Thaddeus Nowak's Blog: Thoughts and Observations, page 22

Event: Atchison Art Fair

At the end of the month, 26 Apr 2014, I will be signing and selling books at the Atchison Art Fair.  It runs from 10am to 5pm.

The Atchison Art Association invites you to join us as we celebrate the arts. This European-style open market is a fresh approach to the exchange of homegrown art, food, & culture. On Saturday April 26th from 10-5 the Atchison Art Association will host its second annual Open Air Fair on the Atchison Riverfront. This event will feature booths by Artists/Artisans, Farmer/Growers and Vintage items (aka funky junk) along with performance art, music, classes and demos from our artists.

If you are in the area, come out and see what is available!

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Movie Review: Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier

I saw this weekend and I found the movie entertaining and worth the watch.

The story picked up with The Captain (played by Chris Evans) and Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson) leading a team on a mission.  The events of the mission lead to a string of questions and a thread of activity that brings up many aspects of the history of the characters and even SHIELD.

Along the way, they also add the Falcon (played by Anthony Mackie) to the small team of heroes.  It would be good to see him in future movies or even in the Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD television series (I’m a bit behind in the show at the moment, so if he has already made an appearance, that would be good).

I think my favorite aspect of Captain America 2 was the amount of screen time they gave to Black Widow .  I actually like her character more than many of the other Marvel’s heroes.  The dark hero appeals to me, always has, and is evident my some of the comic in my collection.

There were a couple of issue I had with the movie, but they were not overly severe.  One was that there were a couple of times the movie seemed to drag a bit for me.  The pacing was such that even before a couple of scenes, I knew that the next scene would have to be an action scene because there had been enough of a “slow” period they would be amp’ing things up soon.  But as I said, not overly bad.

The larger issue I had with the movie I cannot describe without revealing spoilers, so I won’t go into the details.  However, I am mixed on the movie because of that aspect.  I will give the movie four out of five stars and would still recommend seeing it and even seeing it in the theaters.

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My Writing Process, part 2

In the first part of this series, I talked about the struggles I had initially faced as a writer.  In this part, I want to talk about how my writing process changed and what I am doing differently today.

When I put aside the project I had been working on (which reached an astounding 200k words and was not done), I knew I needed a different approach.  I wanted to create something that was marketable, and for fantasy, that meant I needed to have a finished product between 80k and 120k words.  In the supermarket format, that comes out to roughly 320 to 480 pages.  Anything too small is not considered worth the investment to readers and anything too large has production costs that make it more risky to produce.  For me, the goal was right in the middle, 100k words.

Writing on a budget

Because trying to discover the story as it unfolded sent me into an edit spiral, I decided to set up a scene budget, map out the high level events of the story, and assign a page/word count to those events.  I had enough practice with developing the 200k word bad novel that I could estimate fairly well how many words or pages it would take me to convey a specific scene.  Most of what I put into the budget was very high level, but I also kept in mind the pacing of the scene when I estimated the number of words to reserve (faster pacing would need fewer words).  For example:

Introduce Henton and initial encounter with Steph, 15 pages, build up, show cunning
Stephenie learns more about her Mother’s plot, 3 pages, reveal into quick transition

I worked my way through the whole story, listing all of the important scenes needed to make the story work and put it into a spreadsheet.  I kept my eye on the total number of words as each scene was added.  Sometimes I went back and reconsidered pacing and made small adjustments to balance out the scenes, but once I reached the 100k word estimate, whatever had not made it into the budge was tossed out and I said to myself:

Nothing else slides in, this is the budget and I WILL stay with it.

(As a side note, I used a page count instead of word count when thinking about the scenes because it was easier for me to visualize.  A standard rule of thumb is 250 words per page when using Courier New, 12pt font with 1 inch margins and double spacing, so I entered pages in whole numbers and let the spreadsheet do the math for me.)

