Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Craft (Page 2 of 4)

A Milestone Reached

November 11, 2024 /

This past week, I reached the milestone of having written over a million words of publishable fiction.

I remember when I first began tracking my word count how one manuscript page – about 250 words – seemed a huge hurdle to reach every day. Now I’ve developed the writing muscle, and it doesn’t seem such a challenge.

At first glance, a million words sounds a lot, but I wrote those words over a six year period. I have a long way to go to emulate writers like John D MacDonald or Dean Wesley Smith for whom a million words is the annual target.

Just to help with the math on this, a million words a year is an average of about 2,750 words a day. I don’t think I’ll manage the next million words by the end of 2025. In the same way you don’t leave your doorstep and run a full marathon without preparation and training, making that leap to a million words a year requires similar planning and preparation. Not least in the planning is what to do with those ten to twenty books you write in that year!

As I said, I don’t think 2025 will be a million word year, but I should certainly be able to write the next million words in less than six years.

A Long Time Coming

October 28, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.

Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.

As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.

In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.

After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.

The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.

Aligning Timelines

October 7, 2024 /

This past weekend, I was looking at some of the Scrivener projects I haven’t touched in a while. Some were easy to deal with based on the project name alone. Others not so much.

What did I mean with a project named Disciple? It took a while to bring up on my screen as Scrivener needed to convert from an older version before displaying the contents. That alone, gives you some idea how long it is since those files got looked at. Not surprisingly, the story was about the disciples of Jesus, after the crucifixion and resurrection.

And I wrote it as a screenplay, which isn’t a format I’ve used for several years. There were some good scenes in there, and maybe one day I’ll go back to the idea, more likely as a novel.

The next file was more interesting. It’s a historical novel set in South America during the wars for independence from Spain in the early 1800’s. As I read through the notes and story fragments, it all came back to me. For some reason, I’ve never had a clear vision of the different timelines in my head – the story timeline and the historical sequence of events. That’s not been a problem with my stories set in Ancient Babylon, but there were some pivotal events during those wars for independence that obviously have to be covered in the right order – not least Simon Bolivar’s crossing of the Andes in June and July 1819.

It didn’t take much reading through my notes to realize the story and historical timelines were out of sync. It’s not an immediate problem as I have several stories I want to write before I come back to this one, and reading through gave me ideas for another story in the same historical period.

This makes it all the more important that when I do start the writing, both timelines are in alignment. So, I opened up Aeon Timeline and started dropping events and dates into a new Aeon project. Ten minutes in, I started reorganizing the story events. Those small changes have made the story move faster, and now I’m rethinking my 2025 production plan.

More of the Same

September 23, 2024 /

This last week has been fairly quiet. I wrote most of a Jacob short story with no real idea who the killer was, or how it ended. That was until late last night. I have to make some changes for consistency but nothing too heavy. My expectation is to finish the story tonight or tomorrow.

There’s been a lot of publishing energy going on as well. I’m about a third of the way through the final read on a novella. The cover and sales copy are all done so publishing will be soon after I get the corrections put into the manuscript. In parallel, I found several stories with the same protagonist. I finished the cover and sales copy yesterday.

The introduction is next on my to-do list after the Jacob story. By the end of the month, I should have two more titles available.

A One Year Streak

September 16, 2024 /

I wrote earlier in the year about how 2023 was a lean year for writing. What I didn’t add at the time was one of the activities I put in place to improve my word count.

I’d been reading Julia Cameron’s book Write For Life, and as she does in all her books, she advocated Morning Pages. I tried Morning Pages several years ago, struggled with writing three of 8.5 x 11 pages in a timely manner every day, and let it drop.

Last September, I was ready to try anything to get back into a regular writing rhythm, so I sat down and set a goal of three pages within thirty to forty-five minutes. It has now been a full year, and I haven’t missed a day. There have been days where I only managed one page, usually because of a time crunch, and occasionally because instead of letting go and just writing, I tried to force words onto the page.

Most days, I stay within the time limits I set myself. Some days, I find myself looking blankly at the page, and not quite sure where the thought or idea was going? I don’t think that’s a symptom of age as I’ve always been a bit like that.

Has it helped my actual writing? I have to say an unqualified yes. I blew past the 2023 word count in early June, and found Pages a useful place to work out questions or issues I have with a story. It’s not outlining, more a discussion with myself about what I want to happen next. This might be a page or more of discovery, or a dozen bullet points on ordering events across the next three or four chapters. Sometimes what goes into the actual story is close to those musings. Other times, they trigger something and I’m off in a different direction. Either way the process has helped my writing.

