Tag Archives: SF

A Brief Walk Down Memory lane, writing version

This week my speedy progress on Cawdor has been hampered by my lack of good sleep. I am even more tired all the time than I have been recently and that has dropped my per day productivity by half. I am still making progress and I am in many ways very happy with the product. (While still certain that no one else in the wide world will like it the way I do.)

The speed of this novel has mee thinking about the other novels I have written and how long it took, editing included.

My first novel was Freeholder an SF novel about liberal, pacifist survivalists. It was written while I was in high school from Sep 1978 through May 1979. The poor suffering readers of that novel endured a really horrid writer with no edits. Yesh, I pity them now.

Freeholder – 47,000 words over ten months

The next novel I wrote was much much later and it was The Mark of Cain. The first draft was written between January 2004 and July 2004, about seven months. It went to beta read, got properly savaged and I produced a new version by December of 2004

The Mark Of Cain – 121,000 words about seven months, plus five months re-write and edits.

The third novel I have written is Love and Loyalty. I started writing it October 2005 and finished the first draft February 2006. I spent two months editing that manuscript for the beta readers and it was ready by April 2004.

Love and Loyalty – 92,000 words five months to write and two months to edit.

(A special note on Love and Loyalty, In May of 2008 I started a line edit to tighten the prose and that turned into a major rewrite as I had an inspiration in how to improve the novel. So the final version experienced and additional round of edit lasting about five months.)

Cawdor has been different, it has been about two months and I am half-way through the first draft, and this is really surprising because I have been doing a rolling edit for the first time. I write a chapter, edit it, correct it, then move on to the next chapter. If I stay on this track Cawdor will take about 4 months to write AND edit.

Socially Sanctioned Schizophrenia

We writers are allowed, nay we are encourage to have voices in our heads. Unlike other poor souls we can take those voice that no one else is able hear and transform them into external characters. However, they all start off as voice in our heads.

I present to you a stylized conversation thrust upon me by one of my characters.

Character Incognito: You know, I’d be mighty useful in Exodus From Cawdor.

Me: You’re not going to be in Exodus from Cawdor, you die in Cawdor.

Character Incognito: I don’t have to die, son. There’s plenty of means we can hustle up to avoid that sad fate.

Me: Nope, I checked the outline you die on page 22 of it.

Character Incognito: Well now, that darn thing’s just a suggestion. You know like guidelines, you can ignore it if you want.

Me: It’s in the plan. You have to die in this story.

Character Incognito: I don’t see that way at all. But, you’d love having me around for the next book. Sweet Baby Jesus you need me for balance if nothing else.

Me: I could find that in another character.

Character Incognito: Who tell?

Me:…

Character Incognito: That’s what I reckoned. You’re stuck and you want me in that next book, you need me in that book.

Me: Now you’re just ripping off Jack Nicholson.

Character Incognito: That must have been you. I never heard of the fella.

Me: You die in the story. Remember I got source material. (Confidently wiping my hands of the matter.)

Character Incognito: Now partner, that just slavish devotion to the text. You don’t have to copy some old englishman do you?

Me: It’s not slavish devotion it’s…respecting the source material.

Character Incognito: (suspiciously quiet)

Me: Sure you’d be fun and it’d open up a lot of opportunities, but there’s page 22. See look at it!

Character Incognito: Yup. That would have been a mite powerful scene I think. Shame you’ll have to lose it.

Me: Grumble

Character Incognito: You’ll thank me son, You’ll see.

I hate it when my characters are right.

How my writing is like a supercarrier

It’s all about momentum.

Before I can even start writing a big project like a novel I have to do research and build the back story. That’s like fueling the carrier, getting the crew, marines, and air wings aboard.

Once that is done I can set sail with my outline acting as crude navigation to steer me to my far away port, a finished novel.

If the novel goes well, I start gather real speed in the writing and it takes a life of it own. Pages start flying by and the words just flow from me to the page. It takes awhile for this to occur. The first ten or twenty pages are usually me fumbling about trying to find the voice and the path I need to take.

