Just finished transcribing my latest batch of Heroine notes. The story is growing at an alarming rate, though the word count is not necessarily rising by leaps and bounds. This novella is going to be dark, claustrophobic, and very frightening. I really don’t want to say more, which is why I’m playing the adjective game instead of giving you any plot details. Trust me, you’ll want to read this one sans previews or excerpts … and probably with a couple of lights on.

Heroine

10,682 / 50,000 (21.0%)

Now, I’m afraid I have to warn you about a particularly awful movie. It’s ironic that the first Ring movie should be about a videotape that kills you after you watch it, because the Ring Two is a film that will make you want to kill yourself after you watch it … or quite possibly halfway through it, thus preventing you from having to watch the equally odious second half.

I enjoyed the first Ring because I thought it was a fairly original story (as much as a remake can possibly be original), and the cinematography had an atmosphere quality that reminded me of Cape Breton. The film takes place in Washington State, which with its secluded coastal towns and occasional lighthouse is not much different from Canada’s East Coast (except Washington’s annual rainfall is probably more than that of the Maritimes combined). Ring Two has that same dark, wet atmosphere, but unfortunately that’s all it has. The film manages to transcend awful and reach such a level of mind-numbing boredom that I cannot even recommend the film for any possible kitsch value. Nothing happens! There are so many long tracking shots of people walking through dark houses and down unlit corridors that you can almost read the director’s thoughts, Come on, let’s stretch this out a little bit more, we gotta reach that ninety-minute runtime. Then there’s the scene where the woman and her son are attacked in their car by a herd of CGI deer. I’m not kidding. I thought the filmmakers might be kidding, but no, it was not an outtake from Scary Movie 4. The CGI deer attack is never explained or even mentioned later in the film, nor do we find out why it was deer and not, say, badgers or chipmunks, which at least would have been funny. That in itself is a good way to describe Ring Two: not scary, not funny, and not worth your time. Avoid it at all costs.

I’m working hard on my new story, a sf-horror novella called Heroine. I don’t want to say much about it yet, except that it takes place in the not-too-distant future, very far from earth … and yet not that far at all. Am I being artistically vague? Nope, but you’ll have to read it to understand. Of course, I have to sell it to a magazine before you can read it, so I guess the onus is reallly on me.

I’m still working my way through pages and pages of notes I took months ago while working on other stories. It’s amazing to be able to go through these notes now and see a story in its entirety. It’s like discovering a perfectly intact dinosaur skeleton, a found thing that I’ve just stumbled upon and only needs to be dusted off and assembled.

I’ve also come upon a snazzy bit of code (yes, more code) that allows me to keep a running word meter of my writing progress.

Heroine

9,000 / 50,000 (18.0%)

It’s also a good way of letting y’all know how close I am to finishing the stories that I always talk about but you never see.

I’m working! Honest, I am!

I’ve made one more final tweak to the new, PHP-powered journal. Before, I had to manually update the journal link on the main splash page every time I wrote a new entry. Now, with the new script I’ve written, the link refreshes the moment I publish a new post.

So what does this mean for you the visitor? Not too much, except that journal updates will no longer be reported under the "Site Updates" which appears in the right-hand column. Since most users go to the splash page first, anyway, I doubt very much if this will be an omission anyone will notice. The reason I changed the code in the first place was to reduce the time it takes to post a new entry. With this little bit of code, I no longer need Dreamweaver and Photoshop to update the journal.

Exciting, huh?

According to an article on CNN.com, the past year in books has been somewhat lacking. With the exception of The Da Vinci Code, The Historian, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there haven’t been any really huge best-sellers, and virtually no breakout books by new authors.

Clearly the publishing industry is waiting for me to complete my first novel.

I’m reading Angels & Demons right now, the book Dan Brown wrote before The Da Vinci Code, and while the story is somewhat interesting, the writing is no great shakes. It’s not really bad, but to be honest, I could have written this thing with a lot less effort than what I put into my own stories. That doesn’t mean my stuff is better, but I truly feel (and I have the feedback on my rejection letters to prove it) that when an editor is considering one of my story, the one thing they won’t have a beef with is the quality of my writing.

So why don’t I just write a damn novel and have at it? Good question. I guess I feel that a writing career is like any other career, and that in order to succeed I need to work my way up from the bottom. So I started writing short stories and sending them to small-press ‘zines. Then I wrote stories and sent them to semi-pro and professional magazines. That’s where I am right now and where I will remain until I build a stable plateau from which to take my next step – writing a novel. Whether I should try and get an agent after I finish writing it or try to sell it on my own first is something I haven’t thought about yet. I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Until then, I continue to write short stories and the occasional novella, while taking many, many notes on the many, many novels I will write one day. I think of it as stockpiling. Because one day, when I do get my foot in the door, and an editor says, "Hey, Ian, I really like that last story, have you got anything else?" I am going to launch everything I’ve got.

So keep watching the skies.

I meant to mention in yesterday’s post that I finished reading the first of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope books. It was a pretty decent read; a nice twist on the vampire legend, in that Lumley made it more his own thing than simply rehasing old motifs. I also liked how Lumley used the Cold War (the book was written in the eighties) to explain why the English and Russian governments would be so interested in recruiting psychics (ESPionage, they call it, great term).

