I just received word from DailyScienceFiction that “Spoons”, as part of the DailyScienceFiction: Year One anthology, is going to be printed and bound in a no kidding, real live book!
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!
YouWriteOn.com is a UK Council of the Arts funded website where authors upload the opening chapters of their novels, and through a give and take review process receive anonymous feedback from other authors. The books are all rated, and at certain intervals throughout the year books are passed on to professional editors from top publishing firms for a special critique and edit. It doesn’t guarantee publication, but it certainly gets your name out there.
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’s value in hard work, elbow grease, and pushing yourself forward. A lot of people think that there’s no such thing as writers’ block, that all “writers’ block” means is that you aren’t putting your butt in the chair and typing enough. I’m actually inclined to agree with that viewpoint. If you can’t continue writing one story, write another. If you can’t get into that one, do something else that has to do with writing. If you’re brainstorming, drafting, outlining, worldbuilding, or drawing a map in crayon on your wall while hoping your wife doesn’t catch you, you’re still writing.
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!
Everyone needs one sometimes, and that’s okay. We all get caught in spirals that move upward, downward, leftward, rightward, inward, outward, whereverward.
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.
Well it’s over. NaNoWriMo came and went, and thus the beginning (well, nearly half) of my novel In The Shadow of Legends was born. It’s been a good run, and I don’t plan on stopping here. Let’s take a look at the month as NaNo saw it.
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.
In the Shadow of Legends has reached 50,000 words today, making it a “winning” novel for NaNoWriMo!
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.
Strangest thing. I found someone who put a review of one of my works on their website.
I’m certainly surprised that anyone found the time to critique a no-name writer like myself, never mind write about it and post it publicly. I wasn’t even really convinced that anyone had read the book.
The result? Mediocre marks. You can link to it here if you’d like to read it. While I’m really not sure what the issue was with multiple plots (if there was more than one, I wasn’t aware of it) he presents a relatively objective view of the piece, and clearly didn’t find it as funny as some others that read it for me. I certainly can understand the character overload, though.
I think – but I’m not sure – that I’m flattered. I’ll have to let this one sit for a while.
Back to NaNoWriMo!
But I’m not. I’m sitting here at my new writing desk writing this post.
That’s right. That’s where all the magic happens. It took me nearly 4.5 hours to put together (Office Depot stuff is no joke, folks), but I have to say I’m very happy with it. After completely disassembling my life over the last two months, it’s very nearly coming back together again. The trip from Germany to Missouri hasn’t been easy, short, or simple, but at last it’s finally (mostly) over.
That’s how I spent the first week of NaNoWriMo – in a giant mount of cardboard boxes and moving paper, trying to figure out how in the hell the movers lost a key from my laptop keyboard. Seriously, how do you do that when I hand the laptop to you with a closed lid?
Seriously?
I’ve been attempting to use NaNoWriMo to write the first 50,000 words of my novel In the Shadow of Legends, but so far all I’ve gotten is about 5,500. That puts me significantly behind the power curve; last year I was at nearly 3x that amount before the first week wrapped up. So I am going to have to work doubly hard in the next few weeks to make it up – and damn it, I will make it up.
If I’m going to do that, I suppose I’ll have to stop here. Just wanted to let you all know that I am, in fact, still alive.
Never do it.
I have to apologize to my 3 readers that I haven’t been around in a while. It’s been a very hectic time.
I’ve decided, on a whim, to move from Germany to Missouri. I’m not really sure what drove me to this decision, but it’s well underway. We left the Bundesrepublik Deutschland behind many weeks ago, and are now in the process of repatriating ourselves into the glorious United States of America. We’ll miss Germany, but it’s certainly good to be home.
Needless to say, the chaos of the last couple of weeks has taken me right out of my writing zone. I can barely concentrate enough to think about my novel, never mind actually sit down and right it. And the stressors of moving, trying to find a car, trying to find a house, trying to find a niche in society, really take the energy out of you. I think today is the first day since about September 5th that I’ve really had room to take a breath, look at my to-do list and realize that it’s blank.
This is all disappointing, considering that NaNoWriMo is coming up in about 20 days. I’d hoped to have a significant portion of In the Shadow of Legends plotted out so that I could use NaNoWriMo as the springboard for the first draft, but it seems I’m too consistently mired in the details of moving to actually sit down and do it.
Well, I suppose I did have a pretty good non-stop run from October 2010 to September 2011. Hopefully within the next month I’ll be able to get back on track, find a place where I can concentrate enough to write anything more than an email to some US company trying to re-organize my life in the American Way. Until then, tata for now.
Joe
My short story, Crumbling Butterflies, has been released by NewMyths at www.newmyths.com. This month’s cover art was inspired by my piece.
I hope you enjoy!
