Back to the Drawing Board

Twenty-four hours after writing a synopsis of my novel “The Hermit of Iapetus,” I’m having some moments of clarity.

Immediately after I wrote the synopsis, I noted a distinct absence of plot. There’s a lot about character there, but nothing that really says what happens to the character.

That has me worried. And relieved.

I’ve got a few things I’ve been toying with – most notably, why in the world did the Hermit leave Earth for Iapetus in the first place – and now, 24 hours later, I’ve got some ideas why. These are ideas that have been percolating for a while now, but it’s clear to me that the percolation has come to an end and it’s time to edit this baby to put more of a plot-thing into the book.

So chalk me up as a believer in the idea that writing a synopsis of your novel is an excellent way to identify its flaws.

Back to the drawing board.

Lost

Note: A little more novel babbling. Inspiration from being lost with the Scouts earlier this weekend.

Months lost, wandering over the ice. That is why I have so many refuges, crude but habitable, scattered over this battered globe.

You bring compasses and global positioning devices. Then you realize the compass points Saturn not north and the programmers of the GPS know nothing of the Voyager Mountains nor the ice and wax rills of Cassini Regio.

Circles. Walking in circles. Circles upon circles, following the wandering trails of the deer and moose. Recalling that when a bull or a buck is tired, they lower their heads and push through the brush. Pushing, pushing. Pushing through the cottonwoods that wobble as they pass and through the creepers that climb them and through the bramble of thorny paper bushes and rose hips and the purple berries that taste like burning.

You throw a spongy cottonwood log across a stream and find you're on a peninsula between two streams, the one now in your way far wider than the one you just crossed.

Somewhere not far is the road.

Somewhere not far is the road.

Do you track back to the river, trying not to make circles as you go, or do you press forward, hoping there are no circles to make as you go, maybe towards the road, maybe parallel to it, maybe, someday, bound to cross.

I have been lost for hours in the cottonwood river bottoms of the Snake. I have made circles over the lava fields, scanning for the, painted poles, thinking that if I climb that final ridge I will see the civility of a field of sage brush smooth, unbroken, and the truck - the friendly truck - waiting for me to come.

To go home.

To be lost on Iapetus is not a novel thing. Nor am I much frightened by it. Any more.

Again, Kleinman: Space is small; only the planets are big.

Ice is ice on Iapetus. Rock is rock. There are no dainty prints of deer, commanding prints of moose to follow. The only game trails off through the brambles or off over the cracked basalt at the base of that distant volcano are the ones you have made and when you are lost and you cross one of your own trails you freeze not knowing if when you made those tracks you were lost or aware of where you were going.

But then the truck has a flat tire, you have no jack and it doesn’t matter because you can’t get the spare tire released from its cage underneath the bed. And thus is life – from one sort of difficulty to the next.

Dugout Dick

NOTE: A bit more for the Hermit. Every hermit needs another hermit to despise.

Pick and shovel.

Pick and shovel.

Pick and shovel.

“Built my dugouts all with a pick and a shovel,” he said. “No dynamite. No drills. No cutters. And certainly no high-powered lasers.”

I grew tired of the frazzled hair, the greasy hats, the smells and the voice.

The voice.

Speech full of eeees and arrrs, kind of a mix between Walter Brennan and Dorothy’s Scarecrow. When he is not strumming the guitar or wheezing his loose teeth into his harmonica, he is talking, constantly talking, running his white face with his grubby black hands.

“Came here from Michigan, jumped a freight train in Nebraska, got here and there was nothing to build a house with but rocks, so I built a house of rocks. Sometimes I stacked ‘em. Sometimes I found some that fit together like a big ol’ jigsaw puzzle. Ya see I make my own shoes. I make them out of ol’ rubber tires, shingle nails, and . . . old shoes.”

I came to know there’s a fine line between making your own shoes and nailing rubber onto some old shoes and saying you make your own shoes.

