I've been gone from here so long, I'm sure everyone thought I must be dead. But no, I'm just busy.

I have just reached the end of the second volume (er, book?) in my story A Far Sun. I split the story in two when it became very clear it wasn't going to end anywhere near the vicinity of 100K words: Book 1 is 117K, and just yesterday I finished book 2, at just over 97K. It's a good story, with good characters, and I'm loving it. But I'm going to put it down for a while.

Instead, I have about 21K words (so far) written in another story I've been messing with, so I'm going to work on that. A while. It may in fact be more publisher-friendly than my other story. But it seems I always say that about the stuff I write. Regardless, I'm going to start shopping around for an agent/publisher for the work, though I have no idea where to begin. But I'll figure it out.

Some friends are suggesting I podcast the story, but although I'm not a bad reader (and I have read the entire story aloud to my wife) I am not entirely comfortable doing voices. Sure, I could get others to read the parts, but who has time to edit the audio? I surely do not.

My artist-stepdaughter Em now lives with us, but she's still in school and busy as hell. Well, right now she's between semesters, so who knows when (or even if) the story will ever be turned into the graphic novel I once envisioned. Truly, condensing the story into a script suitable for illustrating will be challenging enough, by itself. Who has the time? (Sense a recurring theme, here?)

Podcasting the story myself seems the most efficacious direction, at the moment. Now, if I could just figure out how to do justice to all my female characters' voices, I think it'll be OK. But what I'd really like to do is publish the work(s), mainly so I could justify all that time I'm going to spend writing the 3rd and concluding book in the series. Yeah, I guess it IS a series. Of course, I have already spent time plotting out the next storyline in my invented world. This new storyline involves the children of my current story's heroes, and it attempts to answer the question: "What next?" Who knows when I'll get around to writing it. Ideas, it seems, are not in short supply these days.

On a separate but related note, we saw Avatar on Christmas eve. See it in 3D if you can! Both my wife and stepdaughter have commented on the similarities between James Cameron's story and mine. Yeah, his story involved evil white people with technology, pitted against simple, gentle native people who don't exactly want their interference. Of course, where Cameron's natives are 10' tall and blue, mine are small and orange. (No, my natives are not oompa-loompas. Frankly, that never even crossed my mind when visualizing them. My natives really are normal sized people, just with oddly colored skin.)

Well, I may post parts of my newly-current work Rider on the Storm (the working title), but I don't really plan to publish it online. There has to be an outlet for this type of story, so I'm just going to work on it awhile and see where it goes.

I have posted here in ages. I've been incredibly busy at work, and something had to go. This, given I wasn't going to jeopardize progress on my story.

The numbers: 178K words, but we have the ending in sight! I know it's way too long, but it's a really good story (yeah, I know I'm biased). I also know it will get smaller in the second draft, because by then I'll know what things I can really safely cut, and what things I can't. I also know I can cut about every other adjective or adverb and still have a nice, juicy prose. I just want to suspend judgment until later on.

My former web hosting service experienced a lot of downtime in September, and coupled with their lousy responses to my queries, I bailed on them and signed up with DreamHost.com. These guys are really good, and I snagged an unlimited bandwidth and data storage deal in celebration of their 11th birthday. I don't know if it's still going on, but I thought I would put in the plug. I still haven't wrested my domain afarsun.com from my old provider, so I created afarsun.net. Some day I'll have both of them.

I don't know what else to report. I am finding that as I close in on the ending, my tendency is to slow down. I'm not quite sure what the problem is, except to say that I'm juggling a bunch of subplots. Maybe I'm afraid of it ending, and leaving me with a vacancy in my brain space. But I already have another project in mind.

Many of you probably know about Michael Stackpole's newsletter and podcast.

He mentions in a recent podcast episode that you should avoid going back and editing while you are still writing your book. That is, before you're done writing it. He suggests making voluminous notes about the changes you make as you are writing that will impact stuff you wrote previously. He says editing is a waste of time, because you will end up just doing it again, and again, and again ...

Hmm. I am in general disagreement with him on this point, but I am curious how others work. In defending my own practices (and admitting I am not a New York Times' best-selling author with 38 titles under my belt), I am struggling with the idea that hand-written notes are conceptually any different from typed changes. I don't write nearly as fast (or as legibly) as I type. So I'd be tempted to type out this stuff, not write it. You see where I'm going, maybe?

