{"id":1073,"date":"2018-10-23T20:39:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T03:39:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2018-10-23T20:39:28","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T03:39:28","slug":"my-novel-spin-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=1073","title":{"rendered":"My Novel: Spin City"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Good evening! Tonight it&#8217;s time for part two of my three part series in which I talk about the most important stories I&#8217;ve written so far.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll be going over\u00a0<em>Spin<\/em> City in this part<em>,<\/em> sticking close to the same format I used last night.\u00a0 I&#8217;m hoping I provide some valuable insight into my creative process.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t want to just gush over my own work, but I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;ll be a little bit of that, too.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a list of the things I&#8217;ll talk about regarding\u00a0<em>Spin City<\/em>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What It&#8217;s About<\/li>\n<li>The Inspiration<\/li>\n<li>The Writing Process<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Before I get going, I want to say something quick about titles.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not attached to any of them.\u00a0\u00a0<em>The Repossessed Ghost<\/em> and\u00a0<em>Spin City<\/em> are both temporary names as far as I&#8217;m concerned.\u00a0 When going the traditional publication route, it&#8217;s important to not grow too attached to things that are best left to the marketing department.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>What It&#8217;s About<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><em>Spin City<\/em> is about a down-on-his-luck private investigator named Arthur that\u00a0works and lives in a spinning city on The Moon.\u00a0 The case starts off simple enough.\u00a0 He&#8217;s hired to take pictures for a man wanting to know if his wife is having an affair.\u00a0 It turns into a murder investigation when that same client turns up dead in his own apartment.\u00a0 As Arthur and his partner are drawn deeper into the inner workings of the city, from robot dog fights to glamorous night clubs, Arthur realizes that he must get to the bottom of the case before the place he calls home is taken over by a psychotic criminal.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>What is it REALLY About<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>This is a more serious story about a desperate man struggling with alcoholism.\u00a0 While the character of a drunk private eye is kind of a cliche, this story deals with alcoholism in a much more realistic way.\u00a0 The question of why Arthur drinks is important as well as how his drinking impacts his business and his relationships.<\/p>\n<p>Within the story are themes pertaining to immigration and personal responsibility.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure what more I can say about this story in regards to theme without giving away some spoilers.\u00a0 I will say that while I like Arthur in this story very much, a side character named Victoria is probably my favorite.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Inspiration<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;ve already talked a little bit about the inspiration for this story earlier this month.\u00a0 The very first time I wrote about the character named Arthur Kane, I&#8217;d just come home from visiting my friend Douglas.\u00a0 He&#8217;d written a story about a detective and I decided to try writing a similar story of my own.<\/p>\n<p>After my Dad died, I sat down and started a novel length story which I called The Arthur Kane stories.\u00a0<em> Spin City<\/em> is the grown up re-imagining of that novel.\u00a0 As you might imagine, it&#8217;s very different from the original work.\u00a0 While the names remained the same, the characters grew deeper and more realistic.\u00a0 The plot is radically different though I kept a couple of significant events.\u00a0 I tried to keep the good ideas from the original story and lift them up with stronger writing and a more intentional noir feel.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Writing Process<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>When I wrote\u00a0<em>The Repossessed Ghost<\/em>, I went up to the edge of the unknown and jotted down what I could glimpse just ahead.\u00a0 Most of that story involved discovery writing and I didn&#8217;t have a clue how it was going to end until I got about halfway through the first draft.\u00a0 Since I rewrote that ending in the 3rd draft, you could say I didn&#8217;t know how that story would until a few years after I started.<\/p>\n<p>With\u00a0<em>Spin City<\/em>, I couldn&#8217;t leave things up to chance.\u00a0 I wanted to create a complicated mystery with crime elements.\u00a0 To do that and have it make sense, I needed to work backwards.\u00a0 First I figured out who the antagonists were.\u00a0 I determined their motivations and their available resources, which told me what kind of crimes they could try to get away with.