S L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: Scrivener

Mammoths, mountains, auroras. AI generated by Juggernaut XL v5

Untitled NaNoWriMo After Action Report

December 2, 2023 /

By the numbers

NaNoWriMo 2023 is OVER! On the afternoon of November 30th, 2023, I crossed the 50,000-word line to complete the writing challenge. Yay me!

50,000 words in 30 days requires an average of 1,667 words per day. I…averaged that much. My daily word count totals were all over the place. Some days, life intrudes on writing. Such as Thanksgiving.

Writing 1,667 words per day is challenging, to be sure, but it’s below the 2,000 words per day of productive, professional authors such as Stephen King. Sorry. I’ll try harder.

What does 50,000 words mean? Publishers look for at least 60,000 words in a commercial fiction manuscript. Beyond that, it goes up by genre. Raether’s Enzyme is rather large for a thriller at 117,000 words. The Gray God is a healthy 85,000-word horror novel. For a new author’s adult science fiction or fantasy novel, 100,000 to 120,000 words is a good target range. For established authors, these rules are relaxed, as the author has an audience who trusts the author to make whatever word count worthwhile. Translating word count to page count is tricky. Format and typography play a big role. So, 50,000 words of Untitled Science Fiction Project is half, or less, of the final manuscript length. Or it would be if I hadn’t cheated.

Per my pre-NaNoWriMo post, I went into the challenge intending to finish my main character autobiographies and begin work on the story in screenplay format. This is what I did. Ha-ha! I cheated and I’m glad I did it! I regret nothing! At the end of the month, I had about 16,000 words of autobiography and 34,000 words of screenplay.

The bios will continue to inform how I write the characters. Portions of them may surface in the manuscript where appropriate.

What does 34,000 words of screenplay mean? In this case, the 34,000 words print out to about 158 pages. The film industry’s rule of thumb is that each page is about one minute of screen time. My incomplete Untitled Science Fiction Project screenplay is already over two and a half hours long. That’s the length of Dune (Part 1), which covers half of the 188,000-word novel.  Yikes! A more charitable comparison might be the adaption of the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes (144,000 words). The story there plays out over fifteen 45-ish minute episodes (approximately 675 script pages). Not an entirely fair comparison, as the show brings in characters and events from later in the book series before it wraps up the Leviathan plot line. The point is that a long script may still fit into a reasonably sized science fiction novel. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Evolution is a process.

Seasoned authors have a process, if not a formula, for writing their novels. My process is still evolving. With more seasoning, it may converge on something I can prescribe. Like so much in this blog, what I’ll do here is describe. You may scratch your head, stroke your chin, or laugh your ass off.  I’m not recommending you try this at home. I did, and time will tell if it worked.

So far, it never starts in the same place. Raether’s Enzyme started with wanting to tackle the themes of a previous superhero screenplay in a form that could be produced with a sensible budget. The Gray God began with a word picture of cultists worshiping a strange god in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Untitled Science Fiction Project was born of a desire to write a story whose movie trailer would have epic music. I want it to be big and fun.

For this project, I’m bringing together my favorite parts of prior processes and tossing in a few new ones.

Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God USFP
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo-ing a screenplay!
Drafting Planning Pantsing Plantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener Scrivener, Campfire
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile TBD. Maybe none.
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit TBD. Probably: Word, Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

 

I’ve decided I love working through the zeroth draft in screenplay format. I got much more of my story fleshed out during this NaNoWriMo than I did working on The Gray God in a previous NaNo. Bonus: It was easier to hit the word count goals. Once I get characters talking, the words just flow by the hundreds. These people just won’t shut up. In a screenplay, dialog can just be CHARACTER NAME followed by what they say.

QILIN taps his specs and casts a new holo that floats above the map. We see a herd of woolly mammoths grazing on the steppes. Snow-covered mountains rise in the background. The image crossfades to a similar scene at night. Now auroras shimmer and dance in the sky.

QILIN

Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!

SPHINX

Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.

QILIN

Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.

