Week 16 - Public Service Announcement

 

Update – pretty slow last week. I spent most of my time on paid stuff. The big news is, a publisher I was considering for the detective book had an open call, so I put together a submission package (synopsis and first three chapters) and sent it out. I think they got it. The autoresponse email said, “Thank you for your interest” and discussed dates and general facts, but said nothing to confirm they’d received the thing. I sent a second copy just to make sure. I may be in, I may not. I won’t know until next year; that’s how long they said it’ll take to go through all the subs and make a decision. Which is fine with me, since all I have at the moment is a handwritten first draft and about a third of a typed second draft. But now I’m on a deadline. Whether I get chosen or not, whether I even made it in or not, makes no difference. By the end of the year I’d better have a finished product. Then I can decide if I want to wait for word or start querying agents and publishers. Or self-pub if I don’t hear back from anyone by the end of April 2025. I pretty much win no matter what.

My viewership still consists mostly of Hong Kong-based  bots, though the Chinese contingent is growing rapidly. So have the views from the US; who knows, some of those may even be actual people. And my viewer from Switzerland is back. Hey, buddy! (waves) I’ve had a couple hits from Germany as well, and a big block of “Other,” which I suspect includes Russia. Well, we are coming up on a Presidential election. I did my bit at the primaries by writing in “Bozo the Clown” as my choice for Prez. No matter who wins in November, I’ll have been right.

And now, on a more serious note…

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This one’s mainly for the ladies, though you guys may want to stick around. If you have a significant other, it could concern you too. Two weeks ago I had my first follow-up to my hysterectomy. I have to do two of these a year for at least the next three years, to make sure they got all the cancer. So far, so good. The doctor told me I don’t need Pap tests any more since my uterus was removed. I haven’t bothered with Pap tests in years, so no loss there.

However, there was the matter of the cyst on my left ovary—the size of a grapefruit, so I was told—which, fortunately for me, turned out to be non-cancerous. Would that have turned up on a Pap smear? The doctor said no; Pap tests are only for uterine cancer. There are no preventive tests for fallopian/ovarian cancer.

I had to let that one sink in. Some form of pelvic cancer, possibly ovarian, killed my aunt almost 30 years ago. That’s all I could think of when I was diagnosed with the Big C. Pap tests only catch incipient cancer in the uterus. I’d been walking around with an ovarian cyst for who knows how long. I could have been getting Pap tests for years and it wouldn’t have saved my life had that cyst been malignant. Those tests don’t cover the ovaries. You need an ultrasound for that, which I was only given in the pre-tests before they did the D&C to check my bleeding womb. That’s when they spotted the cyst.

You’d think a growth of grapefruit proportions would have made itself known, wouldn’t you? That’s what I thought. But here’s the thing about the female body: that part of it is designed to expand because that’s where the babies grow. You get cancerous growths in the Easy Bake Oven and the Oven stretches to accommodate them. If you’re pre-menopausal, people will assume you’re pregnant. Or, because you’re a woman of any age, they’ll decide you’re just getting fat. Because there was no pain or bulging or discomfort of any kind, and me being sedentary to start with, that’s what I assumed. The pain, etc. hits when the cancer starts spreading beyond the reproductive parts, and by then it may be too late.

I was damn lucky. My cancer was a slow-growing sort, and my uterus warned me early on by trying to expel it, which is where the blood was coming from. The cyst only got found because they needed to examine the whole Easy Bake Oven to see what else was there. My aunt was clearly not that fortunate.

Ladies, I present this tale to you as a warning. If you’re getting regular Pap tests, see if your doctor will also perform an ultrasound, maybe every couple of years or so. Especially as you start aging and gaining weight becomes a fact of life. Yeah, it’ll cost extra and insurance may not cover it without good reason, but better safe than sorry. Or having to go through a hysterectomy and follow-up radiation/chemo. Or dead.

Sorry to be such a downer, but if this post helps even one woman, in Hong Kong or elsewhere, I’ll have done my good deed for the day. Who knows, I may have just helped save the life of my reader in Switzerland. That makes it all worthwhile. See you next week.

Weeks 14 and 15 - Putting What We've Learned Into Practice

 

Update(s) – Time got away from me again. This past week I wanted to cover the beginning of April, but paid work happened and blogging didn’t, so I’m going to update the last two weeks today. That should put me back on schedule. I had myself a bit of a mini-block on the writing front, which led to a minor brush with the game addiction, but I’m back on track again for the time being. I’ll be getting a new assignment Monday, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

In more positive news, I’m back on the detective story again. Remember that recent blog about letting your work sit instead of just rushing it off to market? Here’s a case in point. I’m typing the longhand first draft onto the laptop, making changes as I go. In the current scene the PI’s just met an important character. She creeps up on him in a cemetery. This time around, though, she’s carrying a machete. She stole it from the bastard who executed her sister. All this was news to me. First time around I knew about the sister and that she was killed, but not how it was done. Or that this other character would wind up with the murder weapon. But now I’ve got some nifty symmetry: later on in the first draft version, another character decapitates a zombie with a machete. Now I know where it came from. Even better, it’s the zombie version of the murderer, so justice is served.

