Writing Progress: Week Ending March 10, 2012

With the Home Project Phase I finally and fully in the rear-view mirror, it was a good week for writing:

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 1,743 words
• First Draft Wordcount: 622 words

Grand Total: 2,365 words

As I posted last week, I finally finished the outline of my work-in-progress novel “Book of M”, and in the latter  half of last week I began the process of actually writing the book.  It took me a while to find my footing.  While I had an outline to work from, the opening scene itself wasn’t clearly delineated.  For a moment I almost thought I should write a detailed outline of the opening scene to help me get the story started but I quickly abandoned that idea.  I decided, instead, that the only choice was to jump in.  Consequently, whereas I knew generally what was supposed to happen, it took me a while to find my authorial voice again.  It’s been a while since I’ve written the first draft of anything.  (The last first draft I wrote was for “Story of G“, which was started over a year ago.)

But toward the end of the week I started to find my footing, and I’m feeling more comfortable with the voice already.  But man… I’ve got a long way to go. (Take a look-see over at that progress bar on the right.  That sliver of red is oh so very small.)

As for the finished outline: you can see that I put in a fair amount of wordcount on that.  Funny, though, because I was on the climactic scene of the story.  Interestingly enough, I found as I approached the end of the outline that my notes increased in detail as I worked to ensure that I had all the motivations of the different characters figured out.

For the most part, I’m satisfied with the direction I’ve chosen for this story.  It’s not as brilliant as I’d hoped it would be.  But I think I’ve got a solid footing for an entertaining, satisfying finale.  The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding.  I’ve finished writing up the recipe for this particular batch of pudding.  Now to cook up the real thing!

[ETA] All of this happy news notwithstanding, now Home Project Phase II looms near to view.  I expect that Dear Wife and I will be consumed by work related to Phase II sooner rather than later.  But, as Dear Wife has said, better that we get the work done now, and get it over with, than that we do it much later.

So, how was your week?

Interrogating the Text #4: Jay Lake takes a “Long Walk Home”

This is a continuation of my occasional series on what I can learn on the craft of writing from reading the stories of accomplished professionals and examining and understanding my reactions.

For an explanation of what I’m attempting in this series, go here.

Today, I want to talk about a story I read recently by author Jay Lake called “A Long Walk Home“, which you can read for free at the website of Subterranean Press.  “A Long Walk Home” is the first science fictional story I’ll review and analyze for this series.  As with all the stories/novels I’ve discussed so far, I definitely enjoyed reading Jay Lake’s “A Long Walk Home”.  There were, however, some things about the story that disappointed me, which I shall get to in due course.  To follow along, you might want to go check the story out first, then hop on back here, as there will be spoilers in my analysis.

“A Long Walk Home” starts pretty strongly, as we’re introduced to protagonist Aeschylus Sforza, thereafter referred to as Ask.  The year is 2977 – the distant future – and Ask is an enhanced human.  These technological enhancements give him increased strength and durability, longevity (and presumably immortality, as we shall see), a perfect memory, and a direct neural connection to whatever information network exists in the future.  Except Ask is cut off from the network, deep underground exploring the strange and mysterious caverns on an alien planet called Redghost – a planet that has been colonized by humans and looks faintly like a far-future version of the American Frontier of yore.

Outline Done

Just a super-short post today: last night I finally finished the outline for “Book of M”. 

It’s over 13,000 words long, in total, split between two documents (one is about 5,600 words long and the other is just shy of 8,000 words).  The longer document overlaps the shorter document, using about 275 words to cover the same territory that the 5,600 words covered.  I was trying to be more concise in my outline – I wanted to finish the outline faster.  But then I added another 7,500+ words to get from there to the end of the novel, so it wasn’t a lot more concise, and it still took a lot of time.

I’ve learned a bit about outlining, I think – and I don’t think I’d follow the exact same outlining journey I followed here again.  Two documents with so much overlap… it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  But it was definitely a useful exercise… and I have a much better idea of where the story is going now, and how it ends.  I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Next step?  I’m jumping into the draft.

I’m still going to do the timeline and probably also the transfer of my outline notes into a yWriter project.  But I’ve been looking forward to writing the rough draft for months.  Now I’m here.  It’s time.  I’ll just take little breaks from rough draft writing now and again to do more work on my notes, timeline, and other supporting materials.  So, rough draft of “Book of M”: here I come!

Still Brave

Wow. 

I wrote briefly about Pixar’s upcoming movie, Brave, back in July.  But have you seen the trailers?

…

This is looking pretty good.  It’s certainly piqued my interest… again.

