As you can see, I got a lot of writing done on Tuesday. Before I started, I had been on a pretty-fully-reversed sleep schedule, going to bed around 8AM and sleeping 8 hours. I wrote that long blog post between 2AM and 4AM, basically “mid-afternoon” for me, and then got started writing. I took my last two modafinil that day, to stay awake until 8/9PM, with the intention of then sleeping all night and continuing the week on a proper daytime schedule. The first day went well, as you can see. My average words/hour rate was consistently above 800 words/hour (which is what I’ve been averaging across my last several books) and frequently at 1k words/hour. In part, I’m confident this is because in addition to being a drug for narcolepsy (let me stay awake), modafinil is a sort of “smart pill” which can enhance one’s mental focus. I ended up writing 4 of the 20 chapters I needed to finish the vampire duology.

When the 2nd pill wore off and I got tired right on schedule, I tried going to bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. After about an hour of that, I tried some mild exercise for about an hour, then tried again to go to sleep. I ended up getting a little over 3 hours of sleep, and was wide awake but feeling odd/off before 2AM. I put myself back to work, but my writing speed was maxing out at 800 words/hour, and I kept distracting myself with other tasks, sometimes for hours at a time. Then at around 8:3oAM, I was overcome with sleepiness. I went to bed. Slept 4-5 hours. My pace (and distractibility) were the same after sleeping, though I tried to keep myself working most of the afternoon and evening. By the end of the day I’d only finished writing 2 more chapters.

By Wednesday night it was clear to me that rather than shifting myself back to a diurnal schedule, I’d merely broken my sleep cycle in two – I slept another 4-5 hours at night, and woke in the early morning. As distractible as I’d been with all the other things I could do on my home computer, I decided to try heading to Starbucks where I (sometimes? often?) have better luck keeping focused. My writing pace, even with the good caffeine & sugar & eye candy and without much to distract me from the task at hand, was under 500 words/hour. I nearly failed to finish a single chapter before giving up and going home – where I almost immediately went to bed. And slept 4-5 more hours, waking up without enough time to get any writing done before I had to make dinner and go with Mandy to a Phoenix Comicon meeting. When we got home, I logged in to Star Trek Online for their 2-year anniversary event (free new ship for everyone!), and didn’t get any more writing done before heading to bed around 1AM. I only got 1 chapter written, yesterday.

So, that’s where I’m at. I slept from 1AM to 5AM and expect to sleep from 10AM or 11AM to 3PM or 4PM – at which time I’ll need to go get started making dinner, followed by having a Friday night with my wife. Worst case for this (barring no writing) is that I go write for the next 3 hours, it goes as slow or slower than yesterday, and my word count for the day goes down by half yet again. On this trajectory I’m facing Zeno’s paradox and will never reach the end of these books.

What I really need is 3 more of those 10k+word days. Quick, someone get me more smart pills! At the very least, this sleep thing is screwing up my ability to write for any sustained period, and is eating some of the best writing hours from the middle of the day.

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

Much of the time, I don’t even have the focus required to work at all, or to blog, or get much of anything done. For much of the last couple of months, though I’ve spent more time playing video games than most anything else, I’ve even had trouble keeping focus there – generally unable to play for more than a couple of hours at a time before my mind wanted to bounce to some other thing. Yet here and there, for a few minutes or an hour at a time, I have been doing work.

One of the problems with this is that nothing is getting finished, which I may address separately, but looming larger to me right now is the ridiculous number of different projects I’m working on (or procrastinating) in these little bits and pieces. I’ll work for an hour, or a chapter, on the vampire novels I’ve been working on for the last year, then later that day (or the next day – the next time I get any work done) I’ll be spontaneously working on some other thing. Outlining a new serial thriller, writing a chapter of my book on publishing, researching or brainstorming for a story I’m developing about an end to senescence, coming up with apps I want to develop on iOS (beyond the interactive comics I initially had in mind), et cetera. I made a list tonight (partially so I don’t lose track of all the different work I’m doing) and have found at least nine different projects I have at various stages of development. (Not including writing things like this blog post, or any thoughts about getting back into visual art.)

At the same time, and almost certainly related, I’ve been experiencing significant irrational emotional distress. Feeling good and bad at the same time. Happy and grateful for all the good things in my life; years of happy marriage, paying down our debt & being financially comfortable, being in the best shape & health of my adult life, free to do the work I want to do on the schedule my insanity allows without external financial or emotional pressure, and so on. Simultaneously I’m going through extremes of emotional overeating, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, full-body physical pain (yes, this is a symptom of depression), bouts of mania, antisocial urges, and a wide variety of effects relating to my libido, among other expressions of my depression. It’s all quite difficult to be going through.

Good mixed with bad. I stated earlier that this was, in a way, a return to an old problem, and that’s true. Working on more projects at once than I knew how to keep up with was something I struggled with in the middle of the last decade, though I don’t recall having quite so many different (big) things going at once. Then there have been periods where I didn’t have any projects going. Even most of last year feels a bit that way, though I know I was doing the work to prepare myself to write my vampire duology, I also look back and see eight-plus months where I didn’t produce anything obvious: No big word counts, very few paintings, no new audiobooks… Except I’m looking at it from my (most self-effacing) perspective, when I see it that way. In reality I put out multiple new books in the Spring, my podcast didn’t fall silent until Summer, I published my first book by another author in the Fall, and then immediately started the writing part of the work on two new books. Which was mostly one project followed by another. Now I’m back to a weird state of being unable to keep my mind from bouncing between quite a lot of things all at once. Good to have so many things going, but also bad that I can’t seem to keep focus on (and sooner finish) any one of them. Good to find myself so inspired by my life and the world, so full of ideas. Bad that I still feel (mostly, I’m working on it) like I don’t have a cause or a “purpose” or some deep passion driving me and driving my work – I’m not trying to “say something” most of the time, certainly not in any overall way, I’m just … expressing my ideas.

Good and bad. Challenged and successful. Engaged and distracted. Frustrated and content. Happy with my life and on the verge of suicide. All mixed up and exactly how I’m supposed to be.

Also: I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps I secretly live somewhere on Mars, or that I’m natively Martian, or something like that. Left to my body’s natural cycles, I seem to slip around the clock. In the past I’d estimated it was nearly one extra hour per day, that perhaps I was simply running 25-hour days – yet my actual experience seems to tell me it isn’t whole hours. I don’t reliably gain seven hours every week; It’s somewhat less. Mars has a day approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes long. I intend to develop a system for calculating and tracking Martian daylight & seasons in parallel with my own wake/sleep cycles, to see whether there is any correlation. If/when I figure out where on Mars I am (or that I’m actually running at some other regular rate, or a wildly irregular rate, which I also strongly suspect) I’ll be sure to post an update.

Here’s some backstory before I get into the numbers: Back in the before-times, I began writing stories. By the turn of the millennia, I’d begun thinking about writing novels. By the end of 2002 I’d written (and published, albeit in extremely low quantity and quality, and quietly) my first novel. By 2004 I’d done a nearly-professional job publishing it, and my second novel, though I still lacked distribution. At the end of 2004, my life went off a cliff, right after I published my 3rd novel, and publishing my 4th novel in 2005 was part of the long descent into Hell, which didn’t begin to let up until the Fall of 2006, when I also finished my 5th novel. Coming out of those dark days, I decided to take publishing seriously, started Modern Evil Press officially in 2007, and re-published my first 5 novels via Lightning Source (LSI), along with two poetry books. With LSI, I had professional (though not offset) printing, and I also had professional distribution (though not the sort of distribution where sales reps were trying to get my books onto store shelves; ‘distribution’ has two definitions in the publishing world, and mine just meant that if a bookstore ordered a book, it would be printed & delivered), and my books began appearing on Amazon &c. in their new forms. In 2008 I left my day job and began working as a full time creative, putting out professional-level eBooks and near-professional audiobooks along with the paper editions. Since then I’ve continued writing, editing, recording and publishing books, and as of right now I’ve written 11 novels, 2 short story collections, 2 poetry collections, and edited & published my first book by someone else. I’ve also published one short story exclusively in digital (eBook & audio).

If you read here much, you probably knew all that. (If not, please check out modernevil.com.) You may even have some idea of my financials. But… Did you know that, of my books released on paper, none one of them has ever made enough sales (even including sales across all formats, to try to make up for the cost of the paper editions through digital sales) to cover the cost of putting out that paper edition? My only “profitable” titles are the ones where I either 1) never published a paper edition, or 2) sold the original work of art I created for the cover of the book. Then there’s that short story I linked to in the last paragraph, Last Christmas (have you read it? It’s only $1.99!), which has both earned more than it cost me to publish the eBook (I still have to buy an ISBN) and for which I sold the cover art. Including some of the other books’ cover art means it’s not my most profitable book, but it feels that way, since it’s earned close to $70 but cost me less than $10 to publish.

Here are some fun numbers about my relationship with LSI: Since I began working with them in 2007, I have paid LSI $2163.46. By my calculation, $408 of that was in “Digital Catalog Fees”, which is an Invoice-y way of saying I pay $12/year/title to have my books available for distribution to booksellers (i.e.: Amazon &c.), and the other $1728.46 was for things like setup fees, shipping and handling, proof copies, oh, and actually printing copies of my books for me to have for direct sales. Let’s take that second number first, and compare it to the total revenue I’ve had come in from direct sales of paper books, which is approximately $1531.33, or a couple hundred dollars less than I spent getting those books. That’s from nearly 5 years of sales. Of course, I have a fair amount of inventory on hand. If all the books I have on the shelves next to me sold for their full cover prices, my bookkeeping software tells me I’d have another $4716.93 from the sale of those 307 books. By retail value, roughly 40% of that is in the two Untrue Trilogies I published this year, fewer than ten of which have sold (between the two titles), so far. Theoretically, if I could ever sell all these books, I’d still make quite a good margin on selling paper copies directly. With the nearly-2/3 margin I calculate for that, I can even afford to do some discounting (which I regularly do, a dollar or two at a time, whenever it’ll help make a sale).

Now let’s look at that other number. The Digital Catalog Fees. I spent $408 to make and keep my titles available for distribution over the last 5 years. I earned $131.26 from wholesale sales of my books (after LSI took their cut for printing them). That’s right. Over the last five years I spent $408 to earn $131.26. On one hand, I’m also paying for visibility; that fee covers getting my books listed on Amazon, bn.com, and theoretically hundreds of other online booksellers, plus it gets them listed as available in the computers of all the bookstores, large and small, across the country. On the other hand, they (bookstores, and customers of online stores) rarely, if ever, order my paper books. Of the 13 titles I’ve printed & distributed with LSI, only 5 titles have ever sold wholesale via LSI, and only one title earned enough from wholesale sales to cover its own Digital Catalog Fees (until/unless I get one more annual fee, then it’s just as red as the others). That includes zero books sold in 2011. (Actually, technically, I sold negative two books via LSI in 2011 – I recently received two returns. Because of strange LSI policies I didn’t fully understand, the cost of the return of one of them exceeded the value of all 5 sales that book had made in prior years. Five sales, one return, zero profit (for that title).) So what is that visibility getting me? Not more sales from my own website. Maybe more eBook sales, though that’s impossible to track. Oh, and speaking of eBook sales: For the 5 titles which had wholesale sales, all earned more from eBook sales than from wholesale paperback sales. All. To readers who paid at least 50% less than those who bought paper copies.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, for one: Paying for distribution of paper books doesn’t make sense, at all. Also: I need to better gauge the number of paper books I’ll be able to sell directly; when I sell them, they’re profitable, but when they sit on my shelf, they aren’t. (To clarify: It was a terrible idea to publish a new edition of the First Untrue Trilogy, and was probably a bad idea to put out a paper edition of the Second Untrue Trilogy. Of the ~$1700 I spent on getting paper books made in the last 5 years, ~$700 was for those two books. Which is to say: Without those books, I’d have had ~$1300 in direct sales and ~$1000 in printing costs, and at least that aspect of it would have been profitable.) Another detail which comes up: Publishing digital-only is much more likely to be profitable for me, even when only a few copies sell.

Really, because only a few copies sell.

I can pretend that “someday I’ll reach a bigger paying audience”, and maybe I will, but I can’t count on it. I need to make decisions based on reality. Right now the reality is that I have a few, very dedicated readers and supporters (the so-called “true fans”) and a whole lot of readers who are very unlikely to spend anything at all on my work. (And when they do, it isn’t on a paperback.) So: I’ve already begun taking my books “out of print”.

I told LSI to “cancel” my two poetry books (right after publishing Unspecified), which have earned about $70 between them and cost me somewhat over $480, so far. They weren’t making even enough sales to cover the annual Digital Catalog Fees, so I cancelled them. (I’ll have full eBook editions for sale… soon.) I’ll probably cancel all the rest when my LSI reps get back from holiday. I have literally no idea when they’ll stop being listed as available on Amazon and other sites. Right now my poetry books are listed as “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon, even though I cancelled them months ago. Note: I still have plenty of copies available. That actually goes for all my books. I have over 300 books sitting here, waiting for readers. Even after they’re removed from all the bookstores’ databases, I’ll still have them for sale. I’ll work on updating modernevil.com in the new year, too. I’ll probably offer them unsigned for the cover price and signed for a little more, close to what I have now, but my own buy button instead of external links. (Since those links literally never worked for getting sales, anyway.)

What about my future books, you may be wondering? Well, how about digital-first? (Maybe digital-only.) How about digital first, and maybe a Kickstarter or just-straight-painting-sale or maybe a pre-order signup process to see whether there’s any interest in a limited-edition, direct-only, paper version of the book (probably hardback). If I’m not doing distribution, if each paper book is limited edition from copy one, the whole thing gets turned on its head, from price to quality to design. Offset printing still won’t make sense until/unless I get that theoretical larger-audience, but I can design a very nice hardback edition for LSI to print just for me and my readers. If I don’t have to give a retailer 50% (or more) off the top of every sale, even POD hardbacks can be reasonable prices. If I’m producing collector’s items, even relatively affordable ones, even just selling a few can make me a lot more money than I’ve been getting from book sales. It’ll be a sort of cautious Freemium model. Less-popular books will make most of their money from digital, more-popular books will make vastly more money from paper books, and I’ll still probably make more money from art than from books for years to come. (These aren’t final numbers, but it looks like for 2011 I’ll have had a little over $700 in book sales, a little over $1400 in art sales, and a little over $1600 in expenses. Profitable again, which is good, but not by a whole lot. If I just get an order of magnitude more successful, I might actually have to think about things like paying quarterly estimated taxes! In the meantime, I’m generally happy where I’m at.)

I’m going to play around with numbers a lot more in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes out for a new set of quarterly (and end-of-year) download numbers, with some interesting spikes, some time next month. I’ve actually got about 3 months of bookkeeping I’ve got to go through; I’ve been slacking. (The numbers above are all estimates; I have numbers, I just haven’t got them all in the right places for business purposes, yet.) I’ll also want to run all the numbers I can think of on … everything I’ve been talking about. And some projections into the new year.

Oh, and I’ve got to finish writing those books. I’ve not been working on them in the last week or two, partially because sitting down every day to grind out more chapters was beginning to feel more like work and less like something I wanted to be doing – and I want to write these books. So I’m taking most of the money/expenses out of my business, and I’m taking most of the pressure off my process, and I think I’ll be better off for it. In fact, I think my business will be more successful, financially, and I’ll personally be more successful, creatively and emotionally. Win, win, win, and win for anyone who likes reading my books, too.

I think most of the people who find themselves anti-NaNoWriMo need to step back and figure out what they really have problems with, and try to focus on those things.

Be pro-editing, if it’s unedited and poorly edited books that bother you.

Encourage and educate people re: using Circles more effectively, to share posts only with those who are interested, if you don’t like your social media to be full of NaNo updates Oct-Dec.

Maybe just try to realize that there are power laws at play: Roughly/over 80% who attempt NaNoWriMo don’t finish (not even the word count, let alone an ending), and after doing it for ten years I can tell you that around 80% of those who do finish (as well as nearly everyone who doesn’t) have no interest in publishing their books – often they barely want it seen beyond their family/friends, if anyone. Anecdotally, I’d say that of the fraction of a fraction who have any intention of their book seeing the light of day, probably 80%+ know they need to spend time editing & polishing it (which is why NaNoEdMo exists, since much of the same need-a-goal-and-deadline still applies to any non-dayjob activity for a lot of people).

Oh, and then there’s the fact that, for me and most everyone I know who enjoys NaNoWriMo, it’s primarily about being social and having fun meeting other like-minded people while we all work on our own creative projects. Even the most curmudgeonly-anti-NaNoWriMo people I know tend to encourage activity of the same description, as long as it isn’t NaNoWriMo. Being social and collaborative and creative and building a network of thousands of local community groups all doing the same thing, all over the world, each allowing people to express themselves and make and meet creative goals and meet new people… Who cares if a tiny fraction of the creative work that comes out of it is professional quality? Do you rag on your grandmother’s knitting circle for not being aware of the market realities of the textile industry? Get a grip. Stop being anti- and find a way to be pro-.

When I started outlining the first book, a few days before November, I determined that at least the first book wanted to be over 65k words. Because of what I’m planning on doing with them, I want the books to be roughly the same length. Consequently, my word count goal for the month was set at, roughly, one hundred and thirty thousand words. Which is about 4,334 words/day, every day. I kept up a pretty good pace for the first week, almost ten days, then began to taper off. This was largely due to difficult things taking place in the story, but once I’d lost my momentum, around 50k words, actually, I wasn’t able to regain it. Different things kept happening, coming up, interrupting, et cetera. I didn’t finish the first book, yet. I wrote to the point that one of the main characters from the other book is introduced – I need to know what he’s like, what he’s been going through, where he’s at, and how the events about to take place in Sophia’s story are going to affect Emily in hers before I can write them. So I stopped that one and started working on the other.

The outline for that one seemed to imply that it wants to be shorter, which is especially frustrating since Sophia’s story seems to have gone even longer, currently on track for somewhat over 70k words. We’ll have to wait and see how that one actually ends up, but so far the chapters want to be short, too, which is frustrating – but maybe later chapters will want to be longer. Meh. I’m sure it’ll all work out alright. When I get around to writing it. Probably slowly over the next month or so. I predict a lot of workdays writing. Maybe not 5k-10k words/day, but some.

It’s more important to me to get the books written well than to stress out over any artificial deadlines. I recently determined that, by the time I’m done working on these two books, I’ll have spent around a thousand hours on them, between research, planning, writing, editing, recording/editing, and publishing them. Trying to rush any part of the process for books I’m investing so much time in seems inappropriate. So, I’m trying to get back into the right frame of mind for writing these books. This one is a tough one, for a whole stack of reasons I’ve mentioned on Google+ as I run into them, but I’m dedicated to doing it, and doing it well.

Anyway, I’m over 60k words so far on the novels this month, so I’m a “winner” of NaNoWriMo. I may write more this week, depending on what else is going on, perhaps another 10k-20k words… but I don’t expect to finish the first drafts of the two novels for at least several more weeks. If you’re interested in helping me with them, in becoming a ‘Beta Reader’ of my unfinished books, to give me feedback on them before I move into the final editing/layout/recording stages, comment or email me, and I’ll add you to the list, then send you copies of the books when I’m finished writing them.

Anyway, as happens in NaNoWriMo circles as November approaches, a familiar meme has arisen in recent discussions with friends and family members; the idea of pantser vs. plotter (or pantser vs. planner – interestingly, I like both plotter and planner as words, but not pantser at all, so having a choice between two frustrating formations is worse than having no choice at all?). For those of you not in the know, this is a question of whether one writes “by the seat of their pants” or one plans/plots out their book ahead of time.

My sister, who was recently named one of the MLs of the Phoenix region (after only 1 year’s participation!), attended a pre-planning meeting with several other Phoenix NaNoWriMo participants a couple of weeks ago. One of the things which frustrated her was their assertion (the other writers in the group) that if you weren’t planning out every little detail of your books ahead of time, down to a minute level, you were a “pantser”. My sister doesn’t feel like a pantser; she has a plot laid out, outlines her chapters, and has a firm grasp on what her book is about, who the characters are, and what they’ve got to go through. She and I agree that a pantser doesn’t really have all those things. A real pantser probably doesn’t have any of those things. I’ve done that several times, myself, sitting down in front of a blank page/screen with literally no plan -no characters, no plot, no setting, no theme, nothing at all but the blank canvas of the page in front of me and my imagination behind me- and watched a book flow through me and onto the page as if by magic. When it works, it works splendidly. I often, in that situation, find myself startled, surprised, and delighted as I read the words a sentence or two behind where my hands are working and learn what happens next only after I’ve written it. In fact, in my most-planned novels, the full outline for the book and the plot and the characters and the conflicts, the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of events and pacing … has all fit on the front of one piece of paper… but has been a hundred times more planning than the books I’ve “pantsed”, with structure, length, pacing, and character arcs all carefully crafted ahead of time and the rest of the story and details fleshed in as I wrote. But I always knew where I was and where I needed to be and in how many words and what route to take, and I considered myself a planner, even if the exact words to get there, the characters’ exact thoughts and dialog and a lot of the specifics were unknown to me until I wrote them.

Which leads me around to what I wanted to post about tonight; I think the line between pantsers and planners is really a false division. Divided that way, it certainly isn’t black and white, and the division isn’t particularly helpful or useful. I know that part of my sister’s reaction to the other writers’ views (and the way they express those views) is because they believe that plotting is superior to pantsing, that their way of plotting is the right way, and everyone else isn’t as good at writing. I’ve certainly met plenty of writers who hold similar views, in my time. It’s a position I believe is artificially supported by the weight of words about writing and how to write which have been published (I include blogging as publishing, here), in that the plotters and the planners, the ones who have a formula, a method, or a list of rules or guidelines they follow, are the ones who can most easily document those ideas about “how to write” – whereas the pantsers, especially the real pansters like I sometimes am, when they try to tell you (or write down) “how to write” have nothing to say, or only something vague, quasi-mystical, and often poorly understood (both by the one trying to share and those trying to learn). So the plotters write more and write more often about “how to write”, and what they write is easier to simply follow/obey, and over time it is this disparity in documentation which has given the plotters the veneer of being “right”. And which has, thus, created an us/them mentality and needless strife amongst authors who feel they aren’t really authors, or aren’t doing things “right” or don’t belong, somehow.

Here’s what I think is a better way of looking at it, a better question to address what is basically the same idea, but which I hope paints a more full picture and which paints different ways of storytelling as equally valid. This is not the complete picture, but consider: Are you engineering a story, or are you growing a story?

When I write, I’m growing a story. Sometimes I’ll build a lattice (an outline) to give the story the support it needs to grow in a particular direction, but the real shape of the story is not something under my direct/conscious control. I usually get to pick the seeds from which the story grows, but the stories then grow and change and thrive (or wither) according to their own designs. My job is to give the story a healthy environment in which to grow, to give it the characters and settings (and conflicts, et cetera) it requires, to prune it here and there, and mostly to stay out of its way and enjoy watching it unfold and expand according to its natural beauty.

Other writers, especially toward the more precise end of the plotting spectrum, prefer to engineer a story. Before they begin writing they create a detailed schematic (outlines, chapter details and synopses, notes, and more), a parts list (characters, usually with full biographies, settings, props and gadgets, et cetera), planning committee approval (careful, detailed world-building, sometimes writing/researching centuries of history and family lineages and architectural details of buildings and drawing/finding maps), and on and on so that, when the time comes to finally begin writing, nothing will be left to question. Often these writers are carefully engineering their stories to fit a very specific set of guidelines, ranging from economic viability in traditional publishing markets and established genre conventions to trying to express a particular political point of view or express a theme which is important to them.

When growing a story from the seeds of the theme and genre and characters and settings of your choice, there’s always the possibility that things won’t go as planned: That the book will be too long, or too short, to be considered by traditional publishers. That it won’t strictly adhere to the established conventions of a single genre, and will have trouble finding an audience because of it. That the characters will do unexpected things, take the story in unexpected directions, introduce new themes and come up with an ending you never imagined. Sometimes it turns out wonderful, sometimes you can get a publishing deal, or find an audience, or express a theme you didn’t even realize you cared so much about, in spite of all the randomness and unpredictability of growing a story. Other times you wish you were a story-engineer, because they at least seem to have some real control over their stories.

I can’t write as much, or as well, or as accurately, about those who engineer their stories, since I usually don’t. As I said earlier, my most-planned books have had little more than a lattice pointing the right direction and a few sketches guiding the placement of the seeds; when I try to engineer a story, or really even consider engineering a story, I get a little sick. (Nowhere near as bad as when I try to engage in Marketing; just a little … unwell.) Planning out every little thing, every scene in every chapter, every action, interaction, motivation and development, knowing it all in advance… just doesn’t work for me. (It occurs to me that the same is true, generally, of my life.) So I’ll not attempt it. There are already a lot of words out there about how to engineer a story, and what you’ll get when you do.

I’m just suggesting that the pantser/plotter division doesn’t really fit as well as that between engineering a story and growing a story. (Though there are positions even beyond those two, in this shape; the real pantser is probably more exploring a story; wandering around sniffing wildflowers, observing the shape of wild stories in their natural habitat, not really gardening or growing, and certainly not designing and constructing, but discovering and observing.) Every method of getting to your stories is a good one, as long as the result is a story told by you in the way which was right for you. Don’t let anyone try to get you down about being a grower of stories, or an engineer, or a wandering explorer. Embrace who you are and get good at it.

Remember, you won’t get any better at gardening by practicing drafting engineering schematics, and you won’t get any better at requisitioning parts and getting past the planning committee by wandering in a field of wildflowers. Try different things out, figure out what fits, and commit.

By the end of the first day, I had basically nailed down the core idea and the story structure I wanted to use, as well as some detailed characters and settings, some of them well-visualized for the comic. I had ideas about exactly how the possibilities of multi-touch interaction combined with some limited animation and the infinite canvas could be used to more fully immerse the reader in the story while also being invaluable to conveying the inner lives of the characters as well as the exterior spaces which represent such a significant part of the protagonist’s journey. The next two days were spent filling in the story details, outlining, doing research on recent history and on interstellar physics, plus some preliminary sketching, and by the time Mandy was done with her final session I had a plan for every “page” of the comic, good ideas about the “panels” they’ll each be composed of, and excellent ideas about the transitions / interactions between them.

Since then I’ve been mostly thinking (ie: no more writing/planning, and not much sketching) about everything, trying to more fully visualize the characters and really get into their minds and to understand their backgrounds, their hopes, and their fears… plus figuring out more and more of what’s going to work best for creating the sort of finished experience I want to create, and coming to the conclusion that in addition to working on my illustration skills (esp. vector illustration) and programming, I’m going to have to learn 3D modeling and animation, too. All of these areas of creative expression are things I’ve explored or worked on before, but never to a professional level of expertise, so each aspect of this project represents a major challenge requiring a significant investment of time and effort. Without intending to, and in service of exploring an avenue of storytelling potential I put on hold seven years ago because I thought I needed to tend to reality and get a “real” job. Of course, I did spend that seven years working on my writing and storytelling, plus developing my painting skills/techniques, so it wasn’t a total loss, but a period of mostly gradual development… which will be an excellent foundation, but not directly applicable to the present mountain of challenges. I can see working my way through this project taking easily over a year, possibly eighteen months or more, before there’s much of anything to show for it.

Also, while I was in Vegas, the copies of Scott McCloud‘s books, Reinventing Comics (which I read when it first came out ~11 years ago) and Making Comics, arrived in the mail. I also read through those in the last week and a half. They gave me a lot to think about, though mostly they reiterated what I’ve had in mind for years, confirmed my thoughts about the possible future of comics, and got me pretty excited about everything I have planned for this project; if I’m able to do everything I have in mind… let’s say I’m going to be standing around all four bonfires at once.

I’ve got some serious doubts, of course, as is my way. I’ve never programmed anything particularly sophisticated, and I stopped learning to program a bit before object-oriented programming hit the scene. I have fewer than, say, 25 hours practice working with vector graphics in my entire life, and probably fewer than that many hours in 3D modeling and animation, combined. I have very little experience writing a story with a formalized or formulaic structure, or anything which would be appreciated by a broad/general audience and risk becoming popular. Oh, and this whole project, which might take the next year or two of my life, is really just a proof of concept for me; not really what I expect a full-fledged interactive graphic novel to be, but a brief exercise to help prepare myself for projects yet to come.

Literally, I’m aiming at what I consider to be 24 “pages” of content, roughly equivalent to a single issue of a monthly comic book… though admittedly each “panel” will be a beautiful, full-color image which fills an iPad screen, and I expect there to be 4 to 9 “panels” in the average “page” of content… which, when it makes any sense in the scheme of the panel layout and story, you will be able to zoom out and see a full page of panels at once. It’s effectively a short story. I haven’t actually got a full script fleshed out yet, but it I’m guessing “short short story” might be a good estimate of the length. I’m guessing it’ll take less than half an hour to experience the entire story, though I’ve already got ideas for several rabbit holes / easter eggs which might add a considerable amount of depth and background to people who are interested, in addition to the fact that the story is designed to change significantly based on user inputs and I’ve thought of creating alternative, unlockable story modes as well, which will require at least new framing, possibly new art, and maybe a sort of “creator commentary” option as well. Because it’s possible, and I’m interested in seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Then, after I’ve accomplished this “small” project, I can begin to imagine new projects which, when I first imagine them, will probably present what looks like the same level of real challenge. Perhaps an actual graphic novel, created from the ground up to be native to a full-color, multi-touch device like the iPad while still being grounded by the heart of what defines comics as comics, and something which tells a compelling long-form story with characters of depth and reality. Or something else, entirely. Who knows?

Oh, and I’m still planning on (and working toward – I also read another dystopia this week) continuing my dystopian research and then writing the dystopian/vampire duology I’ve been talking about and preparing for… and it seems like it should remain on track for my getting started writing later this year. So there’s that, too. Writing books is easy, right? I’ll just squeeze the books in beside all this other stuff I’ll be doing. No problem.

So… that’s what I’ve got on my plate. Luckily, there are no real temporal deadlines, only levels of quality I intend to reach. You may not see these works soon, but when you do I want you to be impressed.

I’m totally out of touch with the modern world of development. Computing power has increased at least a thousandfold since I last dabbled in programming, and I’m confident the entire situation has become more sophisticated and complex… though probably not a thousand times more complex… I hope. The iPad 2 I’m typing this on is ridiculously more powerful and capable than the best computers available to me in high school, and lots of people who had never programmed anything before have been developing iOS apps. So there’s hope.

Every time I’ve had an idea for an interactive story, an “enhanced eBook”, or an online video game or app in the last several years, I’ve put it off. Sometimes after discussing it with my brother, who always says he intends to develop video games, or that he’s developing this or that tool or engine for building video games or online interactive experiences, but often without even making detailed note of my ideas. Partially this has been in deference to my brother; he has a mindset where, often, if I accomplish something, he loses interest in pursuing it for himself. Since his most clear interest/pursuit since he was in high school has been to develop video games, I have done my best not to usurp -or to appear to be trying to usurp- that pursuit. Now and again I’ve attempted to work with him on project ideas, but I’ve always tried to let him stay in the lead on any such project.

In light of a lot of things which have been going on lately, some inside me and some around me, I think now is the time to take up programming and the interactive arts again, myself. I feel my deference to my brother these many years has been sufficient in this regard, and that the friction I’ve been feeling re: books is part of my mind’s (and perhaps the world’s) efforts to push me to consider other forms of expression beyond simply writing several simple/straightforward (ie: text only) books every year from now to eternity. This direction also provides an answer to the question of where to take my art, which has been on my mind for over a year.

I’ve added a few books on Objective-C to my library book lists, and I’ll begin studying programming post-haste. I’ve also begun thinking about which project or projects I’d like to try to address first, with thoughts toward careful planning so that any project can be reasonably carried out by one person. Since I’m just one person.

I don’t intend to give up on my current plans; I’ve still got dozens and dozens of dystopian/utopian novels to read through, and a pair of ‘em to write… but perhaps some of the stories I’ve been avoiding developing, because they required some level of interactivity to be properly told, will come to fruition in the coming years.

Or perhaps I’ll find I’m not well-suited to some aspect of what I have in mind… and I’ll either give up or … learn to work with other people, somehow. Bah.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking I might begin doing, now. If you have any suggestions for good resources for learning to program for iOS, for how to manage indie game development, for interactive storytelling, or interactive comics, or whatever else, please let me know. I’m open to suggestions.

I watch a lot of TV (mostly DVDs and online streaming; almost never broadcast), but most of the time I’m doing it, it isn’t the only thing I’m doing. For example, right now I’m watching Doctor Who: The Ark while writing a post for my online journal. Other times I also play games (on my iPhone & iPad), browse the web, et cetera. In fact, I have found that for most programming, if I try to simply sit still and watch, I get antsy.

I would estimate that, for probably 90%-95% of the shows or movies I watch, I only need to actually be looking at the screen perhaps 5%-10% of the time. Thinking about how I watch my TV, and about my preferences re: going to the movies, I think I’ve determined that -for me- generally, story comes to me via my ears and spectacle via my eyes. Most of the time, what’s going on on-screen isn’t really important to see, certainly not enough to hold my full attention; I don’t need to see it to know what’s going on. This corresponds roughly to my experiences with show/tell in the written word; a little bit of showing, when appropriate, is reasonable, but I need to be told what’s happening to really understand. Otherwise, like when a film (almost never a TV show) insists on actually making good use of the visual aspect of the medium for key storytelling, I find I’m either fully engaged and watch without doing anything else or I’m frustrated that I’m unable to follow the story… depending on the skill of the filmmaker.

I wonder how I’d do with, say, an audiobook with illustrations… or probably an audio drama, rather than an audiobook, with sound effects and voice acting, rather than so much description of action… Perhaps I’ll produce one, someday. Telling the story with words and showing what’s necessary to be shown with images.

Thinking about it, I suppose I do something similar with comics/graphic-novels as I do with TV/film; I get most of what I get out of them from the words, and probably only absorb 5%-10% of the details of the images on the pages. (Most of the time; some few comics actually use their images well for storytelling; most images in most comics seem to me to be a waste of ink and effort.) Which is like saying only about one panel per page or two has anything in it necessary to understanding the story… Showing me what a character looks like, or a setting, for the first time, and then every time that character/setting appears from then on, why would I need to see them? Most of the time, I don’t. Same as TV/film, same as books, you only need to show me a little, and then tell me the rest.

Or, if you’re going to show, show, show, you’d better do a damn good job of it. It better be like well-crafted poetry. What you’re showing had better communicate clearly, effectively, and explicitly. It had better be showing which has a purpose, not showing for its own sake or -worse- showing simply to avoid telling.

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for now. Sorry it wasn’t better-thought-out.

Update: (6/24/2011, 3:13AM-4:09AM)

As I write this update, I’m watching an independent film, the trailers prior to which on the DVD gave me an idea about another way to express my trouble with show v. tell. My example has to do with the difference between a trailer for a film in English and a trailer for a film where the primary language is not English. Now, this is not universal, but there is a certain subset of trailers for non-English-language films which are largely free of language; they are largely silent, or have only music. They are all show, no tell, because … I suppose because someone’s worried subtitles will scare potential viewers off, or … maybe they didn’t have subtitles ready? (That would be hard to swallow, considering the other titles required for a trailer but not included in the film.) Anyway, they attempt to sell you the film exclusively through showing. Showing characters, settings, actions, the things which happen in between the words, and the viewer, the potential audience, is left to infer the story. Completely.

On the other side is the trailer for an English-language film which, because it can include dialogue without the bother of making anyone read, is able to both show a few visually gripping scenes and to tell me what the story is. At the extreme end of this, the total opposite of the wordless foreign trailer, is the trailer which includes not just dialog, but also titles, and enough scenes and words between them to give you the entire film’s story from beginning to end (no surprises left, if you were watching closely!) in the space of two minutes. The only things such a trailer leaves for you to infer are the scenes in between the glimpses and explanations given in the trailer, but this sort of trailer has spelled out for you what those scenes will contain. It has told you what to expect.

With the former sort of trailer, I may not know after watching it whether I have any interest in the film, because I probably don’t know what the film is about. With the latter sort of trailer, especially the extreme form of it, I may not have any interest in watching the film, but if so it’ll be because I already know everything there is to know about it… or if I do want to watch it, I won’t be confused or disappointed when I do, because it’ll be what I was told it would be. The “Show, don’t tell” sort of trailer leaves too much up to chance. Often a 100-word (or less) description of the film is of more value to me, especially with regard to marketing the film to me, since at least then I know for sure what it is I’m considering seeing, and can make an informed decision; I’ll almost never choose to pay to see a film when I don’t think I know what it is.

To a certain extent, I’m sure there are people out there who, if they read these last two posts, would condemn me for, say, “wanting everything spelled out for me.” I’ve often read this complaint, from self-proclaimed film buffs, that American films leave nothing up to the imagination and that the reason Americans don’t appreciate European filmmaking is that it doesn’t spell everything out and hand it to them on a silver platter. The implication being that Americans are too stupid to understand anything but the most obvious. I’m not a stupid person, but I’ll admit that there are some things which are very obvious to the average person that I can’t seem to grasp. I’ve written about such things at length in the past. Apparently, these sort of things, where I’m expected to draw my own conclusions about what happened, where I’m not expected to take everything at face value, and where I’m not told in any clear way what’s going on, what characters are thinking and feeling, et cetera… is one such area I have trouble with. I just don’t get it, most of the time.

The terrible (to me) thriller I’m reading right now seems to be doing an admirable job balancing show with tell, by the way. With all this writing about it, I’ve been paying a close eye today. The author shows what’s going on, then confirms it (backs up what you were meant to infer) by also telling what’s going on. There are patches where it’s more tell than show, and others where I get lost in the showing and can’t tell what’s going on, but most of it seems well-balanced. Also working in its favor is that, 100 pages in (probably 40k-50k words, these pages are so word-dense) and it hasn’t even finished setting things up enough to make any stakes clear, so at least it isn’t hip-deep in ridiculous stakes out of proportion with the characters’ capabilities, less than 20% of the way in. There’s basically no real peril, yet (there was one chapter, early on, where a character was in peril, but I haven’t seen him since) – unfortunately, this is largely because the book is totally disjointed and most of the dozen disconnected story lines are still miles from getting up to speed. Oh, and so far most everyone who could have been said to be in peril wasn’t one of the main characters but was put in peril by the main characters, usually “off-screen,” as it were. So, that’s something. It isn’t entirely clear to me why this book was on the dystopian fiction list, yet. Oh, well.

I’ve seen other writers, and people giving advice to writers, describe in detail the absolute requirement of this ridiculous, frustrating, and annoying feature in all fiction. Every scene must have challenges to overcome, they say at the less-ridiculous end of this ridiculous religion. In thrillers and adventure stories, those challenges must be thrilling in order to engage the reader (so they say) and as the story progresses, each thrilling challenge must me more thrilling and challenging than those which came before it. In modern books (and other media; I bemoan the same thing on TV and in the movies), I have found, that this leads very rapidly to quite ridiculous levels of peril, usually in parallel with stakes so high as to be totally out of scale with the capabilities of the characters involved.

((For example, in the YA series which began with Uglies, in the first book the stakes ramped up from danger of getting caught breaking the rules to risking the lives of the protagonist and her close friends. The second book ramped the stakes up from risking a few people’s lives to risking an entire city. When the third book ramped the stakes from endangering one city to the equivalent of international war, to be resolved by a 16-year-old girl, I predicted that the fourth book would have to threaten the entire world population to keep with the ridiculous requirements of this writer’s religion… and indeed, very quickly in the fourth book the stakes are raised to the annihilation of the entire world, with only a fifteen-year-old girl to save everyone. With her video-blogging prowess as her primary tool to do so.))

Some writers handle this better than others. Within each book of the Uglies series, Scott Westerfield handled the escalating peril reasonably well; it was only as the series progressed that things got so far out of hand. Other authors get their characters too rapidly into life-threatening situations in the beginning of the story, and find they’ve nowhere reasonable to go – they must depart from reason to keep readers interested. Narrower and narrower escapes. Increasingly dire situations. Protagonists disarmed, injured, in foreign, inhospitable places, facing more (and/or tougher) enemies than they faced in the last dire situation. Yech. I have a really hard time maintaining suspension of disbelief in the face of such dire peril. The story could be firmly grounded in present-day, real-world events, histories (accurate or alternate), or outlandish fantasy, but if the situations become unreasonably perilous I simply can’t maintain immersion. I can’t buy in. It’s too silly. Especially when the protagonists are the ones whose lives are supposedly threatened; I know another tenet of this religion of writers is that their main characters are protected from true/permanent harm, especially if a book is to be part of a series. Side characters may die or face serious injury, but certainly never the main characters. Which means that the peril is all false; it’s only a waste of time and effort, a waste of words and pages. I don’t like it.

I’ve also oft-seen/read from these writers-religion-believers the repeated chant, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around. I didn’t understand it at all, at first, though I’m beginning to. Like most anything else, there are ways of doing it well and ways of following the command as mindlessly as it’s repeated by and to writers. When it’s done well, the reader tends to be unaware of it – and the writer usually hasn’t stuck religiously to it. Alternatively, when that tiny idea is too religiously followed… books go bad. One of the adventure-type books I’ve been listening to of late, which has raised the stakes within the first third to the total annihilation of all life, is also so religious about “Show, don’t tell” that I keep finding myself unable to tell what’s going on. Rather than tell me what’s going on, what the characters are thinking or communicating or planning, sometimes even what the characters are doing, the author describes (in detail) the fashion and fabrics of their clothes, the shape of their nose, the color of their eyes, the look on their face, the way they stand, the tone of their voice, where they stand relative to one another while they speak… except the author never tells the reader what they mean, they only imply and the reader is expected to infer.

I’m not being clear here, partially because I don’t get it. Without quoting long sections of a book and breaking it down sentence by sentence I’m not sure I’d know how to accurately describe how, by showing me how the characters feel and what they want by the way they act, by the twitch of an eye and the speed of their step, say, or by stilted dialogue interspersed with descriptions of body language, rather than simply telling me, you’re leaving a whole chunk of your story out… And I keep getting lost. Hundreds of words will pass where nothing sticks, as I listen. ((I’ve run into this a few times in paper/eBooks, too, and I have to go back and re-read, sometimes whole pages, again and again because it’s so show, with no tell, and I just … get lost.)) I recently finished a several-book SciFi series and had to listen to the last 15 minutes three times because the author never actually states what the protagonist’s decision about what to do with his life has been; he simply shows how the characters react to that decision, never telling what the decision was. I was supposed to infer the answer. Except that, based on the words in the book, it’s unknowable. Either answer fits the behavior, as far as I understand it. I only know what the author believes the answer was because I’ve seen the author talk about the books/character in such a way that it can only be one way, not because the author put the answer in the book itself.

My brain maybe doesn’t work quite like other people’s. (Except I’m pretty confident that lots of people must be in the same boat.) ((Or the opposite one.)) I’d had similar problems absorbing books, or sections of books, in the past, but it wasn’t until I’d tried to understand the religious litany of “Show, don’t tell” that I began to understand what it was I was having trouble with. Again and again in recent years I’ve found that those difficult sections are, in fact, too strictly trying to avoid telling me what’s going on. It’s not an elegant mantra (yet), but I keep finding myself exclaiming to books (on their authors’ behalfs) something like “Stop trying to show, just tell me what’s happening!”

Sadly, it seems that the more closely authors hew to the tenets of this strange writers-religion, the more likely their books will find popularity and broad audience appeal.

I increasingly believe I’ll never write popular books.

I don’t think I could stand it.

Despite the fact that I write books, books don’t seem to “do it” for me. I read a lot of books, lately, and there were periods here and there in my youth when I read a lot of books, but … I don’t think I like books as much as book-lovers do. When I was younger, there were a few books I would read and re-read and re-read. The one graphic novel was one of those, I read it at least once a year during my teens. Then there was that period where I wasn’t reading much, and since I began reading again, I haven’t had time. I feel like there aren’t enough hours in my life to spend them reading books I’ve already read. It’s hard to even spend 2 hours watching a film I’ve already seen, at this point; I built up a collection of over 300 DVDs before something happened in my mind and now I can only make time for films I’ve never seen – I probably only see two or three of my hundreds of owned-DVDs a year, despite watching at least several hundred hours of films and TV on DVD each year. The films I re-watch, even now… they’re the ones that I know will make me cry. And I’m up to a rate of reading over a hundred books a year, but it’s difficult for me to imagine wanting to re-read any of them. (Though I’ve just realized that there was one small thing in The Hunger Games that made me cry and which, when the sequel made an allusion to it, very nearly did – if I ever went back and re-read The Hunger Games, I might cry at the appearance of that loaf of bread again…) So maybe books *can* affect me as much as films, and I’m just reading the wrong books?

Anyhow… my favorite stories tend to be the ones where I become so emotionally involved that I am overcome, usually exemplified by the tears in my eyes. It occurred to me today for the first time (no, it never occurred to me before (though now that I’m thinking back on my own books in this context, I’m realizing that there were parts of Untrue Tales… Book Six which already did, which -over and over again as I read and re-read Book Six to edit it, and to record it for the podcast- brought me to that level of emotional involvement and, a few times, to tears)) that I might want to try, with the ‘utopian’ book of the duology I’m trying to ready myself for, to strive to reach that pinnacle. It’s been becoming, increasingly in my mind, a potentially very emotional story. This girl’s story is very difficult, a real challenge, and if the reader doesn’t buy fully into her experience of it, they won’t be able to believe the interpretation of reality I’m trying to present. I’m still not convinced I can write it in first-person perspective well enough; I haven’t the practice with first-person. (Though I suppose I’ve got to write in it to get better at writing in it, like anything else, so avoiding it because I’m not yet good means avoiding ever getting better.) Alternatively, I’m not sure I can create the required level of emotional involvement without using first-person perspective. Perhaps a narrower form of the narrow third-person perspective I normally use, which hovers close, practically over the shoulder of the protagonist, rarely venturing anywhere away. …but probably it’ll have to be first-person.

Perhaps spending half a year or more on ‘research’ (read: thinking about what I’m going to write before attempting to write it) wasn’t such a great idea; almost every time I resolve another aspect of what these books must be or what I’d like to attempt, the challenge increases. Doing better, doing things I’ve never tried, striving toward greatness… Perhaps without so much forethought I might be less disappointed with whatever result I end up with. Or perhaps with enough planning, with high enough goals and sufficient passion, I might achieve something worthwhile. The only thing to do is to keep working on it. Keep thinking. Keep dreaming. Keep striving. Keep feeling. Keep crying.

…and when the time comes, I suppose, try to make other people cry, too…

The core idea I have for the books is in the world I’ve been building in my mind, where vampires are an accepted part of humanity, using their supernatural gifts to benefit society as a whole, fed by the regular blood donations of the general population (opt-out, not actually mandatory) so vampires aren’t required to be murderous fiends to stay alive, or to live in the shadows, though they most certainly don’t sparkle (and they probably can’t go out in sunlight). I haven’t nailed down all the details yet, though I’ve got quite a lot of detail mapped out that I’m not even hinting at here. The structural concept I’m working on for these books is to write two books, one which presents this word as Utopian, and the other which presents the same world as Dystopian. I want each book to totally buy into its own point of view, for all its evidence, even when questioned my its characters, to come to the conclusion that it is correct, the world is [wonderful|terrible]. I’m structuring each book to be a valid demonstration (think Euclid), proving each book’s position by evidence and argument. I want readers to be so convinced by whichever book they read first that when they read the other book they get angry at the characters in it for being so oblivious/wrong.

As I did with my attempt to write ‘a real zombie book,’ where I read a stack of the popular zombie books before attempting to write my own ((though I still haven’t managed to read World War Z – I kept having people promising to send it to me or lend it to me, so I kept not simply buying it for myself or checking it out of the library, and eventually I wasn’t reading zombie books anymore, and I never got back around to it)), and since the idea for these books was inspired (in part) by my reaction to reading some other dystopian books (isn’t that always the way? You read a book and think “I could do better than this!” so you work hard, study hard, and write your own, in your own way), I’m doing the same thing with dystopian books. I’ve told you before about my not being well read, and dystopian lit mirrors that phenomenon; I haven’t read most of the classics. I read Brave New World in high school for a book report / project, but I never read 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 (or even watched the films). I had never read The Handmaid’s Tale before last year, and it was the dystopia I disliked so much I was inspired to write a better one. I read and watched Never Let Me Go as well, last year, and it was generally quite excellent, also inspiring me to write better books (though in a different way than much-loved yet terrible books do). This year, in addition to trying to read my own books, then, I am trying to read as much recommended dystopian literature as possible.

So, from my own shelves (because they were already on my to-be-read list, or because my wife teaches them in her high school English courses), I’m going to be reading:

• 1984 – George Orwell
• Ape and Essence – Aldous Huxley
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• The Giver – Lois Lowry
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Philip K. Dick

In addition to these, I put together the following list from recommendations from friends and from books mentioned during Dystopia Week at Tor.com by other SciFi authors & bloggers, when speaking about their favorite and/or formative dystopian books/influences. Bolded items I haven’t acquired yet, italicized items I’ve borrowed (or plan to borrow, mostly from the library):

• The World Inside – Robert Silverberg
• Native Tongue – Suzette Haden Elgin
• He, She, and It – Marge Piercy
• Matched – Ally Condie
• Brave New Worlds (an anthology with a lot of highly-recommended stories)
• The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth – Carrie Ryan
• The Dead-Tossed Waves – Carrie Ryan
• The Dark and Hollow Places – Carrie Ryan
• Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
• Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler
• Cyteen – C.J. Cherryh
• Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
• Julian Comstock – Robert Charles Wilson
• Soft Apocalypse – Will McIntosh
• We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart
• Walden Two – B. F. Skinner
• Ship Breaker – Paolo Bacigalupi
• Across the Universe – Beth Revis
• How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff
• Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras – Scott Westerfield
• The Hunger Games/Catching Fire/Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
• Birthmarked – Caragh M. O’Brien
• Bumped – Megan McCafferty

Seems like a long list, but I’m already making good progress on it. If you know of other dystopian novels you think I should add to the list, please comment (or email me, or Twitter @ me) and I’ll add them. I’m especially keen on the recent surge of YA Dystopian books, because (something I haven’t told you about the books I’m working on, yet) the books I’m planning to write will very likely be written for the YA market. (Or at least with young/teen protagonists, dealing with that sort of teenage angst/love/drama.)

As I read them, I’m trying to pay attention to how the stories are told, how the characters relate to their worlds, how their worlds are presented, the structure of the storytelling, and on and on, so many elements to try to pay attention to … not because I want to copy these books, but to learn from them so I can make my own informed decisions about how to write my own. What works (for me) and what doesn’t, what sort of arcs characters go through (or don’t), and what I want to take and what I want to leave behind. If you read Cheating, Death, you know I wrote something which was both a zombie novel people who were looking for a zombie novel would enjoy as well as being the sort of book I prefer to write. I hope to do the same with these books, this year.

Oh, and as a parting note, a strange idea: I’m thinking of doing the paperback version as a flipbook (two books, back to back, upside-down of each other), and I’m already brainstorming how I could accomplish such a thing with the eBook and/or audiobook. I may make them two books for formats other than paper. Your thoughts on this strange idea are welcome.