Julia Cameron recommends a weekly review and the first question is “how many days did you do Morning Pages this week?” There’s an implied expectation that at some point you will miss a day of Morning Pages. Last September I expected a miss to happen. So far it hasn’t and I hope to say the same this time next year when Morning Pages has become a two-year streak.

Some Thoughts on History

August 19, 2024 /

Sometime in the middle of July, I started the book Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz. I bought the book because it looked to be about the Marine General Smedley Butler, and his experiences leading up to the time he was invited to join a proposed coup against then president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I had two reasons for picking up the book. First was to learn more about Butler, and his apparent involvement with the coup. Second was to get a deeper understanding of the series of small actions in the Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century referred to as the Banana Wars. I knew a little about the Banana Wars from a visit to the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico some years ago, but outside of the documentation in the Marine Corps Archives, I hadn’t found out much about the Banana Wars, or the planned coup.

In the back of my mind was a novel, or series of novels about Marines in the Banana Wars with a central character present in all the books. I fully admit the idea for this came from my reading of W. E. B. Griffin’s series The Corps and his main character Ken McCoy. I even wrote an opening chapter about the 4th Marine Regiment deploying to Dominica from New Orleans.

Katz’s book jumps from relating one part of Smedley Butler’s service to that same area today – the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti etc. – and documenting the failings and excesses of the US as an Imperial power.

I haven’t yet read enough beyond Gangsters of Capitalism to form a proper opinion on Katz’s view of the history he tells. However, there was enough there for me to pause and think about the Banana Wars series. If I write the stories without reference to the excesses that took place, and which were apparently condoned all the way to the White House regardless of its occupant, I’m painting a false picture of the times. A picture that’s likely unjust to everyone involved.

Dean Wesley Smith reminds me regularly that writer’s are, at heart, entertainers. Staying anywhere close to reality means these stories wouldn’t be entertainment. So, for the moment, the Banana Wars idea is on indefinite hold.

Sprinkles not Spoonfuls

August 5, 2024 /

This past weekend I received some feedback on The Corpse in the Courtyard from one of my first readers.

I found the prolog hard, she said. There were time when you used a comma and I expected the word and after it. Did you do that deliberately?

As an example, I wrote A part of Jacob wanted to relax, walk across the courtyard The expectation was relax, and walk.

Writing that way was a deliberate choice. I came across the technique while studying the Eve Dallas novels by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts). I liked what she did and how she did it, and decided to experiment with the technique about the time I started writing The Corpse in the Courtyard.

Dean Wesley Smith describes using many craft techniques – tags, power words, etc., as sprinkling a spice in your writing. It adds depth and flavor when done right. If you do it wrong, it can pull the reader right out of the story – just like that mouthful of cayenne pepper when you used a tablespoon instead of a pinch.

So I went back to the Eve Dallas books, and then my manuscript.

Essentially that’s what I did in the prolog. Instead of sprinkling the technique through the pages as J.D Robb did, I spooned it on thickly in just about every other paragraph. Because I was now reading the story from a different perspective, I saw what I’d done and felt how clunky the story flowed. Not good as I could lose a reader in the first four or five pages, and they would never know why they didn’t feel at home with the story.

It didn’t take long to make some changes that improved the flow of the opening. Now I have to read through my current work-in-progress and make sure I used sprinkles and not spoonfuls.

A Licensing Wrinkle

July 22, 2024 /

Over this past weekend, I was browsing the DepositPhotos web site looking for images I can license for book covers. I have a couple of projects currently in their early stages, but I have a fairly clear vision of how I want the covers to look to fit into that genre.

One of those visions is to have a New York image as a background with the characters in the foreground.

Easy enough you’d think, except there are several hundred thousand images of New York on DepositPhotos. They range from instantly recognizable landmarks like Central Park or the Empire State Building to street and alleyway scenes you’d only recognize if you lived close by.

I’m getting better and refining the searches and quite quickly found an image I liked that fit what I was looking for. When I clicked on the image for more details, it came up, and there was a white callout box above the image that said Editorial Use Only. Interesting, I thought. What does that mean? Fortunately, there was a pop-up box along with the callout to explain Editorial Use Only.

Essentially these images can only be used for non-commercial purposes and their use in any published work that involves the payment or receipt of a fee is prohibited.

Bummer, but as I said with several hundred thousand images it just took another few minutes to find something I could use without the Editorial Use Only restriction. The cover mockup looked good as well.

Before finishing a quick recap on Pro-Writing Aid Everywhere. I am getting to better grips with it. There are still some areas that feel a little clunky, but overall it has removed a step from my editing workflow.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

A Pleasant Surprise

July 8, 2024 /

Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.

I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.

As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?

Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.

I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.

The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.

I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.

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