Category: Writing

I’m a Tesla, not an Edison

The rivalry between Tesla and Edison has gained much attention in recent years, though I have personally been aware of Tesla’s work since I was a boy. I have done a fair amount of research on Tesla, and some on Edison, but I’m just going to be painting their differences with broad strokes here, to serve my point – if you want to know more details, read (at least) their Wikipedia articles (and probably a book or two). The differences between them are striking in many ways, and some of those differences highlight things about me that separate me from other people.

The primary example I was intending to post about relates to Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This attitude correlates to what I know of Edison’s work habits and his process of “invention.” For example, we know that as the “inventor” of the light bulb, he started from the previously established invention of the incandescent light bulb and painstakingly went through many thousands of variations over several years in an attempt to improve upon the result. Meanwhile many other scientists and inventors were working on the same thing and at least one of them was awarded a patent on “Edison’s invention” a year before Edison had a working bulb. He worked with teams of people, worked things out on paper, worked things out through experimentation, failure, and repetition, then kept working. Living up to his famous quote, he put 99% of his efforts into working, and 1% into thinking.

Tesla, on the other hand, spent a lot of his time thinking. Visualizing. Solving problems (completely) in his mind before ever beginning work on them. When Tesla built the first induction motor, it didn’t take him thousands of tries, dozens of skilled assistants, trial and error after error after error. Instead, he simply built an induction motor, and it worked, exactly as he’d known it would. And the induction motor wasn’t simply a variation of an existing technology, it was a wholly new invention, the like of which had not been imagined by anyone prior to Tesla. The only thing which had stood in the way of its construction years earlier was a lack of financial backing.

That was another key difference between Edison and Tesla: Edison was very much a capitalist, working & creating what he did in order to build power and wealth. Tesla had intended, in multiple instances, to give his inventions freely to the world and tried to prevent them from being exploited for the creation of wealth at the expense of the greater good. Edison “invented” for money. Tesla invented to make the world a better place, to improve things, and because it was fun for him. Edison became powerful and wealthy. Tesla struggled with money, unable to complete (or sometimes begin) the construction of his later inventions for want of financial backing.

Then there’s me. As an author, for a long time when I’ve seen the apparently-universal advice to & from writers/authors about writing every day, editing everything over and over, revising, outlining, rearranging & reorganizing, polishing, tightening, and otherwise working very, very hard on the perspiration-parts of writing, I’ve always thought it seemed odd how far from my experience it was but had trouble expressing that difference. I realized recently that what other writers are doing seems very much in line with Edison’s famous quote, but that what I do is more in line with how Tesla invented.

They’re taking an idea and heaping upon it ninety-nine times more work to turn it into a somewhat improved iteration of the same thing everyone else is writing. They often believe there’s a “right” way to write, and that there are “rules” for writing a “good” book, and a lot of their work goes into trying to fold, spindle, and mutilate their ideas & words until they fit. Alternatively, I sit down and write a nearly finished draft on my first attempt. This wouldn’t be possible without weeks/months/years of ideas gestating in my mind, sure, but not in any rigid or organized fashion. Not with any ‘revising, outlining, rearranging & reorganizing, polishing, or tightening’ taking place mentally. As with Tesla’s visual thinking, all I usually have to do is open my mind and the story appears within it, fully formed. Then I simply have to sit down and, as Tesla built each of his inventions, write it as it appears in my mind – and it works!

Which is not to say that my books work in the same way that all those Edisonian writers’ books do. In fact, if you attempt to judge my creations by the rules of what is currently considered “good” books you’ll almost certainly find them lacking. This is because that is not what I was trying to write. I’m not trying to create the ten-thousandth iteration of any of the same styles/structures/ideas that are already out there, that many other people are working on. I’m trying to create the polyphase induction motor in a world of brushed DC motors, not to build a slightly-longer-lasting or slightly-brighter-burning light bulb or a slightly-better telephone transmitter (all Edison goals/”inventions” and all also “invented” by others).

My favorite of my novels embodies the experience of depersonalization disorder, which multiple characters experience within it, through its own structure, style, and in the way its confusing resolution erases the only actions that happened on its pages. This is clearly not done with making money in mind. Forget What You Can’t Remember exists because I believe it is an experience worth having, an experience different from anything most people have to face. It is not my least-popular novel, but it is close. It is certainly my most-loathed novel. Being nearly the opposite of a thriller, and the structure of a thriller being at the core of the “right” way to write a “good” book, it isn’t going to please everyone. I guess financial struggles are another thing I’ll continue to have in common with Tesla for the foreseeable future, too.

