Jesse S. Smith

Author, Multimedia Producer, Dad

Writing Projects Status Update for July 2021

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Lately my creative focus has been on poetry.

“But wait, I thought, didn’t you say…?”

Yes, I had previously announced my intention to release my fantasy novella some time around now-ish; but I get distracted, you guys. I am still planning to release that fantasy novella; and fans of Terry Pratchett-style slapstick fantasy will hopefully agree it was worth the wait.

[ Update: Although it took some time, I have followed through on that commitment!  I’m pleased to announce that The Overlords of Tlegryth is now available from your favorite online bookseller.  It’s hilarious. Buy copies for all your friends! ]

“All right, so what are these poems, then?”

I’m so glad you asked! As I have mentioned in a few of my previous status updates (and several times on social media), at the height of the Coronavirus lockdown in Spring of 2020, I began a project of writing a poem a day for a year. True to form, I went all-in. A year later, I had written nearly seven hundred poems in a variety of forms: blank verse, free verse, ballad, haiku, sonnet, limerick, and more. More importantly, the poems discuss the psychological nightmare of protracted isolation; the Black Lives Matter protests; the Oregon wildfires; the 2020 election; the January 6 insurrection; and more! This collection may be the most interesting thing I’ve ever done, so I’m excited to do some editing and eventually share it with the world.

Possible Pen Name

I recently did a Google search for my own name, and the results were quite discouraging.  It’s difficult to be unique when you have a name as common as “Smith.” I have been blogging on various sites for some 13 years, and I have written hundreds of posts; but I don’t even show up on a web search for my own name.  All the search results are about other guys with the same name! To make matters worse, at least one of those other guys named Jesse Smith is also living right here in Oregon, lol.  Google is trying to tell me that I’m just not that important! And there is no clear path to suddenly becoming so important that I would begin to outrank all the other Jesse Smiths of the world.

So I think what I’m going to do is draw a line in time. I have a huge backlog of poems, short stories, and novellas. Most of what I wrote before Spring of 2020, I will eventually release under my own real name on a “drip content” basis until it’s all out there.  Past that, I will only use my own name on thematically appropriate select works.

My mythology reimaginings series, and all the poetry I’ve been working on more recently, will eventually be released under a cool pen name, to be determined.

“Are you hiding?”

No.  This decision is about standing out in a crowd.

I will tell you what my pen name is, once I have chosen it! Here I am, announcing the plan in advance. It’s not a secret.

So stay tuned for future announcements, and in the meantime, have a great day!

Onward and upward!

 

Writing Projects Status Update for May 2021

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Howdy folks! Just checking in with a status update to keep you posted on my writing projects.

Year of Poetry

In April of 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdown and just before the Black Lives Matter protests changed our social consciousness forever, I began a project of writing a poem a day for a year. I didn’t impose any rules on what kind of poems they should be in terms of form or length. By the time I wrapped that up in April of 2021, I had written hundreds of poems on subjects ranging from current events to ancient mythology, with a particular emphasis on calendars, holidays, and biographies of historical figures. The poems include sonnets, ballads, blank verse, haiku, limericks, song lyrics, doggerel, experiments in other formal forms, and even some free verse. After some edits, I’ll try to figure out how to get it published.

