Meanwhile…

So it seems that NaNo is right around the corner. Hurm. I was going to pretty much pass on NaNo this year, as I never seem to really get much out of it. It’s fun, but at the end of the month I end up with nothing that’s actually useful. I’m starting to think the whole exercise is maybe not the great idea that everyone thinks it is. I think for some people it encourages a kind of “wait until November and do it then” mentality that is counterproductive. Either way, by the end of the month you’re likely so sick of whatever it is you just pounded out that you don’t ever want to look at it again.

However, I think I may take advantage of the extra write-ins and the spirit of productivity that NaNo creates to work on expanding my Chuck Chaykin story into a novel. It’s already over 8,000 words, which is a little long to sell to a short story market anyway, and could easily be expanded. It’s the kind of story in which a publisher like Baen or Tor might be interested.

The trick will be weaving the two characters together. Chaykin is a rough and bitter mercenary, albeit one who is a bit of a softy deep down. His sidekick, Val, is a teenage orphan girl raised in a prep school for psychics. They have certain shared experiences that bring them together, and I know there’s a fun chemistry between the two, but their stories before they meet are so vastly different that it may be difficult to easily switch between the two plots. Or should I skip her story and not introduce her until they meet? I don’t want to shortchange her, but I’m afraid it would seem like two completely different books crammed together.

I’ll have to do a little world (or universe, rather) building. I have a general idea of how the setting works, but I haven’t worked out specifics.

More importantly, I’ll need to design the ship. In any setting where the heroes spend their time mostly aboard some sort of vessel instead of a particular city or planet, the ship becomes not just the setting but a character unto herself. I’ll need to work out how big Chaykin’s ship is, how many rooms, how it’s laid out, etc. The ship isn’t really featured much in the short story, so I didn’t have to worry about it before. Heck, I had a hard time even coming up with a name.

At any rate, you get the idea. I’ll probably spend the next few weeks working on these issues and if I can come up with a decent working outline I may go for it. I don’t know if I’ll go for the insane NaNo pace, but with a little energon and a lot of luck I’ll get a significant amount of work done.

Well, my NaNoWriMo word count stands a little north of 10,000 words. While that’s bad for NaNo, it’s actually pretty good for me, for a month. I feel like it’s a solid start to the book I want to write. I’m starting to doubt, however, that what I’ve written will stand well by itself, so I probably haven’t ended up with a sellable short story (er, novella).

I doubt I’ll get much else written in the next few days. There’s the mess of Thanksgiving, of course, and I’ve taken on a freelance copyediting project that’s going to eat up some time as well. It’s a fun project, the contents of which I will only hint at!

However…I think I have made an unexpected and delightful breakthrough as concerning the Asta the Android story I was trying to write previously and got distracted from. The villain featured in this section of the NaNo piece is heavily tied to Asta. It’s simply later in his career than the point at which our android detective met (and subsequently incarcerated) him. Now that I’ve firmly cemented this guy in my mind (well, mostly – I still need a good name for him), I think writing the Asta story should go easier.

So I’m going to set myself a goal for December – write the origin story for Asta the Android. The tagline: Murder! Robots! Mad Scientists! Lesbians?

Great. Now I’ve set myself up for all the “robot lesbian” Google searches. My apologies if that’s what brought you here. Your unnatural but intriguing desires can only go unfulfilled.

I would really like to go all superhero in December. Look out for some superhero flash as well. I’ve been neglecting that urge for too long.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Just so I don’t feel like I’m neglecting this place, a brief excerpt from some writing I did yesterday. The villains of my piece are starting to shape up a bit. Continue reading

Bit of a rocky start today. I’m having some trouble with pacing and, well, exactly what I’m doing. I made several large changes. I churned out almost 1,300 words today. Not a terrible start, but not what it should have been. Brief excerpt after the jump. Continue reading

Planning for NaNo is going pretty well, I think. I’ve got several sections of the book plotted, enough to last me a couple of weeks, I think. I still have some large, troubling problems, but I’m hoping I’ll get those resolved, if not in the next few days then during the writing. Things always change when you actually sit down to write anyway.

I’ll be setting up a new page of the blog for this year, and I’ll set it to fall in chronological order. Each day I’ll post an excerpt of what I wrote that day, just a couple hundred words. Posting here on the main page will probably be sparse. I doubt I’ll have much energy for it.

Just a couple of days to go!

Edit: Oh, hmm. Apparently I can’t make posts to Pages. I’ll have to give this a little thought.

There is a ton of information of the Chicago of the 1930s. Sadly, this is forty years before our stalwart hero is alive. There doesn’t seem to be all that much info about ’70s Chicago. I guess I could just take the ’60s, subtract some repression and add some polyester and I would more or less have it.

I’ve obtained so far, a few books for NaNo:

Chicago:  A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods, produced by the Chicago Historical Society in 1979. This was written right around when a lot of the novel is taking place, so that should be very helpful. I know absolutely nothing about how Chicago is laid out or where people live or anything. It seems like a lot of films, for example, of Chicago focus a lot of the architecture and what not, but don’t really talk about the geography or neighborhoods. It’s very different from stories set in New York, where the burroughs are very well known.

