Gaming, Spoilers and Expectations in Writing

So last night we had a gaming session, and though not a lot seemed to happen, I came away from it pretty happy. It's tough with a new gaming world to find your place in it right away. It takes awhile to learn how the new world works. When I was in college, it was easier: a big fight against a cool-ass monster or villain, then phat lootz after, and I'm happy.

It's different now. I'm older, and I place greater value on different things. And our group is made up of writers and avid readers, so much of the joy of the game comes not from big combats, but from moments between characters who have revealed themselves over time. Last night, I had a pretty good moment with lots of conflicting emotions crammed into a relatively brief period of time. I wish I could get something that complex and interesting on the page.

And thinking back over it today, I realize that part of what made it work was that I had set up some expectations earlier. Essentially, what happened was, my character appeared to give another a hug. And in the moment between initiating the contact and explaining what it was about, there was a tension between several alternatives. Was he doing this as a  lost child needing comfort (since he had explained that he had no memories beyond a few years previously and had been wandering the fringes of society for as long as he could remember), or was this perhaps a more romantic gesture (since another personality controlling his body had hit on the same character the previous night--perhaps there was a secret crush or something)?

The reveal, when it came, managed to be both creepy and pathetic, and I hope was a surprise, upending the expectations set up while also (I think) satisfying them in a different way.

This plays into a theory I've had about writing for a while now. The trick--the really hard trick--to writing a story that works is to set up expectations and then satisfy them without satisfying them.

What?

An example: in the mid-1970's, Ralph Bakshi directed an animated film called Wizards. It was a satirical look at fantasy and sword-and-sorcery about the clash between the good hippie fairies led by the wizard Avatar and the dark forces of evil led by Avatar's evil brother, Blackwolf. It is set up in the beginning that these are the two most powerful wizards on the planet, so we know, we expect, that there will be a climactic duel between the wizards. And although it seems as if Avatar's powers are all bluff throughout most of the film, we hang in there waiting for him to bust out his Moment of Awesome, because we've been told that he's actually really powerful.

But the confrontation, when it comes, is over almost before it starts, because Avatar pulls out a gun and just shoots his adversary. And yeah, it's funny and it's a shock, and it's in keeping with Avatar's character. And yeah, this exact bait-and-switch is one of the most fondly remembered moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out four years later.

But the key difference is, in Raiders, it's a throwaway joke against a character we've never seen before. We had no real expectations. In Wizards, we'd been watching Avatar travel to this confrontation for an hour-and-a-half, only to settle for a swift kick in the balls. Now, knowing it's coming, I can appreciate the joke, but the first time I saw the movie, I was pissed off. Because I hadn't received what I thought I'd been promised.

And I wonder if that's part of what went into a recent study which found that spoilers do not actually ruin a story. I like surprise twists in a story, but obviously a story that depends wholly on surprise cannot become a perennial favorite, enjoyed over and over again. You can only be surprised once.

A well-told story is like a series of promises from the author--"Okay, you don't know what this means, but I promise, hang in there with me and it will mean something later, and it'll be cool, I promise!" So if you promise a fight, there needs to be a fight. If you promise love, there needs to be love. If you promise a solution to a mystery, the mystery must be solved.

But there's a trap, which is that you can't meet their expectations too square-on. There's a reason why the words "dull" and "predictable" so often go together. The story needs to be predictable, but in a surprising way, a way that lets the reader or viewer feel smart while also appreciating the author's ingenuity--"man, I knew something like that was going to happen, but I never thought it would happen like that! That turned out way cooler than I expected!"

It's a delicate balance, and one I'm always trying to do better.

A Story About Theme

There's a thread running over on Codex about themes in writing, with basically two camps developing: one side that basically says, "I never write with a theme in mind," and another that says, "I never write without a theme in mind." And I 'm pretty much in the former camp.

When I was in film school, I took a class (actually, I ended up taking it twice and never passed) in which you had to make 5 short films. So comes the week my third film is due, and I have nothing. I get up on Sunday, realizing I have to get the thing planned and filmed that day in order to send it to the lab on Monday, get it back and edit it on Wednesday and turn it in on Thursday.

So I end up doing a TV commercial sort of thing, a pure exercise of movement and music, with no actual story to speak of. I draw my hand writing out the word "Canon" in pencil and then going over it with ink, with the idea that I'll then play Pachelbel's Canon along with it.And to make it visually interesting, I filmed it in short cuts of ultra-close-up with the paper backlit. Substitute chopping vegetables for drawing a word and it would look like any number of TV commercials. But after I had it edited, I realized that Canon was too slow and made it drag, so I substituted an upbeat Mozart concerto instead. So now it really had no meaning.

