Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

Ain’t It a Grind

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Okay, enough about Trump and Musk and DOGE.  Sure, they’re saving me trillions but leave me alone about it will you?  Just send me my share of the loot when you break it loose.

And enough already about Ukraine.  Everybody knows by now they should just stop the killing each other and get back to being cold all the time like they’re supposed to be.  So, until they wake up to this reality, I’ll let Trump shut off the money and the whole stupid merry-go-round will slow down and stop.

And about the government shutdown.  Just shut up.  We’re all tired of that game.

So, what do I want to write about?  Well, I want to write about writing.  My writing.  I handed my story treatment over to Ark Press but that was a cry for validation.  I wanted to find out from an expert if it’s good stuff.  But unfortunately, the story isn’t finished.  So regardless if it’s deathless prose, I’ve only got 55,000 words and I need to finish a number of plot lines and story elements.  I think I have a major character to kill and I may even remove a chapter that moves things into a more difficult direction.  And, horror of horrors I may actually try to entangle two of the characters in a romantic relationship.

The main problem is how I end my war.  The action is frozen in a bit of a stalemate as both sides attempt to figure out a path forward.  The US government is a mess after the attack on Washington decapitated the federal government by destroying the White House, Capitol, Pentagon, Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.  They’ve cobbled together an administration but after the late president’s nuclear attack on Connors’ organization and the country’s reaction there is fear that another ham-fisted military action might start a real civil war.

Connors’ organization is reeling from the shock and anger over the deaths of thousands of their friends and neighbors.  And the realities of trying to guard against the government’s next move and restoring the lives of his communities to some semblance of normalcy is not going smoothly.

So, I need a way to resolve both of these situations in a dramatically satisfying action.  I’m thinking of having my protagonist, Bogey (the sniper) put on trial and using that as the device to sway public opinion into some kind of reformation of the United States.

I also need a plot device that clarifies the back story for my computer genius Cutter and his AI stepdaughter Mel.  I think I have to tie Cutter and Chastain together with some deep dark history.  Maybe even something that neither of them is aware of but Mel digs up.  And I think to work out the story right I need to kill Cutter off.  But how?  Is there a rogue element left over from the CIA or Army intelligence who hunts him down and kills him?  Maybe.

And then there’s the love story.  Bogey’s son’s widow has four kids who need a father and Connors is a lonely nerd who also happens to be a billionaire friend of Bogey’s.  I’ve already added a few sparks between them but how to progress it along?  Obviously, the woman will have to move things along.  This will be something new for me in storytelling.

And last but not least, I have to find a satisfying ending that still leaves room for the next book.   I like the idea of having a world where scientific innovation has been established and I can push off in various directions.

So, as you can see the book is far from finished.  But I’m such a lazy man that between work, chores, the daily website stuff and writing the novel I’m overloaded.  Oh well.  Such is life.  Grumble, grumble.

Wish Me Luck

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Tonight, I asked Camera Girl what she thought I should write my post about.  She said I should write about the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t have a pet dog.  I countered, “But he doesn’t like dogs.”  She said that was weak and that if he got a dog, he’d be much more likely to succeed as president.  Well, what can I say?  She’s got me there.  Of course, exactly what kind of dog would be compatible with Donald Trump seems like a very complicated question.  Well, he’s kind of tall.  Maybe a Great Dane.  I explained to her that it’s sort of a moot question because Trump’s not going to change his mind at this point in his life.  Well, she rejected this explanation and stood by the idea that this situation spelled disaster for his presidency.  Oh well, agree to disagree.

Yesterday I sent a proposal for my unfinished novel to Ark Press to see if they are interested in this soon to be blockbuster story.  It’s almost twenty-four hours since I hit the send button on the e-mail and I’ve heard nothing.  As you can imagine, I’m crushed and dejected by the interminable delay.  I now question my optimism and see all of life as a hollow husk of what my hopes and dreams were.  I was planning on tying a lead weight to my ankle and tossing it into the pond thus ending it all.  But I realized the water depth is currently about three feet so it could take a long while to perish.  I need a better plan.

