post a comment | posted May 3
My second book, Ezekiel Strong, is coming along nicely. I am almost finished writing it and the first part has already gone to the editors. I hope to soon post some excerpts from it to my website. It is an epic story of romance and drama. The hero is a hardboiled private eye / bounty hunter who patterns himself after the greats like Sam Spade. He is a modern hero however with a unique nature that allows him to live both in our world and the underworld of demons, angels, fairies, and vampires. That makes it an other worldly twist on the classic PI novels. I mix elements from mysteries, romance, fantasy, and even a little sci-fi. I am very pleased with it.
I broke one of the cardinal rules of writing. The story is told in first person by Zeke himself and drifts at times from past to present. It is difficult to keep the tense straight, which is why everyone says to not mix them. It was the only way to tell the story and hopefully I was able to pull it off successfully. Zeke is telling the story to the reader in the present while referring to past events. It follows the conventions of a spoken story, just as you would tell someone about past events, mixing present and past tense depending on the current point of view.
The biggest trouble I had was in speaking of characters who still exist at the time of telling the story. For example I would say that "Trixie was mad" but that "Trixie is sexy". She was mad at the point in the story being relayed but she remains sexy we should presume. I had to go back through and correct myself in many such instances. I see now why writers are warned against trying to mix tense in a story. I think it works well however and gives the feeling that Zeke is telling the story directly to the reader.
My other book, ArchAngelxx, was also first person and had some of the same issues. I don't know why I chose the hard way to tell stories but I just tell them as they demand to be told. In both cases it was important for the hero to tell his own story. The narrative would not have been the same otherwise. I could not see ArchAngelxx being told in third person. I could have perhaps told the story of Ezekiel Strong that way but it would loose the romance of the classic detective novel that I wanted to preserve.
I am a little disappointed with the small number of readers for ArchAngelxx. I am beginning to wonder if the Internet is a good medium for novels. A lot of people have trouble reading for long periods of time on a computer monitor, and the Internet itself tends more towards fast bits of information or entertainment rather than literature. I don't think the net is opposed to storytelling per se, but a different format than the classic novel might be more fitting. A return to serials would, I think, be more fitting.
Ezekiel Strong was originally conceived in such a format. I have written the whole thing in one long narrative without chapter divisions. I had thought to break it up into small bite size units for the net. ArchAngel was done in much the same way, with very short chapters to be read in serial form. It is about the length of an old dime novel divided into 40 small chapters. The trick seems to be in the presentation. People will return week after week for the next chapter in a serial but when it is presented as complete it doesn't have the same effect, even though it is divided the same way.
For Ezekiel Strong I plan to go the more traditional route of submitting it to a brick and mortar publishing house for publication. I have decided to not publish it electronically. I will probably put some excerpts of the web, and perhaps offer an electronic version in the future but not right away. With ArchAngelxx I am thinking of reformatting it and perhaps presenting it as a weekly serial on the website. I have already thought of some more things I could do with it on the net, adding some multimedia aspects. So look for a rewrite soon.