Format Bores

Last week I posted the latest chapter of my ongoing (some might say never-ending) novel.  The Mother decided to take this opportunity to post a notice on Facebook so that my friends might be reminded that yes, I’m still writing the damn thing.  And one particularly good friend of mine asked if he could read my novel on his Kindle.  Which I suppose he could, if I turned it into a PDF.  Which of course I can.  So I did.

So, down towards the bottom of the page, you’ll find a link to a PDF representation of the novel as it stands thus far.  And hopefully I’ll be able to keep it updated on an ongoing basis so that the link will always point to however far along we currently are.  One word of caution though: the formatting ain’t pretty.

Of course, that might not be all bad.  I hope that, one day, I’ll actually finish this book.  And, when that happens, the logical thing to do would be to try to put it out in e-book format and try to get some exposure for it.  So it might occur to you, tenacious reader, that I might want to discourage people from downloading a free PDF so that I can charge money for an e-book someday.  But that’s not true.  Let me explain why.

As a software developer, I use use thousands of lines of open source code every day—undoubtely millions of lines, over the course of my career.  Without all that open source code, I’d get very little done on a day-to-day basis ... even at my paying job.  With millions of lines of free, quality software out there, any company (particularly a small company just getting started) would be foolish to ignore all that software.  Paying for something when you could get it for free (and when the free version is often of higher quality) is a pretty poor business decision.  Spending time to rewrite something from scratch when you could get it for free can sometimes make sense ... but not often.  So my entire profession is built on the concept of giving away valuable stuff for free.  It would be somewhat hypocritical of me to balk at offering a free PDF.

In fact, my intention is to keep these blog posts up as well, even after the e-book is out (assuming, of course, I ever get that far—much of this musing is just pre-hatch chicken counting, and I recognize that).  Hey, if people really want to read my book for free, on the interwebs, more power to ’em, I say.  I feel like the e-book will be a lot more convenient a format, and I hope I’m able to get some artwork (at the very least a front cover pic) that will probably be available only via the e-book, and there may even be one last editing pass for the e-book that doesn’t make it back to the blog.  So hopefully there will be some small reason to shell out some small amount of money for the “official” version, once we get that far.  (And the amount will certainly be small.  From everything I’ve been reading about e-book self-publishing, an unknown author should be pricing their e-book at under $6.  Probably well under $6.  And I’m okay with that.  I don’t need to support myself as an author—I have a day job which I love and am in no hurry to quit—and it’ll be much more about getting maximum exposure than achieving maximum profit.  At least at first.  Maybe I’ll change my mind when it comes to later books.  Assuming there are later books.  But that’s my hope.)

But, point being: I think there will be plenty of reason that many people will prefer to get the e-book version, once such a thing is available, without me adding artifical barriers to reading the thing for free on the Internet.  So why then, you may ask, is the PDF version formatted crappily?  Did I do that on purpose?

Well, yes and no.

My master copy of the novel is a Google document.  Once upon a time, Google documents looked a lot like Microsoft Word documents.  This is unsurprising, since Word has become the de facto standard for word processing docs.  There are very good reasons for this.  I hate Microsoft as much as the next self-respecting programmer, but one can’t argue that they’ve done a few things very well, and Word (and Excel) are among that small group.  I’ve used Wordstar and WordPerfect, text formats galore, HP Word and Abiword and probably many other more obscure programs that I can barely recall, but Word was the best, I have to admit.  Now, the more modern versions of Word became hideously bloated as marketing began to drive the feature set more than actual utility, but happily there are Word clones aplenty these days to fill the gap.  There’s Libre Office, for instance, which is nice if you happen to be using Linux.  But undoubtedly the best word processing solution these days is Google Docs.  It’s free, it’s available everywhere, on every operating system, and you can have multiple people edit the same file at the same time and nothing explodes.  And it works pretty much like Word.

Except for one thing.  They keep making changes to Google Docs.  Now, on the one hand, it’s free.  So you don’t really get to complain about it when they change things.  Except I’m going to anyway.  Because somewhat recently (relative to how long Docs has been around, at least), they rolled out a new “improved” version of Docs that changed the way your document looks on the screen.  It’s now paginated like it will be when it prints.  They no doubt felt this was a useful change.  Except it’s not.  This is the modern world we live in: the Internet Age.  When do we ever print anything?  This particular Google Doc gets downloaded to my laptop as HTML, which is then converted to an intermediate markup format that I typically write blog posts in, which is then converted to the pseudo-HTML that Blogspot understands, which is then posted back to the Internet.  And, now, I’m going to be converting the Google Doc directly to PDF, which people will then suck into their Kindle or Nook or what-have-you.  At no point in any of these processes does anything ever get printed.  And yet Google thinks it’s a good idea to do the knockoff-Word equivalent of locking me into print preview mode.

