Adam Christopher | Steampunk and dark fantasy author. Now with added superheroes!
Adam Christopher is a New Zealand-born SF writer living in the sunny north of England.Archive for April, 2009
Introducing the Seven Wonders
The new title of the superhero novel that will save me from beyond-the-grave homicide from the zombified corpse of Jack Kirby is: Seven Wonders, suggested by Slam from Comic Book Resources.
Why Seven Wonders? Three things:
1. My superteam has seven members. True enough, they’re not really the direct focus of the story, but they (and what they represent) play an important role.
2. The superteam is dysfunctional and arrogant with an absurdly over-the-top opinion of itself/themselves. Calling themselves “Wonders” reflects this.
3. The Seven Wonders of course implies the actual ancient Seven Wonders. As a legacy of civilisations aeons past, the title hints that the superteam are just one part of a much larger universe, bigger than everything and everyone, and that really they should take more care to keep their heads down in case someone bigger and badder takes notice…
Thanks to everyone else for the other suggestions. While Slam will get brutally killed in an eye-popping way in the story, there is actually a big scene in which the massed superteams of the world unite, so I could well throw in some of the other titles there. Proper credit will be given, of course!
Back to the writing…
The pony, and how to get back on it
Have finally cracked the new book, and have managed 4,064 words so far, with the first chapter complete. Only 95,936 to go!
Getting back into writing has been surprisingly difficult. Having completed Dark Heart, I gave myself about ten days to plot out novel #2, the as-yet-unnamed superhero story (see, I’m not calling it New Gods anymore!), and then made up a new chart to track daily wordcounts, etc. My average wordcount, according to this, should be 1600 words per day. My actual average wordcount is 508 after 8 days. Ouch! But it’s easy to see where it went wrong – several late nights in a row (something I don’t do often) screwed up my morning routine, and without the morning’s batch of writing, the evening session tended to not work out properly as my subconscious hadn’t been working on the story during the day.
But there is nothing better than a little inspiration to help things along, and this morning a gigantic box of books turned up from Amazon. First on my reading list is Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, and so far it’s living up to its zombie techno-thriller tag quite nicely.
That was really all I needed. Today I actually sat down and typed something, and hammered out 1495 words to finish chapter one. Okay, it’s not the 1600 I need, but it’s a start, and I think tomorrow I can more than make up for the deficit.
And actually, looking at my workplan, it’s only been two weeks or so since I finished Dark Heart, so this sure beats the hell out of the year-long procrastination I fell into in 2007-2008.
So, with a target completion date of 19th June, 2009, I need to start getting the word down, pronto. Luckily May has two three-day weekends here in the UK, so that’s some extra time up my sleeve.
And the title? Oooh, I’m close to a decision. There’s a thread running over at the Comic Book Resources forum about it too. I dare say by the end of this weekend I’ll have a new title, and will start thinking about how to brutally kill the winner… but in the meantime, keep posting suggestions here and at CBR. The more the merrier!
New Gods competition!
Hey, you there, writer so-called! Quit it!
Y’see, I has a problem. I’m writing a superhero novel, and for the moment (just for the moment), I’m calling it New Gods. It’s catchy, it rolls off the tongue, it’s a really cool title.
Thing is, some dude called Jack Kirby happened to have come up with that title back in 1971, when he moved from Marvel to DC. Having created practically the entire Marvel universe with Stan Lee, he set about constructing Jack Kirby’s Fourth World. Yep, his name is in the title. That’s how he rolled.
So with the Fourth World, he created the New Gods, and gave us the twin planets of New Genesis and Apokolips, and the characters of Highfather, Orion, and the ulimate DC Comics villain, Darkseid. Darkseid is such a bad-ass that he even killed Batman.
And Jack Kirby’s Fourth World rocks the damn boat.
When I was looking for a title for my superhero novel, I ran through a variety of unbearable options – ‘Power’ (meh) and ‘The Angle of Power’ (what?) being two of the less awful (but awful) alternatives. Then New Gods came to mind, not just because of the Kirby connection, but because it’s a perfect title.
