Tag Archives: fiction

Not sold…

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Earlier this morning, while waiting for one of the endless piles of laundry to finish, I gave birth to a third draft. What we have is fully formed, edited, formatted, and copyrighted short story. I’d be lying if I said I was completely happy with it. Then again, you can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been completely happy with anything, so take that with a Copyrighthealthy dose of salt. I’m happy enough with the content – aside from the inevitable grammar, punctuation, and usage stuff – but my real hang up at the moment is the title; Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds.

That’s not the first title. It’s not the second or even the fifth. It’s the eighth if I’m counting correctly. I’m just not sold on it yet even though it feels like the best of the bunch. Having said that, I’m not currently in a mode of letting the perfect stand in the way of the good enough.

This little project of mine is moving out. I’ve just launched it into the hands of someone who was there at the beginning to give this draft its first formal read through. Letting other people see one of these things is the most nerve wracking part – especially when that person reads. A lot. It means you’re going to get compared to people who do this for a living. That’s a tough standard to meet when you’ve cobbled the idea together a few hundred words at a time working nights and weekends. Still, it’s my baby and that means I’ll be immensely proud of it even if the rest of the world thinks it’s ugly as sin.

Soon enough you’ll all get the opportunity to make up your own minds on the issue. I just hope I’ve done the work well enough to meet expectations. Everything else is gravy.

Editorial blues…

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I’m editing. That is all. As essential as I know it is to putting out a good, readable product, it’s the part that I hate the most. I know it’s at the very center of the creative process, but there’s something about recovering the same ground two, five, a dozen times that, to me, makes it feel like the most non-productive thing I could spend my time doing.

Add to my generalized hatred of editing the fact that at the moment, I’m trying to do it on a beautiful, blue-skyed, spring day and I hope you can start to see why at this very moment, my heart just isn’t in it. Not to take anything away from the work in progress, but on days like this sitting inside and doing the work is damned hard. I know it’s only going to get harder as the weather gets nicer, though. It’s going to get harder right up to the point I realize it’s 93 degrees and I’m sweating my balls off. Then there’s no place I’ll rather be than in front of the air conditioner getting some long overdue work done.

In this part of the country there isn’t always a long time between frozen tundra and baking asphalt. I’m doing my best to keep the momentum up, but I’m giving up all promises not to get distracted for these few weeks while the weather is nice enough to enjoy.

Garden of Allah…

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Don Henley released the song In the Garden of Allah in 1995. That would have made me a high school junior or senior depending on the date. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before. I’m willing to bet that most people haven’t. I spent a lot of time driving around – because that’s what you do when you grow up in the sticks – and there was almost always music on the radio. It was a catchy tune back then and mostly I forgot about it until about two years ago when it started popping up when I told iTunes to shuffle. I must have been listening to a lot of Eagles tunes then, because it kept coming around. It’s one of the very few seven minute songs I don’t get bored with halfway through. After a few times through, it really got stuck in my head… and that’s about the time I started writing.

It wasn’t anything coherent at first. Maybe a few scribbled notes, a sentence here or there, but nothing with substance. Then a funny thing happened. It evolved and coalesced into the nucleus of an idea. I started off with the idea of writing something political and ended up with something clearly more religious. Blatantly so as it turns out.

So there’s the inspiration behind the short story I’m heroically trying to edit. It’s all there on paper now not because I wanted to explore than nature of good and evil, but because a really liked a quirky Don Henley song back in high school. Clearly the muse works in strange ways.

Editorial control…

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I enjoy almost everything about the writing process. I like that, for me, it’s a solitary effort. I like that it forces me to live inside my own head. I like that it demands a focus and discipline that I don’t always want to demonstrate in other aspects of my life. Most of all, I like that when the final period is added, I can sit back point at the screen, and have the deeply personal satisfaction that I put all those words on all those pages. Even though I spend most of the day writing at the office, there’s no sense of ownership. A finely crafted email or policy letter just doesn’t have the same feel. Most of that kind of writing is set within strictly proscribed left and right boundaries. You can pretty the words up a bit, but I’ve never finished rewriting a section of policy and thought, “damn that’s good.”