Plan B is to start a new career.  Currently the top contender is bare-knuckle-boxer.  My plan is to begin an intensive physical conditioning program.  I’ll start with road work and then add on a raw egg diet and finally I’ll find a good manager someone named Mick or Apollo or something like that.  I figure if I play my cards right, I’ll be ready for a title fight sometime in 2026 which being the 250th birthday of the United States will be sorta like what happened for Rocky Balboa only without the turtles named Bert and Ernie.  I told Camera Girl about my plan and she punched me in the stomach really hard.  It was sort of a foul.  I wasn’t expecting it after all.  But it really has affected my confidence.  I complained that, “Adrian never punched Rocky or did anything to discourage him from becoming the boxing champion of the world and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”  She countered that Adrain was a doofus and Rocky was too short to be an effective boxer.  I reminded her that we saw the movie back in 1976 and she never said anything about those things back then.  She replied that she was still attempting to trap me into matrimony at that point so she let it ride for then.  But she claimed that she always thought Adrian was a doofus.  And as her final point she opined that boxers need very strong neck muscles and I have a bad neck.  Her point was that modern boxers hit so hard that my head would fly off my body after one punch and that would be gross.  Well, that was food for thought.

So, I guess I need a Plan C.  I haven’t really worked out all the details but maybe, possibly, I’m going to go pro in pickle ball.  I’ve heard good things.  But I haven’t bounced it off her yet.  Wish me luck.

It Grows on You

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I think I want to talk about science fiction some more.  I don’t remember the first time I heard the expression “literary science fiction?  But I think it was being used to compare to space opera.  Now I’m not well versed in the history and evolution of science fiction past the 1970s.  Halfway through that decade I became deeply interested in making a living so I didn’t have the leisure to read all of the books coming out.  But what I could tell was some of it didn’t seem to be science fiction.  I can remember reading a couple of Samuel R Delaney books and thinking, “This guy has problems that I’m not interested in.”  And so, I decided that literary science fiction was not for me.

It seemed to me that there should be a middle ground between space opera and Samuel R Delaney.  Without a doubt some of the writers from the olden times like Asimov completely eschewed producing characters that sounded and acted like real live human beings.  Now granted, we don’t expect to get James Joyce when we pick up a book with a cover illustrated with a half-naked woman in the clutches of a giant lobster.  But by the same token once you’ve grown up and have some understanding of what people say and do in real life it would seem to me that an author who wants to make his story interesting would make his people act and speak like … people!

So, if you go back and read, for instance, Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space” as an adult you may be amazed at how threadbare the writing seems.  The characters are for the most part caricatures of the chivalrous hero battling monsters (literally) to save the damsel in distress.  And this is too far in the other direction from literary s-f.  Space ships, evil giant intelligent amoebas and space-time tearing secret weapons are great stuff but unless the characters have at least some similarities to actual human beings it’s kind of hard to get the readers to want to finish the story.

And there is a pretty wide bandwidth between these extremes.  Writers like Asimov and Clarke didn’t spend much time on characterization.  Hari Seldon and Dave Bowman were thumbnail sketches that barely provided enough description to convince the reader they existed.  But these were plot driven stories and as long as their authors would give us anything at all to allow us to pretend that they were people, we could suspend disbelief.

And Heinlein was able to write dozens of stories that were populated with various flavors and ages of his “competent man” whom I guess we were supposed to imagine were stand-ins for Heinlein himself.  And there was some humanity on display there.  Definitely not James Joyce but voices that were reminiscent of real people (at least somewhat).

And over the decades, characterization, especially in the hands of female authors (authoresses?) has become the dominant ingredient in literary science fiction.  And now it has reached the point where leaving out the science is completely acceptable.  Wonder has been replaced by social justice and grievance reckoning.  That’s how you end up with something like “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the exemplar of successful science fiction.

Well, all of this is very interesting.  But there’s nothing like actually trying to write a full-length novel to show someone just how much work it is to balance along that tightrope between too much and too little characterization.  And the hardest trick (for me) is getting dialog between a man and a woman to work.  I really only have my discussions with Camera Girl as my template.  But we’ve known each other for fifty years so it’s almost a pantomime at this point.  One- or two-word sentence fragments, facial expressions and gestures gets a lot done at this point.  This doesn’t translate into character dialog.  Nor would I want my protagonist to sound like me.  I’m anti-heroic.  I’m more like comic relief.

But it has given me greater respect for good writing, even in other genres.  And I think I’m getting a taste for it.  It grows on you.

Fingers Crossed

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I’ve been following a minor drama going on between some science fiction authors about a new publisher called Ark Press.  Most of the controversy centers around whether this new publisher is being funded by billionaire Peter Thiel and whether he originally was trying to buy another publisher Baen Books.  Baen is almost the only science fiction publisher that isn’t horribly woke.  So, from my point of view, both Baen and Ark are both the best fit for publishers I would submit my Sniper novel to.  And that’s not to say I think either one would be a slam dunk to buy my book.  But I think they are the only traditional publishing choices that are even possible.

