Dane Mallahan

Hello hello!  Another week is in the books, literally.

After starting this website and blogging last week, I set out this past Monday to hit certain goals and targets, to meet the metrics that I had set for myself, and to strictly write write write.  That was fine for the first two days, but then I started to get burned out.  I have always struggled with the hipster ideology that “writing is organic” vrs the more hard nosed approach of sitting down for 6-8 hours and writing.  The latter way doesn’t work no matter how hard I try and make it.  The mathematical side of me says that I can write about 3-4 pages an hour, so, if I write for 5 hours a day then I can put together about 75 pages of material in a week.  But that is unrealistic.  

When I was younger I played a lot of RPG’s.  I would be playing along, completing a quest or exploring an area, and then after a time I would decide that I wasn’t going to go on any further.  I didn’t want to get stuck out of a town or not be able to save for another hour or so.  Somehow this mentality has carried over to writing for me.  I don’t want to get too far into the story because…I don’t want to ruin it, I guess, but I also want to do it justice.  I don’t want to come up with something random that doesn’t fit.  I don’t want to make a choice that inevitably I would have to change.  And I don’t want to get burned out.

In the end I still end up writing what I consider a lot and am able to make progress.  I guess what ends up being the difficult part is constraining myself to setting a certain time allotment for writing.  Many writers know that it isn’t all about how long you sit or stand at a computer – or in my case a notebook – and write.  I am constantly thinking and developing the plot of my books and other projects.  I also need to be ok with my process.  Like I mentioned, I start out my stories by writing in a notebook by hand.  For some reason I can’t sit down at a computer and start from scratch.  I have tried for years and years before now to start writing, and the only way it ended up working for me was to write by hand.  So there is an added step for me of typing – and deciphering what I hand wrote – that sometimes takes me longer.  I have started to see it as a benefit, as I can change things and re-develop ideas as I am typing, creating a better and more thorough second draft, but it still takes more time.  

This is where I found myself this week, as I started to type out one of the short stories I had written a long time ago, with a working title of ‘New Life +’, a story about a serial killer in a world that has developed a serum that makes humans immortal.  That is what I spent a large portion of this week, typing up the thirty odd handwritten pages.  I hope to post that sometime mid month, as it isn’t quite finished yet.  I had not written the end yet when I stopped working on it.  But that shouldn’t take me too long, I have ideas already.

I’ve also been developing a…I want it to be a comic, but I don’t know any artists. A series of stories that focus on the “Away Team” on a space convoy as they mark the planets and search for life in the galaxies close to their home solar system.  I haven’t thought much about the reasoning for the exploration, but their mission is to act as a front runner for other ships, marking resources and planets along the way.  I think that it is a mission that does not have a conclusion, and like sending a crew of humans to Mars right now, probably leaves the members of the ship never living off ship again.  Their goal is to be the guinea pigs.  Regardless, I see it as a sort of ‘Monster of the week’ if you will, sort of series, where the team has to deal with harsh planets, strange creatures, each other, and whatever else comes their way.  I got about seven pages of that first issue written, with a goal of 20-30 pages per episode.

And then there is the Path of The Chosen.  This has been a real test in my abilities to edit – which other than college papers I have little experience in – and stick to timelines.  I have a lot of characters and a lot of little pieces in motion throughout the book, and that has been a struggle to set where everything goes.  Be it when this chapter should take place or should other little snippets be in other areas, or even their own chapters.  I think I have it mostly sorted out, and other little sections written that better establish the timeline and the series of events that take place.  

Since I have mostly added in the sections I thought were needed and organized it well, next week I will be doing a chapter outline so I can finalize everything and make absolutely sure ABC happens in sequence.  Then I will do a few re-writes that I have noted and do another full read through.  I am not sure I can get that all done in one week, but I am going to try.  Then I can go back to book one and really hit that with a good polish and get it ready for sending out to editors and or publishers.  Then if that doesn’t pan out I will do it myself!  I might have my short story up next week as well, but I want to play around with the site some more so it’s not just a wall of text.

Thank you all for reading and I hope to have some material you can all read out soon!

Cheers,

Dane