Coming Soon -- The Early Works

My first project for this blog going forward is to look backwards. I have a number of early works written on my old manual typewriter that I  thought I might post samples of, just to see how bad they are -- and how much my style has, and has not, changed in the last 40 some years. At one time I was also playing around drawing comics, and the piece above is a panel from one of them The fellow in the background is Rhyledunbar -- as star-farer, or "sarfeer" -- the narrator/main character of a 30K word novella, a short story and a partially completed comic book.  But I'm jumping ahead of the story, so stay tuned for more about Rhyldunbar, and the early works of C. Litka.

Plan B

My Plan A of writing – writing two or three stories concurrently, skipping between them when I ran out of ideas for the one I was working on, has run off the rails. The reason being that even with three stories in the works, I can not seem to find any enthusiasm for any of them – much less a complete and/or compelling plot. I simply don’t feel like writing them. (Ah, ma, let me sleep. I’ll find a job tomorrow.) So it’s on to Plan B (“Screw it”).

I think there are two types of work; work-work and play-work. Work-work is the thing you have to be paid to do and the thing you have to do to pay the bills. Play-work is the stuff you enjoy doing, even if it involves hard work, say, like gardening or building furniture – things that some people have to get paid to do. Now, if I was a traditionally published author contracted to deliver a new book next year, or a “indie publisher” who, having been dropped on his head as a child, was actually trying to make a career as an indie-publisher and needed to get another book out to pay the bills, I believe I could do get that book out. I have story ideas – though no detailed plots – for three books that, with work (work-work), I could probably eek out 100,000 words with a plot of sorts out by next summer. But I’m neither a traditionally published author or a starry-eyed indie-publisher, I’m proudly an amateur writer who writes and publishes simply for the joy of it. Of course, this also involves work, but it is of the play-work variety. I’m not prepared to make writing a work-work type of work. I had a taste of that writing The Lost Star’s Sea. Getting the story to its end, came pretty darn close to being work-work, but having started it, I needed to push on and finish it. Having had this taste of work-work writing, I’ve no desire to force myself to start off writing a story, that doesn’t engage me, and so will be work-work to get through just to meet … well what really? My expectations? I’ve written and published nearly 800,000 words – the equivalent of eight full novels, or 16 of the common indie-published “novels,” so I I feel that I’ve to prove to myself. I dreamed of writing science-fiction stories and now I have. Do I need to do more? No. Would I like to do more? Yes, but only if it was fun to do. As for reader expectations, well, I’m always happy when readers are entertained by the stories I’ve dreamed up, and would certainly like to keep entertaining readers with more stories – but only with stories that entertain me as well, stories that I enjoy dreaming up and writing – play-work. It’s always been about me. I write stories that please me, everyone else is just along for the ride, so that stories that do not excite me, stories that seem to be just work-work are simply not going to be written. And with no contract to fill or dollars to make, I can maintain this standard. I’m not going to work just produce a so-so, or so-familiar story. It may be that I’ve told all the stories I have to tell. There are limits to both my talents and creativity, and a 67+ years old I may well be bouncing up against them. At this particular time point in my life, I seem to up against them in both my writing and painting. We’ll see if we can push beyond them. Or not.

So, long story short, I’m just going to take some time off from writing stories until – out of the blue – I feel like I have a really fun one to tell again. Can’t say when that will be. However, since I still like playing with words, and have a two hour slot in the morning to fill, I’m planning on spending it writing blog posts like this one. I can think of all sorts of things to write about my writing, including my early unpublished stories and comics, and indie-publishing in general, so I expect I’ll not run out of things to write about any time too soon. So that’s Plan B – blog posts & essays while I wait for creative lightning to strike.

Dog Days of the Blog

For the last several years I've written this blog primarily to provide supplementary and background information on the books I write and publish. I also use it to update the status of upcoming books, and occasionally post entry about the business of self publishing. However, The Lost Star's Sea, was the only book I was writing for the last two years, and with its publication, I now have nothing to post about.

Though I had, for the last year or so, been trying to come up with a new story to follow The Lost Star's Sea, I hadn't come up with any story I could get excited about.  And so, for the last half of the summer, I didn't anything to write. I found, however, that, after five or six years of spending the first two hours of my day, everyday, writing, the absence of writing left a rather large hole in my day. I missed writing. Writing for me is like playing with words, and the end result is less important than the process of writing. I missed playing. So several weeks ago I started writing two different stories on the flimsiest ghosts of a plots. I figure that with two stories in hand, I can bounce back and forth between them whenever I run out of ideas for the story I was working on and slowly push both ahead by keeping them fresh. And if that doesn't work, I'll start another one.

