Monthly Archives: October 2009

What novel should I write?

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Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I’m seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining… well, now.

I’ve actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I’ve never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well — Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I’ve written whole books before, I haven’t ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I’ve had several. I’ve managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I’m having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y’all thought. I won’t necessarily go with the most popular option — it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn’t realize it — but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

  • As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won’t believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
  • Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going — a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it’s got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
  • Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I’ve been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I’ve never done before.
  • The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I’ve been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s a novel or something else.
  • Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I’ve worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if youhave a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want — again, I’m not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can’t vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)

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My muse is trying to kill me

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Wall O' Stickies

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"Where do you get your ideas from?"

It’s actually not a question I get a whole lot anymore. Maybe it’s because people are starting to realize that it’s become the most cliche thing you can say to a writer, or maybe it’s because I tend to be known for working on licensed or collaborative products, and people assume I just don’t have any ideas of my own. Anyhow, while I don’t get questioned about it a lot, people certainly still seem confused by my relationship with the writing process.

As an example, last week I was at a LARP, but spent nearly two hours out of the game. Instead, I was sequestered in the tiny kitchen of the game site, scribbling ideas for a new RPG system furiously in my notebook and testing them out with playing cards and character sheets scratched out on the back of my own. Last night I sat down to just jot down a few ideas, and next thing I knew it was 1 in the morning, and the rest of my family was already off in bed.

I can see why people used to think that creativity came from a spirit or demon — there are a lot of times when I feel an idea possesses me rather than gets created by me. Of course, it’s still a lot of really hard work to get that idea from something rattling around in my head to something that can be seen, but sometimes the idea just sits in the front of my brain and will just poke at me until I sit the fuck down and do something about it. The interesting part is that the more I work on it, the more that other projects jump up and demand to be worked on as well. And when I get into a steady rhythm of writing daily, I find it harder and harder not to write daily. (This is why the first piece of writing advice you’ll probably ever get is "Write every day.")

Let me give you a peek into the various projects I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. Note that this is all outside of my work writing:

  • An RPG system based around teams of criminals put together for heists and con jobs
  • Another RPG system (this time for superheroes) that’s a mash-up between Fudge and 4C (which started as just some house rules for a potential Nextwave campaign)
  • A superhero universe I’ve kicked around for years that might be part of said RPG, or might be used somewhere else
  • Whitechapel episodes and promotion
  • "Gloomy Sunday," the short story for the Close Encounters of the Urban Kind anthology
  • More brainstorming for Katrina Night, my comedic vampire bad girl fiction (which, if I lose my damned mind, I might use for NaNoWriMo this year)
  • A space opera universe (featuring the crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment) that I briefly considered as an audio drama

Odds are pretty good that only a couple of these will actually see the light of day — some of these are old projects that have been sitting on my hard drive for years, and there’s easily another dozen or two projects to keep them company. But on the other hand, Whitechapel was one of those projects, and it’s finally out and getting people excited, so maybe some day a few of these will be out in the open.

Whatever. The point is, my muse is trying to kill me. But what a way to go.
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Giving Away Agent Patriot

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Zork I was Infocom's first product. This scre...

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A few months back, I talked about poking around with Inform 7 and working on an Agent Patriot text adventure. I realized recently that I’m not going to come back around to this — I just have too many other projects going on to give this the attention it deserves. I learned a lot from working on it, but after repeatedly banging my head into walls with trying to get the system to do what I wanted, I’ve decided to abandon the project.

However, since the Agent Patriot universe is open under Creative Commons, I’m going to throw my cobbled-together code out to the Internet, in case anyone else wanted to pick up the project (or at least see how horribly I botched it). You can download it from my Dropbox account here:

Agent Patriot I — Blitzkrieg: New Amsterdam

I also used Inform 7 to test out some of my initial ideas for Whitechapel. People really interested in the minutae of my process can check out the Inform 7 files for that project as well:

The Whitechapel Project

You will need to download Inform 7 to use either of these files. You should beable to just expand them, move the folders to Inform 7′s "Projects" folder, and open the project in Inform 7.

There’s a chance I might flirt with Inform 7 down the road, but I think I’ll approach it with a story that’s actually suited for the medium, instead of trying to work an existing piece of fiction into the IF format.

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Writing and writing and writing

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New & Noteworthy Books

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Before I start, I need a moment.

Ahem.

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST I’M GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN A FICTION ANTHOLOGY.

Whew. There. Now that that’s out of my system, "Gloomy Sunday" has been confirmed as one of the stories in the upcoming Close Encounters of the Urban Kind by Apex Publishing. This is awesome for a couple of reasons: it’s only the second time I’ve been paid for my straight fiction (the first was "Questions" for the Pseudopod podcast), and it’s the first time I’ve been invited into an anthology instead of blindly submitting a story for consideration. I have a chance to do a polish and reformatting pass before the editor gives me redlines. And then, at some point in the future, the awesome happens.

But no time to slow down. I’ve been chugging along on Whitechapel, and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turning out. I’ve been babbling about my writing process on that project quite a bit — you can check out my post-mortems if you’re interested.

And because my brain doesn’t have enough going on, I’ve been poking around with an older project for the past few days — a weird kind of pulp superhero universe. It’s something I’ve kicked around for a few years now, but it’s been intermingled with some other projects in my head, and I’m in the process of slowly extracting them so I can focus on fleshing out those elements. Originally I had a few different OpenOffice documents that I was trying to keep notes in, but it was hard to keep track of all the interconnections, so I’m now putting all my notes into a TiddlyWiki page. My time running a Scion cycle on Obsidian Portal has helped me to think of ways to use a wiki for cross-referencing world information and characters. Of course, I don’t have any plans to work on comic scripts or a superhero RPG, so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with it just yet, but I’m sure I’ll have some fun with it at some point.

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