Read Everything. Write Everything.

I’m reading right now a little book that, in the wider publishing world, would probably never have gone to print.

Not that it’s bad. It’s entertaining. And educational.

But the storytelling therein isn’t a slick or polished as traditional publishing would have it be. So it wouldn’t be a go. It’s the kind of book some of the locals pick up and read because they or a family member or relative may be mentioned in it, but it might lack a wider audience.

Which is wrong. So wrong.

Because everything ought to be written down.

And even if the things written down aren’t as polished as they could be in the hands of another writer, what is preserved could be the germ of an idea. A springboard for a different kind of story. Or a mine for the little details that, say, a big-city writer might not know about small-town life. Or vice-versa.

The book in question is “Life Among the Lava Beds,” by Leonard Stephenson. I picked it up at a local thrift store because a quick glance showed me it was by a semi-local author (I live about two hours north of its setting, lava Hot Springs, Idaho) and I love to read bits by local authors. And in what pages I’ve read I can see a genesis of other Idaho writers, notably Patrick F. McManus, who made a great career retelling stories and exaggerations about his childhood. Stephenson, with a bit more practice and polish, could be southern Idaho’s analog to one of Idaho’s more famous and folksy writers. (The biggest flaw I can see is that there’s a lot of telling, but only a modicum of showing in Stephenson’s stories. With a bit more flair for presentation and a bigger poetic license, he could take his stories a lot farther.)

I’ve got settings and story ideas that could go somewhere. Except I don’t know where to take them. Looking at what authors like Stephenson write can open windows into a different world, one my characters could populate.

And I’m not talking about outright literary theft. That would be dishonest, and a disservice to this author. But I am talking about inspiration and ideas. What kinds of mischief could my characters get up to? So far, I’ve read about Stepehson’s experiences as an eight-year-old on a cattle drive, or being bored to tears helping harvest raspberries. Taken the general idea – cattle drives and berry-picking – gives my characters places to play and expand. Had Stepehnson not written them, and had I not been lucky enough to find his little book, I might not have thought of such ideas.

Is this theft? No. Because if drawing inspiration from other writers is theft, then Mr. Stephenson had better be ready to hear from a lot of other writers who wrote of cattle drives and berry-picking before him. Inspiration is drawing on the bigger ideas or themes. Theft is taking the little details.

It’s quite possible I’ll never be published. But maybe some writer will look at a useless blog posting of mine and find inspiration. That would be neat.

Outlining – Again – to the Rescue

Above: How I feel when I get new ideas for a novel I'm working on.

I was once worried that I’d cut Doleful Creatures down too much.

I’m now north of 81,000 words and I’ve got a lot of story to write; I’m now worried it’s bloating up again.

But as I keep on saying, there’s a lot of story left to write. And to make this re-write more efficient, I’m resorting to my most hated of writing tasks, again: outlining.

So here’s what I’ve got to do to finish this thing up. Some of it is already done, but a lot of it is not:

Beavers, Jarrod, Chylus, Aloysius and the hawks at the dam. They start building.

Man in the Rock blown out of the second cliff, down creek, settles into the lady’s world in a deep pond.

The lady on the way, searching, knowing her realm has been found, but cannot sense entrance, nor where J&A are.

Magda comes to dam, lets them know the lady is on the way. They beg her to go back for a diversion so they can get into her realm first to see if they can do something to stop whatever nefarious mischief she’s up to or could do if she finds her way in.

Magda goes, Chylus is reluctant to have her go, but he is needed in the realm.

Magda off to fight the lady with animals she can find, the sparrows come to help.

The lady sense J&S finally, but is stopped on her way by Magda and company. She calls her starlings for help.

J&A penetrate into the realm, talk with the elephants.

Battle rages. The lady fights her way through and finds an entrance to the realm.

Below, Man in the Rock and the others on various tasks. Man in the Rock talks with the shadow of the lady left. Others foment rebellion among the captive animals.

The lady arrives, absorbs her shadow and grows in strength.

