Thursday, November 30, 2017

NaNoWriMo 2017 Damage Report & Year in Review



NaNoWriMo has always been kind of a disaster for me every time I've tried. This year went better than most.

The Space Opera I'm working on evolved a lot from a third-person perspective largely following one character to a first-person narration from a different character. So most of what I wrote this month was relegated to backstory. It happened to the characters, and its good that I know what it was, but it wasn't clicking in a way that was satisfying. It was merely stuff happening.

Changing the viewpoint opened a lot up, since the main character now is a 20th century man who's been stuck in a stasis capsule for 500 years and wakes up in the far future. It gives the reader something more relatable to latch onto, and someone who can have stuff explained to him without coming off like a complete rube like the previous viewpoint character (who spent his whole life working in a domed city, so he's kind of a sheltered rube anyway). The side effect is that now the original viewpoint character is a lot more likable too. 

So the actual story will be better for it, there's just no way it would be finished for NaNoWriMo. The sad irony here is that if I had a rigid outline of events, I might not have come to that conclusion so fast and wasted more pages on backstory. So I guess minimalist outliner it is.

That's okay. This year's been kind of a sea change in my writing patterns anyway. I've been trying to unlearn the Capital L Literary tricks that were drummed into me in college and go back to having much more fun when I'm writing. This is all thanks to the Pulp Revolution that I've jumped aboard. I recommend it too, since Robert E. Howard is ten times the writer John Steinbeck ever was, and is infinitely more entertaining to read. Helps that he'd rather tell a story about killing monsters than shove an ideology down your throat that turns people into monsters like Steinbeck. The old Pulp masters wrote at incredible speeds because they were working authors and not some trust fund babies drinking it up in Paris after WWI.

What I'm saying is that the Modernists are lionized as great talents, but they really weren't. Some were technically very adept wordsmiths, like James Joyce, but most were pompous, self-important sad sacks like Virginia Woolf or pompous trainwrecks who brought misery wherever they went and compulsively destroyed their relationships like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Screw them. A few sentence in A. Merritt's The Moon Pool were more effective at explaining the existential horrors of World War I than vast swaths of the Lost Generation's musings.

It doesn't scare me one little bit, old boy. The pretty devil lady's got the wrong slant. When you've had a pal standing beside you one moment—full of life, and joy, and power, and potentialities, telling what he's going to do to make the world hum when he gets through the slaughter, just running over with zip and pep of life, Doc—and the next instant, right in the middle of a laugh—a piece of damned shell takes off half his head and with it joy and power and all the rest of it”—his face twitched—“well, old man, in the face of that mystery a disappearing act such as the devil lady treated us to doesn't make much of a dent. Not on me.”
-A. Merritt, The Moon Pool (1919)

So screw the Modernists. If their bad habits have infected the entirety of Respectable Literature, I'd rather roll around in the dirt with Howard, Merritt, Moore, & Burroughs. The people who stirred the imagination and the heart with wild tales of high adventure in the deep places of the Earth and among the stars.

Which doesn't mean its been an easy transition from Fugitive Academic to Pulp Journeyman. While working on adjustments, I've tried fixups of some older stories and submitted them to a few outlets. Fortunately, they were rejected by outlets I'd proudly submit to again once I GIT GUD. Still kind of sucks to get the rejection email, but if it doesn't hurt, then you didn't care in the first place, right?

There's another story I wrote this year for a project that's been put on a backburner for the time being (not by me.) I think its a firecracker, and the best thing I've written all year. It WILL be published in some form or another soon.

This month's space opera? That'll be done when its done. There's good days and bad days working on it, work schedule permitting. A lot of scribbled notes of things that are supposed to happen in it, which is the closest it'll get to an outline.

That's secondary to December's real project. A final revision of an urban fantasy story that I wrote back in 2006-2008, edited several times, revised a couple times, and submitted to agents a couple times to no avail. That was around 2010-2012, so right as ebooks started to get a true marketshare while the Tradpub dinosaurs still maintained the public face of “One True Path to Publishing Success.” I bought into it at the time, and why not? THIS IS HOW THINGS ARE DONE is a convincing statement when said with enough authority. Now in 2017, that monolithic structure is decaying and all sorts of new talent gets to play in the ruins.

Its not a huge revision at this point. Just going through and fixing grammar and sentence economy. The plot is pretty much set. Once that's done, its time to recruit some hapless lucky beta readers and move from there.

I'm pulling for this story, because after the first three chapters, I wrote the rest of it in a single month in 2008, which is the closest I got to Pulp Speed, and is where I want to get back to in 2018. That, and my early beta readers said it was a real page-turner, so there's that going for it too.

Book reviews will continue as I finish reading them. Legends Never Die Expanded Universe stuff has been popular, and I can bitch about Star Wars all day long, so those will be more regular. Probably going to do more Pulp Revolution stuff as well when I figure out a consistent disclosure policy (still not sure how I feel about Amazon reviews for people that I'm internet friends with). Movie reviews might slow down as I try and figure out how I want to format those better.


So that's the year in review, I guess. A. Merritt is my spirit animal, John Steinbeck is literary cancer, writing has hit a bumpy period of transition but is now leveling out and increasing productivity. A lot of seed planting for next year's harvest. 

No comments: