Working on my Mojo

 

Since Christmas, things have been getting better, but I still haven't quite managed to get into my writing groove. However, I have started making models of the character mecha in my books. You can see what I'm doing over on my other blog.

I like turning ideas into things. The act of creating a model inspires ideas; a bit like playing when I was a child. My imagination takes over, and ideas for stories take shape.

In the meantime, I'm editing my next novel, The Bureau.

I've also started a short story called, Omake; the tale of a little lost robot and its companion. I shall try and sell that to a magazine.

And finally, I've been working on Two Moons, restructuring the order of scenes and inserting new scenes in the earlier parts as foreshadowing for what happens later.

Two Moons Progress

When writing a story I prefer to start with the seven point novel structure.

My first three novels were action adventures. This means you have a leader who is surrounded by a team to solve the problems they face.

Two Moons, and my other novel The Bureau, are effectively mysteries.

So a center person solves the puzzle, and has others do the physical action, provide humour and perspective, with a fixer, and a boss that the team reports to. This has totally discombobulated me.

Last time I mentioned Two Moons, I was at 14,856 words. I've stalled and restarted this work several times over the last few months just because the narrative is driven by a different set of needs.

Who would've thought, huh!?

Anyway, I'm now entering the middle of the story, running at 32,714 words. Here's a taste of the opening of Two Moons.

TRANSCENDENCE 

I wake in the darkness, stretched out on a cold surface. The air musty from the passage of time. Only the sound of my breath fills the silence.
   "Is anyone there?' My voice echoes around me.
   A soothing voice replies, "You are safe."
   Emotions rush through me. A sadness that is full of grief and loss. "Are you my mother?"
   "No, I am a machine. You can call me mother, if you wish."
   My senses adjust, the reality of the room coalesces around me. Machinery lines the walls, and in the center I lie on a table, with tubes that snake up from my body into a machine.
   Confused, I ask, "What is happening? Where am I?"
   "You are being cared for. The facility exists to create life."
   The answer triggers a flood of jumbled memories.
   This is where we changed the genetic heritage of my kind. A place where the seeds of all life can be shaped. A place where our learning is recorded for all time.
   I am last of my kind, trapped in a secure facility, all alone, waiting to die.

The Stars are Not Quite Right

The London night sky, and no you can't see that many stars with the naked eye.

My first version of The Bureau was written as a graphic novel, planned to be a six-issue series, I wrote three 28 page episodes. When I word processed the script this became 15,214 words, but only 7,905 words of that were prose. The reduction came from the removal of frame descriptions (size and placement instructions etc.).

My first draft grew to 12,285 words when I created the first Scrivener document, and I expanded it to 46,803 words, and before I went back to a day job it had grown to 51,008 and 37 chapters. My goal for January has been to finish the project.

I've failed. Hence the the title of this piece. But, even in failure there is progress.

I now have 39 chapters and 62,053 words down. I'm so close to finishing the story, but the ending is proving elusive.

Every time I think I have it, I remember I must go back and add an element to foreshadow what I want to describe. In the process of doing so I keep finding errors, typos and missing words, which of course throws me out of my creative writing.

This means I need to push a bit harder and get the job done. Wish me luck.

The Bureau: It's Alive!

H. P. Lovecraft creator of the Cthulhu Mythos.

If you have scrolled down the page lately, you will have seen my new progress statement about my first novel, The Bureau.  It had been relegated to my metaphorical bottom draw.  Reviewing my files and blog entries, I see that the last time I did any significant amount of work on it was back in January 2015.  The project has, up to now, been well and truly stuck.

My excuse is that the story was in the grip of Eldritch forces, but now the stars have moved it has escaped.

The truth is a little bit more complicated than that.  I first started writing The Bureau back circa 1986 and it was my attempt to write a six issue comic that would be turned into a graphic novel.  My inspiration came from watching a highly acclaimed series on the BBC called the Edge of Darkness.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I was playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu games at the time.  They were a lot of fun, and I have many fond memories of my friend Kevin running campaigns, where invariably we all went mad.

Anyway, inspired by these two things, I had an idea to write a Lovecraftian comic book story that rifted on Edge of Darkness.  I managed to complete three episodes of my story.  My friend Alex Stewart read the first them and commented that The Bureau felt like Lovecraft meets The Professionals, which is a great pitchline.  Unfortunately, the artist, who I was thinking of working with, told me he couldn't draw what I was writing.

