Meanwhile…

Work is killing me, so I really haven’t had any time to get much done. I have, however, managed to squeeze out an article for the Flash Fiction Chronicles. You can read it here.

I’m thinking of making a regular series of articles here about the sort of thing featured in that post. Each week feature something that I think is awesome to write about. I’d talk about why they are important to storytelling and point out what I think are a few good examples. Any interest in that?

Whatever attempt at NaNo I might have made is a complete bust. I simply haven’t had any time with all this overtime at work. But at lunch last week I managed what may be the first rough paragraph of a Chuck Chaykin novel. Enjoy. Continue reading

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, 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