Space Available: Post-Mortem.

So, the year 2011 has come and gone, and my experiment with writing a complete novel on Twitter--a book called Space Available, FYI--is now finished. Here's what I learned:

The level of difficulty was way harder than I anticipated.
I had no idea how hard it would be to tell a rich, layered story in 140-character bursts. I think I went into this whole experiment a little naively, because I've told stories before--lots of them--so I just assumed it would be a matter of adapting my storytelling process to the Twitter format.

What I wasn't counting on was the complete interruption of the flow of thinking that comes from having to mind your character count and click "Tweet" every few words. I found it to be much more disruptive than I'd originally figured on. Twitter works very well as a medium for sharing interesting links, or for expressing an opinion in a succinct way (this is why so many comedians have latched on to it--Twitter is the perfect one-liner delivery system).

But hashtag-free thoughts that run the length of more than a few tweets get bogged down easily in the type-count-tweet/type-count-tweet mechanism that is Twitter. In retrospect, I wish I'd made it more of a performance-art kind of thing, Cloverfield-style, like I was live-tweeting the story as opposed to writing my novel down on Twitter. Maybe that would've been just as difficult, but it would have fit the medium better.

I am an enthusiastic dreamer... until life gets in the way.
I started this project like I start all my projects: with a zest and passion for it, knowing that I am going to knock it out of the park. This is mostly the anticipation part, leading up to it. I announced it last December and was ready to hit the ground with my engines revving.

I started out with a darn fine first sentence, and that was all I wrote on day one. Then I had a good burst for a couple of weeks until my daughter was born, and then I took a couple of days off, and then I started back, and then I had other writing projects due, and then I was finding it difficult to work on the book, and then I got a corporate job, and then my family was the victim of a home invasion, and then I got let go from that corporate job, and then...

You see what I'm saying. The writing process was so difficult that any old excuse for not writing would do, and 2011 provided me with plenty of them--most of them not so fun.

Feedback helps.
I found a surprising amount of desire to push through the difficulties of writing anytime someone gave me feedback on it. Even something as simple as a mention at a social function that they were "enjoying" the story was enough to make me think, "Okay, time to do some more work on it."

And I do have to say, there is an unmitigated champion in this regard, and his name is Andrew Joyce, and I knew I could count on a tweet or two in my direction from @authorandrew, almost every time complimentary. There were many times where I felt like I was writing just to this guy. Seriously: a champ.

I do some of my best writing late at night.
There were many, many occasions where I'd think, "Oh, yes! I know exactly what to do next! I will go do that right now!" or, failing that, I would just have an urge to work on the book, and then I would look and see that it was midnight, or past midnight, or 5:00 in the morning.

But then I would realize that, of the 157 people following me, many of them who do so (or at least those who tell me they enjoy reading it) are doing it on their phone. If I send out a tweet, their phone buzzes to let them know it's there. And I don't want to disrupt any sort of sleeping that they might be doing, and so I, being a fairly nice person, would hold off on cranking out my awesome idea for a decent hour of the day.

And then I would forget to do it.

Cliffhangers are crazy-fun.
That said, one really fun development I did not anticipate was the rhythm of my writing output lending itself to an almost serialized feel to the story. I wound up feeling like a day of writing shouldn't be finished until I'd built to some sort of cliffhanger that I could pay off next time.

This was where I started finding the real pleasure in telling this particular story, and I really started to sympathize with the writers for the television show "LOST," because ending a story beat with a cliffhanger is really fun (and kind of easy), but paying it off later on is hard. That show loved it's cliffhanger-y endings ("We gotta go back, Kate! We gotta go back!" remains an all-time favorite television moment for me), and for the most part managed to address those cliffhangers later on (though they never wound up putting together that stupid army in season two).

It's okay to succeed only halfway.
This is the biggest lesson I learned, and it was also the hardest one. With about four or five months left in the year, I started to realize that, unless I really kicked on the afterburners, I was not going to finish strong. And that's when the whole project began to feel like a giant weight on my shoulders. I was already battling depression (it's a thing I deal with), and the added stress of feeling like a massive failure was almost debilitating.

