[On Writing] Logistics behind a Title

Yesterday, I wrote the final lines of my erotica short with horror elements and superheroes entitled "Pages & Play Things". I'm positive about this project as it started with a less of a bang, but as I continued writing I've rediscovered the way to translate my thoughts in projects, something I have been fearing given my absence from writing for a long time. 

Two peculiar things happened with this project. First, I had to fiddle with the story itself and first write 2,000 words before I finally heard the story click with me. And the second has to do with the title itself. If you have talked about writing with me, you will know that I start first with the title. The title is the name of the story and when I sit down to talk to the story, let it come to me, I like to know who I'm talking with. After all, my mother has taught me not to speak with strangers. 

When I don't have the title, I don't know the story. "Pages & Play Things" I think captures the subject matter of the story (a special book, which exists in defiance to the cultural and technological background of its story world) and the genre, a mixture of the erotic and nefarious. After all, Eros and Thanatos walk hand in hand. 

Before the story received this title I started with "Big Powers in Small Tights", which played with the super hero elements heavily, the eroticism of tights and the humor of my main character. Eventually, I decided to down play the humor and dial up the erotic heat and re-titled to "Teamwork", which in the context of the genre should more or less speak for itself.

Although this title is now perfect for creating the steamy images I want to elicit from the title alone, I wasn't  all that happy how it disconnects from the actual plot. The crux of the story lies within the intense diametrical oposition of the protagonist with his teammates. By that time I thought that maybe I need to hint at the plot, so I settled for "The Book That Wants to Play", but as I fitted the title in my mind, my writing devoured all the humourous bits and substituted them with weird, budding elements of horror, so I had to lose the B-movie vibe. 

As I penned the ending and logged into Facebook to announce how happy I felt at the completion of this one story, I didn't feel the title was right and as I wrote the status update "Pages & Play Things" rolled off on the keyboard. What do I think the perfect title should be? 

I think it should convey the tone of the work (the aliteration hints towards the writig style), should hint of the genre or at the very least the story archetype ("play things" whispers a bit about that) and should point at the focus of the story (the book). Sometimes all three elements can't be incorporated, but a combination of two should suffice. 

[Monday February 20th] 8 Things I Learned About Deadlines

Who wins now? EH!

It’s been a month and I’ve nearly forgotten how to blog, which is funny, cause these days you can’t make me shut up. Work has been a bit crazy and my fingers ache from the constant tap, tap, tapping on the keyboard. Then I had to bounce around doctors for awhile, which further added unnecessary stress [nothing too serious with me] and then came news from the frontier to the West, where mother is working right now. In between all of this I’ve been pretty silent, because I’ve been chasing deadlines.

What advice about deadlines will tell is that you have to stick to them. What advice neglects to say is that you have to be extremely realistic about the number of deadlines or at least I’ve missed the guidebook to deadlines some way along the way. If there is a copy somewhere that no one needs, my e-mail is in my bio [just saying]. The gist of this post right now is that I’ve been an incredibly naughty boy and expected unrealistic things from myself.

As you might suspect already, I want to be on top of everything and it’s not been happening as planned. I edit for Tales to Terrify, I write and I review [though I thought I had stopped for good] and then I have several other big as hell blog initiatives, which more or less have fallen in the background. Top that with a full time job and university and you have yourself a basic recipe for chasing deadlines all the time. Here are the lessons I learned chasing deadlines and failing some times:

1] Write down everything connected to your project and deadlines. Most of the time, you will work in tiny bites of time. Managing fiction for a podcast has taught me that a big project is a clockwork robot rather than a brontosaurus, meaning that it’s a ticking organism with so many parts that take minutes separately, but letting them slip through the cracks of your mind will come back to bite you. This can easily apply to writing, which I learned after forgetting a few stunningly beautiful ways I could have employed in my latest story.

