Update #2 on The Preppy Suicides

Today I completed the second block of my novel, which covers everything in the school year from Halloween to Christmas. I am rather pleased and a little shocked that I blew through all that material in just a little under five weeks. It's certainly encouraging.

I am feeling a little relieved now that I'm past the "romance cluster," not because I don't love me some romance, just because I have concerns about whether or not it's too much of a distraction from the story in progress. I know the significance these relationships will play in the greater arc of the novel, but I might be too close to the work to see it with an objective eye. I suppose my beta readers will let me know.

I'll be spending the next few days polishing those chapters up for said beta readers, and then will move onto the third block, which will cover January and February, and I'm looking forward to it, because this is the place where the shit seriously hits the fan. This is where the story starts to take some serious twists and turns and characters start to make some very interesting (if not wise) choices.

I cannot fucking wait.

Go me! First draft is 40% complete!

Working It

I really need to post here more often, but the truth is I'm usually so busy writing, I don't find a lot of time to write about writing. In an effort to keep everyone up to speed on what I'm doing, I'll give a brief rundown of what's been going on.

Earlier this year, there was some serious interest in a pilot script I wrote called "Luminaries," an all-original, American mash up of two of my most beloved genres: Sentai and Teen Drama. The producer in question, the vice-president of a notable company out in L.A., really liked it and wanted to pitch it to a few networks, including SyFy, which would be my first choice, personally. I wrote up a treatment, we even got an artist on board to do some concept art for the pitch. Everything was going along swimmingly, and then...

The president of the company vetoed it. Suffice it to say, I was not happy.

After this, I returned to my prose efforts, where I'm focusing most of my energy these days. My main project, or my "alpha" as I like to call it, I have discussed here before: The Crossroads Chronicles, a pentalogy about a fictional utopian society on the bank of the Delaware and the dark dystopian underbelly its facade hides.

I also have an idea for a fantasy trilogy, The Zodiac Cycle, which is still in its infancy. Not even its infancy, really; more like its gestation. Despite having had a major breakthrough on the series' mythology and internal history, that one's not going to be ready for a while.

Today, I'm going to talk about my "beta" project, a novel that I'm still working on a title for. As I was working on the first book of The Crossroads Chronicles, I realized that it was going to take me a lot longer than I'd anticipated. I thought perhaps I should find a simpler story, something simpler and shorter that I could publish sooner. I thought a lot about it, but -- as anyone who's read my introductory post knows -- I'm kind of prone toward epics, big sweeping stories about diverse casts of characters. I don't really do simple. Not often.

So, I asked myself what really resonated with me? What was something simple, something undiluted, something powerful that I wanted to express? I don't really go into my personal life on here too much, and I intend to keep things that way, but suffice it to say I went through an incredibly painful and traumatic break-up in early 2010. The thing is, it wasn't a clean break. The trauma was subtle and insidious, and I didn't recognize it until long after the damage had been done. Once I did, it was like the breaking of a spell. I could finally see things with some perspective, and it was that very perspective that allowed me to move on. And while that story is very interesting to me, I'm not convinced many people would really care about it. It's not groundbreaking bestseller material is all I'm saying. It needed something else.

Coincidentally, at that very time, my finances were pretty much in the shitter. They're still in the shitter. I was unemployed and running out of money at every turn. Things got pretty desperate, and more than once, I joked with my friends "I am this close to turning tricks just to make ends meet." And then one day, I realized that that would be a great story, the perfect way to frame my tale of the re-assessment of a young guy's self worth. So, I married the two ideas, and thus have my beta.

This untitled project is about a guy whose life is pulled out from under him and turns to online-solicited prostitution to make ends meet. The thing is, he isn't some gritty, urbane hustler. He's not tragic and sexy or some kind of meth addict. He's just a guy with a lot of debts and a very utile history of promiscuity, who finally finds a way to profit off something he's good at. What, on the surface, appears to be merely a funny, strange story about a broke twenty-something going to extremes to get over a broken heart and an empty wallet reveals itself to really be a story about being loved and desired and how we measure our own sense of self-worth.

However, this could easily fall into the trap of endorsing certain cliches and beliefs to which I don't happen to subscribe, so there were a couple of guidelines I set for myself.

