James “I’m The King Of The World” Cameron is working on a number of sequels to Avatar all at once at the moment. I’ve begun to think about him more and more of late as it grows more and more possible that I am going to actually write six novels all at once in quick succession. The novels are all set in the same universe with essentially the same characters with a macro story that takes place over the course of 25 years.
So, in a sense, it’s one big story cut up into six novels that span from early 1995 to early 2020.
Now, while this is obviously a huge project — which is what I wanted when I started all of this — it’s not impossible. Stieg Larsson wrote three novels and then sold them at about my age (just as he dropped dead of a heart attack, alas.) And, really, the key issues at this point are selling the first novel and how long post-production would be.
I’m nervous that I could write all six novels pretty quickly but because of the needs of post production I won’t live to see them all come out. Ugh!
But I have to get this first novel finished and published. I continue to have high hopes, as the song goes, but I have a limited time on this earth. It’s not like I’m 25 and can just chug away for a decade writing novels that are good…but not good enough to get published.
As I’ve written before, generally a first novel by an unknown, previously unpublished novelist should be no more than 100,000 words. It’s because anything past that point, it becomes more and more risky, more and more cost prohibitive for the publisher to physically print the novel itself.
Feeling pretty stoked about the current state of the novel.
Now that I’m finally, gradually beginning to get out of the completely delusional stage of developing and writing this first novel into a phase that is at least a little bit closer to being grounded in something akin to reality, I find myself pondering my scene count.
You see, I don’t work in words, I would in scenes. Each scene, in general, is about 1,000 words. As such, I’m able to gauge, in general, how long the novel will be by the number of scenes. It’s not a perfect metric, but it’s the one I find works best with my personality. Right now — I have too many scenes. At the moment, the first draft of the novel is going to blow past that 100,000 word limit on a rather significant basis.
But the issue is, to tell the story I want to tell in the way that I can tell it given my ability — I’m beginning to fear that for the time being that excess word count is existential. My last attempt at a first draft was about 120,000 words and this first draft is, if I’m lucky, going to be around that length as well. But there’s a real risk that it could be longer.
And, yet, the story itself is really strong. I keep thinking about the scenes and there just isn’t much fat there. Each scene holds up and has a point for existing. I think what might happen — if I’m lucky — is somehow someone might like the general story and I’ll find myself with an editor who can whittle down the scene count to something a bit more manageable.
And this is the point when I’m reminded, again, that I suspect that for all my attempts to reverse engineer Stieg Larsson’s novels….I’m missing something about how he developed his works. Something is going on with his novels that I just can’t figure out. Did he write extensive character studies? How did he go about writing his novels in the context of structure?
The dream is to write something as popular as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
I’ve used repeated readings of his novel The Girl Who Played With Fire to produce a few very arbitrary rules of thumb that I use to map out the novel. It’s because of these rules that it’s both taken a lot longer than I expected and the novel is slowly shaping up to be a lot better than I originally thought possible. It’s taken me a long, long time to get to this point, but I’m finally beginning to feel pretty juiced about my prospects.
But I’m still being delusional. I’m an untested, unpublished novelist who if you do due diligence on me without knowing anything about me — you’re probably going to think I’m a drunk crank. So, who knows. But at least I’m feeling pretty good.
I think I’m within shouting distance of writing a pretty good pop novel that at least won’t embarrass me.
I sometimes write about my failed magazine I had in Seoul, ROKon Magazine. It was a success until it wasn’t. My version of it lasted from August 2006 to April 2007. It was a very wild ride with amazing twists and turns and extremely colorful characters floating in and out of the story repeatedly.
I learned a lot from that experience in no small part because I was also DJing at a bar called Nori at the time. And, in a sense, I’m using all those experiences from a failed magazine in Seoul to write six novels set in a totally different place. But that’s not the point of this post.
The point is — learned a lot about myself as part of that particular adventure. I learned what a quirky life I lead on an existential basis. I learned that I have a lot of vision and need a partner who is persuasive to actually get anything done. But I also learned that much of life is simply picking a direction, any direction and sticking to it.
The moment you have a vision in your head, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come out. People will bombard you with all kinds of reasons for why your vision is wrong or how much you suck or why you shouldn’t even be doing what you’re doing in the first place.
In that respect, working on writing project with an imagined six novels to it is a lot like growing ROKon Magazine back in the day. I know my “true north” and I know what these six novels to be like, no matter how many different people try to make me feel bad about even doing anything to begin with .
