Serial Fiction is a Darned Sock

I always thought I'd love writing a serial. But let me just tell you, it sucks. It sucks in the way that eating right and exercising sucks. You know how great it is and you're proud of the results, but it takes such a long time and it's too easy to slip off track.

I love the novel and I doubt I'd have been able to finish it without the pressure of the serial format, but editing a chapter every week—and often, writing and rewriting several chapters, frantically trying to get everything polished and coherent ahead of schedule while editing that week's chapter—gets uncomfortable. And the more I dragged my feet and avoided it, the more my workload built up, the more pressure I was under, the more I wanted to avoid it...

I won't say it's like having teeth pulled. But it may be like the discomfort of telling the dentist that I've flossed, when we all know I haven't flossed.

Ryan North and Dinosaur Comics on the subject of flossing.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=224

I know what I wrote while out of town at a gig, while editing and writing my other novellas Integrity and Day Drunk, while getting caught up on what we call bits of chair… and in the last couple of weeks I've been scrambling to rewrite and chapters 30 and 31 while recording and filming with my band.

My fantastic bandmates after filming our first video. Such cool kids!

A photo posted by Billy Ammonite (@billyammonite) on Jan 18, 2017 at 1:18pm PST

Most of novel-writing is a blur, one day bleeding into the other, and it's impossible to remember where you were at when you were writing or rewriting a certain part. I remember writing Wire's first visit to Sid's dreary house while sitting on a sun-soaked bench in a public park as gardeners pulled flowers and tossed them aside for the new season's colors. I remember huddling in a blanket at 2am, my keyboard the only sound in the isolated cabin I was renting, rewriting Jordie meeting Luke's friends. When the sun rose I found my first now had fallen outside.

So sometimes memories can stand out, but mostly novels take so long to write, and are such a crisscross of rewrites and edits and new scenes that they get to be like a darned sock. Or something sexier—a tapestry maybe; or that kind of intimidating 20-layers-thick patchwork quilt that you think will win embroidery competitions but instead takes out second place. All anyone sees is that finished tapestry—or that finished sock—and even as the creator it's impossible to keep track of individual stitches.

As a writer, that's what a serial story has done for me: slowed my stitching down until I can see every stitch and am aware and focused on every one. Every individual chapter, I know where I was, what I was doing and what I was thinking. And that's a special experience.

I've officially watched Twin Peaks!

I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time. If you're not familiar with it, Twin Peaks is a murder mystery TV show. Unlike most murder-of-the-week mysteries, it follows one murder over 2 seasons.

Artwork by Michael E. Kelly

(If you haven't seen the show, don't search 'who killed Laura Palmer' unless you want spoilers)

Partway through the second season, the murderer was revealed, and the show had to see if it could survive without the unifying mystery.

The fact that everyone I know is excited to see season 3 when it comes out next year proves this show has enduring appeal.

Why am I mentioning Twin Peaks? Three reasons:

1. So I can show off about finally joining this cult phenomenon

25 years late but moving fast.

2. To share my favorite quotation from the show.

3. Because it relates back to my weekly Wattpad serial, Omega Blues.

The premise of the novel so far—you want to be a werewolf and the one werewolf you love the most is the one keeping you from becoming a werewolf, only you don't realize it—has been resolved. Now it's time to see how the novel will stand when it only deals with little things like, you know, becoming a werewolf and having everything go wrong.

Omega Blues: Chapter 15

My free serial novel, Omega Blues, is moving along steadily and is now up to chapter 15.

The story is at just over 30,000 words, with a chapter added every week.

The last few weeks I've been getting behind then catching back up, so we've seen chapters updated within a couple of days of each other instead of once a week. I've been juggling work and band practice with moving house. Unfortunately I've been dealing with work stress by slipping back into depressive sleep patterns, sleeping 12 to 15 hours a night, which leaves very little time for anything else.

But, despite setbacks, we're still up-to-date with Omega Blues and I'm proud of that. I have a completed chapter every week, and I'm confident I wouldn't have gotten this far in the editing of this novel if I'd just had it as a side project.

Since I'm back on track with a new chapter not due until Sunday, I have a couple of days to focus on editing my next novel, Skin and Edge; a story which is dear to my heart as it's a reworking of my first ever romance novel. Stay tuned, because I think you're going to love it!

