NaNo, NaNo, only 30K to go…

An awesome Numskulls figurine from the ComicVine website — Lucian’s head, yesterday. Except with less hair.

…with a laptop and a pint and a story outline, NaNo, NaNo-NaNo-NaNooooo. Yes, I know what you are thinking: “Oscar-winning song-writing there, Lucian. Top hole!”

Yes, yes, yes. First of all I’d like to thank the Academy…

Anyway, hello you! As the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is in full swing I’ve spent rather a lot of time recently hammering the first 20,000 words of my novel into this here laptop and thus keeping abreast of the dreaded daily word count. (Just.) Some of these 20,000 words, I’m happy to report, even form sentences.

My teenage horror fan self seems satisfied with the yucky bits and my (rather pronounced) puerile self has rubberstamped his seal of approval on the industrial-strength language thrown around liberally by my bad guy. Please be warned, however, that my smartarse self, the one that came up with the tagline to this blog, not to mention the lion’s share of the story, is also fairly pleased with himself. You can give him a slap if he gets too annoying. (All this talk of assorted selves reminds me of The Numskulls cartoon that appeared in The Beezer and, later, The Beano. Ah, memories…)

Anyway, so far, so spiffing, and there are only another 30,000 words to get down before I “win”. Or collapse. One or the other.

In my previous post I mentioned how the launch meeting for NaNoWriMo was something of an eye-opener, and the revelations continue now I’m 40% into the word count. For example:

1) A 10,000 word plot outline doesn’t necessarily make NaNoWriMo any easier
I’ve lost count of the times my characters have deviated from the plot outline I feverishly hammered out over the summer. Either way I’m taking this as a positive: either the characters have developed minds of their own, which will hopefully then resonate with the reader, or my characters’ original actions weren’t so well-realised, so the story benefits from a little tightening up as a result. Luckily the structure of my plot is fairly modular, so my characters’ actions should not affect the overall story arc, but I’m not sure I’ll be so lucky when I come to write NaNo novel #2 next year.
What a detailed outline has allowed, however, is for me to plant a smattering of in-jokes and other stuff into the narrative for those having a second read-through of the novel. See, you already want to slap that smartarse self of mine, don’t you?

2) Aiming to writing a chapter a day was naïve
It sounded good at the time but my chapters are turning out to be longer than 1667 words, often double that. As a result I’m unlikely to complete a first draft of Title Withheld by the end of the month, but should be most of the way there, and definitely more than 50,000 words through. I could be looking at 300+ pages, though I hope not many more. That said I’m now off work until the 29th (happy, happy, joy, joy!) so let’s see if I can’t eat up some of these stray chapters.

3) Missing two days’ writing is terrifying
I woke up yesterday with 13,250 words and had to somehow finish today on 20,000. Yikes! I guess I’ll have to move my birthday for next year’s NaNo.
I feel I ought to put this into context, however: 3,375 words per day for two days doesn’t seem so bad when compared to the regime professional novelists place upon themselves. US horror legend Stephen King claims in his book “On Writing” (very much recommended) that he gets down around 2,000 words a day, every day, without fail, however many hours it takes (usually a morning). UK horror legend Shaun Hutson goes nuts if he can’t get down his ten pages each day – by UK book standards that’s around 2,500 words. So for me to bemoan 3,375 is perhaps a little precious.

4) My main character kicks arse!
Now that my main character is walking and talking and getting stuck in I’m growing to like her a lot more than I thought I would. Looking at my plot outline it’s such a shame that she… well, you’ll have to read the story, won’t you?

5) It costs just over £20,000 to buy a full-page advert in The Sunday Times’ Books section.
Ah. Perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself here…

The important thing is that NaNoWriMo continues to surprise and delight (even if it does sap precious moisture from my eyeballs), because for me that means it also continues to be interesting and worthwhile. If you are taking part in NaNoWriMo then I hope the ideas are flowing from your fingertips, or you are at least engaging with fellow NaNo-ers through the write-ins, forums and Facebook groups.

