The Writing Life: Behind the Scenes of the FLU SEASON Series

Ever since we were stuck at home during our infamous lockdown era, when I blithely declared I shall write a pandemic novel because I then had enough time free to do it, I got into a regular pattern. I arose at about the same time as when I would go off to the job, grab some coffee, and sit myself at the computer freshly booted up. I would review any notes I'd made since the previous writing session as I started playing the musical soundtrack to the story. I usually had an idea of what came next so I would back up and read through what I'd previously written, editing as I went. I like to call this "thickening" the scene. I tend to write lean and go back to add all of the descriptions, character thoughts and feelings, and making sure there are enough nods and sighs. That sends me into unwritten territory. I do the best I can, knowing I will edit it the next day, and again later, as much as needed. As the music evokes the scene, I imagine sitting in a movie theater and watching the action unfold on the screen that's at the front of my mind. I try to get it all down on the computer screen as best I can.

The remainder of the day I do not write (but I continue to think through what I've just written and what may come next). Occasionally an idea flares up in the afternoon that will prompt me to write a little, at least enough that I won't forget it. Same with the evening. Once I am far enough into the story, it tends to stay with me, constantly playing in my head, sending me on scenarios of the next episode, running lines of dialog as though I've just left the theater after watching the entire movie. This cinematic process has been with me from before the pandemic pause yet it has especially been my method while working on the FLU SEASON series, which began as a stand-alone novel only to become a trilogy and now, as I work on the sixth book, a full series.

Perhaps it is easier working on a series because the world is the same, and you have the same cast of characters. However, characters grow up. That is my forte, I believe: being able to write a character as a child, then a teenager, a young adult, and on to an elderly person all while keeping the personality - and shifts of that personality due to aging and the various experiences which shape a person - identifiable as the same person. I first did that in my semi-biographical novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF where I fleshed out a compelling story of a more compelling real life of a friend of a friend. That book began in her infancy and took her up through her adult age. I hadn't planned anything but realized after finishing it that I had managed to achieve something special, yet I had to give credit to all of the then-recent study of psychology and life stages. With plenty of linguistic training, I could plausibly replicate the speech patterns of various ages, especially an uneducated child as well as an adult whose first language isn't English.

In the FLU SEASON series, I have done it again (hopefully) by bringing characters to life as babies and tending to them as they grow across the pages and even into a subsequent novel. Take Isla Baumann, for example, who is born toward the end of Book 1: THE BOOK OF MOM, narrated by Mom's teenage son Sandy. As a baby she doesn't have much to do, but in Book 2: THE WAY OF THE SON, when Sandy takes his wife and baby into the savage Outerlands, Isla starts to develop her own personality, even displaying unique supernatural powers in trying to communicate with her parents - who obviously do not understand her. At the beginning of Book 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS, Isla is a little girl of 4 and so attuned to her environment that she can serve as narrator of the novel. She goes through her life, from a child to a teenager, to young womanhood, to middle age and to the end of her days by the end of this book. Her perspective changes in keeping with the awful things and the good things that happen.

I'd thought that would be the end of the series, just a trilogy that said most of what I wanted to get across to readers experiencing a realistic near-future following the hardship of a 10-year pandemic and collapse of society that resulted from it. But I had more ideas. Toward the end of Book 3, society was rebuilding, returning to some semblance of order although we find it rather skewed in unpleasant ways.

In Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD 

I bring in Isla's last child, a boy named Fritz (named after the family patriarch) who was born at the end of Book 3. Now he is a grown man with a family but in trouble with the government due to his making of a video of elderly Isla telling her stores about the decades of trouble she lived through. But now the government wants to disavow all of the hardship, the official narrative being that the pandemic was mild and the decades of lawlessness weren't so bad. Fritz is a nervous man and gets into further trouble in the novel, but doing so reveals much of what is wrong with the new, rebuilt society. In Book 3, Fritz's family is mentioned briefly. In Book 4, we meet his children: 2 brothers and young Maggie, all stuck in the oppressive capital city.