I’ve left my work in progress sit for a little more than a month. It’s a much needed cooling off period, so I can try to read through it with a little bit of objectivity. And therein lies the current problem. I love the creative process of writing. I love it right up to the point it becomes the editorial process of reworking all the bits and pieces into a more cohesive and understandable whole. It’s maybe the most necessary step, but there’s nothing at all in it that I find enjoyable. In fact forcing myself to sit down and do it is far more difficult than expecting myself to sit down every night and create brand new material.

Exerting editorial control is a necessary evil. It’s an evil that I started tackling last night. It’s an evil that I’m going to spend many more nights wrestling with… mostly because it reveals that the story that I thoughtfully crafted over the winter is full of plot holes, grammar and punctuation problems, inconsistencies, characters that go nowhere, and generally shows that all I’ve done so far is finish a first draft. I knew that intellectually, but the intervening days gave me the space to realize it with more than my brain.

It’s time to get back to work… and by “work” of course I mean that activity that takes inordinate amounts of time and shows absolutely no promise of ever paying for itself. Even knowing all that, a bad day editing is better than my best day doing most anything else I’d consider work. So yeah, it’s time to get back to work.

Thrones…

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I had great expectations for last night’s premier of Game of Thrones. Aside from the minor distraction of trying to figure out why one of the supporting characters didn’t look at all like himself from last season, I can legitimately say I was beyond pleased with how the whole thing turned out… setting aside for purposes of this discussion that each week’s episode could easily be a 2 hour feature film in its own right. Everyone and their brother has already written a review so I’ll spare you those details here.

What I really want to comment on is the unique fandom of Westeros; where the people who read the book are constantly spoiling it for those who haven’t, the people who have only watched the TV show are inordinately annoyed by the book-reader’s enjoinders that something “wasn’t right,” the general consensus is that George R.R. Martin is possibly the most bloodthirsty author of all time, and the sheer volume of characters makes you wish you’d have printed out the Game of Thrones Illustrated Study Guide before settling in for a new episode. And then there are the people who don’t watch, don’t get the fuss, and are mostly overjoyed when the season ends and people around them find something else to talk about. Despite all that, my inner geek takes a serious amount of joy at seeing so many non-geeks drawn into Martin’s world of high fantasy. It’s good to know that real story telling might not be dead after all.

I can tell the season of the year as much from the program I watch on Sunday night as I can by what the calendar says. And just now I’m extraordinarily pleased that the winter of the Walking Dead has given way to the spring of Game of Thrones. I think I’m ready for it to be next Sunday now, please.

Holding…

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Anyone who was following along last month might remember that I was giving fiction a bit of a go. Since I haven’t mentioned that little effort in a few weeks, it felt like it deserved an update. If you’re expecting some exciting or late breaking news, this is your fair warning to go find something else to read this evening. That’s because the update is that there really isn’t an update.

Since I set it aside, Unnamed Short Story #1, has been sitting quietly in a file (or in several files to be more accurate). Why? Because if you’ve ever tried finding a mistake in an email you’ve just written, magnify that problem by a few hundred percent and you’ll start to understand what I’m up against.

What’s sitting on the shelf is a first draft. Some sections are barely an outline held together with a bit of awkward dialog. Translation: Almost every word of it is going to have to be rewritten before I even sit down to do any real editorial work. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the process. I know the only way I can even hope to make any objective corrections is to put distance between me and the first draft… and when you’re writing, time is the only real measure of distance there is.

So, USS#1 is in a holding pattern. Honest to God, I’m still incredibly excited that it’s even gotten to that point. Take my word for it, there were plenty of days I didn’t think it would even make it that far. In the meantime, I’m working on a few side projects and giving my alter egos a workout – some of it professional and some of it decidedly not. It might not feel like it from the position of outside observer, but every time I sit down at the keyboard, regardless of what I’m working on, it feels like I’m giving my chops a workout. I don’t know if I’ll ever make any money from doing any of this, but honing whatever modest talents I have still feels like a worthwhile investment.

