Tag Archives: fiction

Why You’ll Probably Never Finish the First Book…or the 2nd one either

Writing, , , , , , , , ,

From the Chronicles of Stickman & the Unemployed Lego Spaceman

Several decades ago, I was writing my first book. It was one of those stories that had been percolating in my head for years. It was about a murder that takes place in a major corporation where one of the executives frames one of his competitors, and because of the various incentives of several members of the media and organized crime, the hero finds himself competing against the man who framed him, the media itself, misinformation, and even distrust within his own family. Add in a bunch of gunfights and car chases, and I was on my path to writing this first novel.

At the time I write this, the places to explore the research were very limited (the Internet was still a decade or so away from infancy) and, as I’d never worked for a corporation before, having been serving in the Army after attending the United States Military Academy after high school, I pretty much had to do most of my research through letters to industry leaders, conversations with people who had served in corporate leadership and lots of guesswork on my part. The fact that I got more right than wrong still amazes me to this day.

In the writing of this novel, I ran across all sorts of problems, including losing the last 50 pages even after I completed it, forcing me to rewrite that stuff again. But after a couple of years of constant writing, editing and filling in information, Innocent Until Proven Guilty was completed and in the hands of people who were finally able to read it.

You’d think that once that novel was completed, the field of writing would then become my oyster (okay, not really sure what that means but I’m sticking with it), but let’s just say that the obstacles were only beginning, and even to this day there are things that are constantly part of the struggle of one trying to be a professional writer.

Now, over the years, I’ve mentored quite a few writers, which is somewhat of a daunting concept considering that this mentoring has occurred over a period that has encompassed both the days of writing when there were dogmatic gatekeepers who held the entire productivity of the industry at their fingers up until today, a period where all you need to be published is a computer and an Amazon account (or whatever gatekeeper you prefer instead).

In the early days, the type of help I used to assist with had more to do with sentence and form and then more industry-related concepts, such as where to get published, or even what to send to whatever publisher, editor or magazine. The point was that there were certain things you had to do in order to get through or past the gatekeepers. Now, we’re in a cycle of publishing where anything can be published, but the gatekeepers are no longer the professionals, but the readers themselves. Strangely enough, the skills needed haven’t really changed, but the process has changed just how people approach the possibilities of being published.

But one thing that has never changed is that no matter how good you write, chances are pretty good that you’re going to struggle with the reality that finishing a book is one of the more difficult things you’ll ever attempt. And then once you’ve achieved that accolade, you run into an even more daunting experience: Finishing the second novel. But we’ll get to that second problem later. First, let’s deal with the one that you’re probably facing right now, and that’s completing the very first novel. All professional writers have been there at one point or another, but no matter what you do, you’re never going to be a successfully published author if you don’t actually finish that very first book (assuming we’re talking about novelists here; I’m not really quibbling about writers who are attempting to complete projects other than books, like short stories, poetry, lyrics, haikus, or whatever other form that comes to mind).

But I thought I’d mention a couple of problems I experienced over the years in my own writing. And, as I mentioned, I’ve mentored quite a few people, I’ve come across a lot of other problems that I never would have imagined, and perhaps it might help some struggling writer out there who might be thinking of plowing through his or her first novel and hasn’t decided to start just yet.

SOMEONE MIGHT STEAL YOUR IDEA: This is one of my favorite quandaries that beginning writers often bring up. Let’s just say that you came up with a brilliant new idea to write about in your novel, and then you start to put it together into a working manuscript. That’s great, but you’d be shocked at how many writers then come to this “problem”.

One of the first novelists I was mentoring was at first very apprehensive about showing me any of her work, even though she had approached me originally asking for help with her writing. Part of me suspected she thought that the mentoring relationship was just going to be me spouting out random pieces of awesome knowledge that she would start incorporating into her writing process.

I explained to her that if she wanted my help, I’d have to actually see her writing to see what might need work, what might be on the right track (so do more of that) and what things just really aren’t working for her. But it took a very short time to realize we were never going to come to that point if she didn’t first trust that the person mentoring her wasn’t planning to steal her plot ideas and turn them into writing gold.

The way I eventually did this was to explain that every writer has a plethora of ideas that he or she comes up with, and what makes that writer significant is how he or she develops those ideas into prose. By the same token, two writers choosing the exact same topic will almost always end up writing two separate novels that have absolutely no correlation with each other because the mind creates something that only that mind could foster and grow. Therefore, even if her idea intrigued me, there’s zero chance I would end up writing the same book she would write.

It reminded me of a story of my own back when I still hadn’t even written anything more than a few short stories at the time. I had this great idea for a behind enemy lines war story that involved special forces units going back to Vietnam to free prisoners of war that were kept after the conflict. I had even gotten to the point where I was outlining chapters that I was going to write.

And then out of nowhere, a movie was released called Uncommon Valor, and strangely enough, it was pretty much the idea I had been developing for several years at that point. I had that same feeling that young woman I was mentoring probably was feeling about her “idea”, feeling that anyone could steal the idea once they knew what it was.

The reality is that whatever I would have ended up writing would never have been the same story as Uncommon Valor. My proto-novel was going with the title Missing in Action, and what I quickly learned after that moment was that a whole bunch of authors had the same idea, and then once Uncommon Valor came on the scene, a bunch of similar movies, including one with Rambo, showed up soon after.

