To Publish or Not to Publish - That is the Rub

Having spent quite a few months working on the Panthology it's time to ask myself: what's next? I'm happy to get back to reading and writing in my collaborative novels at Pan Historia, but ultimately I thrive on goals and projects that can yield tangible achievements. Writing on Pan is the most pleasurable form of exercise I know, but I still consider it exercise. It's social, it's fun, it's interactive, but the end of the day it's building things that last that I enjoy the most. Tinkering with the structure of Pan is something that gives me great satisfaction and joy as I strive to increase membership and participation by increasing the ease and functionality of the site. Of course I'm only a tinkerer when it comes to site construction but I believe that Pan reflects its users to a large degree. It's not so much about bells and whistles and high tech apps, but about being a comfortable place to express one's imagination. Writers just need to write, ultimately.

Perhaps that explains my mild obsession with publishing Pan Press books? I mean the logical conclusion of a writer's work is to be published. It's as old as the hills—or as old illuminated manuscripts anyway. To be published is to be real, genuine, accepted, legitimate. Technically it's considered a form of publishing to post material, such as this blog, on the internet for others to read, but both you and I know it's not what WE mean, as authors, when we say we are "published." Even when we boast, as I have done, of my status as a "published" author deep down in my heart I want that book with pages of vellum, binding, rabbit skin glue, and black ink. This is probably why authors, as a group, are the most resistant to the idea of eBooks. It's not quite... printed... is it? Of course it is, and I would be thrilled to be selling millions of copies of my novel in eBook format, but that will never cure my schoolboy crush on the first object of my desire: the book; either paperback or hardback.

So what is next? Besides going back to work on my own novel, a supernatural/horror adventure, I think I will prepare one of my collaborative novels, FLESH, from Pan for publication. Like the Panthology it will be a collection of writers, but this time we will bring the whole stories. It will be a challenge to edit the pieces together in order to tell each story (it will be a collection of about 4-5 stories set in a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has turned people into zombie-like killing machines). Zombies are hot items, and some of the stories are really very good with some great writers from the site. This is a piece that I feel has merit beyond the site, and can engage a larger audience of readers from hardcore zombie fans to general horror lovers. I would love to see if I can expand beyond members of the community and engage the interest of other readers for our publications. If it's even mildly successful it opens the door for any number of such projects for any number of genres represented at Pan.

Illustration by Jack Knight

Progress on the Pan Historia Birthday Book

Work has commenced, as promised on the second Pan Historia Birthday Book. The title needs a little explaining. Pan Historia is a community for collaborative and role-play writing, as well as history buffs, and a place for people with a whimsical or literary sense of fun to hang out and make friends. It's like a non-stop costume party (which is why October is such a popular month with our members and writers). We first went live around May 2000 and were in beta forever (it seemed at the time) due to a some what rocky start and no capital investment. Our first collection of work by our writers and artists was prepared and published in time for our 3rd Panniversary (yes, we do awful plays on words at Pan) - which is held every February because our official launch date was Valentine's Day, 2001. I think. Record keeping is not my strong suit. I forget my own name sometimes as well.

Hence the anthology was named "The Pan Historia Birthday Book" with every intention of creating a new collection each and every February. This turned out to be a laughably ambitious concept. Shortly after the publication of the first book we had a major server crash that ripped the site apart, and it took many months of hard work to re-establish trust and fun as usual. I cannot stress how amazing our members were throughout that whole ordeal. Our second effort which was to be a cookbook: it died before delivery. After that it just seemed like the idea was to be shoved to the back burner every year.

This time, however, determination has returned, and the small press world has radically altered. Back in 2004 I had to order several boxes of books, and we never did sell every copy. This time print on demand has developed to the degree that I don't have to take that kind of risk again. By affiliating myself with another small press I'm planning to open the work of our talented writers and artists to a wider audience and have the book available on Amazon. It should be exciting to see how our labor of love and fun does in the 'real' world. I have pushed the publication date to prior to December in order to take advantage of Christmas sales, but I might be too ambitious. There is a lot of work still to be done.

The deadline for entries to be included in the book closes tomorrow. After that we'll be judging the entries so that we have the best and the book isn't the size of Lord of the Rings. Following that is the process of editing. Thankfully we have a number of people qualified to edit who are members of the site. All in all this is a terrific project with great potential, and I can't think of many other writing sites that give their members an opportunity to be published.

It Takes a Village to Create a Good Monster

Most of my adult life I have not signed up for cable TV. It's been a time sucking temptation I didn't need or want. But that's not because I'm some kind of stuck up puritan deeming the viewing of comedies and dramas on the small screen as sinful or wasteful. I just know myself - I love the distraction of a tale well told or a meal well cooked. In consequence my viewing of popular series has been as a customer of Netflix. I tell you this to explain the next part: I watch TV series after everyone else as seen them because I watch them on DVD.

I'm a big fan of the hit Showtime series Dexter and gobbled up Season 1 & 2 with avidity of appetite that left me with a very long wait for Season 3. I had to fill that time somehow. Dexter, serial killer with a code, is such an engaging and fascinating character that when I discovered that he was actually inspired by a book I was delighted. I'm one of those who love to read and believe that most books are better than the shows/movies made from them. I understand that it's hard work to adapt a book to a totally different medium and realize that the result often diverges enough from the original that the reader is left unsatisfied: their imaginative take on the events and characters far different than the script writer and director's. So to say that I was excited to find that Jeffrey Lindsay was the creator of one of my favorite television character was possibly an understatement. These were not books based on the hit series, but a hit series based on popular books, bound to be as good at the show if not better. I must be in for a treat so I bought all three extant books at once.