But that’s not all. As I was hashing out this scene, I realized I had a major plothole looming later on. In a couple of chapters the PI’s going to question the nephew of a writer who worked with the writer the PI’s looking for. The kid knows the writer’s real name and what he looks like. He should be suspicious of the PI from the moment they meet, for reasons I can’t disclose. In the current version, he wasn’t. If I leave the scene as is, by the end of the book people will be going, “Wait a minute. The kid knew A. Why didn’t he question X?” It’s the kind of mistake that makes readers throw a book across the room, editors reject manuscripts, and forces writers to start over with yet another pen name. Fortunately I’ve already figured out a way to overhaul the scene without giving too much away. It’s been two years since I wrote that scene and only this week that I realized its fatal flaw. This is why you should let your stories sit before you start revising, or submitting. We will sell no book before its time.

I was going to do a regular post at this point, but the update has run into overtime, so I’ll let it stand as is. I’ll save the other post for next week. Instead, here’s a good laugh: I’m now over a hundred days into this personal challenge and I still don’t have any followers. However, my daily views have been climbing. I was feeling good about that until I checked the stats and discovered over 90% of those views are coming from Hong Kong, with a recent spurt from mainland China. Great. My biggest audience is Asian bots. Then there’s a handful from the US of A, and occasionally some guy in Switzerland. Hey, I’ve hit the big time. Break out the champagne. Bots don’t even buy books, do they? No, that’s right, they just pirate them. Well, maybe the Swiss guy likes my writing. This one’s for you, Liam. See you all next week.

Week 13 - Should It Stay Or Let It Go?

 

Update – Ran into another case of time managementitis, and had to spend the bulk of Easter Weekend wrapping up paid work before the Monday deadline. Before that, though, I did get back into the detective story. I came up with a reason why the love interest definitely needs to have a showdown with her dad. Hint: he was a church elder before he became a zombie hunter, and lately he’s been talking about the Biblical story of Lot and his daughters. Look it up; it’s a doozy. The woman should have no trouble at all now turning against her father, and with the readers’ blessing. That’s one problem solved. I also came up with a much better action for the writer’s revenge. I hinted at it in the first draft, but only recently decided on switching things up. It eliminates filler and makes more sense. I’ll be getting back to that later this morning. I’ve been thrown off track already this week by the discovery of a puddle of water on the floor of my laundry room, and the secondary discovery that my plumber won’t poke around under a mobile home. You have to hire specialists now. The other plumber I called won’t go under trailers either, but they’re willing to send a guy out to check it over. It may be an inside leak in the washing machine, or rainwater seeping in from somewhere. I won’t know until Friday, which is the soonest he can get here. In the meantime, I mop periodically. It’s always something.

$$$$

The above illustrates why I don’t have more books out, and why it takes me so long to finish something. It’s not just writer’s blocks, depression and life shit happening. I can, eventually, get a draft done. But then what?

Back in the days of yore, when I read how-to-write books and magazines, one repeated bit of advice was, “Finish the draft, then let it sit for (a week, a month, however long you feel comfortable with).” It’s to let that first hot thrill of creation die down so on the next pass you can view your work with a bit of distance and catch all the fubars and logic errors you missed while you were typing. Like Maggie having green eyes and a husband on page 27 and then being blue-eyed and single six chapters later. Or—one of my personal favorites, delivered by Stephen King himself in The Tommyknockers—a character who lost all her teeth several chapters in, but towards the end bares those now-missing teeth at the protag. She must have slipped off to the dentist between chapters.

I imagine this is where plotters have the advantage over pantsers. Plotters know their story from start to finish before they even start typing. Pantsers make it up as they go. Hence the bright idea that initially kicked off the story may no longer even be relevant by the time you get to the end. Characters may need to be added, or cut, or given their own separate story if they’re not important to the one you’re writing but still try to take over anyway. (All of this has happened to me.)

Here’s where my slow writing habits actually pay off. By the time I finally finish a first draft, it’s been so long since I wrote the beginning all the mistakes practically leap off the page at me. Also, all the changes I made along the way are still relatively fresh, so I can go back and set them up properly, and cut any superfluous subplots or characters in the process. By the time I reach the end it’ll have aged properly and I’ll know whether it works or not, or if it too needs to change.

That’s just the second draft, though. It doesn’t mean the book is finished. How long do you let a story cool down before you start revising? When do you know it’s truly done and fit to be sent out into the world?

Answer: you don't. It depends. I wrote the first draft of this book longhand two years ago. I let it sit for a couple of months before I got back to it. I’m not even through halfway through typing and and I’m still getting fresh ideas. This is what froze me on the series. What if I publish Book #1, get up to Book #3 and suddenly get a hot inspiration that would vastly improve the series as a whole, but contradicts most of (done and published) Book #1?