USS#1 will come off the bench soon enough, but I’d like to let it sit for another two weeks or so. It won’t quite be reading it completely fresh, but a full month away feels like a decent enough amount of time away. How long things take from that point, your guess is as good as mine.

Best efforts…

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This was very likely to turn into a long, rambling collection of words that wouldn’t end up saying anything at all. It felt like that kind of night. Actually, it’s felt like that all day, maybe even longer than that. Despite my best intentions, it may yet turn into a bit of a ramble. It certainly feels like it could.

The good news is that the Muse hasn’t left me high and dry. I’m still sitting down every night and making progress on the short story in waiting. I sit down as close to 7PM on the nose as I can manage and don’t get back up until there are at least 300 fresh words sitting in front of me. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, other times closer to three hours. Admittedly, sometimes the words that end up there just plain suck. More rarely, the ones that appear are actually rather good. Like Gump’s chocolates, when I sit down I never know what I’m going to get.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the quality of the output doesn’t particularly matter. What seems to matter is the routine, the habit of writing consistently day in, day out, when you’re sick, when you’re tired, when there are a dozen other things screaming out for your attention. What matters is sitting down and letting the words flow – or sometimes forcing them to flow against their will. It can feel like that a lot.

What I’m going to end up with 4000-odd words and 14-ish days from now is generously called a first draft. I know that draft is going to suck… and I don’t mean just a little. It’s going to be God awful – full of half formed ideas, words that aren’t really words, and phrases that are repeated on at least every fifth page. That’s fine. Not fine for public consumption fine, but fine by the standards of the first draft. It means finally there’s something there that wasn’t there before. Something that I drug into the world kicking and screaming out of my own head and onto the form of evil that fills me with the most dread – the blank, white page with its solitary flashing cursor.

Even after it’s no longer a first draft – maybe a 3rd or 4th version – after it’s been anointed as “final” I know I won’t be entirely happy with it. I’ll want to change and tweak and craft just a bit more. Right now I know it’s not even in the realm of good enough, but it will be. I think. That’s the theory I’m working under, anyway.

OK, yeah, so maybe this did turn into a long, rambling collection of words despite my best efforts to the contrary. Sorry about that.

An unsettling dark streak…

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One of the many things I’ve sacrificed on the altar of having more time to write has been the time I use to spend reading. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself “literary” by any stretch. I wasn’t reading many of the Great Books or even much fiction at all. Far more often it was history, biography, social science – books that taught me things about the world. I’d occasionally venture out into fiction. When I did, it was normally of the pulp variety (not that there’s anything wrong with that). My fiction reading also had a heavy dose of Tom Clancy, James Michener, and Herman Wouk. I liked the books that landed on the coffee table with a satisfying thud. I still like books like that, though the thud is far harder to get with a Kindle than a 1000 page paperback.

As usual, none of that is my point. What I want to turn you on to tonight is a Steven King. Some of you might be familiar with his work. I read a few of his better selling books years ago, but I’m the first to admit horror isn’t my thing regardless of whether it’s in print, movies, or television. Even with that disclaimer, it’s impossible not to recognize Steven King’s absolutely monumental abilities as a writer. The guy is just a force of nature when it comes to using the written word to draw a response out of the reader.

Not long ago, Amazon offered up a screaming deal on one of his books that I’d never heard of before. Since before Christmas I’ve been toting the electrons of 11/22/63: A Novel around without bothering to really give it a look. Until this past weekend. Since then, I’ve been off to the races and using every scrap of free time to get through just another few paragraphs. I tend to find King’s books a little too ghoulish and grisly for my taste, but this one… this one is just different.

