Finished a book!…webtoon structure…words mean things, maybe
Adventures du jour!
I finished book 3 of Blind Date with Death last night – Wednesday/Soup. Next up is Thursday/Main Course. (Working titles.)
The plan is still to write the whole series and get it all edited (and the clues and references figured out) before it goes live as a serial. Where I’m going to post the serial is still to be determined.
I can’t remember whether I’ve talked about the decision behind the book before, so I’m going to jot it down here while I’m thinking about it again.
In October 2019, I picked up what I swear was pre-COVID at a Denver convention, MileHi Con, thinking at first that it was mere con crud but having it drag out into March 2020 or so, when I finally started getting normal color in my feet and being able to walk around the block and carry thing upstairs. (I got tested eventually and was told I didn’t have Covid, but that was waaaaay later. So who knows.)
I stopped being able to read fiction very well during that time; during my subsequent divorce I read almost no fiction. Instead, I got into webtoons, a type of episodic, long-form web comic that is released in scrollable chunks. Webtoons don’t resemble TV episodes, soap operas, classic serial and pulp fiction, newspaper comics, graphic novels, serial fiction, regular novels, or short stories, but share elements of all of the above. They originated in South Korea and a LOT of the best ones are from there, which also makes a nice variation from reading mostly Western fiction.
One of the things I like about webtoons is that, while they have definite sweet spots and unspoken rules around how they handle things, they are *much* more likely to mix genres than the fiction I’d been reading. Romance webtoons occasionally turn into epic slaughterfests or existential terror about whether lack of social media approval will literally lead to a character’s death. I’ve even read ones that did *not* end in a happily ever after.
Anyway, I’ve read a lot of them. They’re addictive. I’m working on my drawing skills, but nah, I’m a writer. So I tried to find fiction work that resembles webtoons.
There’s a whole galaxy of such stuff, called web novels or (in Japan) light novels: long-form fiction originally published in short installments. Unfortunately there’s something about the writing in a lot of light novels that’s a burr under my skin (possibly because I’m not used to the conventions and, as primarily a writer, struggle to leave my more deeply ingrained patterns). And the “serial” writing that a lot of authors are posting is really just a traditional novel, cut in chunks. Meh.
So:
I’m at a writing workshop and I’m *supposed* to be writing a short story, but I can tell that it’s going to go long. VERY long. I decline to turn in the assignment and keep writing.
As I write, I discover that the story will have a natural structure based around the days of a funeral director’s convention, and be paced around the structure of a meal that two of the characters share on the first day. I also discover that the story hits on a lot of things that I’m trying to sort out following my divorce and I start calling it my “therapy book,” at first as a joke and now in all seriousness.
I also discover that the structure of the story differs not just on an overall level, and not just in that it blends genres, but that writing each scene is fundamentally different than how I was used to writing scenes. (I don’t know that I can go back now.)
Each scene has to be written with the assumption that it has been a week or two since the last installment: the setting, characters, relationships, plot thread tracking, information about clues, and cues about what to expect for the scene that follows have to be *nailed* every single time. Without taking up too much wordcount.
I’ve actually started writing “recap episodes” (as fiction, not as cheesy anime summary episodes) to help keep readers on track. I have a huge notes file that I’m always cursing myself for not making longer. I figure, at a minimum, if I have to look something up in the notes file, I should refresh the reader’s knowledge of whatever it is that I just had to look up.
And cliffhangers? Yeah. As the episodes come out, however I choose to release them, there will be a time gap between one scene and the next. The first set of readers won’t be able to just turn a page and move to the next scene. The end of every scene has to be worth a week’s wait.
I *thought* I was decent at writing cliffhangers before this. Even now, I’m starting to go, “Where can I stop this scene that makes ME itch to write the next scene in this plotline?”
I still have a long way to go to master the form. And WOW has it been a ride, with the characters coming to life and constantly tossing in plot twists like they had them planned from the get-go. I often feel like I’m just along for the ride, getting my mind re-written and traumas healed just so I can move from one beat to the next.
I know a couple of things I want in the next section. Things go darker and more dangerous, but also richer. I normally think of this part of a story as “bad guys close in” (from the Save the Cat! series of writer guides by the late Blake Snyder). But, because this is my “therapy book,” I’m also kind of thinking of it now as the alchemy section, where the real tools get built and tested and fail and have to be rebuilt again. Like kintsugi pottery, maybe? The stuff that gets broken and put back together with gold leaf.
If I bring up the main characters and try to apologize to them, they each say something that’s been a recurrent theme for me of late: “You have nothing to be sorry for.” This is what they showed up for, after all; I’m not just committing the story upon them, but with their encouragement and permission, because there’s no other way to get what they want. Their suffering isn’t something to be overcome, as such, but the price of entry. Also, they keep giving me suggestions for how to make it particularly worse for themselves and on each other.–A nice way to do it, if you can manage it.
Scene: front porch of a white south-facing house with wood siding in Colorado Springs, three of those large chairs that are made out of planks that shouldn’t be as comfortable as they are, of sky blue. Three characters, GOOB, MR. ASSASSIN, and GOTH GIRL sit watching the sky.
