Biff Mitchell's Blog: Writing Hurts Like Hell, page 18

The Weekly Man: 224,434,533.05 Bugs, But It’s Done

I’m so glad for the death threats a few of months ago. Without them, I would have been in some pretty deep shit a couple of months ago. I wouldn’t have been ready for this. I would have made a complete idiot of myself (and I don’t need any more of that). I would have failed miserably and hopelessly. I would have had to spend the rest of my life under my bed with an empty bottle of wine, crying.

But thanks to the promises of my unscheduled departure from this world if I didn’t do this at the end of the summer, I had time to do it right…and work out the 224,434,533.05 bugs that somehow crept into the very texture of the project. Things like font and formatting problems across platforms, sizing for devices, figuring out an efficient way to deliver the episodes…

It was a lot, but I won’t get into that now. The first episode is up and was ready for everybody’s Sunday coffee break and that’s what I’m going to do for the next two and a half months…make sure each episode is up and ready for everybody’s coffee break, seven days a week, because we all drink coffee on the weekends, gallons of it, and most of it on our Sunday coffee break. Some of us go into work to do this; some of us have lost our jobs for doing this; some of us skip football to do some coffee break reading; some of us lead normal lives and haven’t read this far…

:)

This is my promise, short of death by dismemberment and other means, I will have all 72 episodes ready each day except for one period where the order of life in the novel will require a week (Sept 30 - Oct 7) for everyone to take a breather and drink tea…just for the hell of drinking tea. And I won’t lie about this…I’m nervous. I spent a lot of time building things, working up a schedule that makes sense and a process for meeting the schedule, creating graphics and freebies that might actually have meaning for some people…and, of course, I had to write a novel.

It took almost eight years to write it…and that includes a year and a half of research to work out the logistics required to make the story believable; plus, I took a few years off to study photography and get a haircut. I used the storyboard for the novel to teach the concept of storyboarding to my creative writing students…the ones who are all better writers than me and didn’t really need to take the workshop. All they needed was this advice. (https://biffmitchell.files.wordpress....) But that’s another blog.

There’re seven main characters, and their names sound a bit similar. Well, maybe a lot similar. There’s a reason for this but I’m not going to tell you what it is because I don’t want to give away something that will make your skin crawl. It’ll all be revealed in time but, in the meantime, it might be a good idea to download the printable one page character guide. (https://biffmitchell.files.wordpress....)

BTW, if you want to read the novel on your cell phone, you can read each episode in PDF form from the Welcome Page. ( https://biffmitchell.com/welcome-to-t... )

Today is Sunday. At exactly nine o’clock, I sipped a Columbian coffee I made with my French press from freshly ground beans and read the world’s first free daily coffee break novel. And I can hardly wait for the second episode…when things loosen up a bit and the humor kicks in.

(BTW, I’ll be posting each episode sometime between 6 and midnight each day.)

How Do You Read a Coffee Break Novel?

You would think I would have the decency and the brains to limit the world’s first daily serialized coffee break novel to five days a week…those weekdays traditionally recognized as work days in the 1950s image of the perfect world where everybody clocked in at 9 in the morning and stumbled out at 5 PM. But I have neither.
And I don’t really feel bad about it. Not everyone works in an office. Not everyone has coffee breaks. Not everyone drinks coffee. And since this is a world’s first, not everyone knows how to read it. There will be chaos and war sprouting out of arguments over how to read a coffee break novel if you don’t have a coffee break. Families will purge members who drink tea on their coffee breaks. I’ve already received disguised death threats from football fans expressing their outrage that The Weekly Man will be published not just weekdays…but Saturday and Sunday as well…even though I had no say in that. You can thank the novel’s characters for that piece of insanity.
I’ve thought deeply about this and I’ve come up with some options.
You can read The Weekly Man five days a week on your morning or afternoon coffee break…and you can come in to work for a few minutes on Saturday and Sunday to read it. I foresee objections to this option and offer the following alternatives:

• Stay home on the weekends and read three days’ worth of episodes on Monday.
• Have your weekend coffee breaks at home in a room simulated to look like your work space.
• Don’t bother reading those episodes, which will very likely increase the novel’s mystery aspect.

