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.

Basing characters on friends

Where do authors find their characters? How do they choose their names? I often base mine on people I know, sometimes even leaving the whole thing intact. Students are a great source. Pick a first name from one student and a last name from another, and I have a character name that I know is perfectly realistic. I have to be careful, though, as my students are from all over the world, and mixing and matching in that pool can produce nonsense.

A few times I have chosen names, especially Japanese names, with the meaning in mind. “Ikenami” means “pond wave,” which as far as waves go, can hardly be a big one. It fit nicely for character that was a tempest in a teapot. In A Scowl Becomes Me, I wanted to name the protagonist’s wife Blessed. So then I named several of the Japanese characters with names that all mean “blessed.” I enjoyed having the protagonist learn the meanings of their names one by one.

More often, however, I choose Japanese names that are as different from each other as possible, as I know foreign readers can have a hard time keeping Japanese names straight. This was especially daunting in The Man Terror Club, as there are so many women and they are all important to the story. I purposefully tried to make them sound as different as possible, while still making them mainstream Japanese names.

I have also occasionally named characters I like after friends. It makes them more three dimensional for me. This can be even more true if the friend lends not only the name, but also the character’s personality or appearance. The female protagonist in my first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, was inspired in part by experiences of a friend of mine (although it is mostly fictional). In The Time Well, I have based characters on a few friends. They have tentatively allowed me to use their full names, and seem to enjoy becoming part of the novel. I am planning the sequel now and one friend in particular is helping me understand how her character will react to the twists in the plot. The only real problem is that she is too busy to spend much time reading and giving me feedback.

The greatest problem with using friends to create characters is that I can never recreate the original person perfectly. So how does a real life friend feel when a character based on them does something they would never do? It has to be disconcerting. And that uncomfortable feeling could exceed the flattery of having one’s name or personality appear in the pages of a novel.

More importantly, I suspect all my characters are me. I am in there for good or ill. I wonder how my friends will feel about all being hybrids with me? I imagine our faces contorted and merged with Photoshop. It’s not pretty.

Perhaps the best way for me to think about it, though, is in line with advice I recently got from a friend who is a lawyer. I was wondering if the organizational setting for one of my novels, which is not at all flattering, could be close enough to a particular organization that I would wind up getting sued. My friend asked who the publisher was, and when I said I was self-publishing, he told me that I shouldn’t worry about it. He said that chances were no one would read it anyway. 

Final lesson: some problems are more rhetorical than real. It’s important to keep things in perspective.

When do you write the sequel?

Is it time to branch out into an all-new novel or march on with a sequel? I have several project ideas waiting in the wings, but I have also been making notes for sequels to two existing, but unpublished novels. Somehow, the idea of a “part II” seems premature when I don’t even know if anyone will like the first book. But I will likely need to have characters or situations that set up a sequel in the first installment of a series, which leaves me wondering whether the initial novels are truly finished.

This seems particularly important for my time travel series. While the world I have built does not allow looping back to the traveler’s starting point, it is still more complicated than a normal linear story line. I have already gone back into the first book and tweaked some facts based on my notes for the sequel. How much more will I need to change once I start the actual writing? The risk of omitting something critical to the later story makes me feel that having the complete series in front of me would be wise before I try to publish the first book.

I know popular authors write sequels long after publishing the first novel. There’s nothing to stop me from doing the same. I am creative enough to knit two stories together after the fact. But how much cleaner could the seams be if I sewed them up tight right from the start? Even straight-line stories depend on the original framework and setting of the story. Would it be best to stay immersed in the world I’ve created and spin another yarn? And how about a prequel?

Am I overthinking all this?

Writing the entire series before publishing any of it may be less important for novels where there are no backward time jumps. I’ve got more than one series started, so it might be useful to let a book sit for a while and work on something else before I write the next installment. It could also be better to stagger the writing and see if I get more perspective by waiting to move on with a storyline. But how many years does that turn into? I can write fast (not Stephen King fast, but fast enough), but as the unpublished manuscripts pile up, along with all the other work I need to do to get the novels to market (not to mention trying to build a customer base), the sequels could turn into a years-long quest. 

But these incomplete stories tug on me. They nag so loud that they’re hard to ignore.

Damned whiney sequels.

