It is decided.

I mentioned in my last post that I was finalizing the title for the novel.  I’m happy to say that the decision is indeed final, and I have indeed settled on a title.  Bear in mind that this is just the title for my book, not the series as a whole.  Myself and the two other authors are still trying to come up with a title for the series of books.  I’ll get back to this in a moment.

In addition to working on the book, I’m also still working on getting the Aftermath series properly formatted for downloadable release.  I really want to at least include some cover artwork for each part, and I might even take a crack at it myself if I can’t find a talented artist willing to contribute.  We’ll see what happens.

Reviews keep trickling in occasionally on fanfiction.net, and I still get a huge kick out of reading everyone’s reactions to the series.  The things people say are seriously too nice.  It’s humbling and encouraging and often makes me laugh/cry/emote at how it affects the readers in such profound ways.  It’s really quite touching, and I mean that with every shred of sincerity that I have.

Okay, I’ve kept you waiting.  I’m going to reveal the name of the book.  Are you ready?  Here it is:

“We Left As Dust”

This title manages to capture the theme and tone of the story.  It also, as I realized after settling on it (I swear,) kind of rhymes with The Last of Us.  I promise, PROMISE, that is completely coincidental.

So, keep your eyes out for that title when it hits shelves (digital or physical, TBD)… sometime in the future…

–J.

Ugh.

And here I was going to try to be better at regularly updating this thing.  But alas.

I still haven’t come up with a name for the book series as a whole, but I think I might have settled on a title for my book.  I’m not going to reveal it until I decide for certain, but I at least have something in mind, finally.  Once I get things solidified, as far as book title and series title, I’ll probably be launching a dedicated webpage for the series.  I’m thinking of doing some kind of viral marketing on it to drum up interest.  Have a few ideas.  We’ll see what happens.

I’m still planning on putting the Aftermath series into PDF format to download for free, and I’ll make a promise: it’ll happen before TLOU:R comes out on July 29th.  There, I’ve promised it.  Now I have to follow through.  I want to go back through the whole series with a fine-toothed comb and make sure I didn’t miss any typos or grammatical errors before putting it in a “permanent” format.  So keep an eye out for that, I’ll be posting it here.

Well, that’s my entire update for now.  The book is still going.  My original timetable when I started it of having it finished this summer is just a joke now.  Not a chance.  MAYBE next summer.  I hope.

Til next time.

–J.

Epiphany

I’m not going to lie.  I’ve been struggling lately with the issue of writer’s block/lack of inspiration on the novel.  The first 27,000 or so words came very quickly and easily, but the last 3,000 I’ve had to slog through, taking much more time than they should.  I guess I kind of just lost sight of “where am I going with this?”  I know how Part I of the book ends, but getting there appropriately and in such a way as to give the conclusion of Part I the proper weight and impact has been proving a real challenge.

Earlier this week, an idea struck me about my main character, Declan, that I think will radically change the book for the better.  It involves fundamentally changing a detail about him/his past that gives me a lot more to work with and makes him a much more relatable character.  I’m not giving any more detail than that because it’d ruin the surprise.

Given this change, I think I’ll be able to overcome the troubles I’ve been having and get to racking up the word count once again.  I sort of expect my writing pace to slow a bit given that it’s summer time and there’s more things to do outside and the like.

Oh, also, for those interested, I’m planning on releasing the entire Aftermath series in .pdf format in the coming weeks.  I’m going to get it nicely formatted and put some fancy chapter headings in it and whatnot, but yeah, that’s the plan.  I’ll post it up here to download, free of course.

Well, this was a short update, but that’s all it was: an update.  Until next time.

–J.

Still here.

Just realized how long it’s been since I’ve written on here.  I figure I should probably remedy that situation, hence this post.

Life has taken a turn for the busy.  Not really sure why exactly, but I’ve found myself with less day-to-day free time than in months passed.  I haven’t been writing nearly as regularly as I’d prefer, and that’s a situation I need to remedy.  But more on that later.

