WIP Wednesday #9: Alpha Readers

March 9, 2022 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged Alpha Readers, Beta Readers, Drafts, Early Readers, Slider, Structural Edits, Tri-State Writers, Writing Group, Writing Worries | Leave a comment

My friend Kristin asked me to volunteer as a leader for a new writer’s group through the local public library she works at. I readily agreed, and we developed a plan for a workshop-style critique group. I would really like to find a bunch of writers in the area with whom I can talk to about books and the craft of stringing words into tales, poetry, and other forms of creative meaning. This groups seems like a perfect way to both find writer friends and to improve my own writing along the way. What I didn’t expect was to be sharing my work with the group so soon.

At the end of the first meeting no one had anything to volunteer. I imagined that a few months down the line I’d have my own unpublished novel manuscript in decent enough shape to feel comfortable sharing it. However, everyone seemed like they would be a lot more comfortable if they first critiqued one of the group leaders pieces. And so, I let myself be the sacrificial writer whose manuscript these readers will have their first stab (sharp and pointy stabs I’m sure) at.

**ACTUAL IMAGE OF ALPHA READER CRITIQUING MY NOVEL**

Yes, I could have submitted any number of unpublished short stories I have moldering away in some inexplicably dusty digital folder. However, I want this group to give me feedback on my novel. I need feedback on my novel. So I sent them the first part of my WIP, and now I’m kind of thinking Oh god, what have I done?

While the piece certainly isn’t as polished as I’d like, that’s only because for most parts of my novel I am making structural edits. I’d really like to be at a line-editing phase right now, but there’s just too much story craft to attend to still. The varnishing stage of word working will have to come later. And these early Alpha Readers will help me test the strength of my structural edits.

I turned on my laptop, loaded up the prologue and first chapter of my novel, selecting a total of fifteen pages. And then I read that oh-so-familiar story. I read it with the intention of sharing it. In doing so, I realized just how fucking different it is than anything most of my Alpha Readers have probably ever read. I think what I’ve written is good. But I do some ballsy shit in those first fifteen pages. So I’m a little nervous because I have no idea how an unprepared reader will take this kind of prose. Of course, I’m not trying to say that I’ve done something so unique that no reader will have ever had an analogous experience to what these, my Alpha Readers, are about to experience. What I’m saying is, not all of my Alpha Readers will be expecting a book like this.

My bestie, Mike, is the one and only person in this group who I know for a fact is at all prepared for my WIP. Though I’m hoping even he’ll be a bit surprised. And maybe the other group members are equally versed in similar modern Literary Fiction. But after meeting the handful of local authors who attended, I strongly doubt that (and make no judgements about it either).

I simply don’t know how readers unfamiliar with books of the sort I’ve written are going to react. So it’s both a bit scary and a bit exciting to see varying levels of blindness when it comes to my Alpha Readers. My bestie is well-versed in the kind of tough books that you must learn how to read while you read it. My co-leader, Kristin, is aware of the potential difficult reading level I write at since she did read my last book (though that book’s difficulty was in its language rather than structure). My other readers, like I already mentioned, I can’t be sure what they’ve read. Though if what they said they write is indicative of their past reading experience, then they haven’t read anything like what I’ve written.

There is an upside and a downside to having Alpha Readers reading blind to the very genre of my book (categorized best, I think, as genre Literary Fiction, subgenre Systems Novel).

We’ll start with the negative.
My Alpha Readers may not give good feedback because the structure is too unfamiliar to their expectation. They may find my narrative approach so jarring that they can’t offer feedback (will my readers be too busy asking “What is it?” to suggest “This part here would be stronger if . . .”?).

There are plenty of potential positives.
My Alpha Readers may find the novel fresh and original. Being they may not have expectations about my genre, they might be more accepting of how it is different from other Lit Fic Systems Novels. No matter their reaction, I’ll come away with a small sample of ways that the regular reading public will react to my book. By the time I’ve shared my whole novel, I might have expanded the reading world for someone.

Our next meeting is on Thursday night, so I’ll have some initial reactions to report back on the day after this post goes live. Hopefully everyone who came to the first meeting also attends the second. And I hope we get more people in attendance even if they won’t be reading the first pages of my book.

All images in this post hold a Creative Common license and were sourced from Pixabay. The image of the husky tearing apart a ball was sourced from JockeEkroth on Pixabay.

WIP Wednesday #8: Growth

March 31, 2021 by Randal Eldon Greene in Books, Novels, WIP Wednesday and tagged Charlotte in the Mouth, growth, plot, Work-in-progress, writing | Leave a comment

One of the things I enjoy most about writing is when things grow beyond what one initially planned. This makes whatever you’re working on feel more fleshed out and is perhaps even where the depths of your narrative are located.