The idea: A Scowl Becomes Me

All my male protagonists are alike. They’re all me, except better looking. In all the novels except The Man Terror Club, which has no male protagonist, the men are sensitive and on the romantic side. They are not particularly emotionally resilient. They are confident in their intelligence and often overthink situations, but are not so socially adept and appreciate being propped up by a heroine. None are overly ambitious, certainly not to the point of obnoxiousness. They tend to be middle-aged. Most surprisingly, women are much more attracted to them than they ought to be, so none have to scheme elaborately to attract their female protagonist.

With that in mind, I felt the need to write someone different, someone not as genial, someone supremely confident. And I wondered what would happen if I made him a little off-putting, perhaps an irascible know-it-all. Of course, he needed some redeeming qualities as well: clever, honest, cares deeply about people who manage to break through. I would also need a situation that threw him together with the female protagonist so they could not easily escape. After all, few are attracted immediately if someone’s obvious qualities are a turnoff.

I should have put myself into a snarky mood each day before I started writing. It was necessary, because what naturally comes out of me is the type of character that is warm and empathetic. This novel needed cool and distant. But non-snarky me wrote warm and empathetic for far too many scenes. 

I kept writing anyway. I liked my characters and didn’t want to throw them away. I also wanted to discover how they got to the vague endpoint I had in mind. So my character didn’t turn out to be as big a turnoff for the female lead as I intended. Still, I came up with a way to torpedo their relationship.

I need to come up with another distasteful but redeemable character. I had an interesting idea about an American road trip for a family that’s disintegrating. I have also thought about sequels to The Man Terror Club and The Time Well, although I already know those characters, so they wouldn’t stretch me as much. 

Maybe an ax murderer. I’ve already done a nice-guy kidnapper and a well-meaning serial killer. Perhaps someone not so stabby, another curmudgeon.

A hermit's life revisited

During the last year I have hidden out from COVID-19 and got settled into a hermit’s life, as I wrote about last August. It gave me more time to write. But now there are vaccines and some places are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. (Although India has taken a horrible turn.) Demand for COVID-19 vaccinations in America has peaked and is falling—to the point in that locations are taking walk-ins. Japan has been creeping along. Vaccinations for the general population have not even begun. I worry my turn won’t come until next winter. So I am being sorely tempted to travel to America, get vaccinated there, and spend a few weeks with my family. I haven’t seen them for over a year. I miss people.

My school started hybrid MBA classes in April. Some students are online and some in the classroom. It’s up to the students how they attend, and it breaks down about fifty-fifty. (The undergrads went from in-person classes in April to totally online when Tokyo entered its current state of emergency.) 

The COVID numbers are bad for Japan, but are still relatively light compared to America. I should be staying home as I did last year, but I don’t feel the danger as keenly as I used to. Staying home was affecting my mental health as well. Interestingly, it sort of crept up on me. I didn’t notice myself deteriorating, but it got to where I wasn’t even leaving the house to take a walk most days. I was not depressed. I am sure of that, because I know depression. But I think I would have been except for all the medication I’m on. My outlook, though, has taken a distinct upward and outward turn since I started commuting to school again. It’s interesting how we don’t notice a slow slide until it’s over.

So I am not a total hermit anymore. This is better for me. I’m still not talking to anyone except for my lectures, but I’m out in the crowd, a passive sort of sociality.

Cover: Under Shōko's Bed II

Laura Duffy sent the final cover pdf files for Under Shōko’s Bed today. They were waiting for the ultimate page counts after my book designer finished. 

This last step was mostly waiting on my end, but it also included what has been the most troublesome part of preparing the book for publication, writing the cover blurbs. I fear that if the book has a weak link, it is the blurbs, the brief paragraphs about the book and me that are supposed to pique the reader’s curiosity and get them to start reading or, ideally, to buy. 

The very short bio includes no writing credentials. What credentials I have are all related to my academic career, not my literary side hustle. But even that bio was easier than describing the novel. The key problem is that the first chapter contains a mystery I cannot divulge in the blurb. That mystery, revealed at the end of the first chapter, drives the rest of the story and its characters. How do I introduce the book without giving all that away?

