P: Passing on the rest of April A-Z

It is with great regret that I must announce that I will be withdrawing from the rest of the April A-Z blogging challenge. I simply have too many other things going on, and I'm not finding it easy to write short, simply posts just for the sake of meeting the blog challenge requirements.

I am happy to say, however, that some excellent posts came out of this challenge. For any passerby who come this way, feel free to check out the links below for some of my proudest posts from April.

I've also been tackling a personal challenge to write a novel in one month. Here are my thoughts on novel-writing before and after this attempt.

Before: Basics of Writing

After: On Writing Novels

My primary interest and area of experience thus far is in writing gamebooks, not novels. Here are some posts for you gamebookers out there:

If you've never read a gamebook

How to Write a Gamebook

An original short gamebook, Mars 2112, to demonstrate what the genre is all about.

A post summarizing some of my thoughts on Gamebook Theory

And, last but not least, some silly Literary Jokes I made up.

If you like what you see and you want more gamebook goodness, allow me to refer you over to Stuart Lloyd's fine site on gamebooks, where he is doing a month chock-full of interviews with gamebook authors, illustrators and producers, along with many excellent articles about gamebooks (including an interview with me!). Of course, chances are good you came here from there, so this may be an unnecessary recommendation ;)

Next year, if I try this A-Z challenge again, I'm going to plan out in advance what the topic of each post will be, rather than trying to make it up as I go along. Lessons learned.

Thanks for dropping by, and rest assured, there will be more blogging goodness coming up. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

O: On Writing a Novel

Writing a novel is hard.


I set a goal for myself, in April, to take a stab at writing a novel in a month. (Yeah, like that was going to happen.) But while I haven't been able to complete it, the important thing for my purposes was using that as incentive to start it. I designed the challenge so that even if I didn't meet the goal, I would still be in a good position. And I am.

Here are some of the lessons I've learned from my first attempt to write a novel.

1) Plan, plan, plan: One of the problems I ran into in this case was not enough planning. Don't get me wrong, I spent a month planning and wrote a detailed initial outline. But after that, because of the time constraints, I never set aside more time for brainstorming. I felt like any time I sat down to write, I had to produce word count, or I would fall behind.

That is ultimately a failing strategy. The important thing isn't the word count, it's the thought that goes into the word count. In my experience here, what I found was not that I produced something awful, but that as the underlying thought behind the story dried up, eventually I just couldn't write at all.

At the end of the day, your story has two values, Thought, and Word Count. The higher you can get the ratio of Thought/Word Count the better. I don't know if, for my purposes, I'll use word count as a benchmark again. It directs my attention and energy to the wrong place.

2) Character Growth: One of the things I found missing was character growth for my protagonist. The outline I drew up looks very good on paper, but as you go through, exploring the reality of the story, you find things out that you didn't realize before. What I need to do, at this point, is take a step back and think about her story, where she came from, and where she's going. That's going to require some re-writing; and that's not compatible with pounding out the most rapid word count I can.

3) Villain Depth: Another thing I discovered as I went along is that my villain has all the depth of a lily pad on dry ground. This is another opportunity for re-thinking and re-writing. It *can* work to have a villain with "evil" drives, such as wanting to dominate and control other people, but I had nothing to him except that. As a friend pointed out, nobody thinks of themselves as evil. In order to make a villain more than a 2D caricature, you need to get inside their head and understand how they see themselves. If I want my villain to be "evil," by any sane standard, that begs the question... how does he justify it in his own mind? A good answer to that could turn a comic villain into a deeply interesting human being.

4) Time to Germinate: Another thing I realized is that sometimes, you can't just sit down and make this stuff up. I knew when I ran into points where something was missing. But it wasn't coming to me, and I couldn't force it to. I tried going on anyway, and felt very dissatisfied with the result. The only thing I can assume at this point is that my inner creative cauldron just needs more time to simmer.

So, these are the obstacles I ran into. I don't know if they'll be relevant in all situations, but if you find yourself in a similar situation, blocked in a novel, maybe this could be a helpful checklist, to see if any of these are the roadblocks you're facing.

Looking back on this challenge to myself, I think it was a ringing success. Though I didn't meet my stated goal (100,000 words in one month,) I knew at the start that I might not, and that would be okay, because I would probably learn valuable lessons along the way. And that's exactly what's happened. I'm one step closer to writing my first novel, and that first novel will probably be a little better for having done this exercise.

N: Names

It's been said that you can tell the quality of a fantasy story by the quality of the names of the people and places within. Tolkien, for example, has some of the most evocative names on record today, and his books are still the gold standard by which other fantasy stories are measured against. By contrast, I once joined a DnD game for a single session, and was handed a paladin named "Sherman." Not even making this up. He was named after the tank.

Of course, picking good names for your characters is always a challenge, whether you're writing in fantasy, or in any other genre. Writer's methods range from the laissez-faire to the deeply thoughtful. Some people don't name their characters until everything else is done. Another school of thought holds that names should be symbolically significant, or contain within them tricky allusions to other relevant works or philosophies.

For myself, I sometimes feel that the best names I come up with are not created after long and careful consideration, but come to me when I get my mind into 'the zone,' that magical place where you have your feet in the dream world, and your hands on the keyboard, and the world comes to life for a little while.

What's your theory? How do you come up with names for your characters? Any names you are particularly proud of? A technique you would like to share?

M: Morris, Dave

The other half of the Fabled Lands team (in addition to Jamie Thomson, who I spoke about last week), Dave Morris is a British gamebook author with a truly impressive list of titles to his name.