As long as I’m still on the more-thinking side as well, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Next/new writing project

First: No, I haven’t painted anything recently. In fact, I’ve only painted one thing since the first week of February, and that was the cover of Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve put some effort into reading through part of the correspondence art course, but I haven’t finished working through it and I haven’t done more than a few sketches. I don’t know whether I’ll be showing at the Art Walk in September or October, but at the current rate, if I do, it’ll be all “old” work. (Not that 99% of people at the Art Walk would know.) Now:

I’m working on Untrue Tales… Book Four. I know I mentioned it on Twitter/Facebook, but in case you haven’t been following me; I began writing Book Four while I was in Las Vegas recently. (During the day while we were there, my wife Mandy was at a teaching conference, so I had plenty of time to work. Evenings were for having fun.) I got about 5700 words written in Vegas, and haven’t added a word in the three weeks since. Actually, I’ve been pretty darn depressed lately -including the last three weeks, comicon, Vegas, and for quite some time before that. I’m a bit surprised I was able to write anything at all. Luckily, I’ve been working on feeling a bit better and in the last week or two, and while I haven’t managed to get any actual writing done (and have actually experienced stress to the level of physical pain the last two times I tried to sit down to work on Book Four), I have been working through the story quite a bit.

I’ve seen/remembered quite a bit of the rest of the story, and it looks like instead of 7 books (or more) as I recall originally envisioning, the story will be well told in 6 books. The first three are done, you can read them now. I should have Book Four done within a couple of months. (ie: before NaNoWriMo’10) Then maybe I’ll write Book Five for release in early 2011 and Book Six for release in mid- or late-2011. I am planning on keeping them all very close to the same length as each other and as the first three books. The writing may (or may not) go quickly through all 3 books, one after the other, but I’m beginning to get used to the idea of investing months per book for editing/preparation/recording in advance of an official release.

I’ve just looked at a calendar, and if Book Four is ready by October 8th & I start podcasting it on the Modern Evil Podcast that week (immediately after TeaTA finishes its run), then it’ll run out in mid-December… Two more books of the same length would be another 5 months of episodes, if posted back-to-back, which would put the release of Book Five in December 2010 or January 2011 and Book Six in March 2011. Which I suppose would be alright. The first three were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I somewhat wish I could release the next three in 2010, 2011, and 2012… but I also don’t like the idea of sitting on a finished book for a year or more… and I kinda want to get all three books written as quickly as possible.

Of course, pre-2008 I was only writing/publishing about one book per year.

Now, for the release, I’m thinking of doing a modified version of what I’ve been implementing with my more recent releases (though certainly in line with the current availability of the first three Untrue Tales… books). I’m thinking of releasing the individual books 4-6 as eBooks and audiobooks and not as individual paperback books, then putting out the second trilogy as a combined paperback after all three books are done. I brainstormed a variety of models for putting out various other combinations of paper/eBook/audio at various intervals, doing various fundraisers, even thought about limited hardback releases, but due to the expense of paper (and the miniscule interest I’ve seen over the years in the individual books in the series in paperback) I think this will be the most reasonable plan. Then, maybe, I’ll look into doing a limited hardback release encompassing the full series.

On the writing itself: (Possible spoilers ahead) I haven’t written -or been in the mindset that created- books in the Untrue Tales… series for over four years. Since then I’ve been through a variety of life changes, not the least of which was my marriage in 2007. Despite Trevor’s having been reunited with his wife at the end of Book Three, their being together for the remainder of the series, and Book Four being about their life together before his being exiled to Earth, my relationship with my wife actually distances me from the relationship Trevor has with his wife. Writing Book Four has been an emotional stumbling block since (perhaps) 2005, and is the primary reason I’ve not previously continued the series. It was supposed to be about Trev & Toni’s love story, which led directly to his exile on Earth… and writing the core of that story is one I may never be able to do.

