For this reason – and this reason only – I undertook the task of reading the first book in the Twilight series.  I admit it was an extremely fast read; I got through the book in only four days.  Will I read the next one?  I’m not sure.  Maybe.  But the reading of the first book has presented me with the following 3 findings, into which I will delve deeper later in the post.

1.  I get it.

2.  That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

3.  Bella has epilepsy.

POINT ONE:  I get it.

One of the startling things about Twilight was the way it surged through the popular domain like the Spanish influenza.  After only a few short months on the shelves, everyone had read this bloody book.  Everyone was talking about it.  Movies were being made.  Teenage girls all over the planet were swooning in their bedrooms, visualizing Edward the vampire as they drifted off to sleep to find them in dreamland.  After reading the book, I think I can understand why it appealed to such a wide audience and why it caught on so quickly.

First, vampires.  Vampires, despite what any literary critic ever says, are not “out”.  People have been writing and telling stories about these creatures for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.  The lore, faces, and perceptions change, but vampires have and always will be a part of storytelling.  Vampires, because of their seductive, dark, mysterious nature, are sexy.  Yet in most vampire stories to date,  with the exception of some of the Anne Rice novels, vampires have largely been inaccessible to mortals.

Not in Twilight, which brings me to my next point.  Bella is your everywoman character, someone that almost every woman can relate to.  Now, don’t think I’m sexist for focusing on women – I’m merely going off my own observations that women read and enjoy the book far more than men.  Why?  Because it’s not a vampire novel.  It’s not an action novel.  It’s a romance.  It stays far away from the books on which overly muscled Mohicans flex, dripping wet, on the cover, but it’s a romance novel all the same.  And placing the main character in a very familiar situation with supernatural elements, Stephanie Myers simply did what we’re all told to do when we write:  create a main character that you can relate to.  LOTS of characters you can relate to.  In a hundred years, this novel will be long, long gone, because society will have moved beyond all of the familiar ground that this novel brings to bear.  If you haven’t lived in the first decade of the second millennium, you simply can’t relate to this novel.  So Twilight functions at the top of the bell curve for sympathy – it’s peaked now, but it’ll probably die down later.

And lastly, the story simply has good pacing that makes you want to turn the pages.  Now, I’m talking about this from a purely romantic perspective.  As an action novel, it’s slower than year-old molasses.  But as a romance novel, you’re instantly thrown into the story, it continues progressing, and it comes to a satisfying, if cliche, climax.

POINT TWO.  I don’t have to like it.

With the above paragraphs behind us, I can definitely say that I understand – and empathize with – the other side of the spectrum.  Frankly, I’m  not interested in a teenage girl mooning over some mythical creature who is obviously way outside her league.  The progression of their relationship is outrageously trite.  Edward likes Bella almost entirely because she smells good.  Bella likes Edward almost entirely because he is good looking.  This changes somewhat throughout the novel; Edward does a few things that increase Bella’s respect for him, Bella does a few things that surprise Edward and make her seem different from all the other women he’s met in his century of life (another thing that’s not really believable).  Other than that, there’s nothing to their relationship.

The writing itself is very amateurish.  Now, I’m not saying that I’m the God of the Keyboard, or anything, but there are a lot of simple mistakes in the novel that any editor should have caught.  Switching tenses, improper punctuation, loads of cliches that make you want to roll your eyes, and an almost barbarous tendency to repeat information over and over again.

Bella’s obsession – and that word is entirely accurate, almost to the clinical definition of insanity – with Edward is nauseating.  She spends most of the novel simply staring at him, looking at him “sparkle” in the sunlight with her jaw hanging open and her eyes popping out.  That’s what the writing mostly consists of.  She dreams about him, fantasizes about him, ogles him, and in general almost instantaneously changes her life so that it revolves around his very presence.  Her thoughts are way over the top.  I can’t vouch for women, but I can’t imagine that any girl very often looks at a boy every day and compares him to gods, legends, perfection, etc.  I won’t bother to quote the text on this, because you can open to any page in the book and see what I mean.