Now, the fact that this is useless and pointless is philosophically annoying, to be sure, but that’s not why I’m pissed off about it.  If that’s all it was, I might have an inner mini-rant and call it a day.  But the fact of the matter is that this moronic decision on the part of the Google team screws me in a far more concrete fashion.  Because, you see, in the old days my text went from the left side of my screen to the right side of my screen.  But now it does not.  Now it goes from the left side of the “page” to the right side of the “page” ... and not even all the way there, because of the margins.  So there’s huge, unused portions of whitespace (well, technically, grayspace) on either side of my text.  Which is visually annoying, but that’s still not the actual problem—if that were all it was, I could just increase the size of the font and be done with it.  No, the real problem is, I don’t have as much text on the screen as I used to.  I’m a writer: all I care about is the words.  I don’t give a crap what the “page” looks like, especially when there is no real page.  I want to see as many words as I can, all the time, with a minimum of scrolling.  The more I have to scroll, the more work it is.  And there’s just no good reason.

Now, I have tried to figure out how to turn off this “page mode.”  So far I’ve come up empty (if anyone here knows how, my eternal gratitude awaits if you will kindly leave me a comment explaining how to do it).  So I do the next best thing I’ve been able to figure out.  I go into “page setup,” and I find the paper size that is the hugest there is (I just recently discovered a new one called “tabloid,” which is 11” x 17”).  Then, since paper is always longer than it is wide, I put it in landscape mode (i.e. turn the “paper” sideways).  Then I set my left and right margins to be miniscule: just enough to keep the letters from physically touching the fake page borders.  This, believe it or not, still doesn’t eliminate all the wasted space on my screen ... but it’s much better.  Unfortunately, when I download as PDF, those settings are retained.  Now, I suppose I could reformat it every time I wanted to download the PDF and then reformat it again afterwards so I could go back to writing.  But, let’s face it: I’m lazy.  I’m not going to do that.

So, yes, it’s formatted crappily on purpose in the sense that I could make it not so crappy if I wanted to.  But, no, it’s not formatted crappily on purpose so that you’ll be more likely to get the e-book version once that’s available.  It’s just me not wanting to bother.  Or, if you’d like a more you-focussed reason, I feel that whatever time I might spend reformatting my document constantly is likely much better spent writing more fiction for you to read.  Or, to combine the two: there ain’t a nickel’s worth of difference between lazy and efficient.  Somebody famous probably said that.  If not, they really should have.

So, as promised, your link:

        The Diamond Flame (PDF version)

I may also add a link to this post on all the chapters.  But that’s a lot of work, so I also might not.  I’m terribly efficient.

Another reading week

Well, it’s another reading week for me, as I make yet another attempt to get back into my book.  Of course, the last time I had a reading week was nearly two years ago at this point, and it resulted in not a single further installment of the sputtering novel.  But, then again, I’ve had a fairly crappy year—starting from when I came back from sabbatical, really—and it’s only been recently that it’s shown any hope of getting better.  So that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.  Still, my characters—Johnny Hellebore and Larissa, primarily—have never been far from the front of my mind, and I finally feel like it may be time to restart the cranky engine of fiction production.  I can’t promise you a new installment next week, of course, but you may see something.  If nothing else, I’m finding and fixing typos, poor word choices, mixed tenses, etc.  I haven’t reuploaded the corrections yet, but the master document is updated through long about the beginning of “chapter” 11.  (I put “chapter” in quotes because the divisions in the story don’t really correspond to the “chapters” I’ve come up with for the blog.  So I have no idea if these chapters are anything even approaching reality or not.)

Anyway, I have nothing new for you this week.  Please feel free to reread the beginning of the book, if you like (start here).  Or read for the first time, if you didn’t read it the first time.  It’s mildly entertaining, if I do say so myself.

Character Building

I fancy myself a writer.  I am, after all, in the midst of writing a book right here on this very blog, where anyone can read it.  Being an aspiring writer, I often ponder the various elements that one must master to create compelling literature.

Pacing, for instance, is one I struggle with a lot.  I tend towards a more deliberate (unkind version: slow) pace, and I have to push myself occasionally to keep from getting bogged down.  There’s also style (wherein I ponder if I’m being too verbose, or using too many adverbs) and setting (wherein I wonder if I’m describing things so thoroughly that people forget what’s going on in the action) and theme (which I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with).  But possibly the biggest one of all is: characters.

Characterization is one of the most important aspects of writing, at least in fiction (and, honestly, most non-fiction too).  Even if you write a story in which not a single human being appears, you will have characters.  Your animals will become characters.  Your haunted house, or old car (or haunted old car) will become a character.  As sick as I am of hearing some schmuck on a DVD special features video say “you know, the city itself really is another character in our movie,” it really can be true, when you’re writing.  We writers have a tendency to turn almost anything into a character—wind, diseases, furniture, electronic devices—and it’s because characters are so essential to a story.  If you’re a writer, there’s a pretty excellent chance that your reader is going to be a person, and they’re going to want to see a person in your story to identify with.  A person like them, or like someone they know, or like someone they’ve always wanted to know, or like someone they’ve always been afraid to get to know.  A character.

