Progress Report: 3/29/2010

I've been doing my Penelope impersonation this week, unraveling my previous work and re-weaving it. According to the advice I've gotten about the matter, it seems that writing a novel in present tense will make it more difficult to sell. So I've had to go back to Thunderstruck and shift what I'd written so far to past tense.

The convention in current publishing is that present tense is all right for short stories, not so much for novels. And when you're not an established author, it's not a good idea to give any prospective agent/editor an easy reason to chuck your manuscript on the junk pile.

Really, it's not too bad. While the first chapter was ideal for present tense (which is why I went that way in the first place), the rest of what I've written wasn't really enhanced by it. Present tense, I believe, gives the story more immediacy and more tension. The downside is that it feels like it gets tiring to read after a while, which is not a good thing for a novel.

Speaking of Thunderstruck, one of the things I feel like I skimmed somewhat in the comic version was Sharon's (and to a lesser extent, Gail's) experience immediately after her miraculous healing, when she was trying to go the scientific route of understand what had happened to her. I am gnawing around with different ways to flesh that part out. It isn't a speculative stretch to say that her case would be written off as anecdotal, no matter how incredible it was. There are, and continue to be, spontaneous recoveries that happen all the time. On the whole, they're ignored. The generous version of why they are ignored is that it's impossible to reproduce these events in a clinical setting (much less a lab), so there's no point in studying them. The less generous version would say that it's because science deliberately does not want to look at certain things that could upset a reductionist worldview. I think it's a bit of both, myself.

Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is not what you'd call a gentle book, and I couldn't put it down. Roger Ebert recently reviewed a film version out of Sweden which he thought was quite superb. I have mixed feelings about wanting to see the story in cinema. On one hand, there's some very nasty stuff in there that might be hard to take on the screen. On the other hand, it's a damned good story.

Progress Report: 3/22/2010

Nothing like the joy of doing one's taxes to get the creative juices going. Or not.

Still waiting to hear back from the prospective agent for Rose & Jade. Having never gotten this far in the process, I don't know if the fact that he's taking his time is a good or a bad sign. So I sit gnawing my fingernails and generally trying not to dwell, since it doesn't particularly help.

To take my mind off things (and since my Thunderstruck writing wasn't getting anywhere this week), I did a little fanfiction. I found from George R. R. Martin's blog that there is an amusing little contest going on where fantasy and SF characters are pitched against one another in a "cage match." I'm sort of a sucker for these things, and since it was especially challenging to figure out how Martin's one-handed knight, Jaime Lannister, could possibly prevail over Cthulhu, I ended up writing a story to explain how it could be done. A silly exercise, I know, but I enjoyed it.

Speaking of writing... does anybody have opinions out there about using present tense as the narrative structure of a novel. I don't think it's done very often. I know Neal Stephenson did it in Snow Crash, and I thought it worked, but that doesn't mean anybody can get away with it.

I ask because it's something I've run into with Thunderstruck that's giving some doubts. I wrote the first chapter in present tense because it was perfect for what was going on. However, after that, it seems to be a kind of take-it-or-leave-it stylistic choice. What I don't know is if it's considered un-kosher by most publishers right now. That is to say, I don't know if I'm hurting my chances of getting it published by writing in present tense. And if I am, I don't want to get too far along, then need to go back and re-write in normal old past tense.

Anybody have any insights on this?

Progress Report: 3/15/2010

For writing, the exciting news this week is that I've gotten a nice tug on the line for Rose & Jade from an agent. After reading the first chapter, he wrote back and asked to see the whole manuscript. This is a first for me.

So whatever comes of this development, I feel like it was time well spent going back and re-writing the first chapters of the story. I know that I feel more confident sending them along now. I have to admit there was a kind of nagging doubt in the back of my head before whenever an agent asked to see the first chapter(s) to get an idea about the book as a whole. I kept trying to figure out excuses for sending later chapters along, since I feel the story picks up a lot of momentum as it goes. Of course, nothing makes sense unless you read the earlier chapters, so that was never really an option.

Anyway, I don't feel that sense of doubt anymore. Funny thing is that it didn't take huge changes to make the opening chapters better. Although it took a fair amount of time to come up with them.

In other news, I am an uncle again! Congrats to my older brother John and his wife, Teuta, on their second child. His name is Erik. Apparently, all the details are on Facebook, and I think this means I'm going to have to break down and get on Facebook myself. This is something I have resisted for a long time, but the sheer social gravity of this thing is overwhelming.