1) While this is a story about realizing what you're worth, it is not about how being promiscuous devalues someone. I think that idea is bullshit, and I will not have any characters of mine paying horrible, moralistic, karmic debts for their sexuality. The hero doesn't flee to the safety and "sanity" of monogamy after some dark adventure through the underworld. He starts the story a slut and he ends it a slut, and for a while in the middle, he profits off his libido. That's it. And while his brief career in prostitution does raise certain questions for him, it's neither the source nor the symptom of his problems. It is merely a mirror he holds up to his life that enables him to see a few things lurking over his shoulder. Piggybacking off of this point...

2) This is a story about insight and growth. It's about the emotional consequences (good and bad) of the hero's actions. For me to dwell on the legal consequences or hold that tension over the reader's head would be a distraction that serves no purpose. So, right on page 1, the narrator tells the reader straight up that he never got arrested, never got raped, and never got infected with anything. The reader learns right from the get-go that those kinds of consequences are not what this story is about, and to dwell on them would be missing the point.

3) That the hero's appraisal of his own worth would not come from the acquisition of a new boyfriend. I'm not saying he doesn't get one. I'm not saying he does. Regardless, it could not and would not be where his revelation comes from. It has to come from within. He needs to be the one validating himself, not feeding off the validation of someone else.

Once these guidelines were set in place, I had my story, and I got to work. And I have to say, I'm having a lot of fun writing it. For someone who tends to go epic with intricate, multi-layered plots, having one simple, heartfelt story with some tasty subtext is a welcome change of pace. The story is moving along very quickly, and it's quite refreshing to have a project that's so uncomplicated, which is not to say it's simplistic; just simple.

I have one protagonist, two supporting characters, one antagonist, and one major love interest. Liberating does not even begin to cover it. I'm also writing in the first person, which is something new for me. I'm so used to having that third-person perspective, always one step removed from a character's thoughts to the reader's experience, but this time... no filter. It's just coming from the character directly to the reader. It's very exciting and a bit scary, as it's a new approach for me, but I'm riding it out to see where it takes me. It's actually leaving me a little raw and vulnerable as I write, which I think will ultimately give the piece a flavor it wouldn't otherwise have.

So, all in all, things are looking good. I'll let you guys know when I have a title. Until then, I'll just keep plugging.

Oh, and for those of you wondering if I plan on being so bitter and petty as to eviscerate my ex-boyfriend in fiction for the purpose of exorcising the last of my demons, please let me assure you that yes... yes, I do.

The Zodiac Cycle

I've always been into astrology. I don't think the horoscopes in the Times are worth the paper they're printed on, but I've known too many hornball Scorpios, meticulous Virgos, and delusional Pisces to think there's nothing to it. It's a hobby, and I'm not fluent in the mythos, but I have a better working understanding than most. This is precisely why it drives me fucking crazy when nobody in fiction gets it right.

Usually, outside of his or her own sign, writers don't know jack about astrology, and yet insist on using it for a witty one-liner, a one-dimensional character quirk, or even a plot point. And they do it wrong almost every time. I remember several years back there was a short-lived comic series I read of, hyped in Wizard magazine. Reign of the Zodiac was about a world where twelve peoples, each for one sign of the Zodiac, were in the midst of political strife. When it seemed the writers were adopting the elemental aspects of the signs and using them as a plot point, I was intrigued and hopeful.

Then I read the first issue. "Steaming pile of crap" doesn't even begin to cover it.

In addition to being poorly written, they got the cultures all wrong. I mean ALL WRONG. Virgo, the sign of pragmatism, analysis, and order being represented by a shallow, foppish, decadent prince (and not in an intentionally ironic way) was just wrong. I couldn't even make it to Issue #2. Well, that had been disappointing. I vowed then and there that one day I'd write a Zodiac-themed story, and I'd get it right! And then I pretty much immediately forgot about it.

