I've got the hook for Len in reasonable shape and the synopsis down to a page single-spaced, so I'm going to let all that sit for a week or so. I'm now flipping through my old short stories files and finding that most of the short stories I haven't sold yet have something in common: They're sad and honest and say uncomfortable things. The ones I wrote 20 or even 30 years ago and have given up selling, most of them more mainstream and adult than I know how to market anymore, seem eerily prescient, addressing issues I've since had to face.
Writing does that. Nothing makes a better case for precognition than old manuscripts. You write things, and they come true, or say things you needed to know and didn't want to.
But the short story I'm most concerned about today does neither. (I don't think.) It's about the post-life business of gathering up people's cast-off emotions, processing them, and recycling them so that people who, for example, need a little more guilt or ego or anger in their lives will have it available when the people who had too much of those qualities divest themselves of it. If it doesn't get recycled, it rots and festers, sometimes gets mixed together to create anomolous phenomena - teen angst and old bitterness create poltergeists as a by-product, for example. People who never let anything go can't open themselves up to fresh stuff and their whole lives stagnate. A lot of this stuff is tangled up in the heaps of large trash you leave at the curb when the city does its biannual collection of that sort of thing, so the trucks of scrap metal and second-hand furniture and appliance dealers are joined by the less-visible trucks of the emotion recyclers.
I really like this idea, but the story is over 11,000 words long - too long to be a short story, too short to be a novella. And though parts of it are well-executed, the parts don't hang together well. It has to be third-person omniscient, which is always tricky. It has to tell several stories at once. And it has to encapsulate truths about the way we process emotions without getting all sappily guruish. And all of that is doable, so I feel like I ought to be able to launch myself at it; but I hesitate to do so.
Because there's a lot of the Year from Hell in there. Not even very well disguised. On the one hand, I'm proud of myself for dealing with that at all in writing so relatively soon. The Year from Hell was 2005; I wrote the story in 2008. On the other hand, reading it again brings the Year from Hell back in full Surround-sound Sense-O-Drama. Also, I've mixed in equally recognizable bits of the Years from Hell of other people I know, and that squicks me. It doesn't matter that the people in these situations are not the characters, may be very different indeed from the characters. If they recognize their situations, they'll confuse the characters with themselves.
So until I work out how to cope with those two things, that's another story that's going to sit on the hard drive.
Oh, well. You have to let cheese age, too. No matter how far behind I feel like I am, I won't get anywhere by hurrying the work.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Everything But What I Want
Still no title inspiration for Len's story. I can think of titles that have no stories to go with them, though.
On the Other Hand, What the Heck's the Use?
70s problem novel, I think.
The Stars and the Gingerbread Man
I have no idea what genre, even, this would be, but c'mon, you'd pick it up just to find out, wouldn't you?
The Secret Mystery of the Hidden Clue.
To catch all the 10-year-olds walking up and down the aisle scanning for the words "Secret," "Mystery," "Hidden," and "Clue" in order to get their mystery fix.
Beginning, Anywhere
YA. This is a quote from Fort: "One measures a circle, beginning, anywhere."
Garden of Memory, River of Time
A Hole in the World
Lost Moonshine
A time travel trilogy, or they could also be Moody Blues albums. Speaking of which:
Psycho Delia.
Don't know anything about it, except the name of the central character. Possibly Delia is not the protagonist, but if not, she's the catalyst.
Brief Lies
Best title ever for a short story collection.
Lunch is Where You Find It: A Guide to Foraging
One Nation, Under the Bed
Is it a middle grade fantasy or a snarky YA contemporary?
A Storm in the Brain
It's Not What You Think You Want
Land Mind
Quit While You're Behind
Time to get ready for the game, anyway.
On the Other Hand, What the Heck's the Use?
70s problem novel, I think.
The Stars and the Gingerbread Man
I have no idea what genre, even, this would be, but c'mon, you'd pick it up just to find out, wouldn't you?
The Secret Mystery of the Hidden Clue.
