Nose to the Wheel

I work a day job in cubeville, which sometimes demands all hours of the night as well.

My wife, as a full time homeschooling housewife and mom, has it even worse.

The 11yo daughter is sick and napping in front of the TV. The wife has been ill, and just got up from her nap.  The 2yo boy was up a while before her, in a foul mood. I think something bit him. He finally settled a little, when I bribed him with fortune cookie and wonton chips, which he insisted we dump out onto the table.

I've had no opportunity to unload the dishwasher for the wife, or to throw some hay to the horses, or clean the latest deposits of goose and chicken shit out of the garage, or to bring in the grazing goat in and put out the next one.  I need to clean up the pile of hay and bird droppings I swept out a couple days ago, but may not manage before dark.

Well, tomorrow's Saturday.  Maybe then.

But I do want to sit and play World of Warcraft with my wife and daughter at some point. I'd like to spend a little time with the insufficiently snuggled Great Pyr pup, who's the size of a truck but still goofy-clumsy.

Then there's this writing thing.  We try to crank out a couple thousand words each, every day. We constantly edit. She's sending me links for new agents to query. I try (I do try) to post to this blog once a day. I'm trying to read and critique the work of friends, and of strangers as well on http://critters.org.

 Let's think about this.  Generally, people need eight hours of sleep each night. I need more; being ill lately, we need even more, but lets stick with eight for the sake of argument.  I work at least eight hours a day.

(The wife is currently "playing" with the 2yo, technically 21 months, and he's calling off shapes and numbers correctly more often than not.)

So, sixteen hours of my day are gone off the top, and usually it's more like eighteen or nineteen.  Then we add in the time for basic maintenance of living. An hour for a morning shower and dress, breakfast, hay for the horses; an hour for lunch, during which I sometimes handle some emergency shopping; an hour for supper, including some time to sit and chat as a family.  There's usually a couple of hours in the evening dedicated to maybe a movie as a family, or some Warcraft, or some other activity we can do together.

Keeping track? At the very least, we've spent 23 hours of our day.  It doesn't look good for the book.

We all know those minutes and hours never fit so neatly into the given timeslots, though.  I shave out time for trips to the bathroom, and coffee breaks, and posts to this blog.  I frequently steal hours here and there by eating at my computer, or using the wife's smartphone to check Twitter in the grocery store.  

But often enough, I push the chore off and grind through a delightful hour of pulling my hair and shuffling words, knowing that tomorrow is Saturday. I'll sleep an extra hour; I'll get those chores done, unless I manage to get completely absorbed in NOT having to spend my time at my day job, and write chapters in a new book.

Tonight, I'll stay up late and write then as well.  It's the one hobby that I don't feel is a waste of time. It's the one thing I love that feels productive, and creative, and satisfying.

So maybe one of the chickens runs in the back door every time we come in. She's a tiny bantam, smaller than a fat pigeon. We give her corn in the house, which just encourages her.

And I write a few lines of blog as she clucks around my feet beneath the table, and look forward to working on editing for HUSH, and smile as I finally get up to throw hay to the horses and finish unloading the dishwasher.

See you in the bookstore.

The Rest of the Story

(And many thanks to Paul Harvey for the phrase. If you haven't heard any of his commentary, I recommend it.)

Yesterday I poo-poohed happy endings. Give me grief and misery! But sometimes a lighter tale can be delightful, as Paul Harvey so often proved.  c.f. here.

It's a tale of a very mundane event with a quiet happy ending, and quite worthy of a short story if someone were so inclined. But why? A little boy's memory of getting stuck in the snow on a mother and son drive doesn't sound so great, but there are special circumstances. Therein lies the crux of the matter.

For him, it was likely the only time it would ever happen.

Don't get me wrong. I do like feel-good movies. I like happy endings, and I love inspirational movies as long as they aren't too saccharine.  I am not inspired by mundane events, however, unless there is something about them that makes them special.

It doesn't take much. Good writing can turn any moment into an epiphany, or an iconic memory, or a symbol for something grander.  If you'll forgive the hubris, I reference a poem I wrote for my daughters about blowing a bubble. The rhythm is perhaps too complex and easily misread, the phrasing might be too contrived for your taste, but it does illustrate my point. Blowing a bubble is something simple and cheap and easy enough we do it to entertain the children, but there is plenty of symbolism to be had.

