Blogging about Writing---mine and others'

IN THE BEGINNING...of 2019

1/10/2019

Hello, and welcome to my first blog post of 2019.
As usual, I'll mention the personal trials, tribulations, and positives on the personal level first.
2019 is starting out with an ominous trend. Less than two full weeks into the year, and I've had to take my wife to the hospital twice. The first was a five-night stay for an infection. The second was what looks like a two-night stay (she's there now) for complications from her diabetes. Those two episodes have put the kibosh on our planned visit with our granddaughter. And oddly, that may not be so bad because she has been having her own health issues.
The good news on the writing front is that Page and Spine (www.pagespineficshowcase.com) will publish my poem "A Brand New Man", tomorrow, Friday, January 11th. I hope you will read it along with the rest of that issue.
If you're new to this blog or just because it bears repeating, Page and Spine is a free read that pays their authors. The publish a new issue every Friday, and each one contains a continuing serial, "Coffee House Chatter" plus a new short story, one or more new poems, observations on writing, and in the tab "The Reading Lamp" you may find a story, poetry, or an essay. One of the best sources of new literature on the internet.
To get back to where I left off last time, I have some decisions to make regarding the fantasy series I'm beginning.
There are two types of series. The one type is just like a normal television series. The same characters, plus often one or two guest characters, have a different story every week. This type is especially favored in mystery or crime novels. Earl Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout were two such, featuring Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe, respectively. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was another. Other well-known series are The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Now, C. Hope Clark has two such series and Anne R. Allen has one, too. And both those authors also publish newsletters or blogs to help writers.
But in fantasy, the other type of series is more common—the very long single story that takes three or more books to tell, and designed to do it that way. I've mentioned King's Dark Tower series before, and that's one example. The Swords of Shanara trilogies and the Thomas Covenant trilogies are other examples, plus, of course, Anthony Wedgeworth's six-book Altered Creatures series. And David Eddings wrote at least three different fantasy series. All of these fantasy series I've mentioned, I recommend.
This was the story I had in mind when I decided to write one. But now I'm playing around with the idea of writing the other kind. Each novel would feature the same main characters: four protagonists so far. The antagonists might change from novel to novel, or reappear, as seems appropriate.
If any of you have any suggestions or preferences, please let me know, either here on my website or on my Facebook author's page at F.G.Waiss, Author.
In the meantime, I'll see what I can get accomplished.
You all please do the same, and, as Gary Moore signed off his shows, be kind to each other.
Be well, and be well-read.

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The End of It All...of 2018.

12/27/2018

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Hello, and welcome to my last blog post of 2018.
Don't worry, though, I'll be back in 2019.
The personal notes first. We had planned to drive to Metamora, Illinois, today (Thursday) and visit our granddaughter for a day or two. But our female dog (she's about 13 years old) has been in pretty bad shape this week. Yesterday we thought she might not live out the day. She just lay in one spot on the floor and her total movement was to change positions in a circle on that spot. She hasn't been eating, she's been in pain, and her tail, which is usually wagging whenever she's awake, has been mournfully motionless. We made an appointment with the vet on Monday for today.
She has pancreatitis. So they gave her a shot of antibiotic and another for pain. We'll have to give her pain medication for the next seven days, so our trip to visit our granddaughter will be delayed. Maybe next week.
On another sad story (or not, depending on you POV), the Denver Broncos are 6-9. However, there are extenuating circumstances. Out of the eleven starters on offense, eight of them are out injured. There's a reason backups aren't starters, and when a team has to start its fourth-string tight end, or start their back-up tackles in the guard positions, a lot of success can be hoped for, but not realistically expected.
I am frankly having a difficult time with the fantasy series. There are two—well, at least two—reasons for this. The most obvious one to someone looking in from the outside is that I've never written a series before.
Yes, I did write a two-book story, the two Just Lucky books, and there might be enough left for a third. But it was never a series. It was written as a single book. A single book of over 300,000 words.
By the way, did you know that Lord of the Rings was a single book? Yep, originally Tolkien wrote it as a single book. But at that time paper was not available in sufficient supply to publish a decent number of books that size. So, for the purpose of publication and sales, he broke it into three separate volumes.
I did the same but for a different reason. The chances of having a 300,000-word book published by an unknown author may not be impossible, but the odds ain't good. Even a well-known author with a proven reputation will have trouble. Stephen King's volume VII of the Dark Tower might be close to that, but King's salability is a matter of record.
Anyhow, that's the obvious reason—I've never written an intentional series before.
The less obvious reason is that all my creative writing--books, stories, poetry—has come from external inspiration. Something I've read, or heard, or experienced inspired me to write the story or novel.
I suddenly had an idea for a story.
Not this time. Instead, I decided I would write a fantasy series of at least three books. There was no external inspiration for the story.
When I made the decision, it took me only a few minutes (really!) to come up with the main theme of the series. And I'm now 14,000 words into it. I have ideas for several events, characters, problems, puzzles, etc. beyond the six significant characters introduced so far. But...
This as close as I can come to a cliffhanger in a blog post.
Next time I will expand on that "But..." and tell you the silly reason I decided to write a fantasy series. Also, which kind of series should I write? I haven't quite decided that, either.
Until then, please be safe, be well, and be well-read.