Mythology Reimaginings Series

Well, if you’ve known me personally or followed me online for any length of time, then you already know that I tend to attempt more simultaneous projects than I can reasonably complete. I write because I enjoy writing, but the books I have self-published to date (including my most recent release, The Gompa Oasis) have not been particularly commercially successful (that said, a huge thank you to everyone who has bought and reviewed them, you folks are true friends). Anyway since I don’t make a lot of money from my writing, it sometimes gets punted to the back of my priority list. My occupation was “web developer” for several years; but my business fell apart in 2016, and between that and the pandemic shutdowns, I’m just a stay-at-home Dad now, homeschooling two great kids while my amazing wife works as the breadwinner for the family. Cooking, cleaning, and supervising children takes the majority of my time, and it’s never done. I still have my professional plans, though, and I still have a few clients who have stuck with me through the years. One of those clients notified me of a software bug a few months back; and trying to patch that darn thing has turned into a major rewrite of a huge piece of code with literally thousands of files that all have to work together. I’ve made substantial headway, but I would have liked it to be complete weeks ago. I have prioritized the coding project at the expense of the mythology project. I’ve only picked up my Bible retelling project a couple times in the past few months. I am looking forward to getting back to it. I already have some ideas for the next one(s) in this series, and I have some new ideas for improvements to my old Arthurian and Greek mythology projects, too, when I’m able to get to them. Someday I might even try to get them published.

Fantasy Novella

I have a lot of other ideas about projects I would like to write and release; but at this point, I think what I’m going to do next is edit and self-publish a fantasy novella. This one is a really fun, lighthearted adventure piece, excerpted from a longer work that I wrote waaaay back in the summer of 1995: my very first novel, which has never been previously released. An enchantress in training uses her magical powers to rescue her farmboy/revolutionary boyfriend from a dank dungeon, and together they enlist the aid of a wizard and a dragon to fight the evil demigods who have seized power in the kingdom. Can their scrappy fighting force face down insurmountable odds against a well-armed magical opponent? I would like to have this one ready for release by July, but folks, the timing will depend on the completion of my coding project (see above), so I can’t promise a firm date.

Self-help book

I have a self-help book project as well. See, I tend to write in whatever genre I’ve been reading; and I’ve been reading a lot of self-help books lately: so this was almost inevitable. It’s past 40k words already, but a connection over on LinkedIn advised me to build a platform before I try to release it; and now I have another years-long project. So I’ve been making YouTube videos about self-improvement. The world is generally unimpressed thus far, but I’ve received encouragement from a few people who are close to me, and that’s all the encouragement I need. So go subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch for my future blog posts on self-help topics!

What are you working on these days? Please feel welcome to leave a comment! I’ll be talking to you soon. Have a great day.

Writing projects update for November 2020

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I have been working on several projects all at the same time. I may have overcommitted myself, possibly not for the first time…

My “main” WIP right now is still my retelling of the Bible. I am really excited about this project, it has a lot of potential. Writing characters like Jesus, Lucifer, and the rest, is so inherently problematic that the book is already funny before I have even written it. I am nominally participating in this November’s NaNoWriMo, but I am not pushing for a crazy word count this time because: I have several other projects, I’m currently the “learning coach” for my kids who can’t return to school due to Covid-19, and I perhaps foolishly decided to write this whole book in verse form, which does tend to take more time per word.

As I mentioned in a blog post the other day, I recently finalized a new self-publishing project. If you have never self-published, you may not appreciate all that’s entailed once you finalize the text: including editing, layout and book design, file formatting, cover design, a different version for the e-book, ISBNs, barcodes, metadata; and all that’s before you even get into actually marketing the thing! The official publication date is coming soon and I will be posting about this but it has been a really fun and very time-consuming project.

My other two main writing projects right now are both retrospective collections: one of poetry, and one of short stories. I would like to finish both before the end of the year. This is creating something of a time crunch, because the short story project is rather long (ba dum psh) and editing it is competing with writing my main WIP for time and attention.

I am also diligently writing a poem a day, every day, for my poem-a-day project. I’ve been working on that for more than six months now, and what a six months they have been! I have written poems on topics including coronavirus, Black Lives Matter, the Oregon wildfires, the Presidential election, and one of my all-time favorite subjects, time itself; also, biographies of historical persons, retellings of famous fairy tales, and more!

Aaand I recently wrote & published some blog posts, and drafted a series of blog posts that hasn’t been published yet.

Thanks for checking in! I hope you are well and feeling creative. Comment below or ping me on Twitter to let me know what you’re working on these days. Have a great day!