Here is where I'm going to offend Jeffrey Lindsay and all his fans. These were definitely the worst three books I have ever read as a series. I confess that I hated the first trilogy of Thomas Covenant by Stephan R. Donaldson nearly as much but for very different reasons, but in main if I have bothered to read three books by the same author about the same subject I'm probably hooked. I was not hooked; I was desperate. I wanted to be in Dexter's world and this was the best I could do while I waited for the series to return (thankfully they were both short and easy to read). Lindsay created an engaging character, a bold premise, and a convincing setup, and for that I will always be grateful. But after that he let me down with pedestrian writing and cheap tricks.

One huge mistake: his sister Debra finds out he's a killer in the beginning of the first book, but she loves him anyway in the second book. Where is the alienation that so defines the character? Doakes gets all his limbs cut off but clumps into the office anyway? Was that mean to be humorous? And the third book... I'm rolling my eyes at this one. In the third book Lindsay blows away his own brilliant premise by making Dexter possessed of a demon, rather than the interesting psychology that is hinted at (not actually explored because Lindsay is not that good of a writer) in the previous novels. The device of Dexter's inner monologue has its source in the books, but whereas it is very interesting and well done in the TV series, after three books you're tired of the boasting and whining:

"Gosh I'm a smart guy without any human emotions, why can't I do my normal brilliant analysis of this challenge right now?"

That was a paraphrase because I can't access the books anymore. Disgusted that I read all three I passed them onto another Dexter fan - who then did precisely what I did - read them all in disgust and then dumped them off somewhere like a dead body that needed disposal. I have googled around the web for evidence that others viewed Lindsay's hack writing the same way as I did, but I have not found it. I believe that Dexter is so arresting as a character in fiction that Lindsay is easily pulling the wool over the eyes of his readers, but the glamour can't last forever.

What is the point of trashing Lindsay's books in my blog since this is not intended as a review? I think, for me, that it's that the collaborative effort that took flight from Lindsay's brilliant starting point shows that the artistic process, even for crafting stories, doesn't have to be a lonely journey. We all know that movies and TV shows are the result of the work of a lot of people, but we always think of them in terms of a 'a writer', 'a director', or 'a star', but the fact is that all those people and more work together to produce a show like Dexter. Every link in the Dexter chain, from Lindsay's premise, to the uncanny performance by Michael C. Hall, is part of a greater whole of people coming together to create something unique in the world. At least that's how I like to think of it when I collaborate on my fiction projects - that we are bringing something unique into the world through our collective creativity and vision. Lindsay conceived Dexter, but it took 'a village' to raise this monster.

Other People's Characters and the Voices in Your Head

As those of you that read my blog regularly know by now I write collaborative serial fiction. I got to thinking, recently, that writing with other author's characters is not so different than writing solo. It's certainly not what I would consider the main difference between writing a novel or short story and what I do. One of the most common experiences I have noticed with all fiction writers is that they talk about their characters coming to 'life' and having a voice of their own. Often writers will claim that they cannot force their characters to behave in a certain way - that each character has a will of their own.

This is totally true for me whether I write the character or someone else does. The only difference between my characters and the characters of my co-writers is that I don't hear the voices in my head. I have to have conversations. Since I do all of my collaborative fiction interaction online that comes in the form of e-mails, message-boards, and instant messages so it's damn near to voices in my head or my general writing experience. Just like when I'm creating my own characters it has its ups and downs. I have to work to be fluid enough to accommodate a writer being true to their character's personality, and keep us on plot, as well as not make my character the 'star' all the time. Just like with any successful living character I can find that they can bring something new to the story that I hadn't imagined but is better than before, and since this is collaboration their character has equal billing.

It's the same whether you are writing by yourself, maybe trying to stick to a plot and a synopsis, or whether you are in discussion with another person - sometimes a better idea comes along and you need to be flexible. In the case of a novelist it might be your own inner critic but it could equally be an objective reader, an editor, or an agent. You also have to know when to stick to your guns. Sometimes characters are wrong - what they think is good for them is not good for the overall storyline. It really doesn't matter who the author of that character is at this point.

My biggest problem with characters written by someone other than myself is not them being true to themselves but when they are out of sync with how my characters are. This doesn't usually come up with people I write with regularly, but with newer collaborators. When I first started out on this path and style of writing it used to happen far more regularly particularly because my main character was an historical person Wyatt Earp. People had very set preconceived notions of Wyatt based on their previous knowledge of the character whether from fictional accounts like the movie Tombstone or from skewed historical perspectives. More than once I had to 'buffalo' a few tough skulls to get it through to them that they needed to be reacting to my version of the character, not one previously written and engraved in their head.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a disparity in the way that one character views another. I think that can be very convincingly done in collaborative writing as long as each writer remembers that they might be omniscient but their characters are not. I still write fiction set around Wyatt Earp and I encourage those that write Cowboy characters to view Wyatt as a bully and a pimp, even if Wyatt sees himself as a righteous upright citizen. There is a huge difference in perceiving an event or set of behaviors through your character's spectacles and another between having characters act out of character.

What I think I enjoy the most about working with other author's characters is that they often have backgrounds and sets of experiences that my characters have no inkling of. Much as I might be able to imagine a full pantheon of unique characters with interesting backgrounds they all still share one common denominator: me. Other authors bring in their own unique life situations and that gives them a range of choices that can often be surprising to me. Sometimes it's unpredictable, but after the taste is acquired, collaboration can be a beautiful and inspirational exercise.

Announcing the Pan Press Project

Plans are moving ahead for the re-launch of the Pan Press as a division of a small publishing house. We had our first business meeting to discussion the structure of the operation. We have a couple designers ready and primed. My idea is to start with some of the best of the best of Pan Historia for the long overdue second Pan Birthday Book.

The Pan Birthday Book was published in 2004 as an anthology of all the various writing that could be found on the collaborative community's forums. It included sections from the role-play novels as well as essays from the reference book section, poetry, and in addition some great original artwork from some of our more graphically inclined members. It was sold solely on the site to the membership of Pan. It was a great fundraiser for the site and a great snapshot of where we were then.