Now, the way the class was set up, after you showed your film, you had to sit silently while everyone gave their crits, and then you could respond at the very end, after everyone had their say. So for twenty minutes, I sat there while person after person waxed enthusiastic about my film and tried to tease ever more elaborate themes from it. Then when it was my turn, I told them that it was just an exercise in sound and motion, with no more theme than "Fuck, I've got a film due." And then I had to listen to them get angry for twenty more minutes for shitting all over their thoughtful criticisms.

I've always envied the people who can write a story that says something fundamentally important about the human condition, even if I disagree with it. The fact that I've never really been able to do it with any kind of conviction has always struck me as a lack within myself--I don't write stories with messages because I have nothing useful to say.

However, over time, I find I've grown less patient and less impressed with stories that try to preach a worldview to me. Death Wave and Hero Go Home might be superficial and without overriding themes that would make them into good English Literature 101 fodder, but at least they don't fall back on the evil faceless corporation, the evil secret government program, the evil military, the evil televangelist, the noble outsider deciding that other=righteous, "true love conquers all," or any of the other simplistic nonsense that makes up most of what I see and read. I can live with that.

Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

No, this post is not about my impending divorce, although the title certainly fits that as well.

Hero Go Home will be officially wrapping up next week. The final chapter publishes on July 1, and with any luck, I'll have the entire thing available as an ebook by August 1, exactly one year after I published the first chapter on-line.

The experience has been really interesting. Since I had already written two previous drafts of the story, I was able to keep up with deadlines at many points by simply defaulting to large chunks of stuff that had already been written. On the other hand, entire chapters were written completely from scratch, and the storyline overall is very different from the previous drafts, even though some incidents play out almost exactly the same.

What has really been interesting for the last few weeks, though, is how the process of writing the climax has progressed. Normally, when writing the climax, I really barrel along. I can sometimes barely ooze out the middle act, but when I get to the big action setpiece at the end, I get in the zone and can knock out 5,000 words in a day, easy.

This time, though, strangely, exactly the opposite has happened. Forced by the deadlines of weekly serialization, I cranked out the middle chapters at a good clip. And now that I'm at the end, that same weekly chapter pace has me lingering over every paragraph, rereading and polishing over and over.

And then comes the agonizing choice of what to do next. Part of me wants to do the Johnny-Dollar-Meets-Cthulhuzilla book, while part of me wants to try writing for one of those houses that publishes exploitative crap under house names. Then again, part of me wants to write something that my daughter will enjoy reading. Guess which option I totally don't have an idea for? There's also another Digger novel partially plotted, but I'm a little Digger'd out right now.

Workout Supplements and Writing

Every now and again, I get on a workout kick. I just get tired of being out of shape and embark on about 90 days of hard workouts to get myself built back up again, after which I let things slide for a while (I would be on one now, if I had a job that allowed me to afford air conditioning).

What frustrated my wife about the kicks I would get on, though, was that I would invariably spend 50 bucks or more on protein powders and other supplements that she figured I didn't need.

And she was right. You can find plenty of articles attesting to the facts that...

• Supplement effects are overrated
• They can't compensate for a bad diet
• Their effect is likely to be minimal unless you're participating in very hard workouts
• There is no guarantee that the research behind them is solid or of the purity of their ingredients

I know these things. And yet, every time I enter a workout cycle, I go out and buy the stuff. Why? And what does this have to do with writing?

The reason why reveals perhaps my own weakness, and yet it's a weakness I'm at least aware I have and know how to exploit for my own benefit (at least short-term). The new object in my life gives me a talisman, a physical object that serves as a reminder of my goal and what I need to do to achieve that goal. And because it's new, I get the added motivation of learning something new and figuring out how to make it work for me. I get to play, and that helps keep me motivated.

I do that with books as well. I seem to approach every new book differently. Blue Falcon (as well as some of my earlier screenplays) was written mostly in longhand at bars, to the point where it got hard for me to write any other way, with a very basic outline outline written in Word. Angel Baby, aborted after 100 pages, was written in an office I rented. I think I also tried using a product called yWriter during this time, but didn't get very far with it.

Hero Go Home was outlined on note cards and mostly written at the same office, partly during Nanowrimo;. For the second draft, I noted the story's different locations on Google Earth. For a proposed sequel to Hero Go Home (which was to become Digger's Big Con, the aborted webcomic story that I need to finish someday) I made a lot of brainstorming notes on a website called KayudaMaps, which subsequently shut down, losing all the notes in the process.

Death Wave was outlined with a product called Anthemion Writer's Cafe. It was demo software, though, so I wasn't able to use its full capabilities.