I’m currently writing a novel I’m titling Charlotte in the Mouth. I’m so super excited about this book, and even more excited because I recently began the penultimate chapter of part 1. I’m calling it part 1, but really it’s all the chapters following a particular character as an adult. These part 1 chapters were the initial conception for the book. The novel stands alone fine with just them.

It was only after I began writing the book that an originally unrelated image floating around my head solidified into a second major character that absolutely needed to go into this book. When I get to this character, I’ll be writing part 2, though both parts will alternate once I put them together. This second part not only will help my little book become much more fully fleshed out, but I can tell it’s adding a layer of depth that wasn’t in my original conception.

So that’s it. Two parts and I’m done! Right?

Well . . . one of the things I enjoy most about writing is when things grow beyond what one initially planned and when the story of its own accord decides to bud and grow further from the already unexpected branches of plot, character, and theme. I guess I’ll be giving an update about not only part 2, but also part 3.

 Image source: Pixabay - FotoXCapture

WIP Wednesday #8: Summer is here

June 24, 2020 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged Dialogues, Novel, Slice of Life, Slider, update | 1 Comment

Summer finally breezed in on the 21st, and maybe with days of exceptional heat, I’ll actually feel like staying inside long enough to hop on the computer. I’ve probably only used this electronic contraption a handful of times since I last updated my website back in April. I admit, nice summer days may simply not permit me to touch so much as a smartphone. Reading and writing (pen & paper) outside is wonderful. And while I’ve spent much more time reading than writing, my time hasn’t been entirely unproductive (and I truly don’t consider reading unproductive; it just isn’t writing).

I managed to get through the minor planned edits of my brick of a novel. I still have a small pile of sticky notes on my desk with major edits that I need to tackle. After completing those smaller edits, I realized I needed to let it rest longer, so I set it aside for all of May and June here and am only now starting to feel that I could potentially begin to grapple with The Brick again soon; though I’m not keen about screen time when it’s nice and sunny out, with the high contrast option I can at least see the screen outside. And, like I mentioned, the potential of weather in the upper 90’s might drive even me indoors.

I finished (sort of) typing up my remaining dialogues . . . at least the ones I could find. Unfortunately, a few pieces went missing during the move. It’s likely that they’re in the house somewhere, but misfiled somehow. I’m not terribly worried. My wife has encouraged me to put off publishing a book of my dialogues until I have at least one more novel out in the world. The marketing makes sense to my mind; a collection of shorts is less likely to be bought and read than a novel, I believe, and I’ll have more luck getting a short story collection in bookstores if I have a publisher who is already selling my other book(s). When I feel like tackling the dialogues again, I’ll either need to find my missing stories, rewrite them from scratch, or write entirely new dialogues. Even if I do find the missing ones, it is possible I’ll write new dialogues while leaving some of the ones I wrote during my weekly challenge unpublished. Not all the dialogues came out great, which is fine for something like the writing challenge I gave myself.

This spring I’ve gardened, finally finished setting up my library, and have given myself quite the to-do list for the first summer in our new home. And today I finished the outline for my next book. This is the first time I’ve outlined a novel. Descriptions of Heaven and The Brick both had notes with sentences and images, but little in the way of plot. For this book, I wanted a detailed outline; it’s a slice of life or day in the life piece following a young woman looking forward to a romantic connection. (Let’s call this new WIP Slice of Life for now.) While I’ve read that day in the life kind of books are frequently plotless, I felt that such a book needed to account for the order of events in a way that my other books, which cover large sweeps of time, did not need. Of course, I haven’t started writing the book yet, so this former “discovery writer” is about to discover if plotting will work for him or not. (I do expect it to work, BTW). If anything, finding that I’m not set in my process, but am flexible depending on the needs of the work, makes me hopeful that I can write more than one kind of book: tightly plotted or loose and digressive.

Let me know what you’re working on this summer, be it writing or roofing.

All photos from Pixabay or remixes from Pixabay unless otherwise stated.

WIP Wednesday #7: Pandemical Output

April 22, 2020 by Randal Eldon Greene in Personal, WIP Wednesday and tagged #WriteOn, coronavirus, COVID-19, first draft, Novel Writing, pandemic, politics, Slider, social distancing, Writer's Life, writing | Leave a comment

It seems that a lot of people are finding life hard right now. They’re stuck at home, can’t socialize, and many have other worries (lost jobs, long lines at food banks, bored children who can’t hang with their friends). This event—caused by the novel coronavirus, a biological entity spreading as a sickness known to the world by the name of COVID-19—as a sociological phenomena has affected me mildly. So I’ve been putting off writing anything about it here on my website (though my personal journal is full of reflections).

Capture from a video of my niece’s dolls social distancing in the yard.

One of the things that social distancing has taught me is that I don’t socialize. It really hasn’t changed my social life whatsoever. The biggest social difference is that I’m no longer meeting up with Mike for our working meetings (we’re creating scripts for a literary YouTube channel we hope to get off the ground at some point). Although this itself doesn’t feel odd, since we only started doing them about 3 weeks before #SocialDistancing became a thing.