It's five years later and I want to take our second Birthday Book just a little further. First of all it will be available via Amazon and other online booksellers and give our authors and artists a bigger potential audience. Because of my desire to showcase our creativity beyond our 'borders' I plan to run a contest for the entries with specific guidelines. The entries should be short stories that can stand alone for the pleasure of the reader. They can be collaboratively worked, based on storylines from the established novels at Pan, but tailored for inclusion in an anthology that might be read by people that have never visited Pan Historia.

If the second Birthday Book goes as planned I will start work on published versions of several of our collaborative novels, and hopefully members of the community will join in to create a shelf of work that can be treasured forever. The potential is limitless. Imagine being able to take your favorite online novel with you to the beach next summer? Imagine running your fingers over the pages of a novel you helped to write? I know I can't wait to see my first edition of my original fantasy story The Midnight People or my zombie horror collaborative FLESH And yes, I plan ebook versions if possible.

Warming Up

If you follow my blog regularly you know that I recently moved. Life has radically altered, and yet… it must, by the nature of what I do, remain the same. I still need to get up in the morning, log onto my computer and begin my day. Besides any paycheck job I might eventually get I brought my work with me when I moved. I still need to work on my community site Pan Historia, I still need to work for any clients I get online, and I still need to be a writer. The challenge is fitting in the old into the new without losing why I came west in the first place.

There have been a lot of disruptions to my writing and Pan schedule. It's been harder for me to find the time to do my fiction writing, or to write for my blog. New family obligations have popped up - and then there is the draw of the outside. Back east so much of the year was spent in cold, sleet, snow, ice, and wind that I had little temptation to unseat myself from my writing and take up other activities. Even in the summer I was rarely moved because I dislike humidity and New England summers are often very humid. I can't even image what it's like down south so don't start with me.

The upshot is that it is very easy to get up from my computer and to take myself outside (which I wanted in my life, a big part of why I moved in the first place), and very hard to get back into my routine which I need to keep as well. It's my writing that has suffered the most. While I have not completely succumbed to writing inertia I have only completed three posts for my collaborative fiction stories at Pan since moving into my new place, thus my stories are languishing. It's not easy for my fellow writers to work around me. My blog has also suffered. Not being in the full flow of writing and thinking about writing means that I have fewer ideas for my blog. I hate to just write for the hell of it. Yet, here I am.

The purpose of this blog post (for me) functions just the same as warming up before an athletic event. Even though the sun is shining on my garden right now, even though the guest bed needs folding up and putting away, even though there are still boxes to unpack and sort and decide what goes back into storage, I am going to write. Even if I have to work later into the night to meet my deadline for my client, Bardic Web, I am going to write.

The lesson in all this for any writer is that no matter what you need to make time in your life to write. It doesn't matter if you love the outdoors, or if you are on a job search, or if you are a single parent (I know of what I speak) you have to make that time and keep to it. It may not be as much time as ideal, but make it regular and make it priority.

There. Now I have warmed up my fingers a little bit. It's time to go slip into the skin of a man who has endured natural disaster and a nuclear holocaust and is now living under a bitter sky.

Wyatt's Fiction

It's come to my attention that I got a lot less traffic over on Wordpress than I do here at Blogger. Understanding as I do that sometimes people are reluctant to click links or just don't see them I thought I would write this post to introduce you to my fiction blog over at WP. It's a collection of posts from my collaborative fiction writing at Pan Historia. I am reposting writing from three stories at the moment: The Midnight People, Turnskin, and Tombstone. The Midnight People is an original concept in the fantasy genre that derives inspiration from Celtic folklore and Tolkien that I consider a modern fairy tale. It often has horror elements and is written with an adult audience in mind. Turnskin is another original concept in the horror genre, this time, and features werewolves. Again I hope to appeal to an adult audience. I kept some pretty strict rules about lycanthropy and preferred to use a blend of both Western and American Indian folklore for inspiration. The last genre I'm reposting is the western genre with my posts from Tombstone. In this version of Tombstone we are moving much slower towards the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. It is a broad mix of fictional and historical elements with an emphasis on being true to the period, though not necessarily dates. In all of these role play collaborative fiction stories I'm just including my own writing (copyright reasons of course) but I do write from various points of view by using different characters to tell the tales.

So I hope I can encourage some of you to visit my fiction blog. Please feel free to leave me comments and even critiques. I don't mind. Some of this fiction is several years old but in revisiting it I have already seen that there is plenty of room for improvement. My goal is to become a better writer whether or not it's in a traditional format like writing a novel or in the area of collaborative fiction.

Romance Returns at Pan Historia

Romance returns to collaborative fiction site Pan Historia…

Everyone loves love so why did it ever leave? It's really a problem of gender expectations and preconceptions I think. Romance has the reputation of being a woman's thing, and yet, hey there blokes, you all know you love romance too. I have long suspected men of being the more romantic of the species, but I digress.

My original intention in removing Romance as a genre option was to tighten up the genres we have and make sure that each and every genre was active. It seemed, in the site design, that we were spreading ourselves too thin. We once had Comedy, Role Play, and World as genre options too. Last year I did a marketing survey of the members of Pan Historia and what I discovered was that many writers at Pan, male and female, loved Romance whether they were writing there or not. I also learned that many people come to Pan just to read. So it seems that a genre's popularity shouldn't be purely based on number of posts per day or number of novels populating the genre.

Having discovered that people often just like to read what is on offer at Pan has changed my thinking about the site design in a lot of ways. I used to be very fervent about cleaning up novels that had gone quiet, but now I think of them more like the books at the library that don't get checked quite as often. It doesn't mean it's time for them to go in the sale bin quite yet. I'm looking at ways to highlight the reading at Pan in different ways than it's been done so far. Right now it's all about what's the latest, hottest, and the newest, which is pretty much how it's done all over the net. My earlier blog posts sink under the weight of my newer ones until they're never read again. I'd like to find some way of bucking that system at Pan so that a novel that was written two years ago can still be a popular read now, and not just data languishing in the database.