The smells, one grows used to. They blend together like fine teas with other odors of my own sweat and the ancient dust and rock and ichors I melt to make my refuges. But when I work with the laser, above the whine and the explosion of sublimating rock, I hear the voice. And the ears never tune out. Unlike the nose, which can be ignored. The ears always listen and latch on to the annoying sounds and deliver them to the brain where the hatred and resentment begins to fester.

Don't be surprised. Every hermit needs another hermit to despise.

Sideshow.

Always the sideshow.

One does not expect a garrulous hermit. Then again, Dugout Dick is no hermit. He’s an entrepreneur, hermiting it up for the yobs who come to gbawp at him living in holes in the sides of a rough-cut mountain. Hermits do not sell cassette tapes of their wheezy singing, nor rent out their vacant dugouts to the curious for the night. They do not spin impossible yarns about ghost girlfriends just to keep the yokels interested so they’ll rent a room or drop something in the begging bowl, so to say.

A true hermit, with his greasy, wild hair, dirt-stained hands and reedy voice, says go away.

I suppose that is why I have selected Iapetus. It is rare indeed for me to have anyone to say go away to. And if they don’t go away, I walk away from the transmitter or computer. I don’t shut it off; true hermits want to let those they shun know they’re being shunned.

Dugout Dick, however, won’t take a hint.

He will not go away.

Fortunately, he favors the kilometer-high cliffs at Engelier, and I have since abandoned the refuge I built there. It is for him and his ghostly bride-who-never-was.

And for his damn pick and shovel.

Book Extras

So I'm hoping to take advantage of time off from work this Christmas to work on a few book extras, namely a map for the Hermit of Iapetus, plus the startings of a book trailer. Yes, I need to do a lot of editing as well, but I'm going to let the book sit untouched a while longer before I jump into that.

First, the map:

Then the book trailer. Here's a rough cut at the storyboarding:

Hoping to get my son, who loves to draw cartoons, to so some cartoony drawing for the book trailer. I had half thought of taking the video camera out to Hell's Half acre to do some recording of my own, but I don't have a chance of getting any footage that would be halfway serviceable. So it's cartoons.

The song might be the problem. I'm going to have to find out who has the copyright for San Antonio Rose. And I'm probably going to have to steer away from the Patsy Cline version which, of course, is a damn shame.



(Yes, there is a version of her singing live. However, it's terrible. She's much better in this studio cut.)

Chapter Something: The Esses and Ems of Progress

NOTE: Something that struck me this morning for the Hermit of Iapetus.

Because I have read a lot of science fiction, I know how this is supposed to go.

It comes in varying patterns, but what is typical is a scientific and cultural renaissance that follows a long period of technological and societal darkness – most likely with fingers pointing squarely at the Twentieth century, as if the authors have knowledge of all there was and all there is to come.

The renaissance in technology is supposed to usher in the renaissance in culture and bring with it peace, prosperity, and progressivism.

I call it pee cubed.

I am proud to say that my presence on Iapetus owes nothing to a period of enlightenment following a period of darkness. It owes much to a society of stubborn plodders who saw a problem, studied it, tackled it, and, over generations, refined the techniques used to surmount the problem until it was no longer a problem or even a major inconvenience.

I am thus not a product of some technological Enlightenment, but of a society that worked through its difficulties one by one, slowly, taking steps forward and steps back, finding new troubles along the way but generally working on a slow upward curve.

Also note: I am not here because I, myself, am at the aegis of any technological renaissance. I am of only average intelligence, if above average desire to flee. I am here because I had a little money and the ability to persuade those in power -- and those with power but not of it -- to get me here.

I am here, alone, free, comfortable and able to care for myself, not because society back home is progressive or empowered or emboldened or labeled with any adjective with multiple esses and the ems of progress. I am here because the technology existed to get me here, and I chose to come.