None of them were the same story.

YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO FILL A BOOK: This is a very real fear, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. What it basically means is that you started writing your novel on an initial idea, not a book premise. What that means is that you had a catch, but nothing to go with that catch (or at least very little).

What often happens is that someone realizes that he or she doesn’t have enough material for a book and then just quits. And that’s usually the completely wrong approach. When you hit that point, and you suddenly realize that you don’t have enough information, the best approach is to then sit back down and begin to outline what you have for your novel. At a certain point in the outline, you’re going to realize that you’re missing a suspenseful element that needs to be found and added. So, you add it to your outline then. But rather than just jump right in and continue writing, this is a good time to finish that outline and see if you have a solid story to continue towards your conclusion.

I once wrote an entire novel, realizing something was missing but just not knowing what that something was. YEARS later, I pulled that novel out of a drawer and read it over again, before realizing that about half of the story was there, and all along I was telling it from the wrong narrator. I then sat down, outlined the novel that I should have written and then had a much more interesting story than I wrote decades earlier. It’s still not completed, as I also discovered that I was missing some location information (I had written the original novel in a specific time line, but the rewrite required a completely different time period, and that initial outline forgot that some of the elements filled in from the original story didn’t actually make sense for the new time period we were in. So, it’s back to being a work in progress.

AT THE HALFWAY POINT, THE BOOK NO LONGER FEELS RIGHT: This is one of those weird situations that happens with a LOT of books. As you’re writing it, you hit a point where you start to question the very nature of the project itself. The original idea doesn’t seem as exciting as it originally was when you first started.

Quite often, the writer will just jettison the project completely and hope for inspiration to hit again on a new project. This is also a similar problem that a lot of new writers have because a technique that seems to occur with a lot of them is to write only when achieving inspiration, and when that ends, wait until it returns. But it rarely does, because it’s a lot like love (it’s very intense in the beginning but tapers off the longer you experience it).

There are two ways to combat this problem. One, just bite the bullet and continue to write through until you reach the end. I will agree that this is probably the most difficult approach to take because you’ve grown attached to the story you liked, and you might have a hard time maintaining that same commitment to a story that doesn’t thrill you as much any more. This first approach tends to work a lot more successfully when you start to realize why you’re experiencing the sensation in the first place. The longer you work with a project, the more you grow tired of it because you’re practically living and breathing that story every day. A reader only experiences it that one moment while reading, but you run over every nuance of the story so many times in your head and while rereading what’s there in front of you. It’s very easy to grow bored of something you’ve been exposed to for so much time.

Which brings me to the second way of combatting he problem. And that’s to wait a certain amount of time until you feel ready to address the story and continue on.

My novel The Ameriad: the Untold Founding of America By the Survivors of Troy was my very first attempt at writing a straight out comedy novel. It was told in the voice of a Greek/Roman historian, much like Homer, and it was basically the retelling of America if the story had been told by a Homeric writer. I tackled this project soon after grad school when my head was filled with political philosophy, but as you may suspect, I got halfway through the story when I realized I had no funny left in me. So I put the project in a drawer and worked on other novels.

5 years later, I dusted off the project and realized what I needed to do in order to finish the novel. And now it’s a published novel, and I’m probably as proud of it as I am some of the previous work that I tackled in the past.

What was important was to give it some time so the ideas could grow and that a funny story could start to become funny again. I’m very happy with the results.

So, those are some of the initial problems you might have when writing that first novel. But I did mention that were a little more to the story, and that’s the revelation that once you’ve written your first novel, that doesn’t make the next one any easier. As a matter of fact, when I was writing my second novel, I came across a problem I never would have imagined.

COMPLETING THAT SECOND NOVEL IS SOMETIMES HARDER THAN THE FIRST: As I was stating, you might think the second novel should be easier because you now have both the skill of the first book behind you and the confidence of having completed it.

My second novel was Leader of the Losers, a futuristic science fiction novel. When I started writing it, it went quite smoothly. Until about the halfway point. And then, suddenly, I started to question everything about the novel. While I didn’t have an actual problem with anything I’d written, there was this horrific voice in my head constantly challenging me with thoughts like: What gives you the nerve to think you could pull this off a second time? Your first book was a fluke. You’re not really a writer.

What I was experiencing was a sense I used to get from one-hit wonders in the literary world. You know, the people who wrote one decent book but could never manage to write another one that didn’t ever do as well as the first because people recognized it was never anywhere near as good.

I started to think that Innocent Until Proven Guilty was my fluke, that I was never really meant to write anything else. And part of the problem with most writers is that you do this activity alone. Your support group is often just you.

So, when I was questioning my own abilities, there was nowhere in the room to say good things, to feed me positive affirmations about the writing process. It was just me telling myself that I got lucky once.

Aside from lots of therapy, which I could not afford at the time, the only real solution to this dilemma is to just shut yourself up and continue writing the novel until you finish it. And I did.

I’ve written 16 novels now, plus more short stories than even I can count (which either means it’s a large number, or I should have studied more when I was taking basic math classes). I don’t even count the hundreds of articles I’ve written over the years as part of my writing collection, but not because I’m not proud of them, but because at some point I just stopped counting.