Fritz narrates his own story in Book 4, but we get a glimpse of a 10 year-old Maggie. In Book 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER, she is a grown woman living out west and still figuring what to do with her life. She has the background of Isla's grandmother and father, who played the family's tuba before Isla took it over. But music is frowned upon in the capital and the tuba was put in a museum of naughty devices. The first step, Maggie decides with her older cousin Eve, is to return there and claim the tuba - if it still exists. Next she will start a kids band in her small town, enlisting the aid and advice of a music salesman from a nearby city. Both plans lead her into dangerous territory and constant trouble. By the end of the novel, Maggie is a mature woman set in her career. 

Maggie is the crossover character, tying the first three books to the second three books. Yet like the others mentioned above, she is introduced as a precocious child and we are allowed to follow her literally through her life into her senior years in Book 6: THE GRANDSONS (not yet published). Do not be confused by the title of this current work-in-progress, for the title refers to three characters who are each a grandson to one of the other characters - including a surprise guest in the final chapter. This final volume is expected to be ready later in 2025. I do not expect there will be a seventh book in the series; however, I will have set up the future world used in my already-publish epic fantasy novel: EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, which is set in the year 8000. In it, those characters make frequent references to an ancient war which occurs in the year 3000. Maggie passes to her reward in the later-2100s with the world already going mad and mentions made of what is happening in Maggie's lifetime that foreshadows these future events. (I've blogged about this linkage previously here.) I also managed to tie in my vampire trilogy (A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, SUNRISE, and SUNSET) which, being pre-pandemic when written, had characters in 2028 fail to mention such an event, thus correcting the timeline.

After five completed books in the series, I feel I know each of the principal characters as well as my own family, perhaps better, as though I've lived with them all of their lives - which I actually have. I was there when they were born and again when they die. This is the reason for writing, for imagining. It is a kind of role-playing game which is acceptable in polite society. I can play in the garden of my own design, and in that time and place, I can live out my remaining days with a fair amount of pleasure - which I'm happy to share with you. Thanks, as always, for your continuing support.

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

(C) Copyright 2010-2024 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.

Reconciling Past & Present

Life happens a little too fast sometimes. For example, I was minding my own business, hard at work revising the second book in my pandemic trilogy, FLU SEASON, when I was contacted by another author concerning a semi-biographical novel I wrote a few years ago: A GIRL CALLED WOLF.

Well, I do like to talk about my books. So the result was me being interviewed for a podcast by Nick Alimonos, author of the Aenya books, a series of fantasy novels (click the link to check them out). You can hear the podcast here - from his author webpage. Nick read the novel and apparently was impressed enough to want to ask me questions about it. He found me through social media and we set up an online meeting. He was particularly interested in how I took the mostly true experiences of the heroine and turned it into a novel. Our conversation, however, ranged far and wide, covering a variety of writer issues and our opinions of other books. (My voice doesn't sound too awful.)

The Trilogy Epidemic

Dear Readers, potential readers, and the merely curious,

Today I wish to address the issue of the trilogy - a series of novels consisting of exactly three volumes and comprising one continuous story or some combination of stories related in such a way that they may be marketed as a series.

I'm not suggesting there is a problem - other than the great proliferation of trilogies, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genre. In other genre, related books are sometimes considered a trilogy, usually because they have the same characters or setting, even though they may not have been considered a trilogy by the author.

For me, I have achieved a kind of trifecta - three trilogies (two completed and one in the process of being completed) - which gives me special status...and not much else.

My first trilogy began as a stand-alone book, THE DREAM LAND, which involved a young couple's misadventures through an interdimensional doorway and how they learned to function in their new realm while often trying to return home. Given the setting - an entire new planet - the possibilities for further stories were endless. I immediately began the second volume upon completion of the first, but I stopped when I ran into a plot conundrum. Then life got in the way, as it may for writers, and I did not finish that second volume (or publish the first book) until ten years later. When I resumed writing on the second book, I decided it had to become a trilogy, and I wrote the third volume straightaway as I concluded Book 2, DREAMS OF FUTURE'S PAST. The idea of a trilogy was not a thing in itself but merely a result of writing three novels involving the same principal players in the same setting. I simply enjoyed the story and kept writing, even with a comet approaching our favorite fictitious world in Book 3, DIASPORA.

