tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72267228763239780042024-03-05T20:27:19.225-08:00Christopher OwenChristopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-38064782112504476492020-07-18T15:19:00.001-07:002020-07-18T16:44:36.158-07:00Why I Went Indie<br />
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Two years ago, I tried a little experiment. I was lamenting the fact that I had several previously
published stories of novella and novelette length that had appeared years ago
but had long since dropped offline or out of print. They were some of the stories of which I am
most proud; what I consider truly representative of my best work up to that
point. I also hadn’t been writing too
many new short stories, other than the occasional piece of flash fiction, as I
had been engrossed in completing a couple of novels for the past few
years. </div>
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When someone would ask me for some of my work, I could of
course direct them to this blog, where there is a list with links to some of my
shorter work and flash pieces still online, but I really wanted those novellas
to be readily available when someone asked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could of course have republished them here on this blog, but I find
such a format lacks a good reading experience for prose fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The other option, of course, was to self-publish them on a something like
Amazon’s Kindle or similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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When I first got into writing professionally, about ten
years ago, self-publishing was still a bit taboo for many writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was still a great deal of vanity
presses in operation, tempered of course with legit self-publishing outfits
like CreateSpace or Lulu.com.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Yes,</span> self-publishing
then still had the mark of amateurism on it, and many of my fellow writer
friends felt that to go this route would be to mar one’s future chances at
traditional publication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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But things changed quite a bit over the next eight years,
driven very likely by Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing program, as well as other
entities like Smashwords, Nook, Apple Books and many more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indie publishing, to use the more friendly
term, has now gone fully mainstream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are indie authors out there with huge followings who sell hundreds
of thousands of books a year, and there are many pro authors who are taking
note.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some traditionally published
writers are doing a sort of hybrid method wherein they sell some of their work
to mainstream publishers and release a few indie works as well, perhaps shorter
pieces set in the same world as their trad-published novels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Older authors are republishing their long out
of print back catalogs on Amazon, reaping a tidy profit from old manuscripts
that would otherwise languish in obscurity, available only in used paperback
form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amazon has allowed writers to take
control of their work and their careers in a way that would have been unheard of
even ten years ago, and I for one feel that is a good thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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So, with all this in mind, I decided to test the waters
of indie publishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My goals were not
too grand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I simply wanted to have an
ongoing home for my own out of print work, with the tangential goals of learning
the whole self-publishing process, from the Kindle interface to editing to
cover creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yes, I could have paid
someone to do all of this for me, but one, where’s the fun in that, and two, I
didn’t want to drop a great deal of money into something that was basically an
experiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I started with four of my old novellas in the summer of
2018.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I made line edits on them, and
also I couldn’t resist tweaking them here and there, as I like to think my skills
as a writer had improved since these were originally released, so why not make
them a little better?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also made my own
covers, which is also somewhat taboo among indie writers, as such is another
whole skill set from writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I do
have a little bit of design experience, so I went for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, my first attempts were abysmal, as
I will outline in another post.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At this point
I did seek the aid of a few pro designers I know, as well as writer friends,
and I got some good pointers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I kept at
it, and while what I came up with probably wasn’t one hundred percent Barnes
& Noble shelf-worthy, I was satisfied with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The covers finished, I set about learning how to do
layouts for both the E-book and paperback forms of the books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the vast majority of an indie author’s
sales are going to be E-book, I liked the idea of having a paperback available
as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It made for an overall more professional
presence, and I like the idea of having a few nice paperback copies on hand to give
out to friends when they ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, while
I do read E-books from time to time, I still love the experience of kicking
back and reading a physical book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I released those four books toward the end of that summer,
and initially, I did very little promoting or advertising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just wanted to see how they would do on
their own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course they did very
little, sales wise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they did sell a little
bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not much, mind you, maybe enough to
buy me an extra cup of coffee each month, and I’m not talking Starbucks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably more like Freeze Dried Taster’s
Choice, but hey, it was more than nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of the four books, the one called <i>The Night Bigfoot Attacked Marville
TX, June 15, 1977</i> sold the best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Apparently, there’s a sub-genre of Bigfoot fiction that attracts a niche
following, and this seemed to catch on with those folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It sells a few more copies a month than the
other books, even though it’s more about the fascination with the legend of
Bigfoot, than an actual creature on the screen so to speak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(oops, spoiler alert!)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The next summer I released four more novellas, which
pretty much got all the old back catalog of my material out there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was also around this time that I was
nearing the completion of the two novels that I’d been working on for the past
several years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And thus, I had a
decision to make.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novellas had almost
all been traditionally published—I’d been paid for them and the rights had
returned to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indie publishing these
books was really no big deal, as there wasn’t much else I could do with them, other
than perhaps submit them to a reprint anthology, though the market for previously
published works of novella length wasn’t that great.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So indie pubbing them was really a no-brainer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But now, my novels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What to do, what to do?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The usual route for a writer at my stage of the game—that
is, someone with some short story sales but nothing more—is to try to find a
literary agent that will take on the novel(s) and market them to traditional
publishing houses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other than a few small
presses, most trad-publishers won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts from a
writer at my level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I have to admit,
as I was writing these books, I had fully planned to seek out an agent and go
the traditional route.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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So what changed?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, first, there was my experience with indie pubbing
the novellas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I really enjoyed it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I loved the whole process, and the total
control that came with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I got
closer and closer to finishing the novels, I thought more and more about going
the indie route with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, I did
investigate retaining an agent, and I reviewed hundreds of agent profiles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem was, my novels don’t fit into
neat little categories like these folks were seeking, and they were also a
departure from my previously published work, which was mostly Sci-Fi and
Fantasy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These new novels were
mainstream fiction, but neither fit into concise genre categories, other than
perhaps romance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> And so transitioning from speculative fiction to a completely different genre probably wouldn't help my chances in going this route. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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So this made up my mind for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do believe in these books, and I believe
there is a readership out there for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For this reason, I decided to go the indie route, as I now had experience
with such, and I found I liked it very much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unlike the novellas, which were basically old news, these novels are
new, original works, and I plan to market them as heavily as I can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m working on a professional website, so I’ll
have something other than this blog as a presence on the net, and I’m creating
a media kit and have plans to contact reviewers and organizations that might
have an interest in these works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will
probably be an uphill battle—traditional publishers still have the most muscle
when it comes to marketing a writer’s work, but this is slowly changing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As evidenced by the hundreds of indie authors
who are having great success, there is a chance to succeed in this crowded
field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I actually think the quirky
uniqueness of these novels can be an asset for me, for when I put my reader hat
on, I’m always looking for something new and different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hopefully, there are a great many more
readers out there who feel the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
just have to somehow boost my signal above the great noisy fugue that is all
the other millions of works vying for readers’ attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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And so, after a great deal of editing and planning, I
released the two novels on Amazon this week, with plans to go wide onto other publishing
platforms shortly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also released two
short story collections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One collects five
of the related fantasy novellas, as well as five previously unpublished short
stories, all of which are set in the same fantasy milieu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other is a collection of forty odd short
stories, about half of which were previous published over the last ten years,
all unified by a central theme, though the stories themselves are quite diverse—many
are mainstream and literary fiction, but there’s also some fantasy and SF, as
that is the genre in which I cut my teeth, so to speak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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And now comes the hard part, spreading the word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to
the challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wish me luck, and check
back here from time to time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll be sure
to update my progress as this little experiment continues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://amazon.com/author/owenchristopher" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMGK0kgwq2vvP7KiLgglV9Jm93C2j-BGlus8AQ9ylfojpBcqcNY6bay1dNfqXeAaTAtQGDGFLbO1L27iDUlwnShhQfSvnIpnX8H2ZB1lVD4yuCCEZAnxp7384X_vCRV9XBqHNu12GayiM/s640/CBO+Three+Covers.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<o:p>My Two Novels and one of the Short Story Collections - Click the image for a link to them</o:p></div>
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<br />Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-62809216835960495112019-01-06T11:42:00.000-08:002019-06-03T11:42:39.579-07:00Long Overdue UpdateWell, here it is 2019 and lo, I realize I haven’t updated the old writing blog in a looooong while. The last post was February 2017, and so, since I don’t want anyone to think this blog (or me) is defunct, I thought I’d better update it. In fact, I think it might be time for a bit of an overall over haul of the entire blog, but we shall see. <br />
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First, I’ll give a brief overview of what I’ve been up to writing-wise for the past two years.<br />
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Anyway, when I started this blog way back in 2011, I had just been back into writing for about six months since retiring. Since I was writing full time, I had plans to make the blog like a lot of other ones by writers—from the famous to the obscure--that I enjoyed reading. You know, lots of updates on my writing projects, but also amusing little anecdotes about the life of a writer, the Cons I’d attended, my coffee intake, what have you. <br />
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I more or less did this for the first year, but even being semi-retired, I found I have only so much writing in my tank per day, thus taking time to update the blog sort of took away from the writing time. For that reason, it sort of fell by the wayside. But, in some ways I sort of miss it, so perhaps 2019 will be the year we resuscitate the old writing blog—at least on a small scale. Not that it’s getting a ton if eyes on it, but I do like going back to the old posts from time to time as a trip down memory line. <br />
