Archive for category Nickajack
The Writer, Back To Work
Posted by DLThurston in Book 1, Nickajack on September 26, 2013
A Post In Two Parts
Part One
I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog that I’ve gone through a layoff recently. If you’ve missed my updates on Twitter, I’ve accepted an offer letter and will be back to work on Monday. I don’t like to actually talk about who I’m working for and what work I’m doing here on the blog, however it’s work similar to what I was doing before my layoff at a company I’m extremely excited to work at. Like, geeked out a little when I arrived for my interview excited. It may or may not have ultimately helped, but I got the job.
I realize I was in a very good position. My former company treated me very well, even through the layoff. I wasn’t an isolated employee thrown to the wind, I was in the third wave of a massive set of layoffs. That meant plenty of notice, roughly six months, and a severance package that I didn’t burn completely through. In some ways, this layoff might end up being one of the better things that has happened in my career.
I know there are folks out there who are having, or have had, a much tougher time on the job market. I could afford a rather leisurely layoff period, applying for every job I could find, attending every interview that would have me, but I got nowhere close to the point where we had to worry about the house, or our food bill. I even had a pretty good backup plan in place. My thoughts go out to every single person who hasn’t been as fortunate as I.
Part Two
I’m not just heading back to work in my day job career, I’ve also gotten back to work on my writing in a good and substantial way. I’ve had a few fits and starts since the baby came along, but I think I’ve found something that’s working for me.
It all started a few years ago on Lifehacker, a post passing along Jerry Seinfeld’s method for improved productivity:
[Seinfeld] said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
I’ve seen this alternatively called the Seinfeld Method and Don’t Break The Chain online. Folks have used it to learn foreign languages, get better about exercising, stop procrastinating nearly so much, and, of course, writing. I started my chain on September 15th. It was the day after my birthday, and that seemed as good a time as any to start something like this. Think of it as a New Years resolution of sorts.
My daily goals are modest. 500 words of writing, 30 minutes of outlining, or 30 minutes of editing. These are very easy goals to hit, but they are also numbers that add up over time. They’re also minimums. On the days I’ve written, I’ve gone well over every time. I’ve yet to break the chain, and I’ve done writing all but one day. Thanks to this, I’m just over 9000 words into the generation ship story that’s been running through my mind for a few months.
The momentum factor is very important. I’ve been keeping a page where I’ve checked off the days. And as the chain gets longer, the temptation to break it diminishes. Hopefully this will carry me through the rough draft, and through edits on both this book and Nickajack.
So that’s me. Back to work in two different ways. Hopefully both are for the long-term.
State of the Writer: July 2013
Posted by DLThurston in Book 1, Nickajack, State of the Writer on July 1, 2013
June saw something odd happen: writing. There are some growing pains in our new plan to get back to work on Nickajack, but we’re back into word crafting and things are going well. We’re focusing heavily on the front of the book, reworking the first chapter to improve character motivations, bringing in a new point of view character that neither of us expected going in. It’s fun to get back into the project, and we hope to improve our methods of writing-with-baby through the next month.
I, especially, hope to improve these methods, as I’m getting closer and closer to the starting point for the first Sarah Constant book. I’ve not gone any farther into the outline than I had at this point last month. Which means, really, I haven’t gone into it at all. I know my major plot lines, but I’m not sure the major beats or the intersection points. Now I’m getting pressure from my own brain, which has been churning out ideas for books two and three in what I hope to make a trilogy.
There’s a problem in thinking in trilogies. First, there’s no reason to presume that books two and three will ever exist. Largely because there’s no certainty book one will exist. To actually bring a trilogy to print, especially for a new author, book one has to sell as a standalone title and perform well enough in the market to create a demand for books two and three. These might then get green lit together or one at a time. Movies often work in the same way. It’s why so many cinematic trilogies have standalone initial movies followed by a massive 4-5 hour movie split in the middle and released as two parts. That first movie pays for the second two by way of its profits. So while it’s fine to think of a book as a trilogy, focusing too much on the latter chapters of that trilogy is…dangerous to say the least. It’s focusing on books that might never exist and distracting from the book that has the best chance of existing and only chance of selling the other two.
That was rather more of a side trip into the economics of trilogies than I expected.
Needless to say, all my notions for books two and three really need to wait while I get book one outlined and written. And the notions of a space immram really can just go to hell, because I don’t need another concept running through my head when I’m having trouble just figuring out when/where/how to write.
State of the Author’s Beer: Hopefully bottling my currently unnamed apple beer this weekend. Which means it needs a name. Fall Ale is still the best I’ve come up with.