So here we are on a third (and I hope, final) draft of Hero Go Home, and what have I done? Besides the chance to play with the layout of my website, I've downloaded two products to help me do what I have never done well before--outline the story. There's a product called Freemind, which is mind-mapping software that I'm using like the old KayudaMaps, only I don't have to worry about the website shutting down and dumping my data. And I'm using yWriter 5 to put meat on the bones.

I didn't like Freemind at first, but now I'm starting to get the hang of it and it's actually helping me figure out the flow of my story. It works with objects called nodes, which is a piece of text. Each node can have siblings and children. So I make a node for a scene, then sub-nodes for each beat of the scene, and if I have a specific piece of information I need to fit in, or if I have an idea for a great line of dialogue I want to have there, I can give it a sub-sub-node, and so on.

And each family of nodes is collapsible, so I can look at the overall flow of a story at a glance, but if I want more detail on a given scene (say, the one I'm writing at the moment, or one I want to foreshadow, or one I want to flash back to), I just open that node and the tree of sub-nodes under it pops open.

yWriter also, I didn't much like the last time I tried to use it. It was an earlier version, though, and it intimidated me with all the fields of information it wanted about characters and such. You build the book in chapters and scenes, and there are database-style fields for you to keep track of characters and locations and such, with space for detailed descriptions. You can even run reports that tell you how many scenes each character is in, or show it visually as a storyboard with a card for each scene on a timeline. The important thing is, I'm more comfortable with leaving as many fields blank as I want, only adding stuff as I go along and discover new things about the characters.

For some reason, I thought I was doing it wrong when I didn't know my characters inside and out when I started to write. But all of the standard methods of filling in backstory and doing character work ahead of time just make my eyes glaze over. It seemed as if I was doing a lot of extra work that I might never use and had little to do with the story I wanted to tell.

And while I am more comfortable now with doing character prep than I was, I am also learning to accept that I will never know my characters perfectly before I start writing. At some point in the writing process, I stop telling them what they're like, and they start telling me instead. It sounds like an artsy-fartsy cop-out, but it's true. Lisa--one of the main characters in Death Wave--was supposed to be a throwaway background character, but emerged to become a driving force in the story.

So will these products be the magic bullets that somehow fix what was wrong with the story in previous drafts? Doubtful. There's no guarantee that I'll have the patience to use them to their full capabilities, or that I will be able to somehow unlock new mental abilities thanks to their help.

But right now, they're helping me focus what were previously really unfocused efforts at revising the plotline, and I'm encouraged at the results. To be painfully honest here, a few days ago, I was really excited with the look of the new website, but very scared that I would have no idea where to go with the story once I got past the first couple of chapters that had already been written. I had serious flopsweat going, and I don't now.

I mean, I still don't know if the book will find an audience, but I'm much more confident that there will at least be a book. And a better book than before.

New on Examiner--Lum and Abner

New review up on Examiner.com. It's not a great movie by any means, but it's got a Tulsa connection, if only because KFAQ's Sunday night Radio Theater plays Lum and Abner all the time.

Stayed up virtually all night the other night making design notes on a system that was supposed to be a streamlined Champions and has morphed into almost a different game. Basically, stats, skills and combat are all virtually the same, the speed chart has been cut in half, and the way powers are bought and played has changed almost completely.

I have a writers group meeting coming up on Friday, and I need to write a story for it. It's the perfect opportunity to write that Digger story I've been noodling around a while, get it out of my head and onto paper and coincidentally, provide one more story for the anthology I'm coming closer to publishing.

Pieces of a Larger Puzzle

So I wrote recently about the idea of publishing Death Wave myself, and I tied it into the idea of finally going out and making this writing stuff that I do actually earn me a living.

Two big problems with that:

Number one, it's scary.

And number two, I've not been very good at it so far.

I mean, the DIY ethos sounds great when you're discussing it around beers late at night, but it's not as if I haven't tried it before. Blue Falcon went nowhere. Hero Go Home, the webcomic, fizzled (partly because I was still learning about pacing, partly because I had other things taking up a lot of my time, but also largely because I enjoy writing much more than drawing, and the art was a shit-ton of work for very mediocre result). Even this blog, which was basically started as an attempt to let folks get to know me and maybe build a following, is basically read by my friends and no one else (not counting the dozens of folks who visit once while searching for pics of the Barbi Twins or Tig Ol' Bitties).

But here I am with time on my hands and a desire to do more, go farther, than I have before. So I'm working on a few projects. I haven't figured out which one I want to lead with yet, aside from one small announcement I'll be making very soon.

