Back from out of town
I am back from vacation. The blogging will now continue…
I Win Family
I came home and The Wife Unit, Thing One and Thing Two were sitting in the Big Green Chair playing networked Mario Cart on their Nintendo DS Lites.
I got my wife a Pink DS for her Birthday. She thought it was silly but it is all part of my master plan. If you want to identify with what your kids like to do, you should at least participate in the forms of entertainment that they like.
I got her a cartridge that had Sudoku on it, so all is good.
Dishonorable curs and scallywags
A good writing Sunday. 2600 words on Bunny Trouble and I used the phrase “dishonorable curs and scallywags”.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be dishonorable curs and scallywags …
Tension
Inadvertently I have setup a situation where two characters in Bunny Trouble are going to get into a row and that was unintended. It is not obvious, I did consciously go down this path, but the undercurrents of their incompatibility stand out when one reads the story: tension.
Why did I do that?
I do not know. Perhaps something personal at home or work caused me to be more disputable than normal.
Now I have a choice. Either I can go for it, which causes me to rethink a rather large portion of the character interaction that itself has consequences and adds to my word count: I am approaching 120,000 already! Alternately I can backtrack and do a rewrite that I would rather avoid. There are many other places needing work, I do not want to add to that list, God forbid.
What I cannot do is the middle road, just pretending that these two are not going to get into it. There are already enough weird tension-filled things happening in my plot. The middle road is just lazy. Readers do not like lazy authors.
This is a situation where I could see a writer’s support group would be handy. I could present the problem without explaining a large amount of context.
Advice? Anyone?
House
House
We have been here before.
The end of a gravel road which itself was
The end of a lonely paved road long forgotten
Most likely only maintained because it was on a map
Connected to interesting things only at each end
“How did he get this place?” I ask.
It was wonderful nothing for miles and miles
“Saving the life of that lumber company boss,” she said.
“Where?”
“On a mountain, I think. I do not know. It was a boy thing.”
It was my favorite place
Hills, woods, deer, rocks… the mountains
Always the mountains
The house was ratty but I loved it
As much as one could love a thing
“It needs a lot of work,” I said. It did not even have electricity
“That’s the fun part, do you think?”
“Do I still have to work in my math books?”
“Everyday, my Sweet. Everyday.”
I frown. She laughs.
A thought.
“Boys climb mountains?” I ask.
“Men climb mountains.
“It is the boy inside that makes them want to do so,” she says.
“I don’t understand.”
She gives me what I have been thinking of as The Eye.
“You will someday. All too soon… all too soon.”
Characters to Avoid
My wife and I were big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. Before it was moved to a different channel that DirecTV would pick up with our DirecTiVo, you should have seen the convoluted workflow for me to get an episode and display it on our TV. I learned more about video formats and the underground world of fandom then I have ever wanted to know in my life.
It did not hurt that Buffy was all hotness and ready to kick butt at a moment’s notice, but my true appreciation for the show was its sheer grimness. Stabbing your only true love after his epic moment of redemption to close a Portal to Hell™, well it just does not get better for me. And that was in the early seasons. The dialog was snappy and witty. And people died.
Nothing says “conflict” than a good old-fashioned body count.
Buffy did one more thing for me other then entertain. I realized my tolerance for insipid little mousy-twerp protagonists was low and in Buffy, insipid little mousy-twerp people just died. There is enough conflict in this world to entertain with without reducing people you want to identify with to passive-aggressive dorks. In other words, do you want to read about the victims of bad upbringing or do you want to read about the people with the heroic mettle of the Americans on Flight 93?
Of course, the Action Hero rallying against the System of Passive Sheep is also a contemporary cliché stretching into middle-age. On the other hand, being a literary witness to watching Passive Sheep get what they so richly deserve can be a vicarious thrill.
Which brings me back to Buffy. Buffy’s rally against the Apocalypse(s) might have been a new look at an old idea, but at least the people fighting were more than just caricatures of heroes you would rather see tossed into a wood chipper for their ineptitude and lack of common sense.
Ah…
Only 1600 words today on Bunny Trouble, but major progress in a difficult part of the book. I had to move along some stagnating characters and connect some plot points. At the same time, I set the stage for some major conflict with some obvious, and not so obvious plot work. It’s not exactly foreshadowing. More like foreslinkingshadowing. Foreshadowing along the edges, if you will.