The main point I want to share is that quite often we’re the obstacle in the way of our writing. We’re very good at creating hurdles where there shouldn’t be any. And no one’s better at questioning ourselves than, well, ourselves.

But be proud of every achievement and know that chances are pretty good there’s someone out there that likes something you’ve written. Our real job is to reach them, and sometimes that means getting through ourselves first.

But I promise. It’s always worth it.

Tales From the WritingTrenches #2: Creating Believable Tension

Self-Publishing, Television, Writing, , , , , , ,

One of my favorite shows from a few years back is one called Blindspot. It’s a somewhat ridiculous story with a premise that involves a woman with a body full of tattoos who was left unconscious in a body bag in the middle of Times Square. The police turn the woman over to the FBI who quickly discover that the woman is an ex-SEAL who was part of a secretive doomsday cult and that the tattoos all involve a secret conspiracy to, oh I don’t exactly remember, but it was pretty cataclysmic. The FBI task force that is chosen to work with her are all experts in their field, including a hotshot “the rules only apply to everyone but me” agent lead, a former CIA agent with milky ties to the agency still, a green FBI agent who may or may not have committed felonies to protect his brother, a nerdy tech wizard female who creates computer code in every language known to the computer industry, can pinpoint every source of dust from any location on the globe, plus all sorts of other tech wizardry that MIT would bow down to as far superior than anything that comes from their research labs, and then there’s the leadership that is changed daily as each new leader is discovered to be secretly plotting to steal the world’s cottage cheese (or whatever dastardly plot a particular tattoo highlighted that week). Anyway, in the first two seasons, it was a romp through tons of mysterious ridiculousness until we passed the “will they/won’t they” stage of the two main characters’ arc of romance to where they finally married.

Which brings us to Season 3. I originally dvr’d the third season, but started late because I didn’t subscribe to the cable service to dvr stuff until the fifth episode aired. So, I had it set to start recording from Episode 6 on, which is okay because these seasons have about twenty episodes to them. But it’s a show you don’t want to start in the middle of a season, so I waited until I could buy the first five episodes on iTunes, and then started to watch it.

I watched the first two episodes, and boy, were they doozies. And by “doozies”, I mean absolutely ridiculous in all ways. First, here’s where the story took us:

  1. The male and female heroes are now married. They have a great romance until evil stormtroopers break into their house and shoot it up, but are quickly subdued by the hero team who were originally unarmed but get weapons from the bad guys (cause they’re just that good) and shoot lots of them (or just karate chop three or four at a time with really sweeping martial arts moves that even Bruce Lee was watching, thinking, “man, I gotta learn how to do that.” Anyway, they discover that a hitman has a hit out on Jane (her name is Jane Doe…yeah, not kidding…it’s what they named her when they found her body and for some reason she decided to just keep it, kind of like how I decided to keep the name Awesome Sauce cause everyone keeps calling me that). So, they decide they have to break up and move really far away from each other (like different continents) so this will somehow protect her if she goes somewhere that doesn’t have friends and witness protection programs. But then they figure out the bad guy doing this is dead but the contract is still active, but they can stop it by pretending to be dead so they can catch the guy who is paying the bounty. Yeah, it’s kind of complicated but it all ends in one episode.
  2. They discover that a new set of tattoos has been put on Jane’s body that can only be seen by a piece of metal that looks like Batman’s batarang (or is it batamarang?). Then they discover it was put on her by none other than the bad guy from the previous seasons. He’s kind of mad, for reasons that really aren’t explained, but I predict we’ll get more explanation around Episode 11 or 12 in some kind of avant garde flashback. They do that a lot.
  3. So, the couple comes back together and declares that they love each other, and as long as they’re honest with each other, nothing can come between them. Fast forward about twenty=eight seconds later and the male hero gets contacted by the bad guy who gives the next clue of the tattoos and hints that the male hero should never tell Jane. So he doesn’t. And then they get back together and re-emphasize about how this new honesty will definitely save their marriage. I won’t get into the simple fact that if he just would have said, “Oh, and by the way Jane, I’m getting instructions from your evil brother. Just telling you this cause we’re being honest to each other now. So, what you want to watch? Star Trek or Game of Thrones?”
  4. Now, let’s get into the concept of this post “creating believable tension”. So, because this show is one of those that deals with conflicts of the moment, the plot goes something like this (from episode one to episode two): The bad brother has kidnapped the three main buddies of the hero and then sold them as slaves to Venezuela. Yeah, I wrote that with a straight face. So, ,they’re being kept in a prison cell in some deeply secret prison in Venezuela. And the bad guys tell the geek girl who was one of the captured, right after wheeling in a large bank sized safe: “You have one hour to open this safe, or I start killing your friends.” So, this geek girl who we just found out has been spending the last two years creating a Farmville app called Wizardville (or something like that) that she needs to  crack this safe. In case you didn’t know it, because most of you are not computer programming experts, all computer programming experts are also experts in safe cracking, hacking of complex computer systems, satellite technicians, satellite reprogrammers (it’s just computer code, right?), experts in soil sample technology, aficianados of what type of dirt exists on the planet (including several variations of “dirt”), cell phone hacking, advanced surveillance systems, security camera technology and how to crack it, and so many other areas of technology that I’ve lost count, although advanced number theory is also one of our areas of expertise. So, she cracks the safe, and in it we find what on first glance appears to be advanced computer technology that I suspect just might be a 386 computer, or possibly a Pentium 1 (translation: from about 1989).