Finding some important character or plot change in a stack of notes is ... er, more difficult than using the search function in my word processing program. Tell me none of you ever have had to go back and refresh your memory with respect to something you've forgotten. I have to do it anytime I've been away from writing for any extended period--like more than a week. Even when I'm busy researching or, for example, creating a new language, I forget some of the important details, and have to go back and re-read. I can't quite see how having 50 pages of scribbled and not-that-well-organized notes is an improvement upon simply being able to read it.

I have a Moleskine notebook, and I write notes in it all the time. I use it when I'm not at the computer, or when I have something (perhaps totally random) I want to record. I put down story ideas and thoughts about plot and characters, but these are things I'm thinking of doing--subject to change as I progress in the story.

I edit my work, perhaps more than even I'd like. I dunno, I guess I enjoy it. Editing, that is. When I change something important, say, after I've written 300-400 pages, I do go back and fix. Maybe that's a bad practice, but I really do try to keep from confusing myself, later. I can easily understand things changing multiple times, and requiring multiple notes/changes/whatever to keep track of the current state. In my humble estimation, hand-written notes are subject to the same evolution as the story itself. Except they take longer.

Maybe it's because I am an "old" programmer. Well, I am past 50 and I've been developing software for more than 30 years. With programming, you cannot defer going back and fixing something for very long. Either it needs to be one way, or it needs to be another way. You won't get it to compile and/or work as expected if you defer making design or other changes as you go along. We actually have a term for this "changing things as you go along" phenomenon. It's called refactoring, and it's considered a good practice. Sure, we sometimes run into something we know needs to be changed eventually, so we leave a //TODO: comment and go on, but before long we need to inventory all the TODOs and address them. That is, fix the code or remove the comments.

I have had to go back to the beginning and reread about five times, so far, since January when I began. Most recently was about two weeks ago. Honestly, I didn't change very much as I went because I was mainly intent on getting through it all to refresh my memory. But if I'd deferred keeping the whole thing current, wouldn't trying to read it again be a bit more ... challenging? I think so, but I'm a wannabe, so ...

Mike Stackpole also suggested that 100K is a good length for a novel, today. Whoops, I'm in trouble, because I'm at 130K on my "rough" draft and I'm just two chapters into the third act. I'm hoping I can put this to bed around 160K. Yeah, I've got more stuff than I need, but given what the story is really about, not that much is fluff. I decided to write the story I wanted to write, so there it is.

I'm still making progress. The story is advancing, and the characters and the plot still feel very exciting, to me. More exciting, in fact. I have the ending written, and I can see a very clear path there from where I am. I know finishing a novel (which this story is not, yet) is very difficult, and there is more than one way to work that will get one to the finish line. I guess I won't know what works for me until I've written a few, because I'm making this up as I go along. Oh, and I have the characters I envisioned back in October, and I've stayed true to my world design, and I am on track to the ending I also envisioned back in January, so maybe I'm not doing so badly, after all.

Yeah, I need lots of encouragement, and if I don't get it from others, I make it up for myself.

I've been writing in "A Far Sun" like crazy, though it seems I'm not making much progress on the base story, itself. I wrote a long scene between two of my characters that I knew wouldn't make it into the "final cut" because it contained overt adult-themed content, and I got an inspiration and wrote the ending.

I know, I wrote it out of sequence, and I'm going to burn in hell for that. But, not really. Now that I know how it's going to turn out, I can definitely navigate to it, from where I'm at. It's a sad-but-hopeful ending, as a [highlight to see spoiler] major character does die, but I'm OK with that. It's how legends are made, many times.

I also found a song to go with the ending, but perhaps I need to explain.

I've been recording myself reading the story with the express intention of podcasting the thing. I think radio-play format would work well, especially since I've written it in present tense. I would voice-cast it, as well, so I won't need all those "Adam says" and "Jane replies" kinds of things in the text. And since I have already invented the sun-skin language, those passages (many of which I have already translated into sun-skin--hence another reason why progress is slow) can be spoken in the real language. (Watch the new Hellboy movie and note the elvin [?] language they invented.)

I don't particularly like my voice, but I'm getting used to hearing it. I'm not too bad if I slow down and put plenty of pauses in the reading. I have decent expression in my voice, and I'm working on improving it. Exciting stuff! And this has no effect at all on my plan to make a graphic novel out of the story, either. Different media; different audiences.

