Hello, everyone! I finished up a really good writing day today (2,000 words in about three hours!) and I can feel myself getting into the groove of this novel. Ben has made an appearance and I’m going to play him as some who seems to be looking out for his interests, but he’s just waiting for the time to pounce. He’s not really the best villain I’ve come up with, but right now he’s the most realistic as far as how he presents himself. Romance novels is not what I really want o be known for, but I’ll do it if I have a good idea.

But, as I write this, I wonder if everything is a little too easy for our protagonist.  Jennifer is really friendly — she just gave him a peck on the cheek for their second ‘not-date’.  While his pressures at work are the norm, and Matt (his best friend and trainer at the gym) is helping out…I just can’t help but to wonder if I can’t throw some grit at this oyster. Again — this is only the first draft. There will be plenty of chances for me to make his life a living hell. I know I sound bad, but I want the reader to empathise and root for the protagonist…or at least not hate him.

I hope that this mojo I have can continue on for this week and the next, so I can get some headway into this novel so I can finish it and get started on the next project. I’m chomping at the bit to get back to fantasy. I also have a couple of projects that I need to get back to…maybe next year. I’m going to gauge the response of The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show as to how I proceed with this particular world. Think of something that’s rooted in Louis L’Amour…or Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Guns, some magic and hopefully some interesting things happening: zombie servants, people possessed and the possible End of The World.  As a good friend of mine would say: “The usual.”

Well, on a side note — I do need to go to bed early tonight (well…early-ish) for a possible job interview. Speaking of that…as always if you would look to the right, you’ll see current links for books either I or friends of mine have written, a Bitcoin tip jar ($700 a Bitcoin!). As always, thank you for dropping by and I hope y’all have a good rest of the day.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

Hello, everyone! I didn’t get a whole lot done because I wasn’t able to get to the office yesterday. I might have tweeted about it.  My car has a problem with the air conditioning. I found the root of the problem: I don’t have one. Apparently, there was some larger issue and it called for the removal of the compressor as a patch. So, I went to the mechanic, think that I still had the ailing compressor and it would be about $200 to replace.

Nope.  A minimum of $1,000 to add one.  Fine.  I don’t really go that far now that I’m a (quasi) working writer. The farthest I go on the work week is to the “office” and that’s only six miles away. I could walk it, but if anyone here has lived in the Louisville area knows that there is no heat, but varying degrees of humidity. The sticky, Southern, energy-sapping humidity. So, I decided to stay home while the mechanics opened the hood to the car and said “Well — there’s your problem!” and slammed it shut.

For some odd reason, I can’t work at home. Yes, it’s the American Dream: my commute could be nothing more than drifting through the kitchen, plopping down in front of the computer desk in my living room and fire up the old Scrivener. Two thousand words later, I can turn off the program and turn on Facebook or anything like that.

Let me walk you through how that’s not going to happen in my lifetime and yours, too.

First off: While I have a serviceable kitchen, the kitchen table has become a filing system. I don’t have enough room to set up a bowl of cereal and a cup of milk. So, I eat in the living room. At my desk. The morning routine is set in stone:

1. Wake up, eat breakfast, read webcomics.
2. Take a look at Facebook.
3. Stay on Facebook — exchange witty repartee, make funny remarks, save cat pictures.
4. Realize I’ve spent three hours trying to think of a funny caption for the AD&D Group (picture of a monster surging up from a sewer taking a group of adventurers by surprise — my caption: “ROTO-ROOTER!”)
5. Spend another two hours playing Pot Farmer.
6. Realize that my day is now a quarter of the day through and I’m still in my shorts.

I can’t work at home because the computer is such a huge distraction to me.  I do all my work on an old laptop. Now, you could say: “So, use the laptop and stay home, doofus.” I would respond: “I still have the TV, the Blu-Ray Player, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, the refrigerator and the people walking by the house chatting about how if they think they’re going to let him back in, they can line up and kiss my ass (you go girl).

