Blog

Just FYI, I have spent much of my holiday vacation working diligently to migrate articles from my old blog to the new site. You can now see posts dating back as far as 2004 in the archives. I encourage any and all new readers to check them out. The old site will no longer be generally accessible.

I’ll be getting back to work on writing The Desert Spear tomorrow. I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. Stay tuned for some major (and awesome!) announcements in the life of Peat.

Posted on December 27, 2007 at 9:16 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life, Writing
Comments Off on Classic Peephole

It’s weird, asking for vacation time when you’re your own boss.

I promised myself a few weeks ago to always write more each week than the week before. Last week I was up to 8046 words. Not horrible, if nothing to be impressed by. This week I was determined to hit 9K, even with Christmas shopping to do and appointments to keep and a house to clean before guests arrived.

I was on schedule until Thursday, when I essentially finished the last section of the current story arc I was working on, and was left unsure of where to start next. Keep working on the same character? Go back to a different one and examine what I’ve already written? Start a new POV?

There are so many threads to a novel, I feel like a juggler trying to keep up with them sometimes. Usually, it means I need to step back and get some perspective.

So I did. I spent most of the day on Thursday looking at the book as a whole. I moved chapters around to give rhythm to the POV shifts, and integrated some ideas more fully into the plot. I cut some plot points that were no longer needed, and added some better ones. I spent hours working, but at the end of the day, I had added a measly 410 words. Less than a third of my already modest daily quota. Not to mention that I had friends coming over for several days, and relatives to visit for the holidays next week, when I would need to produce OVER 9000 words.

I realized then that I was being insane. I was invalidating a day’s work because it didn’t adhere to some arbitrary measurement. More than that, I was about to cast a pall on my own holidays because I refused to let myself have time off.

If I were still working my day job, I would have fully expected the company to close early on Friday, and stay that way until after Christmas. I probably would have taken a few vacation days, too. If my boss suggested otherwise, or tried to deny my vacation, I would have taken it amiss.

And yet, here I was, perfectly willing to do that same thing to myself. Why?

So I’m giving myself a few days off. If I feel the writing bug, I’ll squash it here, on Peephole, and let the book sit and rest a bit. It’s not going anywhere. maybe I’ll keep importing old articles into the archives.

Happy holidays!

Posted on December 22, 2007 at 5:18 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings, Writing
2 Comments »

Despite several major upheavals in my personal life, and a long period of adjustment to my new lifestyle, I have finally managed to get my writing back on track.

Writing full time is weird. Sometimes, it feels like like it is always the weekend. Other times, it feels like it never is. I vacillate between feeling like I am never at work, and feeling like I never LEAVE work. I have complete freedom to goof off and/or deal with issues and projects in my personal life, but I know I better not overdo it, because I have deadlines, and I want to show that I can meet them, even if a lot of authors don’t. Because of this, my attention span for things like TV, books, and movies, is seriously damaged. I feel this huge sense of guilt if I’m not writing, even when I feel creatively burnt out, and need a recharge and influx of someone else’s creativity to inspire me.

A couple of weeks ago I made an oath to write 5,000 words in a week (really, a very modest goal). I thought I had, but a word count later put me at 4977. Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, perhaps, but I was very angry with myself. I promised to do better the next week, and each week after, until I leveled out.

Last week I definitely did better, coming in at 7151 by midnight Saturday. This week I had a lot of distractions, but I powered through most of them and was ahead of schedule most of the week. So far I am at 7169, more than last week, and I still have today to knock out some more. I want to hit 8K at least.

I think part of the reason I’ve been slow up till now was that there were sections of the story I was avoiding. The violent, horrible parts. It’s one thing to write action. I find that effortless most of the time. But there is a difference between action, where your hero(ine) gets in a fight or a fix and manages to get out of it, and… what I call tempering.

Tempering is all the horrible things you have to do to your hero(ine) in order to make them strong enough, driven enough, focused enough, to stand up to the trials you have in store. Spider-man lost his uncle because of his own greed and selfishness. Batman watched his parents murdered before his eyes. Frodo has to flee everything he loves and is stabbed on Weathertop.

