McCreary

Cast of Dramatis Personae Characters

(Image: stock.xchng/michaelaw)

So, here's something sorta embarrassing... I was having trouble remembering the names of some of the characters in my novel.

Yeah. I know.

They're totally minor characters, basically just red shirts. But, it's important to keep that sort of thing consistent throughout the entire piece, right?

So I did something that I really ought to have done from the start - create a list of characters and their associations. I know, I know, Writer 101 stuff. But, I've never really been one for taking copious notes or planning things out with more than just a bare outline and my brain.

In some circles, this is called "pantsing." People who do this are "pantsers." I realize how very 7th grade that sounds, but really, we're just trying to reclaim it.

But there it is. Look at me like a cautionary tale. Your novel will be full of strangers if you don't do things right. It doesn't have to be terribly in depth, just a straight up list. Is there a family, or groupings you need to keep track of? Go for it. Because most of my characters are in the military, I organized it by their squads.

Effort: Five minutes.
Not having to keep looking back through old chapters to remember character names: Priceless.

Current Soundtrack
"Black Sails" by Bear McCreary

Oh, hello there 2014

(Image: stock.xchng/nh313066)

It's apparently been an entire year since I updated this blog. Many things have changed since then.

Many things have also stayed the same.

I finished the Weirdo Company serial! That was a huge moment for me, hitting the "publish" button on the last of 10 parts. I had such an incredible amount of fun writing that story and creating those characters. I initially told myself that I was done with it for a while, and went to work on another project.

But the problem is, ideas for more Weirdo Company kept nagging at me. So I abandoned the other project and threw myself whole hog into a new Weirdo Company novel.  I haven't settled on a title yet, but frankly that's not surprising.

Along the way, other life things happened. I went to five weddings last year, three of them in about the span of a month. It was exhausting, and expensive, but at the same time a good deal of fun. My relationship with my best friend deteriorated until it was no more. That was also exhausting. And I got my heart broken, which was even more exhausting.

In the middle of all that, I got promoted at work. I don't work the night shift anymore, which is huge. I enjoy the work that I'm doing, and I feel like it's another step forward and toward what I would really love to be doing.

But I keep plugging forward with more Weirdo Company. It's comforting. It's fun. I'm pouring a bit more of my own emotions into this one, so hopefully there will be a little bit more dramatic meat beyond all the swearing and explosions and strange monsters.

It's also not a serial, it's a novel, though it keeps a lot of same serial format. I think fans will find a lot to like, and maybe I'll attract some new ones. Maybe.

I'm also writing this post from the very awesome Danish Pastry House in Medford. It's a fine little place that has lots of baked goods, sandwiches and really excellent coffee and tea options. I wrote a blog post for my second job about sleep deprivation while I was pounding back a chai latte. How's that for funny?

But, ultimately... How I'm feeling is this: 2014 will be big. Bigger than 2013. More things are going to change for me. I'm making that happen, rather than waiting for them. This is the next step that I've been building toward since I started self-publishing. Taking that leap was me beginning to do something different with my life than simply go to work, come home and do it all again the next day.

It's a little weird.

Current Soundtrack
"Inception" by Hans Zimmer

How I Wrote a Serial

Part One: Formulaic Nonsense
I’m already five-deep into the “Weirdo Company” 10-part serial. When I first started, I did a little research and I looked up some monsters that I thought were either interesting to build an action/adventure story around or that I’d simply never heard of before and thought would be cool. (“Hellshark” was an idea I came up with a couple years ago as a joke, and it fit right in.) So I found 10 monsters as I had already decided I wanted to write 10 chapters of this story.

While that idea was still forming, I settled upon the idea of mapping out the entire story like it was a season of a television show and treating each chapter of the serial like an “episode.” I looked at my list of monsters and started coming up with basic plots for them. Sometimes these were as simple as “The team is trapped underground with _____” or “zombies vs unicorns.”  But as the list went on, I had other elements I wanted to introduce that would link all the stories together until I basically had a short paragraph for each of the ten episodes. From there, I decided on a certain format each episode would (loosely) follow.

