Word Count Update: 7/20
I didn’t quite make my goal today, but I only missed it by under 900 words. I figure they 400ish I wrote past my goal a few days ago and the extra hundred or so I routinely pile on top of my 2,000 word goal when I do hit it makes up for the slip. I still need to try to get to 2,000 words every day, but sometimes a day can really take it out of you.
Not a ton to say today, really, but I am happy to say that my book’s getting its own voice and the characters are forming up and becoming human. The book is changing every day from what my outline says it should be focusing on, but I think I like the way it’s going. I was able to add in a main character that I previously thought I was going to have to lose from the book, the character I could see spinning off into a series of short stories or subsequent novels if I get ambitious about it…though I know I need to focus on finishing this novel and not caring about the further adventures of my characters.
OK, I said there wasn’t a ton, so, that’s it!
Word Count Update: 7/19
I’m going to level with everyone here. I haven’t had a job in over three months and it’s really starting to get to me. The money’s drying up and I’m getting incredibly depressed as every resume I send out isn’t getting any sort of reply. Because of this, some would say I’ve gone to a dark place. Damn right I have.
Today was pretty bad in terms of depression, so getting myself in front of the keyboard seemed like it should have been the furthest thing from my mind…occupying my time with moaning and laying in bed wondering how bad things would get seems to be the normal course of events. But no, I got to my computer, fired up Q10 and started to write.
Maybe it helps that the scene I was writing deals with the death of a character, a death that sets the whole book in motion. The stuff I wrote tonight was dark, grim, bleak…and completely fit the scene. I channeled my angst and depression into my characters and put them through hell, making them feel horrible and distraught like I was feeling at the time.
And it worked.
I easily cleared my 2,000 words, though it took me a little bit longer this time, and I think that what I came up with was one of the strongest parts of the book. Now I’m not suggesting getting depressed, pouring yourself a double rum and coke and hitting the keyboard (even though that’s exactly what I did), but instead I would say that if you’re writing something that has a hard, bleak edge to it, try to channel all the things that get you down into your writing. It’s cathartic for you, as you have a sandbox to wound, damage and destroy whatever you like inside the world of your book with no danger to yourself or anyone around you.
At this point I’m spent, though…as cathartic as writing through my depression was, it wiped me out. Until tomorrow…
Review: Cold Caller
My first exposure to Jason Starr was in the first or second Hard Case Crime book I read, Bust, the first in a trilogy he wrote with Ken Bruen. Bust was deleriously fun, filled with utterly unlikeable characters doing terrible things to each other, with nobody coming away with their lives even beginning to resemble what they were when the book began.
Since reading Bust was so enjoyable, I decided to give Jason Starr a try. Needless to say, he pulled me in like a mugger shooting his hand out from a dark alley to bring me into his world. I was hooked. I could review all of his other books in this post, almost all of which were great, some better than the others but all of them well worth the price of admission, but today I’ll focus on his 1997 debut novel, Cold Caller
Cold Caller focuses on the life of Bill Moss, a guy who at one time had his life cut out for him, with a top level job at a high powered ad agency. Of course, Starr doesn’t write stories about people who have their lives cut out for them, so naturally the book starts with Bill at his absolute lowest point: he’s about to get fired from a shitty part-time telemarketing job for being a few minutes late. Bill’s life is further drawn down by an increasingly volatile relationship with his long-time girlfriend, Julie.
The book itself is a slow burn for the first hundred or so pages, but Starr drops in bits and pieces of intrigue about Bill’s job and turmoil in he and Julie’s relationship to keep a good head of steam going through the first half. But even though the book describes itself as a “White-Collar Noir” on its cover, the noir elements don’t start creeping in until the second half of the book. In fact, if Bill didn’t make one very important decision at the halfway point, the decision that quickly snaps the book into dreadfully noir territory, Cold Caller could have been a pointless, bland ruminations on office life in the late 1990s, a book that would have been forgotten quickly and sent to the bargain bins within months. So if you’re reading the book, and you’re at page 90 or so, and you’re wondering “when the hell is something going to happen?” Just wait.
Although some people might find the first half of the book slow, I feel that it was necessary to show Bill being taken on a roller coaster in both his job and his relationship with Julie, tracking through the highs and lows as he alternately gets promotions and verges on the edge of unemployment at the telemarketing center, and as he goes between being madly in love with Julie to resorting to watching an overweight stripper in a peep show booth. Showing Bill’s life fly from one side of the spectrum to the other makes the second half of the book possible, as Bill does something that ensures his life will be a living hell from that point on (I won’t spoil what he does, even though the book jacket explicitly lays it out for you, which I think is a bad move on the publisher’s part).
