Category: journal

There are two ways to stop writing a story.

Wait, before I get into that, I’ve reminded myself of something else.

Ah, haha.

No, seriously, the something else: there are two ways to end a story when you, as the writer, completely give up on finishing it. You can either kill off all the characters (or enough of them as to resolve the plot, by way of its invested characters being dead), or you can have someone wake up, and it was all just a dream.

Immature writers think these things are clever. They are not. They occur to all writers, and are a way of getting out of doing the hard work. It’s not hard to write the beginning of a story. It’s not hard to write the middle. It is remarkably hard to write the end. It’s like a sonic boom, if I remember my physics correctly.

(What am I, a Science teacher? Figure it out for yourself.)

That discussion could legitimately fall under the “two ways to stop writing a story” heading, but it’s not what I’d intended. What I mean is, (1) you can burn out on a story by losing interest, or having insufficient energy to push through that barrier and get to the end or (2) you can get distracted by some other project, that draws your attention and energy away from the unfinished work.

I don’t think I’ve ever done (1). That’s what most people call writer’s block. Well, no, that’s what most writers call writer’s block. Everybody else has some strange concept of writer’s block that, honestly, just isn’t relevant.

I’m really bad about (2), though (as you all well know). I don’t let it worry me too much, because I’m young. And because, for the most part, the new project I move on to is generally of at least as high a value as the old one was. I’ve described my writing process here before. I take long breaks, and the project almost always benefits from them.

The problem is…if I die tomorrow, I’ll only have one whole story told. Two, if anyone can dig out a copy of The Poet Alexander. I hate that. I want to think of myself as a novelist, but with all the time I’ve put into it, I’ve only completed two things, and both of them terrible.

Anyway, obviously this has something to do with Sleeping Kings. I am working on it again. Some, a little bit. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to push through the pile of pages, near the end. I’m working on it, though. I’m also becoming diverted more and more, though, by old projects set aside. I came up with a fantastic idea for King Jason’s War the other day, and I’m just itching to write enough of that story that I can use the idea. Incidentally, that’s another story that I set aside around 70%, in the way I’m discussing. Not because I didn’t care anymore, but because I cared about other things that drew me away. It’s a good story, though, and I’d love to get it finished.

I’ve been thinking about my sci-fi stuff, too. Most of you know this story, but shortly after I moved to Tulsa I won a writing contest on the forums of a sci-fi game that was in-development, called Eschaton. The prize for winning the contest was a job as the storyline writer for the game. I was pretty excited.

They never got any backers, though, and after three years of not hearing much from them, the game folded. I asked them for permission to go ahead and write and publish stories set in their universe (on the assumption that any obscene profits I made would eventually translate into them getting their game published), and they were generous enough (or so broken-down) to give me that permission.

It’s a neat universe. They provided me with some basic conceits and general elements, the names of the three major factions and their relationships, and then gave me free reign. In the time I was writing for them, I developed an immense amount of backstory (most of which never even got posted to their website), as well as a “present day” (within the context of the game) storyline concerning goings on in the universe at large.

I might post some clips here, or even make another blog for them, a la Sleeping Kings. We’ll see. Anyway, I find it interesting how much my interest has returned to writing in the last year, so that even when I waver (with the exception of that brief tryst with my programming project), I waver toward other good writing.

Wish me luck. I want to finish Sleeping Kings. I want to finish King Jason’s War. I want to write The Necessary Lie (my first Eschaton book), and probably the vampire book, too. It should be fun. I’ll try to find good ways to share it all with you.

Which reminds me: wasn’t I going to design and maintain a webpage? Ugh. So much to do….

Y’know how I once said that days off during the week have a ridiculously high chance of going bad?

I took the day off yesterday, mostly to hang out with Trish, partly (and specifically) because we had to go to a closing on the refinancing of our house. Well, that last bit was the part that went bad, this time. It was a tiny portion of the day, really, but it went really bad.

In other news, I saw a snake on the drive in to work this morning!

It was…I mean, massive. I work at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, which is this huge sprawling campus with dozens of buildings, connected with city streets (and way too many stop signs). I was already inside the gates, driving 25 mph down one of these connecting streets toward my building, and in the other lane I saw a huge snake slithering toward the curb. There’s a grassy area out there, and I assume it was heading for cover. I thought about turning around and running it over, but that seemed too cruel.

But…yeah. Big ol’ snake. Yeesh. And that’s my walking route, too, when I walk on my lunch break.

I have…well, at the moment I have three stories that I really want to tell: King Jason’s War, Sleeping Kings, and Faithful Jake. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually do a decent version of Faithful Jake. It seems like it might be too heavy for any kind of audience I could write it for. It strikes me as a powerful story, though.

I have about a dozen stories that I really want to write — the distinction being, these would be more fun for me, even if they’d be less valuable to my readers: The First Myth, Order Knight, Taming Fire and its sequels, someday. Taming Fire is done, after a third rewrite, and at this point I want to rewrite it again into something almost completely different. I’d almost be willing to drop it, like I did my sixth grade stories, but I want to do so much with the sequels, with Daven’s family down the line, and readers will probably want to know where he came from. On that note: The Rise and Fall of the FirstKing, or whatever I actually call it. Probably a three-book cycle, but maybe I’d make it one. Somewhere in with that, a book about the Dauric-Elven war, in which the FirstKing’s mother died, the city of Elspaur was ransacked, and the FirstKing’s ire was first awakened.

There’s also my sci-fi, which I’d like to pursue. I got permission to keep working on (and try to publish, even) the stuff I came up with for Eschaton, back in the day. I really liked the world I’d made, the different factions and the underlying mythos. I’ve got another story idea I like, in a much closer future, about human immortality and nanotech. That could be fun. And there’s the Twilight Zone story I mentioned the other day. The one with Idiene.

Is there anything else? I’d kind of like to rewrite The Poet Alexander someday (the story from which I got the username that I use for this blog, and used forever for all my email accounts). And my sixth grade stories…well, I lied when I said I’d dropped those. The story was originally called The Scorekeeper, and more recently The Watcher or maybe The Watcher of the Winds, but that gives entirely the wrong idea. And the focus has changed, considerably, since I first conceived the idea, so it’s no longer about the Watcher, but about the characters that he inspires to save the world. The…err…four characters, youngish, all with their lives suddenly interrupted, who go about trying to make the world a better place, in the midst of a terrible war….

Aww, man! That’s Sleeping Kings. I just noticed that. Grr. Well, but with more magic. And dragons. Which is probably why I gave up on it. It’s hard for me to write magic and dragons anymore, because the people I want to talk to are the ones who aren’t interested in that sort of thing. The doctor and the sick people, style of thing.

Anyway, those are some things.