What an interesting month we’ve had (hopefully derek figures out when to stop reading this)

so after we had our editing teleconference, derek and i are still friends.  all in all the process went very smoothly, and i got to have an excellent conversation with derek’s oldest son about fruit cups and blue markers.  if i had one complaint about the process, it’s just that he lives in nevada, while i reside in new jersey.  when we finished up our conversation, it was closing in on way beyond when i usually go to sleep, while he was just starting his evening.  anyway, here’s how it all went down -

i knew my story had a few issues with it.  the biggest of them was that i had written close to 1400 words of a version that went straight to garbage.  when i started over i was using my previous version as a template and during the writing of the new story, i was mixing myself up in present and past tenses.  believe me, that was a million times better than what i had been putting out previously – an excerpt …

nah, i can’t do it, it was really, really awful.

what i will say about it, is that i discovered i had written 3 (yes, THREE) paragraphs where the house was debating the pros and cons of having his electrical supply upgraded to a more modern voltage.

yeah, it was THAT awesome.

when i couldn’t figure out how to write anything else, i first took a day away from my story.  when i sat down again and read what i had, i could barely get through it.  i knew that if i had spent money on something like that, i would probably hunt down the author and demand it back.  i had to start over.  there was no other way to write the story.

i’m glad i did.  in a couple days i had finished the first version and was pretty pleased with how it turned out.  as derek mentioned the other day, instead of writing from the perspective of the young man who bought and then moved out of a house, i wrote it as the house itself.  i mean, why not?

HEY DEREK STOP READING THIS POST NOW – I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT MY FEBRUARY STORY

that’s enough warning, right?

so our february topic is ‘a time travel story involving teddy roosevelt’.  my initial idea for my story was that i was going to write some sort of sci-fi story where the ship itself was the U.S.S. Teddy Roosevelt.  the more i thought about it, the more that felt like a little bit of a cop-out.  if i was going to truly going to make the most of this topic, i would have to do something crazy like actually having teddy roosevelt go through time.

what a better way to do that, than to bring him into the future with a bunch of his cabinet members to hunt down  a criminal?

i think it’s going to be, at the very least, confusing.  well, confusing BUT loosely based on historical fact.

 

January Wrap-up

Thanks to the miracle of technology, we’ve been able to go over our stories with fine-toothed combs, discuss them, send edits, rework the stories, and we are sending the final edits today. If you would like copies of our January stories, please go HERE and fill out a request form. Put something in the comment-box saying it’s a request for January’s stories. I will email them out to you when the final drafts are done and crisp.

We also spoke quite a bit about how to keep our readers involved in this project. Ultimately, we’re going to be asking you guys for topics to write about, but in the meantime, a few people have mentioned that not knowing what the stories we are currently working on are ABOUT sorta takes the wind out of the sails.

So we’re going to try the following: each of us is writing 2 blog posts a week. One of those (or more, possibly) will be about the actual content of the story. We’ll write “CONTENT” somewhere in the title of the post so that the other one of us knows to avoid reading it. Or, if we have a solid handle on our stories already, then we will read those posts without worry of story-contamination. That way, the readers can know specifically what we’re going through, what we’re getting stuck on (what Aaron got stuck on in his January story is awesome), and how we resolve our issues – all while we’re not worried that we’re getting ideas about plot/concept from the other participant. That’s really the gist of this blog, isn’t it? Separate but awesome?

The other blog posts will be about writing in general, or process, or editing, or inspiration, or synonyms for “lazy pirate” (sloth-buckler?) But probably not about our kids. We already have TWO BLOGS about that as it is.

