Showdowns are Hard

     I have now reached 147,000 words, and I've just started the first sentences of the climactic battle in my latest novel. It has taken me three years to get to this point in this particular manuscript. But now the headaches really begin.

     In a fight scene like this, time slows down and things get very complex. The writer has to follow the actions of the character and the antagonist, their reactions to each other’s actions, and yet also maintain enough sense of the world around them so the reader can put the action into context. And this is if you only have two combatants.

     There are a lot of decisions to make on how as a writer you are going to approach  such a scene.

     First of all, you need to decide what point of view the scene will be witnessed from. A third person omniscient POV of the battle will be very different than a first person or limited third person. I prefer to sit down into the characters head to witness the battle, as this brings the reader right down into the action. The challenge to this is that the reader gets no more information than the character has, and in certain types of battles that can be limited, fragmentary, and confusing.

     One possible solution to this I have found is the presence of a witness character whose perspective I can jump into, to give the reader a little needed oversight of the situation. In Dead Stop I did this by having Rachel witness the beginning of Harley and Marisa’s run for the mechanic’s shop from the roof.  This still gives a believably limited POV but from a perspective that can give the reader a wider view of the “battlefield”. But also remember that a character brings their own "color" to the scene they witness as well. I originally planned to have Deke witness that run, before deciding that Rachel provided the better filter for that scene.

     Another solution is two have multiple combatants and switch between POVs during the battle. This has to be done with extreme care to avoid confusing the reader. I have found that you should always stay in the same POV, and not change unless you’re starting a new sub-chapter that is clearly separated from the previous. In Dead Stop, I even labeled the sub-chapters with the name of the character the POV was being experienced from. I just don’t think you can be too careful in that regard. I’m not sure if I will do the same with this novel, but it is under consideration.

     So POV is a big issue.

     The other is the mechanics of the battle itself. Sometimes as a writer you have a vague idea of a battle only to have the scene you had envisioned fall apart when you actually start writing it. It turns out that when you go into the step by step process of following the battle, you discover the scene you had envisioned was never really thought out and actually wouldn’t work. For instance, once you get into following the step by step actions and decisions a character makes, you realize he would never put himself in the position necessary for the scene you imagined to function. Then you have this conflict of character integrity vs this awesome scene you imagined. And this can happen multiple times in just one scene.

     This is actually what I’m dealing with at the moment, and the way I decided to handle it is to outline the scene itself. Since I'm dealing with more than ten different combatants in four different factions, I can see no other way to do it. This should hopefully allow me to encounter the problems with the scene ahead of time, and tweak them before simply writing that far and realizing I’ll need to back up and throw out several pages of writing so I can go in a different direction.  I hate it when that happens. I bet other writers hate it when that happens.

     Annnnd there are now less than two weeks left until the kiddos are home for the summer and my writing time evaporates. That’s another deadline I wonder how many writers out there contend with.

     Oh well, on with the big showdown…I hope!

Optimism Rising

I have now reached 135,000 words in Argiope (or Spider's Dance, or Dance of Spiders, etc)

The different forces have all been put in place and are about to start converging for the final showdown at a ramshackle little farm on a foggy, early morning. There are still details to hammer out, and a couple of minor characters to decide whether to include in this scene or not, but I'm almost there. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

The goal is to have that rough draft done by May. It's still on the outside edge of possibility, so there is hope.

Not much else to report right now. Just an update.

I'm a One Man Zombie Apocalypse

    

     I have gone and done something stupid. (like that’s a first or something)

     I have gotten my sleeping schedule completely messed up to the point that I’m sleeping in a three hour and four hour blocks of naps. The problem with that is that I’m grainy eyed and tired, and there is simply no way for me to write in this shape. I’ve got one month until the kids are out of school, so I need to have the rough draft of my novel finished by then. It’s gonna be close.

     That’s assuming I can get my sleeping back on track. The problem is that my body easily adopts these new silly schedules and wants to stick to them, even though they leave me stumbling around like a zombie. The last ten days have been pretty much a waste.

     And it’s all because I have stumbled onto something that is evil beyond human comprehension. Something so vile and insidious that I never had a chance. Something that snared my poor mind, and has me circling it’s irresistible flame like a deranged moth.

     That something is called Minecraft.

     So all you other writers take heed from my misery, and avoid this game like the plague. It will mess you  up.

