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Jeff Leaves the House: A Drama in One Act

Author: April 17, 2018 2 Comments

I’ve been saying something along the lines of I am hella old and don’t get out much any more since 2005 or so, and it remains true. The other day, for example, The Duchess and I met our friend Ken for dinner, and Ken made a hurtful remark about luring me out of the house with the promise of cocktails and culinary delights because I never want to go anywhere or do anything or see anybody.

I said hurtful. These comments were, of course, true. I do regard just about any plan that involves me leaving my home as highly suspect and very likely a terrible mistake that will end with me being chased by cannibal clowns or something, and it’s true that the last 50 times Ken invited me to a concert or something I’ve reacted like he just asked me to donate a kidney. How do I know this? Because I also just came across an essay originally published in the Summer 2012 issue of The Inner Swine, in which I more or less repeat my sentiments above. That was six fucking years ago and I was already a curmudgeonly asshole. How do people stand me? Don’t answer that.

Anyways, here’s the essay. Enjoy!

The Last Concert I Went To: The Joy Formidable in New York City

I DON’T GET out much anymore, as I am old and may break a hip. Or, actually, I am lazy, and the idea of trying to remain hip and connected to pop culture beyond fondling my remote control just seems so … extremely exhausting.
Besides, here at the Somers Bunker I have Internet and booze and trained animals to fetch me drinks and books. What more do I need?

Some of my friends still enjoy life, however, and thus I occasionally get an invite to a concert or something. TIS Security Chief Ken West often surfaces from his international missions, breaks into the house, and leaves coded messages written in shaving cream on the bathroom mirror. These messages always decode to an invitation to a concert or film or other social function. Every fifth one or so I accept, without paying attention to what I’ve agreed with, because otherwise I’d never actually see Ken and the property damage would be in vain.

Most recently, I agreed to attend a Joy Formidable concert with Ken. I’d heard a few songs, I was drunk when he asked me, and so it went into the books. Along the way he also invited a guy we went to high school with, a man I had not seen or spoken to in 23 years. And I did not exactly have lots of conversations with him in high school, either. This pushed my antisocial and misanthropic tendencies to their breaking point, but I still went. Such is Ken’s power.

THE ROLLING VOMITORIUM

On the day of the concert, once I had woken up, remembered what day it was, and put on some pants, I was determined not to shame Ken the way I usually do, staggering in to things hours late, confused and shouting. So I took my time, groomed a bit, checked the bus schedule, and made a coherent plan with him to meet for dinner at 6:30 in Manhattan. I actually got on a 5:45pm bus, feeling smug and masterful. I was an adult in charge of his life, heading out for an urbane evening of music and dining.

At 5:55pm, a few blocks later, Vomit Girl boarded the bus. No one knew who she was, as she was not wearing her spandex superhero costume. No one noticed her as she fell into a seat near the front and appeared to nap.

A few minutes later, on our approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, Vomit Girl roused herself to the point of sitting up slightly, opening her mouth, and vomiting all over herself, the seats around her, and one unlucky fellow who happened to be sitting near her. Then, her mission completed, Vomit Girl snuggled into a semi-fetal position, pushed a strand of vomit-soaked hair out of her eyes, and went to sleep.

The rest of us passengers were concerned for Vomit Girl, and alerted the driver that a tsunami of vomit was sloshing its way along the floor towards him. He pulled over and radioed for EMS, and we proceeded to sit and wait.

When EMS arrived, Vomit Girl was annoyed, and insisted she was fine and just needed to get into New York. Having been extremely drunk on public transportation before, I sympathized with Vomit Girl. Once I rode a bus home from New York and spent the entire half hour ride white-knuckled in my seat, fighting the urge to throw up all over every one of those bastards. The sheer force of will required to remain watertight the whole ride into Jersey City remains one of my proudest achievements, and like a true hero the people I saved will never even know they were in danger.

Also like a true hero, I got off at the first stop and went to my Mom’s house to ask her, politely, if I could throw up in her bathroom.

But I digress.

The EMS guys treated Vomit Girl like a dirty bomb. They wore protective clothing and insisted she be removed to the hospital. Which was a good idea, I admit, but I was still rooting for Vomit Girl to win and be taken home. I mean, when I’m sick drunk all I want to do is go home, throw up, take a shower, and shiver in shame until the next morning when I will likely have a cheeseburger for breakfast. Of course, I also understand the EMS guys’ position, which was more concerned with this girl dying of alcohol poisoning after they’d examined her.