The basic formula is that each episode begins with a “cold open.” For example, the first story, “Zombies vs Unicorns,” opens with a brief scene of a scientist escaping a facility overrun by zombies, and then we jump a couple weeks later to introduce our characters as that situation has grown out of control.  The second story, “Ninja Werewolf Assassins!” begins with a harrowing chase sequence, and then the next scene actually jumps back in time to explain how we got there. So both stories follow the same format, even if the content of the scenes themselves is wildly different - and even the time jump is diametrically opposed.

Next, introduce the characters and throw them into the plot. In “Blood of the Keres,” I introduced the characters via a briefing scene, followed by them traveling to Europe and generally getting slowly drawn toward the inevitable final confrontation. That’s fine - I still had a big action-packed opening, and then I built every action sequence larger and larger until the all-out battle at the end.

And that’s the basic formula for each episode. Think of it like a check mark - Start with some big action, then bring it down a little, then build bigger and bigger and bigger.  

For “The Great Dragon Egg Robbery,” I eliminated the opening teaser.  The story has three major action sequences - a train/highway chase, a truck highway chase, and the finale.  In between are sections of plot and character development, but what I wanted this story to be, as the big “halfway there” episode, was essentially an action showcase. So I formatted the story around that. In terms of the plot, we actually open three days after this particular mission has been going on, and the team is frazzled and harried from the last few days. I sprinkle some information here and there in the dialogue to fill us in on what’s happening.

And here’s where we get to one of the important things I want to talk about: Length.

John Ward asked me to help him understand how to write something and keep it short. He said the temptation for many writers is to expand their story as large and as long as they can make it.

Each episode of “Weirdo Company” is around 14,000 or 15,000 words. That’s more than enough time for me to develop relatively simple plots, sprinkle in some action sequences, character development and one-liners.

Think about your average TV episode. I’m going to give my college screenwriting professor, Robert Johnson a shoutout here, because he was awesome and so were his classes. I learned a lot of wild stuff in those classes, such as that TV dramas are often split into A-plot and B-plot. The A-plot is the one with the major focus, while the B-plot tends to get less screen time. In the case of CSI, the A-plot is the murder and the B-plot is generally character-oriented, such as one of the investigators is dealing with a family issue or something along those lines.

In “Zombies vs Unicorns,” the A-plot is the mission - Weirdo Company has to deal with the zombies and the unicorns in a little town up in the mountains of New Hampshire. The B-plot is the new recruit, Davis, acclimating to the team and their charter to deal with strange and dangerous monsters.  In my chosen format for the serial, the next episode, “Ninja Werewolf Assassins!” sends the team on a new mission, but continues the character arc for Davis, who deals with the emotional repercussions of the first episode. And then the third episode does that again - new mission, coupled with character side-plot.

I did that five times.  Now it’s time for episode 6, “Chupacabras on a Boat.” My original plot outline had the team hunting Chupacabra through some tunnels and an oil rig, but since I used tunnels extensively in “Blood of the Keres,” I decided I wanted to look at some different locations. Well, where’s one place that Chupacabra absolutely doesn’t belong? On a boat, duh. So now that I have my simple, ludicrous premise... it’s time to get to work.

Part Two: Don’t Do What I Do

I’ll admit that a lot of times when I start writing, I don’t really know where I’m going with it. I’m not a fan of outlines, I never have been. That got me into a lot of trouble in school when teachers would force me to outline a paper I was going to write, and it was like pulling teeth. Then, once I’d finally come up with an outline, I’d ignore it completely and get an A.  My brain just seems to organize things on the fly, then I go back sometimes and edit.

So, and here’s where my process should probably not be recommended to everyone (or anyone) I often just start writing and see where it takes me. While I’m doing this, the story is slowly coming together in the back of my mind. When I finish a scene, I think for a bit about what should logically come next. Sometimes, that works out fine. Other times it doesn’t.

A lot of writers will read this and think, “You’re freaking insane.”  So be it.  I probably am. But I found that this is what works for me. Some writers will say, “Yeah, me too!” and that’s cool, also.  If you’re the kind of person who’s super organized and you need to have an outline, then here’s what I’d suggest:

Teaser
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Act Five

Or variations thereof, depending on your story. But try it. This is what’s called “breaking the story” in Hollywood. Tear it up into chunks and put them together in a way that makes sense.

