Advice to Neophyte Writers: Don't Try This at Home!

       

Cover of Part One

       I'm getting good results after publishing The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars, Part One: Eagle Ascendant.  I've already had six reviews, all of them 5 star.  It seems my friend Neil Aplin was right in maintaining it would be a success.  I had my doubts about publishing any of the book, because the entire piece is way longer than any book should ever be.  Neil didn't think so -- he read it in manuscript and he wanted it to be even longer, and it was his enthusiastic support that convinced me to publish the beginning of it.

       Part Two: Wounded Eagle is in the works; I'm revising like mad, trying to shorten it.   Part One is a long book, but at least it covers the first 31.5 years of Capt. Nikalishin's life.  Part Two only covers 2.5 years and it's even longer than Part One.  There will be at least six more parts after that so you see my problem.  The ultimate conclusion isn't even written yet.

       You might be saying, how in the world could you let this happen?  I've written a bit about my writing history before, but now I have new readers and Facebook friends who may not know how my writing came about, so I need to construct an apology, in the sense of a justification.

Sneak peak: cover for
Part Two (tentative)

        I've always been inclined to write long.  In college when the professor would assign a 20-page paper, the other students would be groaning -- how would they ever be able to make it that long?  And I would be wondering how I could keep the paper under 40 pages.

        I started to write fiction after I read Tolkien in 1969, and I had no real thought of publishing at that time. I simply found the act of writing to be tremendous fun.  So I wrote my first endless story. It was somewhat Tolkienesque imaginary-world fantasy and it was my million-word learning process.  It will never be finished and I will never publish it, but in case anyone is interested, my novel Children of the Music was written as a prequel to that long piece.

       From 1983 through 1999 I took a hiatus from writing because of family responsibilities.  Then in January of 2000 I bought my first computer, which made the act of writing infinitely easier.  And I had a sudden surge of literary inspiration, beginning with "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" (a novella! Amazing!) and then The Termite Queen and the rest of the termite stories (I've discussed them plenty elsewhere, mostly on my other blog The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head).  I completed the sixth volume of Labors in July of 2003, so you can see that I wrote furiously for those 3.5 years.  By that time I was a little tired of termites and even though I needed one more tale to complete the Quest, I wanted to do something else for a while.  (I did manage to compose the sequel volume for the Ki'shto'ba tales in 2015 while I was on chemo.)

       I should say that during this time I also never contemplated publishing -- I was simply enjoying myself too much.

       And then I got the idea for The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  I had invented the Bird People of the planet Krisí’i’aid, along with their language, for The Termite Queen, and I decided it would be interesting to write about the first contact with the Krisí’i’aida, which had occurred a couple of centuries earlier.  How about writing a biography of the spaceship Captain who made the first contact?  This would also give me a chance to develop my future history to an extent greater than I had been able to do in TQ.  I never intended for the piece to be so long or so detailed, but it was one of those stories that just grew like a clump of mushrooms.  And again, with no intent to publish, I paid absolutely no attention to the length. (A really serious mistake -- again I say to beginning writers: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!)   I started writing in November of 2003 and worked on that thing until January of 2011, when it suddenly hit me that I was 70 years old.  If I ever wanted anyone else to read my books, I'd better suspend writing and focus on publishing.  So I began to work up "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," self-publishing it in November of 2011, and that was followed by The Termite Queen and the Ki'shto'ba series -- and the rest is history, as they say.

       So what was I going to do with all that manuscript for The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars? (By the way, that was not the original title, but I don't seem to have recorded the original title anywhere and unfortunately I can't remember what it was.  Once I thought of MWFB, it seemed perfect and I never looked back.) I decided to publish excerpts from the book on my blog -- those excerpts are still here, on this very blog, but they've been radically altered in the final form of the book.  My friend Neil Aplin was mesmerized by those excerpts and so I agreed to email him longer pieces of the book.  He continued to be crazy about it and finally he convinced me to begin to working over the piece for publication.

