The beginning of the end

The first readers have read Dark Soul 4, and they seem to like it. Considering how anxious I was about it, that's a huge sigh of relief. Dark Soul 4 was written in blood sweat and tears post-November, coming out of a serious rage-induced writing block, and according to some private emails I got, nobody can tell the difference. The bullying assholes haven't damaged my story, thank gods.

And, aware that Dark Soul 4 is the turning point (with a dash of dark moment) in the "big arch", as I call it, we'll publish Dark Soul 5 a week early; it's scheduled three weeks from now. I see a lot of anguish over the waiting, and while I think that it heightens the experience in the case of Dark Soul (episodes need to stay apart), it would be cruel to linger for too long.

There are possibilities for spin-offs and related stories - I'm pretty sure I'll write some sex between Gianbattista and Silvio (set earlier, exploring how Silvio became Battista's "heir"), and I start getting threatening emails about a Franco book. That one should be pretty easy - kind of. Franco's story is a good ten years old, and I know how it goes, and his lover is still very present in my head (good thing - some characters simply don't last that long), so it's just under the surface. I'll have to build a totally new world, though because I can't deal with the research of the one where it's actually set in (I don't speak French and I can't just visit the location). It can be done, but it's something I'll do after my historicals.

What Dark Soul has definitely done was to create a desperate need for me to write more gay mafia stories (hell, I'd READ them, but they don't seem to exist!). And the fact that I'm feeding that urge with watching The Godfather I and II (and, wow, was Robert de Niro hot as Vito Corleone!), and there's Godfather III and Goodfellas on the list next. Mafia stories have a lot of things I like - power play, guns (well, danger, I like danger), social pressure, and so much happens between the lines. A nod, a silence, can mean so much in that world, and it's daunting to show those layers in a way that readers "get it". Some might not, but that's OK. So, yeah, there's the possibility for more. I'm especially tempted by the potential between a boss and a consigliere, but I'd have to build a whole familiglia, and for that I need more research. Taking this stuff from - highly inaccurate - movies won't work. So, there's another pile of research, and right now, that's a touch more than I have time for.

Speaking of historicals - I'm going to free Solange from Special Forces and put her into my WWII novel. I's just a supporting role, but I love that woman and think she'd make a fine addition. In my head, I'm sometimes a director and I like casting and re-casting my favourites. There are only very thin walls between stories in my head. Some are closer than others. Silvio is a character who effortlessly skips across genres and story lines, and he'll get a lot more play, but right now, I'm attempting to fall into that place in 1942, and I'm taking Solange with me.

In any case, I'll try to do some writing on the space opera and then do some plotting/outlining work on my historical novel today. After we've been out to hunt some breakfast, that is.

Tying up loose ends

Last week was all about editing - I didn't write a single new sentence. I cleaned up "Dark Soul 5", then edited a short co-written piece, which is now with the co-writer for a final check. I'm a right-brain/left-brain kinda person. I either edit or write. I've tried editing one book and writing a new one, but my brain can't handle that double stress. I'm either living in one story, or in another, not in both.

So, right now, I'm in limbo, "between books", which is a place like "between job"--lots of options, usually some soul-searching, and generally things slow down a great deal. I clean my study, throw away papers, re-arrange my books (the research books for the finished books get stored further away from the desk to make way for the new ones), attempt to catch up with my email (usually hopeless mission, but I'm trying at least).

Right now, I'm helping a friend outline her novel, which should keep me busy for a week or so. Then the question is what to write next. I have the sequel to "Lion of Kent" on the schedule, which should be a full novel, but that means another boatload of research. That book has been postponed so often that I feel I need to do it now or it won't happen. That'll also mean going back to Deliverance and Lion of Kent and get back into the character. I have a couple medieval biographies here and a couple books on tournaments and medieval entertainers, so the research side at least is covered. I should be able to write all that in 2-3 months, possibly, depending a bit on the workload at my other two jobs.

There are a couple shorter stories I want to write in the meantime (I do like to write short things in between novels), but since I can never predict whether these are actually short stories or novellas or just pretend they are, I'm proceeding with utmost caution.

In any case, I loved writing the two contemporaries (Dark Soul and the co-project), and now it's time to change setting/sub-genre again.

