Amid, Among, Between, Betwixt

H/t to Ashwin Mudigonda for non-commercial use

Just signed up for the 2018 Agents & Editors Conference here in Austin. Last minute. Second year going. Wasn’t going to, but after working on a single query letter for the better part of the day, I might as well see if I can’t catch an agent’s eye. Researching each participating agent and editor took a few hours, but that’ll come in handy as I stalk the Wild Agent at the conference. I’m also gonna do a toss-at-the-buzzer pitch of my larger novel, Last Run, to one or two victims agents that might have an appetite for it. Of course, that means cleaning that puppy up too, before June’s end.

This interrupted writing madly a piece to submit for the ArmadilloCon Writers’ Workshop. I think this is my last year that I’ll submit. I’ve gotten quite a lot out of it but the panel sessions were where I got the most bang for my conference buck. And hopefully I can assist next year.

All this while getting the first “Angels” book cleaned up enough to send to agents. Meeting tonight with one of my writing groups for dinner and last revisions before last cleanup. And find a title. It’d be great if I had something to call it aside from a word unrelated to the story.

Book two in the series is done, at least in first draft. And #3 is already starting to come into focus in my head, so I’m getting character journeys and the larger arc or three sketched out.

And all the above is while my fascination with a paying, full-time day job increases. Doing an application right can take an hour or two for each one.

Life. Gotta love it.

On Relevance and Faithfulness (Or, Tomato, Potato)

As I (continue to) procrastinate writing the climax, denouement, and conclusion to my second novel, I’m getting great feedback from specific beta readers. One in particular read Angels just for the Jewish POV and info. Having been raised Orthodox, and gone to yeshiva, I’m no stranger to my religion, but one might be surprised as what can get forgotten over the years. And it’s important that I get this right because I’m realizing that Angels is almost perfectly written to be read by a frum (religious Jewish) audience. There are recurring tropes in how the religious are portrayed (including this movie, the latest involving Orthodox women “trapped” by their religion).

So when she pointed out that she didn’t think the word sheitel [wig] meant what I thought it meant, I was puzzled.

“No,” she said, looking at her iPad notes, “you meant to say tichel [head kerchief], right?”

I engaged in a spontaneous facepalm. And wrote the first of several notes that’ll become part of the next draft of the book.

I might “know the rules,” but not having lived the life, conflating the two into one word, instead of using the two correct words isn’t surprising. And, to a non-Jewish reader, this would fly right over their (presumably uncovered) head. But getting it right, really right, means as much as possible. Like the carpenter who sands and finishes inside corners of pieces even though no one with ever see it. I’ll know it’s the right word, and a religious woman or man reading it will understand and be less likely to snort, think “that idiot doesn’t really know how we live,” and consign it to the misguided Jewish lit pile.

One of my favorite authors wrote a book including scenes in a Temple (which is what non-religious synagogues are sometimes called in America). The names of the rabbis? John, Paul, and Mary. {crickets} Sure, it’s a fantasy novel, and so what if magic was the theme of the scene, but still: why get something basic wrong if you can help it?

Being faithful to the culture respects it, its members or adherents, and, ultimately, respects the reader as well. Because a writer wants to suspend disbelief only as much and for as long as necessary to make the scene work.

To get more info on the wig/kerchief issue, check out Rivki Silver’s blog post on sheitels, and this whimsical but accurate post regarding tichels by Andrea Grinberg in her store’s, The Wrapunzel, blog.

When the plot goes out of control

Writing this article is a way for me to procrastinate yet another major revision to my current manuscript. But it’s a learning moment for me, that’s worth sharing.

Being able to write without editing is hard for most folks to do, and pushing through that barrier makes writing… not effortless, but at least doable. There’s more creative energy available to move the plot forward.

The downside to writing first and editing later (there are many upsides) is that one can veer off the intended path. sometimes it’s a character tugging at my hand saying “check this out; I can do this, too!” Or it’s a place with gravitas sufficient to move more action to it, or from it, or because of it.

My first tear-down in this manuscript was after creating a mass casualty event. A natural progression of the actions of some characters, actually. But this is a murder-mystery, not a Bruce Willis flick. And I ended up with the chaos that typically happens after a disaster of the “dozens dead, hundreds injured” variety. And while I got about eleven thousand possibly reusable words from it, ultimately I pulled it, and the six or seven new characters introduced at about the 60k mark, out of the manuscript.

