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.

Cover: Under Shōko's Bed

Under Shōko’s Bed has a cover that’s not homemade anymore. I found my cover designer, Laura Duffy, on Reedsy.com. She had excellent recommendations, but the thing that swung me in her direction, besides a great portfolio, was her promise to read the book before designing the cover. Under Shōko’s Bed is an eccentric tale, and I worried about what might both represent the text and create enough interest that a browser might pick up the book (either physically or virtually) and read a little. Without that first fleeting interest, I will get very few readers.

I like that this cover is unusual. There are no other books out there that show feet from beneath a bed. I think it has an element of mystery. And the novel begins that way, as the reader wonders through the first chapter just what is secreting itself under Shōko’s bed. I hope the question will be enough to pique more than a few readers’ interest.

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.

Editing: Under Shōko's Bed III

I thought I sent Tricia Callahan a clean manuscript of Under Shōko’s Bed to copyedit. I had stuck as closely as I could to The Chicago Manual of Style and had looked up all the spellings I was unsure of on the Merriam-Webster website. I was ready to give Tricia an easy payday. But it turned out I had not learned the meaning of thorough. Words I thought I knew turned out to be spelled wrong (e.g., police canvass a neighborhood, not canvas), I had too many echoed words, my punctuation was wanting (e.g., I thought I had fixed all the dialogue sections so that only dialogue tags connected to dialogue with a comma, but there were multiple places I had missed), among other problems.

By far the thing I had the most trouble with was punctuating italics. It is very difficult to know when the punctuation should match the italics of the sentence or phrase versus the roman of the surrounding text. I was able to glean some general principles from Tricia’s edit, though, and can use those to guide me in my other novels. Under Shōko’s Bed, though, is unique in my novels in its use of italics. There are imagined dialogues that use italics to help the reader know they are not actual dialogue. I doubt that I will ever have as much trouble with editing and italics again.

In all her thoroughness, Tricia was the consummate professional. She even created a “Style Sheet” for me to reference as I went through the changes. This included a list of characters, places, abbreviations, words she looked up, and a complete timeline of the scenes. Luckily, I had been very careful with the timeline as I wrote and there were no problems. I had even gone so far as to make sure that art exhibits, etc. in the characters’ pasts were real events. And in my behalf, I should say that most of the problems in the manuscript were small things that the average reader would never have noticed, but which would have driven me crazy when I finally found them. It’s nice to know there’s someone who can point them out to me so I can fix them.

Still, even with all of the problems Tricia found, it was not uncommon to go for pages between errors. In the end, I was able to input all the changes into Scrivener in a single day. So it was a very worthwhile edit. It’s a better manuscript now. Every writer deserves to be humbled. We need to be reminded that perfect text is almost always out of reach. The deeper humbling, though, will likely come when I self-publish the novel. I do not have readership locked in.

The idea: The Time Well

I made my first notes for The Time Well two years ago when I was thinking about what might happen if someone were to travel in time. Someone appearing in the past would automatically create a new future, but what happens to the old future? What if it ceases to exist? Then all that space-time would be annihilated, including all the people. I imagine someone would fight to stop that annihilation. Governments might try to outlaw time travel, scientists might sign agreements never to do it, etc., but in a world where something is possible, eventually someone will do it. So if you didn’t want anyone to travel in time and you had sufficient resources, would you become a vigilante to stop it from happening? That was the basic idea for The Time Well. 

Time travel researchers have been dying in strange accidents ever since the mechanics of time travel were first theoretically posited in 2040. But in 2068, the band of billionaires who have been ordering the murders miss killing a researcher and murder his family instead. With nothing left in this time line for him, the scientist surreptitiously builds the world’s first time machine.

I envisioned The Time Well as a trilogy of novels. As I wrote, though, I realized I did not have enough story or subplots to fill three novels. What I had was working well, though, so I cut it down to one novel with three parts. The second and third parts turned out to be heavy on the love story part of the plot but light on science fiction, so I did a rewrite. Now the middle part is not tense or gripping enough, so I am rewriting again. Unfortunately, in the process the book has expanded (it’s now nearly one hundred forty thousand words). That’s too much story for one book, but not enough for three. So now I must decide what to do with it yet again!

