Newbie Writes a Novel

Ah, I see my comment feature has sucked all of the accumulated comments into some electronic memory hole, never to be seen again. Perhaps it was some sort of comment-vampire, weaving a web of deception to draw innocent comments into its lair before snatching them and draining them dry?

Well, as they say-- "when you use a free service on the internet, you can expect to bend over and take a big flaming kick in the ass like the wretched insect you are."

Oh, yeah. Good writing day today. Here are the numbers:

Words Today: 2,050+
Words So Far: 23,000+

Hey! I'm nearing the 10% mark on my goal of 250K words. Woot, indeed. Be excellent to one another.

Odd day today... rampaging insomnia kept me up for 36 hours before I was finally able to take a nap. I did, at least, manage to find what is possibly the world's finest apple fritter at a little donut shop within walking distance of my house, so it wasn't a total loss. Donuts are clearly the universe's intended fuel for the fires of the human soul.

Gabe's "Why I Hate Publishers" spiel has me deep in thought on practical marketing solutions for would-be authors (like, well, yours truly). I'm curious about what Gabe would advocate in terms of cost-effective self (or cooperative) promotion for an author trying to spread the readership of a first or second novel. So, what's your best shot at such a plan, Gabe? The postcard idea is interesting, but as your own analysis shows, the cost and effort of actually sending your hypothetical 50K of the damn things out far outstrips the printing cost. TNH has pointed out what those of us in the adventure game industry/hobby already know-- that large advertisements in wide-circulation publications have a relatively shitty bang-to-buck ratio and that word of mouth is a publisher's eternal best friend.

I intend to poke around with the authors and editors I know and see if I can get some solid answers to cook into useful data-- this subject fascinates me. Like Gabe said, marketing can be heaps of fun, both in the abstract and in actual practice.

Today's word count: 1,800+
Useful Count So Far: 21,000+

Today's Word Count: 1500+
Useful Words So Far: 19,200+

I definitely need to pick the pace up on this sucker. Pity I have to actually make money while I'm writing it... and eat... and clothe myself... and sleep... etcetera. I think the ideal physical form for a first-time novelist would be a disembodied pure-energy consciousness. Not only would you save a fortune on food and clothing, you'd be incapable of beating your head against the desk too hard. And if you could conjure some sort of energy bolt to fucking annihilate people that were annoying you, well, bonus.

My better half and I watched last year's adaptation ofThe Count of Monte Cristo last night, and I was pleasantly surprised. The shitty trailer I saw last year left my hopes in the gutter, but the film was beuatifully shot, the fights were excellently choreographed, and the cast was universally good. It was a classic matinee swashbuckler shot with all the benefits of modern set design and a decent budget; all in all I would highly recommend it. Dumas is near and dear to my heart, and this film is going on the short list of "things to emulate" as work on the novel proceeds.

The film covers the period from 1813-1829, the very end of the "Georgian" era and one of my favorites in terms of men's fashions. I really groove on narrow waistcoats with tight, cuffless arms, not to mention white shits and black vests. I also dig the high collars and silk ties.

I was similarly enamored of the various fashions of The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Simply put, most medieval fashions bore the living shit out of me, and as long as I'm in charge even my fantasy worlds with medieval-level societies and technologies are going to dress more interestingly than your standard-issue SCA sort of Eurpoean Middle Ages stock fantasy drek. For what little impact it's going to have on the story, the reigning style of dress in Camorr, Emberlain, and all the "modern" city states in the novel is going to be much closer to the 18th century than the 13th.

Today's word count: 3500+
Useful words so far: 17,770+

Switched my schedule around rather significantly... I was getting up at 6 PM yesterday; this morning I started getting up at 7 AM. I Only managed to sleep for two hours, so today was a big fat wash in many respects. Bleargh.