As I’ve said many times before: my brain and I have issues.

Which leads into another problem related to my slow pace. Back in the days when traditional publishing was the only game in town, it was okay if you only published one book a year. Two if you wrote genre and were popular. If you wanted to write more than that, you had to use a pen name (which, to return to Stephen King, is how "Richard Bachman’s" career started). But now we’re in the age of ebooks and self-pubbing, and all bets and rules are off. Prolific writers can put out a book a month, if they’re so inclined. There’s no publishing company to whine about flooding the market. In fact, oversaturation is encouraged. If somebody likes your book, they’ll want to read more, and they’ll want to read it now. If you’re writing a series, you can publish an installment every month if you’re up to it. In fact, a brisk schedule’s encouraged. We’ve got short attention spans these days. We don’t want to wait any more. We find something we like, we want to binge. Wait too long and the audience gets antsy and switches the channel. Or moves on to another writer.

Some writers can pop out a book every month (or more, if they’re writing to a formula. This is handy if you’re doing romance.) Some will actually be good. The bulk will probably be crappy because they weren’t given time to lie fallow between drafts. Some may not even get a second draft. If the readers don’t care then it doesn’t really matter. As a writer, though, you should care, unless you’ve signed a contract and you’re on a deadline. Or you’re hacking out stuff for quick cash. In that case, do what you have to and let mistakes slide. That's what the editors are for.

What I’m going to have to do is follow the second bit of advice that tended to come with the first one. Write your book, set it aside for a cooling-off period—and promptly start your next book. Pretty soon you’ll have a pile of drafts. Then you go back to the first one and revise. And so on down the line. At some point one of them will be ready to sub. You’ll know which one, and when. Send it out, start a new one, continue revising the others. When it sells and readers clamor for more, you’ll be ready for 'em.

That’s what I’ll be doing. At some point I will be writing a book a month. Doesn’t mean I’ll be subbing it the following month. Eventually I’ll have enough in the queue to start sending them out. Then there will be a deluge, and everybody will say, “OMG, she’s fast!” Once I’ve got a loyal following, and sufficient sales, maybe then and only then will I be able to slow down.

If we get to around September and my books start appearing on Amazon, you’ll know this worked. If not, it’s not because the plan itself is bad. It’s because I screwed up, or lazed  off, or got carpal tunnel or something. Or injured my leg because the floorboards in the laundry room rotted out due to the leak. Well, that’s getting looked at Friday. Updates to come next week. See you then.

 

Week 12 - Homework Assignment

Update - I'm still having issues with the gaming addiction, but I'm slowly getting it under control. I'm also back on the detective story, and making substantial progress. I'll be busy this weekend with paid work, but I'll have a couple of days off before the first of two April assignments comes in. I've found if I go straight to the writing first thing in the morning I can get it out of the way, even if I'm typing on the laptop. Longhand is for when I really get stuck.

I was going to post the first chapter of the detective book on my Reading Room page, but for some reason Blogger won't let me add a new post, and it's been so long I've forgotten how to access Edit to make changes. It could be the page is now "static" and I can't add anything to it. So screw that. Here's my first chapter, where I tried to make use of narrative hooks and chapter-ending cliffhangers, which we discussed in passing last week. The two flash scenes that inspired this novel were posted on the October 8, 2022 entry, if you want to do a comparison. The one character's complaints about retcons not only made it into the book, it ended up being a clue. That's the fun of being a pantser: surprises at every turn.

Oh, the picture? That's the novel version of what became Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's the only book I can think of that mine is similar to. Maybe Inkheart, but I only saw the movie version of that, and it didn't have detectives in it. I tend to think of mine as a Twilight Zone episode, with bits of humor thrown in. I still haven't decided what genre I want it to be yet.

$$$

Chapter 1

Rain hit the pavement with a sound like a million despondent souls shattering into shards of eternal gloom. The city bore it all with steely stoicism. It had been raining just long enough for humanity to forget there’d ever been a sun in the sky, that hope was an actual thing. I tipped the bottle of Scotch up to my lips and downed a swig of liquid motivation. Alcohol. Buoys the soul.

That’s how your average hard-boiled private eye story opens, with frills and variations according to the author’s skills. It’s all BS, of course. Here in the real world the sun was out, cars were honking in the street, and it was a coffee mug, not a bottle, I held to my lips. I never drink during business hours, unless it involves caffeine. I hardly ever drink, period. Having grown up with an alcoholic dad, I never developed a taste for it.

As far as the hard-boiled aspect goes, I was feeling more scrambled at the moment, as I was dealing with the paperwork for a couple of recent cases. I hate paperwork, hence the caffeine.

