Category Archives: Personal

In Memorium: Terry

Leave a reply

Oct 20, 1940 – Dec 19, 2020

My Mom, Terry Lynn (Brodbeck) Ward died sometime last night.

She’d been in hospice for that last six weeks or so, once it became clear that the cancer behind her eye had rendered her blind and created so much pressure on her brain that her cognition was rapidly going. She wasn’t really home, from what my sister has told me.

I did get to talk to her right after her birthday, but she’d grown so “forgetful” that her cell phone constantly ran out of juice from not being charged, and by the time we realized, it was too late to get a land-line installed.

Surgery to remove the tumor was likely to kill her, as was the chemo, so there wasn’t much to do save make peace with it all. I have talked to my two sisters more in the last month than in the previous decade, most likely, but ours hasn’t ever been a warm and fuzzy kind of family.

I did get Mom to write a book several years ago. Her grandmother Ruth had owned a traveling family carnival in the late 19th Century, and my grandfather Mel and his siblings all worked on it, both before fighting in World War Two and after they came home.

Each week, they would travel to a new little town and set up. Great Grandma Ruth ran a family sort of thing, with rides and games, rather than some of the weird shit that some places did in the old days for shock values. In the late 40s, Mom got to spent her summers in all manner of little towns, then the whole caravan would pack up on Monday morning and drive to the next place.

From her blurb:

“When I was growing up, I thought all children spent their childhood living on a carnival. It wasn’t until I was taking an English class in college that I realized my early years were unique.

I was a carnie kid until I was ten years old, longer than any of the other cousins. For this reason I feel it is important to tell our story. It is a piece of Americana that is lost and won’t be repeated. Later generations won’t understand what it was like in America in those years. If I don’t share my childhood, it may be gone. We had a great time. I think this early lifestyle influenced the kind of person that I am now. I still like to travel and explore new places. Curiosity is a part of my life.”

Find Terry’s book here.

Mind you, this was before television or shopping malls, so a carnival like this might have been the height of a kid’s summer when it came along.

She lived in Seattle with me for several years about a decade ago. At the time, her hearing and eyes were both poor, so we ended up getting her cataract surgery and hearing aids and gave her another decade. I remember her looking at me at one point and saying “Well, I guess I’m not supposed to be dead after all.”

But she got that extra decade, and many friends.

Terry Lynn Brodbeck Ward is survived by ex-husband Stephen, her brother Ken, daughters Cindy and Julie, son Blaze, and all the myriad generations that followed.

The Hero’s Journey VERSUS Seven Point Plot Structure

Leave a reply

So I never intended to be a writer, in the way of many of the folks I know. They were all in on English, literature, creative writing, etc. I actually wanted to take a speech class for my last semester in High School, but the lovely bitch assistant principle explained that if I wanted her signature on things, I would take a creative writing class instead.

[Archaeological background: I started college when I was sixteen, so getting official signatures for approvals on variances in education factored heavily into a lot of my life until much later. To this day, I can’t be sure that “adults in the other room” didn’t have a conversation when I wasn’t around, intended to push me into the field of art. It failed. My undergraduate majors were Political Science and Philosophy, with a Minor in Geography (which was a nice way of saying I have a map fetish).

In college, I took one creative writing class that was so wonderful I stopped writing entirely for several years afterwards. (Vicious woman who hated all men. I had been warned that I could not get an A from her going in. I was very obviously her favorite student, and got a B+ from her, while almost every female in class got an A. Interesting, huh? But it reinforced that I could write poetry and needed to skip all that other shit and get an education so I could have a financially-rewarding career.]

All the above is to say that I had a weird relationship with the English language as a kid. Never learned a lot of the rote tools they taught, because of reasons. I learned more about the technical structure English by studying Spanish, German, and Latin than I did from any of my English teachers along the way. But that’s a story for another day.

Recently, I went deep into that thing called the Hero’s Journey, looking at it from the standpoint of several different folks, all of whom had officially-recognized opinions. I’m familiar with the pattern, but at the same time I was reading up on that topic, I came across a news article with much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Tolkien and Lewis had once set up a program at Oxford specifically to teach people how to write fantasy as we have come to understand it in genre literature (Epic or one of the sword and sorcery variants here). The program apparently ran from 1931-70, but the folks it had trained were now all retiring and the writer was furious that so much would be lost. So I dug in to what he was demanding we teach.

Tolkien taught something like the classical Hero’s Journey (more later) but shaped everything around an extremely narrow range in time and place, as a sort of 12th Century, Anglo/French world upon which everything was built. If you read his stuff or any of the innumerable folks slavishly mimicking him, they ALL BLEED TOGETHER.

