Alan Edwards's Blog

Sunday, October 14th. That’s when it’s back. The show I love to hate, full of the most dysfunctional group of addle-brained survivors of all time, comes back after an entire season spent on a farm agonizing over morning-after pills, religion, suicide, a woman’s proper role in life, love triangles, and where the fuck Carl has disappeared to and who’s gonna die because of it. Every now and again they put a zombie in it. It was not a good season. Most people agreed that it was slow and awful and dull, until the last episode seemed to make everyone forget about the horrible pacing and stupid arguments and ridiculous thought processes. Zombies! Guns! Impossible headshots and shotguns that never need to be reloaded! And then the big part, the last scene, where everyone seemed to have a collective fangasm and couldn’t stop gushing about what next season would bring. ZOMG the prison! And Michionne! Michionne! MICHIONNE!!!!!!!

The last bit came mostly from the people who’d read the comic. I never did. Apparently the prison arc and Michionne are among the most popular parts of the comic series. My own excitement wasn’t there, because as I said I never read the comic. I don’t want to, not until after I watch the show. Why? Because I don’t want to color what’s on the screen by the canon of the books. I want to just watch the show and judge it on its own merits. So I took the Big Reveal a little differently than most people did. When zombie heads go flying and, uhh, crap, the blonde mopey chick, I knew her name for a while, it’s been off the air for a bit, sorry, whatever her name was, anyway she’s all about to die but someone killed the zombie after her and she looks up to see this mysterious shrouded figure leading two zombies with no arms or lower jaws on chains and she’s holding a katana and the entire fanboy base splooged in their undies, I had an immediate similar visceral reaction as well. However, mine is best summed up by making a wanking motion.

I know, I know, I’m a hater who hates everything wonderful and awesome and Michionne is a badass and all that. I get it. I understand that fans like her. It’s cool. But all I have to go on so far are 1) she leads two docile zombies around on chains and 2) she uses a katana. So forgive me if my judgments are based solely on those two facts, but as a judge of the show, it’s all I’ve got to go on. And I happen to think those two things are lame as shit.

OK, to be fair, I did do some reading about Michionne to figure out where the ninja lady with the zombie slaves came from. I read her background on the Walking Dead Wiki. If you want to be surprised by who the mystery woman is, STOP READING THIS NOW AND GO BACK TO CREATING BIG BIRD MEMES.

The wiki describes the origin of the katana and slaves as this:

Michonne… practiced fencing when she was a child, and briefly picked the hobby up again when she was in college to study law. After graduating and getting her degree, she became a successful attorney and married a man with whom she had two daughters. They lived an average middle-class life in a suburban neighborhood, and often dealt with a troublesome teenager next door who she swore had once killed their cat and destroyed their fence with his Katana. She spent much of her free time weightlifting and avidly following televised football. She eventually divorced her husband and at some point started dating another man named Mike. When the apocalypse began, she lost both of her daughters, presumably at the hands of her zombified boyfriend and his best friend (who ended up attacking her but were able to be fended off and controlled with her neighbor’s sword).

So, to paraphrase, she picks up a teenager’s katana and uses it and her fencing skills to cut the arms and jaws off her boyfriend and best friend and then carts them around with her.

Sorry, gimme a minute, I need to quit laughing my ass off.

OK, anyway, here’s my two problems. The first is the zombies. She walks around with two zombies, who don’t seem to have any fear or cognitive ability of any kind, on chains. They can’t attack her because they have no arms and can’t bite because they have no lower jaw. What I fail to understand is why that would prevent the zombies from attacking her anyway. I would think these mindless ravenous creatures would still come after her, even if all they could do is step on her and bump her with their chests and scrape their upper teeth on her. I don’t think they’d give a fuck about not having the parts anymore. At least, I’ve seen no evidence on the show that any of the dead guys would stop trying to fuck with and eat everyone, whether they have mouths or not. Does it look cool? Sure. But it doesn’t make any sense to me and fails the suspension of disbelief thing. Again, maybe it’s just me.

