writing

Recipes for Writing

A.B. Kelly · January 26, 2022 · Musings · #amwriting, cooking, family, Italian food, recipes, writing, writing advice · No Comments

I make a pretty mean gnocchi.

By which I mean really nice gnocchi. The only thing it’s mean to is your waistline, because everyone grabs seconds. There are plenty foods I make that people say are good but then politely push the plate aside when they’re finished. What, you don’t even want some for leftovers? That’s tantamount to those idiots who stand for the entire bow line at the end of the play. They think they’re supporting all the actors, but in reality, they’re giving equal feedback to the chorus line and Jean Valjean.

Come on, people, I’m an aspiring writer. Show, don’t tell.

Not so with the gnocchi, however.

I’ve got three solid “outside the norm” dishes. I mean, I’m no slouch when it comes to staples like hamburgers and barbecue chicken, and with a seven-year-old in the house, I’ve perfected every mac & cheese this side of the Andromeda Galaxy. But nobody asks how I make my hamburgers. People don’t rush back to the table to split the last drumstick.

My ravioli, jambalaya, and gnocchi, however, bring ALL the milkshakes to the yard. Yet every time I make them, somewhere halfway through dishes I’ve made countless times, I think they’re fubared.

In the writing world, they call that imposter syndrome.

Starting with the Jan Brady of the three, I discovered my jambalaya recipe in my mid-twenties when I became obsessed with New Orleans and all things creole. I went to Mardi Gras at the age of 25 and spent the next couple years hunting down the secrets of gumbo, etouffee, and various colored beans and rices. It seemed an easier experience to transport home than random women flashing me in return for cheap plastic trinkets.

Please note, I wrote creole, not Cajun. Creole food is a wonderful fusion of textures and flavors, foods and spices, into a rib-sticking umami. Cajun, by contrast, is crappy food, like catfish, they mask by drenching in spice and charring the shit out of. All the nuance of a ball-pein hammer.

Of all those NOLA recipes I tinkered with in my twenties, the jambalaya stuck out. Other than that one time I tweaked crawfish bread into scallop bread because, even though crawfish are readily available in Sacramento, they’re a pain in the ass to get the good stuff out of. Scallops accomplish many of the same profiles with much less hassle. If anything, they’re juicier, and scallop bread was fucking divine. Even better than crawfish bread, if I dare say. But I never made it again because it was messy as hell and scallops have become friggin’ expensive.

Damn, I might need to bust out that scallop bread again.

But yeah, other than scallop bread, jambalaya’s become my jam. I’ve probably only made it ten times or so, although more often in my thirties than more forties. Having a child lessens the likelihood I’m having drunk friends over for Mardi Gras. Add to that the fact that Wife doesn’t care for red peppers or Andouille, plus shellfish inflames my gout like a motherfucker, and it’s much easier to just throw a pork roast in the oven or something.

Jambalaya isn’t tough to make, but it’s easy to mess up. You basically make a broth and then cook rice in it. It’s sometimes confused with gumbo, which is also rice in a broth. But the gumbo retains soup form, with the cooked rice being added at the last minute, whereas with jambalaya, the rice absorbs the broth, so it’s a rice dish, not a soup.

Unlike other rice dishes, you don’t just throw a cup of rice into two cups of water then walk away for twenty minutes, it takes a few hour, stirring regularly, to absorb at a low simmer. The first time I made it, I burnt the shit out of the rice. It’s not a dish you can adjust on the fly. One of the recipes I based mine on tells you to taste the liquid before you add the rice with the caveat, “If it doesn’t taste right, it’s too late to do anything about it. Taste it anyway.”

Cooking jambalaya runs in the same lane as the “pantsing” method of writing. For those unfamiliar, with pantsing (meaning “seat of your pants” writing), you have no particular story in mind. You think up characters, throw them into a setting, and see what happens. Maybe the writer is a step or two ahead of the characters, but not always. Sometimes you write yourself into a corner. Sometimes a plot point simmers too long without stirring, and end up with some stale char. But the good news is that you can taste of the broth from time to time and adjust as necessary. Just don’t drop the rice in until all the characters have arrived at the dead man’s mansion.

I wrote one of my books using the pantsing method. Most of my flash fictions are written in the pantsing model, and plenty of them end up burnt to shit. Blog posts, too. I know, who woulda guessed these bits of brilliance are nothing more than, “Fucked up on the gnocchi again, this reminds me of my writing” somehow morphing into 3000 words of drivel.

The problem with pantsing is figuring out where to go with it, when to make stuff happen. You’ve got a premise and a hook, but if you don’t know when to add the rice, you spend five hundred pages circling the drain and never coming in for a landing. Allegedly Stephen King is a huge pantser. Most of the time he pulls it off, but he has a few books where the premise is way cooler than the payoff. I’m looking at you, Under the Dome.

The staple I’ve cooked for the longest is my ravioli. This is a family recipe that the kids “assist” on as early as five or six. I was in college the first time I made them on my own. You know you’re a badass when you’re asking for grooved rolling pins for Christmas at the age of twenty. In my defense, video games were at a low ebb in the mid-1990s.

The problem with ravioli is the prep work. If I get a good groove going, and don’t get distracted by the television or the family, I can finish in a weekend. Yes, a full weekend. Including Friday night, when I cook the twenty or so ingredients that go into the stuffing. Then I need most of it to cool before I put it together into the food processor. Then back to the fridge to ensure it’s coalesced enough to hold some sense of form when I put it in the dough the next day.

The dough takes all day Saturday and Sunday. Make a big ol’ batch, cut off one slice at a time and then roll, roll, roll, stuff, fill and fold, roll with the other pin, then slice. Layer them with wax paper in a Pyrex dis and throw them in the freezer, because they’re still liable to stick to each other at this point. Then start on the next Pyrex and by the time it’s full, you can take the other one out of the freezer and transfer all those frozen ravs into a freezer-safe Ziplock. Repeat the process for 36 hours or so. Ugh.

And yeah, my family recipe that’s been “passed down for generations” requires food processors, Pyrex, and freezers. Not sure how it was done back in Piedmont. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the most important ingredient in my grandma’s “timeless” pasta sauce recipe was a packet of Lawry’s seasoning.

Don’t scoff. It’s still my secret recipe.

Note you don’t actually EAT the ravioli the weekend you make them. This is a “make in October to have at Christmas” kind of meal.

In that way, they’re similar to the “planning” writing style, the opposite of pantsing. Should be self-explanatory, but planning entails plotting the whole thing out, knowing all the nooks and crannies, the pitfalls and prat falls, long pen hits paper. Or fingers hit keyboard, since we’re living in the age of Pyrex.

The good news with planning is, if you do it right, there’s less danger of writing yourself into that corner. Spackle the plot holes before they turn into cervices. Some people even plot specific conversations ahead of time and, allegedly, if you do it right, the book is easier to write by the time you get around to it. Sounds boring to me.

That’s the problem with my ravioli, too. Who the hell wants to work on food all weekend, sending their back into apoplectic quivering, and douse the entire kitchen (and living room and bedroom and shower drain) with flour, so they can just drop it in a pot of water three months later? Not me. Especially when the accolades I receive as reward are about the same, possible a skosh less, than I get for my gnocchi, which only take a few hours.

I was well into my thirties by the time I started making gnocchi. I don’t even remember gnocchi existing in my youth. Nowadays, every Italian restaurant has them on the menu, but I was close to twenty years old, on a family trip to Italy, before I discovered these scrumptious pillows. My grandma was damn lucky I let her back on the plane after she shrugged and said she used to make it a lot but didn’t anymore.

At least that meant she had a recipe somewhere.

I still didn’t make my first gnocchi until close to a decade later. I assumed it was difficult, and ravioli was the Official Family Recipe(tm), so why waste time on something becoming more and more ubiquitous at every Italian joint?

Turns out they’re pretty simple. Sure, you still need to spend a few hours doing the never-ending roll, slice, shape, freeze cycle, but the first part of the process only requires a couple mashed potatoes. It’s not like I’m going to bust it out on a weeknight or anything, but I can bust out a batch on a Saturday afternoon and still have time for college football. So much nicer than sirloin steak in a food processor.

Somewhere in the middle of pantsing and planning lies “plantsing,” which seems to me to just be how 80% of normal humans write. Or really, do just about anything. How do you put up Christmas lights? Do you draw out a bunch of schematics ahead of time? Do you randomly go up the ladder, hang some lights, then go to the opposite side of the house for one inflatable? Or do you pull all the shit out, inventory the basic things that need to happen, then try to figure out the most logical course, all the while ready to adjust the plan if, say, this string of lights needs a replacement bulb or that character needs a better back story?

There’s always a spot in my gnocchi making, and in my writing, where I think I’ve fucked the whole thing, that I don’t know what I’m doing. Even when I know it’s coming, I still convince myself that no, this time is far worse, there’s no way to return from the sticky morass I’ve gotten myself into.

With gnocchi, it happens when I add the egg and butter to the potato and flour dough. Grandma’s recipe says to add “most of the flour” to the mashed potatoes before this step, then add the rest to dry it out after this step. When I make it, there’s not enough flour on Earth to return the flour to a dry enough texture to roll. So I add a quarter cup, then another quarter cup, then fuck it, throw the other half in. Okay, one more cup. Another? Why is it still the consistency of pudding? I can’t even get it unstuck from the cutting board, much less able to be cut and rolled. Wife, can you go to the grocery store for another bag of flour? I can’t touch anything.

I keep telling myself that Grandma’s measurements originated before GMO crops, so the ratio of one potato and half an egg to one cup of flour is off. Modern potatoes are one pound a piece, and I highly doubt great grandma coaxing an egg out of her Genoese chicken was opting between large, extra large, and double-x. So when I’m heading past six cups of flour to counter two eggs, yet still the dough sucks it in like a x-wing into a black hole, I’m always convinced I’ve fucked up.

The recipe says the dough should be dry before slicing and rolling. Instead, I wait until it is barely malleable before starting the next step. Then I dust both the dough and the board before rolling it out. And dip the knife in flour before cutting. And the fork before shaping. Yet still, every time I’m convinced this is the time, this is the batch my extended family and guests finally take a few bites and say, “Thanks I’m stuffed. Can I have some more salad?”

I’ve recently quit two novels. The first I “temporarily put aside” to attempt a serialized story on Amazon Vella. But in reality, I knew the story was going nowhere. Two characters who had basted in my mind for years fell flat, their trials and tribulations pedestrian and predictable, once placed on paper. So if I could jump to an exciting new idea with a baked-in excuse (“Kindle Vella will make me a millionaire, but only if I’m in on the initial launch!”), then it won’t be the time-old story every writer faces at 25,000 words.

But boy, howdy, if I thought a character’s growth arc felt boring and predictable in standard format, imagine writing one as a serial! Good lord, episodic stories sure are episodic. Get in and out of a hairy situation in 2,200 words, then rinse and repeat. All the while knowing that character, not plot, is what brings people back to a series. But how much can I delve into character if I have to wrap up and restore the status quo before word number 2,500?

I guess the good news was that I gave up the serial a little earlier. Fifteen k instead of thirty. Perhaps that means I’m growing as a writer.

Or maybe that means I’m getting lazier.