I have a theme song for the story, and at various points there are other musical passages that will work. Honestly, I got lucky finding music that worked well. The music for the ending, if I try to read it while the music is playing, actually chokes me up. But I suppose it only means I have feelings for my characters. To me, it's as if they're real people, or could be. I'm not worried about reading anything, because the music is added in after the fact. We have the technology!

Perhaps one small problem I do have is that my heroes haven't quite gone on the offensive, yet. It's act III and they're supposed to transition from reactive to proactive. While I'm planning that they'll start moving forward, so far they're still just trying to survive. *sigh*

But, I'm still very excited by this whole project. The ending suggests a second story, and even perhaps a third one, as well. I'm not sure I will write all three, but it's not hard to see how I could. I mean, I've invented the language, the culture, and the world, so ... why not?

I just got the latest Holly Lisle email missive. Subscribe or not subscribe--it's up to you. One item she addresses in this issue involves a writer who (quite possibly) over-outlines her work. Yes, I would agree that outlining to that much detail does take all the fun out of the writing. Cripes, I could argue not to outline, much, if at all. I am much happier in my right-brain state if I don't even know what's going to happen, exactly, let alone how.

But I can hear the hue and cry, now. Oh noes!

Ahem, I know where I want to go and how I want things to turn out. I just don't want to detail it all out beforehand. I have done this (i.e., made this mistake before) and it almost inevitably leads to a tossed-out, unused outline. Right brain wins, most of the time. Besides, my imagination and ability to come up with twists and turns "on the fly" is so much more fun than boring old outlining.

But if you've read any of my more recent posts, you're probably clucking your tongues over my need to revamp and rewrite/change things, so much. And I know it's all because I didn't put (much) outlining discipline ahead of the initial writing. But I still like how I came up with certain things.

Like the wolf attack that allowed my heroes to meet up with the heroic native girl, and established an instant relationship and bond that would help carry them and the whole story forward. I could never have thought of that beforehand (because I didn't). Now it shines as a pivotal event in the story. You'd almost think I planned it that way. And that's the point.

Yeah, I know. It's simply what works for me, so YMMV*.



* Your mileage may vary.

Cross-posted to my other blog.

Let's see if I can summarize what's going on:

• I've been figuring out who the Librarians were/are (as a group). Determining the history of the place, the people who were there originally, and the subsequent 'history' of what happened after. The Librarians call the disease 'the Pathogen.' How nice.
• The pseudo-scientist in me ran into problems with the 300+ year time line. You had to know this was going to happen sooner or later. Even if I could delude myself into believing the Librarians could survive that very long time (317 years), many wouldn't buy my cheesy explanations.
• So I cut 200 years out. It's now 117+ years instead of 317. This actually improved my 'moon phase' problem because I had fewer days to adjust, but it does mean it will most likely be fairly cool when my heroes first show up. Not a major problem, just a reflection of my own lack of planning. Oh, well.
• I kinda like the notion that one of the following would be true: 1) either the sun-skins would want to start the planting at (or after) the first spring full moon, or 2) they would want to have their spring celebration at the (same) full moon. As it stands, the moon is almost new when they have the celebration.
• If I move everything to make the full moon line up with planting and spring festival/ celebration, then my heroes get there when it's still pretty cold. If I wait a month (well, move everything about 2 weeks forward), they won't get to the Library until summer is almost over. Perhaps that's a good thing ...

I have noticed a distinct lack of proper planning prior to writing the bulk of the story. I sorta went for it without having figured out what was going to happen and how long/when, and now much later desiring to line everything up all nice and neat. Honestly, the time line isn't all that critical except for certain events that need to line up with moon phases, like the planting/ celebration and the 'midnight battle' which logically shouldn't occur when the moon is new (or just a sliver).

I am OK with the idea that I don't do enough planning before writing. Writing is a creative right-brain endeavor that is only balanced out by left-brain rigor and structure. I did pretty good with my impulsive right brain; now it's time to place some structure and logic to the story flow. I really think by spacing out some things more it actually makes more sense. It wouldn't just be a few days here, a few days there. I think we get a much better idea of the pace and flow of sun-skin life if we really just take our time and let things meander forward. So ... maybe the full moon in May (though they don't know it as May) is when the spring celebration happens. And if we have Adam and Jane leaving the village at the full moon in July or August (instead of the full moon in June) ...

