The prob­lem with doing some­thing that no one else has done before is that no one else has done it before, so you have no basis for com­par­i­son to tell if you’re doing it right.

As I said before, I’m tak­ing a break from the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles uni­verse and work­ing on Ghost Ronin, my nanotech-​superspy-​turned-​assassin-​with-​a-​heart-​of-​gold story. I hope to make it into a series over time, but we’ll see how this turns out first.

I had an inter­est­ing lit­tle struc­tural thing I was doing with GR, which has mutated on its own into a new — or very old — form. The novel, when it was a novel, was struc­tured as a playlist. Each chap­ter had a song that cap­tures the mood or theme or a spe­cific moment in that chap­ter. The chap­ter where the hero is iso­lated and alone is Green Day’s “Boule­vard of Bro­ken Dreams”, for exam­ple, and the chap­ter that intro­duces the FBI agent chas­ing the hero is “Just A Job To Do” by Gen­e­sis. It was a nice hook, and I thought it added some­thing to the story I hadn’t seen done very often. Sure, some of my favorite authors like Stephen King and Alan Moore are fond of includ­ing rel­e­vant song lyrics in their prose, but I didn’t recall any­one build­ing the whole story around rel­e­vant songs.

The more I work on it, though, the less it feels like a novel. I real­ized early on that I can include clips of each song — up to 20 sec­onds, accord­ing to a lawyer friend of mine — when I release the story as a ser­ial pod­cast. And struc­tur­ing it with pod­cast­ing in mind got me look­ing more closely at how I’d con­tainer­ized the plot in each track of the playlist. They’re not chap­ters in a novel. Chap­ters have more con­ti­nu­ity, flow more eas­ily into the next chap­ter. What I’m really look­ing at here is a series of 14 short sto­ries. Each is largely self-​contained, and should come to its own sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion, like each episode in a sea­son of a tele­vi­sion show.

Also, look­ing at how much story I really have in each track, some of them could eas­ily edge from short story into nov­el­ette, even novella ter­ri­tory. For instance, the first track, inspired by Rush’s “Bravado”, fol­lows an Army Ranger sniper team, a two-​man group of sniper and spot­ter. In this case, the two Rangers are best friends since child­hood and work together like broth­ers. Chris, the sniper, is down to earth and prac­ti­cal, and a mas­ter of any­thing with a trig­ger. Mike, the spot­ter, is more ath­let­i­cally gifted, but also has a rebel­lious, impul­sive streak that often gets him into trou­ble. The two are high in north­ern high­lands of Afghanistan, hunt­ing an al Qaida sniper team that is also hunt­ing them. Over the course of the track, hunters become hunted and back again until the enemy pins Mike and Chris into an ambush. Chris man­ages to escape with severe injuries, but only because Mike sac­ri­fices him­self to blow up the other team.

We find out in the next chapter/​track that Mike is only mostly dead, miss­ing both legs, an arm and half his face, and is recruited by a secre­tive defense con­trac­tor to be rebuilt into an oper­a­tive more for­mi­da­ble than a whole bat­tal­ion of Army Rangers. That’s not part of this story. This is a war story, two bud­dies on their own in enemy ter­ri­tory. And frankly, if I wanted to I could make a whole novel out of that, con­sid­er­ing the flash­backs I could put in from their child­hood and going through Ranger school together. I’m not look­ing for that kind of “decom­pres­sion” to use a comics term, but to really get to know Mike and Chris — while Mike is the pro­tag­o­nist of the series, the Ghost Ronin, Chris will be com­ing back into the story and play­ing a vital role later — we’re prob­a­bly look­ing at more than 10,000 words here.

This has two ram­i­fi­ca­tions that I’m try­ing to get my brain around, and I think they’re why I’ve found it so dif­fi­cult to get started on the actual writ­ing. The first is that if each track ends up being closer to 15,000 – 20,000 words, that pushes the whole 14 track story far out of novel ter­ri­tory. 280,000 words is way too long for a novel writ­ten by some­one not named Rowl­ing, Clancy or King. I could try to edit it down to pub­lish it as a novel, but I’m look­ing at the real pos­si­bil­ity that I’ll have to split this into a tril­ogy if I want to go commercial.

