Tag Archives: writing

NYCC After-action Part One

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I have survived yet another New York Comic Con. The biggest ever, by current reporting.

This year, I had an extra mission, a driving interest behind my presence, thanks to my decision to get into comics writing.

Most years, I graze the fields of NYCC, drinking in the geekdom and following the tides of my interests.

This year, I spent a *lot* more time in Artists’ Alley, talking with creators, making acquaintances and friends. If I’m going to work in the comics community, I need to be a *part* of the comics community, and in a much greater way than I have been happily reading on my own and talking with people about it intermittently.

Which means that I came back from the con with my suitcase *completely full* of comics. And a few clothes, I guess. Mostly comics.

I had several really cool conversations with creators, and got to hang out a lot more with some folks I’d met at cons earlier in the year. It’s an odd thing to be operating in a new professional world, where I don’t recognize people by sight like I do in SF/F prose.

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the swag I acquired during my trip. It…was a lot. My bank account took a not-insubstantial hit thanks to my love of Cool Stuff.

  • The Dare Detectives “The Snow-Pea Plot” (Ben Caldwell)
  • Monomyth #1 (Siike Donnelly, Eric Ninaltowski)
  • “Comics” a collection of work by students in the SVA Illustration Department and Cartooning Department.
  • Shadowman Vol. 1-5
  • Skull Kickers “Treasure Trove Vol. 1” (Jim Zub, Edwin Huang, Chris Stevens)
  • Sleepy Hollow #1 (Marguerite Bennett, Jorge Coelho, Noelle Stevenson)
  • Artful Daggers “Fifty Years Later” (Adam P. Knave, Sean E. Williams, Andrew Losq)

And…more where that came from. I may have gone a little overboard. I also bought some art, which I will show off in a separate post.

From Page to Panel, Part One

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A couple of weeks back, I attended my first Baltimore Comic-Con. It clocked in at around 15,000 people, and unlike the bigger Comic-Cons (NYCC or PHXCC) that I’ve attended, Baltimore was still very much focused on comics.

After two days of panels, browsing, meeting creators, and loading my bags down with glorious comics goodness, I should have expected this to happen.

Sometime during the weekend, I was bitten by a radioactive comics bug. It re-awakened my often-deferred interest in writing for the form.

I grew up reading comics, taking the change from our recycling deposits down to the friendly local comic shop in Brooklyn to buy the latest issue of Spider-Man, Batman, or X-Men. I’ve tried my hand at writing comics scripts only a little bit, but often thought about what it’d take to move into that form.

Now, let me be clear that I have no intentions of leaving prose writing. That’s my home base, and I’m not likely to ever stop writing prose. But more and more, I see writers crossing formats, including several of my writing idols (Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Greg Rucka, among others).

Therefore, the last couple of weeks, I’ve been devouring comics, deepening my immersion in the form, investigating what’s going on at the top of the form with the works that are making waves and pushing at the edges of what the form can and is doing.

Here’s a representative sample of my research list:

  • Saga (Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples)
  • The Wicked + the Divine (Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie)
  • Batwoman (JH Williams III and W. Haden Blackman)
  • Lumberjanes (Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, and Brooke Allen)
  • Gotham Central (Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark)
  • Rat Queens (Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch)
  • Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
  • Velvet (Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting)
  • Lazarus (Greg Rucka and Michael Lark)
  • Global Frequency (Warren Ellis and various artists)
  • Chew (John Layman and Rob Guillory)
  • Atomic Robo (Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener)

I’ve also been diving into some craft books, and revisiting some others I’ve already read:

  • Words for Pictures – Brian Michael Bendis
  • Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels – Peter David
  • Understanding Comics – Scott McCloud
  • Making Comics – Scott McCloud
  • Save the Cat – Blake Snyder

Lessons learned so far

Transcribe

One of the best things I did in trying to deepen my understanding of the differences between writing prose and writing for comics was to open my copy of Saga Vol. 1 and transcribe the finished comic back into a script, trying to capture the visuals, emotion, and to see how much text fit on the page.

