The Yin and Yang of Writing

Isn't it rich? 

Isn't it queer?

Losing my timing this late

In my career?

-- Send in the Clowns

It's not my timing that I've lost. Indeed, it has nothing to do with losing anything. Rather it's discovering something, this late in my career, that gives me the same melancholy feeling as the words of that song does. At 75, I am late in my career, and I regret not realizing there is a yin and a yang in writing until now.

I am not pretending that I discovered something new. While I've not taken courses in writing, I have no doubt what I've discovered on my own is taught, in some form or another, in writing classes. I could've Googled it to find out. 

But I didn't.

Because I wanted to talk about how and what I discovered as a personal tale, rather than as a lesson.

What I realized is that there is a yin and a yang in writing - as there is in all things. This realization came to me while reading Beth Brower's The Uncollected Journals of Emma M. Lion. Or more precisely, in rereading them. 

Yin and yang, usually symbolized by the circle above, can be thought of as a combination of opposite, but interconnected forces, that interact to form a dynamic system with the whole greater than the two parts. These forces are fluid, each with the seed (the little circle) of its opposite within it. The white "yang" is considered active, expansive, bright, open, and male, while the black "yin" is reactive, passive, dark, mysterious, and female. Everything has elements of both within them, in varying degrees, at various times. 

Including writing.

Though in the case of writing stories, the  colors of yin and yang are usually reversed. Black, or the color of the ink, is the active force of yang in writing. It is the color of the letters, the words, and the sentences that drive the story forward, the active, expansive force of the story. The yin, in writing, is white, or the paper. This yin has two characteristics, the visual - the light space surrounding the dark lines and blocks of words. And the metaphorical, in the sense of making up all the parts of the story that are left out as unnecessary, implied, unsaid, and/or left a mystery. 

It is the importance of yin, the white space, in writing that only now has struck me. I came to realize this because the Emma M Lion books are written as journals. As such they are composed of a series of dated entries, sometimes just a line or two, and sometime brief paragraphs separated by time and subject, and at other times verbatim transcriptions of scenes and dialogs. The variety of these different types of entries, and the variety of the white spaces that enclose them, eventually struck me as intralegal to the story and the way it's told. But these books have a a lot of metaphorical white spaces as well, which are even more powerful. Beth Brower, in writing as if we are reading a journal, often leaves things unsaid, half said, implied, or simply mysterious. It is the brevity of words, descriptions, or events that opened my eyes to how one can use the yin of writing - the lack of writing - to enhance the story. What you don't write is every bit as important as what you do set down in words.

To take one example; she has one character who limps from a mysterious injury. Other than being tall, his character is described in terms of a looming storm. She  didn't need to do more than that for us to build our own image of a man, brooding, with contained, but pent up energy. In addition, he, like all the other characters, major and minor, have pasts, parts of which are slowly revealed in little episodes over the course of many books. This is the metaphorical "white space" of writing; the things not described in words, but implied. This yin of things not said serves to hold the interest of the reader every bit as much as what is said. And it implies that even the minor characters, which we know very little about, will, someday, step forward and play their part in the story as it goes on. This is the power of white space, of the mysterious yin.

I hope to give more mind on this type of white space going forward. What can I leave out, hint at, mention in passing, or suggest?  Is it important? Or is it busy work? Is an elaborate description essential? These, of course, are judgement calls, but considering that if not saying something works better than stating it, will probably make me a better writer. It can also regulate the rhythm and pace of the story - sometimes  saying less speeds things up, sometimes saying less pauses the story a beat or two as the reader considers the little mystery resulting from not saying everything, depending on what is said.

As someone who uses ten words were five would do, this realization has had a profound impact on me. Not that I was totally unaware of this on an instinctive level. Often those five extra words are there because the come from the character within the story who is narrating the story, and is used to build the character. But now, by putting a name of the art of saying less, it will make me more mindful of what needs to be said, and what needs not to be said, even by the character. 

But this yin, this white space, is more than mere word count. 

I also have come to appreciate restraint in making everything crystal clear. Everything doesn't have to be spelled out. I think you can trust readers to read between the lines. And sometimes it might be useful to keep them wondering, not quite sure what exactly is going on - that's life, after all. Readers find the mysteries fascinating. Why cheat them of the fun of wondering? There will always come a proper time to clear up mysteries, if they're important. Until then, I think you can use hints and little mysteries as story-strands, threads, that tie readers to the story and pull them along through it. 

In summery, seeing the story as both words said and unsaid will make me mindful of what I'm saying, how it needs to be said, and if it needs to be said.

I've also come to realize that there is the physical yin as well in books. The yin of what you see on the page. In how you use white space visually. The white space on the page is an important as the text. Ideally, a page contains an interesting play of dark text, words sentences and paragraph, and light white space giving a sense of solidness when required, as well as a lively fleetingness, a rhythm of fast passages and slow ones; yin and yang when it is appropriate in the story.

For example, long paragraphs of dialog can make for speeches instead of conversations. Massive paragraphs of description can make for slow reading. Or skimming. Visually they are large, square, solid blocks of text. And when you consider the text as the yang of writing - the driving force of the story, these large, square blocks of text are hardly an active and driving force in the story. They can bring the pace of the story to a crawl. The opposite of what the text should be doing.

Of course, there are many reasons, many moods, and variety of pacing necessary in stories. At the proper time, blocks of text can serve a proper purpose in a story. As does lines of text that run, dance, and play like a brook, in the "air" of white space, when such liveliness is needed. In considering the feeling one wants to create, I think that one needs to not only consider the words, but how they are arranged on the page. How they look, not just how they read.