That’s fine if you’re into that exact story, but I find that it you have read one, you have read almost all of them. The only thing that changes are the names of the characters and the kingdoms. It’s almost like Romance in that way, where things are on rails. Hard rails you can never deviate from.

So back to Hero’s Journey. There are a long set of steps that must be followed, in order to tell this story. Lovely. Good. In science fiction, we call most of that stuff setting.

However, the thing that jumped out at me was the critical importance of how the character must be shown in their native environment, being utterly mundane before something terrible happens that causes them to leave home forever for some grand adventure.

In deft hands, it can be done masterfully, but most of the folks I have ever encountered in the field of epic/sword fantasy are probably hacks. You end up with several chapters of the characters mostly standing around and doing nothing, so you can show just how terribly unremarkable their lives are. I grow bored, because nothing is happening. ONLY MUCH LATER does a plot actually happen. Theoretically.

After digesting that maybe this was the reason I had such problems with fantasy, I went and looked at my various bookshelves.

People who knew me in the wayback can tell you that I used to have a lot of books. As in, 30+ bankers boxes, just of books. Most of those paperback. After Donna died, I flipped my life and decided that I needed to pare things down. Ballpark, I got rid of about 3,000 books over the next 7 years, before I moved out to the farm. Every month, 10% more stuff had to leave the house than came in. Half-Priced Books, Goodwill, and the dump. Every month.

So I went looking through the 300 or so books I still have left. More than half are reference/research. Non-fiction. Of those that remain, less than a dozen are fantasy. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need. Russell’s Initiate Brother. Both duologies.

I do have the complete Eternal Champion by Moorcock, because I got those in fancy hardbacks with jackets in the early 90s when they came out. A little David Drake, but I’m not generally a fan of his fantasy stuff so I got rid of the Isles hardcovers.

No fantasy. That surprised the hell out of me.

Conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ brought all together. In the act of spending those chapters at the front being unremarkable, you lose me. Bore me.

Once she showed me the Lester Dent Seven Point Plot Structure (see my Business For Breakfast book on the topic), I just immediately gravitated in that direction. That was early and I never looked back.

Character, in a Setting, with a Problem. That’s the first five hundred words of your story, by the way, short or epic novel series. And in those first five hundred you should have only a sentence of problem, but that can be enough foreshadowing. (Pulse Pounders tend to start with a bang and a problem, and all of chapter one is a high octane race until you slow down a little later.)

Luke Skywalker is the hero of Star Wars and the two sequels. (R2D2 is the protagonist, by the way.) When we first meet him, George Lucas SPECIFICALLY made him a whiny punk, to show how later he grows up and becomes a hero. Go back and listen to his first line of dialog, and note the delivery. Now compare that to him tossing aside his light saber aside and mocking Palpitine at the end of Jedi.

How do you handle your mundane opening? How much time do you spend wallowing in nothingness before an actual story comes along?

One thing that writers often do until they learn better is to “slow walk to the story.” That’s where the editor looks at your manuscript and says, “Okay, and on page five we finally got to the plot.” Back in the Anthology Workshop days, that was a frequent refrain, but it taught people to hit their openings. When I took the Strengths Workshop, that was Dean’s advice. The practice was to start a story and stop writing at exactly five hundred words. Nothing more.

You had to have your character, your setting, and your problem there.

The way Dean teaches it, you have to grab hold of your reader by the throat on page one, and drag her to the bottom of the lake, never giving her any opportunity to escape you and surface, because if she gets away, she might not come back. Every break gives them a chance. Any time you “kick someone out of the story” by getting something wrong or telling things out of order, they might escape and not finish your story.

In the case of that long, detailed, mundanity of an opening, I might not ever make it deep enough into your story to actually discover that you had a plot. Like Dean, I’m always looking for a reason not to finish a story, unless it hooks me. I have better things to do with my time that settle for pedestrian fiction.

Lucas had you in Star Wars, even with Luke being a mopey teen, because he hooked you on page one with one of the greatest openings of all time. Tell me you didn’t shiver with excitement as the camera pans down into the middle of a space battle coming right past you at point blank range, followed by the battle in the corridors, followed by bad ass in black armor with a light saber in his hands walking through the smoke.

I rarely ever follow the classically-delineated Hero’s Journey opening because I start the story at the moment when something interesting is about to happen. I have four hundred of those first five hundred words to show the character and the setting being as normal as its going to get before all hell breaks loose. After that, you might slip away.