The other is that I don’t know how much to plot ahead of time. As I dis­cuss in an arti­cle I haven’t posted yet, three-​act struc­tures are not only the absolute foun­da­tion of human sto­ry­telling, they are also recur­sive struc­tures like frac­tals (yes, there is more math to writ­ing than word counts). A tril­ogy is three nov­els. A novel is three acts, the begin­ning, mid­dle and the end. But each of those acts also has a begin­ning, mid­dle and end. It’s tur­tles all the way down.

For rea­sons I’ll go into in that other arti­cle, I out­line novel-​length works so I can make sure I hit those act breaks solid, twist in all the right places. But that’s nov­els. Do I need to do that for a novella? I don’t out­line indi­vid­ual scenes. But there’s more struc­ture here.

If I out­line it in too much detail rel­a­tive to word­count, I freeze the story and feels mechan­i­cal, paint-​by-​numbers. If I just dive in and wing it, I have no idea if I can hit the com­pli­ca­tion, cli­max and wrap it up satisfactorily.

What’s a writer out of his nor­mal medium to do?

I lost my job last week. Or, to quote Bob­cat Goldth­wait, “well, I didn’t actu­ally lose my job, I mean I know where my job is still. It’s just when I go there, there’s this new guy doing it.” I won’t go into the details, other than to say a lot of peo­ple got let go at the same time, and I’m not sure it was a coin­ci­dence that nearly all of them made more than the aver­age salary for their job title. #justsayin

Even though I know it had noth­ing to do with me per­son­ally, it still threw me. I was already down in the dumps over look­ing back at the last decade (it wasn’t the best time of my life), and even though my peo­ple (I have peo­ple) are already work­ing on get­ting me on board some­where else, I let the accu­mu­lated self doubt knock me off my stride and didn’t write for days.

Part of it was that I’d already stalled out on Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I was bored with revi­sions on Rev­e­la­tion, and scared of con­tin­u­ing with Cru­sade. I’m start­ing to think I’m still too close to the story to revise it prop­erly, and yet burned out on it after writ­ing the whole first novel. I need a change of pace. Maybe I should start work on some­thing really dif­fer­ent, like Ghost Ronin, Titanus or Home­world.

Or maybe I’m just wuss­ing out again. I’m mak­ing it up as I go along here. Now that the “seven books in ten months” marathon is out the win­dow, I’m try­ing dif­fer­ent things.

On a sim­i­lar note, I’m back to writ­ing every­thing in one mono­lithic Word file rather than indi­vid­ual chap­ter doc­u­ments in Ever­note or Google Docs. Just feels more nat­ural. Maybe I’m old fash­ioned. I am still keep­ing the Word doc­u­ments in Ever­note to keep them synced any­where, and if I need to write a lit­tle extra, I have a new jail­break exten­sion for my iPhone that lets me quickly scroll down to the bot­tom of the Word doc­u­ments to see where I left off before typ­ing in the new stuff in Evernote.

On the tech front, I’m work­ing on a review of the new Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver for the iPhone, which allows me to use my Stow­away in sit­u­a­tions where I’d rather not carry my net­book. Some­times that three pounds mat­ters. What?

I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even mat­ter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn’t even mat­ter
—Linkin Park

The 2000s were a hor­ri­ble decade for me, per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally and cre­atively. I lost sev­eral jobs, lost my place to live twice and after fin­ish­ing Between Heaven and Hell in 1997, “Do Over!” in 1998 and the “In shin­ing Armor” screen­play in 1999, I didn’t fin­ish another work of fic­tion until the very last month of the decade, Decem­ber of 2009 with the first draft of Rev­e­la­tion.

And yet, I grew more as a writer in the 2000s than any other time in my life.

My sin­gle biggest les­son of the decade in terms of writ­ing is that all writ­ing counts. All of it, any­thing you can do helps you grow and develop. While I didn’t fin­ish much in the 2000s, I wrote 80,000 words of the sequel to BHH, a story that will now be mod­i­fied as book four of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I wrote 60,000 words on Home­world, my Mars novel. But the real kicker is that I wrote half a mil­lion words of non­fic­tion between my var­i­ous blogs and free­lance work for other sites. and com­ing back to fic­tion after my “lost decade,” it’s amaz­ing how much bet­ter my prose is because of writ­ing all that nonfiction.

