I consider myself an environmentalist. I get a little uncomfortable talking about this, because it falls within the ‘value’ category for me, and experience has taught me that whenever someone mentions the V-Word, they are also about to suggest forcing conformity on anyone who disagrees. But the truth is, that’s how I feel about this issue. I enjoy the outdoors and want the scenic beauty of America to still be there for the next generation. Theodore Roosevelt is probably my favorite US president. I willingly pay extra for products that don’t cost the earth. I think any political candidate without a solid alternative energy plan is by definition unqualified. Et cetera, et cetera…

I also have the good fortune to live in a democratic, capitalist society. My vote is not my only tool for changing the world around me. I have my income, as well. The dollars I spend toward the products I buy are little votes for the sort of world I want to live in. They represent economic demand which directly affects the profits and prevalence of the brands I choose to buy. I’m not much of an activist – I’m not in the habit of joining street protests. But I’ll happily use my dollar to support businesses that choose to adhere to practices that support my values.

This is harder than it sounds.

For one, there’s a general lack of transparency about this issue. Companies that produce products are not obligated to provide information about their business practices on their labels. If they are cutting corners, then, they can simply choose not to tell you. Why would a clothing company tell you that this shirt they’re marketing was produced with child labor if they don’t absolutely have to? Would a poultry farm mention the fact that their chickens were raised in startlingly inhumane battery farm conditions as you’re trying to choose between products at the grocery store? Of course not. There is no facts label for the environmental/animal damage or human rights abuses associated with each product like there is for nutritional information.

There is also a great deal of obfuscation. There are a lot of people like me out there – people who care about the environment and human rights, people who don’t want to give money to companies who cut corners and sustain abuses, yet who are also less than rigorous in their research methods in figuring out who’s worth spending money on and who isn’t. Therefore, there is quite a lot of money to be made by continuing to pollute or abuse human beings while using marketing voodoo to convince potential customers that you are a socially responsible goods and services provider. This is called ‘Greenwashing’ by the sustainability crowd.

The point is that it’s hard to even start walking the walk when it comes to green issues.  Companies can hide their dirty laundry behind this total lack of information, and they invest quite a bit in obfuscating the issue to keep potential customers confused. After all, most people wouldn’t voluntarily choose to buy clothing made by sweatshop labor. Most people would not want to buy from a company that is actively and without apology damaging the environment to save a few dollars. But at the end of the day, what the customers really care about is putting clothes on their backs and food on their tables. That’s why they’re trying to part with their hard-earned dollars in the first place. When you’re actually in the aisle comparing products, it’s hard to tell which supports your values and which don’t.

Hell, it’s hard for me, and I actually give a shit. I probably own clothes that were made by exploited human beings, and I’ve almost certainly eaten delicious meat made from poorly-treated animals.

(These ideas are not originally mine, nor are they particularly new. The only cure for these things is information. The more knowledge you arm yourself with as you go shopping, the better. Thanks to the magic of the internet, the information is available. The fruit of knowledge is low-hanging. All you have to do is reach out and grab it.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a resource available to categorize and rank everyday products you might want to buy? I submit to you The Better World Shopper. First found this little book while working at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum for a year, and it’s a neat little pocket guide that covers a surprising amount of products. The website is better, more detailed, and more frequently updated.)

A lack of transparency isn’t the only thing that makes it hard to be green.

Let’s be honest. Recycled or Environmentally Friendly products are often crappy products. If you take a sheet of recycled paper towel, look at it with narrowed eyes so it knows you mean business, and whisper “I’m going to take you to a spill, now” in a threatening tone, it will completely fall apart. Using environmentally friendly washing machine tablets actually makes the dirty dishes laugh. Eco cleaning products have a reputation for not doing their job. There are exceptions to this – Method makes excellent cleaning products, and we buy them where we can find them. Their laundry detergent is especially good. But for the most part, the classical, screw-the-planet alternatives are just plain better.

I think this is because many companies offer eco products for the wrong reasons. They want to tap into the market of slightly-concerned consumers – people like me who care enough to base purchasing decisions around that, but not enough to spend hours googling everything I buy. So, they take things just far enough to put environmentally-friendly imagery on their labels and that’s that. They just want your dollar.

The trick is to find the few that actually are worth your cash and compensate where green products just don’t work. I hate recycled paper towels, so we’ve stopped using them entirely. We just use actual towels, now, and wash them when we run out.