I wrote two stand-alone novels after that sci-fi trilogy (A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and AIKO). Then, goaded by the Twilight series' portrayal of vampires, I wrote my own version, based on the finest medical research I could research. A DRY PATCH OF SKIN was intended as another stand-alone, a one-off tale of realistic vampire horror. Yet the ending kept nagging at me: more what-if questions. And so, a few years later, after writing two more stand-alone novels, I picked up the vampire story once more with the idea of making it a trilogy from the start. Titled SUNRISE and SUNSET, respectively, I picked up the story of my vampire hero a few years into his future - and our future - in the second volume and much further into the future in the third volume. I failed, however, to have characters mention the pandemic of 2020-2022 as they recounted their adventures since the first volume's 2014 setting (also written in 2014). (Upon finishing the trilogy, I contemplated a fourth book, making it a tetralogy. I started and then set aside a novel concerning the next generation.)

Then I returned to writing stand-alones. First I wrote a semi-biography based on a real person's life with fictionalized conclusion (A GIRL CALLED WOLF), my most-reviewed book. Then, challenged by my fantasy-writing friends, I wrote an epic fantasy involving dragons (EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS), which is my longest novel - not counting trilogies as a single story. But then I returned to the vampire story and wrote volumes two and three and consider it finished with no threat of a volume four.

After completing the vampire trilogy, I wrote a new novel (EXCHANGE) and I finished a previously written book which I had been revising forever (YEAR OF THE TIGER), as well as completing a sci-fi novel which I had left unfinished for several years (THE MASTERS' RIDDLE) which is told from the point-of-view of a non-human alien hero. So far, so good. 

Then we experienced that pandemic, had lockdowns and virtual school, and I thought it would be the perfect time to write a pandemic novel, a kind of post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama of some kind. I started something by describing my own experiences with the virus then fell silent. I couldn't actually write about something so serious while we were actually dealing with it in such a serious way, so I set it aside.

And then I retired from teaching English (literature, composition, linguistics) and had nothing much to do. So I picked up the pandemic novel scriblings and took another look at it. The main thing for me was to find the right way into the story - something more than coming up with a compelling first page. When something totally unrelated sparked an amusing idea, I knew I'd found the key to enter the story. Even then, I imagined a stand-alone book about a boy and his mother and her tuba fighting to survive in a lawless land. However, before I was very far into the first volume of FLU SEASON: THE BOOK OF MOM, I decided the story would continue into a second - and the inevitable third volume - making it a trilogy. Darn trilogies! Just when I think I'm back to stand-alones the trilogy pulls me back in!

One interesting aspect of my pandemic trilogy is the way Book 1 is actually two books. They make the journey from a chaotic city to the relative sanctuary of a coastal island, which was the story I intended to write when I started. They would reach safety and that would be that. (Sorry if this is a spoiler.) But what happens when they reach that place? I couldn't just leave them there and 'so that's all, folks!' So writing about their uncomfortable experiences on the island was practically another novel. Hence, the two sides of this first novel make it a little on the thick side, but it ends at a better place - and sets up the next book, which is FLU SEASON: THE WAY OF THE SON, which continues our characters' story. The third book will be titled FLU SEASON: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS to complete the FLU SEASON TRILOGY. Have you ever had so much flu season?

However, the second volume of FLU SEASON is more traditional in its structure and does not comprise two separate but related stories like the first volume, and therefore is thinner. In fact, compared to THE DREAM LAND and the vampire trilogy which has come to be named for its hero as the STEFAN SZEKELY TRILOGY, this second volume is shorter than the second volumes of my other trilogies, which tend to be longer because of much more complex things going on. If you look at other trilogies, including in movie series such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the second volume features the characters going on separate journeys, hence a dual story which comes together by the end.

