Scott Kelly's Blog, page 6

Emily/Eureka

Got a good comment on Wattpad today that got me talking about Emily, from my novel [sic]. 

If you’ve read the book, you know Emily is a standout character. She’s dark, she’s chaotic. She could steal your car, or she could sleep with you. 

When I designed the main characters in [sic], I made most of them to be as human as possible, because I knew believability would be a hurdle with readers. With Emily, I made an exception. Emily is a metaphor for the kind of chaos that [sic] represents. Her underlying motivation is an attraction to change and uncertainty – which is not very human.

Visually, I wanted her to stand out. Black clothes, pale skin, black hair. She stalks through the book wreaking havoc on the narrator because she is the embodiment of Eureka and what changing your life could potentially mean. 

Youth writers and Wattpad

Been busy lately. Moving offices at work, moving apartments to the other side of town. Moving copies of [sic] off of Wattpad, Amazon and Goodreads. A lot of movement in my life lately.

I’ve had a lot of success on Wattpad. From what I can tell, [sic] has one of the highest “views-to-votes” ratios of any book on the website (and there are tens of thousands of books) and I’m very grateful for that. My older freebook, Frightened Boy, is also somewhat successful. But, both of these were books I released after a decade of writing books that no one read. Shitty books.

A lot of the books – most, probably – on Wattpad that aren’t very good, are books written by young, first-time authors. They dabble at writing, and most of them never finish their first story. Not all of them – some of the books written by young teen girls (who make up about 80% of the population of Wattpad) become very popular and successful. They really seem to tap into their core audience. But for the most part, the stories just fizzle and die.

I have to wonder if it serves writers better to suffer in total obscurity for a while. I wrote four or five complete novels that no one ever really read. I finished them and decided they weren’t good enough to hold up to the world and attempt to be proud of.

My first one was finished when I was fifteen. It was called “Kid.” It was about being best friends with the reincarnation of Jesus, and having that reincarnation steal your girlfriend. The premise is kinda neat, but my delivery was sorely lacking. I would try to shoehorn whatever my interests were at the time into the book, in a misguided attempt at “writing what I know.” Kung-fu in a religious allegory? Sure.

The second book was Dark Scary Monster. It was about a secret society who travels the world faking miracles in order to drum up a belief in God.

The third book was called Steam. It was about a girl who was everyone’s collective last breath. Three men with different motivations meet her and want to know how they die. There’s a love triangle in there somewhere, too. Steam (also the name of said last-breath girl) also knows how she dies, which is what draws her to interact with these three people. I actually like this concept quite a lot, if I ever get bored enough…

Then I wrote Jimwamba, which I did like, and was published by Flame Books. There’s a sequel to that one which no one ever read, called Liq. Then there’s my space-time cartoon moon epic, IDa, which was also not very good.

Then there’s Ten Minutes to Midnight, which I finished last year and probably will never release due to its mediocrity.

I’m seeing a trend here. My bigger question, though, is: If I had put Kid or Dark Scary Monster on a website like Wattpad, would that have discouraged me from continuing to write? Would it have inspired me? I have really developed a mindset of “I write for myself, not to make money.” I think this gives me the freedom to write better books. I have a comfortable job and don’t have any pressing need to make a big profit from my novels, though my ultimate goal is to quit my job and only write.

Fluff questions, really. I just wonder – was I one of these cringe-worthy writers we see on Wattpad (probably) and at what point in my process did I step out of those ranks and rise slightly above? How long did I just believe I was a good writer, before I actually became a decent writer? If people had been around to crush those beliefs (mainly through their total lack of interest) would I have stopped?

Distance

I started work on The Blue last night. I read once in Stephen King’s book “On Writing” that he sets aside every first draft for a few months after he finishes it, then gets involved in another project. According to him, his brain needs time to reset off of one book before he can see it clearly and edit it.

I feel the same way. When I was working on The Blue last, I was very close to it because I’d just finished it. Some of the solutions that are now obvious… never occurred to me. It wasn’t until I put The Blue away for a few weeks and picked up [sic] (to edit it for release) that I actually figured out some new ways to work my story.

Weird, how the brain works. I think I just get too attached to certain conceptions about the way a story should go. When I return to a story after a while, I’m more willing to give up on all that and just focus on what will make it a good story.

I will say that putting [sic] out has turned the pressure up for me. Feels more real, somehow.

Out of the Blue

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career. Probably because of this whole [sic] thing.

I’ve got The Blue coming next. It’s already written, and in penultimate form. Tonally, it’s cerebral/realistic/gritty. It’s more mature than [sic]; it doesn’t broadcast the philosophical questions it’s asking so loudly. It also has a tidier story that takes place over a shorter time-frame. It’s more literary than [sic] though, and doesn’t have the same hook. I think it’s a better book, but I doubt it will get the crowd response that [sic] sometimes gets. That’s okay though – The Blue is the book I really wanted to write.

I’d been struggling with this manuscript called Ten Minutes to Midnight for a while. It was shitty. I was trying to force certain elements together because I thought it would be popular… the book worked, functionally, like a decent teen fiction book. But it wasn’t great, or noticeable enough to be very interesting. I was fighting on trying to integrate this philosophy from Camus into a teen fiction book, and rewriting over and over, and everything was painful.