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So, what have I been up to, writing-wise, since the last post? Well, I’ve been mainly working on novels. I’ve gone through about four drafts of the European travel novel I wrote in 2016, polishing it up to a point where I hope I can get it out there. I’ve also worked a bit more on a couple of my older novel projects, the ones listed in the ‘In the Works’ section of this blog. They’re still in various states of disarray, but hopefully...someday. <br />
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You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned short fiction. Well, you’re right. When I got back into writing upon retirement back in 2010, I was writing mainly short fiction. This went on until about 2012, when I moved over to novels. The main reason for this is two-fold. One, I felt I had done about all I could do with short pieces—I found it easy to break into the amateur and semi-pro markets, but the pros really proved a tough nut to crack. I did make a pro sale, and I figure if I’ve kept at it long enough, I might crack some of the top-level markets, but to work years at this for a short or two just seemed a bit dreadful. I figured the time was better spent on crafting and marketing novels. The other part of that two-fold reason is that I find that for a really good short story the amount of would building required takes me almost as much time as it does for the beginnings of a novel. That’s a lot of work for the ephemeral nature of short fiction. <br />
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Anyway, for better or worse, I’ve thrown my lot in with novel writing. It has been slow going, but I think I’ll untimely have something more substantial on my hands. <br />
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I have managed a few flash pieces now and then, a form of writing that I do indeed love. Most have found a home over at Every Day Fiction, a market that has been quite kind to me. They published three of my flash pieces last year. <br />
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So, that’s about it on the writing front. <br />
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Otherwise it’s life as usual. Since my last post was a farewell to our cat of almost twenty years, I’ll close with a note that we have two new cats in our lives now, two twin sisters named Gidget and Selina Kyle. <br />
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A few obligatory cute cat pics of them will follow. And on that note, until next time,<br />
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Cheers!<br />
<br />
Chris<br />
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Gidget and Selina the day we brought them home--Ten weeks old. </div>
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Two years later--They're all grown up but sill like to cuddle up together. </div>
<br />Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-87783770881358259582017-01-29T08:25:00.001-08:002017-01-29T09:07:51.482-08:00Farewell to a Tortie Cat<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I don’t usually get too personal here; this is a writing
blog after all. But this week I guess
you could say I lost a writing partner of sorts. My little tortie cat girl, Stinky the Cat,
left us on Friday, January 27<sup>th</sup>, 2017. She was a month shy of twenty years of age, a
hell of an age for a cat, but then she was a hell of a cat. </div>
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I didn’t have Stinky all those twenty years; she came to
me an adult cat as part of a package deal that included my wife and two cats. It was a pretty good deal. My wife and I will celebrate our tenth
wedding anniversary in March, and I had thirteen wonderful years with Stinky
the Cat in my life. (and eleven and a
half with Miss Piggy, the other cat) </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoX30aKp5VFZuEEobAOz95YyEQe6S2gHmU9JyFgI07djQgg6dV5bQaqqfaW31-ajRS8xML3vprFv5NokQxswlmaEjWcNZ4jRf0NCAW7HNwrMCYl21TLfLFqIKj0Wx656lEiWkM6dyrqOU/s1600/IMG_3475a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoX30aKp5VFZuEEobAOz95YyEQe6S2gHmU9JyFgI07djQgg6dV5bQaqqfaW31-ajRS8xML3vprFv5NokQxswlmaEjWcNZ4jRf0NCAW7HNwrMCYl21TLfLFqIKj0Wx656lEiWkM6dyrqOU/s640/IMG_3475a.jpg" width="628" /></a></div>
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Miss Piggy and Stinky - 2007</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Stinky and I bonded right away—she was partial to men,
and to men with beards particularly—she liked to climb in my lap and rub her
head against my unshaven chin all the time. She
has pretty much been by my side for the last decade or so while I’ve been
writing, a perfect writer’s familiar if there ever was one. So if you’ve ever read any of my work, know
that Stinky was there when it was created.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisopEpNuUcRethgHuDfBJTRZ241JcQydUkS_gDTNa6c-WnPU3DrcrcTDUyaYG08QMMaT6Zf9IYK8nWuFY8u8UkaKfLPFxzmCihtCwF-EpGTVdaothz2uTDyH6sxy0D0yN0P4M156GzUv8/s1600/IMG_6357.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisopEpNuUcRethgHuDfBJTRZ241JcQydUkS_gDTNa6c-WnPU3DrcrcTDUyaYG08QMMaT6Zf9IYK8nWuFY8u8UkaKfLPFxzmCihtCwF-EpGTVdaothz2uTDyH6sxy0D0yN0P4M156GzUv8/s640/IMG_6357.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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There’s so much I could tell you about Stinky, I could go
on and on. That’s what I was going to do
when I started this post. But a little
poem I wrote for her last Sunday keeps coming to mind. I wasn’t going to share it, but it perhaps
says what I want to say about her as good as any other writing I could do. So, here it is, then. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>For Stinky</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You're getting ready to go...</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>All the signs are there</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>My sweet friend,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You won't eat; you're wont to sleep,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>More so than usual</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And you're sluggish when you're not</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Days like this are trying</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And difficult to face</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>But I find</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>With the thoughts of the good times</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>That we have shared</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I can get through them.
</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I never knew you as a kitten</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Though I hear you were a fine one</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>A palm-sized tortie fur baby</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Of epic cute felinity</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>That pleaded "pick me, pick me"</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>From the dark depths of the pound</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Such were the beginnings of your long</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Adventurous life</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>No, you were a full-grown cat when we met</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And a feisty one at that</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>But we seemed to strike a chord</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You and I</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And we were soon fast friends</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Confidants, co-conspirators</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And partners in crime.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You took a place by my side</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or curled at my feet, dreaming your cat dreams</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>While I worked</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>My world a great deal better</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>With your presence</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I like to think.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Oh, what times we had</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You and I</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Good times of sweet and carefree joy</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Like watching you stroll the grass of the back yard</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>In the warm afternoon sun</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or stalk a lizard</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or send wayward cats packing</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>That dared to breach your territory.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You were always up for a good ear rubbing</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or a nuzzle of your nose against my beard</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or sometimes, just to lie gently in my lap</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Your microscopic purr a sign of utter contentment.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I wish I could somehow express to you</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>How much rich and true happiness</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You've brought to my life.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>But maybe, just maybe</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Through the sound of my voice</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And little cat treats</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And some catnip here and there</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And lots of love...</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You've known it all along.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You've walked this world for nigh on</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Twenty years</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Spreading out your nine lives</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>With cat-grace and aplomb.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>A great and rich life you've had</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>My sweet friend.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I don't want to say goodbye</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Sweet girl</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>But I guess I'm glad I have the time</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>To do so.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>I can't seem to pet you enough today</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Or hold you in my arms time and again</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>One more time. One more time,</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>One more stroke of that soft, dark fur.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Not to wax maudlin</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>You're not that sort of cat</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>But the unequivocal love you've given me</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Will live forever in my soul.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>And you'll be with me</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>My sweet friend, my sweet girl, </i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Always. </i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i> --Chris
Owen</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i> 1/22/17</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I’ve always had a fondness for cats. They are certainly interesting, mysterious
yet utterly cute creatures. I’ve always wanted
to write a cat related novel as well, particularly after I came across the following in
a book of French paintings. </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjKJz2C4XXTwrH7hA4xXjE7T_UlIuh2tN5ZYBiQ0pM-6n10T9REwd3IXhxASG-7grrkwnnTOOPB7QlVyN5mzwTwvlYf6XDlc2JUboMWH7L4td0BPVXjB6EC4aAmvIZPrkB1zcFK0nPd0/s1600/apoteosis+of+the+cats+Theophile-Alexandre+Steinlen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjKJz2C4XXTwrH7hA4xXjE7T_UlIuh2tN5ZYBiQ0pM-6n10T9REwd3IXhxASG-7grrkwnnTOOPB7QlVyN5mzwTwvlYf6XDlc2JUboMWH7L4td0BPVXjB6EC4aAmvIZPrkB1zcFK0nPd0/s640/apoteosis+of+the+cats+Theophile-Alexandre+Steinlen.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
It’s called <i>The Apotheosis of Cats</i>, and I was struck by
it immediately. Yes, it is just a bizarre
image, but somehow compelling. What are
all those cats doing? Where are they? What is that sort of cat-idol thing in
the distance? I don’t know, but I
decided I would figure it out. I would write a
novel based on this painting. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I’ve had that in the back of my head for years, but I’ve
never really known what direction to go with it. I knew I wanted it to be mysterious and
magical the way cats are, with some Neil Gaiman/Louis Carroll/Ray Bradbury
trappings. But this project never had
really gotten off the ground. </div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Then this week happened.
I found I was too distraught to work on my current writing project. I needed to write something else—something about
cats. And so I started this novel. Just a page, but it’s begun. And, I’m glad to
think that I got to start this, my cat novel, while Stinky was still around. And now that she is gone, writing it will certainly help me deal. I have a feeling she will figure prominently in
it—my old writing partner, after all, deserves nothing less. </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3k_L1ahjc33CiXqF3Dm1zDOtQ0yYQiBd5hWYIv8wnaPOh5C7IJtwDra3Z9LAczlXCOTYK6wcbqOseXfNiIo6eDu_0OJg200nmD6YOqczDyrD9vSEbDr-lqws39x5kfDAdHcA7KSH19lU/s1600/IMG_1249.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3k_L1ahjc33CiXqF3Dm1zDOtQ0yYQiBd5hWYIv8wnaPOh5C7IJtwDra3Z9LAczlXCOTYK6wcbqOseXfNiIo6eDu_0OJg200nmD6YOqczDyrD9vSEbDr-lqws39x5kfDAdHcA7KSH19lU/s640/IMG_1249.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br />Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-46593526354926667292016-07-28T06:46:00.000-07:002016-07-28T08:21:37.895-07:00A Long Overdue Update - New Novel Edition<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
And So, I finished writing a novel last week. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
A nice accomplishment, certainly, but at this point it is
only a first draft; a rough hewn thing at best, held together in some places by
bailing wire and duct tape. But, as a
writer who has struggled with the novel form over the years, with so many false
starts and burnouts, it feels good to have a novel-length manuscript in my
hands that is more or less a complete story arc. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I cut my teeth as a writer on short stories, and while I
can’t say I’ve mastered that form either (my dearth of pro-sales speaks to that),
they are at least something I’ve managed to churn out on a regular basis. But becoming a novelist has always been my
ultimate goal, and thus one has to attempt such efforts even if they (me) find
it a struggle. In the last five years, the
time period in which I’ve been pursuing a writing career full time, I’ve
started several novels, got quite far with a few, but ultimately, all have
either bogged down or been unsatisfying to me.
