Website: 8th anniversary

I turned sixty-nine today. The website turned eight. The last two years have been much more eventful for me than for the website, and even more so for this blog, which has continued to survive my benign neglect.

I continued writing over these two years. Six months ago, my son-in-law completed building a cabin in Scofield, Utah. I get to write there occasionally. It’s marvelous. Unfortunately, I have not written enough to complete either of the novels I started. The first, Orpheus Insufficient, is grounded science fiction, the story of a three-year-long voyage to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, in the years 2204 to 2207. Unfortunately, Orpheus, still unfinished, is over 130,000 words. So I am thinking I might rewrite it to add 80,000 or so more words and turn it into a trilogy rich in subplots.

The second novel is US 89. I started writing it for a contest, but needed to do more research than there was time for. It tells the story of a newspaper columnist in 2076 who is writing a piece a week about each of America’s fifty-two states. She ends up in Arizona, and it is suggested to her that she drive up US Highway 89, which goes from Arizona all the way to Canada. I wrote the Arizona chapters with little trouble, but everything past Utah stopped me in my tracks. The needed research may require me to actually drive the length of US 89. You would think that, being retired, that would be a simple thing for me, but my wife and I are surprisingly busy.

I have also been editing and rewriting scenes in The Time Well, the first in my time travel saga which could end up being eight to ten books. I have to rewrite because the science just wasn’t grounded enough. If we’re talking time travel, of course, it can’t be completely realistic. But my premise was too far out there. There’s going to be hand waving involved, but I wanted to stretch credulity only enough that suspension of disbelief would still come easily.

I continue to work on the sixth Time Well book, which has bloated to 399,000 words. It needs to be edited down and will still require three volumes. I am wondering how to make them work as stand-alone books, but it may just be impossible.

My second novel, Neyuki, is getting closer to being publishable. I have a cover artist, and a friend is typesetting it for me. I think that will all be done by the end of the month. It has taken me far too long to get this out. I kept thinking maybe I would go with a traditional publishing house. In the end, though, I have decided to self-publish. Marketing will be the hard part, and prepping the novel’s debut will take long enough that it won’t show up before July or August.

I have gotten much more involved with the local writing scene, working with two chapters of the League of Utah Writers. I have also joined Apex Writers, a writing community with international scope. Finally, I am still on the committee that puts on one of Utah’s largest writing symposia, Life, the Universe, and Everything, each year in February..

Website: 6th anniversary

Hello from America! Speaking on behalf of my blog, I must admit to another year of inactivity. Speaking for myself as a writer, though, it has been a marvelous year. I completed second drafts of two new novels, tentatively titled Writers on the Storm and August. The first is an attempt at a humorous take on writing, and the second is a somewhat more serious exploration of love in the twilight of life.

I also continue to work on book six in my science fiction series, The Time Well, which began as as a National Novel Writing Month project in November 2022. This is the first time I have had a novel grow out of control on me. It is currently north of 311,000 words. My tentative plan is to break it into three books, although they will not be self-contained units.

I have found that the writing community in Utah, where I now live, is quite active. I have not settled into a writing group yet, but I have so many more potential groups than I had in Japan. My wife and I are even volunteering for a local writer’s conference.

Perhaps the best news is that I am still writing full bore. Unfortunately, I am also writing just as obsessively as always, which still concerns me. Maybe this year I can find better balance in my life. While I have not lacked for writing projects, I did skip National Novel Writing Month last November. With as many novels as I have unpublished, it didn’t seem wise to use that month to produce yet another first draft.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 III

I finished NaNoWriMo today with my biggest thirty-day word count ever: 120,000 words. The novel still has some holes in it and it needs plenty of massaging and patching to make all the pieces fit, but for a first draft, it’s in pretty good shape. As I suspected coming in, already having a world created and characters I know and like made this quick and fun. I am sorely tempted to leave it as it is for a few weeks and start on the next one (book four in my time travel series), then come back to this one and see how the whole arc is progressing.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 II

Today I passed 50,000 words in my latest novel, which is the arbitrary definition of winning set by NaNoWriMo. That makes four wins in four years straight. This year I did it in fifteen days, half of what NaNoWriMo allows. It’s not my fastest win, but it suits me just fine this time around.

National Novel Writing Month 2021

It’s my fourth November participating in NaNoWriMo. This year I am writing a sequel. It’s fun to already know the characters and the world they inhabit. This is book three in my time travel series, The Time Well. I originally envisioned it as a trilogy, but all the content I had conceived ended up in book one. Then, all kinds of other ideas flooded in and now I am thinking about five books. I certainly hope I will be able to keep the the story fresh and unpredictable for that long.

Another problem I have with the series is that I have grown to love these characters. Unfortunately, in writing several books, I will have created too many and not left enough by the wayside. Stephen King says to kill your darlings, and the fact that I don’t want to lose any of these dear characters convinces me that one (or more) needs to go. But which one(s) and how? I have some serious reflection ahead.