My wife, however, has been feeling the changes more acutely than I. She’s a school teacher, so she’s been working from home, doing Zoom video meetings regularly.
Iowa law does not currently allow virtual learning to count toward minimum hours required each school year. So my wife’s district has been creating voluntary homework. It’ll be corrected, but not graded, for those students who choose to do it (AKA for those kids whose parents make them do it).

I must say, having Libby at home has been generally nice. While different, it does not feel particularly novel. After all, she is home pretty much all day during the summer. Summer just came early, while snow still kept repeatedly gracing the ground with its annoying clinginess. #FuckSnow #MeltAlready

We also happen to live in one of the few states without a mandatory stay-at-home order (and I work in Nebraska, which also lacks blanket pandemic measures). So things don’t feel as locked down as they probably do elsewhere in the country. The hotel I work at has slowed down quite a lot; it seemed the summer construction season was ramping up early before the virus appeared on our shores. Nevertheless, we’ve been holding our own. Also, because of our status as a housing facility, I think we’re considered essential business, so it’s likely that even if Pete Ricketts began implementing draconian measures to help save the lives of citizens under his governorship, our business would continue to operate as long as employees were staying healthy.
So if there’s financial hardship headed my family’s way, we’ve yet to see it. With the stimulus check landing in our savings account last week, we’re actually coming out ahead.

I think the most stressing part of all this (outside of the copious amount of hand sanitizer and bleach water I’m using while at work) is seeing the president attempt to rewrite history, push conspiracy theories, cut off funding from WHO, and (most recently) make a call for citizens to rise up against state governments (specifically of Democrat governors; Republican led states doing the same thing aren’t the target of his presidential tweets).

Check out Randal's current sole political essay on Medium

This is highly distressing. It simply boggles my mind how such a horrible human being and incompetent “leader” can possibly be in charge right now. With another weak Democratic candidate as the only option left (well, I guess we’ll see if the unofficial write-in-Bernie movement gets serious by the time November rolls around) I’m afraid it’ll be four more years of the Orange Buffoon. Hopefully his transparent ploy to save the economy by duping people into thinking it’s okay to get back to normal before the transmission rate gets close to zero (the Fed guidelines are only asking for a 2-week downward trend, which isn’t what health officials had suggested as a sign for reopening the economy). Of course, without adequate testing, there’s no way to know for sure if any place is ready. Is the trend really down or are our testing supplies in such inadequately short supply that we’re guessing based on wholly incomplete data? But the Liar in Chief continues to think the public and reporters are too dumb to realize that we don’t have enough tests. Only his ardent cult followers believe him and whatever tumbles out of the screen from Fox News (#fauxnews).

And by the time this scheduled post goes up, who knows what other insane set of alternative facts or devastating decisions that Trump, the Great American Traitor, will let issue forth from his frog’s mouth.

Politics were slightly less stressful for me the first three weeks of social distancing at the beginning of March because I didn’t have time to catch more than a handful of soundbites on the radio. Why? because I was writing. Yes, I was actually writing quite a lot. I found a publisher for a piece called Christ Abyss and so began the process of taking a draft, adding and editing until it turned into a short novella or novelette. I sent it in to the transgressive publisher on the 31st, though I suspect it could have been better (a beta reader got back to me only recently with some great suggestions), but that was the deadline. I don’t know if you’d term it a dark fantasy or horror fantasy or an anti-heaven tourism novel, but it’s not written for righteous among us.

Whatever it is, it had my full attention for those three weeks—despite being just about done with draft 1 of my novel and having just downloaded new software for editing the video footage I filmed for a “Write with Me” style YouTube video.

Order of events: I wrote the damned novella, took a week off from everything except our new Nintendo Switch (okay, this is the other biggest change that the coronavirus has thus far brought to our lives; I haven’t owned a gaming system since 2005), and then finally finished draft 1 of the novel last Thursday. Yes siree, the zero draft I completed on December 3rd has finally been fully transferred into an edited digital first draft.

My goal was to write a sorta bigger book (no Moby Dick, but hopefully something bigger than the standard 80K). I thought I would probably hit somewhere between 120 to 126 thousand words for my first draft. My hope was to then expand this during my edits, adding scenes, better detail, etc. Then, in all likelihood, I would see it trimmed back down to about the original length after my future publisher’s editor got done hacking it to pieces revising it.

My final word count came to 173,499 words. That’s over 47 thousand more words than I expected to get. And I’d love to see this word count even higher when I get to work on draft 2. I don’t think I will see it rise more than 5 or 10 thousand words, but if for some reason I managed to add enough to get my #FutureMasterpiece above the 200K word mark, I’ll treat myself to a fancy steakhouse dinner (assuming the local steakhouses find the means and meat to reopen after America gets its herd immunity—I mean its mass vaccinations).