Living with the budget

One of the obvious ways the budget helped me was when I sat down to write out a scene, I already knew what needed to happen and I could take a considered approach to writing the scene.  It was like following a trail through the woods.  However, my outline was general enough that I still had the enjoyment of discovering the specific details of each scene, like turning the bend and seeing the valley through a break in the trees.  Most importantly, by staying to the budget, the overall plot did not change with new “and more brilliant” ideas, which meant I stayed on time and remained out of the edit vortex.

There were of course some minor adjustments during the writing, but for the most part, I kept each scene to about one thousand words of the estimate (which is effectively four pages).  In the end, Mother’s Curse ended up around 96,500 words.  Not too far off from the 100k estimate.  When I looked at the 3,500 words difference (which is 14 or 15 pages), I had one brief moment when I considered adding a discarded scene, but that thought did not last long.  The work was already a solid and I did not want to cram in another scene just to reach an arbitrary word count.

What I grew to have in common with Isaac Asimov

It was at that moment I realized I had grown.  Many years earlier, I had read Isaac Asimov’s autobiography, I.Asimov, and something he mentioned always bothered me.  He said he hardly ever edited anything.  He wrote the stories and that was it.  At the time, I had no understanding how that could be possible.  I was stuck in the infinite edit loop and couldn’t get out.  Here was this master (or at least very prolific writer), but he rarely edited his work?  How was it possible?

When I changed my approach to writing, setting my scene budget and staying with the high level outline, I found I had very few go backs and edits.  The scene order I envisioned before I started writing remained unchanged, no new characters sprang forth, and no changes to the story’s tone.  I suddenly realized I had achieved something that Asimov claimed for himself.  It felt liberating and wonderful.  And more importantly, I discovered that I had the potential to start on the road to becoming a consistent writer.

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Stories Without a Point

I have decided to start a new series of post about random things that may not have any specific linkage.  These tales are just bits and pieces of life; hopefully they will be amusing.

For the inaugural story, I have decided to relate a tale of exploration…

Platte River

Between my 8th and 9th grade years (pretty sure of the date based on the person who was with me) a friend and I wanted to have an adventure.  We had talked on and off for a couple of years about a river trip from Kansas City down to the Gulf of Mexico (which sounded like a lot of fun and included cutting trees and building our own raft, which we would use to navigating the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, stopping at various cities to resupply on the way … many of you may have guessed we had read Huckleberry Finn at some point).

However, for this particular adventure, we chose something closer to home…

My father knew a family who had a farm about 15 mile from where we lived.  It was a decent sized farm and well outside the city.  More importantly, they were willing to let us camp out and explore the property.  So, the two of us loaded up our backpacks with a heck of a lot of heavy gear, including cans of fruit, beans, and other food, and then mounted our bicycles to head out for the farm.  Now for those wondering, these were not special packs, just backpacks for school, so no waist straps and definitely not balanced nor comfortable, especially when we were bent over on our racing 10-speed bikes.

Ready for any challenge, we hit the back streets to avoid traffic, and since I had been driven to the farm once or twice before, I promptly took a turn that lead us 2 miles down the wrong road.  Undaunted, we backtracked and continued further out into the country and eventually onto dirt roads that left us covered in dust from passing vehicles.

Once we reached the farm, we did as a couple of teenage boys will: dumped our bikes and headed out into the fields and woods without a word to anyone.  The farm covered numerous acres of land that just beckoned to the intrepid explorers that we were (who in all appearances were the only two people left on the planet).

We had rolling fields, empty stream beds, and twisted trees, bent and worn from the abuse of the cows, to investigate.  We roamed those hills and woods for hours until we were startled by the discovery of a road that appeared out of nowhere.  In a world that was supposed to be devoid of any living soul, we could not understand how the pavement was in such good shape (and why we had inhale dirt when this was nearby).

Running from the sound of mechanized machines, we hid in the undergrowth as people passed by in fast-moving steel boxes completely oblivious to their two watchers.  Uncertain of the safety of being seen by people in such strange contraptions, as soon as it was clear, we headed back into the wilderness where we could continue to track the passage of smaller creatures.

