while writing ridiculous ‘historical’ time travel stories, how much do you need to suspend disbelief?

derek and i spent a solid five to ten minutes last night debating about whether or not the faces on money would be the same if various historical figures were removed from parts of their lives (his story).  i was against it being the same, while he feels that enough had been done anyway that it doesn’t matter they vanished, they would still get the honor of a currency.

THAT is pretty much a huge reason i’m excited to be working on this project.

not only are derek and i doing insane research for stories (early 20th century time travel theories, how to build a piano, etc.), we are getting into some interesting debates that really have no business occurring.

how did we resolve some issues?  it’s a comedy.  that’s how.  seriously, lighten up people.

actually, there were some continuity issues that are easily cleared up, and that is how we are going to spend our weekends.  we turn our revised drafts in to each other on monday, hopefully correcting a few of the things that need it.  and then we start to tackle the march sentences that people have been sending in to us.

so far we have a few great ones, but we’d love to widen the pool of which we are selecting them from.  send any and all suggestions to shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com

- Aaron and I discuss our February stories tonight. I was pretty surprised to see I had over 100 notes on Aaron’s story, because all in all it had far less issues than his January one. But when I discount minor grammatical errors like commas and capitalization, it isn’t all that many. He warned me that he didn’t have time to do much proofreading.

- I’m curious how March will go for him – and April for that matter – with another kid. I just have one of those (a 2nd boy) and that sleep deprivation thing is no fun.

- Writing my February story was one of the most enjoyable experiences as I’ve had in a long time. I occasionally write extremely silly things for Fats’ Bad Advice Column on my website, and some of those were fun, particularly this one where I played around in Paint. In fact, I’m going to attach the picture here as Clip-Art so it shows up on the links I put on Facebook. But this story was a blast to write.

- Aaron and I both included a really bastardized version of an actual historical figure in our stories. I like that.

- More next week, particularly about Aaron’s mange (which has shown great improvement!)

we traded our stories sunday night instead of monday because we’re crazy like that.  rest assured, they (again) couldn’t have been any more different.  once again my story seems to be the more sane of the two, which (in my mind) seems odd considering my story was about a certain someone fleeing into the future from 1912 to try to escape a political scandal.

we are going to be doing our monthly skype chat thursday night, so i will give a full update on the editing process and how hurt our feelings are in my post on friday (unless derek decides to take another of my days).  we attempted to talk yesterday but it turned into our sons talking about their favorite trains from thomas the tank engine.

in case you somehow missed his post earlier today, our march topic needs your help.  not so much the topic, but our stories.  our idea for march will be to have people contribute sentences to the cause.  we aren’t going to be giving ourselves an actual topic, instead we will pick a number (based on how many submissions we get) of sentences and we each will have to include them in the stories.  we have received a staggering amount of suggestions so far.  i think it’s up to 3.  so feel free to drop us a line at shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com with your suggestions.  you only have about a week to submit them to us so get crackin!

There are no real guidelines to speak of, other than if it’s supposed to be a line of dialogue, put quotation marks around it. Otherwise, it’s implied that you’re submitting narration.

You can submit by emailing shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com. Submit as many sentences as you like. The more the merrier. We’ll announce the winners at the start of March. Thanks for your help!

my first draft is finished (as i mentioned on tuesday) and i am waiting for my wife to finish reading it for her opinion.  i like to have a second set of eyes on my stuff in the hopes that if i made some glaring continuity error they would notice it.  as it happens, after writing and reading what i’ve written a few times i barely notice anything.  in fact, this month i realized that i had shifted character roles part way through a section of the story and had to go back re-reading everything just to make sure i was fixing the correct names.  i think i got them all, and if not, hopefully julia can find the rest of them.

derek and i have an interesting idea for the march story, he will write more about it in his post on monday.  for now, i’m doing the best i can to brainstorm ideas to write, because who knows how much time i’m going to have next month.  my (completely unrealistic) goal is to have a first draft finished by the 3rd, giving me more than enough time to have a baby (well, witness my wife having a baby) and then edit during my newly rediscovered awful sleep patterns.  maybe i’ll even do some writing on my phone while i sit in the hospital waiting for anything to happen.

that’s probably a terrible idea.

for now, i just hope i have enough time to fix up this draft and send it to derek before monday.  worse case scenario, i don’t fix it up at all until after he reads it.  i don’t think that would be a horrible thing, but i’d rather try to have it as polished as i can before derek tells me it’s all rubbish.

also, we’ve heard from some of you at shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com we’d love to hear from some more.  don’t forget to send us any comments or concerns.