With these thoughts in mind a genre like Romance doesn't need to meet posting quotas or worry about novels coming and going. Popularity shouldn't solely be judged on statistics. A good love story is timeless. It can be revisited again and again.

Burning Down the House

Ever since I can remember I have cared about wild animals and the environment. I didn't get it from politics or 'bleeding heart' liberals. It was just fundamental to my nature. I don't even remember politics discussed in the home or any form of activism being embraced. My home influences were always about art and literature more than politics and government. The themes that inspired my childish mind are still with me in much of my writing today. I was reminded of this when wandering through my list of blogs I follow this morning and I was presented with this video from YouTube at Historical Boys:



Even as a child I hated the killing of wild animals for no reason. I imagined a world where humans got in trouble from their wanton destructive ways and animals were relieved from the bondage, abuse, and killing. I would construct vast apocalyptic end of the world scenarios where only a few caring humans were allowed to survive but animals could finally live in the world in peace. Other imaginative games involved me taking on the persona of a wild animal and living in their world, far away from any human beings. I belonged to the WWF when I was in 6th grade.

Looking at the stories that I write today at the collaborative fiction site Pan Historia I realize that I haven't changed all that much. It seems I still dream of the end of the world in my new collaborative novel The Bitter Sky or in my slightly more tongue in check zombie fiction FLESH. While The Bitter Sky is grim and dark, set in a very long nuclear winter, FLESH retains some of my childhood ire at humanity: none of the animals are affected by the zombie virus. My other story Turnskin, my werewolf horror collaboration, has a very strong environmental theme and streak that has been embraced by the other writers. I have been posting some of that story on my fiction blog if you are interested. In Turnskin there are good wolves and bad wolves, but all of them are united in their belief that humanity is destroying wildlife and its habitats. For a second there I thought I was done with my post-apocalyptic and environmental themes but then I remembered my other collaborative fiction, the modern fairy tale The Midnight People. In this concept I created a world in the future where the Fae have battled humanity to submission to take over because of our abuses of the environment.

It's interesting how my childhood games have continued into adulthood via the media of the internet and online community. Thankfully I have an outlet for my creative visions, as well as a way to learn about, help out, and connect with other people when it comes to trying to make some real life changes for the better. To me I really feel that the protection of our environment and the other beings that share this planet with us should be paramount in our minds right now and should be outside of politics. It shouldn't matter what you think about taxes, gun control, abortion, or how much government we have. Don't burn down the house we all live in. It's just simple common sense and survival. Otherwise dark visions like The Bitter Sky could well be a reality that would lose all the fun when translated into reality.

Burning up about the wolf slaughter? Head over here to help.

Collaborative Fiction: Playing Nice with Others

In collaborative fiction writing, as in life, not everyone is going to be the right 'mix' for your project. That doesn't mean that they're not a good writer or that they are a bad person. It just means that their personal style or their vision of the story is not working with the rest of the team. There are some simple things to do to try to get everyone working on the same page.

First of all: listen. It's essential to give everyone a chance to express their ideas and creative vision. If you're one of the project leaders (we call them Members of the Board at Pan) and this was your idea for a story you might be tempted to come down hard and insist that it's your way or the highway, but if you do you're also likely to be writing your story all alone. Sometimes even the most difficult writer will come up with ideas that improve on the original concept. If you're not open and you don't listen it will never happen. The case, much of the time, is that people are way off base. Say you want to write a hard core survivalist story and they start coming up with some more fantastic ideas like mega-warriors with super-powers that are hyped up versions of Mad Max on steroids. Hear what they have to say, see if there are any parts of it you can use, and then be firm but supportive. The fact is that what got them excited about your story might not be exactly what you had in mind.

The goal is to bring them closer to the concept without stifling their creativity. So in a realistic survivalist story a band of Mad Max types might fit, but tempered down to earth - would that work? Consider the idea before you just out and out dismiss it. With some working it might fit in - or not. But be sure you have listened first and not just playacted at listening. Keep a respectful attitude and a gentle demeanor in your written communications. In writing people can't see your facial expressions or hand gestures. Your respect needs to be OBVIOUS from your word choices and sentence structure. Unfortunate word choices can alienate. Always reread your communications before hitting the send button and NEVER respond in the heat of the moment if things are getting a little hot under the collar.

It's the case in all collaborations where someone with a very differing view of the story is going to decide to walk. That's ok; it happens. When it does you still have to be respectful, and it's ok to let them go. As long as you've done your job of listening, trying to work with their ideas, etc., as a team leader you hopefully avoided any negative conflict and commentary that can spoil the fun of a good collaborative role play writing project. This story might not be the right one for them but, who knows, another time you might find it fun to work together. Try not to burn bridges!

All the above advice can apply to the writer that is having trouble fitting into a story that initially interested them. You might need to be flexible if the story is not exactly what you imagined when you applied to join in, but remember it's ok if not every story is a good fit for you. Just approach every new story as a potential team member. It's not just the vision that you see in your head of the character. It's the sum of the parts, not just the individual parts.

The Bitter Sky

Just a quick update on my nuclear winter science fiction collaborative fiction project at Pan Historia: I got the novel underway with title and right now the first new writers are joining up and putting in their ideas for the overall background scenario. I named the piece “The Bitter Sky” and it’s inspired by a line of a Shakespeare sonnet that reads “thou bitter sky” about winter. The graphics are still pretty spare but I stopped being quite as interested in window dressing as I once was and prefer to have the bones of a collaborative story well structured and strong before going for the rest. In this case I consider the bones to be the believable future scenario where two types of survivors clash over limited resources in a world devoid of sun, poisoned by ash and radiation.