TV dramas, at least when I was learning about them, were organized into a teaser and five-act structure. The teaser, as I mentioned before, sets things up.  “CSI” usually starts with some kind of act of violence, then jumps forward hours or days to when the team has found the body. Gil Grissom looks things over and spouts some kind of pun or witty remark and then all of a sudden The Who is rockin’ us through the title sequence. After that, each act progresses the plot forward but it also does one other thing: each act ends on a cliffhanger. You want your audience to come back after the commercial, right?

In writing this serial, I’ve tried to sprinkle little cliffhangers throughout as I would jump from scene to scene.  Give it a try! Outline a teaser and five acts for your story, each one increasing the stakes for your characters until you get to the climax, then slam us with the best you’ve got!  

Should you end each episode of your serial on a cliffhanger?  Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the nature of the story you’re telling. For “Weirdo Company,” the stories don’t end with explicit “To Be Continued...” cliffhangers (yet...) but I like to hint that the overarching plot is advancing, hoping that the reader likes these little teases enough to come back next month for another bite. I’ll admit, in five episodes, I haven’t given away much about the villains’ plan, but those revelations are coming. How quickly you seed them through your story is up to you. But a good place to do so is probably around the end of each episode, to sort of set the stage for your next one.

Part Three: Watch Your Mouth

So we’ve looked at the structure of a serial being devised like a TV show - carry over your character arcs even if you resolve your plot, divide your episode into acts, etc. So what? You could probably still write a 100,000 word novel with that structure. How do you keep it in check?

Most TV dramas, without commercials, clock in at about 40 minutes, sometimes a little longer like 42. Since I’m developing “Weirdo Company” in the mold of a TV series, that means there’s not a lot of space or time for artful navel gazing. So the plot of each episode is going to be relatively simple. The “CSI” crew have only 42 minutes to solve a murder. Well, I’ve only got about 42 pages to do the same thing.  

Economy of language. Don’t screw around.

One of the things I don’t do much of in “Weirdo Company” is talk about what things or people look like. I’ll give cursory descriptions like “a black Mercedes,” “a gray BMW,” or “a high-ceilinged room that felt like a cathedral.”  I think I might once have mentioned the hair color of a particular character, or that one character is large and muscular.

But otherwise, I’m not spending a lot of time on what things look like unless it’s important. I try to trust the reader’s brain to fill in that information for themselves. Since that’s taken care of, I mostly just focus on action.  In this sense, I don’t mean action in terms of gunfights and explosions, but actions, movements, etc. Instead of focusing on describing the way things are, I focus on describing what they’re doing.

Example: in “The Great Dragon Egg Robbery,” the opening action sequence involves Harper trying to stop a runaway train. I don’t describe what he’s wearing. There’s no scene that says “Harper arrived, wearing a neatly-pressed Saville Row suit with pinstripes and two buttons, his tie cleanly cutting down the center” or whatever. Instead, I just make passing mention to him straightening his tie.  Suddenly, your mind pictures him in a suit.

I could say something like, “Anders was a beefy man with a thick neck, square jaw, and a scar that ran across his eye. He’d gotten it years earlier in a battle with an enraged sasquatch. He looked at him quizzically, the meaning plain in his face.”

Or, I could say, “The big man, Anders, looked at him with his one good eye, questioning.”  The focus isn’t on the fact that Anders is big, or even that he’s scarred but on the action of him asking an unspoken question.  If I toss in that he has “one good eye,” the reader will more than likely conjure up an image of a man with an eyepatch or a scar, or whatever they innately want him to look like.

Spend just enough time on what things look like to get the basic gist across, and the reader will do the rest on their own. A short-form serial is no place for you to go wild with your characters’ deep inner thoughts, or to lovingly explore every nook and cranny on that tree in the background.

After all that, what am I saying?  Get to the frickin’ point.

Do it quickly. Do it succinctly. Still do it with flair, because you don’t want your prose to be boring, but don’t dilly-dally.  This also relates to your plotting and structure, too, not just how many words you use.

I started writing the opening of “Chupacbras on a Boat” and it was about four hundred words that mostly consisted of characters walking into a room, dropping their bags on their beds and then sitting down in an office for a briefing before getting to the fighting. it was totally boring. So I lopped it right out and got down to business. Sometimes you might have to do that - write the boring part until you get to the good part, and then ditch the boring part. Remember that you can always sprinkle some background info into the good part to explain things to the reader without having to actually explain things to the reader.

