John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 32
August 29, 2012
Write Every Day to Stay “In Shape”
Sometimes, I wish this was easy.
I’m good at coming up with ideas for stories. I excel at writing and pacing. I enjoy doing it.
So why isn’t it easier than this?
A couple weeks ago, the right plan for a novel I’ve been trying to write since I was 15 finally congealed in my head. I plotted it out and was excited. I even blogged about it last week. I was raring to go.
And then I sat down and the words stubbornly refused to come out. I practically had to put a gun to my head to write 600 words. And when I would write, touching fingers to keyboard was like taking a giant dose of Benadryl — sleeeeeeepy.
Needless to say, authoring the latest draft of Calibot’s Revenge has been a little frustrating. If I’m enthusiastic about writing this new novel, you’d think I’d have words flying out of my fingers faster than I can read them. I’d have what Stephen Donaldson calls “a gusher.”
Well, maybe. Writing, I’ve learned, is like any other sport or activity. You have to keep at it to stay in shape. and the last time I was actively writing a book was April. That’s when I finished the first draft of Red Dragon Five.
Since then, I’ve been editing. I read the first draft and marked it all up. Then I went through it chapter by chapter and made changes. That required writing but not crafting a lot of prose from scratch. It was making changes. I might have added a few new paragraphs here and there, but that doesn’t take a sustained effort. When I was finished with that, I read it again and put in chapter titles and fixed a few typos.
All that takes time, and it’s incredibly important to the process. But it isn’t like writing 3000 to 5000 words a day on a first draft.
It also didn’t help that I had arguably the busiest summer of my life. With the kids back in school, I’m just now getting back into a regular routine. And I am still run down from all the things we did this summer. Nothings eats my creativity like exhaustion.
So all right, I’ve got some excuses. That’s not good enough, though. What do I do about it?
Any decent author knows there’s only once solution: write. Just sit down and do the work. Try not to put limits or expectations on it. I like to write a whole chapter at once. It feels more satisfying to me that way. But those first few days, I had to write partial chapters. One day, I only wrote 300 words.
But that was 300 words closer to the end. It was a couple paragraphs of the story. I got something done that day, even if it was very little.
Monday, I wrote a 2000-word chapter. Yesterday, the next chapter was shorter, so I only wrote 1200 words. But I can feel the flow coming back. Just like getting back to going to the gym, I can feel my writing muscles growing stronger. I’ve got four chapters done (although the first chapter needs me to go back and add some things). Today, I’m going to try to knock out the fifth one.
You have to stay in shape as a writer — you have to work almost every day so the ability to conjure and shape words stays sharp. And you have to be patient with yourself when you need to get back into it after having been out for awhile.
Keep writing. Write every day. It doesn’t matter if the words are bad. If you get in the habit of putting them down every day, they’ll start improving on their own. You’ll be able to write more of them.
Before you know it, you’ll have a completed project.
August 27, 2012
Adventure Fiction and Real-life Gun Battles: A Writer’s Perspective
Writing and consuming adventure fiction is a form of wish fulfillment. We watch cop shows, because we imagine ourselves to be an heroic police officer solving crimes and protecting the public. We go to James Bond movies, because we fantaszie about being a super-suave secret agent, who can outwit the bad guys and get the girl. We read comic books, because we would like to fly or swing from a web-line high overhead, drawing the adulation of millions while saving the world from the nefarious plots of cosutmed madmen.
It’s fun. Through these men and women we finally take our revenge on the school bully or the arrogant co-worker, who always get the promotion.
Lately, though, there’s been this notion that the principles of the action-adventure story could work in real life. Following the tragic shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora CO, the sentiment ran from some that, if someone in the crowd had just been armed, he or she could have shot the perpetrator before more people had to die. A similar point of view was expressed after the shooting at the Family Research Council in Washington DC.
The idea is a simple one: if we allowed regular citizens to arm themselves, they, like an action-adventure hero, could take down these crazies before the police arrive and before more people could be harmed.
But then there was a gun battle between police and another shooter on Friday in front of the Empire State Building in New York. Police officers fired 16 rounds and eventually killed the suspect. But, in their attempts to get the bad guy, they also shot nine innocent bystanders.
These are the police we’re talking about. Trained marksmen. Guys who practice regularly with their guns and are generaly pretty good at hitting what they’re aiming at. People who are trained to handle the high-stress, low-margin-for-error environment of a criminal with a loaded weapon in a crowd of people.