The final point I wish to share is that this so-called pandemic trilogy was conceived as a trilogy almost from the start. Unlike my first two trilogies where the first book was written as a stand-alone, FLU SEASON is conceived and plotted as a trilogy, which is a different way of writing for me. However, such a project, seemingly vast in its early stages looking forward, has been a fairly easy and delightfully horrific story to write. I know my readers will be happy to know I enjoyed writing it. It has not been a harsh effort, a droll task to be accomplished, yet I do not relish the abuse and horrors I put my cast through. In FLU SEASON: THE BOOK OF MOM you will find a story told 'close to the vest' in as realistic, contemporary, visceral manner possible, a story which could begin wherever you happen to live, say, in the next couple weeks - although in the trilogy the pandemic has been going on for six years when the first book opens and begins its ninth year as Book 2 ends. 

Happy ending? Like life itself, there is good and bad to everything that happens and it is in that light that we must carry on. My only regret is that there will not be a fourth volume. Maybe another stand-alone will follow. We shall see.

Thanks for your support. Please leave a review on your favorite book review sites.

Your Humble Narrator

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

(C) Copyright 2010-2022 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.

On the Compression of Time

Greetings! 

Welcome to the last blog post of this year, a not so prestigious milestone in a year of diminishing blog posts. I've been busy deciding how best to do nothing. Writing is my only escape. That's my story, anyway. To keep the record consistent, however, I am uploading this post. Time flies, even with a broken wing, so this post is about time in fiction writing.

When I was writing my semi-biographical novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF, I was working from the events of a real person's life - a remarkable narrative, I believed, and worthy of telling and sharing with the world. I had gotten to know the story's real heroine via Facebook (we had a mutual friend), and I interviewed her about her childhood in Greenland and what followed. However, when transforming someone's real life into a fictionalized version, I was struck by the conundrum of how to end the novel since she would continue on in real life while the novel would have an ending.

Taking the events of a life, twenty-five years at the time, and hitting only the highlights and omitting the rest is often a recipe for a cheesy Hallmark movie, which was not what I wanted. I had to put myself in the mind of a child describing an unfamiliar world, then as a teenager with teenage problems, then be a young adult discovering new worlds and adapting constantly to changing conditions. That was the kind of narrative that intrigued me, hence my desire to collaborate on this "based on a true life" novel. (You can read more about this project here.)

I learned clever ways to compress the timeline, sometimes going medias res (starting in the middle of the action) and backfilling needed info, for example. I divided the novel into longer chapters which corresponded to phases in her life, based on different locations as she moved from one home to the next. It was rather like writing a fantasy quest story but set in modern times - albeit with primitive conditions at the outset. It begins in the arctic and it ends in the arctic. The ending I chose, approved by the woman whose story I was writing, brings us full circle and provides symmetry and offers a profound message about resilience. 

For those readers who wish for an update (no spoilers for the book), Anna is quite well, living her life in Winnipeg, Canada - from where we last saw her heading north in the book. She had a real arctic adventure (with better results than in the book) during the covid crisis in 2020 working med-evac communications from a town in Nunavut. All is well with her and her son - and a new baby. 

A timeline story like A GIRL CALLED WOLF is what I seem to be writing now in my work-in-progress, POST. The chapters and the scenes within chapters parallel the day to day experiences of the cast. Some days are more interesting than others. I expend more text on the exciting days and next to none on the routine days. Such is the quirk of narrative. It's whatever the narrator deems worth narrating. In this new novel - a post-pandemic / post-apocalyptic tale of a boy and his mom and her tuba - I recount how they fled from a chaotic city hoping to survive in the countryside but finding dangers along the way. Changing plans and directions several times brings them to a new destination but one where all is not what it seems at first.

So again I am faced with telling the story of a family and their activities day by day. To speed things up, I skip days. I compress time. I slow down for real-time narrative and go into overview mode to get to the next interesting thing that happens. It's rather like the opera method (read more here) where the scene with the moment by moment action is the aria - a full set piece that displays detail, emotion, and purpose - while the other parts of the story are needed only to move you to the next aria, what we call the recitative. I enjoy writing the aria scenes (though often complex and challenging) and manage to type out some kind of recitative during the drafting stage to be filled out better later.

