aroslav: Blog

So, how do you expect me to remember the names in Living Next Door to Heaven? [This is a long post, so you might want to save it for when you need something to put you to sleep.]

I remember hearing Mary Doria Russell (author of The Sparrow and Children of God) speak about the release of her newest book (at the time--2011) Doc. She said she was head over heels in love with Doc Holliday while writing that book. A listener asked if she was still in love with Emilio Sandoz (of The Sparrow) and she said, "Oh, no. He's like an ex-husband now. I don't spend time thinking about him."

When I'm writing, I fall in love with my characters. I invite them to live in my mind and my heart. As a result, I write a ton of words every day (averaging over 4,000 a day so far this year!) And now I am working on a new series of stories that I've tentatively called "The Photo Finish Trilogy." I've finished writing the first book, Full Frame, and it is in the editing cycle. It came out to 36 chapters and a total of 270,000 words! You can expect much longer chapters with this than what I've been doing over the past few years.

Now, I'm working on the sequel, Shutter Speed. I'm 130,000 words into it and as I drive across country, the characters are yammering non-stop.

I thought I’d describe a couple of issues that I’ve run into as I got rolling on Shutter Speed. These are more technical than story arc related, so there won’t be any spoilers here.

I quickly reached a point at which I was stuck, dealing with a sensitive subject, and trying to get the right words placed around the intense emotional situation. I don’t often encounter anything remotely like "writer’s block," and I don’t consider this to have been a block like most people say they encounter. I had lots of ideas, but I was carefully considering how to incorporate them without falling back on the crutch of ‘have sex and everything will be better.’ That works, but only temporarily.

Instead, I needed to go to where my trailer was parked, 25 miles away, and start prepping it for travel again. I was in the truck, not more than two miles from where I’d been staying the past month, when the characters started talking. I mostly just listened for the forty minutes it took to get there, then I had to sit with a stack of 3x5 cards and start writing down the gist of what was being discussed in my head. I did eventually get power to my trailer, locate the things I needed, and prepare the trailer for deep cleaning. But when I got home, I immediately sat down to write another 4,000 words.

As I was outlining and determining the direction for the story, I needed a new character who would become a significant player in the story going forward. The new character needed a name. I first chose Pamela. She has a hated nickname of Pammy which she allows only one close friend to call her. Her more usual name would be Pam. I needed those three variations. Then I realized that I already had a significant character in Full Frame whose name was Pam. This would definitely create confusion, so I needed a new name, popular for female babies born in 1949, that had three variants I could use. I tried out and discarded several before I found one that had the right feeling and rhythm. Elizabeth. Despised nickname, Lizzie. Accepted nickname among friends, Beth. And there are a couple of other nicknames that I could use if she becomes really complex, like Betsy, Liz, Lisbet, etc.

Back in ’76, my dad had a VW microbus that I used for a while. I remembered it as being cold (driving from Minneapolis to Indiana in December), having two separate seats in front with a pass-through between them, and a whole new experience driving. So, I described the ’66 VW Kombi that Nate acquires as what I remembered of that bus. Then I found a picture of a fully restored model. I went back to work, rewriting my description to something closer to reality. It had a 1/3-2/3 seat combination that allowed three passengers in front, as long as the one in the middle didn’t mind having the driver’s hand between her legs as he shifted. Some things improved over my faulty memory.

So how do I keep track of all these things and try to maintain some semblance of order in how they are presented?

The first indispensable item I have is a master spreadsheet workbook with several spreadsheets on which I keep track of characters, situations, locations, what photos are being taken, and any other miscellaneous data that I will surely forget in writing a massive serial like this one. I expect the total length of the three planned volumes to come in at around 800,000 words and over 100 chapters. It will cover a period of about ten or twelve years. That means literally hundreds of characters will come into and out of Nate’s life. I won’t try to list them all in introductions, but some will certainly be there. Others, though, I need to maintain a log of, so I don’t introduce a tall thin blonde in one chapter and refer to her as a fat redhead in another. (Can’t recall ever referring to anyone as ‘fat,’ but you get the idea.)

The second major thing that I do is maintain a calendar of what is happening in Nate’s life. In addition to the direct events in Nate’s life, I also note holidays, school start and vacation dates, important dates in US and World history, like the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the invasion of Cambodia, Kent State, the Watts riots (1965 version), and elections and outcomes. Writing a slice of life story in a fairly realistic historic period can be a real task!

