In keeping with the theme of the last few posts, I scoured the hard drive of my old computer for one more example of my earlier writing. Unlike the last two snippets from my failed high school and college novels, which were selected more or less at random from the old files, I went looking for today's clip. It took a while, but eventually I found it.
What follows here are the first few lines of the very first draft of what became "The Lucifer Messiah" -- in other words, the first draft of the first book I was able to get someone to pay me for. It was written while I was in law school, maybe 1999 or 2000.
In my humble opinion, it was better than the stuff I put up here in the previous two posts (you can judge that for yourself.) But it still wasn't good. The following clip went through literally dozens of revisions before I settled on the opening lines of the book, sometime in 2005.
**************************
Flickering pools of light washed across the alley; rude, but momentary intrusions upon the shadows that were strewn like rubbish across the urban filth. For an instant, the hairless tail of a rodent slithered into view, and then just as quickly it slipped back into the rotting debris, and the gloom. A dented tin can similarly rattled along the slime, its path briefly revealed before it too clattered back into the stinking dim.
Just above the gutter level, though not more than a few feet higher than the rats and the rubbish, the milky, shifting lights crossed over a cloud of steam. The warm vapor glistened in the cold light, but only for a silent, aborted second. A rustle followed, rough cloth against concrete, the muted sound of a movement that was meant to have been concealed.
The shuffle of worn-out soles came next, and then the heavy noise of a man's breathing mixed with the crashing sound of a toppled trashcan.
The street-lamps cast their aura more evenly at the mouth of the alleyway, and it was there, for a moment, that a man fell quite accidentally into their harsh gleam. His face was hidden by a felt hat, sodden with sweat or perhaps something more foul, and his body was likewise obscured by the tattered folds of what could once have been an expensive overcoat.
Hardly a moment passed before he scrambled to his feet, and leaped back into the darkness.
*****************************
I hope that these three posts show that writing takes time, and that it takes time to become a writer (a published writer, at least.) It doesn't happen overnight, and Christopher Paolini notwithstanding, it usually doesn't happen when you're in your teens, or (China Mieville notwithstanding) even your twenties. Becoming good at it is a process that takes years. It's frustrating. It's slow and it can seem like a futile effort. Very few people can pick it up right off the bat. The rest of us have to work at it.
So why do it? Not for the money, because I haven't made much of that, and my prospects for future earnings aren't much brighter. You do it because you have to, because you can't quite imagine what life would be like, how your day would be structured, if you didn't do it. Because you really don't understand how the rest of the world goes through their day without doing it, and you probably never will. That's what kept me going from that first, atrocious book when I was 15 to the first book deal when I was 33. Just keep at it.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
You Have to Start Somewhere Part II
The last post contained a snippet from the first novel I ever tried to write. It's probably one of the best passages in that atrocious mess, but it's still pretty bad. I wrote it when I was about 15 years old. In those days I was working on pure exuberance. Some grammar school English composition classes and a year or so of high school represented the sum total of my formal study in the art of writing. Needless to say, I was unpolished. I was wordy, undisciplined and convinced that the best writing was overflowing with adjectives and adverbs. I was also reading a fair amount of pulp fiction and comic books, which only reinforced all of those wrong ideas and bad habits.
Once I got to college, as a journalism major at first, my wrong-headed ideas suffered a serious smack-down at that hands of one professor after another. My ego took a beating, but my writing got better. After a while, I realized that my first attempt at a novel was so bad that it simply couldn't be saved. It had to be abandoned.
It wasn't long though, before I dusted myself off and tried again. The result was something I called "The Curse of the Warlock." It was still an attempt at a Lord of the Rings-style epic, and was still heavily influenced by Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Barbarian, only now blended with H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.
And it was still pretty bad. Better than what I wrote when I was in high school, but still not publishable -- although I tried, over and over again until I eventually came to the realization that my second novel was also destined for the scrap heap.
So here is my second "clip" -- a fragment of a chapter that I wrote sometime around the mid-90s, just after I graduated from college.
