Disclaimer: Feedback Welcome

Except for Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
That might be....slightly less coincidental.

Consider yourself the beta readers to this work of longer fiction.

The electronic media have one distinct advantage over print media: they can be changed very easily. In the blogging medium, a quick edit doesn't require waiting until the next printing comes out, or even a frantic call to change the galley proofs at the last second. It takes two clicks and an edit.

So why wouldn't I take advantage of the particular strengths of this medium?

While certain caliber of broad thematic or content changes to materials already published would border on unethical, I am willing to make smaller changes of clarity and possibly alter the entire direction of the future of the story.

I'm past the "delicate flower" stage of my writing where I need to be brilliant and I can't handle feedback that isn't complimentary. I can't promise to incorporate all feedback, and I may not fully appreciate it if you decide to deliver it as scathingly as possible. I also suggest that for me to fully appreciate your feedback you may want to edit for the use of words like constructival, dispearages, and lazzy, but I welcome all genuine feedback, appreciate the intention with which it is offered, and attempt to incorporate sincere advice into my development.

I don't make enough money to hire an editor (a content editor or a copy editor) and part of this experiment with longer fiction is to see if I can justify the expense. If so, I will go ahead and drop the cash on future longer fiction works (as well as going back and doing a full edit and revision on this and offering BOTH versions for aspiring writers to compare).

Proofreading- I will ALWAYS welcome a copy-edit. You will never ever offend me by pointing out that I've missed a comma or used a homophone. I'm constantly failing to notice that I've used the wrong its/it's or that I'm missing a word. I'll thank you for the catch and make the edit. There are a few exceptions (rules I meant to break, rules that are in dispute, rules I don't consider important) but most of the time, I'm happy to have the help.

Content- Content is trickier to change mid stream, but I am listening. It is possible I will be able to make some small changes that retroactively change content. I may be able to adjust something in mid stream. Or I may have to incorporate feedback into future writing. It really depends on the nature of the feedback. An annoying habit I know I have of overusing parentheticals is not too hard to weed out. Major thematic or stylistic changes would change the whole tone of the piece.

Disclaimer to the disclaimer (on problematic words and positions): The characters in this story are just that–characters. They are not me no matter how sympathetically I may have portrayed them. They are flawed, human, and they do flawed human things. They hold views I do not agree with and some of them express those views with a seductive eloquence. Despite the comedic nature of this work, it should reflect what society is and not what society ought to be. This isn't a morality tale. My hope is that the ideas that I'm critiquing are done so in ways that are subtle enough that they never come across as didactic. (I will fail in this hope, I am quite certain.) But please don't place every voiced opinion into my mouth.

Plus, don't lose hope that some of these characters may come around...or be horribly killed.

Champions of (E)earth.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Champions of dirt Earth earth

by Chris Brecheen

Disclaimer 1 (An experiment in blogging a book)

Disclaimer 2 (Feedback welcome!)

Reminder: All Fiction labeled "by Chris Brecheen" is the exclusive property of Chris Brecheen. It is intended solely for the non-commercial use of visitors to Writing About Writing and may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the express written permission of Chris Brecheen -- with the following single exception:users are permitted to print out a singe copy of the material for their private use. They may, however, under no circumstances whatsoever reproduce or retransmit any such copies in any form or by any means without the express written permission of Chris Brecheen.

Users are welcome (and highly encouraged) to link to any and all pages at Writing About Writing, and to provide the URL for such links to other persons by any and all means. Use of quotes and links is acceptable. As long as such means aren't deplorably violent nor do they exploit narcoleptics or cheese makers.  Users may, however, under no circumstances whatsoever link to any pages at Writing About Writing within so-called "frames" or employing any other format that may mislead users as to the origin and location of Writing About Writing, or that could in any way suggest that the author of these works was anyone other than Chris Brecheen.

Table of Contents

Act Zero 

Act I
Section 1

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

The Next Big Thing

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Anyone following Writing About Writing will, in the next few days, notice the addition of top level menus, disclaimers, and the ground floor of something big. For those on various feeds or e-mail lists I apologize if things get a little "busy" for the next few days. It should die down soon, and all these pages should bloom with content as time goes on.

Those of you paying attention know that I've always wanted to write more fiction, and I've been threatening to put more of it here on W.A.W for a long time. I love blogging about writing, but sometimes, with everything else going on in my life, it does kind of take me away from my fiction. As I've gotten better with time management in the wake of The Contrarian, and my fiction sessions are no longer furtive moments stolen from the insanity of caring for an infant. I can return to many of the long-term goals I have had for my writing instead of just treading water and trying to make it through the next day.

Now that I've basically given up on the traditional publishing industry the question of exactly how I'm going to proliferate and possibly monetize my longer works of fiction has become a question of some concern. I write for myself, of course, but an audience is awesome, and being able to pay the bills would mean I can write more. Of course there is self publishing and e-pub, but I also want to find out if it might be possible to make my writing completely free, save for ads and donations (and hopefully eventually just the donations).

This manuscript is something I wrote the first draft of in high school.

