Category Archives: Writing

It’s not “Keenoo” it’s “Kee-ah-noo”

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I’m not exactly sure when I stopped caring, but about the time I realised that he’d made a lucrative career out of staring blankly and having one, ONE, expression, I started calling him Keenoo.  Point Break is a fucking awesome movie, but I can truthfully say I have no respect for Keenoo.

That said, he made a cool cameo in my dream last night.  Or rather, he inspired one of the characters, as I don’t really think it was him.  Frequently I get characters in my dreams that either look like popular actors or actually are them.  I had a doozy the other night where Brad Pitt, Scott Bakula and myself were all police detectives in the 70’s, like that show “Life on Mars”.  I remember thinking, “Wow, think of all the great experience I’ll get from two pros like these guys.  Plus, I’ll have been a cop and can tell stories when I get back to the future in 2011.”

But Keenoo was only the inspiration for this stringy-haired, flannel-wearing greaseball loser guy in my dream last night.  He’s not much to look at, our hero, but he’s integral to the story.

It opens with a courier, or an assistant of some sort and not notable, carrying a large ziploc baggie with two fresh (dead) fish in it (no idea what, they were movie fish, where they have no distinguishing characteristics other than you know that they are fish) along with several raw eggs.  The yolks were in tact, and there was some sort of wheatgerm or bran grains in there as well, though it was all unmixed.

We follow the journey of the baggie as it gets carried to this giant lab tank, like an aquarium, but with a human in it.  A woman, whose lithe form was suspended in the water and had tubes and apparatus attached to her head and chest.  She had some sort of light robe floating around and her hair was loose.  She seemed semi-conscious but deeply occupied with whatever was going on in the tank.

Gauges and metres ticked and clicked and digital readouts read out while the assistant person carried the bag toward this tank.  She started talking about the massive amount of protein and nutrients that were going to be needed for this when we turn to see the Keenoo wannabe brooding behind her.  They interact only briefly before she leaves, obviously nonplussed by him and a even a little bit scared.

He approaches the tank with reverence and a small TV in the corner shows a black-and-white talking head, like the newsreaders of the early 60’s, and he is telling the populace about how monumentally historic this moment is.  Scenes of rocket ships, still in grainy black and white, show on the screen and it starts to be understood that this woman is going to need protein and nutrients and this special tank and all this stuff because she is going to be on a rocket that’s launched into space soon.

Keenoo is worried and doesn’t want her to go, but takes extra care in prepping some of the machines and such before the officials get there to do the same thing, only very officially.  He’s still brooding though, and we get the feeling that he not only doesn’t want her to go, but possibly should have gone himself yet didn’t.  He makes his exit before the officials get there to avoid having to answer any questions.

The rocket launches…

And the garbage truck pulls up outside my house.  Between his squeaky brakes and incredibly loud robot arm, I am left wondering how ANYBODY is meant to sleep past 6:40 AM on my street.  Fuck that guy and his truck, seriously.

Novel Ideas

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I think the biggest part of the fun of the creative process is actually being creative, because when you’re open to them, the ideas just flow. It’s wonderful.

Unfortunately, until you’re creating full-time (with that full-time creaty income taking care of things), it’s hard to give time to every new idea.  That said, I still try to capture them in their essence as soon as I can.

Typically this involves waking up from a particularly and repeatedly disturbed night’s sleep and trying to write down the dream I had about raw eggs, raw fish and rocket travel to space with a teenage Keanu Reeves before I get tucked into emails and remember what actually pays the bills around here (barely).

My dreams power a lot of my novel ideas, though in reality they’re probably not ALL novels.  Short stories, I suppose, screenplays even, I have no idea.  I know they’re stories, interesting ones, that I’d like to tell.  The medium in which I do it isn’t as important right now.  And like almost all of my other amazing and wonderful stories that I’d like to tell, I have no idea how it ends because I woke up.

I s’pose that’s another big part of the fun too, going along the journey of writing these stories and watching what unfolds and how they end up.

Right now though, right now I am faced with yet another day where I’ve got responsibilities and shit that needs done, and I probably won’t get a chance to sit and write and explore and create and make stories happen and discover how they end.

This way of life will change though.  Soon probabaly.  I’m not sure how just yet, but I do know that it won’t always be this way, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Wish me luck.

New Novel

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See, the funny thing about writing a novel is that when I wasn’t ready to start revising it straightaway, I wanted to write another one.

I dream a lot.  A LOT.  They’re usually quite vivid and sometimes pretty exciting.  Some nights I have “movie dreams” where I feel like I’ve rented a movie and wake up very entertained.  Unfortunately, I frequently miss out on the ending because I wake up with underwear problems that make me have to stand waaaaaay back from the toilet at pre-6am.

It’s a bummer sure, but it gives me lots of great ideas.

