M.J. Whitehead

Hey everyone, I’ve been on enforced break due to having to work nights, and it’s greatly cut into my writing time. I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, in fact I’ve been doing considerable reading, Dreamspace is still undergoing drafting here and there when I can spare some hours, and I’ve been doing a lot of research on romantic arcs and how to build tension in character relationships, which should be very helpful in writing novel-length stories.

Hopefully when I finish my current studies (I’m working and studying part-time at the moment, hence why I’ve not been blogging or talking books and writing since last year) I’ll have a bit more time to put back into building on my writing. I have lots of books to talk about still, (from Terry Pratchett to Brandon Sanderson. I’ve also read Side Jobs, finished the Dark Tower, and read everything Brent Weeks has published so far) so hopefully when I can spare an hour I’ll do some more book reviewing, and maybe even get down to deconstructing things at a more technical level too.

I’m in love with Changes at the moment. For those of you who, like me a few months ago, have not picked up the Dresden Files, you’re missing out. It’s contempory fantasy at its best, borrowing a little from other genres, going interesting places and inventing new rules to do it. It’s not particularly hard fantasy, although there is a little bit of rules-based magic going on, there’s no underlying explanation of the structure of magic or anything, it just happens.

Changes is a great example of how to keep a long series fresh. Jim changed things up with the typical life changes, family revelations, backstory reveals, and all those other tricks we use to keep people interested in a series.

Changes went a step further. It’s completely rebooted the series’ dynamic. As we find out on the first page, Harry is looking for a daughter he only just learned he has, and he goes through some tremendous losses in his attempt to make her safe. This is the kind of book we need more in fantasy- the plot-changing twists and turns follow their own theme. (the title telegraphs that there’s a theme behind the changes, but doesn’t give you a clue at all)

I’m not going to say we should all beat our characters up in exactly the way that Harry gets it in this book, but we should definitely consider having Huge Game Changers™ like this in the middle of a fantasy series. If the Dresden Files were a trilogy, this would be the second book that not only improved on the first one, but really kicked its ass.

If I can do half this well I’ll be gushing with pride.

Writing in the skeleton of Dreamspace continues apace. Some of it is very bare, and there are scenes where I know the prose is off, or the scene isn’t really doing enough yet, or it’s dialogue-driven instead of action-driven, but I’m reassured that I can see all the problems. For now, I can simply say to myself that this is what rewriting is for.

This is fine though, it gives me something to flex the revision muscles. Currently the document is sitting at about 35,000 words, not counting the appendices that are probably more for my own reference at the moment. The plot is beginning to take shape, (those 35,000 words are stretched through a lot of scenes, and include some of the outlining in areas where I haven’t written enough to establish what’s going on) and it looks like it will be readable at the very least, which is exciting. It still very clearly needs test reading sometime to see if it resonates with my potential audience, and I need to resolve whether any of the scenes near the beginning make a strong enough opener. Right now I open by establishing the narrator and setting up some things for the series because it’s just sorted into chronological order.

Otherwise, I’ve been brainstorming a series of short stories in a universe I’m referring to mentally as Ouroboros. As the nickname suggests, it involves time travel- more specifically, it’s about a time-travel war between a distopian world government and a bunch of rebellious historians and scientists who invent time travel. So I have some plans to write about historians playing at being secret agents, mock Back to the Future while explaining that time travel paradoxes don’t really exist, and so on. I think hopefully the geeks-as-spies in a civil war thing should keep the time travel fresh for this universe, and I’m hoping I can use it for some cool short stories.

Just a note to people reading the blog or following me on twitter-

I’m writing enough that I’m now starting to get heavily opinionated on writing¹, and I’m starting to take this out on the comments threads for Writing Excuses. (If you don’t listen to Writing Excuses yet and you write or script anything, you need to start. Not only do I think it’s awesome, I’ve followed it since before it had seasons, and it also won a parsec award for being a sock-rocking podcast.)

If you’re interested in hearing my opinions on how I write or how other people should write, check out the comment threads with me. The latest is on writing emotions and managing your emotions as a writer.

¹That is, I’m writing enough that I’d actually like to get published some day. I’m still not writing as much as I’d need to to make a living from my writing, which is something I’m working on.

