Another Long Break

I spent over two months bringing many of the story/chapters of The Empty House up to their next level of development, revision, and completion. Then, a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to take another break, in order to refresh my objectivity. I left the file open on one of the twelve desktops on my computer. Every morning I click through them to see if anything needs to be done right away, and to remind myself of non-writing projects in hand. Which meant that every morning I saw the open file for The Empty House, where I had left off. 

On the fourth morning of my break — not the fifteenth as I had intended — I saw very clearly what needed to be done with that particular chapter. I did it and, without thinking about it, I spent the next three hours bringing two more chapters up to their next level. I should have put The Empty House aside then, but, since I had already gone back to working on it, I thought I might as well finish that pass, and then take a break, and to really do it this time, for at least three weeks. 

But I was tired, so, instead a full pass, I thought I would just read aloud those chapters which I had marked ‘read aloud’, just to get them out of the way, and to finish out the week. It shouldn’t take much more time than that.

Read aloud’ means to just literally read the chapter aloud to myself, so that I can hear and not just see what I’ve written. The purpose is to find typos, misspellings, punctuation errors, bad word choices, other simple things that require no creativity, and frequently need little thought. This kind of read-through is not a directed polish. Only after that ‘read aloud’ through the whole book would it be ready for polishing. 

And for continuity checks. 

So I read the ‘read aloud’ chapters. Some of them needed more work than I had anticipated. The later chapters were too familiar, since I had worked on them a only a few days before, and that made it difficult for me to be objective about them, but I finished reading them anyway. And now it really was time for me to back off, and to take a longer break before working on the twenty eight chapters which still need to be made ready for polishing. 

And for continuity checks.

Isaac Asimov complained about how hard it was for him to write more Foundation and Empire stories, because he had to make sure that nothing in the new story was in conflict with what he had written before, and which was already published. In other words, he had to ensure continuity. I now know what he was talking about. Because of the complexity of interwoven plots and the number of characters in The Empty House, I will have to do extensive continuity checks, through all sixty seven chapters. That will be another long pass before I can polish. And after that will be formatting for publication. 

I will never write anything as complex as The Empty House again. 

It doesn’t help that I’m getting slower now, and that I run out of energy sooner, and that I frequently have things to do which have higher priority than writing. Things like that sometimes make it difficult for me to get to work every day. The most important thing this time was dealing with a death in the family. 

I used to joke about getting done by Christmas. That was last year. It’s not a joke any more. I hope to be done by this Christmas. I may, after that, be able to work on other stories I want to tell. They run through my head, with beginnings, endings, and whatever is needed in between, every time a little differently. 

But I have to make myself take the longish break which I had cut short before I go back to The Empty House again. I need to become objective again. And I’ll have to be more disciplined about this break than I was the last time I tried to refresh myself. It takes discipline to make yourself get to work every day, but it also takes discipline to make yourself stop when you should. At least, that’s the way it is with me. 

And besides, I need to do my taxes. 

It Takes so Long

My break from The Empty House took longer than I expected. Then there were interruptions, things that were more important, minor illnesses, and ever diminishing energy. This is not intended as an excuse, it’s just an explanation. Writing science fiction, fantasy, and mostly in between is what I do, as if it were a kind of calling. I find that, being able to do less, is not only frustrating, but depressing.

This is about writing. Other writers have difficulties like this, some more severe than mine. My longest pauses were the three years I took off when my daughter was born. But I came back to it. There was a three year hiatus when I felt that my career was over for a variety of reasons. But I came back to it. There were the almost thee years my wife was seconded to London, and we went with her, all household and parenting responsibilities fell to me. But I came back to it.

And here I am again.

Some of the chapter/stories are extremely complicated — descriptions which I don’t do well; sequence of events as they are experienced, not as I think of them; continuity checks between the current chapter and the previous in that plotline some twenty chapters ago; deciding what a character sees first, rather than what I thought of first, by getting into my character’s head. It can take three or four passes, which means, given my reduced endurance, three or four days. Some chapters can go from rough to ‘third draft’ in one pass. There are some of those.

I gave a speech once on what it took to be a writer. (Or creator in any format, really, whether words or music or paint or mathematics.) It included six things:

Talent, which isn’t really necessary, by my understanding. Talent is what comes easy, and you don’t have to think about it. For me, characterization and dialogue is easy, and takes very little revision, mostly to make sure it is in a readable form.