My novel (let’s call it New Gods, just for now) is about a good guy (Tony) who is sick of the bad guy (The Cowl) and the fact that the so-called protectors of the West Coast – the New Gods – let said bad guy get away with it in the otherwise pleasant California city of San Ventura.
The New Gods in question are a seven-member superhero league/society – three men, three women, one robot – and while the novel doesn’t entirely focus on them (and it’s told from Tony’s PoV anyway), the title ‘New Gods’ sums the whole story up very well indeed. Needless to say, New Gods doesn’t refer just to the New Gods, but I don’t want to spoil anything.
But that’s why it fits.
So back to Jack Kirby. Kirby is a legend, and I would not dream of having my mediocre, mostly crappy writing associated with his greatness. A working title is one thing, but a proper title (and name of a superhero league) is another entirely.
New Gods has got to go.
Which brings me to: competition time!
Here’s the deal: come up with a title for the novel, which is not only damn cool, but sums up the whole premise of a superhero league, the fact that maybe there are other forces in the universe that we don’t know about, and that maybe, if you’re lucky/unlucky (take your pick), you can become part of it all yourself.
The criteria: It needs to be short – two words is best. The Something Something of Something is too long and too dull. Be imaginative – remember, this needs to be a short, sharp, memorable hook, because it’s the title of the novel.
The prize: Full credit for the title and name with dedication in the finished product. Plus, a character in the novel will be named after you, and will suffer a truely gruesome and bizzare death at the gloved hands of The Cowl.
So get those thinking caps on, and tell your friends!
Lulu is dangerous
I’m not going to get into a debate here, or discuss why self-publishing is ultimately a bad idea, or at least a dead-end alley if you’re not careful. But one good thing about Lulu is that the price is pretty gosh-darned good.
As Dark Heart is maturing for a few months before I commence the edit and second draft, I discovered that creating an actual physical book with Lulu was cheaper than getting the manuscript printed at a copy centre. So just three days after uploading my manuscript, a handsome trade paperback of Dark Heart arrived in the mail.
The quality is superb, and if I’d gone to any trouble with the cover and interior, I could easily pretend it was a published book.
Pretend is the key word there.
But for a printed editing copy, it’s great. It’s portable, the paper quality is great. So I can take it anywhere, read it, make notes, scribble all over the inside. Good stuff.
And so it begins again!
Hot dog. New Gods is plotted, although the chapter breakdown has yet to be done. But I’ve faffed for a week and I’ve nailed the story, so it’s time to start writing.
It’s been surprisingly difficult to dive in. Dark Heart was swimming around in my mind for a couple of years, and I’d had a full chapter breakdown for it ready for almost as long. New Gods is completely and utterly new. Sure, the idea has been there for probably more than a year, but that was it. And it was a great concept, but could I hang a story off it?
Luckily the grey matter pulled through, and there’s a rip-roaring tale of superheroics to be told. And tonight I’ve made a sizeable dent to chapter one – 810 words down, 99,190 to go!
Actually starting from scratch so totally has been a good excuse to get myself organised. Dark Heart was written half in MS Word, half in Scrivener. And while I did various spreadsheets and trackers for the last 50% of the novel, because the front half took so long to write, I could never get an idea of an average daily wordcount, or plot out a completion date.
But New Gods is different – my Scrivener project is all set up. My tracker sheet is counting words from day one! And all going to plan, I’ll have the first draft of this done in 63 days from now, 19th June 2009. New Gods is another 100k novel, and while I’ve only written 0.81% of it, I can already see that this is going to be a very easy target to meet.
And heck, I’ve done it once, I can do it again. Hell, this might become a regular gig 
And now in glorious colour…
New Gods, new look! Okay, cheesy as hell. But sometimes cheese is good, right?
What isn’t cheesy at all is the fab new banner crafted by fellow comic book and general SF afficiando Lee Medcalf, to whom I am eternally grateful for his mad skillz. Lee can be found on Twitter as @CartoonBeardy, and his excellent blog is linked to the right there. Lee is currently slagging off my favourite author, H.P. Lovecraft, over on his site, so be sure to pay him a visit and post spam in his comments. Tell him I sent you!
Why the change? Well, steampunk is dark and monochromatic and greasy, while superheroes are bright and breezy. So this blog is now in presented in colour-o-vision! Behold the fine blue background, it took ages to find the right shade.
