Sunday, January 26, 2020
Heee'ssss Ba-ack!
Okay, I know. I’ve been away longer than I said, and while I did not accomplish all the things I wanted to during my extended hiatus from this blog, I didn’t abandon writing entirely during that time.
Quite the contrary.
You see when I took a break last February, it was with the intention of devoting the time I usually spent working on this column to finally finishing the first draft of my “Great American Sci-Fi Epic” which at the time was about 80 percent complete. And for a while, it looked like I just might be able to do it.
But as fellow author John Steinbeck noted way back in 1937, the best-laid plans “Of Mice and Men” often go awry. For after I began my break from this blog, a friend and fellow writer F.P.Spirit hijacked my time, cleverly luring me away from my own efforts to work on a project of his own: an anthology called “Tales from Thac”
And when I say cleverly lured me, I mean it. He asked me really, really, nicely. And how can you say no to puppy-dog eyes like these?
Anyway, he wanted me to expand on a “short” piece I’d written as a gag several years ago for another friend as part of a semi-regular Dungeons and Dragons game we were involved in. The piece was an exercise to see how many swashbuckler clichés and stolen movie lines I could squeeze into what I though would be a five-page background story for my character. But because I subscribe to the George R.R. Martin school of story-telling, that document wound up being about 10 times longer than that.
F.P. hadn’t seen it until last year after the game had ended, and he really liked it. He kept telling me it would be great for an anthology he was planning and kept asking me – the little devil – if I would consider “cleaning it up a little” and giving it a better ending so he could include it.
Well a guy can only take so much flattery so I decided to give in, before my head could no longer fit through the doorway. Thus went a few months while I worked with him and his editor to massage the piece to better fit into his Heroes of Ravenford series, which if you haven’t checked out, you really should.
The process took a great deal longer than I thought, as I had to rework a number of scenes which were blatant rip offs of “The Princess Bride,” “Ladyhawke” and half a dozen Errol Flynn movies. I don’t regret the time I spent doing it. For one thing, it actually made the story slightly better forcing me to come up with more original ways to pay homage to those films than just doing an out-right, almost word-for-word parody of them. It also was a good experience learning how to work with an editor (or editors in this case) on a piece of fiction, something I’ll need to know how to do when I finally complete my book. And lastly, I’ll finally have some of my fiction published, which, after all was the whole point of me taking a hiatus. (It just wasn’t the work I thought it would be!)
By the time I’d finished working with FP and his editor, the weather had finally gotten warmer and I needed to turn my attention to finishing the cabinet build I had started documenting in my Adventures in Woodworking series. Later this year, I’ll write up a wrap-up article on that and share a few pictures of the finished (for now, anyway) project.
All this is not to say that I didn’t work on my novel, “Tears of the Phoenix” at all. I did manage to fill in one of the two remaining major gaps in the story. Hopefully by the time this summer ends, I’ll have filled in the other, hole in the story and be ready for the initial round of editing.
In the meantime though, I’m going to try again to resume my regular blog posts. I hope that in forcing myself to turn out an article every month it will discipline me to sit down and write even when I don’t feel like it. Maybe then I can finally finish a story I’ve been trying to tell now for some 40 years. $(document).ready(function() { $('.image-link').magnificPopup({type:'image'}); });
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