IWSG—2024 writing plans

Welcome to the very first Insecure Writer’s Support Group of 2024! The IWSG convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

My major writing plans of 2023 were to finish the radical rewrite of the book formerly known as The Very Last and prep it for publication, then resume my near-total rewrite of Almost As an Afterthought: The First Six Months of 1941, but that wasn’t accomplished. However, I do hope to have TVL ready by the end of 2024. It’s next in line on my queue after….

Finally finishing the first draft of A Dream Deferred! I went back to it in December, and for the first time in ages, I’m really excited about this book and inspired by it again. Once I write “The End,” I’ll start my massive edits—moving chapters and sections around to synch with the actual starting dates of the characters’ schools, moving storylines to separate files to be C&Ped into the future fifth book, writing new chapters and sections as indicated on the long list of notes I took while reading through the completed material in 2022.

The book will be published in four volumes, as Dark Forest was, because of its massive length. Their subtitles are White Light, Black Rain, Radiation, and Phoenix Trees. The Epilogue will be called “Red Canna Flowers.” All those titles come from the order of events unleashed at the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; indeed, the book’s release date is 6 August 2025, the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima.

And speaking of tragedies and writing inspired by them, I recently joined the Artists Registry at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Both visual artists and writers can join. I’ll be sharing excerpts from “Charlotte’s Most Terrifying Prophecy” and “Rising from the Rubble,” from my magnum opus Cinnimin. Though the museum has the right to use our work in exhibits, memorials, and educational material, all artists retain their own copyrights.

And continuing with the theme of tragedy, I totally dropped the ball on a lot of my planned 2023 blog posts, particularly the film ones. Nothing has felt the same since the pogrom of 7 October and the horrific resulting wave of antisemitism, so it didn’t feel right to continue on with my classic horror film series or do any of the other posts about films with landmark anniversaries. Most of the posts I did in the remainder of 2023 were about albums celebrating special anniversaries, plus The Monkees’ film Head. Music has always been very healing for me.

I do intend to make up for those missed posts with a belated Halloween celebration, as well as Cecil B. DeMille’s original 1923 Ten Commandments (one of the silents I was lucky enough to see on the big screen with live music), and the 1913 originals of Quo Vadis and The Last Days of Pompeii. Life isn’t supposed to freeze forever after tragedy.

My March posts will spotlight the solo work of the handsome Roger Harry Daltrey (the blonde, if you didn’t already know), who turns eighty on 1 March 2024. Though his solo career wasn’t as strong and consistent as Pete’s, he still had a lot of criminally underrated albums which I can’t wait to celebrate during his milestone birthday month.

I’ll also be blogging about the albums A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which turn sixty this year, and The Who’s Odds and Sods, John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges, and George Harrison’s Dark Horse, which turn fifty.

Thankfully, the WordPress Classic Editor will remain through at least the end of 2024, so I’ll be spared the headache of being forced to learn Gutenberg’s very non-intuitive, less functional Block Editor.

Second on my fiction writing queue is resuming my alternative history about Dante and Beatrice, which I’m very eager to finally get back to. I also need to do some more research on subjects like Carnival, Holy Week, and Easter in Medieval Italy, Dante’s poet friends, and the various cities he stayed in during his exile.

And of course, I’ll be continuing with handwriting Cinnimin.

What are your 2024 writing plans?

IWSG—May odds and sods

Welcome back to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. The IWSG convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

I declared a lowball goal of 15K for April Camp NaNo, and a good portion came from creative nonfiction (mostly in the form of blog posts and journal entries) instead of the new material for the book formerly known as The Very Last. Going in, I didn’t expect to rack up huge daily wordcounts or to massively overachieve.

I wasn’t in the right headspace or mindset, owing to how I spent the second half of March almost exclusively researching, writing, and editing my A to Z posts for both of my blogs. That put me under a great deal of stress, and I needed some time to decompress. As I explained last month, I had my latest start ever this year because I wanted to see how far I could get in my rewrite of TVL before the free title setup from IngramSpark expired on 15 March.

Additionally, I didn’t get around to my final four posts for my main blog till the last week of April. I really needed all that time to fully decompress and get back into the necessary headspace. Thus, it was harder to give TVL my full attention and motivation, knowing I had a more time-sensitive commitment looming in the queue.

I also went back to writing out of order, since a lot of what I did in TVL in April consisted of adding new material to earlier chapters. I wasn’t going right back to the place I left off before. That made it doubly hard to fully reimmerse myself.

I also had to put my “How to research and write Medieval historical fiction” series on hiatus to focus on writing my A to Z posts and trying to get back into a strong swing with TVL. That series will soon be resuming, with at least four more installments.

I really do believe my pace of writing new material for TVL, and radically rewriting what remains of the first two drafts, will significantly pick up once the NYC chapters are finished and the characters are back in Atlantic City. As fun as it is to research all these museums, historic landmarks, and parks, that necessarily slows down my writing pace and restrains what exactly I can write about.

