Nick Bryan

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NickNoWriQuart – Failure Broadcast

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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.

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

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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

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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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Hobson & Choi Podcast Special – Writers’ Huddle Interview with Ali Luke!

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Like a bolt from the blue, the Hobson & Choi Podcast is back on the scene!

I’ve moving house in the near future and will be without wifi, so internet content from the Nick Bryan/H&C Media Empire will be thin on the ground. But before disappearing into irrelevant meatspace for a bit, I recorded an interview for Writers’ Huddle, a subscription-only writing forum run by the excellent author and blogger Ali Luke.

Listen now to hear me talk about H&C, serialisation, self-publishing, writing characters different from yourself and whether I ever considered putting Hobson & Choi into first person. Plus a little news about the status of upcoming H&C books in the outro.

So, download the episode here using the power of browser rightclicking!

Or go to Mixcloud here, or if you’re faithful enough to still be subscribed to H&C in iTunes, it should be there too…

Thanks to Ali for hosting the chat and letting me put it out to the wider internet. Be sure to check out her blog at Aliventures and her own self-published fantasy book Lycopolis. Plus she’s on Twitter (obviously) as @aliventures.

If this interview got you interested in my Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, you can read more about them at HobsonAndChoi.com. Sounds by zagi2 on Freesound as before.

And that, for now, might really be it for a wee while…

Five ways my book plans collapse upon contact with the real world – A Metaphorical Disaster Movie

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At this stage, I’ve written a lot of novels, and started even more than that. Every single one started with a plan of some form – sometimes a couple of ideas scribbled on a pad, other times thousands of words of ideas, followed by a chapter-by-chapter outline and then individual scene breakdowns within those chapters.

But either way, the plans always come a little unstuck when exposed to the writing process. As I’ve been doing a lot of first drafting lately, so spending a heaping helping of my time dealing with plans not corresponding to prose.

So, to inform and reassure anyone in a similar place, I’ve broken my Plan Vs Reality problems into an internet-friendly Buzzfeed-style five-point list. Yes, only a thin membrane separates some of these feelings, but I’ve spent enough time staring at my plans in despair to know they’re all distinct. If you’ve experienced all five of these, you can award yourself a prize when you reach the bottom!

1) “This bit read a lot better in bullet points!”

“It seemed a good idea at the time!”

BRAIN: “Look, y’know, this scene sounded amazing in my head and even survived the transfer to the planning stage as I wasn’t thinking about the nitty-gritty too hard, but bloody hell, as I try to actually make my characters do it, I feel like I’m trying to shove them in to an ampersand-shaped iron maiden.”

RETORT: Much to the relief of my tender ego, this one happens a lot less as I grow older, accruing more feedback and more experience. Generally, by the time I’ve written broad notes and narrowed them down into a plan, I’ve eliminated most of the utter gibberish.

However, still mega-disheartening when it appears, especially because it often hits on a really macro level. It’s rarely just a scene or a paragraph that withers on contact with the outdoors, it’s the whole damn ending or an entire character subplot.

Like, you were totally gonna write seventeen chapters from the perspective of Rufus The Hot Ice Cream Man but the material just isn’t there. It’s incredibly annoying, but rest assured, you’ll feel happier for having noticed now than after writing an entire first draft.

Although, yes, that can happen and it’s a complete arsewrench.

2) “This is an amazing twist!”

[INSERT ‘YOUR MUM’ JOKE HERE] [PHOTO ATTRIBUTION HERE]

IMPULSE: “Wow, y’know what would be amazing at this point? If he discovered his mother was a hamster! Because people won’t see it coming and it kinda-sorta flows into the rest of my plot and ramps up the tension, even though it does also ruin the next few scenes by disrupting almost everything I was gonna do, since all the characters will probably have to react to Bob being suddenly half-rodent…”

CONTROL: Less depressing than the last one, because at least you feel like you’re improving the story rather than tearing parts away, leaving only frayed edges stained by your tears. However, it still requires a degree of control and interrogation.

After all, many creative types (me included) get massive self-targeted erections when a killer plot twist comes to us mid-writing. We can smug-tweet about it and set about enacting a huge reveal and exploring the exciting ramifications.

And all that is awesome and has often improved my stuff – the sense of excitement and spontaneity travels from your fingers to the words. However, do make sure you still know where you’re going, otherwise you can veer into…

3) “I can’t get there from here!”

“Can’t Get There From Here” is a good song by REM

CARROT: “I… I just can’t get to the end. I mean, I know what it theoretically is and I still like that idea but I just can’t… I don’t know, it’s been hidden behind spontaneous plot additions and mountains and that total eclipse…”

STICK: So the next transition just won’t come. You’ve written yourself into a corner, then built walls around that corner, locked the door and only now wondered about what happens when you next need the loo. You still want that ending, but (possibly thanks to the previous step or perhaps just general drift or oversights in your plan), it won’t work. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just unavailable. Like your celebrity crush or becoming an astronaut.

Unfortunately, this means making some hard choices – probably either deleting one of your beloved off-the-cuff plot points or changing the ending. The degree of the change might be negotiable, though – I’ve usually found a way to have my cake and eat it with only a few nips and tucks. I tend to go for tweaking the ending rather than removing plot twists, because I find my initial plans are often overly linear and a sudden sharp move livens them up.

4) “I can’t get here from there!”

wibbly-wobbly-planny-wanny or something like that

CRIME: “Ever since my brother Lols got into that time machine, I’ve felt like everything has changed, y’know? Like none of the previous passage of my life actually points to where I’m now going? Like once upon a time, maybe my Mum wasn’t a hamster, but now everything hinges on the reactor fuel I’ve squirreled away in my cheeks.”