The bad news is that I didn’t go back to the abandoned project. Much better to go rewrite the first chapter of the finished project that I’m currently querying. Or working on the second draft for my other manuscript. And I hate editing, so that tells you something if I’d rather edit than write fresh. At any given time, I’ve usually got 2-5 completed blog posts, but I still only post twice a month. Why? Cause it’s easier to write something shitty than polish my previous turds. And by the time I get around to fixing them, I have to rewrite half of it. Shit, Obama isn’t president anymore?

But at least those completed novels are going somewhere. They were solid enough characters and stories to carry 100,000 words (which need to be edited down to 70,000). They’ve got backstories and foreshadowing, a twist nobody sees coming. Despite the fact that I was absolutely bored with them at 30,000 words and was absolutely convinced I couldn’t get them where they needed to be in that one scene.

I don’t give up on my gnocchi, despite being 100% sure, each time, that my best option is to throw the gunk into the trash and starting from scratch. All the writing advisers say don’t abandon your project. The fancy “other” story will always entice you from afar, but it’s a mirage. Once you start writing that one, you’ll bog down into the mushy middle the same as where you are right now. Ignore that siren’s call.

Then again, all those advice people say they’ve had to abandon projects before. Whether it’s a “fatal flaw” in the story or a plot hole the size of an iceberg. Crystal clear writing advice: never give up on a project. Unless, you know, it’s worth giving up on. Kinda like four potatoes equals four cups of flower. Except usually not.

Truth be told, I should’ve abandoned my last batch of gnocchi. Even after six cups of flower, it was still as moist as the Mekong Delta. It was a pain in the ass to roll out and half the time when I tried to roll one off the fork, it remained on the fork. The end results were larger than usual, and even after an hour in the freezer, they weren’t frozen enough to transfer to a Ziplock. We transported them to Grandma’s house still in the Pyrex and rolled them straight into the water from their parchment paper.

Nobody complained, though. They still went back for seconds. And honestly, even if they weren’t up to my standards, they were still fine. Now that I think of it, I didn’t need to start the batch over. What I had was fine, it just needed more flour. I was just sick and tired of adding flour after a couple hours. But I’ve plantsed my way through this recipe enough times to know that I always reach this point. This batch might have been worse than most, but it’s all variations of the same problem. The best way through is forward, not some magical new batch that will behave better.

Maybe there’s something to be said for powering through. Not giving up on a batch or a story midway through.

Now if only I could figure out how to add a little more flour to that plot hole.

#amquerying (almost)

A.B. Kelly · April 5, 2021 · Musings · #amediting, #amquerying, #amwriting, Literary Agents, Query Letter, writing, writing community, writing update · One Comment

On this Easter Monday, perhaps I should chat about the Book Eternal.

No, I’m not talking about the bible. I’m talking about my Work-in-Progess that started somewhere in the Obama administration, and is still sitting in about twelve different files, four different versions, on my laptop.

Kinda feels like it’s been around since Roman times. All it’s missing is some divine inspiration.

When I first referenced this work-in-progress, it was a flash fiction I wrote that started a black hole of my brain. The following week, I posted the first draft of the scene in the book that correlated to that initial idea nugget. It was still in EXTREMELY first-draft mode. Not that I understood the difference between first and later drafts back then. I still don’t.

If I ever get an agent, and that agent okays me posting some of my content for free, maybe I’ll pair those with the “final draft.”

Is there such a thing as a final draft?

I’m currently on chapter five of my third work-in-progress (fourth, if you count my first aborted attempt at “autobiographical fiction”). I know it’s a normal reaction, opining how shitty it is compared to the one that’s on its third draft. When left brain takes over, I remember how often that first WIP felt like a smoking pile of dung-heap. All the characters were boring, but especially the main one. The action was plodding and predictable, the writing full of clichés and prone to use five words when two will do.

Even worse, I think to myself, is that this new book is horribly dry compared to my lightning-in-the-bottle first book, and that first book hasn’t even been accepted by a literary agent, much less sold to a publisher.

Of course, I haven’t actually shopped it to any agents. I’ve heard that helps?

Damn you, publishing world! Why can’t you crawl into my computer whilst I sleep and see the brilliance that I’ve written? Maybe I should ask the dude I send a bitcoin to every month for the alleged pictures he took of me doing certain things on a webcam also get me place my book into a “to be published” folder at Simon & Schuster. Or Simon & Garfunkel. I’m not too particular.

Am I the only one who does this? One time, a writing podcast was reviewing ways to make progressions feel earned, character-driven instead of plot-derived. I’m looking at you, “How I Met Your Mother” finale. Yes, I’m still bitter.

While listening to the podcast, I thought to myself, might’ve even spoken aloud to the empty car, “I fucking did that! Why the hell aren’t I published yet?” Then I remembered I hadn’t actually finished writing the novel. It was still sitting at 60,000 words where I left it when I gave up on it six months earlier. Because it was boring and predictable and full of cliches.

Damn you, publishing world! Why can’t you crawl into my computer whilst I sleep and finish my manuscript. Maybe I should get my friendly neighborhood hacker on that. Google keeps telling me all my passwords are hacked. All I have to do is make my passwords 100,000 words long and…

Anything to avoid working on that query letter.

I just spent a weekend delving into the querying process, and let me just say that rabbit hole is deeeeeeeeep! I’m talking Fantastic Mr. Fox level, needing a tractor to sift through all the bullshit that rabbit holed through.

My first foray came via Pitch Wars, a made-for-Twitter event where you condense your life’s work, your magnum opus, down to two-hundred-forty characters. Well, you need to throw a bunch of hashtags in, so it’s really more like two-hundred. I thought I had it down pat, at least until I saw it on my phone screen. Yikes! So I re-wrote it, and again, and again. You’re allowed to tweet your pitch three times in a day. My three pitches were as distant from each other as can be while describing the same book. Unfortunately, none garnered a like from agents, so I can’t figure out which one “worked.”

Next up: the query letter. The good news could use more than thirty words. The bad news was I now had to introduce myself as well as the book. I had to greet the agent like she’s a real-live human being and not a simulacrum, a Twitter bot searching for a specific keyword.

And don’t forget that hook. Like my students do, with a rhetorical question.

“Have you ever been king of France?” they often inquire. “Looking for a way to control the nobles, all the while owning a plot of land precisely twelve miles from the center of Paris?”

“Why no,” I respond, cursing English teachers for providing only one rhetorical crutch. “What an oddly specific question to ask of a position that hasn’t existed for a hundred and fifty years. Does one often respond yes to such a quandary?”

But what the hell. If a history teacher reading thirty essays gets tired of that hook, I doubt literary agents who get thousands of unsolicited drivel will mind.

“Dear agent,
Have you ever poured five fucking years into a hot pile of garbage and have finally whittled that steaming feces into something your mom describes as ‘better than what you wrote in third grade’?”

Hold on, I need to go check all those manuscript requests flooding my inbox.

I read plenty of how-tos and don’t-dos over the years, so I knew what to expect. I subscribe to Query Shark where we all laugh at atrocious query letters. I follow writers at varying stages of their career, listen to podcasts. I figured I had it dialed.

Until I sat down to write it, at which point I promptly became a third-grader learning to write for the first time.

In a foreign language.

Seriously, I’ve written over a million words and now all of a sudden, I’ve lost all ability to communicate via written word. Stephen King says that once I pass a million, I’m a real writer. Do I have to write an extra million in business-letter format?

It shouldn’t be this difficult. All you have to do is be sincere, but not drab. Stick out from the slush pile, but don’t say anything outlandish. Follow the formula, but don’t be formulaic. Opaque much?

It doesn’t help that most of the “sample” query letters start with phrases like, “I’ve written seven previous best-sellers” or “I have 25,000 social media followers” or “You asked me for my manuscript at that one writing conference.” If I’d written a bunch of best-sellers, I probably wouldn’t be looking for an agent. And writing conferences haven’t existed for a year.

Ironically, I did write up a little “elevator pitch” for my book back when I was about halfway done. On its own, it kinda pops. Intrigue, a basic establishment of plot and character, a couple of non-rhetorical questions to whet one’s appetite. Yet when I drop it into the second paragraph of a query letter, I’m all of a sudden second-guessing myself. It’s too focused on the worldbuilding, the MacGuffin that sets my 90k words apart from all those other batches of 90k words.

The query gods say I should focus more on the character, less on the setting. Also, it should read like the back of a book. But most of the book covers I’ve read focus more on inciting incident than on character. The characters are what keeps us in the book, but isn’t the setting what draws us in the first place? Star Wars starts with an imperial cruiser, not whiney Luke.

So let’s see if I got this straight. Introduce the character and the setting and the MacGuffin and the inciting incident. Plus the major plot progressions and other conflicts and themes. Maybe throw in the character’s social security number and mother’s date of birth. All in a sentence and a half. Got it!

With that out of the way, it’s time to find what lucky agent gets my speed dating salvo.

Holy shit! There are quite a few of them thar agents.

Time to pare this down. They suggest looking up the agents of books you liked. Or the books you’re going to use as comp titles. Because we all must have comp titles, published in the last five minutes because after you get your agent, it’ll still be seven decades before the book finds an editor and another three centuries before the traditional publishing houses will put it on the shelf. So you need to prove your book has a market right now.

Fine. Kings of the Wyld is one of the books I’m comping. It came out in 2017, two years after I started writing my book, and its sequel came out last year. Zeitgeisty enough. Unfortunately, Nicholas Eames is Canadian, as is his agent and agency. Plus they’re not taking submissions. Maybe not the best place to start.

So I went to the “Manuscript Wish List” website to search for agents who liked Kings of the Wyld. Found two. Unfortunately, one of them cited the multi-character viewpoint as her main takeaway. Well shit, that’s not why I’m comping it. Come back next week to see why I’m comping Kings of the Wyld. My first book review in a while and yet another post milked out of the WIP That Will Not Die.

My other comp title is Ready Player One. It shouldn’t surprise that most agents who liked that book are looking for Sci-Fi, not alternative history. Strike two.

What about the agent that actually represented Ready Player One? She’s unavailable, unattainable. She left her old agency to start her own agency, but is taking no new clients. In addition to Ernest Cline, who got a seven-figure advance for his second book to say nothing of movie rights, she has one other huge client, which I imagine is enough for both workload and income.

That’s the problem with querying comp titles and “authors I like.” Those who come to mind are successful, and many an agent retire upon capturing their white whales. Let’s do a rundown of authors who’ve inspired me.

Check Wendig and Delilah Dawson have the same agent. She’s closed to queries.

Kevin Hearne has a private, part-timish agent who only represents him.

I’m not gonna bother looking at Stephen King’s agent. If I were his agent, I would spend all my time updating the lock on the safe that contains my four-leaf-clover-embossed, golden-rabbit-foot horseshoe. Except for the one day a month I get another 2,000-page best-seller from my one and only client.

Harry Turtledove is a prolific alternative history writer, and his agent is, at least in theory, taking queries. But after a gander at his rep list, ain’t no fucking way. There are like fifty names on there, some of which are whipper-snapper upstarts like Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Terry Goodkind, and Johnnie Cohcran. Yes, that Johnnie Cochran.

On a positive, half those guys are dead, so I won’t have to worry about a huge influx of new material from this guy’s other clients. But sheesh. I doubt he’s devoting his time to explain publishing nuances to some wide-eyed noob.

I guess what I’m looking for is the sweet spot in the middle. A magical agent who has some, but not too many, successful clients. Whose authors I admire, but who I can write as well as.

