Author: jongraylang

Novel Writer, Screenwriter, Filmmaker & occasionally an Actor. Handy with a Sword, Ukulele, and Skis. Author of Nun With a Gun: The Town with No Name, The Matilda, Twistin' Matilda, Black Matilda, and Secret Matilda. Writer of the upcoming Sci-Fi sequel, Waltzing Matilda.

Writing My Second Novel, Twistin’ Matilda Pt. 1

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So I was left with the question, should I do this whole thing again?  I mean I was asked to, but should I?

I learned quite a bit writing my first one.  I had made revisions to it and brought my vocabulary back to a much more useful level.  Why not do it again.  The second time should be easier.  Besides that, I had fun right?

So I hunkered down with my ‘bible’ and added all the new stuff from the first book, The Matilda.  I wrote all the points I wanted to hit and I left it loosey goosey.  I wasn’t going to struggle with an outline this time.  I waited until I had everything as ready as I thought it could be.

I grabbed my keyboard, flipped the screen on started to write.  The first few days were a struggle.  By the middle of the second week, I wasn’t sure where the story was going and it was frustrating.  But I knew I could it this time, no matter what.

Then my invisible muse came to me and the rest of the second book wrote itself.  I almost couldn’t keep up with the words as they flowed from my fingers to the screen.  I had my first draft done in about twenty days.

That’s one of hell of an improvement from the first one.  It was crazy.  It was exhilarating.  All in all, it was a blast.

That was the most fun I have ever had writing.  I couldn’t wait to work on a third one now.  Of course, I still had to revise that first draft.

Scents of Adventure

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Harry could feel it in his bones.

Today was ripe with the possibilities of adventure.  The sun was shining, the world smelled warm and life was all around… squirrel!  Harry yanked on the collar about his neck and watched forlornly as the little beast took off to the higher branches.

“So close!  So close I could taste it!’

But what was that fragrance in the air?  Where was all that noise coming from?  “Aha!”

There were humans on the weird stone path that wasn’t stone.  And with them was a canine he didn’t know!  His tail wagged hard.  He strained at the leash until he was able to sniff the air around them.  The humans came to a stop.  They made their strange grunting’s and whining’s to each other as they are wont to do.

“Hi, I’m Harry!  You smell like adventure!”

“Hi, I’m Lucille! And you smell like adventure too!”

The aroma of Lucille’s humans spoke of other places… other worlds that he couldn’t even imagine.  Everything about them was mystery.  And where there was mystery there was a tale to tell.

Harry barked, “I saw a squirrel!  Almost got him too.”

“I almost caught a bird!” Lucille howled.  “There were so many birds!”

Suddenly, there was a rustling in the leaves and a small brown creature shot up a tree trunk.  Both Harry and Lucille stopped talking and growled together, “Chipmunk!”  Their eyes tracked the small animal as it stared back at them from a safe distance.

“I am so excited right now!  I can barely contain myself!” yipped Lucille.

“Me too!  Oh my goodness!”

Harry felt a tug on his leash.  The humans grunting’s carried the tone that meant the end of things.  As the two groups separated, Harry yelped back, “Maybe we can talk of our adventures again sometime!”

“Yes!  We should do that!”

But Harry knew that a new adventure was waiting right around that corner and he shot off toward it.  His human was heavy but with the right pull, he had him going.  Oh yes, adventure was right ahead and he could smell it.

(image courtesy of Ryan McGuire of http://www.gratisography.com/)

The Story of the Matilda

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So, besides being a science fiction tale, what is The Matilda about?

Well, to put it in a nutshell, the book follows the crew of the Matilda as they fight their way through shadowy government agencies, crime lords, their pasts, and monstrosities from an unknown layer of the universe.

It all takes place in this section of controlled space known as The Consortium.  This section of space is made up of multiple worlds and systems that are interconnected by wormhole gates, which are in turn, controlled by the bureaucracy known as The Consortium.  The systems themselves are left to their own devices but interplanetary trade is controlled by the military.

