P.C. Haring's Blog, page 9

#WritingWednesday – A new Beginning

(Editors Note – Apologies for the delay in posting this. I thought it had gone live already)

For the weeks of January 12-18 and January 19-25, 2015

The past two weeks have been a bit of a whilwind.  If I had to be completley honest with myself, I’d conceede that ‘whirlwind’ pretty much describes all of 2015 thus far.

I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog in general, and when I have been posting ive been quiet about some big news in my day job professional life.  Namely that I’m changing jobs.  I still work in accounting, I still work a 9-5 job and I’m still winning my bread from the day job as opposed to my writing work.  But it was time to move on, find bigger and greener pastures, and while I don’t regret my decisions to work where I called “the office” for the past 15 months, I am confident the choice to move into this new opportunity was, in fact, the right one.

I talk about new beginnings a lot on this blog.  So much so that if you saw the title of this post, and rolled your eyes at it, I woudn’t blame you.  At times it does feel cliche, even to me.  But in this case, it really does feel like a whole new beginning.

As a result of the job change, I’m forced to make a bit of a lifestyle change as well.  One of the perks of the new job is that I’ve been able to trade in a very stressful hour(ish) driving commute to and from my office for a relatively relaxing 40-60 minute train ride in and out of down town chicago every day.  And while that doesn’t mean much in terms of time spent moving to and fro, the ability to sit and relax while I am moved from point A to point B gives me some flexibility that I did not previously have.  It means that, among other things, I have amost two hours a day built into my schedule in which I can do nothing but write.  Which I am very happily taking advantage of.  In fact, as I write this very sentnace, my train is pulling into Union Station and it’s about time for me to get ready for my work day to start.

But beyond the freed up time to write, it’s also put me on a more rigid schedule, at least in the morning  Because I have a train to catch, I have to be far mor dilligent about getting up and getting moving than I once was.  I find this to be a good thing.  My evening commutes are a little more up in the air, but the trains run late into the evening and there are plenty of options.

So far so good, I think and as I write this, I have logged just under 4,500 words in four days on the iPad.

So what does this all mean?


Well, on the cusp it should mean that with anywhere between an hour and a half to two hours of built in commute time where I’m just sitting, my ability to re-form a daily writing habit should come that much easier.  This is not to say it’s going to be handed to me (and I don’t expect it to), but the whole “i’m tired and need to eat’ argument when I get home falls away.  If I can push through my daily word count on the commute, that potentially frees up evenings to continue my recording for Slipspace Harbinger.

On the topic of Harbinger, the 30 Chapters in 30 days project failed almost immediately.  Part of it goes back to that whole dicipline thing I mentioned earlier, and I’ll own that.  But the other piece of it pertains to the recent cold weather in Chicago.  In order to get the sound I need and want in the studio, I need to turn off my heating/air system in my home.  Inconvenient, yes.  But I an adapt.   However, when the weather highs are in the single digits and the wind chills drop to negative double digits…  intentionally allowing my home to cool only to speed heat it back up an hour or two later…is probably not the best of ideas.  So, I’ll be re-evaluating my plan.  I should be getting the last of my foice actors wrapped by the end of April, and so I’m going to re-align my goals accordingly.  But more on that in time.

So…. that’s where things are.  Momentum is building, day job transitions are happening and 2015 continues to look strong.

Catch you next week!

#WritingWednesday – Closing 2014 and Opening 2015

Well, Happy New Year everyone!

You might have noticed that I’ve dispensed with the dedicated year in review post as well as the three words post that I did over the past couple of years.  Truth is that I’ve decided to roll them both into one, though there won’t be any three words exercise this year.

So 2014 Where to begin?

I suppose if I had to sum up 2014 I would describe it as a year of change and transition.  On a personal note, I completed the mainstay of the CPA exam process in late January and completed the last of the administrative work on it in mid-August.  April/May saw an amazing process as I worked to put Cybrosis: A Codename Ciris Conspiracy out in print for the first time and re-issue the book in it’s various electronic forms.  Demicon 25 and Balticon 48 were both amazing in their own ways and it looked as though 2014 was going to be a rocking year.  And it was… but not for my writing and podcasting.