2] Newsflash: Life’s unpredictable, so you’d better learn to predict situations that will suck your time and be beyond your mortal control. Although doing what you love may offset the depression of having a job that suffocates you or [insert anything unpleasant you have to deal with every goddamn day], you have a real life with real people and other real things. Real life doesn’t like to be ignored. Hell to the no, girlfriend. Real life’s like a kitty cat, a bad kitty of imminent doom that poops on your head for no good reason.

If I hadn’t spent two weeks with intense pain, because of a bad back, I’d probably be on time with most of my deadlines. Plans mean nothing, when you are an unwilling component of this sick algorithm that is life. It’s a crucial skill to know how many projects you can undertake, which you are sure you will bring to fruition even if your life crashes in pretty painted flames of devastation.

3] You are not a time table. As much as I’d want to conquer the Internet and have hot men throw their jockstraps at me, I discovered that I can’t do everything. This is the basic mistake that I do time and time again. I assume that just because I have a free slot in my schedule and yes, I do have a schedule, I can put something in there.

So what happens, when you realize that your schedule has tasks that have you type and read for what feels like eternity and your brain says, enough is enough. Naturally, you crave some sort of outlet, be it skimpy books in pink covers [I stopped reading those, when I discovered that the skimpy pink books came only in female fantasy editions rather than gay fantasy ones] or reality TV [either classy and/or campy for me, please] coupled with as many TV series as I can watch. Maybe you are one of those weird people that go outside and talk to people, fleshy bits to fleshy bits. In translation, work will not be done. Work that needs to be done and you can’t complete, because you are exhausted. Plan activities that will allow you to recharge your batteries or I tell you that you’ve got a first class ticket to Burnout Land. PS: It will not be pretty. It never is and it’s the fastest way to hate something with burning passion.

4] You are responsible for your guilt. If you assign yourself too many deadlines, you don’t meet, because you sought to take a rest, you get your high and then what. Guilt that is what. The wrist-slitting guilt that has you all tossing and turning at night, accusing you that your careless ways are what will always separate you from those that have succeeded in their career. So unless you want to flirt with a sharp set of razor blades and set yourself for low self-esteem and failure, why not cut yourself some slack and what you are realistically able to complete as projects.

5] A deadline does not mean waiting for the last possible moment. The Internet is full of memes, where students consider their teacher’s deadline a challenge to see how late they can start with their paper. Don’t be that douche that purposefully starts at the last minute possible. I’ve done this stunt a couple of times and I’m far from proud with myself. Plus, apart from the inevitable guilt you will generate, your work will be sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. So do yourself a favor and start as early as possible.  

6] Don’t expect people you’ve put on a deadline to remember their deadline. Through my work at Tales to Terrify, I learned the hard way that delegating tasks and expecting them to be done isn’t as innocent as it seems. I did that. I trusted the powers that be that everything will be honky-dory and forgot about the deadline. Guess what. This came back to bite me, cause shit happens to the people you collaborate with. They get sick. They get involved in some sort of life conspiracy and the last thing on your collaborator’s mind is your deadline.

7] Talk with your collaborators about updates. If you want to avoid feeling like an idiot, negotiate with your collaborator how you as the one with the request will proceed in regards to the deadline. Set a few check point dates that will ensure that you get all the updates needed without coming off as a panicked, desperate ninny. You also get the bonus of psychologically engaging your collaborator so that even if suddenly something comes up that will cause delays, your collaborator is way more likely to warn you, even though in the greater scale of things your deadline matters. Of course, I’m referring to all the projects that run on good will rather than money. When money is involved, people tend to be a lot more organized.

8] Content first, publication later. To continue my thread, I’ve always started projects even before my involvement with Tales to Terrify, where I relied on people’s content. A normal person would be cautious enough to arrange the deadlines for the contributors long before they are needed. It’s way easier to schedule something that you have rather than something that you have promised to have. I, on the other hand, assume that everything runs on fairy magic, so I had a few close calls, but lesson has been learned. Everything can happen and a good deadline chaser knows that time is a stretchy, gooey thing that runs through the fingers.