We follow a group of survivors who live on the fringes of society.  Unfortunately, the fringes are controlled by criminal elements.  Trapped between these two forces, the crew works their way toward another meal, sometimes legally other times not so much.

But someone is after them.  But who are they really after and why?  What could one of the crew know that could be potentially dangerous for the powers that be?

It’s moments like this when it’s good to have an ace up your sleeve.  Even if that ace can bypass the entire wormhole gate system by going where no one should or no one would want to go.

The plan is for everyone to join Jacquotte Delahaye and her crew of misfits in the first book of the series, The Matilda.

And remember how I wondered if I wanted to do this again?  Well, the journey will continue in the follow-up sequel, Twistin’ Matilda!

Time Jumping

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Time jumps are a pain.

It’s amazing how the shifting of one hour can completely screw up just about everything.  There I was moving along pretty well with all of my thoughts in place.  I was hitting all my deadlines, my personal calendar goals and all that fun stuff.

One governmentally required time shift later and I am still a recovering zombie.  I miss three deadlines of my own personal making, fall behind a couple weeks on my editing and end up jumping a story because I can’t remember what I wrote last.

Oy to the vey.

I may have to pull back for a while to get back on track.

Tea & Time

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“Is it tea time?” she asked.

The edge of his newspaper dropped, “No.  It is not tea time yet.”

He lifted the corner of the newspaper back up and continued reading.  With the edge of her bath robe trailing behind her, she paced back and forth across the room.  Slowly, she came to a stop in front of him.  Her toe began to tap.  As the tapping grew more insistent, he hunkered down behind his paper.

The staccato beat of the tapping came to a stop and silence filled the room.  With a slow and calculated motion, he peeled the corner of his paper back and took a quick peek.  She stood there with her arms crossed and the glare of all glares burned back at him.  He let the corner come back up but the paper was torn from his fingers.

It was then that she noticed the cup sitting next to him.  Shock registered on her face as the steam wafted slowly from the tiny porcelain vessel.

“What is that in your cup?”

“It’s coffee.  Let me explain…” he muttered haltingly.

“Explain?  Explain?” she cried.  “You have broken the main tenement of the morning drink!  Do you know the damage you could have done?”

“Damage?”

She grabbed the cup and held it close to her chest.  With a quick sip, she drained it.  As her eyes widened until the iris was completely surrounded in white, she sucked in a whistling breath.

The words she spoke ground out past her teeth, “There is a process in place for the drinking of morning beverages.  You start with tea, always with tea.  You don’t jump in willy nilly with coffee!”

The room darkened and her pupils dilated.  An odd light effused around her as the room grew smaller.  Her voice boomed loudly, “Tea is the beginning, the first of the firsts and it lays the groundwork.  Time will begin to accelerate and your control will be in place.  Once the groundwork is laid, you can follow with the bean of the coffee plant.  Time will become malleable to your touch and you will be pleased.  Only now can you drink of the yerba mate and feel like a God!”  Strange laughter exploded from her.

The man cringed in his chair and closed his eyes tightly.  The room grew silent and he felt warmth on his eyelids.  He could hear a bird lilting in a tree through the window. He carefully pried one eye open and then the other.  Everything was as it had been and she had a beatific smile painted across her lips.

He muttered into the lovely morning of this fine day, “Well, uh… I had no idea.  My apologies.”

She dropped the neatly folded newspaper into his lap.  As she turned away to leave the room, she stated, “Don’t go messing with the timelines, my good man.  There are consequences!”

Rewriting My First Novel, the Matilda Pt. 2

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You know that feeling you get when you hand over a piece of your art and hope people like it, but you expect them to tell you the exact opposite?  It makes reviews much easier to deal with.  Also knowing what my cup of tea is might not be someone else’s makes listening to what other have to say much easier.

