Peni Griffin - Idea Garage Sale

Stupid Days

2012-02-10T11:13:00.006-06:00

Sometimes characters who are supposed to be smart do monumentally stupid things, and every intelligent person reading the book (or, more probably, watching the screenplay) protests, because nobody in the story notices the stupidity.

If you have to have a character do stupid things, you need to make him self-aware about it and make clear that it's an aberration and he, and the people around him, know he did something stupid. Because we all have days like this occasionally:

I had an ice pick in the back of my head. (Note that, to the best of my knowledge, I've never actually seen an ice pick. Yet the metaphor for sharp, localized pain comes naturally to me. I must have learned it from people accustomed to ice picks, such as authors, or my mother. How many of our routinely-used metaphors have become cliches with no force because of such learned usages? That's something to beware of.) So I wasn't getting anything useful done. But I had to buy more fusible* before I could work on the blouse again, so I drove to the mall that till recently had a decent JoAnn's and a Hobby Lobby, and now only has the Hobby Lobby, which I don't like to go into because all those rows and rows of useless stuff make me dizzy and they don't carry notions at all. Somebody explain the retail logic behind stocking patterns, fabric, and ribbons, and no buttons, thread, pins, or zippers. Seriously, this is one of the biggest mysteries of the age. But anyway, seeing that the JoAnn's was gone I decided to see if Hobby Lobby had maybe ordered something as useful as fusible by mistake, and patted my pocket as I was closing the car door, realizing as it latched that my pocket only contained chapstick and my keys were still in the ignition. Furthermore, I wasn't carrying my purse, with the spare keys in it, since I was wearing jeans with a back pocket that holds my wallet and my glasses case fit in my cardigan pocket.

So I went on into Hobby Lobby, found some fusible, and saw that they were having a 99-cent sale on Simplicity patterns. I wouldn't have gone out of my way for it, but hey, I do need that pattern for a Hawaiian flowerdy shirt. I didn't find one, but I got five other useful-looking ones, checked out, and asked the friendly check-out person if the management or mall security would help me out with the key problem. The thing about Moby is that he's sufficiently old, you can get him open with a coat hangar if you happen to know how, and everyplace I've done this before, the programmed male response of helping middle-aged white ladies in distress has always served me well. However, her manager only said he didn't know where to find a coat hanger (why a guy with that little mechanical enterprise is even in a craft store, much less managing it, baffles me); and mall security has a policy of not helping people who locked their keys in the car.

All right, so I had to bus home. I didn't have a bus book, so I took the opportunity to look over my cheap patterns; and found that three of the five I had picked up in the wrong size. Well, drat. That's stupid thing number two.

At home, since my house key is on the same ring as the car keys, I broke into the house (which you'll excuse me given details about on the internet; as it happens, I know how to get into my own house without a key and without breaking anything), got the spare car keys, ate lunch, and then called Damon to find out where the spare keys were, because I didn't want to break into the house a second time when I got home. We had a long Abbot-and-Costello conversation before he realized where my brain disconnect was and patiently pointed out that, once I got into the car, I would have access to my house key again.

Oh. Duh.

That's how stupid I was yesterday. And I'm not sure I'm any brighter today. You can see why I didn't even try to accomplish anything meaningful, and I certainly didn't work on the blouse. It'd all be to do over.

But there's always weeding and laundry. And the redbuds are showing pink. And the mountain laurel at the mall had bloomed. And I at least remembered to exchange my patterns. Even days of mind-boggling stupidity with ice-pick headaches needn't be wasted.

*For non-sewers: Fusible is a thin treated fabric that you iron to fuse it to the inside fabric of things like cuffs, collars, and button plackets.

Idea Garage Sale: Goblin Kid

2012-02-05T11:29:00.004-06:00

Rumplestiltskin is a story of a really messed up-family, when you think about it. The kid might be better off with a goblin than with his greedy, abusive father and his dishonest, shortsighted mother. Therefore:

Prolog: A variation on Rumplestiltskin, in which the queen does not guess the name.

Story: The child is raised by the goblin, and learns goblin skills in a goblin community. But they're marginalized by goblin society. The child is too tall, humans can't be trusted, Rumplestiltskin is viewed with suspicion. Something goes wrong (what?) and Rumplestiltskin is imprisoned, the child driven out.

The child finds his goblin skills inadequate to a rescue. He needs his human family now, so he goes looking for them. He only knows Rumplestiltskin's version of the story; the king, queen, and younger siblings have different ones. He has to learn all the stories to understand the circumstances of his adoption, and must learn human skills and find a place in human society before he can rescue his goblin parent and find his own secure hybrid identity, independent of the sins of his biological and foster parents.

This one falls down on my inability to figure out what Rumplestiltskin is imprisoned for and what human skill is necessary to free him. It'd require a lot of worldbuilding upfront.

Necessary Error

2012-02-02T09:49:00.004-06:00

Yesterday should have been satisfactory, because I got a query out, did a lot of work on my blouse, and in the evening got my game disk back.

Unfortunately, the fact that I pushed through the rise of a bad dizzy spell to finish the sleeves, only to discover that they were cut too small (though, based on experience with past sleeves, I cut them two sizes larger than the bodice) tends to wipe out the rest on the satisfaction meter.

Which is perverse. Because I hadn't done this blouse with these sleeves and collar before, I'm making a "wearable muslin" - i.e., a draft version that, though I'll be able to use it when it finally comes out right, is made of fabric I got so cheap it doesn't matter if it's completely mucked up. I think it was on the clearance table for $1.99 a yard or something. I have plenty enough of it to cut new sleeves, and I now know how to do the sleeves, which I didn't before. Yesterday's work wasn't wasted, even though I'm now slightly farther from finishing than I thought I was yesterday morning. In fact, I am closer by the discovery of the cutting/sizing error.

Which, face it, under the circumstances, was unavoidable. It's not like my arms look hugely bloated compared to the rest of my body and I should have known I needed to go up three sizes. I've never done a sleeve that had to clear my elbow before and had no idea how much ease I needed compared to that assumed by the designer. I didn't have the knowledge base to cut the pattern correctly.

If this blouse were a story, I wouldn't be frustrated about this. Or anyway, not as much. I've successfully internalized the truth that making the error, undoing it, backing up, and redoing it is a normal and necessary part of the drafting process. The point is to work on something till it's done right, not to make a set amount of visible progress every day.

I guess it's because sewing is something I want to get done, rather than something I actively want to do most of the time, that I have trouble extrapolating this truth to it.

But it's true across the board. Whatever you're working on, all the work you do on it counts. You can't lose the work; you can only overcome your illusions about it.

News: Hybrid Humans

2012-01-31T21:03:00.003-06:00

Those of you who read the anthropology news know that somebody, somewhere, has a blockbuster romance series coming.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred. (According to Archeology Briefs)

We all know what that means: Interspecies romance! Angst! Family conflict! Deeply hidden supernatural genes!

So, what'd'you think? Harlequin Pleistocene? It's a niche market, but it could be pure gold!

Idea Garage Sale: Starting, Anywhere

2012-01-29T11:27:00.003-06:00

Some days, you just start writing and see if it goes anywhere. Like this:

Once upon a time, a critter lived in a house beyond the edge of town.

The owner had abandoned it because it was too hard to heat, so the critter moved in and made himself comfortable. The area had plenty of things for a critter to eat, and he had plenty of fur to keep him warm when the northers came down, so he did fairly well. When something went wrong with the house - a rotting floorboard, a lose brick in the chimney - he fixed it. The fact that the water was turned off made no difference to him, for he knew where the old well was. He woke when the sun rose and went to bed when it got dark, so the lack of electricity didn't bother him. He saw no reason why anything should ever change.

The owner had the house up for sale, and once in awhile people came to look at it. This provided a change for the critter, following them unseen about the house and eavesdropping. When they said things like: "It's awfully far from the main road" and "You call this a heating system?" and "The plumbing is how old?" he did nothing. But if they started talking about where to put the microwave or what room to put the boys in the critter acted. He could make ratlike noises in the walls, create wonderfully realistic drafts by blowing through the right crack, and he maintained a loose board on the porch steps which, when twisted just right, was guaranteed to throw a person down and scare the daylights out of him.

But of course, someone will buy the house anyway; and everything depends on who.

A Good Day

2012-01-27T07:40:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I did not blog.

I did, however, submit a manuscript to a publisher, dust, sweep, start a blouse, do some much-needed file organization for my game, and make my cats purr.

I call that a win.

No Hurry

2012-01-24T08:45:00.003-06:00

Realizing that the reason I still hadn't done any sewing was that I'd gotten it into my head I needed to make jeans; and this is much too intimidating a project to launch into after such a long hiatus, Saturday I dug through my stash, picked a new project, ironed the fabric, laid out a pattern, and pinned it.

By then it was getting late, and I've been advised not to pin and cut out on the same day, to reduce cutting errors. For those of you not accustomed to sewing, a cutting error can be anything from cutting two pieces when you need four, cutting with the grain (the direction of the threads) lying wrong in the piece, using a piece from the wrong pattern (most modern patterns offering a number of different options, so that it's possible to cut the sleeve for A when you want B), omitting a piece, or just plain messing up the cutting. Since, most of the time, you buy a piece of fabric with the intention of using it in a particular project, and only buy the recommended amount for the project, a cutting error probably means you don't have enough fabric to correct the error. Which is all very well, if you can run back to the fabric store and buy another half yard; but if you're working from stash, the odds are good the store won't have the fabric you bought last year anymore. And I'm pretty sure the fabric I was using was one I'd bought off the clearance table. All this being true, although I was anxious to get properly started and didn't feel like ironing and pinning was enough progress, I left the pinned fabric and did something else.

As I got into the shower Saturday night I suddenly realized: I don't want to make a fitted blouse with that fabric. I want to make a "Hawaiian flowerdy shirt," which by definition has to be loose. I don't have a pattern for a Hawaiian flowerdy shirt, so I needed to unpin that fabric, put it away, iron another piece of fabric, and start over. So if I hadn't followed the advice not to pin and cut on the same day, I'd have ruined the outfit. I probably could have made an acceptable blouse, (hmm...maybe it'd be flowerdy-shirty enough if I left out the darts? No, because they need to be loose in the shoulders, too), but "acceptable" and "the one I want" aren't equivalent terms. So even if the pattern was laid out perfectly and I'd cut with a steady hand, if I hadn't followed the "don't pin and cut on the same day" rule, I would have made a gigantic cutting error, and repented at leisure.

It takes me forever to do things, even working on them every day. I frequently feel that I'm patient to a fault, and it often works against me - patient people tend to get crappy customer service, for example.

But patience is so often the difference between success and failure. It pays, when you think you've completed the final draft, to let it sit overnight and give it one more read-through in the morning before sending off that query, or summary, or manuscript. Cutting errors are every bit as fatal to careers as to outfits; but only if you parade them around, and don't recognize them till later.

(BTW, I got dizzy ironing the contrast fabric for Fitted Blouse Take 2 yesterday, and didn't get as far as ironing and pinning the fabric for the main blouse. Which is frustrating, when I had so much energy Saturday. But the main thing is, I did work on it, and will again today. Also, more book shuffling!)

Idea Garage Sale: Atmosphere

2012-01-22T11:07:00.003-06:00

Sometimes zeroing in on a weakness of your own and trying out ways to address it leads in fruitful directions. Sometimes it doesn't.

Take these notes to myself on the question of why I don't write atmospheric stories:

Q: What does one use atmosphere for, anyway? What's it's literary function?
A: To lift the reader out of mundane reality and create an escapist environment.

But that's not what I'm doing. I want to wake the reader up to the enchantment inside his mundane reality, to the wonderful things she is not aware of. I want to help them enjoy the lives they have or can make for themselves, not moon over distant and hopeless fantasies - silver Elven ships &C.

The place to play with atmosphere then would be in a wholly realistic story (or maybe there'd be some fantastic element in that the VP character would be an elf or something) in which nothing peculiar or unbelievable happened. The romantically fantastic domestic novel.

None of which gets me anywhere close to a story. But it articulates some of what I'm doing when I set my stories - as I always set my stories - in places as close to reality as I can get them. I live in a fantastic, atmospheric environment, and it bugs me when other people don't recognize this, so one of the things my stories do is show them that.

Last week, while waiting for the gamemaster to return with some misplaced notes, the residue of our gaming group was discussing accents, which somehow segued into two of us singing "Amarillo By Morning," and the third protesting vigorously. I countered that he was just jealous because we could sing Texas songs all day, and nobody ever made songs about his home state, New Hampshire. He had to concede the justice of this. It's not because New Hampshire is unworthy of songs, though. It's because too few songwriters are in touch with the songworthy elements of New Hampshire. That's true of every place that doesn't get into songs.

We should all do something about that for our own places.

That's Better

2012-01-19T16:25:00.003-06:00

This afternoon I learned that Elaine Marie Alphin went home. She's a long way from well, but she is better than I ever imagined she could be again when I first heard the news about her stroke.

A lot of stuff is wrong with this week. I'd have one twice as bad, if it would help Elaine get better.

If only we could take all the minor miserable stuff, the rejections and the vermin in the attic and the badly-timed bills and the interpersonal friction and just stuff that gets us down, and trade it in for an improvement in somebody else's major miserable stuff - wouldn't that be grand? You've got to deal with this little crap anyway; it'd be nice to get some good out of it.

Bleah

2012-01-17T09:51:00.004-06:00

I got discouraging news Monday, and now that I need to be knuckling down to Getting Stuff in the Mail (which I hate to do anyway), I'm grumpy enough that all the recent sales I read about for marketing research sound dreadful, which makes me feel that My Day Has Passed and I Will Never Sell Again in This Market. (I feel this way about once a month, on average.)

But I'm going to get stuff in the mail anyway. As soon as I finish draining the lime out of the water heater and get a load of gentles in.

This is no job for someone who requires external pressure to get things done. Or for someone who isn't willing to use housework as a procrastination tool.

Idea Garage Sale: Speaking Carbon

2012-01-15T10:41:00.003-06:00

You know the fairy tale in which one sister's words turn into jewels and one's turn into vermin? Well, in this story, both get forms of carbon. One sister (the crabby one) gets coal; one (the conventionally sweet one) gets diamonds. Both vary in quality with the quality of speech. Lies produce soft brown coal that doesn't burn well and flawed diamonds. However, the coal remains useful, though dirty. The diamonds flood the market and become reduced in value.

Either way, production of the carbon is awkward and unpleasant. The girls (who are twins) resume use of a sign language developed when they were younger. Adult favoritism and sibling rivalry had tended to split them, but under their common misfortune, they gravitate together again. An alchemist can explain to them about the carbon. There's probably some underlying theme with that, but I doubt the alchemist understands about carbon-based life forms.

Do they find a cure, or a way to live with it? Either way, the girls have to stop competing and start cooperating.

The fairy is neutral, rather than good or evil, and the mother figure is selfish and short-sighted rather than wicked.

Their names should mean, but not sound, the same, as Margaret and Pearl, or Rose and Rhoda.

Out of the House, Out of my Head

2012-01-10T14:32:00.003-06:00

I drove out to Cibolo Nature Center this morning to take a class preparatory to monitoring a heron rookery. I was a bit late because it's ages since I've been out there and the directions on the website leave something to be desired (it's Business 87 you want), but this should be something I can do and I'm glad I went.

The trouble with getting on top of the house and yard is that the attempt to do so doesn't get me out of the actual house, to which I've been pretty chained since the renovation started. The Sims game was not guiltless, but it was not the whole problem, either. Mere bodily stagnation, surrounded by the same stimuli all day, made the attention ruts hard to get out of. Ironically, by paying attention to herons, it becomes easier to focus on re-organizing the non-fiction.

Jeans may be a harder proposition. The trouble with sewing is, it's not intrinsically interesting to me. I got into it for the practical reason that stores don't stock clothes that fit me. Ever. I believe the last time my figure was fashionable was about 1489; and I'm not talking weight, but weight distribution. Clothes didn't fit when I was a size 10, either. But I'll get to the point I can do it again, now that the brain muscles are getting back into shape for dealing with things outside my own head.

Anyway, a number of questions were asked today by the crowd of volunteers that could not be answered. The data we assemble will be referenced for decades to come by people trying to answer the questions we asked this morning.

This is why volunteers to monitor heron rookeries, and work in archeological sites and labs, and transcribe historical documents, and take species censuses, and sift road cuts for fossils, and track thousands of datapoints in thousands of fields, are needed. Funds are limited. The world is infinite. We don't know - all kinds of things that we ought to know. That would be cool to know. That are vastly important to know, if the last hominid species on earth is going to survive with any kind of quality of life.

And this sort of activity is exactly what we need when we feel stuck in a rut, unable to go forward. Something to shake us up, enable us to be useful, and connect with reality independent of our own habits, egos, and priorities.

I'm not one of those people who goes around volunteering all the time. I generally have an agenda; and sooner or later I'll have to shut myself up in my head again in order to get the next book written (because there's always a next book to be written, even on days when I'm positive I'll never sell another one - that's got nothing to do with whether I write or not). I'm not even a particularly good volunteer when I do it, certainly not the one who becomes the expert in any one thing. But something always needs to be cleaned, hauled, or held, so I'm not often useless, though it's arguable I get more good out of my volunteerism than anybody else.

But I can live with that.

No Dinosaurs in First Grade!

2012-01-08T11:00:00.003-06:00

Actually it'd be kindergarten, but First Grade makes a better title, don't you think?

Rita's best friend is a ghost maiasaurus named Daisy, who likes raisins, salad, and Kool-Aid (or some other appropriate diet - we may as well be accurate). She's colorful, with speckles and stripes, and not full-grown, so she'll fit in the house. When Rita starts school she takes Daisy along, but having an invisible dinosaur in class proves too disruptive - she tries to fingerpaint and makes a mess, roars during the singalong, tries to join in the games and work and can't. Soon she has to stay home all day, bored - and Rita isn't always ready to play with her when she gets home, because she has to play with kids from school.

How to resolve this? Unsatisfactory if Daisy just moves on with no destination. Can she meet other dinosaur ghosts? Or get passed on to a baby sister?

I can't really write for kids this young - the voice always comes out too old. Also, I prefer mammalian megafauna. But mammoths don't work here at all.

And yes, I do mean for Daisy to be a real ghost, not an imaginary friend.

On the Necessity of Creating Interdimensional Spatial Access

2012-01-05T16:19:00.003-06:00

So, that discipline thing?

Still a work in start-up mode. But the first week is the hardest. One of the reasons I haven't been doing some of this work is that it's hard to find the starting point.

Like, I've finally unloaded the books I wanted to have on hand for writing the lesbian western from the shelf on the computer hutch, making room for my husband to put his geneology and gaming references next to my general references (atlases, dictionaries, field guides, etc.). So, that's good.

But they don't all fit back where they belong. There's now four books sitting on top of the books on the geography shelf, which is a single five- or six-foot board mounted above the filing cabinet and writing desk. There is no more space to put geography books unless we mount another shelf, or clear off the tops of the filing cabinet and writing desk to arrange them there. I was only able to put a couple of the history books back into their proper places - I'm going to have to bring in a ladder and rearrange the entire history wall in order to fit the stuff I was using, and the accumulated new books, on history, archeology, human paleontology, sociology, etc., not to mention the periodicals, onto the history wall. I may have to break out a category and put it - somewhere. And while I was putting up the cookbooks, plant books, and, how-to books downstairs, I found a great big neglected Fortean book, which joins the other Fortean books lying sideways on top of the Forteana-religion-folklore books.

The whole house is like this; and it's a four-bedroom house with ten to twelve foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in more than one of them. The non-fiction must be rearranged and there's not much space to rearrange it to - maybe six feet of shelf space, or less, scattered around the whole house. Some of it in closets; not that I object to shelving books in closets, but we can't get at the exploration and natural disaster books in the mathom* room closet till we decide what to do with the stuff blocking our way to it.

That we will have to add more shelf space somewhere, somehow, is a given, and by the way we need more filing cabinet space, too. But we won't know how much, or where to put it, or precisely what form it should take, until we've done the best we can rearranging what we've got and getting rid of what we can bear to. And then we get to budget their acquisition.

Obviously, what I need here is not just discipline, but access to an inter- or extra-dimensional portal that triples or quadruples my storage space without such troublesome necessities as buying the house next door and using it as a library annex. A bookcase that fits in the space between the filing cabinet and the writing desk, which will store the books we don't use for a long time in some out of the way corner of the universe, with little dust and good preservative qualities, that will respond to voice commands to produce The 1923 Sears-Roebuck Catalog, or books relevant to 15th-century Spanish clothing, or guides to farm machinery, or whatever, without our having to remember precisely the titles, authors, or even whether we actually have such a thing.

What I'm hoping is that I'll make some noticeable progress on the book space problem and then get so hair-tearingly frustrated that cutting out a jeans pattern will seem as blessedly peaceful and easy as putting in a disk or picking up a book, with the added temptation of a prospect of accomplishing something.

*Mathom, for those of you whose Tolkien-derived language skills are rusty, is a hobbit word meaning "something I'm not using right now but am not about to throw away." Our mathom room doubles as our guest room and is the sole repository of things we do have a use for, such as back issues of Fortean Times, Damon's pulp and Sherlock Holmes books, and anthologies; but since the work done on the house it's reaccumulated a lot of mathom stuff. Notably some invaluable SCA references that should probably go on the "history" or "crafts" shelves, had we any room there.

Discipline! Oh, well.

2012-01-03T10:50:00.003-06:00

Realizing that I haven't touched the sewing machine, except to dust it, since the beautiful new sewing room became available; that I've let a number of beautiful warm days go by without doing any yardwork; and that only a fraction of the necessary post-construction home reorganization has been accomplished, on January 1 I gave Damon the disk I need to run Sims2 and told him to hide it somewhere until February 1. I can resist the siren call of the game in order to do writing work, hang out with friends, and such important stuff; but it is so much easier to stick the disk in and take Ernest and Sage Ann on vacation, or find out which parent baby Dove Hawkins will grow up to look like, or throw a wedding party for Luis Iana and Sharla Ottomas, than to figure out how to cut jeans so that they'll fit me without letting a draft up my back!

So the first day Damon goes back to work after his vacation that I don't have the disk available is also the first day in awhile that my balance is so bad that pulling weeds, figuring out patterns (which is more of a balance job than you think, let me tell you - I can barely envision flat shapes into 3D ones when my gyroscope's functioning), and bouncing up and down ladders to organize things are strongly contraindicated. And visual effects often accompany the balance ones, making reading difficult, which is one reason I got hooked on the game as a leisure activity to begin with.

Stupid body. You'd think it'd be on my side, but nooooo...

Don't worry - I'll find some way to fill the day. I may even find some way to make it not a complete waste of time. There are organizing jobs I can do sitting down, after all (she says, looking at the stacks on the computer table).

And yes, I will miss my little pixel people and regret the timing on my decision to cut myself off, possibly for several days; but I won't ask Damon for the disk back. Because sometimes we have to do this - to ourselves, and to our characters. Take the crutch away. Remove the resource that lets them work around their problem instead of solving it. Force the character arc because the character is being lazy.

Lazy is our natural state. But busy is more fun.

Idea Garage Sale: The Year in Ghosts

2012-01-01T09:53:00.002-06:00

First of all - Merry New Year, y'all.

Second of all: Why aren't there more New Year stories? Is it just that most of us experience it as an extension of the big solstice celebrations? The only New Year story I can think of is Dickens's The Chimes, which is considered one of his "Christmas Books." There's a New Year's chapter in one of the Mary Poppins books in which book characters come out of their books in "the crack" between the first and last strokes of midnight at New Year's. That's it as far as I can think off the top of my had.

Yet there's lots of potential in the New Year. First, as expressed in the Mary Poppins incident, it's a liminal time - a time of transition when the barriers between worlds are thin. Ghosts, UFOs, monsters, fey, angels, demons - they should all be out in force. Second, it's a time we have invested with an arbitrary meaning, a time to start over, make new resolutions (which we don't expect to keep), tackle our lives anew, as if we mean it this time, instead of dealing with it in the half-baked way we've been doing; a time for looking back and forward, self-assessment, and self-improvement. In other words, of interior conflict.

But mostly - New Year's is a dangerous holiday. Drinking, illegal fireworks, celebratory firing of shotguns into the air (but the bullets have to come down) - this is a night when lives are likely to be changed in a literal, and unwelcome, way. Need a character dead, paralyzed, blinded, riddled with guilt? Here's your big chance to have somebody say "Hold my champagne and watch this," or a bullet fall out of the blackness from no apparent source, or a car come careening out of nowhere, and your audience will buy it.

I have a little idea about this. A story cycle - I tried to do this as twelve flash fictions, as an exercise in forcing myself to be brief (you can see how well that worked, huh?) or a novel in 12 chapters. The wife/mother is killed in an accident on New Year's Eve, and she is the viewpoint character. The opening sequence would be her bustling around her house trying to get things in shape after the New Year's celebration, and gradually realizing that she's dead. Each subsequent sequence would show her, and her family's, adjustment to this gross disruption of the natural order. Her husband gets depressed; one kid takes on too much responsibility; one acts out; she tries to intervene, with mixed success. One kid goes to college. One kid becomes obsessed with proving that Mom is (or isn't) still around. The cat can always see her, but doesn't always care.

The trickiest part (apart from my complete failure to write short) is how to give the viewpoint character agency and still let the family go through its stages of grief and finally, on the anniversary of her death on New Year's Eve, reach the point where she can let go of them and they can let go of her. We can't deal with anybody else's grief for them, much as we sometimes want to; and dead people can no longer solve problems.

But that's why the POV character is the mother. Mothers, more than any other class of people, have to perfect the art of influencing their loved ones for their good without dominating or controlling them. Which is pretty much all the ghost can be allowed to do. For this story's purposes, the mother is the ideal protagonist.

I'm not a mother and feel this disqualifies me from doing this sequence as more than an exercise.

Or maybe that's an excuse because I don't want to go through the emotional arc of a mother's death until the world forces it upon me.

Anyway, it's outside my genre. Writing YA and juvenile literature from the POV of a middle-aged woman is problematic at best, pointless at worst.

Anthropomorphism? You Bet!

2011-12-29T14:33:00.002-06:00

So yesterday we went to see the remake of Courage of Lassie, aka Lassie Goes to War, the one with Lassie played by a horse and adapted from a Michael Morpugo book.

That sounds snide, but you can always get me (and my mom; and for that matter Damon) with stories like this. I don't think I'm giving spoilers when I warn you to bring your hanky. I was okay for most of the movie, but the bit where our horse protagonist finally panicks on the Western front got me bad. My mom couldn't watch that bit. I think anybody who has ever had an animal friend, or personal experience with barbed wire, will have trouble with it.

It is common to dismiss this sort of reaction as sentimental and anthropomorphic. And I am pretty darn given to anthropomorphism. How much? Well -

I am so anthropmorphic that I am uncomfortable carrying stuffed animals and dolls with their heads down. When I see and handle my old toys I still get a strong sense of their personalities, and I talk to them on those occasions - especially Soda (a pink dog), Thomasina (a pink cat), and Scratchbit (a formerly pink plush doll with a vinyl head). Scratchbit's personality is so real to me that I just laughed writing her name; not because the name is ridiculous, which I know it is, but in the way you laugh when you suddenly recall an old friend.

I am so anthropomorphic that I have conversations with my cats, and frequently translate their conversational contributions for others. That sounds noxious and cutesy, but the fact is - they demonstrate, through action, that I'm expressing a reasonable approximation of their points of view on a regular basis. My husband has caught the habit from me, and we sometimes find ourselves arguing against our own best interests as the puppets for Thai and Bruce.

I am so anthropomorphic that I feel vaguely that I owe it to Vidcund Curious to go back and play his life "right" after accidentally killing him in my earliest experimental Sims games. (Vidcund's entry on the SimsWiki makes him sound nasty; but even after playing him less than three sim days, I know better.) As I've discussed before, I have managed to invest a lot of character and emotion into a lot of little bundles of programming code in those games. It's not too much to say that I love some of them - in the same way that I love Scratchbit, which is not at all the way I love Damon or my Rev. Mom or even Bruce and Thai.

I am so anthropomorphic that I can, in a similar process, take a string of random numbers and a bare-bones context and find complex human characters in them for role-playing games; not just my characters, but NPCs. It's true that, since I do social RPGs and not computer ones, I get a lot of help with those, as all the players tend to play off each other to create the cast of each game. To that extent, all my friends are pretty anthropomorphic.

I am so anthropomorphic that I can find a complex character in an Agatha Christie novel (no, really! Read Crooked House, or Endless Night), a mediocre TV sitcom, a comic book, and a bunch of research on history, geography, archeology, anthropology - anything I read. I can see personality in a bare skull, or a lump of rock, under the right conditions.

Naturally, because I have such a strong tendency toward it, I regard anthropomorphism in a more positive light than do people who complain that we all have too much of it. On the whole, I think it's more a strength than a weakness, though it can be both. I'll probably return to this subject later - if I continued now I would write beyond a blog-reader's patience, and mire myself in incompletely articulated ideas. For now I think it's enough to state an opinion without offering the argument for it, as food for thought as we all head into a new year with new challenges, same as the old challenges.

I think the tendency to project human qualities onto inhuman things is a necessary part of our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of another, which is the prime manifestation of both our sense of self, and our capacity for compassion.

And I think that the capacity for seeing ourselves in others, human or inhuman, real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, is the first step toward understanding those things as they are.

And I think I am so anthropomorphic because I write, and that I write because I am so anthropomorphic.

And I wish you all a Merry New Year.

Even My Dreams are on Vacation

2011-12-27T11:45:00.002-06:00

I had a really great Garage Sale Idea dream last night.

Unfortunately, it was all mixed up with Hunger Games previews, where the Arena had a library in it and one of the competitors was a dog. Now all I can retrieve is the Hunger Games content.

On the up side, Damon is getting quite a lot of gaming work, geneology, and sleeping done, while my sims are having interesting times.

We see Warhorse with the Reverend Mom tomorrow. Maybe that will jolt me into a more serious mindset. Or maybe not. I'm cool either way.

To those of you who didn't or couldn't take the Christmas/New Year week off - my condolences.

Damon's Vacation

2011-12-24T11:01:00.003-06:00

Damon has allowed himself to be persuaded to take the week between Christmas and New Year's off. I promised him ten straight days of doing whatever he wants. I promised he'd like it.

Which means, if he wants the computer, he gets it. If he wants to go out, we'll go out. If he wants me to watch with him while he catches up on Netflix, I'll be watching more TV than I normally would. If he wants to sleep all afternoon, I'll be doing something quiet so as not to disturb him.

So maybe I'll be a little lax about blogging. You'll be too busy keeping Christmas to want to read me, anyway, right?

Happy Christmas, Merry New Year, and may you have the most precious commodity of modern life - control of your own time.

The Loose End

2011-12-20T09:54:00.002-06:00

Well, Len has begun her quest to land me an agent and I'm faced with the question - what now?

I have no idea what the next project will be. But I'm not worried about it. It's not as if I lack things to do. I need to go over all my current projects, maybe do some more revising, maybe retire a couple that have already been everywhere I could reasonably hope to sell them, maybe send follow-ups, decide where to send things next.

I have lots of old notes, dormant files, unfinished projects, and so on I can read through, looking for those that might be viable, marking some for future Garage Sales.

I need to do the Great Book Shuffle, making room for the books presently stacked on top of other books near where they ought to be, getting the books I used for researching Len (hmmm...are any of them borrowed?) back into their categories, probably taking a load to Half Price (but that is so hard to do with non-fiction!). Possibly reorganizing my categories again. Forteana-and-folklore-and-religion has definitely overflowed its boundaries, vague as they were.

Filing, filing, filing.

And, lots of housework, yardwork, gaming stuff, learning to make jeans so when I finally get back to practical archeology I'll have some that don't send a draft up my back and embarrass the person behind me, reading some of these books I need to organize.

None of that has any prospect of getting me paid, of course. But it all feeds into the story-generation device that is my brain. At some point, in the course of getting my act together - and well before my act is together, I can guarantee you that - the next book will rise from the primordial soup in all its shining unattainable perfection.

And that will be that.

Until then - crud, I don't want to do filing.

Idea Garage Sale: What's in Your History?

2011-12-18T10:03:00.002-06:00

I don't think I've ever picked up a history book that some situation that screamed for novelistic treatment didn't leap out at me.

For instance, reading Daily Life in Immigrant America: 1820-1870 this week, I read that the secessionist governor of Missouri, Claiborne Jackson, tried to equip secessionist militias out of the Federal arsenal in St. Louis, gathering a bunch of them together in an encampment called Camp Jackson. The feds in turn called on local Unionist militias, primarily consisting of German immigrants. Four regiments of primarily German-born militia took charge of the arsenal, removed the secessionist commander, and after the firing on Ft. Sumter whisked the ordnance away to Illinois by night, surrounded Camp Jackson, and took the inhabitants all prisoner without a shot fired; however, marching these prisoners through St. Louis caused a bloody riot and sparked a mini-civil war within Missouri. Which after all was ripe for it.

Why most Civil War era fiction isn't set in Missouri has always puzzled me. Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas were dull in comparison.

I also feel that there's a lot more that could be done with the Civil War in Texas. Lee's refusal to acknowledge the authority of the secessionists. Neighbor-on-neighbor terrorism in the Hill Country and Red River Valley. The retrenchment of the frontier under Comanche opportunism. The woeful mismanagement of the only hope the Confederacy ever had to be economically viable, the cotton trade through Mexico.

It's all very well to read paragraphs in other people's books and feel the novel hiding inside them; quite another to coax the novel out. Any one of these situations is too huge for a book. Though huge historical novels have been known to do well in the bookstores; it's not the way to bet. War and Peace was written for an audience with far fewer competing entertainments, and James Michener's early books are much slimmer than his later ones. (Which I personally don't find particularly readable.) So you have to do massive amounts of research, figure out which manageable sliver of the past you're up to dealing with, and find the character you aim to build the plot around; or the plot you aim to build your character within, depending on how you work.

Far too many Americans think they live in a boring place with boring history, because of the selective emphasis given to specific points in the broad sweep of history. So we treat the Civil War as a series of bloody Southeastern military encounters, not as a hot economic mess that sprawled all over the nation, and forget the direct and real effect it had on the lives of people in the Midwest, in California, on the Texas frontier, in Mexico - and in England. We ignore everything that went on in the rest of the world during those four years, and most of what went on in our own country. What was Hawaii like in 1861? Who was doing what in Alaska? What was it like to be an Indian in Kansas then? What about the disastrous New Mexico campaign? California appeared in blue in all my school textbook maps of the Civil War, but the text never told me why California adhered to the Union, or what that mean to the people who lived there.

What happened in your town? Don't tell me "nothing."

I know better. There's a story there if you'll only look for it, instead of taking the simplified, predigested history of popular culture as your guide.

I'm Scared

2011-12-15T12:07:00.004-06:00

I have a book written. I have a hook written. I have a synopsis written. I have all the contact and submission information necessary for an agent who ought to love the lesbian western.

I don't want to send it.

Why, exactly, sending a query - a routine business letter - paralyzes me with terror, I don't understand. I'm not afraid of rejection. I don't like it, but I'm used to it. I've had lots of practice and survived without serious discomfort every time.

It's a lot like my fear of small heights. I can go up in a plane just fine (except for the excruciating pain in my ears on descent), but ladders terrify me. I feel sick and as if I'm falling off backward. I used to think this was a phobia, until the day I went through the battery of tests at the ear doctor and heard the technician say brightly: "Well, you have 0% gravity detection in your left ear." It turns out, my fear of heights is a rational one, given the fact that my body can't reliably tell where it is in relation to the earth in the absence of a direct connection!

Because they feel so similar, I'm inclined to think that my fear of queries may be, like my fear of heights, based on some similar personal idiosyncrasy. I don't know what. It's not shyness, because - though I hate meeting new people generally - I'm not shy. I don't hesitate to approach people in strange cities when I'm lost, for example, though I don't do it randomly; and I frequently approach people downtown who I see doing the Lost Tourist Dance (stand in middle of sidewalk, map in hand, and turn slowly, glancing from map to territory and back with each turn) in order to help them find what they're looking for. It's not asociality, because it's just business and for the most part I'll never meet the person I'm querying in person. I'll get a rejection and that will be that. It's not - well, it's not a lot of things and I don't know what it is, besides uncomfortable.

It doesn't matter what causes it, though. If I want to sell my work I have to send queries, just as if I want to change the light bulb or wallpaper the roof I have to climb ladders. And I can bull through either fear. Done it many times, will many times again. It's one of the few things I have in common with the heroine of the lesbian western - if either of us has to do a thing, we always prove to be able to do it.

Which doesn't prevent me from procrastinating by writing blog posts about it.

Tough morning

2011-12-13T11:31:00.002-06:00

The synopsis is down to one page.

It stinks.

That's to be expected. If I can get Len's voice into the synopsis and query, I should be good to start sending out the query - just in time for everybody to go on Christmas vacation. Life is rough.

And it makes no sense. Just ask Miss Thai. Damon fell back asleep this morning after I woke him up, and I didn't get him woken up again till it was too late to catch the bus. So I'm sitting at the computer doing my morning routine (e-mail, comics, blogs, etc.) with the cat in my lap while he gets ready to go. When he's ready, I tell Thai: "I have to take Daddy to work now."

"That's stupid," says Thai. "Daddy doesn't want to go to work, you don't want to take him, and I don't want to move. So sit still, and everybody'll be happy."

You can tell the world is messed up because of the frequency with which it is impossible to follow perfectly sensible advice like this from your cat.

(Of course my cat talks. I'm translating from the feline, that's all.)

Idea Garage Sale: Hidden Letters

2011-12-11T09:31:00.003-06:00

There are three ways to do the espitolary novel.

1) Straight. Sally Ann writes to Dorothy Jane and that's all we know about it.

2) Sideways. A descendant of the original Dorthy Jane, DJ, finds the letters and the correspondence illuminates a problem, parallels her own experience, or gives her to the clue to a mystery.

3) Tangled. Same as 2, only the Sally Ann-Dorothy Jane correspondence is interspersed with diary entries and letters from DJ's hand (keyboard, phone, whatever). This is justifiable only if the act of writing is part of DJ's illumination process and gives the reader a better grasp of what's going on. Done wrong, it's likely to drive the reader into conniptions.

Any of these forms will serve equally well for domestic, mystery, or fantasy stories; the fantasy could conceivably turn into a horror novel. Writers of supernatural short stories used to be fond of the documents-in-the-case approach, but you don't see it as much anymore.

The ideal way to write in an odd format like the epistolary novel is, that one has a story that can best be told that way. It is risky to sit down with the idea "I want to write an epistolary novel!" as then you have to go searching for a story that is best served by that format.

And they're rare. I have images in my head for the Sally Ann-Dorothy Jane story - a lake, woods full of blackbellied whistling ducks, rowboats with Gibson girls in them, a vacation cabin converted to year-round use, a bundle of letters hidden in a hole in a wall, DJ in exile and desperately searching for Something - and have had for fifteen years or so. They'll remain nothing but images, though, till I figure out what exactly happened to Sally Ann and Dorothy Jane, and what that has to do with DJ now.

Pathetically Soliciting Feedback

2011-12-09T09:57:00.002-06:00

So, how bad is this query?

Eleanor, in men's clothing, leaves her home on the Texas frontier in a die-and-show-them mood. Letters scattered across the hills lead her to the corpse of a cotton trader, miles off his natural route. She carries the body into town and finds that Lee has surrendered; the western theater has not; the Yankees haven't arrived; the Secesh are running for Mexico; no one is in charge.
In this limbo, it's easy for Eleanor to reinvent herself as Len, just another young man at loose ends; but - what then? She goes to work for the cotton trader's beautiful daughter, Miss Diana Bonvillain, who - despite her tragic circumstances - smiles at Len's jokes. When Len uncovers evidence that Bonvillain's murder may have been planned and executed by one, or both, of his partners, there's no court to present it to, no authority to investigate. One partner is Miss Diana's guardian; the other, her suitor. It's not Len's business; but Len has no business of her own.
And what kind of man would she be if she left Miss Diana to fend for herself in this nest of vipers?
A Lie Worth Living is a 70,600 word YA lesbian western.

Note to self: Buy new flashdrive. That should make the old one turn up.

Miss Organization, or Why I Don't Write Non-Fiction

2011-12-08T14:32:00.003-06:00

I found my research notes. The place I'd put them was in fact perfectly logical, which is probably why I couldn't remember it. I went to refer to them so I could have citations to support an opinion of mine to a correspondent; and found that, though I formed the opinion while doing the research, the topic wasn't directly germane to the lesbian western. So, though I did make notes that support my opinion, they're scattered, incomplete, and not immune to charges of cherrypicking. One cold hard fact that appears in my timeline is probably referenced - somewhere in there - but I didn't footnote my timeline because I wasn't going to care about where I got that nugget of information while I was writing the story. And there's simply too much stuff to sift through to give my correspondent chapter and verse.

So I gave her a representative sampling and told her she'd probably concur with me if she read her own city's newspapers from the relevant period. Because it looks really obvious to me and I find laying out for somebody else what should be blinking obvious if they'd only look where I'm pointing incredibly tedious.

I love researching. I hate showing my work.

Meanwhile, I can't find my flashdrive, which means I'm having to start almost from scratch on the query. Say, I wonder if it fell down behind the cushion on the petting couch...Nope.

Sometimes when I lose this stuff, it's fairies playing practical jokes on me, but a lot of times, it's just me thinking of something else at the crucial moment. I keep swearing I'll do better, and then not improving.

And after all, looking for flashdrives and trying to locate citations that are gone with the wind is easier than rewriting a query from scratch.

I Think I'm Done

2011-12-05T11:47:00.002-06:00

Len is down to 70,600 words. I think she's ready to start hunting up agents.

I may try to get Damon to take another shot of reading it, to see if the pacing problem's really solved.

Six thousand words is more than I expected to cut. Good for me.

Idea Garage Sale: The Ultimate History Series

2011-12-04T07:02:00.003-06:00

I've been feeling a bit uncommunicative this week and I still have to recreate a character sheet before this afternoon's game, so back I go to the "Notes and Experiments" file folder, where all the random stuff I scribbled down on wastepaper while bored at various soul-sucking day jobs wound up.

Man, the pressure of frustrated ambition used to build up back when I didn't have any control over my own time!

Consider this plan for a Texas history series.

I'd start with the Indians, maybe one book about an Indian living before European contact; then, one each for her descendants living in the various phases of Spanish/Mexican rule - shorthanded in the notes as "Mission/Military/Civil." In other words, Texas was administered by the Spanish first through the church, then through the military, and finally through the civil authority. The change of power from Spanish to Mexican was not a significant one from the point of view of the far northern territory of Texas - both Spain and Mexico relied on a centralized authority that never really controlled the fringes of the claimed territory or understood the needs of the people, native or colonial, who lived there.