     Ugh.

     Need sleep. Must write. Error….error….error…

Send in the Clowns ... errr... Victims!

     I loved eighties horror movies. Halloween, Friday the 13^th, Sorority House Massacre 256 ½ , and any other rated R hack’n’slash that I could sneak out of the house to go watch. They were funny, scary, and a bit of a forbidden delight. And the surprising thing is, often the original movies in those franchises were pretty good.

But as the franchises wore on, what seemed to be a universal constant started to creep into them…a constant I call the Retarded Victim In Waiting. While in the original franchises the victims were often the “bad” girls due to the director trying to exploit some moralistic foible of the audience,  later on they chose to focus on the gratuitous which meant they needed a broader range of victims.

     So apparently they chose morons.

     You’ve seen them. The girl in her nightgown aimlessly wandering alone through the dark house wondering where all her friends disappeared too…the group of terrified teens splitting up to do different things AFTER they already know there is a killer on the loose (I call this the Scooby Doo effect)…the terrified idiot running OUT of the house once it’s been established the killer is not in there with them…etc.

     Now don’t get me wrong…people often do stupid things, but it seems these acts of idiocy have nothing whatsoever in common with the character presented to the audience until they commit them. They are presented as perfectly normal folks who suddenly decide “Hey! I want to die like an idiot!” Okay, actually that’s not right because they are often not presented to the audience as much of anything at all, other than an item on the carnage buffet. You could usually tell who was going to die simply over how much effort was put into their character development.

     And I really try to avoid that because it sucks all the fear and suspense right out of the scene when it happens. It’s when the character does the right thing, and it doesn’t do any good, that things get scary. I think one of the most effective scenes in the original Halloween was when Laurie Strode did the sensible thing and ran to her neighbors for help, only to have them turn off the porch light because they thought they were the victim of a Halloween prank. That’s when the things get scary.

     That doesn’t mean I haven’t had characters make mistakes or do suicidal things, but I try to do it within the context of their personality or circumstances. When Gerald runs for his car in Dead Stop, it’s because of his psychology…the monsters he sees inside the truck stop have become scarier to him than the ones outside. Holly follows him simply because that is who she has become, and she realizes that as she does it. In a way, it’s a liberating moment for her (at least internally) even as she is doing it. When Deke screws up and illuminates himself with the glow stick it’s because he isn’t thinking things through because he’s an insecure young man focused on proving himself to still be a valuable member of the group. So when he finds the purse, he acts out of triumph at his success before thinking. Nobody in Dead Stop dies due to simply acting stupid.

     And the main reason for that is that I think there is a symbiotic relationship between the monster and the victim. A monster is only as scary as the victim he threatens. And let’s face it, by the end of some of these horror franchises we were being given line-ups of victims that would have had a tough time surviving an episode of My Little Pony.

     So victims matter! They need to have back story. They need to not be idiots. The audience needs to be able to connect with them in some way before they meet their demise, or their death will fail to establish the monster/killer/threat as the fearsome entity you as a writer want it to be. 

Reviews, Covers, and Stuff

Another review on Dead Stop, this time from a site called Quirky Zombie.

She points out something that I consciously decided to do in Dead Stop. Like her, I had noticed that characters never seemed to get injured in zombie stories. They either got killed, or they were motoring along with nothing but maybe a scratch here or there. I thought it would be more realistic for characters to get hurt, and for a group of survivors to have a number of wounded to contend with.

On another front, I have crossed the 120,000 word mark on Argiope. There is still quite a ways to go, but at least I now have all the forces involved heading towards each other. At this point I have the main protagonist learning his new girl's tragic backstory. That kind of thing.

I have also tentatively changed the title to A Dance of Spiders, but that is nowhere near set in concrete. Yet at least I now have enough confidence that I may actually finish this book that I'm starting to consider covers. For instance...

It's a bit simple, and doesn't make the greatest thumbnail, but this is how things start. Such is the lot of being an indie author. You have to wear a bunch of different hats to get that book to the public. And one of your main goals is to end up with a product that DOESN'T look like the work of an indie author.

There is a lot of work ahead.

Fix it Later

One of my weak and strong points as a writer is that I constantly reread my work while I write, and when I find something wrong I tend to bring everything to a crashing halt while I fix it. The good side of this is that I tend to end up with a rough draft that is well on it's way to being a first draft.

