First, there was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  It was a Christmas present, as I mentioned before.  And I mentioned I have a history, and a love-love relationship, with Zelda games in the past.  (There are several I may never have finished, but I loved playing them even when I didn’t beat them.)

Well, from the moment I fired up Twilight Princess, it was love-at-first-sight-all-over-again.  I was lost.  For hours.

What is it about Zelda games that so  unfailingly capture my heart and attention?  Is the comforting familiarity of a new adventure with a new-but-really-the-same Link and a new-but-really-the-same Zelda?  Is it the exciting new ways to retell the same story?  Is it just an overpowering sense of nostalgia that erupts in my heart whenever I start humming the original Zelda Theme in my head (and do at the start of every Zelda game, even if the one I’m playing eschews that theme?  I’m looking at you, Ocarina of Time, with all your wonderful, series-defining tunes except the original theme!)  (P.S. Orchestrating it only makes me salivate more.)  (Point being: you want to brighten my day?  Start humming the opening bars of the Zelda theme.)  Whatever it is, it’s like a drug.  I can’t not be in love with a Zelda game.

I had two or three sessions with Twilight Princess before I knew I had to put it away for a while, or I’d never get any writing done.  I’m still working out a reward scheme mechanism whereby I permit myself a play session after I’ve completed a certain amount of work on the book.  I haven’t settled on a firm line-in-the-sand amount that I need to do to get some Zelda time, but it’ll probably be something like 3,000 words or 4,000 words – to encourage me to exceed my proposed 2,000-words-per-week minimum.  But I’m holding off until I finish the outline, anyway.

What else did I discover after the holidays?

Cinnamon M&Ms.

Or should I call them Crack-flavored M&Ms?  Because it’s basically the same thing.

These I discovered on a trip to the store trolling for some post-holiday 50%+ off holiday merchandise deals.  You know, when the retailers go in a mad scramble to clear the Christmasy-stuff off the shelves because they have to start stocking up for Valentine’s Day.  And there they were on the left-over Christmas candy aisle.  Beckoning me.  I had never seen such a thing before.  I had to try it!

I grabbed like ten bags.  You know, the big 10-oz bags, not the snack-size bags.  Then I put all but two back.  Because, hello greedy.  Then Dear Wife and I tried them.  And it was like, whoa…

Why have I never heard of these before?

If that’s because they’re new then Why have these not existed before?

Dear Wife went back to the store herself a couple days later, as we were obviously experiencing withdrawal symptoms by that point.  She came back with ten bags.  No joke.

Since then, I’ve tried to be a little more judicious in my consumption of these, as I do not desire to experience said withdrawal symptoms again, and who knows how long it will be before we see Cinnamon M&Ms on the shelves again…

Unfortunately, I failed to reach my goal.  Failed, yes, but I’m so close.  As of last night, I believe I’ve reached somewhere between the three-fifths and three-quarter mark of the plot.  There’s a lot going on and a lot of pieces coming together.  I’m getting super-excited for writing this book, because I really like the direction the plot is going.

I think it might be amusing to also point out that as it stands the unfinished outline is nearly 9,000 words long, by itself, and is split between two separate word documents (it’s… complicated).  The length, at least, I can explain: the outline includes a lot of asides, notes to myself about changes to make to the outline, and especially a few internal dialog question-and-answer sessions that I’ve used to help me figure out some difficult plotting.  The upshot: this is definitely not a short story that I’ve blown up into a novel, here.  There’s a lot of ground to cover. 

I’m still optimistic that I can keep this a relatively short book (my target is 125,000 words, but I’m mainly hoping for anything under 185,ooo).  Realistically speaking though… at an artistic level I’m fine with a book that stretches to 250,000 words.  I enjoy works of that length.  And I don’t discount the possibility that this book could go as much as that long.  My shorter-length goal is based more on concerns for marketability – notwithstanding my prior analysis of wordcount lengths in my chosen genres, showing a distinct market preference (vis-a-vis the market of readers) for longer works, the advice of professionals in the business is still to write shorter, roughly 100K-length books.  Still, I won’t sacrifice my artistic integrity to force my book into artificial constraints.  I’m just trying to set a target, so I know what to work toward.

Considering how close I am to finishing my outline, I’m resetting my goal with a fairly short new deadline: to have all this prep-work done by January 31st, which will allow me to start the month of February diving straight into the actual First Draft.  I’ll definitely be able to finish the outline by then, and more than likely I’ll be able to tie a bow on some more character work as well.

Anyway, something became clear to me last night (which I tweeted about) as I was adding scenes - both new scenes that occur earlier in the book to foreshadow and support the direction the plot is moving, and additional scenes that moved said plot closer toward the climax and the end of the book.  At this point, I’ve got 4 POV characters.  The majority of the scenes are from the primary protagonist, Isa’s point-of-view.  A few scenes are from the co-protagonist, Davin’s POV, with a similar number of scenes from the anti-hero’s POV.  After the protagonist, however, the next largest scene-hog is the primary antagonist.  The timeline for everything is getting complicated, with the timing of different scenes and events affecting the course of other scenes and events.  Besides the four POV characters, there are at least 23 other named characters (of varying levels of importance – most of the characters, except walk-on “servant/messenger” roles have names).  Action takes place across four major locations (plus sublocations, such as a specific building within a larger city), and in at least three different time periods.

Those worries that I had about “is this epic enough” or “is this ambitious enough”, that I talked about last week - now that I’m nearly finished plotting this book out, those worries have been whacked upside the backs of their heads with a very heavy shovel and buried deep in the earth.  This is epic.  This is ambitious.  And the realization that I had last night?