My personal and professional lives took some amazing turns and despite my best efforts, the back half of 2014 turned into more of a transitional period as opposed to a momentum builder.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the past year… not in the least.  But if anything I’m disappointed that I wasn’t better able to manage my time and keep certain projects on track.  That one is on me.

But 2014 provided some valuable lessons and as we move out of the December insanity, I transition into 2015 with a certain sense of organization that I have lacked in previous years.  Don’t get me wrong… other years have been organized, but there’s a different sense than in years past and I’m not exactly able to put my finger on it quite yet.

But as I write this on January 4, things are looking strong.  On tap for the year’s goals are –

 

To be completed with the principal recording of Slipspace: Harbinger by 2/14/15.
To have the audio from my voice actors in and collected for Slipspace: Harbinger by April 30
Write 275,000 new words for the year.  This may seem like an ambitious goal, but to be honest it calls for a fairly modest rate of a little over 750 words per day each day of the year.  This should be easily doable, but given my difficulties in maintaining a consistent daily writing pattern last year, it could prove a challenge.
Make steady progress on the Slipspace Harbinger production side of things.

Its hard to quantify that last one.  Ideally I’d like to begin the podcast release in late 2015.  However it is going to be a vary large project, and there ware a lot of moving pieces, not the least of which is the receipt of the last bits of audio from my voice cast.  So I’m going to let this one remain subjective for a while.

So that’s it for now.  I’ll be back soon with an update as things move forward.  Hopefully even next week!

#WritingWednesday – On Content Creation

So November and December have blown up in my face.    I know.  Big surprise, right?

 

The past six weeks have been a struggle, one more than I had expected and suffice to say, the habits I had hoped to form… did not happen.

I won’t bore you with the details of every little reason (excuse?) that content did not get produced over the past six weeks.  That’s unimportant.  What is important is that… well content creation is difficult.

Up until a week or so ago, the barely half finished draft of “Huntress” kept staring at me and laughing at my inability to find that hook, that thread, that twist that pulls the whole thing together and makes me want to give a damn about these characters…. to say nothing about whether or not the reader cares.  It finally came to me in the most unlikely of places… at a performance of “The Nutcracker”… and no, the twist has nothing to do with ballet.  I’m still unsure as to how well it’ll work truth be told.  But it’s the strongest thread I’ve come up with for this story so far so I’m going to take it and run with it until the work is either finished… or the project runs out of steam… again.

Other ideas for other projects keep bumping in and out of my mind and you would think that with these ideas coming back and forth the concept of content creation would be easy.  But for me, right now, it’s like herding cats and it is damn exhausting.

This is not a ‘woe is me’ or a ‘I have writers block” post.  At least that’s not the point.  But when it comes to creating content, the ideas are like a huge crowd of people all fighting one another to be through the one unlocked door before the guys next to them.  Making matters worse is that some of the old standbys I relied on to clear my head and focus my thoughts…don’t seem as effective as they once were.

 

But last week, something may have changed.  I was flying with Nathan Lowell in EVE Online and we got hit up by a troll.  The troll was hardly un-expected and as I chatted with Nathan about it in game, and felt my own frustration start to build he disarmed me with three simple words  “He’s creating content.”

And something flipped.  If I told you that I knew what it was, I would be lying to you.  But in that moment things started making sense.  Here was an annoying twerp of a player who was enjoying ramming his ship into ours in the attempts to push them out of range of what we were doing.  (No ships don’t take damage when they collide.  It’s a conceit of the game).  He was being a pain in the ass about it too.  But Nathan was correct.  He was creating content.  He was giving no thought to it… he was just… doing what he wanted to do and content was being created.  Granted it was not the written or spoken word mediums in which I operate.  But content was being created and in our own story the characters Nate and I played were being presented with a challenge to overcome.  (Challenge Accepted!)

I’m not yet fully certain how this translates over to my writing, but it’s got my gears turning as I wonder if I’m working too hard to create content in my written work and that perhaps instead of continually re-focusing my efforts and trying to drill harder and deeper into what that ‘missing piece’ is… my answer is to do the exact opposite.  Sit back, relax, work on something else and let the pieces come as they will.