I am a big believer in tempering. I think a hero needs to be special. They need to have something that other people in the world don’t have, and more than that, I think they need to EARN it. A lot of authors skip the tempering. Their hero(ine)s are just special because they are special, no further explanation necessary. They fell ass-backwards into power and the thick of things, tripping over a genie lamp or finding the magic belt of whatsis, and they’re ready for their adventure. You can tell a passable story that way, but it can never be as satisfying as one where you let the reader invest in the character through their failures and watch them learn and grow and become the kind of person that can’t just be pushed around.

But that said, when I have lovingly created a character, and I know they are a good person with hopes and dreams and loves, it hurts me as much as anyone to kill their parents, or have them beaten, or raped, or scarred. To starve them, or have them betrayed by those they trust most. To turn my back on them when they are left crying in the dirt, naked and bloody. Even when it’s for their own good. Even when I know there’s a storm coming, and they won’t survive it unless they’re at the top of their game, tempered by suffering and pain, dedicated to their goals to the exclusion of all else.

It makes me feel like the parent who intentionally gives their kid chicken pox when they’re young so they don’t get it when they’re old.

At World Fantasy a couple of months ago, George RR Martin discussed how hard it was for him to write the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords. If you’ve read his Song of Fire and Ice series, you know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, shame on you. Get to it.

Anyway, a fan asked if it was hard to write the scene, because she was so upset by it she threw the book across the room and cried for a long time before she could pick it up again and continue reading. He replied that he finished the entire 900+ page book before writing that scene, because he kept putting it off; it was too emotional, even for him.

“But that’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. “I’m not trying to tell you a cozy story. I’m trying to mess with your emotions and make you really FEEL what’s happening in this world.”

No one tempers like Martin. Not everyone can write on that level, but I feel we should all aspire to.

Posted on December 15, 2007 at 10:33 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Writing
5 Comments »

Fucking Maynard, man. Dude’s a genius.

Hmm. You may not be familiar with what I’m talking about. Allow me to back up.

Sometime in college, my friend Jeremy introduced me to a band called Tool, fronted by Maynard James Keenan, who wrote all the lyrics and music, as well. Maynard was a weird guy. He never allowed himself to be seen without some kind of disguise, even on stage. One time, he came out all painted blue (see pic above). I was at that show. Bizarre.

Anyway, this was sometime before the hit single “Sober” came out, with that creepy stop-motion animation video with all the raw meat. Jeremy mailed (yes, physically mailed, this was before they invented e-mail) me a cassette tape (remember those?) with Tool’s first album, Undertow, and their EP Opiate.

I played the crap out of those albums. Seriously. All the fucking time. They were so damn good, with complex lyrics that explored the harshness of reality and emotion without censorship or shame. It was such a sharp deviation to the Seattle Alternative Rock craze that dominated the music scene at the time. Not to put down Pearl Jam or Nirvana here, but I always liked my music a little… harsher than that. Tool really delivered. Their energy is much more brutal, and the beats and lyrics remind me of the darker side of testosterone, the side I can never really explain to my wife.

The side that likes Fight Club.

Those Tool albums were like the first CD’s I bought when I broke down and got a CD player not long after that. As a poor college student, buying a CD of a band you already own on tape is a big statement. Tool became a staple of my music collection, and I would frequently play it in the background when I was writing, or playing Dungeons and Dragons, or reading fantasy novels.

They put out their next album years later, just after college ended, and I remember it in the context of “The album I was listening to during the Underdark D&D campaign.” That was the campaign where I created Aldun Orion, the fantasy character that would go on to star in first two full novels I ever wrote: Heart’s Guard, and Snowcrest.

And while I was writing those novels, I was listening to those Tool albums, plus Maynard’s “side project”, A Perfect Circle, and their first album, Mer de Noms. Perfect Circle is thematically different in a lot of ways from Tool, but just as deep, just as moving, but also had a fantasy element, using references like “Sleeping Beauty” and adding a heavy religion theme. It was really perfect for the type of writing I was doing.

