I got up this morning, groggy as hell. Yeah, getting up at 4 am will do that to ya. But, it’s paying off! In my inbox was my first acceptance notice! My short story, Gray, is to be published in the January, 2009, edition of Necrotic Tissue!
Sweeeeet… I’m going back to bed 
A great disaster. For a novel I started working on in October, 2006, I started doing some research. There’s a portion of it that takes place in an old, abandoned city, one that had been left in destitution for centuries, so I was looking around for theories on what happens to a modern city when left to the forces of nature. To my shame, I had forgotten about the Chernobyl disaster. In my research, I rediscovered it.
There’s an excellent site - an adventerous woman takes a motorcycle tour of Chernobyl and surrounding areas, including Pripiat. See KIDDofSPEED. It is thought-provoking, saddening, and generally depressing. It provided the example for which I was looking.
After reading the site, I began to wonder if some of the pictures she had could be viewable on google maps. They were. Here are some interesting comparisons.
Also, you can go to wikimapia and search for Chernobyl or Prypiat. There, people have outlined places and you can get a little more infomation.
Check out this YouTube video of Prypiat:
NaNoWriMo wrapped up, of course, on November 30. How’d I do? I wound up with a word count of 48,459. Not the goal of NaNoWriMo, I know. But, it satisfies me that with an outline, and setting aside a few hours a night for writing 5 out of 7 days a week, I can make some tremendous progress towards a novel. Personally, after doing this the second time, I’ve come to agree with these wise words - I’d rather have spent the time writing something worth reading than cranking out 50,000 words worth of crap.
Some of the participants I checked ran way over, some nearing 100,000 words, but when I checked their excerpts, I must say YAWN. Not worth the time. Not one excerpt I read sparked my interested except maybe the one for a piece titled AFTRLYF. To be honest, I only checked people in my region, and maybe, just maybe there’s truth to the 700 monkeys for 700 years, that one of these folks has turned out the works of the master himself, but I’d be hard pressed to figure out which one it was!
Long and short, with a writing plan, I’ve proven to myself that I can still maintain home life, my full time job, and produce sizable and (hopefully) worthwhile works of fiction in a reasonable amount of time. Oh, and the piece I started is only about half done. I wasn’t in any hurry to meet the NaNoWriMo goal necessarily because it was in no way indicative of the novel I’m writing.
Today kicks off NaNoWriMo. I’ve completed most of my novel’s outline, and I cranked out over 1500 words in just a few hours. The outline thing seems to have gotten me off to a great start! My writing came easily, I didn’t have to debate plot lines, or wonder where the hell I’m going with it - all I had to do now was write the scenes I’ve already laid out.
The story is called “The Secret of Kingship”. I know NaNoWriMo is supposed to just be for fun, but I’m using it to see if I can more easily discipline myself to write when I already know what I’m writing. I do intend to publish the book, and assuming the outline really does help in the long run, I’ll make that the first step in my writing process. If I can’t get an agent or publisher, I’ll post the work here, and I will also look into print on demand for anyone who might be interested.
Well, I’m going back to writing now!
I’m actually preparing myself for NaNoWriMo this year. I suppose it’s really just a coincident, but I’m creating an outline for my novel, “The Secret of Kingship”. I finished reading Robert McKee’s book, “Story”, and it has inspired me. It truly gave me a better understanding of story telling in the modern age.
Anyhow, I’ve been working on an actual outline, character dossiers, and other such stuff for a week or so now. And I’m going into this feeling very well prepared. I guess we’ll see, but I think when it comes down to it, good writing is not an accident. Good writing is planned. Maybe not down to the smallest detail, but it is planned. One of my (new) favorite quotes from McKee’s book is:
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost - and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.
- T. S. Eliot
I think my work sprawls when it’s not planned out. My first attempt at NaNoWriMo flopped, no because I couldn’t write, but because I ran out of things to write. I think having a plan (chapters, scenes, characters, themes, subplots) ahead of time will permit me to spend the month of November actually doing what NaNoWriMo requires - producing quantity.
It seems to me that self-publishing has an awful reputation in the literary community. I think the view is that if you’re not good enough to get picked up by a major magazine or publishing house, then you’re just not worth reading.
However, we see more and more in other arts that self-publishing and promoting can break the industry barrier. And, in my opinion, the independently funded and promoted works in many ways exceed the quality of the mainstream channels.
Independent film making has taken off quite well in the past few years. Decades, probably, but I honestly don’t track the film industry. We also see more and more in the music industry that new bands break into the scene not by being ‘discovered’, but by making their art available and letting the public decide. They create the demand, and then the industry comes in later to pick them up and give them the deals they probably should have been able to get from the first.