Frankly, home is the biggest set of distractions I have. So, I head out to the office and write there. Counter-intuitive as it sounds, I can get a lot done in the office than I can at home. Two thousand words? No problem. I just shut off the Wi-Fi so my battery can last the three hours I need it to last to write. I plug-in my headphones and either listen to music or radio. I can come in, get some coffee and work to my little heart’s content. Hey, it works.

As far as what’s happening with the novel, I did push the deadline up a little…as long as it’s done and off to the professional editor by August, I’ll be fine. My ultimate goal is to get this finished by the first of August, then start on the fantasy novel (The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show) for August, September and October. If everything works out right I can swing into Supercapitalist for NaNoWrimo. December can be spent either finishing up a long-standing project or a quick one for cash. This is fun and all, but I need to get something in my bank account.

Well, I think that’s everything for now. I’m going to talk about a project next time…or maybe review a film after I get my two thousand down for tomorrow.

Have a good evening.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

Hello, all — I know that I have been out for a few days from both insomnia and really not a lot going on here as far as writing goes.  Not that I’m not working (I’ve been working as fast as I can) or anything, but I’ve been focusing more on Lard of Love rather than my vampire tale.  Also, I’m getting ready for my second fantasy series called Drinker, Jester, Flirter, Spy.  OK…so my research is really just watching Burn Notice, but you would be surprised about how much tradecraft you can learn from that show.  Absolutely has nothing to do with the women in scene changes.  Nope.  Nothing at all.

Lard of Love is dragging a little bit for me, and there is really nothing left for the vampire tale except a lot of historical research.  So, I am working on the characters for the other fantasy story just because I can’t seem to focus on just one story.  This one is based off of a gaming character I made (aren’t they all?) and I’m working it into the same fantasy world as The Ushabit Series, The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show, The Ridden and at least four hundred years after the events of The Quietest Heart (on sale at the right hand side).  I always try to come up with an elevator pitch for the books that I write (in order: ‘Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord of the Rings while doing a Larry McMurry cosplay’; ‘Dr. House meets the Biblical Legion’; ‘Sybil and Raiders of the Lost Ark take a road trip through Lonesome Dove’).  So far, the elevator pitch for this is shaping up to be: MI-6 recruits Monty Python to infiltrate Fredonia.  Doesn’t really encapsulate the serious parts of the story, but it’s enough to hopefully get an agent to look at it.

Back to Lard of Love, my erstwhile romance novel.  It’s dragging a little bit because we’re heading into a part that I really haven’t thought through.  I just have to try to work through it and get to the next scene I have written in my head…which isn’t going to be for a while because that’s at least two acts away.  The main character is a fat guy.  I can get away with saying that because I, too am a fat guy.  To answer your next question: no, this is not autobiographic.  I just wanted to write a story in which the fat guy gets the girl rather than the fat guy being the main character’s best friend and certainly not an object of sexual affection.  I’ll just keep working at it.  I’m not hating it yet, but the pace is not doing any favors for me.

Well, that’s all for now.  Tomorrow, I need to get back to work on the current one, just work through the slow part, try to make something of it and get to another good part (maybe the main character could give a chubby chaser’s convention a shot?  Speed dating?) to keep me going.  I also need to get the car taken in to fix the air conditioner before the worse of the heat hits…then again, I’m in The South — while technically it is spring, but the thermometers are telling me it’s 103 degrees (or 93 degrees.  How can there be a ten degree difference in just two blocks?).  With that in mind, I’m going to get to visit the mechanics so we can see about getting the car to keep from dying for at least another five years.

Thanks for reading, as always — please look at the links on the right for current works (I promise to put something up soon) and there is a donation QR if you have Bitcoin.  Hope you all have a good evening, and I’ll chat with you again.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

No post today.  Sorry, everyone.  I am just too tired, which means my insomnia should be breaking.  If not, then I’ll come back here and blather on about my favorite comedy.

