a milestone; a forthcoming journey

After what feels like an eternity, I finally lurched past the 80,000 word mark on WLAD.  I don’t feel like rereading my previous posts to figure out how long the last xx,xxx words took, but I’m sure it’s longer than it should have taken.  So it’s a milestone, yes, but I have a hard time celebrating it.  It’s been a long, hard road.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was thinking about taking a trip to Savannah.  After that post, I did indeed start looking into it, and eventually decided to book my flight and my lodging.  It’s officially happening.  A week from tomorrow I’ll be taking off for five days in Savannah, GA.  The main object of the trip is to get away from everyday life for awhile, to spend some time in a city that’s featured prominently in my novel, and to write.  I’m hoping to spend the lion’s share of each day writing, preferably outside at a park bench or outdoor cafe.  I’m looking forward to experiencing a new city, eating a lot of good southern comfort food, and soaking up the old antebellum atmosphere.  This is my first solo vacation.  I’m very excited.

I’m also a bit apprehensive about it.  I want to get a lot of writing done down there, but my momentum as of late has been worse than a snail’s pace.  In preparation, I’ve been attempting to outline the rest of what has to be written.  I know, I know, I’m sure you’re like ‘you haven’t outlined the story yet?!?’  And, well, no.  I haven’t.  I’ve always written without a formal outline.  Sure, one’s always existed in my head, and clearly that has its limitations (as I’ve been learning of late) but on previous writing projects, the lack of an outline hasn’t hindered my progress or writing quality.  It would appear I’ve found the limitations of living that reckless writing lifestyle, so i’m trying to rectify that situation and give myself a clear path forward so that once I get down to Savannah I can hit the ground running.  Here’s hoping.

But yes, I’m apprehensive, yet excited and hopeful.  I’m planning on it being a great trip.  This week I’m going to come up with a more formal itinerary as far as places to visit.  I’d like to stop in at a few different coffee places, bars, restaurants, etc. so I’m going to get those lined up before I get down there.  Should be a good time!

I’m thinking I might journal my days down there on here.  I guess we’ll see.  Keep your eyes open for it!

–J.

Dust

All in all, we’re dust and bone and we’ll dig our graves
before we’re old enough to lie in them
we’ll spread our ash amongst the dirt to soil the seed
that breeds the Earth so we can live again

– Ascension by O’brother

This lyric is basically my entire book.  I can just quit writing now, essentially.

But I won’t.

EDIT: Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve passed 50,000 words.  On to 60,000!

–J.

And so it begins…

Stumbled across this article today.  I’m a little creeped out, because the drug described in here is eerily similar to the drug that plays a major part in the world of We Left As Dust.  Welp… it was a good run, humanity, but society is about to collapse!

On stories and escapism

Fair warning: this is probably going to be one of the more personal posts I’ve written on this blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stories.  ‘Oh?’ you ask.  Yes.  I’ve been coming to terms with my own appreciation for stories and storytelling and where that appreciation came from.  I’ve always enjoyed playing video games, watching movies, and occasionally reading books (though listening to audiobooks has superseded this as of late.)  Now, that’s probably not that uncommon of a thing to say.  Who doesn’t enjoy a good movie, book, or video game, am I right?

But the appreciation I have isn’t that broad.  With very few exceptions, my selections of what media to consume revolves around only a few things.  I love playing video games, but I’ve never been a huge player of multiplayer games, whether online or local.  I’ve played the single player campaign of The Last of Us probably around ten times in total between TLOU on PS3 and TLOU:R on PS4.  I have logged exactly zero minutes of multiplayer, which I’ve only heard great things about.  And I’m sure it’s a ton of fun.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.

It’s the same story with movies.  I’ll pass up (most) summer blockbuster action flicks because there usually isn’t much behind the visual effects and explosions WOOHOOOOOO!

It’s the same story with books.  I need something that’s going to stimulate me, that’s going to…

You know, what I need, what I ask for, in all forms of media, is something that grabs my interest and refuses to let go.  What I need is a compelling narrative.  What I need are interesting, relatable, human, believable characters.  What I need is a story worth telling.

I need my media to be story-centric to have a lasting impact.  Sure, I can gobble down episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and enjoy it, but it’s equivalent to eating, I dunno… junk food?  There’s not much substance to it, but it makes me laugh a lot.  But it doesn’t have a lasting impact on me in the way a show like The Walking Dead or Hell on Wheels or House of Cards, etc. does.

