Get me Re-Write!

I came *this* close to skipping NaNoWriMo this year.

Many problems, as I outlined in another post.

But I'm still doing it, though coming at it in a different way.

One of the reasons I gave for not participating this year was because I'd already started a novel I wanted to work on. At the last minute, however, I decided -- after reading the opening chapters of that novel -- that I loved it enough I wanted to save it, and that meant an extensive re-write. And I mean extensive -- so far, I've ditched at least half of the novel's first 8,000 words, replacing them with new ones that tie in later bits of the book better with the first.

Is that cheating?

Maybe in a way it is. But in a way, it's not. This will be a new novel once the end of November rolls around. There's a lot of potential in this book, but a lot that's buried under a bad beginning that's actually a beginning to a different book than the one that's coming out towards the end. So to re-write a novel, I think, is kosher, as there are many who go into NaNoWriMo with extensive outlines and such, which I do not have. I have a pile of lumber out of which I hope to construct a novel by the time the month is out.

I'm glad I'm doing it this way.

THAT'S MY SONG!

Good advice here.

I'm far too poor to pay for the right to use song lyrics in my novels. But the rough draft to The Hermit of Iapetus does have song lyrics in it.

So, what to do?

Establish the mood without quoting the words. Hint at the song, but don't quote it outright. Or maybe a line? I don't know.

 

Nope. Titles appear to be fair game. But not lyrics. Not even under fair use, according to this expert here.

 

So it's Get Creative Time. I can do that. Here's a sample:

 

At least this way, I don't run the risk of writing a novel in which the only good parts are those that are not original, with the original parts not being good. It'll just be mediocre all the way around.

NoNoWriMo 2013

I have waffled about this for a while, but I have decided not to participate in National Novel Writing Month 2013.

Does that make me a wiener?

I guess so.

But I’ve got a lot going.

I’m editing one of my novels right now. It needs a lot of intensive care. I don’t see writing another novel while this one (and others) lie bleeding as a good way to spend my time, when it can be better spend making something I’ve already got in the can better.

Secondly, I’m reading a friend’s novel right now. I’m hoping if I can get his read fast enough and thoroughly enough, he’ll return the favor. Seeing how someone else writes and thinking about how my suggestions to him can make my own writing better seems like a better way to spend my November than writing a new novel that’s going to need a lot of help.

Third, I’m a lot busier now. Just got called as Scoutmaster, and that’s going to eat up a lot of time and energy. Add that to a full-time technical writing job and a part-time job teaching English, and I’ve got a full plate.

Plus I’ve got three kids who need attention and help and support and encouragement.

I’ve got a novel I started earlier this year that’s still holding my interest. I don’t want to leave it to start a new one for NaNoWriMo. It’s got a lot of promise. But also needs a lot of TLC.

Yes, there are reasons to keep writing despite everything I’ve listed here. Really good writers or really ambitious writer would keep going, damn the distractions.

Well, I’m not a really good writer, nor an ambitious one. I’ve crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line twice. And it feels great. I’d like to concentrate on crossing the self-publishing finish line with something I’ve got, and that’s going to take some effort.

Here’s someone who feels like I do, complete with typos.

Neil Gaiman agrees with me as well. Or, rather, I agree with him: “It’s astonishing how much more cheerful a place the world becomes when you start to finish things.”

That’s exactly what I aim to do.

Scoutmaster Report: One Week In

In my first week as Scoutmaster, we got the boys through two activities and didn’t lose a single one of them.

First activity: The Haunting at Krupp Scout Hollow. Bedlam in the line waiting to get in. That was the scariest part: Standing there in the semidarkness amongst a gigantic knot of boys and leaders, hoping that as I scanned the boys darting past or wrestling on the ground that they were indeed my boys – no correcting behavior tonight; just counting them. The spook alley itself was anticlimactic.

Second activity, much more sedate: Nuclear Science merit badge pow-wow with the local chapter of the American Nuclear Society. Only three boys showed up – not bad for an off-night activity. All three earned their badges. Score.