More next week.  (Seriously)

Habit forming and NanoWriMo

It is no secret that I have been very negligent of this blog over the past few weeks and months.  After the roll out things were going well, but Summer came and had a completely different plan for me.  I won’t go into the details of who what when where and why, as it’s not relevant to this post.  But what is relevant is that this summer has been the summer of cleaning up the mess, both on a literal and a figurative levels.  It’s been a busy summer, an exciting summer, a scary summer, and more.  But as the season winds down and we roll into the heart of fall, it’s time to start moving ahead.

The mess is almost cleaned up.  It’s not done yet, but it’s almost gone.  It will return, but when it does, I will be far more ready to handle it.

The craziness of the summer pulled me away from my writing and my Magic Spreadsheet chain has broken more than once and I have either fallen out of old habits that I wished to maintain, or failed to properly build new habits I wish to see take hold.

Enter NaNoWriMo

For the record, No.  I will not be participating in Nano.  At least not officially.  I will not be starting a new piece of fiction on November 1 with the goal of having 50,000 words written on it by November 30.  For those of you who are, I wish you the best of luck.  But that is not what I need right now.  Right now I need consistency.  So my goal for Nano is to produce at least 500 words each and every day.

On top of writing 15,000 words in November, I plan to begin work on revisions to the second book in the Slipspace Trilogy and continue production on the audio of Book 1.  It won’t all get done this month.  But it’s not supposed to.    For me, this NaNo is not about Quantity over Quality.  It is not about Quality over Quantity.  It is about consistency and habit forming.    It is about –

Getting into a daily word count practice
Writing and posting at least one blog post per week on a regular and predictable schedule
Starting the edits on the next manuscript
Continuing the work on audio production

With a full time day job, this may be a tall order, but it is one that I believe I can achieve and with any luck at all, after 30 days I’ll not only have developed some good habits once again, but I will also have improved my time management skills.

I encourage you to take this journey with me over the month of November.  I encourage you to set out some goals for yourself and use them to develop new or strengthen your existing habits.  Whether it’s writing every day on your way to 50K, or making sure you get enough sleep each night, or getting a regular exercise schedule, let us all make November 2014 a month of strong habit formation.    Please feel free to comment on what you’re planning to do and perhaps we will all find our ways to our respective goals, together.

Until Next week.

#Writing Wednesday – Project Diversity

For the weeks of July 14 – August 9, 2014

Whooo… unofficial three week hiatus.   Sorry about that everyone.

Not a lot to talk about on this update.  Writing on the novel formerly known as Hunter continues, though has slowed in pace considerably.  I was forced to re-address the outline a bit and as I get back into the process of writing under the new outline I’m enjoying what’s coming out of it.  Already both my main character and my main antagonist have hijacked my fingers and done a couple of things my plan didn’t consider but I’m liking their questionable antics enough to keep it.

Filling in the gaps when I’m not working on Hunter I’ve got two other projects in the works.  The first is a new fiction project which is still Classified.  But I can say I’m working on it with a co-author and we had a very productive brainstorm session a week ago and are very very excited to begin work on it when schedules allow.  Under most circumstances I might tease a little bit about it, or why we’re doing it, or what it means for us as writers.  But the nature of the project and the way in which we want to reveal it requires almost complete secrecy and I mention it only because it does exist and it is consuming writing and brainstorming time right now and will be consuming writing time in the future.

I am also working on RPG writing.  No, I’m not publishing anything related to an RPG or anything like that.  But I do game on a near weekly basis with a group of local friends, and I’ll be running a game when our current campaign comes to an end.  I’m very excited about it and have been spending a lot of time doing background research and pulling elements together to form the core plot of my upcoming campaign and seeing how these seemingly independent elements can be pulled in and weaved together into a coherent narrative sand box in which my players will make a big mess.

I’ve also started some preliminary edits on Virtuality: A Codename Ciris conspiracy.  This isn’t a full edit pass, but rather a focused edit and re-write of one or two very specific sections of the manuscript that I want to clean up before my beta readers see it.  I’ll go into more detail about this in a later post, but the initial draft was written during a very dark period of my life and while I am proud of the output… I am concerned that some of that darkness comes out in the writing a bit too much and puts a very different spin on the scenes I’m re-working than I want them to.

