“Last Run” Topped Out

shlomi on July 5, 2017

By Leif Ørnelund – Oslo Museum: image no. OB.Ø59/2680 (Byhistorisk samling), via oslobilder.no., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23247983

When a building’s top floor is in place, especially for tall buiildings, they’re “topped out.” Usually a tree, sometimes a flag.

Authors should have something analogous for a novel. Even if we’re not trying to appease the tree gods.

Sunday I pitched two projects to an agent at the Writers League of Texas Agents & Editors conference. A win for me, at my first pitching, would be “sure, I’d like to see the first ten pages and a query letter via email.” The agent with whom I chatted wanted to hear about two of my projects: my current novel, Last Run, a post-apocalyptic tale, and my Induction series, a “hot” SF set of novels. She wanted the first three chapters and a synopsis of the first, and then maybe the second. Yoiks.

Yesterday I “topped out” the novel, tearing up at the last scene. Last Run currently stands at around 173k words, and the sweet spot for novels in that category is closer to 85k words.

So… behold the mighty editor’s pen, out and primed in red.

 

Bravery

shlomi on May 28, 2017

I have a character in the short story ShutEye who gives her life for a love she knows she can never have, because it’s the right thing for the greater good. There’s a character in Best Shot (being shopped) who will do anything to get the right photo.

These characters are trivial, flickering shadows in comparison with the real ones. On this Memorial Day weekend there are the obvious ones who fought and died, some knowing their actions would certainly kill them, to save others. The young and the idealistic are great for cannon fodder (said the cynical ex-soldier) because we believed in the true rightness of our cause. The brave are a category apart from that: they are willing to sacrifice themselves to save or help others. For examples, look no further than the American Congressional Medal of Honor stories. Every war has their heroes, from Afghanistan & Iraq to the Vietnam War, back through the Korean conflict and of course World Wars One and Two. And every country has its fallen who died bravely for their military cause.

Yes, one can argue whether the war was justified, or served its purpose in the most horrible of methods. But this is about personal bravery, not the religion- and drug-fuels acts of cowards and terror-mongers. The same Medal of Honor rolls tell the stories of bravery during what they call the “Indian Wars,” which today the world (excepting the current US administration) would call “genocide.” These men were, however, brave in their actions, if not the moral righteousness that history best describes.

Bravery is without border, without nationhood. It’s a person deciding to do the right thing as they see it.

This weekend we have two more recently fallen, and another seriously wounded, protecting their country from enemies domestic. Without uniforms, without preparation, without patriotic pep talks or camaraderie. Bravery comes from within, and the ‘spur of the moment’ comes in part from purity of thought. Neither were there under orders, of with a unit. Their bravery was as true and real as any from the Congressional rolls of recent decades.

Friday night a domestic terrorist apparently tried to attack two women in hijabs on a commuter train in Portland.

If Congress can honor a Arnold Palmer, a golfer, with the Congressional Gold Medal, it certainly, at a very minimum, honor these three men for their service to this country, fighting against terror.

 

Character infodump

shlomi on April 19, 2017

My current WIP has a cast of characters, a bunch of whom are all first seen by my POV character in a room together. My first draft of this was, upon re-reading, a flood of details that made the narrative not only drag, but flounder.

imagine you’re walking into a waiting room. You look down and see a tortoise. Sorry, attack of literary drift. Seriously: what do you notice when you look around? I went through this exercise going into a radiology office recently. For my PTSDness I first spotted exits, including windows. Then there was the arrangement of the chairs. Then people, starting with only the basic observations: hair color, bags, canes, or other visually interesting bits. Shoes, the floor. Then back to the people, actually noting the ones who caught my eye, or the tableaus in progress (two people helping an older relative sit down from standing at a walker, a young girl, maybe eight or nine, looking scared next to her dad, with short-cropped hair). Then actually checking people out. A woman wearing a 60’s-style, felted, dark blue coat with big buttons in two rows—and apparently nothing but leggings below. The mom with a toddler and a baby in a stroller, valiantly trying to keep them from hitting their boredom wall.

