That NaNo Thing (2020 edition)

So, ladies and gentlemen, each November there is a competition for writers who strive to compose a story of 50,000 words (or possibly a little more). The National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for insiders) is the Super Bowl for those who have no athletic skills [sic] but have an idea often expressed as "You know what would make a great movie?" 

NaNo was brought to my attention by my writer friends in 2014. Usually it is not a problem to write 50,000 words, even in a month, if I have a lot of free time and a hot idea. So I gave it a go, writing most of a sci-fi novel by the concluding tally of 55,396...which was not the end of the story. I put it aside and finally this year (yes, in 2020) I picked it up and finished it at 95,000 words. It will be available early in 2021.

Usually, I start something in February and write through the spring and summer and finish at the beginning of autumn, then edit and revise through the month of November, precluding my participation. But sometimes it works out. In 2016 I worked on a sequel to my epic fantasy tome and "won" with 52,077 words...but it remains unfinished. In 2018, I worked on a cynical autobiography, based a lot on Grandma's notes of her ancestors and my vague memories of childhood. Again I got to 54,275 words by the end of the month. Lots more to finish that book.

Last year (2019) I was engaged in preparation of my crime thriller novel EXCHANGE (out in May 2020) and skipped the NaNo. But this year...I had no alibi. So I looked at what projects I had started and needed to finish. I picked up my screenplay for a "1984" rip-off and decided to novelize it. We are allowed notes and an outline for NaNo so novelizing a screenplay is not cheating. With 2 days to go, it sits at 49,996 words. I think I can cobble together another 4 words in time.

THE LIE began long, long ago in a high school far, far away. Fresh from a class reading of George Orwell's "1984", I said to myself: "I think I can do better." So I wrote a story about a police state but mine was set in the United States instead of London. I had my own twists on the story so it wasn't entirely a copy. I typed it out on a manual typewriter until the ink ribbon was spent and the typed words faint. Single-spaced, it went to 66 pages - the longest piece of writing I had ever done to that date. I stapled the pages in the top left corner and shared it with a couple guys in my sci-fi nerd circle. They liked it. Others asked to read it so it was passed around for the rest of the semester.

However, I got busy with other things. You know, the usual: college, jobs, relationships, other writing projects, travel, career, family, more writing projects.... 

Back up. In a return to college to take a screenwriting course, I used the story as the plot for my screenplay (see above). The professor of the course had Hollywood ties and he helped some of us get attention. My screenplay was "optioned" by a production company, which meant they paid me for the rights to it for 1 year; if they did not move forward on it within that year the rights reverted to me. Guess who got reverted?

So it went back to the shelf. I ran the high school pages through an OCR system to try to make it able to be edited on a word processor but the optical character recognition system did not recognize very much of my typing. Now (NaNoWriMo 2020) I cannot even find that poor OCR'd file, but I do have the screenplay. So I read the scene in the screenplay format, then write it out as a novel scene. Lots of description needed to be filled in along with the thoughts and feelings of the characters - which the actors and director would take care of in a film production.

Like past projects for NaNoWriMo, I will not finish it by the time I complete the month. But I will get my 50,000 words to win the competition. The project interests me, has a unique take on the basic dystopian themes, and so I will likely finish it eventually - unless a new idea hits me from out of left field.

So that is how I have been spending my November, if anyone wondered where I was. I was assuming you were deep inside one of my latest novels, EXCHANGE or the just launched YEAR OF THE TIGER (read more here), and simply did not realize I had not posted on my blog until now. Next month I will return to that first NaNoWriMo novel, the sci-fi story, and prepare it for launch in 2021.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

What I did on My Summer Staycation

Even after shifting to an online version of teaching to finish the spring semester, I still had big plans for summer travel. Then, week after week, I kept putting off hitting the road. Until the summer had waned and I was back to the same ol' same ol'. So, instead of driving to parts unknown, I stayed home. 

Staying home is not a great hardship for me. It's what I do whenever I do anything. I can easily occupy myself with the usual writing and editing, along with reading and some movies on DVD. At first, I thought I would start a new novel, something apocalyptic - obviously. I got a good start but the idea ran dry. I started reading other apocalyptic books to get inspiration. Good books, but it didn't work.

Next I thought I should use my time to finish some unfinished manuscripts. I settled on a sci-fi story I had started in a National Novel Writing Month competition a few years past. I even made a tentative book cover for it. As expected, I "won" by hitting the 50,000-word threshold, then I got distracted with other projects and left it unfinished. I always intended to finish it but I left it at a crucial point where I realized how off track I had gotten. But first, before I returned to the novel I had titled THE MASTERS' RIDDLE, I told myself I should work on one more revision of my already finished manuscript of an action-adventure magical realism novel titled YEAR OF THE TIGER, which will be coming out this fall.