From there, the stories would get closer together in time and include more overlapping characters as I proceeded to a book covering the Revolution and the Runaway Scrape, then the Republic, then some portion of the Antebellum period, then the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age/Cattle Age/Wild West (which are all the same historical period), World War I and the flu epidemic, Jazz Age, Depression, and World War II.

The notes end with a bunch of doodles and the following thoughts:

Books should be as ethnic as possible - tribes, Mexican, slave, German, various first generation immigrants. Emphasis on the more neglected crises - economic, climactic, medical. Old-fashioned domestic novels, or the traditional juvenile/historical romance? Room for both.

This cries out for pseudonymity. Susannah Long. Jane Dickens. Magnolia Strasse. Antonia Balcones. Kelly Randolph. Sandy Fernando.

At which point either the day ended, I got some work to do, or I realized I was getting silly. Though I really need to name some sims Magnolia Strasse, Sandy Fernando, and Kelly Randolph...

Anyway, had I been willing to devote my life to this and nothing else, I could have been the Rosemary Sutcliff of Texas. And I contend that every single one of these periods merits further fictional exploration; yes, even the Wild West, which is overdue to have its cliches shaken up with some different viewpoints, hard facts, and maverick interpretations of events.

Regular readers of the Garage Sale will have noted that the Impractically Thorough Historic Series is a recurring theme in my imagination. You'll see it again, I'm sure. There's just so much potential - especially in Texas history, but I bet any arbitrarily designated patch of ground would reward the researcher almost as much. Texas wears its history on its sleeve. Just because Iowa is shyer, doesn't mean it's less interesting.

For those of you without my mental network of references, the sources of the pseudonyms are:

Jane Long, the Mother of Texas.
Susanna Dickenson, Alamo survivor.
And of course Charles Dickens, who would have written awesome westerns had he been born a Texan.

Magnolia Avenue, where I live; Strasse of course is German for Street. (Adele Verein would be another good name, since the Adelsverein was the name of the organization that financed the most famous influx of German settlers.)
Balcones Heights, the name of the area where I live, and the Balcones Escarpment, the geological feature dividing Texas in two and on which San Antonio is built.

San Fernando Cathedral.

And Kelly and Randolph Air Force bases. Damon was working at Kelly when I met him, and we were stationed at Randolph when my little sister was born.

We all have these networks in our heads. Exploring them can be fruitful, or merely dizzying.

Happy Birthday, Miss Alcott

2011-11-29T08:06:00.004-06:00

Today is the birthday of one of the most significant figures in American literature, and the goddess of my idolatry, Louisa May Alcott.

Though often scorned at her own valuation, as a producer of "moral pap for the young," it only takes a small amount of historical acumen to realize how radical she was at her time; and only a little more social self-awareness to realize that in many ways, American society is still more conservative than her. Witness the reluctance of many, even most, of her modern readers to admit that

Jo was right not to marry Laurie!!!!!!

Louisa May Alcott was a hustler, writing to market, explicitly and obsessively writing for money to counteract the legacy of her idealistic and improvident father. She enjoyed catering to morbid fantasy, and did - the stories she satirized Jo for writing to make money for the illustrated papers seem mild compared to the drug use and sexual power games in the pseudononymous stories Madeleine B. Stern first unearthed for us back in the 70s - but the work that survives is unrelentingly realistic in ways that made (and still make) the public uncomfortable, to the point that many of us whitewash these things out of our reading.

Marriage is not the climax and happy-ever-after of life; it is the opening of a whole new can of worms. Too much candy will make you sick and too much ease will make you useless. Sexual attraction will not overcome other incompatibilities in the long term. Peer pressure will lead you to do stupid and even wicked things. It is possible to hate your little sister murderously and love her at the same time. Life is unfair. You have to deal with the world you're in, not the world you want, and the person you are, not the person you dream of being. You won't get it if you don't work for it and you may not get it even then.

Happiness is hard work.

But it beats the alternative.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cave Art Kids

2011-11-27T10:28:00.004-06:00

For those of you who missed it, individual children making art can be tracked in Dordogne Cave, especially a particular 5-year-old girl.

This makes me very happy.

For one thing, it illustrates my main thesis, that creativity is a normal human activity, not something special set aside only for the elite.

For another, the individuals who can be identified and glimpsed at Dordogne - and other ancient sites - are natural solid reference points around which we - and by we I mean all of us storytellers, whether we're scientific archeological storytellers or artistic fiction-writing storytellers - can build a story. First we collect the traces of the individual; then we interpret them according to what we know in our selves about people and what we know from the evidence about their environment, and extrapolate a reasonable story about who this person was, why she was there, who was there with her, and what challenges she faced.

Obviously, a cave art picturebook is long overdue.

A novel would require more conflict than is implied by the harmonious and happy picture created by this research; but one can always start with that harmonious, happy picture and work either away from it - happy art-making in caves has to come to an end, the youthful artists have to grow up and face adult challenges - or toward it, with the families of the youthful artists overcoming various hardships to arrive at the happy art-making.

And for the scientist, the image of the happy art-making makes an excellent centerpiece for the reconstruction of Pleistocene culture, a cohesive, relateable context that enables the scientist to put all the disparate and fragmentary bits of evidence together in a meaningful way.

I don't see any way to go about any of these project that don't involve researching till blood comes out your ears; but I can tell you from experience, the reward is worth the work.

Okay, maybe not the monetary reward. 11,000 Years Lost hasn't made that much money. TheEarth's Children series has. This sort of thing is always a crapshoot and there's nothing to be done about that. But the emotional and intellectual rewards of doing the research and writing the story - those are hard to overstate.

Plus, research for any of these projects would involve visiting Pleistocene art sites. Which would be a good in itself.

We cannot have too many books about the Pleistocene. We just can't.

Intransitive Thanks

2011-11-24T10:07:00.004-06:00

Since I am agnostic, I have been asked what, when I am thankful, I am thankful to.

It strikes me as unnecessary for "thank" at the Harvest Festival level to be a transitive verb. I know when I'm well off and I appreciate it. Money is tight, but we (and by we I mean Damon) are successfully juggling our financial needs. We're not in perfect health but we're both alive and much, much more well than we have been. Our back porch work is completed without major disasters. We have plenty to eat. It rained twice this week. Damon and I both made work progress this week, though neither of us made as much as we wanted to.

We can be happy if we let ourselves be.

Merry Thanksgiving, y'all.

It's all in my mind's eye

2011-11-22T15:08:00.003-06:00

I didn't think it would, but revising for pacing is easier now that I've identified the problem, mostly because I've been able to redefine the problem as one of characterization. Len's hyperawareness of her surroundings is not a matter of her taking a lot of extra time to look around, but of her being immersed in each moment as it passes. So rephrasing and tightening the work - especially the traveling parts and the transitional chapter, which are the chief culprits - becomes a matter of creating greater immediacy and conveying Len's character better.

Characterization is easier for me than plot. I had almost no hope of pacing the plot better. Pacing the character better is well within my comfort zone.

On the one hand, it doesn't change anything, except my perception of the problem.

On the other hand, my perception of the problem is exactly what I needed to change.

Idea Garage Sale: Caroline in the Friendly House

2011-11-20T09:12:00.004-06:00

Old notes, verbatim, but with idiosyncratic shorthand deleted.

Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.

The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.

Ghost miscarried, died.

Ghost assists Caroline - how?

Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.

This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?

I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.

I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.

Yes, houses are a big deal to me.

Two Frustrations

2011-11-17T09:06:00.005-06:00

I was going to turn my blog black for American Censorship Day, but the html Blogger gives me to work with is so mind-bogglingly in need of a good proofreader I chickened out of figuring out where to put the necessary code string. So that's one.

The second is, yesterday I figured out what the problem is with fixing the pacing in the lesbian Western.

It's already paced the way I like it!

The thing is, I wrote this book so I could go back in time, in company with Len, and have a good long visit in Central Texas in Spring 1865. I like all the looking around at the landscape and observation of her surroundings and savoring of food she does. Len is a person who enjoys everything there is to enjoy as much as she can while she can, and she and I are happy for it to be so.

So a lot of what I need to take out is stuff she and I, the people telling the story, care about; but can't expect the audience to.

Yeah, I'll get rid of it. Len and I are both realists and we'll be in the minority on this issue. But the more concentrated, action-oriented story I'm aiming for is one I personally will enjoy less than the one I've got. So that takes a lot of the fun out of revising.

Rain Magic

2011-11-15T10:39:00.004-06:00

We got rain! Plus thunder and lightning. And high winds. Normally I'd just hang out inside enjoying it, but I had some early-morning errands and had to be out in it. Since I learned to drive so late in life, we have a running gag about me getting experience points and leveling up in the skill, and it's been a long time since I could feel the x.p. accruing, but I sure did today.

We have of course been in drought conditions, so the morning DJ at the community college station played a bunch of rain songs as an act of sympathetic magic, and took credit for how the downpour increased during that set. Anybody who didn't take an umbrella when they heard the thunder this morning, or who washed a car last night, will similarly be taking credit.

On the one hand, we know it's not so - that even if human action affected the weather, which it does not, any given umbrella, or clean windshield, or playlist is unlikely to have been the crucial one that achieved a critical mass of rain magic; especially in opposition to all the people committing small magics to make the rain hold off till they got safely to work.

On the other hand - we believe it. All of us. Who, in a drought-prone area, has not deliberately left an umbrella behind in hope of making it rain; or hauled an umbrella to a parade, picnic, or fireworks display in order to fend it off, in a rainy area?

It is almost impossible for us, as human beings, to accept that anything is truly outside of our control.

Yet most things are.

Idea Garage Sale: The Deer and the Dog

2011-11-13T07:46:00.003-06:00

One of my bosses once told me about how a family member raised a fawn and it became running buddies with one of the dogs. They'd race each other on country roads.

They disappeared at about the same time.

Can you say "Disney movie?" But what constitutes a happy ending here - the deer and the dog living wild and independent lives together? The deer learning to be a deer and the dog coming home when his buddy's okay?

Disneyfication aside, this is not a story for someone without a profound knowledge of animals. The breed of dog and the species of deer (around here, that would be mule or whitetail) would be the first important questions to answer. A story told without the viewpoints of the dog and the deer would be limited in many ways, so being able to think like the animals, and translate those viewpoints into terms humans can understand, would be vital. When writing from an animal viewpoint, it is important to remember that animals are not stupid compared to humans - they merely deploy their brainpower in different areas. The processing power devoted to a dog's sense of smell is every bit as impressive as that devoted to literary criticism, and the rewards for the dog far more tangible and immediate. The author would have to decide early how much to anthropomorphize the animals (a certain amount is inevitable), and whether to give both viewpoints equal time, or to choose one animal as the protagonist.

Then you'd want to know about the family they were raised in - why did they raise an orphan deer? There's all kinds of reasons not to. City folk get sentimental about them, but anyone who lives in the country long will come to regard them as "hooved napalm." Deer have numerous symbolic roles in our society; deer-hunting is an important cultural activity in rural areas; attitudes toward hunting, and the assumptions hunters and non-hunters make about each other, can stand-in for some of the most bitter, vindictive divisions in early 21st-century American society. These issues are too big to ignore, but could easily overwhelm the story, even if the author is trying to be even-handed. If the protagonists are the animals, these matters must be de-emphasized; but if dog, deer, and some member of their human household (presumably a child) all get viewpoints, they will form a major part of the human's character arc.

You could do something interesting, showing the human grappling with abstract issues while the animals focus on practical matters. Animals are eminently practical. The capacity for abstraction is the hallmark of the human mind; which is a strength in some situations, a weakness in others.

A side effect of this practicality is the essential innocence of animals. I have always considered this to be the essential point of the Biblical story of the Fall. Animals never ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; nor was it ever forbidden to them. They have no moral sense. They have no shame. They don't need either. That's part of the abstract ideation that they don't mess with. I think that's why the death of an animal in a story is such a guaranteed tear-jerker for most readers (certainly for me!).

That's a little simplistic. Certain animals - notably dogs - occupy a midpoint on the moral spectrum. Dogs certainly know shame and guilt. And man is not the only primate capable of abstraction. All generalizations are false.

A story is all about specifics.

Another Draft Done

2011-11-11T11:30:00.002-06:00

Len is down below 80,000 words now; but she's got an 84-word sentence in there somewhere, and I don't know whether the pacing problem's solved or not.

Still, it's good enough for one week.

I'm leaning toward A Lie Worth Living With as a title. It feels a tad long, but it's good enough to stick on the query, anyhow.

Coincidence?

2011-11-09T14:39:00.003-06:00

Yesterday my internet went out. Despite spending absurd amounts of time dealing with getting it back, I got all but one of my list of things done.

Today I have internet and I've done - well - a lot less.

Coincidence? Or causation?

I think I'll blame the weather.

Idea Garage Sale: Contemporary Fairy Tale

2011-11-06T10:05:00.003-06:00

The heroine's name is Jackie, of course; the youngest, the one no one takes seriously. Her family subsists on food stamps and is likely to be evicted.

Jackie shares her tortilla with a stray cat, though repeatedly told not to. El Gato is grateful and will help her find her fortune, but there's complications. Jackie's too young to buy a lottery ticket, and any treasure she digs up will belong to the property owner. Rewards come with strings attached. The grown-ups and older kids won't cooperate - they never do.

It's probable that Jackie and El Gato have different ideas about what constitutes an acceptable fortune.

Writing a book like this is following a well-trodden path; which means, if you want yours to stand out, you have to go head-to-head with some formidable competition. You'd better know your source material inside-out if you want to pull anything new out of it.

Wait, I was supposed to post yesterday

2011-11-04T07:34:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I'm just not into the outside world. I want to stick my head into my study, write my little books, play my little games, arrange my little house (okay, it's a pretty big house by American middle-class standards), take care of my husband and the cats.

It's a luxury and it's irresponsible and short-sighted and undisciplined and it makes people think I'm anti-social.

Don't take it personally.

Random Thoughts on Reality

2011-11-01T15:08:00.004-05:00

Modern aliens are boring. Don't believe me? Read these stories and ask yourself if it wasn't more fun before the grays came along and started hogging all the action.

By the way, I don't believe aliens are extraterrestrials. I believe they're fairies. What fairies are, I don't know, nor do I feel any need to. When I write a story with fairies in it, they'll be whatever kind of fairies suit the story's needs.

Ditto witches; though I don't like the word "witch" because it is used so many ways it's well-nigh useless without endless qualifiers. If everybody's on the same page about what it means for the purposes of a story, though, I can deal.

That's another of the skills fiction teaches us to use; the ability to set aside what we know, or think we know, and our own categories for the duration of a story, so that we can understand and enjoy it. People who get all bent out of shape and condemn an entire story over the mere use of the term witch, or because the aliens in a story don't match their expectations of aliens, or because the supernatural underpinnings of the fantasy are based in somebody else's tradition, are failing at this skill.

We should all practice it as much as we can. We're all jerks when we get bent out of shape, after all.

However, I reserve the right to get bent out of shape about stories in which it's taken as fact that witches were burned in Salem, because that's just not true and shows that the storyteller hasn't done his homework. If you want me to extend my conditional belief to an outright falsehood like that, you'd better tell me a story worth the effort of setting the lie aside!

Idea Garage Sale: Make-up Magic

2011-10-30T10:18:00.003-05:00

A kid/teen with a self-image problem - unfashionable figure, "ugly" (i.e. distinctive) features - has an acting ambition centered around "everybody's natural desire to be somebody else." Plagued by envy, thinks like a victim. Fascinated by make-up artistry, big fan of the Lon Chaneys, but doesn't understand the predeliction to make monsters. She wants to create perfection.

The make-up kit is an entirely neutral magic item, does exactly as asked, and can be cleaned off - possibly only with the cold cream that comes with, though. That depends on whether you prefer a scene where her identity starts to run in the rain, or one in which she wants to erase a failed ideal self and is almost out or can't find the jar. Try for beauty, try to be someone else, try out the opposite sex; eventually try out a monster identity as a means of expressing her increasing frustration.

The biggest problem for the author is wrapping up satisfactorily without being trite. Teens and kids are always being told to be themselves, and responding mentally (as I used to respond): "But what if yourself is somebody nobody likes?" There's no point saying such things out loud to grown-ups - all they do is tell you that's not true, like that should help, which it doesn't.

The biggest problem for me is, I don't use make-up. I never have. I don't know what most of it is for, or why you'd want to muck your skin up with it. It's made of dirt, you know! The closest I've come to stage make-up was smearing all visible skin with gray pancake to play a rock gnome in a LARP. I could research the matter, of course; but it's not intrinsically interesting to me.

By the way - the way I solved this problem? Went to college, discovered RPGs, became Queen of the Geeks. Not practical advice for a ninth-grader.

Oktoberfest Blogfest: Bilocating Kitten

2011-10-26T09:13:00.003-05:00

Since I signed up to join Bish Denham's Blogfest, involving posting a short ghostly experience, I reckon I better get on it.

This is a true story and the weirdest thing that ever happened to me.

Some years ago, we had orphan kittens. We were alerted to their existence by the agonized cries of the smallest, most-loudmouthed one, who was also the first to try to climb out of the box even though her eyes were glued shut by infection. We called her Intrepid. She was a dark gray tabby. She had two sisters, a dark gray tabby with white feet (Whitefoot), a black (Ford; she was an Explorer), and gray with a white chest (Pogo; he looked like a possum).

We kept them in the sunroom so our big cats wouldn't molest them and contract their fleas, fed them with an eyedropper, combed the fleas out of them, and washed their poor infected eyes regularly with saline solution. Before the recent reconfiguration of our back porch, the three rooms - laundry room, powder room, sunroom - were all connected to each other by doors, with entrance to the main part of the house from the kitchen to the laundry room and from the dining room to the sunroom. Once the kittens started moving around on their own, I would utilize the powder room as an airlock, entering through the laundry room, closing the door behind me, and then opening the door to the sunroom. But none of the doors closed very well.

One night I woke up and saw Intrepid, or possibly Whitefoot, on the foot of the bed. I sat up and she pounced into the mass of covers pushed down there - it being June and too hot to sleep with the covers up - so that I had to fish around for her. I couldn't find her. As I woke up more I realized that, even had one of the felines in the house gotten the door to the sunroom open, a kitten who could barely climb out of a box would have had to cross the dining room and kitchen, climb the steep back stairs (each riser taller than any of the kittens at full extension), cross the landing, climb the second flight of stairs, cross the hallway, and climb onto a waterbed frame with no help from a dangling bedspread. It wasn't possible. This was a hypnopompic hallucination - essentially, my body had started to wake up, but my brain had continued dreaming for a short time.

Not a big deal.

Next day (possibly my memory conflates events and it might have been several days later), the kittens were lively and I had to move back and forth between the powder room and the sun room several times in the course of tending to kittens, so to restrict the time they spent underfoot I put all of them on the bench seat in the sunroom while I went to the bathroom to get what I was after. By the time I turned around, I had kittens in my way. Intrepid in particular seemed anxious to get stepped on - while Ford and Pogo chased each other, she was directly where I needed to step. So I gently lifted her aside with my bare foot under her belly, laughing at the way her little black paws clawed the air on either side of my instep, and returned to the sunroom - where I found Intrepid, too small to jump down, standing on the edge of the bench seat meowing frantically.

None of the kittens, at this point, could climb onto the bench seat without assistance. Even Pogo, the biggest and strongest, had to use an intermediate box placed next to it to get himself up. Yet there she was. But I had felt her furry belly across my instep. And although it was easy to confuse Whitefoot - currently at the base of the bench seat - with Intrepid, I had specifically seen that the kitten I lifted had dark paws.

I have no explanation for this. I only tell you what happened.

Intrepid was the only one of the kittens who died. She never gained weight past 6.5 ounces, never got weaned. She died while I was on an out of town school visit, probably of hypothermia in the middle of June in Texas, because her body couldn't retain heat and the other kittens no longer stayed in the box insulating her.

I don't know if that is relevant.

Weird things happen, that's all.

News: Gault in Texas Parks & Wildlife

2011-10-24T14:56:00.002-05:00

As seen online here; but get the magazine, too, if you want to encourage more news coverage of archeological topics. Editors notice which subjects cause upsurges in their sale numbers, and buy and solicit new articles accordingly.

It's been way too long since I've been out there. It's been way too long since I did a lot of things.

Idea Garage Sale: Dilly Montez and the Grace of God

2011-10-23T09:29:00.003-05:00

I was only touched by the grace of God once in my life, and that was when Dilly Montez walked into sophomore English class.

That sentence is all by itself on a blank sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper in my "Notes and Experiments" folder.

I have no idea what it means, who's speaking, or even what gender Dilly Montez is.

What do you think?

A Good Cry

2011-10-20T15:41:00.002-05:00

My sims game gave me a good cry last night, when the first of what I think of as my "core sims" came to the natural end of her life and went off with the Grim Reaper, who came wearing a lei and accompanied by hula girls, gave her a drink with a little umbrella, and wafted her away. (This is the best possible sim death.)

