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Shocktober

I actually got something done on schedule. Shocking! This leaves me, surprisingly, in a position to get a head start on this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance.

Shocking Progress

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit. ~Napoleon Hill

As down as I have been lately about my productivity and focus, I actually pulled off something like a winning week.

I’ve also gotten my October post done and scheduled on Christmas All The Time so that I can actually get on with writing Holly & Ivy.

Of course, that means I have to have something like a vague idea of what occurs in this story.

However, having finished off a lot of naggy-draggy tasks, my mind is actually freed up a bit to concentrate on this very task.

That‘s how I roll.

I still have some naggy-draggies pending at work but I can set them aside for the weekend and give my subconscious a bit of time to churn.

I did decide that I was going to place this year’s story in Wyoming Pass where Jeb was delivering his bear sculpture to in last year’s story, All I Want.

I’m also going to include the guy who Jeb pulled back onto the road as one of the characters. He might be Holly’s husband or he might be an incidental character. I’m not sure yet.

As always, there will be a cameo from the main Sentinels series since the Holiday Season Serial Romances take place in the Sentinelsverse.

So, at least I have a couple of basic pieces in place. I just need to give my imagination time to whip them into some semblance of a story.

Christmas Is Coming!

John Denver & The Muppets- Christmas is Coming

Boy, it’s only 86 days until Christmas and I’m just getting started on this year’s story.

The good news is that this places me at least a month ahead of when I typically start.

Honestly, the last two years I’ve actually been writing the thing right up to the last day or two of the holiday season.

Not this year, friends.

This year, I’d like to have the thing entirely written and parceled out over the 43 days from Thanksgiving to Epiphany by the 3rd week of November.

Ambitious? Yes. However, having gotten October’s Christmas All The Time post done at the cusp of October emboldens me to believe I can actually meet this date.

I wanted to have October’s post done before October began. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it done until shortly after midnight on October 1st. Even so, that’s still way earlier than the rest of the monthlies got done this year.

The goal is to have the story written and the posts configured to drip out over the holiday season. The graphics may need to wait until later in the schedule.

If you’re familiar with A Misfit Christmas and All I Want, you’ll remember that each of the episodes has a header graphic and some have embedded videos or other related links. These will be coming later in the creative process this year.

I’m writing the story, breaking it into 41 episodes and book-ending them with an Intro and Outro. The Outro will have the entire run of posts and a link to the Print On Demand book, as always. If you’ve got a formula, it’s best to stick to it.

Pentatonix – Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Official Video)

Crudeness Of Reality

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw

As much as that’s a big hairy audacious goal for me to accomplish, I still have a bunch of stuff pending at my day job and I definitely have to get my Sentinels series mapped out.

I’ve got a general outline that I want to follow but there are some details that need to be sorted out so that I can intelligently plan the foreshadowing elements of the story.

At this week’s reading, I heard something that has me a bit puzzled. One of the commentators was saying that he could picture the segment he heard as a script rather than as a novel.

What he was kindly trying not to say was that I’m not big on including incidental details. Fair enough but:

It is a first draft
The bit he heard is from the perspective of a character who is deeply depressed and emotionally shut down. As such, she doesn’t focus on ancillary details. The only thing that really registers for her is potential threats. When she’s not on guard for hostilities, she’s basically grumpy and desperately restraining herself from overreacting to her situation.
It was intended to be fast-paced and a bit overwhelming.

Apparently, I’m being too subtle. I need to do a better job of making it clear that each of my viewpoint characters has their own voice, baggage and things that they focus on.

I’m not sure that I’ve worked out how to let the reader know that this is how Tanda, Dave, Meirhe, Claudia or David view the world. The feedback that I’ve gotten so far is that each of these characters seems to have an authentic voice.

Tanda sounds like a twenty-something and Claudia clearly reads as an enthusiastic teen fangrrl to them.

They didn’t get Dave and they’re getting too hung up on Meirhe’s idiolect.

They haven’t heard from David yet, so it will be interesting to see what they think of him when it’s his turn to make an appearance.

As much as I enjoy his dinner with his Aunt Annaliese, I’m not sure that’s where I should actually start with him. Since he has a negative character arc, I need to paint him as the kindly philanthropist that he imagines himself to be.

This is stated clearly in the chapter with Annaliese but I’m having second thoughts about starting him there. I think I need to put him in his highrise apartment overlooking Centre Park for his introductory chapter and save his dinner with Annaliese for a date closer to his induction into The Conclave.

I think it would have more tragic and shocking immediacy if she only gave him a day or two’s notice. We need to see him as a genuinely well-intentioned, nice guy first. That’s going to take a bit of doing.

It’s Saturday. He’s not at school, so sitting around his apartment and patting himself on the back for how wonderful he is won’t paint him in a sympathetic light.

It needs to be clear that he’s the Superintendent of Claudia’s STEM charter school, but having him thinking about her specifically would come across as creepily pedophile-like.

It’s a bit of a pickle, really, but that’s why I want to have the whole series more clearly mapped out. The writing has been pretty organic up to this point.

Unfortunately, this approach tends to get me painted into a corner. Having the waypoints worked out would make it easier to write the scenes that actually need to be there to move the story along.

I’ve done that with A Misfit Christmas and All I Want, kind of. Once I figured out the broad strokes of those stories, hitting the standard RomCom beats has been easier even when I was writing scenes that were due the very next day. I tried to stay at least a week ahead so that I’d have time for the episode header graphics, but haven’t always succeeded.

The Sentinels series is a much larger undertaking and I’d really like to get those broad strokes nailed down so I can fill in the details more rationally. I’d also like to get a lot of this stuff hashed out so I can start filling out the wiki on the Sentinels Station site.

So much to do and so little time…

Peter Gabriel – Shock The Monkey
Given the post’s header graphic, you knew this was inevitable…