The bad side is that things tend to get bogged down to the point where that rough draft is nothing more than a distant gleam on the horizon.

So, from now thru April I'm going to just try and focus on pushing forward and adding things I find wrong to a "fix-it list" to be implemented once I have rough draft in hand. This will be the third time I have attempted to write this novel, so I'm ready to try anything.

The list currently includes things like...

Timeline- the timeline is all out of sorts. The story needs to conclude in late winter or early spring. So adjust timeline accordingly.

Sonni – has no character. Remember, nobody characters make boring victims. Flesh out Sonni a little. Consider changing her name as well.

Remember, prologue is currently a placeholder. Will likely need to rewrite later.

Things like that. Things that tend to drive me crazy at night when laying in bed and thinking about the book. This way I can still the nagging "fix it" voice by claiming something has been done without bringing progress to a stop. Hooray!

I'm really hoping to have the rough draft finished and polished into first draft form by the time the kids get off from school. That way I can send it off to  proofreaders and polish it further over the summer. I'm still not counting on it, but an autumn release would be awesome.

I also still need to come up with a better title. "Argiope" is a tad to obscure, and the average reader won't even know what that means. I'm thinking something along the line of "Spider's Dance" or "A Tribe of Spiders."

Oh well, it will come. That's it for now.

Dead Stop Free March 9th thru 12th

The kindle version of Dead Stop is free for the period of March 9th thru 12th

And for those of you who want something to refer to when trying to visualize the action in the truckstop, this is a floorplan of the Textro.

Slow

Well, after an illness that lasted almost three weeks I seem to be on the road to recovery....although it might be best to think of it as a muddy, backwoods dirt road. I had been sleeping inordinate amounts of time for a period of about two weeks before the bug finally blossomed into full plague at the same time my inlaws were visiting from Ohio. (Sorry about that Carl and Lu) But now the crud seems to be on the wane, and life totters on.

Needless to say, I haven't been very productive. But I haven't been totally inactive either. I'm finally closing in on what I think are the last couple of thousand words on a novelette I've been struggling through. I hope to finish the rough draft in the next day or two. It's designed to stand on it's own, or be the prologue for a future novel I have an idea for. Once done, I'll let it sit a few days before editing.

Sometimes I think being unproductive can become self reinforcing. I originally stopped writing when I started editing Dead Stop for publication. Then I spent the autumn focused on promoting it any way I could. I knew I needed to get back to writing, but it seems like my brain can be in either promotion mode or writing mode...not both. Something I'm going to have to consider, and somehow deal with in the future. But the thing is, more and more time kept passing without me writing anything, and for some reason that made it even harder to get started again.

I'm hoping that finishing the rough draft of this novelette will get me back on the right track. When I say rough, I do mean rough...it definitely needs some serious going over and editing...but even the small victories matter. Currently it's slated for inclusion in a hazy future anthology that would sort of be a sequel to Shades. Only this one would be about monsters instead of exclusively ghosts. But nothing is set in concrete.

Oh well, that's my update and lesson for the time being....

"WARNING: FALLING OUT OF THE  HABIT OF WRITING IS BAD"

Writer's Block and Vanishing Publishers

Every writer has their own set of weaknesses. I think one of my greatest is my constant self monitoring when it comes to writing. I will sometimes get hung up on a scene, a line, or an idea and it brings the whole project to stop.

Now that’s not always a bad thing. It stopped the writing of Dead Stop until I backed up and went in a different and much better direction. On the other hand, it has held up one novel for about three years. And now it seems to even affect my short story writing. It just seems that when it comes to putting something down on paper that I don’t like, I seize up.

I wasn’t aware of that so much until I saw a quote by a famous TV writer who said that writers block was caused by the fear of bad writing. Apparently his approach is to go ahead and write the bad stuff too, then just don’t use it.

Hmmmm… That’s sort of alien to me, since I tend to edit and revise as I go along.

Oh well, things to think about.

On to sadder tidings….It seems that Pill Hill Press is closing up shop. That is a real shame because Jessy and Alva are good people who worked hard to do right  by their writers. PHP had writer friendly contracts, and they were very adaptable when dealing with the types of situations that can arise when publishing a novel. I wish both Jessy and Alva the very best in the future.