I am large; I contain multitudes

Credit where credit's due - a geek blog I follow called Lifehacker reminded me that today is Walt Whitman's 192nd birthday. Please sound a barbaric YAWP in his honor.

An excerpt from Song of Myself:

It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.

What is known I strip away,

I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?

We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,

There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

Births have brought us richness and variety,

And other births will bring us richness and variety.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,

That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?

I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,

All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,

(What have I to do with lamentation?)

I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,

On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,

All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,

I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,

And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugg'd close—long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,

Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.

The Shooter Vanished

and the direction of the story vanished from my brain for quite a while as well. Recall that just recently I was discussing turning it into a screenplay as a way of trying to avoid some of the stuff I was having difficulty with. But trying to write in a form I have no experience with isn't the answer.

Turns out the answer was simply sitting down and figuring out the damn timeline. This is a story that is very dependent on a precise timeline in which events unfold in a particular order. So I figured out the timeline. I made myself a little worksheet and plotted it all out. I even printed some blank calendars and handwrote the key events on the blank calendars to have a way of visualizing things better.

Once I did that, the story really started to click for me again. That, and I realized the yWriter software I thought had been helping me had actually just been throwing unnecessary complicated fiddliness into the mixture, which gave me another excuse to procrastinate. So I took the story out of yWriter and started writing it in Word again, and that also helped. Once I was able to look at what I had written as a whole, I was able to cut and paste, reorder, rearrange, rewrite, and start to really put the puzzle pieces together. I did a ton of that today, and I feel really good about it.

Three Bikes and a Broomstick (which is what I was previously working on) hit a wall for me when I realized that my three main protagonists were all completely flat and featureless. The story is fun, but I need to flesh out my characters before I continue it.

So, current status:

Jeff Thurman in Universe 12: Stalled, until I figure out how the hell it ends.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick: Stalled, until I flesh out the main characters.
"Ark Ship" (my hard sci-fi short story): Stalled, just generally, until I do some major tweaking.
The Shooter Vanished: Progressing nicely now - hopefully for some time to come.

Of course, knowing me, I'll hit a wall on Shooter Vanished next week. If that happens, I'll turn my attention to cracking one of the other things I have stalled. That's kind of how I'm going to operate, it turns out - have several projects going at once, and work on one of them until I hit a wall, and then move on to another, lather, rinse, repeat, ???, profit.

Anyway. Onward and upward.

Oh hai

Much has happened since last we spoke. None of it particularly groundbreaking - I moved, which was about the biggest thing, into a different apartment.

It's a gorgeous day in the City of Roses, and I just spent the last hour sitting on my lovely balcony and writing.

What am I currently working on? It's the NANO that I started and then abandoned last year. It's really fun to write. It's an absurd story about ...well, you'll just have to see, won't you? If I ever get it finished. I'm almost to 20,000 words, so that's good progress.

Essentially, my obsessive admiration of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett is paying off with this story, and I think anyone who reads it will recognize that sort of bizarre humor infused all over this story.

I'm having a bit of a conundrum right now. The Shooter Vanished is stalled, but not for any good reason. I was in San Diego several months ago and spoke with a close friend of the family who suggested that I should consider turning it into a screenplay. My brother studied screenwriting in college, so I'm going to borrow some books from him on how to write a screenplay. If it seems like The Shooter Vanished will work better as a screenplay than as a novel, then I'll do that.

The conundrum, which is not a big deal, probably, is this. I have three novels in progress, all of which have a slightly different feel to them. The one I'm working on now (tentatively titled "Three Bikes and a Broomstick") is primarily a satire. Shooter Vanished is a serious sci-fi murder mystery. The other one is also probably going to be more serious than funny. All of them have to do with alternate universes and skewed realities, so that connects them. But if I publish a funny book first, and then publish a serious book, are the fans of my funny book going to be thrown by the fact that not all of my books are going to be funny? Likewise, if I publish a serious book first, and then a funny one...

These are silly questions, probably. I have to actually get one of these finished before I can think about establishing a "style" or an "identity" as an author. And then there are people like Neil Gaiman, who has written both serious and funny stuff (well, at least one funny thing - Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchett), and seems to be doing just fine.

Just things that rattle around in my brain, I suppose. The important thing right now is finishing something, which is harder than it sounds.

Well that's cool.

Looks like Sinister Decade, my self-published poetry collection, has had over 500 downloads on feedbooks.com. *silly announcer voice* get yours today!

Hey there

*pokes his head up* Hi!

Happy new year. Yes, it's February. Yes, I haven't written you since the end of November.

Briefly: I'm re-writing The Shooter Vanished, and it's going slowly. I have to read a whole lot of books on private detectives, because I realized that it's crucial that the main character be a PI separated from the action. You'll all understand when the book becomes a massive bestseller right after the big meteor blows us all to hell in 2012. Or whatever is supposed to happen.

Anyway. Stay tuned.

Or not.

Nano didn't happen, for one reason or another. Whatever. Got about 13,000 words written and then just...stopped. Think I need more concrete direction on this story before I continue it. Also, I'm too tired, and I think a little depressed, to focus on writing right now...soon, I will get back into it, and finish something, and publish something, and get rich...that's the plan, anyway.

Writing Status

I'm doing NANO again, this time a rollicking story of chaos and mayhem that is turning out to be an absolute HOOT to write. I have 4,748 words so far, which is right on track for the first two days. As soon as the Nano people get their SITE working again, grr, I'm going to install a word tracker on this blog like I did last year, so you can keep track of my progress. Excerpts from this year's Nano will more than likely NOT appear here. One thing a Nano isn't is a well written, tightly woven story. It's more like a 150 page ramble, that, when you're done with it, you have to go back and untangle it and make sense out of it. Or some other mixed metaphor.

Aside from that, I still have The Shooter Vanished moldering on my hard drive waiting for me to revive it and make it sexy and perfect.

And, thirdly, I have about half of another novel done, but the trouble is that I don't know how that one ends, and I had to take about half of the plot out of it because it was in the wrong place. It's complicated. Anyway, that one is on hold.

Well, everything is on hold until Nano is done. Still, once Nano is complete, and I actually finish this novel, which will happen sometime after Nano, I will then have two complete novels under my belt, which is where they will stay until they are perfect and ready to emerge into the scary world of publishing.

In political news, I'm so glad we've decided to give the fire hose back to the arsonists, since the firefighters were doing such a lousy job.