Now, five years might seem like a long time to pursue something with the
only success being a few short story sales, but—I’m nothing if not determined,
and I’m in it for the long haul. Some of
the pro-writers I’ve met on my journey have informed me that in their
experience, up to ten years is a time frame that one can expect for it to take
to ‘break in’ or have a modicum of success in the field. I’m sure a lot of that is learning craft
along the way to learning the business. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So, what have I been up to in those five years? Well, I wrote a few hundred short stories,
about five novels in various stages of in-completion, and blog posts and journal
entries and writing practice and whatnot, all totaling over a million words of
writing. (I think I hit the one million
mark last year—yep, I track my daily word count) There’s an old writing maxim that’d been
attributed to several different <a href="http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2014/03/one-million-words-to-competency-who-said-it-first.html" target="_blank">writers</a> that when you’ve written a million
words, you can throw those out and start over, for by then you’ve maybe learned
something about how to write. I don’t
know if this is the case or not, but I do feel I have certainly improved over
the last few years. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The novels I’ve written, or partially written, are all
dear to me, but it may very well be the case that these will end up being mere
training experiences on the way to other things. I sort of hope not, as I like some of them,
so I hope I’ll gain the skills to go back and hammer them into shape. Some of them are listed in the ‘<a href="http://christopherowenwriter.blogspot.com/p/in-works.html" target="_blank">In the Works</a>’
section of this blog, if you want a summary of them. I’d been sort of alternating between working on
two of them for most of this year, and was feeling very bogged down. So, come mid-June I was just finishing up a
reread of Hemingway’s <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>, which is one of my favorite
books. As I read the last pages, I sort
of reflected how this <i>Roman à
Clef</i> novel was really just a fictionalization of many of Hemingway’s own
experiences from the summers before he wrote it. That got me to thinking that it might be fun
to attempt something like this of my own, but what to do—I hadn’t run with the
bulls of pursued a British aristocrat’s wife recently—what personal life
experience would I mine for fodder?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Well, the first thing that came to mind was my
travels. I’ve made almost twenty
overseas trips over the years, most when I was in my twenties and thirties,
though I’m still making some now, just at a slower pace. Most were to Europe, a place of fascination
for me, but there were a couple to Oceania, and one each to South America and
Africa. Now, I’ve read some travel
writing over the years and enjoyed it, people like Paul Theroux and Bill
Bryson, so I figured this might be an intriguing project—to take some of the
places I’ve visited and events I experienced and the people I met and distill
them down into a work of fiction. I don’t
know why, but this got me very excited. That
very afternoon (June 13) I sat down and wrote up a plan of action, and the next
day I started writing the novel itself, just taking the plunge of letting
myself go and see where I ended up. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Five weeks and 83,000 words later, I had that
aforementioned first draft of a novel on my hands, and I also had something that
I felt very good about. Sure, it needs
lots of work—but I’m excited to begin that work. Now, five weeks is an awful short time to
write a novel in, especially since I’ve worked for years on some of the others,
but of course it is not unheard of. Once
I began this project, I had a real passion for it, and the muse really seemed
to be singing for the first time in a great while, so I just went with it and
tore it up at a blistering pace, sometimes writing long into the night. I usually write in the afternoons, and try to
do a thousand words a day of whatever, so I guess in the case of this work I
averaged about 2,300 words a day, so a little over double my output. Anyway, it was some of the most joyous
writing I’ve done in a long while, joyous anyway for the writer himself as he
was creating it. I think this stems from
the fact that I was writing about something I dearly love, travel, and
revisiting some of those ‘first time’ events that I experienced when I was
traveling to new places way back when. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Anyway, what I’ve got on my hands now is something quite
different from anything I’ve written before.
I usually write speculative fiction—science fiction and fantasy—though I
have done some mainstream before. I
guess what this novel could be called is travel fiction-- I don’t know if such
is considered a genre unto itself, but that’s what comes to mind. I think it’s quite a unique piece of work,
and in searching out similar novels I can’t seem to find one that is close or
very similar to it. It is a novel about
travel, certainly, but also about new adulthood and romance and laughter and
the rare thing that it is to be surprised by joy when you least expect it. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. One of the realities of writing something
this long in such a short time is one often has to gloss over some things or
whatnot, build rickety bridges between the parts that you know are working. So now I’ve got to go back and
shore up those bridges, and make the whole thing sound, and this, I figure,
will take a whole lot longer than five weeks.
But, I’ve got time, and patience, and I’m looking forward to it.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I'll let you know how things come out. </div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-54454777610018801602015-03-26T14:54:00.000-07:002015-03-26T15:02:04.379-07:00Chronological Controversies in Fiction<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I was reading Neil Gaiman's new novel, <i>The Ocean at the
End of the Lane</i>, today. In the book Neil
referenced C. S. Lewis's Narnia series of books, and as often happens when I
read, this sent my mind off on thoughts of my first experiences of reading
those books. This led to additional
thoughts on the internal chronology of book series versus the order of their
writing/publication. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
For some reason, I never got around to reading Narnia as
a child or teen, which is surprising for several reasons. The foremost reason is that I was (and still
am) a great lover of Tolkien, and I knew that he and Lewis were friends and
often shared their works in progress with one another. So I'd obviously heard of Narnia, but for
whatever reason, I didn't get around to checking it out until I was an adult,
and was making the attempt to read a broad swash of fantasy literature to broaden
my own knowledge of the genre.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
When I decided to start the Narnia series, I didn't
really think much about the chronology of the series, I simply went to the
bookstore and bought the Narnia book that had a large number one on the cover,
which surely was the book one should start with, no? This was of course the one called "The
Magician's Nephew."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I read the book and found myself a bit disappointed. It really didn't do much for me, and thus I didn’t
follow up with reading the other books for quite a while. My experience with TMN led me to believe the
Narnia books just weren't all they were cracked up to be. There was also the strange feeling I had
while reading TMN that the author assumed I knew more than I did about the
world of Narnia. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
A few years later the first of the Narnia films was
released: <i>The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe</i>. I saw the film and quite
enjoyed it, but I wondered why this one was made first, and not TMN. My thought at the time was that perhaps
they'd taken what was the best of the books and made that movie first. Of course, this wasn't the case. What they'd done is taken the first book that
was written and published in the series and made that the first film. I acquired that book and read it, finding it
much better, in my opinion, than TMN. I
almost felt I had been ripped off by the publisher listing TMN as the first
book. Sure, the events of that book took
place at an earlier time than TLTW&TW, but it was actually the sixth book
written. Not only does this sixth book
seem to assume the reader has some knowledge of the first five, but reading it
first takes away some of the charm and delight of reading TLTW&TW first,
when we have no idea what the wardrobe does, and we discover Narnia slowly and
with subtlety. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I've since learned that there is something of a
controversy among Lewis's fans over the order in which the books should be
read. Well, put me firmly in the camp of
original writing order. I find this
applies to most if not all other series of books and films that I've
enjoyed. Take for example the <i>Star Wars</i>
films. I believe that now that six of
them have been made, George Lucas has stated that viewing them from one to six
is appropriate, as he as somehow retconned the whole of the story into
something he calls "The Tragedy of Darth Vader." To me, and to the nine-year-old me that
watched <i>Star Wars</i> many times in the theater in the summer of 1977, this is
utter bullshit. Introducing a new viewer
to the series with that god-awful mess of a film called <i>The Phantom Menace</i> not
only risks turning them off with a far lesser product, but it takes away the power
of the earlier (though chronologically later) films as they slowly reveal facts
(Such as Darth's relationship to Luke) that are the ultimate moments of those
films. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Another series of books that I was quite fond of as a
child, and still continue to revisit from time to time, is Anne McCaffrey's<i> Dragonriders
of Pern</i> series. These books now number
more than twenty, with more coming, as her son Todd has taken over the helm of
writing them. I read the first six books
when I was a kid in the early '80s, then additional ones as they were published. Since the books jump back and forth through
Pern's several thousand year history over the course of many volumes, I could
see that a potential controversy similar to the Narnia series could develop. Does one start reading with the later volume
<i>Dragonsdawn</i>, when the colonists first settled Pern, or with the first book in the series that McCaffrey published, <i>Dragonflight</i>? The
author herself weighs in on the matter.
On some of the cover pages of the later novels a blub by McCaffrey states: <i>The author respectfully suggests that the books in the Pern series be read in
the order in which they were published</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I couldn't agree more.
Readers deserve to discover the wonders of a rich speculative world by
way of the same path that the writer did.
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-21084485530158157932014-02-14T09:06:00.001-08:002014-02-14T09:06:06.843-08:00Finally, A New Post<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Just checked my writing blog and realized it was
painfully in need of updating. Last
entry: back in March! Sorry, I’ve been
quite remiss in keeping it up. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I have been writing.
Mostly work on a novel, hence the dearth of short stories this year,
though I did manage a few pieces of flash, most of which are up over at Every
Day Fiction.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Update for 2013.
My word totals were a little under my goals (which is 1K words a
day). I ended up with 259,000 words for
twenty thirteen. Not bad, but I should
be able to manage more. But, with the
novel writing, I’m doing a lot of revising, so that kept the word totals
down. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The biggest thing on the writing front for
Two-Ought-Thirteen was I got the chance to attend the Summer Writing Program at
Yale last June. Not only was it quite a
cool experience to spend a week attending Yale, but the program was taught by
my favorite writer, John Crowley.
Getting to meet John and work with him one-on-one on my writing was
quite a thrill for me. I can’t tell you
how much I am in awe of this man and his writing ability. I hope just a little bit rubbed off. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The little town of New Haven, CT was the locale of the
program, and it was a cool little town.
The Yale campus was interesting, as it isn’t cordoned off by itself like
a lot of universities, but it sort of just permeates the town, with lecture
halls and student residences mixed in on the streets with restaurants and other
businesses. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
My favorite of these other places was a little cigar bar
called the Owl Shop. It’s an old guard
cigar store that’s been around since the ‘30s, and it’s the only place where
you can get a drink AND a smoke in town.
Smoking, outlawed everywhere else, is allowed in the Owl Shop as their
license is grandfathered, or whatever you call it. Anyway, it was pleasant after class and
meetings each day to stop by and have a beer and a nice cigar in a cool old
environment. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So, to sum up, Yale was cool. I met some cool new writing friends, got to
know John Crowley, and enjoyed staying in the rather castle-y student dorms and
eating in the Hogwarts-y Yale dining hall.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The novel I’ve been working on is a new one, different
from the ones I’ve got in my ‘in the works’ section here on the blog. I still work on those from time to time, but
this new one is an expansion of the short story I wrote for the Yale Workshop,
called ‘The Fairies of Maine.’ (Since I
was working with John Crowley, I couldn’t resist writing a fairy story of my
own)</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
TFOM takes place during a single week in June in the
fictional town of Brandywine, Maine.
(The week of Midsummer’s Eve, no less)
It follows the varied and diverse lives of five people who stay at the Brandywine
Inn for that week, and their subtle interactions with the world of Faerie. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So, that’s about all for now. Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting little
tidbits to keep the blog fresh this year.
For now, back to the writing grindstone.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Chris </div>
Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-27865674305633081652013-03-23T10:10:00.000-07:002013-03-23T10:30:43.475-07:00Impressions: Hawaiian DawnAn excerpt from my journal, March 23, 2013.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
It is early on a Saturday morning in Waikiki,
Hawaii. I’ve come out on the balcony
while night still holds sway, the ocean and starless, cloud-filled sky black as
squid ink, blacker still when contrasted by the gentle, incoming breakers that
almost seem to glow a spectral white in the lights of the many hotels. I’ve been lulled by the sound of those
breaking waves all night, and have slept well for it. It is a calm, placid sound, a distant whisper
from the world ocean. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I was awakened by the sound of laughter. Some women were frolicking in the night surf,
shouting, ‘Oh, that’s cold,’ their voices mischievous and teasing. My mind’s eye visualizes them, and this is
enough for curiosity to drag me from bed to the balcony window. I look for them, but they are gone. Oh well, they’re probably better as an unseen
memory anyway, for in my dreams they were beautiful Polynesian maidens, out for
a late night skinny dip. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As I sit out here, dawn slowly begins to blue the sky and
sea with subtle temerity. It is as if
she slowly shaves away onion-thin layers of the blackness, revealing at first
only the darkest of blues and grays, which grow a little bit lighter with each
passing second. At first the sea and sky
are indistinguishable, a single dark nothingness. But as the light grows, slowly, ever so slowly,
the horizon resolves itself into that razor-straight line of reckoning that has
called to the hearts of travelers and explorers since time immemorial. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
A few minutes pass.