Also, it seems to me that comfort is wasteful. Automotive transportation, for instance, is an inherently prodigal endeavor. Any time we drive somewhere we don’t have to, we’re essentially throwing away money. I’m fine with walking everywhere, so this is no issue. The worst of it comes in the winter months, when my desire to not freeze to death in my own home comes into conflict with my SO’s desire to stop wasting energy. Me, I like to be warm. If I can’t take my jacket off in my own home, it is not warm enough. She’s a harder-core Green than me, though, and her philosophy is that if my piss isn’t freezing before it gets to the toilet, the radiator stays off, thank-you-very-much.

(Yes, I’m exaggerating. Please don’t kill me, honey.)

We also own a Bokashi Bin for breaking rapidly composting our food waste, as well as a container of worms for further processing it. We use the soil this creates to raise plants on the balcony (though we have yet to achieve real success there – no edible success, that is). Sounds great, in theory. In practice, the bokashi bin has the sweet aroma of an open-air sewer, and I only keep it in the house to indulge my lovely partner. I’m just thankful that its seal is airtight, so it gives off no stink unless we’re putting food in it. (Incidentally, however, it does do a damned good job of breaking our leftovers down, and has cut down on our food waste quite a lot.)

Anyway, as I write this – there is a point, I swear – I’m taking the temperature of the green movement as I see it right now, and I’m coming to the conclusion that we’re just not there yet.

Hard Greens often make the argument that ‘good lives don’t have to cost the Earth,’ but I’m not sure that’s true. It seems to me that the only way they can make that point stand is to dramatically redefine what a ‘good life’ is. Sure, there’s a lot of fat you can trim. You can drive less, take the stairs instead of the elevator, eat better and healthier, buy locally to cut down on food mileage. You can be perfectly happy living a carbon neutral life, they say. They’re right. To a point. But comfort does cost, and while you can eschew some comfort and still live well, people will not want to do this. Working to maximize your personal comfort is the whole idea of the capitalist system, isn’t it? As long as getting beyond this this is the mantra of the movement, it will always be on the fringe. People will nod their heads and agree that making some lifestyle change is probably a good idea, but when they actually go shopping, they’ll go with the products that actually work and make their lives better.

This is where the green movement fails, I think. Capitalism does not think or reason. You can’t set it aside, explain to it that some of the things it’s doing are harming the environment, and get it to stop. You’d have to make this argument millions of times, once for every consumer cell that makes up the whole organism. And not every one will buy into what you’re saying. The best way to make real changes is to make green products that are equal to or better than their non-green counterparts. Do that and people will pick those products without any cajoling whatsoever.

Instead, the prevailing attitude appears to be ‘make the bad behaviors illegal.’ This does have its place. You can’t really fix human or animal rights abuses by improving on the alternative products. But greens have to understand that to the average consumer, their lives get more expensive and less ‘good’ every time this happens. Of course they’ll resist the idea. As long as this is the party line, they always will. Since we live in a democracy, this resistance translates into legislative inaction on green issues.

But I’m optimistic. Green products are getting better all the time, at least in Britain. They seem to be going in the right direction with this stuff, finally. One hopes that in the near future, being green will feel less like self-flagellation, and smug superiority will not be the only comfort I take from trying to do right by the environment with my purchases.

(Yes. Exaggerating again, please don’t kill me, love!)

Not long ago, I decided to buy Fable III. Its release sort of just popped up on me. I enjoyed the first two games, but wasn’t paying any special attention to the third installment as it approached the store shelves. Then, two weekends ago, I saw Becki’s brother playing it and decided that I had to have it.

Fable III is quite pretty, especially compared to the other two games. This is the best-looking Fable game by far. Indeed, there are a number of little improvements throughout the whole of it, which should not be surprising at all. Video Games are perhaps the only creative media in the world where we almost always expect the sequels to exceed the originals. The world is larger and more attractive, the character customization has gotten even more robust than it was before (with a few noteworthy omissions). They seem to have found their feet with the story this time around, too, which is nice – the narrative has always been a weakness with these games, in my opinion, so it was good to see a story that worked even if it wasn’t especially original.

Basically, the gist is this. You are the Prince or Princess of Albion. Your father or mother (this changes depending on the gender of the player character) was the PC of the last game, and s/he left two children behind to hold the reins of the kingdom. Your brother is King Logan, who is quite obviously the baddie. You can tell by the dark circles under his eyes. And the fact that his name is Logan. Anyway, he is suffering from a chronic case of Evil Overlord and you must lead a revolution to depose him. To do that, you have to become a capital-H Hero and recruit followers.