So, they have this highly “advanced” computer that she is then told she has one hour to hack or everyone else dies (one an  hour). The one thing they forgot to include in the scene was an actual monitor, so as I’m watching this, I’m thinking: “You know, even though I’m a programmer and supposed to know how to hack any computer system on the planet, even I would have a hard time cracking this one without a freaking monitor.” Just saying. But somehow she does, and when the bad guys reappear, a monitor magically appears on the desk that wasn’t in the room a few moments before. So, then we get to watch the start up on the computer as her advanced hacking skills are shown, and we see what looks a little more complicated than “Hello, World” starting on the screen, except they were smart enough to program instead of “Hello, World!” something similar to:

/////// dsfljasfdasjf /////// areafigaglahodf

////// =Verifiable Office System ///////////

////// *********************** ///////////

////////// Super Secret CIA Files ////////////

////////// Do Not Release To Anyone Without Top Secret Clearance //////////

Yeah, something like that.

6. The secret code, it turns out, turns off a super spy satellite network that controls a missile defense system that protects the entire USA. We find out we have this system because of a raid on a super secret warehouse, operated by two geeks, a typical geek guy and a super hot, would never date me in a million years, type of woman, who I immediately suspected was a bad guy (and not just because she would never date me in a million years, although that probably helped me to realize I should suspect her). Surprisingly, she was bad, and she was selling the code to, (let’s see…what enemies can we possibly use? The Russians? Naw, they’re so 1990s. Arabic terrorists? No, we always blame them. Spent the last two seasons kind of doing that already. The Chinese? Good choice, but we want to market this series to the largest population market on the planet, so we’re going to pass on that one. Okay, the North Koreans, cause a country that can’t afford to supply its citizens with even dirt for toilet paper would be the obvious one to pay millions of dollars for a computer code to hack the US secret satellite network). Okay, so it’s the North Koreans. And to make it worse, it’s revealed in the same episode that the NK military isn’t building a nuclear weapon but has built tons of them, including missiles that can reach the US, AND they’ve been constantly launching them on an almost daily basis but our super secret shield has been knocking them out of the sky. You’d think Trump would bother to mention this every now and then. Thanks, Obama! Anyway, so because they have the code, they’re going to knock out our defense network and launch everything at California. Why? I’m guessing cause it’s the only place they could find on a map before they wrote this script. But fortunately, as the satellites are knocked out one by one (in a count down that has geek girl saying: “99…73…65…hurry guys…52…40…we’re running out of time!…23…Oh no, I forgot to feed my gold fish…12…7…2! We’re running out of time!” Meanwhile, we’re watching a gun fight and karate battle with the hero guy and Jane Doe facing off against a room full of ninjas (or ninjas on their day off and wearing their lounge clothing), before they knock out the last one, and jump over the table and hit the big button marked “STOP THE NUKES FROM LAUNCHING!!!” Okay, it wasn’t marked that, but it probably should have been.

Been working in IT forever, and geek girls don’t generally look like this

Those are mainly my biggest gripes with the episode, although I do have to point out one inconsistency because it just drove me nuts when it happened. The two heroes find the secret base in Venezuela (no, I don’t know how, unless there’s only one in Venezuela, or they did some kind of “we traced the signal of their Blipomatosphere and it was right at this location” that I just didn’t catch, but I’m not even worried about that. What did bother me is that they stole an enemy tank, drove it to the battle and saved the day. Even that wasn’t a problem for me, as problematic as that actually is. It’s when the hero said: “We won’t be able to go fast. Tanks don’t move fast.” And I realized right then and there not a single writer on their staff has ever been in , been near, been around, or watched a tank on television. Tanks aren’t slow. The reason people think tanks are slow is because in old movies where they saw them most often, the drivers went slow because it was filmed that way for dramatic effect. A tank is a super fast vehicle on the battle field, and I can tell you that infantry were quite often more scared of being run over at high speeds than they were from any guns from the tanks themselves. Hell, I can tell you a bunch of times where I almost got run over by tanks on my own side because they go so fast that you often don’t see them until they’re practically on top of you.

So, getting back to my point of this post. A huge problem of tension in fiction is making it believable. But at the same time, you have to make the scene strong enough that someone is going to want to keep reading.

I’m reminded of one of the stories often shared when someone starts out writing. In the early days of pulp fiction (not the movie, but the concept it’s based on), there was a period of serial fiction where a writer would produce a long story over a number of different issues of a magazine. To do this, he or she would create a cliffhanger. Those cliffhangers were designed to make you want to buy the next issue of the magazine and find out what happened as a result of the corner the author created. As a result, those cliffhangers would get more and more complicated (kind of like the detective fiction where the concept of the locked room came about…”how did the killer do it when the room was locked from the inside?”…similar concept. Any way, in order to keep selling these magazines, the audiences became more and more acclimated with the technique and demanded stronger and stronger cliffhangers. Which brings us to the story often told:

A writer created a cliffhanger where the protagonist was undergoing one hazard after another and then finally fell into a deadly pit that was more than 20 feet deep. The issue ended with “To be continue….” And people awaited the conclusion, wondering what great writing technique was going to be used to save this hero.

