So I’ve changed the title of the book to Dolan’s Son. And you can buy it here on Amazon for 99 cents.

OR you can read it free in PDF form or .MOBI

See what you think and please write a review. The book description reads like a telegram so I have to re-do that. And the cover is temporary as well, but I didn’t use comic sans or papyrus on it so it’ll do for now.

On Progeny, I used the third person because… I don’t remember why, actually. I never broke from the main character’s story. Maybe I thought I would splinter off the plot lines as the story went on, but then I didn’t. Truth is, I prefer the first person. So when I started this next project, it’s a little crazy that I didn’t think of going first person right of the bat. Why? Not sure.

I was thinking of ways to open the next project and I turned to some of my favorite books for inspiration (aka theft). Count Zero is third person, but has multiple threads. Altered Carbon is first person. Lee Childs’ first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, is in the first person, but the rest of the Reacher books I’ve read (up through book 4, I think) are all third person. Weird to switch it up, but I guess he decided he wanted the reader to know what was happening to people in the story besides Reacher. Mankell’s Faceless Killers is third person, but feels like a first person narrative. You get the sense you’re feeling what Wallender feels even if you never hear his inner thoughts. It’s great writing, and way out of my league.

One of my problems with Progeny is how much it felt like a screenplay (as I’ve said many times here). Third person description and action. How many times can you write, “Jim thought” after every time the guy has a thought? Gets old. For the new project (untitled as of right now), I wrote the first chapter in the third person and I struggled with the same problem. Pretty bland storytelling. Dry description and chains of dialog. Just for kicks, I rewrote the chapter again in the first person. It was like a light went on. Actually, it was more like a floodgate opened. The words came easy and the story unfolded more naturally. The story is about a guy who acquires rare objects for the ultra rich. It’s a future where cities have no vehicle traffic and areas are either overcrowded or abandoned. He has just lost his partner and mentor and is making a go of it on his own. He owes money, his friends don’t trust him, and his confidence is shot. He poaches a job from another collector and is soon in over his head. That’s the setup. Seems obvious now, but it took me a while to figure out that it’s a personal story. It centers around this character and not really the events themselves. The story is Creighton’s story, not a sweeping account of the great battles of the Nextor System. I made that up just now. Gold, right? Gold.

There are enough writing advice blogs and twitters out there and I never intended this blog to be anything more than an account of my progress and decisions. But if you’re banging your head against your idea and the word counter is laughing in your face, try a change of narrative voice. Worked for me.

WHAAAAAAT? Turns out there’s not only one SF book with the same name/concept, but like thirty. I’m still ok because my story is character-based and the world can be changed. But damn, seriously? I thought I was special. Turns out I’m only as special as thirty-something other self-published books. Oh well.

This reminds me of a lesson I learned a few years back. I worked on a movie called Hart’s War. The director’s name was Greg Hoblit (don’t look him up, yet). When the movie was over, he took the whole post sound crew out to dinner and I ended up across from him at the long table. We talked about basketball and he did what he could to convince me he could dunk. I never really bought it. I asked him about Primal Fear because I knew that was his first feature. Like a dummy, I asked how he got that picture. He said, “They brought it to me.” The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Co: That’s cool, how did they line you up with a picture like that?
Greg: From my television work. They thought it was a good fit.
Co: You were in television? Did you work on a series?
Greg: Yes. I created Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue.
Co: Oh. Heh. More wine?

Then the waiter brought his steak covered in mushrooms. The next part of the conversation went like this:

Co: You don’t like mushrooms?
Greg: I f***ing hate mushrooms. I can’t eat them.
Co: What happens when you eat them?
Greg: I die!

Here’s where I took a big risk. I wanted to keep the chit chat going. He had taken the snub from the young guy pretty well, but I could tell there was a little tension as if his face were saying, “who’s this punk who doesn’t know who I am?” I had a few glasses of wine in me so I went for it.

Co: You die?
(he was pretty much shouting at me in the Larkspur Inn, the most expensive restaurant in Marin County, a mecca for expensive restaurants. Yes, people were looking from other tables.)
Greg: Yes! I f***ing die if I eat mushrooms!
Co: Is that what happened last time you ate them?