I need help.

Your Recommendations, Please

So, I’m hoping you, dear readers, might be able to help me out with something.  There’s a lot to track in this book.  I’ve been using a program I bought a few years ago called “ConnectedText” to help me in my note-taking and background writing.  It’s like a desktop wiki, but with way more functionality than just a wiki.  It’s been perfect for the use to which I’ve put it, which is more-or-less creating an encyclopedia of my worldbuilding.

But now I’m entering a different phase of my project, and I find that it’s not exactly designed to help with what I’m working on, now.  I need to keep track of multiple scenes, multiple characters, and multiple timelines.  I need to be able to quickly and easily tie a scene to the brief descriptions I’ve written up on my outline, and I anticipate the need to quickly reshuffle scenes or slot in new scenes.

Now, I’m aware of the existence of multiple software programs designed to help novelists with managing some or possibly all of the above.  But I don’t have time to try out each and every one of them to see which one best suits my needs.  (Nor am I inclined to purchase each one of them to try it out, nor again am I inclined to go through the work of setting up all the scenes, characters, and timelines multiple times in multiple programs to see which works best.)

So, I’m hoping dear readers, that those of you with experience with these programs can offer your thoughts, based on usage, as to how well each or any of these meets the needs as I’ve outlined them.  Please, share your thoughts!

Scrivener ($40) appears to be the favorite among a lot of novelists.  I know it has outlining tools and a storyboard.  But how well does it handle juggling characters and timelines?  Until recently this wouldn’t have been an option, anyway, because it was Mac-only but they’ve recently released a Windows version.  Anyone tried that?  There does appear to be a free-trial period, but of course there’s no way I can write a novel in that period.  (And I don’t want to waste my time with multiple free trials.)

Liquid Story Binder ($45.95) is another that, until Scrivener for Windows was released, I understood to basically be Scrivener for Windows, by another name and software maker – in that it had many of the same features.  A look at the screen-shots suggests a heavy emphasis on images in the program… not that I have any images to use.  The feature list specifically mentions it has timelines… has anyone used that, and if so how does it work?

Storybook (Free Version $0, Pro Version $26.29) appears to allow you to tie a scene to a chronological date – but I suspect those dates are tied to a “real-world-Gregorian-Calendar”, which isn’t much use to me in a world that has it’s own, non-real calendar), which could help with managing timelines.  It also seems to allow you to connect scenes to specific plot threads to see how they come together.  There’s a free version and a paid-pro version, but it’s not wholly clear to me what the advantages of the pro version are.

yWriter (Free to use, $11.95 to “register”) has the advantage of being completely free (I’ve got a copy of both yWriter and the free version of Storybook on my computer already, though I haven’t really tinkered with either or dug into them, yet), and I know it breaks things down to the scene and character level, and has some sort of storyboard, though I haven’t figured out how to get to it.  For certain the UI looks less slick and polished than in the above non-free options, which could possibly impact usability.

And there may be others I’m simply not aware of.

Does anyone have any experience with the above?  Any thoughts on which is the best and easiest to use and set-up, and which has the features that appear to have the most overlap with what I’m trying to accomplish and might best meet my needs?  

I haven’t pre-cleared the idea of paying for one of these with Dear Wife, yet, so I’m not guaranteed to get to use the solution that best meets my current authoring needs, and I may yet resort to just throwing some words into MS Word and slapping together a spreadsheet of some sort… but just in case, I’m interested in what the ideal solution would likely be, for me.  If one of those might genuinely make my writing life easier… well… I guess if I’m willing to do the MS Word + Spreadsheet thing for a while, I will, eventually, have a birthday, or something…

The Fantasy World Map

Who knew that all the world’s fantastic tales all coexisted in the same secondary world?  Now we know.

But they’ve crossed paths, recently, with the reveal of the new EULA for Apple’s iBooks Author platform.  And the early reviews are, shall we say, not stellar.  Says techie guru Ed Bott from ZDNet (a prominent tech industry web-zine), this EULA is “mind-bogglingly greedy” – effectively forcing the users of Apple’s iBooks Author platform to sell publications created in that platform exclusively through Apple’s iBooks/iTunes store. 

To follow that up, they appear to be taking aim at ebook publishing standards with the probable goal of removing the open standard EPUB version from competition with their new iBooks format.

And of course… you’ll need a $500 iPad to buy those fancy new iBooks.  Because, hey, cool, interactive books!  Who doesn’t have half-a-grand to drop just for the right to maybe purchase interactive books sold exclusively by Apple?  (Answer: I, for one, do not yet own an iPad, nor any other variety of tablet/slate computer.  So do a lot of other people.  And I’m not exactly on the “poor” end of the rich-poor spectrum.  I’m not on the “rich” end, either, but I’m still on the “can’t afford to spend frivolously on an iPad” end.) 

So lest it be said that I’m simply an Amazon-hater because of the many posts that I’ve written about Amazon that are potentially read as negative, let it therefore be shown that it’s not Amazon, per se, that get’s me: it’s anything that hurts writers and/or readers and favors corporations who have nothing to do with either and/or which is anticompetitive.  Those sorts of things?  I’m not a fan of them.  I’m a really huge un-fan of them.

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 3,495 words

Grand Total: 3,495 words

My progress for the week was pretty well-distributed across several good writing days – despite having several other days off due to other ongoing committments.  And I made good strides toward my goal of finishing this outline process by the 25th – i.e. by Wednesday.

