Shane is one of the more unique authors I have interviewed. His medium for storytelling is music. He published his story as strictly an audiobook available for download at his Bandcamp page. I wanted to pick his brain and find out his process for that.
What inspires your writing?
My first book, “The Pulse Runs Through Us and The Weave is a Pulse,” was inspired very much by a fantasy world that I had created which is linked to some tabletop role playing games I played with my friends, and also overlaps the persona I take on in two of my musical projects, Sombre Arcane and Phranick. In a greater sense, I am greatly inspired by the fantasy novels of my youth – specifically those written in the Forgotten Realms by Elaine Cunningham, R.A. Salvatore and Ed Greenwood and a love for the history of our world. I have dabbled in other types of creative writing, specifically Cyberpunk, which is mostly inspired by Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020 game, William Gibson, and my day job as an IT Sysadmin/Security Consultant.
What is your process of developing characters
Most of my characters start as either a creative analog to someone, or a “kind” of person that I know or have met and then I begin fleshing them out from there. I may have a personality in mind and I try and ensure there is at least one contradiction (i.e. kind and greedy) so that even if I’m short-handing a character, they have some depth. If I’m seeing that my characters have started to become similar, and especially if myself or an editor is getting confused who is who in the dialogue or narrative, I’ll sometimes use a tabletop RPG random personality generator, where you roll funny shaped dice to get random results haha. This usually leads to me cherry-picking certain characteristics I would like them to have and letting the dice suggest complications.
As a rule of thumb, if think that a character is going to take up more than a single scene I’ll pop over to another document and start writing a short paragraph about that character that is not tied to the story. It might be a small paragraph about what they did the day previously, or leading up to their scene in the book. Sometimes it is an entire page or two of copy about their upbringing, etc. It’s not always proportional to the character’s importance to the story, but usually it’s at least close. There are some characters I wrote two pages about that only had a single line – or none. I’ll occasionally delete it when I’m finished, because I feel generally oppressed by writing characters into rigid patterns of behavior. Mostly because people don’t work that way, but also because the copy just gets to be too much and when I update the character in the main story I feel compelled to do the (unproductive…) work of going back and updating the other document. If it’s going to be a recurring character or a main character, I’ll commit to that work though because it is very helpful.
Did you Start with a story outline or did you make it up as you went along?
In the case of this first book, there are 7 chapters and they do not make up a contiguous “story” as such. They are random collections of poetry that a character may have written, or a short story about a particular performance of a song, or a chapter could be an entire short story in itself. The entire book has a musical companion piece for each chapter. There is a chapter near the beginning however that does have a relatively traditional short story, and for that I most certainly worked from an outline. I didn’t have the outline finished before I started, and adjusted the outline quite a bit as I went along and wanted to change pacing, and came up with new characters I wanted to give more time to. I thought the outline would give me an idea how long the story would be, but there ended up being a HUGE disparity between what my outline suggested for plot points and the amount of copy that I ended up with – what was an outline intended for 20 pages turned into about 130 pages! This is one of the biggest takeaways I have from writing this first book – how much actual copy it takes to explain an outline point without just…saying what happens.
How much research did you need for your story?
Because it is a fantasy story, most of my primary research has been done through my 25 years of tabletop gaming and reading fantasy. This wasn’t an accident – I wanted writing this to be fast, and fun, since it was my first book. However, in an effort to properly portray a character with a lot of medieval warfare research, I did a (quite disproportionate, if I’m being honest) amount of research into medieval warfare tactics.
What researching methods did you use?
I have a book about Irish castles that outlined quite a bit of how they were built, and what they were built to defend against. Additionally I did some YouTube crawling, finding both high-level breakdowns on pre-gunpowder battle tactics and also watched some extremely dry research from historians who were explaining the details of medieval combat through a translation of primary sources such as combat manuals in the middle ages. I wanted to be certain that my high-level descriptions were looking right. In the end, I only used a fraction of what I discovered, of course haha
What were some of your methods for handling worldbuilding?
Because I operate in the fantasy genre, worldbuilding can be pretty fast and loose. Giving the reader only the information they need to know to push the plot forward saved a lot the time I could spend on worldbuilding on the giving depth to the characters instead. That said, because of the nature of the project and how it is tied to lore that exists in a personal tabletop RPG game I run and the band, which has it’s own lore, a lot of the work was really already done for me.
Did you draw on personal experience?
Definitely. As with most early authors, anyone who knows me will definitely see parts of me and my life sprinkled throughout the book. For example, as part of our musical project, we throw a 3-day festival called the Northeast Dungeon Siege. The largest chapter, “Requirem for an Empty Castle” is a loose allegory to the effort, work, and tribulations it took to pull off such a large event.
How did your publish?
I self-published 125 books late last year (2019), using 48HourBooks.com who I absolutely cannot recommend enough. Go to their site, sign up for the “book on how to publish a book” and it walks you through every step of the process. Fortunately my solo musical project is on a label that helps fulfill orders and I’m able to hawk most of them at live shows. They have gone quite quickly, and I’m probably going to have to get to fixing a bunch of small errors and get ready to print a second pressing in the next few months.