One of the rewards of fiction - and sim games and RPGs are fiction, over which the player has less control than a writer and more control than a reader; it's why I play them and why I consider them a legitimate topic here - is that little catharsis; that luxury of weeping over imaginary woes, cleaning out your tear ducts and releasing grinding everyday tensions in a few minutes of good clean emotional intensity, without the bad side effects. I slept fine after weeping for Hilary Aerius and participating in the grief of her son Greg, her cat Eartha, her son-in-law, and her grandson. The world does not have a Hilary-shaped hole in it, I'm relaxed, I had a meeting with a student I'm mentoring and all went well, my life proceeds just fine.

The effects of some fictional emotions linger. I still mourn Beth March (but, happily, I can turn to the early parts of the book and see her again). It was Beth March's death, I believe, that started me on the road to being able to cope with the concept of mortality; a favor I hope I passed on to a few kids when I wrote The Ghost Sitter.

No book, no movie, no game, no factual knowledge can do the emotional work for you; but we gain so much pleasure from forms that give us the chance to exercise our emotional muscles and develop the skills we'll need when real life knocks us on our butts, return again and again to works that allow us to feel love, pain, loss, fear, and other big emotions vicariously, without the surrounding consequences of them, that I think these forms are our natural way of learning to cope. It's like playing games to build muscles and reflexes in our bodies.

Parents should monitor the emotional play their kids get as they would physical play; but they shouldn't be afraid of letting them experience intense unreal emotions any more than they should be afraid of letting them experience a fall off a bicycle. Most of the time the damage isn't significant, and they learn from the experience. When the fall results in an actual injury - a scraped knee, a night terror - it's the parent's job to apply the bandages and security, and teach the kid to deal and heal.

It is not the writer's job to make reading a 100% safe and comfortable occupation for all possible readers. It won't be effective if it is!

Pressure

2011-10-18T10:43:00.004-05:00

I woke up at about 4:30 this morning, apparently because a front was coming through, and couldn't get back to sleep until after I got Damon up at 6:30; at which point I felt pinned to the bed by the atmosphere.

I have a list of 14 things to do today, not one of which I feel like doing. I knew when I made the list I wouldn't do them all, but "none" isn't acceptable.

So this blog post is one of them.

The only real problem with not having a soul-sucking day job (apart from, y'know, the economic ones, which come with the territory) is that on days like this there's no exterior pressure to do the things we need to do. Self-discipline is the most important skill to cultivate for any self-employed person, from writer to plumber. You have to be your own slave-driver because nobody else cares enough to drive you, and the cat would just as soon seduce you into curling up with a book and a cup of tea and a cat all day long.

Idea Garage Sale: Recurrent Preoccupations

2011-10-16T11:11:00.005-05:00

Two biologists/biogeneticists discover the secret of life by accident, creating a species of homunculi. Though kept in a "paradisial" aquarium/safe enclosed environment they escape to live as "Borrowers."

Talk about your huge ideas! The trouble with this one is that the part that attracts me most is the "living as Borrowers" trope, which though important would suffer from lack of attention to the other issues - like that little matter of discovering the secret of life! There's just something about the notion of people in an outsized environment...I've been playing with variations of the tiny people motif since at least 4th grade, but I think I exorcised the need writing Margo's House, which hardly anyone but my mother-in-law likes much.

The alien invasion of Earth parallels historical invasions on Earth. Expressed as an unfavorable review of an historical/anthropological work by an alien, who is accused of exaggerating the value of native cultures and underestimating the long-term benefits to humans of their subjugation.

Ah, satire. Howard Waldrop could write this story and not annoy people. I couldn't. The True Meaning of Smek Day did me the favor of accomplishing everything this concept would have tried to do, much better than I could have.

An archeologist on another planet achieves heaven - dying and joining the dead city she's been investigating on the level of time at which it still exists.

My core notion of time travel is, that all times exist simultaneously and the human brain experiences it linearly because that's all it can handle. And no, that doesn't mean predestination - there's no "pre," and there's no "post," and free will is part of the system. This treatment appears in my head as an atmospheric piece, portraying the archeologist progressively thinking her way into the heads and lives of the members of the alien culture she's uncovering, fighting her way through anthropocentric assumptions; until she dies on the job and breaks through. In other words, no action at all in the usual sense. Requires a lighter hand than I've got.

Onward. Upward. Both Ways. In the Rain.

2011-10-13T13:32:00.003-05:00

Took Damon to a routine doctor visit this morning, picked up a hold at the library, dropped him at work, came home to a short story rejection.

As rejections go it's an encouraging one, as they'd like to see more of my work, but I don't have many viable short stories left hanging around unpublished and I've talked about the trouble I'm having committing a new one. The markets have shrunk so much - apart from the e-markets, which don't feel like real, concrete markets to me and in any case are the equivalent of the $0.025/per word little magazines of my youth - that once a story has circulated four or five times it feels like there's no place left for it to go.

And that is another part of the problem with committing to a new project. It's all very well to write for the fun of it, for yourself, and so on - but I can't pay the contractor in the fun of writing. What we write is only half-written until it's read; and with the internet providing so many free and nearly free ways to connect writers and audiences, the buyer's market in fiction is worse than it ever was, from the point of view of us midlisters with entrepreneurophobia.

Professionals have many things to offer which the amateur pool out there does not. If you pick up a book of mine, you know you're getting a complete story, for one thing. Although many, many talented amateurs are self-publishing through the internet, using blogging services and fora as venues, professionalism shows in lots of ways - from basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation skills to the ability to go over a scene until it's the way it's supposed to be. But a lot of people don't care much about those things, anyway, especially if they can get "good enough" free but have to pay for "excellent."

And many people who should be paid for their work are so desperate for the audience, they'll give themselves away. It's tempting, I know; especially if you're part of a community that offers encouragement and praise. But the inadequacy of encouragement and praise alone to keep a creative artist going can readily be seen by the number of unfinished projects lying around the web. A writer posts on-line to an admiring, but parsimonious, public; doles out chapters that are eagerly awaited, discussed, commented on, and read; reaches the long slog in the middle or writes her way into a corner and then has a baby/loses a family member/contracts an illness/gets a new job/graduates; and the wait between installments gets longer and longer, the audience falls away, and the story remains unfinished.

Sure, those things happen to professionals, too. But the incentive to persevere in the face of difficulties is much stronger in someone who is actively trying to be paid for her work.

And professionals have one luxury that self-published amateurs lack. We can ignore negative reviews. If you're paid in praise, a single ill-natured, ill-considered, ignorant, mean, or tactless person can wipe out all your profits. I don't know whether writers are more prone to remember condemnation and forget approval than the rest of the population; but we are awfully bad about it as a group.

So I'll resist the temptation to bang my head against the desk, start a sim blog, and channel all my storytelling talents into shilling for approving comments in that niche market(a couple of people have asked me to start simblogging, but I tell myself they're just being nice and I wouldn't be able to amass much of a following anyway), and get that story back into the mail. Tomorrow morning. I swear.

And come to think of it, I do have at least one other story I could send to that market that just rejected me...

Eureka! Or Not.

2011-10-11T15:03:00.003-05:00

I saw exactly what I needed to do to revise the lesbian western, where the problem was, what I needed to do to fix it. The whole process unrolled before me tidy as you please.

Then I woke up and lost it all.

I don't regret this - much. Since in the same dream sequence, shooting the rapids of the San Antonio River behind a bunch of anglers, using a backpack as a flotation device, seemed like the logical way to beat the bad guys to the door of the Alamo halfway up a mountain, I doubt the insights were as profound, complete, and easily implemented as they seemed at the time.

That's the trouble with relying on inspiration. It's great fun when it happens, but the opening up of my subconscious and the flowering forth of ideas, connections, and insights that I've been making without noticing them comes along with an endorphin rush that overwhelms my judgment. I don't hurry to write inspirations down anymore. The good ones hang around and the impossible, misleading, and just plain stupid ones melt away like dreams do.

Valid inspirations are the reward for doing the work day after day after day after day - the research, the daily committing of work to medium, the pointless-feeling effort to logically work out a problem that you know perfectly well, from experience, will be solved when two disparate ideas line up together while you're doing something completely different. Like the dishes.

This is why authors should do their own house and yardwork, in addition to writing daily. You've got to give inspiration a place to strike in.

Idea Garage Sale: The Beaten-Down Path

2011-10-09T11:19:00.004-05:00

Rain, rain, beautiful rain! It rained last night and it's raining now and it should rain for the next two days, which should make everyone happy, but people are going to grip about it. I never have taken the gloomy view of rain that most folks do - I'm a plainswoman, experienced in drought, and due to certain peculiarities of my system I am sensitive to atmospheric pressure, so rain starts out as a relief from drought and discomfort and has to go on for a long, long time to become oppressive to me. I wear short skirts and go barefoot when I have to go out in the rain, because skin dries faster than cloth. You can put your shoes on when you reach your destination and be dry and comfortable all day, instead of squelching around in wet feet with wet pants flapping around your ankles. Men, poor things, seldom have these options. Men generally get shafted in the sartorial department.

All this is every day common sense - to me. Yet the weight of culture is against me and I have yet to convert even one person to the barefoot-in-the-rain habit, though many people have seen the benefits in action. Received wisdom is an ogre that can only be ground away at slowly, over time, so gradually that people don't notice their habits changing and in many cases will deny that their habits have indeed changed. If you show them a truth that is too far out of their accepted way of thinking, they will not recognize it.

That's why what used to seem to me to be an obvious method of story generation does not often generate saleable stories. Inside of every cliche, I believed - and for what it's worth, I still believe - lurks some good story that has been overlooked due to the tendency of minds, like feet, to follow the best-worn trackway. If you turn a cliched idea on its head, explore it from a different angle and forge a new path through it, you should be able to provide the editor with the "fresh take" they're always asking for, while providing the public with the familiarity they have consistently displayed their willingness to spend money on.

I have a number of notions like this in the back file. Like this one (from internal evidence, this cannot date from later than 1985):
"There are Rules, Ms. Czimzik." Susie Czimzik answers an ad for a secretary for the Luz Finance Co. Although the company occupies the entire 13th floor of the Tower Life Building, she is the only clerk. Mr. Luz has agents, but they are not friendly. The company loans money on peculiar principles and has odd employment requirements; however, Susie finds Luz himself charming at first; besides, she needs the job. In course of time, she needs a loan, but has no collateral. Mr. Luz offers to do her a favor and let her have what she needs for nominal collateral - her soul. The loan is set up so that she cannot pay it back; realizing this, Susie comes gradually to realize who Luz is, and falls into despair - until an old lady - a derelict, slightly off- quotes the eleventh hour scripture to her and she realizes that the contract is invalid by nature.

Why exactly so few writers who profess the Christian religion notice the logical implications of that eleventh hour dogma for the old-fashioned "Deal with the Devil" plot, when it looks so obvious to this agnostic, is not a question subject to my answering. I think most of the time when we see this story, it is set up more as an exercise in Schadenfreude than anything else - the writer, and the audience, prefers punishment to redemption for the central figure, and the consolations of religion be damned. But it's not for me to say how anybody else's process works.

I never got any farther on this story than the above. My main interest in it, really, was to set a story in the Tower Life Building, which is one of the prettiest skyscrapers you will ever see (for my money, prettier than the Chrysler Building) and, of course, has no 13th floor.

I couldn't figure out how to do it without its appearing to be an attempt at evangelism. I'm not evangelical at all, and living where I do, I am all too aware of how violently people (including Christians!) who are used to the clumsy attempts of streetcorner preachers to evangelize them react to any hint of that. But even if I had solved that problem, and created Susie Czimzik as a more than usually attractive character, and played carefully with every tired trope I wanted to play with - the moment most editors realized it was a "Deal with the Devil" story would be the moment they stopped reading. The moment the rest realized that I'd broken the rules of the storyline would be the moment the rest of them rejected it. The path of the cliche is worn too deeply in our collective brains. The ones with the patience to wait around to see if you deviate from it are the ones who like this cliched path, and prefer not to deviate from it.

The problem is far from insurmountable. I've surmounted it a few times, myself. But it's tricky; and you have to read a lot of cliched stories to figure out how to subvert them acceptably.

Not Catching Fire

2011-10-06T12:06:00.003-05:00

Okay, possibly it's obvious based on the last few topics, but I'm not catching fire. I'm not having trouble generating ideas - that's an ingrained habit of mind; when I can't do that, something's wrong with me. I'm having trouble committing to them. I'd like to go back to Len, but I know I'm not quite ready for another serious go at revision, so I try to fill the writing time with queries and synopses and market research and it drives me wiggy and I find myself cruising newsgroups or thinking about what's going on with an RPG character or a sim instead.

So I look through market guides and pick anthologies I can write a short story for, but all I do is doodle and come up with concepts that need an entire novel to work out. Like I've been fiddling with something for a YA anthology called Eternal Love from Cool Well Press, and I've gotten a really provocative idea about how if reincarnation were the way the world works, then life amnesia would have a function in the system. So it would be cool to explore how messed up that system gets if somebody remembers all her past lives and recognizes her soulmate on meeting him in this life - only maybe what was a romantic relationship in one life is emphatically not one in this life (husband and wife last time, parent and child or teacher and student this one); oh, yeah, set that up, flesh it out, and pay it off in under 5000 words, I dare you!

This happens periodically. And every time it does I feel like there's something wrong with me, it's going on too long, I've gotten completely flaky lost all my discipline am sponging off my husband because I can't sell anything and -

It's one thing to know that it's part of the process and that I'll come out of it the same way I've always come out of it. It's another thing to feel that as a truth. And still another to know when the moment has come when I need to shut myself in a confined space with nothing but a notebook and a pen; because nothing fuels creativity like unrelenting boredom, but the disadvantage of having control of your own time is, your day has no built-in periods of boredom as it does when in a day job.

Still not going back to the soul-sucking day job routine, though. For one thing, in this economy, I doubt I could!

Let the Dice Fall Where They May

2011-10-04T09:42:00.003-05:00

I've always tried to make games into stories. My chess game is erratic because I automatically think in terms of what the queen or knight would choose to do rather than what is strategically the best move. When I play Risk, I tend to roll well in North Africa, for example, which I attribute to that space harboring General Rommel, who is on my side. (Oddly, nobody ever thinks to deploy General Patton against me.)

Most board games, alas, are not amenable to this treatment. When I discovered role-playing games - by which I always mean real, free-form games played with other people, not computer games - I took to them at once, because the whole point of them is to play a character and create, as part of the social group of players and GM, a story in the genre of the game. My fondness for Sims is rooted in the same tendency. One reason I play Sims2 and doubt I will ever play Sims3 is that 3 has no storytelling tool.

The experience of story creation in game format, however, is very different from that of writing one. One of the most fun things about the game/story format is that the creator is not in control. No one likes a "railroad GM," one whose story is set down to run on rails and will work out roughly the same regardless of how the dice roll and what choices the players make. Sit down any bunch of gamers and start them telling their "war stories," and time after time you'll get hear about crucial dice rolls falling at an extreme - the natural 20 rolled by the least powerful party member that saved them all, the critical fumble by a key character that resulted in a Total Party Kill, the failed saving throw that changed everything.

Recently we had one of those failed saves in our group, which resulted in the party rogue succumbing to a magic-induced psychosis and plotting to assassinate the entire party. The player hated it, but as an honest player he played it out, laying a plan that should have worked and, if it had, would have required a complete rethink of the game and new characters all round, probably with the insane character as a major nuisance villain. Only a miraculous series of successful saving throws and the rogue's underestimation of the party cleric prevented this; and now we get to play out the change in the relationship between the now-cured and wildly remorseful rogue and the friends he turned on. Similarly, in recent Sims games the unexpected birth of twins, an alien abduction, and a lightning strike fire that killed a teen on the verge of college have thrown my expectations for the neighborhood into a cocked hat. I am left scrambling to adjust my responses to the new realities and relationships. This is all to the good.

Sometimes, I wish mainstream story forms relied more on dice. Last night I mistimed cooking dinner and had to be in the kitchen for large chunks of the second episode of Terra Nova, but I couldn't feel that as a hardship. Damon didn't have to fill me in on the parts I missed, because it was clear from what was going on when I came into the room what had happened in the interim since I left it. The design of the plot spread out before us like a map. A familiar map; not drawn well enough (though the dinosaurs are pretty good; but I prefer mammalian megafauna to dinos) to hold my attention on aesthetic grounds. It desperately needed a failed saving throw or a critical fumble or a natural twenty rolled by a character which the staging had earmarked as a mere secondary.

It's not that I have spoiled the show for myself by understanding the structure of the one-hour TV show and the genre conventions of science fiction. I understand the structure and genre conventions of the puzzle mystery, too, yet I can read and reread Agatha Christie's and Dorothy L. Sayers's work endlessly, caught up in the sheer pleasure of their execution.

We are all sophisticated critics these days. We may not be able to articulate them, but we know about The Hero's Journey, three-act structure, and of course the TV tropes. We apply them without thinking - and that's our problem, not when viewing, but when creating.

What we've got to do, when creating, is recreate the sensation of the critical fumble, the natural twenty, and the random lightning strike for the reader. This may or may not entail recreating it for yourself. Ideally we are in full control of our material and balance the element of unpredictability with the necessary structure and coherence that fiction (and for that matter narrative non-fiction) requires. But we don't live in an ideal world. Your first draft may be a major structural mess. You may not know until the final scene that a gun needs to be lying on the mantel in the first scene. You may be on the fifth draft before you realize that your narrator cannot be your protagonist. You may be find yourself casually writing a line like "Bean'd jump off a cliff if I asked him to" and only then realize that your heroine needs to ask her faithful steed to jump off a cliff in the climax.

It doesn't matter; not as long as everything's in place in the version the reader sees.

Idea Garage Sale: Enigmatic List

2011-10-02T10:33:00.005-05:00

I was going through a folder containing all the notes I wrote down on stray bits of paper during soul-sucking day jobs. And I do mean all - the following is obviously dated to 1991, when I had a temp job as ticket cashier for the Splendors of Mexico Exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and I have earlier notes with internal evidence connecting them to jobs held earlier than that.

The list itself is enigmatic and probably the result of an exercise in plotting. Before anybody reads this, I wish to make it clear that I don't remember having anything against anybody on this temp job, or even having any contact with the senior curator. I have had jobs during which I plotted the fictional murder of a boss or co-worker as a tension reliever, but I have only pleasant memories of this one. It was a spectacular exhibit, and employees got to walk through it for free!

What - Corpse
Where - Trolley in little-used hall between Exit and Main Hall, behind breakroom
Who - Sr. Curator
How - Cyanide-laced chewing gum
Why - Major spectacular art theft/forgery - cover up or double-cross
When - Monday, Splendors of Mexico

Obviously, anchoring a mystery to a specific exhibit and venue like this would be unwise. What I probably intended to do (insofar as I intended anything; it probably was just an exercise) was plot the story using the geography and schedule of the real art museum, and then use all fictional characters and enough tweaking of the museum to avoid hurt feelings and render me immune to prosecution.

Which is not a bad procedure for writing a puzzle mystery.

I wonder if you could deliver a fatal dose of cyanide in chewing gum, and how you would go about it?

The Four Virtues of Expert Procrastinaters

2011-09-29T14:44:00.007-05:00

Virtue 1. Cats. Thai does not approve of typing. It's okay if she's lying down in front of the monitor and behind the keyboard (though the way I keep pushing her paw off the top row of buttons can be annoying), but when she's in my lap, one hand is supposed to be available for tummy rubbing at all times. Have you ever tried to type with one hand rubbing a tummy? It's exponentially harder. Bruce doesn't care if I'm typing or not - he just doesn't want me to be at the computer at all if there's a bidding of his I'm supposed to be figuring out. So he'll walk up and down on the keyboard, headbutt me, meow fretfully, and so on, until I get up and try out all the possible things he might be wanting me to do.

So if you need an excuse not to get your writing quota done, by all means, let the cat into the room and spoil her rotten. (The funny thing is - if you spoil fruits or vegetables, they get nasty. The more we spoil our cats, the sweeter they get.)

Virtue 2. Neatness and order. There is always something that needs organizing, straightening, dusting, recording, filing, or throwing away. If you start your writing time by taking care of all those things, odds are good you won't have to write at all.

Virtue 3. Communication. People who always answer the phone on the second ring, answer e-mail as soon as it comes in, tweet promptly, and meticulously maintain their websites, blogs, and social networking sites can be busy as bees all day and never get one thing done.

Virtue 4. Generosity. If everybody knows that you are There For Them, they will have all sorts of occasions to call on you. You can't write and deal with a crisis at the same time unless you already have a committed work ethic and sufficient discipline that writing poetry in hospital rooms is second nature to you.

These are all good things in themselves - especially the cats. But the thing they have in common is: that if they are allowed to overlap with your writing time, they will eat it all up. When Virginia Woolf said we needed money and a room of our own in order to write, this is what she meant. Time and space, dedicated to the writing (or whatever it is you do), which everyone understands is dedicated to the writing, during which nothing else gets done.

Nothing else does the trick.

Communicate. Be there for your loved ones. Maintain your tax records and keep your house sanitary. And by all means rub your cat's tummy.

But not during the fifteen minutes, or hour, or two-hour block of time that is set aside for your writing. That's for writing. Only. Not for talking about writing, not for thinking about writing, not for writing business. Butt in chair, hands on writing implements, just writing.

You've heard this before. You'll keep hearing it till you start doing it.

Texas Archeology Month!

2011-09-27T14:35:00.004-05:00

It's almost upon us - the state's very own Idea Garage Sale, when museums, archeologists, historical sites, and chambers of commerce open history up and shake it out for public amusement. I don't care how uncreative you think you are - the more you learn about Texas history, the more inspired you'll get.

