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 Writing
Friday
What? Friday already? Say it ain’t so… apologies for the lack of postage this week, it’s been busy. I might as well see if I can get a whole set of seven posts with a day of the week as the title, so welcome to Friday.
There’s not actually much to report on my front this week – my superhero novel Seven Wonders hit 102,000 words this morning. Although I’m not done, it was still a buzz to cross the 100k mark. I can remember when I did it with my first novel, Dark Heart. The feeling was rather exhilirating, because if nothing else I at least proved to myself that I could write a novel-length work of fiction. Dark Heart ended at about 124,000 words. I think Seven Wonders will be about the same, and I’ve given myself until next Monday to finish it up. Then I’ll print up a trade paperback on Lulu as a personal edit copy and stick it on the shelf for a few months while I take down the ominous black tome that is Dark Heart and get cracking on the second draft. That’s September taken care of. Then once Dark Heart is edited/redrafted, I’ll be starting its sequel in October. I honestly can’t wait to get started, not only because it’s a story I’ve had outlined and plotted for literally years, but because the title popped into my head a few weeks ago, and every time I say it, I positively tingle with anticipation. That title is Dreamweapon. You heard it here first, folks. Tell your friends, tell your family. And yes, it is the name of an album by Spacemen 3. Talent borrows, genius frickn’ steals.
My personal week may have been unremarkable, but not so in the world of teh awesome writers and publishers. Our FDO Scott Sigler, whom I interviewed for a special Writing Habits podcast episode the other week, is now busy signing, numbering, and shipping the initial batch of The Rookie from his secret Warehouse of Doom in San Francisco. The book looks terrific – check out Scott’s own personal unboxing video here. Incidentally, my interview with Scott can still be found on iTunes, and for those who have been asking for it, you can download the original mp3 of the podcast here.
The Rookie also represents the first book from Dark Overlord Media, a new venture officially launched by Scott and business partner A Kovacs. The full press release can be found here, but suffice to say, publishing will never be the same again.
Two words. “Kick” and “Ass”.
Thursday
It’s Thursday, that time of the week that (like Arthur Dent) I could never get the hang of, so I’ll keep it brief. I’ll even itemise things.
The Devil in Chains
Somebody added my 2008 novella to Good Reads (although apparently it doesn’t recognise the cover), and even reviewed it! I’m rather flattered, and quite frankly to have someone tell me that in one scene,
An ordinary exploration of an empty room suddenly becomes an exercise in exquisite grotesquerie.
… makes me all sorts of happy inside.
What also makes my head spin is a review in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet. This goes beyond flattery and into the surreal realms of honour. I think a w00t is called for. Thanks to Kate for her devotion to the cause!
Speaking of The Devil in Chains, I need to get cracking on reformatting the PDF properly for the Sony eBook reader. This website will also undergo a bit of a redesign when Seven Wonders is done, which will make it easier to keep track of projects and also easier for people to find stuff to read. For the moment, you can grab The Devil in Chains here as a PDF, or here as an eBook for the iPhone/iPod touch.
Seven Wonders
The book that never ends! Actually that sounds a bit harsh. The draft of this superhero novel is at about 95,000 words, and I’m slowly in-filling the middle bit. I’m giving myself to the end of August for this, and I think I’m on track. It’s actually a lot of fun writing about Tony and Jeannie and Sam and Joe and SMART, as not only do I know what happens to them at the end, I’ve already written it. Going back in time a few weeks and seeing what they were up to before everything went wrong is really interesting as a writer.
Master project list
Something else for the website is a proper tracker of projects, but I’ve yet to find the right funky progress bar widget. However, having discovered the wonder of VoodooPad (basically your own personal off-line wiki), I’ve started transferring dozens of separate documents of notes and ideas into one repository, which means I’ve also created a master index of novels, plotting out a sort of schedule well into 2010 and beyond. VoodooPad is a work of genius, and now joins Scrivener on my list of essential writing tools.
Which means nothing until I actually show you guys something, but it did surprise me (pleasantly, I should add), that I’ve got no fewer than 11 novels planned so far. Which is good, because to make it as a writer you need, firstly, to keep writing and writing and writing, and then when hopefully something is picked up, if you want to make a living out of it you have to be working on the next book, and then the next, and then the next.
So a list of 11 books is easy. It’s just a list and a few notes for each. Ideas are cheap and the imagination is limitless. Sitting down and writing is hard, but at least I know where I am aiming.
The end is the beginning is the end
Seven Wonders is finished.
Oh yes. The bad guy got what was coming, the good guys got what was coming. There was a meeting on the moon, there was an attack on the city. There was one mother of a finale, with the superheroes of the world uniting in high orbit to defend the planet against an alien attack. Exciting and action-packed, I hope.
Except it’s not finished. The final chapter has been written, the last sentence typed. The story is complete and plot threads resolved.
Except for the middle bit of the book, which I skipped.
Now, I had my reasons. Seven Wonders was pretty difficult to get started. Although I’m a fan of and familiar with the superhero genre, it’s a new one to write in for me, and getting it right is tricky. It has to be serious but not po-faced, with all the capes and spandex and X-ray vision of comics, but without descending into parody or silliness. I cracked it in the end, and the second half of Seven Wonders really took off.
But in order to make the jump and get things rolling, I had to call it quits on the earlier part of the book. I’ve called it “Act II” on Twitter, but really it’s the second half of Act I. There is a big transition to make between all of my characters making their independent discoveries at the beginning of the book, to the giant battles at the end. This bit is really integral, the whole reason for writing the book in the first place, the whole high concept thing. I stopped writing it because I didn’t know the characters well enough, and wasn’t happy with what they were doing. What I had written turned into a series of independent events with no apparent arc or theme. So I stopped, knowing that I would return at the end and add all this in. Now that I know what becomes of the characters in the story – sometimes diverging from my original outline by quite a margin – I can go back, plant the seeds, build the arc, and push everyone where they need to go. Aceness. Currently the manuscript is at 89,284 words, which gives me just over 10k to fill in.
