A short post with tremendous news

Posted on March 3, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I really need to get to bed, and I’m sorry for posting such a tiny post on something so big, but here’s some good news to follow the Oscars.”

Tonight, after about two months of very serious, dedicated sessions of writing, I have completed the first draft of book one of Joshua’s Nightmares. That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of editing ahead of it, and I’m sure it will be incredibly taxing to get things just the way I want them, but this has been such a thrilling, fantastic process for me, and I had to share the news. What happens next? We’ll have to wait and see.

I’m sure I’ll be very busy with the editing, once I pick it back up to look at the story with fresh eyes. Mine are currently bloodshot from the hours of staring at MS Word, so that’ll be a few days at least. I’m trying to not even think about the horrors of looking into publishing just yet, because that is all very foreign and scary to me still. I wish I were kidding.

The final stats for the first draft are as follows:

293 pages in standard manuscript format
79,575 words
316KB in MS Word 2010 docx format
a total editing time of 57,781 minutes

I’d apologize for all the rambling I’ve done about this story (I feel so odd calling it a novel, because that just seems smug somehow? I don’t know), but I’m not actually sorry. This has been so much fun, and it really revived the joy I find in sitting down and just writing like crazy for hours on end.

And now for bedtime, because I have to be at work at my new job tomorrow. At the ungodly (read as perfectly reasonable) hour of 8a.m.

Updates, excitement, and justifying laziness

Posted on February 22, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I finally fixed my description for Joshua’s Nightmares, I have big writing news, and figured out a way to explain some of the laziness in my writing that makes sense.”

Over the course of the past month or so, I’ve written over fifty-thousand new words in my first draft of Joshua’s Nightmares. That’s a NaNoWriMo’s worth of words. Almost a metric shit-ton, or perhaps more than a metric- shit-ton (I honestly don’t know how to properly quantify that much, but I know it’s a lot). It’s been an extraordinary adventure, and I still have a fair bit to go before it’s over. Again, I want to apologize to, as well as thank, all of the people who have to endure me talking at great lengths about this project. I almost apologized to my journal a couple nights ago because I keep writing about writing this, and that’s when I realized I need to calm down and just enjoy every little bit of the writing process as this idea gradually grows into its end stages. It’s the longest piece of writing I’ve ever worked on, and it’s the most excited I’ve been to work on anything in quite some time (since before Thesis Seminar at Edinboro, which was certainly a thing that happened). It’s fifteen pages shy of hitting the 200 page mark, and that seems pretty amazing to me. Continue reading →

Reimagining the Bogeyman

Posted on February 18, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “How I unintentionally transformed a villain whose sole purpose was to act as a plot device to something I think turned out pretty cool.”

Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean more often than I probably should, I create characters out of need to move the plot forward. Don’t give me that side-eyes look, now, because I’m sure it’s not an even remotely uncommon practice. I’m also, after a bit of fun personal experience, certain it can result in some pretty fun ideas. Continue reading →

Progress report on Joshua’s Nightmares

Posted on February 10, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under General Bloggity Stuff, Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I’m pretty damn excited because I’ve been writing all weekend, and this is the most I’ve enjoyed working on a project in a long, long time.”

Tonight, mere moments ago, Joshua’s Nightmares broke the 30,000 words mark. It’s on it’s forty-sixth page, and still has a ways to go before it’s completed. Most importantly, I’m loving every second of it.

I’d also like to extend my thanks to all of my followers. WordPress tells me I hit one hundred followers, and that’s also pretty amazing news. Thank you to everyone who has stuck around and kept reading. You’re all fantastic.

This post feels a bit naked without my standard, rambling prose, and so I’ll end it with this beautiful piece of music from the game Puppeteer (a game truly worth purchasing for its compelling narrative, beautiful art style, and amazing music).

Two; many spaces

Posted on February 7, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under General Writing-Related Posts

Or “I wanted to come up with something clever about spaces after a sentence and this is the best I could think up, so get the eye-rolling out of the way now.”

As far back as I can remember, I’ve put two spaces after sentences while typing. “It looks like you’re only putting one space after sentences,” you might say. And you’d be right, but I’ll get to that.

According to many a teacher, with my Typing class teacher in particular coming to mind, a sentence is to be followed by two spaces before proceeding into the following sentence. Admittedly, it looks right to me. It’s familiar, it’s habitual, and it actually takes some remembering to not make that extra space while in the middle of typing extended bits of writing. If a sentence ended in my writing, the safe bet would have been to expect two spaces.