Couldn’t be helped, though. I needed to get paid. And drum up some extra work. The jobs I had in front of me were standard background checks—simple and quick, but not lucrative. After self-employment taxes, I’d be lucky if I could buy fresh coffee, never mind a bottle of Scotch. I don’t know how the private dicks in those old pulpy novels got by.

Hell, I do know. They were fictional characters. They could afford to sit in their squalid offices with their feet up on their desks, drowning their boredom in whiskey. I had bills to pay.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rollin Stone. Go ahead, laugh. I’ll wait. Let’s just get it out of the way right now. I’m thirty-two, former Army intelligence, former researcher and leg man for a midsized detective agency, now making a living of sorts as a private investigator in the grande dame of American history, the city of Philadelphia. My specialty is finding missing persons, tracking down runaway wives and teens, and running background checks on potential corporate hires. I carry a gun, but it’s mostly for self-defense. Considering the places my quarry hides out, I’m more likely to run afoul of drunks, junkies, and homeless folks with mental health issues. Not once have I ever shot it out with a hit man or been hauled in front of a mob boss by a pair of baboonish thugs. If you were hoping for a Spenser or Philip Marlow, sorry to disappoint.

Although…I wouldn’t  mind having a curvy, long-legged blonde in a blood-red dress with a slit up to here and a neckline plunging right down to there sashay into my office. Especially today. I don’t know why, but this morning I woke up and got socked in the head with memories of Ellise. I’d found and lost her two years ago, but for some reason it had decided to hit me all over again just now. Hence my sudden obsession with mind-numbing paperwork. Sometimes tedium can work better than booze, but I was starting to think neither could help me.

I hefted my mug again and sipped air. Out of coffee. I eyeballed the pot on the hotplate on the counter. There was probably enough left for maybe half a cup. It looked as dark and sullen as a thug in handcuffs standing before a judge. Did I really just think that? Yeesh. I definitely needed to lay off the hard-boiled detective cliches.

Lacking alcohol, I made the best of things, poured the sludge into my cup and optimistically gulped it down, trying my damnedest to ignore the taste. It didn’t work, but I did feel a lot more awake now. After getting a fresh pot going, I tromped back to my desk, but before I could sit I was stopped by a knock on the office door. A possible client? I’d take it. Anything’s better than paperwork, or sad memories, or my coffee.

“Excuse me?” the possible payday said. “Are you the detective?”

“Like it says on the door,” I quipped. Even before I looked I knew I was going to be disappointed. The voice was deep but nowhere near sultry, and unmistakably male. No classy dame in a red dress and stiletto heels to drag me out of my misery. Instead…

Being a good PI often requires one to have an exceptional poker face, and I had to make mine earn its keep here. The guy wasn’t ugly, exactly, but… Holy Mother of God. I’ve seen sheepdogs with less hair. This guy was sporting a full-body rug. Head, face, chest, forearms, knuckles, feet. Which were bare, by the way. The legs were probably hairy too, but I couldn’t see them due to the baggy, size XXX sweat pants he had on. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt, open to reveal all the body hair carpeting what looked like rolling mounds of muscle. Once I got over my initial shock I started noticing details. The hair was coarse, like a gorilla’s, but with a reddish-brown tinge. On second look I decided he had a pretty okay set of cheekbones after all, along with a chin you could break a cinderblock on and a pair of piercing blue eyes. If there was a low forehead and a beetle brow, it was well concealed by the mop up top. He was maybe about five-seven, several inches shorter than me. He had me beat in the bulk department, too; I tend to lean toward lean. Side by side, we must have looked like Tarzan and one of the apes. I wondered if Tarzan getting too close to an ape might account for his Neanderthalish appearance.

Still, a job’s a job, and anything beats paperwork. As long as he didn’t try to pay me in bananas.

“C’mon in,” I invited. I noticed him sniffing, either me or the room. Thank God I’d started a fresh pot of coffee. “That’ll be ready in a sec,” I said. “Have a seat.”

I put my desk between us and carefully sat in the well-worn swivel chair behind it. I did not put my feet up. I wanted to be ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice in case Barney Rubble pulled out a club or something. I did clear my unfinished paperwork out of the way. The ape-man walked over—just like a regular guy, no dragging knuckles involved—and settled onto one of the two wooden, non-swiveling chairs set before my desk for clients. His butt just barely fit. He didn’t put his feet up either, which, considering his lack of footwear and the state of a lot of Philly’s sidewalks, was probably best.

“So,” I said. Such scintillating wit. “How can I help you, Mr….?”

He blinked at me and pursed thick, apish lips. “Treelore.”

“Mr. Treelore. I’m Rollin Stone. Go on, take your best shot.” He stared at me blankly. The silence started to stretch. “My name,” I invited. “No comment?”

“Stone,” he said, and nodded. “Strong. Sturdy. Powerful. A positive omen. I’ve been told you search for missing persons?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping my private-eye poker face was still as strong as my name. Because behind it, I was as puzzled as hell. “It’s my specialty.”