The next issue appeared. The author wrote something to the effect of: “Stuck in the pit, Dave (our hero) leaped out of it to safety. He then….”

As you might guess, readers were pretty pissed at the author for taking such a stupid short cut. Ever since then, it’s been referred to by a lot of names, but more often “The Writer’s Pit”, although I remember hearing it once recently and not a single person in the room had an idea what that name referred to. References tend to diminish in notoriety over time.

So, if you’re trying to build tension, it requires investing some time. The characters first off have to be believable. The days of superhero protagonists are not acceptable these days. Developing your character as a stereotype trope of Arnold Schwarzeneger might seem like a fun exercise, but people generally aren’t going to buy some of the very recent attempts at re-creating James Bond and giving him a different name, yet keep unbelievable attributes that people just don’t imagine one person being able to inhabit.

So, let’s look at a series like Blindspot. How would I have made it more believable?

  1. The hero needs to be grounded in reality. He could be a great FBI agent, but he’s not some special forces/intelligence agent/brilliant tactician/martial arts dabbling/no faults whatsoever. One or a few of those qualities, and it’s more believable.
  2. Eliminate all of the CIA agents on the team. It makes absolutely no sense.
  3. Put about ten scientific experts on the team. One person can’t possibly know as much information as geek girl seems to know and be incredibly hot at the same time. Not saying hot women can’t be geek girls, but no one is as smart as this woman is made out to be.
  4. Get actual computer experts to deal with some of the tech. Person of Interest and Mr. Robot do that really well. Emulate that example.
  5. Understand international politics and international politics a lot better, or at least stop trying to fool your audience and believing your audience is composed of complete idiots. If that’s the case, I’ve been watching the wrong show for the last three years.
  6. Stop with the characters lying to each other just to create drama. It serves no purpose. Right now (in episode 2) the male hero is lying to Jane Doe for absolutely no reason, and she just told him “Our relationship will last forever as long as we’re honest to each other”. His reply SHOULD HAVE been: “Wow, you’re right. By the way, your brother is starting to send me messages about your tattoos. I meant to tell you but we were so caught up in watching Game of Thrones that it totally threw my mind.”

Anyway, just my thoughts on how writing fiction can benefit from watching really bad fiction in what could otherwise be really awesome television.

 

 

Some updates and current projects

Education, The Deck Const, Writing, , , , , , ,

caption134Well, the first semester at the new college in Texas is finally coming to a close, and let’s just say that things haven’t been all that great, but at the same time, I’m still here, and hopefully things will start to improve a bit. It’s honestly a struggle to teach at a college/university where students aren’t all that interested in doing the work, the institution isn’t all that interested in supporting its faculty and staff, and there’s just not a whole lot of money to pay debts that were actually promised.

Yeah, it’s been a bit of a struggle. We’re all being put on furlough, which means we’ll be losing 20 percent of our pay next semester, and it just makes it really difficult to want to continue coming to a place where you feel like you’re not really respected for the kind of work that you do. Oh well.

As for my writing projects, The Deck Const: Shadows & Rumors was published last month, so it’s now available on most e-readers and on paperback through Amazon.com. I was pretty happy with it.

My next project is a series of three books all involving the King Arthur legend. For years, I’ve been doing the background research for this novel, and now I’m finally ready to start putting it onto paper. The working title has been Return to Camelot, but I can’t promise that’s the name it’s going to end up having.

Not much else going on. The Christmas season is about to come upon us, so I’m hoping that means a few weeks of rest and relaxation. But, of course, I intend to write during that time, so we all know how that whole rest thing goes under such circumstances.

Dealing with multiple languages in fiction

A Season of Kings, Tales of Reagul, Writing, , , , , , , , , , ,

In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn't speak lego
In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn’t speak lego

I came across one of those little struggles that I didn’t anticipate while writing A Season of Kings. For those who have been following the story line of the first book of the epic, The Tales of Reagul, it involves several villages from Roman times that are transplanted onto the planet Reagul. A part of the story line is that previous civilizations have been transplanted to this planet earlier than Rome, so there are hints of people from Sumer, Egypt and many other civilizations of earlier history.

One of the first encounters involves Sarbonn, as the young man Spurias, who comes across some of these people. But it dawned on me that someone from Sumer would be speaking Sumerian, not Latin or some derivation of local Roman languages. So, I’m stuck with that old Star Trek problem of “how do people who have never met in their history actually communicate with each other?” Unlike Star Trek, there’s no actual “universal communicator” that everyone is carrying around with them, which means I either have to establish some communication process created by the original aliens (and some back story as to why they’d use something like that any way), or I have to figure out some way to develop a class of people in their societies that would actually be able to translate. Of course, I could go with the old Star Trek method of just assuming everyone speaks English and figure no one will care either way, but that just seems like such an easy cop out (even Star Trek had to eventually explain this situation to its viewers because people don’t allow “yeah, just let it happen” to provide them with justification.