Dead silence as he stared at me. The rest of the table and half the restaurant was waiting for the response. Swear to God it was right out of a movie. He laughed. Not loud, but it was enough to ease the mood. Then his steak showed up with no mushrooms and we talked about basketball and the actor Marcel Iures who was amazing in this movie that Greg was so disappointed with. The studio had ruined the surprise with the trailer and cut out the best parts of the drama in favor of more courtroom scenes. But Marcel as the evil Nazi was amazing.

Anyway, my original point was that you gotta do your background checks. It’s impossible to know everything and if you move forward with that attitude, you’ll get burned over and over. All reading is research and all research counts.

More stories soon.

Here’s something I realized as I’ve been reading: when I read a book I like, I read slowly and when I read something I don’t like, I skim. I read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and loved it. It has a few mini tells in the middle that give away the ending (granted, I’m cursed with figuring out the endings of jokes, stories, and movies before most), but it was really well put together and fun to read even when I knew how it was going to end. I read it in two days, but that was because I couldn’t put it down. I caught every word and read my favorite parts twice. Before and since, I read some self-published sci fi that wasn’t strong. The pieces were highly reviewed on Amazon and I thought even if the writing isn’t great, the storytelling or ideas might be interesting. I got impatient with them almost immediately. The description was either pointless, predictable, or both. The stories had unnecessary characters or the main character knew too much without being privy to the information. Worst of all, the ideas were gimmicky and everything hinged on a wafer thin concept.

When I first saw The Matrix, I was floored by how many great ideas were packed into the story. I thought even one small element – like deja vu indicates lag in the matrix – could be its own story. You could harvest dozens of movies, books, comics, or games using that one movie as a source. These three or four self-pubbed ebooks I read prove that you couldn’t and shouldn’t. A small idea with no depth isn’t enough to sustain a novel. As a result, I flew through the pages hoping to find some kernel of awesome to make reading these books worth the effort. And didn’t find any.

So herein lies the rub. I believe Progeny reads the way it does because I was impatient with it. The story didn’t have the substance and depth I wanted as a reader. Since I was reading as I was writing, I literally skimmed the writing. I knew the idea was thin and the best part would be the ending so I cranked past all the development and skipped the meat that can make a simple story great. In other posts, I blamed it on my experience as a screenwriter, but now I realize it’s because the quality of writing and the strength of the idea didn’t satisfy my experience as a reader.

This next project will take much longer. I’m determined to write and enjoy the process of reading as I’m putting the words down. I know you’re supposed to always work to get to the end of the story, but I’ll take the slow road this time.

There are some typos, naturally, and a few missing words, but no problems in terms of spelling or grammar. That’s where the typing-after-writing stage really helps out. Makes me read it as I’m typing so I hear it when it sounds wrong. I have a thing about repeated words and I’m able to catch those at that time as well. The real problem is the pacing. I can’t tell if I just blasted through it to get to the end, or if it’s the right length for this story. OR maybe everything I write will be less than 50k words. Who knows? It’s possible that my impatient reading style that has dictated the length of Progeny.

Now I’m making notes and tying up loose ends. There are some ideas that I launched early in the book that never pay off. Reading through it now, I’m like, “Oh yeah. Where was that heading?” Some of these chapters were written a year ago so some of the third layer ideas kind of slipped away in the process. I’m making notes and trying to decide what to develop and what to scrap. Maybe an extra sentence would sew up an idea, but some of those things will need a lot more. Do I work on the more elaborate ones and try to better integrate them at the risk of watering down my favorite parts of the book? Or cut them altogether and risk having a story that lacks depth and dimension? That remains to be seen. We’ll see what the test readers say.

I’ll post the whole book here for free when it’s done. Hopefully by the end of the year.

This book is my first attempt at a long-form prose narrative. I can’t really call it a “novel” because it’s going to come up just over 30,000 words. I’ve seen charts where people call a novella anything between 20,000 to 50,000 so let’s call it that. The internet has also informed me that novella length is ideal for electronic publishing. A positive! And positives are important when venturing into a new personal frontier. When I start anything new (a script, de-hoarding project, etc), I want a lot of yes men around. People who are there at the launch of the ship. Thing is, support is easy to come by in the early going.

“Can’t wait to read your novel!”
“Novella.”
“What’s a novella?”
“Not as long as a novel. Ideal for electronic publishing.”
“Oh… Yay!”