Words are words, peo­ple. Every­thing you write makes you bet­ter. Every word. And this les­son is what makes it pos­si­ble for me to give away a seven book series in Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. because even if these books don’t get pub­lished in the tra­di­tional sense — and keep in mind I very much intend to get my later work pub­lished tra­di­tion­ally — they still make me bet­ter as a writer just by writ­ing them.

Not a sin­gle word you write is ever wasted, pub­lished or not. It all helps you learn the craft. it all teaches you. It all increases your mas­tery of lan­guage. So write as much as you can, as often as you can. Don’t worry about mar­ketabil­ity, don’t worry about sell­ing, just write. It’s all worth it, espe­cially if you’re lost.

“Don’t blame the car­pen­ter. Blame the tool.” –Howie Long in a new Chevy commercial

Am I the only one who thinks he’s call­ing that guy a tool? Any­way, I’m not going to com­plain about my tools today, so much as doc­u­ment one more step in my never-​ending quest to find bet­ter tools for writing.

My grand Google Docs exper­i­ment lasted all of two chap­ters into Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this has noth­ing to do with Google Docs, but when I hit a slump one of my first impulses is to mix up how I do things. As it hap­pens, a major improve­ment to an old friend hap­pened along at just the right time.

Ever­note

Two days before Christ­mas, Ever­note gave us iPhone users an early gift. Ever­note for the iPhone ver­sion 3.2 fixes most of the prob­lems I had with the iPhone ver­sion. Sync­ing is no longer modal, mean­ing you can search and do other things while sync­ing to your data­base, and you can store selected note­books locally on the device, mean­ing you can always access them offline even if you’ve never opened that par­tic­u­lar note on your iPhone before. While Ever­note for the iPhone still doesn’t allow you to edit rich text notes directly, ver­sion 3.2 does allow you to make a plain text copy and edit that rather than just append­ing to the rich text note. This allows for revi­sions I couldn’t do before.

These changes make Ever­note vastly more use­ful to me for writ­ing on the go. And of course it doesn’t hurt that the lat­est build of the 3.5 beta — yes, I know I said I wasn’t upgrad­ing, I have a sick­ness — is pretty solid as well. These changes are so impres­sive, in fact, that I’ve gone back to Ever­note for my actual draft­ing. I keep each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate note, tagged as “draft” and in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles note­book. I really like hav­ing all my stuff in one place again.

BTstack Key­board Driver

Of course, writ­ing on the go with just the on-​screen key­board on my iPhone only works for rel­a­tively short pas­sages. For any kind of speed, I’d still need my net­book, with the addi­tional five pounds — 3 for the net­book, 2 for the AC adap­tor and cables — to lug around that this would entail, right? Not so much. The BTstack Key­board Dri­ver also appeared on Cydia last week. This is part of the over­all BTstack project, intended to pro­vide an alter­na­tive Blue­tooth stack for the iPhone that han­dles pro­files Apple chooses not to sup­port. The key­board dri­ver, as you might expect, allows the iPhone to use exter­nal Blue­tooth key­boards using the Blue­tooth HID (Human Inter­face Devices) profile.

I still have my Think­Out­side Blue­tooth Stow­away from my Win­dows Mobile days, so I paid my five bucks, down­loaded and installed the dri­ver and set about test­ing it. It’s def­i­nitely still a work in progress, but it’s very promis­ing. Not all of the ancil­lary keys work, and some­times I get a string of garbage char­ac­ters, but over­all, it works for get­ting text into the iPhone fast and easy on a full-​size key­board (my Stow­away is actu­ally mar­gin­ally more com­fort­able than my 92% full size key­board on my net­book). So add this to Ever­note and now I don’t have to take my net­book with me to Chipo­tle for lunch. My back and shoul­ders already thank me.