So my thanks to Lee, whose banner will be proudly displayed as I tackle my second novel!
New Gods
Plotting a novel and hammering out a synopsis is tough. Too much time is spent in keyboard hand-wringing, in worrying about whether plot A slots into plot B, and whether what character #1 does in chapter 15 is logical and meaningful.
But it’s an essential process (and I know some authors don’t do full chapter breakdowns or outlines, but I think you can tell in the finished product), so it’s just a case of madly typing everything out that you can think of, then editing it and crafting it into a proper story.
I’m about halfway through the plotting of New Gods, and having got the basic beginning-middle-end down, I wrote a fake back cover blurb for the bestselling superhero novel you might pick up at your local bookstore. It’s only a draft, and it’s too long really, and no doubt the story will work out slightly differently, but here you go:
San Ventura, California. A bustling seaside metropolis, a jewel of the Western Seaboard. A city gripped by a reign of terror instigated by the superhuman hooded criminal, the Cowl, and his accomplice, Blackbird.
But to the New Gods, the Pacific Coast’s self-appointed guardians of justice, it’s all just a game. Having eliminated every other threat in their territory, they’re reluctant to take down the last remaining supervillain and put themselves out of a job. Caught in the middle, the San Ventura police department fight hard to protect the city while cleaning up the trail of death and destruction left by the Cowl, and more often than not, the New Gods themselves.
When store clerk Tony Farrell wakes up one day to find himself suddenly the most powerful superhero on Earth, he wonders if he can stop the Cowl and bring peace back to his home town. His new girlfriend, Jeannie, certainly thinks so. But with power comes both responsibility and temptation, and Tony isn’t sure he can handle both alone.
But a new menace is coming, something hidden deep the annual Caprotinae meteor shower. And when the night above the city is lit with the celestial fireworks, it is not just the people of San Ventura who are looking to the sky. For Tony and the New Gods, defeating the Cowl may soon be the least of their problems…
Dark Heart 1st draft: complete!
I apologise for not jumping straight in an announcing it, but I’ve been enjoying a few well-earned days off. But I am very pleased to say that on Thursday 9th April, 2009, at something like 7.50am, I completed the first draft of Dark Heart. The target wordcount was 100,000 words. I made it to 118,637, which is fine and dandy as I can already see sections that need reworking and editing, so cutting 18,637 should be fine. A huge, rollercoaster of a novel in 19 sizzling chapters; a searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in… erm, hang on, that’s not it! Ancient voodoo gods, steam-powered cyborgs, and a final battle in the flooded London Underground (although it’s the Vacuum Tube Transport System really).
One unexpected side-effect was that as soon as I saved the project, created a back-up and an archive, and updated my wordcount spreadsheet, I felt quite sad. For a project of this difficulty – first-person Victoriana told from the point of view of about five different characters, each requiring their own voice and personality – I was really, really looking forward to finishing it and moving onto something more straight forward. Third-person, modern day, easy!
But then it hit me that these characters – Dr Clarke, Alexander Bellamy, Zoe, Canadian Airman Scott Faulkner, and others – had been living in my mind for the better part of three years. The writing itself took around a year, although about 80,000 words were written in the last couple of months as I finally cracked the procrastination bug.
And now they’re gone, frozen in amber as the final page of the book is turned over. The immediate reaction to this would be to start the sequel – I have the second book plotted and it’s ready to roll – but this would really be a bad idea.
Firstly, Dark Heart isn’t done. It needs an edit, and a second draft. But I can’t do that now, because I’m too close to it. It needs to ‘cellar’ for a few months until I forget how I wrote it, and then I can read it fresh and will be able to edit, cut and change as required with a much clearer view of what works and what doesn’t, rather than what I want to work.
Secondly, if something significant changes in Dark Heart, it will affect the sequel. So if I start the sequel before Dark Heart is at second draft, that might be a lot of work to undo further down the track.
Those are the two practical reasons why the as-yet untitled sequel needs to wait. In the meantime, I need to learn more about the craft of writing, so I need to write something completely different as a new challenge.
