What I've learned in the last six months.

Hm. November. Last time I wrote in this blog, it was May.

Six months.

I wish I could say I had more to report on the story front. Ink-on-paper reports. Unfortunately, I don't. What I can say, though, is that I've thought a great deal more about stories and writing, and I've learned some things about myself as a writer. Specifically, I learned two things about my process and method.

I am a slow writer

I lied in the introduction. I did write a brand-spankin' new story. It was garbage except for the initial concept and one of the characters. A janitor and some fucked up kids sneak into the local high school every weekend to play elaborate games of dungeons and dragons--but the moment of time I'm focused on is a game that never happens.

I wrote this story for a graduate-level fiction workshop. I wanted to try my hands at a "realistic" story--but about something that didn't involve alcohol, adultery, romance, or any of the things I've come to expect from my peers in this workshop.

While my peers were supportive and considerate, it wasn't hard to tell that the story was poorly conceived and executed even worse.

I wrote the story in two weeks. That's the shortest time it has ever taken me to move a story from brain to scribbles to digital draft. The only scene that worked--for me or my peers--was the first scene, where the Janitor dumped a wheelbarrow of cattle feed over the students' cell phones in the cafeteria freezer, and told the "main" character (the close third person PoV) that nobody would get their phones back until the dragon was slain at the end of the night--or the party died in the process.

The Janitor--Ron--was frightening, which is what I wanted, but the rest of my characters were just empty vessels, space fillers. The only character I really had was Ron. Everything else was forced.

Given a month or more of contemplation, I might have developed more of a narrative, or made my characters more believable. But I didn't have that kind of time. I usually sit on a story idea for months before committing anything to pen(cil)--and then, after writing it, it usually takes me about a week or two to draft the story into digital format--making notes along the way to make changes or rewrite certain sections.

Then the revision process prior to allowing others to read my work is usually another two week affair.

If these were short short stories (3-5k), this would be a problem, I think--but I tend to write novellas. 15k-20k monsters, which brings me to the second thing I realized...

I have mammoth story ideas

My peers in the fiction workshop are all short story writers. They like their tight, controlled, restrained pieces of prose. Their stories are as much about what's on the page as what is made liminal by remaining off the page. The stories are sometimes beautiful, other times haunting.

But they don't really transport me anywhere. They don't grab me and drag me through a messiness. I feel like when I'm reading a short work, I'm look askance at a scene--like I'm prying as opposed to watching.

My stories and my approach to them are unapologetically big. It's not about a brief insight into a little drama in a banal world--I want you to gawk at an ugly scene and watch it spread, like watching a flooded river gradually overwhelm the river's banks, the streets, the sandbags, until it reaches your porch and begins to dribble under your doors. I want to bind you in a chair and hold your eyelids open and make you watch everything unfold.

Which takes time. And space. Which means more words, and more pages.

I don't think the short story can do that. And I don't think short story writers--whose tendency is to try to condense and contract a story--know how to provide feedback to feed that impulse, or to make it work for an audience.

First drafts: word dysentery

Writing first drafts of a story is probably the worst part of the writing process. I can pump out pages of material, and only like maybe two sentences and half an idea after a day's worth of writing. Every time I begin a new story, I second guess myself as a writer and a thinker. When I'm writing a first draft, I have to strike a balance: I know I'm at my least efficient when I'm writing that first draft, but I'm also arguably working through the most productive stages of the writing process. Once the story is put down on paper, it's a refining process: adding more content in some areas, stripping it from others, rearrange the order of events, and then falling in and out of love with the work enough times to constitute the whole relationship as abusive.

It's a rough moment. I hate it. Forcing myself to sit down and write is difficult. Everything is a distraction--food, web advertisements, the sounds on the street. I concoct stories about what my neighbors are doing when they're running up and down the stairs to their apartment so I don't have to work on concocting the story I'm writing in front of me. I'll cook meals, browse the internet, do bills--anything other than write. 

Today, I wrote three pages and decided to call it quits. They're rough. I hate the language, the pacing, and the structure the narrative took. But I know what I want to do when I sit down on the laptop and write up that section of the story now. I know that the first section of the narrative will be a much more focused conversation between Nettie and Calixte conspiring to avoid a return to what they once were, and that the next few sections will be lost in a haze of chloroform and german. I know that what's next is a conversation translated from French to English, and that an ultimatum will be offered, and that Nettie and Calixte will realize they've been captured by religious radicals. I know Calixte's purpose is grim, and Nettie's impossible, and that when they've lost hope, and despair settles in, that an agent of the Abyss will be compelled to visit, and that Griswold will walk into the trenches and wander their waterlogged lengths like they were a private garden, and when the Volk find him they will know he is something Other.

It's not pretty. My thoughts are still cluttered and the narrative itself is taking shape. But it is coming together. That's what matters at this point--making the narrative happen, and planting the seed for characters so that they can be nurtured in the second draft and the revisions.

One step, one day, one word at a time.

Brainstorming A Griswold tale.

My current fiction project is a Griswold story. For the uninitiated, Griswold is a Necromancer character who has turned the dark arts into a for-profit game. In an early draft of the first story I wrote with him, Griswold had a business card which looked like a page out of a tiny book, which read:

"'Griswold Ritter Von Bitterlich, He-Who-Smothered-The-Goddess-Inanna, Scurge of Babylon, Talon of Ahriman, Binder of the 12 Unnamable Tomes, Nidhogg’s Rot, Inkwell to the Dread Sea Scrolls, Eight Worthies’ Tormentor, Buzzard of Malta, Rat King of Jerusalem, Chief Engineer of the Abyssal Printing Press, Archmachinist to the Beast, He-Who-Skinned-the-Spirit-Coyote, The Medicine Man Scalper, C.P.A, M.D., M.B.A., references upon request.'"