So, I’m analyzing the different ways I can deal with this situation.

The Problem of Genre

A Season of Kings, Books, Memoirs, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

One of my biggest problems as a writer is that quite often it is very difficult to nail down the genres in which I write. It was easy in the beginning of my career when I wrote Innocent Until Proven Guilty, which was mystery/suspense. But then I started branching out on other types of books and things got, well, kind of confusing. Let me give you a bit of a run-down, and you’ll see what I mean:

Innocent Until Proven Guilty: A murder takes place in corporate America and then an executive frames another for the murder. Works well as mystery/suspense.

Leader of the Losers: A dystopian future where poverty and class distinction has been solved by eliminating the “losers”. Definitely science fiction.

72 Hours in August: During the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union, a plan is hatched to start a nuclear war before the coup is over. Suspense, but also historical, and kind of a mystery as well.

Destiny: The Tales of Reagul story that starts the whole series, except it takes place 3000 years after the beginning of the epic. Story begins with a space battle, turns into a fantasy trek across a mysterious land and then ends with another large space battle. Science fiction? Fantasy? Both?

Deadly Deceptions: In South Korea, a counterintelligence agent uncovers a blackmarketing operation that might actually be masking a major espionage cover-up. Guess that’s a suspense novel, or a thriller, or also a mystery.

The Ameriad: A humorous Greek epic that spoofs the Iliad and the Odyssey by turning the icons of American society into the “new” gods. No idea where this one belongs.

Absent Without Leave: A military criminal investigator uncovers a 20 year old crime that started with the framing of his father and leads to the political future of Texas politics. Mystery, maybe? Thriller? Suspense?

The Teddy Bear Conspiracy: A CIA agent, running an operation to defeat the Colombian drug lords, finds himself targeted by his own people, forcing him to finish the mission alone while someone within his organization is trying to kill him and take over the project. Suspense?

Thompson’s Bounty: A time-traveling Coast Guard cutter encounters 16th century pirates and is sucked into a battle between two naval commanders. Science fiction? Naval warfare?

A Season of Kings (my next novel): The first official book of the Tales of Reagul, which tells the story of a planet where science and magic are intertwined. Most of the story is fantasy, but the whole premise comes from an alien experiment, which basically makes it science fiction.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg, and I’m finding it really hard to market my books because none of them really fit into any solid genre. Or few of them do. I won’t even try to figure out where Plato’s Perspective fits in, as it’s a novel with the protagonist named Plato who may or may not be the actual Plato, and the novel’s point in time may be a bit confusing as well. It could end up being philosophy, science fiction, fantasy, mainstream, history, etc. I’m sure you get the idea.

Now that I’m on my own

A Season of Kings, Books, Memoirs, Self-Publishing, Social Networking, Tales of Reagul, Writing, , , , , , , ,

This was once me, at West Point. Boy, have I sure come a long way since then
This was once me, at West Point. Boy, have I sure come a long way since then

The last day of work for me was on Tuesday, and it was one of those days that really didn’t have a lot going on. I came in expecting to be given grunt work to do most of the day, but the senior boss decided that I would have my exit interview at 11:30 AM, and then I was finished with the job as of noon. Still got paid for the entire day (or so they say), and then I was kind of on my own from there. I forgot to pick up some medication at the pharmacy at work because I was in such a hurry to leave, so I’ll probably have to wander back there this weekend and do the pick up of that stuff.

So, I’m now in the process of putting together my writing projects and pushing forward on those. I completed and published my novella, The Beast of Begmire, and I’m trying to see about getting it listed for free on most e-book sites. I also put it up on Wattpad this evening, so it should be available for anyone to read free there.

My next project will be to complete A Season of Kings, and during that project I’m still working on completing the first book of the series I’m writing with Marie. Hopefully, we can get that one moving forward, as I seem to have a lot more hope for that series than any of the fantasy ones I’m writing.

Money is going to be tight, mainly because of the way Spectrum Health completes the quitting process. I can’t ask for my payout money from my retirement until the last paycheck comes through from SH, and unfortunately the way they work it out, it will probably be about a month before the last “paycheck” comes through, and THEN I’m allowed to put in the paperwork for that money. Which means February might be a bit crappy when it comes to paying my bills, and unfortunately I’m not really sure what the solution to that is going to be. If it’s not one thing, it’s another….

Another project I’ve been outlining lately is one that I had on a back burner for many years now, and that’s my Return to Camelot series. Every time I write a specific novel, I find myself getting tons and tons of ideas, dialogue, and even scenes from the next novel I’ll be writing after the ones I’m currently working on. For some reason, Return to Camelot has been the one that’s been building momentum lately. All I can do is write down the ideas and hope that I can get to the actual writing soon. My working titles for that series are:

1. The Once and Future King

2. Return to Camelot

3. Le Morte D’Arthur

They’re not massively original, but they’re working titles for now, and they seem to push the ideas of what exists within each volume. I’m kind of looking forward to writing that series, as I wrote the first couple of chapters years ago and still refer to those chapters from time to time because they were so very good. Yes, a writer can admire his own work from time to time. You wouldn’t believe how critical I am of practically everything else that comes through my word processor.