Eventually I found a YouTube video where the main editor of Ark Press (D.J. Butler) answers a bunch of questions about Ark Press and some misinformation about the relationship between Ark and Baen.

It’s quite long and probably not that interesting to anyone who’s not writing a non-woke science fiction novel.  But I was very excited to find out there are two possible publishers I can offer my book to.

But the more generally interesting thing about Ark Press is that someone like Thiel who is a pretty heavy hitter, is getting involved in publishing conservative science fiction books.  This is exactly what I’ve been bloviating about for ten years.  This is what Andrew Breitbart was talking about way back.  Culture is upstream of politics and we are completely shut out of the culture because the institutions (book publishers, record companies, movie studios) are 99% controlled by the Left.  Literally 99%.

Hearing that someone with extremely deep pockets is dipping his toes in genre publishing is miraculous.    It’s as if all the howling I’ve done in the wilderness wasn’t in vain.  And then there is the synergism.  Peter Thiel was the guy who turned JD Vance onto the Trump train.  And he’s an old friend of Elon Musk.  The two of them were start-up partners on PayPal.  If Thiel were to persuade Musk that some of his books were very popular with young adults maybe as a lark Musk might buy some broken down movie studio like Paramount or Warner Brothers for a song and strip it down like he did Twitter and make some movies that people actually want to see.  Just imagine.

As you can probably tell I’m pretty excited about all this stuff.  Of course, it will probably lead nowhere if the people running Ark and Baen can’t recognize the obvious genius displayed in my Sniper story.  But right now, it’s fun thinking about it both from a personal angle and from the larger considerations of the wider culture.  I mean, come on!  Every boy in America used to be a science fiction/fantasy fan.  Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Marvel, DC, you name it.  It took Disney and the girl bosses they hired a whole generation to kill that excitement with the awful female-centric drivel that currently passes for science fiction/fantasy.  It’s as obvious as daylight that if publishers and movie studios produced what boys used to pay to read and watch, boys would pay to read and watch it again.

So here we are.  At the dawn of a new golden age of science fiction publishing.  It can’t be a coincidence that it is happening just as Donald Trump has declared the beginning of the American “Golden Age.”  Well, I haven’t been using any booze or drugs so maybe there is a reasonable chance that some of this may resemble reality.  If not, it was fun thinking about.  Fingers crossed.

Times that Try Men’s Souls

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One step forward two steps back.  Ah, the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.  Last week the mainframe that I keep my photos and editing software on died a terrible death.  I had hoped at first that maybe the power supply had given out.  I sent it off to the local computer geeks with this dream of a call back the next day about how a wire had come loose or a fuse had blown and all was well.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I received the dreaded news that, “The motherboard is fried and all you can reuse is the case, drives and the fans.”

The horror.

Well, at least my photos didn’t go up the chimney so that’s good.  But this has put a kink in my photo-editing schedule.  For the last week I’ve been scouring my camera memory card for stuff to post and I’m reaching the bottom of the barrel.  I’ll need some more stuff really soon.  Plus, I can’t use my favorite editing software or the big monitors I usually use.  Well maybe I can, but I’d have to fiddle around with the wires and I’m too lazy to do it as a one-off.  But I must be stoic.  As the bard reminds us, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;  They kill us for their sport.”

Or something like that.

But not everything was bad this week.  I decided on a path forward for my story.  If you remember in the last installment, I had my good guys strike back at the vicious President of the United States who had hurled a 10-megaton nuke into their underground retreat.  As a counter attack they undermined the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon and a few other key federal buildings and sent them hurtling hundreds of feet into the underground abyss.  This effectively decapitated the United States federal government.  Specifically, the president, vice president, the congress and the cabinet secretaries are all dead.

What I’ve decided to do is arrange for the only honest man in the FBI to be selected to succeed the president.  And this is the guy who I’ve been using to track down my protagonist and his sponsors.

So, the antagonist I have who has been hunting for the sniper is selected for succession to the presidency.  In part he is selected for the knowledge he’s gained hunting the sniper and the organization supporting him.  But because the head of the FBI had been assassinated earlier, he was also the acting head of the bureau.  Of course, that isn’t technically in the line of succession for the presidency but with all the legitimate successors dead, the military and the supreme court put their heads together and after doing an inventory of who was left and who was willing, they chose my guy.