This is your brain on two months of serial fiction

I'm working on a serial story, a m/m werewolf romance novel uploaded free to the internet chapter by chapter. I've just uploaded chapter eight which brings the story so far to just under 20k, so it's impressive to see how a little bit every week adds up over time.

My idea with Omega Blues was to complete a draft then edit and upload it in chapters, but of course a first draft is often little more than a vague outline that shows you what you want to write for your actual story. This and the next two chapters are completely fresh and not in the original draft.

When I started uploading Omega Blues at the start of March, I had a 50k-or-so manuscript to work from. In the last couple of weeks I've been re-imagining the story to make it more dramatic—cutting something into 2k chunks really makes you realize where the dull, infodumpy sections are! I've tossed aside well over half of the original writing. The fresh draft couldn't have existed without the first draft, and it definitely wouldn't be shaping up the way it is if I hadn't worked chapter-by-chapter to focus in on the best story I can possibly craft.

I've wanted to write a weekly serial for years, but all the blog posts I'd read couldn't prepare me for the experience. Like with any novel, it's an experience unique to the writer and the novel. Between work stress and band practice, I've been drained this month, and I'm confident that I wouldn't have been able to achieve as much as I have if I hadn't put in place weekly deadlines.

On the other hand, editing Omega Blues each week takes days of writing time away from my next novella, Prima Donna Boy. In the past I've seen that multi-tasking on writing projects makes them all go slower so the time between publishing drags out longer and longer. While I think this is true here—I defnitely would be further through edits on Prima Donna if I didn't keep switching to Omega Blues—the weekly chapter uploads are proof that I am getting something done.

With writing there's a war between wanting to write fast and furiously, creating 'in the moment' with no breaks and no distractions, and wanting to take a break to plan and think about the story. Handling these two stories at once has forced me into the latter mindset, but I figure as writers we should always be experimenting and trialing, in our writing practice as well as in the writing itself.

There are plenty of anecdotes about famous writers and their routines and superstitions. They can be terrifying for a new writer because they're told from the perspective of full-time writers with established careers. Those writers always seem so definite: the only way to get any writing done is to do it exactly like this and yet there's so much conflicting advice.

The thing is, every writer is different and there isn't a one-size-fits-all writing habit. Before we know what's going to work for us, we have to experiment. From the time of day when we write to the level of distraction we can handle (music, a cafe, silence?) to the way the story itself is created—intricate planning or broad brushstrokes? Write from the start to the end, or from a key scene outwards? How much can and should a story change while it's being written?—every writer and every book will be different.

I've lived in isolation, writing in a cabin in the woods with no internet or phone reception, and I have Boganettes, Hot Blood Punk and Mr Wonderful to show for it. Now I'm living in a city and writing in stolen moments between irregular work hours, a reading challenge and intense band practices. I have Omega Blues to show for it and, whatever else I can produce, I know I'll be learning more about myself and my writing from the different experience.

The latest chapter of my free werewolf m/m romance, Omega Blues, is now live on Wattpad!

The Only Rule for Writing Paranormal

Whenever we write, we're creating within a framework of existing stories—all the fiction that came before us and that influences and shapes our writing.

Even if you want to create the most fresh and original story possible, you still want to create a story that people enjoy, so that means obeying basic laws of writing: narrative flow, conflict, dialogue, the story building up and increasing in tension before reaching a resolution, etc.

The vast majority of writers know the genre they're writing in, and that means expectations you need to take into account. It's hard to satisfy readers with a crime novel if the crime's not solved by the end of the book, people will be disappointed in a horror that's not scary, and so forth.

Another Earth, 2011, is rare for a successful science fiction film in that it deliberately breaks the expectations of science fiction and steps away from the fantastic.

When we write stories about the paranormal, we're not just working within story structure and genre conventions, we're also working with what people know and expect from our paranormal creatures. Because vampires and shapeshifters don't exist, there's no set definition of how they actually work.

Readers would be confused if you wrote about talking cats in a book that wasn't labelled as 'fantasy', because we've all experienced cats and never seen them talk. But with non-existing creatures, we get to decide how they'll function in our story.

Drunk is still my favorite Ed Sheeran song.

But that doesn't mean we can completely ignore reader expectations. If we're stepping too far from the accepted parameters of our paranormal creature, it can be better to call them something else. The zombies in 28 Days Later or I Am Legend are called 'virals' because they're not true zombies—re-animated corpses—but also because they don't fit the slow, shambling, totally mindless expectation of zombies.