All in under 2000 words. Funny how a multi-directional plot can start to become interconnected without even consciously drawing the points. It is a complicated style, but that’s what I like to read, so there you go.
Work starts early. Must pass out now. Brian hurts.
Sea
Sea
The beach was empty.
To the left, rocks and forest
To the right, forest and rocks
Ahead, more rocks jutting upwards through the surf
As if they were angrily protecting their beach
The mist wanted to be rain, or the rain wanted to be mist
The weather was no match for wool and silk
But my nose was getting cold.
My small hand in hers again. I always liked holding her hand.
She never grew tired of it, and it was always warm.
“If he loved the sea so much, why didn’t he live here?”
“Look and listen, maybe the ocean will tell us,” she said.
I watch and listen. Waves crash in, hiss of water receding
The roar of the wind and the surf far off mixing with the close by.
The sounds are the same but they never pattern
Lonely, so very lonely…
She picks me up and kisses a tear
I did not know I was crying
“I don’t like it here anymore, can we go?” I ask.
“Of course. Where would you like to go?”
“Ice-cream?” I ask hopefully.
She laughs and ruffles my hair
I hate it when she does that
But every time she does it she smiles
The book on writing that started the fire hose
In reference to Nicole’s post on Becoming a Writer, I wanted to pass along a book that was very helpful to me: Stephen King’s On Writing.
On Writing is an autobiographical look on the art of writing stories. There are many fascinating gems in this book. The brightest one for me was his plotting technique. King does not outline so much as he stuffs characters into a situation and sees how they come out. Some make it, some don’t.
His free-flowing method of writing is pure storytelling goodness. For me, there is a price to be paid. Brevity goes out the window, and one must circle back or bloat ensues.
I tired this and the result was a book of 150,000 words in the first draft. My outlines, I realized, were confining me. Confining my characters. They were wooden, characters forced into a role because The Plot demanded it.
A prime example is my protagonist in Bunny Trouble. She started out as a little fluffy piece of blonde, set to give “the main character” trouble because she is young and sexy and determined to get her way with whatever man she chooses.
Ha! She sure showed me. She decided that she was too cliché. That, instead of being a bit of sexy filler, she would dominate every setting she was in by the sheer force of her amazing will. She owes her very existence, her ability to be smarter then everyone else, to Mr. King. Without his little book on writing she would have merely served to annoy The Wife Unit, and get me into trouble. I think of the protagonist now looking at me with her sky-blue eyes and waving a feminine finger at me saying “Shame on you for stereotyping me so. You owe me an apology, Mister!”
Stephen King, I thank you for such a helpful little book.
I am not making this up
My first post for this blog I described the torrent of writing in which I happily suffer.
Poking around with the Writing Tag, I found this poor soul. Now, I come across Nicole who relates us this tidbit:
I have had so much energy to write that I can’t manage to contain. I’ve been taking my notebook everywhere, park, pool, you name it. I can’t keep it in, and I want to get it out of my brain and onto the page before the expiration date…which is usually after sleeping on it for a night.
Write Niki, write! Write right now!
This ends my only worthy advice I can give from one writer to another. No need to thank me, that’s just they kind of guy I am.
This was me 17 years ago
The person on this new blog was me 17 years ago.
I am afraid to leave a comment, like I would corrupt him or her to 17 more years of itchy skin and confusion, instead of just 6.
The Life and Death of Deputy Lang
In reference to this post I bring you a little blurt:
Lang was driving uncomfortably fast with one hand while the other was fumbling with the patrol-rifle lock in the other. The setup was new—rifles moved to the center rack while the shotguns moved to the trunk in 2007. He did not have a lot of experience with it and not being able to look at the thing while he was driving was giving him fits.
He growled and smacked it in frustration. This seated the rifle all the way in its cradle with an audible snap, and this time when he turned the key the rifle guard swung out of the way.
“HA!” he yelled.
He did not know if it was the Abusers, Pereira, Phelps, the shotgun-wielding neighbor or a combination of all four who fired the shots. He held certification with his M4 since 2003; he was not going to bring just a Glock to a gunfight. Not a gun enthusiast as some of his buddies were, he was knowledgeable of the fact that in the shotgun vs. M4 match-up, the shotgun was going to lose, especially in his desire to stay as far away as possible from any unfortunate incident involving firearms.
“Militarization of the police, Baby!” he yelled, slapping the dash.