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Beginning the End, And Beginning the Beginning

12/14/2018

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While I was away I finished Song of Susannah and I'm now well involved with the final volume, The Dark Tower.
One of the really different things about this part of the story is that Susannah, a beautiful black woman with no legs below the knees, had become pregnant by a demon. As part of the complication, she develops an additional personality, a white woman named Mia who is the mother personality for her baby—her "chap."
What is very different is that Mia actually splits from Susannah and becomes a physical person—with legs. There's some spooky psychology going on there, also, and King is outstandingly creative with the situation...and of course just the situation itself is outstandingly creative.
There are some horrible incidents in this series...violence, demons, cannibals, vampires, and suicide. But this is definitely not a work of horror. I doubt an author could produce a seven-volume series of horror without getting pretty repetitious. So, any of you that are inclined to not read this because it's written by King and King writes horror, don't cheat yourself.
This is a far-reaching and unusual fantasy series. And it's really good.
As for my own writing: Saving Atlantis is still being considered by two publishers. One of them, Red Sage Publishing, has had it for about four months. They say that if they like it initially, four months or longer may be the wait time before an author hears back. After the first of the year I'll send them a follow-up letter if I haven't heard back from them.
When I submitted the manuscript to Gnome on Pig Productions, who published my Just Lucky books, the editor/publisher said she really liked the synopsis. They are busy with other stuff, so I don't expect them to respond until late January, if then.
I'm 12,000 words into the first/second draft of the first volume of the Lying Swords series. It's the first/second draft because lately there's been so much time between writing sessions that I need to go back at least a few pages to get a feeling for the flow. While I reread, I make alterations.
One of the neatest things about writing novels is when the story surprises the author. I had just such a surprise during my last writing session. The swords, that had a semblance of sentience anyway, since they were able to answer questions, unexpectedly developed even more. They don't like to be touched by any but their owners.
This provides all kinds of possibilities going forward. Part of the ongoing story will be that people—some bad, some good—covet the swords. But it will be difficult to control two deadly sharp blades that don't like their handlers.
There is also the matter of a second, almost identical, set of swords that don't speak. They do have their own unique properties.
That's it for now. I've posted another clip from one of my novels on my author's page, F.G.Waiss, Author. Please take a look if it pleases you. And, please, read something!