Dave Morris might be my favorite gamebook author to-date. Admittedly, he wasn't in the team that wrote Talisman of Death (childhood favorite), that was his friend, Jamie Thomson, with another collaborator, but he pushes the boundaries of what gamebooks can do. Furthermore, he is, at least by my definitions, a literary author, not just a gamebook or fantasy author. He writes Mirabilis, Years of Wonder, a comic book epic that mixes fantasy, young adult fiction, and edwardian england. He wrote Heart of Ice, one of the most thoughtful gamebooks to date, with an intriguing, post-apocalyptic setting. And recently, he put out Frankenstein--an interactive re-visioning of Mary Shelley's classic, in which the reader interacts with the text not by stepping into the shoes of a lead character, but by speaking directly to the lead characters. Sometimes, they say no!

To my knowledge, no one has ever done that before. It appears not to be to everyone's liking, judging by some mixed reviews, but I think it's fascinating.

He recently had Minotaur at the Savoy available for free via kindle, and it's still a very reasonable price for a good read.

I find that many gamebook authors are game-designers first, and not as adept as writers. Alternately, many authors are writers first and don't really know how to include an engaging, balanced game into their story. Dave Morris is one of those treasures who can do both.

Check out his blogs at http://mirabilis-yearofwonders.blogspot.com/ or http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/.

L: Literary Lightbulb jokes

So, I came across the writercize website today due to the A-Z Challenge, and she had put a challenge forth to writers to make up some jokes. Since I've been thinking about humor in stories lately, I decided to take a stab at it. As far as I know, these are all original.


How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Three. One to do it and two to critique the work.

How many mystery writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One, but he'll turn it very slowly to keep the reader in the dark, until a surprise twist at the end illuminates everything.

How many romance writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Only two, but it better be a big lightbulb.

How many science fiction writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Five. One to do it, one to criticize the pedestrian technology, and the rest to speculate on the laws of a world that has no lightbulbs.

How many fantasy writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
The Darkness can only be banished by the Chosen One.

How many existentialist writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
The dying of the light is a metaphor for human existence. Why bother to fight it?

How many horror writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
None; horror writers do it in the dark.

How many literary writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Literary writers can't afford lightbulbs.

K: Kylarra

Kylarra is not a name that will mean much to most of you at the moment, but hopefully it will someday. Kylarra is the name of one of the two leads in the novel I'm working on. This is a character profile.

Kylarra is a woman of indeterminate age, with the beauty of youth, but without the soft edges. She is a sorceress from an ancient bloodline, exiled from her ancestral homeland due to the crimes of the forefathers of her particular branch of the family. So she lives as a wanderer, traveling from place to place, earning her living through song and, when a buyer can afford it, her magic.

As we get to know Kylarra, we discover that she has a troubled past. As a woman, travelling alone along the Barren Coast, she has seen her share of uncouth men and foul language. Her magic and power have protected her--from all but one man, her equal in power, charisma and seduction.

What the reader will discover is a dark tale of desire and betrayal that left Kylarra a damaged woman. She managed to extricate herself from a situation that had spiralled into abuse, but only barely, and the scars from that time are still livid upon her soul.

As the story progresses, the ghosts of Kylarra's past rise up to threaten her. Due to her magical bloodline, she has power, but there is danger in that power. If she overextends herself, magically, the Beast of Magic could enter her, pushing her out of her own body and turning her into a demon-woman of terrible power and overwhelming evil. 

With her emotional state becoming frayed by reminders of her past, Kylarra struggles to keep hold of her sanity, and keep her magic under control. When her best friend, the person who is her best and only link to the world, is threatened by the same evil man who hurt her, will she be able to master her own power and rage long enough to execute a rescue, or will she succumb to the desire for revenge?

There you have it, ladies and gents. Overly dramatic? Maybe. WTF, it's a practice novel. We'll see.

J: "J" names in gamebooks

I'm a little late getting this post out (surprise surprise), but I've also been thinking about this challenge. I've written some fairly thoughtful posts already, but I have now said most of the heavy stuff that I have in mind. Furthermore, I'm trying to complete a novel by the end of the month, and that takes a lot of time and energy.

So, the rest of my posts for this event will be a little shorter, often linking to someone else awesome or relevant. This time, we have three "J" characters to discuss, two of whom are real people, gamebook authors, and one of whom is the lead character in a gamebook.

JJ Shultz: The lead character of "Getting Dumped," JJ Shultz breaks the mold by being a romance heroine, rather than an action hero. I, personally, am thrilled to see gamebooks branching out into other genre's, and all congratulations to Tawna Fenske for taking that step. Furthermore, JJ is a charming character: a girl's girl who likes to go out in pink hardhats and operate heavy machinery to crush things. Check out the reviews for "Getting Dumped" on Goodreads.(Although be aware, this is different from most gamebooks in that you only get to make a few choices. It's mostly straight text. But I think that's also a valid, and very interesting, way of doing it.)

Jonathan Green: Jonathan Green is one of the most established gamebook authors today, with a long line of works written for Fighting Fantasy, the recent, award-winning "Temple of the Spider God," and many other works, some gamebooks and some straight fiction. He is also one of the go-to authors for writing Warhammer novels (dream job, right???) Check out his blog at http://jonathangreenauthor.blogspot.com/. He is also participating in the April A-Z challenge.

last but not least...

Jamie Thomson: Jamie Thomson has an impressive portfolio of gamebooks under his belt, including Duel-Master, Falcon and Way of the Tiger (all co-written with Mark Smith), and Fabled Lands (co-written with Dave Morris). He's also written for Fighting Fantasy, including being co-author of Talisman of Death, my 10 year old self's favorite gamebook of all time. Oh, if only I had found some of his other works when I was that age. He recently published Dark Lord: The Teenage Years, under the auspices of his own new publishing house, Fabled Lands LLP. Go check out a review for Dark Lord: the Teenage Years, which is supposed to be hilarious. Can't wait to read it myself.

 

Catch you all next time!