State of the Author’s Bees: Worrisome. One hive lost its queen through an apparent swarming, and we’ve not yet been able to gauge the health (or existence) of a new queen. Our other hive, by far the healthier of the two, may also have swarmed. Or maybe was just really busy this weekend. We’re hoping for a chance to go into both hives all the way down to the base this weekend. Look for a longer apiary post this week or next.
Going forward in the Great Hugo Read, we’re tucking into Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, already the winner of this year’s Nebula Award. I’ve never read any Robinson before. He’s best known for his Mars trilogy, featured between 2018 and 2019 in the read. 2312 is Robinson’s fifth Hugo nomination for Best Novel, and he previous won for Green Mars and Blue Mars. On the Nebula side, 2312 was his fourth nomination and second win. Needless to say, he and Bujold are the big guns in this year’s race, having between them 15 nominations and six wins. We’ll wrap up the nominees next month with Mira Grant’s Blackout, then we’re back to classic winners in September with Fritz Lieber’s The Big Time.
It’s getting hot outside, what better reason to stay inside and write? If you’re north of the 49th Parallel, have a happy Canada Day, south have a happy Independence Day. Or, hell, let’s just combine the two and celebrate North America Week.
State of the Writer: February 2013
Posted by DLThurston in Book 1, Mogollon, Nickajack, State of the Writer on February 1, 2013
2013 Goals:
Query Nickajack. Um…so…about this. Yeah. Thing is, after much discussion with my wife/coauthor we decided to fire one of our point of view characters. It’s been a long time coming. We accidentally created a character far more compelling and with more agency. This is great, this is what editing a novel it all about. Not just fixing little grammatical errors, but making those big changes. Of course, this means cutting out 7-8 chapters and replacing them with chapters written from scratch. I’m hoping to get those new chapters outlined and drafted this month, but it does push the schedule back a little. Hopefully not a lot, but at least a little. Which means it also pushes back the schedule to…
Draft Mogollon. …by the same amount. Since we’re hoping to do a lot of outlining and drafting while Nickajack is with alpha readers, and since it’ll take longer to be alpha reader ready…yeah.
Draft GS Book One. This isn’t pushing back. I’m fleshing out characters and working out just how much of the plot for the series should end up in the first book. Or first novella. I’ll admit it’d be an interesting experiment to write this as one big volume containing three novellas, linking short stories, and a 1000-ish word coda that’s already written. It all depends on how much plot there is, and how much ends up in that first book.
Woof. Takes longer to find excuses for being behind on three goals than it ever took for being behind on one.
It’s otherwise a quiet month with little to report. That is to say…
State of the writer’s bees: Sadly, dead.
State of the writer’s beer: Happily aging.
We’re also going into the second month of the Great Hugo Read with our primary book They’d Rather Be Right aka The Forever Machine and a secondary book I Am Legend. The Goodreads group is still going, and is seeing some activity, so if you’re reading the books and are a member pop on in. If you’re not a member, I do plan to talk about the books both over there and over here. It’s another month where the book is hard to find. Starting next month we get into books with audio and digital formats. Here are your options:
Primary: They’d Rather Be Right aka The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955)
- Print: As Forever Machine, used on Amazon starting at $9.02. As They’d Rather Be Right, used on alibris from $10.00, more expensive as The Forever Machine.
- Electronic: Sony reader only.
- Audio: Not available
Secondary: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
- Print: New on Amazon at $7.99. Or go support your local book store! Used on alibris from $0.99.
- Electronic: Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader. SF Gateway outside US and Canada.
- Audio: Audible and iTunes (Fantastic narrator)
2013 Resolutions
Posted by DLThurston in GS Sarah Constant, Mogollon, Nickajack, State of the Writer on December 31, 2012
I’ve talked my 2012 resolution to death. It was overly ambitious, especially in light of a new member of the household, but it’s one I’m still glad I set. I’d rather overreach with a resolution and let that push me through the year than underreach and be left with no motivation as the year ends. With that said, here we go with some overreaching resolutions for 2013.
