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This is number 157 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I WOULD LIKE, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.
Ring a bell? By the time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1979, it was already a cult classic. People went to it more to participate than to watch. Costumes, dancing (Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!), flicking lighters, putting newspapers over their heads, and shouting out lines or comebacks for lines that almost drowned out the soundtrack from the movie.
Well, years ago, live theatres building on the campy idea started doing shadow cast performances during October. Essentially, people playing the roles perform in front of the screen showing the movie. It adds a whole new level of chaos to the Rocky Horror experience. I recently saw a ‘memory’ from a friend who was in a shadow cast in Everett, Washington twenty years ago! Productions got a big boost in 2025 for the 50th anniversary of the movie’s release, and then again this year, after the sad passing of actor Tim Curry.
And this year, I’m deep in the cult, acting out the role of the criminologist/narrator with a cast that is mostly kids half my age or less. I’m having a blast.
It is so much better than pumpkin spice.
This is number 156 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I TURNED 77 TODAY. I think that’s a lucky number, right? It’s my golden-golden birthday. 27 on the 27th plus 50. I just made that up.
I started writing in my newest journal (mentioned last week) on Thursday this week. The first entry began “Breakfast at IHOP.” Pretty mundane entry for this fancy a journal. The book itself is imposing. Large pages, narrow lines, gold leaf edges, and I’m writing about breakfast.
But that’s the way life is.
When writing a novel, I’m concerned about moving the story along, creating tension, having a hook that keeps the reader engaged. But life’s not like that. Life is lying in bed under the electric blanket as long as possible on a chilly morning, and then having breakfast. It’s realizing I forgot to put my hearing aids in this morning, so I can’t listen to my phone in the restaurant. It’s enjoying the first sip (or cup or pot) of coffee in the morning, thinking about my lines for the show, and putting gas in the truck. ($130!) Things that aren’t even related to each other by anything other than being part of my life. There’s no hook at the end of this chapter. There’s just my bed and the warmth of my electric blanket when I’ve had enough of the day.
It’s not at all depressing. It’s life. It’s realizing life is not a novel. There won’t be a world-shaking crisis to resolve in this story arc, nor an even graver crisis in the next chapter to keep the audience reading. For that matter, there is no audience—no readership to keep interested. Life simply is not a novel.
Which is one of the problems with writing a novel.
I’ve read books and have seen movies, and have even written books, that require a sequel. The problem is: to maintain interest, there needs to be something even more critical to be resolved in the sequel than there was in the original. I’m convinced the proportion of sequels that garner greater readership than the original is quite small compared to those that fall off.
I think of it this way: Book one—the hero saves the life of his one true love, and they live happily ever after. Except in book two—the hero saves the village from the destruction of the monster so they can live happily ever after. Except in book three—the nation faces a crisis that will plunge it into devastating war if the hero doesn’t rescue it so they can live happily ever after. Except in book four—the world faces a cataclysm that will end civilization as we know it unless the hero’s brilliant scientific mind can bring it back from the brink, so they live happily ever after. Except…
What comes next? A threat to the solar system? The galaxy? The universe? When do we actually get to ‘happily ever after?’
That’s life! No sequels. Whether it is happily ever after is entirely up to us. At 77 years of age, I can happily say I have already survived the worst day of my life so far. Should something happen in the future that I don’t survive… Well, I’ve already lived happily ever after. Don’t wait for the sequel. It’s already been written.
When I first conceived of Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose on SOL) City Limits, I’d already started the outline of Wild Woods. I knew there would be a sequel, because I couldn’t adequately explore the subject in one book.
Are we nothing more than the accumulated memories and experiences of our lives, or is there something deep inside us that makes us what we are, able to rise above those memories and experiences?
Gee Evars arrives in the city of Rosebud Falls just in time to dive into a raging river to save a drowning toddler—and to lose his memory. I thought of the two books as season one and season two of a television series possibly called The Man Without a Memory. I’m sure television execs would have come up with a better series name. Ah well. Season one: Gee’s arrival in Rosebud Falls and loss of memory. Building a life for himself based on what he perceives as right and wrong. Season two: Discovering a purpose in his memory loss that makes him the perfect counselor for damaged and abused children.