Dawn comes more quickly now; she adds subtle complexity to her empyrean palette,
colors an artist might call cerulean, celeste, Prussian blue, cobalt,
ultramarine, lapis lazuli, Davy’s grey.
Between this mottled, sea and cloud-formed canvas is the air; the rich,
clean, fresh morning air--an air which almost seems to resonate with a faint electricity
in a way that can only be found in the morning, before the sun fully
rises. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Dawn and dusk are both times of great beauty, and they
are similar in that they are a transition between two states, a thing that
exists only in passing, a realm that can be chased, but alas, never
caught. Both dawn and dusk are subtly
different incarnations of twilight, each with their own job to do, and each
with their own effect on me. I see dusk
every day, and always cherish the feeling it inspires in me. Dawn is a much rarer thing for me, not being
much of an early riser. So for today,
this morning, it is a pleasant thing to be greeted by dawn, and in her tropical
livery to boot! For dawn is a time filled
with promise, and it is like a promise both long held and diurnally fulfilled. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
More time passes, and the world is fully awake now. The beach is filling with strollers, combers,
joggers, and a few fishermen who have set up shop at the end of a small
jetty. My little private dance with dawn
has come to an end. But, as promised, I
know I’ll meet her for many more, and each will have their own unique
beauty.<br />
<br />
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Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-68389053606896863912013-01-23T14:51:00.001-08:002013-01-23T15:07:04.433-08:00Vonnegut and the Future of Books<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I’ve been reading a lot more lately--a thing which I
challenged myself to do when I got back from Worldcon last September. Any good writer will tell you that a writer
needs to read as much as they write, for it is in this manner that the brain
feeds itself so that it can then regurgitate that input into what one hopes
will be wholly better output. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It was of course reading during childhood that
fueled my interest in writing, so I’m glad to be back going at it whole hog
again. Reading is one of the genuine
pleasures of life, and it rounds one out in so many ways. Since the new year, I’ve been managing to
read about two novels or collections a week, which is a better pace than I’ve
ever managed, and I hope to keep it up throughout the year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One aspect of this ‘great pleasure’ is the discovery
of the little bits of insight that an author has woven into their work. Some do this more than others, but there is
almost always a little of it there. One
of the best writers in this capacity is Kurt Vonnegut. It’s hard to read one of his works without
having little delightful ‘ah ha’ moments over and over again. I came across a (for me) particularly good
one in the current novel of his that I’m reading: <i>Bluebeard</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It deals with the status of the ‘average quality’
artist and their place now in a world ruled by mass media and global
communication. I’ll let Mr. Vonnegut
take it from here:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">“I was obviously born to draw better than most
people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell
stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing
and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great
leaders or athletes, and so on. </span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I think that could go back to the time when people
had to live in small groups of relatives -- maybe fifty or a hundred people at
the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep
the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have
somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to
paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid
of anything and so on.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">That's what I think. And of course a scheme like
that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been
made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites
and all that. <i>A moderately gifted person who would have been a community
treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of
work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with
nothing but the world's champions.</i> [italics mine]<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The entire planet can get along nicely now with
maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A
moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in
a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the
coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her.
We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.'</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to
him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever <i>drunk</i> last night!”</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> -Kurt
Vonnegut, <i>Bluebeard</i>, Page 76<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This brought to mind a feeling that I’ve had ever
since I first put pen to page many years ago and aspired. There are so many others out there, so many
voices in the worldwide fugue of art, all crying out their tales, their songs,
their brushstrokes, their unabashed creativity--how will one insignificant
little voice be heard? Does it deserve
to be heard?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On the surface, that can be a little
depressing. But I also find solace in
this situation. Yes, for the bulk of the
five and a half centuries since the printing press was invented, only the
greats have risen to the top. (Well, mostly greats...there is certainly pulp in those bestseller lists as well). But this
is a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful
thing for me, as a reader, because I get to be exposed to those works that in
any other era of human history I wouldn’t have been. It’s also great for me as a writer, and for
the same reason. Having the opportunity
to read these ‘champions’ is the best of all possible schools for a
writer. One can learn a lot from Mr.
Vonnegut, or Mr. Shakespeare, or Misters Hemingway, Steinbeck or Faulkner. If I had been born in the dark ages or
earlier, the best I could have hoped for was whatever grade of tales the local
village teller was telling, or perhaps the Latinate ramblings of a
half-illiterate parishioner. So yes,
this is the best of all possible times to be a reader, but also a writer as
well. Thank you, printing press. Thank you, mass communication. And yes, thank you, internet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Ah, the internet.
A two-faced beast if there ever was one.
In some ways liberating, giving a voice to all, yet in others, perhaps,
the death-knell to traditional publishing.
This has many writers, both well-established and would-be, shaking in
their Birkenstocks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We are liberated in many ways because we can blog,
we can self-publish, we can even give away our hard-fought words for pennies,
or even nothing. But this strikes many,
including me, as a dismal way to do business.
Because writing is one of those strange beasts that is both art and a
business, at least if one wants to be a published, working author. Borders is gone. Barnes and Noble is on life support. Mom and Pop booksellers are dropping like
flies in a cloud of internet DDT. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But, somehow, the art survives. These things have all happened before. They said television would be the death of
movies. They were wrong. They said the VCR would kill the whole
industry, but it merely created a new market for the material. So, will the internet and digital publishing
kill that wonderful avenue that has existed for centuries for writers to
survive and profit from their work? In
some ways, it will, and it has. Midlist
authors are having trouble making ends meet, and their plans to retire on their
back catalogues have gone by the wayside.
But I believe books, traditional books, will always survive. I think we are merely in a great transition
in this industry, and whatever shakes out will ultimately form itself into
something that is sustainable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So, where does that leave the one little voice
crying out into the worldwide fugue?
Well, I’ll answer that by stating that I believe that there are more
writers working now than at any time in human history. And I chose to believe that this is a good
thing. For the writer that works hard and never gives up, there are still many avenues available to success. The important things are, like I just said, to work hard and
never give up. And the <i>most</i> important
thing is to write. If you truly love
doing this--if you truly love putting butt on chair each day and weaving words
into something you find beautiful, they you are already a success, for a love
of your art is the most essential of all things an artist must possess. The rest will work itself out in the
end. It always does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-69791548144593045722012-12-31T12:08:00.001-08:002012-12-31T12:08:54.612-08:00End of the Year Update<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Well, here we are on the final day of 2012, and I find I’ve
been sorely overdue for a blog update, so I thought I’d do one in the form of a
year-end progress report. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
My word totals this year finished out at just over two
hundred thousand, about half of what I did last year. I attribute this to several factors: Spending more time researching and world
building for the novel, reading more, and a bit of burnout that set in toward
the end of the year. But I’ve had a good
rest over the holidays, and I think I’ll be ready to hit it hard again the
first of the year. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I still think I’ll try to get back to my thousand words a
day goal, at least for the foreseeable future, as it is doable, and tends to
keep me sharp. I do think I need to come
up with some new story/plot generators, as some of the older methods that I’ve
mentioned here in the blog have started to falter. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Other than writing, as I mentioned, I did start reading
more heavily in the last couple months of the year. I’d decided that I hadn’t been reading
enough, and a writer really needs to be a reader as well, practically
constantly, so I knocked out twelve novels as of today, including a reread of
some old favorites like Tolkien and Crowley’s <i>Little, Big</i>, as well as some new
stuff and some Kurt Vonnegut that I hadn’t read before. I think in the new year I will keep up the
reading, trying to allow an hour or two each morning so I can knock out 50-60
pages or so. Then I’ll spend the
afternoon writing. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
My submissions also dropped off in 2012. In ’11, I pulled off 100 subs, but of course
I had a pretty large back catalog I was drawing from, and I also had a lot of
flash and shorts from the 400K words I wrote last year. In 2012, I managed 27 subs, with eleven sales,
so a pretty good ratio.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
One thing I did a lot of this year was flash fiction,
which I enjoy, and will continue to do, but I really want to try to get more
work in the 4000-6000 word range in 2013, and with these pieces try to crack
more pro markets. So the sales may fall
from what I’ve been doing, but ultimately I think it will be more satisfying in
the long run. I think a good plan will
be to devote a week or so a month to writing a short of this length, and the
rest of the time I can work on the novel.
That should give me a shot at twelve decent length stories for the year,
as well as progress on the novel. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So, that’s about it.
Time to hunker down and try to add at least a thousand more words or so
to those 2012 totals. Happy New Year!</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-36886246471824455972012-09-22T07:05:00.000-07:002012-09-22T07:19:40.651-07:00Heading to Middle Earth<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I’m currently on a vacation of sorts, in a much-loved
realm, though I haven’t left home. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I’m talking, of course, of the pilgrimage I take to
Middle Earth every few years, in the form of re-reading my favorite novel, The
Lord of the Rings. (and yes, though it
is call a trilogy, or even THE trilogy, it is really just one long novel)</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I first read TLOTR in the autumn of ’81, at the start of eighth
grade, at the impressionable young age of thirteen. My sister had been hounding me to read it for
a couple of years, telling me how much I would love it, but for some reason I
put it off. I was more into straight
science fiction—my head was caught up with rocketships and aliens. But, as summer was slowly waning I was
finishing up Anne McCaffery’s original Dragonrider’s of Pern series, and I
found it one of those books that I didn’t want to end. And while it was billed as science fiction,
it certainly had a fantasy feel to it, so perhaps a grain of interest in that ‘other’
speculative genre was planted, and perhaps I had that with me a short while
later when I was perusing the stacks at my local used bookstore. It was
there that I came across the Hobbit and TLOTR books. There they were; battered, dog-eared mass
market paperbacks with those wonderful 1970s era covers (painted by Tolkien
himself—they’ve always been my favorite, and what I’ve always felt were the ‘proper’
covers for the books). </div>
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My hand moved
forward, and I picked them up and bought them.
Later, with the darkness of an early autumn night, I read those famous
words: ‘in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit...’ I was hooked.</div>
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TLOTR was the first real work of fantasy that I’d ever
read, and it remains the best I’ve read, and my favorite. Tolkien’s garnered quite a few imitators over
the years, and I’ve read most of them, and they pale in comparison to the rich,
deep, majestic world Tolkien created. </div>
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I began the habit of rereading TLOTR every couple of
years, always in the fall, for these books just have an autumnal feel to
them. I find I never tire of revisiting
the world and the characters; each read brings new discoveries along with the
joyous reliving of favorite scenes and passages. </div>
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When the Peter Jackson film versions came out, I
certainly enjoyed them, and I’ve watched those several times over the years,
but they can never replace for me the reading of the novel. For one thing, the movies, by necessity,
speed everything up, and one of the great pleasures of visiting Middle Earth is
to enjoy its coziness and its scenery. I
will readily admit that it is a slow moving novel, but I think in this case
that is one of the reasons I like it, because in its indolence is the time to
enjoy the beauty of Tolkien’s language, and the world that he painted with
those words. (In the books, I'd forgotten that over seventeen years pass from Bilbo's 111st (eleventy-first!) birthday party to when Frodo leaves the Shire) Tolkien was a great lover
of nature, and this is reflected in his prose.
