Plan for the Postponed Holiday Trip and Onward to 2016

This week has been chaos with a drawn out illness for our cat resulting in tears and questioned priorities and a postponed holiday trip.  Last night while making a pro/con list of two options I had with respect to the postponed holiday trip, I thought, "At least if we stay here to feed the cat through a tube, the baby can play Jesus in the Christmas pageant."  I can say with certainty that this is a thought I have never had before.  I think if there was a dark humor story in all this, that would be the jumping off point.

In other writing news, one of my New Year's resolutions (which are more Things To Do In January, just like I had Things To Do In December) is to get back to querying.

The complete list looks like this:

• Query
• Finish Draft of Firebird Story
• Sleep Training

Sleep Training, for those of you that don't know, is training the baby to sleep consistently, teaching him to soothe himself back to sleep instead of needing me to sing him progressively questionable lullabies, and breaking him of all the bad habits he's picked up about sleeping on me and sleeping in a swaddler and needing to eat to sleep.  When I think about how much of a nightmare this is going to be, it makes the first two bullet points look easy.  I'm in control of both of those.  I just need to buckle down and do it.

So I have a few prerequisite steps to take before jumping back into querying.  First, I want to re-read my novel and get hyped about it again.  Second, I want a better title.  I have one in mind, but I want to focus in on it and run it past some people.  Third, I want to take another look at my query letter and see how I can make it better.  With this much time away from it, I'm sure something will jump out.

Our holiday trip will be a great time to do these.  It's mostly reading, not a huge time commitment, and I can do them instead of working on my draft of the Firebird story and still make progress.

This Shattered World Review

This week I read This Shattered World by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner.  This is the second book in the Starbound series, which is young adult sci-fi/romance.  The first book, These Broken Stars, was fantastic.  I'm not going to retroactively review that one (even though I should), but in short it ended up with plot points similar to Solaris, but with characters that had believable reactions to those plot points, which was my big (big big big) beef with Solaris.  There was also an amazing space ship crash.  The third book, Their Fractured Light, came out this month, but I have yet to read it.  Stay tuned.

This installment takes place on Avon, whose terraforming process has mysteriously stalled and is generations behind where it should be.  Instead of farmland, it's a big swamp with complete cloud cover that causes problems for all sorts of high tech systems: scans, communication, transportation.  Since they're so far behind on their terraforming, Avon does not have the same status as completed planets.  They don't have representation, they don't have schools outside of story time in a cave, they don't have communications equipment, they can't grow their own food and their supplies are strictly rationed.  This setup would be feasible if this was the state of things for the first round of colonists for a few decades while the terraforming progressed, but it's been generations and the colonists are getting restless.  They form a rebel faction, demanding rights, turning violent, and the military is called it to keep them in check.  On top of any normal tension that would exist when the military comes in, the soldiers keep succumbing to the Fury, a weird quirk of Avon, which makes them momentarily black out and attack anyone near by. 

The world building here is really interesting, and while Avon is flushed out as a fully realized environment hosting different cultures with different histories, motivations, and desires--none of which are black and white--you also get the sense of the greater universe.  Avon, despite its vibrancy (it's funny because it's the least colorful world ever), is a backwater world in the far corner of civilization.  

The different sides of the story are shown really well with two alternating points of view.  There's Flynn, who is one of the rebels, and Lee, who is a captain in the military stationed on Avon.  Not only do we see where their sides are coming from (and they both make such valid points that at times you despair they'll ever come to an agreement), but we also see the ways they disagree with the people on their side.  So it shows all sorts of facets of the situation.

The points of view are really well done in that both characters were equally engaging.  This probably has a lot to do with the non stop action in this book.  Every chapter, something explodes or someone is shot or a building catches fire or some other mayhem.  It really snaps along.

And despite all the action, the characters still managed to grieve, to feel fear, to doubt.  However, they weren't given enough time (what with the fires and explosions) for their emotions to turn melodramatic.

So if you like sci-fi and romance, and enjoy YA pacing, you should check out this series.

This point of view is cramping my style

I'm still chipping away at this story.  It's like digging for freedom with a spoon.

Since I've been writing on my phone so much, and since the Google Docs app on my phone doesn't have the capacity to tell me my word count, I've been setting goal based on the content of what I'll write as opposed to the quantity I'll write.  Mostly I've been writing a scene every day.  Strangely, the few times I've checked on my computer, I've been writing more than 1,000 words a day this way without really noticing or stressing about it.  The end is clear, and I don't have to ask myself, "Have I hit my quota today?  Let's check...Blarg!  I need 37 more words." 

This adjusts the accountability plan I came up with last week.  Instead, I'm back to using HabitRPG, which has changed its name to Habatica in my absence.  There's a lot going on with Habatica, but basically you get gold for doing the things you're supposed to do every day, and you can use that gold to buy armor and weapons that have stats and stuff, but mostly the armor and weapons make you feel more accomplished as your avatar looks cooler and cooler.  When you don't do the things you're supposed to do, you lose health points and eventually die unless you level up first.  Losing health makes me sad, and that's enough accountability for me.  Right now the only things I have to do are write a scene every day and make a blog post on Sunday and Thursday.  I also get some points for reading and listening to podcasts, and lose points if I read too much or listen to too many episodes to the point where I don't write my scene for the day or write my blog post.  Eventually, I'm going to expand this list.

A problem with this story has been stewing for a while, and it raised it's ugly head again yesterday when I got to the scene where the problem becomes a serious issue.  To understand, here's a few fun facts about this story as it exists now. 1. It is from the limited perspective of a single main character.  2. This main character has blackouts, during which he does things, which are progressively more awful.  He doesn't know what he gets up to until people tell him about it later.  The problem is that these summaries of the awful things he did are not nearly as satisfying as it would be to see the events play out.  Not only do I suspect it'll be boring or frustrating for the reader, but I'm also sad that I'm not writing those awesome fight scenes.

So I have a puzzle.  I know I'm going to end up writing fight scenes because I always end up writing fight scenes.  The struggle here is how to include them without jumping into someone else's point of view (which would be weird) or making it kinda cheesy (What if they mind meld and he gets to relive the memories of someone watching him be awful!)

You know, now that I've written it out, it doesn't sound as bad as it did in my head.  The truth is, however I decide to fix this, it's all going to live or die in the execution.

Again, this is not a problem to fix now, because I'm still just drafting at this point.  But I know it's something I'll need to go back and give special attention.  I'll think on it and see if I can find some examples of stories that also encounter this problem.

Bathing the Lion Review

I recently read Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll.  My mom recommended Carroll to me, and a while back I read The Land of Laughs and enjoyed it enough to put a bunch of Carroll's books on my To Read list.  I checked a few weeks ago, and found that Bathing the Lion was available at the library for immediate download.  Score!

I didn't know what I was in for with this one.  Carroll's stuff is all a little weird, but this one was much further down the spectrum of weird, heading into surreal territory. 

It's impossible to tell much about this one without giving away the story's secrets and surprises.  That should tell you a lot right there.  I can't tell you what this book is about, because I didn't know until the end.  I had no idea where it was going.  Every time I thought I knew, I was wrong.  It kept changing what it was about and where it was headed.

At one point, the book is about collecting all of human experience by sampling events from the lives of thousands of people and mooshing those disjointed experiences together into one whole that makes sense.  In a way, this book is like that.  There are mundane back stories presented for each of the characters--little tidbits about their lives, little moments that stuck with them or didn't.  You expect these stories to reappear later, to have an effect on the plot, to mean something.  But they don't.  They're there and then they're gone. 

The same goes with the fantastical components of this novel.  Sometimes the novel is about dreams.  Sometimes it's about "mechanics," a race of super-beings that "fix" things around the cosmos.  How the dreams work, or what things in the dreams mean, or what they need to do with the knowledge they gain from the dreams are never explained.  The mechanics use special tools in their fixes, they present concepts through encoded messages or pictures, they have some sort of culture and traditions and language.  But while I'm fascinated, wanting to know more about all of this, I'm not given more.  I'm given an amuse-bouche of world building, and then it's gone.

So in all this, through most of the novel, it feels like there is just a string of unrelated things happening.  They don't lead from one to another, nor does one event cause the next.  There's a rolly chair that talks to people, AND THEN an elephant shows up, AND THEN someone's on an airplane and puts a lot of effort into drawing a very important picture, AND THEN...time travel?  Okay.  Are we ever going to find out what was up with that elephant?