Friend, fellow writer, and horror movie enthusiast, Zach Owen posted a link to an article on Facebook recently that sort of turned this need for one more space between thoughts on its head, though. The article, and a Google search on the topic in question, revealed the use of two spaces between sentences is a relic from when typewriters were more commonplace, but it is also something to now be considered obsolete by many because of the nature and appearance of the typed word in digital format. Naturally, and as it totally should be, this is the topic of some debate. I prefer to think of it as the grounds upon which defenders of the written word go to battle over, armed with Oxford commas and colorful diction, for the glory of their one space or two space ways.

The most compelling bit, I’ve found, is from Zach’s personal experience with publishers not accepting works with two spaces after sentences.

Fun fact: Joshua’s Nightmares, upon a quick Search and Replace, had 1,026 instances of two spaces after a sentence. So, I mean, thank god I could search that out with Ctrl + F, because otherwise that would have been a special sort of Hell.

In closing, I pose this question: one space or two? What brought you to your one-spacer or two-spacer ways?

A villain’s journey is a hero’s story

Posted on February 1, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under General Writing-Related Posts

Or “Oh, yeah, I totally went there” and “Yes, this is totally another love-letter to villains that I’m completely unashamed of writing”, as well as “Yes, I am referencing Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’, and I’m glad you noticed”. I need to dial down the subtitles. Yeesh.

Let me pose an idea that has probably been presented many times before, but not quite yet in my verbose and almost cartoonishly-exaggerated prose-style. The villain of many stories is, in their own way, going through their own variation of the hero’s journey. The variation, and to what degree the villain’s journey is a reversal of the hero’s journey will depend upon the story, and each individual writer’s approach to how they treat (or abuse) their characters. However, and it pains me to write this, I would argue that the hero’s journey and the villain’s journey are no more or less boring than one another. The determining factor of which one is more or less compelling is how well-written the characters are. By this logic, I pose that is is totally possible to have a hero on a compelling, interesting, and emotional of a quest for whatever (redemption, acceptance, to save the world, or any of the other standard or not-so-standard possibilities) opposite an equally compelling, interesting, and emotionally involved villain’s quest to prove those who doubted them wrong, to fulfill their ambitions, or, again, whatever other standard or not-so-standard plot-based rails upon which the character (or character’s) journey will travel.

The villain is the hero of his or her own story. They have their own dreams and aspirations, even though a lot of those dreams and aspirations happen to involve grabs for world domination or lots of people dying and what have you (although not always, of course). The morally righteous and the morally questionable are both just as guilty of following their hearts to carve out their own little place in the universe. The villain just happens to be doing so in a way that has much stronger backlash than the hero.

Yes, it is important to consider that there are villains who are so powerful and impressive in terms of their backstory and their traits that they can eclipse a story’s hero (and I would like to offer a nod to every Loki/Tom Hiddleston fan who would probably agree with this point). There are times when an amazing hero overcomes such great odds that it makes the villain seem like a crucial, but still boring, set piece in the overall scheme of things. It’s also important to consider that there are heroes who will be written as generically and blandly as possible, giving readers only the sinister machinations of the devious do-wronger to keep them going through the story in the same way there are villains that are so typically I-want-to-do-bad-because-I-want-to-do-bad boring that the hero is the only redeeming quality the writing has to offer.

The key part to have an amazing story, complete with both noble and morally dubious characters, is to find the balance between the hero’s journey and the villain’s mirroring of that journey in some way. I am, by the way, so far from finding this balance, I fear, I can hardly see it on the horizon, but it is something all fiction writers should strive for. To not only have the hero overcome great difficulties, fall to their lowest low, and leave the whole experience transformed by it, but a villain who deals with their own inner demons (sometimes maybe even in a very literal fashion), is faced by great odds, and ultimately leaves the experience changed (even if that change is dying, as that still constitutes a transformation, albeit a very permanent one in most cases). And yes, there are, and should be, stories that feature the hero ultimately facing the villain, losing, and coming out of it better (as well as the villain not, you know, dying in a spectacular fashion). Ultimately, yes, there will be some very boring heroes and some just-as-boring villains, and biases will color the way readers look at these types of characters, but I find it hard to accept that one journey is any more or less interesting than another.

Note: I feel like I’m forgetting bits because I started drafting this in my mind while I was still at work, and it’s been a few hours and distractions since that point, so this post didn’t quite receive its deserved, proper treatment.

