Year: 2024

Okay, I know last time I said I was going to talk about three act structure but…

There was, as my fellow youths say, some discourse on Bluesky (and maybe the dead bird site, too, but why would anyone be there?) about recognition. It’s one thing to finally make some money off my writing, but let’s be honest. It’s also nice when we finally get known for our writing. When we get those starred reviews and interviews and con invitations.

And the awards. Can’t forget about the awards. We just had a couple sci-fi/fantasy ones in a row, and I think that’s part of what spurred this little bit of discourse. That’s the big recognition, isn’t it? Getting to stand up there in front of our peers and give a speech and get applause and know that we’ve been acknowledged. Our work’s been judged and recognized and now we’ve got a little rocket/ obelisk/ haunted house on our shelf at home to remind us—to remind everyone—that we’re really good at this.

I felt like a lot of folks covered said discourse pretty well. But it kept nagging at me. I think it’s because it’s something I’ve got a fair amount of experience with. On both sides.

So let’s talk about screenplays for a few minutes.

If you’ve been following along here for a while, you know my partner and I both read for a couple different screenplay contests during our poverty years. Some of them were big enough contests you may have heard of them, if you follow such things. And some of them you probably haven’t heard of, even if you really follow such things.

Thing is, it gave me a real look behind the curtain at this sort of thing. How semifinalists and finalists and winners get chosen. And look, the simple truth is so many contests and awards and fellowships all have a bunch of inherent problems. Some of them have poorly written rules for the contestants and/ or poorly written instructions for the people judging them. The judges all have their own personal biases they may or may not be able to avoid to some extent. Hell, most contests and awards are very limiting by design—you may notice it’s been quite a few years since a sci-fi romance won the Stoker Award,

And this is before we even get into someone deliberately putting a thumb on the scales, which has happened… well, quite a few times in the recent past. People tend to abuse systems. Sometimes they abuse systems that let them abuse other systems. And all of that, again, affects the final scores and results of all these judging systems.

Now to be very, very clear, I’m not saying that contests or awards are bad things. They’re absolutely not. I think it’s fantastic to recognize achievements and it can be a gigantic morale boost for lots of people when a book or writer you really relate to gets that recognition. Hell, especially you if it’s you who gets the recognition.

But I also think it’s important to remember that not getting recognized isn’t necessarily a sign of failure or that my work’s lacking something. It can literally just mean one (just one) of the key people who looked at my screenplay (or novel or whatever) didn’t connect with it. Or maybe connected too much in the wrong way. It could just mean three people sat around a table and said “well, that one’s a little less sci-fi than this one…”

In a way, this is a lot like deciding what gets to be art, which I talked about a few months back. Art is a completely random, subjective term that gets redefined constantly. Some things will get recognition now. Others get acknowledged years later. And yeah, some things should get recognized in a much bigger way and just never are.

(quick note that not getting recognized also doesn’t automatically mean everything was rigged and my work is flawless and brilliant and I’m a genius who deserved to win. Don’t be that guy)

Anyway, my personal take has always been that awards and recognition are great, but they really shouldn’t be seen as the end all-be all of writing. I definitely shouldn’t let it drag me down if I didn’t win. Or even get nominated. Being a writer’s tough enough without beating myself up because some random strangers decided they liked someone else’s book slightly more than mine.

And that’s my thoughts on that.

Oh, I also updated the FAQ, if that’s of any interest to you.

Next time, three act structure. Really.

Until then, go write.

Okay, so… I’m flailing a bit right now. I think I’ve mentioned our two sick cats, yes? Then I ended up one of the many, many people who caught covid at SDCC (despite being masked). I isolated pretty quick, but it wasn’t a big surprise when my beloved tested positive a few days later.

So life’s been fun here.

But let’s talk about you and your life.

And your writing.

So, as promised last week, here’s a simple tip for checking what kind of shape my story’s in. Pick something you’ve written—it can be completed or a work in progress or whatever. It’s okay if it’s not fully written out. I just need to know it.

Now I just want to tell the story. Not word for word, more like beat for beat. Just tell it like you and I are sitting at a bar or hanging out or whatever. Maybe it’s a very casual pitch session or something like that. That’s the level of “telling my story” I’m aiming for.