      At one point I considered getting a professional editor to shorten it.  I'm sure a professional could do that -- just take shears and whack away.  But then it wouldn't be my book and I think I would have an apoplexy trying to deal with that person no matter how tactful and truly interested they were. Nope, that doesn't work for me.  I'm not concerned with becoming a bestseller, and it costs me nothing but time to self-publish, especially since I do my own covers.  However, I do like for people to read what I write and enjoy and comment on it.  I'll take my chances that the lengthiness may exhaust my readers' patience.

       So I think the world is stuck with something no writer is supposed to do -- an interminable novel cut into many segments, each one too long in itself.  That's why I call them Part One, Part Two, etc.  It suggests a single story rather than a series.  I made that mistake with The Termite Queen.  It was too long for one volume, but it is really all one story, and by designating the halves v.1 and v.2 rather that Pt.1 and Pt.2, I made people think it was a series and too many people have stopped reading after v.1 and so don't get the full effect.  The Ki'shto'ba books really constitute a serial rather than a series, but the volume designations seem to fit OK in their case.

So here are the upcoming volumes in the endless progression of MWFB:

Part One: Eagle Ascendant (already published)

Part Two: Wounded Eagle (being edited)

Part Three: High Feather

Part Four: Survivor

Part Five: Phenix (this is the one that requires drastic cutting -- Fathers and Demons was extracted [and will be cut] from that section)

Part Six: Rare Birds (still experimental)

Part Seven + : ??? not written yet!

       Do you think any reader can survive all that?  Do you think I can live long enough to actually accomplish the required editing?  I had some other books I wanted to write, too. Sounds hopeless! Anyway, I just wanted everyone to know how this all came about and warn them about what might be coming.  I beg your indulgence!  At least you've seemed to enjoy Part One.  Who knows?  Maybe you'll enjoy the other parts just as much!

Writing about Immortality

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     I haven't updated my progress on publishing Children of the Music since May!  I'm happy to report that I'm close to considering it ready and will try to publish it before the end of August.  The book was meant to be a prequel to a much longer fantasy, which I never completed and do not plan to complete. This means that the prophecies uttered in Children leave the reader with a lot of unanswered questions.  I have been writing an Author's Note to set at the end of the book, explaining what was meant to happen in the larger work.  I'm going to quote parts of the Author's Note here (without giving away anything important about Children!) and add a few comments that I cut from the Note.

The “big story” was entitled To Sing with the Wind (a title I never especially liked) and it grew out of my fascination with the immortality of Tolkien’s elves.  I began to wonder – what would it actually be like to be immortal, especially in a world also inhabited by mortals? To explore this, I created an immortal race of my own called the Demrai, who fell victim to hubris, dominating and mistreating the “inferior” mortal peoples of the world who were supposed to be under Demran care. Their god (Dar) punished them by mewing them up in the mountains, unable to find a way out.  However, they were promised a Liberator who would come when they were worthy and guide them back into a life in the larger world. Simultaneously, all mortals were imbued with a sense of horror toward the spine of mountains that bisects their land, ensuring that there would be no accidental contact between mortals and Demrai.   

Now a few words about the difficulties of creating a race of believable immortal beings.  For example, if Immortals propagated at even a slower-than-human rate, they would ultimately overrun the earth.  There had to be a way to kill off some of them.  Furthermore, what would happen to Immortals who were maimed in some way?  Would they simply regrow a severed hand or an eye?  My invention of the Demrai predated Highlander, but the writers of that motion picture and series had to deal with some of these same problems.  Highlander-style Immortals are sterile, so that fixes the propagation problem.  And as we all know, they can die if their heads are cut off. 

My Immortals didn’t get off so easily.  The only way for them to die was to will their own deaths.  Life can become very tedious if it has no end (remember the song in Highlander “Who wants to live forever?”)  Depression would surely have been rampant among the Demrai, especially since their lives have lost all purpose during their separation from mortals.  When their Liberator finally appears, their numbers are in a dangerous decline.  

