Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 32

Writing Flurries

I finished the rough draft of a new novel, the second in the sequence of three I’m developing. I used the same process I used to write the new sections of the first novel (of this new trilogy) and it worked even better this time:

First, know the characters and what they want
Outline the events I’m most interested in seeing, arising from clashing character motivation
Sketch out the arcs (this book has two major POV and three minor)
Pick an arc and start drafting.

I started my novel career by writing books  deliberately drafted to sound as though one person were sharing a story with you, the listener. It’s been a bit of a shift to write novels with multiple points of view, but I’ve gotten more and more practiced with it. 

I still miss limited first person, and I assure my wife that I’ll one day write at least one more Dabir and Asim novel from good ol’ Asim’s point of view, but third person has its attractions. For instance, I can now show what’s happening in other places, even with the villains, something my first person narrator couldn’t ever do.

I’ve gotten more and more accustomed to writing things out of order, something that never quite worked right when writing first person. Those books and stories had to be drafted in sequence, as colored as each scene was by perceptions and feelings rooted in the narrator’s experiences earlier in the story.

With my first four multiple point of view novels I wrote everything in order. With the first one of this new sequence I wrote all of one arc and then all of the next. For the second I varied even that tactic a little — if I ever got stuck on one arc I switched over to another until I’d worked out how to manage the unsticking.

I can’t say if this method would work for anyone else, but it certainly worked for this first draft, which consists alternately of blocks of text that might appear mostly unfinished in the completed project to little bits of stage directions with dialogue and notes to myself. Some minor characters are currently identified as “thing 1” or “thing 2” with names and characters to be developed in the next draft. Eventually their roles might be expanded so that they express hopes and fears or impact the narrative a little more, but in some scenes I just needed to find my way through, and extra touches weren’t important at the time.

The next step? Well, I’m going back through the first novel of the trilogy and making changes suggested by my beta readers and necessitated by some events in the second book. I always like to let a draft sit on the window sill for a while to cool when I finish it, and that’s where book 2 will be, figuratively, for a few weeks. In the mean time I’ll hopefully get book 1 into near publishable shape and further flesh out the outline for the last book. The plan is to write that before year’s end.

In some ways I think I prefer the editing/revising process to the actual drafting process. I love having something down on the screen that I can start fiddling with. Maybe that’s due to all the years I spent as an editor.

Madison and Village Lights

Two Thursdays ago my wife and I headed over to Madison Indiana, where she had a work conference. My son, just finished with his first year of college, tagged along, and while my wife was busy conferencing, the first born and I wandered around the little community.

It was only our second visit and I’d already forgotten just how lovely the main portions of it are. Madison happens to have the largest contiguous National Historic Landmark in the United States — meaning 133 blocks of beautiful, well preserved older buildings. They’re an architectural feast for the eyes, and then there’s the Ohio River just a few blocks south of the downtown, and the steep hills with beautiful greenery ascending to the north and south. A large state park with stunning views, Clifty Falls, provides a lot of great hiking trails as well as campgrounds and even an expansive hotel if you want to come back and relax after you’ve been roughing it in the wilds.

The city’s loaded down with antique stores, art stores, and restaurants — which is great for foodies like us. My son and I scouted around and enjoyed visiting a number of art boutiques and grabbed an early lunch at Hong Kong Kitchen, whose unassuming interior provided us with an amazing meal. We also discovered an outlet for the Galena Garlic Company, a heretofore unknown (to us) chain to which we happily introduced my wife later in the day.

The highlight, though, was visiting The Village Lights Bookstore, which sells both new and used books out of a beautiful older building, and is replete with what you’d expect — lots of great wall to wall shelves, a lovely old staircase winding to even more, a couple of bookstore cats, and assorted treasures. It ended up feeling like a home away from home owing to the kindness of owners Nathan Motoya and Anne Vestuto, who made us welcome and then graciously permitted my son to play on the Steinway dominating the Twain Room in the back of the store. He entertained us for close to an hour while I alternately browsed or chatted with Nathan about shared interests, including the obvious reading and literature and moving straight on to martial arts.