So, in order to draw the reader in, your characters needs to be as realistic as you can manage.  There are all sorts of tricks to achieve this.  You can base the character on someone you know, for instance; that’s always a popular one.  Or on some historic figure.  But of course the character will never be (can never be) exactly like another person.  They must have at least some qualities that are unique to them.  You will always have to, at least partially, make something up.

Now, as near as I can tell, there are two schools of thought on this.  This is not really an either/or choice, of course, but rather two extremes on a spectrum, with many people falling at either end, but many falling somewhere in the middle as well.  At one end are the authors who say “my characters do exactly what I tell them to and nothing more.”  At the other end are the authors who say “I just let the characters speak through me; I never know what they’re going to say or do until they tell me.”

The people at the first end tend to think of the people at the other end as New Age hippies spouting pseudo-mystical bullshit.  Contrariwise, the people at the far end tend to the people at the other end from them as fascist megalomaniacs who won’t let their characters “breathe.”  Given my belief in balance and paradox, it will not surprise you to hear that I think both camps are right ... and also that both camps are wrong.

Let’s pick on one of my favorite authors for a minute, Robert Jordan.  Now, please don’t accuse me of Jordan-bashing.  I’m not being facetious when I call him one of my favorite authors—I named one of my children after one of his characters, after all.  But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything he says.  Here’s something he said once:

The characters never surprise me. In terms of the book I am God. A writer who says that the characters take control is doing one of two things... either he or she is telling people what they want to hear because a lot of people seem to want to hear that the characters have taken over... or else, that writer is being exceedingly lazy and not paying attention. The characters NEVER really take over.^*

As much as I respect the man, I have to say I think he was wrong here.  And, if you’ve ever been reading the Wheel of Time series and wanted to reach into the pages and strangle one of his characters for making the same stupid mistake for the fifth or sixth time in a row, I bet you’ve wished he was willing to let his characters surprise him too.

On the other side, some of my other favorite authors, including Anne Rice (after whose character yet another of my children is named) and Stephen King (who is my ultimate literary idol) have implied or even come out and said that they never know what their characters are going to say next, and they’re just as surprised as the reader by their characters’ actions.  This is a bit too much hand waving for me.  It goes beyond metaphysics and into prestidigitation.

Basically, what I want is a theory that does allow my characters to surprise me, at least sometimes, but is still founded on rational, explicable thinking.  I want to be in charge as far as I can be, but not so far that I limit the organic reality of my faux people.

And, after a lot of pondering, I think I’ve found such a theory.

Let me approach this from an oblique angle.  Imagine your best friend.  Do you ever have conversations with your best friend, in your head?  You know, practicing for what you fear might be a difficult topic, or daydreaming about the two of you doing this or that, or whatever?  Sure you do.  In those conversations, your friend will say, or do, different things, and those things are likely exactly what your friend would do or say in real life.  But it’s all in your mind.  You have the ability to predict, with a pretty high degree of success, how your friend is going to react in a given situation.  And you know why you can do that?  Because you know things about them.

You know he never got along with his parents and left home at 17.  You know that she had an older sister that she always competed against, even though the sister herself never tried.  You know that he was raised Baptist and is now an agnostic.  You know that she was raised atheist and discovered Buddhism and fell in love with it.  You know that he hates peas but loves asparagus; you know that, when she goes to an amusement park, she’ll ride anything except the rides that go around in circles, because they make her queasy.  You know that, when he gets drunk, he gets maudlin and sappy; you know that she harbors a secret disdain for women who “pamper” themselves with massages or manicures.  You know that, in middle school, he was a bully, which he looks back on with shame.  You know that, in high school, she considered herself dorky and unpopular, but that there were at least two different boys who were madly in love with her.

And it doesn’t actually have to be your best friend.  Anyone that you’ve known for a long time will fall into the same bucket: family, even if you don’t particularly like them; out-and-out enemies, for that matter; even co-workers, if you’ve worked together long enough.  If you know them well, you know what they’re going to say in response to this or that.  If you can’t do that, you don’t really know them that well, right?  And, sure, you’re occasionally wrong, but that just adds another datapoint that will make you more likely to be right the next time.

We know that knowing all these details makes us more able to predict with certainty what a given person will do, how they will react to a given situation.  But we don’t know exactly how.  We know that all these details feed into a complex mental model, a sort of simulation of the other person.  The friend that you had that conversation with in your head isn’t actually your friend: it’s just a symbolic representation of that person.  But it’s close enough that you can use it to have a conversation with, just like a real person.  And, most of the time, your mental model of the real person will react in realistic, appropriate ways.

