Impulse Writing

Follow #Impulse on Twitter now!

So it's 2012 and we all make new year's resolutions, right? One of mine for the new year was to just do it. Whatever I needed to do to get an IT job, vent my creativity or otherwise needed to work off my To-Do list, I just needed to stop faffing around and get cracking. 

Just Do It!
So with regards to Ælemental, this meant get the damn book finished. Last time I had worked on the 4th (and final) draft was back in November 2011! I need to get this book done. Too many people know I'm writing yet too few people have actually seen any results. And I mean, c'mon, there are less interesting works filling up the bookshelves every month. In fact I picked up a book in the YA section the other day, which had an interesting fantasy cover, and not only did it turn out to be more of the same '13 in a dozen' material that has appeared ever since the boy wizard became big, the author had churned out 3 books since I started plotting my series back in 2006!

Naila, our heroine

No More Mr. Lazy Writer
Get your act together and this sucker published. Yet, the attitude is right, but being a father, husband and unemployed IT web designer looking for work does not leave me with much time to sit down, focus and write. After all, without making excuses, I do need at least 4-6 hours to really get into the deep mythological world I've created, with all of it's emotional ups and downs, character and plot developments and keep the editing now consistent. After all: draft 4 is where I turn the 'bullet list' of a book into a smooth read - something that's crucial if I want to stand out over the rest.

Naila's mother

Dedicated Writing Time
'Just doing it' is all nice and dandy when you're drafting your first book, but by the time you get around to the 4th version of your writing, you really need to be able to dedicate all of your attention, be immersed in your story and edit with care. Be that smooth operator, I talked about earlier. Yes, I have to act, but I have to also be smart about it. This means taking a week to clear out my schedule from all the job interviews, social 'catching up's and chores, so I can seriously book my time for the next few weeks and dedicate every breathing moment to my writing.

Naila's warrior father

Start With A Fuse

So where does this leave my momentum? My jazzed enthusiasm to just do it? Well, have you heard of Twitter? :) While I free up my schedule, my mind and my workspace to Ælemental Book 1: The Tree of Life, I can still keep the spark of my Muses going. I can lit that creative fuse leading to the explosive event (of wrapping up, DTPing and self-publishing my first big work) while at the same time remaining within the realm of my vast fantastical microcosm. Enter Naila.

Impulse is a teaser to Ælemental

The kidnappers

Naila is Impulse
Naila is one of the side characters in The Tree of Life, a little girl who helps Sally through the worst of times. Sally of course has been kidnapped and so have other kids all around the world. But this truth holds more secrets than may be apparent at first sight. And so does Naila. In a brief teaser to the main event, I am telling Naila's story through a number of tweets, three of which I am publishing every day for the next ten days. Limited to 140 characters (120 when an image is included) this forces me not only to be concise and tell a lead-in story in it's essence, it also allows me to disconnect quickly, so I don't spend too much time with it.

The Snowy Forest

A Taste of Ælemental

Impulse is not meant to be a full story, worthy of sitting down for, let alone any kind of literary masterpiece, but hopefully it will keep the awareness on Ælemental, while experimenting with Instant Storytelling. I'm not sure if Twitter has ever been used to tell a story, but I kind of like the immediacy of it. It's like a serialized free status update from a person that only exists in our imagination. From a secret world that is opening its door for you to glimpse through. A secretive race within a hidden domain is revealing its secrets in a series of quick tempting flashes.

Mr. Myst

Free is the New Sell
This is truth: offer your creativity for free to get the awareness for your work, so you can sell it later. I'll publish Ælemental as an e-book and charge an acceptable fee for it. If popular enough it might get me a published hard copy as well in the long run. But for now, nothing is more exhilarating and freeing than seeing my imagination come to life immediately and share it instantly with everyone. It is the new business model of our times after all for that same reason. So Impulse will be free to follow and comment upon. Let me know what you think. And to get you started: here are the first 11 chaptweets:

A mysterious helper

Impulse, The Story So Far
C1: Naila hadn't meant 2 start d fire. Rlly, she hadn't. But d flames had leapt off her fingers n on2 d man b4 she could stop them.
C2: Running thru d snow, Naila sucked on her black fingers n smiled. She heard d kidnappers yell bhind her.
C3: Naila stppd bhind a tree n thought of her mom. She missed her. 1 Spark Spell later n her mom appeared.
C4: Naila remembered when her family was whole. Her father, a fierce warrior, had taught her d pwr of fire.
C5: 'No time 4 daydreams,' she reminded herself. D burnt kidnapper n his gang were near!