English has all sorts of rules on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, which, if take literally, will make one's writing formal. Creative writing is a different beast altogether, which need not, or should not, be constrained by formality.  

The mindful use of white space on a page by they mindful use of lines of text and length of paragraphs, will, I think, make for better, more evocative writing. It is a matter of writing with a rhythm, rather than as a dull drone. 

So, my takeaway with my discovery of the yin and yang of writing is that visually and metaphorically I need to open my eyes to what I want to say, what I need to say, and what is just as important, what I don't need to say. And to say it with a pattern of light and darkness, lines and spaces, that dance.

Perfection(ish)

 

I can’t spell. Never could. Still, my attitude is that the only way someone knows that I misspelled a word is that they know the correct spelling and thus the misspelled word did it’s job. It may’ve taken a split second to translate it on the part of the reader, but it still conveyed the meaning of the correctly spelled word. Which is all you can ask of a word. I may’ve used a crowbar to hammer a nail down instead of a hammer but it got job. You gota work with what you got.

I’m not a person who learns by rote and memorization, and there is no way to learn spelling, or indeed the ins and outs of the English language except by rote memorization. And to put it bluntly, the English language is a hopeless clusterfuck. There is no logic in its spelling, and for every so-called rule, there are exceptions, so there are no real rules. No real guides. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the English language is that some people think its unalterably sacred. I find it hard to believe that the gods of the English language handed down the word “nevertheless” to us. (I Googled it to save your the trouble. It likely comes from the Middle English word neverthelater and means notwithstanding.) Nevertheless, I have to believe that at some point some Middle English people just started stringing the phrase “never the later” altogether, whether the high priests of the English language objected or not. And then someone, some time later, just slipped nevertheless into its place. Who knows if the high priest of English objected or not. If they did so, they failed to put a stake through its heart. 

In that spirit, I think I’m going to invent a word myself. A useful word – atleast. Atleast is atleast as useful a word as nevertheless, if not more so. The gauntlet is down. And I don’t care if there’s a red line under it. There’s a red line under “neverthelater” as well. And that’s a good Middle English word.

Given my attitude, one has to wonder how it is that I’m a writer. Or perhaps, how good a writer I am.

I’m okay at it. It’s a journey not a destination, but we’re on the road. As for my lack of qualifications in the English language, well I’ve got a crutch. A computer to do the spelling for me. I hate writing by hand these days. But on a more general note, my attitude is that I am not an automobile mechanic and yet I can drive a car. All the illogical messiness of the English language can stay under the hood, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t need to know it. Sherlock Holmes didn’t want to clutter his head with useless knowledge, like the earth circling the sun, for fear of filling it up with useless knowledge at the expense of useful knowledge. That’s my attitude as well. In the place of rules and diagrams of sentences, I have read maybe two thousand books in the past half century. And  from that experience I have distilled what I think is good writing and storytelling looks like. And I try to apply what I think is good to what I write.

Attitude is one thing. But it takes one only so far. You gotta respect your audience as well.

In 2015 I self-published the three novels I’d been working on during the previous five years, starting with A Summer in Amber. In doing so, I decided to lay my strengths and weakness as a writer out there for anyone to see. It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. However, I realized that there was no great risk in doing so. If I did made a fool of myself, I’d only be a fool in the eyes of a few, maybe a hundred, strangers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In doing so, I learned a lot. One of my major lesson was I discovering just how blind I am to typos. I read, like most people, what I expect to read. Just as long as the shape of the words more or less match expectations, I'm good to go. And because they were my words, I hardly had to read them at all. As a result, I would give my wife what I considered a clean manuscript to proofread and she’d find five or six hundred or more mistakes. And still not catch them all. And I didn’t help my cause by making revisions after the manuscript had been proofread. So there were a fair number of typos in my first books, though, as I said, many hundreds less that if left to my own devices. This sad fact was mentioned in the early reviews, which was fair enough. However, what was encouraging is that they were, for the most part, still good reviews, so I knew that I’d done the most important thing right. I just had to do other things a lot better.

In the five years since I first published these works, I’ve made many revisions to correct those problems. I had a year’s worth of Microsoft Word that had a more robust grammar checker than the LibreOffice program I use to write. I went through the books I'd written at that time using Word to find mistakes we’d missed. It helped, but the real solution came when some of my readers stepped up and volunteered to send me lists of the mistakes they found when reading my books. And some of them have stayed on to be volunteer beta read for all of my subsequent books as well.

The process is rather eye opening.

My wife, a retired high school teacher who knows a lot more about English than I do, is my first proofreader. And as I said, she finds the first five, six, seven hundred or more mistakes I make. After making corrections, I send the manuscript off to my four or five beta readers. They find an additional 50 to 100 mistakes. They all get the same copy, and yet, there is remarkably little overlap in the mistakes each of them find. It seems that everyone reads a little differently, and each get tripped up by different words. The process, however, delivers a pretty clean copy, and I am ever so grateful for their efforts. I don’t get complaints about all the typos these days, thanks to them.

However, I want to give my readers the best possible experience (within my budget) and I noticed that while typing emails in gmail, it would highlight awkward grammatical phrases, and such. I wondered if Google Docs would do the same thing. So I uploaded my latest book to Google Docs, and sure enough, it worked the same way, finding double words, missing words, and those correctly spelled wrong words that slip in, the its and it’s, where and were, discrete and discreet – my usual suspects.

As a result of this experiment, I’ve spent the past week running all of my works through Google Docs and making corrections that this process found – when appropriate.

I found many things to fix in my earliest works, though almost no misspellings. But in those early works, I wrote in a rather telegraphic style. I wrote them how I heard my characters speaking, and I often skipped little words like “a” or “the” that were almost understood without speaking in speech. And I would think that they’d not be missed, when in the flow. However, this time I put them in.

