If anyone out there happens to know any Arabic contemporary to the late 15th century, I’m looking for a word that would mean a monstrous flesh-eating creature. The best I’ve found so far is al-Ghûl, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Category Archives: Writing
Entries where I talk about my writing: stories, novels, general creativity.
Writing Update
Not a great day for writing today. “Who Remembers Molly” has been sent to The Harrow. “Indications” is off to Black October Magazine and Borderlands 6 for consideration, and that’s about it. I did write up about 900 words of outline for The Terassic Cycle; mostly rehashing of background material, though it’s good to have it done because it answers some questions for me that have bugged me for quite awhile now.
I also had some ideas for some of the other products that AO Enterprises (from “Joe’s Salvation” — and by the way, has anyone figured out what “AO” stands for? I know, but I’m wondering if anyone even guessed that it might stand for something) might be trying to sell. They may well end up being featured in a series of stories. in the future.
Reason #33223 why my wife is cooler than yours
After the first day of the advanced writers’ workshop at Dragon*Con, I mentioned to Jennifer that the laptop bag I’ve been using to carry around my notebooks and snacks and medicine was getting awfully heavy; even without the laptop, the thing weighs about eight pounds (I’m not kidding), and this becomes painful on my back after awhile. I told her I was thinking about getting a lightweight messenger bag just to carry around my notebooks and pens and possibly a book for days when all I was going to do was go somewhere and write (which I do without my laptop more and more these days). So she went and made me this satchel (after letting me approve the final design and choose the yarn, of course). I love it! It’s just the right size for the leatherbound notebook I keep all my drafts and working copies in plus a couple of books and some pens, but it’s also incredibly sturdy and light.
Note the Serenity pin on the flap, which I got at an advance screening two weeks ago. Bwah ha haa!
In writing news, I’m surprised by how well “Joe’s Salvation” has gone over. I slapped that one out in just about half an hour plus another fifteen minutes for quick revisions, expecting it to be another throwaway piece. Now I think it’s actually publishable.
Plus, I’m almost done with the most recent round of revisions on “Who Remembers Molly”. I tried to add in some more humorous elements without being blatant, and bring some more depth to Molly herself. Plus I realized that one of the subtexts I was trying so hard to get across just wasn’t happening, so I finally just decided to spell it out bluntly. It never pays to assume that your readers are stupid, of course, but it also never pays to assume that they see the same things that you do.
Meta Satire?
I’ve been thinking about satire quite a bit lately; I’m not sure why, except perhaps that it’s been recommended to me as a form of therapy. The idea is simple: take something that upsets you about the world and write something funny about it and hope that Someone In Power will notice and do something to fix the woes you’ve so cleverly pointed out. It’s harder to do than you might think. The few satirical pieces I’ve written work, I think, either because they’re well-written or because my readers owe me a lot of money.
But I began to wonder last week whether some sort of meta-satire can be written. Take reality shows, for example. The phenomenon seems to be dying down, thank God. The Apprentice may still be one of the most popular shows around right now, but it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing Survivor: Antarctica anytime soon. But for awhile, reality shows were such a huge part of our culture, and such a stupid idea, that satirizing them become just too simple. Before long, satires of reality shows became just as prevalent as the reality shows themselves. At least one move — Series 7: The Contenders — was made, and perhaps a dozen anthology series had an episode spoofing the concept of reality television. It got to the point where writing a story spoofing reality shows was just as clichéd as reality shows themselves.
So I got to wonder: would it have been possible to write a story satirizing the satirization of reality shows? I’m imagining something about a bunch of writers sitting around with guns ready to shoot each other for the best reality show spoof, something like that. Could something like that have worked? On a slightly different tack, would it be possible to make a movie spoofing all of the Leslie Nielsen films that spoofed spy movies or airport dramas? Or would it have been something that only a few people in America would have enjoyed, congratulating each other on having understood the joke while simultaneously trying to one-up each other with stories about how they saw infinitely more subtle layers of meaning in the jokes?
I’m not sure, personally. I think that only one or two levels of mockery are possible before any meaning is lost.
As always, there’s nothing even remotely resembling coherence or clarity in this entry. Just assume it’s done here.
Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Wedon
My wife pointed me to this:
TIME.com: Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Wedon
Two of my favorite creative geniuses together on the same… er, website. I take some comfort from the fact that they’re both in their 40’s and I’m 37; on the other hand, they’ve both been working since their late teens.
Writing Update #whatever
Today was a pretty good day for writing. I did some basic revision to the latest draft of “Who Remembers Molly”, hoping against hope that this will be the final one, and I actually wrote two short-short stories: “Blink”, a study of fear, and “Joe’s Salvation”, a little satire about the modern American quest for spirituality and lawsuits. I’m not sure if either of these little dribbles work the way they’re supposed to, but I had fun writing them and I think they’re both strong enough first drafts to merit further work. I think I’m more excited about “Joe’s Salvation” if only because it’s a longer story with a stronger plot. “Blink” is probably going to end up being part of something much larger.