I’m really good at the “vision thing,” but very bad at persuasion. That’s why in the early days of ROKon Magazine the late Annie Shapiro and I made such a great team. I came up with the vision and she convinced people to help us. But I’m all alone now and it’s going to be a massive accomplishment on my part to get a literary agent to take me seriously enough to help me get this first novel published.
But here I am. Hoping to try to be in a position around the fall of 2023 where I can sell a novel. I’m still smarting over how long post-production might be if I manage to make that dream come true. But those are the breaks. I just have to accept that I have to be patient.
I only write about this because, well, I’m still in the delusional phase of the process of writing these novels and I feel like letting off a little creative steam. This project begins with a novel set in 1995 and ends with one set in early 2020. In the last three projected, imagined novels, there is a character who is essentially a “proxy me.”
Chris Pratt
You’re not supposed do that, of course. You’re not supposed to write yourself into your universe. It’s bad form and it’s too easy to abuse. But I am very self-conscious about this element of writing these novels and so I hopefully will avoid the storytelling pitfalls of having a “proxy me.” Besides, the proxy isn’t one to one. Even though the character is probably going to share many of my flaws and weaknesses.
Anyway, in my mind, this proxy me looks a lot like Chris Pratt. I think some of this comes from my own self-perception of what I look like. Of course, this is very amusing given that I think Pratt is a MAGA Republican who keeps doing voice work because he’s a doofus and refuses to get his COVID vaccine.
But the key issue is Pratt is just about the right age for the character. Let me be clear — I am well aware that I’m being delusional to even broach this subject. I haven’t even finished the first draft of the first novel — set in 1995. But you have to believe, you know? You have to keep going and believe that if you do the hard work then it’s at least possible that someone like Pratt might play a version of me on the silver screen one day.
For the time being, however, I’m trying to just focus on finishing the first novel, querying it and ultimately getting it published. Only time will tell, of course.
I don’t know anything about anything. But I think that we may be in Fourth Wave Feminism. Gone are the days of Third Wave Feminism which, relative to me being a smelly boy, were pretty cool. The ideology of Third Wave Feminism was that women could do whatever they wanted from sex worker to medical doctor. This lead to lots of young women running around with no clothes on and dudes getting an eye full in more ways than one.
Ugh
But now, things are changing.
Apparently, we may be on the cusp of Fourth Wave Feminism which is something of a downer relative to the good old days of “liberated strippers.” In general, I don’t care. I’m not a woman and it’s not really my place to get involved in which particular wave of feminism we might be living in.
So it’s not that I’m concerned about. What is bother me is the idea that somehow using the word “female” is now taboo and “gross,” if all the videos I see now on Tik-Tok would be any indication.
What the what?
Words are really important to me –obviously — and the idea that I can no longer use the word “female” of all things is really, really shocking and aggravating.
It will be interesting to see if the malignant idiots of Fox News will pick this new attack by the “woke cancel culture mob.” Whatever. But all I can say is the center-Left will do itself no favors by attacking clueless men for simply using the word “female.”
I just don’t know how much the forming taboo about using “female” is a Tik-Tok thing and how much is real. Only time will tell.
I think I’ve written about this before, but, lulz, it’s not like anyone reads this blog on a regular basis outside of a few random stalkers. Wink. Anyway, I really like the vibe of the acclaimed Hollywood actress Jessica Chastain. And, almost from the beginning of this old six novel project I have wanted a character that, if somehow miraculously somehow Hollywood got involved with an adaptation, she would be interested in playing.
Jessica Chastain
What I didn’t expect when I started of all of this, of course, is, well, when the character first appears she will be so young that Sadie Sink will have to play her or something. Some younger beautiful red head. If it was Sophia Lillis, well, then, that would be great but at this point something of a cliche.
So, the plan now is we open in 1995 and we see, over the course of six novels a collection of characters interact with each other until the modern era. Since ultimately one of the heroes of this project is well, me in proxy form, I needed a character who thought I was an drunk ill-focused loser and someone like Jessica Chastain fits the bill.
Anyway. The character inspired by Chastain is a straight edge who ultimately causes a lot of problems for proxy me.
But at this point, I’m really, really being delusional to believe I will get through all the hoops necessary to ever see Chastain on the silver screen making my vision a reality.
After a number of years of hard work and spinning my wheels in a very conspicuous manner, I finally feel like I have the framework I need to achieve something akin to my original goal — entertain the same audience as Stieg Larsson did with his original Millennium series.
It’s not a one-to-one for a number of reasons.