“Perfect,” he said, and bared a set of large, heavy and scarily healthy-looking teeth at me. “I was definitely sent to the right man. I need a person of your caliber to help me find my creator.”

Mmmmkay. “That sounds a bit outside my balliwick, Mr. Treelore.” So much for paying the bills. “Sounds more like you need a priest. We’ve got tons of churches here in Philly. Pick your favorite denomination. I think there’s even a Druidic cult that holds meetings in Fairmount Park. They may still have their web page—”

“Not that kind of creator,” my erstwhile client hastily interrupted. “I’m not looking for any deity. I’m looking for the man who created me.”

“Your father?” Not that that was any improvement. I’d have a better chance of finding Jesus than I would Bigfoot, especially in the city. One of them, at least, may have actually existed at some point.

“I suppose he could be, in a broad sense of the word. This gets a little tricky.” Before I could loose yet another witty rejoinder, he finished, “He’s a writer.”

“Your father was a writer.”

Son of Kong sighed and rubbed his forehead with two thick, stubby fingers in a very modern human gesture. Turned out there was a beetle brow under all that hair, though it wasn’t as pronounced as I’d expected. “I’m not sure how best to put it. Maybe this will help.”

He reached under the Hawaiian shirt, dug his fingers into the tight band of his sweat pants and pulled out an object which he laid on the desk before me. I’d automatically tensed when he did the reach but relaxed again when I saw what he’d come up with: a paperback book.

And not just any paperback. This was the type of book that helped to give “pulp fiction” its moniker. Earth B.C. was plastered across the top, overshadowing a secondary title, Realm of the Troglodyte King. The cover painting showed a creature even more simian than my would-be client with its trollish mitts on a struggling redheaded co-ed type in a fur bikini that was more afterthought than garment. A second, slightly-more-human-looking brute with a long black mane and chest hair to match charged at them with club upraised, perhaps rushing to the co-ed’s defense. The background showed a bare plain and a smoking mountain, with a couple prehistoric-looking birds gliding overhead. If “lurid” had a mug shot, this would be it.

“That’s him.” My maybe-client reached across the desk and tapped his finger at the bottom of the cover. “This is the man I’m looking for.”

I tore my eyes away from the woman’s fur-clad, heaving bosom—hey, I’m as human as the next private eye, and the artist had given her one hell of a rack—and looked where Captain Caveman was pointing. Sure enough, there was a name down there, near the troll’s huge, ugly tootsies: Jack MacAron. Given the subject matter, it was probably a pseudonym. My name’s no prizewinner, but I still wouldn’t want it tied to anything like this.

“Did you try contacting the publisher?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They went out of business years ago. They had a building in Radnor, but it’s an office complex now.” He sniffed the air. “What’s that delightful smell?”

“Coffee,” I told him, though he was the first and only of my clients to call its aroma “delightful.” I got up, careful to keep the desk between myself and him. He watched me avidly, but didn’t budge. I gave my mug a quick rinse and pulled a fresh one out of the cupboard for my client. There was some powdered creamer in there too, hopefully not too petrified. The sugar was fresher; there are days, and cases, where a sugar rush to top off the caffeine came in handy. This could possibly be one of those cases. “How do you take your coffee? Black?”

He squinted at the pot. “It’s black already.”

I had my answer. Abandoning the creamer to its cupboard tomb, I poured myself a double, then filled the second mug and returned to my desk with them, along with the box of sugar cubes tucked under my arm. I set the mugs on the desk along with the box of sugar. After a second’s consideration, I shook a couple of cubes into my palm and dumped them into my java. Every little bit helps.

“How about Google?” I asked, resuming our conversation. “Did you try looking him up?”

The ape man was still sniffing his coffee. He dipped the tip of his tongue into it, and made a face. I relaxed a little. That’s the reaction I expect in regards to my coffee. “Sure you don’t want some cream or sugar?” I nodded toward the box.

He took the box. Shook it. Sniffed it. Okay, this was getting weird. Weirder.

Then a thought hit me and my own nose twitched. That whiff of phantom ashes drifting up my nostrils was the scent of a paycheck going up in smoke. Nobody, not even a Philadelphian, would dress and act like this unless they were totally wackadoo. Or cosplaying.

I had an interest in science fiction and comic books back when I was a kid. It was part of the reason I went for intelligence training and info gathering during my stint in the Army—homage to my childhood inspiration of Batman, the world’s greatest detective. My enthusiasm shifted away from such things when puberty hit, but I knew it hadn’t for a lot of others. These others read books, went to movies, held conventions, sometimes even found ways to make a living based on their childhood hobbies, then bitched about it all on the internet. It’s one of the reasons I stay off social media except when I’m tracking somebody.