Useful word total: Approx. 500
Total so far: 14,270+

Today's useful word count: 1, 110
Total so far: 13,770+

The Wentworth Community Library in West St. Paul, Minnesota has a discard shelf right out of a Twilight Zone episode; generally speaking, a book on my to-read list, or one peripherally related to it, shows up there every week. It's getting spooky. The quality and rarity of some of the stuff they discard for fifty cents or a buck is staggering. I've picked up the entire Horatio Hornblower saga from them (paperback at a quarter a pop), all of the Ian Fleming Bond thrillers (same price), a pristine hardback of Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, dust-jacketed copies of Greg Benford's Timescape, Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, and a flawless trade paperback of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, all for a buck apiece, not to mention sixty or seventy paperbacks of every sort.

Tonight I picked up a couple of slender Poul Anderson "interstellar trader" thrillers from the 60s (I tend to enjoy economic/mercantile spec fic, so we'll get along just fine), J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, and an excellent paperback edition of Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel. Since I slugged my way through Foundation's Edge last week, I figured I might as well suck down some more of the Nerd King's classic work, but... my mood has shifted. I'm sure I'll enjoy it when I do get around to reading it, but dammit, the extremely circumspect third person limited viewpoint he used left him with no room to drop in back-story except via conversation.

"As you know, Elijah, we went to college together..."

"As you no doubt already know, this building is three thousand feet tall, and it's Tuesday, and you really enjoy the pink mint gelatin desserts the comissary dispenses on Tuesdays..."

Shit, this sort of "as you know...' exposition should have been too lame to make a final draft even in 1952.

Of course, Asimov sold eighty-three fucktillion books in his life, and I suppose that if you do that and die, you really can't be expected to give two dry bowel movements what some internet meshuginah has to say about your work. G'night!

Today's useful word count: 1,763
Total thusfar: 12,660+

I've been tinkering with my opening chapter for about six hours; profitably, I think. I can't overemphasize how important it is to me or how seriously I take it. In my unhumble opinion, one of the shittiest things an author can do is waste good page space getting things off to an uninteresting start. That doesn't mean immediate slam-bang action; it just means that something interesting is presented. Some hint is given that the author knows what he's doing, and cares enough to hook the reader's attention from the word "go."

Hence, the naked lesbian acrobat orgy while a samurai fights a dinosaur, all perched on top of an circus elephant. That makes for a very busy first paragraph. I wonder if the lesbian acrobats should be samurai, too.

*****

Originally, I introduced my main character in the opening paragraph; I've shuffled things around to keep him off-stage until four or five pages have passed. I like the effect this creates-- it gives him a stronger entrance, and immediately sets him a bit apart from his partners in crime, and it also affords me a much more elegant opportunity to describe his appearance. This description is actually terribly important for future reference (he's unremarkable in every way, medium in every sense of the word). I generally take a very dim view of the practice of describing characters as simple collections of visual traits, but Locke's instantly forgettable (and easily disguised) demeanor is a major reason for his success as a confidence trickster, so just this once I need to bend my own rules.

To create the narrative structure of the first chapter, I tried to think of how it might be filmed as a caper flick. The sequence begins with a flashback to the protagonists discussing their foolproof plan, followed by a "now" scene in which they execute the plan, screw it up, and try to recover, followed by a flashback to the next part of the plan under discussion, followed by a "now" scene in which the slightly modified plan is further screwed up and somehow recovered, and so on and so forth until they either pull it off or screw it up for good (sorry, folks, I said I was going to be coy). I think this setup is ideal for rapidly introducing the reader to the idea of an elaborate con being planned and staged, and for keeping things interesting by throwing down a few stumbling blocks for the protagonists to protag themselves past.

As originally set out, the first chapter was just as elaborate but nowhere near as sexy. Just goes to show that if you beat your head against a desk for two years, you might eventually come up with something that seems to work. I am significantly more pleased with this thing than I was even a week ago.

*****

Will this sucker be updated daily? Barring vacation and illness, I will certainly shoot for it. Several Dead Cities-ites have remarked that an untended blog is an ugly thing; I agree. The only real promise I'll make is that at least there won't be any "Too busy to blog today!" posts; if I can take the time to open up Blogger and log in, three freakin' minutes to conjure a paragraph can certainly be found.

Tonight (this morning, more accurately): 810 useful words.

