There’s no plot yet. I’m kind of backtracking because I was getting a little ahead of myself at the beginning of the year. It’s very important to me that when I write a story and try and sell it to an audience that it’s both worth my effort and something the audience will benefit from.
What I can tell you is that it will be on an epic scale, but still a very personal character story. The thing that’s holding me up is there are literally around 20 versions of the story right now. I’m trying to find a common thread that will tie them together. They all share some parts with others but aren’t all connected the same way so it’s a big mess.
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Obviously I’m looking to make just one story. It just has so much in it now I’m trying to simplify it without sort of losing the complexity or the details that are really important.
A big goal I have for The Caves is to do this story realistically and accurately which means a heck of a lot of research… most of which probably won’t even show up but for a line or two, but it’s ultimately to help me craft the story more effectively and to make the characters more realistic.
So my 3 goals right now are really focused on Finding a Plot Direction, Story Development, and Art and Characters (aka the fun stuff)
I was expecting to get into the art and sort of character/story development at the end of January, but I underestimated the amount of research I had left before I really wanted to get into that.
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I’ve been doing a ton of research the past few months off and on and I found a lot of great videos, documentaries, and stuff with lots of pictures which has been nice haha. I can share a few with you, but not others as they would give away parts of the story I’m keeping secret…
-I found this great lecture series on Physics on Youtube (A subject I reallllllly needed to learn -It’s hard to write science fiction if you don’t know the basics of science) Physics or science in general was never my strong suit, but this was a really great course. It’s called “Physics for Future Presidents” and it was really good. If you want to learn Physics without getting into any of the annoying math it gives you a general understanding and focuses on the practical applications in the real world, which is perfect for a writer.
There’s actually a whole bunch of free lecture courses from UC Berkley online. I’m planning to watch one on Chemistry soon also from the same place in the coming weeks (It certainly beats reading 20 page articles on Wikipedia that always lead to opening 100 other pages before I can understand one paragraph)
Another great resource was Earth: the Biography, which I ordered on Amazon for $1.56 in brand new condition. It was a really good buy. The illustrations alone are really cool, but it’s chalk full of the exact kind of info I was looking for for a good chunk of the backstory, and a really good read.
I published an article on some Research Tips I learned from all the research I’ve been doing on AssociatedContent.com. It’s a site that allows you to submit articles for payment. I thought it would be a good way to improve my writing skills, make a little extra money, expand my online presence, and actually write some of the ideas that get lost in my notes somewhere where I’ll be more likely to remember and come back to them. I’ve only published the one article so far but I’ve been brainstorming topic ideas and have a few in the works so we’ll see how that goes. For now you can read my Research Tips article here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5562424/4_important_research_tips_for_researching.html?cat=4
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I don’t want to scare anyone away either… you won’t have to be a genius to read this thing or anything lol. I’m writing it so that the plotline is really smart, but the presentation is such that anyone who can read will be able to follow it. And a lot of that isn’t actually in the language because most of the characters are going to be speaking in techno-talk a lot but you don’t need to understand what they’re saying so much as what they’re doing. It’s the context of the story that’s important and I really like that idea of not necessarily explaining things, just getting immersed in a world and needing to find the contextual clues to figure out what’s going on.
The concept(s?) is really good. It’s really what’s driving me to pull out all the stops and make sure this is top notch writing. It’s really pushing me to make it as good as I can. But I’m avoiding falling into that trap where everything has to be perfect -I have clear goals set, they just take a lot of work to get there. I have a relative destination and I’m an avid believer that impulse story and character decisions are often much more interesting than ones that take days to go over and outline all the implications and so on… so having an outline of the entire plot beforehand -taking care of the planning aspect of the work, really frees things up for me to sort of go with my gut and write it the way I feel, because I’ll know sort of where the boundaries are for where the story can go and what needs to happen at some point.
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Versatility is certainly something I’ve been struggling with. I tend to get stuck on a task and then it takes a week instead of days. So I’m trying to be a lot more versatile and I’m starting right here with this blog.
The blog has been in a coma for the past few months like so often happens when I get caught up in work. I think the problem is finding the right pace. Once a day is too often and I tried a few times a week but I really don’t have enough time to post that often.
I got a Twitter account at the beginning of last month, and that seems to be working out well. I’ve been using it to post short frequent updates and links to things that really are not long enough to constitute a blog post here in and of them self. So I think I’ll continue using that and the blog will be for longer, more substantive posts, and may take on a slightly more focused approach to documenting my projects.
If you have Twitter you can follow me @mikhailpschalk:
I’ll probably place a feed widget on the sidebar eventually… although it’s getting a little crowded. I also signed up for the Amazon Affiliates program so I could share products on the blog. It’s better than Google Ads and it lets me share things I was already going to anyway so it’s a win win.
I think Paul Cageggi of The Process Diary has got the right idea. He posts like once every 2 weeks I think and I’m always like “YES, new Process Diary post!” when I see it in my RSS feeder. He’s got a really good blog about the process of producing his graphic novel that may someday be a movie, and has a tutorial series and a lot of followers.
I’d like to do something like that, with tutorials or something in the future if I can find time to just experiment and see if anyone is interested… but at the moment I’m really just trying to get The Caves out. I don’t know how Paul finds the time cause he’s got like a professional tutorial series and a podcast and he communicates with all his followers and still has time to work on his personal projects while maintaining a day job as a freelancer. But he seems to have a good setup working over there so I’m taking notice.
The first 2 pages of Paul’s online graphic novel “Pandeia” are online now:
It looks really unique so far and from what I’ve heard about the story on his podcasts it sounds really exciting. And, you can of course find out more about it from the podcasts directly over at The Process Diary: http://theprocessdiary.blogspot.com
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So in a way I’m trying to find a direction for the plot as well as a direction for my own way of life really. And the two have been very much intertwined in my mind with all this experimenting I’m doing with the plot and my blogs alike. I’ve spent most of the past few months trying to feel out the right way to do this stuff and I can feel it nearing a point of stability now, or as stable as it’s going to become given the nature of what I do.
So as of yet, I have lots of notes on possibilities and things that will probably be a part of the story, but there’s no solid plot, no official characters, nothing concrete about The Caves at this point, which is very liberating and helpful as a writer and artist, and extremely frustrating as someone who wants to release something and see what the reaction is.
I’ll leave on that note to get back to work. Sorry for the lack of updates like I said I would be doing. It’s something, like the plot, that I’m still working on with myself.
A lot more to come! Stay tuned!
-Mikhail
Basically just juxtaposing different ideas. In The Caves the goal is sort of to take obscure, outlandish, sensationalized concepts like Sci-fi B-Movies of the 1940′s-50′s and Anomalee-of-the-Week Pulp Gothic Horror stories like THE THING FROM THE SWAMP and THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, and juxtapose them with sort of A-list production values and grounding them in real/hard science. A-Movies of that era were kind of like Film Noir, Murder Mystery, and Classic Romance movies -with a lot of humor and cultural themes and dramatic sophistication.