I ended up with a stack of books, as tends to happen if you let me loose in a bookstore, among them two modern(ish) historical mysteries, Laura Joh Rowland’s Bundori, Boris Akunin’s The Winter Queen; Stephen Leigh’s Assassin’s Dawn (Nathan had such good things to say about him I had to try it), and Nicholas Nickelby, by some guy named Charles Dickens.

After my wife escaped from her conferences we got to show her some of the neatest stores we visited, did some hiking through Clifty Falls, visited said falls and several others, then had a wonderful meal. We look forward to returning and exploring further.

For a complete change of pace and despite my groaning to-be-read pile, I started Nickelby the other day. It’s only my fourth Dickens novel, if you count A Tale of Two Cities, which I read and didn’t appreciate my junior year in high school. (When I think back to how much I complained about that book and how much more fun it is to read than the required reading foisted on my own children, where they’re constantly exposed to miserable people suffering I want to go back and shake some sense into young Howard.)

Anyway, I quite enjoyed both Bleak House and David Copperfield when I read them a few years ago, with some caveats, but didn’t want to jump right in to more Dickens right away. I thought three years had probably been a long enough hiatus to enjoy his voice again.

 

Tough Chicken

Sometimes I’m driving along listening to the radio, and something incredible comes on. The older I get, the less it happens, possibly because I’ve been introduced to more music and possibly because the radio in our primary vehicle usually identifies the music being played even if the disc jockey doesn’t.

Some sixteen years ago, long before we had ANY vehicles with fancy displays, I was driving around Topeka Kansas and for some reason I had the radio on an unfamiliar station. Out from the speakers rolled this skipping, melodic jazz base line. It was enough to get my head nodding instantly. After the organ and drums kicked in the flute arrived and owned the song with a wailing ear worm of a melody.

After the song was over it was still a few minutes from home, but I recall walking into the house, flipping open the phone book  and calling the radio station to politely inquire what that great song was with the lead flute part.

And the disc jockey introduced me to “Tough Chicken” by the James Taylor Quintet, off of the CD Message from the Godfather. I liked the song so much I purchased the CD (again, long before downloading days). The CD is good, although nothing else on it never thrilled me as much as this number. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and maybe you’ll do what I never did and track down more of the band’s music. Hmm…. I see they have numerous additional CDs…

Writing Away

Once again, you’d be right in thinking that lack of posts means that I’m nose to the grind stone. I’m hoping to get a rough draft of the newest book done before the end of the month, and I think I’ll make it. In this case, some sections are very rough — little more than a few stage directions and some dialogue. Oddly enough, even writing this way sometimes things go slow. For the last few days, for example, it’s been like pulling teeth to get scenes written. On the other hand, once I rough out the scene, I know it’s mostly right — after years of trial and error I am finally better at NOT writing a detailed scene which will later be cut.

Also, in the mornings before I wake the family, when I usually write blog posts, I’ve been playing Lock ‘N Load Tactical: Heroes of Normandy, a World War II tactical board game. Even though it’s a two person game I’ve been having a lot of fun running it against myself. It deserves a post on its own, and I’ll probably get to that later this week.

I wish I could tell you when the newest series will debut. The first book has some great feedback from my beta readers that I’m dying to implement, but I’m really waiting to hear from editorial before I do anything. When I finish this second book, though, I’ll probably place it on the window sill to cool a little and go back and edit book one for a couple of weeks. Then, fingers crossed, I can whip book two into shape and hopefully write and revise book three before the end of the year.

At some point there I hope to know when it will be in print, which is news I’ll happily share with you.

Skelos Magazine

So here’s a cool thing: a kickstarter for a brand new sword-and-sorcery e-zine from some real sword-and-sorcery experts. The mag’s going to be called Skelos, and it’s masterminded by none other than Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Jeffrey Shanks, Robert E. Howard scholars all. Hearing that these three are behind it fills me with glee — I look forward to reading whatever treasures they unearth, and, heck, I look forward to submitting some day as well.

I hope you’ll join me in backing this one.