I’m now past the 70k mark. this is where things should be coming together. The number of threads decreasing, the tension focusing on who did it, and what’s the protagonist going to do about it.

Now’s also the time I’m realizing I’ve got an extra suspect. He’s threaded throughout the story, Hinted at, a cause of trauma, of mystery… I’d already edited him out of the beginning, because even I couldn’t figure out what his motives were for his actions, cool as they looked when the protagonist came across them. To me he felt like Richard Kiel in Moonraker. Interesting, glitterly, but almost a one trick pony in terms of evil. I could have made him more evil, more important. But I kept butting into the fact that he wasn’t fitting in with a smooth narrative. Other detectives kept tripping over him. He added a complexity to the search for the murderers that I had to divert time and words to explaining.

So goodbye, Evan Stone. May you appear in another novel, in a different guise. And perhaps in a nicer role; I really didn’t like this version of you.

On Pantsing, Characters, and “Writer’s Block”

Isaac Asimov, at his “best” (we can critique his literary skills elsewhere) could sit down and pound out a novel as fast as he could type on his clunky electric typewriter[1]. With the kind of throughput he had, he had to be pantsing it, but I’ve found no references either way (but at 5k/day every day, I can’t imagine that he had time to plan).

I pants it (write without a clear outline), depending on my characters to pull me through the process because I know who they are, and what they want, and where they’re going. Doesn’t work for everyone, but at the last Armadillo Con writing workshop there was a panel of published authors. They went down the line: six authors and an increasingly bemused moderator. “Pantser,” “pantser,” “pantser…” You get the drift. Last was most surprising: an author with dozens of published murder mystery novels to his 90+ year credit. “I don’t know who did it,” he said. “Sometimes not until it’s all revealed.”

What he did know was his dramatis personae. See above, character, motivations, etc. Given that start it’s possible to “run with it.”

D&D dungeon masters (DMs) do something very similar (except, of course, for humans manipulating the player characters). And the DM has to handle any and all non-player characters (NPCs) that appear in the game. This is very close to the kind of pantsing I know. And there are some awesome dungeons with frantic DMs trying to keep one plot twist ahead of the characters.

For about a week I couldn’t get more than 1k words on a page. Some days under 100. And it brought me up short, because I knew the main characters pretty well. After coming through and then removing several scenes because they were flat and lifeless, I went back to my characters. Like solving an electrical problem in a car (before computers did most of the heavy lifting), I went and looked at every character and their interaction with others.

The “NPC” ones: the (first) victim, the mysterious stranger, the new characters on the block: they were all mysteries to mo. Why were they doing what they did? Why did they care about a better-defined character, or their actions?

So I took a step back (sans computer) and doodled on one of my writing notebooks for several hours. What were their names? Why were they in the story? What were they trying to get out of it? A few paragraphs of backstory, a clear physical and psychological description of each, and I was back in the driver’s seat, as it were.

At least, the seat by the keyboard that kept the words flowing.

On Perpetrators and Puzzlement

We’ve all seen a puzzled neighbor or family member interviewed after some horrific killing or act saying “I don’t get it; he was the nicest guy. Never a problem.”

“Yeah,” I’d snort to myself, “I’d have seen something.”

Nah.

I went to a liberal Orthodox Jewish school (an oxymoron today) back in Riverdale. Or, as everyone else called it, The Bronx.

The school was, for me, heaven. Latest (1970s era) gear, brilliant teachers, 3-day camping trips complete with art and science teacher hookups, bus tours of Washington, D.C. Some of the most amazing and brilliant people I now realize I was friends with.

I loved the place so much tht when I had my bar mitzvah I had yarmulkes made with the school’s logo. That place, and some of the amazing people in it (Mrs. Ratner, the secretary, the Doyle family, custodians and cooks extraordinaire, and a few others), kept me tethered to (relative) sanity.

Yes, yes, this story has a point. Where was I? Oh, right: heavenly idyllic place, blah blah blah. I had had a real nemesis there, a fellow student “J” whom I’d been with since kindergarten. We hated each other with the fire of a thousand suns. For good reasons on both sides.

Rabbi (later known as Cantor) Stanley Rosenfeld was the assistant principal, handling the Judaic end of things. He was determined to “make us shake hands.” And, in the end, I think he succeeded. At least, neither of us buried our hatchets in the other’s skull.

He invited “J” and I to spend Shabbat at his house (Friday evening through Saturday night). It was an apartment in South Yonkers, right near the Riverdale border. He was a member of one of the less glitz, more prayer, synagogues.