In previous Fable games, ‘Heroes’ are basically androgynous, freakishly tall humanoids with glowy-magic tattoos scrawled across every inch of their unnaturally muscular bodies, and ‘recruiting followers’ means finding the right people and heroically posing in front of them, giving them gifts, or farting on them until they like you. That your character’s appearance changes with their moral choices is something of a hallmark of the series, though they have thankfully toned it down a bit in the third game. Your Princess won’t become superbutch as you increase your melee skill, and you can only see the glowing Magic-lines when you’re actively casting spells.

This is a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned – I enjoyed Fable II, but I thought my character looked hopelessly retarded by the end of the game. In Fable I, your character ages as the story progresses – by the end of it, he is a wrinkled old octogenarian. I like to have more fine-tuned control over how my character appears, and Fable III allows this. Your character also gets something amazing that the heroes of other Fable games lack: a voice actor.

Combat and Interaction are much the same as they were in the first game, except that Lionhead has taken great pains to simplify everything. When you pick a villager to interact with, you have three buttons with corresponding actions associated with them. Press A for ‘Good,’ press X for ‘Evil,’ and press Y for ‘Douchebag.’ No, Evil and Douchebag are not the same. Good actions are what you might expect: shaking hands, hugging, dancing, and the like. Evil actions are things like Threaten, Fart In Face, and Insult. Douchebag consists of belching, vulgar thrusting, and other such crudities. Unlike Evil, D-Bag gets mixed reactions, as some citizens find it funny. This simplification gets the job done and discards the endless branching expression menus of the previous games, but can force the player to cycle through interactions unnecessarily. It also dumbs things down by taking any subtleties out of the expressions. A hug is always good, and it’s just as ‘good’ as Tickling, Kissing, or Dancing. Villagers will always react the same way to these gestures. The simplicity of the system compared to the previous games means that it’s easier to pick up, but it also means that it loses its entertainment value faster.

Combat and the experience system has also been readjusted for the lowest common denominator. There are only two types of weapons in each category, now – swords and hammers in melee, pistols and rifles at range. There are some stat differences in different weapons, but they all feel exactly the same. It’s really quite boring. Even in the first game, you had axes, katanas, cutlasses, what have you. They have unlockable traits which can change these stats, but these add very little to the feel of the weapons. They even look the same. Fights are as silly and simple as they can possibly be, and they primarily consist of spamming melee attacks, spamming ranged attacks when you feel like a change, or charging up for an area magic attack. Most enemies in the game are dull, predictable, and easily dispatched. There aren’t really any serious challenges to confront, and even the final enemies fall flat.

Anyway, the story is more functional than it was in previous Fable games, but the tradeoff for this is that it’s more linear. Good or Evil, you will get people to side with you against the King, and you will square off against a greater threat when you rule. For the most part, I think this is a positive change. The trade is worthwhile. The story does not take itself too seriously, either, and the humorous element works very, very well.

Voice acting is exceptionally good in this game. There are more than 80 voice actors contributing to the game, including John Cleese and Johnathan Ross. This adds a gleaming coat of polish to Albion as a game world. Even the lowest peons get loads of good lines. This, combined with the pretty environment and a fairly detailed, makes the sandbox element of the game great. Albion is an excellent place to dick around.

Despite this, Fable III will be considered by many to be a mediocre title. Indeed, it carries the same flaws as the first two games – it’s a game with a lot of ambition and big ideas, and not enough delivery on them. There are some memorable moments, sure, but there are just as many spots that are actively disappointing to an experienced gamer. I would be tempted to pass a verdict of ‘middling’ on it, myself.

However… Fable III has added fully-functional two-player coop play without the need to connect to XBOX Live. It’s impossible to overstate how much enjoyment this adds to a game that is only moderately entertaining by itself. Add to that the fact that the game’s dumbing-down makes it accessible to non-gamers and you get a recipe for fabulous fun. Last Friday, for instance, I convinced Becki to start a playthrough and joined her on my heroine. She played a Prince, and we started raising hell. It got silly almost immediately. We opened a bottle of wine as we played, which only added to the fun.