SPHINX

That’s how they went extinct the first time.

GRIF

There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?

No dialog tags (said, asked, whispered, etc.). Bits of action to frame the conversation. All those things will come in time, but here we’re trying to keep up with what’s being said. This does result in Tarantino-esque talking scenes that seem to go on forever. That’s okay because I’ll come back and trim things later. For NaNoWriMo, I wanted the words to flow. It was fun and I made progress in refining the characters’ voices.

Where do I go from here?

I plan to continue to work on the screenplay until the story is complete. It is much less expensive to rewrite or discard a screenplay scene than the equivalent scene in novel prose. The completed screenplay is something I can share with very intrepid early readers. This worked for Raether’s Enzyme. Two friends read the whole script in single sittings, and one of those was on the john. If the script can excite readers and pull them through the story, then you have reason to hope the novel will do the same.

For grins, I asked ChatGPT to adapt the scene fragment above into prose.

Qilin tapped his futuristic spectacles, initiating a holographic projection that materialized above the digital map. The hologram revealed a sprawling expanse of steppes, where a herd of woolly mammoths peacefully grazed. Majestic snow-covered mountains provided a stunning backdrop to the scene. The visual seamlessly transitioned to a nocturnal setting, with the same landscape bathed in the soft glow of auroras dancing across the sky.

Excitement bubbled within Qilin as he shared his discovery with the group, exclaiming, “Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!”

Sphinx, ever the voice of reason, countered Qilin’s enthusiasm, “Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.”

Undeterred, Qilin proposed a compromise, “Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.”

Sphinx, with a hint of sarcasm, responded, “That’s how they went extinct the first time.”

Attempting to restore order, Grif intervened, “There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?”

Fear not, dear readers. I will be adapting Untitled Science Fiction Project by hand.

And I’ll let you go early. This post is only 1,267 words long.

Generative AI has been well-trained on a corpus of generic science fiction art.

Get Ready to RUMBLE!

October 31, 2023 /

Na-No-Wri-Mo, here I come!

Right back where The Gray God started from!

At the gym today, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo 2023, the current iteration of the 50,000 words-in-a-month writing challenge. Yes, I am writing this on October 31st, 2023, the day before the challenge begins. As with my previous NaNoWriMo, an important part of my motivation here is to hold my feet to the fire writing-wise. Also, per my previous NaNoWriMo, I’m charging into this without a solid outline. Hey, I’m happy with the results of the last run, so I’m optimistic.

The same, only different

This time around, I’ll be working on Untitled Science Fiction Project. In previous blog posts, I discussed the lengthy worldbuilding phase of this project. Since then, I’ve been working* on character backgrounds in the form of mini-autobiographies, which flesh out the details of their pasts and refine their distinctive voices.

I’ll be working in Scrivener again. It’s a great writing tool. Its ability to break a manuscript into independent scenes makes jumping around the plotline easy. This is especially boon-i-licious when you have scene ideas scattered from beginning to end. You go where the muse takes you to get your precious word count goal for a given day. NaNoWriMo doesn’t require you to produce a coherent product, just 50,000 words of product.

I’ll be sticking to my plan of developing the story as a screenplay. This worked, albeit unintentionally, for my first novel, Raether’s Enzyme. The screenplay format is brisk, lean, and hyper-focused on key story details: character, setting, and plot. A screenplay can serve as a super outline for a novel. You have the essentials, which can then be developed into prose.

Another key lesson from the previous NaNoWriMo is: Always cheat, always win. The best you can hope for in NaNoWriMo is first draft quality. Unless you’re Stephen King, who routinely writes at 2000 words/day. By cheating, I mean counting material that may not make it into the final product. Say, for example, the as-yet-unwritten mini-autobiographies. Those are pure backstories, but I’ll count them. Bits and pieces of them may get woven into the ‘real’ story.

