Writing About Writing

NickNoWriQuart – Failure Broadcast

November 17, 2015 by Nick Bryan

After a few weeks of admin-linking to work elsewhere, a full on-this-website blog post this time – although not a super-long one as I’m going to talk about something I failed to achieve and I don’t think dwelling on it for thousands of words is super healthy.

Between that paragraph and the title, regular readers may guess where I’m going – my one-thousand-words-a-day-for-three-months word count challenge did not reach its final goal. To be precise, it wound down a week or so back at around 66k, but due to real-life busywork, writing blogs for other sites and the huge amount of comic-based TV I’m trying to follow, I haven’t got round to posting about it for a while.

Still, after going to the trouble of announcing the challenge was happening, I shouldn’t gloss over my non-success. Pretty annoying that I chugged along fine for two months on my own and then died off just as everyone else joined in for NaNoWriMo, I must say.

Anyway. Where did it all go wrong?

Plan Vs Reality Vs Words Vs Plan

A lot of my problems can be summed up with this post I wrote in June, which is nice as it saves me typing all that out now. Turns out, planning a new novel in a whole new world is harder work than planning another nice comfy Hobson & Choi book.

My plan didn’t entirely fall apart, which is nice – my words were going in the direction I planned, but the way they got there and the circumstances under which the story took place changed so much that I couldn’t really keep going. Or rather, I could, but I’d be writing stuff I knew I’d end up deleting and much as I sometimes enjoy the NaNoWriMo forge-ahead-no-matter-what approach, I also don’t like knowing beyond all doubt that I’m wasting my own time.

Plus, in terms of progress along my book plan, I’d written sixty-six thousand words to cover plot that should’ve taken about forty thousand max. So, even if I did my planned ninety-one thousand by the end of this month, I’d never have a full first draft as I barely covered half the story. Not to mention, I don’t see much point in writing a new major part if I know huge chunks of the foundations will be removed, but haven’t yet decided which ones.

So I’ve started bashing together a better, more coherent draft of the early chapters, re-using existing material for most of it, but stitched together differently. We’ll see. As with all these word count challenges, best to focus on the fact I achieved something. Even if a huge chunk of my 66k gets cut, it all went toward figuring out the world.

…Vs Reality Vs Plans Vs Leeds…

Also unhelpful, I admit, that just as I started wobbling on how to progress the novel, I became incredibly busy all the time so momentum died. I was in the day job a lot, many birthday parties came along, I went to Leeds for Thought Bubble – which was fun, by the way. Saw loads of comics, feel like I want to write some more of them soon.

No idea how that fits in with the novel writing, no. Will try and keep bolting together my better draft.

To be honest, it is with some confusion that I stagger towards the end of 2016. At least I know to start editing H&C4 in early January, that’s a pleasing constant. Everything else is in a state of weird flux.

And that’s a current writing update, for anyone interested. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, good luck to you – you’ve just passed halfway, that’s gotta feel good. And if you’ve attempted and failed NaNo, ah well. Stick with me and focus on the fact you wrote something. There could be gold in there somewhere.

ADMIN FOR THE ADMIN GOD – Video reading! Guest blog! Thought Bubble!

November 13, 2015 by Nick Bryan

Hello! Yes, it’s been a few weeks since the last brief admin post and now here’s another one. Sorry. Got at least one thing to blog about, but I have to get a train to Leeds in about an hour for reasons you’ll discover shortly, so it’ll have to wait.

But! I have managed to write a guest blog post for someone else entirely (because I secretly hate you etc), so at least there’s something to read. This is on the excellent If These Books Could Talk blog and is me musing about prose serialisation (yes, my pet topic), complete with recent examples and the inevitable bodily fluids joke at the end. It’s a good post, check it out.

Outside the written world, I also did a reading at the lovely Big Green Bookshop (where you can now buy all three Hobson & Choi books in print!) as part of the Novel London series. If you couldn’t make the reading due to only hearing about it now, that’s okay, as Novel London filmed it and the result is now up on YouTube and also embedded below. Note the delicately beautiful product placement of H&C3 in the background.