It's probably a manuscript I should bury and chalk up to "a good experience." However, I have a few reasons to put it here on W.A.W. First, even though it's sophomoric to the point of being a little embarrassing, it conforms to the mission statement of Writing About Writing to share the experiences of writing in real time. One of the biggest, most endemic problems among aspiring writers is the perception that writers simply spring forth from genius and "talent." They don't quite understand that years of hard work precede most success stories. The truth is most writers have some horrible first book tucked away that they never could publish and wouldn't want to once they realized how bad it was.

The more important reason is that I want to run an experiment to see how possible it will be to offer my longer fiction as serial posts. If this seems to be successful, I will put more of my fiction up this way and consider e-pub and self-pub as alternatives for those who are willing to drop the extra money to have their own copy.

However, perhaps the most important reason isn't even slightly pragmatic. It is fundamental to me as an artist. I have put this manuscript away in the back of a drawer. Twice. And many are the nights I have woken to the scratching sounds of it trying to get out, its paper claws dragging relentlessly along the inside of the drawer and my mind. I feel like I have to get it out there and I have to get it right, and I'm never going to do the latter if I don't do the former. Somewhere in the twisted landscape of my artistic development, this has become my "first real boss battle."

If my friends were with me, one would hold out their hand to restrain the others and say "We can't help him. He's got to do this on his own."

Since high school, I've completely rewritten this story twice, but it's still pretty rough around the edges. I'll be giving it another major revision (especially since its inception was well before my own social justice consciousness and it has some problematic parts that are going to take a lot of work) and doing my best to polish it.  Though as with all my fiction published here, I welcome suggestions for improvement. That means it's going to come in slowly as I have a chance to revise and polish. I am going to try (with heavy emphasis at this time on TRY) to get a chapter of this uploaded each week, probably on Sunday.

In Memoriam

An entry on Writing About Writing might
be just a tiny bit less impressive than
this memorial.

[This is our latest new menu to go into The Reliquary. Everything in italics will disappear in a few weeks.]

Not every writer we lose can be celebrated here at Writing About Writing, or this blog wouldn't be a whole lot more than Writing About Recently Dead Writers. However, sometimes the light of a writer's words were so bright and so brilliant that the whole world flickers and dims just a tiny amount at their passing. I try to say a few words about such writers, and all those posts will end up here.

Gore Vidal
Nora Ephron
Ray Bradbury
Seamus Heaney
Maya Angelou
Leonard Nimoy
Carrie Fisher
Peak Orangosity

Personal Attax!

Open relationships and sweaty man sex. Constructive Criticism (sort of). It's all about personal hate this week.

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. Most personal attacks will be ignored unless I'm feeling like a masochist.] 

Amr writes:   

You're deplorable. You know it's really not that burdensome to deduce your personal situation involves being in some "open relationship" with a married woman–your parenting blog bio isn't that problematic to find. You are a profligate. Your licentious sexual exploits are contemptible. You are indubitably so supportive of gay marriage because you secretly dream of copulating with other sweaty men.

My reply: 

Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up. I mean I could. I'm pretty imaginative, but if I were writing a self-loathing gay character, I would think that adding "sweaty" was WAY over the line of ham handed characterization.

Amr, I'm guessing we just discovered Thesaurus.com, yes? Or did you honestly think your vocabulary would somehow make me take your comical levels of bigotry seriously?

Source: weirdnutdaily.com

I'm consistently amazed by people who say they are repulsed by my morality and then dig around my blog and even other blogs I write for looking for details of my personal life. Why not just go live your life all moral and shit and quit minding other people's business? Why troll a tiny two bit half bit blog that drops the fucking f-bomb every other word? With all the problems in the world from poverty to war to famine to water shortages, why would you choose to take time and effort out of your day to worry about who I fuck?

Aren't there better ways to spend your clearly overabundant free time?

Or do you have some fantasy I am going to open my inbox, read your tripe, clutch my pearls, and say "Sweet buttlicking Jesus, I never realized how upset my life choices were making Amr. This calls into question....well everything. I must turn over a new leaf!"

Regardless, Amr, you've obviously thought a lot about me and other men. A lot. You can confront your recent preoccupying thoughts of me having sweaty gay sex with a "that's-not-a-moon" sense of growing realization. Or not. Up to you. Personally I would have to subscribe to the exegesis of doctrine or interpolate my own predilection towards non-heteronormative congress in order to concur with your dissection or capitulate to its proscriptions.

And don't go blind looking at that GIF up there.

Amy writes:

Chris Brecheen, in case you're running low on hate, here is a coworker who likes me way more than he should given how much I've told him he sucks. His first name is [redacted]. No, really. 

"Constructival crit for that Brecheen blog you linked me to: So like he dispearages Nano but doesn't do it? Sounds lazzy to me. No reals Aimsters, is this your own blog and you're trying to cause the Twitterati to bunch its pantaloons into an ante diem bunch? I'd fuck you happy silly if you say yes. Or no. Either way..." [sic–like the whole thing]

My reply:

There are a couple of reasons I don't do a lot more hate mail here on Writing About Writing, and I promise that it's not because I don't get enough. I've got e-mail here from people who literally compare me to the Antichrist and Hitler (combined) because I think prescriptive grammar is elitist, not to mention the death threats I've gotten for having the temerity to stop someone from harassing a woman who was begging to be left alone.