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Exploring Other Worlds

11/26/2018

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I did warn you that I might not be able to add to this until Christmas. If my work schedule develops as the bosses seem to think it will, then, yeah, that'll be the case.
On a positive note, I was able to finish and submit the holiday short story I was working on, and I was also able to submit another story to another contest. The best thing about those was that there was no entry fee!
Surprise! Had an eight-hour day on Sunday and Monday. I have time to do this!
On the reading front, I'm still enjoying Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I'm now about half way through Book VI, Song of Susannah. This book gives us a surprise character: Stephen King! King includes himself as a younger man, encountering his own creations. The meeting is a bit traumatic, as you may imagine, not only for King, but for Roland and Eddie Dean as well.
King does not portray himself in a particularly favorable light...which is good. I think he honestly tries to imagine how his younger self would have reacted to such a situation.
I want to bring up one point...well, at least one. Might develop into more. This volume, plus the one prior (Wolves of the Calla) explores the idea of characters in fiction actually existing in their own worlds...that each world may be completely real to the characters even though they are "created" by a writer. He introduced the idea of multiple worlds, with death as one of the doorways between them, in The Gunslinger. The idea of "leakage" between Earth and Midworld continues throughout the series, but is seldom seen as more than a sidelight.
This concept was explored pretty thoroughly, and differently, in Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I must include that many of the characters and settings for those two books are introduced in his Time Enough for Love. These do not constitute a series, exactly. Except that TCWWTW ends in a sort of cliff hanger that nevertheless serves as an adequate ending, yet is wrapped up in the following book, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which was Heinlein's final novel...except that he had four books published after his death, though one was with Spider Robinson collaborating by finishing an unfinished work...which I have not yet read. Another of those four is a resurrected novel Heinlein wrote much earlier in his life...in fact, his first novel. The other two books published post mortem are non-fiction.
Whew! Sorry about that tangent. I'm a big Heinlein fan. To continue the tangent (unapologetically), for those that are not familiar with Heinlein's name or work, I here offer a quote from the back jacket of his novel, Job: A Comedy of Justice.
"Following World War II Robert Heinlein emerged as not only America's premier writer of speculative fiction, but the greatest writer of such fiction in the world. He remains today as a sort of trademark for all that is finest in American imaginative fiction." ---Stephen King
All right, back to the original subject.
Obviously, there is much more to those excellent science fiction novels than just that theme. There are interesting characters (including some from Heinlein's earlier works), romance, war, mystery, and sex. But if you want to explore this particular idea, reading those novels will give you a real look at some of the possibilities. Like, seeing a character literally erased from a scene.
More about King's work, my reading, and who knows what else next time.
Be well, be kind to each other, and READ!

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Revisiting

11/3/2018

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I have a confession to make. I read comic strips every morning, about two dozen of them. That's not the confession. I've been reading the comics since I learned to read.
The confession is that after I've read one, I read it again.
I'm sure some one (or many ones) immediately thought that I need to read it twice to understand it. For those of you that thought that or something similar—good for you!
When I was a pre-teen I encountered some story where a character was reading a book he wrote. I wondered then why would anyone reread their own book? They know what's in it. The particular book in question was a memoir of sorts.
Now I understand. Earlier this year I read my own fantasy novel, Prophecy of Honor. It was published in the fall of 2015 and I hadn't read it since. I wanted to see if it still appealed to me, (it does—it's really good, just shorter than your typical fantasy novel) but also I was curious to see, as a reader, what I could have done better.
It was for recreational reading, but also for learning.
Now I'm reading Witchery, my fantasy novel published in 2016. It's been over two years since I read it last and I'm curious, again, if it's as good as I thought it was when I finished it.
So far, I'd have to say yes...and no. The story is still excellent. The four main characters are well developed, the plot is solid and not too complicated, but not too simple, either.
As I believe I've written before, I could have made this into a two- or three-book series. Or even more. I'm pretty sure that an author whose experience and talent run to producing a series instead of a single novel would have stretched it out. There is so much backstory available for all the characters except Teyla that visiting those stories would easily expand the novel into two or three. The question, though, is, could all that backstory-ing maintain the interest of the readers?
In some of the fantasy series I've read I find myself losing patience with all the unnecessary extras. I want to get to the showdown that's been intimated since almost the beginning.
In Witchery I made no concerted effort to disguise the showdown. Heroine and villain were destined to meet. And if you assume there's going to be a happy ending, then the hero—Teyla—will be victorious in the conflict.
But how? And what of the battle of everyone else? How will that play out? Could I have visited all those back stories of the supporting characters...and the villain, and maintain the readers' interest?
At that time, probably not, at least not as the main plot is approached. It was published in 2016, but I started writing it in 1990. I finished it in '91 or '92, but collected nothing but rejections. I determined that it needed a major overhaul of the magical elements—what the magic could and could not do. One of the characters also needed a major change.
I did not get around to doing that until 2015 and basically rewrote most of the second half of the novel while not changing the plot. Plus the necessary changes throughout. It is absolutely much better than the original.
I could, though, have been a little more stylish in the writing. I could have used more metaphors, similes, alliteration, etc. But I was not yet to that level of my writing...and besides, I don't use a lot of that anyway. But I try to use more than I did.
I am now almost embarking on a fantasy series. I say almost because with my required work hours, I don't have the time I need to make much progress. But we'll see how I do with a project of that size.
Thanks again for reading, and please...VOTE!!
And if you vote my way, all the better.

