Tagged: road trip

Worth the Wait

We love to travel. We love to see what life is like in other parts of the world, and visit amazing sights. We had an epic trip to Eastern Europe planned for March of 2020, which didn’t happen for obvious reasons. At first we postponed it a year, thinking “Eh, the pandemic will surely be over by then.” Ahem. So then we postponed it again.

One of the stops on our itinerary was Romania, which is right next door to Ukraine, so things were looking iffy again for a while, but by fall 2022 we were comfortable enough — and vaccinated and boosted — to go. And we are so glad we did.

We met some amazing people, ate some delicious new foods, drank some intriguing new beverages, and managed to squeeze in some research at the same time.

First stop: Romania. Our Bucharest hotel was next door to the Romanian parliament, aka “The Heaviest Building in the World.” Who knew they kept track of such things? We took a side trip to Transylvania to explore some castles and the breathtaking Carpathian Mountains. Kent drank a Dracula beer in the village below Castle Bran. It was red, but contained no actual blood. Bummer. We also visited Snagov Monastery which is both the burial place of Vlad the Impaler and an ostrich sanctuary. One stop shopping for all your touristic needs!

Disappointingly, the Bank of Transylvania is not a blood bank.

We’ll continue our travelog next week. See you then!

A Tale of Two Roadtrips

Back in April we took a little roadtrip. And as we usually do, we spent the time on the road brainstorming. We came up with a doozy of a character moment for someone’s backstory. It’s really quite a shocking thing. So shocking that at first we weren’t sure we wanted to commit to it. Once it was shakily noted down, we set it aside. (The writing was shaky because we were in a moving car, not because the idea itself was that outré.) We walked around the city a bit, attended a phenomenal concert, and the next morning we found a place with fantastic crepes. In short, we pretended we weren’t writers.

We picked the idea up again on the drive home and found that, yep, that terrible thing is indeed what happened in this person’s past. By not talking about it for a while we were each able to get used to it on our own, and all on its own it became the obvious answer.

More recently we took a day trip, and we barely talked about our work at all. Part of that was because the weather was wretched and Kent needed to really concentrate on not driving us into a ditch. But mostly it was just time for us to have some adventures unrelated to the current project. Sometimes a writer needs to soak up new experiences to give the ol’ creativity engine something to work with. (And maybe there was a touch of still being a bit stunned from the last big idea.)

A good writing partner is someone who is ready for novel adventures when you are. And also someone who shares a taste in funky lamps for the auxiliary writing cave.

We Can Be Taught

The purpose of our recent trip to New York wasn’t to spend a lovely afternoon with our agent — that was an immensely enjoyable bonus. The true purpose of our visit was to scope out locales that figure in some of what we’re writing. What we’re currently writing, no less. Yes, we can learn — this time we didn’t wait until the draft was all the way done before heading out to do recon. This time we’re in the middle. Perhaps someday in the future we’ll be organized enough to conduct our location scouting before we start writing at all.

The need for this research took us by surprise. We’ve been to New York before — more than once! — plus, there are a million pictures online to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We thought we were all good, but once we set fingers to keyboards we discovered more and more details that were a little too fuzzy for comfort. Details that our google-fu was inadequate to turn up.

The specifics of where we went and why are on a need-to-know basis, but we’ll share a tidbit that’s not too spoilery: verifying certain facts entailed renting a rowboat in Central Park. In the process, we verified that working a set of oars brings out the creative side of many New Yorkers.

We really do hope to be able to stay put for a while now, and focus on the actual writing. A writing partner is someone to enjoy a romantic getaway with under the guise of research.

Roadtrip Season

It’s roadtrip season, and faithful readers know what that means: brainstorming! Hours spent traveling hither and yon cut into our writing time, but we don’t let that kill our productivity. We find that extended car trips make a great time to have in-depth discussions about our works-in-progress.

Our current WIP (Sibling of Music Novel) is puttering along smoothly, and while we do need the occasional chat about the details of a scene, there’s nothing knotty enough to fill a couple of hours of straight discussion. That’s a great place to be as a writer. Or as a pair of writers.

So when we need a topic that can fill a few hours, we switch gears to a project that’s in an earlier state of development. And right now, that means the Ghost Story. It’s still fairly embryonic, with many of the kinds of Big Decisions left to be made that are ideally suited to lengthy conversations.

We recently dug out Ghost Story’s dedicated Steno o’ Notes and read through it, and we reviewed the folders of inspiration images we’ve been collecting. With our pumps primed, discussion came easily. Our conversations have already been quite fruitful, and roadtrip season isn’t over yet. We expect to make some real progress on this whole new story world so that it will be waiting for us to dive in once the Music Series is complete.

A writing partner is someone to help you tell ghost stories around the steering wheel.

Successfully Defining Success

Saying you’re a self-published author is just another way of saying you’re both an author and a publisher. If you’re like us, you don’t find those two occupations equally rewarding.

So, as a self-published author, how do you define success?

As we mentioned, we just got back from the Book Baby conference in Philly. There was a lot of good stuff there, starting with the opening keynote from Daniel Lerner on the topic of, yup, defining success. Daniel’s talk was excellent — energizing, moving, and thought-provoking. If you get the chance, definitely check him out.

