Writing
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On Brains…
I hate my brain.
No, no. Don’t even try to defend that . . . that wrinkly, three-pound lump of fatty tissues! It and I are not talking at the moment.
On, you want to know why? Fine.
INT. GARY’S BATHROOM – NIGHT. BRIGHTLY LIT BY EIGHT (DOWN FROM TWELVE) CFT BULBS.
Gary brushes his teeth, then rinses his face and, especially, his eyes with warm, soothing water to relieve the slightly sandy, scratchy feeling. On Saturday, he tore his right cornea. On Sunday, his left. He has no patience for more cornea-tearing.
He applies copious amounts of the ointment he uses to prevent more-frequent cornea-ripping. He swirls his eyes around to spread the ointment, then makes his way across the bathroom, only able to make out bright and less-bright shapes. He makes it to the door of his bathroom, plots a path to his bed, then shuts off the bright bathroom light.
INT. GARY’S BEDROOM – NIGHT
Gary climbs into bed and spends several minutes getting comfortable. Pillows in just the right places. Blankie pulled up just to the right level. Breathing slows . . . he’s starting to drift off . . .
BRAIN
Hey!
GARY
No.
Gary snuggles into the pillow emphatically.
BRAIN
What do you mean, ‘no’? You don’t even know what I —
GARY
No! Whatever it is, it can wait until tomorrow. When I’ve had sleep. Remember ‘sleep’? You need sleep. My eyes need sleep. Otherwise, I’ll have a hard time staring at a computer screen tomorrow.
BRAIN
(in a disgustingly sing-song tone)
But you’re going to really liiiiike thiiiis!
GARY
Go. Away. I’m trying to sleep.
Brain vomits out the entirety of the remaining plot points of the novel Gary and Brain have been agonizing over for several months. In detail. With red herrings, false leads, and answers to all the difficult parts they’ve been butting against. With — BONUS! — motivations for the secondary protagonist.
Gary rolls over, opens eyes, stares blankly in the direction of the ceiling.
GARY
I loathe you. Why did you wait until — ?
BRAIN
Yeah, yeah. I love you, too.
Pause.
Listen, you should probably write all that down.
Gary rolls over and closes his eyes, snuggling into the pillow once again.
GARY
I’ll remember it.
BRAIN
(whispers, smugly)
GARY
Ass. Whole.
Gary gets out of bed, stumbles through blurry darkness to blurry slightly less-dark adjoining office. The night-light in the office is green, which casts eerie shadows on the walls. He moves the mouse on his PC. Immediately, bright light floods the office — and his bleary, blurry, ointment-filled eyes — with searing whiteness. He leans into the screen, locates the blurry outlines of the Evernote icon, clicks it. Types for about fifteen minutes, eyes closed, hoping he’s making some sort of sense.
GARY
Happy?
BRAIN
You’ll thank me, later.
Gary makes his way back to bed. At least it’s still warm. He goes to sleep in less than five minutes.
So, yeah. My brain and I aren’t on speaking terms, today.
I know, I know. It sounds like I should be thanking my brain, doesn’t it? But, you see, what it did was, it waited until after I sent my first five thousand words off for critique at Paradise Lost 6 to supply me all this. Until after I wrote ten thousand or so words of the novel. Most of which now have to be rewritten. Or at least heavily edited.
Couldn’t it have done this . . . I don’t know, three months ago?
<sigh>
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On Rabbit Holes…
This is both an example of how my brain operates and how amazing The Internet is. And a writing lesson, but in a very left-handed sort of way.
Today on Facebook, a friend of mine made a post asking his friends to recommend a recording of a specific piece of music by Handel.
My brain instantly seizes upon the scene in a M*A*S*H episode where Charles Emerson Winchester, III, asks Margaret Houlihan for a specific recording, with the joke being that the recording doesn’t exist. (Or so I thought! Keep reading.)
Being the snarky person that I am (I’m sure you can’t tell that by any of my posts, here), I instantly responded by typing, “I recommend the 1923 recording by Shnobble” and then stopped. That’s not the exact line. But to get the exact line, I’ll need to know which episode it is.
I have a friend named Mike who is a huge M*A*S*H fan. As big as me. We have frequently talked for long periods of time about M*A*S*H and are able to recognize episodes based on a single line of dialogue or a fragment of plot. I knew it was a late-series episode, and that Margaret was asking a favor . . . but that’s all I had to go on. I asked Mike, and he recognized it, but couldn’t remember exactly, either, only noting that it was probably a 10th- or 11th-season epsiode. So I called up M*A*S*H episode guides and started looking through the titles and short synopses.
I immediately found one in the 11th season that looked promising: “Say No More.” But it involved Margaret coming down with laryngitis and not being able to make it to Tokyo for a probably romantic assignation, so Charles contacts the doctor and has him come to the 4077th, instead. An “uncharacteristic” nice gesture by Charles. But not the one I wanted.
A few minutes later, scanning backwards, I located another possible one in the 10th season called “The Birthday Girls,” which involved Margaret wanting to go to Tokyo for her birthday, but instead getting stuck in the godforsaken middle of nowhere, Korea, with Klinger in a broken jeep.