The second is the katana. Holy fuck am I sick of the Katana Trope. Somehow, just picking up a katana is supposed to make everyone a skilled master swordswoman. It’s the Magical Blade of Awesomeness that cuts through bone instantly. It’s better in every way than any other hand weapon ever made. All of that is complete and utter bullshit, but if you watch TV or movies then you know it’s completely true in the Land of Make-Believe.

Now, let’s go ahead and make a couple of assumptions about this katana. I will make the logical leap that this is not a Hattori Hanzo sword, handcrafted in the ancient mystical ways and all uber-balanced and wickedly sharp and incredibly rare and awesome. Instead, I will assume that it’s like 99% of the katanas on sale at flea markets around the country. It probably cost 20 bucks and is a cheap piece of shit. Why? Because a teenager owns it. Unless his dad was a samurai or some shit, he’s got a piece of shit sword. I’m also going to assume it’s not in good shape, and the additional background info that the teenager used it on a fence implies that he knew fuck-all about how to take care of one. So not only is it a cheap piece of shit, but it’s in awful shape. But apparently it has the ability to imbue its wielder with the knowledge of how to sharpen and care for it along with the innate ability to transform them into a kensai.

I won’t even go into the fencer background. Fencing is to katana use as slingshots are to compound bows. They are similar in some ways, but the skills in one wouldn’t exactly translate to the other. But whatever.

I’m not into full cursing snark-mode, but I’m trying to slowly ease back into shape. Here’s to an exciting new season! /wanking motion

One of the many cool side effects of coming into contact with a whole slew of authors, indie and otherwise, is being able to hear about the writing process from other perspectives. It’s fascinating (to me) to hear about how people go through the creative process and what they do to keep on track and plot and plan and gather information and organize themselves and all the work that goes into the long painful birthing process. I’ve read about the outlines people put together. I’ve seen in-depth analysis (with pictures!) about the creation of character cards that detail each person’s description, personality, traits, and their connection to the other major and minor figures in the novel all charted on a huge whiteboard. Notebooks, scribblings, collages, all part of an organized approach to writing a novel.

I see this stuff, and all I can think of is: Holy shit, I am the least organized writer of all time.
I’ve written one novel and am about 70k words into its sequel. So in roughly 150,000 words I have created the following extensive archives of notes to help me along (CAUTION: SPOILERS!): One (1) yellow half-sheet that has a few names and cunningly drawn arrows.

That’s it. It’s the “outline” of the last three chapters of Storm (the sequel). I did have another 3 sticky notes of jottings from Curse which are now gone, and were mostly illegible and made no sense when I did have them. That is the sum total of my prep-work for writing. I’ve always been this way, from birth as far as I can tell. Every paper I turned in for school was the first draft, written the night before, from grade school to college. I’d lose points for not turning in outlines and whatever, but I didn’t care. I had one paper in me, and that’s what my teachers got. A unique academic snowflake.

I am sure there are a lot of people who don’t come close to the level of organization I talked about at first, but I have never seen anyone do as little organizational work as I have. My guess is they are out there, but get too intimidated by the sheer load of stuff other people do to ever mention it publicly.

So how do I write?

I do my writing in the shower. Also, in the car on my way to and from work. Sometimes when it’s morning and I’m slowly chewing my cereal looking vaguely more alive than the zombies I write about. Anytime I’m staring off into space not doing anything, or when I’m reading something only to realize I’ve been reading the same three paragraphs over and over again without acknowledging a single word, I’m probably writing.

The way I do it is I picture the scene I want to describe, or a scene I want to get to, or the penultimate scene, or whatever my brain happens to want to work at. I see the characters, their clothing, their mannerisms. When I want this character to say this line, I watch him saying it to figure out how he’d fold his arms or roll his eyes or whatever. I watch my book as a movie first, then I describe as best I can what I saw. It can be frustrating sometimes when I discover that I don’t have the words to convey the scene like I see it, and that can bog me down. Other times, I’ve daydreamed a scene, the couldn’t remember exactly what happened or why, and to me that’s a sign that the scene didn’t resonate enough with me. I know that there are Pantsters (writing by the seat of, in other words), but I don’t know of anyone that takes it to that level. The only reason why I “outlined” the last three chapters were to make sure I hit all the points I wanted to. There are probably 20 scenes that will be in it that I didn’t write down, the bridge scenes and color and whatnot. They’ll just happen. For the rest, I can jot “zombie stuff” on the top flap of a Fruit Loops box and I know what I mean without ever saving the box for reference.