If those guys can accidentally hurt nine people in addition to the perp, doesn’t that give the lie to the concept of an heroic citizen with a .357 in his waistband?
I am not a gun-control proponent. My political views are pretty liberal, and I’m not really sure why private citizens have need for assault rifles, but I am generally pro-2nd Amendment. I don’t object to people owning guns. I don’t object to people enjoying shooting them in proper environments. And I certainly don’t object to people shooting a criminal in self-defense.
As a guy who writes adventure fiction, though, I worry about crossing the line between wish fulfillment and cold reality. I am a black belt. I have often thought I could take down a terrorist on a plane should the need arise.
But could I? Should I?
I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. As my bio states, I’ve long wished to be a superhero. I want to save the world. I want to be the person everyone calls hero and looks up to. I write stories to fulfill those desires and to entertain people just like me, who want the same things.
But we need to be careful about crossing the line from fiction to real life. Because there are innocent people involved. A gun battle at the theater in Aurora might have ended the incident with less loss of life. Or it might have made things a whole lot worse.
When anyone engages an armed criminal in a crowd of people, he or she is gambling with the lives of everyone there. Unlike a fiction writer, that person can’t control the exact outcome of the encounter. The NYPD officers certainly did the right thing, but, even with their training, there were still unfortunate results.
My perspective as an adventure-fiction author is this: there are no simple solutions to the problem of disturbed individuals expressing their outrage and their insanity through violence on the innocent. Suggesting that someone should have been armed and done battle with the perpetrator is both naive and disrespectful to the victims.
Friday, real life and action-adventure fiction converged in front of the Empire State Building. In the end, the good guys won. But neither the story nor its resolution was perfect.
August 24, 2012
Front Row Lit Features STATE OF GRACE
August 22, 2012
New Ideas in Old Manuscripts
It’s always interesting rummaging around in drawers or boxes you haven’t opened in awhile. You find things you had forgotten completely about. I’ve been moving into a new house, and that’s caused a lot of finding things I’d forgotten about. Some of them I’ve decided I don’t need anymore. Others I think I need to do something with. Both often cause a sense of surprise and delight.
It is like that rummaging around in the drawers of the mind too. I was going through my notebook (I keep tons of these; it’s an old habit from the pre-electronic days of my childhood, when I wrote down everything I wanted to do), and I was looking over notes for a novel I wrote about eight years ago I’d been planning on making my next project. It needed a rewrite to tune up the prose, update the technology, and streamline the story.
The more I worked on it, the harder it all seemed, the less I wanted to do it.
But there were notes to another novel in that notebook — a novel that is much, much older than the one I thought I would work on. It is the second-oldest “completed” work in my history as a writer. It’s a novel I wrote in high school (the first draft was handwritten into a spiral-bound notebook), and the notes I found were for my most recent (a few years ago) attempt at a rewrite to bring it up to date and publish it.
Calibot’s Revenge is an awful book. Based very loosely on a couple events from my first D&D campaign, the first draft has all the ugly earmarks of an awkward 15-year-old’s power fantasy. I try not to read it anymore, because it makes me cringe.
But there is the seed of a good story within it. A son is forced to avenge the murder of his father, one of the most powerful wizards in the world. A magic sword and a close friend are the tools he has to combat another magician.
In 1991, I found the original manuscript, laughed at how bad it was, but found that germ of a story for something that was actually worth writing (and reading). I changed Calibot, the central character, from a warrior-adventurer to a poet. He would be unwillingly thrust from a life of increasing his standing in court as an artist to the role of world savior, stopping a plot that would change the balance of power. The novel’s major theme was the way power-mad individuals (including Calibot’s father, who allowed himself to be murdered to set these events in motion) attempt to manipulate histroy for their own selfish purposes.
I wrote about a third of it, and then inexplicably stopped and never returned. It was just as well. It was still very much a traditional male fantasy.
Years later, I was researching another book and came across an interesting tidbit on the mythological derivation of gnomes. They were believed to be guardians of powerful treasures, magical creatures who protected the treasures of the Earth.
Because it was based on a D&D campaign, the villain in Calibot’s Revenge was a gnome. Knowing this piece of mythology changed my perspective again. What if Calibot’s father had used his magic to steal something from this gnome? Then the murder would have a real motive. The villain would be trying to reacquire the artifact stolen from him.
I made a bunch of notes to rewrite the book with this idea in mind, but I only wrote one chapter. Still, it was these notes I stumbled across a few weeks ago.