The episode guide didn’t elaborate, but I was sure that was the one. So I looked up the synopsis of the episode on a better site. It said that Charles asked Margaret for a particular recording in exchange for taking over her teaching duty that she had to miss in order to get to Tokyo, but didn’t reveal the name or the recording. Crap! I’d have to just watch the episode.
I break out my DVDs of M*A*S*H, locate the 10th season, find disk 2, and insert it into my computer. Where it was rejected. Several times. Drat! So I put it into my DVD player and played it on my big screen TV in the living room, fast forwarding to where the scene takes place. Captions on, of course, so I could get the names right.
Keep in mind that all of this is so I can make a one-line snarky comment on a friend’s Facebook post. Just wanted to remind you of that. :)
Charles says, “Lately, I have had a craving to hear the Beethoven Emperor Piano Concerto.” Margaret replies something to the effect of, “So that’s all it’ll take? I get you a record?” Charles continues, “Well, of course it must be the incomparable Artur Schnabel as soloist.” Margaret again replies about that being a snap. To which Charles qualifies, “Ah — And not the 1947 performance. It’s just tentative. On the other hand, the 1932 performance with its limpid runs. . .” Margaret replies that she’ll get it. “If I have to, I’ll find that Schnabel guy and bring him here to play it for you!” (or something like that).
And I had my quote. “I recommend the Schnabel performance, but not the 1947. It’s tentative. But the 1932, with its limpid runs…” Aaaaaand done. Research complete, I moved on.
I share the information with Mike, who in the meantime has also inserted disk 2 of season 10 and is watching it, and provided me with the exact wording of the entire conversation, as you see it above. (Charles’ parts only, which is why the Margaret parts are paraphrased.)
But . . . then I start to wonder who Artur Schnabel was. I’d never paid attention before to the name, because I assumed that because of the resemblance to the word ‘snob’ that Charles was just being a jerk and sending Margaret on a wild goose chase for a recording that didn’t exist, possibly by a piano soloist who didn’t exist. “Shnobble,” as I’d heard it before.
So I Googled Artur Schnabel. And discovered that not only was he a real person, he was quite famous for his recordings of Beethoven piano pieces, including a 1932 performance of The “Emperor” Concerto (The Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73). Stunned, I went to YouTube. And sure enough, there it was. The 1932 performance. I listened. I don’t know what “limpid” means in terms of music, but I’ll be honest, it was quite a performance. I enjoyed listening to it.
. . . Then, I wondered, “Well, was there a 1947 performance?” and I went to YouTube again. By now you’ve probably guessed that there was, indeed a 1947 performance of the same piece, and . . . it wasn’t as good as the 1932. Again, I’ve no clue what Charles meant by “tentative,” but I will say I greatly preferred the 1932 performance to the 1947.
“Wait a minute,” said my brain. It says that a lot, actually. (Just between you and me, it can get quite annoying.) “What,” it demanded, “was the point of that whole conversation, then? If Charles actually gave Margaret a legitimate recording, then it makes him far less of a jerk in that scene.” Note: LESS of a jerk. Instead of sending Margaret on a wild goose chase for a recording that doesn’t exist, he’s now just making fun of her for her lack of sophistication and knowledge about “classical” music, and perhaps for not being able to find a 20-year-old recording of western classical music in Tokyo, Japan.
Basically, my entire understanding of that character has altered, based on this little research rabbit hole down which I found myself falling. Don’t get me wrong: I dove in head first, secure in the knowledge that I would fall into something very like Wonderland.
To bring this back around to writing (because, hey, this is my writing blog): writer Lee H. Grant, who wrote that episode of M*A*S*H, added this little tidbit of character building to this episode, and probably knew good and well that the vast majority of the people watching the episode (in 1982) would have never heard of Artur Schnabel, may or may not know what Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73 was, nor that it was also known as ‘Emperor,’ and nevertheless put it in there because the character, Charles Emerson Winchester, III, would know about it in 1952(ish), when the episode took place. Because Charles was a snob, was a music lover, and had a very wry sense of humor. Perhaps, the little smirk on his face after Margaret promises to “bring that Schnabel guy” back to the 4077th to play it for Charles in person was because Schnabel died in 1951, just a short while before the events of this episode would have taken place, and not because he was a supreme jerk who was reveling in the cruel joke he’d played on a friend.
What writer in his right mind would write something that obscure into his work?
Answer: A good writer, who knows his character, and wants to get the details right, that’s who.
What have I learned from this? Basically, that a good writer does his/her research, to get it as right as possible. “You’re an author. You know that borrowing of the real always gives a better foundation for fiction. There’s a rhythm and sense to reality that’s hard to fake.” This was said to me by Nick, the friend on whose Facebook post I made the snarky comment that started all this. :)
Thank you to Mike, Nick, and Lee H. Grant for making this little lesson in writing possible. And to the anonymous people who compiled the wiki articles about the episodes and the anonymous YouTubers who illegally ripped and uploaded the recordings of the music so I could hear them. They were “limpid” and “tentative.” Apparently.