I’ve been slogging through Grounded Mode of the Last of Us.  Actually, slogging might be the wrong word for it.  Slogging implies it’s something I’m doing begrudgingly.  In actuality, I’ve been enjoying Grounded Mode immensely.  Having played through  TLOU about seven or eight times, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the AI and the patterns they operate within.  Grounded Mode throws a wrench in the works of all of that.  Sure, while the enemies haven’t aggro’d on you their patterns haven’t changed, but once they’re aware of your presence, things get hairy really quick.  It’s changed the way I play.  The spaced-out checkpoints make for some frustrating deaths, especially when you die and lose 25 minutes of work.  I was stuck in the coal mine part of winter, in the final room with David, for quite some time.  I honestly wasn’t sure how it would be possible.  But I got through.  I’m still in the winter section, and should be wrapping it up in the next week or so.

Something got in the way of completing it though.  This week, Transistor came out.  If any of you are familiar with the game Bastion, it’s made by Supergiant Games, and this is their first game since.

I enjoyed Bastion while I played it, but the ending just absolutely stuck with me for a long time after finishing it.  In addition to a great narrative, it had some of the best music I’ve heard in a video game before.  I’m happy to say that Transistor follows suit.  The storyline was very affecting, and the music… oh, the music…

I completed the game this morning, and I can confidently say the ending is going to stick with me for a long time.  I don’t want to spoil anything so I’m not going to say anything about it, but it’s excellent.  Really, it is.

One thing I really liked about the game, and something that’s made me think a lot about the novel, is how heavily it relied on the intelligence of the player.  When I say it doesn’t hold your hand at all, I mean it.  You are thrown into the game with no context or explanation of why things are the way they are.  Now, this isn’t a novel concept (pun!)  BioShock did this.  My novel actually does this, as well.  But Transistor takes it a step further.  It gives you extremely rudimentary instruction as to how the combat system works.  The rest of it is up to the player to figure out through experimentation and iteration.

They’re putting a lot of faith in, and giving a lot of (perhaps undue) credit to, you, the player, to be able to piece things together.  I love the fact that they did this.  I can see how it might turn some people off to the game.  Not everyone has the strange brain that loves to poke and prod things to see how they work, or to peel back little obscure pockets of information to claim a scrap of knowledge to add to the back story.

There’s so little traditional exposition in Transistor that, for a great chunk of the game, it’s hard to understand what’s going on in Cloudbank, the futuristic sci-fi city that is painted with a delightful mashup of cyberpunk and art nouveau.  Its modes of filling in back story is incredibly unique.  Information can be gathered in snippets from OVC Terminals, kiosks where the populace of Cloudbank can gather and vote on a wide variety of (seemingly trivial) issues, to details embedded in the files of Functions you pick up that serve as your attacks in the game.  I’ve never heard of a game filling in plot in such a way, and I thought it was delightfully original, if not a bit confusing at first.  Obviously, they don’t explain why there’s an identity attached to every Function you pick up.  You have to figure that out for yourself.  They tell you just enough information that you can put the story together, but no more.  I love it.

These things have made me rethink some things pertaining to the novel.  I feel compelled to go back and reread, seeking out sections that I feel are overly expository and reworking them in a way that lets the reader piece things together rather than having me spell it out for them.  It’s going to be a bit tricky to balance this, as Declan is writing a historical account of the whole situation that gave rise to the current world.  But I think I can do better.

That’s something I love about great stories.  They make you rethink the way you look at the world.  And then there’s that ending.  I need – NEED –  to come up with something that poignant.  It was damn beautiful.

Well, that’s pretty much all for now.  I’ll try to be more regular with this, but it would be imprudent to make that a promise.  So, I’ll see you when I see you.

–J.

Decompression in process

I plan on writing a more long-winded post once I decompress after the completion of the Aftermath series, but that post is not this one.  I’m still collecting some thoughts in the wake of completing the series, but I assure you, I will properly arrange them once I have them all.

I’ve had a couple people asking for the series in PDF form, which shouldn’t be too difficult to put together.  I’ll probably give it some formatting and then get it posted here one of these days.