Lately I’ve been churning out nearly 8 pages a day on Cawdor. This has been a really productive time and its made me quite happy.

Monday the crippling headaches brought all progress to a rapid halt. I got nothing done, yesterday the headaches and the exhaustion from a bad nights sleep reduced me to less than two pages of text completed. I was really depressed today when at my first break at my day job the headache had returned and robbed me of even more writing time. I managed just 30 minutes of writing during my hour lunch.

Luckily i seemed to have found the steam again and finished up with about five pages completed, but it’s been tough getting that momentum back up.

SciFi thought of the Day

I’m having a really bad arthritis knees day so I will leave you with this one thought.

How Many people live on Coruscant? Wikipedia lists the fiction planet as having a population of 1 trillion.

From the films we can see it is a densely populated world and we are told that the entire planet is one big city. (In George Lucas’ mind all planets have one dominate feature, Desert, Ice, Forrest or City.)

So let’s assume a population density matching that of Manhattan. (That’s a low ball figure considering the height of the buildings but it gives us something to work with.)

And a surface land-area equal to the earth’s.

Manhattan Density : 27,485 per km square.

Earth Land Surface area: 148,940,ooo km square.

27,485 X 148,940,000 =4.0936159^12 people. or 40,936,159,00,000 almost 41 trillion people.

Seems to me the wikipedia entry is a bit of a low ball figure based on the fantastic nature of the planet,

Here’s an interesting thing to run, given that population density how big of an area would the Earth’s current population take up?

Current population: 6,812,000,000 / 27,485 = 247, 844 square kilometers.

That’s smaller than the state of Nevada at 286,367 square kilometers. Every man woman and child on planet earth fits into Nevada if we all live like New Yorkers. That really gives SF colony designers something to think about.

Sunday Night Movie: 2012

So being a fan os disaster movies, and to a somewhat lesser degree a fan of disastrous movies, withe the release of 2012 on Blu-ray I had to make that movie my Sunday Night Movie this week. (before anyone thinks I slipped a cam and actually bought the Blu-ray, I ordered it via Netflix. That’s one of the reasons I have Netflix, so I can see movies I would not ordinarily pay for.)

As I have said in other posts I thin Roland Emmerich is in a race with Michael Bay as to who can make more stupid movie. After Michael Bay raised the stakes with Transformers : Revenge Of The Fallen, Emmerich had no option but to go all in with 2012.

Like all really classy disaster movies this one has a diverse cast from all sorts of walks of life caught up in the disaster. They struggle to survive, many failing and ending up in either noble moving deaths if they were likable characters, or ironic fitting deaths if they were jerks. There isn’t a single surprise in this entire films save for the level of stupid.

For example, the scene picture above. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) failed writer whose HARDBACK book sold less than 500 copies (a face many people know in the film, no matter how divorced those characters may be from the publishing business.) is running to catch the plane with his ex-wife, two kids, and their new step-dad in order to escape the eruption of the super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. Behind the character is the slowest pyroclastic flow in the recorded history of vulcanology. In real life this effect can have speeds up to 750 km/hour. Jackson has managed to outrun the bit of disaster in an old RV. Crashed the RV into a fissure from the eruption, climb out of the fissure, chase down the plane with family et al aboard, and still manage to escape the deadly winds, pressure, and temperatures of up to 1000 degrees C. Now to paraphrase Morbius from Forbidden Planet: Prepare your minds for a new scale of stupidity values. What I just describe was the most CREDIBLE disaster/action/escape sequence in the whole film.

I laughed my way, and I mean that quite literally laughing out loud, through this entire movie. From the ridiculous psuedo-science (Sub-atomic particles do NOT mutate Mr. emmerich, they decay.) to the ignoring of the vast distances involved this film gets everything wrong and does it in the most over the top manner imaginable.

It is filled with stock character, not one of which has any spark of originality and life. It ignores the consequences of its own stupid actions and stands. SPOILER ALERT.