 

Photo credit: Jonas Leupe via Unsplash

Writing Progress Update for July, 2020

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If you follow me on social media then you probably already know my main current event:

Retelling The Bible as Epic Poetry

I am participating in “Camp NaNoWriMo” (short for National Novel Writing Month) this month for July. I have set myself an ambitious goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month. To make my job that much more complicated, I decided at the last minute to write the whole thing as an epic poem. Oh, and my subject matter is a retelling of The Bible. Yes, that Bible.

This will be the fifth book I have written in my mythology reimagining and retellings series (although after I edit and hopefully eventually publish them it will probably be the third one in the sequence). I have superimposed a sort of alternate reality superstory on top of the familiar myths to make them all fit together in some semblance of a quasi-coherent story. It’s a little complicated but, anyways, I am referencing the Bible a lot while I write, as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost; and I have been listening to Dante’s Divine Comedy trilogy as audiobooks. Another influential source is William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I highly recommend to even the most casual philosopher.

Other Writing Projects

So, but in order to embark on this project I had to put some others on hold.

Norse Mythology

I called the first draft of my Norse mythology reimagining project “good enough for now” on June 22 at a word count of 88,630 words: a little later but also a little longer than I had anticipated. It is still badly in need of major editing; but my plan seems to be to draft the entire series and then edit afterwards to eliminate continuity errors, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Science Fiction

I am hopefully nearing completion of my science fiction novella based on a short story I wrote more than 20 years ago. I have rewritten large sections, including the ending and a pivotal scene in the middle, and added new action and character development and “world building.” It remains very silly in a Douglas Adams sort of way. I intend to self-publish it in the vague future.

Poetry

I am still writing daily poems, separate from my Biblical epic. I had thought July would focus largely on American history but instead I seem to be mostly writing about Ovid, the famous exile poet. I doubt there’s much commercial market for poetry-as-book-report, but I am no Robert Frost, and there’s no point pretending that I might suddenly become someone else, lol. I have been reading Frost, too, lately, and I love his work; but temperamentally and stylistically, I personally have more in common with Ovid and, let’s face it, Catullus. Not in terms of epigrammatic technique specifically but in terms of raw pathos more generally.

Anyhoo, if you’re a writer, keep on writing, and if you’re not, keep on doing what you do!

 

Writing Progress Update for May 2020

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I really never stop writing. Some people seem to have trouble getting started or deciding what to say. That’s not my problem. Anyhow, I’m not here to talk about my problems today. This is just an update on my current writing projects.

Norse mythology

In early April, I wrote the ending of my Norse mythology reimagining. It took me another few weeks to transcribe my handwritten changes, and then I started adding the last few sections to fill in some gaps in the plot. The section I added most recently is deeply offensive and totally hilarious. The project is still incomplete, but it is most of the way there. I have been working on it for 13 months now, and it’s currently 75,608 words long. I will probably finish it in the next month or two.

Poetry collection 1

I recently began writing a collection of new poetry inspired by Ovid’s Fasti. Fasti is chiefly concerned with Pagan holidays, the structure of the calendar, and the history behind the names of the months. Anyone who has read my novella Rise of the Pagans will know that these are longstanding interests of mine. I was thrilled to learn that Ovid, famous for his epic Metamorphoses, had written a book of poetry about the calendar; and having read it, I immediately wanted to write one, too!