*******************************************************
Slick condensation slowly dripped from the top of the cold granite window frame, carried away in the cool breeze. Gray-white haze hovered like a lingering spectre over the royal port city of Thudaal as the faint lapping of waves on the nearby shoreline soothed the city to sleep.
The icy glow of the double crescent moons cast little light upon the slumbering metropolis as the faint sound of beating wings became barely audible. Through the thick haze, roaming atop the marble towers, a dark, solitary figure floated menacingly. A silent predator hunted for his kill....
...Then, swooping again like a bat from the shadow, Kha'Ralost plunged his sharp nails into two of the guards, heaving them across the room. Their larynxes dropped to the sticky wet floor as the Warlock turned his hell-red eyes to another. The blade landed hard on Kha's iron gauntlet and a spear deflected harmlessly away from his chest. The wielders of the weapons were quickly dispatched by the ferocious Wraith, his fangs tearing mercilessly into a crushed skull.
******************************************************
As I pointed out the other day, even Ed Wood recognized that the trick with writing is to just keep plugging away. You might not be good at it when you start (and it's probably better for you if you don't realize just how bad you really are at that point, but that's another story) but if you keep it up, you will get better.
The snippet above is better than what I wrote when I was 15, but even then, at about 22 or 23, it was still far from good. But I wasn't about to quit.
Once I got to college, as a journalism major at first, my wrong-headed ideas suffered a serious smack-down at that hands of one professor after another. My ego took a beating, but my writing got better. After a while, I realized that my first attempt at a novel was so bad that it simply couldn't be saved. It had to be abandoned.
It wasn't long though, before I dusted myself off and tried again. The result was something I called "The Curse of the Warlock." It was still an attempt at a Lord of the Rings-style epic, and was still heavily influenced by Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Barbarian, only now blended with H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker.
And it was still pretty bad. Better than what I wrote when I was in high school, but still not publishable -- although I tried, over and over again until I eventually came to the realization that my second novel was also destined for the scrap heap.
So here is my second "clip" -- a fragment of a chapter that I wrote sometime around the mid-90s, just after I graduated from college.
*******************************************************
Slick condensation slowly dripped from the top of the cold granite window frame, carried away in the cool breeze. Gray-white haze hovered like a lingering spectre over the royal port city of Thudaal as the faint lapping of waves on the nearby shoreline soothed the city to sleep.
The icy glow of the double crescent moons cast little light upon the slumbering metropolis as the faint sound of beating wings became barely audible. Through the thick haze, roaming atop the marble towers, a dark, solitary figure floated menacingly. A silent predator hunted for his kill....
...Then, swooping again like a bat from the shadow, Kha'Ralost plunged his sharp nails into two of the guards, heaving them across the room. Their larynxes dropped to the sticky wet floor as the Warlock turned his hell-red eyes to another. The blade landed hard on Kha's iron gauntlet and a spear deflected harmlessly away from his chest. The wielders of the weapons were quickly dispatched by the ferocious Wraith, his fangs tearing mercilessly into a crushed skull.
******************************************************
As I pointed out the other day, even Ed Wood recognized that the trick with writing is to just keep plugging away. You might not be good at it when you start (and it's probably better for you if you don't realize just how bad you really are at that point, but that's another story) but if you keep it up, you will get better.
The snippet above is better than what I wrote when I was 15, but even then, at about 22 or 23, it was still far from good. But I wasn't about to quit.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
You Have to Start Somewhere
I was organizing some files today and I found a bunch of old floppy disks that I hadn't touched in years. After I hooked up a portable floppy drive to my laptop I popped a few of them in. Oh, the memories. These things are upwards of seventeen years old, and contain things I wrote when I was in college.
Most of them are school-related, term papers and scripts for short films and things like that. They're all awful. Reading them now I wonder how I ever passed anything in college. But those aren't even the worst things I discovered. There are other, older files on some of the disks. Files I remember writing, but I didn't actually remember. These are the chapters of the first book I ever tried to write. It was an attempt at a fantasy novel in the Lord of the Rings style, heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The documents were last saved on the disks I found in mid 1990, probably around the time I moved to Boston, but they were written years before that, beginning around 1987.