No.  It's just there.  Chillin'.

But as someone who has come out the other side, the haphazardness of it all does make sense eventually.  The ending is not as satisfying as I would have hoped, but it does make you feel okay that we never found out about that elephant.  It makes you feel okay that everything wasn't wrapped up.

Progress Report 12/7

Remember that great momentum I had at the end of December?  That has collapsed like a wet taco. 

December 1st, I was writing, and I thought to myself, "If the officer lets you, can you ride in the front seat of a police car?"  Last month, if I'd had this question, I would have shrugged, made a mental note to look it up when the draft was done, and moved on with my writing.  But December 1st, I stopped and looked it up.

December 2nd, I thought, "What's that word for when things are inside other things?  It starts with a C?  Geez, this is the worst brain fart."  Last month, if I'd had this question, I would have written, "There was another thing inside that thing," made a mental note to make it more eloquent later, and moved on with my writing.  But December 2nd, I stopped and busted out the thesaurus app, which has been updated since I last looked at it, so I had to tool around on it a bit.

It's now December 7th, and I am behind on my word count goals.

I've come up with a few reasons why that might be.

Reason 1: Excuses Excuses

My son was baptized this weekend.  This in itself wouldn't put me behind on my writing progress, but the grandparents that came into town to witness my baby scream while a paster shouted over him can account for some lost time.  It's hard to write and socialize at the same time, or write and pick someone up from the airport (although waiting in the cell phone lot was time well spent).  I do recognize that this is an excuse, and I could have been more assertive.

Reason 2: The NaNo Drop

It's really weird that the lack of accountability would have such a strong effect on my productivity, but I think it did.  One of the cool things about NaNo is that people can click on my user page and see my progress.  I told everyone I was doing it.  I had to have something to show for that, or people would know that I was slacking.  That makes sense, but the weird part is that I strongly doubt anyone looked at how I was doing.  The accountability was mostly in my head.  But still, when that accountability was taken away, all of a sudden, my motivation took a nose dive.  Absolutely no one would know I was under-preforming, except that I'm writing this blog post to tell you about it.

The other part is that NaNo has that cool graph that showed where I was and showed the red line of where I ought to be.  The site had those stats about average daily words written and how many words I needed to write to stay on track.  There's something really satisfying in getting my words above the line.  There's something really satisfying in making those stats turn green when I hit my daily quota.  Now, the good thing is that this is pretty easy to fix with a spread sheet.  I think I need to do that.

Reason 3: The Psychological

Last week I was "getting to the good part," but now I'm at the good part.  My hero is hitting all the barriers all at once.  Everything is falling apart.  He's cracking and shuddering and about to explode.  And it's emotionally draining.  I need to get into a mindset where I can channel his anxiety, his fear, his stress.  And I am not in the mood.  I don't think it'd be good for me right this second when I'm already stressed about splashing water on my son and stressed about all the violence in the world that just keeps coming and coming.  I don't think it'd be good for me to get in the mindset I need to be in while my son naps on me.  On the other hand, when is a good time to write?  Never.  Might as well do it now.  And also, I've said before that this draft is weirdly emotionless.  So why do I care all of a sudden?  I need to just chug through.

The War of Art Review

I recently finished The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  This was recommended to the world at large on an episode of NaNoWriPod by Ben. It continues the trend of Ben and I disagreeing with one another.

This is another book about writing (or any other artistic/spiritual endeavor).  It focuses mostly on motivation without using the word "motivation".  Pressfield puts forth a framework that has three main parts.  1. The force that holds us back from completing our endeavors is Resistance, which whispers in your ear about all the reasons you shouldn't work right now. 2. To overcome Resistance you must be a Professional, who shows up every day to work and behaves professionally. 3. Ideas are created by muses in a higher plane of existence, and if we are Professionals we can listen in and transcribe what the muses have to say.  Ideas come through you, not from you. 

This book was not written for me.  That much is obvious in the number of golf anecdotes, the quietly pervasive sexism, and the metaphors about motherhood and childbirth designed by and for someone who has not experienced motherhood and childbirth.  Aside from these more overarching issues, the prose also alienates in more subtle ways.

He asks questions, then assumes how I answered.  "Have you ever worked in an office?"  No.  "Then you know about Monday morning status meetings."
Well, I do know about those, but I guess you're talking to the guy standing behind me right now.  I'll just wait out this passage until you move on and maybe address me again.

This is a shame since the main idea of this passage is interesting and something I could use.  His idea here is that, when you are writing Professionally, you should run your own status meeting with yourself.  What do I need to do this week? What do I need to do to get that done?  How can I improve?  I've basically been doing that this month with the weekly NaNo updates, even though those focus on looking back at the previous week rather than looking ahead to the next week.  But even though this is an idea that resonates with me, it's hidden under jabs that turn me off.

Sometimes he'll be in the middle of making an interesting, useful point and--suddenly!--spew bullshit everywhere!  It's like going for a nice walk and--scwelch!--dog shit, or--splat!--bird shit.  It threw me completely out of whatever he's saying.

"Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder.  These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys."  Bullshit!  "...Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live.  Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing Tex-Mex songs she gave up to raise a family." You couldn't look up the word Tejano?  That's bullshit.  Also bullshit: the way he talks about raising families.  For example.  "Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace." ...Seriously?  Ugh.  Just...stop.

These seem like little nit-picky things, and in the grand scheme of things they are.  The real trouble I have with this book is much deeper.

The way he describes various aspects of Resistance can be useful.  They're concepts I've heard before using different vocabulary.  Resistance is entirely internal; no one can force you to not work on your project.  Resistance is strongest at the very end of a project.  The amount of Resistance you face is proportional to how much you love the project because you'll be more afraid of failure and more likely to make excuses to not experience that failure.  If you give in to Resistance one day, Resistance will be twice as strong the next day.

Most interestingly, he talks about how Resistance is sneaky.  The arguments it makes for not working are all perfectly reasonable.  Resisatance doesn't want you to be able to identify it and say, "oh, hey, this is Resisatance and I should ignore it."

When I began this book, Resistance almost beat me.  This is the form it took.  It told me (the voice in my head) that I was a writer of fiction, not nonfiction, and that I shouldn't be exposing these concepts of Resistance literally and overtly; rather, I should incorporate them metaphorically into a novel...Resistance also told me that I shouldn't seek to instruct, or put myself forward as a purveyor of wisdom; that this was vain, egotistical, possibly even corrupt, and that it would work to harm me in the end.  That scared me.  It made a lot of sense.

I've experienced this before, where I started to doubt a project and thought to rework parts of it to the detriment of the work and my sense of self-worth.  However, I've also had doubts about a project where I reworked it to the betterment of the project.  He doesn't talk about how to tell the difference.

He says that Resistance is in fact so sneaky, that whatever reason you have for not working is just Resistance disguising itself in reasonable clothing.  You have no excuse.  The reason you're putting it off is because you're not a Professional.

Now, I take issue with that.  I'm letting my family take priority over my writing because my family has priority over my writing.  Is that really letting Resistance win?  I guess so, because it sounds reasonable and is keeping me from my work.  Does this make me not a Professional?  Yep!

It's this all or nothing mentality that I find the true problem here.  There's no room for slack.  No room for forgiveness.  You beat back Resistance or fall prey to it.  You're a Professional or an over-emotional loser.  This is really dangerous thinking, because in all or nothing, the vast majority of the time you'll be in the "nothing" category.

And I think that's why my earlier pet peeves bother me so much.  This book put me in all or nothing mode, so if parts of it ticked me off, then the whole thing must tick me off.

NaNo Review

I consider this National Novel Writing Month a success, even if the official website doesn't.  I hit my goal of 30,000 words.  I stayed confident and compassionate.  And, most importantly, I established some good routines that work with my new lifestyle.