Was there a season three planned?
Not really. Not because Gee wasn’t an interesting character, but that the normal life he lived from that point on was much like the lives of most of us. His day started under his electric blanket and ended when he returned to it. I didn’t want to keep inventing bigger crises for Gee to become the hero of. He was the hero of this crisis. Now there was happily ever after.
City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks from ZBookStore and in paperback from online vendors.
So, does this mean that I think of life as meaningless and uninteresting?
No. It’s just not a novel. My life is quite full. I’m joining my daughter and our family to see a production of Hamlet this afternoon. This evening, I’ll go to rehearsal for the shadow production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Red Curtain Theatre, in which I play the role of the Criminologist/Narrator. I’m eleven chapters deep in my new work in progress, My Name Is Vengeance, and am preparing another book, Code Kitty, for editing and publication.
I ordered three new shirts that arrived this week, as well as path lights to install in front of my trailer. Oh, and two new fountain pens in vintage rose and emerald green as birthday presents to myself. I’m enjoying the flow of ink from my pens as I write in my journal—even when what I write is not profound.
Life is filled with adventures. They just aren’t necessarily what novels are made of. I think sometimes we believe our lives are incredibly boring just because they aren’t filled with manufactured plots and crises. It’s not so.
It’s just that life is for living, not reading about.
This is number 155 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
That doesn’t resolve my dilemma of what to write in my new beautiful journal. As I mulled the situation over, I came to a realization: I don’t write in the journal to be profound. I write in it for the joy of writing, of feeling the paper, of seeing the ink flow from my fountain pen in multiple colors as I switch pens and load different inks.
Having a beautiful book like this to write in will give me great joy, no matter what drivel I write. Perhaps it will be what I had for breakfast and where, or the next chapter of my current WIP, My Name Is Vengeance.
It doesn’t need to be profound!
I have made a couple of concessions. I ordered new extra fine point nibs for all six of my fountain pens. The lines in this journal are closer together than I’ve used in the past, so I can’t comfortably use a medium nib to write on them. I’ve also decided to write on both the left and right pages. And finally, I’ve decided to continue with my next entry wherever on a page I happen to end the previous one instead of turning to a fresh page.
Your first thought might be, it will take forever to fill a journal like that. True. But I think of it as extending my enjoyment of writing in this beautiful book.
In coming to this conclusion, I’ve also realized how similar what I’ve gone through is to what many aspiring authors go through, whether they work with a pen and paper or with a computer and word processor. They sit around and wait for the right words to come to them instead of sitting down and writing. That is far more important than deciding the right word.
I have a motto that I live by (even though I just made it into a phrase I can repeat).
YOU CAN’T REVISE A BLANK PAGE.
A major part of the writing process is editing and revision. In my current WIP, My Name Is Vengeance, I realized the first five chapters I’d written were really too short. I’d rushed through concepts and episodes much too quickly, something I tried to remedy in Chapter six and following. Alpha reader Les even commented that the first chapter could have been darker.
I realized if I spent another six hundred words or so on it, I could make it appropriately darker, without going into graphic scenes of bloodshed. But it’s not a problem. I have content that I can revise. If I hadn’t written it, I could not revise it.
I guess this is all my way of saying, don’t wait for something important, or perfect, or brilliant, or even right to start writing. The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits down with pen in hand (or keyboard at fingertips) and writes. If you have always wanted to be a writer, I hereby give you permission to simply sit down and write.
November is coming. Even though National Novel Writing Month is no longer an official organized event, many of us who participated still challenge ourselves to write 50,000 new words during the month of November. If that sounds like too much to you, challenge yourself to write 10,000 new words. Use a pen and paper or a keyboard and monitor. Or even dictate it into a microphone if you prefer. Use whatever means is necessary to get your creative juices flowing and write something.
Later (in December) you can revise.