Personally, none of these options appeal to me, but then, I’m bald and have an unruly beard that I try to conceal from the public.
Now, let’s suppose you don’t have coffee breaks, don’t drink coffee, don’t work because you’re a 105 year old hippie like me, don’t have time on your 3 minute coffee break or…don’t whatever. I have a page, a hidden page that doesn’t appear on my website’s navigation bar because it’s a secret page. It has all the episodes, every single one of them listed for the whole two and a half months of its serialization.
One problem though.
Each episode will be posted on its scheduled date…not all at once. But you can still put aside some time and read say, a week’s worth or a few days’ worth. And you don’t even have to drink coffee while you’re reading. You can drink beer. Or tea. Click here for the secret page…but don’t tell anyone else. This is just for you. https://biffmitchell.com/welcome-to-t...
Come to think of it, reading a weeks’ worth of episodes each Saturday would be more like the original serialized novels from writers like Dickens a thousand years before they had coffee breaks.
Using this secret link will allow you to read the whole novel after all the episodes have been published. But keep in mind…that would require a lot of clicking because each episode requires you to click to open it. You’ll get Click Thumb and Fingers and your hand will fall off.
Here’s another option that just occurred to me: Read the episodes at night while you drink coffee on a break from your evening activities. How cool would that be? You’re watching a movie with friends and suddenly stand up and announce, “I think I’ll have a coffee break now and read The Weekly Man.” You’ll be envied as the loneliest person on the block. I know this from experience.
I guess it boils down to this: Read it however you want. I’ve put together a few options to give you some choice and that choice is yours.
You can read The Weekly Man on its own blog here. https://www.theweeklyman.com. If you’re reading on a cell phone or tablet, read it at the secret place mentioned above. And check out the welcome page at https://biffmitchell.com/the-weekly-man for more options and lots of freebies for readers and writers.

How to Write a Novel

I've been teaching writing workshops for over a decade through the Maritime Writers Workshop, the UNB College of Extended Learning, the Foglit Literary Festival and others. One thing that crops up repeatedly is the angst about ever being able to write a novel or even get halfway through the process.

Only a handful of over a thousand of my students will ever write a novel, and some already have...and are published. The rest enjoyed the workshop and will likely use what they learned to better their writing skills in other areas, but not in the writing of a novel.

Unfortunately writing a novel takes a long time, requires extreme effort and sacrifice...and it may never be published. After writing this, I kind of don't want to write novels anymore, and I've already had several published.

One thing I realize is that the students who took my workshop and were eventually published would have written their novels and had them published whether or not they too my workshop.

They were willing to spend the time and effort and make the sacrifices. They were willing to accept that what they were doing might never go anywhere but on their computer desktops.

So, in light of this revelation, I put together a very short note on how to write a novel. It's all you really need...if you're willing to spend the time and effort and make the sacrifices.

You can download it here: https://tinyurl.com/yxe5rkv4

And when you've finished the first draft, check out this paper on how to revise it at biffmitchell.com. Click The Weekly Man in the navigation bar at the top right on the screen.

Sometimes You Have to Cry Before You Laugh

Sometimes you have to cry before you laugh…or just do something that’s not anywhere near laughing…like being confounded, grossed out or puzzled. The Weekly Man is a mystery of sorts. In terms of genres, it would fall loosely into speculative/magical realism/humor/social commentary/not always so humorous. Something along those lines.

The first episode is not humorous. My apologies. It’s kind of serious, kind of gross, kind of foul-mouthed and kind of hopeful. You won’t like the main character…for now. However, if you don’t like serious/gross/foul-mouthed/hopeful, you can just skip it. It’s being published on a Sunday anyway, and my friends tell me they’d rather stay home and watch football than go into work so that they can have a coffee break and read the first episode of The Weekly Man.

Oh well.

But honestly, the first episode won’t make any sense until almost halfway through the novel anyway; however, it sets a tone that’s important coming into the story because, sometimes, it’s necessary to erect humor on a solid foundation of muck.

Dark muck.