Useful word count so far: 10,890+

Welcome to the Stupid Newbie Blog, where I'll be attempting to describe the process of writing a first novel in excruciating and embarrassing detail.

I'm a scruffy, long-haired 25-year-old geek living in St. Paul, Minnesota. I've done freelance writing, freelance editing, and even a bit of ghostwriting, but most of my writing income currently derives from my surprisingly lucrative roleplaying game material in PDF format, available at Cryptosnark Games and at RPGnow.com. So, although I'm no stranger to writing and even getting paid for it, I am a thoroughly clueless outsider where the publishing industry is concerned-- one of umpteen million wannabes, grazing placidly on the publishing borderlands, where we meep and gibber to ourselves in great wannabe herds.

After a great deal of thought, I've decided to create this pixellated ego trip for one primary reason: I only have a tiny handful of peers (people around my age, as serious as I am about seeking publication, looking for a committed and fairly aggressive critique group rather than a gentle support group) in my immediate area, and I'm currently not a terribly mobile person. There's enough of the fan in me to want to network with my fellow geeks online, and there's enough of the pedant in me to take heart at the thought of some hypothetical person learning from my flagrant screw-ups.

I feel a certain sense of community with the Dead Cities crew; I guess you could also say that this is my attempt to give a little something back to them (find 'em in the links at left if you like). I certainly don't agree with all of them all the time (for more on that, see below) but if I have an online "home" I suppose that those wayward bums and their message board would probably be it.

*****

So, what the hell is the book?

I'm going to do my best to keep this thing interesting without actually discussing a great many plot and character details; those things I'll play close to the vest-- not because I fear any sort of theft, but because I know from bitter personal (and anecdotal) experience that writers who blather endlessly about what they're going to write tend to never get around to doing so. Chatting at length about narrative specifics releases the pent-up ambition that gets the actual prose pounded out of the brain and onto the page. Without that internal creative pressure, a project tends to get neglected indefinitely. Basking in approval from a friend or confidant that likes my work is extremely pleasing; unfortunately, it tends to rob me of the impetus to actually write the damn thing I'm talking about.

With that said--

It's about con artists in a world where "con artistry" as we understand the term is not generally known to exist. A very small cabal of crooks have privately refined the art and craft of the elaborate scam, guarding and nurturing it as their trade secret. Naturally, things go wrong for them early on and only get worse as the pages turn.

The world is a "late Renaissance-era" humanist fantasy construct, full of city-states and warring kingdoms and collapsing empires. The presence of the urban burgeoisie, along with post-feudal economic advancements, allows for a complicated and vibrant set of circumstances for the protagonists to manipulate. A con artist in a less advanced fantasy world would, for all intents and purposes, be a glorified sneak thief-- the classic elements of what we call "confidence tricks" require a fairly twisted monetary system to play with and a fairly diverse social pool to hide in.

Anyhow, you might call it a gritty fantasy crime thriller. I summed my original concept up as "intellectual swashbuckling" about two years ago. It's acquired quite a bit more weight and depth since then, but that will do for starters. My major design precept is to make it as flat-out entertaining as all hell; I have little to no patience for slow-starting stories that "get moving" around page 80. I want to write something that zings from page one, and I think I might finally be pulling it off (after only four earlier drafts terminated with extreme prejudice!).

I'll post a nightly word-count, referring only to "useful words" that might conceivably go into the evolving draft or be saved for later use.

*****

One item of current interest is Gabe Chouinard's newest flaming Molotov cockmail; handle with care! I like Gabe, misanthropic little supervillain-in-training that he is, but dammit, I suppose my reaction amounts to this:I just don't care. I am tired to my bones of pissing and moaning and malaise; knowing zip-dick-nada about Gabe's basis for comparison, and, having read contradictory/mitigating statements from some of those "intellects vast and cold and distant" that actually work in publishing, I can only say "bitch less, write more." Ask me for a more in-depth response if and when a publisher actually buys my brain-squeezings. Weren't you writing a novel or two, Gabe? They sounded pretty fucking cool from the meager crumbs you let slip about them, once upon a time.