Ten Years Ago Yesterday

October 20, 2024 by Harvey

In today’s Journal

* Ten Years Ago Yesterday
* Every Decision Leads to a New Future
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Ten Years Ago Yesterday

On October 19, 2014, I started writing what would become my first novel, Leaving Amarillo. I also published the first official edition of the Journal on that date.

The novel wrapped with 40,610 words on November 10, 2014 (23 days). Although it was my first novel, it ended up being the fourth of the twenty-two books that comprise The Wes Crowley Saga.

So yesterday was kind of a major anniversary for me. And yet I didn’t even notice until my wife mentioned that Leaving Amarillo had popped up on her calendar as a past event.

***

I enjoy thought experiments, by which I mean either wandering about within the confines of my own mind or using the confines of my own mind to wander about elsewhere as I consider possibilities.

Come along with me for a moment as I wander into a digression:

Every Decision Leads to a New Future.

Time travel, as imagined by HG Wells in The Time Machine, is impossible. That is, owing to the nature of each of those, you can’t physically “visit” or change the past or the future.

1. You can’t visit or change the past because it’s already happened.

You can try to rectify the past if you want to, but anything that happened still happened.

Like an insect fossilized in amber, past events are locked in time and space. A particular thing happened at a partiular place and at a particular time, and nothing can change that.

2. And you can’t visit or “change” the future because it hasn’t happened yet and because it’s fluid.

Just as you can rectify the past, you can set yourself up for new futures, but you can’t change something that hasn’t happened yet.

Every decision you make, consciously or unconsciously, leads to a new future, which immediately and unerringly becomes the present and then the past, albeit still in your own life (your own “timeline”).

How is that relevent to the events of ten years ago in my own life?

I am a novelist today only because I made the conscious or unconscious decision ten years ago to trust Wes Crowley to tell his own story. That is, I chose to go wherever Wes led me, and I continued conveying his story until it came to a natural conclusion.

In the short run, that became Leaving Amarillo.

But in the longer run, it became a trilogy followed by a three-story prequel, followed by an exploration of a 16-year gap in the original trilogy. And finally the entire saga was complete.

All because I decided to trust the character and keep writing to see what would happen next.

Remember what I said above about the future being fluid?

Had I chosen instead to “wrap” the story after a sngle significant event, or had I chosen to wrap it after a few significant events, Leaving Amarillo would have been a short story or a novella.

Several years before I wrote that first novel, I constructed an outline for what I thought would be a great novel, a contemporary “they come here” SF story. By the time it was finished, I knew every character and every major event of that story.

I never wrote that novel. I already knew everything that would happen. Even the thought of writing it was boring. No fun.

That might easily have ended my fiction writing career before it even got started. In fact, it did end it for several years.

Flash forward to October 19, 2014: If I had forgotten that valuable lesson and chosen not to trust the character—if I had chosen to control everything myself instead—I probably never would have written Leaving Amarillo either.

I probably never would have written The Wes Crowley Saga. And I might never have written any of the other novels or sagas or series I’ve written. It isn’t my place to force myself on a character. If they don’t invite me to share their story, then their story is none of my business.

Given how much I despise nonfiction authors who publish how-to books about writing literary genres they don’t write themselves, I almost certainly would never have written a nonfiction book about how to write a novel.

And there is also at least a good chance that TNDJ wouldn’t be here at all.

At the most I might have continued writing only short stories, and when those didn’t sell well enough, I probably would have found something else to do. Something fun.

Like go fishing.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: “Embracing Uncertainty”

The Numbers

The Journal……………………………… 780

Writing of Blackwell Ops 29: John Quick

Day 1…… 1781 words. To date…… 1781
Day 2…… 3792 words. To date……. 5573
Day 3…… 3087 words. To date……. 8660
Day 4…… 3545 words. To date……. 12205
Day 5…… 2667 words. To date……. 14872
Day 6…… 1665 words. To date……. 16537
Day 7…… 3073 words. To date……. 19610
Day 8…… 5593 words. To date……. 25203
Day 9…… 1963 words. To date……. 27166
Day 10…. 3557 words. To date……. 30723
Day 11…. 3235 words. To date……. 33958

Fiction for October……………………. 64032
Fiction for 2024……………………….. 805540
Nonfiction for October……………….. 20480
Nonfiction for 2024……………………. 324070
2024 consumable words……………… 953649

Average Fiction WPD (October)……… 3370

2024 Novels to Date……………………….. 14
2024 Novellas to Date……………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date………………… 18
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..……. 96
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………. 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………..… 255
Short story collections…………………….….. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.

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