My top movies for 2012, so far, are looking like this:

1. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Because duh!  Huge fantasy nerd, here.  Definitely seeing this one in the theaters.
2. The Dark Knight Rises After the last Batman flick, The Dark Knight, both Dear Wife and I left the theory feeling terrified and unsettled. This is not the normal reaction you’re supposed to get from a superhero movie. But I am fascinated by the dark, uncompromising, and true-to-life vision of Christopher Nolan’s Batman. And I want to see how he brings this saga to an end.
3. The Hunger Games Dear Wife and I will both enjoy seeing this.  I just recently read the book, and Dear Wife just recently re-read it.
4. Brave (in a statistical tie for #3) because, well… because Pixar, and because those trailers…
5. The Secret World of Arrietty I’m a pretty big fan of Hayao Miyazaki. I’m predisposed to liking Anime in general, but Miyazaki’s works transcend the genre, and are beautiful and wonderful storytelling. This isn’t a Miyazaki-directed flick, but it’s by his studio (Studio Ghibli), and he’s an Executive Producer, so it’s still got his stamp on it.
6. Prometheus It looks very rated-R, which is something the denizens of the Casa Chez Watkins typically eschew, so I probably won’t see it.  But it is based on the Alien franchise, of which I partook before the days of my trying not to see too many rated-R flicks, so I am still quite fascinated by it – and it looks to be a much more intriguing and intelligent movie than the last few entries in the Alien series.
7. The Amazing Spider-Man I’m still miffed they ruined the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire franchise, and still think it’s too soon; and yet this looks pretty decent.  I may not catch it in theaters, but I’ll probably still see it eventually.
8. Is there a number 8?  Lots of spectacle-flicks this year (The Avengers, John Carter), but nothing that really and deeply excites me.  The Avengers looks to rely too much on last year’s Thor which I didn’t see and which just didn’t strike much interest in me compared to other Marvel titles like Captain America (and the Thor-connection in Captain America annoyed me) and Iron Man.  And John Carter… looks very visual-tastic… but something gives me the sense there isn’t very much there there.  Another title that I might put on my list is World War Z; but so far I just haven’t seen enough about it to form an solid opinion.

Anyway, I hope to see my top 4 in theaters (it’s probably already too late for Arrietty).  Any of these on your radar?

Writing Progress: Week Ending March 3, 2012

Last week, the tide was going out.  This week, we were at low-tide:

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 0 words

Grand Total: 0 words

Technically speaking, my wordcount for the week wasn’t actually 0 words.  I wrote a very little on Saturday.  But the amount of work I got done was so little that it wasn’t worth the effort to count it up in time for this week’s writing progress report.  So I figured I’d just count it up for the next week’s post.  I estimate it was around about 100 words or maybe a little less.

But anyway.  Not a busy week, writing-wise.  This week, Dear Wife and I finished up most of the work on our ongoing home project.  We basically reached a point where we can virtually tie a bow on “Phase I”, though we still have no idea when we’ll progress with “Phase II”.  We were basically done by Wednesday, but the past few weeks have been non-stop, with super-busy weeks on both our day-jobs, as well as all the work on the home project.  So when we were ready to call it done?  We just crashed.

Over the weekend we started to see signs of a return to normalcy for us.  The stress and accumulated fatigue of the past few weeks began slowly to melt away.  All that is good news for my writing, and bodes well for my progress this coming week.  I hope to at last finish my outline this week.  Then this week or next, maybe I’ll actually start with the first draft.  I’m very much looking forward to it.

Before I commence with the draft, I’m contemplating a short diversion or two.  One is to pull together all my notes and fashion a timeline for the book… Pursuant to the results of my last request for input on the subject, it’ll likely be something simple in Excel.  The second diversion would be the transfer of the relevant notes from my outline into yWriter (I’ve decided not to opt for a non-free software solution at this time, since none of the non-free packages has everything I’m looking for).  I’m not yet sure if it will be a valuable use of my time, but I’m interested to see whether it might be useful.  The first diversion I figure will take me a couple hours.  The second… it’s harder to be sure, but I’d be willing to put money on it taking longer, which is why I’m more tenuous on whether I want to do it.

I might opt, instead, to start putting some words down in a first draft, just to say I did, then go back and transfer some of my notes into yWriter…

Or just to write the thing and be done with this whole outlining thing…

Five Questions About Writing

Fellow author/blogger T.S. Bazelli recently answers some interesting questions on her blog, at the prompting of author/blogger John Wiswell, who was asked the questions by a reader of his blog and aspiring writer.

I am still an aspiring author myself, so my answers to these questions aren’t likely to be of any further use or insight to the original inquisitor of these questions.  But they were thought provoking enough that I thought I might learn something more about myself by addressing and answering them.  So, here goes…

1. What inspired you to be a writer?