Last Tuesday, I began a short story, a dark fantasy based loosely on the penultimate chapter of Papillon, telling the story of the demon-fed plague, but from the Rat King’s point of view. It was a blast to write, and I got down 4500 words in one day. Then I was hit by a truck, and I haven’t been able to write very much at all.
But this is the first paragraph. I’m pleased with it.
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… the last two words I typed today.
“Papillon” stands at 112,243 words at the end of the first draft. Nine chapters. 176 single-spaced pages.
73 days, 435 cups of coffee, 26 cups of tea, two terrible hangovers, forty gallons of sweat - and I’m finished!
Now I have about two and a half weeks of off-time before we jet to Bali. So much time to fill. What do you non-writers do with your lives?
I guess I will turn my attentions to mastering the banjo.
… just kidding. The Tournament of Titillation approaches! I must generate content! In exchange for you guys reading my boring descriptions of the novel-writing process, I will fête you royally throughout August! It will be so exciting!
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Papillon’s at about 110,000 words. I’ll finish it tomorrow. I will … finish … my first novel … tomorrow.
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“Your word is like unto a bucket of shit.”
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Papillon is at 102,133 words. This probably seems like a less important milestone than yesterday’s. And it would be - to the casual observer! To the learned, though, today’s milestone is COLOSSAL, for I finished writing “The Reign of Vermin”, the eighth (of nine) and by far the longest chapter. And it’s a jim-dandy-fine chapter, too - it probably contains the best writing in the book, and it’s the culmination of the themes and characters I’ve worked so hard to implement. There’s one more short chapter left, and I almost feel like I should make it an epilogue. Structurally, the novel’s over. In terms of character and theme, I have a lot left to do. Also, the action of this planned chapter is actually what I conceived first; it’s important to ME. The reader, as always, will just have to quit his gol-durn belly-achin’ and enjoy it!
I intended to write some about the immediate future of this website, but now it’s time to go home! So off I go!
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Hurrah!
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Papillon’s at 91,500 words, right at quota! Hurrah! This book is totally not going to be finished at the 100,000 word mark. I still have three major scenes to write, and have to insert that segment way back in chapter IV. Maybe 120. It will be nice to have something else to talk about, eh?
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Papillon’s at 87,000 words. As I come closer to the end, I realize that this will probably be a 110 or 120,000 word first draft. Good or bad? Who knows. All I know is I have really, really got to finish by August 9th, when we head to Bali. I will NOT go on vacation with a 95% finished novel, like I did with the last one, even if it means writing 5,000 words a day. No way. This novel is too good to do that too. Oh, yes.
… the artistic process isn’t that exciting to watch, is it? Sure, there’s a lot of mental wrestling in the crafting of a narrative. How do I decide what the characters? What comes next? What each scene, symbol, and line of dialogue means? But ultimately it comes down to: “I wrote X words today; I will write X words tomorrow; and so on, until it’s done.”
That is all!
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Papillon topped 80,000 today. Exhilarating to think I could be done within two weeks. “Exhilarating” is a word I can never spell right on the first try - one of the few!
I just finished reading “Starship Troopers,” by Robert Heinlein. I have many well-formed thoughts on this book that I will not put down now. All I can say is, damn, Paul Verhoeven was so far off the mark that he had no idea there even was a mark. Satire is only effective if we can tell recognize its subject; if the title did not link the book and the film, you would be excused for not realizing one is (very loosely) based off the other. (Of course, Verhoeven admitted that he never even read the book. Oi. Is understanding of one’s subject necessary for effective satire? Methinks.)
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Papillon’s at 76,500 words. By the end of the month, I’ll be - done!
In other news, I was interviewed at Space Westerns. I don’t come off as too pretentious, either - just pretentious enough!
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Strangely, when I mentioned bird flu on here the other day, my journal got linked to on several bird flu blog-watching sites, which amuses me deeply. Let’s see if it works again!