Thanks to Safeena of Novel London for setting all that up, and if you get the chance to read at or attend a future event, give it a go. It’s fun.

Last of all, I am off to Leeds shortly to both visit my godchild (also called Nick, it’s weird) and attend one day (Saturday) of the Thought Bubble convention, which I hear on Twitter and many podcasts is one of the best comicon type events in the UK. Excited for that. Do say hello if you’ll also be there, I am wandering around by myself so may look scared. I also have a copy or two of The Gathering: Noir anthology featuring my published corporate noir story, so that’s exciting.

That is it! I hope to manage a more meaningful blog post next week. Or at least before the end of November.

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

October 16, 2015 by Nick Bryan

This is going to be another post which mish-mashes together some smaller points rather than having an amazing structure of its own, I’m afraid, as I’ve been writing a lot of guest-posts for other people’s blogs, so haven’t got a huge amount of fuel left in the Blog-Engine (or spare time left in the day) to produce a properly-structured masterpiece for my own.

However, I want to do some kind of update on my ongoing thousand-words-a-day writing challenge and I’ve got a few other bits and bobs too, so here’s another disjointed general summary!

NickNoWriQuart – OOH WE’RE HALFWAY THERE

The big news (for me anyway) is that I’ve made it over the halfway mark of the daily writing challenge I outlined on this blog a month ago. My day job got quite busy for a while and then I had to publish the third Hobson & Choi book and write all those guest posts and I really thought one of those things would smash it to bits, but no, I’m still on track. In fact, I’m a few days over quota, as I’m busy most of the weekend – for reasons I’ll outline a little further down – and wanted to make sure I didn’t drop the challenge.

So, the good news is that I’ve done nearly 50k and, if this were NaNoWriMo rather than NickNoWriQuart, would have won by now. But NickNoWriQuart is both more hardcore (longer total!) and less (smaller daily wordcount!) than NaNo.

The bad news is, as with nearly all my first drafts, decent-sized chunks of the plan haven’t really survived contact with reality and various changes became necessary as I went along. This is something I’ve blogged about a fair bit – here I am talking about making less mistakes and here I am talking about plans going awry – and yet still it happens.

But I’ve got my notes, the broad plot remains in place, so I’m going to try and swoop onwards for now. Mostly because I think it would be useful to have taken a swing at the ending – more infuriating to go back now and make a huge amount of substantial change, then discover this new version doesn’t work for my ending and have to change everything again.

So, in short, everything continues as normal. I still want a full first draft by the end of November (or possibly the end of the year if I need to write a final couple of chapters in Dec) and I’ll do another update at some point.

Guest Post – Five High Street Institutions I Could Turn Evil in Future H&C Books

If you want something that more closely resembles a structured blog post, I’ve written this one for Jim over at YA Yeah Yeah in which I talk about five fixtures of the British high street that I could theoretically turn all crimey for a future Hobson & Choi novel.

Do give it a look for some fun. Even if you’ve no interest in hearing about my writing process (in which case the previous section of this post must’ve just killed you), this really is all silly jokes.

Oh, and as this is the only H&C-relevant section of this post – yes, the book 3 launch went fine, thanks for asking. Sold a decent amount of book three, gave away a huge amount of the newly-free-on-ebook book one.

Coming up next: some promotion, including a few more guest posts (I’ll try and list them here in some kind of link compilation) and maybe even some Multimedia Content. We’ll see if that works out.

GollanczFest – Will it be GollanczBest?

This weekend, I am going to GollanczFest in London, in which a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy authors (who happen to all be published by Gollancz) will be talking in general about their work on Saturday and in a more advice-to-writers way on Sunday. I hope it’ll be interesting, there are some great authors in attendance (including Joe Abercrombie, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, loads of others) and after the excellent fun of Nine Worlds in August, I’m up for more of this kinda thing.