Continue reading →

Chapter 3 – first draft completed

So I have now completed the three critical chapters of Cawdor. At least in rough draft form. I’ve done the edits to the first two chapters and I am currently entering the edits on the third. Tomorrow at my day job while on break and lunch I will start writing Chapter 4 and at home I will complete entering the edits and corrections on chapter 3.

The edits are going pretty well. It helps that I think I know my first draft weaknesses pretty well. I tend to overwrite – so it’s lots of taking out words I do not need. And I tend to write passive on my first pass, she the edits also tend to switch the sentences to active instead of passive construction.

I’m hoping I can find someone who is not familiar with the work to let me know if the first three chapters have any grab to them

Making progress despite constant headaches.

Until I was 40 years old I did not need to wear glasses. That doesn’t men I’ve been blessed to live trouble free where it come to my eyes. I had a real fright in high school with an infection that almost blinded me. However, my vision after that was 20/20 just restricted in terms of light levels.

On my 40th birthday my gift from the fates were my first reading glasses. Every year since then I have had to had a new pair fashioned as my prescription changed. Each year as my vision gets worse, I start getting headaches that eventually become constant headaches with the occasional migraine tossed in for variety’s sake.

This year is no different. Last week I had my exam because I could feel the strain building after long bouts reading. The new doc confirmed my rx had changed — again and I ordered new glasses. Seven to ten day wait to get them so I am living in the land of constant headaches again.

However, I am still writing. I am clocking about 1500 words a day and if I can maintain this pace I should have the draft of Cawdor finished by the end of May or early June.

Tonight I will continue chapter three. Now all chapters are important but the first three have a special place for the unknown author. When you get a bite from a query letter it nearly always is a request for the first three chapters. This is what you have to sell the editor or agent on reading the rest of the book.

In the case of Cawdor the third chapter is really important. It is where those who were not clued in by the title, but familiar with MacBeth will realize what it is I am attempting; with great hubris, stealing from Shakespeare. Tonight I will take my first crack of the highly modified scene where the witches first encounter Macbeth.

Wish me luck.

Condor Convention Day 1

Here in San Diego we have a local sf con in February/March called Condor. Today was the first day on the convention.

Now Condor is a small convention. 300-400 people in attendance usually is my understanding. I went to several panels, the best being on weapons of the Victorian Age. This turned into a show and tell of fire arms from 1830 thru 1900 and the panelists brought their own collection. It was a big table full of firearms. The panelist were well informed and I had a good time.

There were other panels on the theme of the convention – Steampunk, including panels on Oz and Alice in Wonderland and other aspects of Victoria culture, such as their interest in the paranormal.

All in all it was a decent day that ended in a mild headache.

Next Week I start Cawdor

Well I had meant to start writing Cawdor this week, but that just didn’t happen. Between the hellishly busy pace at the day-job and two days sucked into the Big Bang Experience, I got nada done this week.

Still, I am excited. This will be a challenging novel for me to write and I am looking forward to it.

Why I write with an outline

There is a saying in Hollywood, “Paper is cheaper than film.” That means it is always easier to experiment and work out story issues in the script before you start trying to film the movie. I find a similar thing is true of writing novels.

Outlines are faster than novels.

When I write I use an outline for anything larger than a short story. I find it is an essential part of my tool-kit in learning what my story really is and how to make it work to the best possible advantage. In the outline I can experiment with plot developments and twists. I can have a characters captured, killed, or ignored and see how that affects the overall plot and the other characters. If something doesn’t work, I have not wasted dozens of pages, perhaps thousands of words and who knows how many hours chasing down the wring path.

I understand not all writers can use the outline method. When I go to convention sometimes I feel like I am the token outline using author there and everyone else in the world simply fires up their favorite word-processors and the characters take off on adventures. I cannot do that. I have to know how my story is going to end. To get to that ending I have to have an outline. It’s like a map. I may go off the trail here and there exploring things as they pop-up, but the map lets me know which way is out.

I have had a major breakthrough in my understand of my next novel, ‘Cawdor.’ Because I am still in the outline stage it is easy for me to go back and incorporate all the new ideas and ramifications in the story without having to tear down and re-write most of a novel.

I cannot comprehend writing any other way.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur