Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp, page 8

Short story theming

I've been writing little ones lately.




At my absolute best, I can vomit out the first draft to a doorstopper in just a couple months - my personal best is 133k words in 45 days. But I can only pull it off successfully a couple times a year, at best, and it's just as likely that I end up running out of steam halfway there and the story just peters out. The rest of my time is usually spent on revising and editing those raw drafts, gathering up new ideas, or all too likely, just faffing about.

And in the event that I do succeed and pull of one of these, the withdrawal is insane. Can you even imagine what it's like to write three thousand words every day for two months, then suddenly just run out of shit to write? The floodgates of imagination left open for so long, then losing their purpose and needing to be shut down after a habit is already formed? It's more unpleasant than you'd think.



Maybe if I learned to write like Stephen King and just immediately jump to a new project after finishing the last, but I'm not sure I could pull that off. I'll look into it.

For now I think I have a much better time doing short stories, on the whole. It only takes me a week or two to put one on paper in full, even when not on full steam - or just a couple days at my absolute best - which is nowhere near enough time to form a habit out of it: once I'm done, I can just stop writing and don't feel so terrible about it.

Now I've got about half a dozen of them written this year. There'd be enough of them to clump together into a reasonably-sized collection that I could throw in here for you.

Problem is, they don't really have anything to do with one another.



A story needs a theme at its heart - something to run it, rather than just a bunch of things that happen. That's difficult enough on its own, but I think that the same is true when a bunch of different stories are joined together under same covers: they would need a shared theme among them. Something to connect them all together.

Right now I'm writing of the queen of a small kingdom, fighting a megalomaniacal conquering prophet with the power to control weather. After this I'll probably write of the last lifeforms in the dying universe looking for a way to escape the inevitable by going back in time. And then there was the one I wrote earlier, a satire about modern video games. They don't even have the same main characters, or take place in the same world.

That said, I think I could continue some of them. Write more short stories and link them together. Watch this space.

Focus

Keeping my mind in the thing I want to do, keeping it from wandering to other things and getting unrelated ideas, is a regular problem.

I've talked about music before, how I should only listen to things that relate to my current project, but that's only the beginning. There's also movies (I think I named a few that helped with this pirate story I wrote), video games, books and comics, even conversation with friends. I need to essentially overload my brain with related things. They not only help me keep focused, but also give me more ideas on what to do, story elements and arrangements, and insight on how other people handled stuff like this, what they did better than me, and how I could improve.

The real problem is that it works both ways.

I have several video games I've been wanting to play, that people have recommended for me, and that I'm fairly sure I would like - but they've got nothing to do with my projects, and would end up with occupying my mind with unrelated and frankly harmful thoughts and loves and obsessions, making me want to abandon the thing I'm doing now and going off to something entirely different. It's happened before: the short story Loot, which I posted a couple months ago, came from a stray news article and completely killed all progress with Ivar Stormling of Skar. I haven't written a word of that story since then.

Just now - and this is why I'm writing this whole thing now - a friend of mine brought forth the subject of Artificial Intelligence, which made me want to return to that robot story I've been working on for years. Problem is, I'm currently trying to edit a couple short stories for publication, and also heading off abroad in about a week. I can't spare the mind on a major project now, no matter how much I'd want to.

At best, this is probably the reason I can vomit out a doorstopper novel in about two months. At worst, it can completely scramble up my brain and halt all progress.

I've been doing a lot of short stories lately. They need much less time and focus, and are therefore a lot easier for me to manage. But every once in a while, the desire for greater things comes up.

The Sixth Hustler - a short story about a high-stakes card game, starring Mirari Aedelwine

I should have another book out sometime in the next few months, barring some unexpected inconveniences. Taking place a good three centuries after The Straggler's Mask, it features Peal's successor and her altogether different yet no less effective problem-solving philosophy. I wrote a short tale about her the other day, to give you a general idea of just what to expect of her.

Check it out



And here's a sketch of her.

Loot - a satirical short story, starring Peal

I haven't written so much Ivar Stormling of Skar today, because I was flashed with a random bit of inspiration and just had to churn it all out at once. I may as well put it here now.

Loot



Also, this is a very nice picture of Peal someone drew for me.

(I've never written any satire before. This probably shows.)

Now THIS is a Pointlessly Indulgent Race Scene!

I'm reaching the middle point of my current work, Ivar Stormling of Skar. It's entirely dominated by an extended sequence involving the heroes participating (for dubious reasons) in a long and deadly high-speed death race.



This is the first thing I had in mind about the book, in fact: I've had it running through my mind, in one shape or other, for many years now, and you could even say that this entire book is written as an excuse to finally get the damn thing on paper. It all certainly formed around this thing: I thought of the race first, then far more recently started to imagine what got them to this position to begin with, what motivated them to enter it, and where they might go after the fact.

And I'm now coming to the somewhat painful realization that the race, and the plot constructed around it, actually have very little to do with each other.

Like the podracing thing in Star Wars Episode 1, the entire sequence is basically an excuse to make a new friend, then elongated into a superfluous action scene that is mostly there because the author really, really wants to add it in.

I'm rather often guilty of that sort of a thing. Many reviews of my first work, The Straggler's Mask, point out the flaw that a great deal of the book's events could be easily skipped without the story or the plot suffering at all. Since then I've taken some steps to try and curb such tendencies, but it seems it will always be a part of me no matter what I do.

Even as I write this, I'm struggling to find ways to make the sequence more relevant for the plot. There's not a whole lot that I can do to tie it to the main antagonist or his plans, for one. But maybe I'll work to develop the characters during it, let them display new sides of themselves, experience growth, and learn important lessons. I can also take it as an opportunity for them to show off new skills and abilities and equipment, things they could then use to save the day in a more climactic context - a bit of foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, so that it wouldn't all come completely out of left field.

But all such procedures are mere bandages on a gaping wound, and can never conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, it is pretty pointless. I could just ditch the whole thing, and scavenge all the actually important moments and put them elsewhere, to save pages and my readers' sanity. But I don't think I will do that, not this time.



So, what should you take out of this? Well, if you really enjoy death races and fast-paced action with little plot to hold it back, then I suppose you could skip the first fourteen chapters of the book to get right into the meat of things. If on the other hand you'd like your story to be tighter, each scene and chapter to actually mean things in the greater context, and were annoyed by how the previous book indulged in a bunch of pointless side tracks, then you might want to skip everything from chapter fifteen up to... twenty? Twenty-one? I'm not sure yet.

Progress on the whole is good: I've written 68k words since the beginning of the year, and if this keeps up I might get the whole thing written as quickly as Demure Sea, perhaps even faster. I doubt it'll come out this year, though. There's a great deal of backlog in between that I'd like to throw out there first.

New Year's Resolutions

2018 was a little bit less productive for me than the year before: I spat out Pirates (now Blight) of the Demure Sea in about a month and a half, sure, but other than that there were just a couple drafts I ended up shelving halfway and never getting back to, and a short story or two. The year before, by comparison, I got through with The Straggler's Mask, Chaos Star, and The Vagrant's Wings.

I'll see if I can do better in 2019.

Today I began writing Ivar Stormling of Skar, and all being well I should have a draft finished by April. Then maybe I can get back to editing Demure Sea and Chaos Star, maybe finishing Shadowland and/or a few more short stories, and finish up with The Vagrant's Wings and get someone to slap a cover on it. I did have another idea coming up in my head, too, about mountains and such: we'll see if that goes anywhere.

Two grievous injuries, two stories, one big mess

About two thirds into the story I'm frameworking, the hero gets badly hurt. This is his darkest hour, the rock bottom, the point where the quest seems truly impossible. He'll pick himself up, but it's not him I want to talk about here.



The hero is not the only one to be hurt, you see: one of the supporting characters is also injured, and significantly worse at that. He will still be out of commission a long time after the hero's dusted up his own injuries and walked on. I was thinking of him returning in the story's climax to turn things around and to bring ultimate victory for the good guys.