Part Four: The Gang’s All Here

The “Weirdo Company” series has seven or eight recurring characters that are generally in each episode. Think about the original “Star Trek.” Everyone knows about Scotty, Chekov, Sulu and Uhura, right?  Sure. But the main characters of every episode were Kirk, Spock and McCoy. The others were around, but they were rarely the focus of an entire episode, maybe just a few scenes here or there. Still, everyone tends to think of them as main characters.

Well, I might have seven or eight characters that are always in these episodes, but I’m really only focusing on three. Harper, Davis and Rhymes are the characters with the most “screen time” in my serial. The others are there, and they serve their distinct purposes, they’re just for support because I need a larger world than three characters. You might not, but in continuing the TV analogy, they’re my supporting cast. They’re my Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura.

Even in a modern ensemble TV drama, you’ve got a couple people who are always at the forefront of the action. “The Walking Dead” is undeniably about Rick Grimes, even with the hugeness of that show’s cast. We might focus on Andrea and Michonne for a bit, or toss a couple scenes to Glen and Maggie, but we’re mostly following Rick.

So don’t try to give all your characters equal time. Don’t always try to flesh them out as much as you can. Sometimes, you just need your characters to be who they’re supposed to be. Flint is the medic, Mendez is the gunner. Tailor their actions and dialogue to those purposes and they’ll do just fine.

And now: Villainy.

Your story will probably require some kind of antagonist or villain. Mine has two, a pair of brothers who call themselves Joker and Thief. Joker is the plotter, Thief is the doer. I’ve set up that dynamic, so the characters feel fairly well established even if we don’t know much about them - particularly their plans. But through the dialogue we know that Joker wants to rule the world and has some sort of intricate plan to do so while Thief does what he’s told and is resentful of his brother’s power over him.

All these things lead back to being economical. Don’t put more effort into something than you have to. Focus on telling a good story, rather than trying to flesh everything out. The short form prose is less about depth. I could write thousands of words about the backstories of every character, give all of them more time to do things like drink coffee or walk their dogs, but I’m stripping away everything that, while interesting, is ultimately unimportant.

NaNoWriMo is upon us!

Yes, the yearly writers Mecca is here: NaNoWriMo, the month when everyone sits down and tries to crank out a 50,000 word fan fic masterpiece!

Every year I find some excuse not to participate, though this year I'm getting closer. I've got two jobs and so many writing irons in the fire, that I just can't sit down and crank out a novel from scratch. Instead, I'll just use my NaNoWriMotivation to work on a novel project that I started before but only got about 16,000 words into before it came grinding to a halt.

I think that's a pretty good use of my time, considering the two jobs and working on the Weirdo Company serial. That project is going well, since I just released Weirdo Company: Hellshark and I've already made solid progress on the next episode, Blood of the Keres.

So, I'm feeling pretty good about NaNoWriMo, even though my participation is a little... NaNoWriModjacent. 

Any of you out there going to dive into this yearly sacrifice ritual?

Current Soundtrack
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier by Jerry Goldsmith

'Ninja Werewolf Assassins!' and 'Hellshark' updates

For some reason, my posts announcing the release of Ninja Werewolf Assasins didn't actually... post.  Unfortunately, I was posting remotely and didn't bother to check if the posts actually went up, and well, they didn't.

So here I am, looking kinda dumb with a blog that hasn't been updated in over a month.  Awesome.

Anyway, Ninja Werewolf Assassins! is out now!  You can get it for your Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook.

My other update to share is that the third story in the "Weirdo Company" series, Hellshark, is moving along nicely.  I've mocked up the cover art for it, but it's a long way from finished.

I'll also be giving away a few copies of Zombies vs Unicorns this weekend in honor of World Zombie Day.

Current Soundtrack
The Expendables 2 by Brian Tyler

Progress Update: 'Ninja Werewolf Assassins!'

The second part of the Weirdo Company series, which began in Zombies vs Unicorns, is well under way.  This next adventure of Lt. Harper and his band of monster hunters takes the team to the United Kingdom, where they will team up with their British counterparts to capture a wanted terrorist with a deadly secret, a dastardly plan, and a painful connection to General Thibault.

Right now, the story stands at 9070 words, about 4,000 of which I've added just in the last few days.  This one is just pouring out of me now, and I'm having a blast writing it.  It goes a little bit deeper into the characters, as my plan had always been for the first story to act much like the pilot episode of a TV series.  In fact, I'm approaching the entire Weirdo Company series like it was a TV show, and I've plotted out the arc of the "episodes" through a complete "season."  I'm hoping to release one per month,  with some real fun surprises in store.