To catch all the 10-year-olds walking up and down the aisle scanning for the words "Secret," "Mystery," "Hidden," and "Clue" in order to get their mystery fix.
Beginning, Anywhere
YA. This is a quote from Fort: "One measures a circle, beginning, anywhere."
Garden of Memory, River of Time
A Hole in the World
Lost Moonshine
A time travel trilogy, or they could also be Moody Blues albums. Speaking of which:
Psycho Delia.
Don't know anything about it, except the name of the central character. Possibly Delia is not the protagonist, but if not, she's the catalyst.
Brief Lies
Best title ever for a short story collection.
Lunch is Where You Find It: A Guide to Foraging
One Nation, Under the Bed
Is it a middle grade fantasy or a snarky YA contemporary?
A Storm in the Brain
It's Not What You Think You Want
Land Mind
Quit While You're Behind
Time to get ready for the game, anyway.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
More Progress
I forgot all about blogging Tuesday. I have an obligation Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, so I have to cram all my housework into Tuesday-Thursday.
Third pass complete. I'm not sure I've reduced the mentions of food to their minimum - Len does have a personal relationship with food, due to her outdoor life - but I've done what I can for now. 85,563 words; average word length 4, average sentence length 14; longest sentence is now 67 words and I still don't know where it is.
Tomorrow morning I'll try the hook again and take a stab at synopsizing. It's better than market research.
Some weeks just aren't exciting, but you need those, too.
(Painters today. The cats are aggrieved that they covered all the nice new tile with plastic.)
Third pass complete. I'm not sure I've reduced the mentions of food to their minimum - Len does have a personal relationship with food, due to her outdoor life - but I've done what I can for now. 85,563 words; average word length 4, average sentence length 14; longest sentence is now 67 words and I still don't know where it is.
Tomorrow morning I'll try the hook again and take a stab at synopsizing. It's better than market research.
Some weeks just aren't exciting, but you need those, too.
(Painters today. The cats are aggrieved that they covered all the nice new tile with plastic.)
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Cipher
Getting up this morning with no clear idea for a garage sale, I opened up the link to the Fortean Times breaking news page and looked at the stories posted on Friday. Here I found a story about a man in Massachusetts who claims to have deciphered a 340-character message from the Zodiac Killer which has defied all previous attempts to read it.
You don't have to know anything about the Zodiac Killer, or to have read very many examples of Fortean code poking, such as the search for ciphers in the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, to realize that the guy is, um, overly optimistic. He's started from one bit of coincidental data (340 characters, 340 is the area code of the Virgin Islands - but only since 1997; the message was received in 1969), used addition and subtraction to get another number, used this number as the basis to decide on a particular established code with which to work; made a huge assumption about how the letter ought to start; then pushed, pulled, and prodded the bits of the message that don't work within his framework and under his untested assumptions until they more or less almost do and he gets a message that kinda sorta makes sense and even fingers a definite person.
And then he is surprised and offended that the relevant police departments aren't interested.
The interesting thing, the relatable thing, here is the way the case interested this person to the point of obsession, of forgetting to eat; of spending hours working on an internal construct that would offer him some sort of resolution he can project onto the outside world.
Because we all do this. Writers do it and produce books and poems; painters do it and make paintings; the Fen do it and produce fanart, fanfic, costuming, and props; programmers do it with programs; gamers do it with games. Sometimes the result is a fun, harmless hobby; sometimes it's a great work of art; once in awhile someone actually solves a crime this way; sometimes it's a mental train wreck that eats up a life, or a virus that spreads to innocent other people and mutates in unpredictable ways.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy preoccupation seems to be the capacity to keep perspective. Fan artists, novelists, master chess players - they know where the boundary lies between their absorbing mental preoccupation and the exterior world. They don't use their preoccupation to filter the real world into someplace it's comfortable for them to live, then try to persuade other people to accept this filtered version of reality as reality. Which is what crackpots are generally trying to do, and the point at which they become pathetic, tedious, and potentially dangerous to themselves or others, because walking through hallucinatory terrain is inherently dangerous.
