Stage 10: Gorracula Arrives

FOLLOW FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS HERE 

It's been four and a half years since my last entry.

The full length novel draft of Gorracula that I completed in 2019 had a short life. I took it to the writer's conference, pitching it to a series of polite but un-interested agents. I also used it to query a series of other potential agents throughout the remainder of that year. It went nowhere. I handed it to a few friends to get opinions and one of them got back to me with some very useful feedback. The main part being that it was a mess from a grammatical and punctation standpoint. I knew that much just based on my long familiarity with my own limitations but he also gave me good insight into what had worked and what hadn't in the story. 

Mostly though I had begun to doubt the draft's value. It felt over stuffed and unfocused and I did not feel equal to the task of rebuilding without knowing in better detail in which direction to take it. Gorracula was once again put back in the closet of ideas.

By the end of 2020 I had begun working again on another old idea of a similar vintage to Gorracula. The friend who had given me feedback on the draft was also someone with whom I had maintained creative contact over the years and back in 2010 we had taken turns writing entries toward a proposed Sci-fi Comedy Detective story called Johnny Spacehair and the Oil of Ages. 

 I had kept the start we had made because it was amusing nonsense and it tickled me to occasionally read it back and work on it. As of late 2020 I had begun a concerted effort to complete Johnny Spacehair. By April or so of 2021 it was completed and I sent it to the short list of possible outlets for a 14,000 word Sci-Fi comedy. There were no takers.

I was however proud of it and enjoyed reading it myself so I decided to self publish. The experience was fairly neutral. A few people read it. I got some good feedback and then it settled into the background of my life. But it did give me a small shiver of pride when I reminded myself that I had completed something that I was proud of and could point to and say, "This, this is what I can do."

The cycle repeated its self with another old idea, this time a stylish steam punk adventure called The Altitude of Kings. It was another story whose seed had been planted around 2010-11, in communications with that same friend. I started plugging away at finishing it while also developing other ideas. It eventually landed as a nearly 25,000 word novella and again I was very happy with it. 

I decided, given the satisfaction I felt regarding these first two stories, neither of which had any natural home in the traditional publishing world (Works over 10,000 but under 50,000 words are pretty much still born for traditional publishers) that I would just become my own brand and aim at churning out my growing list of story ideas as short pieces that I liked at that were entirely my own. They would be the evidence of myself to myself and anyone else who wanted to read them was welcome too.

Thus 2023 was largely spent banging out a fourth and final version of the Gorracula story. It combined elements from all previous versions and pared away most of the side plots and secondary characters. But it also gained new aspects and elements. But this time they were things that served to propel the story rather than divert it into long side plots. The result is fairly lean and I like it very much. It clocks in at just under 35,000 words and tells the story of a university professor in the early 1960s experimenting with the cognitive development of a gorilla. It features horror, romance, rock music, Shakespeare, and drive in movies and it has finally reached its final form.

BUY IT HERE!

Stage 09: New Day, New Draft

I came into 2019 with a ten thousand word start on this new version of Gorracula.

It had a central character. It had a narrative voice. It had the legacy of work I'd put in on previous versions providing a narrative skeleton.

In 2013 I had gone to the Midwest Writer's Conference with a previous version of this story. I remained on their mailing list so I got word they were hosting a conference centered on finding an agent. I have never relinquished the focused hope that I will become a published writer and I used this event as a point of focus and motivation.

I bought tickets as soon as they went on sale in January. It was scheduled for May and I decided I would have a draft ready by then.

As it drew closer that came clear as a naive hope. Life was just too busy. I was making progress but not that level. I took mornings on my vacation to Florida to write by the ocean while everyone else slept and the sun came up. I snagged stray moments between work tasks but was not getting near my goal.

So I scaled it back and decided I would have 50,000 words written. I began waking up an hour earlier than I needed to in order to write for the month leading up to the conference. This had me up at 5:30 am and I'm fairly certain my proper work-work suffered for it. but I got to my goal and by the time the agenting conference came around I had the comfort of knowing my book was well over half way done and I had met a goal.

I got to make a handful of encouraging pitches to the agents in attendance. I came away with greater energy and self assurance. I decided to let off the gas until the end of the semester when life would become more open. At the beginning of June I decided I would treat writing as my job and finish a draft by the end of the month.

I insisted on a thousand words a day, or more. I started waking up an hour early just to write again. I plugged and grinded and worked and worked.

June 30th, 11pm, one hour left in the month to meet my goal, I typed the words, "The End."

I had my draft.

Now I intend to edit and polish for the month of July then I will seek representation for Gorracula.

I have a plan, I have a book and I have time. I am optimistic.

Read PT 10.

Gorracula Stage 08: New Everything

The title of this post is a purposeful overstatement.

In 2018 I began rewriting Gorracula: a Tale of Science. I Gave it a main character, someone who had never existed in previous versions, rather than just expanding on an existing character. Other than that I did not set out to explicitly change anything else.