I’ve spent the last couple days re-reading what I have written so far on the novel so that I can pick up where I left off properly.  It’s good to get back into the novel, but I’m faced with a myriad of challenges that just aren’t there in the Aftermath series.  So much legwork was already done for me, and it’s kind of jarring to realize I need to do it for myself this go-around.  I had the luxury of fleshed-out characters with clear motivations and personalities in the Aftermath series.  In the novel, it’s all up to me.  I have to sell the reader on these characters being real people with real idiosyncrasies and motivations and fears and everything else.  It’s a fun challenge, to be honest, but a formidable one.

With the appearance of Declan and Rebecca in the Aftermath series, I was able to give you a small teaser of their personalities and relationship.  I’m going to give you another teaser, and a very brief one at that.  Here’s the first paragraph of the novel as it is written right now (and thus, likely to change.)  I hope it piques your interest:

Silence.  Silence was the sweetest sound he could fathom.  Silence was many things to many people.  It was the harbinger of impending death.  It was safety.  It was anonymity.  It was awkwardness, distrust, indecision, discomfiture.  Silence was solitude.  The last of these was the silence that graced his ears.  In this world, silence was currency, and you were smart to hold onto every cent.

There you have it.  And no, the importance of silence has nothing to do with clickers.  I will reiterate that this is not a zombie story.  Nor a story of an infection.  At least, not in the medical sense.

We’re still trying to come up with a name for the series, but once we settle on one I will make it known.

I hope your interests are piqued.

Q&A Follow-up: GUEST POST EDITION

In my previous entry, I had mentioned that my roommate is writing a his own novel simultaneously with me and I’ve been throwing ideas back and forth with him.  Well, he wrote up a response of sorts… actually I guess, it’s more of his own input to some of the questions than a response to my answers.  I think he had a lot of good insights, so I wanted to share them with you.  If you like what you read, you can follow his blog here.

So without further ado, here’s my roommate Peter:

Hey, I’m the aforementioned roommate. To add something to what Jeff said, the third guy writing with us is also an INTJ. Funny. The three of us are all approaching the revealing of this post-apocalyptic world in very different ways. I suppose my approach is similar to Jeff’s but more drawn out. The third guy is actually setting part of his story around the time when things are just starting to fall apart, so you get the more immediate impact of that part of the story line. I haven’t read his story for a little while, so I’m not entirely sure what he’s doing with it, but he’s dropping that part of the story right in the reader’s lap right at the beginning. I think this is also an acceptable approach to building the environment, but it takes a more delicate hand in some ways.

One thing Jeff and I have talked about at length is the tendency to fill in too much of a story when writing, and to put the focus on the setting instead of the characters. This is partly a problem because I think we all have an easier time developing a setting for our stories with compelling context than we do creating characters that really move a reader.  Alternatively, perhaps it’s because we are human and we relate to characters on a much more intimate level than we do a story’s setting, we are much quicker to recognize the flatness and blandness of the amateurish characters we write than the weaknesses of the settings of our stories, which we can just fill in and correct with our imaginations. Settings, though, won’t make for a very compelling story, and at the end of the book you’ll just have a reader that thinks they could do a better job (which might be true). What makes a story like The Last of Us so great is the strength and depth of its characters. While writing a cool back-story is fun and important, you can have a compelling story with hardly any context (see Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”). Characters are what make a good and compelling story. I promise you, I’m not a good writer, but that’s something I’ve noticed as I’ve read books that really stick with me.

Anyway, back to setting. What I usually end up doing is just looking at how other books/movies/games give you this info. Any time this info is just handed to me as a voiceover or whatever at the beginning of a story, I feel like they took the easy way out. I prefer it to be evident from the way the rest of the story is put together. A few games come to mind: Bastion does a great job explaining things in very little detail and spread out over a long story, using a narrator. Bioshock makes you put the story together. Bioshock Infinite drops the whole thing in your lap at the end and makes your head explode. The Elder Scrolls series always have you starting in a very vague context and the backstory is given to you (Skyrim as an example here) through action scenes at the beginning – you’re about to be executed but a dragon attacks the city. Dragon? Those haven’t been here in thousands of years! Quick, you’ve got to escape! Who are you going to run to safety with? Right there are the general plot points of the game: dragons are back, and there are opposing political groups in conflict. The rest gets filled in with conversations and quests. I like the way games handle this kind of thing, partly because it’s interactive so it puts more emphasis on the person playing, whereas in a movie or book you are handed exactly what the writer intends. Games can afford to be more subtle in some ways, because they can expect that a player will explore an environment and gather information in that way. In a book or movie, that doesn’t happen.