I found a few other interesting points going through my work. Google prefers that my characters look “at” each other, while I prefer that they look “to” each other, i.e. “I looked at her” vs “I looked to her.” I also found that Google prefers that when a character did something, did another thing, and then says something, it prefers it written as, “I looked down, jumped back, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!” Whereas I prefer prefer to choreograph the action, i.e. “I looked down, and jumping back, exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!’ I kept my way in both cases.

These revised versions of my books are now available in all the bookstores. My Google books now have the 2020 covers as well. If you’ve already read them, it’s water over the dam. But if you have some sitting around yet to be read, swap them out for the new editions, if you can. I’m confident that they are now perfect(ish). At least as perfect as they’re ever going to be – though I will, of course, make any corrections readers send to me.

Bottom line; no looking back now. They are what they are. And I think they’re good enough for me to sleep well at night.

Writing as Art

 

In a Wilderness of Dunes, in my impressionistic style of painting 

I view my stories, like my paintings, as art. I write and paint to bring something new into the world. To create. I also try to make it good, though I am the sole judge of what is good, and what falls short of being good enough. I try to be critical of my work. I don’t expect to succeed all the time, or indeed, most of the time. I expect to always fall short of total success. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they are very rare. However, I don’t get discouraged by falling short of perfection. Falling short is part of the process – especially if you, like me, are exploring an art form on your own rather then by the book or in class. We must expect to learn by trial and by error. And mostly error. We have to be honest with ourselves about our shortcomings. And yet, be happy enough with our little successes to try to fix our shortcomings the next time we set out to create our art. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Big Pine Bend in my watercolor style of painting

For me, the criteria I judge my writing and painting on, are my own tastes. Period. Everyone else is welcome to their opinion, but for me, my opinion is the only one that counts. I will often come across writing advice that says that you need to get other people’s input, which I do. My wife will tell me if something seems wrong. But they also advise one to hire an editor, because you, as the writer, are too close to your work to see its flaws. This advice comes from a particular, and often unsaid mindset – that you are writing to reach a commercially viable audience – or at least you should be. A good editor knows what is selling in the fleeting moment, and will shape a manuscript to conform to the current tastes of the target audience so as to increase the chances of the book selling enough copies to make publishing it turn a profit on it. Which is all fine and dandy. Makes sense. Book publishing is a business, and business have to make money if they are to continue to be one.

Misty Morning in Crofthaven, in my impressionist style

However, I am not in the business of publishing books. I’m not in business at all. I’m terrible at business. As I said, I’m an artist. And what I seek to do is to bring my imaginary people and places to life in the imagination of other people through words and paintings. In doing so, I take the same approach to writing as I do to painting. I try to be critical of my work, and release the best book I reasonably can. Reasonably, in the sense that there are a hundred different ways of saying anything in English, and that on any given day, I know that I’ll prefer one way over the other ninety-nine. This means that I can never read more than a few pages of mine without wishing I’d said something better. However, if you are ever going to share a story, at some point you have to say, enough is enough. It is what it is. Release it, and hope to do better the next time.

Cealanda in my watercolor style, though in this I used acrylic paint on canvas

In addition to deciding when I’ve reached the point where I could fiddle with it forever without making it appreciably better, I also make decisions about what I want to tell, and how. Since I am not in the business of writing, I’m not concerned about how to make my stories appeal to the most people. Instead, I tell the stories the way I think my first person narrator would tell them. For example, in A Summer in Amber, I have two chapters devoted to weekend trips – a bicycle tour and an overnight sail. Neither chapter advances the main plot one iota. At best they can be considered world building. However, they remain in my story because I enjoyed writing the character Red Stuart, who is featured in those chapters, and secondly, because my narrator, Sandy Say, is writing essentially a “what I did on my summer vacation” story, would certainly have include those adventures in his story, since they were part of that memorable summer. All of my stories have that same priority – they are told by a character in that story, and told in a manner that character would tell the story. As such, they include things that the character would include in his telling – regardless of what an editor employed to take a creative work and make a product out of it, would think of it.

Crescent Park Study 2 in my impressionist style

And perhaps I should add here, that I write, as I paint, by instinct and, I would like to believe, talent.  I am always amazed when I hear authors talk about their books as engineering projects, with all sorts of standard components placed in standard patterns. Every component of the story is engineered to produce a desired effect. Not that I'm criticizing that approach, I'm just saying that I can't think of a story in that way, at least not in the detail they work with. I take a much more organic approach to a story. 

However, writers, like myself, live in a sort of golden age. Ebooks, the internet, and self publishing has allowed me and millions of other people to tell our stories. Now, many, but by no means, all, of those stories are written as products to sell. And many, if not most of those products, are really bad products. Still, as I said, there are those of us who simply have imaginary stories that we want to bring to a life outside of our imaginations. And judged on that basis, there are no bad stories. What counts is that journey from our imagination into the world, not the number of destinations it arrives at. Being creative is what matters.

Side Note

I've illustrated this post with several of my paintings in my two main styles of painting. I started painting regularly (50 paintings a year or so) using ink and watercolors 1992. They are of an imaginary country, Cealanda, that I, as the painter, rambled around in painting what I saw. I suspect that my paintings in this style are several times (or more) more popular than my impressionist paintings. I turned to oil and acrylic paints when I started selling paintings in 2003, as they command more money than watercolors. I found it hard to paint in thick paints, and at 53, I didn't have time to start over again. Luckily I always like impressionist paintings, so I adopted that style as my own. I think my impressionist works are better than my watercolors. I've painted a thousand of them, even though maybe only one person in a hundred (who appreciate art) really appreciates them. Like in my writing, I get to decide what is good and want isn't. Not the market. And the best of them are good.