So what we need for a story is two people embodying these different ways of dealing with the same preoccupation, illustrating the advantages and the dangers of the interior life - without, of course, being didactic, because the audience can tell when you're doing that and it makes the story suck. That's always the danger when starting with a theme rather than a character or situation; so let's proceed to those ASAP.
Since this train of thought began with Zodiac's code, let's start with a similar, but fictional, situation. Forty years ago, Drama City was terrorized by a killer who taunted the police in coded letters. Although the case is now only a cold and bitter memory, it has never officially been closed, and the knowledge that Cipher is still out there is like a taint in the town's water. Shadows of suspicion still lie on several people. The daughter of one of these people - still suspected in the public eye, though officially and definitively cleared - is a cop, and she can't stay out of the case files, continually going over and over evidence and trying out various dodges to solve the unsolved ciphers. Or are they codes? Because those aren't the same things. She isn't making headway. No one ever does. But trying to understand Cipher has had the side benefit of improving her job skills.
A newcomer in town moves into a building associated with the Cipher killings in some way. Perhaps he lives in the apartment of a victim, or a suspect; perhaps a body was dumped in the alley behind his office. He's a bit of an encryption buff, probably a programmer, and he becomes fascinated by the case and the messages. So he starts working on them as a hobby. Maybe there's even a local group that offers a prize for solving one. He has one of those jolts of inspiration that feel like revelation, so clear and so compelling that he assumes it must be true. Using this as his guide, he "solves" the ciphers and takes them to the local police, meeting Detective Daughter. Possibly his solution points back to her family, so that when she tries to show him the fundamental errors that arise when his assumptions are tested against reality, it's easy to claim that she's protecting the guilty. It needn't be her father that's implicated; he could easily have a brother hitherto never considered, or something.
This begins a raging political division in town, with Mr. Solution heading up a faction determined to expose police corruption and incompetence at a time when the police department is already struggling for funds and personnel. Detective Daughter, who has worked hard to get the respect of her peers and rise above the shadow of Cipher, finds herself thrust into a false position, her mere presence a danger to the reputation of the force. Even if she solved Cipher, would anyone, in light of the conspiracy theories suddenly running amok in Drama City, accept her evidence and chain of reasoning?
This being a story, we must have a definitive resolution - Cipher must be caught, and he must be someone significant, but he cannot be the person indicated in Mr. Solution's version of the code. He can, however, be someone Detective Daughter kept coming back to; someone who feels threatened? No; police taunters are arrogant SOBs who feel superior to the police. The kind of people who, seeing this kerfluffle arise after years of dormancy (and you'd need a convincing cause for this dormancy), would be unable to resist getting into the middle of it. Guiding it. Using it for some end of his own.
Mr. Solution would be easily manipulated by such a person. Could easily turn into his puppet.
And if Detective Daughter's father was suspected because Cipher always wanted him to be suspected - if he has some sort of grudge against her family - and now she also represents the police whom he has always longed to humiliate -
Well, that's a thriller plot, isn't it? The key thing to get right would be the character and motivation of Cipher. Do that, and everything falls into place around it.
I'm not about to live in such a person's head long enough to write so far out of my comfort range. What if his voice took over like Len's did? Ugh.
I might read the book, though, if somebody else wrote it.
You don't have to know anything about the Zodiac Killer, or to have read very many examples of Fortean code poking, such as the search for ciphers in the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, to realize that the guy is, um, overly optimistic. He's started from one bit of coincidental data (340 characters, 340 is the area code of the Virgin Islands - but only since 1997; the message was received in 1969), used addition and subtraction to get another number, used this number as the basis to decide on a particular established code with which to work; made a huge assumption about how the letter ought to start; then pushed, pulled, and prodded the bits of the message that don't work within his framework and under his untested assumptions until they more or less almost do and he gets a message that kinda sorta makes sense and even fingers a definite person.
And then he is surprised and offended that the relevant police departments aren't interested.