If I described all that it’d be interesting for that one paragraph. But characters deserve attention, to fix them in a reader’s mind. I resolve that (in the book) by interleaving my character’s action. In the above example, he’d walk across to the clerk’s desk and do business while idly puzzling about the woman in the coat. Then turn around, walk past the walker and people, maybe catch a snippet of conversation triggering a background thought. Then try and dodge the mom and her kids, and end up next to the close-shaved girl. Each stop gives the opportunity to really look, and describe, the character. It also is a way for you to go deeper with the POV person: how they react, what memories are triggered, comparisons with other people in the character’s past.

Today’s takeaway: describe characters the way your POV would, starting with details interesting to her or him, and use action to break up the internal monolog.

And… back early in town

shlomi on March 5, 2017

My field research trip for my current novel made it as far as Big Spring — and barely, at that. Dunno what I picked up, but it was an arduous, stop-filled trip. And after a terrible night in a great hotel, I drove back to Austin rather than head out for the more adventurous destinations: the MacDonald Observatory, Alpine, Balmorhea, Fort Stockton and the Agate Ranch.

Well, it’ll have to be a short trip with more preparation as work for me starts this coming Monday. When I come up for air I’ll contact UT: they might have some folks to help save on some of my sneaker traffic…

Business Trip — For a Novel

shlomi on February 28, 2017

Okay, rented the car. Packing tonight, off tomorrow for a book research road trip at the crack of dark. I’ll be hitting various places in West Texas over the next few days.

This will be the first time I’ll be tracking all expenses for tax purposes. It’s a grown-up feeling—kind of like the first time a kid does their taxes. Feels impressive yet doesn’t amount to much.

Seriously, though, it is something that I think of as a milestone from “someone who writes” to “writer.”

And then I read up on how that works for a guy who’s also a computer guy with a job. In short, there’s plenty of things I can do that are tax deductible, but so long as I’ve got a “regular” job (and I’m guessing that’s at the IRS’ discretion), I can’t deduct writing expenses from anything other than writing revenue. I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect.

And that means I’ve got a goal for 2017: make more money than anything I can deduct! Which will be a bunch, since I’m in the process of converting a bedroom into a tax-compliant writer’s office.

Middle Novel Writing Spread

shlomi on February 25, 2017

I’m somewhere at the 95k mark in my current novel in progress. I’d assessed it at 130k-150k for the first draft, and I still think that’s a good target number. (Of course, given how I’ve been glaring at previously written chunks, inane dialog, scenes that go nowhere, and broken stuff I need to go back and fix, I’m hoping I end up with 90k of solid second draft.)

What is interesting is that this novel, which I’d started on a tear with 5k and even a 7k writing day, now struggles to get to 2k. And that doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the plot hasn’t progressed anywhere nearly as far or fast as I’d expected. My experience is that this is normal: there’s more to remember about characters, more to fact-check against what’s already happened and, when dealing with “real world” fiction (instead of SF/FF) ensuring that real history matches what characters know, remember, and experience. Of course, given that this is a post-apocalyptic hero quest, there’s a boatload of science that needs to work out correctly: everything from heavy metal contaminant levels in volcanic ash to which grasses would be growing in a colder, wetter Permian Basin to me hitting up oil field workers and equine rehabilitators for their expertise in various archana I’d not be able to suss out on my own. (The internet, oddly enough, seems to have a wealth of incorrect, outdated, and ludicrous information on just about every topic imaginable; who woulda thunk???)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m trying out Scrivener for this novel, a departure from my usual and long-trusted package of MS Word/Excel and a tab or five of web links in my browser. It’s forcing me to look at everything from a scene/chapter point of view, and a lot of the handy things (like, for example, editing shortcuts such as switch case and autocomplete) are different, and more cumbersome, in Scrivener than in Word. One shouldn’t have to need a tutorial to use a package like this. Ugh.