My next task is to dive back into the remainder of my unedited dialogues. I’m sure that I’m waaay behind where I should have been with these, but that’s the writing life for ya. You get creatively distracted. You get bogged down by life or lifted away into a book (when will I learn that I can’t read fiction in the mornings if I want to get any writing done?). Your muse sometimes says you must muster your writerly might for more material matters (for example: an alliterative blog post).

I also don’t know how attentive I’ll be on my AuthorTube channel; whatever pleasure and practical gains I get from it can’t compare to the simple act of writing & creating story. On top of that, it begins to look nice enough out for sitting around outdoors in the evenings with a book. Maybe I’ll make a goal of one video a month for now (though don’t hold me to it). Other than putting off the unessential, I’ve also taken some stabs at starting a new novel. The proper way to begin is eluding me. What I think I need to do is actually sit down and plot this book. I’ve never plotted before. And since my attempts at not plotting this thing have petered out, it’s time I take the plunge into the twisty waters of plotting. Wish me the best of luck! #WriteOn

Please stay healthy, happy, & word-nerdy, Bookworms.

***

[An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that requiring online education was illegal in Iowa. This post was updated to reflect more accurate language around virtual education in this state.]

WIP Wednesday #6: Zero draft DONE

December 4, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in Books, Novels, WIP Wednesday and tagged Novel, Novel Writing, Overdose II, Slider, writing, writing goals, writing habits, Writing on Twitch, Zero Draft | Leave a comment

Ever watch an author finish writing his book?

Watch Literally writing the last pages of my novel. from RandalEldonGreene on www.twitch.tv

If you clicked my video above, now you have.

Finishing the book took me a bit longer than I expected. Buying a new house, moving in mid-October, setting up the office, and learning how to begin “professional” livestreaming all took time away from actual writing. But actually write I did, and the book was finished yesterday.

My novel technically began in early 2007, as an idea. It had a lengthy seven-year gestation period before the first words of the book were born. I actually started writing it around September of 2014. So it’s been five years in the making, around twelve years total from concept to paper-draft completion. In time since writing began I got a girlfriend, moved into a rental house, got married, wrote a short story collection, became a first time home buyer, had something like 24 short creative pieces published, and saw my first novel printed by a small press.

The plan today is to begin typing up my zero draft. First, I’m going to tidy up the chaotic mess that is my desk. I think there is such a thing as creative chaos, and the tendency towards this in my writing space seems to affirm it as a fact. But periodic cleaning is a good thing for focus. And a good time for decluttering is the start of a new chapter. This certainly counts as one for me.

I’m still making small adjustments to my process. This includes how and when I livestream my writing to how and when I work on what. For example, I’ve been putting off my dialogues for a long while now. The novel was imperative. And, truly, it still is. But I need to finish editing my collection of creative conversations sooner than later. What I think I will do is set aside certain hours of a specific day to focus on that and other short fiction projects.

Livestreaming itself has been an interesting experience. I feel like maybe I should move the livestream to YouTube where there is an existent community of authors and writers. I may attempt a trial of this in the near future. I’d also like to try making some videos for AuthorTube and see how that goes.

As for livestreaming on Twitch, I’ve found that most Twitch people aren’t there to write, even if they want to hang on my stream. For this reason, my most popular streams have been ones where I’m chatting. Chatting while writing is, naturally, distracting. So I’m adjusting my schedule to make sure I consistently do silent writing streams and also give myself more hours of “private” writing sessions (you know, just regular writing, not in front of a camera). So some of my streams are going to be starting later to make sure my writing isn’t overly interrupted by social sessions. In other words, writing comes first; the stream is there to build community by encourage others and myself to keep at it.

I’m also encouraging donations with a Whiskey Wednesday stream, where I’ll be imbibing a drink or two during the writing session. There’s a nicely placed whiskey fund tip jar for those willing to subscribe or donate to the cause of writing drunk and editing sober.

How long will this novel take to edit? That is simply something I cannot be sure of at this juncture. Hopefully less than a year. During the writing of this book, I’ve learned not only a lot about how I write, but how my body desires to write and desires to not write. I don’t experience writer’s block, but I do experience distraction, excuses, the easy pleasures the TV screen and of a book (“just one more chapter” becoming an all-morning read). So in the next phase of this novel, I’ll probably be learning a lot about how I edit something this lengthy. Certainly, I have ample experience editing short fiction, and even my first short novel, but this manuscript is sure to both test and teach me.

It’s a test and a learning experience I’m looking forward to.

WIP Wednesday #5: Home Stretch

September 11, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged Novel Writing, Slider, Writer's Life, writing goals, writing habits | 2 Comments

I think I’m in the home stretch. But I’m not sure. It’s takes me months sometimes to write a chapter. Technically I’ve been working on this book for years. I haven’t always had the luxury of being able to build a daily writing habit. Nor have I always utilized the writing time I have for working on my novel. But even when I am writing daily, I find it takes me a long time to finish a chapter. And I’m only on chapter 11 of a planned 15 chapters. Yet, despite the evidence of the past, I really feel like I’m in the home stretch.