So how does knowing that your friend hates peas help you predict that he won’t take kindly to the suggestion that he’s treating his girlfriend badly?  We don’t really know.  But it all feeds into it, somehow.  We know that some mental conditions make it much harder for certain people to do this.  We know that, just like anything that people do, some people are better at it than others.  But everyone can do it, to a lesser or greater extent, and it works.  And the fact that we don’t entirely understand it provides the element of mystery to it.  Sometimes your mental model of your friend will surprise you with her answers.  And yet you still know it’s right.

Now you see how we can apply this to creating fictional characters.  Authors are famous for inventing countless details about their characters that never appear in the actual story: “backstory,” we call it.  Why do we bother with this?  Because we’re building mental models.  Our mental models of a made-up person have a major disadvantage that models of real people don’t have: there’s no feedback loop.  With a real person, their actions in the real world are constantly helping us refine our models of them.  On the other hand, models of fictional characters have a huge advantage over models of real people: they can be complete.  No matter how well you know another person, you will never know everything about them.  There will always be some secrets, something held back ... even if the other person doesn’t mean to.  There just isn’t enough time for someone to tell you everything that’s ever happened to them or everything they’ve ever thought about when they were alone, even if they could remember it all.  But a fictional character can’t hide anything from their author.  You know all: their deepest secrets, their innermost thoughts.  You can make up as much or as little as you need to, and you can always add more later.

Of course, you have to be careful about adding.  If your character has already appeared in the story, and you go fiddling with their backstory, you might inadvertently change how they should have reacted to something that you already wrote.  You also have to consider that the experiences that happen them in your story (that is, the plot points) are now experiences that feed into your mental model of them.  In this way, your characters will grow as the story goes on.

And now you can see how you are in charge of everything, and yet your characters can still surprise you.  With my characters, I find myself having long imaginary conversations with them, and, yes, occasionally they do surprise me with their answers.  I don’t always know why they say this or that; I just know it feels right.  And sometimes they even do things which completely mess up my authorial plans.  And, when that happens, you better just go with it.  If you try to force them into the course of action your plot demands, they’ll start to feel fake to the reader.  The reader won’t even be able to put their finger on why; they’ll just throw down your book in frustration and cry “Frederica would never act like that!” and storm off in a huff.

You see, readers have mental models too.  And they’re not required to respect your plot.

So, in a certain way, it is like your characters are talking to you, but there’s nothing mystical about it.  There’s a perfectly logical explanation, and it involves you maintaining ultimate control.  But that doesn’t mean you get to put words in your characters’ mouths all willy-nilly either.  There are boundaries.  And there can be surprises.

* from an AOL chat, preserved by Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Delays and Excuses

So remember how I said last week was a reading week?  Well, I’m still reading.  I went all the way back to the beginning, and it takes time to work through all that text.  Man, I wrote a lot.  I could probably use a good editor.  Except that she (or he) would probably cross out all my adverbs, and that would just piss me off.

So I’m not ready to present a new semi-chapter of my ongoing book.  My next thought was to fall back on a technical blog, but I’m not ready there either.  I’ve got a couple of really good ideas, but I’ve not had the time to work on them sufficiently to make them ready for blogination.  In at least one case, I think I could actually slap together a CPAN module, which would be pretty exciting.  Of course, to do that, I’d probably need to finish my Dist::Zilla customizations which I’ve been working on forever—well, I don’t need to, per se, but it would be more convenient, and I really want to finish that anyway.  Except, I got stuck on this other thing that I wanted to do for that, and I ended up making a suggestion to another CPAN author and then I agreed to do the thing with the thing and ...

Sometimes I worry that I’m too much of a perfectionist.  I do like things to be just right.  Sort of like Tolkien was ... or at least, like what the stuff I’ve read about Tolkien indicates that he was.  He always wanted to create just one more grammatical construct in Elven, detail just one more century of Númenorean history, retranslate just one more line of Beowulf ... so much so that he had difficulty fininshing things, at least according to some.  Not that I’m claiming to be as brilliant as Tolkien, of course—I still have some modesty—I’m just saying that perhaps I feel his pain.

I’ve often been told that Meg Whitman was fond of saying that ”‘perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good enough.’”  To which my response is, generally, “perhaps, but ‘good enough’ is often the enemy of ‘we’d like to have it last for a while instead of falling apart due to shoddy craftmanship which was deemed “good enough” at the time.’”  Still, there’s no doubt that Meg’s formulation is pithier than mine, so probably hers is more true.

That was a bit of sarcasm there.  Sorry.

Still, one can’t deny that she (or, if we want to be pedantic about it, Voltaire, who originally said “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) has a point.  As you may guess from my previous posts, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  But the tricky part is knowing where to draw the line.

Today I’m leaning a bit more toward the “perfect” than the “good enough.”  Although, one could make the argument that, in settling for this particular blog post (which is about a third as long as I normally strive for), I’m actually taking a pretty firm stance on the “good enough” side.  But mainly I’m saying I want a little more time to polish things.

