Spinwork Blog

As unheard of of two blogs in a week may be in recent years, yesterdays achievement is owed one.

After a lot of bitching, moaning, throwing things, and all the other crap I usually do that I’ll spare you when I have issues writing, I finally finished the first swath of Cloudnigh, bringing me just short of being ready to post. In retrospect its sort of horrifying that it took me almost THREE MONTHS to write THREE CHAPTERS (me, the dude who write 200 pages in four, once), but in my defense, this whole thing was a huge learning experience involving what it takes to get quality writing out of me, and the role editing plays in my process.

Over the next three-odd weeks, I’ll be editing what I have with Marina and getting the first episodes ready to post. By the looks of things, it turns out I’m actually going to be moving ahead with two-three updates a week, rather than bi-monthly as I was planning. I’ll have a definite one or the other closer to launching time.

Along with Cloudnigh, I’ll be moving house over to leophimstudios.com, and opening Leophim Forums, running on IPB. I don’t know when exactly the move is going to take place, since ‘Nigh is sort of the priority right now. ^^;

Keep an eye on my twitter for updates! Thanks for reading!

Spinner Cloudnigh, Daily Blogging, Site-related 2010, Cloudnigh, Editing, forums, launch, leophim studios, Site-related

My God. Holidays at Starbucks were made to murder both customers and baristas. The last five days has consisted of some of the most maddening hours I’ve ever spent at this job. Rushes have started lasting all day, from 8AM to 5PM, with intermittent swells before and after. I’ve even noticed it as a customer. Those of you who follow my twitter will know I had numerous occasions today where I had people’s butts shoved in my face for minutes on end. Not cool. Even if growing up on the New York City subways have me partially used to it.

The other day I finished something that’s been driving me starkers since mid-November, that being finally finding a good, solid opening to Cloudnigh. People who read the IF version may or may not know how much I hated the original opening. If I have one pet-peeve, it’s protagonists that give an impression of emotional patheticism–which Roman did, uncharacteristically so. After much attempting to soften what I had, and then fretting over it, I finally  broke down and wrote a new first chapter. I’m fairly happy with the result–again, shocking, since I hate first chapters.

Now that I’ve got a solid foundation, my effort can now go into editing the remainder of my material–my goal is five chapters as a buffer–and then getting things going. I’ve been toying with web designs and the like in my spare time, and leaning towards a brown-grey themed design (Matt’s artwork asks for it). We’ll see how that goes in the long run. I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I have something up, but I’m aiming for late January, early February. I’ve also got some Spinwork related changes coming down the pike, but that’s another update.

So, it’s the new year now, meaning I should have some new years resolutions. Yeah. Well, I do–don’t get me wrong–but nothing really worth discussing on a writing blog–losing weight and eating better is among them–but nothing writing-related that I’d call a resolution. 2009 has been the best year for writing for me since 2004/2005, and that’s saying a lot for me. I finished a draft of Lanternfly, which still continues to mature and grow in my mind even though its been 2 months since I did any work on it, worked on and off on Shadower throughout the year, and fixed my sights on Cloudnigh. Its hard to believe I’ve been working on the story for eight months–exclusively, for four. In short, there’s nothing I want to accomplish in this year that I can’t from setting realistic goals and just keep walking.

In other news, I’ve started reading Anna Karenina, which has induced many orgasms of joy. Tolstoy was one smart mother fucker when it came to people. I can’t count the number of times while reading I found myself laughing and thinking, “I’VE THOUGHT THAT WAY,” and “I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE THAT,” which seems to be the pinnacle reaction to my reading lately. Its so incredible how writers from the fucking 1800s are seeing the same sort of human traits I’ve picked up on with the people I’ve known. I’d always thought that when a society evolves, the mannerism did so too, which in retrospect, I guess is sort of naive. No–people seem to have had the same “shoulds” and “oh-god-fucks” and “ZOMFG WHY?” now as they did then, if not made a little bit more insecure and unstable by the 21st century’s marketing and media machine.