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On Patterns
Sometimes, we’re not able to see the patterns right in front of our faces, because we’re too close to them. One has to back up to see that there is, in fact, a pattern.
Lately, I’ve been trying to type up what amounts to a synopsis of my novel. It’s not written completely, yet, but . . . it’s for Reasons. That will become clear in the fullness of time. I was specifically trying to come up with what themes are included in my novel. I’m terrible at themes. A theme has to beat me about the head and shoulders with a dead fish before I notice it.
While I was working on that, I noticed something, and started looking at my other writing.
I have a distinct pattern. And it’s pervasive.
I shall give you a couple of examples.
A few years ago, I signed up for an eight-week writing . . . “course,” I guess? Kinda? . . . by local(-to-Atlanta) author David Fullmer. It was eight consecutive Wednesdays or whatever, and consisted of him giving us lectures, answering questions, and assigning homework, and us reading the homework aloud the next meeting. The first week, our assignment was to write a setting. To pick an interior or exterior scene and describe it so that others could see it. No dialogue. If characters are present, they’re ‘furniture.’
This is what I wrote.
I woke flat on my back and opened my eyes to complete blackness. Panicked, I struggled to sit up. Strange noises came at me from all sides, and I realized quickly that they were echoes of my own movements. I made a conscious effort to sit still and breathe normally. I listened, trying to gauge the size of the room. In the distance to my right I could hear the slow, steady drip of water into water. Plink! Plink! Plink! Plink!
“Hello?” I called, and it was redoubled and sent back at me in shards by walls an unknown distance away. I shivered in the still, icy air as the echoes faded away slowly. I was sitting on hard stone so cold it seemed to leech the warmth from my body. I felt around me with my hands, following the coutours of the rock as best I could, its surface rough and clammy against my skin.Not my best effort by any measure, but it shows the pattern: David asked for me to make readers see the scene, and the only thing I wanted to write after that was a setting in complete, total darkness where seeing is impossible.
Another example. I have a time-travel novel that is currently trunked, waiting for me to come up with a better ending. The entire thing came from my saying, “Why is it in time travel novels that it always hinges on some cataclysmic event? Why can’t the event be something ordinary, but could only be done by a certain person?” (It is still trunked because I didn’t handle that premise as well as I wanted to.)
The very first self-contained short story I wrote was from the POV of a woman who was on the losing side in a battle against her second personality. Another was about an old woman who hires a vampire to cure her dying son. Another was the typical rookie-writer ‘Adam and Eve’ story where they were AI programs created sort of by accident on a limited budget by harried programmers. In my dragon and princess story, the dragon is the hero, not the knights. In my novel series, I wanted an Urban Fantasy specifically unlike most of the others that are popular: male cast, third-person POV, characters inside the establishment/law, magic is ‘out,’ no sexy vampires or werewolves, nothing sparkles, etc. Another story evolved from me saying, “If a psychic wants me to believe in them, they need to call me at home and say, ‘Gary, you’re in terrible danger!’ and then prove it.” And then writing that very scenario.
I think my pattern is that I look at the ‘rules’ and try to find a way to turn them on their heads, at least to some extent.
And, you know, I think all writers do this to some extent. But the fact that it took me this long to see it is kind of funny, I guess. How boring would it be to read the same characters in the same stories handling the same situations in the same way, every time? (It would be like re-reading the same book over and over again.)
Now, how does that answer the question about themes? It doesn’t. At all. I suck at themes. I may have mentioned that.
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Guide to Social Media
This is a bit of a departure for this blog, but I figured, “What the heck?” and here it is. :)
Full disclosure: This was originally something I wrote on Facebook as a note. It was inspired by a comment on my friend Nick Falkner’s wall. I started to respond to Nick’s comment, and it got long, so I decided to create it as a note, instead. Another of my friends (Carol Cassara) liked it enough that she asked if she could host it as a guest post on her blog. I was (and am) quite flattered, and it ran on the 8th of December. I waited a few days to put it on my own blog so as not to steal Carol’s blog’s thunder. There may also be a few minor differences between what’s here and what’s on Carol’s blog and on my Facebook page. This is the “definitive copy.”
The characterizations herein are based solely on my personal experience with the sites. Sites I didn’t mention, I have no personal experience with. (Or I do, but couldn’t think of anything pithy to say.) Your mileage may vary, and that’s awesome. Feel free to comment with your own characterizations.
Facebook
is my living room. I’m very careful about the people I invite in. I expect them to have a certain sense of decorum and to not leave garbage all over the place. I expect people I invite in to respect me and the other people in my home. Or if not respect, at least show tolerance. Or if not tolerance, just politely ignore me/them, or come back at a time when the others are not there. No one has to agree, but you don’t have to get in anyone’s face, either. I’m not always the most gracious host because I forget others are around, but I do at least try. If I overstep, I expect to be shown the error of my ways. I have certain rules, though, and if you break them, out you go. It is my living room, after all.