There’s something deeply wrong with humans (that would be you and me), but I won’t get into that now. I will later…well into the story when, hopefully, you’ll see something intrinsically wrong with the way the lives of the characters unfold. It’s something we do all the time and it’s probably going to kill us eventually and that’s why the story starts on a down note.

There will be humor, but you won’t be slapping your knees or choking on coffee. It’ll be quiet and bothersome. And it’ll go well with your morning coffee.

Follow The Weekly Man at theweeklyman.com.

Coming September 8: The World’s First Free Daily Serialized Coffee Break Novel

(Fredericton, Sept 4, 2019, For Immediate Release)

The serialized novel is about to enter a new chapter with the release of The Weekly Man, the world’s first free daily serialized coffee break novel, on September 8 this year.
“Dickens started this in the 1800s with The Pickwick Papers,” said author Biff Mitchell. “I’m paring the concept with the modern coffee break.”
The Weekly Man will be published episode by episode every day starting September 8 and continue until mid-November of this year.
“Each episode is short enough to fit into a coffee break,” said Mr. Mitchell. “The novel is mostly humorous and I’m hoping it will give people a morning smile, or even a laugh.”
The novel follows the lives of seven people who have sensed since childhood that something mysterious lurks under their daily lives. Their lives are changed forever when they make a stunning discovery.
“I can’t give too much information about the novel at the moment,” said Mr. Mitchell. “It has a few surprises and I don’t want to give them away. There’s a legitimate reason why the novel needs to run on the weekends as well as weekdays, but that’s a surprise as well.”
According to Mr. Mitchell, The Weekly Man explores a number of contemporary issues, especially our insane ability to ignore what’s happening in the real world and build our own realities no matter how wrong we know they are.
“We do this with climate change,” said Mr. Mitchell, “every time we buy a bottle of water in a plastic container. We do it when we eat fast foods, knowing they’re killing us, but we shrug it off and supersize.”
Mr. Mitchell has had several novels published through Double Dragon Publishing, but says, “Of all the things I’ve written this was the most difficult and the most compelling.”
The Weekly Man will be released September 8 at www.theweeklyman.com. You don’t have to sign up for anything. No requests will be made for email addresses. Just go to the site and read. A smartphone version will be available at https://biffmitchell.com/the-weekly-man. For more about Biff Mitchell, visit www.biffmitchell.com.

A Writer's Real Job

“So you want to be a writer, do you?” His eyes narrowed as he chuckled and I suddenly felt like I had two purple heads. “And what exactly are you going to do for your real job?”

Even with self-publishing making it possible for anyone on the planet to become a published writer, this attitude that writing (unless you just sold the movie rights to your bestselling novel and bought a new Ferrari) is somehow a pastime that people indulge in when they’re not spending their time accomplishing something useful like diagnosing a disease or making copious notes at Monday morning’s marketing meeting, even though the PowerPoint will be emailed to you later in the day…this attitude persists today much like it did 30 years ago.

It’s a lethal attitude. It’s killed countless creative efforts and pulled the rug out from under aspiring writers for as long as there have been aspiring writers.

It’s not always as blatant as in the example above; in fact, most of the time, it’s subtle, but always there, lurking under the surface of your interactions with the people around you.

“Can you pick Sheila up at the airport?”
“This is my writing time…remember the schedule? And I’m finally on a roll with Chapter 7. Can you pick her up?”
“I have to pick up the party favors for next weekend.”

“Pick them up tomorrow.”

“But I just want to get that out of the way. You can work on Chapter 9 tomorrow.”

Been in this situation before? You’ve scheduled your writing so that it’s not just a random thing you do whenever the creative juices bubble up. It’s something you take seriously and it’s probably more important to you than the job that helps pay for the party favors.

Part of the problem is that painfully long gap between starting a novel, finishing it and getting it published…if it ever gets published. It’s the immediate return on invested time and money. For instance, a plumber repairs your leaky sink and gets paid, all in a matter of hours. You go to the office, sit around for eight hours and collect a paycheck two weeks later. For most people, work has definite start and end dates with something accomplished (repaired sink, sore butt) for which there is a definite payment. You can schedule the start, end and reward.