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R.I.P.

10/20/2018

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2018 has been a rough year for science fiction fans...rougher still on the families and friends of the many s.f. authors that have stopped writing—forever—this year.
There may be others (I hope not!) but the ones I've discovered are Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Harlan Ellison, Gardner Dozois, and Mary Rosenblum.
Long time readers of science fiction, especially older readers, will recognize some or all of those names. If you like reading sf and you don't recognize those names, please do a Google search, or an Amazon search, and get acquainted with them.
Most died of illness and/or old age. One died in a crash of a private airplane near an airfield in Washington. She was the pilot and the only one aboard.
That one was perhaps the least famous on the list, at least for die-hard science fiction readers.
Mary Rosenblum published and won awards for her science fiction writing, but also for her mystery writing. She was also an expert cheese maker and taught classes for that. And in 2010 she took up flying and relatively quickly became president of the Oregon Pilots Association.
She was also an excellent teacher of writing. She taught at the Clarion West Writers Conference, one of the most prestigious writers conferences in the world.
In 2011 I was ready to give up writing. I'd failed again and again to get anything published. But I decided to give it one more try. I signed up for the basic writing class with the Long Ridge Writers Group (LRWG). If you show enough promise, they pair you up one-on-one with an accomplished author that has also shown an ability to teach. I was fortunate enough to have Mary assigned as my tutor. I published for the first time in 2012, a poem and a short story in Page and Spine, an internet magazine (e-zine) that was just getting started.
I credit her for getting me "over the hump" on the road to publication. At that time she also wrote the newsletter for LRWG which included not only instruction points on writing, but also on publishing, self-publishing, and the hazards of publishers that will rip off an author if they get the chance.
In 2012 she established her own company, The New Writers Interface, to help shepherd new writers through process of writing, especially self-publishing. She billed herself the Literary Midwife and published a newsletter under that title.
I was offered a contract by a publisher for Witchery. The contract was an obvious rip-off, and when I pointed out I wished to renegotiate, he informed me that he did not renegotiate contracts and that his offer was standard in the publishing business. He was either a crook or woefully ignorant. For example, his contract gave the publisher the copyright rather than the author. I declined the offer. I emailed Mary and sent her a copy of the contract offer, which she featured in one of her newsletters as a perfect example of what an author must not sign.
Besides being Facebook friends, we exchanged emails infrequently, mostly she would reply when I had a question or a declaration of success.
Sadly, we'd had little contact over the last two years, so I did not know of her death until this week, even though she died in March. A notice appeared in my email saying that Mary Rosenblum wanted to be friends on Facebook. That was obviously a bogus request.
When I went to Facebook and keyed in her name I was sent immediately to Google, and the notice of her death.
Many friends and associates of Mary in the Oregon pilots community and the science fiction community have written tributes and obituaries.
I guess this is mine. I am very sad...sad about her death and sad that I did not learn of it till seven months after the fact.
Thank you for reading. Please remember to keep in touch with all those special in your life, especially the ones you don't see often—or ever—and whom you won't miss until it's too late.