The book ends quite abruptly, and I have to say I’m curious to see how the story picks up in the second volume. Overall I found it to be a fast, entertaining read. I’m surprised no one’s tried to ruin it by turning into a movie. I don’t plan to begin Necroscope 2: Wamphyri in the foreseeable future, seeing as how I keep promising myself I would get around to reading Mr. Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. I’ve been told the writing is rather pedestrian but that the stories are decent. Sometimes you read for story, sometimes you read for the language, and when you find that has both, you must cherish that book.

I’m not sure where I read that, but it’s much too insightful to be an original thought.

Ian

As someone of you know, and as some of you have no doubt deduced from my posts here, I’m usually very confident in my skills as a writer and in my prospects for a career as a novelist. But what you might not know is that I actually have a plan to achieve this dream. Or rather, as much of a plan as one can have in an endeavor in which luck and timing play large parts.

Those who visit this site with any kind of regularity have probably noticed that I haven’t been posting very often in the past few months. The humidity is to blame for that, at least in part. Mostly I’ve been focusing on other things … big things. Well, they’re big to me. These things have taken me away from the website but, ironically, actually have a direct effect on the future of Lit Noir.

I’m making some changes – not big ones (not yet) but little tweaks here and there to streamline things a bit and make the place look a bit more polished and, hopefully, professional. I will admit that it’s hard for a writer who has sold only a single story to impart much professionalism. And yet there are so many people out there who really believe I will make it, and I know that they are not just paying lip service.

The journal has clearly been given an overhaul (I’m still in the process of importing all the old entries, so please bear with me). It’s much faster for me to post updates now, which means I can spend more time on writing without feeling guilty about keeping my fanbase (both of you) of the latest news. I know some of you were pretty peeves about my killing the message board, but frankly it was just one more thing to distract me from my writing. I promise, if I ever become so successful that there is an audience who wants to discuss my works online, I will re-build The Sugar Shack.

For those of you who would still like to leave some feedback, the new journal format allows users to leave comments. You don’t need to sign up for a membership or anything, but comments need to be screened for spam and ex-girlfriends before they appear on the site. Blame terrorism. It’s as good an excuse as any these days.

After finishing "The House on Ashley Avenue," I initially went back to work on "Leaves Brown," a short story I’ve been playing with for the last month or so. At the time it was referred to as "the thing I was working on when "Ashley" was kicking the shit out of me." Anyway, I expected to get back to work on it, but it appears I’ve been sidetracked once again. No, it’s not the humidity this time, which seems to have abated (at least for the time being), but rather a new novella tentatively called Heroine.

It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for the past year or so. I already have much of the story plotted out in notes but haven’t had the time or inclination to sit down and actually write the thing. But it looks like that time has come.

Since I started work on Heroine on Monday, I’ve completed about 8,000 words. I expect it’ll be about 40,000-50,000 words by the time its finished. Not too shabby. I feel like I’m building myself up for the big monster novel, which I know is lying in wait. The novel writing part of me is like some enormous machine that I’m currently keeping in a shed next to my house, going out periodically to put in the key and rev the engine a few times. ‘Cause once she gets going – and let me tell you, friends and neighbors, that day is not far off – she ain’t gonna stop.

I’m going to a wedding this weekend (in freakin’ Woodstock of all places), and since I’m not actually taking part in it, you can be sure I’ll be bringing my Heroine notes and my laptop. I expect to get a good chunk of writing done. I’m also reading the first of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope books, and I expect to finish that, as well. All in all, it should be a good weekend.

Ian

New links: Ansible.

Something I don’t think I’ve talked about here before is the window of time between the completion of a new short story and its submission to a magazine.

I guess I should preface this by saying that I finished "The House on Ashley Avenue" on the weekend, shaving it down to a svelte 8,000 words, and I’m fairly happy with the final result. My Ideal Reader seems to dig it, too, and that’s certainly a plus. (If your I.R. thinks your story should be ripped up into tiny pieces and used to fertilize the lawn, it’s probably a good indicator that most editors will feel the same way.)

When I finsh the first draft of a new story I like to leave it for a little while before I make any changes. It’s a little bit like coming home from a long trip and waiting until the next day to unpack your bags. If you do it while you’re tired and cranky, let’s face it, kids, you’re going to put everything in the wrong place and end up making more work for yourself later on.

Most writers agree on a grace period before tackling subsequent drafts of a new story. The length of time depends on the writer, of course, but for a short story I personally like to wait about two weeks. In two weeks I can forget about the story and all the associated baggage that invariably came with eking it out. (And if you don’t think there’s any blowback for those who work in the creative arts, take a moment to think about what a sculptor’s hands look like after a day of chiseling stone, or how a dancer’s feet look after a long ballet practice.

Once those two weeks are up, I go back into my office, boot up Word XP, and take a look at my story again. I’m feeling fresh and rested, and more importantly, I’ve dropped a good portion of the bullshit that traveled along in my wake while writing that first draft. I’m excited to see if my great idea is still as great as I thought it was two weeks ago, and even if it’s not, I’m now ready to make any necessary changes with a clear mind (if not an impartial one).

And how do I distract myself during those two weeks?

Why, I work on another story, of course.

As if you had to ask …

Ian

New links: Anti-Masonic Claims Refuted, Robert McCammon, and Origin of Phrases.