writing

Why I Hate George Lucas

Over this past weekend, for some reason, Spike TV was on constantly in my apartment. They were airing the entire Star Wars saga over and over again in a continuous loop. I’d head out for errands and come back to watch Luke get de-handed. After a late dinner I watched some Jar Jar. On Sunday I watched the finale of the original while texting with a friend.

It was during this text conversation that we realized that all of the movies would be trotted out, once again, starting this spring…only now in 3-D!

My friend had one thing to say: “I hate George Lucas.”

I agreed.

But over the past few days I’ve come to realize what a strong phrase that is, “I hate George Lucas,” and I began to wonder why a guy obsessed with puppets and magic could bring such strong emotion out of me. Oh, I know there are plenty of reason to hate the prequels (ChefElf covers those far better than I ever could). I have long since downgraded all of them to “Crap.”

But it wasn’t the prequels my friend and I were watching when our issuance of hatred arose. It was the originals. The new originals. The ones packed full of just utterly absurd changes that serve no purpose. In A New Hope we get to see Jabba! Hooray! And he’s presented in a way that makes absolutely no sense and as if fucking up his physical appearance wasn’t enough, we now get a scene where Han Solo steps on the tail of the most feared crime leader in the system and nobody cares. It’s played for laughs in fact. Ha. Ha.

In Empire, R2 gets eaten by a swamp monster and spat back out. Luke, in the original, wipes mud off of R2 and says: “You’re lucky you don’t taste very good.” Now, through the magic of editing, he says: “You were lucky to get out of there.” Awesome!

And this goes on. And on. And on. It’s like a madman is at the wheel of my childhood, and instead of passing by all my favorite memories he’s randomly making right-hand turns to see things no one cares about and tell fart jokes.

And yet still, I’m not sure that’s where my hate comes from, though mucking about in my childhood memories is not a good thing, to be sure.

No. I think I hate George Lucas because the prequels manage to make THE ENTIRE FIRST THREE MOVIES MAKE NO SENSE. Obie-Wan ages forty years in the time it takes Luke to grow into a teenager. Chewbacca, who fought at Yoda’s side during the Clone Wars (apparently), never once pipes up with the slightest bit of information. Vader doesn’t bother to look for his children or old master in his hometown. Oh, and also, nobody remembers or cares or believes in the Jedi, who less than twenty years ago were a major part of the Imperial whatever the hell it was called.

And I know, these things are somehow explained in the books. I get told that a lot.

But I don’t care about the books. People are constantly plugging up plot holes using a jury-rigged explanation from material that doesn’t exist in the movies. I get angry when fans defend the existence of cities that make zero sense by conjuring up some bizarre native cultural belief that is not addressed in the films. Or how I get assured that scenes of complete nonsense are actually perfectly explainable if I know the back-stories of the characters that got made up to explain the nonsensical scenes in question. In short, I get angry when anything outside of the movies needs to be brought in to explain the movies.

Because that is crap.

Pure and utter crap. You don’t get to have legions of fans and gh0st writers scramble to cover up the mistakes you were too lazy or too blind to see, Mister Lucas. You are not a writer, if you do so. You are not a creator. You are not giving anything to your art and you are not respecting your craft.

And that is why I hate you.

Look. Here. These are some notes I wrote trying to piece together one set of scenes for Persistent Illusions (warning: there might be spoilers in here assuming you can read my handwriting):

That’s a sequence of maybe four scenes. I wanted to make sure that my time-lines made sense. I wanted to make sure, since my characters are all over the world, that I had sunrises and sunsets occurring at the right time in the right places. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t accidentally skip too far ahead or give a character knowledge they couldn’t possibly have. I wanted to make sure that emotional responses had time to build, that fights had back stories, that breakdowns had build-ups.

I wanted to put together the best possible product I could for my readers.

I’m sure I made mistakes. And I know I fudged some things. Artists do that. But I thought long and hard about everything I fudged, everything I did that pushed the unspoken agreement between me and my readers that I’m going to be a good guide for them. And I tried as hard as I could to dim those down and I tried my damnedest to eliminate all my mistakes.

I’m not sure when George Lucas stopped caring, or if he ever did. Maybe he just got lucky in the originals. But I know that the minute you stop caring, the second you shrug and give no thought to putting your name on something you haven’t sweat for, that’s when you stop being an artist.