Silence of the animals and their departure causes her power to shrink and she fades, becomes itty-bitty snake.

Denouement

Even this outline has some serious writing nuts to crack. What, exactly, does the Lady hope to do once she’s back in her realm, deep underground in the dark with a bunch of cranky animals? Why couldn’t she go there whenever she wanted? Maybe the magpies blocked her off? But they how did Jarrod and his kind get out? Are they the canary in the mine as far as nasty uncorporeal entities invading Earth? I just don’t know. Plot creep, I suppose. But it’s better than a revision ago, when I didn’t have much of a plot to speak of.

What’s more frightening: I think I’ve got to go back and edit at least one more time again anyway, in order to more fully develop the characters of Chylus and Jarrod. It’s funny to see Jarrod really taking a back seat to other characters, seeing as he started out as the main bird. Subsequent rewrites, however, have helped me develop other characters as I saw how they fit better into the story. In doing so, however, I’ve neglected my main character and his corvid sidekick. So back to the drawing board for them.

Given what I’ve got to write, I won’t be surprised if this book hits 90,000 words before the end.

Then I have to find more beta readers to help me before this book takes over. As if it hasn’t already.

IT . . . COULD . . . WORK!

I sent myself this somewhat cryptic email after I received a bit of inspiration on how to make Doleful Creatures a better novel:

Both j and a lose spouses in first beaver death. Rest of story shows how j and a work thru guilt and mutual animosity over deaths. A goes to the lady to try to free his beloved, go far himself there instead. Jarrod flies higher and higher to find her, to say himself there.

Thru man in rock and cave somehow they are,able to communicate 26th lived one's at end.

I'm thinking this about it now:



If only I could figure out what I meant by the 26th. . . 

Sounds About Right

When Inspiration Strikes . . .

This is one of the reasons I enjoy having a Kindle Fire -- I've got an instant little spot, if the battery isn't dead, to record what little inspiration comes my way.

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.

Getting Past the Undesireable Chairs

Finally

After nearly a year farting about with things, I’ve finally started revising “The Hermit of Iapetus.”

In part, I’m reluctant to do so because I’m certain I’ll find out just how bad it is. But at the same time, that’s good news, as letting this much time pass has thrown in some emotional distance from the story and I can see where it needs help. Lots of it. Now.

I still need a strategy, though. I’ve taken notes. Lots of notes on things I want to fix. And I’ve got a lot of mental notes as well, including doing a lot more research, particularly in reading Roald Amundsen’s journals from his Antarctic voyage in full before proceeding too far.

But I’m making progress. Progress is good.

I’m at a crossroads with my writing. I want to finish something, particularly with only two months now before NaNoWriMo 2013 starts. I’m indecisive on whether to participate this year. Part of me really wants to write another novel this year. Another part says, um, you’ve got at least four novels for which you’ve done the first draft, and nothing’s come of any of them. Maybe finishing one of them before you start another is a good idea. But then it hits me: Writing one while editing another might also be a good thing.

Add to that I’m teaching two classes again this semester.

Add to that I’m changing church callings (more on that in a few weeks) and it’s not going from something tough to something easy, let me tell you. Though it is going from something uncomfortable to something more preferable. No undesirable chairs here.

 

So I’ll soldier on with the edits, and, I think, participate this November as well. Might as well stay busy, right?

Oh Boy! 3 AM!

It’s the kind of thing you hear about. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to puke.

Inspiration. Fine and dandy if it comes to you, smug if it comes to others. And in such ways it comes to them. Like this:

So here's the dream that had me awake a few minutes before the alarm this morning: Two feuding New England towns, divided by the ice trade that plies the lake that lies between them, are giddy with delight as the feud nears an end due to the impending marriage that will join the two rival ice houses. There is ice skating and rabbit raising for all -- until he returns. He, of the black suit, thin mustache and uncompromising nature, is the one who terrorized the bride-to-be as a child by daily smearing her with his peanut-butter-encrusted fingers (I know the historical timing is a bit off, can't help that) way back in grade school. His presence in town upsets the wedding plans, thaws the ice and causes the rabbits to go all runty. Will the towns' plan to run him out on a rail succeed before their villages are back to feuding? Will he once again smear the bride-to-be? Or will they go off to raise rabbits of their own?