Not always so in the arts world; in fact, rarely so. You might spend a few months or a few years writing a novel and, unless you’ve made a deal with a publisher, you’re not being paid while you’re writing and, if it’s your first novel, you haven’t established yourself as a professional writer. So most people will perceive your writing as a hobby…not as something to which you want to devote your life. And the longer it takes you to write your novel, the less likely they’ll take it seriously: they’ll see it as your little dream, that quirky little thing you do in the background of your life while you in your keep from the real job selling cars or insurance.

This attitude can be devastating, especially during those times when you’re having doubts and feeling the angst of doing something for ages that’s moving forward slowly but: “who’s going to read it?” “do I really have anything important to say?” “what the hell am I doing?”

That kind of stuff. It can kill you as a writer. I’ve had five novels published and tons of short stories, but I still have these feelings, these doubts that what I’m doing is even worth the effort. Fortunately, I expect the negative thoughts and I keep writing at the scheduled times (yes, I schedule my writing because, like my fulltime job, it’s work).

I’m not saying there won’t be those moments of pure joy when you read something you wrote the night before and you’re floored by the idea that you, yes you, wrote these beautiful words. Those moments are worth the fear and loathing of a thousand moments of doubt. But the novel isn’t finished. You’re halfway through and you’ve been working on it for over a year. You have another year to go, maybe longer.

I try to alleviate the uncertainty by storyboarding my novels before I start the writing, but once I’m 30 or 40 pages into it, the characters and story take off and the storyboard evaporates in the heat of the writing. But the structure and direction it initially provides carries me through. A diver is more likely to dive successfully from a solid board than a rubber one.

Not everyone is into storyboarding, and I get it…it’s work and you might not know where the story is going until you start writing. This happens to me with my short fiction. But storyboard or not, it’s a long process and it eats a lot of time and requires daily sacrifices. So much of writing is discouraging and, if you’re like most of the writers I know, you’re not going to get the kind of support you really need: acknowledgment that your writing is just as valuable as anything else you do, and maybe even more so.

It’s not just a hobby. It’s not just a distraction from the real stuff. It’s what you are and what you want to be.

It means putting things in a writer’s perspective. For instance, would you take time off the 9 to 5 job to pick Sheila up at the airport? If not, why would you take time off from your scheduled writing? You might say, “Well, I have more flexibility with my own time.”

“My own time”?

That attitude has turned many a promising word smith into dissatisfied retiree with a lot of regrets. I know some of these people. They still talk about that novel they should have written and maybe, when they have some free time in their post-retirement life, they’ll get around to it.

Your own time is when you write…when you’re who and what you are.

When people don’t take your writing seriously, feel free to take those people and whatever they do with a grain of salt. Better yet, avoid them. Unless you have no choice but to interact with them, just stay clear of them. Treat them as toxic chemicals. If you’re stuck with them, don’t talk about your writing. They don’t deserve to hear about it.

Resolve that you will be spending much of your time alone, even when you’re in a crowded area like I am when I write in coffee shops. While others are gliding through their mundane lives, you’re creating new worlds, birthing personalities that grow and evolve, focusing on those little things that everyone misses until they read about them in your novel and think, “Oh yeah…that.”

That’s your real job.

What Is the Coffee Break Novel?

Everyone needs a coffee break. It’s that period of time during the workday when you say to yourself, “If I don’t have a coffee right now, this minute, I’m going to kill somebody.” Not that you particularly want to harm anyone (unless, of course, telemarketers have your work number) but, you know, it might be Monday. It might even be Monday morning. On the other hand, it might not be a weekday. It might be Saturday or Sunday and you’re sitting on the beach under a beautiful blue sky thinking, “Damn, I’m missing my coffee break. Why don’t beaches have coffee?” I do this all the time and I’m sure you do as well.

So, now that we’re thoroughly covered the topic of coffee breaks and their contribution to a healthy (and alive) workforce and their absence from beaches, let’s talk about coffee break activities. Some people read newspapers because they hate trees and want to see every tree in the world turned into a newspaper with stories about the shocking conspiracy to deforest the planet by sending the rain forests off to the printers. Some people like to talk to their co-workers about what they watched on TV the night before. This used to be Game of Thrones episodes. Now, it’s arguments about what happened on old Game of Thrones episodes, especially the finale. Some people like to just sit and stare. I’m seeing this more often and it kind of scares me. But we won’t get into that. Some people like to transport themselves out of the workplace and into another world (not the ones staring…they’ll be doing that all day) through the medium of story.