Origin Stories -- The Bright Black Sea (Part Three)

A cover featuring the arrival of Cin in the nick of time on Despar

In this my third and last, I promise you, post on how The Bright Black Star came to be written, I want to talk about the things I did and why. And the things I learned along the way.

Rather than starting the story like a scalded cat right out of the gate, (as it seems to be how many writers do it today) I decided to spend some time setting up the premise, the story’s setting, its economics, and then introduce the ship, the Lost Star, its acting captain, and crew. Because I don’t have a visual mind, I see my creations only vaguely, out of the corner of my eye. So, to give them some sort of concrete existence, I imagine all the little, everyday details of life in the universe I create, to build a scene and a setting, piece by piece. There is a lot of that in my writing. For instance, if I wanted dogs aboard the ship, they would need to have magnets surgically implanted into their paws so that they move about when the ship was in free fall, which was much of the time. On the other hand, cats, with their claws, might not need them. And so it goes, lots of little details, that might be considered non-essential, but contribute to my understanding of my world.

I also wanted to create a well rounded world of the “spaceers” central to the story. I tried to imagine how they lived both aboard ship and downside. Side stories, like the moon buggy racing, were borrowed from stories about old sailing ships in anchorage waiting for their cargo. Unlike today, here turnaround times are kept to an absolute minimum, in the old days, idle crews would stage contests – boat races, cricket matches, etc to pass the idle time. I also tried to make interplanetary trade economically realistic. Ships like the “Firefly” that carry a couple of pallets of cargo from planet to planet make no economic sense. And since the days of break cargo are long since gone even today, it would make no sense to move cargo between the planets in anything but prepacked containers. I even thought about how credit might work between mostly economically independent planets. The central story could’ve been told without these sidelights – and I am sure some readers would argue that it should’ve been – but I disagree. I want my readers to look back and have the feeling that they actually visited the Nine Star Nebula. I want them to believe that the Nine Star Nebula is real.

Battle scene art with the Lost Star and a jump fighter

And yet, because I don’t have a visual mind, I had only the vaguest impressions of what my characters look like – at best. I did do some sketches of them, but in the end, I decided that less was best. Rather than piece together some sort of manikin of a character, I just gave each a vague characteristic or two – perhaps a body shape, or a hair color, and build my characters on what they said and did. I am quite content to let the readers to fill in these blanks themselves. If someone is pretty or handsome, I’ll leave it to the reader to picture in their mind what they think pretty or handsome looks like. I was careful not to give any character a skin color. That too, is entirely up to the readers. And because the story is set so far in the future, and so far away in space, I did not give any character any sort of ethnic homeland on earth. In these stories, those homelands have long since been consigned to ancient history.

I felt going into the story, that the idea that they would have some sort of different adventure on every planet they call on, wasn’t all that realistic. Realistically, the spaceer’s life should’ve been pretty tedious – one orbit like another, cargoes loaded and discharged, around and around they go – even the spaceer dives would be almost the same. Of course, there could be small adventures when downside, but I felt that eventually I’d have pushed my imagination to the breaking point, by having to come up with some new danger or adventure for every planet and every story. To smooth over, as it were, this sticking point, I suggested early on in the story that there was some mystery connected to the ship and its former owners, the “Four Shipmates,” as they called themselves. I figured that that mystery, whatever it was – and I had no idea what it was – could serve to drive the story when an adventure a planet got stale. It could be used to explain at least some of the adventures as the story progressed. As it turned out, I turned to it almost right away, and it became the central theme of the whole book. That was not planned, it just evolved that way. And to tell the truth, the mystery, also evolved as the story went along. It was never clear what the mystery was when I was writing the first three or four, or five episodes. I had several possible candidates in mind, and only settled on the final one, as I went along.

My 2020 cover

This is the way a lot of the story worked. I’d toss things in just for some “color” since, as I said, I focused on little details to build the set and setting. And then, these little color items, like the ghost, Glen Colin, or the Travel Book of Faylyen, or the grandmother from the drifts, or the darq gem ring, somehow became very important and useful, if not essential, later in the story. It was almost spooky how many things that I just tossed in for color, turned out to be essential to the story. It is really the magic of writing.

As I said earlier, I intended to write a variety of different types of stories. I think I succeeded, somewhat. We have an eerie story, a “war” story, a pirate story, some lighthearted times within the stories, some romance, adventure, and sense of wonder, discoveries. But the thing is, I only wanted to write small stories. Stories about people. I believe that one can write thrilling stories where the stakes are only the life of the hero or his friends. You shouldn’t need greater stakes. It seems, however, that I’m in a minority on this issue, with both writers and readers. Almost every SFF book I read about has some great conflict central to the story, even if the story focuses on one character. I suppose I shouldn’t make such a sweeping statement, but that’s the impression I’m left with. Anyway, that is what I tried to do. I guess in the end, they did find something big and important – but only to the characters.

An alternative title and cover

About halfway through writing the story, I came up with the story’s ending – but not just the ending, but with the story I really wanted to tell after the ending, which dragged me into writing its sequel, The Lost Star’s Sea. The locale I created for the ending became ever more expansive as I went along. What was once imagined to be an abandoned space ship with some sort of secret onboard – perhaps a treasure in darq jewels or something – became a floating island in a sea of air, and a revolution. And that sea of air became the Archipelago which continued to grow ever more expansive, so that by the time I got my characters shipwrecked for the story that I thought would be great fun to write, getting them out again became an almost impossible problem. Indeed, I have yet to do so, but that’s the next installment's story.

I think I will take a break from this series of post for a week or two. Coming up next, I will explore my library and talk about some of the books in it, and their importance to me.