When dusk started to take over, we looked for a place to camp for the night.  Of course, with all the food we brought, we decided it would be wise to pack light with regard to tent, sleeping bags, or anything else that would offer cover.  So as men, we looked for a flat spot with few rocks and slept out in the middle of a field, laying directly on the ground.  It was a test of courage.  We slept outdoors with no protection from the marauders that were sure to have stalked our movements that day.

Spirit of the Sierra by Jason Jenkins

That night I made a number of important discoveries:

The night sky is intensely amazing once you are well outside any city lights.  It is ablaze with stars and is truly a wonder to behold.  Even more so when there is scarcely any moon in the sky.  I highly recommend to everyone that at some point in your life, find a place without light and look up to the vastness beyond our planet.
Without much of a moon, the night can be rather dark and human eyes are not that great at seeing in low light (we were men and had no need of flashlights and the family who owned the land didn’t want us to light any fires).
Sleeping directly on the ground is uncomfortable, there are always some rocks you miss (though this was not the last time I did that).
Even in summer, the ground gets cold at night and shivering keeps you awake.

But due to our cunning, we survived the night and the predawn light woke us easily, though we were not quite as rested as we would have liked.  We spent that day as we did the prior, exploring the world that was around us.  When we finally ran out of good food to eat (some of the stuff in the cans was not tasty when cold) we headed back to the farmhouse and our bikes.  On the way, we decided we would rather not ride home, so we knocked on the door and for the first time in almost two days, made direct contact with another person.  A quick call to my dad netted us a ride home in the van and we declared the adventure a complete success.

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My Writing Process, part 1

With my third book, Daughter’s Revenge, now available, I can say my writing process has become more formalized and I am now able to do the actual ‘writing’ in just a few weeks.  It is amazing to look back upon what had once taken me years to do and is now no longer a daunting task.

I am not saying writing is easy; it can still be challenging at times, but the mechanics that used to get in my way are no longer the roadblocks under which I once suffered.  What is even more interesting is that the change was not as gradual as one might expect.  If fact, the change in my approach resulted in a rather sudden change in my output.

A little bit of background

When I first started writing, which was when I was in Jr. High, I approached writing very much as a ‘discover’ writer.  I had a vague concept of where the story was going, knew a little bit about the characters, but I needed to learn about the world, who was in it, and what was happening just as the characters did.  I often waited for my muse and when it struck, I’d rocket through a few chapters and then crash squarely into a wall.

My wall, which survived all those crashes, was always that something wouldn’t seem to fit in the story.  Most often, it was issues with character motivation, where suddenly I’d realize the characters would have done X instead of Y and I could go no further.  Some times, I would try to force their hand, making subtle changes so they would do what I wanted.  Other times, I would give them a different course to follow and change where the story was going.  Either option would cause me to go back a few chapters and start editing the content (not so much for typos, but to add or move scenes, characters, large chunks of plot, …).  In this way, I’d make the narrative even better, resolved the plot holes, and make the story just a little bit longer.

Those changes led me into the endless cycle of write / backtrack / edit / rewrite.  It was often painful and frustrating because I would get through five chapters, then realize I needed to go all the way back to chapter one and that change would cascade down a dozen chapters. I knew there was a great story in there–a masterpiece–but it would never really solidify as too many parts were constantly moving under me.

The slow burning catalyst for change

Over those years of writing, I consumed various bits of advice and articles on how to write.  Most of them I adopted to varying degrees, but I normally didn’t fully adopt anything.  Fortunately, a bit of advice I had initially dismissed, continued to simmer in my head.  Once it was done, it finally made sense and I could have kicked myself for having ignored it.  I wish I could attribute this advice properly, but time has consumed that part of my memory.

The advice boiled down to the following:

Write a bad novel.

For years, I could not understand the reason why I, or anyone else, would willing want to write a bad novel.  I was working on a masterpiece that would make me rich and famous, I could not afford to waste the time writing something bad.

As it turned out, I was already writing something bad, just ignoring the fact.  And worse yet, I was wasting a lot of time because I just wasn’t getting it done due to the constant editing and reworking of the story.  And while each paragraph was a work of finely tuned art, overall the story had grown to an unpublishable 200k words as a result of the bloat created by all the editing.