Finally, if you would like a sneaky preview of Title Withheld I have pasted a short excerpt here:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/lucian-poll/novels/title-withheld-184410

(10 Lucian Poll points to anyone that spots the goof. Don’t worry, it’ll come out in the second draft.)

Laters ‘taters.

A spot of premature e-publication

The Buskers' Union cover image — Oh my giddy aunt, I’m on Amazon…

When I published my last blog post I had no idea that within a week I’d be publishing one of my stories too! And yet there it is, “The Buskers’ Union”, available to purchase on Amazon for 99 cents.

Is it awesome to see it listed on there? Yes! Terrifying? Also yes! Planned? Not a bit. You could say I went off a bit early.

But why? I mean, the last time I blogged I was about to start sending stories to horror fiction magazines to try and get my name in print. Was it a fit of impatience? Could it have been a sudden, unquenchable desire to see my (assumed) name in print? Or was I just pandering to a massive ego trip?

In the end it was nothing like that. Instead it was all about placeholders.

You see, part of creating the Lucian Poll persona has involved registering accounts with a few sites, like Twitter and Goodreads. The theory is that, over time, I can use them to build a presence on the web that could attract readers and perhaps help me sell a story or two in the run up to publishing <Title Withheld> next September.

At the moment some of these accounts are placeholders, created simply so I can reserve the Lucian Poll name in advance. For example you can find me on Smashwords here, but at the moment there’s nothing much to see apart from a few words, a teaser for my novel and my calling card. In due course, however, I hope to put some stories on there, some freebies and maybe even the odd review. It’ll just take a little bit of time.

Anyway, next on my list of placeholders to create was a page on Amazon’s Author Central. I was half-surprised then to discover that, in order to create an author page for Lucian Poll, I had to publish something as Lucian Poll. That I did not anticipate.

(A little tangent, if I may. Unless I’m missing something major the honour system that Author Central operates is barmy! Part of the registration process requires you to put dibs on all of the books you have published. You’d never have thought that I wrote Moby Dick, did you?)

The last week has therefore been a bit frantic. I’ve had to pick a black comedy short story that I had planned to submit to Black Static (particularly after they published the very funny “Shark! Shark!” in issue 29). The story, however, needed a few extra drafts and a second pair of eyes on it. Then I had to create a cover in Inkscape (which looks okay, though it must be said the guitar has perhaps the worlds’ shortest fret board). With the story and cover done I then had to upload the book to Kindle Direct Publishing, preview the eBook and then, finally, pluck up the courage to hit the “Save and publish” button.

Bingo! One eBook for sale!

So it’s been a busy old time of late, but totally worth it. It felt blooming marvellous the first time I hit “Look Inside” and saw my cover fill the screen. (Having a humungous monitor helped!) While the story is something of a placeholder, it is nonetheless genuine. Give it a go and let me know what you think. It is my little tribute to all of Norwich’s terrible buskers, and the two or three good ones.

I’m still not sure about the apostrophe though…

Yay! My first rejection!

When reading the bios and the various “how I made it” stories of other writers, a common theme soon emerges. The rejection slip. They’ve all had them. Great big wads of them scattered around studies and offices, stuck on spikes, pinned to noticeboards, shoved in drawers, and filed in waste paper bins.

Some writers take rejections of their work badly, which is understandable if they have spent ages researching the subject(s) covered in their story, taken the time to draw together well-rounded and believable characters, painstakingly plotted a devilish story arc for them to follow, and then, after all that, wrung their OEDs dry polishing and perfecting every last sentence. To then have an editor, agent or publisher turn around and issue a form rejection with no feedback… well, you can imagine how said writer might get a wee bit tetchy.

On the other hand you have writers that are happy enough to get their work out there. They’ve probably got five story ideas bumping into each other for every one they manage to get onto paper. The rejection slips don’t really matter so long as they keep the faith that one day one story will make it into print. In the meantime the struggle is deciding which one to write next. Indeed I’ve read some writers’ desires to collect, say, a hundred rejection slips in a year, which I think is a great way of going about it.