Griswold is my resigned optimist, a malicious force for the greater good. As I seem to do in my stories, magic is place-based--it's drawn from an elsewhere, an ambient place sitting beside and within our world. All my magic originates from an "othered" place, and Griswold defines this place as the Abyss--an empty place generally associated with negativity (an epic understatement, but one I stand beside) where sentient misery echoes and twists upon itself.

Sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts are familiar with this song and dance, no doubt--evil is powered by negativity, good by its inverse. Rinse and repeat, you say; this is nothing new.

Where I like to think I've differed with Griswold and his relationship with the Abyss as opposed to other sorcerers who've made bargains with beings beyond the mortal coil, is that he's:

A) not trying to throw the world into cosmic darkness or to spread negativity. He responds to it, the way an insurance underwriter responds to a traffic accident. The abyss isn't trying to kill the world, and neither is Griswold. as an agent to the Abyss, his job isn't to foment destruction or to create tragedy--he is instead supposed to harness it. He is a "man at the crossroads in the twilight of your life" type; he doesn't kill your wife, or spread the plague, or let your child whither and die from cancer, but he always happens to find people going through those sorts of traumas. The rationale being, that the abyss is an abstraction, an idea-place, and when folks minds and bodies are experiencing negativity, if their lives are changing in drastic, devastating ways, Griswold is drawn to that like a shark to blood, because in that specific moment when someone's whole world seems to be falling apart, they are the physical manifestation of the Abyss, and Griswold turns that darkness into energy. 

B) trying to save the world through mutualism. And anti-corruption. And the death of free market capitalism. And the cessation of bigotry. Griswold has been alive for several thousand years--he was a Minoan noble originally--and seen all sorts of terrible things. And done terrible things. His philosophy on his purpose as an agent to the Abyss has evolved over time, and in my mind's eyes his modern self is trying very hard to fix the world that has outgrown his way of operating in the world. Industrialism and humanity's potential have far outpaced his expectations, and he's painfully aware of the fact that we're teetering on throwing ourselves into the Abyss: nuclear weaponry, global climate change, and resource scarcity could kill everyone and everything, and despite being an agent of the Abyss, Griswold is still his own person (and the Abyss is largely mindless). He wants to continue living on the planet, and he wants humanity to survive itself, because the alternative is for the death of the thing that sustains him.

Griswold is a pretty typical anti-hero, insomuch that he's motivated to do good for reasons other than the sake of being good.

My current Griswold project is focused on WWI. It's not about Griswold directly--at least not right now--but it's definitely a story where he is important. At least, I think so--I haven't been able to write him into the narrative yet.

The story is written in the third person; an American nurse and a french ambulance driver on the frontline have been moonlighting as corpse robbers and black market fences on the Allies' side of the war. With the war ending, the nurse, a lesbian, is stuck between a rock and a hard place: she doesn't want to go home, because home means marriage and living a lie and passing, but staying in Europe means shell likely have to work to fight the Spanish Flu, which terrifies her more than treating war victims. 

What I want is for the--

Interrupting myself. I just realized how I can get to my point faster. I've been having this long and drawn out build-up in this narrative, with Calixte (the frenchie) and Nettie (the nurse) sneaking past the german trenches after the war to look for spoils, just so they can get caught by a Volkish cult that has moved into the trenches after the war and used them to house their families.

These Volk cultists have children with them. These kids are dying of meningitis because the trenches are unclean and they don't have supplies--so they could raid the Allies side instead--many of the male Volk members are ex-military, so why not have them snatch up Calixte and Nettie on a night they plan to sneak out to No Man's Land to hunt for stuff worth selling--Nettie is a nurse, calixte is an ambulance driver. The Volk could have been looking for a chance to snatch up one of the nurses, and Calixte is a bonus because he's an ambulance driver (which necessitates him being a mechanic). The Volk offer a deal: save the children (dying of meningitis) and get an ambulance running so we can go into town for supplies, and you can live--otherwise we'll sacrifice you to our gods.

Griswold shows up in response to the tragedy of the children dying and the fear Calixte and Nettie feel when they think they're going to die. Griswold believes he's there on account of the children, but it turns out he's here because he saw Nettie shining in the Abyss.


The end goal of this story is supposed to be about Grsiwold taking Nettie on as an apprentice. This gets me closer.

I'm sorry for the abrupt end, if you're reading this, but this blog just served it's function--it helped me jog my thoughts.

Update later?

A brief introdution.

Hello,

I'm creating this blog as a place to post idle thoughts and psuedo-ideas about my fiction, scholarly endeavors, and observations about the way the world operates from my limited perspective. Mostly I see this as a chance to hash out my ideas as if I'm writing for someone who cares to see what I think, rather than slipping into a solipsistic, self-indulgent mental cul-de-sac with a narrative/character idea.

Right now, the issues I'm working through as a writer are:

Justifying fantasy races in my writing

Developing characters I'm interested in writing

Revising the Griswold tales; writing a Griswold tale.

Revising (and re-envisioning) the Blue Mason

Crossing my fingers about the Jasenovac Oven

What would biological immortality do for a culture?

What stressors and mutations would bears go through to become more bipedal, develop thumbs, develop tools and language, and develop a pseudo-nomadic matriarchical culture of goat herders?

What is magic? Why should it exist? What should it do in a world?