He is far darker than I am. And I think he was probably a conspiracy theorist. And, what’s more, he breaks a lot of rules of modern novel storytelling that just don’t have the luxury of doing. I mean, I can’t just spend 135 pages getting to the fucking point like he did with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
As such, I have structured my first novel in a far more traditional manner. My inciting incident is far closer to the beginning of the story. It’s taken me so much hard work and trial-and-error to get to this point, in large part I was using Larsson’s work The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook.”
While I love that novel — so much that I can read it over and over and over again — it’s structure is totally fucked up and it’s simply way, way too long for what I need to use as a guide. I have a strict “sweetspot” of between 80,000 to 120,000 words to play with.
Will I pass the test? Maybe! (I fucking hate this test, by the way.)
I have a lot of work still to do. And one key element I have to do is read. I have to grit my teeth and read some books that will help give my characters, well, character. Quirks. Color. You name it. I have a number of books that if I actually sat down and fucking read them would really improve the end product. As it stands, I have a general vision for my characters, but, too often, they just “moods” that with character traits that exist solely for expediency’s sake.
But recent my self-confidence with this project has improved. I have finally found the land over the horizon that I was looking for so long.
As I keep saying, I want the novels in this projected six novel project to be an old brown shoe for the audience of Stieg Larsson’s work. In other words, I want people who enjoyed the Millennium series to “get” these novels from the moment they read the first page.
This is what the heroine of this first novel looks like in my imagination.
That’s been the goal of all of this from the very beginning. The biggest problem has been I’m very reluctant to “just write” if I don’t believe in the product. I have very high standards for myself and I don’t want to fucking embarrass myself.
So time and again, the whole thing has collapsed and I’ve started all over again. Then there has been significant mission creep, with this starting off as just a novel, then two, then three, then four then five and now six. This has happened after a series of major turning points, the biggest among them being Trump being so stupid and lazy that the he actually manage to do what I thought was impossible — lose the 2020 election.
Trump losing the 2020 election was a huge turning point in this project because suddenly I was freed from the original goal of using this project to rant, directly about Trumplandia. I realized I had all these stories to tell in the same universe. But to tell them, I would have to go back in time.
I fucking hate MAGA and Trumplandia. Enough to write six novels generated off of that rage against them.
And that’s how I found myself writing about events that kicked off the whole series, set 25 years ago. So, in a sense, I’m consciously writing prequels in a sly way. Or, had Trump not lost, I probably would have keep pounding away at a two-novel story set in the modern era.
But as it stands, I’m doing all this work to explain, to show, to the reader, the origins of a very fucked up situation that happens somewhere later down the the line. I like this idea because, well, it’s weird and I’m weird and also, most importantly, there’s a lot of slack in it.
I have a lot of room to grow. I have a huge universe of pretty well fleshed out stories I can now grow into should I somehow manage to sell this first novel. That, unto itself, will be a miracle. I know that. I get it. But it’s not a crime to dream.
Things are going well with this latest attempt at a first draft — knock on wood. But I’m facing a cold hard fact — if I’m going to flesh out these characters, I’m going to have to do some fucking reading.
So, I hope to gradually work into my very lax schedule a lot more time for reading over the course of the next few months. I hope that by the time I’m working on the second draft that I will have read enough that I can flesh out the characters a lot more.
That’s the thing about so much of this first novel, it’s been such a struggle to get to this point that it’s really beginning to dawn on me that I need to flesh out the characters so someone actually wants to hang out with them the number of hours necessary to finish reading the damn thing.
As I keep saying, I monitor my Webstats extremely carefully. I study them constantly throughout the day because, well, I have no life and I live in such oblivion these days that anyone showing me any attention for any reason is something to take note of.
The biggest mystery I find in my Webstats is when someone, out of the blue, appears interested in something I wrote without there being any obvious explanation for how they came to the post. They didn’t search for it and they didn’t come to the site via Twitter.
The only thing I can think of is there may be a lot of pings to this site that I just don’t see — probably because my Webstat software registers the visits as those by a bot, as opposed to a “hard” hit by a person. Or something. I have no idea.
The only reason it’s of note beyond me being sad and having no friends is if I had a better understanding of what people were interested in, then I would know to write about those subjects more. As an aside, it seems interesting to me that some people — who I assume are “VIPs” definitely seem to come to this site either in the very middle of the night or really early in the morning. It gives you some insight into the Web usage of powerful people.
But anyway. Welcome everyone. Except for the few stalkers I have — apparently — who are a little bit TOO obsessed with my meaningless writing.
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