Category Archives: writing

Writing the Book was Easy.

 Writing the Book was Easy.

Beta reader feedback is coming in on The Wolves of Wallace point and the signs are good. There aren’t any major issues that people have a consensus on and as such no major rewrites or revision required at this stage.

I have drafted a query letter to use in the search for an agent to represent me and my horror writings but before I can start that process, I must tackle the toughest part of the writing, the synopsis.

I recall an interview with the master Japanese director Kurosawa when the interviewer asked him what the message in his latest film Ran was. Kurosawa replied, through a translator, that if the message was simple enough to be an answer to a question, he wouldn’t have made the film he would have just stood on a corner with a sign.

It took 97,000 words to tell the story of The Wolves of Wallace point and now I must retell it in something like 1000 words and still make it compelling, interesting, and engaging.

This is way I would rather just jump into the next book.

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Ready For Beta Readers

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My first horror novel, tentatively titled The Wolves of Wallace Point is ready for beta readers.

Beta readers, for those who do not know, are the test audiences of the book world. People invited to read a manuscript, provide feedback about what they liked or did not like about the work and then the author may revise, edit, rewrite, or junk the entire project. I have certainly had novels that did not survive the beta read stage, where I hadn’t quite achieved what I wanted to, and it was easier and simpler to set the manuscript aside until I was more confident that I would tackle it properly.

This is an open call. If you are interested in reading this book and providing me with your honest opinion and feedback either use the contact me link on my blog or drop me a direct message in Facebook and I’ll put you on the list.

The novel is about 100,000 words, so that much like most SF books but a little thinner that most fantasy novels, and I would appreciate a turnaround time of about two weeks.

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Inconvenient Inspiration

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So, last night I went to bed and started drifting off to sleep. Somewhere I had heard or read that in order to sleep your heartrate has to drop below 60 beats per minute and mine was slowing, approaching that moment when cognitive systems shut down and slumber would take over.

As I drifted my minds began recalling carious Tabletop Role Playing Games in the horror genre I had run for my friends. When I run a horror themed games I like to do it as a ‘one off,’ just that set of characters and events. Horror repeated becomes adventure. One of the games I recalled had been a massive game made up of several sessions instead of the customary single night of game play. I had borrowed the structure of the classic film Citizen Kane with the characters investigating aspect of someone life searching for the key that would unlock the nature of their life.

My heartrate shot up from the gentle slowing and sleep fled from my presence.

I hadn’t thought about that game in years and years now grasped a new purpose for it, a novel.

Now that particular story, much of which I do not recall, but the structure. That would make a fine way to approach a horror novel that would be both grand in scope and focused on a single character. Much more of what the plot might entail flooded into my brain like a river washing away the Black Riders chasing after Frodo. Even more concepts fell into place. I adore the five-act structure and each act could encompass one of the historical aspects of the investigation; a character introduced in the epilog of my werewolf novel could be the point man in this one.

It took quite a while for my thoughts to cease racing, for my heartrate to once again begin to slow, but that sudden inconvenient flash of inspiration still burns this morning.

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Quick Novel Update

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So, 3 out of 5 acts have been proofed so I am nearing the point where I will be looking for beta readers for ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point.’

I often hear about writers who detest their first drafts, but I am not one of those. Sure, sometimes the draft fails, and I didn’t get to my target. But it’s never detest or I can’t stand reading it as I edit and revise. This novel was no different even though it was written without an outline. There were elements that need minor adjustment because as things became clearer to me near the end earlier scenes had to be adjusted to ensure a consistent continuity.

As I wait for my sweetie-wife to complete her pass on the final two acts I have begun actual writing on the next horror novel. I may need to put something else as the opening scene however as this sequence is so dark and troubling it may be more of a turn off that an enticing opening.

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2023 A Personal Review

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The year, as we in the west number it, is coming to a close and that is a time for reflection. This year has seen triumph and tragedy in my personal life, much like the years that preceded it and that will follow.

In January I began the world building work for my next science-fiction novel, a dystopic and cynical story set on the corporate cities of Mars under the thumb of a once brilliant billion now degenerated into madness and paranoia. With it set only a hundred years into the future that required lots of research and planning to keep from making myself appear too foolish. This month also saw a dear friend of nearly 40 years struck with a terrible wasting degenerative neuro-muscular disease.

February saw the released of a pair of films that I thoroughly enjoyed, Megan a fun take on the killer doll cliche and Cocaine Bear which delivered precisely what was labeled on the tin.

In March I continued the work on my Mars novel and endured the lackluster Antman and The Wasp: Quantum Mania and the even less enjoyable 65 but was treated to the spirited and fun Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

April saw the historic event of a former President of the United States charged with crimes and his party lash themselves to the mast of his sinking ship. Sadly, nothing in the intervening 8 months changed and they remain devoted to his insurrection and criminality. April was also when I began thinking seriously that the time was right for someone to revisit the werewolf as presented in 1941’s The Wolf-Man with particular attention to the fascism in the subtext.

May was a birth month, a celebration if you wanted of my own and the experimental scene I wrote for a very vague and unformed concept of a werewolf novel. After its reception at my writers group and with their encouragement I continued on past that scene and unwittingly started writing a novel without a prepared outline.

In June I watched Asteroid City a strange almost poetic film nearly devoid of any traditional plot and yet strangely compelling. All world building work ceased as the werewolf novel took over all of my creative CPU cycles.