By this point, it’s obvious the final version will be much longer than the first two books, but the subject matter is so much more expansive, mature, and complex. If I hadn’t added all those chapters set in Delaware, Long Island, and NYC, the book doubtless would be much shorter, but it wouldn’t be the story I came to realize it needs to be.

There’s a natural progression in language, situations, themes, subject matter, and chapter length as the characters age, just as there is in the Little House series. I wouldn’t be doing my job as their creator if the third book were as short and simple as the first.

It truly was hashgacha pratit (Divine Providence) that I put the radical rewrite on hiatus in 2015. Had I continued along with it, the resulting story would’ve been wrong in so many ways, and not taken the characters and storylines in the directions they needed to go.

Did you do Camp NaNo? Has another commitment, writing or otherwise, ever wrought havoc on your fiction writing? Did you ever come to realize it was the right decision to put a project on hold for a long time?

IWSG—A defamatory review and a swamped writing schedule

Welcome back to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. The IWSG convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

Last month, I became aware of a downright nasty, defamatory, off-topic 1-star review of my alternative history And Aleksey Lived on Goodreads. My issues with this review aren’t so much about it being 1-star as they are with her personally attacking me and every single choice I made to give the story original angles and dramatic tension.

While I was going through old photos on my phone, I came across an Instagram screenshot which really tingled my Spidey sense. I’d bet money on that girl being the one who wrote the novella-length vitriolic rant with no paragraph breaks. When I encountered her a few years ago, her nastiness and anger towards someone with a different theory of what might’ve been really unnerved me.

It’s really creepy, disturbing, and chutzpahdik for a total stranger I only had the briefest of interactions with on Instagram to speak for my motivations and beliefs. Shockingly, Goodreads doesn’t think calling someone an evil, shameless murder apologist who believes murder is okay as long as you’re a leftist is against their TOS. All they did was remove the word “evil” and reword that sentence.

She accused me of that because six real-life Bolsheviks, Lenin included, are genuinely reformed during their eleven years in prison, pardoned, and given high-ranking positions in Aleksey’s government. Has this child never heard of people toning down their radical politics over time and changing for the better in prison, let alone forgiveness?

She thinks the seven-year age difference between Aleksey and Arkadiya is creepy, gross, and would be condemned by “everyone,” and that no 25-year-old man would want a 32-year-old woman who’s “almost past her expiration date” and therefore automatically not as attractive as a 20-year-old. That makes me think she’s either very young and sheltered, or has sadly bought into the ugly double standard.

It’s particularly creepy how she’s convinced Arkadiya is a self-insert and too perfect. That’s sure news to me! She has the perfect characteristics for her role as Empress and Aleksey’s wife, but she’s never intended as perfect altogether.

It’s too bad if this troll doesn’t buy my explanation of why I created this match and felt it would’ve been too cliché and expected to match Aleksey with Princess Ileana of Romania. My story, my rules.

This comparison never occurred to me until just recently, but Arkadiya does seem to have parallels with Princess Diana. Though Diana had a much more privileged upbringing than Arkadiya (to say nothing of the much less happy marriage!), they were both born into non-royal families, unexpectedly landed the role of a lifetime, and endeared themselves to their subjects as a long-overdue breath of fresh air who cared about the common people on a really deep level.

And what about all the modern royals who marry not just morganatic spouses, but people with zero connection to any royal, princely, or even aristocratic families? Does this troll condemn them all too?

I’m thinking of writing an author review (obviously without a star rating) to explain some of the story behind the story and correct all these insulting accusations.

It seems safe to say at this point that I’ll miss the deadline for the free IngramSpark title setup for winning NaNo 2022, but I’d rather take my time finishing the rewrite of the book formerly known as The Very Last than rush through and submit a file that has to spend months in further editing and proofing. I did start the title setup, though.

I could insert a bunch of blank pages and submit that, but the cover file would need redone to reflect a different spine size if the file were more than eight pages above or below the original number.

I lost some time writing posts for both of my blogs, plus all the research I’ve done for the chapters in what’s now Part II. It made more sense to split the chapters about Long Island, Coney Island, the World’s Fair, and NYC into their own section, and for the first two NYC chapters to be further split by each day’s activities. The original Part II is now Part III.

Since I’m so superstitious about numbers, I had to add in two new chapters for an even total of 60, and made the original final chapter into an epilogue. As per my initial intentions, I’m able to write chapters about Orthodox Pentecost and Cinni and Sparky sitting in on a day at a progressive school in Wilmington after all.

And I still have to write my A to Z posts for both of my blogs!

The importance of keeping a file of discarded material for your novels

In 2011, I started a discard file for the absolute garbage culled from the 1993–94 material of You Cannot Kill a Swan, and the historical infodump and pointless clutter from the 1996–97 material. That way, it was cleared out of the book without being forever lost.

I’ve never had a reason to look back at it in all these years, but it’s comforting to know it still exists somewhere, as a record of what once was. Since I have an elephantine memory, I also remember many of the passages and lines I cut, and exactly where they are in the book.

I also have the original files of each chapter on disks, from before I began the three and a half years of exhaustive editing, revising, and rewriting.