But now it’s a year later, and people have stopped asking about the book. Actually, they stopped asking six months ago. Scratch support as a motivation to get the book done. But I can’t blame that, either. I’ve always preferred to work under the RADAR, then re-emerge with a first draft. Sometimes I reveal the completed draft to people who didn’t know I was writing it instead of the people who were asking about it way back when. It’s like refreshing the promise. If I give it to someone who asked about it last year, they’re not as pumped as those who never knew you were trying for it. But that hasn’t really affected me one way or another. Let’s do the numbers: chapters written in first six months = 4, chapters written since people stopped asking about the book = 10. So I don’t need external motivation, why isn’t the book done?

I’ll tell you why. All these forking ideas. Yes, I’m being funny. And yes, I’ve thought of all the other ways of using “forking” to hilarious effect. I will giggle each time I use it in a sentence, but the truth is, as I sit down to write Progeny, I get distracted by all the other stuff I want to write. A full year ago, I wrote this entry about managing ideas. I was really good about sticking to my “Not Main Idea Day” for a really long time. But in the past few months, I have not only had trouble with distractions from other ideas, but these ideas are splintering into more ideas. I feel like every time an idea forks, I end up with two or three different ideas that might even work together. Complicated! The whole concept behind Progeny is that it was simple, self-contained, and digestible for both reader and writer.

It’s gotta be anxiety. I’m anxious about finishing this book. I’m anxious about what to do next. I’m anxious about how much energy my new Dean of Education job is burning. All that anxiety is bad for focus. The only thing that has helped so far is reading. Reading helps me focus and reminds me of the satisfaction of completing something.

I read the first three Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) books in the past month. Really good. Even if you don’t like fantasy (which is light in these books), they are great reading. The style is casual and immersive. Since then, I’ve tried to get into other books, but it’s obvious when the author is trying too hard. The description will be clunky and forced, the dialog is that times ten, and the plot is either overly elaborate or non-existent. Why can’t all books have the sustained tension and satisfaction of Game of Thrones? GRR Martin’s background in TV is evident. He can interweave multiple story lines and keep you reading. But that was with the first three books. It is said that he was stressed out writing the fourth book and it shows. Even though I’ve just started it, the style is different. The confidence and constantly-moving story is gone. In short, GRRM was anxious and his mind wandered. In the first four chapters, it’s apparent that he wasn’t focused on his story.

Am I comparing my skill to GRRM? No. But it does feel like a distant camaraderie has formed with someone who struggles the way I do. Read Feast of Crows and see if you agree. Then keep that in mind if you ever get the chance to read Progeny.

So why is it, after a whole game of flat play and missed shots, that it feels like the last shot made all the difference? The guys were all cool and didn’t hold it against me, but since then, I’ve had dreams where I made that shot. I wake up in the morning still aggravated that I missed it. In an effort to put some relevance on this thing so I don’t feel so absurd that I’m spending so much time replaying that shot in my head, I tried to find analogies in life for the last second shot. The buzzer beater.

Here’s what I came up with: the buzzer beater is the basketball equivalent of the overnight success. People love those stories. They love to hear that M. Night Shyamalan or Robert Rodriguez (old references, I know) showed up out of nowhere with a movie and hit it big. Same thing with the last second chance to win. It’s always a highlight on ESPN or on Youtube. There’s even blog space dedicated to the best buzzer beaters organized by NBA season. People like to think all success can be summed up in the last moment of the desired goal. Want to win the game? Hit the basket that puts you ahead. Think nothing of the exertion of the preceding 47 minutes and 59 seconds. Want to be the next JK Rowling? Or Darren Aronofsky? Just pull a kick ass book/movie/album out of your pocket.

I’m not treading any new territory in pointing out that success takes hard work and years of preparation, and that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is my personal problem: I look back and only identify the complete ideas that have gone nowhere. I just want to change the finish on them and receive the cheers. I dream about that final moment and what follows. Just like the game where I wish I had made the last shot. What I should be doing is evaluating the whole game and thinking about the accumulation of mistakes or lapsed effort and applying that to the next project.

A week ago, we were in another final second situation in the men’s league, but this time the opposing team hit the final shot and won at the buzzer. I could have put my arm up and contested it, but I had already realized the truth. The whole game had led to this moment. Make or miss, we didn’t deserve the win. Is that any way to think? My answer is no. That doesn’t work either. You can’t blame a loss on a missed last gasp, but you can’t pass up the chance to win, either. You must try. At every possible opportunity.