Also, it's perhaps my least favorite time of the year, which is the time shift forward. I despise Daylight Savings time. Pick a time and stick with it, damn it. Enough of this mandated jetlag.

Here's compromise: set the clocks back permanently half an hour and be done with it. Sure it'll throw off all the international time zones and inconvenience the hell out of the rest of the world, but we're Americans! That's what we do! Rugged individualism and all that.

Eh, maybe it isn't such a hot idea.

Progress Report: 3/8/2010

Think I'll take a little time off work this week and try to get more writing in. Last week was kind of poor for productivity.

More agent submissions in, more irons in the fire. A tip for aspiring writers: Some agents don't ever write back. They all claim they will on their website, which is nice of them, but I wouldn't take it to heart. Right now about 25%-30% of the agents I submitted to never responded. I'll take that as a "no."

Let's see, in terms of books I've been reading, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is Free: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson is an excellent read. This is the editor for Wired who also wrote the essential book, The Long Tail. In Free, he lays out a very thorough overview of how the digital age economy got to where it is today, and perhaps where we are going with it. The book offers some solutions as to how one can make money by giving away things for free, which is the core conundrum of the web. Some folks have made a killing doing it right, like Google. And some folks, like YouTube and Facebook, are immensely popular but haven't actually made a dime (unless you count being bought).

The best part is that if you go to Audible, you can get the download of his book for free. So he puts his money where his mouth is on this.

(I always appreciate a good non-fiction writer, because so many of them are full of interesting information but can't seem to deliver it in an engaging way. Science writing suffers from this problem worse than any non-fiction field. Good science writers, like Carl Sagan and Robert Bakker, are a treasure.)

Okay, now the bad news.

Since I've got a book to sell in the Young Adult market, I like to check out some of the successful authors in this genre. I already know enough about Twilight not to touch it, so the next big book-turned-movie story was Percy Jackson. I started up The Lightning Thief and chugged along for a while. It wasn't exactly wowing me—definitely a Harry Potter knockoff, featuring a downtrodden hero with a secret birthright, hints at some kind of big destiny, and a summer camp that was clearly a bargain-bin Hogwarts ("Camp Half-Blood?" The Greek gods create a sanctuary for their offspring and the best they can come up with is "Camp Half-Blood?" Ooookay...). I also thought it was a mistake to choose 1st-person narrative for this story.

It was going along tolerably up to a point, and then WHAM. I'm out of the book.

(Let me see if I can explain this without spoilers. I'll call this a Spoiler Warning, though, so reader beware if you're planning to check out the book.)

Fairly early in the story, something terrible happens to Percy. He loses someone important. This should be a moment of defining tragedy for him. For maybe two paragraphs, he's thinking about this tragedy.

And then he gets a magic milkshake, and it's all better!

Seriously. His friend gives him some kind of energy drink that tastes to him like cookies, and he's all fine again. He's ready for his next adventure. No more tragedy for little Percy. He wanders off into Camp Half-Blood, meets a bunch of people, and even his favorite teacher-friend doesn't even bother to console him on his loss. Why should he? Magic milkshake solved the problem, after all.

Pop! I'm out of the book, just like that. I can't even think of Percy as a person anymore—I can't even dislike him. The story has been ripped away, and all I can see is the author, Rick Riordan, banging along on his keyboard and making a colossal mistake. I put it down and went on to the next thing.

I suppose there's a chance that someone out there has read this thing from start to finish, or has seen the movie, so perhaps you can tell me if Riordan provides any excuse later on as to why the Magic Milkshake basically cored Percy of his human soul and turned him into a Stepford Boy-God. Perhaps Riordan redeems this scene later on in some way, and I was simply too put off by the whole thing to wait around for the payoff. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, if this is the sort of thing that qualifies as a big success story in the Young Adult Fantasy market, it shouldn't be that hard to break in.

Progress Report: 3/1/2010

And the Winter Olympics are over. Sad to see them go, although it does mean I will be getting a proper amount of sleep. I got the eerie impression that the coverage on NBC was all designed around a conspiracy to force viewers to watch bobsled. I like pretty much all the events except the ones where they have to slide down an ice chute.

So with regards to writing, I have entered Rose & Jade into a 1st novel contest on Wordhustler. Wordhustler is a writer networking site for finding agents, editors, etc., and does a bunch of other writer-related stuff. It seems a good service, though I have my doubts about the name. A "hustler" to me is either a con artist or a rather skanky porn magazine, and neither of those is the association I'd want to draw for my business. Oh well.

