JeffKirvin.net

I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news is that I’m going to stop talk­ing about Ever­note so gor­ram much. Not that I don’t still think it’s made of AWESOME, but I have a lot more inter­est­ing top­ics to cover.

The bad news is that I have a lot of more inter­est­ing top­ics to cover. My rel­a­tive silence recently is near­ing an end.

So, in the inter­est of “What per­sonal life? I have no bound­aries, I’m a blog­ger!” here’s what’s on my plate.

I’ve got­ten hooked on the best-damn-writing-podcast-I-should-have-founded-but-didn’t, The Dead Robots Soci­ety. This is a group of folks who talk the talk about writ­ing on a reg­u­lar basis. They’re seri­ous about writ­ing but not seri­ous about them­selves, which means they avoid the pre­ten­tious puffery so com­mon in writ­ing dis­cus­sions. It’s a fun, insight­ful pod­cast even if you write some­thing other than SF.

(I even dig the name, so sim­i­lar to the writ­ing cri­tique group I’ve led here in Den­ver for ten years now, the Dead Asi­movs Society.)

And since the Robots and their guests do a lot of pod­cast fic­tion, they’ve inspired me to give it a shot. I will be pod­cast­ing “Do Over!” first, since it’s only 17,000 words, and then if that works out with­out start­ing any major wars with third world nations, I’ll be pod­cast­ing my first novel, Between Heaven and Hell. BHH will be pro­duced semi-​weekly, with new episodes every Mon­day and Thurs­day. This will give me three 10-​week sea­sons, one for each sec­tion of the book. I am NOT updat­ing the book into the present day. The events in the novel take place from 1997 – 2000. This means they were before Google. Before ⁹⁄₁₁. Before YouTube. Before smart­phones and before Twit­ter. It would be a very dif­fer­ent book if it were set today, less than 15 years later, and I don’t have time to write such a book unless, of course, a pay­ing pub­lisher really wanted me to.

A few notes about the pod­cast. While I admire the work of pod­cast novel pio­neers like Scott Sigler, JC Hutchins, Phillipa Bal­lan­tine and Mur Laf­ferty, I’m not going to do what they do. A lot of pod­cast nov­els bor­der on full-​on audio drama­ti­za­tions, with sound effects, voice actors for each part and well… pro­duc­tion val­ues. That’s not my style. I’m a total Audible.com audio­book junkie and was hooked on that style of audio fic­tion before the term pod­cast was even coined, much less applied to fic­tion. So what you’ll get from me will be more of the Nathan Low­ell–style straight read­ing of the text, just me, a micro­phone and what­ever ambi­ent noise makes it into my car (which is the qui­etest place I have access to in order to record). If I get really fancy, I might splice in intro and outro music. Maybe.

But that’s not all I’m doing. I’m also going to try to fin­ish the first draft of Ghost Ronin by Hal­loween. This is an less an updated and expanded novel ver­sion of the “In Shin­ing Armor” screen­play on my blog as a new novel loosely based on that screen­play. Lots of new stuff, new char­ac­ters, new moti­va­tions, new end­ing. I hope I can pull it off because I’m doing some inter­est­ing stuff with it. I’m about 20k words in, and hope to get to 75-​80k by Halloween.

Why fin­ish by Hal­loween? Because the day after Hal­loween is the first day of NaNoW­riMo! This year for NaNo I have a pretty inter­est­ing project. It’s a story set in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles uni­verse, long after the events in Between Heaven and Hell. The novel will be about a lone human try­ing to sur­vive stranded on an alien home­world in the mid­dle of a civil war between the male and female aliens. In addi­tion to being a cool story in its own right, it’s a trial run to see how the set­ting works. I have lots of ideas for this set­ting down the line, a galaxy united by war against a com­mon enemy and then torn apart once that enemy was defeated. The story of that war, the Neme­sis War, is a tril­ogy I had aban­doned, but am now using as back­story for this much richer can­vas. I actu­ally stopped writ­ing the first book in that tril­ogy 80k words in, just a few scenes from fin­ish­ing it, and learned much about the aliens — the Sendeni — we’ll see in this Sins of the Moth­ers.

(yes, I’m bloody well aware of the pat­tern you see here, and I’m work­ing on it)

And finally, when I’m done with NaNoW­riMo, com­pletely fin­ish­ing the first draft no mat­ter how many words over 50k or days into Decem­ber it takes, I’m going to fin­ish the first draft of my NaNo ‘06 project: Home­world, my Mars book. Every SF writer, it would seem, even­tu­ally has to tackle Mars, and this is my take on the sub­ject. The ele­va­tor pitch for it is “Bill Gates goes to Mars,” but there’s a lot more to it and I’ve had a blast get­ting as far as I’ve got­ten, maybe halfway into the third act.

Lastly, I’m going to try to take this blog back to the old days of Writ­ing On Your Palm, and by that I mean a new arti­cle posted every Mon­day. Top­ics will be the usual sus­pects: mobile tech­nol­ogy, writ­ing, pub­lish­ing and other items of inter­est to the gadget-​obsessed writer.

This should leave me with three nov­els in first draft form, and halfway through a pod­cast novel around New Years. Big plans for 2010 include lots and lots of rewrit­ing and get­ting my own apart­ment. Also, naps. I’ll talk about the process of all of it here, in the hope that I might at the very least serve as a cau­tion­ary tale for some of you.

So that’s me. What are YOU writing?