The action – something I expect when I read a vampire novel – just wasn’t there.  On page 380 out of 490, something finally happens that doesn’t involve Bella making googly eyes at Edward.  From there on, it’s merely drummed up tension that, at the climax, doesn’t even really resolve.  The climactic fight between Edward and the vampire James is off-screen, so to speak.  Bella doesn’t even get to see it.  So we spend the whole book with Edward saying how dangerous and amazing he is, and then we don’t even get to see him rip another vampire apart.

There’s more I could go into, but I want to move briefly onto my third observation.

POINT THREE.  Bella has epilepsy.

In the core text of Twilight, Bella shivers, or shudders, or does something similar, well over 60 times.  I used a word search to figure that out – I’m not exaggerating.  Sometimes she does it twice a page.  So, on average, Bella’s body trembles once every 7 pages.  Keep that in mind.

Also in Twilight, Bella’s ridiculous clumsiness causes her to fall and trip roughly once every chapter.  I’ve known a lot of clumsy people in my life, and I’ve never seen or heard of anyone falling down so often while completing simple, meaningless tasks.

Therefore, with a combination of ceaseless shuddering and a penchant for falling on the floor, I can only conclude that Bella has epilepsy.  Poor Bella.

To conclude, I would like to explain a bit about my title.  I’ve already said that the major basis for the relationship for Bella is the fact that Edward is preposterously handsome.

Now, think of it this way:  What if Edward was ugly?

Suddenly, Twilight changes.  A creepy, ugly vampire spends his time smelling a woman and trying not to eat her because she just smells so good.  He follows her to other cities in his car.  He spends every night outside of her window watching her sleep.  When other men look at her, he doesn’t just feel jealousy – he wants to rip them to shreds and drink their blood.

All of a sudden, Twilight is a horror novel about a stalker.

Whoops!

It all started after Save the Date was released.  I was outrageously happy with the way the production turned out, thanks to the folks at Dunesteef, and a few nice comments on their forums gave me the warm fuzzies that every author likes to hear.  I got to listen to it on my way home from the beach during a business trip to California, and it really made the traffic suck much less.

A few days later, I got an email from an unassuming gentleman in Japan.  That’s right, Japan.  A member of the Able School of English had liked my story so much he wanted to use it as a piece of the school curriculum.  I can only assume, therefore, that he wanted to teach his children a.) how to make themselves the outcasts of society, b.) how to enchant a calendar or c.) how to avoid being killed by a hoard of Mayan warriors.  These are the only things I think are educationally valuable about that story.  Needless to say, I am flattered.  It means that not only am I international, but that my strangeness will be talked about in languages I don’t understand.

I got an email from the Dunesteef folks shortly thereafter requesting an unbelievable amount of voice acting talent:  one line in two stories.  Seriously guys, you think my days are 25 hours long?  Thanks to my dear friends Jen and Steve Lerud and Lakeview Studios, I was able to cut the lines in a few minutes and send them away.  The first one, “The Question” is available on the Dunesteef Website – I’m the man who rushes into the bar and shouts about “Doc Z.” being on television. Could this be the first recording in a long career of voice acting?

No.  But it’s fun, and I’d love to do it again.

There are also a few other career moves I’m in the process of making, but I’m not quite ready to talk about them just yet.  Not everything in my life has to do with writing.

Pity, that.  Maybe someday.

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference, Life, the Universe, and Everything is a writers’ conference for speculative fiction authors (sci fi and fantasy).  It’s held every year at BYU/UVU in Orem, Utah, and brings together experienced and budding authors to give panels and lectures about the craft, journey, and business of writing.  I’ve read books on writing, I’ve listened to podcasts on writing, I’ve even meditated for long hours in the woods about writing, but I’ve never been to a conference where I could MEET people who WROTE.

In short, it was pretty fantastic.  Thanks to my good friend Jen Lerud, I was able to be a horrible mooch for a few days and not have to pay for lodging while getting to hang out with her wonderful family.  I’ll probably be posting lessons learned from the conference as I begin to digest them, but right now I’m just still on a high from being around so much writing in such a short, concentrated period of time.