At this point, I anticipate that I’ll miss that deadline/goal.  But not by much.  I’m still learning, at this stage, about what I can accomplish in a given time period, and about how fast I actually write.  This will have been at least the third time I’ve missed a self-imposed deadline on getting the prep-work for “Book of M” done so I can start the actual draft.  This time, though, I’m really close.  In my outline I’m at approximately the 50% mark, or just a little short of it, for the novel. 

I’m guesstimating, of course, because I’ve reached a very murky part of the plotting for this novel.  The weird thing about this story is, since the very beginning I’ve had a very clear vision of how this story starts, and that vision has only gotten clearer.  But I’ve never been entirely certain where it goes from there.  I had a small catalog of scenes and goalposts in my head, but no connecting thread.  The hard work I’m doing now is sussing out that connecting thread to see where it leads.  So I still don’t know how this thing ends.  I’m finding out as I go.

I suspect that means, as I reach the end of the outline, that I’ll actually have to go back and revise some elements of the outline earlier on.  Actually, I’ve done that already – going back and adding notes about things I want to show or foreshadow at earlier points in the story.  And that’s before I’ve gotten past the halfway.

As things progress, I’ve also become aware of two peripheral things: (1) I’m really in love with this world.  It feels rich and alive to me.  That’s probably consequent to the long time I spent writing out it’s whole history. (2) I’m really worried about the direction of the plot, as a whole, and about the potential reader’s attachment to main character. 

Part of the problem about not knowing how this story ends is that the main character lacks a cohesive direction from the very beginning.  I find myself comparing the first half of this book to the first halves of other books I’ve recently read (or am reading).  Take the current book that I’m reading: The Hunger Games.  It’s clear from very early that the main character wants two things: to protect her sister and to survive the Hunger Games.  Everything else about the plot flows naturally from those two driving character facts.  Or in The Children of Amarid, the main character leaves home to become an apprentice mage, and along the way gets pulled into a quest to find the source of an evil scourge that is being blamed on the order of mages, and to find a way to clear the mages’ name.  The “quest” framework is a pretty traditional and standard fantasy trope that easily allows the author to give a character and the plot a clear direction.  Or before those, in The Magicians the plot is given direction by the promise early in the book that the alternate fantasy world will be revealed to be real – and the protagonist’s disaffection with his present real world makes the question of the existence of that fantasy world more compelling.

The challenge I face: there’s no quest in this book.  I haven’t figured out any driving imperatives on the part of the protagonist except to survive and escape… not some finite specific goal (like “survive the Hunger Games”) but in general (survive in a harsh world, escape the conditions of a corrupt, cruel and descriminatory society).  There’s no logical endpoint at which I can say the protagonist has clearly either won or lost.  And that robs the story of a certain tension and uncertainty.  What happens next matters less because there’s no connection between the reader and the protagonist’s plight.

All of this is wrapped up in and tied to worldbuilding in this story.  The protagonist is from a small village with a harsh system of rule.  When she escapes that, she discovers that the wider world is no less harsh, and no less unjust.  What then?  On one hand, I’m able to introduce the reader gently to this world through a protagonist who is discovering it the first time herself (which is a common fantasy trope, as well, and one that made sense in this story).  But on the other, the protagonist isn’t tied to anything in this new, larger world, and there’s no benevolent guide to help give her direction: again, there’s no quest.

That also means that large parts of the plot, through the halfway-mark, are driven by extra-protagonist forces; i.e. it has been others, not the protagonist, who have driven most of the plot.  Only at about the 2/5ths mark I’m finding the protagonist come into her own, and she acquires new capabilities and strengths that allow her to be more active in her own destiny.  Now, if only I can figure out: to what end?

Hopefully, once I learn how this story ends, I can go back to the beginning of the outline and more convincingly foreshadow it, and also give the protagonist a more sympathetic, active mind-set and a measureable opinion on the subject of how the story ends (even if that opinion perchance changes over the course of the story).  As it stands, now, I’m worried that she’s a leaf blowing in the winds of fate, and right now fate is blowing in a pretty random and haphazard manner.

Unrelated to all this, I ended up feeling the need to reintroduce a certain Final Fantasy borrowing that I had previously more-or-less discarded.  That’s right: I’m bringing back chocobos.

Well, not chocobos, actually.  But large, flightless birds.

I was at a point where I needed the protagonist to be able to cross a decent stretch of arid or semi-arid wasteland in a fairly quick time-frame.  I didn’t want her to have to walk and die of thirst.  So I needed a mount.  A mount that was well-adapted to the desert clime.

I briefly considered camels.  But this is a fantasy world, dammit!  And I reserve the right to introduce fantastic, implausible creatures into my story!  Except, my bird-mounts aren’t entirely implausible.  Just to make sure, I’m basing them on the real-world Elephant Birds of Madagascar, which only went exctinct in the 1600s, and the Giant Moas of New Zealand, as well as on Ostriches.  Ostriches because those animals are already adapted to a semi-arid environment.  And Elephant Birds, it turns out, could weight between 800 and 900 pounds.  Small riding horses, I learned, could weigh between the low-800s up to 1200 pounds.  That puts an Elephant Bird in the range of plausible to use as a mount. 

My flightless riding birds, of course, won’t be called “Chocobos” (although the name I’ve chosen has echoes of the word “chocobo”).  But functionally they’ll bear more than a passing resemblance to the riding birds of Final Fantasy fame.  In retrospect, I hadn’t actually discarded the chocobo-homage from the story – I just hadn’t fit them in.  But then, all-of-a-sudden, I had a need.  And the chocobo doth provide.

