Let The Waffeling Begin

Okay.

So, yeah, NaNo starts in a week and I have (tentatively) decided I’m going to go with a fantasy novel that’s kicking around my gray matter.  This, of course, leads to a sci-fi novel trying to elbow its way to the front burner.

So now I’ve got my brain, convinced that I’ve been granted a miraculous gold nugget, trying to shift from plotting/writing the fantasy novel to exploring this sci-fi story.  It will be one heckuva story given enough time to develop but it only came to me in the last day or so.  I already determined that I’m not a pure pantser and, therefore, probably cannot plot enough of the sci-fi novel to do it justice in November.  But it’s a great story with compelling characters.

Did I mention that NaNo starts a week from today?

I’m hoping that my brain will settle for plotting the sci-fi on the side while hunkering down and writing the fantasy for NaNo glory.  If that doesn’t work then I’m setting up for certain failure (again).  This is the same sort of thing that happened last year.  I ditched the original plan to tackle a great idea that came to me the night or two before NaNo.  In the light of the pressure of multiple thousands of words a day that story didn’t look so great somewhere around the tenth of November.

I’m sure the lesson I need to learn here is to stick with my original plan but that’s easier said than done when a story is crying out as loudly as the sci-fi one is right now.

Let’s hope it turns out to be a lesson learned.

The Beginning of the End for DRM?

DRM.  Three letters that mean the world for the proliferation of e-readers.

Digital Rights Management.  It’s what “protects” the e-books you buy and keeps you from copying them.  It basically tells you where you can read your e-book once you make the initial decision.  You want to read it elsewhere, buy another copy for that device.  Not very consumer friendly.

Imagine going to Barnes and Noble and getting a paperback off the shelf.  You go to the checkout and buy it.  They ask where you are going to read it.  “I’m going to read it in my chair in the living room,” you say.  “That’s fine,” the clerk replies, “But we’re going to have to insist that it never leave the living room.  If you want another copy, for the bedroom or whatever, you’ll need to buy a copy for that.”

I don’t know about you but that exchange would leave me flabbergasted.  It’s my book once you take my money!  If I want to read it on the toilet, what business is it of theirs?  Same thing goes for e-books.  If I buy an e-book and download it to my laptop, I want to also be able to put it on my PDA so that I can read it in the doctor’s office waiting room, in line at the store, at the mechanic’s, etc.  I don’t want to have to buy a different copy based on how portable I need it to be.

I can understand the whole not wanting to sell one copy and have 1,000 people end up with it for free thing.  But, really, how is that a different issue from one person buying a paperback and loaning it around town?  Are they going to start policing that too?

I’ve basically ignored e-readers because of this stuff, telling my wife that I wasn’t even going to think about buying a dedicated reader until the DRM issues were ironed out.

Google may be pushing the industry toward that end with the launch of Google Editions in the first part of 2010.  It will be Google’s e-book “store” which will digitally warehouse around half a million titles, many of which they have from their whole Google Books scanning project.  They are, however, trying to set up to allow publishers to sell new e-books through it as well, for a fee amounting to 37% of the receipts.

It will give web browser access to the books;  rather than PDF, ePub, Kindle Edition, etc.  If your device has a web browser, it can access your book.

It sounds to me, based on what I’ve read, that Google is merely selling access to the book rather than the book itself.  Kind of like a 24-hour library where you can look at the book anytime you want for the small initial fee.  I’m not sure if that approach is the best way to go but it’s surely a step in the right direction (read: a step away from restrictive DRM).

It will be interesting to see how this changes the landscape of e-publishing, if at all.  I know I’ll be keeping my eye on it.

Back From The Dead…

Alright, let the lambasting begin.  This assumes that anyone really cares whether or not this blog is updated at all.

It’s been pretty hectic for the last few months what with little league, attempts at summer calculus classes, changes in major, etc.  So, now, since I’m officially majoring in something writing-related (Technical Communication and Knowledge Management), I won’t feel as guilty if I do my noveling as well as journaling that whole process right here in front of the whole internet.

Also, I wanted to freshen up the blog in the hopes that it will do for me this year what I hoped it would do for me last year:  Make me accountable and more motivated to actually win NaNoWriMo.  If you’ll notice, I’ve put up a LARGER word count reporter.  This will make it easy for any of you folks out there to see whether or not I’m making good on the challenge.

So, anyway, yeah, I’m all signed up for NaNo 2009 (tmacy).  This year’s novel will be a fantasy that’s been kicking around my head for the last 3-4 months which is tentatively titled “Magic’s Death”.

Oh, and, I’m back from the dead, too.

