My Anti-Rules of Storytelling

Do As They Don't Do, and Not What They Say.

I don’t write like anyone else, not the way it’s supposed to be done according to others. I broke everyone else’s rules because I don’t know them. I’ve been riffing.

This is a riff on a growing part of my life since Jan 2021. This is me at my worst & best.

I’m close to finishing writing a 2nd book, via buzzmode of the nanoment, “in public”.

Every page of it was posted on a social network for 30 days straight.
Every chapter was shoehorned into a daily post, as part of a writing community. Everyone else was writing for perhaps the first time, I was 18+ months into a journey.

Everyone around me was posting a couple of paragraphs a day, or doing massive stealth pieces released weekly or monthly for incredible groups. I did both and neither.

I was not the sexy wild-cat-domesticated-cat hybrid that costs a fortune, I was a mule. The thing is, sexy hybrids do the sexy but mules, they carry a lot a long way.

I was going long form in pieces, one piece published daily at a time, shoved on-stage as standalone posts on twitter. A mutt who did history and Sci-Fi at the same time.

I already started “Book #2” before “Book #1” even has a buy button.

At the moment, I’m writing “Book #2”, entitled “Ledger Domain”. The book would not wait for me to print “Book #1”, I couldn’t hold it in, I couldn’t do multiplication in my head to distract me, and cool me down, I had to have it, I wanted “Book #2” so bad.

I’m already done with “Part 3” for “Book #2”, you can see the draft right now.

I waded waist-deep in the history of art and an imagined history in an imaginary world I called the “Verse”. Parts 1 and 2 of “Book #2” were set on Mars and Earth, launched with the first chapter about the birth of the Space Age with JFK’s speech in 1962 at Rice University. It’s all there for everyone to read on Mirror and Typeshare.

My search for taming the wild stallions and mad-dogs of my drafts led me to editors.

You can do it yourself but if you want a nose-job or any other kind of “job”, you have to go to someone who can do the up close and personal. You ask to be gentle but pain before pleasure. I must pay to kill my darlings. It’s hurt-you-so-good work on words.

But first, a long summer of settling the last thing left after my father’s passing, a house. Dad’s passing in Jan 2021 hit an “on” switch to write. In the back of my mind, I told myself, this winter, is when I go to “press”, without knowing what that meant.

Winter isn’t coming, Clubber Lang is coming for my drafts.

Remember what kind of hybrid mutt writer I am. The gears are frozen in this half-non-fiction and half-science-fiction mode. Two stories in one, each time, everytime.

“Book #1” began with an image of an astronaut tumbling through the interior of a city-sized spaceship made from a hollowed out asteroid. I wrote a hell of a story in 30 days, 30+ pages set hundreds of years in the future. After, I longed to fill in the blanks, 5 more times. Over the course of 6 “30 day” periods, I wrote “Book #1”, “Box of Stars”.

“Box of Stars” happens a 1,000 years from now, in a post-war solar system society.

In my mind were history’s “forever wars” (the “30 Years War” came long before America’s wars). The story’s cast of characters included an artist superstar celebrity, a veteran turned entertainment promoter, a war hero and his son, a genius and his more-than-human progeny. All drawn into deciding the shape of the peace.

I wrote "Book #1’s” chapters in 6 series, 6 characters defined by historical themes.

“2X21” (the original 30+ chapters), “1648” (The Dutch Golden Age, Treaty of Westphalia), “1961” (Cold War), “1987” (money and pop), “1999” (networks - Internet up, USSR down), and “1976” (origin stories incl. Apple, Microsoft, Arpa to Inter-net).

Again, I’m neither just non-fiction nor fiction. Pull on a thread, it falls apart.

When I wrote about “JFK’s “We Choose To Go (to the Moon)” 1962 speech, as the intro for “Book #2”, I was riffing. I had a sense and feel, and figured out my way forward. The next chapter was set a century later, in fictional town in Texas, “Heavyville”, a town of “the Space Cooperative”, with a hurricane looming, and a solar storm about to hit Mars. My mule-mind is a runaway rocket.

I didn’t have an outline. I didn’t have a “second brain”, I barely have a first brain.

I wrote 1.75 books over the past 18+ months, in an environment where everybody else was either writing 1.75 paragraphs daily for a few weeks, or posting entire books to the admiration of a pre-arranged audiences. For the last 18+ months I’ve been riffing.

Figma, Canva, twitter, Notion, Typeshare, and Mirror were toys I used to get’er done.

If I could post it on cardboard on the internet, I might do that instead, it’s all the same, there are no rules. On the ‘gram, Onlyfans, telegram, I don’t give a damn.

Last words, my rules, the only rules I have, if I have rules, are:

Just do your best, experiment a lot, tell your tale, and take your own sweet time.

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Here’s some links. You don’t have to click on them, just know I wasn’t BS’ing you.

I used Canva to make images for some reason before I dove into writing. Later, an editor friend of friend said I was making “mood boards” (I had to look that up).

I put in a link to a web 3 service called Tellie, which has links to Notion pages that have all the pages and playlists of music. (For some reason, like the images, I had to make up music playlists for each series of chapters.)

The Tellie Page looks okay but I like my “mood board” better.

Below is the first three-quarters of “Book #2”, “Ledger Domain” on Typeshare.

I even made “threads”, irritating both pro- and anti-threadists because I was messing around with the image formats used, I made my own on figma with a friend’s help.
Here’s one for the “1961” part of “Book #1”. I found an old CIA doc and a friend made templates so I could use them instead of what others were using. Gotta experiment.

I lied, I do hope you click on some links, the music ones, there’s a lot of spotify playlists I made for you, the writers and the readers who found me by accident.