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ominous fortune cookies

 [20 Aug 2008|03:21pm]
Mostly fortune cookies are my friends, offering me fame, fortunes, and magical ways out of difficulties. I LIKE fortune cookies. Occasionally, though, a creepy/weird/incomprehensible one slips through ("Now is the time to make circles with mints" or the lovely one [info]tmseay got : "when you are squeezed, all that is in you will come out.")

But yesterday I got a troubling one.

"Love does not always wear a friendly face."

I've parsed and parsed, trying to figure out what they actually meant, but all that comes to mind are 70's harlequins where the hero belittled and abused the heroine but down deep, it was only because he was really, truly In Love with her.  Yeah, dark period in romanceland. 

Still, "Love does not always wear a friendly face."   It's stalker-land.  I'm old-fashioned.  I like people to express their interest by oh say, smiling, flirting, instead of skulking at the back of the room, brooding, and insulting the people I do hang out with. 

All the cookie really makes me think of is a scene I wrote not too long ago:

"Everyone loves Bran.  They can't help themselves.  Even those bitches that Kevin works with, they're as sweet as sugar to Bran."
"There's all sorts of love," Sylvie said.  "Some of them will turn your stomach."

Still, when all was said and done, the cookie was delicious!

Reading report:
Finished Daemons are Forever from the TBR pile, and enjoyed it.  The Edwin Drood series is never going to be my favorite of Simon Green's works, but it was good audacious fun! (He dragged in characters from his other novels!)
I read Underground by Kat Richardson, which was not in the TBR pile, but it wasn't my fault.  I was in the bookstore, just looking around--to see what's new, y'understand--when my boss called and asked me to bring her chocolate, and since I had to get into line anyway. . . . Besides, I love this series.  It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite UF series, right up there with Jim Butcher. 
Now, I'm slogging through the Lies of Locke Lamora, which is really frustrating.  I want to love it.  I love the writing, the nicely grotesque world Lynch has built, but Locke himself is leaving me cold.  He's too smooth; there are no cracks for me to slip into and feel with him. 
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happy full moon!

 [17 Aug 2008|06:14pm]
Have a poem!

This was in Weird Tales some years ago, and it still stands as one of the few poems I committed that I like. We won't talk about the huge file of stillborn bits and pieces, or things that were completed that should have been scrapped upon inception. Thing is? One of my earliest memories is hearing my father read Annabel Lee to me. Result: A writer who can't help but put poetry, doggerel, or random homemade song lyrics in all my novels. Or on livejournal.



Villanelle by Moonlight

I have roamed as long as the world is wide,
carrying bone-deep secrets in my skin.
(A wolf in the heart is hard to hide.)

I cannot fight fate while moonlight marks the tide.
Let one pale thread meet my eyes and change begins.
I have roamed as long as the world is wide.

This time I thought to see the odds defied;
I have you here and more, I call you friend
(but a wolf in the heart) is hard to hide.

Shall I speak truth--utter no more lies? I
wear two faces; one wields a killer's grin.
I have roamed as long as the world is wide.

Draw back the drapes; my hunger waits outside.
It's not a matter of if but when.
(A wolf) in the heart is hard to hide.

What burns in my blood will not be denied;
Month after month the wildness filters in.
I have roamed as long as the world is wide.
A wolf in the heart is hard to hide.
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why I am never ever allowed to buy books again!

 [11 Aug 2008|04:14pm]
Or at least until 2009. Or when absolutely necessary, in the sense of "In case of bad day, buy book". Still, I keep complaining about the pile of TBR books.

The worst part is most of these books have now been on my shelves waiting to be read for the better part of a year, which wears the shiny off. Part of my brain can't get excited about picking up a book because, ho hum, that looks familiar.  Posting the list in hopes I'll start working my way through it.



Reading: Just finished The Magicians & Mrs. Quent, which I bought in the store, even though I have this backlog, but only because Border's made me do so by sending me a 40% off coupon.  Really interesting book, with a stylistically strange middle section.  Awesome characters and world-building though.
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housekeeping

 [30 Jul 2008|12:04am]
So, revisions are done. This is great, but now it's time for the dreaded task of cleaning up the sheer disaster my desk/study/computer has become. I am not an organized person. I think in clutter. I think in the equivalent of a thousand neon post-it notes, a series of randomly connected urgent thoughts.

When I'm writing books--the mess slops out of my head and into my house.

This means I now have to:

straighten up the computer's desktop. As the novel progresses I tend to drop two sentence files all over it. (don't tell me about Scrivener and its wonders. We didn't get along. It laughed at me and called me stupid. And I deleted it with prejudice.) The desktop's easy enough. The files either get drag/dropped into the book folder or into the trash and erased.

Then there's the actual desktop, or in this case, two desktops, and the dining room table. This is where the burden really lies. Sorting the mess. It's a little like doing a dig of your own life.

Reference books, back to the bookshelf! Or the library, with money to make up for the fact that I've had them for. . . oh, some time now.
The scatter of pens, black ink, mostly missing their caps (damn cats!) go back to the pen mugs/boxes/drawers.
The piled up cds for inspirational songs that were unaccountably not on my hard drive; back to the cd shelf, which, sadly is a midden in its own right.
Candy wrappers. Oh the shame. My friends had to stage an intervention and take the jujyfruits away from me. All the way away to Florida.
Pocky wrappers. Yeah, I'll be dead before people can pry pocky from my hands. Perfect food, pocky, and so fun to say. Pocky, pocky, pocky!
Fortune cookie fortunes. They accumulate. They often say things about writing. I don't know why. My fortune cookies are wicked accurate.
Cats. They will have to be removed from the desks several times during this process.
Paperclips. Alligator clips. Pushpins. I don't know why these things accumulate. I don't use them, but there they are.
Random Hoodies, in black or grey.
Random electronic paraphernalia. iPod cord, earphones, remote controls for machines that are approximately five feet away. (the shame).
Cat brushes. Where there are cats. . . .
Cat treats. See above.

And then? There's the paper.
The other stuff is all easy-peasy. Sort it, file it, store it, throw it away, or feed it.
But the paper. It's a land mass in its own right, and ALL of it has to be gone through page by page and dithered over.
The six different beginnings? Where I still like the scenes and might Do Something with them? Someday. Really I will. So save, but where? Set aside and move on.
The collection of spiral bound notebooks, all tangled together, with maybe fifty pages scrawled on in each. Sort, read--I might have missed something VITAL that can be squeezed in during the line edits--and set aside for further use. (yeah right, I start a new notebook every single time.)
Scrap paper. Read, and throw away or file. Drag out the hanging folder for the loose bits.
The stop and start drafts, with or without comments from other suffering people. Duplicates. Sort, create giant recycling pile to be added to the already huge recycling pile upstairs. (theoretically, I recycle. Really, I just collect.)
Loose index cards; hanging folder. That's easy enough, speeding along.
The scraps of paper that weren't scrap paper. The check registers with story notes on the statement lines. (oh THAT'S where that got to.)
The bills with vital pieces of plot written on them. The story ideas mingled with other novel plots.
I can't throw any of those away, but now I have to decide which filing takes precedence? Bill payment folder? Checkbook? Short story or novel? I make myself crazy.
But at least I'm getting to the bottom now. I'm at the post-it note level, bright squares on black and white tables. With all sorts of useful information that would have been really nice to have during the revision.
(Did you know Harm was a blond? No? That Delight liked apples? That Psyke had a running and interrupted question?) These are oops! vital things. I'll have to keep them out for sneaky insertion/double checking.

Then comes. . . THE BOX! I love the box. It's a five-ream paper box, which is pretty much the perfect size to hold original notes, one bloated draft, a couple revised drafts, the contents of the hanging folder, and the list of reference tools used for this novel. Then it can be taped shut and put into the closet. For me, this is when the book is done. Forget the bookstore. It's all about the box.

There's the old saying: I love having written. Well, I love writing, but I have to admit. I do so love that purple lidded box.


Reading: just finished Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling. Loved it muchly.
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miscellaneous was once my name

 [24 Jul 2008|07:37pm]
So if the cat walks up and commits hairball on my keyboard, thereby killing half the keys, is it criticism or coincidence?

I've finished the revisions for Kings, at least the first go through. And yes, as is usual, I had to cut cut cut! But the story feels stronger, faster, and meaner. Sigh. Someday I will write a proper hero, full of goodness and light and moral certainty.

It's been an extremely full week or so. House guests in duplicate, my friends from high school, and it still boggles my brain that I have now known these friends for more than HALF MY LIFE! And they still like me?! (Guess I'm not as much a villain as my characters.)

I have also watched Dr Horrible approximately six-kajillion times, and have managed to turn all the songs into earworms that I wake up humming. Or when my brain slows down. I have now been caught humming at lunch, in the elevator, in the car, probably on the phone. It's wildly addictive, just to see a character become his truest self, even if that means people have to die.

Tonight? It's celebrate, eat, watch at least four hours of the television I've been missing, and then crash, die, and refuse to move until at least eight hours have passed. I'm pretty sure the soundtrack to my dreams will be Horrible.

Reading: Still working on A Kiss Before the Apocalypse.
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[15 Jul 2008|11:49pm]
Wow. Nearly a month since I last posted and on a tv show of all things. This has been a pretty crazy time though. Good, but crazy.

I finished up the draft of Kings and Assassins, the working title for the sequel to Maledicte, and am now soldiering through revisions due, like, immediately. And yes, I'm at that oh-so-lovely stage where none of the words look familiar and keeping track of linear progression has pretty much become impossible without external aid. I've resorted to working on the dining room table, and sticking post-it notes all along one side, reminding me of key moments.

It's always the crazy-making part of revision, when I've lost the ability to tell whether I'm moving forward or backward through a ms, and find myself in some strange limbo land. When I worked at a bookstore and spent much of the day shelving books, I tended to lose control of the alphabet because I was running it both backwards and forwards in my head. This is much the same. But the results can be far worse than simply filing Pratchett both before and after Resnick.

Recently I was doing line edits for Sins & Shadows and realized that due to this linear confusion, I had basically created the equivalent of a massive spoiler that would have ruined an entire chapter. I sweated a lot when I found it (on a FOURTH pass, mind you) and banged my head into the keyboard at the narrow escape. So it's post-it notes for me, on the table, and the cats, and the floor, and the walls. . . .

I've also been workshopping at the CSSF Novel Writer's Workshop at the University of Kansas. It's such a great little workshop. Two weeks long (instead of six, Odyssey or Clarion style) and with a slightly more relaxed format. Instead of the usual circle of critiquers going one at a time, the novel workshop is a much more fluid discussion group guided by the insightful Kij Johnson (and her terrifying sock-monkey army, but I don't hold her allies against her.)

This was a pretty well-rounded group; we had two high fantasy writers, two urban fantasy, two sf, one humor, one alternate history, and one that sort of slid between. We had lizard people, monkey gods, nanotech clones, good-hearted but clueless aliens, people with guns, people with psychic powers, people with three eyes, and radically dysfunctional and compelling family units. And of course, Nazis. Sadly, we lacked pirates or ninjas. But all in all, a good time. I talked so much I kept waking up with a sore throat from overuse, and for those of you who've met me? You KNOW how much talking that takes. I'm surprised no one's ears bled.

This upcoming week is crazy too. On the slate is: the Florida brother's visit, high school friends visit, little orange cats visiting, revisions, revisions, revisions, and the day job yearly trauma: the annual Sidewalk Sale that requires us to be at work from 5:30 am to 8:30 pm.

Still made time to watch Doctor Horrible though. A girl's got to have her priorities.

Finished reading: The Devil You Know by Mike Carey. Enjoyed it whole bunches! Not only was it fun to read, but Carey did one thing I love. He built a changed world. So much of the urban fantasy market seems to rely on most of the world being clueless about the supernatural (and yes, I admit it. I'm as guilty as anyone) that I get excited when the world itself is aware of the change. Carey builds a world where people see ghosts frequently, and as a result, exorcists are everywhere.
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childhood memories

 [21 Jun 2008|11:24am]
My god,

It actually existed.

Until recently, I'd never even run across another person who had seen this show.  And I could recall almost nothing of it.  Except that my five year old self thought it was amazing. 

I'd begun to think it was some bizarre fever dream. 

But no!  Amazon, that purveyor of all that is amazing says I can have it any time I want.

http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Isis-Complete-JoAnna-Cameron/dp/B000QQDEZG/ref=pd_sim_d_2


Maybe this explains why my brain is warped.