- A few people have asked how to just be on the list to receive each month’s stories without asking each time. Well, as Aaron said, we’ve made a new email for the project (and it can also be found on the “Contact Us” part of the blog) – shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com. Send a quick email there asking for each month, and we’ll put you on the mailing list to get them automatically. If you only want to receive a month here and there, that’s fine too.

- Along those lines, SEND FEEDBACK! While we’d love everyone to become enamored with our obviously-faultless stories, chances are people might have helpful criticism to enhance the stories. Don’t worry about hurting feelings. At worst, we don’t use the suggestions, but at best, those suggestions might help our stories. You can either email us or post the criticism here, or even on our Facebook pages if you really want. Just let us hear.

- The 13th seems to be “my day”. Both months I wrote the majority of my stories on the 13th after some breakthroughs the days leading up to it. A two month sample size isn’t exactly tell-all, but it’s odd nonetheless.

- Aaron’s mange, I’m afraid to say, has not gotten any better.

- My rough draft of the February story is done. With the size of these stories (this one right now clocks in at ~6250 words, and Aaron’s supposedly is over 9000), I don’t think it will be feasible to try to publish these in one volume. If they end up averaging 5000 words (which seems conservative), that makes the book a pretty ungainly 120k words. That seems long for a collection of short stories.

- As for the actual content, I ended up putting a running gag in that I thought was funny, only to have it be a pretty key part in the story, plot-wise. Despite all the research I did for this one, there are still plot holes big enough to drive a Suburban through. I wonder if I should tighten those up.

in fact, if i have some downtime throughout the year (or any time in the future, because let’s face it – my second child is due in less than 4 weeks) i will probably make an attempt to make that project a reality.  there was so much i wanted to write that i left out, and there was so much i did write that i cut out because of the size of the story.

i wrote the last time about how i felt that i had strayed from a believable reality in my story, which based on the subject matter still makes me laugh.  i decided that instead of trying to go back and edit it into something i felt fit better, i just started the story over.  since i had written so much the first time, i also felt that it would be a good opportunity to cut the story back a bit.  this way, if the story continued to be a long one at least the first half would be shorter.

i failed.  hard.

by the time i had gotten back to where i left off, the new version was about two pages longer.  that was when i decided to say ‘screw it’ and just let it run however long it had to.  i may have cut down on the end a little bit because i was trying desperately to keep the story under 10k words, and maybe upon a re-read in a day or two i’ll fix that up a bit.  but for now, i’m pretty happy with my insane story of teddy roosevelt going into the future to save his past.

derek and i were also discussing on the phone that we had done a lot of research while writing these stories.  i won’t spoil some of the fun things derek was looking up, but i relayed how i spent the better part of this past weekend researching early 20th century theories on time travel.

my reasoning is that 100 years ago people would not have been as scientifically advanced and would not know about some of the things we know of today.  in order to make this story as believable as possible (i’m cracking up over here again) i would have to use some form of a theory circa 1912.  thankfully there is a thing called the internet so i didn’t have to go bother a librarian with questions about the kerr metric and immutable timelines.  they probably would have just pointed me towards the internet anyway.

i have a little less than a week to go over the story and clean it up, but to be honest with you, i’m afraid if i do that i’ll just add another six pages.

also, you may have noticed in the upper right corner of this site there is a new little ‘contact us’ tab.  derek and i set up a gmail account to make things easier for the both of us to read and respond to emails.  if you want to ask us anything that may be too long (or boring) for a bunch of comment replies, feel free to email us at shortstoryproject2012@gmail.com if you want to keep receiving (or begin receiving) our monthly stories, feel free  to send us an email over there as well.  this way you will be automatically added to our address book, which just makes it easier for lazy me.

The jumping-off point for a story can come from the strangest places. For the longest time in my February story, I was stuck on the bullet, on The Eradication, and on teddy bears. This story was going around in circles. I was modelling it in style after Jasper Fforde. In fact, I said all of this in some prior blog posts – go back and read them if this sounds foreign.

Now I’m reading Verner Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. In it (as far as I can tell – I’m still quite early on) there are these creatures which are, by nature, a collections of smaller creatures. Their personality traits, memories, etc… all are determined by which sub-creatures constitute these bigger things. I read this and, like most people, immediately thought of Voltron. In fact, telling Ash about it, she immediately thought of Voltron (though it was before her day.) And suddenly, my story had shape.