Update: I added a few additional books to my list of dystopias to read. Mandy was flipping through the Brave New Worlds anthology and saw a “further reading” list at the back of it… and noticed that we owned one of the books on the list, so she went and pulled it from the shelf and added it to my stack. So I took a glance at the list and saw a couple of others, and added them to the stack, too. The list at the end of the book was “compiled by Ross E. Lockhart” and is five pages long. I’d already read 5 of them before creating a dystopias-to-read list, and I have another 21 of them on my lists above. This weekend was a Friends of the Phoenix Library sale weekend; they come up a couple times a year and Mandy and I like to go on Sundays (half off) when paperbacks are $0.50 and hardbacks are $1; we take home a good number of books for a small amount of money (usually less than $20 for a couple dozen books). I made a copy of the list and brought it with me to the sale, and got a good-sized stack of books. Then this evening I went through the rest of the list and looked up whether it would be easy to get the remainder of the books to read; I found that a good number of them are in the Phoenix Library system, a bit more than half. The following is a supplemental list. The first four I already had on my shelves (Neuromancer & Grey, I’ve read, but may read again), the next chunk of the list I found at the book sale this weekend, and the italicized end of the list are additional (58) books I found available in the library system and added to my account’s ‘bookshelf’ to remind me to check them out later.

• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Grey – Jon Armstrong
• Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegut
• The Fifth Sacred Thing – Starhawk
• Einstein’s Monsters – Martin Amis
• The Jagged Orbit – John Brunner
• Crux – Albert E. Cowdrey
• Mindscape – Andrea Hairston
• Final Blackout – L. Ron Hubbard
• The Second Angel – Philip Kerr
• It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis
• Unquenchable Fire – Rachel Pollack
• Postsingular – Rudy Rucker
• Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America – Brian Francis Slattery
• Soulsaver – James Stevens-Arce
• The Mirrored Heavens – David J. Williams
• Random Acts of Senseless Violence – Jack Womack
• A Scientific Romance – Ronald Wright
• Feed – M.T. Anderson
• Yarn – Jon Armstrong
• Pebble in the Sky – Isaac Asimov
• Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
• The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood
• The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi
• Crash – J. G. Ballard
• Jennifer Government – Max Barry
• Genesis – Bernard Beckett
• Genetopia – Keith Brooke
• The Wanting Seed – Anthony Burgess
• The Army of the Republic – Stuart Archer Cohen
• The Pesthouse – Jim Crace
• Prayers For (/Sins of/Heart of) the Assassin – Robert Ferrigno
• Truancy – Isamu Fukui
• Daughters of the North – Sarah Hall
• The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway
• Fatherland – Robert Harris
• Make Room! Make Room! – Harry Harrison
• Hellstrom’s Hive – Frank Herbert
• The House of Dust – Paul Johnston
• The Iron Standard – Henry Kuttner
• The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. LeGuin
• Just Like Beauty – Lisa Lerner
• The Road – Cormac McCarthy
• Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
• Market Forces – Richard Morgan
• Thirteen – Richard Morgan
• Paradise – Toni Morrison
• The Baby Squad – Andrew Neiderman
• The Suicide Collectors – David Oppegaard
• The Last Book in the Universe – Rodman Philbrick
• The Space Merchants – Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
• Anthem – Ayn Rand
• Enclave – Kit Reed
• The Wild Shore/The Gold Coast/Pacific Edge – Kim Stanley Robinson
• Jamestown – Matthew Sharpe
• Solstice – Ulises Silva
• Blackjack – Lee Singer
• The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
• Battle Royale – Koushun Takami
• Far North – Marcel Theroux
• The Gladiator – Harry Turtledove
• Farthing/Ha’Penny/Half a Crown – Jo Walton
• Love Among the Ruins – Evelyn Waugh
• The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
• When the Sleeper Wakes – H. G. Wells
• The Bar Code Tattoo/The Bar Code Revolution – Suzanne Weyn
• Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
• Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy
• Ecotopia – Ernest Callenbach
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein

Considering my original dystopias-to-read list was less than 40 books long, and I’ve already picked up an additional dozen-plus, I may or may not choose to work through the other nearly-60 books I’ve got italicized there. There are several among them I’m more eager to read than others, but if you read my previous posts about my reading history the last few years, you may realize reading 100+ books, most of them new-to-me or borrowed, is neither likely nor my intention for this year. We’ll see. Without 2-3 weekly podcasts requiring my attention, no ongoing series I’m trying to complete, et cetera, I may be able to read through a book every day or two (or two books a day, depending on their length and engagement level), and get through even the extended list within a few months. We’ll see.

((Also of note, I’ve been writing this update while growing ever-sleepier, so there are probably some unusual typing errors mixed in. Sorry about that.))

With all these projects and ideas and such burning to the fore of my mind, keeping me continuously busy for the first quarter of 2011 (and beyond), my initial plan for the year nearly faded from my thoughts. If you’ve also managed to forget it, it went something like this: My general goal is to write/publish 2 to 4 books per year and I’ve already done that much (with the Untrue Tales series), so there’s no real pressure (from my own goals) to try to finish any new books this year. This gives me the freedom to spend more time reading, to make progress on my “reading list,” as it were, not just books for pleasure but books for research (for several upcoming books I’ve got in mind, but don’t want to write without a lot of appropriate reading first). I’d also like to get some time invested in working again on my art, in taking it in a new direction, and in trying to produce beautiful artwork free from commercial concerns.

This last thought is perhaps the central one; to move to a place where the work I’m doing is no longer driven by commercial concerns. I think I’ve got our finances structured now in a way which will allow me to fully realize that mindset before the end of 2011. …though not if I continue to allow myself to obsess over things like getting funding, like promoting & marketing my creations, and/or like trying to learn how to write commercial/normal/formulaic books (or screenplays).

Anyway, I’ve been having some trouble keeping my mind focused, lately. I’m pretty sure the proliferation of projects preceded the present peripatetic propensity of my thoughts. Either way, it’s too many things, within and without. All things I want to accomplish, but I’m not confident a hurry in any way enhances or improves those accomplishments, so I’m going to try to slow down and take things one at a time. Try to focus on each thing in turn, if I can, instead of focusing on none of them at all. I’m significantly less stressed than I ever was working for someone else, or working for money, but those things are like infectious splinters, wedging their way into everything and poisoning even the good in life – and I am more stressed than I’d prefer to be because of them.

If my Kickstarter project gets funded, I’ll try to focus on that. If not, maybe I’ll try to focus on screenwriting for a month. Otherwise, I’m just going to focus on reading and on gradually developing the ideas, structure, and meaning of my upcoming vampire duology… while I try to adjust my frame of mind.

I suppose in some ways I’m still a nihilist. I have trouble seeing the meaning in most everything. Life seems largely to exist without purpose. On the other hand: My faith informs me that the only meaningful purpose in life is spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, perhaps with living a life according to the example of Jesus’ life coming in as a distant second. I’m not as good at either of those things as I ought to be, or as I wish I were, and I’ve been trying to do better and to gradually work more and more of that purpose into my writing. A problem I’ve been having, mentally, is in trying to conform my mind to the Will of God… and still tell the stories I have it in me to tell, in a way I know how to tell them.

This is another side of the problem I’m writing about here. Sure, there’s the side where I don’t see that anything is really about anything. I can write and tell stories, no problem, but it’s all just meaningless. To me. On this other side I know about something meaningful, but I haven’t yet figured out how to write or tell stories about it.

Interruption: My iBook just died, which is what I was writing this post on. I was going to write more, but those 300 words sum up the problem pretty well. I may do another post later, to do the working-through-the-problem-in-words I’d meant to do, but a dead laptop is a more pressing problem right now. Help me deal with it: Go buy something I’ve created, even though I do find it all meaningless.