Wish me luck

Please. To the extent I succeed, I’ll have built momentum for Untitled Science Fiction Project. Yay! Getting it to a good state before production and publicity work for The Gray God kicks into gear is the goal. If you have a NaNoWriMo account, you can follow my progress on my NaNoWriMo here. I’ll be posting updates on Facebook and X as the month progresses.

*Of late, my level of work output brings to mind this scene from Office Space.

Peter meets with the Bobs in Office Space.

“Well, I Wouldn’t Say I’ve Been MISSING It, Bob.”

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

OPERATION: X-RAY

November 3, 2020 /

In all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself.

In the run-up to Raether’s launch, staging and scheduling the e-book was easily done and completed early. The other preparations filled me with so much excitement and terror that I had little time to think about the Kindle edition. If Amazon KDP prompted me to provide X-ray content, I missed it. You may be familiar with X-ray from Prime Video. It will pop up information about who is in a scene in the movie you’re watching. Some clever combination of annotators and algorithms connects the content of the movie to IMDB, which Amazon owns.

X-ray annotations are available for Kindle e-books. They are not folded into the e-book file directly, but live in a database in the Amazonian cloud. Launching the annotation web app is cleverly hidden in the ellipsis menu. Like so.

Launch X-Ray, if you can find it.

I stumbled onto this a week after launch. Given the choice between writing about and around the book vs. trying to figure out how to market it, I took what I thought was the easy road and got to work annotating.

Everything’s automated.

Except the things that aren’t. The system does a decent job of combing the text for character names and specialized terminology. Some of the terms will have Wikipedia content pre-selected. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit each and every character and term and:

  1. Write a short character profile or term definition.
  2. Chose a Wikipedia entry to supply the definition.
  3. Exclude the entry from X-Ray.
  4. Realize that this entry is a nickname for a character and needs to be added to that character’s profile as an alternate spelling.

Sample character entry.

I expected Operation X-Ray to run over a couple of sessions in as many days. I was wrong.

Terms real and imagined

Raether is written in close third person perspective with multiple point-of-view characters who come from different backgrounds. The narration uses vocabulary from the POV characters’ worlds without slowing down to explain the terms. It mixes real and fictitious Pacific Northwest geography. It coins new jargon around the recently discovered Raether’s enzyme. The number of people who will get all the references is a demographic of me, because I wrote the story and the story required the research.

I like to think that you can enjoy the story without knowing the details of the Ruger firearms catalog or all the Native American names for Washington’s stratovolcanoes. The story doesn’t hinge on any of these details and provides enough context that you should have enough of the idea to keep reading. X-Ray is there for readers who enjoy stopping to indulge their curiosity. For the real-world terms, the Wikipedia text does a fine job. For the products of my imagination, I provide more details to flesh out the story’s world.

In the current X-Ray, there are 24 custom entries and 163 Wikipedia terms.

Characters central and minor

The core cast of Raether numbers about twenty. There are a great many more secondary and named minor characters. X-Ray’s automated search counted a total of 143. Some of those were false-positives. ‘Roooowf’ is a noise a character makes, not a new character. After coalescing the nicknames and excluding the super-minor characters, the current X-Ray has entries for eighty fictitious people.

The character profiles should enrich the reader’s understanding of the major characters but not reveal anything that would revise that understanding. The text of the novel should be the reader’s guide to the characters. This sets up a balancing act for the X-Ray profiles. They need to be interesting enough to reward the reader, but not reveal secrets. I erred on the side of being shorter and less interesting. X-Ray content can be revised at any time, so I may revisit this in the future.

For the minor characters, I recapped what we already know about them as an aid for readers who might have lost track and explained a few that came up in passing conversations.

Beyond Raether’s X-Ray

X-Ray is a nice supplemental feature that I would like to provide for future books. To make it easier, I’ll need to keep better track characters and terms. In Raether, it was all in my head. I should at least maintain a spreadsheet of who’s who and what’s what. Such accounting will help during rewrites by challenging me to justify keeping minor characters. I’m looking at you, Timothy Wood, Esq. Scrivener has facilities for keeping track of characters built in, so The Gray God will start in a better place when its time under the X-Ray comes.