They finally managed to carry her off the bus, and everyone thought the adventure was over and if we just avoided that quadrant of the seating we’d be in Manhattan in ten minutes. However, the EMS team came back on board to clean up the area. Which was simultaneously impressive and annoying. I mean, Jesus, if we treated every drunk’s vomit like the Andromeda Strain, I’d have to live my entire life in a Virus Suit. True story.

Then ensued a discussion about whether it was safe for us to remain on the bus for the ten minutes it would take to deliver us to the Port Authority in New York. Seriously. Because some drunk girl had bonked on the bus. This is why I usually follow a strict No Involvement With The Outside World policy, and stay home, wearing tissue boxes as shoes and shouting at people from an upper-story window.

INSIDE THE GREEN ROOM

We were eventually allowed to continue on in the Plague Bus, although I suspect our faces were secretly scanned and transmitted to the CDC just in case we turned out to be a collective Patients Zero. I arrived at The Shake Shack just as Ken and John were leaving, so all I got for dinner was the vague smell of delicious burgers and fries. To be fair they offered to sit and stare at walls while I waited on the immense line, but I said I’d just grab a slice of pizza on the way to the venue.

We saw two pizza places on our way; One was a tiny healthcode violation that seemed to be offering pure Salmonella on each slice, and the next was a too-bright flourescents-on-white box staffed by grinning men who appeared to understand pizza only phonetically. I’d only just survived a brush with The Plague via Drunk Vomiting Girl on Bus, so I was being especially careful with my health.

John, the guy I hadn’t seen, spoken to, or thought about in twenty-three years, knew a divey bar nearby called The Green Room, so we went there for some shockingly overpriced whiskey and non-shockingly divey atmosphere. Whenever a bartender looks confused when you order Wild Turkey, and then looks even more confused when you use the technical term neat instead of just saying no fucking ice goddammit, you know you are in for a humorous ride down the Fail Highway. Throw in a pool table far too large for the space so that everyone was jamming the cues into the walls, a digital jukebox that kept a steady image of Lana Del Rey staring at us hypnotically the entire time, and the vague smell of nachos even though the place didn’t sport a menu, and you have an almost perfect weirdness quotient.

We hung around for two rounds, and then headed for the show. By this point I was getting that lightheaded feeling you get when you haven’t eaten all day but have spent the last few hours drinking whiskey like tomorrow’s Prohibition. At the bar I noticed they were actually selling pretzels, and it seemed like a good idea to eat one, probably because I’d been drinking whiskey on an empty stomach again, which is usually the beginning of all my gastrointestinal misadventures. You’d think there’d be a lesson in there somewhere for me, but you would be: Wrong. I am unteachable.

The thing I received in exchange for some currency was pretzel-shaped. It was not, however, pretzel-flavored. It had the texture of drywall and the moment I bit off half of it I thought to myself, well, here we go, this is how we die, this is the End of Jeff, choked to death on a pretzel-like object in a seedy club in Manhattan standing next to a man he hadn’t seen or thought of or spoken to in twenty-three years.

Whiskey, as usual, saved me, as I was able to wash down the drywall with a good slug of Bushmills, and all was well. The Joy Formidable took the stage, and we moved into the crowd to watch.

The band was okay. Live, The Joy Formidable’s songs blur into one single chord, droned at you while the pixie-ish blonde lead singer leaps about the stage and the drummer dons a lobster costume – all good fun, but I doubt I could pick out which songs they played. Then again, I am old and my ears are shit, so who knows? Someday when The Joy Formidable is the soundtrack to The Singularity people may have 3-28-12 tatted on their backs and ask everyone where they were when the Greatest Concert Ever was played, and I will burn with shame.

Doubt it, though.

When I was a youth, my concerts were fraught with drama. I lost pairs of glasses, got my nose broken, got lost in Alphabet City, met underage girls who stalked me – those sorts of things. That night, however, the band finished, the lights came up, and twenty minutes later I was being driven through the Lincoln Tunnel, dozing off. Sure, I’m older. Possibly smarter. Certainly less likely to puke all over myself on a bus. I’m still trying to figure out if this is a tragedy or not.

More Shit I Gotta Do, The Inner Swine

Spin Those Plates

Author: April 17, 2018 0 Comments

As you might suspect from a blog tied to a book called Writing Without Rules, I generally don’t believe there is any “correct” way to write. You Do You tends to be my reaction to people’s declarations of process, writer’s block cures, or systems for developing characters or plots. All that matters is that you get words on the page or screen, and that you’re excited about those words. However you get there is immaterial.

