On Wandering Novels, and Genre
June 9, 2024 by Harvey
In today’s Journal
* The Archives
* The Novel (or The Wanderer)
* A Note on Genre
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The Archives
I had a question awhile back about the Journal archives.
At the end of this year, as I have since 2014, I will also make available the archive for 2024 on the Journal website. Anyone can download free, searchable PDFs.
The upcoming 2024 archive will contain every post up through May 31, 2024. From June 1 forward, it will contain only the TNDJ posts I share with unpaid subscribers for the remainder of 2024.
On January 1, 2025, I will discontinue posting new archives for download on the Journal website.
Of course, paid subscribers can continue to read the full archive of TNDJ posts at any time at the TNDJ substack.
If future downloadable archives are important to you, email to let me know that.
I haven’t decided yet, but if the demand is strong enough I might save a new set of TNDJ archives to PDF and post them to the Journal website for download.
If I do that, those will be for sale to unpaid, free subscribers and others. Only paid subscribers will be able to download them free, probably via a password or something. As I said, I haven’t decided yet. Once I do, I’ll announce that here too.
I hope this clarifies things.
The Novel (or The Wanderer)
After what feels like a year of writing, cycling, and seemingly endless rearranging the major scenes of the current novel, I suspect the novel will wrap today.
All of that rearranging was to keep to the timeline and provide a seamless experience for the reader.
As I wrote earlier in this space, I don’t recall ever having written a book like this before: in jagged fragments, scattered here and there to be rearranged later.
Nor could I have “just written” all of those fragments and then rearranged them after I typed “the end.” I had to rearrange as I went, because that rearrangement itself directly affected some future events or how or when they happened.
Writing this one was a really weird, but still enjoyable, experience. I want to believe the jumble was a result of having so many different POV characters, both good guys and bad guys. But that wasn’t it.
As always, the different POV characters gave me the story directly as it happened while they and I were running through it.
But in no particular order, one character conveyed part of the story that happened hours or days or years ago and another immediately followed with a part of the story that happened at another time and in another place, tomorrow, a few hours later, or years later.
As I moved through writing this one, I was in a near- constant state of Wait. What?
Earlier, I wrote that the reading experience is seamless. That isn’t exactly true. There are two major seams, and I labeled them.
The story begin with two chapters in Present Day. (Frankly, that’s where I thought it was going to stay.) It continues with the next 8 chapters in Six Years Earlier. Then it culminates in Present Day with the remaining chapters: 11 through whatever the last chapter will be (probably Chapter 40).
And most of those up through Chapter 30-something were written out of sequence. Like I said, a weird experience, and not one I hope to take again anytime soon.
But then, that’s all up to the characters.
A Note on Genre
Maybe because I write so many series, I usually know in advance what the genre of the book will be when I’ve finished it.
That also isn’t true with the current novel. The earlier novel of which this one is a continuation, Jonah Peach, started with a slash-and-gash horror scene. It remained in that genre, though maybe to a lesser degree, through the whole book.
Although I enjoy psychological horror, I don’t personally like the slash-and-gash stuff (think Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Of course, we write what we are given.
But the current novel, as it turns out, is more what critics call a “police procedural” than anything else. When I publish it, I will dub it a psychological suspense thriller police procedural.
So that divergence in genre is just one more weird thing about this novel. But as a writer, I gotta love it.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week (“Reading”)
Four Focus Bundles Now Available If you enjoy Dean’s classes, this is a great way to get them.
Pulp, Pipe, and Poetry Magazine Check this out. This online magazine is edited by Frank Theodat, a regular TNDJ reader.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 770
Writing of When the Owl Calls (novel)
Day 11…. 1960 words. To date…… 25912
Day 12…. 2157 words. To date…… 28069
Day 13…. 2122 words. To date…… 30191
Day 14…. 2254 words. To date…… 32445
Day 15…. 1594 words. To date…… 34039
Day 16…. 3976 words. To date…… 38015
Fiction for June…………………….….… 18433
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 359030
Fiction since October 1………………… 662087
Nonfiction for June……………………… 8590
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 192220
2024 consumable words……………… 551250
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 8
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………… 90
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 239
Short story collections…………………… 29
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing are lies, and they will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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I've had that experience of writing things out of sequence then having to rearrange them to put them in the correct order. Another writer friend who has run into the same thing and I refer to it as "puzzling" a book. Definitely not something I'm a fan of, but I can hardly tell a character, "Sorry, I can't write that yet." They tend to frown on such rejection and get even at some point. LOL
Maybe the characters are all old gaffers, retired, sitting around and telling old war stories, and that is why they are all out of order and jump around, as one riffs off the other for "their" next bit of memory.