It’s also a musical.

Of course, since I’m fine and dandy with this, you bet your boots this inspiration came to me.

Now, where did it come from?

Partly this. One of my favorite documentaries, all about the cold, including a bit on Frederic Tudor, the so-called “Ice King,” who pioneered commercial ice delivery by harvesting ice off ponds in frozen New England. He became one of America’s first millionaires when being a millionaire meant something. So that’s in the background.

I’m not sure where the peanut-butter came from.

So yes I’m going to write this. Not now; I’ve got other projects in the hopper. Nice to have an idea in the can, though.

This is Why I Read

Inspirations from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking.”

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed “There goes a Saint-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy Lander.

. . . vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

You do have to go to the Holy Land.

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

. . . not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

Walker Errant – is what the Hermit calls his little robotic wagon.

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character – will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.

This is why he wanders – to get away from those certain impressions.

I would forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is – I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Mind should be where the body is.

There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.

Wife says you don’t have to wander farm from home. This is inside the letter in the spacesuit he abandons on the regio.

Politics are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the enjoyment of it.

More for the letter from his wife.

The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun.

THIS WAS THE HEROIC AGE ITSELF

Graffiti he marks constantly on the surface of Iapetus.

Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoah!” to mankind?

One of the Hermit’s favorite sayings.

Actinism – the power of the sun’s rays to degrade rocks and metal – but that the rock and metal can restore during the nighttime.

The Hermit thinks a lot on this topic.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste – sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill – and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.

Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry.

Why he runs – he is fearful is brain is dying, that his life has no meaning, that he has no great thoughts.

When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,” – and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

The Hermit hallucinates the calls of roosters, except during times of crisis? Or especially during crises?

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever ha has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

Plus a little bit from Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street:

The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than the girl librarians she knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago.

“Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God, we don’t have to go purr at Juanity Haydock and the Jolly Old Seventeen."

The Hermit calls his favorite refuge Swede Hollow, and there’s some kind of mountain range he calls the Jolly Seventeen.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day.

The Hermit says this to would-be interviewers.

She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonpalceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. IT had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.

And a little from Carl Sagan:

Carl Sagan says the Earth is the shoreline of the cosmic ocean. I am going for a swim. But not a swim. I am barely standing on the wet sand, among the sticks, seaweed and twigs left behind by the ebb tide. Saturn lays a billion miles from that cosmic shore, but as I stare outwards toward the heliopause, I can see the tide gushing out, gushing out, leaving bare the mud and sand and rocks and sunken treasures of the solar system. The water of the cosmos recedes, welling into a tsunami of stars and dust and heat and cold and dark matter and comets and atoms that ever threatens to crash but always, always recedes until I am dizzy merely watching it, merely feeling the barest bits of moisture on my sand-encrusted toes.

Hm. Just Like the Books I Write

The Democracy of Ebooks

If you’d have talked to me two years ago, you probably would have heard me say I’d never read an ebook in my life.

But, as you know, things change.

Today, though I still tend to favor printed books over their electronic cousins, I have read a fair share of ebooks. 

And I’m learning more from them than I ever would have from a printed book. Not necessarily as a reader, mind you – but as a writer. 

Part of it I chalk up to maturity, to an increased awareness of the raw mechanics of writing a good book, brought on by trying to write good books of my own. But most of it, I chalk up to the electronic medium itself, and the ease with which unpublished authors become published through it. 

Electronic books certainly have a more “You wrote it, you publish it” vibe. There are fewer gatekeepers – for both good and bad. It’s easy to tell, for example, that in writing her first book, J.K. Rowling had more assistance from editors than with her later books (or at least a lot less leeway with those first books). There are pauses for explanation in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone you don’t see as much in her latter works. 

