Crazy 8 Press

There’s a strange feeling that comes with almost being done with a novel.

Almost.

I’m having that sensation now.

The sequel to Finders Keepers — Genius de Milo — is just about done.

The manuscript is written. I printed it out, doubled spaced, and have been reading the pages for the last few weeks.

I’ve read every word on every page, twice, and I’m down to the last 20 pages on the third and final read-through. Some pages are perfectly clean, others have lots of hand-written notes, and the rest are somewhere in between.

In addition, the Genius de Milo manuscript is in the hands of three trusted friends who I’ve worked with before, who will be sending back their notes within the next month.

There’s an excitement to being almost finished. A flutter of anticipation.

There’s also a sense of … ooooh, this book is going to be great, but I’m basically done, so … let’s ease up.

And there’s even a middling sense of … I want to be done already. I’ve been at this a long time. I’m ready to move on.

But mostly … I’m feeling good.

Yes, the fatigue can set in, but this time around I’m coming to the finish line with energy, focus, and enthusiasm.

I’ll be done reading pages within a day or so.

Then I need to get back to the computer, and start transferring all of my hand-written notes to the electronic file. In most cases we’re talking minor technical edits — a spelling mistake, a misplaced comma, the wrong character name!

But there are cases where a sentence or paragraphs needs to be re-written, and one section I’m going to cut entirely because it doesn’t serve the story. There’s some character development that I liked, but not enough to warrant slowing down the plot. So that’s gone.

I’ll have to fill in some details through Web searches, and fact check a few items.

I figure it’ll take me 2-3 weeks to input all of my changes, by which time I should be getting notes from my reader crew. What comes next will depend on their notes. They might have minor notes, or perhaps they’ll be more extensive. And then I’ll have to think on them, and decide which ones to incorporate into what by then should be a ‘clean’ manuscript.

But getting back to being almost done …

This is the time to really focus. To appreciate that being almost done isn’t the same as being actually done. It’s those final edits, those little tweaks that can clean up a mistake, take a passage from good to great, and even elevate the tenor of the entire novel.

The finishing touches are vital. At least that’s been the case for me.

Yet getting those final touches across with nuance and sophistication, while fighting off the fatigue of just wanting to be done, is critical. It’s where the mental discipline comes in. The focus.

So here I go, ready to finish another novel, one that I’m awfully excited about.

Genius de Milo has been a lot of fun to write. I’m curious as to what you all will think. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it.

Now it’s a matter from getting this book from almost done to actually done.

Wish me luck.

By Paul Kupperberg

Created by me (with John Byrne and Steve Irwin), owned and © DC Comics

Recently, Bob Greenberger wrote about the satisfaction of creating and writing a recurring character of his own and that got me to thinking about characters I’ve worked on in my career. Having spent more than a little of the past forty years laboring in the comic book field, a majority of the stories I’ve written were about OPCs (Other People’s Characters), from the Atom and Archie to Superman and Scooby Doo. I’ve never had a problem with that; as a lifelong comic book fan, I was always happy to get my paws on the classic characters I grew up reading. But a writer comes to these established and long running characters weighed down by the character’s baggage, allowed to bring to them a certain limited amount of individual interpretation but always bound by what came before…and with full knowledge that no matter what story they tell, things have to be reset to the status quo when they’re done.

Still, along the way, I managed to create a few new additions to the DC Universe of characters. A sorcerer here, a spy agency there, a science fiction hero way out there in deep space…but though I created them, they aren’t really mine. Mainstream corporate comics operate (for the most part) under the work-made-for-hire provision of copyright law, meaning that the corporation is considered the legal “author” of the work. The actual creators have some (small) equity in the creation, but no real control over its destiny or use. The editor, as representative of the “author,” has more control over the character than does the creator and the corporation is free to make whatever changes or alterations it deems necessary.

I’ve also written a considerable number of words in prose for OPCs, including the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, Star Trek, Doctor Who, the Avenger, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Archie, Powerpuff Girls, and others, and I’ve enjoyed them all. But, again, these characters were all well established before I got to them and I was obliged to leave them pretty much as I found them once I’m done. As much fun as I’ve had with all the neat toys in those different sandboxes, I always knew they belonged to someone else and that when I went home at the end of the day, I had to leave them where I had found them for the next writer to play with.

The difference between writing OPCs and your own creation is the same as the difference between running a race with and without leg irons. In corporate comics or prose featuring licensed properties, you’re hobbled by the rules of the characters’ owners. But with your own characters, you’re free to run like the wind, limited only by your own imagination.

And, thanks to the paradigm shift in publishing I wrote about last month, I’m free to write my characters, my way. Of course, I was always free to write the stories…I just wouldn’t necessarily have had a venue in which to publish them so someone other than myself could actually read them. But thanks to Crazy 8 Press (and Charlton Neo for comics projects), now I do. And what I write remains mine, to do with as I wish and retain full rights to them should I ever be lucky enough to have any of them optioned for licensing or other media.

Now: Created by me and Rick Burchett…and owned and © me and Rick Burchett

Maybe corporate comics and book publishing can offer me greater exposure (although neither seems to be offering much these days in the way of anything except to the Big Names who can sell Big Numbers), but they take away much more by what they demand in exchange for the privilege of being published by them. Junker George and F.B.I. Special Agent Irwin Benjamin in the ReDeus stories, shabby and put upon little Weekly World News investigative reporter Leo Persky in a quartet of tales (previously published in R. Allen Leider’s Hellfire Lounge anthology series and soon to be included in my upcoming Crazy 8 collection of short stories, In My Shorts: Hitler’s Bellhop and Other Stories), the comics characters Blank and Neo (and others to follow) in various Neo publications…mine, mine, mine, all mine.

As Janice Joplin sang, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” but in this instance, I think it means everything to gain.