About a decade ago, I worked at a company that used mind mapping software (don’t remember which one, but I loved it at the time). When the company went away, I could no longer find anything at a reasonable price, because the licenses were all expensive and annual.

Got out of the habit of mind mapping.

Fast forward to 2021. I have a new laptop that I am breaking in. Xubuntu 20 atop a Wintel Core I3. Cheap, but good enough because I was installing my own OS.

For those of you who have never installed Linux on a laptop, it can be a right pain in the ass. The thing that used to be BIOS goes by another name now, and most major hardware manufacturers lock it down hard. I presume Microsoft is paying them a lot of money for this.

Eventually, I found all the places I needed to unlock. (There are TWO of them today. I expect 3-4 by the next time I do this). Got the OS installed, and then brought everything up to stable tips. Usually a wise idea with Linux. Not the bleeding edge, but most of the security fixes.

Then I went looking for things to install that are not part of the Core Distro.

As part of my wandering around, I found FreeMind for Linux. Installed it and then forgot about it for a month. Because I’m like that.

Tonight, I stumbled across the icon and decided it was time to open and try to use.

Kinda like riding a bicycle, but it took me about an hour to suddenly remember why I loved mind mapping in the first place.

Start with a central node. Give it a name that indicates what the hell you think you’ll be doing. Add subs off that. And that. And that.

About the fourth map I opened, I called it “Unpublished Fiction” and started organizing things. I recently put the first seven Beyond the Mirror Collections up on my store for $0.99 to see if they would sell. That’s part of what triggered this, looking at all the short stuff I have written over the last two years and deciding that some of it needed to come out.

I’ve had stories in Boundary Shock Quarterly that never saw the light of day elsewhere. There have been four Blaze Ward Presents so far. That alone is 20 stories right now.

Then I began brain dumping on electronic white boards. I love mind mapping because I can just node things as I need. And open new maps if one grows so big that I need to take it as a thing, instead of part of something else.

I have a lot of things to send out into the world. More than I was really processing. I asked Fabulous Publisher Babe™ if she wanted me to use a template, or just build the next three volumes of Beyond The Mirror (8-10 at this point, all science fiction). I might need four, once I start the process of organizing for publication. That’s a lot of stuff.

My Patreon (patreon.com/blazeward) fans have read some of it. If you read Boundary Shock, you’ll see some.

A bunch of it hasn’t ever seen the light of day. Mostly because I wanted to get that far ahead in 2020, before any of us knew what the year would look like. My goal was 36 short stories. I wrote 50.

Some of it is even for sale on the store right now, just because.

We live in a strange future. I can write it, wrap it up, and publish it, without ever asking permission of some twit in New York City. If it sells, I get to keep all the money.

It took a mind map to make me really visualize how much stuff I needed to get out. You’ll get it cheap in the collections, because otherwise I would sell it for 0.99 each. Here I can curate stuff for cheaper and call it good. Maybe push it out to the major distributors. Maybe not.

It you are a visual thinker like me, you owe it to yourself to look into mind maps. Yell if you need a quick primer. I am not an audio learner. I knew that in college, where I took complicated hieroglyphics for notes. Worse, my mom and I would take at least one class a semester together (usually upper level philosophy courses), and she would borrow my notes, study them, and then take tests. Took her a while, because I would write whole paragraphs on the fly without vowels, because I was in a hurry and we didn’t have laptops in the classroom in those terrible old days. (I was nerdy early, but still didn’t have a laptop until the early 90s.)

Mind map, if you can. I remember how well I stayed organized in those days, because it went onto a map, and then got moved around as I dealt with it, handed it off to the person who would deal with it, and then checked it off lists. (The joys of middle management, when you work with a pair of literal geniuses as peers, when your Director expects you to translate them into English occasionally.)

Expect new fiction soon. Expect more gushing about mind mapping. I have found a tool I lost a decade ago and forgot how much I loved it. Spent the last decade using Notepad++ as a poor substitute. Still have a document I first opened in 2011 that I use on a daily basis, if that gives you any ideas.

Y’all have fun. It’s snowing around here, having been 50F six hours ago.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of The Mountains, WA

I wrote a blog post yesterday, but realized as soon as I started that I was too angry to publish it.