Fortunately, with about six weeks left in the year, I had a good chat with Jeff Gerke, the publisher at Marcher Lord Press about the state of the book and where it could be. I also had a good chat with my wife, who helped me to realize something that I have a hard time owning up to:

Admitting my limitations is not the same thing as admitting defeat.

And one other thing:

Admitting defeat is okay, too.

And when it came to Space Available, I felt defeated. I had gone into it with such high hopes, and it wasn't turning out at all like I'd thought it would. It was way too short, it was scattershot, it was far afield thematically from what I'd set out to do, and it generally felt like a big, giant misfire.

But I was learning to be okay with that. These things happen (even the usually smart Apple released the Mac Cube). I was willing to admit that Space Available had, in a lot of ways, become a misfire, but that was okay. And even if it wasn't where I'd originally wanted it to be, I could give it the ending it deserved, bring some closure, and even leave the door open for a sequel, should the desire arise (though not written through Twitter). In the end, my novel turned into a novella that will be published as an e-book, and I learned a good lesson about biting off more than I could chew and that sometimes cutting bait was preferable to fishing when you're in over your head (and perhaps I could've learned more lessons about mixing metaphors).

All in all, I've come away from the experience a wiser writer and a better person, and that's really all I could hope for. We'll see what the future holds.

Space Available: The Press Deluge Continues.

This time it's an interview with Where The Map Ends, the totally awesome and ultra-rad website that specializes in Christian speculative fiction (should we abbreviate that "Xspecfic"?), and which happens to be run by my friend and the publisher of Marcher Lord Press, Jeff Gerke, and which also happens to be featured in the current run-on sentence you just happen to be reading.

Thanks for reading!

Space Available: The Press Deluge Begins.

So I get an "at" tweet from this cat @authorandrew from a website called Into The Book asking for an interview. I check the site and it is super-cool and so I look him up and we make the interview happen. You can read it here.

Space Available: Paralysis And Promises.

Boy, I was not counting on this. I mean, I thought I'd have a little difficulty to push through, but I was certainly not prepared for the mental struggle I'd be going through right about now.

Writing your first draft in front of people is very, very hard.

And, to be honest, it's keeping me away. I sit down to read my Twitter feed and have now visually tuned out that big white box at the top that says "What's happening?" above it. It's just too painful to look at, the constant reminder that I need to write something for Space Available but am just unsure about what to write. I've navigated the story to a point where I know something major's going to happen; I just don't know exactly how it's going to happen.

Ordinarily I could just write whatever I want and see if it works, and if so, great; if not, no harm done. But now I'm transmitting this thing as it happens, writing without a net. Which is part of the exhilaration of it--if I uncork a good one-liner (which, there've been a couple), I get the satisfaction of immediate feedback on it (usually from one or two close friends).

But I'm so terrified I'm going to screw the thing up that it keeps me from writing it. And that's starting to happen more often. I've now had at least three, maybe four entire weeks where I didn't write at all, partially motivated by work and other things, but very often just out of sheer paralysis. A hope that tomorrow I'll know beyond a shadow of a doubt what I'm supposed to write, as if there is a "correct" thing to put in that white box.

Am I starting to feel overwhelmed by the challenge? Yeah, a little. But I'm also overwhelmed by my story at the moment. I know where I'm going (at least I have that much figured out), but I have little to no idea how to get there, and I'm afraid that I'm going to take it down a path that will block me from my original intent. So that makes me overthink it, and that leads to the aforementioned paralysis, which leads to the full week of not-writing.

So! From here on out, I make this solemn vow to you, the dear reader of Space Available: I will not tweet every day, but I will tweet every week. There will not be a week go by until the end of 2011 that I have not written a portion of this book. It's the only way to break me out of this funk--to commit to writing on it regardless, and then to make that commitment public.

Oh, and I also hope to write more blog updates. That's important, too.

See you on Mondays!

Media Review 2010: Top Motion Pictures.

[The media review rolls on into its final installment as I break down my favorite films of the year.]