I missed a few days in there.  Thanksgiving happened and so did some other day where I had no time and then got too tired.  I logged onto the site to see I was 2,000 words behind plus the thousand for the day, and I set about making it up.  "I can do it," I said.  "I'm amazing!"  I then proceeded to not do it.  I made my daily 1,000 word goal, but 3,000 was not going to happen.  "Tomorrow," I said.  "I'll do it tomorrow.  I haven't lost any ground."  The next day I didn't do it either.  The day after that I got frustrated.  "Would I still be happy with myself if I changed my goal to 28,000 words?"  No.  I wouldn't.  "Well, okay.  Let's accept that this deficit exists.  If I spread it out over the remaining days, how much to I have to write every day to hit the 30,000 word goal in the days I have left?"  Turned out it was 1,666.  (Or close enough.  It was like 1,672.)  "You mean the NaNo word goal that everyone else is doing?"  Yep.  "Wow!  I can do that.  I'm amazing!"

Turned out that the timing worked out really well.  With Thanksgiving, my husband had a few days at home and decided he was going to take over the baby's afternoon nap.  Maybe the baby would sleep in his bassinet if someone other than me put him there.  Worth a shot.  Turns out he won't sleep in his bassinet, even if someone other than me puts him there.  However, he ended up sleeping on my husband instead of on me, giving me nap time with both hands free and a couple hours to write.

I won't bore you with more news on my baby's clinginess or his terrible napping habits. 

I will tell you that after that day of frustration--a definite low point for the month--I came back strong.  And not just in terms of word count.  The writing also improved.  I've been asking myself why this is.  I'm definitely getting to "the good part" where things start to fall apart for our hero.  Scenes are more dramatic, more lyrical, more emotional.  But I don't know why the emotion was completely absent in earlier scenes and here now.  It is supposed to get more dramatic, but not by that much. 

It could be that the middle of my story is saggy, and now that I'm getting into the home stretch, where instead of setting up the dominoes like I was earlier, I'm now knocking them down.  The prose flows, the word count comes faster, it's easier to tap into the emotion.

It could also be that I've been painfully out of practice.  My writing muscles had all atrophied and it took three and a half weeks of NaNo for me to build back some muscle.

I don't know, but I need to keep this momentum rolling into December.  The plan is to keep up this pace of 1,000 words a day until I leave for my holiday road trip.  At that point, I'll reassess how much I want to write during the trip.

NaNo Week Three

Chugging along.

This week I'm really starting to notice that this draft is awful. 

It needs another draft to be even with my usual first drafts.  It's like a preme baby draft or a uncooked cookie dough draft.

This means I'm doing NaNo correctly!

The main things that I'm shoving onto the back burner, noting that I need to suck it up for now and deal with them in January are the characterization and the world building.  This is boggling, because in my self-evaluation I rank myself pretty high on those.

I blame my outline.  It's not that I don't know how characters are feeling, it's that I'm not writing it.  The only reason I can figure that I'm doing this is that I didn't write it in my outline.  The outline focuses on events (with the rare frowny face thrown in), so--with my current MO of checking my outline and writing what it says for 20 minutes--I'm missing out on...everything but plot.  There's no racing heartbeat.

Now, I needed to know how the characters were feeling to make my outline.  In fact, I re-outlined the end a few times making sure the stresses would build enough to break my main character.  I have post-it to-do lists stuck to the folder that holds my outline that have check boxes like "angry enough?" and "Keep <side character>'s attitude consistent."  Just for some reason notes about the character's emotions didn't make it into the outline.  Maybe I didn't think I needed to spell them out.

Since I know what everyone's feeling, I can insert that into a second draft.  Plot is usually where I struggle, so going into the next draft with that skeleton already in place is going to be a huge relief.  I can read through and note where the story is missing heart, where it needs to be flushed out.

The world building problem comes from the fact that this is several stories squished together.  When I removed the main threads from the old stories, they dragged other remnants along with them, like when you pull a weed up by the roots to find clumps of dirt snagged with it.  Now that I'm getting deeper into the story, those remnants are coming to light, and some of them are contradicting each other.  The big example is the state of magic in the world at large.  In one old story, everyone knew about it.  In another of the old stories, the magical world was a secret, underground community.  So now, in this story, how do people react when magic happens in front of them on the street?  Do they panic?  Are they intrigued?  Are they annoyed?  This needs to get answered and these disparate stores need to meld together completely, or this endeavor is destined to fail.

I'm not going to let that happen.  So the world building will need another hard look (or several hard looks).

The Intern's Handbook Review

I recently finished The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn.  I think this one was recommended to me by Goodreads in one of their monthly e-mails about what was coming out that month, the interesting synopsis got it added to the To Read list.

In this one, assassins pose as interns in prestigious companies in order to kill executives.  The idea is that interns are invisible.  They work right under everyone's nose and no one remembers their name.  At the same time, they can gain all kinds of access by doing work vitally necessary for the functioning of the company but so boring and tedious that no one getting paid wants to do it.

It's presented as a kind of handbook with rules and tips, written by John, an assassin about to retire, for newbie assassins to read.  Instead of just a series of rules, he walks the newbies through his last assignment, pointing out rules as necessary.  So it ends up being like a memoir, where we get the story of his last job and the story of his life.  Meanwhile, there is a second framing device where this handbook has been intercepted by the FBI and is being sent to field agents.

I've gone full cycle with this one.  I had a lot of fun during the six or so hours it took me to read it.  But when I was done and started thinking about it, it stopped making any sense at all.  Then I started to think that maaaaybe this weirdness was intentional.

Let's start with the plot holes.  Why, once John has continuously screwed up the super important job and proved himself untrustworthy, does his boss insist that (even though he'd usually kill him) John can't be replaced mid job, even though the job was switching to phase two and it would have been a perfect opportunity to change guys? Why would the FBI agent offer to help John find his father, and how did John manage to give her enough information to do that without blowing his cover?  Just.  What?  As I was reading, I assumed this was hand-wavy on the part of the author to keep the plot chugging along.  I rolled my eyes and moved on.  Towards the end of the novel, it turned out that most of these plot holes were holes in the narrative to manipulate John.  People were lying to him and even in the world of the novel this doesn't make sense.  That meant the author had covered himself, filling in his own plot holes.  But then...John's supposed to be the best.  If I picked up that something was screwy, why didn't he? 

Then John consistently breaks his own rules, screwing himself over in the process and repeatedly messing up the job.  There's many examples, but let's stick with the big rule: to stay unnoticed.  That's the premise of the book.  He breaks it almost immediately and then keeps breaking it throughout the book.  He contradicts himself in other ways too.  For example, he says that his early development has made him incapable of having feelings or strong emotions, which makes him such a good assassin.  But then he gets downright tearful at least twice. 

Then I start to wonder.  Who is this handbook even for?  By the time the book is over, the newbie assassins would have heard of him and how he completely bungled this job.  He even embarrasses himself in front of them at one point in the story.  Does he actually expect these people to read his memoir when he sends it to them?  

And this is where things almost start making sense again, because Yes.  Yes, he does.

He's so deluded that he thinks people will want to read his crazy manifesto.  He doesn't realize that he actually does have emotions or that that contradicts anything he's said.  He thinks he's the best of the best, even after missing giant red flags and screwing things up over and over.  

That's part of what this book does really well.  Every now and then there are transcripts provided by the FBI.  Afterwards, it will go back to the handbook, where John will summarize the conversation in a way that it most definitely did not go down.  Some conversations he won't mention at all.  It's clear that he is completely full of shit.

The FBI part comes through in another way too.  John addresses the junior assassins several times with the second person "you."  However, the stuff he says does not describe me at all.  It throws the reader out of the narrative, but then the FBI framework catches the reader as they're thrown out.  John's not talking to me.  He's talking to newbie assassins and I'm listening in.  It sets up a sense of voyeurism that works remarkably well.

So, it was really hard to tell how much was intentional and how much was me trying to reason through this one.  I'm going to go with that it was intentional, because I don't like giving bad reviews.

NaNo Update Week 2

Things are still going well.  Being forgiving of myself is still working very well.  I've realized that if I get to 30,000 words this month, I'll have felt accomplished.  This is 1,000 words a day, which is completely doable if I have an hour to myself. It also means I'm right on track.  The outline is also still working well.  I'm about to finish two pages of an eight page outline.  So that means if I stay at this pace, I'll get it done the end of December (or middle of January with traveling for the holidays).  Writing on my phone has gotten better over the last few days, but it's still not ideal and I've found that I'm much less likely to be in the mood to write on my phone than I am likely to be in the mood to write at night when I'm tired.

