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.
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