I find that I'm starting scenes ("sub-chapters") in my new novel most often with dialog, even as a short phrase, then filling in what's needed to know via the ensuing conversation. Otherwise, I begin with a setting description. For important plot points, you have to write out the scene in the detail you would find if acted out on stage. Cannot compress time, cannot gloss over, cannot merely suggest or hint at. You must write it out as though choreographing every movement and every utterance precisely. All right, yes, you can skip over mundane talk: instead of exact speech in quotation marks (e.g., "I shall go forth and write," the bard proclaimed.) you simply say what the character said without having to write out what he said exactly (e.g., The bard proclaimed he would go forth and write). 

Where's my books?

At 95,000 words, I should be nearing the end of my new novel. However, the way the story is proceeding, I could follow the cast members' adventures forever. I only need to invent more things for them to do. If not, I shall have to end it sometime, somewhere, somehow. I'm currently wrestling with how to end the novel. I have three ideas: a happy, hopeful ending; a sad/tragic but inevitable ending; or the vague could-go-either-way ending full of profound meaning. Place your vote in the comments below...and then go have yourself a wonderful holiday season.

Many thanks for your continuing patronage!

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

(C) Copyright 2010-2021 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.

Greetings & Salutations!

I see you. I know what books you are reading. And which books you have avoided reading. Perhaps you only read certain genre, particular themes, about characters much like yourself...or quite the opposite. Either way, I forgive you. It is not too late to pick up a copy of one of mine. The odds favor you enjoying them.

So after lazing through a dull and dreary holiday pause, I pondered the first blog post of this, the year of 2021, that of the Ox. I've been thinking of "years of" for several years and finally have brought out my novel of a similar name: YEAR OF THE TIGER which is set, as you may guess, in a year designated for tigers; in this case 1986...before computers, cell phones, social media, and TSA checkpoints and a pandemic. Although the first inkling of the complete story was composed in 1983, I waited to share it until I thought the world needed it as a profound distraction for the viral dilemma filling our lives in 2020. 

Which leads me to this blog's topic: How do I get the titles for my novels?

As 2020 turned surreptitiously into 2021, I realized that I have been at this writing effort for ten years. Sure, I wrote before, but it was not until 2011 that things began to improve exponentially. (You can read about this career arc in earlier blog posts.) I dared offer a "weaker" work to an untried publisher, willing to throw this story away if the deal fell through or I got burned by unscrupulous purveyors of publishing pomp. AFTER ILIUM is a contemporary tale of misdirected romance in the exotic setting of northwest Turkey and the ruins of ancient Troy. Troy also had the name Ilium. The 'after' part refers to what happens to our hero after he visits the site with his new, older lady friend. Much of the story is how he struggles to get back to her after they become separated. So...after Ilium. 

(Click the link in the upper right corner of this blog page to get a copy of any of these books for yourself.)

At the same time, my offering for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition that year caught the eye of another small publisher and we tried to make a go of a career launch. A novel I had already written and submitted to the ABNA became our focus: A BEAUTIFUL CHILL. While working on a revision of this campus relationship novel, I also got another novel, AIKO, involved before the publisher dropped both books, and me, over creative differences. The title of the first novel refers to a phrase the heroine says, describing a feeling of loneliness or a melancholia which can only be alleviated by brief random encounters, such as with a professor on her campus. The second novel is, obviously, a Japanese girl's name, who is the center point of a story involving a man's search for the daughter he suddenly discovers he has. He goes to Japan to claim her but it is not an easy mission.

At that time I wanted to bring forth my magnum opus, a science fiction book revolving around interdimensional voyaging, an alternate universe, and the twisted reign of a pair of high school science nerds who find their way there. I called it THE DREAM LAND, later with volume two and three, The Dream Land trilogy. Originally titled simply Dreamland, I found a book in a bookstore one day about the Coney Island amusement park in New York City which had the same title. So I changed mine to The Dreamland. And wouldn't you know it? Another book already with that title, so another change to what it is today. The three volume epic is quite the tour de force of interdimensional intrigue with a lot of steampunk elements and a fatal comet, a personal favorite.

With the vampire craze reaching its peak, I became enamored with the medical side of the condition and swore to write a medically accurate story of transformation into a vampire. I titled my novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN after the first noticeable symptom which marks our hero's descent into monstrous madness as he seeks a cure only to surrender to his family's curse. A couple books later, I had ideas for continuing the story, making it into a trilogy, so I sought matching titles for two books and came up with SUNRISE for volume 2 and SUNSET for volume 3. They fit: Sunrise tells about his rise and reintroduction into polite society. Sunset sets the theme for the downfall of his vampire empire.

Between volume 1 and the other two of the Stefan Szekely vampire trilogy, I wrote a novel based on the real childhood of someone I met online (a relative of a Facebook friend) whose experiences I believed would make a good story. Because the heroine's name meant "wolf" in her native language, we agreed on the title A GIRL CALLED WOLF - slightly different than our first choice A Girl Named Wolf which was already a nordic folk band's name. I crafted a novel from a list of her adventures gleaned from many interviews and added a fictitious conclusion sequence.

My colleagues at Myrddin Publishing have championed the fantasy genre so I boldly declared I would write a fantasy, too. In fact, I asserted, I would title it Epic Fantasy just to make clear what it was. I was further challenged to include dragons in the story. No problem. I made the title of my longest novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS - yes, with the asterisk, just to be a little tongue-in-cheek. While starting off in an easy manner, the tale of an unjustly exiled dragonslayer on a quest to find the dragons' breeding ground and kill them all to regain his position, I found myself exploring all kinds of big ideas and profound themes by the end of it. I declared when I had finished it that I would never write again because I had "said" everything I had to say in this tome. Then I returned to the vampire theme....

In summer 2019, I had an idea burst into my head that I had to write - and put aside what was trying to be the 4th book of the vampire trilogy. EXCHANGE was a contemporary drama revolving around a mass shooting and the surviving husband/father who must put his life back together while dealing with the arrival of a Chinese exchange student who doesn't know what has happened to her host family. You can guess where the title came from, and yet there are several kinds of "exchanges" that occur throughout the story, including a couple big twists as we rush to the final pages.

The Year of the Rat (2020) was not anything like what we wanted. I delayed launching Exchange until finally I decided to hit the button. People had plenty of time to read but it seemed few were, aside from the apocalyptic plague novels. I read a few of those myself; I even tried to start writing one. Instead, I worked on yet one more revision of my YEAR OF THE TIGER novel which I had kept putting off because other books poked me more. With not much going on and nobody buying books anyway, I did the only thing I could: I put it out there onto the bookshelves of the world. I will let you guess where the title of this book came from. Hint: all the action occurs during the year 1986.

The kitschy cover for my 2014 NaNoWriMo effort.

My next novel started in the 2014 National Novel Writing Month competition, where I wrote the first 55,000 words of it but still unfinished. It is a science fiction tale of alien abduction (the alien is abducted, not a human abducted by aliens) and his escape and attempt to return home (but not at all like that movie E.T.). I'm nearing the end of a final polishing. It should be coming out by summer 2021. The title is THE MASTERS' RIDDLE - which refers to the question of why the evil captors took our hero away from his home world. It may be my last novel. 

Oh, I'll keep writing, but I may not get to the end of what I have left to work on during my idle days of retirement. Stay tuned for the amazing conclusion.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

(C) Copyright 2010-2021 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!

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(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.

What's the deal with Father's Day?

So I'm sitting comfortably at my computer, writing my new work-in-progress (a sequel to my 2014 vampire novel), passing the 10,000 word mark, and it hits me! I should be promoting my Father's Day novel, the one titled AIKO. It's a kind of Father's Day story, after all. Father's Day is here again and everyone is doing a grad and dad marketing blitz. 

Everyone knows that grads are tired of reading. Dads tend to be reading averse, too. So maybe books do not make the best gifts. Job search books for grads, perhaps. A book on dad's current hobby, maybe. But fiction too often falls to the dark, dusty shelf of well-intended gifts. Next to the neckties. (My own father would rather read through a stack of history and politics books before he would ever crack the cover of a novel.)

(Sure, AIKO is a novel about a man discovering he is a father and the many obstacles he must overcome to really make it true, to go get his child, but that would be my pitchman talking. Ignore him.)

