I'm totally distracted right now, so it would make sense if trying to write my current project, called The Ephemera, was harder than normal.

(You know: distracted because I've got that Kickstarter campaign going right now, for special signed editions of Plague of Demons and my complete Gore Point trilogy. Running a Kickstarter turns all of life into an ADHD fugue.)

But as I think I've mentioned before, I underwent a weird sort of "writer's reboot" last year. As a result, I've been consciously re-acquainting myself with storytelling skills that used to be automatic. It's less like learning and more like remembering (which, by the way, is totally on-theme for The Ephemera, which is about memory and whether we truly know the things we think we know), but it's still a process. It still takes work, and it still takes time.

Because I'm now paying more attention to all of that used-to-be-subconscious stuff, I'm noticing some of my own tricks and eccentricities as if they're new.

Today, I thought I'd share one such revelation with you ... complete with some of my in-progress excerpts.

I just recently realized how standard -- and how important -- the "discussion scene" is to my understanding of a story.

It works like this:

You guys know me. You know I get all ethereal and weird during parts of a story, and because of it my characters sometimes don't know which end is up. It happened in The Beam at SerenityBlue's school, where gifted kids seemed to be changing reality and nobody was clear what was true. It happened in The Dream Engine, when Eila had to contend with Daw Blackburn's maddening question "What is real, Eila?" over and over again. It happened constantly in Unicorn Western, whenever Edward infuriatingly refused to tell Clint what the unicorns understood but humans didn't. And it sure as hell happened in The Island, where I'm still not entirely sure what was going on.

When there are a lot of "what's happening here?" questions at the beginning of a story, I get just as lost as the characters. That happened in The Ephemera ... seeing as memory looks a lot like illusion.

I've learned that the only way out of these situations (for me as the author; forget about the people in the story) is to get my confused characters together with some sort of authority figure. The idea is to get them talking, at which point the authority explains the world. It's a shameless info dump that I try my best to make entertaining enough that you don't think, "What an asshole. This is just an info dump."

I start them talking, and soon enough the "authority" character explains everything to me.

Here's an example from The Ephemera, my current work-in-progress:

See what's going on there? That's me, not Elara, wondering what's happening. I just put my own confusion in a character's head.

After an introduction like that, there's typically a little bit of banter. Then the authority starts to say some really weird and disjointed shit that doesn't seem related to anything, but it's all part of the process:

The phrase "society is a cult" had occurred to me a few nights prior, just as I was falling asleep. I made myself roll over and write it on my bedside notepad because it sounded awesome. I knew what it meant at the time (you'll need to read The Ephemera to find out), but I didn't know it had anything to do with Elara's question until Vespera said it out of the blue one morning.

And I do mean out of the blue. I don't really control my dialogue, you understand. If I have to put words in my characters' mouths, I'm doing something wrong. A better choice is to let my mind go blank, get into flow, and listen for what the story says. These are the characters' words, not mine.

I don't usually know where the conversation is headed, so I let it go where it wants. The discussion flows free-form, often meandering for a long time. I let it do what it wants. I know I can edit the scene later, after I start to understand.

Usually, the confused character eventually gets annoyed with the authority and balks. Almost always, actually. That was standard in Unicorn Western. Clint would ask a question, Edward would be a gatekeeping asshole about the answer and just say some random-sounding philosophical shit instead of being helpful, and then Clint would get mad. "Enough of an answer" only came after Clint (the stand-in for me and my own ignorance) became annoyed with Edward's rambling and put his foot down. It always required a lot of back-and-forth, though, before any progress was made.

In the case of The Ephemera, I wasn't surprised when Elara did the same:

I think my characters always get annoyed because a person has to reach their breaking point to have a breakthrough. They have to get past what they think they understand before they can open themselves up to something unbelievable that they never would have accepted before. I hate it when characters in books and movies are simply told something crazy, and they accept it without argument. I like to let my characters get pissed off first, then come to their own conclusion that there's simply no other option than to consider the impossible.

At this point, Elara makes a bit of progress. Not much, but some:

After enough of this kind of thing, the world starts to take shape for me. Only after I've worked it out by listening to my characters speak (which is really just a clever way of allowing my subconscious mind to have its say) can I comprehend and move on.

I didn't realize any of this until I got into a logjam with The Ephemera. Once I did -- and once I noticed a lot of similarity between Elara's dilemma and the aforementioned dilemma in The Dream Engine -- I formalized the solution in my own head. In tribute to that scene in The Dream Engine, I began calling this kind of thing a "Daw Blackburn scene" because the authority character in The Dream Engine is named Daw Blackburn.

And that's cool, and it's fun to realize ... but just as I enjoy telling you my process in these emails, I also enjoy poking fun at it right inside the book. So I was like, "Oh, it's a Daw Blackburn scene? Then I'd better make some tongue-in-cheek reference to the Dream Engine scene here in The Ephemera because Easter eggs are awesome."

So I wrote an Easter egg into the scene. Because awesome.

If you haven't read The Dream Engine, this next passage won't mean anything to you. If you have, though, you'll hopefully think it's as funny as I do. (And by the way, reply and let me know if you would understood the reference if I hadn't explained it).

Here's how the scene opens:

Get it? It's not a huge thing, but it's a direct Dream Engine reference ... and the Dream Engine reference itself is a reference to something else. (See how layered I am? I'm complex and stuff.)

In the original Daw Blackburn scene (now an archetype for my problem-solving story technique), Daw gives Eila a drink called thunderclap. "I read that somewhere" is my wiseass way of pointing it out, because it's in another of my books.

(What even you Dream Engine people might not know is that thunderclap, which does nothing at all, is itself a joke at the expense of a social media service called "Thunderclap" that Sean and I used to promote our 2014 "Fiction Unboxed" Kickstarter campaign, from which The Dream Engine was born. Or at least, we TRIED to use Thunderclap to promote our campaign. Turned out, it did nothing at all.)

Yeah. I know. Welcome to the weirdness inside my head.

Anyway, I thought you might enjoy that peek into my process. I'm just starting to truly understand it myself ... or at least as much as something like this can be understood.

Before I go, I wanted to remind you to check out my current Kickstarter campaign, for Plague of Demons (the final book in the Gore Point trilogy). You can get just the newest book in the campaign, or you can get the entire trilogy in matching hardbacks, paperbacks, and/or ebooks.

OH: And you can also get the behind-the-scenes audio author's commentary for all three books. Those commentaries are chock full of weird, inside-baseball tidbits and Easter eggs like the one I just shared.

​Click here to join my current Kickstarter before it ends.

In the meantime, happy reading!
JT

P.S: Backers of the Plague of Demons Kickstarter campaign will also be able to buy ANY signed paperback(s) from my catalog after the campaign ends. It's a weird concept, so I suggest going here and scrolling down to the subhead "Signed copies of any of my other books will be available as post-campaign add-ons" toward the bottom for a better explanation.