PUNISHMENT: Okay, this might move into time travel logic, but stay with me.
So, you’ve worked your way through a string of plot problems – maybe the above-mentioned, maybe others – and you find yourself with a clear run to the end. And you’re gonna make it, but… but… you’ve made so many on-the-fly changes to the current set-up to make the new ending work, you’re now aware that huge chunks of the earlier part of the book need to be rewritten in order for everything to flow smoothly.

Good news: this doesn’t mean more work right now, but it does leave that hanging over your head for when the next draft comes around. It may even be tempting to go back and make changes now, even though conventional writing wisdom nowadays tends to gravitate towards finishing the first draft and then tackling this eternal to-do list.

Personally, I lean towards the standard POV, partly because if I go back and do extensive changes before I get the ending down, it’s entirely possible I’ll then make spontaneous changes to the ending, which will cause more butterfly effect ripples back into the past, thus causing me to rewrite the start yet again, trapped in an endless vortex

And at that point, time to collapse and scream. If it were an episode of Doctor Who, I would stop watching it.

5) “This is a pile of shit and I’m going over there to cry.”

My post-novel-abandonment selfie

BLOODY: “This is terrible. I definitely didn’t plan on making it terrible. I don’t even remember when it became terrible. I can’t even point to a specific scene which isn’t working out. It’s just everything. I have built a tower and the foundations are rotten – now I can only cower below as the girders tumble, punching red, gushing holes in my prone body.”

HELL: No, you won’t be the first writer to have these emotions. Again, conventional wisdom dictates you push ahead to end of draft and assume you can fix it in edits, and that will probably work most of the time. No-one but you can judge whether your worries are real or if it’s just a momentary wobble you should shake off, Taylor Swift style, and fight on to fix later.

I wrote the first 20-ish thousand words of a novel recently and it’s come to a halt – partly because other projects demanded the time but also because I really think some of the foundations are fundamentally wrong. I need to rethink some stuff rather than piling more and more dirt on top of myself until my bones start to splinter and crunch.

I stress, I don’t think the problems are unfixable, but still, they’re pretty extensive. And, much like the first point in this post (man, remember that?), it’s mostly experience that teaches you when you’re at that stage. Reading posts like this on the internet might get you looking in the right direction, but ultimately you need to hone these instincts. This is why most writers have at least one ‘trunk’ novel they worked out their issues on and eventually gave up, moving on to apply the lessons to book plans with stronger foundations. Personally, I have,.. at least four, maybe more than that.

And there is the five-step love-hate-love-hate-hate-love relationship between me and my novel plans. If any of this made someone out there feel less alone, it was worth writing. If it made you worry about my well-being (or if the tone appealed to you and you want more), feel free to buy one of the Hobson & Choi books to make me feel better. They are darkly comic London crime stories and quite a few people seem to like them – review quotes also on the page linked above.

But don’t feel like you have to, I’m just throwing that out there. Now, I’m off to rewrite a book plan for the seventh or eighth time.

“No-one else dies tonight!” – Nick Bryan’s Ongoing Commitment To Making Fewer Mistakes

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It’s been a while since I wrote about writing – in fact, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog which didn’t hinge around the Buy my work! message. So, since it’s late on a Sunday and I’m feeling too tired from last night’s drinking to do any hard labour, I thought I’d break things up on the blog by talking about my current writing obsession: not fucking up.

A couple of months back, I finished drafting a fantasy novel which ended up having the bulk of its middle act and about half its third erased – not after the first draft (which is kinda acceptable) but after I’d finished a beta-readable draft and thought things were going okay.

More recently than that, I went back to the third and final major Hobson & Choi webserial storyline, ready to punch it up for eventual book release. Rather than just chopping and changing a few scenes, adding chapters to flesh stuff out and punching up the writing – as per the first two books – I ended up deleting much of the final third of the story and starting over.

(So yes, H&C serial readers, it might be worth buying the third book, as not only will you get a new bonus story, but also a large chunk of the main storyline entirely reimagined. The new timeline will be used for the books going forward, while the original serial events drift off into non-canon limbo.)

Having been editing these various projects solidly for the best part of six months, my insistent feeling that this level of trashing material must never happen again is getting prohibitive. Don’t get me wrong – it’s obviously quite positive that I’m able to recognise these problems, plan changes and execute them, rather than getting hung up on killing my darlings or whatever. But the more often it happens, the more I start thinking… surely eventually I’ll be able to avert it earlier, right? Eventually I will live in a creative utopia where first drafts sing and dance perfectly in the pasture?

During breaks from editing, I’ve started laying down early scenes for something entirely new, and find myself semi-paralysed by the knowledge that I might eventually have to delete a load of it. Like when Spider-Man feels guilty about not saving someone and makes some weird vow that no-one else will ever die again, I suspect a commitment to total perfection isn’t sustainable.

All that happens is this: you write six-thousand word planning documents, hoping that if you prepare enough, the odds of needing to ditch and rewrite shrink a bit. And then you put off ever starting the first draft, because if you think about a project long enough, there’s always some small problem you can’t quite solve.

Realistically, the metaphorical Green Goblin (I just like comics, okay?) of me fucking up is still going to be out there no matter how much I plan and I’ve just lost the knack of fear-free first drafting after so many months editing.

Regardless of all this introspection, the fact is: once I get the third H&C done, I’ m going to have to get back to scribbling new stuff somehow, as I will simply run out of things to edit. Well, unless I pull out one of my abandoned novels from my early twenties and try to rewrite that instead of doing anything new, but… no, let’s not give me ideas.