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Green Zone
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
How to Train Your Dragon
The King's Speech
Secretariat
The Social Network
The Town

THE TOP FIVE:
5) Inception [Yes to the ideas. Yes to the characters. Yes to the imaginative visuals. Overwhelming yes to the masterful way Christopher Nolan worked in exposition without killing the momentum. Super-duper yes to the ambiguous ending. No, no, no to the bland directorial style and the James-Bond-villain-via-Hoth climactic battle setting. You fold up Paris for practice but when it comes time for the real thing, you just shoot a bunch of guns? Yawn.]
4) Exit Through the Gift Shop [While Inception is very good at provoking thought about the plot of Inception, this documentary is good at provoking thought about larger questions, like where should one draw the line between art and commerce, and how do free market principles play into that, and how awesome, exactly, is street artist Banksy? The first must-see documentary in a long time.]
3) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World [Not only is it outrageously funny, inventive, and smart--it is also far more perceptive about love in the real world than your average romantic comedy. Odd that a movie this off-the-wall has so much to say about the realities of relationships.]
2) True Grit [Pretty much perfect, and would've been my number one were it not for...]
1) Toy Story 3 [Based on the trailer, I was certain this was going to be Pixar's first grand misstep, a cynical cash-grab that just regurgitated the first two. So imagine my surprise when it turned out not only to be a wholly original story, but the story that the first two installments led up to. It's like they had this in mind all along. Storytelling at its best.]

MIGHT'VE MADE THE LIST IF I'D SEEN 'EM:
127 Hours
Four Lions
Inside Job
Lebanon
Rabbit Hole

THOSE OSCAR-BAIT MOVIES THAT COME OUT EVERY YEAR BUT THAT I'M NOT INTERESTED IN:
Black Swan
The Kids Are All Right
The Fighter
Blue Valentine

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BUT ACTUALLY KIND OF TERRIBLE:
The Ghost Writer
Greenberg
Shutter Island
Winter's Bone

BEST FROM A PREVIOUS YEAR:
The General (1926) [I introduced my kids to the big three silent comedians on New Year's Eve, and we had a wonderful year experiencing some of these still-hilarious classic films. My favorite of all of them has to be this one, featuring Buster Keaton, a runaway train, and some of the most clever, seat-of-your-pants comic gags I've ever seen. The man really was a genius, and I can tell because his films still get belly laughs today, even from my children.]

WORST:
Clash of the Titans [Not nearly Transformers-level awful, but still loveably terrible, especially in its dartboard approach to mythology, Jamba-Juice-blender approach to editing, and who-cares approach to accents. Add in the casting of current interchangeable, mix-and-match lunkhead Sam Worthington as the lead, and it's just bland enough to be boring where it should be exciting.]

Media Review 2010: Top Music.

[So much good music this year! I couldn't narrow it down to only five, so I cheated and made two top five lists: one for American bands, one for bands from places other than the United States.]

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Broken Bells, Broken Bells
A Chorus of Storytellers, The Album Leaf
I Learned the Hard Way, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Love and Its Opposite, Tracey Thorn
Magic Chairs, Efterklang

TOP FIVE (AMERICAN):
5) Leave Your Sleep, Natalie Merchant [Miss Merchant wanted to teach her daughter a few poems, so, she did what any loving parent would do--she set them to music, then recorded them so the rest of us can enjoy. It's like brand-new Americana.]
4) Beautiful Things, Gungor [At first, I was unimpressed. It felt like a checklist of tracks from all of Michael Gungor's favorite bands (here's the Muse song! and now here's the Regina Spektor song! and now here's the Switchfoot song! Sufjan, anyone? etc.), but the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me. Really good worship songwriting, and hardly a Jesus-is-my-girlfriend number on it.]
3) My Room in the Trees, The Innocence Mission [They coasted a bit with their last album (2007's We Walked in Song), so I set the bar a little lower than usual when I heard this one--and then had to raise it right back up, and they still cleared it. They have their thing, but they do what they do so unbelievably well that it never gets old. Fun fact: "God Is Love," the third song on this album, is the unofficial theme song of my newly born baby daughter.]
2) Provenance, Maya Beiser [There are very, very many musicians who are technically proficient on their instruments but who always sound like they're playing a bunch of notes by the rulebook. Maya Beiser is a cellist who uses her instrument for Art, who speaks through it, who lives through it, who breathes through it. Oh, and she covers Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." What's not to like?]
1) Interpol, Interpol and High Violet, The National [I wound up getting these albums days apart from each other, and as a result, began listening to them back-to-back, so much so that they became a sort of double album. Now they are inseparable in my mind. And as far as I'm concerned, their drummers contribute most of the awesomeness.]