The Monsters of Joshua’s Nightmares

Posted on January 30, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I totally just posted about villains not even a day ago, but have some more stuff about villains. I’m not even a little sorry.”

I wrote what amounted to a love letter to all things villain-related just hours ago, and it spawned another idea that has been bouncing around my brain inconveniently (and preventing me from sleeping, which is awful as I have to be awake in less than four hours from now). I’ve done a lot of talking about Joshua’s Nightmares here, which makes sense because this blog was born as part of my efforts related to working on it. I have a page about the novel-to-be (that needs revising, I fear) that gives a solid enough synopsis of its plot. Beyond that, I’ve not really posted anything from the actual story, whether it’s for fear of it being swiped and used elsewhere (gasp!) or just because I’m overly-picky over who gets to see works-in-progress.

However, it only seems appropriate to share a little, and so I present the villains and monsters (a sampling, so as to not bring out any major spoilers) of Joshua’s Nightmares. Obligatory “the following characters and locations are my intellectual property, and are not to be used in any way without my express permission” comment goes here. Continue reading →

Creating monsters is my favorite thing to do

Posted on January 29, 2014 by fictionalpenguin under General Writing-Related Posts

Or “This is totally a love letter to writing strong, love-to-hate-and-hate-to-love villains.”

I love me some well-crafted villains. That’s not exactly news to most people. There’s a certain appeal to bad guys that heroes can’t capture, and for obvious reasons. Sure, the hero saves the day, usually by dramatically untying the dude or damsel in distress, foiling the villain’s plan, and defeating/imprisoning/killing off the bad guy in question. And yes, there’s definitely something enjoyable about writing the hero, flaws and all. My heart, however, will always have a special soft-spot for creating the villains. You may find yourself asking “Why’s that, Phil?”

Honestly? Because we’ve all got a bit of a dark side; that little monster in the back of your head, hiding right behind your conscience and whispering things you’re sure couldn’t have been your own thoughts. Villains provide the backwards version of our own moral compasses. That’s not to say all villains are purely evil, and I’ll get to that shortly, but oftentimes they are modeled after a writer’s own view of what is wrong. You won’t find any heroes tying people to railroad tracks or dangling them above shark tanks. They’re the thieves, the marauders, the evil grand viziers (or, really, just grand viziers, because that titles seems to belong exclusively to sinister folks intent on taking over the government), the terrorists, and so on and so forth.

There’s so much fun potential for depth and moral gray areas with villainous characters, though. Can they have redeeming qualities? Yes. Why not make them just a teensy bit likeable, too. Or what if there’s some sad backstory on how they became the nefarious overlord or overlady they are in your story? Writing villains, at least for me, is the creative equivalent of finding myself on a private beach with a bunch of construction equipment and endless hours to build the most epic, giant sandcastles ever. That comparison sounded so much cooler in my head. The best villains are the ones the reader will sympathize with. The ones who will make readers think “Wow, what an asshole,” but still also cause the reader to want to wrap them in a shock blanket, offer them a mug of hot chocolate, and assure that everything will be okay (just as soon as they put down the remote to their Doomsday Device). The most fun comes from finding the perfect blend of whatever brand of evil a villain should be and redeeming qualities. My ideal villain needs to be just evil enough, but have a strong enough pull on a reader’s heartstrings to leave them thinking “Oh, man, did I really just hope this nutcase succeeds over the hero?”

Now you might be saying “Phil, I think you might be a little twisted.” Maybe you’re right, convenient character helping me transition between talking points. I would argue, however, that everyone is a little twisted by other people’s standards. Everyone has at least one or two behaviors or traits that can, and probably would, make another person’s skin crawl. The fun in writing a good villain is taking a trait like that, mixing it up with other things such as a dash of charisma or a hint of homicidal tendencies, wrapping it in a bow, and then letting it run havoc all over an otherwise perfectly peaceful fictional world.

Villains stir things up. They screw with the status quo, help get heroes to the moral of the story, and, quite frankly, usually look pretty awesome in the process. This post was brought to you by me writing a particularly “holy crap, did I just think that” line for a villain in Joshua’s Nightmares. What are your favorite bits about writing bad guys? And yes, killing them off in magnificently creative ways is an option.

Phil's Misadventures In Fiction

My ongoing misadventures, both in writing and life in general

Tag Archives: writing