aroslav: Blog

My daughter is 26 years old now. Hard to believe I'm old enough to have a daughter who takes her dad out for a martini on Father's Day. But at least 20 years ago, I learned an important lesson. When driving my daughter and her friends around, don't try to participate in the conversation. Just shut up and listen. It's amazing what you learn.

Over the years, I discovered the same advice is valid for driving my story characters around. I drive and listen to the voices in my head.

After the great turnout and reception for my book releases last Sunday, I had to return to camp in Idaho. I sold 25 books that day, including all but one copy of Wild Woods. I need to restock. We further celebrated on Monday as Jason and I smoked a brisket for eleven hours and had a dozen friends over for dinner that evening. Great conversations, lots of questions, new ideas. I went to bed with my head buzzing.

What had me going was the condition of Book 4 in the Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins: Double Twist. I use continuous numbering through the series, so I'd been working on Part XV, Chapter 190. I was up to about 150,000 words and getting worried. I still had half a dozen chapters to write in this part and if I continued on with Part XVI, the book would turn out to be 220,000 words minimum. An unwieldly tome.

The four books are already 683,000 words. The Bible is only 783,000.

BUT… I wasn't sure I really had a story for the years after Jacob and crew graduate from high school. And then "a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping…" It still didn't answer the question of whether it was a final part of Book 4 or a whole Book 5. And that is where my head was when I hit the road Tuesday morning for the 350-mile, 8-hour drive back to camp. (Why so long? Traffic congestion just getting to the freeway. Well over an hour to go the first 20 miles! That and old man bladder. I'm good for thirty minutes or thirty miles, whichever comes first.)

So, a bit dazed and with a Carly Simon CD in the player, I started listening to the characters talking and basically ignoring me. And they outlined three more parts to the story that got me excited enough to stay up Tuesday night writing the next chapter of Double Twist so I'd be ready to start writing Double Team on July 1. Tomorrow!

Friday, I completed chapter 195, the end of Book 4. Tomorrow begins Camp NaNoWriMo and I've committed to continuing to provide my Sausage Grinder patrons ($10/mo) with a chapter per day of the story as I have since the first of April. And yes, if you join up, you get access to all the chapters written up until now. Or wait until August 20, 2020 for Book 5 to start on SOL.

When I told my editors that I'd just decided there would be one more book in the series, Pixel the Cat responded: "You are either having me on, indulging in some high-quality weed, or have totally lost it. There is absolutely no bleedin' way the post HS National Service time will fit in one book. More like three. But then, you probably expected the pre-NS HS story to be only 80 or so chapters."

He probably knows my writing style better than anyone other than Old Rotorhead who, upon receiving the last fourteen chapters of Book 4, said, "I was going to write to you today to say, "Gee, you've been quiet lately." So much for that!" Two weeks since he returned the last sixteen chapters and he's goading me to write a little faster!

So, here's the way it's shaping up at the moment:

Book 1: Double Take, Parts I-IV, chapters 1-48. Completed posting 5/26/2019.

Book 2: Double Time, Parts V-VIII, chapters 49-98. Started posting 6/1/2019 and scheduled to end 10/29/2019.

Book 3: Double Tears, Parts IX-XII, chapters 99-149. Scheduled to begin posting 11/5/2019 and end April 2, 2020.

Book 4: Double Twist, Parts XIII-XV, chapters 150-195. Scheduled to begin posting April 5, 2020 and end August 17, 2020.

Book 5: Double Team, Parts XVI-XVIII, chapters 196 and following. Scheduled to begin posting August 20, 2020, probably ending before the end of that year.

That will make two solid years of posting every three days. Woohoo!

In the meantime, just for fun, I'm writing Wayzgoose's Stocks & Blondes. I also plan to post his (my) seminal work, The Volunteer, in the next month or two as Wild Woods has only three more chapters to post.

And if that wasn't enough, my story consultant, Doug, has started to badger me about an interesting concept in a sci fi time travel story that has me intrigued. But he's banned me from starting it until I finish Double Team. Probably the story I'll be working on as I travel around the world this winter. More about that soon.

So, there you have the plans. Let's see if the universe decides to disrupt them!

Cheers!

I like to base my stories on an actual calendar. It helps me keep Sunday from following Tuesday and gives me a frame of reference for school years, vacations, holidays, and even birthdays of the characters. I read a story once in which I'm sure the main character had three birthdays in one year. In fact, I have an entire Outlook calendar devoted to each storyline I write, including "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins". Often the calendars are for years past, but occasionally they stretch well into the future. For example, in Yelloweye, this week marks the high school graduation of Caitlin, Phile, and Mandy and the beginning of some of their most intense adventure. And I wrote that a few years ago.

I've also noted that Double Time begins on July 8, 2019. That means everything I've written for the rest of the series not only takes place in an alternate version of our world, but also in the future.

