I've been meaning to create a writing log for awhile now. I'm not sure if this'll last (as almost all of my other blogs have faded in my interest), and I'm not sure if I'll be able to have the wherewithal to want to write after a day of slogging through the process of creating a book. But, regardless of what it'll eventually become, here is what it's supposed to be right now.
John Steinbeck somehow managed to write a journal about the experiences of being a writer--particularly with East of Eden, one of his most impressive pieces--most of which were recorded in letter format. Anyway, I'm pretty far from Steinbeck--about as far as a man is from the moon--but I figure that, if nothing else, the process of making a story is a story in and of itself, and I love to write stories.
Writ in Blood
I am currently writing a book called Writ in Blood. Using yWriter5 software, I can actually plot out how the timeline of the process has taken shape. In February of 2010, I officially started on the new world that I was interested in writing about. I wrote a couple of rough introductory chapters that got me to know a tiny bit about the main character, Nicomachus.
Nicomachus is actually the son of Aristotle, and the Philosopher has a work called Nicomachean Ethics, and his name helped inspire the setting in which the book would eventually take place.
See, I had, by the end of '09, just finished tormenting myself and my writing group with an atrocious book called Tales from the Flame. In it, I had--at the very beginning, but nowhere else--attempted to add heightened language to the dialogue. I had some of the characters address the others as 'thee' and 'thou' and an occasional 'wouldst'. It fell (and felt) flat--much like the whole book--and I never continued the elevated language motif throughout the rest of the story. Yet something within me--my burgeoning poetry, probably--wouldn't let the possibility die.
I was reading a lot of poetry at the time, particularly (as always) Shakespeare. I started to think more closely about why I like words in the first place, and why poetry in particular has such a potent effect on me. My analysis eventually drove me to create a fantasy world in which poetry has a literal effect on people and things. The Poets who would speak it--Nicomachus--would be empowered in all the cool ways that fantasy books let people be empowered.
But the first couple of chapters showed me a Nicomachus who was mercenary and snobbish and looked like Neo from the Matrix. I wasn't impressed.
I needed a place for this stuff to happen, and, more than that, I needed a conflict that kept me intrigued. To answer the former, I decided to create a world based on the Greco-Roman paradigm, complete with robes (togas, basically), slaves, a Mediterranean flavor, and a lot of names that end in -es and -us. As for the second part, I looked to what I was (then) studying in my college class: the Cold War.
The Cold War is a fascinating time when the only thing that kept us from being dead was the fear of being dead. This tension of a world on the brink of self-destruction, I thought, would be a perfect place for me to put my story.
Coratha was then born. Both city and place, Coratha became a new world for me that actually felt unique and real (though I do like Tintyr in Words of the Silenced quite a bit, it didn't have the same strength as a quasi-character in the book, as Coratha seems to have). I had never created something with this flavor to it, and it made me really excited.
All of the other parts of worldbuilding started to percolate (as they always do). Additional countries, locations, customs, and peoples began to populate the world. The severity of the Cold War-era crisis became greater and greater in my mind. Chapters started flowing.
And they haven't stopped. Perhaps that's the weirdest part, for me. Sure, I've had a few days of less effective work and complete inability to work. But it's never been permanent; rather, it's just part of being a writer--good days come with (one hopes) more frequency than the bad days, but they come just the same. The experience is so natural and organic that it doesn't feel like I'm writing as much as simply channeling the story out of my brain and onto the screen.
Currently, I've accumulated a total of over 200,000 words (putting me well over 400 manuscript pages), though the actual number of words in the story (not counting the deleted scenes and chapters) is a more modest 170,000 words. This is a lot for me. My last two books were both around 135,000 to 150,000, meaning the entirety of the story was finished by this time.
I'm really pleased, overall, with the progress of the book as a whole. Despite that, I do have some reluctance and worries.
Reluctance and Worries
Worries first: I have utilized my 'training' as a self-proclaimed Bardolator as the only guide I have to being a poet or writing in anything resembling heightened language. I did buy a book (one) about poetry that was very useful and has helped me a lot in writing this book. But I am the 'resident poet' in my writing group--no one feels comfortable critiquing or giving feedback on the poems that I write for the book. In fact, the elevated language invariably makes the reading experience significantly harder for the people in my writing group. I worry that the thing that makes the book so unique is the thing that will make it completely 'put-downable', a dreaded and worrisome phrase.
Additionally, I worry that this story--which is intensely interested in what motivates the characters, what makes them tick, and why they do anything at all--moves too slowly for most audiences. It is deliberately slow for two reasons: 1) It is how the story is unfolding itself; 2) it's a character story. It isn't supposed to have crazy chases and brutal war scenes every other chapter. That's what other fantasy books are about anyway, so why write another one? Mine is as much about the exploration of these characters via tightly controlled detail drips than getting to the next fight/sex scene.