The same goes at the end, when people seem to want to have a dozen epilogues showing how everything returned to normal and lived happily ever after. I only ever use an afterthought like that to advance the story past the “ending” of the thing. Jessica Keller ended <<<SPOILER ALERT>>>with her decision to negotiate instead of burning the whole galaxy down.<<<SPOILER ALERT>>>

From there, I resolved the stories of many of the interesting characters, so that you got their happy-for-now moment, but also setting things up for other things to occur And each of those did not show a return to normalcy. They gave you some important bit of information about “how” things were resolving. (Hint: it never returns to normal.)

So when you look at your intended story, how much time have you spent noodling around and not actually telling me anything useful at the opening? How long does it take for the adventure to begin? How many dwarf Bollywood numbers are necessary BEFORE the plot occurs?

And how much more interesting would your story be if things happened on page one?

I Can Never Fail

Leave a reply

So Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I have the Anti-Stodgy Campaign, where each month we consciously try to do something new. Something fresh. Something we’ve never done before.

I will be the first to admit that it doesn’t always work out, but the whole point is the newness, not the potential improvements to efficiency. She and I got to talking the other day and I made the comment that “I can never fail.”

I need to break that down for the folks playing along at home. I can fail, but it doesn’t matter. Just this afternoon I poured a half-gallon of hooch down the drain because it just didn’t work out. Coffee intended for turning into wine, but it really just ended up being all the bitterness of coffee with the astringency of alcohol. Nothing worth pursuing, because we drink for the taste and wouldn’t go after that taste.

But the rum worked out and I’ll make it again. The coffee mead is still brewing, and hopefully that works. Again, not worried.

I cannot fail because I am not trying to succeed. Or rather, I measure success in the “trying something new” not in the outcome.

Recently, I got contacted by a musician who picked up on my usual comment that I wanted to be Bernie Taupin. He needed a lyricist and asked if I was interested in becoming his Bernie.

Well, hell, that sounds like fun. Never written lyrics, but I have written a lot of poetry in my time, so I’m used to breathing the words and finding the rhythm of the thing. So we met for coffee and hit it off. He’s a fun guy.

I went home and finished one of my instant expert research books on the shelf, related to writing musical lyrics. (I have a weird library these days.) I read the lyrics section and skipped the composition part because I cannot write music. And skipped the business part because the book is twenty years old, and so everything is likely badly out of date. But writing lyrics and score does not change, except to get easier as the tools evolve.

I wanted to experiment with lyrics. So I did.

In the last week, I’ve written lyrics to three songs. I have no idea if they are any good. I’ll let Elton take a look in a few days and pronounce his opinion. I trust that he’ll have useful opinions that I can turn around and use to make my writing better, because he’s been doing this for decades.

The best job review I ever got was broken down into “Do more of this. Keep doing this. Do less of this.” It was fantastic because I could work with that. (When I started dating again, his sage advice was “Be less you.” and I understood that. Didn’t need it in the end, because I found a woman who was enough of herself to handle me, but that also worked. Haven’t worked for him in 14 years and we still talk occasionally.)

So my approach to writing lyrics is that I cannot fail. I mean, hell, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Someone likes them enough to record the song and I hear it on the radio? Gosh.

I cannot fail, because I tried something new. Anything new. That was the success.

You can’t fail, if you intend to do new things and become a newer/better you. So go out and try some new hobby.

Personally, I try to keep a list of twelve things that I want to pursue at any given time. Then, on a regular basis (frequently June 1 and Dec 1), I chuck one or two out so I can try new things. Lyric writing replaced something else. Okay. If it works out, we’ve do more. If not, I’ll mark it down as a REALLY useful learning experience and move on.

I tried something new. I succeeded. When you try something new, you succeed.

In fact, for me, the only way to fail would be to just keep doing the same thing for the rest of my life. Eat the same food. Listen to the same five albums. Wear the same clothes.

Yuck.

Stodgy. Don’t do that.

Try.

That is the single most important lesson anyone ever taught me.

Strive.

What new thing have you done lately?

OryCon 2020

Leave a reply

I did a Con

OryCon has always been one of my favorites. For the last several years I have even been lucky enough to be on panels, talking about what it means to be a writer in the modern age.

OryCon is even moving into the present, however slowly and painfully. For the longest time, all of their writing track panels were aimed at how to get an agent and a book deal, in spite of the number of us making a living Indie. (Hell, the most recent rumblings from Industry Insiders suggest that traditional publishing, as it has been known, does not survive the pandemic, and that all the big houses will shake out and largely collapse into places where only the biggest names get book deals, but many of us are not surprised. Reach out direct if you have questions.)

This year, the con had to be online and way cut down. Instead of the old days where there was a filk room, a crafting room, a kids track, and maybe thirty rooms with panels going on at any given moment, that was reduced in the end to three channels. And all online.

