Still available is the fascinating Jackrabbit. This is a historical crime novel about the latter career of Depression-era gangster John Dillinger. This criminal’s life was indeed stranger than fiction – so much so that I had to focus on only the last five months of it to keep from overwhelming myself and the reader. Check out the Jackrabbit page for details.
Progress is being made on the latest MS; I’ve just completed editing the second draft of Fester Descent. The story’s tight, but could still use plenty of polishing. One polishing, coming up – but it’s also time to think about publishing and (UGH!) marketing the book.
I’ve already reached out to an editor who I’ve worked with before. She’s being cagey, as editors sometimes do. However, she did a bang-up job on Fester, and I’d rather work with her again than take my chances picking one randomly from Reedsy. That worked out very poorly on Laughingstock, and I’m not eager to recreate that experience.
While that drama is playing out, I’m looking at cover art – one of the most fun parts of self-publishing – mainly because I’m the one pointing our errors and demanding changes! No, it’s great to see how a written work will be represented graphically.
I found an organization that claimed that it could produce a professional-looking cover for a hundred bucks. Well, that just about fits my budget, so I thought I’d give it a go. (I’ll let you know the name of this organization once I’m satisfied with the work.) One bit of concern – will they use AI to create the artwork? There is a checkbox on the intake form about whether you want to avoid AI-generated content. It does not, however, specifically state that they won’t use AI if you check that box. I guess we’ll see.
Of course, conveying the intent of the book to the cover artists involved summarizing the book, which is something that many authors struggle with. I know I sure do. It needs to be done, so I got on it. Besides, this is just a clumsy explanation, but it will eventually morph into a reasonably decent back over blurb, and – eventually – a well-crafted Amazon Ads description.
I did submit an idea for a cover, based on some of the more interesting elements in the narrative. I asked the artists to create a cover that incorporates these three elements:
A brothel
An M50A1 tank
Upwards of three (3) monkeys
I’d like to think that a book cover with these elements just screams “great read!” Or maybe it will be something else entirely. We’ll see – stay tuned!
After getting off to a slow start, I finally got up a bit of momentum on the second draft of my latest project. After re-writing one of the early chapters, it was pretty much just picking up the redlines I had marked up the Shitty First Draft – easy stuff. Then my timeline came back to haunt me.
I had learned about the importance of having an accurate timeline from Paula Guran, who edited Fester. She was merciless in addressing the timeline, among other things. (Shame she wasn’t available for Laughingstock,which was an editing nightmare.) I hope she’ll be available to edit Fester Descent.
But just in case, I’ve been keeping a tight timeline as I’m working through the second draft. This is where I pay for the sins of the SFD. Timing issues are just one of many sins, but arguably the most problematic. And as I learned with Fester, you don’t want these problems to linger too long or they, um, fester.
So I’m jumping on it right now, at my earliest convenience. (No point in worrying about it during the SFD; that’s all about getting words on paper.) When cranking on the SFD, I was only worried about the sequence, not the timing. I just knew that event A came before event B, and to hell with the details. Now I’m dealing with situations where a character gets shot, but his wife doesn’t visit him in the hospital for five days. Oops! Gotta fix that.
It’s a knot, I think – and it pays to un-knot the story as quickly as possible. You can sometimes shove the knot down the rope a bit, but you sure don’t want to shove it all the way to the end – because it gets begger the further you shove it.
I think I’ve worked the knot metaphor for about as much as I can. Best to call it good right here. More news to follow as I finish up Draft 2 and start to think about showing it to an editor. I can hardly wait.
After nearly two months, I’ve finally gotten through “editing” the Shitty First Draft of my latest MS, working title Fester Descent. Now, when I say “editing,” I really mean reading and redlining the text, and making notes for the next draft.
Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that it took me so long to read through my own first draft. A nasty part of my mind tells me that a real writer would have gotten through the whole thing in a weekend.