I'm not sure how well being motivated is work for me.  This is unexpected since I figured being excited to write is always a good thing.  Turns out it's a good thing when I can scrounge up the time to write.  But if I can't find the time, the excitement starts to bubble into an itch--a build up of creative energy without an outlet.  And then it turns into guilt.  I really could do the full 1,667 words if I would just suck it up and stay up another half hour.  Or Why am I not writing on my phone right now?  This is precious time that I'm wasting, even if I would have to spend it with a tiny key board.  So it's turned into a war between being motivated and being forgiving.  Thankfully, the forgiveness is winning so far.

On Thursday, I took the baby to a write-in at the Edgewater Workbench, which is a workshop for artist.  It smells pleasantly of wood shavings and hot glue.  It was a really low key affair, just my friend, Jim, and the two people that own the shop.  The baby and I came in, made introductions, and caught up a bit.  The baby sat in his sling, staring at the 3D printer as it jerked back and forth.  With the first onset of fussiness, I turned him around to sit in my lap where he could use his distracting cartoon eyes to stare at Jim.  Then Pooh Bear came out.  Pooh Bear makes more jingling noises than Jim and was more readily accessible for gnawing, and was therefore far more interesting.  Then we were out of distractions and, with the next wave of fussiness, had to leave.  I clocked our write-in time at 45 minutes.

Jim apologized that it wasn't more productive, which confused me because that was the longest I'd been able to sit and write in weeks despite the distractions of catching up with Jim and asking the baby, "What do you see?  Yeah, that 3D printer's pretty cool."  I also met about half my word goal for the day.  I wasn't upset at all, and I felt accomplished rather than regretful or itchy.

Oh how my life has changed.

We ended up getting a shout out on NaNoWriPod.  I feel famous.

Jim pointed out that I do this weird thing with NaNo where I'll stick with the project and finish off the draft after November, then go back and edit it.  It's been kicking around in the background of these posts, but I've never explicitly stated that that's one of my NaNo goals.  This doesn't end in November.  It starts in November.





 

Wool Review

I recently finished Wool by Hugh Howey, as recommended to me by my friend Eric.  Eric has earned himself a gold star.

This is a series of scifi novellas about a society that lives in an underground silo.  At the top of the silo, there's a jumbotron that shows continuous footage of what it's like outside.  As this is post-apocalyptic, it's pretty bleak, which generally keeps people from wanting to leave.  The acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you get the image of barren desert all gunky over time.  So if anyone starts spouting crazy talk about wanting to go outside, they get sent out to clean the cameras for the jumbotron, and then promptly die of acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you.  The mystery is: why does every person sent to their death--every single one throughout silo history--clean the cameras?  What's in it for them?  It's bonkers!

I really enjoyed this one  The five novellas all together were about 500 pages, but it was a page turner and I went through it in about three days.  The chapters are short and end on cliffhangers involving ghostly people running around in the dark or running out of oxygen while submerged underwater in a hand made scuba suit...okay, I feel like I'm not selling it very well, but I was having trouble sleeping and this did not help.

I cared about all the characters.  The main character shifts for each of the first three novellas (Holston, Jahns, then Jules), then jumps around between several characters for the fourth and fifth.  I didn't slow down enough to remember that this is something I usually don't like, and didn't stop to think about it until I was done.  I usually get attached to characters and then get irritated when I don't hear about them anymore and have to start from scratch to forge a new relationship with a new character.  But here I think it worked for a few reasons.  First, the next point of view character was introduced in the preceding story, and not only introduced, but I was made to like them before the shift.  During Holston's story, I got to appreciate Jahns, and during Jahns' story I got to appreciate Jules.  So I wasn't really starting from scratch each time.  Secondly, when the point of view shifts in the second and third novellas, I felt content with Holston and Jahns' stories.  Their stories were over and I was okay with moving on from them.

I also thought the world was cool.  The silo is a self contained world with farms, water treatment, recycling, shops, schools, apartments, doctors, judges, security guards, a power plant, an IT department.  It's 144 floors, connected by a huge central spiraling staircase, and to get from one place to another, you have to hike up and down the stairs.  If this sounds really inconvenient, that's because it is.  It was designed that way.  The visual is just so cool, and it acts as both a setting and a physical barrier against anything the characters try to get done.

Compelling characters, exciting world building, and dystopian intrigue.  Fun times.

NaNo Week One Update

I'm one week into National Novel Writing Month, so this is a good time to do an assessment of how I'm doing. 

Quantitative assesments are pretty easy for Nano, what with all the graphs and stats they give to show word count.  But one of the steps of my four step plan of attack for this year is to be compassionate and forgiving to myself.  I'm making progress.  I made an effort.  So way to go me!  Great job! 

I'm kind of impressed that this is working so well.  I don't feel horribly guilty for how far behind I am or how horribly awful my product is, and I don't feel frustrated with my life and my family and my writing.  That's better than some of my non-Nano months.

Planning ahead of time has also worked out surprisingly well so far.  Every time I sit down to write, I check my outline, and I can see exactly what I'm going to write for the next half hour.  I've gone into my outline a few times to make some additions--little things that became clearer as I was writing--but I haven't made any drastic changes and no changes to anything I've already written.  The research I did before hand also helped, but not in that it's all done and usable now.  It's helping more because I did my research and then told myself I was done for November, and now when new things crop up that I didn't realize I would need to investigate, I'm SOL because research time is over.  Again, I'm kind of baffled that I've been able to let it go.  That's not like me.  But then again,iIt helps that I'm so strapped for time that there's just no way I'm going to manage to fool around on Wikipedia for ten minutes.  And by ten minutes, I mean an hour.

What's interesting is I think this is the closest I've ever been to doing Nano as the Official Nano Gods intended.  In previous years, I've had hours every day to write, so I've polished as I went along, taking my time to make the tone and the meter work for me, going back to incorporate my blossoming ideas.  But this year I have maybe a half hour before the baby wakes up and decides that he can't be in this coffee place for one more second, or before my husband comes into the bedroom where I've set up my laptop and closed the door for the illusion of an effective work space and says, "I've got a hungry baby!"  There is no editing.  There is no staring off into space to find the perfect phrasing.  There is just a mad dash to get as much down as I can.  There's just the cycle of setting Write or Die for 500 words for 30 minutes, then vomiting up sentences so the screen doesn't turn red.  Sometimes they're sentences.  Sometimes I don't even manage that.

It's by far the worst first draft I've ever written. 

It's just awful.  When I edit this thing in January, it's going to be a mess.  A painful, frustrating mess.  I'm going to have to relive this horror--or live it for the first time because right now I'm not even giving it the time to settle.  Tone, diction, exposition, epic dullness. You name it and it's a problem.  Today I wrote, "There was a fire metaphor in there somewhere, but he couldn't think of it," and then I wrote two hundred more words of equally stupid garbage.  It would be embarrassing if anyone read it, which they will over my dead body after they've figured out my laptop password and puzzled through which Untitled Document is the one I've updated most recently.

Bird by Bird Review

I just finished Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  This is a book full of writing advice recommended to me by some folks in my writing group.

Lamott says to make a shitty first draft.  No one will ever see it.  It can be sentimental and nonsensical and self-involved.  It's shittiness is okay because you can change it later.  I've heard this advice all over the place, that you should just vomit out whatever you're thinking and fix it later.  It's the cornerstone of National Novel Writing Month.  I happen to be writing the shittiest first draft ever to hide on Google Docs, so this advice pleases me.

She advises is to give yourself short, doable writing assignments.  She says you should write only what fits in a 1" by 1" picture frame.  My writing group tends to think this is weird when I talk about doing it.  Although, I talk about it differently.  While Lamott talks about just describing the kitchen or just writing how warm the sun feels, I make to do lists of a bunch o tiny things that need to get done.  This is usually when I'm editing.  "Figure out what that word is that means you're writing something that only you will enjoy and no one else will be interested.  'Self-involved' isn't quite right."  Or "Fix awkward sentence on page 84."  Or "This description of the sun is not singing like I'd like.  Try again."  So mine are almost always more about editing rather than writing, and therefore only fits in a 1" by 1" frame if the frame is even more metaphorical than the one she talks about.