Things go swimmingly–so off I swim. Thanks for reading!

Spinner Books & Reading, Cloudnigh, Musings & Rants, Site-related 2010, Anna Karenina, Cloudnigh, Lanternfly, New Years 2010, ranting, Starbucks, work

It’s about 10:30 in the morning and it feels like its about midnight. Chalk it up to my World Issues professor deciding it would be a good idea to watch Wall-E at 8:00 in the morning instead of a final. Not that I’m complaining–Wall-E’s one of my all-time favorite movies, but one I like to watch after a long Saturday, or when I want to wallow in the movie’s unique atmosphere, not just after waking up from an involuntary all-nighter. The upside is I’m currently blessed with that clarity that comes with 2AM writing sessions, where everything makes that sleepy kind of sense and you’re less inhibited to pursue your muse through the pearly avenues of her perpetual acid trip.

I finally finished Atlas Shrugged last night after a near three-month struggle. I say struggle because Atlas isn’t one of those books you read–it’s one you excavate with heavy explosives. Where the effort in reading it was is difficult to say. It’s a long sucker, to be certain (1168 pages), complete with everything I was taught not to do as a writer–from long, expository passages (60 pages, long) to dragging explanations of character’s morals, sexualities, and stoicism against emotional trauma. Still, when it pulled me in, it pulled me in good, and hundreds of pages would fly by in a blink. I wouldn’t quite say its a page-turner, because there are times I had to reread entire passages with a feeling of, “wait, what the fuck did he/she just say?” The reward of being able to fist-pump on my favorite characters in the end was amazing, though (DANNESKJOLD! REARDEN!).

The book is, without question, one of the most intense, overwrought, annoying, hair-tearing, scalp-shredding, bitter-laughter inducing, inspiring, life-changing books I’ve ever read. There’s something masochistic about reestablishing my reading habit with two, 200,000+ word books in quick succession–books that have earned me groans of “you’re reading Ayn Rand? But she’s so conservative/republican/economically fascist/idealist/reactionary, and her prose sucks.” I don’t read books for their agenda. Every writer has an agenda. I have an agenda. I don’t force it down peoples’ throats, and I don’t swallow when writers try to force theirs down mine.

Virtually every criticism I’ve heard about both Atlas and Fountainhead focused on Rand’s views, and I agree. Rand is an idealist, and her opinion is conservative past realism. Her prose is clunky–although, in her defense, English wasn’t her first language–and not something I’d recommend to someone looking to improve their writing. What hooked me was her focus on character and her portrayals of the ideal man (and woman, in the case of Dagny Taggart), which, although hyperbolic and utopian as the rest of Rand’s themes, had enough “real” for me to latch onto, and sufficient “unreal” for me to suspend my disbelief. In a way, I think it was that hyperbole that drew me in. You can learn a lot from exaggeration. After all, it’s more or less the core of comedy. Apparently it works well in fiction, too.

In the end, its difficult to put into words just what the effect was. There were a lot of parts in the book where I’d read a scene or speech and be like, “I FEEL LIKE THAT SOMETIMES,” or “DAMNIT, I’VE HAD PEOPLE PULL THAT ON ME,” or at times, be  awed that such a complex story could be held together with such ostensible simplicity. Maybe the message and the meaning is meant to be mine alone.

That said, I’m continuing my reading extravaganza. I don’t know what I’m going to read next, but I like blogging about it. It gives me something to talk about that isn’t creatively whorish and expository (a use for this blog!). On my list right now are Slaughterhouse-Five, Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, Scarlett Letter and Stranger in a Strange Land. I should also look into finishing Snow Crash, but I haven’t been in the mood for sci-fi lately.