Linking back up to the first part, GollanczFest is why I’ve written a short way ahead on the NickNoWriQuart challenge. It may also be the topic of its own blog next week, if I can think of much to say beyond “Yeah, it was good.” If you want that level of analysis, follow me on Twitter and it’s a safe bet you’ll get some over the weekend.

Okay, that turned out a decent length (if still quite bitty) post in the end. Cool cool.

NickNoWriQuart – One K, Once A Day

September 14, 2015 by Nick Bryan

I stopped blogging regularly about my writing a while ago, felt I was running out of new/readable ways to say the same things – certainly, nothing I couldn’t say on Twitter more concisely. However, I’m embarking on a Big Writing Exercise shortly, so I’m throwing it a post.

Because, yes, it’s autumn, the end of the year is poking its head over the door, leaves are brown and it’s cold in a Winter-Preview kinda way, all that can only mean one thing – Writers Doing Calendar-Based Word Count Challenges!

Obviously, I’m a little ahead of everyone else here – most are waiting for November to embark upon the epic NaNoWriMo quest. But I’m doing something a little different and I’ll now attempt to explain it…

Own Goals?

If you read my 2014 writing retrospective post (and why wouldn’t you?), you’ll see I listed my third goal for last year as writing the first draft of my new fun-adventure post-H&C post-devil novel. Well, nine months on, I wrote about twenty thousand words of that in Spring before deciding it wasn’t working, then sidetracking for ages writing H&C4 and editing H&C3 (out soon!).

Basically – writing the first draft of an entirely new Thing has been on my to-do list for literal years at this stage, and I’d like to have one last aggressive punt at it before 2015 dissolves into memory.

So I’ve decided to do a word-count challenge, but not NaNoWriMo, because

The daily targets on NaNo are slightly too tough for me to produce work I’m happy with, even by first draft standards – not that I can’t produce 1.6k of tolerable first draft on a day when I’m not busy, but catching up after days when I am busy soon turns it into a miserable chore and flushes the quality down the toilet.
The overall target of NaNo is too short for me to finish a book – and not even just because I ramble. The NaNo standard 50k is shorter than almost all adult novels and many (most?) YA ones too. Even my H&C books, which aren’t exactly epic tomes, are longer.

So, what am I doing instead?

Quarter Master?

Don’t worry, I’ll probably still tweet.

Well, I spent a lot of August trying to hammer out my new ideas for an adult fantasy novel (not the one from earlier this year) into shape, and I decided I was ready to at least give a first draft a go. I also noticed there are ninety-one days in the months of September, October and November. So if I write 1000 words a day for the entire of that quarter-year, I get something around the length of an adult novel.

Plus I’d finish at the same time as everyone doing NaNo and piggy-back on their party! It’s a win win! I could feel bad, but I’ve been “rebelling” at NaNo – working on projects outside the normal parameters – every year for ages now. Would be more rebellious to not rebel, at this point.

Hardcore calendar users might note it’s nearly halfway through September, so I’ve not told you about the challenge until it is one-sixth over. This is because I have an ego, so decided I’d put off blogging about it until I’d met the quota for a while. If I trailed off in the first week, no-one need ever know.

Numbers Up?

The existence of this blog post suggests that it’s going okay. I’m writing this at 11PM on the 13th Sept with word count currently at 15k. I could have padded it out to 16k maybe by drastically overwriting the description in recent scenes, but the whole goal here is to produce a first draft that isn’t a smear of shit. So let’s try and slow down, pace properly, otherwise I’ll get to my 90k and be nowhere near the end.

In fairness, the one remaining risk in the plan is that this might happen anyway. Realistically, I probably need to get 100k (or slightly more) to finish a book, but if I can make 90 by the end of November, I might conceivably be able to squeeze the last tiny bit out in December around all that Christmas stuff.

The biggest threat to this enterprise is myself, as I’m releasing H&C3 on 6th October (EXCLUSIVE ANNOUNCEMENT), smack in the middle of this challenge. Fortunately, I’ve already done most of the formatting and tech prep, so I’m hoping I can keep it clattering along. We shall see. I do have a very busy week coming up approximately right now, so maybe the plan will fall straight off the rails after doing the blog post.