On the drive home, we dug down into how Rune Skelley defines success. It was an exercise we hadn’t gone through previously, to articulate our aspirations. We had a strong sense that we wanted mainly the same things, but this was laying it out raw in a moving vehicle. It could have gotten tense. But what we confirmed is that we do agree on the definition of success.

For us, the quality of the writing is paramount. We measure quality by our own standards, and we strive to set that bar high. And, we believe that quality writing will find an audience. (This belief seems to verge on mystical, but we’re trying to become more realistic.) We have no desire to chase trends in search of a hit, we’re certainly not going to change how we write in hopes of broader appeal, but we do want to help our work find its audience. We have to figure out how to be as good at being a publisher as we are at being an author.

Watch this space for more reflections on the conference. To hear from us occasionally about our upcoming novels, subscribe to our newsletter.

This Little Author Went to Market

There’s this amazing new method for helping the public learn about your product. It’s called “Marketing.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

We’ve talked a little before about how much we don’t like marketing, and how we therefore don’t really do much of it. But here’s the thing. If you want to sell books, it helps if people know they exist. And we want people to buy our books! We really enjoy writing them, and think that a lot of folks will enjoy the hell out of reading them. We know they’re not for everyone, but that’s what makes them perfect for an elite few (including you!).

In order to learn about this new “marketing” thing all the cool kids are into, we attended this year’s Independent Authors Conference. Careful readers of this blog will recall that we attended last year, too, but the difference is that this year we’ve actually made a plan to implement what we learned. Gasp!

(We have a great excuse for why last year was a bit of a bust. We returned from a big trip to the Adriatic four days before the conference started, and our heads were still mostly in Croatia.)

So we spent this past weekend in Philadelphia, attending sessions, meeting other authors and industry pros, eating a seven course Moroccan meal without silverware (so. delicious.), and watching a goofy video of Kaiju Ben Franklin battling a giant cheesesteak.

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Mystery Science Road Trip 3000

A little while ago Kent had a birthday, and Jen gave him the best present ever: VIP tickets to a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live show. The date of the show finally rolled around, so we jumped in the Skelleymobile and headed off on a road trip.

Faithful blog readers will know that we like to use car trips as brainstorming time. Our open projects are dwindling in number as we complete novels and launch them into the world. In fact, out of our first three trilogies, we currently have only one book that’s unwritten, and it’s most of the way outlined already. The part of it that’s not nailed down yet involves a lot of moving parts that all need to mesh together just so, and “in a moving car while Kent pays attention to traffic” didn’t seem like the best environment for tackling it. Enter: the Ghost Novels!

Before this trip we had a few wisps of ideas for the way we want the supernatural to work in our newest story world. Now, after a couple of hours of discussion, we have a much clearer picture of the way our ghosts will work, and even the ghost of a plot (see what we did there?). At this point it’s more like two or three plotlings, some of which might work together and some of which contradict each other. A lot more conversation will be needed before we’re ready to start writing. But it felt good to explore a whole new universe, especially this one at Halloween time. We’re surrounded by spooky stories and it’s exciting to start to work on our own.

You know what else is exciting? Getting to have a conversation with Joel Hodgson (who is very nice! — he told Kent he asked a great question!), having our pictures taken on the Satellite of Love with Joel, Jonah, the Bots, and Pearl Forrester’s clone Synthia, and then watching a live riffing of a truly terrible movie.

Most exciting of all? Having a writing partner who shares your sense of humor.

Hit the Road, Jack

There’s a lot of music in our lives. We listen to it when we’re writing, editing, and plotting. Our sons are both omnivorous musicians, which means we’ve spent more than our fair share of time attending drum, guitar, bass, and piano lessons, marching band parades and football games, piano recitals, jazz band, concert band, symphonic band, and orchestra concerts, and battle of the bands. One son was in a metal band that had gigs at a local bar before he was 21, the other plays highly esoteric and experimental stuff, in addition to straight-up classical and jazz.

For as much as we like music, though, there unfortunately aren’t many local shows that interest us, which means that when there’s a band we want to see, we have to hit the road.

That’s just what we did earlier this week. We like to use the time in the car to brainstorm ideas, and this time we worked on fleshing out Sibling of Music Novel. It felt fitting to talk about music on the way to the concert, and on the way home we were flush with energy and insight. The drive was about six hours each way, so we had plenty of time to dig in on some details of world building and theme. Since this one is a sequel, you’d expect a lot of the world building to be done already, but we’re adding a new wrinkle which requires us to start from scratch for one of the settings. We’re talking “are the laws of physics the same here?” level stuff. There’s a lot to talk about.

Kent did all the driving, while Jen navigated, which is how we like to run things. It also means that it was up to Jen to take notes on our conversation. She used the voice recognition dealy on her phone, to quite amusing results. Our main character has a non-standard name, and in the notes it ended up being spelled at least four different ways. When we got to our hotel we had a good laugh over all the other kre8ive word choices as we transcribed the notes and expanded them.