Twitter
is the busiest train station downtown (the one where all the lines meet). Everyone is standing on their own soapboxes, shouting into the wind. Some of them use megaphones. A few people are gathered ’round some of the louder voices, listening intently, but most people are busy and hurry by without paying attention, occasionally looking up from their phone to listen for a few seconds, then moving on. Some people toss heart-shaped coins at speakers’ feet; others yell things at them. A lot of people are just animatronics blaring the same things over and over. A lot of people are just animatronics blaring the same things over and over. Other people just say the same things others are saying without contributing anything original. It’s kind of a mess to figure out which are which.
Google+
is the monorail station at Google HQ. Everyone is still standing on their own organic kale-boxes, but the only people listening are other geeks and nerds with the same cross-section of interests. Most everyone is wearing Google Glass, and some of them are tuning you out, even though they look like they’re in a circle around you. For some reason, a lot of people are intensely angry that they had to go through this station just to get to YouTube. It is an unnecessary stop . . .
Ello
is a bare-bones, designed community that has fallen into disrepair, and no one really goes there anymore, except on a dare. All the buildings look pretty, but if you examine them more closely, they’re all merely façades. They all say, “IN DEVELOPMENT” on the door. There are two people there, right now, wandering around on opposite ends of the subdivision saying, “Hello? Anyone there? Is anyone listening?” The guy who sold you the property led you to believe it was going to rival all the other communities, but now he’s nowhere to be found. Good luck getting a refund.
Instagram
is looking at everyone’s boring vacation slideshow at the same time. Some of them are interesting, but most of the time it’s nothing anyone would ever want to see except your closest friends and family. The occasional celebrity shows up and everyone runs over to see their boring vacation slideshow. At least there are a lot of cats.
Pinterest
is looking at all of your great-aunts’ friends’ scrapbooks at the same time. All of them. They’ve all gone a little “off” and think they’re Martha Stewart, but deep down, they’re closer to Rod Stewart. You know they’re never going to try to do any of those things they put in their scrapbooks, and if they did, they’d never show the results.
Etsy
is kiosks at Burning Man.
Snapchat
is the lunch room at the largest high school, ever. Everyone is so self-obsessed, it’s just a bunch of people standing around taking duck-face selfies and obsessing over finding just the right filter, while talking endlessly about themselves. There’s the occasional streaker, but they mostly seem to be looking at themselves, as well. No one stays for more than a few minutes, and then everyone forgets them, because me!
YouTube
is the largest cineplex ever, and people just go from theater to theater, watching videos. Sometimes, you find yourself in a theater and wonder how you got there, but it’s OK, because the “safe” ones are just across the hall. Every time you turn a corner, you find another huge -plex of related content. The cat video -plex seems to be the most popular, but no matter what your interest is, if you keep looking, there’s a whole wing devoted to just that. Every once in a while, the RIAA or MPAA will send goons in and rip films out while they’re playing, but if you wander next door, someone already posted the same video. It’s probably in Portuguese with English subtitles, but it’s there. The films vary wildly in quality because it’s free to show them. In every theater is a group of 9-year-olds who shout ‘fat’ and ‘gay’ and ‘ugly’ and ‘go kill yourself’ and ‘first!’ because they’re at the age where they think that kind of thing is funny. Sit in the front with your bluetooth headset on and ignore everyone behind you and you’ll do fine.
Vine
is an infinity of iPads set up in an infinite theater lobby, each playing a six-second video that loops continuously. People wander from iPad to iPad. And then wonder where Tuesday went. Every six seconds, there’s an enormous laugh from the people clustered around the funniest clips.
Vimeo
is pretty big, like YouTube, but the theaters are all IMAX. You have to pay to get your videos on screen, so the quality is amazing, but other than that, it’s basically just like YouTube, only not as full of 9-year-olds.
Tumblr
is a diary that just happens to be public. You pour your heart out onto its pages, and other people copy it and share it without attribution, or draw a big pink heart on it to let you know they liked it.
LinkedIn
is a break room full of water coolers where everyone you’ve ever worked with eventually shows up. Recruiters dash from cooler to cooler, desperately trying to get everyone’s attention. Every time someone gets a promotion or changes jobs, a PA announces it to the whole room. Everyone golf-claps. Occasionally, someone you barely remember shouts, “This guy/gal? S/he’s great at” some skill you don’t actually possess. You look around, embarrassed, and wonder who let them in. People you’re glad you no longer work with solicit you for recommendations and you have to pretend you didn’t hear them.
MySpace
is a 70s disco. The people who are in there have no idea it’s not 1979. Don’t tell them. It’s . . . kinder, this way. ♩♪You should be daaaaanciiiiin’, YEAH!♬
LiveJournal
is that apartment where you used to live in college, where all your friends were in and out at all times of the day and night, having lively discussions about anything. But then the Russian mafia took over the management right after you moved out. Now the security gate at the complex entrance is locked on more days than not. It’s too bad, because it used to be a really nice place.
Goodreads
is an infinite book store where readers and authors tear each other to shreds in public, while onlookers cheer with bloodlust, often turning on each other in the excitement. Meanwhile, in nooks scattered about, peaceful groups of readers and writers meet, ignoring the spectacle going on around them.
