Thoughts on The Adjusters

Writing Journal: I essentially finished drafting The Adjusters #37 this afternoon, and started on #38. That one should be pretty easy, considering I know what all the scenes are, and what I want to say. That's pretty rare. Plus I think I had a flash of what the sex scene will be. Not the one I originally planned, but this one should be more... interesting.

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I promised to say a few words about the big picture for my serial. Partly, this was prompted by the discussion we had back around the beginning of Book III, where people were basically telling me—and I apologize for paraphrasing—WTF, dude?. Not an unfair reaction, as the story took a bit of a left turn there.

Warning: shameless over-thinking and navel-gazing follows.

Okay, we have to go back to the beginning. I've always wanted to write a big-ass MC saga. My introduction to the genre was Blackie's The Book, which pretty much blew my impressionable mind when I first read it, hoping it would never end. But to write a saga, you need an idea that will carry you through the long haul, and it took a while for one to simmer in my subconscious. I knew I didn't really want to write about a guy or a girl that gets some MC powers, because while I've read a lot of interesting stories with that premise, I couldn't figure out a way not to have the whole story either grow into hero screws everything in sight, chapter after chapter, which gets boring after a while, or hero starts fighting with others, undoubtedly also MCers, which didn't really inspire me.

Several years ago, the basic idea for a story came to me. Really, it came in the form of two scenes: an initial scene, and a final scene. The initial scene basically became Daniel's “dream” of Jenn and Biff in Book II. The final scene, well, it's not written yet, obviously. Then it was a simple matter of figuring out what happened to lead to the final scene—that also took a while. But eventually, I had the basic skeleton of the narrative thread, by answering the question: “Who did actually help Biff Cusker gets his grubby hands on Jennifer Hansen?” and following the answer to that question (“Doctor Cargyle”—“But who the hell is he?”) to its logical conclusion.

And in the process, I discovered a whole Universe in which the larger story takes place. The story I'm now slowly writing. It's big, it's complex, and it keeps being refined every time I pull a thread and start asking, “why is this?” (The Specials, whose existence we discovered in Book III, came out of exactly such a question asked of another plot point elsewhere in the story.)

And by big, I do mean big. If you like SAT-style analogies, Books I & II are to the whole story what #11 is to Book II. (Not in literal size, I hope.) Maybe that's too big. Who knows. I have the story in my head, and I know where it's going, and where it ends. So I'm not worried. Hey, I could have brought Book II to its “natural end” with Daniel finding Jenn and that would have been it for the story. I think my idea is more interesting, but time will tell. (Perhaps I should write an alternative ending to Book II for those that wanted the story to end there.)

So now I have this long tale to tell, how do I tell it? I think a long involved straight-up narrative would have ended up either being boring, or impossible to follow. Or maybe not. But I'm not sure I have it in me to write a single long sustained story like that. So I decided to break up the story into different arcs, each its own contained story with a beginning, middle, and end, with a narrative thread unifying all those stories into the big story I'm telling. It's no accident that I keep saying that the original model for The Adjusters was as a sort of comic book series, but in prose, following characters through different arcs that are part of the same story.

Doing things that way lets me experiment with different styles for each book, which not only keeps the story fresh in my mind, but also lets me try different things that I might not try otherwise. For instance, Book I was just a straight up narrative. Book II had a big cast and I experimented with multiple points of view. (Especially from midway on, when I discovered that yes, multiple points of view were needed, and helped the story. I wish I had done that sooner.) Book III plays with the past and the present, tracking the Special in the past all the way to the present, while our “heroes” are in the present. (It's not working as well as I would have liked it to work, but better than I feared.) Book IV will probably be a bit different in style as well. Book V might be five or six independent but related short stories looking at a few characters in our Universe—some we know, some we don't yet. I'm not being cagey on purpose: while the overall story line is pretty clear in my head, its breakdown into books, chapters, and scenes very much gets pounded in drafts.

Really, if you scratch all the self-aggrandizing rhetoric, I just view it all as a large-scale writing exercise. One that lets me write smut, of course, which is the immediate goal, and the reason I started writing the serial in the first place, but also one that lets me play around with a large world in which I get to tell various connected stories that make up a larger story while experiment with different stylistic perspectives and explore some rather twisted aspects of my own psyche, since all writing is just self-psychoanalysis.

I hope this makes some sort of sense. The TL;DR summary of this post probably is as follows. If you're reading The Adjusters, rest assured: there is a beginning, middle, and end to the story. But we're going to get there through a series of arcs each with its own beginning, middle, and end.

Hey, I did warn you that there would be over-thinking in this post...

To compensate, I'll leave you with some lighter fare MC smut I ran across over the weekend. It's a story by Kenn Ghannon, Ring of Command: “Andrew Malley is scuba-diving with his father off the coast of Jamaica when he finds a ring half-embedded in the sandy floor. Without thought, he slips the ring on his finger -- and his life will never be the same.” Your typical guy finds a magic artifact and controls folks around him, but it's well written, doesn't go too far too fast, and has interesting characters. A warning: the characters are teenagers, and there's incest involved. I'm looking forward to see where the story is going.