Writing Resolution #1: Query Nickajack. Yup, like a zombie rising up from the grave, this goal is back for 2013, and feels much more attainable. We’ve still got some editing to do, some alpha reading to endure, some more editing to do, some beta reading to endure, and yes, even more editing to do. But I think we can pound that all out this year if we keep our eye on the prize. The fact that the alpha and beta reading stages will leave us with downtime leads to writing resolution #2…
Writing Resolution #2: Draft Mogollon. We’ve talked the plot of Mogollon at the highest levels, potentially know all our POV characters (if you’re my wife and reading this, I still love the character we created at dinner Saturday night), and should be ready to sit down and outline this beast once Nickajack is with the alpha readers. Drafting ends up a fitting term for this process, in racing you draft to move faster, and I unquestionably move the fastest when I’m sitting at a keyboard and generating fresh words. Which leads to, yes, a third writing resolution…
Writing Resolution #3: Draft Sarah Constant. I still don’t even have a good working title for this story yet, which is fine, because I don’t plan to write it until late in the year. Over the last few years, after deciding that pantsing it through Nanowrimo isn’t for me, I’ve still been interested to try the event with a fully realized outline to work from. So for the first ten months this year I’ll be outlining this novel in my spare time with the goal of sitting down and writing at least the first 50,000 words of it in November, if not the whole bloody thing. This might be where I’m officially overreaching.
Reading Resolution: 30 Novels. This I’m intentionally setting my sights low. But it will still be more than I’ve read in most recent years. 12 of these will be the primary novels for the Great Hugo Read, 6 or so will probably be secondary novels, the remaining 12 will be random other picks. And, hopefully, there will be more than those.
So there you have it, laid out in the most open forum available to me. I’m going to skip State of the Writer in January, as it would just be a repetition of this post, but those goals will kick off SotW starting in February and each month after that.
Have a happy new year. Ring it in safely.
State of the Writer: November 2012
Posted by DLThurston in Beekeeping, Fatherhood, Home Brew, Nickajack, Old Weird South, State of the Writer on November 2, 2012

Picture released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported by Wikipedian Someone35.
What do you mean it’s the second?
2012 Goal: Query Nickajack. Last night started a new phase for Nickajack that will see my wife and I find a half hour, even if it’s in two fifteen minute chunks, to read at least one scene of Nickajack out loud a night. It’s a great way to hear the adjectives, the filtering, and the misworded dialogue. The intent is to fix these on the fly and to identify spots where props appear or disappear, character motivations aren’t as strong as they could be, and other plot weaknesses that we can then go back and fix up. This is the novel moving forward in a substantive way for the first time since the birth of our daughter, and it feels good to be back into it. If we push hard and have a good product on our hands, we hope to be ready for the first round of alpha readers by January. No later than March is my hope.
The ultimate plan is two rounds of external readers, the first likely drawn from those who have seen the novel as we’ve crafted it, and the second drawn from those who have no knowledge of the plot or the twists. Each will be followed by a round of editing based on comments. After both rounds are done, then we’ll be querying this bad boy. We likely wouldn’t have made the 2012 query goal even if we hadn’t had a kid, even if we did work straight through, but I’m still glad I set the goal so high. Occasionally you need something completely out of your grasp to keep you jumping.
If you fall into either of the camps that we’re looking to draw readers from, keep an eye out. I’m not looking for volunteers yet, but I will be soon.
In other writing news, I’ve accepted final edits of my story for Old Weird South, and the publisher is hoping that the anthology is out by December 1. I know that dates like this frequently slide, we’ll see about when it will actually come out. If it does hit that date, or up to 30 days later, that will be three short stories published in 2012. Which is awesome. I’ll need to get my ass in gear if I want to match or top that in 2013, and set my sights on some professional rate sales.
State of the author’s beer. Man…I’ve got to bottle that stuff. It’s okay to hang out in the fermenter, but yeah, I’ve got to get that bottled. Maybe that’s a this weekend thing.
State of the author’s bees. They survived the storm in one piece, and now we’re focusing on winterizing them. This means keeping them fed with sugar syrup and pollen so they have reserves to make it through the hard months ahead. That’ll probably be its own post in the next month or two.
State of the author’s baby. Eight weeks old now and super cute. She should start “hatching” over the next few weeks, but she already looks at us and smiles. This is all part of the process by which she’ll learn what is and isn’t a face, and what is and isn’t a person. So while she smiles at us, she’ll also smile at the cats, the wall, and random spots in the middle distance. Still, any smiling is smiling, and it’s awesome to see.
This month is Nanowrimo. The editing I mentioned above is my primary project, but I think I’m going to pick two other goals.
- Redraft Vampire of Mars
- Finish draft of Antioch, 1098
That’ll be a great start if I am going to try to top this year’s three published stories. Jen Brinn, sage leader of the Cat Vacuuming Society, always cautions to not make sales a goal since they’re beyond the writer’s control…but it would still be nice to at least match this year’s output.