The ending of the book pays off, though, with Bill going to extremes to cover up his actions while simultaneously growing more and more delusional about his stance in the world and that his future will bring. Once the book comes to its conclusion, Bill has certainly gone through some major changes in his life, most of the changes for the worse. Unlike most of Starr’s subsequent novels, though, Bill actually ends up on sort of a fucked-up high note, though the last page shows that the darkness that permeated the last half of the book won’t ever go away from Bill Moss’ life
From a pure writing standpoint, it’s pretty obvious that this is a first novel, and the frays in Starr’s prose are visible throughout the book. He tends to use exclamation points a lot, probably twenty or so times in the narration, which just smacks of immaturity. Having exclamation points in the narration would be OK if the narrator was a 14 year old girl, but the exclamation points are a betrayal to Moss’ voice and take you out of the story as you try to understand why the exclamation point was needed. It’s off-putting, but Starr thankfully wised up and hasn’t done it since.
Overall, I would recommend reading this book, if not to just see how much Starr has improved as a writer in the intervening twelve years. Even though his debut has some rough edges, you can see the birth of a great writer in this book. From here I would go on to what I consider his best book, Twisted City, but you can’t really go wrong with anything by Jason Starr.
Rating:
3.5/5
Word Count Update: 7/18
To contrast with yesterday’s utter failure, I actually exceeded my word quota for the day, breezing through 2,400 words in a little over an hour and a half. I could have written a lot more, probably cracking the 3,000 or even 4,000 word mark, but I wanted to stop at a place where I could pick it up tomorrow with some momentum. Stopping in a place where you know you can keep going is really difficult, but I think it helps build the habit of writing every day no matter what. If you can’t help but to get back to your computer next day to polish off the end of your cliffhanger, you’re more likely to linger around and bang out some of the more slow-paced (boring, maybe?) portions of the exposition or rising action. I think if you end at the end of something, you’re left the next day with pretty much nothing, staring at the blank page without a thought in your head, which is one of the most terrifying things a writer can experience. But, if you leave your writing while you’re in the heat of the moment, you can plow through a ton more and get a lot more work done. It’s sort of the writing equivalent of tantric sex…without, you know, the sex part…just the whole thing about reserving your energy to make the whole experience enjoyable and energetic, that’s what I’m getting at. Oh, whatever, it’s late and I reserve my good material for the books anyway…
My plot problems with the novel were also solved today, as I added an entirely new main character to the story. He’s the character I had to initially cut out of the book because I thought I needed to focus more on the two protagonists, but I feel that adding him back in fills the book out very nicely and allows me to move things forward at a better clip (if all of this sounds like I’m being tight-lipped about things, I assure you it’s not because I’m fearing that somebody will steal my ideas…there hasn’t been an original idea in literature in a little over 3,000 years, it’s just that I don’t want to sit here and blather about a book that’s still in progress and ruin it for anyone who’d like to read the finished product)
I finished Jason Starr’s Cold Caller today, also. It’s certainly not his best work, that honor for me still goes to Twisted City, the first book of his I read, but it was still a grim trip to absolute hell with a protagonist that I alternately loved and hated. I’ll post a full review tomorrow to get into some more detail about what I liked and didn’t like.
Word Count Update: 7/17
Noooooo!!!!!!
I totally mishandled today and therefore blew my word count goal by about 1,700 words. It was a combination of just general procrastination, taking some time with my wife to watch a movie (A Simple Plan, which was really amazing by the way), and then nausea from dinner to cap things off. All in all, it really sucks and I have nobody to blame but myself.
I think another reason that I missed my wordcount today is I feel that my novel is sort of running off ahead of me in a direction I’m not sure I want it to. My original outline is staring me down and saying “You’re headed down the wrong road…you’re lost and of course you’re not going to ask me for directions.” Call it a crisis of conscience, call it what you will, but my book is starting to show signs of health problems.
My characters are saying things they don’t need to say, I’m finding myself writing out situations that I have no honest explanation for as to why they’re in the novel, and I’m just all together breaking down with this thing.
Tomorrow will be occupied with trying to wrest this thing back onto the right course, because I’m terrified that the book will degenerate itself into a lifeless blob that I can’t do anything with. I need to whip characters back into shape, get my plot points straight, and just beat the shit out of the novel until it’s where I want it to be. I’ll try my best to make up for the 1,700 lost words tomorrow, as well.
Wish me some luck, because I need it!
Word Count Update: 7/16
I hit my quota tonight again…but at this point I’m too tired to write up anything about it. Sorry, maybe more tomorrow.