I set the story in the United Kingdom because a) the initial cause of the natural disaster was the eruption of a mega volcano in the United States that would have destroyed most of the northern American continent and b) I used to live there and c) it would probably have avoided a nuclear strike in the crazy fallout from the volcano’s eruption. We have a very good writer from England on the new team and he’s been able to give us all invaluable suggestions that make the setting authentic to British culture and how it might have devolved in twenty years of nuclear winter. My memories of Britain are fading, sad to say, so I definitely need the tips and reminders.

So far the writers the story is attracting are some of the very best Pan Historia has to offer, particularly in the scifi genre, and I’m very excited to be working with writers both familiar to me (from 666 West End Avenue, FLESH, and Turnskin) as well as writers I have not had the challenge and honor of working with before. I’m equally excited to be working on an original science fiction story once more. The last time I wrote scifi at Pan Historia was for the much mourned novel Forever is Too Long (I think I got that write) which was created by a wonderful published author who occasionally frequents Pan Historia. It was set on a huge seed ship that had been drifting in space too long and some of the crew are awoken from stasis and cultures are developing within this massive labyrinth. It was very challenging for me, in particular, because I took a character that came out of the head of another writer, a scientist, and I had to make him both convincing and mine.

I might consider posting my fiction from The Bitter Sky on my writing blog once we get going, but for now it’s still in the planning stages.

Nuclear Winter Science Fiction Novel Idea

Driving to New York City on Saturday afternoon I was inspired to start a new scifi story at my community site Pan Historia. The afternoon had grown prematurely dark from clouds that seemed heavy with snow. The forecast had been vague, anything from 1-12 inches depending on where you were, but the sky looked ready to deliver Armageddon. The afternoon light, as we approached the early evening of winter, became sullen and bruised with menace. I have a tendency towards motion sickness when I travel by car, if I’m not the driver, and so I looked out the window at the winter landscape of Connecticut and then New York State.

I imagined that this light would be similar to the light caused by a layer of ash in the sky – nuclear winter – and from there my mind started running over a future scenario where it the Earth suffered from such a nuclear winter for at least a whole generation. Could people survive? How did they survive? I could easily imagine that a small population could manage by using generators and other power sources to grow food in bunkers or underground facilities with artificial lights, but I also tried to imagine if there could be survivors on the surface. Would they live by scavenging, cannibalism, or what?

There was a section of woods on the journey where the trees had largely died and they were strewn around like dominoes tumbled. This is what nuclear winter would do to the woods over time as the trees died and then rotted. The idea caught hold so thoroughly that I spent a couple hours thinking about it. I imagined the Morlock type scavengers gathering wood to burn, as well as the survivors from the bunkers. There would be conflicts. When I returned home to Vermont and was able to again login into Pan Historia I started doing a little research on the science. My technological survivors would, of course, also have to be scavengers as well as act defensively against the dangers of the twilight world I envisioned. Most of the theories of nuclear winter did not suggest the length of time I imagined, at least not for nuclear bomb fallout, so I looked into mega volcanoes, and I could postulate a situation where that might keep up for some time, particularly if there were also nuclear detonations and perhaps fires burning for years, such as would happen at dumps and oil fields, adding to the dust filled atmosphere.

Those survivors that lived outside would be like sick animals, our Morlock types, scrounging for scraps of food. They would suffer from UV poisoning from what light did come because of the damage to the ozone, and of course water would be contaminated. They would be short-lived and reduced to brutal lives. The clash between the two groups could provide a great deal of drama for long-term collaborative story-telling which is my specialty and the specialty of the writers at Pan Historia.

For those of you new to the concept of Pan Historia but interested in collaborative writing, getting in at the beginning of one of our role play collaborative novels is a great way to get started. More experienced members of the community would be more than happy to mentor you, and you wouldn’t have to feel like you were intruding on an established storyline. I’ll be creating my new ‘novel’ just as soon as I have fixed on a good title for it. There has been good interest in the concept so I hope to see a broad range of writers bringing their ideas to the world we create.

Getting Ready to Fire Up the Press

Time to take a long and welcome stretch and then consider what the New Year will bring.

This year, for me, I anticipate many changes, but what goals might I set for myself in terms of writing?

As a collaborative writer I'm approaching something rather exciting at Pan Historia. One of my collaborative 'novels' is coming to an end. We are in the process of planning a conclusion and tying up all the loose ends. Ideally it can then be read just like any other novel with a beginning, middle, and end. I would like to also propose to my fellow writers at The Midnight People that we edit and then publish the work. One of the really exciting developments of the computer and internet age is the greater freedom that writers have to get published. Of course the Vanity Press has existed as long as the printing press, but nowadays self-publishing with all the trimmings of self-promotion and marketing is now a real possibility. I anticipate a fairly small audience for our fantasy novel, but I think it would be a great thing to hold the real life paperback version of our collaborative work in our hands. The sense of accomplishment alone would be worth it, even if we don't entirely recoup the costs of the project.

In addition to a print version of the completed The Midnight People I hope to extend the publishing option to all of Pan Historia. A number of years ago we put together a compilation book that we named the Pan Historia Birthday Book. I had planned for a new one every year but sadly that was more work than I could manage, but I think it's time for another. It sounds to me, reading what I have just wrote, that I really plan to enter the world of publishing, albeit in my small and quirky way. Pan Press here I come!

Which leads me to my own solo literary effort: it's time to get serious about my novel. My New Year's resolution will involve dusting off my research, and then writing at least a page a day. If I can write a page of blog every day… well you get the picture. I won't wait a week to start, I'll start today. There is nothing like grabbing the moment and not letting good intentions get away. I finally realized, in a blinding moment of revelation, what the block was to the novel and that was that I had character, no problem, but I hadn't really decided what the damn plot was. So I will work on a rough outline and try and hammer out the story arc.

