Time to Write That Novel

The month of November is known for many things. It’s the month we give thanks to the Almighty God for all the things with which we’ve been blessed. Then again, it’s also the month that, mere hours after we’ve offered those humble oblations to the Most High and have eaten ourselves sick, we step over each other in a greedy attempt to acquire the most things at the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time for a holiday we’re supposed to be focusing on the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ.

November is also the month that men grow mustaches. I’m not participating because I can’t grow enough facial hair above my lip to even look like a 70s porn star, much less Tom Selleck.

I am, however, participating in the OTHER thing for which the month of November is known.

National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” for short.

The concept is that participants write an entire 50,000-word novel in exactly one month, starting as soon as Halloween has officially ended (midnight on November 1), and finishing by 11:59 p.m. November 30.

Two years ago I attended an orientation meeting at the Idaho Falls Public Library, but never participated. This year, I've run out of excuses. 

Last weekend, my wife and I drove to Boise so I could attend (for the third year in a row) the Idaho Book Extravaganza, a seminar for published and aspiring authors in Idaho. I was sitting at a table with a published author named Joanne Pence, and explained to her that I’ve been stuck for countless hours trying to iron out the prologue of a fantasy novel of mine, and I still haven’t finished ironing it out. (I’m an editor and a perfectionist, and so my natural tendency is to write, then refine, then write, then refine, rather than write, write, write, and refine later.)

She told me in no uncertain terms, “Don’t do that.” She then said something so profound I should post on my wall. (A real wall, not a Facebook wall, though I guess that would work too.) She said, “You don’t know how a novel will begin until it ends.”

And so, with it being National Novel Writing Month, and with the basics of an outline for this fantasy novel already in place, I’m writing 2,100 words per day. (I’m behind and I won’t write on Sundays). It sounds like a lot, but I've found if you can give yourself three 15-minute writing sessions a day, and if you can pound out 700 words all three times, you can do it. It doesn't have to sound good—yet. Even when I'm not pleased with how something came out, I'm still watching the plot move along and the protagonist is taking shape. 

One thing I learned at IBE last weekend (among many—every year it’s like drinking from a fire hose) was to NOT quietly work on your novel and then tell everyone about it when it’s ready to launch, because then it’ll be DOA.

So here’s my synopsis:

In a nutshell, it’s “‘The Sacketts’ meets ‘The Dragonriders of Pern.’”

The planet Elva revolves around its star in an elliptical orbit, four times as slowly as our planet Earth around the sun. One end of the orbit is much closer than the other. That means that for nearly three years out of every four, crops can be grown and people can flourish. But for over a year, the planet experiences winter so heavily that no living creature can survive without proper shelter. All year.

On this planet, humans from Earth settled when winter had passed, and for nearly three years they prospered. And then winter came. And lingered. Thousands died. Only the most resourceful and the hardiest survived. When the snows finally receded a year later, the decimated human population was divided into clans. Clans started out as mere families and extended families, but over the years the clans became corrupted. Greedy. Lazy. They annexed lesser clans into their own and made them into lower class servants, bound to do the work none of the "royalty" wanted to do. As a result, a smaller number of large, powerful clans rose to the top.

And now one young serf is trying to break free and do what no one has done for centuries. Start his own clan.

My novel is (tentatively) called, “The Chronicles of Elva: Rebirth.”

I'll keep everyone posted on the progress of the novel.

Introductions, please

I know what you’re thinking.

“What on earth is a ‘tree barn’ and why would anyone build one?”

Lest I give the federal government an idea on something ELSE to build that’s massive, expensive, dangerous and has no foundation (thanks a lot for making me lose my medical insurance, by the way), I’ll say that there’s no such thing. Nor should there be.

It all started with M&Ms. 

For years, I’ve wanted to see my name in print—and I have, under newspaper headlines and magazine articles—but within the past several years I’ve wanted more. I’ve wanted to see my name on the spine of a book. A real book. Something you put on the shelf to read again another time, rather than toss in the trash at the end of the day or month.

While copy editing for Hewlett-Packard in Boise in 2006-2007, I took an online course from Eastern Idaho Technical College in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on self-publishing. The instructor never mentioned a single word about self-publishing through Amazon’s CreateSpace, because I doubt he had ever heard of it. (I hadn’t at the time.) He talked about self-publishing the old school way, which at that time was as current as it got. I was fascinated and wanted to self-publish. I had several ideas for novels I wanted to see in print.

So I came up with the name of my as-yet-unformed self-publishing business, called “Clover Publishing,” which was based on a random dream I had had one night. (Thankfully, it didn't involve me being in my underwear.)

Now we come to the M&Ms. While I was working as the new editor of an agricultural magazine called Potato Grower magazine, I was chowing on M&Ms at my desk, with no regard to calories, from a small Tupperware container. I poured out several more onto the desk to munch on and suddenly found what I thought was a statistical improbability. I only saw two colors. Green and orange. There were about 10 or so of them on my desk, but there were only two colors. Inspiration hit, and I decided to make those two colors the main colors of my logo.

I eventually abandoned the idea of using a generic clover as the theme of my business logo, and I went with something a little more self-centered. I decided to use two of the three initials in my name (TB) to represent my business name. The “T” was obvious. My last name is Deutsch for “tree,” and so that took care of that. After deliberating, I finally decided to go with what once was the red, wooden, rickety structure across the street from my house before it was torn down, to represent the “B”—a barn.

Thus, “Tree Barn Publishing” was born.

At this time, I’m focusing on using my editing skills to help clean up the filth that’s all too pervasive in the written word nowadays. And I’m working on a fantasy novel. And I’ve got lots more novels in the pipeline to start on, and even a few nonfiction books.

So stay tuned. And have some M&Ms.

-Tyler J. Baum