   

[December 20th] Anthology Projects Worth Your While

That's how my brain feels like at the moment

As I'm gearing up to switch from academic to creative writing, I'm jotting some ideas for short stories that I've been planning to write for the following projects:

1] Pandemonium: Stories of Smoke to be edited by Jared Shurin and Anne Perry: I've been following the critical non-fiction these two have produced on Pornokitsch to be confident that they know what they are doing and their first anthology has gathered some of the biggest rising names in genre to date, which in its own is one hell of a feat.

Coming in spring of 2012, Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke brings you London as you've never seen it before - science fiction and fantasy in the great tradition of Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens lived and breathed London in a way few authors ever have, before or since. In his fiction, his non-fiction, and even his own life, Dickens cast an extraordinary shadow over the city he so loved - so much so, indeed, that his name has become synonymous with a certain image of London. A London of terrible social inequality and matchless belief in the human potential; a London filled with the comic and the repulsive, the industrious and the feckless, the faithful and the faithless, the selfish and the selfless.

This London is at once an historical artifact and a living, breathing creature: the steaming, heaving, weeping, stinking, everlasting Smoke.

2] Bibliotheca Fantastica to be edited by Claude Lalumiere & Don Pizarro: Dagan Books impressed me with their Cthulhurotica anthology, which will delightfully be continued come next year, and Lalumiere has been hailed as a force in the short form, so I wish to be involved hopefully as a contributor.

What we want: Stories having to do with lost, rare, weird, or imaginary books, or any aspect of book history or book culture, past, present, future, or uchronic. Any genre. Although the fantastical is not essential per se, stories should evoke a sense of the fantastic, the unknown, the weird, wonder, terror, mystery, pulp, and/or adventure, etc.

3] Fungi to be edited by Orrin Grey & Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Creepy mushrooms in an anthology produced by one of the key authorities on creepiness. Yes, please. 

Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia tackle the darkest of all horrors: fungi. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and its Japanese adaptation, Matango, terrified and fascinated the editors. And now, they’re back for more.

Fungi is an anthology of dark speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, science fiction, and any other variant, such as steampunk) focused solely on the fungal. No happy mushrooms from Mario Bros. A fungus of some type must be a key element in the story, not just a throwaway element. A character can attempt to poison someone with a mushroom, mushroom cultivation may be of importance to the story, the dark patch of mould on the ceiling may begin to terrify an unhappy tenant, a group of people may consume hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc.

We are looking for a variety of settings and protagonists. Mushrooms sprout around the world, after all.

4] The Worldbuilder Project inspired by Empire State written by Adam Christoper: Technically not an anthology in the traditional sense of the word, but I think it can be fitted here. The project itself can lead to a potential inclusion into an anthology, which is always a bonus.

[December 3rd] The Weird in its Cephalopod Beauty

After rave reviews, heightened publicity covering and Weird Fiction Review, a website launched with regular material provided, all in the name of the weird movement in literature, I ordered my copy of the VanderMeers' latest monstrosity bound by ink and paper The Weird.

I've been captivated by the dedication the VanderMeers have placed in their promotion of different, peculiar fiction [often with a mad glint its glassy eye and a smile that carries the charm of an inter-dimensional morgue chamber] that is yet to claw its way to the spotlight [or maybe it has, but people are too afraid to admit it]. "The Weird" will be my indoctrination into this cult so openly led by two prophets of the tasteful bizarre. Inspired by the in-depth coverage provided by Maureen Kincaid Speller over at her blog Paper Knife, I'm tasking myself with the idea to read and place my thoughts on each of the more than hundred stories on this blog come 2012.

This will be one of the directions I'll be heading in for Through a Forest of Ideas next year. "The Weird" and all subsequent release of non-fiction connected to this anthology is of great interest to me and my writing.      

[Nomber 19th] State of the Writer

I've been silent a bit more than intended and it's high time I share some insight on what's going on with plans and projects that I'm running.