First, Brain Pickings. It’s a blog of interesting things this person finds around the internet. Always intellectual. Always interesting. Never pop-culture-y or affected. Love it. It makes me think about all the cool stuff that’s out there that I’ve never heard of and reminds me that I’ll never know everything. Which is a good feeling for someone who likes to learn new stuff. Definitely add it to your Twitter and/or RSS feed. And if you have a few bucks, donate.

Now for Terra Nova. I thought the pilot was pretty cheeseball. Then I thought, “Oh, they’re going for a mid-level, family audience.” So then I thought maybe the cheeseball was purposeful and appropriate. Nothing too challenging, nothing too dark. Like ST:NG or a watered-down Jurassic Park. But ultimately, it didn’t move me like early episodes of Walking Dead, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, or any other kick ass show that surprises you with how kick ass it actually is. So why am I listing it as a favorite thing this week? Because I got a hold of the pilot script. And guess what? It’s not strong. But even better than that, I can see how greatly improved the pilot is over the script. Whomever re-wrote the pilot for production really made some great adjustments. Particularly in the opening “teaser” ten minutes. They took out tons of VO, dialog, and standing around. They made everything into action and not discussion. The same story elements were there, just converted into actor movement and visual context. Watching the show while following along with the script was like a shot in the arm for me.

As I may have mentioned before, I’ve been working on some Earth-based sci fi stuff for a production company with no guarantees of anything, only the request to read my stuff. I have the story broken down into “chapters” which will easily become “episodes” but I was worried that if I blasted out a pilot script, I would need a great cliffhanger to keep the show going. Reading the Terra Nova script pretty much cleared my mind of any concerns. A) Because the producers reading it will change everything around once they’ve read it. And B) because the script feels like it was written pretty quickly. These writers had a great idea and blasted something out that would be readable and have the key plot points in obvious time markers for commercial breaks and the finale. So yeah, it went through a bunch of re-writes. Why wouldn’t it?! I don’t know why I thought I would have to deliver genius in the first draft. Maybe it’s a procrastination/avoidance technique that I’m using subconsciously. Either way, I’m back on pen and paper and moving forward.

UPDATE: A while back, I read a book by Ania Ahlborn called SEED. It’s a self-published novel about a deal with the devil. It was a fun, fast read (worth way more than the .99 I paid for it on Kindle), but I thought, “How is this thing selling so crazy well?” Then I found out from her blog the book got picked up by Amazon’s print publishing division AND she’s talking to Paramount about movie rights. Whoa. Then I saw this post, and I tied it back to my Terra Nova experience. If you check it out, she has very graciously posted an image of the revisions in Word from the Amazon people. There’s a LOT. Just like Terra Nova, people saw the great idea and picked it up even if they wanted to make a bunch of changes or clarifications. The lesson? Forge ahead! Be the bull in the china shop and smash your way through to completion. If the idea is there, people will get it. Maybe it will end up a cheeseball TV show, but I bet you that’s something compared to the nothing you get when you don’t finish anything.

I’m not a huge buff of nautical themes, but I always appreciate a book that integrates research into the story. The key word there being intergrates! I’m not a Tom Clancy guy who enjoys chapters and chapters that read like a military technology manual. The Terror is a great example of how the writer’s research is actually part of the story and not just the surrounding environment. The story is a fictional account of what happened during the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin back in 1845, but the theme is how technology and preparation can be absurdly off-base. Simmons doesn’t merely talk about the cold and the ice, but the clothing and the supplies and how much crap they carry around when they try to move across the ice. If that weren’t enough, he deftly contrasts the over-loaded English operation whose men are freezing and starving with the Inuit tribe who live almost comfortably in the same environment. It’s great stuff. A highly recommended book for pretty much anyone. Literary-grade historical genre fiction.

But don’t judge the creator by the creation.

Throughout my life, I’ve had the privilege of meeting a lot of artists, filmmakers, and writers. It’s great when you love a book, meet the author, and they turn out to be really cool. Examples? Comic book writer Ed Brubaker is a good guy. Happy to chat and not in that fake-y, “buy my books” kind of way. Terry Brooks handled the crowd at his signing with charm and patience. In fact, I don’t even fault writers like Greg Rucka or Neal Stephenson when they get impatient with fans who ask a lot of crazy questions. Or when people are just plain crazy like David Peoples who I met briefly at a screening at the San Rafael Film Center back in 2000. He was really, really out to lunch. Remember this, kids: drugs are bad for you.