Also, I’ve been putting in an unusual number of work hours lately, and that ain’t helping.  Plus ... I ran out gas.  I had a flat tire.  I didn’t have enough money for cab fare.  My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners.  An old friend came in from out of town.  Someone stole my car.  There was an earthquake.  A terrible flood.  Locusts!

Or, er, something like that.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.^*





* Eek! Stop me before I cross-reference again!^**

** Too late: SNL trifecta.

To Orphan or Not To Orphan

It’s another reading week for me.

If you don’t know what I mean by “reading week,” then you should probably refresh your memory on that point.  We’re talking about my fiction here; specifically, the on-again, off-again novel whose semi-chapters I keep inserting randomly into my blog.  (And, if you don’t care anything about that, you can move on immediately and save yourself some time.)  Last time I mentioned a reading week, I managed 3 more installments over the following 3 months, and I haven’t returned to it in the 4 months since.

Of course, I also have a 4-month old child now, so that’s probably not a coincidence.

Still, I need to get back into the groove, if I ever plan to finish.  And, excitingly (at least for me), I actually did have a useful idea—remember when I said that I was having trouble figuring out how to get from where I was to the end of this book?  Well, I had an epiphany a couple months back, but I haven’t had the opportunity to do much with it.  I need to put it into words before I completely lose it.

Of course, 4 months is a long time.  So long, in fact, that I’ve gone all the way back to the beginning of the novel to really refresh my brain about the story.  Another thing I do besides reading what I’ve written, as if I were reading someone else’s work (that’s the reading week post again), is I interview myself.  That sounds really weird, I know ... some people say talking to yourself is a sign of insanity.  It’s not, really, and that’s good, because I do this all the time.  I practice difficult conversations I need to have with other people, I explain things I’m working on to an imaginary audience, sometimes I even psychoanalyze myself.  I do this because I’m naturally a verbal person, and saying things out loud, putting abstract thoughts into actual words, makes them real for me in a way that just pondering doesn’t.

Take that second example, for instance.  I’m working on a difficult problem at work, say, and I’m not sure what’s the best way to design the solution.  So I’ll pretend I’ve already done it, and now I’m giving a presentation on it, perhaps to my co-workers.  I explain what I’ve done, and defend my choices.  If I can get all the way through the presentation without stumbling, I’ve got a pretty good design there.  But, essentially, that never happens.  What happens is, about halfway through, I’ll trail off in the middle of a sentence, because I’ve realize that what I’m about to explain is the stupidest thing ever.  And that makes me backtrack, and rearrange, and refactor, and come up with a better design.

Same goes for my writing.  By pretending I’ve already published my book, and now people want to interview me (’cause, you know, I’m a famous author at that point), I force myself to verbalize why I made this authorial choice, or what I was trying to say with this particular passage, or whatnot.  And that, in turn, brings many things that I was doing subconsciously out into the light where I can stare at them a bit and go “hey, that’s interesting,” or sometimes, “no, wait a minute ... that’s dumb.”

In a way, this is just a continuation of the reader/writer dichotomy I talked about in the reading week post.  Me the Reader is the interviewer, asking questions to try to understand the story more completely.  Then Me the Writer comes along and answers the questions, as best he can, talking about what (or who) has inspired him, why he made certain choices, etc.

One day recently, I was conducting such an interview on the way to work (I have a 40-minute commute on a good day, so it’s a perfect time for this sort of thing), and Reader Me asked what Writer Me thought was a very interesting question: why isn’t Johnny Hellebore an orphan?

Although the story of Johnny Hellebore is aimed more at an adult audience (as I explained previously), there’s certainly no denying that he is the latest in a long and venerable line that includes Peter Pan, Dorothy Gale, James Henry Trotter, Harry Potter, and the Baudelaire children ... all of whom are, in fact, orphans.  So, why not Johnny?

Of course, the simple answer would be: because he isn’t, that’s all.  In other words, Johnny might have been “born,” as a character, with parents “built in,” so to speak.  But, the truth is, he wasn’t.  I described how Johnny came to me: fully-formed, in a dream.  He was ragged and unkempt, and I knew he lived on the streets, and I sensed somehow that he was parentless, but that’s not really the same as being an orphan.  Giving Johnny parents who were alive, but absent—and more than absent: ineffectual—that was a conscious choice on my part.  Why did I do it?

Well, to a certain extent, it was just to be different.  The orphan thing’s been done.  Done very well, by authors much more talented than I.  If I tread those same boards, I have to step up my game quite a bit to compete.  Safer—and more interesting—to try some new territory.  I’m not entirely sure why I chose to have Johnny’s parents be the way they are now (probably it started with the dream I had that became the prologue), but, upon reflection, I really like it.  It reminds me of one my favorite movies: The Breakfast Club.  Remember the scene between Andrew and Allison?

Andrew: What is it?  Is it bad?