So Friday, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had her first panel at 1pm. It went well. She and I were on a second panel together at 2pm, with the ever-wonderful Josh Vogt, discussing “Creating Your Own Anthologies, Bundles, and Magazines.” It was the usual talk about vellum, BookBrush.com, and BundleRabbit, and how those allow the Babe and I to put out twelve anthologies a year (although we’re cutting that down some in 2022, depending on how things go). The world has changed, and you really can do it these days, and on the relatively cheap, as well.

After that, she was done until Sunday, but I had two more.

I went straight into “Can You Really Carry That?” with Guest of Honor A. Lee Martinez and podcaster Remy Lerner. That was a hoot, talking about armor in fantasy versus literature and role-playing games. How much is too much for encumbrance, and how the hell do you really loot that many gold coins from a dead dragon?

Finally (and we’re talking three hours in a row here) “Do I Really Need an Editor?” with EM Prazeman and Joyce Reynolds-Ward. I’ve known both ladies for many years, so we had a fun, wide-ranging talk about all aspects of the things that happen AFTER you have finished your manuscript. Why you should learn to write clean first drafts. What are the various kinds of editor you might hire. Why the editor you get recommended might not work out, which turned into a discussion of Voice, both the character and the writer.

I’m sorry that I didn’t get to do “Military Rank Structures and their Functionality” because I would have taken that shit entirely sideways. Anyone who has read my science fiction understands that I put a lot of time and research into military ranks, trying to make them completely original and more than just the exact same thing everyone else does based on how the US Army worked from 1990-2005.

At that, I had been “On” for three hours, sitting in Vintage Coffee in Maple Valley, WA. That’s the closest non-corporate spot, and I needed to use somebody else’s wifi for that many hours of heavy lifting. Even wore my mask for the first two, but after that the place emptied out and I was a little more confident without my mask on. Not entirely, because Washington State goes into mandatory lockdown tomorrow, but the numbers in my immediate zip codes haven’t been too bad. (I expect that to change.)

I went home and crashed: emotionally, mentally, physically. This introvert had had enough.

But for the whole Con being online, it went well. Each panel had a monitor who’s job was to kick out jackasses who couldn’t behave, and I only had one of those. Mar got rid of her quickly and the rest of the day went well.

The think I did miss was being able to just hang out with folks I only see as con buddies. At least these days I have social media, so I can stay in touch, but not everyone does that, so there are folks I only see at OryCon. Those are the ones I look forward to seeing. We used to do a massive group breakfast, in the old days, when we could reserve a table for a dozen folks, and then get twenty as people came and went over the course of a morning.

That’s how you build good friendships, sitting around and arguing politics and nerdiness with people you like and respect. Didn’t get that this year. Hoping that by this time next year, COVID has turned into a seasonal flu kind of thing, with a vaccine you can get that works and keeps most people from catching it.

The problem has always been that a spike fills the ICU beds at the hospital, and then anyone who comes along with ANYTHING is out of luck. So being at home and zooming in from a coffee shop is a price I find worth paying.

Hopefully the folks who attended the con had fun. I’ve already gotten a new Patreon patron from it, so that was wonderful.

With any luck, the world is coming back to something like normal, but that won’t be until February, based on the math of the current pandemic, so everyone be careful out there, because I need you supporting my lifestyle.

The Living Room Test

Leave a reply

I’m tired. Fortunately, I took an entire day to sleep and recover before I wrote this blog post, so you can just imagine what it would have sounded like yesterday.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Living Room Test. This is the era of social media. It might change later, but right now a great many people exist in a virtual convention center where they can run into various people and talk to them from the safe confines of distance.

You get the facade of being personal, without actually being close enough to someone for them to turn and punch you in the face for mouthing off.

I myself have a great many friends whom I have never met IRL, but know tremendous details about them, their career, and even their lives, because of what they have shared in the interwebs. However, if I have never met someone in person, I always have a thread of restraint about what I say when interacting with them.

Before you say it on the social medias, ask yourself: “Would you say it in their living room?”

This is a variant of the old, “Is it nice?” question. Would you come to my house as part of a cocktail party and say such things, expecting me to do nothing about it? If you were raised with any manners whatsoever, chances are you wouldn’t say those sorts of things to me or anyone else.

Other folks might throw you out of a party for saying those things to their face. I’m more likely to drag your unconscious body out to the curb and dump it there after punching you. Repeatedly. In the face. Until my point has been made. And you might require a significant amount of convincing.

I’ve used curbstomp as a verb this week.

I’m tired of people lacking the basic humanity and decency to remain polite to relative strangers on the internet. I can probably name all my my social media friends who have ever actually been in my living room, but I don’t entertain all that often, and usually only friends who are first and second circle.