And then I sat down to do some outlining of this Act I.5, and it’s so long I think I’m going to need, oh, 50k to fit it all on. Well, hot dang.
As with my first novel, Dark Heart, the target wordcount is 100,000, for various reasons I have mentioned in the past, but mainly because for a first novel from an unpublished author, 99.99%-recurring agents won’t touch anything longer. While this doesn’t influence my writing to a significant extent – a story is as long as it needs to be – it is something I try and keep track of. Dark Heart ended up as 126,000-something, which means it’ll need trimming in the second draft. The second draft that I’m supposed to be working on now, in August, while the completed vomit draft of Seven Wonders sits on the shelf in as fancy Lulu POD’ed trade paperback editing copy.
But it looks – maybe – that Seven Wonders is going to be longer, possibly much longer. Well, fine. The first draft is the first draft is the first draft. As Scott Sigler said (more on my interview with him later!), you’ve gotta get that clay on the wheel. So Seven Wonders is going to be a long one, and will need maybe another month to finish up.
What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, really, except I’m a list-maker and a box-checker, and had the rest of 2009 mapped out, writing-wise. Now that schedule is out by a month, which considering the glacial pace of writing and publishing in general, is nothing major. But one frustration is seeing steampunk increase in popularity almost daily, and I’ve got a cracking steampunk series that begins with Dark Heart, a novel that is in need of rewriting before I can even begin to think of shopping it around.
But that’s just me. Steampunk won’t go away. If anything, it’ll be even more popular in 2010, looking at forthcoming books, films and TV shows.
So what do I do? I write, and keep writing, and do my damnedest to make Seven Wonders completely awesome, even if it is 150,000 words long.
Time to put some new dates on the wall planner.
Sweet, sweet rejection, part 2: the next step!
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that my weird tale short story The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery had been rejected by Weird Tales. Them’s the breaks. Competition is tough, especially for a top-tier magazine like that.
So, what’s next? Well, I’d still like to sell it. I think it’s a good story, and that chances are other people might enjoy it.
But first and foremost, it needs another edit. Even though it went through a set of beta-readers, and was edited and polished and in pretty tip-top shape when I did the initial submission, it’s long. Too long. While there are plenty of markets that will take a story that’s somewhere in the 6-7,000 word range, the number of publications that would look at it expands exponentially as the word count drops. If I can get it to 6,000, suddenly I’ve got a lot more options. If I could somehow reduce it to 5,000, that opens a completely new avenue. But the important thing here is to be realistic. The story can’t just be hacked to meet a certain length. Since it was returned by Weird Tales I’ve only given it one reading pass, and have already identified changed and edits starting right on the first page. Knocking it back to just under 6k should be fine. Anything lower, and the structure and style will start to be affected. It’s verbose and old fashioned on purpose, and that style does require more words than something modern and sparse.
Once the draft is down to 6,000 words, the next step is to identify new markets to try. The short fiction market has been retracting since the 1950s, although the transfer of publications from print to the internet and even to podcasts now offers some intriguing possibilities. One of the hardest parts though is figuring out where to start.
There are several online resources that list fiction markets – some are less useful than others. There are a couple of gigantic lists which just show the title, which makes it fairly hard to judge content. My personal favourite is Fiction Factor, which provides a list of markets divided by genre, with brief descriptions of each title, and indication of pay range. For Thackery, I used this to cobble together a large list of potential submissions to investigate one by one.
Now, here’s the interesting thing. I don’t recall the exact number of markets – print magazines, online magazines and anthologies, and podcasts – but my list was pushing 100. That sounds huge, but immediately about half had to be discounted as they were not accepting any more submissions. Competition is fierce, slots are limited, and that 50% are backed up with slush piles for years to come.
The next largist group was magazines that actually aren’t in print. Despite the best efforts of the list makers, not every listing can be accurate or up to date. Some magazine websites haven’t been updated since 2001 (I’m quite serious). Some say that the next issue is coming in August (August 2006, that is). I emailed a few to see if they were still around – most emails bounced, some vanished into the ether.
So far, so good – all helping to whittle the list down to something manageable. Once I’d got it down to markets that were alive and kicking and were accepting submissions, it was time to start crossing off those that, really, I didn’t have a chance for.
That’s not to say I don’t have confidence in the story, but that when a magazine says they’ll take something of this sort, it really needs to be something quite, quite special. Take Asimov’s Science Fiction. This is a prestigious, quality, SF magazine. My story fits the guidelines. Looking at their back issues, they’ve published Lovecraftian weird fiction before. In fact, they’ve even published stories that are directly tied to the Cthulhu mythos (mine isn’t). However, all of them are by Very Big Names, and they’re all very short. This kind of fiction is an acquired taste, and they need to hook the reader with a writer they will recognise, and even then, it needs to be kept brief. Asimov’s is not the only market that fits this, so that’s another handful off the list.
This leaves me with about a half dozen markets – a few print magazines, a couple of online magazines, and a couple of podcasts. The podcast option is interesting, and once this story gets below that magic 6,000-word mark, I’ll be ready to start submitting.
