aroslav: Blog

November is nearly over, and with it, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I'm feeling pretty good about my NaNo project, Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon, with 140,000 words so far. I've been averaging 5000 words a day! I plan to finish the story by Tuesday.

That doesn't mean it's ready for release, unfortunately. I'll start rewriting it at the same time that I'm drafting the next Team Manager book. Then I'll get it off to my overworked editors. Maybe we'll be ready to start posting in early January. Maybe.

Yes, that's the number of words I've written this year for your entertainment and enjoyment. Well, mostly for that. It includes a few words I wrote just to spout off about something that bugged me.

Yesterday, as I ran past 100,000 words for November's NaNoWriMo, I also passed the 1,000,000 mark for how much I've written this year. It's not the first time I've hit that mark in a year, but this was something a little special in my mind. I started the year slowly, struggling for every word I was writing in two different works in progress. Then I discovered I'd gone back into a-fib and that explained a lot of January and February. I still managed to get The Assassin finished and released.

Then, on March 15, I had a dream so vivid that I had to stop writing anything else I'd been working on. I started writing and sending chapters to my editors at once. In a month, I had the first draft of Team Manager SWISH! written and was deep in writing Team Manager SPRINT!

I had to take short break from the Team Manager series and write Wayzgoose's Jackie the Beanstalk because it was just demanding that I write it. It was scarcely in the hands of the editors when I was back to writing Team Manager COACH! I took a drive one afternoon to let the characters work out some difficulties when my thought process was interrupted by a new character I'd never heard from before but was demanding mindshare. I finished the draft of COACH! just in time to begin Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon for NaNoWriMo. Now, 100,000 words into that story, I'm seeing the third act take shape and am confident I'll finish it by the end of the month, at which time I'll be ready to start writing Team Manager CHAMP!

It doesn't take that long to get a million words written! Fun!

I was reflecting on some of the humorous searches that come up when I'm writing. (Like "How much does a barrel of wine weigh?" or "What was the monetary unit in the third century in southern India?") I doubt there is a person who has ever searched the internet for information who hasn't at one time or another ended up with a dozen open windows, music or voices coming from an unknown source, and some anti-virus software telling them their computer is at risk. It happens more often than I care to admit.

But there are also sites that try to just be helpful and overdo it a little.

I needed information on pirates of the Indian Ocean in the first century CE. Wow! What a bunch of useless information! Until I came upon an academic paper titled "Before the Somali Threat: Piracy in the Ancient Indian Ocean." How often do you find such a specific answer to a question? I downloaded and read the paper with great interest. And it was good. I dealt with the subject and moved on.

Nearly every day since then, I have received a suggestion that "A related paper is available on Academia." Here are some of the papers that have been recommended to me this week.

"Early Greek and Latin Sources on the Indian Ocean and Eastern Africa"
"Lost Port of the Red Sea"
"The Notion τὸ πέρας τῆς ἀνακομιδῆς and the Location of Ptolemais of the Hunts in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea"
"The Coastal Arabia and the Adjacent Sea Basins in the 'Periplus of the Erythraean Sea'"
"The Nabataean in Eastern Desert in Egypt"

Since it was mentioned twice, I had to look up 'Periplus of the Erythraen Sea' and found that it was a document that recorded the distances and sailing time from port to port around the Indian Ocean. Fascinating.

And you thought I just wrote entertaining adventures with a little sex tossed in!
Enjoy!

I was thinking this week about how retirement (age) has made me forgetful about some things. For example, this week I totally forgot why I was supposed to be happy it was Friday!

I think there is also something about my brain running out of my fingers onto the keyboard. I went to take a nap and could not stop thinking about San Francisco--one of my favorite cities--the location of a scene I was writing in Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon.

Speaking of which... The writing of my current NaNoWriMo project is going well. I've averaged 5,000 words per day so far, which means the story is currently 70,000 words in length. Likelihood is that I'm about halfway through it. I've really enjoyed letting Bob take control and run on about his adventures over the past 4000 years. At the same time, I've had to do insane amounts of research in order to not sound like a total idiot when I'm talking about Alexander the Great or ancient India.

And then there is the sudden bouncing to, say 1955 San Francisco and the beat generation. Here's something funny. Back circa 2000 BCE, a fellow received some gifts from a god of war that included a drum. I didn't say much about the drum in that episode, but in '55, Bob gets enthused about the beat crowd in SF and pulls out his old drum to go join them. But I didn't know exactly what the drum looked like or how it was played. I just had a vague notion of what I wanted.

I sent a message to a drummer friend and asked if he'd ever come across an ancient Persian war drum that was held between the knees as it was played with hands and changed pitch when it was squeezed with the drummer's knees. If so, what was it called?

He wrote back that he'd check it out but it sounded like he needed to get one. Within half an hour I got a response to the question indicating he thought it was called a djun-djun and was most popular in West Africa, but extended all across Northern Africa and was probably around Persia as well. He sent a picture and it was exactly what I imagined the drum to look like!

So, now you know that the reason my stories sound like I know so much is all research. And asking friends who know things.

BTW, what coin was used as a monetary unit in India, circa 300 CE?

I was going to start by saying that I seldom get so caught up in a story that I have to stop everything else and just write until it is done. But, of course, that's a lie. It happens routinely. Last spring, I got the idea for a series about a geeky high school kid in Iowa. That was on March 15. I released the finished Team Manager SWISH! and started serializing it the 26th of May. And then I went straight into writing Team Manager SPRINT!

Then I got this crazy idea about a teenage wizard on an unorthodox adventure called Jackie the Beanstalk (Wayzgoose). It took a couple of weeks to get that written.

I immediately started back in on Team Manager COACH! (It started off being called SPIKE! but it isn't really about volleyball.) I got the first draft of COACH! finished October 27th and the editors have had a good time with it. It will be ready to post as soon as SPRINT! finishes.

It was important to get COACH! off my desk, because National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started November 1 and I could hardly wait to get started on Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon. Is it obsessing me as much as the other books I've named? Oh, yes.

As of today (seven days) I've written just over 35,000 words in eleven chapters. It's going really well and I'm churning out about 5,000 words a day on the story. I'm about to write the last chapter (of four) about the Trojan War, only not really about the war. It's mostly about what Bob was doing before and after the war. Setting a few myths on their ears!

This story is heaps of fun, from running away with the king's new bride, to becoming a king, to rescuing (and screwing) the most beautiful woman on earth. And what comes next? The hanging gardens of Babylon? The abduction of Julius Caesar? or will I jump forward a few centuries to Bob's time in Australia where everything tries to kill you! I'll know soon, but it is not likely that it will be a simple progression like a timeline could suggest. As Bob says:

"To clarify: Four thousand years is a fucking long time. I'm a simple demon. Don't read too much into that word. I'm not dumb. I'm just not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnimnemonic. That last is a word I coined to mean "all-remembering." I'm not. I remember some things as clearly as if they happened yesterday. In fact, I should tell you what I did yesterday. It was… not this part of the story. Okay? Besides, at this point I can't always keep straight what century some things happened in. There was a couple in which I was so drunk I really don't remember anything that happened. And then the time I was stuck in the infinity room for fifty years. Esmira…"

Well, you get the idea. I have no foreknowledge of when this book will be ready for release, but I'm guessing it will be sooner rather than later.

My "Sausage Grinder" patrons are trying to read as fast as I'm writing with about 5,000 new words posted on my site every day. Let me just say, we're having fun now!

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All fans and readers are invited to join the conversation.

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