First things first: I owe a great apology to the beta readers whose time I wasted, among other sins, on a book that just evaporated on me. I will name them and beg their forgiveness at the proper point in the narrative, but believe me, I am deeply sorry, deeply embarrassed, have learned my lesson, and will trouble no one else with my half-realized projects again.
Since the completion of Beyond the Rails II this past February, I have been engaging in a running conversation on this site, and a few others, about returning to writing, and what the next project would be. Through it all, I have been unable to make anything "take," that is, to get traction in my imagination and take off, bloom, blossom, soar to the self-sustaining level of interest that becomes a completed book. Daphne Du Maurier tells us that
Since the completion of Beyond the Rails II this past February, I have been engaging in a running conversation on this site, and a few others, about returning to writing, and what the next project would be. Through it all, I have been unable to make anything "take," that is, to get traction in my imagination and take off, bloom, blossom, soar to the self-sustaining level of interest that becomes a completed book. Daphne Du Maurier tells us that
"Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty . . . like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again."
I am here to tell you, that lady knew of what she spoke! Since I typed "The End" at the bottom of BtR2, I have been floundering in a way that hasn't been the case since my eighteen-year old self decided to write the great American science fiction novel. Of course, no less a master than T.S. Eliot prescribes a cure:
"Writing everyday is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it."
Hasn't worked so far. The more I try to "bring it," the more gets left behind. The obvious next project was Beyond the Rails III. I found myself bored and completely blocked. Looking at the stories it seemed that anything I told was going to be a simple repetition of an earlier story; heck, I had even come close to that in BtR2. It needed revamping. I looked at having the crew accept employment for the governor-general as his eyes, ears, and occasional transportation in matters of state. Couldn't force Monroe into a situation where he would throw himself into service on behalf of the government that had unjustly ruined his career. My next thought was to bring back Jinx, a mysterious Australian roustabout, from the first book and have her lead them into service as a group of secret agents. Trouble there? What supervillain could find anything to do in the backwaters of Kenya that the Crown would even notice, let alone feel threatened by. I tried again to expand them into a novel, but once again found that characters and situations designed for short stories (TV shows) rarely make a successful jump to the novel format (movies).
Perhaps a new project... I looked into some other genres, but none held the attraction for me that steampunk does, and the fact is that over the course of fifty-odd years of writing, I've tried most all of them without a hint of success. So I returned to the world of goggles and gears, and outlined a world in which a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-style organization works to counter threats to the established world order, threats from anarchists, mad scientists, utopians, and power-mad villains bent on world domination. Those beta readers will recognize the plot from The Darklighters in this paragraph, and now is the time to apologize to them by name, and thank them for their service.
They are my writing.com buddy Amy; the matchless Arabella; Bonnie and Sidra Tyler, Kent Edward Whittington; Naomi Rawle; Patrick Wells; Steve Moore; and William J. Jackson. Some of these people are authors, some are bloggers, at least one is a teacher. All of their time is important, and I apologize to them individually and collectively for wasting it on a project that I ran with prematurely. I can't give it back; I can and do promise that I will waste no more of it.
During these conversations about the missing muse, I speculated that perhaps becoming an author was an item on a subconscious bucket list that, once checked off, was put in the wake, never to be revisited again. This still could be the case, but I have sat down and coldly calculated on an almost mathematical basis what is the best possible story for me to write. Here are the minutes of that meeting:
The forty acre patch of Earth that I know more intimately than any other is San Diego, California, and its immediate surroundings. The only genre in which I have ever had any writing success is steampunk. Conventional, traditional steampunk ties an author to the last about two-thirds of the nineteenth century. As it happens, during the later portion of the nineteenth century, San Diego south of Market Street was home to one of the toughest red-light districts on the Pacific Rim. Throughout its civilized existence, from Spanish rule, to Mexican, to the present day, San Diego has been known by the name bestowed by the early explorers, but to a generation of sailors arriving on trade winds from the Orient or braving the howling gales of Cape Horn, it has been known by the name of that particular district: Stingaree.
Anybody see where I'm going with this? If I can't write this story in this time and place, then it is pretty much settled: I'm finished as an author. That isn't something I want to find out, and though I'm almost afraid to, I'm going to start. There will be no beta readers, no advance copies, no weekly updates on this blog. I'm going to hold to the advice by Anne Tyler and Norman Mailer that I recently cited, that sharing a developing idea causes it to evaporate; that certainly happened on my last half-dozen projects, and I won't invite that particular gremlin to visit me again. I will either present you with a finished book sometime around next spring, or I'll never write another one. While I wait to see which one it will be, I offer a few pictures of San Diego in the late nineteenth century, including one taken in Stingaree by a photographer who was tough enough or clever enough to escape with his camera!
Perhaps a new project... I looked into some other genres, but none held the attraction for me that steampunk does, and the fact is that over the course of fifty-odd years of writing, I've tried most all of them without a hint of success. So I returned to the world of goggles and gears, and outlined a world in which a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-style organization works to counter threats to the established world order, threats from anarchists, mad scientists, utopians, and power-mad villains bent on world domination. Those beta readers will recognize the plot from The Darklighters in this paragraph, and now is the time to apologize to them by name, and thank them for their service.
They are my writing.com buddy Amy; the matchless Arabella; Bonnie and Sidra Tyler, Kent Edward Whittington; Naomi Rawle; Patrick Wells; Steve Moore; and William J. Jackson. Some of these people are authors, some are bloggers, at least one is a teacher. All of their time is important, and I apologize to them individually and collectively for wasting it on a project that I ran with prematurely. I can't give it back; I can and do promise that I will waste no more of it.
During these conversations about the missing muse, I speculated that perhaps becoming an author was an item on a subconscious bucket list that, once checked off, was put in the wake, never to be revisited again. This still could be the case, but I have sat down and coldly calculated on an almost mathematical basis what is the best possible story for me to write. Here are the minutes of that meeting:
The forty acre patch of Earth that I know more intimately than any other is San Diego, California, and its immediate surroundings. The only genre in which I have ever had any writing success is steampunk. Conventional, traditional steampunk ties an author to the last about two-thirds of the nineteenth century. As it happens, during the later portion of the nineteenth century, San Diego south of Market Street was home to one of the toughest red-light districts on the Pacific Rim. Throughout its civilized existence, from Spanish rule, to Mexican, to the present day, San Diego has been known by the name bestowed by the early explorers, but to a generation of sailors arriving on trade winds from the Orient or braving the howling gales of Cape Horn, it has been known by the name of that particular district: Stingaree.
Anybody see where I'm going with this? If I can't write this story in this time and place, then it is pretty much settled: I'm finished as an author. That isn't something I want to find out, and though I'm almost afraid to, I'm going to start. There will be no beta readers, no advance copies, no weekly updates on this blog. I'm going to hold to the advice by Anne Tyler and Norman Mailer that I recently cited, that sharing a developing idea causes it to evaporate; that certainly happened on my last half-dozen projects, and I won't invite that particular gremlin to visit me again. I will either present you with a finished book sometime around next spring, or I'll never write another one. While I wait to see which one it will be, I offer a few pictures of San Diego in the late nineteenth century, including one taken in Stingaree by a photographer who was tough enough or clever enough to escape with his camera!
Until we meet again, read well, and write better!