TOP FIVE (INTERNATIONAL):
5) Miike Snow, Miike Snow [The Official Adam Palmer Album of the Summer of 2010. Creative electronic music that goes far beyond the standard and mixes in some artistic flair. Perfect for barbecues, cleaning the house, or for bumping in your car, with the windows down, as you drive to go view the mushroom cloud that wipes us all out. Yes, it's that epic.]
4) Black Swan, Athlete [Not to be confused with the Darren Aronofsky film of the same name, this is Britpop at its finest. Break out the cigarette lighter and rest your arms well, because you're going to want to raise it up for every single song. An entire album's worth of anthems.]
3) Go, Jonsi [Exactly the sound you would expect from a pop album by the lead singer of Sigur Ros and produced by Nico Muhly.]
2) ...And They Escaped the Weight of Darkness, Olafur Arnalds [Breathtakingly beautiful minimalistic orchestration, again from Iceland. Holds a special place in my heart because, while I already had it at my #2 spot, it was playing while my daughter was born a few weeks ago. Great music to have your kid be born to.]
1) Sigh No More, Mumford & Sons [The nexus of great music, insightful lyrics, and at a time in my life when I needed both. Unless something crazy happens, this will be on my decade-best list in 2019.]

BEST FROM A PREVIOUS YEAR (TIE):
The Fountain Soundtrack (2006), Clint Mansell [I'm already a huge fan of the movie, but I never realized the degree to which Clint Mansell's score adds to the overall experience. This is some fantastic writing music.]
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997), Spiritualized [This is the same year that Radiohead released OK Computer and The Verve released Urban Hymns, and this album just may be better than both of them. Layer upon layer upon layer of musical genius that speaks to the futility of trying to numb pain through drug use, though it does have some unfortunate swearing.]

WORST:
Plastic Beach, Gorillaz [What a letdown, especially after the pleasant time I had with their previous album. Sounds like, instead of writing actual songs with something to say, they invited a bunch of celebrity rappers into the studio to smoke weed and spout the first things that come to mind. Total harvest? One decent song ("Stylo," if you must know).]

Media Review 2010: Top Books.

[Time once more for me to reveal my picks for the best in media for the previous year. Today's entry: the best books of 2010.]

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, Sean Carroll
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Mike Brown
The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English from Shakespeare to South Park, Jack Lynch
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, David Sedaris

TOP FIVE:
5) Sonic Boom: A Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the New Economy, Gregg Easterbrook [Very interesting thoughts on the immediate future of our world as we experience a "sonic boom." The publisher positioned it as a "business book," but it isn't, really. It's just interesting, if you're into that sort of thing.]
4) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis [Still feel like you don't completely understand what happened with the credit crisis in the fall of '08? Still befuddled about what exactly is a "credit default swap"? Want to learn about the handful of people who made a bundle while the rest of us were losing our collective house? This is the book for you.]
3) Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger!, M.T. Anderson [There's a series of books called "Pals in Peril!" This is the fourth one. They are very, very funny, especially if you spent your childhood reading series books.]
2) Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, Michael Spencer [Michael Spencer used to write gospel-centric rants about wrongheaded ways we do church and theology in 21st century America. He wrote them on the internet. Then he got a book deal and wrote this. Then he died. His was a clear-headed way of thinking about Jesus that sidesteps the pointless blather and speaks directly to the heart of the matter. Oh, and full disclosure--I am an infrequent contributor to his website, InternetMonk.com.]
1) After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, N.T. Wright [This is the natural progression from my #6 book of the decade last year, Surprised by Hope. Sometimes it gets a little egghead-y, but it's still entirely worth the read.]