One really feels each tree leaf and blade of grass as the Hobbits walk
through the Shire, or each drop of rain as they lounge around Tom
Bombadil’s house on Goldberry’s Washing Day.
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In the House of Tom Bombadil—heh, speaking of slow
sections of the book, this is a chapter where even such a slow tale as TLOTR has
come to a grinding halt. It is no wonder they left it out of the
movie. But, I’m glad they did...not
because I don’t like the chapter...I happen to love it. It may be my favorite chapter of the book,
and I really can’t explain why. There
is just something so absolutely charming about Bombadil, and something so
dreamy and comforting about his home in the old forest. It both opens a longing in my heart and satisfies
it at the same time...I could dwell here in this place for a long while. So yes, I’m glad they left it out of the
film...the movie could not do it justice.
And so it remains a little treasure to be discovered over and over
again, only in reading the book. </div>
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I’ve just finished that chapter, and it inspired me to
write this, as I wanted to linger in the world of Tom and Goldberry a little
longer, before we set out for the barrow downs, and Bree, and what lies beyond.</div>
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Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-70508086241401599682012-08-31T07:36:00.001-07:002012-08-31T07:36:27.565-07:00WorldCon<br />
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Just a quick update to inform that I arrived at Worldcon in
Chicago yesterday. WorldCon, for those
who don’t know, is the World Science Fiction Convention, this year in its 70<sup>th</sup>
iteration. It’s actually my second
WorldCon, (I went to Lonestar Con 2 in San Antonio back in ’97), but it’s my
first to attend as a writer. </div>
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As I’m still relatively new to the game, I only had one
panel appearance, which was yesterday. I
had a story come out in Daily Science Fiction’s Year One Anthology, so I was
asked to participate in a reading/signing supporting the book. I have to say it was an honor to get to read
some of my work at a venue such as WorldCon, but I was also a bit nervous, so I’m
sort of glad it’s over. Now I can simply
enjoy all the overwhelming craziness that is WorldCon. </div>
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More soon...</div>
Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-67257888495172637692012-06-07T10:05:00.002-07:002012-06-07T10:05:48.890-07:00Ray Bradbury, RIP<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors, has just passed away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Better writers than I will eulogize him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can only offer these simple thoughts:</div>
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Ray Bradbury was the first writer who made me realize that words alone can evoke great beauties in the mind that go beyond the mere meaning of the sentences that they make up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made me realize that a writer, at their best, is an artist painting with words, painting great visions on the canvas of the mind’s eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Take the first paragraph of his story, ‘April Witch:’</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Into thin air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals as the breeze blew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She perched in a lime-green frog, cool as mint by a shining pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She lived in new April grasses, in sweet, clear liquids rising from the musky earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></div>
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Or the equally great story, ‘The Emissary:’</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In dark, clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dog jumped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!</i></div>
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I cannot praise enough the way the richness of his words bring me into these stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They instill a longing in my heart, but also satisfy in a tangible way that only reading those words can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a dance going on here between the author and the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The author is leading, and providing the music with those magnificent words that delight with every syllable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bradbury celebrates both the mundane and the massive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The little things:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leaves, flowers, animals, and the large:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seasons, emotions, and a life well lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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As I’ve grown older, I’ve discovered that such a thing is a feat that only certain authors can manage for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John Crowley and Gene Wolfe come to mind, or the rare prose of e.e. cummings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(His poetry does it for me as well)</div>
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But Ray Bradbury was the first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can’t say that he inspired me to write, but he certainly made me realize that there was something going on in good writing that dwelt beyond the mere meaning of the words on the page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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RIP and Godspeed, sir! </div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-53560620388067285622012-05-02T08:00:00.000-07:002012-05-02T08:00:51.817-07:00Dissecting A Story: Way to Blue<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Writers often seem to loathe the thought of commenting on their own writing process, and even more so upon their finished stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is probably a good thing, and I for the most part concur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A finished piece of writing should stand on its own, without explanation or annotation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the reader’s right to discover the charms of the tale on their own, and let the story be what it is for them and them alone. </div>
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Still, as a reader, I often times long to know what a writer was thinking when they crafted a particular story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I wonder this perhaps even more as a writer as well)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this reason, I don’t have a problem if an author comments upon their own story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just think the comments should follow the story, so the reader has that chance to let the story enchant them on its own first.</div>
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Since this is a writing blog, I often comment on the craft of writing, and perhaps offer a line or two of commentary on a story of mine from time to time, but I’ve never really dissected one of my own stories in detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been considering doing this, however, as a exercise unto itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am still in the process of growing as a writer (something I hope never stops, actually), so I think the endeavor might be not only of interest to a few readers, but beneficial for me as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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I’ve decided to comment upon the genesis of a recently published story of mine called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Way to Blue</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before I begin, however, I ask that you give it a quick read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It won’t talk long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a piece of flash fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can read it <a href="http://www.everydayfiction.com/way-to-blue-by-christopher-owen/" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Way to Blue</i> had a twofold origin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first was a germ of an idea that I had summer before last for a story about a fairy who falls in love with a mortal woman, and he is so flummoxed he loses the ability to fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That idea sat unrealized for quite some time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it was certainly an intriguing premise, I just couldn’t move forward with a story about a romance between a fairy and a mortal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second half of the origin lay in one of my tendencies to use music as inspiration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was shuffling my iPod with such intent in mind and the Nick Drake song <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fly</i> came on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve always loved Drake’s music, and particularly this song, so I decided to write a story inspired by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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As I wrestled with myself in that ‘blank page’ moment that all writers fear, thoughts of my ‘fairy in love’ idea came back to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I decided this might be the time to try to develop it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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For some reason, however, a story about a fairy didn’t seem to fit the Nick Drake song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The song is certainly about losing the ability to fly, at least metaphorically so, but the song is so somber and sad that it didn’t seem to fit a story about fairies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fairies felt too ‘happy’ for this song, and also they carry a lot of historical and literary baggage of their own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Readers expect certain things from fairies, so using them didn’t seem to work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fairies certainly fly, but it is not integral to what they are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I needed beings for which flying was so central that it was at the core of their very being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this reason, I invented the winged ‘Cloudfolk,’ beautiful and humanlike in size and appearance, save for their feathered wings with which they flew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Making this change was the first step in getting the story to flow, for I no longer had the baggage of ‘fairy lore’ holding me back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Before I continue, let’s listen to the song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Click the play button to hear Nick Drake’s Fly.</div>
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Beautiful, eh?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Almost all of Drake’s music is like this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drake’s haunting voice and ethereal guitar tunings weave a tapestry of yearning tinged with sadness and solemnity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think this song is about someone who has tried and failed, and now wallows in the sorrow it has brought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He asks perhaps for a second chance (Please, give me a second grace), or at least forgiveness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is also perhaps embarrassed by the act. (Give me a second face).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever he has done, he has fallen, literally or metaphorically, far down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he ‘Just sits on the ground in your way.’ </div>
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Now, he can only ‘sit on the fence in the sun’ and ‘watch the clouds role by, and never deny, it’s really too hard for to fly.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He contemplates the difficulty of what he has tried to do, and feels only futility in his act of trying, either metaphorically or literally, ‘to fly.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love this part of the song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who among us hasn’t tried and failed at something, particularly love, something which makes us feel like flying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love the particular phrasing he uses in this line of the song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t say ‘it’s really hard to fly,’ he says ‘it’s really too hard FOR TO fly.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know exactly what Drake meant by this (I’d love to ask him, but alas, he died forty years ago), but there is something exceedingly eloquent and highly literary in that phrasing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also remember the first time I heard the song, I misheard the lyric, hearing instead ‘it’s really too hard, butterfly,’ as if he were addressing the little fluttery, delicate creature of that name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It almost makes sense that way, too.</div>
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The song continues on to its dreamy, languid conclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And thus, back to the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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After letting the song play over and over again, I still struggled to begin writing the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then, inspiration, as it thankfully does, hit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of forcing myself to write this tale from the point of view of Nick, the stranded male cloudperson in love, I recast it and began to write from the perspective of his friend, a cloudgirl named Winny. </div>
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From this POV, the tale began to flow, and I finished it quickly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t know when I first started out that Winny was in love with Nick, but this soon revealed itself to me, and the tale thus became hers, and not Nick’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I always love it when I’m surprised in the course of my own writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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With the tale complete, it needed a title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I already had another story called ‘Fly,’ but more to the point that didn’t seem like the right title for the tale anyway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ultimately I chose ‘Way to Blue,’ which is the title of another Nick Drake song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m very happy with the title, as it is a double entendre of sorts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the one hand, it speaks of the ‘way to blue,’ i.e., the ‘way to the sky,’ which is of course for them literally flying off into the sky, but also love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it also phonically echoes the phrase ‘way too blue,’ as in ‘way too sad,’ which both characters are at the conclusion of the story.</div>