If you’re doing Nanowrimo, best of luck with your projects!
Update: Earlier version of this post stated my baby was eight months not eight weeks old. They grow up fast, but not that fast.
State of the Writer: August 2012
Posted by DLThurston in Beekeeping, Ghosts of Venus, Home Brew, Nickajack, Untitled of the Fourth Planet on August 1, 2012
2012 Goal: Query Nickajack. We’re on a similar pace as I mentioned this time last month, with a hope that we’ll be ready to step away and let alpha readers at the project by this time next month. Things are not going as quickly as they could, but that’s entirely because we’ve had other things on our mind, what with the baby now due in a little over four weeks. We’ve been working on both for roughly the same length of time, but one is going to be far more insistent on when it makes its debut to the world, so the shifting of priorities is unavoidable.
This morning I reached the end of Act Two in the novella I’ve been writing on the side, mostly during the mornings. I forgot to grab my morning writing total for the month before working on this blog post, but I know it’s lower than last month as I lost the first week of July to power outages and some vacation time. Still, July did see me push past 10,000 morning-written words, and tomorrow should see me cresting 15,000. I’ve averaged around 300 words a morning across all mornings, averaging in several zeroes, and closer to 350 on the mornings I’ve actually written. In the last few days I’ve also surmounted a block I discussed on Unleaded wherein I was only working in the morning. The evenings have seen me working on the novella, and even starting the outline of a new project of currently unknown length.
I am, if I am honest with myself, not being quite so productive a writer as I would like, nor nearly so slothful of a writer as I have at times been. The summer tends to do that to me.
State of the Author’s Beer. I should arrive home today to a shipment from Austin Homebrew featuring their oatmeal stout, which I will combine with Boysenberries to make the infamous Pi Stout. It’s irrationally good. I’m hoping to find some time this weekend to set up the small television in the kitchen and brew while watching the Olympics.
State of the Author’s Bees. After the scare at the beginning of the month, the hives look happy and healthy. They’ve nearly stocked up enough honey for the winter, though a little more certainly wouldn’t hurt. We’re going to thoroughly inspect them this weekend, make sure everything is a hunky dory as it appears. If it is, each might get a new super.
State of the Author’s Education into World History. This isn’t quite enough for its own post, but I’m quite thrilled with the amount of online material I’ve found in my quest to learn a little more about World History. I’m currently working through Richard Bulliet’s Columbia course “History of the World to 1500 CE,” watching Crash Course World History as it updates, and listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects while commuting. In the wings I’ve got Open Yale’s “Early Middle Ages,” and University of Houston’s “The Vikings.” That should keep me going for quite some time. If I still want more, I’ve been looking at another Open Yale course on the American Revolution, and UHouston’s course on the Normans. Big help was finding this page, which compiles free online classes offered by several universities. Phew, that was a lot of links.
That’s me. I hope to finish the first draft of Ghosts of Venus this month, do some good outlining and get started on a project currently called “Untitled of the Fourth Planet,” and see Nickajack through to a point that it’s ready for alpha readers. That’s an ambitious month, but I think we can do it. This week or next I owe my next Ace Double review. Spoiler: it didn’t contain my favorite individual story, but it was probably my favorite combined double.
Collaboration from the Inside Post 1
Posted by DLThurston in Collaboration, Nickajack on February 9, 2012
Wait! Don’t run! I’m not planning another epic three-part three-day post. I only call this Post 1 because I anticipate future posts on this same topic. Please, I’m so sorry I put you through what I have this week, I just had so many thoughts to share on one subject.
Alright. Collaboration. As I’ve mentioned in passing both here and on Unleaded, I’m in the process of collaborating on a novel with my fantastic wife. As I’ve also mentioned here, I’m currently working through every damn episode of Writing Excuses in reverse order. It’s odd listening to them backwards, since it means they randomly fire Mary Robinette Kowal and get progressively worse equipment. This backwards listen has delivered me through season 4, and I’ve now come to the end of season 3 and their episode on Collaboration. Give it a listen, it’s only fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry, and they’re not that smart.
The episode has put me on defense, just a little. Basically the advice given over-simplifies to: if you’re a starting writer considering collaboration, don’t do it.
I’m not going to pretend to contradict them for a second, I’m not going to suggest that new writers such as myself and my wife should form collaboration teams, or especially that novice writers shouldn’t, as apparently some do, contact established writers and offer to either sell them an outline or “collaborate” by having someone like Brandon Sanderson write their novel for them. Seriously. Who the hell does that? DON’T DO THAT!