Some of them—more than used to be, I’m afraid sometimes—never quite make the jump from kid to grownup, even with puberty’s help. My Stone Age guest looked like he might be in his twenties. Hard to tell under all that hair. Even so, a little old for dress-up. Yet here he was, in my office, made up to look like a caveman and pretending not to know what coffee and sugar were. And he was looking for somebody. A writer whose oeuvre included books about cavemen. Maybe he was just an overenthusiastic fan. Like the one who shot John Lennon. Or Mr. Hinkley, Jodie Foster enthusiast.

I edged closer to my desk, and the drawer with my gun in it. “So,” I said, “Mister…Treelore. I’m guessing you’re not from around here. Why start your search in Philadelphia?”

“Mmphggff?” he responded around a mouthful of sugar cubes. He had another half dozen in his big simian mitt.

“The sugar’s supposed to go in the coffee,” I offered helpfully.

True to character, Mr. Treelore grunted, shrugged, and slurped down a big gulp of coffee. It must have met with his personal standards, because he smiled with all those big teeth showing again. “Much better. Rather refreshing, once you adjust to the bitterness. We’ve got something like this back where I’m from, but you have boil tree bark to get it. You had a question?” He popped several extra sugar cube chasers into his mouth.

I moved the box to my side of the desk, out of reach. “What led you to think your writer friend might be found in Philadelphia?”

“That’s the city outside, right? Well, I…I didn’t exactly come here. This is going to sound rather strange.”

“I think I can take it.”

“I certainly hope so. Last night I was home. I went to sleep. This morning I woke up here, in your Filladelfya. I was confused at first. I wasn’t the only one. You should have seen the faces on the people around me. I know I don’t exactly fit in.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’m sure. At any rate, as I sat there I began to…know things. Like remembering, but more organic. Who I am, what I am, why I needed to find this particular author.” He eyed the paperback, then the box of sugar cubes. I tensed for a lunge, but he sighed and slumped in his chair. “That’s not completely accurate. I’m not entirely sure just why I need to find the writer, only that I do. Perhaps he’ll be able to tell me why I was brought to this world.”

Oh yeah. Serious psychotic break in progress here. “I thought you said he was your father.”

“My creator. An entirely different thing. He wasn’t my father, per se. This is my father.” He pointed to the Neanderthal on the book cover. “And my mother. This is the world that I came from. I’m not really real, not as I’m sure you know it. I’m a fictional character.”

Oh-kay. Time to go for the gun.

“I know what you must be thinking. ‘He’s nuttier than a squirrel in an oak tree.’ If I may?” He reached—slowly, I’ll give him that—for the letter opener on my desk. His steady stare remained fixed to my face. I didn’t dare make a grab for the drawer. The slightest twitch was liable to set him off.

Only he didn’t try to cut me. He cut himself instead. A quick, shallow slice across the meat of his forearm. Blood welled up almost at once. Or something did. Whatever it was, it was liquid, glistening and black.  He smeared some on his fingers, then transferred some smear to one of the unfinished forms on my desk. He laid the letter opener carefully next to it. The air hovering around both form and letter opener took on the smell of a newspaper.

Captain Caveman plucked a tissue from the box on the other side of my desk and blotted his arm with it. Then he set about wiping his fingers. “Go ahead,” he invited, with a chin jab at the paper. “Check it out.”

I did, starting with the letter opener. A few streaks of black still clung to the metal. I dabbed a cautious fingertip at it. It was warm, though not blood warm. More like room-temp water. When I wiped my finger carefully along the blade, it left a dark stain on my skin.

All of a sudden I realized what the scent was. Why my finger suddenly smelled like a David Baldacci tome hot off the press, with a slight undercurrent of sweat. “This is—”

“Ink,” my mysterious client said. “Printer’s ink.”

$$$

Hey, at least I'm writing. See you all next week.

Week 11 - Downsizing

Update – Things didn’t go so smoothly last week, but I did get some writing done on the romance. I know now how to fix that scene that wasn’t going right. I’m also getting nudges from the detective story rewrite, where I was similarly stalled. Now that I know specifically what the crazy zombie hunter had in mind for his daughter, I can proceed again. That’s assuming the assignment that’s coming in tomorrow doesn’t take up all of my time. It’s either feast or famine here.

Which leads neatly into today’s topic, in which I admit defeat.

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Not total defeat. I’m not giving up, not by a longshot. That phrasing up there was deliberately chosen to entice people to keep reading. In the biz it’s called a hook. TV shows do it a lot. Some shows run a quick pre-opening credits scene to drag you in, then end each segment with a twist or a threat so you’ll come back after the commercial break. Books do that too, starting off on page 1 with a bang (literally, if it’s an action story or murder mystery) and ending each chapter with a cliffhanger to keep you turning the pages. Remember The Hunger Games? The first paragraph on page 1 introduces the reaping; the first chapter ends with Katniss’s younger sister Prim being chosen as Tribute. Would you stop reading? Millions didn’t. That’s how it’s done in the big leagues. This has been your writing tip for today.