I've heard more than one person complaining that Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series featured vampires too far out of expectations, then praising The Vampire Chronicles without caring that Anne Rice's vampires are far from Bram Stoker's or even the vampires from folklore. You don't have to like Twilight (I'm personally uncomfortable seeing abusive relationships romanticized, I dream of a world where healthy and fulfilling relationships are romanticized and I try to create my own romance novels accordingly), but it seems contradictory to criticize one book for changing vampire myths then praising another one which also breaks vampire myths.

What We Do in the Shadows, 2014, as a comedy can get away with featuring many different and conflicting kinds of vampires.

As you might have noticed from the Meyers rant, I don't like people policing what's 'real' or 'true' with non-real creatures. As long as your story stays true to itself, I don't care how you deal with the paranormal. The whole point of paranormal creatures is that they're not normal – they're not something we can see every day, like a cat, so there is no one set of rules for how they should behave.

When we write paranormal, just like when we write genre or any narrative story, we get to decide which expected elements we'll pay attention to and which we'll ignore. And that means being aware of the conventions of paranormal in the genre we write. Meyers vampires aren't horror vampires, but they fit within the expectations of romance vampires—like the Vampire Diaries series of YA romance novels by L. J. Smith.

You can tell they're romantic leads because they all look gorgeous.

I've never written vampires, but I do write werewolves in my Jagged Rock series. They're romance novels so the werewolves are romance werewolves—all about strength and power and beauty, rather than the terror and mystery associated with horror werewolves.

The thing is, I've often heard fans of horror werewolves saying what a shame it is that werewolves never got turned into romantic leads the way vampires have. And I want to tell them, they have! You're just reading the wrong genre!

Whitley Strieber's The Wolfen. Not a romance.

You could write a horror werewolf as a romantic lead, but it would be quite a different story than most werewolf/shifter romance readers are expecting. As with any kind of reversal of expectations—like a sci-fi that drags the camera away from its sci-fi elements—you need to be aware of the expectations so you know when you're subverting them. Because, at the end of the day, you can write anything you want; but if you want to satisfy your readers then you need to be honest with them and know what they'll expect from your genre and paranormal creatures.

I've never written vampires, but I do have a series of free werewolf romances called Jagged Rock. The second one, Omega Blues, is a weekly serial on Wattpad and you can find the fifth chapter here.

Kitchen Wolves, and what do we call chairs?

While editing Omega Blues this week, I got caught up on a tiny detail: What do I call the bar that joins chair legs? In the story, I have a wolf climbing onto a chair slowly. I described the wolf standing on the chair's 'rung' and then wondered... ladders have rungs, but what do chairs have?

Image from Visual Dictionary Online

In this picture, Visual Dictionary Online call the 'rung' part a spindle. Other places on the internet label it as a stretcher or spacer or, on circular chairs, a foot ring. My woodworking experience makes me lean towards 'spacer,' but what does it matter if no one's going to understand what I'm talking about?

With words like this, there's a balance to strike between what's technically accurate and what readers will understand. None of these words turn up in the Wikipedia article on chairs, and chairs aren't high on the search results when you google them, so I have to assume they're not in common usage and, even worse, they might confuse readers and drag them out of the flow of the story.

For the sake of making the story easy to read (in a tense moment with a wolf in the kitchen and climbing closer, every sentence is precious!) I defaulted to 'foot rest' which I think is a happy medium between accurate and easy to understand.

Of course, now that I've crawled this far down the rabbit hole of furniture names, I should talk to a carpenter about the (American) technical term and drop a reference to it earlier in the chapter: "I'd seen Will making these chairs, shaping the legs on a lathe and fitting the whojiwhatsit bar between them," to lead seamlessly to "The wolf put a paw on the whojiwhatsit of my chair." Sort of a Chekhov's spacer bar. Or perhaps I could run a quiz for my readers and see what the average Omega Blues fan calls that part of a chair—not necessarily technically accurate, but at least most people would know what I'm talking about.

But this is the sort of small detail that I get caught up in, and the reason it took me two and a half years to edit my last novel. The whole point of making Omega Blues a serial story was to hold myself accountable: I have to get a chapter edited every week, whether or not I know the correct or common word for a chair's rung.

With that out of the way, here's the link to the new chapter of my m/m werewolf romance, Omega Blues on free serial-fiction site Wattpad! This chapter is called Kitchen Wolves and has—whoa!—wolves turning up in the kitchen.

