Grinding Exceedingly Fine

That's probably the best way to describe the drafting process for Teratogenesis.  I'm pretty sure that it will take just as long to edit the first draft as it did to write the damn thing.  But progress is being made.  Slowly.

With Halloween coming up, I plan on posting a new ghost story on Scribd.  I've said it now, so I'm committed. In this case, I'm actually fairly interested in peoples input, so let me know in the comments what you're interesting in reading.

I've actually had a bit of a clean up of my Scribd account.  Everything on there is now mobile formatted and I've removed the duplicates  I'm pretty impressed with the way things are going with Scribd.  Unlike Google Docs, which seems to have been "upgraded" so that it's harder to format documents.

Some thought is being given to projects for next year.  It might include revisiting something that I've had locked away for awhile.  Something deemed so horrible, it was never to be unleashed.  Or it could be something a bit more light hearted and considerably different from everything I've put out so far.

Long Time, No See

To say that my output this year has taken a downturn would be something of an understatement.

Frankly, due to changes of circumstance, I just don't have the energy to write of an evening lately.

This has left the second draft of Teratogenesis stalled.  My short story output is dead in the water too.

There is also the fact that I was going to host the second draft of Teratogenesis on the HarperCollins Authonomy website.  But given that HarperCollins is owned by News Corporation, it's not a company I want to be generating content for.  After all, they're good enough at that themselves...

So, the hunt begins for a new home for Teratogenesis, efforts must be made to make the effort and some progress needs to come of a year that's running away from me.

This isn't the 'droid you're looking for...

This is just a quick test to see if the Blogger Android app is working.

Inch By Bloody Inch…

Progress is being made on the second draft of Teratogenesis.  Slow progress but progress, nonetheless.
I’ll be honest, the short story a week is dead in the water.  I’ve simply had more on my plate with other things than to churn out four thousand words every week.  Or month.
There will be more being posted on Scribd, but there is a fair amount up in the air at the minute.
I’m not even going to put a date on when Teratogenesis will be done.  I’ll do my second draft, then I’ll ask for volunteers and try the same “distributed proof-reading” they do on Project Gutenberg.  Then I might see about getting an expert in to look at the final draft.
Even with the supplementary material I’ve got planned, I think it would be too slim a text to merit a print run.  Although, fewer pages means fewer plates, which means cheaper book….  Instead, I’ll format the final draft into an e-book.  And spare the trees.

Lacunae

So, today is the first of March?  What happened to February?  And wasn’t it Christmas the other week?

This year is flying by.  Maybe I was just keeping closer track of last year with the schedule I had set for the Teratogenesis updates.  Maybe it’s all an elaborate joke and everyone is moving the clocks back a minute at midnight every night.

“Escalation” was to be my watch word this year, but I suspect “consolidation” might be closer to the mark.  The Wicked Steeple, the latest, first and only new short story this year, has taken me two months to write.  Or one sixth of the entire time I’ve spent so far on Teratogenesis.

It’s taken almost exactly two months, because it’s based on a nightmare I had in the early hours of New Year’s Day.  This is third longest writing period I’ve ever spent and actually finished the piece.  The other two were my final project for university (six months) and Teratogenesis (a year.)

Why has it taken two months?  I’ve been distracted by Twin Peaks, the cat and conquering aliens (on the computer.)  I need to step up the pace.  But in the meantime, I’ll be reorganising and redrafting the other short stories on Scribd and looking at MobiPocket editions.

Tempus Fugit

“…One a week for a year.  I’ll tell you now: it won’t happen…”

Well, that became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But I’ve got my excuses ready:

• I had the actual flu for the first two weeks of this year.
• I’ve started three short stories to make up for it.  But not actually finished any of them…

So it’s the usual case of feast and famine.  The whole point of this short story exercise is to take the more structured approach from Teratogenesis and push it further.  When the focus is undone, it all falls down.
It’s also the end of the “cooling off” I’ve imposed on Teratogenesis, so that means assembling the final manuscript.  And getting it edited.  And designing the cover….
So the first short story should be up in (Chinese) New Year and we’ll see about getting back on track.

del.icio.us Tags: Short Story,TeratogenesisUK,Prophecy,Influenza,Feast,Famine.

Escalation

It’s strange to think that it is only a year since I started writing Teratogenesis, but today the story has ended.