Acquired skill is far more important. You can learn how to use the language well; how to describe a thing or place so that the reader can almost see it, without going into too much detail; how to put plot elements together, how to leave out what isn’t necessary, how to find where to begin telling a story, how to know what the ending is about. 

Time to write has to be made, it can’t be found. If you spend all your time looking for the time to write you get very little written. At least that’s my experience. Making time means, getting up early, going to bed late, giving up some activity such as an amateur sport or going to church. And setting aside that time every day. (If your child becomes sick, then that takes priority.)

Patience, to take as much time to get your writing right as it needs. Rushing through to the end means your writing isn’t as good as it could be. When it comes time to submit, the patience to wait for the response. (You can work on something else while waiting.) If your story or novel is accepted, the patience to work with the editors. If your story, long or short, comes out in print, the patience to wait until your publisher finally pays you. And that can take time.

Discipline, to actually do the work every day, at whatever time you have set aside. (If your child becomes sick, then that comes first.) The discipline to do as many drafts as it takes. The discipline to finish, and sometimes that take a lot more discipline than you might think. A special discipline to learn what you do well and where you can improve, to put aside the favorite and accept what is better.

You can get help with these five things,  from friends, understanding family, books sometimes though most of them don’t help much, from teacher if they understand what you are trying to do and there aren’t many of them. But that last thing any creative person needs is completely up to you, and no one can help you with it.

And that is Determination. The Decision to Actually Do It. Not someday, but now. You can’t be a creator of stories or images or technology unless you really want that. Dedication is another word for it. And no one can help you with it. If you aren’t determined, if you aren’t willing to dedicate some significant part of you life to it, then you just won’t create much, even for just yourself. 

So, despite needed breaks, despite other obligations, despite unwelcome interruptions, despite creeping (galloping) old age, I’ve come back to The Empty House. And I will finish it. Maybe by Christmas.

The Empty House Progress

My last post was August 29. It has been a complicated and sometimes difficult time since then. There have been commitments to other people, minor illnesses, slowly reduced creative energy, the needs of my family, and so on. I can usually get three to five hours writing done in the morning, but if I am interrupted by anything that demands more than a moment’s attention, it breaks my concentration and I can go no further. You might say these last few weeks have been just a little frustrating.

I have, fortunately, been doing good work on those days when there were no interruptions — updating story/chapters from sketch, to rough, to first, and so on, but just one level at a time for each, instead of trying to finish each one all at once. I am working now on chapter sixty. I’ll take a break after I update the last chapter — sixty seven — by one level, then I’ll  go back to those chapters which are not already at what I call ‘third draft,’ updating each of them one level at a time as I have done before, until I finally get the whole text at that ‘third draft’ stage. Then I will take a longer pause, maybe a week or so, then start the three polish readings and the text to speech. I feel like it is — and it is — taking a long time to do this.

Old age is not for sissies, as someone once said. It’s preferable to dying young, of course. I have known some who have. I intend to keep going and writing for as long as possible. When I can no longer write, I’ll get my rescued English Bulldog, name it Mike (for Michael or Michelle), and retire.

But not yet. Each chapter gets closer and closer to how the investigators close the gates to evil and shut it out. Every morning of good work gives me chills, which means I’ve been doing it right.  

When The Empty House has been published at last, I will start work on one more book, an idea that has been rattling around in the back of my head for decades, taking place in the world of A Thing Forgotten, but at a later time. It will not be a sequel, any more than two stories in set in New York are prequel/sequel of each other. If I am able to finish that, I may try another.

What I am hoping, with this post, is to assure you — and myself — that I am still in business. I do not intend to quit, unless my muse (so-called) retires first, leaving me with no ideas and nothing to write about. I’ve seen no hint of this yet. Every morning I find my muse (my unconscious creativity) waiting for me, and it is sometimes so strong that I am surprised by what I have accomplished.

I’ll be back as soon as I have something to report. Or, you could stop by and we could just talk for hours.