I blogged elsewhere & update on Dark Soul

Welcome, new subscribers! Please feel right at home. :)

First of all, I'm really enjoying to see Dark Soul going viral. I don't think there were many stories I've written that have turned out to be so popular, but it's great to see all the reviews and tweets pop up. I consider those motivation to sit down and finish Dark Soul 5.

As an update - Dark Soul 4 is completed.

Dark Soul 5 looks like it'll have five stories, as I have a lot of plot to wrap up and am currently pondering to add a sex scene somewhere. Interestingly, every single story of Dark Soul explores power, and most attempt a mind fuck of some description. (Yeah, I know, I'm slow, bear with me for a moment.) Some of those are tied up into sex, others into loyalty and obligation. The most powerful stories - IMHO Dark Secret, Dark Night and Dark Lady I - combine those themes.

How do I know these are the best ones? They are the stories that I balked the longest over starting. ("The m/m readers will rip me apart if I put a sexy guy into a female dress" was one of the considerations, admittedly.) And they were the hardest to write overall, and at the end of every single one I sat back, thinking, or saying "holy hell, I need a drink/coffee." (But I do keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer for this type of "woah, hell.")

So it's a ride; for me too.

So, back to Dark Soul 5. Two of the stories are written and they clock in at around 13k. It feels like I have most of the plot still to get through, but least, the research part is done, so now I can concentrate on finishing what I've started in terms of the plot arches. As a side note, I did not expect Stefano to have quite that much internal strength, courage and humanity (well, he has to, considering the beating he takes throughout the series).

Overall, I'd reckon DS5 will clock in at 20-25k words, which means the whole series will be around 90k words, which should make an attractive paperback later in the year.

Right now, I don't want to be thinking about "what book next", but I do want to get the second part of William's story finished before I vanish in WWII for a year or two. (Possibly two.)

We'll see what the next year brings in terms of queer writing and in the mainstream.

I hear wings beating

The next time I'm writing a series, I'll write the whole thing before I publish a single book.

Granted, it's quite possibly terribly inefficient in terms of work. What if reception is so bad that you've just spent three years of your life writing a series that people are hating? And yep, overall reception has a huge impact on whether I'm writing the sequel, or feel like doing a prequel. Characters that are loved are more likely to come back on the stage for an encore. People hating the overall concept of a series can strangle the second part in its infancy. On the part of the author - total deniability: "It was meant as a standalone anyway."

Writing a series while parts are being published seems like a clever thing to do, then, until you do it in practice. (Hey, I'm still learning how to treat the Muse right - a writer's career seems largely a series of experiments on him/herself, trying to trial and error a way to stay alive and productive and more-or-less - but not too, that's dangerous, too - happy.)

When I started the Dark Soul series, I wrote "Dark Soul" for a gun kink anthology. Much like a lucky oil explorer getting the drill in just right, I then saw the earth split wide open. Geyser. Unstoppable. I'd hit 20-year old oil in my own soul. Holy shit, I hit THAT geological layer again, get the rig over here, NOW!

I wrote Dark Soul 1-3 in a happy daze, sucking on that general area and swallowing as fast as I could. Then, November happened, certain moderators of a certain Goodreads group stepped up their harrassment of trans* writers, "sniffing out" "fake men" and demanding that publisher police the contents of their writers' underwear or be threatened with boycotts, some bloggers ran around outing trans* people as having ovaries (gosh, the possession of ovaries now a crime or what? Personally, most trans* men would like to keep theirs in jars or wash them down the toilet, but they ARE kind of important for the body's hormone equilibrium).

Things thankfully died down (mostly, anyway, not that those mods ever learnt a thing or even apologized), but the important thing was, the geyser had died off. My "sure I can write this whole Dark Soul series, want the whole thing next month?" became pure boisterous posturing.

For weeks, I didn't even feel like a writer. Words were just scrawls on paper. I had moments (days) of intense loathing for pretty much the whole genre and everybody involved in it, including myself, then I slowly dragged myself out of that, realizing, deep down, that I'm not going to allow a few entitled assholes to ruin me as the writer, ruin my fun, or take my books out of the hands - and minds - of my readers.

In short, just because there are assholes and trolls on the internet, I don't have to suffer for them, or hurt those people who really want my stories. Of course, when I write, I'm emphatically NOT writing for the assholes and trolls out there, but I've also discarded the very petty idea of anti-dedicating my books ("This book is for readers, but not J., L. and JM, or A.S., who I hope burst spontaneously into flames when they read any sentence I've written" - ah, if words had such power!).