Reddit
is a bulletin board in the rec room at a college dorm. People post all kinds of crazy stuff on it, and other people can move it around so it’s more (or less) visible. People hang smaller bulletin boards off the big one, but around corners so you have to go looking. Often, if you do, you find yourself scrambling back to the main board, wishing for eye-bleach.
Hope you enjoyed. I wrote it in about 20 minutes of inspiration, not giving a lot of thought to it, and it turns out to be one of the most popular posts I have made on Facebook. Go figure. Such is the fickle nature of humor. :)
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NaNoWriMo 2015 Redux
Let me start out by saying that, from the stated goal of NaNoWriMo, I failed. I wrote just over 20,000 words, which is my least successful NaNoWriMo run since 2007.
HOWEVER.
And it’s a big ‘however,’ as you can see by the font and bold and . . . SEE WHAT I DID THERE?
Anyway . . . I wrote 20,000 words that I do not hate. This is something that I’m still having a problem believing. I haven’t liked anything I’ve written for a long time, aside from some flash pieces. So the fact that I have this foundation to work with is heartening, so I don’t really consider this a loss so much as a good start.
Now, I just have to keep my momentum going. I have characters, a plot, clues I have to drop, lead-ins for the next two books to subtly hint at . . . and now I just need to put butt in chair, hands on keyboard, and follow through. Which is easier when you sit down and don’t hate what you’re writing. Hence the lack of posts on this blog over the last . . . long time.
For added incentive, I sort of have to get this to a point I like before too long. I am going to Paradise Lost VI in San Antonio, TX, in April, 2016. In the critique track. So I have to have, you know . . . a thing to critique. I think it’s something like the first x chapters or the first x,000 words, plus a synopsis. I think I have enough that I could conceivably do the synopsis now, and maybe even use that as the outline for writing the rest of the novel.
Me? Do an outline? I’d be practically unrecognizable!
A while back, I posted something about J. K. Rowling’s method for plotting the Harry Potter series. After I posted that, I played around with the format until I landed on something I could maintain. I have a spreadsheet with columns for all my plot lines and rows for days/chapters. It was surprisingly easy to lay out several linear plot lines. I’ve known what has to happen in my story for a long time. It’s all that wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff where you have to smush them together into something coherent that was the issue. Because I kept trying to do that on the fly. I’ve been a pantser for as long as I’ve been writing. This whole ‘planning’ schtick is . . . hard.
There are twenty-one work days in December (plus four weekends and a two-day work holiday). Of those twenty-one, I will be at the office for only eleven. This means that for roughly two thirds of December, I will be at home. With nothing to do. Except write. If, that is, I can avoid the time-sucks that are Facebook and Twitter. And Codex. And Goodreads. And Reddit. And YouTube. And podcasts.
I may have a . . . slight problem.
Maybe what I’m leading up to is to take a month off social media to work on actual things that matter to me, or so I keep telling myself.
In other news, by the way, I have been submitting one story for publication. I’m currently waiting on a rejection from its fourth market so I can send it on to the fifth one. The waiting is the hardest part, because some markets have wait times measured in months. And this is a humorous, science fiction, flash piece. The number of markets is quite limited. :) I have other pieces I’m working on to get ready for submission, and will start those as soon as I think they’re done. And then have one or two people look them over to make sure there’s nothing else I can cut.
I could set an actual goal for December, if I put my mind to it. Something like . . . let’s say, getting two — no, three — more stories (of any length) ready for submission before 31 December.
There! I did it! I set a goal. An actual goal! And it’s a SMART goal, I think.
Which, of course, gives me the perfect opportunity to put a progress meter up for the actual writing of my novel, and for the SMART goal.
No, it’s not an elaborate form of procrastination. Really.
- This is not me being a pessimist. This is me being realistic. :) I’m not at the level in my writing where stories get accepted more than rejected, yet. Because I don’t write and submit as much as I should.
- Specific (3). Measurable (stories ready for submission). Achievable (it’s a stretch, but I can do it). Relevant (to my personal goals; duh). Time-bound (by December 31st, 2015).
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NaNoWriMo? Again? Already?
NaNoWriMo 2015 Participant Banner Last year (2014), I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo because . . . frankly, I 1) had no new ideas, 2) wasn’t particularly enthused with the thought of doing it again, and 3) wasn’t sure NaNoWriMo had anything left to teach me.
And this year, I was in pretty much the same mindset. Until.
Three things occurred roughly simultaneously, then a fourth one happened that pushed me to the point where I am right now; i.e., considering doing NaNoWriMo again for 2015. I’m not 100% sure, mind you, but . . . there are processes that are . . . um, processing. In my brain.