(Just as an aside, I reckon I could do that quite easily. All I’d need to do is write a 5000 word horror equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake and send it to every publication on Duotrope. I can imagine the responses: “Dear author, Thank you for your submission but I regret to inform you we will not be considering your work for our upcoming Erotic LGBT Cthulhu Stories With Cake Recipes collection.”)

Anyway, blathering aside, this post is a means for me to record my first rejection email. Penny Fiction had an intriguing opening for thirteen-word flash fiction stories. (That’s intriguing in a “How on earth can you write a story in thirteen words?!?” kind of way.) But when I had spotted that “THIRTEEN WORDS” itself contains thirteen letters I quickly came up with a gruesome sentence using each letter and fired it off. Two-and-a-bit months later I get a reply to my original email.

It’s my first rejection.

You know what that means? That’s right, folks, someone has actually read something I wrote! Well, that wasn’t so difficult, and with a bona fide rejection I’m now in good company!

Lots of perfectly decent stories don’t make it into print for various reasons. Look at the submissions pages of your favourite fiction magazines and they often state they receive well over a hundred submissions for each story slot they have. Even after subtracting all the stories about torturing and butchering ex-girlfriends in freezing cold outhouses, the odds aren’t good.

But there is always a chance, and I’ve got the bug. It’s time to properly start chucking stories out there starting with Shroud Magazine, whose submissions window closes at the end of the month. I’ll submit a little cautionary tale about why you should always ask for ID when answering the front door, even if you were expecting “The Gas Man” to call…

The (re)start of something

The result of my first three hours of Inkscape. My calling card, if you will.

Around nine years ago my alter ego wrote a novel. A real 120,000 word monster, written just to see if it could be done. You won’t have read it. Only a few have and I’ve been apologising to them both ever since. I even feel sorry for the drawer it currently rests in. And so was scratched my brief (but fun) writing itch.

But now the itch has returned, and I don’t think a bath of camomile lotion is going to do the trick this time.

Often a writer is born through the stuff they read. Some plough through a bad book, hating every page and resolving to write something better. Others read a great book fizzing with energy and ideas, and BOOM! Suddenly they have a burning desire to get that silly story that’s been floating around their heads onto paper.

For me it was “Q” by Luther Blissett (or Wu Ming, these days), which, strangely enough, was a book that I had bought eight or nine years ago only for it to remain unread on my shelf until this summer. Who’d have thought a rip-snorting novel set in Reformation-era Europe would spawn an idea for a short sci-fi story? (Again, you won’t have seen it. Funny story about that. I’ll have to post something about it some time.)

It’s the start of something, or in my case a restart. One short story idea is followed by a couple more. Dreams start chipping in a few ideas too. And then, quite unexpectedly, you get THE idea. The big one. The one that leads to sleepless nights because your brain just won’t shut up about it. The one that has you frantically typing an 11,000 word plot outline in two days before you forget it all.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I’ve had what I deem to be THE idea. My one half-decent shot at writing something good; good enough perhaps to be read by others without apologising for it afterwards. (Something that I’m astonished hasn’t been done before, or not to my knowledge.)

Hence this blog, this domain name, this pseudonym, that Facebook page, that Twitter account, and so on and so forth. Sometimes you just feel that you’ve got to give it a shot. Write the damn thing. Put it out there and be judged by it. (Even if it is behind a pseudonym.)

So come NaNoWriMo I’ll turn my 11,000 word outline into a 50,000+ word novel. You might even see me slaving away at one of the Norwich write-ins. Then I’ll knock out a second draft, then I’ll have it properly proof-read, and then finally, after all that slog, after annoying everyone I know with THE idea, I’ll put it out there. On Kindle, through Smashwords, via every channel I can find.

So that’s the gauntlet slapped down. As I finish my inaugural post on this blog my deadline for publishing <Title withheld> is exactly one year from today: Friday 13th September 2013.

I’ll let you know how I get on.