A few years later, I caught Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica, one major element of which was the Twelve Colonies of Man, Aerilon, Tauron, Gemenon, etc. I thought, "Okay, interesting. Oh, hey, Caprica is the seat of government and politics. That's actually pretty right on. Maybe there's hope." Then Gemenon became the world of religious fundamentalism (should've been Picon), Aerilon was known as a primarily agricultural world (should've been Virgon), and Sagittaron? Thinly veiled Christian Scientists (I have no idea). There was some minor improvement in The Plan, where Libran was noted for its court system, but for the most part it was clear the writers really hadn't given it much thought. And even when this was amended later (apparently, an elaborate document on the characteristics, cultures, and economies of the Twelve Colonies was written between BSG and Caprica), I highly doubted it was based on any kind of astrological lore.

This awoke the fire in me anew, but what to do? I had no idea. I mean, building a fantasy world from scratch... that's a tall order. And I didn't even have a story or characters to work with, much less a medium. That was a recipe for disaster. So, I thought, "You know what? Fuck it. Build the world. Build the world and the cultures in it with as much thematic accuracy as possible and let that world tell you what the story is.

So I got to work.

For nearly a year, I'd been devising geographical domains, ethnic and cultural templates, economies and religions for these twelve zodiac tribes. I took into account each sign's archetypical traits, its elemental designation, and behavioral quality. For instance, Aries is the cardinal fire sign. Active fire made me think volcanoes. This combined with the Arian tendencies toward rough edges and confrontation made me think of the Vikings, so their environment would be akin to Iceland, a subtropical volcanic terrain. And from there, I began to further develop the culture. And then onto the others.

And then slowly, quietly, a plot began to form. As it did, a structure came and I realized I was looking at a novel. And then I realized I was looking at three. Now, I don't subscribe to this fad nowadays that states everything cool needs to be a trilogy. Stand-alones are fantastic, but 1) The trilogy structure works well for a reason; 2) I've always been an epic kind of guy. My stories do indeed grow in the telling, sometimes even just the dreaming; and 3) it was just. too. perfect.

I decided to call the trilogy The Zodiac Cycle. It's simple, descriptive, got some nice word play going on there. Each volume would be split into four sections or books, each of those representing one of the signs of the zodiac, going through it in sequence, starting with Aries, ending with Pisces. Each sign's book would feature that culture in a prominent role, but wouldn't exclude the others. That way it would keep things from getting too predictable. Just because Leo wouldn't come until the beginning of Volume Two doesn't mean we won't hear about or even see them in Volume I, and other cultures could play important roles in the Leo segment, but Leo will prove in that book to be the most important. In the beginning of it? In the end? Who knows? So...

VOLUME ONE covers Aries to Cancer.
VOLUME TWO covers Leo to Scorpio, putting the sign of intrigue and mystery right at the end of the second installment. Nice!
And VOLUME THREE covers Sagittarius to Pisces.

I'm not going to give away what the myth arc is really all about, but I can say that as we're starting in Aries, the protagonist is a young Arian man of about twenty, and the story follows his journey though the world. Aries being the sign of energy, initiative, and impulsivity, it seemed a great place to start with a character, giving him a lot of room to grow from his enlightenment and increasing worldliness.

I am more and more excited about The Zodiac Cycle every day, and I can't wait for even more elements to take shape. Without giving too much away, here's a basic idea of what can be found in Volume One: Rising Signs.

In the first "book," Aries, we are introduced to our protagonist, Aerik, who is neither the classic hero nor the bad-ass rogue. He is simply a man of his culture, which will be admirable, repugnant, or both, depending on the personal values of the reader. In his efforts to find his friends, several of whom were serving aboard a ship that's mysteriously gone missing, Aerik comes across Sianna, a common Scorpian girl far from her homeland, on the run from a strange and relentless cult hell-bent on her abduction. Sianna doesn't know what they want with her and has no intention of getting close enough to them to ask. Overburdened with troubles of his own, Aerik is content to leave Sianna to her fate until he realizes that not only is she a useful traveling companion, but she just might be the key to discovering where his friends are... assuming they're still alive. In the process, they'll pick up lots of hints and clues that, while irrelevant to their initial goals, will awaken them to an impending conflict that will change the word as they know it forever.

No, they do not fall in love. Ever. Did you really think I was going to be that pedestrian?

More to come as I have it.

