imagineblog

This week’s meeting with the Asimovs brought up an interesting point. If I’m not careful, I could plan this book to death without actually getting around to writing it. With that said, and the other Dead Asimovs glaring at me holding their menacing nerf bats, I think I’d better lay out some milestones for what I plan to accomplish here. (Warning: Personal productivity theory and writing may intersect. Wear adequate head protection.)

I’ve been “given"; two weeks to finish planning the book, which I think is absurdly optimistic. Was Patton given two weeks to plan Italy? No! Was Tommy Franks given two weeks to plan Iraq? Actually, quite possibly. But anyway, two weeks ain’t a lot of time if you have a full time job, a part time job, a nagging addiction to sleep and angry cats. But two weeks to do what, exactly? I don’t plan on writing the whole book backwards, and I don’t plan on even having a really detailed outline. While I can’t seem to pull off King’s “fossil” trick, I don’t want Revelation to be a paint-by-numbers affair like the original BHH. So what I need, really, is a skeleton outline, a simple list of the big plot points to hit along the way, the important character moments, the basic structure of the story without the details. The details are what makes actually writing the damn thing fun.

Let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. — Inigo Montoya

So here’s the plan. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to work backwards and assemble the skeleton of Revelation bone by bone. Your job is to make sure that I don’t miss anything big, like a pelvis or ribcage. That the outline makes sense in general terms and there are no “Far Side” style “and then a miracle occurs” moments business papers. As I get the outline working, I’ll post it as a bulleted list at the top of each post. And just to be completely inconsistent right from the start, I’ll start it at the end of this post.

Susan posts her proof of immortal existence on the web, causing a public stir that starts small but snowballs as more media outlets pick up the story and verify it.

Daniel and Jack get recruited into a government organization to study the demonic threat.

So my next step is to figure out what happens before Susan posts her proof.

I’ve been ready to start for a week now. The outline is as complete as it needs to be, filling out any more detail will freeze the story. I have all my tools in order, I’ve given up on fiddling with mobile tech, I really have nothing to do with my time away from the office but read, write and sleep. (Seriously. My TV has atrophied down to a wristwatch, and there are pictures of my LOTRO character on milk cartons all over Middle Earth.) I’m ready, nothing ahead of me but the open road.

 

I am, therefore, spending a lot of time petting my cats.

 

Don’t get me wrong, my cats are great. But this blog isn’t about my cats. Nor are my cats going to write my gorram book, no matter how much they purr. That probably wouldn’t make much of a book, anyway. “Chapter 2, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

 

So it’s up to me. I have to write it. I’m excited to get into it. I’m enthused, really. I’m also scared out of my mind.

 

I’m not sure why, really. I’m far better prepared to write Daniel Cho’s story than I was eleven years ago. I know the story, I know the characters, and I’m a much more mature and seasoned writer than I was. I should be able to knock this out of the park (without steroids!).

 

And maybe that’s the problem. Preparation is all fine and good, but now that I’m down to the moment of composition, the pressure is squishing me like a little bug. I’m so damn well prepared for this that I’m expecting myself to be perfect, to just start spilling out golden, finished prose. Very much not the freedom of writing Anne Lamott’s “shitty first drafts.”

 

I need to get over myself, sit down and start writing. I need to forget my preparation, forget what I know of the plot and the characters (forget these things in my concsious mind so that my subconscious is free to use them), and just write. I can spend weeks, months, years waffling and fussing about things like when I write, where I write, what input method I use (Letter Recognizer, Transcriber, thumb keyboard, onscreen keyboard, Stowaway keyboard, big comfy Microsoft Natural 4000 ergo board on my desktop), whether to start each writing session with writing practice or just dive right in, etc. But that’s not writing. It feels like writing because it’s peripherally related, but it’s not writing.

 

Writing is writing. Time to get to it.

I’ve been wondering how much about the actual plot and characters of In Shining Armor I should tell you guys about. Conventional wisdom tells me I should keep my big trap shut about the book itself so no one “steals it” before I finish it and find a publisher. There are several problems I can find with this line of thinking.

 

No one steals story ideas. Really. I copyrighted the story behind In Shining Armor in 1990, and I’ve already “published” it several times as an ebook in various forms. So if someone is dumb enough to try to rip it off, I can sue them into oblivion. The one good thing about the 1976 copyright extension was that it made copyright far more inclusive and defendable in court. And if I were worried about copyright anyway, posting the chapters to this blog would provide a court-ready proof of copyright, so in a way I’m actually defending the story by posting it here and talking about it as I write it.

It’s going to be really, really hard to give you guys a behind-the-scenes look at a working writer without talking specifically about what I’m writing. I could bring up topics like plot, pacing and characterization without specific examples from my own work, but that would be even more effort with the added benefit of being less effective.

Print publishers don’t seem to care about online exposure. Scott Sigler’s novel-by-podcast got picked up with no negatives because of the online exposure prior to print publication, so why shouldn’t a novel-by-blog? It might even work in my favor if I develop a following.

Lastly, “conventional wisdom” has never really been my bag. So why not blog about the novel as I write it? Sounds like a fun “experiment” to me.

The only downside I can see, really, is that it runs counter to the excellent advice of Stephen King to “write the first draft with the door closed.” How am I supposed to write real “shitty first drafts” if everyone is looking over my shoulder? Well, the answer to that one comes from my experience in writing serials. The chapters you guys see won’t be the final versions (I’m sure the editor at the publisher will have some ideas) but they sure as hell won’t be my first drafts, either. At the very least, I’ll do a clean up and polish before I post each chapter.

 

As for the actual posting, I’m thinking of posting each chapter as a PDF (it’s just easier to preserve formatting that way, this is a manuscript) and then linking to it from a blog post announcing it and asking for comments. That way people that don’t want to read the actual manuscript for whatever reason don’t see it cluttering up their RSS feeds.

 

So, what do you think? Have I missed anything?