Did not have a chance to blog yesterday.  I had new hire orientation at Amazon and then I spent the day setting up new work laptop.  But I did finally get started on my Mad Scientist story.  In it, he uses his new creation, Therium 99 to perfect organ transplants, even across species lines.  Naturally, there are some side effects. In my head, he sounds like the Monarch from the Venture Brothers 

So far, the Mad Scientist story is amusing me tremendously, so it’s successful at that, at least. I’ll finish it up tonight, I think and then I’ll send it off for the Anthology I’m writing it for. What the heck, if it doesn’t sell there, I’ll send it elsewhere. It is fun to write and to be honest, I needed to write something, finish it and send it out.

Speaking of, yeah, more accountability.=: I didn’t write or submit a story last week. So I’m two weeks behind now. But the good news is, I have some time to catch up now that my interview cycle is done.

I’ve also been giving more thought to my first Epic (huge) fantasy novel. I started outlining it a few years ago and realized that the scope I had in mind was way too big for the level of skill I had then.  So I tried to write a few ‘simple’ novels (one of which still managed to sprawl to 140k words).  But reading Shelby Foote and Michael Sharra has made me start thinking about it again.

The challenge is to write a secondary world novel that feels as real as the historical fiction and narrative fiction of Sharra and Foote.  I don’t want to write a pastiche of an existing war, now covering up WW 2 or the Civil War in fantasy or sci-fi clothing.  I want to do something original, utterly fictional but detailed enough that it feels like history, not fantasy.

To do all that, I’ll need to invent a whole lot of characters and history.  Luckily I like doing that. I’m leaning towards fantasy, setting this in my Angel Odyssey universe. That means gods and magic, which should also be cool.  But I don’t want it to feel too contemporary. The last thing I want is 21st century sensibilities in a 5th century BC sort of world.  I’ve read a few historical novels lately that did that and it irritated.

Anyway, very much enjoying having my brain turned on again.  I can’t wait to see what boils over.

Sorry for the day off yesterday, work will intrude sometimes.  The editing class I’m taking seems to have really wanged my writing momentum.  I have all these ideas for new stories and I have three novels to edit and put out there but I end up spending my spare writing time doing homework for the class.

The good news is, the class won’t go on forever and I am learning bits and pieces that will help me when I get back into the editing rut again.  (Sadly, I don’t mean that  like the animals do. I’m thinking more like highways.)  I have stories I want to write and stories I need to edit but that’s the trade off when you take classes, I suppose.

I’m really looking forward to the writer’s retreat I’m going to in March. A week of nothing but writing? Bliss…  I just need to spend some time planning so I can use the time most efficiently. I’m leaning towards the Smooth Running sequel but I could also do the second Angel Odyssey book.  I even have a few ideas for the sequel to Mageborn Mechanic. Who knows, maybe this year I’ll write all three.

What I need to do before March is start sketching out the plot and story I want to write. I might try the Snowflake method* again, that worked pretty well for Angel Odyssey. O r I might do a more chapter-based outline, which worked for Mageborn Mechanic.  It’ll be good/interesting getting back into a third person, multi-POV writing style again.

The Snowflake method worked well for summarizing what the story is and for telling the plot from the POV of the main and minor characters.  Pitches are a lot easier when you start with a single sentence and then expand it out into a paragraph, a page, three pages, etc…

The chapter outline method seemed to work well for thrillers or anything else that relies on structure (if I ever try my hand a writing a Mystery, I’ll probably do the chapter outline again).

Ah, but first, homework tonight and then critiques for Wordslingers and then for Potlatch.

*http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

I end up reading a lot of classics from the past.  I don’t know what it is, there’s plenty of fine writers today, but I find myself going back again and again to books that are…I don’t know…proven.    I like reading Hammett and Chandler, their novel and short stories.  No one writes like they do, it seems.  People call it cliché or treat their style as a mine for parody.  Heck, some writers and editors don’t even consider it Noir anymore (what is it with this hysterical NEED to put everything in neat little buckets?) But their stories work, that mix of terse and verbose. 

Another favorite from a little further down the line is Westlake, especially his work under his Richard Stark pen name.  Man, his Parker novels just tick down like a freight train, lean and mean.  I love that.

I’ve been trying to write lean for this past half year or so. My first novel was 125k words, Angel Odyssey was at 140k last time I tried editing it.  (Need to do that again, soon)  But I got The Mageborn Mechanic in at 50k.  Which gets me wondering if it’s TOO lean.  The proof of that will be when I get off my hinder and solicit feedback from beta readers, I guess.  But I did do a little readthrough last night and found some places for expansion.

Terse writing is like…dialog, I guess.  It works but you can’t do page after page of minimalist prose, I don’t think.  You need to break it up, just like dialog.  For example:

“Hey,” Josh said, as Vidal came into the shared office room.

“What’s up?” Vidal asked.

“Got a report from Ceylon.  Doesn’t look good.”

“Oh yeah?  How fresh?”