Which is the next worry. I have purposefully added marriages as one of the defining characteristics of this world that I've created. Within the four main 'nations' that are a part of this book, only one of them has what we'd call a traditional view of marriage. One (called Meleah) is matriarchal and the women are in charge of courtship, proposal, and initiating the marriage. Bigamy and polyandry are allowed there. Coratha has what is called trial marriage: without proof of the fertility of the couple, the couple isn't allowed to marry. (The other two countries, Jajiin and the Barbrian tribes, treat marriage as a monogamous relationship, though the Barbrians' concepts of what should go into the marriage is significantly more strict and monogamous.) Anyway, the importance of this comes through in the plot, and my group has responded pretty positively to it. With the emphasis of marriage being the way it is, it's inevitable that sexuality comes in at some point. It's necessary for what I'm trying to do with my characters. But I don't want my book to be some sort of tawdry B-movie piece of sensationalism. I'm keen on it being realistic without being graphic, and while I certainly don't have explicit sex scenes, I worry that--provided I ever get this monstrosity to an agent--there will be demands for such explicitness. I'm not interested in writing a titillating tale; I'm interested in writing a tale about people in a fantasy world who deal with issues that real people have to deal with, including perceptions of society, what it means to be human, and how to be honest with oneself when one isn't honest with others. Sex provides a powerful barometer for that sort of thing, and while I think I treat it with delicacy and appropriateness, I know others would say that all that I have in here (which isn't much) is too much--and others would say it isn't even close to enough.
That leads to the real reluctance I have: Hoping to publish this thing. See, writing is one of the strangest forms of communication that we have. It is an attempt by the author to control the mind of the reader. Whatever is written on the page, even if it is fiction, was real enough in the brain of the author to write it down. And that means that what's on the page is really personal.
Now, I'm aware of the fact that, to publish a story, one has to be willing to let others read it. That's fine; I'm okay with that. I don't have a lot of compunction about others reading my writings. The problem is, I feel like this is a really good story. Not to the point of hubris or egotism, but just an honest, "If this were in a store, I'd probably buy it" kind of thing. Sometimes I am genuinely, emotionally moved by the honesty of my characters and their willingness to share their lives with me. Aside from the latent concerns of schizophrenia (which all authors ought to have), I worry that I'm feeling overly impressed with my own work.
Reality points out that people, in general, might be interested in a vampire story with a Grecian god as the love interest (Twilight), or stories that don't derive from Greek culture but actually appropriate Greco-Roman tradition (Percy Jackson), but the interest that the general public has in poetry is generally abbreviated. Most suffered through it in high school, sing it when they like a particular song, and then ignore it for the rest of their lives. Precious few can be good enough poets to really make a living at it, and those who do deserve it. (I'm thinking particularly of Robert Frost and Billy Collins, though there are more than that who write some really impressive poetry and that's their job. And let me just say that I'm about as close to Robert Frost and Billy Collins as a poet as I am to Steinbeck as an author.) So when I worry about the quantity and explicitness of the sex scenes (which are both low), I have to laugh at myself. Poetry is much harder to sell than sex and violence--unless you're Shakespeare.
And we needn't create a metaphor for how far I am from the Bard.
Pep Talk
All those worries listed above are irrelevant, of course. If no one reads Writ in Blood I will be sad. Like I said, I really think that this story is remarkable and ought to be enjoyed by thousands of people who pay for the privilege. More than any of my other books, I can look at this one--even in its early, chrysalis stage--and say, "Yes. This is a well done book." But other people reading it is not what I really care about. I care about writing it, getting it down, and finishing it. I care about aiming for the goal of 200,000 usable words by the end of 2011. I care about penning the best poetry that I can when my fingers are on the keyboard. That's what really matters.
Gayle asked me a little while ago why I write. I gave her some answers that were all well and good, but, on reflection, I think I would have said this: "Why does someone breathe? Why do we sleep or eat or move? It's because we have to. I write because that is how I am and who I am. Not writing is like not eating--it'll kill me eventually." Of course, that last one is a little melodramatic, considering my opinions of eating. I would rather write than eat. But that's the whole point, isn't it? That it feels like it actually matters to write. No, Nicomachus and the rest of the Tagan Continent don't really exist. Lots of things in life don't really exist, but we care about them anyway. But right up there with my family, my religion, and my job is that there are things that make life have substance. Writing is one of them.
I don't know if I'll publish this book, though it certainly won't be because I wouldn't want to publish the book. With the way things are going in the publishing world, I don't see a market for my book. One of my dreams has already been destroyed by the recession: I'll never see my book sitting--unpurchased, of course--on the shelf of Borders. But I don't know if there's a place for my book on bookshelves of any bookstore. After all, it's poetry and fantasy fused into a character drama. Who wants to read that?