But even then, even with a very short list of just a dozen submission options, I could be looking at a long wait. Nearly all of the markets I investigated do not accept simultaneous submissions – that is, they won’t accept anything sent to another magazine at the same time. Which is fair enough, because you could potentially have the situation where two magazines will accept the story at the same time, which will just be a real pain to try and sort out. But if you can’t do simultaneous submissions, and the response time for magazines is anything from 1-3 months, it can be a long, long wait just to receive a rejection so you can try the next one on the list. Fortunately, with novel-length fiction, this isn’t the case, as you can simultanously query as many agents as you want. But the short fiction business works differently.
My plan is to edit, and run through a few submissions. Hopefully someone will pick it up. Some other options in the back of my mind are to put it online for free, put it on the iTunes store as an eBook, or podcast it myself as an audiobook. But still, that’s a while off. My focus is novel-length fiction. Thackery is just a bit of fun, but it would be nice to see it in print!
Sweet, sweet rejection
My ears deceived me. I asked my guest to repeat his statement.
“Dogs,” the Reverend Tobias Thackery said. With a smile he bit into his cake.
Time to talk about that story that I haven’t talked about.
The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery was written over a couple of days back in May this year. My wife and I had just tripped down south for the Bristol Comic Con, and stayed at the surprisingly delightful seaside town of Portishead. I don’t know whether it was the sea air, or the slightly different atmosphere of a town that has no railway (well, I’m trying to find a pattern here), but over the two days I had a few images of a completely new story running through my head. In fact, I woke up one morning with the opening line fully formed, and spent the morning repeating it over and over as I sat at the comic con waiting for the main event (the DCU panel) to begin.
So despite working on a novel and having three reports to do for Comic Book Resources, as soon as we got back home, I had to get the story out. I’m not actually much of a fan of short stories – I find them near-impossible to write, and not so interesting to read, unless they are spectacularly good. But this was a rare occassion when I had a good and short idea, so I got it down.
Thackery – as we shall call it – turned out to be a 6,900 word Lovecraftesque weird tale. Given the initial idea – that humans are descended from dogs, not apes (which came from the sleeve notes a forgotten Pulp single from their mid-80s dark age, Dogs Are Everywhere) – I always knew it was going to be in the ‘weird’ category, and as I was immersed in a modern-day third-person novel (Seven Wonders), I took the opportunity to indulge my love of the pulp of Lovecraft and Bloch and write an antique first-person narrative.
Lovecraft and Bloch are my two favourite dead authors, and last year I managed to snag a collection of Bloch’s Cthulhu mythos story cycle, that normally goes for about £50, for just a couple of pounds. In fact, the book is so rare and expensive that Chaosium are reprinting it this year. I recommend picking it up, the collection is uniformly excellent, even though Bloch tears nearly all of the stories to shreds himself in the introduction. My favourite pieces are a roughly linked group that deal with refugees from Ancient Egypt establishing dark and terrible temples in the caves of Cornwall and Devon, where they continue to worship their unspeakably evil old gods. When it comes to weird pulp tales, that kind of juxtaposition is right up my alley. So I tied Thackery to this concept. In the story, our hero – a Victorian professor of paleontology – meets a strange old vicar with a funny idea, and travels down to the South-West of England to take a look at some remarkable evidence for himself. Cosmic horror ensues. There is a fair amount of blood involved.
Thus Thackery was done in two days. I shipped it out to my beta-readers, who came back with some very useful comments. All liked it (this is good). Some said it was too long (this is true). Some said a few bits needed some further explanation (this is fair enough). In one of those catch-22 situations which I’m sure a lot of writers find themselves in, I did manage to cut the words down by quite a bit, only to replace them with new sections expanding on a few points that some readers thought needed it. But it was done, and polished, and now I could stop worrying about it and get on the with novel.
Busy as I was I didn’t plan much in the way of selling the story. I decided to aim for the top first, and see what happened, so I sent it to Weird Tales, the very magazine that Lovecraft and Bloch wrote for more than 70 years ago. And then I waited, and waited, and got on with other writing.
Just last weekend – well within their specified response period, I should add, which was very impressive – I got a response from the magazine. It was a rejection – a form rejection, although a very well written one that made it slightly hard to tell, and I had to read it a dozen times before I saw that it was. I allowed myself one minute thirty seconds of devastation and depression, cursing my chosen profession, and deciding to pack it all in together and burn down my website.
Then I pulled myself together, and got back to writing. Note to other writers – this is how to do it. If I only ever give one piece of useful advice, it is this. Rejection feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to you, and it is at this point that I’m sure a vast proportion of budding writers just calls it quits at. But the key here is to accept it, just for that one minute thirty second period. Allow yourself to be angry, sad, and depressed. Swear and stomp around, and go outside and shout at a tree. Then forget about it, move on, and update your submission spreadsheet with the rejection and get back to working on your current project.
This was my first actual rejection, I should add, for a completed work. I had previous submitted novel proposals to a work-for-hire series, each of which consisted of the first chapter and a synopsis, and each of those were rejected. Each of those got a personal rejection, which was nice, along with a bit of advice, and also an indication that on two of the three proposals, I’d actually been in the very short list. These were still rejections, but they really were terrific news – the editor had read my proposals, liked them, seen merit and possibility, but I’d lost out to something better. But it did tell me that I was doing something right. Buried somewhere in those three story ideas was something worth working on. But they weren’t rejections on finished projects, just a 5000 word chapter and a 5000 word synopsis.
Weird Tales, in contrast, was a form rejecton. Is that “worse” than a personalised rejection? Well, yes, but the shory story market is both limited and highly competitive. That’s not to say the novel market isn’t either (and it is), but with the volume of material that the editor has to see, they just have no choice. And Weird Tales is top tier, it has that cache. My story wasn’t right for it this year.