That as they say put a damper on things.

A little later my life became very difficult, and everything got put aside, because I had to go off and work to make money to have somewhere to live.  This meant I dropped out of writing thirteen years, and it wasn't until 2004 that I found my hand written first draft, and I decided to copy type my manuscript onto the computer, with the intent to turn it into a novel.

And again, life got in the way, in the shape of going off to train to become a cognitive behavioral therapist.

So another eight years passed until I dug The Bureau out to start working on it again.  But then I got side-tracked by Bad Dog, and being so inspired by the setting that I had to write two sequels to it.  Since then I've tried restarting The Bureau on two occasions, and managed to add scenes to the story, but basically I was stuck.

The reasons for this weren't immediately obvious, but with hindsight they clearly are.

This insight came from following various blogs around the web that talk about publishing.  Dean Wesley Smith and Kristin Rusch have both talked about writing and publishing.  What they write may upset you, but it's better to be upset and knowledgeable than ignorant, and end up being disappointed.

Anyway, they made me rethink my assumptions about what I was doing.

I realized that The Bureau was my first novel.  It had become my preciousness, and I was trapped by expectations I could never realistically meet.  Those were rooted in beliefs from the past about writing the best first novel that one could.  But the harsh truth is that failing to finish writing a novel is more of a problem than failing to write the breakout novel that in one's imagination will sweep the world off its feet, and show people how brilliant your are.

For one very simple reason, no one can judge my writing if I haven't written anything.  Besides, if my first novel is so wonderful, how on Earth would I ever be able to write something that was better?

And that was the trap I was caught in.

Realizing that, all my assumptions fell away, and I was able to sit down and revise the structure of the story and just like that everything fell into place.  All my clever tricks I had wheeled out when writing The Bureau I could now see were getting in the way of finishing the story.

To finish my piece today, I had one other insight, courtesy of Kristin Rusch, from her post here:

The book is giving me fits, because I can’t seem to nail down the structure.  I write books out of order, as those of you who followed me through The Freelancer’s Survival Guide know.  I wish I could change this process, but my mind sees books as a mosaic instead of as something linear.  When I finish, I have to construct the book, rather like a quilter with scraps of fabric.  If I put the scraps together one way, I have one kind of book.  If I put them together in another, I have a completely different book.

Until I read this, I though I was the only person doing this.  I made an assumption that other writers either outlined or wrote a story instinctively discovering the story as they wrote it.  I thought I was the only person who shuffled scenes around to fit the story.

Again, as they say, live and learn.

Work in Progress: 21st Jan 2015

Another week of writing has passed.  Looking at my diary where I log my writing progress I see I've been mostly working on articles for Miniature Wargames & Battlegames magazine.  So over the last week I've written 10,049 words spread across the five articles.  All of the articles require me to go off and check what I'm saying is right, and this takes time.  More time than I would like.  This means that no one article is finished, so I've decided I need to focus on one of them and finish it

As for my novel The Bureau I've been distracted, for reasons see above.

I've been using this distraction to think about stuff that's niggling me about the plot of my fourth novel, and by plot I really mean story.  The difference between plot and story is that the first is structural and the second is what scenes you choose to write to tell the story.  The latter has been my main stumbling block, because having taken the novel out of the bottom draw after 25 years I've forgotten how a lot of scenes were supposed to connect to one another.

So that's it until next time.

Edit:  I forgot to add that this week I received another rejection for my short story Territory, which is obviously a bit of disappointment, but I it had a nice line that while the story was not what the editor was looking for, he hoped to see more stories from me in the future.  This was very heartening, because it's the firsts sign I've had that an editor thought what I'd written was promising.

Addendum: You may have noted I've revised the tags under the labels column, as is my won't.  In this case to reduce the list down to a more manageable size to scroll down.  So all TV series and Films will fall under the appropriate tag, rather than adding a separate entry for each.

RoboCop

We rewatched RoboCop over the Xmas holidays and decided to take a chance on the reboot and compare the films.  I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by how good the RoboCop reboot was.  The original Paul Verhoeven RoboCop is one of those iconic films that people still talk about nearly thirty years after its release.  The themes of the story still resonate today, and the new film had a lot to measure up to.