Have I ever talked about pitching? Maybe I should do that at some point. Would that be interesting to anyone?

Anyway, now that I’ve got this simplified story in my head… write it down. Go for speed. Seriously, we’re not worried at all about typos or grammar here. Run-on sentences are fantastic for this. I just want to fill a page and tell the story as quickly as possible.

Go!!!

Okay, got it?

Now I want to go through this abbreviated version or my story and look for conjunctions. Specifically and, but, and or. Yes, just like Conjunction Junction. ha ha, you’re old if you know what that means.

Everywhere there’s an and (or a plus, also, in addition, or so on) odds are that’s me character- or worldbuilding to some extent. It’s me expanding on things, adding details and facts and more details. Every place there’s a but (however, although, you get the idea) that’s conflict. We want this, but unfortunately that. And everywhere there’s an or, there’s a good chance it involves one of my characters making a decision.

Knowing this, it’s real easy for me to look at things and say, huh… my story seems kind of short on conflict, doesn’t it? Maybe my protagonist doesn’t really seem to make that many active choices. It’s possible there’s so much going on that nothing’s ever really explained.

Simple, yes?

Now, right up front, this isn’t an ironclad, infallible test. There’s a chance I did some weird phrasing at some point and managed to skip a conjunction or two. By nature of rushing through, there’s stuff I probably left out. Other things I over-simplified. And that’s going to affect how I put things down in my page of text. So again, not a perfect test.

But maybe I could also ask myself… why did that point get left out when I knew I should be listing all the key things? If it’s not an important thing, but I want to use it to balance out all the things that are important… maybe that’s worth looking at a little closer. This is one of those exercises that can always give me a little more if I’m open to looking at it.

And that’s your quick and easy tip for the week.

In other news…

Like, I mentioned up top, my life’s been kind of hectic lately, and to be honest… since consolidating things here the ranty writing blog isn’t getting anywhere near the interest/ response it used to. Which was never gigantic to begin with. I don’t know if it’s because I moved it over here and a lot of folks didn’t follow? Or maybe it’s just another sign of social media collapsing and people just don’t know I’m posting? Perhaps we’re just all flailing on the internet now, trying to be heard and seen? Maybe I’ve gotten very boring and repetitive and not offering the tips people are looking for. Any of these is plausible.

Whatever it is, I’ve decided to scale the blog back to biweekly for a while. That and the newsletter—have you signed up for the newsletter? It’s completely free—will still keep things coming here. Oh, crap, and I really need to update the FAQ, too.

And, of course, if anyone wants to ask any writing-related questions, I’ll still do my best to answer them.

Next time… maybe I’ll talk about three act structure real quick.

Until then, go write.

Well, okay, haven’t done an actual ranty blog post in about a month. Sorry. These past four weeks have been pretty stressful, overall. Two sick cats and, by the time you read this, seven visits to the vet (they’re both doing better now). And that’s made editing this book a little tough. Then there was San Diego Comic Con, where I didn’t do any panels or signings but still had to shoulder my way through the unmasked crowds looking to pick up a few things.

Like covid, for example. I picked up covid. Lucky me.

I also had a quiet, casual meeting with one of the writer-producers of Orphan Black. And the producer of In The Mouth of Madness and Ghosts of Mars. And the writer-director of The Fog and Big Trouble in Little China and a couple other things you might’ve heard of. It was really cool and we chatted about some interesting things we might be doing together.

Or maybe I’m just making that last bit up. It’d be amazing if a group of people like that all liked one of my books and wanted to adapt it, wouldn’t it? And it’s not outside the realm of possibility. At the very least it sounds good, right? You could believe something like that could happen if any of those people had actually been at Comic Con this year.

And that of course brings us to this week’s topic. Well, really it brings us to Harry Houdini. Perhaps more specifically, to the time he claimed he’d discovered the lost city of Atlantis.

Okay, so some of you may have heard stories about Houdini and how he often tried to self-publicize by writing up stories about his “adventures” around the world. Escaping from Egyptian tombs, fighting werewolves, stuff like that. It was mostly nonsense and his ghost-writer—a wanna-be aspiring writer named Howard P. Lovecraft– flat out said so and often did page one rewrites of Houdini’s “true” adventure stories.