In other news, I am still getting used to having an Olympus Mans Google+ page.  Right now it's really bare, but I'm going to be adding content slowly, and especially a lot more as I release more of my work and get down to another upcoming project that I'm very excited about.

Current Soundtrack
"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" by Brian Tyler

'Star Trek: Russian Roulette'

'Russian Roulette' is a second story that I wrote and submitted for the "Strange New Worlds" anthology that wasn't selected, I can pretty well guess why this one wasn't picked: it's not very good.  While I've been a fan of this premise for a few years, and have tried to work it into several different projects, I've never really managed to make it work.  My execution hasn't caught up with the idea yet.

In this story, which is a much more traditional 'Star Trek' story than my last post, the Enterprise is damaged in orbit of an alien world.  The engines could overload at any minute, wiping out half the planet below.  To Captain Kirk's horror, the alien denizens try to use the ship's threat of destruction in some kind of sick game of worldwide, political Russian roulette - whichever half of the planet isn't decimated by the explosion wins. Even worse, military units from one of these nations manages to board the ship to try and force it to explode over enemy territory.

Again, I really like this premise.  I'm glad I wrote the story, but in rereading it years later, something about it doesn't click for me.  The ending feels kind of rushed, and I think my characterization of Kirk is... off.  He spends a good deal of the story being something of a bystander, and I think I push his fear of losing the Enterprise a bit too far.

I tried to 'hang a lantern' on the old 'transfer-power-to-the-deflector-to-solve-all-our-problems' trick, but I'm not sure that really works, either.  In the end, all I did was... well... transfer power to the deflector.

Still, on a technical level, I think I did pretty well with this story.  I like my descriptions and a good deal of the dialogue.  And, again, I really like this premise.  One day, I'd like to really do it the justice I think it deserves.  Until then, enjoy.

View PDF

"The Infinite Perfectionist"

My first professional publication was a short story in the anthology "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, vol 9".  I submitted only one story, and I submitted the first draft of that story because I had run up against the deadline.

The next year, I submitted four stories.  None of them were accepted, which was too bad because I thought a couple of them were actually quite good.  The other two... not so much.  But, I've decided to share them here with you.

The first, "The Infinite Perfectionist," may be downloaded in PDF format here.  I think it's a pretty good story, though I can surmise the reasons why it wasn't accepted.  It draws upon a number of concepts and ideas from various eras of the franchise, and concocts a perhaps too complicated idea of a shattered, fractured timeline.

In it, a severely weakened Q finds Christopher Pike, who was to be captain of the Enterprise, but is in this new reality a New York City bar owner, and takes him and his wife on a wild adventure through time and space.  They meet a mutated version of Guinan, who helps send them to the Guardian of Forever.  There, Pike learns how time was fractured and figures out how to put things right.

The idea I had in my mind when I was constructing this story was to explore what would happen if something awful happened to the Guardian of Forever - like, say, having it be assimilated by the Borg.  Ultimately, I thought having it being assimilated wasn't right.  But if the Borg Queen were to step through it, the trillions of minds connected to her own would be too much for the Guardian to handle, and an overload would pretty much break time.

How, then, were our heroes supposed to put things back right?  Q and Guinan were natural choices.  Guinan has shown to be sensitive to changes in the timeline, and Q is, well, an omnipotent being.  But of course, I couldn't just let Q snap his fingers and put everything right, so I just said that surviving the time fracture had weakened him greatly.

Anyway, I thought the story was intriguing enough, and I even think it's fairly well-written.  But, like its premise, it's maybe a little too jumbled.  Maybe Pike was the wrong character to pick?  Perhaps it should have been Kirk, or even Picard - who, of course, has a much heftier emotional connection with the Borg Queen.  Pike would have never even heard of the Borg in the original timeline.  But I thought that was the fun of the story.

Ultimately, I can only guess why the story wasn't accepted.  It just wasn't.  Oh well.  If you get some enjoyment out of it all these years later, then, well, mission accomplished.  Sound off with your thoughts in the comments.