If you think about it, though, few books or movies go out of their way to explicitly explain their setting. There are better ways to do this. I’m rambling here, so I’ll try to make the rest of this brief. I think the key is to use your characters to tell the story, rather than just trying to tell the story. Here are a few examples of what I mean, common methods for handling an apocalypse in a story. Most of these are zombie stories because most apocalypse stories tend to be zombie stories.

28 Days Later and The Walking Dead both use the survivor of a story, the main POV character if you’re writing a book, waking up with no idea of what happened, only that something is wrong. You get to experience their strange and terrifying introduction into a world that no longer works the way it did before. This rude awakening is an effective method that can be used if you want to set your story shortly after some big catastrophic event, which is zombies in this case. Fallout 3 did something like this too I think, but I only played a few minutes of that game. Bastion is another good example (excellent game, worth playing, award-winning soundtrack). Bioshock is a bit like this, but that’s complicated.

I am Legend, Shaun of the Dead, and The Last of Us all follow a character through the catastrophic event instead of having them miss the event and wake up in an empty world. This helps you bond with the character more, and it makes it pretty clear what happened because you get to set the stage before things fall apart and then through the process of destroying your world you can explain what is happening. This shows up in other sorts of movies too, such as War of the Worlds, Gladiator, and any movie where Harrison Ford shouts “I WANT MY FAMILY BACK!” This isn’t so much an apocalypse trope as it is a war trope. These kinds of stories typically involve family and a paternal character trying to redeem himself, hopefully saving his family as a part of that process. This is what the third writer of our writing group is doing with his story.

The Road and The Book of Eli both just have you tagging along with the main character, letting the setting gradually build itself for the audience. In the case of The Book of Eli, the backstory is important, and is gradually revealed. In the case of The Road, the backstory is never really revealed. I think The Road is incredibly boring, but it’s also a great and well-written book, because it shows the power of characters to build a compelling story instead of relying on explaining the setting to the audience. This is what Jeff is doing with his novel, except that he’s more explicitly recounting the story for the reader, because the backstory is its own compelling narrative, and that story is told in parallel to the main narrative.

The last kind of apocalypse storytelling I’ll mention is what I guess I’d call the “earth that was” storyline, where your characters are far enough removed from the actual event that the truth of it is somewhat obscured, or they at least don’t know the truth first hand. This is what I’m doing in my story, my main character is a young child that grew up after the world already fell apart. Most apocalypse stories have characters that fit this mold, but they are often not POV characters. At the end of The World’s End, Nick Frost’s character is narrating the story of the apocalypse to a bunch of kids. Most of the people in the town in The Book of Eli fit this mold. The kid in The Road fits this mold. There’s quite a bit of variability here, though, because there’s a lot of variation in how much of civilization is left. Ellie from The Last of Us fits this mold as well, but there’s enough of a civilization left that while she wasn’t around when the Cordyceps infection started, she knows the whole story. Using this method gives you quite a bit of leeway with how you present the backstory to your audience, because you can just decide how much your character already knows, and have that be assumed knowledge, while the rest of the context is something a reader can learn as the character learns it.

With any of these methods, you can count on a few things: one is that you have to be very careful if you’re explicitly handing your readers the back-story, because it is way too easy to make it feel forced. The second is that humans are highly intuitive creatures, and we connect dots subconsciously, so as long as you write in a world that is consistent with itself and leave enough detail and context, the reader will be able to get at least a vague idea of what’s going on in the background. How much you want to tell them and the timing by which you reveal it are up to you.

——

I think Peter had a lot of excellent things to say and am happy to have him on as a guest.   Hopefully this gives you perspective from another completely amateur author such as myself.

You may be happy to hear that Chapter 10 of Part III is in process.  Working on it now and hoping to post it within the next couple days!  Stay tuned!