Point of View
“Point of View”, I’m discovering, is one of the harder elements of fiction writing to master. I’ve grown very sensitive, over the past few months, to how POV is used in short stories and in novels, and to what seems to be more or less officially called “POV drift”: that is, when the point of view in a short story wanders from one person to another. For example:
I looked at my hands and wondered how they got coated in blue ink. Then I looked up at Shari, who gazed back at me with a sense of foreboding.
In this case, the highlighted element is an example of POV drift: we’ve temporarily drifted out of the narrator’s head and into Shari’s. The narrator cannot know what Shari is thinking or feeling or sensing (unless one or the other of them is a telepath). A friend of mine refers to this sort of thing as “head hopping”.
A more subtle variation of POV drift happens when we see a character from an outsider’s perspective, when the story has up to that point been told strictly from a third-person limited point of view. For example:
Joe looked at his hands; how did they get so blue, he wondered? Then he looked at Shari, his face pale with agony.
In this case, the POV drift occurs in the second part of the second sentence; if the entire story has been told from Joe’s point of view and we’ve been deep in his thoughts the entire time, then to describe what his face looks like this is a bit of drift. It’s as though we’ve suddenly been thrown out of Joe’s head and are now looking at him from outside instead of inside.
All of this is difficult enough for writers to master. I keep coming up with questions of my own: how much can a person describe his own external appearances, and under what circumstances?
I looked up at him with that look of befuddlement which comes when you are overwhelmed with new information.
This example comes from Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods. You’re temporarily out of the writer’s head and seeing him from the outside; and yet this scene was written directly from Bryson’s own experience. Is this an example of acceptable POV drift?
In spite of all of this complexity, I do find point of view relatively easy; when critting stories by other beginning writers, I am frequently amazed by how much head-hopping and POV drift occurs. And even more amazed when I point it out to the writer only to have him or her respond, “What do you mean by point of view?” I usually recommend to them the book Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card, which contains an excellent discussion of this question.
Complicating all of this, though, is the notion of “narrative distance” which I’m only just beginning to comprehend as a concept. In a single story, there can be times when it’s entirely appropriate to be deep in the head of a particular character; and other times when it’s more appropriate to be outside that character’s head. To draw a cinematic analogy, there are times in a movie when closeup shots are appropriate and times when a wider shot is appropriate. A closeup shot — a deeper POV — gives us better insight into a character, while a wider shot — a more removed POV — gives us a better, more objective view of the action. This can lead the writer to a terrible quandary: at what time is it appropriate to be deep inside the character’s head, and when is it appropriate to be outside?
Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told from deep inside the narrator’s head; given the Chief’s schizophrenia, it is therefore impossible to know whether the entire story happened as described, or whether much of it was delusion. It worked for Kesey, but for other stories, that very deep 1st person POV may detract from the story if the character’s thought processes are untrustworthy; in this case, a third person limited POV may be called for, with varying depths to show both the level of the character’s insanity as well as a more objective view of the action. That’s just a single example of how appropriate narrative distance can really monkey up the notion of point of view.
Writing is much more difficult than I had imagined in my youthful days of exuberant imagination. But a good story, well told, is its own reward.
Carrying On
This cold has pretty much been the ass kicker of me this past week. I’ve been to the doctor twice, and pretty much lived on Albuterol. I was out of work three days last week, and I really wish I could have done that this week as well. Fortunately, though, after a course of antibiotics and Prednisone, I’m starting to feel better again. Not 100%, maybe, but 75% at least. Maybe 80%. My throat is still a little sore, and my voice is still hoarse. Over the past few days, by the end of the day, I’ve been pretty much unable to talk at all.
Prednisone is one of those miracle drugs that pretty much nips an asthma attack in the bud by reducing the inflammation in the bronchial passages. It’s cheap, too; my insurance won’t even cover it because the $10.00 co-pay for a bottle of 30 is more than the cost of the pills themselves. Unfortunately, it has undesirable side effects, even for short-term use: in particular, it gives you a voracious appetite. I think that I could probably finish off three or four double bacon cheeseburgers and still feel like I have room to spare, which is not a good situation for a guy whose doctor has been repeatedly telling him to lose the weight or start taking even more medications.
When I was at the pulmonologist’s yesterday, I took a spirometry reading; basically, you breathe into a tube which is hooked up to the doctor’s computer, and the machine measures the amount of air flowing in and out of your lungs. For four breaths, you breathe regularly. Then the nurse has you breathe in as deeply as possible, and then force all of the air out of your lungs as hard as you can for a full five seconds. You do this as the nurse counts the seconds off.