I recently went and saw Interstellar in theaters for the second time.  It remains one of my favorite movies, and one of the best post-apocalyptic films to date (and yes, it is a post-apocalyptic film, but it never blatantly says it.)  I’ve seen a lot of pouty bloggers lamenting that it doesn’t really say anything worthwhile and that it’s just another manly-man-saves-the-world movie with the classic Nolan Syndrome, whatever-the-hell that means.  I don’t really give a rat’s ass about that noise.  I love the movie because it attempts to tell a tale of such grandeur and scope, and it mostly succeeds.  The emotional resonance of that movie is off the charts with me.  Plus, there’s the fact that I have a physics degree and it made the physicist in me geek out like none other.

(Light spoilers ahead.)  There’s a scene where Matthew McConaughey and his team experience the theory of relativity (namely gravitational time shift) in a more tangible way than has ever been illustrated in any form of media.  The team effectively loses 23 years of “earth time” in a couple of hours, and McConaughey sits down to watch 23 years’ worth of recorded video messages sent from home.  The raw emotion of that scene is so incredibly powerful.  That’s the kind of thing I look for if I want media to have an effect on me.

But why?  I’ve given thought about the question of why I want those things.  I have a close friend who doesn’t understand my fascination with shows like The Walking Dead in particular.  She doesn’t understand how I can be so enamored with a story that’s so hopeless and grim.  She doesn’t understand why I would want that in my life.  It’s something that I hadn’t given much thought before.  Why exactly am I (and apparently millions of other Americans, seeing as TWD is the number one show in the country) drawn to post-apocalyptic stories, which are depressing more often than not?

I can only answer for myself, but I think it’s a case of classic escapism.  As far as life stories go, mine is fairly mundane.  I had a decent childhood.  Didn’t have a ton of friends when I was younger, but had a loving and supportive family.  I went to college, got a degree, and have a career.  Thus far, my existence has been fairly “white bread.”  It’s been a pleasant, if somewhat dull, existence.  I lose sleep over this fact.

The last line of the graphic novel film adaptation “Wanted” is simple.  It follows a monologue about retaking control of your life, and James McAvoy breaks the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera and asking “What the fuck have you done lately?”

It’s a question that haunts me.

There’s a part of the human mind and imagination that wants something more than the pleasant, comfortable but boring existence, and that’s where escapism comes in.  Stories and tales of adventures grand and small with characters both larger-than-life and undeniably human and realistic.  When I get wrapped up in a story, I live vicariously through the characters.  I can’t tell you how many times I said “oh no, oh no no no no noooooo” out loud when Joel takes his nasty fall while playing TLOU the first time.  The same thing happened at the end of the second to last episode of season one of Sons of Anarchy, which I just started watching.

It’s a strange phenomenon, to become invested in fictional characters, but I think it’s traced to escapism.  I could be completely wrong, too.

I think this has become clearer to me while writing We Left As Dust.  In so many ways, it’s such a hopeless book.  I believe it’s going to have an upturn nearer the end of it, where some of the themes get more intimately explored.  Everything thus far is rather bleak, and asks the question of whether we’re cursed, as human beings, to inevitably destroy ourselves.  Can we overcome entropy?  Latter sections of the book are going to delve more into what it is to be human and struggle with these things, and what living really means.  And the fact that living and surviving aren’t necessarily analogous.

This post has been incredibly scatterbrained, with several segues and random thoughts, but it’s kind of been a stream of consciousness thing so that makes sense, I suppose.  This is a topic I might come back to later on, but I just felt like I needed to do some word-vomiting and get it out.  So bear with me, because that’s what this was.  Me puking my thoughts all over the place.

I should probably try to make this post more coherent.  But I won’t.

–J.

So I’m not good at blogging with any regularity…

Roughly two months since my last post.  Yikes.  Keeping a blogging schedule with any semblance of regularity clearly is not a strong suit of mine.  So, for that, I apologize.

Well, what has been going on in the last two months?

Work on the book is progressing as usual.  As far as keeping a regiment with writing, at least I’ve been somewhat successful where the book is concerned.  I try to write several days a week, spending a couple nights at my favorite coffeehouse sucking down the sweet nectar, the lifeblood of creativity, the elixir of originality: black coffee.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to need to give this place a shout-out in the section of the book where you thank people.  “Thank you to everyone who believed in me.  And to Spyhouse, where 90% of the book was written.”