Return to The Empty House

I sketched out The Empty House in 2015. It’s a rather ambitious book, an experiment to see if I could write stories like Lovecraft’s gothic cosmic horror, but in Shirley Jackson’s much more subdued style. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which is truly scary, though there is no violence or bloodshed. The original movie, The Haunting, is excellent. The remake is garbage.

I started with a list of sixty seven linked but semi-independent stories, and I tried to finish each one before going on to the next. But after nine stories — notes, sketch, rough, first draft, second, ‘third’, and reading aloud once — I got tired, so I put it aside to work on other things for a while, so that I could come back refreshed.

Which I did in 2018. I developed more of the stories, but this time I didn’t try to finish each one. I wrote extended notes, detailed sketches, roughs, first drafts, and so on. This was a lot more productive than before, but by the end of the year I was tired again, so I started working on another project. Then another, and another …

Finally, in May of this year (2023), I got back to The Empty House, and spent over two months of intense work on those stories which were less finished. I brought each of them up a level — from sketch to rough, from rough to first, and so on. That kind of work takes a lot of focused concentration, which is exhausting, despite great satisfaction — as anybody who does original creative work of any kind will understand. And at my age, I’m lucky if I get four or five creative hours a day. 

Many of the stories toward the end had only titles and a single-line note of what the story should be about. The last six stories had neither title nor note, just what characters were involved. When I had first created this list of stories, I had left those all but blank, knowing that when I came to them I would have a better idea of how to get to the ending that I wanted. Those last six stories, taken together, would be about how the evil in the house would at last be vanquished. 

When I got to those ending stories, I was able to write sketches without being handicapped by what I might have written eight years ago, which would have been completely wrong, after all that I had written since then. (I know some writers who can’t free themselves from an outline or a sketch, and can’t let the story lead them in its own direction. I actually heard one writer say that she hated outlines, because then she was forced to follow them.) 

I reached the point where I needed another break, so that I could see the book with fresh eyes. I decided that this time the break would be for only two weeks.

I learned how to use a graphic application for designing settings for D&D table-top games. I have a first edition, second printing of the original D&D boxed set, signed by Dave Arneson, but I had been designing settings for underground adventures for many years before D&D came out. 

My graphics application has a not-too-steep learning curve, but it took intense concentration and focus (of a different kind from writing fiction) in order to create a ‘draft’ of something that might actually be used in a table-top game, and it wasn’t always easy to figure out how to make the application do things the way I wanted it to, instead of in the way for which it had been designed. I have certainly done that before. Doing this drove The Empty House so far into the back of my mind that I wasn’t even aware of it any more. Which was just what I wanted. 

I finished what I had set out to do with Dungeonfog and put it aside. It was the perfect distraction from the very different problems of The Empty House with its sixty seven stories, and I started working on it again, looking forward to exploring the nightmares in that empty house, and making them work. 

It was going well, until I discovered that my email client wouldn’t let me send anything. I still receive emails, but I can’t reply. It took me three days searching on line to discover that it wasn’t my fault, but that my provider, without letting anybody know, had decided to not support email any more. Since then it’s been a nightmare of a different sort, trying to contact about four hundred websites that require passwords, trying to let something like five hundred fifty friends know that I have a new address. I did discover that hundreds of these could be scratched off my lists. There’s still some clean-up to do, but three weeks of this business is more than too much.

Do I sound just a bit miffed? Hmm. I wonder why (he said sarcastically). But last week I finally got back to The Empty House

And it was as if I had never been away.

Promotion Results, a bit late

This post was supposed to have been uploaded on June 4, but though I wrote it, edited it, and started the new post, somewhere along the way I failed to take a critical step, and it never appeared. I’ve edited it slightly to be more in tune with the late upload.

The promotion for Slaves of War started on May 2, 2023 and ran through May 5. When I checked on the results on May 27, I found that 2,487 people had visited my Amazon page, and 1,580 orders had been processed, including the free books offered during the promotion. It’s hard to get precise numbers, but by dividing my estimated royalties by the actual price of the books, I may have sold six copies.

If I were to try doing this again, it wouldn’t take so long to learn how, but the promotion service refuses submissions which have too many errors or typos. Though I edit my work quite thoroughly (I have read professionally edited books published by standard publishers which have typos and homonym errors), I still would need to use text to speech to find anything I had missed, and that could take a week or two, or a lot more, if it’s something as long as Dead Hand (160,000 words, 350 pages).