Have a good day, or evening.

Seething Apathy

The reason why I call the main category “The Background Chatter In My Head” is because it’s precisely that: it’s what I’m writing in my head, even when I should be concentrating on other things…like cooking, laundry or driving.  Sometimes, there is an idea or a concept that’s in my head that runs around for a while.  This one is going to show up in a couple of my works: the vampire story I’ve been blathering about for a while, and another one which I might discuss later — it’s a take on a very popular Biblical tale.

The concept is the idea of a mentor.  Now, when we thing of a mentor, we tend to think of people who have been instrumental in helping us understand the world and our place in it. Mine are Leslie Dressler and Amanda Hillard-Beam.  These two women have been central in me becoming the writer I am trying to be today.  They have been kind, generous with their wisdom and their time.  They are a sterling example of a good mentor.

What if the mentor wasn’t so good?  What if the mentor seemed to have something against the pupil?  What if your mentor said flat-out that they would not help you, threw a beer bottle at you and said to scram?

What if your mentor was bad?

It doesn’t seem to make sense.  A mentor should at least not want their student to die — even if that’s what it would take to get through their thick skull.  Mentors in TV, stage and cinema were at the very least cranky drunkards who bullied and shoved their student to education and then tell them ‘you had it in you all along’.  They may be crass, but at least they had their student’s best interests at heart.  We have at the other end of the spectrum: the noble and wise teacher, gently pushing their student past their limits with gentle encouragement (or in the case of the Star Wars series, where the notion of mentor was cemented in my young brain) and ultimately stepping aside (or getting a lightsaber jammed in their bellies) to give the student the chance to fly on their own.

The idea of a mentor doing harm isn’t a new one, I know that, but I’m just turning the idea around in my head as what the vampire could be to our protagonist as first, but he’s been a vampire for so long, he might forget (or is he?) that his student is a little bit on the squishy side.  While it’s not actively trying to kill him, but he is certainly making our pseudo-Harker remember the lessons.  While it’s not necessarily a bad mentor, I would certainly hope he grades on a curve.

The other bad mentor I was thinking of is nothing more than the Devil himself.  Him being a harmful mentor is really par for the course.  The notion I am having deals with something that has bugged me for a while: what happened to Abel after he died.  I can see all the theology students raising their hands and stamping their feet for attention (yes, I know that he went to ‘the Bosom of Abraham’ and if you’re a Catholic, he was carried up to Heaven by Jesus during the Harrowing, but that’s not my point).  However, I am not going to let facts get in the way of a good story.  The idea is that Abel discovers a new world after death, and runs into something that is called It-That-Is which enslaves the spirits of the dead.  Abel needs help, and the only one that can help him is Morningstar (try not to call him that, it brings up bad memories).  Obviously, there will be bad blood between the two from that whole Fruit Incident, but there is nowhere else that Abel can go for help.  This is an idea that isn’t going to be worked on for a while because I want to this to an epic series along the lines of “A Song of Fire and Ice” or “The Dark Tower”.  So, there may be notes here and there.

Well, that’s it for now.  I wanted to give some heartfelt thanks to my mentors — who may or may not want to do me harm — and talk about something else in my head.  Thanks for reading and I hope you have a pleasant evening.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

Hello, everyone!  As I am getting ready to get this vampire story fleshed out, I’ve talked about the protagonist a little, but now I want to look at the antagonist.  I’ve called in a vampire, but that’s only because I want to get myself (or the reader) into a certain mindset about the character.  And what is that mindset you ask?

That this guy is mad, bad and dangerous to know.  Much like Lord Byron.

Earlier on, I explained that I wanted to bring back the menace and danger to vampires.  There is a lot we can still do with this particular archetype that doesn’t have to be limited to just sex (although as Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre — that’s what they’re there for), but it can be for any sort of lust.  Lust for money?  Sure — you ever seen a poor vampire?  Lust for power?  Have you ever seen a vampire worry about his voice not being heard in city hall?  Vampires are the spirits of lust given form and substance.  Sex is picked because it’s the most primal and the one that almost everyone can identify with.

I don’t want to call them vampires, though.  That word still has a lot of baggage to it.  Yeah, i said that I wanted to use the word vampire to put myself in a mindset, but I don’t want that word to be used  in the manuscript.  I don’t want my protagonist to suddenly jump up and yell “BLOODY HELL!  YOU’RE A VAMPIRE!”

That is not going to help matters.

So, I’m going to call them vampires, but I am going to give them a couple of traditional weaknesses so that the reader can begin to pick up on things, but still leave it open to the reader should they choose to not believe that a bloodsucking fiend from hell could be a bit on the ornery side.

Well, I’m starting to feel a little mentally fuzzy, so I am going to make it an early evening here.  When I come back tomorrow, I’ll get back to the character of the antagonist and maybe think of some ways he can be a mentor to the protagonist and some ways he can be a jerk to him.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a good day.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

Hey — did you know that the word ‘and’ when written with numbers — like…say…the title of a wildly popular writer’s blog — that the ‘and’ means a decimal?  Like…say if I mention that this post before this one was the Three Hundred and Sixteenth Post, it would be written out in numbers like this: 300.16.  Which would be cool if it were say… my income from writing for the month.  Not cool for listing off how many blog posts I’ve done so far.

Math.  Numbers.  From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee.

Speaking of stabbing — I’ve been working fairly consistently with the current project “Lard of Love”, but the story is starting to take a life of its own.  I was really trying to keep everything neat and tidy, but now I’m still not to the first date, and I’m almost halfway through the word count (was going to be a prim and proper 55K when it finished, but now it’s at 35K, sitting on the couch and demanding wheelbarrows of Twinkies).  I’m not upset or shouting at my screen for the characters to get on with it, but this is what would happen if I didn’t have some sort of outline.  Of course, all of this is for naught because the daily word count is what matters and that I have stuck to self-imposed deadline of finishing this novel by the end of June so I can get to my next and currently the one I am really jazzed up about.

Speaking of getting jazzed up — I did mention I was going to talk a little about the protagonist for the vampire idea I had…but there’s really nothing new for me to reveal.  He is going to be a slightly squishy hero, because he needs to rise to face the Evil before him…but in the beginning, the protagonist and antagonist are going to be friends…maybe even have the antagonist start out as a mentor figure.  I am not sure about adding in a love interest.  I am personally getting fatigued with the idea that the hero needs to a girl threatened to jar him into action.  Or a guy.  I’m just trying to find some other reason for our intrepid hero to face someone who would probably get into chainsaws if he would just give them a chance.  I’ll toss it around in my head for a couple of days.  We’ll see what happens.

Speaking of running a joke into the ground…I should actually head off to bed.  I’m getting better at writing every day, and I want to be fresh(-ish) for the morning.  Hence why my ‘office’ is a Starbucks.  Free Wi-fi and relatively inexpensive coffee is the quicked way to my heart.

Good night, everyone.  As always, thanks for reading and feel free to check out the offerings on the right, and the bitcoin tip jar.  I am trying to get something set up with PayPal.  I might have to stretch the truth and say that this blog is for charity.

The nuns at Our Lady of Mercy would be so proud of me.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

Yesterday, I discussed the secondary protagonist Nigel (not his permanent name, seriously) and I mentioned that next time I was going to talk about the world that this book takes place in: World War I Europe.

Of which I know next to nothing.  This is not the biggest problem I am going to face, thanks to Google, Amazon and Wikipedia.  My biggest problem is going to be picking what time period I want the different acts to take place in.

The issue I have is that America isn’t really central to the story.  I don’t want this to end with the US Marines Expeditionary Force charging over the hill and trampling Dracula.  That’s not what the story is about.  It’s about the death of one age and the beginning of the another.  Nothing here about the dawning American Century.  Just a crazed blood sucker who doesn’t want to swap out a hand-and-a-half sword for a Steyr machine gun.