Writing-wise I've completed the rough draft of "Girl with One Eye" and am two thirds in the first draft of "A Kiss with a Fist", though both have been tough to write. After reading about Paul Jessup's disenchantment with conventional storytelling, which expects a natural progression from point A to point B [resolution wrapped in a pretty colored bow], the stories I've written are divorced from this notion. There is no challenge to occupy the character's life and demand a swift resolution [well, there is, but it's not central to the story]. I like to think I'm in exploration of life as a series of things that happen to a person and the reactive element in human nature.

The difficulty with these stories in particular stem from the fact that both of the narrators don't have eyes for the beauty in their surroundings and in their lives as well, which demands more modest and transparent prose. After the sophisticated and richly ornate prose in "Crimson Cacophony" it came to be a shock to my system. Another hurdle comes from my aversion to using the keyboard, when I create, mainly because my day job demands I spent eight hours per working day typing, which saps my creative desire to write my first drafts on the computer. 

And no matter how useful "Write or Die" has been in nailing down first drafts in record time, I can't use it when my brain is against the idea to tap on keys after work. I didn't know what the problem was [I thought I was being lazy], until I sat down to at least try and outline a scene. The result: I very convincingly wrote in my vision of the story on paper. Longhand, no matter how strenuous on my arm, is how I'll forge on with my short story projects from here on.

So what have you been working on? 

[July 7th] The Project Merry-Go-Round

“My life is like that, but only less fabulous and the carousel has a jet pack strapped to the horsey.”

I crack open an imaginary book. The spine creaks, the dust avalanches down the hardcover and pools around the yellowed pages. Yes, it’s been that long since I’ve opened this book and the guilt feels as though my body is under a siege of spiders. The book is filled with titles, the titles sit neatly stacked one below the other and much like literary accountancy, numbers have nested in flocks.

The pages stare back in accusation that I’ve probably forgotten the Defoesque title I’ve given it at the start. It certainly sat through without supervision long enough to accuse me of neglect and much like a horcrux schemes against me, meticulously cataloguing my ideas, curving c’s into vicious vertical smiles.

I’m of course referring to the “Book of Unfinished Works that I really want to write, submit and subsequently publish for the sake of my sanity and satisfaction” or in other words the to-do list of the projects that I really need to get to, if I want to tell people I’m a writer with a straight face.

The first thing I’ve written in months is nonfiction for Beyond Victoriana as part of my series on Bulgaria, its history and its application for the steampunk genre. “Slaves in the Ottoman Military” deals with the sensitive topic of the Ottoman practice to forcefully take young boys from Christian families in order to turn them into an elite fighting squad for the sultan called the ‘enichari.’ The article will go live on Sunday.

I’m interested to pursue my interests in writing nonfiction again. Only the librarian gods know how many books I’m interested in reviewing [old habits die hard] and I’ve also volunteered to join the crew of the World SF blog [after yet another seducing invitation from Lavie Tidhar], but only as a very occasional contributor. On the minus side, I’m no longer working at Apex’s The Zombie Feed and handling their Twitter feed or marketing. I’m good at it [even though I learned that I like zombies, but don’t breathe them to be excellent at it] and in order to do a satisfactory job I need more time and energy on a daily basis, which I don’t possess.

Fiction-wise, I’m way behind. The ‘edit my way through all the short stories’ isn’t going well at all. I find some are lacking a small piece to make them work, others need expansion and I am not sure if I don’t need to write a brand new story for the same concept. So that makes six stories to edit, nine to write and a novella to finish. Not to mention getting to my novel, if I’m to submit it this year.

What have you been all up to yourselves?

Ready, Set, Write... and Edit on the multiple projects I have in mind

Guess the witch!

NaNoWriMo is over and so is the celebratory weekend filled with doing nothing. My wrists had to rest a bit and I also have family return home for the weekend, so there. I have perfect excuses to justify not-writing. All of which end now.