She says to keep a flock of index cards all over the house so you can write down your ideas as they come to you.  This doesn't work for me at all, because I need to be obsessively organized or nothing.  I can't just have drifts of note cards floating around my house.  But then she talked about how it's not really having the note card and seeing it later that reminds you of the idea.  It's the act of writing the idea down on a note card that cements the idea in your mind.  This I can get behind.  I tell my students to do this all the time.  It works great for kinesthetic learners.  "It doesn't matter if you never come back to your notes, take them anyway."  And "The real purpose of a crib sheet is to make it, because making it makes you study all the material." 

So, as with all other books and all other advice, take what you can use and just leave the rest behind.

Two things she said and one thing she didn't say really stood out for me.

First, she talked about how her writing students would always ask her where to start and she would say something like "Write everything you remember about Kindergarten!" or "Write about school lunches!" and her students would be upset because that's completely random and not something they want to write about or not related to their big project.  But her point was that it gets you writing, and as you're writing some idea will pop up and that will strike you as what you want to write about.  Yes!  Exactly!  This is what I'm talking about with writing prompts and bingo prompts.  It's not really about the prompt.  It's about getting yourself moving until the story starts revealing things to you, until you circle around in the writing prompt you're doing to really writing for your big project. 

Second, she talked about radio station KFKD (K Fucked) that plays in your head while you're writing.  It tells you how awful you are.  Yes!  This!  This happens to me and this name is fantastic and I will forever refer to it as such.

Finally, every chapter in this book is kind of a piece of writing advice, kind of a personal story that relates in a subtle, interesting way to the piece of writing advice, because--after all--this is instructions on writing and life.  I've been thinking lately that this blog is just stupid.  It's full of itself and no one cares and I'm not saying anything thought out or new or eloquent or remotely researched.  And reading this I thought, "This is what I need to be doing."  I need to tell a story, which I think is actually something I've said before that I ought to be doing on this blog.  That's ringing a bell now. 

The part of me that has all this pent up creative energy with no outlet says, "Yes!  I want to do that.  That sounds great!  That will fix all my problems and make me a better writer and it'll be fun."

Then the part of me that lives in reality says, "But if I do that, I'll actually have to put some work into my posts.  I don't have time for that.  I barely have time for NaNo and showering.  I'll have to write a shitty first draft and edit and everything."

So now it's on my list of "Things I'll Do when I'm a Full Time Writer Again" where it will probably stay for a while.

The Magicians

I just finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

This book was recommended to me as "Harry Potter for grownups," which turns out to be an accurate description.  In it, Quentin, an overly intelligent guy who's constantly depressed because he's waiting for his real life to begin, for the big adventure that's going to make his life worthwhile, goes to a secret college for magicians.

From the outset, it seems that just the idea of going to a secret magic school and entering the hidden community of the magicians would make it like Harry Potter, and the inclusion of swearing, sex, and violence would make it for adults.  But there's more to it than that.  The way in which the magical world is presented echoes the prose in Harry Potter.  Details of the magical world are presented simply as existing, then there is a line about how the students feel about it or the subtle effect it has on their lives, and then the detail is never mentioned again*.  The difference is that in The Magicians, the students' response is some variant of "Ugh.  Fuck that."

"Quentin spent very little time in the Brakebills library.  Hardly anybody did if they could help it.  Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility."

The fact that little details like this are never mentioned again in a way makes the culture and traditions and history alive and immersive.  The characters take them for granted almost as part of the scenery, which makes the world feel lived in.

*Of course, in the Harry Potter books no detail is safe from being a major plot point later.  But in order for these details' importance to stay a surprise, they have to be buried in a bunch of other details that are unimportant or they'd be too obvious.

The Magicians extends this treatment of details to descriptions of characters.  The descriptions are minimal and focus more on Quentin's response that the color of each character's eyes and hair and nose shape.  This is something I love to read and love to write, even though I should do it more often than I do.

"Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass."

The other thing I was really taken with was Lev Grossman's ability to tell the story of a series of books that the characters in The Magicians have read.  The series is called "Fillory and Further" and are basically a fictionalized Chronicles of Narnia.  A family of children visit the magical land of Fillory through a magic portal and there become kings and queens and talk to horses and rabbits before being send home by a pair of ram gods.  The exposition of the plots of these books are interwoven into the plot of The Magicians with exceptional skill.  Quentin loves these books, and so their plots and characters are presented in a similar way to the details I've already mentioned.  Quentin knows these books backwards and forwards and doesn't need to stop and explain.  He thinks about them often and he thinks about them well before they're needed in the plot of The Magicians.  It's cool.

So the Magicians and Harry Potter present the magical world in similar ways, but The Magicians is for adults because of the themes it explores.  Where Harry becomes an angsty teen, Quentin becomes a depressed man who has no one to understand his genius and his beautiful ennui (especially not women who could never understand him).  Where in Harry Potter, his life changes to what it's meant to be when Harry goes to Hogwarts, Quentin is still waiting for something better when he goes to magic school, he's still waiting even after he's graduated.  While in Harry Potter, bad people use bad magic and all the magic the good guys use is good and useful and harmless, The Magicians has a running theme that magic is dangerous and corrupting in how much power it gives to users.  It lets them live lives of excessive luxury where they lose themselves.  It lets them cause horrible accidents that get people killed and disrupt the boundaries between worlds.

"Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods.  They're just kids, Quentin!  With all that power!...It's amazing that place is still standing."

Too Many Concepts in the Kitchen

Last week when I made my outline, it turned funny pretty quickly and I started thinking about this blog post.  Thankfully, I've made some breakthroughs since then and I get to ultimately talk about those.

A while back, I had a premise that was not enough to support a whole novel.  Then I had another idea, and again not for lack of trying) I couldn't extend it into a novel.  Maybe a short story.  Or a song.  And THEN I had a third idea for a novel that I probably could have written, but it turned boring what with being so flimsy and I lost interest.  Even after weeks spent flushing out motivations and back stories, side characters and wold building, these ideas stayed skeletal.  I had a surplus of ideas and I kept shifting them to the back burner in hopes one day a brainwave would strike to flush out one of them.

And a brainwave I got: what if I rolled them all together into one story?  Ben from story 3 replaces Hank in story 1, changing his motivations and changing his name to Trip.  Hank from story 1 then becomes a side character named Ben.  The guy from story 2 gets genderbent and the little girl from stories 2 and 3 get melded together.  Then I do all the plots at once.  Now that's a story!

I'm sure you will spot the problem I ran into faster than I did.

The first thing I did while outlining was to make a chart, diagramming the story strands, giving each storyline its own color of gel pen, putting each in order, then grouping them with events from other storylines that happen at the same time.

This is madness.  Cthulhu wrote this.

It was at this point that I realized that I had five stories going at the same time and aside from being a logistical mess, they felt wholly separate from each other. Each story arc happened to the same characters at the same time, but they had little effect on one another.  One had a mythical monster; one had a serial killer.  Even if I wrote it all in the same book, it wouldn't be one story.

I actually didn't set out to fix this immediately.  

I set out to fix a list of plot holes and things I hadn't settled yet.  Why is the plot line about the curse even happening?  Why would the serial killer show up at the climax?  Big problems, but almost expected at this early stage.

My breakthrough was this: I started fixing these plot holes using the other plotlines.  Why is he cursed?  Because a mythical monster hates him.  Things got knotted together.  Then things got streamlined.  The little girl(s) became a dog.  A big chunk of the serial murder story (including the woman who was the serial killer) got scrapped and replaced with "that guy from another plotline did it."  

Furthermore, while thinking about these plot holes, I started to see thematic similarities across story arcs.  This makes sense as I came up with all these concepts during the same period of my life.  These similarities could be expanded upon to bind them tighter.  Then I thought about the tone, how the main character is purposefully taking on too many things in order to stay busy and distract himself.  So I can use that chaotic feeling of jumping from one issue to the next to drive that home before the plotlines start interweaving.

In short, all the different branches of a story have to support one another.  They can't just come together, but they have to work together like a great sport team or the members of an orchestra.  I think I've got this in good shape, or at least in good enough shape that I can work on it.

Two-Month-Old Reading Preferences

I have vivid memories of giggling uncontrollably as my mother read The Monster at the End of this Book in her best manic Grover voice.  So, of course, I got this book for my son as soon as I started building a library for him.  I pulled it out with a grin and cleared my throat for my best grover voice. 