Saga, Issue #1 page 1. From Image Comics. (C) Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

 

Script != Finished Page != Script

The biggest challenge I’ve faced so far coming to comics writing is that the finished product is drastically different from the working document that a comics writer will produce. When learning prose writing, you can look at a piece of fiction and see the final draft as the actual product. But in comics, there’s so much of a collaboration and melding of the styles and skills of several creators (sometimes as many as six: writer, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, editor, graphic designer) that a writer’s script is only one part of the equation. For me, that makes it harder to tease out where my part is, especially writing without having yet found any collaborators. I want to write some scripts and see how well my novelist chops translate before trying to make finished comics, and then start reaching out when I’m confident that I’ve learned the comics form well enough to start making professional works.

Basically, It’s Writer Multi-Classing

I’ve written seven novels (two of which are trunked, never to be seen again), and a long novella, as well as a couple dozen short stories. In D&D terms, I’m somewhere in the 3-5th level in terms of my Prose Writer class. But this, this is taking a new class – Comics Writer. There are different skills, different class abilities, and a whole power tree of collaboration powers for when you’re in a party with other comics creators. So while my overall Writer level combines my Prose Writer and Comics Writer levels (like a Wizard taking a level of a prestige class), my Comics Writer level is still 1 right now, so there’s a weird feeling of starting over, of going back to square one. I know a lot about storytelling, but the format, the medium is very different, and I’m having to learn to adjust to it, just like I adjusted from storytelling in RPGs to storytelling in prose.

Choosing Your Moment

Since the comics form is one where moments (panels) are compressed into a fluid narrative experience by the reader, one of the most important tasks for a creator is to chose your moments, to pick which snapshot in the action to depict in a panel, as well as how to space out your moments – several panels showing moments very close together, or jumping farther in time between panels. This is not unlike the task of scene selection in prose writing, or picking where to dramatize within a scene, but it’s very much its own thing in comics.

The Business End

I work in SF/F prose publishing. I’ve been learning about the trade publishing industry, and SF/F prose publishing in specific, for around a decade. It has certain processes, customs, and paths to publication.

Comics, unsurprisingly, is different. I’ve asked questions about submission and breaking in to creators and publisher staffers at the various comic-cons I’ve attended, and I’ve received incredibly divergent answers.

Here’s how to break in, as I’ve been told:

  • Self-publish your own works and the editors will find you.
  • Send everything you make to the editors you want to work with.
  • Pay an artist to do a whole graphic novel and then try to sell it to publishers.
  • Pitch editors with ideas and then they’ll ask for scripts. Then they’ll find you an artist.
  • Submit a complete 8-page comic.
  • Submit a full 22-page comic.
  • Self-publish for a while and then try to pitch a new project to publishers.
  • Look for comics anthology invites and start there.

As you might be able to tell, that’s a fair range. The fact that I have several novels out from traditional publishers changes the game for me somewhat, but it doesn’t give me one clear path to publication. In prose publishing, you can query agents, who then pitch to editors. There are other paths as well, but this is the ‘standard’ path. Comics doesn’t seem to have as clear a ‘standard’ path to publication. (Note that the standard path in prose publishing is often anything but easy. But it is the default, one that takes an unpublished debut work and then gets it sold to a publisher).

As you’ll note, this post says ‘Part One.’ I’ll keep talking about my experiences moving into comics writing, both to remember what the process was like, and to (hopefully) cast some light on the journey for other writers interested in moving into comics, either from a prose background or not.

Just Keep Swimming

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You know how ducks swimming along look all chill, but if you look under the water, they’re paddling away? That’s me, right now. I’ve got a bunch of balls in the air, so I’ve been spending more time traveling for work, writing, and submitting than on blogging.

Here’s what I’m up to right now:

1) Doing a read-through of Hexomancy to set revision objectives. I’m 251 pages into a 318 page document, and so far, I think Hexomancy is the sharpest, most fun Ree Reyes story yet. I’m really happy with the rough, so I think revision should go fairly smooth.

2) Working with Agent Sara on project proposals to send out into the world. This includes the project Formerly Known As Metaphysical Fencing Academy as well as another project from from PITCHAPALOOZA. The third thing prepping to make the rounds is a Shiny New Idea that I’m particularly excited about.