I’ve done this all my life. Modern spirometers are fancy devices that plug in to a desktop computer with a regular serial port, but when I was a kid, they were essentially big bellows with a meter attached. So all my life I’ve taken these tests, breathing in and then blowing out as hard as I can for five seconds. Each time I’ve always felt light-headed afterwards, as is to be expected But yesterday, I think I might have actually come close to fainting for the very first time out of the thousands of times that I’ve done this. I remember breathing in; I remember the nurse telling me to blow out as hard and fast as I could; I remember him telling me I had just four seconds left, and listening to him count off those seconds.
And then I remember simply sitting in the chair in the office, shaking almost uncontrollably while my world slowly came back from being black. I remember thinking that it was desperately important that I continue to hold the mouthpiece for the spirometer in my mouth, but I couldn’t because I was shaking so much. The nurse told me, “You can go ahead and put that down, buddy,” and I did so, gratefully. I sat in the chair, shaking for a few more minutes, and managed to say, “I think I almost passed out there.”
“Yeah,” the nurse said, “I think you almost did.”
Strangely, this was probably the best spirometry I’ve ever had. My lungs are taking in more air than they have in months, and handling it better than before. So I should be feeling fine, right? Of course I’m not. I’m still, paradoxically, short of breath and coughing a lot. The doctor told me that this was probably the residual infection left over from the cold; probably a secondary bacterial infection at this point, but possibly viral as well — and if it’s viral, of course, there’s nothing to do but let it run its course. In addition, my lungs, having been affected by asthma all of my life, have become scarred and damaged, and have even become reshaped over the years: a phenomenon called “airway remodeling”. My lungs will never be normal. There are little pockets in there that could possibly get infected and I might not even know it because the air never gets to them. I think that this is fascinating, especially because it provides me with some built in excuses: “Gee, I’d love to help you move your couch to the second floor, but I can’t — you know, that airway remodeling thing, never breathe normally again, etc., cough cough.”
It probably wouldn’t work. My friends have seen me move couches.
Work continues apace. We’ve gotten final word today that we’re going ahead with a major project that we’ve been planning on for a few months now, so things are going to be very interesting around the office for quite awhile as we plan and execute database migrations, code rewrites, platform changes, and so on. The biggest changes will be the ones in our business model and business logic, and we’re going to have to reorient our partners on how we do our business, but in the end, it will all be for the best.
The writing continues as well. I wrote The Outer Darkness for National Novel Writing Month as I had planned, but I am very unhappy with the way it turned out. I think that instead of focusing on this one as my novel for the upcoming year, I’ll bring back The Road to Gilead, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year, and finish that up. It’s got a good story and a sound plot, I think, as well as some really good characters. I know where some of the weaknesses are as well, but I think I can make something good of it.
And with National Novel Writing Month over, I can focus again on my short stories. I’ve finished receiving crits on “Variations on a Theme” and am in the process of writing the second draft of that story. I’ve also been receiving crits on my most recent, “The Winds of Patwin County”. I was unhappy with this one while I was writing it, but after receiving a couple of crits, I think it’s probably one of my better stories. I already have ideas for the second draft, and one of the crits I received suggested that there might actually be a Serious Theme to that story. I was honestly shocked.
And my Grand Plan for the Terassic Cycle continues unabated. More on that later, perhaps.
So, that’s what’s been going on in my life. How about yours?
Writing Update #6: NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (nowadays also known as NaNoWriMo) begins in just over six hours from the time that I write this. In 2001, when I participated for the first time, I was completely on the sidelines and lived in my own little world while I worked on it (of course, there were no forums on the website back then, and it was in the days before weekly write-ins in different cities and so on). I was all set to write my epic science fiction post-apocalyptic western back then, but at about 5:00 p.m. on October 31, I suddenly decided to switch and write Unfallen instead. I saved The Road to Gilead for 2003, which was the second time I participated in NaNoWriMo; and then I went to the kick-off party and to the Thank God It’s Over (TGIO) party at the end of November as well. The Road to Gilead was, if I do say so myself, a great story. It’s not fit for general consumption at the moment, and needs a lot of work, but I think it’s got great potential.
This year, I’m writing The Outer Darkness, and I am nervous. When I wrote Unfallen in 2001, I based it off of a role-playing game that I had run a couple of years before, so the plot was still strong in my mind. In 2003, when I wrote The Road to Gilead, the entire plot came to me in one sitting a couple of months before I’d even begun writing.
This time, though, I’m having problems with the plot. The novel is based off of a role-playing game that I planned and plotted and set in a milieu that my friend K. and I created together, but that I never actually got to run (and probably never will at this point, unless I do so for DunDraCon 2006). The plot is simple, but I have no idea how to execute it. None at all.
Which makes me nervous.