And that brings us to the coffee break novel. I scoured the internet for over a minute and the only mention I could find was a Kijiji ad posted by me. So…I guess that leaves it up to me to make up…I mean, define the coffee break novel.

Let’s start by listing some characteristics. First, it’s intended to be read during the reader’s coffee break. This can be problematic given that some people might be missing two coffee breaks each week because their employers refuse to let them work seven days a week, forcing them to take weekend coffee breaks at home so that they don’t miss any of the story. This could actually lead to dysfunctional activities like sneaking into work on weekend mornings but I’m sure that most people will opt to create a reproduction of their workplace in their basement or spare room so as not to miss a single episode. Others might do some speed reading Monday morning.

And speaking of episodes…that’s another characteristic of the coffee break novel: It’s parceled out in episodes…each with just enough reading to get you through your morning java fix. The Weekly Man is just right for this. It’s naturally broken into episodes following the lives of seven characters, each with their own day of the week to tell their story. There is one spot where this runs awry and may require a three to four day break before plummeting head first into the dazzling conclusion but that’s a few months away and, by the time it comes, I think all two of my readers will need a short break.

The coffee break novel should be mostly light-hearted as in humorous. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be serious, heart-breaking, soul-blistering, tear-prodding, existential moments, of which there are a few in the novel, but these are introduced for the sole purpose of pacing the story like a roller-coaster. There will be no flat lining in any of my stories. I mean, even Mary Poppins had her down moments. But for the most part, it’s going to be humor and lightness of being because it’s your coffee break and you don’t need to be crying and borrowing tissues from your co-workers on your coffee break. (WARNING: The first episode of The Weekly Man is not humorous. But it has a sort of happy ending.)

There has to be a strong element of weirdness so that the novel is able to compete against the news of the day, which keeps getting weirder by the day. And besides, I’m weird and it’s my invention, so I’m calling for weirdness.

All coffee break novels should have more than one character. This makes it much easier to create things like conversations, conflict, plot, human interaction and all those other elements that might cause a story to become interesting. Plus, there has to be both male and female characters because that’s more like real life and we’re all big fans of real life, aren’t we?

Words. The coffee break novel draws on a list of easily recognizable and commonly used words with careful attention paid to correct spelling and usage. I’m seeing less and less of this in most of the world’s published content, either online or in print and I think this is something we all need to enthusiastically gossip about in all the right places…because we all know that meeting a challenge with gossip is more effective than meeting it with thoughts and prayers. Hopefully, The Weekly Man will lead us out of this barbaric mire of editorial carelessness.

Well, actually, that probably won’t happen, but as long as there are coffee breaks, there will always be a need for something to do during the coffee break…and now the world has one more thing designed specifically for that. It’s called the coffee break novel and The Weekly Man (https://www.theweeklyman.com) is the world’s first free daily serialized coffee break novel.

Coffee Shops and the Single Writer

I’m a coffee shop writer. I’ve written five novels in coffee shops because they’re the only place I can write fiction. There’s something about the atmosphere and the availability of coffee that burrows deep into the headlands of my creativity and starts a stampede of words and ideas. I write for about an hour to an hour and a half each evening and get one to two pages (yep, I’m no Stephen King). Anywhere else and I might get a paragraph or two and on very rare occasions, a whole page. Surprisingly, it doesn’t matter what coffee shop or where it is…if it’s a coffee shop, the trail to the headlands is a six lane highway racing into story telling.

And yes, I’ve written about writing in coffee shops before; in fact, my last post (in my personal blog) covered some of the hurdles to overcome. But this post is about single writers who write in coffee shops and why they’re likely to remain single forever.

