Maybe it’s because of my recently-passed birthday, and that I am in pretty much the same place I was last year at this time, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Legacy. I mean that as a big idea, the thing that will live on past my lifetime. I think everyone has some idea of what they want it to be, whether it’s their children, their work, or their art. Of course, I’d like to have all three of those things, but what I’m focusing on today is my writing.
Because, you see, I don’t think I’ve used the last year wisely when it comes to writing. I’ve had all this “free” time, but I’ve only written a handful of blog posts, and have hardly worked at all on any sizeable projects. Left to my own devices in an unstructured environment, I do stuff that doesn’t contribute to my writing. Does that mean that I’ll never be able to make it as a full-time writer? Or does that just make me like every other writer out there?
Whether it does or not, I’ve been thinking about all the writing I’ve done in my life. What does it amount to, really? For starters, I can take a look at this very document I’m typing this entry into… it contains all my blog posts so far. But then I got thinking, how much other work do I have? If I created some kind of Norton Anthology of every original work I’ve ever written down, what would it amount to? Well, let’s settle in and break it down, starting with childhood:
It all started with a story I wrote in kindergarten about Woody Woodpecker taking a trip to the moon. I have *no* idea where this came from, since I’ve only ever been peripherally aware of Woody Woodpecker, and never watched the cartoons with any regularity. I think I might have had a digest-size comic book about him back at that time, so maybe that was where it came from. But this was a school project, with illustrations, bound in cardboard covered with brown corduroy. My parents still have it around somewhere. So I was actually a little ahead of the self-publishing curve, wasn’t I?
I don’t think I wrote with any regularity until fourth grade, when I showed my teacher a story I had written. It was only two pages long and had about a dozen chapters (back then, my concept of “chapter” and “paragraph” were pretty much interchangeable), which she liked so much that she started a weekly creative writing workshop for the whole class. The other students’ work consisted mostly of wedging other kids’ names into action stories or talking about dreams they had, but I tried to come up with something interesting each time, even made some attempts at serialized storytelling, where I’d write a chapter a week of a continuing story. Of course, I don’t think I ever wrote a second chapter to any of them. These stories I still have, in a three-ring binder that my parents got me for Christmas that year. They taped a piece of construction paper on the front. They wrote “Stories by Aaron” and a little note on it, saying how enthusiastic they were about them.
In late elementary school, based on my obsessive love for movies (or as obsessive a ten-year-old’s love for them can be) I made some attempts at writing screenplays. These started as scenes and treatments for sequels of movies that I liked (“Tron II” and the nonsensically-named Indiana Jones project “Raiders of the Death Spirit” are the only ones that come to mind.) I didn’t really hit my stride, though, until the sixth grade. A rich but unpopular acquaintance of mine from school dropped the hint that he might be able to get a movie made if I would write it. Looking back, he probably said it as a way to get to hang out with him more (there’s a whole other post I could write about how moving around so much as a child resulted in most of my friends being the kids that everyone else in the school already knew were kind of jerks), but I did actually apply myself and write what came passably close to being a feature-length script. It was called “Under the Full Moon”, and had a definite Indiana Jones influence to it, although the heroes of this one were a pair of brothers (not coincidentally the same age as me and my friend), last name Henderson. There was also an older sister and a mom, and they were all traveling to Wales to find their missing archaeologist father, who was searching for the ruins of Camelot.
In the story, they do find it, but also find that their father has been sacrificed by a cult of devil worshipers who have taken over the ruins out in the wilds of Wales. From there, it turns into a series of revenge action set-pieces, a very Temple-of-Doom scenario. It ends with the vestiges of Camelot being blown up and pretty much ruined even more than they were before, along with the devil-cult. Believe me, it sounds better than it really is.
I remember showing this to my friend who had “commissioned” it, taking his notes and incorporating them into the script. I know that I passed it around my family for reactions, but the only one I can recall is a friend of the family reading it and laughing at some of the jokes. I even ended up approaching the older sister of one of my other friends, and asking her if she’d play the part of the older sister when we got around to filming. But nothing ever happened with it – I’m sure my friend was actually surprised I finished it. We went to the same K-12 school, but because by the time I finished the script he was in sixth grade and I was in seventh, we were based in different buildings and our paths rarely crossed. Eventually I stopped bugging him about it. The experience didn’t stop me from starting a sequel, though. It was called Return of Atlantis, and I honestly don’t remember much about it except that there was a scene where the adventurous Henderson family were thrown out of an airplane, but survived by landing in a backyard swimming pool.