So — I’m going to have to figure out what’s what as far as acts and where everything is going to take place.  I’ve got a good idea about the first act: Merry Olde England where we find our protagonist.  Not so sure about the second, third or fourth acts, but the fifth act should definitely take us back to England.  Yes, I give the Heroic Cycle some lip from time to time, but it works.  What about the middle?  What do I want to bring up?

Well, there are some neat battles I want to bring in: Mons and Ypres to start with.  Mons just to see if I can incorporate the myth of the Angels of Mons into it somehow.  I don’t know if I want to have the protagonist get signed up right away (if I do, then there is a really good story potential lost there) or I want to wait.  Just a quick look at the article about the Battle of Mons tells me that there’s no way I can do that — the Battle of Mons is the first battle fought by the British Expeditionary Force.  Oh, well…I’ll have to look for some other legendary battles and myths during the middle of the war.  I’m sure I’ll find something.  or I can just make it up.   It’s not like Dracula is going to sue me or anything.

When I come back Monday, I think I am going to really get into the protagonist.  I want to get everything set up for this poor man because he’s going to be pretty much the spirit of the age.  I have to admit, I have cribbed this idea (slightly) from Alan Moore’s From Hell.  Although my protagonist isn’t doing anything as nefarious as Jack the Ripper, but I love the idea that there is something beyond our ken that pushed humanity into the age we know.

Thank you for dropping by and reading my blatherings.  On the right of the screen is my current work, a bitcoin tip jar and works of dear friends.  Feel free to click and look about.  I hope y’all have a good evening.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

OK – we’ve talked about the antagonist in this vampire tale, and we’ve touched on the protagonist (I’m going to take about him in depth next time).  Now, I want to talk about the second-most important character in the story: the protagonist’s best friend.  For now, we’re going to call him Nigel.  Of course, this is not his final name, but I am not going to keep typing ‘the protagonist’s best friend’ while talking about him, so Nigel it is.

A lot of times, the secondary protagonist serves the purpose to highlight the main protagonist.  Your main protagonist is a quiet, calculating type, so the best friend is the guns-blazing, shoot-first, second and third sort of person. Your protagonist is a sober sort of fellow who has to come in and bail out his best friend from jail…again.  This a rule that doesn’t need changing a whole lot.  In my last post, I talked about subverting tropes.  I intend to do that with this story, but there are some that shouldn’t muck around with.  This is one of them.

So – as our main protagonist is going to be the Harker-expy from Dracula (I am taking some things from the original text, only because I’m trying to get back to the notion that vampires are thins to be feared, not snuggled), our man Nigel is going to be a little more adventurous.  Hie might even be in the War ahead of Harker and have some responsibilities ahead of him, which no doubt has aged him a little, maybe made him a little more sober about such things.  Not as bad as some people, but we are going to see that war is indeed hell, and one of its Dukes has as of yet to arrive.

Will Nigel get hurt or killed at the hands of either our Harker-expy or Dracula himself?  Not really sure how that is going to fall out.  I’m torn between two camps:

• Yeah, he should die.  The whole Hero’s Journey shtick has him passing through the Underworld (or the trenches of the Underworld) and something should be sacrificed.  We can’t sacrifice the hero because ultimately it is about transformation.  The sidekick on the other hand is completely open to have abuse after abuse heaped upon it, ultimately ending in his death with this also the spurring action.  This has been done, parodied and lampshades over and over again.  So if I want to play with the audience’s expectations…
• He should live!  After all, the point of this whole story is to subvert a lot of the audience’s expectations.  We have been primed to believe that the best friend has to undergo something dramatic, or even fatally dramatic. Going back to the inciting action (this could even be the proverbial Call To Action), he doesn’t have to die, he could just see what’s going on and politely opt out.