Luckily, upon examining the way the story needs to be told and how events unfolded prior to Trevor’s exile, I discovered that the emotional core of and the how-they-met-and-fell-in-love part of Trev & Toni’s story doesn’t get told in Book Four or (probably) anywhere in the series. Book Four is still nearly-all-flashback to what led Trev into exile, as told by Toni, but she’s keeping a vital element secret. Something that won’t be revealed until the cliffhanger ending of Book Five. Something which, since she’s keeping it secret (for good reason), means she won’t be telling the story of how they met, fell in love, et cetera, either. This takes a huge weight off my back re: writing Book Four.

I’ve also discovered that the tall man, the closest thing to an antagonist in the first 3 books, figures into Trev & Toni’s backstory and into future books – would you believe he’s actually a complex, sympathetic, and manipulated character? His love story, I get to tell.

Most of the rest of what I have planned, I can’t tell you about here. It would give too much away. But it’s going to be awesome. The main battle sequence in Book Five is mind-blowing, and the twist at the end of Book Five… well, the main storyline has been planned from the beginning, it’s just a few details that have needed ironing out. Most of which happens in a process very similar to remembering something that happened to me long ago… or far into my future. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

It’s coming. If you want to get early access, you can volunteer to be a ‘Beta Reader’ – you’ll get to read the books before the general public does, in exchange for giving me feedback on them. You don’t have to be a professional editor, you just have to be an interested reader (and familiar with the first three books in the series).  Email me, or comment below, if you’re interested.

positive feedback

I was awakened yesterday afternoon by a phone call from an unfamiliar phone number. I always take calls from unknown, unfamiliar, and blocked phone numbers, preferring to lean toward optimism. Even when it interrupts my incomplete sleep cycle. (As I wrote in an essay in my upcoming release, Time, emiT, and Time Again, I live fairly ‘Unstuck From Time’ and the hours I sleep and wake drift casually around with little regard for the rotation of the Earth. In this instance, I had gone to bed a bit after 10AM and my phone rang a while after 3PM.) I answered the phone as politely as I could.

I do not recall the precise details of the conversation, but it began with a confusion. When the caller insisted that something must be wrong, that Untrue Tales… wasn’t all there, I immediately went into tech-support mode and tried to determine where their problem downloading might be. Soon, as they explained further and my mind wakened more, I realised that what they meant was that the story didn’t have an ending.

Which is correct. Only the first three books of the series are written, so far, and I have plans for at least another four (possibly six) books to complete Trevor’s story. I have been putting off continuing the story for the last several years. Book Four is supposed to be nearly entirely flashback, filling in the story that led to Trevor’s exile on Earth and separation from his true love, and I’ve worried that I won’t do the story justice.

I wrote & published (via Cafepress, originally) Book One in 2004, Book Two in 2005, and Book Three in 2006. In 2007 I began seriously working on starting Modern Evil Press, buying ISBNs, contracting with Lightning Source, and getting several books both in print and available for purchase everywhere. And got married. In 2008 I stopped working a day job and started being a creative full-time, devoting quite a bit of that time to creating audio versions of my existing books and writing Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, which were published on 1/1/2009. In 2009, in response to certain feedback from readers of FWYCR, I spent the better part of the year doing research on zombie novels, then wrote Cheating, Death. Then edited together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut for sale as an eBook. So far this year I’ve put out the print edition of LaNF-DC and am nearing completion of this new collection of short stories and essays, Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve been busy.

Then, while I was working on Cheating, Death I had a few ideas for an alternate history universe where I could tell at least a few good stories. I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on the period and characters from which I intend to develop these stories from, but the task is far and away the most research-intensive project I’ve ever attempted. (Normally I prefer simply to write the stories and worlds that originate in my own imagination, rather than to attempt to start anywhere near actual history and real people.) So I’ve postponed it a bit, too. In fact, putting together (and expanding) Time, emiT, and Time Again was partially because I suspect that I might not feel ready for the first book to see print by the end of 2010, and I wanted to be sure to put out at least 2 new books this year.

On the other hand, I’ve received my first enthusiastic contact from a fan since Dragons’ Truth also led a few people to ask me if/when there would be a sequel. (My response to that is a question of where, exactly, one might go from the end of Dragons’ Truth. As soon as someone has a reasonable idea, I don’t see any problem with pursuing it.) I know thousands of people have downloaded the eBook and Podiobook versions of each of the three Untrue Tales… books, but the dropoff in readers/listeners from Book Two to Book Three is fairly significant, feedback & reviews are sparse & mixed, and I’ve long suspected that people aren’t getting to the end or don’t like the series very much. The only people who, prior to today, had asked me about continuing the series were people who hadn’t read it yet and were avoiding it because it was unfinished.