Then there’s A Place Beyond the Map, by Samuel Thews, an electronic book I’ve just finished reading. Thews, though he writes a good tale, needs more of that editor’s subtle touch. And that need goes beyond the occasional use of passive voice, the misspellings (Thews has characters cheer “Here, here,” rather than “Hear, hear,” at one point; he also misspells the name of his enchanted land at least once) and into the trickier realms of characterization and pacing, which is where I struggle the most as well. In missing the little things, perhaps ebook writers miss the bigger things as well. 

Not to say that Thews is a bad writer – he actually crafts a good tale, but one that could have been better with a bit more help from a disinterested third party. Maybe what we need is a collective of individuals ready and willing to read, for free, each others’ books before they’re published, to offer critiques, advice; kind of like J.R.R. Tolkein’s Tea Club and Barrovian Society, or, more appropriately, the Inklings. Surely there’s got to be something like this around (NaNoWriMo has meetings locally; I should go check them out.) I did find this, where a former co-worker (published) writes. I’ll have to check them out.

Reading these published ebooks and noting their good and bad points helps me, as an author, recognize what’s got to happen in my own writing before I hit that publish button, which surely I will without the help of a publisher, likely without the help of a paid editor. A bit of “There, but for the grace of God, go  I.”

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.

A Dying Art Form

And with that, we bid adieu to Alice and Petey Otterloop, the best comic strip pair to walk out of the newspaper pages since Linus and Lucy.

Few comic strip artists -- and I mean few; I think only Charles Schulz understands children, or at least the oddly adult way kids think they understand themselves and this world they live in, as well as this -- ever capture the essence of childhood ekeing out an existence in the adult world as well as Mr. Richard Thompson.

Mr. Thompson is giving up the comic strip business with some reluctance today, as he fights Parkinson's disease -- a cruel disease no matter who gets is, but crueler still for one who relies on brain and hand to create such art.

Having three kids of my own, I know they approach understanding this world through different lenses than adults. They may have an adult grasp of concepts and consequences, but there's always something oddly childish about their interpretation of those consequences and how they may apply in situations where an adult wouldn't see them at all, as we see Alice here bringing so much angst to the comics pages.

This rerun of Thompson's is a fitting end to his strip. If only it didn't have to end.

Ghosts

I read it in a book, so it must be true: When interplanetary travel becomes commonplace, the bounds of Earth will cease to pull on the hearts of men.

We are natural explorers, the futurists urge. Cite the Vikings. Cite Columbus. And cite the unlikely Gagarin, Armstrong, and those who followed from the groundbreaking to the routine.

Explorers all.

My great-grandfather felt like that.

He wrote, expansively, in his journals, of his time as a soldier in the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia – he was not a colonialist himself; he was just there to fulfill required national service and spent his money, with a compatriot, on local food. He once demonstrated how to cross a river and keep his gun dry at the same time by leaping into the current, gun held high over his head. He lost his footing, was swept away, nearly drowned, and, of course, lost his rifle.

Then he emigrated to the United States, once his service was done, and left the green of Indonesia and the green of the Netherlands for the dusty tawny grey of the high desert of eastern Idaho.

His home became a beacon to other Dutch immigrants, settling in the unlikely place of New Sweden, a jovial Dutchman surrounded by taciturn Swedes.

And still he explored.

He wandered the desert steppe, explored caves, climbed mountains and followed creeks from where they chortled into the lava sinks and back up into the mountains where they drained tiny lakes held in the granite scree.

And still he explored.

Farm prosperous, he willed it early to his oldest son and traveled to the far southern reaches of Australia, where he discovered the green of his youth.

There he died, aged 102, on a wild night of storms, chasing sheep, trying to bring them back to the barn.

The family still holds deeds to his properties in trust.

I have no deed to add.

But I have deeds.

It is written in the book:

“There are no ghosts in this place. Those who gathered here once were already voyaging on in spirit, even as they sat here, eager to be gone. They have left nothing of themselves behind.”