For some reason, every night I seem to be dreaming about work (the old job). I keep dreaming how someone is telling me I have to do something and it must be done on a deadline that has already passed. And then an inner voice tells me, hey, you don’t work here any more, and I kind of toss and turn through that. I guess the subconscious does that to you when you’ve been living and breathing a job for so long, especially one that was becoming really good at developing arbitrary deadlines and then sitting on the results for weeks while new deadlines are thrown at you for new work that will then be sat on as soon as it met its completion. Anyway.

So, that’s kind of where things are right now. And as so few people tend to read my blog, aside from the spider sites in China that seem to access my page hundreds of times a day, it would be nice to hear from people who are actually reading it. Otherwise, I might just have to discontinue it, as it’s turning very much into a diary where I’m the only one who is really reading it.

On to new projects

A Season of Kings, Books, Memoirs, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, , , , , , ,

Last night, I finished the last touches of The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, and it’s now on sale on Kindle and will be on sale in paperback in the next few days (had one more run through the edit check and had to fix a couple of things before I could let it go one more time). Either way, the book is done, and it is now available for the masses to read, so hopefully you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Which brings me to my next projects. Over the next few days, I have some outlining to do for my Haven project, and then I’ll be working on The Tales of Reagul, specifically book one, A Season of Kings.  With an aggressive schedule, I’m hoping to have these books released within the next month.

I’m starting to explore new ways of generating reviews, and Library Thing has become my new plaything. I put up ten digital copies of The Ameriad there last week, and then a few days ago, I put 100 copies of Leader of the Losers. Part of what drives a writer’s career these days is reviews, and I can’t even begin to explain how difficult those have been to come by. Which is shocking  because the books themselves have sold enough copies that you’d think they’d have lots of positive reviews, but they don’t. It’s like they’re completely overlooked by everyone, mainly because those who write me and say they loved the book never bother to leave a review on Amazon, which would make things so much more beneficial for someone like me. You know, someone who is still trying to get ANYONE to realize he’s actually publishing books.

Well, only two weeks (and one day) of work left in this job before I’m a full-time writer, and I’m really hoping this works out for the best. Right now, I’m not feeling so great about this decision, but it had to be done, which means it was meant to be, whatever that might actually mean in the greater scheme of things.

Let’s hope for the best.

The Countdown to Being Solo Is Around the Corner

A Season of Kings, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Deck Const, The Emperor of Reagul, The War of the Wizards, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I think I mentioned that I decided to quit my job a few weeks ago. I put in my notice, and I have a little over two weeks left. A couple of days, I almost quit on the same day I was working, but I’ve perservered, and my last date of work will be December 24th, Christmas Eve. There’s no significance to that day, but that will be my last day of work.

So far, no other jobs have lined themselves up for me. And I’m anticipating that it’s probably not going to happen either. This means I really need to make it as a writer, or I’m going to starve to death. Simple as that. I won’t even get unemployment benefits. I kind of screwed myself on this one, but I’m trying to move forward with a positive disposition, no matter how many dark thoughts keep overwhelming me about this decision and its process as its being carried out.

Monday, I have a release for one of my new novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy.

theteddybearconspiracy2a

I ran a 2 month contest on Goodreads for this book, and nearly 600 requested a copy of it. I am giving away 10 copies. There’s still a few more days left in the contest, but I’ve given up hyping the contest. Check one of the older posts, or just go to Goodreads if you’re interested in that. I also listed a giveaway of The Ameriad through Library Thing, which I did this morning, and it has about a month before it will complete its giveaway process. I don’t have an immediate link to that one, but you can definitely find it if you just go to Library Thing’s site and search for it under giveaways.

But anxiety is definitely beginning to emerge for me because so far this month, I haven’t sold a single book on Amazon. I’ve sold a few through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but Amazon, which is usually the one that does the bulk of the selling, has been dead cold for me this month so far. That is not a comforting feeling. Remember what I was saying about starving? Hunger pains are already starting to emerge, and I’m not even at the no food stage yet.

After the Teddy Bear Conspiracy goes live, my next project involves a romance series I’m writing with a female writing friend of mine, and then I’ll be heading for a “sometime in January” release of the first book of the Tales of Reagul series, A Season of Kings. Actually, it’s not really the first book, as Destiny was the first book, but I did something a little strange with this series that not too many other writers do with a series. The first book, Destiny, starts 3000 years after the Tales of Reagul series begins, which kind of makes it an interesting universe for someone following the saga. To explain:

During the period of the Roman Empire, a small group of villages were snatched up by an alien civilization and placed onto a planet called Reagul, where an experiment was being conducted to see how civilizations handle in different environments (the original Rome being the control group, and Reagul being the experiment group). One of the citizens of the new Reagul is a young man who eventually learns all of the alien technology (to be the shepherd of this planet) and immediately after he learns everything, the aliens are called back to their home system to fight a war that is obliterating their people. The young man becomes the prominent wizard of Reagul, as everyone sees his technology as magic, and with such knowledge, it practically is. This begins the Tales of Reagul. 3000 years later, which is about 1000 years in our future, the human empire has spread across the stars, and a coloony comes under attack from the empire. A survivor of the assault leads a mission to destroy the empire by killing the emperor, which brings her to the planet Reagul, where it is discovered that her abilities (the reason she was chosen for the mission) rival those of the wizards of Reagul, indicating a tie between her planet and the strange alien race that contacted them years before (obviously being the same aliens who started the experiment with Reagul in the first place). That loater story is Destiny.