\u00a0 Then I worked backwards chronologically.\u00a0 For person X to accomplish crime Y, they needed to get the aid of Person Z.\u00a0 That sort of thing.<\/p>\n<p>Once I worked back far enough, I had a fairly comprehensive map of everything the bad guys accomplished.\u00a0 That gave me ideas for how Arthur could find clues and be a disruption in some of the antagonist&#8217;s plans.\u00a0 At that point, I started doing some loose outlining from the beginning and going forward.<\/p>\n<p>This sounds way fancier and more complicated than it really is.\u00a0 While I created an outline that went from the beginning to the end, it was not a very complete outline.\u00a0 I left plenty unplanned.\u00a0 Also, the exact details of the end were a little bit fuzzy.\u00a0 I left plenty for me to discover along the way.<\/p>\n<p>Like with\u00a0<em>The Repossessed Ghost<\/em>, a couple of characters I expected to have much smaller parts wound up gaining more prominence in the story after I realized how much I liked writing them.\u00a0 I knew that Arthur and his partner were going to need to bring in a specialist.\u00a0 I assumed it was going to be a hacker named Victor.\u00a0 She turned out to be a wet-wired net-head named Victoria, and I think she may be one of the best characters I&#8217;ve ever written.<\/p>\n<p>The overall process still involved a lot of discovery writing even though I stuck with the outlined structure.\u00a0 I wound up changing the outline in minor ways a few times when I realized that what I&#8217;d planned wasn&#8217;t as cool as some ideas I had along the way.\u00a0 I made adjustments to the outline, rechecked the reverse chronological map to make sure everything still made sense, then kept going.<\/p>\n<p>I wound up changing the ending quite a bit just before I got there.\u00a0 Without going into spoilers, I thought I was going to end with a bigger action sequence.\u00a0 While there is still quite a bit of action, the whole story is much more psychological than physical, so the ending shifted to follow suit.\u00a0 I&#8217;m currently very satisfied with the ending.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Where is it Now?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;ve submitted two queries.\u00a0 One was a request for full that came out of the New York Writer&#8217;s Digest Pitchslam.\u00a0 The other was to a prominent agent I&#8217;ve met several times at WorldCon.\u00a0 The agent turned down the query without seeing the manuscript.\u00a0 I haven&#8217;t heard from the one via Pitchslam yet.\u00a0 It&#8217;ll be another month before I ping them.<\/p>\n<p>I quit my writer&#8217;s group before submitting\u00a0<em>Spin City<\/em> to them.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t have a lot of people I can send it to that will provide a critique.\u00a0 Most of my friends on Twitter are busy reading other things.\u00a0 I finished this thing that I think I should be proud of, but I need fresh eyes and reader reactions to see where I can improve it.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Gallowglas heard me lamenting my lack of critique partners and he volunteered to read it.\u00a0 This is a big deal because he&#8217;s developed a significant critical eye on his quest to acquire is MFA.\u00a0 Also, neither of us have critiqued each other before.\u00a0 It&#8217;s kind of scary, but I trust our friendship to be able to handle this however it goes.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure Michael will tell me some stuff I don&#8217;t want to hear.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll tense up for a moment, take a few moments to process, then try to see what he sees.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;ll be fine.<\/p>\n<p>And just so you don&#8217;t get the wrong idea, it&#8217;s not exactly a first draft.\u00a0 I did a lightning fast edit of the entire thing, reading it out loud to Melissa in order to find the most egregious errors.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t like to share first draft stories with people anymore.\u00a0 The current state of <em>Spin City<\/em> is that it is more than a first draft, not quite a second.\u00a0 It&#8217;s also the rework of something I previously wrote.\u00a0 I&#8217;m note sure how that affects the draft version math.<\/p>\n<p>When Michael agreed to read it, he talked about printing it.\u00a0 I printed it for him.\u00a0 The damn this is 100,000 words and the chapters are short.\u00a0 I knew it was going to take a lot of paper.\u00a0 When I printed it for him, I had a copy printed for Melissa.\u00a0 To give a literal answer to the question of where it is,\u00a0<em>Spin City<\/em> is in two places.\u00a0 One copy is with Michael, and one is buried under some of Melissa&#8217;s clothes in our room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good evening! Tonight it&#8217;s time for part two of my three part series in which I talk about the most important stories I&#8217;ve written so far.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll be going over\u00a0Spin City in this part, sticking close to the same format I used last night.\u00a0 I&#8217;m hoping I provide some valuable insight into my creative process.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}