Previous cover art

Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea (Part Two)

An early book cover with one of my working titles, a play on "Ports of Call." I wasn't certain that it would be clear that planets weren't called "Call" though I liked the title.

In my previous post I discussed what inspired me to write The Bright Black Sea. In this post I’m going to discuss the nuts and bolts of how it came to be.

I began thinking about the stories that would become The Bright Black Sea soon after Amazon’s lending library, Kindle Unlimited was introduced. At that time authors were being paid whenever their book was borrowed. It was a flat rate payment per book, so that short books paid the same as long ones. Authors quickly took advantage of this, and started publishing short stories and novels as serial stories, to get paid many times more that a single novel length book would bring in. It was in this economic atmosphere that I conceived the idea of writing a series of connected space ship adventures. My model was Guy Gilpatric’s series of short stories featuring Mr. Glencannon. the chief engineer of the tramp steamer Inchchiffe Castle. Using a tramp freighter space ship sailing between the planets would not only allow me to set my stories on a variety of planets but to write a variety of stories, from comedy to spooky stories, intrigue, romance, and adventure. I intended each story to follow one after the other, so that I could weave some sort of over-arching plot into the series, if needed. And, indeed, this is the formula that I have followed, though I never released it as a serial story. For quite a few reasons.

A never published cover

First was that Amazon changed the way the Kindle Unlimited program paid their authors. It is now the number of pages “read” that determines payment amounts, rather than just if the book is borrowed. Serials, or installment novels no longer offered any economic advantage.

Secondly, I was very leery of having to produce a story on any sort of schedule, much less a monthly one. I feared running out of ideas. Which, as it turned out, is a real issue with me. I suppose that I could crank out some sort of a story on demand – but it would be work, not fun, and probably not very good. And as I have said already, I don’t like to work. So the idea of having a monthly episode seemed too daunting a prospect to pursue.

Thirdly, I don’t write short stories. And, for the most part, I don’t read them. Even in my heyday of reading science fiction, I read mostly novels. I never subscribed to any of the SF magazines. And the episodes that I ended up writing reflect this anti-short story bias. All were novella length pieces of between 20,000 to 40,000 words. It would have been pretty impossible for me to keep up a monthly pace at that length, unless I had a hundred stories to write already in my head. Which I didn’t.

Fourthly, as I have already mentioned when writing about A Summer in Amber, I became aware that I did not write tight, fast, thriller type of stories, or as Sargent Friday might say, ‘Just the story ma’am.” My pace is wordy and leisurely, which is not the type of writing that would lend itself to writing old fashioned Saturday matinee adventure serials. To write a story that would keep readers on pins and needles until the next episode, not only would I need to write differently than I do, but I would have to write in a way that I didn’t care to. Episodic serials usually involve ending with cliffhangers. Which is to say, one writes the first ¾ of the story in one episode, but only the finished the last ¼ in the next episode, along with the first ¾’s of that nest episode… to be concluded in the next, as so on. In short, I would have to forego telling the whole story in the hopes of hooking readers by making them wait for the conclusion in the next episode. As a story teller, I didn’t care to do that. It seemed to be to be unfair to the reader. And as I said before, I don’t write stories that lend themselves to that technique anyway. Nor do I want to.

The Nine Star Nebula in color

So in short, the incentive to write serials went away, and the episodes I could see myself writing would be too long and too complete to insure that people would keep coming back for the next one. And I wasn’t confident that I could keep to any reasonable publishing schedule for a serial story.

Yo get around these qualms, my first plan was to release the first three episodes, Captain of the Lost Star, The Mountain King, and Lontria, as one book. Story wise, the end of Lontria was a good story break point, as we were leaving the familiar Azminn solar system astern, and together the three episodes ran well over 100,000 words, making it a good sized novel. My thinking was that by making the first three episodes available to be read without any time gap between them, I could hook the readers into reading the first three episodes, and then they’d be so invested in the characters and story that they would read those that would follow, even without cliffhanger endings.

However, it was such a great theory, that it could be applied to every other episode I would write. Why not wait and release the following three episodes as a novel as well, since it too, had a good break point – which is not surprising since I was, by now, more or less plotting the episodes to make them novel sized installments. Indeed by that time I was writing these episodes, I had abandoned the release by episode idea and was all in on releasing novels, or just a novel.

Now, given how they were written, I could’ve easily released The Bright Black Sea as a trilogy, with three 100K+ word novels – basically how I wrote them. If my goal was to at least try to make money, this would’ve been the best route to take. It is the strategy that almost everyone recommends that a writer should do – especially if you have all three books written and ready to go. However, since I was always intending to release my books for free, maximizing profits wasn’t something that needed to be considered. It wouldn’t matter if I released one book or three books. Except to my ego.

The thing is, not everyone who opens a book is going to like it. That’s a given. And that means that the second book in any series is going to sell less than the first book, as all the people who didn’t like the first one aren’t going to buy the second. The second book may still attract readers on the fence, but by the third book, the readers are either engaged in the story, or they’re out. Quite candidly, I didn’t wish to see that inevitable decline. I don’t need that sort of heartbreak. So, by selling the complete set of episodes in one volume, I would see only the numbers of people who tried it, not the number of readers who liked it enough to read it all the way to its end. Of course, in the end, I did write a sequel to it, so I do see that number, but well, The Lost Star’s Sea came out two years after The Bright Black Sea and is a different sort of book, despite having continuing characters, so it’s a little bit different. And well, maybe I can take disappointment better now. Not that I am disappointed. Like my characters discover, one should be careful what one wishes for. Wishes sometimes come true. I’m happy with my writing, and I don’t think becoming a best seller author would suit me very well. With that comes responsibilities. I try to avoid those as well. So, I’m planning to be famous only after I’m dead.

