Week 7 - Waste Not, Want Not

 

Week 7 update – slowed down a bit here and there, but now I’m back on track, and back on the romance book. Having paid work and its attendant deadline threw me off for a couple of days, but I fixed it by going back to longhand in the morning. I also got some rewriting/typing done on the detective story before the internet distracted me. Looks like it’ll be the romance for the time being, I can’t say for sure how long. Plans, plots and intentions can change on a dime. Such is the life of a pantser.

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Speaking of distractions, my subconscious lobbed a doozy at me, probably as a last-ditch effort to knock me off my productive course. When the new story ideas didn’t sway me, Mr. Subconscious decided to go for broke and dump the whole shebang on me. Long story short, a long book of short stories. In other words, an anthology.

For years now I’ve made it a point to write some form of fiction every day. Best case, it would be a specific story aimed at a certain genre or market, hopefully with some kind of payment attached. Since depression and writer’s blocks often interfered with that, I decided flash pieces—everything from brief paragraphs to full stories under a thousand words—would also fill the bill. This way I could honestly say I wrote some form of fiction that day, even if I never returned to it. Writing is writing, after all, and one way or another, no writing ever goes to waste.

Some of them did lead to better things. One night I scribbled a bit of fluff about a reporter interviewing a human who’d been raised by vampires. It wasn’t very serious and ended after a couple hundred words with the reporter meeting the parents, with the (off-camera) expected result. I set it aside but didn’t quite forget about it. Over time the premise morphed in my mind into the tale of an orphaned child (female at first, later male after I discovered the TV show Supernatural) who’s taken in by a flock of vampires and grows up to work in a brothel that caters to paranormal beings. That became my erotic M/M romance Belonging, one of my best sellers. The fantasy/detective story I’m currently working on got its start when I mashed two of these random flash bits together. You can read that background info at the October 8, 2022  entry of this very blog.

I’ve got years—decades, even—of these things, scattered around in notebooks and a couple computer files. Some might someday bloom into full-grown stories or even books. The others…well, quite a few were scribbled down before bed, sometimes right before midnight, in a panicked effort to keep my daily writing habit intact. They’re not often coherent. Or clean. (For example, last week I jotted down how leprechauns come by their pots of gold. It has to do with another meaning for “pot” along with the phrase “shit a brick.” And the source of fairy dust? You don’t even want to know.) My sense of humor was shaped in my early years by Mad magazine, later by National Lampoon and Monty Python. This is the type of thing that comes out of my head when I’m tired, or desperate, or both. Most of them are unfit for human consumption, let alone development into a decent story. Or any kind of story, decent or otherwise.

But, Mr. Subconscious whispered seductively, what if you dusted off some of these piles of crap, polished ’em up a bit and passed them off as a self-published ebook of humorous short-shorts? Like Jokes for the John, but for lit majors. Most people don’t have the attention span to deal with a whole book anyway.

And instead of calling him out as a total nutjob, tired, desperate, writer’s-blocked me replied, Y’know, that’s just crazy enough to work.

So now I’ve got another side-side project. I haven’t stopped work on the detective book or the romance. The series is still in the queue somewhere. But now so is this. Any time I get blocked I’ll haul out a random notebook and see what’s in there. The bulk are going to be on a par with the leprechaun thing I alluded to a couple of paragraphs back. But there still might be some gems among the crap. If I can scrape together a hundred of the best of the worst, whip it up into an ebook and sell it for $1.99—hell, that’s less than two cents per story. If you only find one out of the batch you like, you still come out ahead. You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick.

Besides, I’ve been wanting to improve my formatting skills, and I need to learn how to make my own covers because right now I can’t afford to pay for one. This will give me something to practice on. I might even make a little money from it. No writing, or effort, ever goes to waste.

I’ll need to come up with yet another pen name, though. Variations on my real name have already been used, and I want to keep my other pen names for actual serious stuff. Damn you, Mr. Subconscious. You’ll pay for this. See y’all next week.

Secret Origins

 

Challenge update: no real progress since my last entry. Hopefully, that’s about to change. The paid work went out last week, the side project’s almost done, and bad weather has forced mowing the lawn to the back burner. I’ve still got the procrastination issues, but have a better handle on what’s causing them. Dealing with and conquering them is a whole other problem. For example, I’m writing this blog instead of writing the book. Still, it’s not playing computer card games, so it’s a step in the right direction. Once this is done and posted, I’ll see about typing up some longhand. Or go take a shower. When it comes to self-improvement, still a work in progress here.

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Today we return to the topic of, “Where do you get your ideas?” As we learned a couple weeks ago, the side project came out of two unrelated flash scenes that my brain decided went together like peanut butter and chocolate. Or chocolate and peanut butter. Either way, that Reese’s Cup of a book is very nearly done, so clearly Brain had its neurons together on that one.

