On a Grahampage

Total new word count for May: Roughly 9000.
Total word count for 2012: 95,000
Bottom line: Spent this whole month locked in mortal combat with a manuscript. Less counting, more combat-ting.


Next month will see more raw production of new material.

1 Tuesday
Major progress tonight, shut off the Internet and wrote without distraction. Overhauled two big chapters, proofed two more. Total new words written, probably 4K.

2 Wednesday
No writing, had to go to airport.

3 Thursday
More headway, but don't expect word counts for the next few days.

4 Friday
Frustrated. It's like every time I think I know what I'm doing, I don't.

5 Saturday
Better, but still pretty blocked.

7 Monday
Worked on the outline, think I've got it.

8 Tuesday
I don't got it. Wrote 1500 words of bullcrap.

9 Wednesday
Recounted multiple plot points to Schaara, got some feedback on how to make a decent female character respond to a crisis. Think I've got it fixed this time. We'll see tomorrow.

10 Thursday
Broke through the slogging parts. Will still need to go back and fix, but I think I've got it. Forging ahead.

12 Saturday
No writing yesterday, camped out. Did some reorganizing on the outline, it's coming together.

14 Monday
Fixed another chapter and tweaked more bullet points on the outline. Some new words written, not more than 500.

15 Tuesday
Picked at edits, but was tired from a night of hanging out with the guys at a hockey game, so not much progress.

16 Wednesday
More progress, completed a chapter and bridged a gap. Pretty much going to start over from here and do a read-through, fix the old problems and what not. Time to make a punchlist!

17 Thursday
YES FINALLY. Today was one of those days where much progress was made, and I feel like I finally cut out a lot of the crap from SIDEWINDER. Good times.

18 Friday
Better night of editing and piecing scenes together.

19 Saturday
Mostly cleanup on battle chapters. This version is still rough, but another cleanup will get it ready for other readers.

21 Monday
Cleaned up another two chapters, now I have to rewrite one of them from a different character's POV.

22 Tuesday
Deleted what I wrote yesterday, wrote anew today. Changed the ending, or at least the sequence of events leading up to it.

23 Wednesday
Pretty sure I did the same thing tonight that I did last night. About 1000 new words, but once again I'm not keeping track. Re-outlined the end.

24 Thursday.
Son of a...AGAIN. Deleted the end sequence. I'm just not addressing my conflicts properly. If you've got a dude crash-landing a jet in DC when a bunch of high-ranking politicians are in town, there's just going to be a lot of bad crap happening. Period.
Took a drastic measure to fix it. Feeling much better now, going to roll with it.

25 Friday
Rewrote the penultimate chapter. Only one to go now. About 1500 words today.

28 Monday
Finished this draft! Time to insert some cleanup stuff, then get ready for a read-through.

29 Tuesday
First night of working on a punchlist. I knocked out the simple stuff first, so that it doesn't get in the way of the bigger stuff. More to come.

30 Wednesday
Checked off all but 1 thing on the checklist, and that's just a matter of giving Sonia some Irish phrases to use. The rest is coming together nicely.

31 Thursday
We are officially underway with revisions, chapter-by-chapter. Woot woot! Did 2 tonight.

My one fear in committing to a career choice that would (hopefully) let me be a full-time author was the lack of practical contribution to the world. I was afraid that even if I was successful, I might get to the end of my life and realize "Crap, I didn't do anything that really mattered. I just had fun and made stuff up."

I even tried getting into medicine. I knew I didn't have the chutzpah to be a doctor, so I figured nursing would be a better fit. After two days of work at a rest home--the Pee Wee League of the nursing field--I hated it and knew that I would never be happy doing it. So I quit and changed my major.

In the years since, I've seen some examples of how good writers can accomplish great things in their careers. The obvious answer is philanthropy, but since that's as simple as "make a ton of money and give it to people who need it," it makes for an uninspiring blog post. So let's talk nerd philanthropy.

There are things that nerds can do to help people that simple philanthropy can't accomplish. Sometimes people need more than just a thing. More than just money. Sometimes their problem is more complex, and only a dedicated nerd artist can solve it. I'm no damn good at chemistry or nursing, so maybe this is what I need to do.

Let me illustrate this three ways. The first Nerd Philanthropist you should know is Roy Williams, a guy who lives in South Carolina. Roy's a gamer. A few years ago, he heard about a kid up in Canada, Jordan Verner, who loved video games but was blind. (Riddle me that, right?) Roy, being a great guy, found a way to beat Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, whilst blindfolded. Read the story here.

Dude. That right there is amazing. How many of you have the patience to help a blind man beat a video game?

The second Nerd Philanthropist is...well, actually a tag-team, and they work at Marvel Comics. Their names are Bill Rosemann and Nelson Ribeiro. They received a letter from a New Hampshire woman whose four year-old son was deaf and loved comic books. Recently the boy had stopped wearing his hearing aid because superheroes don't wear hearing aids. Rosemann and Ribeiro then created a superhero who finds people in trouble with his hearing aid. Now the kid is wearing it again. Story here.

The third--and in my opinion, greatest--example of Nerd Philanthropy is Brandon Mull, the man who wrote the highly entertaining FABLEHAVEN series. (As a guy in my twenties, I'm not the target audience for middle-grade fantasy, but it's a great bunch of books.) The fifth and final book in the series came out in 2010, and everyone was jazzed up for it.

Perhaps nobody was more excited than a young boy named Chase who had a terminal case of cystic fibrosis. He had read all four books, but was in a pinch because his doctor didn't expect him to live to the fifth book's release date. Amid everything that the family was going through, someone got in contact with Brandon Mull and explained the situation. Mull then called the family and spent an hour and a half telling Chase how the series ended, a few months before the book launched.

I was there at the launch party in April of 2010, and witnessed something of a miracle. Chase had actually improved a little bit, enough to leave the hospital and come to Salt Lake City so he could attend the launch party in person. They brought him up on stage and made him an honorary member of the Knights of Dawn (a faction from the books). The capacity crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Chase passed away a few months later.

That was a great turning point for me, seeing an author help someone who was going through such a severe trial like that, giving him a great moment, a great memory for his family...letting him know that he mattered.  I knew right then that I wanted to be that kind of person, to do things like that if I was able.

I may never actually cure the deaf, blind, or terminally ill, but that doesn't have to stop me--or anyone--from using our unique talents to do what we can for them.

So I guess that part of me can rest assured that I can still do something really, really important in this line of work. That's the plan.

Have a nice week.

 

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

These next two are from a later version of the aforementioned story. The first one is a mobile quadruped armor (think Iron Man on all fours), with the pilot dude next to it. The other was a sit-down version with heavier weaponry.