Part II of the book is progressing nicely.  Whereas Part I finds the protagonist mostly interacting with one other person, Part II thrusts him into group settings often, something he isn’t entirely comfortable with, being the proverbial “lone wolf” type.  I’m also messing around with some point-of-view stuff.  Though the story is told in near-third-person perspective (excluding Declan’s journal entries) I’ve been shifting it slightly between characters.  In a recent encounter, Declan is incapacitated for awhile, and while he’s unconscious, the point-of-view changes to the two people he’s with, and the lens of the story shifts accordingly.  It’s interesting to write that way and gives you a bit of variability in perspective without switching around in first-person, which can be jarring.

I’m completely committed to finishing my book, but I’m starting to think that the other two books, written by two friends of mine, will never be completed.  I hope I’m wrong and that they eventually get finished, because they each tell some interesting stories in a manner and style different from my own.  I like the concept of a shared universe between three books written by three separate authors that have collaborated, and I hope it comes to fruition, but we’ll see.  They’re far, far behind me at this point and haven’t been writing with the frequency that I have.

Well, this was rather scarce on the news items, but it is what it is.  tl;dr version: the book is still coming along nicely, I’m not sure the other two authors’ books will ever be finished, and I suck at writing blog posts regularly.

Til next time, y’all (whenever that’ll be)

–J.

A Milestone

I’ve hit another milestone as far as word count is concerned.  As of last night, I hit… (drumroll please)…

40,000 WORDS

Does it feel good?  Yes.  I’ve been aiming for around 100,000 for the book, which means I’ll probably overshoot that a bit since I have a feeling I’ll be chopping out a significant amount of content during the editing phase while asking myself “why did you write this whole section about hunting for a specific breed of mushroom to eat in the woods of southeastern Georgia?”  (It sounds like I just pulled that out of my ass, but there’s a section of the book that is exactly that.)

I know you’re all – well, at least some of you – are eager to get your hands on the book.  Trust me, I’m as eager to let you read it.  I initially hoped to have the first draft done in a year, and well.. I just checked when I created the document of the manuscript: 10/14/13.  So I’m officially a week out from having worked on the book for a year, and I’m maybe… 40% done?  Funny how things work like that.  It feels like the first 20,000 words took barely any time at all, but the next 20,000 had to be wrangled and broken like wild horses before they would agree to be collected and ordered properly.  I also have to deal with the fact that writing is not my day job.  Yes, I spend most nights working on the book, but regardless: it’s going to take much longer than I thought.

I bring this up because I hope you can all be patient and stick around with me while I get this thing right.  I want to keep those who are interested updated with the progress, but I also don’t want them to lose interest.  One way I was hoping to keep people’s interest was by creating a website for the series where I would upload some little hints and teasers about the series, giving you small snippets of back story to build some interest in the world.  It’s something I’m still very interested in doing, but had been precluded from due to the fact that the other two authors and I hadn’t come up with a title for the series just yet.

Well, I think we may have settled on something.  Or, at least, I came up with the best idea thus far and the other two haven’t voiced any protests on it.  I haven’t figured out how we’re going to organize the books in relation to the overarching series as a whole.  We’re each tentatively planning on writing a trilogy, so we’ll have three parallel stories within this shared universe.  I don’t know how that’s going to work.  Book 1A, 1B, and 1C?  No idea.  That’s stuff to figure out sometime in the future.  Maybe it’ll be “Book One of Declan’s Tale,” “Book One of Milo’s Tale,” and “Book One of Asher’s Tale” and it’ll go from there.  Actually, that might work… I might have just solved that problem…

But anyway, the series title… the tentative series title… that I came up with is:

The Extinction Vector
We Left As Dust: Book One of Declan’s Tale

I like it.  Eh, we’ll see if it sticks.  It’ll probably change in some capacity, but that’s where it is right now.  Hopefully I can get it set in stone, get the website put together which will hopefully be able to give some background to all of the stories, as well as the authors behind them, and some other goodies too.

On to the next however-many-thousand words!

–J.

News, news, news

So it’s official.  The first draft of Part 1 of the book is done.  Part 1 is tentatively subtitled “The Lifeline,” so go ahead and speculate as to what that means.  I’m very early into the writing of Part 2, which is tentatively called “The Facility.”  Proceed with speculations.  Things are trodding along, slowly.  It’s funny to look back to when I first started the book and was just racking up the word count.  I thought I’d have the first draft finished this summer.  Well, today is the autumn equinox, so that’s how that went.  I’m hoping to have the first draft done next year sometime, if I’m lucky and studious in my writing efforts.  So I prithee thee to stay with me.  I assure you that the wait will (probably) be worth it.