I envy the Plotters. I can’t imagine having all that shit at my fingertips. I just don’t think I’d ever be able to do anything with it. I’d have it all, neatly there, and then write a completely different book anyway. More likely, though, I’d get halfway through plotting and outlining, then say Fuck it, I’m gonna watch this Mythbusters rerun instead. The mechanical tedium would murder me. I want the good stuff, the writing itself, the unfolding of story, the development of the characters as they come and introduce themselves fully to me and say Howdy. I don’t necessarily know who they are until I write them.

Perfect example: I had a bunch of scenes in mind when I wrote Curse, the Have to Happens to move the plot along. One character was going to do something that was necessary (from a plot perspective) to spread the zombie plague further and faster than it might have otherwise. I knew what he was going to do and how he would do it. When I got to that point, something funny happened.

He wouldn’t do it.

I realized that character couldn’t do it. There’s just no way he would have. Not like he was a great guy about to do something out of character, but the way things developed around him, he grew as a person until I couldn’t make it happen. The scene ended up happening, but for entirely different reasons that made for a much better story. I think, anyway. I know it worked 1,000 times better for me, anyway.

So for all you Plotters, hats off. I couldn’t do what you do. And for other Pantsters like me, you aren’t alone. Sometimes the only way something can get written is to sit down and write the goddamn thing, because in the end, you still have to do that anyway.

I go through crippling periods of self-doubt when it comes to my writing. Luckily, at the moment, I am not in one of those trenches of despair where every word I type including “Sincerely, Aravan” looks ungainly and wrong. Bad word choice. Probably spelled wrong even though there isn’t another way to spell it. Tone is flat, metaphors lame, characters boring, setting insipid, point pointless, and everything I’ve ever written should probably just be gathered and burned so I can crawl into the supply closet of some abandoned factory somewhere and never have to reveal my stupid face to the world.

Other days, I feel even worse.

If you’re a writer, or have ever written, or ever plan on writing so much as an email in the future, then I hope you go through this feeling of utter self-loathing several times in your life. Why? Because I am a small bitter person who takes some measure of meager self-satisfaction from the joint suffering of others and will take whatever mean-spirited path I need to in order to make myself feel better. But also because I think it makes you a better writer in the long run.
Somewhere in the world, there is a writer who feels a sense of calm satisfaction with every word she types. She has no doubt that everything she writes is exactly correct, the choices she makes with the language are flawless, and that the world at large could not possibly help itself but to admire her utter brilliance. If such a person exists in the world, my guess is that it’s probably Harlan Ellison. (Long Parenthetical Aside: I like Ellison’s stories. Not love, but like them well enough. Unfortunately, I read the Foreword from one of his short story collections recently, and came away with the impression that here is a man who thinks his shit not only doesn’t stink, but also feeds hungry children in Haiti, postulated string theory, and is currently ranked third worldwide in single’s tennis. I get confidence, I can handle a little bit of arrogance truly earned, but the level of hubris that oozed its way off the page made me want to shower with a cheese grater.) Anyway, if that person really exists, I hate her. Hate isn’t even the right word. Loathe comes close. I need a word that means “the feeling caused by the sight of someone who you’d give nearly anything in the world to see hoisted on a gigantic platform for the entire universe to witness getting humiliated in such a fashion that even single-celled creatures view them with derision.” You probably do too, if you’ve ever struggled to come up with just the right salutation for an email to your company’s CEO, or tried desperately to describe the scene in your head but suddenly discover that there aren’t any words in any of the 3 languages you know to explain that particular manner of foot-positioning.

