flip, flip, flip, flip

Okay, according to my calendar here, it’s only April. I might give you May and as a very long shot maybe June. But in no case can it possibly be October already.

. . .

In my last post, I promised to unveil the very slightly redesigned Back to the Fridge. However, as frequently happens in such matters, real life got in the way. I am now a bit gun-shy promising a new date, such as “tomorrow.” So let’s just go with Real Soon Now™.

And so closes a summer where I thought I might post all sorts of random, interesting stuff. Yet nothing of the sort happened. I’m sure the lack of posts had nothing to do with a long string of eighty hour work weeks. I’m also quite sure it had nothing to do with writer’s block or blog fatigue.

But the fall season is definitely upon us. It’s that time of year I enjoy so much, when the temperatures finally drop into the upper 90s and I start thinking about what pumpkin I’ll carve in the ten minutes between the time I get home from work and the start of trick-or-treating.

It’s also that time of year where I start thinking about what to do with the blog. Actually, I already started and completed thinking what I’ll do to it. I’m going to create a new template (I never did like this one), clean up the side bar, add a couple minor features, and start writing on topics broader than Cheez-Its and Onederland. I hope the few of you whom I have yet to drive away stick around.

Meet me back here on October 1.

Ah, the latest writing project! So it’s finally come to that, has it? All right, here we go. In late June of 2008, I got yet another idea for a book project. Not counting all those video editing books, I essentially had to my name two near and dear writing projects. First: the completely out-of-my-league, never-gonna-start-let-alone-finish, epic, two-brazillion word fantasy novel. Second: the funny “diet” book.

“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. People seem to like my writing style and humor. Perhaps that is my only superpower. “Hmmm,” this other book is really serious. I mean, I’d worked on maps, invented alphabets and languages, spun alternate histories, and created many, many megabytes worth of backstory. I had (what I thought, and still think) is a pretty cool idea. But the pace (or lack of it) was killing me.

“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. What if I dispensed with all that seriousness? What if I just went with the flow and combined some of my humor writing with some of my fantasy novel inklings? Because if the whole thing was supposed to be humorous, whole new worlds would open up to me. I could drop all the haughty pretense and just do … well, do whatever I wanted. If it didn’t have to be serious, I wouldn’t have to “waste” a lot of time on onerous backstory work. I could just write and be free. This sounded perfect.

The title of the book came to me immediately. (The title of the book will come to you all in good time.) The book itself began with an interesting idea. Have you ever seen the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? If you haven’t seen it, go see it. Like, right now. I’ll wait.

Insert Jeopardy theme music here. . .

Wasn’t that a great movie? In case you didn’t notice, it was a loose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. I decided to do something similar. Except I took three completely different and unrelated stories and worked on retelling them in a traditional, stereotypical fantasy setting. Even better (or worse?) these three stories, if looked at as a contiguous whole, formed a fourth, complete overarching story.

This sounded like fun.

So I set to work on the details, and then a bit of backstory work. Of course, the stories require a setting, and that meant maps. And what’s a good fantasy story without some kind of crazy runes or ancient script. And you need some fake history to make it seem real. That means lands, and kings, and wars, and lots and lots of solid backstory and . . .

Aw crap. I’m doing it again. Can’t I just keep it simple for once?

So by January of 2009 I said, “Okay, enough’s enough. Start writing, stupid.” And I did. I wrote fairly regularly until mid February. I almost reached the 10,000 word mark in the manuscript when I hit a wall. The story was going nowhere. The writing was terrible. It wasn’t funny at all. Ugh.

Plus, I was spending just about every precious spare minute of free time on this blog. I began to get doubly discouraged. My now-sixteen year old goal of finally writing a real book was falling apart—again.

About a month later I rebooted things. Undaunted, I threw out basically everything I had before, except for the main characters and general setting. I disposed of the 3+1 story retelling idea and instead picked a completely different story as a model (for some reason I still wanted to stick with that approach). Then around a month later, I completely disposed of that as a completely original story began to take shape.