Wish me luck.

Gender Role Play and Collaborative Writing

Traditionally it's quite normal for an author to speak for characters of a different gender to his or her own. Gender is usually inferred right there on the cover by the name of the author and then confirmed on the back with an author photo. Once the story is started it's quite alright for an author to slip on the persona of male or female and we are all quite happy here with our coffee, because we know we're being told a story. This has not applied equally over all genres however. Romance, deemed to be of interest only to women, often has male authors writing under female pseudonyms or gender non-specific names to leave the reader to make the assumption. The same has applied, in the past, to women writing in the Mystery genre, and I'm assuming it still could happen in the Western Genre.

It's quite different when an author leaves the safety of solitary authorship and joins the ranks of the collaborative writer, a group that has roots and relationship to role-playing games. Why it should have evolved to be so I'm not exactly sure because I often played a fiery sultry vixen half-elf enchantress who liked to wear skimpy clothes and could use a knife like a ninja assassin, but then a lot of guys got used to playing female back in the early days of D & D when nary a female dared show her face in that pimply testosterone heavy crowd (I see a relationship to Elizabethan theater here). Things are very different now, I know, but I'm talking over twenty years ago. Eventually women were allowed into gaming, I'm glad to say, and the last time I played was Vampire the Masquerade where half the players were women. The Vampire game involved a lot more acting and story telling, which I found even more fun than all that dice throwing and long character sheets and endless discussions of percentiles and weapon weight, but it seemed to involve less cross gender play. Perhaps because you were speaking the lines out loud and didn't want to appear foolish - but certainly my group tended to stick to their sex with the exception of the game master and their entire cast of thousands.

When a writer or role player comes online and logs into a site as his or her character there seems to be that same sense of gender association, but there begins a merging of the lines between fact and fiction. Without the visual cues all a person has to go are the written words. Thus when a person signs on to Pan Historia, for example, they are free to commit themselves to a fictional persona, of whatever gender, and then be accepted at 'face' (avatar, bio, etc) value. Meeting and greeting new people as they explore Pan we move people towards this association with character and discourage the standard sex and age questions that prevail in other forms of online social site.

The association with the character is so strong in the role play and related collaborative fiction world of Pan Historia that people often do not remember that the person playing that character and writing those stories is the author. The convention that the author can do as they please in writing for male or female breaks down and the character becomes the author. It doesn't seem to cross into other areas of the character like profession, for instance. If I'm writing a ninja mage (going back to my elf analogy here) no one assumes I'm really a ninja mage or elf. But if the first time they met me I was also presented as a female elf, the assumption would rest squarely that I was a woman in real life. I have to admit that my example breaks down a bit when I played a sadistic killer for the first time. I did have online friends decide I must be a sicko. I consider that flattery; I must have done a damn fine job of writing.

The interesting thing is that, quite obviously, lots of people are writing characters that are not their own gender online, or playing them and everyone knows that. The majority of World of Warcraft characters are not male, yet the majority of their players are. Some players are perfectly open in their forum and other out of character communications and some players choose to remain in character. People turn a blind eye until someone is 'outed'. The whole issue seems to have become less fractious with time as more people realize that it happens all the time online (and try it themselves), but there are still a surprising number of stereotypes and thus a lot of reasons for an individual to prefer not to 'out' themselves as one gender or another in their writing partnerships. We think it shouldn't matter - and it seems to me it really shouldn't - but gender identification is such a fundamental to the bone social programming that we seldom question our gut reactions.

For instance my female character that I had for many years as taken at face value as a strong woman while people assumed the writer was female, but later on people shifted their views and I found her far less successful to write with, including interactions with other collaborative writing partners. The example that comes to mind was her love affair with a male character where suddenly they were fighting and not having a passionate love affair once the writer realized I wasn't a proper woman. In effect his discomfort at writing romantic fiction with a male writer altered the way his character behaved to the point that the story changed radically. This was not an isolated incident.

One positive reason, though, that I can cite for total immersion identification with your characters of the opposite gender is what you learn about gender from it. It can only enhance your writing to really start to relate and understand characters of opposite sex. Of course when a male author sits down to write a novel with a female protagonist (or vice versa) they are doing exactly that: slipping into the skin of that character. It should be no different with any form of writing ultimately.

In online writing relationships I guess the best maxim is: do no harm but have fun and explore new things.

Writing Just for the Fun of It

I read a lot of blogs these days about writing for profit whether as a freelancer, ghostwriter, author, or professional blogger, but I want to remember, today, that I write for the love of it. Of course making money at what you love to do is probably one of the most fantastic jobs on the planet and so all hail to that concept. My point, however, is that I can still play like a kid in a playground, by writing, and I never want to lose that.

When I log into my writing and role-play site every day I'm stepping into another world where the writing is for the sheer play of it. I can slip out of my everyday worries and cares, put aside that tired old hat, and don something a lot more colorful. Crafting a sentence to convey the thrill of old west gunfight or two starships in a firefight to my readers, knowing how they'll react and enjoy and then want their turn to respond and react, is a true pleasure. One of the greatest thrills of writing collaborative fiction, for me, is that interaction.

A couple of my friends are published authors. I know well the hard hours that they put into their work. Both of them work as much as they can, banging away at their laptop keyboards. CG works late, after his day job, alone in his room. PL works from the moment he opens his eyes on the day, and it's seldom that he's seen out of doors. For both they are in a very lonely profession. They seldom get feedback on their work until they are ready to submit it to the agent or editor. Even once the books are published they have to wait for book readings or the e-mails of fans to get any kind of response.