Well, I do. And for now, that's what matters.
John Steinbeck somehow managed to write a journal about the experiences of being a writer--particularly with East of Eden, one of his most impressive pieces--most of which were recorded in letter format. Anyway, I'm pretty far from Steinbeck--about as far as a man is from the moon--but I figure that, if nothing else, the process of making a story is a story in and of itself, and I love to write stories.
Writ in Blood
I am currently writing a book called Writ in Blood. Using yWriter5 software, I can actually plot out how the timeline of the process has taken shape. In February of 2010, I officially started on the new world that I was interested in writing about. I wrote a couple of rough introductory chapters that got me to know a tiny bit about the main character, Nicomachus.
Nicomachus is actually the son of Aristotle, and the Philosopher has a work called Nicomachean Ethics, and his name helped inspire the setting in which the book would eventually take place.
See, I had, by the end of '09, just finished tormenting myself and my writing group with an atrocious book called Tales from the Flame. In it, I had--at the very beginning, but nowhere else--attempted to add heightened language to the dialogue. I had some of the characters address the others as 'thee' and 'thou' and an occasional 'wouldst'. It fell (and felt) flat--much like the whole book--and I never continued the elevated language motif throughout the rest of the story. Yet something within me--my burgeoning poetry, probably--wouldn't let the possibility die.
I was reading a lot of poetry at the time, particularly (as always) Shakespeare. I started to think more closely about why I like words in the first place, and why poetry in particular has such a potent effect on me. My analysis eventually drove me to create a fantasy world in which poetry has a literal effect on people and things. The Poets who would speak it--Nicomachus--would be empowered in all the cool ways that fantasy books let people be empowered.
But the first couple of chapters showed me a Nicomachus who was mercenary and snobbish and looked like Neo from the Matrix. I wasn't impressed.
I needed a place for this stuff to happen, and, more than that, I needed a conflict that kept me intrigued. To answer the former, I decided to create a world based on the Greco-Roman paradigm, complete with robes (togas, basically), slaves, a Mediterranean flavor, and a lot of names that end in -es and -us. As for the second part, I looked to what I was (then) studying in my college class: the Cold War.
The Cold War is a fascinating time when the only thing that kept us from being dead was the fear of being dead. This tension of a world on the brink of self-destruction, I thought, would be a perfect place for me to put my story.
Coratha was then born. Both city and place, Coratha became a new world for me that actually felt unique and real (though I do like Tintyr in Words of the Silenced quite a bit, it didn't have the same strength as a quasi-character in the book, as Coratha seems to have). I had never created something with this flavor to it, and it made me really excited.
All of the other parts of worldbuilding started to percolate (as they always do). Additional countries, locations, customs, and peoples began to populate the world. The severity of the Cold War-era crisis became greater and greater in my mind. Chapters started flowing.
And they haven't stopped. Perhaps that's the weirdest part, for me. Sure, I've had a few days of less effective work and complete inability to work. But it's never been permanent; rather, it's just part of being a writer--good days come with (one hopes) more frequency than the bad days, but they come just the same. The experience is so natural and organic that it doesn't feel like I'm writing as much as simply channeling the story out of my brain and onto the screen.
Currently, I've accumulated a total of over 200,000 words (putting me well over 400 manuscript pages), though the actual number of words in the story (not counting the deleted scenes and chapters) is a more modest 170,000 words. This is a lot for me. My last two books were both around 135,000 to 150,000, meaning the entirety of the story was finished by this time.
 |
| Documentation of the progress of Writ in Blood |
Reluctance and Worries
Worries first: I have utilized my 'training' as a self-proclaimed Bardolator as the only guide I have to being a poet or writing in anything resembling heightened language. I did buy a book (one) about poetry that was very useful and has helped me a lot in writing this book. But I am the 'resident poet' in my writing group--no one feels comfortable critiquing or giving feedback on the poems that I write for the book. In fact, the elevated language invariably makes the reading experience significantly harder for the people in my writing group. I worry that the thing that makes the book so unique is the thing that will make it completely 'put-downable', a dreaded and worrisome phrase.
Additionally, I worry that this story--which is intensely interested in what motivates the characters, what makes them tick, and why they do anything at all--moves too slowly for most audiences. It is deliberately slow for two reasons: 1) It is how the story is unfolding itself; 2) it's a character story. It isn't supposed to have crazy chases and brutal war scenes every other chapter. That's what other fantasy books are about anyway, so why write another one? Mine is as much about the exploration of these characters via tightly controlled detail drips than getting to the next fight/sex scene.
