Progress Check

I haven't updated here as much as I would have liked, but I HAVE been making progress on the various writing projects I mentioned in the last entry here at House Improbabilia.

• Goal One - My Paperback Reader is still rolling, and it's still fun!
• Goal Two - I'm a little behind whatever schedule I was hoping for, but it's still coming, and it's still coming along strong.

Again, a bit vague, right? Trust me, I think y'all would rather I spend more time writing my actual writing projects than a blog post, right?

I like that, Heather - goals, not resolutions

A good friend of mine - Heather over at Out of the Green - posted earlier this year that she's not making any New Year's resolutions. Rather, she's setting goals, and her reasoning made a lot of sense to me, so I'm following suit, and setting goals for 2010.

Some of my goals are personal (dealing with health and finances, for example), and some of them (the ones I'm sharing here) are more writer-ly.

• Goal One - Maintain my bi-monthly column at Paperback Reader. This should be easy and a no-brainer; my "Papercut" column is part editorial, part critique, and I've got plenty of thoughts about the horror genre that I can put to virtual paper.
  
• Goal Two - Non-fiction book project Number One. Yeah, yeah, I'm being purposefully vague here, and I will disclose more as I get closer to seeing this one completed . . . which, if I can keep my head down and nose to the grindstone (and that's the very last time that I, as a writer, will use that clichéd phrase), I can see being completed in three months time.
  
• Goal Three - 2010 Novel Number One. I'm working through an old National Novel Writing Month novel I completed in 2006, expanding the text, changing the perspective and fleshing out the characters a bit more. I've started work on this already, and would like to see a finished draft by summer.
  
• Goal Four - 2010 Novel Number Two. This novel features a character that will appear in my contribution to the upcoming anthology Dark, scheduled to be released later this year. I'm as excited about this one as I am about 2010 Novel Number One, and look forward to learning a bit more about this great city in which I live(-ish - technically I don't live in Portland, OR, proper) as I hope to tie some of this novel into the history and geography of the Portland, OR, area. The goal for this is to see a first draft completed by the end of 2010.
  
• Goal Five - Non-fiction book project Number Two. This is a big one, with a lot of work to do and headway to make. I'm looking forward to tackling this as it's been bubbling around in my brain for at least a year now, and it's about damned time I throw those words down. More details as this project becomes more concrete.
  
• Goal Six - As much short fiction writing as I can. There are some markets that have asked to see some of my work, and I can't let them down! Besides, I can always go back to a short story to keep the writing gears turning if any of my novel or non-fiction projects give me any grief.
  
• Goal Seven - Not quite a fiction or non-fiction project, but there's still some writing involved, so there you go. I meant to complete this project in 2009, and I need to touch base with the collaborator with whom I was working, but I think this will be a fun project to get off the ground and shop around.
  

Wow. That seems like a lot, huh? I should probably got off of this blog and get to work . . .

Looking back on the old . . .

I don't know if it's a fault or not, but I constantly find myself looking back on my older stories, especially the ones that haven't found a home. Sometimes this gets in the way of my working on new stuff, sure, but there's a part of me that feels somehow held back by a piece of writing that never quite got to where I thought it should go while I was writing it.

So while I'm gearing up for my current novel, I find myself looking back at Memories of Home, my National Novel Writing Month novel from a few years ago. At the time, the NaNoWriMo folks had a deal with Lulu.com, and I was able to have one copy of my novel published for myself, and I went ahead and left Memories of Home available online for others to download and even purchase if they wanted to. A few websites reviewed the book, and I moved on.

But it's always stuck in my head. And I always asked myself the big what if? questions. What if Memories of Home can be expanded beyond the 50,000-ish words I threw down during NaNoWriMo? What if I could turn it into a full-length novel and even shop it around?

I think I might give it a go. Of course, I hope it doesn't get in the way of the current novel and non-fiction project . . .

Where do stories come from?

Bren and I are working on some writing projects together. We're not co-writing; we're both working on different similarly-lengthed fiction projects, and we had an interesting conversation the other night that still has me asking myself a few questions.

She identified a HUGE difference in our approaches to storytelling. She prefers to come up with an overarching story - she referred to it as the "fiber" of the tale - and then she'll start to flesh out the pieces inside that "fiber," tackling things like character, setting, etc.

My approach has evolved over the years. For a long time, an image or a visual would pop into my mind, and I would try to build a story around that. (My early movie-making efforts are filled with stories like this. "Wouldn't it be cool if I set myself on fire?" "Wouldn't it be cool if my friend Mike's face melted?") These days, I find myself building characters, and then finding scenarios in which to plug these characters.

I don't know if one approach is better than the other, but it certainly speaks to what might be a problem I'm running into with my own writing project. I've got a character - a character whose entire life story I could tell you over a few cups of coffee, a character I've been spending a lot of time with as I sketch his history and build his relationships with the world, a character whose been swimming in the murky depths of my dark imagination for years - and I want to take him out for a spin . . . but I'm finding myself questioning just WHERE I'd want to take that spin.

We spoke further, and Bren and I both think that maybe this approach to character-building-before-fiber-building comes from my history reading superhero comics in which the characters are typically reactionary as opposed to proactive, as well as my background as a tabletop role-playing game player, even though I haven't thrown the dice in years.

So to you few readers of this new blog, I pose to you a question - what comes first for you? The fiber or the character? Or something else all together?