Serial vs. unstructured writing

Lately I’ve been getting more and more into the idea of serials, and perhaps even seriously podcasting audiobook/audiodrama versions of serial fiction. I’m actually contemplating finding other writers and voice-over people and actually getting into serious online publishing. The internet seems like a fertile place for serial fiction, especially following the model of a lot of the old pulp style productions. After all, there’s almost no cost at all to just hosting a website and posting podcasts, then publishing the final audiobooks and ebooks online.

Most recently I’ve been spending a lot of time editing and doing some rewriting for my NaNoWriMo novel, and I’m tweaking the structure of it to fit better with audiobook or serial publishing. At first it had the kind of fractal structure where the basic rise and fall of the action was mirrored all the way down from having four major plot points or scenes in a chapter, four chapters per act, four acts per book, and all the way up to having four books in this series eventually. Of course, since I wasn’t intending to serialize it at first, each chapter segment was a somewhat arbitrary and random length, ranging from 800 to nearly 2000 words. The longest chapter was about 6k words, the shortest about 4k. I’ve recut some scenes, rewritten some others, and eventually gotten a much steadier pace. 1200-1800 words per section. Judging from my experience with doing the Saving Christmas audiobook, these will make for a good 6-10 minutes of audio each.

I honestly don’t know if this will end up being an improvement or detriment to the story. It definitely changes the flow to a much steadier pace. And it’s forced me to flesh out some sections that were a bit more skeletal than they should have been, while trimming back or moving some other scenes that made another section too full. But I’m happy with what I’ve done so far, so hopefully that counts for something.

Unfortunately, if I only do a weekly post/podcast with the chapters in quarters, that means it will take 64 weeks to get the entire thing out. That’s more than a year of podcasting, just for one novel. Doing two or three chapters a week would leave each week with hanging chapter bits, unresolved plots, and generally wouldn’t fit the shape of the story well. So if I am going to podcast it, the only real option would be to do an entire chapter a week.

I’ve been tooling around with the idea of actually doing up to seven daily podcasts, one for each day of the week focusing on a different genre of pulp-style storytelling. However, since I go to school full time and work part time, I simply wouldn’t have the time to do them all myself. Which means that I would definitely want to find other writers and voice-over people to work with. Writers who enjoy working within the structure of serial fiction, making self-enclosed bits short enough to fit well into a short audiobook/audiodrama snippet, but make up a part of a larger whole. Voice-over people who enjoy either doing storytelling style narration or doing character voices for audiodrama.

At the moment, all I’d really have to do to get started is to find a few people to work with who share an interest in these things. People who don’t mind taking a risk on doing some work that may or may not actually earn any money. Pick a few possible days/genres to start. And go with it.

And there’s the rub right there. I’d love to actually get into a solid, serious bit of publishing online. Something that will connect readers/listeners with writers, and let them share what they make and enjoy. Serial fiction is growing on the internet. But so far, few people have been able to actually make any money with it. I want to help writers get paid. I think trying an approach like this, podcasting, then selling the final books/seasons/whatever you want to call them to the people who enjoyed them as they were broadcast. Not too dissimilar to how TV stations make extra money by selling season boxed sets of DVDs after the season finishes.

I know I’m going to get into publishing in some way, shape, or form eventually. Since I also do role playing game design, I will have to find some way to get my role playing sourcebooks published. So I am going to have some kind of publishing company, even if it’s just a company name with only me behind it, to publish. Why not get a jump on things by starting now with the fiction that I have ready to go, instead of waiting until I have finished and fully tested role playing games?

I don’t have particularly good spam filters for my site at the moment, so I haven’t been allowing any comments. So if you are a writer interested in bringing back a modern version of pulp serial fiction and/or voice over artist interested in narrating, acting, or hosting a show and you are interested, find me on twitter or facebook.

I haven’t gone into great detail about some of the ideas I have for my podcast and publishing here, just a general overview. I don’t want to put my entire business idea out there for someone better equipped than I to steal and beat me to the punch. But I have started putting out some feelers to other writers to see if people are interested, so I figured it would be best to at least lay a few cards on the table here on my personal website.

I’ve been neglecting my blog…

but not my writing. After NaNoWriMo, I managed to keep the momentum going for a bit. I was still writing Saving Christmas: Slay Bells, which has now finished. Right up until I got a nasty cold that killed my voice I was recording audiobook chapters, and I’m just now getting back into that. I’m really enjoying doing audiobook serial installments, to the point where I’ve been considering doing a regular podcast of whatever it is that I’m writing.

I’ve been continuing to work on Murder Most Fowl as well, although that’s going a bit slower than I had originally intended. I think I’m going to start releasing it along with an audiobook version at the same time. That way I can use the audiobook recording as a way of editing it before releasing it, much like I had been doing with Saving Christmas up until I got that cold.

And, since it’s been almost two months now, I think it’s time for me to get back into my NaNoWriMo novel and work on finishing the last two chapters, and doing rewrites for all of the previous ones.

This could end up being a lot of work that I make for myself.

It could also end up being well worth the effort.

NaNoWriMo is DoneForNow

I didn’t finish the novel itself, and I’m taking a little breather before I dive back in and do the ending. I got 7/8ths of the way through my outline, which put me at about 71,000 words if I recall correctly. So I ‘won’ NaNo, but I still haven’t finished my first novel.

Still, I am taking a breather on that to keep up with my serials. My fan fiction updated four times this week, and I decided to do a big shocker on my return to that. My favorite review so far on that work is just one word: “WHOA!”

And I’ve managed to keep Saving Christmas: Slay Bells updated once a week, save for Thanksgiving week which I felt was an inappropriate time to update it. I didn’t have the free time to record the audiobook for the last two chapters, so I’m hoping to catch up with that. And I’m hoping to make audiobook recording a more normal thing, because I’m thinking about podcasting all of my serial work. It probably won’t happen for at least a few weeks, possibly not until the new year. But I’ve got a decent microphone now, and I’m getting a feel for it.

So, I’m backing off from the grind of NaNo to get my nose back in line for the grind of… well, everything else I’ve been working on lately. :)

Halfway through my first novel

This last chapter was actually fairly emotionally draining. Understandable, since it’s a four act structure, and this was the high point of the middle of the book. For a cheesy adventure about pirates, this book is dealing with some serious shit. The chapter started with battle, and ended with a marriage and a funeral.

A birthday update…

On my birthday, I managed to finish editing and uploading the fourth audiobook chapter of Saving Christmas: Slay Bells, and finish Chapter 3 of my NaNoWriMo project, which put me at just over 15,000 words.

The next day I had expected to have a full day at home to work. But I got a call from my boss, asking me to come in and cover a shift. I needed the money, so I said yes. I didn’t get home until about 4:30 in the afternoon.

By I had finished chapter 4, which put me at just over 20,000 words. The first act of my NaNoWriMo project is done. After only getting back into writing for about two months, I’ve managed to write over 95,000 words split among various project. Although, I do have to admit, I may have cheated a bit and reused a few words here and there.

I hope I can keep up this pace, because my outline puts my NaNoWriMo project at a little over 80,000 words. And I would very much like to finish it before the post-Thanksgiving rush at my day job.

First NaNoWriMo workblog update

I finished my first chapter yesterday. Unfortunately, I realized that I had to jam two scenes together, because each one really was just half of a whole. Which meant that I was lacking an ending scene for Chapter 2.

Then I realized that the whole scene worked better to end Chapter 2 anyway. So I started today off by moving it to Chapter 2, and writing another ending scene to Chapter 1. Which was okay, because I was missing something to bridge the two chapters together anyway. 😛 And then I ended up moving a couple of scenes around in Chapter 1 to make it flow better. Which I know I shouldn’t be doing, I should be writing, not moving scenes around. But copy and paste is quick, and I can’t walk away from something without fixing it.

In the end, I just had to realize that my outline was just that. An outline. A guideline for writing the novel itself.

So now I have chapter two a quarter done before I’ve even started writing it. And Chapter 1 is much better, smoother, self contained, and metes out a better flow of information to the reader about the characters and setting than it did in the outline.

Zombar and Tavern

I was wiping down the counter at the bar when a group of zombies came in. A few of them wrinkled their noses when they got here, which was a little weird.

“Oh man… smells like somebody died in here,” said one of them.

Oh great. Not real zombies. Just what we needed. Still, it’s best to be polite.

“Can I get you fellows anything? The headcheese on rye is the special today.”

“Um… can I just get a coke. With a straw. Don’t want to have to redo my latex.”

I leaned forward and said, fairly quietly, “You boys realize that this is a zombie bar, right?”

“Yeah, we’re just on break. The director said we should check out a real zombie bar before we get back to shooting. He wants it to be a realistic as possible.”

I snorted. I’d heard that the crew of Dead/Alive 3: Back for More was going to be filming a few scenes here in town. I didn’t realize that they were hiring human extras to be zombies. That’s what I get for not paying attention to the news.

I took the rest of their orders. Mostly just drinks. Apparently the lead makeup artist was a bit of a terror, and none of the extras wanted to incur his wrath. I was about to suggest a table on the side of the room closest to the door, but before I could, one of the group wandered into the middle of the room and snagged the table

Every half-rotted eye in the room was on them. And they were oblivious.

Buster, one of the bigger regulars, staggered over to their table. It was hard to tell if he was angry, since most of his facial muscles weren’t connected to anything. “What you think… you… humans… doing?”

I was surprised that he remembered to lift his pitch at the end of the sentence to signify that it was a question. His speech center is decayed enough that tonality usually escapes him. He must have been thinking long and hard about what to ask before he stumbled over there.

“You have… human… face. You wear zombie face. Why?”

The one with the coke swallowed nervously. “Umm… we’re in a movie. We’re extras in the movie.”

“Buster know about movie. Buster went to cas-ting a-gent. Cas-ting a-gent says Buster is too dumb to take direction. Buster think that director is too dumb to direct zombies.”

“They were just looking for people in the background to play zombies.”

I could see Buster stiffen, or at least the parts of him that still worked stiffened. “Hey! That… our word. You say different-ly anim-ated.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know… he said it a minute ago,” the guy said as he pointed at me.

“He works with us. He knows us. He allowed to. You. You wear zombie face. You pretend to be us in film where zombies not allowed. You not allowed to. Is our word.”

“Sorry, man. We just got hired to play parts, that’s all.” The guy looked genuinely nervous. I think it just hit him that he was surrounded by actual zombies. And they didn’t seem to like him much.

Buster leaned down to eye level with him, and I saw the guy trying not to recoil. Also trying not to breathe through his nose. Buster grinned, a horrific sight to see from a distance, let alone up close.

“Look at him. He thinks we going to eat his brains.”

There was a general chorus of ‘brains’ from around the room.

“Buster not want tiny snack,” Buster said as he walked away.

The group of humans filtered out the door. I sent a bowl of chicken ganglia to Buster’s table. On the house.