Slightly Off the Mark

Update: I'm up to 42,000 words in my new rough draft!

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My fire photo book project has been handed over to Emily, who's working on getting all the photos ready and put in their proper place--a job I wouldn't wish on anybody. I mean, she has to go by my notes.

So that leaves me without much to do until she finishes her part, just in time for NaNoWriMo. That's National Novel Writing Month, November, in which authors are challenged to pound out 50,000 words on a novel (or some kind of writing) in just one month. I've won NaNoWriMo twice, coming out with the rough drafts for Summer Jobs are Murder and Fire On Mist Creek. (Both are finished but unpublished at the moment, but that's another story.)

I'm doing something different this year, but also something I've been wanting to do since I was a kid. I'm writing a novel set in a universe created by somebody else, specifically by Lyman Frank Baum, who can't complain because he passed away a hundred years ago.

It could be called fanfiction, which is a generalized term for fiction written using someone else's world and/or characters. That's popular but technically illegal, unless the work has passed into the public domain. In this case it has, which is why you've seen properties such as Wicked and Oz: The Great and Powerful.

By now you've figured out my novel is going to be based on the Oz books, by L. Frank Baum (not the MGM movie, which varies in critical ways from the book--don't get me started on "it was all a dream".)

"Pay no attention to that author behind the curtain!"

This is something I've been wanting to do since I was a little kid, reading Baum's 14 Oz books over and over. For the last several years a more specific idea has been germinating, and now I'm going to take the time to finally do it, before it drives me crazy.

There's more than one way to approach doing an Oz adaptation, though:

You can stick slavishly with the original version, making it completely faithful. This can be very difficult, because Baum was writing kid's books, and the later ones reluctantly. He sometimes didn't concern himself all that much over continuity. If you try to stick to the details of all the canon Oz books--forty or so, by different authors--you'll make yourself insane.

Second, you can throw all that away and have something only loosely based on the original, such as the novel Wicked, or the TV show Emerald City. Baum, who was after all writing for children, wouldn't have recognized some of them.

Then there's whether you're going to write a children's book or one for adults. Probably the most difficult thing you could do is to follow the original books, yet make your own work be for older readers.

So that's what I'm doing.

You may be cool, but you'll never be "Ozma of Oz on a chariot being drawn by a lion and a tiger" cool.

Naturally I'm not going to give you a lot of details, considering I have not only the rough draft, but weeks of revision and polishing to do before it's even ready to send to publishers (if we don't self-publish). My outline is done, but my outlines tend to change along the way.

What I will say is that the story will be meant for adults and young adults, with the conceit that Baum's Oz books were retellings of events that actually happened: But that the "Royal Historian of Oz", L. Frank Baum, was after all a storyteller first and foremost. In other words, he himself changed details to suit his stories, and to make them more suitable for children.

That explains such things as people dying in the first book, but later books staging that no one in Oz can die, just as an example. Otherwise I'm going for humor, action, magic, and a fun storyline. There will also be a few deeper questions, such as what kind of a personality a ten year old girl will have after living well over a century--and still being ten years old.

So, what do you think? Can I do this? And how badly could I screw it up?

This was lost in my blog drafts--it was actually written several months ago, then forgotten! It's interesting to me, because in it I speculate on a novel project I'd just started on--but in the real timeline, I just finished the first draft.

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Recently I had some free time and wasn't in a position to go through photos (and didn't feel like doing promotion work), so I jumped to the next project: and wrote a 1,400 word outline for a future humor/mystery book. I'm thinking series! But then, I usually am.

Most of my published novels so far have had something of a mystery element to them, but this one's a full mystery that I gave the working title of We Love Trouble.  It's about a wandering husband and wife team and their dog, because everything's better with dogs ... kind of a mix of The Thin Man and Scooby Doo.

And who is the bad guy?

Well, even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Sheesh.

Not that I haven't narrowed it down, but I'm thinking about doing the Agatha Christie thing: Write the whole story, then decide in the final chapter who the real killer is.

I figure, hey: If it worked for her ....

(But apparently that's not the way she did it, at least not for every book. It's a mystery.)

The important thing is to have fun with it, of course. So, what do you think? Can these little grey cells handle shaping a comic mystery?

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

I didn't cheer. I didn't run through the streets, kissing perfect strangers. I just kind of sat there slack-jawed, staring at the e-mail. My wife probably thought I'd gotten a death notification.

But no: I'd sold a short story. And yes, I was happy--just having trouble believing it.

To understand why one sale should shock me so, we have to go into history. Don't worry, it won't hurt.

Shortly after turning 18, I started submitting short stories. At first, they went one by one to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which these days is called Asimov's Science Fiction. There were and are plenty of other magazines that print (or post online, these days) short stories, but Asimov's was the first one I read, and I was stuck on appearing there first. Just so you know, that's a stupid way to do it, then and now.

I wrote dozens and dozens of short stories. I took a course on writing them; bought dozens of books about writing; and I read hundreds of the short stories of others. I also got smart enough to send each story to every market I could find.

By the way, thanks to Linda Nagata, my teacher in that correspondence course. It was in the snail mail days. The story she helped me improve was "Grocery Purgatory", a tale of disappearances set in a small town grocery store. Read all about her here: https://mythicisland.com/

None were ever published. I came close later on, with favorable and personal rejection letters. Eventually I discarded the ones clearly written in desperation--some of them were real stinkers--while revising and improving the ones that showed promise. But no final sale.

Here's the thing: short stories of mine have been published. Some were holiday themed tales, part of Christmas inserts in the three weekly papers that published my humor column. They were not in the habit of publishing fiction, and if I hadn't already been on the staff it wouldn't have happened ... so they didn't really count.

In 2011 my first novel, Storm Chaser, came out. I wrote several short stories featuring the characters from the book, intending to give them away to promote the book itself. But when I told my publisher about it, they suggested selling them together, as a collection. That's how Storm Chaser Shorts came about: They're published, and they're short stories, but it seemed to me again that I had a bit of an unfair advantage, compared to cold selling a single story to a publisher who didn't know me. 

Three anthologies carry my stories, but they were by invite, and I think they also don't count. 

The point is, it had become personal.

(Oh, and as usual, all those can be found on our website and here, on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO.) Always be closing.

As time went by, I boiled down the publishable stories to six, always waiting there in my master submission log. I had submitted my first short story in the summer of 1980.

So you see, when I received an e-mail from Alban Lake Publishing, telling me they were buying a story for one of their periodicals, I had been trying to sell to a magazine for thirty-nine years.

The story is "Coming Attractions", the bones of which I first wrote three decades ago. Revised many times and workshopped with Linda Nagata, it's hardly recognizable from the original (which was twice as long).

I'll give out more information when I get it, but my new publisher's website is here:

https://albanlakepublishing.com/ 

After almost four decades, I'll have a short story published in a magazine. Well, e-magazine. Let's just say periodical. After a summer of everything breaking and a long week of sinus infection, this small step is very good news, indeed. 

Now: On to selling the rest of them! 

http://markrhunter.com/