The series, on the other hand, grew out of another problem of mine, a case of advanced sequelitis. More often than not, something I write sparks ideas for sequels, continuations, spinoffs and updates. This particular one falls under the subheading “spinoff.” To understand its origins, we need to go back to 2011 and the not-quite-a-trilogy that gave birth to my latest literary headache.

I’ve always read in a number of genres—mystery, romance, some mainstream, Stephen King (he’s in a class by himself)—but my main fix was science fiction/fantasy. Up until the early 2000s, I considered myself a writer of that last, though every now and then I considered writing a romance, mostly for a few extra bucks. I know of at least two (female) SFF writers who churned out the occasional gothic back in the ‘60s to help put food on the table. Probably some guys, too. Category romances were short, straightforward, and could be whipped up in a couple of weeks if you put your mind to it and didn’t stop to do housework. Then, as now, earning a living as a writer wasn’t easy.

But it wasn’t until the erotica ebook explosion that I seriously got into the game. A publisher advertised for stories for a paranormal anthology. Fantasy romance. Only half out of my wheelhouse. I sent in a story and got rejected. I sent the story to a second publisher and this time got a contract—and, eventually, royalty checks. I was on my way!

I kept to the fantasy/paranormal subgenre in my next couple books (write what you know). Then one night I scribbled a flash scene involving a reporter interviewing a human who’d been raised by vampires. Interesting premise, but not enough to hang a book on. It needed something else. That turned out to be me answering a question never raised in vampire romances: “How to the guys, um, function if they’re technically dead?” The answer was, by overeating. A vampire who takes in too much blood at once gets horny to the point he or she needs to have sex or they die. My nascent romance dealt with a human woman working in a brothel that catered to paranormal creatures, and the vampire client she falls in love with.

And then the plot took a major swerve when I became obsessed with the TV show Supernatural. My prostitute suddenly switched to male, and I became a writer of paranormal M/M. If you’ve ever read my book Belonging (hint), take a close look at my description of Jeremy. I got into the show because of Castiel, but writing that book turned me into a Sam girl. Cas had a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo as the slayer who attacks Jeremy’s vampire family. There were other minor jokes scattered in there as well, including the one that eventually led to me struggling to write an eight-book series. I’m leading up to that.

(Disclaimer: I want it known that I’d already finished the book and was about to sub it to the publisher when they aired the episode where Dean was turned into a vampire. I was not ripping them off. It was sheer coincidence. Though to me that scene where Dean cleans out the vampire nest will always be Wally’s assault on the brothel. More coincidence. Must have been something in the air. I can’t explain that line in the later episode where the girl says to Sam, “Maybe you’re a hooker.” Or the one a couple seasons later, where Crowley referred to Sam and Dean as “the Scarecrow and the Tin Man.” No one ever took me to court for plagiarism or copyright infringement. Maybe I’d better shut up while I’m ahead.)

Anyway. A year after that (my procrastination issues go way back) I wrote a sequel, Legacy, to answer the question, “Can the undead have children?” where Wallace and Jeremy add a woman to their growing flock. There was more of Cas, AKA the Preacher, in this one. Two side characters, Gus and Annie Stanton, also had larger roles. Annie was that joke I mentioned earlier. She was originally Anna from season 4, which is where she got her long red hair, but when I started writing her dialogue I heard a Texas accent, more fitting to an Annie than an Anna. She and her husband Gus were old friends of Wally’s, from their days as a slayer team, until the two got married and left the slayer biz. At this point they were in their 50s, having aged like normal humans, unlike vampire Wallace. I got a few nudges to complete their story, in a future where the orphaned girl they adopted grows up, but nothing ever came of it.

Nothing ever came of my intended sequel either, which would have told Preacher’s story. I tried, but couldn’t quite make it work and eventually abandoned it. However, there was one scene where the love interest, a vampire/human hybrid woman (introduced in Legacy) is researching slayers on the internet. She comes across a mention of the Colts, a family of Texas cowboys who double as vampire slayers. I chose “Colt” as a nod to the Winchesters, and made them Texans because Jared and Jensen are both Texas boys. My obsession with the show had begun to fade by then, but the in-jokes didn’t have to.

Wait. Whoa. Hold on thar, pardner. Wasn’t Annie, my retired slayer, from Texas? Stanton was her married name. What if she’d been born a Colt?

And just like that, I had a premise for a series. Long ago, in the wake of the Civil War, vampires invaded Texas and were turned back by the Colts. A century later (1960s) the suckers tried again, and were repelled again, this time with a teenaged Annie as part of the defense. Afterward Annie left Texas, became a slayer, married Gus and retired from monster hunting. But now, in yet another century, the bats are back again. Now widowed, with her children grown and nothing to look forward to but a retirement home, Annie returns to Texas to help her kinfolk fight off this latest attack. Because that’s what the Colts are all about.