Several dilemmas are solved by the suicide concept.  What happens if an Immortal is buried in a landslide?  Would this person still be alive if he or she was disinterred thousands of years later?  Such a situation would surely be unendurable, and a person in this situation would undoubtedly choose to end his or her own life.  

And what about physical damage?  In Highlander: the Series it is made clear that severed limbs of an Immortal don’t regrow and that if the voice box is damaged, a glorious singing voice can be destroyed.  In my version one of the main characters is a blind Demran priest.  But I never tackled the question: What would happen to a Demra is his or her head was cut off?  Or if he were chopped into a hundred pieces?

I remained fixated on immortal beings for years.  I couldn't seem to come up with any other theme, even though I had already mentally stored away the concept of a race of giant intelligent termites.  After I abandoned To Sing with the Wind in the late 1970s, I invented a new world with another version of immortal beings.  The series, laid in a much more fantastic world with more fantastic beings, was to be called The Wizards of Starbell Mountain.  I did manage to complete the first volume, but later efforts also fell victim to the improvisation virus that had doomed Wind.  Anyone who is interested can get a taste of this world in my novelette “The Blessing of Krozem,” which is perpetually FREE on Smashwords.  It was written as a Prologue to the Starbell Mountain series.  Someday I might look into publishing that first volume.  But don't hold your breath.

Political Correctness: How Do You Handle It in Your Writing?

     “Bend to the reed’s tune – sing a new song.”

The Siritoch were made to endure and the Epanishai to strive. 

When two such peoples are driven together, 

which one has the most to lose? 

     I've now been through Children of the Music twice, correcting the scanning errors and making a list of all the names so I can consider whether I should change any of them.  For those of you who might have forgotten, Children of the Music is the 30-year-old story that I'm working over for publication. I'm considering putting the passages quoted above on the back cover.  The first line will be the epigraph of the book.   

     I'm liking this book better and better, but I need an opinion on one aspect of it (well, really on two aspects).  The gentle, pastoral Siritoch, who have no word in their tongue for murder, have dwelled alone in the Land between the Mountains and the Sea for longer than memory, and now they are being invaded by a different people -- a fierce tribe of horsemen and cattle-drovers who are themselves fleeing an even more barbaric foe and who don't take kindly to finding that the land they have been seeking is occupied by sheepherders.  And they have no aversion to murder and pillaging.

     Both sides see their adversary as demonic beings.  And so I have a chapter in which the wise women of each tribe reject this, saying, "For they are men."  Now, when I was growing up, way back in the dark ages of the 1940s and 1950s, before gender equality became such a big deal, I was taught that terms like "men" or "mankind" or "he" could legitimately be used as collective nouns or pronouns subsuming both sexes.  That made perfectly good sense to me.  It's just a convention, after all -- one I still had no trouble with when I wrote this story in the late 1970s.

      Let me give you some examples in the story -- first the Epanishai:

“Rashemia, I didn’t intend for this morning to go as it did.”

“Nor I.”

“Even you – even you failed.”

“Do you think I am not human? After all these years you could think that?”

Her bitter candor vaguely surprised him.  “Did you really believe the holy wood would mean something to them?”

“I hoped.  They are men, Daborno.”

“But they frightened you.  Dare I say that? You were human enough to be frightened – even you.  Perhaps they are not men.”

“They are men!”  Rashemia struck her fist into her palm, hunching her shoulders.  “And, yes – 1 was afraid! Their music is inexplicable! It comes up as if – from deep water – or out of the wind.  It says things in some language older – older than the trees.  By Aftran, I yearn – I yearn to understand it!”

And now from the Siritoch's perspective:

“There is no being prepared – can’t you see that?”  Himrith had gathered herself up, clenching her hands in the wool.  “Oh, Narlach ... Parnom ... fleeing can’t save Thran! The only course is to wait and hold to the things we know – and – and – perhaps when they come back, we – and they – will understand!  For they are men, my son – I could see human trouble in their eyes.  If they are men, they are not evil!  No more evil than those winds and clouds and the grass that flourishes and fades.  For there is a third choice – I have only just seen it!  We have a third choice: to stay and not to die! And if we put enough faith in the Music, we need not fear these men, for all their giant horses and their knives and their loud voices.” 

