95!

Whooooo! I have defeated Process Five! I finished Three Kingdoms early this morning and shipped it off to find its way in the world. It's story number 95. I just ran a search of this blog for Process Five. On April 20th, 2006 I mentioned I was about to begin the second draft of Process Five. On May 13th, 2006 I wrote that I expected it to be story number 52 and that I'd probably have it finished the following week. On September 24th of 2008 I declared war on the story and stated that I'd conquer it in two weeks. Oh, past me, you are so easy to laugh at!

But now it's dead like a movie monster (at the end of the movie) and I can get on with my life. Yay!

Here's a fantastic quote from Alan Moore that Lou Anders posted in his Watchmen review. If you're a creator, copy this and hold it close to your heart always:

It is much more exciting and thus creatively energizing if you are attempting something where you are uncertain of its outcome, where you don’t know if it will work or not. And this is only the beginning. Eventually, increasingly confident of your talents to make a workable story out of most anything, you will come to regard being merely unsure of a work’s outcome as far too facile an approach. Instead, you may graduate to only attempting works which you privately suspect to be impossible. This is no bad thing, and if rigorously applied would weed out a great many dull and repetitive creators from the world while at the same time increasing the world’s relatively meager cache of genuine unexpected marvels. - Alan Moore

I swear this is not an Alan Moore fansite even though I've mentioned him in three of the last four posts. I'll stop for a while.

Alan Moore.

Say Nothing (Or, Dan Gets Lucky)

I just read some stuff on Watchmen and Alan Moore on Tor.com and io9 and I had some problems with some of the comments. But I decided not to get involved, even thought I read some facts that I think are incorrect. For one, I don't care that much. For another, one of the commenters went all youtube and said some unnecessarily harsh stuff that didn't really contribute to the conversation and I don't want to throw down because it only causes more chaos and unpleasant feelings.

But let me say something here, not about that, but about the movie. Lots of reviews are talking about how long the sex scene is and how awkward it makes them feel. In fact, when I saw the movie, I almost wondered if the sex scene had been trimmed because it didn't seem as unbearably long as people said it was. My former wife and I had no problem with the scene. I don't imagine it's a question of maturity, but just being comfortable watching people have sex. When I was a teenager watching a sex scene on HBO with my parents in the room made me want to smash the TV so it would stop. It was hideously uncomfortable. Maybe they felt the same way or maybe they didn't care. Watchmen was totally different. My parents weren't in the room, I was a middle-aged man, I had actually had sex with someone by that point and I was sitting next to that person. And we'd both watched plenty of porn.

The scene was fine. It wasn't nasty or overdone. It was two people who really needed each other and wanted each other sharing something wonderful and life-affirming and normal. And I didn't mind the Hallelujuh song either. If I was Über-geek Dan at that point, making it for the first time in who knows how long, making it with this very hot lady and getting it up when I hadn't before, in my head I'd be singing Hallelujuh too. Which brings me to another point. If you haven't read the book, but you've seen the movie you wouldn't know that the reason for Dan's impotence was the lack of costumes. The costumes get him hot. I wish they would have mentioned that as well as a lot of other things. Ah, well.

Just finished my rewrite of Three Kingdoms. Now I'm going to read it through out loud and see how I like it. I did add a couple of cool little things with this draft that I really liked. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Writing Stuff

My new Thaumatrope story showed up yesterday. You can read it here. I should have another one up later today. I'll post the link next time around. Today's and yesterday's are both St. Patrick's Day stories.

I'm currently working on a rewrite of my Process Five story, Three Kingdoms. I'm saving the last version in case I fuck up the rewrite. I don't usually save previous versions when I do rewrites, but I will if I'm not sure the rewrite will improve the story. I've used the word rewrite five times in this paragraph.

I am ridiculously behind on Fiction Crawler 6. The only good story I've read so far is going to be on the Sofa as a Nebula nominee, so I don't want to use it. That means I've got no (0) stories to recommend so far. That will make for a mighty brief Fiction Crawler. I know Tony's going to be asking for it at any moment and he'll want it immediately. Gads!

