Another short one today.  

Shorter post today, I promise.

Ah, this is the 'fun' part of blogging. The accountability.  Ok, like taking a band-aid off, best to get it over with.

I did not get seven short stories written. I got two.  And a half, which will probably end up as a novel that I won't be able to publish.

So what happened?  Well, lack of commitment, I think.  The first short story was more involved than I expected. It came out to about 7k words and I spent three days writing it. But in hours spent, I cheated myself.  Normally I write from 7-9:30 plus what is usually a big, productive chunk of writing time from 7am or so until noon on Sundays.

Several times, I wrote for only an hour or an hour and a half. They were productive hours but I could do better (thanks Drake!).  Other times, I allowed myself to get distracted with family or movies or just plain laziness (See Friday).

I did lose productive time on Saturday when I got a virus, damn it.  That ate up two or so hours fixing.

I will say that the time spent watching movies did teach me some things about storytelling, at least in a negative sense.  I watched Sucker Punch and 13 Ghosts (the remake).  Frankly, with the latter, I'd rather have that time back for something more productive, like napping.  Seriously.  But it did teach me one or two things.  So why not mention them now?

Things I learned from 13 Ghosts:1.  Casting is everything.  Casting Mathew Lillard and then directing him to play his annoying, spastic schtick to the max...well, it's no wonder this movie tanked.  The movie opens with Lillard and never really recovers.  Next, they cast a very unnecessary and pretty much worthless 'sassy black nanny' character (Rah Digga?).  I honestly don't know what purpose she was supposed to serve, unless it was to try to pull in a black audience for the movie.  She bordered on racially offensive and did nothing, plot-wise or character-wise.  Every time she was on the screen, it was time taken away from character who could be actively furthering the plot or at least not annoying the audience.  Then there were the kids...well, Shannon Elizabeth didn't embarrass herself but 'Bobby' was annoying like too many little kids are in movies.
--Lesson: Write characters that won't annoy your audience.  

2.  Infodumps suck.  At several points in the movie, the scares are put on hold so one character can lecture another character on the laughable mythology of the story.  This kills the momentum of the story, kills the suspense, kills it dead.  If it NEEDED to be in the movie (and frankly, I doubt it), putting it up front and getting it out of the way might have been a better way to go, or alternately, letting the villain monologue the purpose of all the chaos at the end.  Not ideal but better than bringing the story to a screeching halt in the middle when we need to be ratcheting up the stakes and tension.
--Lesson: Infodumps kill the momentum and take the audience out of the story. 

3.  A few clear antagonists are better than too many.  13 ghosts has some genuinely scary antagonists in this movie. Um, 12 is too many, though.  As a result, some of the work spent creating these antagonists is wasted, since we can only focus on a few at a time.  It would have been better to have three or four ghosts and have them act as the main antagonists.  We have a finite amount of time in a movie and a finite number of pages in a novel.  With 12 psycho ghosts, the effect is wasted. Also, with so many bad guys, we aren't clear which or who is the real antagonist.  Several times, these ghosts simply 'looked' at the hapless characters, rather than doing anything bad to them.  In the end, only three ghosts actually assault anyone.  The rest were just...spooky pictures. If there had been one, it probably would have been more intense, oddly enough.
--Lesson: Make your antagonist clear to your audience and don't clutter your story up with too many characters.

4.  Don't forget characters. The main character of the movie is actually Tony Schalhoub (who did the best he could with what he had).  His main driving force is concern for his children, rightly so. But the children disappear, literally, halfway through the movie.  We don't see who takes them, we don't see where they are, we don't know if they're in danger or if they're dead.  The movie did this (I think) for a cheap reveal of the 'real' villain.  (Which didn't work, see lesson 3, above).  Not knowing where they were or what was happening to them felt sloppy.  If you're going to introduce characters, stay with them until their fate is resolved. If they have to be absent, make it of short duration and have the other characters reference them. The movie did try to do this, Tony Schalhoub is constantly worried about his children, but it didn't work. For too much of the running time of the movie, these two characters are absent.
--Lesson: Use your characters, don't leave them out of your story for prolonged periods.

