Category: Musing

Something that occurred to me regarding my writing a couple weeks ago: one of the things I’m ‘encouraged’ to do by those folks who are reading and giving feedback on my stories is to reduce the number times I switch the point of view during the story.
What I mean is this: we meet the main character. We hang out with them for awhile. Then there’s a little side thing with another guy. Then back to the main character. Then back to second guy. Then main character. Then we meet a third guy…
… and that’s Chapter One.
And I realized why I do that. It’s entirely from running roleplaying games for so many years. I’m automatically cycling through all the main characters and trying to make sure that (a) I don’t ‘play’ with just one character for too long and (b) everyone gets a turn.
It’s generally a good thing in games. It doesn’t translate well in fiction.
It does WORK, but you need to structure it very clearly. It took me three or four passes on Hidden Things before I started to feel like I really had a strong pattern established for when the Point of View switched away from Calliope… and, like most of the book, I’d already unconsciously established the pattern in the second two-thirds of the book, and simply needed to reverse-apply it to the first third. (Here’s a hint: the camera only leaves her when she’s asleep.)
I’m beginning to think that eighty percent of the work during revisions lies in looking at the good patterns that developed later into the book, and trying to apply all that good stuff to those first five chapters where you were flailing madly at the keyboard like some sort of fox hunt brush beater, hoping a feral story would flush out and make a break into open territory where it could be gunned down in a proper, civilized fashion.

My efforts at book revisions are hampered SOMEWHAT by the fact that, on my main computer at home, Word won’t let me add new words to the spellcheck dictionary.
Yes, seriously.

So, as I may have mentioned, I’m doing revisions on Hidden Things right now. Having wrapped up the main effort, I sent the document to a couple of readers. ***Dave sent me his feedback already, all of which was valuable (even if I don’t end up using all of it), but I wanted to share one comment that really tickled me.
In one section, Dave points out an inconsistency in my use of typographic settings by noting the following:

Dragons speak in all-caps italics.

Now granted, I established that particular rule in the story, so really he’s just telling me that I’d forgotten to do that in that spot.
Still, it really amused me to see the rule summarized and stated so clearly.

So I’m being a typical neurotic writer in need of babysitting right now — I’m working on a third draft of Hidden Thingsight now — I’ve got an outline/list of things I need to add/tweak in the story, and I keep circling the end of the story with a frown on my face, because it does not make me happy. In the last couple days, it’s felt more like ‘circling the drain’ circling.
I had a burst of creative emotional energy on Tuesday and literally could not WAIT to get to my keyboard. Of couse, when I did get to my keyboard, the first thing I did was get caught up on a long weekend of work and personal emails, fiddled with some other online to-dos, and by the time I was done, I couldn’t even bring myself to open the document.
Ugh.
After beating myself up about it for awhile (and being wisely told to talk to Kate, a suggestion I shrugged away, because she’s got tons going on right now), I talked to Kate.
“Go read Teresa’s Writing Journey,” Kate said. “Now. Do it.”
So I went. I read.

Late winter is a bad time for me. I’d managed to hold off the doldrums with regular exercise, but we had a fierce cold snap and I just couldn’t do it. But for some reason, I just couldn’t figure out myself that my writing blahs were related.

So imagine me slapping my forehead. Hard. Back in South Dakota, I used to have a Regular February Flipout — toward the end of the month, every year, I’d just get so worn thin and worn out and wound tight that I just spun out. I attribute a lot of this to the lack of sunlight in winter months up there, and I rarely if ever experience it here in Colorado, with all its warmth and sun, but…
… cold snap.
… lots of snow.
… few group activities.
… exercise in the last two months that I can count on one hand.
… reading more online journals than offline fiction.
Right. Duh.
So… I’ll see you guys later. I’m going to go outside, walk somewhere (anywhere!) for lunch. Tonight, I’m going to the gym.

“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.”
— Abraham Lincoln
So: finished up my meager contribution to April’s Storyball last night. A very fun project I’ll eventually link to, but which I’ll sum up by saying “10 Authors, working in six rounds over the month, writing the stories that go with someone else’s keen title ideas, and tied into the stories that have already been written, using nifty hyperlinks and stuff.”
It’s cooler than it sounds, so if it sounds cool, it’s even cooler than that.
This time we set the tales in the Midway Truckers Paradise, and … I dunno yet, cuz it’s not quite done, but I think we destroyed the world.
Well… someone did, anyway.
It was fun. Different than the first Storyball, which had more short-story-type entries — this one tended toward entries that felt more like chapters in a book — less self-contained, I guess.
Very cool. Very different this time around, and cool for that reason as well.

So awhile ago, we had a discussion about the difference between pornography and erotica.
Notably, Ted commented:

If the recipient views the materials and thinks about sex, it is porn. If the recipient views the materials and thinks about both sex and the love that inspires that sex, then it is erotica.

Why do I bring it up? Was reading an article about Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls” project, which he pitches as straight pornography.

Set in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, Lost Girls centers on three women who meet at a European hotel: an aristocratic British lesbian in her late 50s; a middle-aged, middle-class, unhappily married English woman; and a 19-year-old farm girl from the American Midwest. Amid increasingly heated bouts of debauchery, they tell each other the stories of the early sexual experiences that formed their fantasy lives and worldviews. Oh, yes: the three women are, respectively, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Of note: the reason he opts to call it pornography instead of erotica:

“I didn’t want to call this ‘erotica’ because, for one thing, erotica is material relating to love. What we wanted to talk about was sex.”

Which of course put me back in mind of the whole discussion we’d had here.
Dunno if any of this makes Ted’s point more valid, but at least he’s got an anarchist, occultist Brit on his side.

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” — Plato
We are on the subway. It is crowded, and late afternoon. Standing room only, which we’re claiming in the center of the car, both length- and width-wise.
Near one of the doors, there is a man.
He’s huge. My eyes come up to his Adam’s apple, probably, and he’s not skinny. He’s wearing a new, bright yellow, leather jacket that sets him out from the browns and blacks and grays of New York like a sign.
He’s preaching. It takes me awhile to see it through the crowd, but he’s got a bible in his left hand — the one he’s not using to steady himself on a rail. It, like he, is enormous and striking. He gestures with it, he balances himself with its weight, but he does not read from it; in this case, it’s his anchor, not his ship.
Everyone is listening.
Not… hearing the words. I don’t mean that. Even though his voice is strong and deep like a river, it cannot be made out at the other end of the car. They are listening to him speak — simply to the fact that he is making words, not what they are — at the same time, everyone is trying to act like they are not listening.
When the train comes to a station, the doors open and the conductor announces service changes for the weekend schedule. The preacher pauses, politely giving everyone time to hear.
The doors close, the train moves again, and he resumes (with a change in subject – I can hear that much); for the conductor he will pause, but he’ll willingly compete with the train and the white-noise roar of the tracks.
Dedicated? Crazy? Both? Unrelenting, certainly, even in the face of the concentrated not-listening of his standing-room-only audience.
There is another station. Another pause. He resumes, his subject changing again.
This time, it’s love.
This message, it gets through the not-listening.
He’s still a (possibly crazy) preacher, and still unstoppable in his delivery, and you can still only barely make out the words from less than ten feet away.
But you can hear him say ‘love’.
He says love like it’s his favorite word in the whole of Creation. He says love like it’s a secret cookie recipe. He says love like Barry White says love. He means it, even more than he means everything else.
As one person, the audience in the car smirks. A few crack a head-shaking smile. Two of us chuckle a bit and grin.
Then it’s business as usual, and the next stop is ours. We leave the preacher behind.
But the way he says ‘love’ stays with me.