Writing – calobannon.com

8/27/26

Happy August, everyone. I thought it might be a good time for a writing-centric post, one that eschews the world’s absurdities in favor of something positive. One of the great pains of writing is getting stuck—not writer’s block, per se. More like when you find yourself staring absently at the screen, or reading the last sentence you wrote over and over as the clock ticks on. Chances are you know what comes next, or at the very least where you are trying to go . . . yet the cursor continues to blink.

My solution to this state is to write what I know, and I don’t mean this in the way you have probably heard it. The old stock phrase write what you know suggests you should write about stuff that aligns with your prior knowledge, something you know about. If you are a woodworker, you should have a character work wood. This philosophy is good and fine, but it is not what I’m talking about. I am talking about moving on to something you know you can write whenever you hit a wall. Maybe an upcoming scene is clear in your head, but you can’t seem to finish the part that gets you there. Maybe you are wary of leaving that troublesome transition section unwritten because it could kill the flow of the story, or cause continuity issues, or—whatever the reason.

If the idea of jumping ahead causes you consternation, there is a simple trick you can use to move on without leaving a gaping hole in the narrative. I am generally not a fan of outlining and/or plotting works of fiction—doing so can pigeonhole your characters before they even begin to take shape—but in the micro sense, it can be useful. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

The following paragraph represents what a section I’ve been struggling with might look like:

“I know whatever is taking place in the lowercase sentences should be here, so I am having a go at it, writing it out in that loathsome, first draft form that looks good at the time and leads to head-shaking the next day. I know the protagonist is doing this and that, working their way towards a scenario that may or may not be clear to me. THE CAPS ARE WHERE I SHIFT TO A FORM OF SHORTHAND. I HAVE ONE IDEA FOR THIS. I HAVE ANOTHER IDEA FOR THAT. I AM PRETTY SURE THIS WILL GO HERE, BUT THERE IS NO REASON TO WRITE IT NOW BECAUSE IT COULD POTENTIALLY CHANGE.”

Sometimes the blocks of caps are little more than ideas, and sometimes they are closer to prose. Sometimes those chunks wind up being pretty darned close to what was required, and other times they go straight in the trash. It doesn’t much matter what you do with the shorthand so long as it serves its intended function, which is to keep you moving along. Oftentimes I find that if I write out a section in caps with zero regard for the form—or how I will ultimately want it to read in the end—it is easier to get an idea out. For example:

THE ROOM THEY WALK INTO IS DARK AND DAMP AND FULL OF TRASH. CHARACTER ONE IS DISGUSTED AND SAYS SO. CHARACTER TWO SAYS COME ON, IT’S NOT THAT BAD. CHARACTER ONE SAYS MAYBE NOT TO A SLOB LIKE THEM, WITH THEIR DAMAGED SENSE OF SMELL FROM YEARS OF LIVING IN FILTH . . . and so on. Once you’ve got the idea out, you can begin to rework it: “She could see nothing beyond the threshold, but whatever was in there, she could smell it. The scent of a rain-soaked apartment dumpster . . .”

Every writer has their own tricks for dealing with roadblocks, though you could do worse than giving the above process a try. It took years of trial and error for me to land on this method, and it generally serves to keep me writing—generally. I can still get myself marooned on a page with the best of them, and sometimes there is nothing for it. Such is life.

Until next time,

Cal

Life, Writing

7/31/26

I don’t know how many of you still read your local newspaper. I hope there at least a few of you out there. For my part, I would take the print edition of a local paper over the doom loop of a national news site any day, and the same applies to your good, old-fashioned TV news. If you find yourself watching a national news broadcast anytime soon, consider how many times you hear one or more of the following words: shocking, stunning, harrowing, frightening, terrifying.

Is it really a shock someone committed a violent crime in the United States of America? Were you stunned when one of your esteemed politicians said something stupid or unbecoming? In my experience, local news tends to be less prone to embellishment for the sake of shock and awe. You’ll still hear a few stunnings and terrifyings here and there, but because the anchors are not using such terms to describe every piece of news, the words hold truer to their intended function.

Maybe you are wondering what I’m getting at here (I am wondering the same thing myself as I write this). I guess the point I am trying to make is that in our strange, modern world, there seems to little regard for the actual meaning of words. You see it in news and broadcast media. You see it in politics, of course. You also see it in academia, where any slight to one’s sensibilities might be labeled an act of violence. You can even find it in the opinion section of your local newspaper. I’ve long been irritated with correspondents’ habitual abuse of adjectives, but that was not what got me started on this post.

The paper I like to read prints a handful of short letters to the editor, most of which—surprise, surprise—focus on politics. Some opinions are informed, others are not. Nothing to write home about there. But every so often someone will fashion (and for some reason, the paper will publish) a long-winded diatribe stuffed with inaccessible terms and rhetoric, the kind of language that would die if dictionaries failed to preserve it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your average reader’s response to such a piece would be: what? So why write something like this at all? What purpose does it serve?