All right, done. I completely revised, edited, and formatted that ancient manuscript and polished it to within an inch of its life. It is now ready to go.

So...back to the sci-fi book about the little alien who is captured by mean invaders and just wants to go home....

I always liked the idea but writing it was taking too much of my soul. The protagonist was, after all, a non-human character, forcing me to think way outside of boxes. That was a fun aspect of writing the story, of course, but challenging. As a professional linguist, I love playing with languages and alternate ways of thinking. And world building? Don't get me started! But by the time NaNoWriMo ended, my alien had slowly shifted into a regular human. Sure, I was hurrying to finish the competition; I knew I could revise it later, but the way that portion turned out left me puzzled about how to shift it all back on track.

So there I was with a whole summer and nothing to do, nowhere to go. I did try to work on it more than a year before. I had gotten a great new idea and just started in with a whole new scene. That was interesting and it worked. I would make the two storylines dovetail. But I got distracted again by other projects. So now, in 2020, I thought I might as well work on it. So I picked it up where I had left off with the new section from a year ago - where my protagonist is back to being a little alien. (I knew I would work on the original "left off" section and make it fit the new section later.)

With a rough outline from previous planning - which is odd, because I don't usually plan and I don't usually outline, at least not more than what happens in the next scene, or this section will go from here to there - I headed on from what would be the exact middle of the story. It was like going to see a play and in the middle of Act II, the whole cast changes costumes and starts forgetting their lines, and the director just stops and tells the audience to come back next year and it will all be fixed. You return and pick up the play in Act III and everything seems fine for Act III but you wonder what happened in Act II the year before. Anyway, I was willing to proceed with Act III and write it all out to the end. Then I would go back and fix the section where my alien hero slipped into being a human.

So I did it. Just finished it. The ending that happened turned out to be a very satisfying conclusion although not the one I had originally planned. How we get to that conclusion also had some twists I had not imagined originally. Happy little coincidences. But all the more powerful - I mean visceral. I think it is a "happy" ending in some ways but raises disturbing questions, too. I like those kind of stories.

Anyhoo...our alien hero struggles to get home, but how do you get home when home is another planet far, far away? Even if you get help from other kinds of creatures that have escaped... Even if you form an army to fight against your captors... Even if you find and capture the machine that enables your captors to go through an interdimensional portal to other worlds and kidnap creatures for slave labor or experiments... how do you get home? And what will you find when (or if) you do get home? Totally depressing possibilities make for a great story.

At least you have the cast of other alien beings from several different worlds, speaking different languages, having different cultures. Could there be any story with more diversity? So I got to invent different species, each with its own way of doing things in their normal lives on their home worlds, with different languages, and so on. World building! That was fun. Easy enough to describe beings from tropical worlds, desert worlds, frozen worlds, watery worlds, and so on. How they are mostly "upright" and mostly "intelligent" is solely because those are the kind of creatures the invaders choose to bring back as captives.

Languages and how they communicate was both the most frustrating aspect and had the most clever solution. IMHO. They speak (verbal utterance) in their own language, of course, but some have telepathic ability. Others are intelligent enough to convert the symbol patterns of one language into the patterns of their own language and thus understand. Some creatures pass pure ideas to other creatures without the idea needing to be coded into a language system. And so on. The hardest part was deciding how to show each different kind of communication on the page.

All right, enough teaser! I will save the big twists for another blog post sometime in my fallcation. In the meantime, look for my action-adventure novel of manly daring-do where a man-eating tiger with vengeance on its mind takes on a crazy cadre of inept hunters (warning: not a comedy) in YEAR OF THE TIGER.

[Note: This is my first blog post using the new design of Blogger. It is what it is.]

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Year's End of Kind of a Review

There comes a time in every blogger's life when the blogging is easy, and that time is known as the Year End Review or some variation on that topic. You simply recount everything you have done, and/or blogged about, during the year. It's a chance to rewrite history or boast on yourself, or perhaps humbly beg for more readers.

For me, this has been a difficult year - and yet I have persisted, keeping my claws locked in the edge of the cliffs time and time again. Fortunately, my actual life and my writing life have coincided strangely. When I don't feel well, my protagonist has difficulties, too. When something goes right for me, my hero has a good day, too. It's eerie how that alter ego keeps me going. But I suspect many writers role play a happier life (or, at least, a more invigorating life) through the fictional personas they create. Am I right? Am I?