These days, with everything done electronically, my first ever rejection slip only exists as an email. But I’m going to be traditional, and print it out, and I’m going to buy one of those receipt spikes. I’ll put it on my desk, next to my computer, and skewer the rejection from Weird Tales. Stephen King says that his rejection spike held a full ream of paper before he sold his first story. Looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do!
Seven frickin’ Wonders: Half freakin’ way
And in the nick of time too! Seven Wonders has crossed the magic 50,000 word mark (in fact it’s about 51,000-and-something even), and with a month to go, I can basically give myself a little personal NaNoWriMo challenge – 50,000 words in a month, or 1667 words a day. Right on target. And 50,000 words – half a novel – is nothing to be sneezed at. Seven Wonders is also about proving that Dark Heart wasn’t a fluke. It’s a milestone, no mistake. Sure, in ten years time I’ll look back and laugh at how wonderful I thought it was, but novels are big, long, scary, frequently heavy items. I’ve got 1.5 under my belt now. Top show.
I have to admit it’s also a relief to get Seven Wonders to this point. As I’ve alluded to in previous posts, I’ve found this novel to suffer from the “difficult second album” syndrome, but I’m starting to see this as a good thing. My next book is number two in the Dark Heart series, which is plotted, outlined, and sitting at the starting line with steam-powered engine revving. It’s going to be a good story, and I’m looking forward to writing it, and I’m glad that I hit the hump in Seven Wonders and not that one.
But that’s not to say Seven Wonders is suffering as a consequence, or is that annoying, must-get-it-done second novel that I’ll fling into a draw and forget about. Not at all. I knew from the beginning that it would be a challenge, and I deliberately made it so – the modern-day setting, the third-person narrative, these were conscious decisions made to ensure that Seven Wonders would be completely different in every way to Dark Heart - style, tone, setting, language, the works. Although I didn’t set out to construct an unclimeable mountain, or set impassable traps and roadblocks, I did begin with the intention that it was going to be a learning experience.
Like anything, writing requires practice. Having completed a novel in pseudo-Victorian first-person, I needed to write one in modern-day third-person, just to see what it was like, and whether or not this suited my personality. As it happens, I don’t think it does that much, but I’m making a damned good hash of it. Perservering out of my comfort zone is teaching me an awful lot about long-form fiction, which – given that I’m just a beginniner – is essential for me to improve my craft.
Which brings me to an important concept for all writers to remember: you are allowed to suck. The first draft is the vomit draft – it’s you typing out the story, transferring it from your head to the screen/paper before you forget it. Some bits will be great, some bits will be terrible. But the important thing is to get one word down after another until you reach the end. Then you can go back and fix it. Later. At the end. When you’re finished.
I’m trying to remind myself of this rule this week because while I’m hitting my daily target of 1667 words, for the past few days they’ve not been terribly good words. The story has reached a very crucial section where
Several Big and Important Things need to happen that change each and every one of the individual characters, effectively finishing Act II (most of which I haven’t really written yet) and leading into the final third.
It’s almost because the Several Big and Important Things are big and important that it has been very, very difficult to actually integrate them naturally into the story. First there was a big fight out on the streets of San Ventura between the superheroes and the supervillain. Then everyone went to the moon, and a couple of shocking secrets were revealed. There’s another fight (on the moon this time), and now the superheroes are retrospectively figuring out what went wrong, allowing them to return to the Earth and start Act III.
Which sounds great in the outline. And actually the outline is quite detailed at this point – this happens, that happens, X says that, Y realises this. But writing a story around it was surprisingly difficult. What has happened is that apart from the two big fights, the superheroes have basically sat around a table and discussed things very seriously for about a million pages, which is not only not particularly interesting, but at first glance seems to be the classic trap of plot exposition and info-dump. Take your protagonists, sit them down, and they’ll chinwag about the story for chapters without actually being involved in it.
Except – and here’s the problem – this is pretty much what the Seven Wonders would do anyway. They’re a committee of seven, they have big shiny conference rooms with 3D computer displays. Sitting down and talking about stuff while pretty graphics fly around is exactly their idea of fighting crime.
So what am I doing wrong? I’m worrying about the first draft, that’s what!
Yep, the last 3000 or so words will need reworking, probably significantly. But so what. All I need to do now is move everyone off the moon as quickly as possible (less chin-stroking around a conference table I think), and then on with the exciting Act III.
Panic averted. Carry on.
Superheroic writing plan and Seven Wonders progress report
Last week I did a bit of a mid-year assessment of my writing, comparing where I want to be with where I actually am, having a look at word counts and targets (daily, weekly, yearly), and sketching out not only writing work for the next six months, but looking ahead a little to see what projects I will have coming up well into 2010. It’s important for all writers – seasoned pros or enthusiastic amatuers – to set writing goals that are measurable and attainable, and it’s equally important to take stock at regular intervals to see what needs improving, and how the long-term writing plan needs adjusting. I even got a wall planner, wrote some dates and timelines on it, and stuck it to the wall next to my computer. It’s a good reference, and with a glance I can remind myself what I need to achieve this month, next month, before Christmas, etc.
For the moment, I have three main things on my mind. So for today, first on the list, is my superhero novel Seven Wonders.
Seven Wonders has a target of 100,000 words. I’ve just today hit 46,454. My own, self-imposed deadline for this is Friday 31st July, so I need to crank out about 2,000 words a day to get this first draft done.
Seven Wonders has been an interesting learning experience. I chose this as my second novel quite deliberately, as the modern-day third person style is very different to the pseudo-Victorian first person of my steampunk series. Writing is a continuous learning process, and having completed my first 100,000-word novel in one style and genre (Dark Heart), I needed to tackle a different genre and style to learn about that.
