Micah R. Sisk's Blog, page 2

Beginnings

Upon hearing that I had just self-published my first eBook, a friend asked me how it felt to finally have a novel available for general consumption. I didn't know what to say. It feels weird. Not because my writing now shows up worldwide on search engines, nor because it is exposed to the public’s criticism, but rather because I feel oddly little at all. It’s nice, yes. It’s exciting, sort of (true excitement will come if/when sales and good reviews do). But…well, let me put it like this:

I love beginnings.

Beginnings are my forte. Beginnings are ultimately the most attractive and exciting part of any creative endeavor.

Not that the endings are bad; it’s rewarding to bring a project to conclusion. And the middle of projects, where the real heavy lifting is done—the sculpting, the refining, the discovery, the reforming, the revision, the hammering into being—all that has its own attraction and rewards, challenges and payoff. But still, it is beginnings that bring sparkle and delight to my imagination.

The honeymoon effect? Not entirely. Beginnings are ideas, concepts ripe with possibility. They are the quick “Ah ha!” moments that impose themselves upon my mind even while I am fleshing out old beginnings. Beginnings are quick, coming far faster than I can complete my old ideas. As a result, as you can well imagine, I tend to have a dozen or more stories in progress at any given moment, and my rate of completion leaves much to be desired.

To break myself of this habit and prove I can actually finish a novel, in 1995 I chose one story among my open inventory at the time and ran with it. I created a detailed outline, chapter by chapter; designed a spreadsheet to track my words/hour written vs. the estimated words/chapter on the outline, and was able to complete the first draft of a 450 page novel in eight months. I spent every spare hour I could on that novel: vacations, weekends, work nights… every hour I could. It was grueling, but I did do it.

And then then the endless editing sessions started (and still continue to some degree on that particular manuscript).

PleshaCore was not that novel. I know I can write that way, but I simply do not like to (not while working a full time job at any rate).

So PleshaCore began in 2006 after a prolonged period of nibbling away at various other stories, and generally avoiding the disheartening work of trying to get traditional publishers or literary agents interested in my first novel.

PleshaCore had no outline. PleshaCore was written strictly as entertainment. For me.

PleshaCore’s beginning came to me while contemplating the issue of inertia in FTL space flight. Those of you familiar with Dan Simmons’s excellent Hyperion Cantos will recognize the problem: human flesh tends to pulp under such immense acceleration. The solution presented in PleshaCore is to digitally store the minds of your spaceship’s crew in a computer, and then reintegrate those minds with cloned bodies at journey’s end.

That a mind could be reintegrated into any body at all—male or female, gay or straight—came as a natural thought. That people would want to reintegrate into idealized, “perfect,” bodies was obvious. And given those two inevitabilities, the concept of pleasure planets catering to humanity’s carnal instincts was simply unavoidable.

Thus the beginning premise of PleshaCore was formulated, a set piece in which the Captain of a starship awakens to find himself trapped in a lesbian’s body. With that starting scene in mind, it didn’t take long before a generalized ending took shape in my mind, and working from those two points (not actually knowing who the bad guys were, or “what’s really going on”), I set off to discover what came in between.

Again, simply for my own pleasure.

I set myself no deadlines, imposed no working regimen. I simply wrote when I wanted to be entertained, and stopped when I had written my characters into a situation for which I had no resolution. Months would go by as I worked on other projects, developed new beginnings. But the world of PleshaCore and the predicament of its characters kept running like some background program in my subconscious. Until one day, musing over this or that, the answer to their most recent situation would occur to me and I’d be off again.

At some point—the beginning of Chapter XII to be precise—I realized that I could go no further without finally resolving who the bad guys were. So I sat down and wrote a “What’s Really Going On” document, tying up all the threads I had left dangling so far. With that in hand, the march toward PleshaCore’s conclusion began in earnest, culminating in the first draft’s finish some time in 2011. Editing (and new beginnings) have occupied my time in the two years since, as well as the arduous task of learning to format a working Kindle version of this novel.

So how does it feel now that PleshaCore’s been published? It feels like an ending. Relieved, a little proud that it’s finally done. But PleshaCore’s a known quantity, a done deal. It’s no longer a beginning, though I suppose I should look upon its publication as such (same for this blog, now that I think of it), yet…

…Oh. You know, I’ve just had the coolest new idea…