The Unification Chronicles

Or rather, hav­ing Google do the math. I’ve posted my Cru­sade track­ing spread­sheet via Google Docs. Click the link (or type http://bit.ly/CrusadeWC on your own, either way) and you’ll see two tabs. The first is my daily progress in total words, the sec­ond is words per chap­ter and how that adds up against the NaNoW­riMo goal. Feel free to check in through the month of Novem­ber for updates on how I’m doing, and cheer or jeer appropriately.

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.

You’d think now that I’m start­ing a new book writ­ing would be fun again. You’d be hor­ri­bly mis­taken, and quite pos­si­bly bark­ing mad. I’ve got 793 words today, 1530 for the book over­all, and it’s just tor­ture. Maybe not waterboarding-​​caliber tor­ture, but at least as bad as being forced to lis­ten to Yanni records.

I’ve got a han­dle on my first two chap­ters, and I know my char­ac­ters pretty well (btw, Dante Hicks from Rev­e­la­tion has been renamed to Patrick Rus­sell, as the name Dante was too sim­i­lar to Daniel if the char­ac­ter is going to be stick­ing around a while). Maybe that’s the prob­lem. A big chunk of this first chap­ter is pick­ing up a few months after the events in Rev­e­la­tion and going for­ward. But I still have to do that awk­ward second-​​book-​​in-​​a-​​series thing where I rein­tro­duce the char­ac­ters to peo­ple who just so hap­pened to pick up this book first – the first and only Nar­nia book I’ve ever read was Prince Caspian, the seoond in the series – with­out appear­ing to intro­duce them to the peo­ple who just fin­ished read­ing about them in book one. GAH.

I do need to send out props to my tweeps. A good chunk of the action in the first half of Cru­sade is thanks to them as Patrick and the rest of Jack’s demon-​​hunters try out all the sug­ges­tions I got from Twit­ter about how to kill a nanite-​​infused demon. (very few of them turn out to work, because it still has to be a chal­lenge to kill these bas­tards in book three)

So I might be able to crest a thou­sand before I head not home, but to the com­pany xmas party. I’ve got a cou­ple of iPhone apps that sync with Google Docs, so I might be able to squeeze in a few hun­dred words at the party if the stand up comics turn out to be, well, Yanni.

We’ve all heard the old saw about how writ­ing is such a soli­tary endeavor. And while that’s tech­ni­cally true, I’ve real­ized recently how much the sol­i­dar­ity of writ­ing along­side other writ­ers mat­ters. Consider:

Aver­age daily word count on Rev­e­la­tion while I was still par­tic­i­pat­ing in NaNoW­rimo, ie. up to 50,000 words: 2,041

Aver­age daily word count on Rev­e­la­tion after hit­ting 50,000 and writ­ing “on my own”: 1,161

So my word count dropped by almost 900 words a day once I was no longer “rac­ing” against the NaNoW­rimo com­mu­nity. This is why writ­ers so often hang out with other writ­ers, and this is why I’ll be rac­ing my writ­ing part­ner, Josh Curry, in my sec­ond book, Cru­sade, against the first book of his Pan­theons series. At present, he has a 5,218 word lead on me because I’m still two scenes away from fin­ish­ing Rev­e­la­tion even though we’re five days past the mutu­ally agreed upon start date. I hope to fin­ish that today and start eat­ing into that lead.

Which brings me to, why is it tak­ing me so damn long to fin­ish the first book? My aver­age daily word count over the past five days is a pal­try, even pathetic, 496 words. Why am I stalling? I know how the book ends, I have the out­line straight­ened out, and when I make myself sit down and write, the words flow as freely as they ever have and I enjoy the writ­ing itself. But some­thing in me is resist­ing, might­ily, fin­ish­ing Rev­e­la­tion.

I think part of it is fear of the unknown. I know where Cru­sade is going in broad strokes, but haven’t out­lined it in nearly as much detail as Rev­e­la­tion. I think that has me freaked out and try­ing to avoid start­ing the new book for as long as pos­si­ble. And the best way to do that is to drag out fin­ish­ing the first book for as long as I can. I know this is a dumb idea, and I know that when I actu­ally do start writ­ing Cru­sade I’ll be sur­prised and delighted by it just as I was by Rev­e­la­tion. It’s just been really hard to trans­late that into motivation.