Not long after the New Year started, I had a really cool dream about a future where telepathy was fairly common (on a limited scale) and a World War had ended up driving the surviving society of Australia into the bush, where they lived for years thanks to skills learned from the Indigenous Australians.

Well, waking up with a peeboner or not, I was bound to lay there quite awake formulating the rest of this story after that kind of dream.  A lot came after that, and by the next morning I was sketching the outline in my notebook and prepping myself for another novel.

I did it different this time though, I took my corkboard and pulled all those pesky pictures of children and memorable moments and started putting up thumbnails of characters, locations, timelines… all sorts of planny goodness.

Then I just started bopping through it, outlining sections and making the stories fit together… then I challenged Scotty and the crew again.  A few different takers, but me and Scotty, Abel, and Doc-in-law again, only this time it’s 1,500 a week minimum, and the winner is the one that types “The End”.

And gets a publishing deal.

KIDDING.

But once we kicked it off, we’ve been doing pretty good, and we’re on about Week 5 or 6 even, I’ve lost track.

So, writing and writing on the new book.  What’s happening with the old one?

It’s been resting.

Like a fine wine or some freshly kneaded bread dough, or a tired pregnant woman sitting in front of a fan and watching baby boy thump in her belly.  It’s resting.

I wanted to get crackin’ of course, getting it finished straightaway and getting it published.  But wife suggested I follow some advice from Stephen King.  She even made me look it up.

He finishes a book and puts it in a drawer for at least a month.  3 months usually.

Well, I didn’t think I could make it, but once I got crankin’ on the new novel I almost forgot all about it.

Almost.

Then Scotty got back to me with his feedback, and it was great.  Most of it was stuff I’d thought of, but the rest was ideas that I didn’t have fleshed out nor really had the confidence to slap in there.

So, now I’m hip-deep in the telepath novel and I have this whole other novel, My First Novel, waiting for me to finish it.

Because once I finish it, I hope to “self publish” it, where I make a kickass cover and put it “out there”.

I’ve been following along with these folks, and they’re chock full of good ideas and great ways to do this:

I’m following The Passive Voice too, that emails me articles every day about all of this fun shit.

I gotta say, this whole process has been a hoot.

Can’t wait to see where I end up.

Wish me luck.

Next Step: Revising

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So there it is.  My first novel.  It isn’t like the old days where it’s a pile of papers that I can still chuck in the fireplace.  It’s an e-pile of papers, and I’ve saved it and backed it up and all that (Dropbox.com is working pretty well for this).

But, for as much as I celebrated, drinking too many beers at the in-law’s on New Year’s Eve Eve, I wasn’t finished.  I’m not finished.  I’m not even close.

See, now I take the novel that I wrote, and actually make it something readable.  Hell, not just readable, enjoyable.  Sought after.  SELLABLE.

It’s not.  Not right now anyway.  I sound like I’m whinging a bit when I say it like this, but… it was my first try!

It was my first try at this.  I’d never written a book, let alone one that people might want to read or someday even *GASP* purchase.

It’s a good story though, and it’s got a lot to it.  I have a lot of work ahead of me though, in that I have to go through it, from the beginning, with a fresh set of eyes, with a cold and hardened heart, with an artist’s flair and an editor’s temperament.  I have to go through it all again, to make it good.

Not that it’s not good, it’s just not ready.

So, first I’ll go through it and I’ll revise it into something readable.  Then I share it with strangers.  Yes, that’s right, strangers.  To see what they think.  They’ll critique the work, not the artist, and I’ll get some honest feedback.

Then, I’ll make changes, as I see fit, and I’ll share it with the most important reader I have.  My wife.  She’s the inspiration for the story AND my chief editor.  That’s when I’ll get the real deal back at me.

Then I’ll share it with everybody.  Well, everybody that’s willing to pay $0.99 for it on Kindle (or something similar).  Then I’ll look for feedback that’s less honest, the kind where my mother gets a bit teary and says, “Oh, I always knew you could!”  Of course, by that point it’ll be too late to change anything, I’ll be published.

Yes, that’s right.  This is the New Millennium.

Old School Publishing Houses and Literary Agents and Editors and Agents and all that… well they may not be long for this world.  Not in their present form anyway.

I’ve delved into researching the world of e-book publishing, or self-publishing.

It all really started with David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants, an email I get every day (usually) sent for free from a published and successful New York Times Bestselling Author.  He mentioned an Indie publisher named Amanda Hocking, whom I checked out, and that was that.  I was sold.

See, Amanda Hocking hasn’t been published anywhere, not traditionally.  She didn’t send out millions of queries just to get millions of rejections.  She didn’t go all J.K. Rowling nor did she go Stephanie Meyer.  She just wrote lots of books, a series or two, and then e-published them.  For Kindle, predominantly I assume, and then she spread the word about her books.

