Inlanders - 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

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I’ve been poking at two new, unpublished posts: one about the hypnagogic state and its role in my creative process; another about how attempting to finish a first novel mirrored the adoption of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

So, says Mr Self-Critical, why bother writing a site about writing? Who’s gonna read the thing anyway?

Me, for one, I spit back at him.

I see, says the bastard. It’s a vanity press.

No, me, I repeat. As in me, a writer. A writer would read it.

Writers will read it!

He’s not convinced, but I am.

You know why?

Because when I’m writing (read: grinding the grind, seeing to that searing, solitary business of sliding ass into seat and squeezing sentences from cerebellum as easily as blood from stone, sir), nothing is more heartening and motivating and…well, soothing…than reading the words of someone else who’s grinding too.

Due to this scientific truth:

Only a writer can feel sorry for a writer.

Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who isn’t a writer.

They don’t get it.

Oh, poor thing, say They, what a terrible go of it you have, plinking around on your ‘pooter, making up funny names for places that don’t exist. How hard it must be for you, blessed with the time to jot down all your cute ideas. I’d do just the same, if I didn’t need a real job and a real life and real people to spend my time with instead of imaginary ones.

Yes. The only Greek chorus who’ll stand behind me and chant “hear, hear” when I trumpet the difficulty of this particular calling is one made up of fellow butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keys freaks who know damn well what I’m talking about when I say writing fiction is only ever pleasurable when you’re finished doing it, and only then if you can ignore all your own Mr Self-Criticals long enough to believe what you’ve just spent the last three years of your life jotting down isn’t complete and utter horseshit.

Writing is not a lark. It’s not even a larf.

It’s more punishment than reward.

It ain’t for the weak of heart, nor for dilettantes and hobbyists.

And it has nothing to do with vanity, Mr Self-Critical.

That’s why this site, the Inlanders site, is not my “consolation prize” in case I never publish the book. It’s not a formalized proof to show for myself, should the words I agonize over in the manuscript not reach an audience themselves.

This site is for people like me, people who look for sites just like this while they’re still hip-deep in the shit, down in that trench of misplaced and misused words all heaped atop each other like the severed limbs of felled soldiers, a gangly and ungainly labyrinth of jutting arm-stumps and bleeding torsos and dangling legs you gotta shove your way through, head down and teeth gritted, if you wanna make it out.

It SUCKS in the trench.

So if that’s you right now, or whenever you find this, if you find this - know I’m there with you, sister. I got your back, brother. Keep on chopping your way through. Together we’ll make it.

Ahem.

All this bluster serves as hopefully worthy introduction to the author bearing an inaugural link in the Writers section of my blogroll at right, one Elizabeth Bear.

Lady’s written a helluva lot more fiction than I have, in nearly the same amount of lifetime. And she’s published a scary-large chunk of it. Yesterday I read her short story Tideline, a 2008 Hugo Award nominee, found it boffo, and immediately scoured the web for any traces of non-fictional musings from the gal.

What I found was a blog started in 2003, when Elizabeth was just on the cusp of becoming a published novelist. A blog that perfectly (and honestly) captures what it feels like to be down in the trench, to claw your way out of it, and bravely jump back in for more of the same. Reading Elizabeth, I felt like we shared the same brain, so identical to my own thoughts and feelings were hers. She even uses some of the same jargon I throw around when referring to what it is I do with my disheveled lump of words that might one day be a novel: I poke it, I prod it, I kick its sorry ass until it stands on two feet and uses one of them to kick my ass.

This blog is for Elizabeth, the same way her blog is for me.

It’s for all us fools.

Fools stupid, crazy or masochistic enough to make a go at this plodding, elaborate drudgery of building fictions for public consumption. That’s who I’m writing this site for.

Thank God others have done the same for me.

A few of them are already in the blogroll: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio of Wordplayer, whose essays nursed me through my years of trying to become a professional screenwriter (and remain potent for me today); Dan Simmons with his Writing Well columns and accompanying forum for aspiring scribes; Rick Kleffel, perhaps the only existing writer-fanboy for fictive practitioners of all persuasions, including us spec-eff weirdos.

And now Elizabeth, whose blog I wish I’d found back when I was in the first-draft trench with Inlanders.

For what it’s worth, I’m reading her tale - of becoming a published novelist - in its entirety now.

Hear, hear.

- Stephen Reese

I spent Easter Sunday hanging out with a fellow writer. Such is a prescription for day-end whiplash, since together we comprise an eight-limbed, four-eyed, double-mouthed ADD machine pointing at and yapping about anything and everything we mutually or separately notice. It’s an exhausting enterprise.

But a comforting one, too.

It’s nice to remember there are other freaks like you.

Us freaks talked about something else we believe is germane to the writing life, over dinner. It involves an ongoing effort to unbalance what seeks balance, discomfit what’s become comfortable, upend things when they feel ended.

Making good stories, we agreed, requires intimacy with chaos.

I’ll try to explain this by starting in “reality”.

If you believe there’s a tendency toward order in the universe, after observation you must also admit chaos is a necessary part of the equation. Order is built from chaos, and chaos strips order down again, that order may rebuild in better form.