I learned that when you remove the consequences and add alcohol, my girlfriend becomes a complete hooligan. It’s hilarious. She dressed her character up like a gay pirate – he could have been a member of the village people – and immediately decided that she would rather be feared than loved. She proposed marriage to my character and, being in a fairly drunken state by this point, I agreed. We then set out across Albion like Bonnie and Clyde, beginning a terrifying spree of cratesmashing, chicken-kicking, and murder as we moved from town to town. Becki’s hero proved a jealous husband – any time a villager commented on my heroine’s beautiful appearance, he would shoot said villager in the face or maul him with his massive hammer. Besmirching his wife’s honor was an instant death sentence. The poor prince has trouble controlling his temper, see – indeed, if he goes twenty minutes without sex, he gets violent. And when Becki discovered that you could reproduce, she announced her intention to sire children all across the nation and break her hero’s new wives’ hearts by introducing them to my character.

… Yeah. Good times. There’s quite a lot of puerile fun to be had in Fable III if you’re the sort of person who can enjoy that sort of thing. If you have friends and are looking for a casual and enjoyable two-player adventure, look no further. If you’re a more serious gamer looking for challenging action or a truly impressive, immersive, and serious story, then you might be disappointed.

Well, it’s been a while since V and I finished posting the Ballad. It’s an entirely new experience for me. It’s not that I’ve never finished a project before, but rather that I’ve never finished one so large and put it in front of so many potential viewers. I said when I first started out that this was an attempt to reach an audience far larger than I’ve ever tried to hit before, but I don’t think that really hit me until a few days after the book was ‘complete.’ My reaction to it was not exactly what I anticipated.

There was a brief high of achievement. I had a completed audiobook! I’d done it! Work on the Ballad of Iron Percy was over for now.

I was elated. For like two days. It was a huge high, but I suspected that it would eventually end. Indeed, sooner than I expected, I’d sobered up. Thinking about how we finished the job no longer really feels good. Thinking ‘it’s over!’ no longer brings about glee. Instead, I am forced to ask the frightening question which inevitably comes after any declaration of ‘Finished!’ That is, ‘What comes next?’

Next, I cross my fingers and hope the post-complete boost in listeners is enough to sustain a larger ripple in the Podiobooks pond and get me enough attention to the book to sustain interest until we start releasing the second one.

Next, I bask in the praise of those who enjoyed it without reservation.

Next, I weather the criticism of those who have some of it to offer.

After that, I keep going. I finish the sequel’s rough draft and start my third project – a sci-fi novel I’m currently calling ‘Tin Ballerina’ as a working title. I try to find ways to raise interest about the Ballad, get a plan to get the word out, and implement it.

On Praise and Criticism, I can take it. I think. Everybody likes to hear good, nobody likes to hear the bad. Writers are often sensitive and can take criticism pretty personally, and I am no exception to this. It’s only natural to recoil from it and get defensive, even if you know it’s neither helpful nor mature. I’m resolved to learn what I can from any ‘bad’ things people have to say – if I want to become a professional, I’ll probably have to develop a thicker skin. Now’s a good time to start working on that. I do want to know what people think. My greatest fear is not meeting a few misgivings that people have about the script I wrote, but rather meeting empty, apathetic silence.

That’s the easy part, though. All I need to do is endure and learn. The tough part is figuring out how to proceed with the Ballad now that the writing and editing is over. I do indeed have a completed podiobook, and I need to know how to get more people to listen to it. While the Ballad was being released, I had 300-500 listeners working through it at varying paces. This never ceased to amaze me. After all, I was a total unknown to almost all of them, and there are a huge number of titles on Podiobooks to choose from. These were 300 or so people who read my blurb on the site and decided to give it a whirl without knowing anything at all about me, and for whatever reason, they stuck with me for 46 chapters. This mentality is a mystery to me – I’m fairly discriminating with the books I read and will generally choose to invest my time only in novels and authors that come with a recommendation from a trusted friend. I expected other people to do basically the same thing, and so did not expect to get so many listeners right away. It was a pleasant surprise, and I am grateful for every one of them. They were the First Wave.

The Second Wave consists of the folks who subscribed after the book was listed as Complete. Can’t really blame them for waiting – as I said, I’m a total unknown and they didn’t know what to expect from my script. Besides, it’s what I would have done. At this point, some of those folks will have finished, some will still be going at it, and others will have lost interest and dropped it.

I don’t think there will be a Third Wave – not a surge of new listeners, but perhaps a trickle of them if I’m lucky and work to get more. Yet what can I do? Other than word-of-mouth, what can I do to put it out there and pick up new audience members? A serious question. I’m genuinely curious to hear suggestions on the matter, especially from anyone who’s tried it.