Here's a smattering of upcoming events, with an emphasis of course on the things that interest me most.
Oct. 1 - Tour of Archeological Ruins of Rancho de las Cabras, Wilson County but within the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
Oct. 8 - Archeological Information and Civil War Symposium, Gainesville - Topics at the symposium include "forts, funeral practices during the Civil War, fashions, cotton, and plantations." Also child-centric activities.
Oct. 12 - Face to Face with the Son of America, Huntsville - Forensic artist presents her facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skull found in a cave on the Brazos River.
Oct. 14-16 Rock Art Foundation Annual Rendezvous, Val Verde County - A tent campout with tours of remote prehistoric art sites; only one of several events centered on the hard-to-see Pecos Valley art; plus nature walk, of course. Action! Adventure! Romance! (Well, you'll have to bring your own romance, but tell me you don't see an opening trailer in your head right now, based on knowing such an event exists.)
Oct. 17 - "How Texas Won the Civil War," Lecture by Dr. Donald. S. Frazier of McMurry University, Abilene; Houston - hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, laying out the ways Texas benefited by the late unpleasantness.
Oct. 22 - Gault Site Tour, Bell County. Preregistration required, openings limited, but they also do it on the third Saturday of every month so if you miss October, don't despair.
Oct. 29 - Murder Mayhem and Misadventure Walking Tour at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin - to "highlight the lives and dramatic deaths of local early citizens."

Nov. 18-20 - 2011 Hot Rocks Cook-Off in College Station, "demonstrations and scientific experiments using Native American earth-oven cookery and stone boiling." (Are you smelling a cookbook? I sure am.)

Yeah, I think that's a pretty representative sample. Go look at the calendar - there's something that intrigues you. I need to start planning my month - October's not that far away and I know I can't do more than a fraction of what I'd like to, but that's no reason to miss what I can do.

Idea Garage Sale: This Thing About Dwarves

2011-09-25T09:58:00.004-05:00

(Note the technically incorrect plural. If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me. The man wrote the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.)

I've always liked dwarves. My first favorite movie was Disney's Snow White. Elves and fairies lost a lot of appeal for me when they got human-sized in pop culture. I like how a dwarf is a dwarf whatever book you go to - short, hairy, set in their ways, pragmatic, slightly cranky, craftsmen. The word "dour" crops up when fantasy writers and gamers are describing dwarves, but in fact they are often comic characters - sometimes because the guy with no sense of humor is the funniest guy in the room, and sometimes because his sense of humor doesn't jibe with other people's, but does with mine. Gimli is the only non-hobbit member of the Fellowship of the Ring who cracks jokes, but he only makes them with a grumpy face and at times of tension release. "Here's a pretty hobbit skin to wrap an elfin princeling in!" "Where did you come by the weed, you villains?" He's also the one who initiated the grim kill-counting game with Legolas at Helm's Deep. I wonder how many stoic middle-aged enlisted men Tolkien knew in service? I'm certain they informed the writing on this character.

Anyway, I have a vision of dwarves and their lifestyle that dates back to at least my first reading of The Hobbit, but probably predates it, as I think I read Ruth Nichols's A Walk Out of the World before then. Certainly I'd been reading Tolkien derivatives before I made it to Tolkien, and I feel like I absorbed his dwarves into an existing vision rather than adopting his and grafting details onto it. Dwarves live in mountains, obviously; they have a highly structured society centering on notions of duty; craftsmanship is one of their highest virtues; they believe in emotional restraint; their doors are tapestries (the hivelike nature of the dwarf community probably contributes to the emotional restraint, now I think of it); they love deeply, quietly, and epicly; and the tradition is that only sorrow ever came of romantic relationships between dwarves and other intelligent species.

Yes, I cast dwarves as romantic leads.

I actually tried to make a story around this core concept several times in high school, but I kept getting sidetracked by the necessity of world-building. It wormed its way in as a subplot of the dormant story I discussed here awhile back, but I haven't tried to put it at the center of the story since high school. Not because I didn't want to; but because it gradually became clear that neither high fantasy nor romance is my natural genre, and to tell this story I'd need to do both.

Which is a bummer, because you can make decent money off both those subgenres, especially when you combine them, but life is rough.

The central problem of doing it is, first to create the high fantasy world in which the dwarves and the other races are acceptable and logical, but not boring and cliched. We have enough straight Tolkien-derivatives, thank you. Once you have that world, you need the conflict - which, being high fantasy, almost has to be a macro-conflict, war famine pestilence mystical threat you know the drill - that brings the disparate couple together.

I have one really convoluted plot that starts off in a desert community with the heroine being expelled, with her old adoptive mother, during a witch hunt; and as they cross the desert the adoptive mother gets more and more senile, and finally the dwarves rescue them and that's when we find out about the princess who was spirited away when the usurper killed the rest of her family and all the signs point to our heroine who gets help from the dwarves including the improbable and forbidden male romantic lead - but in fact she's the decoy and the real princess is still in her kingdom getting old enough to ascend the throne, and sacrificing the decoy may be necessary, and...yeah, I kind of bogged down in plot there.

And then there's the one where there's some sort of interspecies war on and the heroine is a prisoner, and she Knows Something, and the political situation is such that the hero (who is her captor) is under pressure to Do Terrible Things but he won't because he's got standards, dammit, and this war is eroding the dwarves' cultural standards and this couple who have to be enemies are the pivot point on which the future of both cultures turns. Which could be pretty epic if I could, y'know, work out the specifics of what the war's about, what information the heroine has, how to get them both facing 90 degrees away from the problems they understand themselves to have at the start of the story to be facing the same direction and agreed that they have a common, totally different problem. I believe I wrote some scenes that were reasonably brilliant for a 14-year-old, but that's a low gate to get over and I trust none of them survive. Without context, a scene is meaningless, anyway.

There used to be others - romances are the easiest stories to mull over during insomniac nights in adolescence, and I was a hell of an insomniac back then - but I have mercifully forgotten most of them. I still think somebody, somewhere, could do - something moving and atmospheric and heck, just different from the human-draconic-elvish centric high fantasy we all know so well.

But I'm afraid it's not likely to be me, so - fly free, vague epic idea! Find a good place to land!

The Query Grind

2011-09-23T10:02:00.003-05:00

You know the worst thing about agent hunting?

The way you lose faith in what, six months ago, was a book as good as any you've ever been paid for.

I am so sick of the first ten pages of The Astral Palace I could scream and it's impossible to imagine anyone else wanting to represent me based on them, either. I should start trolling with the lesbian western instead (only Damon's not reading it very fast and I begin to think I'm having pacing problems, which is a good sign - it means I should be able to go back and revise it properly instead of merely basking in Len's voice, soon).

I can't sell stuff if I don't keep it in the mail, but I can't find people to mail to when I'm hating the work, either.

This is the kind of thing that makes teen-agers eat entire gallons of ice cream and declare their lives over. Thank goodness I'm old enough to tell the difference between perception and objective reality. But I still can't match the project to a prospective taker like this.

Maybe I should give up and work on the emotion recycling story instead.

The Obsession Questionnaire

2011-09-22T14:05:00.004-05:00

Our culture is suspicious of enthusiasm. A kid who is crazy about dinosaurs or a game; a teen who is always on social media; an adult who spends all his free time perfecting his imaginary world - all are likely to be told that they're overdoing it, that they're obsessed, that they're wasting their time and should be doing something else.

And, okay, sometimes that's true. We've all heard the horror stories about the couple who let their real baby die while they looked after a virtual one, the gamers who died because they couldn't get off the game, the artists who starve or sponge off their relatives, the writers whose marriage breaks up because writing takes precedence over the marriage, the little old ladies who cannot stop crocheting doilies.

But think about Professor Tolkien, using his spare time to create, first imaginary languages, then vast complex worlds, mythologies, and cultures to provide the context of those languages. Could The Lord of the Rings have become a global phenomenon if he hadn't built it on this foundation of apparent wasted time?

No. No more than Michael Jordan could have been paid to play basketball if he hadn't played and played and played for years before he ever went pro. No more than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could have become the perfect dance duo without dancing till their feet bled.

Before you sell a book, you have to write one. Before you get hired to illustrate, you have to put together a portfolio. And before you do either of these things, you have to spend a lot of time doing things with no obvious relationship to reality. Things that look, to people who aren't doing them, like obsessive time wasting. And you have to do it knowing that there is a very good chance you will never be paid for anything related to what you're doing, even if you get very good at it indeed.

After all, the demand for doilies will always be less than the supply churned out by people who like to crochet.

So how do you tell when you're crossing the line?

Well, look around you.

Is your family healthy? Can you remember their names? Do you know who their friends are? Have you spoken to everyone who shares a residence with you in the last 24 hours? Did any of these conversations involve subjects other than your Project?

Is the cat happy?

When you hear a loud crash and smell smoke, do you get up and take steps to understand what happened?

When did you eat last? Was it real food, or junk? Who prepared it?

Can you see the floor of your house or is it so covered with dirt and junk that you have to follow little paths through it?

Did the work you are contracted to do - either as part of paid employment or as part of your obligation as a member of your household - get done? Was it done well, or did someone have to come after you and do it over?

How many projects, of any kind, did you in fact complete during the past year? How many did you start? How much of this ratio (which is bound to be depressing in and of itself) is due to your own choices?

Under what circumstances do you choose The Project over:
Your health?
Your loved ones' health?
Making money?
Spending time with your loved ones?
Housework?

Does the way you conduct The Project allow you to do so in conjunction with the above priorities?

Answer those questions, and be honest with yourself.

If you actually have a problem, the answers will point you straight at it. But you probably don't. You've probably just internalized the idea that if you like it, and you're not getting paid for it, it must be bad for you.

Also, feeling guilty is the least fun and constructive way to procrastinate.

Get over it.

The Happy Media

2011-09-20T15:09:00.005-05:00

In one way, I am a fortunate individual. I always knew, and so did everyone around me, that I was going to write stories. And by always I mean, always. I was a writer before I could write things other people could read. This was so plain and obvious that everyone around me conceded it as a given, too. This or that individual person may not have thought I'd be any good, or that I'd make any money, or that it was a worthwhile endeavor - but nobody ever disputed that I would do it.

Not all writers know their destiny so well, or manifest it so clearly, from the git-go like that. They flounder in search of their purpose, or they are actively discouraged from it by those around them, or they mistake their calling and do something else for half their lifetime until the day they wake up and start writing, or realize they've been writing all along and it's time to take that somewhere.

I didn't, however, always know that I would write for young people. For a long time I thought I'd be one of those novelists who's also an academic (that was before I experienced academia and how little I am suited to it), or I'd write science fiction and fantasy, or - something. I had a leg up on my period of experimentation because I knew my medium and my skill, but I still had to find my subject and my audience. My niche only became clear after I had - first of all - realized that I prefer books written for young people to books written for adults, for the most part (and once I realized that most genre fiction is "really" YA, in that the qualities I enjoy in it are the same as the ones I enjoy in YA literature); and - second - that I did in fact write well enough to produce them.

This is another way in which I am fortunate. These two discoveries were easy enough to make, since I already knew what form my artistic expression would take and I could focus my experimentation on finding my niche within that form. A lot of people have to experiment on their form, their subject, their audience, and their genre all at the same time. Even more people are raised with the idea that they aren't creative, or that there's some qualitative difference between messing about with creativity, and actually being an artist, a writer, a musician, a dancer, or whatever.

Some people even have to muddle along without access to their form and audience. The world has more essayists now than at any time in the past, if we concede that bloggers are essentially essayists, freed from the limitation of needing someone to pay them to write essays for a periodical. The first people with a talent for programming computer games were born before computer games were invented. The modern world contains far more talented actors, scripters, costumers, prop builders, and effects artists than the related drama industries could ever support; hence the existence of historical recreation societies, cosplayers, and gamers. I've known many people for whom their game of choice is their creative outlet - on tabletop, playing field, or computer, they flower.

This is why fandoms proliferate. People who for one reason or another cannot use their native talent professionally can find it avocationally, in the company of a sympathetic audience, in the context of a fandom. Some of them pass through their fandom and come out the other side as a professional, and good for them (Cassandra Clare being a prominent current example, but hardly the only one). But many, many people do professional-quality work in the context of a fandom and never get paid; either because they never think of going pro, because they try and fail, because they're afraid they'll fail, or because they decide that the effort of going pro would spoil the activity for them. Sometimes it's because their talent lies in a niche so narrow that professionalism is unlikely, or unlucrative, or unacceptable - many gamers reject the restrictions that would be placed upon them, were they to enter the corporate structure of the gaming industry.

I happened to think about this in the context of poking around simblogs in an idle moment. (Okay, idle afternoon. Look, the floor's going to get clean; I was just a little giddy and needed a break. Of several hours.) People document their games online, with pictures, dialog, and snarky asides; make their favorite sims available for others to play; create new clothes, objects, even modifications to game code, investing hours not even playing their game, but playing with it. Their only audience is other players, but that's all right. They like it that way.

There's a person writing an extended fanfic about how a particular iconic neighborhood, with which everyone who plays Sims2 is familiar, got itself into the starting situation for that neighborhood. She writes it in chapters, formatted as screenshots from her game accompanied by blocks of text; and setting up the screenshots is obviously not a matter of playing the game at all, but of performing elaborate maneuvers with custom clothing, objects, modifications, and something called poseboxes to take a number of different pictures of the characters and then discarding most of them. Not too different from the process by which Dare Wright wrote The Lonely Doll and its sequels, in fact, except that this person has nothing tangible to work with, just a game designed for an entirely different purpose.

I can, just about, see how Dare Wright got pleasure out of her process. I can't see how "Skelljay" does; but I don't have to, either. Apparently, this is her medium and she likes working in it. It seems to me she could have finished the story by now if she hadn't mucked about with all those pictures but maybe she couldn't have. And maybe - who knows? How would we tell? - she's building skills in this medium that will enable her to be more profitably creative in another one. But if she's not, and she's satisfied, that should be enough for anybody.

But it raises the question: If you think you're not creative, is it because you haven't experimented enough and found your medium? Is it because, though you've found a medium, it seems silly to you?

I know that voice. Filking isn't really songwriting. Blogging about your hamster isn't really writing. Your elaborate macaroni sculpture isn't really art. You should do something more worthwhile with your time.

Don't listen to that voice. If something makes you happy, it is not a waste of time.

And if it brings pleasure to others, even just a small handful of others, it is a positive boon to society.

(While I'm doing this, let's have a couple of links to my two favorite simblogs, in one of which we get the story of Barkertown, the other of Ste. Margo. Warning: This game is rated T for Teen for a reason! Don't worry, you'll get most of the jokes and follow the story just fine without knowing the game.)

Idea Garage Sale: The (Your Hometown Here) Slasher

2011-09-18T09:07:00.003-05:00

We had some nice rain yesterday; at least, in my neighborhood we did. And the fires are finally thinning rather than just shifting their locations. Soon, I will find something new to obsess about. Yay!

Meantime, after all that generalization last week that went on and on and on, I thought I'd do something short and specific today. Also, I'm not much in the mood today and I need to wake Damon up to play the Sunday puzzle soon. So I do what all experienced authors do when they need an idea in a hurry - I opened up some old files.

Seriously, I have a subfolder in my Story folder labeled "Dormant." Stuff I haven't worked on in forever and am pretty sure I can't make saleable, but am not ready to discard, because hey, the idea was sound; I just didn't execute it well enough. And hey, I still have a word processing file for "The San Antonio Slasher." Good lord, there's a blast from the past. Draft 1 was almost certainly typed on my old electric machine.

It was the story of a Day in the Life of a wannabe serial killer and his victim. Jim Seagram is a young man whose ambition is to be a serial killer, a mysterious figure who strikes terror into the hearts of all and whose identity becomes a popular intellectual game. His heroes are Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. And his victim of choice is little old ladies. It's the day he's planned for his debut, and the story alternates between him - going to his job at a small neighborhood garage, interacting with his co-workers, planning the evening's work - and his designated victim, Persis Morgenroth, going about her little old lady business. Her daughter is a worrywart and keeps calling her, wants her to get a guard dog or something, but Persis has lived in this house for over fifty years and is on good terms with all her neighbors (though that mechanic is beginning to annoy her, the way he glares at her). She gossips with her garden club, makes a carrot cake, runs her errands, goes jogging, and feels secure. Nothing bad can possibly happen to her in the house she came to as a bride, where she raised all her children, where she can still feel her family's love all around her.

Even when Jim breaks in, Persis remains calm; which is more than can be said of him. The reason he wants to kill little old ladies is that he resents the power they exert over him - he was raised by his grandmother, who treated all men as incompetent boys - and he thinks his big knife will reverse that. But Persis recognizes him despite his carefully worked out disguise and she just can't feel anything but annoyance at that rude young man from the garage.

It doesn't end well for Jim.

I realized, writing all this out, that I've gone back to the core idea - the story alternating between the serial killer who kills, or tries to, out of his sense of inferiority and his innocent prospective victim, who really is superior to him - for the often-rejected novel to which I sometimes refer as "The Happy Family Serial Killer Story." I don't seem to have quite made it work there, either.

But if somebody could, I'm positive there's an awesome story to be made of it.

Idea Garage Sale Completed: Disasters, My Main Idea at Last

2011-09-16T09:47:00.005-05:00

It looked bad there for awhile yesterday, with a bunch of new fires, but as of this morning it's looking kind of stable. And we had a good hard rain this morning here in San Antonio, so maybe things are looking up.

Sorry about yesterday's silence - the pressure system that brought the rain also brought me the kind of headache that prevents coherent thought. Had there been an ongoing, immediate disaster going on around me, I could have coped, but in the absence of such a focusing agent lying around with a wet rag on my face, rubbing Thai's tummy, reading Moomin books, and a little simming were as much as I could manage.

How do I know I could have coped in an ongoing, immediate disaster?

Well, I've done it.

And if you haven't, you will.

The thing about disasters is - at a certain base level, they're all the same. A major illness is not as bad as an earthquake, as a matter of scale, but the effect on the individual and family is roughly the same. Daily life is disrupted. Ordinary concerns lose their weight, even their reality, except as excuses not to look at the disaster itself right now. One subject swallows up all your attention and you'd rather do anything else than think about it but there's nothing else to think about and things are going to get so much worse if you don't step up to the plate and deal, right here, right now. Adrenaline valves get stuck in the open position. You're exhausted, but you can't afford to sleep and then when you can afford to, you find it physically impossible. You keep coming to these cliffs of experience and stand blinking at them, not comprehending, not knowing where to put your foot next, and then you find it's too late - you're already falling and the thing to do is try to land so that the person right behind you lands on you instead of the hard ground. Because that person is more fragile than you, and right now, that's saying something. But you don't want to land on the person offering to catch you because he's making the offer without any idea of what he's volunteering to do. Or there's nobody down there to catch you at all because nobody understands what's going on and you can't tell them because - you can't.

Because the disaster is your fault. Somehow. And someone out there is telling you it's you're fault and you'd like to strangle them, but you can't spare the time and effort from keeping you and yours alive.

I'm not going to tell you the specifics of how I know all this. It doesn't matter. All you need to know is that the events in my personal life at the cusp of 2004/2005 were such that, when I dreamed of a tsunami on New Years Eve, I thought it was a clear and obvious metaphor for what was happening to Us. The fact of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami hadn't registered in my conscious mind, though presumably I had caught some news of it while I was busy wrestling with events nearer to home.

Writers are often told to find "the universal" of common human experience in order to reach our readers and make them empathize with the figures in our books. What is not made clear is where "the universal" lies and how we tap into that. "The universal" is the individual. We all experience life the same way, processed through our sensory apparatus, mediated by the chemicals in our body. Yes, there is a hideous difference of scale between a miscarriage and a tornado ripping through a school, but the adrenaline pumping uselessly through our gland, urging us to save children we cannot save, to run when no place is safe, to fight what we can't grapple with, doesn't care about scale.

It would be massively insensitive to say to someone looking at the ashes of his entire subdivision: "Yeah, I know how you feel. I've been divorced." But - if you have been through an ugly divorce, you only have to tap into that memory to realize that he doesn't want to hear anything from or about you right now, but he probably could use the physical boost of a strong cup of caffeine with plenty of sugar and a couple of practical suggestions for what to do next. Not advice, absolutely not, but a question: "Should we spray down the barn some more in case there's still some embers alive?" Or an offer: "You can use my cell if you need to call anybody." Or an order, if he's still shell-shocked enough: "You're sleeping on my couch tonight and the kids can have the floor in the rec room."

And if you're writing about how and why the subdivision burned, you still go to that same place. The place where your own disaster still lives, helping you treat the disasters of others with the respect they deserve.

Idea Garage Sale Continued Some More: Disasters, you get the drill

2011-09-14T14:24:00.004-05:00

Wow, suddenly there's a fire in the middle of the Edwards Plateau! (No, I did not omit an apostrophe; Edwards is the name of the place.) That's probably an ordinary brush fire we'd never have heard of without all the rest of this going on; though it could easily become something more. Looks like if Arkansas and Louisiana aren't dealing with this yet, they will be by sundown.

So anyway, we come now to the core problem at the heart of the process of writing about disasters, and if you solve this one the rest will fall into place:

What business do you have with it?