Jeff

Q&A: Answer time

Alright, between here and fanfiction.net I did end up getting a few questions that I can answer without spoiling anything significant, so I’ll answer them here.  They were split between questions about the novel and just general writing questions, so I’ll split them up accordingly.  First, as a disclaimer, you should know this:  I haven’t had an English class since senior year of high school.  That was 8 or 9 years ago.  I am not an authority on English or writing.  I am an amateur author working on my first novel who also enjoys writing a fan fiction for the best video game ever made.  The below answers are simply my opinions and approaches to writing.  They probably break a lot of the supposed “rules” of writing, but meh… who needs rules.  Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get started.

NOVEL QUESTIONS

You sound very excited for Aftermath part 3. Did you stop writing your novel entirely until AM3 is done?

First off, yes, I am extremely excited for the rest of Part III, and it is cutting into how much time I’m spending on the novel.  I haven’t stopped writing the novel completely, but my pace has slowed significantly from when I first started it.  I’d love to spend all of my free time writing, but for those who don’t know me (probably all of you,) I spend my weekdays working in engineering and quality assurance for a medical devices company, and as such I’m relegated to writing exclusively in the evenings.  I’m actually pretty excited to finish Part III so that I can spend all of my time on the novel, which will come with its advantages and disadvantages.  But I’ll get back to that later.

In your blogs, you’re working on [the novel] with two other people. How do you brainstorm and think of ideas? Also, do you divide the work?

So here’s the long and short of it.  I came up with this really intriguing idea for a post-apocalyptic setting that could provide a very interesting and provocative backdrop for a book and began turning the idea around in my head for awhile.  Honestly, I realize how in vogue the whole post-apocalyptic thing is these days, but I really think I’ve come up with an interesting take on it.  My roommate and I have been living together since freshman year of college (so for the last 8 years, save the two when he went to grad school) and we both share a lot of similarities.  We both majored in physics.  We both got the same ACT score.  We’re both INTJs on the Myers-Briggs personality type system.  Needless to say, I use him to throw ideas off of rather often, so when I got this idea for the book and started developing it, I brought it to him so we could toss out ideas and see what sticks. Once I got to discussing it at length with him, pieces of the back-story for this world started falling into place and I eventually decided that I had enough to work with to turn this into a book.  Before too long, he became so intrigued by the idea that he, too, decided to write his first novel.  One night over beer and wings, we were talking to a third friend of ours about the stories and he became so enthralled by them that he too decided to join in.  I was very receptive of the idea of having a couple of authors working in the same universe.  There’s plenty of stories to tell in this world, enough that I wouldn’t be doing it justice to tell them alone.  Needless to say, communication is, and is going to continue to be, an extremely crucial part of this project.  We all are writing our novels through Google Drive and share them with each other, as well as having a shared document where we can keep notes, character profiles, a synopsis of the history, an explanation of terms, etc.  We all have to make sure our stories gel with each other and don’t have any contradictions or plot holes.  Most of our brainstorming sessions take place over beer and wings on Thursday nights or breakfasts on Saturday morning.  As far as splitting the work goes, we’re each working on completely separate novels, so there isn’t exactly work to split.  We each have our own plate.

Other than a zombie apocalypse, what else will your story include? Romance? Angst? Friendship?

Well, first thing I should clear up here is that there’s no “zombie apocalypse” in my story.  Yes, it is post-apocalyptic.  Yes, there are so-called “monsters,” in a manner of speaking, that were once human, and in many ways still are.  I don’t want to go into too much detail as to what or who they are, as that’s going to be slowly revealed throughout the story (more on this later.)  And no, this isn’t one of those “they’re not zombies, they’re infected” kinds of things.  I won’t say much more on the topic, as I want it to be somewhat of a surprise.  As far what else the story will include, I don’t really know the full extent yet.  The lead character, Declan, is a very interesting character.  He has a lot of similarities with Joel from The Last of Us, but at the same time is very, very different.  Joel is bitter, cold, and emotionally shut-off at the beginning of TLoU, but it’s clear that he’s dealing with a lot of emotions under the surface in the wake of losing so much.  Declan, on the other hand, is kind of a loner and never really liked people, even before everything went to hell.  He’s rather detached, dispassionate, and is simply concerned with his own survival, not giving a rat’s ass about other people.  His detachment is a survival tactic, allowing him to do unspeakable things without dealing with the emotional repercussions of taking life, or worse.  A little ways into the story, he ends up coming across a woman who he travels with for a time as a sort of mutually-beneficial, you-watch-my-back-I’ll-watch-yours kind of agreement.  She spends a lot of her free time trying to figure out what makes Declan tick, and on several occasions tries to prove to herself that there is some humanity in this guy.  That right there is going to be a big theme throughout the story: what exactly makes us human?  And if we’re surviving just to survive, is that really worth it anymore?  Okay, I’m going to stop before I give too much more away.