So what was my writing like 21 years ago?
Pretty freaking terrible.
What follows here is a pretty random selection. None of it is any better, and some of what I read was -- to my horror -- much, much worse. So why post it? To prove a point. It doesn't really matter if you're any good at it. If you want to write, just write. And keep writing. Even if you're awful, don't quit. Keep it up. Eventually you will get better. I promise.
So here it is, a never-before seen (and never to be seen again) excerpt from my truly awful first novel, The War of the Empires (a title I stole, by the way, from an episode of the British Sci-fi series The Tomorrow People):
The inside of the throne room was a beautiful polished ivory-white walled chamber similar to the stairs outside, it was decorated with sparkling jewels of immense size from all over Arulai many of them dating back to the time of Polarian. At the huge wall directly opposite from the huge double wooden doors that led into the room there sat an old wrinkled man with long snow white hair that glistened in the golden sunlight and a beard that stretched all the way down to his lap. He was clothed in elaborate jewelry and expensive white robes with a ruby studded golden crown that bore the emblem of a golden Phytor, a majestic bird twenty times the size of a man which lived in flocks in the forest lands of the far off Penninsula of Sithrica. The phytor had it's wings spread as if it was in flight while its scarlet ruby eyes gleamed like twin crimson stars amid a sky of gold.
Ed Wood, one of the worst and one of the most memorable writer/directors of all time once wrote "...just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
Poor old Ed didn't get much right, but he nailed that one.
Most of them are school-related, term papers and scripts for short films and things like that. They're all awful. Reading them now I wonder how I ever passed anything in college. But those aren't even the worst things I discovered. There are other, older files on some of the disks. Files I remember writing, but I didn't actually remember. These are the chapters of the first book I ever tried to write. It was an attempt at a fantasy novel in the Lord of the Rings style, heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. The documents were last saved on the disks I found in mid 1990, probably around the time I moved to Boston, but they were written years before that, beginning around 1987.
So what was my writing like 21 years ago?
Pretty freaking terrible.
What follows here is a pretty random selection. None of it is any better, and some of what I read was -- to my horror -- much, much worse. So why post it? To prove a point. It doesn't really matter if you're any good at it. If you want to write, just write. And keep writing. Even if you're awful, don't quit. Keep it up. Eventually you will get better. I promise.
So here it is, a never-before seen (and never to be seen again) excerpt from my truly awful first novel, The War of the Empires (a title I stole, by the way, from an episode of the British Sci-fi series The Tomorrow People):
The inside of the throne room was a beautiful polished ivory-white walled chamber similar to the stairs outside, it was decorated with sparkling jewels of immense size from all over Arulai many of them dating back to the time of Polarian. At the huge wall directly opposite from the huge double wooden doors that led into the room there sat an old wrinkled man with long snow white hair that glistened in the golden sunlight and a beard that stretched all the way down to his lap. He was clothed in elaborate jewelry and expensive white robes with a ruby studded golden crown that bore the emblem of a golden Phytor, a majestic bird twenty times the size of a man which lived in flocks in the forest lands of the far off Penninsula of Sithrica. The phytor had it's wings spread as if it was in flight while its scarlet ruby eyes gleamed like twin crimson stars amid a sky of gold.
Ed Wood, one of the worst and one of the most memorable writer/directors of all time once wrote "...just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
Poor old Ed didn't get much right, but he nailed that one.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Dear Reader
I just found out yesterday that "The Lucifer Messiah" has been selected for the Dear Reader Online Book Club. If you're unfamiliar with it (as I was) Dearreader.com is a new idea in book clubs (at least to me.)
It's actually a number of clubs, Romance, Science Fiction, Horror, etc. One book is selected every two weeks, and during that time the club emails members with short snippets of the book, maybe a few pages at a time. Over the course of a week or so, the daily emails usually add up to the first few chapters. At that point, if the reader decides that he or she is enjoying what they've read, they can go out and buy the book or click on a link to amazon to have it delivered to them. If they don't like it, they can just quit there.