Now that I’ve got you here, let me explain myself. I started this blog as a personal challenge, to chronicle my efforts to write a novel in a month, every month, for a year. It’s now the middle of March and I’ve produced zilch. I’ve got two books in the queue, both of which were already under way on January 1, and I can’t make significant progress on either of them. The detective story’s a second draft, for crissakes; the heavy lifting’s already been done, I just need to refine it. I’ve got the usual suspects lined up as to why I can’t proceed: writer’s block, depression, video game addiction, outside assignments (at least they pay), and the million other things life can and will throw at you at a moment’s notice. It’s all excuses. Either do or do not, sayeth Master Yoda. There is no try. Except I don’t believe that. It could just be I bit off more than I could chew. If I were to take smaller bites…

Which is why, for April, I’m going to scale back. Instead  of  a book, I’m going to see about writing a short story. Or a couple of short stories. I’ve got a ton of snippets and false starts in notebooks that date back years. There’s got to be at least one that I can draft in a week, polish up, and send out to market within thirty days. I need to start getting subs out. It’s the only way checks will come in.

Then there’s that book I was thinking about, the compilation of the best of the worst of my toss-off flash fiction. Most of those are just dialogue; a little added exposition would flesh them out nicely. Maybe some can stay as is. If I can find a hundred entries and learn to self-publish, that could be my April submission. Plus a short story or two. Oops, there I go again. Haven’t even started and already I’m overextending myself.

In spite of what conventional wisdom tells us, just because you fell off the horse doesn’t mean you should get back on right away. I’m remounting, but this time I’m riding a pony. If I fall off again, it’s a shorter trip to the ground. Now all I need to worry about is my subconscious figuring out ways to screw this up. As I’ve said in previous blogs, my brain and I have issues.

For instance…now I’m wondering if I should post the detective novel’s first chapter on my Reading Room page, as an example of the opening hook and the chapter-end cliffhanger. Maybe I should have been a teacher after all. Nah. They don’t get paid a living wage either. See you all next week. 

Week 10 - The Fine Art of Cannibalism

 

Update – I’m back on track with the romance, but only up to a point. My realization last week has me rethinking all the characters, not just the coyote shifter. For example, my heroine is one of those annoying “too stupid to live” types, and she deserves better than that. How was she supposed to know the town was run by shapeshifters? Or that they’d mistake her for a spy just because she’s human? This was supposed to be a little quickly-tossed-off romantic comedy, but now it’s acquiring themes and depth. Nothing and no one is/are what they seem to be. I will not be calling it A Comedy of Errors. I believe that title’s been taken. Meanwhile, I got stalled at a scene farther along so I’ve gone back to typing up the longhand Story So Far in the hopes a better idea will occur to me when I hit the trouble spot. Sometimes being a pantser really sucks pencil erasers.

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If you’re sweating over the title up there (not to mention my choice of illustration), fear not. I’m talking about literary cannibalism—re-using an earlier story as the foundation for something I hope I can sell. The romance started life as a serial story I fiddled around with on a writing blog I was on several years ago. Each week we’d post a scene about life in our little shared universe, which included a remote Western town populated by shapeshifters. I had a human outsider show up, looking for a place to use as a writer’s retreat, who started writing her book based on the people around her. The ruling wolf shifters, being wary of strangers, had two of the pack (young, handsome and sexy) follow her around to find out what she was up to. Hijinks ensued. The story progressed through about five erratically-published installments before I lost interest and moved on.

When I decided to write a book a month, I had a different story in mind—an action romance series about vampire slayers, told over the course of eight books. However, as soon as I sat down to write that one, I got blocked big time. My subconscious and I still have issues. But then I remembered all the snippets and flash scenes and ideas that petered out on the blog, just sitting there and moldering. Why not re-purpose them into something that could maybe help me pay the bills?

I’m not the first person to think of this. More than a few fan fiction writers have filed off the serial numbers on their media-inspired creations and turned them into self-published novels. Sometimes they get professionally published; repurposed fanfic is how we got Fifty Shades of Grey, and allegedly several vampire romances starring variations on Buffy and Spike. I went back to the blog—the group faded out several years ago, but the blog itself is still up—and trolled my entries for useable material. This story and another one hit a chord, and here I am writing a book.

What’s the difference between cannibalism and plagiarism? Basically, who wrote/created what. I’ve heard there are romance writers who’ve written and sold the same book to different publishers, only one version’s M/F and the other’s M/M. Same basic plot, maybe even duplicated sections of prose, but the characters and certain incidents would have to be radically different. “Brandon worshipfully caressed Michael’s ample breasts” just doesn’t cut it, not even in M/M.