3) Developing the Shiny New Idea. Said Shiny New Idea is especially exciting because it was created in direct response to my Business Brain going to Creative Brain like it was a TV executive or an editor and said “Hey, Creative Brain. I want to do X thing, business-wise, so bring me a saleable idea that fits models X and Y, preferably in Genre Q.” And Shiny New Idea was the result. I have so many different ideas that I get excited by that it was actually fun to give myself a market-based challenge, saying “I dare you (self) to come up with something cool that fits this business agenda,” and then to do it.

Guacamelee art - by Drink Box Studios

Guacamelee – by Drink Box Studios

In addition, I’ve been really enjoying a video game called Guacamelee, a Castlevania/Metroid-style Mexican Fantasy game starring a Luchador. It’s pleasantly bonkers, and really rather hard, especially since my USB controller doesn’t work with my laptop. I’d play on my desktop, but that’s hooked up to my standing desk, and I’m still recovering from the knee injury from back in February (I got X-Rays, so Medical Responses are in progress).

Other than that, I’m coming up to NYC this weekend to lead a Writecraft workshop at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn. Hope to see you there!

Marie Brennan Interview

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Back in the day, when I was a fresh-faced n00b writer, I joined a writers group, including the Aggressively Competent Marie Brennan, about to debut with Doppelganger (now titled Warrior) from Warner-Aspect. Marie and I met through a gaming troupe, and it’s been a pleasure to watch her steady career growth, including a huge step up with her Memoirs of Lady Trent series (starting with A Natural History of Dragons, continuing with The Tropic of Serpents, both from Tor books)

Marie is a dear friend, so I was excited to catch up with her and share our conversation with you all.

First, a quick Bio for Marie:

Marie Brennan is a former academic with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which she now puts to rather cockeyed use in writing fantasy. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she spends her time practicing piano, studying karate, and playing a variety of role-playing games.

Marie Brennan

And now, the interview!

Mike Underwood: Can you tell us real quick about your newest projects, Chains and Memory and The Tropic of Serpents?

Marie Brennan: They’re wildly different projects — which is a very good thing! I like getting a change of pace, rather than telling the same type of story over and over and over again. The Tropic of Serpents is the second in the Memoirs of Lady Trent, which is the autobiography of a pseudo-Victorian gentlewoman who travels the world studying dragons. These aren’t your magical, sentient creatures out of Tolkien; dragons in her world are wild animals — but no less wondrous for all of that.

Chains and Memory, on the other hand, is the sequel to a novel I published in 2012, Lies and Prophecy. The Wilders series are urban fantasies . . . or as I sometimes describe them, near-future alternate-history mildly-post-apocalyptic urban fantasies. Pyschic powers have become ubiquitous; the protagonists are college students studying magic and trying to deal with a sudden threat against one of their friends.

MU: Who did you have to kill to get that amazing Todd Lockwood art for the Dragons books?

MB: I could tell you . . . but then I’d have to kill you. 🙂

MU: That’s fair. Have you been in contact with Todd directly, or was he just working off of the manuscript?

MB: I’ve been fortunate enough to meet him a couple of times, usually when I’m passing through Seattle on book tour. We talk a bit, but mostly he works off the notes I send through my editor, describing the material to be included in the image.

MU: When you were writing Isabella’s adventures, did you have the older Isabella’s perspective already in place in the first draft, or did you draft through and then add the older Isabella perspective? What have you found to be the challenges and benefits of writing in this memoir-style POV?

MB: Oh, it’s there from the start. I couldn’t possibly write her narration without keeping in mind the fact that she’s an old woman talking about her youth; I’d end up ripping out 95% of the words and replacing them if I tried to start with the young version and then add in the old one post facto.

The challenge is that you always, always have to bear in mind that your narrator is consciously writing for her audience (i.e. the people in Isabella’s own world). That means there are things she won’t say, maybe because they’re obvious to her readers, maybe because they’re too personal and she’s not going to share them publicly. But since you’re writing for readers in your own world, you have to find a way to get that information in there regardless. On the other hand, the benefit is that she’s very self-reflexive; she can comment (often critically) on her own past decisions and attitudes, which invites the reader to then consider how they judge her judgment, if you follow me. And absolutely everything becomes characterization: I can get away with six straight paragraphs of Isabella describing the Green Hell (the jungle where she spends much of her time in The Tropic of Serpents) because it isn’t just description; it’s also character.

MU: The Wilders books (Lies and Prophecy and Chains of Memory) and  are projects you’ve had in mind for a long time. How has your perspective on the story and the characters changed since you first imagined the story?