In my defense, I have three good excuses as to the dilatory nature of my review:
I find it difficult reading my own writing, especially for extended periods
I had a whopper of a spring cold in May that sidelined me for nearly three weeks
I am monumentally lazy
However, now I’ve finished my review and now I have to write the Slightly Less Shitty Second Draft (SLSSD). Okay, I merely have to take a big breath and just start doing it.
Easier said than done, of course.
There is one thing that will make it a little easier: for a first draft, it’s not that bad. You never know what you’ll end up with at the end of a first draft, especially if you’re a pantser like I am. Usually, I end up with a large number of loose ends that have to be tied up, sometimes awkwardly. With this draft, that wasn’t so much of a problem. (OK, yeah, so I had to resort to a deux ex machina in the form of an Air National Guard F-16, but other than that…) Maybe it’s luck or maybe some small portion of accumulated skill, but it seems like things came together a lot more easily on this one.
That having been said, there is still a lot of polishing that needs to be done. Time to get down to it. Then sell some plasma so I can hire and editor.
I’ve discovered something about finishing the first draft of a novel: nobody really gives a rip but the writer. Which is understandable. For starters, nobody’s going to get to read it. There are only a handful of people who read any of my pre-publication manuscripts. The rest of you aren’t missing anything, believe me.
Nevertheless, I was mighty glad to be done with the Shitty First Draft (SFD) of my next novel. For starters, I finished it in less than a year, which is an amazing record for me, since I am essentially very lazy, and it usually takes me a long time to write anything. I fully credit this relatively fast writing time to my participation last year in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. This was great, as it allowed me to add 66,000 words to the MS in 30 days – a word count that normally would have taken my five or six months to produce with my normal glacial pace.
I had been meaning to participate in NaNoWriMo for years, and was glad that I actually took the plunge and did it in 2024, because it was recently announced that NaNoWriMo has gone bankrupt. A sad and sorry end to a 25-year-old institution whose laudable goal was to get authors to put words on pages. So long, NaNoWriMo.
The upside is that I now have a new MS brick to edit. I didn’t get started on revising it right away, however. First, I went back and reread Fester, as this is a sequel. Good thing I did, too – I had forgotten a number of important details of the original story that have an impact on the new one. The biggest was my faulty recollection that Billy Snyder had gone to prison following the shenanigans of Fester, when in fact he had used his J. Edgar Hoover-esque collection of intel and political dirt to keep his butt out of lockup.
Overall, I’m pretty well pleased with how the SFD came out. Usually, the end of the MS is a little chaotic at first, due primarily to my pantsing style of writing. This time, however, things resolved themselves with a relatively low level of chaos as I tried to weave the disparate story lines together. Despite – or perhaps because of – the mad rush of NaNoWriMo, the S-level is relatively low in this SFD. I think that with one more draft, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show this to an editor.
Hot New Item! Audiobooks!
This just happened recently – all of my books are now available as audio books. People have been asking after this for years, but I have demurred. Mainly, I didn’t have the time or the interest or the money. It can be expensive to produce an audio book – especially if the other formats don’t sell that well. Sometimes people ask, “Why don’t you narrate it yourself? You have a good voice.” I do indeed have a face made for radio, but these folks grossly underestimate how much time is involved in recording – and especially editing – an audio file. My rule of thumb is that it takes eight times as long to prepare a presentation such as this as the length of the presentation. That is to say, if the recorded audio book runs ten hours, it would require eighty hours to record and properly edit. That’s a lot of extra work to snag extra sales that would net me enough each month to perhaps buy a 2-pack of Hot Pockets. If they were on sale. So, no thanks.
However, Amazon has made it easy now. They have a computer-generated narration tool that sounds pretty decent, and only takes a few minutes to convert the text to an audio file. Best of all – it’s free! Of course, it involves AI – something that I have been loath to involve myself with, but this was just too good to pass up. I tried it out on Laughingstock and it sounded pretty good, so I pulled the trigger and created audio versions of all my books. See below for an example.