I don’t come into your living room and talk shit. Or take a shit on the carpet. You should probably consider that same decency when you go to visit folks you only sort of know.

The Social Medias give you a false sense of security because I can’t punch you. It’s like when you are so drunk that you feel bulletproof.

So I’m tired. I have run out of fucks to give. People are no longer going to get any warning.

Up until now, I’ve mostly just unfollowed folks when I felt like they had maybe a radically different political view from me, but were IRL friends going back a ways. I will accept friend requests from strangers who meet a fairly stringent test of me going through their timeline and seeing what they share. How old is the account? What pictures are there? Do things pass a sniff test (has the account been abandoned and then hacked, like the 60-year-old male Thai banker named Jennifer?)?

If you can’t even behave that little bit, I’m just going to unfriend you and block you. There will be no warning. No confrontation. Nothing.

I’m just tired of you being an asshole on the internet and I don’t have to put up with it from anyone.

If you are IRL friend, I’ll even snooze you 30 days first once, but after that, I’ll unfollow the people I expect to see next year (and I’ve done that this week) and unfriend/block the rest of you.

If you can’t say something nice, shut the fuck up. Simple as that.

Wil Wheaton’s Rule: “Don’t be a dick.”

You aren’t funny. Nobody else might be willing to tell you that, but when I chuck your ass out the airlock, understand what I’m telling you.

I don’t care if you later turn over a new leaf, sober up, and become a nicer person. I’m done with you. Because you should have been an adult in the first place and that was too much.

So you can fuck off. I value my other friends more than your opinion of yourself, and I don’t want them judging me just because you have no manners and snuck in the door when nobody was checking credentials.

And with that, I will bid you good day.

More summer weirdness

Leave a reply

So I’ll go into greater detail in the newsletter coming tomorrow, but I had a summer cold last week. (Just a cold, with a lot of panic.) Lost two days of brainless sitting on the couch. Way behind on word count and not really feeling the need to make it up because eventually I have to break my streaks, so I might as well let it happen now and be done with it.

But this week I have a fantastic guy out restaining the interior and exterior of the house. So the place is torn apart and everything covered with plastic. Sleeping over with Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) for now. Gotta stay around the house, in case the painter guy needs anything, so I’ve basically just written on the back porch for three days.

Had to put the Lazarus novel aside, because it is in a bright and exciting phase of the arc and I’m so not there. Partly, summer. Partly, overt fascism as certain elements of society decide that they would rather burn it all down than be arrested for their crimes. (And they are crimes. I hope that people get extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes when this is all done. That’s the scale of evil we’re facing.)

But I’m a writer, so I write. That meant two new Gunderson stories in the last three days (SF Private Detective set in 1955) because those are dark, plus a quick short on one of my other projects. Last night, was sitting down counting and realized that I had written 20,000 words in those three days.

My normal pace lately had been 4,000/day. I was running 7,000 this week. Shit.

Instead of being completely off pace from being sick, I had actually managed to catch up, to the point that I think I needed to write 4300 words today to zero my counter out.

At this moment, I’m not sure if I will, or if I will consciously push back and goof off instead. Last December, I wrote a novella because I had written all the novels I was going for in 2019. Just cut the story down enough that it came in at 18,000 when I could have EASILY pushed it to 40,000.

And at the very end of the year, I was at 1,394,500 words. Over that last week I could have pushed and hit 1.4M. Really didn’t want to. Might just hit it this year, if I stay on pace. Dunno. Not today’s problem.

Streaks are good, but I don’t live or die by them. As I have explained to many people, the only person I am competing with is Death. She’ll come for me long before I run out of stories to tell and things to say, but if I write more, I can get more done.

The goal at the beginning of the year was 14 novels and 40 short stories.

Then 2020 happened.

I have 6.8 novels complete right now (Lazarus 5 is 40,000 of about 55,000 when I stopped). I have also written 31 short stories. Through July. Fortunately, if I combine some of those shorts into a single volume as a “novel-sized collection” then I have three more novels done so far this year.

But it has been a 2020. I’m fine with not hitting my original goals. I have had to put aside several projects because my mind was not in the right place for them. Gunderson was there for me instead, when I wanted/needed to tell gritty, dark, hard-boiled private detective stuff. And of course it is science fiction, because that’s what I do, so you have Godzilla, aliens, Cthulhu, spandex, and Medusa as themes/styles. Because I can.

But they are dark. Hard-boiled falls on a spectrum, with Cozy mystery at one end and horror/noir at the other, depending on how much blood and violence you have, plus how corrupt everyone else around the PI is. Gunderson lets me dive into some of those dark corners and tell stories that are likely to make some of you uncomfortable.