Teratogenesis:  Thirteen Lunar Months In The Life Of A Lycanthrope.

The closest feeling I have ever felt to this before was when I graduated university.  I’m fairly proud but know I could have done better and the real work is only just about to begin.

There is the editing still to do, any and all volunteers would be very appreciated.  I need a cover for the eBook for which I intend to hold some sort of invitational.  Costing needs to be sorted, a lot easier than with print, but since both Amazon and Google Checkout charge a commission and, for some reason, eBooks are subject to VAT, there is a fair amount of number crunching to get the balance right.  Some sort of promotion should be done.

Not only is there all that (and more, no doubt) but next Saturday sees the start of my weekly short story series.  One a week for a year.  I’ll tell you now: it won’t happen, but we’ll see what the score is this time next year, eh?

 

del.icio.us Tags: TeratogenesisUK,Online Serial,Lunar Cycle,Optimism,Pragmatism.

A Race Against Midnight

Welcome to my “televised” attempt at writing a short story.  Hopefully, it will work and we’ll have something to read at the end of it.  But that’s not really the point;  it’s just an exercise that I quite like to do.

 

9:42am

Typical.  When you need to use your computer and time is a factor, there are updates to be installed.

First things first: music.  I’ve already done this as I prefer to operate a computer with music playing.  This year it’s mostly bluesy, rocky music with a lot of Nick Cave and BringTheWarHome.  With that sorted, we can move onto the actual writing.

All stories basically consist of: a beginning, a middle and an end.  They needn’t come in that order, but they all have to be present.  Stories tend to conform to archetypal structures, as well.  The most famous of these is the monomyth as described in Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces.

The shortest description of this is Star Wars (the old ones, not the new ones) which adheres to pretty much this exact map.  It also appears in the classical hero stories, Wizard of Oz and myths from around the world.

But it’s a bit unwieldy for a short story, so I’ll just be using Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations, which are a little more condensed.

The decision making process I’ll be using means drawing a Tarot card (from a Colman-Smith deck,) looking at what images appear to me, referencing it to A.E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot and then making my decision on that.

So, I’ll draw the first card…

 

10:07am

The first card drawn is the Page of Pentacles, reversed:

My first impression was an image of a young man, hands raised as if in offering, between a copse of trees and a hill.  Pages are traditionally female cards, but the shadow of the jaw creates the rebus of a goatee beard when reversed.

Arthur Edward Waite describes the Page of Pentacles reversed as follows:  “Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury, unfavourable news.”  After looking through the 36 Dramatic Situations, this seemed to fit closest to Number 35:  Recovery of a Lost One.

 

10:24am

This dramatic situation only includes two characters, One Who Is Lost and a Seeker.  There is no specific conflict between them; it is the situation that they have to overcome, rather than each other.

The next card I drew was for The One Who Is Lost:

The Moon represents the tension between the mind and the soul, the intellect and the spirit.  As stern (and solar) as the Moon looks, she is waxing and offering hope.  The scorpion represents a “nameless and hideous tendency that is lower than the savage beast.”  The path leads between a dog and a wolf, between civilisation and the wild.

Again, synchronicity rears its head and returns us to the themes of Teratogenesis…

 

10:41am

The card I’ve drawn for the Seeker is the Knight of Swords:

Sometimes, harmonies and correspondences appear between the card that appears and its place in the story.  The Knight of Sword is the prototypical questing knight and a perfect card for our Seeker.

He represents all the qualities of the chivalric hero, both good and bad:  “Skill, bravery, capacity, defence, address, enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance, ruin.”  He is someone who is willing to not only brave death but also to deal it in pursuit of his goals.

 

10:53am

The card I’ve drawn for my beginning is Strength or Fortitude, reversed:

This isn’t a physical strength, as suggested by the  taming of the lion, but a strength of faith as per the chain of roses which bind the beast.  However, it is reversed and suggestive of a loss of faith and an unleashing of the feral instincts.  This ties quite nicely into the image of The One Who Is Lost that we already have.

 

11:05am

The card drawn for the middle of the story is The Emperor:

The Emperor is not just a temporal king but a manifestation of the will, of exerting ourselves onto reality.  This is often in simple ways, like making and discarding, but goes right up to the stage of life or death decisions.  In many ways, he is the direct opposite of the previous card, showing a recovery of the self.