Thing the First. I went to WorldCon, thoroughly enjoyed myself (other than the trips to and from the con, that is), and decided pretty much on the spur of some moment or other to go ahead and register not only for the 74th WorldCon in Kansas City, MO in 2016, but the 75th WorldCon, as well. That one’s in Helsinki, Finland, in 2017. I’m quite excited about both of those, actually. I’ve already registered for 74 and paid my dues and all that. I’m applying for a passport in about a month for the trip to Helsinki. I already have flight alerts for both trips set up so I can get good prices. Alternatively, I check the price of driving to Kansas City, MO each Monday to see if it’s more than the price of the flight. If not, I may just drive.
Thing the Second. A friend (Karl) happened to mention on Facebook that registration was open for Paradise Lost 6 Writers Workshop. Paradise Lost is only open to people who have participated in certain other workshops (Viable Paradise, Taos Toolbox), or who are a member of Codex Writers. I am both a graduate of Viable Paradise (in 2012) and a member of Codex Writers. So yay.
Once again, on the spur of some moment I wasn’t aware of until it had passed, I registered for it. It’s in San Antonio, TX in April of 2016. I already have a flight alert for the trip set up so I can get a good price. Alternatively, I check the price of driving to San Antonio, TX each Monday to see if it’s more than the price of the flight. If not, I may just drive.
Thing the Second-and-a-Halfth. When I registered, there was the option of registering for the workshop only or the critique track. For critique, you have to read some other people’s submissions and critique them, and submit something for critique yourself. The workshop is in April. On the spur of yet another moment, I threw caution to the wind and clicked on “critique track.”
Which means one thing: I better get my butt in a chair and my hands on a keyboard.
Thing the Third. I started reading — and very much enjoying — Debra Jess‘s wonderful book Blood Surfer: A Thunder City Novel. It’s an urban science fiction . . . fantasy . . . kind of a thing. Basically, super heroes plus romance. It’s very good, so far. I’m going slowly because I’m also reading another friend’s novel at the same time, this one for critique.
Thing the Fourth. A lot of my blog posts contain this phrase, but it is, nonetheless, true: so, I was in the shower . . .
So, I was in the shower and this . . . idea just popped into my head. Not quite fully formed, but my brain decided to dwell on it during my commute to work. And while I was at work. And on my drive home from work. And as I lay in bed that night waiting for sleep. And the next morning. And . . . well, you get the point. And then, this morning, after the spectre of NaNoWriMo had been broached by the Forum Writers (my standing Tuesday night critique group), my brain went into overdrive and I dictated many ideas into my little digital voice recorder on the way to work.
I won’t go into great and glorious detail on what the idea was, but I will give you the first sentence that was what popped into my head in the shower that morning: “Hero Man often wished the press had given him a more . . . well, magnificent name.”
That’s all you get. :)
I will, however, add that all this comes just two short weeks until November 1st, which leaves me very little time to actually plan out anything, which is where my reluctance to commit comes in. Also, my Apple MacBook died. With Scrivener on it. I write everything in Scrivener. So I need to get a new laptop, regardless.
- I keep meaning to post a write-up of what happened at the con. And I have started the posts. But I keep having interruptions. (Stupid work. Stupid real life.) But I’ll get to them. Eventually. Probably.
- Debra was in Viable Paradise with me in 2012.
- I listen to podcasts on the way to and from work. The one I listened to this morning happened to be a back episode of The Round Table Podcast during which the guys brainstormed and workshopped a superhero novel. If I believed in such things, I’d think this was the Universe sending me a strong message. Good thing I don’t believe in that sort of thing. :)
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That’s One Small Step for a Writer . . .
Lately, I’ve been participating in a weekly write-in. A group of us get together one night per week and sit together writing away for 30-minute sprints. After each sprint (we typically do two or three), we talk about how many words we wrote (or edited) and potentially what we are working on. No reading, no critiquing. Just writers writing, but together, for encouragement and solidarity. And maybe a little idea-generation.
I’ve been working on a short story (probably a novelette) set in the world of my Urban Fantasy series, which I call The MCU Case Files. I’m trying to get a handle on some of my characters, and one way of doing that is to write about them as the main character of a shorter work. They may or may not ever see the light of day, but the exercise is valid for my purposes.
For the last couple or three meetings, one of the other writers has been working on plotting his next novel. To do this, he is using a hand-drawn grid on paper, and we asked him to explain what it is and how it works.
Turns out, it’s a version of what JK Rowling used to plot her Harry Potter books. Basically a spreadsheet. Intrigued, I decided to look it up. Nothing else has seemed to work for me, so it couldn’t hurt to try one more thing, could it?
Order of the Phoenix plot spreadsheet page. Click to embiggen. I’m not plotting just the one book, of course. I’m plotting three at once, and keeping myself open to ideas for books four (already have the situation, just no plot) through six, as well. For hints I could drop in early. Not bad for a story that started as a first-sentence-writing exercise, huh? Over the last few months, I’ve identified the six or seven major plot points that will arc through the books.
Over the past few days I’ve played with my own version of this. I’m not doing it by hand, though. How gauche. :) I’m using Excel, because I have access to it at work and access to Excel 365 for free through the Microsoft website, so why not? I’ve completely thrown out the entire plot of the second book and substituted one that makes more actual sense, that ties in neatly with the plots of books one and three. And refined two of the other subplots, and added one new one.
