Teel – Page 44 – Teel McClanahan

Cheating, Death – chapter 4

Chatper 4 is the longest, yet, clocking in at over 3500 words. (And without any zombies!) If you’ve been reading along you’ve probably noticed that structurally I’m writing each chapter in two parts: First a brief scene someplace Melvin Spall (my main character) isn’t, then a longer scene featuring Melvin’s misadventures in the zombie outbreak – which relates directly to the other scene of the chapter. With chapter 4, the initial scene is over a thousand words and, while it somewhat mirrors scenes we’ve already been through in the book (the family being woken in the early morning to evacuate), it also shows the danger of keeping secrets. Secrets that, by the end of the chapter, end up putting a lot of people’s lives in danger.

I spent a lot of time working on this chapter (relatively), which is usually a sign that I’m forcing it rather than following the flow – and usually results in a lower quality of writing. I would especially appreciate any feedback or criticism (preferably constructive) on chapter 4, for this reason. Having worked so hard on it, I might not be able to see what’s wrong with it, right now.

Also, chapter 4 pushes the length of the book-so-far over 10k words (Smashwords estimates 10,853 words right now, though that includes the copyright page & foreward – Scrivener says it’s 10,295 words when I just select the contents of the chapters themselves), so while I’m currently leaving the eBook at “name your own price” on Smashwords, as soon as I (write and) upload chapter 5 I’ll bump it to $0.99. I’ll try to get the sample% to still give you the first four full chapters, but from then on you’ll have to pay to read it as I finish it. If you’ve downloaded a sample without signing up for a Smashwords account, now is the time to sign up.

Remember, once you’ve paid for it you don’t have to pay for it again, and you have access to all future updates. Of course, I do welcome your money, so feel free to pay $100 rather than $0 when you “name your own price” at Smashwords:

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Cheating, Death – chapter 3

Go read Cheating, Death now.

What fun chapter 3 has been! About 2400 words in a little under 3 hours, and most of it was rock’em sock’em zombie-pocalypse fun to write! I mean, look at my last few tweets:

“12:30AM – time to start writing again, right? Have I mentioned I love my job & don’t want to lose it? Love, love, love being a creative.” – from about 12:30AM

“Chapter 3 starts out with a bang. 750+ words in 50 minutes isn’t bad, especially if it’s as fun a scene as that.” – from about 1:20AM

“I wonder if I can keep this up for the rest of the book. Another 50mins, another 850+ words of intense zombie awesomeness for Chapter 3.” – from about 2:10AM

And now it’s about 3:15AM and Chapter 3 is live on Smashwords. Plus the whole thing is still free. Don’t you want to see what I’m so excited about?

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Cheating, Death – chapter 2

Go read Cheating, Death now.

I’ve just finished writing chapter 2 and posting it to Smashwords. For the 5 of you who had already downloaded chapter 1, please just grab the most recent copy – you’ll see 3 updates in quick succession; I was just trying to get all the formatting right. It should only take 1 try for future chapters, I think I’ve got a workflow that will give consistent results.

Did you need a synopsis? It’s only ~4500 words so far, and it’s still completely free; just go read it. And then tell me what you think.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Cheating, Death – chapter 1

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Yesterday, I finally started work on my new novel, Cheating, Death. As I’ve been working toward, as soon as the first chapter was done, I got to work getting it set up on Smashwords. My idea is to write the book “live” on Smashwords; to make the rough draft available to readers as it unfolds. The first few chapters will be free, and after a certain point I’ll gradually start increasing the price so that by the time the book is fully written, the eBook will cost full price. Because of the way Smashwords handles versioning and rights, once you’ve paid for an eBook you have access to it no matter what the price gets updated to or how many times the text is modified – in fact, you actually get to choose which version of the book to download, if it’s been updated since you purchased it. So whatever price you pay, whenever you purchase it, you don’t have to pay again and you get access to all future updates, including the final one.

I plan to update the book on Smashwords every time I finish a chapter (or if I’m on a roll, at the end of each writing session with any completed chapters). I expect to finish the book by Halloween at the latest (because NaNoWriMo starts at midnight on Halloween), and perhaps as soon as the end of next week, if the story really flows out. (One time I wrote a book over a long weekend, so there’s no telling, maybe I’ll be done by Monday.) Your feedback on the novel-in-progress is appreciated. Feedback on the content, the grammar, spelling, the unlikable characters, whatever – anything is welcome. I’d like to get the thing in as good a shape as possible while I’m writing it.

I plan on doing as much of the back-end work as possible while writing it (plus I’ve already got the cover almost finished, and I’ve just put together several pages on modernevil.com for it) so that within a couple of weeks of finishing the first draft, I should have the paperback in hand. Then, with any luck, I’ll start podcasting the audio version of the novel on November 13th – one week after Untrue Tales… Book Three is finished on the Modern Evil Podcast… which should give me podcast content until around mid-January, 2010.

Continue reading Cheating, Death – chapter 1

“…fiction is all about action…”

“…fiction is all about action, about pursuing a goal, doing something.” – No one ever told me this, & I didn’t notice it in my reading of fiction over the years, and I’m not sure I believe it’s true. It certainly isn’t true of most of my fiction. Forget What You Can’t Remember is largely the opposite of this, and in some ways even more the opposite of the source of this pull-quote. (It’s from #3, on dialog, if you actually go look.) My most popular podiobooks, the currently-running Untrue Tales… follow a protagonist who is simply being led from one thing to another by external forces, with no real goals of his own, and often spends pages and pages with the characters not really doing anything. Daydreaming, discussing the size and shape of Hell, thinking about whether to read each other’s minds or just have sex, even just staring at an impossible fireplace for 5+ pages.

The book I’m working on next, Cheating, Death, is also contrary in some ways to this idea that I had no idea until recently so many writers considered sacred: That your main characters need to be pursuing a goal at all times. I’m intentionally writing a book where the central character can’t decide what he wants, changes his mind frequently and usually in response to outside stimulus (rather than any internal decision or conviction), and where the closest thing to a firm goal that he ever has (don’t get eaten by zombies) exists in a contrarian sort of thought-space (since the threat of the zombies exists basically as a symbolic external representation of his indecision). His goal of ‘avoiding zombies’ is really a twisted admission of his deeper avoidance of setting or pursuing goals. Oh, there’ll be action, he’ll be doing things; I’m also writing this book in direct contradiction to the most common responses to the zombie content in Forget What You Can’t Remember: Not enough zombies, not enough action, not a ‘zombie book’ et cetera. So Cheating, Death will be a zombie book, with lots of zombies, plenty of action, and cliched zombie things like having to turn on your own zombie-fied family members & narrow escapes not directly related to the skill/ability/resourcefulness of the characters. I’ve been reading thousands upon thousands of pages of the most popular and successful modern zombie fiction I could get my hands on as research.

(Mostly what I’ve learned is that I don’t like ‘zombie books’ and I don’t like thrillers, whether they have zombies or not. In addition, my favorite of all the zombie stories I’ve read have been ones that didn’t actually have any zombies in them.)

Was I supposed to have or come to a point, here? Hmm.. just the one from the first sentence; I don’t think that the sole purview of fiction is action. I prefer for the fiction I write to be more contemplative and introspective. I’ve even recently thought of a name for the “genre” of fiction I write: Introspeculative Fiction. Two steps away from traditional Science Fiction or Fantasy, concerned with looking in rather than acting out, but always speculating on the future & the fantastic.