As I left off the idea of rewriting the other novel, and started thinking about Calibot’s Revenge, one of the book’s main problems stared me in the face. Nearly all the characters were men. I was going to have to make some changes if I wanted it to be something more than the male power fantasy.
And that’s when another idea hit me. What if Calibot was gay? What if, instead of having a close and loyal friend, he had a lover?
As my mind starting turning that possibility over, a sub-theme from earlier drafts occurred to me. What if Calibot was estranged from his father. What if Calibot was the son of the most powerful wizard in the world, and his dad was disappointed in him. What if all that was the case, and then suddenly Calibot had to avenge his father’s murder and possibly save the world in the process?
The character conflicts were rich and interesting. I had a novel I really wanted to write. It wasn’t just an adventure story; it had the potential to have some real meaning.
I immediately decided I was going to present Calibot’s relationship with Devon (the friend turned lover) as normal. I wanted the book to be about relationships — specifically Calibot’s relationships with his father and his lover. Because I don’t see any difference between heterosexual and homosexual romantic relationships, I just wanted the book to be about two people in love struggling to deal with being unexpectedly thrust into events that are larger than they.
So I’m excited to be writing Calibot’s Revenge for the fourth time. I think I’ve got it right this time. I think I’m finally writing a novel worth reading.
August 20, 2012
Writers Write
The first truism a writer needs to understand is “writers write.”
Sounds simplistic and meaningless, right? Well, not when you think about it in terms of career development. If you want to be a writer you have to write.
There are countless things indepedent authors have to do. We have to market ourselves and our books, update our websites, blog, design or approve covers, find an editor, work well with him or her, chase down reviews, and tons of other equally important tasks.
But, we have to write. We’ve got to crank out the words, constantly putting a new piece into the hard drive for later editing, rewriting, and, hopefully, publication.
That means never really resting. Red Dragon Five is currently in my editor’s hands. When she’s through with it, I’ll need to sit down for another rewrite. But, in the mean time, I need to be working on another project.
My business plan calls for me to expand my catalog. One book sells another, and, in the competitive world of indie e-publishing, I need to make sure anyone who enjoys my work can find something else by me to read.
So today I started a new book. While Red Dragon Five is getting its preliminary edits, I’ll be working on another novel. This one’s not in the Wolf Dasher series. Oh, I plan to write several more Wolf Dasher books after Red Dragon Five, but, for the moment, I’m working on something different.
When RD5 comes back to me, I’ll stop working on the new book and rewrite Red Dragon Five again. Then, when I send it back to the editor, I’ll return to the new project.
Writers write, and I’ve taken a few weeks to refresh my brain and plot the new book. Now it’s time to get back to the writing part.
So what’s this new book all about? Like my other pieces, it’s a fantasy novel. It’s a reworking of a very early project (so early, one of the original drafts was written on an Apple IIc with “Bank Street Writer”). The book’s title is Calibot’s Revenge, and I’ll blog more about it later this week. In the meantime, I’ve got some writing to do.
After all, writers write.
August 16, 2012
Contest: Win Jeff Bennington’s Indie Author’s Guide
I’m very pleased to announce the first contest on the “Pleading the Phyth” blog. Jeff Bennington, author of the Amazon.com bestsellers Twisted Vengeance and Reunion, has agreed to give away a free electronic copy of his book, The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe, through “Pleading the Phyth.”
“The Indie Author’s Guide” is an excellent resource for self-publishing writers in the Brave New World of e-publishing. Bennington offers hands-on practical advice for marketing and selling your book, and a lot of encouragement and inspiration for the beginning self-publisher. He includes quotes from numerous successful indie authors to provide both inspiration and advice.
It’s an excellent book that I highly recommend. I feature it on my “Indie Spotlight” page, and you can read my review on Goodreads here.
I’m very pleased to be partnering with Mr. Bennington on this giveaway. To win the book, leave a comment on this blog entry by 31 August. On 1 September I’ll randomly select a winner.
To learn more about Jeff Bennington, check out his blog, “The Writing Bomb,” and follow him on Twitter at @TweettheBook. Click on the links above to order his books through Amazon.com.
August 14, 2012
Differences in Tone
It’s funny how things change.
When I set out to write Red Dragon Five, I was largely planning on creating the next installment in the Wolf Dasher series. While it is a direct sequel to State of Grace, it is also a standalone adventure. I wanted the novels to have a specific sequence but also to be able to be read without having gone through the previous one. Thus, I figured Red Dragon Five would have a pretty similar feel to State of Grace.