Instead of my usual recounting of what I did, I’ll leave you with this for no particular reason other than it’s quite possibly my favorite movie of all time:
Now Free: My story “The Cleanup”
So, it looks like nobody on the Amazon Kindle marketplace found it in their hearts to buy my short story “The Cleanup” for the low, low price of $0.99. I understand, I’m not upset…if I could do it, I would have just given it away to everyone for free on the Kindle, but Amazon doesn’t allow you to set the price of a work at $0.00, as far as I can tell. But this post isn’t just about me complaining that nobody bought my story, even though I could complain about it for a while.
The failure of “The Cleanup” on the Kindle store is your gain, my readers. Since nobody would buy the thing, I decided to just give it away, in a nice little PDF that should work well for just about anybody. I do have a couple of stipulations about giving this tale away, though:
1) Link it on your site/blogroll/twitter as much as you’d like to. I love free publicity. I’d love it if you’d send your readers directly to my site, though, instead of just dropping the file onto your site, even if you attribute it to me
2) If you really like it, or even really hate it, leave me a comment on this page. I’m a beginning crime writer and I’m still learning the ropes of everything, so there will be rough spots, and I’d appreciate if anyone with more (or less) experience in writing this kind of stuff could give me some pointers.
3) The story is licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works. This means you can do whatever you want to the story: make a short film of it, draw up a comic book based on it, or stage it as a play in your living room…anything. Do whatever you want with it…and if you do, I’d love to hear what you did with it, and chances are I’ll post whatever you do on this page and give you a little bit of free publicity.
Alright, with all that out of the way, I present to you: The Cleanup
The Cleanup by Sean May is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Word Count Update: 7/15
I got through another 2,000ish words today. I’m getting into the rythym of doing this as a habit, and I think it’s really going to pay off. I have a lot of things I want to mess with in this novel, and I think my biggest challenge will be to focus in on what I really need to say and what can be cut without much harm. I have a character that I really, really like and want to write 500 novels about, but I might have to just rip him from the book alltogether, because he might just not fit. Such is the life of a writer, I guess. Kill your darlings and all that.
Alright, well, short post tonight…I’m tired and I have a novel waiting to be read sitting next to me (Jason Starr’s Cold Caller, if anyone is interested).
Word Count update: 7/14
It was a tough task, especially since I didn’t get started with writing until about 11:30 (damn All-Star game), but I met my 2,000 word quota for the day. I think I’m liking what I’m writing right now, and at this point I don’t really know if I’ll miss those words I lost in the beginning. I see it more as a false start, but even in a false start you just have to pick yourself up, put your feet back on the starting blocks, and go for it again.
I had a hard time with motivation for writing tonight as well. Some nights I just really don’t want to sit down at the computer and pound out the words. But I am pretty firm in my belief that one of the major things that separates real writers from the forever aspiring ones is that a real writer will sit down every day, regardless of mood, ignoring what time it is, and they’ll just write something, anything. It’s all about showing up for the job. You can’t wait until the muse reaches down from on high and kisses your forehead, you need to sit down in your chair and write your fucking stories, because that muse, if it even exists, only comes down every once in a while, so if you only write when the moment strikes you…well, have fun with that half-finished manuscript you stuff in the bottom of your desk and never finish. I’ll be the one at my computer, mad as hell that I’m forcing myself to write, but at the end of the day I’ll have something to show for it.
The best laid plans, destroyed
So, more than a few things sort of crashed into each other today to mean that my Novel in 30 Days has hit a major setback. Some of the stuff I can’t really talk about, but the main thing that set me back was that for some reason the words I put into the book yesterday, about 2,500, weren’t saved while using Focuswriter (you can find it here but I wouldn’t suggest it). The entire prologue of the novel was lost completely, and so I’m back to staring at the blank page, armed with nothing but my outline to guide me.
I can’t use Microsoft Word to write anything long-form, because I’m way too easily distracted by seeing things other than my story on the screen. I’ve toyed around with more than a few full-screen word processors, but today I think I may have found my favorite: Q10. Q10 is a nice, stripped down fullscreen word processor with cool little features like alarms for timed writing as well as multiple word counters. What can I say, I’m a total word count fiend, and I love to look at my daily word count progress, sometimes to a fault, but I still like seeing the numbers rise and rise as I keep the pages coming. Maybe I need to be more focused on writing and less on stupid statistics, but there’s just something about me that likes to rifle through every stat I can gather about my writing.
Anyway, the Novel in 30 Days begins tomorrow (actually today as I write this), so my target date for finishing the first draft will be August 12th, 30 days from July 14th. I’ll be posting my progress once again, and as you can see here I’ll probably do a good amount of complaining about things that go wrong. But, I think I’ll have more things go right for me than wrong, and I will finish the first draft of the book within my 30 days.