It isn’t always clear from my stories, but I’m a fan of fan of science as well as science fiction and fantasy. While writing the first Mystic Rampage book I was working on a biochemistry degree and tried to incorporate some of the concepts into how the Genie’s powers work. In a way, it helped me through classes by providing a reason to study more closely and fit concepts into a fictional story in a way that made at least kind of made sense. That process became more difficult after introducing Dr. Wicker, whose powers are based on physics. In case it wasn’t obvious from my writing, physics is not my strongest subject, especially when it comes to the quantum level. Everything about that character was based on a Kindle-fueled crash course in sub-atomic particles. Most of it was from books by Leon Lederman (God Particle, Beyond the God Particle) and Brian Greene (The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of The Cosmos), as well as other science fiction authors who incorporated the standard model or similar concepts into their work like Douglas E. Richards (Quantum Lens) and Douglas Phillips (Quantum Space). While these authors were helpful and got me to the point where I could make general statements, I had to avoid going too deep into any details since I can’t explain what I don’t know. Hopefully that will change soon. Earlier this year I decided to go back to school. I was accepted into a graduate program and signed up for classes earlier this week. It’s still a chemistry degree, but one of the classes involves quantum mechanics and how it relates to chemical reactions. It sounds like a complicated course and I’m sure there will be a lot of late nights but I’m looking forward to studying leptons in terms of their quantum properties instead of picturing them as just dots on a Lewis diagram. Hopefully there will be some information to work into the series and give it more impact to any readers who also happen to be science geeks. Book 2 isn’t scheduled to be released until 2021, so there’s still time to absorb new information and try to build it into Dr. Wicker’s world.
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There have been some new faces in the critique group. I’ve been bringing in pieces of the final book so one of the newcomers asked for a synopsis of the earlier ones to get them caught up. It didn’t seem like a difficult request and I figured it wouldn’t take too long to put something together. After all, everything is written down, so all I had to do was review them chronologically and bring up the main events. It turned out to be a very difficult request and it took a few days to put something together. The first book is just over 250 pages. That’s less than half the length of any Game of Thrones book, and compared to some Stephen King books it’s practically a pamphlet. In spite of the relatively short length it sounded very complicated when I tried rushing through all the events. Nothing seemed clear, especially when trying to explain how magic works in my world, and as soon as I had a page written I felt the need to delete it and start over. It seemed most coherent when instead of selecting important events and trying to explain why they happened I focused on conveying the themes and portrayal of the characters. This is something I’ve been dwelling on a lot lately since current events have made me consider how the characters might be perceived (especially Officer Tymbir; he’s an aggressive person who happens to be a cop but I never intended for him to be depicted as a bad cop). The main themes I emphasized, and the ones I hope readers take away, are people finding their purpose in the world and finding someone to carry on in their place. That was the reason behind Flarence and Soleil’s disagreement about their mysterious rulers. It was also the reason Darren and Tyrell had such a close relationship and why Claire was never far from Flarence. If I had those themes in mind when I was pitching this book it probably would have been easier to find a publisher. I guess every work of fiction gets needlessly complex when trying to go through the series of events and explain why they happened. That’s part of what keeps people interested and sometimes readers have a sense of pride when they’re able to make sense of it all. Still, getting too deep into those weeds makes it easy to lose sight of the main purpose behind the story which is more important than any plot twist.
I’ve finally finished the conclusion to my trilogy. It feels like a milestone so I want to take a moment to reflect on my current position.
While the conclusion is finished the book isn’t. I’ve only been focusing on the last 1/3 of it. I usually don’t like writing piecemeal but moving forward has been challenging because things that came easily before are difficult now. This is most notably the case with the action scenes. Two years ago having characters fight was the easiest way for me to add a few thousand words to a chapter. Lately it’s been taking a day or longer to write them. When I was writing from start to finish I kept getting stuck. It’s not that I’m lacking material. I’ve introduced new characters with their own powers and personalities. Writing their battles is taking so long because I’ve been hesitating a lot, wondering if what they’re doing is the best way to use those powers, or if their actions really fit their personality. Another writer I know likes to bring up the Hellraiser franchise where (SPOILER ALERT) a character is torn to pieces with chains in the first movie. He admits to enjoying that movie, but feels like it maxed out the brutality too early and when the sequel came out he thought what are they going to do, tear someone into even smaller pieces with even more chains? I think he’d describe my writing issues as the result of “pulling a Hellraiser.” There’ve been so many fight scenes that when I try to put in something new it doesn’t feel new. It’s just another person defying gravity, nothing we haven’t seen before in this story. I’m not discrediting my work. It still ends with a battle and while writing that final clash was tough I’m satisfied with how it turned out. However, I feel it’s best to alter my style prior to that portion. There will still be a place for icicle-shooting guns and super-strong zombies (sorry, Enchanted corpses), but I’m going to try making it more of a mystery than a traditional thriller. Changing things up so late in a series seems like a risk, but I’ve been looking back at the earlier parts and they feel forced. I don’t expect coming up with brain teasers for my characters to come easily. I just hope it will make the chapters less stale. The Mystic Rampage series has been going on a while and every now and then I’ve taken a break. Usually it happens during NaNoWriMo and it’s helpful to spend a month focusing on a different project. The problem with that month is that it comes with its own stresses due to the deadline and even if I’m not planning on getting the story published I still desire it to have a certain level of quality. The past few weeks, I’ve taken a lesson from my office ergonomics team and have been taking what I feel is the writing equivalent of a “micro-break.” Instead of taking a single month once a year I’ve been taking a day or two every week to work on a different story; a fan fiction. I’ve always been nervous about that genre since plagiarism can be a serious issue. That being said, it’s been fun. The stories come more easily when you don’t have to create a new character from scratch. It’s been a struggle lately to reach my usual one thousand word limit for the current novel in my series, but with the fan fiction I’ve been able to reach it without too much trouble. I never considered fan fictions to be “real” writing since they inherently take someone else’s work, but now I feel like I owe writers on those forums an apology.
