The main reason I decided to to a power-read on it was to take a look at the outline. I envision this story to happen over as many as six or eight books now, none of which do I intend to be big old doorstops…and, yes, I know that’s not exactly marketing wisdom speaking, but what the heck. I’ll change my tune when the book contract hits. [grin] Anyway, I felt I needed to read through the draft because I’ve got a sketchy, episodic outline developed to act as a loose guideline for things, and I wanted to see how well the outline was standing up.

The verdict: Well, it needs a little adjustment. Not tons, but a little. In addition, I’m thinking the working title I was using for this book is probably better served to cover what might eventually be book 3. We shall see, though.

Anyway, the main thinking here is that I want to be prepared to respond if/when someone has interest in book 1. Hey, it never hurts to be prepared for success.

And now I am. Well, almost anyway. Just gotta make a few edits to the outline, and then I’ll be there.

So, rather than beat my head against the concrete, I’ve changed course and spent the morning reading the “shitty first draft” of the second book in my sword and sorcery series. It’s got lots of first-draftitis, meaning I can sense gaps and a few places where I rushed things. I see places I can explain a bit more, and maybe compress a couple supporting characters. But overall I am pretty pleased. It’s a story with a much broader scope than the first one, and the writing looks like it will support that. Even better, I think it will take less work than I had originally envisioned to get it where I want it.

All good. All good.

In a recent post, I noted that my writing process had become different these days, meaning that I’m not doing anywhere near as much pre-plotting these days as I have in the past.  I’m starting more and more with a situation, then growing stories more organically from that point.  To that point, among several accomplishments I made this morning was that I managed to write a couple hundred words of a new story.

When I was done, I had this little internal dialog with it:

Ron:  Okay, that’s interesting.  Where are you going?

Story:  Nowhere.

Ron:  What’choo talkin’ ’bout Willis?

Story:  I said I’m not going anywhere, and don’t call me Willis.

Ron:  This is a problem, dude.

Story:  Yes, it is.  But, luckily, it’s not _my_ problem.

And so I stewed and thought about it.  Why wasn’t it going anywhere?  And then one of those little shivers struck me, you know, one of those “hey, that’s weird” zen-yoga things you get when you know something’s right but you just hadn’t seen it that way before.

I realized at that moment that I wasn’t looking at the beginning of a story at all.  Instead, what I was looking at was the end of it.

Interesting.

It immediately got me to asking lots and lots of fascinating questions about these characters and the situation–another fact that leads me to believe that I’m right in interpreting this as the back end of a story revealed to me.  So now I get to play the game differently the next couple days and figure out what events have conspired to wind up with the little bit that appeared this morning.

As I think Dale Carnegie once advised, I’m beginning with the end in mind.

It’s something new every day, eh?

Regardless, it’s just so weird to have an established background but feel so out of touch.

Realizing this, I’ve made it a priority to address the vacuum over the past few months and I’ve been working my tail off to get myself back into the game–or at least to understand where the game is at. If I’ve learned anything at all through all this work it’s that this is one helluva great time to be a new writer.

Of course, I’m not really a new writer, but it kinda feels that way every now and again. Mostly now. Except when it’s again.

Anyway, I mean … wow. It’s a really different world than even ten or fifteen years ago. Back in those grisly old days you had to code your own damned website, blogs were journals, and there weren’t any simple ways to learn anything. The only real way to get real contact with professional writers, or direct understanding of what it took to be a real writer was to drop a couple thousand bucks and go to a Big Name writer’s camp or at least find your way to a convention. Both of these options are still there, of course.

But now. Well.

The material available to the total newbie out here today is immense and really useful. It’s freaking staggering how easy it is to find help now. Forums, websites, podcasts, twitter feeds, social networks. Geez. I can’t imagine how any new writer can possibly go wrong.

My latest approach has been podcasts. I mentioned a few posts back that Lisa and I are spending a lot of time at the health club. We go for an hour after work pretty much every day, and we’ve been doing three hours a day each weekend day. This means I set aside about eleven hours a week to listen to something of value. This doesn’t count the quiet moments around lunch that I can use, or the 10 minute drives to work that I occasionally grab. (Note: none of this is actual writing time, but instead is time I can pull through multi-tasking–nothing better than learning about the field while burning a few calories).

So the iPod has been burning.

I’ve spent some of this time listening to interviews of editors that I was considering sending my book to, which immediately gave me a feel for what they thought and how they approached material. I’ve listened to several what I’ll call “culturally relevant” stories by the Scalzi’s and the Doctorows and the Buckells (hiya, Toby…you go, guy) and several others. I took in James Patrick Kelly’s environment-changing Burn. I’ve experienced NPR and Barnes and Noble interviews of probably 30 writers that range from Anne Lamott to Ken Follett to Niel Gaiman to Laura Lippman. I’ve found Shaun Farrell’s Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing, and Mur Lafferty’s I Should be Writing. And, yeah, those are just a few of the goodies I’ve come across.

I mean, it’s almost impossible to _not_ know at least something about what’s going on in the field as long as you work on it just a little bit. And this is just in Podcast space. I’m not even yet touching on the fact that there appear to be a gazillion solid markets for short fiction now.

It all makes me feel like an old geezer. “In my day and age you had to write uphill both ways…”

So, yeah, it seems like a great time to be a new writer, though I admit I wish I didn’t feel quite so much like one.

Here’s a not-so-secret secret.  Writing a 10,000 word story doesn’t take much longer than writing a 3,000 word story.  For me, anyway.  Sure, it takes a little longer–a few hours–just in raw creation of words.  But the bulk of the work (again, for me, anyway) required to create fiction is focused on creating story, which is a lot different from creating words.

Now I get to decide what to write next.

New short?

Back to a novel?

Second novel in the Glamour series?

The choices seem endless — but that’s only because they are.

I was surprised at times at where the characters sent me.

Part of the joy of creation, I suppose.

As always, the title may change after the final tale settles on me a bit.  That’s how it seems to be working right now.  The working title gives me a push-off, then I come along and clean up behind the process to give it a face lift.

I had jotted a few notes here and there, and even had a paragraph or two of pseudo-code prose to capture a flavor of a thought, but the real work has really just poured throughover the past two days.  I figure tomorrow probably sees the end of the first draft, anyway, bloated as it will likely be.

We’ll see, though.

The second draft is generally more fun anyway.

I find that bigger projects are like this for me.  When I ‘m writing a novel I get all my energy tied up in it, and I really struggle to go work on anything else.  Short work I can multi-task between.  But novels are beasts that sit on my shoulder and whisper at me during all times of the day.  Novels get jealous, I guess.  Short Stories are just happy to be here.

And that is the sum total of my wisdom for the morning.  Off to work.