 

tonight is when we start to hate each other

later this evening, derek and i shall be going over our stories with each other.  both of us have a tendency to get overprotective of our creative processes and our output.  both of us are also super critical of other people and their work.  it looks like our project may be ending tonight.

actually, i think things will be fine.

i really liked derek’s story.  i enjoyed it so much it made me hate my own.  i enjoyed it so much it made me rethink decades of friendship.  now that i have inflated his ego enough, perhaps he’ll go a little easier on me with the edits.

during my first go round i really spent most of my time familiarizing myself with the story itself.    i don’t want to spoil to much of it, but it has something we can all relate to – crazy parents.  granted, i don’t know anyone with parents as completely batsh*t insane as his creation (although i do know some VERY interesting parental units).  my second read through i started to get a little critical of general grammatical issues.  it was during my third read that my printed copy started to resemble one of my old textbooks with notes in every margin and squeezed in between the lines of text.

it sounds a lot worse than it really is.  a lot of my frustrations with his story is a general lack of knowledge of MMORPGs.  well, that’s not true – most of my frustrations are jealousy at how awesome his story is (please be nice to me).  it should be an interesting conversation between the two of us, because for however fiercely we protect our own creations we each trust each others opinions at an almost equal level.

i’ll let you know on tuesday if we’re still talking.

on another note, i am pretty sure i have figured out how i’m going to go about writing our february story.  january’s didn’t turn out nearly as crazy as i thought it was going to be, but i am pretty sure that this month is going to be the one to push me into the realm of crazy.

 

The Difference is in the Pudding

Reading Aaron’s story has made me instantly sure that I’m glad we’re doing this project. Right when I realize that his slant on the story – having it be from the perspective of the house itself – I knew that we had ourselves a winner. I won’t go as far as to say that I wouldn’t have ever thought of that idea in a million years, but the fact is that I didn’t, and he did. And because of it we have two very rich, very different stories based on the same premise. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

Sure, the story is rough around the edges – he hasn’t written with any regularity in years and years, if ever really. But grammar and story enhancement can come later, I’m not worried about that. Really, you need an interesting angle to come from for a short story, where you don’t have an awful lot of time to lure someone in. And he did that, and that rocks.

Interestingly, Aaron’s story (I feel) is extremely predictable. I mean, our topic itself pretty much sums up the ending of the story right from the beginning. But like Ender’s Shadow, a book I happen to know Aaron and I both like a great deal, it’s not the ending that’s important. We all know how it will end. It’s how the story’s told that makes it interesting. And the totally unexpected consequences of an ending we all know will come. And that, of course, is this:

I will say this, about 1/3 of the way through the story, I was hoping the house itself would just start shouting out “You cocktease!” I guess I can’t always get what I want.

Tomorrow we discuss our suggestions, do our edits, and on the 1st we start with the Teddy Roosevelt time travel story. I will also broach the subject of possibly having Aaron and I ignore each other’s posts, so we can actually type about things immediately in our story (to better connect with our four followers). Lots of things happening here.

I’m stoked.

 

one of my biggest worries

going in to this project i knew that a few things could happen -

• i could write total garbage
• derek could join me in writing said garbage
• we could write stories that we each really liked and were vastly different

or my one real worry about this project

• we could write stories that we were very happy with and then upon trading the stories realized we had written pretty much the same thing

well, so far, we are 0-for-1 in that respect.  our january stories could not have been any more dissimilar.  i don’t want to give too much away about the actual content of the stories until they are closer to being finished, but i think i am very pleased with how this project may turn out for the both of us.

we each deal with themes (on the january story topic of ‘a young man buys his first house, moving out of his parents place, only to become increasingly lonely and ends up moving back in with his parents’) of depression, anxiety, madness, and loss; but the different angles we came at those themes is what got me the most excited about this project in the first place.

derek wrote a little bit about his editing process, so i’ll give a little background on how i usually work in these situations.

when i was reading his novel, i ended up converting the word document and putting it onto my kindle so i could read it wherever i wanted.  when i was going through it, i had a notebook with me where i would jot down all of the questions, comments, or errors i came across.  i’d shoot derek an email every few days with what i had come up with, but of course, since i was in a different format if i said ‘on page 29 paragraph 4 …’ it was almost a guarantee that it would be nowhere near where it was in his copy.  on my end, it was nice and easy, but to go back and make corrections on derek’s part was probably a real annoyance.  i stand by my assertion that if he had a basic grasp of the english language it would have been much, much simpler for him.

since our stories are much shorter in length i’m going to go at it a little bit differently.