Much of my energy went into my job work last week, so not a whole lot of time for writing. Besides, my inner naysayer has come for a visit. The inner critic is an essential part of writing, but the inner naysayer doesn't have anything of value to add. This is the voice that just says, "It's terrible! Everything you've ever written is all terrible! Give it up!"

Anybody else get that? I expect it's not all that uncommon.

I've learned not to get worked up about this voice. I don't meet it with much struggle, just a kind of acknowledgment: "Oh, there you are, naysayer. I see you." It goes away on its own before long. Kind of difficult to work with it clattering around like a noisy neighbor, but as long as I know it isn't actually correct and that it's just a little bundle of insecure nerves that fires off every so often, it doesn't do any real damage. I'll see if it's quieted down this week. Meanwhile, more agent queries on the way.

Progress Report: 2/22/2010

Yes, well... working along, basically. That's the progress report.

Okay, I can give you a little more than that. Going from the comic version of Thunderstruck to a print incarnation is a very interesting experience. It's true that I lose the ability to tell the story through art, which gives you tools that prose doesn't have. By the same token, I have the opportunity to go deeper in a lot of other ways. Mapping the internal geography of each character is done more from the inside than the outside. By that I mean that the drawn Sharon can express herself through facial carriage and body language much more than the prose Sharon, while the prose Sharon can give you more of what's going on in her head. It's an interesting trade-off.

Another difference, though, is that the comic version is very literal, while the prose version gives me freedom to speak in metaphor. Comic artists have been trying to cope for this a while using visual metaphor, which is a technique I only use sparingly. Manga art has a whole vocabulary of visual metaphor. Still, nothing beats the written word. I can say something like: "the earth itself seems to rise Psyche’s feet as if it cannot bear to be separated from her." Without resorting to the unbearably clunky tool of the narrative balloon, that's not the sort of thing you can really do in a comic.

Okay, so while I'm here...

MINI REVIEW
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Look, this one was an assignment for work. One of the authors we publish is Lynne McTaggart, who is cited as one of the main influences for The Lost Symbol. And since I handle the ad copy for Lynne McTaggart, it fell to me to know something about what was in Dan Brown's latest big book. After all, as The Da Vinci Code proved, his books can make a sale-influencing impact on other related material.

So I'll start with the good.

Hold on. Still thinking.

Um...

Okay, so there's something kind of compelling about the way Dan Brown writes, which is to say it carries you along in a reasonably good thriller fashion. The big mystery is why this should be the case, since there isn't an interesting or realistic character in the whole thing, and usually it's concern for the characters that allows tension to build. His research is interesting, though I would never take anything from a Dan Brown book as true or accurate until I looked it up myself (worst offender was his book called Digital Fortress from a decade or so ago, which I abandoned halfway through when it became clear to me that every single "fact" in the entire book was demonstrably wrong).

Hmm. I was trying to write "the good," and I seem to be throwing in caveats left and write. So let's get to "the bad."

There is much, much too much to cover in a mini-review on the topic of the bad. I'll just hit on a few points.

Brown writes with a sledgehammer. There's not a subtle moment in the whole thing. For someone who loves to talk about symbology and the multi-layered meanings of things, he's big on spelling everything out ad nauseum so even the thickest reader will get the point. One expression of this is his "astonishment moments." Something is revealed to the character, and they react with such utter bewildered surprise that they practically fall over. This happens all the time, often with things that are not, or should not be, even slightly startling.

There's a particular plot twist in The Lost Symbol that Dan Brown tries to set up, and his inability to do subtlety makes it painful to watch. He telegraphs the true identity of the villain pretty early in the book. And then he spends the entire book trying to conceal that identity, so he can reveal it in the final dramatic moment. It's like trying to watch a stage magician with cards spilling out of his sleeves still trying to pull off his trick. I ended up feeling sorry for the author, which is probably not the emotion he intended to evoke.

And then there's the reveal of the Big Secret. With Da Vinci Code, at least the secret was something interesting. In this case, though, it's a Ruby Slippers moment. By that I mean it's one of these "You had the answer with you all the time!" revelations, and boy, those are hard to pull off. The secret in The Lost Symbol is a big fat lot of nothing. The fact that our protagonist, who we are reminded constantly is a Harvard symbologist, finds this "incredible" obvious revelation to be the least bit surprising means they're letting any doofus teach at Harvard these days in Dan Brown's world. What's more, the whole book is spent with characters risking their lives, sanity, body parts, etc. trying to protect this deep dark secret, and nobody expresses the least shred of bitterness that it was all to protect a "mystery" that could be found in pretty much any bookstore in the world.