And to do that with your biggest project? To do that and manage to ruin your previous projects in the same motion?

No.

Just no.

I’ll never join you, Lucas.

Never.

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writing

A Poem for NaNoWriMo

It’s November, which means it’s also National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo for short. During this time hundreds of thousands of wonderful lunatic take on the task of writing an entire novel in one month. I have never participated in this event…because it’s freaking nuts. But I do love to support all those taking on this challenge and pursuing their dreams. I usually write a little pep talk each year but this year I did something different. I wrote a poem, in the style of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” Because that seemed like a good idea late last night.

Good luck to all you NaNoWriMo’s, this is for you:

Doubt
by
Joseph Devon

 

As you sit there never sleeping, at your keyboard often weeping,
Piling up your word count like a Herculean chore,
Late at night your face is scowling, while empty stomach it is growling,
You might sense something prowling, prowling at your cranium’s fore.
“My lack of sleep,” you’ll say, “is causing pain upon my cranium’s fore-
Only this, and nothing more.”

Ah, what madness is November, every NaNoWri club member,
Lumbering like zombies as more coffee they do pour.
Wishing that the month was through, insanely they do all pursue,
A novel’s word count to accrue, accrue it in one month’s time and no more.
For all you at this task for just one month and then no more,
Please, closely heed verse five and four.

Late at night your tale grows stronger, while your face it does grow longer,
Fingers typing cross the laptop from your computer store.
As I mentioned, while you’re clacking, at the keys so madly tapping,
You might feel a distant rapping, rapping at your cranium’s fore.
Preying on your weakness as it raps upon your cranium’s fore,
There comes a monster with fearsome roar.

A word-count halting terror. Your project’s grim pall bearer,
Snorting and laughing at the plot holes you ignore.
Quickly moves this horrid beast, neither fettered nor policed,
Till your dreams lie there deceased, deceased and turned to ash upon the floor.
Your heart and dreams and vision turned to ashes on the floor.
The beast has fed, you’ll write no more.

Do take heed this warm advice, I’m trying quite hard to be nice,
Though I scare you with this monster slavering at your door.
You’re not alone here is my point, and this beast should not disjoint,
In fact he does anoint, anoint you to the club of writers all through yore.
This beast has crushed the spirits of every writer heretofore,
Its name is “Doubt” (we’ve met before).

So I demand that you take heart, as you practice at your art,
Wringing out your story like a soldier gone to war.
Proudly steel your trembling jaws, as you take on Doubt’s cruel claws,
Knowing that he gnaws, gnaws on you as well as all who came before.
Face him down, it is your right, not a task to be deplored.
Trust in yourself, and let your artwork soar.

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writing

5 Tricks Every Writer Needs To Know

Over the course of almost a decade of writing I’ve come across a few tips that I felt like sharing with other writers. These are pretty simple and should help you on your collective creative journeys.

So let’s get started.

My 5 Tricks For Every Writer:

1. Write: This is the really annoying one. This is the one I trip up on most. I look up articles on writing and read blogs about writing or remember books I loved that made me want to write…but all the while I’m not writing anything.

One simple fact should rule every author’s brain: no one else is going to sit at your keyboard and write your story, so start typing.

2. Write: So you hate your manuscript, all your characters are stupid, and you don’t want to write anymore? So you’re sitting with your Word doc open and can’t think of any reason why you should continue with a story you’re not “into” anymore? Guess what the answer is?

Yup.

Write.

The beginning of a book is a wonderful rush of creativity and endorphins. It’s a romance that seems like it will never end. But then it does. And you still have to write. This is what I call “Writing after the high is gone,” and every author has to do it. Books get written over the course of years and there is no way that you’re going to sit down with all the pep in the world every day when it’s time to work. It just won’t happen like that. But if you don’t want to wind up with yet another first-80-pages-of-a-manuscript collecting dust somewhere you have to learn write even after the high is gone, even if you’re not feeling it, even if you think what you’re writing is useless crap. It sucks but it’s necessary. I’ve actually hit my word count while swearing through my teeth the entire time.

But maybe that sounds too harsh. That’s okay, there’s a more pleasant way of phrasing this: Your writing talent is a group of muscles, and you’ve been working those muscles for awhile now. Believe it or not, even at your lowest, most self-loathing moments, your muscles and all your training are still with you. You’ll be shocked how much crap you’ll write that, during rewrites, turns out to not need nearly as much fixing as you thought it would.

