Path to Publication, Part IV: Further Flailing And False Starts

All right, so, NaNo 2003 proved one thing: I can finish a novel, right?  So I'm all set and can just charge forth with this novel-writing thing.  Right?

Yeah, not so much.  The next few years were dire.

I attempted to throw a lot of stuff at the wall, and have a handful of failed manuscript beginnings based on that. A big manuscript graveyard. There was, for example, Long Night of the Pieman, a non-genre attempt to turn my experiences as a late-night pizza delivery guy into a kind of shaggy-dog novel.  Because, I mean, I have stories from those nights, and that would totally work as a novel.  Right?

Never quite came together. Attempting that as a NaNo was a failure as well.

So I also decided to really move forward with the fantasy stuff.  I had Fifty Year War after all, right?  So I kept editing that, and then reworked that diplomatic-outpost idea to a traveling ship.   Some of the same characters, but I was so pleased with myself because I was making them active, having them go places instead of having stuff happen in their orbit.  This was the real start of Crown of Druthal. 

But yet it wasn't coming together.

So I tried to force myself, this time with my Space Opera idea.  I set up a website (that doesn't exist anymore, and was so off-road in terms of traffic, I doubt it was even archived), with the idea that every week I would post up 3,000-5,000 words worth of a serialized USS Banshee.  After all, if I'm doing that, and there's an audience expecting it, I can't let them down, can I?

Of course, the audience never came, and that was a hot mess of a story.  Those two things are likely connected.

Then in 2005 I went to the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop, using the first chapter of Crown as my submission.

Friends, I was so damn cocky about that first chapter.  I honestly felt I would go in and get solid notes, but essentially praise, thumbs up, and pats on the back.  That is not what happened.  AT ALL.

And it totally deserved that.  Because it was a mess.  My writing was a mess, flat out.  I needed to get it together.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  Well, in a way, I kind of did try with the USS Banshee project.  I mean, I just put it out there, no gatekeepers, and let the people find it, with word of mouth and stuff?  Right?  Yeah, except it was a mess.  No one found it, or if they did, they certainly didn't talk about it.  And why would they?  The most charitable thing you could say about it was that it was a charming hang-out story with a handful of lower-deck characters on a starship, and the only thing that separate it from being mediocre Star Trek fanfiction was that it wasn't actually set in the Trek universe.  So there you have it: mediocre fanfiction of a setting no one else knew but me.  Yeah. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?:  Yes.  Characters at the center.  For better or worse, with both Banshee and Crown, I had gotten the core idea of coming up with having characters to anchor the story, and writing unique voices for those characters.  I still hadn't come up with things for them to do, or refrained from pointless worldbuilding or historical tangents.  For real, that first chapter I brought to the workshop?  In less than 5,000 words, I not only had extraneous paragraphs about wine or mustard, there is a nearly 2,000 word side-story about how and why the main character's uncle was elected to Parliament.  An Uncle who, I should point out, wasn't going to appear in the story beyond that first chapter of putting the main character on the ship.  So, with the workshop, I was starting to get the idea that not every bit of backstory needed to be told.

Perils of the Writer: False Starts

It hits like lightning across the forebrain.  The Brilliant Idea that will be the Next New Book.  And every thought is consumed with the "Oh, wow!"ness of this new idea.  It's fresh and exciting, especially if it hits in the hard-middle-slog of a novel.  Then, it inhabits your brain like new lover, with promises of how everything is going to be easy and light and problem free and THIS is the project you should be working on.

And the initial worldbuilding snaps together, characters are as clear as day.  You open up a document and just start writing, because isn't that's how it's supposed to be?  Isn't that how real writers write, right?  They just pound it out and go where the story takes them and they do it brilliantly on their first draft and that's what you're going to do this time because it's brilliant and you're brilliant and this is the best novel ever written by anyone ever and--

CRASH

Somewhere between five and fifteen thousand words, the fiery passion part is burnt out, and then you're poking at those dying embers and realizing, "I don't actually have a plot here, do I?"

So you put it do the side, mourning its failure for a bit.  Get back to work on the things that need work, where the work is paying off, slowly and surely. 

But, of course, the siren call is there, summoning you back with the promise that this time it's going to work.  This time it's going to be brilliant.

I've gone through this particular cycle with USS Banshee  several times now.  I do have a good sense what "went wrong" on my first few attempts: namely, that lack of plot.  But with later ones, it was almost as if I didn't want to actually get to the plot.  Put simply, I kept wanting to just write a "hang out" book.  I was having fun with the various sets of characters in different sections of the ship, just playing with the personalities, showing off shiny toys, that I could never manage to get to the point where they went anywhere for something to actually happen.  One failed draft reached 40,000 words of NOTHING. 

That's the most prominent false-start in my stable.  I keep coming up with new takes on it, one of which I'm currently quite excited about.  Still hashing it out, but I think this one might work.  But I've thought that before.  Not to mention, there's all the "terminal cases" I have in my writing folders.   But USS Banshee is, frankly, the one I can never give up on.

Outlines and the Graveyard

I think it goes without saying that every writer has a graveyard; the place where dead projects are left to molder. The ecologist in me believes the ideas found in those dead projects break down and filter back up, get a chance to be used again.

For me, my graveyard is mostly filled with proof of the necessity of outlining. Several projects that were mostly borne of a single idea, and I immediately went putting pen to paper, figuring it would all come together as I wrote.

That was not what happened, of course.

My thoughts today went back to one of those graveyard projects, from over 15 years ago. Not to the point where I would revive it-- I really don't see that happening-- but just reminiscing. This one really was a Big Idea kind of project.

The Big Idea was this: What if five men, all born on Earth in the 1970s, were destined to be at a specific event on a distant planet in 3184? To all be there at the right time and place, they would have to use extraordinary means. I decided that each journey would have to be different.

One of them would become a test astronaut, doing the distance and time in cryo-sleep. One of them would learn magic, and fling himself directly through time and space to the appointed meeting. One would die and be resurrected when the moment came. Those three had the "short path", as it were.

The other two guys had the "long path". Or, one long and one indirect. One of them (Jake) essentially became immortal through little more than an act of will, deciding to live long enough to still be alive centuries later. The other (Ian) received a map of time/space portals, allowing him to travel all around time and space, making sure various pieces were in place for the event to occur (including sending the map to himself). These two, inevitably, became my more central characters of the five, as they had to deal with the intervening moments that led up to the Big Event, while the other three guys got to skip over them all.

The thing is, all of this is a whole lot of Big Idea, but not a whole lot of actual story. A big part of that comes down to not having any outline. Mostly what got written was a few vignettes where Ian would emerge through a portal, usually somewhere near Jake, and depending on where each of them was on their personal timeline, one of them would Know What Needs To Happen, and the other would be clueless and confused. None of these vignettes really amounted to much of anything, mostly because whichever character was more in the know would inevitably pull the "You Can't Know That Yet" card, in a lame attempt on my part to build mystery. This was in no small part to the fact that I honestly had NO IDEA where I was going with anything. Especially the Big Event. What the hell could it be, and why did it need these five guys there? No clue. I never came up with anything that I didn't immediately decide was either anticlimactic, contradictory or just plain stupid.

So, my point is, in the end, I need that outline. Especially if I set up something leading to a big climax.

Though, at some point, I might want to revisit some of these ideas. At the very least, there is something intriguing that could be done with the out-of-order friendship of an immortal and a time-traveller.