Enso Words

Writ­ing in Ever­note has a few dis­ad­van­tages, chief among them that Ever­note has no word count func­tion. How do I track my progress with­out work count? Enter Enso Words. This is a small util­ity pro­gram that runs all the time in your Win­dows sys­tem tray and waits to be called either by hold­ing down the Cap­slock key like a sec­ond shift key, or as I pre­fer, tap­ping the Cap­slock key and enter­ing a com­mand and enter, or esc to go back to what you were doing. When you have Enso Words acti­vated, you can have it per­form a vari­ety of func­tions on what­ever text you have selected in vir­tu­ally any application.

So to get a word count on my cur­rent note in Ever­note, I:

1. Hit Ctrl-​A to select all text
2. Tap Cap­slock to invoke Enso Words
3. Type “wo” to nar­row down the com­mand selec­tion to “word count”
4. Hit Enter

Enso words then pops up a lit­tle box on screen with my cur­rent word count, and that box fades away auto­mat­i­cally as soon as I type some­thing or move the mouse. With a lit­tle prac­tice, this becomes sec­ond nature. I could even shave off a key­stroke if I used Enso in “qua­si­modal” mode and just released Cap­slock after typ­ing “wo”, no longer hav­ing to hit enter to send the com­mand. Enso is also great for look­ing up def­i­n­i­tions and syn­onyms, spell check­ing in any appli­ca­tion, chang­ing case, search­ing Google and more. It’s free, and takes up very lit­tle sys­tem resources, even on my netbook.

Write­Mon­key

When I want to get hard­core, though, I break out the mon­key. Write­Mon­key. This is a text proces­sor for Win­dows inspired by the pop­u­lar Write­Room on the Mac. While it works win­dowed — and that’s how I use it at the office — it’s really intended to run full screen. In full screen mode, Write­Mon­key takes up your entire mon­i­tor, hid­ing even your Win­dows taskbar and shows you just what you need to see to write. It’s small, fast, portable and keeps a run­ning word count at the top or bot­tom of the screen so you can see how you’re doing. The idea here is to remove all the dis­trac­tions and just write.

Write­Mon­key doesn’t inte­grate auto­mat­i­cally with Ever­note, but it’s not all that hard to get them to play together. I select all the text in a note like I would with Enso, but then copy it, fire up Write­Mon­key, paste and start writ­ing. When I’m done, I select all and copy from Write­Mon­key and then paste back into the note in Ever­note. Pretty simple.

Google Docs

I still use Google Docs for one thing: spread­sheets. I keep my word counts there in a sim­ple sheet that holds the word count for each chap­ter and then sums them to tell me the word count for the over­all novel. And hey, I can even update Google Docs spread­sheets on my iPhone! (Now I just need Enso Words for the iPhone.)

So that’s it, my new sys­tem, designed to be the sim­plest I’ve come up with yet (since it can’t really han­dle for­mat­ting, there’s no temp­ta­tion to spend time mak­ing it pretty). How do you take your writ­ing on the go?

It would seem I’m des­tined to do this writ­ing thing in bursts over time. I don’t know how much I’ll be post­ing here and on the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles blog in the near future, nor how much fic­tion I’ll actu­ally get writ­ten. But unfor­tu­nately, I have other pri­or­i­ties that usurp writing.

Last week, my mom had her thy­roid taken out because the doc­tors couldn’t tell whether or not it was can­cer­ous by biop­sies alone and fig­ured it was safer to remove it. We now know that it was can­cer, and that the can­cer had spread to the lymph nodes nearby. We don’t know if the lym­phoma has pro­gressed any far­ther, which of the 35 kinds of lym­phoma it is, or which of the four stages it pro­gressed to. They’re still test­ing to deter­mine those things. My mom could be cancer-​free because they already removed all the can­cer­ous tis­sue, or it could be much, much worse.

So for a while, my top pri­or­ity is to be there for my fam­ily, to sup­port them and help out as much as I can. I’ll try to find time for writ­ing, will have to find at least some time to pre­vent going crazy. But my grand scheme to write seven books in ten months has been thor­oughly derailed by real life.

I saw Avatar over the week­end, and loved it. I’m nat­u­rally inclined to like James Cameron movies. I think he’s one of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing today. Not the most inno­v­a­tive writer, but the best sto­ry­teller. It’s an impor­tant distinction.