Which is the next worry. I have purposefully added marriages as one of the defining characteristics of this world that I've created. Within the four main 'nations' that are a part of this book, only one of them has what we'd call a traditional view of marriage. One (called Meleah) is matriarchal and the women are in charge of courtship, proposal, and initiating the marriage. Bigamy and polyandry are allowed there. Coratha has what is called trial marriage: without proof of the fertility of the couple, the couple isn't allowed to marry. (The other two countries, Jajiin and the Barbrian tribes, treat marriage as a monogamous relationship, though the Barbrians' concepts of what should go into the marriage is significantly more strict and monogamous.) Anyway, the importance of this comes through in the plot, and my group has responded pretty positively to it. With the emphasis of marriage being the way it is, it's inevitable that sexuality comes in at some point. It's necessary for what I'm trying to do with my characters. But I don't want my book to be some sort of tawdry B-movie piece of sensationalism. I'm keen on it being realistic without being graphic, and while I certainly don't have explicit sex scenes, I worry that--provided I ever get this monstrosity to an agent--there will be demands for such explicitness. I'm not interested in writing a titillating tale; I'm interested in writing a tale about people in a fantasy world who deal with issues that real people have to deal with, including perceptions of society, what it means to be human, and how to be honest with oneself when one isn't honest with others. Sex provides a powerful barometer for that sort of thing, and while I think I treat it with delicacy and appropriateness, I know others would say that all that I have in here (which isn't much) is too much--and others would say it isn't even close to enough.
That leads to the real reluctance I have: Hoping to publish this thing. See, writing is one of the strangest forms of communication that we have. It is an attempt by the author to control the mind of the reader. Whatever is written on the page, even if it is fiction, was real enough in the brain of the author to write it down. And that means that what's on the page is really personal.
Now, I'm aware of the fact that, to publish a story, one has to be willing to let others read it. That's fine; I'm okay with that. I don't have a lot of compunction about others reading my writings. The problem is, I feel like this is a really good story. Not to the point of hubris or egotism, but just an honest, "If this were in a store, I'd probably buy it" kind of thing. Sometimes I am genuinely, emotionally moved by the honesty of my characters and their willingness to share their lives with me. Aside from the latent concerns of schizophrenia (which all authors ought to have), I worry that I'm feeling overly impressed with my own work.
Reality points out that people, in general, might be interested in a vampire story with a Grecian god as the love interest (Twilight), or stories that don't derive from Greek culture but actually appropriate Greco-Roman tradition (Percy Jackson), but the interest that the general public has in poetry is generally abbreviated. Most suffered through it in high school, sing it when they like a particular song, and then ignore it for the rest of their lives. Precious few can be good enough poets to really make a living at it, and those who do deserve it. (I'm thinking particularly of Robert Frost and Billy Collins, though there are more than that who write some really impressive poetry and that's their job. And let me just say that I'm about as close to Robert Frost and Billy Collins as a poet as I am to Steinbeck as an author.) So when I worry about the quantity and explicitness of the sex scenes (which are both low), I have to laugh at myself. Poetry is much harder to sell than sex and violence--unless you're Shakespeare.
And we needn't create a metaphor for how far I am from the Bard.
Pep Talk
All those worries listed above are irrelevant, of course. If no one reads Writ in Blood I will be sad. Like I said, I really think that this story is remarkable and ought to be enjoyed by thousands of people who pay for the privilege. More than any of my other books, I can look at this one--even in its early, chrysalis stage--and say, "Yes. This is a well done book." But other people reading it is not what I really care about. I care about writing it, getting it down, and finishing it. I care about aiming for the goal of 200,000 usable words by the end of 2011. I care about penning the best poetry that I can when my fingers are on the keyboard. That's what really matters.
Gayle asked me a little while ago why I write. I gave her some answers that were all well and good, but, on reflection, I think I would have said this: "Why does someone breathe? Why do we sleep or eat or move? It's because we have to. I write because that is how I am and who I am. Not writing is like not eating--it'll kill me eventually." Of course, that last one is a little melodramatic, considering my opinions of eating. I would rather write than eat. But that's the whole point, isn't it? That it feels like it actually matters to write. No, Nicomachus and the rest of the Tagan Continent don't really exist. Lots of things in life don't really exist, but we care about them anyway. But right up there with my family, my religion, and my job is that there are things that make life have substance. Writing is one of them.
I don't know if I'll publish this book, though it certainly won't be because I wouldn't want to publish the book. With the way things are going in the publishing world, I don't see a market for my book. One of my dreams has already been destroyed by the recession: I'll never see my book sitting--unpurchased, of course--on the shelf of Borders. But I don't know if there's a place for my book on bookshelves of any bookstore. After all, it's poetry and fantasy fused into a character drama. Who wants to read that?
Well, I do. And for now, that's what matters.
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