MB: In a way, having more than a decade to mull over the story has been a good thing. I came up with the first, early ideas for it not long after I finished the original draft of Lies and Prophecy, nigh on fifteen years ago, but those ideas were just seeds. They took root in my brain and have been growing ever since — and in fact, thinking through Chains and Memory ended up feeding back into the first book as I revised and eventually published it. There are elements of Lies and Prophecy that are there because I thought, okay, if I want to make X be a big issue in the sequel, I need to establish its existence from the start. And oh, huh, if I’m going to be dealing with Y, that would probably change the way these other things get presented early on.

I wouldn’t recommend this process for every series. You have to be really passionate about a story to still care about it and want to write it a decade later. But in the case of the Wilders books, it helped make the whole thing so much richer.

MU: Can you talk about one element from the books that especially benefited from the gestation, without getting too spoiler-y? Are they questions of character, setting, plot?

MB: The biggest example is sort of half-character, half-setting. I originally wrote Lies and Prophecy as a stand-alone book — less because I thought the story itself ended there, more because after that, it didn’t seem like it was the story of my protagonists anymore. It would be in the hands of other characters. But a year or two after finishing the first draft, I realized that the nebulous shreds of additional story floating around my head all had a common element, and that was the wilders: the people born with extraordinarily strong psychic gifts, rather than developing them at puberty.

Julian, one of the two main protagonists, is a wilder, and so I’d thrown bits and pieces of background about that into the first draft of the book. As I started thinking through how I would continue the story in Chains and Memory, he grew immensely as a character, because I had to take those bits and pieces and flesh them out: think through their underpinnings and their effects and what those would mean not just for him, but for all the people like him. So that entire component of the world became 400% richer, and so did he — and by extension Kim, because of her relationship with him.

MU: Very cool. It’s fun to dig back and re-approach works after a long time – I’m so glad that you’ve been able to get the Wilders projects out, since they’ve been with you for so long.

You started with adventure fantasy, then moved on to historical fantasy, and now you’re writing contemporary and secondary world-but-kinda-historical-ish fantasy. Does one of these styles feel the most natural for you? If not, what have you done to make each mode of fantasy fit your writing?

MB: I think historical and historical-ish feel the most natural for me right now, but I also think that’s because they’re what I’ve been doing for about seven years, from the Onyx Court books up through the Memoirs. It’s been a challenge getting back into a more contemporary voice for Chains and Memory. And there’s a short story I’m working on that might become the foundation for either a linked series of stories or maybe some novels, which would be set in a non-historical secondary world; it turns out that those gears in my head are incredibly rusty. I love the inventiveness of it, but I keep reflexively thinking “okay, so what time period and place am I going to base this on?” I have to remind myself that the answer is, none of them. I can steal bits and pieces, but I’m allowed to mix and match them and make new stuff up. You don’t realize how much of a skill that is until you don’t practice it for years!

MU: I love the Driftwood setting, and have for quite a while. Could you talk a bit about how your anthropology/folklore training has impacted the way you construct Driftwood? Also, will we ever find out what’s up with Last? (I don’t have much hope for a straight answer on this one).

MB: You’ll get bits and pieces of his story, the way you have so far — but no, I’m never going to tell you exactly what’s up with him. That would ruin the fun!

Oddly, Driftwood is the setting where I tell myself to throw the anthropology and folklore out the window. My impulse is to try and create coherent, well-knit worlds, where if I say the religion preaches that the soul remains in the body forever after death, I have to think about what the consequences of that would be for funerary practices and property law and all the rest of it. That’s the anthropology talking, trying to make the cultures believable. But Driftwood isn’t about coherence and well-knit worlds: it’s about fragmentation. So I can make up anything I like and chuck in there, because the answer to “what does this mean for property law?” is “their government has fallen apart anyway and there’s only five people left in that world, surrounded by stacks of haunted corpses”. (I just made that idea up while writing this answer, and now I want to make a story out of it.) I sometimes pull bits from things I’ve read about other cultures, but a lot of it is me cutting loose and going way out on a limb.

MU: What are you working on next, writing-wise? Is there a genre, sub-genre, or medium you’d like to work in but haven’t gotten the chance to?