Once I find that agent, all I need to do is come up with a pithy sentence that tells him or her that I’m the perfect reincarnation of their best clients, totally worth the time they’d spend reading through my drivel, and that fits perfectly into the publishing world of today, being exactly like countless other books on the bestseller list no more than three weeks ago. But it’s also completely original!

Or I could spend the next few hours adding more agents to my spreadsheet and wait for the hackers to do their work.

Maybe Shakespeare’s agent is available.

Thoughts on that Mandalorian Finale

A.B. Kelly · January 19, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · character agency, Mandalorian, mandalorian season finale, Star Wars, story structure, television, TV Shows, writing · No Comments

Everybody’s been gushing about the second season finale for The Mandalorian. After all, it’s got CGI! Behold, a tick to make Hollywood actors more attractive than they are in real life! What more could one want as a going-away present to get us through the long, dark offseason that before it is filled with WandaVision and seven other temporary fulfillments of the vacant holes in our souls. Character agency? Pshaw.

So, y’know, spoiler warnings and whatnot. But you clicked through on something that clearly referenced what I was reviewing. If you didn’t want to know about the menage-a-trois between Mando and Captain Kirk and Harry Potter, it’s kinda your own fault now.

And honestly, I’m at least a year behind the times on this, but Mando the Mandalorian? Really? Maybe it’s a good thing they waited a year and a half to name Baby Yoda. It gave us time to name it Baby Yoda instead of, I don’t know, Bob, which is probably the name they would’ve given it if they’d been forced to come up with one. Fighting alongside Humo the Human.

And yeah, I know Baby Yoda has a real name now. But sorry, producers, ya done waited too long and he’s forever gonna be Baby Yoda now.

I’m probably not the best person to review the second season finale of The Mandalorian, considering I’ve been a whole lotta meh on the series as a whole. One of the reasons this is coming a month after the series ended is because I wasn’t planning to watch season two at all, until I heard about the ending.

Some of my friends incessantly gush about the show. They’ll note that the red hat in the background of one scene was an homage to an outtake from Episode II wherein Jar Jar Binks shoved a red hat up his hoo-ha only to find out that he was color blind. Meanwhile I fixated on asinine things like there’s no way the little kid Boba Fett in Episode II could grow up to be the old dude Bob Fett in this show. I feel like he switched ethnicities. Maybe being pooped out by the Sarlacc changes your accent. Or maybe he’s a character that never shoulda taken the helmet off. Or, you know, returned at all.

Cue Poe Dameron. Somehow, Boba Fett returned. If the answers disappoint you, perhaps you should stop asking questions. About anything.

“It’s like a Western,” my friends say. “Like Kung Fu.”

People called the Han Solo movie a western, too. Amazing how many westerns take place in space. Ironically, I really liked the Han Solo movie. I don’t know if it was because of any Outlaw Josie Wales motifs. The best part of the movie was Donald Glover doing a spot-on impression of Billy Dee Williams, circa 1979.

I’m not a huge Western fan, but I’ve seen my fair share of Bonanza episodes. I even visited the Ponderosa up at Lake Tahoe when it was a kinda, sorta amusement park/homage to the show. You could get there early and have a pancake – sorry “flapjack” – breakfast, complete with whiskey in your coffee and I was only 22 and shit, howdy, while I loved me some Baileys and coffee, I don’t know that I was quite ready for whatever rotgut they were throwing in there.

Regardless, I never once say the Mandalorian call for Hop Sing, nor ride his horse into Carson City, so I don’t quite think it’s a western.

But fine, let’s pretend that both Solo and The Mandalorian are westerns. Let’s pretend they’re both Kung Fu. You know what was great about Kung Fu? You didn’t have to watch every episode.

Back in the 1970s, we didn’t have every Disney movie and show, except for Song of the South, available whenever we wanted. Your options for “children’s programming” were Saturday mornings or afternoon syndications or PBS mid-mornings.

And if you wanted Star Wars content on TV, good fucking luck. Far too valuable of a commodity to sell TV rights for. Your only option was the now infamous Holiday Special with Bea Arthur, who played a hideous tentacled alien species who reside with their Sicilian mothers in Miami retirement communities.

What’s that? Bea Arthur’s character was a human bartender? If you say so.

But we can all agree that Golden Girls was thinly-veiled tentacle porn, right?

We also didn’t have Netflix dropping an entire season of a new tv show all at once in the 1970s. “Binge Watching” meant not getting our asses off the couch to change to one of the other five channels. Because we had no remote control, so might as well keep the TV tuned to this station and see what’s on next. The Jeffersons? Sold!

Heck, most homes didn’t even have VCRs until well into the 1980s. So if you weren’t going to be home for your favorite show, you were more or less fucked. There was a chance said episode might rerun during the summer, but not every episode did. A typical season might have 20-some episodes, but only about ten weeks of reruns. And really, who wants to be inside during summer evenings? Nobody. That’s why TV networks ran reruns.

The first serials, like Dynasty and Dallas, didn’t hit the market until after VCRs were around. So if, say, wife was going into labor, they didn’t have to decide between calling in a midwife or never finding out who shot J.R.

Then again, waiting till your wife is in labor to figure out how to set the clock on the VCR was a really bad idea.

Obviously, TV has come a long way since then. Most shows are designed to be watched back-to-back. Season-long storylines are now the norm. There’s no reason to ever “miss” an episode. Even more so with subscription services.

So I was a little disappointed with the utter lack of continuity in the first season of The Mandalorian. I spent the first few episodes trying to follow every little plot thread, keeping track of all of the hints at what had happened in the five years between Return of the Jedi and the start of this show. But I was hard pressed to find any through-lines.

After a few episodes, I saw someone refer to The Mandalorian as a video game. Each episode was a different level, with a boss fight at the end, after which he leveled up with a fancy new weapon. That explanation crystalized my nagging, unfulfilled feeling while watching it.

During season two, I saw a much funnier explanation of the same thing.

Again, it wasn’t that I thought The Mandalorian was bad. It was fine. It just didn’t give me a reason to want to tune in. It’s Kung Fu and I’ve got a whole slew of Falcon Crests on my plate. I’m talking The Boys and Witcher. WandaVision was on the horizon and I still hadn’t finished Daredevil. Hell, even sitcoms like The Good Place and Schitt’s Creek have continuing plotlines now. How can a Star Wars property be so episodic?

I resolved not to watch season two. Maybe “resolved” is a bad word. It wasn’t a boycott. It was asking myself if I cared enough to tune in. and answering with a resounding. “meh.”

I heard about Boba Fett. I shrugged. Never cared too much for a character with a whopping ten minutes of screen time in the first trilogy. The Mos Eisley saxophone player showing up wouldn’t have me running either.

Then came the announcement about the finale.

God damn it.

Fine.

So again, if you haven’t heard about the ending now, approach with caution.

A de-aged Mark Hamill shows up.

Which ruined everything.

Let me back up.

I’m not opposed to the idea. We were all hoodwinked into thinking there was no way any of the original characters would show up, other than those in masks, although we probably shoulda seen it coming. After all, they had already done that with Carrie Fisher in Rogue One. Then, to one up themselves, they put her in Rise of Skywalker after she was dead.

My problem with the Luke Skywalker cameo wasn’t the obvious “gotcha” quality of it, nor that I was duped into watching the entire second season for it. And yeah, it was dramatic as hell. Impressive. Even knowing what to expect, my heart raced when that lone X-Wing came out of hyperspace to board the ship.

But from a storytelling motif, it’s totally bullshit. Deus ex machina, anyone?

The second half of season two was actually fixing a lot of the problems I had with season one. There was a cohesive plot, a through-line of getting Baby Yoda to “the jedi.” And after Baby Yoda got kidnapped by Gus the Los Pollos Hermanos dude, there was actually momentum building toward the finale. Even a wee bit of character development, if I dare say.

Seriously though, Giancarlo Esposito has been sorely underused in this show. Anybody who can steal scenes in a show like Breaking Bad should be running circles around an MMA fighter and a dude in a mask. Dude can play cold-blooded sociopath, and y’all got him playing Dr. Evil.

Unfortunately, Gus the Chicke Dude and the MMA fighter and the dude in a mask who the fucking show is named after, those characters I finally got to know over the episodes leading up to the finale, were thrown to the sideline in the culminating scenes, so Luke could come in with his fancy lightsaber. Like whoever the old Tampa Bay quarterback was when Tom Brady decided he wanted to move south for the winter. Maybe they need to change the title of The Mandalorian to include the character we’re actually supposed to care about. Season three’s working title: Hey maybe they can get a Han Solo cameo, too.

Okay, so they set the scene in the finale by showing us the Terminator. They called them Dark Troopers or Storm Shadows or something, but they were basically the Terminator. Or Ultron. Basically, half storm trooper, half robot, so we shouldn’t worry about the moral qualms about murdering them. Not that we’ve ever had any issue of mass slaughter of bad guys before. Weren’t the stormtroopers understood to be clones, anyway? Although, let’s be honest, that wasn’t established until the fifth movie. We went at least the entire original trilogy assuming those were real people.

Speaking of which, why did they clone a guy that was such a shitty shot with a blaster?

In typical superhero stuff, they show us that one fight with one of these fuckers was almost too much for the hero. Mando the Madalorian used up all of his weapons to no avail. He was finally able to defeat dude using a one-time weapon that he wouldn’t be able to use again. And now they’re showing Mando and his friemds, trapped in the bridge of an imperial cruiser, about to face twenty of them. How ever shall our hero make it out of this quandary?

It’s a standard motif in the fantasy/sci-fi/superhero genres. Our hero is shown being totally outmatched by his opponent only to finally discover the way to beat them later. Sometimes said hero discovers a weakness and exploits it. The James Bond route. Other times, a la Rocky III, the hero realizes he wasn’t taking the fight seriously the first time. More often, it’s done lazily. I guess all Superman had to do to beat Zod was level half of Metropolis. Too bad he didn’t try that the first time.

Even when it’s done poorly, though, there’s still some payoff. Some conclusion. Ultron could beat all of the Avengers with barely a thought, but once you’ve got a city flying in the air and the Avengers are simultaneously saving civilians AND fighting Ultron, well then, that’s how they win. Divided attention always makes us stronger.

So how did Mando and his pals finally overcome this threat? One took everything he had, and now he’s facing an army! Perhaps the three episodes they’ve been together will culminate into working together as a team, each member intuiting the others movements. Perhaps the imminent threat on his only father figure will finally push Baby Yoda beyond the threshold, resulting in a focused blast of force power he’s never manifested before. Perhaps Mando goes all MacGyver and creates twenty of those spear things he used earlier.

Or maybe they’ll all just stand there and watch it play out on a fucking screen.

Really?

Look, I know Jon Favreau is a better plotter than I’ll ever be. He’s as much to credit as Robert Downey, Jr. for the entire MCU existing. But that was utter bullshit. Would we have been happy if, in the final battle against Obediah Stane in the first Iron Man movie, the Hulk randomly showed up and beat the shit out of the bad guy, with Tony Stark unconscious on the sidelines?

But if it’s Luke Skywalker instead of Bruce Banner, all bets are off. As the “debate” over The Last Jedi proved, Skywalkers are the only beings in the entire Star Wars universe who are EVER allowed to resolve ANY conflict. Or maybe the Emperor.

There were ways to bring Luke back without being the deus ex machina, without stealing all agency from the main character. They could’ve gotten out of the situation then delivered Baby Yoda to Luke, similar to the Rogue One Princess Leia scene. I even would’ve been fine with Luke showing up to help Mando, who was already fighting back on his own. But the title fucking character should not be a fucking bystander for the ultimate battle.