Actually, I’ve still been asked more frequently about the description of the fireplace in Book Three than when or whether Book Four will be written. As in: “I really liked the whole series, except for the description of the fireplace in Book Three. What was that about?” That, dear readers, was in the same vein as the entirety of Forget What You Can’t Remember; I was trying to simulate in the reader, via writing style and structure, the experience the character is having – forced on you by the act of reading itself. You like to feel tension and excitement while reading the tense, exciting parts of a thriller. You like to feel as though you are being romanced while reading a romance. I just tried to do the same thing with irritating distraction (in the fireplace), depersonalization disorder, and amnesiac confusion and ethical doubts (in FWYCR).

Yet I’ve now had a great conversation with someone who not only liked the Untrue Tales… books, but is eager and excited to read the rest of the series. Eager enough to look up and call the author’s phone number, to ask about the rest of the story. Which is, in itself, perhaps enough motivation to attempt to squeeze Book Four into my schedule before starting on the alternate history series. At first glance, I think perhaps if I start thinking about it now, I might be able to finish it & publish it by the end of August. Or perhaps September.

Even though I’m not much motivated to write it. I’m a bit distanced from the explicit erotica, violence, and (the core of the thing, which most readers will never notice) the central motivation for the whole project being the satire by exaggeration of the way series like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events were unfolding at the time. Rather than despising such frustratingly written yet inexplicably popular books and wanting to mock them by emulating and exploding them, I just don’t care about them any more. Technically I had already got to that point by the time I published Book Three, but it has been a real stumbling block to the continued writing of the series. I will have to determine whether I can either simulate or replace that motivation, in order to continue the series without drastically altering the storytelling style.

Perhaps this comes down to that question of ‘why’ – Why I write, why I publish, why I do all this work. If I write “for the readers” I’ve got to finish the series. If I publish to be able to write what and how I want to write, I’m fine to go on ignoring it. I think it’s complicated and contains some of both of those (and other factors), which is why I’ve neither written the next book nor taken the first three out of print. I shall continue to think about  it, and I’ll see if I can start working on it this summer.

New story idea / it was all just a dream

As you know, if you’re following/backing my Kickstarter fundraiser for the publication of my next book, I’ve made some good progress on that project in the last 24 hours. I wrote the first draft of the first of the essays I’ll be including, and I began work on an idea for a new time-related short story. Actually, in the last 12 hours (since I first came up with the idea for the new story), I’ve written somewhat over 1200 words of notes, outline, and information toward the development of that story. I spent the last 3 hours trying to figure out how to start writing it, actually – it’s difficult to know where to begin, in a story with a lot of convoluted & iterative time travel, without a good idea of the entire sweep of the story.

As you may know (I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned it here), I’m not a fan, in general, of the “it was all a dream” story structure. For example, regardless of anything else it may have going for it, I consider Donnie Darko a piece of shit because it cancels out everything interesting that would have happened in it, if not for the time-altering resolution. I recently watched and complained online about several episodes of Stargate where “it was all a dream.” In one episode, we start in the future, follow the characters, the intrigue, the investigation, then the dramatic action sequence, the result of which is … nothing you just watched happened, because they sent a note back in time preventing it. In another episode we watch what seems like interesting character development, interesting action, and enigma-unravelling intrigue, but when they unravel it, it turns out the team was actually kidnapped, and everything we just watched never happened, it was just a dream the alien captors projected into their minds. There were three episodes in a row that did the same thing.

I don’t like it. I don’t like spending hour after hour watching or reading about events that, within the story’s own created rules/timeline/consistency, never happened. I don’t mind that it’s fiction. I know that fiction never happened. I don’t even mind something like fan-fiction, which I know isn’t canon & the events of which didn’t “actually” occur in the timeline of the original story. So I suppose it may be a subtle, difficult-to-define line. I suppose it has more to do with a particular structural technique within the story, rather than the basic concept of a story that “never happened.”

So … knowing how much I dislike “it was all a dream” stories, it was -momentarily- troublesome to me when I realized that there was an aspect of this sort of structure in the new story I’ve been developing.