So, lots going on.  I’m in the process of beta reading a manuscript, a process I am very much enjoying and, of course, there’s still audio production for Slipspace: Harbinger.  I’ll detail some of that work in a future post.

Until then!

When a Jaeger shoots itself in the foot…

I don’t think I’m alone in the sense that when I watch an action movie, like Pacific Rim, I often find myself wondering what part would I play in a real world version of what is playing out on screen.  Would I be the hero of the story who must overcome his fears in order to save the world?  Would I be a fellow pilot, respected in my own right, but one who must die in some horrible way in order to 1) show how badass the villian is and/or 2) to give the hero the required motivation to kick ass in the final battle?  Would I be someone on the technical crew making sure the pilots and the tech are ready to rock and roll when the time calls?

Well… if recent events are any indication, I’d be the poor peon on the street trying just to survive and get the hell out of the way of the battling monsters only to fail and get smushed, crunched, eaten, or otherwise killed in the blink of an eye.

What the hell am I talking about, you ask?

Amazon vs Hachette.

This has been going on for a while and a lot of bloggers, writers, publishers, and people with opinions have weighed in on their various platforms.  I, however, have chosen to remain more or less silent.  Leaving my opinions on this matter to private conversations as I run down the street trying to avoid the giant feet, seemed to make sense given how small and insignificant I am in regards to this battle of the titans.  No… seriously.  I’m small and insignificant here.  There is very little I can say or do that will affect how this plays out…  so why spend the energy.

But after one of the combatants picked me up and asked me if I wanted to be thrown at the other in some attempt to knock down their opponent via millions of small little wounds, I, like many of my colleagues, have found myself drawn into a fight.  So..  Here we go…

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about with Amazon vs Hachette, here’s a brief TL:DR version of WTF is going on.  For those of you who do know… well here’s a refresher

In 2012, the Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Apple and the Big 6 publishing houses.  In this lawsuit they alleged that these parties colluded with one another to keep the prices of their E-books artificially high.  AKA, they were accused of Price Fixing.  Here’s an Article on the lawsuit.
Ultimately the DOJ won their suit and as a result, publishers needed to re-negotiate a pricing strategy with Amazon
Hachette is the first of the companies to undergo this re-negotiation.  Both sides have dug in their heels on their various positions.  Amazon wants lower price points so as to better serve the needs of it’s customers.  Hachette wants higher price points because…well… I don’t actually know.
Both sides have resorted to some…questionable tactics in order to influence public opinion to their sides.
The clash of these proverbial titans continues.

So now you’re more or less up to speed on what’s going on.

So why am I breaking my silence now?  I am not a Hachette author.  I have no plans to become a Hachette author.  Well I’m here because… I got dragged into this conflict.

I recently recieved an E-mail sent to me from Amazon Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP).  As you know I am a KDP author with Cybrosis: A Codename Ciris conspiracy.  I am not the only KDP author who has received this E-mail.   Several of my friends and colleagues have as well.  So, I am hardly being singled out.  In this, fairly long, E-mail which you can read in it’s entirety here, amazon calls it’s readers and KDP authors to action by petitioning Hachette to agree to lower their prices.

Well now.

I think one Jaeger just shot itself in the foot.

First and foremost, as Starla Huchton so eloquently put it in a related facbook post – “I’m not a Hachette author, so why would they even care what I have to say?”

As I said earlier… I’m nobody.  In the grand scheme of things, I am a small voice, with a relatively small platform as an independent author (remember that for a moment) who has no association with Hachette whatsoever.  Why on earth would they care what I have to say as an independent author?

Second… From a traditional business model, it is not Amazon’s place to try and force one of their suppliers to sell at a price they want to pay.  A supplier supplies a product, they set a price.  And those who wish to buy it may do so, or attempt to negotiate for a lower price.  Now, Amazon is trying to do the latter, and that’s fine.  But their way of going about it is horribly distasteful and is very reminiscent of the way companies like Wal-Mart try to do business by snapping up as much consumer market share as they can get, and use that leverage to force their suppliers to sell at prices that they are unwilling to sell at either because they can not recoup their costs/earn a profit*, or because they simply don’t want to sell at that lower price point.  This is called Monospony, and just as broken and unfair in practice as it’s functional opposite- the Monopoly.