There were other attempts started back in those days, stories based on Dungeons and Dragons (which my brother, cousin and I were into for a brief period), plus an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for longest novel, which I think I got about three pages into before abandoning. It seemed like I wanted everything I started to be an epic, and then gave up when it turned out that I didn’t have anything to say beyond my initial idea.
Also in my filing cabinet is a small collection of poetry I wrote for a project in seventh-grade, although honestly I couldn’t get past the basic requirements. Poetry in general doesn’t interest me, unless there’s something about it that I’m personally invested in. I guess I tend to think that writing in general should flow easily into your mind, almost as if you’re thinking of it yourself. Poetry in general seems to be hard to understand, and more for the writer of it than the reader. There’s great stuff out there, of course (Poe is a good example), but there’s nothing in me that says “Ooh, poetry! Gotta get some of that.” My eyes tend to glaze over as soon as I start reading it.
Eighth grade brought a Composition class, and I still have the writings I did in there… man, are they bad. But it really taught me that I just can’t write under pressure. The inspiration has to come before I can write anything. It can’t be forced. I didn’t find much inspiration between 8th and 11th grades… I remember starting several stories that were either adaptations of movies, or based on videogames I was into. It really seems that during this time I was spinning my wheels, trying to keep my writing muscles toned while not really having much to say.
In tenth grade, I volunteered to write a section of my school music department’s Musical Revue, which was something that they did on alternate years, when they didn’t have a school musical. This was where I first came in contact with Amy, my future wife, since she and a friend of hers had written another section. My own contribution was terrible and had no ending, but it got me into a script-writing mode that I would pursue for more than a few more years.
Another of the participants in that year’s Musical Revue was none other than Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who would go on to be a respected writer for TV shows such as Lost, and creator of cult show favorite The Middle Man, and the musical revue was my first chance working with him. He had started up something in the drama department called Lunchbox Theater, a student-run theater program that produced original plays that were rehearsed, promoted, and performed by students entirely during the lunch hour, at the rate of one about every other week. After Javier’s graduation, I continued working on that program until I graduated, even becoming president of it during my senior year.
During this time, I wrote only one show by myself (“Still of the Night”, a weird, pun-filled comedy about a group of friends getting lost while driving through the desert at night), although I did do a short bit called “Kung-Fu Theater”, in which I said all the cheesy dialogue, and my friends onstage did equally cheesy martial arts fights and moved their lips as I overdubbed their lines. It was quite popular, and a full Lunchbox Theater production was cobbled together around it, so the whole thing took on an SCTV-ish form of late-night TV shows and commercial parodies.
Also in my senior year, I wrote and directed the majority of another Musical Revue. Granted, it didn’t come off as well as planned, but it was my first full-scale production that I helmed. I also wrote the scripts for two silent shorts that I did for a film class, but of course those don’t count because they had no words.
I was working on fiction during this time as well, but as my wife and original reading audience will tell you, I had this tendency to overwrite and run things into the ground. I would focus on one idea, latching onto it and refusing to let it go until I had made every attempt to figure out whether it would work best as a novel, screenplay, stage play… whatever format I could think of, trying to find the one approach that would unlock it, until I was thoroughly bored with it and either unable or unwilling to fix its inherent flaws. I remember, among other ideas that I treated this way: a man who finds that the whole world is a construct, the equivalent of an elaborate stage show, by climbing a high building at sunset and watching the sun being shut off and pulled back through a giant pair of doors. Later, I thought I really had a great idea with three generations of vampires, all living together and eternally young but having entirely different ideas of their places as predators in the world.)
So I went back to the script-writing mode and stayed there for a while. In the mid-90’s I worked on three different projects in that vein, this time aiming for feature-film territory. My plan developed into having three different spec scripts – one completely original, one literary adaptation, and one sequel to an established franchise -- that I could shop around… all are complete, although one still needs a finished second draft and polish.