So I then spent the rest of April and all of May, June, and July on this new foundation. Posts here grew few and far between. One or two of you actually noticed. Then at last, on August 1, 2009, I stepped back, looked at my large pile of notes and said, “That’s enough. Start writing, stupid.”

And I did. I wrote about a thousand words that first day. On the next day, five thousand. As of last night, the manuscript was up to 18,418 words. But it’s more than just that, because I think I have some good characters, a believable backstory, and a story arc that’s currently planned to span five books.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the humorous fantasy book. It’s not funny. And by that I don’t mean, “I’m trying to be funny and it isn’t.” You see, as I began typing, regular old distinctly non-goofy words just came out. Hmmm… okay, let’s just see what happens. I don’t want to force anything. That’s been a big problem for me in the past. So I’m just going to go with the flow. After all, what else can I do?

I know by now at least three of you want to know the title, the plot, and all that pertinent info. Unfortunately, I’m not at the ‘reveal’ point just yet. But fear not. I didn’t bring you all this far just to leave you high and dry, so I’ll give you the opening paragraph.

It’s an image, because I don’t want search engines grabbing it. And I’ve changed the main character names to just Bob and she to protect the innocent. I only hope you don’t have to wait years and years and years to see it published. But mostly because I don’t want to wait that long either.

So without further ado, click here. It’s not much, but let me know what you think.

With my epic fantasy novel seemingly on perma-hold and the video editing treadmill winding down, the idea of a “diet book” popped in my head. It wasn’t going to be a diet diet book. That is, I didn’t have the next big craze ready to foist upon the world. I more or less wanted to tell my story and maybe entertain along the way. I have a knack for humor (or so I’ve been told: personally, I don’t see it) and that pretty much set the tone.

The title jumped out at me almost immediately. (If you don’t know the title, it’s right over there at the top of the left hand column. If that thumbnail is too small, I recommend buying the book for easier viewing.) In fact, the title essentially meant this was going to be an anti diet book. (Not a book against dieting, but the exact opposite of a diet book.)

I wrote the first twenty pages or so in a single sitting. (Not the order the pages were in the published book, however.) I printed it out, sat back, and read it. “Hey, this isn’t bad,” I thought to myself. “Maybe I’ll try some more.” Of course, I still had those video editing book projects to work on, so it really wasn’t until 2006 that I began to focus on it more. Then I really put the pedal to the metal in 2007, just to get the stupid thing finished. After all, four years had gone by since I first conceived the idea, and I was tired of regularly scratching out the copyright year on the title verso page.

Once the writing was finished, things moved very quickly. Here’s the run down:

• Self-Published the book.
• Looked for a publicist.
• Canceled the publicist. Looked for a literary agent.
• Discovered real publishers very rarely touch self-published books
• Got a publicist. Gave some book talks.
• Discovered non-fiction books are really hard to sell if you aren’t Madonna or a famous doctor
• Decided to start some serious blogging to help make a name for myself (yes, I did this completely bass ackwards.)
• Blogged like crazy for about a year.
• Realized I spent about three times as much time trying to promote the book as it took to write the book.
• Watched book sales soar to upwards of one copy every seven weeks.
• Realized this little project was essentially doomed.

That’s when the blogfunk set in and that’s when, back on the left side of this summer, I wrote this post.

It still feels strange to me to only write one or two posts a week, after writing five a day for nearly ten months. And it feels even stranger to build up a small but loyal following, and then just piddle out like that. Heck, even Lyn not a couple days ago thought I hadn’t posted in four months. (Although I blame a bad RSS feed on that.)

But … if I’m really going to ever write another book, I don’t have much choice. I can’t work sixteen hours a day, commute another hour, sleep four hours, blog for two hours, then clip my toenails the rest of the time. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for forward progress. Something’s gotta give.

Next in the series: Confessions of a Middle-Aged Whiner

Although BTTF existed before August 25, 2008, I really count that date as my blogoversary. That’s when I launched my (then) new look and got five-posts-per-week serious about this.

Believe it or not, that site is still up. If you’re new here and missed it or if you’ve been around since then and are feeling nostalgic, you can find it right here:

http://version2.backtothefridge.com/

Very first post is at the bottom of this page.

Enjoy!