One is publishing Death Wave. It's more or less ready to go right now. It could use an editing pass, and needs some other work, but most of the heavy lifting has already been done.

Another is perhaps publishing an anthology of Digger Universe stories. I don't have a lot of those so far. There are basically four that have been published (three starring Digger and one starring Digger's former teammate AcroCop), plus another that was started but never finished, another that has been basically plotted but not written, and another unrelated story that also features supers and could easily fit into the universe with a couple of tweaks. So that's seven, which is not really enough for a proper anthology, but could serve as a chapbook or something that could be the seed for future development. But since all the writing hasn't really been done yet, it's not as "shovel-ready" as Death Wave is.

Another possibility is finally doing another draft of Hero Go Home. I still take out the idea and mess with it, trying to find a way to make it work. I really want to make it work, although two bad drafts has pretty much scared me away from it. But if there was interest in the Digger anthology, I could certainly see myself writing this up as a follow-up. If there was interest in that, I might even figure out a way to finish Digger's Big Con, the storyline I barely started in the webcomic.

Also still rattling around in my brain is the new book I want to write, the Twenties-era Johnny Dollar meets Cthulhuzilla story. And at the same time, I'm playing around with notes for a role-playing setting that I might have finished enough and be brave enough to present to friends by the time our current Atlantis game starts to wrap up in a year or so. I probably won't make any money from that, but there are a lot of indie publishers with PDF's for sale on DriveThru RPG. Somebody must be making some money. Maybe after I've run it a while, it will be something I feel confident enough to sell.

Will any of this pay my bills and make me a living? Seems doubtful. Nothing here looks like a Penny Arcade/Schlock Mercenary caliber idea. Then again, who knew that those would take off the way they did? I did have an idea once that struck me as a possible hit, but I had neither the money, nor really the desire, to pursue it to its conclusion.

The point is, no matter what's going on with my current job situation, I feel as if I need to start putting more stuff out there. I know some people will buy it. I know my work is worth paying for, because I've been paid for it by professional markets. Now I need to find the right way to connect with the right audience, and find the confidence and enthusiasm to start producing the kind of work I was producing five years ago. And hope enough people will pay for it to make it worth the effort.

Corinne Bohrer, give me strength.

Impatience

Impatience has led me to lots of bad decisions. I understand this, and yet, it doesn't keep me from doing it again and again. Because for me, the opposite of impatience is dithering, refusing to pursue something because I'm afraid or feel as if I don't know enough.

Example--impatience: Burned out at my job at Newport Television, I quit without having another job lined up. I actually wanted to try owning my own business, but by the time I had to leave Newport, I hadn't found exactly the right thing. So I jumped into The Biggest Mistake of My Life, which is still weighing down on me today, almost a year after it blew up in my face.

Example--dithering: I dropped out of college in 1984, and have intended ever since to finish my degree. But although I've looked into it several times, and even went back to school for a while right after getting out of the Army, I still haven't finished my Bachelor's, mainly because I can't commit to a major. Pathetic.

But there is one decision I made out of impatience that I'm still not sure whether it was a mistake or not: Blue Falcon. The link describes the pros and cons of that situation pretty well, but it boils down to the fact that I'm embarrassed by the book and by the stigma of the vanity press, even as I'm proud of parts of the book and learned many valuable lessons about writing and publishing through the experience.

The experiences I've gone through since, having joined a writers group and published fiction professionally, make me think I jumped the gun by going to iUniverse. Then again, a part of me thinks that I would have been unable to move on and have those other experiences if I had not made the plunge and gotten Blue Falcon out of my system.

Why am I bringing this up again?

Because of a chance Facebook thread of an author I've talked to on-line here and there, a very talented fellow named Steven Savile. It was regarding a decision by another author to release his books through createspace.com, Amazon's self-publishing venture. And the tone was somewhat admiring of the guy for taking control of his own fate, because midlist authors are stuck in a terrible place, professionally.

And suddenly it seemed to me as if the idea of POD publishing had suddenly become not as stigmatizing as it once was. And here I am with a finished novel, Death Wave, that I think is pretty good, but is a hard sell to publishers because it's so short. Should I try this again?

On the one hand, I haven't really explored my options with traditional publishers. I've submitted to one publisher, Hard Case Crime, and been rejected. I've checked out a few other publishers, and almost without exception, they ask for word counts substantially higher than Death Wave's. I've queried a few agents, but have gotten no bites so far.

But I could spend years pitching Death Wave and not have it go anywhere, or maybe place it with some small publisher who gives it a crappy cover and dumps out a few copies at conventions here and there.