Then one day I just said “Fuckitall” and tossed the whole project in the trash. I picked out a notebook and started writing to myself, looking for a new idea. I wanted to write about reality. I wanted to make people question their world, but not in an obvious way like The Matrix or Truman Show. I wanted to do something very possible and human. I was sick of big stories. I wanted a small story, without the world at stake.

That’s what led me to faceblindness, to a car crash and a trial and a vendetta. To questions about society and redemption and basically, the fact that everyone makes up everything as they go and whatever the most people agree on is what we call reality.

Derek’s journey is one of really asking what the world we live in is made of. Thanks to his bad luck – his faceblindness, the trial, the way he is cast as the villain and his own questions as to if he is one – he is left with no stable ground to experience his life. Derek is forced to enlightenment by the conclusion of the book, as all notions of right or wrong are torn from him.

The Blue makes the case that while there is a single solid reality, none of us truly live in it. I’m excited to get back to the final draft, and making sure it’s up to snuff for my readers.

F5

I try to not care what people think of my work. I’ve been getting pretty much positive feedback from the general internet audience for a couple of years now, so I’m fairly confident that I don’t totally suck. However, having books on both Amazon and Wattpad threatens to turn me into an endless loop of refreshing my profile pages and waiting to see who voted/bought/tagged/commented. My God … someone could have done one of those things just now. I’ve got to go press F5 some more… 

[sic] is on Amazon

After a week of editing and screwing with formatting options, [sic] is now live on Amazon. There are links all over this page. I’ve also sent out a message through my Facebook and Wattpad channels; we’ll see what happens there. Hopefully I can get a good clustering of 5-star reviews on Amazon within the next couple of weeks. That’s my project as far as [sic] is concerned.

Of course, all of this is leading up to my release of The Blue as well. Stay tuned.

The [sic] cover that never was

Greg Poszywak does all my cover art. He’s a hell of a guy and a brilliant artist. I like his work because the covers make great advertisements – they are simple, direct, and eye-catching. Because the covers are usually seen as thumbnails on websites like Amazon or Wattpad, it doesn’t work to have overly complex or ornate covers. However, when looking through my email for some old drafts, I happened across one of his first ideas for the cover of [sic].

 

 

I love this image, because I feel like that girl could so easily be Cameron. However, we never managed to get hold of the person who uploaded that photograph onto Deviant Art, so I didn’t want to use it as the official cover. Still, though.

Q & A with Wattpad Fans, Volume 2

Zigon11 writes:

Shoot man. I’ve gotta say your story, [sic], was probably one of the best things I have ever read. Such creativity… I wonder, did you/do you play eureka? If not, how did you come up with the idea with your own personal experiences in life?

I responded: 

Hey, thanks for the compliment. I have never actually played Eureka… in fact, I find change somewhat threatening – though I know I shouldn’t. But I really like to play with people’s perceptions/brains through my novels, and I recognized that fear of change most people seem to have would be a smart topic for a novel. I could add to the thrills by playing off that innate fear.

After I figured out the basis for Eureka – forcing characters in a book to confront that fear of change – the rest flowed from that. Well, some of it came from my old sociology courses in college, or thinking about the work of Emerson or Camus. These sources all address the way our identities are handed to us by the people around us (mostly) and I thought one side-effect of Eureka would be messing with that process.

The actual plot of the story is not really that complicated. I knew with something thought-provoking like Eureka I’d need a more standard plot to keep the story from getting too brainy, so I went with a murder mystery.

Q & A with Wattpad fans

I’m carrying these over from my old site. Fans often comment on my novels that are available on Wattpad, and sometimes I answer their questions with some information on the novel.  When they’re worth it, I’ll bring them here.

On [sic]:

shinney writes: 

“I’d love to read your next book. I also want to go and read other books you have written. If they are half as good as this one, it’ll certainly be worth my time. I have to ask, what inspired Eureka?”

I responded:

Well, I don’t really feel like Frightened Boy (book I wrote before [sic]) is as good as [sic]. I do think The Blue is better, but it is a more mature novel and doesn’t have the catchy hook that [sic] has.

As for Eureka… I was sitting and writing in a spiral journal, which is how I develop my book concepts, and trying to pin down themes for my next book. I knew that I wanted to write about identity, because I really felt it was interesting that the way we identify ourselves is mostly something that other people impose on us, and not really something we choose for ourselves. I also recognized that people are very afraid of changing that identity, and that change is something that personally frightens me (though I knew it shouldn’t, and I wondered why it did.)

So, I set out creating a plot that would mess with people’s fear of change and challenge that idea, and also draw in some arguments for where we get our identities from… because I feel like those two things are linked somehow – maybe we don’t want to change who we are because we are afraid of letting down the expectations of the people around us, who also told us who we were going to have to be in the first place.

Hello.

I’m Scott Kelly, and this is my home on the web. I’m twenty-eight and I write novels. Notably, I’ve written Jimwamba, Frightened Boy, [sic], and The Blue. My works have been published by independent presses as well as read by over fifty-thousand people online.