Another very important part of the advice was:

You can learn a lot from finishing a novel.

When I finally accepted that what I had was a bad novel, it occurred to me I should stop editing it and finish it as it was.  I put something of an end to the story arch and call it done; or at least done enough.

Believe me, that was hard.  I’m a bit (I say with a chuckle) of a perfectionist and turning off that compulsive need for it to be perfect was hard.  However, when I finally said the book was complete, an amazing thing happened in my head: I could finally put the story aside and start something new.

It was that decision to call my masterfully bad novel done, that freed my thought process up enough that I could focus on a new project.  Before that point, I could not get the bad novel out of my head and so I was always suffering under the burden of that story.

In the next part, I’ll talk about how my writing process changed into what it is today.

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Planet Comicon, here I come!

I am very pleased to announce that I will be at Planet Comicon this March!

I have a table in Artist Alley and will have all of my novels with their new covers.  Stop by to get an autograph and pick up a copy of the just released Daughter’s Revenge or the whole Heirs of Cothel Series.

If you are in the Kansas City area, come by and enjoy the fun.  This year there will again be a lot of celebrities, artists, and authors present. Below is the poster for the Con and that will give you a taste of whom to expect. Check out  Planet Comicon’s site to get the full details.

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Map of the countries around the Sea of Tet

This is a large map (a couple of MB for the full image if you follow the link), but I know some people are very interested in maps and other details about fantasy worlds.  I have had the map printed on poster board and will have the 2′x3′ image with me at Planet Comicon coming up this March 14th-16th. (I hope to see some of you there, it will be a perfect change to get the new Daughter’s Revenge signed!)

The Heirs of Cothel Series takes place across a number of countries on the western side of Tet and later books in the series will have the characters traveling north.

There are a number of significant features in this part of the world.  Several of these aspects may appear in the Heirs of Cothel Series as well as other stories I intend to write in this setting.

A couple of items to note:

The mountain range that is referred to as the Rim Mountains has isolated this section of the world from other parts of it.  Around the Sea of Tet, humans have ruled and lived for hundreds of years, having driven the elves out of what had been their homeland into the Rim Mountains (which serve to further isolate the humans around Tet).
Many of the countries around Tet are in a temperate climate zone.  The further north one goes, the more tundra and arctic the landscape.  Along parts of the norther border of the landmass, sea ice does not always melt each year.
The Lost Kingdoms are what is left after a series of countries collapsed from internal and external strife.  Mostly the eastern side of the map is ruled by warlords and people declaring themselves “prince”.  Quite a bit of pirate activity comes out of the islands in that area.

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Map of Ulet, Epish, Tenip, Selith, and Ipith

Here is an additional map that will feature in Daughter’s Revenge, the third book in the Heirs of Cothel Series.

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Learn and Grow – New Covers

You may have already noticed a bit of a change on my site and in the Heirs of Cothel Series: New Covers for the books.

I really liked the initial covers, but based on feedback, we realized that the current trends in the industry are to use photo manipulated covers instead of ones that are completely illustrated.  I will show a little bit of age and say that when I was growing up, pretty much every cover was based on a painting or drawing.  It was the heyday of TSR and they had many artists on staff to produce some very remarkable images.

Now, while I am still very much a fan of fantasy art, I will concede that today many of the current book series that are very popular have covers with anything from simply graphic design to the photo manipulated to shots from movie scenes.  There are still some illustrated covers out there, but those are becoming fewer and fewer.

One thing that has always amazed me has been those people on reality shows that bring in a consultant to get recommendations about their business and then argue profusely that the consultant is wrong. Yes, it makes for more interesting TV, but I wonder at what all those people are thinking.

To that point, we have listened to the feedback from a number of people and have updated the covers to reflect the current trends.  While I still very much like the originals, I also really like the new ones and I hope all of you will enjoy the change as well.  Of course, I welcome any continued feedback about them or anything else (including which Doctor has the best hair: David Tennant).