I did some extended free writing trying to find this new individual's voice and once it emerged and once this person started guiding the story it became a lot more obvious, piece by piece, what still had a place and what no longer belonged.

I tried hard to preserve my previous structure by splitting the chapters between ones narrated by this main character and ones told by an omniscient narrator. But the pieces collided and began to seem too much like I was writing two competing books. So eventually the story telling has fallen to this new character.

This voice not having been along for the ride up until very recently actually brings a fresh eye to what had become some very familiar set pieces. The basic plot structure has existed in recognizable form: shifting, expanding and chipping away like a coastline over the course of centuries, for nearly a decade now. So it has been useful to put the exposition in the hands of a fresh observer.

To extend the coastline metaphor, if you were to look at the earlier versions of this story and compare it to what it is emerging as now it would be similar to looking at 16th century maps of North America vs. ones from say, 1860. I'm not quite up to satellite imaging fidelity but at least Florida  is no longer bigger than Texas and I've filled in where Oregon should be...so to speak.

As of now I have about 25,000 words of my new draft and a fairly clear plan of attack. I have a main character and an abbreviated internal timeline for the story so it doesn't go wandering on for metaphorical months and years.

Only time (and work) will tell if any of it matters.

Read PT 9.

Gorracula Stage 07 (2013-2017)

It has been three and a half years since I posted here.

I have been working on Gorracula in dribs and drabs that entire time.

I left the story of the book's progression in summer 2013 when an agent at The Midwest Writer's Conference asked to see a sample of my book. I sent it. She told me to send more when the book was finished. Then I went back to school. I was still very unsure of my writing abilities and felt like I needed guided practice and time to develop if the book would ever take a decent shape.

I finished my creative writing bachelor's degree in May of 2015. I had taken a novel writing class that went a long way toward helping me drive the story of the book forward and finding what didn't work. I had also taken the summer of 2014 and made concerted progress, treating writing like a job, blocking out five hours a day meant specifically for writing.

That process led me to a clearer shape for the book than it had yet had. But I also had some distressing insights. Distressing because they revealed story elements that wanted to be introduced but which would require rewrites starting at the very beginning of the book.

I plugged the new ideas in and worked as hard as I could make myself work. By Fall 2015, the time I initially started this blog, I was nearing the end of a serviceable complete first draft. I entered a crowdfunding contest through InkShares.com and tried to build a network of interest around Gorracula. It came to very little and meanwhile I was running out of money, trying to ignore the fact I needed to get a second job and time was running out on my life as a novel writer with the time to write his novel.

I began interviewing for jobs, crap jobs, the kind we all end up taking no matter how much we try to deny we'll have to work them. I got one at a call center, working product support of a tax preparation software (you know the one). I was set to start the first week of January 2016. I had a couple of weeks to give birth to a completed draft of Gorracula before that job started and I ran out of time and hope.

I had the business card of the agent I had met two and half years before in my wallet and I held it like a talisman. It offered me some hope if I just did my part and finished, maybe I had a chance. I finished my draft. It came in at nearly 200,000 words and for all its janky mismatched pieces, unwieldy character diversions and unanswered plot questions, it was a complete story I'd finished it. Then my call center job started and on that first day of work I sent an inquiry to the agent whose card was burning a hole in my wallet.

A week passed.
No word.

A month passed
No word.

I decided to write again. This time I heard back. Sadly she had switched agencies and was no longer representing fiction. She was kind and encouraging and that was all. It was done.

I took her card out of my wallet and continued work.

Obviously I didn't give up entirely. I tried to harness disappointment into motivation. I researched agents nominally looking for the type of thing I'd written.
No takers.

I gave the book to a couple people to read trying to get some feedback. No one finished it...not a good sign.

I ran out of steam and went on living. I didn't think about Gorracula for a good long while. When I came back to it I came to a difficult realization.

It was awful. It was structured all wrong, it had no main character, it had too many side stories and covered too much time. It was unfocused, uninteresting and tedious.

It would have to be completely rewritten. I kept maybe 40% of the first three chapters but beside that it needed to be rewritten.

Read PT 8.

Gorracula Stage 6 (Midwest Writer's Conference)

Let's fast forward a bit. My last entry left the story dangling right around spring 2012.

2012 produced nothing more in the realm of writing. I made personal advances, formed relationships and began planning my next moves in life. But for the purposes of this book's story we can pretty much ignore the remainder of 2012.

January 2013 I laid down a writing challenge with a fellow writer, we would pay for our admission to the Midwest Writer's Conference and then have the six months leading up to it to produce 50,000 word drafts with which to attend the conference. Thus I began writing in earnest. I began adapting the screenplay into a prose narrative, I attempted to maintain the tone of offbeat comedy though it was becoming clear that in the more complex form of the novel the characters wanted elaboration. If I was going to maintain my own interest I would have to make the story more about the people and less about the events. This slowed me down considerably as I was still fighting to keep it as the silly farcical thing it had been born as.