A Game of Edits

March 2, 2020 /

Failing Hard at Experimental Design

When you’re setting up a scientific experiment or exploring an alternative engineering solution, it’s a good idea to fix as many variables as you can so that you can better judge the ones you’re studying. I have utterly failed to exhibit this prudence in the course of writing The Grey God. Many of the writing process variables are in play. Few are fixed. This is not methodical.

  Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo
Drafting Planning Pantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

This post will attempt to tease out the results of my ongoing experimental use of AutoCrit in the self-editing phase of the project.

Gamifying the Editing Process

AutoCrit is a suite of editing and text analysis tools that lives in the Cloud. Its advanced features are accessed via subscription. The free tier includes a text editor that is adequate for composing a novel’s manuscript. Where it gets more interesting is in the ‘Professional’ mode. For $30/month, AutoCrit will dice and slice your text with a variety of statistical and heuristic analyzers and assign your work corresponding quality scores. It will also give you a score relative to your genre and major authors. AutoCrit turns editing into a game.

Gamification is not a new phenomenon. Reframing tasks as games has a long history in education, sales, and other endeavors which include elements of competition or self-improvement. Rewarding people with scores, badges, smiley faces, and thumbs-up add game-like perks to fitness trackers and social media. AutoCrit rewards you with better scores for ‘improving’ your writing.

I put improving in quotes not to disparage what AutoCrit has to offer, but point out that optimizing your score in AutoCrit has notable limitations. The software doesn’t read your story. It can’t judge the depth of characterization, find plot holes, or critique your pacing and structure. What it can do is apply fixed rules and identify patterns that deviate from an analysis published works. It can flag word usage that is considered poor form in commercial fiction.

Working with AutoCrit is like having a precocious six-year-old niece who has taken an interest in your work. You explain to her a few of the rules you’re working with and she takes them to heart. She sits down beside you and starts pointing to the text. “What about that?” “And that?” “Right here, you have an adverb. Adverbs are bad, right?” She really gets into it. You say, “That’s okay, it’s where my character is talking, so it doesn’t need to be right.” She ignores that because she’s on the hunt. You’re just about to politely suggest she go outside and play when she points out something you missed. You realize that what she lacks in nuance, she makes up for in tenacity. Playing the game with her is productive, but it is not without risks.

Applying AutoCrit to The Gray God required exporting the manuscript to a Word .docx file and uploading it into AutoCrit. I parked Scrivener on one side of the screen and the AutoCrit browser tab on the other and worked my way down through the manuscript. The biggest initial finding was that I had an adverb problem. Sure, I didn’t overuse words ending in -ly, but I dropped in ‘just’ all over the place. Things were just outside. Just before. Just it. I used the word in just about every adverbial form it could take. I just didn’t see it until AutoCrit called me out on it and suggested I remove just about a couple of hundred uses. Cleaning that up tightened the writing and improved my score. I got into the game and was happy with the results.

I was so happy that I cracked open Raether’s Enzyme, which had been in lockdown since the proofreader worked on it. The AutoCrit pass took longer than I expected. I corrected passive voice issues. In pursuit of a higher score, I shaved over 3,000 words off the text. The manuscript was leaner and smoother than before. This was good. It was also broken.

The damage resulted from my ignorance conspiring with my greed for a better score. AutoCrit flagged ‘that’ as a (potentially) problematic filler word and recommended an aggressive target for reduction. In the course of lowering my ‘that’ count, I substituted ‘which’ for ‘that’ in numerous places. My score improved. As you might guess, the two words are not entirely interchangeable. I suspected as much and researched ‘that’ vs. ‘which’. Sigh. Yes, there is latitude for using ‘which’ in place of ‘that’, but to be right you should use ‘that’ for restrictive clauses. And you precede ‘which’ with a comma in nonrestrictive clauses. I shouldn’t have made those changes. Now I wonder what else I broke playing the AutoCrit game.