Friend or foe?

C6: 'Child,' a voice echoed over d white blanket of fine snow. Naila gulped. 'I know yur here. I smell Persia'
C7: D man called Mr. Myst drifted closr until he stood almost nxt 2 Naila. 'We r family, grl. I 2 know fire.'
C8: Naila was terrified. Not only was she alone, an orphan in life. She was also far from the cold city she called home.
C9: 'Psst' Naila heard a voice whspr. Rubbing her skin a soft Ghost Glow appeared of a girl w/ long gold hair.
C10: D ghostly girl image hovered over Naila's wrist. 'Use yur Persian fire pwr 2 distract Mr. Myst.'
C11: 'Gotcha!' cried 1 of d kidnappers, pulling Naila frm hr hiding spot. Naila screamed n went up in flames

Follow 'Impulse' here and let me know what you think of it.

A More Solid Approach

I'm forty today and still learning. 'Yay!' for both. One of the recent things I've learned is that I cannot split up my day in too many activities. I guess that's sound advice for any length of time, but I'll stick with a working day for now. I've never been very good at multitasking or switching quickly between tasks, probably because I've been a designer for so long and a perfectionist at that. You see, for me every activity needs a certain start-up time before I get into the 'Zone'. Maybe this is true for everyone, but having been a precise and technical oriented worker for many years of my life it takes me that much longer to reach that special place where the magic occurs. So you understand that working in a cubicle in an office or at a convention/fair/street corner is like torture to my inner Muse.

These last two weeks I've tried my hand at writing a couple of hours early in the morning after I put my son on his school bus and I commit to finding an IT job. This doesn't work. I ended up spending way too much time setting up my computer and notes, finding the right mood, backtracking what I had written before, etc. So maybe dedicating every day of the week to one task in and by itself will save me from all the 'overhead'. Whether its writing Aelemental or looking for IT work or developing any other one of thousands of great ideas that run through my head (for which I need meditation and exercise to bring them down a notch or two). It doesn't matter. I can still squeeze in those last two activities and some chores around the house of course - I do need to get away from the computer now and then after all - but no longer will I split up my time trying to do it all. So starting this week (and my newest decade in life) I will do one thing at a time and do it well.

SPOILER ALERT

So what did I write? I've wrapped up the first few chapters of Aelemental, balancing out emotional character development and action (nicely reflecting my new 'one thing at a time' philosophy) and I'm no longer counting words or pages. I am now master of my own online publishing after all. As I'm very visual I'll share some of my visual notes with you, the first relating to the major scene in the prologue, where 70 years ago Simon's grandfather Mick is a young boy who struggles to escape from a deathtrap ruin in the Amazon rain forest. His uncle, an archaeologist from Australia, inadvertently set off a chain reaction within a mysterious old temple. This was something I had to draw out to be able to describe. Below are the 'plans'. Enjoy and I'll be back next week with more.

The Final Dash, part 3 (of 6)

Avalaaaaaaaanche!

Coming through! Wheels on fire. Stampede. Watch out. This car is racing like the bus on Speed...on speed. It is mutating into a monster and I have no idea where the breaks are. Another 9400 words zoomed by and the chapters are big enough to give birth to octlets (what? I dunno. Moving on.) I'm on fire. I'm crazy. OMG I'm staying up until midnight, writing 10-12 hours a day! But I need to get this finished. I did the monstrous chapter 25 where empowerment comes to Simon and everyone is ready for the final climactic battle. I'm writing that now.

Nancy came up with a good idea. She said: "Relax. I don't want to spend my whole vacation reading the book. Why don't you detox from the pressure of writing and when we get back re-read your own work, editing it along the way?" This is sound advice. Already I find myself wanting to rewrite things when I'm just looking up in a previous chapter what I wrote. I don't, because of the cardinal rule to just get it all out there, syntax errors and all. Always forward, never go backward. Don't be your own critic. Otherwise the darn thing will never get written.

So this takes away my fear of it becoming a bloated piece of redundancy. I'll just keep going, continue to make notes along the way to check on one thing or another so I don't get caught up in researching consistancy and then I'll take a long break. When I come back, I'll start anew, open that chapter one and read it, rewrite it and go through the story, making sure the speed, flow and consistency is in order. But for now?.....

Incooooooooooomiiiiing!!!