Allison: <silence>

Andrew: Real bad?

Allison: <silence>

Andrew: Parents?

Allison: <softly> Yeah ...

Andrew: <nods> What do they do to you?

Allison: <whispering> They ignore me.

To me, that’s one of the most powerful scenes in that movie, and that’s saying something.  The idea that you might have parents who would hurt you is frightening.  The idea that you might have parents who don’t care enough about you to even bother ... somehow that’s even scarier.  And, intentional or not, that’s how Johnny’s parents turned out, as I began to develop his backstory.

Johnny’s father was interested in money.  Climbing the business ladders was all he cared about, and, in the end, he resorted to extra-legal measures to achieve the level of success he was aiming for.  In those circles, being a family man was important.  It showed stability.  He could have gotten where he wanted as a bachelor, but it was easier to just go out and find a wife.

Johnny’s mother was taught that men were the key to financial security.  She didn’t particularly feel like she needed to fall in love; she just wanted to have enough money to be comfortable and didn’t particularly want to have to work for it.  Some might call her a gold-digger, and she probably wouldn’t even have objected to the characterization.  Along comes this man, and he’s obviously successful, and on his way to even bigger things; he isn’t hideous or anything, fairly quiet and non-obnoxious ... sure, why not?

And they were married, so he got what he wanted, and she was left to her own devices, which is what she wanted, and then he said now we need a child, and so she said, okay, but just one: I’m not getting fat and screwing up my back more than once, and one was all he needed, and there was Johnny.  His father only needed the fact of a child, and his mother didn’t even need that.  As an actual, physical being, they had no interest in him.

What happened to these people when they were children to make them this way?  I don’t know, although it’s an interesting question, and perhaps we’ll explore it someday.  I suspect it was pretty awful, although probably not as awful as what Johnny grew up with.  Although, remember: this was Johnny’s life from day one.  In a very real sense, he had no idea that parents were supposed to love you until he started school and met other children.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Amiira, Johnny would be a very cold person, and quite distasteful himself.  This is why Amiira keeps coming up in the story even though she’s been gone for years before the story starts.  She’s Johnny’s anchor, the one person who helped him realize that people could make connections with each other ...

Anyway, it was interesting for me to ponder all this, and I thought it might be interesting to share with you as well.  Plus now I have it written down for me to review later, in case I need to return to this topic for future reference.  And you, fair reader, will now be able to experience some déjà vu when you hear my first interview as a famous author.  You’re welcome.

Reading Week/Writing Week

This week is a reading week for me.

So, remember last time we talked about writing, I said that I was trying to figure out what to write about next?  I believe I managed two more sputtering installments after than, then nothing further.  And my partner has lately been wondering aloud what’s going to happen when she finally gets to the last installment of my novel and then there is no more?  How would you feel if you were reading along and suddenly the book just stopped and said, “Stay tuned! more to come ... whenever I get around to it”?  Might be a bit frustrating, eh?

So I’m trying to get back into it.  There are various things I do to recapture my mood, get back into the groove, so to speak, after taking a break.  What I mentioned last time was reading through notes, and dream logs, and things like that.  I’m doing a bit of that this week as well.  But mainly what I’m doing is rereading the novel so far.

I do this a lot.  No, I mean: a lot.  Almost every time I post an installment of the book, I’ve reread the previous few installments, anywhere from 3 to 8 of them.  This not only helps me get back in the swing of things, it helps me recapture my voice, re-establish my style, pick up where I left off.  Renew my acquaintance with my characters.  Revise any rough spots I find.  Find things I never knew were there.

This is key.  I talked about this a bit in my discussion of art-as-dialectic.  Remember (or perhaps reread) the story about my writing professor finding things in my writing that I didn’t even know were there?  Well, that was when I was young and stupid.  Now I’m older, and moderately less stupid, and I find that I can find those things in my own writing.  Not while I’m writing, of course.  But when I go back and reread, I can find them.

It’s like I’m two different people: the author, and the reader.  As the writer, I concern myself with writing what feels natural: I worry about flow, I worry about realistic dialogue, I worry about plotting (although probably not as much as I ought to).  But, when I put my reader hat on, I start looking at the text very critically.  Does it make sense?  Are the words well-chosen, or do they make me stumble?  Are there any places where the visual can’t match up with the words because the author didn’t lay it out properly (think “The Writer” sketch from the old Carol Burnett show)?  And, perhaps most importantly, what is the author really trying to say here? what is his message? his theme? his moral, if he has one?

I’m not much for morals, overall, but I do believe that Art (capital A used advisedly there) has to reflect our lives in some way: it has to tell us something about ourselves, or else it’s not truly Art.  Now, whether that something is advice on how to do things better, or simply a reflection of something we have known (like seeing a close friend in a fictional character), that part doesn’t matter.  But the writing has to be saying something beyond its mere words.