Naturally, procrastinating me only fiddled with this and didn’t get around to any actual writing until around last year. Why now? Because I could use a couple of extra bucks, and the publisher likes series books with lots’a hot sex and multiple partners. Sure, I can do that. Also because the books that gave rise to this idea have a clause in their contracts, giving the publisher right of first refusal on any book I write that shares characters, locales, themes or concepts with books they’ve published. Since Annie appears in the series, I’m under contractual obligation to offer it to them first. I have no problem with that. I don’t mind having all related books under one publisher’s banner. Now I don’t have to spring for editing or covers. Those get expensive, and like I said, making a living as a writer isn’t easy.

I’ve got the plot; I’ve got the characters; I’ve got ideas. I’ve got the time. All I need to do is write the thing. Which brings us back to my procrastination issues, which I’m still struggling with. Yeah well. No one ever said life was easy.

Excuses, Whines and a Bit of Positivity

 

WHINE ALERT: This opening segment lists my excuses for not (re)starting the series yet. If you’d like to skip it, drop down to the line break below; that’s where the “positivity” in the title begins. Just because I like to suffer doesn’t mean everybody has to.

So here we are. A little over two weeks into the challenge and I’ve barely done a thing on Book #1. I’ve been reading over what I typed—at least a year ago, if not longer—and I’ve done some editing and gotten some new ideas. Mostly, however, I sit down at the laptop and either watch videos or play games. I tried unplugging the WiFi only to discover that didn’t work. The urge to log on was too strong. I tried logging on and getting my Internet business out of the way first, then getting to work. Those were the days I never got to work. What did work was going onto a music site and running background music while I worked. That did the trick. I’ve got a chase scene coming up with my heroes being attacked by vampires, and I know just the cut from the Aliens soundtrack I’m going to run in the background. Assuming I ever get there. I’ve got over a decade of bad habits that have become firmly entrenched, and when I try to fight or replace them they just dig in and get worse. I’ll keep experimenting and let you know how it turns out.

On the upside, the side project is still going great guns. But then, that’s longhand. No Internet distractions. Once I go to type the second draft into the system, bet these problems will pop up again. Unless I figure out a way to defeat or at least deflect them. The series and I are both works in progress, and it’s far too early to give up on either. Next week I’m getting a new paid assignment, so the pressure will be on for that as well. Stay tuned.

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Now for the positive stuff. Since the side project’s doing well, I’m going to talk about that. Today’s topic will be the lesson: “No writing ever goes to waste.”

I try to write something every day. I haven’t missed a day in fifteen years, not even when I was in the hospital for the hernia operation. It’s not always much, and it’s not always part of a work in progress. Even a sentence is better than nothing. Don’t let the blank page win!

On the days when I don’t have a WIP, or I didn’t work on the WIP (see whines, above), I write flash scenes. Dialogue mostly, but sometimes a vignette or a snippet or random words of something that may or may not ever develop into a story or book. I’ve had tossed-off flash scenes mutate into stories and sometimes into entire novels. Case in point: my current side project. Here’s its origin story.

This first scene was written in July of 2021. It was inspired by the news Gold Eagle Books was closing up shop. They published pulp stuff, men’s adventure, in spite of being a subsidiary of Harlequin, the romance publisher, of all people. Remember The Executioner, or those Death Lands books on the shelves at Kmart? That was them. I needed to write something and I needed a topic, so this is what came out:

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So…it’s gone. A&A Books. That’s Action and Adventure, to those not in the know. It wasn’t a biggie, like Random House or whoever’s publishing Stephen King these days. It was just some little mom and pop publisher that put out cheap paperbacks, like the kind you can sometimes find on racks in a drug store or at a truck stop. They handled all the pulpy tropes: jungle heroes, cowboys, one man armies against the mob, plucky survivors wandering post-apocalyptic landscapes. It was all in good fun, and you could while away a rainy afternoon with an easy read about macho heroes, evil villains, and half-naked women in chainmail bikinis. You didn’t even need to worry about grammar, or proper punctuation. They were the kind of books where more thought went into the weapons and landscape descriptions than the characters or the plot.

But all good things do come to an end. So do bad and indifferent things. Readers had gotten pretty indifferent to A&A Publishing, especially with the rise of video games. If you had an XBox, you could be a barbarian or a zombie fighter or a lone ex-Marine mowing down Mafia baddies. In full color, with realistic graphics. No more struggling with syntax and picturing the action in your head. Xbox must have been a godsend to dyslexic kids.