So that’s where things stand, right now.  I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me.  I’ve got a long way to go, in some ways, to figuring out how this story ends, and then refashioning the beginning to better support that ending.  And I’ve got a long way to go to give my main character some focus, some direction, some goals and desires, and some spine.

We’ll see if I can make it by Wesdnesday.  I haven’t given up, yet.  But if I don’t make it, I should still be done with the outline very soon.  I look forward to writing the actual first draft!

And how are things in your own writing world?  Problems with aimless characters?  Still trying to hammer a plot in place?  How has your writing been going?

[ETA: I neglected to mention, in the main body of this post, the key role Dear Wife played in helping make a great writing week happen.  It's not often that I do a week with more than 3,000 words.  Dear Wife saw my goals - and remarked that the self-imposed January 25th deadline for finishing my outline and prep-work was really ambitious, all-things-considered.  Dear Wife is, of course, well-acquainted with my history of missing those deadlines, so far.  And yet, despite the long odds on actually hitting that target, Dear Wife went about doing everything she could to help me make it.  And we still got some good work done on our home-project during the week, too.  Her help made it a top-notch week for my productivity.]

Coe suggests three kinds of ambition in his post, and I’m going to address the three types with regards to my own ambitions. 

Fame! Fortune! Critical Acclaim! Bestseller Lists!

The first type he calls “Material Ambition“, by which he means the ambition to win awards, make tons of sales, gain recognition and fame for our work, to make more than a comfortable living on it, and so on.  Of this type I say: what writer doesn’t have this sort of ambition, and in spades?  I’ll tell you at least one who does: this guy.  And by “this guy” I mean me.  Yeah, I’m sure it comes as no surprise.  I want to win awards.  I want to be recognized for my writing.  I want to be a bestseller.  I want to live off the income my writing generates.  But I frankly take this as a given.  Nobody sits down to write and says: “I want to labor in total obscurity and anonymity.  I don’t want anyone to read this, and heavens forbid anybody should praise it as being of value or worth!”  Maybe not every writer sits down and thinks about their material ambitions consciously, but somewhere in the back of most writers’ heads is the unstated assumption that they believe in the merits of what they are doing, or else they wouldn’t be doing them.

For myself, if I don’t believe in a story that I’m writing, I won’t finish it.  And part of believing in what I write is the belief that others who read it will enjoy it.  For instance, I haven’t yet written a single word of first draft for “Book of M” – but I believe that it has the potential to be a very good story.  I believe that it will be powerful, moving, touching, frightening, and epic.  I believe it could be a bestseller, with the right support and polish.  If I have the skill to pull it off.  And that belief feeds the ambition.  If it can be those things, then I want it to be those things.

But this is the type of ambition over which I have the least control to achieve, and on which I spend the least amount f thought.

You Wrote How Much?

The second type Coe describes is “Output Ambition“.  This is the ambition that says “I will write X number of stories, or finish Y number of books, or write Z words of first draft”.  I’ve seen a lot of stuff lately that has led me to believe that a successful writer is, more-often-than-not, a prolific writer.  It’s not a perfect 1-for-1 correlation, mind you, but there’s some evidence to suggest that in general, and especially all other factors being equal, an author with more books/stories/etc. will be more successful than one with fewer.

I believe I’m being very output ambitious this year, subject to the limitations of my circumstances.  In my 2012 Goals post, I indicated that I wanted to produce upwards of over 80,000 words of first draft, combined between “Book of M” and at least two short stories.  In the last two years total I only wrote in the neighborhood of 30,000 worth of first draft – or around 15,000 words per year on average.  If I can achieve 80,000 words, that will be a substantial improvement – an over 500% increase in productivity.

But I also have a fair share of output envy.  There are numerous writers on the web who can boast of producing 80,000 words worth of first draft in only a few months.  These folks are producing two or three novel drafts per year, plus dozens of short stories.    Envy is perhaps not a strong enough word to describe how I feel about that.  (And remember, kids, envy is one of the seven deadly sins, so that’s a pretty strong word.)  Really, it’s not output envy, per se, but time envy.  I could write a lot more, too, if I had the time.  Those planned 80,000 words for 2012: that’s based on an assumption of 1,000 words per hour for two hours per week.  But let’s say I had a more regular, more reliable writing schedule?  Instead of 2-3 reliable hours per week (sometimes more and sometimes less, but generally 2-3 reliably), but instead had 2-3 reliable hours per day, 5 days per week?  If my 1,000 words per hour expectation is accurate, that would be over 10,000 words per week.  With the same 41-week-schedule I’m giving myself in 2012, that would be over 400,000 words.  I’ve noted all this before (and in further detail) in a post on productivity.  In short: I could write a lot more – I want to write a lot more - but I’m constrained in the near-to-medium term.  In the meantime, I think I’m being quite ambitious within those constraints.

Ambition That Means Something

But the third type of ambition is the most interesting: “Creative Ambition“.  And on a day-to-day basis, this is the ambition I think about – and worry about – the most.  Creative ambition is the drive to create something new, something innovative, something complex, something sophisticated.  It’s the ambition to stretch ourselves and our skills and capabilities, to push to our own creative boundaries, and then to break the old barriers.

