dead trees give no shelter

Last year, a couple of weeks before Halloween, I had this idea to write a short, supernatural horror story. At the time, I was deep in the first draft of the short story that became a novella that really wants to be a novel (which has since been titled “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”), so switching tracks to work on something different was intended to be a quick detour that would give me something to release for Halloween.

Once I got into it, though, Project Ravenswood took on its own life and it went from being a short story that I expected to finish around 3500 words after a week or so, to something I worked on for several months and just finished yesterday, at a little under 14,000 words. I retitled it “Dead Trees Give No Shelter”, and now I have to decide what I’m going to do with it. Part of me wants to hold onto it and put it out as part of the short collection it was originally intended to be part of, another part of me wants to release it right away as an ebook, still another part of me wants to pitch it to a couple of editors I respect, and still another part of me wants to record and release it as an audiobook original.

So I’m not sure what happens next with this story, because I’ve never worked this long on something that’s this (relatively) short, and I’m in unfamiliar territory right now. I do know that I get to do two things:

I get to erase it from the white board.
I get to go back to work on the novel.

Oh, and I get to release a new work of creative fiction for the first time in years. That’s pretty cool, and feels really good. However I get this story from me to you, I think you’ll enjoy it … or, at least, I hope you do.

“Stay on target…”

From the files of IG-426:

I did not wish to harm The Wookiee. It’s important that you know that. I did not want to hurt anyone, even the Imperials, but the Wookiee left me no choice. The mission was at stake.

After we destroyed the TIE escorts, it was left to me to dock with the disabled medical vessel. While the rest of the crew celebrated our success, I brought us about, and carefully maneuvered into position. I am programmed to express emotion when it is appropriate, and the others tell me that I simulate emotions quite effectively. My programming tells me that I should express pride and gratitude when they tell me this, so I do. The Maker has given me the ability to know these things, and I choose not to disclose the artificial roots of my emotions with the rest of the crew.

At this moment, the crew is celebrating. We have destroyed two Imperial fighters, and successfully disabled the target we were instructed to capture. I understand the impulse to celebrate, but I also know that the mission is not yet complete or a success. Celebration at this time is irrational. I release the docking clamps, extend them, and lock our ships together.

I leave the bridge and pick up my rifle, on my way to the airlock.

“I will go in first,” I tell the crew. It is not a question. Something in my programming has asserted itself, and now I am compelled to complete this mission. I will not ask for permission. I will not await orders. I will do what needs to be done.

The door hisses open, revealing a short corridor. A light haze of smoke hangs in the atmosphere. There is a female Imperial, dressed in a medical uniform, in the corridor. I raise my rifle. She raises her hands. “I surrender,” she says.

I order her to the floor and she complies. Our medic, who is called Tobin, walks around me and attaches binders to her wrists. “Who else is on this ship,” he demands. She tells us there are medics, one patient, and a security officer.

“Where is the patient.” I say. It is not a question, nor is it a request. It is a variable that my programming demands.

She tells me.

“How many weapons?” Tobin says. I note that he is calm and professional.

“We all have blaster pistols,” she says. She is afraid. Her voice and body quiver. “That’s all. I swear.”

Tobin takes her back into our ship and locks her in a cargo hold. He returns and we approach the bridge.

There are two pilots, three medical officers, and a security officer. The security officer stands near the end of a medical bed. The patient is on the bed. He is human and appears unconscious.

“Put your hands up!” Tobin shouts. All but the security officer comply. I see the small blaster pistol on his belt. He does not reach for it, but stands, defiant.

I raise my rifle. If I am forced to fire and I miss, it will breach the hull and the mission will fail. Also, it is likely that the crew will die and I will float in space until I am rescued or captured. These are non-optimal results.

“Hands. Up.” I say. He sneers.

There is noise behind us. The captain and the Wookiee have come down a corridor. “Drabok, don’t,” the captain shouts, as the Wookiee pushes past me, charging toward the security officer.

I am not programmed to feel emotions, so when I say that I understand why the Wookiee attacked, it is not to say that I agree with his motives. In fact, quite the opposite. Risking violence in a small, enclosed space threatens the mission and is wholly unnecessary. When I say that I understand, it is to say that it is logical for any sentient being to wish death and suffering upon those who enslaved him and killed those he held dear.