I am also here because there are problems that technology cannot fix. But that is a story for a different day. Or at least a story for a different chapter. Of, perhaps, a different book.

Again this Contest?

Finished National Novel Writing Month a day early this year, with a few words to spare. And I immediately edited some of the words out. Sometimes the story's done before 50,000 words.

On to other things: Anyone want to read a novel about a guy who goes crazy while he's wandering the surface of Iapetus alone -- with the ghosts of Richard Nixon, Jack Kennedy, and Bebe Rebozo? (And my wife thought my Nixon obsession would never pay off.) Let me know if you want to read it.

Tricky Dick

NOTE: An experimental excerpt from the novel I'm currently working on.

“My mother was a saint,” he said. “Probably nobody will write a book about her. But she was a saint.”

I sat with him on a greasy rock, overlooking the lapping waves.

Suit coat, back home. But still the proper dark blue windbreaker, tie, wing-tip shoes. “Just because you’re on the beach,” he said, “is no reason not to look presidential. You never saw Kruschev in swimming trunks. And Brezhnev, well, you wouldn’t want to. All that dark hair.”

We sat on the greasy rock, overlooking the lapping waves.

The lapping waves.

The lapping waves.

See? It is meaningless.

Meaningless.

We fed the squirrels, while their cows grazed on the sawgrass.

“Quite the little herd,” he said. “Never knew cattle could eat sawgrass, but,” he said, glancing at the sun-dappled sea, then up into the black of space where Saturn and its visible moons and rings danced in the same sunlight, “guess they’ve got to eat what’s available, right?”

“Yes, that seems correct,” I said.

“Damn this tapioca, though,” he said. “It’s terrible. Might as well have flies in it; couldn’t taste any worse.” He dropped his spoon back into the little hollow in the stone we sat on, from where he had been spooning the pudding into his mouth. I looked at it. Though spoonable, it was as dusty and unattractive as the grease we sat on, the grease that did not appear to stain his suit, but left mine oozing a black ichor for weeks, even after I washed it. I picked up the spoon and poked at the stuff. It was reddish-black, the color of burnt toast spread with burnt raspberry jam. When I pulled the spoon from the muck, a long strand stretched form the rock to the spoon, finally snapping when it was about a meter long.

“I miss the challenge,” he said. “The fight. You know what they wanted me to do,” he asked.

“No,” I said, putting the spoon back in place. “I do not know.”

The dog danced in the surf, barking at the foam.

“Diplomacy in hell. Literally, in Hell itself,” he said. “My grandmother, Almira Milhous, she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“But I did it. Studied it out. Read everything I could about it. Do you know that Mormons don’t really believe in Hell like the rest of us do?” he said. “Very few people go to Mormon hell. The rest of us, we all go to heaven, though heaven’s divided like a three-story building. Sartre said hell was other people. The Mormons say hell is knowing you could have done better.”

He clasped his hands, and his head drooped. He fumbled with his fingers for a moment as the dog barked in the surf.

“You don’t have to say it,” I said.

“I say it every day,” he said.

We stared into the surf for a while, watching the dog leap as the waves rolled gently in.

“We lived in the same house,” I said, after a long silence. “She did her thing. I did mine. We got along well, so I thought we were happy. It’s what happens when one hermit marries another – you forget. You forget there’s togetherness.”

More lapping waves.

More lapping waves.

So peaceful. Regular. And calming.

The sea, is a hermit. Though it girths the world, though it is filled with plants and animals making love and reproducing and birthing and dying and rotting away and being eaten or hunted, it is a hermit. It is alone. If something small within it dies, it moves along. The waves keep crashing to the shore.

“The world moves along,” he said, finally looking up, back to the sea and the sun. “No matter what you do, the world keeps turning. Night turns to day, day turns to night. The stars fade as the sun rises, reappear as it sets. And the colors,” he said. “Oh, the colors. Red and orange on the clouds, rippling from the horizon on that sine wave of differing pressures. And mackerel skies, patches of indigo, purple, blue, and that delicate pink you see only in the sky. I’ve never seen it reproduced anywhere else.”