The Original: Syzygy – The story of a haunted hitwoman named Raven Airheart. She gets an assignment to kill a woman in her hometown, and it turns out to be her husband’s first love. He and the target run off before the hit goes down, and a cross-country chase ensues. I worked on this during spare moments at the Borders book warehouse. The process was fascinating. I essentially wrote the middle first, then had to create a backstory that became the beginning, while at the same time working my way toward an ending. It was a constant juggling of How did I get here? and Where am I going? That ending, though… I was really excited when I first came up with the idea of how to wrap it all up, but now it seems derivative to me, borrowing heavily from Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Orson Welles’s film The Lady from Shanghai. But overall, I think it’s a strong first effort. I actually got it copyrighted and certified by the WGA so that I could submit it to the original Project Greenlight online contest (remember that?), where the first round winners were determined by other competing screenwriters who critiqued it. Reviews were mixed to positive, but it didn’t make it to the second round.
The Adaptation: Next, I made a script of out Tim Lucas’s novel Throat Sprockets (one of my favorite unheard-of novels), set in the pre-Internet 80s, when a man becomes obsessed with a vampire art film that he sees at a local theater by accident. He gets pulled into an underworld of bootleg videos and vampire subculture as, it seems, everyone else in the world slowly becomes obsessed by the film as well. I really liked the way the script developed, becoming something that was actually quite different in tone than the original novel, although parts of it are lifted (mostly the movie-within-a-movie that becomes the main character’s obsession) directly from the novel’s pages.
The Sequel: Alien 4. I was initially dissatisfied with Alien 3, especially the way they killed off all the characters who went through hell and survived the second film of the series. So I turned Part 3 into a symbolic fever dream, and made this what “really” happened after Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop returned to Earth…. It turns out that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation has actually gotten some Alien eggs into their secret labs underneath their massive pyramidal office building. Newt (now a grown woman and going by her given name Rebecca) finds out about this through Hicks, who is subversively working as the building’s head of security. Rebecca gets the assistance of Mimi Yutani, the granddaughter of the Company’s CEO, to smuggle them into the building just as an alien outbreak starts. I really liked the way this shaped up, although the ending and some of the action sequences need additional work.
This isn’t to say that I had given up on short stories altogether. Given some free time and access to the U of M computer lab in the early 90s, I wrote the first of what I consider my “adult” short stories (aside from a little experimental piece called “Pinnacle”), a longish horror piece called “Crucible”, which I worked and reworked so long that it’s surprising that it held together so well. After that, I wrote the first of my Dreamstories, inspired by – and trying as hard as possible to stay true to – actual dreams I’ve had. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve been in a dream, saying “This would make an *awesome* story, or even a novel!” and then wake up and find myself unable to get that feeling back, or even remember much of what happened. So when I get a dream that actually survives being dragged up from the depths into the waking world, I kind of feel the need to preserve it somehow. Up to the present, I have eight of these, and I always find them intriguing, but there’s a saying that there’s nothing as boring as someone else’s dreams, and I leave it to you to decide if that’s true.
I started a journal in 1996, one that I’ve kept up to this day. In the past 16 years, I’ve written about 400,000 words, just outlining the details of each day. I even worked backwards from the present, with the help of my wife and brother’s day planners from the high school years, old school papers, and my parent’s day calendars too. If I can pin down a date something happened, I’ll add it in, even if it’s nothing more significant than setting a record on one of my old Atari games. This endeavor is all saved in digital form, except for a four-year span between 1999 and 2003 where – for some reason – I wrote everything down longhand in blank books. That still has to be transcribed. But it’s the one project that I’m sure I’m going to continue for the rest of my life.
My next half-dozen stories dealt with some weighty issues… death and what’s beyond, if anything. The stories I wrote in the 2000’s dealt a lot with that sort of question. There’s a man who builds the perfect place for Armageddon to start (“12:00 and Holding”), a satirical – and not entirely successful -- piece about Jesus being cloned from his blood on the Shroud of Turin (“The Holy Resuscitation”), and a pioneer woman who has a run-in with a seductive dark angel, in a town perpetually shrouded by smoke from a nearby coal-mine fire (“Moloch”).
Through this time I was finishing my film projects, too, even though as time went on I became increasingly disillusioned with ever getting into the film industry. The dream of the indie film boom of the early 90s – anyone can max out their credit cards and make the next Clerks! – was fading, and the prospect of moving to Los Angeles was impossible. So I switched back to writing prose. At first I tried novelizing my original script Syzygy, but didn’t get far on it. It seems that the ideas I had for the film didn’t translate realistically into fiction. Or maybe I just didn’t find the right tone. At any rate, I abandoned it after a few chapters.
I did, however, embark on something new, a novel that resulted from my desire to write something Big & Important. The questionably-successful result, 28 IF, was the story of two exes spending a day visiting an amusement park and talking. Over the course of the day, they discuss the Big Issues, rekindle their relationship, reveal life-altering secrets, and change their worlds for better or worse, all to the soundtrack of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. I’m quite proud of it, and I’ve informally submitted it to a publisher, although it came back with the note that there’s a lot of talking but not enough *happens* in it. That’s fair, and I always knew that even if I wrote the best novel in the world, the necessity of including all of Abbey Road’s lyrics would be a cost and a hassle no publisher would want to undertake. It’s a little short too, about half the length of your typical novel, which makes it even harder to market.
Also during this time, my cousin, who also dabbles in writing, started a round-robin story with me where we would each write a short chapter (about 500 words), then send it to the other. We ended up writing about 40 or 50 chapters, and a pattern soon emerged: my cousin would write something crazy and tangential, and I would spend my chapter finding a way to work it into the existing narrative. It eventually morphed into a story about an enchanted watch that opened an alternate dimension, and a hero who has to stop a real-life version of the Tasmanian Devil. He ends up getting caught up in a war between armies that use giant talking spiders for steeds. Yeah, it’s weird. And it might be lost to time, forever trapped in the amber of floppy disks that I may have already thrown out. Although I do remember one low-budget Christmas when I printed out the entire story for my cousin… he says he’s digging through his archives to see if he can find it.
Shortly after I finished 28 IF, I tried to keep my momentum going by starting on another novel, with the working title “Tints of Dead”. It’s based loosely on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, which I love as a bit of surreal, existential horror. In that short story, a prince shuts himself and his loyal subjects in his castle to save them from a plague that is ravaging the country. He sets everyone up in a suite of rooms, each themed with a particular color, and stages a constant masquerade party to keep everyone’s mind off the horror outside. In my story, people are invited to an exclusive nightclub, which is centered around (like Poe’s story) an imposing grandfather clock. They select animal masks, then get locked in and introduced to their host, whose motives on how and if they’ll get to go home are unclear… I got about 34,000 words into it and then ran out of steam, unsure of how to structure the back half. Actually, I had the structure thanks to Mr. Poe, but how I’m going to change it and make it work for me, I haven’t figured out.
It was during this time that I realized my personal pattern for writing stories… I seem to gravitate toward a linear, real-time story, based on another work that I admire (Abbey Road, the Poe story, etc.). It seems to be the only way I can last for anything approaching a novel’s length, like training wheels. I’ve got to have some greater framework already existing, for me to drape my own plot over it and have its contours guided. It’s part of the pattern-seeker in me… I like nothing better than when something that appears to be random comes together in a pattern.
Round about 2003 I started something that, for a while, I really thought would be the major writing project of my life…. When I was a kid, I had a collection of at least the first 30 books in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. (Side note: for a while I actually went to the same school as the son of one of the series’ creators, R.A. Montgomery, although I never tried to get myself invited over.) I have to say that I read them a lot, and even came close to memorizing a few of them. I even remember trying to map them out, to see if there was any pattern or trick to the way the pages were laid out. By the way, there isn’t.
I always had the idea of writing a CYOA in the back of my head, although it seemed more like a kids’ thing. Then I came across a pop culture blog called Robot Skull, which I thought was awesome for the title alone, along with the fact that when you first logged into the site, your computer’s CD tray would open and you would be instructed to “Insert Quarter”. They had a neat feature on the site where the author had written the first chapter of a CYOA, and then invited people to write the next chapter to either of the choices he provided. Every new chapter would have two possible choices, and then could be added to by any other reader, ad infinitum. I have to say, I tried it once and then couldn’t stop. Before I knew it, I had filled out four branches off of one of the choices, which meant that I had written 16 mini-chapters before I even knew what was happening. At that point, I copied down what I had posted and used them to start my own CYOA. Over the next year, it actually turned into a pretty massive project. I completed the first 8 levels, following every possible choice (which means 256 chapters = 2 to the power of 8), and I followed the most promising chapters even farther than that, down to levels 11 or 12.
I had dreams of somehow parlaying this project into something that could actually net me some profit. I had visions of micro-charging readers for each time they started at the beginning, just a couple cents. Or publishing it in an actual book (remember, this is back when such a thing was actually in the realm of possibility, although I know no book company would actually undertake it now), something massive and leather-bound with multiple bookmark ribbons in the spine so you could keep track of your previous choices, which would make backtracking easier -- something I always found annoying with regular CYOA titles.
But, like so many other projects, it lost steam after a while, mostly because by definition it has no end. Like I said, my intention was always to put down the first idea that came into my head, and it turns out that the first idea isn't always the best. And each chapter, good or bad, then has to spawn a possibly infinite array of further chapters. But, I have to admit, for a while it was great fun to work on. I don't think I've ever made myself laugh so much at my own ridiculous imagination. I still go back to it from time to time -- it currently logs in at about 110,000 words, inching close to actual novel length.
I didn't really tackle any big projects again until a few years ago. While working at Borders, I realized what a dearth of paranormal romance titles there were. It seemed like they were coming out daily, a growing pile of tales about werewolves, vampires, demons, and magic-wielders set in contemporary settings. I wondered if I could do the same thing and dash off a clever little twist on a classic monster living in the modern world. Of course, the first thing a writer should be taught is not to write in order to make money, but in this case I did -- and ended up with something that will eventually, I think, turn out to be much more interesting.
I decided to make it a romance between a human and demon. I knew there were plenty of stories like this out there, but they always take place on earth. Mine takes place in Hell. I thought that would be my "in", my way to set it apart. So then I had to figure out why this human was in Hell, what he had done to get there, and how Hell itself works. You know, determining a just, fitting, and fresh method of eternal punishment for sinners isn't all that easy. I ended up with a sort of version of the Circles of Dante's Inferno, but rejiggered to use the seven deadly sins to form the hierarchy of the various levels. And for a plot, I used a standard quest device... although the goal this time is The Answer to the Eternal Question of the Meaning of Life (yes, that thing again). The hero -- if you can call him that -- thinks the whole idea of Hell is terribly unfair and pointless, and sets off to descend through the levels to confront Satan and demand some kind of explanation. That's how he comes across a female demon who seems to want the same thing.
As it stands, the couple (along with small band of travelers they’ve accumulated) have made their way into the eternal war being waged in the Circle of Wrath, and are just starting to come to terms with the fact they're falling in love. The strange thing is, the idea of constant war is one of the first I had when starting the book, and now that I've arrived, I don't quite know how to proceed. The way Hell works has been firmly established, but I'm not sure what the characters are going to learn about where they are, or how they're going to pass through it. I’ve settled on the title “Nadir”, showing my penchant for using relatively obscure words for titles, which is sure to infuriate any future publicists.
Around the time my daughter was born, I kind of stopped working on my big projects and focused on the smaller ones, mostly blog posts, little bite-size pieces that didn't take a lot of concentration to complete, as opposed to a big book that takes some time to get into every day, figuring out where all the balls you're juggling were when you left off. When there's a baby in the house, there's precious little ability to focus on something that's not right in front of you, or brainspace to process something that's entirely imaginary.
Only in the last few months have I thought of a way of maybe goosing myself into finishing at least one big project. This latest one is about a writers' workshop, a small group called the Wednesday World Forgers who meet every week to share what they're working on and trying to find ways to encourage each other. The one thing they all have in common is that they have varying degrees of writers' block, and the projects they're working on are -- you might have guessed it already -- my own unfinished works. I'm hoping that in this new story I can somehow get my own characters to solve the problems I've having with each of these projects, and maybe figure out how to complete some or all of them.
There. I think that's the bulk of it. My Complete Works. So if I were to go through and total it all up, how much would it be? Well, let me formulate a list here and then make some guesses, and we'll see what my writing life has amounted to at this point. Approximate word counts follow each:
Kid Books: 20,000
Kid Poetry: 1,000
Kid Scripts: 10,000
School Papers: 7,000
Adult Scripts: 60,000 (Syzygy, Throat Sprockets, Alien 4)
Adult Stories: 94,000 (24 short stories)
Borders.com Reviews: 5,000 (customer reviews informally written for the website I worked for)
Novels (complete and incomplete):
28 IF: 72,000
Nadir: 105,000
“Tints of Dread”: 34,000
Wednesday World Forgers: 5,000
Ongoing Projects:
Life Journal: 378,000
Ultimate CYOA: 110,000
Blog posts: 31,000
So all added up, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 932,000 words, or the equivalent of 3,728 pages, which is about 25 novel-length books.)
Holy crap, maybe I am a writer after all.