Seriously, what qualifies you to write about this disaster; to reduce it to page and word count, comprehensible narrative sequence, and some sort of resolution? Because you have to resolve something at the end of the book - answer a question, wrap up a story, achieve a catharsis, something, or the reader will be dissatisfied. But the people who live in the aftermath of a similar disaster will call BS on you, because they know resolution is a fantasy. People who died are still dead, and mere curiosity about the manner of their deaths is intrusive and offensive. People who survived are still dealing with it - waking up in the middle of the night sweating from it, overprotecting their children, taking paranoid precautions against it ever happening again. Where do you get off talking about it, when a lot of them can't?

If you're a survivor, yourself, that answer is simple. You talk about it because they can't; because somebody has to, and you can, so it defaults to you to tell the story. Telling the story is important to us as a species. We organize a lot of our intelligence and culture around the process. If the story is told, well and honestly, that is a good in itself. It's hard to articulate why, but I doubt you'd be reading this blog at all if you didn't feel that in your gut.

But what if you're not a survivor? If you're writing about an imaginary disaster inspired by a real one you didn't participate in, or setting a novel against the background of a real disaster, or acting as the historian of a real one? What gives you the right to do that? To turn real pain and anguish into an entertainment, or an interesting true-life tale, or - if you're an academic historian - tenure?

The historian's role in a disaster is the same as it always is. If no single person can tell the whole story, then the historian exists to assemble the bits and pieces. He can do it well, helping people understand what happened; or he can do it ill, pushing some agenda of his own. But at least the role itself is a viable one. The story needs telling. The historian is the servant of the story.

So is the novelist; but we run a special hazard. I illustrated it yesterday. Nothing takes the edge off a tragedy like cliched delivery. Nothing violates like trivialization. We are breaking a kind of trust with our species if we reduce real-life horror to a mere voyeuristic entertainment or lure the reader into playing the Prediction game.

A fictional character can give us the key that allows us to compassionately share the humanity of other people and understand the viewpoint of survivors; who may, face it, seem a little crazy after the disaster is over.

Or - a fictional character can overlay the real people and lead us to view them as mere characters in a story.

Do you really understand what went on well enough to do the first and not the second? Are your skills up to the job?

More importantly - can you bear to do the job?

Tune in tomorrow and I'll finally get to the point I wanted to make all along.

Idea Garage Sale, Cont: Disasters, Threat or Menace?

2011-09-13T15:06:00.004-05:00

Five new ones today, though it's thinning out in the west. That cluster between San Antonio and Kerrville just keeps sitting there, though.

So, where I was? Oh, yes, making narrative out of disaster.

The first thing to remember is that whatever you're writing, if you want it to hold the interest of the general public, must be a story; and a story, at its simplest formulation, is character + conflict. With a disaster, the conflict is a given. But unless you're writing a treatise on the mechanics of fires or shipwrecks or whatever - which is useful stuff to write about, don't get me wrong, but it's way outside my purview - if you're writing for a general audience, you'll have to find at least one character and structure the reader's experience of the disaster from that viewpoint.

Disaster narrative is a subgenre that benefits a great deal from multiple protagonists. Since most events worthy of the name are huge and chaotic, no one person will experience, much less understand, all the aspects of the disaster. If you're in one, you can only see a little piece of it - the piece presently trying to kill you. You may or may not understand where this wall of flame/water/whirling air/molasses (don't laugh; people died in the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 from drowning in the stuff - imagine having molasses in your lungs!) comes from; you only know that it's over there, rapidly coming here, and there's a very real chance that if you run and grab the baby it's going to cut off your escape route; and that your husband left this morning in the direction that wall is coming from now. Your husband, meanwhile, knows that he's safe, the wall is bearing down on home, and he can't call you because he just saw the cell tower come crashing down; but isn't sure whether you're home with the baby or have already left to visit your sister. It should be evident that the use of multiple viewpoint characters can enhance a disaster narrative considerably, both by making it easier for the reader to follow, and by ratcheting up the suspense by choosing the key moments in which to change viewpoint.

In a lot of novels, the writer is faced with difficult choices in characterization. To render the viewpoint character vivid and sympathetic, it is necessary to figure out what he has at stake in the conflict and make the reader care as much as he does. This is not a problem in a disaster story. Everybody's got the same base motivation, and it's real easy to care about, if the character is established well at all. But if his only motivation is "surviving the disaster," the audience can still fail to connect with him, and that will be the writer's fault. Maybe at the key moments of the narrative, survival is the only thing on his mind; but he's in the disaster area for a reason. He's got a life, to which this disaster is at base a dreadful interruption, like a traffic jam or broken plumbing, only - you know - freaking deadly. The narrative should not, then, begin with the disaster proper. It should begin with you and your husband and the baby getting into position, talking about little things - where he's going and why, what time you're going to leave for your sister's; for that matter, why you're going to your sister's while you're husband's going an entirely different direction. This means that the first pages are likely to be full of small establishing scenes and dialogs and exposition, mostly mundane in nature.

Which means they need to be well-written. Mundane is boring. You'll be helped some by the fact that the reader knows he's going into a disaster story and that all this mundanity is threatened; but if you and your husband and baby and sister bore him at this point, he's not going to care if you, the husband, or even the baby, die or not.

No, really, even the baby. Because - even if he knows he's reading non-fiction - at the beginning, he's reading a book, and books aren't real. So none of the characters is real till the writer chooses the correct mundane details, the ones that pop everybody into their proper three-dimensions so the reader grasps, emotionally, what he knew intellectually when he picked up the book: that this disaster affected real human beings who could as easily be him.

There is a certain kind of movie that I can only manage to sit through by playing the Plot and Dialog Prediction Game. Most disaster movies fall into this category. I'm sitting there watching the characters dance through their motions, and I start to recognize them, so I make a game of it. These two will survive.(Usually, The Lovers; usually, The Lovers Having Trouble With Their Relationship. Recent divorces are common.) There may be two sets of lovers, but only one is going to make it through the disaster, and the experienced viewer should be able to pick which one; based, alas, on age, ethnicity, and degree of domesticity, most of the time. This one will sacrifice himself to let others (particularly The Lovers) survive. That one will also sacrifice himself, and for him it will be a Redeeming Moment, because up until then he's been a jackass. The other guy will die first, and it's depressing how often First to Die will be instantly identifiable because he's the only non-white cast member. And so on.

Once I've determined death order, which can usually be done during the establishing scenes, it's time to figure out the difficulties before they arise: What initiates the disaster; in what inadequate ways the people who should be dealing with it fail to do so; which random chances will arise to drive people into their correct positions for their role in the plot; how exactly poor Mohinder or Martinez or whatever generic ethnic name First to Die goes by will in fact die; how the first solution on offer fails; what surprising development happens just when it looks like things are coming under control (that one's the most fun); and so on. And of course it's always fun to say softly: "That's crazy! You'll be killed!" or "Tell my kids I love them!" , or whatever, immediately before the dialog is spoken.

Well, as much fun as I'm going to get in this kind of movie, anyway.

I don't do this with books because if I find it happening in a book, I put it down and do something else. There's too many books to read out there without wasting time on one like this. But a movie is a social occasion; I can't just get up and walk out of it. Though possibly if I don't play this game quietly enough the people I'm with wish I would.

If you're going to write disaster narrative, for pity's sake, read and watch enough of these things to recognize the rhythm of the cliche, and keep its metronomic beat out of your work. You have to read a lot of trash to get really good at not writing it. Which is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

Idea Garage Sale Continued: Disasters, Threat or Menace?

2011-09-12T11:04:00.004-05:00

Two new fires on the map this morning, I see.

To cheer yourself up, bear in mind that today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Caverns of Lascaux, by four teen-age boys and a dog, during the Nazi occupation of France. Which is the kind of thing that makes you sit and ponder the possibility that God writes YA fiction...

So anyway, let's see if I can finish that thought I started yesterday. The fact that I'm having trouble writing about writing about disaster while a disaster is going on in my metaphorical backyard and the airwaves are clogged with 9/11 memorials and Elaine is still in a coma (but showing improvement) illustrates one of the hazards we face. Disasters are painful to think about. They should be painful to think about. And we avoid pain for good reason.

This is one cause for the time lag between the disaster and the historical explorations of and fiction based on the disaster. Another is that it's only with the passage of time that we can even get a long enough view to see the plot and structure of the disaster. Clouds of smoke, homes and national forests and pastures burning, evacuation, suspense, endangered firefighters and cattle and wildlife, jurisdictional disputes among agencies - this is the core experience of the wildfire, but it makes bad narrative. Only afterward, when we have the whole map of the affected area and can view its path, when the casualty statistics are assembled, the bills delivered; when the years have gone past and we've seen which areas needed to be burned over for their wildlife to come back and which subdivision developers went bankrupt and which families developed recurring lung problems, and the unpredictable repercussions have appeared - the local political dynasty founded in the ashes, the restructuring of this county's emergency services or that county's population of hobby ranchers - only then will we be able to find a narrative thread we can fruitfully follow.

Because that's the whole impulse behind talking, writing, drawing, and filming about chaotic terrible things to begin with. Irwin Allen movies aside, it's not entertainment, and catharsis is only a part of it. We are a pattern-making species. We crave order. More, we need it. Without it, we cannot extract useful generalizations with which we can map the best course of action through the next disaster.

Which is coming. In our hearts, we all know this.

Tune in tomorrow for a discussion on how to extract story from disaster, real and imagined.

Idea Garage Sale: Disasters, Threat or Menace?

2011-09-11T09:18:00.003-05:00

Someday, American historians will build entire careers out of studying aspects and repercussions of the events of September 11, 2001. There'll be a whole subgenre of fiction using those events as a backdrop.

At about the same time, one historian will do an intensive study of the 2011 Texas drought and September wildfires, and one or two people will write historical fiction based on them. Probably one YA and one juvenile. The adult historical novelists will be too fixated on 9/11; as far as the general public is concerned, 9/11 will be the only significant event of the first decade of the century.

In the meantime, where does that leave us?

The trouble with recent disasters, and those of our own lives, is that they are simultaneously impossible to think about, and impossible to stop thinking about, and impossible to grasp. A correspondent of mine who lives in New York and works nights slept through the attacks, and when she got up and turned on the TV in the middle of the umpteenth replay of the footage, she wondered why 7 Days (Remember that show? About a guy employed by the gummint to go back in time to fix various disasters?) was on at that hour. I thought the first airplane strike was an ordinary, though appalling, air disaster; when the second one hit, I heard myself wonder: "So where the heck is Superman?"

We are all used to disaster in fiction; so used to it, that our initial reaction to a disaster is to treat it as a fiction. This is why it's so easy to collect heartless responses to major disasters. Remarks that would be reprehensible if applied to real people are much more acceptable applied to fictional ones.

At the same time, one of the uses of non-fiction is to help us sort out our own responses to a real disaster; and one of the uses of fiction is to exercise, in a safe environment, the mental muscles necessary to cope when disaster strikes. Our problem, as writers, is to find the balance in ourselves that lets us use real pain, confusion, and horror fruitfully without losing touch with them and turning them into entertainment and an intellectual game.

Sorry, I thought I could do this when I sat down, but the effort of thinking it through is making my head hurt and my eyes unfocus. I'll try to pick up the train of thought tomorrow and get down to something usable.

The wildfires are looking better today, by the way, though they may be about to become the Texas/Louisiana wildfires. For awhile yesterday the map was looking very bad indeed. But I wish it would rain.

It's All Material, If You're Not in the Midst of It

2011-09-08T08:48:00.004-05:00

The news has handed me this weekend's Idea Garage Sale, I think. For those who read wildfire reports and have no idea what the names in the stories mean geographically, here's a handy map. It disturbs me that, as of this post, Austin is wholly obscured on this map by little flame symbols. The fires, however, in general surround Austin, in the agricultural and suburban areas, rather than being in the city proper.

As for me, the worst problems I have are that work on the house is at a standstill until Damon and I decide what to do about the screens; and that I only realized yesterday that I don't have a grasp of the character arc of what should be a key character in the novella I've been revising. The thing's unpublishable without that and I have to wonder what's wrong with me that I didn't notice it till yesterday! However, past experience indicates that once I work that out, everything that's been vaguely bothering me about this story will fall into place or fall off the edges, and it'll be all downhill from there.

Yeah, health crap and all, I have it pretty good. Note to self: When was the last time we donated to the Red Cross? Probably time to do it again, though the house has curtailed our generosity.

Silence and Wind

2011-09-07T07:11:00.003-05:00

I got up Sunday and I wasn't sweating. The kitchen floor was uncomfortably cool on my bare feet. It was like suddenly being in a different country. Unfortunately, the winds that brought this coolness did not bring rain, and made wildfires harder to control. We and ours were not in any danger, though we have some friends who were uncomfortably close to some of the fires.

Excuse the week of silence. Health crap, plus for part of the time, A Mood. Sometimes we just shouldn't talk in public. Often we do anyway, and our best course of action is to apologize and move on. As some wise person on one of my newsgroups somewhere said sometime or other, "We're all jerks on the internet once in awhile." But learning to recognize when we're prone to it, and keeping our hands off the keyboard, saves time and stress and people randomly coming across something we regret saying in a google search ten years down the line. If you're not willing to see it in print with your name under, don't write it down.

Of course we all know people on newsgroups who regard apologizing and moving on as - I'm not sure what, weakness perhaps. You know who I'm talking about. I recently had to put someone on ignore on a newsgroup, to prevent attempts to bully me in PM (like I hadn't gotten enough of that kind of behavior in middle school), and I gather from matter from this person's posts which gets quoted in other people's posts that I am now being pursued and insulted in public. Because that's supposed to make everyone else on the newsgroup hate me, I suppose. That it's tiresome for everyone but the would-be bully never seems to occur to her/him/it.

I often see flamewars degenerate into the worst offender taking on the group's moderators who are trying to make things civil again as attempting to limit his free speech. "I can say anything I want!" seems to be the be-all and end-all of this right to some people. Well, yes, you can. But - is it, in any given case, wise? Or kind? Or interesting? Because even sociopaths will turn against your vitriol if you commit the cardinal sin of being dull.

Now, off to see if I can be productive today.

The Fabric That Wasn't There

2011-09-01T08:54:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I was leaning against Damon's shoulder, facing down, with my eyes closed - crashing and caffeine-buzzing at the same time - when the spinning hit. I opened my eyes to do the point-fixing trick to shut it off, and was startled to see his arm covered by a swathe of white fabric with little black dots all over it; about the size of dotted swiss, but in an irregular pattern. Of course no such fabric exists, and I didn't much like to fix my eye on anything that didn't exist, but the alternative was turning my head, so I managed it. The spinning stopped and gradually my color vision and depth perception returned, so that Damon's arm separated out from the expanse of my sundress, which is white with red cherries on it. The cherries are much larger than the dots I saw at first, but I saw one emerge from the other.

This was all more disagreeable to experience than I am likely to be able to express, and is also illustrative of the fact that just because we see something, doesn't mean it's there.

Conversely, I have several times this week gone looking for something and had to return to the place it was more than once before I could see it, though (absent the fairies) it must have been in my field of vision every time I went there. This illustrates the fact that just because we don't see something, doesn't mean it's not there.

So how on earth can we tell what is and isn't true?

Given that truth and the universe are infinite, and our brains are finite, we can't. Insisting on doing so will either drive us mad with uncertainty, or (and this is the most commonly-chosen option) box us in to a mental state much smaller than our natural capacity, rejecting any points of view or new information that make us uncomfortable, and cutting ourselves off from truth and the universe in favor of a virtual environment that we find more comfortable. This often involves talking to our own reflections and confining our personal life to people from whom we cannot learn anything new. Conversely, if we accept our limitations and roll with them, we will find ourselves more and more comfortable in a larger and larger space, able to have more fruitful conversations with a wider variety of people, and coping better in unfamiliar situations.

All of which is better than permanently seeing the fabric that isn't there.

Idea Garage Sale: At Random

2011-08-28T07:30:00.002-05:00

Vertigo last night, and this morning, too. So just some random real-life sentences and phrases, in need of context.

"We have a buffet, but it's covered with angels."
"Chicken in my purse."
"The dog that leaped out of my wall."

Public service note: When the room is spinning, do not close your eyes. That will make it worse. Find a point and lock your eyes onto it. This may take several tries, but when you succeed, the spinning will be over.

Until the next time you change the angle of your head, but you can't have everything. I'll probably have to caffeinate today.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lovecraft

2011-08-23T12:46:00.003-05:00

August 17 was the 121st birthday of Mr. H.P. Lovecraft, who was either the worst great writer, or the greatest bad writer, of 20th century America, a place where he felt not at all at home. In his honor, the fanblog The Lovecraftsman published pictures of 50 Cthulhu-themed cakes. Some of them just look like Octopi to me, but what the hey - it's a hard project. I particularly like the ones where the sucker-lined arms are crushing little people.

News: Mammoth Art in Utah!

2011-08-22T06:56:00.002-05:00

http://www.stonepages.com/docs/malotki-wallace.pdf

People being what we are (i.e. naturally and relentlessly creative) I knew there had to be some.

Idea Garage Sale: Hello, Mary Sue

2011-08-21T09:07:00.004-05:00

Entire treatises have been written, and elaborate checklists constructed, defining the Mary Sue character, but it really boils down to this: A Mary Sue Story is a daydream, written down.

It says something (I'm not sure what, but I think it's a good thing) about pop culture fandom that the (if correctly attributed) Mary Sue story that named the genre is in fact a clear parody of the genre, not an honest example of it. That doesn't mean that the author, one Paula Smith, did not have this sort of daydream and never committed one to paper - in fact, it would not surprise me to find that all the elements in the story are ones that feature in her fantasy projections into the Star Trek universe - but that she was able to step outside these daydreams, realize their absurdity, and laugh at herself for having them. The true, the dire, the much-warned-against Mary Sue Story has no such self-awareness.

Face it, we all do this. It's our natural starting point, and not as egotistical as it looks, either. It's hard enough getting to know ourselves; how can we, as beginners, hope to portray anybody else accurately? The Mary Sue Phase of our lives is when we practice the process of dissecting ourselves into component parts and reassembling them into believable characters who are recognizably not us. We must all do this badly before we do it well, and once we do learn to do it well, we can perform miracles of characterization. Elaine Marie Alphin's book Simon Says is about a number of fully-realized, three-dimensional characters who are all, at one level, mirror shards of a single person trying to become a whole one; and that's one reason why it so perfectly represents my own interior universe. Better than I could have done it. But I digress. (Why, yes, I do really, really want everybody to read this book. Elaine is currently in a coma, thanks for wondering. I'm one of the "assembled multitudes" her husband is sending status updates to, thank goodness.)

Also, Mary Sue stories sometimes do really well in the market. Twilight is a clear Mary Sue story, and that hasn't hurt it that I've noticed. Harry Potter has some Mary Sue-ish elements, too. So if you're still in the Mary Sue phase, and want to write to sell, the thing to do is to work out a story in which Mary Sueishness isn't a bug, but a feature.

Jane Langton, in The Swing in the Summerhouse, and Edward Eager, in Seven-Day Magic, had segments addressing the egocentric and ultimately dull or lonely Mary Sue fantasies of the characters; but I think we can do better than just following their lead.

The central character may or may not have professional ambitions, though that's the obvious way to go. Most kids try their hands at a story now and again, or even frequently, just as they draw pictures and fool around at the piano. It's all the same process. In order for the story to work, though, she must feel a little isolated and misunderstood. There's any number of ways to accomplish this - natural loner, new school, odd one out in the family. Even a "popular kid" is likely to feel the pervasive alienation of our society, the uneasy sense that the popular kid is a facade and no one knows the real one. Nor are we limited in medium. A Mary Sue may be created in text, in graphics, in games - the player who always runs a half-elf wizard or mighty barbarian as an idealized alter ego is a recognized type in the gaming world, as is the one whose avatar bears an uncanny resemblance to himself. LARP and theater will not work, as the notion I'm approaching here requires a Mary Sue with a separate existence; but animation should.

The protagonist and the Mary Sue must interact directly to solve a shared set of problems. The most straightforward thing would be to put the creator into the story at a crisis point; one at which the Creator has written herself into a corner and doesn't know how to proceed. Normally Mary Sue solves problems with ease because the creator is in control and says she does; but with no one driving the plot, it will proceed on its own momentum and the normal easy solutions won't work. Mary Sue and her creator will be the only ones in the story capable of solving the problem, because it is in the nature of a Mary Sue story that everyone except her is purely background decoration, existing to reflect her and give her a setting in which to shine.

"Wait," you say, "stop right there, what about the romantic Mary Sue story in which she is the drooping heroine, continually being rescued? What if it's that sort of story - won't the hero solve the crisis?" No, indeed! For that sort of Mary Sue's existence is predicated on the assumption that everything is about her. The hero rescues her, but never addresses the core problem, which is that something about her (her vast political importance, her beauty, her intelligence, her absurd amounts of money) acts as a trouble magnet and as soon as one threat is disposed of another arises. This sort of Mary Sue also probably has more than one hero, and these heroes, when not saving her from villains or whatever, will be busily trying to score off each other. They will not have any attention to spare for metaproblems, and may be a positive hindrance to their solution, as they keep wanting to interrupt the action to say poetic things to Mary Sue. They will also probably be confused by the appearance of the creator - you could have quite a lot of fun with that, in fact. Mary Sue is agonizing over which of them to pick, and suddenly both the heroes are trying to settle between them which of them gets which version of her.

(Also, IMHO, the romantic heroes of that sort of Mary Sue story are almost always jackasses. You show me an alpha male, and I'll show you somebody who needs a slap upside the head.)