Now, when I’m a writer, I don’t put much effort into that.  But, when I change roles and become a reader, I look for it.  Hard.  I dig for it, and I expect to find it.  And I nearly always do.  I may not be trying hard (when I’m a writer) to add it in, but some part of me is: call it my subconscious, or my instinct, or my higher being, or whatever you like.  I often feel that that part of my mind is a whole separate entity, poorly understood by the rest of my brain, and he (at least I assume it’s a “he”) should get all the credit for the creativity going on here ... I’m just a spectator for the most part.  Oh, I do a little of the work—the stitching together of the disparate pieces into some coherent whole, mainly—but mostly I just kick back and watch the genius at work.  Then I remember that he is me and when I call him “genius” I’m really calling myself a genius, which is far more immodest than I feel about the whole thing, so then I scramble around for a rephrasing ... but you get my drift.

So if you ask me what my story is about as its author, I have no opinion.  Besides, as I pointed out (in that same blog post), it doesn’t matter what I think as the author.  What you think, as the reader: that’s all that really matters.  Of course, when I become the reader, then I do have an opinion, and I could tell you what it’s all about.  But I’m not going to, because you would be tempted to take that as the opinion of the author (which it wouldn’t be), and then you’d try to see the same things in it that I (reader) see as opposed to finding your own things in it.  But finding those things helps me (writer) put together a more coherent story, because if I can just get some consistent themes lodged in my subconscious (or whatever it is), then they’ll come out in the writing, even if I’m not trying to put them there.

See?

Well, maybe that’s all too confusing.  But, the point is, every now and again I need to go all the way back to the beginning in order to completely immerse myself in the story, and not only rediscover my voice, but also make new discoveries, find new viewpoints, make new connections, and that helps the story be richer.  So that’s what I’m doing this week.  Hopefully soon that will allow me to produce the next installment of the Johnny Hellebore saga.

Assuming you care.  But I’m also assuming you wouldn’t have bothered to read all this deranged rambling if you didn’t.

Fictional Pondering

I was going to have another half-chapter or so of the book up today, but I didn’t actually get anything written.  I’ve been busy trying to figure out what to write next, which isn’t particularly easy for me.  Now, I mentioned when I told you what this book thing is all about that a lot of what I’m doing here is just writing my way from one crazy dream idea to another.  Which is true enough.  And, honestly, at this point, I know which dream idea I’m writing away from, and I even know which dream idea I’m writing my way towards.  But the problem is how to get there.

Unfortunately, the next dream idea in the queue is almost the end of the book, and I need some stuff in between here and there.  And thinking up stuff isn’t my strong point ... I mean, that’s a big part of the reason why I’ve never published anything I’ve written, right?  No great ideas.

So I’ve been spending my time today going through old dream logs, and old roleplaying game campaign notes, and old stories, and anything else I can think of, waiting for inspiration to strike.  And a lot of it was quite inspirational, don’t get me wrong, but nothing that will really help me get to the next plot point (whatever that may be).  So my search continues.

I did run into the story/novel I wrote a mere chapter and a paragraph of before I started on Johnny Hellebore.  I’d totally forgotten about it.  It wasn’t a bad idea, just not a great one (story of my life).  But there might be something salvageable in it, so perhaps parts will show up in the JH saga at some point.  Weirdly, my story notes indicate that I was planning to put Larissa in that story as well; perhaps she was fresh in my mind from that attempted recycling when Johnny came along and needed a companion ...

Anyways, mostly I’m sure you don’t care.  Other than the fact that I don’t really have a blog post for today.  And even then you don’t care, if you’re smart.  But if you’re not smart—or, I suppose, to be less of a jerk about it, if you’re stubbornly insistent on reading this blog after all warnings to the contrary—then rest assured I’ll have something next week.

The Diamond Flame

In my very first post I explained why you should not read this blog, but, in case you don’t want to go back and read that, I’ll recap it for you: blogs are full of other people’s crappy opinions, and mine is certainly no different.  But every once in a while I take a break from regaling you with my crappy opinions and write some fiction instead.  If there were a reason to read this blog (and I’m not saying there is), it would have to be for the fiction, assuming that sort of thing appeals to you.

I’ve been blithely rambling on for about 13 “chapters” now (although admittedly they’re mostly arbitrary divisions) without ever once explaining what the thing was supposed to be, so I thought I’d take a moment to do that.  The explanation is a bit late at this point, but perhaps I’ll go back and put a link to this post on each of the chapter parts so people won’t have to wonder what the hell is going on if they stumble into the middle of it.