My semester’s over as of yesterday, closed with a read-and-edit of my friend Will’s book, Imperium, which he’s been working on about as long as I’ve been working on Hellion. It’s been really interesting seeing where he’s come from and gone with his stuff, and I’m really starting to see his story and concepts coming together, which is exciting. I’m just hoping he sticks to it. *stern look*

With the semester closed, the time’s come to do more work on Cloudnigh, which continues to stumble and swell in the relative semblance of growth. I haven’t done any actual writing on it in a few days, as the story seems to be demanding some background notes. Its sort of nice that I can finally identify the feeling of “what the fuck am I doing?” as a reminder to check my notes and see what I’m actually trying to say. When I look at the inspiration of my process, its sort of weird to see where I’ve drawn it from: Ayn Rand, Jonathon Stroud, Phillip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Herman Melville, Fred Gallagher, my dad. I guess I make it work in my own way. Only now am I starting to realize how adaptable you have to be to plan a project. I’ve approached Cloudnigh in such a different way than I approached Lanternfly.

In that vein, I’m still working on Lanternfly–not as actively as I used to, but still. I’ve got a long term plan for that, and for Shadower. The gig right now is trying to execute Cloudnigh as best I can and see what comes of it as an online project. I’m finally at this place of relative confidence (90% acceptance of failure, 5% raw excitement, 5% stubbornness) where I can start to realistically plot out my course for the next year. With luck, that course will be Cloudnigh.

We shall see.

Thanks for reading!

Spinner Books & Reading, Cloudnigh, Daily Blogging, Hellion, Shadower 2009, Atlas Shrugged, ayn rand, Cloudnigh, fountainhead, Hellion, inspirating, Lanternfly, Rants, reading, reading list, Shadower

A week as has passed since I finished the first draft of Lanternfly and I’m really surprised by how empty I feel without something to do every day. This has got to be the first (and longest) period in the past two years where I haven’t gone to some cafe and sat down to write. When it wasn’t Lanternfly, it was Endoflux, or a short story of some kind, and one of my many tangent projects, and if it wasn’t actual writing, it was conceptualizing. The other day I sat down to look at all the material I have and its sort of shocking–especially the amount of stuff I did in 2007 that *wasn’t* actual writing. Not that I did much of anything writing-related in 2007, but… ah.

According to Erik, the fun part starts with editing. Not that the last 170,000 words weren’t fun, or anything, but the entire effort of actually writing something that I’d eventually have to edit was sort of like coaxing myself to jump off a cliff. In fact, a good portion of the process this time around was writing with editing in mind. I don’t know when, but I came to a point where I just went “fuck it” and started banging away. That really made all the difference, and that’s when I really started having fun.

Now that I think about it, I’m really looking forward to editing, especially since it means I get to revisit and reexplore many of my characters. It also means learning more about the drafting process, and how much room I can give myself in the initial writing. The biggest problem I ran into in the independent study was toward the end where I ran out of time to develop the concepts and characters of the chapters I was about to write. The last three, while decently written, are a complete mess and a prime example of what happens when you don’t space out the bones you throw readers. There’s also the first three, which were when I thought I was writing a story about some girl whose father worked on steam engines in Quebec City and the relationship with the girl’s mother made her run away up there. Well, I still wound up in Quebec City–nearly wound up in Germany, however the fuck that came about–but with a very different story

Something I noticed in writing is that not all the characters came to me fully formed at the end. In fact, one particular character, one who actually used to be the protagonist of the whole damn series, and will assume that role later, is the worst off. In fact, I pretty much ignored his development completely in the first draft just because I had no idea “how much” the reader needed. Now that I’ve got the book down, I’m thinking, I’m hoping, that I can go back and tinker with him a bit and get him how I want. That’s the glorious thing about the drafting process is you can consciously allow a few of these. Or at least, that’s what I think right now. Maybe I’ll wind up revisiting him and shoot myself a quarter chapter after his introduction or something. Fuck.