I’ve spent most of my life, off and on and going back to my early childhood, writing the same book (around here I call it “Project SOA #1“).  It was to be the first in an epic fantasy series.  Throughout my teens and early twenties, my ambitions for this project grew.  Not three books, but five!  Not five books, but maybe ten!  The plot would span a whole world, across five continents with at least two or three major political powers on each continent.  I’d planned to have a number of fully-articulated, functional languages, and an intricate linguistic backdrop that tied the history of the languages together.  The world’s history would span no less than fifteen thousand years, and I’d  have figured out all the major legends and important historical events.  I could go on.  It was going to be epic.  No… it was going to be EPIC!!!!!!111!!ONE!

Creative ambition?  Check.  I got that.

Except, somewhere along the way, I realized that my ambition for the book had far exceeded my capabilities as a writer.  Not by just a little, mind you.  I was a boy scout with a bottle rocket trying to reach the moon.  I simply was not equipped to succeed.  At last I admitted to myself that the whole concept for the story was weighed down by every fantasy trope and cliché that I could possibly throw at the thing.  Orphan boy hero?  Check.  Magic sword? Check.  Princess in peril?  Check.  Hero becomes the true king?  Check and check.  Unaccountably, world-destroyingly evil villain?  Why, check, of course.  Hey, let’s play a game!  Name a fantasy trope/cliché.  I’ll bet I can find an example of it from my planned novel series. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things, on their own.  But in aggregate, I simply lacked the skill to synthesize all of this into a satisfying and successful book.  I was insufficiently prepared to tackle all those tropes in a way that would be fresh and engaging to readers.  Iwas, I discovered, writing the quintessential “Fantasy Heartbreaker”: that is, a fantasy novel doomed to disappoint not only any reader unlucky enough to come across the manuscript, but to disappoint its author for having failed utterly to match his or her ambitions. 

The scope and scale of my creative ambition was too great.  I knew I had to dial it back.  Not a 9-or10-book-series, but a single, stand-alone novel… or at most, a trilogy. Not a dozen Tolkienesque artificial languages, but one or two half-formed embryonic languages with a consistent phonology but only hints at a morphology and grammar and very little by way of a lexicon. Not the bones of a half-dozen common fantasy races (Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, etc.) recast in my own molds, but only humans. Not the affairs of many powerful nations and empires spanning five separate continents, but the affairs of only two powerful nations sharing the same continent, and only hints of something else beyond. No magic swords (besides: what, really, do I know about swords?), no horse-steeds (and what, really, do I know about horses?), and so on. Basically: strip out all the typical fantasy clichés and focus on the few things I can write about with authority. (Except, as it turns out, “Book of M” is heavily Steampunk flavored… and what, really, do I know about steam engines? I guess I’ll have to find out.)

As I started work on “Book of M”, though, I began to worry.  Worry that I’d scaled back my ambition too far.  Was I stretching my abilities?  In writing this book, am I addressing serious, mature themes?  Am I courageous enough to put my protagonist through the wringer?  Will “Book of M” pass the Bechdel Test?  Is a single, stand-alone novel sufficiently epic?

Some of these questions nag at me.  But in other cases, I really do feel like “Book of M” is stretching me.  As I ruminate on Coe’s article, though, it becomes clear to me: it’s not stretching me enough.  “Project SOA” was too ambitious.  But “Book of M” is not ambitious enough.  It’s almost there… but not quite.  I’m not sure what I need to do to, yet, to amp up the creative ambition on this tale.  But I know I need to push myself just a little harder, just a little farther, to make this something to be proud of.

What about  you?  Do you have writerly ambitions?  What are they?  How about creative ambition?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

The points that stand out to me:

• He’s living a very spartan life.  Not just “no cable” spartan (Dear Wife and I live without cable, for example) but “no TV” spartan.  Run-down appartment spartan.  No car spartan. 
• He’s single
• He lives in a dangerous urban area in a run-down appartment, which he makes work by being a physically imposing individual (seriously, check out the author photo on his bio page: he’s significantly more ripped than your average doughy author (yours truly included – I’m fairly thin but I’m all bone and squishy bits, and you’d be forgiven for laughing if I tried to “flex my muscles” for I have none to speak of)), meaning nobody messes with him
• He makes healthcare work by being a military Reservist

I think about the finances thing a lot.  The thing is: I have a pretty decent job.  It’s not a truly creative endeavor, but I enjoy many aspects of what I do and I get paid reasonably well to do it.  I have a comfortable home, and my family is safe.  I don’t have to put my life in danger to live or to work.  I’m not the maximally happiest I could possibly be, doing what I do for a living, but I am sufficiently happy with the work that I do to say that I enjoy my life and my work.

Here’s the thing: I want to be a published author.  I want it deeply and truly down in my bones and to the very core of my being.  Creating and sharing stories is part of who I am, and I can’t ever not do it.

But as important as those things are to me, there is one thing I can never, ever, ever, ever compromise: the health and safety and comfort of my family. 

It’s very interesting to see how a fantasy/sci-fi author makes it work.  It’s good to know it is possible.  But the life Myke Cole is living would be intollerable to me.  It wouldn’t have been intollerable to me, say, ten years ago when I was single and didn’t have a family and responsibilities.  But I have a wife and a son both of whom I love more than life and more than myself.  I want to be a published author, and it is the dream that drives me.  But if being a published author would require the kind of sacrifices of my family that Cole has made in his life, I would sooner sacrifice my dream – sooner sacrifice my very self – than ask that of them.

Someday, I hope to find a way to make becoming a published author work – to make it compatible with things like “a regular income” and “full-coverage healthcare” and “college savings for my kid” and “a comfortable home in a good school district” and other things like that.  When I do, watch out!  For now… I write when I can, but I have to focus on those other, important things first.