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I got a lot of great feedback from friends and readers on this one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the comments at Every Day Fiction was as follows:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A charming story about the impetuousness of love. Winny loves Nick, Nick loves Nena, and Nena loves the boatman’s son. All that’s left is for the boatman’s son to see Winny and become smitten in his own case of unrequited love.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love that scenario.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s reminiscent of Shakespeare’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twelfth Night</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just might have to write a longer version of this tale, and explore such things! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-71330665890693334592012-04-14T09:27:00.010-07:002017-01-29T08:34:34.769-08:00Paintings and Prose<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My story, <a href="http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-luncheon-of-the-boating-party-by-christopher-owen/">The Luncheon of the Boating Party</a>, just came out today over at <a href="http://www.everydayfiction.com/">Every Day Fiction</a>. It was inspired by the Renoir painting of the same name:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I use many things to inspire stories—music, random collections of words, little snippets of conversation I overhear, dreams—but sometimes I also use images to inspire stories. These can be random photographs I’ve found in a book or on the internet, something someone posts on Facebook, or in the case of this story, something hanging on the wall of my very own house. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve always loved Renoir’s <em>Boating Party</em>, and a print of it has been hanging in my breakfast nook since I moved into my house fourteen years ago. The figures in the painting just look like wonderful people having a wonderful time, and staring into the painting always stirs a longing in me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Images can be wonderful sources for inspiration in one’s writing. Sometimes you just stare into the picture and wonder what the story is, and it slowly reveals itself in your head. Sometimes the story will have a similar feel as the painting, but sometimes it might take off on a tangent and end up somewhere you’d never expect. In the case of my <em>Boating Party</em> story, the painting itself is a character, driving the actions of the protagonist. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve used other paintings as inspiration, and I’m particularly fond of the Impressionists and Art Nouveau. Thus I’ve written stories based on paintings by Toulouse Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Mucha, and Van Gogh. For the latter I did three pieces of flash based on each of his famous ‘starry’ paintings, ‘Starry Night,’ ‘Starry Night Over the Rhone,” and “Café Terrace at Night.” Hopefully, these stories will see the light of day sometime in the future. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
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Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh</div>
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Starry night Over the Rhone - Vincent Van Gogh</div>
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Cafe Terrace at Night - Vincent Van Gogh</div>
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All right, time to go write!<br />
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Chris<br />
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Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-53509554354753804642012-03-18T09:49:00.003-07:002012-03-18T15:01:45.365-07:00Today's Writing Challenge<div class="MsoNormal">My normal target goal for each day of writing is one thousand words. I usually exceed this, but a thousand is very doable and good for those days when the words just don’t seem to want to come. It also works out well that a thousand words is the commonly accepted length for flash fiction, which I really enjoy writing these days. If I can’t seem to get anything else going, I can usually brainstorm up a flash piece and knock it out for the day. Sometimes they suck. Sometimes they’re acceptable. Every once in a while, I get a really good one. Those are the keepers. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some days, like I said, I exceed my thousand-word limit. I easily hit two thousand quite often, and sometimes even three. I’ve exceeded five thousand a couple of times, and my all time record is sixty-five hundred, which I did on a day when my wife was out of town, and I was in a groove, so I decided to skip dinner and just keep writing until late in the night. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve been getting a lot of writing done lately, which is a good thing, but much of it hasn’t been prose writing. I’ve picked up a project to do a rewrite on a screenplay for a producer friend of mine, and I’m also doing some writing for the Bail Out web series (and hopefully, someday, TV series) that I’m also working on as First Assistant Director. There’s nothing wrong with this...any writing is good writing. I’m not opposed to continuing to work in screenwriting from time to time, so it’s good to keep my skills up in that area, and all the words count toward my daily goals. But my first love is prose writing, so want to keep working in that area as much as possible. Since I know I have some screenwriting commitments this week, I decided that today I would do a marathon prose writing session, and see if I can beat my personal best and crank out seven thousand words of prose today. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I type this, I am already three hundred and fifty words toward that goal (blog entries count). So, here goes. I’ll report back on how I did. <br />
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UPDATE: Mission Accomplished. 7271 words in six hours. Whew! I'm spent! Two stories knocked out. An SF piece and a mainstream piece. </div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-38545032216628090392012-02-29T08:24:00.000-08:002012-02-29T08:24:20.366-08:00Leaping into the Year<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Just noticed that February has almost slipped by and I don’t have a blog post for the month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I figured I’d better get something whipped up, and what better day to do it on than that most elusive of rare days, February 29<sup>th</sup>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, first, an update, I guess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Work on my novel “Behavior” started in mid January, and progress was good out of the gate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got about 20,000 words of background material, world building and whatnot written, but then I hit a wall, and things have been slow going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think there are two reasons for that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, I’ve exhausted all the ideas that had been floating around in my head about the futuristic society in which the novel takes place (it is currently set in 2064), and I guess I need time for new ones to fill it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m also used to doing invention work on the fly, as I write the story itself, so I may just have to dig in and start the narrative, so that I can see what corners of my world need to be created and fleshed out, even if I have to revise significantly later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The second thing that has slowed me up is I’ve gotten back into filmmaking in a minor way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was heavily into this several years ago, but pretty much got out of it to focus on my prose writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I have a friend who I worked on a pilot for two years ago, and he is starting production on more episodes, and asked if I would come back to help with production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I agreed, as I enjoy filmmaking, (I’m currently working as First Assistant Director on the shoot, as well as doing a bit of writing on the scripts) and figured it would be a nice change of pace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But like anything, it takes a lot of time, and in the last two weeks I’ve been working on it, I’ve made little progress on my novel, or any other prose writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I’m going to have to see if I can get my head back into the game, and make the novel priority number one, or else bow out of the film project at some point in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We shall see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">On the publication front, I’ve had a few sales since the beginning of the year, and a couple of stories have come out as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every Day Fiction just bought “Way to Blue,” my story of a winged man who can no longer fly, inspired by the Nick Drake songs “Fly” and the eponymous “Way to Blue.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Used Gravitons released “Rememories” in January.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This story, about a disfigured man who visits ‘mem joints’ to relive his former life in his head over and over again, got ripped to shreds by a professional author at Odyssey, but I made a few changes (though probably not as many as he suggested) and I’m happy with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes you just have to let a story get out there and see what the world thinks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally “The Ale Wife,” a story about a farcical courtship with unexpected results, will be published by Mirror Dance in March.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My wife and I watched the Woody Allen film Midnight In Paris last weekend, and we quite enjoyed it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact that it featured some of the “Lost Generation” writers as characters really made me want to reread some of these authors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hemingway, Fitzgerald and some of the others were heroes to me during college, when I read pretty much their entire oeuvre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film also brought the romance...the ideal...the fanciful dream of the writer’s life back to my mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The day to day life of a writer in reality can be pretty banal, though satisfying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes one has to let one’s mind wander a bit, and look at things from a distant place, to realize that the romance, the ideal, and the dream are indeed there, just as they were for Ernest, and F. Scott, and Gertrude, and all the rest. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-53284985960423789942012-01-23T13:49:00.000-08:002012-01-23T13:53:02.728-08:00"Fun Project" finished<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Well, I finished my ‘fun project,’ yesterday, which entailed completing the fantasy novel that I started writing when I was nineteen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel finished out at 90,992 words, of which 39,763 are new words added to the twenty-four-year-old manuscript.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As I mentioned I would do in a previous post, I just blazed through the writing, using the forty-six page outline as it was written, and I didn’t take any time to worry about fixing all the major problems that this piece held.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a tedious and even painful thing to do at times, but I feel overall the effort was a great learning experience, and it feels good to be able to say that I’ve created even a crude, quite bad, rough draft of a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Laundry listing all the problems this novel had, or the things I’ve learned from finishing it, is probably beyond the scope of this blog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I’ll highlight a few of them here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First off, the novel was quite derivative, drawing heavily on Tolkien and his imitators, as well as the game <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dungeons and Dragons</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in itself is not inherently uncharacteristic of the fantasy genre, but I myself find I wish to be more original in my writing, and that alone will probably preclude me from ever revisiting this work as something to revise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do like the characters, and a few elements of the plot, so perhaps these will find their way into a future work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We shall see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Another problem that I found with the work was massive amounts of point of view (POV) shifts throughout, all of which were not handled very well by me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had three main characters in this novel, and I tended to jump between all three throughout the work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the third person omniscient POV is a legitimate form, it requires the most skillful of writers to handle it well (Mario Puzo’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Godfather</i> comes to mind) and I feel such is beyond me at this point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was definitely beyond me then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This POV, if not handled well, can be very distracting for the reader, and can often thrust them out of the narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is much safer to stick to third person limited POV in most cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>George R. R. Martin succeeds with multiple POVs in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of Ice and Fire</i> series, but he handles it by breaking the work into chapters with a single viewpoint character for each.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Another problem I found was the overall lack of danger for the characters throughout most of the novel, and the way that they usually found their way out of danger with too much ease in most cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A writer really needs to pile it on to their characters, and make them work hard toward their goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lots of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ moments are good as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The stakes should always be raised again and again and again, higher and higher, until the ultimate crisis moment when it looks like all is lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sadly this work just did not do that in most cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The novel overall seemed to lack what I’ll call depth, for lack of a better word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Characters, particularly minor ones, were often wooden and two dimensional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the major ones were two dimensional in many ways, not to mention the setting itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An author really needs to create a background for their characters and world that not only provides depth and realism, but also motivation for the actions and desires of the characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not saying every novel needs the level of background that Tolkien created, but I think there is a happy medium between that and simply writing what only appears on the page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This can probably be accomplished in many ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are writers who do vast amounts of ‘world building’ before they begin the manuscript proper, and there are those that simply create as they go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both are valid, but there is no excuse for not doing it at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think for me, a combination of both may be the way to go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since I’ve mostly worked in short stories, I’ve mainly been of the ‘create as you go’ school of thought, but for a novel, particularly a novel as complex as the ones that I want to write, I think I may try a little bit of pre-manuscript world building to get me where I want to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And so, with a little sadness but also excitement I leave this world and these characters behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sad, because I have enjoyed revisiting them again, breathing a little life in them and completing something that I started.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excitement, because I am now ready (I think) to tackle the SF novel that has been gestating in my brain for several years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But, a few short story ideas have presented themselves over the course of the last few weeks, so now the decision is, do I knock those out, or move right into the next novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only time will tell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">On the reading front, I’ve just started George R. R.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Martin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Game of Thrones</i> novel, the first volume of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Song of Ice and Fire</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I very much enjoyed the HBO series based on this novel last year, and am surprised at myself for never getting around to reading this series.