I’ll find out over the next month when the Raether manuscript comes back from the copyeditor. I may reactivate my AutoCrit Pro subscription to see how it scores the changes.

The Gray God is Narrative Complete

June 25, 2019 /
Terrible author cover art mock-up.

Still so wrong.

On Monday, 6/24/2019, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete Milestone. A more detailed version of what this means to me, see the tail end of Adapting the Screenplay. Short version: The beginning of the story connects to the end of the story. If you attach electrodes to both ends of the manuscript, current flows, but there are whiffs of acrid smoke, dangerous hotspots, and a disturbing buzz.

The 50,000 words written during NaNoWriMo 2018 have 26,000 siblings, more of which have a fighting chance of making it into the final product, as none of them are flagrant cheating.

And there was much rejoicing.

Forward Unto Draft

There’s still work to do before I’m ready to inflict the manuscript on my intrepid first readers. During NaNoWriMo, and this Spring’s Camp NaNoWriMo, I bounced up and down the storyline, adding full scenes when inspired and inserting placeholders where I knew something about what needed to happen and had no clear idea how to write it. This process didn’t result major plot holes. As far as I know. Minor inconsistencies abound.

As of this writing, I’ve identified the following issues and tasks to tackle before I can claim a first draft.

  • Extend Research – Focus on mycology and hot springs of the Olympic Peninsula. Field trip!
  • Consistency of Names – Various locations, roles, and concepts may need capitalization.
  • Consistency of Geography – The details of the map and floorplans evolved over time. Relocating and rebalancing of the setting descriptions is required.
  • Consistency of Props – Significant props need staging. Guns on mantlepieces, as it were.
  • Consistency of Voice – The Gray God, like Raether’s Enzyme, is written in third person limited. In Raether, the narrator reflects the vocabulary and worldview of the scene’s POV character, heroes and villains alike. I tried this with the kids in The Gray God. It works in some cases but falls short in too many others. A general rewrite in a more articulate adult voice will make for a better story.
  • Edit for Quality – Much of the text got hammered out quickly, and it shows.
  • Edit for Length – When you’re NaNoWriMo-ing and you’re on a tear, you let the scene stretch out so you can claim word count. Those scenes need to be cut down to size.
  • Edit for Flow and Momentum – Writing scenes out of order runs the risk that Scene 42 does not flow smoothly into Scene 43. Similarly, having been written as a discrete unit, a scene may end without enticing the reader with the all-important question: “What happens next?”
  • Fix known issues – To keep my writing momentum up, I add minor problems that occur to me to a ToDo list. Before I ask anyone else to read and make notes, I owe it to them to fix all the things I know are wrong.
  • Consult AI – Give my trusty algorithmic and machine learning associates a crack at spotting spelling, grammar, and higher-level writing issues. This will be sadly painful. See below.

This will keep me busy.

Scrivener Revisited

NaNoWriMo was also a test run for using Scrivener as my main writing tool. I’m still liking it. Its binder view is a serviceable outliner and great for navigating around the text. The project statistics report word counts at the chapter level, allowing you to recognize when a chapter is getting over-stuffed relative to its peers. The corkboard, index cards, and metadata features haven’t made their way into my writing process. Gathering notes, research links, scene fragments and reference images into Scrivener has proven ever-so-marginally useful compared to maintaining a companion OneNote notebook.

The big test is still to come. Readers and editors are not likely to have Scrivener. None of my friendly proofing and analyzing tools plug into Scrivener. The collaborative phases of manuscript development require exporting my Scrivener project to a Word or text file. There’s no automated way to bring the edits back into the project. It’s a one-way ticket to Editsville.

Still…

Narrative Complete is an important milestone. It feels good to have reached it. I’m one step closer to sharing a new story with you. Please stand by.