Happy is good. I love it when the hero wins the girl. I just want him to prove to me he deserves it first. That's usually easiest done by showing me he can respond nobly to a bad situation.

Happily Ever After

...and they ate ice cream, and had babies and lived happily ever after.

The End

Hm. I'm not inspired to go out and buy the book. Heck, I don't even want to watch the movie. I'd rather subject myself to 2am infomercials pimping potato peelers that let you pull your own teeth, or at least make you want to.

On the other hand, if they're sharing a small pot of greens because that's all they have, we tend to watch to see how fairly they share it. 

If they must hide their only child because the soldiers are coming to kill the children, we wonder if this one might survive.

If they sacrifice themselves, both dying in futile gestures to save the other, we rail at the injustice -- but now we're involved.

Happy is nice, but it doesn't sell the print, and it doesn't make us remember the story or buy a copy for friends. Don't get me wrong, there are exceptions, but in general, even Disney movies have villains and injustice. 

If my heroes can make it through a book and walk away at the end healthy and happy and sane, I am relieved, but I wonder what went wrong. When they stagger away broken in body but not in spirit, supporting each other in their grief for those they lost, I admire them. I honor them. I remember them. I want to be them, though I thank my stars I don't have to go through the hell they've endured.

That's the point. A good story is always about character and conflict, and nobody walks away unscathed. If the character is untouched, we do not love them. At best, we can pity them, but they have not earned our devotion.

And again, of course, there are exceptions, but those just demonstrate the rule.  People who survive lightning strikes and falling out of airplanes without parachutes do not convince the rest of us that it's safe. They amaze us, because they beat the odds.

Break your heroes. Even if they are angry, your readers will feel something.  If you do it well, they'll curse you with their tears, but praise you with their wallets.

TANSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." -- Robert Heinlein

Even if you don't have to cough up cash, someone has to pay for it; and if you don't honor the debt you incur, it costs you face and reputation. You may not care, but there's still a cost, always.  Even if you just pull up wild onion by the road, it costs time and effort and sunlight and water.

You have to pay your dues.

I see people, even friends of mine, giving advice all the time. It's usually pretty good advice. I just read Denise Tompkins' blog post about synopses, and it was great.  I spoke with her the other night about the professionalism of her blog voice, how much I enjoy it, how right she usually is, and we laughed about the way a great bit of writing sometimes seems like the swan from the line of ducklings. We sweat and grieve and waffle, then finally put it out there and wait for people to point and laugh, but often the result is actually good.

I'm no expert. This blog is about our efforts to learn, to sink or swim in the world of modern publishing, but I like to think there are useful, pithy bits now and then.  I have no qualifications worth including in a query; my degrees are computers and ancient language, my job is telecom, and I've not had so much as a short story actually published and paid (technically not true, but I assure you the technicality doesn't buy gum.)

Yet I write. I offer my apparently baseless opinions. I query our book with confidence, knowing that it still has so much improvement to be made.

I'm paying my dues, and learning what I need. I'm patient, and I don't give up. In the meantime, I'm writing, polishing the book we've finished, working on the next, tossing in a few lines to others now and then, planning for the day when my backlist is long enough to earn a living.

I'm enjoying the ride. In the meantime, I borrow experience and contacts from dear friends like Denise who's plowing ahead with her Nitecliff Evolutions, and with Raising Cain, which sounds utterly engrossing.

Good luck, Denise, and thanks for the visit. It recharges my batteries to know that talent and perseverance can and do, in fact, make it in today's market.

Hiatus

Attending personal matters this week, apologies for anyone who was actually expecting daily posts.

Will try to get back into the swing asap.

Humans is the Craziest Peoples

It bothers me when people I like say things I can't reconcile. I don't want to hurt their feelings, insult or embarrass them, so I end up trying to just shut up and ignore it...but sometimes it gives me ulcers.

We've all seen it. Normal, likable folk will do something, exhibit some common human foible, and we twitch. In the hope I won't inadvertently wrong someone, I'll try to anonymize an example.