And, of course, there is my search folder that shows all the different websites I’ve gone to trying to find different tidbits to stay consistent with reality, even though my story is anything but reality. I even have the regional weather marked for the period of the story and I check frequently to see what the weather was like on a particular day. What movies were out? When was Arlo Guthrie’s "Alice’s Restaurant" released? What style swimsuits and dresses were the girls wearing? Were there front closure bras in 1967? How did the Selective Service change in 1967?

Well, you get the idea. I haven’t mentioned the marked-up maps that show the region I’m referring to and the way I’ve renamed streets and cities, what all the local high school sports teams were called, and doctrinal issues in the Methodist Church at the time of the merger with the EUB that created the United Methodist Church. It was an interesting era, and I lived through most of it.

All of this for one purpose only. I really want to bring you the best story I can without jarring you out of it with miscellaneous misinformation. I still can’t guarantee that I get everything right, nor that my editors catch every anomaly. But we do our best.

I'm currently camped in St. Regis, Montana and Wednesday will continue my journey eastward. Expect Minneapolis area sometime around July 20th, Des Moines area the last week of July, Northern Illinois the first week of August, and Columbus, Ohio the second week of August. That's as detailed an outline as I have at the moment. If you are on that general routing and would like to get together, let me know. I'd love to meet up.

Team Manager COACH! ends with chapter 45 tomorrow. But don't despair. (Save that for October.) Team Manager CHAMP! starts on Thursday, June 16. And for those of you who have been holding your breath for the next eBook release, breathe easy. It's on Bookapy now!

Team Manager CHAMP! is 37 chapters long and 134,000 words. It will continue to post every three days until October 2. That will conclude the Team Manager saga for now. Get those kids out of high school and into college. Then, I'll be moving on to another story and may revisit the crew from Iowa sometime in the future. No guarantees beyond getting them out of high school.

Enjoy!

I've just queued up the first chapter of Team Manager CHAMP! to post on June 16, three days after the last chapter of COACH! posts. The final installment of the four-book saga will finish posting October 2, 2022. Wow! What a trip!

I'm still integrating the final edits and formatting the book, but I expect everything to be ready before the first chapter posts, including the eBook on Bookapy.

I started posting the first chapters for my Patreon Advance Release ($5/month) members today.

My Patreon "Sausage Grinder" patrons ($10/month) are already 24 chapters into the next big thing, my novel Full Frame, which I plan to start posting on SOL sometime late in September or early October. By that time, I expect to be well into writing its sequel, Shutter Speed. Sausage Grinder patrons see what I've written almost as soon as I write it, without benefit of editing and proofreading. They get it raw, and it often changes significantly before it reaches a public audience.

I'm currently camped near Pendleton, Oregon where we've had thunderstorms today. Tomorrow, I'll move to Yakima for some minor warranty work on my trailer, then I expect to be in Lynnwood, WA on Wednesday for the remainder of the month.

I think I'll start a leisurely trip east around June 27 or 29. I plan (as much as I ever plan anything) to visit friends in Minneapolis before dropping down into Iowa to visit some of the locations I based the Team Manager series on. I'll see if I even came close to describing them realistically.

Then I'll cut up to Dubuque and travel across northern Illinois and visit some of the locations I've based my new novel, Full Frame, on. Finally, I'll visit my oldest sister in Columbus, OH, possibly visiting some of my old stomping grounds in Indiana on the way.

It's a little uncertain from there, but I expect September will find me back in Las Vegas for the winter.

Of course, it's all predicated on whether I think I have enough money to pay for gas on this trip. Never thought I'd say "It's not so bad here in Oregon at just $5.35 a gallon." But I filled up in California at a discount place for $6.60 a gallon! That was the cheap gas in that town.

If you live along my route east and would like to meet for coffee along the way, let me know. I always like meeting up with readers and turning fans into friends.

It’s been long enough ago that many of you might not recall that I used to post stories as soon as I finished a chapter. I quit doing that back in 2016 when I finished Living Next Door to Heaven 2. Then I started holding books until they were completely finished and fully edited (and/or rewritten) before I started posting them.

There were a few motivating factors. First, I was becoming alarmed at the number of stories I started reading online only to get to the last chapter and discover the story was “Unfinished and Inactive.” At that point, I decided that I would only post stories that are finished and edited so I could upload all the chapters to post automagically on the scheduled dates. I didn’t want anyone to get to the end of one of my posted stories and say, “He didn’t finish it?” Even if someone came along later and said, “Oh yeah. He died.”

