On Span of Memory and Tools

shlomi on February 20, 2017

Last week a fellow writer was discussing the trouble with editing a document that had been laid down for a while. Keeping the entire novel in one’s head, the writer said, was important when making edits with large blocks of text (e.g., changing scenes and chapters around). This was said in the context of using Microsoft Word vs. something like Scrivener, which I’m currently test-driving.

Word maintains a single document. And while one may use heading levels to delineate parts, chapters, and scenes, a large manuscript can get unwieldy. Scrivener and other scene-compartmentalized software tools make it relatively easy to shuffle around the various scenes or chapters, but if a writer wants, for example, to move parts of three scenes into two other scenes elsewhere, there’s a lot of cutting and pasting and remembering what scene is where that’s involved. Add to the text being edited ‘cold,’ it seems to me that the specialized tools would almost require quite a bit of cold reading and flipping around to scenes.

I’m still making my mind up about the Scrivener software, but I’ve got two strategies for writing large texts using word: multiple documents, and headings. I’ve written 130k+ word documents with no more than having a Heading 1 reserved for manuscript, characters, locations, objects, kipple, and research. Then chapters are at the Heading 2-level and Heading is for scenes. Having an automatically generated table of contents at the beginning makes hopping around easy. Outline mode views and automatic outlining can also help, but I don’t use the latter two.

A variant is to put each novel component into its own file (e.g., a folder with the novel, characters, research, and locations).

The important thing isn’t the tool, is comfort with it. Every new keystroke combination that requires learning is time not spent writing. And that means writers will usually be most comfortable with the general document editor (e.g., MS Word) rather than a specialty software package. My $0.02, so far.

On Characters with PTSD

shlomi on February 19, 2017

One should write what one knows, goes the hoary advice. And it’s true: stories are vibrant, clear, more memorable and more interesting when the writer really knows their subject matter, whether it’s a location, a type of character, or an event.

One of the characters in my current novel in progress has fairly severe PTSD. Enough to function (mostly) in society, but not in great shape. He as flashbacks, hypervigilance, almost paranoid worries… and is living in a post-apocalyptic world where being paranoid was a useful trait. Read More about On Characters with PTSD

Midnight Writing

shlomi on February 15, 2017

Its been getting ugly in my neighborhood these past few weeks: the new complex owners installed a kiddie playground directly outside my bedroom/living rooms, where I sleep/write. And in the mornings, when I used to sleep in after writing late, are now taken up by teams of people digging post holes and pounding lumber into the ground then sawing and drilling dozens of new “porches” in front of apartments (+$75/mo. for renters). So I’ve been sleeping  badly, and eventually I’ve gotten to the point where three out of four nights I’m up and raring to go around midnight.

There’s a certain peace and calm, for me, stepping out of the house to start my day. I go to a local 24-hour place to write, and can bang out six hours of writing, up to 7,500 words, cranked beup on coffee and the parallel play of other humans. I don’t know if it’s  being out of the normal time stream, or that quiet that settles over the area when the traffic lights blink suggestions to the odd car instead of blazing out orders to traffic. If it weren’t so hard to find sleep during the day, I might take up vampiric English composition.

On Putting My Babies to Sleep

shlomi on May 15, 2016

I started writing pieces on in the Thippah’n universe since 2005. First a science fiction NaNoWriMo novel. Then a few really neat long scenes — expandable into shorts. Then another novel and another and another which needed shredding after I published the first online.

I’ve been sitting on editing the second novel for years. Light passes. Blocking and language passes. Rearranging for plot and twists. This last one is a back-to-front, word-by-word edit. And I want to stop.

Writing is about being ruthless. It’s about ripping out what’s not working. For non-writers, it’s like finding a knit where there should be a purl and yanking out six inches of knitting to make it right.

What I’m thinking of doing is like unraveling five sweaters because one doesn’t like the design. After they’re already up on hangars. But they’ve become my albatross, leaching energy from other projects I’d like to do. But it’s such a great universe! But its far more inchoate than almost every other project I’ve got on the drawing boards, in my drawers, under the table, and stuffed into cracks on my shelves.

So is stopping and not scheduling work on them cryosleep? Or euthanasia? I won’t be the same author if I return to them in a few years. Would that be better for them?

A post with many questions and no answers that I can see. Suggestions, however, are always entertained.

The Vagaries of Vagueness

shlomi on April 7, 2016

GMOs are the red dye #2 of the decade. Vilified as poison, sanctified as nothing but yield increasing. As with everything outside the soundbite universe, it’s a bit more complicated.

The basics: A “genetically modified organism” includes every food plant and animal, and all the service animals humans have touched in the past 14,000 or so thousand years. GMOs in the protested context are ones where scientists have diddled with the genes to create changes in a single generation, tinkering in ways nature couldn’t. The unintended consequences of these changes are what’s at debate, not the initial intent. After all, it’s not as if we’re trying to invent a carnivorous plant.

It’s what you add. There’s a tomato, one of the first GMOs, that’s had a salmon gene added so that the tomato’s flesh is firmer and less likely to go soft in transit. Aside from the weirdness of having different kingdoms’ genes muddled, there’s not too much of an issue.And there are a lot of fish for which modification is in their future.

The most popular GMO to hate are the Roundup Ready™ soybean and corn and crops. Economics aside, adding pesticide resistance to the genome is a question of the unknown: there have never been any long-term very large scale, double-blind studies of any side effects. It looks good, but that’s as far as it goes.

The other kind of modified food is exemplified by adding not a gene to change the food’s taste or portability, but defenses. While organic crops are sprayed with microbial agents that produce the Bt insecticide, they can be washed off. The GMO versions cannot, as the active chemical in Bt is part and parcel of the plant.

 

The bottom line (and this is a post on writing, not organic farming), is that lumping a huge swath of anything under a single banner muddies the waters for all and creates a monolithic concept from which it’s harder, as a writer, to finesse nuances that give a scene, character, or even a more interesting reality.

Oh, and check out a mythbusting blog post on GMOs in Scientific American, as well as a whole raft of responses.

Stale Writing and Technology

shlomi on April 4, 2016

The novel I mostly wrote back in 1985 can’t be finished now. Technological advances and political events have overtaken major story points so unless I want it to be an alternate universe fiction, it’s dead.

And that’s a good thing, I think. Writing the ten-year novel should be about the things that are unchanging: the nature of people, of personal growth. Wanna write science fiction? Write it and get it out there: dawdle and the po’on (POH-ohn, a Hebrew word literally meaning “‘here’ device”) is leapfrogged by the smartphone. And the Israeli-Palestinian stupidity has surpassed even the blackest of my noir fantasies. At least I got Syria and Jordan right.

I’ve been re-reading a slew of science fiction novels (latest: the Barrayan Saga books), and, as Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that most of the novels were written to stand alone, it’s been eye-opening to see how she avoids infodump in pursuit of establishing character and milieu when readers attempt to peruse them in order. Learn from all that’s been written, not just the latest.

Yearly Writing Prompt

shlomi on March 31, 2016

CaptureSeeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.

The former invites reflective meditation. Frequently the subject is personal, based on my experiences that year. The latter is a poem, with the number of syllables equal to my age that year, and functions as a sort of momento mori for my life to that point. I’ve some really good ones and many that stretch and strain to syllable count instead of content.

But there they are: days for reflection based on a habit of {shudder} decades at this point.

Have you prompts? Please share!

Trainventure: More Character Sketches

shlomi on March 25, 2016

These sketches were from the Amtrak boarding lounge in Chicago.

Therapy Lady and… Dad?