The number one reason I should not feel this way is that I am moving to a new home. That’s right, my wife and I are moving out of our rental and are buying our very first house together. In a month and a few days, I’m going to be a bona fide homeowner. This week we began packing.

The first box for the move is taped up and labeled.

Trying to finish a book while also getting ready to move is probably not wise. But you know what I think is even more foolish? Not writing.

There’s a time to write and a time to rest. Right now, it’s not a time to rest, but a time to use the changes in my life as a catalyst to finishing the first draft of this book. I figure that if a normal person only gets to pack in the evenings after work or on weekends, then I can just pack after I’m done writing for the day.

I won’t be finished with this book by moving day (Oct. 12!). Still, the feeling of crunch time is helping motivate me to get this novel done. I might get burned-out with packing our whole house into boxes, but I don’t think I’ll be getting burned-out on writing the book. There’s too much excitement there for me. Especially since I have a self-imposed deadline of October 31st.

Why Halloween? Only because I want to do NaNoWriMo, so I will ideally be done on or even before the deadline. Hopefully I’m not setting myself up to fail in November (or to fail to even participate) by cutting things so close. Nevertheless, I think it would be nice to just set the novel aside in November and let my creative side jump into something completely different.

I won’t go into my evolving thoughts on NaNoWriMo or into the piece I hope to write for it because it’s not yet being written and this is work-in-progress Wednesday. All of that will come later—if at all. I will, however, share a photo of a note from my wife I found on the back of one of my as yet unpublished stories while sorting through papers that needed filing.

WOW. This is probably the best thing you’ve written. Seriously, honey!! ❤ ❤ ❤

In summary, I think the rest of chapter 11 and the subsequent chapters will be written faster than all the parts of the book that came before. I’m in the home stretch. Let’s just hope that my move doesn’t stretch me beyond my limits, creatively or otherwise.

WIP Wednesday #4: Am I a Novelist?

June 12, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in Fiction, WIP Wednesday and tagged impostor syndrome, Novel Writing, novelists, Novella, Novels, poetry, short story writing, Slider, Writer's Life, writing habits | Leave a comment

Work in Progress

When I began writing Descriptions of Heaven, though I did intend to one day become a novelist, I never intended this narrative to be of book-length. The thing grew from a single scene into a story composed of chapters. It, in fact, unintentionally took the place of a book I was writing about a son dealing with the decline of his mother’s health due to Alzheimer’s disease.

Even with this book published, I had never been quite certain that I legitimately was a novelist, since my first book is what many call a novella. However, I have come across writing just as short as my novella where the publisher calls it a novel in the blurb and foreword. So I was either a novelist who wrote a little novel (novella) or a short story author who wrote a long short story. Either way, my book was published as a standalone piece, just like any novel—big or small. Yet, I still kept asking myself, Am I a novelist?

©2004-2019 wredwrat

When asked what I do all day, my default answer is no longer “I’m a writer” or the only sightly less vague “I write books.” Instead, I’m more apt so say “I’m a novelist” (though saying I’m a short story author is equally true, short fiction work isn’t a part of my quotidian practices).

There are two primary reason I’ve embraced the term novelist:
1) Recently, a friend on my Literary Fiction Writers Facebook group, during a discussion about the demarcations between a short story and a novel, pointed out that the real difference isn’t word count, but structure and flow. Novels and short stories are extremely different in that respect. While I’m not willing to discount word count as playing a central role in their difference, I’m apt to agree that rather small word counts can still be structured as novels. Descriptions of Heaven has under 35 thousand words, but it is structured as a novel and does not flow like a short story.
2) I have to admit that in this past six months I’ve become much more focused on my novel-in-progress, spending less time on my short fiction, which I often used to write, edit, and submit in lieu of working on my novel. Not only did my computer go kaput, as I explained in a previous WIP Wednesday post, making this kind of productive “distraction” less available, but I’ve also been spending every free day I have novel-writing for as long as I feasibly can. While it’s often not as much as I want, I can honestly say I am spending large chunks of my weekdays writing a novel.

©2016-2019 TheGraphicNovelist

So, there you have it. I have already written one little novel, and most Tuesdays through Fridays I spend my hours after breakfast until lunch writing my next novel. I am a novelist, both a published and actively working novelist.

Real talk time: I think a lot of novelists suffering from impostor syndrome or whatever, suffer a lot not because their book is too small, but because they don’t write as much as they can. No one should spend all their time writing, and in your life there are likely other things that take precedence over creative work. But a lot of us have the time—have in fact painfully carved out some small hours to focus on creativity—and yet we feel like impostors because we haven’t developed a good writing habit, thus we don’t use the time as we should. Consequently, we don’t feel like writers, let alone novelists.

