I’m glad I’m finally not writing this newsletter on the road or in the process of traveling somewhere for work, family, or otherwise. We’ll talk writing, home, and feeling like you have to accomplish something if you have ten or so weeks of official vacation. Let’s get into it.
The Home Front
I don’t mind traveling, but all of the commuting I’ve had to do for my past job and for my son while he was still trying to recover from his February accident. Now, he’s back at work and my daughter has graduated from University of Iowa and begun her new job with a top engineering firm in my hometown. As for me, I’m off work and without too much on my calendar until the end of this month (more on that in a second).
Now, I’m starting to feel more like a local resident in Fort Madison. I just voted in the primary, signed up for the YMCA, and trying to participate in some of the summer festivals and activities going on in the community.
There was one last bit of travel I undertook last weekend with my wife to Chicago which was the first experience I’ve had with the Amtrak train system. I enjoyed riding the rails, and would definitely recommend it to others.
What I’m Writing
With all of this traveling, I’ve fallen behind my goal of writing at least 200,000 words this year by at least a few thousand words off the pace. However, I’m hoping I spend the next several weeks of my vacation getting a boatload of writing done so by the time I start my new job in August.
So, what have I been writing? I’ve been planning out my next steps for The Yank Striker 2. As of right now, I have about 34,000 words for a rough draft, but I could easily trim 5,000 of those off the rough draft, because some of it on second glance will be honestly repetitive1. My plan is to end up with a rough draft of no more than 70-80,000 words, especially since the book will only cover less than a year of action and, if you couldn’t tell from the working title, is one in a series. The good thing about a series is, if you think a book is getting too long, you can always split it up into more than one books.
I’ve also been piecing together a rough draft of a fiction project I first came up with nearly a year ago now – a project having to do with a family of professional wrestlers. I even posted a short story which eventually became my initial stab at the project.
With our move early last year, I haven’t had much time to work on this project as I thought I had. However, with a bit of work, I’ve managed to put together more than 10,000 words for the project so far. As with The Yank Striker 2, since this will be the first book in a series (in this case, I’m thinking a trilogy), I don’t want it to be much longer than 80,000 words. I’m now at the point where I need to plot out the key scenes in this book to help better structure the rough draft2. I’ll let you know how it all is going further down the road.
Of course, I’ve been active here as well. I have (with only a couple of exceptions) posted regularly on weekends, usually Saturdays, with the odd bonus posts happening as well. They run as follows:
- First and third weekends of the month – my normal The Writing Life newsletter, which you are reading now.
- Second weekend of the month – Prose Night at the Writing Life, where I run original essays, short fiction, fiction excerpts, or (occasionally) longer-form advice about writing.
- Fourth weekend of the month – Poetry Night at the Writing Life, where I post original poetry and (usually) a bit of background about the poems.
- In the event of a fifth weekend of the month, I’ll either take a break or post some sort of bonus writing-themed material. For instance, since there is a fifth Saturday and Sunday this month, I might give a recap of how this writer’s conference I’m going to attend at the end of the month (read below about it).
What I’m Doing Having to do With Writing
Other than the typical blog maintenance stuff, I’ll be attending the Midwest Writing Center’s annual David R. Collins Writers’ Conference from 27 to 29 June next month. The MWC, based at the Rock Island (Ill.) Public Library, will be hosting the event at the campus of Augustana College in Rock Island. I’m looking forward to the fiction revision class and the poetry class for the event. This is especially true for the latter class, as I’ve not really had much of an opportunity to take any poetry workshops or classes up to this point. Until recent years, my focus has been almost entirely devoted to fiction.
As for anything else in this category, there’s not really much to report on upcoming, so I’ll hold off on talking about it for now.
Writing Quote(s) for the Week
For a change of pace, we’re going to include three writing quotes for the week. This one fits into why I’m so fascinated with building worlds in my fiction.
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
This next one fits in with how I feel compelled to write sometimes.
If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.
- Lord George Gordon Byron
Finally… I used to have this book in my collection, but I doubt I still do. It was one of those books I felt an obligation to read rather than a desire to read and I reacted accordingly (I never finished the book, never getting into the main character or his motivations). However, this quote made me laugh and reminded me not to take myself as a writer too seriously.
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
- John Kennedy O’Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Writing Advice
For the first time in a while, I’ve run across some writing advice I don’t necessarily hold with, although I might have some qualified support for the idea. Here’s the advice:
In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
– Rose Tremain
I can see Tremain’s reasoning here, in that the ending has to be “earned” – which I interpret to be a logical and fitting ending based on the events leading to it. There has to be a cause to the effect.
However, I’m too much of a “plotter” not to have an idea of where the story will end up or resolve. I will not write out what the scene will look like until I am about to finish the rough draft, but I will know the basic beats of the scene well in advance.
“Idea” is the key word in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Even though I may have an idea what the ending will look like, it could easily be tossed out or altered before I’m even done with the rough draft. It could very well be changed in the revising process. For me, however, just as a scientist needs to have a hypothesis before he can try his experiment which may or may not confirm said hypothesis, I think a writer should have an idea of an ending even if it is altered or discarded by the end of the writing process.
The one group of writers where I think this advice might fit are those “pantser” writers who start with a premise and a couple of characters and follow it wherever it might go. I talked about the differences between plotters and pantsers briefly in my last Prose Night post about my system of producing rough drafts.
TL;DR analysis – Not the best of advice for a writer like me, but it might suit others.
A Few Links About My Books and Where to Find Them, as Well as Something About This Site
My first book is a journalism thriller set in Chicago during the turbulent days of the 2008 election and the start of the Great Recession. Check out more about it here.
You can get the paperback version of this book on Amazon here and the ebook version of it here.
A fellow Iowa writer and organizer of the Windsor Heights Book Fair, Tyler Granger, recently did a review of my book: you can find it here.
My second book, the first in the The Yank Striker series, is a soccer drama telling the story of the beginning of a young American’s career as a player. There’s more about it here.
The paperback version of this book can be found on Amazon and the site of my publisher, Biblio Publishing. It is also available in ebook format on Amazon here.
For full links to these and other helpful places having to do with me and my writing, you can go to this page on my WordPress site, Liegois Media.
You can also get my books in person at these fine Iowa bookstores:
- Beaverdale Books, 2629 Beaver Ave # S1, Des Moines
- Pella Books, 824 Franklin St, Pella.
- The Book Vault, 105 S Market St, Oskaloosa.
I’m always looking for some new places to place my books (especially in eastern Iowa), so feel free to hit me up in the comments if anyone has a suggestion.
Let’s talk briefly about how The Writing Life works.
With a free subscription, you always will have access to my newsletters on the first and third weekends of the month, as well as selected articles up to a month after they’ve been published. However, if you have a paid subscription with me (which is pretty inexpensive), you will have access to all of my articles here, all of my archives, and my eternal gratitude. Plus, some first-dibs on possible future offers.
Final Thoughts
That’s all the writing news for this week. All you writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.
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- Fellow fiction writers, have you ever been in a situation where you’ve tried to start a scene, struggled to finish it, and as a result wound up with three separate scenes stuffed into one? That’s what I’m running into. Feel free to chat about it in the comments or by direct message. ↩︎
- This is not to say I’ve not done any world-building for the project – far from it. I’ve already put together a rough timeline of events for the full trilogy, a family tree for the main character’s family and the family tree of their chief rivals, as well as information on the fictional wrestling companies involved in the story. ↩︎