This weekend, started on my goal of meeting with the scouts and their parents. Met with two scouts, both anxious to get their Eagles before they turn fourteen. I have mixed feelings on that, but I will keep my mouth shut, because it’s none of my business whether they want to do that or not. Later this week I will meet formally with my own son, whom I’ll have in the troop for the next few months. Debating on whether to visit with the boy who is moving on to Varsity Scouts in November. I may skip him. Not because I don’t like him or anything, but my goal in meeting with them is to see what they want to do in scouting – and if they’re moving on, the interview has little value.

Those meetings will eventually spread into calendaring. I sat down yesterday to sketch out a three-month calendar, and it actually turned into a calendar almost a year long. I’ve got some gaps to fill, and – more importantly – more input to gather, but it’s at least a start on something, right?

So once I complete the calendaring and my visits, I will have completed three of my Wood Badge tickets. That’s exciting stuff. And the good news is the other two will fall into place rather quickly. Not that they’re going to be easy to do – this meeting thing is a challenge for an introverted boob like me. But there’s lots of value here, certainly if I can get boys excited about helping me out with communicating with their parents and working in the two patrols.

There’s a neat thing – I had no idea our troop had any patrol organization, but it does indeed have it. I still think dividing the troop into two smaller patrols to help pass around the leadership opportunities is a good thing, and I know of at least one scout and one father who thinks that’s a good idea as well – and it’s not me and my son, which is even better news.

So I’ve got to figure out patrol training.

Don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, but also don’t want the boys to think I’m having them do busy work.

Part of the calendaring I’m doing, however, is to encourage patrol work. One week a month I’ve designated as “requirements catch-up day.” Ideally, the week before this happens, the patrols will meet to identify what each individual scout would like to work on that day. The patrol leader will gather that information and present it to the senior patrol leader, who will report to the scoutmaster. Each patrol quartermaster will make sure the necessary equipment is present at the catch-up meeting so things can get done. The quartermaster can either bring the materials or work with the scoutmaster and other leaders to ensure the materials are present. If a scout can’t think of something that needs to be worked on, the patrol leader will ask the scout to work with the scoutmaster to identify what needs to be done. Older, more experienced scouts will be encouraged to help those who have requirements to meet. This is, hopefully, a model of the “helpful laziness” Ralph Oborn encourages in scout leaders – meaning we’re not the sages on the stage, but there to assist if needed but more often than not just to fade into the background, letting the boys do the work.

Nixon [whispers] and Obama [back to loud] and Surveillance

There’s a new video out there by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others urging commoners to get very, very upset about warrantless surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency that, at first reading, left me very confused.

“We’ve seen this before,” says Daniel Ellensberg, whistleblower from the Rand Corporation who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Then, yes, we get to see Tricky Dick, in glorious black and white, cued along with sinister music.

And that’s it. More black-and-whites of the left’s favorite punching bag. But no context. Just the assumption that since the left regards Nixon as a villain, the EFF’s audience for this video – and just might who that be but perhaps the youngsters who will swallow it all without bothering to look for any historical context  – will know what connection Nixon has to warrantless surveillance. (Meanwhile, no sinister photos, black and white or otherwise, of Barack Obama, the current president currently presiding over the current surveillance dragnet we’re supposed to be upset about.)

Here’s where I say: Don’t get me wrong. Nixon was, in many ways, a villain. His administration’s prosecution of Ellensberg and its attempted prohibition on publication of the Pentagon Papers were wrong. That he was impeached and resigned over the subsequent Watergate investigation, in which paid White House spies tried to bug the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters is justified.

But making Nixon the sole identified villain in warrantless surveillance is, at the foundation of the argument, wrong. To make the accusation fair, we ought to be seeing black and white photos of Messrs. George W. Bush and Obama, along with their own creepy music, right alongside those of Tricky Dick. Leaving them out of the video effectively gives them a pass and fails to connect today’s younger audience, to whom Nixon is a historical figure they may have read about in the textbooks, with current administration abuses and rationalizations for continued abuse.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which has led to current surveillance abuses, started first during the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama administration came into being as a result of Nixon’s abuses of the Fourth Amendment as his administration pursued enemies using government entities (abuses also proved against Nixon predecessors Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy). The act was sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (featured in the EFF video) in 1977 and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the act has been amended and/or extended a few times. And abused many times, including by the White House’s Current Occupant.