Now I could substitute "humans" or "people" for "men."  Try reading it with those substitutes.  I just think the impact is lost.  "Humans" and "people" are both weak words with a feminine rhythm. (Are we going to have to get rid of the terms "feminine and masculine rhymes"?  Just wondering.)  "For they are humans."  "For they are people."  Just lacks the punch of "For they are men!"

So what's your opinion?

Are you so offended by this use of the word "men" 

that the story will be ruined for you is I leave it as is?

Would you enjoy it more if I used "people" or "humans"?

Tell me!

 And one other thing along the same line.  The Siritoch refer to the Epanishai as "aliens."  I don't know why I used that term instead of "strangers" or "outlanders" or some such.  I wasn't into science fiction in those days, so I wasn't thinking of the connotation of somebody from another planet.  This one I really may change because I've come not to like the term "aliens" -- it's come to connote humans ("men") from a country not your own, and I prefer to reserve it for extraterrestrials or else to eliminate it entirely.  I wrote about that once before here: You Say Alien and I Say Extraterrestrial.

     (Sorry -- still no artwork for this story!  I'm working on the cover, but it's a long way from being finished.)

Next on my Writing Agenda: "Children of the Music"

Known as a serpent, this antique musical instrument
looks like the trumpet that plays such a significant role
 in Children of the Music. 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Serpent%C3%B3.jpg
By Sguastevi (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

    First off, let me say that from now on most of my posting will be on this blog.   My Termitespeaker blog (entitled "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head") has lost relevance because I have now completed the series.  I had also used that blog as a vehicle to discuss myth, especially myth in literature, but I've kind of moved away from that, so I'll reserve Termitespeaker mostly for book reviews of the series.

    Today I'm going to talk about Children of the Music.  It's one of those manuscripts that has been stored in a drawer for 30 years and has now been taken out and dusted off.  That's supposed to be a no-no, but I see no point in trashing something that I believe has merit.  Here's how it came to be written.

    I started writing in 1969 and I churned out an unending manuscript over a period of years.  It got way out of control for length, because of my propensity for improvisation in the middle of books.  I always have a beginning and an end, but how in the world do you get from here to there?  And since this was the first thing I'd ever written, I kept going back and rewriting the beginning, which never made it shorter.  Finally I threw in the towel.  The book could never be finished.  I have shelves of manuscript for this book, which bore the title To Sing with the Wind (somebody once said to me, "You should just call it 'Sing with the Wind,'" but you see, that's the wrong connotation.  I'm not ordering somebody to sing (imperative) -- I'm emphasizing the process of learning how "to sing with the wind."  And yet to use the infinitive really does weaken the impact).  

    But that's beside the point.  When I gave up on my Tolkienesque first novel, with its evil sorceress, white-bearded wizard, young female heroine, and tragic young hero, I decided I needed to write a prequel.

    That prequel is Children of the Music.

   It features the past history of the two peoples who exist at the beginning of the humongous piece and depicts the families of the parents of To Sing with the Wind's hero and heroine.  And it benefited from my "million words" -- the amount you're supposed to have written before you can call yourself an author.  It turned out really well -- it had an appropriate beginning, middle, and end, and some really intense storytelling and compelling characters.  And it's a reasonable length of 118,000 words.

   Now I'm planning to publish it after some revision.  My problem is, I don't anticipate ever completing the book that was supposed to follow it.  Children is complete in itself, but it does contain some prophecies that foreshadow the main book, and it kind of leaves things hanging at the end.  Am I capable of writing a totally different book to follow it?  I somehow doubt it.  I simply don't like the book I originally wrote.  My original idea in To Sing with the Wind was to investigate a race of beings who were immortal, and somehow I don't want to do that anymore. These days, I'm not much into magic -- seers and prophecies are fine, and hints of the interference of gods, but my worlds are always real worlds, not governed by magical principles that have nothing to do with scientific reality. And my characters are always human.  (And if you say, well, giant termites aren't human ... just ask the people who weep over their story whether or not they have human appeal.)  