Now, at this point in time, I have no expectation of publishing either of these stories. I have only the nose of a story. To get a complete story you have to write it back to the tip of its wagging tail, and that is far from certain at this point in their development. For that reason, I'm going to keep these stories under wraps for now. If and when I have a first draft of one or both, I'll be back with concrete information on when they would see the light of publication.

This, however, leaves me little – well nothing – write about. I could write about self publishing, but that's old hat these days. The gold rush days of indie publishing are behind it. All the readers and genre open to reading and being read on ebooks are now found on ebooks. Any growth will incremental and with tens of thousands of new books being released each month on Amazon, it is a golden era for readers, and a brutally competitive marketplace writers in it for the money. A best of times, the worst of times thing. But I'm not in this for the money, and I expect to be writing everyday, and while I don't expect to have much to post, don't take the absence of posts as evidence that I've abandoned writing. There's no reason why I can't get a story from its nose to its tail in time for summer 2018, though, at this point it's not a given. Hopefully in a few months, I will be able to tell you for certain that there will be a new novel in 2018.

And as a down-payment on that promise, below is a sketch map of one of the stories I've started. Make what you will of it.

Some Day Days Version 3

I have finished rereading and slightly revising Act One of the Hugh Gallagher memoir/romance/saga, Some Day Days. The revised version, number 3, is now available wherever fine ebooks are sold.

It seems that I've been writing stories off and on almost all my life. Recently, going through some old boxes in the attic, I was surprised to discover a whole stash of handwritten stories I'd written during my 6^th thru 8^th grade years. I'd forgotten all about them – I have a very poor memory of my life. I also have several typewritten manuscripts on a shelf from my 20's – a fantasy novel, a science fiction novella, and at least one short story – and their rejections slips. From my 30's I also discovered extensive notes from a planned novel about a weapon that could destroy IBMs in space – a cold war s-f novel. From my 40's I have the manuscript of a young adult adventure story set in Scotland. I had written it on a X88 computer – a little laptop device from England – and printed it out on a dot matrix printer, a step up from a typewriter. In my mid-50's I took up writing again as a challenge. This time a full fledged computer made things a lot easier, and I wrote the long short story, Kiss of the White Witch. This turned out to be piece one of the continuing Gallagher stories that evolved into Some Day Days (A Romance in an Undetermined Number of Pieces). I ended up writing 12 pieces, a mere a quarter of the pieces I'd imagined while daydreaming up the complete story of Gallagher's wooing of Selina Beri in my head.

The pieces of Some Day Days were the first efforts of my late life writing, and it probably shows. Still, I took an idea, made it into a story, and then put it into words, the hard part. Irregardless of the quality, this is an accomplishment not to be sniffed at. And it opened the door to writing more stories, allowing me to fulfill a long held ambition to be a science fiction writer. And as such, it plays an important part in my development as a writer. I'd like to think I gotten better at writing as I've gone along, but even so, I feel that Some Day Days while, far from perfect, is good enough to see the light of publication. And while it is the least downloaded and likely least liked of my books, and probably not unfairly, I am, nevertheless, quite fond of it.

Once again, I made only minor changes to make it read a little more smoothly, and fixed some misspellings. One thing I couldn't find a way to fix was the curious case of two different types of apostrophes, a curly one, and a straight one. I don't know where the curly ones came from, but even switching fonts back and forth failed to eliminate them. No doubt an artifact of a long obsolete version of OpenOffice on a Mac. I also updated its blub, which was long overdue. It seems that I'd not touched it since I first put it up in 2015, since it was still advertising the fall 2015 release of Planets of Call, my original title for The Bright Black Sea.

Other than rereading my old stories, I'm still struggling to find a story to write for 2018. I've ideas, but no stories that I can get enthusiastic about. And without a publishing contract to flog me to work, I need to be enthusiastic about a story to sit down and get to work on it.

The Bright Black Sea Revised Version 5

I've reread, revised, and released version 5 of The Bright Black Sea. I make no claims to being a proofreader, especially of my own work. I tend to read what I expect to read, and when it comes to my own work, I pretty much know what I'll find, (whether it's there or not) so I don't look all that closely. That said, I did add a lot of Oxford commas, broke up some run-on sentences, added a few words here and there to make it read smoother. I also eliminated a few words and some lines that even I couldn't make head or tails out of. Along the way I corrected a the few misspellings (i.e. Strata is the plural of stratum, not “stratums” – go figure) and generally conformed to what my spell checker wanted. (For example, it doesn't like “onboard,” which is a perfectly good word. I changed it to “on board” just to make it happy.)