To begin with…being a writer is a powerful sentence to singleness in the courtroom of relationships. I mean it. Most of the writers I know are single…and not necessarily happy about it. Some have fond memories of those days when they had someone special in their lives, someone who understood them and stuck in there in spite of long hours alone while their writer mate disappeared into the jowls of a coffee shop (we’re talking just about coffee shop writers here) to do mysterious things with words. They put up with the roller coaster of moods and lifestyle that brand writers as persona non cool. They looked the other way when the writer, foaming at the mouth and crazy-eyed, tried to explain the world-shaking ramifications of not being able to find the right word to describe Sam’s blue shirt.

“Just say it’s blue,” she says.

“But how will they know the blue?” he responds.

“By the use of the word blue,” she says.

“But how will they feel the blue,” he says.

“You only feel blue when you’re sad,” she says.

“You don’t understand me,” he cries.

“You’re making a mountain out of…” she tries to say.

“You’re just like the rest of them,” he yells.

And suddenly, he’s single. And not necessarily happy about it.

The same things happen to female coffee shop writers, proving there’s no gender inequality when it comes to losing at love, especially if you can sneak a bit of the loss into a story.

There’s something about creating worlds with words that takes you out of everybody else’s world and plops you into a place that only exists in your own mind, like when was talking to a group of co-workers while I was working on my first novel. I started talking about a man called Baxter. The others looked at me in a strange way, like my head had just fallen off. One of them said, “Who’s Baxter?”

It suddenly dawned on me that Baxter was one of the characters in my novel. That’s how real he’d become and how unreal the world of my co-workers had become. Sadly, this didn’t discourage me from writing; in fact, it probably spurred me on. Something along the lines of OK, I’ve lost it with these people, so what do I have left? Oh right…Baxter and friends.

Writing is a deep uncharted pit with a shallow slope that slants ever more precariously as you slide into it. It leads into a place where a blue shirt is deep sea or sky blue, not just blue. A place where nothing is whole until the last draft, or until an editor has a better idea for blue. It’s a place where you can get lost, where you can drift away from everything that’s known into a great unknown that you get to arrange and rearrange until you’re satisfied that it’s the right color of blue.

Sound crazy?

It is. And it’s not like those writers who write at home where the better half (at least, saner half) can pop in say, “Hi, how’s it going?”

“What’s another way of saying blue?”

“Just write blue. I think people will get it.”

“You don’t understand me.”

“Don’t stay up too late.” Door closes. Writer is alone to stew in blue. Until bed time.

But for some, the coffee shop calls out to us and off we go, single and bursting with words under the brilliant azure sky.

Another Side to a Publisher: Deron Douglas from Double Dragon Publishing

My first two novels were published by Jacobyte Books in Australia. When they were bought out by a company in England, authors were given the option to stay with the company or find another publisher. I decided to find a Canadian publisher and came across Double Dragon Publishing in Markham, Ontario. The publisher, who is also a brilliant cover artist and does many of the covers for the books he publishes, is Deron Douglas.

It was around 2008 that Deron published of two my Boson Jonson mysteries (Murder by Burger and Murder by Art). They immediately shot up on the NY Times bestseller lists and were made into movies the following year.

Oh, wait a minute…that was the dream. They didn’t do nearly as well as that, but Deron went on to publish three more of my novels with the expectation that they would eventually start selling staggering quantities. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s only been eleven years. What impresses me is that Deron knows good writing and stands by it even when the reading public refuses to cooperate.

I mentioned that Deron is also an artist. I recently learned that his art goes beyond cover art for books, he’s also an accomplished Kanien'kehá:ka figurative artist who works in oils on canvas under the name Deron Ahsén:nase Douglas. Check out his website at http://derondouglas.ca/index.html. You’ll be impressed.

The Weekly Man

I'm trying something new. I'm giving one of my novels away. It took my years to write it. It took over a year just to do the research. But I'll be honest...I'm hoping something good will come out of this.

The novel is called The Weekly Man and it's about seven people whose lives are intricately connected through a secret relationship that they're unaware of until after 30 years. And when they find out...all hell breaks loose.

I'm going to release it one episode at a time starting September 8 and running until the middle of November. There will be enough reading to fit into the morning coffee break.

In the process of overcoming some of many obstacles (pardon me...challenges) like problems with fonts and formatting, creating versions for various platforms, et al. I expected these things.

The novel will be serialized every day for two and a half months at The Weekly Man .