But it’s OK, because Ellison, errr that person, will never do the one thing that you do every time you type a word: Improve.

That’s right, those stupid plunges into frantic self-hatred are good for you. It means you don’t feel perfect. It means you aren’t convinced that you have no room to possibly get one iota better. It means you can still learn, and without that you’re just stagnant and predictable and doomed to exist in the same rut you’ve made for yourself. It’s a horrible tragic painful learning experience, like every other terrible gut-wrenching agonizing episode you’ll ever go through in your life.

I hate those times when I’m mired in self-doubt, when I don’t even want to look at the title of my horrendous mutant creation of a Word Doc. I become morose in all phases of my life. I stop blogging, I withdraw from my friends, I struggle to write the simplest emails. It honestly and truly sucks. But it also gives me a perspective I generally don’t carry. It exposes me to feelings that, although uncomfortable, will make me a better writer if I can tap into the memory of them when I want to describe something tragic. At some point, the feeling will pass, and I will own it and make it mine and hug it and pet it and call it George. I’ll use it at some point in my writing to describe how that person feels when they hit rock-bottom inside their own heads, the place they have the farthest to fall.

Or at least I hope so, because if I don’t get anything out of it then I totally want to be Harlan Ellison.

But I never will be, and I have to come to grips with those times when I hit my own mental Skid Row. Usually during the throes of self-flagellation I just stop writing, take a mental break for a while. Then, when I think I’m ready, I’ll take a story I’ve written that I normally like or a section of my book that I haven’t read for a while and read it again. My eye is super-critical, it’s true, but those times when I read something I’ve written and it can still make me smile a bit, or there is a turn of phrase I don’t have any conscious memory of writing but enjoy immensely, I can begin to feel a sense that I’m not the world’s worst writer after all, that I have a perspective worth sharing, that my ability to translate thoughts into words is at least somewhat operational. And that’s good enough.

And if that doesn’t work? I have a secret weapon. I generally don’t give advice, but here I will: get one too. It’s amazingly helpful. On a shelf at home I have access to what I consider the most god-awful pile of dreck that was ever written. It’s published by an actual publishing house, one of the places that rejected me. It’s awful. So every now and again I take it down and read some it, and I feel a little better. My novel may be a festering pile of shit, but it can only be the second-worst novel ever written. I take comfort in that. Because I am small and bitter and mean. So find that book or poem or play or whatever, that someone actually published, and think to yourself, I might suck, but this crap got published. Mine deserves to be too. And keep writing and learning and improving. That’s important too.

The impetus that finally pushed me to write a novel consisted of a combination of two things. The first was the incredibly vivid Zombie Dreams I’ve had over the years. These dreams are full Technicolor and Stereoscope dreams, with jump cuts and multiple camera angles, where I might be a spectator, actor, or disembodied witness, but always vaguely aware that I’m watching a dream and ready to fill my role as either zombie killer or victim or hard-running candyass. I love these dreams, and have never thought it right to call them nightmares – I may get creeped out, but I don’t necessarily want to wake up from them.

The Zombie Dreams laid the foundation. The second push came from a daydream I had, where my friends and family were villagers in a medieval town that was overrun by zombies and eaten in a very gory and glorious fashion.

I’m a swell friend, eh?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could actually see it all playing out in my head, as if I’d seen it as a movie years before and remembered most of the details. When one of the daydreams seemed to include a beginning – one of these friends playing a role as an innocent village girl, naive and friendly, greeting a Stranger to her town with just-picked early spring flowers – I knew I was going to write it. I was going to kill off my friends and family.

I mean, I’m an awesome friend.

So I got started. At first I thought I’d make all of the characters friends and family, throwing in some in-jokes, especially since I never expected anyone but friends or family to actually buy the damn thing. Since many of my friends are actors or roleplayers or just plain odd, it was easy to picture them playing the roles I gave them, and having their images as visual aids made it easier to conjure just the right sketch to give them each a distinctive look. As I went, though, a funny thing began to happen.

They weren’t my friends anymore.