The interesting thing, the relatable thing, here is the way the case interested this person to the point of obsession, of forgetting to eat; of spending hours working on an internal construct that would offer him some sort of resolution he can project onto the outside world.
Because we all do this. Writers do it and produce books and poems; painters do it and make paintings; the Fen do it and produce fanart, fanfic, costuming, and props; programmers do it with programs; gamers do it with games. Sometimes the result is a fun, harmless hobby; sometimes it's a great work of art; once in awhile someone actually solves a crime this way; sometimes it's a mental train wreck that eats up a life, or a virus that spreads to innocent other people and mutates in unpredictable ways.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy preoccupation seems to be the capacity to keep perspective. Fan artists, novelists, master chess players - they know where the boundary lies between their absorbing mental preoccupation and the exterior world. They don't use their preoccupation to filter the real world into someplace it's comfortable for them to live, then try to persuade other people to accept this filtered version of reality as reality. Which is what crackpots are generally trying to do, and the point at which they become pathetic, tedious, and potentially dangerous to themselves or others, because walking through hallucinatory terrain is inherently dangerous.
So what we need for a story is two people embodying these different ways of dealing with the same preoccupation, illustrating the advantages and the dangers of the interior life - without, of course, being didactic, because the audience can tell when you're doing that and it makes the story suck. That's always the danger when starting with a theme rather than a character or situation; so let's proceed to those ASAP.
Since this train of thought began with Zodiac's code, let's start with a similar, but fictional, situation. Forty years ago, Drama City was terrorized by a killer who taunted the police in coded letters. Although the case is now only a cold and bitter memory, it has never officially been closed, and the knowledge that Cipher is still out there is like a taint in the town's water. Shadows of suspicion still lie on several people. The daughter of one of these people - still suspected in the public eye, though officially and definitively cleared - is a cop, and she can't stay out of the case files, continually going over and over evidence and trying out various dodges to solve the unsolved ciphers. Or are they codes? Because those aren't the same things. She isn't making headway. No one ever does. But trying to understand Cipher has had the side benefit of improving her job skills.
A newcomer in town moves into a building associated with the Cipher killings in some way. Perhaps he lives in the apartment of a victim, or a suspect; perhaps a body was dumped in the alley behind his office. He's a bit of an encryption buff, probably a programmer, and he becomes fascinated by the case and the messages. So he starts working on them as a hobby. Maybe there's even a local group that offers a prize for solving one. He has one of those jolts of inspiration that feel like revelation, so clear and so compelling that he assumes it must be true. Using this as his guide, he "solves" the ciphers and takes them to the local police, meeting Detective Daughter. Possibly his solution points back to her family, so that when she tries to show him the fundamental errors that arise when his assumptions are tested against reality, it's easy to claim that she's protecting the guilty. It needn't be her father that's implicated; he could easily have a brother hitherto never considered, or something.
This begins a raging political division in town, with Mr. Solution heading up a faction determined to expose police corruption and incompetence at a time when the police department is already struggling for funds and personnel. Detective Daughter, who has worked hard to get the respect of her peers and rise above the shadow of Cipher, finds herself thrust into a false position, her mere presence a danger to the reputation of the force. Even if she solved Cipher, would anyone, in light of the conspiracy theories suddenly running amok in Drama City, accept her evidence and chain of reasoning?
This being a story, we must have a definitive resolution - Cipher must be caught, and he must be someone significant, but he cannot be the person indicated in Mr. Solution's version of the code. He can, however, be someone Detective Daughter kept coming back to; someone who feels threatened? No; police taunters are arrogant SOBs who feel superior to the police. The kind of people who, seeing this kerfluffle arise after years of dormancy (and you'd need a convincing cause for this dormancy), would be unable to resist getting into the middle of it. Guiding it. Using it for some end of his own.
Mr. Solution would be easily manipulated by such a person. Could easily turn into his puppet.
And if Detective Daughter's father was suspected because Cipher always wanted him to be suspected - if he has some sort of grudge against her family - and now she also represents the police whom he has always longed to humiliate -
Well, that's a thriller plot, isn't it? The key thing to get right would be the character and motivation of Cipher. Do that, and everything falls into place around it.