Have faith in the talents you’ve been training all this time and learn to write after the high is gone.

3. Write: I can remember back when I was a young lad, eighty billion years ago, when I lived and died by every sentence I wrote. Every story was the most important thing I would ever do in my existence and every review, even a brief nod from a friend while reading, was analyzed and agonized over to wring it of all possible information.

Boy that sucked.

And I’m happy to say it is not a mindset that stuck with me. Which is not to say that putting some pressure on yourself to achieve and listening to criticism is a bad thing, but back in the beginning it wasn’t constructive so much as super-crazy-stressful.

But, again, it passes. How? With more writing. After a few stories, after a bunch of reviews, after you’ve hit “The End” a number of times you gain some perspective. You get a firm foundation that you can feel comfortable with and are no longer swayed quite so hard by each review, you no longer stress every story to the point that it becomes counterproductive. You learn, even, that maybe some blasphemy at the alter of writing can be a good thing, that being silly or trying to write a totally different genre for kicks or even intentionally trying to write poorly can be educational, enjoyable, and, oddly enough, result in some fine work. “The Donkey of Vincento” is a story of mine that I have declared to be, “the stupidest thing I have ever written.” And yet it is also a favorite of some readers. I’ve never understood that.

This craft is a weird place to inhabit at the best of times, and that’s a good thing because it means you don’t always have to stress the rules, you don’t always have to shackle your self to perfection, you can have some fun with it.

Just keep writing, you’ll relax more.

4. Write: Okay. So maybe when you sit down and touch your fingers to the keys you get a jolt of psychic-electricity of shame and worthlessness that sends you reeling away from your work in progress to go do some cleaning. We’ve all been there. Something isn’t right in your story but you can’t figure out what and all attempts at moving forward are useless. It’s like walking face-first into a brick wall over and over again. Sure, the wall might give in a thousand or so years, but you’ll have been beaten to a pulp by then.

So what’s the answer?

Write.

Just, maybe, don’t try and write anything in your current work in progress. I actually had a chat a few days ago with @Albert_Berg about my favorite word-pressure-release valve, which is free writing. I take out my notebook of college ruled paper, take out my favorite pen, set the pen to the page and then write. And I don’t stop. Not for edits, not for thoughts, not for smudges, not for anything. I do this for an entire page which, in my handwriting, is a fair amount of writing. And I write all of this with the tacit agreement that what I’m writing will never be read by anyone. I force a page out with no pauses, and if I want more I write more.

It is shocking how much gets lined up in your head, how many breakthroughs you have, how many new avenues will open up by doing this exercise. And you’d be a little stunned at how many notebooks I have filled up with deranged, endless scribbles that I’ve never looked at once.

I can’t quite explain it, but the combination of complete anonymity and ZERO stops greases the wheels somehow.

And, once you’ve tried this trick for awhile, you can start to get creative with your free writing. I’ve done pages of just one character’s thoughts as well as nothing but pure setting description. I’ve also done nothing but insane rants about how much my back hurts.

It all helps.

5. Write: Write. Always.

That was the advice I always got growing up. I was in some movie somewhere, “A writer writes…always.”

I hate that stupid line. I hate that stupid line and I’m the guy writing this post about constantly writing.

You know what? Sometimes not writing is the right answer. Sometimes getting away and going for a walk is the right answer. You have to teach yourself discipline but along with that comes the fact that you have to teach yourself moderation as well. You are your own boss and it’s quite possible to wear yourself out.

So, some days, I don’t write.

Or, to be more exact, I don’t type.

But I’m always writing. And this is some of my favorite training because you can do it anywhere.

Read billboards and then think about how you’d rewrite them to better effect.

Look at something, anything, and ponder how you’d paint it with words.

Pause now and then and check your feelings and give some thought to how’d you describe them.

Taste new foods and come up with words for what’s happening on your tongue.

Describe smells.

Always remember that this is what the whole point is, capturing reality with the written word. It’s easy to lose track of what your core goal is when you have two deadlines and a day job screaming at you.

That’s why this fifth one is so important. Taking the world around you, the emotions in your heart, and the impulses in your head and crystallizing them into words is everything.