NaNoWriMo PoMo

January 6, 2019 /

No, no, the cat hasn’t been partying on the keyboard. There is no cat. NaNoWriMo is the friendly abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It isn’t so much a contest as a creative writing challenge. Can you write 50,000 words of new fiction in 30 days? That’s an average of 1667 words per day, each and every day. For reference, paperbacks run 300-350 words per page and the larger 6”x9” trade paperbacks are about 350-400. Four or five pages in a book you’d read. If you do the math, 50,000 words is a very slim novel. These days, novels with only 60,000 words are on the slender end. 120,000 words is considered bulky for a first-time author. Established authors can publish as many words as they want. For better and worse. If you reach the NaNoWriMo goal, you’re probably more than half-way through an initial draft. Yay!

PoMo is usually an abbreviation for postmodern. Here I’m saying it is short for postmortem. This is cheating in service of a bouncy blog post title. The corner of the software industry that I used to inhabit used this term to describe analysis and discussion after a project’s completion that focused on questions like: “What went well? What went wrong? What can we do better going forward?” Participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time provided a great opportunity asking such questions.

Pantsing Not Optional

And whose fault it that? Mine. I dithered about doing NaNoWriMo as Summer gave way to Autumn. I lied to myself about resolving the question during my October road trip. As November loomed, I had a story idea, a setting, a few characters, a couple of scenes, a couple of monsters, and the hint of a theme. I also had months of not-writing on my conscience. I needed to shake the funk of Raether’s Enzyme’s submission/rejection cycle.

This meant taking a trusting, desperate leap into Chapter 1 with no story outline and only a vague sense of the ending. This was at odds with my engineering mindset. I am a planner, a plotter. I want to hold the architecture and structure in my mind and work towards a design. For this project, I would be flying by the seat of my pants. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I was about to become a pantser.

On the Precipice

In the last week of October, I set up my NaNoWriMo profile under the alias Scriblius (contains spoilers for this metastory). The site encourages participants to supply book cover images for their novels. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I have an enthusiasm for dev art that is coupled with a serious deficit of artistic talent. I combined some dubious Microsoft Word WordArt with a crude approximation of one of my monsters. The result was art only a developer could love. To be honest, I did not. But here it is.

So wrong.

Scrivenering Things Up

As part of the whole experimental/improvisational thing, I decided that The Gray God would be my first attempt to use Scrivener. Scrivener is a creative writing tool that fills the role of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in the software world. It combines a word processor with tools to organize, reorganize, annotate, research, and format projects ranging from articles to screenplays, short stories, and novels. It doesn’t impose a workflow. Its outliner is useful for planners. Its ability to shuffle sections and scenes around is a boon to pantsers.

Into the Breach

The plan, or perhaps intent is a better word, was to write 2,000 words per day for a long as possible. For the first week, I did just that. If I had kept that up, I’d finish on the 25th, or have a chance to be properly human for a few days that month.

To reach that goal, I had to set aside editing as I went. I stopped stopping to correct and improve the text. Mostly. I just let it flow. If a sentence ran on or a scene was unnecessary, I kept it for the sake of the word count. This felt dirty. It felt like cheating. If I slowed down, I’d bail out of the scene and move on, sometimes jumping to some unknown point in the story and filing the material in the Chapter Pending folder in my Scrivener project. It was disorganized. It was naughty. It was fun. The results are…rough…to put it politely. To see what I mean, check out the excerpt I posted  to NaNoWriMo from Day One’s writing. Yeah…it needs work. Lots of work.

The Joys of Pantsing

Pantsing offers the thrill of discovery. I started with what I intended to be the prologue. Two young men, Pete and Scott, are heading off into the deep woods with a nefarious purpose. Pete will cook meth while Scott collects edible mushrooms. At the end of the weekend, they’ll come back from “mushroom hunting” with no one suspecting they were breaking bad. Something supernaturally terrible happens to Scott. The original idea was that our main character would meet Pete later in the story and they’d reluctantly work together to survive our horror story. What I discovered was that Pete and Scott were younger than I expected. They were the same age as the main character in the story. I discovered that Pete was the main character and that Scott’s disappearance is what drives him towards confronting Lovecraftian horror.  