The truth is, I haven’t developed a consistent habit of getting back to the desk after lunch. I can’t even blame it on a honey-do list, since I don’t let chores distract me anymore. My problem is that writing’s been going so well that I often finish my intended writing goal for the day or complete a long scene before the hours I’ve carved out for myself are used up. So I often stop writing because my brain feels like it needs a reset or some time to think about what’s next (yeah, I’m not a huge plotter).

On the one hand, I don’t mind these breaks because I’ve felt productive and hit my goals. On the other hand, I want to make a living as a writer—as a novelist—and in order to do that, I’ll probably want to be putting out a book every other year. Stopping for scene changes isn’t going to cut it.

Maori Sakai writer's life

© Maori Sakai

Here’s four things I’m doing to try and keep it going:
1) During lunch, I don’t turn on the radio or watch any TV. This lets my mind linger on my work, keeping me in my novelist zone or at least letting me transition back there faster.
2) I just get right back to the desk after my break and write. It’s been years since I’ve had to be in a mood or needed the Muse to write. So why I think I need to be calibrate my brain for the next section of my novel, I don’t know.
3) If I don’t have so much as a bullet point on a sticky note or general idea of what comes next, I’ll let myself go on a walk and think about it. I write when I get back. This isn’t something I want to become a habit since I won’t be going on walks come our long Midwestern winters, so I’ll only go out for a walk after serious creative thought. If nothing comes, I’ll let myself head out into the neighborhood for an hour or so.
4) I’m building a habit by writing every day I can, starting as early as I can and staying at it until 3:00pm if possible. Yet there’s this thing called real life that gets in the way sometimes of that good habit, so I’ve been trying to write daily regardless of the time. If needed, I’ve started at 11:00am, which is really late for me. I’ve even resorted to writing in the evening if I didn’t get a chance to during the day. While it cuts into family and reading time writing so late, it also shows my commitment to making a living from my books, continues to build my writing habit, and literally gets me a few pages closer to my goal.

This book is getting done. And, while I am a novelist, it’s forming the habit of novel-writing that’s going to let me someday be a career novelist (and occasional author of short story collections).

author novelist short story writer

© Elias Stein

Do you consider yourself a novelist whether you’ve written a novel or not? Or a poet, even if you haven’t made a collection of poetry? What are your writing habits like? Are your habits working or can you improve upon them? Let me know in the comments below.

WIP Wednesday #3: Adapt

March 27, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged Novel Writing, Overdose II, Slider, Summer Reading, Writer's Life | 2 Comments

My computer broke. It became extremely slow of a sudden. I did manage to finish typing up chapter 7 before the thing became unusable, giving me disc error messages when I boot it up.

I’m not terribly upset. Yes, I need a computer to type and edit, but I really don’t miss the internet. I’m actually enjoying the extra hour(s) of book reading now that I must wait until a work day (like today; I was called in) to do anything online. I already refuse to own a smartphone. I really don’t want to deal with the constant presence of social media in my pocket. And the computer that went kaput is also the same one that for years didn’t have internet, functioning as just a useful word processor. I was forced to add internet functionality back to it when my tiny laptop with a half-broken screen finally died. The truth is, I’ll probably get the thing fixed come winter. Maybe. The Spring and Summer months are really the worst months to be staring at screens anyway.

I spent over a week typing up chapter 7. I ended up with 71 double spaced pages with 21,577 words. My novel is now past the 100 thousand word mark. Chapter 8 was written before chapter 7, so I took a weeklong break to just read, which corresponded nicely with my computer going to shit.

During this break, I also contemplated what to write next. I thought I knew where I wanted to go. In fact, I still want to go there. But there’s been this character, Kimmie, who has been sitting in my mind since the beginning, and I wasn’t sure if there’d be enough room to squeeze her in and flush her out like I wanted. I’ve toyed with cutting her out altogether. But this book is a “cast of many,” and so I never entirely snipped her out and, in fact, mentioned her in the last chapter, basically daring myself to find a way to give her some page time.

So I was sitting in my library, thinking about how to start the next chapter, and this big old monologue from Wesley formed in my head. I had problems with it though. The first problem was that it simply didn’t feel right for the next chapter. Though maybe it could be slipped in somewhere, I couldn’t imagine where exactly. The second problem was that chapter 8 already had a heavy dialogue-only section toward the end. It would make a good beginning of a chapter, but not a good start to the next chapter.

The idea of Kimmie’s displaced narrative suddenly bumped up against this monologue, and I could see thematic resonance. While I still couldn’t start the next chapter with the monologue, it could certainly follow Kimmie’s section just fine. And once I had set the monologue behind my other character’s story, I realized I had a new chapter—an extra and previously unplanned chapter.

With this extra chapter squeezed in, will my book fall apart under its own weight?