Something New

Well, back to work tomorrow. The writing week started off gangbusters, but there must have been a leak, because the pressure dropped as the week went on. I wondered why my house was so steamy. Ah, well. Onward and upward.

I've been working on too much mundane stuff lately, Maisy's Many Souls, Process Five, TIWOTAM, and Fiction Crawler. I want to loosen up a bit and write some crazy stuff. I got very close to what I wanted last year with a short thing called Dritty Does. I like it a lot, I liked the writing, but I did want more story underneath it. The writing for something like that gets far out and the problem has been that the more I try to bring it down to something that appears to be a story, the more pedestrian the writing gets. I want both. I want acid-laced lunatic beat prose with a real conflict-laden story beneath it and I want some length to it as well. Dritty was only about twelve-hundred words. I want something in the neighborhood of four-thousand. Anyway that's what I want to do next. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

I saw Watchmen. You guys can hear what I thought about it on the next StarShipSofa. I won't be recommending it to people who aren't comics fans. I don't think they'll care for it at all. But hardcore geeks will wet themselves.

Do any of you guys do songza? I abandoned it for a while because it didn't seem to play nice with my Mac, but things seem to be better now. The thing I like about it that I can't get from Pandora or Jango is that I can listen to the song I want when I want to. Anyway, see if you like it.

I figured out what was wrong with this blog. Not enough Nerf Herder. Although the lyrics don't address my particular feelings about Van Halen, I love the song.

Writing And Kutiman

The writing is going so-so. Only 19 hours in for the week so far. (For those of you who are wondering, I did brush my teeth today.) I had to get out of the house today because of a sore neck and cabin fever. I was going to try to come up with some new flash fiction today, but I was more interested in moving forward with my novel The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind, AKA TIWOTAM. I finished a draft of Chapter 10 yesterday and sent it on to some readers and I wasn't ready to drop it there and move on, so I wrote another draft of Chapter 11 today and I'm on Chapter 12 right now. These aren't final drafts. As I've discussed in previous posts, I'm sending this one out to people chapter by chapter in a less than perfect state. It keeps me working on it, and they get to see it in a more raw form than they otherwise would.

Anyhow, I figured it was more important to keep up my momentum with a project I wanted to work on than to go in cold on something I thought I should work on and then fizzle out.

I finally wrestled Process Five to the ground! Woooooooo! It's visiting first readers and I'll have to make revisions once I get their feedback, but I finally feel I conquered that story. It took me years, honestly.

Steve Bickle turned me on to this yesterday. The site is http://thru-you.com/ but they've been down because of heavy traffic. No wonder. What Kutiman is doing there is awesome. He's taking other people's youtube videos and remixing them to make his own compositions. He's got all the credits for the original posters on his site. Sorry, I don't have them here. You can check out a couple of the songs right here. All the sounds you'll hear were made by the original posters. Enjoy!

The Mother of All Funk Chords:


I'm New:

Cleaning Up

I'm at the nearly-done point in my revisions of the Process Five story where I scan for certain words or types of words and weed them out. Maybe someone out there will find this helpful. By this point I'm pretty happy with the story, All the parts are in place, I feel I've got the character development points in there, I've read through it aloud (an absolutely necessary step. Your brain can hear some problems that it can't see), and now it's down to the gritty. The nice thing is I can listen to music during this stage, which I can't in some other stages, like the reading aloud one.

Step one: Killing all of those unneeded "to be" verbs. "Is," "was," "were," "had been," and the like. Sometimes they're unavoidable. Many times they're not. Get those limp-ass verbs out of there. "The dog was sitting" leaves an extra barrier between the reader being at home and the reader being in the story. "The dog sat" makes it more immediate and drops one more barrier, bringing your reader a little closer. My story ran a little over 9,600 words four hours ago. It had 138 instances of the word "was." I took it down to 39.
From 39 "were"s down to 5.
From 83 "had"s down to 32.
And it truly does feel like weeding because you have to deal with each instance. One. By. One.