Poetry collection 2

Having decided to write a book of poetry, the thought occurred that I should first publish some of the poetry I have written previously. For that purpose, I began assembling a collection of all the poems I have written since high school. Surprisingly, there weren’t even that many, until I also included song lyrics. But I have written a lot of songs over the years! I arranged the collection chronologically, starting almost 30 years ago and ending last month. But I wasn’t happy with that ending, because I omitted all the epic long-form narrative poetry that I’ve been working on recently (because I intend to publish it separately), and that left the final section of the collection filled with nothing but Twitter poems. Some of them are all right, as Twitter poems go; but ending the collection that way failed to really demonstrate my progress as a writer, which was kind of the purpose of arranging the pieces chronologically. So, I did what writers do: I began writing some new pieces. The collection now concludes with a series of narrative poems in blank verse, each of them a brief retelling of a familiar story or fairy tale. I will probably write two or three more of them and then kick myself for making the collection too long, and then I will have to make some difficult decisions about what to cut to bring it back down to a readable length. It’s currently about 19k words, including some commentary; which is probably about 18k words too long, lol.

Twitter break

Twitter is a cesspool of toxic sludge. If you know me from Twitter, you may or may not have noticed that I am taking a break. I don’t know when I will be back. Eventually I will need to use the platform for marketing my books, but given the way I’m feeling now, I might just automate my account and avoid ever looking at my feed, ever again. My sister recently remarked to me, “Twitter is a big bowl full of popcorn insults and bulls**t,” which seemed remarkably accurate and also slightly concerning because I didn’t know she had an account. If you are still on there, dear reader, I hope you’re having more fun than I was having before I logged out. Anyway I said I wasn’t going to talk about my problems, so…

Back to the poetry! Have a great day.

 

Photo: Jesse Smith 2020

Writing Progress Update for May, 2019

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Completed a first draft

Not big news to the world, but big news to me: I have officially moved on from the first draft of my Robin Hood reimagining. I wrapped it up at the beginning of April, almost exactly a year after I began writing it, at a word count of about 73,000 words, set in blank verse.  I have no illusions that this project is finished, it needs substantial editing and probably rewrites in several places; but the first draft was complete and it was time to move on to my next project.

Started a new project

Accordingly, more or less the same day I decided I was done working on Robin Hood for a while, I started working on my new project. Don’t worry, I won’t be so foolish as to try to make this one a poem also.  This will just be a regular novel like any other novel, with the notable difference that this novel will be a euhemeristic modern reimagining of Norse mythology.

I can’t offer a word count at this time because I write my super-rough drafts longhand in a notebook.  I’ve been working on it for just over a month, and I’ve filled something like 46 notebook pages, which includes a rough outline and some notes as well as the beginning of the story itself.  I write super slow, you guys.

Research

As before when I worked on the other books in my mythology reimagining series, this project is based on research.  In some ways Norse mythology is simpler because there are fewer original sources.  No surviving written accounts of the mythology were left by the people who actually believed in Odin, Frigg, and Thor as their primary gods.  It was only hundreds of years after everyone had converted to Christianity that the bards (skalds) set down the Poetic Edda, followed some time later by Snorri Sturlusson’s Prose Edda.  I obtained two translations of the Poetic Edda, but quickly found the Prose Edda is much more readable.  There are a number of other historical records preserved by the people of Scandinavia and Iceland, but the Eddas are the only ones concerned with mythology as the core of their substance.  That means, for the student of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda are literally the only two original sources in existence.

I’m reading some other retellings, too, though.  My sister gave me a copy of the d’Aulaires’ Norse Myths several years ago, which I have read several times with my children and which has fundamentally informed my view of the mythology.  I also got a copy of Roger Lancelyn Green’s retelling of the Norse myths, which I haven’t read yet.  (Incidentally, my current plan is essentially to mirror Roger Lancelyn Green’s literary career, at least in terms of writing retellings of all the major myth cycles of our culture; with the difference that his versions are straight tellings rated G and meant for younger audiences, whereas my versions are wild modern reimaginings and rated R, probably suitable for basically nobody, lol.)  And to round it off, I got a copy of Neil Gaiman’s recent bestselling Norse Mythology, which seems meticulously researched and crafted with the artistry that we have come to expect from Mr. Sandman himself.

And that’s where I’m at with that for now! I’ll posted occasional updates as the project progresses.