But, of course, what was done by Bush and what is being done by Obama is all for our own good, you see:

Once a critic of President George W. Bush’s hawkish policies, Mr. Obama was ready with an explanation for why he has preserved and extended some of them when a reporter asked him at the health care event if he could assure Americans that the government was not building a database of their personal information. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

But he argued that “modest encroachments on privacy” were “worth us doing” to protect the country, and he said that Congress and the courts had authorized those programs.

A National Security Agency telephone surveillance program collects phone numbers and the duration of calls, not the content, he said. An Internet surveillance program targets foreigners living abroad, not Americans, he added.

“There are some trade-offs involved,” Mr. Obama said. “I came with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly.” In the end, he concluded that “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

That makes me feel all warm inside. “Nobody is listening to [our] telephone calls,” Obama says. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

My, my, my. Are we supposed to believe that? If it were Nixon saying, it, no way. But apparently, as far as the EFF and its supporters are concerned, President Obama gets a pass as long as we’ve got Dick Nixon to kick around. So, EFF, and Ellensberg, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Wil Wheaton, as you deliver proper umbrage over the surveillance state, be sure you’re not protecting anyone. Not even your bestest of best buddies.

What Nixon did was terrible. What has continued in the name of warrantless surveillance today is unpardonable (Hear that, Gerald Ford?). Leaving Bush and Obama out of the picture is like condemning the common cold without talking about the Spanish Flu.

We have this today from Georg Mascolo and Ben Scott at Slate.com:

[W]e’re left to confront was may be [Edward Snowden’s] most dismaying revelation: That basic expectation of private communications on the Internet is now commonly seen a fiction.

Also, per Mascolo and Scott, those foreign governments raising proper umbrage over US surveillance, are you prepared to come clean with the kinds of snooping y’all are doing? (Hear that, Germany and Brazil?) Glass houses, and all, folks. Glass houses.

Mascolo and Scott conclude their screed by saying this, and I echo what they say: “[J]ust as President Obama has declared his intention to end the war on terror, he should also take a strong interest in lending an effort to reset his policies on surveillance to restore the balance between security and liberty – and in so doing, restore some of the trust the Internet has lost.”

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.

Would You Read This?

Read the following synopsis and tell me -- and be honest -- would you read this book? I'm planning to use this synopsis to enter a get-your-book-cover-designed-for-free contest. Honesty is appreciated.

He traveled nearly 900 million miles to be alone.

But as he wanders the cratered, icy surface of Iapetus, he is besieged.

Tricky Dick marches on the shores of the Invisible Ocean, spaniel Checkers at his heels. Dugout Dick shares a refuge in the Carcassone Montes, wheezing breathlessly into his harmonica and banging his begging bowl on the tables. Patsy Cline and Andy Williams sing to him out of the darkness, accompanied by the hiss and thrum of the radio waves from Saturn’s rings. And cattle-riding squirrels infest the plains, interrupting his solitude with chatters and bellows.

Then there’s Gloria.

Sentinel of Ronceveaux Terra, staring Sunward with her old eyes, holding leashes to the memories that follow the Hermit of Iapetus these millions of miles from Earth.

She’s there at The Butcher Shop, eating Roald Amundsen’s dogs in an endless feast, underneath the umbrellas that protect them from Iapetus’ cyanide rains.

And his son is coming to join him. His long-lost son, whose mother forbade him contact. He is coming. With soap.

To be alone, the hermit discovers, is to bring his own demons with him.

Annihilator of Words

Call it political correctness, call it Big Brother-ish, or call it a lame-o topic for articles (and blog posts, how meta), there is much to be said for the annihilation of words.

Or not. But at least this comic strip about the concept is funny.