Woman in her forties wearing a hijab sitting next to an older man in a vest and sports coat with a distinguished goatee. He’s operating a large apple mac and she keeps repeating “the orange leaves are moving in the direction of…” and “the points are pointing in the direction of…” again and again and again. Patiently. I’m guessing it’s either some kind of therapy the silliest game I’ve ever heard. I later realize she’s working on one of those “brain building” web sites to help older folks with cognitive skills. She changes the patter almost every time and is ever patient with him. He seems focused and concentrated, with nary a sign of frustration. On second look the jacket seems about four sizes too big on him. His voice, when he speaks, is furry and slow, but he’s clearly thinking.

Turns out she’s a physician “two of my daughters are,” says the proud papa, waking up from the snooze in his chair. I complement her on her patience. “You should ask my daughter how patient I am,” she says. But smiles. I bet she’s a great doc.

The Bike Master

72, looks like a rugged, pudgy white guy. Casually talked about biking. Was laid up for a bit “because I had a cancer thing up my nose.” I realized while talking with him that the ‘painter’s cap’ on his head was actually a mesh biker’s cap with a bill.

Regaled me with taking the train (another train buff who spends a lot of time riding the rails) to Alberta, then biking down through Montana, then down through Eastern Oregon to meet his daughter for his grandson’s birthday near San Francisco. “You’ve got to go get out of the train in Whitefish, Montana,” he says. “While everyone is out there smoking and filling, check out the scenery. Really beautiful.” ‘Filling,’ he explained, was filling up the engines with diesel. Asked if I smoked after he said that, looking a bit abashed. I feel his angst; nice to have someone who speaks more plainly than politely, sometimes.

“When I biked the train route from Chicago out to Seattle it was beautiful.” “Wasn’t it a bit bumpy,” I asked? Took a minute, but I got the eye roll. “We would get up every day, my grandson and I, and every day we’d time with the train would come the other way. It was fun how it came by earlier and earlier each day.”

I asked him about biking in Europe, specifically in the Netherlands. “Flat and small,” he said. “I paid five euros to take the train to the beach,” he said. “Three stops later bang, there we were: sand and water. Small place. Americans don’t understand how small the rest of the world can be.” I chuckled and told him the old piece about driving at highway speed for 17 hours and not leaving Texas.

“During the war my wife was heading out to see me at my base. When the conductor said they’d entered Texas she gathered up her things and got ready to get off. Took another day or so, but she got there.”

I told him all about Daughter the Elder and her intended journey. “She’s going self-contained?”

“Yes.”

“Well, remember it’s five dollars to camp and all the hot shower water you want in Oregon,” he said. “California it’s another two quarters to get the water running.”

“And packing food is tough,” I said.

He nodded, and patted his belly. “It never fails,” he said. “I eat whatever I can get my hands on, but I lose 35-40 pounds every time I do a long ride.”

I’m jealous in so many ways…

Trainventure: Some Character Sketches

shlomi on March 23, 2016

I recently took a vacation that was supposed to be a train writing adventure: Austin → Chicago → Seattle, get to Olympia, then again on a train to LA and from there back to Austin. My goals were:

  1. Finish a couple of stories
  2. Get some train experience for my writing
  3. Write a piece entirely on the train

12829496_10153794963230813_1653401339937989656_oThis… Did not go as planned. My PTSD precludes sleeping on moving vehicles unless I’m totally exhausted, and even then only for a couple or three hours max. I’ve known about cars and planes forever, but not trains. I figured they wouldn’t be an issue. I slept three hours en route to Chicago, then three 2-3 hour chunks as exhaustion allowed. The roomette (feels like closet) was just large enough for me — if I were 2″ shorter.

I was a zombie in Seattle, and in Olympia that night and the next day, although a good, hard sleep helped, but I was only operating at 80%.