To the left is the mock up of a cover for what would have been volume 2 of a 3 volume paper release that I considered doing given the size of the complete book. In the end, I abandoned the idea. The titles would have been The Captain of the Lost Star, The Ghosts of the Lost Star, and The Secrets of the Lost Star.

Hmm… It seems that this post has run on long enough, but since I still have more to say, there will be a third episode of Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea, in which I’ll talk about actually writing the story. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to avoid, and how it evolved as it went along.

Origin Stories -- The Bright Black Sea (Part One)

First cover with its first title. This would end up being the first 1/3rd of The Bright Black Sea

I can pin part of the blame for instigating The Bright Black Sea on a website/magazine called Raygun Revival. It was on the web from about 2006 to 2012 and featured short stories and serials recalling old fashioned space operas. I can’t say I actually read many, if any of the stories – I really can’t read books on a computer (the scrolling gets to me) but the idea of writing the type of story that they might welcome was certainly one of the threads that lead to The Bright Black Sea. I did start to write a short story – on my ipad – with the idea of submitting it to them, but I didn’t finish it, and it got lost… But while nothing concrete came from my interest in Raygun Revival, it planted the seed to write an old fashioned space opera.

A cover prototype, never used.

Of course, I must go much further back in time than Raygun Revival to find the true origins of my space opera. I wrote it as a homage to all of the space operas of my youth, from E E Smith, Andre Norton, Heinlein, A Bertram Chandler, and many others who told stories centered around space ships. The space ship is, to me, the defining feature of space operas – it carries you to adventure.

However, the seeds of The Bright Black Sea were planted even earlier. I think I can go all the way back to the old Flash Gordon serials that I watched on the small screen of a b&w TV in the 1950’s. And from that on to the first SF books I read: the Tom Corbet, Space Cadet series, along with the Tom Swift Jr. books. My decision to set my story based on old fashioned rocket ships was both a challenge to myself and a nod Flash Gordon, Tom Corbet, Digg Allen, as well as Arthur C Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, the first “adult” SF paperback I read. No faster than light drive. No artificial gravity. It was “rockets away, lad!” And magnets in the soles of your shoes!

And it was a challenge. Those old rocket ship stories still had a solar system to explore when they were written, with the steaming jungles of Venus, the ancient ruins of Mars, the mines of the asteroid belt, and all the rest. Setting a rocket ship story in today’s solar system, while certainly possible, did not interest me. I wanted the romance of the jungles of Venus and the dead cities of Mars. So I had to invent a place where I could invent anything I cared to, without sacrificing the authenticity that using rocket ships brought to the tale. I would, of course, have to fudge science somewhat to get everything working – everything from inventing materials that would protect my spaceers from the deadly radiation of space, to making plasma/fusion propulsion easily do-able, to genetically engineering humans to be able to live in free fall, low gravity, or high gravity without health issues. I also wanted a wide canvas to paint my stories against, and, with travel between stars that were light years apart impossible with my rocket ships, I had to invent a place were I could cram as many planets and even stars into a relatively small space of space.

But they couldn’t be too close, either. If there is one thing that makes me close a book, it is when authors chose to set their stories in the “galaxy” and then make every planets a subway stop apart. The universe is really, really big. The galaxy is really big. And yet I often come across stories where stars are just several hours away from each other. And then, as often as not, they’re one feature planets – a desert planet, an ocean planet, a city planet…That being the case, why not set the story on a planet, or even a continent, and have cities or locales so that the heroes can drive, fly, or even take a train to? But before this turns into one of those observations directed at the clouds, I’ll just conclude by saying that I wanted my locales to be a realistic distance away from each other, but close enough that I could write a variety of stories about routine travel between them. So I gave each star a whole host of habitable planets, and packed the stars very, very close together by making them the debris of a failed supernova. In this way, I made travel between planets a matter of days or weeks with months between the solar systems. I created the Nine Star Nebula.

The Lost Star in orbit.

And that brings me around to yet another thread that lead to The Bright Black Sea, which is sea stories. I can remember at least looking at the Howard Pease’s “Tod Moran” series of juvenile sea stories on the library shelves while I was selecting Heinlein’s juvenile books. I don’t think I actually checked one out back then, though I did pick a few up when I came across them at book sales later in my life. Still, that seems to suggests that I was interested in sea stories from an early age as well. I certainly started reading them in late teens and 20’s. There were Basil Lubbock’s books about the China clippers, W Clark Russel’s Victorian era sea stories, C. S Forester, and later, Patrick O’Brian’s (and many other’s) stories of the Napoleonic era.There was Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands as well as the tramp steamer stories of C J Cutcliffe Hyne, Guy Gilpatric, and others. I was never brave enough to go to sea myself, so I went to sea from my armchair. So, with my love of sea stories, I made my rocket ships, ships with crews, not airplanes with a pilot and perhaps passengers, or subway cars that whisk one from stop to stop.And I imagined that the distance between planets was an ocean to sail across in days or weeks, not something to fly over in a couple of a few hours.

The ancestor painting of the present cover 

But seeing that I've a lot more to talk about, I think I'll bring this post to a close. In the next installment in this series I will discuss the how The Bright Black Sea came to take its present shape, what  my original plan for it was, and how and why I abandoned that plan.

Stay tuned.

Origin Stories -- A Summer in Amber

Evening, Maig Glen

I suspect that I had begun working the first “episode” or two of that would become The Bright Black Sea prior to starting A Summer in Amber, but since A Summer in Amber ended up being published first, I’ll discuss it first.