I was able to shake hands and talk briefly with all the members of the Writing Excuses podcast, a fantastic resource for anyone looking to start writing.  I exchanged business cards with people that I never even thought I’d have a chance to talk to (NYT Bestselling authors), had lunch with two pioneers of fiction, pitched books to editors for practice, and learned a LOT about the business of writing.

Above all that I took away from this conference, the one thing that really is whispering somewhere in my mind is this ridiculous, absurd thought:

I can do this.

The idea of “making it” as a writer is no longer a pipe dream.  I have had nine stories published in the same place as people who were leading those panels and giving those lectures in only one year of writing.  In that same year, I have finished the first draft of three novels, and I have at least six more itching at the tips of my fingers.

So, maybe it’s crazy, maybe it’s even a bit vain, but I think I can do this.  I want to write stories that change and inspire people, to weave tales that will help someone get through a tough time because they can relate with my characters, because the story I wrote planted a seed inside them that gave them the tiny push they needed.

I think I can do this.  I want to do this.  And I want you to come with me.  Pass my blog along, join me on Facebook, leave comments.  Tell me what you think of what I do.

Come on and be part of this with me.  This is gonna be fun.

Check it out at Dunesteef’s website (www.dunesteef.com).  I hope you enjoy!

For those of you traveling here from the Dunesteef website, welcome to my internet home.  Feel free to take a look around or use the contact page to shoot me an email.

Since there’s a push for all the authors who go to Worldcon this year to sign, I am assuming the book is going to be published sometime in the mid to late summer, but you never know with this sort of thing.

Hooray!

The Last Scion has done extremely well on this site.  I wasn’t really expecting much, since its a website with thousands of authors submitting thousands of pieces, but a few months ago The Last Scion reached #3 on the book list!  That was nice, but also a thing of transience.  Books are constantly shuffling back and forth on the list, falling 20 places in an instant.  The Last Scion ended up  staying for a few months in the top 15.

But then…

I opened the novel profile today after not looking at it for a while and saw something that REALLY got me going.  The Last Scion made #6 on the Best Seller list of 2011!  Now, that doesn’t mean that it sold anything, or it received any professional attention, but this list is reserved for the best books on the website of all time.  It does, however, mean that it will probably be looked at for the overall best book competition of 2012, and it means that I was ONE PLACE away from receiving a professional crit at the end of the month in which it appeared.

Like I said, without some attention to go with it, it’s essentially meaningless.  But it’s nice every once in a while to have your writing appear in something that shows high praise that’s not because someone who knows you read it and doesn’t want to hurt your feelings

There is a time, however, when you have to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself “Does my prose look as tired as I do?”  Lately I’ve been answering “yes” to that question an awful lot.

I’ve been working on In the Shadow of Legends since November 1st.  Since then I’ve pounded out 140,000 words (just about 75k a month) and gone places with this novel that told my outline to go pound sand.  It’s been a wild ride, but I’m getting tired.  Maybe it comes with the speed of typing very quickly, or writing so many words so fast, but lately I’ve been re-reading sections of the book and feeling like I needed to get a glass of water because it was so dry.  It could be that my eyes are jaundiced from looking at the same thing for so long, from dealing with the same characters and setting, but in any case there’s probably some handwriting on the wall that I need to take a break.

And I think that’s a good lesson for myself.  I pumped out the Last Scion relatively quickly as well – more words in less time than I’ve done with In the Shadow of Legends – and at the end of it I added something like 40,000 words to compensate for the dry, point-to-point storytelling method I’d adopted in favor of speed.  Now, in the middle of In the Shadow of Legends, I’m finding myself bored and it’s starting to show up in my writing.  Not good.

I’ll come back to it after a short while, I think.  I’m too in love with this story to stay away for very long, but there are a couple of short stories (and maybe some worldbuilding for other novels) bouncing around in my head that are trying to get out.  In the Shadow of Legends has so far given it the Heisman, and the Type A personality in side of me is screaming “No!  Finish this one, and then you can start the next one!”  But that’s making my writing suffer, and I need to tell Type A to go in to corporate management instead of writing.  I’ll never miss a deadline – a personal promise to myself – but I’m not operating under any right now.  It’s time to start treating my writing that way.