774697_10153794963415813_744799248641000499_oThen I pulled a Shlomi, and realized Monday evening, after a day in Seattle and dinner with family back in Olympia, that I was supposed to be on a train Tuesday morning. I’d thought I had an additional day (me, not reading dates on ticket, oy!), and suddenly I realized that no, another four days of this and I’d be a zombie. So I canceled reservations and, in a fluster the next morning, just booked tickets for that day. Screwed up people’s plans to be with me, but, worst, left without having some more time with The Son. Stupid move on my part, driven, I see now, but exhaustion and wanting it all to stop (still felt like I was on a train even a day later). But I made the (bad decision). End of guilt trip. And by midnight Austin time I was back home, ready to enjoy several days of crazy jet lag, back pain, etc.

But.

I finished one short story, at least to the point where I could start on the rewrite. Got the train experience sticker, and several character sketches that I’ll publish. and made some great progress on Shabbat Queen, which I’m rewriting for the nth time.

I’ll post more character sketches in the coming days; here are the ones from my Austin to Chicago leg:

Preacher Man

Leather right eye patch, right leather and metal leg brace, long brown hair past his shoulders and a full white beard almost as long. Felt Stetson (dimple on the top, flattish brim). Tightly crocheted yamulka covering 1/3 of his head. With all the other damage, I first thought maybe it was an artificial skull covering.

First I see of him is drinking a cup of coffee a little noon as we chug through the rain. He raises his covered cup. “It’s better with Bailey’s though.”

“So,” I say, after chatting about the semi vs. pickup accident three years back that brought his trucker career to an end (“I’m retired now. Time to drive around, and healthy enough to do it now that I got my truck set up so I can drive it with one leg. Just not the money to enjoy it.”): “Is that a yamulka?”

“Yep.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“I’m a rabbi,” he declares. I hope I haven’t just given him a gimlet eye.

“Really? Where did you study? In a yeshiva?”

“Yep.”

“Which one?”

“I studied scripture in Seguin.”

I bit off the next five things I want to say. This is going to be a long train trip, and he and I are forced company all the way up to St. Louis.

 

Later that evening I’m talking with Cal. “Wow,” she says excitedly, “I want to be Jewish.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because all I gots do is be good to others and be nice!”

The next twenty minutes are my attempts to put Judaism in a scope unrelated to Preacher Man’s Messianic delusions of Judaism. And it bugs me, even as I write this, that I’m having to defend a religion I don’t believe in from the god perspective from an evil parasite that would weaken it further. And embarrassed that I’m not confronting this shill on his lies. “Lies.” Feel the cognitive dissonance.

8:30 in the morning: after an hour-long breakfast “dining, we’re dining,” Cal says when I say hi, he’s sitting with them an hour later, tippling at a bottle of Bailey’s, sans coffee.

Sunny

“Rain is for springtime,” she said. “It’s when everything comes back to life. But we can stop it if we do a sundance.”

“But it’s raining,” I said.

She takes a section of an orange and holds it up near the window. “See now it’s sunny out, we can do it!”

She’d appeared in the dining car the previous evening in full flapper mode, complete with hat, narrow, matching, eggplant-colored jacket over a dark purple top and a short pencil, but not fringed, skirt. Bright red hair, wide cheekbones and eyes a bit too wild to match the eyes. She works in a used book store, which, she says, gives her time to travel. Austin to Kansas City. But the Missouri side, not the Kansas side, she assures me. “It might be great for sunsets, but otherwise the Missouri side is better.”

Cal and Erin

Lesbian couple living in Michigan. They call each other their fiancée and plan on getting married “soon.”

Cal’s a black, 31-year-old woman with sport-style prescription glasses who lost 200 pounds after meeting Erin. She dresses in layers of clothing from neck down, still coyly disguising her (self-described) deflated figure.

Erin’s a curvy, outgoing woman (26) who confides that she’s got a bad case of shyness: she just can’t speak up in public. In one sentence she says she wants to work in particle physics and that she’ll never do it because she doesn’t have a degree. I try chivying around some assumptions. Afterwards Cal says “thanks for saying that: she doesn’t listen to me.” Then: “I’ve been working on her and you should have known her back then. Takes a village to build someone up, it does.”

