Moby?
or John Linnell of They Might Be Giants?
Discuss.
Who Would Win in a Fistfight?
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The Obligation of the Internet
A blog is like a houseplant. Fail to feed it and it dies. Wait, that makes it sound more like a pet.
A blog is like a dog. Fail to feed it and it dies. That’s terrible. Who say things like that?
A blog is like a baby. Feed it and it will grow up.
There, that’s a little more like it. Less horrific in any case. Unlike a baby or perhaps a puppy, if you fail to feed a blog, it won’t die. It will sit waiting for you, like that treadmill you bought last year because you were definitely going to use it everyday I mean what like thirty minutes a day how hard is that? Collecting dust.
Feed it. Feed it and watch it grow.
Dragonland is finished!
Well, the first part is, at least. I’m celebrating by writing short stories.
Hurray me!
On Creating Worlds
I’m not a world-creater. While every person who writes imagines themselves to be god to one degree or another, some take particular pleasure in drawing maps and creating landscapes, monsters and lost planets full of intelligent and less intelligent beings.
I’m more of a bare bones kind of guy. I put a protagonist somewhere concrete, like a city street in Chicago, and let he or she go from there. I fret about where in the city they are, if it is realistic that they could cover that many blocks in a car when you just know at four o’clock on a Friday traffic is just going to be murder. I don’t create worlds.
All of that is going to change next month. It already has, really, for I am going to write a fantasy novel. It won’t be your normal giant strapping men with swords killing wizards (was it Asimov who dismissed fantasy as stupid people with swords killing smart people?), but for most intents it will be fantasy. There are dragons and magic, which makes it fantastical enough.
I had prepared myself by setting this in the United States. I figured, why draw a map (because what is a fantasy novel without a map?) when I can just print one out? That’s when things get complicated. If it’s in the US, was it populated the same? Would the same roads be there? What would the roads be made of? If they have cars, would they be powered by combustion or magic?
It gets complicated really fast.
Fantasy writers must spend a lot of time coming up with this stuff. Not just the geography and the history, but the rules. I read a great essay by a writer named Brandon Sanderson (who I never heard of but is apparently very popular among fantasy readers) about the rules of magic. Rules of magic? It needs rules?
He posits that if you don’t explain your magic clearly, you should use it to solve problems, because then it just becomes a deus ex machina. We’re trapped! Oh, wait, I can just teleport us out of here. Very convenient. That’s just sloppy story telling. To paraphrase his essay, if you set hard and fast rules and limitations, you allow the audience to try and figure out solutions for the characters. If you don’t describe your magic (like in Lord of the Rings, for instance) then you don’t use your magic to solve problems– you either use it to create problems or to give your characters a sense of being in a larger world (Sanderson cites the hobbits lost in a larger conflict). He calls it hard magic and soft magic.
There are rules for everything!
So, I’m working on it.
It’s Not Like He Didn’t Have Advanced Warning
The Difficulties of Finishing Anything
Next month is November, National Novel Writing Month. For those of you unfamiliar with this, here is the deal: You have 30 days to write a novel. A novel for these purposes is defined as 50,000 words of a non-fiction story that is completed (i.e. the story comes to its conclusion) by November 30. It doesn’t have to be a good novel, it doesn’t need to make any sense, it just needs to be completed. The prize? You wrote a book. There, now you’re an author.
This will be my third year participating. Year one I began a gritty detective novel that ended a week into the month due to my contracting some sort of nasty flu. I thought I could soldier up and write through it, but I am a far weaker man than I like to believe. My future mother-in-law not only participated but won, and she had never written a story in her life.
Year two went much better. I buckled down, took the story that I had worked on last year and advanced it a year. I also decided to make it funny, since I’m not really a gritty guy, as much as I’d like to believe. This went much better. Not only did I finish the book, it came out very well, I think. I’ve given the first draft to a number of people, all of which seemed to genuinly enjoy it (I don’t think they were humoring me).
My original plan was to not let anybody read the thing until I had written the second draft. My deadline for the draft to be completed came and went, and so I just let people go ahead and read it, and I’m glad they did, because it made me feel good about what I had written.
But how’s that second draft coming, you ask? It’s still sitting on the table in front of me. Not completed. Not even close. And here we are, almost a year later.
I’m going to try again. I’d like to be able to say that I’ve written not one but two unpublished novels. Maybe I can even finish one of them and you, lucky reader, will be able to partake in my genius.
Until then, there is the blog, I suppose.
The New New Blog
But wait, there’s nothing here!
That’s because I deleted my old, non functioning site to replace it with this shiny new empty site. Since NaNoWriMo is rolling around again this year, I thought it might be a good exercise to get blogging again to get my fingers in training for novel writing.
So here we are. *sips coffee* Now what?