Some days it’s best to just head to a crowded restaurant and stare around and devour everything you see with your eyes.

Just, you know, try not to freak people out.

Too much.

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writing

Writing Urban Fantasy or No I Don’t Write Porn

During the course of an average conversation with someone I’ve just met, the fact that I write books usually comes up. This is always followed by the question, “Oh? What do you write?”

I always respond, “Urban fantasy.”

Why do I respond in that way? Because that’s what I write. Urban fantasy. Here is the definition straight off of wikipedia:

Urban fantasy describes a work that is set primarily in a city and contains aspects of fantasy. These matters may involve…coexistence between humans and paranormal beings.

That’s Matthew and Epp for certain, and I’m so used to clicking off that box in the hundreds of forms I’ve filled out over the years, marketing and publishing these books, that I no longer think twice about it.

At least not until the words come out of my mouth during one of these conversations and something flickers through the other person’s eyes. Something fleeting, a little giggly, and absurdly skeptical of what I’ve just disclosed.

Then I remember. For the vast majority of people, the phrase “urban fantasy” means “porn.” Or at least “porn with ghosts.”

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the covers of some of the best selling urban fantasies going today.

We can assume that this is set in a city…I guess. I mean there’s a treasure chest so surely there’s a town somewhere and, yes, there are demons and they apparently prefer blonds. So check and check, urban fantasy.

The little teaser paragraph on that one is truly amazing, managing to borrow those old Mastercard ads as well as get across that our main character pays a sufficient amount for her haircuts so that we know she’s not boring or poor or anything.

Moving on.

At first this one seems deceiving. There are woods in the background! This can’t be taking place in a city! However, were these two out camping they would probably need some sort of protection from the elements. Like clothes. Thus, we can infer that they are merely out sunbathing with their automatic weapons and that their apartments where they keep their clothing, and therefore a city, are nearby.

Plus…oh fuck it that one just makes fun of itself.

Now…this one is…there’s a city…is that dude wearing make up?

And is the chick a vampire too?  Those look like fangs.

So basically this is vampire sex? And even if we presume the chick was human, I don’t think I’d label her as scared by this encounter. Granted, dating back to the earliest legends, the notion of vampires has often been interpreted with sexual overtones.

But this is just sex. Sex with biting. Which some would say is the only kind of sex worth…you know what let’s just move on shall we?

Here we’ve got a little something for the ladies.

Now, I know what you’re thinking (god help me). You’re thinking, “There isn’t a single thing in this cover anywhere that’s fantastical or urban.”

Well as for the urban part, we can assume that the ship in the background, being a small vessel, is unable to travel very far from port, so there’s a city around here somewhere.

And the fantastical part? One word: merman.

Now check out this one.

…

…

…

What? Am I supposed to be talking?

…

I really like green eyes (note to self, add Green-Eyed Envy to Amazon wishlist).

At any rate, I’m not entirely sure how this happened to my genre or when it happened. Maybe porn with ghosts came first and then the genre urban fantasy was defined and *I’m* the newcomer here. Or maybe urban fantasy was defined as a genre and for some reason it happened to draw in a lot of porn writers…it does sort of sound dirty. Or maybe these books are all literary masterpieces that are just trying to be heard in a crowded market by putting some eye candy on their covers.

All I know is, right after the words, “I write urban fantasy,” come out of my mouth, I immedietly follow it up with, “that means it takes place in an urban landscape, like New York, but has fantastical elements in it.”

Or something.

Whatever I’m going to stare at that green-eyed one again.

 

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writing

I’m a Genius

So I have about five artists reading through rough drafts of the first two parts of the new book, all of them picking out scenes to draw up. This is stupid amounts of fun and I’m quite glad I thought it up. Frankly it’s getting harder and harder to sit on this stuff and not share with you all. But, my desire to host a little countdown is outweighed by my desire to say, “Checkthisoutthisissocool!”

Though not by much.

Plus it’s late August and the world is on vacation and I think I’d rather show the work of these artists to you when your brains are actually turned on.

So I’ll just continue to sit on my ever growing pile of super awesome mystery pictures from the coolest fans ever.

No problem.

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writing

So…how do ya’ll want to run this?