My main cause for my slowing down is, however, my outlining skills. I’ve got a 100- and 5000-word synopsis of the novel, so I know what goes on. How the characters get to these waypoints is the issue. When I outline (or even sketch out) several scenes or chapters ahead, I can roll along merrily. And then I get to the end of that piece, and I find that all the minutiae of the writing in getting through the outlined areas has brought me to where I dont want to continue from there. A character has had an epiphany, a place I’d imagined in my outline as abandoned isn’t, or vice versa. The weather. The horses. My main characters’ moods. So then there’s a period of Great Restructuring so I can get things lined up before I can continue outlining.

Sure, I could just slip a note in at the end and then continue writing as if the Great Restructuring had already happened. But there are dialog and scene changes that would be written, and by the time I’d get around, after the first draft is finished, to revisit them, I’d have a lot of remembering to do, with multiple discontinuities to be addressed. I’m shuddering just thinking about it.

The alternative, I’m told by smug parts of my apparently-not-sub-enough parts of my consciousness, would be just to outline everything and stick to the plan. For so many reasons I rebel against this. I tried writing a novel based on this idea and I had to put it down after about five thousand words of writing (not including the outline, summaries, etc.). Maybe one day I’ll pick it up again and try it without using the dang outline as a poured-concrete kind of framework.

With fully outlining a piece before starting comes the ability to do all the necessary research for the novel. All the science and pack train questions I’m asking or looking up could be done in one fell swoop instead of being salted into my writing time. (Of course, then what productive thing would I do when pausing in the writing?)

I’ll be all right this time, because the story is tied to a very specific geographic trek, one that I can map out using Google Earth in advance, and then I can tie events to literal markers on the map. That’s meant that I can turn around and tie days of the trek to chapters in the novel, even if I may move the delineators around after I’m done with the draft for plot development reasons.

Bottom line: I think there’s a lot more thrashing and extra writing time when not working with a fully-developed outline. And its faster from a research perspective as well. But “pantsing” the story gives my characters the freedom to develop and make the novel theirs, instead of being a careful construct of an author.

As always, YMMV on this.

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

Alt-reality

shlomi on January 23, 2017

Charlie Hebdo, Synagogue shootings, Orwell 1984, Orwellian Doublespeak, vaccines, war on terror, war on cancerI’ve got a word — augre — to describe augmented reality (as opposed to VR or virtual reality). Currently social media and news call it “AR,” which is, I think, a geeksnob way of obfuscating things.

The neo-nazis and other fascists infesting America took a page from Orwell’s 1984, redefining their brand of hate as some kind of political alternative to the spectrum of what was, until this point in American political history, bounded by parties respecting the idea of democracy — or, at least, a republic.

It’s clear that the idea of “alt-” is the new Orwellian doublespeak. Alt-right. Alternative facts. This, friends, is doubleplusungood development. And while it’s thrilling in a “we’re going down the maw of the kraken” kind of way, it’s a danger sign about our society, and the validity of language as a means to describe the reality around us.

On Writing Christ Origin Myth Analogs

shlomi on November 19, 2016

Courtesy Wikia

Courtesy Wikia

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, “StarMan” (starring Beau Bridges), and the Matrix trilogy all mimic, purposely or accidentally, the origin myth of Christianity. Echoes of the various aspects of the Roman, Celtic, Nordic, and many other cultures have been blurred into the practices of modern Christianity. And some of these have become universal, such as the idea of transubstantiation: the idea that wine and wafer turn into blood and body. That this is a ritual act of cannibalism is amusing from this Jewish Atheist’s point of view.

And irrelevant, or so I thought, until, as I was going over feedback notes on a short story Blood of Leeches, before submitting it for publication. An author reviewer wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here) “…so you mean his blood makes people into followers?” As if this was an alien, weird, idea. Now, I’m not equating my little piece with the works listed at the top. But… it’s funny how people incorporate (sorry) the rites of their religion as normal parts of their lives, but see them as alien when expressed in someone else’s world view.

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.