And now my ego is considering putting the post on hold for a few days to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I’ll power on through. I’m going to refrain from banging on about this endlessly, but at least one or two updates will follow if the project continues. Good luck with anyone else out there doing pre-NaNo writing challenges, let me know if you want to form a support group.

OUT NOW: Phantom Of The Space Opera – a novel team-written in 75 minutes at Nine Worlds! Guess my chapter and WIN STUFF!

August 18, 2015 by Nick Bryan

As mentioned during last week’s Nine Worlds 2015 round-up, a highlight of the convention was NaNoSessionMo, in which myself and twenty-eight adventurous co-authors wrote a book in only seventy-five minutes! Not as catchy as an hour, but we needed every second we could get.

After compilation by the excellent people responsible, the resultant masterwork has now been released onto the internet! Along with a photo showing me apparently drawing inspiration from my forearm! And a lovely cover by Sally Jane Thompson which you can see to the right! It’s called Phantom of the Space Opera!

Yes, there’s a play on words in the title. I approve. Keep reading for a few more words about the experience and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to guess my chapter and win stuff!

How to write a novel in 75 minutes

Just in case anyone is curious how you plan a novel in around half an hour (followed by another thirty-ish minutes of frenzied typing), the basic framework was to start off yelling out ideas, and then hammer them into this story-circle structure outlined by Community creator Dan Harmon.

The genre? Space opera. The main character? A cyborg. The motivation? Love. And I’ll refrain from spoiling any more, but everyone really got into it, strong, fun and surprisingly serious ideas started emerging and, yes, the more literal opera is eventually involved, because the titular wordplay demands satisfaction.

Inevitably, nearly thirty people shouting risks dissolving into chaos and ringmaster Chris needed to steer us back onto topic a few times. Still, when the dust settled on the plotting half of the session, it was impressive how much the resultant list resembled a novel outline.

How to read a novel written in 75 minutes

And also how much the final product kinda resembles a story! Yes, a sometimes inconsistent one – inevitably, many transitions between chapters don’t quite join up. Still, perhaps because it’s the product of a group of likeminded people in the same room following a half hour chat and with a fairly detailed scene-by-scene plan, there actually is a good sense of tone.

And it’s fun, too. Having structure without strict rules allows for moments of weirdness that are entertaining without dissolving into the incomprehensible.

So yeah, as a fun convention experiment, I can’t say enough good things about this. Special kudos to Chris Farnell and Megan Bettinson running the event, who did a great job keeping us both on schedule and in good spirits. I haven’t said much about my specific segment, because it would ruin…

THE CHAPTER-GUESSING COMPETITION

Look what you could win!

The PDF of Phantom of the Space Opera doesn’t specify exactly who wrote which part, so I’m gonna take this opportunity to do a nice straight-forward competition. Go forth to this link here, download the file and give it a read, then try and guess which part I wrote.

They’re all clearly numbered and a different human being produced each one. Email your guess to me at nick@nickbryan.com and every correct entry can have the first two Hobson & Choi books in the ebook format of their choice. I’ll also do a draw (in the event that I get more than one correct entry) and that one person can have a physical copy of the first volume too. I’ll sign it as well, unless you don’t like that sort of thing.

This is a fairly loose competition, but you gotta have some rules and here they are:

The closing date is the end of August 2015 – 23:59:59 BST on the 31st if you’re a big specificity fan. The correct answer won’t be disclosed until after that.
You can have up to three guesses per person. Email them to nick@nickbryan.com all in one go. Use them wisely.
Yes, anyone can enter. Even though it might end up with me posting a book to Australia.
No, I won’t tell you who wrote any chapter other than my own. It’s not my place and, for the most part, I wouldn’t know anyway.

Go on. It’s only 13,000 words of homework, you know it’s worth it. It’ll be fun.