I will try and blog a bit more in the couple of weeks before NaNo and then every day during NaNo and maybe then I’ll be in the habit and actually make this sucker informative.

We shall see.

The Loss of a Fantasy Legend

It is fitting that the day dawned overcast and a bit rainy here in Dallas today.  The news I read this morning brought that same gloom to my heart.

David Eddings is dead.  Torak’s teeth!  Eddings is dead.  He was 77.

My first serious attempts at writing were in the fantasy genre.  This was because of the authors I read and admired at the time (junior high and high school).  Terry Brooks for his ability to bring a Dungeons and Dragons type of sword and sorcery world to life in epic proportions in The Sword of Shannara and its follow-ups. Piers Anthony had the sort of humor in the Xanth series that appealed to my early teen self.

Then there was David Eddings.  I’m convinced that the reason I hold the view of characterization that I do today is because of the characters I met in The Belgariad and The Mallorean.  He wrote that first purely for money.  Tolkien was riding high with his series (I didn’t list him as an early influence because I never could finish his books until later.) and Eddings saw fantasy as a way to, for want of a better term, make some “easy” cash.

Most books written just for the pay have that stink about them.  The stink of greed killing the artistic process.  Not so with Eddings’ books.  The world was thought out so fully and the characters so well developed that these books were destined for greatness.  In fact, Lester Del Rey told Eddings that he had written a classic.  I would have to agree with that assessment.  It wasn’t until years after I read Pawn of Prophecy that I learned that Eddings’ wife, Leigh, had just as much to do with my beloved series as David did.

I came across this interview with Eddings conducted in 2006.  Of course, the interview was handwritten and faxed since Eddings didn’t use a typewriter, let alone a computer.

David, you are now rejoined with Leigh.  Know that I would not have the view of crafting all fiction I have today without your influence.  For that, and the many wonderful hours questing from the farms of Sendaria to the exotic lands of Mallorea, I thank you.  You will both be sorely missed as we vainly attempt to fill the fantastic void left by your departure from the world of active writing.

Multisyllabic Formulations

In this communication I shall endeavor to ostend that multisyllabic formulations of patois are infrequently indispensable.

Whew!  Did y’all need a thesaurus to read that sentence?  I sure needed one to write it and it took me ten times longer to write than if I had just said, “In this post I will demonstrate that big words are rarely necessary.”

There was a point to that monster of a sentence.  Did it improve your respect for my intellect?  Or did it make me sound like the yammering fool I felt trying to sound smart?

I’d wager it was the latter.  It flies the red flag with “smart people don’t have to try to sound it” emblazoned on it.

Many beginning writers fall into this artsy, purple crap of seeing who can come up with the biggest, most obscure word that means “crap” or “sit” or “chair”.  Hell, that describes a lot of my writing from my high school years.  In those days a thesaurus in my hand was deadly enough to the English language to be illegal in 48 states and immoral in the other two.  I massacred our poor language daily.

I never was convicted, however, and I’ve changed my murderous ways.  Now the only time I’ll write any sentences like the one above is if I’m being silly (sometimes it’s a good exercise for me to do “artsy fartsy” writing to get my juices flowing) or proving a point (or if I’m dead tired and for some reason it sounds good to me, kind of like a late night infomercial).

What I learned in the intervening twenty years or so, and what serious beginners learn to help them move away from beginner status, is that the art of writing is not in choosing the fanciest word.  It’s in choosing exactly the right word for the situation you have.

You don’t want your characters “explicating” when they should be explaining.

You don’t want them “verbalizing” when they could be talking or speaking.

Don’t make them “utilize” when they need to be using.

There are dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of similar examples I could come up with but I really don’t feel like it right now and I’m sure y’all get the idea anyway.

Sometimes the smaller words pack more emotional punch, anyway.  And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?  We want our readers to forget they are reading a wholly fictitious tale that we poured from our heads and into their laps (the whole suspension of disbelief thing) and experience whatever emotion we are trying to convey on whatever page they are reading at the time.  The more time your reader spends thumbing the thesaurus the less time they have for reading your book and that ends up a death sentence for your writing with that person.

The only time that modern writing should use pretentious language is if it’s an important character trait or quirk or if the writing is farcical or satirical in nature.  As I said it’s fun sometimes to be silly with a thesaurus in one hand and a fake “modern English-speaker” ID in the other.

How much of our writing do we really want others to view as silly, though?  I beseech every writer, please put down the thesaurus, unless absolutely necessary, and feel the right word.  Chances are that the vocabulary you already possess contains the word you are looking for.