Intentionally inaccessible pieces of writing are not meant to inform. They function only to sell the intellectual superiority of the author and their oh-so-dignified take on the matter. I find this type of manufactured credibility particularly annoying because (A) at the end of the day, it is just bad writing, (B) professional editors do not seem to recognize it is bad writing, and (C) it reinforces the idea that knowing a few big words adds value to your opinion.

You can find these types of bloated, insufferable op-eds just about anywhere. Sites hosting amateur movie reviews are rife with them, for example, one-star ratings followed by five-hundred words on plot development and dialogue and character motivation, the writer claiming they rarely write reviews but just had to for this one. I think the South Park episode lambasting Yelp reviewers said just about all that needs to be said on this phenomenon, so check it out. It is one of my favorites.

Anyway, the long-winded diatribe I found so irritating was five or six paragraphs long, and if you cut out the unnecessary words and metaphors and convoluted turns of phrase, the guy’s actual point would amount to two or three sentences. A reader would read those sentences and think to themselves, yeah, well that’s nothing new, because it wasn’t. Free of the manipulative wordplay, it was no more than the same tired point hundreds of political commentators make every day.

Whether it’s news anchors abusing adjectives, wannabe intellectuals stroking their ego or idealogues hijacking words, it all boils down to the same sad truth: It’s been a bad decade for the English language. There’s no harm in having a little fun with it—I try to—but when that fun veers into shenanigans, that’s where I draw the line. I can’t be the only one who sees it, right?

Until next time,

Cal

Life, Writing

6/23/26

It’s about that time again: posting time, or in truth, well past it. I tell myself I should post something here every three to four weeks, though I rarely seem to meet the deadline. I could blame this on all types of distractions and what-nots, though it really boils down to two things: (1) I forget, and (2) when I actually remember it’s time to post something, I put it off. Tomorrow is always another day, and then the tomorrow that follows it.

I’ve made some progress on the next book . . . and I hesitate to say any more than that. There is still plenty to do, and I don’t want to go throwing potential release dates around yet. The path is always rife with roadblocks, and I imagine I’ll hit one or two before the end. I can see a bit further ahead with this one than I have in the past—always a good thing—though one still must travel the distance.

While considering what to write about for the rest of this post, I recalled an article I discovered a few weeks ago. The piece was about a prize-winning author who has been accused of either (A) using AI to manufacture prose or (B) not being an actual person at all. I have harped and crowed about generative AI in previous posts, so I am not going to focus on that bit. Rather, I wanted to highlight some of the criteria referenced for determining whether this author is in fact flesh and blood.

The article stated that this particular writer had next-to-no social media presence (I am paraphrasing from memory), which supposedly constituted a red flag. My thought was, so what? Do authors need to subject themselves to the myriad offenses of Big Tech companies to be considered authors? Are humans required to do so to be considered human?

You may have noticed I do not keep profiles on any of the big name social media platforms (apart from Goodreads—I find Goodreads’s cause more noble), nor have I since circa 2012. I looked into it when I was first getting ready to publish, and I did not like what I found. The amount of personal data such platforms expect you to provide is Orwellian—A three-dimensional mapping of your face? Seriously?—and for an author looking to maintain a degree of personal privacy, it was nothing short of a deal breaker. I would rather air my thoughts on this humble site than allow the data-mongers to sell my stats off to the highest bidder. You’ve heard the saying, right? If a product is free, then you are the product?

Offenders will claim they are collecting such information in the name of security, and whether you choose to believe that is your prerogative. Cybersecurity is no joke in the modern world, and I don’t doubt that is at least part of the equation. But how much is it worth? Do you have to be of a certain age to value privacy nowadays? Should we have to forfeit it altogether to access so-called public forums?

For the record, I am inclined to believe the award-winning author in question was likely a cheat (there were other notable tells), along with a boatload of others who have managed to slip through the cracks. Writing a book is no walk in the park. It takes time, patience, and determination, not to mention a fair degree of knowhow. Society is full of wannabes, and thanks to AI, they now have an easy workaround.

But choosing privacy over the Big Tech data-traps should not automatically lead to questions of one’s validity. Pen names exist for a reason, and they existed long before corporations sought to commodify personal information. Some of us would prefer to keep our private lives out of the public sphere, and while the data-brokers might frown on such behavior, the literary world should not.

I have to wonder what Mark Twain would have made of all this. Or J.D. Salinger.

Until next time,

Cal

Writing

4/12/26

This blog is long overdue for a post, and seeing I don’t have any news regarding my own writing at the moment, I thought I would talk a bit about the formatting process. You might think formatting a piece of writing is something to be done after the fact, after drafting and revising and nitpicking and revising and nitpicking some more. I used to think this too.

I can only speak for myself here, but I have found that beginning a work with the end product in mind—or how you would prefer it to look in book form, in other words—can be beneficial. There are detailed tutorials freely available about how to format a book using Word and similar programs, so I am not going dig too deep into the how of the process here. Rather, I am going to list a few steps that may save you some time in the long run, not to mention the stress and tedium that comes with reformatting hundreds of pages of prose.