So 2018 began for me with the finishing of the second volume of my vampire trilogy. Any Book 2 of a trilogy exists because something was not addressed in Book 1. And Book 3 follows automatically once the decision has been made to take the plunge into a 2nd volume after a so-called stand-alone novel fails to wrap up one or two crucial issues. So I did that, and launching Book 2 of the Stefan Szekely Trilogy was a pleasant diversion from the run of the mill runs around that old mill.

But seriously, then Book 3 stared me straight in the face, demanding what I would do for an encore. I said, "Here, hold my Merlot goblet." And promptly ratcheted up the rhetoric and the horror. For what could be more horrible that to be forced to commit evil every day lest you be punished? Everyone hates you for that daily act of evil yet you must do it or those around you whom you care for will suffer. It's an unpleasant conundrum. How to escape from this situation? Ah hah! And so Book 3 was born and shall be available soon enough (yet not so soon that you wouldn't have time to read Books 1 and 2 first). As with previous years, I went to China to teach a class in the summer and spent a lot of my free time alone in my hotel room typing away on the latest book. 

Besides the day job, that is what has occupied my time and attention for the bulk of the year. Except for the NaNo - the National Novel Writing Month - which I elected to indulge in by finally writing my autobiography. You know: finally a chance to write down all those little anecdotes you remember being told about when you were a baby or a toddler, and the adventures you remember from your elementary school days, and the first inkling of puppy love in junior high school.... Oh dear! I sense I'm getting into "spoiler" territory so I must cease. Well, it remains unfinished, as most good autobiographies are until the author ends it with a good whack or a doctor's note.

So what else did I do in 2018? You can look back through the blog posts of this year, down by count from previous years. As mentioned in a blog post or two, on too many occasions, when I planned to post a light-hearted entry about nothing important at all, something horrible would happen in the real world and my blog post seemed even more frivolous, so I did not post. I don't think the problem was my posts but, rather, the things people do to each other. What work of fiction can stand up to the reality we often face every day? It almost makes the writing of fiction a delicate luxury: a place to hide, or an escape into a mental landscape - which is good for a time, yes, but should not be a permanent condition.

Alas, as with every end of the year, the optimist I keep in my shirt pocket pops out his little head and grins precociously as if certain the new year will be nothing but merriment and mirth. I wish always to agree. And yet, as we so well know, it may not be. In each of our corners of the world, or in our own little neighborhood, try to take care of each other, share stories, be less suspicious and ready to wield weapons. Talk - for that was the reason the great Rhetoric was invented. Words are not sticks and stones; they're made of phonemes, which are soft and squishy and slide right off us unless we pin them to ourselves.

"Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow." 

-Weekend Update sign-off, Saturday Night Live

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(C) Copyright 2010-2018 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The End of NaNoWriMo!

Last night I won this year's National Novel Writing Competition (#NaNoWriMo), and I haven't even finished writing my novel. I did, however, attain the 50,000 word threshold of greatness. Of course, I knew I would achieve that mark. I don't enter competitions unless I intend to win. However, the competition is really (at least in my case) a contest against myself, and against the day job and all manner of vagaries that might interfere with my writing. Yet, once again, I have succeeded! (More on this year's entry below.)

Last year (2017), I was unable to participate. I was simply written out. (Read more about that situation here.) The year before (2016), I did participate and wrote what became my epic fantasy novel. Despite writing only about 55,000 words during the month of November, I eventually finished the novel at 233,000 words months later - which is about average for an epic fantasy, leaning heavily on the word 'epic'. I skipped 2015 but did give it my first try in 2014, producing most but not all of sci-fi story about a captured alien trying to get home.

My initial reluctance at trying to do such an intensive writing effort - not that I don't want to! - was that it falls in November, one of the busier months for those of us in academia. However, with a story idea, some notes, a plan or outline, it is possible to cobble out a rough draft in 30 days. That's about 1,700 words per day. Or, as my college freshmen like to say: "Well, you like to write, so it's okay for you." Indeed, I do like to write; it is the one activity that brings me peace and enjoyment.

So this year I thought to write an autobiography. Yes, many times I've borrowed from my own life for fiction I've written. This time, I really wanted to bring together the many stories and anecdotes from my life, especially my childhood. I'm not so vain that I expect to find my life of interest to others; however, that does not stop me from writing for myself. That still counts in the NaNo world. So, yes, I wrote, or started writing, my autobiography, beginning with the moment of birth told from the nameless baby's perspective.