But I'm not really sure if I want to write about that at all anymore.

Rather, the more I think about this scenario, the more I want to write about this supporting character's recovery. Just... lying around on a hospital bed, for several months, trying to not get bored to death. A bunch of things happens to him, but he never goes far from that room. It really has very little to do with the original story idea at all, apart from how he ended up in this place and what he wants to do afterwards.

If I went down this route, then I suppose the story would begin at the point of his injury. Perhaps in a dream sequence, or flashback. Then he wakes up in the bed, hurting like hell.

Problem is, I'd have to also inform the reader of the circumstances of his injury, and all the war and stuff going on around him that led to this point. And since all that stuff is so much more exciting, the reader's attention would most likely end up fixed in it - and then they'd get disappointed when it's just fairly uneventful daily struggle in a single room. It probably would not work all that well.

No, I think I'll have to separate the two stories entirely. The poor sidekick is off the hook, for now. I'll have him blown apart in a story of his own - perhaps a continuation of another story, that ends with him being hurt to begin with.

For now let's go back to the original thing. Only the hero will be injured. Everyone else is fine. It's kind of unfair, really, but he wouldn't be the hero if he couldn't handle a bit of unfairness in his life.

Bugbears, and other things that go bump in the night

So what exactly is Peal? What does it mean to be a "bugbear", apart from some small and timid prey animal? Let's try to figure them out.



When you're a small child, darkness is a living and deathly thing in a way it never again will be as you grow up. Things live under your bed, in your closet, creaking up in the attic or down in the basement... or looking at you through your bedroom window when the lights are shut. The hollow trees, under roots, abandoned buildings, empty playgrounds, dark alleyways, even your dreams - all are teeming with life.

You never see a bogeyman, but you know it's there. Stalking. Waiting. Even as an adult, you're not always sure that you're alone.

So the first question I asked was: "Why do they hide?"

The usual answer, in fairy tales and literature, is that they're predators that are just waiting for you to lower your guard so that they might pounce up and devour you. As dreadful as the empty darkness and occasional glowing pair of eyes is, it's still vastly preferable to the true terror of what they look like.



I flipped the premise around: what if they hid not because they're predators, but because they're the prey?



They're small and weak, scared of all the big loud folk like you and I, or wolves and eagles - but they're quick on their feet and good at laying low. They almost never come out in the open if they can at all help it, so most people don't even believe they exist, let alone know that they're not all that big or scary or toothy after all.

If you're a small child living out in a small village or farm, or an ancient manor or castle, and like to explore your surroundings... you might just meet one. They aren't that scared of children. But even then, odds are low - and odds of you remembering it, and not chalking it up as overactive imagination of childhood, probably won't be much higher.

And then, the natural next question... what if one was forced out of hiding? What if they lost their home and found themselves in the daylight sun, at the road to faraway lands and places?

It would be a highly uncomfortable and terrifying experience to the poor creature... and therefore make for a great story premise.

It's exactly what happened to Peal, after all. He found himself as a prey out in clear view... forced to take a page or two out of the book of the other kind of bugbears - and become more like a predator.



I intended to tell a little more about bugbears, their appearance and culture and what they were meant to represent, at the beginning of The Straggler's Mask - but in the end I cut most of these away, shoving the rest down into footnotes, so that the story itself might pick up faster without having to wade through all this exposition first. It probably worked a little better like that, but it still wasn't entirely ideal... and maybe it started a bit slow anyway.

Perhaps, if I ever end up writing an epic trilogy of books where Peal has to wander to a distant volcano and throw the palarum in, I can start it with a prologue called On Bugbears.

Peal

More on the hero of The Straggler's Mask.



He's not the first of my main characters even in his setting (Aurel would hold that distinction, though there's a version of Mirari that's even older), but not only did he end up to be the first one to be published, ever since his conception the vast majority of my story ideas involve him. I guess it's his inherent underdogness – small, weak, and meek – the near-guarantee that he'll be at a serious disadvantage in almost any situation he's put, that makes it easy to write stuff about him. I like underdogs.