“It moves along,” he said. “Rain falls on the just and the unjust. And the sun, it will always rise.”

Lapping waves.

Lapping waves.

“What is it,” he asked. “What is it that finally happened?”

I sighed.

“I tell people,” I said, “it’s because she said she could tell the difference between butter and I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.”

He laughed. “And they buy that?”

“Not really,” I said. “But it’s the tale I tell.”

Making an Atlas

This is the kind of thing a guy does when he wants to make sure what he's writing about Iapetus is accurate. Or at least as accurate as I can make it. Hopefully I'll have a complete atlas here in a few days. Then I get to start making up my own stuff. I hope. I wonder into how much detail the official maps go. I wonder if it really matters, as long as I leave the big stuff alone.

Who's More Foolish?

This is a foolhardy thing to do, given that I’m the sole writer at work now, that the overtime at work is putting me a bit behind in my grading at BYU-Idaho, but it’s going to happen no matter what: I’m doing National Novel Writing Month again this year.

On par with my commitment with Yershi the Mild, NaNoWriMo implies that I will write a 50,000-word novel (a fairly short one) in 30 days. For those of you interested in critiquing the work, you can join me at the Targhee Writers Blog, where I will share snippets and such. I may occasionally post a bit here – if I can actually write something decent – but most of it will be under Internet lock and key so I don’t surrender my first publishing rights to the world at large.

Starting out by cheating a little, stacking the deck in my favor, by working on The Hermit of Iapetus. I don’t feel bad starting out with some words in place, as at this point it’s more of a collection of thoughts and ideas than even a rough draft of a novel, so there’ll be some refining and stitching along the way that will make the guilt go away pretty fast.

This novel makes me a bit nervous, however. Even though I just went where the story took me with Yershi the Mild, it’s different with the Hermit – because he’s not really going anywhere. He’s schizophrenic, or at least he thinks he is, and lives alone on a remote moon of Saturn, or at least he thinks he does. He might or might not have a son who joins him, or he just might have Richard Nixon as a companion. Honestly, this could go anywhere, and that wide-openness is a bit unnerving. Too much wandering by the author and the readers will wander off as well. If they haven’t already. You have to ask yourself: Who is more foolish? The novel character or the author who follows him?

I do have a cover, though. It went together fairly easily. As is probably evident:

What I need to do is look at the freewheeling possibilities here and have fun with them. Here’s a chance to write a novel that’s not formulaic (like the one I’m reading now; more on that later this week if I can actually finish the awful thing).

To Be That Dog

Betimes I hear the waves.

At Carcassonne Terra, the ocean.

The dust and rocks are caressed by light, washed by water under the stars grown pale as Saturn rises, suddenly, like the tropical moon. The water is ink capped with white foam, for there is no blue in the sky to reflect off the water to give it its customary, illusory hue.

I blink and the waves and surf is gone, leaving the dust and rocks drier than bone, approaching dampness from the other side. There are ices; exotic caves filled with frozen pools, stalactites caught mid-drip. But though they know the light of the distant sun, there is nothing here that will melt them, not even the touch of a human hand, because this ice cannot be touched bare.

A man.

Sometimes he is there with a cocker spaniel, who leaps into the surf and emerges, grinning, dripping, to shake the water and sand from its fur.

Sometimes he is there alone, walking the beach at the surf line.

I blink and he is gone.

I blink and he is there again.

He waves to me.

Incongruity: He is there in a suit. Dark blue to match the hue of the seas of Earth, dark blue to blend with the black seas of Iapetus.

He is there to be at ease, to enjoy the sun, to feel the wind’s caress, to walk on sandy soil that crushes and slides underfoot – which are in black wing-tips.

He waves to me.

His is a friendly face.