Now this is an outrageous scenario.  And so, it’s really a lot of fun to poke around with.  And because it’s so outlandish I can do more or less whatever seems like fun with it.  I have the poor schnook summoned to a military base and he’s thinking that he’s about to be blamed for the catastrophic failure of the manhunt for the sniper and instead he’s being asked if he will accept the presidency.  That’s a pretty great scene.  I think I’m going to have him ask if he can work remote from home.  That would be a nice touch.  I think that’s what I would ask for.

So anyway, the story is moving forward.  So that’s good.

Camera Girl laid down the law today and had me put the weatherstripping around the basement door.  She found where I had hidden the supplies and brought them out to me.  So, I grumbled and dragged myself over to the door and did it.  And you know, it really made a big difference.  But I really did a lousy job installing it and I’m planning to redo it and add a sweep to the bottom of the door.  Funny how these home improvement projects can grow on you.

And looking around at the Trump juggernaut I see he’s making headway in all directions.  He’s travelling to North Carolina and Los Angeles to get involved with the hurricane and fire victims.  And tonight, JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.  Collins, Murkowski and good old Mitch McConnell were the holdouts that made Vance’s vote necessary.  Well, that’s why we needed the other Senate pickups last November.  But things are looking up everywhere in Trump world.

So that’s my post, a little this and little that.

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

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At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

That’s Entertainment

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Over the course of three thousand years of western civilization, storytelling has transformed from an oral tradition of poet/rhapsodes reciting mythological epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey at religious festivals to information age books read on an electronic page or listened to from an audio-file.  I find it interesting that the Greek epic poems are approximately the same length as a typical modern novel, something between one and two hundred thousand words.  Reciting the whole poem at a festival would take up week’s-worth of listening.  That’s comparable to the time it takes to read a book.

Now for shorter subjects, the Greeks had the drama.  A play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides was just an hour or two of the viewer’s time.  Pretty similar to a Shakespearean play and interestingly enough, the amount of time that a motion picture usually takes to watch.

Does this mean that human beings inherently absorb story telling in these lengths of time?  I can’t prove that assertion but you know, a three-hour movie starts to get to be a bit much for one viewing.  And a four-hundred-page book better be damn interesting or it also begins to wear out its welcome.

So maybe our entertainment has been standardized to suit our mental, emotional and physiological parameters.  Humans have a limited attention span.  We also tire after a certain amount of time sitting or standing watching something.  Also, hunger, thirst and the realities of hydraulic pressure eventually force us to interrupt even the most fascinating entertainment.  To ameliorate these considerations, movie theaters are equipped with a snack bar and restrooms.  But dramatic interest will begin to flag by the third hour.

So, I’d say we’re programmed for these lengths of entertainment products.  Whether it’s Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or The Lord of the Rings at some point you either come up for air or you fall asleep.  And similarly with a book.  There have to be chapters or groups of chapters that allow for the reader to put the book down and come back to it later.  It needs a punctuated progression.  The action must go through a series of starts and stops.  It needs a rhythm to the action, a flow.  And if the rhythm isn’t right, the story doesn’t work because the reader is jarred out of the spell of the story.

You may be wondering what this post is about.  It’s a transcription of an internal dialog I’m having with myself.  I’ve been rereading my story and some sections seem choppy to me.  Some of the transitions from one chapter to another just don’t flow.  So, to make myself feel better I’m imagining Homer sitting in his office in downtown Mycenae and wrestling with the transition between the story of the cyclops Polyphemus and the Island of Aiolos.  He’s plucking the strings of his lyre and thinking, “This Aiolos story is really boring compared to all the excitement of the cyclops.  It needs something to punch it up a little.  Maybe I can include some more man-eating giants again.  No, wait, that’s stupid.  There can’t be man-eating giants on every island.  That’s just lazy.”  I totally feel for him.  The epic poetry-listening public is easily jaded.  They demand good writing (or singing).  Ah, the vicissitudes of the epic Muse Calliope.  Like all females, she is fickle.  Well back to the grindstone.

Stop the World and Let Me Off

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Okay, it’s enough.  I’ve watched my last screaming progressive video.  It’s not fun anymore.  And I’m good with the Trump cabinet picks and his agenda.  Honestly, that’s his problem.  He’s responsible for avoiding weasels and psychopaths.  That’s what we hired him to do.  Every once in a while it will be interesting to note how that’s all going.