I’ve just finished world-building the wider universe for Dreamspace. I’m pretty enthusiastic about this one, so I’m having trouble thinking about whether to post it online or not. I am, however, enjoying breaking from aBoM, but I’m getting to the point where I really need to start practicing describing this book for

It’s a fantasy, but unlike the A Beginning Of Magic universe, there’s no science-fiction crossover. (The universe could be said to be a fantasy-western crossover in that it involves interstellar colonisation, frontiers, and as Ian Banks calls them, “out-of-context problems” or first encounter situations. But there aren’t cowboy hats or pistol fights, so I’m never going to pitch it that way) The universe features faster-than-light travel, (but not the book) and I’m tentatively calling it the Worldcrystals universe. The initial book features four hard-fantasy magic systems, three of which are “foundational” to the wider universe. Can’t spoil much more about the world-building, as I don’t know what else I’m embargoing until after the book is finished. (I haven’t decided if I’m going to do a big reveal about the wider universe or not, as this world is “special” within the universe)

The plot of the story is half “magical school is much more frustrating than I expected it to be” and it twists to its other half at the climax point, which is “what might happen after the hero wins the day and kills the villain?”. I’m not done here so I don’t want to say too much more, as I’ve not really started outlining in earnest, just done discovery writing on a few chapters.

The book is narrated in first-person by a main character, and in third person from our narrator’s perspective for two other characters. Trying to differentiate the narrative and the dialogue has really helped me with a better sense of “voice” for my characters, so whether or not this book ends up being good, I’ll have learned a lot from it.

Spoiler warning: This post will contain spoilers for the whole Harry Potter series. I’ll be doing this kind of analysis from time to time, but I will always gate it behind the “read more” link to avoid accidental spoilers. Just because Harry Potter has been released in its entirety for quite some time does not mean there do not exist people who are still halfway through it, or have not yet read it but may later.
(continue reading…)

So, today I added a new idea to my notes full of loose ideas. This document is really important to me because I have a tendancy to make light first drafts without enough complication, so it really helps to have a list of things I’ve been wanting to write a story about so I can look at it and ponder “what can I fit in there?” Usually I write stories first based on what is familiar to me about the story: is it a fantasy? What’s the main similarity here that I need to work off? Part of this probably comes from being a dedicated reader who goes over books again and again.

Having a list of loose ideas is great because stories aren’t just defined by what they’re similar to, they’re also defined by how they’re different. When I’m partway through a draft and realise my story is not complex enough, it usually means I’ve failed to distinguish it enough from its peers in my outlining process. ¹ Usually when I refer back to my cheat sheet to help me out with longer-form fiction², I’m looking for the strangest idea I can get that I can make fit comfortably into my story. While this might sound weird to those of you who read this but I assume it will be familiar to those involved in writing for any sort of fiction. When someone tells you about a book, or TV series, or movie, the format you’ll often use to sum up a piece of fiction is something along these lines: “It’s like Battlestar Galactica, only with zombie accountants instead of human-looking robots.” That is, you’re contrasting the familiar and the unfamiliar, and both need to be cool enough to catch your potential audience’s attention.

Today I added “the logic of increasing returns”. This seems obvious to me because it’s one of those little theories I’ve been really interested in for a while. For those who don’t know, the logic of increasing returns is simply this: In some markets where it is costly to switch products, a product doesn’t need to always be the best overall to sell the most. It simply needs to be the initial best product when demand increases, and then be sufficiently good to maintain its position as a standard. While that might not sound particularly cool on its own, it has great potential to become a conspiracy- what if the products we trust are out to get us? Are they spying on us through them? Are they ripping us off? Or is there something even more sinister about this monopoly? Corporations make excellent conspiracy fodder in urban fiction and science fiction, not because they’re all evil, but because they aren’t transparent. It’s credible for a corporation to not be trustworthy because it happens so often in the real world- without that transparency they often run out of check, accountable only to their investors, and even then it’s usually only in terms of whether they’re making enough money.

That said, I have no desire to write corporate dystopias. The a big draw of SF/F is escapism, and for many people the bad elements of corporate culture are exactly the things that most frustrate their lives. So my corporate villains tend, in my early fiction that I shall never release³, to be the least successful ones, because it makes for good escapism.

¹ Which is really easy for me to do as I tend to function as a discovery writer, figuring things out as I go and more and more of the pieces click into place. I’ve only actually started outlining since I got back into writing and started taking it seriously, and it has made a huge difference.
² When I write short stories I don’t need to complicate them any more as a short story tends to be about exploring a single concept, or in the slice of life genre, one facet of a single character or relationship between the two main characters.
³ I’m sorry, but even for free, nobody is that interested in stories that can be summed up in single clauses like “my take on elves”, that I wrote when I was in the early half of my teenage years.