That turned out to be really wrong.
Red Dragon Five is a really different book. I could feel that as I was writing it, but it became obvious when I read it through and rewrote it. I’ve read it three times now, and I’m fascinated by how different two books featuring the same characters and setting can be.
Firstly are the themes. State of Grace is about patriotism and religious fanaticism. The novel explores what happens when people take their faith — both in God and in their country — to illogical extremes.
The themes in Red Dragon Five, though, are love and family. This book explores the concepts of what it means to be in love with someone who has a dangerous job, how far one should go to protect one’s love, and what it really means to be part of a family. That alone creates a very different book than the first one.
The nature of the plots also differentiate the two books. State of Grace concerns a coup attempt, and there is the implied threat of a ticking clock throughout the novel. One constantly has the feeling that if Wolf doesn’t figure things out soon, a disaster will occur.
But in Red Dragon Five, Wolf goes undercover with the bad guys early on. He knows more or less what is happening and is looking for the right opportunity to stop it. In fact, he spends a good portion of the novel either trapped behind enemy lines and forced to maintain his cover, or choosing to continue the charade longer to see what else he can learn.
The politics in the two books are different as well. In the first, there is a sense that things can be resolved diplomatically if people will really try. In the second book, that hope is a lot less evident. May Honeyflower despairs as Alfar’s coalition government continually argues over minutiae instead of dealing with the larger issues.
Perhaps most importantly, though, is the difference in the point of view of the protagonist. In State of Grace, Wolf is the vehicle through which the reader comes to know Alfar. He is exploring it for the first time too, and we get his point of view as we learn how this strange world works. There is an innocence to Wolf’s perception of the conflicts, since he is not previously familiar with them.
In Red Dragon Five, he’s been in Alfar for seven months. He’s stopped a major coup and been hunting for the operational director of the country’s most notorious terrorist cell. He’s more jaded, and he’s frustrated at his lack of success. That drives him to make several tactical errors.
Likewise, May is frustrated by her government’s lack of will. She knows what needs to be done, but her efforts at making it happen are constantly rebuffed. Only a massacre can move the ministers to do something about escalating sectarian violence, and May is incensed because, if they’d acted when she asked, it could have been prevented.
Red Dragon Five is a moodier novel than State of Grace. It hints that things will not get better but will get much worse. On the other hand, love is a powerful force in the narrative. It drives May and Wolf to protect each other, and it twists the villain into a deformed mess driven by vengeance.
Red Dragon Five is a very different novel from State of Grace, and I’m really excited about that. I’m hoping each of the novels in the series has a separate feel to it. That’ll make the whole thing richer than I originally imagined.
August 9, 2012
Ready for an Editor
Well, it’s finally done. And by “done” I mean not even remotely done, but I can at least move on to the next stage.
Red Dragon Five — the second book in the Wolf Dasher series — is ready for someone else to read. Maybe I should explain my process here.
First I write the novel. Then I read the first draft. No one else ever sees the first draft. It’s not so much that I’m ashamed of it; it’s just that I know it isn’t good enough yet, so there’s no point in letting anyone else have a look at it. I read that first draft, make a whole bunch of notes, and then go through it chapter by chapter, rewriting it.
Then I let others read it. I listen to their suggestions, and I make more changes. I repeat this process until I’m satisfied with what I have.
For Red Dragon Five, I intend to stratify things a little more. The first person to read the book will be my editor. I’m going to let her rip it apart and then make the changes (most of them, anyway) she suggests.
Once I’ve got a third draft, I’ll give it back to her and involve a group of beta readers to solicit their feedback. Synthesizing what I hear from them, I’ll then write a fourth draft I’ll let my editor have another crack at.
So, yeah, this whole writing and publishing a novel thing takes a little time to do right. And this time I added an extra complication. When I wrote State of Grace, I put the chapter titles in as I wrote it, adding timestamps as well. But the rewriting process caused me to have to do a lot of that over. So this time I didn’t add chapter titles until after I’d finished the second draft. Which meant I had to go back and read it again.
Frankly, I’m ready for someone else to see it. I’ve been living with this book since the turn of the year, and I want some feedback. I want to feel like it’s moving forward. Publishing requires patience, and sometimes that’s really irritating.
But I’ve got the second draft finished. I’ll deliver it to my editor by tomorrow.
Then I’ll try not to be nervous while I wait to see what she thinks.
