Hayden Wiseman's Blog, page 3

Cannibal Dwarf Detective in Paperback!

Just a quick update:

Yesterday I received the proof in the mail from CreateSpace and approved it. The paperback version of Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening is now available for purchase here. 

This edition is great for the people who have an aversion to reading ebooks or just prefer a physical book they can hold.

I know I didn’t really consider the thing “done” until I could hold it myself and thumb through the pages.

I’m really happy with the way it came out.

 

NaNoWriMo 2014: Preperation

National Novel Writing Month is 16 days away. It will be my first time participating. I’ve decided I’m not going to be the kind of person who doesn’t think about their story going in.

The NaNoWriMo website defines two kinds of writers: planners and pantsers.

The Research

Planners, they say, “believe in rigorous preparation.

You’ll spend the months before November carefully fleshing out characters, building worlds, and plotting your story.

On November 1, you’ll have an outline—or at least lots of helpful notes.”

Pantsers wait until the first day of November to begin any writing at all.

I want to be the former. So I’ve begun reading books to prepare myself for the mess of a rough draft I plan on writing and I’m working very carefully on an outline. I may not have months in advance to plan – since I didn’t even think of doing this until just recently – but I’m sure the outline will help.

Or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll throw it out a couple days in and my book will become another stream of consciousness mess like CDD mostly is.

I’m not going to write too much about what I’ve got floating around in my head right now, but guesses can be made based on “The Research.”

Maybe I’ll write an update on my NaNoWriMo book once I’ve actually started it and have something to share.

How to Write Trash – The Making of Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening

Origins in blasphemy:

My brother Hunter was writing a paper about his spiritual perspectives for a class. He had chosen to write about Buddha, Jesus, and other spiritual leaders. At a certain point he became frustrated with his paper and I offered to write while he dictated. What he said to me did not make it into the paper he would eventually turn in, but it formed the groundwork for what would become one of the dumbest projects I’ve ever participated in.

“Once upon a time there was this guy named Buddha,” Hunter began. “He did some things. Those things were very good for him. He became a monk.”

Hunter and I spent many hours working on the cover. This was one of the original ideas. We did our mock ups all in one night and concluded designing around 5am.

“He did some things as a monk,” he said. “Also, he killed 80,000 people with his bare hands and drank their blood.”

“Are you typing what I’m asking you? Buddha as a monk, he did some things, and became enlightened (from the blood drinking) and then he became really fat and got old and died. Before that, though, he wrote a book, or whatever. The end.”

The dictation was, of course, a factually inaccurate telling of the Buddha’s journey of enlightenment. I’ve learned a lot about Buddhism since then and know the real story to be far less… absurdly violent.

The Buddha, then Siddhartha Gautama, was sheltered for many years. He had supposedly never seen sickness, or an old person, or death. One day he left the comfort of his palace and rode out with Chandaka, his charioteer, and witnessed the suffering of the world firsthand.

The charioteers name would eventually become the name of the planet our novella would take place on. Read into that what you will.

Writing a novella:

“I don’t really know,” Hunter said when I asked him when the moment was that we decided to write a book. “I don’t even remember it becoming like… a book.”

The mock up that we put the most work into.

I can’t recall how we got here either. It started as a joke. Then one joke became two. So on and so forth. Every time we traded places at the keyboard I think our goal was to come up with more and more ridiculous scenarios to make each other laugh.

“I don’t think there was a moment where we said, ‘hey, we should publish this.'” Hunter said.

“But I think there was,” I said. “We did end up publishing it after all.”

“I know,” Hunter said. “But I don’t remember when that was.”

The novella took took three years to write.

“Why do you think it took so long?” I asked.

“For a while I don’t think we had any direction,” Hunter said. “We wrote a bunch of nonsense and it became difficult to piece together. There were times when we sat down to write and ended up just talking about it. Plus we were both in school. We just had other shit going on.”

I recall a sketchpad filled with names and badly drawn maps. We tried separating the characters into factions (beyond what was in the book) to better keep track of what was going on but eventually gave up on that. The book didn’t take itself as seriously as we were trying to. Tolkien-esque world building was never in the cards.