Papillon is at 72,000 words. I think the current part is very strong dramatically, but it has almost no jokes. I’ve found that one of the hardest things to do as a writer, after one has mastered crafting compelling plots and complex characters, of course, is maintaining tone. This is especially difficult over the course of an entire novel. Tone, you see, is a product of many things: my precise mood when sitting down to write, my caffeine level, whatever music may be playing nearby, the weather, etc. It is less frequently a product of intention. “Papillon” is particularly difficult in regards to tone. I want it to be fundamentally serious, if absurd, but not funny-absurd, but sprinkled with many hilarious jokes that amuse and inspire laughter but don’t detract from the impact of the drama. This tone is a knife edge!
Some good examples are the television shows “Deadwood” and “The Wire”. Each features uncompromising verisimilitude in acting, direction, and dialogue; the quality of those elements makes for wrenching, highly effective drama. Yet each show is frequently side-splittingly hilarious. It is a mark of incredible skill that they can have a foot in comedy and drama without falling into the respective pit-traps of farce or maudlinism. The two elements complement each other exceedingly well. Comedy relieves the tension of drama, and drama keeps the characters relevant and interesting. Leavening comedy with drama means not letting your jokes get the better of your characters, cannibalizing them for laughs - see the past ten years of “The Simpsons.”
(”Farscape,” that sweetest of shows, is not a good example of the balance I’m talking about; it falls into farce and camp, and leaps the fence again, with the greatest aplomb, and it always works. As far as I know, it is unique in this respect. The works of Joss Whedon are a better example.)
Why is this approach so effective? Because it most resembles life, methinks. Life is alternately difficult and joyous. We laugh and cry; works that evoke both reactions fire all our emotional cylinders. I keep going to television shows - something like “Heroes” leans too far to the drama camp, and, when watching it, the absurdity of so many straight lines in a row, with no one cracking a joke, simply strikes you as unrealistic. This quickly devolves to tedium (an unfortunate victim of lowest common denominator scripting). Purely comical works, though, become amusing nothings; enjoyable whilst consuming them, but forgotten within days or hours.
“The Office” strikes the sublime balance of which I speak; a comedy that doesn’t forget its characters.
The works of Sinclair Lewis often do this. What else? Glancing at my bookshelf: Eco, Philip Jose Farmer, Heinlein, Terry Pratchett (sometimes), George MacDonald Fraser, Balzac, Roald Dahl, Steinbeck.
I’m not saying that this is essential to producing great works. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Hemingway are not known for their ability to make jokes. I am saying that great works can be produced this way.
What say you, dear reader?
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Papillon is at 67,500 words - right at quota! It’s been so long since I could say that. On Friday, I’ll break 70,00. That Herodotus quote really did the trick.
I’m reading “The Great Mortality”, by John Kelly, about the Black Death epidemic of the 14th century. It’s incredible. The devastation wreaked by the plague is hard to imagine; twenty-five million dead in Europe alone, and another fifty million in China. I don’t really have any way to describe it.
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It’s been three days! Oh, no!
Papillon is at 65,000 words. I’m about a thousand behind. Last weekend was crappy for writing, and it looks like tomorrow I’ll have some extra school botheration that may slow me down. I should at least make quota, though I won’t close the gap any.
65,000! Wow! I’ve got the rest of the novel plotted out. I even have three more chapter titles for you.
VI. Justice
VII. Arabia in Perfumed Splendor
VIII. The Reign of Vermin
And then there will be two more chapters, and then the end!
I came across this quote of Herodotus the other day:
“Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; While others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.”
And I thought, damn, that’s just what happened with my last novel. And I realized that I was slacking on my current novel, and resolved to exert more vigorous efforts than ever before!
I plan on expanding the chapter “Wondrous Light and Color” by at least 5,000 more words. Then I can’t imagine writing “Reign of Vermin” and the final chapters in less than 40,000, which means that my novel might come out at around 120,000, which is 20,000 more than I originally intended. I intend on eliminating the easy and stupid jokes on the rewrite, so that should trim out 15,000 easily.
Enough about that! What else is going on? Well, I’m thinking of becoming a fan of They Might Be Giants. Opinions?
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Today saw the creation of an excoriating monologue. Who was the object of this monologue, you ask? God. He gets a stern comeuppance! Presumably He recovers.
Tomorrow: pirates! And the return of two fun characters, including the always colorful Captain Septimus Petit.
