Category: writing

Though my work schedule has been tight, aggravated by winter weather delays, I’ve found a little time to work on the follow-up to Cordell’s Rebellion. There are only a couple of scenes to complete and the first draft will be done. The excitement is building.

The notes and outlines for the remaining scenes have been written for some time. The current work is to put them into a narrative format. The notes for the final scene are so extensive that it is almost ready to paste in as though complete. With these scenes finished, then the next steps begin.

Mapping and Checking

With the first draft finished, my next steps have to do with maps, charts, and lists. I will map out the dates and places to make sure they make sense and that there aren’t any continuity issues. I will also map out any character arcs with the scenes. This makes sure the waypoints on the character’s personal journey are spread evenly and that there aren’t any magic jumps or back-tracks.

This is also the point where I make sure the names are consistent. Not just character names, but I will list out places, streets, and anything else that has a name. It’s also a good time to verify that I didn’t subconsciously appropriate a name from some other author or from history. I’ve already caught myself switching between “Harv” and “Herb” for one character and picking the name of an actor for another. I will also look for characters whose names are too similar to each other since that can confuse some readers.

Second Draft

Once all the mapping is complete, I can dig into the second draft to make all the needed changes. In this version, I will fix any issues revealed in the mapping phase. I will also work on the language, attempting to make everything concise while carrying more emotive and physical information.

I will also read much of the material aloud to make sure it flows well. In some cases, I may print a copy and mark the meter much like you would a poem. This becomes important in scenes with faster action. A slow-metered sentence or two in a fast paced scene can ruin the scene. On the other hand, too much speed can really throw off suspense.

The word search feature of the software is a great way to find the word “had”. Like many midwesterners, I use “had” far too often. It shows up in my writing and must make a conscious effort to avoid it. Many instances of that word can be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence. Of course, if it shows up in the speech of a character, it may need to stay just to flesh out their manner of communication.

After That

After the second draft, I can hand it over to my editing gurus and bribe them to give it the once over. That should, and I mean should, be the end of it. A little polishing here or there and it will be ready for the press.

The feedback on my last cover was neither positive or negative, but I really prefer positive. A graphic artist friend has shown preliminary drawings for the new book and things will go well there. She will get paid and get to add a book cover to her portfolio. It’s a benefit to both of us. If things go right, she may be able to help with the third book as well (I have notes for seven books in this series).

I just have to maintain the momentum and get all of this done. I also need to work on the promotion side a little more. That’s a different story.

One of the problems of print-on-demand publishing is that you don’t get all the support that comes with a publisher-driven launch. Even though my novel is through the Barnes and Noble Press, I’m still responsible for the initial promotion. That made it more exciting when I got my first customer review on the Barnes and Noble website.

The anonymous reviewer gave my book five stars and described it as “Not a typical storyline pick for me…” This illustrates some of the difficulties I’ve had getting people interested in my novel. It is difficult to put it into a category but still has some nice pieces (so I think). Telling people, “This is different from what you like to read but you should give it a chance,” just doesn’t motivate them.

Because the reviewer was anonymous, I’m not sure how much weight to give it. Was it one of my friends? Was it a relative? On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago I sent out a bunch of gratis copies to the Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (those in the continental United States) because their church inspired some of the characters in one of the subplots. Could one of these copies have resulted in the review?

Either way, I’m a bit giddy about seeing the review. It’s an awesome thing. Now I just need a few thousand more, preferably accompanied by actual sales.

As part of my writing, and because I’m a data person, I always wonder about the structure of language. In grad school I had to write a simple search engine (similar to Google) and learned about taking documents apart and determining word frequencies. Just recently, though, I learned about a neat concept called Zipf’s Law and how it relates to, among other things, word distribution in both written works and entire languages.

For reference, I got hooked on this idea based on two YouTube videos:

How Some Words Get Forgetted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFW7orQsBuo

The Zipf Mysteryhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

For the most part, this is just a curiosity for me. I’m not planning to change my writing based on the statistical characteristics. Where I thought this would be most useful is in world building when there are new or evolved languages.

I have a world I have been building since high school. I’ve worked on it extensively, creating great detail for about a thousand years of its history. Where the great Professor Tolkien built his world to work with languages, my world was built to play with the spread and change of religious beliefs. Later, I looked into the economics of the world as well.

One of the things that I wondered about as a background sort of thing, was the changes of the languages. The world starts out as our current world after a severe cataclysm (an extremely unoriginal idea). Different peoples meet and their languages have to blend and then change over the thousand years. I understood that the culture of these people would determine which words were important and which were common, daily words.