Enjoy!
This is number 155 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
That doesn’t resolve my dilemma of what to write in my new beautiful journal. As I mulled the situation over, I came to a realization: I don’t write in the journal to be profound. I write in it for the joy of writing, of feeling the paper, of seeing the ink flow from my fountain pen in multiple colors as I switch pens and load different inks.
Having a beautiful book like this to write in will give me great joy, no matter what drivel I write. Perhaps it will be what I had for breakfast and where, or the next chapter of my current WIP, My Name Is Vengeance.
It doesn’t need to be profound!
I have made a couple of concessions. I ordered new extra fine point nibs for all six of my fountain pens. The lines in this journal are closer together than I’ve used in the past, so I can’t comfortably use a medium nib to write on them. I’ve also decided to write on both the left and right pages. And finally, I’ve decided to continue with my next entry wherever on a page I happen to end the previous one instead of turning to a fresh page.
Your first thought might be, it will take forever to fill a journal like that. True. But I think of it as extending my enjoyment of writing in this beautiful book.
In coming to this conclusion, I’ve also realized how similar what I’ve gone through is to what many aspiring authors go through, whether they work with a pen and paper or with a computer and word processor. They sit around and wait for the right words to come to them instead of sitting down and writing. That is far more important than deciding the right word.
I have a motto that I live by (even though I just made it into a phrase I can repeat).
YOU CAN’T REVISE A BLANK PAGE.
A major part of the writing process is editing and revision. In my current WIP, My Name Is Vengeance, I realized the first five chapters I’d written were really too short. I’d rushed through concepts and episodes much too quickly, something I tried to remedy in Chapter six and following. Alpha reader Les even commented that the first chapter could have been darker.
I realized if I spent another six hundred words or so on it, I could make it appropriately darker, without going into graphic scenes of bloodshed. But it’s not a problem. I have content that I can revise. If I hadn’t written it, I could not revise it.
I guess this is all my way of saying, don’t wait for something important, or perfect, or brilliant, or even right to start writing. The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits down with pen in hand (or keyboard at fingertips) and writes. If you have always wanted to be a writer, I hereby give you permission to simply sit down and write.
November is coming. Even though National Novel Writing Month is no longer an official organized event, many of us who participated still challenge ourselves to write 50,000 new words during the month of November. If that sounds like too much to you, challenge yourself to write 10,000 new words. Use a pen and paper or a keyboard and monitor. Or even dictate it into a microphone if you prefer. Use whatever means is necessary to get your creative juices flowing and write something.
Later (in December) you can revise.
Enjoy!
This is number 154 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I JUST NEEDED to check the dates of D-Day vs. VE Day. That was two hours ago. Now there are twenty-seven tabs open in my browser. I’ve discovered the names of ranks in the RAF, have a file that won’t finish downloading, have a virus alert and a screen that repeatedly insists I prove I’m not a robot, and I have a video of a P51 Mustang supporting the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Somewhere, The Beatles are singing, “the British army had just won the war.” I now know how much uranium was used in “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima. I have a page on Americans flying for the RAF in WWII, and four different aircraft pages. One tab is about Rhodes Scholars, and another about Hitler’s suicide.
And I forgot what I was searching for in the first place, or why it was important.
That’s called “research,” right?
I still remember how back in college—1968-1972 at Indiana Central College—I spent hours with a notebook sitting in front of the library card catalog, jotting down the names, numbers, and other information for books on a subject I was researching. It’s something we’ve lost in the computer era. Yes, all the same information is available in the computerized card catalogs, but there is something missing.
I could look at my handwritten notes after I’d located the book and found the quote I wanted for my paper. Everything I needed for my footnote and bibliography was there. Now, as soon as I follow the link from the card catalog to the electronic copy of the book, I’ve lost all the bibliographic information I might later need. I have to go back through the same search process again to recover that information.