My first impulse was to hyphenate “always colorful”. Why? “Always” is an adverb. Since when do we hyphenate adverbs and adjectives? The same impulse gives us “well-known” instead of “well known” or “well-liked” or any of these other abominations, become acceptable by “merit” of usage. Bah. Bah. Prescriptivists unite!
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Slow but sure. 57,100 words. I had to skip over a portion because I don’t yet have the books I need. It’s weird. I’ve never done that before. I always write novels linearly, starting with chapter one and finishing with chapter (whatever). I never skip around. But this time I didn’t have a choice. Material on cathedral symbology is hard to come by on the internet, and it’ll be ten days before my books arrive in the mail. Sigh. By then, Papillon will be in Egypt or something, far away from any cathedrals. And I’ll have to rewind my brain.
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I have five chapter titles so far. There will be perhaps eight or nine in all. What do you think?
I. Papillon
II. The Grand Whore
III. Chivalry
IV. Rat Kings
V. Wondrous Light and Color
I like ‘em.
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Yes. After writing this damn novel for six weeks or more, I’ve realized I’ve been spelling the title wrong. The French word is “Papillon,” not “Papillion”. Now let us never speak of this again.
This weekend was miserable for writing. Saturday we were traveling and Sunday I suffered in the grip of a cataclysmic hangover. Yes, cataclysmic. My world was ending.
So today I called in sick and wrote 3,000 words in one sitting, bringing me up to 52,000. According to quota, I ought to be at 54,000. No matter! I’ll catch up - tomorrow!
In the meantime, I’ve finally finished reading “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,” by Haruki Murakami. Frustrated. Confused. Then today I saw that a friend had put this in his gmail profile: “Murakami: empty boxes, blowjobs, spaghetti, empty people, ambivalence, baseball, david lynch”. I agree completely. Some parts of the novel were incredible. Some were obscure to the point of nonsense. Much of the novel takes place in a squishy dreamlike state where actions and spatial relations have no meaning. It is five metric tons of information, and not an ounce of comprehension.
Now reading: “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” While writing “Papillon”, I kept staring at my bookshelf, thinking, “I wish I had more fiction set in medieval Paris,” my eyes skipping over this volume each time, never realizing that it fit exactly. Then my mother emailed me: “Why don’t you read… ?”
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Papillion: 48,000!
I bet you want to talk about something else now.
Flash fiction, then!
I think my initial problem with “flash fiction” was the nomenclature. It gave me the idea of writing stories in an impromptu fashion, with no preparation and no polishing. Why would you do that? Why would we have markets specifically for that?
(Of course, I later identified this as a misconception.)
I was fine with simply writing very short stories, though I preferred to call them “short-shorts”. This also makes one think of Daisy Dukes, which are sexy and fashionable, as well as the timeless pop song regarding the wearing of short-shorts, and the participants in this activity. More importantly, it gives the impression that so-called “flash” pieces are just very short stories, given the same thought and meticulousness as any other work, regardless of their length.
More troubling, though, was the existence of “flash authors”. You sometimes encounter them on the Internet. They are difficult to recognize in real life. I wondered, what sort of author would work solely on stories under a thousand words? What kind of madman limits his artistic growth so?
Answer: I don’t know, but I don’t really think of it that much.
Now I have come to value “flash fiction,” though I still prefer my term of “short-shorts”. “Flash fiction,” or simply “flash,” as it’s known on the streets, is edifying as a writing exercise. Furthermore, story ideas too gimmicky or half-baked to work as a long piece can be quite successful in five-minute form. The brevity of “flash” is also very convenient to a modern audience with the attention span of a rabid African white-toothed shrew. Every Day Fiction knows this, and succeeds accordingly. And amazingly.
All this is to say that I can’t wait to start posting my weekly short-shorts on the website. Katie McCullough is putting together some grand art for them. You’ll love them.
But let’s not call them “flash”.
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Today I summoned the above-mentioned powers and plowed through my quota. After a thousand-word shortfall yesterday, I had a bit of doing before me! And I did it!
So now it’s at 46,500 words. 48,000 tomorrow. 51,000 on Saturday. Wow!