I'm not about to live in such a person's head long enough to write so far out of my comfort range. What if his voice took over like Len's did? Ugh.
I might read the book, though, if somebody else wrote it.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Pleasant, but Minimally Useful
I was hoping my first reader could point me to the extant problems in the manuscript, but her first response was "I want to hang with Len!"
Which means I succeeded reasonably well in conveying my protagonist's personality, but that doesn't surprise me much. Since it was first person, all I had to do was channel her voice and she took care of the rest. Len's a good character and I don't even feel self-conscious about saying so, since I have no sense of having invented her. Sometimes while working out the plot I worried that she's too reactive, but "reactive" and "passive" are not the same thing, and during the writing the concern always fell away. Len is not in control of her life - who is? - but she is an active agent in it. She can't change the world, but she can find a place in it that doesn't violate her sense of self. And if somebody wants to sneer at her for how she treats her horse, well, that's no skin off her nose.
My reader volunteered to give it another go now that she knows how it ends and can read more critically. Maybe she can at least help with the title. With some poking and prodding I got her to admit that maybe some of the travel could still be tightened up and that she did sometimes think "Oh, they're eating again." I'm afraid Len takes a lively interest in food; but you do when you live an outdoor life like hers. So that's something I can pick away at, anyhow.
I really should give this to another author, but I'm not in a critique group and the person I would naturally give this to is presently swamped. I'm disinclined to join a critique group because I can't see doing it as a regular thing to works-in-progress. I'm happy to mark up my friends' drafts and hand over my own for inspection, but it's generally the big picture I need help with and can offer the most useful feedback for. It's way too easy, reading bits and pieces, to offer too much and unconsciously try to steer your friend into trying to write like you and vice versa.
(We have floor tiles in the bath and mudrooms, and most of the tile wainscot in the downstairs powder room. Cats don't like tilers - they use power saws.)
Which means I succeeded reasonably well in conveying my protagonist's personality, but that doesn't surprise me much. Since it was first person, all I had to do was channel her voice and she took care of the rest. Len's a good character and I don't even feel self-conscious about saying so, since I have no sense of having invented her. Sometimes while working out the plot I worried that she's too reactive, but "reactive" and "passive" are not the same thing, and during the writing the concern always fell away. Len is not in control of her life - who is? - but she is an active agent in it. She can't change the world, but she can find a place in it that doesn't violate her sense of self. And if somebody wants to sneer at her for how she treats her horse, well, that's no skin off her nose.
My reader volunteered to give it another go now that she knows how it ends and can read more critically. Maybe she can at least help with the title. With some poking and prodding I got her to admit that maybe some of the travel could still be tightened up and that she did sometimes think "Oh, they're eating again." I'm afraid Len takes a lively interest in food; but you do when you live an outdoor life like hers. So that's something I can pick away at, anyhow.
I really should give this to another author, but I'm not in a critique group and the person I would naturally give this to is presently swamped. I'm disinclined to join a critique group because I can't see doing it as a regular thing to works-in-progress. I'm happy to mark up my friends' drafts and hand over my own for inspection, but it's generally the big picture I need help with and can offer the most useful feedback for. It's way too easy, reading bits and pieces, to offer too much and unconsciously try to steer your friend into trying to write like you and vice versa.
(We have floor tiles in the bath and mudrooms, and most of the tile wainscot in the downstairs powder room. Cats don't like tilers - they use power saws.)
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Excuse Me While I Scream
I have a friend who has more than one publishable novel in her train. She keeps getting within a hair of publication, going through multiple rounds of extensive revision, serious negotiations with editors, the works, only to lose out at the last minute. Recently I and all her friends rejoiced over her finally getting a contract with a certain publisher - which has now folded.
She's being philosophical about this - after all, as she points out, she is not homeless in Haiti and she'd had a few doubts about this publisher to begin with. This is no doubt the correct attitude.