He hated it.

He did not like how upset I got and started crying in response.  He's also not at the developmental level yet where he turns pages, which is most of the fun of that book, and it's also like I was turning the pages, then yelling at myself for doing it, then doing it again.

Since then, I've learned that he's not ready for pretty much any children's book I remember enjoying.  He gets bored with a lot of them and only this week even started looking at the pictures.

We had to reassess, and we found that two-month-olds like lyrical language and stories with structure.  Or maybe my son just has a persnickety personality.  Who knows? 

He likes books that rhyme and have a distinct meter.  He likes books that have a set, predictable format, where optimally the last word or phrase of each verse would be something that everyone in the room can shout together  and wave their hands as if to say "ta dah!"

"Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Dave.
"No, she is not," is the answer Dave gave.
"She hangs by her feet, and she lives in a cave.
I do not believe that's how llamas behave."
"Oh," I said.  "You are right about that.
I think that your mama sound more like a
BAT!"

A BAT!  YAY!

He goes nuts.

He goes nuts for Goodnight Moon and Time for Bed too. 

And there were three little bears
sitting on chairs
and two little kittens
and a pair of mittens
and a little toy house
and a young mouse
and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
and a quiet old lady who was whispering "hush"

Every couplet, he kicks his feet and beams like chairs and mittens are the cleverest things he's ever heard.  He really  likes it, but it's not a bedtime book.

I'm Big Enough to Admit When I'm Wrong. And Rude Enough to Admit I Thought you were Wrong.

Lots of people I know swear by outlining.  They say that especially for National Novel Writing Month, you have to know exactly what you're going to write before hand, so when you sit down to write, you'll know exactly what you're doing and it will flow like a mighty river of printer ink.

The pieces I have outlined before were all articles in list form ("Seven Ways to Be a Helicopter Parent") or junior high papers where I had to have an intro, three arguments, and a conclusion, and I just slotted arguments into place.  In junior high this was stifling and no one bothered to explain the benefits of presenting a clear argument, what we were actually learning with a five paragraph essay, or why nothing we read ever looked like what we wrote.  So when people talk about outlining fiction, my first thought is that chart of rising and falling action, where you would insert plot point one and plot point two and plot point three, which has the same issues as outlining a persuasive essay. 

I've looked at outlining like it's sucking the magic out of the process.  I've always discovered a story as I write it.  The more time I spend working on it, the more I learn about the characters, the more the world unfolds, the more plot puzzles snap into place.  I've heard writing a novel compared to a romance: there's a get to know you phase and a magical phase and a phase where you hate each other.  At the beginning, you're strangers, so how could I possibly know what I'm going to write enough to outline?


Clearly, I did not understand.  I apologize to all my outlining friends.  You're not as crazy as I always thought you were but never mentioned so we could stay friends.


I learned this week that I can outline the same way I write.  That's to say I can start with the main plot points that I know well, then put them in order and quilt them together, adding smaller events around them, things that need to happen before them, tension that needs to build and release.  If I make the outline detailed enough, I can learn about the characters and the plot as I outline, and then go back and alter things acordingly.  The outline isn't written in stone, and I can cycle through it, adjusting and expanding, adjusting and expanding.

My friends probably already knew this obvious bit of insight, and now think I'm really stupid for not already knowing that.  Kind of the same way I thought they were weird for outlining.  Now we're even.

Water is wet, y'all! 

I now have five iterations of an outline, each more detailed and filled in and flowing than the last.  I have a list of issues that I can already tell are going to be problems, a list of people and things that need names, and a list of research I need to do before I write in any detail. 

National Novel Writing Month Preparations and Tailgating

I'm self-aware enough to realize that doing National Novel Writing Month with a two and a half month old and starting at the same time I go back to work is going to be way harder than even normal NaNo.  The state of this blog can attest to that.

The bunny baby usually lets me write for about an hour a day when I put him in the sling, walk him to the coffee shop, and sit for a bit.  The baristas like him.  They call my order "the usual" and greet us by name every morning.  Two out of three times he falls asleep on the way there, and just takes his morning nap in the sling.  One of the baristas commented the other day on how quiet he is.  I took the compliment and didn't correct him.  The truth is I know how irritable some people get about babies crying in public, so as soon as he starts getting fussy, we pack up and leave in record time.  So I get an hour of writing in about 4 or 5 days a week.

This is not enough for NaNo.

I've been thinking about ways to mitigate this problem, and have come up with a few strategies.  I'll talk about each in more detail in later blog posts, and if they work, I'll continue with them post NaNo.

1. Plan Ahead

Whaaat?  But that's not how I operate.  Outlining!?  Researching ahead of time!? Who am I and what happened to Carolyn!?  I recognize that with my time constraints this year, it would help me to know exactly what I need to write before I write it, especially with a story as complicated as the one I want to tell this year.

2. Get Hyped

If I love my novel, if I think and plan and mold every minute even when I'm not in front of my computer, if I'm excited every day to sit down for what little time I have and get it all out like releasing a pressure valve, I will get it done. 

3. Write on my Phone

I spend a lot of time on my phone lately, mostly reading or listening to podcasts or playing Flow.  I have a lot of down time when the bunny naps, but the problem is that during the day he will only nap if I'm holding him.  This makes it difficult to use the computer (without the use of the sling) or hand write in a wobbly notebook without balancing something on his back and praying everything doesn't clatter to the ground and wake him up.  But my phone I can manage in terms of how to hold both it and him.  The problem is that it'll be slow going, maybe frustratingly do.  I'm going to give it a try and see how it goes.

4.  Be Forgiving

I've talked about this before, but it's--as always--still relevant.  I'm probably not going to win this year.  I will probably be hilariously far behind.  That's just how it's going to be.  But the key word there is "hilarious."  Instead of a frustrating failure of skill and self-discipline, this is going to be funny.  If I go in with the attitude that I'm going to be compassionate and forgiving of myself, that my pace is my pace and it's justified, I may not win, but I'll feel good about myself and my story and eventually get it finished at my own speed.  Follow the #RuhRohWriMo tag for more!

Misleading Prologues

My husband the other day told me that he likes prologues that have nothing to do with the story.  This boggled me, and I realized that I'd been thinking around this topic a fair bit lately without approaching it directly.

"Really?" I said.  "Because I hate that.   It's like I've been tricked.  I get emotionally invested in this first character and then they never show up again."

Maybe this is left over from my high school English class where we learned that a book teaches you how to read it, what to expect, and then spent the year analyzing the first lines of everything we read.  Or maybe it's from college where my Film Studies class said that the first scene teaches you how to watch a movie.  Or from grad school, where they said that a video game teaches you how to play it, the internal rules, the implicit expectations.

"I like seeing the story from different characters' points of view," he explained.  "Especially from characters that aren't involved.  It gives things a sense of perspective."

He pointed out that this happens a lot in movies.  The first scene will focus on the bad guy, showing just how awful they are and what their evil plot is, when the good guys won't be able to see it for themselves (and therefore it wouldn't come into the story if you stuck with their POV) until much later.  Sometimes the first scene will focus on the victim of a crime: it'll show the event that sets off the rest of the story, even though the main characters aren't involved in that sparking event and aren't called in until later. 

These make sense and don't bother me that much.  But I find they are more common in movies than they are in books (or maybe that's just the kind of books I read).  It's narratively efficient to show things this way.  But in a movie, the prologue will be just a few minutes, where as in a book, reading it can take twenty minutes or so.  20 minutes out of a movie would be a sizable chunk of time.  So it makes sense to me that I'm more upset about prologues in books, where I've already sunk a decent amount of time only to find out this is not the character I should care about.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a book I ready recently, did this.  The book starts from the POV of a book rep from a publishing house, come to sell the winter collection to a small book store on an island.  The rep has her own problems and back story outside of this set up, and it looks like shes the person we're going to get to know for the span of this book.  I assume she's going to learn something about small town island life, or wax poetic about books, or something will happen to her at this meeting that will set off the rest of the novel.  (At some point, I must have read the back cover of this book and then just completely forgotten it by the time I got around to it on my To Read list.)  About ten pages in, she leaves the book store and the POV shifts to the owner of the book store, who is the actual main character of the book.  Bah!  Why?  I liked the sales rep and this guy was kind of a jerk.  The first time I tried to read it, I didn't make it too much farther into the story before turning to something else.  Turns out she comes back later as an important character, and that the book makes a note (in a kind of lampshading, wink-wink way) that in novels, sometimes they follow random side characters for a few pages to flush out that they're fully developed.  So there's a reason, but I didn't get far enough in the first attempt to learn that.


