Writing Tales and Progress in the Real World

Wow, I've been busy. I'll just sum up everything from the past week, leaving more to elaborate on later.

On an old note, I found out that my professor is back in North America. No notice to me of course, I was left to find out by seeing him from a distance. I'm nearly set to turn in another draft, having worked on it more on Thursday. I just need a bit on the history of the research and I'll be set.

This past weekend was the Second Annual Cape Girardeau Comic Con. Since I'm friends with the promoter/organizer of the event, I was asked to do a few things to help out. No problem. The result: I get to meet guys like Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neil not only in person, but also by name.

I also got a chance to have dinner with several people on Saturday night. Jonnie Allan, creator/writer/publisher of Stykman was among them, and just a great person to have a conversation with. I'll probably end up communicating with him again in the future.

Denny O'Neil was also present at the dinner. The great thing about Denny is that he is such a fountain of interesting conversation, so much that, if the restaraunt stayed open long enough, we could have talked until dawn. It was a great, informative, enlightening conversation, one I'll never forget.

Finally, today, I got the most recent rejection for "The Golden Hollow" back in the mail. The best thing about this rejection is that I got story comments from two different editors along with it. As a whole, they liked the core idea of the story, but they didn't care for either 1) the resolution of the initial conflict or 2) the small amount of descriptive detail.

Jim Butcher Signing

Do you like The Dresden Files? I've recently gotten a bit hooked between the tv show and finally getting to read a couple of the books. The newest came out a week ago. I've been steadily making progress through it, which is good since I read more than one book at a time now. I'm surprised that's been working out, but that's besides the point.

I found out recently that Jim Butcher, the writer/creator of The Dresden Files would be signing in St. Louis to promote White Night. In a string of odd luck, I found myself able to go. So, this afternoon, I piled into a car with a couple of friends and we were off.

Along the way, we encountered many strange things, which I won't recount here. Long story short, we had all the makings of a typical road trip, with the exception of the manditory sequence of getting lost. That happened on the way back.

As the clock struck 7PM, we found ourselves listening to Jim Butcher personally answering questions from the crowd. He's quite an interesting speaker, mixing together the right amounts of humor, raw information, and entertaining anecdotes.

When it came time for the signing itself, a bookseller took down what we wanted written in our books. With most people, myself included, our names were the order of the day. I spelled mine out to make sure it was right. Misspelling names of those directly infront of you is a minor pet peeve of mine, as well as Jim Butcher. He always made a point to clarify someone's name if it wasn't written down in front of him.

The thing that made me smile the most about the actual signing was that, when he wrote in my books, Jim began with "For Len!" When I just write my first name down on something, I usually put my first name in all caps followed by an exclamation point. It was a fun coincidence, nothing more.

Vitamin F--two months in

The first file I made for Bridgett's tale was on February 1 and dealt with her first verbal encounter with the leader of the terrorist faction, the Brotherhood of Life. On March 30, I started another file where Bridgett and several of her sorority sisters physically and mentally abuse another girl (Bridgett's best friend) just because of her sexual preference.

One of the things I keep in the notebook I have for this story, is a running log of each file that serves as a scattered puzzle piece of the whole tale. I mark down the number of words, the page length, and the properly formatted page length (my page length times 1.78). Here is the current tally after two months of work:

Words: 34,005
Page Length: 67.35
Proper Format Length: 119.883

I'd like to point out that I've written another couple of pages since I figured these stats up. I'll try to keep a monthly log of how these values progress, all leading to the inevitable completed first draft.