How’s season three gonna go? Is he just going to stop trying to get out of situations? I mean, the more dire the situation, the more likely Zeus will fly in to save the day, right? Just tell Baby Yoda (who we all know will still be prominently featured in season 3 despite “leaving” with Luke) to call for Papa.

Or maybe they’ll just wait for Han Solo this time.

Still Editing

A.B. Kelly · May 19, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · #amediting, #amwriting, editing, writing, writing update · No Comments

I’m still editing.

Editting? Meh, I’ll have to fix that on the rewrite.

I may have used that joke the last time I wrote about editing. But right now it’d take too much damned effort to double check. Kinda like when I really don’t want to look up how I described this character 20,000 words ago. So if it’s the blond she was gonna fuck and the brunette she was gonna marry, then oh well. At least we know she was always gonna kill the redhead. While Rick Astley played in the background.

I still don’t know if I’m technically editing or writing a second draft. Sometimes those are used interchangeably, other times not. I think editing is where you get rid of adverbs and sprinkle out some cliches. Find them crutch phrases and fuck them right in their nose-holes.

Nostrils? Nah, nose-holes has more panache.

I’m not to that part yet. Where I’m writing, there’s nary a nostril nor nose-hole in sight. What I’m doing right now is closer to, “see if you can find your five worthwhile words in this chapter of drivel and then burn the rest of it to the ground.”

I know a number of real authors say they add 10-20,000 words in their second draft. Add a little foreshadowing now that you know how the story will end. Maybe add a red herring. Or make the redhead that we didn’t know she’d kill in chapter 20 back into that party scene in Chapter 2. Ooo, can the redhead be a red herring?

That’s not how I approach my second draft. If I’m not cutting 1,000 words from a chapter, then it’s probably still too goddamn verbose.

I just cut 2000 words from a fight scene. That shit was originally 5000 words. Because, you know, when a trained king’s guard is swinging his sword at you, it’s a great time to have three paragraphs of physics. What the hell was I thinking?

Actually, I know what I was thinking. That I suck at writing action scenes. But 500 words a day, yo! So let’s see, the bad guy started swinging his sword yesterday and I’ve got to move the book along today. If I can equivocate for 490 words, I only have to advance the arc of that sword for 10. The POV character, after all, is in heightened adrenaline mode. Time slows down. We notice everything. When else would he be likely to notice the morning dew condensing on a beautiful chartreuse lily? Then maybe tomorrow, a gentle will-o-the-wisp shall flitter across like a… like a… I’ll figure it out later.

Crap, will-o’-the-wisp only counts as one word. He must encounter a rare Will O’ The Wisp. The O’ the Wisp family certainly has a penchant toward a certain fist name for their male children.

I’m aware of my tendency while I’m writing. It’s the only way I ever get on with the scene. When it’s been a week and I’m still thinking about that goddamn sword, I’m like, “Okay, today I’m going to write where he rolls out of the way.” This happens on non-action scenes, too. Oftentimes at the beginning of a new chapter, especially after a major scene shift, I have no friggin’ clue how much set-establishing to do before getting into the real shit. On the re-read, the answer might actually be none. Does the reader really need to know every detail of the alleyway between dude’s apartment and the pizza place if all he needs to do is order a pizza? Come to think of it, can’t I just start the chapter off with pizza already in hand? Will my non-existent readers be tweeting me screaming, “WHY? What was his internal motivation for procuring a slice of pizza. How can I identify with him if I don’t know how many shakes of crushed red pepper he likes?”

Actually, the red pepper shakes might be some good character info. But not the number of cracks in the pavement outside. And he can still shake the pepper after the scene starts with slice in hand.

Astute readers might note that I first wrote about editing this book back in July. It’s been almost a year. How the hell am I still on the second draft? Aren’t those supposed to take, like, a couple weeks? I thought so too!

In my defense, it took me about five years to write this book, so maybe one year on the rewrite is par for the course. And during that time, the other book I was stuck on got unstuck a couple times. Of course it did. Anything that’s not the story I’m currently working on sounds super easy right now.

And no, I didn’t finish that other book when I abandoned my editing for its sultry seductions. I just made it a couple chapters longer. Chapters that I’ll probably cut in the second draft.

Hey, you know something I’ve learned from this process? One of the things all the professionals say is to let your first draft sit for a while before re-accessing it. That way you won’t remember what you were writing and you won’t be as emotionally vested in it. If you approach it as “this was written by someone else,” you’re more capable of tearing it apart and making it better.

Okay, obviously those people didn’t take five years to write the first draft. Because I totally could’ve gone back to page one the day after I finished page last. It wasn’t fresh in my memory.

But on the flip side, I totally remember writing large portions of this. I remember the major plot points. Sometimes I’ll be rewriting a scene and think “Didn’t I make a reference to xyz here?” only to find it a couple chapters later, but still in the same general area. Oh, maybe I don’t remember some of the metaphors or precise language used, but if the whole goal is for me to approach this as if it was written by somebody else, that ain’t happening. I remember precisely why every beat of the story is in there.

Which doesn’t mean I’m super tied to it. Like I said, if I’m not cutting one out of every four pages, I’m not doing it justice.

Maybe it’s because those real authors burn out a book in three months. Whereas I spent a month on this one chapter, so I remember all its nooks and crannies.

Of course, now I’m hearing that the second draft is actually supposed to be shortly after the first draft, and it’s primarily for “making the head match the ass” or “making the drapes match the carpets.” THEN you wait 3-12 month before writing your THIRD draft, which should feel like it was written while masturbating with your left hand.

Wait, I’m going to have to write this AGAIN? THEN I send it to beta readers and they tell me all the things to change and I write the fourth draft. Followed by another drapes-and-carpets run, then let it sit for… Boy, I can’t wait to start the querying process in 2050.

Here’s the strangest thing about this rewriting process though: I’m giving up at the exact same spots.

When I say it took me five years to write, it didn’t really take me five years to write. Even those long slogs of 500 words a day before I finally got on with it happened for maybe only a week at a time. My normal writing schedule was to write 10,000 words in a month or so, usually around NaNoWriMo, then to muddle through another couple months, writing once a week or so, then get discouraged for three months before rinsing and repeating.

I remember the times I walked away. Sometimes it was right before an action scene, other times it was right after. And it wasn’t always in the “this sucks” vein. Sometimes it was a catharsis. Yeah, I nailed that fucking scene. Let me replenish. The book goes through three or four arcs, as did my writing.

When I started this rewriting adventure last summer, I muddled through the same emotions I had when first writing. This sucks. I’ll never be a writer. If I’m bored by this scene what reader in their right mind would ever sit through it? That usually leads to cutting 1000 words. But then there are those times of, “Wow, this isn’t half bad. This character really seems to be earning his level-up. Awww, people are gonna cry when that character dies. If they make it past that super shitty chapter 3.”

When I approached the first major give-up point, I resolved to power my ass through that rewrite. I took out most of the inner-monologue-while-facing-mortal danger that I tend to fill my first drafts with. And you know what? It took me a week, but I finally made it through that fucker.

Then I took the next two months off.

Now I’m finishing the second major arc, and I’m running into the same general malaise I had at this spot during a first draft. I’ve heard it referred to as the mushy middle. I’m once again faced with a general boredom with the plot and the characters and an impostor syndrome that says Stephen King’s first book was Carrie, and even after I’ve fixed half the shit, this drivel ain’t even on the same fucking continent as Carrie.

I was prepared for this on the first draft. I mean, not prepared in a sense of I fought through it. No, I put the manuscript away for a year at a time. But I at least learned from other sources that the impostor syndrome and the mushy middle were things. So at least when I succumbed to them, I knew it was par for the course.

I wasn’t prepared to go through it a second time.

It might be worse now that I know where the story is going, how many more beats it has. Add to that the fact that, the first time I wrote this, the end was where I ran into more and more of those “just get shit on the page” days. I’ve heard a number of authors say they power through the end because that’s when it’s fun again. Not me. The culminating scenes, where I bring all my chickens back to shit in the woods with the Pope, are a fucking nightmare. That’s where I am on that second book that only looks good when I’m stuck on the first book these days.

Both of my “books” start out with crisp 2,000-3,000 word chapters and end with 7,000-word lardasses. And I don’t know if they’ll be any easier now that I’ve made the ass match the face.

The second give-up point is different from the first. This time, I’m going through the “maybe I should change the entire premise of the book. Maybe I should start over from scratch with a different tone. Yep, almost 200,000 words in (120,000 words on the first go through, and 70,000 words through the rewrite), I’m now thinking “eh, fuck it.” I want to make it campier, funnier. I’ve been reading “Kings of the Wyld” by Nicholas Eames. It’s a refreshing take on epic fantasy by merging it with rock bands. Maybe I should do something like that? Something to differentiate myself from everything else that’s out there.

For those who have been following the travails of this Magnum Opus, it’s a world where feudalism never ended, They’re on the cusp of the twenty-first century, but it’s filled with peasants and nobles and an absolute monarchy, nary an industrial invention in sight. Now I’m thinking of moving it from the late 1990s to the mid-1980s and drop in a bunch of real-world eighties references. Maybe all the peasants wear day-glo? A mixture of “Kings of the Wyld” with “Ready Player One.” Aren’t we supposed to use comparables in our query letters?

The problem is I don’t know if I have that book in me. I turned 15 years old in 1989, so while I remember the 1980s, it’s not like I have a font of knowledge of the decade beyond that of a child. I’d have to do some extra research. It can’t be all Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

I also wouldn’t want to go full camp. “Kings of the Wyld” doesn’t. Every time it has a chance to go more “rock band” and less “epic fantasy,” it doesn’t. Most of the band references are subtle. So maybe moving my story to the 1980s rewrite wouldn’t take a whole rewrite. But what fun would that be? If you wanna burn something to the ground, you don’t decorate it with a doily.

Then again, maybe I’m just going through this whole rigmarole because I’m in the mushy middle. My main character is really annoying when he’s still 20,000 words away from finally growing the fuck up and complete his character arc.

God, my writing sucks. Hey, this is pretty fucking good. Back and forth. Back and forth.

I’ll see y’all back here in 2023 when I hit this spot on the fourth draft.

In the meantime, my other book’s making sexy eyes at me, so I gotta go.

Editing

A.B. Kelly · June 28, 2019 · Musings · #amediting, #amwriting, writing, writing advice, writing update · No Comments

I’ve started the editing process.

Wait, editing? Editting? Meh, fuck it. I’ll fix that later.

Right after I finish regrouting the tile. Because that sounds more fun than editing.
Man, I thought it was easy to get distracted away from writing. Then I started editing, and hoo boy. Any chance I can sign up for a root canal surgery or something?

I’ll just blog something instead. Nothing makes writing seem more appealing than editing.

It turns out there’s a lot more “how to’s” about writing than there are about editing. Everything’s all like “Yeah, just keep writing. Get that first draft done. If it sucks, you can fix it in the second draft. You can’t edit a blank page.”

So I finished my first draft. Woo-hoo!

Then they say to let it sit for at least a month, better yet two, so that you can edit it with a fresh set of eyes.

So I waited two months. Even though it took me four years to write in the first place, so Chapter One should have Fresh Eyes, regardless.

Then I waited two more months. And another two. It’s now been close to a year since I finished the book. Five years since I started it.