Why did you do it that way?
DIY is all I have ever known when it comes to creative commerce. I’m open to other methods of publishing as I write more, but I grew up selling tapes I dubbed at home in High School and this is just a natural extension of the indie punk rock and hip hop scenes I come from. There’s also a very hearty DIY indie spirit in the modern tabletop community so it also seemed natural for those reasons.
How long did it take to land representation?
KEEP IT REAAAAAAAAAAAAAL
REPRESENT WHAT?
I represent myself. I don’t see this changing anytime soon. 🙂 But I would work with anyone who thinks they can do more for me than I can do for myself.
Who did your cover and marketing?
The cover was done on commission by a local artist Aaron White. The first chapter in the book is a short story inspired by the image after I received it. I’m so happy to have had him on board and everyone should check out what he does. While my cover is quite fantastical, anyone who is a fan of surrealistic horror will really enjoy his work too.
I’m almost sold out of the book already so it sufficed for the marketing to be limited to direct sales to fans of my other artistic output. My “dungeon synth” projects Sombre Arcane and Phranick are well recognized in Facebook groups dedicated to the genre, and to a limited extent I was able to market a few sales through fans of my hip hop project as well and a lot of old friends who were simply tickled that I had spent the effort to write a book. I would be interested in marketing the next edition to a wider audience but don’t honestly have the first idea how to go about that short of spending time I would rather spend creating becoming a part of new facebook groups haha
What are some of the methods you have used to generate interest in your book?
Again, I’m very lucky that there was a built-in interest in the book based on other things that my bandmate and I already spend a good deal of time marketing.
Did you use beta readers? How did you secure them?
Not as many as I would have liked to, but my bandmate had a vested interest and for some reason seems to like what I do, so he read it and gave me some wonderful feedback. I enlisted, early on, the help of a good friend who has a good attention to detail to help with editing the book. In retrospect, I should have reached out to more friends for this – and fortunately now that I’ve got this one finished people are offering to read the next one ahead of time…you better believe I have a running list of people who’ve said they’ll do it next time around!
What was your process in integrating music into the creation of your book?
In most cases, the music existed first and then I wrote a story or poem that was inspired by it’s textures. A few were done in reverse order but I’ve found this to be the easiest way.
How many revisions did it take to get a publishable book?
It’s hard to answer that because I revised everything quite a bit as I went along. Some chapters were written very swiftly, but the most complicated story probably had 2 thorough revisions after it was complete. This doesn’t count many occasions of just mass-deleting an entire chapter because I was having a bad night.
What aspect of the book writing process did you find the most challenging?
Finding each character’s “own voice” was a big challenge. Since my story is very largely character-driven, as opposed to action-driven, I had to rely on some extreme tricks to ensure that each character didn’t turn into my own personal wording and voice. One of my favorite tricks is something I call “Sentence Mapping” – which I use for a particularly long and dense scene of dialogue. I’ll open Excel (or google sheets if that’s your jam) and make a column for every character. Then I’ll copy/paste every sentence that character says in their column, one person talking per row of the spreadsheet. Then, I’ll read straight down the column and make sure that people aren’t shifting too swiftly from one conversational tone in a single sentence. Truth be told, I adopted this tactic way late and can see on subsequent reads some places I should have used it and didn’t. Oh well, next time.
What are you writing now?
Right now I’m in the preliminary process of working on a similar fantasy book that will be a companion for my Dungeon Synth project Sombre Arcane’s first release. It will be bigger, and better, now that I’ve learned all the things I learned in the process of creating this book. I haven’t started the outlining process proper, but I have several chapters, scenes and characters in mind and a few even outlined briefly in files called “unnamed document” in my quite chaotic Google Drive. 🙂 I’ve also taken a stab at a Cyberpunk short story about a Netrunner (think “3d virtual reality hacker…part tech-nerd, part social engineer”) who hacks into insurance companies to give people free healthcare for fun. I deleted what I had though, but I know I’ll get back to the concept. As a musician the idea of just doing something over and over and over and throwing away what you did to maybe just do it a LITTLE better next time is sort of built into my process.
What is your advice to other writers?
Stop waiting and write. Do it wrong. Making a shitty book is more fulfilling than not making a book because you know it will be shitty. Don’t be afraid to come out of what you’re writing to take on other, seemingly barely related tasks. Writing what seems like an unrelated story is still practice at the process of writing, after all. Honor your original intentions, but don’t let that be a prison – delete stuff and re-write if it’s not hitting right. Read about how other people engage in the writing process, and steal the ideas they have that you like. From a more mechanical standpoint – show, don’t tell and make sure your characters have their own voices as best you can, it’ll help the reader develop a connection with them just by being able to intuitively separate them from their counterparts. Above all please remember: with very few exceptions anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish a book. At it’s core it takes exactly 3 things, some hours spent making the content, the money to pay the people who put it together (printer, graphic designer, editor), and the guts to do those first two things.
Be Sure to Check Shane’s story, along with his other work out at his official page, https://phranick.bandcamp.com.
