FULL BLEED: LITTLE ORPHANS IN THE SNOW

Maybe you heard the news. Finished another novel a couple days ago. Trying to remember whether this is number ten or eleven. There’s four I can’t really count even though I wrote ‘em. Maybe those names will get counted one day. Not today for sure. So yeah, that’s My Gifts Are Hungry printed and waiting markup.

I say “finished” knowing full well that there’s an edit pass. This serves a couple purposes. One, it makes me experience the book in reader time, ie over a course of hours (over a few days likely). This lets me catch the “Oh I love that phrase so much I’m going to use it five times in the course of a book” level of problems. I’ll tweak wording and probably know what I meant a scene to actually do so that I can rebalance it. Yes, sometimes I write stuff just to get the ball going and it stays in there. That’s why there’s rewrites.

I also use these to make sure that what was happening at the end, after the course of several realizations in the writing, is led to by what happens in the beginning. Is that writing the end first? Kinda? “But that’s cheating!” Oh go dry up. Everyone reading a book knows that it didn’t happen as they’re experiencing it, right? It’s all already happened even if it’s being revealed to the reader a sentence at a time.

Physicists talk about block time, which they say must be the way things are because of things like relativity and non-locality. Block time is the belief that everything, and I mean everything, has already happened and we’re lonely living through a slice of it at a time. That sneeze that happened just now which made the cat jump off your lap and claw you half to death in surprise? Yeah. That was waiting there for you. You just didn’t know it yet. Everything that’s going to happen already has down to the heat death of the entire universe.

Yeah, it doesn’t really track for me, either. There’s that whole free will problem etc etc. Or it’s just a shortcoming of the metaphor with which physicists are trying to describe, ah, everything.

Now, the only time you really get block time is in a book or a movie (and even those can bounce around, whereas block time is strictly linear.) But for the sake of argument, let’s leave it as books are primarily linear narratives. What’s yet to happen on that last page is already set in stone. Yes, we’ve tried choose your own adventures and hypertexts and other forms to try and nod to agency and they don’t end up like any other story, do they? You’re just replaying something at that point. But books are already set (though, again, they may choose to be nonlinear or try to describe simultaneity between multiple people or any other number of formalist pretzel twists to avoid being anything other than a linear narrative. How boring. How de rigeur.) So the order they’re written in doesn’t really much matter. Write the end first and then carefully engineer every single word and line to point to that ending.

Which of course gets you a dead plot. Maybe one with so many things lining up that it feels unreal (derogatory.) The last time I really ran into this was The Martian, which was heaped with so many things just needing to happen exactly the way they did that it didn’t feel written so much as laid out. I’ve seen it in some comics, too. Where the conclusion was so contrived that okay yeah, whatever, let’s just check in again next month.

I try to strike a balance between organic unfolding (that’s what the outline stage is for) and constructed (it’s nice when the ending makes some degree of sense.) But it’s gotta breathe. You’ve got to let yourself have the opportunity to be surprised. Unless of course, you’re writing something deliberately non-linear and wild and crazy and you gotta be really good to pull that off. It’s something I’ve kinda lost patience for. “Anything can happen in this! It’s crazy!” That’s not an enticement to me. That’s me hoping that the writer has the imagination to make it really feel like that. And, unfortunately, folks who use those as the starting blocks don’t make it too far past them. I just want a good story. What constitutes that has a pretty wide range, I guess. Like I said, I try to deliver.

But I write the way I write. Which means starting at the beginning and ending at the end. If I run into structural problems, then I go back to the outline and fix it or figure where I deviated from it. I’ve got pretty good instincts by now, been at this awhile.

Granted, My Gifts Are Hungry had a more troubled process than most of the other novels I’ve written. It started behind the 8-ball. Mostly because it was the first book I wrote after effectively walking away from publishing. Even the most modest description of the word, which is where I was going to be with my last contract. Wanted to walk away from all of it, and maybe nearly did a couple times. Eventually decided to walk away from success instead. I mean, success is only possible if you’re in the publishing world. And don’t talk to me about Brandon Sanderson. If he’d started out as a nobody crowdfunding, I can tell you exactly where he'd be still. (And his books would still be dull. I don’t know, maybe all of them aren’t, but the bits I’ve read lead me to believe that it’s all structurally dull and there’s no helping it. But he sells a million copies of his stuff soooooo…)

But yeah, I did walk away from this book four separate times. Just didn’t touch it for a month during one of those, mostly a couple-three weeks on the other breaks. Which means there’s likely to be some surgery required. How much, I’m not sure. The book stands at 537 pages now, 107k words. I don’t know how much trimming there will actually be. Won’t know for a little while. I do know that I can actually finish a book when there was some doubt about it. Maybe that makes the next one easier, who knows. Maybe there won’t be a next one. Depends on the kickstarter. Depends on whether this one lands with any manner of audience. Though I have seen a lot of sales-shaming out there on Bluesky recently.

You know. Sales-shaming. Intimating that oh, a book only sold a thousand copies so it must really suck. It only sold thirty-seven copies so it absolutely sucks. Which reads to me like an internalized mindset that’s pretty toxic at best. Cope-driven at worst. Folks. Publishing does not look like it did even ten years ago. Stacking Chicxulubs, which has rippled out to even the non-traditional advertising (ie social media) space. Only the sure things get pushed. And that’s true, frankly, even of outlets that protest very loudly that they want to lift up new writers or get them attention. Not that I’m a new writer. I’m not. It’s all still klout-trading. And since I’ve got none (nor do I have money to buy marketing to simulate it), well, I am where I am. But yeah, keep talking about sales numbers and not if a book is any good or not.

Right. Rant over.

It’s tough being the sole means of support of a thing as big as a novel. Yes, I have friends who toss in an attaboy or click that like when I post an update. But that’s not anything near the heavy lifting required to get one of these things shaped and then brought over the line of completion. Little tougher to look at it and know that the process will be the reward. But I didn’t walk away from it no matter the temptation. Even had fun with it in places. That’s been true of all the Hazeland books, though. I just hope that some of it transfers out to the readers.

Right. Well, I got a ton of other stuff to do now in advance of the Kickstarter. None of which I’m particularly good at, barring perhaps the graphics for the Kickstarter page itself.

Yes, I’ll offer the personalized story tier. Yes, I’ll even offer the totally insane grilling tier. I will do these things with the absolute confidence that nobody will bid on them. That’s okay. Getting books in peoples’ hands will be enough.