At this point, the book and all links to it have fallen off the front page of Podiobooks, so I think it’s unlikely that people will stumble across it on the site at random. For whatever reason, The Ballad of Iron Percy did not make the grade as a staff selection pick, so it’s not going to get a link on the home page again anytime soon. I need to be active in advertising for the book, and I don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

I find the writing easier than the pimping. I don’t think I’m the only one. I’m open to any and all ideas about how to get started. Has anyone tried paid-for ads for their work on Facebook, or on Project Wonderful, something like that? If so, results?

Well, ’tis done. The Ballad of Iron Percy is complete on Podiobooks.com!

It’s been a while since we first started in April. We upped the release schedule and have been pretty good about keeping to it and putting out two episodes a week. Veronica and I haven’t completely kept our promise to release on time every week – we ended up losing a lot of work as V. upgraded her studio, and we struggled in the beginning with a few global errors in the earlier recordings thanks to hiccups with her new setup. By and large, however, I think we’ve done a good job sticking to the plan and getting quality content out on time. I’m extremely pleased with how this turned out. It’s my hope that now that the Ballad is complete, we’ll continue to pick up listeners from the pool of audiophiles who don’t subscribe until a book is listed as Complete. I’m hoping that interest in Pandemona and her adventures in Jucata will snowball a bit until we’re in a position to start releasing the sequel in a few months.

If you care – and I don’t know why you’d still be reading this if you didn’t – the sequel’s rough draft is pretty darned close to complete. I expect to sit on it for a while and get to work on another project before I begin the revision process. It will probably be another few months after that before it’s ready to release, as it can take a while for beta readers to get back to me with feedback and longer still for me to act on that feedback. Still, the point is that the next book in the series is most of the way done. It’s hard to put a date on its eventual release at this point, but vague projections lay at ‘more than two and less than six months from now.’

I’m not sure how many books will be in the series in total – at least three, maybe four. My characters have many more adventures to embark upon and challenges to overcome. So, stay tuned. There is much more to come.

I must offer thanks to my voice actress and producer, the highly talented Veronica Giguere. Without her effort and attention, The Ballad of Iron Percy would not be available as a podcast novel. The idea would never have occurred to me, and even if it had, my voice certainly wouldn’t be able to give life to Pandemona’s story in the same way. Veronica is very well suited to the role. I feel that a lot of the time, her voice makes the work sound better than the writing allows. I am extraordinarily grateful to have her ability and expertise tied to this project.

I am also grateful to have her guidance and friendship. I spend a lot of time wandering through the savage jungle of the Internet, and I’ve met a lot of people here in my ambling. I’ve met a bunch of cool people as well as (it must be said) a surprising number of emotionally unstable weirdos. Veronica is by far one of the best relationships I’ve managed to forge online. She’s optimistic, intelligent, driven, and incredibly nice. She believes in people and wants them to succeed, and she is willing to divert her own time and energy to her friends. I know that this has led to some instances of incredible frustration for her, but it also makes her the sort of person who means what she says and is willing to turn idle musings into action. I’ve found that this is incredibly rare in other neophyte creatives, so talking to her often results in a fresh and badly-needed injection of optimism into my outlook.

V’s trying to do an awful lot with her life right now – aside from the writing and voiceovers, she’s studying for her Ph. D., raising three children, and working a full-time job. I wish her luck and success in all of these pursuits. Truth is, though, she doesn’t need Luck. She’s got Skill.

I’d also like to thank the beta readers that have given me the best and most expansive feedback – Rebecca James, Ruth Quiles, and (again) Veronica Giguere.

I’d also like to thank Twitter users and fellow bloggers who have helped us get the word out about The Ballad of Iron Percy – @MorganElektra, @dsobkowiak, @Nobilis, @Melzer, and others I might have missed. Thanks to those who hosted the promo clip and to the Creative Alliance for allowing Veronica to do some live readings, too.

Thanks to anyone who took the time to rate and comment on the story at Podiobooks/iTunes as it progressed. I checked these obsessively, and each one brightened my day and made me smile. Here’s hoping the Goddess of the Veil sends some Happy your way.

Thank you, listeners, for lending us your ears. I certainly hope you’ve enjoyed the story thus far and can promise more to come.

- Edward Clark

I’ve just gotten back from a four-day trip to Edinburgh this weekend. Becki loves that place just as I adore Sun Valley – it was the site of her first job out of college, where she got her first taste of independence and adulthood. It was a pleasure to watch her excitement leading up to our first day there, and it was great to see the city with someone who had local knowledge of the area.

