Okay, on the 11th September, this was the state of play as regarding dating:
Introductory messages received: 0 Introductory messages sent: 9 (well, I've actually sent 10, but 2 were to the same girl because I didn't realised I'd already sent one before - oops) Replies to introduction: 2 Replies to 2nd message: 2 Replies to 3rd message: 0 Dates: 0
Then things went on hold for a bit after I did get a reply, did go on some dates, but ultimately it didn't work out. Which was fine. A few weeks later she told me she was already seeing someone else and I found myself going: 'Do I feel upset? Jealous? Sad?' And the answer turned out be 'no, still feel fine', which I took to mean she was right about us not being right for one another, though it could also mean I am cold and emotionally distant.
Now, I'm trying again and lo, updated stats. This is cumulative with the stats above and perhaps help illustrate the original point of doing this, namely: it is a numbers game, which means unless the number of attempts are big, the number of successes are small.
Introductory messages received: 0 Introductory messages sent: 18 Positive replies to introduction: 5 Negative replies to introduction (includes saying 'not interested' or 'can't reply because not a subscriber'): 2 Replies to 2nd message: 3 Replies to 3rd message: 1 Different girls dated: 1
Actually, putting it down like that, turns out the odds of getting a reply are actually higher than I thought, though it does depend on the site in question. As I've suggested before, you're far less likely to get a reply on match.com, simply because other members don't get to read or reply to your messages unless they're a subscriber.
Okay, I had this damn fool notion that I could get the book done by early December if I devoted most of my evenings to working on it. That didn't seem realistic half an hour ago, when I was still feeling lethargic after a day of work and then an evening meal. Still, I managed to shut off the internet and put on some music and retreat to the toilet with my notebook.
I should make clear that I don't normally do my writing in the toilet, but I needed to go and I thought having my notes to hand might make it a more productive poo than simply reading the latest issue of Empire like I usually do.
Anyhoo, I was thinking through how to put together the new chapter 37 and realised I was doing something I've never done during a first draft. I was - and I warn you this is going to sound pretentious - doing a textual analysis.
Of course, I don't actually know what a textual analysis is and I do suspect it requires an actual text, rather than an ephemeral notion of what the text might be, but I'm not going to let that stop me. By textual analysis I mean breaking down the proposed scene into dramatic beats and stating, okay, this scene is describing this action (two people having a conversation), but it's progressing this character's agenda (one of them is planning to do something and hoping to convince the other such an action is justified without ever saying what it is they plan to do) and also serving this story function in terms of explaining these plot points to the reader and illuminating the subtext of the scene (e.g. conversation turns to people covering up secrets, cut to scene revealing to the reader secrets held by another set of characters. What those secrets are matters to the plot, but not the structure - the structure cares only that a suitable reveal takes place).
Now, I'm not doing any of this because I want to. I don't even think it's a good way of writing most of the time, better to let gut instinct deal with getting these story mechanics right*. However, I'm on a second draft, where the challenges are less about writing and more about re-writing, revising and fixing structural problems. This particular chapter happens to be one of those pivotal chapters where a whole set of objectives have to be met in order to pull together much of what's gone before and set up what's yet to come. Moreover, I'm determined to make sure it does it efficiently, without resorting to excess verbiage or repetition of those dramatic beats.
To do that, I need to figure out the effect this chapter needs to have and then decide what cogs and gears are required and how much pixie juice needs pumping in to achieve the desired result**. Because, when it comes right down do it, you can analyse things until the cows come home, but if you liquidate an insufficient amount of pixies, you know you won't be able to respect yourself come morning.
* - And I'll freely admit that this kind of reductionist, systematic approach won't be right for everyone. My professional background is in designing, analysing and building systems, so I'm accustomed to thinking of a narrative in much the same way.
** - Weird thing is, I don't know if I could have done this properly even a year or two ago. I could play at it and kind of know what I was doing, but I don't think I would have really understood (the dancing caterpillar allegory applies here). Yet now, possibly mistakenly, I think I do. The curious thing is, it's probably in the last year that I crossed that one million words written mark. Maybe there's something in that after all.
Would you believe it's almost two years since I started writing the first draft of 'An Alternative History of Balesley Green'? I don't know the exact date I opened a new Word document and started typing, but by the 8th December 2007, I'd got almost 5,000 words done. Of course, as I near the end of draft two, most of those words have now been cut, but the opening paragraph is still exactly the same:
When we were kids, this was a place of excitement, mystery and adventure. In the fields beyond the manor house, aliens visited in the dead of night to scribe crop circles in the corn, the hunchback who dug the graves outside the church turned into a werewolf each full moon, and the well at the end of Riddler's Lane was the final resting place of all those who crossed the coven of witches who ran the local school…
In fact, I'd guess that of the 194,353 words that made up draft one, only 10% or so made it into the second draft. Yet the telling thing is that while it took me eight months to write the first draft, I'll have been working on the second draft for over a year by the time it's done. This despite the fact it should come in 40,000 words shorter.