I’ll save that thrown-out plot, though, for book five. Or maybe six. Depending. Now that I’m working through the plotlines, I’ve changed the rules of magic a little to accommodate some stuff, I’ve moved some things from book three into books one and two, and just generally been happily manipulating text in a spreadsheet. It even looks vaguely like work if you happen to walk past my cube. (As does this, since I’m writing it in raw HTML.) :)
I hope this is the right tool for me. I’ve been foundering on trying to keep all this in one coherent place for a while. Pull one string, and the rest tangle like iPod earbud cords in your backpack.
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Write What You Know?
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Silence, Be Broken!
So . . . it’s been a while. :) Unintentionally, mind you.
Last November, I was doing what I called NaNotWriMo, meaning that I ignored NaNoWriMo for the first time since 2008, and instead, I decluttered my office. I made it a lot better. It’s still not perfect, but it is orders of magnitude better than it was.
And then toward the end of November some stuff happened. Real-life stuff. Stuff I won’t go into. But it was enough that I didn’t want to blog or write or do much of anything else creative. So I left the office declutterization unfinished, abandoned all my writing projects, and every time I thought I had something to say, here, I’d talk myself out of it with a very old argument. “Dude, this is a writing blog. You should write about, you know . . . writing. And since you aren’t doing that, what’s the point?”
And that is how we end up at May 7th with the first post since November 18th.
But enough about that. I have ranting to get to!
What I was wondering is: am I the only one who, while reading, lets a name that appears to have several, conflicting, legitimate pronunciations throw me out of the story?
I can’t help it. Every time I see the name, I find myself pausing and thinking “Is it Lord High Emperor of Space and Time Potayto Salaad, Potahto Salaad, or Pah-tah-toe Salaad? And is it Salahd, Sah-lah-ahd, or Sah-lah-ahd?”
Yes, this kind of thing really does bother me, and it is literally every time I run across the name while reading. It slows me down and throws me out of the book. If it’s a name like Mary or Frank or Kira or even Binbiniqegabinik, there are very limited ways it could be pronounced. And in the case of that last one, it was made clear in the book what the proper pronunciation is, if I recall correctly.
A friend posted a question on Facebook, asking if she should use ‘Kira,’ ‘Brianna,’ or ‘Brienne’ as a character name. I voted firmly for Kira, because for me, those other two would cause me to read at half speed unless a pronunciation guide were given. Is the ‘i’ in ‘Brianna’ long or short? Is the first ‘a’ like the one in ‘bat’ or the one in ‘father’? We won’t even go into ‘Brienne’ and all the different ways I could find to pronounce it. I would probably have to just mentally call ‘Brienne’ something like ‘Bree’ or reading a sentence would go like this:
Brienne [Bree-en? Bree-en? Bry-en? Bry-en? Is the final ‘e’ pronounced? Gaaah!] and Gemina [Is the ‘g’ hard or soft? Is it ‘{G|J}em-i-na’, or ‘{G|J}e-mee-na’? Gaaah!] leapt into the saddle of Brienne’s [Bree-en’s? Bree-en‘s?] steed Fnaben [Dammit.] . . .
I’m guilty of it, myself, of course. On Second Life, I’m known by the name Sathor Chatnoir. Although ‘Chatnoir’ is fairly simple if you know French pronounciation, apparently ‘Sathor’ gives people fits. To me, it’s obviously Say-thor (where ‘Thor’ is pronounced like the Norse god), but when I heard people pronouncing it (we sometimes abandon typing and actually talk), people were saying it to rhyme with Dan Rather’s last name, or pronouncing the ‘Sa’ as “sah” instead of “say.” I was totally flabberghasted because to me, it’s so obvious. :)
And yeah, I know that it doesn’t matter how a name is pronounced unless there’s some poetry involved (A Elbereth Gilthoniel / silivren penna míriel . . .). I guess all I’m saying is that I like to know. Maybe it has something to do with being raised fairly early in my reading-for-pleasure life on books like The Lord of the Rings where there is an actual pronunciation guide right there in the book to tell you that the “C” in “Celeborn” is hard, or that the second syllable of “Lothlorien” is stressed.
Anyway, it’s probably just me, and this is just a rant, but at least it’s off my chest, now, and I can get back to plotting my novels and novellas. :)
You may notice over on the right of this page three circular graphs showing progress. Those are novels I’m working on co-plotting. They are the first three novels of my MCU Case Files series, and there are a lot of interwoven plots that need to all resolve by the end of Book 3, so that’s mostly what I’m working on. The current figures are only guesses, but I had to point out the cool graphs because cool.
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NaNotWriMo 2014, Day 18: Organized Chaos
A little past the halfway point of the month, I’m pleased with my progress. An embarrassing amount of stuff has been removed from the room. Some of it books that went into another room. Some of it trash that is still being dealt with. A lot of it needs shredding. And I do mean a lot; there’s no way I could do it with my small shredder at home, so I’m taking it with me to work in small batches and dropping it into the shredder bins at work.
What remains in the room has been put into strategically placed themed piles.