Of course, it also meant charging through one of the hilliest cities in Britain at a relentless pace for several hours. My legs and I still aren’t on speaking terms. My friend Kelly walks as if she is being chased by a Shoggoth at all times. Her normal walking speed is just a hair slower than jogging, even on the steep bits. So, right now, I’m utterly knackered, though I did have a good trip.

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Witchblade came highly recommended by Amazon. I could see why just by looking at the cover, and I must say, I’m slightly ashamed that our predilection toward violence, explosions, and girlflesh has been detected by the retailer’s preference detection heuristics. Le sigh. Next time, we’ll branch out into something different.

Next time.

… Maybe.

For now, bring on the boobies and boom-booms!

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I had a conversation with a friend of mine about a week ago that amused me. He’s an associate of Veronica’s, and he’s trying to do a zillion things at once – one of which is to start his own comics label. I wish him luck.

Anyway, he knows about The Ballad, and we were talking about my strategy for trying to expose it and eventually sell it. It’s all virgin territory for me, and as he’s trying to do something similar with Incubator Press, both of us had something to gain by swapping notes. Eventually, the topic turned to writing itself. He knows I’ve written a novel and I think he plans to do one himself, but he’s having difficulty starting. So, we talked for a little while about my method. His comment on it after I explained it to him made me laugh. He said:

<paraphrase>

“Wow. Don’t take this the wrong way, dude, but I wouldn’t have thought that this approach could successfully produce a novel.”

</paraphrase>

There are a number of methods people will use to write. Some people are super organized about it – they plan everything before they do anything, thinking about the plot and writing out pages and pages of detailed outlines before they actually begin work. They know what scenes will happen and when, and they’ve got it all on paper. They can even write scenes out of order and assemble them like puzzle pieces into a contiguous whole after all of them are done.

That seems almost superhuman to me. It’s so far removed from my own method that I can barely relate to it. But hey, whatever works, right? I can’t really argue with it if it gets the job done. This is how I used to write collaborative fiction when I was still into that – we’d plot out the scenes and decide who would write which ones, and then we’d get on with it.

But this is not how I do things when I’m working by myself. My method is a whole lot messier. Here are my steps:

1: Start at the beginning.

It’s my experience that if I’ve got an idea for a novel, and it’s a good one, then I obsess over it in the beginning. I turn it over and inspect all its sides in my imagination. Before I put pen to page, I have an idea for an opening scene for the work and a general direction for the plot. I find that beginning. I fire up Word. And then I start writing.

2: Fuck Outlines. Just Go.

I don’t think that outlining counts as writing. I do use outlines as a tool – they can be really valuable for a sense of perspective in something as long as a novel. I just don’t bother with them in the beginning because I find it simpler and better to just start writing.

I do take notes, however. This is especially valuable for the Fantasy genre because you end up inventing a lot of things from scratch, and it can be hard to keep track of everything. I write down the names of new characters with a one or two sentence description as they come into the narrative. I do the same for other abstract concepts – religions, factions, rules of magic, place names, etc. I do this as I go along, while I’m writing. This is to prevent me from having to root through all the dreck I wrote looking for a single sentence that gives me the name of a person I introduced months ago. I don’t trust my own memory. I can’t rely on remembering the names of every minor character I’ve ever introduced months down the line, so I write things down. But I don’t do it at the beginning, because I can’t shake the feeling that that’s wasted time and effort.

One of the reasons that I don’t use comprehensive outlines at the beginning of the process is that in something as long as a novel, I can always count on getting taken by surprise by a plot twist or two that I never expected going in. I don’t outline going in because it makes me feel too attached to one specific plot track, and I know that sometimes, my characters like to trailblaze. I’m better able to adapt to this if I haven’t spent hours putting together an outline first.

Instead? Just Go, baby. Start at the beginning and wing it. Keep writing until you’re done. It’s that simple.

3: … ‘Keep Writing?’

That you can knock a brick wall down by banging your head against it repeatedly is probably one of the most important ideas that has ever taken root in my mind.

I’m convinced that capital-C Commitment is what separates an Author from the untold legions of Wannabes. It’s not enough to be creative and have ideas. You have to write. And if you want to write a book, then you have to write a lot. It takes a very long time in front of the keyboard to finish everything. There’s no shortcut to this. You have to keep writing long after the muse is gone, because you can’t count on that chick sticking around long enough for you to finish the job.