On top of that, since I had a more of a script writing background, I’d done edits on the fly (aka, rewritten dialogue so it wasn’t a tongue twister for the actors or just dropped entire sections of well-crafted dialogue to make everything flow better).  I was willing to make changes or start from scratch if it seemed necessary.

I had chosen people close to me as well others who I knew and respected their reviews.  I also tried to choose people who weren’t necessarily into the genre that this story fits into.  As an added bonus, I also got reviews from people that I didn’t know.

So it was with quite a bit of surprise that I got mostly favorable responses.

I listened to what they each had to tell me and made revisions where I saw fit.  I gave it out to other people and let them have a go at it and I made a few more.  Every single person involved in this step helped me become a better writer.  It made me wonder if I should try this whole thing again.

Funnily enough, the biggest response I got was, “When can I read the next one?”

It’s a Trap

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It was a beautiful night.  The young couple held hands as they walked around the pristine lake near their camp.

She pulled her hand free and pointed at the glowing ball in the sky.  In the most theatrical tone she could muster, she cried, “That’s no moon!  That’s a space station!”

His shoulders tightened as he kept walking but his face screwed up in anger, “Oh my God!  Will you stop already?”

Her grin dropped, “Stop what?”

Abruptly, he stopped and turned toward her, “You have been making Star Wars references all day today.”

He began to count out each instance on his fingers, “When we left on this trip morning, you said, “Adventure? Hmmpf!  Excitement?   A Jedi craves not these things.”  When I was trying to give you directions to this campground, you came back with “Travelling through hyperspace aint like dusting crops, boy.”

In frustration, his hands fell to his side, “Never mind when we arrived here, you went all “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Even when I told you I loved you, you replied “I know.”

“It’s not my fault.” She said with smirk.

His teeth ground into each other, “You’re doing it again!”

She sighed loudly, “No reward is worth this.”

“Stop!  Stop it!  I can’t take it anymore.”

Maybe she had gone too far but she couldn’t resist the urge, “Well, you said you wanted to be around when I made a mistake.”

He just glared at her.

Suddenly, the sky lit up with a green haze that only grew brighter.  He glanced up and noticed that it seemed to come from the moon.  “I have a bad feeling about this.”

With a sense of triumph she shouted, “The circle is now complete!”

Daylight Savings Time Grievance

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I wake suddenly from a dream and I am lost.  Blearily, I watch a vortex form above me.  What is this place?

A beast screams its strident tone repeatedly.  Its red eyes glare at me.  I smack at the monster until it quiets but its disgruntled presence fills the room.

My body tells me that I am bound.  Am I sandwiched between the petals of a flower?  Or is this luncheon meat that surrounds me?

I realize that these are the sheets that I sleep within.  The vortex is the ceiling fan as it does its lazy dance.  The beast is the clock by my side.  Its angry red eyes the numbers that equal time.

Darkness reigns supreme. Why do you still exist Daylight Savings Time?

Rewriting My First Novel, the Matilda Pt. 1

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Aah, the joys of rewriting my story.  Can I count the ways?  Should I count the ways?  Or how many times I had to count the ways?

I actually enjoyed the rewriting / editing phase(s).  This is when I had the chance to make my first novel something worth reading.  My first draft was awful… to me anyway.  I’m sure others would have found it awful too but I’m not a sadist.

So I’ve given the story a read through.  What happens next?

For me, the first round is simply cleaning up the tense, spelling and grammar. I also tried to get rid of duplications (be they words, names and so forth).  The next round was fixing the story so it outshone the plot.  This included moving chapters or paragraphs around in the story or cutting them out entirely.  Finally, the third round was fleshing out the bits that needed it and getting rid of the repeating parts that weren’t necessary.

So the benefits were pretty cool right off the bat.  My story got better as I plowed through it.  Each time was a little (or a lot in some spots) better than the last.  Sometimes I’d read parts out loud to work on the flow as well.

After these three revisions, I was pretty happy with what I had created. In fact, I was so pleased with it, I decided to let other people give it a go over and tell me where I went horribly wrong.