Cal said “it’s great we’re both into boobs: it’s like we’re 13 year old boys!”

Meth Man

Taller than me, baggy jeans and maybe a pair or two more. Corduroy coat, a couple of t-shirts under a denim shirt. No teeth, flapping cheeks and wild eyes.

I walked past Cal and Erin later in the evening. “Oh thank you thank you thank you,” Erin says. “We thought he’d never leave.”

By morning he’d disappeared.

Mom & Daughter

25ish yo black woman in stretch pants with similarly attired 2yo daughter, who is smart, vivacious and outgoing if not very verbal. Mom is a chef, who started our conversation by talking about how much she needed to smoke, and how she would use the stroller hood so she could puff and how hard it was to smoke when it was raining out. When I said I was allergeric she said “what? Which are you allergic to?” “Both.” “Oh, wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Tough.”

When she was drunk later that evening she went circular on me for getting the best deals on travel by rail and chided me for paying too much, saying she was getting all the way up to Chicago for under $200 for them both, then the same to go from Canada down to Florida the next week and I needed to figure out to push them on prices and get discounts booking ahead or being part of the club. Much later that evening she and Cal and Erin were all talking at max volume with the daughter’s far overwrought tired whines as a counterpoint.

Pre-Navy Writer

First three time he walked past me I thought he was on the Autism spectrum. “Looks good,” he said, looking at my writing. 5’6”, intense, glasses. “Like the font,” the next time. When he settled down near me he showed me the laptop rest he fashioned from the back of a metal chair. Writes fan fiction, “but that’s not real writing. It’s all erotica,” he says. “Ever hear of Fallout 3? That’s where it’s at.” Lists several games. Seems nervous, discounts his writing. Talked to him about nanowrimo. Going into the Navy in May.

Retired Gummer

Retired 21 years ago, train lover. Took the train from Cairo to Alexandria with his son who’s a train buff because he is. Asked “so, you look like you know how to order meat. I don’t have any teeth – I mean, I’ve got dentures, but I don’t wear them. What’s the best way to order my meat so it’s easy to chew? I explained about aging and protein breakdown, but that medium would be the best for low quality meat. And wondered why I was the elected poobah for that. Also a self-taught computer guy, doing the apocryphal DOS->building computers to building them for family to linux guy. Self-effacing, polite, nice. Neatly trimmed beard/mustache, 5’4” hobbit-ish but balding, white hair.

Evie of the Trains

Black rubber boots, eminently practical, with a pink ribbon in pigtails in her dishwater blonde hair. A nose ring, pink cell phone charger cord. Piano pen case, a journal, three books, plastic bags. A rosy flush, possibly rosea, puts her age from anywhere from 17 to 25. Gray sweater tunic and stripy pink pants.

Tweed Couple

In their 70s, chatting while looking out the window. Woman mentions geospatial intelligence agency as they chat while downtown Springfield, IL passes by. Satisfied silences as they look at the window and occasionally continue the patter of a couple long familiar with one another and eminently comfortable with their silences.

ArmadilloCon & Fast Drafting

shlomi on June 12, 2014

 

ArmadilloCon 36 Logo

ArmadilloCon is one of those events I kept promising myself to attend, but for which I never chose to make time. I thought I had an out this year: I didn’t have any 5k word writing samples, which is the limit for the the workshop component of the Con.

Whew!

Then I rifled through my stories. Ah, From Generation to Generation. Fantasy. Jewish mystical fantasy… Oh, good: almost 6,000 words. Won’t work.

Good.

Um, well, maybe if I gave it another editing run-through…

It’d been long enough since I’d last read it not to wince at the trimmings of word and scene. A couple of ‘ritas later and 4,998 stood the word count.

Now I have no more excuses. And am looking forward to all manner of critiquing late next month.