Of course, there had been a blurb for Under Shōko’s Bed here on the website for three years. Somehow, though, in my mind, what was on the website was only temporary. I could change it at any moment, and indeed I have a few times. Putting it onto the cover of the book, in print, seems so much more permanent, even though with print on demand I can change the electronic file the book is being printed from. It’s funny how the mind works. Anyway, the book cover now has the necessary introductions. I only wish I had a subject pool I could draw on for experiments to tell me which concepts would have been best. My academic training pushes my mind in that direction. The literary part of me is simply supposed to feel what works. And I suppose it does, to some extent. It just doesn’t always lend as much confidence as I would like.

Book design: Under Shōko's Bed

Scrivener has a “compile” function that takes all the hundreds of brief documents you’ve written, all your scenes, and strings them together into a novel with chapters and section numbers and everything. It has some impressive formatting capabilities if you’re willing to go to the trouble of learning how to use them—and it is trouble, a lot. But what do you do when your fancy word processing software hyphenates the word wanting after the I instead of the T? How can you fix something that fundamentally broken?

I obviously could not trust Scrivener to format my novel for publication. Its compiler is fine for printing out drafts for editing, but that’s about it. The tool to use for page layout is InDesign from Adobe. I have Adobe’s Creative Cloud, because I use Illustrator and Photoshop, and I had experimented with InDesign. I wasn’t confident enough, however, to format a novel. I did not even know what rules to follow in formatting.

And I like rules. They’re good to have, even if you break them. (But don’t break the ones for hyphenation.)

I needed a book designer. I wanted a beautiful book, even if it made the likelihood of a profit an even further reach. So I asked my cover designer for a recommendation, and she pointed me to Karen Minster. I have been working with Karen since late last year on the layout of Under Shōko’s Bed.

I had hoped to learn enough in working with Karen that I could format a future novel on my own. (I can’t keep paying all the costs of hiring others to prep my books for publication. I don’t have the resources.) And I learned a lot. I can now format ellipses so they look like they do in The Chicago Manual of Style. I learned the two pages that make a spread should be the same number of lines on the page (unless one ends a chapter or section.) But I wish I had learned everything.

One of the minor inconveniences for Karen was that English word processors don’t know where to hyphenate Japanese words. So I went through the manuscript and checked the end of every line. It sounds like a pain, but it goes quickly. Then I gave Karen the syllable breaks, and she chose where to hyphenate.

A more major inconvenience was that I still cannot read through the manuscript without flaws jumping out at me. In reading to check on the formatting, I made edits. It went on longer than it should have. But Karen was patient with me. I don’t know if she cut me some slack because she knew it was my first time doing this or if she is simply that way with everyone.

Karen has now completed her work. It looks great. Now all I have to do is upload it, along with my cover art, to a print-on-demand service and I will have a book for sale.

Website: 3rd anniversary

I have written fewer blog posts this third year, only seventeen. But I have been writing. I wrote a new novel, my eighth, and got Under Shōko’s Bed ready for publication. With that, editing the other novels, and a full-time job, I have been plenty busy. But it’s difficult to stay current on the blog when I have no readers. I trust there will be readers eventually, though, so I will keep at it.

I hope that the next twelve months will see publication not only of Under Shōko’s Bed but also Neyuki, plus significant progress toward publication of The Man Terror Club.

Revisiting the decision to self-publish

It excited me when my editor told me my first novel was good enough for a publishing house to pick it up—excited enough to give up my plan to self-publish it, which I wrote about in this blog in May 2018.

The normal way to find a publisher is to land an agent first. So I sent query letters to agents, a few each week. Interested agents will email back and ask for a copy of the novel. No one was interested. So after a few months of knocking on virtual doors, I stopped. My editor was amazed that I had gotten no nibbles. As I worked on other projects, I thought time and again about whether I should go back and contact more agents. But Under Shōko’s Bed is an odd book about a foreigner in Japan. That’s not the sort of thing the average reader is clamoring for. I don’t know what publishers could tap that narrow niche of readers. I also worry that after finding there to be too few, the book would go out of print and that would be the end. Almost every book goes out of print, but I don’t want to face that disappointment so soon.

So after months of vacillating, I have decided to go back to self-publishing. It gives me total control. I get to choose the cover and book design. I get to write the cover blurb. I get to set the price. It also puts all the weight for book sales on my shoulders. There will be no one out there pushing the book but me. That is a sobering realization, since I’m not very pushy. If I end up selling five copies, it will be my fault. If by some miracle I sell more, well, I’ll be thankful for miracles.