It’s the very opposition of these two that defines them. There would be no conception of order without a chaos to measure it against; no impression of chaos without an order to counter it. They need one another as yin needs yang.

In fiction, things also work this way.

A story starts from a place of order, an equilibrium. Unexpected events tip the balance toward a position of chaotic disharmony. Characters once comfortable in their established realities face contingencies and challenges that squeeze them into new shapes and possibilities. Eventually, at length and through struggle, equilibrium returns, but it’s hard won. And the rise and fall of the scales, that lack of balance between balanced states - it hurts.

As writers, we need to do that on the page, through fiction. But more importantly, we need to do it in reality - in our own lives - to get the ball rolling.

I’ll use myself as an example.

In the preparation year leading up to the writing of Inlanders, I fell in love, moved, was dumped, fired and sued.

Don’t get me wrong - it was not a fun twelve months.

Did I willingly bring it on myself?

Not exactly.

Did I enter into certain situations knowing they’d play out chaotically?

Without question. I knew it would lead to good material.

Yes, it was a humdinger of a year, not pleasurable in most senses of the word, and living through it, I wasn’t a particularly happy camper. But boy, did I write afterward. And here’s the thing: I didn’t write at all about what happened to me.

Inlanders is not a novel about Stephen Reese falling in love, moving, getting fired, dumped and sued.

Nonetheless, having lived through those events prepared me for what followed, this task of writing the Inlanders manuscript.

It was a quieter process. A lonelier one. Just me on my own, thinking and typing and making sense of what came before, building not from it but because of it an attempt at order following chaos - a novel.

And I wasn’t a particularly happy camper then either.

But I did write.

I brewed some fictional chaos.

Drama didn’t surround me anymore. Instead it went into my story. I made drama up. If in the previous year I transited chaos, in my writing year I forced fictional people to do it. And now, in my editing year, I’ve found myself a stable place from which to muster perspective over the mess I’ve surely put onscreen.

This last part of the process: the perspective, the edit, the order from chaos from order, will also come to an end. When the story is as good as I can make it, and I’ve achieved my new equilibrium, the cycle comes round to start over. 

And make no mistake, I do want to tell another story.

So right back into chaos I’ll go.

- Stephen Reese

At this point, I’ve invested two years in the Inlanders novel. About 12 years of “seed-time” preceded that, wherein ideas, concepts and earlier permutations of this fiction came together, fell apart, and reformed.

In January 2006, I made some early notes toward the novel, and wrote a first chapter I soon realized was completely wrong.

So I set things aside and spent the remainder of that first year taking notes (mostly on my cell phone) and thinking about the world, characters and story structure. Come autumn, I started poking at the first chapter again, and this time, things rolled on.

The writing stage continued to January of 2008 and wrapped up, as I mentioned yesterday, on 4 February - roughly one month past the deadline I’d set myself, of 31 December 2007.

Though the writing phase, like the “thinking” phase, took a year, only 45 days of that year were spent actually typing sentences. Most of the time I spent “living” with the story, “carrying” it with me, thinking about it regularly, taking notes.

This ratio of “writing” to “living” may seem strange, even pretentious. The fact of the matter is, when I’m working on a story, I’m always working on it, even while going through the usual rhythms of everyday life. My head is attuned to a frequency that converts absorbed stimuli into narrative, mostly narrative that fits the story.

I don’t mean real-life events are directly translated to book events (mine is a fantasy novel, after all, and none of the external things characters experience therein have ever happened to me). But living, while I’m writing = writing. They’re one and the same.

Until I finish the story, I’m in it.

Now I’m out of it. I’ve shifted from a subjective, involved headspace to an objective, critical one. From that place I’m able to edit what I’ve already “lived” with these characters. And to be honest, it’s a place I’m more comfortable inhabiting. My natural tendency is to criticize, to refine, to rearrange and streamline. I edit way faster than I write.

But that’s a topic for a different post.

- Stephen Reese

So I finished the first draft of Inlanders on 4 February 2008, in the midst of starting a new job, securing a renter for my condo across the country, and suffering the sickening sneezing and snotting stage of my first head cold in over a year. That means I wrote the finale feeling like a crushed pop can being kicked around a particularly dirty part of town…perfect for typing THE END!

Now the manuscript sits untouched by me for at least four months while I cool down, regain some perspective and prepare for the merciless editing phase. To be honest, I can’t wait to hack that bloated, pockmarked, larval sack of a story to grisly pieces, but I must win some distance from it first.

In the meantime, I started work on a new query letter. What a difference from the early attempts at same, way back when Chap 1 was all I had committed to word processor! Even one month outta the jungle, I could see more than just the trees, and was better able to summarize what my mess of sentences might be about.

I’ll keep picking away at said query during this four-month vacation from the novel. Also on the itinerary: a synopsis. But NOT an outline, not until I wade back into the underbrush and start plotting a clear path through the forest. When I’m out the other side, I’ll be ready.

For now, I won’t even open the Word file. There are plenty of meanwhiles to keep me busy in my off-time:

• Uploading music to http://anywhere.fm/Podge
• Reading, for the first time, Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories
• Perusing Monster Hunters and Unexpected back issues
• Enjoying the heck outta Lost season four

My conclusion? Vacation is FUN!

- Stephen Reese