I mean, the faces were, but the characters weren’t. It became as if I really were directing the movie of my book, casting certain people in roles that I knew they could play since I’d seen them perform similar roles over the years. The characters themselves became their own thing, with their own motivations and desires and foibles that went further and further from the person they looked like in reality. They became Mine.

Looking at it now, there are definitely people who are easily pointed out by Those In The Know that can say, “This character is Joe, this character is Beth”, because of real-life name similarities and physical descriptions and some exaggerated real-life characteristics. I recognize that, and I mean it as an homage in the most sincere way – these people have moved me to an extent that I wanted to immortalize part of them the best I could with what little talent I have. I’ve killed many of them along the way, but it was never done maliciously, I swear.

The rest, though – they might “look” like friends, but they aren’t them. Not anymore. The problem lies in situations where one “known” character, say Joe, has a son in the book and a real-life son. The assumption is made that the sons are automatically the same person and inspiration. That isn’t the case all the time – in fact, it only happened twice out of a lot of characters – but the perception is occasionally there.

The most important part during the editing process became making sure these characters, all of them, could stand on their own, without real-life knowledge of who they may have been based on. Without doing that, then no-one would truly want to read the story if they weren’t already an existing friend. It would be like sitting at a table with strangers who all knew each other in college and converse in a language you know but can’t understand and connect to, leaving you there to nod and smile while feeling like the dumbest person alive. As an aside, I hate going to weddings alone.

I believe I succeeded, according to the people who have read it and don’t know my friends. I know others do this as well: a friend of mine (and traditional publishing success story) kills off another friend of ours in every novel he writes. Tolkien based Treebeard off of his friend C.S. Lewis (who apparently loved saying Ho, hmm, come now), and I imagine a lot of the most memorable characters in fiction began their lives as someone’s mailman or cousin or best friend. For me, being able to really capture a scene requires me to actually see it inside my head, with colors and textures and scents, and having a model that I can picture readily makes it that much simpler.

Plus, when one of my friends annoy me, I can have their heads gnawed off. I’m a special friend.

When I published The Curse of Troius through Createspace, I was excited for two things: I now had an actual printed book that I wrote in my hands, and I could look at Amazon.com and see my book for sale across the country. I felt good about it, to see all those hours and days and months that added up finally resulted in an actual tangible result. I suppose it was a shadowy imitation of the experience of having a child (I wouldn’t know for sure, but in my imagination it is): something unique that only you could have created, now in the world. All I know is, Lady Aravan probably thought I’d lost my mind as I sat holding it, giggling and shaking my head in sheer wonder.
Like other children, it was a little ungainly at first. The cover was generic, there were typos in it, information I wanted in the book didn’t get in. Gradually, though, it grew up. A talented artist made the cover something awesome instead of bland, I fixed some of the typos and added some of those things I’d wished I’d had before – including whole new sections of story – and made a Kindle version available. I’d gone digital!

Now, I felt like I was done. I’d done everything I could to make my book accessible and hopefully attractive to a publisher. Of course, months went by full of rejection letters, one manuscript request, and heaping helpings of stony silence. It’s not like I expected the publishing world to open up its shiny gates and breathlessly sing my praises and herald me as the second coming of Shakespeare, but I thought I’d written a decent enough story that was better than some of the dreck that managed to get published.

As my last post explained, though, my eyes were opened to a whole brave new world, one free of gatekeepers and people trying to sell books that were popular a year and half before they managed to get them out the door. I realized that while I was waiting for Traditional Publishing to welcome me into their homes (through the small side servants’ entrance of course, disdainfully and reluctantly, while I held my hat and cringed appropriately and fawned and nodded at their every word), their method of doing business was beginning its death rattle. Authors were leaving them, rejecting them, and doing the thing I had done in order to make themselves more money, the very opposite of my original plan. Places like Smashwords made it possible for an author to publish a novel, not in years, or months, or even weeks, but in a couple of hours. How? By ignoring paper and targeting the growing world of eReaders like Kindle, Nook, and iPads and iPhones and Droids and the entire new method of consuming the written word.