 

11:17am

Hmm.  I seemed to have missed out the Emperor in that last post, but he’s back now.

The final card I’ve drawn is a Minor Arcana, the Two of Wands:

Another appropriate card, as the Two of Wands indicates that through hard and difficult work, success is likely.  However, it may not bring the pleasure or satisfaction that we wanted…

 

11:31am

So this gives us a condensed plot that looks something like this:

Someone has given into their baser instincts and become lost. Someone else, capable and ruthless, is sent after them. When they find them, they have recovered themselves but are not necessarily able to come back.

Now it is time to essentially wrap this up in the uniform of a ghost story.  Currently, the story could be about anything: a kitchen sink story of infidelity, a two-fisted war story of guilt, a romance, anything.  But the goal of the exercise is a ghost story, so that is how we’ll dress our set.

Now, the hard part begins, the actual writing…

 

12:47pm

The story is wearing its ghostly robes, the characters are all named and the scene is set.

Time to splice the main brace and move onto the first draft…

 

1:43pm

We have a title: Dependence.

All of the Christmas ghost stories have one word titles:  Harbinger, Sacrifice and Dependence, which remains unpublished because its not very good.

 

3:09pm

This is turning out far darker than I expected…

 

3:47pm

First draft done in 6 hours and 5 minutes, not bad going.

But the balance of horror and terror isn’t right.  This isn’t a ghost story, it is a horror story.  Horror is a much more visceral thing, while the creeping sense of terror is far more subtle.

Time to let it rest for a few hours and then the second draft…

 

6:37pm

There’s so much to change  on a second draft…

 

6:56pm

Decent templates make formatting so much easier…

 

19:00pm

And there we go!

Dependence, a Christmas horror story written and posted in nine hours and eighteen minutes.  Available from Scribd formatted for screen and mobile devices.

It’s far more gruesome than I expected and falls well short of the definition MR James used for his ghost stories, but it’s done and it’s up.

 

Thanks to everyone who’s been following this, I’ve enjoyed and hope you have too.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

del.icio.us Tags: Synchronicity,Short Story,Christmas,Tarot,Live,36 Dramatic Situations,Horror

Unlocking

A huge and penultimate Teratogenesis update today.  There is only one chapter remaining and then it’s done.  I can’t quite believe it.  Mostly because it’s not necessarily true.  There’s still the editing, the two missing chapters (which will foreshadow Lyall’s return) and Trudie’s prologue and epilogue to write.

Then I’ll have to design the ebook, market the ebook, write the theme tune, sing the theme tune…  It’s a year in and I’m only just beginning.

I’ve got something special planned for the cover, which will hopefully avoid me having to hack something out of Paint and be useful to someone else.

I’m also making another attempt at my annual Christmas ghost story.  It’s a mostly Victorian tradition, but it’s an exercise that I quite enjoy.  Basically, I have one day to write a short story from scratch.  Two of the previous stories, Harbinger and Sacrifice, are both up on Scribd already, but aren’t formatted for monitors or ereaders, these a classic A4 pages.

This year, I plan to “write live” which essentially means I’ll be blogging as I go.  I’ll be starting work at 9am and detailing the various stages it goes through here, on this blog, on Friday 24th December 2010.  And obviously, the finished item will be posted to Scribd… If it does get finished!

 

del.icio.us Tags: TeratogenesisUK,Online Serial,Little Britain,Short Story,Scribd,Blogging,Christmas,Finales

Stage Fright

This chapter of Teratogenesis was even harder than the last.

The big problem with working on this for a year, is that now it comes to the end, I’m so invested in it that I don’t want it to end.  And this brings in the issues of dissemblance and skiving.

But then, killing my darlings was the very problem Teratogenesis and my Scribd account are meant to be solving.

On a related note- synchronicity rearing it’s head again- I’ve just watched Reichenbach Falls on BBC4, which is on a similar theme.  Essentially, it’s a fictionalised Ian Rankin killing off an even more fictionalised Rebus.  To an extent.  Well timed to say the least, especially since I finished Exit Music, the last Rebus novel on Friday.

del.icio.us Tags: TeratogenesisUK,Online Serial,Synchronicity,Short Story,Ian Rankin,Sherlock Holmes