Omega Blues is a free serial story, with a new chapter uploaded every week. So you can read it as it's uploaded and enjoy the thrill of waiting (like with oldschool TV shows) or you can wait until it's finished and read the whole novel at once!

New werewolf m/m romance chapter!

The third chapter of my Jagged Rock spin-off novel, Omega Blues, is now up on Wattpad!

Omega Blues is a full-length novel that I update with a chapter every week. So you can read it weekly if you like the excitement of seeing new chapters every week, or you can wait until it's all finished and read it in one binge.

I wrote the draft for Jagged Rock a little over a year ago, but I'm editing the chapters weekly. This is my first time writing a serial story and one of the cool things I'm seeing is all the distinct memories with each edited chapter, instead of the vague mass of memories that jumble up after editing a whole novel over months.

Work was full-on this week and I traveled out of town for a punk festival, so I ended up editing the chapter while sitting on the door between bands. Now I have a double set of great memories: all the fantastic bands and people, and finishing a fresh chapter of Omega Blues.

I hope you enjoy the new chapter and are looking forward to fresh story and fresh memories in weeks to come!

Omega Blues: chapter 2

Chapter two of my Wattpad serial m/m romance is now live!

Omega Blues is the spin-off sequel to Jagged Rock. Both stories are completely free to read.

Being a werewolf has always felt like a curse to Bren, even after he's let into a friendly pack of mostly-humans led by his alpha nephew Will. The Jagged Rock Pack are friends and members of a rock band, standing together even after their vocalist came out as a werewolf. It's Will's plan to turn all the members of the band into werewolves, and that sounds like a great plan... except for Matt.Matt is funny and kind and endlessly helpful, the sort of guy anyone would want for a friend. Unfortunately, as a werewolf he's marked out to be an omega which comes with its load of weaknesses and agonies.It's Bren's job to look after Matt and help him with the transformation. He didn't plan on falling for him, especially because Bren's never felt anything like love or attraction before. It's another complication in his already difficult life.Matt's had a crush on Bren from the moment they met, and he loves teasing and flirting. He's delighted to think he might have a chance.Matt would do anything to become a werewolf, and Bren would do anything to stop him. How can the two have a chance at happiness or a life together?

First chapter of my free Wattpad story!

Nearly two years ago I wrote a free novel called Jagged Rock for the M/M Romance Group on Goodreads. It featured a college rock band with a werewolf for a vocalist, and enough characters that I've always wanted to write spin-off sequels about them finding their happy endings.

Introducing Omega Blues!

Omega Blues is the story of omega werewolf Bren and human bass-player Matt. I wanted to make it free and as I've always loved the thrill of serial stories, I decided to write one and give readers the experience that I've always loved.

Omega Blues is available free on Wattpad, a site for sharing free serial fiction. I'll upload a new chapter each week so you can follow the story weekly, or wait until it's finished to read the whole thing.

If you're worried about reading something that won't get finished: don't! I have a complete first draft and, while it needs extensive revision, I have at least the total framework for the novel.

I am thoroughly looking forward to the serial writing experience, and I hope you're looking forward to reading it!

Upcoming release: Happy Valley

I'm delighted to announce Happy Valley, a new m/m romance short story coming out on the 30th!

Happy Valley is a romance between two ski field employees on the slopes of Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand. It's super cute and sweet, a totally adorable fluff of love with a gorgeous backdrop!

I wrote Happy Valley while I was working at the ski field, as a special request from one of my friends who'd read some of my stories and wanted me to write one for him. Romance meets snowboarding? Yes please! I added in some quad biking, another hobby I developed while working on the ski field, to blend a cocktail of extreme sport and sweet love.

I'll post an announcement when it goes live, so keep an eye out!

Also coming out soon: Coin Tricks - my m/m romance novel in which a security guard catches a cute guy stealing soap.

The release of Coin Tricks is extra exciting for fans of Jagged Rock, because when it's out I'll be able to focus on uploading Omega Blues, the sequel to Jagged Rock (about a werewolf rock band at college). Jagged Rock is free and Omega Blues will be, too: I'll be releasing it as a weekly serial on Wattpad. I've never worked on a serial before and I predict it's going to be an awesomely fun experience!

There are plenty of delicious treats for your eyes and hearts on their way, so stay tuned!