Marching Slowly with a Bit of Looking Back and Forward

 
I am still Marching to a Million. I’m just not as far along as I expected to be. I hope to pick up the pace this week.
 
Comic writing of one sort or the other has been in the back of mind for a while now, so I’ve been reading up on comic story structure lately.
 
The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter was my first stop. That’s a great how-to book for creating stand-up comedy material–and Ms. Carter is quite convinced that all paths in comedy begin with stand-up–but it barely touches on more story-oriented approaches. I learned a lot, and I plan to use a number of the exercises in the book. But I’m more interested in writing comic novels like the comic horror of Christopher Moore (e.g., A Dirty Job, or Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story) or even, someday, somehow, the comic sci-fi of Douglas Adams (e.g., The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy).
 
My next bit of reading turned out to be a real gold mine of information: The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus. In fact, I think this book is a great book about writing in general, not just comic writing. I love this book and I’m glad I bought a new copy of it to keep handy. The focus of the book is on story-oriented comedy, especially sitcoms and comedy movies, and delves into creating comic characters and comic story structures.
 
Back in Nanowrimo 2010, my project was a comic horror novel that I abandoned at about 30K words for reasons that made sense at the time–but that I couldn’t recall when I re-read the manuscript last week. I always expected I would come back to the novel someday, fix the story and characters, and finish it. After reading what I had last week, “someday” is going to come much sooner. And armed with what I’ve learned in my recent reading, I think I can fix the flaws that are there. I’m almost impatient to get re-started.
 
The stack of projects I need to get to has begun to take on imposing, almost looming, proportions. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll work in the re-start, except that it will be after my current project. And probably after the one planned after that. From where I’m sitting right now, not counting Gunwitch2, I have 7-8 novels planned (some more planned than others). And as I write those, I’m sure I’ll add more to the list, and probably rearrange the order I write them. In addition, there are shorter stories I want to write in various worlds/situations I’ve already created, like Dragons of the Stars, Effie Two-Five and the Gray Angel.
 
Which means that even as my March to a Million reaches its finish line, I have another million or so words at least waiting for me. And then, I’m sure, another million after that. And then again…and again…
 
I’ll just stop there. I don’t want to scare myself too much.
 
-David
 
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