No. I don’t think it will. In fact, Wesley’s monologue will be a great segue into chapter 10. It’s an accident of inspiration, and the novel will adapt to fit it. Just like I’ll adapt to only having access to a computer when at work on the weekends. My experience of the sunny months will be better without a computer in my house. My novel will be better with this extra chapter nestled happily into the middle of the story. Everything will adapt just fine.

WIP Wednesday #2: The Book Pitch

January 16, 2019 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged Book Pitch, Elevator Pitch, Overdose II, Pitch, Slider | 2 Comments

What the hell is this book about?

I’ve been working on my novel for a couple of years now, yet until recently I never tried writing out what it was about in any succinct but descriptive way. The most I’ve said about it is basically an evasive log line: It’s about a rock band that gains fame through infamy. Yeah, that doesn’t tell you a lot. I finally decided it was time to write out what the hell this book is about when someone in a Facebook group asked members to pitch their books.

The Pitch

The death metal rock stars of Overdose II, known for the on-stage suicides of their guest artists, are looking for a new permanent lead guitarist. Will Wesley Hartsell, the sole survivor of a band whose concert was attacked by terrorists, be willing to take their offer? What he doesn’t know is that the mother of one of the band’s “victims” is out for revenge, the wife of their music producer has begun a destructive emotional affair, and Overdose II’s next guest music artist may just be someone Wesley cares about.

Now I’m no expert at writing pitches. And I’m certainly not recommending anyone use my pitch as any kind of template. For a Facebook comment, though, it held up well enough that I was contacted by a member of the group who happened to be an acquisitions editor for a publishing company.

I’m really flattered that there’s already some interest (well, someone interested) in my book. I jumped the gun a bit and agreed to send the manuscript in May when the book is closer to done. After really looking into the publisher, I won’t be considering them. While they print quality books, I see that their marketing plan doesn’t include getting their author’s books on bookstore shelves. In other words, I’m looking for better distribution and marketing than they can offer.

In truth, I’m going to end up needing an agent. This means I’ll need a query, but I can wait until the book is completed before I begin to write one.

Elevator Pitch

You’re in a elevator with either your dream agent or a decision maker with a major publisher. You’ve got their full attention, but the ride is short. In 50 words or fewer, pitch them your unpublished masterpiece.

That’s the setup for the elevator pitch. You’ve got to sell it with something brief, enticing, and true. It’s the true that’s hard for me with this novel. It’s hard because there’s so much crammed in it—characters, plot lines, digressions, regurgitations, non-diegetic narrative—that any pitch I write is lacking a major piece of the book-shaped puzzle. Even my slightly lengthier pitch makes Wesley sound like the main character, when in reality the plot isn’t revolving around him in the way that pitch suggests.

“Step back and breathe, Randal.”

Good advice to myself from myself. I need to remember that if a whole plot summary can really really fit inside a pitch, it’s probably a plot belonging to a children’s picture book. A pitch is for selling the book, not revealing all the nuances. And it’s possible that it might even leave out whole plotlines that don’t fit into the short pitch very well. And when you have an elevator pitch, well, you’ve got even less to work with. So make those words count, even if something rather important is left off in the 50-word pitch.

Again, I’m no expert, but here’s my elevator pitch: The death metal rock stars of Overdose II, known for the on-stage suicides of their guest artists, are looking for a new, permanent lead guitarist. Will Wesley Hartsell be willing to take their offer? It’s a musical affair of wills where revenge and love collide.

What’s here?: One of the main plots.

What’s missing?: The other main plots.

Does what’s missing matter?: Not for an elevator pitch.

Mock me, not my book.

Feel free to send me your thoughts, suggestions, and corrections. I’d love some feedback on the pitches and my pitch-writing abilities. But be nice to the book—what little you know of it; the novel is, after all, a sort of paginated fetus right now. You can beat up on it after publication.

TL;DR I finally wrote a pitch for my novel-in-progress. I’m by no means an expert at pitches, but my pitch did capture the attention of someone in the publishing world (ultimately, I’m rejecting them). I also prepared a 50-word elevator pitch. Pitches leave out a lot of information, but that’s okay as long as they’re brief, enticing, and true.

All images fair use/public domain. Elevator image remixed from pxhere.com CC0 public domain

WIP Wednesday #1: 90K in and Counting

December 12, 2018 by Randal Eldon Greene in WIP Wednesday and tagged genre, Slider, systems novel, word count, Writer's Life | Leave a comment

Work in progress

INTRO TO WIP WEDNESDAYS

I’m starting a new blogging segment I’m calling WIP Wednesday. This is WIP Wednesday #1. I don’t plan to post every single Wednesday but occasionally will be writing about my latest work-in-progress on Wednesdays.