It sounds like a good idea to me, and I'm thrilled that after a year and a half people are still reading the thing. Hopefully at least some of the folks who get these emails will run out and pick up the book, and maybe pop in here for a visit.
It's actually a number of clubs, Romance, Science Fiction, Horror, etc. One book is selected every two weeks, and during that time the club emails members with short snippets of the book, maybe a few pages at a time. Over the course of a week or so, the daily emails usually add up to the first few chapters. At that point, if the reader decides that he or she is enjoying what they've read, they can go out and buy the book or click on a link to amazon to have it delivered to them. If they don't like it, they can just quit there.
It sounds like a good idea to me, and I'm thrilled that after a year and a half people are still reading the thing. Hopefully at least some of the folks who get these emails will run out and pick up the book, and maybe pop in here for a visit.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Serpico
The Sidney Lumet film "Serpico" has been making the cable rounds lately. Until this week I hadn't seen it for several years. Over the last few days or so, I kept picking it up on HBO somewhere in the middle, before I finally happened to catch it at the beginning.
If you're like me, and you saw it years ago, or maybe read the Peter Maas book, it's worth watching again.
Frank Serpico would be one of my favorite film characters of all time -- a hippie, non-conformist cop, a civil libertarian law enforcement officer, a man of refined tastes in art and music who made his living for years working in the gutters of NYC -- the sort of man who seems to embody contradiction and yet seems so perfectly adjusted. He would be one of my favorite characters except for the fact that he's very real.
Every time I watch this movie, I feel a little ashamed. How he managed to stand on principle, for as long as he did, taking the kinds of risks that he did, is just amazing to me. Especially because I'm pretty sure that if I were put in his shoes, I wouldn't be able to do it myself.
Apparently Al Pacino asked him once, when he was preparing to play him, just exactly why Serpico did what he did. Why did he risk everything, literally risk his life, to preserve his integrity?
His answer?
"Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?"
If you're like me, and you saw it years ago, or maybe read the Peter Maas book, it's worth watching again.
Frank Serpico would be one of my favorite film characters of all time -- a hippie, non-conformist cop, a civil libertarian law enforcement officer, a man of refined tastes in art and music who made his living for years working in the gutters of NYC -- the sort of man who seems to embody contradiction and yet seems so perfectly adjusted. He would be one of my favorite characters except for the fact that he's very real.
Every time I watch this movie, I feel a little ashamed. How he managed to stand on principle, for as long as he did, taking the kinds of risks that he did, is just amazing to me. Especially because I'm pretty sure that if I were put in his shoes, I wouldn't be able to do it myself.
Apparently Al Pacino asked him once, when he was preparing to play him, just exactly why Serpico did what he did. Why did he risk everything, literally risk his life, to preserve his integrity?
His answer?
"Well, Al, I don't know. I guess I would have to say it would be because ... if I didn't, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?"
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Clark Ashton Smith
This year Santa (apparently in partnership with amazon.com) brought me a gift that I will probably keep for the rest of my days --a pristine, 2006 hardcover edition of The End of the Story, volume 1 of the collected short fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger.
I have several other small collections of Smith's work, all of which I found by hunting through the discount racks of used bookstores over the last ten years. Those paperback volumes are all older than me. Some are water-damaged; most show their age on their yellowed pages, broken spines and brittle brown edges. I love every one of them. I re-read them often and I never tire of them.
If you're not familiar with Clark Ashton Smith, you're not alone. Sadly, he is all-but forgotten these days, except by a core of dedicated fans who continue to keep a taper lit in his memory, and in memorium of his unique brand of bizarre horror-fantasy. To attempt to describe the kind of strange fiction Smith crafted, and put on display across the pulp pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of the thirties and forties would be to insult his work. There is nothing else quite like it. It cannot be explained. It cannot be suggested. It must be experienced.
Smith is at once an inspiration, a marvel and an enigma.
Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he began his career as an acclaimed young poet while still in his twenties, despite having had only five years of formal schooling. It seems he was one of these individuals afflicted with both poor physical health and uncommon genius. He is said to have taught himself all manner of things, not the least of which was a rare mastery of this language.
His writing bubbles over with obscure words and phrases that were probably falling out of use even when he wrote them, seventy years ago -- many of which are almost as forgotten as the man himself today. In Smith's conception, one did not wear old, rusty armor, one was fully caparisoned in verdigrised chain-mail. In Smith's dark and terrible world you find fallen gods frowned in rotting psammite and evil-looking fungi with stems of leprous pallor. It is a feast of sights and sounds and smells and ancient horrors.
That he wrote as he did continues to inspire, that he wrote as much as he did -- cranking out dozens upon dozens of stories during his period of greatest production betwen the late thirties and mid-forties -- is stunning.
But Smith puzzles as much as he inspires. Just as he was at the zenith of his work, he quit writing almost altogether. He seems to have retired to his preferred pursuit, sculpture, for the remainder of his days. Much like his contemporaries, H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith appears to have been something of a social misfit, although it would seem he eventually did do a little better with the ladies than either of his two Weird Tales comrades. He married sometime after the mid-forties, which I suppose would have put him somewhere in his fifties at the time, and he passed away quietly in 1964.
When you read anything that I write, you are reading echoes of Clark Ashton Smith.
I have several other small collections of Smith's work, all of which I found by hunting through the discount racks of used bookstores over the last ten years. Those paperback volumes are all older than me. Some are water-damaged; most show their age on their yellowed pages, broken spines and brittle brown edges. I love every one of them. I re-read them often and I never tire of them.
If you're not familiar with Clark Ashton Smith, you're not alone. Sadly, he is all-but forgotten these days, except by a core of dedicated fans who continue to keep a taper lit in his memory, and in memorium of his unique brand of bizarre horror-fantasy. To attempt to describe the kind of strange fiction Smith crafted, and put on display across the pulp pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of the thirties and forties would be to insult his work. There is nothing else quite like it. It cannot be explained. It cannot be suggested. It must be experienced.
Smith is at once an inspiration, a marvel and an enigma.
Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he began his career as an acclaimed young poet while still in his twenties, despite having had only five years of formal schooling. It seems he was one of these individuals afflicted with both poor physical health and uncommon genius. He is said to have taught himself all manner of things, not the least of which was a rare mastery of this language.
His writing bubbles over with obscure words and phrases that were probably falling out of use even when he wrote them, seventy years ago -- many of which are almost as forgotten as the man himself today. In Smith's conception, one did not wear old, rusty armor, one was fully caparisoned in verdigrised chain-mail. In Smith's dark and terrible world you find fallen gods frowned in rotting psammite and evil-looking fungi with stems of leprous pallor. It is a feast of sights and sounds and smells and ancient horrors.
That he wrote as he did continues to inspire, that he wrote as much as he did -- cranking out dozens upon dozens of stories during his period of greatest production betwen the late thirties and mid-forties -- is stunning.
But Smith puzzles as much as he inspires. Just as he was at the zenith of his work, he quit writing almost altogether. He seems to have retired to his preferred pursuit, sculpture, for the remainder of his days. Much like his contemporaries, H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith appears to have been something of a social misfit, although it would seem he eventually did do a little better with the ladies than either of his two Weird Tales comrades. He married sometime after the mid-forties, which I suppose would have put him somewhere in his fifties at the time, and he passed away quietly in 1964.
When you read anything that I write, you are reading echoes of Clark Ashton Smith.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
It's Labatt Blue Time!
I'm having a beer. I'm celebrating, even though my fantasy football team is in the process of losing this week -- against my ex-girlfriend's team, no less.
I should be enraged. I should be throwing things and cursing myself for playing Travis Henry instead of Laurence Maroney, but I don't care. Because I just finished The Prometheus Gate, and I'm kicking back.