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Guest Blog Post: The Unfinished Song (Book 1): Initiate by Tara Maya

Occasionally, I’ve been asked to do guest blog posts to help increase visibility for fellow authors.  Since I have enjoyed doing a few myself on other blogs, from time to time, I will include a guest blog post here as well.

This is a series by Tara Maya and currently you can download the ebook from free from several locations.

Book Details

DEADLY INITIATION

A DETERMINED GIRL…

Dindi can’t do anything right, maybe because she spends more time dancing with pixies than doing her chores. Her clan hopes to marry her off and settle her down, but she dreams of becoming a Tavaedi, one of the powerful warrior-dancers whose secret magics are revealed only to those who pass a mysterious Test during the Initiation ceremony. The problem? No-one in Dindi’s clan has ever passed the Test. Her grandmother died trying. But Dindi has a plan.

AN EXILED WARRIOR…

Kavio is the most powerful warrior-dancer in Faearth, but when he is exiled from the tribehold for a crime he didn’t commit, he decides to shed his old life. If roving cannibals and hexers don’t kill him first, this is his chance to escape the shadow of his father’s wars and his mother’s curse. But when he rescues a young Initiate girl, he finds himself drawn into as deadly a plot as any he left behind. He must decide whether to walk away or fight for her… assuming she would even accept the help of an exile.

Except

Blue-skinned rusalki grappled Dindi under the churning surface of the river. She could feel their claws dig into her arms. Their riverweed-like hair entangled her legs when she tried to kick back to the surface. She only managed to gulp a few breaths of air before they pulled her under again.

She hadn’t appreciated how fast and deep the river was. On her second gasp for air, she saw that the current was already dragging her out of sight of the screaming girls on the bank. A whirlpool of froth and fae roiled between two large rocks in the middle of the river. The rusalka and her sisters tugged Dindi toward it. Other water fae joined the rusalki. Long snouted pookas, turtle-like kappas and hairy-armed gwyllions all swam around her, leading her to the whirlpool, where even more fae swirled in the whitewater.

“Join our circle, Dindi!” the fae voices gurgled under the water. “Dance with us forever!”

“No!” She kicked and swam and stole another gasp for air before they snagged her again. There were so many of them now, all pulling her down, all singing to the tune of the rushing river. She tried to shout, “Dispel!” but swallowed water instead. Her head hit a rock, disorienting her. She sank, this time sure she wouldn’t be coming up again.

“Dispel!” It was a man’s voice.

Strong arms encircled her and lifted her until her arms and head broke the surface. Her rescuer swam with her toward the shore. He overpowered the current, he shrugged aside the hands of the water faeries stroking his hair and arms. When he reached the shallows, he scooped Dindi into his arms and carried her the rest of the way to the grassy bank. He set her down gently.

She coughed out some water while he supported her back.

“Better?” he asked.

She nodded. He was young–only a few years older than she. The aura of confidence and competence he radiated made him seem older. Without knowing quite why, she was certain he was a Tavaedi.

“Good.” He had a gorgeous smile. A wisp of his dark bangs dangled over one eye. He brushed his dripping hair back over his head.

Dindi’s hand touched skin–he was not wearing any shirt. Both of them were sopping wet. On him, that meant trickles of water coursed over a bedrock of muscle. As for her, the thin white wrap clung transparently to her body like a wet leaf. She blushed.

“It might have been easier to swim if you had let go of that,” he teased. He touched her hand, which was closed around something. “What were you holding onto so tightly that it mattered more than drowning?”

 Links and Other Details

Tara’s current blog and this is Tara’s old blog
Tara’s Twitter
The Unfinished Song on Facebook
The Unfinished Song on Amazon
The Unfinished Song on Barnes & Noble
The Unfinished Song on Kobo
The Unfinished Song on iTunes
The Unfinished Song on Smashwords

Initiate is free everywhere except on Barnes and Noble (where it’s $0.99). You can download a free .epub version via Smashwords.

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