Ah, so there's another problem. They need to plan to get back to the village before winter. This means leaving the village sooner instead of later is important (now I remember why I 'rushed' this in the story!).

Argh! Pushing the story too early in the spring means cold weather and possibly snow; pushing things later mean there wouldn't be time (necessarily) to make the trip before it gets cold again. My left brain is about to asplode, now. My right brain is saying everything is OK the way it is.

Stay tuned. I'm still working this out.

I originally posted this the other day; I'm un-privatizing it today.

Goody goody! I moved the end of act II (yet again) and now I get to introduce my villain (aka "big bad guy") right at the start of act III. I've just started writing the introductory scene.

I know in a previous post I mentioned (or was it only in the comments) that my big bad guy is the "head librarian." I know it's hard to visualize a librarian as being someone you would want/need to fear (and/or hate), but the term "library" as I am using it in my story isn't quite the classical definition.
Think of the kind of place that might exist in a world where nearly everyone had been killed by a manufactured disease, and yet a small group of living scientists and educators remained who were determined to keep the accumulated knowledge of an entire planet alive. Where would they go? What would they do? What would they call the place where they set up shop? I'm calling it "the Library," and the head of this insular cocoon of research and learning is naturally the head librarian. And in my story, he is bad.

My challenge will be to make him crazy enough and still keep him marginally believable. But of course, reality is stranger than fiction, so I might not have that much to worry about. I'm still crafting some deep-dark secrets to be revealed, giving more credence to the whole "we need to take down the Librarians" idea, but I think their warped and degenerate ideas will be motivation enough for my heroes.

I am not at all discouraged that I added another chapter (about 8000 words) to act II. It now makes for a much better segue into act III, and if I am paying attention to the word count/balance, it actually makes act II the length it's supposed to be. I wasn't upset when it was 20 pages too short, it's just now more or less exactly what it needs to be, length-wise. My universe is back in balance. Hee.

So, I am officially just passing 111K words. I got the juices flowing big-time, so I'm expecting pretty quick progress, now. Besides, I still have 14 pages of description waiting in the wings for when we finally get to see the Library. (And I drew a simple map showing the layout, etc., that will help me visualize things a little bit better.)

In the process of creating the sun-skin language for my story, "A Far Sun," I ran into a few wrinkles. So, in the interests of passing on what I learned, here are some notes and suggestions that some might find applicable:

• Figure out how you will conjugate the huge category of what I call "helping verbs." I can walk, I may sleep. I should eat cheese. Until I came up with a convention and a rule for these, they drove me nuts.
• Figure out how you will handle adjectives and adverbs. I used short word roots for things like "big" and "old", and simply prefixed or postfixed them onto nouns and verbs as required.
• Find a simple rule for negation, and use it. I can make nearly every verb into its negative with a simple postfix. It's your language, you don't need some fancy, complicated rule.
• Oh, don't make up a bunch of fancy, complicated grammatical rules. You won't need them (trust me!) and even the language buffs in your audience won't expect them. A totally foreign language is probably good enough.
• Find a suitably obscure (real) language, and use it for your root words. I used an uncommon Eastern European language (it's one I have ready access to, as well) and derived about 80% of my root words from it.
• I used Excel to build my vocabulary, making the search for instances of these root words easy, thus avoiding duplicated words.
• I found being flexible on pronunciation rules to be a good thing. Don't constrain yourself, too much. I have some strange consonant combinations, but that's just because I wanted to be different. No one is ever going to actually speak this language out loud.
• For most word roots, you can make a noun, a verb, and an adjective or adverb. In my language, there is no difference between adjectives and adverbs, so I made it a little bit easier.
• Since every root word can make (at least) three words, your vocabulary will literally explode. I have about 1K words, and it's still growing.
• Predetermine your (foreign) characters' speech patterns. For example, sun-skins (my native people) don't have contractions. Well, they don't have verb contractions. They have contractions for all sorts of other things. Since some of them do speak English, this gives them very distinctive English speech patterns. They also don't have the Perfect Progressive case in their verbs. (I didn't know what it was, either, until I looked it up. Then I decided I didn't need it.)
• My language doesn't have articles, like "a" or "the." Makes my sun-skin characters sound Russian, but even then sometimes I have to have them use articles. Without them English becomes quite stilted and hard to understand. I don't want my readers struggling; I just want them to sense a difference.
• Everyone needs short, simple words for "Yes" (or OK), and "No." Having a very poetic and simple way of saying "I love you" also doesn't hurt. Of course, if your novel is sci-fi or horror you probably don't need terms of endearment. My characters have engaged in inter-cultural (and inter-universal) love affairs, so they naturally need these.
• There will be words that don't fit any of your rules. That's OK. Some words will come out of other languages (in fact, the sun-skin word for "gun" is ... gun) and other words will simply not want to be spelled funkily. Don't constrain yourself too much. I started out that way and had to back off. It's not worth the anguish.
• My bilingual wife has suggested I pay attention to the poetry and music in my characters' speech. Of course, what I found is that my invented language, once I worked with it enough, developed its own rhythm and "music". It is what it is. And let's not forget that when word combinations are hard to say, people will reorder and change things to make them easier. If words are too long, people will shorten them. Do this where it seems appropriate.
• Did I mention I used Excel? It most easily alphabetizes lists, searches for words and/or word roots, and the layout can be infinitely stretched and massaged to show what you want, where you want. And you can print the stuff, too (this is for the Luddites out there). Oh, there are free spreadsheet tools with this kind of functionality, as well. Open Office is pretty good, though I'm not using it.