Last Friday, I had my last meeting with Erik about the independent study. Idiot that I am, I was half asleep through most of it being that I was up late doing things that one should not do when they have to be awake at 9AM. One of the best parts about working with him has been the manner of his encouragement, and caution of holes I could possibly fall into while writing. I think the most important question he asked me was sometime right after we started and he asked why making dreams concrete was important. I sort of sat there for a minute and was like, “wait… what?” And then realized he’d hit on something I hadn’t thought about directly. I had thought about it, but in that really abstract way you do when you’re hashing out an idea and want to leave the specifics out for the time being. In the end, that conversation helped me come up with a pretty important bit of info, and I was able to write merrily again.

There was also a lot of good reading over the course of the study. The two that affected me the most are the ones he gave me about character and the idea of the villain as a catalyst as they taught me to view my characters and my antagonist as humans and not devices. It opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities, not just for the book, but for the series as a whole that I’m really eager to explore.

I could write a million more things about this, and how much fun I had on the first draft of Lanternfly, but I’d be getting ahead of myself. After all, the book’s not done yet and I still have a lot of stuff left to do before I can let anyone read it. What I’m going to do now is enjoy the rest of my “writing vacation,” finish out the semester, see my family and then kick back into things again. And make lattes. Can’t forget the lattes.

Thanks for reading!

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory, Hellion, IS 2009, Short Works 2007, draft one, Erik, IS2009, Lanternfly, Rants, school

I had to edit a peice of Endoflux Theory for class today. My mind’s been really far from the story lately, so I feel like what I wrote is slightly lacking. Nonetheless, I think its decent enough to share with the few of y’all who may read this. Just as long as y’all know, for the record, that this piece annoys the shit out of me. For those of you who read the original on SE,  this will be 100% new. Enjoy, if you can.

“Jump, Lucas.”

Lucas Sebring blinked. Below him sprawled a world shielded behind grey curtains, streaked with the white of slowly falling snow. He knew this place.

He’d had this dream before. It was always the same. The same thoughts. Same stimuli. Nothing was ever any different.

Somewhere behind him, the man who’d told him to jump stood, but Lucas knew that he would never see his face. He was transfixed, as always-rooted and staring into the oblivion below him with the suspicion that somewhere below destiny waited. Was it a chasm? A city? Hell? It was impossible to tell from the muted glow barely perceptible from the other side.

Lucas Sebring sighed. He’d had this dream before. His task was burned into his mind like a drug habit. Right now, he was tripping, repeating things he’d done a thousand times before. When he opened his eyes-or rather, found them open-everything would be gone. Not even the tatters of the dull tinge of this high would remain.

The voice behind him, repeated. “Jump, Lucas. Save yourself.”

Who the fuck are you? Lucas yelled in his mind. Irony told him it was his father, and this dream was post-traumatic stress. Of what, though? Why the hell would he associate that with his father? He couldn’t remember exactly. Something unpleasant. He evaporated the thought.

“You must save yourself!”

The voice had become urgent now. He’d had this dream before. Why did it want him to jump so badly? There were no answers-just orders. Jump. Save yourself. It was like being asked to lose all faith in order to regain it. Stupid shit-the sort of crap religious fundamentalists tell you to do when you meet them on the train. Take a leap. Take a word from someone who’s face he couldn’t see.

So did that mean this was the voice of God? Lucas was a biologist. He was raised in the Earthen tradition of Roman Catholicism. He went to church on Sundays-at least, when he didn’t have a hangover to recover from. That he attended at all was out of guilt, Lucas knew-for what, that was another thing he couldn’t remember. Why the hell did all his memories feel like distant road signs in this place?

The voice came again, this time its tone was reproachful. “Hesitation will not save you, Lucas. Only action.”

Even if the man behind the voice wasn’t his father, he sure as fuck sounded like him. Even the frustration was the same. Fine, Lucas hollered, remembering a time where he might have screamed this from the other side of a door, rather than on the edge of some precipice overlooking some nondescript place. I’ll fucking do it. Save myself-Whatever! Just stop telling me what to do!