Except for one story Houdini submitted. One where he claimed that, on his way home from Europe, the ship he was on got blown a little off course in a storm and came across an uncharted island. And apparently even from the ship they could see all the buildings on it. So they diverted, sent a few boats out (with Houdini and his wife Bess on board, of course) and spent the next twelve hours exploring all these ancient Greek-styled buildings. And then a giant crab attacked them (no seriously) and killed one of the sailors and Houdini had to save everyone by making this clever set of snares to slow down the crab. Because if you can get out of knots, it kind of make sense you know how to tie them, too, right? And of course Bess lost her camera in the rush to get back to the boats, so there’s no evidence but Houdini swears on his honor it all really happened.

And, yeah, it all sounds like pulp nonsense, I agree.

But here’s the thing that made Lovecraft hesitate a bit. The log books from the ship Houdini was on, The Ocean Queen, still exist. There’s even scans of them online. And it turns out, yeah, they really were blown off course on that trip and they actually did investigate an uncharted island (at Houdini’s insistence) that appeared to have ancient structures on it. And a deckhand who’d gone along, Leslie Davis, was killed on said island and his body wasn’t recovered. Again, this is all true, historical fact. So maybe, in this case, Houdini wasn’t just making up stories. Maybe they actually found something out there.

Or maybe I just made it all up here on the spot. Every bit of it. Maybe it’s no more true than me claiming I met John Carpenter at Comic-Con.

See, here’s the thing. Lots of people tell true stories. And they often let you know it’s a true story on the cover or the first page or at the end of the manuscript. And I think they do this—not always, but quite often—to put a sort of armor around their writing. You think these are bad characters? Well guess what, they’re based off real people, so you’re wrong! The plot’s kind of thin? Well these are all true events so you’re wrong! The whole thing just comes across as a ridiculous pile of coincidences? Wrong, wrong, wrong! You can’t say any of it’s bad if it’s all true! If it really happened!

And look, here’s another ugly truth. Nobody wants reality. They may say they do, but they’re lying. To me or to themselves. The majority of readers prefer their reality with a thin (or very thick) veneer of fiction over it. They want clean dialogue. They want things to make sense and story threads to get tied up, or at least gathered together in an orderly fashion. They want characters who win (maybe not cheerfully or without scars, but they do win).

Y’see, Timmy, reality’s messy. All of it. No, seriously, take a good look at that thing. It’s clumsy and awkward and weird, borderline impossible things happen all the time for no reason.

But I don’t want my writing to be messy. I don’t want it to feel like a pile of random coincidences. I want it to be clean and polished and perfect. As many people have said, in a few different ways, the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. When I’m a writer I’m the God of my world, and if things just randomly happen without serving a greater purpose… well, I’m kind of a piss-poor god, aren’t I?

One final note about this. You know what finally did Houdini’s career in? Well, didn’t kill it, but definitely caused a lot of bleeding? Movies. He’d done thousands of live shows, escaping from so many different locks and handcuffs and so on in front of audiences, he figured movies were the next big thing for him.

Except movie audiences had already figured out that you could do anything in movies. They’d seen people travel to the moon. Monsters of several types. And yes, many daring escapes. They knew the “reality” of what was on screen was a lot more flexible, and a lot less important than if it was entertaining in some way or another. Houdini didn’t grasp that on screen anyone could be a great escape artist. The fact that he was actually doing all this stuff… it just didn’t matter.

Sorry to hammer it home but, again, nobody cares if my story’s true or not. They just care that it’s an interesting story and it’s well-told. If it’s a boring story told in a lackluster way, being “real” isn’t going to make up for it. If I want to tell the true story of drug addicted sex slaves in 2010’s Texas, it needs to be just as compelling as a story about, say, Houdini discovering the lost city of Atlantis. It doesn’t matter if one of them’s true or not. In the end, I’m telling a story, and it’s either going to be a story that holds my reader’s interest or it isn’t.

Reality doesn’t enter into that equation.