So, now I’m in that world with both feet. My novel is available in a multitude of electronic formats. You can go sample 15% or so of it for free. It is going through the process of vetting for inclusion in the Premium Catalog, which would gain it access to the Nook through Barnes and Noble’s site, Apple stores, and more. A few hours after it was published, there were already people downloading the free sample. It feels good, and it makes me even more jazzed and excited to finish the next part of the story and get it published. It makes me feel like a writer, a real one. I don’t care if only two-dozen people ever read my work – that’s a hell of a lot more people than could have ten years ago.

So I’m excited, and I’m excited for you, too. Maybe you have a short story or fifty sitting around, something you had to write because it insisted on it. Right now, for absolutely NO COST, you could get a eBook of your collection available for purchase, all in less than a day. Imagine an explosion of content available, no longer held back by the stony-faced gatekeepers of the traditional publishing world. Certainly, some of it will be bad, just like the crap that gets printed right now. Some of it will be sublime. Some will trigger the imagination of a young person and change their life, opening their eyes to some possibility they never considered before. Some of it might just make sleep a little uncomfortable as they jump at shadows.

It’s a pretty cool friggin’ world we live in. I’m a writer, just like I always wanted to be. I don’t make a living at it, of course. Yet.

Recently, a friend and fellow-writer-stymied-by-the-ridiculously-impregnable-world-of-publishing sent me a link to a blog post (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03...). Since it was about self-publishing, which I have done and my friend has not, he thought it would be of interest to me.

Boy, was he right.

It wasn’t just interesting. It was mind-blowing, perception changing, paradigm shifting (when I said that last one to Lady Aravan, she immediately groaned – her attendance grad school during the heyday of that catchphrase always gives her nauseating flashbacks when it resurfaces). It’s a dialogue between two authors who voluntarily left the regular world of publishing to become self-publishers. What was a vanity project ten years ago has, thanks to Amazon and other eBook companies, become a more viable publishing tool for authors. One of them walked away from a $500k book advance and contract to do it himself. Why? Because he can make more money that way. When all is said and done, an author generally gets less than 15% of the profits generated by the unique that only he or she could ever create when publishing through the traditional method. An eBook published on Amazon generates 70%. It’s math. 70% > 15%. Added to the fact that an eBook costs a few dollars when self-published (did I mention that The Curse of Troius is now available on Kindle for $2.99? Cheap than a vente mochachocolata frenzichino!), meaning that it is more likely to sell more copies and STILL generate more profit per copy than the traditional route, and self-publishing is now a preference for authors.

In fact, we aren’t self-published authors anymore. We’re indie writers. Now, that does make me feel like I should be wearing a beret and ill-fitting clothes and slouch around coffee shops a lot listening to shitty music, but I love the term anyway. Are we any different than people like Dave Sim and Jeff Smith and the other independent comic-book publishers that completely changed the comics industry a couple decades ago? I don’t think so. No one sneers at them anymore and derides their work as vain and mediocre. The world is changing in the publishing industry, thanks to a online book retailer.

It changed my life. Seriously. A year ago, I decided to self-publish independently produce my own work in the far-fetched hopes of actually landing a deal with an established publisher. Now, I realize that I’m doing it wrong. I’m better off doing it myself. No more time wasted on bullshit form inquiry letters and submitting manuscripts (some of them still expect them on paper, for gods sake. It’s the digital fucking age, for crying out loud) to bored agents and monolithic publishing houses. That time is better spent actually writing and producing material to publish. That stuff makes money. Begging someone else to take a cut doesn’t.

I’m excited. I can actually see a future ahead of me as a full-time writer. I might not make it, but you know what? I’ve already made money on my first novel. That thing that no agent or publishing house wanted has earned me money that I had to pay taxes on. It’s just the start.

So, for my friend, that lovable Browncoat, and all of the rest of you out there who love to write – polish it and publish it. Share your unique perspective with the world: it’s easy now. Those words you’ve put down could only have been written by the singular entity that is you. Don’t be selfish; let us read them too.