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For Starters...

9/23/2018

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Sept. 20, 2018

He had decided that, yes, it was possible to become acclimated to hell.
How's that for an opening sentence?
I have no story to follow up that sentence, however.
I must apologize for the amount of time between posts, and the fact that these long gaps will continue.
I am now working 5 10-hour days each week. This is the real-life reference to that opening sentence above. This is not my idea.
When my employer declared we had to devote an additional ten hours of our lives to work every week, there are things that must be sacrificed. In my case it is exercise and writing. And if I'm writing this blog, then I'm not writing my fantasy novel.
Also, I'm still working on finding a publisher for Saving Atlantis. Every publisher and every agent wants the query/submission to be a little different from the others, so it's not feasible to develop a template and just change the name of the recipient and send the same thing. Each query must be different and tailored for that specific market. And that takes time.
Back to opening sentences and/or paragraphs.
I'm going to blow my own horn just a bit. After all, it's my horn. Who will blow it if I don't?
Anne R. Allen's writing blog devoted an entire post to opening sentences. It impressed on me the importance of that first sentence or paragraph, but I think I did a pretty fair job before reading that. The importance of those opening words is to grab the readers' interest right away and make them want to read more.
I like to think I did that with Prophecy of Honor: "The funeral fires were still smoldering, but after four days the flames were no longer visible within the blackened collapsed pyres. My anger, with the flames, had subsided but still simmered within."
Who died? How many—obviously many since there were pyres. Why? No doubt the why is connected with the narrator's anger. We need to find out more.
That was my goal. I like to think I succeeded at least a little.
With Witchery I tried a different tactic...well, I stole one, really. In popular television shows like Law and Order or NCIS, they introduce the episode by revealing the crime with a witness that has no other role in the story. I did that. I introduced the plot—the conflict—with a woman bearing witness to the aftermath of a terrible crime:
"If you live long enough to be a grandmother, you don't ignore your instincts." That sentence tells the readers that in this world, living long enough to be a grandparent is not something taken for granted. Old age is not too often the cause of death. Then the third paragraph begins with, "She could smell the blood even from thirty paces away."
My hope is that any reader is going to want to know about the violence she will discover in a moment, and then the story will pull them along from that point.
That opening scene was the last thing I finished in that story. I must have tried a dozen different openings before I finally got something that I felt did what I wanted it to do.
Witchery is the only one of my four published novels written in third person, and that is mostly an omniscient third—the thoughts and desires and fears of the characters, even those many days' travel apart, are revealed.
Prophecy of Honor and Witchery are fantasy books. Witchery is, in fact, a great example of what is labelled "high fantasy." They are both stories of action, decisions, striving, and violence, and the opening lines reflect that.
The two Just Lucky books comprise a story that is partly romance, partly coming of age, partly adult fiction, and partly derived from true events. As such, an opening sentence implying violence would not be appropriate. I needed to entice the reader to want more information by offering something unusual. I included a Forward that explains why this tale is being told in first person. In Prophecy of Honor I did the same, but the reason was given at the very end.
The first chapter after the Forward is titled "Curse". And the first line is: "My sophomore year in college I met a young lady who saw things before they happened." I hope that will intrigue readers enough to keep reading.
A good ending is also important, and much of that is knowing when the story...or the blog entry...is finished. Which is now.
Thank you for reading. I'm sorry to say it will probably be as long before the next entry, but I will try to do better.
Stay well, and well-read.

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IN THE BEGINNING...of 2019

The End of It All...of 2018.

Beginning the End, And Beginning the Beginning

Exploring Other Worlds

Revisiting

R.I.P.

For Starters...

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

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Categories

IN THE BEGINNING...of 2019

The End of It All...of 2018.

Beginning the End, And Beginning the Beginning

Exploring Other Worlds

Revisiting

R.I.P.

For Starters...

AuthorI'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.

Archive

Categories

Author

I'm a former teacher and current warehouse grunt that loves writing.