How does Voltron relate to Teddy Roosevelt? Well, isn’t it obvious? I immediately thought to another Verner Vinge story, Marooned in Realtime, and suddenly something else became very clear. My story needs to take place in post-Apocalyptic Earth. Clearly. That way, I get to keep all the cool bits about The Eradication.

Then, I thought back to a game of Taboo (where Aaron and I typically kicked serious ass), and a strange link Aaron and I seemed to have. He was the reader and he said, questioningly, “Heads?” Many people would say ‘tails’, or something. No, I went immediately to “Mount Rushmore.” Point for us, but more importantly, a jumping off point for my story. Because you know who’s on Mount Rushmore? That’s right, Teddy F’n Roosevelt.

So now I have a setting: a small subterranean settlement in what was once southern SD. And an antagonist; evil aliens. And guess what, I can still use the bullet. In fact, just about the only thing I’ve gotten rid of is the teddy bear. I’m past the point of no return, of course, so this will be my story, for better or worse. It’s making me laugh each time I work on it, though, so I think I’m on the right track. ~3000 words down, and I’m hoping to finish up a very rough draft tonight.

And now that I have a foothold, I’m off to read Aaron’s blog posts from this month.

i have had issues with parts of my story already, but i was just going to write through them and let derek tell me  i am either correct in that it doesn’t work, or that i was wrong and it works fine.  instead, i’m just going to try to clean it up on my own.  not to mention there are about 4 pages i can probably just edit out altogether because it revolves around the white house talking about its electrical output.

there is only one thing that i know i need to keep in the story exactly as it was written as a joke mostly for derek.  oh, derek, don’t read that previous sentence.  i think that i have a brilliant idea that i just have to figure out how to make it work.

back to my story issues (derek, stop reading here for realsies) -

i am attempting to go about this month story princess bride style with the main bulk of the story being told by one of the characters.  the problem i am running in to with that, is that it feels sort of forced when i jump out of the ‘story’ and into the present day conversation talking about what happened.  one problem i know i have always had is writing dialog.

i think that i am a pretty good story teller.  for some reason when i am putting an oral story to paper (well, computer) it just doesn’t feel right.  i’m actually tempted to grab an old tape recorder and make a recording of me telling the story and just transcribing it.  who knows if that will work any better, but it’s worth a shot if this new revision doesn’t quite do it for me.

we shall see how this goes.  i only have 11 days left to finish my draft and clean it up before i give it to derek.  it looks like he is having troubles with this month as well, maybe historical fiction will be our demise.

I’m stuck in my story, but I don’t necessarily have writer’s block. In fact, I’ve written nearly 1000 words in two different attempts. The problem I’m having is that I want a humorous story, and what I’m churning out is some sci-fi that is too silly to be actual sci-fi, and too serious to be a comedy story. So I’m still plodding along.

But it made me think about writer’s block. I used to pride myself in high school that when I had writer’s block is when I wrote the most. It was true. I had floppy disks (remember those?) full of writing that I wrote when I couldn’t think of anything. Of course, it was all drivel. But I was never a writer who fell back on the ole’ “I can’t think of anything to write” mantra when I was stuck. I wrote and wrote and wrote. It might have sucked, but at least I produced.

Now that my schedule has tightened, with a job that consumes my days, two kids, a wife, a house, and other projects (like being a competitive athlete in a professional sport), I don’t have time to write crap. I find myself only wanting to sit down when I have something GOOD to write. I know I *can* write for writing’s sake – that’s never been a problem. If I sit at my computer, I’ll have pages of writing after an hour, not just a sentence then blank space. But I have better uses for my time. Hell, reading a book ranks higher than churning out pages of poop.

Which is why I’m so frustrated with this month. I feel like I have good ideas, but the longer I write them, the less interested in them I am. That’s a sign that they’re not as good on paper as they are in my head. A good idea will remain a good idea the whole way through. I think I’ve had a dozen different ways to go in this story, and none are sticking. Maybe I need to scrap every idea and start over once again. I’m not sure.

With the timeline crunch, I do at least have the benefit of knowing that I could finish any of my false starts for a story. It may not be the best one I could possibly write, but it will at least be done, and decent. But I’m a perfectionist – I want excellence, not acceptability.

Curse you, Teddy Roosevelt. Curse you and your really cool hat.