“Forty, give or take.  Raw feed is going through Analysis now but I think we’re looking at an Incursion.”

Now do that for page after page. No physical movement, no setting description…it would get dull, reader brains will shut off.  We need to vary the pace and length of sentences and vary the level of detail we provide. It doesn’t mean shoveling in exposition willy-nilly, but rather finding a balance.

That’s what I’m wondering about with Mageborn Mechanic, how far over the line am I?  Am I too terse?  What does my audience NEED to know? What do they want to know?

Sigh. Yeah, I know.  The only way to find out is to put in front of people.  Rabble.

Hi folks. Sorry for my silence yesterday, fell under the weather.  Which is odd, since the weather is glorious for Feburary. In other, better news, I got an offer to work for Amazon full time, which I’m taking with both hands. I’ll still be working on the Kindle Fire and such. This is awesome for me and I fully intent to work on the Kindle Fire with the mindset of a writer and a reader.

Back on to writing, my Write 1, Submit 1 for last week is a failure.  I was focused on preparing for my Amazon interview, so I didn’t do a ton of writing. I do have a short story idea and I’ll be tapping out tonight or tomorrow, though.  I also need to write my synopsis for The Mageborn Mechanic and send that out.

I was reading Bob Mayer’s “Duty, Honor, Country” but gave up.  That gave me no satisfaction. The book is set just before the Civil war and has U.S. Grant as a main character. This book should have been right up my wheelhouse but it didn’t work for me. 

Part of the problem for me was the two fictional characters Bob Mayer inserted into the historical narrative. (there was a third character but he didn’t bug me as much) I didn’t find the two characters sympathetic, which is death for me.  I realize the author is trying to create a character arc and a redemption arc or two but it took too long for me. I wasn’t hooked.  I also disliked the way the two invented characters ‘stole the thunder’ of real people and real events. Making one of them ‘best buddies’ with Kit Carson was a bridge too far for me.

The author seemed to have definite opinions about the character of historical figures like Fremont and Robert E. Lee.  I get that there is a tendency to over-romanticize Lee, especially; but it felt like Lee was written to be a dick.  Lee may have been ‘merely human’ but even his worst enemies might have a hard time recognizing him here.  The fictional characters also have a sub-plot that wouldn’t have been out of place in Mandingo (Sexual slavery! Incest! Fun for the whole family!), which didn’t help.  On the other side, Grant is made a little too saintly, particularly on slavery. From what I recall from his autobiography, he didn't have strong opinions on slavery until the War. The real people are complex enough to make for compelling stories; I don’t see why they needed to be reinterpreted like this.

What did work well for me was the setting at West Point, those scenes felt alive.  If the whole novel had been set there, I’d have devoured it, melodrama or not.  Spending four years with figures destined to cast a long shadow over the coming war while they were still students would have made for fascinating historical fiction.  Likewise, a novel that focused on the Mexican-American war back in the 1840’s would have been another part of history that has been under-told. Or simply focusing on the historical character’s real, compelling stories could have been made fresh and interesting. But that’s not what we have here.

I ended up buying, again, Shelby Foote’s Civil War narrative instead. This time for my Kindle Fire. I also picked up U.S. Grant’s autobiography, along with Sherman’s and Longstreet’s.  Again, the real stories are dramatic enough and the people themselves abounded with flaws and contradictions. There’s no reasons to make up new ones.  Especially not with the fictional characters created here.  I really, really wanted to like this book and it gives me no pleasure to write a negative review of it.

When it comes to writing a synopsis, I am clueless. I have submitted Smooth Running to three publishers with three different synopses, same with Angel Odyssey.  Each one different, each time, unsure of what I was supposed to write.  But I have an idea…

For my editing class, our instructor offered to critique our novel synopsis for us.  That’s cool but how do I write a synopsis?  Previous advice books and blog posts made it sound like your synopsis should read like the copy from the back of a paperback.  I’m here to tell you…that doesn’t seem to be right. At least not according to the Fairwood Writer’s workshop I attended last year.  (Not that anyone knows anything*)  Previous attempts to sum up the plot of the novels have consistently ballooned up past the three page maximum, even for outlined novels like Angel Odyssey.  Some guidelines suggest putting in passages from the book in the synopsis, to give the reader a taste of your writing voice.  It’s enough to make me pull out my hair, if I had any hair.

But I’m going to try something new.  I’m going to get in character**and see if he can tell me the story.  The Mageborn Mechanic might be uniquely suited to this attempt, since it is a thriller and a heck of a lot shorter than my first two novels.

I’m hoping that letting my character narrate the story of the novel will help fix some of the problems I’m having figuring out what to put into a synopsis.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

*It seems like there is very little consensus on anything in the writing community as to the ‘right way’ to do anything, except to follow submission guidelines to the letter.

**Simon, to be precise, my protagonist from The Mageborn Mechanic

Hey folks.  I'm still offline, writing-wise.  I have my Full Time interview at Amazon today.  I'm pretty focused on that.  Tomorrow, I'll be back on track.

Wish me luck!