Because every time I started to think that maybe I should get around to editing, I would realize that it’s 120,000 fucking words. Good God. When I’m looking for a book on Audible, I don’t like them going over twelve hours. This polemic I wrote would be twenty hours. And bear in mind these are 120,000 words of mistakes and typos and characters that drastically changed from the beginning to the end.

Ugh.

But I’m finally doing it. Let me dust off Chapter One, written in November of 2014, and see what I can do.

Back to the writer websites and podcasts:

Write the First Draft. Check.

Let it sit (at least) two months. Check.

Hey, here’s a blog entry about sentence structure.

Because nobody wants to talk about editing.

I did find one podcast, Story Grid, but it’s a really boring podcast. They want me to buy their book, so they never actually say how to make a story grid. It’s just a dude talking about his specific book, and it’s a book that sounds like a boring rip-off of Hunger Games. So I make it about five minutes into each episode before giving up.

Then I edit for five minutes and think that this OTHER episode of the podcast sounds super interesting.

Step number one, according to Story Grid, is to read the entire book while taking notes. Don’t touch a thing. Don’t fix typos. Just read the whole fucking thing.

Hmm…. Let me see if I can find other guides.

Allegedly Lee Child doesn’t edit his books at all. He writes from beginning to end, then gives it to his publisher to fix typos. I guess that’s easier to do when you write pretty much the same story over and over.

I once found a “four color” editing process where you print out a copy of your book and you read through it using four colored pencils to mark four different types of things to fix. It promised that it would become a one pass-through process. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what any of the colors were for. All I can think is, holy shit, there are FOUR things I have to fix on my second draft?

That’s what comes after the first draft, right? The second draft?

Wait, second draft? As in, this manuscript that it took me four years to write, I now have to start over from scratch? Rewrite the whole thing? I want to EDIT, not REWRITE.

In my mind, I really just wanted to go through the book once. Move this thing here, delete that passage there, add a little background to that one scene, change a few “teh”s to “the”s and voila, start the super-fun querying process.

But everything I’m looking at says to go macro first. Read the whole thing, then rewrite it all. Write a second draft, then to start over with the third draft.

Does Stephen King do this? Because it takes me two years to read through one of his books, and he publishes seventy-five per year, give or take. George R.R. Martin says he hasn’t finished writing the next Game of Thrones yet. When he finishes it, is he going to let it sit for a season, then rewrite it twelve times? Good God, he’s never going to finish.

So I decided to say fuck it all, and do things my way. Sure, some of these guys are published. But everybody’s different, right? I’ll just fix it as I go and wrap this shit up in a week.

So I started with Chapter One.

Fixed a couple typos. Cut out some of the excessive internal monologue. And does the reader really need to know the layout of the village the main character lives in? No, maybe not. Clean. Polish. And that’s not a bad first chapter. See? I’ve got this. Bite me, Story Grid podcast.

Why is that foreboding music playing in the background?

On to Chapter Two.

Fix. Clean. Polish. And you know what? Now that I think of it… Do I need Chapter One at all?

A lot of the writing advice I’ve seen says that many books start too early. Chapter One is often groundwork, background information that can easily be sprinkled in later. Some books don’t really get into the plot until you’re 10,000 words in.

I also saw an agent say she couldn’t stand the fact that so many fantasy novels start with the main character harvesting crops. Sure, how else can you make a “Farm Boy Saves the World” story without having him start on a farm. Even if it is a moisture farm on Tatooine.

And here’s where I’m going to do what annoys me about the Story Grid podcast. I’m going to talk about my Work in Progress, which you don’t give a shit about. The difference is I’ll do it for a few paragraphs instead of an hour-long podcast.

First of all, the agent’s comment doesn’t apply to me, because this isn’t a fantasy novel. It’s an alternative history.

But it’s an alternative history such that the Middle Ages never really ended. So it reads like a fantasy. Hmmm…..

And you see, my character isn’t HARVESTING crops in the first scene. He’s PLANTING them. TOTALLY DIFFERENT!!!!

Okay, so is the first chapter really necessary? Ask yourself, the pros say, why does the story start here?

Well, you see, they’re about to leave their manor to travel to a festival many miles away.

So what?

Well, on the way to the festival, they’re going to stop at a tavern and meet the guys that introduce them to the rebellion and whatnot.

So why is he planting shit?

Umm… Because he’s a peasant.

Why doesn’t the book start when he gets to the tavern?

Umm… Did I mention I have a mental map of the village?

…

Okay, so what if I just start it in Chapter Two? And I can move this part about cotton, which will play into the rest of the book, into a conversation with the girl traveling with him. And all of his whining about the state of feudalism? Well, if he’s already thinking all of that stuff, then what’s the point of the guys who bring him into the Rebellion. Okay, I’ll cut that out. And maybe the third important tidbit from Chapter One can be added later when he meets that one other character. I know precisely where it will go.

After all, I just finished poring over Chapter One word by word.

When I was editing it.

Right before deleting it.

Fuck.

Maybe I should’ve, I don’t know, read my whole book first. It would’ve saved me all that time going back over Chapter One. I wonder if that’s why they suggest it?

Okay, so after reading the first 20,000 words or so, the first major arc, I decided that I now knew where the book should start. On the fourth paragraph of Chapter Two. And I’m going to cut and paste some of those parts from the old Chapter One and split the old Chapter Two into two chapters. One approaching the tavern, one in the tavern.

Except I’m not cutting and pasting. Because the wording doesn’t work when he’s standing on a bridge into town instead of planting crops back at home. And while I’m at it, some of his conversations are going to change a little bit. And you know what? That female character needs some agency. Because I know what’s going to happen to her, and it shouldn’t come from out of the blue that she’s got so much inner strength. Plus, if I change her from “The One He’s Always Wanted” to “The Only Girl Around His Age In His Tiny Village,” it’ll make it more pronounced when he meets his True Love later.

So how do I go about keeping most of the words the same, changing a few things subtly, and tweaking a character all at once?

Well, I open two Word Docs. Old one on the right, new one on the left. And then I, you got it…

REWRITE.

THE.

WHOLE.

FUCKING.

THING.

Oh, is this what they call a second draft?

Writing Update

A.B. Kelly · May 16, 2019 · Musings · #amwriting, fiction contest, flash fiction, update, writing, writing update · No Comments

I ended up taking a good portion of April off from writing. Or at least from blogging. But unlike those plebiscite sites that come back from a long hiatus with an “I need to blog more,” followed by another six months of radio silence, I at least had the wherewithal to post a few times before acknowledging the fact that I was mysteriously absent for a while.

This wasn’t my first dearthful April. It turns out April is a bad month for me. I teach an AP Class, and with the AP Test in early May, I spend pretty much the entire month of April buried in essays that really need to be returned on a timely basis. The nagging in the back of my head, which usually says “You should be writing” whenever I’m wasting time, switches to “You should be grading” whenever I think about writing in April. Perfect time for one of the NaNoWriMo camps, huh?

Plus that Disneyland post took a lot out of me.

Oh, and there were at least three weekend-long curling bonspiels over the past two months. I don’t want you to think I’m responsible or anything.

Anyway, what I’m really here to talk about is what else has been going on in the background of my writing. March and April also held the latest incarnation of the flash fiction contest I competed in last year. Each competition has five rounds, which consist of a prompt coming out on Friday evening that is due Monday evening. Last year, I competed twice, making ten full rounds, and I placed twice. One time I came in first, the other time in third. Both were historical fiction and can be found on my Published Works page.

But this time I either figured something out or, heaven forbid, am getting better at this shit. Because how many times did I place this go-around? I’ll quote LeBron James when he moved to Miami and they asked him how many championships he would win there. “Not one. Not two. Not three…”

In the end, I’m better than LeBron, because I won FOUR times!

Okay, I didn’t technically win all four of those. I only won once. Plus two third-place finishes and one fifth. So okay, LeBron, I guess I’m willing to acknowledge you might be slightly better at basketball than I am at amateur writing competitions. But only slightly.

But I’m still thrilled. I made it in the running four times out of five. That means four of the five stories I wrote for this competition will be published. Even more shocking, only one of them was historical fiction. That’s the one that came in first. The others were about a teacher and a game show and a furry convention. Yes, that’s right. A Furry Convention!

I also found out that this competition was bigger than I thought. When I was super happy about winning a round last year, I thought there were forty or fifty entrants. TI have since learned that the number is closer to three hundred. And sure, not all three hundred actually wrote an entry each time, but even if that number is in the low triple-digits, I’m pretty proud of having multiple top-five entries.

The one drawback is those losing entries usually provide fodder for this blog on the weeks I don’t have much to write. Unfortunately for all of you, I won’t have a lot of fiction to post in the near future. And trust me, you don’t want to read that fifth story. It was horrible. The literary equivalent of that dentist who says you shouldn’t chew gum.

But keep your eyes out for “72 Hours of Insanity, Volume 6.” Or maybe “Volume VI,” since Amazon seems to be particular about that. My guess is it’ll be coming out in the December timeframe. I’ll probably mention it then. If I don’t, then I’m pretty shitty at promotion and marketing.

Oh, and I finally finished the book I had been writing for four years. And I’m about 2/3 of the way through another book. And every once in a while I feel like I should do some editing. But then I figure, nah, I’ve got some wonderful European history essays calling my name. Editing sucks, y’all. Maybe I’ll blog about that at some point. It would beat the hell out of… anything else I should be doing with my screentime on a given day.

In the meantime, I’ll try to find some more harmless musings about the world around us to keep the blog updated more often.

At least until next April.

Not Quite Gilligan

A.B. Kelly · June 8, 2018 · fiction · fiction, flash fiction, short story, writing · No Comments

Time for another one of my not-winner flash fiction entries. For this one, the prompt gave us the first line (“They leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise”) and the last line (“They command attention, leaving their spectators breathless.”). We had to fill the part in the middle. I immediately thought of a zoo-type setting, but wanted to twist it around so that the “breathless” part was literal. Blood and mayhem, baby. I didn’t care for it at first, but by the end I was okay with what I had written. Definitely not my strongest, but I’ve usually struggled getting to the action part, so it was nice for that part to come out okay.

Of course, I was really annoyed when I was 2/3 of the way through and all of a sudden realized that the first and last line were in present tense…

NOT QUITE GILLIGAN

They leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. At least that’s how it appears to their spectators.

“Oooooo.”

The zoo’s visitors gasp as one through the plexiglass that is not quite plexiglass. One of the graceful specimens comes up a little short on this particular soar, and begins a plummet toward the soft grass canopy that doubles as their bedding. The anti-gravitational boosters kick in. The spectators learned the hard way that these specimens do not recover from a fall as easily as the research indicates.

“Why the hell did they give us branches to jump around on?” Chuck asks, sitting up and wiping grass off his tunic.

“We’re primates,” Arthur says, still sitting in the branch above. “They didn’t bother to classify us beyond monkeys.”

“I thought they were supposed to be super smart. They can’t even tell the difference between humans and goddamn monkeys?”

“Would you know the difference between a greyhound and a bulldog?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feed Meow Mix to a friggin’ lion.”

Chuck stands back up. Experience tells him that the mild electric tingling he is currently feeling will grow to a legitimate shock and beyond unless he leaves = the grassy canopy. The zoo is open, and during opening hours, they can’t be allowed to rest out of sight. The show happens up on the branches.

He walks over to the nearest tree that is not quite a tree. It looks like wood and acts like wood, but it doesn’t feel like wood. The best route up is a ladder embedded into its back. The spectators don’t seem to notice, or don’t seem to care, how their specimens climb up to the observational branches.