For instance, the computers, the printer, all the cables, keyboards, mice, and other assorted computer-related equipment are all in one corner. The read books are all stacked together. All the souvenirs from cons are together. The bags are all together. The notebooks are all together. The desk toys are all in the same box.
And the Pisa-esque, somewhere-between-two-and-three-foot tower of past critiques perches precariously at the precipice of the portal.
Mocking me.
Perusing that will be the most time-consuming part, considering some of it is a novella I wrote, had critiqued, and then promptly lost off my hard drives. But once I transcribe whatever commentary I choose to keep from critiquers long past, the gods of recycling will receive them as my tribute.
I still gotta find places for all this stuff, mind you. But the paper is a huge part of it. And I’m making major inroads on it.
There are also an awful lot (most of a seven-foot shelf) of computer books that are now obsolete. Those probably need to either go away entirely or be donated or rehomed to someone who will use them. Anyone want a Visual Basic 5 book? SQL 6.5?
It’s actually getting harder and harder to FIND things to disposition because at this point “disposition” means “find a permanent storage solution,” and I’m not quite to that point, yet.
As for the other goal . . .
It’s getting there, I think. Every time I run across a scribbled note for the novel (series), I transcribe it in one place and toss the original. I have quite a file of ideas I forgot, a good number of which are really great ideas that I’m going to work in as I write my outline and refine it.
I know the endings of all three books. And the beginnings of two of them. I know a good deal of what’s going on in the world of my story, and realized that I’ve been ignoring a whole category of conflict that, in retrospect, I’ve been just stupid to ignore. I know the motivations of two of my bad guys.
Now I just need to come up with some more case characters and secondary characters to play in my world. The Magical Crimes Unit is a new division, after all, and has to share space with the other FBI agents, some of whom aren’t as friendly as others.
Internal strife. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?
And lastly, I’ve cut severely back on my YouTube viewing. I don’t think I’ve watched a single video in about a week. I’ve read, I’ve listened to podcasts, and I’ve wasted time on the Internet in other ways, but I’m definitely scaling back on YouTube.
Onward and upward!
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NaNotWriMo 2014, Day 7: Treasure!
Last night, I was up fairly late catching up on a podcast and some YouTube channels. When I went up for bed, I kept my self-promise to disposition at least one thing in the office. Since I wasn’t leaving again until the morning, I decided to shuffle some things around that I knew would either be staying in the room or staying in the room until later. Call it “consolidation” of similar items.
I moved all of my old computers into one corner. With the old printer and the old speakers, and stacked old keyboards and mice nearby. Shuffled a bunch of boxes of photos to one place. Stacked back editions of magazines together. Stacked books I’ve read together.
Etc.
Then I came to this box that I knew hadn’t been opened in quite a while, if ever. I think it has been in the room since I moved in, and has had stuff stacked on it since.
Upon opening it, I immediately recognized every item inside. Stuff I haven’t seen since probably 1999 when I moved to Georgia from Alabama.
Without even having to go through each of them laboriously, I knew I had found:
- A spiral-bound notebook from 1983 containing a travelogue I wrote while on a trip to England and France (graduation gift from my parents). Pictures from that trip. Souvenirs from that trip.
- A spiral-bound notebook I used to carry around in high school (ca. 1980-1983) and in which I hand-wrote stories in pencil. It has several in there that I had thought long lost. For the good of humanity, they shall remain so. I was amazingly, overwhelmingly, stupendously fond of utilizing really overly dramatic and annoyingly overabundant abverbs and adjectives back then.
- A spiral-bound notebook containing story notes from a novel I have had in my head since I was about eleven years old, and which eventually became my (unfinished) NaNoWriMo novel for 2008, The Third Prophecy.
As an aside, judging from the writing, I probably should have been writing the story as a screenplay. I did things very cinematically, starting the story with a wide, exterior establishing shot, then zooming in to a medium distance, and finally into a close-up of the character starting his action. That it took me five pages to get there is a testament to how far I’ve come since then.
- World maps I drew of my sci-fi/fantasy world(s) from the larger universe surrounding The Third Prophecy. The alphabet I came up with for the language spoken by one of the races on one of those worlds. Notes I wrote for the sounds of that language and several more. A few rudimentary words in said languages. The numbering system used by the race that speaks one of those languages. (Have I mentioned I was a huge Tolkien fan?) Pseudocode for a computer program to create random words for said language. (Somewhere there exists a program I wrote that, given any number, generates the words to say it in this language. Have I mentioned I’m a huge geek?)
But the pièce de résistance was another spiral-bound notebook in which I had done my “first sentence” exercise from 1995 until I got my first Franklin Planner. Archived in this notebook are probably hundreds of first lines of stories that were never intended to be written. Just looking through them reminded me how creative it felt to do that.
But if I start that again, where to put it? My planner? Evernote? Dropbox? Google Docs? Scrivener? Somewhere else? Heh! The same notebook, nearly ten years later?
Anyway, I look forward to going through these old treasures and finding a proper place to put them. Perhaps the recycle bin is best for some of it.