Perhaps I should begin by saying that I blame it all on Edgar Rice Boroughs. Boroughs was experiencing a great revival back in the mid-1960’s when I started reading science fiction, and I was a big fan of his stories as a teen. Still, I never realized just how much of an influence he had on my tastes in stories until I started writing my own. All his stories had an element of romance in them. There was always a princess to fall in love with and rescue, usually many times. I realized, only after I started writing my stories, that I always wanted that element in them as well. They didn’t seem complete without one, nor would they be as fun to daydream about. I am, however, very careful to make certain that my princess are usually the ones doing the rescuing. They’re more fun that way.

The Maryfield Road

Now on to A Summer in Amber. The first files I find for the story, then titled The Rhymer’s Gate, date back to March 2013. This fits with my time line, since I know that watching the first two seasons of Downton Abbey on Netflix sparked my desire to write this story. I enjoyed the atmosphere it created, both visually and with the music, and the romance. I was, however, certain that I could write a better one using the same theme – a commoner’s intrusion into the world of the upper classes – while avoiding that show’s soap opera entanglements. i.e. no dead bodies need be hauled around the house.

My first thought was to write it as a period piece, like Downton Abbey. But I rather quickly rejected that idea. First, because it would require a great deal of research to get all the little details of everyday life in England in 1910 right, since I know that historical fiction readers are very picky about getting those things right. This would mean researching all sorts of things, from train schedules and times, to how telephones worked, as well as the manners and speech of the English of all classes of the time. And a thousand other things. It could, and no doubt has, been done. But it would involve a lot of work. I don’t really like work. And, well, in the end, I would mean that much of the backdrop of my story would reflect the research, work, and writings of other people, which made me uneasy.

Glen Road

I can offer two examples of this phenomena from my experience. Many years ago I started reading a fantasy book that featured a sailing ship. As I read the description of this ship, I experienced a sense of deja vu. It seemed that I was reading an almost word for word description of the tea clipper Cutty Sark. Tea and tea clippers where an interest of mine in my youth, and so I happened to be quite familiar with such ships – in words, anyway – and the passage struck me as something I’d read before. Maybe it wasn’t. I never bothered searching for the description in the Cutty Sark book that it reminded me of, but it just seemed so eerily familiar.

And then there is Connie Willis’s Blackout. I was also an avid reader of life in England in 1940, and the blitz. So that when I was reading her story, I got the distinct feeling that she had read, and incorporated into her story, incidents related in the sources I had also read. I know that she had spent a year researching the books, so this is not surprising. And while this is just a sense of deja vu rather than any suggestion of plagiarism, the fact that I could see, as it were, the bones of her story from my own reading in the history of the period, made me leery of doing something like that myself. I feared that if I wrote the story as a period piece, the work and writings of others would inevitably creep into my story. I didn’t want that. I wanted it all my own.

Bridge over the Maig River

The other reason I decided not to write it as a period piece is that history is an iron master. If I set it in the same time period, all the young men would be going off to war in a couple of years, and the world would change in ways that are well known. So, unless I wanted to make a historical fantasy out of it, the future of my characters would be dictated not by me, but by history. I didn’t care to cede control of my characters and story to history. And if I was going to write a fantasy, I might as well make it all my own.

However, since I wanted that old-time feel to my story, I decided to set the story in a post apocalyptic future. One that would allow me to bring in all the old-timey stuff I wanted. Not only I could then mix  old stuff together with some modern stuff as needed, but I could give the book a vaguely haunting, nostalgic air to it, like Downton Abbey had.This would also give me complete freedom to make up whatever I wanted, without a tremendous amount of research, which is to say, it saved me from having to work. It would be my world, and I’d call the shots. I figured that a story like this could fit – more or less – into the steampunk genre that was fairly popular at the time, and might still be. Sort of.

Road to the Highlands

The second major ingredient of A Summer in Amber was Scotland. The locale was inspired by the work of John Buchan and the stories he set in the Scotland of the first several decades of the twentieth century. Stories like The 39 Steps, John Macnab, and Huntingtower, plus the Scottish stories of Compton Mackenzie like Monarch of the Glen, Keep the Home Guard Turning, Whisky Galore and Hunting the Fairies. All these stories and their vivid description of the Scottish countryside brought that land to life in my imagination, and I wanted to revisit them in my story. I had traveled about Scotland on an extended holiday after I graduated from college, so I could bring a bit of personal experience to the stories as well. I should also credit the 1959 movie The 39 Steps with Kenneth More and Taina Elg. It is one of my favorite movies. It offers a rather romantic version of Scotland of the 1950’s. No low, grey skies to be found in its Scotland. The bicycle weekend in the story was inspired by a scene in the movie.

So I had a theme inspired by Downton Abbey, and a setting inspired by the books of Buchan and Mackenzie. What I needed was a story to get my narrator to Scotland and on to the estate, if not into the house of the wealthy upper class laird.

Evening in the Glen

I set out to write a mystery/thriller centered around a legendary invention. I explored many ways the story could play out. At one time the secret was a theory that would lead to a great scientific revolution which was devised by one Hugh Gallagher who stayed at the estate – owned by the department head of the college that he taught at – during the Storm Years. There, with the aid of his wife, Selina, he had perfected this theory, or so legend had it. It was lost, and would be found… Another version, closer to the final version, had a lot more industrial spying, intrigue, and action in it. Rival firms were actively attempting to steal the secret that Sandy Say was deciphering, including waylaying him, stealing the papers, along with chases through the countryside. But… after working on it for a year and more, I realized that I wasn’t that type of writer. I couldn’t get that type of story to work. And so, in the end, I just decided to write a simple “What I did during summer vacation” romance.