In addition to his housekeeping, I did some minor revisions. I made the opening a little sharper. I always felt that it was rather awkwardly written. I rewrote the scene where I introduced Botts. I had written it before I had any idea what I was going to do with Botts, so with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, I wrote what I think is a much smoother scene. I papered over several minor plot holes – not because they were all that important, but because I hate plot holes, especially my own. And I added a little bit of explanations here and there. Again, nothing to write home about. I hate reading blurbs that give half the story away, so I avoid outlining my plots in the blurbs, and since I don't know if you've read the story or not, I'm going into the details of the plot holes or revisions. If you're curious, drop me a line.

All in all, I was happy with what I found when I read through the story again. I believe it has been a year since I last read it – but this time was a bit different – I've written a lot more words since then, and I've gotten Litang's story to its ending, so I was able to look on it as the final product. Of course, it is what it is, and nothing I did changed that. But when you go back and read something that you started writing four or five years ago, it can be rather iffy. You could well discover something that you'd not want to be found dead in a ditch with. The Bright Black Sea has its flaws, but I think it is a story I can be proud of. So, if you haven't gotten around to reading the story yet, or if you ever want to reread it again, make sure you have version 5. It's free, as always.

A Hole in the Day

For the better part of the last four or more years, I've spent some two hours a day writing, revising, or working on covers, blurbs, etc. Some days I reached a good breaking point 1 ½ hour in. On others, when things are going well, I might work 2 ½ hours. I do most of my writing the first thing in the morning, getting my work done by 10 o'clock for a cup of tea and some sweets. Some days, when in the heat of creation, I'd put an hour or two work in the evening as well. It is amazing how fast time flies by when you're writing. Now, this is not a whole lot of time in a day, but I find that with no story in hand to work on, there is a noticeable hollow in my day that I need to fill. Since I can't conjure up a story with a snap of my fingers – I've had to find other projects to work on to fill that hollow.

The first project has been rereading, and slightly revising A Summer in Amber. Mostly it involved filing off a few rough edges, and touching up a few clunky lines – adding or subtracting a few words, adding commas, breaking up long, rambling sentences, and correcting a few mistakes that I found. I did however, rewrite one scene, the scene on the hill after the Gate opens. I was never happy with it, but in the end, I rather gave up on it. I've now taken the opportunity to streamlined it, making it read clearer and more logically. I also slightly touched up the opening and ending.

Version 5 (12 August 2017) is now the newest, best, and, hopefully, the last version. It is now available from all the usual suspects. If you have downloaded earlier versions are are now just thinking of reading it, I would urge you to download this version. The changes are relatively minor, but it is a better, and likely the definitive version of the story.

With A Summer in Amber done, I've now started rereading The Bright Black Sea. Again, my object is to make it read just a little better. Besides more commas, and shorter, clearer sentences, I find that I'm adding words here and there – I guess I was writing rather telegraphically back then. In any event, the changes will be minor. My attitude is that it is what it is and my goal is to make it read a little smoother. Sometimes you wonder just what you wrote, and rather fear finding out. The Bright Black Sea goes back far enough that I wasn't so sure what I'd find. In rereading it, I find that it isn't all that bad. I know it begins slow, and has a fair amount of not strictly necessary details, but I'm comfortable with that. Still, having spent so much time going over and over it when I wrote it, it is hard to tell how it reads to someone for the first time. But when all is said and done, it is what it is, and I can't change it beyond soothing it out a bit. Look for this slightly improved Version 5 of The Bright Black Sea in the coming weeks.

No doubt Some Day Days will get its read through as well. Hopefully after that, I'll have a story (or two) in mind to fill my days.

A Summer in Amber Version 5

I have released a slightly revised version (#5) of A Summer in Amber -- some corrections made, thanks to notes from Carlos, a slightly revised opening paragraph, along with a slightly revised cover. My current windows computer does not have the same LibreOffice fonts my old mac mini had, so that my recent titles used a different title font. I decided to make all the books uniform, so I reworked the covers, and while I was at it, I took the opportunity to add Nesta and Sandy on their bikes to the A Summer in Amber cover as well.

While I was making the corrections to A Summer in Amber, I was sort of dismayed by some of the passages I read. I think I could now do better. I'm tempted to read through the story again and smooth out some of the most awkward passages. The only problem is that I don't trust myself not to add about a 100 typos to the book in the process, no matter how careful I am. I seem to be blind to typos. We'll see how bold and ambitious I am in the coming months.

Which brings us to the next book. So far I've not stumbled on any new story to tell, so it's hanging fire. I've had several ideas for characters, locale and such, but no story to tell. I'd like to do something different if only to see if I can attract a different set of readers. A fantasy is possible, but I'm not really fond of fantasies -- at least those with magic and some vast, frightening evil that must be defeated, sometime within the first dozen or so books -- which is to say, most fantasies. I'm thinking of something set in a bit more modern world, likely without magic, which may not make it a fantasy at all. We'll see.