Today I wrote two sentences of which I am very proud:
“Her bony hips were as inviting as the pincers of a giant crab.”
“Rats surfaced and dove among the corpses like fish playing in the surf.”
Today’s installment also features an appearance by the Wandering Jew.
In other news, many of my Talented Friends are endeavoring to write a story every day for the next two weeks. What an undertaking! I wish I could join, and would, if not for this novel. But encouragement is due them. Join your plaudits with mine!
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Papillion hit 43,500 today. I’ll be past 50,000 by the end of the week - “halfway” is what we call that!
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“Homunculus” is a word I can never spell right on the first try.
“Pseudopod” is the plural of “pseudopod”. Who knew?
(Edit: Unless you use the longer form of “pseudopodium”; then you can have “pseudopodia”.)
To give you an idea of what sort of novel I’m writing, I wrote this sentence in my notes today:
“Adjust homunculus timeline to allow for dragon slaying.”
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Talented Friend Erin Kinch has sold her piece “The Dragon Thief” to Static Movement; it’s online now! This zine, you may recall, is renowned for its excellent taste.
Papillion’s at 37,500 words; I have a three-day weekend, so I don’t see why it couldn’t hit 90k by Monday!
Just kidding. I’m shooting for 42,000.
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Work on the novel continues apace - etc. Up to 36,000 words, which means I’m back on schedule. Like a champ!
Papillion has become squire to the great Sir Figaro, and they’ve gone to the annual tournament in the Bois D’Ouest. There he meets an old enemy and participates in a general melee, winning much honor for Volumnia, his lady love.
I’ve actually written the chapter after this scene, where Figaro and Papillion fight the dragon that’s been terrorizing France. After I finished that passage, I decided to insert the tournament, to give Papillion a glimpse of the finer side of chivalric life, before plunging him into a holocaust of horror. Again.
The dragon lairs near the alpine city of Channecy, which the astute French geographer may note does not exist. My book may therefore draw some criticisms for inaccuracy. I would also submit that the book contains a dragon.
In other news, Talented Friend Erin Kinch has gained acceptance at the august journal “A Thousand Faces” for her piece, “Bridge Club,” just like I knew she would. It’s a solid piece and perfect for the market, which is renowned for its exceptional taste.
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Papillion: 34,000 words. That means I’m only 500 behind. Oh, yes!
I wish I had something more exciting to say. But my head is tired.
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I only had two classes today, and wrote all afternoon, with a concentration forged of hardened nickel-iron-coated diamonds in the hellfires of Hell! I made over 2,700 words, bringing me up to a scant 1,000 behind, and a total of 32,000! That’ll teach you to bet against the Jensotron, world!
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“Papillion” is 2,500 words behind quota! Thanks to the aforementioned botheration and a weekend road trip, I have some serious catching up to do. What’s that? You say it can’t be done? I say this only makes me work harder! There’s a bit of dramatic tension in it now. Can he come from behind? Will the odds overwhelm him? Can he catch up? That’s right. I just fell behind on purpose to make this more exciting for you, the spectator. You’re welcome.
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Due to some imbecilic work botheration, Papillion closed at 27,900 words today, some 600 behind schedule. Tomorrow I must not only make up this deficit and finish the usual quota, but also write ahead for Sunday, due to a small trip, or I’ll be catching up all next week.
“Imbecilic” is a word I’ve been using a lot lately. It’s so much more satisfying than “idiotic” or “stupid”. “Cretinous” is another good word.
Finished “The Magic Labyrinth.” Read the 500-page book in about three days, so that should tell you a thing or two about its quality. Today I began “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami. I took books from my shelf at random, giving them a chance to catch my attention with the first sentence. This book beat “Hyperion” and “Ilium,” both by Dan Simmons. Someone needs to work on his opening paragraphs!
(Just kidding, Mr. Simmons. I love you. Please give me one of your Hugos.)
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Papillion’s at 25,800 words - 300 above quota.
Currently reading: “The Magical Labyrinth,” by Philip Jose Farmer, the fourth and final (?) in his Riverworld series. It’s an incredible story. I’ve been reading this series for over 1200 pages, and the fourth book is undiluted gratification.