I do, however, have opinions based on my own experience. It’s important to note that these are just opinions, personal expressions of personal experience filtered through my own preconceptions and assumptions. Still, it’s useful to see how other people do it. Sometimes finding out that another writer does things the same way you do is heartening. Sometimes seeing another process or an alternative view of the business or craft of writing fiction and/or non-fiction suddenly prompts you to change your approach.

For example: Concurrent projects. Some writers fixate on a single project. They devote themselves to it, doing research, planning and plotting, then writing and re-writing, revising and excising until they’re satisfied. They work in a linear fashion.

Not me. I usually have several projects going at once, usually a few novels, a short story, and any number of other things. And that’s not even counting the freelance work and promotional blogging that I do. What can I say—I think there are distinct advantages to spinning plates.

WIPs All the Way Down

I just completed two novels that I was working on concurrently, and I have a third novel begun while those two were in process, plus a monthly short story, another one-shot short story set in one of my established universes, and two other ideas that will either be novels or … something else, who knows. And I recently stumbled onto another short story that I’d half completed and then forgot about, so I jumped in to finish that.

I like having all these projects going for three main reasons:

  1. Variety. If i get bogged down in one story, uncertain how to proceed, I can just jump over to another one. And while I’m working on the second, I’m subconsciously recharging my batteries for the first. Plus, I get to indulge two genres at once, if I want.
  2. Confirmation. Ideas are funny—they jump into your brain electric and buzzing with potential. Then some of them die off, withering away, while others just get stronger and brighter. Working on a bunch of different things means that if one withers away and goes nowhere it’s not nearly as devastating as it otherwise would be.
  3. Preservation. For me, ideas don’t last too long unless they’re developed. A concept that seemed ingenious last month might turn into ash if I don’t hang some words on it.

I don’t divide my time and attention equally. One project can rise up and claim all of my attention for a time, especially if it’s near the end. I don’t have any rules about this. I just work on whatever I want to, regardless of what else is on my dance card. Including this blog.

General, Writing

Plot Holes: Gaslight ?Em

Author: April 11, 2018 0 Comments

To the outside world, writing probably seems easy. We sit around daydreaming, then spend a few hours typing, and a few weeks later we email a manuscript and receive a million dollars, probably. We writers, of course, know better—most of us are going to end up broke, insane, and working at a local big box store mopping the bathrooms and muttering to ourselves about how hacks stole all of our ideas.

Even worse, the act of writing is rough going sometimes. Ideas that flare into being as bright, perfect creations wither into rotten, saggy lumps when we get our potato hands on them. Characters fail to become real people, Netflix suddenly drops a full season of a new show with the exact same premise as your WIP, and plot holes infest your story until it’s more hole than plot.

A Feature, Not a Bug

I recently had a manuscript reviewed specifically for plot holes; I braced myself, because my mind wanders at the best of times and I am no stranger to the hell of realizing the character who saves the day in Chapter 31 was killed off in Chapter 9. I’m a person who lives very much in the present; I forget things so quickly and utterly I am not kidding when I say that by the time I finish a manuscript there are elements of the early chapters that I have zero memory of. It makes taming a plot into coherency kind of difficult.

This time there were no big plot holes to worry over, thank goodness, but it did prompt me to consider my usual tactics for dealing with plot holes.

Sometimes, of course, the only way to deal with plot holes is to eliminate them even if it means yet another extensive revision to the story. This is only necessary when the plot holes in question make your story a mess. But going back to fix up a plot hole isn’t always necessary—and sometimes causes ripples in the rest of your story, a domino effect of fixes opening up new rifts.

So, sometimes—sometimes—the best thing to do is to take your plot holes and celebrate them. Elevate them from subtle to screaming. To gaslight your reader with them.

This isn’t a technique you can use a lot. The story has to have a certain elasticity to it, a certain loose relationship to realism—if your plot is rooted firmly in the real world, playing around with plot holes like this won’t work. But if you’ve got some leeway with the point-of-view, if your narrator is unreliable or the reality of your fictional universe is a bit skewed, you might be able to take a plot hole and turn it into a feature instead of a bug.