A lot of talk around this movie cen­ters around the spe­cial effects, espe­cially in 3D. Yes, they’re amaz­ing. Yes, the 3D is used sub­tly, almost never throw­ing things “at” the audi­ence, and pro­vides an addi­tional solid­ity to the CGI that you’ve never seen before. You feel like like you’re there, on the moon Pan­dora with the char­ac­ters. And as Chuck Wendig points out, the 3D and CGI com­pen­sate for each other’s weak­nesses, mak­ing every­thing seem just, well, real.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

A lot of the reviews and even snide com­ments on Twit­ter about the film men­tion is that the story isn’t any­thing new. They mis­un­der­stand some­thing fun­da­men­tal about sto­ry­telling and assume that this means Cameron is just “mail­ing it in,” using new visual effects to dress up a tired story that we’ve all seen before.

They don’t under­stand that the very best sto­ries, by def­i­n­i­tion, are sto­ries we’ve all seen before. That the very rea­son why cer­tain sto­ries have been told over and over and over for thou­sands of years is that they work. They res­onate with us, down to an uncon­scious level. Was the plot of Avatar pre­dictable? Sure. It’s basi­cally “Dances With Smurfs.” But think for a sec­ond. How many times have you seen a story about a bro­ken sol­dier who finds first com­pan­ion­ship, then pur­pose, in the com­pany of his enemy? Dances With Wolves? Poc­a­hon­tas? Enemy Mine? How far back can you go?

If you really think about it, thou­sands of years. This story is one of the time­less tales you’ve heard before and will hear again. It comes from myth. Just like “com­ing of age”, or “the hero’s jour­ney” or “pride goeth before a fall”, or any of the other fun­da­men­tal struc­tures hard­wired into our pri­mate brains. The story of Avatar was told around cook­ing fires in cen­tral Europe 10,000 years ago. The details change, but the story is eternal.

And that’s why the movie works. Because while the CGi gives you a sense of awe and won­der, and helps in the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, it’s the story, and the char­ac­ters of Jake, Neytiri, Gail and the rest that make you care. I was welling up sev­eral times dur­ing the film, a dif­fi­cult thing when wear­ing essen­tially two pairs of Ray-​Bans, and it wasn’t because of the CGI. It’s because I was caught up in the story, totally engaged and root­ing for the characters.

Don’t mis­take the sim­ple for the infe­rior. All too often the best sto­ries are those we know by heart.

“I hate writ­ing, I love hav­ing written.”

—Dorothy Parker

I fin­ished writ­ing the first novel in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series today. This is the first time I’ve actu­ally fin­ished a full-​length novel since the spring of 1997, when I fin­ished Between Heaven and Hell. Sounds like a big accom­plish­ment, right? So why don’t I care more?

I used to com­pletely iden­tify with the Dorothy Parker quote above. (Hardly sur­pris­ing, as she’s one of the godesses of snark.) I was all about the des­ti­na­tion, in a hurry to get the jour­ney out of the way. But in the last dozen years, a funny thing happened.

I became a writer.

Yes, tech­ni­cally, I was a writer in those early years, in that I wrote things. But I was always more con­cerned with what I was going to do after the book was writ­ten than actu­ally writ­ing it. In no small way, this is why it took me a dozen years to fin­ish writ­ing another book (even if that book itself only took six weeks to write). Because my focus wasn’t really on the writ­ing. It was on other stuff. On what my life would be like as a best sell­ing nov­el­ist, on quit­ting my day job, on get­ting to hang out in cof­fee shops all day.

Now, things are dif­fer­ent. I’m older, and I’ve spent the last fif­teen years writ­ing con­sis­tently. Mostly non­fic­tion, but writ­ing. Putting words together. In that time, I’ve devel­oped a feel for the Eng­lish lan­guage, taken a tal­ent for writ­ing and turned it into a skill. I still have a lot to learn, as evi­denced by my already grow­ing lists of things I need to fix when it comes time to revise the book, but that’s okay. The journey’s okay.

