Inlanders - Stephen Reese

I haven’t had a good chunk of uninterrupted time in the weekday evenings to knuckle down on the rewrite (I’d rather spend my unpaid hours Monday to Friday ripping around the park on my mountain bike, or stomping a 5 or 8k around the block - it being summer, and lovely out). But I’ve been picking away at some small nomenclature changes that affect Inlanders nonetheless.

So I wanna yabber about the art of naming for a moment.

One of the things that bothers me about, let’s call it…established fantasy fiction, is the proliferation of weirdass, made-up names for people and places. At its worst, the practice becomes a comic act, turning out multi-syllabic über-appellations broken up only by strategically placed apostrophes or other extraneous punctuation. In my opinion, before a casual reader even gets near the end of a sentence such as Yll’trathanagarr Moribundix Gildrantothalosis El’Etten entered the eastern Half-Palantirs of Frightenbarrow Earthensward on Upper Elderloft, they’ve likely moved on to a fiction that offers instead as its novelty the mere repositioning of recognizable nouns within sentences they’ve never read before.

That is to say, fantasy already requires one challenging leap sideways from reality, one conspicuous level of remove, one willing suspension of disbelief, to get the reader outta their comfort zone and into an alternate world in the first place. Why add insult to injury and complicate the transition by giving our unfamiliar objects, creatures and locations needlessly alien names?

It alienates the reader!

Ahem.

What I’ve tried to do with Inlanders is keep the fantasy-naming to an absolute minimum. The characters aren’t called Patrick and Jennifer, but their given names are at least related (phonetically, spelling-ly), to the patterns of some existing human languages. And those names aren’t twenty syllables long, either.

Too, I’ve specifically avoided appending fantasy monikers to locations, objects, creatures and ‘races’ in the Inlanders world, with the exception of cases where there’s no existing correlative in our language and experience - namely, no similar concept or process that exists in the real world we call home.

What I’m getting at here, is I want to draw a reader closer to my weird tale, by any means possible - not push them farther away. I’m willing to make a number of concessions to ease that seduction from the everyday into the fantastic, and one genre affectation I have no hesitation to cast aside is invented nomenclature.

Don’t get me wrong; I LOVE making up names, especially when they’re played for laughs. But in this day and age, I feel the technique has become a cliché, and it’s very tricky to pull off in full seriousness unless you’re China Miéville (i.e., cool enough to come up with something as interesting to say aloud as New Crobuzon), or if you’re willing to close doors to those people who might otherwise find something human and interesting to relate to in your fiction, if they could just get past all the made-up words.

- Stephen Reese

This weekend the only living creatures I interacted with outside the interwebs were the Mom (it being her day, on Sunday) and the cat (it being her day, every day). The rest of the time I read, slept and starting picking away at the rewrite.

- deleted one of the two introductory quotations

- rewrote the opening and closing lines of the manuscript

- played around with the final three paragraphs

I’m thinking I’ll rewrite from the last chapter backward, or perhaps start with the outlying chapters (1 and 12) and work my way inland (har har).

Let the games begin.

- Stephen Reese

Well, that’s that. I made it to the end.

The book is sad, strange, and, I suspect, impossible to sell.

But it’s worth a try.

Now, to cheer myself up, I’ll watch Wristcutters: A Love Story.

- Stephen Reese

Took a look through some of the trickier material near the end of the book last night, with Guinness in me in case it fell completely flat. It didn’t, though I suppose that could have been the Guinness thinking.

Only a bit to go now. Hope it keeps hanging together.

- Stephen Reese

It’s possible I overreacted.

Guess what I found out when I crossed the halfway point reading the manuscript last night?

The thing starts coming together!

Once you’re over the hump, almost exactly dead center in the story, it rather suddenly and surprisingly clicks.

That’s curious.

It’s also a huge relief.

Post-middle, the voice is there, the tone is correct, the sentences flow far better than they do (if they do at all) in the first half.

What happened?

Well, I guess I found Inlanders at that point in the writing process.

Or Inlanders found me.

Whatever the process, I’m super grateful for the results, because now I’m not so bummed about what’s left to read. And not so embarrassed about what I’ve already read.

But I did start rewriting yesterday anyway, right from the beginning, soon as I decided the whole draft had to be chucked overboard and left to drown. Peering hopefully at the back half of the book, though, I suspect I won’t need to cut as deeply into the living tissue there to perform any necessary surgery.

Might not even need anaesthetic.

W00t!!!

- Stephen Reese

I knew it would be bad.

But I didn’t know it would be this bad.