Anytime I take an interest in the writer, I like to find out more about them as people. I’m pleasantly surprised more often than I’m let down. I’m a left-leaner when it comes to politics, but I don’t usually come up swinging against mainstream republicans. I take the “to each his own” approach. However, fringe crackpots on either end of the spectrum really bug me. Dan Simmons is pretty much Glenn Beck who writes horror and sci fi. Here’s the difference, I truly believe Glenn Beck is an act like Andy Kaufman or Joaquin Phoenix. He may be around the bend, but it’s only for the attention and the paycheck. Dan Simmons really believes this stuff. He lives in a cabin in the mountains and believes he’ll be in the better position when Obama destroys the world. So he’s a nutcase hater, but can I ignore that and still like his books? I’m not the only one who wonders about this. And this guy says the same thing.

My problem is that once I know a media creator is a dick, I can’t look at the work the same way. I was in the room when Michael Bay screamed profanities at one of the assistant editors over a nothing issue. As a result, I relished his Pearl Harbor failure. Now when I think back on The Terror, a novel I respected for its research, I wonder if all Simmons did was watch the Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander. I’ve seen the movie a half dozen times and as I read The Terror, I noticed a lot of similarities. When I was indifferent toward Simmons, I thought, “Of course there are similarities, how different can English nautical adventures be?” But after learning all this annoying stuff about the author, I think, “He lifted all this stuff from that movie and/or O’Brien’s series of novels.” And seriously, every little moment in M&C is mimicked in The Terror. A guy gets shot, make sure you get the piece of shirt out. Doctor is hurt, he better operate on himself. Guy gets smashed in the head, make a metal plate out of a coin for the hole in his skull. The list goes on. And don’t even get me started on Simmons’ Hyperion series which is lifted directly from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

The question is, why does finding out about the author’s political fanaticism spoil my reading experience? It’s because reading a book or watching a movie feels like a connection with the person or people who made it. When they’re making the work, they’re thinking like me to make it appeal to people like me, and when I consume it, I know how they were thinking when they made it. It’s like we’re thinking the same things! So when I enjoy or respect a Dan Simmons book, and I know he’s not just crazy, but mean and crazy, I don’t want to know that on some level we think the same way.

Maybe that’s a short-coming on my part, but lucky for me, there are plenty of books by nice folks out there to read. Check out anything by Mary Roach if you’re a non-fiction fan or the Criminal series of graphic novels by Ed Brubaker or sci fi by Richard K. Morgan and William Gibson. With the exception of Mary Roach, I’ve met these folks. And I like to know they think like I do.

When reading a book, sometimes an author will latch on to a word or phrase and use it over and over. Sometimes — though rarely successfully — the repetition is done on purpose for effect, but even then it rubs me the wrong way. I’m currently reading The Terror by Dan Simmons and I really, really dig it, but his favorite word is “impossible” and derivations thereof. Example: “The creature rose to an impossible height, then jumped to the next spar, impossibly.” Sure, in that one sentence, you might say the author is expressing the impossibility of the creature’s very existence. But EVERY time the creature appears? Man. Now that it bugs me, the word jumps off the page and I find it distracting. The overuse of the word is putting an asterisk to a great reading experience. He also repeats phrases such as, “As dark as a Welsh mine,” but that’s different because it’s something the characters in the story would say or think in the time period of the story, and he doesn’t do it over and over in a chase scene! Also, there are less obvious words like “cold” (the book takes place in the Arctic) and repeating that doesn’t bug me. Henning Mankell uses the word “cold” a billion times in Faceless Killers, but it’s so matter of fact that it’s really effective. Understated, almost.

So maybe the problem is the repetition of superlatives that gets under my skin. “Impossibly impossible-ness that simply couldn’t be any impossibler.” I guess the skill in writing is embedding words carefully so they don’t pop off the page or saving certain words for when you really mean it. I’m going to finish this book, but the word impossible has no effect on me now. What will happen in the next attack scene? I’m not certain, but I already know it’s possible.