*Now a brief side note about profits.  The argument that big publishing is living in an antiquated business model and is fighting tooth and nail to hold onto something ‘traditional’ despite the changing of both times and technology is well represented and not an argument I’m interested in getting into.  As an independent author and an accountant, I am well aware that the majority of the costs involved in Ebook sales are fixed, not variable, and considerably lower overall.  Thus I am aware that a lower price point would still permit a decent profit on a per unit basis.   Implications of market collusion notwithstanding, this is not intended to be an endorsement or a condemnation of the ebook pricing strategy used by the big six, simply an acknowledgment that this is what they’re using.  The debate on the practicality of such thing is best suited for a separate conversation.

Now another side note – as a reader, I am all for lower prices.  I don’t believe the next Stephen King E-book should cost me $20 or worse, so from that perspective go Amazon! Stick it to them!  But this is not the way in which Amazon chose to approach me.  They approached me as an independent author… more importantly… one of THEIR independent authors.

Lets look at that for a moment… and lets de-construct this…  I am an independent author published through Amazon.  I have a title on both their KDP and their Createspace Platforms.  Eventually I will have titles on their ACX/Audble platform as well.  I do not have the resources to put a marketing plan together like the Big 6 do.  I do not have the resources to churn out a new book every 6 months or less like the big six do.  I do not have the following or the success stories of some of Amazon’s biggest indie authors.  As I said earlier… I am nobody.

In fact, there are only three ways I can hope to successfully compete with Big publishing – 1) Customer(reader) Service and Interaction, 2) Producing a product of comparable or superior quality and 3) Price.

Price.  Price. PRICE.

Amazon, why on earth would I, an independent author want to help you pressure big publishing into selling books at a lower price point?  Lets try to follow this logically –   If we accept that the target customer will not pay any more than $10 for an E-book and we also accept that I sell mine for $3.  Why would I want to help you to force a competitor who has chosen to price themselves out of the market (at say $15) to reduce their price against their will AND become a more direct competitor for reader dollars?  Why would I help you encourage competition against me that I have no chance of overcoming?

Nope.  Nope.  Not going to do it.

Now obviously, as I said before, I am nobody.  Amazon doesn’t care about my titles or me as an author.  I don’t move enough volume.  The big six do and the more volume they move, the more money Amazon makes and the more ebooks they move for their kindle platforms, the more money they make selling their kindle tablets, phones, and whatever else they end up building in the future.

So… I get it.  I honestly and truly do.  But Amazon… seriously.  Try not to be so transparent when you try to manipulate your own indie authors into competing with themselves.  We’re not stupid.

Hachette… rock on with your bad self.  Stay stubborn and continue to rely on an antiquated business model that has a limited shelf life if you want to stay in business.  The longer you price yourselves out of the E-book the better for me and other indies.    If you two want to shoot yourselves in the foot… go right ahead.

Just don’t ask me to join in your fight.   I’m not interested in letting myself be stepped on.

 

Until next time…

#WritingWednesday – Multitasking

For the Week of July 14-19, 2014

The challenge coming out of last week was to maintain the momentum  I had built up.  Things with the Novel formerly known as Hunter were going gang busters, I had fallen into a productive groove and things could not be better so long as the momentum could keep going.

I’m not going to say the momentum fell off.  Even though it kinda did, it doesn’t feel like things ground to a halt.  But rather I’ve added back in a few more things on my plate and with limited time and more balls to juggle into the air, less time can be spent with any one thing.

So… what did I add to the mix?

Audio

The Slipspace Harbinger Podcast has been a slow burn of ongoing work since I started the CPA a year ago.  And while I’ve been working it on and off in between CPA studies I’ve been engaging vocal talent, organizing production schedules and the like, and doing what I can to put things in order for work.

This past week, aside from my usual bout of audio wrangling and touching base with the voice cast I needed to get updates from, I took advantage of some unseasonably cool weather in Chicago and took some time off work to record.  I managed to record three chapters of narration representing close to 20,000 words of text.  It had been my plan to do more later in the week, especially on sunday, however heat and humidity blocked that plan, as I have to turn off my condo’s HVAC system to prevent the blower from contaminating my recorded audio.

