The Phoenix from the Mushroom Cloud

All---

So I recently posted about reaching the point of no return with a noel in progress and making the hard choice to nuke it and move on.  I took a couple of days mulling over concepts that I had sketched out for other novels, working on where I wanted to go next.  As I settled on one, I suddenly began to see ways that some of the themes of the nuked novel could be resurrected in the form of the new concept.

So it may yet be resurrected...

Meanwhile, conversation with a friend led to a concept for another novel that also has me suddenly on fire.  At the moment, I'm grinding through a quick treatment on that concept so that I get everything down, and then planning to concentrate on the other project.

I have now gone, though, from being at a dead-end, to being captured by two separate novels with a lot of momentum and a strong future.

Writing is a strange, unpredictable art.

.Nevets.

Merciless Unto Your Craft

All---

One of the things that I think marks a professional writer is the ability to be merciless to himself and to his writing when necessary.  I'm not saying professionalism requires selling out, debasing your artistic integrity, or  treating your talents with disrespect.  I am saying that there are times you look at a project, even one you're 25K words into, that part of you loves very much, and realize that you can invest three years into making that one project work out, or you can nuke it and take on something else.

It's okay to be a pure artist, and to say, "No, I cherish this project," and I will work with it as long as it takes to make it right."

I think writers on the more professional end of the spectrum have to be willing to make those calls.

So that's what I'm doing for right now.  Book #2 is being nuked.  Actually, I'm parking it for another day.  There's a lot of potential in it, and there are things I love about it, but while Book #1 is on query right now, I need to focus my energy n having an effective follow-up offering in a timely way.  That's not going to happen with Book #2.

So now onto a new Book #2, which will be a stretching experience that will require plenty of its own merciless attention.

.Nevets.

Be Brave Enough to be Boring

All---

There are worse things than being bored.  You could be trapped in a cavern of horrors behind a green door. You could lose a year of your life in which you might have committed murder.  You could be stuck in a heat wave, staring at a swimming pool that isn't clean enough to swim in.

I want my writing to be interesting, clearly, and as a writer of thrillers, a certain amount of excitement is rightly to be expected.  But if being bored isn't the worst thing in the world, why should I be terrified of it in my writing?  Do I want to write a boring story?  Um, no.  But do I need to fret over every little passage, afraid it might bore some readers?

No.

There aren't many books that I don't skip passages in.  I'm a terrible reader in some ways.  I have such a poor visual imagination that I skim through or skip over most lengthy descriptive passages.  I can't conjure the image in my mind, so I bore easily.

And what do I do when I'm bored?

I don't put the book away.  I don't stop reading the story.  I skim or skip.   I only give up reading if there seems to be no hope for a pay off.  If I don't have an investment in the story -- if I don't see an end to the boredom -- if I feel trapped by tedium -- then I might stop reading.

So, if being bored isn't the worst thing in the world and I know that my own boredom of the moment doesn't kill an entire work for me as a reader, why should I be afraid of it as a writer?

A couple of years ago, I entered a content that encouraged courageous writing.  My piece, "I Need This," was honored and I was able to publish, "Terminal Instar," in the Notes from Underground anthology.  It took some guts.  Some of it was what Rachel Thompson and Lorrie Moore would call, "writing something I would never show my mother or my father."  Some of it, though, was writing minor little digressions that might risk boring some readers.

In the end, it's often times the digressions that get me my most positive feedback.  It's taking a moment, amidst the adrenaline and emotional trauma, to philosophize a bit that I think gives my writing its special character.  I don't just write thrillers.  I write thrillers that linger and contemplate.  No, I don't linger in the moment like RJ Ellory does.  Instead, I linger in the ideas behind the scenes like Chuck Palahniuk might.  It's a recipe that I think serves me well, but it's a recipe that risks boring people.

And that's really the point.  It doesn't even matter if you're a writer.  For that matter, it doesn't matter if you're a creative person at all.    If you're an athlete you can't always go for the home run or the knock-out punch.  If you're a salesman, you can't always play for the big deal.  If you're an archaeologist you can't wait until you get a Phase III excavation.  If you're a forensic anthropologist, you've gotta do your metrics.

Whatever you do, if you put your all into it, if you try to own that thing you do, you need to show courage.  That doesn't just mean the adrenaline junkie kind of daring.  That means being brave enough to risk boring people.

You will probably manage to do just that.

But you will also reap great rewards.  And the truth is, most of the time, if you're good at what you do, you bore yourself more than you bore other people.

So.  As readers -- what do you do when something gets boring?  And, as followers of whatever path life has taken you down -- do you shy away from doing those things which might bore your clients?

.Nevets.

What I'm Working On

All,

It's been a little while since I've talked about what it is I'm actually working on, so I thought I'd mention my two major WIPs. Pardon if these summaries sound a bit like pitches. They sort of are, I suppose.

Real Stakes is a novel of psychological suspense in which an outlandish web of conspiracy ensnares an over-confident con-artist of a businessman and a legalistic investigator who holds the Law as the only ethics and morality of any meaning. The conspiracy itself is equal parts outlandish and terrifying, falling somewhere between Ludlum at his most intrigue and Koontz at his strangest. The tone and intimate portrayal of human fragility are both brutal and compassionate, in the veins of Fight Club or Candlemoth. In an abandoned pickle warehouse on the outskirts of Denver, a high stakes poker game becomes the opening foray of a battle between Smith and Jones -- a battle that the woman known to her colleagues only as The Detangler will do anything to stop. For those orchestrating the battle, it a struggle between God, the Devil, and Man. In the end, will anyone come away winning?

Ennui and Malaise is a novel of psychological suspense in which a painfully bored man who has turned to day dreams, wistful prayers to gods in which he doesn't believe, and the power of an adventurous imagination finds himself accused of murder -- the murder of a man whose death he had daydreamed. As in Faulkner or O'Connor, the contemporary work of RJ Ellory, or the cinematic work of M. Night Shyamalan, much of the real violence is psychological. His sense of self and his understanding of the world come crashing down on him, and all he has left to cling to is his own original wish that life present him with something interesting. Interesting, he now has, but perhaps at the cost of everything else.

Not truly pitches, don't worry, just done that way to try and help you get a sense of what I'm working on and where it's coming from. Each novel is is at ~ 30K words. Real Stakes will probably end up around 120K, since it follows something of a suspense thriller format. Ennui and Malaise is more like to be 80 -- 95K when all is said and done.

Rose and I are working out a system for her to act as sort of my draft manager, giving me goals and deadlines, because I really do work better when I have an external expectation to meet. We haven't gotten to specifics yet, but I am really aiming to one of the two WIP's "done" by Christmas. (Ready to look for representation.)

.Nevets.