Sibling Rivalry

I have been very busy these last few months. Very, very, very busy. After about a two-month detour from writing my first novel, time spent prepping the pilot script and pitch materials for an opportunity that fell through at the last minute, I'm now back in a prose groove. It took some doing, but I'm here.

My novel, the first book in a planned pentalogy, is a labor of love. When people ask me how long I've been working on it, it's a difficult question to answer. Perhaps because there are several answers. Any writer can tell you that projects shift and change, stories grow in the telling, as Tolkien once said. So, how long have I been working on it?

I came up with the original idea for The Crossroads Chronicles, then a TV series called Crossroads, early in my senior year of high school, in late 1997.

I came up with the greater idea, of which the original idea was merely one element, about a year later.
 
I wrote the pilot script shortly thereafter.

I wrote several revisions and completely different scripts over the next few years.

I realized the story would be better served in prose than as a TV series, and made the decision to convert everything over in 2007, nearly a decade after I'd had the initial idea. I wrote the first three or four chapters when I realized that I was having far too much trouble, and that it was time to do what I'd been putting off for a long, long time: writing the backstory. Three years later, I was done. Trust me, it's very elaborate.

This past winter, I sat down and got back to writing the actual narrative. After some fooling with format and structure, I found my groove. I'm now back in the swing. It's coming along great, and I'm extremely excited.

Here's the funny:

I have another prose project, a story I've wanted to tackle for a while, one that I've only recently decided should be prose. Unlike The Crossroads Chronicles, which takes place here in the world we know, this project is a fantasy epic, which meant building the world from scratch. As one might imagine, that's a LOT of work. It was only a year ago that I finally took that idea, the vaguest of concepts, and actually started working out a story. As of today, I have developed that world significantly. I've got miles to go, but it's a solid start. I also have the basic story in mind, though the details are still very vague. I have a flawed, compelling protagonist, three supporting protagonists, one minor character of ambiguous alignment, and an antagonist group, if not specific antagonist characters yet.

Most people would think that this is a sign that the latter project is better. After all, it's coming together so easily and with such strength that it must be a stronger idea, certainly more so than The Crossroads Chronicles, which has been evolving slowly over nearly fifteen years. Most people would think so.

Most people aren't writers.

The thing is, stories are like kids: they're different and grow at different speeds in different directions. They require different amounts of attention, different types of nurturing, different levels of patience, and different degrees of analysis.

The Crossroads Chronicles is close to my heart. It's a story with characters I love and a message -- more than one, actually -- that I deeply believe in. And it's taking its time. And that's okay. It will mature and come of age on its own schedule, not mine. I've tried to force the hand of evolution. It never works. This new story, it's flowing nicely. I won't be starting on the narrative any time soon, probably not for a year or two at least, and I'm not worried about it.

Things will ebb and flow, and you have to let them. There's something to be said for discipline, for just sitting down and pushing through a problem or a block, but you can't run a current through a burnt out circuit. More and more, I've found my greatest strength in my craft is trusting in my instincts, the things that can't be taught, my writer's intuition, if you will.

I don't treat these projects equally. Like a good parent, I give each of my kids what they need (if not what they want) when they need it. And we're all of us doing just fine.


For details on this new project, see my next post.

Conflicts of Interest

There are all kinds of stories: funny ones, moving ones, the kind of that can awaken something in you that you'd long thought dead. They can be small character studies, sweeping epics, simple, or layered with meaning. However, for all the variety, all the contrast, there is one thing that all stories must have.

Conflict.

We need it. We crave it. All stories are built on it. There's just one problem. Most conflict is fucking boring. Have you ever been sitting around, watching your favorite show, and then realized within about five minutes not only where the plot is going, but why you're going to end up groaning for the next hour? It's because the conflict sucks. There are a lot of reasons this happens and not just in television, though TV does tend to be the worst offender.

The reason for this is that most conflict is false. Most conflict is about shit that just. Doesn't. Matter. When you've got to talk yourself into why the stakes are high, they're not. False conflict is all around us, infesting our fiction like rats.

I want to be perfectly clear, false conflict is not the same as fantastic conflict. Trekking into Mordor so that the One Ring can be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom: this is a fantastic conflict, but the emotions it fuels are real. The struggles and choices the characters make would affect most real people in exactly the same way, given the circumstances.