You know those post-apocalyptic stories? Hunger Games? Divergent? Yeah, since you’re working on a zombie story where the future is of zombies or is being a future of zombies, how do you explain it in a story? I mean, I want to write a fanfic with an apocalypse and I know what caused it and all, but I’m just struggling to explain it. If by any chance, you could give me a little example-segment or whatever of you know, explaining dystopian stories?

(I addressed the zombie part in the previous answer.)  As far as how do I explain it in the story, I’m actually taking a lot of inspiration from the way the original BioShock did it.  At the beginning, I’m throwing the reader into the post-apocalyptic world with no context for what they’re doing there.  There’s terms that are used that they won’t understand until they’re explained in later chapters, and general confusion as the world is slowly revealed to them.  In the first chapter of the book, Declan finds a journal in an abandoned bookstore and decides he’s going to write down what happened from the beginning.  Each chapter or two he’s going to write a new entry in the journal, and the reader is going to get another piece of the puzzle up until the last chapter when they finally get the whole picture.  I expect some people to kind of be able to put things together before then, but what can you do?  So that’s the way I’m addressing this.  I’m describing the world in its post-apocalyptic state, and then relying on the journal entries to explain how it all happened.  If the rest of the novel isn’t that exciting, I’m hoping the journal entries will at least keep people interested in finding out just what the hell happened.

As far as other ways to do this, it can be tricky.  You can do it through dialogue, but you don’t want it to sound purely expository and inorganic.  That can be one of the trickiest things in writing: making things sound natural and organic.  It’s what leads to the most re-writing I do in my novel and fan fiction.  You can do it via pieces of left-over propaganda, or simply through narration.  It all depends on the story and how you want to tell it.

GENERAL WRITING QUESTIONS

Whenever I try to write, it either feels too sparse or way too detailed. How do you know when enough detail is given to create the scene without weighing in down?

This is very, very tricky to nail down.  I recently went to my parents’ house for their 32nd wedding anniversary (woot woot, nice job ‘rents!) and asked if they wanted to hear chapter one of the novel.  I got to sit back and listen to my mom read it out loud, which was an extremely useful experience for me since it was great to hear my words read with someone else’s interpretation of pacing.  Afterward, they gave me their thoughts and one of the critiques was that early on it was overly detailed to the point where it almost became laborious for the listeners.  There is such thing as giving too much detail to your readers, and finding that sweet spot is tricky.  I guess I approach it as such: only give detail to things that you want attention drawn to, things that you view as significant or symbolic.  As for whether or not I follow my own rules, I’m not sure.  I’ll have to go back and re-read some stuff since I’m not always that self-aware.  That’s the best advice I can give.  Give vivid description to things that are critical, but don’t shirk on giving some color to things that might be monotonous otherwise.  I’ve been straining to come up with different ways to say “snow” in Part III since it’s something that’s basically omnipresent.

I was wondering if you do much research for things that you don’t know about? For example, if you didn’t know much about hunting with a bow, would you look up information about it? And if so, where do you like to hunt for that sort of information? Books, internet, real people with real experience?

Whenever I don’t know much about something I bring into my writing, I do one of two things: one, I’ll speak of it in vague enough terms that I can get away with it, or two, I’ll do research either on the internet or through people who have more know-how than I do.  I’ve never personally hunted with a bow, but I know from reading other stories and even from playing TLoU that there are certain terms or tactics that are employed when using a bow.  So I guess the short answer is: if you don’t know much about something, either be vague enough toward it or do your research.  If you’re going to go into detail, make sure you get your details right.