The fact that I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing my first novel in a dozen years could be best thing I could ask for in my writ­ing career. Because the biggest rea­son I’m not more excited about fin­ish­ing the first book in the series is that I’m already work­ing on the sec­ond book. And the fact that I now derive more plea­sure sense of accom­plish­ment from writ­ing every day than fin­ish­ing a novel means I’ve learned to love the jour­ney. I’ve become a writer.

A big part of this blog, and Writ­ing On Your Palm before it, has always been to doc­u­ment my jour­ney as a writer and serve as either a cau­tion­ary exam­ple or inspi­ra­tion to oth­ers. It occurred to me recently that I have a unique oppor­tu­nity to do so much more.

When I was writ­ing my first novel, one of my idols was Joe Straczyn­ski, the cre­ator and writer of nearly every episode of Baby­lon 5. I read every word Joe pub­lished on the inter­net dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of the show, and I learned a lot about both writ­ing in gen­eral and how tele­vi­sion is made. But there was always more I wanted to know. I wanted to see the scripts. I wanted to sit in on the break­out meet­ings. I wanted to see the back­ground of the story the way Joe saw it. I never got those things, because Joe is sane and had a busi­ness to run.

But now, I have the oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide just what I wanted. I can do some­thing no one else has been nuts enough to do. Here’s the plan.

Step 1: Write and edit Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles simultaneously

Reg­u­lar read­ers know I’ve com­mit­ted to writ­ing all seven books of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series in ten months, to be fin­ished by Labor Day week­end, 2010. But now that I’ve fig­ured out how to write 2,000 words a day and still have time for my nor­mal life, I’ve decided to aim still higher. I’m also going to edit the books in nearly the same span of time. Basi­cally, while I’m writ­ing 2,000 words a day of Book 2, I’ll be edit­ing 5 – 10 pages of Book 1. This is pos­si­ble because the 2k-​per-​day rough draft I’ve been turn­ing out is sur­pris­ingly read­able, not at all the unread­able crap I was expect­ing. Turns out you can write well and write fast at the same time (Mike Cane, I’m look­ing at you).

Step 2: Blog everything

Yes, every­thing. I’d like to announce The Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles Blog, where I’ll be pub­lish­ing every sin­gle thing I use in writ­ing these books, doc­u­ment­ing every step in the process. There you will find notes, research, plot out­lines, even drafts posted as I write them, and before I revise them. I want aspir­ing writ­ers to see the whole pack­age. To be able to com­pare out­lines to drafts to the fin­ished prod­uct, and see how it all changes. I’ve set up a wiki for most of the struc­tured infor­ma­tion that doesn’t work as well on a blog.

Step 3: Sell the fin­ished prod­uct cheap or free

Once I’m done with each book, each chap­ter will be avail­able as a free PDF file or a free pod­cast (nar­rated by yours truly, and a straight read, none of this voice cast busi­ness). Each book will also be avail­able on eReader.com, Fictionwise.com and Amazon.com as a 99 cent ebook. At the end of the series I’ll also make a 7-​book omnibus edi­tion avail­able for $5.

For those that want some­thing to put on a shelf — or don’t take my advice about how to read ebooks com­fort­ably—I’ll also be pub­lish­ing each book via either Lulu or Cre­ate­Space—haven’t decided which yet — for just a lit­tle bit more than it costs to print. I’m not try­ing to get rich here. But I want to make sure that any­one who wants a printed copy can get one. I likely won’t be doing a printed omnibus edi­tion, how­ever, as it would sim­ply be too expensive.

Step 4: Embrace the Chaos

One of the rea­sons I’m doing this is to estab­lish a cer­tain set­ting I plan to come back to again and again through­out my career. This is the Chaos. After the events in Book 5, I basi­cally have kicked over all the anthills and set the galaxy on fire. Every­one is at war with every­one else, human­ity is in pretty dire straits, and every­thing has gone to hell. Book 6 actu­ally takes place dur­ing the Chaos, but it’s far from the only thing going on. It will take years, maybe decades of this to get to Book 7, Uni­fi­ca­tion, where the heroes that sur­vived Book 5 get back together and unify the galaxy. In those years are an infin­ity of tales.

