The Writing Schedule

THE PLAN

Over the course of three or so months (including June*), the plan is to write about 90,000 words of my current work in progress. I’ve been using a word tracker app to set monthly goals, it shows how much you have to write each day to hit your word count goal, and it’s been extremely helpful in motivating me to stay on track. (The app I’m using is an old one called WriMo Demon, I don’t think it’s available for download anymore, but I’m sure there are other similar apps.)

After I finish the first draft, I’m going to set it aside and hunker down to finish The Underbelly War. My goal will be to write another 30,000 or so words. At that point the story should be finished, and then I’ll set it aside.

After that, I’ll dive back into the inevitable mess that the 90k novel will be, and start rewriting/editing it.

Throughout this I’d like to carve out some time to write a few short stories that’ve been knocking around inside my head. 

THE GOAL

Get some shit published.

So yeah, that’s the current plan. I might provide some progress updates along the way.

Are you working on anything, from a short story to a beefy epic, and if so how have you planned out your writing schedule? 

*I started about a week into June, but as of today I’ve written 23,000 words of the 90k novel.

Camp NaNoWriMo and the Mighty Newsletter

Camp NaNoWriMo turned out to be a success. I’d pledged to write 20,500 words, and I hit that goal plus 55 extra words.

The project was the sequel to The Horned Scarab, tentatively titled The Underbelly War. I had already written 10,000 words of the rough draft, and wanted to use Camp NaNo to spur me on to finishing it. I’d guesstimated that the story would only need 30,000 words to tell, but I’d been wrong. Looking at the rough draft and all the dangling plot threads, I’d think it needs another 20,000 words before it’s a complete (albeit rough) story.

I don’t know when it’ll get those extra words. As I’ve said on here and on my twitter, The Underbelly War is unlikely to see the light of day. The Horned Scarab just didn’t make enough to justify the expense of self-publishing a sequel. So for now, I’ve written 30,000 words of it—including some rough endings—and made a ton of notes for whenever (if) I return to it.

In its place I’ve been working on submissions for shorter works, but I’m going to devote the majority of my writing time to finishing a full length novel. Once done, I plan on shopping it around to be traditionally published. Wish me luck.

The Mighty Newsletter

In other news, I’ve made a newsletter. You can subscribe here or on the sidebar of my blog. It’ll be a sorta monthly email letting you know when new stuff I’ve made comes out, as well as book recommendations, and sometimes even a mini-blog only for subscribers. I plan on including other goodies in it, short stories, poems, and even giveaways. SUBSCRIBE and you’ll get it all sent right into your inbox!

Gnomes, Big and Small

I’ve had multiple secondary worlds tumbling around inside my head. One of them is Aftania,* a world that is unashamedly inspired by things like Dungeons & Dragons and Warcraft. It features all manner of monstrous creature as well as the expected “races” like elf, human, orc, and gnome.

Absent from this world are Dwarves and Halflings. Anyone that knows me would think the absence of Dwarves was weird, fantasy dwarves are one of my favourite races (coming in close behind orcs). But I decided to condense them all into gnomes. So, gnomes, in the world of Aftania, can be small three-foot humanoids, slightly larger (halfling-size), or burly and wide shouldered with bushy beards like Dwarves. This makes gnomes more similar to humans in that they can be a whole variety of sizes and shapes as oppose to all being made out of the same mold.

It also gives me more freedom to make certain body types and features more common among certain gnomish cultures. Maybe the mountain gnomes to the north are the burly ones, while the gnomes with deep ancestral roots in urban areas are smaller. It allows for a lot more variance.

It bugs me when all of a race are the same. It doesn’t make sense that elves high in the mountains have the exact same culture as the completely disconnected elves on the other side of the continent. Same goes for physique, though I’m not sure if this is a remnant from Tolkien or the influence of video games/pen and paper RPGs.

I’m trying to keep all the things I love about this kind of high fantasy but with a few twists that make it uniquely mine.

*Aftania is actually the name of the largest territory, and is also where the majority of my current stories/characters reside. The planet is referred to as Mo’den (an orcish word), but particularly arrogant Aftanians insist on calling the planet “Aftania.”

NaNoWriMo 2016 was a Bust

National Novel Writing Month did not go well this year. I only wrote a pitiful 15k words, far below the goal of 50k. But I did draft three short stories in those words, so there’s something that I can work with and hopefully refine/rewrite into something decent. 

A few things threw me off balance this November, one of which being the election. Even though I’m not American, it still managed to occupy a lot of my time and thoughts. Another hurdle was my own disapproving brain meats. I’ve gotten to the point where nothing I put out into the world seems to stick, being it self-pubbed works, submitted stories, or even this blog. There’s been some serious soul-searching as to whether I should continue to pursue writing. Ultimately, I think I’ve decided to throw in the towel and focus on other things. I’ll still write and post short stories here (and maybe on Wattpad), but the idea of writing as a profession is probably going out the window. 

I hope you all had a better NaNoWriMo, and let me know your word count totals!

Techno Babble and Starkiller Base: How much do we need to know?

I have a love/hate relationship with techno babble. Sometimes, I love it. It can make a story feel smarter and more rooted in reality. Like all that information you’re being bombarded with is saying “this is how it could happen in real life.” But, on the other hand, it can feel cumbersome and dull. The temporal capaci-what is going to do the thingamajig now? Great, let’s get to the pew pew.

I recently rewatched Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and started to think about Starkiller Base and some of the questions that surrounded it. A lot of wondering how it got made, how it’ll move once the star is dead, and also how can it even suck up a star? Did it use warp technology? Also, the way warp speed works in Star Wars seems…

Does it matter? That depends on the story and the world. In the case of SW:TFA, I don’t think it does. Starkiller Base is the big bad, we know what it’s going to do, when it’s going to do it, and—to a degree—how it’ll do it. The point of Starkiller Base is that something is going to get exploded if it’s not stopped. We have all the necessary information. Technological details have never been the point of Star Wars, at least as far as I can tell. If this was Star Trek, that’d be a different matter.

This is a hard line to tow. How much information does the audience need? I don’t want to overburden them with a dump of information, but I also don’t want them to be lost and unable to follow along. There is also a certain level of believability, not realism, but in-world consistency that gives the audience cues as to how the world works.

Dragons, a staple of fantasy, shouldn’t be able to fly (at least not the typical image of a dragon). At best, they should be clumsy gliders. But when a dragon soars through the sky, we all buy it. It doesn’t matter how it flies, just that it’s a dragon and it can fly.

Now, if you had a dragon that could fly because it exuded fart clouds, okay a little weird but whatever, then you’d have established a rule in your world. So, if say, you had a another giant winged beast show up and start flying around, but it didn’t use fart clouds to fly despite its huge size, that’d create an inconsistency in your world. Once it’s established that big bulky things have to adhere to some rules if they want to fly, it becomes a glaring mistake when your own rules are broken. It messes with the world’s consistency.

Ultimately, how many of your world’s rules you have to communicate to the reader/viewer depends on the context. In the case of Starkiller Base, all we need to know is what it does and when it’s going to do it. The same tends to apply to most doomsday machines. There are a lot of other times when we do need to know how The Thing works. Especially in stories that are set in modern times or hard science fiction, but also if it’s just you breaking one of your established rules. If you’re going to break one of your world’s rules, the audience has to understand why or it’ll mess with the story’s consistency.

What do you think, is there such a thing as too much techno babble or not enough of it?