One of the things I’ve done this winter in lieu of writing, was to do something I haven’t done in about 45 years: build a model tank.
However, I wasn’t just acting like a 14-year-old, lurking in the basement, blasting Black Sabbath and gluing together squidgy little plastic parts of a tank replica. No, I was doing research.
This was in aid of the current work-in-progress, a sequel to Fester now using the working title Fester Descent. One of the initial mental images I had for this book was a column of tanks rolling through downtown Fester. (Pretty sure I copped this idea from the Book of the SubGenius, of which you should own several copies.)
Further consideration rendered the idea of a column of tanks too complicated, but a single tank should be much more manageable. And I already had a character to command that tank: Billy Snyder, the disgraced former Chief Constable of Fester. It had already been established that Billy had served with the Marines in Vietnam and that he was adept at procuring classified military hardware.
Then it became a matter of research: what type of tanks did the U.S. Marines use in Vietnam? There weren’t many choices, as that war did not see much in the way of armor battles. Then I hit upon the beauty seen at the top of the page: the M50 Ontos. The Ontos was used in Vietnam, and it was small, so it could conceivably be operated but just one whacked-out ex-cop. Best of all, it was weird.
The Ontos – Greek for thing – isn’t so much a tank as a mobile platform for a half-dozen recoilless rifles, with some sheet metal over top. That made the Ontos maneuverable and powerful – but also very vulnerable. It could go places other armored vehicles couldn’t, but was also vulnerable to any weapon more powerful than an assault rifle.
Of course, I had to also research under which circumstances the M50 was used in that war. It came down primarily to two engagements: the Battle of Khe Sanh and the Battle of Hue. The latter seemed more likely from a dramatic perspective, owing to the brutal building-to-building nature of that fight and the likelihood of using the Ontos to blow up buildings. After all, what do you think Billy Snyder is going to do with this piece of hardware? Hint: he’s not fixing it up for the Fester Veterans’ Day parade.
The research included a detailed investigation into the Battle of Hue in 1969. The research also stumbled across a plastic model of the Ontos. At 1:16 scale, it was large enough to boast a detailed interior. This was important, as I really wanted to know what it was like to ride around and fight in this thing.
The answer: awful. It was cramped, it must have been loud, and with the hatches closed, the only way to see or steer was through periscopes in the hatches. It also had to be difficult knowing that the armor was so paltry, to cut down on weight. One thing became apparent – the driver’s position (the one Billy had in the war) was the safest on the vehicle, since the engine compartment protected the driver’s right side.
It was an aggravatingly detailed model, and it took nearly three months to put together. After it was done, my wife asked if I was going to do any more. I said no way. One could be excused as research, but any more would just make it another pathetic middle-aged white-guy pastime, and I already have enough of those.
For my money, T.S. Eliot had it wrong – January is the cruelest month. The warmth and light of the holidays are a rapidly-receding memory, the days are cold and the nights are long and summer couldn’t seem further away. And it’s so damn loooooong.
January, for me, has always been a time to hunker down and hibernate. Undertake as few obligations as possible (and absolutely no New Year’s resolutions), keep warm and curl up with as many books as possible. Lie fallow.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I sure haven’t been doing a lot of writing. I somewhat painted myself into a corner with the balls to the wall writing blitzkrieg of NaNoWritMo, and have just been kicking around ideas how to resolve my plotting conundrum.
Also, I’ve been building a model tank. This is research – more on this once I’m done putting this blasted model together.
That’s it. Stay warm, stay safe, hold onto your hat and hold onto your hope.
In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attempt the NaNoWriMo Full Meal Deal. That is, I was going engage in the National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 of a novel during the month of November. This breaks down to 1,667 words per day. This was pretty intimidating to me; I usually only crank out ~500 words per day in my usual laid-back style of writing. This was going to take courage! This was going to take discipline! Did I have what it takes? I wasn’t sure, and it was only at the last moment (literally, Halloween) did I toss my hat in the ring and commit myself to the NaNoWriMo challenge.