They make some fantastic points, collaboration shouldn’t be about finding someone to do the things you don’t do well so you don’t have to do them. Now at this point an astute follower of my writing here and Unleaded will no doubt point out that I wrote a blog post called “Coauthor as Foil” where I made this argument:
Perhaps the single best piece of advice I can give from my limited collaboration experience so far? Find your foil. Find someone who is good at the things you’re not so good at, someone who has admitted their own shortcomings and they’re your strengths. Admitted is an important piece of this. I don’t know if authors can work together if they don’t know their own writing well enough to know what they’re good or bad at.
It might sound like the lazy man’s way of advancing as a writer, find someone who can do the things you can’t so you don’t have to. But it’s also a learning experience. I’ve been told the best way to improve on my flaws as a writer is to read people who do well what I do poorly. See what they do, analyze it, and bring it into my own writing. It’s fine advice, but it’s only the second best way. The actual best way is to find someone who does it well, and not just read them, but witness their process. Watch it come together. There’s something about being there in the planning stages that just doesn’t come across in the final product.
This now sounds like I’m contradicting myself. The trick here, though, is the learning process. I didn’t team with my wife’s skills at bigger picture world building and description so I could not do these things, I teamed with them so that I could do them better. I’d like to think I now do.
There’s a deeper reasoning to our collaboration on this project, though: we already did it anyway. I can’t think of the last project either of us worked on that didn’t include a certain amount of idea bouncing back and forth. Heck, one of the best monsters I’ve ever created was for one of her novels. Nickajack largely started as an experiment in formalizing, and I’ve very happy with the results thus far. Does that make us an aberration? An exception that proves the rule? I don’t know, I certainly can’t say this will be a success in the long-term, but in the short-term I’m very happy with our results.
Would Howard Tayler still yell at us? Probably. Is that going to stop us? Absolutely not.
A few words about our process, at least the process so far. We’ve developed a fantastic three-part method for churning the first draft. We world build in our separate ways. She looks at the distant past, I tie that in with the recent past. We talk about it with each other, get it all written down, and make sure it’s all internally consistent. It’s how she knows what’s going on in our world in 950 BC and I know what went on in 1863. We outline together, and I cannot stress enough how important I think that is in the process. Both the outlining, and the shared nature of it. We both throw ideas out, we bounce them off each other, and come up with the best path forward. Sometimes she’ll end up having all the ideas for one chapter, sometimes I will, sometimes they need to come from both of us. Sometimes she’ll have all the ideas, but only after I’ve vetoed one and we move on to her second idea, or vice versa.
Then the writing begins. I’m the rough draft writer, which means I’m sitting down and turning the outline into chapters of around 1500-2500 words, making sure all the ideas are there, that we’ve gone from point A to B to Z as planned, that the dialogue and descriptions are down. These rough drafts aren’t missing anything, but they are quickly written, which is my style. Like I said, I’m not using the collaboration as an excuse to not write description, but as a way of getting better at it. Which means writing it. She’s the first draft writer, going through a few chapters after my pass and polishing things up, making the draft as good as possible. Even those bits that we know will change. Perhaps especially those bits we know will change. In the end, I call them rough and first drafts because mine isn’t quite a first draft, and her’s isn’t quite a second, and because I’ve long used that phrasing in my own short stories to distinguish between the pass where I’m getting ideas down and the pass where I’m making the ideas work together.
That’s really where we stand two-thirds through the initial draft. We’ve discussed some plans on how we’re going to do the second draft process. It may be largely similar, but with the outlining stage replaced with a reading the first draft together stage. For those interesting in our process, I’ll probably talk about it when it happens. It’ll probably develop organically, much as our first drafting process has. With collaboration, like with any writing, it’s about finding the methods that work best.
I still stand by finding your foil if you’re going to collaborate, but don’t use it entirely as a crutch. Don’t assume collaboration is the best possible idea. There’s a lot to keep in mind. Make sure you have the same goals, make sure you have ground rules. We actually went into this process with a negotiated out if we decided it wasn’t working. As the Writing Excuses folks point out, it doesn’t make the process easier, there are more things to juggle, not fewer. There’s working around schedules, especially if you don’t share the same sofa most evenings. There’s negotiating ideas, the novel isn’t going to be entirely one writer’s baby. That was, perhaps, the hardest part for me to learn. I’ve found it very rewarding, however, and I think the novel is far stronger for both of our ideas than it would have been if just one of us was writing it. Collaboration is not a tool for everyone, but then, no writing tool is.
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