So A&A rode off into the sunset, sailed off the edge of the world, packed up the assault rifle, found the radiation-free Eden, etc., etc. I reread my collection for a time, until I realized how repetitive the plots were, and the fact the heroes remained unchanged for over twenty years. Physically and psychologically. The characters couldn’t grow or change; it would screw with the formula. Then there was Elder Breen, the zombie hunter, still out there a-shootin’ and a-knifin’ away, with kids nearing 40 and him still 52. Yeah, time to pack it in.

Eventually I loaded my collection of A&A books into a box and dropped them off at the library’s  donation bin. Maybe some kid would find them, and enjoy them as much as I used to before puberty set in. I didn’t even shed a tear as I walked away. I was done with those characters, those worlds.

What I didn’t realize at the time was, they weren’t done with me. Or with any of us.

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Exactly one week later, I wrote this scene:

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 “So…are you human or aren’t you?”

“Uhhh…it’s complicated.”

“In simple terms, please.”

“My mother was a character in a Bigfoot porn novel.”

“Excuse me?”

“You wanted simple terms. That’s a simple as I can make it.”

“How can your mother be a character in a book? How could she have—” The Inquisitor poked him in the arm. “Produced solid, living offspring?”

“Beats me. You’ll have to ask her that. I was just a kid.”

“Where is she now?”

“She went into hiding when you Puritan pussies came to power. Try the Nancy Drew series. Or Lord of the Rings. She always had a weakness for elves.”

The Inquisitor hissed. “Do you think I’m a fool?”

“You betcha. Also a dick, a douche, a motherfucking tinpot dictator, and a—”

“Do you honestly think I’d be foolish enough to believe your mother was an actual fictional character?”

“Don’t take my word for it. Check with the author.”

“This ‘author’s’ name?”

“M. T. Condom. I think it’s a pseudonym.”

“I’m sure. Where were you born?”

“In book six of the Babs and Bigfoot Chronicles, Sequoia Fever. Page 27. Only two paragraphs. It was a difficult pregnancy, so M. T. had to summarize. The good news is, I was 10 years old by the end of the chapter. Transitions are the greatest thing ever.”

“Such nonsense. I’ll not stand for—”

“You know what sucks? Retcons. Or when the writer gets ‘inspired’ and starts adding background. I’ll be at work, or on the can, or with a chick, and all of a sudden I get hit with memories I never had before because my ‘creator’ decided to give me a childhood. Or a broken heart. Or siblings. I had a sister who was born and killed off in the space of a page and then I had to deal with it. Really, what the hell? What’s even the point?”

“That’s enough,” the Inquisitor said. “Enough of this farce. You will tell me the truth. Who are you?”

“My name is Itrigo. My father was Bigfoot and my mother was a grad student named Babs Moorecock. I was born in an erotic romance novel. My parents were fictional characters.”

The Inquisitor slapped him across the face, drawing blood from his lip. “My time is not unlimited, and I don’t appreciate wasting it. You will—” He stared at his fingers, and the dark, sticky liquid smeared on them. “What is this?”

Itrigo chuckled. Darkness seeped from his lip. “It’s ink. What else did you expect?”

$$$

And there you go. Two unrelated flash scenes written a week apart. Yes, Bigfoot porn is a thing. You can find it on Amazon, but only if you’re 18 or older. Amazon’s got all kinds of fun stuff, but only if you know which keywords to type into Search. Happy hunting, fetish freaks.

Anyway. Like I said, two unrelated flash scenes. Unless, of course, you’re a writer. Writers’ brains like to play mashup, which is what mine did. I wasn’t writing anything in particular at the time, so Brain chose to toss me a bone. One night I sat down to write flash, and what poured out of my pen was the tale of a private investigator who’s hired by a cavemannish person to find his “creator.” The caveman (not Bigfoot; I wanted to keep this story clean) claimed to be a fictional character created for a publisher’s book series, and he wanted to find his author. Trouble is, the books were written under a house name, so the author could have been one person or several, with a name different from the title on the cover. Hence the need for professional aid. To prove his story, the caveman uses the PI’s letter opener and cuts into his arm. Black ink wells to the surface. See how it all ties together?

I didn’t have a plot at that point, but that wasn’t an issue. I’m a pantser; lack of a plot doesn’t stop us. You just forge ahead and see what happens. Plus the name “Elder Breen,” tossed off in the flash scene, intrigued me. He became one of the story’s bad guys. Heroes, bad guys, mystery. I was off and running.

This is why writers are always taking notes and jotting everything down. A lot of it ends up being trash, but sometimes you strike gold. Plus it makes an easily-justifiable excuse not to work on your stated project while still legitimately claiming you did write today. We artsy types are such weasels. Enjoy your day!