The Unification Chronicles

Peo­ple told me real life would inter­cede, that writ­ing seven books by Labor Day 2010 was crazy. And despite my best inten­tions, they were right. I’m about 30,000 words behind sched­ule, burned out and depressed. Part of this is due to exter­nal fac­tors. I didn’t expect my mom to get can­cer,  I didn’t expect to get kicked back to Old Job and I didn’t expect the hol­i­days to run over me the way they did. And I know a big part of my depres­sion is the direct result of not hav­ing writ­ten any­thing in the past two weeks. Writ­ing is a nec­es­sary ther­apy for me if I’m to remain happy and sane, and I haven’t been doing it.

I big part of this grand exper­i­ment was to com­mit myself to writ­ing and see what worked for me. But it’s just as key to acknowl­edge that some­thing doesn’t work and stop doing it that way. And even though it’s galling to admit it, I bit off more than I could chew. My plan to write seven books in ten months, while simul­ta­ne­ously edit­ing the books I’d just writ­ten and then pod­cast­ing, pub­lish­ing and pro­mot­ing them, was too ambi­tious. Try­ing to do all that, and main­tain a shred of a social life, and hold down a day job, was just too much.

That said, some aspects of the exper­i­ment, like writ­ing every day and blog­ging about the process here, are def­i­nitely worth­while things I need to keep doing. A lot of this has been really good for me, both per­son­ally and cre­atively, so I’d be an extra­or­di­nary fool to walk away from all of it.

So here’s the revised plan.

Write every day

This, more than any­thing, was the most pos­i­tive thing to come out of the Max­i­mum Geek Ulti­mate Writ­ing Chal­lenge for me. Writ­ing needs to be some­thing I do every day, no mat­ter what, for the rest of my life. Even if some of that writ­ing is just for me and never sees the light of day — although given my lit­er­ary exhi­bi­tion­ism, there’s not really much chance of that — I need to write some­thing con­sis­tently. But it doesn’t always have to be draft­ing, because the sec­ond point is

Alter­nate between draft­ing and edit­ing books

It’s clear to me that writ­ing long form fic­tion is a cycli­cal activ­ity, and that after about six weeks of high-​​intensity right brain draft­ing, I need to let that aspect of my cre­ativ­ity rest and spend at least as long allow­ing my left brain to edit and revise what I just drafted. I think one of they key drags on my attempt to draft Cru­sade was that part of me really, really wanted to go back and fin­ish Rev­e­la­tion first. There are pros and cons both ways. Before I got into draft­ing Cru­sade, for exam­ple, I didn’t real­ize I’d have to fic­tion­al­ize the Pres­i­dent of the United States in Rev­e­la­tion. But over­all, I think Scott Sigler’s right. I need to know one book is fin­ished before I move on to the next.

I should also note that this runs con­trary to the com­mon writ­ing advice to put aside your first draft for a while and come back to it when you can see it fresh. When I’m done with Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles, I might do that and write stand­alone books in pairs, ie. draft Home­world and then Titanus before going back to edit Home­world. But UC is such a known quan­tity to me that I think I can edit it fairly with­out the tra­di­tional cool­ing off period. Gen­er­ally, the cool­ing off period is so you can get enough dis­tance that you’re no longer so in love with your work that you can make cuts and change things. I’m already itch­ing to change things in Rev­e­la­tion.

Con­tinue to post work in progress and thoughts about the work here

I still think post­ing drafts has a ten­dency to slow me down and make me over­think what I’m writ­ing, but I’m con­vinced that doc­u­ment­ing this process has value. Iron­i­cally, it doesn’t have all that much value right now. Very few peo­ple are read­ing this blog. I have eight sub­scribers to the RSS feed and just under five vis­its to the actual site per day. But, it’s still early. A lot of the value in what I’m doing here might not be appar­ent until long after I’ve fin­ished all seven books and released them as ebooks and pod­casts. Basi­cally, while I’m blog­ging this live, the real value is as an archive. I’m writ­ing to the future, not to the present.

While this means that a key value propo­si­tion for me per­son­ally — daily feed­back and encour­age­ment from read­ers eager to get the next install­ment — turned out to be a bust, it’s still worth doing. In a lot of ways it’s like Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pas­cal sug­gested that it was bet­ter to believe in God and be wrong than to be an athe­ist and be wrong. Sim­i­larly, if I end up becom­ing well-​​known enough for this archive to help other writ­ers, it will. If I don’t, then I haven’t embar­rassed myself by try­ing since by def­i­n­i­tion very few peo­ple would even know I did this. But if I don’t write this and do become well-​​known, it’s a hell of a missed opportunity.

Don’t worry about pod­cast­ing until have the con­tent and means to podcast

Right now, I don’t have a rea­son­ably quiet place to record, but more impor­tantly, I don’t have the mate­r­ial. Once I’m done with the rewrites on Rev­e­la­tion and have moved into my new place — which has pre­req­ui­site con­di­tions of its own, like my job sit­u­a­tion sta­bi­liz­ing, fil­ing bank­ruptcy and sav­ing enough money to move — I’m not going to worry about pod­cast­ing or ebook releases. Let’s keep that horse firmly in front of the cart.

Quit try­ing to be part of a com­mu­nity I haven’t earned my way into

I’ve recently unfol­lowed a ton of peo­ple on Twit­ter, the vast major­ity of them other writ­ers. I still have them all in one of my lists, so I can still keep tabs on them, but hav­ing them show up in my nor­mal tweet­stream was depress­ing me. It gave me the illu­sion that I was friends, and more impor­tantly, peers, with peo­ple who have achieved some­thing I haven’t and who have no idea who the hell I am. Every time I wanted to reply to peo­ple like James Rollins, Mau­reen John­son, Wil Wheaton, Caitlin Kit­teridge, Mur Laf­ferty, JC Hutchins, Pip Bal­lan­tine, etc., I had to stop myself and remem­ber that while I know them, they don’t know me and don’t care what I have to say. Some­day, if I keep work­ing hard, I might earn myself I place at their table. If my life had con­tin­ued on the path it was on a decade ago, I might already be there. But I fell a long way down in the last decade, and I’m still an unknown. Bet­ter that I stop putting on airs and pre­tend­ing I’m some­thing I’m not.

Don’t worry so much about word count

Going for­ward, I have a sim­pler met­ric to use, one that works just was well for draft­ing and edit­ing. I want to do a chap­ter a day. Period. My chap­ters tend to be around 2,000 – 4,000 words long, which is also a pretty com­fort­able daily word count tar­get. And when I’m edit­ing, word count doesn’t really mean any­thing, as my chap­ter may end up actu­ally being shorter when I’m done edit­ing. So a chap­ter a day on the work in progress shall be the rule.

That’s it, folks. Either today or tomor­row I’m going to start rewrites on Rev­e­la­tion, and will post the revised chap­ter here for com­par­i­son to the orig­i­nal draft. And then from then on I intend to keep going through Rev­e­la­tion—if I start today I’ll fin­ish it at the end of the month since there’s exactly 30 chap­ters — then move on to draft­ing Cru­sade again. When I’m done with Cru­sade, I’ll edit it a chap­ter a day, then start draft­ing Jihad. This sched­ule, if done through all seven books with­out life get­ting in my way again, would mean I’d fin­ish the series by April, 2011. So let’s say I have every rea­son to believe that by the end of sum­mer, 2011, I’ll be done with all seven books and ready to move on to the next big thing. Which might be the 2011 Drag­onCon, since I’m not going to make it this year after all.