Spark in the Umbra

Things have happened.

Good things.

And I figure this makes for a lousy journal if I don’t record them here since this is supposed to be all about my writing journey.

Firstly, I joined the kiwiwriters.org site.

Sure, it’s great to connect with other Kiwi writers and it’s already been really useful for advice on a few nagging questions I had. (One of which was rather pertinent to this blog – I’ll get to that in a minute).

But selfishly, it was so I could post the novel draft I’ve written so far to get some critique and feedback.

The feedback I received is that so much back story in one burst so early in the novel robs the text of forward motion. But the back story and the character development it represents is actually good and worth keeping.

This nicely sums up and confirms my own mixed feelings about the draft so far, so I’m not completely wasting my time.

This is a relief.

Relating this to my wife, she looked at me and said “See, I told you I thought it had promise”. I could only grin somewhat sheepishly.

Here’s the thing, I feel asking people close to me about my writing is a two-edged sword. I want them to like it but it puts them in a rather awkward position.

I’m sure it’s the writers equivalent of the question every man dreads:

“Does my bum look too big in this?”

It’s a no win question. (No shit, sherlock!)

If you say no, they feel it’s only because you love them.
And if you say yes, well… let’s not go there.

Secondly, I found an experienced NZ writer of horror, Lee Pletzers, who has been a fount of knowledge and encouragement. We seem to have similar tastes in fiction and even similar first experiences of horror – The Sunday Horrors.

This was a fixture of NZ television when we were both nippers (i.e. decades ago) and showed various classic horror films. We both managed to escape appropriate parental supervision one evening and were never the same again.

For me, it was the original B&W movie ‘The Fly’. I saw it whilst staying overnight at my grandparents. It blew my young mind.

The tension, the excitement, the dread.

It had never occurred to me that people could even think such thoughts, let alone make a movie about them.

The guest bedroom was down a long hallway at the other end of their house. Boy, that was one scary journey.

And the light switch was on the other side of the room from my bed. I figured if I hit the switch as fast as I could and leapt across the room, I could get into bed and under the covers before the darkness reached me.

As a child, I knew that monsters can’t get you if you’re hiding under the covers. It’s some sort of a universal code of childhood monster conduct.

However, crouching down and looking under the bed is an absolute no-no and breaks the above covenant. It’s positively asking for trouble.

Anyway, I damn near broke the light switch I hit it so hard. But I survived so, it was justified.

Anyway, Lee confirmed my feeling that I needed to write some short stories. Both to build up my writing muscles, and to get some closure. As in, start something, rewrite, and then finish a story.

Sage advice.

Hell, I could even try submitting and maybe even get them published somewhere. Now, wouldn’t that be cool!

Speaking of advice, sadly, I shall not be featuring more of the novel draft on this blog.

Courtesy of the Kiwi Writers site, I’ve learned that there’s a rule of thumb that many publishers use:

If more than 10% of a work is put up on-line on a non-password protected site, they consider that you’ve effectively used up your first publishing rights.

So if I were to post much more, I would be getting dangerously close to crossing that threshold. And that would suck since I do hold the dream of one day getting this novel published.

That may be wildly optimistic, of course, but that optimism is what keeps me going. Novels are hard work so I need all the motivation I can get.

The short stories I’m writing, since I want to try submitting them, fall under the same knife. Bugger.

So this blog ends up needing to be about my process of writing and not the stories themselves, kind of like it was supposed to be.

Of course, if any of these short stories are soundly rejected by all markets, then I could put them here.

But that probably means they are crappy stories, so that might be kind of pointless.

Still, if it’s one of the on-line horror fiction e-zines that takes me up, I will be able to link to them with great pride.

It’s an amazingly powerful feeling so have someone like what I wrote.

I’m hooked.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.