National Novel Writing Month 2020 III

National Novel Writing Month is done—and won—for the third straight year. The novel is 91,700 words, quite a bit more than my 75,000-word goal. But there are still places that need filling out and the novel is terribly disjointed. I need to read it through and do a major edit. I am also dissatisfied with the character of my protagonist. I wanted to make him less of the sort of nice guy that populate my other novels (all except The Man Terror Club), but what I have written is a patient, caring, though judgmental man. He is not as irascible and sarcastic on the outside as I had imagined him. Turning him into that less lovable character may take more than a single rewrite.

My two past NaNoWriMo novels have each required more extensive rewrites than I had thought they would need. I know this one needs a big rewrite, and it makes me wonder just what is in store for me and the characters I have created.

National Novel Writing Month 2020 II

I won National Novel Writing Month! In other words, today I passed 50,000 words in November. I was trying not to write at quite the breakneck speed I have the last two years. In 2018 I won in fifteen days. In 2019, twelve days. My goal this year was to slow down and win in twenty days, but I got carried away sometimes and ended up winning in seventeen days. That would suggest that I’ll end up surpassing my 75,000-word goal. That’s all right. I just want to get as close to a complete first draft as I can. I recognize, though, that it will need major work afterward, especially since my curmudgeon isn’t quite curmudgeonly enough. And I’m only about two thirds of the way through the story.

National Novel Writing Month 2020

It’s NaNoWriMo again, National Novel Writing Month 2020. This year’s novel does not have a final title yet, but the idea is to do something a little different.  Six of my novels have male protagonists, and they are quite similar: all are American expatriates living in Japan; all but one are middle-aged; all but one are educators (four professors and an English teacher); they are smart but not too confident otherwise; mental problems are not uncommon (three suffer from depression); all are soft spoken, with strong internal emotions but not effusive outsides; they are thinkers and internal dialogue is not uncommon; all are tall and trim; they are reasonably handsome; none are sexually aggressive or even adventuresome; and all are open to finding an attachment, someone to love. They are nice guys in difficult situations who end up being helped or even rescued by women.

I thought this year for NaNoWriMo it would be nice to stretch and write a character who is not as nice. So this protagonist is going to be a curmudgeon, or even irascible, at least to start. 

I also do not plan to win NaNoWriMo as quickly this year. My primary goal is still simply to win (write fifty thousand words), but I would like to make that happen over twenty days. If I write twenty-five hundred words a day, I can finish the month with a seventy-five-thousand-word novel. Even pounding out that many words in the month would make the novel shorter than any others I have written. 

It’s odd that I have written as much as I have and yet I still feel trepidation at the start of every project, wondering whether I can turn it into something worthwhile. Could that be a good thing, a little humility, perhaps? Or is it part of the reason my protagonists are as weak as they are?

Japan Writers Conference 2020

I attended the Japan Writers Conference 2020 online October 10 and 11. Although I’m teaching online during the pandemic, I had not attended a virtual conference before. I was relieved that there were no big technological hiccups. It was extremely comfortable sitting in my living room watching the presentations. The one major drawback was that I missed being with the other writers. There were online happy hours, but I wasn’t willing to jump in and be convivial. That’s generally true for me even in person, but I found it more difficult online.

The conference had three main tracks: fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. I stayed in the fiction track and enjoyed hearing from some excellent speakers, including David Brennan (Playing with Voice in Fiction), Michael Pronko (Structuring Blues: Long Fiction), Barry Eisler (Write a Killer Opening), and Charles Kowalski (Creating 3D Villains).

There was one speaker, though, whose presentation was so good that I took notes. Steven Wolfson, a screenwriter and teacher, talked about Cinematic Storytelling. His talk was so full of useful advice that I have gone back to it time and again as I have prepared for the coming National Novel Writing Month. One of the best insights he shared was the importance of recognizing that dialogue is action. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, although I have always enjoyed writing dialogue. Now I have a better idea of why I like it so much and the role in can play in the novel.

National Novel Writing Month 2019 III

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is over—I won for the second straight year—and it is time to balance out my life again. I started a few days ago. My daily word count slowed down a week earlier because the text was over 80,000 words and I had told the story. I tried over a few days to just write a little, but it was hard not to let it consume me, and I struggled when it was time to change gears. So I focused more on my job. Still, I was tempted to tinker. So I have been filling things in, doing little bits of editing, adding metadata to the Scrivener file, etc. in the days since I finished the basic story. Now the word count stands at 95,700. I have a little to add in December, but otherwise the novel is ready to put on the shelf for a month or two before I start an edit. I don’t think, though, that it needs a major rewrite like last year’s NaNoWriMo novel did. That feels good.