As I snatched a few minutes here and there to write more, I tended to jump around in the timeline. I wrote about my family's travels while I was a toddler, with a tongue in cheek attitude. I wrote about elementary school and the quirky kids I met there. I jumped ahead and told the story of, for example, how I met Carla, the funeral director's daughter, when I moved across town to a new school for 7th grade. I explained the family history according to both grandmothers. I named names, including actual relations (they'll never read this!). I was writing for me, for my entertainment. It has been self-satisfying and I make no apology for that. I'll continue through my college adventures and my various experiences living overseas (I kept journals). I may depict events slightly better than they actually were because who wants to read the complete unvarnished truth? (Oh, and I quickly made a cheap-looking book cover.)

You see, at the same time, during the same month, aside from the day job, I was finishing the final revision of Book 3 of my vampire trilogy. Also during the month, aside from this autobiography, I worked on a short story I owe for an anthology. Then, as I approached the 50,000 word goal line, I got drawn away to start a revision of an early novel of mine involving a man-eating tiger which I hope to publish in the near future. I also graded stacks of essays, literary analyses, and research papers. 

Because the words never stop coming. And I think, if they ever did stop, I would also stop. And that is not a possibility I wish to consider.

Next time: The Stefan Szekely Trilogy comes to a close with mayhem and melancholy!


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(C) Copyright 2010-2018 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Why I'm not joining the NaNoWriMo cult

November is the principal month of worship in the cult of NaNoWriMo (what the uninitiated may call the "National Novel Writing Month"). It is chiefly for those whose nervous fingers cannot avoid the succulent keys. Until 2014, I had never been able to participate because of its unfortunate scheduling. You see, November is the fattiest meat of the fall semester and tough to cut; it's when I have the most day-job work to do. Sure, I could write a draft of a novel in a month - if I had no day job to tend to, if I had no other disruptions, and if I had the idea in advance. But that is really the challenge of it.

I could not participate in the NaNoWriMo celebration of 2016 because I was in the thick of a write-in campaign for President of the United States, as the candidate of the Bunny Party. Needless to say, I lost. (You can read about my defeat here.) By then, there was no more time in the month to write 50,000 words and win it. And if I decide to start, I must win it. I started my epic fantasy tome during that NaNoWriMo, perhaps to distract me from the pain of losing, and got the 55,000 with not too much trouble. The finished novel is 230,000 words but vivid, lean prose.

The 2015 celebration month occurred just as I finished my then-latest novel, A GIRL CALLED WOLF, written mostly during the summer when I was stuck in Beijing, China, teaching a university course. I could not stop preparing it for publication just to start writing something new - something so new that I didn't even have an idea. And I had the busy day-job things to do. So I bowed out.

In 2014, with my vampire novel sent out into the world just in time for Halloween, I was free of projects. I decided to give it a go, hell or high water, day job be damned! I had no idea as of October 31, so I grabbed an unfinished sci-fi novella that had been sitting around for many years and plunked it into the microwave for 90 seconds. Then served it to my NaNoWriMo muse. THE MASTERS' RIDDLE (still a working title) was about a little alien captured by mean Earth people, who escapes and tries to make his way home. For a quartet of weeks it was happening. I thought I would finish it. I "won" by completing 50,000+ words during the 30 days of the month. Granted, I started with a couple thousand and an outline but I finished with more than 55,000 words, anyway, thus earning me a cool sticker. But the novel remains unfinished at about 70,000 words. I lost that loving feeling when I hit a plot conundrum; before I could figure it out, I was compelled back into day-job stuff.

November for me is typically the lull season. The past few years I have had ideas stew during November and take root in a Word file sometime in January or February. I pound the keyboard through the spring months and cruise into the final page somewhere in the middle of the summer. I revise and edit into the fall and voila! a new novel is born. 

Then it hits me: the lull. Writers know what this is and dread it. The Lull Month is full of doubts. Did I just write a bunch of crapola? Will I ever get another idea? What in the world will happen to me if I can't write anything else? 

Then spring comes and everything blossoms - although, for me, it's usually in December or January. And the process starts over again. November? Not the best time for me.

In 2014, I wrote my medical thriller vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN on the above schedule. In 2015, I wrote a novel about an orphaned Inuit girl who grows up and saves the world, A GIRL CALLED WOLF. Now I am once more in that schedule, having finished the sequel to A DRY PATCH OF SKIN and too busy with revisions to dive into a new project. I am a serial monogawriter, after all. One book at a time. Besides, it's the lull month again and I have no ideas. I still have not finished the sci-fi novel from last year's NaNoWriMo but it would be unfair to try to use that again to achieve some dubious fame. 