Something had been hampering my progress, though.  Ever since Naughty Dog put on the live performance that was The Last of Us: One Night Live, and reading accounts of the epilogue that was shown only to those in attendance, another idea stirred within me.  I love, and loved writing, the Aftermath series.  Thus far, it’s my proudest literary accomplishment.  That said, the story told therein would not work well as a video game.  At least, I don’t think it would.  Ever since hearing Neil say the epilogue was written as “a goodbye to Joel and Ellie,” my brain got to working.  I remembered a piece of fan/concept art that Marek Okon, an artist who worked on the game, came up with back in May.  It depicted an older Ellie, sitting on a rock by the side of a body of water, guitar in her lap.  Out of the mist behind her, several figures in riot gear approached, and at the back stood a lone figure on horseback.  A caption accompanied the image, painting a small back story.  Check it out here.

My mind took this piece, combined with the description of the epilogue that was performed at One Night Live, and started to weave a little vignette of what a prologue to TLOU2 might actually look like.  Eventually, my mental ruminations could no longer be ignored and I decided I had to let the words out.  And so, I did.  I published it on fanfiction.net late last night, and you can check it out here if you’re interested.  If you plan on reading it, do it now before you continue reading this.

Alright, read it?  No?  Go do that first.  Okay now?  Well, I warned you.

So, “The Hope.”  That title comes directly from Marek Okon’s caption, and it felt fitting seeing as The Hope itself is Ellie.  She’s the focal point of the story and in my mind would be the main playable protagonist in a prospective sequel.  When Neil Druckmann said that the epilogue that was performed was “a goodbye to Joel and Ellie,” I took that to mean that their story, as a duo, was more or less finished.  There wasn’t much more to be told, there.  Joel’s arc has more or less come to its conclusion.  Ellie, on the other hand, provides a much more workable canvas.  So, what would happen, then, if the story proceeded with only Ellie?  That’s the basis for what I came up with.

I’ve already seen one person express their disappointment that Ellie didn’t (SPOILER ALERT, LAST WARNING) get to say goodbye to Joel before he was killed, and that it seemed empty with that omission.  My reaction to that is to say “good.”  It’s supposed to.  I think in our saturation with traditional Hollywood storytelling styles, we sometimes forget how unremarkable such events can be.  They’re devastating in their stark plainness and unexpectedness.  There’s no fanfare, no dramatic music, no slow-motion shot of our hero screaming “Noooooooooo!”  We’re spoiled into thinking that every death needs a heart-wrenching, drawn out goodbye to be effective.  Unfortunately, as often as not, that isn’t what gets to happen.  Life hangs by a silver cord that can be severed in an instant, without a moment’s notice.  And the world doesn’t care if you don’t get your dramatic goodbye.

A goodbye offers closure, and that’s something I wanted to withhold from Ellie in this story.  It almost becomes a theme.  She never gets closure.  She never finds out what really happened with the Fireflies.  Never finds out if she really could be the cure.  Never gets to find out what Joel really feels towards her.  Never gets to say goodbye to him.  It’s a whole series of unsatisfying open-endedness.  I can only imagine the kind frustration that would wreak on your psyche.

Marek’s captioned photo spoke of a woman who will stop at nothing to get to Ellie and find the cure.  Rather than creating a new character, I thought it’d be fun to pull someone in from the lore.  Someone who had lost all of her loved ones to the infection, directly or indirectly, and who made it a personal mission to find the cure, no matter what.  I wanted to make her a sympathetic character in that regard, even more than Marlene was.  The search for Ellie had almost become a holy duty to her, a promise made to those she had lost that she would do whatever it took to prevent others from experiencing the same loss she had.  This comes out in her hesitation to threaten Joel.  If you read closely, it should become obvious that she isn’t the one who shot him; it was actually the soldiers surrounding her reacting to him headbutting her.  It was Joel’s hastily thrown-together plan to remove himself from the bargaining table.

The fun thing about doing this as a oneshot is that I don’t have to worry myself with what happens next.  Leaving it at the exact moment depicted in Okon’s concept art feels right.  And yes, I’d play that game.

Anyhow, that’s all for now.  Hope you enjoyed the read!