Without giving anything away, he pulls you in with a story of time travel, righting past injustice, decisions, consequences, and then paints in a truly unsettling dark streak that you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s just a magnificent piece of work. If you like Steven King, or historical fiction, or just have an itch for a good (if unconventional) goosebumping, 11/22/63 has the jeffreytharp.com seal of approval.

It will be…

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It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally built up a sufficient head of steam that I feel comfortable saying a few words about a current work in progress. As I’m writing, it feels like a short story in waiting. As of last night it’s 2904 words and will most likely offend those with deep religious convictions. Being an offensive douche wasn’t really where this all started out (and it’s still not my intent), but any time you so much as touch on Christianity and are anything but strictly differential to the Almighty, there’s a certain subset of the population who will get their knickers in a twist. That’s ok. They’re entitled. As I’ve said before, opinions are like certain anatomical orifices – everybody’s got one and needs to use it often.

The fun (and admittedly frustrating) part of this whole effort is that after tinkering around for a couple of weeks, I actually have no idea where it’s going, how it will end, or what the point of the whole exercise is. There’s no outline. No concept map. Every day I sit down, re-read what I wrote the day before, and then have a little exercise in free writing. I’d like to bring the draft in around 10,000 words, but I’d be happy with anything from 8,000 to 12,000. Really, the plan is to just keep plugging away until it feels like something close enough to done to justify pasting it with the “first draft” label and chunking it over into my version of the editorial process. I’m not bold enough to even suggest a date when that might happen, though. It’s just going to take as long as it takes.

I’m not going to sit here on a sunday morning with a few thousand words on the page and guess whether it will be good or bad. At best, I can promise that it will be. That may not sound like much, but for a guy who’s been taking about trying his hand at fiction since high school, it’s a pretty big deal.

Free time is for wimps…

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After kicking Nobody Told Me: The Cynics Guide for New Employees and What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 in Review out the door this summer, I took a break. Or at least I took a break from writing things I wanted published with my name on the masthead. I’ve still been tinkering with other projects, of course, because just sitting around with nothing on my plate makes me nervous and jerky. Still, it was nice to have some breathing room and to not be beating myself repeatedly over self-imposed deadlines.

As much as I’ve enjoyed not laboring under too many of those requirements these last few months, the gears have still been slowly grinding out a few new ideas. Now that the nights are long and the temperatures are getting downright cold, it feels like a good time to start tinkering and see if either of those notions have legs.

The first isn’t so much a fresh ideas as a continuation of the What Annoys Jeff this Week series. I’ve started doing some of the initial leg work to publish 2013 in Review as soon after the new year as possible. I’d love to promise it on January 1st, but creating commentary, editing, and formatting take time. More time than you might think if you’ve never given it the old college try. What that really means is that 2013 in Review is probably best described as “available in January” with a date to be determined. Sure, maybe it’s an exercise in pure ego, but who doesn’t want to start off the year with a blunt reminder of all the stupid shit that happened in the one that just passed? Anyone? Bueller?

In a departure from my usual ranting full of snark and discontent, I’m also gearing up for a first plunge into fiction in almost 20 years. I’m not so ambitious as to think I can take on a novel, but I have been kicking around an idea for a short story. I wish I could take credit for the original idea, but it was actually a passing comment from a friend at work that I haven’t been able to shake for the last few weeks (despite trying very hard to ignore it in hopes that it would go away). I’ve been doing my due diligence and some initial research. It’s still the barest fog of an idea, but I think it could make an interesting 10-20,000 word virgin effort. I won’t even hazard a guess about how long something like that might take me.

I like to think my chops have improved a bit since I wrote a few shorts back in high school, but I suppose we won’t know if that’s true until I sit down and start smacking the keys. Even if it never sees the light of say, I have the feeling it’s going to be a worthwhile mental exercise. So there are the two big bites I want to take off over the winter months. I’d say between those and a few other bits that are percolating, I can manage to keep myself gainfully occupied for the foreseeable future.

Apparently free time is for wimps.