And it was hard work. I didn’t do a comprehensive outline either. Instead I wrote a list of 45 key events or plot points that I wanted to occur – most of them flow from one to the other, so arranging these ideas into a story order is relatively straight forward. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so really it’s just filling in the gaps and cementing the plot threads together.
What I soon discovered was that without a proper outline, I initially floundered a little. I found myself picking and choosing exciting moments from that list of 45, and writing those almost as self-contained vignettes. While each was satisfying in its own right, because I was skipping story chronology, I couldn’t quite visualise a cohesive narrative for the novel as a whole. Cue hair-tearing and table-thumping and declarations that writing is not for me and I should really be doing something else with my time.
Which, of course, is what every single writer thinks at some point or another. Looking back at Dark Heart, I had exactly the same feeling at almost exactly the same wordcount – that this was too hard, too big, too stupid, and 25,000 words really was enough of this nonsensical slog.
And again, as with Dark Heart, a few thousand words later it all seemed to snap into place. With Seven Wonders, it was when I picked a pivotal scene from that master list and wrote it, then an idea came to me and I wrote the next scene. Then the next, and the next. From here onwards I seem to be moving linearlly through the story, and I expect to continue to do so until I reach the end. This means that I’ll have the second quarter of the book to go back and write, but knowing how the land lies from words 50,000 to 100,000, it should be quite satifying to tie it up with some backstory and earlier events.
What I have I learnt so far from Seven Wonders? That writing is hard work, but it I can do it, and that throwing the computer out of the window after a few weeks of work is just a natural instinct best ignored.
According to my schedule, Seven Wonders will take me to the end of July. Following this, I have all of August pencilled in to edit and revise Dark Heart before I send it to my beta readers. If I can time it right, I should be in a good position to start querying agents with this – steampunk seems to be gaining (quite coincidentally) in popularity. Just this weekend, the latest issue of SFX magazine arrived with a big feature article on the genre, and there seemed to be a lot of interest generated by my guest posts at Babbling About Books.
But first things first. I have superheroes to torment and Californian cities to destroy. Someone has just betrayed the Seven Wonders, and the villain has met an untimely early death!
Superhero and steampunk round-up
I know I promised some info on Crescent Rising this week, but we’re actually busy rebuilding things as our secret planning site for that collaborative fiction universe got hacked and/or taken offline. Hopefully the database will be retrieveable, but in the meantime it’s about time I updated a couple of links.
Superheroes!
Last month I attended the Bristol Comic Expo, which featured DC Comics Senior Executive Editor Dan DiDio as guest of honour. They’ve dropped off the main site now, but I wrote three reports for major US comic site Comic Book Resources. Snag them here:
The DC Universe – Story plans and upcoming titles and events for 2009-2010.
DC Nation – The first and only time a DC Nation has been hosted outside the US. Great discussion and feedback session.
Gibbins & Higgins Talk Watchmen – including CG genitalia.
Steampunk!
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to write an essay on steampunk, and why I chose to write in this slightly unusual genre, for Babbling About Books, the website of New York-based blogger Kate Garrabrant. Kate split my rather long essay into three chunks (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), but I’m going to reproduce it here in full. I’ve also added in some extra detail about the various subdivisions of steampunk, which I had glossed over in the main piece and then went into when prompted by some reader comments on Kate’s blog.
I’ll put this on its own page, but in the meantime, sit back with your favourite brand of absinthe and afix your Gentlemen Reading Goggles at setting four!
Top Hats and Hellfire – The mystique of Steampunk
1. “So, what are you writing about?”
Cue the big grin, the far-away look, the deep breath the preceeds five minutes of non-stop exposition. Hand-waving optional but recommended. Because you’ve just asked a writer their favourite question.
Well, most writers, anyway. For Those Guys it’s easy. “Oh yeah, Jack is a cop, and he’s about to retire when his young niece goes missing…”, or “Well, it’s about a princess called Missy who lives in magic castle…”. Those Guys, they have it so easy. Ten minutes later, your eager audience is delighted and expresses good luck and best wishes for the project. If they’re related to you in some way, most likely an elderly aunt that you don’t really know that well, then expect excited promises to buy the book when (if!) it comes out.
But then there’s us. We’re not anything special, we’re just average Joe writers working hard at our craft, just like Those Guys. Thing is, to answer the question “So, what are you writing about?”, we need more than five minutes and a wistful gaze. This expedition needs provisions. Tea, coffee, cake. Anything with sugar or stimulants. Then that deep breath (we have the same requirement for oxygen as Those Guys), and we’re off.
“So, when Babbage designed his difference engine… you know Babbage? And the difference engine? Like a big clockwork computer. No, not 1972, 1822. No, I don’t know how it works either. Okay, so let’s skip that… so then Byron, riding a steam-powered brass horse, becomes Prime Minister… the poet, Byron? Yes, steam-powered. Like a robot. Star Wars? Erm, not quite. Steam-powered, yes. Okay, so going back a bit, you know the industrial revolution…?”
This goes on for some time. Eventually you’ve laid the foundation, explained the world, and you’re fairly sure Great Aunt Nelly has remembered that Faraday is a time-travelling action hero, even if she doesn’t quite know that he really discovered electromagnetism in the mid-19th century. And then you get the seal of approval: “Well, good luck with the writing! I can’t wait to buy it in a bookstore!”. My advice at this point is to just smile and drink your tea. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t actually got to the story yet, the bit you’re actually writing. Get used it. As a writer of steampunk, incomprehension and potted histories of Victorian railway engineering go with the territory like gaslight and brass goggles.