Peal hatched in midsummer of the year 1554, as the phase of storm was shifting to rift, under particularly inauspicious auguries. At that time an especially violent thunderstorm was rolling its way above the hills, the forests, the town of Floris, and this one bugbear burrow. Then just as the very first crack appeared in an egg, just as the shaman lit a candle so that a shadow was cast and the newborn was granted a soul - the whole tribe was shaken by the absolutely loudest thunderclap that anyone could remember, like the skies themselves were seriously angered by something no underdweller could even begin to guess.

And so he was named, Peal-Of-Peeved-Heaven. Just Peal, for short. (I don't think he's ever given his full name to anyone actually.)

To a human this may sound like a pretty cool name with a badass origin, but to a bugbear it's... well, imagine if a really awesome and well-respected seer came over when you were born, looked at her seeing stones and fish guts and what have you, then solemnly named you Blind Joe. Even though your eyes work fine. How would that make you feel? How do you think other children would take it, and how would they treat you?

Bugbears like to pride themselves for their stealth, being unseen and silent, and see these traits as the only reason they can survive or prosper in the world at all. Being named basically the antithesis of the whole thing, Peal had few friends in his childhood, and was bullied a lot. No one gave him any respect: he tried hard to be as quiet as the others, but they'd always just laugh and (falsely) claim they could hear him coming from three tunnels away. In truth he was only ever, at worst, a little bit less quiet than the rest - even that because of his insecurities and lack of encouragement.

Usually he'd timidly take all this abuse, but every once in a while his temper would blow over and he would stand up to himself... loudly. As you might imagine, this only made things worse. He got into a few fights that - being nearly always outnumbered - he was bound to lose.

One of the few exceptions to this treatment was a girl bugbear named Floe. A bit older and bigger than him or his peers, she dissuaded the others from picking on him where she could, treated his injuries, comforted him, and was generally really nice to him - a tiny glimmer of warmth in an otherwise rather gloomy life. This not only led to him developing a crush the size of a moon towards her, it had a profound impact on him that would carry on to the rest of his days.

In the emberspring of 1561, some time before his seventh birthday, a number of his peers got each other dared into going outside the burrow, having a breath of the greater world around them, and seeing their shadows. At an age equivalent to a thirteen-year-old human, Peal was pressured into joining, and Floe (who'd gone through the same dare a year before) went along with them to make sure it'd all be okay. This is where things flipped around in a way that no one could foresee and that came to have a lasting impact in not just his life, but the world as a whole.

For a reason or another, Peal was just slightly more taken by the outside world than the others, and a little bit less frightened. He lingered for a bit to look at the stars... then followed a noise, wanted to have a look at the spoils of a battlefield, and came face to face with a dying human hero that gave him the Call to Adventure.

And for all his fears and insecurities, great many desires conspired to accept this Call: he wanted to see more of the world, to get his hands to this treasure promised at the end, to show off to his peers, and to impress his crush.

(A bit of spoilers for The Straggler's Mask follow. Spoiler tags don't seem to work, for reasons I can't tell.)

He had his highs and lows.

He got to experience true and overwhelming loneliness for the first time in his life, but he also made a number of genuine lifelong friends. He got to see endless expanses of the world and even beyond it, realize that there was more to see than he could see in a thousand lifetimes - but it all also nearly got him killed more often than he could count. He learned that the magic mask of courage on him was actually not magic at all, and that the courage was inside of him the whole time. He got his share of the treasure, but by that time had learned that the true treasure he'd attained was something far more than gold or jewelry. He grew to fill the shoes of the hero everyone thought he was, and irrevocably altered the destiny of a world far greater than himself. He returned home at the back of a dragon, to the tune of Return To The Tribe by Edguy.

But it was no longer the home he'd left behind.