Then people were reading them and buying them and further spreading the word.

Last year at this time, she was still working in her dingy disadvantaged-care job, getting more and more excited at the idea that she could sell books online.

Last July or so, she made more in book sales than she did the previous year at her job.  In December, she made around a quarter of a million dollars.

Just between you and me, that’s a lot of money.

Not that I’m in it for the money, because if I was I’d be a bit retarded.  I’m in it to make books happen and see if people like them and entertain and make people’s lives a little bit better.

If that makes money, then Rock On.

But we’ll see how it goes.  For now, I’m just documenting how I’m going and trying to keep track of the cool shit that happens on the way.

Wish me luck.

The Start of Something Big

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On New Year’s Eve, just last year, I finished my first novel.

I’m going to pause to let that sink in and give your mind time to swirl around with all the ideas of what that could potentially mean.

Now I’m going to tell you how it went and what I’m looking at ahead of me, and at the end we’ll see if your head is still running down the midway of the Imagination Fair, or if it’s fallen asleep on its desk in the Study Hall of Reality.

Much like anybody who’s got a novel inside of them, I’ve always had a novel inside of me.  Well, lots of them I suppose, but there was one that I’d actually wanted to write for quite a long time now.  Ever since I met my wife really, as it was such a asskickingly romantic tale that it needed told.

Well, I’d run through some outlines a few times, bandying about ideas like those wet strands of spaghetti that you fling against the splashback tiles to see if it’s done, but I’d never actually sat down and written anything.  I had plenty to go with, but nothing having gone.

Then, through the magic of Facebook, I reconnected with a good friend of mine from my earliest career job, Scott.  Good ol’ Scooterberry humbly and aw-shucksy walked me through how he started a cool coding 3D-CAD software company, sold it to Google who then made Sketch-Up out of it, made a little girl named Audrey and is writing novels.

Well, one novel anyway.  One that he reckons he didn’t have the juice to get done until somebody smacked him in the face with their glove and challenged him to a duel.  Well, a race really.  And he probably wrote a few novels worth of short stories and LARP (powernerd gaming) characters.  He also designed the shit out of many websites and somehow casually created an entire Content Management System in his spare time (4 years before other web companies started marketing theirs).

So he’s a little bit brilliant, and he’s still my friend.  Go figure.  We used to spend hours, HOURS, playing foosball at a crappy old table in our old web employer’s offices before the Fall of the Dot Coms.  We used to trade insults and compliments that were frequently interchangeable and typically consisted of some manner of description of intercourse.

I begged and pleaded and Scotty sent me a copy of his novel.  It was awesome.  I mentioned I wanted to write one too.  He called me a “pussy” if I didn’t.  Well, he actually said something along the lines of “Join me!  We’ll race to write 50,000 words by the end of November, and if you don’t make at least 6,000 words a week, you’re a pussy!”

How could I resist?  So, I roped in the doc-in-law, Scotty grabbed two of his mates, and we were off.  Sort of like NaNoWriMo, except 2 months instead of 1.

The first bit was GREAT, with everybody throwing around character bios and story outlines, and giving each other feedback on what’s probably going to work and how we hope the other novels will end.

Then somebody’s busy with house renovations.  Then somebody else has to fly to Antarctica because they’re the only geologist that can save the penguins or some shit.  Then inspiration sits in the hot tub while the rest of us are cleaning up after the party.

Bit of a bummer.  But we plugged on.  After about 5 weeks, I think I was the only one to never miss my word counts.  Just for fun, I did 3,000 words one week to see if I got called a “pussy”.  I didn’t’.  Heh.

End of November hit, and nobody really had anything other than Scotty, who had taken much of that time to revise the novel he’d already written.  Well, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, knownst only to wife really, I had set a goal to finish my novel by the end of the year.  December hit, and I was still writing.

My style changed as I went along, particularly after a friend, a published friend, told me I was good at dialogue.  Over the moon, I started writing more dialogue.  I don’t know about you, but 6,000 words a week is a LOT, particularly when you’re doing things other than writing.  When December hit, I went at my own pace, sometimes only 1,500 words in a week, but I was writing for the story, not for the word count.

Then the story changed on me.  It got longer and the ending was different.  My character developed into something that I hadn’t outlined and his relationships went even more in-depth.  It was great.  It was the kind of fun that I can only describe as “soul fulfilling”.

My soul was happy.  I was writing and writing and my soul was doing great.

And I was getting there.  But then the year was ending.  The kids were all staying at grandparents and I’d taken the week off for work, so I had sat down to write.  And write.  And wife cheered me on, and we were even a bit lax in our social commitments, just so I could write.

Well, I did it.  On New Year’s Eve, I finished.

And I haven’t even really started yet.  Uffda.

Stay tuned.  I shall be blogging here about where this process takes me.

Wish me luck.