In other news, I’m closing on the conclusion of the second major arc of my new book. It seems hard for me to believe, but I might actually be finished with the rough draft for the whole thing by the end of the month. This arc should conclude no later than early next week, and then I’ve got a couple of chapters from minor arcs to draft. This is pretty rough still, and some of it is mostly framework with dialogue, but it feels solid. I suppose I’ll know how solid after I let it sit unread for a few weeks and return to it. A writer’s fear is always that it’s much, much worse than you think it is…

Return to Evenmere

Just last week I discovered from an interview Nick Ozment held with the talented James Stoddard that there’s a third Evenmere book. I also learned that Stoddard had revised the second of the two previous books (The False House) to raise it to the standards of the first.

The first meaning The High House, which is among my favorite novels. It’s a house that sort of contains the universe in its myriad passages, attics, and hidden ways, and is a loving homage to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series from the late ’60s and early ’70s. (And no, you wags, not THAT kind of adult. Once upon a time it had to be stressed to readers that fantasy wasn’t just for kids.)

The High House is a wonderful men’s coming of age story. It’s not a child’s story of a boy learning to grow up, it’s a man learning to stand on his own. Main character Carter Anderson has to come to grips with his vanished father, learn how the world works, seek wisdom, overcome heartbreak, find common ground with his estranged brother, etc. And it all happens under a backdrop of mystery with wondrous places and fantastic scenery and beautiful writing and amazing magical tools. I love it.

I enjoyed vast sections of The False House, its immediate sequel, but didn’t like it to the same extent overall. Apparently Stoddard never did either. Many sections in the new release of The False House have been revised and expanded.

In any case, the moment after I read the Black Gate interview I went and ordered Evenmere and the revised The False House. That’s how much I love this series. I mean, I could have put them on a birthday list, because my family knows how impossible I am to buy for. And I ALSO have a huge to-be-read pile and didn’t need to throw anything more on top of it. But no. I ordered ’em.

This series does have its detractors. Some decry the use of anarchists as the bad guys, saying they don’t act like real anarchists. They’re kind of inspired by some anarchists from one of the Ballantine Fantasy books and aren’t meant to resemble any real movement.

The other detraction I’ve read is that the first book doesn’t have many female characters. There are plenty of them in the second book, powerful, interesting, and motivated, but not in the first.

And maybe it’s just me, and because I’m a guy, but I don’t see that as an issue for this story. It’s really a very male story (but not in the mighty thews and heaving bosoms kind of way), and by God, there ought still to be room for some of those. I know men dominated all stories for ages and ages and that wasn’t fair, but that’s not a reason to kick this story down. The High House is about learning to take responsibility and learning to be wise and having to make sacrifices, etc. in a way that men are forced by society to do. It speaks powerfully of our relationships with our fathers and our brothers and spins a great adventure story along the way. My son loved it just as much as I did, but my wife didn’t understand our affection for it. Some stories aren’t intended for everyone.

I suppose I’m especially sensitive to this attack because I sometimes see people knocking The Desert of Souls because it mostly has male characters. Well, yeah, it’s the story of how two men become brother in all-but-blood. It’s a buddy novel. Criticize it about other stuff if you want, but don’t complain that my Arabian buddy novel didn’t have enough women in it, you know? It wasn’t about elephant poaching either, even though elephants have been my favorite animal since I was a little kid and I’m fully in favor of rights to protect them. That’s not what the story was about…

Anyway, I digress. I can hardly wait to read this new version of The False House and the third book in the series, Evenmere.

 

Introductions

Sometimes I think it’s interesting to chart your life by your interests/obsessions. I suppose for a lot of men my age it starts with dinosaurs or indian tribes or trains, or maybe all three, then branches out into differences depending upon where we grew up, what toys we had, who we played with, etc.

The other day I started thinking about who introduced me to which things that have had a huge and lasting impact upon me, which is perhaps a healthier way to think about all of it.

For instance, my mom introduced me to The Beatles and fantasy fiction, and my father introduced me to sports and gentlemanly behavior. The sports never stuck until I found karate about twelve years ago, but I’ve tried to be gentlemanly. Both had a love of music and reading, and had a wonderfully empathic way to look at the world. Boy, did I love talking story theory with my father. They made sure to introduce me to the playing of musical instruments as well. 

My friend Mike not only gave me my first phone call (at age 4 or 5), in that phone call he made sure I turned on the TV to watch that great show he’d discovered, Star Trek. The original Star Trek is a cornerstone not just in the way I approach story and character, but in the way I think of proper conduct, of trying to do the right thing, all the time. I could probably write an entire post on that subject alone.