Next time, I’d like to give you a quick, easy lesson on storybuilding and conflict.

Until then, go write.

So, hey… the past week’s been pretty brutal on a personal level (and, well, a national level, too, really), but I do have some cool news for you.

We’ve officially signed everything for GJD which I guess I can now tell you stands for God’s Junk Drawer. What’s it about? Well…

Forty years ago, the Gather family—James, his daughter Beau, and her little brother Billy—vanished on a whitewater rafting trip. No sign of them was ever found.

…until five years later, when Billy Gather appeared on the far side of the world, telling a ridiculous, impossible story of his family plunging down through time to a primordial valley populated by dinosaurs, a clan of cavemen, an alien, and an android butler from the far future. Little Billy became the punchline of so many jokes, until he finally faded away.

Now years of research and calculations have told adult Billy Gather exactly where and when he needs to be standing in order to get back to his prehistoric valley.

But the valley isn’t the place he remembered. Maybe it never was. He’ll need to navigate more danger, more violence, and even more mysteries if he has any hope of finding his way back to the present-day world again.

And so will the handful of grad students he accidentally brought with him.

And to stop you now, no, there isn’t an official release date yet. I’m guessing maaaaybe next spring, going off past experience? As soon as I know, you’ll know.

Meanwhile, I’m just over halfway through the second draft of TOS. Which is very cool. And maybe deserves a little explanation.

(if you’ve followed the ranty writing blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard some of this before)

When I sit down to write a first draft, I’m a big believer in forward motion. I don’t like to linger or puzzle over things or worry about if I’m getting some detail right or not. My first draft goal is to get to the end. It’s much easier to renovate a house when you have, y’know, a house, and I think it’s much easier to find the right words and details for a story once you’ve actually got a story.

Now, in all fairness, this means my first drafts often have lots of filler names for people and places, markers to make sure something gets a second look (#########), and lots of all-caps notes to myself Things like ASK JEFF RE: OLD REPORTS or DOES THIS LINE UP??? or the ever-popular DO I EVEN NEED THIS BIT???

So for me, the second draft is when it becomes a little less about the wild, fun creative process and a little more about the work. Filling in the empty spaces on the page. Researching the facts. Talking to people smarter than me about this and that. And doing a little basic editing along the way, too. My real goal at the end of draft two is to have a manuscript that I could hand to someone and they could read beginning to end with no problem. Is it the most efficient method? Don’t know, but it works really well for me.

Also, please keep in mind this doesn’t mean I do let people read it at this point. I normally do one big solid, pure editing pass after this. Examining, cutting. rephrasing, cutting more

So that’s where I am with that.

Also, hey, one last thing– San Diego Comic Con is next week and I am not going to be there. Not officially, anyway. I’m not doing any panels or signings, but it’s just a ten minute train ride away for me so I may be wandering around (masked, because the SDCC floor was a cesspit of disease before the pandemic) just to say hi to a few folks and maybe try for one or two con exclusives. Look carefully, maybe you’ll see me there. Look for the wine-red blazer and the cool t-shirt.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Deep into My Hero Academia now. Star Trek: Prodigy is back and it’s still wonderful. A Million Ways To Die In The West wasn’t a great movie, but it was pretty fun with wine and pizza (we’re going to be joking about kids with sticks and hoops for a while, I think).

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I got a bunch of Atomic Robo graphic novels to fill holes in my collection and have enjoyed all of them. I also picked up a Tintin book (Explorers on the Moon) that I had as a kid and adored, and I’m pleased that it still holds up in its own, very retro way. Currently deep in the Micronauts omnibus.

Cool New Toys
Hey, I sold a book, which meant a trip to the LEGO store for the big Jazz Club set and a couple smaller, Mandalorian-themed Star Wars sets. Also, I was very fortunate that a friend picked up the two exclusive Monster Force figs for me at JoeFest right around the time of the last newsletter and… wow. I hoped they’d be good, but I really like this Forgotten King/ Omen of Doom. I also got a small handful of Animal Warriors of the Kingdom figs during Spero’s Fourth of July sale and I’m really liking them as well.

And I think that’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for your interest.