Or I could give this DIY thing another try. Design my own cover, maybe commission a few interior illustrations to give it that truly pulpy feel. Maybe add in a special bonus short story to round out the volume, fatten it up a bit to give more value for the money. Use the lessons I learned from Blue Falcon to put together an even better product this time, and use what I've learned about social media and web advertising to reach a bigger audience. Redesign herogohome.com and use it to add value to Death Wave (and maybe also to build an audience for a Digger anthology or future books).

It may thud as loudly as Blue Falcon did. But look at a guy like Jonathan Coulton, who decided to blow off the rat race and grab destiny with both hands. It paid off for him. Then again, he was ready. He had the skills and he was able to connect with a big enough audience to make it work. And he appears to be the big exception to the rule. There are a lot of people out there trying to do the same thing I would be trying to do, and I would need somehow to get my message to those people who would be interested in what I'm selling at a time when they have the cash and motivation to buy.

The question is, can I? And whether I can or not, is it worth the risk?

Or am I just being too impatient again?

Getting Bigger

So when I was originally brainstorming the new book, I had an idea that I immediately dismissed as too over the top. A couple of weeks later, I decided to go ahead and make that the climax.

Then I saw "Iron Man 2," using a free pass my mom gave me last year that I had never gotten around to using, and afterward, I dropped by Barnes and Noble, where I picked up a compilation of Spider pulp novels reprinted by Baen under the title, Robot Titans of Gotham (with a cover by Steranko, woot!). On the discount rack for five bucks!

Just looking at the cover, I immediately felt that my too big, over-the-top novel climax was now too small. I've only read a couple of Spider novels by Norvell Page, lent to me by Sargon, and his words echo in my brain. That the novels are relentless. They never let up. I don't know if Satan's Murder Machines lives up to that Steranko cover, but that's what I want my book to live up to. And it occurred to me that it would be a cool trick if I could pull it off, to make what seems like the predictable climax happen in the second act, so that people can still be surprised when the story spins into unexpected territory.

I don't know if I can come up with an idea big enough, but that's what I'm shooting for. To have a first act where people say, "No way he would go that far," a second act where they say, "Holy shit, he did go that far, but look how many pages are left! WTF?" and a third act where all they can say is, "Dude!"

Corinne Bohrer doubts I can pull it off.

But Caroline Munro believes in me.

Corinne Bohrer can't believe I'm bringing in another imaginary kibitzer.

Taking Shape

So what did I do with myself yesterday, having given myself permission to lay off the regular feature updates for a while? Interestingly enough, I did a little work on my book idea.

There's an interesting tension between forced productivity and paralysis. When I was working at the Daily Oklahoman in the 80's, I wrote three or four screenplays and pieces of a couple of novels. The discipline of having to write at work on demand gave me the ability to do so on my off hours as well. In the years after I left the paper, though, I pretty much stopped writing for several years.

I picked back up in 1992, challenging myself to write every day, which resulted in a screenplay. Then I enlisted and didn't write as much, though I did write one incomplete novel during the next five years. Leaving the service with a book idea and a year's worth of research done during my second tour in Korea, I wrote my first finished novel, but didn't write anything else during a five-year period.

When I was unemployed last year, I took to the regular features on my blog as a way to keep myself disciplined, and eventually made myself write a novel as well, while still maintaining those regular features.

But since I've started working again, I find that all my free time has been taken up with thoughts of the regular features whenever I sit down to work. I keep telling myself I'll work on the book, but I've got to get the weekly features out of the way first, and I've had less and less mental energy to do both.

So now I'm turning my energy toward the novel instead of scanning comics and doing screencaps of movies. Which is not to say I've done a whole lot of actual work. Most of what I'm doing right now is technically called "stalling," which is to say I'm turning ideas over in my head again and again, trying to find the approach I want to take. Romancing the stone, so to speak.

I spoke before about "negatives," giving myself a list of things I didn't want to do. The problem with negatives is that, if you don't have a bigger and stronger list of positives--things you want to write about, qualities you want the finished product to have--then basically what you've done is talk yourself out of writing anything. Which is where I was until yesterday.

So I asked myself in the simplest terms, what do I want the finished product to look like? What book do I want to write?

And the answer I got was, "Johnny Dollar meets Godzilla/Cthulhu, in the style of 'Big Trouble in Little China.'" Which means what? More or less, action-comedy with trappings of mystery and supernatural horror in a period setting. I paced around for a while today and sketched up an idea map for the story. Not a plot outline, per se, but just an idea of all the factions at play and the overall scheme.

Now I need specifics, especially characters. Characters have always been a weak spot for me, but Death Wave showed just how much good character work can pay off in the writing. I had a really firm grasp on my main characters for that one, and they surprised me a couple of times.