On creative influences:

The things that influenced me in writing this train wreck are obvious in retrospect. Lord of the Rings, horror, shock humor, bad puns, wordplay, and of course crime dramas. It ended up being more of some of those things and less of others.

I asked Hunter what he wanted the book to be.

This book was crucial as an influence and in guiding the editing process for Cannibal Dwarf Detective. I had read it right before we started the first draft. It is said that Tim and Eric of Adult Swim’s “Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!” created that show after finishing film school and wanting to implement the opposite of all they had learned. I followed a similar philosophy here. I plan on applying King’s knowledge of writing in a more accurate way in the future.

“Before we even had a title,” he said. “I wanted to write a noir detective story. You know, realistic. And then you started adding dwarves and cannibalism. I was fine with that, but then you started scalping people and putting the scalps in [Jeac's] beard. I don’t know.”

“Did I ruin the book?” I asked.

“No you just made it into something different.”

Revisions:

The first draft was a mess. A stream of consciousness with little punctuation, paragraph, or page breaks. We ended up with three drafts of the book. And then two more after its publication. I kept finding mistakes and wanting to fix them.

A book is never finished as it turns out. Like any creative endeavor there is a time  when you have to just stop and call it good.

There are parts of the book I wish I could have elaborated on and made more dense, but I’m not sure that would have benefited the book. Its speed is part of what I think makes it so readable. Hunter wanted more from certain characters and arcs as well.

“I wanted to expand Ja-La Pe-Pe Ecko Sanders more,” he said. “Why would a character have such a cool name and then just be killed off immediately? I don’t feel like we used him as well as we could have. We gave him a bit of back story and then never bring it up. He’s a rancher and he has that basement full of weapons. He might just be the coolest character, but we didn’t do anything with him.”

Editing:

Making a revision is not editing. You might do what you would call editing when making a revision to a draft, but editing itself can be a much heavier task. That’s why, after Hunter and I finished the first draft, we asked Jared Larson, a freelance contributor at IGN.com, if he would like to edit for us.

The final cover by TJSGrimm.

I did most of the editing on subsequent drafts and I feel kind of guilty subjecting Jared to the mess that was the first. In the future I’ll do as much editing on the first draft as possible, pass it on to someone else, then return to it before writing the next draft.

“It was a tad bit rough,” Jared said of the first draft. “The lack of commas was definitely my biggest frustration. Sometimes I felt like I was reading Hemingway, if Hemingway had just snorted several lines of coke and taken a handful of LSD.”

Jared told me the editing process was long.

“It’s not a long story,” he said. “But looking for grammatical and spelling errors, as well as narrative issues, made it a bit of a doozy. Not so much because of the volume of errors as because of the time it took to write the reason for the edit and suggested alternatives.”

Because Cannibal Dwarf Detective is written in an unorthodox way and I wanted to break the rules in Stephen King’s On Writing it created challenges for Jared.

“There were quite a few times where I pointed out an inconsistency or objective error and the brothers shrugged and responded, ‘We’ll keep that. It’ll be funny.’ No matter how many times I argued that nobody would get it, I almost never changed their minds.”

Despite his frustrations with our incompetence, Jared did enjoy working on the project. He marked specific parts in the first draft that made him laugh to counter his criticisms. A spoonful of sugar.

“Jeac’s odd behavior usually made me chuckle,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure the constant abuse at the hands of his boss got some laughs out of me.”

Jared said he would work with us again in the future and offered this final take:

“Director Alejandro Jodorowsky wanted to make a film adaptation of Dune that would give viewers acid-like hallucinations without the need for drugs. I would argue that Cannibal Dwarf Detective accomplishes that. I think I know what it feels like to watch Adult Swim cartoons while high as balls now.”

Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening is available on Kindle. You can get it here.

Like Cannibal Dwarf Detective on Facebook!

 

 

 

Throwback Hardware Review: PSP-2001

Disclaimer: This PSP was already broken. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done this.