Step two: Then there are my favorite words, those that are unique to my manner of speaking and writing. Like the word "just." I use that way too much and it's not needed. I wrestled 21 of them down to 7. I got rid of a couple of "maybe"s but there weren't many at all in there, that's a good sign, I may not have to worry about that one in the future. The thing about writing, and I suppose it's the same deal in any other type of learning-while-doing effort, is that, although it make take years to learn something, once it's in there, you don't have to worry about it anymore. So my first drafts today look almost as good as my final drafts from twenty years ago. I took the word "look" from 19 to 10. "Still" from 12 to 5. "Only" from 22 to 10. "Seem" from 12 to 5. And because some of these are interchangeable in certain cases, fixing one problem exacerbates another. As in He was mad, He looked mad, He seemed mad. Killing a bunch of "just"s inevitably leads to birthing a couple of "only"s.

Step three: Seek and destroy adverbs and other weak words ending in the letter "y." Adverbs suck. If you use them, you can make your work a lot better by dropping them. He ran, is so much better than He ran quickly. No shit he ran quickly, that's what running is. If he ran slowly he didn't run. He jogged. "But you're just doing the same thing!" he said angrily. If the writer is writing properly, the reader already knows that guy is angry, he doesn't need to be told a second time by the writer. In fact, it's annoying and clunky and just don't do it. Those weak words ending in "y" are words like "really," "actually" and "very." These words are useless. Take them out and read it again. See? I told you. I cut out about 35 instances of these and adverbs.

I knocked out over four hundred words doing this.

Any of the above words are fine when used in dialogue. People say all sorts of stuff. When I edit, I'll often try to let only one character use a certain bad word. The verbal idiosyncrasy helps distinguish that character from the others and helps round out the character.

Sometimes you need a word. If so, keep it. But make sure you need it first. Sometimes you can just pull a word out and the sentence stands up fine. Sometimes you need a better word. Sometimes you have to rearrange the whole sentence to say what you meant before. When I do this, I alter the flow of my own words and bend my statements into better ways and sometimes odd ways and I arrive at a voice that isn't exactly my own. With each scan and replace for a certain word, I'm running the story through a filter and changing the feel of it, if only a little bit. After all of this is done, I've got a story that's a little stranger to me than I meant it to be and I like that. The most exciting thing about creation is making something good that you didn't expect. This makes me wonder about other filters I could apply to change the story in other ways.

I have no advice on commas. I feel I use far too many and I feel they're all necessary. Going on forty years, I'm still trying to figure out commas.

Comic Bookery

I twittered about some of this stuff earlier, so maybe this won't be new for you. I'm going to reread Watchmen before the movie comes out. I read it every few years anyway, since it first came out. I've been poking around it at the store, rereading my favorite line in all the works of man - Rorschach (To an entire prison population): "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." You have to read the book to really appreciate it, but fuck, that is bad ass. If you haven't read it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? You have less than two weeks to swallow it down so you and I and the rest of geekdom can be sufficiently disappointed with the movie. Hurry up!

Process Five, some of you may remember, began as a comic book script. I had an encouraging half a bite on it too, before a certain line of a certain publisher bit the certain dust. Because it was a comic script, I wrote Process Five's lines in first person present tense, a mainstay of gritty story-telling throughout the past thirty years of four-color heroism. I tried it that way in the story I'm working on now, with other parts being third person past tense. Then I decided to can the other points of view, so it was all going to be first person present. Then I thought I should put those other parts back in and entire thing should be third person past tense. The other day I realized Process Five's parts should again be first person, but in past tense, while the other parts should remain third person past, save for Process Five's dream/memories which should be first person present. Are you following me? What all of this means is that I keep going through this goddamned story, changing piles of pronouns and verbs again and again and this isn't the first time I've gone through this with a story. Gaaa!

With this post I realize I don't talk nearly enough about comic books here. They were practically my life for fifteen years or so, and now I hardly ever pick one up. For much the same reason I don't watch much TV or see many movies or even read much. I'm too tied up with work, householdery, writing and wasting time online. But man I have some happy comic book memories. I want to tell you about Watchmen. I want to tell you about Andy Helfer's brilliant nineteen issue run of The Shadow and Kyle Baker's magnificent art on that book, the excitement of an honest to goodness comic book space opera near the end of The Omega Men with the wonderful round-bodied cartoony artistry of Shawn McManus, Gaiman and McKean's Black Orchid, Englehart and Rogers' magnificent Batman stint. Ah well. Some other time then. I need to catch my breath.