Spoiler-free short version:  The fiction is basically a novel, called The Diamond Flame, and it’s meant to be the first in a series of books about a boy named Johnny Hellebore.  I won’t go into any details about who he is or what happens to him (that’s the joy of reading, I think), but let me offer a few similar titles so that you can judge if the thing is your cup of tea or not.  In rereading the content (which I do quite often), I would say the book is most similar to novels such as The Talisman or Shadowland, or possibly the (still ongoing) series Abarat, although I’ve heard Barker intended Abarat to be his Eyes of the Dragon, so to speak, which would make that a poorer comparison.  (Note that these three titles are penned by three of what I refer to as the pentagram of my literary idols.)  Specifically, it is designed as adult fiction, and definitely not children’s fare like Harry Potter or Perseus Jackson, although it has some similarities to those series as well.

The longer version would be this.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  Since I was very young, I can remember writing stories.  I was actually never very good at telling stories, but I always tried to write them.  Longhand in notebooks, or on my grandmother’s manual typewriter—it didn’t much matter, I just wanted to write.  Once I got a computer, I started using that, and that’s how I write exclusively these days.  I wrote a lot of short stories, some of which are decent, although none of them are really good, and I started at least two novels that I can recall.  But I never published any of my fiction, and I still haven’t.  Now I’m over 40, and I suppose there’s at least an even chance that I never will.  But I also firmly believe in never giving up your dreams, so perhaps someday ...

Then again, maybe this is just my personal mid-life crisis.

There are two primary reasons that I never pursued my dream of becoming a writer.  The first is that I became a programmer.  Now, Stephen King once said (as apparently Somerset Maugham did before him) that you don’t become a writer because you want to; you become a writer because you have to ... because, if you didn’t write down all the stuff trying to burst out of your brain, your head would just explode.  I think that’s true, but perhaps too specific.  A creative outlet is required for a creative person, but it does not necessarily have to be the first thing that you fixate on.  We see this all the time, with singers who take up acting, actors who take up singing, directors who take up painting, ad infinitum.  I’m just a writer who took up programming.  And don’t let anyone ever tell you that programming is all logical and not creative.  That’s bullshit.  Writing a software program is like writing a story in many ways: you start with nothing, and then you create, trying different approaches, experimenting with different techniques, and, in the end, there is something.  Sometimes it’s beautiful.  More often it’s just adequate.  But, either way, it’s yours, and you made it, and you’ll always feel a bit proud of it, even if you know you could have done better.

So my creative urges found an outlet, in an unlikely place.  I actually only took up programming because I was decent at it, and I figured it was a great way to make money while I became a famous writer.  And then I ended up running my own software company for 12 years.  Funny how those things work out.

But probably the more important reason why I never became a writer is that I never had a great idea.  Oh, I had several good ones; just never a great one.  I was always a good writer, if I do say so myself, but pretty writing without decent ideas behind them isn’t very publishable.  In fact, you’re better off if you have good ideas and can’t write worth a damn.  My own idol King was recently criticized for noting that this was true of Stephanie Meyer; I’ll agree with him and go even further and call out another very popular author, Charlaine Harris.  In my opinion, neither Meyer nor Harris writes particularly well, but I’ll freely admit to being jealous of their brilliant ideas.  I only wish I had come up with something as innovative as either of these ladies.  But, alas, I never have.

Until, perhaps, recently.

One day about a year or so ago, I woke up from an unlikely afternoon nap with my younger son to find a picture in my mind: a picture of a teenage boy, dark-haired, slightly ragged-looking, and I knew his name was Johnny Hellebore.  And I became fascinated with this character.  The name alone was classic, in some sense ... a name worthy of a comic book hero, reminiscent of both Johnny Blaze and Daimon Hellstrom.  I had no idea who this boy was, or why he had invaded my light dozing, or—assuming he was a comic book hero—what sort of powers he might have.  But he kept running around my brain, and he soon acquired a companion: Larissa, a little girl who had first appeared in a D&D campaign I ran in the early 90’s.  Then followed a few more half-dreams about Johnny (and occasionally Larissa), and then a few more dreams which weren’t really about those characters at all, but somehow seemed that they might be shoehorned in nonetheless, and then I was writing little scenes and vignettes, completely disconnected, and then ...

And then I started a blog, for some insane reason, and suddenly there was a place to actually put all this stuff I was writing.  Of course, that required making some sort of coherent whole out of it.  So that’s what I set about doing.  Most of the content of this “novel” is really just me writing my way from one scene to another, trying to make them all fit together.  I think I’ve achieved some amount of success with this.  In fact, I suspect—although of course I may be wrong—that this may be the best thing I’ve ever written.

So, if you think this is something you might be interested in, I encourage you to start at the beginning.  Feel free to backtrack occasionally; you may find that I’ve gone back and revised things slightly (mostly for grammar and phrasing, not so much for content).  Each post has a link at the top to the previous entry, and one at the bottom for the next entry, so it should be moderately easy to navigate through it.  And, every now and again, I post a new half a chapter or so.  You can also find other posts like this one—me writing about the process of writing—by searching for the “metafiction” tag.  If you find any of this entertaining, feel free to post a comment.  I know, I know: I keep telling you not to read this blog.  But this novel just may constitute an exception to that.

Happy reading.