The concepts in these two videos, and subsequent readings, made me start wondering about the word distributions of my peoples. For example, most of the thousand years involved an ongoing war in one region. How many of their most common words would have to do with conflict and defense, as opposed to simple food production? How would these distributions compare with the distributions of people on the other side of the continent where war was less of an issue?

Honestly, I probably will not go through the trouble to develop the languages of these people for my writing. The stories would be written in my Iowan English anyway, so at most I would just pick a few terms to translate for color. Even so, I may want to consider how the characters phrase certain ideas to reflect their underlying language.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the website of a writers’ group to which I used to belong (from 1996 to about 2007). They still seem to be meeting, but one detail surprised me. They no longer critique poetry in the group. I know good reasons why that is not good.

Many people don’t care for most poetry. Most modern poetry annoys me; I consider it whiny, humanist drivel and most of it fits into the category of “trying too hard”. Many of of the free verse poets I’ve encountered were only doing free verse because they did not have the skill or work ethic to do structured poetry, so the lack of form was a cop out from doing the work.

Those problems with poetry are why more people should write poetry and should get a thorough critique from writers who are not “poetry people”. Good poetry does take a lot of work; it is an exercise of words, images, and meter.

Compare writing formal poetic structures with weight lifting for football players. At no time during football does a player lay on a bench to raise and lower a weighted bar, but every football player engages in that activity as part of the training. Weightlifting makes the player stronger. Writing structured poetry makes a writer stronger.

Writing is a form of communication. Poetry must also be thought of this way. The poet puts words to paper to communicate an idea to the reader. Whether structured or free verse, the reader must be able to receive the message without the poet being present.

This is where the group critique helps. In an effective writers’ group, the author being critiqued listens, possibly taking notes, but never speaking. The other members discuss the work as though the author is absent, referring to the author in third person or just as “the author”. Doing this helps the group members speak more freely and prevents the urge for the author to defend the work. The author sees exactly which parts of the message were received by the readers and, hopefully, understands which parts were missed.

By reviewing the critique, the author/poet can revise the work to make their message more clear. With experience, the author builds a talent for communication so their audience will miss less of the message.

Again, poetry can be a bit abstract, or just flaky, and a good critique from friendly but honest group members can really help. For someone serious about their poetry, this is invaluable. They can develop beyond “why does life have to suck so much?” dirges to poignant little descriptions of the beauty of aggregate in sidewalk composed of clever but simple words. On the other hand, if the poet just wants to identify as poet to inflict their nonsense on others, a couple of good critiques may discourage them.

If you have a group, I hope you will critique poetry. Whether you have a group or not, I hope you will experiment with poetry. Just so you know such things exist, I hope you find one of the truly awesome poems by a great poet and that the poem has an effect on you.

I am starting to see a pattern. Fall of 2017 was almost as bad. In my day job, I teach software development and databases. This fall, one of my courses, the technology changed while I was teaching it. All of my preparations, my examples and so forth were invalid. This really cut into my writing time.

As I struggle to get back to my passions, I find a barrier. It is as though the busy beavers of my day-to-day have built a dam of daily responsibilities and mundane tasks. The creative flow, now blocked, built up behind it, building pressure at the same time.

Now I have to carefully disassemble the dam, piece by piece, to let the pressure out in a controlled manner until a healthy balance has been restored. My fear, though, is that I will pull out some important structural member, allowing a flash flood of creativity that displaces my daily tasks and the ability to pay bills they provide.

Hopefully, I will be able to get back into the swing of things and create some stuff. I also need to get back to promoting my novel, Cordell’s Rebellion.

One of my former students has asked if she can provide cover art for my next novel. She is a good illustrator, so I am excited to see what she comes up with. As a matter of propriety, I had to insist that I pay her for the work (she wanted to give it as a gift) because she is a former student. I will also make sure that she gets proper credit for the cover art.

The other side of that is the imperative to complete the second novel. The first draft is about four-fifths done. I need to finish the first draft, diagram the crap out of it to look for structural flaws, do all the grammar and spelling checks, and complete a few more drafts. That shouldn’t take too many more lifetimes. If I really crack down, it should be easy. I just need to do it. I also need to keep up with daily responsibilities.

I’ve always heard it said that good writers don’t find time to write, they make time to write. That is going to have to be my way of doing things. I have to shoehorn time to write and be generally creative. If I don’t the rest of life will take it over.