{"id":485,"date":"2009-09-29T08:16:10","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T13:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=485"},"modified":"2018-10-30T20:58:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T00:58:03","slug":"introduction-to-%e2%80%9cfinzel%e2%80%9d-and-the-serials-section","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to \u201cFinzel\u201d and the Serials Section"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I promised (or threatened?) a few weeks ago<\/a>, I\u2019m starting a new section where I\u2019m going to attempt to serialize a short story every month.\u00a0 Or thereabouts.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m constantly annoyed at my own laziness when it comes to my writing, so these serials are going to be something of an experiment.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never had the patience or focus for long-form writing, and yet it seems I\u2019m bedeviled by ideas and characters who are just begging for a big old doorstopper novel.\u00a0 At least, they are in my head.\u00a0 When I sit down and make an attempt to get that sort of wheel rolling, I usually don\u2019t survive two pages before I give up.\u00a0 That’s because writing is hard, no matter how it may appear otherwise.\u00a0 In fact, it fucking sucks, and I have no idea why anyone does it if they can help it.<\/p>\n

My hideous apocalypse novel Judgment Day<\/em><\/a> is about the only instance where I managed to break the 30 page mark and keep going\u2026and, if you\u2019ve been reading, you\u2019ve realized that I didn\u2019t keep going in the right ways.<\/p>\n

The hope with the serials section is to see if I can teach myself some patience and focus.\u00a0 Instead of dashing off a rambling one-off for the front page, I\u2019ll sit down and try to put together a more cohesive story.\u00a0 But I won\u2019t lock myself into the unending, months-long cycle of novel writing.<\/p>\n

The middle ground, I\u2019ve found, is ten to twenty thousand words.\u00a0 Just long enough to allow some space for the story, and short enough to keep it fun (and simple).<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not planning out the stories, either.\u00a0 That’s part of the experiment.\u00a0 I’m approaching them with the barest of outlines — usually just the chapter titles — and letting the story spin out in the way it wants.\u00a0 Part of the lesson is to try and keep it from spinning out of control, and I suspect that I won’t always be successful.<\/p>\n

Writing, as I said, is hard work.\u00a0 It\u2019s always hard work, even when you get into the groove.\u00a0 The ideas may come from some strange, diseased back-of-the-mind place, but the mechanics of putting them together and crafting the story is pure back-breaking labor.\u00a0 That\u2019s why so many of us can\u2019t put a proper novel together or, when we do, it\u2019s pure shit.<\/p>\n

Since I feel like there are no standards for Greatsociety, and since I would be betraying this first phase of the experiment if I gave up on a story, I\u2019ll be posting the short stories regardless of quality.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve put up with The Boble<\/em><\/a> and the Sunday Archives<\/a> and my novel, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll mind.<\/p>\n

First up is \u201cFinzel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finzel is a wide spot in the road in western Maryland.\u00a0 I\u2019ve passed by it hundreds of times over the last couple of decades.\u00a0 It\u2019s a road sign and not much else along Interstate 68, my path to college in West Virginia, and now for vacations to visit my beer-swilling and overly embarrassing Appalachian family.\u00a0 I stopped once in Finzel around 1995, sometime in the early AM, to take a piss in the church parking lot.\u00a0 Besides that, the town has never been on my radar.<\/p>\n

A couple miles past Finzel is a hand-painted, home-made billboard mounted in the woods.\u00a0 You can\u2019t see it until you\u2019re ripping past at 70 MPH, but it\u2019s always been there advertising the \u201cHen House Restaurant”.\u00a0 The interstate, up and down that section, is lonely wilderness, parallel to US 40, the old National Highway, which meanders drunkenly through the valleys.\u00a0 In some places, 40 has been destroyed by I-68, in others it runs along as frontage road, crossing back and forth over I-68 with little sense of direction.\u00a0 US 40 along I-70 and I-68 behaves with the eccentricity of old Route 66 through New Mexico and Arizona.\u00a0 It follows the road that killed it and, occasionally, peels off into the woods where it still serves as main street for countless little bumfuck towns.\u00a0 In terms of a nice summer drive, that stretch of 40 from Frederick and up into western Maryland is well worth the time, and often gets my creative juices flowing.\u00a0 Going to and from college, I would tend to favor 40, chattering mindlessly into a tape recorder the whole way.<\/p>\n

Having always been a fan of post-apocalypse fiction, I\u2019ve daydreamed along that long rural drive about fleeing to western Maryland myself if the end ever came.\u00a0 Zombies, plague, asteroid\u2026 Everything would be okay in the mountains!\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 At the very least, hiding from bandits and war parties seemed possible in western Maryland.\u00a0 Make that drive along 68 at night and you\u2019ll see how many lonely farmhouses are set back in the hills, apparently inaccessible by car.\u00a0 Hide back there, farm the land, and live out the apocalypse under cover of the tangled forest, and the weather, and the emptiness.\u00a0 That\u2019s the way to do it.<\/p>\n

The first draft of Judgment Day<\/em> entertained this fantasy, but I quickly found that the story pretty much ended when our heroes made it to western Maryland.\u00a0 Why bother continuing?\u00a0 So the most rural they get is the climax at Sugar Loaf Mountain, about an hour outside of DC.<\/p>\n

Finzel incorporates a few of those discarded Judgment Day<\/em> ideas, and also recycles a couple of characters you may recognize (if only by name) from the Sunday Archive stories.\u00a0 There are four sections:\u00a0 \u201cParker\u2019s People\u201d is based on a “false-start” to a novel I recently found myself entertaining.\u00a0 An idea where the hero, Parker (now greatly reduced as a character), led a band of survivors from the ruins of DC out to Finzel.\u00a0 From there, it would become my agrarian apocalypse fantasy.\u00a0 Think the 70\u2019s-era Survivors<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The final section, \u201cAlways Coming Home,\u201d is from an unrelated false start where the protagonist, having abandoned a party of survivors, takes a post-apocalypse walk through the suburbs of Silver Spring, MD, heading to his long-empty apartment in White Oak.\u00a0 A story I play-acted many mornings going to work, returning from a bar, or just taking the air at 4am on a Sunday.\u00a0 Which is, yes, what crazy people do.<\/p>\n

The two middle chapters are wholly original and, more or less, feature me trying out different styles with characters.\u00a0 Overall, it’s just terrible.\u00a0 But… Well, it’s free.\u00a0 And I know you’re bored.<\/p>\n

Finzel is eight parts, starting next Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I promised (or threatened?) a few weeks ago, I\u2019m starting a new section where I\u2019m going to attempt to serialize a short story every month.\u00a0 Or thereabouts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[126,405],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-finzel","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":804,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}