Although it admittedly would have been fun to watch how quickly and indignantly they'll deny having done "anything" to "deserve such vile treatment", while at the same time working very hard behind the scenes to damage me and my business, and that of my friends.

Honestly, regarding November I'm very nearly past caring, because my real battle - the one that almost nobody has any influence on whatsoever - is to finish a five-part series when trolls have stomped all over the well you'd been tapping. Why do I even bother?

I've spent what feels like two months staring at the screen, digging in my brain, using the sharpest tools I had to try and draw blood. Some writing is nothing less than digging through the
scar tissue of your soul and trying to get at a fresh artery. Some of us look inside like junkies trying to find one good vein. And if you can't find any on your arms, you can always go for the one in your balls or between your toes. We're talking THAT kind of writing.

I felt so bruised and so numb inside that I couldn't see the faint blue shimmer of a vein through my skin. And when the blade went in, I couldn't get deep enough to get even a spurt of blood. Anywhere. Obsessive writer that I am, I kept cutting away, kept digging, and probably made all my friends utterly miserable with my thinly-veiled self-loathing. A blocked writer is a pitiful creature, and he/she knows it.

I knew it would be two more parts, but I couldn't get them written. I analysed my own writing process from inception to final proofing stage to debug it, and I have some vague ideas what I can optimize now and in the future. All this under the pressure to have to deliver two novella-sized books of several stories that were nothing but a twinkle in the Muse's eye. My Muse, however, usually a hard-working and pretty reliable bastard, had fled the scene.

And then you're stuck in the middle of a series, much like a marathon runner who gets a foot blown off at kilometer 20. In front of what feels like thousands of people, most of whom haven't even heard the shot or noticed what's wrong. All they see is that "their" runner staggers and falls. A few go after the shooter, others stare or shout in horror. And while you stagger, all you can think of is to shout "I'm OK! I'm OK! Of course I'm finishing the race, no problem, I just, errr, stepped funny on a stone or something." It's not a pretty picture, because the reality is, you know something's badly wrong, and there's this myth floating around that writing is easy once you know how to do it, and we're all writing machines and reliably produce if given half an incentive, and surely the money is enough, right? We just sit down and do this thing. We're "professionals". Usain Bolt doesn't get a cramp. Muhammad Ali doesn't chicken out.

It's all nonsense. In the end, the battle is between you and the white page on the screen. If I can't find the hole in to the story, it's not happening. That's a block, and I haven't had a real one in ages, but this one was nasty. It was made nastier because of the loathing and disgust, the trolls, and a deep-seated insecurity whether anything would have changed after November.

The answer is, yes, everything has changed, and I'm still cataloguing the fall-out, good and bad. But the first area where I had to do damage control was in my own writing, and, specifically, Dark Soul and whether it would get completed.

You're getting all these funny ideas, too. Whether the pre-November parts will have the same tone. After that huge upheaval, will I write "differently"? How will people now read part 3, which was written well before any of that shit happened?

You manage to take the first steps in part 4 and keep thinking "is this what I would have written before the trolls ate my Muse?" There's a certain taint, a certain fear and tentativeness in the writing that is maybe totally in my imagination. None of my own struggles HAVE TO have made it on the page. Writers can happily suffer in real life and nothing of it makes it on the page. I think. I hope.

And while the trolls haven't destroyed my writing, I do wonder if they twisted it. If I let them down inside me too deep and they did shit in there than I can't even fathom. Or whether I'm clenching up, in a protective reflex, in expectation of their next move. Whether I write in a certain way to justify myself, and how my Muse works, and what my themes are, and how I tackle them.

And then you write more, and the tentativeness slowly falls away. You're a swimmer who has broken out of the pollution of the coastal waters. No plants that wrap themselves around your ankles. The sea out there looks like you remember it - cold and powerful and dark and threatening, and now your muscles are warm and you can SWIM again, for all you're worth. There's no help out here, but veteran that you are, you don't NEED anybody's help. You pull, push, stroke, the machine remembers how to do it, and all the creaky, painful, self-conscious shit, the stuff about expectations, good and bad, all falls away. It's done. None of that matters.