That light-hearted, ‘even fun’ tone I mentioned yesterday? It’s only one of oh, maybe twenty different approaches I’ve already found in just the first half of the book alone.

And none of them work!

How did this happen? I’ve never read an early draft of mine this craptastic before. Is it because I wrote ahead blindly, without going back and editing as I advanced? The latter is my usual method. I iron all the wrinkles I can see in the shirt before even trying to smooth out an adjacent section. It worked for those ten screenplays I wrote in my 20s just fine. When I came back for draft two, the necessary changes seemed less…overwhelming.

Is it because I’m more critical now? More able to see my errors, my missteps, my complete…idiocy? On this first pass, I haven’t come close to hitting the target on anything…except those first few pages I wrote and rewrote multiple times before proceeding with the rest of the circus.

How did something this flawed take so damn long to get outta me in the first place? Surely that year could have been better spent choosing a tone, a voice, a style that clicked, and pursuing these to their logical conclusions. Why instead do I have this botched afterbirth of mad science in a broken-down laboratory whose dented, scuffed counters are spattered with the debris of a hundred failed experiments?

Reese, Reese. Always the why with you.

Why doesn’t matter.

All that matters is how.

How you fix it.

If you want to, that is.

Good point, Mr Self-Supportive.

(And where the hell have you been, anyway?)

Is this manuscript even worth salvaging? Can it be salvaged? Or is it just 102,400 of those million words of shit Stephen King says we gotta get outta us before we can produce anything effective?

Sigh.

Who did I think I was kidding, anyway, coming off ten years of writing screenplays and hoping to pull off a decent first novel.

You’re such a whiner, Reese. Shut it. Think clearly.

This is the FIRST. DRAFT.

Does it work on any level?

Well, the structure is there. The emotional arc too. The dynamic between the lead characters seems right.

The themes feel…present.

But everything else?

Everything else has to go.

On an executional level, maybe 5% of what I’ve read so far works. The rest is faeces thrown against the wall by a monkey hoping something sticks and makes a pattern that entertains somebody.

I meant well. I wrote a story I wanted to read. I put something down that meant something to me.

But at this point, it’s a blueprint at best. A sloppily drawn blueprint covered in coffee spills and food stains.

My work’s cut out for me.

I have to rewrite every sentence in this manuscript.

Better: I need to chuck every sentence in the trash where it belongs and write new ones.

Good ones this time.

- Stephen Reese

Right then. I read the first third of the manuscript last night.

As expected, it’s a mess.

What I didn’t expect was the tone: light-hearted, even fun.

The book has serious things on its mind, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It approaches its concerns with a spirit of play.

That’s consistent with my own personality, so there’s no good reason I should be surprised.

But I was.

More soon.

- Stephen Reese

Okay, I’m ready.

Or nearly so.

I look back at this month’s measly two posts and realize I’m not interested in killing time anymore.

March saw a surge of creative energy directed at this blog to get the thing rolling and somewhat relevant. But my enthusiasm for ice-breaking small talk has subsided.

I’ve been poking at two new, unpublished posts: one about the hypnagogic state and its role in my creative process; another about how attempting to finish a first novel mirrored the adoption of serious long-distance running into my lifestyle.

Both are worthy topics, and there’s decent sentences in ‘em.

But I’ve no drive to keep nattering about writing.

I want to get on with the real thing.

Also.

To counteract the necessary labor of completing my tax return, I sought to MAKE something this weekend, to work on a creative project whose completion would fulfill me where finances couldn’t. So I dug out some sound files from the Upcoming Mixes folder on my hard drive (I do that, too, for fun - make music and mix other people’s), and some DJ-centric ideas popped out of nowhere for me to explore yesterday evening.

Alas.

They. Did. Not. Hit. The. Spot.

No, there’s a bigger unfinished project yodeling its presence from on high, goading me from behind, its incipient forms now three months distant, its Platonic ideal teasing ahead, and friends, readers, it’s now time to distance-run toward that destination clearly visible from my comfy spot here atop Procrastination Peak.

I’ve been scared. I’ve been excited. Now I’m just impatient.

I thought maybe there’d be a quiet moment, a whimper not a bang, that presaged my return to the naive, sputtering first draft, there to whip it into an honest, upstanding novel.

Turns out it was neither.

It’s a burn. An itch. A barely-articulate buzz at the back of my subconscious that keeps intoning, as best it can:

Yes, fool, yes - the need is ripe.

Behold that dubious fruit you’ve harvested, then make of it a satisfying meal.