I’ll get back to Lazarus soon. 1-4 are at first readers right now and coming out Jan+. I have time to write the rest of 5 and then cap it off with 6.

But first, I really needed some darkness to match my summer and my soul.

Ugly Summers

Leave a reply

I’ve had a cold for the last several days. (Only a cold. Been paying attention to symptoms.) Haven’t gotten hardly any writing done, because there just wasn’t brain there. Decided that July was going to be a month I broke my daily average streak, just so that I didn’t have it lingering over me. Still going to make 100,000 this month, but not 120,000. That’s okay. Spent Thu/Fri looking at coming books and art books, just kinda refilling the brain with creative juices.

Another thing I’ve found is that the crap going on out there is finally starting to get me down. Angry, as opposed to depressed, but I had a chat with Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) this morning that I might have to put the current novel aside for a bit and write other things. I’m deep into the fifth Lazarus, and getting ready to wrap this one up and head into #6, which will culminate the series.

Except that these tend to be brighter and cheerier than I feel right now. One man fighting against a corrupt system, but he’s to a point where you’re starting to see the momentum swing his way.

I don’t see that when I watch the news. I see echoes of Augusto Pinochet and his thugs taking to the streets with truncheons and tear gas. I saw a picture of a water-cannon bulldozer heading north to either hit Portland or Seattle shortly. I see a small fragment of this country that are calling for troops to just start shooting protesters in the streets. (Finally lost one of my oldest friends over this. That was his solution. I can’t help you if you have decided to actively worship evil.)

On the other hand, I have a couple of short story series I’ve been working on that do fit my mood. Dark. Ugly. Not horror, but bad. Hard-boiled Private Detective stuff, set in the mid-1950s where all the science fiction you see in the movies was real, and he has to deal with it. Just finished one with Cthulhu overtones. Got more in mind.

I can’t really write about heroes overcoming the obstacles until the world changes. 2020 was always going to be an ugly place. Anyone who knows me has heard me talking about it since the late 1980s, after studying Kondratiev and Long Cycles. Mix that in with the Boomer generation starting to die off, after dominating US culture for fifty years. They don’t want to surrender power, and many appear to be willing to burn the whole damned country down rather than admit that they are done.

So I’m writing dark stuff right now.

This blog post is for the rest of you. I understand why I’m having issues and how to solve it, but y’all need to realize that you can do the same. If you are not happy, you can’t write happy. If you are angry, maybe you need to put everything to the side for now and paint. Or knit. Or write horror. (Those of you who write horror maybe need to write something bright and cheery as a mental break.)

This whole nasty year will not be getting better for a while. Possibly for a long time, depending. People talk about civil wars, and we’re closer now than we’ve been in nearly a century.

Take care of yourself. And drink a lot of water. You’ve still got things left to say.

SeekerStar

Leave a reply

Hopefully, everyone enjoyed WinterStar. Just sent the final manuscript for MorningStar to the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) last night and I believe it is in the publishing process everywhere as we speak.

In between, you got some time.

  1. WinterStar
  2. SeekerStar
  3. SeptStar
  4. SwiftStar
  5. MorningStar

SeekerStar comes out this weekend (technically Mother’s Day so maybe you need to get Mom hooked on some awesome space opera with something other than your NW Euromale protagonists. Next month, we’ll talk about Hammerhead Sharks, so stay tuned.)

I’ve been consciously working in writing fiction that doesn’t follow the standard white northwest European male archetypes, because you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when someone it sticking it to the Man. Right now, that’s literary publishing. Technically, there are only two Anglos in the entire series, both of who are largely walk-on parts.

In this series, Daniel largely sacrifices his agency at the beginning of WinterStar, and then works hard at not doing things, because he had the power to alter the universe. And a fear of turning to evil, because NOBODY can stop him.

Agency and evil are my themes here, because in my sordid and semi-troubled youth I embraced evil.

I know people say that, but most of them just dye their hair and act tough. I actually destroyed people. Emotionally. Psychologically. Not anything I’m particularly proud of, other than to say it was necessary in one case, because someone I knew was using her power for even more chaotic evil purposes. So I rendered her harmless. What happened after that was her choice, but she’s gone now and the world ended up a better place.

So “I understand evil, Mistress. I’ve been evil.”

Daniel has the power to do anything he wants to the people around him. And he chooses to hand his agency over to someone else (Kathra, Erin, Ndidi, Iruoma) that he believes they will do better with it, because nobody but him can wield the power, but everyone else will do bad things with it.