On November 1, I wrote 2,187 words. It didn’t seem that hard. On the 2nd, I wrote 2,031 words, just to prove to myself that it wasn’t just a fluke. After a few more days of 2000+ words per day, I decided to shoot for an overall goal of 60,000 words by the end of the month. And I did!
I had a work-in-progress: the sequel to Fester, which is currently using the working title of Descent. The manuscript had been off to a sluggish start, with a little under 25K words written in 5 months. NaNoWriMo seemed like it would be a great opportunity to give the project a boost.
And it did – but it was not without its challenges. I am a pantser when it comes to my writing. That is, I don’t do a lot of planning or outlining – I just fly by the seat of my pants. This typically isn’t a problem when I’m writing at my normally glacial pace, but it got to be an issue for NaNoWriMo.
One of the fun things about pantsing is that the story and characters will take off in directions I’d never conceived. It can be fun, but also frustrating. Cranking out 2,000 words a day in this mode can be a problem, however. I liken it to driving fast at night. The headlights can only illuminate so much of the road ahead; the faster you go, the less time you have to react. And I was going pretty fast, especially towards the end of the month. It felt like I was running out of road. Up until then, I’d had a pretty good idea what was going to happen over the next three or so chapters. Not so for the last week, where I was pantsing it to the max. The verbiage became verbose: I was shoveling adjectives and adverbs as much as I could.
In the end it was a good thing, though. Having to write something, even when I had no idea what it might be, definitely introduced some interesting elements into the story. My characters really had to bear the brunt of my word count goal!
At the end, it was a good thing. Tapping into my long-dormant overachiever tendencies, I kept going even when I’d met the 50K goal. I needed to collect all of the badges (see image above). And I did, just because I’m a Lisa Simpson-type geek.
More than that, it really helped me as a writer. First, it helped move my latest project along by getting 10 or 12 months’ worth of writing done in just one month. It also allowed me to understand how to deal with some serious production. I intend to keep moving Descent along sharply – but I’m taking a week off just to let things percolate in my subconscious. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up in the story now!
It’s November, and for writing weenies like me, that means it’s time for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I believe that earlier to get full credit for NaNoWriMo, you had to start with a blank slate (or manuscript) at the beginning of the month. Now they’re cool with works in progress, which was good for me, as I had the sequel to Fester sort of farting along in low gear. This seemed like a good opportunity to give the project a kick in the pants.
To get to 50K words in 30 days, that boils down to 1,667 words per day. That’s three or four times as many as I normally crank out in a writing session. I had done a truncated “personal goals” NaNoWriMo a few years ago – but that was only for 500 words per day. I made that goal, but to get full NaNoWriMo bragging rights, you need to hit that 50,000 word mark.
I’m nearly a week in, and I’m pleased to report that I’ve been able to keep up a solid 2,000 word a day pace without unduly straining my brain (or fingers). I know some professional writers who would scoff at this pace, but this is on top of a full 8-hour day of work. So, pffft.
So that’s it – I’m doing NaNoWriMo and I’m off to a good start. Will I maintain? Don’t know. I do know that I ought to be able to milk this topic for at least one intermediate post before I report the final disposition at the end of the month. See you soon!
Well, if I’m to follow in Mr. Dumpty’s footsteps, I’m due for an awesome fall – because this summer was, in fact, rather sucky.
July was okay, just hectic – but in August, things went downhill in a hurry. In early August I had stomach surgery, which is all well and good. At first, the recovery went great. They sent me home with a large bottle of opiated syrup, and that was just fine. However, about a week and a half after the surgery I got hit with a GI bug, and it cleaned my clock. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it was a strong and persistent bug that laid me quite low for five freakin’ weeks. It wasn’t just nasty, it was dag nasty.