My current work in progress, My Name Is Vengeance, involves a 10,000-year-old demigod who transmigrates into the body of a 30-year-old scholar/businessman in 1950 Boston. I lived in Indiana and was only born in 1949! I needed to have a clear picture in my mind of Boston in that era in order to write an effective period piece.
I know there are only a few readers who have experience living in Boston at that time, but an amazingly high percentage of them will read my story and comment about how wrong some of my atmospheric statements are if I’m incorrect on any aspect. I know this for a fact just based on the fifty-some comments I received regarding the reach of WLS in Chicago in 1966 in my novel Full Frame. The debate was intense.
So, my research needs are immense.
There’s very little political in this period piece, but the academic environment, business practices, labor disputes, and Mafia involvement in unions are almost overwhelming. Then there are the ordinary things about family and home life.
I chose this period intentionally. The biggest cultural revolution of modern America (IMHO) occurred in the sixties. Prior to that, male and female roles were more rigidly adhered to. Race and class influenced all of social interactions. This was before Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy began his campaign against organized crime and its influence in labor unions.
Moreover, there was little or no concept of personal computers—even in science fiction!—or of cell phones, though Dick Tracy had a two-way wrist radio, upgraded to the two-way wrist TV in 1964. People used payphones for only a nickel. Making a long-distance international phone call from the US to Europe was more expensive than sending a telegram. Commercial airlines were flying propeller aircraft; the first commercial jet went into service in January 1951. Commuter trains and subways ran to all the bedroom communities surrounding a major metropolis.
The tallest building in Boston in 1950 was the Custom House Tower at thirteen stories. It was built in 1915! Legal Sea Foods was established as a family fish market in 1950. It wasn’t a restaurant and had only one location in Cambridge, MA.
MIT had a sailing pavilion and developed a single person sailboat called the Tech Dinghy. Harvard Business School didn’t take over the Radcliffe Training Course in Personnel Administration (for women) until 1954 and didn’t admit women directly to the MBA program until ten years later.
How is a 10,000-year-old demigod supposed to respond to all this?
My Sausage Grinder Patrons have begun reading the unedited first draft of My Name Is Vengeance today with the first three chapters. It will not be available as a pre-release until January of 2027. You can join the adventure by joining my Sausage Grinder Patrons.
On many of my books, I’ve estimated that the first draft requires two to five hours of research for every hour spent drafting the story. I think the record is Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose on SOL) The Gutenberg Rubric, which took over twenty years of research before I started writing it. I filled notebooks with research. I wrote training programs on the history of printing. I taught typography and book design.
And talk about rabbit holes! I read a book titled 40 Centuries of Ink. Another called 100 Years of Offset Printing. I read a scholarly paper titled “Non-Destructive Microanalysis of Cultural Heritage Materials.” And dozens more.
I compiled my own analysis of how the Library of Alexandria might not have been utterly destroyed with recorded movements that could lead it to the heart of Turkey and the creation of the monument at Mount Nemrud. I literally printed—on a Gutenberg era printing press—facsimile pages from The Gutenberg Bible at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany.
And all of this was done before I used a computer for more than word processing!
The Gutenberg Rubric by Nathan Everett is available as an eBook from ZBookStore. The 15th anniversary hardcover Signature Edition is available from my Ingram Spark page or most vendors.
All of this is to say that Lewis Carroll’s famous rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 is still waiting out there for any adventurer contemplating a journey into the wonderland of historical fiction—even if it is a paranormal transmigration story.
And it’s not all a bad thing.
The most important thing about ‘doing your own research,’ whether for a novel or to prove vaccines cause autism or other fiction, is to maintain an open mind. You can’t just search for things that support an opinion you have already formed—even when you’ve already written part of the story based on it.
I was sure I could have my hero flying a P51 Mustang on D-Day as part of the RAF. I’ve discovered there could be several problems with that premise. So, do I continue insisting that was what he did, or do I change the story a little to be more in line with the historical evidence?
It probably won’t be resolved in the first draft, but now that I know the problem, it will affect how much emphasis I place on something I know will be changed in the next draft.
Now I just have to find the web page where I got that information!
Enjoy!
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