I’m hungry.

And so.

I’ll not wait another month. I’ll get back into a tussle with Inlanders some 30 days earlier than planned. I’ll finish the damn taxes, rip through what’s left of the fiction I wanted to consume while on vacation from my own make-believe, then blunder headlong into draft two at the top of May.

If nothing else, it’ll give me something to yap about here.

You’ve been warned.

- Stephen Reese

Some writers with links in my blogroll at right have been posting about the number of novels they wrote (to varying degrees of completion) before the one that got published came outta them.

Now.

I haven’t published a novel yet.

But I’ve no shortage of unpublished ones.

Because it’s fun, I’m gonna post mine too. Here’s the rundown:

1986 - Identity
My attempt at a Fighting Fantasy gamebook, heavily influenced by Steve Jackson’s Creature of Havoc (my favorite in the series). You play a wordless brute trying to figure out who you are - or were; your enemies have magicked you into monstrous form to prevent your interfering with their nefarious plans.

1987 - The Heroes of Goodlund
My desired addition to the Dragonlance canon, focusing on heroes from a remote area of the Ansalon map who matched, nearly to the race/class/orientation, the existing Heroes of the Lance. I outlined the entire book in the spirit of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s original trilogy. Basic monkey-see, monkey-do.

1988 - Stones
Almost a direct ripoff of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, with giant extraterrestrial chunks of obsidian subbing in for an otherworldly sentient globe. I was learning a lot of new words thenabouts, so I eschewed Crichton’s spare, screenplay-ready style for extremely long sentences crammed full of mouthfuls like “plenipotentiary”.

1990 - The Sixth
Clive Barker and J.D. Salinger were retrofitting my brain by now, so this time I mixed big words and florid prose with counter-cultural pretensions. A disagreeable fellow eats his entire body, while alive, to “prove a point to society”. When he awakens in the afterlife, he gets his own personal Virgil to guide him through ethereal strata of meaning - and correct his self-eating ways.

1992 - The Twilight
Blown away by William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, I tried to convert the events of a cyberpunk roleplaying session I was game-master for into narrative format. I ran out of plot when the gang stopped playing. Strangely, I didn’t try to ape Gibson’s poetic wording; my own voice was starting to emerge here.

1995 - Roadfolk
Not understanding Douglas Coupland’s method of jam-packing encyclopedic pop detail into his stories of godless youth fumbling toward epiphany (but wanting to duplicate it nonetheless), I ported a notebook around with me, scribbled copiously, and later tried to assemble the jots and thoughts into a plot about city-born youngsters trying to become adults out in the country. Four years later, after countless changes and rewrites, this once-novel turned into my Nicholl semifinalist screenplay.

1998 - That Problem Child
Started as a short story, alternated between a screenplay and a comic book script, and eventually ended up as my first mostly-finished novel. I may finish it yet. It’s about the future, but I’m not sure it’s science-fiction. The idea grows from my wondering what high school might look like a few decades down the road.

From 1998 through 2005, I was trying to become a professional screenwriter. I wrote ten scripts, had one optioned, and even tried a few literary adaptations. It was when I was working on the last of these adaptations I realized I was far too interested in wordplay to continue pursuing a career where the end product is images and sounds, not sentences in sequence.

And so I returned to my first love, the novel.

It was the top of 2006. Inlanders happened.

Will it join the unpublished list above?

Time tells.

- Stephen Reese

It was a beautiful spring day. I went for my first bike ride of the year. Skidded through some leftover slush. Mudded up my legs. And when I came home, I found myself poking at the query letter.

Thing’s a little closer to where it needs to be now. Maybe halfway.

And so am I, incidentally.

Halfway through my vacation from the novel.

Halfway near the edit.

I’ve carefully monitored my feelings toward that task as my distance from the novel increases across these months away. There are days I’m chomping at the bit to get started cutting and rewriting. There are days I’m scared shitless of seeing just how bad the first draft turned out (I didn’t look back, you see, as I wrote it - my first time trying this technique, which I’ll discuss in a future post). Ups and downs. As roller-coastery as the writing was.

But as time goes on, my emotions are tipping toward a more balanced, neutral perspective on the whole business. And that’s probably the best place to be in. We’ll see.

In the meantime, the meanwhiles continue, with a few additions:

• Uploading music (and obsessing over playlists) on http://anywhere.fm/Podge
• Reading The Ruins, The Kite Runner, Tuesdays With Morrie and Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• Getting the aforementioned bike back on the road

Vacation remains fun!

Two months to go…

- Stephen Reese