An editor and writer acquaintance who calls herself obsessive recently mentioned (in front of a broadly mixed audience including professional peers) some trouble she habitually has with a couple of homophones. That's common enough - you know people who confuse its/it's, they're/their/there, to/too/two or any of a hundred others. This was a much less common case, one of those nasty ones where the words end in -eet and -ete that stump us all sometimes.

I very briefly tossed her a couple of ways to know which to use, word associations and visual reminders. I only did that because it's the kind of thing we all need, I'd had that very problem, and many of us might appreciate the tools.  Believe me, I'm not shy about grabbing a reference when I realize I'm unsure of something. Simple enough, but her response in front of an audience was to flippantly dismiss it, claiming inability to understand or remember it, apparently intending to just live with the handicap...as a professional editor.

This is a known career writer and editor, blithely dismissing a distinctly professional foible in front of potential clients and peers? Ok, she is a smart, established career woman with a known reputation, and anyone who knows her should dismiss it as a moment's distraction (I hope), but to me it's like a professional programmer saying "pfft, what do grammar, punctuation and spelling matter to a computer?" If you know anything about it at all, you know it matters a lot.

It's like a professional carpenter saying "Wow, I only brought a sledgehammer. Oh well, it really doesn't matter."

It's like a biology teacher, asked whether a squid is a mollusk or a chordate, responding with "Like I care. Go look it up," before going back to a magazine. Anyone else would give such a response, it should be expected - but that person in that situation maybe should not. Not knowing is fine, is only human. Not caring when it's so obviously relevant to what you profess is a little harder to swallow.

I call myself a science fiction writer. I love it when people ask me about odd stellar phenomena, obscure theories, quantum mechanics interpretations or likelihood of life on other planets. Sometimes I may not be in the mood to discuss it, but I don't want my potential audience to believe for a moment that I don't *care*.

I do care. I sometimes use "it's" when I should have said "its", or "that" when I should have used "which", but I care, and if you point it out, I'll fix it. If you suggest rules to help me decide, I'll likely tell you it's absorption in the story, not ignorance,  but I'll try very hard to catch it in the editing.

I don't want my baby to be ugly because of blemishes, but if the problem is just dirt I could have easily wiped away, the fault is truly mine.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've been looking over some of my writing, and editing the mistakes that creep in when you're concentrating on moving scenes along, rather than being grammatically correct. It's time for a cup of coffee and some humble pie.

Mood and Voice

It's been a long damned day -- a long year, a long life.  If you know someone unaffected by the twitching economy, offer them a sandwich because they have nothing.  While you're at it, I'll take a PB&J.

Read the torrent of commentary on the web and it seems all anyone wants in this market is commercial paranormal romance with a gut-grabbing opening, a constant fast-paced easy read that doesn't require you have a dictionary nearby, and maybe a soft grade of paper because you're never gonna want to read such tripe again, and will probably burn through a chapter every time your bowels move, so it might as well do double duty.

Do you hear the frustration? The snarky tone? Is this edgy enough, or do I need to throw in more profanity?

---

I love doing that. String together cliché words and phrases and make something recognizable. Fun! Admittedly, it can be a bit trickier to write in a mood you don't currently share, but hey, authors are actors, playing every character in the book. Sometimes you have to get into the part!

It's like writing poetry; dirge of woe or ode to joy, we take words and weave a mood. It's what makes or breaks a story, but I have a quote for you:

"A only writer begins a book; a reader finished it." - Samuel Johnson

• Take the top section and read it with the mindset of gloom and a long face and it comes out one way.
• Go back and apply grumpy anger and it comes out differently.
• Try again with resigned humor and it shifts yet again.

The reader is under no obligation to think of what the writer was imagining. My favorite example: J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth in which THE HOBBIT, LORD OF THE RINGS, and of course THE SILMARILLION occur, was a master of this idea.

Do Balrogs have wings? It's a topic people rage over (yes, maybe only geeks, but they are a significant market...)  Look at the argument and some discussion of each side HERE. The answer is, they do if you imagined them that way while reading the passages. Or don't if you didn't.  Your book, your world, your choice. The author did not choose to decide for you.

Yep, I really said it.

So when you buy a book, think of it as unfinished furniture you still have to paint.  The author wrote the words, but you have to give them breath and life.