Easier said than done, of course. But then, so is writing a novel in the first place.

plot, Writing

Plot Holes: Gaslight ?Em

Author: April 11, 2018 0 Comments

To the outside world, writing probably seems easy. We sit around daydreaming, then spend a few hours typing, and a few weeks later we email a manuscript and receive a million dollars, probably. We writers, of course, know better—most of us are going to end up broke, insane, and working at a local big box store mopping the bathrooms and muttering to ourselves about how hacks stole all of our ideas.

Even worse, the act of writing is rough going sometimes. Ideas that flare into being as bright, perfect creations wither into rotten, saggy lumps when we get our potato hands on them. Characters fail to become real people, Netflix suddenly drops a full season of a new show with the exact same premise as your WIP, and plot holes infest your story until it’s more hole than plot.

A Feature, Not a Bug

I recently had a manuscript reviewed specifically for plot holes; I braced myself, because my mind wanders at the best of times and I am no stranger to the hell of realizing the character who saves the day in Chapter 31 was killed off in Chapter 9. I’m a person who lives very much in the present; I forget things so quickly and utterly I am not kidding when I say that by the time I finish a manuscript there are elements of the early chapters that I have zero memory of. It makes taming a plot into coherency kind of difficult.

This time there were no big plot holes to worry over, thank goodness, but it did prompt me to consider my usual tactics for dealing with plot holes.

Sometimes, of course, the only way to deal with plot holes is to eliminate them even if it means yet another extensive revision to the story. This is only necessary when the plot holes in question make your story a mess. But going back to fix up a plot hole isn’t always necessary—and sometimes causes ripples in the rest of your story, a domino effect of fixes opening up new rifts.

So, sometimes—sometimes—the best thing to do is to take your plot holes and celebrate them. Elevate them from subtle to screaming. To gaslight your reader with them.

This isn’t a technique you can use a lot. The story has to have a certain elasticity to it, a certain loose relationship to realism—if your plot is rooted firmly in the real world, playing around with plot holes like this won’t work. But if you’ve got some leeway with the point-of-view, if your narrator is unreliable or the reality of your fictional universe is a bit skewed, you might be able to take a plot hole and turn it into a feature instead of a bug.

Easier said than done, of course. But then, so is writing a novel in the first place.

plot, Writing

The Great Compression

Author: April 4, 2018 0 Comments

As a writer, I like to finish things—more than finish them, I like to whip things into marketable shape. On the one hand the psychology of this is obvious; as I’m fond of saying, you sell exactly zero of the books and stories you don’t finish. My legacy on this world is going to be my writing, so the more of it I can publish and get seen, the better.

On the other hand my obsession with finishing things and extracting some sort of publishable value from my writing goes beyond simply practicality, and I’m not sure where it’s rooted in my life. All I know is, once a work gets to a certain bulk, I’m determined to make the effort of writing it worthwhile by finishing it and then polishing it into something that might, conceivably, get published.

One side effect of this obsession is an eagerness to try new techniques or crazy ideas. I get super excited with experiments that might lead to stronger material—experiments that go beyond polish and revision. One example is when I Frankensteined two failed novels together to make one great novel (something I discuss in detail in Writing Without Rules). Another is something I just mentioned on Twitter last week: Boiling a novel down to a short story.

The Great Compression

I’ve been planning to submit a story to an anthology, but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write a fresh story to match the theme or see if I had something already in the can that would work. I realized that a novel I completed last year was actually a perfect fit, theme-wise. The only problem? The antho had a word count limit of 6,000 words and the novel was 63K+.

This novel has a long history. It started off as a short story I wrote in the early 1990s; I really liked it but could never sell it anywhere, and so a few years ago I started trying to work it into different formats, eventually ending up with an unsatisfactory novel last year. I still thought it had great potential, so the story was still alive in my head, but it wasn’t right.

The idea of trying to cut 90% of the story? Exciting. Like, thrilling. I love stuff like that, extreme challenges. Could I excise most of the novel and still have the core of it?

It was dismaying easy, actually. Dismaying, because it implies that 90% of that novel was just bullshit I poured in there to bulk it up, something I expressly advise people not to do. My only defense is that I didn’t bulk it up on purpose. And I like a lot of the writing I deleted. In practical terms, one reason the story was easy to compress is the structure I used in the novel—it has three timelines, so step one was simply to choose the timeline in which the main, core story occurred, and then delete the others. Just like that, 50% of the words were gone.

Next, I compressed characters. In a novel you can be subtle and granular with your characters. In a short story every character has to be essential. So I eliminated characters whose roles could be passed on to other people. That took care of another chunk of words.