today, after i received the email with his january contribution, i printed that sucker out.  i sat down on the couch, put my feet up and just read through it once to get a feel for the story he is trying to tell.  after i finished the first read, i grabbed a pen and made a couple little notes about some things i came across that may have continuity issues and some other very minor tweaks.  after a day or so, i’ll sit down with it again and really go through the story in more of an editorial mindset.  we’ve set friday evening as when we are going to get on the phone and talk through the stories together.  based on our stories it should be an interesting discussion.

i’ll be honest, during my first read through i didn’t come across a whole lot that needs to be improved on – derek’s shocking lack of knowledge of MMORPGs notwithstanding.  it was a pretty solid read from start to finish, and for me to not pick up on where the story was heading until pretty much just before it happened is quite an accomplishment.

in other news, we have settled on what the february topic is going to officially be – A Time Travel Story Involving Teddy Roosevelt.  now i know what you are all thinking, it’s been done a million times before.  and while that may be true, i think that what we come up with will breathe fresh life into a genre verging on overkill.  there was a brief conversation about the story involving fdr instead, but that would have just devolved in to both of us writing a great depression musical that i have been brainstorming for years.

but that’s a story for another time.

 

Editing

The stories have been exchanged today. I’m going to give myself a few days to look at it, not just read Aaron’s once, make some edits, and send it back.

Which made me wonder about editing. When I edit my own writing, nearly all I do is come up with better/more interesting ways to say things while getting rid of grammatical errors where I can. But is that really editing? I seem to make the assumption that what I’ve written is exactly the CONTENT I want, and I just make sure it’s presented in the best way. Well, that may not be smart editing, that’s really just proofreading.

With the short time constraints of this project, it may be all I can afford, but really I want to try to use the editing process to make a better STORY, not just make better what I wrote – see the difference? That’s what I’m going to try to do when critiquing Aaron’s work. Sure, I’ll be looking to fix every your/you’re in the story and all the grammatical errors, but that’s just being a proofreader. I want to look at his story and see if there are ways he can tell a STORY better (in my opinion). As I hope he does with mine.

It’s also a time to eat humble pie. I reread my story a few times, and think it’s damn good. I like the turns it takes, I like the characters, and it has just enough levity to keep it from being a real downer of a story. But what if he does shred it? What if he spots the twists a mile away? As someone who has ALWAYS welcomed criticism, I have a peculiar way of responding to it. Initially, I will reject it or defend what I’ve done to the ends of the earth. Only after that person walks away (shaking their head that I was being stubborn) will I sit back and, more often than not, listen to the criticism and use it to tweak the story. I never like being wrong, but usually end up admitting that I was. Except for the scene in the blackout in Unusual Suspects – all you haters keep hating, that’s staying in forever.

On Thursday I’ll talk about my story a bit, or maybe Aaron’s. Who knows?

 

the january stories go out on monday

after debating the logistics of this project for a couple weeks, we still don’t really have a definitive idea of what’s going on.  what we do know, after a series of emails and text messages today, is that we are going to send our stories to each other on monday.

when we first started this project, i was unsure how the actual timeline of our work was going to play out.  did we turn in our stories on the last day of the month?  do we turn them in as soon as we had a completed version that we were satisfied with?  would i even be able to finish the stories in time?

derek and i both had moments of clarity and were able to pump out the january story very early on, which came as a surprise to both of us.  after having my completed story sit for a few days i went back to it to give it one last once over.  again, a few tweaks were made, but otherwise it stayed pretty much as is.

so there i sat with nothing to do for the next two weeks until i send my story through the wonderful world of the internet on its way to the land of nevada and on to derek’s computer.  that’s when i received this text message (in the middle of a conversation about the recent revelations that fausto carmona is not actually fausto carmona) - “Wanna send stories on mon?”

um, yes.

a few more days to make sure everything is completely in order and then its on to tearing apart reading derek’s story.

 

My “Process”

Aaron had asked me a pretty straightforward question about my writing process, and it wasn’t until I really thought about it that I came to a pretty startling conclusion: I don’t have one. I mean, there are some similarities in my writing sessions – they’re almost entirely in my office, I don’t have a TV on when I write (anymore), and I use both hands when I type. That’s about it.