Part 1 has now been edited. It isn’t done by any means,I like to read things a LOT of times before I call them done. That being said I’ve been sitting on these damn words for so long that, now that I’ve given them the first once-over, some cracks are starting to appear in my facade of silence. It’s possible that some very large chunks of text have been emailed to some longtime readers. And it’s possible that this trend shall continue.

The cat is very slowly being let out of the bag. What this means is that I need to start figuring out exactly how I’m going to go about releasing this book.

Normally a book is picked over by dozens of people before its release, like reviewers to editors, and then it becomes available for large scale sale on a certain date.  The thing is, you are my reviewers and editors and I’m sort of inclined to invite some of you into the process because I think that’s fun…and also because I need help finding those damned typos. They’re like cockroaches they are.

On the other hand I also want to have a big opening day release for my book because that also sounds like fun, my book deserves a proper birthday party, and I think that starting everyone off at the same time helps build buzz. Maybe. We tend to aim for slow builds as far as marketing goes here at Joseph Devon Industries. We’re like the mother fucking Ravel’s Bolero of this business.

Yes.

Sooooo…yeah. I’m going to need some readers in the near future.

Think that over and get back to me.

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writing

I’ve Missed Rewriting Like This

Rewrites continue and I continue to enjoy them.

Most people have forgotten, or never knew, that Probability Angels was written in serial format. It was part of an experiment called 26 Stories in 52 Weeks. The Matthew and Epp stories, as they were known back then, were written section by section, once a month give or take, all within their own separate two week deadline.  This means that over the course of fourteen days each part was conceived, written and rewritten before being published online.

This book has sat unread by me for over a year. The difference between those two rewriting processes is large. When you only wrote something a week ago and need to rewrite it your head is filled with the images and dialogue and characters to the point where it becomes very hard to see what words are actually there instead of the words you want to be there. It’s like listening to a song that you’ve listened to a billion times and trying to hear it new. The song takes up so much space in your psyche that the task is difficult, to say the least. Some songs you can hear so many times that you aren’t even listening to the same song anymore, you start to pick up new sounds and nuances and what have you. These are the sorts of songs that you can sing along to and you’re not only singing the words but you have every breath from the singer memorized and you know all the drum strokes and every warble of the guitar. I know parts of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Rosalita” that should, by all means, be merely background noise. Getting distance from something you know backwards and forward is very odd, and getting distance is what rewriting is all about.

The words I’m going over now are entirely unfresh in  my mind and it’s a wonderful feeling to be able to see my own mistakes clearly, to not hit a muddy sentence and still sort of know what I was going for but, instead, immediately know it should be dismissed.

Not to mention I don’t quite remember a lot of these scenes way back in the beginning so it’s almost like I’m reading it for the first time.

Almost.

Reading something I’ve written for the first time is something I never get to do. Because, you know, I’m the one that wrote it, so even on my first read through I still know what’s coming. It’s like a magician being amazed at his own trick.

It just never happens.

*sniff*

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writing

The Joys of Rewriting

I forgot how much first drafts suck. There is nothing like having to carve out that first pass at your story from pure nothingness. I swear it’s an act that would be considered madness in any other context. Basically I cram as many voices as possible into my head and then collaborate with them to tell a 100,000 word long lie that I expect people to spend their free time reading.

Makes perfect sense.

But rewriting? Oh, sweet sweet rewriting avoids so many of the crappy parts of the first draft. Everything is set. That’s the big one. Sure I may need to change a ton of things in a ton of scenes to get my work where I want it, but the basic framework is already down. The first draft is like staring at a giant block of stone and trying to figure out what it’s going to be. You have no idea, it has no idea, you have to literally carve everything out of nothing with no path to follow. Rewrites are like having your basic sculpture in place, you can see that that it’s a guy standing on a rock, and you know that maybe his feet need work or the rock doesn’t look right and needs detailing done, but it’s not like you’re going to have to go in and make the rock into a zebra and turn the guy into the Amazon river. Which is pretty much what you feel like when you’re turning nothing into something during that first pass.

There’s also a nice built in end-point. Sure I may need to lengthen some scenes and some chunks might be more work than I realize but for the most part my page count is my page count and I know that X number of pages a day times Y number of days will bring me to the end of one whole read through. A handful of those and suddenly we’re releasing in beta. During the first draft you have a vague idea of where you’re ending is but until you write “The End” it’s never actually there and the words could keep coming and coming for weeks and weeks for all you know.