As of June 3, no books were actually sold, and none since then.

I have continued working on The Empty House, which I posted about previously, a Lovecraftian cosmic gothic horror as if written by Shirley Jackson. It consists of sixty seven semi-independent stories, each climaxing with a moment of horror only implied, or the realization of some equally horrific truth. 

Some of the stories which I had already worked on were in first draft form, others in rough draft, some were well-developed sketches, others were brief sketches, some were preliminary text, many were just two or three lines of what the story would be about. Some had no story lines, and some did not even have titles. But they were on my story list for reasons which were clear to me in 2015. I had to trust myself.

I started at the beginning, taking each story to the next level, instead of trying to do a full final draft all at once of each one. The pause until I get back to those stories will let me see them fresh, and I’ll understand more about what needs to be developed or tightened or even changed. I did two good if brief sketches, a day or so ago, when the story idea lines told me only a person and a place. Doing those sketches was pretty good for starting from almost nothing. I have done full roughs, extended sketches, and brief sketches some of those stories for which I had no information. It’s going well, but will still take some time.

Promotion. Maybe.

Three years ago, a friend of mine whom I see only once a year, told me about how he promoted his self-published books, by using an on-line service. It seemed, from what he told me, to be a rather complicated process, so instead of trying to learn how it worked, I chose to spend my time writing instead. Two years ago he encouraged me again but, being in the middle of a writing project, I did nothing. Last year we sat down, and he spent almost an hour telling me about the promo services (there are several), about which one he used, and how it worked for him. When I looked him up on line, I saw that he had, indeed, sold a decent number of books. 

This year I decided, that when I took a break between finishing Turning Point and getting back to The Empty House (which I had left unfinished in 2015), I would finally do what my friend had been encouraging me to do.

It was, in fact, rather more complicated than I liked. It took me almost three weeks to figure out how to do it, and to prepare Slaves of War for a second edition (since it had far too many typos that I had somehow missed), which would be my test of the service, rather than starting with The Black Ring, as my friend had wanted me to do.

I got an email from the service when the promotion was supposed to have begun, telling me that I had failed to do something even though I remembered having done it, and that the promotion would not take place. (I suspect that I had not clicked a critical button, which has been a problem of mine in the past.) I tried again, and it seems that I have corrected the mistake. I am now waiting for a report, which should come in a few days. If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll explain what happened to my friend, and tell him that I don’t have enough spare time to try it again.

Meanwhile, I have gone back to The Empty House. It’s a long series of connected stories, which take place from 1869 through 1926. It is Lovecraftian gothic horror, not written in his sometimes rather purple prose, but more like Shirley Jackson’s very understated style (she wrote The Haunting of Hill House). It’s going to take a while.

Turning Point

I have finally finished the book which I used to call Star Kings, and changed the title when I found that Edmond Hamilton used it in 1949. Look it up. My book is now Turning Point

The last thing I needed was a cover. My artist has a regular job, and was not well for a while, and there were other things happening which had higher priority, so it took her longer than she had expected to get to it. Just in case, so that I wouldn’t have to delay publication for too long, I made a cover of my own, which I rather like. But it is not in the same style that my artist has used for my other covers, and which has become a kind of brand. The cover she did for me does not look at all like mine, and I like it a lot. You can see it on Amazon, or the last Library entry on Allen Wold’s Books.

Turning Point has nine parts, each of which is a long story. There are forty seven chapters altogether, which are almost stories in themselves. I work from sketches, not outlines, and let the story develop as it will. I had an idea about how each part and chapter would begin, and I knew what was supposed to be accomplished at the end, but I did not know how I was going to get there.

I do not write biographies for my characters. They all come from that part of my unconscious which I call my muse, and sometimes they just show up while I’m writing. I get to know them, including my hero, in the same way that I get to know the people whom I have just met, learning more about them each time we meet. I let my characters be who they are, and let them behave according to their nature, and let them deal with whatever is going on around them in their own way. I am constantly surprised by what they can do, and by how they do it. I really enjoy that, even though my hero wasn’t quite what I expected him to be. My characters are not static, they grow as real people do. 

My hero is one of the Vaandae, who are ordinary people in their own life. I learned about their safe and familiar culture as star-miners and galactic traders as I developed it. I learned about what they did at home in their city between the stars, about the non-human peoples with whom they traded in the Cold Star Cluster, and I realized that trading with the worlds and peoples beyond the Great Cloud, out in the limb of the galaxy, was sort of like trading in the Mediterranean when it was the center of the known world. 

As my knowledge of the Vaandae grew, I came to understand that their culture was almost ideal — as I might wish, but only in some ways, that our culture could be. I discovered the over-all arc of the story, and how to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, even as I wrote it. And I realized that every chapter and every part had a turning point, after which things were different; in a character’s life, in the culture of the Vaandae, and in their place in the larger culture of the limb of the galaxy. That was what gave me the title I now use.

Almost Ready for Publication

I finished what I call a ‘third draft’ of Star Kings, and I’ve been getting it ready for publication.This has taken much longer than I had hoped. I read through it one more time for obvious typos, errors, and weaknesses. I then read it aloud for text, flow, and readability, and fixed more typos, doubled or missing words, wrong choice of words, bad phrasing, sentences or paragraphs which were out of place, and other things. I used a text-to-speech reader which revealed a few more problems, which I had not seen in all the drafts and edits until then. It took that much polish to meet the standards which I have set for myself. 

Formatting did not take as long as I had feared. Most of the things I fixed were widows and orphans, that is, when only the first line of a paragraph is at the bottom of a page, or the last line is at the top. I also fixed paragraphs when the last line was only one word that was fewer than five letters, or was the last part of a hyphenated word. I wasn’t so minutely picky this time about line spacing and kerning, but it still took a couple days. I may do a post on formatting later. 

I created the front-matter, which includes title pages, also-by’s, copyright notices, and so on. I added three appendices; for Characters (to remind readers who they were without me having to repeat it), for Other Peoples (those non-humans on other worlds, so I didn’t have to describe them every time), and a Brief Glossary, for terms which I had made up, and for words which had a special meaning in the story. That didn’t take very long either.

I began the process of submitting the book to the company which is my printer/binder. The first thing they want is the title, which can’t be changed later. That’s when I discovered that Star Kings was the title of a book published by Edmond Hamilton in 1947, so I couldn’t use it, and had to come up with something different. It feels strange to say it, but it took me three days, and dozens of bad ideas, before I finally settled on Turning Point. It’s appropriate, because the story is full of turning points, which are events or decisions or discoveries which change the way the story will go and what will follow.

Then I needed a blurb, which is the text that is on the back cover of the book. I did that in a day. Then I needed a description, which is what you see on the bookseller’s web page when you look for it on-line. I wound up doing seven versions, each with many drafts, until I finally got one which satisfied my unofficial but highly competent editor.

Now I’m ready to go. 

Except for the cover picture …

Higher Standards

It has taken longer than I had hoped to finish reading Star Kings aloud; for text, for story/content, for performance. Weather, health, family obligations, other interruptions to my so limited creative time.  But the reading is done, and now I will do a text-to-speech. 

It has been recommended several times that the writer have someone read the story aloud, to catch things the writer would not otherwise see. That might work for short fiction, but finding someone to read Star Kings for me would be a bit of problem. The text is something over 137,000 words, nobody I know has that kind of time, and I haven’t found any way to hire someone to read aloud for me, all in one go, and I’m not sure I would like it anyway. I have used text-to-speech software, and it works. Despite all the times I’ve read the manuscript (typescript?) it still finds lots of little errors that I’ve missed.

It has also been suggested that I hire a professional freelance editor. That is way beyond my budget, at about $40 per hour, at about ten pages per hour, at about 550 pages, given a standard 250 words per page. That’s $2,200. Not counting how long it would actually take. Not counting how well the editor might understand what I’ve done. I’ve had editors make egregious assumptions, and make totally unacceptable “corrections.” Story on request.

I find characters easy. They all live in my head, as it were, and I come to know them as I write. But description, narration, and sometimes even flow of plot are hard for me. It’s the problems with those aspects which I find while reading, silent or aloud, that must be fixed. So, aside from my apparent talent with characters and dialogue, everything else is an acquired skill, and what needs to be fixed takes a long time.

The standards which I have set for myself have become higher than they were even ten years ago. I do not judge other writers by my standards. There really is no comparison. My standards concern my use of my acquired skills, which standards I apply to whatever irregularities I find. I am not aware of these irregularities until I read my story aloud, maybe for a third or fourth time.

Getting it right is important to me. There are lots of times when I find a tiny glitch in what I’ve written, and I’m tempted to say, “Ah, it’s good enough.” Then I read it again. And then I decide to fix it. Maybe I’m obsessed with it, but “good enough” isn’t good enough. It has to be right, or at least as good as I can make it.

After this comes formatting. Sigh.

One Thousand Words a Day?

When I started writing full time, the received wisdom was, that if you wanted to be successful, you should write one thousand words a day. 

I had, and still have, a problem with that: was it one thousand words of sketches and notes? a rough draft? a polished draft? If I wrote one thousand words of first draft and, the next day, revised and corrected it, did that count? If I cut and tightened it so that it became only eight hundred words, did that mean I had done minus two hundred words? The dictum was never really explained.

I don’t know how long it took Thomas Wolfe to write Look Homeward Angel, but according to the biography of Maxwell Perkins, who was Wolfe’s editor, it took Perkins five years of working with Wolfe to get it into publishable shape. I don’t know how many words that comes down to from start to finish, but it is not a thousand a day. Even without all that editing.

Ernest Hemingway edited his own work extensively before submitting it, polishing his style to be exactly the way he wanted it to be. 

I don’t know how long it took Margaret Mitchel to write Gone With the Wind, but I’m sure she didn’t just dash it off at a thousand words a day. 

It took Truman Capote about five years to research In Cold Blood

Tolkien took sixteen years to write The Lord of the Rings

So much for a thousand words a day.

I have written a thousand words a day, but they were first draft. I wrote Planet Masters, 75,000 words, in eight and a half days, nearly ten thousand words a day. I also did sketches, maps, characters, created the world’s complex culture. Then revisions, corrections, and responding to my editor’s comments. I wrote The Pursuit of Diana in fifteen days, because I had to. Plus dealing with my editor’s comments. 

But I still wonder sometimes, am I taking too long with Star Kings? Aside from the years between when I started it and when I picked it up again.

I finished what I call a good third draft of Star Kings, and read aloud for text, and finished, after thirteen months, on September 9, 2022, when I took a “much needed break.” I got back to Star Kings on October 20, read it aloud again, and now I’m working on reading for story, that is, does it flow? does it make sense? is there anything which might kick a reader out of the story? 

Yes, there is. There are continuity problems, such as when a description of something in one place is different from what it is in another. There were several paragraphs where the text was fine, but I had no idea what I had been talking about, what it meant. That took almost two hours to fix. If I hadn’t fixed it, someone else might just have stopped reading. 

And because of the length and complexity of the story, about 136,000 words at this point, I decided to create an appendix for a list of characters, instead of having to remind the reader if that character hadn’t shown up for a while. 

My viewpoint character interacts with many peoples who aren’t human in any way. They have their own home worlds, biologies, physiologies, and so on. So I am adding an appendix describing each of them, so that, for example, when I mention the Mroghan people, say eleven chapters after the last time, I don’t have to describe them again. 

And there are lots of terms, the meanings of which are clear in the context of the story, but when they are used many chapters later the reader might forget. 

For example, when I wrote Stroad’s Cross, which took place in 1958, I didn’t have to put in a description or explanation of what a “stick shift” was. I’m sure there are people today who have no idea. In Star Kings, a reader might not remember what I meant by “tablet” when I use it so infrequently. My characters would just know that, and would not have to remind themselves.

Doing all this takes time, and I have only three or four good creative hours a day. But it still nags at me, am I taking too long, am I being too careful?

After re-reading my first paragraphs, maybe not. And besides, the standards which I have set for myself have become higher than they were even ten years ago. 

I do not judge other writers by the standards I have set — or am setting — for myself. Every writer is different, so that is not really possible anyway.

It is that, as I have grown as a writer (storyteller), I have become more aware of my weaknesses and faults, and I am no longer content to say, “well, it’s good enough,” when I can in fact do better if I just try. Which takes time, and energy, which is in ever diminishing supply. And there’s no way I could write one thousand finished words a day.