Anyway, even just writing this post has been a little refreshing.  I’ve written something that had nothing to do with my novel, and I have at least 3 short stories and one or two novels ready for something to come out.  It’s about time I get to it.

Ciao, and Happy New Year to everyone!

I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately.  I’ve been pounding out words on my new novel In the Shadow of Legends (rapidly approaching 150,000 words at barely halfway through the plot) but they don’t feel very good.  A lot of it feels sort of empty and shallow, like I’m really just sort of journaling about the days of someone who has just a slightly more interesting life than me.

At the same time, I’ve been looking at older pieces of writing and wondering what the heck  I was thinking.  There’s something yet missing from my writing, something that I haven’t quite grasped how to do yet.  I think it’s LIFE, but I’m not entirely sure.  It will require many more wasted (alright, not necessarily wasted) words before I figure out what it is, I think.

In the meantime, I needed something that would boost my confidence.  Something that says “Hey:  You’re not just decent at something.  You’re awesome.”

So what is that? TypingTest.com, that’s what’s that.

That’s right. I type 120 words per minute.  They might suck.  They might be drivel, nonsensical, or even offensive, but they’re fast.  I have a water-cooled keyboard that also helps power New York City’s streetlights.  I’ve been asked by the scientists working on the Hadron Collider to slow down, because my fingers are throwing electrons into counter-spins and messing with their results.  Superman won’t use a computer because he’s embarrassed.  Chuck Norris takes typing lessons from me.  

So there.

Figure 1: NaNoWriMo 2011 Statistics (Click to Enlarge)

Ah yes.  That’s a good looking bar graph, if I do say so myself.  I topped out at just over 90,000 words, and I’m pretty happy with that.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to break 100,000.  I’ve done it before, but this year it just wasn’t meant to be.  Despite the idea behind NaNoWriMo, it’s taught me to slow down a bit when I’m writing.  The prose that comes out when I’m concentrating is a lot better than the stuff that comes out when I’m racing,  like in my first draft of The Last Scion.  That monster was a 150,000 word book written in 34 days, and I definitely saw the results of that after I went back to edit it for the first time.  My goal for In the Shadow of Legends is to take a bit more time, write a bit slower, and make a better first draft that won’t make me wail in despair (and run out of red ink) when I go back to edit it.

November held a lot of interesting things in it other than NaNoWrimo.  In looking at the way my writing statistics shaped out, I noticed a couple of anomalies in the slope of the curve.  If I kept a consistent writing pace and followed the minimum word requirement to finish on time, I should have seen an equation that looked something like x = 1667y, where x is the total word count and y is the number of days.  Instead, at the beginning we had a more x=700y curve, but shortly thereafter followed by an exponential increase, something to the effect of x=500y².  After performing a detailed analysis, I came up with the following (click the picture if you can’t read the notes).

Figure 2: Causality Analysis (Click to Enlarge)

See?  There is nothing that can be solved by simple scientific observation.  I think everyone can benefit from this sort of analysis.

Anyway, the novel isn’t done, and therefore neither am I.  This, right now, is shaping up to be about a 200,000 word novel (around the size of a Twilight book, or one of the latter Harry Potters).  I’ll post a bit more about my experiences writing this book, and compare them with the experience of writing my last few, another time.  For now, I think it’s time for  a well-earned rest.  Oh, and work.  Have to go and do that, too.

It was slow going at first, with the move and all, but I finally got the chance to pick up the pace.  I am having an absolutely wonderful time writing this novel, and I can really feel the experience I’ve gained over the last year of taking writing seriously coming through in it.  I won’t say it’s going to be worth Tor knocking on my door (rhyme!), or anything, but it’s been a pleasure.  As it turns out, apparently I like writing.

Good like to all my fellow WriMos!  I’ll see you at the finish line.