Then he remembered that he was running code so the in-dash recording system was recording everything he said and did.
Whoops.
Deputy Lang is a minor character in a near-future novel. Here, he is on his way to back up the other Deputy on a domestic disturbance call that went the wrong way. He does not use his M4 on this call nor does he meets an untimely end, or become harmed in any way.
I Love You Please Don’t Die
Here’s one way your story can get bloated: start either identifying with or sympathizing with your characters, and then start to like them. Then if you don’t like them, appreciate their vileness. And if their vileness is too vile to be appreciated, then appreciate the fact that they are either a dark mirror to the protagonist or a light-absorbing example of how low one can sink.
Becoming enamored of your pretend people after a certain level of detail and setting poufs the page count to heights better left looked at, not ascended. As a firm believer in the “less is more” theory, this is the literary equivalent of drug addiction. You now have character addiction.
Character addiction is insidious and painful. Painful because while self-editing you start to chip and cut into their existence because the story is drifting. Lord help this now wounded thought-soul when a real editor gets your work. Now one of your creation is externally tortured. It hardly is fair and it certainly is not sporting.
And then, then… then you realize, this person is going to die because it is not just your characters which seem to live and breathe, but the actual story itself. The story is moving in a direction that bodes ill for your thought person. Now my beloveds are in peril, and I feel helpless to save them. One of them dies and I am left with a melancholy that hovers over me like the ocean mist on a spring morning. The mist might burn off, or it might just rain.
Limitations
Limitations
Silently we cross the carpet, my small hand in hers
The viewing is a window of nothing, he looks
Like a caricature of a statue based on a painting of a photo
“That doesn’t look like him, really.”
A sigh. “No, it doesn’t it.”
“Didn’t he want to be pushed out to sea on a boat shot with burning arrows?”
She smiles. “There’s no limits to our thoughts. We can picture that as if it happened.”
I look at her. “You sound like him.”
“I was his muse. He was inspiring. Perhaps I should be more now, no?”
“Maybe if we push him out to sea, I would not miss him so much.”
“No,” she whisperers, “I think that we’d be missing him more… we’d miss him more.”
She finally cries
Dripping Dark Sequins Like Bitter Tears of Love
Many people have the talent to write, but not many have the ability to do so. Our educational system, even with its faults, makes writers. They may not be literary geniuses, but they have the ability to translate thoughts into words to make a coherent story. This writing may not be enjoyable, but it is writing.
The ability to write flows from within, much like a burning passion that bursts forth in a carnal onslaught, like two lovers ripping off their clothes in an unquenchable desire to get at the flesh beneath. This passion translates into sitting down and writing. A pause in the writing is just a refractory period. Soon the writer is back at The Craft.
I point this out because talent is separate from ability. Writing, like music, is very personable, blood, flesh, and thoughts making written words. Other people may not like to read these words. These words may not meet a threshold of talent. In actuality, they most likely do not meet the literary standards for a person making a purchasing decision to purchase your words.
This circles back to raw, unmitigated passion. I write for my friends and The Wife Unit. Someday I will even write for my children. Even if this small circle did not like my stories, then I would simply write for myself, for I could not ignore the ability to make a story.
This is all a fancy way of saying I can crank out the words but I may be an insipid hack. I would like to brood on this, but the characters in my story, like favored lovers, beckon me. Consider it a warning. I can write two books in six months, but you might not want to read them.
Delerium – Just a Dream
Walking barefoot on the shore
Hypnotized by the ocean roaring
Thoughts of you drifting in and out
Never fails to calm me down
I still see your eyes when light hits the water
And I’ve never seen a color so beautiful
So blue… Ocean blue
I keep moving to the distant sounds
And visions of you drifting in and out
Clouds mixing with the sand and the sea
Sounds get carried on the ocean breeze
I still hear your voice from across the horizon
And wasn’t that you walking into the shadows?
In time I’ll believe it was just and illusion
In time I’ll believe it was only a dream
I still see your eyes when light hits the water
And I’ve never seen a color so beautiful
I still hear your voice from across the horizon
And wasn’t that you walking into the shadows?
In time I’ll believe it was just and illusion
In time I’ll believe it was only a dream
Till then I will breathe you in from the ocean
And walk with the waves rolling under my feet
Brutal
There is a chapter in Bunny Trouble that is action packed and filled with Conflict Goodness. Bad people do bad things and get their asses handed to them by the good guys. It is glorious and a corner of my brain would like to think if Tom Clancy ever read it, he would go “ooh rah!” Sometimes the Good Guys have to win. They just have to win.