Look over your bookshelf and decide what size of paperback would best suit your work, then set the margins of your document to match that size (I tend to prefer the 5.25 x 8 inch format). When you set up your document in such a fashion, you will essentially be typing your paragraphs out the way they will appear in print. If you plan to submit your manuscript to agents or publishers, it is easy enough to save a new copy and clear the formatting and select-all and double-space and so on. Trust me when I say this: it is far easier to de-format a piece than it is to format it.

Set up all of your formatting and preferences before you start writing, or, if that ship has already sailed, take the time to iron this stuff out before your first (or next) round of revisions. What I’m talking about here are things like chapter and section titles, page breaks and spacing and hyphenation settings and the like. If you get this stuff right from the get-go, you can plug your manuscript into any E-Book generation program with minimal fuss (for paperbacks, all you really need is a properly formatted PDF). You can find guides for all of the above online, and, if you are using Word, take a few minutes to read up on the Styles feature. It will fast become your friend.

Don’t worry about adding a table of contents until you have completed multiple revisions and are reasonably sure all of your chapter and section titles are set. Or, better yet, make this step the very last item on your checklist. If you alter the contents of your book after setting this section up, you will need to update the table accordingly, so you might as well wait until everything else is in place. The automated tables in Word can be finicky (particularly if you manually reformat the styles, spacing, et cetera), and you will be glad you only had to format it once.

This one is another post-writing note: When you have reached the end stage of your project, go back to your shelf and pull out five-or-six titles that are similar to your book. Between these five-or-six titles, you should have all the front-and-back matter references you’ll need to create your own pages (copyright, dedication, epigraph, author’s note, and so on). They may look a bit different in places, but they will all (for the most part) be organized in the same fashion. Even if you’ve unearthed a reliable template on the web, this exercise can be useful for sorting out exactly what information you want and/or need to include.

Some of the above largely applies to self-publishing and may-or-may-not be relevant to your endgame, but understanding how a book is going to look in print can (and in my case, does) inform choices you make while writing. It can also save you time, which is no small thing for your average writer. Time is money and money is time, right? Yeah.

Until next time,

Cal

Hawks Pass, The Bad Things, Writing

2/21/26

I am happy to say that The Bad Things is now out and available for purchase (Kindle edition on Amazon and paperbacks via Amazon or IngramSpark and affiliates). It took a bit longer to get over the line than I was anticipating, but alas, sometimes that’s just how it goes. In light of the new release, I figured I would write a bit about the book, the series it will ultimately belong to and why I opted to publish it a few short months after releasing Hawks Pass.

Let’s start with a bit of background. I completed the rough cuts of both Hawks Pass and The Bad Things some time ago. I wrote the first draft of Hawks Pass from 2021-2022 and shelved it, and over the ensuing years I dusted it off, revised it and reshelved it multiple times. The same was true of The Bad Things to a lesser degree (2023-2024), though the tale of how this story came about is a bit more interesting.

I had been trying to write a story involving the types of antagonists in The Bad Things for years, and each of those attempts keeled over and died somewhere along the way. I kept at it, reworking the settings and characters and exposition and so on, and eventually I landed on an idea I liked. I hit a roadblock there, so I started writing something else, and about 40,000 words into that something else, I realized it was an extension of what I had already been trying to write.

But that extension did not evolve into The Bad Things. I hit another roadblock with that one and began working on a different project, and—once again—after writing a good chunk of the story, I realized that effort could be tied to the two others I’d set aside. With that understanding in mind, I was able to plow straight through to the end of the first draft without hitting the same miserable obstacles, and that story—the 3^rd attempt, if you want—ultimately wound up as the first installment in the series. The final revisions that took me so damned long to complete were to ensure The Bad Things could function as book one of a trilogy, that I was properly securing any loose knots, that I was not giving too much away, et cetera.

As for the two stories on the shelf, I will be releasing them as the 2^nd and 3^rd installments in the series in due time. I know the 2^nd book will be titled Relics, and, seeing a good chunk of that story has already been set down, I would cautiously estimate it will be completed no later than the end of 2026. As for the third—my first genuine attempt at establishing this world and the one I originally set out to write—there is plenty of work to be done. As the old saying goes, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

I thought it appropriate to write a bit about the process here due to the seedy environment modern-day writers are forced to navigate. One might assume an author releasing two books within a few months of each other is using AI in some capacity, and I want state firmly and for the record: NO, I do not use AI in my work in any form, not for ideas or drafting, not for editing or revisions, not for artwork, nothing, not a stitch. I could dedicate post upon post to the sordid nature of generative AI and its masters, but for now, I will limit it to a few parting thoughts:

If you fed an idea into a construct and it spat out a narrative, not only did you not write it, but it is no longer your idea. If you used a chatbot or similar program to rework problematic prose, those fixes are not your revisions. If you are generating and uploading AI slop to platforms for any purpose at all, for the love of God or whatever you might hold dear, knock it off.

Perhaps if Congress passed a law where profits generated by materials created or improved by AI went straight to the manufacturers of the program, creators would stop polluting the waters.

Just something to think about.

Until next time,

Cal