    But Children of the Music really does have sufficient merit to stand on its own.  Until I complete its revision, I'm going to blog about the book from time to time, and probably post excerpts.  I also have some questions I want to throw out to anyone who is interested.  But that will have to wait for another day.

    (Sorry I have no drawings yet for Children of the Music.  I do have some planned, however.  And take a gander at the great serpentine trumpet at the top of this post.)

A Tangled Web?

Young Lochinvar Carrying Away His Love
From Misrepresentative Women by Harry Graham  (c1906)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42407/42407-h/42407-h.htm#Lochinvar

       Remember the old quote "Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practise to deceive"? Bet you don't know what it's from. Shakespeare? (Isn't everything from Shakespeare?) The Bible (less likely!) Well, I didn't know either, so I looked it up. It's from an epic poem that's pretty obscure these days -- Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field, by Walter Scott, first published in 1808.  It's a tale of romantic intrigues involving nuns who break their vows, wronged heroes, duels, revenge, deaths at the battle of Flodden Field in 1513, etc., etc.  Modernized a bit, it might actually have something going for it! It was immensely popular in its day, although it was not a critical success; according to Wikipedia, it was castigated for the "unwarranted intrusions" of the letters to Scott's friends that head up each canto and its poetic style was called "flat and tedious." There was also a complaint that it was written solely to show off Scott's erudition.  However, the poem also contained the "Lochinvar" section that people used to read in school.  I remember that galloping anapestic rhythm very well -- and with some nostalgia ...

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,
He rode all unarm'd, and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar ...

       Does anybody read that poem these days?

 

       So where was I?  What was my point?  Oh, I remember -- the tangled web.  First, however, let me say that some might criticize my writing for some of the same reason they criticized Scott's (although I don't write poetry):  That my stories have "unwarranted intrusions," that my style isn't spectacularly original (although I really wouldn't call it "flat and tedious"), and that I like to show off my erudition (which isn't as mighty as I wish it were).  That's still not my point, however. 

 

       My point is, everything I write is interconnected -- a bit of a tangled web.  I really hadn't thought about that until lately.  All of my books share characters and allude to events or people which exist in my other books.  The Termite Queen is the seminal tale.  It introduces Prf. Kaitrin Oliva, who is also the main character in "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," which is laid thirty years later.  Kaitrin is also the editor of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head series, which begins hard on the end of The Termite Queen.  The series contains many references to events in The Termite Queen, because after all it was the coming of the Star-Beings to the termite planet that precipitated the New Time (doesn't the arrival of aliens always change things?)  Kaitrin mounts several expeditions to the termite planet after that fateful first one, and these are mentioned in footnotes throughout the series.  And Kaitrin actually does make a physical appearance as a character in the series but only near its end.

       Then of course two of the major characters in the series -- Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head and Di'fa'kro'mi the Remembrancer -- were introduced in The Termite Queen, so that's an essential interconnection.

       See how tangled it's getting?

 

       I also have a number of unwritten books that increase the tangles.  Something I plan to call The Dark Leopards of the Moon (title from a poem by Yeats) will be the story of the remainder of Kaitrin Oliva's life, and then there is an episode of her life alluded to in "Monster" as "my experiences with the Etúmanoi on the fourth planet of Foraka 3."  That one I mean to write as a separate novel (entitled The Hard, Bright Crystal of Being, from a poem by Conrad Aiken), and it also includes a couple of other characters from Termite Queen whose names I won't mention for fear of spoilers.

 

       The only story I've written that isn't tangled up with the others is The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  It's laid in the 28th century while TQ is laid in the 30th, and its only association with The Termite Queen lies in the fact that first contact with the bird aliens (Prf. A'a'ma's people) occurs in MWFB.  That's important, of course, but it does allow the plot of MWFB to pretty much stand on its own.