Blogging seems to be an equivilent in the writing industry. I think we see now where more and more publishing houses are picking up popular bloggers and either publishing compilations of their blogs or offering them book deals. However, I don’t see many bloggers spitting out works of fiction or poetry.
I think it’s time for the fiction and poetry writers of the world to take those chances. There are printers who are more than happy to print anything you can afford. There are also now more and more ways of creating electronic versions of works.
So - my goal for now is to distribute as much of my work as possible. I want it out in the public eye. And if it really is worth reading, then it’ll get around. If it’s not, then I’ll keep producing and trying to make things that are worth reading.
I have an idea….
Wiki’s have become awefully big, and they’re great at semantically linking information together. However, they’re most suited towards documentation and fact gathering. I’ve seen one site - The Fiction Wikia - that tries to apply the wiki concept to story telling, but I think it has several shortcomings. The most notable is that it forces each and every author on the site to use the same license, the Gnu Free Documentation License, which is great for information sharing, but is in my opinion not well suited to the fiction writer. In my opinion, the Creative Commons licenses are much more appropriate, and provide the freedom and flexibility needed for sharing fictional work.
Enter “wikshun”. Wikshun is not a single site, but it is an approach to writing. The idea is to create a mesh of wiki-like sites, each under the control of a single author. On each site, the author would publish their own fiction, and optionally host that of other authors in their own namespaces.
The author(s) would then enhance their fiction by providing semantially linked detail for each story. For instance, on the first appearance of a character’s name, it would be a link to a character bio, either in a generalized “characters” namespace, or under the exiting store (Story/CharacterName). The same type of linking could be applied to settings, dates, special objects or items (i.e. Tolkien’s “Ring of Barahir“).
What does all this get you? Well, with each new page standing as an individually copyrightable piece of work, each author can choose to apply different licenses to different pieces. For instance, I may not want anyone deriving directly from my short stories, but I’m more than happy to not only let people derive from, but directly copy and use my characters as described in their character sheets.
I might also be more than happy to let authors place their stories in some wonderful setting I’ve invented. With each new tale that takes place there, the setting itself can become expanded and enhanced. With using wiki technology, these stories can be interlinked relatively easily, allowing for writers to concentrate on doing what they really want to do - write.
Why would anyone want to do this? Well, for one, it’s a good way for new authors to expose their work to the world, under their own licensing terms. Licenses could range from the GFDL all the way to the typical restrictive copyright, and an author can have finer control of what he would like to allow other writers to use.
I watched The Shawshank Redemption tonight. Not the first time I’ve seen it - and I had read the short story before the movie came out. Both are fine works. In the movie, Morgan Freeman’s character, ‘Red’, gives this little speech about how one of the other characters has been in so long, he’s become institutionalized. In essence, it’s what happens to a person who has been in prison so long, they stop knowing how to be valuable outside of the prison setting.
The speech is about what happens to a man in prison - I’m coming to beleive that it may be equally applicable to the typical worker-bee in corporate america. A person works so long for a company, doing pretty much the same thing for 50 years. Retirement is like a parole from a life sentence. What do you do at that point, what do you know? In the words of Red:
Man’s been here fifty years. This place is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man, an educated man. A librarian. Out there, he’s nothing but a used-up old con with arthritis in both hands. Couldn’t even get a library card if he applied. You see what I’m saying?
These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. After long enough, you get so you depend on ‘em. That’s “institutionalized.”
Try spending 50 years doing the same thing - that’s “institutionalized”. Your value, your very definition, is no longer controlled internally. Rather, your self-worth becomes tied to an external yard-stick. You are defined by the institution in which you have become embeded.
ouch…
1000 words per day. If you write 1000 words per day, you can crank out a lot of writing. I’ve seen indications around that a writer’s ‘apprenticeship’ should amount to one million written words. If you can do 1000 words a day, then an apprenticeship amounts to about 3 years.
I have no idea if that stuff about an ‘apprenticeship’ is true, if it really takes one million words before a writer achieves that almost mindless level of production to consider themselves a writer. What I do know is that 1000 words a day is a good target for me. It’ll get me cranking out a short story per week.
I set up this new site today. It’s my first step in publicizing myself as a writer. My wife recently gave birth to our first son (also David L. Day), and during the course of her pregnancy, as well as the three weeks I was off after the delivery, I came to realize something. I want my son to learn a lot of things about life, and one in particular is that he should never give up on pursing his dreams.
One of the things I’ve learned in life is that the best way to lead is by example. I realized that I had given up on pursing one of my dreams, one that is very important to me. Being a writer.
I’ve taken it back up. I don’t expect to become rich or famous, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make a full time living out of it. But there is no reason, nor has there ever been a real reason, for me to not be a writer. I write, I love to write, and if I happen to be good enough, I’ll make money at it.
My son should have the confidence and persistence to follow through on his dreams, no matter where they may lead.