There is nobody in my circle who would be impressed at me writing 50,000 words in a month. When I was again stuck in Beijing to teach a course in 2016, I pounded out 72,000 words of my 230,000 word EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS novel (as well as a 33,000 word erotic novella that shall remain unpublished). Lots of free time, ok? Those who know me, know I can do it. 

This past summer (2017), I wrote 55,000 words of my 2014 vampire novel's sequel, SUNRISE, while sitting in a hotel room in Beijing and teaching a class on the university campus across the street twice a week. (I blogged about that experience here.) However, I've always been a quality over quantity type of person and go through many waves of revision, tweaking a word here or there until I cannot contain the urge more.

Nevertheless, I shall cheer on those who choose to dive once again into uncharted waters - for what could be more uncharted than the lexical spaces within the gray matter of a twisted mind? 

The goal for the blessed celebrants of NaNoWriMo is to create from sacred mind-fire a 50,000 word book. By definition, that is the minimum length for something called a novel. That seems to be easy enough. My previous novels have been in the range of 72,000 to 128,000 words. My epic fantasy, being an epic fantasy, rose to 230,000 words. However, let us not forget the time factor: one month - with the day job looming precariously over everything. That 50,000 word goal means 1,667 words per day for 30 days. You can write that much over lunch - or between classes, as I did. (My students often complain about writing 500 words per week.)

Good luck to all, and to all a long night!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2017 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The End of #NaNoWriMo as I know It

Another NaNoWriMo has passed and many of us are somewhere along the spectrum from elation to dejection. For those bloggers who don't know what that means, I'm referring to the National Novel Writing Month competition (hereafter called "NaNo"). However, competition may not exactly be the right word for it. The "experience" is really a competition against yourself and all the excuses writers may have to keep from writing that novel that's been stuck in their heads for a while. It is a just-get-her-done kind of motivating vehicle. I know many writers who finally got a novel written because of NaNo. Not me, of course; I'd write it anyway, NaNo or no NaNo, no?

I had been aware of NaNo for several years but it always was in November, a busy time of the year for me in my day job, so I declined to participate. Then I did, just for the heck of it. I sucked it up and dove in. I had the start of an idea for a sci-fi novel (The Masters' Riddle) and thought NaNo would be a "low-risk" way to push myself to write it. So I did. 

I "won" NaNo by achieving the 50,000-word threshold for calling it a "novel". I reached that milestone before the Thanksgiving week holidays that year, the time when I had expected to make my big final push. By the time the month ended, I had reached 55,000 words but not the end of the story. Then December arrived, end of the semester tasks piled up, and then the end-of-year holidays distracted me from finishing that sci-fi novel.

Last year (2015) I did not participate because I was busy with the novel I had just finished, A Girl Called Wolf. This year (2016), I decided to dive in again. Initially, I expected to start the sci-fi novel where I'd left off and go forward. But I had completed my newest novel, Epic Fantasy *With Dragons, during the summer and still glowing from the thrill I thought to continue in a sequel. That became my NaNo novel: Epic Fantasy 2 *Without Dragons.

I posted my word count every day for the first week or so. Seeing it steadily rising was motivation. Then came the inevitable distractions from the day job. There were days I could not write at all for lack of time or energy, much less post a word count update. I grabbed a few minutes between teaching my classes, some more time in the evenings. I talked up my participation in NaNo in my classes to motivate my students to write more--just for fun! Yes, writing is (can be) fun! But a half-hour here, an hour there was enough to keep me going. Never go 24 hours without writing something, even if only one sentence! As I told a colleague, I am always writing in my head; I just need enough time to download it through my fingers and keyboard. 

Then I had some good weekends with a bunch of keyboard slapping. We're talking 4 hours at a stretch, thinking and writing, not stopping to revise or edit. I was tossing out such crap as I never would have believed--as I never had let myself write and still move on. It was heartbreaking at times. But every word counted! I did not even write and validate after I won. I got lazy.

That's the idea: get a draft done, no matter how bad. Anything can be fixed in revision--after the competition ends. The goal is to complete a manuscript, but like in 2014, I reached the 50,000-word threshold without finishing the story. When I validated at 52,077 words, I got all of my cool winner graphics to paste all over social media to announce my achievement. But I knew when I began that I would win it. I would make myself win. I am known as a verbose writer, after all. When I mention "50,000 words" to my students who balk at writing 1000-word paper, or I tell them my new fantasy novel is 235,000 words (not atypical for the genre), and they seem in such shock, almost as though I had just eaten a live snake in front of them, I have to grin. It is difficult to put the grin away.