 I practically feel this way every time I stare at what I’m working at so how do you keep going when you feel lazy or uninspired to write?

Most writers will tell you that the way around this is to just sit down and power through it.  “Write every day.  Just sit down and write, don’t worry about if it’s good or not.”  I, unfortunately, do not work that way.  I’m the sort of personality where if I’m going to write, it’s going to be damn good or I’m not going to do it.  “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right” and all that.  Something that’s actually been useful to me is that I’ve had these two projects to jump back and forth between when I’m losing steam or just feel uninspired by one of them.  So I’d say it’s not a bad idea to have another writing project, even if it’s something that never sees the light of day.  It means you’re writing more often, and that does nothing but good things.  Also, I’ve found it useful to have this fan fiction provide a good contrast to my book in that in the fan fiction all of the characters are already written and the world is already fleshed-out whereas in the novel, I’m actively developing these characters and fleshing out the world.  It’s beneficial to me because it keeps me on my toes and lets me flex different “muscles” so to speak.  Beyond that, though, I’m not sure I have much more advice to give.

Well, this concludes this set of questions.  I enjoyed answering them.  If you have anymore, feel free to send them my way and I’ll answer them in a future post.

In other news, The Last of Us movie has been announced.  How do I feel about it? Well, I’m tendering some reserved excitement about it.  The fact that Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley are involved eases my anxiety a great amount.  I’m going to wait until more information about it comes out to fully develop an opinion on it, but I’m hopeful!

Alright, that’s enough for now.  Til next time.

Jeff

Speaking of…

… answering questions, I was thinking the other day about asking if you guys had any questions for me.  Subject-wise, they can range far and wide: questions about the Aftermath series, including questions you might have about previous chapters (how did you come up with this plot point?  What was your thought process here?  What is wrong with you?) or other things related to the series; questions about my in-process novel; questions about my writing process in general.  I’d be willing to field any of them to the best of my ability, but be warned that I’ll be avoiding spoilers like the plague.  If that’s something you’re interested in, leave a comment and I’ll post my answers to any questions in the next blog entry.  If I don’t get any questions… well, I’ll just write about something else then.  Na-na-boo-boo.

Okay, back to the Aftermath series.  I think it’s kind of amusing that numerous people are already convinced that I’m going to kill off the dog.  I feel like that’s such a clichéd thing to do, isn’t it?  It’s like a cash-in for emotions.  It’d be more of a twist to not kill Titus.  Does that mean I won’t?  No comment.

I’ve been running the end of this series through my mind and the more it gets fleshed out, the more excited about it and proud of it I am.  Seriously, I feel like it’s a “hoity-toity-conceited-author” thing to do to pat myself on the back, but I honestly think I’ve come up with something really, really good.  I’m actually having to stop myself from writing ahead, because I don’t want to do it that way, but those chapters are going to be so darn intense.

That’s not to say that the chapters leading up to the climax won’t be worthwhile.  In fact, there’s a scene I have coming where I have a feeling people will simultaneously go “wait… WHAT?!” and “You just.. you can’t… that’s not….” and “F*** YEAH!” with a fist pump.  Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.

Okay.  Enough hyping.  Back to writing.

Jeff

Easter Eggs in Aftermath: Part I

You know, this is something I realized I’ve never explicitly mentioned, but there’s a fair amount of location-based Easter Eggs in Aftermath: Part I.  While writing that, I actually spent a good amount of time combing through Google Maps and trying to figure out what route these two would have most likely taken to get from where they were in Colorado (I approximated it as outside of Fort Collins) to Salt Lake City.  Once I decided what I figured was a likely route (they’d stick more or less to a highway so they’d have something to follow,) I peppered in several real-life locations into the story.  There’s overt ones, such as the Historic Elk Mountain Hotel, to subtle ones, like where they come across a road sign that says something like STRONG WINDS – NEXT 5 MILES.  That’s a real road sign that’s along that route.  I challenge you to find it.  The shootout in Sinclair?  There’s a real refinery there, and that scene was pulled directly from Street View data.  The main-street-style location that reminds Ellie of Bill’s town?  That exists too, and when I stumbled across it I was stunned.  It was almost a carbon copy, with the church steeple rising at the end of the main street.  Read that section closely and you should be able to find it using Street View.  There’s plenty of real-life locations peppered throughout, so give it a re-read and go scavenger hunting!