When I was writing the Ballad, I stuck to quotas. I wrote at least 1500 words a day, every day. If I felt like going beyond that, then I would. If I didn’t feel like hitting it, then I’d sit my ass down in front of the monitor and just do it, damn it, even if I had to stay up into the wee hours of the morning. Or I’d fail. I’d go to sleep with my 700 words, wake up, and try again the next day.

Quotas are not a new idea. I took it straight from NaNoWriMo, set a higher bar, and extended it over several months. Forgetting the Outline isn’t a new idea, either – I got it from Stephen King’s method, and have been using it for all of my fiction since I first read On Writing in high school. It works quite well for me. Your mileage may vary.

Sometimes it felt like trying to get blood from the stone. It would take ages to do a few hundred words. Other times, it would come easily. I’d slip into the story and tap out 2000 words without even trying. I learned a bunch of little tricks to maximize my writing productivity (travel, use the Magic Pre-Coffee Morning Hours wisely, etc.), but I couldn’t rely on them completely. The important thing was to get on with it and write a lot every single day. On each individual day, I rarely feel like I accomplished much. But after a month, I look back on all I did and grin. 30,000 words is a significant chunk of a novel.

I can’t do the same thing, now. I wrote the Ballad in college and could think nothing of staying up until 3:00 AM writing. Though I absolutely love doing that, I can’t anymore. I have a job and a relationship, and I can’t neglect either.

But I still write every single day. And I still shoot for 1500, even though I don’t  always hit it.

3b: Drink Coffee.

The amount of coffee I drink over the course of writing out an entire manuscript can only be estimated accurately if I use bathtubs as my unit of measurement. If you don’t drink coffee, now it’s time to start.

One of us… one of us…

4: Sit on it.

This next step is of critical importance. I have to do absolutely nothing – nothing related to this project, anyway. I use this time to take a break, write a few shorts, or start another project. I need to get the story that I’ve just written completely out of my mind. This can be really hard, because when I’m done with the rough draft, I’m usually quite pumped to start editing, finish the job, and pass it out to my alpha/beta readers. But it’s necessary – I ignore this step at my own peril.

I do this because it’s easier to be objective and follow the logic of the story as it is on the page if my idealized concept of ‘how it’s supposed to be’ is diluted in my mind. Letting the rough draft sit for a while allows me to get a better answer to an often difficult question – that is, “What the fuck was I thinking?”

I need to be able to look at my work from a reader’s perspective, not as the author.

If I begin to edit immediately, my reading is influenced by what I was thinking when I wrote it. But if I sit on the project for a little while, then I forget my reasoning. I have to reacquire it based on what’s on the page. If there’s a gap somewhere or a flaw in my logic – and there are always a few things that need tuning up – it’s easier for me to spot. This makes the whole editing process a lot more smooth and efficient.

5: Edit!

I have a completed manuscript and I finished it several weeks ago. I’ve successfully resisted the urge to touch it in all those weeks, and am just now thinking about how I’m going to edit it.

So, I open her up.

On the first pass, I clean up obvious errors and writing mistakes. I get rid of unnecessary adverbs, remove and replace repeated words where I find them, and rewrite bad sentences. I also write down each scene in the order it appears, with a brief description.

When I’m done with this, the manuscript is already beginning to look a lot more refined. A single pass improves things dramatically. It also leaves me with a list of the scenes and the order in which they appear, and a big-picture portrayal of the plot – an Outline, in other words. I use this to divide my list of scenes into chapters. I also decide what’s missing and what, if anything, does not fit and should be taken out. I write up these new scenes, give them a lookover, and insert them into the manuscript. I delete anything that needs deleting. I add the chapter breaks where I’ve decided they belong, and I redo these divisions when I find that I’ve made some too short and some too long.

The third pass involves formatting. I double-space the whole manuscript, eliminate the line breaks between paragraphs, and indent at the beginning of each new paragraph. While I’m doing this, I idly scan for more repeated words and other mistakes – I probably caught most of these in the first pass, but given the size of the manuscript, it’s likely that some slipped past me. I’ll catch a few while I’m formatting. Even this time, however, I’ll be left with some errors. But unless I want to do yet another pass, I’ll leave these to my beta readers.

6: Distribute.

At this stage, I pass it to my alpha reader – Becki, my partner. This is the single toughest part of the process, because it involves putting my self esteem in the hands of another. She’s gentle with it, of course, but it’s still a nerve-wracking process. She reads and gives me her first impression, takes extensive notes and provides me with page-number references to her observations. She looks for continuity errors in the story as well as more basic errors in writing – anything I might have missed in the first and third passes. She also looks at the narrative critically and tells me what works and doesn’t work, what she feels is missing, and what she thinks I could change.