I'm not knocking the lonely life of the author. I would easily trade my day job for the chance to work at home at my own pace every day creating deathless prose, but I also think I actually enjoy writing than either of my published friends. Of course they are passionate about writing, but for them it's often a true "labor" of love. It's hard work and discipline. When I start to write it's pure play (even if I whine about "owing" posts). I get to playact some part and when I'm done, hit the post button; I get to socialize with my fellow writers who give me instant feedback.

PL, when I can get him to remember that life is fun too, actually comes to Pan Historia to write for simple play. I can get him to admit, at times, that he gets a kick out of it, even though he claims he does it just to be a good sport. I guess it's just a little like when he was a kid and he wrote his little stories in little handmade books he made. It was, of course, a bit challenging to get him to learn to play well with others after years of being the sole author and in control. I think he got the concept that you can't kill off someone else's character without their permission, but it took a while to wean him off of putting words in their mouths! He was far too used to having it all his own way with all of his own characters. Sadly I can't get CG to come and play. He says he just doesn't have time between the day job, writing at night, and having to do all his own PR these days. He says if he came to play he might have too much fun and forget to do the hard stuff!

Who Will I Be Today?

Who will I be today?

Will I be deputy U.S. marshal in Arizona looking to make a fortune speculating in silver while falling in love with the corrupt sheriff's girl?

Will I be a degenerate saloon keeper scheming how to make sure I stay top dog in a gold camp in Black Hills?

Will I be a scholarly professor pulled away from my classroom to head up a top secret security team of a top secret ancient society because I'm really a lycanthrope?

Will I be an Unseelie Prince, immortal and fae, that is determined to become King of all, human and fae, Seelie and Unseelie, Dark and Light, no matter the cost as I wage a war across the planet and in and out of dimensions?

Will I be an aging pop singer, suddenly thrust into a world he doesn't understand, trying to lead a motley band of survivors against a plague that turns people into mindless zombies?

Will I be an embittered and skeptical paranormal researcher and writer who finally finds himself in the most haunted building of his life, and soon will be fighting just for his sanity.*

This is actually a short-list of my characters that I write. I picked just one from each of my collaborative stories. I often throw in a villain to play off against if I'm writing the hero and vice-versa. Playing more than one character in the same story allows me to shift point of view very naturally from post to post and move the story forward in ways that I find more dramatic. Who will I be today? The answer is often all of the above as I move a block of the action into place to surprise and hopefully delight my fellow travelers in fiction.

*I swear this only has a passing similarity to the Stephen King short story 1408 which he published in 1999 which I have not read. The 2007 movie definitely came out well after I started writing my 666 West End Avenue tales of haunting horror with my co-writers.

Open Source Fiction

I use the term 'collaborative' fiction a lot because I'm trying to fix an idea and not wander around in vague terms that would confuse a reader not familiar with the activities of which I speak. My personal favorite used to be 'story play' which was coined by my son, then only twelve, and I thought it brilliant. Sadly it didn't catch on with the writers at Pan Historia and we continued to happily call ourselves role-players even as the world around us moved forward while we wrote our interactive stories with each other. We had evolved, many of us, from role-playing but the reality is that the majority of us just got caught on fire with the concept of writing together with like-minded people on a creative project that could span from a two person narrative to a sprawling novel of Ancient Egypt with the entire Court of the Pharaoh Ramesses or King Hatshepsut being represented right down the naked serving girl.

But just the other night I caught a blog post titled Open Source Art that sparked another term in my mind: open source fiction. Just like doing open source code we take a story and we bat it back and forth between us, each one adding our part, some of us more, some of us less, but even the smallest contribution adding to the whole until it is a unique entity almost independent of us. We get very little critical acclaim, if any, except within our unique community, and yet I believe there are some really good writers writing open source fiction. In fact I know for a fact we have had several published authors play around with the format and enjoy being able to take a traditionally solitary medium and make it social.

Reading deeper into Open Source Art the author discusses the medieval tradition of storytelling, for instance the King Arthur legend, and here I specifically reminded of fan fiction on the internet. There is really little difference between the imagination being fired up by a modern myth like Star Trek or Harry Potter and then, as a group of storytellers, adding your stories to the mix and passing them on. As the author of Open Source Art states what are different are the ideas of sole authorship and ownership.

I really appreciated reading Open Source Art and was glad to be able to rediscover and expound on the ideas as they related to my own favored art form. In many ways I know that I have harbored doubts about my involvement in an online writing community as frivolous or a waste of time over the years - and trust me have heard it from friends and colleagues as dismissive jibes - or as a repudiation of myself as a serious writer, but coming to terms with the very real revelation of collaborative writing as an art form of its own, a form of open source fiction is power and liberating.

Creative Play for Adults

You know once in a while it occurs to me that what I do for fun and a living (not talking the day job) could be seen as a little silly or frivolous - this probably in my moments of existential funk when I ponder the fact that we all seem to be going to hell in a hand basket in my lifetime.

But it only takes a quick consideration on my part to remember that I happen to believe that one should embrace life when one has it and if life is better, for me, because I spend a great deal of in imaginative play-acting then why not? We all of us have our passions - or we all of us should have some passion in life. Mine is not to climb the Himalayas or invent better scuba gear. Don't get me wrong: I would actually love to do all sorts of mad adventurous and important things, but that's the beauty of being a writer and even more the beauty of being a collaborative writer. I get to create a spread of different worlds, different lives, and try them all out. I get to be soldier, sailor, peace officer, badass evil elf, star fight, you name it. I can expand my mind in all sorts of directions trying on each role for size.

Each time I write I try to learn from the time before letting the words and my imagination take me all over time, the globe, and even beyond. Over the years my proficiency as a writer has grown. Only yesterday, for my collaborative online novel The Midnight People, one of my fellow writers paid me the incredible compliment of being touched by a line of description. I have cultivated a hobby that allows me to practice daily the craft of writing, and no longer in the seclusion that is the torment of many writers (though often the bliss of others).