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 1,446 words

Grand Total: 1,446 words

I’ve mentioned a few times over the past several weeks that I was struggling with something of an intractable plot problem.  I’d reached the start of what I plan to be the eleventh chapter of the book… and I wasn’t sure what to do next.  I wanted certain circumstances to force the protagonist and co-protagonist apart in chapter 11, but I needed to solve a world-building question in order to explain how it came about.  And I struggled for weeks to find a solution.

You could say I had writer’s block, but I don’t.  I still made progress, I just switched gears to focus on other things – the character profiles, primarily.  In the intervening time, I let my subconscious work on the problem, expecting a solution to come to me in a flash of brilliance.

At this point, I’d already discarded a couple simple half-solutions – ideas that seemed like they could be good ideas, but which didn’t feel right for the story.  But I was ready to sit down this week to continue working on my outline, and yet the real solution still hadn’t presented itself to me.  I resolved to write.

I’ve discussed before how I don’t really “believe” in writer’s block.  How it’s a convenient fiction, or an excuse: a phrase we use to describe a number of different creative challenges that writer’s often face but each of which can be solved and overcome.  If there is one great panacea to that malady we call “writer’s block”, it is this: to just sit down and write.  BICHOK, I’ve heard it called: Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard.  This, then, is what I did.

And I solved my problem!

But you saw that coming, didn’t you?  What I did, specifically, was to sit and write a dialogue with myself.  Ideally, I’d been wanting to talk this problem out with some other writerly soul, or someone who was inclined to listen and toss back ideas and questions to get me thinking in the right direction.  But I did this myself, asking myself questions: what are the possibilities?  What are the implications of these different options?  Which ones feel right?

Here’s a short sample of the dialogue (warning, some minor spoilers may ensue).  For context… Isa is the protagonist of the story, and Davin is her co-protagonist.  Isa and Davin have been thrown together by… let’s say magical circumstances.  The kind of magical circumstances that physically keep them together, whether or not they’d like to.  The question, then… if magical circumstances have bound them together… what could pull them apart?  Previously, I’d considered – and discarded – the idea that the story’s villain is responsible, somehow.  But I’d decided instead that whatever was going on was not caused by human intervention:

So what causes this involuntary but otherwise natural separation between Isa and Davin?  Let’s consider the possibilities.  A malevolent, magical  force or intelligence (i.e. another ghost) drags Davin away.  A non-sentient magical force propels Davin away.  Frankly… I like the idea of another ghost being responsible.  But who?  And why?  This would give me something to work with for this chapter.  Hmm.  It’s possible the force that draws Davin away is a ghost, but not a wholly sapient one: the ghost of a creature, or an animal.  Something that is free-ranging, unbound, and fearful.

And so on.  I kept writing, asking more questions and tossing more ideas onto the page, until an answer to the question started to form.  And then, as the answer became apparent to me, so too did the direction for the eleventh chapter.  And a new wrinkle was added to the plot of this book.  The final answer felt satisfying to me, and excited me once again to continue work on this book.

So the large majority of my wordcount for the week was in pursuit of this answer.  That answer having at last rejuvenated me, I feel great about the progress I made.  That’s why, for me, this week was a solid home-run.

How was your writing week?

 2012 promised to bring many changes and opportunities for me and my family.  Many of these are private matters, of course, and suffice to say Dear Wife and I have a few important changes and goals in mind for the year to come.  But there are some big changes that are pretty clear.  2012, for instance, will be the first full year in which I will not have any MBA classes, owing to my graduation from the program last May. 

This being the blog of an aspiring author, though, most of what I want to talk about, with regards to my goals, plans, and dreams for 2012, concern my writing.

One thing I want to clear up: 2012 is not the year that Stephen A. Watkins gets published.  First, as a technical matter, that year was 2011, anyway.  But I don’t anticipate repeating that success in 2012.  It could happen, but I’m not planning on it.  And how could I?  It’s not exactly in my control.  Which gets to the point of how I want to think about my writing goals and plans for 2012.  I want SMART goals.

SMART goals?  You might have heard this acronym before.  Specific.  Measurable.  Actionable.  Realistic.  Timely.  These are the characteristics of a goal that is achievable and within your control.  (There are alternative specifications for the five components of a SMART goal, but this is how I learned it.  The underlying words may change but the point doesn’t.)

Let’s take the typical New Year’s Resolution (and yes, it’s one of mine this year as well): get in shape.  “Get in Shape” isn’t a SMART goal.  Really, what does “get in shape” mean?  It’s nebulous and non-specific. How do you know when you’ve achieved the goal?  But it can be translated into a SMART goal.  Mine?  Perform some combination of stretch, aerobic, and strength exercises for at least 15 minutes a day on 5 days each week.  It’s specific.  I can look back at the end of each week and know whether I’ve achieved my goal for that week.  It’s measurable.  Did I work out five times this week?  That’s a simple yes-or-no question.  It’s actionable.  I can find 15 minutes a day for physical activity.  This is within my control.  I can decide whether I work out each day or not.  It’s realistic.  Getting in shape is nebulous, and I don’t know if I can really do that, but I can do this.  And working out even a little five days a week will move me toward that generalized goal.  And, finally, it’s timely, or time-based.  Each week I can check my progress, and now how I’m doing.  Each day.  I’ve printed up a small calendar for the year, and I’ve started crossing through each day when I work out.

How can I apply these same principles to my writing goals for the year?  As I ask myself this, I have to consider, what do I have control over, with regard to my writing?  The tongue-in-cheek answer: everything and nothing.