Star Trek: T(eachi)NG

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sure both of my readers are disappointed in my extended absence but I was busy passing a couple of classes, failing one, scrambling to set up summer classes in order to make up for that spectacular failure, and making sure, successfully, that I would have to bump out my self-imposed first draft deadlines. All of this and the duties of a husband and father, to boot.

It’s enough to make you want to clap someone upside the head when they complain (as I once did, as a young fool) that their life is too boring.

Anyway, on to the point of this post.

Part of what little down time I selfishly stole for myself I used to bask in the nostalgia that is ST:TNG. The show aired during some of my later formative years, ages 12-19 or so, and is considered by many to be the best Star Trek series ever (there is still a blood-feud between the ST:TOS camp and the ST:TNG camp on this).

I was plowing my way into Season 4 (out of the total 7) when it occurred to me that I wasn’t just relaxing and enjoying a blast from the past. I was studying. Studying my craft, no less.

See, what I figured out was that the main reason, in my opinion, that ST:TNG has such staying power is its characterization. This didn’t really surprise me since I’m a big believer that strong characters can carry weak plots and ST:TNG, for all its juicy goodness, has its share of relatively weak plots sprinkled in with the beautifully original, creative ones.

Part of this characterization is, of course, the dialogue. The writers took full advantage of a wide variety of species and gave each of them a distinct speech pattern. This makes it easy, even without visual cues, to tell which character is speaking. Even more impressive, to me, was the ability of the writers to distinguish each of the main human and humanoid characters by speech pattern.

Whether it be Picard and his Shakespearean, King’s English or Troi with her soothing, dulcet tones and comforting choice of words or Riker with his “John Wayne of the 24th Century” affectations or Data and his “just this side of monotone” glorified machine language (the obsession with precision and accuracy kind of remind me of Asperger’s Syndrome on steroids); each of the main characters (I haven’t even mentioned Worf, LaForge, O’Brien, the Crushers and a host of others) is easy to pick out even with eyes closed.

So, I’ve been able to justify being a little selfish by chalking up my ST:TNG watching to the study of dialogue. Kind of like taking a tax deduction for business expenses for the gas to drive to the post office because one of those twenty envelopes carried business correspondence. That’s legal, right?

Anyway, back to studying.

Tension and conflict

I think today I’ll post one of those pretentious “I’m gonna teach y’all how to write” blogs.  This isn’t because I’m a master of the craft.  Far from it.  It’s also not because I know more than anyone out there.  There are at least thousands (probably more) who know more about writing than I.

But this is one of those muddy areas that trip up beginning writers and where, by giving my own examples, I can either help those falling on their faces in this particular bog or someone can comment and show me the light and clear it up for me if I have it wrong.

So it’s either a pretentious teaching blog or a seriously confused cry for help blog.

Let’s find out which.

A lot of beginning writers are confused by books they read which tell them that every page should have tension and conflict.  Usually they take that to mean that someone needs to be getting killed, maimed or at least bloodied a bit on every single page.  Even when a child and parent are having breakfast?  Of course not.  But that situation can still have tension and conflict.

“Tension and conflict” doesn’t necessarily mean high tension and conflict.  What the books are saying, and rightfully so, is that every page should move the story forward.  This can be a shootout, characterization, dropping clues, etc.

For instance:

“Hey, Bill.”
“Howdy, Ted.”
“Whatcha up to?”
“Just gettin’ some money.”
“Crazy weather we been havin’, huh?”
“Yep.”

If you read all of that, I commend you.  No tension, no conflict. Let’s inject some:

“Hey, Bill.”
Bill turned from the ATM and barely avoided letting a grimace show on his face as his boss approached. He got enough of that haughty gasbag during the week without having to deal with him on the weekend. “Howdy, Ted.”
“Whatcha up to?”
I’m at a friggin’ ATM, you idiot, what the hell do you think I’m doing? “Just gettin’ some money.”
Bill tried his best to convey a tone that would push Ted away faster than a gale from a hurricane. There’s no way he wanted to look into his boss’s face after what he’d found out on Friday. The fecal matter would hit the whirling blades on Monday but Bill wanted it to be a complete surprise and, so, had to make nicey-nice no matter how much it made him want to vomit.
“Crazy weather we been havin’, huh?”
“Yep.” Why wouldn’t he go away? Bill had to suppress a vindictive smile as he thought about just how long Ted’d be going away for come Monday. Served the bastard right.

Granted, this isn’t my best work, or the best example in the world but I think it shows the difference between small talk for the sake of small talk and small talk involved in a scene that moves the story.  The first example gives the reader nothing to care or wonder about.  The second, at the very least, makes the reader wonder what Ted did, what Bill found out.  It’s also more obvious exactly how Bill feels about Ted (plenty of conflict in that relationship).