So how many books are there about Father's Day, anyway? Or about fathers in general? Mothers are easy. Brothers and sisters are common. The sweet aunt and the generous uncle are often seen in literature. In my vast reading, Fathers are generally the bad guys, villainous, cruel, authoritarian, mean, and uncaring. They are more often than not portrayed as abusers. Sometimes they only appear as the bad memory of a protagonist and we get a couple of incidents to showcase dad's unpleasantness. (I confess doing that in A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and A GIRL CALLED WOLF; fathers in my other novels are less abusive, thankfully.) It's almost a stereotype. Fathers get a bad rap, I think; we only hear about the bad ones. (Think of Darth Vader, a.k.a. "Dark Father", and others of his ilk.)

I think about the fathers in my other books. My protagonists seem to relate to their fathers much as I relate to my own. Funny, that coincidence. Or am I drawing on the only role model I have? (I'm an only child, as well, and my protagonists tend not to have siblings, also--or siblings that are throw-away characters, mentioned but not active in the story.) In AFTER ILIUM, the young hero dislikes his dentist father's strictness and is glad to be on his own touring Greece and Turkey. In EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, our dragonslayer hero's father was a military commander killed in battle, so our hero carries only the memory of a violent, frightening man. In A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, our poor hero, transforming into a vampire, is angry at his father for not warning him and for sending him away to live with an aunt. In AIKO, our hero discovers he is a father, then struggles to find his child. There is a brief mention of his father being stationed in Japan after WWII--as my own father was. After the war, my father went to college on the G.I. Bill and became a social studies teacher--later, a librarian. 

When I think of my father, the image that comes most readily is of him sitting in his reading chair, reading: reading in such a focused, determined way that nothing could disturb him. Thus, he was apart from everyday activity, on the sideline, uninvolved in my experiences. And that is what I learned of fatherhood: 1) provide the income, 2) relax at home after the job away from home, 3) fix things around the house and yard when needed. Also, 4) be master of the castle, 5) enforce the rules, and when necessary (6) represent the family like a knight in shining armor when some authority or institution challenges us. He is the (7) champion, the protector, the lord of the manor. And that is, for better or worse, how I portray the fathers in my books: powerful yet distant. Art imitating life!

If you've been following this blog you probably know I'm a dad. It's a weird feeling knowing there is someone living in the world partly as a result of my actions. Sure, we can imagine clones, or cyborgs, but another human? That's crazy. Like us and yet not like us. And eventually they go their own ways and have their own lives and we scratch our heads and think What just happened? Now my offspring is in college, studying to be a nurse. This is after going through Army training to be a combat medic--a course I doubt I could've made it through if I were the same age!

As I think back on the past 20 years, I can pinpoint a few things I did that may have helped raise this baby to adulthood. But there are just as many other things I did that I have no clue about. Maybe they helped, maybe they hurt. Only my grown child can tell. If it is even possible to figure that out conclusively. But I'm pleased, even proud, of how this googly little bundle of joy became this awesome adult who vaguely resembles me in appearance and words and behavior. 

So for now, I must pass the reins over to my protégé. No longer do I need to concern myself so much with me doing great things and achieving this and that and tell my child about, you know, the things I can boast about. Now it is time for me to boast about my grown child, to note what this new adult is doing, and praise the new things, the new deeds, of this adult--to praise and be proud of what my child has done more than being happy at what I have done. Oh, I'll still write books; I must or die trying. But now it's no longer all about me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(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.

Naming Names in Epic Fiction

As a kid, I never liked my name. It was too easy for other kids to deliberately mispronounce just to tease me. So once I started writing stories, I thought up several cool pen names to replace the name my parents had foisted upon me. However, I gave up pseudonyms eventually because I decided I needed to use my real name so family and friends would believe I actually wrote the books.

The subject of names continues to impact my life, especially my writing life, because as writers know, names are important. After all, Adam was tasked with naming the flora and fauna of the Garden of Eden, and with each pronouncement, it became real. Each time we cast a label on something, we could be said to name it. And naming creates powerful associations. Our characters’ names are no different, never more so than in fantasy. 