So my next steps: develop my main characters, and take the plot from vague overall notion to a list of specific events and scenes.

Negatives

As I said a couple of days ago, I have a new novel idea I've been toying with. And it strikes me that one element of my personal creative process seems to be one that I don't see remarked upon very much by other writers.

That element is this: although the initial idea arises as something positive--the type of story I very much want to read--the development of that initial idea is governed at least as much by negatives--the kinds of things I want to avoid in telling the story.

For instance, the current project is another period piece somewhat like Death Wave, but a more fantastic, science-fictional story with greater scope and maybe a Cthulhu-style horror tinge to it as well. And as I was developing the idea, I became intrigued by the idea of setting it in Tulsa.

But from there on, I started defining it by negatives: I don't want it to be the typical story set in the city where the author lives just cause the author wants to tell everybody how awesome his home town is, so I'm thinking of making Tulsa alien and strange and downright scary. I don't want the book to follow the basic Cthulhu storyline, with doomed hero fighting a losing struggle against an immensely powerful entity that cannot be defeated, only delayed for a time. I don't want the villain to be the basic stock villain everybody uses: a greedy wealthy industrialist, for example, or a secret government conspiracy plotting to destroy freedom for the greater good, or God help me, Nazis.

A certain part of me wants to think that every writer does this--defines the story before writing it as this, but not that, circumscribes it, places limits on it, assigns it a certain format like a sonnet or a haiku--but I either take it to an extreme or else do it poorly, because I find myself writing things that I like but have no confidence in. In my quest to avoid cliche, I also manage to avoid audience identification, leaving my story filled with characters and events which are unlovable and unbelievable, but are at least not cliches, thank God.

I want to think I'm getting better at this. At least, I hope I am, because I really need for this next book to be The One, if you know what I mean. I think I've got the technical ability. Now I've just got to hit on The Story and The Character that will click with agent, editor and audience. No easy feat, and as the years press down on me, I find myself believing less and less that I will ever manage it.

But I keep trying, thinking every time, "This is The One." I hope I'm right this time, but there's a lot of words between me and that goal.

Distractions

It has been a unique feeling for me, in the days since I finished the first draft, for me to have no interest in the manuscript whatsoever. The books I've finished before, I was on such a high after finishing that I couldn't wait to go back and start reading from the beginning, experience the whole thing in one big panorama.

I haven't done that this time. I actually started divorcing myself from the manuscript even before I finished it. After 32 or 33 days, I was sick of pushing myself, especially at the end when I could feel the failure pressing in on me. So I did the GIMP-shop that serves as my new profile photo. Then I made myself finish the manuscript, and instead of rereading it from the beginning as I formerly have, I didn't even think about it.

Instead, I started up another GIMP project. It was originally supposed to be a quick and dirty test of a concept for photoshopping a picture of a person into a superhero (and yes, I just used "photoshop" as a generic verb--if Adobe wants to sue me, they are welcome to learn just how broke I am). No, the character is not anyone you would have heard of. I just made her up as I went along, obviously ripping off the outfit from Mr. Incredible/the Flash, and going on from there.


As you can see, it eventually grew into something bigger, and is now the wallpaper on my desktop (this is a scaled-down version for web display).It's not perfect, but it's better than I expected it to turn out. If I were trying to sell this (I can't, because I have no rights to the model image I used), I'd spend a lot more time on details like making the boots and belt and bracers more realistic and improving the graphics spelling out Neutrina's name down the side.

On the other hand, the logo symbol I tossed off for the character looks pretty good, and the background, which was assembled as an afterthought, isn't horrible either. I learned some valuable lessons putting this together, and added some techniques to my toolbox, like layer modes. If I had the patience and inclination to do this all the time, I almost start to think I could make a living at it. Of course, you could say the same thing about writing, probably. Alas, I don't have the patience or inclination to become good enough at any one thing to make a living at it.

That would appear to be my doom.

Pounding It Out, Day 36

Success!

Finally.

53,000 words, give or take. It sucks, but it's done.

And maybe, once I've gotten some distance from it, I'll find out it doesn't suck as much as I think it does right now. Maybe it'll be worth fixing up and submitting to Hard Case Crime. That was my ultimate goal when I started this, and until I'm sure the book is hopeless, it's still my goal.

I'm still broke as hell, but I have some cigars left from back when I was solvent. I think I'll light one up tonight after I get back from seeing my daughter. I may even splurge on a cheap little champagne split or something. I haven't had anything worth celebrating in my life for a long time, so I want to make the most of this moment.

Corinne Bohrer wants to congratulate me in a very special way. If only.