It could just be that I’m worrying too much. I’ve been planning on The Outer Darkness for this year’s NaNoWriMo since ’round about July, when I developed my Long Term Writing Plan (which I wrote about here).
In an ideal world, I would stay up really late tonight and begin writing right at midnight. Unfortunately, I have to get up really early tomorrow to work out, and, sadly, I can no longer do the all-night writing binges that I used to do way back in the day. Perhaps I’ll get up at five and push out a few words and upload the document to my CVS server so that I can punch out some more during some downtime at work tomorrow.
In other news, today is Hallowe’en. This year, we’re sitting in front of the television, watching specials on HGTV about haunted houses and throwing candy at small children when they come to our door making vague promises of vandalism. Next year I want to have a Real Hallowe’en Party, with costumes and scary movies and ghost stories and all that; I even have the perfect costume in mind for next year. Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday, and it seems a shame to sit around and moulder in front of a television all night.
Writing Update #5
I’ve put off updating this journal for a couple of weeks, partially because I wanted to give both of my regular readers extra time to read about Rebecca, but also because, well, I’ve been lazy. Bad Richard. No biscuit.
So, a quick update on what’s been going on.
Last week, everyone in my office went to a distance learning conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. My boss picked me up and we drove to Walnut Creek, where we picked up BART to Market Street (I thought of my friend Little Owl as I did so), and that was, on the whole, less exciting than I thought it would be — though I did get stuck behind the stupid gate on my way out of the station after we got back to Walnut Creek. I was pretty darn embarrassed, I can tell you.
The conference itself was pretty interesting. While we in our office are in the process of evaluating an ILM (Intergrated Learning Management) product called Moodle — which we are liking so far, partially because it’s written in PHP and is open-source — we found that there are plenty of other really expensive products that we could spend a year’s budget on. And plenty of on-line services ready to take the rest of our money as well. We only found one product that looked particularly valuable because of its ability to transform Power Point presentations into Flash files, but we’re not convinced that it would be a better investment than OpenOffice.org — which is free but less full-featured — would be. It was also an opportunity to do some networking, which I did a little of.
Mostly, though, the best reason to go to these things is because of the swag. Swag, of course, refers to all those little goodies that vendors give away: pens and Post-It notes branded with the company’s name, for example. I made out with a couple of T-shirts (always exciting for geeks), a frisbee, a tote bag (perfect for groceries), a mysterious tube-like device which turned out to be an on-the-spot hand sanitizer device (I swear, it’s like a highlighter pen — only it sanitizes streaks on your skin instead of turning it yellow), and a little stress-relief toy that’s shaped like a little man. And brochures and software samples, of course, though I’ve only ever recommended one software purchase based on a sample I received at a conference like this. However, the best item of swag that I picked up was a little green dinosaur made of foam and attached to the end of a stiff wire. For some reason, the cats seem to really love this and will attack it madly whenever I bring it out and dangle it in front of the.
The next day, sadly, Jennifer and I discovered that our cat Allegra has bone cancer. We don’t have much time left with her, which is a shame. This news came especially hard because we’re still dealing with the grief of having lost Rebecca so suddenly.
October is turning out to be a bad month for animals in my family. First we lost Rebecca, then we got the bad news about Allegra; and earlier this week, my parents had to put down their little dog Rover.
I’m hoping November turns out to be better.
On the writing front, things are progressing slowly. I finally finished up the rough draft of “The Winds of Patwin County”; it’s about 15,000 words long altogether, one of the longest stories I’ve ever written. There were a couple of points where I almost gave up on it; but now it’s done. I also finished up the first draft (as opposed to the rough draft) of “Variations on a Theme”, which, so far, has gotten fairly decent comments from the one or two folks who have looked at it. I don’t like the title, though, and I’m unsatisfied with the ending, and I think I tried too hard in a couple of places. If you’re interested in reading it, drop me a line and let me know.
I also received a draft of part two of “A Thousand Times Before” from my friend Ed, and, along with some ideas that Jennifer gave me, I think that story has some Serious Potential. I probably won’t get to finishing that or finishing the first draft of “The Winds of Patwin County”, though, until December at the earliest. Because November, of course, is National Novel Writing Month, and I’ll be participating in that. My outline for The Outer Darkness, the novel I’ll be writing, is going slowly and with great difficulty, and I may simply scrap the whole thing and rework the entire storyline from scratch in a couple of days.
So, in summary: Life goes on, in spite of the randomness of animal health, the writing goes on. My goal is to be a full-time writer within five years, but I’ve got a long ways to go. I plan to write at least 2,000 words a day during November (so that I’ll have 60,000 words of The Outer Darkness done); hopefully, I’ll be able to write down some preliminary notes on a couple of stories as well: “Dracula Ate My Homework” and “Sunday Services”, but I won’t stress if I don’t.