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d read a little bit of Martin’s work before, mostly short stories and the novella <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandkings</i> (which I highly recommend), but this is the first of any of his longer fiction that I’ve read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So far, I must say, I’m enthralled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Martin is a master storyteller, and he has crafted a certain masterpiece here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His plot is far-reaching and complicated and the history of his world so complex it almost reaches a Tolkienian level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His world feels gritty and real, and he doesn’t pull any punches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would love to know more about how he built his world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My only dislike with is prose is his heavy use of adverbs, which I’ve always been taught weaken one’s writing, but such is a minor complaint against what amounts to one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look forward to the next few volumes with great fervor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-44833751266242867552012-01-02T15:19:00.000-08:002012-05-02T06:32:05.673-07:00Happy New Year!<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I meant to do a quick post at year’s end, but here I am, two days late.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah, well, better late than never.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">THE YEAR IN REVIEW:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Looking back, 2011 was a great year on the writing front for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Final totals were 416,976 words written, which comprised 1,367 pages--by far the best I have ever done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also met my goal of submitting 100 stories by year’s end, an accomplishment of which I’m quite proud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of these 100, thirteen were published, sixty-seven were rejected, and twenty were still out there as of the end of the year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new year has so far brought two more rejections, and, huzzah!, another acceptance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This acceptance was for my story entitled “The Ale Wife,” to Mirror Dance Magazine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a humorous little tale of false assumptions and misconceptions that I am happy has found a home, and I’m glad to place something at Mirror Dance, which I enjoy reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is edited by the brilliant Megan Arkenberg, who has placed a great deal of finely-crafted stories in many well-respected venues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I see her name on a piece, I always know I’ve an intriguing, well-told tale in store for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m now hard at work finishing an old novel from the 80s as a little inspirational and educational side project to help ramp me up to working on the SF novel that will be my main focus in the first part of 2012.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was averaging about 3,000 words a day on this before the holidays hit and the house filled up with family, but I’d knocked out about 16,000 words on it before that, and I’m now back at it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Here’s to a great 2012!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Chris</span></div>
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<br /></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-40596250983158674522011-12-11T14:23:00.000-08:002011-12-11T14:23:37.294-08:00Revisiting an Old Manuscript<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So I mentioned in my last post that since I reached the milestone of 400,000 words for the year, I planned to spend the balance of December, and possibly a little of the beginning of next year, working on a little ‘fun’ project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, allow me to elaborate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">First, a little background.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">When I was nineteen years old, during the spring and summer of 1987, I wrote a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More precisely I wrote a complex outline and summary for a novel (46 single-spaced pages) and then wrote almost two hundred pages of the novel itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something then discouraged me, and I put the novel in the proverbial drawer, where is has languished for over twenty-four years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Novels written by teenagers usually aren’t that good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(and no, no apologies to Christopher Paolini)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This one wasn’t the exception, either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a standard Tolkien Fantasy knockoff with Elves, Dwarves, Dragons and such, set in a standard medieval Europe-like milieu.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such books were all the rage back in the seventies and eighties, with the likes of Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, David Eddings and others cranking ‘em out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I lapped ‘em up like crazy, so it is no surprise that such was the leanings of my first attempt at a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I came across that manuscript in an old filing cabinet recently, and I actually read it in its entirety--with much delight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And no, it wasn’t that good, but it was fun to see what my skills were at that point in my life, and also my weaknesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a little disappointed when I got to the chapter where it abruptly ended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, in spite of how bad it was, I was enjoying reading it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I found a note I’d placed in the same folder where I’d kept the manuscript that outlined my reasons for abandoning it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d been browsing the bookstore that day and I came upon a published fantasy novel that I decided had quite a few similar elements as my little opus, and I think the experience just deflated me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wrote a few more pages, but the burning drive to finish the novel just wasn’t there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think I’d been so driven because I felt I’d had a very original premise for this novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One that hadn’t been done yet in genre fantasy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">That premise?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My main character was a dwarf who wanted to become a wizard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And you see, according to the tropes of the day (as started by Tolkien, but reinforced by later, copycat authors, and of course Dungeons and Dragons), dwarves are inherently non-magical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I had a character, and a seemingly impossible goal, and I sat down and created a rich but quite derivative world in which to tell this story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did a lot of research into Norse myth for this work, and I think that is why there were so many similarities to the published novel I came across (which was, for full disclosure, called “The Plains of the Sea,” by Neil Hancock), right down to several names I’d used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Old Mr. Hancock had mined the Norse mythos as thoroughly as I had--perhaps even more so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, flash forward twenty-four years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve reread the manuscript, and while I don’t think I’ve got anything even remotely usable on my hands, I did enjoy it, and I sort of wished I’d finished it way back then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So now, I’m thinking, just for fun, I may do just that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It shouldn’t be too hard, as I’ve got the detailed outline and summary that I created, I just have to pick up where I left off and complete the prose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only question is, of course, would this be a valuable use of my time?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Before I answer that, I’ll say that the original writing of this novel WAS a good use of my time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I taught myself a great deal about writing that summer by simply going through the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The technique of writing an outline and summary for the whole thing first was a good and useful method, one which I think I will use on future novel projects that I have planned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then going through the day to day writing of the thing, even though I didn’t finish it, still proved to me that I could handle a work of that complexity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, on the one hand, finishing out a novel that I feel has no hope of success would seem on the surface a waste of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, I don’t plan to spend that great of a deal of time on it...maybe six weeks or so, and I think there can be some benefit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d wanted to start on my novel called “Behavior” at the beginning of next year, but I still feel my mind is geared toward the short fiction I’ve been writing, and I need to do something to sort of ‘ramp myself up’ to the task of writing a novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I think the exercise won’t be completely without benefits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll no doubt learn a few things along the way, so I think it could be time well spent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most established authors maintain that a writer has one or more ‘bad novels’ in their system that need to be gotten out before their better work emerges, so perhaps “Shillelagh” (as this novel was titled) could be one of those.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, I’ve set a few rules for myself in this endeavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The main one is that I’m going to stick to the story as plotted by my nineteen-year-old self, plot holes and all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, no going back and fixing issues in the first two hundred pages that were already written.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(It is full of problems like POV issues, gaps in the causal chain, unresolved character arcs, etc).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the rest of the writing, if I can address any of these issues at the sentence level, then that is fine, but no major changes at the chapter level or greater.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Part of me also wants to try to channel that nineteen-year-old’s voice when I write the rest of it, but that might just be asking a bit too much, and really isn’t necessary, since I’m writing this only for an audience of one...me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, here I go, revisiting some characters and a world that has sat frozen in time for over half my life, waiting for the tale to be told.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m almost excited to begin this endeavor, and I think that nineteen year old I once was would be pleased. Get ready to find your magic, little dwarf!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I’ll keep you posted on this little project as it develops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Chris</span></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-45475551002828222132011-12-10T11:47:00.000-08:002011-12-10T11:47:39.198-08:00400,000 Words!<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I entered my daily word count in my tracking spreadsheet yesterday and discovered I’d hit 400,000 words for the year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m quite proud of that, I must say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My daily goal for this year has been a thousand words a day, so with a couple weeks left in the year, I can say that I’ve happily blown past that milestone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Hit 365K on November 9<sup>th</sup>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has truly been a year of living like a full time writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s hoping I can keep up this pace, or something close to it, for many years to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As I check my spreadsheet, I see that these totals include 124 complete short stories, ranging in length from a few hundred words to twelve thousand, plus quite a few unfinished pieces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some are crap, some are salvageable, perhaps a few are good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I’m planning to start on a novel at the beginning of next year, and I think the thousand word-a-day goal will work well for this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t want to completely stop writing short stories, though, as I’m learning a lot still from that format, and I’m having a little success selling a few.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So perhaps I’ll split up the week, and work perhaps four days a week on a novel, and spend the other three on shorts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another way to do it might be to set a goal of a certain number of short stories per month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was suggested by Gary Braunbeck, our writer-in-residence this summer at Odyssey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While he spends most of his time on Novels, he says he tries to write at least one short story a month, so he ends up with twelve a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s not a bad goal, though I may try for a few more a month, since I’m writing a lot of flash fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But if I keep up the thousand words a day, that should easily allow me to produce two or so ‘rough draft’ novels next year, and still have quite a bit of words left over for short fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course there is also the need to do revision, particularly for novels, so I’ll have to work that in somehow as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I really haven’t done a great deal of revision this year, so I need to improve on that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">For now, though, since I’ve reached this milestone, I’m thinking of taking the rest of the year off from ‘serious writing’ and work on a little fun project for a change of pace (not that ‘serious writing’ isn’t fun as well).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll let you know what that is in the next post. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Chris</span></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-80719219648892508552011-11-19T13:40:00.000-08:002011-12-03T13:54:41.524-08:00The Pearl<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One of my favorite writers, Lucius Shepard, is also a Facebook friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was recently in Nantes, France, and posted a little story on Facebook about the singer Patti Smith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had seen her in the Seventies, wild and out of control, most likely messed up on drugs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next time he saw her was just recently in Nantes, and he described her as a sixtyish lady in a long coat and boots, waiting in a hotel lobby, a smile on her face and bouncing on her toes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lamented not catching her recent show, but said it didn’t matter, as ‘the little dance’ she did in the lobby had answered all his questions about her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Patti Smith has survived her personal rock and roll and, as do some few survivors, has grown a pearl around the sadness that entails.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">That last line struck me as an incredibly beautiful piece of sentiment, and I couldn’t help but reflect on it throughout the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone has some measure of sadness in their lives, and most of us try to move beyond it, or dispel it, or drive it from our lives through whatever means we find at hand--perhaps religion for some, or drink or drugs for others, or sex, or baking or perhaps, for some, through art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But no matter what we do, that sadness never really leaves us, it just becomes a part of us, like a scar that tells the story of the roads that we have traveled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The concept of “growing a pearl around it” is quite a powerful thought, for that’s what we, as writers, are hopefully doing when we take whatever measure of sadness is dealt us and turn it into something beautiful with words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve had great sadness in my life at times, but I’ve never found a greater opiate than putting pen to page and turning those sour, ascorbic lemons into lemonade, or turning the painful, gritty grain of sand into a pearl, as Lucius so beautifully put it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Such thoughts leave me feeling dreamy and poetic as I sit down for my daily writing session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All is well in the world, but somewhere, through the quantum throes of time, hurt lingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there is always room for another pearl....</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-16917252453743859552011-10-04T06:19:00.000-07:002011-10-04T06:19:04.495-07:00Flash Fiction FrenzyIt’s been a week of flash fiction frenzy. Not only have I been writing it like crazy, but I just got word that in addition to the two pieces that sold last week (<em>Annie’s Book</em> and <em>Nikki Comes Home</em>) to Every Day Fiction, I’ve sold a third to Weird Year. It’s a little piece called <em>During The Eclipse</em> that deals with myth, religion and the nature of belief, all in about 650 words. <br />