So, basically, we’re just trying to make sure that every page is integral to the story.  No page gives the reader a good reason to stop reading.  Of course, you could write a James Bond book and just alternate sex and violence every page. 

I’m kidding.  Really, I am.

Agent For A Day

I’ve been remiss on reading some of the blogs I like (Calculus test on Friday) but what a good idea Mr. Nathan Bransford had. 

To give writers an idea what is involved in being a literary agent (at least the gruntwork) he decided to post 50 queries to his blog, http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2009/04/be-agent-for-day-here-we-go.html, throughout the day yesterday.

I have yet to try my hand at evaluating these but it seems like a great way to show why form rejections are the norm and just how fast you have to make a decision on a query before moving on to the next.

I urge anyone reading this post to try this little exercise (don’t forget that you should do them all in a day) and see if you can request the right three.  Apparently three of them are queries for novels that got published.

Go ahead, see if you have what it takes to be an uberagent.

A New Approach

Well, Friday was a day to reflect on the direction I want the remainder of my life to take.  Well, reflect and keep tabs on my two boys.

Ultimately, of course, I’d love to be a widely-read and liked author.  Perhaps that’s a pipe dream but there’s always that small chance that I actually have some talent at this wordsmithing and one day my hard work at learning how to harness it will pay off and I will be recognized.

The first step, of course, is to write, write, think a bit, write and then write some more.  It’s been said so much that it’s probably entered into the realm of the trite cliché but it is nonetheless true; writers write.  No matter what your talent level.  No matter how many great ideas float around in your head.  No matter what you write.  If you don’t write, you’re not a writer.  Just like if you don’t do surgery, you’re not a surgeon and if you don’t teach anyone anything, you’re not a teacher.

The whole “write anything even if it isn’t coherent” advice I’ve seen around tends not to sit well in my cerebellum, however.  It’s in my makeup to need at least an ultimate destination.  I’m one of those people who can’t even drive aimlessly, I have to be going somewhere or it seems pointless. 

Obviously, then, what I need is to begin my day with a destination in my writing.  Where do I hope to end up?  Who will be with me when I get there?  Will the trip be worthwhile once it’s over or will the trip end up being a waste of intellectual gas?  Would I have been better off sleeping for that time?

I suppose the answer to that will come as I implement this new tack.  I’m sure it’s far from a new approach but it may just be the one that helps me the most as my self-imposed deadline for Veil nears (only about 9 weeks ‘till that puppy hits).  I also have to learn to allow myself to ax everything written in a day if need be.

Because it’s just important I have a destination even if it’s just to get back home again.

Write Crap.

Yeah, I’m in one of those writing funks.  You know the ones.  The “Why the hell would anyone want to read this crap?” place in our minds.  The brimstone-lined room that reeks of sulfur and houses the Inner Critic.

I would much rather spend all of my time next to the pool sipping some “inspiration juice” in the delightful company of my Muse.

Alas, I spend more time with Inner Critic than I do with Muse. 

This latest bout I’m having with the dreaded funk has been brought on by breaking two cardinal rules of first draft writing.

First, I stopped to think.  My best writing is done in sort of a writer’s daze.  This is something I’ve been forgetting far too much lately.  In those euphoric times I am nothing but a conduit for the words.  They flow from my characters’ mouths, down my arms and into the keyboard.  I can generally type faster than I can think (not always but a lot of times) and when I’m just doing dictation it makes the process that much faster.

Also, and this goes back to the first point, I’m reworking Chapter 2 of Veil because the characters are a bit flat and I needed to de-purple it a bit.  Hell, I figured if I wasn’t writing new I should rewrite old flat stuff.  Put that critic guy to use since he was whizzing in my Cheerios anyway.  I do think Chapter 2 is improving (y’all can be the judges when I finish the rewrite, hopefully this weekend, because I’ll post it here) but I will still be facing Chapter 4 when I get done procrastinating.

Honestly I think I just need to get rid of Inner Critic for a while (after this little rewrite) and remember the First Rule of First Draft Writing:  Write Crap.

Yes, crap is bad.  Crap is not publishable.  Crap will definitely not put your name in the annals of literary history alongside Dickens, Tolstoy and Melville.  Crap has but two redeeming qualities that should interest us writers.  Crap is quick and it is fixable.

I can write crap a lot faster than I can write literary gold.  Thing is that crap can be shined into literary gold by a skilled hand or two given enough time later.  Sometimes I forget this and it gets me into this sort of trouble.

So, anyway, I have a date with Muse.  First, however, I have this Inner Critic guy to deal with.

Anyone have any duct tape?