Announcement: Weirdo Company

I'm very close to releasing my next story.  The story itself is finished, and I'm making progress on the second.  This is the beginning of a pretty massive project.  Work on other things, like the novel, are still progressing, but this is going to be one avenue that I'm exploring.

It's called "Weirdo Company."  A series of 10 short stories about a military unit that handles weird, screwed up missions involving monsters and other scary creatures.  It's not designed to be very serious, sort of like the "Call of Duty" games that feature zombies.  It has lots of violence and foul language, but it's also very silly and ridiculous. I hope people like it.

The first adventure is called "Zombies vs Unicorns" and I thought I would share some of the work I've been doing on the cover for it, the last step before release.

This is the first design I sort of slapped together quickly.  It's pretty lame, though I kind of like the treatment of the text:

You an see it's very plain, and the zombie and unicorn are sort of oddly off-center, which doesn't quite work very well.  And that 'blood spatter' looks more like bad spraypaint (which, I'm pretty sure it actually is).

This is what I've settled on for an overall template for the cover:

I think it looks much nicer, though I may play with the text a bit before I'm done.  The gray area in the middle will feature some artwork of a zombie and a unicorn.

Here's the beginning of it, in the form of a rough pencil sketch:

The picture is of poor quality because I took it with my phone rather than scanning the actual sketch.  But I think you get the idea.

Anyhow, I'm pretty excited about this project.  It's almost ready to be unleashed upon the ebook world, and I hope people enjoy it.

Current Soundtrack
"King Kong" - James Newton Howard

A treasure trove of old material

Recently while on the search for something else, I discovered a large treasure trove of old files that include a bunch of writing from the last decade.  Most of it isn't publishable, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is copyright issues - several of the stories I found were submissions I made to the "Strange New Worlds" anthology that didn't get picked.

While I won't be able to release these stories for sale on Amazon, I do plan on putting them here.

But the biggest discovery was that I found the original version of "The Box".  As you'll recall, the whole reason I rewrote the story and released it via KDP Select was because I couldn't find the original to include in "Show Me the End of the World." Reading the story last night, I was pretty surprised to find just how different it is from the second version.  But, if you've read "The Box," what's interesting is that the premise of the story actually allows the two stories to co-exist.  I'm not sure what to do with this old version now that I've found it.  I half gave a thought to packaging it with the new one, but that doesn't seem fair to the hundreds who've already downloaded that.

More than likely, what I'll do is include it as a bonus in my next collection, which I'm already working on in addition to my novel.

Current TV:
'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Season 3 [blu-ray]

Status Update

Just some thoughts:

I'm waffling on the title of my novel.  Whether or not to include the word "City."

The novel itself is coming along well.  Following the outline, piecing back together parts of the 20,000 or so words I'd already written, discarding some, rearranging and rewriting others.  It will be much better now.

At the moment, it's about 9924 words, but there's still pieces to be added back from the original.  I suspect that I'll only lose about 3,000 or 4,000 words and then I'll be ready to start writing the rest of it.

I don't have a goal word-count for this project.  The disparity of online opinions of what length 'officially' constitutes a novel told me I should just write the damn story and see how long it ends up when I feel it's appropriately finished.

I plan on having a couple people read the novel before it's released to get some feedback as well as some extra editing help.  I didn't do that for "Show Me the End of the World" and there ended up being a couple of embarrassing errors.  I did it for "The Box" and felt much better about it, despite one friend's assertion that he got a Grammar-Nazi Eye Twitch (I suspect he was exaggerating).

"The Box" continues to sell an average of one or two copies a day.  Those three dimes keep rollin' in...

Current Soundtrack
"Thor" by Patrick Doyle

Outlines are hard like my...

...high school algebra finals.

What?  Where did you think I was going with that?


Anyway, I've written before about my difficulty with outlines. But I decided a novel, as the single largest writing project I will have tackled so far in my life, deserved more than just to be spat out upon my keyboard, spewed forth from my brain without direction of any kind.

Thus it was that I completed an outline for my novel (which I have yet to settle on a title - that will be another blog post, I assure you).  It's a pretty basic outline which merely lists a couple of goals for each chapter, sentence fragments of ideas that I think should happen at each point.

"So and so meet at this place and discuss such and such" is essentially how it goes.

"So and so beat the crap out of each other at bla bla" and so on.

