August 25th, 2010 by Neal

It is just that really good things are happening. Stay tuned.

May 19th, 2010 by Neal

Two songs profoundly informed the new novel. “No Surprises” by Radiohead, and “The Genius Next Door” by Regina Spektor. This in turn was informed by Ben Folds’ “Hiroshima” song, which inspired the title for the book (among other things), and through Folds I found Spektor.

Today, fishing around the net, I found this, recorded the week I finished the book.

Creepy, man. I love extraordinary coincidence (or dare I say with an air of presumption, great minds thinking alike?):

God damn, is it beautiful.

May 18th, 2010 by Neal

Hal 3 is done.

This is exactly what the process is like. You start out finding some interesting someone or something concept you don’t know or understand (suicide, plural marriage, child molestation, and SHRIMP!), fully explore it to the point that makes you feel stupid, and then:

That’s… that’s about it.

Nothing to do but look up and go…. Okaaaaay.

May 17th, 2010 by Neal

Work continues apace, which is nothing new.

I’m trying to decide if I should read one more time through or just let it fly away. I think I’ll probably read through again, because I’m a nut. Mostly it’s the beginning. It’s fine by any standard, but I love making little tweaks.

I’m tired, though. 44 pages of editing today. Ten hours. I want to be done, as much as I know that the minute I’m done, I will wish I had it back. Catch-a 22.

99,710 words, so far. Probably the most tiring book I’ve ever written, despite its relatively short time frame. But, I hope, a good one.

May 12th, 2010 by Neal

I’m very tired, but work progresses. The book is at almost 98,000 words, and will probably top out at 100K ish.

I’m doing about thirty pages a day, which puts me at completion at roughly the end of next week or the beginning of the following week, but either way, I should be done by the end of May. Then I’m gonna take a well-earned bloody break for a few.

Today I had a strange scene where I went into a 7-11 and saw the clerk being accosted. I was in perfect position to utterly ruin the day of the potential assailant, but he decided to leave. Had he taken a swipe at the clerk, I would have taken him down. It was literally a hair away from a really crazy scene. Instead he left, and now I have gummy worms and half a day of work.

In another universe, though, I karate chopped a bum today.

Sigh.

May 12th, 2010 by Neal

Happiness is playing with the word count function and realizing that the word “Just” appears 450 times in a 98,000 word document. It makes the pulse quicken, and you begin to excise the “just” from your book. Sometimes “only” will substitute. Usually it’s a character doing what people do when they talk in real life, just doing this, just doing that, I was just using just to just, I don’t know, Justify something.

There’s that old maxim that good dialogue sounds how people really talk. I disagree, as do some of my writer pals I’ve talked to about it. Good dialogue makes you think you’re reading how people really talk while still showing craft.

Nonetheless, it’s when you’re talking and you realize you say “like”, “All right?” or “Right?” all the time. You realize that it’s damned near impossible to remove your personal habits, no matter how practiced you are. For instance, the last sentence read “it’s just damned near impossible” until I saw it and went back before I made an ass of myself.

Point remains, after looking at the word “just” for an hour, I doubt I’ll be less conscious of it in the future. If only to avoid going mad.

May 7th, 2010 by Neal

I am now 55 in to the fourth draft, my hope is to finish it next week, do another quick read-through for a fifth draft, then send it in by the end of the month.

I’m not changing hardly anything, which is very good, but it’s very easy to spend a last read-through skimming and making sure, all the same.

I came up with what I believe will be the murder for the next book, which is rad. I am also thoroughly intrigued by Columbo, and am considering Hal’s polar opposite, a detective that is much more formal and intelligent. Then again, many have written Sherlock Holmes, so I’ve got a lot to consider.

It’s very strange not to be changing genre every book. I used to do that. Hrm.

In other news, the pages for Nightmares of the Macabre have been coming in, and WOW. You guys will LOVE this book. LOVE LOVE LOVE it. I do.

April 27th, 2010 by Neal

Done-O.

Woo.

April 27th, 2010 by Neal

I am editing my novel, and I set a timer early on in the book of ten days before a BIG EVENT happens (to not spoil).

I then proceeded to tell the story as I wanted to, having days pass, things happen, etc. I winged it, knowing that in subsequent drafts I could add or delete a day at random, or combine events, etc.

Still and all, roughing it in, at one point I had a character say “That big event happens tomorrow!”

That was my cue to make everything tie in, and make sure that ten days had passed. To that end, for this draft, I’ve been writing down each day in chronological sequence, IE, “Day One: Hal does this. Day Two: This happens.” Etc, on and on.

Without consciously doing it, I somehow managed to tell my story (without subsequently changing a single chronological event) so that the climax occurs EXACTLY ten days after the timer starts.