This list is very non-scientific, but represents some of my observations whilst building a language. Now that I've got a good bit of it, it's becoming quite valuable in shaping how my characters talk, even if my main characters all speak English (yes, including the sun-skins--that's an important aspect to the story). Having invented the language means my heroes, who don't begin the story knowing this strange new language, get the opportunity to learn the language and speak it as they progress. They're Americans, and you know how much we like to use and make up new words.

This week has excelled at major suckage. Monday started out nicely enough. Had a cookout with the fambly (until it began to rain) and talked about my story stuff (especially my invented language). Then Monday night I started feeling nauseated. Tuesday I noticed certain ... er, gastrointestinal effects, and stayed home, though I called into all the conference calls I had on my calendar. Then Tuesday afternoon I went to my doctor for a totally unrelated followup, and proceeded to pass out--TWICE--in the doctor's office. Let me be clear on this--don't pass out in your doctor's office if you don't want to call undue attention to yourself. They wanted to send me to the ER via squad, but elected instead to let me lay in an unused exam room until my wife could come to take me there, instead.

Shoot forward a few hours and I'm laying in a room in the ER of our local Big City Trauma Center being poked and prodded and tested for ... who knows what. Now my mother and one of my brothers (and his wife) are there along with my wife, and everyone is looking at me like I almost died, or something. Turns out it was just dehydration that (probably) caused me to pass out. Everything else was normal. Except, of course, the fact I had some kind of intestinal flu or other that had caused me to become dehydrated in the first place. The best news out of Tuesday (except being not ready-to-die-suddenly) was that they sent me home about 9:30 PM.

Wednesday I'm totally wiped out though I elect to go to work. Not a good idea all things considered.

Now it's Thursday and my schedule permits me to stay home and sleep except for one conference call at 11:00 AM that I make, but am so fuzzy-headed that I can't think of what to say. The project manager does step in and talk while I sit there wondering where 50 points of IQ suddenly went to. That's how it felt. Maybe everyone forgives me for being sick, but I still hate sounding like someone's "short bus" cousin. I mean, I'm supposed to be a friggin IT architect. The man with a plan, if you know what I mean.

So, now it's Friday and I'm feeling better. That is, until I eat lunch and by 3:00 I'm feeling a little lightheaded and nauseated, again. So my wife IMs me to ask how I'm doing, and when I'm honest with her (note to self: never do this again!) she insists I cancel the dinner reservations we made for tonight. No big deal, just a celebration of her birthday, which was on Wednesday. She wants to take me home, tie me down and feed me chicken soup. I'm getting tired of chicken soup, you know, after three nights of nothing else.

The worst part is that I'm obviously not over this thing, just yet. And now her mothering instinct is kicking into overdrive. I'm doomed. Now you know the significance of the snack hamster image adorning this post (note the snake nestling next to fat Mr. Snackie, heh).

Oh, and I haven't done a damned thing on my writing project all week. Argh!