Which is to say, I have some control over many different aspects of the process, but that control is within the constraints of other factors.  I can, to a certain degree, control the time I spend writing, but that time is constrained by other, higher-priority needs.  Time with my family comes first, before writing.  Time for the joint projects and goals Dear Wife and I have planned for the year also comes before writing.  Ultimately, time is the limited currency I have to spend which will determine whether or not I can achieve what I want to achieve in my writing this year.  And although time is in slightly greater supply than it was when I was a day-time desk-job-jockey, evening student, full-time dad, full-time husband and an author, now that one of those five roles has been removed, three of the other four are still enough to put a lot of pressure on writing time.

That said, Dear Wife is supportive of my little writing habit, as long as I can fulfill those other duties.  Accordingly, she makes a great effort to help me find the time to write as often as is reasonably possible, even if we can only scrape together three or four non-contiguous hours a week (sometimes more, sometimes less).  And I think I can count on that largely being the case in 2012.  Some weeks I won’t be able to write at all.  But most weeks, I should be okay for some writing time.

So, those constraints in mind, what are my goals for 2012?

1.  Find at least 2 hours per week in which to write in at least 45 of the 52 weeks of the year.  The two hours should contain at least one period of 60 minutes of uninterrupted time.  The second condition is because I find that writing time gets increasingly productive the longer an individual writing session lasts.  I don’t think this will be too much of a stretch goal, really.  I think it’s fairly close to the baseline that I already maintain.  I also realize that there will be weeks when I can’t find even two hours, because other more timely, time-consuming, and higher-priority things come up.  That’s why I’ve give this goal a little escape clause of 7 writing-free weeks in the year.

2.  By January 25th, I shall have completed all preparatory work on my current novel-in-progress (the code-named “Book of M”) and be ready to write the first draft.  This is the goal over which I’m least sure of the specific attainability.  I’ve been pushing back the date when I’ll have finished the preparatory work for the novel for the past six months already.  This is the first time I’ve really started from scratch with an idea and built up a novel from the ground-floor, notwithstanding my prior efforts to write a novel.  Before, I’d always been rehashing, reshaping, and rebuilding the same novel story that I first started writing when I could count my age without employing all of the fingers of my two hands.  But I finally put that novel away – not dead, but not actively in development – in favor of working on something fresh.  Someday, I’ll go back to that old story – when I  have the skill as a writer to tackle it – but for now “Book of M” is the center of my writing world. 

Starting from scratch has been a new experience for me, and learning and developing my process for the novel has not been without growing pains.  I still don’t really know what it takes, in terms of preparation, for me to successfully write a novel.  I’m doing what I think is best for how my mind works.  And I’m 85% sure that I can really, really, really be done with this preparatory work by the 25th – that’s two weeks.  But.  Well.  Maybe I’m more like 75% sure.  Or… I… maybe I don’t know.   But it’s at least SMART.  Or it’s SMART when I specify that I will have completed my master outline for the book and all the Character Profiles, including a first-person version for the protagonist, for all the Primary and Major characters.  There’s lots of other prep-work I could throw in there – expanded notes on worldbuilding, additional profiles for minor or less-important characters, and so on, but those are the bare essentials I think I need.  A lot of those additional details I can fill-in along the way.

3.  Concomitant with the above two, I will produce at least 2,000 words of new First Draft material per week spent writing.  This is, I think, an achievable stretch goal for me.  I’ve typically averaged about 2,000 words per week while working on preparatory materials and research.  Part of the idea behind putting all this up-front work in is that the actual drafting will go faster.  So setting 2,000 not as my average weekly wordcount but as my minimum will push me and stretch me, but I know I can do it.  This goal, of course, is subject to the 7-weeks-off escape hatch of the first goal, in case of various other higher-priority goals taking precedence. And it’s subject to achieving the second goal, which is to say that my 2,000-word-minimum doesn’t kick in until I’ve finished the prep-work.  Note, also, that achieving this goal will not see me completing a first draft of “Book of M” in 2012.  If I succeed in 2,000 words a week for 41 weeks (that’s the 45 active work weeks minus the four weeks that will have passed by the end of January), that’s only 82,000 words.  With an anticipated first draft length of around 125,000 words, New Year’s Eve 2012 would find me only 65% of the way through the book.  And that’s not counting some loss of weekly wordcount to Goal #4, below…

4.  Complete first drafts for at least 2 short stories having less than 8,000 words apiece.  Which is to say, more specifically, complete first drafts of short stories totalling approximately 16,000 words.  I can write more or less per story than 8,000 words, but if by year’s end I’ve got an unfinished story that’s a little longer (i.e. another novelette) plus another that’s complete in first draft (of whatever length), then I will consider this goal to have been accomplished.  Likewise if I have two stories or more than two stories of substantially shorter length completed.  The point is that I will have put some of my writing resources into completing two short stories, and I consider the goal complete if I have at least two stories started and with more than 16,000 words between them or at least two stories finished even with less than 16,000 words between them.  Obviously, this writing goal takes time and wordcount away from the above goal regarding the novel project.  I’m okay with that.  Because the novel is still taking the majority of my writing time for the year.  But I feel that writing and honing my short-story craft is an important part of my development as a writer, too, and I don’t want to neglect it.