All of this work took me: One day. And I had a story that was still coherent at about 9,000 words. The rest was shaving and shaping, and I really like the story I ended up with at 6K.

Is there a lesson here? The only lesson, I think, is that it’s worth it to push yourself, to try crazy things, to go beyond NaNoWriMo and see what you’re capable of. I can’t swear I’ll sell this story to this anthology or anywhere else. But it was fun to do this, and ultimately successful.

For my next trick, I’m going to try compressing an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into one night. I may not survive. You may not survive. But someone’s got to try, dammit.

General, Writing

Writing in Real Time: Episode 3

Author: April 1, 2018 0 Comments

Video: How to Determine Your Novel’s Word Count | Jeff Somers and the Rough Beast, Episode 3

Jeff Somers takes a moment to contemplate the utility (or lack thereof) of using word count as a progress bar in a book. He discusses the fact that his first published novel was far from oft-cited word counts for viable novels, and the fact that forcing yourself to write words you’re just going to delete later is a waste of time.

Writing, Writing Without Rules

Snatching Failure from the Jaws of Victory

Author: March 30, 2018 0 Comments

Last year I submitted a short story to an anthology, and a few weeks ago I got an email informing me that my story had been selected. This is always great news, and it was made even better by the fact that the antho was kind of prestigious and I could expect a bit of attention, so this was more than just a tidy sum of money and an extra credit on my resume.

The email noted that the although the editors had chosen my story, the publisher had the final say, but I figured, what could go wrong?

You see where this is going.

Thanks but No Thanks

Yup, the publisher pulled my story. They had their reasons, and the editor who contacted me to break the news was very awkwardly embarrassed about it, but hey, shit happens. I sold a story and then it got un-sold, and that sucks, but you move on.

Luckily, stuff like this is rare, and usually it’s me doing the un-selling. I once sold a short story to a magazine, but their contract turned out to be very shitty, so I pulled the story. I’ve been ambushed by vanity publishers and had to pull stories. Usually, once you get the acceptance, though, the rest is just details.

Not much you can do about it. Losing opportunities like this is just part of the game, because there are two sides to every sale: The editorial, and the business. And whenever you get a story past the editorial part, there is always the possibility that the contract will be bad, or the terms not what you expected—or that someone on the bean-counting side will object for bean-countery reasons.

The lesson is simple: Don’t brag on your sales until it’s a done deal. When I was sixteen, I sold a novel to a tiny publisher. I immediately began bragging to everyone about, and was very likely insufferable for a very, very long time. Two years later, as I started college, the tiny publisher had gone out of business and had mailed back my manuscript, half-edited. And I had to start admitting to everyone that I wasn’t getting published after all.

It’s part of the game. The fact that the game’s rules were apparently written by a drunk and vengeful god is beside the point.

career, Writing

Salvaging a Fail

Author: March 27, 2018 0 Comments

It happens. Every novel I start begins in a surge of excitement and a sense of infinite possibilities. Then, as I work, those possibilities start to shrink down with every choice I make. Certain plot twists become impossible, certain characters prove to be less than fascinating and are phased out, certain ideas get pushed aside.

Along with those dwindling options in your story you also start to get a sense of whether or not the story is working. As much as writers are often poor judges of their own material and rely on other people’s feedback, we generally do have a handle on whether the book is even working on a fundamental level. There might be some serious denial going on, of course, but deep down you know. And sometimes you get the ominous feeling that this book you’ve been working on for six months, this book that now has tens of thousands of words in it simply isn’t working. You have a thing that looks like a book but is really a shambolic mess.

Or maybe that’s just me. When a novel that I’ve invested time and energy into starts slipping through my fingers like a castle made of sand, I don’t just give up, because I like to finish things—because you publish exactly zero of the projects you don’t finish. Instead, I try to come up with a solution to save the day.

Finish Him

My choice of solution varies depending on how far along I am.

Almost a Novel. If I’m three-fourths through the plot and the work is already or close to book-length, I just push through. Just because a novel is terrible is no reason to just not finish it—as long as you’re close to the end. If I think I just need a few more weeks to polish this turd into a novel-shaped thing, I go on and put that work in, because at least I’ll have a book at the end of it.

Halfway to a Novel. On the other hand, sometimes you realize that you’re writing something awful much earlier. If there’s a lot of work left to make this into a novel-length story, I’ll usually abandon that goal and focus instead on coming up with a resolution to the story that ties everything up in a much shorter time span. Better to have a novella than nothing at all.