But the bemmy Zicti, in Andre Norton’s “The Last Planet,” told a lie. There were ghosts left behind, ghosts who came to worship at the Place of Leaving once a year, to worship the gods who left them behind. Those left behind fell into primitive barbarity, though the gods left functioning cities filled with wonders and robots and flashing lights behind.

But I tell a lie. The primitives are not the ghosts of the gods.

The gods – the mortal explorers of the outer stratospheres – left no ghosts. Those who stayed behind chose to remain. Later on, perhaps, there were some who grew ashamed of their staying – maybe through cowardice, or avarice, they realized they sold their birthright for an uncluttered world.

And perhaps, in their cocoons of steel and plastic, or as they tramped the wonders of their new-found worlds, the gods of the outer stratospheres thought regretfully not of those left behind, but of things they took for granted when they lived on their good green earth. Sky of a certain blue, never achieved again no matter how many worlds they visited.

Petrichor never the same. Artesmichor of the desert never achieved again.

They left no ghosts.

Only regrets.

And as they gaze across the sky into the stars, perhaps, with their youngsters, pointing out the star around which their home world orbits, orbits, orbits, their youngsters – and their youngsters youngsters – wonder why they ever left such a wonderful, magical place as that for some orb as common as the one they trod upon.

The bounds of earth are weak.

The bounds of regret, of knowing the unknown, can never be severed and grow only stronger as distance is achieved.

Every Day's A Good Day With Your Paint

Those folks who brought us a singing, philosophical Mr. Rogers now present a singing, philosophical Bob Ross.




Every day is a good day with your paint. Or, in my case, my words. I will push myself to become one of these people uninhibited by what the world thinks of my talents, and just develop them.

Mr. Rogers. Still Brilliant.

A Writer for Writers

One of the disadvantages of building a library almost exclusively from thrift store finds and free ebooks is I don’t often find books by the authors I’m really curious to read. Yes, I could resolve that problem simply by buying new books (that would certainly make the authors and publishers happy and I certainly hope the same happens when I publish), but I’m a poor slob. So I was pretty excited when I saw a Lois Lowry hardback on sale this weekend for $2 at a thrift store. Messenger is the third in I guess what is being called the “Giver” trilogy.

I loved The Giver. I’ve got a weak spot for dystopia and to read one in which many progressive ideals (rather than conservative stasis) is skewered is a treat. (Not that I’m overly conservative or anti-progressive; I happen to sag quite happily in the middle.) Messenger hits a nice, middle-of-the-road tone that I find quite striking.

Lowry’s style impresses as always. I’m intrigued at her ability to bring in the mundane to a story to help it jump off the page. She’s there with vivid imagery and great characters and brisk plotting, but it’s the little details she adds that make her stories go so far.

“I remember all the fish, the feeling that they would never end. I felt that I could drop my line in again and again and again and there would always be fish. Now there aren’t. But, Leader . . .”
Leader looked at him and waited.

“Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem father. The first time I came here through Forest? The journey seemed forever.”

“It does take days, Matty, from where you started.”

“Yes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn’t seem as far or as long. Because I’m older, and bigger, and I’ve gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and Im’ not scared. So it seems shorter.”

Leader chuckled. “And the fish?”

"Well,” Matty acknowledged, “there don’t seem to be as many. But maybe it’s just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless.”

This exchange has little to do with the plot or story, but it helps set character – and that’s what counts almost as much as the story itself. I try to emulate this in my own writing, with mixed results.

What I appreciate the most about Lowry is that she takes a fresh approach – or at least a fresh, spare writing style, to an old fantasy meme. This kind of getting-what-we-wish-for is a common staple of fantasy writers, and I love it when it’s handled well. Lowry handles hers subtly, leaving the reader in the dark but offering enough hints that the astute reader can generally figure things out and still be pleasantly surprised that he or she is right. And I don’t mind when authors handle this kind of device overtly; Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with the hall of mirrors and the merry-go-round handle the meme with a blunt overtness that swiftly carries you along for the ride.

Distance Achieved

I am here to testify that writing the first draft of a novel is easy.