July was a very good month for movies with the release of Oppenheimer and Barbie both film outstanding in their quality with resonate themes of deep importance. My sweetie-wife and I finished the TV series Silo and agreed it had been a waste of time and talent as had Marvel’s Secret Invasion. It was about this time that I began to seriously consider that my unplanned novel was not going to crash and burn and might actually get finished.

In August The unplotted novel passed 40,000 word and my sweetie-wife and I discovered the delightful Australian murder/comedy series Deadloch a real hidden treasure on Amazon Prime.

September witnessed the passing of that dear friend diagnosed in January and once again the hard terrible lesson of life is that it ends. The movies of this month, A Haunting in Venice, and The Annual secret morgue of genre films, did little to mitigate the sadness of that period.

With October I became confident enough in my werewolf novel to reach out to a former editor and pitch him the book. He expressed an interest but also cautioned I would need a pen name for it. The Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage enrollment started and the day-job became more stressful and busier but work on the novel continued.

November was a pleasant month. Two enjoyable features at the theater, The Marvels and Next Goal Wins provided comfort cinema, the annual sf convention LosCon provided friends and geek infusions as well as seeing to completion of the novel first draft.

That brings us to December, I closed out in theater film watching with the fantastic Godzilla Minus 1, abandoned the series The Crown as the Charles and Diana story held little interest for me, and turned my manuscript over to my darling sweetie-wife for her red pen of corrections.

As I said at the outset, 2023 held triumph and tragedy and now onto 2024.

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The First Draft is Complete

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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.

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General Catchup:

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Posting here of late has been quite sporadic for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the current novel in progress has consumed most of the creative CPU cycles in my brain. Perhaps the fact that I am ‘pantsing’ the book, that is writing it without a pre-created outline means I need more synapses on station or perhaps because it is my first novel length horror project, or some other reason, it’s been front and center of my brain for weeks. Either way there has been creative output toward the blog and more in the direct of these Family Value Fascist werewolves.

Secondly, we have entered the busy season at my day-job. The non-profit healthcare HMO I work for get very busy from October thru January as this is the yearly ‘open enrollment’ period of member’s with Medicare to enroll, disenroll, or make changed to the Medicare HMO coverage. Overtime becomes plentiful and work takes up loads of hours.

Still, this weekend, after shifting my working on Friday to 7am until 4pm, my sweetie-wife and I sped up to L.A. and enjoyed the weekend with the Los Angeles Area SF Convention, LosCon. This year I did not participate as a panelist, but enjoyed going to panels on writing, movies, and technology. In the evenings there were room parties, lengthy discussion and I ended each night in the lobby with a soda, my laptop, and the final chapter of my horror novel. Which I completed on Saturday night.

The last couple of panels of the convention were of only middling interest to us and so we left about 2:30 pm to get home to San Diego. Once home we settled on simply microwave meals and watched the new Doctor Who special.

All in all it was a good weekend and today I start the corrections and revision to ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point.’

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November is National Novel Writing Month

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National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, has started and loads of people have enlisted in their attempts to write 50,000 words on their project by November 30th.

50 thousand words is not an obscene goal. It’s 1667 words per day, every day. It’s tough but certainly doable. I am not participating in this grand global goal not because I do not believe in it but because I am already eyeball-deep in my current project. I did once attempt to do a NaNoWriMo. It would have been a science-fiction novel about the survivors of a crashed passenger liner. It also would have been written without an outline. That novel crash and burned as completely as the doomed starship after less than 10 thousand words.

Still, NaNoWriMo is a good thing. For many writers the temptation do anything but write is quite strong. There is always something else that needs to the researched, there are tone boards to construct, characters to devise, locals to investigated online, so much that prepares you for the writing that is not writing. Making a public commitment to NaNoWriMo help some over that hump between planning and plotting and what is the hardest part of writing, butt to chair, fingers to keyboard. (Or pen to paper, or voice to tape. There is no one correct way to wright.)

So if you have committed yourself to this endeavor, may your words flow like wine, may your plot not clot, and remember even if you don’t hit the goal, writing itself is the victory.

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Crunch Time has Arrived

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By ‘crunch time’ I do not mean heaping bowls of nautically ranked golden squares containing unimaginable quantities of sugar but rather the time of year when at my day-job the work overflows, overtime is authorized, and I often work six days a week.

I work for a non-profit HMO in their Medicare membership division. Each year from October 15th thru December 7th people on Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or change their Medicare Advantage Plans so loads of applications and roll into our HMO during this time and that translates to loads of work. It’s good, I am paid well, represented well by my union, and being a non-profit I feel pretty good about the services my HMO afford these Medicare recipients. I sock my overtime money aside and use it for frivolous treats.

This year it is even more of a ‘crunch time’ as I am on the final stretch for completing the first draft of a horror novel. One written without an outline. As of the writing of this post I am sitting at about 73 thousand words. I expect the piece to land somewhere between 80 and 85 thousand. At one thousand words or so per day that means 7 to 12 writing days to wrap it up. Looking back there is less spade and reconstruction work that I had expected when starting the ‘no outline’ adventure. There is some rework to be done, some scenes to be rewritten but no major points of conflict or retroactive continuity to correct. I credit this feat to my decades of running tabletop Role Playing games, where there is never an outline that survived contact with the players and the need to make sure that nearly everything fits together coherently is fairly great.

In short I shall be busy during November, but not unhappy.

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