Here, I look at her notes and make the most obvious changes. I look for all the basic stuff and zap it right away. The suggestions about plot or story require a judgment call on my part. I’ll look at them individually and decide what, if anything, I’m going to do about each one, and then I take the appropriate action.

Once I’m done making changes to that manuscript, it is in its second draft. This is a mostly finished state. It’s almost completely free of errors, aside from a handful that have managed to elude multiple dragnets. The plot is solid and has passed continuity checks, and it has been evaluated and okay’d by a person who is not me.

Now, I bring in the beta readers. I have a small and important list of people who are willing to read my scribblings and provide detailed feedback that I can use to further refine it. These people are incredibly precious to me. It’s not hard for me to get readers, but they usually give me a reply email like ‘it was good, and I liked it,’ which is not very helpful. A rare few of them go above and beyond the call of duty. They give me detailed comments on specific parts of the narrative that let me make positive changes to it. I take this feedback and I think on it, making the alterations that I deem appropriate.

And then I’m done. It’s in its third (and final) draft. Break out the bubbly!

Drawbacks:

My method is flexible in that it doesn’t tie me to specific plot devices. This is nice for the Big Picture of the narrative, but it has a few major drawbacks that are worth noting. It’s a very wasteful writing method. I end up deleting whole scenes because they turn out not to fit in the final piece. I waste an awful lot of work. Days of it, in fact. I feel like I could mitigate this if I were a bit more structured from the getgo.

But I also feel that having absolute plot flexibility makes this worthwhile.

It’s also worth noting that this messy method is vulnerable to continuity errors. Minor details can have trouble staying consistent across the whole manuscript, and it’s very hard to catch each inconsistency across 600+ pages. For instance, in the Ballad of Iron Percy, I have a pair of characters (Jared and Elise Aranoun) that are siblings. They are roughly the same age, but they aren’t twins. One of them has to be older than the other, obviously, but this little detail is not that important to the story. I never wrote it down when I recorded the descriptions of these characters. So, which sibling is the elder was inconsistent throughout the first versions of the manuscript. It proved a serious annoyance to iron this out throughout the manuscript, and it wouldn’t even be an issue if I’d taken the trouble to be more detailed and explicit with character notes. Writers who make in-depth outlines before they start probably don’t have this problem.

When I start a new series with a new world, I’m going to try being more detailed with my character notes as I introduce new ones to the story. I’ll see if that mitigates it. Otherwise, the only remedy is a painstaking examination of the text after the fact.

I am constantly refining and reexamining my method. I probably always will be.

Claymore is the latest in a string of Action Girl oriented anime shows on our list. The equation of Girl + Weapon + Kickass = Awesome has led us to some nifty shows in recent weeks. I’ve already reported on Noir and Ergo Proxy, and still have yet to write about Witchblade. This week, the show I’m writing about is Claymore.

Claymore’s premise gets laid down within the first five minutes of the opening episode. It’s a fantasy series. In it, humans are plagued by a species of monster called Yoma. These beasts feed on human flesh and can take the form of people, blending in with their prey perfectly. The only defense against them are a sect of warriors called Claymores – human/yoma hybrids that wield swords and have special Yoma powers to augment their natural strengths. A fairly standard setting. Nothing jumped out at me as unique when I first looked at it.

Yet I took a huge amount of joy from this show. It wasn’t just the protagonist and her struggle that did it for me – although yes, Clare scratches all of those itches in the best possible way. It was the action sequences in general. All the sword-fighting scenes were vastly superior to basically everything I’ve seen in other shows. I found it thrilling. I was genuinely pumped watching them. I couldn’t explain it at first – it was more than just the sharp visuals. It took me a while to figure out why I liked them so much in this series.

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Between the two of us, my girlfriend and I own a lot of books. We like to own paper copies of the stuff we read, and we do read quite a lot, so one of the peripheral benefits of moving in together has been exploring each others’ libraries. Our tastes are pretty similar, for the most part, so it’s worked out really well. I have access to a number of great books that I haven’t read yet.

Out of boredom and curiosity, I picked up a book called ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre. I don’t usually read books like this. I tend to avoid nonfiction unless I’m trying to acquire a new skill, because I usually find it dull. I’m more of an escapist with my reading – I gravitate toward Science Fiction and Fantasy because of this. On occasion, however, I am tempted to pick up and read through something long, dry, and factual. I suppose I am a masochist.

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