False conflict is the kind of conflict where, if the characters behaved with even a modicum of maturity for, like, thirty seconds, the plot wouldn't happen. This can occur by many means.

1) The characters could become very stubborn about an issue that it is positively ridiculous for them to be stubborn about. Sure, people can have sore spots or even a petty issue here and there, but there are some things where, if anyone really feels that strongly about it, the character just becomes irritating or altogether less likable. "But we need them to disagree! We need our conflict!" You need a different conflict that isn't predicated on bullshit.

2) Miscommunication. Oh, the comedy of errors, a classic! To some people. To me, they rarely come off well. Maybe it's the product of being raised in a household where miscommunication led to substance abuse problems and loads of family therapy, but I don't find it very amusing. In fact, I don't appreciate misunderstandings in a story unless the entire point of them is "misunderstandings are dangerous." To me, miscommunication is the stuff of tragedy, because what is tragedy ultimately but really sad shit that could have been avoided?

If Carol gets mad at Frank for something she thought he said, rather than something he actually did say, then the conflict is essentially a lie. It's cheap. It's empty-calorie conflict: no nutritional value. Now, if Carol gets mad at Frank for something he said but didn't mean, that's another story, because whether or not he meant something, he still made the choice to say it, thus Carol is angry with Frank's choices. What you have is a clash of beliefs or ideologies. Carol's either mad at what Frank is expressing or just the fact that he would say such a thing, whether he meant it or not. Either way, her anger is based on something real, not a bad game of telephone.

Some writers try to handwave this by having the offender try to explain to the misinformed and fail. For instance, Frank tries to explain that he never said what Carol's friend told her he said, but then Carol refuses to listen to his explanation or even hear him out at all. Or she's being so irrational about the whole thing,Frank decides he doesn't owe her any explanations, and refrains from clearing things up on principle. And the truth is cockblocked, sustaining the false conflict.

Right about this time, you want to throw your remote at the TV, and with good reason. Because on some level, no matter if it's a sitcom, no matter how wacky or comical the characters, at the end of the day, we want to invest in what's going on, and we can't if we don't respect the characters. I challenge any of you to respect someone who's acting like a tool.

To prove that I'm capable of seeing the good as well as the bad, I'd like to offer an example of a show that more often than not gets it right. Tonight on Parenthood, the character of Haddie was talking with her boyfriend, Alex, who is nineteen, about going to her junior prom. He didn't look thrilled with the idea. Now, since this exchange occurred within the first five or so minutes of the episode, I immediately clenched, but rather than waste an hour dragging out this fairly stupid problem, they dealt with it right then and there. Rather than have Alex dig in his heels about how stupid he thinks prom is and how he really, really doesn't want to go, he expresses the point once, and upon Haddie explaining how much she's looking forward to it, decides that a few hours of bad punch and overplayed music, while not his first choice for a Saturday night, is hardly worth taking a stand against.

This frees us up for the actual plot, Haddie's parents worrying about her possibly having sex on prom night, especially given how much older Alex is. Double-interesting because Haddie is a level-headed girl who's not the type to be talked into anything she doesn't want to do, and her parents genuinely like Alex. This now creates two legitimate conflicts, Haddie's parents dealing with the possibility of her becoming sexually active and, what for me is the far more interesting and on-theme dilemma, her mother trying to figure out how to deal with this situation and how to be a good parent without her daughter hating her, resenting her, or otherwise finding her lame... if that's even possible.

Mmm... that was tasty. False conflict, not so much.

So, to all my fellow writers out there, a word of advice and caution. Sometimes our characters are petty people who make petty choices. Sometimes the stay of execution arrives too late. Sometimes Romeo drinks the poison. Sometimes people don't articulate everything as well as they probably could, and it creates a huge clusterfuck of fail. That's life. But life is not fiction, so be careful how you pick and choose when to use false conflict, because, sure, you might keep your story going. People might stick with it to see how it ends, but they'll probably be so pissed off at either you or the characters, that they won't be coming back for the next one.

Do us all a favor. Don't be a lazy fuck. Real conflict. Write it.