Pounding It Out, Day 34

Well, I passed the 50,000 word mark yesterday, but the draft's not done yet. I'm in the climactic scene, though, so it should only be a day or two now. The big problem that has been slowing me down: I did a little research that convinced me my final scene was completely improbable, location-wise. So I'm completely replotting it on the fly, which is going very slowly.

My other big problem: I had decided to write a book with a main character who was a remorseless killing machine. However, I find I'm having trouble making him be that. And I'm having second thoughts about the ending I'm heading toward. I don't know if it will be satisfying, to readers or to me. And as often happens in my writing, I've engaged in some self-sabotage, writing scenes that are disturbing. Which is weird, because I know lots of people who write similar stuff that's worse and seem to have great success, yet when I try it, it always seems to misfire.

But the questions will only last at most for a couple more thousand words and then I'll be done. For the nonce.

Pounding It Out, Day 31

Failure!

And yet not.

I did not make my arbitrary deadline of 30 days. But I did not end up far off either. At midnight, I was at 47,500 and heading into the final confrontation. So on the one hand, yes, I failed. But on the other hand, I am very close and almost assured of finishing a first draft very soon. The first half drags, and the second half lurches and the climax is probably going to be entirely too short and vague, but it will be something I can build on and fix.

So "encouraging failure," like "good rejection," is not something to be sneezed at in this business.

Pounding It Out, Day 27

I finally hit the wall, and in the weirdest possible place. I'm nearly to the end--only about 8,000 words to go--and instead of picking up momentum, I'm stopped dead. I'm not sure how to get from where I am to the climax.

It feels like I have overcomplicated what was a very simple storyline. In trying to set up my denouement, I've blocked myself from the climax preceding it. So I need to either work out a way to push through this quickly, or else scrap the last thousand or so words and take a different, simpler path.

Or do what I usually do and put the manuscript down for six months or so, then see if I feel like picking it up again. Crap.

Corinne Bohrer senses disaster.

Pounding It Out, Day 25

Not a lot to add today, since I just updated progress yesterday. I'm still grinding it out, staying pretty close to pace. Past the 40,000 word mark now.

The one big thing is, back on day 8, I had mentioned a twist I'd come up with for the ending that I was debating whether to use or not. Today, I started setting up the groundwork for that twist in the text (in one sense, you could say that I've been setting up the groundwork for the entire book, but it gets sort of specific now). In fact, what I'm doing now may help me bring direction to the entire third act and make that final denouement seem less like a twist ending and more like something inevitable (although still ironic and maybe even funny, which, given what has happened in the last 90 pages I've written, might seem inappropriate).

We'll see what happens. If nothing else, I'll have something unusual to show people at parties.

Pounding It Out, Day 24

It's funny. Two days ago, I was engaged and energized. Felt like I was picking up momentum. Then yesterday, I finally finished Part Two, and now here I am feeling like I'm in a void.

I know where the book needs to go. It's just that, having come down off the intensity of the final scene of Act Two, I need some emotional space to regroup. But I can't let that translate into a work stoppage, or else the whole thing goes down in flames.

I know why I'm reluctant. I have very little structure for Act Three, I have basically three major scenes planned, but I'm starting to feel ambivalent about them all. One's too small. One's really hard to pull off. And the third one (which is the first one chronologically) I have no idea how to write without killing off my main character. I need a clever plan, but I'm exhausted from two nights in a row with very little sleep. I'm all out of clever.

And this is how I get blocked. I'm like those wussified parents who try counting to three to get their kids to obey. "One...two...two-and-a-half...two-and-three-quarters...don't make me get to three!" Truth is, the parent's afraid to get to three because there is nothing to back up the threat. So they're desperate not to get to that point and come up empty.

I'm like that when writing. I can feel that I haven't got the problem solved long before I get there. So I slow down, trying not to get there, because when I get there, I'll have nothing. I've got some transitional stuff I need to write before I get to that first big problem scene, but if I write it all now, I'll get there too soon empty-handed.

So I play computer games and read and watch TV and wash dishes and run errands. Anything to put off that reckoning.

I ended yesterday only about 300 words off pace, so the situation is in no way dire. But I can feel that inner surrender coming on again, and I've got to find a way to push it off for at least one more day. If I can push it back one day at a time for seven more days (including today), then I'll be done.

Pounding It Out, Day 22

I know, you're probably getting tired of the constant updates, but I'm doing this as much for my own future edification as for any curiosity you may have about the progress of the book.

I dropped off pace by around a thousand words yesterday, but then I got the scenes I needed kind of figured out, and between midnight and 3 p.m. today got myself almost caught up. I need another 500 words today to stay right on pace.