In short, it was a Dan Brown book. What did I expect?

Progress Report: 2/15/2010

Okay, so... not much to report this week. I'm refining my query letter for agents, and showing it to some other people to see how it stands up. I'm in a bit of a waiting pattern here.

I think I'm battling a cold on and off here.

Well then, let's see...

MINI REVIEWS:
Under the Dome by Stephen King.

If I had to rank Dome in the overall library of Stephen King's books, It'd land somewhere around the same spot as Needful Things. In both books, King focuses on a very large cast of characters, trying to capture the essence of a small town in the grips of a growing crisis. On the whole, I prefer it when he focuses more on a smaller cast and gives us time to know them better. I never felt the sense of attachment to the protagonists of Under the Dome as I normally get in a King book.

And thematically, I would say that I felt the emotional impact of the story was reduced for me somewhat by the fact that the villain was so reprehensible. See, Under the Dome shares a kind of thematic resonance with Lord of the Flies. Normal folks are put in a situation where they're cut off from the rest of the world, and the civilized veneer breaks down to reveal both the scarier and more heroic parts of us. All well and good. However, the main villain of Dome is never "normal" to begin with. He starts out about as vile a human being as imaginable, and when the town is cut off, he gets a temporary and dangerous boost of status that drives the plot. It's not bad, but I don't think it's as powerful as it could've been if everyone had started off more or less unremarkable, and we'd seen their true natures emerge as their isolation continued.

Anyway, it's a pretty good read and there are always good moments in a King book. This one doesn't rank with my favorites of recent years, but it's a solid entry.

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First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher.

The last installment of Butcher's epic Codex Alera fantasy series. At the outset, Butcher expressed his desire to create a high fantasy story in the tradition of Lord of the Rings. Did he succeed?

In some ways, yes. Butcher's writing always carries you along. His characters tend to be likable, his plots are tight and the pacing is strong, and he's very good at building the tension with ever-increasing stakes. He also does a fine job with the "Braveheart moments"; that is, when a character has to stand before a large group of people and deliver an inspiring speech about how this will be our finest hour, or something along those lines. It's very easy to do these sorts of scenes in a cheesy, unconvincing way, but Butcher delivers them handily. And he's always reliable for a good humor moment here and there.

So it's well-constructed fantasy. In terms of the deeper mythic resonance that gave Lord of the Rings the extra level of meaning and power... no. Butcher doesn't really have that arrow in his quiver. It's a fun read, not a book that will change your life. I don't think any author should be ashamed of that, though.

There are a few things that Butcher should be ashamed of, however... or perhaps his editor. The entire Codex Alera series smacks of sloppy editing. There are way too many sentences like: "Her long hair was tied back in a long braid." The repetition is totally understandable in a first draft, but by the final version that sort of stuff should be gone. And it's everywhere in the Alera books.

Butcher also has some writing mannerisms that just get on my nerves. By now, somebody must have mentioned to him that characters "arch an eyebrow" too goddamned much. I want to take Nair to the whole cast. We also get entirely too many wolfish grins, orders of magnitude, and grunts. Repetitive stuff like that happens throughout the book, and Butcher's editor needs to step up to the plate here.

Interestingly, Butcher's tendency for repetition provides a fine object lesson in this writing truism: there are some words that you can only use once, even in the course of a 600-page novel. "Ululating" is great for one use, and after that it sticks out like a sore thumb. "Mellifluous" is another word that's good once. So choose the timing and placement of such words with care, writers, and don't get stuck on them.

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And last but not least, I bid farewell to Dick Francis, who just recently passed away. I'm not too big on the mystery genre on the whole. Dick Francis was always an exception. To maintain such a consistent level of quality for so long is an incredible achievement. He was, undeniably, a champion.

Progress Report: 2/8/2010

Rewrite finished! Now I'll get a look at the new chapters from my C&C readers, and Rose & Jade will be ready to go back in front of the agents again.

I'm happy with the rewrite. The opening chapters are more lively and engaging, some of the unnecessary stuff is cut out, and I really like the new prologue. Previously, I was ambivalent about whether the prologue was a good idea or not. Now I'm much happier with its place in the story.

Hey writers out there. Here's something you'll want to see. In the extras on the DVD of Up, they have a segment about the first draft of the opening sequence. They even do an animated version with the storyboard so you can get a rough idea of how the original version would've played out. There are some really funny and clever moments that the writers were very proud of... and it was absolutely the right choice to cut them all out.

If you haven't seen Up, rectify that omission as soon as you can.