Even so, I’m very happy with the progress and am looking forward to some more mild temperatures so I can put in a few more marathon sessions.

And in case you’re wondering, no… there is still no ETA on when Ep 1 goes live.  Way too much to do at this point to even speculate.

Writing has slowed a bit.  I’ve come up against a couple of snags in the plot of the novel.  Nothing insurmountable, mind you, but a few character related questions that need to be answered before I can proceed.  Even so, writing continues.

This coming week will prove busy.  It’s a concert week for my orchestra which will see me in five hours of rehearsal (instead of the usual two and a half), plus the concert itself.  There’s a day trip scheduled, and some preparation that must be done to ready my home for guests who are coming for said concert.

Still, there will be time for words.  Due to time constraints as well as hot and humid weather, I am not planning any recording sessions this week, but as some of the NfkaH plot questions get answered and come into focus I’ll be getting back to the writing.  I have also pulled the first chapter of Virtuality, for review and re-writes as it’s very explicit and very dark content needs a facelift before I am comfortable sending it out to beta readers.

So.  That’s been the week.  Tune in next week and I’ll update you all on how things are going on that front.

Until Next time.

 

#WritingWednesday – Productivity

A bit late… sorry about that everyone

For the week of July 7-13, 2014

Well its been a heck of a crazy week around here but in this case… that is such a good thing.

In my world, terms like “crazy” and “busy” are often brought on with negative connotations as to why things have not been done.  It’s usually a crutch and a series of excuses (my words, not yours) of varying legitimacy that are used to justify the lack of progress.  But… in this case that crazy busyness has been focused on the production of getting stuff done.  And as I sit here writing this post on the day it goes live and I look at what has been accomplished in the early days of this week that I’ll report on next week, I can tell you that it’s only just getting started.

Last week saw several awesome developments on the day job front as some time consuming tasks that I was temporarily given to cover a staff shortage were re-assigned.  It also saw some new developments on the personal and social front that I’m very excited about, but will not detail here because this isn’t *that* kind of a blog.

And then theres the writing… oh and the podcasting.  So lets discuss that…. after the break.

With just under 3,000 words written this past week, not including a re-working of the first scene in the new project, I am well entrenched in my pace of 500 words a day writing goal with 6 days being for writing fiction and the 7th for blogging or working other non fiction but word count building projects.  The Novel Formerly Known as Hunter (thank you K.T. Bryski) is a project that is finally building some writing momentum in my head and while it is still early on in the process and I don’t have a formal outline for it quite yet, I’m hopeful that this time will be the time I push this project to completion.

Even though no formal outline exists as yet, there is a backbone flow chart I put together over the weekend that sorts out the underlying motivations of my villian and pulls my main characters into that scheme.    That in and of itself was worth the time I spent working on the book.  I think that’s going to lead me down a road I want to take and allow me to tell the story that I want to share with you all.

I also managed to sit down and do some project planning over the weekend.  IF things continue on the current pace, this novel should be fully drafted by November 30.  That means I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but it will give me a good two and a half months before I leave for the Smoky Writers retreat to sit down and start working edits and re-writes of one of my other drafted projects.  That will probably be Slipspace Book 2.

And that will leave me ready to start something fresh at Smoky writers.  Which will be a good thing since I’ll have some preliminary re-writes to Virtuality to do before it sees the beta readers, I’ll be ready to work on edits to the writing project I’m doing right now, I have at least two more full length novel ideas I may want to start tinkering with and, oh yeah a seekrit project or two.

So where does the recording of Slipspace: Harbinger fit into all of this?  Great question!

I’ll fill you in on that… next week.

#WritingWednesday – The Balancing Act

For the weeks of  June 16 – July 6, 2014

Well… I’ve missed… two weeks of updates and for that I’m sorry.  It’s been a busy few weeks complete with big, epic orchestra concerts and a lot of writing.

Yes… Writing.