The series, like most, is about family of choice over family of birth. Blood is thicker than water, after all, if you understand what that phrase really means. It’s also about power and evil.

There’s a good stretch in the middle where it also talks about depression, because I went through a (thankfully-rare-and-relatively-short) depressive stretch when I was writing it, so Daniel could talk about things.

It was cathartic. It was good.

I’m pleased with the arc of the series. I’m a better storyteller now than I was several years ago, so I can tell more complicated stories, with more shaded characters, and still keep it interesting and rush you through the book. My brother in law bitches that he sits down to read “just one more chapter” and suddenly it’s two in the morning.

That’s good.

You should preorder SeekerStar to see how things unfold now that the Sept have decided to do something about Daniel, Kathra, and the Star Turtle. You won’t believe where it goes.

🙂

Quarantined: Week One

Leave a reply

So many of you know that Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) came down with symptoms last Saturday. Not bad. The week turned into a very mild case of the yucks as I made her stay over here in the main house with me (kitty was a little disgruntled) and stay on the couch all day, frequently napping (kitty liked that part).

She’s already over it and generally on the mend at this point, such that she was able to go on short walks the last few days, when her fitbit told her to get up and move. Each day, she’s a little better, but I remind her not to push.

So that’s the lovely news.

I’m still asymptomatic, but assuming that I’m a carrier of some sort, so I’m generally confined to the farm. Have made masks for both of us, but safer not going anywhere.

And lemme tell you, not being able to go down to my favorite restaurant for Sunday breakfast sucks. The ladies even offered to just put a box out for me and not charge me anything, because I’ve been so effective at advertising for them as they run Fri-Sun take out only.

But I don’t want anyone else getting sick. Bad juju.

So now it is Saturday night. Had a nice week, banging away at the new novel. It will be MUCH longer than any of the rest, at least as far as I can tell right now, with a general target length of about 150-175k words. And this is a book one, but I have no idea how long the series goes. My notes only have three titles, but the end of three is not necessarily an ending, and this universe is my largest and most complicated yet. (And yes, if you tack a zero onto the end of all of Alexandria Station, you might see what I see. Not for word count, but for scale of the things I have had to invent, the cultures I’ve had to understand, and the technology that drives things so far beyond previous projects.)

Having fun, and it will keep me busy all of April and part of May.

But I’m also extremely lucky, in that I work from home already, for her. I can’t get laid off. I can’t lose health insurance suddenly. My days don’t really change, except that I tend to sleep later when she’s over here. (Body wakes me at 630 sharp when I’m sleeping alone.)

I’d like to say quarantine isn’t much of a change in my lifestyle, but I can’t just pop into town for groceries. Can’t just run down to Krain Corner for breakfast (grumble). Make my own coffee.

Still get up every morning, take a shower, and fix breakfast. Kitty has been over here, so I feed her while Babe does yoga, then fix myself breakfast. Check the news and the social.

Then write.

At one point, I wondered if I could/should push my daily speed up another notch. The general rule for 2019 was 100,000 words per day. Have been on that pace since June 2018 and held it. For the last several months, I’ve pushed just a little.

Now the goal is to maintain 4,000 words/day over the course of a full month. Managed it in Feb and March. On pace to do it in April. Wonder if I can sustain that newer level for a year. That would be the difference between Pulp Speed 2 and Pulp 3, which is kinda awesome to contemplate, as I’d be running 120,000/month as a rule. I can do that when I write longer projects. Longer short stories, because I don’t have to hit a particular word count by cutting key bits out. Novels as long as I can keep me and reader both entertained, which is usually the challenge.

Mixing up short fiction and long every month, because the goal is 40 shorts and 14 novels this year.

Having fun and making a living at it.

It hurts, watching my various friends have to deal with the day job coming unhinged on them. Or just ending suddenly. The stress is killing the art for a lot of them, and that’s usually the thing that brings them joy, so now it is a double load.

Been trying to do my part by reaching out to folks I know but maybe don’t talk to all that often, and just checking in. Saying hi and seeing if they need a friend. I’d recommend all of you give it a try, as it really does help provide that personal touch.

Plus, there are ways you can help, if your finances are stable. I belong to a facebook group centered on Enumclaw/Buckley, WA that collects cash donations from the group and then each day selects some local small business and buys gift cards in the amount. Good, old fashioned socialism keeping folks afloat, and keeping communities together. It does my pinko heart good to see people helping each other.

So help if you can, but don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it.

You’ve got a lot of friends, some of them people you didn’t even realize.

🙂

Pacing

Leave a reply

I’m working on a new novel. I know, shocked, SHOCKED to hear there is gambling going on in this establishment. (#48, for those of you keeping score at home.)