GOOB: [Twisted over the legs of the chair like a feather boa across a femme fatale’s shoulders] [Looks at MR. ASSASSIN.]
MR. ASSASSIN: [Throws up his hands, hauls ass elegantly but efficiently out of chair] No.
GOOB: [Looks at GOTH GIRL.]
GOTH GIRL: [Narrows eyes; otherwise, no expression] Dan’s in charge and I do the talking. You keep your mouth SHUT.
MR. ASSASSIN: [Halfway across the street to a black SUV parked on the opposite curb, in front of an open lot full of overgrown prairie grass] No.
GOTH GIRL: [Leans all the way forward, basically falling forward onto her feet off the big chair] Unhh. I’m up.
GOOB: [Smiles smugly at the sky.] Oh, buddy. This is gonna suck. [Untangles himself from across the arms of the chair and bounces up onto his feet.]
…
Other stuff:
–New movement thing. I haven’t adjusted to the last thing and I hurt today already. Rotating femurs in hip sockets while bearing weight. I don’t know that I’ll ever get *to* the splits, but I want more leg control, so this makes sense.
–Friend project sent! When I started it, I was worried that I’d throw it away when I was done, so I promised to send it to a friend. I’ve changed enough that I no longer had the urge to toss it. Of which fact I am proud. Wow is it TMI.
–Started Disco Elysium. It was going well until, last night, I gave my character a heart attack by kicking a stupid locked container. An ignominious death. I had to start over; the game hadn’t saved anything. I looked up how to save and see a possible fix, but I kind of don’t want to apply it. The friend I’ve been gaming with on Thursdays talks about how it changes the experience to play on “hard mode” World of Warcraft, where if you die, you start over. I have no real urge to play WoW on hard mode, but it was FUN to start over in Disco Elysium. I played differently the second time through, ran into new things, and actually took more chances. Hard mode might get old after a while, though.
–I think if you want to familiarize yourself with semiotics, it might be easier to read the Borges Selected Non-Fictions before tackling Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics. Eco is writing for professionals in his field AND was writing after Borges AND has stated that Borges was a major influence; Borges was used to writing for a general audience that encompassed popular women’s magazines. Side note, both passages are useful, in my opinion, for understanding how generative AI works (and where it doesn’t).
Borges (“An Investigation of the Word”):
Opponents may argue that the notions of “horse” and “brown” are equally concrete or equally abstract to the mind. The truth is, however, that the controversy is absurd: the amalgamated symbols “caballo-colorado” and “brown-horse” are already a unit of thought.
How many units of thought does language include? It is not possible to answer this question. For the chess player, the locutions “queen’s gambit,” “pawn to king’s four,” “knight to king’s three check,” are unities; for the beginner, they are phases he gradually comprehends.
Eco (AToS, 0.4 Political boundaries: the Field)(don’t try to grasp this one!):
Text theory: the exigencies of a “transphrastic” linguistic and developments in plot analysis (as well as the poetic language analysis) have led semiotics to recognize the notion of /text/ as a macro-unit, ruled by particular generative rules, in which sometimes the very notion of “sign”–as an elementary semiotic unit–is practically annihilated.
…I *think* those two passages say the same thing. I’m probably missing a lot of nuance and context. But I think it’s 80% or better overlap.
–I got connected with a potential client, an acquaintance of a friend, who is distinctly NOT ready for any of the services I might provide. I had a quick call with him (rush rush) and promised to get an estimate together, but when I looked deeper, it became evident that not only was he not ready, but the resources he said were already online were not. I explained this to him politely and am waiting to have it blow up in my face. Later, I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to work with the guy at all; not only was he putting out red flags, but he’s not working on anything that will rock my world. As usual for me, in order to get to that realization, I had to think with my feet and a few frustrated tears under the boughs of the Most Favored Tree. Some thoughts are too big or too pervasive or touch on things too deep for me to handle them purely rationally: this one touched on people pleasing in general, the understanding that I have, at best, a limited time left in life, and what I actually value in life and what I want to make sacrifices for. Aiyyyyy.
–I have a ton of things that I need to get done while I have the mental space between books, because Blind Date with Death is mentally consuming. I won’t get them all done, because I don’t want to lose what momentum I have. I’m going to feel bad about all of them.
Today: clearing out emails, making some plans (kayaking tomorrow?), getting mentally up to speed on a short story I started and need to finish soon. Taking Ray out to eat later. Maybe.
…
I talked out my thoughts about that client (and the underlying issues around working with him) out in the dark, just after I left the Most Favored Tree. Recording myself talking forces me to have thoughts one after the other, I find.
Not a perfect photograph, but the one that’s grabbed me the most lately. From last night’s walk after finishing B3.
Another “glass”-themed piece, combining Czech glass beads with a nazar, or the evil-eye bead, in the prompt. The ring I wear on my right hand (Czech glass) has the same kind of iris, sans swirlies.