The other thing that slowed me down, frankly, was this blog. Not post­ing itself, writ­ing these sorts of things, but rather get­ting gun­shy about post­ing my rough drafts. Because I’m tak­ing Mur Lafferty/​Anne Lamott/​Stephen King’s advice to heart in these last five chap­ters, folks. These chap­ters suck. I’m doing way too much telling rather than show­ing, rush­ing through things or gloss­ing over them, and I know they’re pretty much going to have to be rewrit­ten from scratch in revi­sions. And if I weren’t doing this in pub­lic, for all to see, that wouldn’t be so bad. But in the inter­est of allow­ing this project to show the process of a work­ing writer, that means you folks need to be able to see the “before” pic­tures, as it were. So please, just bear with me through revi­sions. The end­ing of Rev­e­la­tion will get better.

Okay, back to writ­ing. I have just two scenes to write, and I just fig­ured out this morn­ing that not only is Jack the leader of the demon hunt­ing team in the next book rather than Daniel, but the team isn’t backed by the UN as it was orig­i­nally. It’s backed by the angels them­selves, in a bold and pretty sub­ver­sive move against the demons. This is actu­ally the first vol­ley — okay, sec­ond, giv­ing Susan the data­base was the first — in a war the demons don’t real­ize they’re fight­ing until it’s already too late. Angels are sneaky.

Yes­ter­day was actu­ally fairly pro­duc­tive, and if it were not for my own hubris, I’d be pretty proud of myself. I got 2,075 words writ­ten, includ­ing a tense yet funny scene with Dante, my probably-​​needs-​​to-​​be-​​renamed hacker char­ac­ter, and a lab tech with a place­holder name of Shel­don Cooper try­ing not to get killed by demons. You guys will see the first draft for that posted on the 13^th. I also got some final tweaks done to the Rev­e­la­tion out­line and split the Cru­sade out­line into three acts. I’ll have an arti­cle for JeffKirvin.net next Mon­day about the sacred and dreaded three act struc­ture and why you really can’t get away from it, no mat­ter avante garde you may think you are.

I didn’t get as much done yes­ter­day as I wanted, though, because I still have some bad habits to break. Notably, Big Bang The­ory and Cas­tle. I didn’t even really have to watch Cas­tle, because I knew it would be in my Hulu queue this morn­ing. I ratio­nal­ized it because not only is it an awe­some show with one of my favorite actors, but it’s a show about a best sell­ing nov­el­ist. As for Big Bang The­ory, one of my minor char­ac­ters in the chap­ter I was writ­ing was loosely based on Shel­don, so I had to watch, right? For research. Yeah.

Oh, and I took up the hour after Cas­tle watch­ing the local news tell me how our sub-​​zero Fahren­heit weather can kill you in under an hour while I down­loaded the unabridged audio­book of Stephen King’s Under the Dome to my net­book and synced to my iPhone. All 32 hours of it. Aw yeah. Hey, I sat through Atlas Shrugged unabridged, and this has got to be better.

Hubris. I agreed with Josh that I’d start writ­ing Cru­sade this Thurs­day while he started the first book of Pan­theons. So now I have a hard dead­line for Rev­e­la­tion. I’ve got three chap­ters, about 10,000 words, left to write, and only today and tomor­row to do it. And my day job to deal with. And it’s my mom’s birth­day tonight, so there will be cake over at my sister’s.

If I may quote Nicholas Cage from “The Rock”, “I love pressure…”

Accord­ing to my spread­sheet, here’s where I am for the first book with three days to go:

So my words per day has suf­fered from the last few days of min­i­mal pro­duc­tiv­ity, but as long as I get a chap­ter a day writ­ten today through Wednes­day, I’m still on track.

Who knew writ­ing involved so much accounting?

I got pre­cious lit­tle actual writ­ing done over the week­end, about 2 pages total, because of get­ting the new blog and wiki up and run­ning. Rev­e­la­tion is sit­ting at 63,182 words, and I need to do 4k per day to fin­ish it before Thurs­day. Yes, I know that’s only 75k. But I skipped a few scenes ear­lier in the book and have recently fig­ured out I do need to find a place to put Jeff Frankel’s tale of vengeance from the orig­i­nal novella back into this ver­sion, so the first draft should round out almost exactly 80k.

I need to be done by Thurs­day because that’s when I start a WORD WAR with Josh Curry, my pod­caster in arms from Max­i­mum Geek. I’ll be writ­ing Cru­sade and he’ll be writ­ing the first book in his Pan­theons series. First to 80k wins!

So yeah, the next three days will be head down, writewritewritewrite.

I’m going to be post­ing four chap­ters a day, on aver­age about 10k words, here until I get y’all caught up to what I’m writ­ing currently.