The definition of a novel is fluid, and depends on who you ask. Some consider it as low as 30,000 words. Others range up to 60,000. I use the Hugo Awards definition, because I primarily write science fiction. (Not that I can ever see myself getting nominated for a Hugo, unless someone pulls a Chuck Tingle on me. I’m old, white, nominally-cis, and Euro. But weirder shit has happened.)

So, forty thousand words. The first novel I ever wrote was Imposters, and it was a novella where I added enough bits of story to push it above 40. I’d written a lot of novellas and shorter before that, so I just really had to add a single extra story arc to the thread and I was good. The second novel was Auberon, although it came out first for technical reasons. I’m way better at my craft today than I was then. Just reading from Auberon to Petron will show you that, but there are several million words written between those two books.

So my novels fall into a handful of categories.

Forty-five thousand words is enough to tell a full story, but you have to keep it tight, fast, and action-packed, or you start meandering into slush and dullness. I have a number of those because it forces you to up your craft and focus on just the parts of the story that matter, leaving out all the sidequests that do not advance story.

For me, the next cluster runs around sixty-five thousand, plus or minus. Same action-packed, but now I can add a second main character and give them a full story line to themselves. WinterStar is like that, with both Daniel and Kathra having equal parts of the story. Kathra fades some as the main second character later in the series, but that’s because other characters rise and each get their time in the sun. Ndidi, Ife, and A’Alhakoth all factor largely in later novels, plus the two villains get to chew scenery.

Above sixty-five, right now, you have Jessica. Auberon is the shortest at 78,000 words and they creep up from there as my craft got better. The last four all clock in around 135,000 words.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles are all generally fast-paced action space opera, with enormous casts of characters so big I had to include a list at the front of every one, with clues you could discern before reading, if you were sharp.

Those long novels pace just like the shorter ones though. They just happen to tell 2-3 times as much story. Epic Space Opera requires that.

But this week, I started a new project. I first had the idea in about 2016 or so but I wasn’t good enough at my craft to even consider writing it, because the scope of world-building was enormous. Each of them felt to be 175,000 words in my head then. Still do. Large enough casts, but big personalities. Big problems. Epic, cataclysmic clashes even greater than Winterhome, Petron, or the Star Tribes books. And even the Star Dragon introduces actual gods at the end.

I’m going beyond that here. Not in scope, because how do you top a story about conquering the entire galaxy and everyone in it?

No, here, I’m taking a different approach to the storytelling itself.

I have a Triumvir of heroes, each of them flawed in their own way but striving. I have a megalomaniac who doesn’t see himself as the villain at this point, fighting his own war against the galactic overlords. I have an alien species of conquerors who take me back to the old D&D days.

In the way back, Half-Ogres were drawn as huge, disgusting slobs of fat and anger. Which was how they were described.

However, when they published stats for them, one set listed them as a playable race at 7’6 and 350 pounds. Shaquile O’Neil, in his playing days, was 7’2 and about 300. That sort of description is just Shaq’s bigger brother. And he was a world class athlete, as long as he wasn’t shooting free throws.

So my uber villains run from 8-10 feet tall. 400-600 pounds. Short, broad versions of Nordic giants, if you will, because given the physical stats, half-ogre just implied to me quarter-stone-giant.

Blue, with red to white hair, because I could. Muscular, because I wanted them to be physically imposing. Mean SOBs.

But pacing is the key. I’m 13,500 words in right now. Nine chapters, which have introduced each of the four main players, and each of the problems those four will have to overcome by the end. Characters, in a setting, with problems.

I haven’t even really gotten to the try/fail loops. Just world-building on paper, trying to micro-setting a sentence at a time as part of opinion and observation. Problems, conflicts, and the beginnings of a whole raft of triple-crosses, because all of the heroes are flawed in their own way, and malice and misunderstanding is everywhere.

Writer-brain keeps going back to a pace Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) suggested we call Epic. Not exactly slow, but I’m also not starting with a bang like a pulse pounder here. I have a HUGE sandbox into which to cast story, rather than trying to keep it fast and tight. I can wander, but at the same time, writer-brain wants tightness, because I have a lot of story to tell.

Right now, it might just be a trilogy. Dunno. Three big stories to tell. which will combine over 400,00 words, and I might have something even bigger, because of the way the universe open-ends at key places. There are other stories that could be told, if I want to pursue them. Other lost races and forgotten technology to consider.

Dunno.

But for me, this project is all about practicing pacing. With each novel or story, I am trying to practice some aspect of craft. Depth. Voice. Visualization. Emotional manipulation. Something.

Pacing right now.

And I’m having a ball. How about you?