This meant that my prolog needed to be the first act. Wow. It also revealed the template the evil cult used to select its victims. These kids were all at-risk youth, like Pete. I might well have sorted this out during planning. We’ll never know.

The Perils of Pantsing

Letting things flow and discovering the characters and the narrative voice on the fly is all well and good, but it does entail risk. The Gray God was intended to be straight-up Young Adult (YA) fiction. Pete and Scott are contemporary adolescent males who drop F-bombs with coarse frequency. Don’t get me started on their insidious Uncle Jack, who was another discovery in this early writing. That’s uncool for the audience of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Can you imagine J. K. Rowling allowing Ron Weasley to curse like a soldier? “Bloody Hell” has a certain weight of profanity to it, but it’s still PG-13. Harsher language is alluded to while Rowling uses her fantastic setting to substitute more wizardly oaths for common profanity.

So, pending significant adjustments to tone and language, pantsing blew my marketing plan to smithereens.

The Terrible Two

NaNoWriMo encourages its writers to update their word counts daily. Combine that raw data with anecdotes from its vibrant user community and a pattern emerges where the second week is when things get more difficult. The initial adrenaline is spent. Mistakes made in the opening rush have been accumulating, threatening the narrative integrity of what follows. If you’re pantsing, the number of directions the story could go is rising with the square of the number of central characters.

As I reached the end of the second week, I had most of the unexpected first act down. In a desperate bid to escape the aftermath of Scott’s disappearance, Pete unwittingly crossed over into a realm of eldritch horror. I had scattered scenes ahead of him, but the threshold he crossed was a major reset to the thriller/mystery balance. I struggled for word-count. This was bad.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo

Short version: Write backstory for your characters.

Long version: I was stuck going forward, so I went back. Pete’s uncles, Jack and Dan, had a history of violence that informs Pete’s actions in The Gray God. I hadn’t worked out many of the details, but I did have a few of lines of dialog from different scenes:

Uncle Jack (threatening Pete): “It’s another sort of sin to make your mama cry. One I am ashamed to bear. Don’t make your mama cry, Peter.”

Leah (Pete’s mother): “Don’t even think about it. I’m sure Jack told you stories about what Dan was like before he met Aunt Jan, but you haven’t seen him in a fight. It’s scary as s**t, Peter. Look, I know he did some bad things to Scott, but the counseling really did help. If he lost control again…”

Pete (to his new friend, Joseph): “My uncle says I should kick the guy in the nuts and punch him the throat. Then, I guess your mom hasn’t done time for aggravated assault.”

I logged 3,888 words over two days with a short story that ties these lines together. Writing The Steve Incident taught me about the dynamics of Pete’s family.

Breakfast of the NaNoRhinos

NaNoWriMo is an event that brings a vast and far-flung community of aspiring novelists and self-publishing authors together for a frenzy of artistic creativity that is bigger and longer than Burning Man, if not as flamboyant. The website buzzes with updated word counts and discussions in its various forums. Out in the real world, volunteers organize meet-ups and write-ins where participants can share the joy and pain of the thing. They work hard to make NaNoWriMo both fun and a catalyst for ongoing writing community.

My home region for NaNoWriMo is the Snoqualmie Valley. Our Municipal Liaisons put together a full calendar of events and entertainments. Lacking a laptop to take my work on the road and being overwhelmed by the self-imposed workload*, I missed most of these events. I did make it to the Traveler’s Breakfast Meet-up at the Fall City Roadhouse. It was a good time with friendly, interesting folks. The slice of the valley’s sixty-nine writers were busy with projects generally fantastical in genre and varying in tone from horror to whimsical mystery. I enjoyed the company and the eggs Benedict. If you decide to NaNoWriMo, avail yourself of the community events set up by your local volunteers.

Dreams and Horrors

As you may recall, before the pleasant interlude with NaNoRhinos, I was getting stuck as to how Pete’s journey into horror and madness should proceed. While I struggled to sort that out, there was work I could attend to. The Gray God is a story of Lovecraftian horror. It needed more horror. There were characters that my planner side knew were doomed. I set to writing scenes describing their ghastly fates. When these events occurred wasn’t set yet, but the power of Scrivener allowed me to park those chunks of text in Chapter Pending for safekeeping.