 

       I say all this only because the tangling of my characters and plots may make them a little problematical to read.  You may have read TQ and found some things not to like about it.  It has a double plot line, so you may like one plot and not the other.  Besides, it contains all that conlanging gobbledegook, which is a little bit of a specialized interest.  (However, I can't imagine anybody who wouldn't be curious about how we're going to communicate with aliens when we finally meet them.)  So I would say this: if you enjoyed the termite people in The Termite Queen, please do go on and give the Ki'shto'ba series a try.  And even if you haven't read TQ, it's summarized sufficiently at the beginning of The War of the Stolen Mother, so don't be deterred from jumping right into the series. 
       I hope to meet you there!

      

Do I have any WIPs?

       As I attempted to write a comment on a post on Catana's blog "Tracking the Words," I decided her topic "WIPs and Productivity" would make a good basis for a blog post of my own.  She describes a method of writing where the author keeps a backlog of story ideas, outlines, and beginnings and draws on that whenever she gets burned out on the current opus.  As usual I seemed to be the odd person out because this isn't how I work at all.  In the first place, I'm not a good multitasker -- I start something and I finish it before I go on the next thing.  I can't really pay attention to more than one story at once.  And then for about 12 years I wrote without any intention whatsoever of publishing -- I wrote just because I loved what I was writing.  So I have this big backlog of stuff ready or nearly ready to commit to print (next up -- "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head," which I've decided to turn into 6 volumes in order to avoid publishing another weighty tome like v.2 of "The Termite Queen."  On that subject see my second blog, which is being dedicated to the "Labors" series).

         But I've decided that I do have WIPs -- I just never called them that.   I have notes for an essential concluding novel in the "Labors" series, and I have separate documents of Story Notes for two other works.  One will be called "The Dark Leopards of the Moon" (quoted from a poem by W.B. Years, fortunately in the public domain); this narrates later events in the life of Kaitrin Oliva and uses "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" as a centerpiece.  The other picks up a minor character from "Termite Queen" and details that character's life, particularly as it relates to Kaitrin Oliva.  It's to be called "The Hard, Bright Crystal of Being," from an poem by Conrad Aiken that unfortunately is under copyright, so if I use that title, I may have to work on one more permission (groan!)

     And then I have a catch-all document called "Story Notes -- Proposed Tales," which includes ideas for a piece about the culture of the termite people (the Shshi) 2000 years into the future, when they have developed technology and are about ready to take to space themselves.  Another story would retell "Huckleberry Finn" with Shshi characters.  Then I had a vague idea about a device that records dreams holographically and allows people to enter parallel universes through those holograms, like a portal (I may never write that one -- sounds too much like "The Lathe of Heaven" and possibly other creative pieces I've run into.)  The most important story is about the author of the Mythmaker drama "The Valley of the White Bear" that's mentioned in TQ; it would be my only dystopian novel and would make it necessary for me to actually write that drama.  That would be  tough because "The White Bear" is supposed to be one of the greatest and most influential pieces of literature ever written and I don't know if I'm up to that task!

       And then there is a wickedly satiric and rather ambitious treatment of Old and New Testament myth, in which a race of "gods" (intelligences so enormous that a galaxy is like handful of dust to them) uses the multiverses as an experimental laboratory.  I actually wrote a rather obscure short story on this theme; it took off when I read an article on the snowball Earth theory of the Cambrian explosion (I might publish that story on this blog sometime; it's called "A Little Laboratory Work"). 

       The long treatment has a working title; it comes from Exodus 33:23 (KJV), where God hides Moses in a rock and covers Moses with his hand as he passes by, because no man can look upon the face of God and live -- "And I will take away mine hand and thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen.” So I was thinking of entitling my satiric treatment "The Back Parts of God."  Boy, will I get in trouble!  By the way, I looked at the translation in the website called Hebrew Bible in English and the translation reads as follows:  “I will take away my hand and thou shalt see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”  A good bit more dignified, but it loses a little bit of its humorous potential!  Probably the term "back parts" didn't carry the same suggestiveness in the 17th century as it does today!