Constantly being busy has made the past few years rush by. Now that most places are closed and everyone is urged to stay indoors it feels like time is at a standstill. I’d probably get stir-crazy if grocery stores weren’t still open, providing at least some reason to get outside once a week. The other people keeping me sane are members of the Cyberscribes writing group. I’m not a good millennial and doing anything online is usually a struggle, but one of the members knew about something called Zoom and it’s been surprisingly easy to use. In addition to pushing each other to keep progressing with our work, maintaining the meeting times has provided a sense of normalcy while everything else has been changing. It’s easy to take for granted how therapeutic having a schedule can be until it’s forced to change. Having some free time felt relieving initially, but these past few days those free hours have ticked by more slowly. Knowing people are still expecting weekly submissions to discuss provides a deadline to meet, and it’s been keeping me active. I don’t know how long this sheltering in place will last, but I want to show my appreciation for fellow writers who have been passionate enough about what they do to keep it up and push others to do the same. It has been very helpful while everything else is off limits.
The year started with good news. The future of the Mystic Rampage series seems promising. Responses from participants in the blog tour that concluded last November were positive and I appreciate everyone who took the time to read Made to Be Broken and share their thoughts. My publisher also said he is excited to continue being involved with the series and putting book 2 in stores. The bad news is the next one won’t be published until next year.
Initially, thinking about that lag time was frustrating. I feel like the second book is ready to go through the publishing process now. I finished a rough draft over a year ago, gave it to beta readers, and made major revisions based on their feedback. I’m anxious for responses as well because if readers liked the heroes in the first book, I’m confident they’ll love the villains in the second. One particularly psychotic character was especially fun to write. However, if there is a bright side to the long wait, it’s that I have more time to focus on part 3. I started this story in 2013 and didn’t expect to be at it this long. I have ideas for other novels, and sometimes Mystic Rampage feels like a distraction. I was actually hesitant to make it into a trilogy. The end of book 2 leaves questions unanswered, but my target audience seems like the kind of people who would enjoy a little mystery. I don’t remember what pushed me to give a third installment a try, but it came out being a full length novel. Unfortunately, only about half of it works. The rest is so ridiculous I'm ashamed to have it on my flash drive. Those results aren’t surprising. I didn’t spend a lot of time outlining the third book since I wasn't even sure I'd be writing it, and if I don’t start a project with a solid plan there’s pretty much no chance of it working out. However, there is enough workable material in my rough draft to keep going, so Mystic Rampage is going to be a trilogy. That’s going to mean putting all my other projects on the back-burner … again. It might be for the best, since it will provide a reason to continue modifying the second book. Since I was leaving readers scratching their heads anyway, I figured I might as well make it as wacky as possible. The epilogue of book 2 included a floating shrunken head that communicated telepathically and a secret society developing a neurotoxin capable of taking away a Genie’s powers. Neither of those concepts has been easy to fit into the plot, so I stopped trying to work them into book 3 and took them out of book 2. There will probably be other things I’ll add or remove from both installments by the time I’m done. It will take a few more years, but at least I’ll know I had ample time to perfect both to the best of my ability. The main lesson of the publishing process seems to be in the value of patience; that, and setting aside as much time as possible for revising. It’s been a few years since I’ve attempted National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). For those who don’t know, it’s an annual challenge to write 50,000 words in November. Some common criticisms are that the challenge seems like a way of putting quantity over quality and that any story written in a month won’t be ready for publishing. Both are fair points. This year I met the 50,000 word requirement but the story isn’t complete. A few years ago I made it to 50,000 words and that story is complete, but it needs editing and has been untouched ever since. Even though neither of my attempts resulted in a useful product, they were still worthwhile.