So there's nothing for it - in order for Creator Girl to get back to real life and Mary Sue to live Happily Ever After, they're going to have to get together, because they're the only fully-realized characters in the setting. The first development will be that Mary Sue gets to truly exercise, for the first time, the characteristics which the Creator gave her to make up for her own faults, but which she didn't understand well enough to show in action, rather than merely telling about.

If Mary Sue is a black belt in karate, and the Creator has maybe seen the remake of The Karate Kid and a few episodes of Kung Fu, she won't have ever really gotten to use it before. Now instead of the usual cut scene, from Mary Sue confronted by two dozen thugs to Mary Sue dusting her hands off after rendering them all unconscious, she'll have to fight - and she'll have to protect the Creator while she's doing it. Also - she'll have the chance to lose. Stakes will be higher. She will start making decisions that the Creator wouldn't have made for her, based on both her superior ability and the new vulnerabilities that arise without the Creator's protecting/smiting hand hovering over the action.

Meanwhile, the Creator is busily trying to regain control of the scenario she created. Remember, she had written herself into a corner. When that happens, you either have to go back to where you started to go wrong and rewrite (or replay) the whole thing; or you study what you've got and work out the logic of the situation. The first option is no longer open to her. She will have to analyze her own work and her creations, which are all continuing down the paths she started them on, and find solutions that will work within that paradigm. Of course this will reveal the places where she completely misunderstood what she thought she was doing; but she'll also find the places where she miraculously planted the seeds of her own salvation, in what she thought was a throwaway line. Because it's amazing how often and consistently that happens.

Depending on how long the story is, other characters will start improving their performance. Any character who exists to provide those necessary abilities (apart from admiring Mary Sue) that didn't interest the creator, which she found unattractive, or which are so alien to her she couldn't give them to her reflection. If near-sightedness is a core part of your self-image, and you make a Mary Sue with glasses, any plot functions that require visual acuity must be assigned elsewhere. Heroes and sidekicks provided for such supplementary purposes will be the first to begin to increase in depth as soon as they have to think for themselves when Mary Sue or the Creator fail. Minor background characters may begin to step out of the shadows, bearing useful and attractive and annoying traits from other people the Creator knows, or from parts of herself she either didn't notice or didn't value.

So the Mary Sue story problem is solved when the Creator figures out the necessary conditions of sending her back to her life, and the Mary Sue (and by extension, her pocket universe) gains enough character depth to gain some control over her own story.

Thematically that all works. As a story idea, it lacks specificity. What is the crisis? What is the medium? What is the genre? How old is the Creator and how old is the Mary Sue?

But basically that will all sort itself out once you answer the questions: Who is the Creator and What does her Mary Sue look like? Everything else will follow from those two points.

Something Like That, Anyway

2011-08-18T08:29:00.002-05:00

Damon hasn't read the lesbian western yet, but he skimmed it and noticed that an awful lot of the things characters do depend on the lie they're using to cope with the world. Some characters lie to themselves; Len in particular lies to the world in order to best live with herself.

His first stab at a title, better than all the ones I've come up with so far, is A Lie Worth Living With.

I think he's put me on the right track here, but that title says "contemporary" to me, not "historical" or "western."

It might be good enough for a working title to use on the query, though.

Soooo Close...

2011-08-16T10:49:00.003-05:00

You remember how I compared the end of a writing project to Sir Lancelot attacking Castle Swampy? Far away far away far away on top of you with no middle distance.

The last part of a construction project is the opposite.

We are now past 95% complete. The cork floor tile ran out two tiles from completion last week and the new tile hasn't come in yet and we can't hook the washer and dryer up till the floor's finished. We have one and a half renovated and fully-functional bathrooms, except there's still work to do on the windows, one glass light shade broke and the replacement hasn't come in yet, one cabinet doesn't have the doors on, the plumbers broke a tile, we don't have the towel rods and so on yet, and the french door upstairs still needs the glass reputtied before it can be painted. The mudroom is completely done except for one window and venting the water heater. I forgot to ask the plumbers who just left about the saltless water softener, which goes under the house, so I won't see it one way or another. However, the current glass of water seems to have fewer flecks of lime floating in it than usual. You wouldn't expect it to be lime-free for awhile, since it'll take awhile for the ice cubes to be fully replaced in the icemaker.

But we are really, really, really close here. We've been really, really, really close for the last two weeks.

And once this project is finished, I can get to work.

Because projects don't end. They get handed off. The construction workers will leave this house behind and then I, with some help from Damon but realistically mostly me because I'm the one home all day, get to reorganize the entire house; decide on and buy such additional towels, shelves, and supplies as the new organization requires; and do the jobs that have been put off because there's no point doing a Great Book Shuffle till I know how many feet of bookshelf space are available. Suddenly I will be able to sew again, but first the sewing/laundry room must be set up. Similarly, I finish a book and mail it, and it becomes part of somebody else's job for awhile, till it comes back and I do more work on it; and it goes back and forth for awhile, ideally: author agent editor author copyeditor author proofreader printer proofreader author binder bookseller reader.

And the part of life during which you have to leave your projects in other people's hands is called limbo. Won't miss it. Having drive and direction is better.

Stupid "Progress."

2011-08-15T07:14:00.003-05:00

I hate upgrades. I log on this morning and my blog reader opens with some news about having turned on spam monitoring without asking me about it - I haven't been having a problem with spam - and my blog reader was empty. According to it, I'm not following any blogs. Um, I am too! Apparently the upgrade disconnected my blog reader.

I still show my whopping 11 followers, so probably the following is intact except for, you know, the useful bit where it loads the blogs you're following into the reader. But if I've vanished from your list of followers, I'm not dissing you; the service is.

No upgrade was ever done right the first time in the history of computing. This is why I'm still running WordPerfect 8 - as long as it works, I'm not fixing it! By the time we get around to an upgrade, all the bugs have been worked out of it.

Idea Garage Sale: Crying in Restrooms

2011-08-14T07:14:00.003-05:00

When I achieve ultimate wisdom and figure out how to perfectly balance emotional, economic, and social reality, I will write a self-help book and I will call it Crying in Restrooms.

I used to do a lot of that.I'd be trapped in an office eight hours a day with a bus ride at each end, and I'd be doing stuff that didn't matter a lick to me and in many cases didn't matter a lick to whatever entity was writing my checks, but I couldn't leave and I couldn't do anything constructive and nobody in the office would be anybody I could talk to honestly about anything and it would build up and build up and build up and somebody would be a jackass and I'd be losing control of my voice and hands and posture with the force of internal pressure and I would be in entire sympathy with those people who come to their workplaces and commit mass murder and the only possible way to deal with this state without getting fired (which I would have preferred but couldn't afford) would be to go into a restroom stall and hit the wall and scream and cry until the pressure let up enough that I could control it.

Even this was enough to get me lectured, censured, and occasionally treated as a vandal (Look, I am not physically strong enough to break a metal stall door and I never could see what they thought was wrong with it anyway - it still locked, for crying out loud) by self-important tinpot dictators who appeared to be under the impression that the proper treatment for a stress fracture is more stress. The ones who pretended to be sympathetic weren't any better, because they never were. All my life I have been surrounded by people who didn't care if I was bleeding, as long as they could get me to stop bleeding on the carpet. If I did that, they could pretend nothing was wrong and even feel good about having solved the problem by getting me to pretend to feel better.

Actually addressing anything that might be wrong in the workplace - such as contradictory imperatives, bullying (in a workplace, the noogie-givers of the playground are restrained but the nasty queen bees get managerial positions), inequitable rules or rules applications, dishonest practices, counterproductive policies, malfunctioning equipment, or inadequate training - is never, in my experience, considered as a solution. No, if a worker is unhappy enough that her work is disrupted, the worker is to blame; and half an hour spent telling the worker this is much to be preferred to five minutes spent in addressing the source of the problem.

So a self-help book providing something more useful than the usual platitudes and unconsidered conventional wisdom about dealing with stress would be a public benefit. In order to be useful, it would have to include diagnostic tools to help the afflicted figure out why she is the only person in an obviously malfunctioning office whose physical stress symptoms are so bad she has to resort to crying in restrooms; because this does vary. Some people could handle the existing level of stress and frustration better by eating the correct thing at the correct time. (It sounds silly, but truth often does.) Other people are handling the stress less well because they're getting more of it than those around them, because they have somehow gotten the position of office omega - the one person everybody else relieves stress by dumping on. It is vitally important to distinguish between those two cases and adopt a strategy appropriate to the real situation.

Such a book wouldn't sell as well as the platitude/conventional wisdom books do, because the most successful self-help books are always those that allow the largest number of people to feel that they're being active and insightful, without actually requiring them to do any work. But if it could reach its target audience, and enable them to deal constructively with their problems, it would do all kinds of good in the world.

Alas, I have no such wisdom. The only thing that worked for me was getting out of the soul-sucking day job business entirely, which unfortunately leaves my poor husband trapped in one. And that's why I keep having to give myself permission to be unproductive on days when I don't feel I've done enough. The workplace problem looks to me as insoluble as crime, poverty, and war, and for similar reasons.

Because the problem is insoluble, I don't use it for fiction much, either. One of the satisfactions of fiction is that, at the climax, the core problem of the story is resolved, one way or another. The big exception to this is the horror genre, which is allowed to be purely cathartic and to resolve the core problem by escalating it into primal inevitability and scorching the earth behind it. A modern corporate workplace is the natural abode of monsters, and it puzzles me that we don't see more horror stories addressing this directly.

I have used it successfully once, myself. It took me over 20 years to do so, horror not being my natural genre. The story is "The Restroom Murders," and it appeared in Realms of Fantasy in August 2008, though I first conceived the basic plot while temping for a certain bank in the early 80s. It took me that long to understand enough about workplaces and workers to get the story into the hands of the correct viewpoint character, to gain the narrative ruthlessness to work the premise out to its necessary conclusion, and to be out of the workplace long enough to write about its horrors with equanimity.

If you can write the self-help book envisioned here, please do so. If you can't, but rather need to consult it yourself, consider the horror option. Mystery might work, too, if you can thus gain the satisfactions of messily killing the worst person in your office and sending the second-worst person in your office to jail for it. Just don't put a word of it onto the company computer or leave your notes for it lying around, as security personnel are likely to take such things seriously and unlikely to have any policies that allow them to grasp the difference between fictional catharsis and planning.

And if you can't handle the fictional options because the situations you'd have to tap into are still too raw to handle, please, start today devising the plan that makes quitting your day job practical. You'll function better as soon as you feel less trapped.

August = Limbo

2011-08-11T10:09:00.003-05:00

Triple digit temperatures. House improvements perpetually 90% complete. Mornings that are pleasantly cool as long as I don't move. Plants that look like old, faded, construction paper. Drinking constantly. Sudden sleepiness (though sleeping in the middle of the day is impossible for me) when the electrolytes drain in spite of that. Able to see where the work needs to be done, but unable to concentrate long enough to do it.

The air conditioner in the study is in the window onto the balcony, so I keep a 10-gallon bucket underneath to catch the condensation, with a rock in the bottom so the cats don't knock it over when they stick their heads in to get a drink. That isn't a problem at the moment as after an afternoon of labor (I don't turn it on before noon) it's always full to the brim. Every morning I haul it downstairs to empty it over the yard. It doesn't help noticeably.

Yes, it's August. Dormancy time for plants and Peni. At least I can be constructive by being available when glitches arise in the construction.

Just Go Read Simon Says

2011-08-09T08:01:00.003-05:00

Elaine Marie Alphin has had a stroke.

It's too soon for retrospectives and tributes and things. That would just be self-tormenting. She's in ICU. I don't know anything, just what her husband posted to our online writers' list. I only met her in person once, when we were both up for an Edgar and neither of us got it. It's just -

Well, go read Simon Says. I don't care how much it hurts, go do it.

That's what my interior universe looks like. And I don't want her to die or survive in a twilit half-life with her interface to other people borked to hell and I'm going to stop now.

I Got a Dragon for My Birthday!

2011-08-08T12:55:00.004-05:00

No, sorry, not a new book title. Just a fact. My birthday was July 11, but I didn't get a picture till I took Smug to a game this weekend and a friend took one with his mobile. One of these days I'll get a digital camera.

Speaking of new book titles, Damon came up with one for a fantasy western: There's a New Seraph in Town.

I'm afraid the only new option I've come up with for Len's story is Have Squirrel Gun, Will Travel

Idea Garage Sale: So Close, So Far

2011-08-07T08:15:00.006-05:00

I took another stab at "Brush Week on Pear Street," the 11,000-word short story, today, and still don't see my way clear. It's a structural problem. But I've realized that it's another stab at an idea I've had for a long time, which I've seen other people do, and am not sure why I can't find my feet in it.

The premise is simple: You take a discrete multi-residence unit - an apartment building, a block, a village - and you tell the story of each resident. The stories intersect and affect and reflect each other. Some of the characters are active figures in each other's stories, others aren't. Even the nosiest character doesn't have all the information. Only the writer - and eventually the reader - has enough information for a god's eye view of the whole picture.

This premise itches my brain enough that I've already talked about it, but there's just so many ways you could do it, if you knuckled down to do it, that I don't mind putting it out there twice.

I think the fact that it itches me so bad means I'm going to get it done sooner or later. Maybe with this story? It's the closest I've gotten so far - it has a final page, anyway.

I'm not the only one with this urge. Sim blogs, like the ones posting to each other over at the Build-a-City Challenge on LiveJournal, are basically the same thing. For free. Not me - I want to have my artistic expression and be able to pay the builders, too!

Recycling, Revising, Same Thing

2011-08-02T14:03:00.003-05:00

I've got the hook for Len in reasonable shape and the synopsis down to a page single-spaced, so I'm going to let all that sit for a week or so. I'm now flipping through my old short stories files and finding that most of the short stories I haven't sold yet have something in common: They're sad and honest and say uncomfortable things. The ones I wrote 20 or even 30 years ago and have given up selling, most of them more mainstream and adult than I know how to market anymore, seem eerily prescient, addressing issues I've since had to face.

Writing does that. Nothing makes a better case for precognition than old manuscripts. You write things, and they come true, or say things you needed to know and didn't want to.

But the short story I'm most concerned about today does neither. (I don't think.) It's about the post-life business of gathering up people's cast-off emotions, processing them, and recycling them so that people who, for example, need a little more guilt or ego or anger in their lives will have it available when the people who had too much of those qualities divest themselves of it. If it doesn't get recycled, it rots and festers, sometimes gets mixed together to create anomolous phenomena - teen angst and old bitterness create poltergeists as a by-product, for example. People who never let anything go can't open themselves up to fresh stuff and their whole lives stagnate. A lot of this stuff is tangled up in the heaps of large trash you leave at the curb when the city does its biannual collection of that sort of thing, so the trucks of scrap metal and second-hand furniture and appliance dealers are joined by the less-visible trucks of the emotion recyclers.

I really like this idea, but the story is over 11,000 words long - too long to be a short story, too short to be a novella. And though parts of it are well-executed, the parts don't hang together well. It has to be third-person omniscient, which is always tricky. It has to tell several stories at once. And it has to encapsulate truths about the way we process emotions without getting all sappily guruish. And all of that is doable, so I feel like I ought to be able to launch myself at it; but I hesitate to do so.

Because there's a lot of the Year from Hell in there. Not even very well disguised. On the one hand, I'm proud of myself for dealing with that at all in writing so relatively soon. The Year from Hell was 2005; I wrote the story in 2008. On the other hand, reading it again brings the Year from Hell back in full Surround-sound Sense-O-Drama. Also, I've mixed in equally recognizable bits of the Years from Hell of other people I know, and that squicks me. It doesn't matter that the people in these situations are not the characters, may be very different indeed from the characters. If they recognize their situations, they'll confuse the characters with themselves.

So until I work out how to cope with those two things, that's another story that's going to sit on the hard drive.

Oh, well. You have to let cheese age, too. No matter how far behind I feel like I am, I won't get anywhere by hurrying the work.

Idea Garage Sale: Everything But What I Want

2011-07-31T10:48:00.004-05:00

Still no title inspiration for Len's story. I can think of titles that have no stories to go with them, though.

On the Other Hand, What the Heck's the Use?
70s problem novel, I think.

The Stars and the Gingerbread Man
I have no idea what genre, even, this would be, but c'mon, you'd pick it up just to find out, wouldn't you?

The Secret Mystery of the Hidden Clue.
To catch all the 10-year-olds walking up and down the aisle scanning for the words "Secret," "Mystery," "Hidden," and "Clue" in order to get their mystery fix.

Beginning, Anywhere
YA. This is a quote from Fort: "One measures a circle, beginning, anywhere."

Garden of Memory, River of Time
A Hole in the World
Lost Moonshine
A time travel trilogy, or they could also be Moody Blues albums. Speaking of which:

Psycho Delia.
Don't know anything about it, except the name of the central character. Possibly Delia is not the protagonist, but if not, she's the catalyst.

Brief Lies
Best title ever for a short story collection.

Lunch is Where You Find It: A Guide to Foraging

One Nation, Under the Bed
Is it a middle grade fantasy or a snarky YA contemporary?

A Storm in the Brain
It's Not What You Think You Want
Land Mind
Quit While You're Behind

Time to get ready for the game, anyway.

More Progress

2011-07-28T10:16:00.003-05:00

I forgot all about blogging Tuesday. I have an obligation Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, so I have to cram all my housework into Tuesday-Thursday.

Third pass complete. I'm not sure I've reduced the mentions of food to their minimum - Len does have a personal relationship with food, due to her outdoor life - but I've done what I can for now. 85,563 words; average word length 4, average sentence length 14; longest sentence is now 67 words and I still don't know where it is.

Tomorrow morning I'll try the hook again and take a stab at synopsizing. It's better than market research.

Some weeks just aren't exciting, but you need those, too.

(Painters today. The cats are aggrieved that they covered all the nice new tile with plastic.)

Idea Garage Sale: Cipher

2011-07-24T08:45:00.003-05:00

Getting up this morning with no clear idea for a garage sale, I opened up the link to the Fortean Times breaking news page and looked at the stories posted on Friday. Here I found a story about a man in Massachusetts who claims to have deciphered a 340-character message from the Zodiac Killer which has defied all previous attempts to read it.

You don't have to know anything about the Zodiac Killer, or to have read very many examples of Fortean code poking, such as the search for ciphers in the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, to realize that the guy is, um, overly optimistic. He's started from one bit of coincidental data (340 characters, 340 is the area code of the Virgin Islands - but only since 1997; the message was received in 1969), used addition and subtraction to get another number, used this number as the basis to decide on a particular established code with which to work; made a huge assumption about how the letter ought to start; then pushed, pulled, and prodded the bits of the message that don't work within his framework and under his untested assumptions until they more or less almost do and he gets a message that kinda sorta makes sense and even fingers a definite person.

And then he is surprised and offended that the relevant police departments aren't interested.

The interesting thing, the relatable thing, here is the way the case interested this person to the point of obsession, of forgetting to eat; of spending hours working on an internal construct that would offer him some sort of resolution he can project onto the outside world.

Because we all do this. Writers do it and produce books and poems; painters do it and make paintings; the Fen do it and produce fanart, fanfic, costuming, and props; programmers do it with programs; gamers do it with games. Sometimes the result is a fun, harmless hobby; sometimes it's a great work of art; once in awhile someone actually solves a crime this way; sometimes it's a mental train wreck that eats up a life, or a virus that spreads to innocent other people and mutates in unpredictable ways.

The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy preoccupation seems to be the capacity to keep perspective. Fan artists, novelists, master chess players - they know where the boundary lies between their absorbing mental preoccupation and the exterior world. They don't use their preoccupation to filter the real world into someplace it's comfortable for them to live, then try to persuade other people to accept this filtered version of reality as reality. Which is what crackpots are generally trying to do, and the point at which they become pathetic, tedious, and potentially dangerous to themselves or others, because walking through hallucinatory terrain is inherently dangerous.

So what we need for a story is two people embodying these different ways of dealing with the same preoccupation, illustrating the advantages and the dangers of the interior life - without, of course, being didactic, because the audience can tell when you're doing that and it makes the story suck. That's always the danger when starting with a theme rather than a character or situation; so let's proceed to those ASAP.

Since this train of thought began with Zodiac's code, let's start with a similar, but fictional, situation. Forty years ago, Drama City was terrorized by a killer who taunted the police in coded letters. Although the case is now only a cold and bitter memory, it has never officially been closed, and the knowledge that Cipher is still out there is like a taint in the town's water. Shadows of suspicion still lie on several people. The daughter of one of these people - still suspected in the public eye, though officially and definitively cleared - is a cop, and she can't stay out of the case files, continually going over and over evidence and trying out various dodges to solve the unsolved ciphers. Or are they codes? Because those aren't the same things. She isn't making headway. No one ever does. But trying to understand Cipher has had the side benefit of improving her job skills.

A newcomer in town moves into a building associated with the Cipher killings in some way. Perhaps he lives in the apartment of a victim, or a suspect; perhaps a body was dumped in the alley behind his office. He's a bit of an encryption buff, probably a programmer, and he becomes fascinated by the case and the messages. So he starts working on them as a hobby. Maybe there's even a local group that offers a prize for solving one. He has one of those jolts of inspiration that feel like revelation, so clear and so compelling that he assumes it must be true. Using this as his guide, he "solves" the ciphers and takes them to the local police, meeting Detective Daughter. Possibly his solution points back to her family, so that when she tries to show him the fundamental errors that arise when his assumptions are tested against reality, it's easy to claim that she's protecting the guilty. It needn't be her father that's implicated; he could easily have a brother hitherto never considered, or something.