Despite the distractions of election vitriol and the day job's hecticness ("hecticity"?) and the holiday obligations, I still managed to win NaNo once more. Now let the revision begin! (See you again next November--if I get another story idea.)

P.S.- Just for fun, here are the opening sentences from Epic Fantasy *With Dragons and Epic Fantasy 2 *Without Dragons. Yes, I intend them to be nearly identical.

EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS
Corlan scratched his whiskers and grinned. A dragon clan was approaching. Brushing his wind-swept hair out of his face, he kept his eyes on the clan as he reached for the dragonslinger and prepared the weapon. Eleven of them in a tight formation. It would be a good day for hunting.

EPIC FANTASY 2 *WITHOUT DRAGONS
Corlan scratched his whiskers and tried to grin. He brushed his long auburn hair out of his face and focused on the quartet of minstrels approaching the dais. With his rusty dragonslinger resting heavily against the wooden throne, he fought a yawn and prepared to hear yet another petty complaint.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2016 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

A Girl Called Wolf ...saves the world!

Ever since I was a little boy trying to write science-fiction stories, people have asked me where I get my ideas. It's a question most writers get. To me, the implication has always seemed to be that I'm either quite insane or I am cheating a little by borrowing real events. Both are partly true. Usually I develop a "what-if" scenario that intrigues me. Most of my books came about that way.

However, my latest book is a strange kind of collaboration. There truly are a lot of stories out in the world and if one merely pays attention one will hear them, read them, talk about them, and perhaps write them down so others can experience the amazing adventures of real people who walk through our lives. They say fact is stranger than fiction. Perhaps that's true. (Pardon the pun.) In this case, my new novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF is a hybrid of fact and fiction: telling the story of Anna Good up to the present day and then extending the story into the future--which may or may not turn out to be fiction.

Over the past two years I've interacted on social media with many people. They post bits about their lives, as we all do. Pictures, snippets of events, episodes that go well or as often go badly. I tend to hold back my personal life. Nobody's interested, or someone out there might be far too interested in me. Either way, it has been my tendency to sit back and observe. And I watched a mutual friend of an internet contact blossom from an introvert in real life to a confident social media maven eager to tell about her life.

Her username is Anna Good on Facebook and @Anna4Anybody on Twitter (how it came to be is in the book). Over the years, I have found her story compelling, heroic even. Her early life was definitely not what most children experience. I was intrigued. So I began a conversation that extended over the year, picking up all the key events, many of the details, becoming more and more intrigued and naturally absorbing Anna's way of thinking and speaking. It was a story I would want to read. 

Then I asked the fateful question: "Could I write your story?"

Ironically, Anna, a University of Manitoba student about to graduate with a degree in librarianship, is an avid reader. And she writes poetry. People told her she should write her story. She gave the National Novel Writing Competition a try in 2014, planning to write her autobiography, but couldn't make much progress telling her story herself. Not a problem: hire a writer to write it for you! On social media it is easy to become friends with writers.

Anna is an enthusiastic promoter of indie authors and was one of the more active fans of my 2014 vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, enjoying it enough to help promote it on social media. She also enjoyed my novel A BEAUTIFUL CHILL, which described my brief encounter with her half-sister. (Yes, there's a kind of connection, after all, although Anna and I have never met face to face.) So Anna trusted me to be able to tell her story.

We began with interviews by email and on social media, lots of Q&A. Some of the material was difficult to handle--that is, situations in life not always being pleasant. I began slowly, as usual, searching for the right voice, trying to make the narrative sound like her authentic voice while maintaining a readable style that suggests a native speaker of Greenlandic. Being a trained linguist helps. We had to work around her classes and exams, and her fight schedule as a boxer (had to take some liberties with her record) as well as her training schedule as a member of the Canadian Army reserve. These could be spoilers. It's not a spoiler that her favorite word is badass. Definitely a long way from living "on the ice."

Then I left for China, where when I wasn't teaching a class on American Business Writing, I was pounding the keys of my laptop. (See my account of that here.) NaNoWriMo be damned! I still wrote more than 50,000 words during the month of July. With each chapter written, I sent off drafts so Anna could check them for authenticity and she often sent back suggestions for changes. We negotiated a lot: the cold hard facts vs making a good story. As with any life story, we had to compress some events, merge others, take some shortcuts, to create a compelling story which follows her adventures without reading like a set of diary entries. Writing to create drama, that is, to tell a good story, not just writing that this happened and then that happened. And yet, the writing flowed almost effortlessly. It seemed one of the easiest novels I've ever written. Of course, I always had a muse and a plot-checker working with me!