Believe me, I have a lot of those stories in my files. Among the most recent ones are stories I started called “It Ain’t Immortality, But…”, “From Birth”, “A Place Among Peers”, and “Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain 2.” In each case the story was interrupted when I found it didn’t hold together past the concept, or that I lost interest in it, or another great idea just came along and claimed my head (like Team Manager SWISH! and Bob's Memoir). I can hear the screams from irate readers if I just quit posting those stories and they faded into a yellow bar across the title.

Another reason is that I change a story significantly after the first draft and people get irrationally upset when the names of favorite characters change, the birthday changes, the story location changes, etc.

Case in point: I wrote and posted Living Next Door to Heaven between 2014 and 2016. THEN, I decided to publish the story. Only I’d used names and even a few events that were too similar to actual people I’d known. Even though the chances that those people would be the kind of people who would read one of my books were slim, I did a sweeping change of names, schools, towns, and other locations. However, I didn’t post those changes on SOL because LNDtH was my most popular story and people were heavily invested in the characters the way they were named.

Spin forward two or three years when I wrote LNDtH 3: What Were They Thinking? I had left behind the original character names and places years before. I wrote with all the new names. I am still getting comments from people who read the last story and get upset because the names have changed.

Another example happened this week. I’m writing a fun new story that I can hardly wait to share with you, called Full Frame. I post the raw, unedited version online for my Sausage Grinder Patrons who pay to see it before anyone touches it. But over the past week and a half, I re-read and edited from the beginning because a reader had suggested that I didn’t set up certain relationships and actions well enough early on. And I agreed.

So, I rewrote several chapters and realized I didn’t like the name of the town; the name of one character who became more important than I thought he would was too similar to the name of another person I had introduced; a sister’s name wasn’t appropriate for the family; and I’d consistently misspelled or switched between spellings of a couple of others. I corrected all that in the new draft and when I continued writing, I used all the new information.

Now I have to explain to the Sausage Grinders that I know Eby Mill has been changed to Abbey Mills (not entirely because of autocorrect); I know the sister is now Naomi, not Susan; yes, it is Father Emory and not Father Emroy; and the tension between the town constable and the motorcyclists was established in chapter two.

But they paid to see that, so they understand. Readers on SOL wouldn’t.

I leave published works far behind me when they are finished. I seldom even go back to correct a typo. “What is written is written; it cannot be erased,” said. Pilate.

On the other hand, my blog posts go up with no more than a re-read, untouched by editors’ eyes. You get this raw.

Enjoy!

Bob's Memoirs: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon Volume 1 ended yesterday without really being noticed. Which is as it should be, since Volume 2 continues Friday with the next chapter in the saga. The book became so unwieldy that I had to cut it up into three volumes of five parts each.

Volume 2: After Caesar (Mostly) picks up the story with Part VI, chapter 27. It bounces between San Francisco in the 60s and India in the third century AC (After Caesar). Yes, there is actually a reason for this and it all makes perfectly clear sense. To Bob.

Also available on Bookapy, May 27.

In other news, I'm pulling up stakes and heading out of Las Vegas tomorrow, just as 100+ degree weather moves in again. I'll be traveling north and spending the holiday weekend in Bordertown, NV before I start the leisurely trek across Oregon and up into Washington State. I haven't settled on a plan for the summer yet, but it is looking more and more like I'll be headed east if I can scrape up the dollars for gas. My eldest sister will be 86 in July and it's been seven years since I last visited her in Ohio.

Of course, I have other motives for making this trip east. The entire Team Manager series is set in central Iowa, an area I really haven't spent much time in. I thought I'd tour the area, visit the towns and colleges I based the fictional story locations on and then move on into Northwestern Illinois.

Why there? Well, the next big story is set in the northwest corner of Illinois, and I think it's time to visit the small towns and pick up a little more local color. That next big story, Full Frame, which is already some 200,000 words, won't reach you until the end of the Team Manager series is either upon us or near. Team Manager CHAMP! is slated to begin posting on SOL June 16 and will conclude the saga October 2. I'll probably break down and start posting Full Frame in September, just because I'm so excited about the story.

Of course, Bob's Memoir will continue running with Volume 3 and will not conclude until October 12.

Stay healthy, live a good life, and make the world a better place!