I will admit I’m watching very intently the madness in Ukraine.  Apparently, the neo-cons running the war have decided to start WW III before they are physically dragged out of office.  And, I assume this is also the case for the Pentagon.  So, I can’t say I’m done with Ukraine because it’s not done with us yet.  But I restrict my attention to a few daily checks on some YouTube channels that cover the war.  So, until the mushroom clouds blossom over Dunwich I’ll take a watch and wait approach.  Which is about as much as I can logically hope to do.

So, what does that leave for me?  Well, as I’ve been reminded, I’m supposed to finish up that book.  And, lo and behold, I have been doing some work.  I put together a list of changes and additions to round it up and I’m rereading it to find any weaknesses or mistakes in the story.  And I’ve recognized a few.  Connors’ role in Iraq needs to be clarified and justified.  After all mega-billionaires aren’t usually strolling around forward operating bases of a war zone as if it were Silicon Valley.

And I have to inject more personality into my main characters.  This means I have to invent scenarios where they interact beyond strategizing how to pick off evil intelligence officers and their goons.  And, heaven help me, I might even have a relationship break out between Connors and Grace.  It would tie up some loose ends and add to the emotional interest in the story.  And so, I’m looking at those things.  But what I’ve noticed is that when you start a story by the braille method (that is, without a somewhat detailed outline) it’s hard to tack an outline onto it once it’s gotten beyond a certain point.  It’s like an off-the-rack suit that doesn’t quite fit in a bunch of places.  Trying to make it fit requires a lot of alterations.  And some of these alterations feel awkward or rub the author the wrong way because they seem antithetical to the way you originally saw a character or an event.  It’s a very uncomfortable activity.

What it’s made me aware of is that starting a story with a good road map ahead of time is an invaluable asset to finishing the story.  So, the lazy lout in me says, “Well, put this story aside and start another one from scratch with a good outline.  But I know myself too well.  That’s terrible advice.  What needs to be done is to bite the bullet and put in the work and wrestle with the problems until they’re resolved in a creatively satisfying way.  So that’s what I’m going to try to do.

What it will require me to do is put a few hours in every morning to get it done.  And that’s few hours every morning that won’t be devoted to reading the news and political stuff.  Well, I guess the world will survive with me at half strength.  You folks may notice a certain slackness on the site but I guess it can’t be helped.

Anyway, let’s give it a try.

All That Jazz

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So, it turns out I should be a plotter.  Looking at my story from the point of view of character arcs it became obvious that I haven’t even decided on several characters’ outcomes that are pivotal to a satisfying resolution to the plot.  Put succinctly, somebody’s got to die.  And maybe that’s part of the reason why I haven’t moved those character arcs along.  I’ve grown fond of all my main characters and deciding which of them has to die and then writing that outcome is disturbing.  But I do see it has to be done and I’ve begun working out the scenario.

So now I understand why just drifting along on plot can be very problematic for anything more complicated than a short story.  If you have six or eight main characters and another dozen secondary characters, not mapping out what ends up happening to them risks all kinds of conflicts or worse; wasted opportunities for adding interesting content to the story.

I said that writing a death scene was disturbing.  And it is but at the same time it’s interesting to plan how this event will impact each of the adjacent characters.  For instance, it’s not too challenging to have associates and even friends react to a death.  But one of the most likely “victims” has a parent/child relationship with one of the other characters.  That will have to be a developed carefully to produce a satisfactory effect.  So now all of a sudden, my simple dystopian sci-fi book has emotional states like bereavement and anguish.  Who knew?

And a much bigger consideration for being a plotter versus a pantser is how much more important it is if your story is part of a larger series of stories.  If the story doesn’t end with the end of a stand-alone book, then things like killing off characters, even killing off antagonists is much more serious.  If you invest an enormous amount of effort into building up a really wonderful villain then you’d be crazy to kill him off in book one.  Sure, kill off his henchmen; Helmuth and the Tyrant of Thrale by all means.  But Gharlane of Eddore has to last through six or seven books.

And that’s just one aspect of what needs to be coordinated between a series of stories.  Doing that without a map would be very difficult.  And I see that now.  So, I’ll be heading down the path of plotting an outline for the whole story first and then a detailed outline for the first book.  It’ll take a little longer but in the long run it’ll save me a lot of time and it’ll make for better stories.

And on a completely unrelated topic, today I reduced the number of videos I watched of Kamala voters barking at the moon to three.  Well, everything’s relative and I think that’s pretty good progress in kicking the habit.  I remember in 2016 I watched the Hilary shriekers all the way through December and still couldn’t get enough of it.  Now it’s starting to get boring.  Maybe with Trump in the White House we’re all ready to move on from all of this jazz.