MB: I have one idea for a poem. One. And god help me, it wants to be a sestina. Writing a good sestina when you don’t have any skill at poetry or any other ideas to practice on turns out to be really, really hard.

At the moment I’m drafting Chains and Memory. I’m running a Kickstarter campaign to fund it, since this is a side project of mine; I met my initial goal early on, but there are some stretch goals for which I have my fingers crossed. And then after that, it’s the fourth book of the Memoirs. Fourth out of five, which means I’m already looking ahead to what I’ll do next, even though that’s a couple of years off. I’d like to get a foothold in YA, write for both audiences; the Wilders series is alllllmost YA, but not quite — college is a bit too old for that category.

MU: Could you talk a bit about the way you relate gaming (tabletop and LARP) to writing? Do you have a specific process for adapting material to or from gaming, and if so, could you share it? If not, how has each case been different?

MB: Each case has been different. In a couple of instances I’ve directly adapted bits of plot from a game; that happened with Midnight Never Come (and to a lesser extent A Star Shall Fall), and with my novelette “False Colours.” But even in those cases, what I’ve done is taken a few plot points, then said, okay, if I’m going to make those happen, what framework can I build to hold them? And the framework itself is new invention. Usually the connection is looser, though. I have an idea for a YA series that would involve taking the background I made up for my character and making that the actual story.

The two major skills I take away from gaming are character and “narrative space” — those coming from the player and game master angles, respectively. As a player, I live very intensely in the head of a single character, which means I get to know them much better than the characters of my novels, who have to share my attention with everybody else in the book. Doing that helps me port the skills over. As a game master, I make my job easier if I lay down a foundation of material within which the story can happen: political factions, different types of conflict, etc. In a game, that means the players can run around more freely, and I can easily respond on the fly. In a novel, it gives me a whole array of tools I can choose from when I’m halfway through the book and need the protagonist to find an ally or screw something up. If you want a non-game example of the latter, look no further than the dinner party in Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign. She didn’t have to invent things to make that party a flaming trainwreck for the characters; she just had to take the things she already had and put them in a room together. The result was spectacular.

MU: If you could train with the greatest master ever of any martial art/weapon form ever known, who/what would it be, and why?

MB: Inigo Montoya.

Was there every any doubt? He’s the reason I studied fencing in the first place. Of course I would leap at the chance to train with him.

MU: What is your favorite RPG system so far, and what makes it your favorite?

MB: I’ve become intensely fond of Legend of the Five Rings — to the point that I’m a freelancer for the RPG line now. The setting is fantasy, but inspired by Japanese history, and it’s amazingly rich: there are many different interesting factions, a thousand years of in-world backstory, and lots of little cultural details of the sort that most RPGs don’t bother with. (How many game lines devote part of their books to talking about the customs surrounding birth, marriage, and death, and how these vary from clan to clan? How many games go off onto random deep-dives about sake brewing or poetry?) The richness of the setting can be a little intimidating for newcomers, but if you’re the sort of person who digs the immersiveness of it, it’s incredibly rewarding.

MU: Major love for L5R from me, too. What would you say is your favorite clan and favorite sourcebook, and why?

MB: Dragon Clan, all the way! I actually got into freelancing for AEG because of a sidebar in the book Imperial Histories that talks about what the Empire might have been like had a different Kami won the tournament to rule it. The sidebar says that had Togashi (the founder of the Dragon Clan) won, Rokugan would have been much more like the world of a wuxia film. I loved that idea enough to write an alternate-universe version of the setting called “The Togashi Dynasty,” which ended up being published in Imperial Histories 2. The Dragon are well-suited to mysterious, mystical kinds of stories, and those are exactly the kind of thing I dig.

But one of the main strengths of L5R is that I can totally understand why somebody might be a fan of any of the clans. They all have their selling points, and even if a given one isn’t my cup of tea, I don’t doubt that it’s somebody’s. Because of that, my favorite sourcebook (so far) is probably a toss-up between The Great Clans, which spends an entire chapter exploring each of them in detail, and Emerald Empire, which is basically the anthropology book of the setting. I think I knew I was going to love L5R when I discovered there was a whole book that had not just mechanics, but chapters on religion and law enforcement and social customs and more.