Plot-wise, I'll be wrapping up Act Two either today or tomorrow, so that's pretty much right on schedule as well. I had thought I would have a lot more crowded plot between the halfway point and here, but it hasn't turned out that way, and I think it's pretty much all right as it is. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do fill the space from here to the end. I have a couple of scene ideas, but only a couple. So between now and the end of the week, I'm going to need to sit down and do some serious plotting. But once I get that done, I'm pretty much rocket-fueled for the final push.

The best part for me, right now, is that I seem to have gotten past that crisis-of-confidence point, where I was feeling totally lost and thinking I was just one day away from sputtering to a complete halt, and am now starting to feel kind of energized and enthusiastic again. One week and a wake-up...

Pounding It Out, Day 20

Well, it's official: I've surpassed my previous word count record (in truth, I may have written more words in some months, when I was coming down the stretch of Hero Go Home or Blue Falcon--seriously, one awesome thing about making it to the end of a book is that the last 50 pages or so fucking fly).

But as of the end of the 19th, I was only about 300 words off my goal pace, so somewhere around 31,300. On Friday, I fell off my pace by over 1000 words; I was not only stuck, but I went to visit friends for the evening, which killed my writing that night (which is not a complaint--I had a good time and good discussion). But today I ended up writing the big middle scene that I had spent time working up before I started the draft, so a lot of that was sort of already blueprinted, which made the words fly by.

The last time I tried this, I only managed 28,500 for the entire month. But I'm still hanging on to my finished-in-30-days pace, and though I may fall off that pace between now and the end of the month (this kind of thing gets sort of mentally exhausting after a while), I have gotten so far now that I'm virtually assured of making it through to the end eventually.

Whether I'll have anything worth anything when I'm done is anyone's guess.

Today I'm heading into the end of act two, in which our 'hero' (who has turned into a seriously bad, even evil guy over the course of the book) tries to accomplish his goal and fails miserably. Everything goes seriously, seemingly irrevocably wrong for him (and no, I don't know exactly what that means--I just know that it needs to happen somehow--fuck, I hate this part of the book!).

Pounding It Out, Day 18

I'm officially hitting the wall now. Still pretty much on pace as of midnight, but will probably fall behind significantly starting today.

I'm past the halfway point, into the hardest part of the book for me, which is taking all the specific threads I've written into the manuscript so far and fitting them into the outline, which has by this point turned into the vaguest of vague allusions ("at some point, he'll kidnap this guy and get some piece of information out of him which will give him the clue to how to do the big climactic thing" when neither point nor guy nor information nor big climax exist even as ideas yet). I had been writing to more or less a decent plot outline, although I invented a lot to fill in. But when I passed halfway, I lost almost all of that.

And in writing the first half, I forgot to introduce several supporting characters on which the second half hinges; having those characters established would make the second half much easier to write. Not to mention that I have become extremely uneasy about the plausibility of the big halfway twist, upon which the entire book depends. So no pressure or anything.

Meanwhile, I just read Richard Stark's Nobody Runs Forever. Okay, this will sound stupid, probably because it is. I have long admired Richard Stark from second-hand, because I'd read about how much Stephen King admired him. Stark was the pseudonym under which Donadl Westlake wrote his series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief, Parker. And reading King's description of Stark's writing, it was almost as if I'd read it myself, but I never had. I just imagined what it would be like.

So when I started this book, I had Stark as an inspiration, but not the real Stark--the imaginary Stark I'd pictured from King's descriptions. Well, I finally got around to reading one of the Parker novels, and my book is nothing like that. Which isn't necessarily bad. I think what I'm writing may be closer to James M. Cain, whose books I had read before (altough in Reader's Digest condensed versions that my mom had lying around, so some would say I haven't read those, either).

But I will probably take some inspiration from Stark. The writing is very economical, fast-moving, unsentimental. Strangely enough, I've been struggling for years to bring more emotion into my writing, so it's an interesting thought to try to leach it back out.

But it's clear now that I'm going to need some major revisions to make this book work, and it's getting harder to drive on with the weight of those mistakes behind me, knowing htat I need to make changes both big and small to the first half of the book, and those changes will be reflected in the second half of the book, meaning what I write now is sort of doubly irrelevant. Not only will it need to be rewritten on its own merits, but it may need to be fundamentally changed due to changes in the first half. I feel like that dork who starts telling a long, involved joke, then halfway through says, "Wait a minute, I'm telling it wrong. I forgot this big part. Let me start over."

But there's no way I quit now, go back and start making revisions to the first half. Then I'd never get to the end. That way lies madness.