If you have, you know that the opening sequence is where we get the full life and relationship between the Carl and Ellie. This sequence is critical. We must fall in love with them in order for the rest of the movie to work. We have to get a full and rich idea of their life in as short a time as possible. And it has to set up the action for the rest of the film.

The original draft version would've dropped the ball. Good as it was, it wasn't good enough. The final version was a masterpiece.

As a writer, what strikes me about the journey from the first draft to the final version is how many "darlings" they had to kill. This is a kind of maxim in editing—"Kill Your Darlings." It means don't be afraid to cut stuff. Even if you've got a brilliant joke or a great character moment, if it doesn't serve the story as a whole, it's got to go.

That's hard to do as a writer. I've done a lot of commentary for other writers, and one of the things that becomes obvious pretty early on is when a writer thinks their own work is too "precious." Instead of listening to critique, they rush to the defense of what they've written. Every sentence is like a baby they have to protect from harm. They never change anything, and it's not worth critiquing them. Not that my commentary is always brilliant or correct—far from it. A writer can be receptive to critique and still decide they don't want to go with a specific suggestion.

And hell, I know how hard it is to make those cuts. It's brutal.

So here's my corollary for "Kill Your Darlings," and it's simple: "Trust Yourself." As in, trust yourself that you can write something even better. Trust yourself that you have it in you to replace whatever you cut with something that works. Once you start trusting yourself, rewriting becomes more fun, I've found.

I've got a lot of darlings to kill off in Thunderstruck. Back to the novelization this week.

Oh, and congrats to the Saints. I get the feeling that Sax and Hayaka were in the audience with their Peyton Manning voodoo doll for that key interception.

Progress Report: 2/2/2010

Beg your pardon about missing yesterday's update. I was sick and not really with it.

Today, I am better, though it was still a struggle to pull myself out of bed. That isn't a sign of illness, however--I'm always like that. Especially in winter. I feel it would be a very short step for me to become a hibernating animal. In fact, that sounds wonderful.

Think of a civilization built by a hibernating species. Let's say bears. Why not? They're smart, very dexterous with their claws. Not too far from prehensile. They even walk upright when they want. So a civilization of bears, with the hibernation instinct firmly in place that puts them to sleep three months out of the year.

And let's gloss over the tropics, since nobody hibernates in the tropics. And the fact that the southern hemisphere bears would be on a different schedule. Right.

Wars would be shorter. If you didn't finish your war before hibernation time, then you'd have to leave it for three months. And you'd wake up too hungry to fight for a while, and by that time you'd have plenty of time to think about it all and decide whether or not it was worth the trouble of all the fighting.

It would be a civilization with a completely different weight consciousness. Nobody would be upset about getting fat, because you have to put on as much weight as possible going into hibernation. An when you wake up, you'd be thin! Diets wouldn't be in the picture. That alone would make the whole thing worth it.

Ecologically speaking, though, there's a big upside. Basically, the earth would get a 3-month break from bear civilization every year. Very healthy for the planet. I think we should implement it now. Sounds civilized, doesn't it?

At least we could make a Discovery Channel or Sci-Fi special about it. We could call it "Hiber-Nation."

Um... anyway. Illness notwithstanding, I got some very good writing done this week, so I'm happy about that. It's getting to be close to that time when I hit the agent pool again.

Progress Report: 1/25/2010

So let's see... making progress on the rewrite of the early chapters of Rose & Jade. I think I will have it done this week.

Provided I survive the kitten.

In the time it has taken me to type the above three sentences, there have been two incidents at my desk with young Ezio attempting to do something. Kittens get ideas, you see. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to characterize them as thoughts, and certainly they are nothing so lofty as plans... ah, incident three just occurred. Yes. As I was saying, they are moments of inspiration, in which the kitten embarks on a sudden and bold experiment about where he can go, how high he can leap, and upon what he can pounce. These ideas come darting out of the ether, invisible as neutrinos and just about as numerous, and connect with the interior of the kitten's skull.

This happens to cats through most of their lives, but as they grow older they at least develop a certain buffer zone between the point at which the idea intersects with their brain and their attempt to fulfill it. There is consideration, a moment of reflection upon the possibility of the notion, during which time the self-preservation instinct has a chance to weigh in on the viability of the whole idea. With kittens, there is none of that. It's straight from inspiration to manifestation, with no pause in between.

It's amazing that any of them survive.

So, writing continues, as does madness. I suppose there is a relation between the two, so perhaps the madness of young Ezio the kitten will somehow spark creative inspiration in me. Assuming, of course, he doesn't destroy the house first.