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Yes, that’s why I love flash fiction. You can seemingly pack so much into such a little space, it can really pack a punch. And it is often what you don’t say, but only hint at, that often leaves the most impact. <br />
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I think writing flash is a great exercise for a writer; one learns a lot about brevity and being succinct, and using one’s words to their greatest effect. I’m also glad the form has grown as popular as it has, because I enjoy reading it. It is almost the perfect format for the fast-paced, please-me-now world of the internet.Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-13443238260058945122011-09-30T08:33:00.000-07:002011-10-01T06:56:20.161-07:00Quick Update<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In the past few weeks I hit a couple of milestones in my writing goals for the year:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I reached both 300,000 words and 1000 pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The word count goal is the most important, as I’ve tried to keep myself to a thousand words a day all year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This really keeps me motivated, even on days that I don’t feel like writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s good to see the totals add up in the little Excel spread sheet that I use to track my writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At this pace, it looks like I could go over 400,000 words for the year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">I consider this quite an accomplishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve never maintained that pace at any time in the past, but I’ve found it very doable this year, particularly with the extra time afforded since retiring from my full time job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 400K words is all short stories or novellas, but I think it’s a good number, as I am eventually planning to move more fully into novels, and this represents the number of words necessary for perhaps three novels of good length, or perhaps four even if we go with a more standard length.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Now no, I don’t plan to work toward writing four novels a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that’s asking for too much, and probably stretching the creativity too thin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think I will be happy with writing one to two first draft novels a year, interspersed with some short stories and novellas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rest of the time will be spent on revision, which is something I haven’t done enough of this year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Revise, revise, revise, or so they tell me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Also on the good news front, I just had another couple of sales to Every Day Fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They're flash pieces; one is called “Annie’s Book,” and the other "Nikki Comes Home." They should be coming out in October or November.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-1776655448366088542011-09-07T09:23:00.000-07:002011-09-07T09:26:00.175-07:00Old Titles List DiscoveredSo I was shuffling through some ancient files this morning. (Read: College. Twenty-four years ago. Stuff I originally wrote on my IBM PC jr and saved to floppy disks that were actually floppy) While doing so I came across this list of short story and novel titles that I compiled sometime during college. These were stories that I either had written or planned to write, with the majority of them still being in the planning stages. <br />
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Full disclosure: I loved titles then, and I love them now. Give me three odd words and I’ll gladly arrange them into a title, and then my mind immediately starts creating a story to go under them. It was how I liked to work back then, and how I still like to be inventive now. <br />
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Just for fun, I’ve attached the list of titles for your perusal below. If memory serves me right, the ones in italics are all the ones that I can remember having completed back during college. Most of the rest were just ideas that I had that I had given a title to, or just some words or a phrase that I thought sounded cool. <br />
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Short Stories Titles <br />
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1. <em>Far Pavilions</em><br />
2. <em>Father Figure</em><br />
3. Way Down South<br />
4. <em>Free Enterprise</em><br />
5. Boomtown<br />
6. <em>Bellum Bellum</em><br />
7. <em>Blue Song</em> <br />
8. Michaelangelo's Going Out of Business Sale <br />
9. Sound and Steam<br />
10. Creativity is Neuron 151 Firing Twice<br />
11. Spin, Infinity!<br />
12. Worlds Apart<br />
13. Mars Needs Women <br />
14. Shades<br />
15. Socrates, Please!<br />
16. The Church of Christ Bar and Grill<br />
17. <em>In the Rain</em>18. <em>Northern Girl</em>19. Soar!<br />
20. Bend Sinister<br />
21. South Seas Sun Co. <br />
22. Jihad #83q<br />
23. Insensation<br />
24. The Having Been Loved Man<br />
25. To Raise, Again, the Dead<br />
26. Lettuce, Thank You...<br />
27. <em>Boobs</em><br />
28. <em>Breezeway</em><br />
29. Fish<br />
30. Greenway<br />
31. Heart of Stone<br />
32. Storm Warnings<br />
33. <em>A Clockwork Banana</em><br />
34. Designs<br />
35. Taylor's Place<br />
36. Stones<br />
37. <em>A</em> <br />
38. <em>In Black Mourn I</em><br />
39. <em>Carols</em><br />
40. Refrigerator Repairman<br />
41. Stream of Consciousness<br />
42. White Stuff (Snow)<br />
43. King<br />
44. Kid<br />
45. <em>Victoria</em><br />
46. Third Person<br />
47. <em>Inferno Lost</em><br />
48. <em>The Mephistopholes Gambit</em><br />
49. <em>A Penny Earned</em><br />
50. <em>Raindance</em><br />
51. Windy<br />
52. Cassanova Jones<br />
53. Ice on Pearls, French Say (Ici est Parle Francais)<br />
54. The Supreme Conversation<br />
55. Banner of a Thousand Lands<br />
56. Weeds are Would-be Flowers, Man<br />
57. The Antarcticans<br />
58. Faraway's Star<br />
59. Leap Year<br />
60. A Vision Once I saw<br />
61. Our Grandfather's Plan<br />
62. Carrabeing<br />
63. The Belt of Orion<br />
64. Arc to Arcturus<br />
65. The Heart of Antares<br />
66. Olympus Mons<br />
67. Red Train<br />
68. The Melancholy Man<br />
69. Madonna and Child<br />
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Reading through this list brought a smile to my face, as it reminded me of some good writing times back in college. College was an intensively creative time for me and my writing, and I got a lot done then, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all my classroom workload. Why didn’t I finish more of these stories? Well, that would have to do with me getting hired by the FAA as an Air Traffic Controller during my senior year of college. I suddenly was so beleaguered with ATC training that I had to leave college temporarily (I finished up a few years later) and I suddenly had no time or energy to write. It was great to have a good job, but getting it probably set my writing career back twenty years, because I didn’t write for a long time, and when I did I just didn’t have the energy or drive to stick with it. Thankfully, now that I’m retired that is not a problem, and I am trucking along great this year with the writing.<br />
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Since I love titles so much, I think I will go back and see if I can mine this list for some titles that appeal to me now, and perhaps create some new stories to go under them. I particularly like Michelangelo’s Going Out of Business Sale. I remember where I got the title...it was an art store commercial on the radio, but I had no idea what sort of story I had in mind for it back then. Guess we’ll have to come up with something now. I’m also inspired to go back and read some of these old college short stories, which thankfully I archived from floppies to hard disk a long time ago, and see if there are any that could potentially be updated and/or brought back to life. <br />
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Oh, the list also contained some titles for novels I had planned back then. Here they are:<br />
<br />
Novels Titles<br />
----------------------------------------------------------------<br />
1. Winter's End<br />
2. Samson Sound<br />
3. Padre South<br />
4. Fiji Archipelago<br />
5. Raindance<br />
6. Baron Red<br />
7. Bend Sinister<br />
8. Obsidian<br />
9. Lancelot<br />
10. Shillelagh<br />
11. A Boy and His God<br />
12. Autumn<br />
13. First Person<br />
14. The Antarcticans<br />
<br />
Reading through this brings back memories as well. <em>Shillelagh</em> I actually got about two thirds through when I was nineteen. It was a Tolkienesque standard fantasy knockoff about a dwarf who wanted to become a wizard. <em>Samson Sound</em> was about a deaf kid who discovers he is an amazing baseball player, only to lose the talent when he gains his hearing back. <em>Padre South</em> was about a band of outrageous college kids and their adventures during a summer on Padre Island, written in the style of Steinbeck’s <em>Cannery Row</em>. <em>Raindance</em> was about a planet of perpetual rain. <em>Bend Sinister</em> was the story of a bastard son of a king and his rise to power on a medieval world reminiscent of feudal Britain. <em> A Boy and his God</em> was about a child–the sole survivor of a plane crash in a South American Jungle–who invents his own religion to explain his surroundings. <em>Winter’s End</em> was a fantasy about a world locked in an unending winter which I’m actually gently trying to nurse back to health as a current novel project. Most of the others I can’t remember exactly what I had in mind–may have just been a title. <br />
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So, I had some ambitious goals way back then. Perhaps some of these works will make their way back into future projects. For now, I’m hopelessly caught up in nostalgia, so I will have to tear myself away from these old files so I can actually get some new writing done today.Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7226722876323978004.post-15939100106954709862011-08-12T12:00:00.000-07:002011-08-12T12:05:19.570-07:00Thoughts on NPR's 100 Best SF/Fantasy Books<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;">Well, NPR just released their <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books">list</a> of the 100 greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy books. Since I’m a fan of both NPR and Science Fiction/Fantasy, I thought I’d make a few comments on the list. Like anyone who encounters this list, there are some things I’m happy about, and some that I’m not. Overall, I think it captured most of the classics, but snubbed a few, and it left something to be desired in its exclusion of some deserving contemporary authors. <br />
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I was happy to see that Tolkien’s <em>Lord of the Rings</em> came in first on the list. I feel it is the seminal work of speculative fiction of the twentieth century and thus deserves this lofty station. Yes, I’m a bit biased in my love of this book, but I think most would agree that Tolkien had a powerful impact on the genre that fantasy was to become. I also cannot think of a single other work of fantasy (or science fiction) that has had as great an impact, so I couldn’t really see anyone else on top of the list. <br />
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This leads me to another thing I like about the list. I’m glad they excluded young adult and horror from the list. While there are certainly some worthy titles in both of those categories, I think first that SF and Fantasy deserve to be represented alone (both could have probably had their own 100 greatest list) and second, since this list is voted on by readers, and thus basically a popularity contest, they could have ended up with something like the <em>Harry Potter</em> books, or worse yet, something like <em>Eregon</em> topping the list. Not to slight J. K. Rowling, her HP books are highly entertaining, but despite their great sales numbers, they are not the best of the best when it comes to the classics of speculative fiction. <br />
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This brings to mind the fact that Douglas Adams’ <em>The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</em> came in second. While I like the book, I find it an odd second place in the entire canon of SF/Fantasy. It would seem more appropriate to me for something by Heinlein or Clarke to hold this place on the list. But at least those two are represented somewhere further down the list. I was saddened to find that Alfred Bester didn’t appear on the list. His two novels, <em>The Demolished Man</em>, and <em>The Stars My Destination</em> are integral SF works that should be on anyone’s speculative fiction reading list. <br />
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As to what was included, I was not thrilled to see graphic novels included in the mix. While I love Alan Moore’s <em>Watchmen</em> and Neil Gaiman’s <em>Stardust</em> and the <em>Sandman</em> series, I don’t think of them in the same mix with straight up novels and story collections. They are a different art form, no pun intended. Leaving them out could have opened up space for writers like John Crowley, whose novel <em>Little, Big</em> practically redefined Fantasy in the early eighties. Or Tim Powers, whose exclusion from the list is practically a travesty. <br />
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I was also disappointed to see a commercial movie tie-in like Tim Zahn’s Star Wars inspired <em>Thrawn Trilogy</em> on the list. Nothing against movie tie-ins, they are often entertaining and well written, and they generate some well–deserved revenue for SF authors, but I just don’t think derivative works like this belong on a 100 best list. Especially when so many well known authors of original fiction, like Lucius Shepard, Michael Swanwick, Frederick Pohl, Tad Williams and others didn’t make the list. <br />
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I also found it interesting that authors with series books had the whole series listed, rather than just one book. The main reason that I prefer this is the fact that it opened up more space on the list for other authors, even though in some series, the later books might not hold up as well as the first ones—Frank Herbert’s Dune books being a good example. <br />
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I also found that I disliked the fact that Neal Stephenson had four books on the list. Not to slight his books—he is a brilliant author, but to have a list with four of his books and not one by Samuel R. Delany, or Octavia Butler, or worse yet, Fritz Leiber, is to me unthinkable. Leiber, perhaps almost as much as Tolkien, helped define modern day genre fantasy with his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser works. It is inexcusable that the list excludes Leiber. <br />
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So that’s my two cents on the list, which all in all isn’t too bad. I like when entities like NPR or other places do these sort of things, as it helps promote authors’ books, and gets people talking about books, just like I’m doing right now. I’m sure I’ll take some flak for some of my opinions, but hey, that’s the way it goes. <br />
<br />
In reviewing the list, I find that out of the hundred, I’ve read forty-nine books on the list, including seven out of the top ten. There are several more on there that I’d like to read, so thanks, NPR, for bringing them to my attention. <br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10pt;"><br />
</div></div>Christopher Owenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05739819288891730131noreply@blogger.com0