It is also brutal. I finished the chapter and had to get up and go outside for some fresh air and reflection. I have written some disturbing things before but this was ugly. Several times I have contemplated deleting the chapter and moving the book in a slightly different direction.
It comes to this: if I do not want The Wife Unit to read it, then I just cannot have it as part of the story, and I am not too sure my wife would want to read something like that. Did I mention it was brutal?
After some soul searching, I have decided to keep it. In the chapter, I introduce a minor character, someone just above plot convenience and slightly below ‘give me more of that person please.’ Without intending it, this character says a few things that sum up the premise of the book plot in a sneaky way and makes the entire chapter necessary: not so much to move the plot along but to justify the entire book theme. Thus, what comes next is a validation of the entire Bunny Trouble series of books. How could I delete that? I cannot. It was like a gift from the Literary Plot Producing Gods. You will be reading book two and go “well shit I should have seen that coming.”
Therefore, what do I do with The Wife Unit? If I have to leave the chapter in, I just have to deal with the consequences that she and some of my friends will just quit reading the book and come kick my ass for wasting their time putting emotional investment into characters they do not wish to read about anymore, even though they won against Evil.
In the end, I am gambling that The Wife Unit and my friends would want me to be true to myself and true to my story. Bad things happen to good people. This is the reality of the world in which we live. No one, including myself, wants to read about these bad things in the course of entertainment if the book does not bring any value to the table. Thus, I have to trust myself that I am bringing value. That long after you put the entertaining book down; you are thinking thoughts of a deep and meaningful nature. One of the best books I have ever read, I felt like I received the end of a literary sledgehammer, the ending of the book actually had me feeling vaguely ill. There are no regrets in the reading, for in the end it was a story of a love between a father and a son that said so very much on what it really means to have such a relationship.
I used to think writing was easy. I wish I could travel back in time and kick my younger self in the ass. “No it’s not easy. You just have not started writing yet.”
God
Is there a God?
Hike up the Hoh River and the Hoh Rainforest. It may not prove the existence of God to you, but it will confirm some sort of spiritualism in yourself.
A temperate rainforest, the land it unique, you won’t find something like it hardly anywhere. The land is spectacular. Primal. The rains wash anything away that isn’t supposed to be there. It is clean. Beautiful. It’s so wondrous, that walking it fills you with a sense of loneliness.
Some dreams are real...
Coffee Shop Armageddon
If you were wondering (and even if you were not), here’s what it means to be a writer. On a hot hot summer day:
heatherpa [1:42 PM]:
Are those barista boobs at the coffee shop really necessary?
Tony [1:42 PM]:
I am so getting coffee after work.
heatherpa [1:43 PM]:
/smack
A normal man (let’s leave off the ultra-cool fact that my wife will point out Epic Breasts for me to gaze at), would drive to the coffee shop, do his leering, and putter on home.
Noooooooo. Not I. What I did was go to the coffee shop and look around the parking lot, in which my mind, for reasons on its own, formulated a book. Indeed, I envisioned an epic book about the next American Civil War. Starting right there. Right in the very spot I was parked in.
Thus, my leering wasn’t terribly productive. I spent the entire week resisting the urge to put Bunny Trouble aside and work on this story. The desire faded to a controllable burn, akin to something between indigestion and a morning erection.
This happens to me every day.
Be careful what you wish for, the road to Hell is paved with creativity.
IM Conversation with The Wife Unit
heatherpa [9:26 AM]:
so when are you going to explain Bunny trouble on your blog?
Gibbers me muh book!
Tony [9:27 AM]:
Ha ha the book is not done yet
I guess I should edit the first book and print it for you
heatherpa [9:29 AM]:
um yes b/c I’ll be done with my other books in no time at this rate %)
My wife and her lusty desire for good reading material. I am doomed.
What’s that about?
What’s that about you ask? A book? About what?
I love writing. At work, it’s all research and specifications. At home however, it’s pure fiction, Baby. Science Fiction. The kind that sneaks up on you.
You can get the gist of the book theme by taking a look at my blogroll and the graphic on top of this blog. Other than that, ah… no. Newp. Uh-uh. Unless you show up where I am standing and say “Gibbors me mah book!”, you, sadly, have to wait for it.