BEST FROM A PREVIOUS YEAR:
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), Francis S. Collins [Dr. Collins led the Human Genome Project, the conglomeration of scientists that unraveled the mystery of our DNA and figured out what every bit of it does. This book is a history of the project itself as well as Collins's firsthand account of the way he found Jesus in the midst of it. Awfully darn good.]

BOOK THAT SHOULD BE ON EVERYONE ELSE'S LIST:
The Soul of Spider-Man, Adam Palmer & Jeff Dunn [This one wasn't supposed to be released until next year, but then Regal brought it out anyway! My streak remains alive!]

WORST (TIE):
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins [I was introduced to the very good book The Hunger Games this year, which I devoured with relish. Then I found out it was a trilogy and did a little dance of joy. I got the second book, Catching Fire, and thought it was so-so, but it picked up toward the end. So then it was time for Mockingjay, the final book in the trilogy, and I was cautiously optimistic--surely she would end on a good note? Nope. Collins makes bad decision after bad decision, forgetting what made the first book so great. Such a disappointment.]

Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, Jon Stewart et al [It's no secret: I really like The Daily Show a lot, and I think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both serve a wonderful purpose by poking holes in the public discourse. Colbert's book, I Am America (And So Can You!) is smart, incisive, and seriously funny. This book, by Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show, is stupid, crass, and juvenile, with jokes that land as gracefully as the whale in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Stick to television, fellas. Full disclosure: It was so bad I didn't even make it ten pages in. Maybe it gets awesome on page eleven. I don't care.]

Fan Mail.

Got this little note last week, through an "at" tweet from my friend Zach. Thought I'd share:

Adam - thought this "novel on twitter" idea was stupid when I first heard it. I was wrong. It's Awesome. I'm hooked.

So, with that in mind, today is a great day for you to catch up on Space Available, seeing that it's Monday, meaning that I've compiled all of last week's tweets, combined them with the previous weeks' tweets, and sent the whole thing over to Marcher Lord Press.

Taking A Few Days' Worth of Break.

I've taken four days off from working on Space Available, but it's not because I'm being a slacker (for once). I actually have a good reason!

Visit my family's website to find out why.

I'll resume either today or tomorrow. Until then!

Space Available: First Impressions.

I'm just over a week into Space Available and already it's a blast. Easily the most low-pressure writing I've ever done. Instead of putting my head down and cranking out content to meet a high daily word count or a publisher-mandated deadline, I am really enjoying taking my time and thinking through each tweet I send. I have an entire year to get this thing done, so instead of writing 2000 words a day, I can take it easy and write a measly thousand words per week.

I say it's low-pressure, though that first sentence was a doozy. I mentally crafted and rejected probably twenty first sentences over the final week of December. As New Year's Eve hit, I had one ready to go, but when the morning of January 1 rolled around, it just felt wrong. I opened up Twitter and meant to type it in, but I just couldn't do it yet. I waited and waited and waited (and quietly panicked) until finally, sometime that afternoon, something else entirely popped into my head and I knew it was my first sentence. Yes, the beginning of the novel sprang, fully formed, into my consciousness as I made macaroni and cheese for my kids.

I'm curious to see how this project feels as I get into the routine of writing and as the story develops. Obviously, I'm still introducing things and am not yet beholden to pay off much of it yet. The real work will be to make the ending live up to any promises I've made in the beginning, especially since I'm making those promises so early.

Thanks to all who are following and (shockingly) retweeting as it comes along. If anyone is interested in joining the journey now, you can head over to the official Marcher Lord Press Space Available page and catch up. It is updated every Monday, so that should make it semi-easy.

I said in an earlier post that anyone with questions can send them through email or Facebook, but I realized you can also tweet questions/comments/encouragement to me through Twitter at @AdamAuthor and I can then answer them here on Dregs.