I read a lot more novels than I normally did, trying to gain some greater fluency, to get my head into the right space. It worked to a certain degree, though I only managed about 35,000 words by the time of the conference and what I had was a bit choppy.

I entered on the conference with a concept I liked, a solid start on a draft and a tiny pulse of optimism. The conference went well and was interesting, a lot of non-specific "you-can-do-it" encouragement and a decent amount of useful practical information on everything from researching a real world detail to navigating tax time as a freelance writer.

I had paid the extra amount for the privilege of a pitch session with a real working agent. I had my story pitch whittled down to three brief direct sentences which I memorized. I sat down across from the agent, a pleasant and open faced young woman perhaps five years younger than me and I tried to put the picture of the story in her mind clearly and quickly.

The final exam pitch session from back in film school was a very useful reference point and my success in that situation gave a feeling confidence if not complete ease. It translated pretty well. She liked the idea and gave me her card. She asked me to send a sample.

Read PT 7.

Gorracula Stage 5 (Screenplay Completion and the Passage of Time)

So I finished the first draft of Gorracula: A Tale of Science as a screenplay. It ended up a little less zany than I had imagined it when the idea first occurred to me. No Gorilla-fronted rock band, no scenes of him crashing fraternity mixers. But it was still a largely comic horror film. The kind where disbelief is suspended far enough by the middle of the film that when the gorilla sneaks out to see a movie in a trench coat and dark glasses the audience would perhaps only squirm slightly but still maintain enough emotional investment to find the climax compelling.

I sat congratulating myself on finishing it. I went out for a drink with a friend and we toasted an idea begun and completed. It was very nice. But then, as days past and I looked back over it making edits and corrections, I began to feel like a tree fallen in the woods, wondering if I'd made a noise.What's the next step? I wrote a screenplay. Who might care?

I sent it around to outlets and contests advertising for submissions and time passed.

I had another inspiration and began writing a second screenplay more along my own actual cinematic tastes. I imagined it as a mordant surreal social commentary set in a remote 19th century Germanic kingdom. A cross between the wry surrealism of Luis Bunuel and the opulent grotesquerie of Federico Fellini it was about a kingdom under attack and nearly bankrupt that decides to throw a final party for its citizenry before they are invaded. They invite all social classes to the palace and endeavor to use up any and all resources before the enemy can arrive and deprive them of their freedom. But over the course of the night as aristocrats mix with commoners and the military, their pride wounded by the defacto capitulation, become restive, the party begins to self destruct and culminates in a spectacular slapstick blood bath.

I wrote that one too, over the course of the next six moths. And again it was a silent tree fallen in an empty forest. I began to imagine I might one day publish a book of unproduced screenplays and call it "Films not for Production."

Read PT 6.

Gorracula: Stage 4 (Doctor Who Carries Me Through)

List of assests September 2011:
1. Gorracula A Tale of Science 1st full scene.
2. Broad narrative outline and stacks of character notes.
3. Access at local library to four seasons of recent Doctor Who
4. Time

I sat alternating between writing bursts and Doctor Who breaks for the space of a month or so. At first it went slowly. The watch breaks were long and the writing bursts brief. I was not watching it all in order. The library had the seasons split into two-disc packs and very rarely would a full season be checked in at the same time.

So I watched Doctor Who completely out of order. A batch from season one, followed by a few from season three. Then a swing around to four and then back to one. That's how it unfolded for the most of September and it worked as an invigorating diversion that seemed to keep the creative side of my brain energised.

I think the first episodes I saw during that time were the Daleks in Manhattan story arc. I had a rudimentary understanding of the series having seen episodes like Blink and The Lodger and being dropped into stories without complete comprehension is a good way to make the universe of the story seem incredibly vast. You see what's happening and don't know why but look forward to finding the answers. Perhaps as an outgrowth of having to watch things in this way I have come to enjoy the feeling of discovery as all the things you've already seen begin to make more and more sense in the course of watching.

Then finally I got my hands on a complete season. I still had yet to see any of them fully through. I Had most of series one under my belt and then got all of series two in hand having not yet seen any of it.  This may all seem like a digression away from the main narrative of the writing of Gorracula but, at least in its screenplay form, Gorracula is elemtally tied to my experience of watching Doctor Who.

Over the course of watching series two, in the accustomed "Write-watch-write-watch-write" pattern, I banged out two-thirds of the screenplay in about two and a half weeks. I felt like I was writing at a run, ideas formed and materialized on the page alarmingly fast and the time I spent at writing without getting fatigued greatly increased. The energy of creativity and the depth of chemistry and emotion I experienced from that span of episodes was completely inspiring.

This story would mean a lot more if anything had ever come of that screenplay, you know the sort of reminiscence that plays well on the DVD extras, but the fact remains that Doctor Who Series 2, the Rose and 10th doctor arc, powered me like an outboard motor through the process of writing.

I haven't watched it since, waiting for the memory of it to grow dim enough to maybe work like that again.

Read PT 5.