Progress on the Novel formerly known as Hunter is going well and is just shy of 7,000 words.  That may be a little low for two weeks, but I’ve been making steady progress and I’m liking what I have laid out.  Character conceptions are solidifying and I have had to break a rule of first drafts, and to go back and re-work.  I’m probably going to have to re-do the first scene again to define out some characterization.  It’s going to take a night when I’m in the mood to rip that scene out and re-write it almost from scratch  But I’m still very happy with progress so far.

 

The past few weeks have been a crazy balancing act with family, work, writing, and music obligations.  I hear it often, and I say it myself quite frequently, but these past couple of weeks have really put it into a new context for me.  It’s been good.  So, with lots of things on the mind, I’m keeping this one short and going to dig back into the novel.

Until next week!

#WritingWednesday – Brainstorming!

For the Week of June 9-15, 2014

It’s a strange thing moving from world building one universe, to world building another universe, especially when the goals of the two world building projects are so distinctly different.  While I was working with the Slipspace universe bible, I was giving it updates and filling in holes and streamlining the inconstancies in the notations to get it ready to be imported into the scriverner project file I have for Slipspace Book 2 because, well that middle chapter in the trilogy needs to have it’s re-writes done.

But now that I’m done (for now) with Slipspace and moving onto Hunter.   This is a whole new ball of wax because much like some of my colleagues, my work on Hunter has been… problematic at best.    I started work on this novel universe back in… 2010 I think(?) and despite my best efforts I failed to complete it… three times.    Various reasons of course.  I blamed the outline, I blamed not knowing the characters, and a few other things and the piece never came together.  All I had were these disperate images, some general ideas but nothing that I could pull together into a story despite my best efforts.

But I can’t give up on Hunter.  I know there’s a story in there somewhere… I just had to find it.

So, last week, I torched the world bible.  Set it on proverbial fire and wiped everything out except the objective research I did on the Solar System.  Everything else… gone.

And I’m starting almost from scratch.  The framework of the universe is staying the same, but everything else is on the table.  Characters are rebuilt from scratch, though the archetypes are intact and I’ve got one hell of a blank canvas.

Which in and of itself can be very overwhelming.

It’s been an interesting week as I dig through what I have, flesh out my characters of “Antagonist”, “Protagonist” and “Hacker”.  And as I built characters in an MMO I play to use as visual basis for the descriptions in the book and started to get to know their needs, wants, and desires, ideas started to come out of the wood work.  Some of them were tiny little minute things that probably will never directly see the page and some of them were quite large that likely will huge ramifications for the plot and story.    I thought I had it all figured out.  Until I started talking with a good friend of mine about the ideas running around in my head.

I’ve always know the benefits of brainstorming with another individual and it’s something I’ve often tried to do, to make sure I bounce my ideas off of someone else who can think both critically and creatively.  I haven’t been disappointed in the past, and this session was certainly no different.   For one of my characters I had a certain preferene in my head that seemed to be a fun little quirk… until the full ramifications of that idea were pointed out and discussed.  For another character I had, what I thought, was a very clear picture in mind for how they viewed the world and the people around them, only to have it pointed out that I had created someone fundamentally incompatible with the role for which they had been selected.

My brainstorming partner was and is dead on accurate.

And so, as I roll into the third  full week of June, the brainstorming continues.  Two of my three characters have switched roles with one another and the re-defined relationship between Protagonist, Antagonist, and Hacker is coming into a clearer, stronger picture.  As a result the ever elusive plot is starting to take shape and has a lot of potential in many of the possible directions in which it can go.  The working title is now being revised into something new, but for now (and with thanks and apologies to K.T. Bryski) I’m referring it to the “Novel formerly known as Hunter”

So… progress continues due in no small part to an amazing brainstorming partner whose use of the Socratic method is both frustrating and amazing.  God I love having good friends around me.

 

And in the spirit of working with friends on creative projects, I’m happy to include in todays post, the audio from Demicon 25 of the panel “Collaborating with Friends.”  This panel consisted of Myself, Tee Morris, and Phlippa Ballantine in which we discuss the ins and outs of working with friends on creative projects.  As with before, this was recorded live, so please forgive any poor/inconsistent sound quality you may (and probably will) encounter!

Until next week!