What words would I choose to annihilate, or, at least through the Otterloop Conundrum, render meaningless through endless repetition? Annihilate seems to be a good candidate. First of all, do you pronounce the H or not? Do those who pronounce the H sound pretentions, thus inciting the listener to wish they would be annihilated? Would the annihiliation of annihilate, uh, annihilate the unclear antecedent from the previous sentence, where we’re not sure whose annihilation we’re meant to celebrate? Or should I forget the whole thing and start over?

Scoutmaster

I don't quite know when this entry will be published, but it'll likely be sometime in September.

I don't really know why I'm writing it even, aside from getting a few thoughts down in the ethers while the moments are still fresh in my mind. So here goes.

I've been called as the new scoutmaster in our ward.

That set me to thinking: Scoutmasters. What to expect of scoutmasters. I knew only one scoutmaster when I was a scout: Scott Haroldsen, a builder and retired Denver cop who, dint of his former profession, had lots of stories to tell us about the "bad dudes." I don't recall a single one of them. I do remember being riveted by them, in a pre-teen sort of way. We also got to shoot his .45, which I shot once and decided I would never shoot one again.

Other recollections:

Going on a camping trip in the snow up beyond Kelly Canyon and watching him yank a pair of burning sneakers away from the campfire.

On that same trip, him confiscating some C-batteries out of a tape player (we had tape players back then, kids) and throwing them into the woods because we weren't supposed to be listening to music while camping.

Other leaders, of course, came along, but not for scouts. There was Eric Haroldsen (some relation, I'm sure) who took us camping at Lake Leigh in Wyoming and introduced us to poker and swimming in the rain.

I've been on a few camping trips with our current scoutmaster, Dan Winterholler, and feel like I've got some big shoes to fill. He's got size 1,000s.

Brother Whitworth said when he gave me the call that they like to keep on to their scoutmasters for a long time -- Dan's been in for years. I don't know exactly how long, but I do know it's been long enough that he's ready for a break.

Paul Fairborn will remain as the assistant scoutmaster -- don't know why they didn't call him to the job, but there you go. I think we'll get along fine. I need to do more on the building relationships of trust thing, and get to know people and such. Not my strong suit, but one I'll have to work on.

This painting -- from Norman Rockwell, to be sure -- illustrates how I feel about the whole situation. Michelle's trying to help. She bought me two official pairs of Boy Scout socks. I have almost a complete uniform now. But I'm not sure how it's going to fit.

I was assistant scoutmaster for the 11-year-old scouts in Sugar City before we moved to Ammon, but that was mostly because there was some concern with how our oldest would adjust to scouting. He did fine. Maybe that's a sign for me. Maybe it's also a sign I need to get a hat like this kid has.

I blame Michelle for this, of course. About a year ago, she convinced me to go to Wood Badge this summer, as she's on staff and thought it would be a good thing for me to do. So I signed up at the University of Scouting, where I won a $50 scholarship. Then we talked to the bishopric, who said they'd pay the rest of my way there. That got me on their radar. So my goose was cooked.

I've now got to figure out how to shuffle my work schedule so I can go to scout camp.

Now I've got too figure out how to pretend like I enjoy camping in the snow. That's going to be the hardest part.

Addendum: I wrote this post a while ago, shortly after I received the first notice I was being handed this job. Since then, I've been through Wood Badge training. I can't think of a better way to get trained up in a hurry and to feel a bit less intimidated about a new calling. If only other jobs in the church had such intensive, valuable training for new (and old) people in such jobs.

Addendum No. 2: Today it's official. And you'll note it's late October, not late September, when this happened. Feeling overwhelmed, but also feeling extremely lucky. I have two other scout or young men leaders anxious to help out, and I'm going to need it. I also get to associate with a pretty good group of boys. And we've got a busy week planned: Trip to the local haunted house, a merit badge pow-wow, and then a camping trip which I'll have to miss because we're attending the BYU-Idaho Halloween Concert Friday night. Oh, what terrors await. And I'm not talking about the haunted house.

Addendum No. 3: Just finished meeting with the former Scoutmaster, whom I know well since I've been on many a campout with him since we moved into the ward a year and a half ago. He's a fountain of knowledge and understanding and yet has the biggest grin on his face because now he's an assistant ward clerk. Big shoes to fill, big shoes to fill, big shoes to fill . . .