“At least that bought me another ten minutes before I have to make another leap.”

“And what are you going to do with it?” Arthur asks, standing up on his own branch and preparing to make a leap of his own. He flips his foot backward and grasps his ankle, stretching his hamstring. “Flip them the bird again?”

“I just might,” Chuck says, cracking his knuckles and wiggling his fingers toward the customers as if he is a wizard preparing to cast a spell on them instead of throwing up a universal signal that is not quite universal.

“You might as well fling your poo at them.”

Arthur leaps from one branch to the next, soaring with a bit more poise and grace than usual. Seeing a fellow captive stumble often has that effect on the next few leaps. It’s nature to relax a bit on a mundane task, until you are reminded how easily it can be made un-mundane.

“If I thought my poo would get through to those a-holes, I would,” Chuck says. “But it would just splatter on the plexiglass, and I don’t need a reminder that I’m in a cage.”

No one responds, so Chuck feels an impulse to continue.

“Besides, it would probably disintegrate in their poisonous atmosphere. No effect whatsoever except for me with a bunch of dingleberries left in my hand.”

Chuck laughs. He knows he’s made a good one, and screw the rest of the humans if they don’t like it. Besides, they’re all minding their own business. The zookeepers don’t like much fraternizing between the specimens. But Chuck’s already been buzzed once this hour, what’s the harm in getting another tingle?

“Their atmosphere isn’t poisonous,” Arthur responds. “We could breathe it.”

“How the hell do you know that? You been holding out some laptop or something?”

“Not at all. They come in to feed us, clean out our cages.”

Chuck says nothing. No one says anything.

“And what do they have with them when they do?” Arthur probes, enjoying the upper hand.

“Cattle prods and shit.”

“And what don’t they have?”

“Qgrxry.” A disembodied, synthetic voice garbles from the air above, a sound all of the humans have become well aware of. They learned quickly to understand the subtle nuance of an alien language.

James, the third male prisoner, shakes out of his forlorn spot near the front of the cage, and turns to leap away from the spectators.

“Hey numbnuts, qgrxry doesn’t mean jump. It means-,”

“QGRXRY!” The voice booms everywhere, a god that is not quite a god.

“Silence,” Chuck mutters under his breath, refusing to let E.T. get the last word, but not wanting another shock. His internal bravado meets external reality.

James leaps. Layla leaps. Before too long, it’s Chucks turn to once again leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. This time, he even manages to stick the landing, one branch away from Arthur.

“I’ll bite.” Chuck tries to look like he is only absorbed in his own thoughts, muttering under his breath. “What don’t they have?”

Chuck picks his nose for effect. He saw a real chimpanzee do it at a real zoo once. He twirls it in between his fingers, acts like he’s talking to the booger.

“They don’t have any environmental protection. The zookeepers look the same as the spectators. If they can breathe the air in here, we can breathe the air out there.”

Chuck pops the booger in his mouth. For effect, of course.

“Not bad, professor. Now can you turn a coconut into a radio and fix the fucking boat?”

Arthur just shakes his head at the amazingly failed allusion. It’s his turn to leap away, and he is all too happy to do it.

Chuck steps up to stretch, and leaps in the opposite direction long before any sort of warning can come from above. A couple times a day, he varies his schedule. Got to keep them on their toes, he thinks. He imagines some bureaucrat alien staring at a spreadsheet, trying to make rhyme or reason of the exercise habits of humans.

Plus this time, he has an idea brewing. The first person he encounters is Layla.

“So if he’s the professor, I guess that makes you Mary Ann. I mean, not that I’d like to see you in a halter top or anything, no offense.”

“None taken,” Layla responds. “I wouldn’t show you my halter top if you were the last… Come to think of it, you are one of the last three, and I still won’t show you.”

“Not the last three on Earth, toots. Earth’s still out there, with plenty of humans on it, and I’m starting to concoct a plan.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus. Try not to get us all killed in the-,”

“GRZYXR,” the disembodied voice calls. Chuck clenches, but then relaxes. It isn’t the silence command, and he was planning on leaping away, anyway. He lands near James.

“Hey Gilligan, I got a plan. Sorry, Jimbo, but I figure, if we’ve got the professor and Mary Ann, and clearly I’m the Skipper, that leaves you as Gilligan. You don’t strike me as much of a Thurston Howell type. Do you mind if I call you Gilligan, Jimbo?”

James looks up, then immediately looks away. He likes neither Gilligan nor Jimbo, so he plots his next two leaps, hoping to get far away, fast. Of the four prisoners, he interacts the least, choosing to perfect his leaping and posing ability in hopes of being promoted.

“So I figure if they can breathe, then we can take their breath away, right? And I don’t mean in some cheesy eighties pop-rock sorta way. I mean kill ’em. Dead. Breathless. Although that sounds like eighties cheese, too. Tin roof rusted, and all that.”

James is astonished, and more than a little ashamed, that not only does he understand all of Chuck’s pop culture references, but the idea behind his misguided drivel, too. Chuck thinks he has a plan. It is not quite a plan, but it is, at least, an idea.

“Okay, so at the next feeding time, and man I hope we’re getting mac and cheese tonight.” Chuck pauses for a moment, thinking of the blue box of Kraft goodness that they’ve somehow perfected on this far away planet. “But at the next feeding time, we-“

“Qgrxry.”

James leaps from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. Chuck has to admit that, of all of them, Jimbo has the most grace and poise. Even if he seems to jump away at the wrong commands. Doesn’t seem to know his Qgrxry from his Grzyxr, if Chuck is honest about faults. But he’s a damned fine physical specimen, and he should do well as front-line cannon fodder like the Gilligan he is.

“They brought an egghead and a stud,” Chuck mutters under his breath, a compulsion he often feels after the Qgrxry command. “Then there’s me, the streetwise guy. And the girl rounds it out as a foil, like any good story. Stand by Me, right? No wait, there was no chick in Stand by Me. What’s the other one? Oh yeah, It.”

The four specimens continue to leap in silence. If the bureaucrat with the spreadsheet is paying close attention, he might see a spike in their leaps from branch to branch, although the bureaucrat, not actually in the vicinity of the four humans, would fail to note their additional grace and poise. They leap with a vigor, with a purpose, that they have not had in ages.

While they command the attention of their spectators, their own attention is in a different direction. They leap for different vantage points, always mindful of the entrance. From each direction, the entrance looks the same. No hidden trick, a simple portal that leads to a hallway beyond. An airlock, the chance of breathing true air laying beyond. Although each human, apart from Chuck, rues the man who brought the idea to their attention, they cannot deny the merits of the idea. James and Layla and Arthur share glances with each other as they pass each other in silence. Eventually, they must even share their upraised eyebrows in with the malcontent. Everybody needs to be on the same page.

Not that it matters. The box is open, Pandora is free. Chuck is going to bum-rush the first alien motherfucker that walks through that portal, come hell or high water. The other humans were either going to let him fail, and be guilty by association, or help him succeed. It is no choice at all. No more soaring. It’s time for breathless.

“Chgrchx.”

Feeding time always comes with anticipation, a moment to be human instead of spectacle. The anticipation of this particular Chgrchx, however, rivals all since their first one, when they weren’t yet sure if their captors could even produce human food. For the first time since that feeding, their survival is again in the balance when the zookeepers walk through the door.

Chuck knows the timing. He arcs through the grass, seemingly random but always with a direct line toward the door. If he is correct, he will be directly in front when they appear. Of course, he is correct. There is nothing to learn in this cell except for the timing between a Qgrxry or a Grzyxr or a Chgrchx and its insequential action, like a primitive culture knowing that the Winter Solstice sunrise will shine through a pillar. And when this Winter Solstice of a feeding comes shining through this particular Stonehenge, Chuck is ready to pounce.

He runs right at the alien, shoulder lowered. The alien is unarmed, holding only a tray with four plates of macaroni and cheese. Chuck’s shoulder makes contact with the tray, slamming it up into the chest that is not quite a chest. The alien stumbles backward, one step, then two, and is about to regain its footing when the second wave hits.

Chuck is vaguely surprised that it is Layla, not James or Arthur, that steps in from the alien’s left. Not a full step, only a half step. Only enough to prevent the alien’s third step, the one that would plant and pivot its gravity back forward, from landing on the grass. The alien’s tottering becomes a sprawl, and the alien sprawls backward through the portal, a spray of neon-orange pasta somersaulting through the air the only proof it had been in this location at all.

“Could’ve waited till the armed guards were in first,” says James, still poised on the branch closest to the door.

“Now what the hell do we do?” Arthur asks, already winded from running in on a diagonal course.

“The portal’s still open,” Layla says, returning upright and attempting to avoid being covered in macaroni. “Do we just run through it?”

“But we know there will be armed guards right behind the-,” Arthur starts.

“We keep the element of surprise,” Chuck says, and barrels into the around the corner into the hallway beyond.

Chuck doesn’t have the element of surprise anymore. Two shock sticks ignite simultaneously, one on each side. Thousands of volts course through his body. Chuck drops to his knee.

Layla kicks out again, this time higher up, knocking one shock stick away. Chuck can at least breathe, but even one shock stick is enough to immobilize him.

James aims his leap at the other weapon, but instead of kicking out at it, he grapples for it. The force of gravity, combined with the element of surprise, gives him enough leverage to seize the stick from the alien body he is tangled with. He rolls onto the ground, a move he was not capable of before his years of forced gymnastics, and comes set as the other two humans follow into the hallway.

Layla kicks again, this time in the direction of a groin that is not quite a groin, incapacitating the alien she had just disarmed. Arthur, in typical Arthur fashion, does not break a sweat as he walks through the portal. He picks up the shock stick the picks up the shock stick Layla kicked out of the first alien’s grasp. He thinks about brandishing it himself, but realizes that would make him a target. Instead, he hands the weapon to Chuck.

Chuck tries to stand, but can only get to his knees. He grabs the weapon and nods his thanks to the nerd. He wheezes and coughs, and pretends the air smells so different now, even if it is stuffier in the hallway than in their cage. He is trying, once again, to find his footing when a new sound comes from the next room.

It is not a new sound, entirely. It is a sound the humans are all too familiar with, but have not heard for years. The click, chink, chunk, of a gun being loaded. And not a gun-that-is-not-quite-a-gun, but an honest-to-goodness, steel assault rifle.

Chuck tries to stand once again. He wants to press the advantage. He knows the cause is lost if they wait until the machine gun makes its way into view. One foot up, dragging his knee behind, he takes one step, that is not quite a step, forward. He uses the shock stick not as a weapon, but as a crutch, dragging himself toward his adversary and his freedom.

Chuck never hears the bracka-bracka-bracka that slices through his body. He is breathless before he even sees the lone gunman, a cowering, diminutive zookeeper that had probably been staring at spreadsheets two moments before.

Chuck doesn’t know that James had already gotten into a defensive position next to the doorway, much as the two aliens guards had lain in wait for him, moments ago. He is long gone before James uses that shock stick to fell the alien and upgrade to an assault rifle. Not that it would have done Chuck any good to be in on the plan. One human was going to be the cannon fodder.

“He never knew he was Gilligan,” says Layla, grabbing a gun of her own from the second room. “Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”

Arthur smiles at the reference. “Old Charles would be so sad to know you waited until he was gone before making a Die Hard reference.”

“That’s why I waited.”