On the Artistic Merits of Bioshock

Cannibal Dwarf Detective Patch Notes

I recently self-published a novella with my brother called Cannibal Dwarf Detective: An Ephemeral Beardening.  When it was first available on Amazon I wasn’t aware of the myriad mistakes my brother and I had managed to leave in the book. I’ve since re-read the entire book on my Kindle, highlighted the mistakes I found made me cringe personally, and fixed them. That new draft should be available very soon.

Among the fixes I made:

1. Added two pages before part one of the novella.

2. Changed all instances of Armondo to Armando. I made that decision based on which spelling was used more. Had Armondo been the dominate spelling I’d have changed it to that.

3. Fixed a paragraph where Water Baby had been mis-gendered for whatever reason.

4. Fixed minor spelling errors/typos that were missed. Examples of this include using “and” in place of “an” and other tiny annoying things that muck up the page.

5. I’ve added Jared Larson, the editor of the very first draft of the book, to the contributors on the Amazon page. Although this final draft is fairly different from the one he edited I couldn’t have finished this project without him. His criticisms and support have been invaluable.

This is by no means a perfect novella. It is incredibly nonsensical and I imagine it would be critically torn apart if it were ever to receive any readership what-so-ever.

I loved writing it and whenever I read it I laugh. I hope the people who have bought it and read it find some form of enjoyment from it too.

I can’t thank the five of you enough.

On the Artistic Merits of Kingdom Hearts

Talent Show At The Jedi Praxeum

YAVIN 4 – The event started late. A student who wasn’t part of the talent show took a microphone and sang hymns and told bad jokes during an intermission.

“How do you go eight days without sleep?” he asked.

“Sleep at night!” the audience shouted back.

This was the tone of the show: Light, playful, and somewhat unrehearsed.

The Associated Students of New Jedi Academy hosted Jedi Got Talent on Taungsday last week in the auditorium at 11 a.m.

Shamara Ackdool, the ASNJA Cultural Events Coordinator, organized the event.

“The talent show, Jedi Got Talent, is an opportunity to showcase the various talents on our campus,” she said. “To really give an opportunity to the students who have talent to share it with their friends and family.”

Ackdool said the event would have 14 performers, but two did not perform. Most were musical acts, but there was a hip-hop dance group and one spoken-word poet as well.

Darien Tallon, an NJA student studying star fleet administration for the past three quarters, won the contest with his solo vocal performance. He said he didn’t expect to win when he saw the acts that performed before him.

He sang two songs: one in Rodese, his native language, and one in Galactic Basic. Tallon said he chose the songs because they went well together, not just in sound, but in meaning.

“The Rodese song I sang was about saying goodbye to the people you love,” he said.  Tallon paired it with the song “I’m Warping Back” by Bothan vocalist Rathma Brintt. It was a juxtaposition that the audience responded to with emotion.

“I was looking at the audience and I saw that some of them were about to cry,” Tallon said. “I did not expect that.”

Although Tallon won the contest, he said he considers singing to be a hobby. His real focus is on fleet administration classes. He plans to go home to Coruscant after attending NJA so he can help take care of his family and work to make their centuries old merchant fleet even better.

Jasper Zarmer, a drama instructor at NJA, said that he was not contacted and couldn’t inform his students of the talent show. He said this is because people expect a talent show to be about singing and dancing.

“When people think about talent shows that’s what they typically think of,” Zarmer said. “They don’t think of people getting up on stage and acting scenes on stage and that being a talent.”

Zarmer was not angry about being left out of the loop. He said he sees the competitive nature of talent shows as a hindrance.

“The thing about talent shows a lot of times too is the competition comes into play,” Zarmer said. “My function here is more about the process and learning from the process than actually the competition itself and awarding a prize.”

Zarmer said the reason he doesn’t care for contests is because it makes some students feel less valued than others.  “I think it’s a great venue to showcase talent that we might have,” he said.  “But I don’t know that we necessarily need a competitive aspect.”

Despite his position on shows being contests, Zarmer said he would like to see his students perform.

“Yeah, if they did more talent shows I’d absolutely encourage them to.”

Disclaimer: When I wrote this for my JOUR101 class I hadn’t intended on publishing it. To protect the identities of my sources I’ve used a Star Wars name generator to replace their names. The name of the event, the name of the college where it took place, and some minor details have also been changed to fit the new theme.