Finally there’s the new-found freedom. A first draft requires a stupid amount of discipline. There’s a belief that writing is an ethereal process that can take place anywhere and is full of inspiration and magic and marshmallows. I’ve never really found that to be the case. I dunno, maybe I’m doing it wrong, but in my experience the ethereal and joyous part lasts for, at most, the first third of a book. After that it just becomes a desk job. One that requires you to be at your desk at a certain time every day or else you lose your thread, get punished by the writing monster and are then forced to reorganize your brain so that you can pick up your storyline again.

Rewrites have none of that, you can read through ten pages here, ten pages there, and if you have a hangover during one part you can count on yourself to fix that part up better on the next pass. The odds of being hungover for the exact same parts for every read through are quite slim.  With a first draft if you start taking that mentality, if you start leaving chunks to be finished later, then you don’t really wind up with a first draft, you wind up with an outline. And that’s not the same thing at all.

Anyway, we’re off and running on the final leg of this process and I’m enjoying it immensely. At least I’m enjoying it so far. Sooner or later it’s bound to become mundane and the newness is bound to wear off and then we’ll get a post listing all the things I hate about rewriting…but for now, “Huzzah for the Land of Rewrites!”

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writing

The Beginning of Rewriting

God this is weird. Rewriting consists of rereading your work over and over again. At least it does for me. I understand that the process differs from person to person but, for me, I just like to sit at my computer and read and read and read and then reread and then rereread and correct and reshape as I go. I really need to get under the hood in order to tinker around.

However, I haven’t read a single word of this book since I started writing it outside of the briefest of scans a few sentences up at the start of each day to reorient myself. Oh, and I think way back when I tinkered with the opening a bit. But  basically I’m reading this for the first time which is…wow this is a weird experience.

On the other hand I left my running shoes in New Jersey this weekend and I dropped my razor in the toilet when unpacking my Dopp Kit (n0 idea how to spell that) and today sucks so I think the thing to do is go watch the Bachelorette at a friend’s house and then maybe watch Inception at like midnight and then see how tomorrow goes.

Which is technically today for you. Because this will post in the morning.

It’s kind of like time travel this thing we do here.

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writing

Moment 1: Matthew Makes His Second Choice

It’s hard to explain where a story comes from. Caffeine has something to do with it. So does lots of upbeat music played over and over again very loudly. The events in my life have something to do with it, although there rarely seems to be a direct, “I once skinned my knee so now this character will skin his knee,” correlation. What sort of story my brain is in the mood to create certainly comes into play. And then there’s everything else.

Which of course explains nothing.

I had a guy, he was at a wedding, he was wearing a tuxedo. That was how this all started. It was my third story and I was fresh out of ideas. The first two stories were things I had wanted to write for years. They were fleshed out to some degree. This was to be my first outing of the project with no real foundation to build on. And I had nothing but the image of said guy at a wedding. So I got playful. I started wondering if I could make it into a Twilight Zone sort of thing where this guy makes a deal with the devil and there’s some sort of ironic ending where he gets what he wants only to discover that this is a bad thing not a good thing.

Then I decided that was boring and started wondering why the devil always gets such a bad rap. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were rooting for the guy who brings pain into this world? If he was actually the good guy?

Suddenly all sorts of things started clicking and over the course of a few subway rides larger and larger chunks began fitting together. I can distinctly remember worrying this over in my head, standing there on my ride home, and suddenly understanding how the choices worked. This was possibly the only time I completely understood the choices. They’re rather confusing. I prefer Epp’s explanation where he brushes aside explanations and just says that there is, “an odd little hiccup in the universe.” How the choices work isn’t really important, only that a choice exists. At least that was what I told myself every time I screwed up the choices and had to go back and rewrite a scene.

But back during that subway ride I understood, and I knew that this “Matthew” character would have made one choice back when his wife died, only he didn’t understand that situation fully, because really he had two choices to make. A second choice was coming. The first was to give his life to begin with, the second revolved around who it was, exactly, that he was giving his life for and whether he would continue on in this world when those he continued to love moved on. And at the center of it all was a discarded home pregnancy test.

And then I was off, branching out and discovering one of the most interesting worlds I have ever visited as a writer. Coming up with new stories for Matthew and Epp became one of the best parts of this project. They gave me a canvas where everything could be played with.