–J.

So close

I’m nearing completion of Part 1 of We Left as Dust.  If I haven’t mentioned this, the book is split into three parts.  I’m not going to go into detail as far as plot goes, but I’m hoping the end of Part 1 works out how I’m intending it.  I’m looking forward to getting on to Part 2.  The end of Part 1 is going to mark a shift in the main character, and I’m looking forward to exploring where that takes him.  Things are going to get real interesting real fast.

I got fairly bogged down during the last fourth of Part 1.  I’m not exactly sure why, since I’ve known exactly where I wanted it to go for a long time.  I guess I was sort of struggling with having everything feel natural, which is very important to me.  I want things to lead themselves along, rather than having to rein them in and have it feel forced.  Making it feel organic is paramount to having the reader buy into the story.  I just know that when I go back to edit this, I’m going to rewrite a lot of lines of dialog that sounded natural at the time, but in hindsight just sound a bit… fake.

The other authors I’m working worth are a bit behind me.  I’m over 36,000 words, while I think they’re in the mid-to-high teen-thousands (I just made that word up.)  We still haven’t come up with a good name for the series yet, but when we do, I hope to give the series its own website and start posting a few teasers that will start building the world before the books even come out.  Got some fun ideas for that.  Just need to come up with a series title, dang it!

Alright, that’s all for now.

–J.

Aftermath: Remastered

The time has come:

With a week left until the release of The Last of Us: Remastered, I thought it would be an ideal time to release the “Remastered” edition of the Aftermath series.  As I’ve outlined in previous entries, I went back through the series and combed through it for typos and other corrections, as well as made one change to a plot detail in Part II.  I then put it into a few formats that should cover a wide range of devices: PDF, AZW3, and ePUB.

Now, I don’t have any Apple products, so I can’t speak on how well the formatting of these works on those devices (from what I hear, ePUB can be opened natively on iDevices, but if that doesn’t work, just get the Kindle app and sideload the AZW3 format.)

As far as Android, I tested this on my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, so I have a couple tips to make it easier to get reading:

PDF: this is the easiest format but also the least flexible.  It can be read on basically any device, but probably won’t offer font resizing and other reading experience tools.

AZW3: Download the file and place it in the “kindle” folder on your phone/tablet’s “sdcard0″ location.  It should then pop up in your library in the Kindle app.  Only thing I noticed that’s weird is the page numbering/”locations” gets kind of wonky.

ePUB: The easiest way I’ve found to get this to work is using Google Play Books.  Just download the ePUB file and put it into Google Drive.  Open the Google Drive app and click on the book, it should be uploaded into Google Play Books.  This seemed to work well for me.

Your mileage may vary in all of these, but with some persistence, it should work!

I made .zip directories containing all of the formats and split them into each part.  So follow the links below and get downloading!

Aftermath: Part I
Aftermath: Part II
Aftermath: Part III

I hope you all enjoy getting to read these in a more friendly format than what’s accessible on FanFiction.net.  This is a final farewell to the series, and my parting gift to you!  Thanks for reading!

UPDATE: I forgot to include the Aftermath (Main Theme) song I had written and recorded for this project, so you can access it here

–J.

Keep on keepin’ on

I have some good news.  I’m finishing up my work on getting the Aftermath series into both .pdf and eBook format!  That’s right, you’ll be able to read the series on your favorite eReader device, with adjustable text size and scalable formatting.  As of right now, it looks like I’ll be posting it in three formats: PDF, ePUB, and AZW.  ePUB is an open source format that works on most eReaders, like the B&N Nook, Kobo’s eReaders, and apparently iPads, iPhones, and iPods as well.  AZW is a Amazon’s format specifically for Kindles.  So I think I should have a lot of devices covered as far as compatibility is concerned.  I’ve also whipped up some simple covers for each part, so these eBooks will include some nice cover artwork.

I’ve been reading through the series and trying to squash the last few typos that snuck by my all-seeing eye, and in the process have been smoothing out a few awkward sentences here and there.  I guess you could view these upcoming releases as the revised edition of the Aftermath series.  I’m also making a slight tweak to a plot point in Part II that I think improves the story.  It’s nothing drastic.

I’m hoping to have this project wrapped up within the next few days, at which time I will upload the files to Mega or Mediafire or something and provide links to each format.  I think it’ll be a nice bon voyage to the series.

Not much more to update than that.  The book is still in process, slowly but surely.  Yep.

–J.