My friend Sean showed me role-playing games via Dungeons & Dragons, AND introduced me to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. My friend Jon introduced me to tank board games (via Panzer Leader) and Elric (and other Michael Moorcock books). The tank board game seed was planted after just one or two games, and only recently sprouted, because I wanted to recapture the fun I’d had with him. I’ve been a role-playing gamer off and on ever since Sean showed me how to play.

I could go on and on, of course — about how my sister Allison introduced me to Leigh Brackett, and how my friend Loren gave me a Robert E. Howard book that made me “get” how good he really was, and so on. I won’t bore you with the details of all these names that would mean nothing to you, but I’m going to compile my list, and I’ll try to look at it from time to time.

The long and the short of it is that I wouldn’t be who I am today if not for the input of a whole lot of people. I think it’s a good idea to stop and remember that now and then and try to be a little grateful.

If any of you have standout moments you’d like to share, I’d love to read them.

Dedications

I generally put a little thought into each book dedication I write, but yesterday the one I drafted stopped me cold and left a very long shadow through the rest of the day.

As I’d hoped, I finished revising my fourth Pathfinder novel last week and sent it back in first thing Monday morning. The only part left on its to-do list when I got up was to draft the acknowledgments and dedication. The acknowledgments were simple enough — I was grateful to several people who’d provided guided and feedback, and thanked them accordingly.

But the dedication… When I sat down to write this book two summers ago, my friend Kris was alive and well. And last summer, when I revised it, he was doing fine. Last fall he passed away on an operating procedure after a perfectly normal minor surgery went terribly wrong. And so the book is now dedicated to his memory.

I still recall when I pitched the book to James Sutter while we sat in a noisy hallway at GenCon (we couldn’t find an empty room!). I’ll never forget working on the outline at The Three Broomsticks in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

How could I have known that when it was finally ready for publication I’d be dedicating it to the memory of a man who’s been like a brother to me since grade school?

Had I know this was how it was going to end I sure as hell would have found a way to get to San Diego to spend a week with him instead of putting it off for another year. Man, I miss hearing the sound of his voice.

Don’t delay time with the ones you love, people. All I’ve got now are the memories and a handful of photographs.  I’d rather hear the phone ring, see it’s from San Diego, and smile as I readied myself for the tale of Kris’ newest adventure.

Revising Away…

I’m nearly through the revisions of my fourth Pathfinder novel, and you know what, I quite like it. I just finished Chapter 6 and it’s one of the finest chapters I think I’ve ever written.

Wish I had the sense that more people were reading these… I’m just not seeing a whole lot of comment about them either out there on the ‘net or even on the Paizo boards. I’m starting to think that those Pathfinder fans who’re reading the books are reading them in the order they were written and haven’t gotten to the more recent books yet, like my third Pathfinder book. And I’m starting to think that maybe people who ordinarily read lots of fantasy don’t read tie-in novels? I dunno.

Right — got to get back to revising. Have an excellent weekend!

Of Hats and Teeth

I’m getting ready to switch hats and work on something else. I’ve been steaming full speed towards the conclusion of my newest book, but, as often happens, a previous book has popped up with editorial comments. This is my fourth Pathfinder Novel, Through the Gate in the Sea. The comments aren’t too extensive, so I hope to finish it before the week’s end and get back to the new book. Of course, if the other book needs more time, I’ll have to give it, because I want it to head to print in the best shape I can manage.

In other news I’ve been enjoying the fantastic weather hear upon the sea of monsters. I’m heading into town in just a few moments to learn just why I have shooting pain when I chew on the right side of my mouth. It’s probably those darned tooth crowns. You see, when my wife and I were first starting out and were very badly off, financially, I thought I could save us a little money by not visiting the dentist for a few years. I had incorrectly reasoned that because I brushed and flossed appropriately my teeth would be okay.

Turns out that I was wrong. I ended up with three tooth crowns and root canals. I’m pretty sure that there’s no living root beneath this crown, so I’m not sure where the pain’s coming from, but I assume I’ll know very shortly.