(Sent the last one to paid subscribers only. Whoops! This one should work.)
Hey everyone! JDO here.
I haven’t posted in a bit because I’ve been writing my ass off.
Hello to all the new subscribers. I keep getting dings in my inbox when you all sign-up, and I think damn I should write a post.
But then I work on books, or play with the kid, or go to work. Such is life.
I’ll keep this short and sweet, because I was working on my Ronin Trash outline and had a revelation about why the outlining process is so valuable. It’s not anything I’ve seen in any online how-to thing that I’ve ever read.
Most times I’ve seen outlining pitched, it’s because it’s good for productivity. You’ll get your book written faster if you have a map. You won’t get confused and make amateurish mistakes. Etc.
BUT my experience is that outlining is valuable because it is very fun.
I already work at a job for money. If my eventual goal is to replace that job with full-time writing (some day…ten years? twenty years?) then obviously writing has to be more fun than going to a full-time job. Otherwise, why do it at all?
This led to many years of writer’s block. If I’m being honest, it’s because I wasn’t having any fun writing.
You’ve probably heard someone say “I like pizza, and I like ice cream, but I don’t like ice cream on my pizza.” I think of it like lemon broccoli and ice cream. Outlining is lemon broccoli. Prose writing is ice cream.
I wasn’t having fun because I was mixing those flavors together. In discovery writing, trying to do it all at once, the whole experience sucks. Unless of course you’re the type of freak who likes ice cream on broccoli. Everyone’s mileage may vary.
I’m telling you it is so fun to make character sheets, background lore, scene-by-scene breakdowns, and magic systems. But it is a completely different kind of fun than writing sentences. Turns out I love them both.
If I separate them.
To have a bird’s-eye view, unencumbered by the need to make the prose sound good, I am free to construct and craft, to free-associate, to make connections between plot points. I can follow my character through their progression and feel how each scene ties in thematically with the book as a whole.
That’s very different from the boots-on-the-ground, stepping-into-the-booth feeling of prose writing, where you’re listening to the syllables and watching the colors of metaphors float in your mind like sunspots and seeing the potholes in the freeway and hearing that crackling dialogue coming off your characters or smelling what a dead demon smells like or hearing a katana come free of its sheath or feeling what it’s like to watch your best friend lose themselves to fentanyl.
Two different types of artistic satisfaction, separated by phases in the novel writing process.
And by the way…you do produce shit faster and cleaner than the alternative, if that kind of thing is important to you.
WRITING SHIT:
I’m done with the outline of Ronin Trash. This will be my best novel to date. It’s the one that grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let me go til I worked on it, the one that I think about at work and sometimes when I should be thinking about life things. Time-travel demon slaying with low-down Oklahoma peckerwoods and samurai swords AND, surprisingly, considering its pulpy bestseller structure, it contains the exact same thematic question I explore in the Black Gum Quartet and Low Down Death Right Easy. I guess we keep going back to that well!
Speaking of those books, I’ll be re-releasing 2013’s Low Down Death Right Easy with a new cover along with its sequel, Low Down Death Right Easy 2: Plainswalker in the fall. The sequel is coming eleven years after the original, and we continue to follow Danny Ames and Arlo Clancy, but in a world that’s been overrun by zombies. So yeah, a sequel to a slightly-weird but mostly straightforward crime novel is a zombie apocalypse book. A strange choice, but it’s what I wanted to do. (This is going to be what Elkhoury was supposed to be, for Kickstarter backers).
And Black Gum, A Minor Storm, and Tomahawk will be packaged with the fourth and final novella Wolf Like Me as The Black Gum Quartet around the same time.
Ronin Trash will likely drop at the end of the year, along with Neon Hell, the next Gods Fare No Better cyberpunk book. If you read War In Heaven, you’ll know that Neon Hell is going to be cyberpunk ninjas versus Sadako from The Ring, and it has a bad guy called The King of All Tears (shoutout The Invisibles) who’s a living cross made out of centipedes.
So we’re cooking!
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Fusing genre fiction with anime sensibilities is almost always a good idea. My novella, Dracula and the Devil Walk into a Bar, does basically that. I resurrected Jonathan Harker as a cyborg/mech because why the fuck not?
God damn are you cooking.