I am half tempted to have poor Nigel end up as the Dragon – the secondary antagonist (the best example of The Dragon is Darth Vader. Also point of trivia: ‘Dracula’ isn’t a name, but a title meaning ‘Son of the Dragon’.  Just sayin’) Ina the story.  This does strike as a little overdone, so maybe this will something I will come back to later on, after I have fleshed out the main antagonist and protagonist a little better.  For right now, Nigel gets to remain alive, sane and possibly a War pensioner by the end of the story.

Lucky man.

Thanks for reading this and bearing with me while I blather on.  As always, if you’re generous and tech savvy, there is a bitcoin link to donate to.  I am working on getting something up like PayPal.  There are also book links on the right.  Feel free to look over those.  Next time, I might explore more of the timeline of this story.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy

…because I am finally caught up with the two missing days of the week!  Anything else I do after this will hopefully put me on schedule to finshing at the end of June and beginning editing.  I do have someone lined up for editing, so hopefully this one will be better than my first novel out there.

I said I was going to talk about my vampire project (which I am not going to get to close to being started until 2018. I am slow, but complete), and I want to talk about the themes I want to work with.  This might have been covered in an earlier post, so I apologize for any repetition.

First off…while I agree with the notion that the vampire is a polite Victorian stand-in for lust, but why should it be only sexual lust?  Yes, I understand that sexual lust exactly what the vampire was representing, and the triumph of the main character is symbolic of the triumph of will and manners over our bestial nature.  With me so far?  Good.

What if we substituted the idea of bloodlust for sexual lust? I know that I described the scene that got me going for this idea earlier on, so I won’t bore you with those details.  The time period I’m picking is World War I, because it’s the perfect time for something like this.  It’s the end if one era and really the beginning of the modern era as far as warfare goes.  The grand nobility of war is wiped away by the mechanization of the tools of warfare.  We get frightfully accurate (for the time) artillery and machine guns mashed together with 19th century tactics.  This is something that a being accustomed to the hot spray of blood on his face should be horrified over.  The intoxicating feeling in watching the light flicker out from someone else’s eyes is now lost to the notion of ‘advancing barrage’, ‘acceptable casualties’ and ‘trench warfare’.  In the modern era, we would shrug our shoulders, even though we are going through that change here and now.  Drones have been put out into the field to not only spy on our enemies, but kill them from long distances.  While it is good in the notion that we are shedding less and less blood on the battlefield (don’t believe me? Take a look at causality statistics going back from their height at the Civil War to today), I can’t help but think Chesty Puller would look at a drone and make the same statement he made about seeing a flamethrower: “Where the hell do you put the bayonet?”

So, if this vampire story is going to be about the spirit of bloodlust giving way to the cold calculations of modern warfare, should our protagonist and handy audience stand in get to become a vampire, or just see the horror first hand?  I’m saying first hand witness, but I do want to have someone undergo the change.  One of the vampire tropes I am not going to openly subvert is the notion that the main character is going to have to put down someone he likes.  We’ve seen this in almost every iteration of Dracula and every other vampire film (not Twilight…for that is not about vampires. It’s about sparkly bitches that my vampire character would tear through to the sound of thunderous applause).  I’m thinking, however, that while in the movies, the character does this with the notion that “so-and-so is dead, I’m just putting him/her to rest”, I want it to mean something else entirely.  What that should be, I have no idea right now.

My ultimate goal with this book is to bring vampires back to being something feared, and not to be cuddled up to at night.  That’s a tall order to be sure, but that’s why I’m not planning on getting to the rough draft until 2018 at the soonest.  I really want this book to be the best one. The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show is going to be my best fantasy work, and The Dreaded Day Job my best comedy — I want this vampire story to be my best horror story.

Double points if I get it finished before I die.

Well, I will work a little more on this and throw some more ideas at you.  Thank you for reading, feel free to avail yourself to the tip jar or buy one of the books to the right.  Have a good evening.
Sincerely,

Seething Apathy