5.  Read at least 550,000 words worth of novels or books this year.  At first, I was going to say something like “Read 3 Books” or “Read 5 Books”… but then I thought… really… not all books are created equal.  I started The Hunger Games.  It’s just under 100,000 words.  Then I want to finish Children of Amarid which I started before the New Year.  It’s just over 200,000, though I’m a quarter through that.  Then I intend to read Elantris after that, which is also over 200,000 words.  After that, who knows.  But each of the latter two books is significantly longer than Hunger Games.  Heck, I could just read a few short Middle Grades books – super-quick reads – and fulfill a goal based on number of books.  So instead, I decided to boil it down to the only definitive measure of a book’s length: wordcount.  So I can fulfill my goal by reading a small number of larger fantasy door-stoppers, or a larger number of shorter YA and MG books, or some combination thereof.

So yes.  Those are my goals for the year ahead.

But New Year’s is also, in it’s way, a time for dreaming, a time for possibilities.  What are my dreams for 2012?  If the stars aligned, and everything went my way, what do I think is possible?

Some of these dreams are sort of within my control.  Some are decidedly not.

I want to finish my novel in 2012.  First draft, of course, not a fully-revised and fully-presentable novel, but a first draft.  I’d have to do something north of 3,000 words a week to make this happen, but it’s theoretically possible.

I want do better in the Writer’s of the Future contest.  I haven’t yet talked about what happened to my last entry.  I’ll be discussing that soon, and the lessons I’ve learned.  But I truly think I have what it takes to do better than the Honorable Mention I earned on the entry prior to that.  As long as I’m dreaming, I might as well admit that I’d be ecstatic beyond my capacity to express it with words to get one of the top-three spots for any given quarter.  That’s a tough nut to crack, but my writing is improving, and as long as I improve that dream moves closer to within reach.  Maybe right now it’s outside my grasp.  But by the end of the year?  Who knows?  It could happen.  Probably won’t, but it could. 

And if the above-dream were to come about, then surely I could also dream to have some other bit of short fiction published in 2012 in a professional-paying market.

And lastly, I’d love to attend another writing-centric conference or convention in 2012.  I’d love the opportunity to interact with published authors and editors and other aspiring authors.  And I’d love to find myself possessed of the social fortitude to actually engage them rather than play the role of wallflower.  It’s possible I might get part of such an opportunity this year (even if it were so, I wouldn’t be optimistic about the “social fortitude” part), but other plans that Dear Wife and I have for the year make this one rather more than a little unlikely. 

And that’s about it, writing-wise.  I don’t dream of getting a novel published in 2012.  Even if I finish it, that’s pretty far outside of the realm of the plausible.

So what about you? What are your goals, plans, dreams, and resolutions for 2012 – writing-related or otherwise?  Feel free to link to your own blog posts on the subject if you’ve already got something written.

I’m pretty sure this:

is at least in part an homage to this:

Partly, of course, that’s because both utilize the same source material.  But the style of the song in the Peter Jackson/Howard Shore version of The Hobbit is strikingly reminiscent of that of the song in the Rankin & Bass version. (It’s also a bit reminiscent of Aragorn’s song in Jackson’s version of “Return of the King”, but that’s probably because it’s the same composer.)

The lament of the dwarves, as portrayed in the Rankin & Bass version, was actually a big inspiration to me. It became the model for a particular culture in my currently-shelved novel-I’ve-been-working-on-since-forever, “Project SOA”. Not the typical trappings of Dwarves – the beards, the battle-axes, the mines, the covetousness, the hating-of-elves. No: the singing. The deep, melodic, basso profundo; the sound of melancholy. The idea that songs of mourning and longing are central, integral, to a given culture has wormed its way into my head, and I wanted to express that in “Project SOA”. Reconciling that idea with the attached fantasy-cliche baggage of Tolkienian Dwarves is one of the troublesome aspects of worldbuilding that I had not yet unraveled (and didn’t feel qualified as yet to unravel) that lead me to temporarily shelf “Project SOA” until I have acquired sufficient skill to justice to the concept.

While on the subject of Tolkien and movies and music… This brought to mind my worries back when I first heard that Lord of the Rings was going to be a live-action movie. I was… worried really, about the music of the new movies.  I’d grown up watching the Bakshi version of Lord of the Rings (which, tragically, ended partway through the books).  In fact I’d watched the Rankin & Bass “Hobbit” and the Bakshi “Lord of the Rings” long before I ever actually read the books.  And for me, Bakshi’s film defined the sound of Middle Earth.  It had a really good, stirring, heroic theme and frightening, dark Mordor theme.   And I wanted the new live action movies to sound the same.

In the end, however, I was just blown away by what Howard Shore produced.  It was incredible, beyond my fears and expectations, and it easily knocked such classics as Star Wars and Superman from their perch as my favorite soundtracks of all time.  I still love the sound and the themes of the old Bakshi film.  But now, for me, Howard Shore is the sound of Epic Fantasy.

Incidentally, I somehow forgot in my recent Christmas post that one of the soundtracks I got for Christmas was actually the Lord of the Rings Symphony.  Symphonic arrangements of the Lord of the Rings score?  Score!

Anyway, now, just for the fun of it, here are a few of my other favorites from Rankin & Bass’s “Hobbit”:

…

You know what’s funny, though?  I don’t have the same attachment or fondness for the Rankin & Bass adaptation for Return of the King as I do for their version of The Hobbit.  That’s probably because I’ve never actually seen it, of course.  Until Peter Jackson came along, I’d never seen the end of Tolkien’s books.  That’s why I had to read the books.  Bakshi left me hanging.

I think I’m done gushing over the impending Hobbit movie, for now. Just had to get that out of my system, because it’s going to be a long wait…