The benefit this year didn’t come at the end of the month. It came during the month, on days when I don’t usually write. Too often I put projects aside with the excuse that it’s too late and I’m too tired to focus on anything. This year proved that excuse to be inadequate. Even on late nights, I was still able to add to my word count. I admit the quality was poor. There were a few nights when I was writing with my eyes closed, and one night when I snapped them open and realized I’d accidentally been writing about my day, but the important thing is that I was active. I realize now that there is no reason to write less than 1000 words a night and if I can hold on to the energy that I got from NaNoWriMo this year I should have another book completed in no time.
That’s the let down of research. The concepts are amazing to think about but most of the work comes down to turning on a machine and waiting for a printer to spit out a graph. That was always an issue for me when taking chemistry courses. In a drug design class I found studying exactly how and why compounds affect people interesting, but the processes of producing them tedious (and mistakes too easy to make).I turned to creative writing as a way of keeping things interesting by only focusing on the fun stuff.
This approach might sound appropriate for writing science fiction novels. For a while I wanted Mystic Rampage to be a sci-fi. In an earlier draft I did a lot of research and tried to explain the fantastic parts to make them more believable. However, putting too much explanation in the middle of a battle distracted from the action, and by the end things became too ridiculous for the word ‘science’ to be related to the story anyway. Flarence has a coil gun powerful enough to be used in self-defense, but it’s small enough to fit in his pocket. Soleil fights by throwing toxins, but he keeps them in palm-sized vials. In real life a coil gun would have to be massive to generate an electromagnetic field strong enough to be used the way it is in the book, and the quantity of compounds Soleil uses would not be enough to impact a roomful of people. I’m aware that nothing in this story is practical, but making it realistic wasn’t my goal. I wanted to take real concepts and exaggerate them to make the fight scenes fun. I hope it’s fun enough for any readers to forgive the creative privileges I’ve taken. I hope that in the end people will mostly remember the conflicts.
I I feel monster and serial killer stories work best when the reader has a front row seat to the action. This is especially popular in extreme horror where the author describes every blood spatter and scream. While this is an effective method and respect authors who use it, I found it difficult to emulate. I have a character named John Klarbel, also known as the Tool Shed Killer because he kills people with power tools. I tried to dive into detail during one of his murder scenes but I was not comfortable writing that level of gore. There are authors who can make it work, but when I tried it just felt forced. So I took it out. There are still some deaths in my book, but they either happen quickly or the brutal parts are skipped.
While I removed the over-the-top bloody scenes, I didn’t want to give up on the horror genre altogether. To make up for the lost material from the murders, I emphasized other things that would make the chapters memorable. I gave the Genies special weapons and described the mechanics of how they were used. I also gave them special outfits to make them stand out. The more I worked on it, the more I realized something I hadn’t considered before: how similar horror movie monsters are to superheroes. They have signature looks, sometimes masks, along with a weapon of choice, a set of powers and weaknesses, and some have a tragic backstory. There have even been crossovers having the famous ones fighting each other. (I hope there are more of those someday. I’d pay to see Wishmaster vs. Pinhead). After editing it seemed the main difference between a horror story and superhero story was the amount of gore the author was willing to provide, so it was not a difficult transition to make. Reading through it now I feel like it works better as a fantasy/action instead of a gore novel. There is still a serial killer and a shootout, so the publisher labeled it a fantasy/thriller on the cover, but from my perspective Soleil, Flarence, and Darren are all heroes in their own way and I’ll always see them as such.
I decided to base Mystic Rampage in Illinois, but not strictly Chicago. The hotel where Flarence and Clare stay is based on The Drake, but the path that leads to Soleil’s Café is based on a trail in Dekalb. In book 2 the Genies raid an adhesive factory which is based on a place in Montgomery where I worked briefly. This method of combining multiple settings might seem inconsistent to some readers. One chapter paints a picture of a densely populated city with cars lining the streets, and in the next people are firing shotguns in their backyard and nobody is around to hear them go off. Even though this does all take place in one city, the kinds of places the characters live are intended to emphasize their personality. Soleil is the quiet type so his house is secluded, while Darren is more sociable so he lives close to other people.
It might still seem strange to read about people with such different lifestyles living so close to each other, but it isn’t so far from reality. Illinois is a big state and the scenery changes quickly. Keep driving and pretty soon you go from the part of the city filled with hipsters and sports fanatics to rail yards and closed down factories. Before you know it, there’s no infrastructure at all and you’re surrounded by fields of corn and soybean fields that seem to never end. I feel that using different settings to bring out aspects of my characters helped incorporate the different aspects my home state as well. A pair of towns separated by only a sixty minute drive can seem worlds apart. It’s my hope that my characters seem worlds apart based on the kind of house and neighborhood they live in. |
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