And the interesting thing about this journey, albeit one taken from the safety of my desk chair, is that it has had a profound and significant positive effect on the me that types this - the me that has to head to work in an hour or so and deal with bosses and paperwork and workday challenges. By trying on different 'hats' I have been able, finally, to slip into the me that suits me best, the most comfortable, the easy-going, the "yeah, no problem, I can do it". I even know when to say "no" and not feel guilty.

It's also a beautiful thing to sit down and want to talk about something important like animal rights, or writing, and be able to do so with some ease. Young animals play to learn. Adults can benefit from it too.

Western Writing Sample from Pan Historia

It occurred to me that in an earlier post I gave you a link that has samples of my collaborative fiction writing set in Ancient Egypt but that I haven't shared anything yet of what I do in the Western genre. So without further ado here is a free sample of some writing of mine from Pan Historia. It is from the Tombstone novel and features my trademark Wyatt Earp from the day of the Gunfight at the OK Corral:

I watched the back of the sheriff as he moved off to 'deal' with the cow-boys that had been threatening our lives all morning. I think I heard a snort of derision from Doc, who was, I might add, in particularly fine fettle this afternoon - as if the danger was all he needed to feel in perfect health.

We stepped off the sidewalk as a group when we were accosted by concerned citizen after concerned citizen. First the cow-boys were at the Dexter Corral and then at the O.K. Corral. There were numerous first hand accounts coming at us in all directions of the threats against our lives. I had cause, in the days to come, to remember many of the names and faces and offers of assistance, and not in a pleasant way. Captain Murray, a stockbroker with a military past offered to gather a militia, a man by the name of Sills told us that the cow-boys had said they mean to kill us on sight.

We were not another ten paces down the street after declining help from left and right when a foreigner by the name of John L. Fonck came to see us. Fonck sells furniture in town but apparently had a far more colorful past - as a Chief Detective of the Los Angeles Police Department and an agent of the U.S. Secret Service. He tells us what he has heard of the threats and that he can quickly round up ten men.

"I swear to God, are these boys just going around finding everyone in town to issue this threat to?" exclaimed Virgil in exasperation.

It was getting a little tedious.

"Where are they now?"

"They are all down there on Fremont Street," said Fonck.

"Thank you, sir, but I think we can take care of things - as duly appointed officers of the law. We'll take it from here."

After Fonck made his retreat Virgil turned to me with distress in his face. I knew he didn't want to fight these men, and I knew he'd much rather be studying the racing form, but there really was nothing for it.

"Nothing to do but try and disarm them, and if they want a fight, make a fight."

"About time," said Doc, "I'll go along."

"This is our fight, Doc. There's no call for you to mix in."

"That's a hell of a thing for you to say to me, Wyatt."

I wasn't going to gainsay my friend if he wanted to back our play so I nodded. Virgil didn't argue either, which surprised me a little, but then he requested Doc's silver capped cane and handed Doc the shotgun.

"The sight of this thing could give folks the wrong idea. Put it under your coat, Doc, and now you're a deputy."

Reading this now I'm surprised it is as cohesive as it is. I wrote it under a lot of pressure on the actual anniversary of the gunfight. If I were to rewrite the thing today at my leisure there would be some changes. I worked quite closely with Virgil and Doc Holliday when I composed this piece, and each had done their research on the day so this was one of those occasions when the role play and collaboration went as rapidly as the shots fired that cold day in 1881.

Plotting Between Collaborative Writers

Or the plot goes on and on…

The traditional story will move from beginning to middle and finally to end but in the case of many or most collaborative fiction stories at Pan Historia the idea is never really to end. When it comes to the storyline I prefer to think of my stories more in the light of a serial or ongoing series. There may be story conclusions to individual stories but the characters need new challenges to crop up all the time.

This is where collaborative writing needs more than one head because, frankly, coming up with new plot ideas all the time to keep a train moving indefinitely into the future can be daunting. Some days you just don't have the inspiration and bouncing ideas off the other writing partners can be a great thing.

I tend to assume that most of the readers of my fiction are writers in the same story (though I have found with great pleasure, on occasion, that there are other readers who enjoy the stories) and so I always have a little line drawn in the sand - how much to reveal and how much to conceal so that they will still have the joy of surprise over plot twists. This is a true balancing act for me though I understand different writers resolve this in different ways.

There are two ways to deal with writing discussions - one through private messages between two writers and the other through forum or chat room discussions between groups of writers. My problem with the chat room is that if you need everyone there you might be lacking a window of opportunity while bulletin boards allow for everyone's unique time table. Generally I use the private messages over public discussions because of my desire to give everyone else the thrill of surprise, but eventually you will come to a place where everyone needs to be on board. However writers prefer to deal with plot discussions Pan Historia has the tools for it: forum boards available only to the group (novel as we say in Panspeak); chat room; or instant messaging onsite. With the recent re-enactment of the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" by my Tombstone writing group we used all of the available media. We posted widely on the forums in the weeks leading up to the writing event, then we instant messaged each other to work details between characters, and finally on the day we kept coordinated using the chat room.

Which leads me to an interesting aside: as far as I know most collaborative fiction sites are using models adapted for other kinds of interactive social media and Pan Historia is one of the few built specifically to cater to role-playing collaborative writers. I think once people try the site and get past the first "oh shit I don't know where to find anything or what does this button do" feelings they should find themselves in a complete environment catering almost exclusively to their interests.

Another important thing to remember when discussing plot with your fellow writers is to remember to listen and to be flexible. You might have something in mind and it becomes your 'darling' and you want to control that plot, but don't. You'll end up writing alone - which is fine if you're a novelist but kind of dull on in a collaborative situation. Also, and this has happened to me frequently, if you let someone else's ideas help to shape yours you might just find that the resulting story is even better than the one you originally imagined.