I've also been thinking about it with respect to my own work.  I've been working on this beginning for way too long, which is silly because I'm positive that once I have a full draft, I'll end up completely rewriting it and making it so now there's an explosion or something instead.  But one of my earlier attempts focused on the rival from down the street instead of on the main characters responding to that rivalry.  It made it seem like the rival was going to be the main character, even from the first few paragraphs.  When I switched over to the people I really cared about, the jump was jarring.  So I refocused even though this was on a much smaller scale than a misleading prologue.

The Effect of Heavy Editing on Atticus the Dog

With today's release of Go Set a Watchman, I figured it was a good time to talk about how the book's portrayal of Atticus Finch is not the fall of a hero.

In the months leading up to its release, Go Set a Watchman was promoted as the long lost sequel to the national treasure that is To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's set 20 years later, in the 50s, with an adult Scout returning home to Maycomb, Alabama with characters from Mockingbird making appearances, which certainly sounds like a sequel.  Then the early reviews started to come out, shocking absolutely everyone with facts that come to light in Watchman: Atticus Finch is a huge racist.

What? 

But--What?

Yeah. 

While Mockingbird presents issues of racism and the end of innocence by creating an upstanding moral hero for Scout to look up to, Watchman covers the same themes by having an adult Scout realize that her father, who she always considered to be a moral compass, is not as great as she thought he was when she was a child.  So Watchman pretty much ruined everyone's childhood, including Scout's, and has made things awkward for everyone who named their children and pets "Atticus."

Atticus the dog was a little awkward anyway.

For me, there are two ways to rationalize this.  First, take into consideration that Mockingbird is written from a child's perspective, and therefore her father was a great man who did great things and formed her into the person she became.  It's only after she grew up (in Watchman) that she was able to look back and see that things weren't the way she interpreted them at the time or that things weren't as shiny as they are in her memory.  And we, the readers, can go through this horror with Scout, since we too believed him to be a shining example of morality.

This way of looking at it makes sense, and may hold even more of an emotional punch than if Watchman hadn't been released at a point long after Mockingbird had become a renowned part of the American Literary Canon and Atticus had taken his place in our hearts.

But I prefer the second way to look at it: Watchman is not a sequel.  And not in the "Lalala pretend it didn't happen" kind of way.

Looking at the history, Go Set a Watchman was actually written first.  Then Lee's editors told her to rewrite it, focusing more on the charming stories of Scout's youth.  In rewriting, she came at the same themes from different directions, changing the point of view and time period, along with characters' personalities and plot points.  So it's as if Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird.  (a lot of reviews are calling it a "bad first draft.")  We can see this in the fact that several sections (mostly descriptions of setting) appear verbatim in both books, like they were reused in Mockingbird because they were worth keeping and Watchman was never going to see the light of day.  Furthermore, some facts are altered between Mockingbird and Watchman, most notably the outcome of Tom Robinson's trial.  Yeah!  In Mockingbird, a huge plot point is that he was accused despite lack of evidence, but when it's mentioned in Watchman it's stated that he was acquitted.  That kind of continuity error doesn't make a lot of sense if Watchman really is a sequel.

So it's not that we didn't know Atticus or that we were fooled by an unreliable narrator.  It's that these Atticus Finches are different people with the name held over between the two drafts.

I prefer this way of looking at it, because it shows how much books change in the editing process, and I personally find that more fascinating.  How did these ideas start?  What did this book used to be?  What changed and what was kept?  How did it evolve?  We can actually look at the progression of To Kill a Mockingbird, like looking back through fossil records.  It makes me feel better about the massive overhauls I've done on stories and makes me feel better that even if what I'm writing is crap, there are ideas there that have the potential to flourish.

Audience Surrogates through Sequels

I was more excited for the premier of Jurassic World than I was of any other movie this summer.  I watched all the trailers and read all the articles.  I made sure we got VIP tickets at the Icon (the 18+ balcony attached to a restaurant, where you can bring your drinks and cake and fries into the theater and set the plate on the side table next to your comfy chair) so that the seat would be big enough that I could squirm around when my back got sore.  The publicity photo of Chris Pratt and the velociraptor has been my background picture for months. 

Not many other people were as excited, and I set out to figure out why.  Why was I so enthusiastic?  Why weren't other people?

The main reason, as far as I see it, is the audience surrogate in Jurassic Park.  I've long held the belief that Jurassic Park is terrifying, and it's more terrifying to me than it is to my mother because when we went to see it in theaters, I was the same age as the little boy and all the traumatic things happen to the little boy, Tim.  No, really.  Think about it.  A bunch of adults die, but they are mostly attacked and eaten suddenly.  They have time to think, "Oh no" and maybe scream and then they're gone.  With the kids, it's strung out.  The T-rex terrorizes them in the car before throwing the car over a cliff and into a tree.  Tim then has to escape the tree with the car falling on him.  He then gets electrocuted.  Then the kids are chased through a kitchen and then through the ceiling by velociraptors.  Even though Dr. Grant is with them through most of this, fewer traumatizing things happen to him.

Additionally, the kids act terrified, while the adults manage to keep it together a bit better.  As a kid, I reacted to their fear.

People who were older than eight-years-old when the film came out, didn't relate to the kids in the same way.  They had audience surrogates like Dr. Grant or Dr. Sattler or Dr. Malcom.  How boring.  They see some rough things, but they aren't as traumatized, so neither are the people relating to them.

It also, of course, has a lot to do with how, as a kid, this movie is just more scary than it is for an adult.  There were scenes I couldn't watch except from behind my fingers until I was in high school, at which point I got over it.  I was thinking when I came out of Jurassic World that I wasn't worried for the kids in that movie at all, because--Come on!--they're not going to kill a kid.  This is not that kind of movie.  There's an unspoken agreement between the film makers and the audience that this movie is going to be fun, action packed, have dinosaurs, and not kill children and puppies.  They're not going to violate that contract.  Which got me thinking (and I feel kinda stupid now for not realizing it sooner): they were never going to kill Lex and Tim in Jurassic Park either.  As a kid, I wasn't familiar enough with narrative tropes to realize this, but as an adult, I'm intuitively aware of it.

So this explains why Jurassic Park had such an impact on me and was just an okay movie to other people.  It explains why other people wouldn't be as excited about it, since the first film didnt have as big of an emotional impact.

But why was I so excited?  It's not just because I love the first movie, because I didn't care about The Lost World or Jurassic Park III.  The less said about them the better.

It's because I was terrified of velociraptors for years, and this movie--when I now relate more to Chris Pratt than to the little boy--has my audience surrogate clicker training the velociraptors.  Now that I'm an adult, my fear has been conquered, not just by my more mature brain that no longer needs to sleep with the light on and won't eat green jell-o, but by the movie itself.  The movie has taken these terrifying monsters, and put them under a measure of control, and done it while respecting that the velociraptors are still dangerous and still deserve respect.  It's a victory.

I'm Spending My Vacation at the Library!

I got a Chicago Public Library card yesterday, and spent probably too much time this afternoon transferring my To Read list from Goodreads to my For Later list on the CPL website.  Apparently, like Goodreads, on the CPL website you can write reviews, make lists, and follow people.  I haven't investigated it too much other than to see that four of the books I want to read are available right now at my preferred library location. 

Four out of ninety-six.  Alright!

When you select books for your shelves, you say what format you want: book, eBook, paperback, audible book, etc.  I said "paperback" whenever I saw it and "book" otherwise, and now I'm wondering if they maybe have more of the books on my list but in non-paperback form.  And I wouldn't mind checking out the eBook program, but that's a project for another day.  I'm also wondering if CPL has an inter-library loan, like if the book is at another branch and I request it, they'll send it over and I can pick it up.  So it's not as bad as the 4/96 stat makes it look.  All 96 books are in the CPL system somewhere, and it's a long enough list that I don't need every single one of them available to me right this second. (But that would be fantastic.)