But I’m not going to be the only one writ­ing Tales of the Chaos. At least I hope not. I’m going to open up that set­ting under Cre­ative Com­mons so that any­one can write sto­ries set there. There will be a few lim­i­ta­tions, like not using actual char­ac­ters from my books, so the new sto­ries don’t end up con­tra­dict­ing Uni­fi­ca­tion—and even that will be nego­tiable, I expect to approve a few canon­i­cal sto­ries I don’t write — but over­all, it’s an open sand­box. Most of the sto­ries will even be hosted on the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles site.

Step 5: The Audition

Once I’m done with Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles — aside from Tales of the Chaos — I’ll keep writ­ing, of course. Home­world (my NaNoW­riMo 2006 project) and Titanus (which I devel­oped for Script Frenzy 2009 but decided I’d rather write as a novel) still need to be fin­ished. As does Ghost Ronin, the first in a new adven­ture series. These, and the works that fol­low them, will in all like­li­hood be writ­ten with the door closed. I will seek an agent and get these and future works pub­lished tra­di­tion­ally. But here, the work I’ve done for Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles will give me an advan­tage. Agents and edi­tors con­sid­er­ing my work will be able to see that I can write to a spe­cific length, fin­ish what I start, and tell a good story. They’ll have half a mil­lion words of my fic­tion as a work sam­ple, and they’ll be able to see exactly how I research and write a book. And hope­fully, they’ll see you, dear read­ers, and see that I can build a fan base and get peo­ple excited about my work. That’s why I’m giv­ing Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles away for free — or as cheap as I’m allowed to make it. Because if I pull it off, and do every­thing right, then I get to…

Step 6: Quit my day job and write full time

I want to make my liv­ing as a nov­el­ist. I want my only require­ment in life to be con­tin­u­ing to tell the sto­ries that make my life worth liv­ing. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been really good at, and with your help, I think I have a way to make this hap­pen. I expect this to take time, but hope­fully I’ll be a full time work­ing nov­el­ist by the time I’m 45 (I’m 38 now).

Let’s get started.

I’ve noticed a weird thing recently. No mat­ter what kind of mood I’m in when I sit down to write, the qual­ity of the writ­ing itself is the same. It’s like I’m just a radio, and when it comes time to write the words just flow through my fin­gers onto my key­board. It doesn’t mat­ter what’s going on in my head, the words are the words. I’ve writ­ten funny scenes when I’m depressed, excit­ing action scenes when I’m tired. It just doesn’t mat­ter. The book is what it is, and I’m just writ­ing it down.

Of course, I know that can’t pos­si­bly be the case. I know that the qual­ity of my writ­ing is a func­tion of my study and prac­tice of the craft over the last two decades. I know that the story I’m writ­ing now I wasn’t capa­ble of writ­ing ten years ago, five years ago. I know that at a neu­ro­log­i­cal level, I’m mak­ing up a story, not recount­ing some­thing that actu­ally hap­pened. I’m delib­er­ately choos­ing each word I string after the one before it.

Only it sure doesn’t feel that way.

I was going to talk about my new sooper seekrit plan to release and mar­ket Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles today, but I expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties recently that I just have to rant about. We’ll get to the busi­ness plan stuff, I promise. Eventually.

But first, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

For quite some time now, my writ­ing sys­tem has been rel­a­tively sim­ple and has served me well. I have a note­book in Ever­note for each of my major projects. In each, I have var­i­ous sup­port mate­ri­als along with a note for the man­u­script itself. In this note, I have the out­line for the book in plain text and a .docx file attach­ment for the man­u­script. When it comes time to edit, I open the note, dou­ble click on the attach­ment and edit the doc­u­ment. Ever­note is smart enough to update the note/​attachment every time the file I’m work­ing on is saved (it’s in a temp folder on my hard drive, but that doesn’t usu­ally mat­ter). I also keep my progress spread­sheets in sim­i­lar notes and work on them in a sim­i­lar way.

Until yes­ter­day, this sys­tem worked flaw­lessly. I have Ever­note on every PC I use: my work desk­top and lap­top, my per­sonal net­book, my iPhone. It all works great. Right up until it doesn’t.