I've jotted down ideas for my 1920s inspired mythological story called "Rabbit Heart". It's a story especially written for an anthology called 20Spec: Speculative Stories of the Roaring Twenties. It's a secret so far, but it has a very famous witch from mythology appear. I've also planned this one to fit in the "Lungs" concept of Florence and the Machine inspired shorts. I have to keep it under 5000 words, which will mean that I will use some dream logic to weave in all the elements I've envisioned.

In the spare time... Okay, that was a lie. My main focus will always be revising "Crimson Cacophony", a novel neglected when NaNo came. I kind of dread it, because it will involve retyping it from the journal I wrote it in. Several months of journal pages. But then again, if it was not for the journal I would not have finished it at all.

So what are you working on?

Schedule, Re-schedule, Goals

My current situation is the following: Creativity is overflowing, productivity is the malnourished child. 

Yes, writing has not been going so well. The awesomeness of having a smaller sibling return from her private palace in the summer caused serious issues for me. I had to cook, feed, provide the sibling with attention and PC time, take it out and get it to private tutors. Not good on the writing routine. BUT with additional family members also returning from my family's vacation-home, I can safely stick to her education, which is less time consuming. 

In light of this, here are my short term goals till the end of the year: 

(1). Finish AirBoy. We are speaking first draft. My first drafts are always short. I think 60,000 to 70,000. I have an outline. I have 13,000 words. If I adopt a 2,000 word routine I can get it done. It will be crappy... But whatever. I am not getting that voice done, until edits. That's evident. I need too much trivia to make it work.

(2). Revive a novella I left at the stage of a short story. 

(3). Edit, edit, edit. Start with Crimson Cacophony and then whip my Friday Flashes into shape and then send them off.

(4). Finish what I have started... Oh, these are just 10 or so short stories.

[Air Boy] Prologue + On Beginnings

Yesterday, I completed the prologue for Air Boy, my urban fantasy young adult [something I had thought I'd never type] novel. Yes, I am fully aware that urban fantasy novels do not do in general and prologues have lost their sparkling popularity lately, but this short [1,127 words long] prologue had to be written or else I'd have to bog down the first chapter in flashbacks. I am fully aware that this is the vomit draft as Adam Christopher calls it, but I would like to have a look at it again, because Ambrose [main protagonist] is a different from what I usually write and I want to tweak the voice, get used to it. He's a teen. A self-made goofy teen, who uses the bouncing ball of humor image to cover up whatever crosses his mind. Serious thoughts, jokes, sarcasm and whining have to be balanced.

However, I am not talking about the intricate challenges of writing teens. I want to talk about beginnings in general. I wanted to start work on Air Boy, since the beginning of the month, but I pushed the date as far as possible [using the excuse that I was working on shorts] and when I sat down on Wednesday to start I yet again postponed [this time I realized I had to name the cast, because I could not use my brother, BFF, uncle 1, uncle 2 and hobo dude for ever]. At that point I realized that I feared starting this novel. Ever the philosopher, I decided to rewind and observe whether I acted scared with my previous projects.

Starting Crimson Cacophony was not difficult. I welcomed the first chapter, because it was my first chapter [for real that time] and I enjoyed it again, when I had a second go at it, because I knew how to fix it and do justice to the concept. My second and third novels [a NaNoWriMo and a sudden fancy] never caused any problems. Then again the NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words long and written according to what scenes I wanted done, while the 'sudden fancy' is not yet done, because after the middle mark I realized how it should have been written. I never have problems starting short stories [finishing them is a different thing], but Air Boy is somewhat of a different animal. Air Boy is me trying to think as a professional, seeing the market's state even if it will definitely change by the time I am ready to submit, fitting it in a schedule, but most importantly having expectations.

"Novel I" is a first novel. Nobody expects those to make it. You learn the ropes and that is that. Sometimes it gets published. More often than not, it doesn't.

"Novel II" is a NaNoWriMo. I did it to try it, to learn to work in a tight deadline. Since it is more or less an experiment, I can't say I feared anything.