The idea: The Keeper

The Keeper is another idea I had years ago. I was watching a superhero movie on television and wondered what would happen if a regular person started acting like a superhero—not believing he had superpowers, just intervening to stop crime. But what do you do with the criminals once you stop them? The idea bounced around in my head for a long time. I made notes on it at various times and even made some abortive attempts to start in the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2016. But the story, although interesting to me, had problems. I tried to set it in America, but I realized I did not know the vernacular of an inner city (the south side of Chicago, where I lived nearly forty years ago). Then I thought about setting it in a small town out west (Springerville, AZ, my wife’s hometown), but the setting would not have had enough crime to drive the story.

As with many of my ideas, it sat and waited. I considered it for National Novel Writing Month in November 2018, but went with a new idea instead, Vision More Glorious. I made more detailed notes for The Keeper the next spring, though, and was ready to write when NaNoWriMo rolled around again in November 2019. The first draft took only thirty days.

The novel bears little resemblance to the superhero idea that I began with. A foreigner living in Tokyo becomes depressed but does not want his daughters to have to live with the pain of their father’s suicide. So he decides to get himself murdered. That’s not a simple thing to do in Tokyo.

The Keeper has been through a major revision and two rounds of editing by my wife and me. It is six months away from being ready to give to readers to get some feedback before sending it out for a professional edit. I hope to go to market with it in two to three years. It could happen faster if there were not so many other projects ahead of it in line.

The idea: Vision More Glorious

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ve participated in each of the last two years’ typing marathons. In the lead up to the first, I was concerned about having a story inspiring enough that I could tap out half a novel in thirty days. But then I started musing on the role of psychoactive medications in my life, how they affect my mood and even my perceptions, the whole way I view the world. I wondered what would happen if a medication could not only alter the way I think, but the actual way I physically see everything around me.

Vision More Glorious follows a young English teacher in Tokyo who takes part in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. To his amazement, it quickly alters the range of light he is able to see, giving him a wonderful, though almost useless, superpower. After the tale of faithless love I told in Kintsugi, I wanted to write a sweeter, more hopeful love story. I found this one, though, wrapping itself up at about the fifty-thousand-word point. There wasn’t enough to it. So I added a drug company as a complication. That got me to ninety-five thousand words that were not entirely internally consistent. So I did a significant rewrite after NaNoWriMo to fix things. That included writing whole new scenes and weaving details together so they made a whole story. I’ve done a lot of editing even since then, but Vision More Glorious is now ready to give to a few readers for feedback before I send it to an editor.

The idea: Kintsugi

I have quite a few American friends in Japan, and there’s one thing many of them do that puzzles me. My inscrutable friends separate for the summer, the husband staying in Japan to work and his family going back to America. It’s not at all uncommon (except in this year of COVID-19) for them to leave the day after American School in Japan lets out for the summer. They return just before school resumes in the fall. I always feel so sorry for the poor, pitiful men left behind, and I wonder that it is not a recipe for marital disaster. From that worry, my novel Kintsugi was born.

The name Kintsugi comes from the technique for mending broken ceramics with lacquer. The lacquer is most often golden in color, and it makes the break look as if it has been filled with pure gold. Pieces can end up more beautiful after the break than they were before. 

Kintsugi is a story of faithless love, what can happen when spouses are separated, and whether shattered hearts can be mended. The novel follows an American couple, their marriage weak, who separate for the summer, and a Japanese couple, their marriage even weaker, separated by the demands of their careers. When the fates of these two couples intersect, the complications test their characters and relationships. Can they mend them kintsugi-fashion to be better than before, or will they simply have to sweep up the shards and throw them away?

The novel also gave me a chance to explore my interest in Japanese ceramics. In fact, the filename while I searched for a title was Arita Girl. Arita is renowned for its ceramics and was the first place in Japan where porcelain was made. Unfortunately, the novel still has small gaps. They are waiting for me to take a trip to Arita. That is near the top of my list of post-COVID activities, but until I either get a vaccine or somehow catch and survive the virus, it has to wait.

I wrote the first draft of Kintsugi in the spring of 2018. It needed significant work, though, and I revised it the next spring and summer (2019). Now the novel has gotten too long, and I need to cut and tightened it. I was hoping to do that this summer, but other novels (and life) demanded my time. I think it will have to wait for the winter.