In contemporary fiction, however, names are easy (supposedly) because they are familiar words friends and neighbors might bear. I used to read through baby-name books to find just the right name for a character. Surnames were tougher. I looked in phone books.

Perhaps not every character fiddles with his or her name. Thank goodness they seldom complain. I imagine, however, that characters do what real people do, and fiddling with and changing and using just the right name is as important to them as it is to a lot of us. Sometimes a name is actually a crucial element of a character's psyche, motivation, or raison-d'être.

For example, in my contemporary novel A BEAUTIFUL CHILL, the heroine, Íris (note the accent mark), is from Iceland and the correct Icelandic pronunciation of her name matters to her. As it turns out, her name is about all she has that is truly hers, so she firmly corrects anyone who speaks her name with the English pronunciation; her friends know how to say it and by that quirk she marks them as friends. “My name is Íris. Like the letter E,” she scolds the male protagonist early on. It is literally a defining moment for her: 'Get my name right, or we’ll have nothing to do with each other.' Her name is a major motif throughout the book.

In another example, the young man in THE DREAM LAND science fiction trilogy who in the last book takes over the story from our hero is named "Chucker". It's a nickname used by his mother since he was a little boy, and since he is now searching for her on another world, it has meaning to him. Visiting Earth on his travels, he meets up with a detective who agrees to help him.

“What do they call you in school? Is it Chuck or Charlie?”

“Chucker is what they call me—but I hate that name. Mom was crazy naming me that. Chuck R. Tucker. The ‘R’ stands for René. Sissy name, ain’t it? That was her dad’s name. Her name was Tucker, and after she got married it was McElroy. Then she changed it back to Tucker. My dad’s name is Chuck. That’s what Grandma said. So everybody calls me Chucker Tucker—ya know, like Chuck R. Tucker? Hate it.”

(For more instruction on naming the characters in THE DREAM LAND Trilogy, click to this blog post.)

And in the ultimate example, Alex Parris is in love with everything about the Trojan War in AFTER ILIUM. In fact, when he meets an older woman named Elena on a cruise ship bound for Turkey, where he will tour the ruins of Ilium, he cannot help but imagine himself as young Paris carrying off his prized Helen to the storied walls of Ilium. That name association is the start of a whole lot of trouble for Alex. Bearing the wrong name is as bad as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In my Japanese romance novel AIKO we again place a name at the center of the story. Of course it has to be a Japanese name. "Aiko" literally means "love" and "child" (愛子) - not an unusual name in Japan but one with other associations to English-language readers. Aiko's mother's family name also has meaning. Nakamori means "in the middle of the forest" if you translate the kanji symbols to their basic meaning. And, yes, our protagonist does search for her in the forest of northern Japan.

Names are important in another recent novel A GIRL CALLED WOLF. The young heroine's birth name means wolf in her native language. After struggling on her own after her mother dies in the harsh landscape of Greenland, she treks to the nearest village. In time she adopts a new name, a Christian name, Anna, but she continues to carry the "wolf" associations with her no matter what name she uses. The associations with "Wolf" are an important feature of the character - a character based on a real person whose real name was "Wolf".

So let me suggest, when you select a character’s name - whether it’s some common Anglo-Saxon name, a Biblical name, or something Chinese, Indian, or whatever - keep in mind the associations the name may have. Think about how the character carries his/her name. How picky is your character about the name? Also, what nicknames may ensue: Elizabeth is a noble name but it boils down to Lizzy. How does the character react to other people using or misusing their names? Will people see Stephen and pronounce it Stefan? Names become another element, another layer, of a character’s identity.

Because what is a name but a marker of identity? It's proof of existence, and for a fictional persona brought magically to life in the pages of a story, existence is everything.

Your homework for next time is to come up with names for the following stock characters in an epic fantasy:

• The brave, burly hero who is good with swords
• An old woman who mixes potions in her cave
• Two little boys who like to play pranks on villagers
• A beautiful prized mount (which may not necessarily be a horse)
• The charming princess who may or may not have magic powers

NEXT: Naming Names in EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
(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.