Life has been really busy lately and I haven’t had nearly as much time to write as I would like.  I work 8-5 every day and am relegated to writing in the evenings, and evenings are typically busy.  Every Thursday night I go out with some friends to get hot wings at a nearby bar.  Two of those friends are the two authors who are writing books with me, so we oftentimes use these nights to chat about the books.  These sessions are great, and we hash out a lot of details together to make sure everything is cohesive and makes sense.  It reignited some enthusiasm about the books for me, as my drive had started to wane as I got mired down in the current section.

I also came up with a pretty good scenario for Chapter 2 of Aftermath: Part III, so I’m definitely gonna get rocking on that and hopefully get it posted sometime this weekend.  I know people are getting anxious, but it’ll be worth the wait.  SPOILER ALERT: first appearance of a certain kind of baddie.

So yeah I hope to really get some writing done this weekend.  That’ll be really good.  Oh, and today is Friday, so that’s already really good.

Jeff

Mulling about

I’m sitting at Spyhouse Coffee’s Northeast Minneapolis location, the location where I do roughly 90% of my writing, trying to push through this section of the novel.  Character development can be a sticky wicket.  I want to make something obvious and prevalent in the reader’s mind without being ham-fisted or repetitive.

My lead character is a rather misanthropic guy.  He never connected well with other people, and found most of their tendencies irritating and self-destructive.  In general, he just doesn’t like most people he meets.  He believes that all people are self-serving, even ones who hide it under a veneer of altruism (for lack of a better word.)  He has a thorough distaste for the power-hungry types.  He’s always kept to himself, embodying the “live and let live” outlook on life.

Fairly early on, I think in chapter 3, he meets a fellow survivor who also happens to be traveling alone.  Traveling solo is rather uncommon in the world of the novel for several reasons, so he is already kind of an odd duck, but to find a woman traveling by herself was even rarer still.  This female character is considerably more personable than he is, and on several occasions tries to get him to open up and give some indication that he has an emotional bone in his body.

This is what’s giving me fits right now.  It’s hard to try to accurately convey to the reader that this guy has so detached himself from the world.  He shrugs at profound comments, declines to answer most personal questions (and when he does, answers them in a factual fashion devoid of any heartfelt revelations,) and approaches every situation, even life-threatening encounters, with a cold, calculated calm that betrays the anxiety that dwells within him whenever his life is on the line.  There are hints here and there that this guy is indeed human, and that’s what the female character is desperately trying to reveal, but for the most part he’s kind of robotic.

I honestly think most people won’t connect with him well.  I think the secondary characters are going to be much more likable, relatable, and interesting.  This is actually a conscious choice, but I’m not going to reveal why.  I have a suspicion that, seeing as he’s the main character, people will still end up rooting for him, which I suppose is a good thing because I do want to have some sort of redemption of character for him.

Fact is, he is the way he is for a reason: it caters to survival, which is his utmost priority.

Shifting gears here, I have started Chapter 2 of Aftermath: Part III.  I’m only a paragraph or so into it, but the opening scene is taking shape.  Spoiler alert: we’re back with Joel to open Chapter 2.

A funny idea crossed my mind today.  Or at least, I think it’s funny.  I thought it could be interesting to introduce alternate universe versions of my main character and his companion into Part III.  Their dispositions would translate rather well into the world, and I can see Ellie running into them at some point and bantering with the woman, seeing as the main character isn’t too personable.  I know I would have a lot of fun with it.  We’ll see what happens.  They’d only pop up for maybe one chapter.  Who knows… maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t.  I’d probably get a bigger kick out of it than anyone else.

Alright, enough procrastinating.  I’m going to get back to work.

Jeff