Want it to get really creepy? Well, how about this… the ten days weren’t arbitrarily chosen based on the story, they’re the real life legal number of days it would take for X to occur.

Sometimes, fiction is creepy. Or I am just paying to more things subconsciously than I realize. Freaks me out, man.

April 23rd, 2010 by Neal

I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last few days, mostly spurred by a good conversation with friend Will. I’m pondering what I hold to be my concepts of self-worth, I’m looking into the way I focus on things. Constantly trying to prove, I’ve been confronted with contradictory logic in my own methodology of thinking, and I’ve been exploring it a little. I won’t cover much of it here, but one point that came out was remarkably astute.

I’m focusing on the numbers. For me, it’s a tool to give myself a gauge of where I am. I say “Your goal is ten pages, or 3,000 words, or one draft.” Etc. The outward impression, however, I realize, can easily be seen as “Aha! I’ve written two books in a year. Behold, my superior power!” This is not my intention, so I’m seriously questioning my use of the pie charts, especially given that the outward impression (False or true) that could come of it is that I am churning books out less concerned with quality.

As my sunken eyes and broken demeanor prove, this is not the case. I am literally killing myself for these books. Nonetheless, writing is a form of communication, and if I can’t communicate what I feel as opposed to what I am actually doing, that’s a failure of writing. The IDEA was to let people know I have work coming down the pike, and to give them a conceptualization of how hard I’m working to get it out there. The REALITY is that it kind of looks like I’m rushing. I dunno. I worked hard to produce 3,000 good words a day, but it’s hard to conceptualize, I know, on a regular basis.

I’m still not sure what to do, beyond noting what I’m working on in a less numerical way. It springs from my long time obsession with statistics and running numbers. I love baseball statistics, budgeting, word counts, gas mileage, timing trips. It’s an OCD thing I’ve always had I can’t get rid of, but I don’t have to inflict it on others, especially when it might give a negative impression.

I think I’ll keep it up for this book, and then just have a draft number for future books in the “Works in Progress” tab.

It IS quality, not quantity, and I don’t have to justify how hard I’m working to anyone but myself. That urge comes from my past, and I apologize for it. I do my work, that’s all I need to do. Consider it the last hiccup of my earlier predilection to try and fight battles I couldn’t win on message boards. I hope to hell it’s a sign of maturity as an artist. We’ll see.

This is your cue to write “U SUK!” and let me not respond.

I had a startling moment of revelation goofing around on Warcraft two days ago, actually, about this. WoW has this thing called the random dungeon, where, if you don’t have enough people to run an instance (a five character dungeon), you can sign up for random people who also want to do a dungeon. You invariably implode half the time, because getting five sane, normal, intelligent people on the internet is like, I dunno, flipping for heads 200 times.

It used to lead me to rather stirring rage, to the point that I quit the game for years. Now I’m more calm. Reassured. I can just drop out of a group of assholes and not give a shit.

Anyway, back to two days ago. I was in this instance, and I was JUST level 80. Part of the endgame is spending tens of thousand of hours grinding for gear, and when you just hit 80, you’re going to be low in “DPS,” or damage per second. I drop in, and the first thing I see is some leet geared DPS guy typing incoherent phrases and sentences. Like, this is some of the worst grammar I have ever seen, even on WoW. He says something fractured about asking why my gear sucks. I write one sentence, “Just hit eighty. Trying to get geared. That’s why I’m here! :)”

The response, verbatim: “ur to stupid to insalt” sans period.

This is like “your retarded” taken to the point of trolling, but he’s absolutely serious.

My response was to just laugh, leave the group, and move on to something else. A while back, I would have probably engaged the guy and used my command of language to try and smite him. I didn’t, and I’m very proud of that.

Now, as Will would probably chide me, “Why the fuck are you talking about it two days later, then! Stop telling us how much it’s not affecting you as a way to tell you how much it’s not affecting you.” True. I cite this example more as a piece of humor.

The truth is, I’ve found me sweet spot where I don’t care any more. It took so long. I still have hiccups. But I realize the last time I talked about something ruining my day, making me lose writing because of bullshit, was almost a half a year ago, and that was an isolated incident.

I’m also past a lot of the dysfunctional shit that pervaded a lot of my thought process. Each year I can look back and see improvement. I regret things I used to suck at, but I’m glad things are getting better. I’m learning to interact in ways that were beyond me years ago, and a lot of that maturity and change comes of the decision to let go, come to Portland, and find a new life.

Even when I’m feeling down (and I have a lot, of late, at random times, mostly because Kristen is gone a lot at work and school, and I’ve had some shitty bills killing me), that’s a point of optimism.

The next Hal book, not coincidentally, is called “Live in Hope.” I don’t know if I’ll write it next (I have a few ideas I’m mulling), but it’s there, nonetheless, and important.

Hope.

Things get better. They do.