On the other hand they also became the biggest stress inducer of this project, because as more and more stories piled up, more and more pressure to carry on this tale in the expected fashion began to pile up as well. I never want to write a book in that way again. That was terrifying.

So Matthew and the choice that set everything off gets the top slot. His encounter with the daughter he’s been unknowingly following for her whole life never fails to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the moment he decides she’ll be okay if he lets go sends me all over the place emotionally. It is the single most important brick in this building. Despite the zombie knife fights and trips back in time, it is Matthew’s struggle to accept his second choice that is really what this is all about. It is Matthew, after all, who brings Epp back around at the end. And it is Matthew, in a mirror image of the scene below, who signs off on Gus’s last push and all that it involved by letting himself believe that Zach will turn out all right, leaving a little message for the mortal in the meantime.

At the beginning of “26 Stories” weaving a book into it was certainly not the plan. Now, though, I have a hard time imagining what this would have been like without a visit with Matthew and Epp every third story.

I’ll visit with them again I’m pretty certain. Their world strikes me as way too rich for me to stay away from for long. I did mention a few months ago, though, that there are no plans to go back at the moment. And that remains true. The doors are currently closed and I will not force them open without an actual story in mind. But I get the feeling that one will fall into my lap eventually.

I’ll be working over a scene in my head or something, and it won’t sit right. I’ll be unable to put the camera in the right place, so to speak, and the characters will all be acting off and I’ll run it over and over in my mind trying to figure out what’s going on. And then I’ll take a step back to regroup and I’ll notice, there in the background behind the trees, a man in an immaculate suit resting his weight on a cane, or the girl on the blind date will suddenly turn blond and the patrons around her will walk right through her, or the man holding up the liquor store will have a big blind man with mirrored sunglasses breathing down his neck…and I’ll know.

But for now that hasn’t happend. For now I leave you with my favorite moment from this project.

Matthew Huntington of Brooklyn making his second choice:

The hallway Matthew entered was dark, but he had the feel of high ceilings and dusty white walls. He walked, his feet noticing the occasional warped slat of wood under his feet. He walked past a semicircle arch that led to a cramped kitchen, past a closed door, then around a corner to a bedroom. There was a fluffy comforter, rumpled and bright like starched snow, an end table with a clock radio and a lamp, a small desk cluttered with books and a laptop. He stared around; everything looked generic enough on its own, but combined there was a personality here.

Epp stood at a tree, his hands passing around and around it as he unwrapped loop after loop of tape until he finally reached the end. He walked around the tree, gathering handful after handful of tape as he went, the light on his left shifting from dusk into darkness now, and two figures ran towards him, one of them tossing a knife into the bushes before they reached the barrier where the tape had been and they disappeared to catch up with their present selves.

Matthew heard a door slam and he spun around to see a woman standing in the hallway, sleepy eyed, wearing a large t-shirt, reaching a hand through the doorway he had passed to flip off the bathroom light. He breathed in, and in, and in, seemingly unable to exhale any as his blood beat warm in his ears. “Christ, you look like your mother,” he said as his daughter walked past him. And her face, on top of the resemblance to his wife, was somehow so familiar, and he remember in rapid succession, a child’s laugh at the corner of a room he was working, a little girl in pigtails who had watched as he caused a fight on a street corner, the glimpse he caught in the shop window of a teenager walking past as he looked over the clientele, her face at a thousand different moments in his past appearing again and again as he floated through his work and it was like an optical illusion that he had only seen one way until just this moment when it became so clear how close he had been to her this whole time, how much of her life he had witnessed.

Epp wound his way around the third corner of the square he had marked out, tugging the tape off a tree branch. Inside the square the light rain that had passed through earlier that night began to fall, the raindrops tapping soothingly against the treetops.

Matthew watched her climb into bed, roll around a few times trying to get the comforter right on her body. She settled down onto her back, her face up at the ceiling. He watched and could tell that she was debating whether she should go back to sleep or not. She reached a hand up, scratched her forehead, half rolled over and looked at the clock radio, then rolled back. She clasped her hands behind her head, wriggled back onto the pillow, and smiled as she looked up at the ceiling. One thought went through Matthew’s head as he watched her and it shocked him with its certainty, but as a lifetime of watching his daughter grow up flooded through his memory he knew it was true.

“She’ll be okay,” he thought.

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