I have seen others on the beach, clad in trunks, or bikinis, sometimes nothing at all. But they do not notice me. They never notice me, nor wave, nor smile, nor glance at the funny man standing far up the shoreline, far from the water, far from the line where sand meets water. That man, that incongruity, they must think, does not exist. He cannot exist for he is not one with the environment he imagines.

But this man.

He waves to me.

Betimes, I hear him, in a croaky voice, declare “Hello, young man. Fine day to be out in the sun! Walk a bit in the surf. It will do you a great deal of good. Fellows like you and I need a bit of relaxation.”

So I walk with him. I walk with him and the spaniel dog. I walk with him, him in his blue suit and tie and white shirt and combed hair; I in my worn space suit, stained with the dust borne in the blinks when the smiling, jocular, quiet man isn’t there with his dog nor the surf nor the breeze nor the feel of the hot sun on the skin that I remember. I remember that feel. It is the universe entering your body. It is the universe saying hello, from millions of miles away.

“How long have you lived here?”

So many questions.

But he is in earnest, not caring that the water sloshes over the tops of his wing tips, wetting his black socks. His interest reminds me of the feel of sun on my skin. Quickly, I leave behind the grunts, the monosyllabic responses, and we converse.

His father owned a lemon ranch, he said. “Poorest lemon ranch in the state of California, I assure you,” he said. “He sold it before they found oil on it.”

I told him of my father’s dreams, his voyages across the globe, looking for his dreams to come true.

“I had to leave Earth to find my dreams,” I said.

He smiled. “Have you found them? Your dreams?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded. “Dreams are elusive things. I went from a small town in California to New York, then to Washington to find my dreams,” he said, his face darkening. “I saw many things on the way. Many places. Met many wonderful people."

"And some rotten bastards, too,” he added.

“When it gets too much, I come to walk on the beach,” he said.

Leadership must have hung heavily on his shoulders, I said.

“Oh,” he said with a sigh. “Sometimes it did. But do you know what hurt worse? Chasing those dreams. Always chasing them, rarely catching up. Because you catch one dream, you find it has spawned another, more quick, more alert, more active and elusive. And you want it. You want it so bad you forget you’ve just caught a dream and go after it. You leave that other dream on the side of the trail, its blood not yet run cold, and you go after the other. You run. You leap. You whoop and holler when you careen down the mountainside, slipping on rocks, tripping over stones, getting hit in the face with branches. But you still run. You still run after that dream. And when you catch it, there’s the tail of another, bigger dream just disappearing over the next ride. You run after that one, leaving the second dream cooling on the trail.”

“I’m a rotten bastard, to be a slave to my dreams,” he said. “Always running towards the sunset but never stopping to watch the sun rise. Thinking dreams are more important than, than those marigolds. Or spending time walking on the beach with my dog.”

“And you get tired after a while, chasing dreams,” he said.

“That’s why I like the beach,” he added, after a long silence.

“On the beach, there are no dreams. There is only now. There is only the water coming in, the water going out. And if you’ve brought your dog to chase, rather than your dreams, oh, it’s fine. It’s fine to run after that dog, because the dog looks back at you as you’re running, and it’s got that tomfool grin on its face, and if you get tired, that dog comes running back to you, noses your hand, keeps nosing it and nosing it and nosing it until you give it a pat, and that grin comes again. And as soon as you’ve caught your breath, it’s off and running again, jumping over waves as they crash, sniffing at the seaweed, and oh,” he said, his voice choking. “Oh, to be free like that dog, worried only about what’s happening now. Never worried about the future. Never feeling guilty over the past.”

He stood on the beach a long while after that speech, watching the dog run, not caring as he surf washed over his soaked feet.

“Oh,” he said. Clenching and unclenching his fists. The fists were not bellicose. It was if he was pumping his blood with his hands and the squeezing kept him upright, standing there in the surf, watching the dog run.

“Oh,” he said. “To be that dog.”