During the final revisions, we worked to accentuate certain episodes, particular details, and cut others until we had a good finished story. With Anna's approval, we finally get to bring her story to the readers of the world. However, there is a twist. Up to the present day, the novel follows her life. Beyond the present day, what might happen? It is easy to speculate based on what has happened in her life and in the book. An exciting ending to an adventurous story? What to do? Any more teasing would take us into spoiler territory. Of course the ending is full fiction--it occurs in the future, after all.

We chose the following structure, using larger chapters which place the events both chronologically and by location:

Chapter 1 - The Dark
Chapter 2 - The Ice
Chapter 3 - The Village  (...that would be Tasiilaq, on the east coast of Greenland)
Chapter 4 - The Town    (...Nuuk, the capital of Greenland)
Chapter 5 - The City     (...Toronto, largest city of Canada)
Chapter 6 - The Province   (...Manitoba; Winnipeg is its capital)
Chapter 7 - The Nation    (...of course, that would be Canada)
Chapter 8 - The World

The cover art was created by Anna's half-sister, Iris Schaeffer, who is by necessity a character in the book. She says she is "all right" with how she is portrayed.

Back cover text:

Ice and snow are all 12 year old Anuka knows outside the hut in Greenland where she was born. When her mama dies, Anuka struggles to survive. The harsh winter forces her to finally journey across the frozen island to the village her mama always feared.

But the people of the village don’t know what to do with this girl. They try to educate and bring her into the modern world, but Anuka won't make it easy for them. She sees dangers at every turn and every day hears her fate echoing in her mama’s voice.

Her mama gave her that name for a reason. She is A GIRL CALLED WOLF who searches for the place where she belongs, a destination always just out of reach, on a path she will always make her own.

Kindle version available now. Paperback coming soon--as soon as Anna approves a proof copy! Knock-knock...ahem...waiting!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my story and I'm sticking with it!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Are you better at wasting time than me?

Last week I complained about vexing issues which may have seemed deliberately inane. I did not intend to worry anyone. I assumed that you would assume that I was busy and could not come up with anything more stimulating. And we both would be half-right.

No, the truth is much more glamorous than that: I have been decidedly un-busy. Slothsome, in fact. Sure, I've held up my end of the bargain at Ye Ole Day Job--which should count as some form of recreation. I go through my paces, saying the right words, smiling at the right moments, interacting as though I live and breathe. But it may be construed by any astute observer to be a very good act, perhaps worthy of an Academy Award. (That Acting 101 class has finally paid off!) I confess to using more and more of my office time to see what great things are happening in the world of social media...and find myself more often than not rather disappointed in humanity.

And I've been dutiful in my duties at home, i.e., the book business. Things are progressing nicely, but I shan't explain more lest certain somebodies be tempted to rant that I am promoting again. That nasty P-word! I'm not after huge sums of cash; I only wish to share a good story or two--or three. Welcome to my [invented] world, and all that! Enjoy the ride. (You can click on links to the top-right of my page if you wish to escape reality.)

It is simply the time of year that it happens to be now. The mirth of Halloween is done, the upswing to the Thanksgiving shopping season is about to begin, and that leaves us (well, me, anyway) with not much to do. Last blog post, I waxed on waxed off about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), lamenting how I could not participate because of my full schedule--then that full schedule never quite materialized. I look like a liar now.

So I made excuses. Sure, I've written 50,000 words in a month. No big deal. Sure, I've got papers to grade (well, those that have been turned in). Sure, I've got life issues to slap around--and, in turn, dodge the ripostes. Sure, the weather has been up and down, hot and cold, winter parkas and shirtsleeves. Sure, I avoid saying 'surely' so as not to link with that old Airplane movie's tag line ("And don't call me Shirley!"). Still, they add up to no excuse, which is just a poor excuse for having no better excuses.

However, I have been successful in one endeavor: wasting time. Of course, time is finite, and if you waste it, you don't get it back. It's a zero-sum game and you don't know the rules. Father Time is a cheater, too. (Truth be told, that time machine thing I mentioned a while back? Well, it's fictitious. I know you're shocked.) Clocks are evil, alarms like a musty foot out of hell. Calendars steal your soul. In a perfect universe time would be unmeasurable, one eternity as slick as one moment. Thus, what you waste is truly waste. And what a waste that would be!