But one of the things that struck me while I was writing it was that the structure of it seemed to flow a little better.  The outline adheres to the basic idea of the novel I've had in my head, with some added junk thrown in.  But therein, you'll recall, was my problem - I constantly have new ideas I want to add in which ends up changing the project drastically as I'm writing it.  With the outline, I'm hoping to avoid it, but I don't know if that's possible because I simply found myself modifying the outline on the fly!

My high school art teacher, who always was reminding me that I was very talented but extremely lacking in organization and follow through, once said that "the real world doesn't have outlines."  This was because my naturally cartoonish artistic style meant that every object I drew had lines to define its shape instead of using shade.  It's sort of hard to describe, but essentially it boils down to, Look at the world around you and note that no real object has a black line around it.

This is a completely different kind of outline, but the idea popped into my head earlier as I was finishing the outline.  I thought this was very funny because now years later, outlines are still bugging me and I'm still a giant pain in the ass who lacks organization and follow through.

The dreaded outline

I am not what you would call a particularly organized person.  I tend to just sort of let things happen, let them pile up.  I don't really plan things all that well, and I'm sometimes very poor at budgeting my time.

Of course, this is a problem for a person who wants to tell stories.  Disorganized stories can be a huge turnoff for a reader.  But my writing style is very "get started and see what happens."  The number of times I've started a project only to decide halfway through to veer off in another direction because I had what I thought was a better idea is astonishing.  It also means that there is a graveyard of unfinished stories, screenplays and half-baked ideas littered like slaughtered corpses throughout my hard drive.

For writing short stories, this is actually rather an easy problem to overcome.  They're typically short enough that I can just write and see where it goes and generally be pleased with the outcome.  I had some struggle with "The Box," but overall the writing of it went smoothly.  Of the stories in "Show Me the End of the World" only "DreamTime" and "Man's Best FrienD" went through any serious revisions.

But writing a novel is an entirely different animal.  I've even written screenplays without any real outline... they just sort of come out of me the way they do, and I rarely feel the need to go back and change them.  I've been slowly revising one that's been gestating since college, but even that has remained largely the same in terms of its structure.  Each time I read it, I see where I could make a funnier joke or that I need to add an earlier reference to pay off something that happens later, but for the most part the skeleton of the thing hasn't changed in the years since I originally sat down to write it while working crappy desk shifts in good ol' Larned Hall.

For this novel, I attempted to come up with an outline.  The problem is that when I sat down and started writing the novel I almost immediately started deviating from the outline!  I've struggled with this problem for all the time I've been a writer; rigid boundaries simply don't agree with me.  Outlines for school papers were a pain in the ass, and when teachers forced me to do second and third drafts as part of the assignment, I often simply passed in the first draft again and they'd get upset.  Even at work, I hate being constantly boxed in by design concepts older than I am, and I'm constantly battling with people over this.

I guess what I'm going to try for the novel outline is to simply write a simpler one.  I was trying to sketch it all out down to the individual scenes, but that isn't working for me.  I think I'll just put one or two sentences down for the goal of each chapter and hope that I can stick to that.

But maybe I'll get halfway through and decide, no, that's not how I roll.

Current Soundtrack
"Total Recall" by Jerry Goldsmith

Pushing the button

Well, that's that - I uploaded 'The Box' to Amazon today, and enrolled it in their KDP Select program.  As soon as it's live on the site, I'll be posting links and updating the My Books page.  But mostly what I want to say in this post is that it feels good to hit that button.

When you get to the point where you know that continuing to work on something you're just spinning your wheels and overdoing things.  There's that saying that art is never finished, just abandoned - and there is truth to that.  At some point, you just say, 'Alright, it's time to get this out there.'  And that's just what I did today.

And it feels awesome.

Current Soundtrack
"Amaryllis" by Shinedown

The Editing Phase

So as you may know from previous posts, I've been working on a new story that I'm rewriting from an old one.  It's called "The Box."

Wellllll it's pretty well done.  Clocking in at just under 16,000 words, I'm steadily going through it now making sure all the i's are dotted, all the t's crossed.  I've had a couple people read through it and got some positive feedback on that end, as well.

On that note, I'd like to mention that editing a document in real-time with another person on Google Docs is pretty awesome.

But this story is nearing the finish line.  I can't wait to get it out there.

Current Soundtrack
"Tomorrow Never Dies" by David Arnold