I only remember two things about that Shabbat: (1) that we hid his clothing and he chased me and “J” around the house in his underwear to get his stuff so we could go to shul for afternoon services. I think it was the first time “J” and I were partners in mischief. And, (2), when he caught me he kept twisting my wrist to get me to tell him where his clothes were. Twisted it until it broke. To my memory he was horrified and apologetic and as solicitous a vice-principal as an 8th grader might expect.

Oh, and he raped boys. The son-of-a-bitch was a serial pedophile, child rapist, assaulting his way through several Jewish schools in the Northeast until he was put away, paroled, and jailed again for breaking parole with yet another assault. And now, according to the JTA, it turns out that someone, someone I probably knew, was raped by him.

 

If someone had interviewed me about him I’d be that gormless, clueless guy, not knowing how close I was to the dragon’s fire.

Flipping the Page

I wanted Angels to be finished, or at least topped off, by January 1. I missed that deadline, but my real next deadline is getting back to my editor with changes to Infection, which is a whole other genre and animal. Then Last Run needs a thorough editing, and Induction, for re-release with Infection. I’ve got a couple of shorts that I want to write, and one titled Five Thousand Words that I’m rewriting after the Austin Public Library workshop. And shopping stories. And getting things together to find an agent.

I’m also going to try and emulate Marshall Ryan Maresca‘s amazing blog posting schedule. Once I have a good sense of the kind of content I want to put out.

Wow. Okay. I guess there’s plenty of work to do… Happy 2018! I hope.

Alternative Histories

Authors of Alternative History novels (and TV series) often hinge on specific events: what would happen if Hitler won? After all, the Nazis were close on more than one occasion. Or if the creation story of Jesus never coalesced? Or, in one of my works in progress, Jewish Qabala really worked, starting with descendants of Nachmanides, entirely displacing non-Judaic systems and disrupting the search for the New World.

We’re at that time. The Angry White Men have disrupted what’s been a stable, if fluidly changing, political system. This time is, globally, a schwerpunkt, a turning point, for many futures. Futures that three years ago, in the glow of a liberal view of the world, accepting refugee in numbers unmatched since World War II, accepting people for their love, not their gender or orientation, we could not have imagined.

2016 and 2017 was that slow slide to insanity, led by der Amerikanischenführer. Toward a general-run government, toward a kleptocracy. Let’s see what 2018 brings us…

 

 

Competency Test

You-Know-Who pic: If they're cosidering a reality TV star for president / Judge Judy pic: Don't we need a reality TV star for supreme court justice too?

h/t to Freedom Memes

I had this little nugget, in draft form, on my desktop for an NPR 3-minute fiction contest, but wasn’t happy with it at the time. Rummaging through my draft posts at year end, I’m seeing just how prescient and sad it all is.

Read More about Competency Test

On fidelity in world-building

It’s hard to create a new world, complete with languages, people, and the minutiae that separates the reality that is our planet and its history. In a recent population analysis of GoT, Lyman Stone drills into deathly detail on how impossible George RR Martin’s world is. Marshall Ryan Maresca has written scads of posts on worldbuilding (here’s just one).

As a writer and a reader, there’s a lot to be said for creating the right atmosphere, especially if there’s a book or five needed to write the whole story.

More than the analysis, than the facts, has to be the telling. Readers need to feel a location that’s real. They need to know that a staircase in the house leads to a door, and that the other side of the door aligns with the layout of the house. Knobs need to work as expected. Trolls should meet the expectation of the described milieu. Physics should be consistent throughout.

My last novel finished was “post-apocalyptic.” And walking through the science, as much as it made my storytelling better, makes, I think, for a more believable story than some Luc Besson movie. (Unless you see them as pure comedy and not sci-fi…)

I Tried Valerian…

Related image…And it wasn’t even as good as the herb. Couldn’t make it past… I don’t even know where it was. This was Vulcan crystal paper with pink rock candy for the eyes, and lobotomy needles for the mind. I’d resisted the chorus of boos and hisses—I mean, 5th Element director! And the main (human) characters were eye candy. Well, until they opened their mouths.

Not sure what this says about the comic’s fans, but I lost IQ points just watching a piece of it. Sad, really. Lots of interesting ways the story could go, and it oozes with species that would be need to see in a Rendezvous with (a Populated) Rama kind of way. But this? This is a pizza with six times the necessary cheese and a white bread crust.

Yes, it’s all about food. I’m roasting a duck. Pretending it’s a “Mul.”