Yesterday was the American Inauguration, and the end of the Trump Presidency. The third Wednesday in January of 2021, when the first one was an attempted coup and the second one was the impeachment for the first one.

I am not looking forward to next week.

But I also went ahead and posted it. Sort of. People wanted to read my vaguebooking, so I put it up on a download site with an expiration at the end of this month. Wasn’t expecting the number of folks to read and comment. Nor the support.

Couldn’t post it on FB. They would have read the inflammatory language and given me at least a 30-day vacation. Maybe longer. Didn’t want to post it to my wall back home, because that feeds out to Amazon, Goodreads, and other places eventually. Too public.

As a writer, I have to self-censor to some extent. Doubly so when I write in a category of genre (mostly space opera science fiction) where a good chunk of my readers are frequently to the right of me. Sometimes a ways to the right, but that’s me shifting leftward a little over the last thirty years as the Overton Window moved into deep right field.

I am a whore. We all are, at the end of the day, because we have to cash a paycheck dependent on someone else. Most of you work for some company that might fire you for your politics, if they could. I don’t have that sort of a boss. (I married mine and kind of slept my way to the top, but that’s an entirely different joke.)

Instead, I have fans. My job is to entertain them, first and foremost. To provide them stories that encourage them to keep coming back with money for me to sustain my lifestyle. Past that, I try to make them think. My stories are not generally running on rails, at least compared to most.

Or if they do, I try to have interesting and different characters trying to solve their problems. (And no Chosen One stories. I hate those, because the gods are always assholes.)

But you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when somewhere, somebody is sticking it to the Man. That’s my politics. The Underdog fighting the bully.

Others bring different things to the table. That’s why fiction is so much fun and you can always find something to read, because we are all different.

But I was angry yesterday. And I bled it all out on paper. More than one person noted the visceral feelings I inspired, but I warned everyone ahead of time and made them jump through a few hoops to read it, so only my friends (and deeply committed deep-cover enemies, of which I probably still have a few) would read it.

Because I don’t want to alienate everyone. Sure, I have air-locked a couple of former fans over the years, but the guy who defends his right to wear his Klan hood to the grocery store as a political statement on wearing masks against COVID was just an asshole.

Better, he told me that he couldn’t be racist because he was born “white trash.” His words. Can’t argue with someone like that. (You can imagine how he voted in 2020, can’t you?) Hell, I’m pretty sure he bought one entire series of my novels after that (at full price) just so he could leave 2-star reviews on them. Somebody did.

You have to be deeply committed to your particular insanity to “show someone” like that when they throw you out of the party.

And I don’t do it often, but Confederate Apologists are bullies. And if you have read ANY of my stories, you know how I feel about bullies. The only fights I got into in grade school involved me stopping bullies from picking on other people. Including the time I beat up my best friend. (At the time, anyway. That went south quickly.)

So I write. And not all of it can be published. Shit happens. I’ll even share some of it, but right now my contribution to a more polite society doesn’t involve punching people in the face. Or rather, not punching some people in the face is my contribution to a more polite society, because they frequently deserve it.

We have reached an age where bullies are emboldened to abuse people. This is a problem because structural racism still lingers in this country. The BLM protests last summer and how they were handled, compared to the Capital Insurrection two weeks ago, tells you all you need to know about the police power structure in this country.

That’s part of why I write Science Fiction, because otherwise, I would have very strong opinions about the modern age and what’s wrong with it. We are corrupt, as a nation and as a society. We can fix it, but a lot of people profit from it and don’t want to give up their perks. Others would rather die or go to jail than allow the rest of humanity equality under the law.

And mind you, this is me much calmer today, so you can imagine what yesterday sounded like.

What contortions have you been forced into, in order to not be fully ostracized? I can list mine, but we’d be here all day.

I will suggest that if your friends make you do those things, you have the wrong friends. If your job drives you that crazy, it might be time to find a better place to work.

Change is coming, so things might get better. I don’t want to go back to what we had two years ago, because that was flawed and broken. I want something better. I want a world where nobody is hungry, or cold, or alone.

In science fiction, sometime I can even show you what that looks like.

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 12^th 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?

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.