5.  Wow, I could go on at length, it seems. There are a lot of negative lessons to learn from 13 Ghosts,  but let me end on the most important one:  Keep the tension tight.
  If you're writing horror or suspense, you can start out in a natural, calm state. But once the antagonist is introduced, the state of tension should rise and rise until the climax and only during the denouement at the end, should you return to that calm state.  There is a rhythm to horror, and you can spike things up and then release tension with humor or a reveal but the underlying tension should not give up. It should always trend upward.  Infodumps (Lesson 2), annoying characters (lesson 1), too many characters (lessons 3 and 4) all killed the tension of the movie. There'd be a lot of running, some scary images and then...we'd jump to someone else's POV, who's not scared or running or threatened. Or there will be several minutes of infodumping. Or a character will be acting 'all crazy' in an attempt at humor. (Which never worked) And the movie would have to build tension all over again.  
Lesson: Build tension from the beginning to the climax if you're writing suspense or horror.

Thirteen Ghosts is a bad movie but it didn't have to be. Clearly, a lot of time and effort went into making it and I'm sure the director, Steve Beck, had an intention of quality.  The production design was amazing and the visual effects were good as well.  However, I'm guessing a lot of stuff got cut to make its running time. The script and casting were problematic.  I'll close with a lesson that affects us both, the director and screenwriter on his movie and me on my writing challenge:

I'm just sayin', you could do better.

Thanks again, Drake.

One of my online friends* is dealing with writing burnout**.  They've either been trying too many writing projects, are in too many critque groups or are just tired of dealing with the same, multi-year novel they've been beating their head against.

I sympathize. I've been in all three of those situation and am just emerging from my post-World Fantasy slump. First of all, slumps happen. Burnout happens.  Most writers, don't ask me why, tend to go up and down.  Some weeks we're on fire, ambitious, determined...some weeks we hate ourselves, we hate our work, we hate that we hate ourself and our work.

Well, that came out better and more brutal than expected.  I finished up the short story I was working on last night. It came in right around 7k words, most of them written last night.  I'm not used to a story taking three days but...eh.  Sokay.  I think it reminded me of how much of an exploration writer I am. I had an outline of sorts, a list of scenes really from Monday's 5 minute pre-writing exercise.  Those gave me a skelton but the implications of what I'd written didn't hit home to me until I was actually writing.

The brutality at the climax might mean this story is going to struggle to find a home. I hope not. It's not like most fantasy stories I've read, hopefully in a good way.  In the end, when I was writing it, I knew things had to get 'that bad' and that dark in order to have the characters transformed, pushed past the point of no return.

I'll edit it up some, there's lots of sentences that need surgery, especially at the beginning.  Another thing is I know know what the story is, I can go back and sprinkle in some foreshadowing and some world-building early in the story to support what I'm trying to do. Heh.  Writing is fun again.

Tonight is gaming night, so I'll just need to write, um, six short stories from Friday to Sunday...yeah... Well, who knows, it could happen. I just have to try.

Heh.  I'm not complaining but after two days of my personal challenge I have...2/3rds of a story. It's ok, I think it's going to be a good story.  And you never know what will happen this weekend.

I find myself writing some blocky, awkward sentences but if I rush past them, I get into the sweet stuff.  Later, next week, probably, I'll go back and cut out the blocky stuff.  I'll be frank, the awkward sentences bother me. I'm no Harlan Ellison but I usually write pretty decent first drafts.  So these rough spots...

But I'm giving myself permission to suck, so long as I don't let the awkward stuff block me and keep writing, I figure I can fix the ick later.

I've been reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi's Boys and...not really enjoying it.  Which is odd, because his short stories are some of the best things I've ever read.  But here's my problem so far (and keep in mind, I'm not all the way done yet): I don't like the main characters.  Fat Charlie is awkward and passive. At first that made him a bit sympathetic but by now, I'm tired of him.  I don't like his fiance, who's decided she doesn't want to marry Fat Charlie after falling in love with his 'brother', Spider.  I don't like Spider, who is selfish and thoughtlessly cruel but at least has the saving grace of being entertaining.  I think I see where the plot is going and I don't like that, either.

Strange.

Maybe it's just me and my delight in heroism and heroes.  I like larger than life people or at the very least, ordinary people who rise to the occasion when the time comes.  Fat Charlie keeps going to other people, asking them to solve his problems for him. That might fit for some fairy tales but not the fairy tales I love to read.  Maybe there' some weird English defeatism there, that doesn't trust in heroes or asserting yourself and wants to just stand by the side of the wall and make snide comments.  

I tried the 'five minute summary' last night.  It was good, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's going to make for a longer story.  I don't think that's the planning's fault. Just the latest short story idea seems to want some space to breathe.

I think part of that is due to the genre, Fantasy.  Fantasy always seems to want a bit of world building and that bumps the word count. I need to see if there's ways to hint at the world without sentence-long, or worse, paragraph-long explanations of things.