I didn’t make a big deal of this on social media, partly because I don’t like sharing personal details online*. Also, I didn’t want to unduly worry my legion of insanely-devoted fans, at least until I felt I was out of the woods. I’m sure I spared many rendings of garments, not to mention much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Naturally, my writing suffered. I did get some feedback expressing the expectation that I was doing wonderful writing during my recuperation. There are two reasons for this: initially, large bottle of opiated syrup; then, 24-7 vomit-o-rama. Neither is conducive to authorial motivation. Robert Louis Stevenson may have written wonders from his sick bed, but I was either giggling at the cracks in the ceiling or clutching my spasming belly and moaning piteously.
It was a bit of a chore to finally shake the rust of and get back down to writing the sequel to Fester.I managed to fake my way through a few writers’ groups with chapters I had already completed before the surgery. Soon enough, I had to get cranking again. It was tough at first, but pretty soon the thoughts began to outpace the fingers and the word count continued to ratchet up.
I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m developing new characters – or rather, they’re developing themselves. The characters from the original book have already revealed their personalities to me, but these three new Schmidts (Ronald, Ophelia and Thelma Louise) are just starting to become more than cardboard cutouts, which is always fascinating to experience. Of course, there’s plenty of fun in seeing what the old characters are up to. For example, Billy Snyder is working on a restoration project that is really batshit crazy.
Enough for now. I don’t want to give too much away – especially since it might all change by Draft 2. Suffice to say that I’m well on my way to recovery and cranking on the word count.
*I’m only sharing this info here because I’m pretty sure hardly anyone will read it.
After a bit of a rocky start to the summer, I am moving forward more briskly with my sequel to Fester. The working title is Fall, although that is almost certain to change eventually. I had hoped that this story would be an easier one to write because I had somewhat of an outline.
The outline came from a series of local newspaper articles from Astoria, Oregon. It chronicled the final downfall of a once-prominent local family called the Flavels. And the end of their story was so weird, it seemed straight out of Fester. In fact, Astoria has some geographical similarities to my mental picture of Fester – save the three-mile-wide river mouth and the Pacific Ocean. I’ll save the story of the Flavels for another time, though.
I’m about 50 pages into the manuscript, which isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it is enough to give me a broad view of how the story is progressing. And I’m not particularly surprised to discover that the vaunted Flavel narrative is not the watertight outline I’d originally (and unrealistically) expected, but more of a loose framework.
I guess that is to be expected of an inveterate pantser. To Hades with the outline; we pantsers are allergic to them. However, what I do have, 50 pages in, is a number of narrative threads that will weave themselves together in ways I can’t predict and may not even want. Even better, I have a number of characters in interesting situations that have yet to reveal themselves. This is the best part of being a pantser: winding up the characters and observing what they do.
Seriously, I frequently have no conscious intention about a characters actions. I just watch and report. It’s like having a movie projector that only works when I hammer on the keyboard. Entertaining as hell, and also a little spooky sometimes.
Here’s how things are shaping up right now. Normally, I would be hesitant to give too much of the narrative away this early in the process. However, since this is the Shitty First Draft, what’s going on now may have absolutely no resemblance to the final product, so what the hell. Here are the threads that have manifested themselves so far:
Martin Prieboy has now been the Chief Constable of Fester for nearly twenty years. He has just lost his spouse to cancer, and finds himself bonding with a police informant.
Billy Snyder served several years in the state pen for his part in the events in Fester. Now he lives in the boondocks outside of town, where he sells military antiques – and plots revenge.
The land once known as the Wizard’s Woods has been developed into a mall. However, in 2014, malls aren’t doing too well, and Harold Todd, the mall’s owner, is starting to get worried about its financial viability. And there are some strange things going on at the mall after hours…
Michael “Bolly” Bollinger has successfully taken over his father’s automotive repair shop. His landlord, the Schmidt family, is once again hiking the rent on the shop, making Bolly concerned about his financial future.
What happens next? OK. I’ve got a pretty good idea what Bolly’s going to do now, and maybe some ideas about the mall, but that’s it. The rest will reveal itself as I pound the keyboard. That’s part of the fun of being an indie writer. That and the money. Woo-hoo!