This begins a raging political division in town, with Mr. Solution heading up a faction determined to expose police corruption and incompetence at a time when the police department is already struggling for funds and personnel. Detective Daughter, who has worked hard to get the respect of her peers and rise above the shadow of Cipher, finds herself thrust into a false position, her mere presence a danger to the reputation of the force. Even if she solved Cipher, would anyone, in light of the conspiracy theories suddenly running amok in Drama City, accept her evidence and chain of reasoning?

This being a story, we must have a definitive resolution - Cipher must be caught, and he must be someone significant, but he cannot be the person indicated in Mr. Solution's version of the code. He can, however, be someone Detective Daughter kept coming back to; someone who feels threatened? No; police taunters are arrogant SOBs who feel superior to the police. The kind of people who, seeing this kerfluffle arise after years of dormancy (and you'd need a convincing cause for this dormancy), would be unable to resist getting into the middle of it. Guiding it. Using it for some end of his own.

Mr. Solution would be easily manipulated by such a person. Could easily turn into his puppet.

And if Detective Daughter's father was suspected because Cipher always wanted him to be suspected - if he has some sort of grudge against her family - and now she also represents the police whom he has always longed to humiliate -

Well, that's a thriller plot, isn't it? The key thing to get right would be the character and motivation of Cipher. Do that, and everything falls into place around it.

I'm not about to live in such a person's head long enough to write so far out of my comfort range. What if his voice took over like Len's did? Ugh.

I might read the book, though, if somebody else wrote it.

Pleasant, but Minimally Useful

2011-07-21T09:25:00.003-05:00

I was hoping my first reader could point me to the extant problems in the manuscript, but her first response was "I want to hang with Len!"

Which means I succeeded reasonably well in conveying my protagonist's personality, but that doesn't surprise me much. Since it was first person, all I had to do was channel her voice and she took care of the rest. Len's a good character and I don't even feel self-conscious about saying so, since I have no sense of having invented her. Sometimes while working out the plot I worried that she's too reactive, but "reactive" and "passive" are not the same thing, and during the writing the concern always fell away. Len is not in control of her life - who is? - but she is an active agent in it. She can't change the world, but she can find a place in it that doesn't violate her sense of self. And if somebody wants to sneer at her for how she treats her horse, well, that's no skin off her nose.

My reader volunteered to give it another go now that she knows how it ends and can read more critically. Maybe she can at least help with the title. With some poking and prodding I got her to admit that maybe some of the travel could still be tightened up and that she did sometimes think "Oh, they're eating again." I'm afraid Len takes a lively interest in food; but you do when you live an outdoor life like hers. So that's something I can pick away at, anyhow.

I really should give this to another author, but I'm not in a critique group and the person I would naturally give this to is presently swamped. I'm disinclined to join a critique group because I can't see doing it as a regular thing to works-in-progress. I'm happy to mark up my friends' drafts and hand over my own for inspection, but it's generally the big picture I need help with and can offer the most useful feedback for. It's way too easy, reading bits and pieces, to offer too much and unconsciously try to steer your friend into trying to write like you and vice versa.

(We have floor tiles in the bath and mudrooms, and most of the tile wainscot in the downstairs powder room. Cats don't like tilers - they use power saws.)

Excuse Me While I Scream

2011-07-19T13:47:00.003-05:00

I have a friend who has more than one publishable novel in her train. She keeps getting within a hair of publication, going through multiple rounds of extensive revision, serious negotiations with editors, the works, only to lose out at the last minute. Recently I and all her friends rejoiced over her finally getting a contract with a certain publisher - which has now folded.

She's being philosophical about this - after all, as she points out, she is not homeless in Haiti and she'd had a few doubts about this publisher to begin with. This is no doubt the correct attitude.

But I, as her friend, feel like I can rant about it a bit. So (apologies to my Christian friends, for the particular expression I am about to use):

JESUS H. CHRIST IN A BASKET, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THIS INDUSTRY?

There. I feel better now I've done that in public.

And of course I know the answer to my own question. Publishing is an industry. The quality of a work is only one of many, many variables in getting from author to public. Corporations working the way they do, it sometimes seems like a miracle that as much quality stuff gets published as does; and I know that a great many wonderful works will never see the light of day or reach their best audience, even with the e-book revolution that is gradually gathering momentum. It isn't fair, but if you expect fairness you're going to live a life of disappointment. She may never publish a novel; I may never publish another one. We accept that and move on, or we stand still and gnash our teeth for the rest of our lives.

At least she has an agent to help her maximize her chances. So excuse me again while I go back to trying to find one for me, too.

(It appears that laying tile involves a lot of pounding and razor blades. All occupations are mysterious to those outside them.)

Idea Garage Sale: Adventure Book

2011-07-17T09:48:00.004-05:00

Bookworm Annie picks up a battered old book of short stories at a used book store, off the "please take these I can't sell them table" out front. When she reads, she enters the story and becomes the main character. This means that she can use her extensive knowledge of literary convention to solve plot problems, and her annoyance with certain tropes to shake things up; but it also means that she can't skip the boring parts that the author zips the reader through with a transitional sentence. Being in a Western is a lot less exciting if you have to actually experience the ride from Point A to Point B! And the desert island story, face it, is excruciating.

She can't enter a story a second time, just reread it - no matter how embarrassing it now seems - but if she reads aloud to someone else, that person can come into the story with her.

Skills learned in the story remain learned, but a little muted, in the real world.

This one's written and in the attic somewhere. I didn't have the skill to pull it off when I first conceived it back in the mid-80s. You have to be able to carry the short stories (which of necessity include the boring parts, remember!) and tie them in to the reader's real-life situation, making a believable and satisfactory character arc.

I still think it's a viable concept, and I still like the ending, in which Annie intends to pass the book on to the friend she made in the course of the story, but instead it winds up with the bully who's been picking on her, and who could really benefit from that desert island experience.

But I haven't gotten any better at short forms, and having already written this book once I'm disinclined to write it again.

Reflections on a Dormant Story

2011-07-14T14:41:00.005-05:00

So, I felt fairly lousy today and instead of doing market research, finished reading through Nightmare in Shining Armor, the vampire/quest fantasy mashup I mentioned yesterday. And I still don't know what to do with it. The mechanics of magic have to be worked out a little better. The contemporary culture references have to be updated. (But I really like the dwarf analog getting into Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" on a Walkman!) I have not overcome the inherent writing problems of the quest structure, which involves constant changes of scene and transitory characters.

But I like the relationship between Galen, the "vampire," and Bethany, his donor, which is controlled by her until the point, near the climax, when he admits to himself that she's "always been crazy as a bedbug." I like Hathil, the youthful queen who chews her nails and persuades Galen to accept the central quest by admitting that yes, it's inherently a bad thing to do and no, she may not be able to offer him anything he really wants in return. I like the political background and how the international situation keeps banging up against the plot as former allies quarrel over the bones of a conquered territory.

But mostly I love Galen and Bethany's guide through quest territory, Corix, variously known as "Big Brother" (Hathil's name for him), "Hathil's dog," "the queen's Right Hand," "Hathil's half-breed," "Your Efficacy," and various less complimentary things. He's the result of some pretty serious miscegenation, enough that his father's people don't like to admit he exists. He loves his husband, eats appalling amounts of garlic (which is important to the plot), and is supremely good at his job,which boils down to "Making sure Hathil gets what Hathil wants." In context, and if you have my sense of humor, his dialog, particularly with Galen and Bethany, who are veterans of the foster care system and continually pushing against him on the grounds that he's Authority, is often funny in a low-key way.

He's probably a little too perfect.

So I still don't know what, if anything, I'm going to do with this. Better sleep on it.

P.S. The sewing/laundry room has yellow dadoes now! It's gorgeous! This is really happening!

Less Progress

2011-07-13T14:44:00.002-05:00

What can I say? It's hot. I had health crap this weekend. Monday was my birthday, today is my anniversary, and I've been having trouble keeping track of what day it is.

In the mornings it's pleasant to sit on the porch with the laptop, but in the afternoons it's the study with the air on or nothing; but the study with the air on isn't all that cool and I have a lot of distractions on this machine. This morning I got the hook into what I think is reasonable shape and it needs to cool. I think I took the manuscript out a little too early, because although I can't believe it's ready to go after only two passes, I don't see where the work needs to be. I was expecting to have to tweak the camel stuff, but my camel expert says not to. (Good for me.) So I'm getting someone to read through it for me and tell me where I go wrong.

Meantime I should be doing market research, which - well, let's just say I spent the morning on the porch reading an old dormant manuscript, instead. The vampire/alternate-world quest mash-up, in which there is some good stuff but I don't, so far, quite see how to salvage it. The trouble with it is, that I took two common tropes of which I am fed up and mixed them together to get something I rather like. But this is exactly the kind of thing I have the hardest time selling: It looks like this other inexplicably popular crap, but it's better. Yeah, that doesn't sound clueless or egotistical, does it?

However, the sunroom beadboard is painted bright white and the yellow will go onto the dado tomorrow, and our back steps have sturdy wooden rails, so at least somebody's making visible progress around here. Meanwhile, Happy Anniversary to Damon and Me.

Aaron Williams Understands YA, Yay!

2011-07-08T08:13:00.001-05:00

At last! Someone from outside the industry who grasps that YA is not watered down!

And more progress

2011-07-07T10:30:00.003-05:00

Just drafted a hook. Of course it sucks, it's a first draft; but I think the last line is a keeper.

"And what kind of man would she be if she left Miss Diana to fend for herself in a nest of vipers?"

I wonder, is A Nest of Vipers a decent title for this?

I work to the music of nail guns - the workmen are back.

More progress

2011-07-06T09:31:00.002-05:00

Revision Pass 2 complete. 85,471 words. 338 pages. Average word length still 4, average sentence length reduced to 14. Longest sentence is now 78 words long and be damn if I know where it is. I didn't see it.

There's supposed to be all kinds of workmen here this week, but I'm not seeing them, either.

Titles Len's Story Will Not Have

2011-07-05T12:59:00.003-05:00

Fistful of Specie (This phrase is used in the text; I didn't notice till I did the backward revision).
Len and Bean Go Over a Cliff.
The Trail of the American Horse.
An American Transvestite in Texas.
Secrets of the Purple Sage.
Western Disguise.
The Making of a Man, from Scratch.
Frontier Masquerade.
Found with the Wind.
Letters on the Western Wind.
Oh Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow?
Leaving Homestead.
Inventing Len Hausman.

Three days of insomnia reduces the inhibitions, which I suppose is a good thing. Uncomfortable, though.

Idea Garage Sale: The Alien Zoo

2011-07-03T01:41:00.004-05:00

I conceived this as a Sims2 neighborhood I'll never have the time, dedication, and custom content to run, but it could also serve as the setting for an extended literary parody ala Silverlock or the Thursday Next books. Possibly also a shared world anthology, twisting the model established by Thieves' World and perfected in Bordertown. I don't think it'd make a very good RPG setting, though I'm willing to be proved wrong.

The aliens have set aside a series of islands in which to maintain viable populations of other intelligent (or by their standards possibly semi-intelligent) species. Their technology allows them to treat time and space very differently from what we're used to, so from our point of view they select samples from wildly disparate times and places as well as environments, and they construct the islands in some way that permits observation at will without disturbing the exhibits. Each sample, consisting of everybody they happened to find within a particular household on a particular night, is transported along with its immediate environment while sleeping and set down in a suitable location on the island.

"Suitable" is an aliencentric notion, so the March family's modest Concord home may find itself next door to a single tenement from Dickens's London, inhabited by Fagin, Sikes, Nancy, Oliver, the Artful Dodger, and assorted other folks. The Bennet family may find itself forced to consider the suitability of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Horatio Hornblower, Babbit, and Sir Lancelot as husband material for Jane, Lizzie, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. Scarlet O'Hara, Melanie, and Mammy may be in a burned-out Tara with a view of Dracula's castle in one direction and an Iroquois longhouse in the other. King Arthur, Guinivere, and whichever knights weren't out questing (not to mention Morgan Le Fay) would have to adjust to a life without a tax base, and the inhabitants of the Little House on the Prairie would have their movements sharply restricted.

This would be intended as a human breeding colony by the aliens, so they'd be encouraged and manipulated into mingling and developing whatever hodgepodge sort of culture they could. Probably the aliens would arrange for some kind of educational system which would enable the colony to become more or less self-supporting and self-policing, and would interfere only when their own interests are threatened. Probably policies would fluctuate with changes of management, the alien political climate, and available funding; or it's possible that the policy would be consistent, but based on principles and implemented through a space-time continuum so foreign that it would seem to fluctuate from the point of view of the people affected. I envision Sherlock Holmes spending half his days trying to work out the rules governing the place and the other half desperately trying to get more tobacco.

The problem with this is that I don't have a plot at all, just a setting and more characters than anybody needs. Throwing the characters together would generate plenty of conflicts and hence stories, but this is exactly the kind of setting which sucks one into spending the whole time worldbuilding and none of it storytelling.

It's two in the morning and I can't shut my brain off. Maybe sending this out into the ether will help. Happy Independence Weekend, and don't forget to watch 1776! (The Laserdisc version if you can possibly get it.)

Neatness Sucks

2011-06-30T07:32:00.002-05:00

When I put the draft to rest, I packed up all the non-book research I had - my folder of maps, my three-ring binder of photocopies, that sort of thing - in the tapestry bag I used to carry pens, notebook, and lunch when I did library research during the research phase, and put it someplace where I'd find it again when I needed it.

Now I have no idea where that is.

If I could only figure out how to exploit this talent for misplacing things for profit, the house would've been fixed up long ago. (Complete ceiling, window trim, and more than half the wainscot up in the laundry/sewing room! Hurray!)

How to Shorten Your Book

2011-06-28T13:36:00.004-05:00

Revise it backward.

This has never failed me (and believe me, I know about needing to cut wordage). Starting at the end, work back a paragraph at a time, breaking up paragraphs that won't fit on one screen of your word processor at normal viewing size, futzing with wordage until that single-word last line in the paragraph fits on the line ahead of it, ensuring that each chapter ends at the bottom of a page instead of in the top quarter.

Because you're disrupting your context, it's easier to take each paragraph as a unit. My excessively long sentences stand out more. Overused words, ditto. Redundancy, ditto.

Read the forest forward. Read the trees backward. Prune accordingly.

The lesbian western is already shorter by one full page.

Progress

2011-06-27T11:16:00.002-05:00

Revision pass #1 complete. 91,000+ words, 32 chapters, one 91-word sentence, average word length 4 characters, average sentence length 15 words. About typical.

Next step; another pass, more slowly, concentrating on breaking up all sentences longer than 60 words. This will automatically shorten the book and I'll probably see other things on the way, like expository lumps and places with too much or too little grounding in the setting.

By then, I hope, I'll have a title I can stick in a query.

Idea Garage Sale: The Sequel to Switching Well

2011-06-26T06:34:00.004-05:00

Kids who like a book often ask for a sequel. So far the only book I've felt I might could write a sequel for is 11,000 Years Lost, and apparently sales figures didn't justify it, though never say never (it would be about Telabat). The one I've been asked for the most is my little Energizer bunny, still grinding out a few hundred dollars in royalties every year, Switching Well.

Since I don't expect every person who runs across this blog has read Switching Well: it's about two girls, Ada and Amber, who swap places across time when they make wishes in an old well in a vacant lot, one to live "a hundred years from now" and the other to live "a hundred years ago." I don't think it's too spoilery to say that the story wraps up when they figure out how to swap back.

And as far as I'm concerned, they're both done. I don't have another story about Ada or Amber, and I'm sure not going to fall into the common sequel trap of telling the same story in a slightly different dress. So if I were to do a sequel, I'd have to shift to one of the other characters, and there's no question in my mind who that character would be.

Everybody who has expressed an opinion on the subject, myself included, has the same favorite character: Violet, who takes the bewildered Ada under her wing in the emergency shelter. Violet is a tough, savvy girl manipulating the system. her special needs sister is fine as long as her mother can stay home with her, but her poorly-educated father is unemployed and, under the rules of the welfare system circa 1991 (if anything, it's probably worse by now), if he lives with his family, they can't get enough in benefits to cover their needs, so he "abandons" them to prevent the sister from having to be institutionalized and lose all her hard-won independence. But once their grandmother dies, the benefits are further reduced, and can no longer support both sisters. So Violet takes her cue from her dad and begins a life of "running away," appearing at different shelters around the city at different times with different identifying information, grabbing her education on the fly. She's tough, she's smart, she's cynical, and she becomes Ada's staunchest friend.

Yes, American "child welfare" laws really are written badly enough to split up families and provide the worst possible (and often most publicly expensive) options to the families they're supposed to help. I'll spare you the rant. You can provide it for yourself if you care to research the topic. The character of Violet is a direct result of that research, providing Ada with a much-needed guide to the late twentieth-century and me a tangible, non-story-wrecking outlet for the rage and frustration my research left with me.

Anyway, Ada does her best to give Violet and her family a leg up at the end of the book. But Violet does not live in a world of easy solutions. And the thought follows me around sometimes: She knows where that wishing well is, and she knows it works. Is someone as cannily opportunistic as Violet not going to use that?

I think she's too smart to wish for money. It's finite. Power over her situation is what she wants, but that's too vague to form a wish about. The quickest route out of her family's troubles would be to wish her sister's special needs away. But it can't all be roses after that, or there's no story.

OMG, look at the pitfalls. First and foremost, by putting the sister front and center like that, I'd be running the risk of writing an "issue driven" book, which is crap.

More crucially, I don't have anything like the intimate contact and experience with people - look, I'll tell you how bad this is. I'm actually sitting here trying to think of the current polite way to describe Rosesharon's original condition.

Large chunks of the book would have to be from her POV. If I can't even put an honest, straightforward name on that, how am I going to track and express the changes she endures, much less depict her reaction to them? When I'm in a character, I'm in the character - seated right behind her eyes, in total harmony with the way she approaches the world even while I'm wincing and allowing her to make her necessary mistakes. This doesn't mean I can only write about people like me, but it does mean I have to do massive amounts of research in order to find the starting point that will enable me to to find a comfortable seat in the heads of those who are unlike me. And Rosesharon's difference lies exactly in the spot where I would have to sit.

Violet's wish, in essence, would be to make Rosesharon more like me. The character is violated at the outset.

No way I can write this book. If I tried, I'd probably come up with a third-rate Flowers for Algernon rip-off. No one wants that.

Nobody else can write this book either, of course. Violet and her family are my intellectual property.

But if you happen to have the "in" that will let you write about someone wired sufficiently differently from the mainstream as to face her family members with the choice of making huge sacrifices for her, or sacrificing her to an institution - don't be afraid to go there. If you succeed, it will be brilliant and groundbreaking.

And isn't that worth the risk of failure?

Killing My Darlings

2011-06-23T13:51:00.004-05:00

I tackled the Eighteenth Chapter today, the transitional chapter between the set-up of the first half and the action of the second. I knew as I wrote it that a lot of what I put in was stuff I needed to write but the reader didn't need to read; details that would help me place my imaginary people in the real landscape of San Antonio, May, 1865. I could also tell that what remained would have to be shuffled around and that part of it belonged in the next chapter. I have probably not taken out everything I need to, but at least everything's in the right order and I believe the chapter break comes in the right place. It wasn't any fun, though. Some of what got taken out was broken off and tucked less verbosely into other bits of the chapter; some of it is just gone.

Here, for posterity and to soothe my vanity, is the longest continuous chunk of stuff I had to yank out. I'm inclined to think it's not bad descriptive writing, and if I had the leisure of a nineteenth-century audience I could polish it up into a really good one; but I don't and I won't.

So I had plenty of time on my own. One of my favorite places to spend it, and my money, was the bookstore across the street from Mrs. Schmidt's. The proprietor was a German, and though his stock was well picked over and some of it damaged, compared to our home library out on the frontier, it was a treasure house. Also, like most bookstores in those days, he ran a circulating library; so for a small fee I could take a book home, read it, return it, and read another, only buying the ones I knew I would read again and again. Scientific works, sermons, and silly novels; Schiller, Shakespeare, Shelley; Burns, Byron, Bacon; Ivanhoe and the Iliad! No Roman lounging in a bath ever felt a greater sense of luxury than I did lounging on the riverbank in the cypress shade, reading and smoking and looking up to see the spangle of sunlight on the water.

As if to make up for that long, miserable winter, the sun came out and stayed out, baking the clouds out of the sky. Entire days went by with no breeze except directly on the river. Where people walked, what had been ankle-deep sucking mud dried hard and fragmented into billions of particles, which rose with every footfall and coated the town in a fine layer of white lime dust. Where no one walked, the vegetation grew rank and lush, goosegrass forming waist-high green mounds, sunflowers shooting for the sky like military flares, bushes flinging new branches across paths overnight. Where the ladies of the town had planted flowers or tomatoes, grass choked them out; where they'd planted roses round their houses, they found themselves mewed up by briars and blossoms like the Sleeping Beauty in her castle.

Mornings and evenings, dogs, cats, and children hunted rats through green tunnels of weed. Swallows wove crazy patterns above the shimmering green river in pursuit of insects. Frogs and fish dined like kings on the black clouds of flies breeding in the stables, and herons -- big and little, brown and gray and blue and white -- dined like emperors on the frogs and fish. Around noon, every inhabitant fell into a torpor, or into the river, adopting the Mexican custom of siesta, because absolutely nothing happening in San Antonio during May of 1865 was worth rousing oneself to action in that midday heat.