Lucas took a shuddering breath and knew what came next. He would close his eyes. Then he would open them. Take in one more breath. Hold it. Jump. His final exhale would propel him to his death.
He’d had this dream before. It was always the same. The same thoughts. Same stimuli. Nothing was ever any different. Except for this time.

This time, Lucas found defiance lingering beneath the surface of his usual response. Where it had sprung from, he didn’t know. Perhaps one of the distant road signs had changed. Maybe it was less clear than usual or more so. Whatever the reason, when Lucas finally jumped, he didn’t let himself fall as he always did-turning in midair as he fell, so he wouldn’t see the ground coming up.  Instead he turned, twisting in mid air so that he faced the precipice, to gaze upon the face of the man giving the orders…

…But there was no face. No eyes. No nose. Or even a mouth or hair. Just a broad frame, the hands held behind its back expectantly, waiting for the command to be carried out.

Figures.

Allowing his back to turn to gravity, Lucas Sebring fell to his death.  An instant later, he found himself staring at the stucco ceiling of his apartment. The traffic light outside flashed yellow against the ceiling. The synchronized beats of his twin hearts echoed in his ears. The 36-hour time clock beside his bed red 9:55AM-five minutes before his alarm. For all he’d known, he hadn’t slept a wink all night.

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory, Short Works, Site-related Endoflux Theory, snippet

For those of you who visit the writing-void (WORKING ON THAT) that is my Spinwork portfolio, I updated a few of the pages, added an FAQ, cut the Endoflux page, and added more detailed sections and pictures for the Lanternfly and Shadower sections. Still working on the blog layout, and possibly, a forums (I have the stuff installed, I just need to skin it and actually figure out if there’s even a point/any time).

Backing up to the Endoflux thing for a second. Why’s Endoflux gone? I’m not cutting the story–but it’s just not on my list of in-progress projects right now. At the moment, Lanternfly is my 100% priority. Hopefully I’ll get to Shadower sometime before 2010. But Endoflux–I really don’t have time for it right now. It’s a great idea, and has a lot of potential. But I’ve got other stuff I want to write, so that’ll have to wait. And that’s that.

In other news, I got to change the water filters at work today. Seriously one of the most entertaining moments at Starbucks ever. First of all, it gave me every reason to never drink unfiltered water ever again. New York/Vermont water is fairly clean, but looking at a brownish water filter after three months of use and you’ll actually realize there IS shit floating around in there. Haha, fuck.

This is a lot later than I’ve been up in a while. Funny, I’ve actually been sleeping lately.

Back into Lanternfly tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory, Hellion, IS 2009, Shadower, Site-related Endoflux hiatus, FAQ, Lanternfly, Shadower, Spinwork, work

So far, I’ve been surviving my hell-semester with minimum incident. Not much writing, either–just some edits to Endoflux Theory’s prologue, Stagnancy, which is now posted in Seventh-Element’s Underground. So far I’m really proud of how that’s working out and the responses I’ve been getting. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to launch into Part I (I have so much freaking back story work to finish ;_;).

Just a quick update, really. I’m waiting for a train to JFK to go back up to Vermont.

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory

Already I am starting to see how this semester is going to cause problems for my writing. Not only am I taking 5 classes and a lab, I’m continuing to work at Starbucks 20 hours a week. This leaves me virtually little to no time to do any work. On most days, I won’t be able to sit down at the computer until after 8-9PM, when chances are I’ll have homework to do. I do however, have Friday nights, and weekends totally off, which is usually when I do most of my writing any way during the school year.

This leaves a few things open to happening. One, is that I’ll lower my hours at work to 15 hours (Five hours makes a massive difference at this job–you would be surprosed). Another is dropping a class and taking it over the summer. Worse still, is pushing back ET until next semester when I’ll hopefully have less classes. I’m counting on the lab class not being that bad–if it is, I’m screwed. But at least it’s out of the way.