"Novel III" was more of a whim than anything, so I did not invest much into it. Since I do enjoy the themes and the world of it, during rewrites the situation will change.

But I feared starting Air Boy, because:

* This will be a series I hope to sell and it adds pressure. Once you have started, you have to do it and you have to do it right, because to sell a series the first novel has to offer promise.

* I have invested half a year into the world, the characters, the eventual storyline. No detailed outlines or anything, but active investment. And I want to represent them as best as I can.

* Because the upper two clauses have built expectations as to how I should write this novel and I have to meet them. If I fail, I would be failing my imagination and it's scary.

* On a completely unrelated note, this is a commitment. A novel is no joke and to a certain point this fear is always present within writers.

I have started. The battle is on. I am a general on a mechanic battle horse and am more than ready to charge. The fears are behind me. Only the writing is important now, but tell me do you venture bravely or do you go through these fears?

---
I tried searching for an image titled Air Boy, but came up with Balloon Boy by Mike P Mitchell. It is vaguely related, but I am posting it cause it's fun.

So what exactly did I do during my vacation?

I vacated. I had my brain vacated and napped. To be honest, heat had melted whatever conscience I had left to butter so I generally napped and read. On Twitter I announced I would be bringing six novels, of which I only fit four: one manuscript to critique, one to review [after being already read] and two for reading. I managed to read:

'Quite the sophisticated challenge. I need erudite super-intelligent space chimps to get the subtleties, but oh-how-marvelous and weird' says Daily Markov.

and am in the middle of:

'A bit dizzying, but boy what a read. I have never read the offspring of a narcoleptic [bottle-loving] script and self-obsessed [drug-abusing] novel. Can't get enough.' quoted from the MARKOV...

What I did is strengthen 'Cosmic Love' with another round of edits [I underline final tweaks or else this may become a novel] and outlined a new novel [the former short story Drumming]. I haven't done much on the actual projects I'll be tending to starting Wednesday. I have a title for the YA novel: Air Boy and finally a name for the protagonist. World meet Ambrose, who will be teased with nicknames such as Rose and Amber. Perfect balance between hilarity and a teen's worst nightmare.

"Lungs" -- A Short Story Cycle

~


Standard edition

1. "Dog Days Are Over" – 4:12
2. "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" – 3:52
3. "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" – 3:05
4. "Howl" - 3:34 5. "Kiss with a Fist" – 2:04
6. "Girl with One Eye" – 3:38 7. "Drumming Song" – 3:43
8. "Between Two Lungs"– 4:09
9. "Cosmic Love" – 4:15 10. "My Boy Builds Coffins" – 2:56
11. "Hurricane Drunk" – 3:13
12. "Blinding" – 4:40
13. "You've Got the Love" – 2:48

---

As you have already guessed, ''Lungs'' -- A Short Story Cycle will be based on "Lungs", an album by the British 'Florence + The Machine'. I am rarely inspired by music. Music is my music font. It is responsible for extracting the feelings I need for a scene and translating them into my writing, but never so far have a song, much less an album give birth to a whole pantheon of ideas for a cycle.

'Florence + The Machine' has elevated my creativity beyond what I imagined and while I am not actively working on "Forged in Blood", I felt ideas swirl in and out of my consciousness. I started writing them down and I found myself, entering worlds, which I could do a lot with. As illogical as it is, since I am working on a novel right about now, I decided to start working on this short story cycle.

I am fairly open about my projects, which may or may not be the best decision in my career, since intellectual theft is the current bogeyman and it can happen to anybody. But then again, I cannot always speak about 'Sekrit Projects' [Kaz Mahoney has perfected the practice], so here is the gist of it. The play list will be the short story arrangement. Most short stories will be surreal fantasy, steampunk and urban fantasy. Perhaps a few, even a bit gothic. I am currently drafting out "Cosmic Love" [B-Side title -- "Andromeda"].