And suddenly you have 15 thousand words, and they might be different from the 15k words you'd have written before it all happened, but, never mind, those 15k are still pretty good words, there's no taint, no rage that doesn't belong. The trolls haven't actually reached THAT deep. They are beach trolls, but once you're deep and far enough in the water, they look like spoiled, bored children hitting each other with plastic sand spades.

In the last four or five days, I've written more than 15k words. Dark Soul 4 is almost finished, and once I've finalized the last scene, I'm going to swim further and bring back Dark Soul 5. I'd say they should both be done in January.

A fractal of images

Of course I've been writing. I've been writing another short story with the characters from "Dark Soul", and I'm increasingly realising the shape of this project. It's less of a series of shorts and more something "fractal" - while time progresses, it doesn't actually have an overarching plot and is more looking at one aspect of the main character. Which brings with it all kinds of potential issues about publishing them.

I can't WAIT for "Deliverance" to go out of contract largely because I want to fix a continuity mistake I've made there. (Well, which means that'll get fixed eventually) In this case, I feel like holding back all these stories until they are all written so I can treat and fix them like one unit. Because in a way, they are.

Of course, writing 13k in 4 days or so has its disadvantages (like a hundred more emails in my inbox that need dealing with) - it's also 13k I didn't pour into the two birds book. As I did pretty much nothing else (that includes the research for the short story, which saw me revisiting, at least in spirit, one of the most beautiful places on earth - Tuscany, Italy), I'm way behind and will have to re-start the two birds book.

As it's reporting season at the bank (meaning, the analysts are writing their little hearts out), I'm pretty busy at work, and fully expect to pull some serious overtime due to the catastrophe about to happen in one of our continental offices, where a big report is heading towards an, as yet, impenetrable wall at breakneck speed, its drivers unwilling to listen to any frantic shouts of warning from London.

We are all foreseeing a prime opportunity for We Told You So, but we all wish we weren't first in line to fix the crash. Lovely.

Anyways, the 13k short is done, just needs editing, and I'm now back to my birds and working out in my head what I want the other short stories to look like.

The time, the time

Currently I'm tied up in the massive Sekret Project that we can hopefully announce pretty soon - which means all the grey matter in my head is engaged, leaving very little space for things like socialising (I AM socialising a lot with my co-conspirators, of course).

But I'm still there.

It's 4 weeks until the launch of "Dark Edge of Honor", which I'm pretty excited about. I read the file on my e-reader the other day and actually couldn't stop. It's rare that my own books develop such a "pull" on me. After all, I still kinda remember what's going to happen.

And that's the year done (and we still have five months to go). Which means, basically, I have to get cracking on the marketing, the "promo", but I try to think of it not as advertising, but as telling all my friends about my new book. Marketing itself is soul-crushing for many writers, but these days part of the package.

In my real life, we've had some excitement - the financial markets were going/are going through some jitters at the moment, focusing on Italy. As the bank I work for has been caught up in that, last week at work was interesting and actually really quite stressful. I don't believe I'm losing my job, but senior management has announced "changes". Banks are slaves to the markets, and the markets don't behave in a rational manner. The more I know about the financial markets, the more I'm in favour of much, much harsher controls and some practices actually outlawed. We'll see if politicians ever grow enough balls to do that... I'm not positive.

Last week, we also got new windows and doors installed at Casa Voinov. We used to have really badly converted Victorian wood-framed box sash windows in a few places (one of which was really badly rotted underneath the paint) and two doors (garden and front) that were basically just a pane of wood and single glazing - the kind of door a vigorous child could kick down. Well, that's over now - with all the additional locks and bolts (all inside the door), we're locked down pretty tightly now.

The last remaining single-glazed windows were replaced with PVC windows that actually open (hence you can even clean them - I know, the marvels of progress), and which should prove a lot warmer in winter that the others. With last year's "cold snap", some of the rooms in this house were so cold that I didn't actually want to stay inside them for a long time. Which is unfortunate if you're talking about the study where I write or the library where I do my research.

Meanwhile, the "two birds" book is continuing - slower again, and slowed down by a short story I just need to throw onto the paper and hope to finish this weekend. I've taken today off to do that. There's also an editing project that needs doing by Monday, and a novel to feedback next week.

Life's busy, but that's good.