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities, by Janet Abu-Lughod. This is kind of a sociologist’s view of these big cities. It’s looking at the big picture and large events. Looks like it’s a good mix of history, politics, and cultural demographic information.

I have a third book about Chicago that’s a history book (don’t have it handy at the moment).

Startlingly handy little tidbit I discovered: Chicago’s first and only female mayor was elected during this era. That dovetails very nicely with some of my themes. I’ll need to look up some more stuff on this lady.

Needed still: Greek gods, women in police history, Chicago public school system

The more I’m looking at all this, the longer I think I’m going to spend on Kelly’s childhood.

So the NaNo site appears to be up and running again. A minor miracle has occurred and I actually remembered my old username and password, so if you’re playing along at home feel free to friend me there: flakbait. Even if you’re not participating, you can peek there to see my progress. If all goes as planned, I should be updating here daily throughout November with excerpts and word counts.

I have a set of characters I love and a general idea of how I want the story (or stories, probably) to go, so I have a lot of hope for this year’s effort. I really need to get to work on a solid outline, though.

If anyone in the Fort Worth area wants to join us for write-ins, let me know and I’ll post the relevant info. We’ll be meeting at least once a week.

Well, we’re nearing that time of year again. This morning I received an email from the NaNo people warning that they’re about to prep the site for this year’s contest.

It’s still over a month away of course, but I think the biggest thing that kills NaNo attempts (or at least mine) is lack of preparation. If you’re writing a fantasy/science fiction story, you’d better have your world pretty well built by the time you sit down to even outline, I think. That can take a lot of time. I tried to do all that on short notice two years ago and it didn’t work out so well.

I’m determined to get a lot of material written for Kelly Sienna, The Scarlet Ranger. I’ve already got one published short story about her, plus several short exercises (mostly posted here somewhere, if you look around). A lot of her life story is written out in my head, so I think I can put together a pretty decent outline. It might be roughly broken down into something like this:

Part 1 – The Early Early Years, about Kelly as a young girl, when she first receives her powers and massive events that will shape the rest of her life happen.

Part 2 – The Teen Years, when she discovers just how different her powers make her, and must decide what to do with them.

Part 3 – Early Hero Years, involvement with the second generation Liberty Gang

Part 4 – The Experienced Years, as she comes into her own as a hero and her rocky romance with The Chicago Defender.

Something like that, anyway. That would be 12,500 words per section. 

 So now I’ve got to decide on a couple of things. Do I want to write it as several novellas? Should I avoid the decades-spanning story and focus on just one of those periods? If I decide to write a later period, will I regret limiting what I can do with the earlier times?

I’m leaning toward a novella of each time period. This way I may be able to avoid Star Wars-style continuity issues, and if I feel like there’s enough story in one, it can always be expanded. I may add another Part, which would give me five 10,000-word stories. If some fall short I can always fill in with much shorter one-off adventures. I don’t have a solid villain for her yet, so I could maybe do little flash pieces about whoever that turns out to be to fill in the gaps.

Anyone else out there doing NaNo? It’s daunting, but as I understand it, it becomes easier once you get it done once. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

I absolutely love writing action scenes. I feel like I’ve always been pretty good at it, and that probably stems from growing up reading a lot of books with great action scenes. (Michael Stackpole, I would have to say, is a huge inspiration for this; his action scenes are always stellar.) I’ve been complimented on my clear, fun, descriptive action scenes. It’s one of the few times that my tendency to over-visualize is an asset, I think. I don’t know if I’m any good at writing the stuff in between the action, but I’ve got that, at least.

So when Jens sent out this prompt this month, it got me a little excited (and I didn’t have to grab a dictionary to understand it ):

Prompt: Write a story with the best dang fight scene ever. But it also has to mean something. Within the context of the story. A spectacular, mind-shattering fight scene, but with emotional heft and moral repercussions, in under a thousand words. Yeah!

So I took the opportunity to fledge out a little more the Scarlet Ranger’s history. With some expansion, I think this might might a pretty good stand-alone short story, so I’ll just post a brief bit of it here. This is set in the early days of her career, before Kelly even took the mantle of the Scarlet Ranger. A member of the Liberty Gang, Lieutenant Governor (formerly sidekick to the Governor, of course) is featured as well.

The more I think about it and the more I write about her, the more I want to NaNo Kelly’s story. I enjoy writing her enough that I think I could keep it up for a month, and portions of the story are already rolling around in my head.

Anyway, on to a dark, dingy Chicago alley, mid 1980s… Continue reading

Irritating side note: I just discovered Hotmail has, at some point over the past few months, completely deleted my old account. So much for a good 5 years worth of emails and contacts. I’d transferred most of it over to gmail already, but damned if that’s not irritating.

Anyway, rocky start today. Maybe I should have gone with something different. I’m not sure I’m feeling this book right now. We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll get anything done this weekend, since I’ll be out of town, so I’ll have a lot of catching up to do next week. I also still have to finish up my Secret Santa story. Ugh.

End word count today: 1,535, just shy of the minimum goal per day. Here’s the first couple hundred words. Continue reading