Then I remembered what a “terrible” writer I am: My plan for the story is (and has been since I came up with it) to not tell the parts of the story that were cancelled out by time travel (except as first-hand accounts by witnesses from the alternate futures). I’ve been mapping out the (currently three) iterations of an epic space opera involving human colonization of the solar system, invasion by aliens, and humans’ various (and increasingly advanced) attempts to defend itself, making use of a modicum of time travel as a last-resort measure, over and over, and that’s why I have so many pages of notes already. I’m confident that I could, if I didn’t write the story in such a way that cut out all the action, adventure, romance, et cetera -if I wrote in a more traditional way, and if I wrote “publishable” fiction- this could easily be a book length story by itself. Quite possibly an epic space opera, longer than any of my other individual books.

Instead, I’m going to write it from a different sort of perspective. I’m going to try to explore the effects and implications of time travel (and love), rather than to try to write an exciting and engaging yarn of adventures through space and time. I’m also going to try to address part of the idea that people are trying to wrap their minds around when they utter something like “if time travel was possible, wouldn’t we have seen time travelers already?” I’m going to do it by showing all the parts that weren’t “just a dream” and I’m going to leave out all the parts that were.

When I first began explaining the story to my wife, this afternoon, I said that it seemed I was about to write yet another story where nothing happens; where none of the action takes place on the page, where it’s just a bunch of people talking about things that happened, and about what they’d like to do next. Seems to be a big part of my writing style, I suppose.

Podcasting pressures

So, I’ve recently passed my 150th episode of the Modern Evil Podcast, having posted 2 episodes a week almost entirely without fail (there was a week or two where the episodes were a few days late, but no actual gaps in content) since I started it. I’ve just put up the penultimate chapter of Dragons’ Truth, and the final chapter will go up on Friday. ((Yes, Dragons’ Truth was the first of my books I made available, through Podiobooks, almost two years ago – but since I didn’t start the Modern Evil Podcast until  several months later, it hadn’t yet been in the Modern Evil Podcast feed.)) Then, starting a week from today, I’ll be podcasting the short story ‘Second Thoughts’.  It comes from a short story collection I haven’t yet released (I feel I need at least one more story before I can put it out, possibly several more.  They’re long-ish stories, but right now I only have 4 of them, and it comes together as about 150 pages so far.) but this story is one I’ve made available as a limited edition chapbook.  I should put those online for sale…

Anyway, ‘Second Thoughts’ will run for 3 episodes. I’ve got it recorded but not yet edited. Then I had planned on alternating between episodes of the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut (on Fridays) and new poetry (on Tuesdays)… and when I drew up that schedule a couple of months ago, I’d expected to have been able to write the 5 new poems such a schedule calls for… but I haven’t written any new poetry.  I could grab 5+ more poems from my 3 existing collections. I could cut the podcast back to once a week. I could *quick* write some poetry in the next 2 weeks. I haven’t yet decided.

Regardless of what I do, after I finish podcasting ‘Second Thoughts’ and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, I’m out. If I only do 1 episode of LaNF-DC per week, I’ll run out of content April 9th. Including the presumed mid-week poetry episodes, that’ll be episode 167. I don’t have anything ready for episode 168. Yet.

Theoretically I could podcast the remaining stories from More Lost Memories… though I have been reluctant to do so. I could podcast all the remaining poetry from both volumes of Worth 1k… I could edit and polish the other stories from my unfinished collection and podcast them. I could … write a new book. I could let my podcast go on ‘hiatus’ pending new content. I don’t know.

I should be able to write a new book between now and then, but I have a lot of other things going on. A major factor of which is that the book I’m currently researching for … I expect not to be one of the quick ones. I expect to spend at least the next month researching for it, actually (though I suppose if I cut back on crochet work, I could get through my reading faster), before I write word one. I expect it to come out to be one of my longest novels yet, if I want to do a good and thorough job with it. I suppose I could do what some other authors have done before, which is to podcast the unfinished, unedited work as-I-write-it. Or I could write some other book in between researching for it, and podcast that.  I don’t know.

What I don’t want to do is podfade. To stop podcasting. I really would prefer not to go on hiatus. I don’t want to lose my momentum. I also don’t want the quality to drop, or the nature of the feed to change – it’s a podcast of my writing. It isn’t some guy jabbering, it isn’t an interview show, it isn’t topical or political or humorous or informative – it’s a podcast of all the literature I write. Twice a week, every week. I’d like that to continue.