Last week I finished “Something Wicked this Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury. I read “Fahrenheit 451″ in middle school, and some of his short stories a few years ago; they didn’t impress me. SWTWC is a triumph. I’m sure you have some idea of the plot. It’s the original evil-carnival-comes-to-town story. But the carnival is almost metaphorical. The real story is the maturation of its protagonists. The novel is a farewell letter to boyhood, written in Bradbury’s middle age. It’s filled with sweet memories of innocence, innocent debauchery, innocent raucousness, and the bittersweet loss of those idylls through the traumatic process of aging, and how they may be reclaimed, through some extent and in a different way, later in life.
It’s also a study of the nature of evil and why it conflicts with good, why good is driven to contest it, why it must. These truths are so profound as to be obvious, but Bradbury’s exploration rescues them from the banal.
The star of the show is the prose. It’s dazzling; intoxicating; magical; surreal. It’s effectively scary, which most “horror” works are not. Bradbury’s use of language is so inventive that he shatters the brain-to-brain barrier through which all writers struggle, beaming his ideas directly into your mind. Part of this is his frequent use of functional shifts - that’s when a writer uses a noun as a verb or an adjective as a noun or whatever. This technique lets Bradbury cram every sentence with startling and vivid imagery. There’s not an empty word or an idle sentence in the book.
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Papillion: 22,200 words. 300 behind quota. Yesterday’s installment included a hilarious yet titillating sex scene. I haven’t written many sex scenes, because they’re very hard to get right. All I’ll tell you about this one is that it includes the sentence “Now gallop, boy!”
Some writers scoff at the idea of quotas, saying that you can’t force the muse. If you do, obviously, the product will feel forced and the lack of inspiration and fun in the piece will be evident. William Styron (Sophie’s Choice) worked that way, sometimes producing only a paragraph a day. He only wrote four novels in his long life, but they were among the greatest of modern American fiction. Not everyone has his talent, of course, or his financial freedom. For humble pulp authors, regular production is a must.
I have a quota because it’s the only way I can get through a novel. I began and discarded three novels because I tried to write only when inspiration hit; they never went anywhere, and I worried that I’d never produce a novel and never become (what I considered to be) a “real writer”. When I threw myself into last fall’s NaNoWriMo, though, I actually produced a hundred thousand words in a few months. I learned I could do it, but only as long as I forced myself.
The thing is, it’s not working without a muse. It’s not some sort of inspiration-less grind. When you apply discipline to your writing schedule, you learn quickly that you can make your own inspiration. Your muse works for you, not the other way around. You produce, you create, you become adept at slipping into the realm of thought with a minute’s notice. (Until one day you vanish altogether, leaving a pair of glasses and a mug of cold coffee in front of the laptop, and are never seen again - poor wife and children!)
Anthony Trollope might be the most known quota writer. He produced a set number of words every day, without fail, and if he finished his quota but not his sentence, he would come back to that sentence the next day, by God. If he finished a novel and still had words left to reach his quota, he would go right into the next novel at the same sitting. He wrote on vacations. He wrote on trains. He wrote forty-eight novels averaging 150,000-180,000 words, towering, colossal novels. Trollope was no genius; among 19th century British novelists, he was a distant second to Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, the Brontes… but they were geniuses. I am not a genius, so I must make a quota, and maybe, maybe, I can do half as well for myself as Trollope did.
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Papillion: 21,000 words. It’s so good. I can’t wait for you to read it.
What did I write today? Papillion has found his way to Paris, and lucked into the friendship of Gaspard the Magus Magnus and his wife, Tatienne. They’ve found him employment at a patisserie owned by Tricol, who is described thusly:
“She was a dollop of fat swathed in a sail of white linen, armed with fortitudinous elbows, a piercing pinpoint glare, and swift, pointed feet, which now kicked a scrap-questing cat in its friable ribs. Her temper carried her visibly; Papillion could see the force of her anger and destruction moving her as the lines move the marionette. This anger had as its focus her faint blonde moustache, which bristled as if charged with lightning.”