We’ve been pretty deep into editing Elsewhere’s Twin, while also doing some writing on Grandson of Science Novel. It had been a long time since we devoted a lot of brainpower to plotting out a new story, and it felt really good. We came up with a lot of really fun stuff. Well, we think it’s fun. Our characters definitely won’t.

But back to the important thing, our concert experience: the venue was small and stuffy, there was unexpected moshing and crowd-surfing, the opening act was pretty good, and the headliners — Royal Blood — were phenomenal. We were only about 10 feet from the stage. We both got caught up totally in the music, which is just how it should be, and which is a feeling we want to be able to capture in our Music novels. The sweat, the flailing limbs, the thump and roar, the smell of the smoke machine, all of it will hopefully make it onto the page.

The evening was topped off with the surreal discovery that the building across the street from our hotel burned down while we were at the show. That unsettling feeling might make it into the novel, too, but mostly we want to just relive the excitement of a really good rock show.

It Counts as Research

It’s been a while since we talked about the music we listen to when we’re writing, but it’s still an important part of our process. Especially this time of year when all of our neighbors renew their passionate love affairs with their lawn mowers. It’s been an especially noisy spring around the writing cave. A few weeks ago we rode out a pretty severe storm, and ever since we’ve been treated to practically daily concerts by the chainsaw chorus. And as I write this post, the people across the street have a cement mixer beeping and chugging away in their driveway. They’re in the midst of a never-ending construction project of some sort, and I can’t imagine what they need the cement for, since yesterday it was all nail-guns all day, putting up siding.

Both Jen and Kent skew pretty hard toward the Introverted/Antisocial end of the spectrum. In order to keep our sanity we need a buffer from the leaf blowers and hedge trimmers, the shrieking kids and teens on skateboards, the yodeling beagle and that weird guy who walks the streets in the dark, singing.

No, I’m not tense. Why do you ask?

Music is our respite, and lately it’s also been research. We’re in the early stages of plotting out our third Music Novel and it’s really helpful for us to swim around in songs that we love in order to get in the right headspace.

Last weekend we went to an out-of-town concert. We used the drive time to hash out some character details and brainstorm some plot points. Once we got there, we put that part of our brains in neutral and simply had a helluva good time. Of course, being writers, we were observing everything, soaking in the atmosphere along with the secondhand pot smoke. The ride home was filled with talk of fun details to work into the two extant Music Novels.

Now that we’re trapped in the writing cave again, we’ve taken to choosing songs from our collections that we feel exemplify the sound of the various bands in our novels. Interspersed with that are stretches where we listen to nothing but the Red Army Choir. Son and Grandson of Science Novel feature Russian characters and settings, so it really helps to set the mood.

Sometimes instrumental music is called for, especially during editing sessions. At those times we gravitate toward classical guitar or piano

What do you like to listen to when you’re writing? Let us know in the comments.

“Poor Harold?”

  • by KentHe may not kill you
  • But unlike Kim Kardashian
  • refused to give up to him a tender young rodent she had captured
  • a magic thingamajig
  • make up for it by bribery

Tune in next time part 75                             Click Here for Earlier Installments

“Poor Harold?” the vinegar woman hooted. Her rosy face and rolling gait spoke of many pints, most of them not vinegar.

After almost a minute of wheezing, hacking laughter, she finally drew herself upright and caught her breath. “Oh, he’s poor alright. He’s a poor Harold, he’s a poor driver, he’s got poor hygiene, and oh yes, he’s got no money. Get it, he’s POOR!” The exclamation’s attendant blast of her awful breath made me wish the wind would shift and engulf me in the smoke from the cooking fire. That only smelled like someone was cleaning out a coffee pot with a goat.

“You run off and tell the ‘thorridies whatsoever you choose,” the vinegar woman resumed. “Harold’s fine. I expect him back in a tick. He may not kill you on sight, but he’s going to be in a mood I can promise you that. Doesn’t care for being set on fire, although I tell him and tell him how it helps with the fleas.”

I glanced around in case Harold was sneaking back to the campsite. In that moment, Svetlana vanished. I heard the van’s motor start. Vinegar woman’s jaw swung slack as she spun to see what was happening, and I sprinted to join Svetlana in the van.

We were a mile up the bumpy road before we realized we were not alone. A sleepy female voice from the back of the van inquired about dinner.

I looked at our fellow traveler. A young woman with olive skin and long dark hair, her makeup overdone and her eyes empty. She reminded me of someone from television. But unlike Kim Kardashian, this woman was chained up in the back of a seedy van. I asked her who she was. While Svetlana’s driving tested the structural integrity of the stolen vehicle, I listened to the other woman’s tale. She never told me her name, only that she was being punished (by Harold, I wondered?) because she refused to give up to him a tender young rodent she had captured. Now she was cursed to wear a magic thingamajig. She had tried to tell him she was sorry about not sharing, tried to make up for it by bribery. But he wouldn’t lift the curse. He didn’t even want the rodent anymore.

“Here,” she concluded, “do you want it?” She held out her hand, on which rested a snake’s head. The rest of the snake formed a spiral around her arm. The reptilian tongue flicked.

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