Word count wasn't horrible, 1800 or so words in an hour and a half.  So, too soon to say if the 'five minuete summary' before writing is working or not. But I have a story I'm excited about telling and that's worth a bunch of roses.  I'll just have to scramble more during the week or, God forbid, during the weekend.

Tonight we begin our one week sprint of stories. Seven days, seven stories, that's my goal.  I did a test run yesterday but the story fell apart like a snowball when the snow's too dry.  Which is an appropriate simile since the story was called The Winter Wife.  I may take a crack at it again, since a little Fantasy Horror might be just what the season needs.

Anyway, I came across an idea from a blog (and if I stole this from you, let me know and I'll like and offer props) where the writer spends five minutes before they write planning out what they're going to write about. I don't usually do that for short stories. Normally I have a beginning or a ending and a character and I just go with it. When it works, it's like magic. But when it doesn't, it gets frustrating.

So, rather than doing what I normally do when I'm frustrated, I'm going to quit wanking and get planning.  Tonight, I'm going to spend just five minutes writing out what I intend to write about. We'll see if that bit of structure helps with my productivity.  I'll let you know tomorrow if it works.

So, it's been a month since World Fantasy.  In that month, I had hoped to write a passel of short stories, like I did in April.  I didn't and I want to talk a little bit about why.  Not just in the interest of accountiblity and full disclosure of my flaws and my journey.  Yes, I want to be on the record so I or anyone else can look back and see what was going on in my writing life.  But I want explain what I think the failure was caused by.

But first, a few sentences of context.  I am applying again for Clarion West. It is pretty much the best writer education program in the country if you want to write fantasy and sci-fi, as I do.  (Clarion and Oddysey also deserve mention as well) This year, the states are even higher because George R. R. Martin is teaching.  Now he's not a paragon of perfection but he has written three books that may be the most important and highest quality fantasy since JRR Tolkien.  I want to learn from him, even for a week.  Naturally, so do a whole lot of other people.  

So the Clarion West application is competetive. You need to send in your best work. Last year, the first two chapters of Angel Odyssey weren't good enough.  So, my plan this year was to submit short stories instead.  Which brings me to how I blocked myself.

You see, unlike April, when my goal was just to write 30 short stories in 30 days, (about anything and they didn't need to be good, just complete) I set the goal of writing something great. Something that would catch the judges eye and make them tap me on the shoulder and say 'you're in'.  I want that, need it almost.

So my bar for creation was so high, that I rejected ideas before I even sat down to write them. I have myself stress headaches out of sheer expectataion. I needed to write great fantasy, great sci-fi. I needed to be great and I wasn't willing to settle for anything less.

Well, guess what? I didn't settle. And I didn't produce anything great.  See that's the lesson.  Don't try for greatness.  Just try.  Don't write the greatest thing you've ever written, just write.  Writing is hard enough, God knows, without putting the additional burden of NEEDING to be great.  Don't do what I did.  Just write.  Write what you love, what makes you laugh, what entertains YOU.  Just write and don't worry about greatness.

So what am I going to do? Am I going to take my own advice?  

I'd like to. I'd like to just write a bunch of stuff and see how it comes out.  I WOULD like to use my critique group as a resource.  It helps a lot to have other eyes on your work. But time is running out. I wanted to get Smooth Running up and for sale by...well, two weeks ago...and ideally before Christmas.  But is that my real priority?  Smooth Running can go up anytime, and if I miss this holiday season, well, there will be another one.  (I'm hoping and trusting...assuming the Mayans were wrong) But I have one shot at Clarion West this year.  I think I need to take it.

So, I am going to dedicate a week, a solid 7 days to writing. I'm going to write seven to ten short stories (I can crank them out when I get going and don't get in my own way). Then I'm going to re-read them and submit the best to my group for feedback.  Then, the rest of the month, editing time.  And at the end of the month, on December 31st, if not earlier, I'm sending my application off.  I don't know if there will be anything great. But if all goes well, there will be two or three stories that I enjoyed writing and reading.

I'm going to try to just write.

Yep, I sent off my submission to the Norwescon Fairwood Writers workshop.  Let's hope it doesn't impact on the outer rim.  I've already found a few typos in my snopsis...hopefully that's all I missed...but probably not. 

Unlike last year, I did not extensively workshop this novel excerpt prior to...workshopping it.  This is more raw, more honest, I think.  That may mean unpolished. I hope not but we'll see.

There was another deadline I missed yesterday, though. There was a super villian anthology I really wanted to get into but...time ran out.

Now we're in December, that means 31 days left to get my Clarion West application ready for submission. :)

Well, wish me luck. We keep going forward.