—

Be sure to check out Marie’s Kickstarter for Chains of Memory, the second of the Wilders books – it’s in the final days, and is moving forward to some excellent stretch goals.

And while you’re at it, check out one of her novels or stories via her website.

 

SHIELD AND CROCUS is here!

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Today is the day!

You can get Shield and Crocus on Amazon as well as several different bookstores. It’s also available in audiobook, performed by the amazing Luke Daniels.

If you’d like to read a preview first, Tor.com has you covered.

What have others been saying about it?

“…with Shield and Crocus, everything I love in a summer blockbuster. was contained between two covers. I think it’s safe to say that summer is officially here.”
-Eric Christensen, Fantasy Faction

“Blindingly creative, Shield and Crocus delivers action-packed, four-color fantasy with a lot of heart.”
-Michael J. Martinez, author of The Daedalus Incident

“Audec-Hal is a city where dispassionate robots co-exist with mad sorcerers and unpredictable storms that warp the fabric of reality itself. Fans of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station or David Edison’s The Waking Engine will surely enjoy the mad inventiveness on display here.”
-Marie Brennan, author of A Natural History of Dragons

“The book is fast-paced, especially impressive considering the amount of world-building. The fight is desperate. The tyrants are villains in the truest sense. Superheroes + Epic Fantasy = Awesomeness.”
-Beth Cato, author of Clockwork Dagger

“I can’t say enough about the mythology and the world building. Underwood put a lot of thought into constructing the world of Audec-Hal, and it shows.”
-Beauty in Ruins

 

 

The Editorial Process: Part One – The Editorial Letter

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My editorial letter for The Younger Gods arrived today.

For those not familiar with the process, here’s a quick summary. When I submit a novel to my editor, they read it, think, write notes, and usually send me both a letter and in-line notes in the manuscript. The in-line notes are more zoomed-in, focusing on individual moments, while the editorial letter is an overview.

For me, the editorial letter is the real gold. It’s a 5-10 page essay from a smart, invested reader, entirely oriented toward helping me make my work better. It can be intimidating. In fact, I’ve been living kind of in fear of this editorial letter, since I knew there was a lot to be done on this project.

But as I said on Twitter: Editorial letters are like removing band-aids. The fear of how much it will heart is worse than the short sting of reality.

Taking critique, even very supportive critique like most editorial letters are, can be painful.

Here’s how I handle it:

  1. Download editorial letter.
  2. Be afraid for 20 minutes, trying to do anything else.
  3. Steel self to the necessity of reading the letter.
  4. Read letter.
  5. Immediately walk away.
  6. Come back a couple hours (or a day, if you have the time) later, and go back over the letter, now that my emotions have calmed down.
  7. Start brainstorming a plan.
  8. Find someone to talk things over with. This is usually my fiance, who is a fabulous beta reader. When I can, I also talk to my editor directly, to work things through and accelerate my process of going from “How do I do all of this!” to “Here’s the plan.”
  9. Get started. And that’s Part Two, which I’ll write once I’m done with Part One for this project.

How To Write a Novel in Four Weeks

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…if you’re me, writing Hexomancy.

Because that’s what I did. And I’m still kind of reeling. Hexomancy came out about twice as quickly as I’ve ever written a novel before.

Yeah, so that was a bit link-baity of a title, but this whole thing is still kind of crazy to me, so I’m still processing.

I started writing the novel on April 14th, and I finished on May 15th. I took several days off (mostly Saturdays), and had a couple of low-production days. But the net effect is that I wrote a complete rough draft of 72,326 words in 28 days of production.

Here are the factors that went in to my being able to write a complete, if short, draft in just over a month of calendar time.

1) This is the fourth Ree Reyes story, following two novels and a novella. By now, I know the characters, they have pre-existing relationships that I can leverage into lots of tension and sparks, making interpersonal scenes zoom along fairly well. I had a clear vision of what the big concept for the novel was, what the major sub-plot would be, and what the big, explosive ending would be. Those all got me very excited to write the novel, so I started with a ton of energy, writing 15K words in the first week.

2) The series is designed to be light, energetic, and action-packed urban fantasy. Much of the setting is our own world, and most of the rest of the setting I’d already created in previous books in the series. This means I didn’t have to do much world development on top of what I already had, which might slow me down as I have to create whole new systems or settings before moving on with a scene. I broke down the new settings during the outline stage, so I knew enough about each of them to flesh them out on the fly as I wrote. If I were writing sociological SF that was light on action and long on politics, I don’t think I’d have been writing anywhere near as fast.