Hate mail even does very well compared to other topics I tackle here on The Mailbox.

The first reason I don't do more of it is that even though replying to most hate mail is delicious and strangely sadistic, it takes the focus off of writing. I want to talk about how setting works with theme or how characterization moves plot. I want to talk about the creative process and the passion and fire that moves us all to write even if we can't be rich bestsellers. I don't want to get quagmired in snarkfests with people who couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing the first time round.

The second reason is that most of it looks like this.

I'm not sure if Mr. Name Redacted ate a bunch of Scrabble tiles and decided to write an e-mail consisting solely of arguments he shat out the next day (and, if so, you have to admire the chutzpah of someone willing to shamelessly add all those extraneous letters to various words just to use up all the tiles), but this sort of inarticulate tripe is usually what I'm up against when the hate mail hits.

This is what I got from Googling "Constructival."
So maybe this guy rolled a 20 to strike and
that's what "Constructival Crit" means:
decapitation by New Years Eve paper plate!

You see, I'm not sure in what world this might be considered constructive criticism (or "constructival crit" in this case). Most of this seems to be trying to get Amy (or Aimsters as she's referred to by those she dislikes) to admit that my blog is really her own blog, surreptitiously designed to get something known as the Twitterati–which I'm guessing from context is sort of like the secret cabal of people who really run the world....on Twitter–to bunch up its pants because it doesn't like the day. It is possible that anti-diem is a filk on carpe diem even though the carpe is the grabbing part. In which case, I'm guessing the meaning here is that Aimsters is secretly blogging under the name Chris Brecheen in order to convince the secret masters of the universe on Twitter to take no risks.

I think.

And apparently whether that is or isn't her intended goal, our friend here will fuck her "happy silly." Happy silly is much better than sad silly when you're getting fucked (and don't even start me on angry silly), so she's got that going for her, at least. Still, I can't help but get the sneaking suspicion that the game might be rigged since the last half of this e-mail basically has nothing to do with constructival crit and is instead saying that Aimsters is getting fucked whether she was machiavellian in her stratagems or not.

Really the only claim of substance in this whole constructival crit is that I "dispearagers" Nano but don't do it, and that this makes me lazzy.

Well, first of all, who doesn't feel lazzy from time to time? Amirite?

Dispearage! Get it?

Mostly though, I doubt our fine redacted friend here, or the general throngs of people who send me this sort of shat-Scrabble tile hate mail, really even have the reading skill to keep up with the counterpoint if I took the time and energy to make it. It would literally be a waste of the calories it takes to press down on the laptop keys.

But since I'm indulging all kinds of mindlessness for Blogust...I shall preserve.

Redacted, I'm a lot of things–a writer of questionable quality, horribly redundant, terrible at not procrastinating, in desperate need of an editor–but lazy isn't really one of them. I have 844 articles in a little less than two and a half years. Hopefully you're better at math than you are at writing, but if not, that breaks down to about 900 days. Basically I average less than one day off a week. I work 60+ hours when I'm not teaching, and that usually adds 8-25 hours to my schedule depending on how many classes I have.

Further, if you'd bothered to read the article you took one look at the headline of before deciding that I was "lazzy," you would know that I have done NaNoWriMo. In fact, I've done it several times. (Four times as of this writing.) It's not that I don't see the benefit; it's that I see, all too often, the downsides. My attempt to bring nuance and perspective to an event when its fans have become rabid and reactionary to the slightest criticism is hard enough when I'm not trying to deal with someone who has difficulty with things like sentences and words.

Soon.

The Very Basics

Not everyone is ready to dive into the subtle nuances of word choice's affect on tone or the difference between close and distant narration. Some people need to know what's the difference between first person and third or what irony means. Before we can appreciate the subtle ways in which a good setting echoes the theme, it might be important to know what both of those things are. Before we can talk about how effective it can be to have the direct characterization through a focalizer be in conflict with the indirect characterization of dialogue, it's going to be important to know what focalizers, indirect and direct characterization, and dialogue are.

These are articles with some of the very basics. For the starting writer, the vet who wants to brush up on the fundamentals, or just the old hand who isn't sure they know what everything is called, these articles will help spell out some of the things experienced writers sometimes assume all writers know.

Point of View
The Very Basics of Submitting
Writing Query Letters

Types of Editing

August Poll: Best Collaborative Book

What is the best multi-author book?  

Our August poll is live.

Everything that was given at least one second made our poll. Everyone will get four (4) votes.

Our resident Pratchett fan is already working behind the scenes to stuff the ballot box in favor of Good Omens, so if you have a clear favorite (that isn't Good Omens), you might want to try to whip up some support.

The poll itself is long and black and at the bottom left of the side widgets.

Also, please don't forget that the program I use for polling will forget your IP address after one week. You can get in multiple votes, and since I can't stop it, I might as well fold it into the logistics.

Vote early! Vote often!