A while back, I upgraded my net­book to use the new Ever­note 3.5 beta. Keep in mind, here, that I used to be a pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­oper. I would never trust my writ­ing to some­thing in the alpha stage of devel­op­ment, but a beta is sup­posed to be rel­a­tively sta­ble, just not fea­ture com­plete (see the Win­dows 7 beta as an exam­ple). Ever­note has made it clear that they will not be sup­port­ing 3.1 very long after 3.5 is offi­cially released, so I fig­ured I may as well start get­ting used to it. So I installed 3.5 Beta 4(!) and set about my work.

Yes­ter­day, the unthink­able hap­pened. Some­how, as I was open­ing the note con­tain­ing my man­u­script, the attach­ment for my man­u­script com­pletely dis­ap­peared! I wasn’t able to undo, and the desk­top synced the change back to the server, so I wasn’t able to pull the attach­ment from any of my other Ever­note clients. It was just gone. Noth­ing in the trash in Ever­note, just gone. 57,000 words of fic­tion, nearly 60 hours of work.

I scoured my hard drive look­ing for a backup or copy of the file. In the third place I looked, I found some­thing that looked promis­ing, and was able to get the file back. If that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to recon­struct it from emails sent each day to my beta readers.

Psst, pro­gram­mers. Yeah, you. C’mere. You NEVER, EVER screw with the user’s data! A friend of mine pointed out that I was using beta soft­ware, but ANY bug that can irre­triev­ably destroy a user’s data should never have made it past alpha stage! I’ll accept a beta pro­gram crash­ing, but I will NEVER be okay with it trash­ing my data!

/​whacks Dave Eng­berg in the head

So I decided to take my data else­where. If I can’t trust Ever­note to never, ever lose my data, I can’t trust it at all. What else is out there?

A lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Drop­box. So if fig­ured, sure, I’ll give it a go. I installed it on my net­book, and hey, so far, so good. The UI is clean and effi­cient, and it doesn’t seem to kill my Via CPU net­book (it pre­dates the Atom, we’re talk­ing stone age net­book). Doc­u­ments saved to fold­ers inside the “drop­box” folder on my desk­top are auto­mat­i­cally synced both to the cloud and any other PCs I have linked to my Drop­box account. Feels a lot like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, only about a kajil­lion times faster.

And it worked great until I got to work this morn­ing and tried to install it on my office PC. Ever­note works fine over my cor­po­rate proxy server. It uses the same proxy set­tings as Inter­net Explorer, set up in the Con­trol Panel, so it never even asked. It just worked. And while Drop­box claims to do the same, it doesn’t work. Nor does it work if I man­u­ally set up the proxy set­tings in Drop­box itself, which it does allow for (Seesmic for Win­dows doesn’t, which is why I can’t use it at the office). No mat­ter what I do, I can’t get Drop­box to con­nect to the cloud through our cor­po­rate net­work gob­lins. Stu­pid goblins.

So that’s two highly regarded file sync solu­tions blown out of the water by my par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. I don’t trust Ever­note any­more — even after down­grad­ing it back to 3.1, because I know I can’t keep 3.1 indef­i­nitely — and I can’t use Drop­box on the PC where I spend half my wak­ing hours. So what’s left?

Sadly, the only thing that comes to mind is good old Sneak­er­net. I have a 2GB thumb­drive on my key­chain, and for now, I’m just going to put every­thing on there, and peri­od­i­cally use Microsoft’s Sync­Toy to back it up to the Drop­box folder on my net­book. That way I can access my files on any PC — well, any PC that uses Microsoft Office 2007, because I’m not giv­ing up Word; I’ve tried Google Docs and found it lack­ing — and as long as I remem­ber to run Sync­Toy every so often, they’ll get backed up to both my net­book hard drive and the cloud. It’s an inel­e­gant solu­tion, because it relies on my markedly unde­pend­able wet­ware to remem­ber to back it up, but that’s all I’ve got. Every other solu­tion I know of doesn’t meet my require­ments: sup­port my cor­po­rate net­work, run on both the iPhone and Win­dows, and be safe and dependable.

How do you store your work­ing manuscripts?