As you can see, it’s kind of complicated, but it’s a great, fun story. The first of that story (aside from Destiny) is slated for release in January.

The next project is a sequel to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, my time travel adventure involving pirates and the Coast Guard. The new adventure will take Thompson and his crew into the Greek and Roman eras. That should be a lot of fun to write (and hopefully, read). People have been asking for a sequel to this novel for years now, so I finally started plotting it out.

The other distant project is my Deck Const series, which received a bit of fame from a series of short stories that I published back in the 1990s in some of the pulp magazines of that time. They were often referred to as The Soldier stories, and there was always a hint of something called The Deck Const in every one of them. I’ve finally finished the first draft of three novels that I’m reworkiing for publication. It’s a dystopian suspense series of the last soldier who is trying to rebuild civilization while on the quest to find a mysterious talisman only known as The Deck Const.

That’s kind of an update for now. Not sure if anyone even reads these updates any more, but just in case this is being read by soldiers from the future who are in search of the elusive Deck Const, let this be your clue that it exists and perhaps you are one step closer to finding it and rebuilding civilization again. Until then, sorry life kind of sucks for you right now, but dystopian societies can be that way.

Why I Never Quit Writing

Memoirs, Writing, , , , , ,

Me writing
Me writing

There’s an interesting post from Konrath’s site, in which he explains why he never quit writing. Basically, years ago, he was making about 25k a year from writing and felt it wasn’t enough, and now he’s making a ton of money from writing, but felt that if you can’t hack the writing challenges, you might be better off just quitting. And he’s right. But his post also hints at something else: The people who basically are driven to write, and therefore need to make it part of their professional life, if not their entire professional life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the same sentiment because let’s be honest, my writing career has never taken off the way it was supposed to. When I was a kid, teachers used to tell me that I was a brilliant writer, that they could see a future for me as an intense writer. I loved telling stories, whether in person or on paper. Writing came naturally to me. It felt inevitable as a future career for myself.

Early in my writing career, I latched onto an agent who was going to sell my first novels. She was a well-known, highly placed agent. Everything was looking great. And then she had a brain injury and left the business. And then came back to it years later, but honestly couldn’t remember who I was. Yeah, sounds like a bad soap opera plot. I then secured a second agent who tried for about six months to sell my stuff (or just thought about it and never did anything about it) and then fizzled. Since then, finding another agent has been almost as easy as climbing Mount Fuji by starting in Texas.

And then the ebook revolution took place, and the whole industry fell apart. There are still publishers out there, but connecting with them has become almost impossible, and agents don’t seem to be interested in anyone any more, and everyone that has ever wanted to be a writer, even if it was just for fun, is now a published author selling their own stuff through Amazon and others. Now, the model has changed from good writers getting attention to the best marketers getting the most attention, even if the writing is awful (i.e., Fifty Shades of Gray, although people tell me that once you get past the really bad beginning writing, it actually becomes a much better writing enterprise).

Which brings me back to my original question in the subject line of this post. Why I never quit writing. You see, I really can’t stop. I love to write, and the only way I’ve ever been able to understand and then explain the world is through writing. For me, the act of writing is an exercise in learning more about the universe and why we’re here. Through continuous experiments in writing, I find myself learning more about myself and more about the world around me. Each new novel is an exploration into the process of writing for me, and each new novel is something completely different than what I wrote before. It’s more of a Murakami type of writing, although it’s my own journey, not one scripted out by someone else.

But the business of writing has been the thorn in my side since day one. I’ve never made it successfully, which often leaves me wondering if I should even be able to consider myself a professional writer when my books are read by so few people. Sure, I can take any title I like, but what good is a false accolade in the long run?

But getting back to the question, what I have discovered is that writing is basically all I have. I don’t have a family. I don’t even have a girlfriend. I don’t have a job that I go to where I think “those people would suffer if it wasn’t for me coming in each and every day.” The people where I work wouldn’t notice at all if I wasn’t there tomorrow. They might notice the desk not being occupied, but that’s about it. I don’t do anything of enough significance that it matters to anyone, nor will it ever.

I don’t have a lot of friends, so I don’t have a large group of people who rely on me as their social hub person. I have very few friends, to be honest.

I don’t even have a pet that relies on me for its meals. Not even a goldfish swimming around, thinking, “where’s that strange human who puts food into my bowl?”

For me, writing is all that I have. I construct fantasy worlds, and sometimes I create scenarios where people do horrific things that force them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t have normally done. I write about people who question their reason for being, their relationships, their place in the grand scheme of things, while I meanwhile ask none of the questions of myself because I have no ties to the material world that my characters inhabit.

So, for me, if I didn’t have my writing, I’d have nothing. Which brings me to the conclusion that if I ever finally realize that my writing is a joke, that my purpose actually has no purpose, I’d probably end everything right then and there.

That’s why I never quit writing. It’s all I have.