A Complete Mess. If I’ve got a lot of words and not much else, I’ll lower my goals to simply extracting something from the pile. Maybe the first chapter—when I was inspired and focused—could work as a standalone short story. Maybe a middle section could work on its own. If there’s nothing worth pulling out then I’ve really screwed the pooch, because that means there’s literally no contiguous set of a few thousand words worth reading in the whole thing and I should reconsider my application to Clown College.

That last scenario almost never happens, though, because there’s almost always something worth saving. A few years ago I started work on a novel that’s been up and down quite a bit. I originally cut it off and Went Novella on it when the story lost steam, but then I went back and thought I had a solution to the book’s many problems. I doubled the word count and yes, it’s a novel now, but it still isn’t a good novel.

Still, I’d rather have a finished novella and novel out of it than a swamp of messy words. I may never publish either version of that story, but at least with finished, somewhat polished work the possibility of publishing it in some form remains.

Whether or not the world benefits from publishing those stories is an issue our future alien overlords will have to determine when they sift through the ashes of our culture.

Novels

The Long and Winding Road

Author: March 19, 2018 0 Comments

In a few weeks I’ll finish revising the second novel I’ve completed in 2018 (technically they were both completed in 2017 in terms of first drafts, and now they’re both hitting a “presentable” polished stage, meaning I can inflict them on my long-suffering agent). This isn’t unusual for me; since 1988 or so I’ve completed 44 novels, and it’s not at all strange for me to finish 2-3 in a calendar year. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re good novels; of those 44, after all, I’ve published 10 (one self-published), and at the moment there’s only 3 unpublished novels that have any chance of seeing the light of day (and that number includes the 2 I’m discussing here).

That’s me, that’s my process. I’m a write-it-all-and-figure-it-out-later kind of guy. I draft quickly, pants my way through plot, and as a result I have a high failure rate in terms of having top-notch material ready for my agent. I’m okay with that, because it’s just naturally how I work. By the time I figure out that a novel’s not working out I’m 80% of the way through it and my compulsive need to finish things kicks in.

The two novels I’m finishing up right now are really good, I think. And they’re interesting because they were both born, originally, as short stories written in 1992. Which, if you’re keeping score at home, was 26 fucking years ago.

I am old.

The Glorious Year of Glad

So, 26 years ago I wrote a story called The Hollow Men and a story called The Only Time. One was sci-fi, and one was sort of a dark thriller that wasn’t speculative but felt speculative, is the best way I can describe it.

I never sold either story as a short, but they lingered with me. The Only Time I tried to work into a novel in 1999, and to be honest I really liked that book at the time. A few years ago I was thinking about my journey with The Electric Church (which was originally written in 1993, then revised in 2004 into the version that sold to Orbit Books), so I dusted off that 1999 draft of The Only Time to see if similar magic might be done, but I wasn’t too happy with it in the cold light of middle age, so I started re-working it entirely in 2016, combining it with another concept. I finished that draft in 2017 and, frankly, hated it. The mixture of concepts didn’t work, and the earlier chapters had a different tone and feel because they hued closer to the earlier draft.

The Hollow Men just sat on my hard drive for decades. I always liked the core story, but even shortly after finishing it I realized it was juvenelia—one of those stories you write as a kid because you think it’s “cool” and “edgy” when it’s really just pointlessly nihilistic. But the basic concept stayed with me, and I finally decided in 2015 to try to expand the story into a novel. 60,000 words later, I had a hot stinking mess of a story. There was some great stuff in it, but one of the big reveals in the latter part of the plot turned out a bit more ridiculous than I’d expected.

I worked on it again in 2016, changing the big reveal to something more speculative and out-there. This didn’t work either.

Finally, I started revising again last year. The book had bloated up a bit, so I started cutting out unnecessary stuff, shifted a few parts around, and removed all explicit references to the speculative aspect while leaving it in invisibly—in other words, I know what’s behind everything, but it’s no longer stated in the story, and that works so much better y’all.

So: I wrote two shorts stories in 1992. In 2018, I’m finishing up novel-length versions of each and you would be hard-pressed to see the connections between them. The novels are so different from those original stories you’d never guess in a million years th related in any way.

And that’s writing, sometimes. The evolution of ideas is harsh. You cut ruthlessly. You sand and hone endlessly. Details erode away to reveal new details. Characters and entire subplots get deleted, shifted around, rendered invisible. And sometimes it take more than a quarter-century to take an idea and make it into a book.

Novels