As for “writers” who take someone else’s book, change the names and nothing else, and publish it as their own, that is plagiarism and is not to be tolerated. You’re basically stealing money from someone who did all the heavy lifting. Stealing ideas from yourself is a different matter. I never read any of Barbara Cartland’s romances, but I’ve heard she wrote essentially the same book over and over, with only minor variations. No wonder she could churn them out so fast. That’s cannibalism on a professional scale. If the readers don’t mind, what’s the harm?

Again, it depends. I’m not stealing from anyone else; these are all words, plots and characters I created and wrote. However, those chapters that appeared on the group blog need to be revised. We were using a shared universe, created by everyone. Other people’s characters could and often did show up in each other’s stories. As I rewrite I need to go through and scrub out anything that wasn’t originally mine. The notion of a remote town populated by (vampires/shapeshifters/aliens/monsters/Nazis) is a common trope, so I’m okay there. I’ve renamed the town and moved it to a different state. I’ve also had to rename my main characters because one of them (the coyote) appeared in a book the group put out as a freebie to drum up interest in our writing. The café where my heroine gets accosted for writing was someone else’s creation, as was its original owner. Both have now been changed. I’m going to miss Sergei, my white Siberian tiger assassin, but he appeared in a book I self-published under the group’s imprint, with permission from the other members. He’s a Russian bear now. He’s dating the local bookstore owner (a widowed bison) because his original girlfriend was created by somebody else. And so on down the line.

Getting sued for plagiarism is bad enough. Getting sued for plagiarizing yourself? That’s downright embarrassing.

If I’m lucky, I won’t have to worry about that. Because something interesting’s happened. With the new names and setting have come new ideas, new inspiration and new characterizations. It’s taking on a whole new life. By the time I’m done I suspect it’ll look nothing like the original. Of course, the original was never officially published; only readers of the blog ever saw it, and I doubt if they’ll remember. Though now that I’ve spilled the beans on this blog, I could be in for trouble. I really should have thought this through. But hey—pantser. What can you do? See you all next week.  

 

Week 9.5 - Catching Up and Writing Tips

Update – Just thought I’d drop in and let everyone know I’ve recovered from my latest fall off the gaming wagon and am back on the productive track. I’m wrapping up a bit of paid work and have returned to work on the romance. I do that one in the mornings, longhand. Without the internet’s distractions I’ve been making some serious progress, with ideas for characters and plot twists hitting me so fast I can barely keep up. No urge to play games whatsoever. Looks like I made it through to the other side and should be okay. Until the next time. Here’s hoping the next time is many months from now. Or even never.

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While I’m here, allow me to impart a discovery I made about my writing habits. My current project is a shapeshifter romance, a resurrection of a story I started and abandoned several years ago. For reasons I’ll discuss next week, I need to change some settings and character names, as well as some characterization. In the course of reviving this ancient corpse, it suddenly struck me that some of my shifters, the coyotes in particular, all seem to talk and act alike. I’ve got one in the series that’s currently blocked, but I wrote enough to that story to realize he and the one I’m writing right now are basically interchangeable, even though they’re in two different stories with two vastly different settings and plots. Like the Klingons in the original Star Trek and the Ferengi in ST: The Next Generation, the coyote shifters have become my go-to stereotype.

Treating any homogenous group of beings in such fashion, like an overall set of quirks instead of as individuals, is not only lazy writing, it’s an insult to the readers and especially to the characters. Luckily I’m early enough in my current story that there’s still time to change course. The fragment I’m reworking was originally intended to be a simple M/F romance between a wolf shifter and a human woman, with the wolf’s coyote buddy as comedy relief. I’ve already decided to make the new version a threesome, so he’ll not only need to be a fully-rounded character, but one worthy of winning the woman’s affections. So what makes him stand out? What makes him different from any other coyote character I’ve written over the years?

Better characterization. And hidden layers. The coyote is a relative from an eastern pack; he’s been called to Wyoming to help the western branch of the fam in their turf war with another shifter species. (Fun fact: the subspecies known as the Eastern Coyote has been found to have wolf in its DNA, probably from interbreeding before farmers with guns wiped out the eastern wolf packs.) The coyote craziness my wolf-shifter hero can’t stand only shows on the surface. Underneath lurks a serious predator controlled by a trickster’s mind. There’s a good reason the western Alpha called him in to help and paired him up with the humorless, straight-arrow hero. Over the years the others characters have all bought in to my patented coyote stereotype. While everybody’s watching the wolf, the coyote will slip in under the radar and get the job done.

One trait I did retain from the stereotype was a coyote’s reputation as a horndog. Fortunately for my wolf hero, they’re not as sexually uptight as wolves and don’t mind sharing. Once my characters form their threesome, the wolf in this one will keep him faithful. My woman character’s dad was a Marine drill sergeant, so she’ll keep ’em both in line.

See? A little thought and a lot of effort will lead to a much better book. This is also why you should let a draft sit for a while before attempting revisions. Time makes the jarring notes jump out at you, as well as the overused  tropes. You can teach an old dog, or coyote, or writer, new tricks. See you all next week.