This challenge is a modern-day superhero novel that I used to call Power, but now I’m calling New Gods. Yes, okay, it’s just a working title, and comics legend Jack Kirby got there a LONG time before me, and I would be a foolish writer who would speak of their meagre efforts in the same breath as Kirby. But it’s a good title, and there is no connection to Kirby’s Fourth World, but the title is relevant and resonates with my story. And anyway, titles are not important at such an early stage. So for now, New Gods will be a useful enough temporary title to save my project as.
So here’s to Dark Heart! A novel of blood, sweat and tears, both for myself and for my heroes, who are well and truly wrung by the end of it.
And here’s to New Gods!
Grim Victoriana: London Stone by Jennifer Williams
These people, these old people of London looked up to other gods though, Aggie. Gods with names and horns.
The 19th century is one that holds intense fascination for me – Victorian England (well, mostly Victorian London, let’s be honest) is a bizzare world. On the one side, full of invention, innovation, science, progress, exploration and expansion of the empire. Learned gents in top hats and tails unwrapping mummies at the British Museum. Courageous men hacking at jungles with machettes and discovering lost worlds. The age of iron and steam.
And from a different side, an age of hopeless poverty and appalling slums; virtual slavery in mills and factories. The age of Jack the Ripper, of murder by gaslight, of strange doings in the fog.
Needless to say, it’s this mix of the wonderful and the horrid that makes the Victorian period endlessly interesting and, for writers like me, an infinite source of plot and setting for fiction. Add in some coal-fired science fiction and you have steampunk.
As a fan of the darker side of Victorian life, I was very pleased to see a short, sharp tale by fellow author and friend Jennifer Williams appear alongside part two of my steampunk novella, The Devil in Chains, in the latest issue of Pantechnicon. London Stone. tells the story of a girl born into the seedy underbelly of the 19th century city, as she progresses from pickpocket to prostitute, and the terrible act she must commit on the London Stone to secure a future for her sickly child. But there is a price to pay, in blood…
London Stone is a tightly written short story, lean and precise, evoking splendly the dark, desperate plight of Aggie. The stone itself – a relic, perhaps an altar, left behind millenia ago by long-dead society – brings to mind the infinitely ancient source of the haunting in Nigel Kneale’s superlative 1972 television play, The Stone Tape, with a hint of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and the unspeakable rites of their insane tribal worshippers thrown in for good measure.
Fans of Grim Victoriana, the ‘weird tale’, and horror should check it out – London Stone can be found online for free as part of Pantechnicon #9. Author Jennifer Williams has her blog here, and can be found on Twitter as sennydreadful.
100,000 words, and beyond!
Funnily enough, the 100,000 word mark – which I reached on Dark Heart sometime last week – didn’t feel like a big deal. 100,000 words is the intended final length, but with my buffer of 25,000 to get the story finished, it didn’t quite feel like the milestone I thought it would. So no matter, I kept on trucking, and the draft is now 113,138 words long. See, I even passed another 10k marker and didn’t even notice!
Dark Heart draft 1 is now in the final stages. I’ve just written the grand finale, where three plot strands come together for a big old fight, a difficult decision is taken, a sacrifice is made, the world is saved, and one major character dies.
Novels are all about character change – the heroes or heroines that enter the story at the beginning cannot be the same heroes or heroines that exit the story at the end. They must change, or there is no point in writing the story. That’s something I was very conscious of whenever I took a step back to check what I was writing against the plot I had designed. Did events have meaning for the characters? Do the characters change over the novel?
I think the answer has been ‘yes’ at every checkpoint. The finale itself was rather difficult to write, and as a single chapter of 7000 words I know it is way too long. I’ve been trying very hard not to worry about what I write, but even so, I can clearly see areas that need to be cut and tightened. I don’t think there will be any problems with reducing the text to 100,000 words when I’m done.
So what’s left? A closing chapter, then a coda, and then I need to go back and fill in those 1000 words that went missing when my backup failed, and add in the second chapter in the story of the Interregnum. It’s almost like the last piece in the puzzle, as it will link up the black sarcophagus buried outside the temple in Africa with the exiled kings of Europe, and the strange gentlemen who makes a rather surprising entrance in the final battle.
Getting close now!