One of the fun things about writing about future events is that you don't need to be consistent with any current history. My prognostication is strictly from my imagination of what might happen, given the state of our world and the few things I've changed historically in Jacob's world. The big and obvious things that have changed in this timeline, of course, include the National Service, the absolute no tolerance traffic laws that levy time-fines rather than monetary ones, the complete lack of non-profit exemptions in the tax laws and flat tax, and the enforcement of absolute equality under the law. With those few changes to history, I'm not projecting my imagination into the future.

So, you can pretty much bet that I'll get most if not all of it wrong if you are comparing Double Time to our current reality. As the story progresses, the timelines will become more and more separate. So, maybe it's not necessary to critique my adherence to what is real in our world. By the same token, I don't think it would make any more sense to praise it when I get something "right". It's all just a story and I'm having fun making shit up.

Even though I consider The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins to be one very long story (probably about 200 chapters), I'm releasing it as separate books in a series. Book 1: Double Take ended Sunday and yesterday I started posting Book 2: Double Time.

Double Time continues the story of Jacob and his friends literally from minutes after Double Take ends, and goes through his sophomore year in high school. There are new things happening to Jacob. He's encouraged to run, gathers more girlfriends into a pod as they learn more about the National Service, and stretches his playing on the guitar.

Breaking the series into book-length units gives readers convenient points to opt out when they grow tired of the story. And people do grow tired but worry that they will miss something if they don't keep reading. If you are in that group, put the new story aside in a bookmark and come back to it in a few months.

The chapters and parts, however, are numbered consecutively through the whole story, so Double Time begins with Part V: Reincarnation, Chapter 48. There are 51 chapters in Book 2 and it is all uploaded to post every three days through October.

Both Double Take and Double Time are available as Kindle and ePub eBooks, but Amazon has declined to release it. As a result, if you'd like to get the eBooks, you need to send $5 to me via PayPal with an email address where I can send the link. Send me a feedback message to this post if you'd like to get either book and I'll send you the link. Sadly, I can't put the link in my blog post or the post won't show up in the front page feed.

I appreciate your comments and votes on the story. J-Hop is standing by to respond to any questions you have for him. Otherwise the forum is open.

I uploaded the serial Double Take before I decided if I would make it one super long serial (like Living Next Door to Heaven with five books in one long serial) or if I would create a series and make each book (I think there will be four but there might be five) a separate serial. Eventually, I decided to make them separate since that gives people who are offended and disgusted but force themselves to read till the bitter end a chance to bail out and not continue. Of course, those who bailed three chapters before the end don't need to worry.

Okay. I forgot to mark Book 1: Double Take as finished when it was posted. I've corrected that now. So, today, with chapter 47, Double Take comes to an end. Book 2: Double Time will begin on June 1.

Now to confuse things thoroughly some more. I consider the entire Transmogrification story to be one story. It won't make any sense to start with Book 2. So, when Double Time starts, it will begin with Part V: Reincarnation, Chapter 48. There is a total of 51 chapters (ending at 98) and 180,000 words in Book 2.

In case you're wondering, so far, I've written 161 chapters and am well into Book 4. This series is going on for a long time!

Comments on the story pretty much went off the rails when I revealed a character was a trans woman in chapter 44. I don't care. I didn't interrupt the flow of twenty some comments on old people using slide rules. I'm certainly not going to get in the middle of comments by people offended by my introduction of a trans woman.

What I am going to do is continue to write material that challenges the ideas and conceptions of the old man that lives inside Jacob Hopkins. I will not back down on that. Some of those challenges will be to the right and some to the left. It really makes no difference to me who has their delicate worldview offended. If I was concerned about it, I'd have followed the typical mindless do-over formula and by this stage in the story he'd be fabulously wealthy and fucking his mother, as well as all the fourteen-year-olds in school. Two things I find particularly offensive.

I do get inspired by some of the comments and can't hold myself back. Here's a bit I posted on Facebook based on a single sentence I found intriguing and how it related to many other things I find on my newsfeed.

The comment received on the story began: "Ya know... that is really a dum comment and perfectly illustrates why some of us got Fed up with the accusations from the educated and informed." The comment inspired a bullet list, if you will.

• Being uneducated and uninformed does not equate to 'having common sense.' They aren't mutually exclusive but they aren't the same thing. People don't get common sense educated out of them. Common sense isn't something everyone is born with. It's learned… like algebra.
• Being uneducated and uninformed does not equate to being able to earn a good living as a skilled laborer. Many people lack the skills and the ability or opportunity to gain them in order to be a well-paid skilled laborer. The vast majority are unskilled labor and unless the union steps in, they are unlikely to be paid a living wage.
• Being uneducated and uninformed does not mean one's opinions and beliefs are as good as any other. They are indicative of what one prefers to believe, regardless of what is true.
• Being uneducated and uninformed does not mean a person is simply smarter than the educated. It gives rise to the 'ignorant elite,' who believe their lack of education makes them superior to those who 'waste their money' on college.

Sadly, pretty much everything I've said here also applies to the educated and informed. Being educated and informed doesn't guarantee common sense, a good job, valid opinions, or elitist superiority.

Now I need to get back to actually writing something worthwhile.

"And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims." -Isaac Asimov, The Best of Isaac Asimov

You can read more on my blog. Or don't.