This year I’ve been posting weekly about my dialogue challenge, and I’ve found setting a blogging goal related to my creative writing is a great motivator. This isn’t that exactly. Unless I’m doing a weekly post, an occasional update on my next WIP isn’t going to really motive me not to procrastinate if for some reason I am procrastinating. Instead, I hope this new segment will be more topical in nature, letting people know some aspect of what I’m working on as opposed to what I used to do pre-dialogue days, which was only really post when a story of mine was published somewhere.

Since I’ve already been posting like crazy about the dialogues, expect my WIP Wednesday posts to be mostly focused on the novel. Though there will probably be WIP posts about the dialogues once they are ready to be compiled into a short story collection, but I wouldn’t expect any such posts in the near future.

Image Source from reedsy’s great article on word counts.

WORD COUNT

For my first WIP Wednesday, the focus is going to be on word count.

I just did a recount of the latest drafts of all the chapters in my novel-in-progress, and I’ve got 89,191 words typed up. Now I write everything by hand and only a small portion of the chapter I’m working on is actually typed up. Using a conservative estimate, I’m without a doubt over 90 thousand words.

When I began writing I feared that my book would be too short to count as a novel. I worried I didn’t have enough to say—enough words—to tell a novel-length story. After all, I write lots of flash fiction and my debut book was a novella of less than 40 thousand words (at least after my editor got through with it).

cutting a book down to size

The goal for my current WIP was at least 80 thousand words. I tried to focus on just writing—not word count—and repeated the mantra, A story will be as long as it needs to be, whenever anxiety about my novel’s length cropped up. Truth be told, I failed to brush away my worries and instead have been keeping track of my chapter’s lengths. Here’s the current breakdown:

Prologue: 623 words
Chapter 1: 17,082 word
Chapter 2: 10,943 words
Chapter 3: 8,359 words
Chapter 4: 6,404 words
Chapter 5: 10,034 words
Chapter 6: 5,389 words
Chapter 7: 4,647 words typed (This is the chapter I’m currently writing.)
Chapter 8: 25,710 words

Now that I know I’ve reached the magical 80 thousand, I feel relief because I have certainty that this work is long enough and, with more to write, will stay long enough even after editing. I believe I have something like four more full chapters left to write, including the one I’m currently writing. So I can calculate the average of my completed chapters (not the prologue or chapter 7) at 11,989 words. At only 4 more chapters, that’s 47,956 words left to write if I hit that average. Add this predicted total chapter length of the next 4 chapters to my completed chapters and we’ve got a 132,500 word book.

I have no way of knowing right now if I’m going to be spot on, way short, or a lot longer than this guess. At the lowest, my chapters should be 5 thousand words. I’ve read in places that 5K is a good word count for chapters in most books for adults. As you can see, my chapters are all above 5 thousand words. I think 5K is a good chapter length myself, but that’s not how this book decided to structure itself. It’s perfectly possible that I could end up with four 20 thousand word chapters to finish off my book or, much less likely, end the book with four 5 thousand word chapters.

Isn’t over 100K words too long for a novel?

According to this reedsy article, my book is likely to be a little on the long side for literary fiction. 80 to 100 thousand is the sweet spot. And while the sweet spot is a good place to be because it’s more likely to be accepted by agents and publishing houses, it’s also shorter than I hoped my novel would be. You see, while I fretted about reaching that magical 80K, I felt my book needed to be bigger. It might be best to remember that the sweet spot exists for a reason, but it’s also good to remember the mantra, A story will be as long as it needs to be. And I always felt this story needed to be longer than the minimum. Ideally, I really wanted it to be at least 120 thousand words.

Why break the “rules” of novel-length, especially when it’s your first novel?

That’s a great question? The simple answer is the same as my mantra. But it might also have to do with genre; though to be honest, I really don’t know. To me, my book is literary fiction. But a friend of mine said the book I’ve described to him is a systems novel, a genre of both literary and speculative novels.

I don’t know if he’s correct or not, but one trait that some systems novels have is bulk. Word counts in lit fic systems novels are often way larger than my guesstimate of 130K. So if my friend is right, then maybe the word count this thing is bound to be is closer to correct for its genre (though the mantra takes precedence IMO over any other correctness criteria). My friend is smart, so he’s probably right. But whatever the genre, I feel like the more words for this particular book, the better. You can look up articles on systems novels and, after the book out, decide for yourselves if it’s one, and while you’re at it, you’ll probably make a decision on how you feel about the long chapters in my book.

endless book

TL;DR Announcing a new blogging segment: WIP Wednesday. I’ll be posting these occasionally. My current WIP, a novel, is at 90K words and could get past 130K words. This is long, but it might be the right word count for the book’s genre, a literary systems novel, if it’s even its actual genre. In the end, A story will be as long as it needs to be.

Share a little about your WIP in the comments and don’t forget to drop a link to your website so we can follow you.

Randal Eldon Greene

Novelist & Short Story Author. Bookworm & Logophile.

Category Archives: WIP Wednesday