So those are future reading projects.  Let me tell you what's going on with my current reading projects.  I don't usually read this many things at once, but--eh--what can you do?

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  "A novel"  I picked this up from the library because I didn't feel like using the card catalog to look through my mighty list of books I need to read and I saw it sitting in the middle of the shelf and thought "hey, that's on the list."  The reason I noticed it is that it's less a book and more a raw material to build a small house.  I have three weeks to read it before it's due back at the library.
• Sandman.  I picked this up at free comic book day and since I've been interested in it and heard good things, I picked up the first volume to check it out.  Did you know that Batman is in this?  Also John Constantine.  The fact that this story is situated inside the greater DC universe turned me off tremendously, but I will keep going with it and maybe change my mind.
• To Be or Not to Be.  This is a Hamlet choose your own adventure written by Ryan North and it is fantastic.  Since it's a choose your own adventure, it's hard to read the whole thing, so I mostly do one adventure before bed.
• Baby 411.  This is a book about babies and all the stuff they do and don't do.  It's good because they use science and cite research and I like that.  But it's also overwhelming and my coping strategy is along the lines of "just not thinking about it" so it's taking me a while.

Prompt Bingo

I'm getting a new project off the ground, which has the working title of "Firebird Project."  It's a novel about a girl who has to put up with this guy who is a firebird.

Sometimes I have a brilliant idea and sit down and write for hours and stay up at night thinking about what I'll write next so I'm ready to go write it all down the next day.

This is not one of those times.  I blame it on being out of practice.  Like when you don't go to the gym for a week and you know it's going to suck when you finally go again so you put it off even more.  Or like when you forget to do the dishes one day and then might as well burn down your house because there's no coming back from that.

I also blame it on how this donut looks tragically unappetizing even though I'm sure it's perfectly fine.  I consider this a very good excuse, thank you very much.

So anyway, this procrastination cannot continue and it's time to get an action plan together to actually get this thing flying.

Step 1 is a little thing called "Prompt Bingo."  What you do is make yourself a bingo card and then fill it in with writing prompts.  These writing prompts can come from anywhere, including the many many writing prompt generators on the internet.  Some will even just spit out a random bingo card for you.

Here's my current one:

Safe and Sound	In the Park	The Kraken Wakes	Degenerate	Serpent
Finger	Mouth	Petal	Murder	Haiku
Hurt	Wife/Husband	Free Space!	Special Forces	A Quiet Moment
On the 4th Bridge	At Brimingham New St.	Summer	Labyrinth	Far Away
Window	Soft	In Battle	Belief	Jungle

You don't have to write in order.  So you find a prompt that jumps out at you and then write a scene using your characters and world and plot.  You can hone in on a prompt and think, "How does this word fit into my story?" or "What would my characters do with this prompt?"

The cool thing is that it first gives you some direction when writing if you start with very little (like me right now.)  Then once you have a string of these scenes, you can piece them together and start to get a better view of the plot and the story's overall structure.  Once you have a kind of skeleton, you can start to flush it out and fill in the gaps.

BYOT Blackout Editon

Bring Your Own Theater happened again last weekend. It was a lot of fun, especially since a bunch of writers went to Clarke's to write together and not only did it feel less lonely, but I also got to eat pancakes.

I felt really good about this one and the play ended up really close to the script. They added tinkly restaurant background music. When the lights came up, Vinny was sitting alone at the table, looking sad with sad music and the crowd went “Awwww!” Five seconds without saying a word, and he had the audience hooked.

So, for your reading enjoyment, here's "Glitching."

Breaking up is hard to do

Yesterday, for the fourth book in a row, I gave up on a book because of the second act breakup.  A second act breakup takes place after your main romantic leads have fallen for each other and everything seems like it's going great and everything looks like it might turn out okay. 

But wait!  She's suddenly had a brain wave that they're too different after all and maybe this won't work out.  Or the mobsters to whom he owes money track him down and he has to break up with her for her own protection.  And...did you lie to me about that thing???  Unforgivable! 

Also he's keeping his secret wife in the attic.

It's in most stories, especially most romances, and it has completely valid reasons for being there. 

1. Stories need conflict.  If they get together too fast and have a happy, healthy relationship and that's the entire focus of the story, then that's boring.  And also like 20 pages long.  So if you have a romance story, something has to keep them apart.
2. This structure lines up well with the hero's journey.  There has to be a low point of the story from which the hero or heroine can bounce back.  This initial failure usually mirrors the climax in some way: they fail at first, but then get stronger or learn and then overcome it at the end.

Now, I've written second act breakups, and I'll probably write one again.  But they've really been getting on my nerves lately.  I think mostly because I'll be enjoying a book and then this will come completely out of the blue.  One of them will suddenly go, "Wait!  I'm not good enough for you!" and run off without talking to their partner, who could reassure them that that's bogus.  One of them will need to do an outside thing and go, "I could talk to my partner about this and get their help with it, but instead I think I'll lie about what I'm up to and then go it alone." 

Gah.  Nope.  I'm done with this book.

If the conflict of your story could be solved with a single conversation, something's wrong.  This would solve a lot of stories' conflicts, but not all of them.  A chat between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (although enlightening) isn't going to keep Alderan from getting blown to bits.

So I've been thinking (since I've written this and started wondering if I'm as irritating as the stuff I've been reading lately) and I've come up with some ideas to break out of this structure.

• They don't get together enough to break up until the very end.
• They get together and have a happy, healthy relationship that grows over the course of the story, but the main conflict is outside of their relationship and they face it together instead of having it tear them apart.
• They have a big fight, but work through it and they're back together by the end of the chapter.  Bonus points if this happens every chapter and every time the fight is different.
• The break up is a ruse!  They'd planned it together to confuse their rival families. 
• There's a second act breakup, but it's because of spiders.

Guess What

I have not been writing much lately because it turns out the first trimester of pregnancy is terrible.

That's my smooth way of telling you I'm pregnant.

I'll get back to the regular schedule of talking about writing and reading and whatnot next week, and this will hopefully be the only pregnancy post.  But since I haven't been doing much writing, I'm going to indulge today.

1.

I gave up caffeine.  It was terrible.  The week before I figured out I was pregnant, I made a big push to finish my latest novel.  I woke up, had a coke, went to the coffee shop, had a coffee, went to a different coffee place, had two more coffees, went to work, came home, and had another coke.  People keep telling me when I complain about it that I don't have to give up caffeine.  "If you just have one cup of coffee a day, you'll be fine :D"  Like one cup of coffee is a completely reasonable amount. 

As soon as I realized this routine had to stop, I froze and gaped indignantly at my only audience at the moment: the cat.  "I'm not prepared to change my lifestyle that much!"  

The cat stared at me, and I provided his side of the conversation.  "You think that's bad?  You ain't seen nothing yet." 

I hate it when the cat is right. 

So I just quit cold turkey and felt like crap for a while as I went through withdraw.  Or maybe it was the zygote making me nauseous and tired.  One or the other. 

2.

Prenatal vitamins are enormous.  Remember Flintstones vitamins?  You know those chewy vitamins they advertise on TV that look like fruit snacks?  I was expecting those. 

Instead they are horse pills.

My mother cackled when I told her over the phone.  Apparently they have not decreased in size since the 80s.

3.

I called and told my parents when I found out, and told them they could tell whoever they wanted, but they would be responsible for un-telling those people if it became necessary.  Then the other day, now that I'm out of the first trimester, I made an announcement on Facebook, because this is how we pass information these days.

My uncle saw it, and immediately called my dad to be sly.  "So...what's new with Cary these days?"

My dad is a firm believer that nothing is anyone's business.  This character trait added to my warnings, and he shrugged and said, "Nothing."

It made my uncle's day when he got to break the news to my dad. 

4.

Instead of calling the print outs of ultrasounds "photos", they should be called "soundos."  Because no photons are involved.

5.

Ron calls the fetus "Cary Jr." and refers to it exclusively with female pronouns.  Everyone else seems to think this is really funny and it's caught on.

6.

I've gotten aggressive about correcting people when they ask about the baby's gender.  Let me explain it to you.  "Gender" is about identity.  We won't be able to know that until the baby tells us.  "Sex" is about genitals.  The fetus right now has genitals, but you couldn't see them yet on an ultrasound.  And I don't know why everyone keeps asking about my fetus' genitals.