No one bullied him anymore. Instead, unexpectedly to him, they came to fear and detest him for all the things he'd seen and done, having truly walked the world above and returned: it's like you never left your house and then went on to spend a year in hell. He had changed: he'd become something none of them, not even Floe, could understand anymore - nor could he understand them in turn.

And he couldn't fit in any better: it felt like such a small place now, cramped and stifling, when the wide world above called for him.

He lasted for maybe a few months - through his eighth birthday - before heading on out once again. He would still visit home, every once in a while over the years - but each visit would be after a longer time than the last, and each time he'd find that they remembered less of him, having reduced him to the status of a folk hero, a cautionary tale, or even a terror in the dark, a haunter, a living shadow.




Over the years to come, Peal goes on to leave his mark into the world in many ways. His activities run the whole gamut between saving children from predators, and taking an active side in the cosmic war between the forces of Law and Chaos. He brings balance to little towns, but also has a hand in toppling entire evil empires as much as rebuilding good ones. He travels to other worlds, alternate dimensions, even the streams of time itself. The high and the mighty come to know his name, and great many of the rest can feel the impact of his deeds.

Problem is, he's not cut for the job at all.

Even having discovered his courage and confidence, it turned out that there isn't much of either in him. He's far from the tall, handsome, and mighty warrior-sorcerer that you'd typically imagine in this line of work. Put him next to his predecessor, Aurel, and he'd look like nothing at all. Indeed, it's often doubtful that he could take on as many as three thugs in a fair fight at once, let alone hordes of mooks like most other heroes could. With almost everyone he ever meets being twice his size, he's easily intimidated. He's naturally a pack creature, yet for his size and meekness - combined with him often facing prejudice for being some weird monstrous little goblin - he has a hard time making friends. Things are often tough for him, especially when he first arrives to a new place and has to tackle all the stares and what have you until he manages to get through someone.

What he needs the most, usually, is for someone to hold on to him, comfort him, and help him unwind all the mental and physical scars his many issues tend to leave behind - and like with Floe, doing so is more than likely to evoke feelings of deeper attraction, which in turn tends to lead to heartbreak. He has a terrible love life and is pretty much inherently incapable of long-term relationships: he'll grow to recognize this eventually, I think, but I'm not at all sure he will ever find a way to amend this flaw.

He adores children. They're small and harmless, and tend to take him for what he is - unburdened by expectations or preconceptions, all they see is some cuddly creature to shower with hugs and affection. Anyone that would harm a child, or knowingly put a child in harm's way, is in for a bad time: he'll pull all stops to put the fear of darkness in such heinous folk.

Really he just wants to see the world, marvel the sights, try the foods and drinks (apple juice is his favourite), befriend the locals, sample everything there is to offer to him, maybe fall in love and actually not blow it for once, instead of getting involved in all these heroics and cosmic wars. But still he persists, because he feels like he can make a stand - and therefore should. Give him some darkness and shadows to lurk in, a few friends to give support, and he'll get the job done.

If he survives, long enough for it to become too much to bear and for his body to start breaking up under him, he'll probably retire somewhere involving children. Perhaps he'll haunt a school or an orphanage somewhere.





(Art credits, in order: Chai, jemmyky, Ink-Stained Matchbox)

First draft of book complete - what's next?

Moments before writing this, I finished writing the first, roughest draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea. It packs a good 126488 words and took me only 43 days to finish, which is easily a new record for me!

The previous holder was probably The Vagrant's Wings: its first draft stood at 140743 words and took 62 days. Rather slower, all in all. Here's hoping I can still keep on breaking the record.

So what happens now?

Well, now I'm going to take a break out of this thing. I've hung it to dry for a month, clearing my head and getting involved in other projects and activities. 15th of November next month, I can return to it with an open mind and rewrite the whole damn thing. By new year I'm hoping to have something to throw at my editor, and then barring sudden cataclysms it should be ready for publish sometime 2019.

I rather like how this one turned out, and it's gotten rather good reception in my test group as well. I hope it will find a bit larger audience. It remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.