To quote:
This book is for Anthony Neil Smith who taught
me how to be awful and own it. We don’t do
safe fiction up in here!
— Victor Gischler
That preface is to Gestapo Mars. On the back cover among other things, it is described as “Extraterrestrial Espionage with Sex, Violence, and Nazis.” The book, I do not dare to call it a novel, delivers on all promises. What stops me from calling it awful, shit or other things that I dare not put in print is I read the entire thing. Yes, it delivers sex. Yes, it delivers violence. Yes, it delivers Nazis. It delivers all of them, ALL of them in abundance. Especially the violence and Nazis.
There are plot holes that look like a baby crawling through, a grandmother tottering through a football team to score the winning, come from behind touchdown. The holes are that big. Carter Sloan comes through all of the holes, despite the ships and comrades he leaves behind.
But it is awful and there is a lesson there. As Austin Kleon and lots of other people have said: you need to do the bad things before you can do the good. If you are stuck with your protagonist not able to do what you want, have he/she do it anyway. This is fiction you are writing. Have your star Character do things that are out of character, that does not make sense, that are dumb (from the hero s perspective) Have them do that. You are still writing. You get to go back and rewrite it. And again, and again, But when you rewrite it you know what direction to avoid, what to have the hero do.
This is all how I keep up with my draft. I do not stop writing until I hit my daily goal. I know, I KNOW, a bunch of stuff won’t last. But it is out.
— MichaelRpdx :: h3k
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PS. If you are participating in the thing whose name I will not type and you think or know you are too far behind to make the “goal”, Keep On Going. The idea is to write for a month. Maybe with a big goal. But truthfully the goal is to keep writing. Kinda like One Typed Page.