There are only two guns, just as there are only two shock sticks. For emergency purposes only. This is a zoo, after all. The zookeepers, the spectators, even the guards, scarcely need a gun.

“So what do we do now?” James asks.

Arthur ponders for a moment.

“We fight for as long as we can. If we can make it to a spaceport, so much the better. But failing that, we take as many of those spectators with us as possible. They are just as guilty as the one who captured us. Agreed?”

Layla cocks her gun. James cocks his gun. Both nod.

The three humans break out of their confinement. They emerge, guns blazing, into the crowd of zoo-goers.

They command attention, leaving spectators breathless in their presence.

A Writing Retrospective

A.B. Kelly · June 5, 2018 · Blog Entries, Musings · #amwriting, 4thewords, writers write, writing · No Comments

A couple weeks ago, I did something I hadn’t done in almost 200 days.

Or rather, I didn’t do something I had done every day, for just under 200 times in a row.

On May 16, I did not write. No blog entry, no flash fiction, no in-progress novel.

Oh, I wrote plenty on May 16. Notes on essays, probably some e-mail responses, but those don’t count.

Prior to that Wednesday, however, I wrote. Every day, all 195 of them from November 2 through May 15, I created some typed content. I wrote on Christmas. I wrote on New Years Day. On Valentine’s Day. On St. Patrick’s Day. The day AFTER St. Patrick’s Day. I wrote the day I flew to Hawaii, and every day when I was there. On the day I flew to a curling bonspiel, and after every game I played while I was there. I wrote while camping (although it was only a one night camping trip, so I wrote before I left and after I got back).

More specifically, during that streak, I typed at least 444 words into the website 4thewords.com. That website is also the reason I know how impressive my streak was. I don’t even know what my best streak was before this. Maybe twenty days? I mean, I know I sure as shit never wrote on Christmas before. Or any of those other dates written above. Except for Camptathalon, of course.

But 4thewords keeps track of my streak, which thereby makes it easier to maintain said streak. My character gets special wings when my streak reaches a certain number of days.

The website and its various carrots are also the reason that the streak was as impressive as it was. I wrote about it after NaNoWriMo. Wow, the number of throwbacks in this blog post makes it feel like those clip shows that sitcoms used to run in April before everything was available on demand.

But because of 4thewords.com, for the first time ever, I continued writing after November was over. Every day. Some days it’s a struggle. Some days, I drudge back downstairs at 10 PM to put down some drivel. Naturally, I get wordier that time of night. Or maybe, since I’m typing this in 4tw, it might be better to say I get as wordy as a talkative wordsmith crafting his wordiness for a living.

What happened on May 16? It was a conscious decision to not write. No, I didn’t wake up with a general “fuck it.” But, with the finite amount of time available to me between the child being put down and my impending crash into unconsciousness, I opted for what was behind Door #2. The AP Test was two days away and I still had a handful of essays I wanted to return to the students taking the test the following day.

So I said “Fuck it.”

Actually, after I “fucked it” (fuck ited? wordy wordsmithed it?), I logged onto the website to make sure I didn’t lose my streak. They have a special item that extends a streak without needing the 444 words. I had five of them in reserve. Then I got back on the donkey the next day. I’m now up to 216 days, which they count as 195 legitimate days + May 16 + 20 more days since.

So don’t worry, I didn’t lose my wings. Had I not owned one of those items, then I guess my students would’ve just been a little less prepared for a nationwide standardized exam. Gotta have my priorities, after all. Now I have four of the mulligans left. I’ll earn back the one I used next Monday when my streak hits 222. Who knows, maybe I’ll just get a hankerin’ and take a week off from writing. Of course, this is coming from the teacher who has 120 sick days banked, so it’ll take a much more legitimate “fuck it” before I lose that streak.

But still, maybe I should take Christmas off this year.

Oh wait, Christmas is with the in-laws this year? Yeah, I’ll be writing that day.

So what are the results of this newfound verbosity?

On a sidenote, I just looked up verbosity on thesaurus.com, and evidently there’s a word called logorrhea. Like diarrhea, but with words. I definitely need to use that word more.

Okay, here are the stats: I just passed 197,000 words written on the website. Not bad.

They’ve come in all forms: blog posts, which have allegedly become more frequent; flash fiction, and I promise there are more of those on the way, I can only post them after I lose the contest, but I’m 0-for-4 so far, so I’ll start posting them weekly in the summer; e-mails, letters, and Facebook posts (don’t judge); and, of course, the novel-in-progress.

I started the novel way back in NaNoWriMo, 2014. You can read the basis for it here. And a sample chapter that’s four years old. It fizzled out after about 25,000 words, but the idea was still there. Over the next four years, I managed another 15,000 words. In the past 200 days, I’ve added another 75,000+ words to be on the cusp of 120,000 words. That’s too long for a first book, but a lot of those frivolous words will be edited out. I’m guessing it’s closer to 80,000 legitimate words.

How did I triple the output? Well, this will be a shocking answer to some: I actually sat my ass down and wrote. For 200 days. Not always on the book, but I run out of e-mails eventually, and if I want my 444 words, I’m going to have to move that pesky main character along.

I always knew where the book was going. Since I first started, I had this grandiose final scene in my head. Some of the dialogue’s been ready to go for four years. I’ve known where the characters will be placed and exactly how much of the big picture would be revealed (gotta keep a couple things for the sequel, after all).

But getting to that final scene is sometimes a problem. And by sometimes, I mean always. For four years. I’d often get stuck mid-scene. How do I get the characters or narrative through a particular scene? So historically, I would get to a spot, the main character dangling precariously from the precipice, and then I’d take a few days off while I mulled how do get him to the bottom of the cliff. Or a few weeks. Or years.

Then maybe I’d figure it out, and I’d sit down to write the scene, and I’d write 1,000 words and, wouldn’t you know it, the fucker’s still up on his clifftop. Because I forgot I needed a little internal dialogue or a scatological description of how scared he is. And then I’d get frustrated that I spent two months deciding where this scene was going and I finally sat down to do it and I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO THE FUCKING PART I JUST SPENT TWO MONTHS FIGURING OUT!

Here’s how that same scene has played out over the past 200 days: I blog for a day, write a flash fiction over the weekend, and when Tuesday rolls around, I guess I have to write the actual book. So I write 500 words. That’s easy enough. Nothing has to happen in 500 words. He shits himself. Then the next day, he wipes for 500 words. After three or four days, I finally get to the point where I just say “Fuck it” and describe him scrambling down the cliff. Three days later he’s finally engaging in the dialogue I’ve known he was going to get into at the bottom of the cliff.

There are chapters that I know for a fact I will chop 1000 of the first 1500 words. But a lot of times those words were necessary for me at the time, because they helped me work through what the character’s going through. I gain insight into my characters and their world that can be edited to be implied instead of explicit.

It’s the same process I would’ve gone through before, just without the winter of contemplation in between.

So here I am, 120000 words later and guess what? I’m finally to that culminating scene! The one that’s been in my mind since page one. Woo Hoo! Easy sailing from here!

And how’s the scene going? The one that I’ve known the intricacies of forever?

Well, I’m blogging right now.

Because, goddammit, this “easy” scene is just as difficult as any other scene. Maybe moreso because it’s the culmination of four years and 120,000 words of character and plot development. One of the characters who’s supposed to be there is dead. There is a character that showed up around the 70,000 word mark that is vitally important now. rDi I just have him stand around and pick his butt while the corpse of the dead character does something important? Just because I know Darth Vader’s going to reveal he’s Luke’s father doesn’t mean I know how Luke’s going to get there in the first place.

Come to think of it, how the hell is there a Death Star-esque bottomless cylinder in Cloud City? Is everything in the Star Wars universe built by the same contractor?

I think there’s something else hindering my process right now. Do you ever get to the end of a book and slow down your reading? Not sure if you’re ready to be done with it? Well, this book’s been in my thought process for four years. What am I going to write the next day? Sure, I have plenty of new books I could start, but which one should I do? I feel like I’ll be so lost when I don’t have this specific existential weight on me. If I’m not thinking of this specific character and plotline, will I suddenly become aware of a lack of substance in the rest of my life?

Meh. Maybe I’ll take another day off.

But until then, it’s a shit-ton of logorrhea.

4tw FTW

A.B. Kelly · December 5, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · 4thewords, NaNoWriMo, writing, writing advice · One Comment

I’m currently kicking the ass of an evil marionette brought to life by a wicked witch. In typical RPG fashion, I already beat the shit out of the witch. Actually, the witch was a “global event,” so all the MMORPG players contributed to beat the boss monster. But now that I’ve finished this level, I’m bumping around to finish some side quests and level up. If I can beat this marionette two more times, I get some tickets that I can use to buy sparkly items for my character. Fun times.

Based on my current count, I will have killed the fucker by the end of this sentence.

Yeah, you’re dead. Eat shit and die, Ceratonia.

Of course, now I’m no longer fighting Ceratonia. I wouldn’t have wanted to waste that last sentence. I’m now fighting Wiwaz, an even “stronger” marionette. And the first salvo in our battle were the sentences “Yeah, you’re dead. Eat shit and die, Ceratonia.”

Dammit. I should have written “you are dead,” not “you’re dead.” Because the way to defeat these particular Dark Lord spawns is to write words.

I found a new writing website just in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I also won NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. Causation or correlation? I’m leaning toward the former.

4thewords.com is an RPG-style website. But each of the monsters require a certain number of words written in a certain amount of time to be defeated. Some of them are easy, 300 words in forty minutes. Others, like the Wiwaz I’m fighting right now, max out at the NaNo-inspired 1,667 words in 24 hours.

So maybe I should’ve told Ceratonia that he should dine heartily on a plethora of his own fecal matter. Oh, and die.

After a few fights, you can get better weapons and armor, so in my current battle, I actually have about 26 hours and only have to write about 1400 words. Easy as pie. A very, cherry, strawberry, boysenberry, and a zillion other kinds of berry pie. Shall I describe the scrumptious crust?

I can’t say enough about how this website has transformed my approach to NaNoWriMo, and to writing in general. That 300 word monster? He’s the first one you fight. I always knew I could write 300 words if I was ready to go at the start. The forty minutes was a little daunting, but I made sure I was free of distraction and got it done.

The next monster I encountered required 500 words in two hours. Not surprisingly, the 300 words I had written against the first guy didn’t really get the scene I was planning down on paper. Of course not. Three hundred words barely gives you enough room to describe a bowel movement, much less how a wooden puppet is going to dine upon it.

And yet, in the first forty-three years of my writing life, there have been many days that I couldn’t even get 300 words on a piece of paper. And then I’d go a week without writing 300 words. Then a month. Then when I’d finally sit down and write 300 words, I’d get pissed that I had finally found time to write and I didn’t even get to that point of the scene that had been playing around in my mind for two months. Then it’s rinse and repeat, and a year later, I’d be a thousand words farther into the same damned chapter I was in a year ago and pissed as hell that I couldn’t get anywhere with this particular project.

But now? If I don’t finish my train of thought with one monster, I’ll just gauge whether I want to take on the next one now or tomorrow. Depending on what part of the dungeon you’re in, you can usually choose who to fight next. If I feel like writing 800 words over the next three hours, I can. Or if I want to take a more leisurely approach, I can got 1000 or 1200 over an 8- or 10-hour span. As a result, I’ve actually become pretty good at knowing how many words I need to get through a certain scene.

Now, in contrast with those days of struggling to writing 300 words down, I know I can do 500 words almost as an afterthought.