2. What is steampunk?
I should preface this by saying I’m not an expert on steampunk. Steampunk is a vast, complex subcultural phenomenon that spans literature, fashion, philosophy, comic books. And while I go misty eyed over the thought of top-hatted Victorian explorers travelling to the moon in coal-fired brass rocket, or Sherlock Holmes packing a clockwork raygun as he battles the Giant Rat of Sumatra, I’m not particularly interested in wearing Edwardian frockcoats over brass breastplates decorated with clock gears. True enough, I’m probably slightly too interested in the facial hair of King George V as is normally considered healthy, but I’m not a “steampunk”, if such a thing even exists or is an appropriate label. See, I really don’t know. Steampunk as a fashion statement and as a way of life is, I think, a related but somewhat distinct movement from steampunk as a science fiction/fantasy subgenre.
Responsibilty disclaimed. So, what is steampunk?
Steampunk itself can be broaded divided into two different sorts – ‘period’ steampunk, and ‘modern’ steampunk.
Period steampunk is set, usually, during the height of the Victorian era. Top hats and canes, gaslight and London fog, moustachioed adventurers unwrapping mummies in the British museum. Every kind of Victorian pulp cliché and imagery, with added supertechnology. And by supertechnology, I mean technology which more or less resembles the correct period, but is floating away into the realms of fantasy. Steam-powered robots, clockwork rayguns, giant calculating machines that think. All related to the fundamentals of the late Industrial Revolution – namely steam power. Period steampunk is a vision of that period of industrial revolution accelerated, advancing science and technology to fantastical reaches, allowing the Victorians to colonise Mars in coal-fired rockets, or the monarchy overthrown by a clockwork computer. These are just examples. It could also be something much better. /futurama
‘Modern’ steampunk, by contrast, is set in the present day or the future, and postulates that the steam tech of the 19th century never went away, that the 20th century developments of electricity and electronics never happened. Instead, we get a charactiture of Victorian life in the present day – people still wear top hats, gentlemen discuss matters of great import in their exclusive clubs, and detectives chase cut-throats through the gaslit streets. But computers are clockwork, intercontinental travel is via supersonic steam-powered zeppilin, and a night at the movies is brought to you by Mebberson’s Magic Lantern, That Wondrous and Fully Patented All-Purpose Aetheric Transference Visiscope to Delight and Thrill All-Ages.
Both are alternative versions of our Earth. One is about a superadvanced Victorian age, exploring how the wonderfully inventive and eclectic society of the 19th century would use such fantasic technology. The other is about modern or future age which, despite disappearing into a steam-powered technological dead end, has flourished, using steam and coal for outrageous and decidedly modern achievements.
However, to build up a more accurate picture of the possibilities of steampunk, I need to expand on this rather cut and dried definition, because, obviously, you can have steampunk elements in a book which isn’t steampunk, and likewise you can have a steampunk book that is nothing to do with Victorians and the Industrial Revolution.
For the first example, I’m currently reading Lamentation, by Ken Scholes, which is a rather good high fantasy novel. Except it includes steam-powered robots called mechanoservitors, which are programmed by engraved metal scrolls.
Does this make Lamentation a steampunk novel? No, I’d certainly be happy calling it high fantasy. But it’s a steampunk element – ie, a steam-powered, out-of-place piece of supertechnology.
The second example is something like Stephen Hunt’s Jackelian series, starting with The Court of the Air and following with The Kingdom Beyond The Waves and most recently The Rise of the Iron Moon. The world of his novels is Victorian-esque, and mixes magic and steampunk (complete with airships!) very effectively, but it’s not set in England, or even on the Earth, unless it is in parallel universe several times removed. Later books do hint at it being modern steampunk, but set in the far, far future after some calamity, but I don’t want to give anything away!
Interestingly, Stephen’s first novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, is actually a very good example of real period steampunk, where the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century are fought with wizardry and steam-powered supertechnology.
So, back to that that difficult question “So, what are you writing?”. While steampunk is growing in popularity, it’s still a fairly specialised subgenre, and unlike mainstream fiction or even science ficton and fantasy, it relies heavily on context and historical knowledge. Sure, it’s pulpy, that’s part of the charm, but it’s also literate and intelligent to a degree that perhaps other genres aren’t. For example, in my own steampunk novel, Dark Heart (modern steampunk, I should add), you really need to know that in our universe, Prince Albert died in 1861, not Queen Victoria. Once you realise that he’s still around in 2009 while Queen Victoria succumbed to typhoid in his place 148 years ago, you can start to see how real history can be adapted, twisted, and rewritten to present a new, alternate reality of brass and leather and steam.
3. What’s the appeal?
Ah, to ask the unanswerable. Why do some people like olives, and why do some people like Westerns. I suspect most fans of steampunk, the literary genre at least, feel nostalgic for an imaginary Golden Age that waxed and waned 150 years before their birth. An age where everything had it’s place, where formal headwear was required when out of doors, where men could smoke cigars and stroke their waxed moustaches (their own, I imagine, although I’m sure mutual beard-stroking is a niche market) and women could be frightfully brave and adventurous and yet still look hot in a bustle.
But clearly to be a fan of such a bizarre genre isn’t as strange as all that. Alan Moore, the greatest comic writer there has ever been, has gathered a huge following with the decidedly steampunk League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and super-gravitational science hero Tom Strong. Northern Lights – aka The Golden Compass – features airships and clockwork magic. Steampunk is in now like it never has been before. Of course, steampunk existed even in the Victorian age itself – Jules Verne and HG Wells, with their Captain Nemos and First Men in the Moon, were not only the first writers of science fiction, they were also the finest proponents of genuinely period steampunk.