So one day last week, I found myself standing in the middle of my kitchen wondering what to do: at that moment, lost between one particular second of time and another particular second of time, wondering why it's called a 'second' when certainly there is a 'first' and a 'third' that will tick by just as blithely as the second second. Choices. Nanowrimo or Yesowrimo? Coffee, cocoa, or tea? Bagel, muffin, or oatmeal? See a movie, browse for books, or shop for groceries? Too many choices. And then it hit me: the insight I'd been waiting for:

When you turn the last page of a calendar, you're done. No more. The end.

Well, that probably was not as dramatic as it could have been, but it fulfills the goal of cranking out a crank blog post before my first sip of coffee. Notice I pasted an hour glass instead of a calendar? That's got to mean something. Something profound, perhaps. Must ponder that. (That should take up an hour or so.) In the end I chose the muffin and the bookstore. I watched people come and go. Some of them stopped for a while, cracked book covers. Creepy! Others seemed as lost as me, wondering what to do between our lives, the here and now versus the whatever comes next. Some call it the weekend. End? Did someone just type 'w-e-e-k-e-n-d'?

Perhaps, I should have waited to write this until the first cup was finished. (The water has now boiled.) Then I would not need spellcheck. Then I could have been more verbose, more sanguine, more...whatever. I really should not blog on an empty stomach. Or when lack of sleep has caused the brain to wither. Or anytime in the month of November. Thanks for your patience. As always.

And remember: The blog you write may be your own!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Why I'm not joining the Nanowrimo cult!

It pains me to use the word cult but perhaps that is the most accurate word. Let's try to keep things in perspective, however: it's a good cult. You might say it's "cultilicious"!

November is the month of worship in the cult of Nanowrimo (what the uninitiated may call the "National Novel Writing Month"). It is chiefly for those whose nervous fingers cannot avoid the succulent keys. I have never been able to participate because of its unfortunate scheduling. You see, November is the fattiest meat of the fall semester and tough to cut; it's when I have the most day-job work to do. Sure, I could write a draft of a novel in a month--if I had no day job to tend to, if I had no other disruptions, and if I had the idea in advance. But that is really the challenge of it.

That sticker was from last year, when I did participate. I had no idea but grabbed an unfinished sci-fi novella that had been sitting around for years and plunked it into the microwave for 90 seconds. Then served it to my Nanowrimo muse. I "won" by completing 50,000+ words during the 30 days of the month. Granted, I started with a couple thousand and an outline but I finished with more than 55,000 words, anyway, thus earning me another cool sticker.

November for me is typically the lull season. The past few years I have had ideas stew during November and take root in a Word file sometime in February. I pound the keyboard through the spring months and cruise into a final page in the middle of the summer. I revise and edit into the fall and voila a new novel is born. Then it hits me: the lull. Writers know what this is and dread it. The Lull Month is full of doubts. Did I just write a bunch of crapola? Will I ever get another idea? What in the world will happen to me if I can't write anything more?

Then spring comes--although, for me, it's usually in December or January. And the process starts over again. November? Not the best time for me.

In 2014, I wrote my medical thriller vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN on the above schedule. This year, I wrote a new novel about an orphaned Inuit girl who grows up and saves the world (forthcoming), A GIRL CALLED WOLF. But now I am in the lull month again and have no ideas. I still have not finished the sci-fi novel from last year's Nanowrimo but it would be unfair to try to use that again to achieve some dubious fame. 

There is nobody in my circles who would be impressed at me writing 50,000 words in a month. Those who know me, know I can do it. This past summer, I wrote 55,000 words on a laptop while sitting in a hotel room in Beijing and teaching a class on the university campus across the street twice a week. (I blogged about that experience here.) However, I've always been a quality over quantity type of person and go through many waves of revision, tweaking a word here or there until I cannot contain the urge more.

But I digress....

I shall cheer on those who dive once again into uncharted waters--for what could be more uncharted than the lexical spaces within the gray matter of a twisted mind? 

The goal for celebrants of NaNoWriMo is to create from sacred mind-fire a 50,000 word book. By definition, that is the minimum length for something called a novel. That seems to be easy enough. My previous novels have been in the 72,000 to 128,000 range. However, let us not forget the time factor: one month--with the day job looming precariously over all.

When we are embroiled in the vagaries of daily life, we cannot simply sit down at a given moment and type out a story! 

Good luck to all, and to all a long night!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.