But I, as her friend, feel like I can rant about it a bit. So (apologies to my Christian friends, for the particular expression I am about to use):
JESUS H. CHRIST IN A BASKET, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THIS INDUSTRY?
There. I feel better now I've done that in public.
And of course I know the answer to my own question. Publishing is an industry. The quality of a work is only one of many, many variables in getting from author to public. Corporations working the way they do, it sometimes seems like a miracle that as much quality stuff gets published as does; and I know that a great many wonderful works will never see the light of day or reach their best audience, even with the e-book revolution that is gradually gathering momentum. It isn't fair, but if you expect fairness you're going to live a life of disappointment. She may never publish a novel; I may never publish another one. We accept that and move on, or we stand still and gnash our teeth for the rest of our lives.
At least she has an agent to help her maximize her chances. So excuse me again while I go back to trying to find one for me, too.
(It appears that laying tile involves a lot of pounding and razor blades. All occupations are mysterious to those outside them.)
She's being philosophical about this - after all, as she points out, she is not homeless in Haiti and she'd had a few doubts about this publisher to begin with. This is no doubt the correct attitude.
But I, as her friend, feel like I can rant about it a bit. So (apologies to my Christian friends, for the particular expression I am about to use):
JESUS H. CHRIST IN A BASKET, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THIS INDUSTRY?
There. I feel better now I've done that in public.
And of course I know the answer to my own question. Publishing is an industry. The quality of a work is only one of many, many variables in getting from author to public. Corporations working the way they do, it sometimes seems like a miracle that as much quality stuff gets published as does; and I know that a great many wonderful works will never see the light of day or reach their best audience, even with the e-book revolution that is gradually gathering momentum. It isn't fair, but if you expect fairness you're going to live a life of disappointment. She may never publish a novel; I may never publish another one. We accept that and move on, or we stand still and gnash our teeth for the rest of our lives.
At least she has an agent to help her maximize her chances. So excuse me again while I go back to trying to find one for me, too.
(It appears that laying tile involves a lot of pounding and razor blades. All occupations are mysterious to those outside them.)
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Adventure Book
Bookworm Annie picks up a battered old book of short stories at a used book store, off the "please take these I can't sell them table" out front. When she reads, she enters the story and becomes the main character. This means that she can use her extensive knowledge of literary convention to solve plot problems, and her annoyance with certain tropes to shake things up; but it also means that she can't skip the boring parts that the author zips the reader through with a transitional sentence. Being in a Western is a lot less exciting if you have to actually experience the ride from Point A to Point B! And the desert island story, face it, is excruciating.
She can't enter a story a second time, just reread it - no matter how embarrassing it now seems - but if she reads aloud to someone else, that person can come into the story with her.
Skills learned in the story remain learned, but a little muted, in the real world.
This one's written and in the attic somewhere. I didn't have the skill to pull it off when I first conceived it back in the mid-80s. You have to be able to carry the short stories (which of necessity include the boring parts, remember!) and tie them in to the reader's real-life situation, making a believable and satisfactory character arc.
I still think it's a viable concept, and I still like the ending, in which Annie intends to pass the book on to the friend she made in the course of the story, but instead it winds up with the bully who's been picking on her, and who could really benefit from that desert island experience.
But I haven't gotten any better at short forms, and having already written this book once I'm disinclined to write it again.
She can't enter a story a second time, just reread it - no matter how embarrassing it now seems - but if she reads aloud to someone else, that person can come into the story with her.
Skills learned in the story remain learned, but a little muted, in the real world.
This one's written and in the attic somewhere. I didn't have the skill to pull it off when I first conceived it back in the mid-80s. You have to be able to carry the short stories (which of necessity include the boring parts, remember!) and tie them in to the reader's real-life situation, making a believable and satisfactory character arc.
I still think it's a viable concept, and I still like the ending, in which Annie intends to pass the book on to the friend she made in the course of the story, but instead it winds up with the bully who's been picking on her, and who could really benefit from that desert island experience.
But I haven't gotten any better at short forms, and having already written this book once I'm disinclined to write it again.
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