To compensate for the elimination of the industrial espionage elements, I made the “The Rhymer’s Gate” more central, mysterious, and dramatic to the story. And for this element of the story, I was inspired by a Popeye story by E.C. Segar. He drew and wrote a story entitled The Mystery of Brownstone Hill, which ran in the newspapers as a comic from early June 1930 to early November 1930. It featured a mysterious house on Brownstone Hill, where one Doctor Wattey rented. He took with him only a few boxes, and then, well he was never seen again, and for 20 years not only did nothing grow within half a mile of the house, but no one was able to get within a quarter mile of it before they fled for their lives. While E.C. Segar's story is quite different from mine, I used some of the elements from it, the mystery surrounding it, and the inability to get close to it, for my Rhymer's Gate. 

So A Summer in Amber owes its existence to such diverse inspirations as the TV show, Downton Abbey, the old thriller, The 39 Steps, the Scottish stories like The Monarch of the Glen, and a Popeye comic. Go figure.

The story is actually based in a real place, though I changed all the names, slightly. If you find it, you can see, on Google street view, what the countryside looks like now. Though, of course, after the Storm Years, it looks somewhat different in the story – more overgrown and abandoned.

My goal as a creator is to bring something new into the world. And yet, as you can see, the seeds for whatever is new to the world in A Summer in Amber, were in the world already – brought there by creators before me.

The aurora over the highland

NOTE: The illustrations for this post are samples of the chapter heading art I had created for an early version of the book. Art in ebooks is somewhat problematical (for me) and I decided that black and white versions for the print book wouldn't be worth the effort.

Origin Stories - Some Day Days

An early cover, with my preferred spelling of the title

This is the first of my origin stories, in which I explore what inspired me to write each of my stories.

I should begin by mentioning that I don’t do market research. I haven’t read the 100 best selling books in my genre(s) to get a feel for what those readers expect. I haven’t studied their blurbs, nor have I modeled my covers after the best selling books in my genre. I also haven’t sold tens of thousands of books or make much money either, so take my method for what it’s worth.

All of my stories were inspired by self-imposed challenges, memories, or books I’ve read and enjoyed. I’ll talk about each of them in the order that they were written.

Some Day Days  

Original working title: Yours, (someday, maybe)

My preferred title spelling would be "Someday Days", but "someday" is not universally considered a word, especially in Britain where the story takes place, hence some days.

Kiss of the White Witch, is the opening “piece” in my “fix-up” novel, Some Day Days, A Romance in an Undetermined Number of Pieces. It was the first story that I wrote that I eventually took all the way to publishing it. I have files dating back to 2009, with the working title of Tea and the White Witch. I wrote Kiss of the White Witch as a short story – or as short as I can write a story. It originally ran a bit under 10K works, so that it is really a novelette, though once it became part of the a much longer story, I fleshed it out even more. My attitude is that if a reader is in a hurry to get through my books, they probably should just move along.

It come to be written as a result of two challenges. The first was some sort of challenge to write a flash fiction story about a piece of technology and how it impacted the future. I don’t recall where I came across this challenge. In any event, the piece of technology I chose was something that was in its infancy (and still is) – a device that takes a video of what a person is seeing. Think of Google Glasses or those Snapchat sunglasses which have cameras that record a few minutes or seconds at a time. I took that ideas to the point were one’s entire day could be recorded on such a device. I called them “dynamic diaries”, or dyaries for short. And in the story, I briefly explored what implications such a device might have, if widely adopted, and used a romantic plot to do so.

My second challenge was self-imposed. I wanted to write the story using as much dialog as possible. I wanted the characters to tell their stories in their conversation. At the time I had read some stories written by a friend of my wife, which I felt could be told more engagingly and more interestingly by the people within the story. Most of us live our lives in first person singular, and to me that seems the natural way to tell a story. Life at ground level.

Another cover idea.

As it turned out, I fell in love with the lives of my characters, and so I continued to daydream about them and their friends, piece, by piece, scene by scene, over the course of many months. I began to set down more of their story, though my imagination raced far ahead of the written words.

However, by the time I got serious about publishing the story, several years later, many of those scenes had faded in my memory and had acquired that “been there, done that,” feel to them… And well, I didn’t have the energy to write the whole saga as I had imagined it, and doubted that there was a vast market for a Gone With The Wind sized romance novel. I had, however, written down the beginnings of Hugh and Selina’s romance and still had in mind enough of their story that I could write  Some Day Days as the first story arc in their saga. And having spent a great deal of time on those stories, and, as I said, grown very fond of those characters, I decided that they deserved the light of day and so I published what I had written, even if it wasn't the complete story I had to tell. 

I always considered Some Day Days as an experimental piece. In my early drafts I tried writing it as if it was a jazz piece played by Thelonious Monk, though, in the end, I did end up smoothing out my writing over the course of many revisions. I have always considered it a romance. However, I gather that these days, a true romance must have an “and they lived happily ever after” ending, which the story does have – only a couple of hundred thousand unwritten words later on. Oh, well. I did sneak that happily ever after ending into A Summer in Amber, which is set in the same time line, decades later.

And that is the origin story of Some Day Days. It began as an exploration of what recording our daily lives might mean, turned into an experimental romance, and ended up, just part one of a sprawling, unwritten, and now mostly forgotten story.

It is my least popular book, but I am actually rather proud of it. (Though, like all my work, I dread re-reading it, yet again, to be certain of that.) Popularity is not the yardstick I use to measure the success and failures in any of my creative endeavors. Thank goodness. I’d be a pretty sad fellow if it was.

First print version (with original title spelling)

The cover scene is inspired by a narrow street in Oxford, England, perhaps Rose Lane, or Brewer Street, or some similar little street.