On the writing front, I’ve been scrounging up time to work on Endoflux Theory lately. The writing is really good for the most part. The problem I’m running into is that the first page doesn’t lead into the main character the way I want to. The result is a lot of rewriting as I struggle with finding an easy-to-follow way to get readers into the story without confusing the shit out of them. The past couple days I’ve been breaking from that to get some work done on characters and plotlines.

Although I’d rather avoid pushing back ET, it remains a possibility. The upside is, I’ll be able to spend my wayward time working on Hellion. It won’t be until a few weeks into the semester when I’ll know for sure, and heavily depends on how much editing I can get done before plunging into the week. We’ll see.

Spinner Endoflux Theory

http://spinworkstudios.com/endofluxtheory/

As some of you might have extrapolated, I’m about ready to begin posting ET in September. I finished the prologue of the story a couple of days ago. In a few days, I’ll begin editing and finalize the details for the first “Act” of the story. Since ET is pretty much being written for the internet the chapter structure and updates will be different. Given how difficult it is for some people to read stuff on the computer, I’ve shortened the updates to three pages (A4/8×11 size).

As for the preview: What you see is a first draft with a lot of the prose removed. I did it more or less for the “wow” factor. I know there’s some awkward phrasing there. I’m pretty sure it’ll be changed in the final version.

Spinner Endoflux Theory

After what could be described as some epic fails testing some Twitter crap out for the blog, I’ve decided that for the moment, I’m going to keep this blog set-up as is, if not change the skin to reflect the overall design of the site (I hate having a different design here than on site).

The new site’s been up nearly a week now, and I’m still puttering about ideas with how I want everything to work, whether or not the site needs a forum and what work I want to get up here. I’m still working hard on Pennies and And the Silence Screamed to post, but with the way Endoflux Theory is going, I think it’ll be some time before we see any of the two shorter works.

I’ve been getting IMs from people for the past few days asking what Endoflux Theory is and the plot. I’ve always been really bad about explaining plot lines, especially when I have to do it nine or ten times a week, because the plot changes so much that I find myself telling two entirely different stories to some people. I’m going to hold off on describing the plot at the moment, since I’m just reaching the point where I’m laying out plot lines and figuring out where my vision and the story are going to meet. In reality, when I write a story like this, plot lines are the last thing I worry about since so much of the story relies on the characters and their chemistry.  That’s not to say I don’t have ideas–but they’re still in that phase where everything’s a big ball of multiple threads of yarn all tied together that I’ve yet to unravel and work out the knots and stuff.

The one clear thing is that in many ways, ET is a bit of a departure from my other attempts. It’s a lot lighter and a lot darker in many ways than Hellion is (if I were to describe Hellion as neutral colors, its a light is more of a muddy yellow and dark is a mucky dark brown, where ET to me feels like various shades of ground up chrome and ball barings swirling around in light and dark vortexes), and a lot more open in terms of possibilities. Since this is going to be published online in a serialized format, it gives me a lot more freedom to explore from installment to installment. All in all, ET is an experiment and I’m not planning on judging very quickly.

Besides that, I’ve got some people who have agreed to help me along with the site when it comes time to get things rolling. My roommates Dan and Mike have agreed to help me out with design and coding respectively so I can keep things rolling more efficiently. For those of you who frequented SE, Dan was Knowyourenemy. You can check out Mike at Over the Pond, his blog.

That’s all I’ll say on that for now.

In other news, I’m finally out in California on vacation. Since 2006, this has really been the time where I’ve taken what I’m working on, whether its a concept or actual manuscript and ran away with it. This is where I really hit stride with Salamander and wrote the concepts that made going forward with Hellion possible. Sitting in a place where I can stare out at the Pacific Ocean whenever I get a block is more than a help . As an aside, since I work for Starbucks now, I get a 30% discount on all my purchase. Cross that with drinking the much-cheaper iced shaken green teas, and getting free refills for them, I pay as little as a dollar-forty for the first go, and thirty-five cents per refill.

In short, I am a happy writer

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory