Writing, Editing & Journalism

Writing Update: Post-NaNo '18

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National Novel Writing Month came and went. I logged a “win” with my highest wordcount ever, just shy of 52k. This year marked my eighth consecutive year of participating and my fifth overall win, so now I’m batting 0.625.
But this year wasn’t really a win so much as it was a cleanup for several fiction and non-fiction projects. I didn’t work on any single manuscript, but rather revised and extended several things concurrently then dutifully logged my daily word count. (I pasted the exact same number of words from a Lorem Ipsum generator to validate in the NaNo system.) In fact, the only reason I attained 52k is because non-fiction writing, for me, is an order of magnitude easier and faster than novel-length fiction composition. I spent less time writing this November than in any previous year — mostly because I’ve been focused on book production for CafPress. That, and I was out of town for several one-off days as well as a week early in the month focused on prepping for, then speaking at, a conference in Minneapolis.
Here’s what I accomplished on the penmonkey front:

  • Finished not one but two of the erotica novellas in the series I write under pseudonym, one of which I started in 2016 then set aside, three-fourths done. And got a decent amount of sales out of them, too, in just a few days of November.
  • Revised a flash story, which I submitted to the Write Michigan contest.
  • Wrote several chapters in a non-fiction book I’m developing, Introduction to Health Quality Analtyics.
  • Also wrote several chapters in the other non-fiction book I’m developing, From Pencil to Print: Practical Advice for Emerging Authors. Both of these non-fiction chapters mostly went to non-controversial stuff that I can use as samples when I shop the proposals for both, later this month. (Non-fiction books generally aren’t written in advance; they’re researched and planned, then pitched, and if a publisher picks it up, only then does the book get written — exactly the opposite of fiction writing.)

I also learned a few things worth passing along.
First, my recent practice of writing in Visual Studio Code, in Markdown (well, CommonMark), works fine for most straightforward material. But the more complicated book-length content doesn’t work quite as cleanly. For starters, Markdown isn’t so much a standard as a bunch of competing standards that don’t always translate the same way. Second, Markdown doesn’t really handle citations well. And third, Markdown tends to be less strict about some things that, for a technical non-fiction project, probably ought to be strict.
So, as I spin up the next novella, I’m writing not in Markdown but rather in AsciiDoc, using the Asciidoctor toolkit. It’s a different workflow, and Visual Studio Code doesn’t natively support AsciiDoc like it does GitHub-flavored Markdown, but after tinkering last night with a sample book-type project, I think I’m migrating to AsciiDoc anyway, and converting my existing non-fiction projects to it, too. Case in point: E-book construction. Asciidoctor runs on Ruby, so after I installed Ruby (then installed an older version of Ruby, because Dependency Hell), I could install the AsciiDoctor-EPUB3 gem to natively generate EPUB3-compliant e-books. And the rules for developing these e-books are fairly precise — you must use a spine document, specify includes, specify metadata in the spine, declare folders, cite image locations, etc. — but after you get that figured out, then a perfectly formatted e-book awaits with just a single command. I opened the resulting sample EPUB in Edge, Calibre and Sigil and it was flawless, inside and out. So there’s that. And because AsciiDoc supports conversion to DocBook, you can use AsciiDoc to create very complex technical documentation at book length without any interoperability problems.
So “mark me down” as a convert from Markdown to AsciiDoc. And it’s not even hard to parse, either:

So you can convert the AsciiDoc source to HTML5, XHTML5, DocBook5, DocBook4.5, Manpage, PDF, EPUB3 and LaTeX. Plus, bolt-on gems support conversion to other formats, too. Nifty. And because AsciiDoc source is a plain-text document, I’ll continue to sync it with my private GitLab CE repository like normal. Oh, yeah, it natively works with BibTeX files with another plugin, allowing for both unique citekey references as well as bibliographies that can be rendered in any of the major citation styles.
So, good learning. And a good November.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Writing All the Words; Reading All the Words

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Well, NaNoWriMo 2017 is officially, as one of our MLs put it, The Year of the Slog. Painful going, mitigated by the good turnout at my Saturday-morning write-ins and the surreal silence of our Day of Knockout Noveling in Holland.
I managed to eke a narrow “win” this year. I did something different for this project. For example, it’s (literally) only half-done. This novel consists of two parts: The first half is a series of 15 chapters dotted between 1981 and 2017; each chapter consists of two scenes, one each from both of the two point-of-view characters. The second half—next year’s project, perhaps!—will cover just six weeks in the late summer of 2017, again with a two-scene, 15-chapter design. The whole project should clock in somewhere between 100k and 120k completed words, if I elect to finish it.
In a nutshell: Liz Thompson, an FBI agent, is temporarily reassigned home, to the Grand Rapids field office, to hunt a suspected serial killer. That killer actually exists; he’s Tyler Parker, a formerly abused and bullied kid who transforms (in his own mind) into a vigilante dispensing justice to abusive men who cross his path.
The first half of the novel relates the touch points, in a series of brief and disconnected vignettes, that led two normal, middle-class toddlers to become radically different adults. The second half is a more traditional agent-pursues-killer plot.
The point of the exercise wasn’t really to write a novel. The point was to experiment with long and complex conflict arcs. I’ve learned that one weakness in my fiction has been my tendency to use plot as a series of events that just happen, with conflict being relegated to the sidelines. With this project, I focused on making the conflicts—between Liz and Tyler, between Tyler and his father, between Tyler and his childhood abusers, between Liz and her mother, between the main characters and the passage of time—serve as the key drivers of the story.
For you stats kids out there keeping track of all my NaNo’ing, that puts me at:

  • Seven continuous years of participation with “wins” in four of those years (a ~57 percent success rate, making me a better bet than a coin toss).
  • Cumulative total of 255,830 validated words.

With all that writing done, I now pivot to reading. I’ve picked up A War Like No Other, the history of the Peloponnesian War as told by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s rather nice to sit in the cozy microfiber recliner in my office, with a feline on the lap and a glass of wine at hand, with some soft Bach playing in the background and the lights dim except for a subtle reading lamp and the glow from the fireplace.
However, I need your help.
I’m working on one of my long-time bucket-list items: I want to compile (and then begin!) a life-long reading list. Not a list of top 10 books or anything that modest. Rather, a comprehensive list of what books are the most worth reading if you have a lifetime to dedicate to the pursuit.
I already have quite a list prepared, although my earlier research is long on antiquity and short on modernity. I am not limiting the list to Western Civ, nor to any time period. Items on the list begin, for example, with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of the Dead and the I Ching and the Odyssey. Also, no genre restrictions.
Share with me what books you think are worthy of the list, either as comments here or in Facebook comments or tweets.

Healthcare Quality & Analytics, Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

An October Update

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After a brief stretch of unseasonably warm weather in late September, West Michigan has unambiguously slipped into autumn. I look out my home-office window—the air is nice, with that charming mix of cool and moist that suggests “tailgate season”—and I see more and more orange and red amidst the green. Squirrels scamper with earnestness. Bugs are vanishing. Things slow down.

“Winter is coming,” I’m told. And I hope it does. I’m excited for this year’s holiday season. In my head, it kicks off with my mid-September birthday, which marks for me the end of summer (Labor Day doesn’t do it for me) and the beginning of “winter Lent.” Then October sees the tree transitions and sweater weather and writing prep that culminates in Halloween—holiday season kickoff!—and the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. Thanksgiving re-grounds me with family and marks a pivot point for NaNo. And as soon as the mad-dash of writing is over, I pivot to Christmas and then take two or three weeks off from the day job to recharge, etc. It’s a great time of the year, even in years when I’m not “feelin’ it.”

So today seems like as good of a time as any to offer some updates, offered as usual in no particular order, but as always under the watchful gaze of my feline overlords.

VLO’s Summer Vacation. Tony and I took a half-vacation (i.e., work slowdown) in late July and throughout August; as of September, we were back to a normal weekly podcasting schedule. The upside to VLO now rolling in its sixth year is that we’re stable and mature. And, of course, that we have thousands of downloaders and hundreds of engaged listeners on Twitter, Facebook, the blog, etc. Given that we don’t monetize this program—it’s a hobby and labor of love—the response by people all across the world has been fantastic. And for almost all of the shows for September and October, our alcohol segments came to us free of charge courtesy of gifts from our listeners. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a joyful thing.

NAHQ @ Cincinnati. On my birthday, I flew to Cincinnati for the back-to-back board meeting and educational conference for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. It was a professionally rewarding experience. Being a board member means that the conference is tightly scheduled for us. Six days, five nights. But what made it personally rewarding was the deep camaraderie among the current members of the board and the great cadre of seasoned, senior volunteers who work with us. NAHQ is about to go into a very tight period where the organization pivots from an association-management model (i.e., a separate company “manages” the association, hires the staff, provides the office, etc.) to a fully stand-alone model where the association itself handles all its own operations, leases its own offices, hires its own team, stands up its own I.T., etc. This is a huge deal. We’re bigger than most groups that make the independent pivot and we have only about a quarter of the time the average group enjoys to make the move … but our staff are awesome (almost all are leaving the management company to be hired by NAHQ outright) and our finances are rock-solid. It’ll be a heavy lift, but it’ll be done with finesse and—we expect—utterly transparently to our thousands of dues-paying members.

Jot That Down. I’m pleased to share that Jot That Down: Encouraging Essays for New Writers has been successfully released. I worked with A. L. Rogers, the book’s editor, to get it produced in print. It’s a great resource for new/aspiring writers, covering a variety of topics and genres in an easy-to-digest manner. Currently available for purchase for $14.95 from Caffeinated Press or by special order from your local independent bookseller.

Other CafPress books. And speaking of Jot That Down, I’ve wrapped up Isle Royale from the AIR, an anthology edited by Phillip Sterling that collects stories, poems and art from former artists-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park. I’m also in the production phase of Brewed Awakenings 3, our annual anthology, and Off the Wall: How Art Speaks, a collection of poetry and art co-developed by Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Mary Hatch. And final edits are due from the advance review copy for Ladri, a novel by Andrea Albright. Barring disaster, each of these books should be in-scope for a boost event we’ll host at the end of the month. Two more novels await this year—Kim Bento’s Surviving the Lynch Mob and Barbara David’s A Tale of Therese—plus Jennifer Morrison’s local-history book The Open Mausoleum Door, then I’m caught up with production across all of our lines of business.

NaNoWriMo. NaNo’s coming, so that means that I’ve had to (a) re-curate my author page and (b) think about what I’m going to work on. I think my technical focus will be on sharpening conflict and using that conflict to be the primary driver of the plot (instead of my usual, which is to let the plot drive the conflict). The story itself will be another bite at a Jordan Sanders murder mystery because I’m well-acquainted with the characters in this universe. But I still have three weeks to nail down my idea.

Grand River Writing Tribe. The Tribe has been together for 10 months now, and it’s been going gangbusters. People are participating. Getting published. Supporting each other. Without a regular, focused critique group, a writer stands at a significant disadvantage. GRWT meets twice monthly for three hours, combining critiques, focused education and dedicated writing time. And we still welcome potential new applicants!

Juicing. So this happened. On October 1, a scant week ago, I began a significant diet program. I had purchased a juicer and accessories. For several days, I had nothing but fruit and vegetable juice. Then, on the advice of clinicians at work, I’ve migrated to a part-juice, part-good-food regimen. So it’s been juices with a little bit of, e.g., shredded chicken or sushi or carrot/celery sticks. The thing is, I’m avoiding all processed sugars, alcohol, refined carbs, etc. Not even doing my traditional Lean Cuisines. It’s either juice I prepared myself, or plain shredded chicken or sashimi without the rice. (Tonight, I’m making a salmon fillet with asparagus.) Already down five pounds in a week. And although the diet part isn’t hard—I really like what I’m consuming—what’s been more interesting is the level of planning I’ve had to do. Actually preparing a shopping list (“I need this many swiss chard leaves, this many pears, this many ounces of blueberries …”) and planning my evening schedule around my dinner schedule has been both illustrative and challenging. And now that I bought an elliptical, which just got set up in my living room—whoa! Credit to my friend Tony who did a 30-day juice diet in May (and lost a ton of weight!) and who remains incredibly supportive even when I mock him unfairly for becoming a vegan.

The Great Outdoors. Tomorrow, a half-day kayaking trip beckons, with Jen, Brittany and Steve. Next Saturday, I’m doing a day hike on a section of the North Country Trail in the Manistee National Forest.

Home Shopping Spree. With the annual management bonus we received at the day job, I was able to pay off some bills, pay other bills early and invest a bit in both Caffeinated Press and my own home front. Of note, with the mid-summer swap of my bedroom and my office, I had to buy all new bedroom furniture. That’s done: Dresser, headboard, vanity with bench. Then some odds-and-ends, including the aforementioned elliptical, some knickknacks like candles and new lamps, a full-length mirror and a stool for the bathroom, and a replacement computer. My “normal” all-in-one home computer is very old and has been intermittently hostile, so it’s been retired to be a dedicated writing machine at my dedicated writing desk. The new machine—the first upgradeable tower PC I’ve owned since, I think, 2005—is an iBuyPower box with a quad-core i7-7700 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a 3GB GPU (GeForce GTX 1060). In all, a decent if not bleeding-edge machine. The only real hesitation I had with it is that it appears to have been designed by a 13-year-old boy, with proliferating LED lights (that I covered with electrical tape!) and a keyboard that looked like a l337 toddler toy. Picked up a 27-inch monitor for it; almost got two but I’m glad I didn’t because with it and the 17-inch aux monitor I already had, I’m literally out of room on my desk. I literally cannot fit two 27-inch monitors. Anyway, Duane, if you see this: “SIXTEEN GIGS OF RAM.”

Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. It’s an exciting time at GLCL. The board has been discussing a very, very robust programming schedule for 2018 as well as rebranding and an expansion of the board. A ton of work, to be sure, but I think it’ll help focus the organization and promote local literary citizenship. More to come.

All for now. May your autumn Winter Lent warm your soul even if it chills your toes!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Reflection on #NaNoWriMo

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The end of the month draws nigh, with tens of thousands of scribblers furiously adding to their daily tallies in anticipation of validating their 50,000 words before 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 30.

This year marks my sixth consecutive foray into National Novel Writing Month. My first two attempts were not successful. My next three, were. This one won’t be. And let me tell you why, by means of a brief history lesson.

The Road So Far

Easy Way Out (2011; mystery; words = 7,725)

My first foray into November’s literary machinations, and my first real attempt at long-form fiction, started two days before the season commenced. As I recall, on Oct. 30, 2011, my friend Duane asked me if I had ever heard of NaNoWriMo. I said, “Na who?” — but he convinced me to sign up and to go with him to a write-in (a group of authors who write together and socialize and sometimes eat) at the food court at Woodland Mall. So I did. I discovered that pantsing (the act of sitting down and writing with no planning whatsoever) is not my cup of tea. I started writing a murder mystery before I even knew who the killer was or why the corpse met his demise. I had a rough idea that I’d try to play off some sort of theatrical assisted suicide motif into it, but … didn’t work out so well. Without a roadmap, all I could do was stare at a blank screen that I was sure was taunting me somehow. Very humbling experience. But, I did go to a lot of write-ins, and being social got me invited into a private writers’ group. That group became my tribe; I still write with, and because of, them.

Magellan Ascendant (2012; sci-fi; words = 14,504)

“Aha,” I thought, one October evening in 2012. “My problem last year was that I didn’t plan my novel!” So I planned Magellan in detail. In fact, it was developed as a trilogy. I still think the story has legs, although I can’t use much of anything that’s already been written. Two core learnings: First, that editing-as-you-go isn’t helpful (e.g., do not waste one full week working through the physics of interstellar travel just to feed a handful of lines of dialogue — although I can authoritatively tell you that you do not want to be hit by a single grain of sand traveling at 40 percent of the speed of light). And second, that a detailed plot really isn’t as helpful as it seems if your characters all act and speak as if they’re cardboard cutouts of the stereotypes they were modeled upon.

Sanctuary (2013; mystery; words = 50,736)

My first win. It’s not a bad story, I don’t think — a murder mystery set in Grand Rapids. I finally developed a cohesive planning approach for developing scene-by-scene synopses and plot/character goals. In this novel, I managed to work through a primary plot (the murder investigation) that included a few minor subplots revolving around interpersonal disputes for several character pairings. A few chapters introduced other point-of-view characters, but my POV strategy was more of an accident than anything. The novel clocked in complete at roughly 51k words. Too short. And the characters, although a bit more fleshed out, weren’t quite complete. Yet it’s done and self-contained. I suspect that if I ever had to go back and rewrite a story for publication, this is the manuscript I’d reach for first.

Aiden’s Wager (2014; literary; words = 52,098)

This is probably my best work, but it’s the last one I’d show to people, because there’s a section in the middle that derailed into torture porn. However, that challenge aside, the rest of the work retains a lot of promise. It’s basically the tale of an arrogant, rich young man who earns his comeuppance by his peer group, but has to claw his way out from a perfectly set trap through (in part) figuring out how he’s going to center his life. The novel was planned to be more didactic than it turned out to be — the “wager” in question is actually Pascal’s Wager, a theme that underlies many of the softer scenes within the plot arc. And, significantly, it’s not complete. It was targeted for 90k words. I know what the end looks like, but I’m not there yet.

Six Lost Souls (2015; literary; words = 50,049)

I crossed the “win” mark, although the work wasn’t complete. Still had probably another 40k to go, to pull it off as planned. The story is an improvement, technique-wise, relative to its predecessors: I deployed several POV characters, more internal dialogue, some extended action scenes (much of my writing is basically people going somewhere to talk), additional conflicts, more fully rounded characters. That said, I was overly ambitious with this effort and I think, ultimately, a few of my characters just weren’t plausible. The overarching theme of family transcending blood and time was dashed on the fact that I made the characters dissimilar enough that the intended third act just didn’t firm up appropriately.

The Catfish in the Shallows (2016; literary; words = 32,517)

So. We arrive at my current work effort. I knew going into Halloween that this one wasn’t really a novel, per se, as much as it was an experiment in designing literary fiction in a less tidy way. My previous novels basically had One Main Plot and One Main Character who advanced linearly through time, without flashbacks or foreshadowing or substantial internal dialogue. Although I introduced a few subplots and even allowed for other POV characters, my prior works were, overwhelmingly, first-person stories told through the artifice of Third Person Limited that shared one big idea from the perspective of one good-but-flawed hero.

With Catfish, however, my goal was to divide POV relatively equally among four main characters, each of whom had imperfect knowledge of the opening scene’s murder, but each of whom has his-or-her own motives and observations about the universe they inhabit and the dramas in their lives unrelated to the murder. None of the characters would re-tell the same scene, but several MCs were in the same scene together at various times, with differing opinions of that scene that the reader experienced as POV shifted.

The goal, then, was to advance a series of intertwined shorter stories, culminating at the end of the third act with the reader — but not necessarily all the characters — understanding the “who and why” of the murder. The problem? I didn’t plot it well enough to tie this together with any hope of success. I’m at 30k words and I realize that I don’t have a plausible go-forward plan; my only real pathway to conclusion requires much of the opening to be completely rewritten. So instead of trying to hit 50k just for the sake of it, I’m acknowledging that I have learned a lot from this experiment but that there’s no intrinsic value in keeping it alive just for the “win.” I’ve already won, in the only sense that matters.

Some Writing Thoughts

The real benefit of National Novel Writing Month, for me, isn’t so much the “win” but rather the chance to hone my long-form writing craft in the social context of friends who are also hell-bent on putting their story to paper.

Writing isn’t easy. Lots of folks — I see them all the time through the Caffeinated Press query system — seem to think that anyone can generate a novel on the first go-around that’s ready for the open market. These one-hit wonders might generate a corpus of words, but such early-career authors are unlikely to find commercial success until they’ve stumbled through a half-dozen or so failed “training” manuscripts. Just like trying to advance from a Fisher-Price trike to a lean Ducati motorcycle in one day is a recipe for disaster, so also is trying to move from your first 50k-word manuscript into a contract with the Big Five.

People approach NaNoWriMo with several different goals. For some, it’s fun — a chance to hang out with fellow writing nerds. For others, it’s an accountability tool. For a few, it’s an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe way.

As I look back on my earlier works, I can see the evolution. The growth. The challenge of NaNoWriMo, though, is to keep growing in months other than November.

Good luck.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Literary Life

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The last few weeks as a “literary dude” have offered no end of insight and opportunity.

First, I’m honored to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors of the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. The GLCL is a non-profit writing center dedicated to encouraging, promoting, and celebrating the craft of writing, the endeavors of writers, and the importance of the literary arts in the communities of the Great Lakes region. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in the heart of beautiful and historic Grand Rapids, Michigan, GLCL offers reading series, craft talks, classes and workshops, Great Lakes author book launches, teen and young adult programming, writing contests, consultations with professional regional writers, and much more.

Second, I recently concluded a trip to Kalamazoo-area bookstores coordinated by Deborah Gang, an author/poet with whom Caffeinated Press has contracted for her novel, The Half Life of Everything. Deborah introduced me to the major indie booksellers in the area–Joanna at Bookbug, John at Kazoo Books and Dean at Michigan News. Each visit brought me a valuable new nugget of wisdom about how publishing works from a retailer’s perspective. Not only did I enjoy the chance to visit new-to-me bookstores, but I also filled a few holes in my thinking about the best way to market new titles.

All of this–on top of the recent release of Brewed Awakenings 2 anthology that I edit, plus the contracting with Wipf and Stock for a short essay in Tushnet’s Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church–makes for a busy but incredibly rewarding fortnight!

Because now we pivot to National Novel Writing Month. Whoa! NaNoWriMo begins on November 1. I’ve already figured out, in broad strokes, what I’m going to do: A literary novel presently titled The Catfish in the Shallows.

The teaser:

Police detectives remain stumped after Noah Thomas is found dead, his mangled body tossed into the Grand River, so the young man’s grandmother hires Jordan Sanders, an effective yet colorful private investigator, to uncover the truth. Sanders takes the case, but the deeper he probes into the intersecting lines of four prominent West Michigan families, the more he discovers that although wealth can obscure a multitude of sins, no family can completely hide all the rot within.

I’m trying something new with this season’s work effort. It’s been my observation through my work as fiction editor of The 3288 Review and series editor of Brewed Awakenings that many authors seem to present stories in a plot-forward way–i.e, they develop a single overarching plot and then build everything else (characters, settings, twists) in service to that major plot. And that’s fine … but it’s not sublime.

With Catfish, I’m aiming for a more baroque experience. The West Michigan setting isn’t intended to be an afterthought, but rather a cultural reality deeply woven into the fabric of the story, with Upper Midwest proclivities shaping the conflict and the logic behind each clue that the main character uncovers. I plan to use lush descriptions and more complex sentence structures (including a Buckleyesque vocabulary) to set the story apart. And although the main plot is a murder mystery, this isn’t a typical detective novel–the search for the killer is, in a sense, a vehicle to advance several deliberately developed subplots that address the animosities that the very rich sometimes feel for one another. The overall feel is intended to be more literary than genre.

We’ll see how this works. As with my previous NaNoWriMo experiences, I use this time to experiment. I learn a lot by doing. I have no idea whether I’ll be satisfied with the output or whether, come December 1, I’ll file it away in the back of the cabinet.

Regardless of the manuscript’s potential legs, the November frenzy will be worth it.

Personal, Vices, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Twelve Quick Updates from a Whirlwind of a Month

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What an interesting — and busy! — few weeks it’s been.

  1. Las Vegas trip. I got back this past Monday from a two-night trek to Sin City to meet up with friends surrounding the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic event. VIMFP is an annual confab featuring Vegas-focused podcasters and bloggers. Lots of attendees. Lots of fun. You can listen to me and Tony discuss my trip report on episode 290 of The Vice Lounge Online.
  2. Nicole’s wedding. My cousin Nicole married Corey on the 14th. Lovely wedding and reception. I wish them the very best for many years of wedded bliss!
  3. Horseshoe Hammond excursion. Tony and I trekked to Hammond, Indiana for a day trip to this lovely Caesars Entertainment casino on the outskirts of Chicago. Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold! You can hear the highlights in VLO’s episode 289.
  4. Essay contracted.  I’m pleased to announce that I’ve recently signed a publication agreement for a short essay, “A Moment of Clarity,” intended for publication in a volume titled Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church. The book — edited by Eve Tushnet and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers — is currently in early production status.
  5. Brewed Awakenings 2 released. I’m delighted to share that Brewed Awakenings 2, the annual house anthology of Caffeinated Press, is now on the market. Buy your copy today to support local literary excellence! This collection features 15 stories by 14 different authors, ranging from just a few hundred words to more than 20k words; the stories cross genres and styles.
  6. Grayson Rising released. And speaking of releases, Grayson Rising also hit the market this month. This delightful YA novel, partially set in Grand Rapids, is the first major fiction release by local author AJ Powell. In fact, AJ hosted a small launch event at his place of employment that was well-attended and greatly enjoyed by those who dropped by.
  7. The 3288 Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1, released. And now the trifecta: We recently printed the fifth iteration of our quarterly journal of arts and letters. It’s a flourishing property that is already drawing attention across the state. Quite proud of it!
  8. NaNoWriMo is coming. November looms, and with it, National Novel Writing Month. I will participate again. I will also continue to host my Saturday-morning write-ins. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write, a point I’ll expound upon in greater detail over the next few days. Let it suffice that I’ve developed a good skeleton for a literary novel augmented by some detective-genre conventions. The working title is The Catfish in the Shallows. Do not expect to see/hear much of me between 10/31 and 12/1!
  9. Site5 shenanigans. Although it didn’t affect this site, I had a world of trouble — as in, five days of unexpected downtime — with my longtime Web host, Site5. Outmigration is on the near-term horizon, unfortunately.
  10. Health quality glossary. Spent a fair amount of time recently as a subject-matter expert for NAHQ as we fine-tuned a comprehensive glossary of terms specific to quality improvement in healthcare. Much of this work entailed the alignment of definitions across existing products. Good intellectual exercise.
  11. SIP lines for Caffeinated Press. For years, the CafPress toll-free phone number (888-809-1686) went straight to a voice-mail box. I’ve now set us up with a SIP provider (i.e., a voice-over-Internet phone service) so our toll-free number actually rings in the office. I even have a desk phone, now, with my own extension and local number. Not that I actually use the phone much. But still. Progress.
  12. Outdoor kitties. A pair of felines have been lurking around my house. One of them has a home, and I’ve ensured that she’s been returned to it. The other — a fluffy black tabby, neutered, and sweet as molasses — keeps visiting. He likes it when I give him some Meow Mix. So I do. So far, he looks like he’s in good shape: his coat is fine, he looks well cared-for, his weight seems constant. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs of neglect as the cold-weather season sets in. I get the feeling he’s someone’s cat and that he might be an indoor/outdoor dude.

All for now.

Personal

Two Brief Reflections: Winning NaNoWriMo, and Governance

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I did it — I crossed, barely, the 50,000-word mark on The Children of St. William’s to earn my third consecutive “win” for National Novel Writing Month. The story isn’t finished, of course; my detailed scene graph pushes the final word count much closer to 85k. But working through the story when you’re at 50k aiming for 85k is much easier than starting from zero. Which, I believe, is the whole point of NaNoWriMo. And as I finished, I figured I’d change the book name, too, to the less cumbersome Six Lost Souls.

Some take-away observations about writing this past November:

  • I wrote my last 10,000 words in a single marathon day. That’s a lot. I couldn’t have started the month with that kind of productivity, mostly because — for me, anyway — I have to get north of 30k to 35k words before scenes start to roll off fluidly. Prior to that, and I’m still spending too much time thinking about structure and characters, so the writing process is slower: I’m making follow-up notes, thinking through the finer points of character voice, making decisions about scene details, etc. I tend to plan in detail, but you can’t plan for everything.
  • Much of my writing in the moment focuses on dialogue. I usually have to swing back after I’ve finished a scene to insert environmental details.
  • I don’t write much action — most of my scenes tend to be people arriving at a place and talking. I varied it this time around, however, and had a fight scene and two scenes of extended narration while a character does something alone. On rewrite, I’ll chop things up a bit. But, as they say, just knowing you’ve got an authorial quirk is half the battle.
  • For the first time, I was deliberate from the get-go about my point-of-view characters, and which scenes led with a specific POV. By default, I tend to write Third Person Limited, with a small number of POV characters.
  • I couldn’t write nearly as efficiently without Scrivener for Windows. With this app, I can condense notes and research and plot my story on a chapter-and-scene basis, with target word counts and synopsis cards. I can also configure various status flags for each scene (I customize my own) and set color codes to indicate which character’s POV governs a chapter or scene. I don’t think I could be nearly as successful if I had to rely on a generic word processor.

State Leaders’ Summit

I spent some time last week in Chicago, for the State Leaders’ Summit sponsored by the National Association for Healthcare Quality. The event went off without a hitch. I drove, which was fine, although I managed to hit eastbound I-90 around O’Hare just in time for Friday-evening rush-hour traffic. Took a full two hours to get from the airport area (Cumberland Avenue) to the Skyway Bridge. That said, there was much fascinating discussion to be had, including a valuable two-hour presentation by an association-management attorney about the basic principles of governance and legal/tax compliance for small non-profits.

Board members have three duties: A duty of care, a duty of loyalty and a duty of obedience. I think this tripartite distinction offers a good framework not just for business endeavors, but also for how we nurture personal relationships. More to ponder about that, I think.

Strategic Planning Retreat

Tonight the Caffeinated Press board of directors conducts a four-hour annual strategic governance retreat. Lots on the agenda. We’ve had a busy year, with a great mix of successes and … ahem, opportunities. We’ll cover Governance 101, plus look at our board composition, 2016 editorial strategy, the annual budget, and ways to grow the market.

The retreat starts after the regional TGIO party — celebrating the end of NaNoWriMo — so it’ll be a long day. But worth it.

Personal

November: The Busiest Month — A Recap & Reflection

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Hard to believe that tomorrow is the last day of the month. Over the last few years, the Eleventh Month has become the Busiest Month, much of it related to writing-related activities. This year was both more packed, but more manageable, than most. Herewith a recap, in no particular order.

  1. Library election. With all due gratitude and appreciation to the 17 people who wrote me in for the Nov. 3 election for the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Board of Library Commissioners, another candidate managed to get more than 450 votes. Wow. I am considering running on the formal ballot in 2017, because I still believe GRPL is far too parochial and antiquated in its thinking, particularly about local writing talent. The Kent District Library far outpaces GRPL on that front. Doesn’t need to be that way.
  2. Caffeinated Press update. Speaking of GRPL, we presented at the KDL fall writer’s conference in October, to a group of probably 200. We (John, Brittany, AmyJo and I) had 40 minutes to talk about the gotchas of moving a manuscript from your desktop to a publisher’s desktop. Likewise, I’ve been working like a mad demon on book projects. In the last six weeks, I’ve wrapped up production on A Crowd of Sorrows, A Broken Race and The One Friend Philosophy of Life. I also completed our corporate catalog and helped John with final proofing on The 3288 Review (vol. 1, issue 2). We even managed to hold a well-attended kickoff for National Novel Writing Month, here in the office, and to nominate six worthy pieces for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Next on the list: Edits on Letters lost then found, final production on Grayson Rising and proofing and production on Brewed Awakenings 2.
  3. The Children of St. William’s. My own NaNoWriMo novel, The Children of St. William’s, recounts the tale of Sarah Price, a young progressive woman who, although she had known she was adopted, discovers that she has several siblings. The novel addresses her shifting motivations for tracking each of them down — and how connecting all these people together both hurts and helps them all, while her parish priest struggles to understand how and why the adoptions happened in the first place. Currently at just a hair above 40k. On track for a NaNo “win.” I like the story and will continue to work on it; the current storyboard targets around 85k words. More to come.
  4. Treks to the Windy City. This coming week, I drive to Chicago for NAHQ’s State Leaders’ Summit. Then in January I have back-to-back NAHQ-related Chicago trips, both by air — the first for the quarterly board of directors meeting, and the second for the inaugural meeting of the Recognition of the Profession Commission (which I chair). Interesting professional-growth opportunity. Looking forward to the National Quality Summit in Dallas in the second week of May.
  5. MAHQ Conference 2015. Our October conference went off well — more than 60 attendees and fairly good results. I spoke about the health policy climate in the state government, as well as serving as overall conference chairman. Our venue, the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, served lovely food, but wow … horrific service standards. I expected better from the Amway. Did receive, however, solid support from ExperienceGR.
  6. Requiem by Brahms. AmyJo and I went to see German Requiem by Brahms earlier this month. The performance, guest conducted by Rune Bergmann, was a delight; the symphony was wonderful, as usual, and the chorus was well-balanced relative to the symphony. Before the performance, we stopped at Reserve for wine and cheese. In all, a great way to de-stress after a rough month (for each of us, individually). I have so few folks who enjoy fine-arts performances, so slipping out with AJ was awesome. (And I’ll have to book another opera trip with April soon.)
  7. Fully staffed! I now have a completely staffed department at Priority Health. A few weeks ago, two of my new hires — Jen and Maria — joined the team. A few weeks before that, it was Gabriel. And now we have Patrick. Focus will be on predictive modeling, quality improvement analytics intended to transform the care model, and ongoing support for our employer-group reporting team. Exciting time to be a leader in health data analytics.
  8. RIP Abbey. My classmate at West Catholic, Abbey Czarniecki, passed away recently. She was a lovely lady; may her soul find eternal rest.
  9. Hell = Frozen Over. I ended up buying an iPad Mini 4. The device makes work at Priority Health so much easier, since Spectrum Health’s IT department apparently only understands iOS. That said, although the device is conveniently portable, I still prefer my Surface 3. The way I see it, the iPad is great for quick, single-focus tasks, like answering an email or browsing something on the Web. But iOS falls far short compared to Windows 10 regarding multitasking and true productivity work. On my Surface 3 (not even the Pro model), I can do pretty much the same stuff I can do on my CafPress laptop. For context, the CafPress box is an HP laptop with a medium-high-end AMD processor and 8 GB of RAM. On the Surface 3, I can use Scrivener and the full MS Office suite. On the iPad … I can use simple versions that look and feel like Web apps. I’d give iOS the edge in core OS stability, app availability and ease of executing single tasks; Windows 10 wins in terms of sheer power and versatility and harmony of design. (Yes. Design harmony. You have no idea how hard it is to find basic settings in different iOS apps; some are in the app, some are in the Settings app. Geez. And writing with a stylus? Astonishingly infantile on iOS, smooth as butter on Win10.)
  10. VLO 250. Hard to believe that a weekly 30-minute podcast dedicated to casino gaming, premium cigars and fine adult beverages would last five years and 250 episodes, yet yesterday Tony came into town and we recorded through episodes 247 through 249 for The Vice Lounge Online. Wow. In December we’ll hit the quarter-millennium mark. We’re planning a “VLO Anniversary Party” for April 1-3 in Louisville, KY. Basically, distillery tours, the Urban Bourbon Trail and fine dining. And a cigar-related event. Probably no gambling, though, unless we do something minor at the Horseshoe Southern Indiana. More details to come. And I believe VLO is doing something fun as a scheduled activity in this summer’s 360 Vegas Vacation III in Las Vegas.

All for now. Have a lovely December, y’all.

Personal

November: The Busiest Month — A Recap & Reflection

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Hard to believe that tomorrow is the last day of the month. Over the last few years, the Eleventh Month has become the Busiest Month, much of it related to writing-related activities. This year was both more packed, but more manageable, than most. Herewith a recap, in no particular order.

  1. Library election. With all due gratitude and appreciation to the 17 people who wrote me in for the Nov. 3 election for the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Board of Library Commissioners, another candidate managed to get more than 450 votes. Wow. I am considering running on the formal ballot in 2017, because I still believe GRPL is far too parochial and antiquated in its thinking, particularly about local writing talent. The Kent District Library far outpaces GRPL on that front. Doesn’t need to be that way.
  2. Caffeinated Press update. Speaking of GRPL, we presented at the KDL fall writer’s conference in October, to a group of probably 200. We (John, Brittany, AmyJo and I) had 40 minutes to talk about the gotchas of moving a manuscript from your desktop to a publisher’s desktop. Likewise, I’ve been working like a mad demon on book projects. In the last six weeks, I’ve wrapped up production on A Crowd of Sorrows, A Broken Race and The One Friend Philosophy of Life. I also completed our corporate catalog and helped John with final proofing on The 3288 Review (vol. 1, issue 2). We even managed to hold a well-attended kickoff for National Novel Writing Month, here in the office, and to nominate six worthy pieces for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Next on the list: Edits on Letters lost then found, final production on Grayson Rising and proofing and production on Brewed Awakenings 2.
  3. The Children of St. William’s. My own NaNoWriMo novel, The Children of St. William’s, recounts the tale of Sarah Price, a young progressive woman who, although she had known she was adopted, discovers that she has several siblings. The novel addresses her shifting motivations for tracking each of them down — and how connecting all these people together both hurts and helps them all, while her parish priest struggles to understand how and why the adoptions happened in the first place. Currently at just a hair above 40k. On track for a NaNo “win.” I like the story and will continue to work on it; the current storyboard targets around 85k words. More to come.
  4. Treks to the Windy City. This coming week, I drive to Chicago for NAHQ’s State Leaders’ Summit. Then in January I have back-to-back NAHQ-related Chicago trips, both by air — the first for the quarterly board of directors meeting, and the second for the inaugural meeting of the Recognition of the Profession Commission (which I chair). Interesting professional-growth opportunity. Looking forward to the National Quality Summit in Dallas in the second week of May.
  5. MAHQ Conference 2015. Our October conference went off well — more than 60 attendees and fairly good results. I spoke about the health policy climate in the state government, as well as serving as overall conference chairman. Our venue, the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, served lovely food, but wow … horrific service standards. I expected better from the Amway. Did receive, however, solid support from ExperienceGR.
  6. Requiem by Brahms. AmyJo and I went to see German Requiem by Brahms earlier this month. The performance, guest conducted by Rune Bergmann, was a delight; the symphony was wonderful, as usual, and the chorus was well-balanced relative to the symphony. Before the performance, we stopped at Reserve for wine and cheese. In all, a great way to de-stress after a rough month (for each of us, individually). I have so few folks who enjoy fine-arts performances, so slipping out with AJ was awesome. (And I’ll have to book another opera trip with April soon.)
  7. Fully staffed! I now have a completely staffed department at Priority Health. A few weeks ago, two of my new hires — Jen and Maria — joined the team. A few weeks before that, it was Gabriel. And now we have Patrick. Focus will be on predictive modeling, quality improvement analytics intended to transform the care model, and ongoing support for our employer-group reporting team. Exciting time to be a leader in health data analytics.
  8. RIP Abbey. My classmate at West Catholic, Abbey Czarniecki, passed away recently. She was a lovely lady; may her soul find eternal rest.
  9. Hell = Frozen Over. I ended up buying an iPad Mini 4. The device makes work at Priority Health so much easier, since Spectrum Health’s IT department apparently only understands iOS. That said, although the device is conveniently portable, I still prefer my Surface 3. The way I see it, the iPad is great for quick, single-focus tasks, like answering an email or browsing something on the Web. But iOS falls far short compared to Windows 10 regarding multitasking and true productivity work. On my Surface 3 (not even the Pro model), I can do pretty much the same stuff I can do on my CafPress laptop. For context, the CafPress box is an HP laptop with a medium-high-end AMD processor and 8 GB of RAM. On the Surface 3, I can use Scrivener and the full MS Office suite. On the iPad … I can use simple versions that look and feel like Web apps. I’d give iOS the edge in core OS stability, app availability and ease of executing single tasks; Windows 10 wins in terms of sheer power and versatility and harmony of design. (Yes. Design harmony. You have no idea how hard it is to find basic settings in different iOS apps; some are in the app, some are in the Settings app. Geez. And writing with a stylus? Astonishingly infantile on iOS, smooth as butter on Win10.)
  10. VLO 250. Hard to believe that a weekly 30-minute podcast dedicated to casino gaming, premium cigars and fine adult beverages would last five years and 250 episodes, yet yesterday Tony came into town and we recorded through episodes 247 through 249 for The Vice Lounge Online. Wow. In December we’ll hit the quarter-millennium mark. We’re planning a “VLO Anniversary Party” for April 1-3 in Louisville, KY. Basically, distillery tours, the Urban Bourbon Trail and fine dining. And a cigar-related event. Probably no gambling, though, unless we do something minor at the Horseshoe Southern Indiana. More details to come. And I believe VLO is doing something fun as a scheduled activity in this summer’s 360 Vegas Vacation III in Las Vegas.

All for now. Have a lovely December, y’all.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Reflection on Winning #NaNoWriMo

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Remember, remember the First of December — hangovers, and burned by your plot.
I see no reason why this writing season, should ever be forgot.

The stroke of midnight on this, the glorious first day of December, A.D. 2014, ended my fourth straight year of participating in the orgy of nerdtastic masochism known formally as National Novel Writing Month. It also marks my second, and consecutive, win; I clocked in mid-day Sunday with 50,004 words — a whopping four more than I needed to thwart the validation algorithm’s “you must be this tall to win” rule. And all that, with the entire third act left to write.

NaNoWriMo is a hobby for some and a kick in the pants for others. Despite bold proclamations that participants can write a 50k-word novel in a month, the truth is, NaNoWriMo is intended to get the bulk of a “zero draft” written by aspiring writers who may not otherwise have the time or the focus to do it on their own. The promise of the November wordslinger scramble is that if you get a bunch of work done in one massive flurry of drunken and/or caffeinated activity, you can augment and edit later, instead of eyeballing a blank paper with zero words and thereupon becoming the literary equivalent of a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

My first attempt, and my second, ended in Boris-and-Natasha levels of failure. Neither broke 10k and neither was organized in a logical way. Last year’s was better, and although I got the story to about 56k, there was one problem — that damned fourth chapter — that I couldn’t quite work around. One of the hardest lessons for this former journalist to internalize was the difference between fiction and non-fiction writing. Give me a word count and a deadline within the newsroom, and I’ll deliver page-ready copy every time, on time. I became quite adept, when I ran the opinion desk at a small community newspaper, at writing 800-word staff editorials in 20 minutes or so. But fiction? I thought I’d breeze into it. How hard could it be to make shit up? Karma spied my arrogance and rewarded me with humiliatingly low word counts until, having caught that good, old-time fiction religion, I repented of my sins and treated my novels like the precious works of art they truly are.

Writing is like sexual metaphors: The less you practice, the more you’ll embarrass yourself when you finally pull out and fumble sheepishly for your pants. Over the last few years of doing NaNoWriMo as well as branching into short stories, I’ve learned a few things about my style and my craft:

  1. I do better when I detail my plot and main characters before I write. This year, like last year, I used Scrivener for Windows. That program brilliantly organizes prose and supporting information into one clean interface. I detailed every chapter and every scene, setting 50-word scene summaries for each and even specifying target word counts, points to make, quotes to include and whatnot. Some folks forego planning and just write. I don’t know why they’re not alcoholics.
  2. I start at the beginning and finish at the end; I rarely jump around the story.
  3. I self-edit as I write. During word wars at our write-ins — i.e., when we writers peek out from the shadows and count how many words we can write during a specific period of time — I average about 360 words in 15 minutes, with a standard deviation of 103 words. At the write-in I hosted on every Saturday in November, I logged the results of every war, covering 17 different writers. I had the narrowest SD of anyone as well as the lowest mean; I also had the second-lowest maximum. But my prose is clean, so there’s that. (Point of pride: My write-in incurred a whopping 221,481 logged words in 2014, with a max spurt of 1,317 words over 20 minutes, a grand per-writer mean of 522 words in 15.25 minutes and an average standard deviation of 169 words.)
  4. I tend to write dialogue-heavy, with episodic short scene descriptions. When I relate a series of actions, I tend to use a lot of “after” and “then” — a stylistic affliction I can only really fix on a later cold read. Initial character descriptions focus on physical attributes and wardrobes; mannerisms only get pulled in to break up long passages of dialogue.

This year’s effort was … precious. Having been waylaid by sundry crises in the first half of the month, I arrived at Day 25 (of 30!) with a whopping 17,195 words complete. But, mirable dictu, I had a five-day vacation for the last five days of the month. You want to know what that kind of progress looks like?

All the words.
All the words.

It basically looks like 6,562 words per day. Remember how I said I write at about 360 words per quarter-hour? That tally doesn’t include frequent breaks for peeing, getting more wine, waiting until the cat re-positions himself on my lap, re-reading and editing what I just wrote, checking email, peeing again, looking up bondage equipment on Wikipedia and eating candy. I wrote for eight to ten hours per day, each of those last few days, to eke out the narrowest of wins.

And I’m good with that workflow, because I learned that it’s easier to keep your story straight when you’re plowing through it, instead of dabbling with a disconnected scene here and there every couple of weeks. I got inside my characters’ heads, and actually changed a core part of the story based in large part to how I wrapped up one important, but sad, scene. That scene, by the way, marked the first time I’ve ever teared up over what happened to my characters.

All of the above notwithstanding, let me share with you the gist of Aiden’s Wager. I’ll begin by asserting my surprise at discovering that this was really the novel I intended to write last year. My 2013 effort — a detective story — followed a fairly typical, plot-heavy structure with a few one-off scenes added for color. In the end, though, the plot got in the way of the characters. That incongruity between story and structure was my ultimate problem with the fourth chapter: It tried to fix the plot holes through careful foreshadowing, but the real story by the end wasn’t the mystery, it was the way the main character evolved over a particularly challenging case.

Aiden’s Wager is different. I billed it, on the NaNoWriMo site, as “literary fiction.” Which it is, insofar as the real story eschews an event-driven paradigm in favor of a narrative showing how the main characters progress or regress over three weeks in late autumn. In a nutshell, the protagonist — a 22-year-old named Aiden, first-class-prick scion of an exceptionally wealthy family — gets disowned and disinherited after a brief jail stint, by his reputation-conscious father. Aiden hails from a “Rich Kids of Instagram” kind of social circle of cut-throat young people vying for power and dominance within their tribe of fellow hundredth-of-one-percenters. Aiden maintains his swagger and assumes he’ll come out of his newly diminished circumstances like a boss, but one of his rivals sets him up, blackmails him and treats him like a trophy to solidify his own status within the tribe. Aiden must therefore think about the purpose of his life, the source of moral authority and the way that power dynamics corrupts people and relationships.

It’s not a light-hearted story. The entire middle third of the book deals with the blackmail — its origination, and how the main antagonist deliberately isolates, dehumanizes and subjugates Aiden. That middle third is, in places, vividly pornographic. I try to show how a cocky rich kid gets the rug pulled out from underneath him, and in the emotional chaos that ensues, he becomes a victim who succumbs to Stockholm syndrome and becomes willfully subservient to, even worshipful of, his abuser. The final third covers Aiden’s attempt to repair the damage he caused to himself and his family after forcible intervention by his disgusted older brother. A big chunk of that recovery entails an exploration of moral authority, aided in part by a visiting Catholic priest.

I’m happy with this story. I think it has legs. At the outset, I wanted to write about moral authority in general in the guise of a questioning young man crossing paths with different people. In this story, I accomplished that goal — but concepts like power, coercion, consent, faith, control and teleology also recur. I tried to mainstream bisexuality, present the clergy favorably, touch on the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder among the elite and emphasize the emptiness of a life devoid of meaning beyond one’s own ego. I may have to edit out some content in the middle third; some audiences may not want to read extended and explicit passages of gay torture porn with a strong D&S overtone.

But then again, in a Fifty Shades of Gray world, maybe they might.