You get bonuses for maintaining a writing streak. You need to write 444 words to get credit, and no weapons or armor make that number easier to reach. That’s one reason I’m still writing into December. You put fake digital badges on the line, and I become obsessive. I lost twenty pounds the first month after I got a Fitbit, and was at fifty after a year.

And obviously, the website doesn’t distinguish between writing a book or a blog entry. I actually wrote a few things I needed for work on 4thewords. Cheating? Maybe, but the work shit had to be done and that’s the type of thing that would normally derail me from writing, whether it’s NaNoWriMo or any of the other eleven months of the year. And finishing that boring work report is a hell of a lot more fun if I’m shoving a metaphorical sword up a puppet’s apocryphal ass.

It should be noted the website doesn’t actually show the deaths of the monsters and any references to scatalogical functions are entirely my own. 4thewords.com disavows any and all unsightly references being made in their honor.

One other way that 4TW (as the cool kids are calling it) helps my particular brand of writing is that it counts all words, not just the final product. If I rewrite a sentence three times, I get credit for each of the words in each rewrite. One would think that would hurt NaNoWriMo. “Hooray, I’ve written two thousand words! Oh shit, it only counts as five hundred.”

But that doesn’t happen. For one thing, I don’t rewrite as often as I think I do. If I write 1000 words, the actual amount is usually in the low 900s. Sure, a particularly bad batch might only net me 850, but guess what? That 850 might not have been written in the classic NaNoWriMo. They tell you to turn off your inner editor, but I’m sorry, sometimes I know that what I just wrote makes no sense, and I like being rewarded for looking at it a second time. That doesn’t mean I’m going to agonize over every morsel. This isn’t editing.

But the NaNo mantra is ever onward. Each precious word is your child, and you’re not just going to go back and erase your child. If you EVER erase a baby, you will NEVER get to 50,000 babies!

But the way that plays out in my writing style is this: I’m not sure how to word the next sentence in the best way, so I don’t write it. I stare at the screen. I go grab a drink. I play a round of Candy Crush. Or a round of golf. Or I re-shingle the roof. Anything to avoid putting a sentence down that might need to be erased.

4TW works the opposite. When I get to that sentence, I’ll just write it. And as soon as it’s on the page, I can look at it, think it through, and go change those three words to three better words and, voila, I’m six words closer to defecating on a witch. (Not in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” kind of way.)

As such, I am amending a statement I made a couple of NaNo’s ago. It’s my most-read blog post, presumably because most of the participants of NaNo are trying to avoid “doing the NaNo,” so they google things to read about NaNo. I will insert a link later, but for the purpose of words on paper, right now, I will just describe the inserting of links later.

My original statement was that one thousand words a day was, under normal circumstances, an upper limit for me. 4thewords showed me that I can blow past that. Even if I’m not sure what I am going to write, I can at least bumble around enough to get words on paper. They might not be good words, but they’re there. Before 4TW, when the goal was just an amorphous 1667 words in a day, or even worse, “write something today,” a thousand words seemed some sort of natural upper limit before I needed an overnight to replenish my idea bank. Now I’m like, 800 words over 10 hours? Shit, I can go see Thor in between and still have hours to spare.

Most of the time, when I have a specific plan for then next 1,000 words, it’ll actually take me closer to 3,000 words to get through it. And the vague idea I have for what will come after that probably covers another five to ten thousand. It used to frustrate me that I’d write and get no closer to the next scene. Now I embrace it. Words on paper are the goal for today, not finishing the scene.

Of course, one thing I’ve noticed about both 4TW and NaNo are that they make you a bad writer. Usually the fewer words you write, the better. But, as I joked earlier, it’s easy enough to turn a five-word sentence into ten words. That doesn’t make it better and often makes it worse. It tends toward the passive voice. NaNo only does it implicitly. In fact, they explicitly say 50,000 words is an entire novel. Not any novel I’ve ever seen, other than “Slaughterhouse Five.” So it goes. So at least in theory, NaNo’s 50,000 words should not be wasting any space. Yeah, right.

The NaNo people say that you’ll probably add 10,000 words in the rewriting/editing phase, making it closer to “Lord of the Flies” territory. Um, no. Am I the only one that actually takes words out when I’m editing? The first time I attempted a 1,500-word flash fiction, it was close to 4,000 before I took the butcher’s knife to it. The book I worked on through November is at 70,000 words. (When I say I won NaNo, I actually cheated a little. There were already 20,000 words written. But I still did the 50,000 in a month, so screw you, it counts.) The book isn’t done yet. Based on where I am in the story, it’ll easily make it past 110,000 words. Then I’ll edit 25,000 of them out.

4TW actually exacerbates that problem by making the “add some frivolous words” a bit more explicit. If I’m nearing the end of a scene and still have 150 words to defeat this particular monster, I’m not going to spend the time making a new file, am I? Hell, no. So let me just make a wordier description. I’ll have my main character scratch his chin and think about the predicament he’s in, think through his potential choices and the logical ramifications of taking each of those choices. Ten words left? Fine, he scratches his ass, too.

That doesn’t make good story telling, but that works wonders for both NaNo and 4TW. Hence the reason I’m going to have to chop at least 10,000 words off of my novel once it’s finished.

The good news is that, for the first time since I wrote those first 20,000 words in 2014, I feel like “once my novel is finished” might actually happen. And I have 4TW to thank for that feeling. If you’re interested, look me up – my character’s name is Wombat. I also have a referral code. If you want me to let them know I recruited you, leave me a comment.

For now, I’ve got 800 words left to write in my current battle, and it might be worthwhile to put some of those in the actual novel. To quote the Blues Brothers, it’s 800 words to defeat Tamarix, I’ve got a full blog post, a half a book, it’s dark, and I’m wearing sunglasses.

Hit it!

NaNoWriMo Postmortem

A.B. Kelly · December 1, 2014 · Blog Entries · NaNoWriMo, reflecting, writers write, writing · One Comment

National Novel Writing Month is insane.

Some might say evil, but that could be taking it a bit too far. Not because a month cannot be evil. It most assuredly can. I’m looking in your direction, August. You know why.

But NaNoWriMo is insane. Writing 1,667 words a day is insane. That many words in one day is no biggie. In fact, I did that a whopping three times in November. Sometimes I can even back up one 1,667-word day with another day that approaches 1,000 words. Hell, I think I got 3,000 words in a weekend once. But writing that much every single day? That’s insane.

Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day. He is insane. He is one of my favorite authors, but he is insane.

Here are my totals for the month: I wrote just under 25,000 words. The first day I fell thirty words short. Could I have written the extra thirty words? Sure. But I figured those extra thirty wouldn’t matter in the long run, and falling short on day one might give me motivation on day two. I was correct on the first assumption, not on the second.

I participated in a number of Word Wars over the past thirty days. In Word Wars, a whole bunch of people stop chatting for about 15 minutes and just write, write, write. I’m usually good for somewhere between 250-350 words in a 15-minute span of writing. Some people write over 1000 words. How? I have no idea. They say things like “it was dialogue,” or “it was a scene I had already thought about.” Um, okay. I could have planned out every damned word, and I couldn’t regurgitate a thousand in fifteen minutes. My brain needs to stop and breathe from time to time.

And yes, I can hear you math majors already – if I can write 300 words every 15 minutes, all it should take me to write 50,000 words is… carry the one… about forty hours. One work week! What’s the problem, Wombat?

The problem is that I can’t string together too many Word Wars. I’ve improved a bit from last year, when I would spend the ten minutes following each Word War going back over the drivel I had just written and edit it. I became much more comfortable with writing, and more importantly leaving, that drivel this year. My inner editor took the month off, and I’m happy with that. I’ve found that the mantra of “fix it in the re-write” is a good one to write by. Characters are going to change, anyway. I’m going to be writing one scene and think “Oh, crap, I need to allude to this in an earlier scene.” So save it for the second draft.

But even without the inner editor and with Word Wars aplenty, I cannot consistently push past 1,500 words. My sweet spot seems to be about 800 words a day. I know I need to increase that. But for right now, those 800 words are all that fit in my brain at any given time. I think about what I’m going to write the next time I write, and about 800 words later, I’ve finished that scene or description or dialogue. Then I usually need some time to think about the next batch. Occasionally that will happen in the same day. I might write a few hundred words, take an hour or two to drive somewhere or take a shower (a really long shower) or whatever, then I’m ready to go again.

So why don’t I just make sure that I always write two batches of 800 every day?

Because I’m not insane.

Okay, maybe that’s not it. I very well might be insane. But the things that are preventing me from always double-dipping, from always pushing 2,000 words a day, are the same old things as before NaNoWriMo. Lack of motivation, lack of confidence, real world distractions.

This year one of those real world items was my daughter, the best distraction in the world. Some of the best writing times, evenings and weekends, are now prime baby time.

My wife also has a very busy November. She works in health insurance, and of course, most people renew their insurance on January 1. So her November is spent driving all over to various open enrollment meetings. Last year, she’d call and say she wouldn’t be home till 8:00 or she was spending the night in beautiful Redding, and I thought, “Cool, I’ll just sit here and write.” This year, that meant I was single parent for the night. Similarly, my school district gets the entire week off for Thanksgiving. Last year, I wrote in overdrive that week. This year, we took baby out of daycare for the week and I was full-time daddy.

Mr. Mom finds it hard to get things done. I know, I know, the baby naps. Why don’t I write then? Just like in the first month of her life, when the so-called experts said “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Sounds good in theory, but I never know if this particular nap is the 15-minute variety or the 2-hour coma. And then bottles need cleaning and, oh, a shower might be nice. I can also put the baby in her swing or give her some toys on her playmat. And in fact, I did get some writing done at those points, but anyone with a child knows that is living on borrowed time.

But I’m not laying this year’s shortcoming at those tiny feet. There’s still that fear of the unknown. Twenty-five thousand words later, I still haven’t finished the part of the story I had already plotted out in my head, much less figured out how everything would resolve itself. I thought it would take 10,000 to 15,000 words to get to a point in the story that is still probably over 5,000 words away. Sometimes I got disheartened by how little happened in those 800 words. Hell, I was writing a sex scene for five damned days. Every day, I woke up thinking, “Okay, another two or three hundred words to finish off this scene (literally and figuratively during the sex scene), then on the next scene where some cool stuff will happen.” Then the next day, 1,000 words later, I was still on that damned scene. It’s bad when even the guy writing says “Okay, this scene is boring me, when does the good stuff start happening?”

I know, I know. It’ll come out in the re-write. Some of the excessive character introspection and revelations will be spread out over to other points in the novel. But you cannot edit a blank page.

And I refuse to divulge how many levels of Bubble Witch Saga I passed when I should have been writing.

Now NaNoWriMo is over. The next time I write 800 words in a day, it will be an accomplishment, not a disappointment. And if I can string together a few of those, who knows, I might finally find out what happens after the sex scene.

This is the time to remind myself that I wrote over 20,000 words last month. That is no small feat, NaNoWriMo be damned. If I could add another 20,000 this month, and another batch in January, I’d be close to having a bona fide novel. Last year this transition from writing in November to writing in December was where I failed miserably. This year, I hope to do a little better.

Right after I do some Cyber Monday shopping.

If worse comes to worse, I can always just wait until next NaNoWriMo and try again. Then maybe I can do everything exactly the same way I did this year. I’ll just expect different results.

Because we all know what that is the definition of.