I put that down to the fact that it simply takes longer to agonise over how to make something better than it does to scribble stuff down in the first place. Though next time I'll try and do as much of my agonising up front as possible to save time.
Having said that, there's always a degree of procrastination involved too. This whole blog post came about because I have a road-block of a scene coming up where I don't know yet how I can plausibly get my protagonist from this road over here, into a deep dark tunnel over there. As a result, I have compared the various snapshots of my re-write plan to see how much progress I've made (see graphic below) and also found out that my second draft improves the readability of the first by taking the Flesch Reading Ease from 78.1 to 78.8 and lowers the Flesch-Kincaid grade level from 5.5 to 5.2 (both drafts feature only 3% passive sentences). Hurrah!
Still, should really try and come up with a solution for that problem scene and get it written this weekend if I want to get the second draft comfortably done before Christmas.
I was asked this morning 'How on earth do crime writers write crime? How do they enjoy it? How do they sleep?'. Note that this was with respect to portraying gruesome murder, as opposed to a cozy whodunnit (though I'm sure the same question could be asked of those that write crime-solving cat fiction).
Well, I don't write crime, so I don't really know. However, I have written unpleasant scenes in the past and subjected my protagonists to torturous trials. A favourite of mine was the hero of Megalomania 101 nearly getting drowned and buried alive in a cramped and collapsing escape tunnel while held captive in a rebel camp in the South American rainforest. I even gave him diarrhea at the same time, just for good measure. Then there's that sci-fi novel I'll re-write one day that features the heroine trying to break her own skull open with a claw hammer.
So, I can't answer for crime writers (or horror writers, who usually try to commit far worse atrocities), but I can say that I sleep at night after coming up with such stuff thanks to a couple of points:
Rather like a surgeon focussing on the job at hand allows them to distance themselves from the ickiness of cutting someone open, judging the logistics of a murder, what details to describe and what not to and the effect the scene needs to have on the reader within the context of the entire story, can make the task of stringing together words that tell of a knife plunging into a struggling victim's neck over and over, gouging blood and tissue with each ragged strike, turning desperate screams into a choking splutter of agony, a somewhat mechanistic exercise.
Unlike a surgeon, a writer often has to emotionally engage with their characters. That could be the victim and their feelings of terror or the killer taking sadistic pleasure in their act of brutality. What stops the writer climbing inside the mind of their psychopath and getting stuck there, like a Japanese schoolkid inducted into a top secret mecha program that involves them piloting giant battle robots and who ultimately finds themselves unable to break the mental link to a machine built for one reason and one reason only: to kill and destroy? Yes indeed, what stops these writers rampaging through Tokyo burning pedestrians to ash with their laser-vision and exploding tower blocks with their shoulder mounted rocket launchers?
Well, sad to say, some writers do suffer this fate. However most are able to divorce their own behaviour from stuff wot they made up. This is probably the key point. Writing involves exercising the imagination, but also exerting discipline over it. What goes on in the region of the brain that conjures up creative thought, stays in the region of the brain that conjures up creative thought*.
At least that's how I do it, and if I enjoy it, it's only within the context of telling a story, with this gory scene simply being a necessary piece of the puzzle. Though there is a degree of professional pride involved too. If I'm going to write something that needs to be horrible, I'm going to try my darnedest to make sure an appropriate level of horror is provoked in the reader**.
Anyway, I'll open this up to the real crime writers and horror writers. How on earth do write what you do? How do you enjoy it? How do you sleep at night?
And what about writers of true crime accounts? They don't have the same excuse of 'making it up'. How do they do it?
* - In truth, there's probably no one region responsible for the creative process; I confess I simplified for effect.
** - And mention must be made of the reader, who will bring far more to the page that can be written upon it with words. Some readers will fail to bat an eye at an expert telling of a chilling disembowelment, while another will squirm at a ham-fisted suggestion of someone's cousin breaking a nail last Tuesday.
Saturday was the tweet-up - an excellent meeting of the cream of this country's cognoscenti - while Sunday was marred by something happening to my face. I don't know what it was, but it felt like sunburn.
But that's not what I'm here to write about, for Sunday also gave me, Suw and Kev a chance to read through the first draft script for 'Heroes and Hobgoblins and Household Appliances' - a radio play. Everything was done in a single take except for where lines were fluffed, so the performance can undoubtedly be sharpened up (especially mine), but the point was more about seeing whether we could produce something that sounded at least part-way decent.
I spent last night editing and mixing the first episode together (5 hours work for a 3min 42sec running time), I'll leave it for you to judge whether it works or not.
Reading the Peter Jackson biography, then watching 'The Frighteners' director's cut, then watching some of the bonus features from the film has given me a hankering to shoot another short film. However, short films are an awful lot of work, which was why I started 'Heroes and Hobgoblins and Household Appliances' as a radioplay/podcast drama.
Then, at FantasyCon, I was talking to Lee Thompson and Steve Mosby, and the subject of 'The Jessica Fletcher Effect'* came up. This was supposed to be a short film (or rather, a series of five) and some footage was actually shot, including this trailer haphazardly cobbled together from pictures I found on the internet:
I'm now thinking I should do this as a radioplay. I'll still do 'Heroes...', but I've already got scripts written for TJFE, they just need adapting for the new medium. This idea appeals to me, because a number of people had agreed to play a part in the short films and I felt bad for them when I killed it.
What makes it more interesting is the new idea Lee came up with. I'd already thought I could follow up The Jessica Fletcher Effect with stories of other people affecting by conditions from other genres and then having them all meet up at the end in a big genre convention explosion.
Lee simply suggested handling this as a book, but split up into four parts or mini-novellas - the first three parts telling the story of a different character, the fourth showing what happens when they meet up. I may yet do this as a book, but it also works in the radio play format - four half-hour episodes that anyone can listen to on their MP3 player.
The first episode will be The Jessica Fletcher Effect. The subject of the second and third installments are up for grabs. They need to be something similarly iconic, clichéd and genrified.
My original idea for part 2 was teen slasher horror; a teenage girl keeps having all her friends killed by a serial killer and however many times she kills him, he keeps coming back (other options would be a Scooby-Doo style parody, or maybe a mixture of the two, where the serial killer is a different bizarre creation each time).
For part 3, I don't know. Lee suggested science fiction and that appeals to me, but what to do? The best I've come up with so far spins off 'The Invaders', but an alien conspiracy doesn't sit right with the idea of a normal person who occasionally suffers TV show clichés warping their life. An X-Files / monster of the week format is too similar to the horror concept.
In fact, thinking further on this, the three 'shows' need to be as diverse as possible. A final episode where 'Murder, She Wrote' meets 'Friday the 13th' meets 'The X-Files' wouldn't have as many possibilities as 'Murder, She Wrote' meets 'Friday the 13th' meets 'The Waltons'. Though I've never watched 'The Waltons', so I don't know if I could write a parody around that.
Though a downside to that last idea is that it somewhat scuppers another idea I had. For 'The Jessica Fletcher Effect' I managed to rope in some crime writers to play cameos (yes, writers - you don't think I'd actually get actors to act in one of my productions do you?). In theory, after FantasyCon, I could try and rope in some horror or SF writers for subsequent episodes, but the circle of writers I know does not currently include any who churn out pleasant family dramas.
Anyway, to conclude, at this point I'm open to ideas. Many of you who read this will probably be far more widely read and versed in genre clichés than me, so any suggestion you've got, I'm more than happy to steal. Thanks!
* - Briefly, this concerns a regular guy who suddenly finds himself afflicted with a condition that requires someone to get murdered wherever he goes. And, more often than not, his nephew is pinned with the crime. Suffice to say, our hero takes this turn of events rather less matter-of-factly than Jessica Fletcher of 'Murder, She Wrote' fame.
By the way, did I see a shot from a Murder, She Wrote / Magnum P.I. cross-over in this video?
Okay, after mentioning my intention to trying the dating thing again, I thought I would keep track of some numbers, because after saying that it was all about numbers it would be churlish of me to try only a couple of times and then give up. Plus it might be helpful to others if they can see this guy needed to introduce himself to 20, 40 or 100 girls for every first date arranged*.
Introductory messages received: 0 Introductory messages sent: 9 (well, I've actually sent 10, but 2 were to the same girl because I didn't realised I'd already sent one before - oops) Replies to introduction: 2 Replies to 2nd message: 2 Replies to 3rd message: 0 Dates: 0
Point to note: five of those messages I sent out were on Match.com and you can't read a message on there unless you're a subscriber (looks like you can't even tell if a message you've sent has been read unless you pay extra on top of a subscription). As I'm going to guess most girls on there aren't subscribers, chances are that you're only likely to get a reply if your profile is so enticing it prompts them to shell out for a subscription. And that's not very likely.
Another point to note, I'm afraid I haven't exactly been able to take on board the advice that it's simply about meeting as many people as possible. I have been just a little bit picky. In some respects that's fair enough - sticking to candidates within a reasonable distance of Leeds, for example - but I have summarily dismissed some based on height, others on their (mis)use of English and one or two because they showed too much gum when smiling.
But y'know, it's early days yet. Plenty of time for me to learn how to stop being so superficial.
* - Okay, there is an assumption here that I am representative of the 'average guy'. In many respects, yes, I absolutely am, though I suspect stating the fact I don't drink will put some girls off. Also, I did mention putting wheels on a cherry blossom tree and dragging it round on a leash in one of my recent messages and that may not be entirely normal either.