Amusing, n’est-ce pas? After this, Papillion meets the anti-love of his life, the bewitching, or just plain witching, Volumnia, and he throws himself headfirst into more trouble than he can imagine. Volumnia is described thusly:
” [...] the most beautiful in the world, he was sure. She was tall and thin, raw-boned and pale, but with an active heart that flooded her breast, throat, and face with hot blood at an impulse of emotion. Her dark hair was tied in back like a horse’s tail, and her eyes were tar pits.”
Evocative, non? Ah, what sort of book is this? I have no clue, but I’m excited about it.
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Papillion” hit 18,000 words today. Score!
I spent some time catching up on critiques for my good ol’ writing group. Critiquing, the jolly dissection of someone else’s hard work, is an educational experience. Reading unrevised works with an especially critical eye, you detect weaknesses of prose, structure, or storytelling that would be weeded from a more polished story. (Please note that my writing group produces stories of uncommonly high caliber. All values of quality in this blog post are relative!) In so detecting, you learn to avoid these errors in your own works. Or, you might learn from something that your friend did right, something you wish you did, and you quietly steal that something and wait for an opportunity to bring it back in another form. Hee hee.
And I want to tell you of one of the stories I read. It’s called “Bridge Club,” by Erin, and it’s hilarious and subtle and joyful to read. I wish I had written it. I’m sure I’ll be able to link to it sometime soon.
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Last night I finished reading “All Things Are Lights,” by Robert Shea.
This book is set during the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century, and Louis IX’s failed crusade to Egypt. I’ve read two others historical fictions by Shea, his Japanese epic “Shike” and his “Saracen” books, both of which I considered excellent. Shea has very little in the way of a personal style, and, as a prosist, I would even call him weak; however, his skill at storytelling more than compensates for that.
His style is bland, yet effective. He errs on the side of under-writing. But that’s not the main draw in his novels. His characters are well-developed and interesting, his use of history is compelling, and his eye for the moral question is masterful.
His novels are subversive in that way. One picks them up expecting sword-filled entertainment, and instead you get heartfelt meditations on violence. Even when he writes about a very narrow era - ten years of medieval France, in this book - Shea seems to address the whole of human history, and particularly the problem of violence in history. He writes of wars and bloody battles, and it’s exciting and well-depicted, but he makes you question the necessity of violence at every turn.
This leads to the creation of an odd sort of protagonist. His heroes usually begin as typical warriors or soldiers, but begin to question their actions and the actions of their enemies through the course of the story. By the end they are conscientious to a fault. If they slay their mortal enemies, they do it as a sad necessity. Or, if they are defeated, they accept it stoically. For, by the end of the book, they have grown past the need for violence as a solution, though they remain mired in a world that understands nothing else. It’s a strange fit in a genre that usually has no qualms about mass deaths; indeed, a genre that revels in violence. How many works of historical fiction are there that aren’t about war?
Shea’s approach to the problem of violence in human history is refreshingly mature, and makes an interesting foil to Sabatini’s supermen.
As for “All Things Are Light” in particular, I found it superior to “The Saracen,” behind “Shike.” The plot is well-executed, and the history is used to good effect; I have since worked the Cathars into “Papillion”. The characters, as usual, all have compelling motivations and desires, making for a gripping read.
A note on the text. My copy was purchased on lulu.com. Since the original book had gone out of print, Robert Shea’s son released it under a Creative Commons license as print-on-demand. The title page tells me that it was formatted with Open Office, and the text was riddled with typos and formatting errors - question marks instead of em-dashes, pronouns gender-switched, breaks where there should not be breaks, and vice versa. It was a jarring read. However, I get the impression that Mike Shea and maybe a friend or two typed the whole thing by hand into Open Office, working from an old hard copy, so I can’t hold the errors against them. I’m indebted to the work he (or they) invested so that others could read this beautiful book.
Now I’m reading: “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Ray Bradbury. Usually, while writing a novel, I try to read books from which I can take something for my own novel. However, in this work, Bradbury writes so supremely that there is nothing I can use. I feel like a finger-painting chimp studying Rembrandt.
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13500. I’m right on quota.
Yesterday, Papillion escaped from a band of knights and pirates, started a fire that claimed many lives, and finally made it to Paris. End of Part I. Today I’ll hit 15000 words - 30000 by the end of the month! Work continues apace!
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