3) Most importantly (for me), I plotted out the whole novel before I started writing. This was a chapter-by-chapter outline, though some of my chapters were more like beats, as I discovered going through and seeing places where a beat was a chapter, or a chapter turned out to be just a beat. I’ve been outlining more and more for my work, between reading Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K, following Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds, and perhaps most importantly, taking the Writing on the Fast Track class with Mary Robinette Kowal, which focused on writing fast by outlining and training for better discipline.

 

My next step, aside from backing the MSS up across several platforms, and sleeping, is to let the manuscript sit for about a month before I go back to do anything. I made some notes of stuff to fix while I was going, so I can start with that, then do a read-through to identify revision objectives.

But the awesome thing? My deadline to turn this novel in is mid-November, exactly six months from now. I’ve got *plenty* of time for revision, even with a super-busy summer.

HEXOMANCY Begins + Process Hacks

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I started writing Hexomancy on Monday, and in two days, I’ve hit 5583 words. I’m hoping that this is something of a sustainable pace, since a 2500 words a day pace would be more than double my production rate on The Younger Gods.

What’s different? A few things:

1) This is the fourth Ree Reyes story, so I know the characters, the world, and the tone.

2) My outlining work for Hexomancy is an order of magnitude more detailed than what I did for The Younger Gods – I’m outlining down to scene beats, rather than overall story beats. (For context, when I started writing Geekomancy, I had a sense of what the ending would be, and that was about it. I went in and plotted more after starting, so I had a bit more direction).

3) I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve got lots of irons in the fire, and if I want to produce work fast enough to keep up with the various series I’ve got going, I need to work faster.

4) To that end, focus. I’ve been more dilligent about closing out all of my browser windows and making writing time be just for writing.

5) Splitting the time – rather than trying to get all of my words in all at once, I’ve been writing in 45-minute to 1-hour chunks. My writing brain often slacks off after 60 minutes, so I’d rather get two sessions at higher efficiency than one longer session where the last 1/3 is like pulling teeth.

 

So far, it’s working really well. Life will inevitably throw me some curveballs that will threaten this new habit, but I’m going to do my damndest to keep up the pace, though I’m also going to be wary of burnout. Novel writing is a marathon, not a sprint, and hitting 20K in a week and a half isn’t worth much if I then have to take a month off.

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The Fear (Revision, Critiques, and the Liberation of Doing)

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Back in February, my fiance and I moved across town to a new home – and since it was a short-distance move, we broke it down into a number of waves. That had the overall effect of reducing the amount of stress on any one day, but it ended up getting spread across the month, spreading out the stress. I could have managed the schedule better, especially since it was a also a busy time for my fiance at work.

The thing that made the whole process more problematic, no matter what form it takes, is my strong aversion to moving. Something about putting my whole life in boxes, in de-nesting, is really emotionally taxing for me. I moved several times as a kid (IN->TX->NY->NJ->IN) and the stress of moving seems to get an automatic critical for double emotional submission damage.

Not working on writing due to free time going to moving plus the stress of moving meant that when I did get to sit down and look through the critiques from my beta readers for The Younger Gods, it all seemed a bit too much. I got The Fear. The ‘Oh crap this book is garbage I can’t possibly fix it,’ kind of Fear that is totally baseless and is just self-doubt wearing context-specific armor and dual-wielding fatigue and not-having-written anxiousness.

After a day or two of letting The Fear get to me, I decided to just start working. I picked a couple of small changes and fixes to make, and I did them, ignoring what at the time seemed like a huge pile of ‘impossible’ work.

Surprise surprise – once I got started working, The Fear receded. This is something I’ve faced before. If I spend too long not working on something for writing, whatever I’m supposed to be doing seems more and more intimidating. In reality, the day-by-day effort of working on novels, stories, or even promotional admin keeps The Fear at bay.

Put me down as a ‘make sure to always be working on something’ kind of writer. I still sometimes need fallow periods after big pushes, but I think I’m the sort that always needs to be tending to the irons on the fire. Luckily, I have a lot of irons.