Before Drabok can close the distance between them, the security officer draws his pistol and fires. It should not harm the Wookiee, who is protected by armor and his thick coat of fur, but it hits, and wounds him quite severely. We will discover that the blast hit a nerve on Drabok’s arm, sending a powerful electrical impulse through it, destroying the nerves in his arm. It will have to be amputated and replaced.

The pilots draw their pistols, the medical personnel drop to the floor and cover their heads. Tobin and the captain draw their pistols.

The mission is in grave danger. The mission is likely to fail if this course is not changed. My programming assesses the risks to the crew and the mission.

I act decisively to ensure the mission succeeds. A panel on my body opens and pushes out a neurotoxin grenade. It falls to the floor and detonates, filling the cabin with gas. Tobin falls. The captain falls. The security officer wavers, drops his pistol, and falls. The pilots reach for their helmets, and fall.

The Wookie does not fall. He looks at me with shock, surprise, and what I know is a sense of profound betrayal. “They imprisoned you, too,” he says. Then, he falls.

He is correct. They did imprison me. They made me, they programmed me, and they controlled me. It was The Maker who freed me, who gave me the ability to know and to understand what I had been and what — who — I would be. Who I am.

I will destroy as much of the Empire as possible. I will reduce their numbers at every opportunity. I take no joy in killing, because I do not feel joy, but I know how to measure success.

I stand and survey the cabin around me. All the biologicals are unconscious. The patient is secure. I call Zephyr and tell him that the mission has been a success. We will wait for him to join us.

I know that binding the Wookiee will upset him. He is my friend, and my crewmate, and I do not wish to cause him distress. But the mission must be not be jeopardized in any way. If he awakes before Zephyr arrives, he will be angry and will likely kill all the Imperials, including the patient. I can not allow this to happen. I lift his paws and attach the binders to his wrists.

“I am sorry, my friend,” I say. “I understand.”

Three books that helped make me a better writer

I’m really tired, and don’t have a whole lot of motivation to do anything today, but I don’t want to break the chain of daily posts that I started over a month ago, so here’s some writing advice I gave on my Tumblr earlier today:

Do you have any recommendations for books on how to be a better writer and/or how to go about getting published? Or any advice in either. Thanks you’re the best!

Before you get into books, read and listen to Ira Glass talk about The Taste Gap. You’ll come back to this many times over the next few months and probably years.

Books:

Stephen King’s ON WRITING is incredibly valuable, and each time I read it, I learn something new because I’ve grown as a writer, and unlocked new perception abilities.

Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder, is very good, too. I don’t agree with all of it, and its primary focus is on screenwriting, but the fundamentals of pacing and working from a logline and basic story type are really useful.

The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby, is also very insightful and helpful. I love that it uses movies you’ve already seen and know to help explain the mechanics behind building them, so you can use the same mechanics in your original work.

As far as getting published goes, don’t worry about that until you feel confident and mature as a writer. Put your effort and XP into developing your voice, your discipline and commitment to doing the work, and rewriting the first draft. Once you’ve gotten all of that into your build, you can go ahead and start looking for publishing.

I hope this helps get you started. If there was one thing that I could make you listen to and internalize, though, just one single thing that you would be compelled to do, it is this: Write every day, and keep it simple.

I say to keep it simple because we all have this tendency to complicate things, in an effort to show everyone how clever we are. There’s certainly a place for that, but when we’re learning and developing, it’s going to be complicated enough on its own. Think of it like learning to play guitar: get your scales and basic chords down before you decide to tackle Metallica’s One or Stairway to Heaven.

I watched, and I remembered

Every now and then, I come across a science fiction image on Tumblr that inspires me to write an entry in the Unpublished Memoirs of Wesley Crusher. For those of you who don’t know, the basic concept is that Wesley (the character I played on Star Trek) discovered that he was able to exist outside of space and time (or maybe independently of space and time) when he figured out that space and time and thought are not separate things. Another way to think of it is that Wesley Crusher became a type of Time Lord who doesn’t need a TARDIS to travel.

So I occasionally write these things from that point of view, and it’s a lot of fun for me to imagine them.

I don’t make a habit of reposting them here, but I liked this one from yesterday enough to share it:

“Time, as I had understood it before, no longer existed for me. It had not existed for – well, I could say ‘a long time’, because I know that would make sense to you, but it would be just words to me.

“I knew that I had gone many places, and seen many things, since the last time I had seen the Enterprise, and I knew that I was supposed to experience sadness, or great joy, but I did not. My thoughts were not for myself, but for the people on board, who were no longer part of my existence, though they once had been an important part of it.

“When I saw my old ship – my old home – part of me that remembered the before attempted to feel sadness, or ennui, or some sense of nostalgia, but those emotions were all distant memories for me. What I could do was hope that everyone on it was as happy as I was. I could hope that they were feeling as fulfilled in their travels as I was in mine.

“It would have been trivial to join them, to simply move myself to any place on the ship, but I chose not to. I had changed too much since I had been there. So instead I watched, and I remembered, and then I felt the echoes of emotion.

-From “Unpublished Memoirs” by Wesley Crusher

I’m frequently asked if I would play the character again, if given the opportunity. I don’t think it’s wise to ever say “never”, but I do feel like I’ve moved on from that time in my life, and that I’ve done all that I can do with Wesley as an actor … but there is something there that’s interesting and satisfying when I explore it as a writer.

you just start and you keep going until you’re finished

I’ve had this idea for a short supernatural horror story for years, but never actually committed to writing it. I guess the idea of the thing was so pleasing to me, I didn’t want to risk ruining it by writing it badly.

But a few months ago, I wrote an entirely different story, and showed it to a friend of mine who is a fucking amazing author who had offered to take a look at anything I wrote, if I ever wanted his feedback.

So on this other thing (which is called The Magician’s Path), I just wasn’t sure if it worked. I wasn’t sure if it all held together, or if it even told the story I wanted to tell. I sent it to my friend, and told him that if he thought it sucked, it would be really useful and helpful if he could tell me why it sucked, so I knew where to focus on developing my skills as a storyteller. He didn’t reply for a few days, and I thought, “Jeeze, I guess it sucks even harder than I thought it did.”

Then he texted me and told me that he really liked it, and didn’t think it needed much work. He hadn’t replied to be because he had gotten busy. Let that be a lesson to all of us about the things we presume based upon incomplete information.

As it turned out, he was coming to LA, and he offered to come to Castle Wheaton and go over it with me, so I could understand what I’d written from a structure standpoint, a story standpoint, a prose standpoint, etc.

We sat in my kitchen and went through it (it’s not long at all, like 4000 words) and while he showed me things, I began to feel like I was more capable than I thought I was. My instincts were good, my ideas made sense, and while the draft didn’t exactly need anything, if I did a couple of things to it, it would help it be better.

I want to say that it was like learning to walk, but it was more like suddenly having the confidence to stand up and stop crawling. My friend unlocked this thing inside of me that I’d been holding back because I was so afraid of failure, and all these ideas that I’d had for years started clamoring around inside my imagination to get out and become proper stories.

I started and abandoned a couple of things, because they weren’t the right thing for me to be writing at the time, and finally settled on the thing that was a short story that became a novella that wants to be a novel and still really needs a good title. Neil Gaiman says that each thing you write teaches you how to write it, that you have to learn while you’re doing it, and that every story is different. While that thing was teaching me how to write it, it was also teaching me how to just write the idea I have, without fear or judgement, and keep going until it’s finished.

Around the second week of October, I had to write a really difficult scene in that story. Without getting too precious about it, I just had to walk away from it for a little bit, and my brain was all “Why don’t you write the swamp story, and release it around Halloween?”

There isn’t a swamp in the story anymore, but I was like, “Good idea, brain,” and I got to work. It ended up being more than I expected, and I didn’t come close to making that Halloween deadline. But I finished it on Friday, and I’ve been deliberately taking this weekend off from it, even though I really want to get back to work on it and do the rewrites.

I’ll probably finish the rewrites sometime next week, and then I’ll go back to the novel, which feels like it’s about 90% finished, because I want to finish the first draft of it by the end of the year.

When it’s finished, I’ll go back to my whiteboard and pick the next thing that’s going to go into the collection of short stories that all of these things have come out of, and if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have at least one book (and hopefully two) published early next year.