Another important aspect of the Lovecraftian fiction is dreams. Great Cthulhu torments sensitive minds and incites his followers with dreams of monstrous alien cities and worlds afire with chaos and death. Dreams reveal the Doom that came to Sarnath. Dreams in the Witch House transport poor Walter Gilman to frightful dimensions and ensnare him in hideous rites.

Many writers (and not a few readers) will roll their eyes at the prospect of a dream sequence.  And, yes, they can be abused to shoehorn in exposition and/or heavy-handed symbolism. In Lovecraft’s work, dreams are frequently either an experience of an alternate dimension or something the character uses to rationalize a horrible experience. It was only a dream. It had to be a dream. I chose to break from the subgenre in this regard and give the dreams in The Gray God the realism of weirdness. The characters in question have reasons to suspect something is very wrong, but what is wrong is beyond their reasoning minds’ abitility to accept. It’s up to their subconscious minds to raise the alarm. The dreams are short and very oblique. The alarm is raised but the danger is not revealed. To get the surrealism and disjointedness I was looking for, I wrote backwards from the ending event or realization that snaps the character awake. There’s a flow to it, but it’s not normal. I think it works. Some day soon, you’ll have a chance to judge for yourself.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo – Part 2

Entering the home stretch, I was pantsed-out. Dreams and horrors were duly recorded. Numerous scenes between the heroes and villains made the characters and conflicts clear, even if the plot wasn’t. I was still thousands of words short of the goal line and I didn’t have another short story dangling before me.

What I did have was memories of fast and fluid work in the screenplay format. Descriptions are lean. Grammar is relaxed. The format itself decides how and when to interleave action and dialog. If you want to fly through a story, write it as a screenplay. Scrivener is happy to help with that. You can drop into screenplay format for any scene and it will attend to the format and auto-complete your character names.

To make things fun, I sat the villains around the dinner table and had them talk freely. This was inspired by the Villain Pub series on YouTube. They are in a safe place where everybody knows their name. They discuss what they each plan to do once their evil scheme succeeds. They argue with one another. I learned more about them. Perhaps I can salvage some of the better lines for the main story.

To balance this out, and cheat a little less, I also screenplay-sketched a scene that I did want for the main story where the heroes are gathered for a brief respite. It’s cold and wet, but Joseph brought some beer and Amber has a joint to share. Kids around a campfire. What fun! Why on earth would you think it’s the last time any of them will be happy? Oh, it’s a horror story. Yeah. Sorry, kids…

Always Cheat. Always Win.

I kept the campfire scene going until Scrivener and the NaNoWriMo word-counter agreed that I was over the finish line. Scrivener says 50,347. NaNoWriMo credits me with 50,087. I won! Yay!

PoMo Take-aways

Things I learned in my first NaNoWriMo

  • Pantsing can be great fun. It offers exciting opportunities for serendipitous discovery.
  • Pantsing allows the story to go where it wants to.
  • Allowing the story to go where it wants may not get you to where you want and need to be.
  • I would prefer to have an outline or other roadmap of the characters, conflicts, and story beats before diving into Chapter 1.
  • I enjoy talking with folks about stories and storytelling. Maybe even enough to join a writing group.
  • Scrivener is a solid tool for the early phases of creative writing. I will continue with it at least through the first drafts of The Gray God.

Thanks for reading this far.

* 2,000 words per day is an ambitious goal, but not an outrageous one. Professional authors range from 500 to 10,000, with prolific and skillful Stephen King right at 2,000. King also writes every day of the year except his birthday and Christmas, if you were wondering. And he doesn’t stop after one month to play Red Dead Redemption 2, catch up with his Netflix, and travel to see his family. Unlike some aspiring authors I could mention.

For reference: Word says this post is 2,522 words long.

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