94

Sleepy tired. I sent story 94 out yesterday. It's called The Creepy Little Mailbox Man.

The boy has hand-delivered me to the edge of madness this week. I dealt with the stress the way I always do. Comfort food. I turned two very big sub rolls into a bunch of cheesy garlic bread and downed it all. Later I had moose tracks ice cream. I like that kind because it has real chunks of moose in it. Though I once chipped a tooth on a piece of antler. So now I'm big and bloated and full of stinkbreath. Come and get me ladies!

Near brush with greatness: I almost saw Robert Wagner and Jill St. John today.

I feel good about my ongoing struggle with Process Five. I think I've got a handle on it now, and I've solved enough of the problems to make it a real story. Once I've done that, I'll see if I can turn it into a good story.

Likee Vid of the Day:

Toe Jam

I'm making progress in my battle with Process Five, the story that wouldn't die. I've fought for years now with this thing. I'm going to win, I just don't know if the story that comes out of it will be any good. I don't know if I'll care. I just want to put it behind me forever and ever.

Here's a great video I discovered the other day while wandering through the corridors of youtube. It's got David Byrne, a clever and funny concept, a great song and lots of naked people. What I mean to say is, it's got everything you could possibly want in a video.

For Me To Know And For You To Find Out

Here's an odd little thing to heap atop the mountain of odd little things that make my psychology: For the past few months I've found that if I tell people what I'm working on (literarily speaking), I end up not doing it.

I used to be a self-help freak, reading all the books, stopping well short of actually doing anything, but I read again and once more that you should never tell people what you're going to do because it sucks all the energy out of it for you. Now I never bought into the magical aspects of the modern self-help movement, but I believed that a lot of the mumbo jumbo parts could easily be reinterpreted as the workings of the subconscious mind. Have I lost any of you yet? When did you give up on this post to check your e-mail for the hundredth time?

Anywho, I think that telling people what I'm working on might fill a psychological need for me that fulfills the same role as the need to show the work itself. If I want to write my story about the Jolly Green Giant and his penchant for wearing women's underwear, telling you that I'm doing it might satisfy my brain as much as actually writing it and showing it to you. So the thrill is gone and I am left a husk.

What I don't know is why this started happening only recently, or maybe it happened and I hadn't noticed it, hence my struggles with my archenemy, Process Five.

In summary I won't be telling you what I'm working on anymore. I'll just tell you when I've finished something, sent it out or had it published. We'll see how that works.

76, Big Silly!

I'm a big silly. Number 76 has been off to the races for two weeks and I haven't even mention it. It's a little poem called A Spec Fiction Writer's Lament.

The last few months have been less than stellar, from a production standpoint. I've noticed that when I get on a roll, I get all cocky. Then I confront my arch-nemesis, Process Five, and I'm stopped dead in my tracks. I'll have to sneak up on that one and take it down bit by bit, beat it up in a long war of attrition.

November promises to be very productive of course, as it's NaNoWriMo. I'll keep you guys updated. Last year I e-mailed lots of friends regularly on my progress, and they cheered me on. This year, I'm just going to do it on my own. Friends are great but I don't want to treat them like a crutch. Besides, last year was the hard one. This year I already know I can do it and short stories come easily to me. Now whether or not I produce fifty pieces of flash fiction or five novelettes or something in between, we'll just have to see. But I'm going to have fun. I haven't been very creative for the last month and a half, so I imagine brilliance will just squirt out of me unbidden. Tomorrow night it begins!

Did I Say War?

I take my lumps like a man. Two weeks ago I said I was going to kick Process Five's ass. That hasn't actually happened. Not even a little bit. I haven't given up, but that deadline will soon disappear in the rearview mirror. I was so full of fire, too! Feel free to harass me.

Did I mention I won Fantasy and Science Fiction's Competition #76? I don't think I did. Check out their October/November issue to see my entry. I just sent in six entries for Competition #77. You should too.

I sent Fiction Crawler 2 to Tony at StarShipSofa the other day, hopefully that will be on Wednesday's show, but we never know the future until it happens.

That's all for now, folks. Beddy-bye, as it's up for work in about four hours and some change. I wish you all a wonderful Monday.

This Time It's War

Longtime readers of this blog may know that I have been struggling with a story for years now called Process Five (at least that's the working title. I have had enough pussyfooting (And I love those open-toed shoes you're wearing - George Carlin) around. I am, here and now, openly declaring war on that goddamned story. Over the next two weeks I will turn that son of a bitch into a real story and send it out into the world. You heard me. The gauntlet is there for all to see.

73

A Hard Rain, out the door. I'm hoping to have 74 packed off by the end of the week, just waiting for a microphone. It's an audio submission.

I just finished a draft of chapter seven of The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind and sent it out to early readers (by that I don't mean preschoolers), so now I'm thinking about what I'll work on this week. Longtime readers of this blog may recall that every so often I pull out a story with the working title Process Five and say, "This will probably be number (whatever the next number is)." But it never is. Process Five is the story that never launches. Therefore, I won't say that Process Five will be diamond number 75. I will say that I may make it a draft or two better this week and maybe work on something completely new next week. We'll see.

Doing a thing a week, whether it's a story or a chapter is working well for me and it's definitely a better gear in which to be. My short term goal is to reach one-hundred stories by the end of 2008. It won't be the optimal speed for The One-Thousand but it's a hell of a lot better than any speed it's seen so far.

I've got nine days of vacation beginning Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting more than one thing done next week. Time now to dive back into the fray. Talk to you soon.

Follow The Bouncing Ball

Just about to mow and I spot a bunch (flock?) (gaggle?) (herd?) of seventeen white ibises cruising around my yard. I waited and let them fill their bellies on our bugs and slugs. I didn't want my dog to scare them off. This photo isn't of one of them. My yard is somewhat drier.

The great thing about being an ADD-riddled spaz is that you don't sweat jumping from project to project. My Process Five story is on temporary hold after a couple of days work while I polish up an old story for an anthology submission. The deadline is in ten days. The anthology is Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse Two and the story is For the Love of Ceelie (Number 26 in the canon). I used to think it was well-written, but it's five and a half years old and my chops have improved somewhat. I've always liked the story. I consider one of my more solid science fiction stories and it was the first of my stories to get the attention of a certain editor who had previously shown no interest in my work. So over the next couple of days, I can only make it better and I hope it will find a home.

I feel like I'm running a pound with that last sentence. I'd like to place each of my puppies with a loving family. Provided they pay for its shots and the spaying or neutering. Believe me, you don't want one of my stories getting knocked up by the story next door. No one will ever take that litter off of your hands.

It's getting late and I've been told to make supper. Damn, I wanted to mow, too.

What Novel Writing Has Taught Me

I’m a short story writer.

Twilight in Mumbai is the fourth novel I’ve gotten more than two-hundred pages into and each one feels the same to me. A big hairy mess. They have all stagnated in varying states of disrepair. If I had a stove with a middle burner between the front and back burners, that is where this novel would go. It’s no longer going to be a primary focus, but I will be working on it regularly. So I don’t expect it to be done by October 31st like I had originally planned. I told some of you that I would definitely be doing NaNoWriMo again in November of 2008. I’m not so sure of that now.

See I’ve got my mojo back, but it’s because of short stories. I spent a good chunk of my vacation working on a short story (Unit One) and I was extremely excited to be working on it and that hasn’t happened since early last summer. So, that story being completed, I’m moving on to another, with a working title of Process Five, from comic book scripts I wrote for an unpublished series I created called Unity, which some of you may have read.

I’m still keeping a hand in Twilight. Don’t ask me why, but the entire novel was squashed into five chapters. Have you ever read a five chapter book? Neither have I. I’ve broken it down into seventeen much more manageable parts and I imagine it will grow more chapters in time.