And let’s face it, a man really should never be without a hat while outdoors. It’s just not seemly.
4. Writing steampunk
And here, dear reader, I must admit to a frank truth that may, if administered without due preparation and preface, be prone to cause such surprise and shock that certain jointed extremeities may with sudden impulse become quite weak, necessitating an immediate adoption of the reclined position and the furious fanning of whatever Popular Magazines may lie close to hand, preferably with the able skill of a personal friend.
Because, friend, writing steampunk is a damn good lark.
It’s not easy. If you want to sink right into the world, you pretty much need to hunker down in front of your keyboard and pretend you’re Sir Aurther Conan Doyle. You need to get the style, the wordage, of an era and style long since passed. If you can crack it without throwing your computer off the nearest convenient balcony, it’s a hoot.
Fun it may be, exhausting it most certainly is. My first official foray into steampunk was a novella, something like 26,000 words, called The Devil in Chains. I wrote it for the web zine Pantechnicon, and it was split into two parts and published in 2008-2009, and it’s also available as an eBook for the iPhone/iPod touch.
To give a practical demonstration of the difficulty in describing steampunk to an unknowing audience, here’s the blurb I finally came up with. This is approximately the 34th draft, give or take.
December 14th, 1861. Queen Victoria dies from typhoid fever. A distraught Prince Albert instigates a coup and takes direct control of the Empire. A patron of science, he steers the path of progress down a dark and dangerous road, antagonizing the forces of magic and the occult as he strives to bring his queen back from the other side. As the 21st century dawns, the world is trapped in a Victorian caricature, industry powered by sun and steam. And nearly 150 years since the death of his wife, Albert still fights to bring her back, his lifespan unnaturally extended with steam power and black arts.
When journalist Jackson Clarke is sent to the Isle of Man to investigate the tale of a talking animal, he unwittingly steps into a battle between mankind and an ancient evil imprisoned beneath the peaceful island. Charged with treason and cut off from the mainland, can Clarke defeat the Devil in Chains?
Gripping stuff, I hope you’ll agree. I actually wrote it almost as a trial run for my first steampunk novel, Dark Heart, which features the two main characters introduced in The Devil in Chains, now in partnership many years later as part of an occult-detective agency. In Dark Heart, the agency is sent by the British government to investigate a poltergeist outbreak in the West African jungle, where they uncover a buried voodoo god and a zombie army. Meanwhile, an explosion rips through the heart of London and a steam-powered serial killer stalks the streets.
Oh yeah, and an airship crashes into the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
See? Steampunk is fun! The pulpiness of it is part of the appeal, letting you play with clichés and familiar tropes, welding them together to form something quite, quite wonderful. Despite what appears to be a fairly rigid form, in many ways steampunk actually allows far more creative freedom that regular space-faring science fiction or even fantasy – the more outrageous the steampunk scenario, the more fun it is hammering in to the pseudo-Victorian framework. One of my current projects is a collaborative fictional universe, Cresent Rising, set in a single location, the mythical city of Fell Hold, and as part of that I’m writing a steampunk story set in an early period of the city’s history. The title started as a joke – Captain Carson and the Case of the Robot Zombie – but then I realised it was actually perfect. Fitting a plot around it was hard work, but immensely satisfying once all the pieces had been slotted together. And this is an example of that other-worldly steampunk – it’s not Victorian England, although it might be a parallel universe several times removed.
5. The future of steampunk
What’s next? Well, for me, getting that draft of Dark Heart ready to pitch to an agent, while plotting Captain Carson’s adventures in Fell Hold City. In the meantime, I’m writing a superhero novel called Seven Wonders – more as a break from the rigours of first-person Victoriana – but when that’s done, it’s on to Dark Heart II. And then III, and then IV. And then… well, you get the picture.
The popularity of steampunk and it’s various subcategories – Deiselpunk, Oilpunk, NeoEdwardian – is likely to come and go, just as with any genre. You must never write just to fit a trend, because by the time your book is out the trend will be long dead. But for fans and enthusiasts of brass and leather and steam and robots and airships and rockets and, well, anything that the extraordinary and unique Victorians could never had built in their wildest imaginings, there are fog-shrouded cities to explore, robotic murders to solve, and Venusian landscapes to visit with hot-air balloons. All with tophat and cane and a stiff upper lip.
And brass goggles. Don’t forget the goggles.
Writing inventory, June 2009
This blog is about writing. In fact, my life is about writing. So I’m going to talk more about it, in more detail. Sounds good. But first it’s about time to take a quick stock check to see what I’ve done so far, what I’m doing now, and what’s up next.
Current projects
Projects underway and being typed, if I manage to actually sit in front of my computer for long enough. Note to self: sit down and write.
Seven Wonders (superhero novel, 36,569/100,000 words (36.5%) - the main project is my second novel, Seven Wonders. It’s proving to be fairly difficult to concentrate on, but looking back at the writing process on my first novel, Dark Heart, I actually think I’m at about the same stage. It’s the one that all writers will be intimately familar with, where everything you write is the most godawful trash ever created, and that every single keystroke is the most appalling agony. You sit at the computer and sweat blood trying to work out what to say, and then when you’re done for the day you’ve convinced yourself that you really need to give this up and go work in a fast food chain. So just business as usual then.
Crescent Rising (collaborative fiction project, world building/plotting stage) - I haven’t talked about this yet, and it will be the subject of its own blog post this week. But to give you the brief, Crescent Rising is a collaborative universe set in and around Fell Hold City, split across different timezones. There’s six of us working on it, and it’s still in the early stages, but I’m co-coordinator for two of the four main time zones. This means developing a world bible for the zones, as well as plotting stories within the zone.