I’ve followed this pattern for every book since which I’ve assembled from separate chapter files. The original chapter files are untouched in their folders, as an archival record, while I C&P them into master files for Part I, Part II, etc., and edit from there. Those part files in turn are C&Ped into one big master file, from which more edits are done.

Books which were originally created as one single document are broken into chapters within that master file, saved as File Name Original Version, duplicated as File Name New Version for edits, and duplicated again and saved as File Name Final Version for the last bits of polishing and editing.

To be clear, I no longer write any books without chapters, and the old drafts lacking them are split into chapters. The books written in master files from the jump are also all divided into chapters within that document.

In recent years, I’ve gotten into the habit of maintaining discard files for every book, regardless of whether they’re written in one big document or chapter by chapter. These are mostly scenes, paragraphs, and lines I realised weren’t working or right for the book and discarded in media res. As my unconscious inability to turn off my permanent editor mode intensified, the length and usage of these files increased.

I recently hit upon the brilliant idea to turn such text blue in the original document, so it’s marked for immediate deletion during edits. That way, I no longer have to waste time C&Ping these discards into a separate file.

However, such a file still serves an important function. Not just for my own personal archival records, but because sometimes I decide to use that discarded scene or chapter in progress after all. The material is right there waiting to be C&Ped back into the master file, completed, and edited.

Other times, I keep a file of discarded chapters. Since these are entire chapters instead of selective portions, it makes more sense to archive them separately. They also may be put in the general discard file as well.

This really comes in handy if the chapter itself isn’t entirely being discarded, just heavily rewritten. It’s good to have the original to look back on. I also might want them all in one place for easy C&Ping later if I realise they’ll work better in a later book in a series, or if I want to use select portions in another place in that book. They could also just be good as backstory reference.

Most importantly, even if you have zero use for any of these discards in other books or different places in the book they came from, they’re a valuable record for yourself. We need to look back at our past writing to appreciate how far we’ve come from our earlier days.

IWSG—Of book covers and recharged mojo

Welcome back to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. The IWSG convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

This month’s question is:

If you are an Indie author, do you make your own covers or purchase them? If you publish trad, how much input do you have about what goes on your cover?

I paid a local cover artist to do my first published book, And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away, and bought a premade cover for the second volume, And the Lark Arose from Sullen Earth. I did the back covers and spines myself when it came time for print editions some years later.

It was quite frustrating how the cover artist for the latter only provided the name Betibup33. That’s not a professional-looking credit! She also said she’d only do the back cover and spine if I bought some photos from her child’s photography profile.

                                    

I did the original covers for Little Ragdoll and You Cannot Kill a Swan myself, but came to regret that decision. They’ve since been replaced by proper cover art from free stock image repositories, which I did some edits on.

Little Ragdoll also has an e-cover from an artist in my old writing group. Initially I had expected to use that for the print edition as well, but there was a problem with the pixelation when I went to enlarge it (regardless of program), and a few tiny spots that weren’t entirely filled in. She also no longer had the artwork to make the necessary adjustments.

                         

                              

Like night and day!

I used real sepia photos for the front cover, spine, and back cover of And Aleksey Lived.

For The Twelfth Time, I found an appropriate free stock image and again fiddled with the colour saturation.

For Journey Through a Dark Forest, I found free stock photos of woods and made them as dark and shadowy as possible. Unfortunately, I was unable to use those dark covers for the print versions, since the printing process may have distorted their appearance on account of how much black there is.

                                 

                                 

For my Atlantic City books published to date, I’ve used another free stock image and changed the colour for each e-book. The print editions’ covers were designed with help from my father (who really knows his way around that software). I’m thinking I may replace the e-book covers with the print ones, since they look more professional.

                                 

                                   

In other news, I’m beyond thrilled my writing mojo seems to finally be back. I needed that humiliation and wakeup call of barely limping across the finish line of NaNo 2021 to start taking steps to pull myself out of that deep chasm. Sometimes we have to sink to the lowest, saddest, most hopeless and depressing point possible before we can start climbing back up to happier, prettier, more hopeful places and get back on track with our lives.

After I finished the Coney Island chapter in the book formerly known as The Very Last, I went back to my alternative history about Dante and Beatrice and finished Chapter VI, “Christmas Celebrations.” Then I returned to The Very Last to finish the World’s Fair chapter, which I’d barely begun in 2015.

I had so much fun researching and writing it! I almost felt as if I were at the Fair myself, and never wanted that chapter to end.

Everything became so much easier when I remembered I don’t need to incorporate every single detail from my research. Rides, exhibits, and holiday traditions are there for worldbuilding and a backdrop to character development and storylines. The entire book isn’t built around them!

The radical rewrite of TVL has also become so much easier since I began turning text blue if I recognize something’s not working, worded poorly, or clutter. Prior, I C&Ped it into a file of discards, which wasted a lot of time and fed into my bad habit of premature editor mode. Now I just make it blue so it’s marked for deletion in the final edit, and continue on writing.

Have you ever lost your writing mojo and then regained it? What helped you? How do you design your covers?