Beware the codeX!

Somewhat interesting things going on over at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, as the wonks there ponder whether the word “ebook” is evocative enough for this new species of reading material.

They’re proposing the word “codex” replace “ebook,” for the following reasons:

With some trepidation, we would like to nominate codex, a word with a rich history that most of us don’t know anything about. Codex, derived from the Latin caudex (meaning “trunk of a tree”) even happens to contain the English word code, which will be central to the future of reading in a variety of ways. The things we’ll be reading in the future will not only involve a lot of programming; they’ll also require readers to decode complex, multilayered experiences and encode their own ideas as contributions in a variety of creative ways. Since standard printed books are technically codices, we propose (with significantly more trepidation) to distinguish our variant with one of those annoying midword capitals: codeX, to remind us that these new things involve experience, experimentation, expostulation … you know, all those X things.

And, why the capital X, pray tell? Oh, they explain:

This also works nicely because it reminds us of the X-Men and the X Games: We see the future of reading as an arena with the social dynamics of competition and play, scoring points and showing off, rather than a LeVar Burton rainbow of love and generosity. (Twitter works like this now, as a performance space where we’re all more or less openly vying for the award for “most clever person on the Internet this minute.”) Books have always been potent weapons in the cultural battlefield for prestige and distinction, and they won’t magically turn into utopian spaces anytime soon. At the risk of sounding too academic, we think the X highlights the jousting and (hopefully friendly) conflict inherent to digital reading.

Part of me understands this. When the bound book was introduced, I’m sure there was some quibbling over what to call the newfangled things. Parchment or scroll wouldn’t work anymore, principally because you don’t roll up books like you do a scroll and while they might be made of parchment, books, with their mobility, their “staytogetherness” demanded some new nomenclature.

But part of me, the cynical part that would sit in French cafes and smoke cigarettes, wonders what the fuss is all about. At the same time people were coining the word “book” to differentiate the mechanism for recording and distributing packaged words, I have to wonder if the content was changing all that much. Just because there were books available didn’t mean there was a fundamental change in what was written. Books were still used to record stories, histories, profits and loss, births and deaths, and all the other arcane and ordinary information that used to get recorded on scrolls or parchment or clay tablets for that matter.

Social media may have changed the amount of access we as readers and authors have to reading material, commentary,  snark and cravings of fame, but things like Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads are just modern versions of things like Punch magazine, pubs, gentlemens’ clubs and other spots and venues for interaction of the literati and their fans and detractors. It’s more centralized, More accessible to the unwashed masses. But it’s the same book, just a different chapter.

Plus ca change, the old saw goes, plus c’est la meme chose.

Charlie Stross says pretty much that has he writes about the brave new world of “feral spambooks,” books that will leap into your ereaders and into your brain without your permission or consent, much like the tomato that would eject itself from and egg and tomato roll, or even your stomach, if an accident were imminent:

Advertising spam made its way into paperback books, so it’s inevitable that it’ll work its way into ebooks (or codeXes, I suppose). The insidious nature of books forcing themselves into your ereaders (probably another term these folks are uncomfortable with) seems, well, farfetched. But stranger things have happened. I’m sure ebooks (or codeXes are a ripe platform for malicious code, but I also have to wonder about the long-term prospects of any author or publishing platform that welcomed and encouraged such behavior. There’s enough snobbery about to ensure that this cockorachization of the publishing world wouldn’t occur, or at least occur to the technicrati who fret about such things.

Funny thing, though. I’ve read a lot of ebooks lately, and I can’t say it’s the novelty of e-reading that’s kept me going. I’m not sure I’m ready for texts that bear with them embedded video and music – that kind of thing has been tried before, what with books coming with their own websites, and experimentation with selling CDs along with the printed books.

No, what keeps me reading is boring, mundane stuff such as curiosity, characterization, plot and soforth. A good story doesn’t need the window-dressing, right? Because the window-dressing appears IN MY HEAD. And if we take the window dressing out of my head and into the electronic pages of a codex, well, we’ve entered the world of books that read themselves, so what do we need readers for?

Oh yeah. The money. Ha.