I didn't expect this. I was actually having a less-than-good day. We're kind of snowed-in here in Cleveland, and I don't really want to be here anyway. I have a bunch of cases next week that I don't want to do, and I used to enjoy fantasy football, which is now impossible. All signs were pointing to a bad Sunday.
Then I turned off the games and started writing -- and a few thousand words just spilled out. In the end, it turns out that the end pretty much wrote itself.
I had a minor breakthrough a few weeks ago. Up until then I had been pretty well stalled for several months. I had the end in sight, but it just wasn't coming together. Then I realized something. I hated one of the characters. He was passive and weak and he wasn't really doing anything for the story.
Characters are everything. The plot rises and falls on what they do, and what they do has to be authentic. It has to come out of who they are, and nothing was coming out of this guy.
Until I made one little change.
I made him a jerk. A miserable, misanthropic s.o.b. who never got over his wife leaving him, and still hates her years after their divorce. A guy who used to care about things, about his job and about other people, who is now just a bitter, sarcastic a**hole. He's only looking out for himself. He gave up caring about other people and other things when he decided that no one else cared about him.
And it all flowed from there. I re-wrote all of his scenes, and suddenly he meshed with the rest of the book perfectly (at least as far as I can tell.) It was liberating, too.
So now I'm done -- pending revisions and re-writes from my editor and the publisher, I guess, but at the moment IT'S DONE.
Time for a drink.
One postscript - thanks to any of you who just bought a copy of Lucifer. It's been selling better than usual lately on Amazon, maybe because of the holidays. I love the fact that anyone thinks it's a good idea to buy a book called The Lucifer Messiah for Christmas. Warms my little atheist heart.
Second postscript - turns out my fantasy opponent this week had an even worse game than I did, despite doing her best to beat me, going so far as to pick up one of Tom Brady's favorite receivers as a free agent the day before the game to try to run up the score. So now I'm really happy. I don't even care if I win in the championship next week.
I should be enraged. I should be throwing things and cursing myself for playing Travis Henry instead of Laurence Maroney, but I don't care. Because I just finished The Prometheus Gate, and I'm kicking back.
I didn't expect this. I was actually having a less-than-good day. We're kind of snowed-in here in Cleveland, and I don't really want to be here anyway. I have a bunch of cases next week that I don't want to do, and I used to enjoy fantasy football, which is now impossible. All signs were pointing to a bad Sunday.
Then I turned off the games and started writing -- and a few thousand words just spilled out. In the end, it turns out that the end pretty much wrote itself.
I had a minor breakthrough a few weeks ago. Up until then I had been pretty well stalled for several months. I had the end in sight, but it just wasn't coming together. Then I realized something. I hated one of the characters. He was passive and weak and he wasn't really doing anything for the story.
Characters are everything. The plot rises and falls on what they do, and what they do has to be authentic. It has to come out of who they are, and nothing was coming out of this guy.
Until I made one little change.
I made him a jerk. A miserable, misanthropic s.o.b. who never got over his wife leaving him, and still hates her years after their divorce. A guy who used to care about things, about his job and about other people, who is now just a bitter, sarcastic a**hole. He's only looking out for himself. He gave up caring about other people and other things when he decided that no one else cared about him.
And it all flowed from there. I re-wrote all of his scenes, and suddenly he meshed with the rest of the book perfectly (at least as far as I can tell.) It was liberating, too.
So now I'm done -- pending revisions and re-writes from my editor and the publisher, I guess, but at the moment IT'S DONE.
Time for a drink.
One postscript - thanks to any of you who just bought a copy of Lucifer. It's been selling better than usual lately on Amazon, maybe because of the holidays. I love the fact that anyone thinks it's a good idea to buy a book called The Lucifer Messiah for Christmas. Warms my little atheist heart.
Second postscript - turns out my fantasy opponent this week had an even worse game than I did, despite doing her best to beat me, going so far as to pick up one of Tom Brady's favorite receivers as a free agent the day before the game to try to run up the score. So now I'm really happy. I don't even care if I win in the championship next week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