In the olden days where I didn’t have my own home office, I used to have a TV on. I always told myself, “If I know what’s happening on the TV, then I’m not paying attention to my writing.” This was true enough, and if I was in the zone, it didn’t matter if I had a burlesque donkey laser show in my room, I’d be paying attention to my writing alone. But why set yourself up for failure? Nowadays, I allow myself music, because almost everything I do is underscored by some tunes, but usually a playlist of mellow music, often instrumentals. It isn’t a detriment to my writing, and that’s key. I also try to set myself up with a Mountain Dew, but unfortunately in my older, wiser years, I know that drinking it as often as I’d like will result in premature disembowelment.

I don’t force myself to write for a certain time. When I did, it’s not like I’d be stuck and frustrated, but I’d churn out an awful lot of unreadable pages. So I write when I at least have a few ideas floating around, and but rarely with more than that. I seldom have even an idea where I want to end up in my stories, which is part of the fun. But I’ve found historically that I write BEST with deadlines and restrictions (I was once challenged to write and submit a play for a contest in two days that had to revolve around an animal, and produced one of my favorite plays ever Deadline. In fact, that version there is almost the exact thing I’d written in those two days, without many edits. That’s another reason this project seemed so fun – the speed.

I’m sure to write more on this topic later, but right now, everyone’s favorite new segment, Space Debris:

- I’m terrible at naming things. It’s always been my Achilles heel. Most of my most familiar works (Unusual Suspects, Everyguy) were named by other people. In fact, my nickname Esoderek was created by someone else (thanks Aaron!). So I still don’t have a title for my January story.

- Speaking of it, after I’d written it based on my cathartic moment, I sat away. Just thinking about what I’d written over the next few days, I felt disappointed, like the idea was cooler in my head than what I’d put down. I finally reread it this week while battling a stomach illness, and found I enjoyed it as much as I had hoped. Let’s hope it translates to other people.

- I’m going to be putting up a link at the month’s end to submit requests for copies of the “complete” short story each month. That way, I’m not risking putting it up online (though legally I’d be pretty safe to do so), but I’m still not having people read my progress here and not be able to see the results. Bye bye viewers (both of you).

- Aaron has mange.

- Oh, if you are reading this, comment on it. What do you want to see more of? What do you like/not like about the project? Or suggest monthly topics. While we’ll be coming up with our own topics for now, I don’t imagine either of us would outright reject suggestions of story topics from outside sources.

 

i think i’m finished

at least until about 15 minutes from now when i decide i need to re-do the entire thing once again.

i also think i’m happy with how the story turned out.

when i first told my wife my premise for this month’s short story, after staring at me blankly for a minute or two she told me that i had problems.  after reading my first draft, she seemed to enjoy the story a lot.  now i’m stuck trying to figure out where i went wrong.  either that, or she is the one who has the issues.

she noticed a few things i needed to clean up (apparently she couldn’t follow a story that bounced between tenses unintentionally).  let that be a lesson to me, i should read a story through after i finish writing it and before i hand it to someone to look at.  so i did a little bit of cleanup, expanded on a couple ideas, removed a couple things that i didn’t think worked so well, added those things back in, re-worded them, removed them, and then settled on how they were originally.  all in all, it was an annoying process.

now comes a little time off.  since the end of the month is still two weeks away i figure i’ll just forget about this draft for another few days.  the time off will, hopefully, let me go back with a clear enough head to see it differently than i have been.

also, the time off gives me a little time for some work on another story i’ve been working on (unrelated to this project) and some historical research (related to this project).

how did me wanting to ease back into writing turn into research?

 

Following arbitrary rules

With my first draft of my January project already done (though I admit much work still needs to be done), I’m looking forward to February. Now, we already have February’s topic, which is probably the only time we’ll have a subject a month in advance. The enthusiast in me wants to start writing, because I already have some ridiculous ideas flowing. But really, that’s not how deadlines work. So I’m going to stick to the heart of the project and wait until February 1 to put any ideas down on paper.

In the meantime, I have to figure out how to put those two angry squirrels in my story. Actually, I’m considering putting one running reference in each story. Whether it be a gag, a word… I’m not sure. Kinda like how every major thing I’ve ever done has the word “monkey” in it.