August 7, 2012
Back to Work
I didn’t plan for it to be like this.
We had our summer activitiess all laid out, and it was busy but manageable. Then we had a new house practically fall into our laps, and so a move overtook everything else we were involved in.
In between performing in a show, teaching youth theater, and supporting the kids in a show of their own, I moved a four-person household across town. And the day after that was finally completed, I packed everyone in the car and drove to Maine for a vacation.
Needless to say, it’s been a little difficult to work on my writing career. Time has been in short supply.
But the vacation is over now, and the kids go back to school next week. It’s time to start focusing on my business in earnest.
The nice thing about vacations is they re-energize you. I am ready to go on the attack again.
I’m coming down the homestretch on the second draft of Red Dragon Five, the sequel to State of Grace. I’ve got it rewritten, and I’m going through it now putting in chapter titles. As soon as I finish that, it’ll land on my editor’s desk. My plan is for that to happen this week.
One of the things I did get done this summer was publishing my second short story. “Sleeping Beauty” reimagines the classic fairytale in modern times. I published it through Amazon’s KDP Select, and I need to set up a free event for it to get it some exposure and hopefully kick up some sales. My research indicates I should give this a month lead time to publicize it, so I’ll be starting work on that shortly.
And I also need to d0 some more work on the website. I want more background information for Wolf Dasher’s world and a map, so you can more easily visualize the locations.
I’m pretty excited to be getting back in the swing of things. My world has been upside down since May, and I am very much looking forward to put it on its feet again.
Plus, football season starts really soon!
Speaking of which, I’ve created a second blog dedicated to my thoughts on the Cincinnati Bengals called “The Who Dey Herald.” I wrote the first post for it yesterday. Check it out by following the link to read my reaction to George Will’s column about the NFL and heacd injuries.
Vacation’s over. It’s time to get back to work. I can’t wait.
July 5, 2012
Writing and the Train
Murder on the Orient Express is my favorite Agatha Christie mystery. From Russia with Love is my favorite James Bond film.
So it only stands to reason I would find train travel romantic. As a writer, the prospect of finally taking a train cross-country was exciting.
It’s kind of strange it took me so long to do this. I lived in London for a semester while I was in college, studying abroad. I had the opportunity to get a EuroPass and travel the continent to see a bunch of exciting things, including the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But I didn’t do it.
And I’ve travelled all over the U.S. for business and pleasure. I’d drive or fly, somehow finding the money to do that.
But this year, everything lined up right. I was going to Madison to visit my brother and friends. I couldn’t get a cheap plane ticket, and gas is well over three dollars a gallon. But a train ticket was only $63. Sure, it would take long erthan if I’d driven, but I could ride instead of drive, and I could work.
I took the train from Kansas City to St. Louis, and then from St. Lou to Chicago, where Dave picked me up and drove me to Madison. It was not without inicident.
Apparently, really hot temperatures can cause tracks to superheat and trains to derail. So we weren’t able to go more than 60mph once the 100-degree heat set in. That put us behind schedule everywhere we went, meaning we had to stop frequently to let other trains pass.
The power went out in several cars twice. We had to stop, so they could manually reboot the circuit breaker to keep us cool.
I forgot my phone charger, and being out in the middle of nowhere (where the trains run) meant no signal. My battery was sucked dry as the phone searched for service. To preserve it, I had to keep shutting the phone off and then turning it on to send progress texts to Dave, so he could gauge when to come to Chicago to get me.
At Springfield, a ton of passengers got on, and a comfortable, half-full train, became a cramped full one. A five-hour-and-40-minute trip became an eight-hour one — and that was just St. Louis to Chicago.
Overall, it was a lot more adventure than I bargained for.
Writing on the train from St. Louis to Chicago
But I got 13 chapters of Red Dragon Five rewritten. Thirteen!
I took several naps. I enjoyed watching the countryside roll by and looking at the little towns we cruised through and to. I was able to write right up to the point we got to the station. There was no forcing me to
shut down my computer for takeoff and landing. TSA didn’t hassle me. I got to keep my shoes and belt and hat on.
As a writer, the train was an ideal way to travel. I got so much writing done it was silly. And I didn’t have to drive. And I wasn’t packed in like a sardine.
If you’re in the middle of a writing project and you need to travel, I highly recommend the train. It was extremely conducive to working.
And, if I didn’t see Hercule Poirot or James Bond aboard, I at
least had their spirits in my mind and on my computer.