Tool and A Perfect Circle had each released another album by the time I started working heavily on The Painted Man. I can’t even tell you how much of that book is written while thumping my head rhythmically to Lateralus and Thirteenth Step.

A Perfect Circle put out an anti-war cover album, eMotive, right before the 2004 election. Like everything at the time, it was politicized and demonized and trashed, but it really is a solid creative work. That carried me a while, as did a single called “Rev 22:20” by Maynard under the name Pusicfer that was on the soundtrack to the movie Underworld, again showing a fantasy bent towards their work.

I just found out a couple weeks ago from my buddy Jay Franco that over the last few months, Maynard released a flood of work from his Puscifer project; an album and 2 EP’s. Needless to say, I bought them immediately.

And like a chameleon, Maynard has once again delivered an amazing piece of art totally different from the other things he has done. I think that is why I respect him so much as an artist. He keeps pushing in new directions, trying to play with the emotions people don’t use quite so much. The ones that make you uncomfortable, but leave you feeling cleansed when it’s over. This is something I am always reaching for in my own work. I don’t want to keep writing the same book over and over, like many authors do.

How amazing and wonderful it is, then, that now, as I am embarking on a full-time creative career, the artist who has musically inspired so much of my work is helping me along once again.

(He’s got help, of course. Maybe I’ll post again soon about music no one cares about but me!)

Posted on December 14, 2007 at 9:36 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Musings
13 Comments »

I think like plotting more than prose. I love, love, love making bulleted lists about a story’s plot and what is happening, putting in details about what the characters are feeling and their motivations, designing exciting moments in their lives and then arranging them in order with little “connector” points showing how they drift from one Moment in their lives to the next.

When I am plotting, I feel myself humming with creative energy. I see little movie scenes in my minds eye, and write down keywords and mental tags so that I can recall the scenes again later. Sometimes I am writing so fast my hands are a blur and I am making all sorts of typos and I don’t care because I want to know what happens next as much as anyone. More. I put a character through their paces, see where the adventure leads, shave out the irrlevancies, and put it all in order. It’s like a rollercoaster ride that ends in the satisfaction of finishing a jigsaw puzzle.

Writing prose is MUCH harder. You agonize over every word, and find yourself tripped up over things like “what’s that post you tie your horse to called?” or “What’s the design schematic of the outhouse the character gets locked in?” Prose is a lot more work, and yet, in many ways, it is LESS creative than plotting. It’s satisfying when it’s over, but as Myke once said, it’s a bit like sawing your own leg off: It takes a LONG time, and it hurts a LOT.

The most enjoyable is when I plot IN prose. This keeps the thrill of creative energy flowing, keeping my attention focused. However, the problems of that method, which I used for many years and eventually abandoned, are twofold:

One is that when I am making up a story while I’m writing it, there is a real danger of going off-track. I want to explore some little side road, write several pages I like, and then look back and realize it took the story off focus and it needs to be scrapped. So now I have several pages of prose I really like that I can’t use. I can either include them anyway, knowing they distract from the overall thrust of the story, or relegate them to the limbo of my “deleted scenes” file, where they will probably never see the light of day. That time Arlen wandered into an abandoned building, only to find it was now a den for a hungry wolf pack, was awesome, but no one but me and a couple of test readers ever got to see it.

As an aside, if I ever get famous one day and someone other than my friends and family starts going to this website, I hope to make a “deleted scenes” page, giving people a chance to read some of those little side stories and tangents. Kind of like special features on a DVD. Naomi Novik does it, and Naomi Novik rocks the Casbah.

Hey, did I mention that my editor at Voyager is also Naomi Novik’s editor? Like me, she is signed with Del Rey in the US and Voyager in the UK. How fricken cool is that?

See what I mean about going off on tangents? I should have plotted this blog entry out with a bulleted list first…

The other problem with plotting in prose is that I plot MUCH faster than I write, and eventually the plot in my mind gets so far ahead of the prose on the screen that I have no choice but to stop and make another bulleted plot list, lest I forget something.

And then it’s back to square one.

Posted on December 2, 2007 at 9:31 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
7 Comments »