The new RoboCop is billed both as a remake and reboot of the original, and of all the sequels I will say it's the best.  It's a remake because it essentially retells the same story, and a reboot because it takes a different slant on the themes.  For me the changes were welcome, because they made the story feel fresh; as in looking at things the original didn't really address.  Also the ED209 scenes, both in Tehran and Detroit, were stunningly good.

However, the original is still the best, because the execution of the ideas were original.

The new RoboCop has some wonderful scenes, and it does talk more about what it means to be human.  Michael Keaton is chillingly good, Gary Oldman plays an interestingly conflicted good guy, and Samuel L Jackson is the man, which I think sums up the weakness of the new movie.  Peter Weller owned the role in the original film, whereas Joel Kinnaman is outshone by his supporting cast, because at best he's riffing off Peter Weller's performance, and at worse is rather bland with none of the nice touches Peter Weller brought to his relationship to his son's interests.

Moving on.

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag of stuff.  Still not really into the groove, but I'm getting there.  I added another 3,168 words to The Bureau, but then found a scene in the wrong place (as in moved to the wrong chapter during my last round of edits, which was a bit of an oops moment).  Banged head on table a few times.  Wrote a new chapter that went places I wasn't expecting it to go when I started, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that it expands the story, bad as in I have to think about the character's story arc and retrofit stuff in.  So the current novel stands at 50,996 words.

The weekend was a fun filled trip to the Natural History Museum to see Sophie the stegosaurus with our godchildren.  Got home to find a pipe was leaking in the flat, and managed to sprain my wrist moving all the stuff in the cupboard out of the way to be able to get at it.  Been in a lot of pain and was worried I might have triggered my rheumatoid arthritis, but it seems I'm OK.

One final note.  I have, as is my wont, gone back through all my posts and revised titles and tags of my posts.  I had one of those moments when one realizes that if I kept the Writer Log title for those posts that only talk about what I've been working on, it would make it easier to keep track of those posts – well at least for me.  As for tags, I have the habit of revising them as and when needed to keep the labels functional so that when one is searching for something one can find it. No point having a tag if it doesn't do that.  Of course one can always use Google to search my blog if you want, but not everyone wants to cut and paste URLs to do so.

So thank you for reading.  That's it for another week.

Grimm

As I said here we really got bitten by season one of Grimm, and my partner went and ordered season two, which we are now nearly at the end of watching.  Seriously addictive fun, and it is nice to see the format of the show develop with all the hints about the background of the world.  While the cast is largely male centric it does have several strong female characters, and it passes the Bechdel test too.  So highly recommended.

Work wise this week I've started my fourth novel, which was the one I abandoned back at the beginning of last year to write my Military SF trilogy.  This one's working title is The Bureau, which will be changed as and when I can decide on a better name for it.  The first couple of days were spent picking apart the earlier draft and compiling a version that I was happier with.  The next day was spent redoing the outline and putting in a five act structure, adding characters to the story bible, and doing research.

By end of all that I was feeling less than awesome, because it's a lot of work that doesn't feel like one has a lot to show for it, but as they say writing is writing.  Got down to drafting the first new chapter one, to replace the old chapter one and managed to 3,258 words done this week.  This brings the first draft up to 21,789 words.  I've also realized that I wrote 18,552 words last year that I hadn't accounted for, but I've decided to compile them with this years totals instead, just because I can really.

Bludgeoning a Novel

Yesterday I took out my first ever novel The Bureau, and beat it into submission.  Having just finished the first draft of my third novel, Bad Dog I could now look back on my first born, see the problems I was having with it, and why they were problems.  We don't talk about the second born as that was terminated due to not owning the IP for the setting.

The title for my first novel was The Bureau, which got a big thumbs down on the writing course I attended a little while ago.  Once I explained why it was called The Bureau people understood, but felt that it lacked punch.  So today after beating the words I had written into a different shape I'm thinking of going with State of Mind as the title (update I changed my mind, and went back to The Burea until something better comes to mind).

Pitch line for State of Mind aka The Bureau WIP: The Professionals meets Call of Cthulhu.

Synopsis:  Two men face a darkness that leads to reality changing around them.  One thinks he is going mad, while the other runs from organized crime lords. Two stories, one dark truth.

Let me know what you think.