How can I say that? Well, I've done it, for one. And now that I'm beginning the first deep editing of the thing, I can say safely that the editing process is going to be a lot tougher. And I'm not just talking about the 20,000 or so words that are going to be cut out of the novel. I can do that in swathes and sections, so it'll be pretty easy and I won't hurt the continuity of the story at all. But figuring out how to make the other 90,000 words sing, while also augmenting the story in parts and making things more cohesive in general, that's going to be the tough part.

Percolation is helping. I've been gathering little ideas, impressions here and there, things that I think, wow, I should add this to the story. What's also helping is this: Walking away from it and coming back to it with a dispassionate eye.

This is an old trick, one I've applied many a time before. Walking away from a bit of writing, then coming back to it, even after 48 hours or so, lets you see its many warts and bumps and faults. That's a critical tool for any serious writer to have in his or her toolkit. But this is the biggest by far bit of writing that I've walked away from.

Trick is now I'm seeing it as a whole, not as little bitty sections as I wrote them. Sitting down to read this as a story, not as blog posts, is helping me to get a more omniscient overview of the story and characters, and how I need to do a lot more structuring to make all the little pieces fit together better to make the story overall more enjoyable. I realize there are plot elements I can extend, some that I need to drop entirely, and others that need to be explained just a bit more to help the reader -- and myself -- understand why I included them in the first place. Right now the plot and storyline is a little crooked road. I need to straighten the spine up a little bit and then trim the branches to make sure I can see the tree for the forest I've hidden it in.

So what's next? Well, with winter coming on, my goal is to have the first deep edit of this novel completed by the end of the year. I know I'm going on three years working on this novel, but the distance achieved this year by setting it aside (technically longer than I intended to at first) is going to be time well spent because I can see more the things that need to be fixed. With a good deep edit done, I'll feel better shopping this around in 2012.

The Terrazzo Jungle

Stumbled across Malcolm Gladwell's 2004 piece, "The Terrazzo Jungle," from the New Yorker today. I'm not a habitual New Yorker reader, but the subject of this article -- Southdale, the nation's first enclosed shopping mall -- still enthralls. This piece actually helped inspire "Slouching Towards Bensonville," the perennial I'm still working on that one novel.

It is, if I can be so bold, an ambitious book. I've got a few characters fleshed out, but not much of a plot at the moment, which is why this one is on the back-burner for a while. Still, when I read snatches of it, I feel there's something there I've got to keep working on.

It is by far the novel I've researched the most. That might be part of why it's still stalled. "Considering How to Run" took a little research, but it's nowhere in the same league as "Slouching." Why that one got finished in a year and "Slouching" still sits is a mystery. Well, not that much of a mystery. "Considering" is the one I pulled out and worked on, while the other has just sat there. Now both sit there, waiting for me to come along and finish. Maybe re-reading "The Terrazzo Jungle" will help.

What Did He Say?

NOTE: Once again, this is the kind of high-quality blather you're missing not being a member of the Targhee Writers Blog. Send me an e-mail at misterfweem(at)yahoo.com to sign up.

The next bit of “Their Hearts Run Cold” is going to be either slow in coming or discombobulated with the rest of the novel and the one that preceded it. I’m going to try for the former, because the latter just begs to be fixed later, and why write something to be fixed later if I can write it correct right now?

It all comes down to the author needing to know his or her characters, their behavior, how they have responded in the past, while preparing the reader for how they might respond in the future.

It’s Seth and Altus. I’m trying to make them more in-depth. And to do that, well, Altus isn’t necessarily going to do something bad because he’s a bad guy, but rather something bad is going to happen despite him being a good guy after all. I just have to remember how much of a bad guy I’ve made him previously so his sudden flip-flopping can be explained. And do it without the customary twelve boxes of introductory material.

Used under the fair use doctrine for educational and commentary purposes.

This is important because if my characters act in contradictory ways, I want it to be purposeful, not because I’m a moron and forgot what one character did when I put them in a different situation. This is probably rudimentary to the best novel writers, but since I’m not a member of their august panel, I have to learn things the hard way.