Completed projects
Written. Done. Dusted. Published or awaiting the second draft.
Dark Heart (steampunk novel, 118,750 words) - my magnus opus! Well, possibly not, but my first completed novel anyway. If nothing else it showed I could write at length and to style (and believe me, first-person pseudo-Victoriana from about six different PoVs was no walk in the park!). The final length needs to be 100,000 words, so it is currently sitting in draw maturing, and once I’m done with the first draft of Seven Wonders I’ll start the edit on it. Getting it to length should be pretty straightforward, I hope. Once the draft is polished, I’ll be sending it around a group of private readers for their critiques, and then once ship-shape and Bristol fashion it’ll be time to query agents!
The Devil in Chains (novella, 24,160 words) - Originally written for the eZine Pantechnicon, and now available as an eBook for the iPod touch/iPhone (and also a PDF), this steampunk tale started as a short story and grew, and grew, and grew. It’s a prequel to Dark Heart, although entirely self-contained, and features a Turk-head meerschaum pipe (among other things).
The Unpopular Opinion of Reverend Tobias Thackery (short story, 7143 words) - Again, something I haven’t mentioned much of. This is a weird tale written specifically for a magazine. I submitted it, and now I have to wait at least 12 weeks for a yes or no. More on this if and when I get a response!
Future projects
I’m a writer, I’m full of ideas. Which is lucky I guess – writer’s block has never affected me, and I have more ideas, notes, plots, concepts, etc, that I can record. So for future projects, I don’t mean a list of everything I can think of to write in the future, I mean projects that I have properly mapped out to at least some degree, ones that I can (and intend to) start writing immediately, when the current project I’m on finishes.
The Eleventh Hour (steampunk novel, part of the Dark Heart series) - This was actually plotted as something else, long ago, but I since realised it would fit the world of Clarke and Bellamy rather well. The plot needs some further adjustment to complete the transition, but other than that this is novel #3 for me.
The Dead Sands (YA novel, standalone) – I am actually in danger of forgetting what this is about. Each time I bring it to mind I find a bit of the plot has vanished, so I should really start taking some serious notes on it ASAP. It’s a modern day YA adventure, with a target wordcount of 80k. Think Children of the Stones meets Quatermass and the Pit. With added sand.
Captain Carson and the Case of the Robot Zombie (Crescent Rising Golden Age novella) - novella or long short story, I’m not sure. What I do know is that anything I write comes out way longer than expected! This is part of the collaborative city project I’ve mentioned above, and will be the first story set in Fell Hold’s ‘Golden Age’ period, which roughly corresponds to late Victorian England. It is – obviously – a magical steampunk fantasy, featuring a retired polar explorer, a steam-powered superhero, and a ship full of… well, I don’t want to give it away. More on this on Thursday. Work on this will actually start fairly soon, before Seven Wonders is finished, so time management will become crucial I suspect or neither will get finished.
And that’s it for now. I appear to have written 186,622 words in total so far. My target for this year was an ambitious 486,400 words, which I doubt I will hit. However, you never know! The aim for 2010 is 1 million words, or 2,739 words each and every single day.
Well, it’s good to have a dream, isn’t it!
The difficult second album
This is weird.
Back when I was writing my first novel, Dark Heart, I got about a third of the way through and started to panic. I was finding it hard to write in the pseudo-Victorian style, and as I’d decided to make it first person from about six different points of view it seemed like I was deliberately making it as difficult as possible. I considered stopping, and switching to my superhero story (now called Seven Wonders), which I thought would be much easier as it’s a modern-day, third-person book. Standard fare, easy to write.
Fortunately I saw good sense and kept on with Dark Heart, and shortly after my angst I found the natural pace of it and the whole thing took off. I was done in a couple of months, with 120,000-ish words done. That book was put in the draw to be worried about later this year.
Seven Wonders has reached about 20,000 words, and is completely horrible to write. This is my first full-length third-person novel, and I’m finding the style very, very dull. Sure, I’ve read plenty of great third-person books, and most people prefer it to first (and nobody uses second, unless the book is deliberately strange). But it’s boring to write, and boring to read back. Maybe I’m destined to write steampunk and alternate Victorian histories. Maybe superheroes, as much as I love them, are not for me, at least in prose form.
So now it occurs to me I’ve hit exactly the same point as I did in Dark Heart, where I have convinced myself it’s all worthless and that I’m better off switching to something else.
It feels worse this time, but then I’m probably just saying that. I’m sure the Dark Heart roadblock was just as bad. And the thing is I need to get my writing habits down pat, which means finishing this 100,000 word novel so I can get on to the next one. If I allow myself to stop a book mid-flow once, I’ll let myself do it twice, three times, etc. By the year’s end I’ll have written half a million words and have four abandoned novels.
The problem, I suppose, is that I’m worrying about what I write. There are two things I need to remind myself of.
One, the first draft is going to be cack. This is the vomit draft, the type anything draft, the get the story down on paper so you don’t forget the plot draft. This is about typing 100,000 words, one after another, until I reach the end. Nobody will ever read this draft. Which brings me to:
Two, any and all problems in the first draft will be fixed in the rewrite. So I write a page of the worst prose ever produced by a human being. So what? When it comes to draft two, I’ll spot it a mile off and will rewrite it until it’s good. Easy.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. If I can fool my conscious mind into believing those two facts, perhaps my subconscious will do the work for me and will get the remaining 80,000 words down. And the quicker I get those words down, the quicker I can file this away as novel number 2, and get on with the third. Novel 1 was an achievement; novel 2 will show me that it wasn’t a fluke.
Ok, problem solved. Thanks for listening!