Maybe not
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books I am not reading

 [20 Jun 2008|04:15pm]
Some books I pick up in a bookstore and put back on the shelf immediately, uninterested in the subject/character/situation/other. Some books I pick up and browse a few pages and put back with a shudder, thinking No, just no. Some books I take home, read them, and have a resounding "meh" as a reaction. (Some books, of course, get clutched to my breast while I whirl around the house making happy noises and declaring undying devotion, but that's probably more than anyone wanted to know.)

Some books I buy without vetting, read the first ten pages, and hurl across the room.

Then, there are the disappointing books. The ones that start off well, meander around, slowly but surely accruing black marks in my mind--character bobbles, plot holes, plot cliches, time jumps of the kind that make me cross--until I just let the book slide from my hand with a sigh of regret.

And it's feels so awkward, that dithering over when to give up and call it quits, like that first date that is going badly, but not badly enough to justify hiding in the bathroom and bribing a waitress to say you've died. You're just sort of stuck.

I WANT to finish the book, but I know it's not going to go anywhere I like, that there's going to be another whole collection of irritants, and having glanced at the end--I know there's a sequel in the works. Which makes it one of those bad dates where you count the minutes, skip dessert just so you can get out of there that much sooner, and he says, "Hey, had a great time. Let's do this again."

Sigh.
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Time, my old enemy. . . .

 [18 Jun 2008|10:44am]
Things that make my head explode. . . .

I fight a never-ending battle with my alarm clock and the need to get up in time for work.  I am categorically not a morning person, and as a result, my mornings are both frantic and full of zone-outs where I blink and time disappears in chunks.   I'm not particularly happy about this but I am used to it.

Today, someone/something changed the rules.

I set my alarm for 7:15, rolled over and adjusted it to 7:45 when it went off, and fell back to sleep.  I woke up at 8:02, realizing that I might have changed the time, but didn't reset it.  Late again.  Crap.

I did the usual morning things: feed cats, shower, primp, pack lunch, pet cats, check email, and headed off to work.  I got to work early.  8: 28 to be exact.

Now, I'm more than confused, I feel as if the world is not to be trusted.  The thing is, on the best days, driving to work takes a minimum of 15 minutes.  Showering takes 20.  Feeding the cats takes 10 (I have to stand guard and watch the old cat eat his wet food very very very slowly while the other cats jump up and down and whine about how he's not appreciating it the way they would.) Hair gel, blow-dry, tooth brushing, picking out clothes: 20 minutes.  Packing lunch: 5-10 minutes.  Finding my keys/wallet/cellphone/glasses: 5 minutes (longer if it's the glasses that are missing and I can't see to find them.)

The point should be evident:  it is physically impossible for me to have been on time this morning.  Yet. . . .
I thought maybe I misread my clock, but: it had to have been after 7:15, since the alarm had gone off.  And the numbers were clear: I wasn't that sleepy.  Awake enough that I didn't have the adrenal jolt of realizing how late I was, nor any confusion about how this had happened--just a oh hell, I forgot to slide the button back over. . . .  I didn't even rush.  I KNEW I was going to be late.

So, I figure one of three things have happened, all equally improbable.
1) I'm delusional, and this is all a dream about going to work. 
2) I'm a time thief, and somehow I took twenty-thirty minutes from one of my neighbors who is right now rushing around screaming AH, I'm so LATE, a lot.
3) All my prior "zone-outs" were not actually zone-outs where I fell asleep standing up, but the equivalent of the universe mugging me for my spare time.  And now, it's having to pay me back.

This is oddly much worse for my fragile grasp on reality than the day when the pizza plates changed color mid-meal. 
Reality should not change the rules on you once you've internalized them. 


Currently reading:  novel excerpts for the CSSF novel workshop.  Finished SUPERPOWERS by David Schwartz.  Go out and read it.  I'm not saying that simply because he's a fellow Odyssey alum; I'm saying it because the book is surprising.  It takes the superhero riff and makes something really interesting of it.  SUPERPOWERS reads really fast, but it also hurts a lot in weird and touching ways. 
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3 AM

 [14 Jun 2008|03:20am]
The problem with staying up late to work and turning your schedule around. When you want a break? There's no one to talk to and even the internet fails. . . .

It leads to danger, disaster, and downloading endless episodes of tv shows you thought you kind of might have maybe sorta wanted to see. Sometime.

I have now tried out Californication. (dear god, I really don't want to see that many breasts, no matter how clever and real the writing feels.)

Downloaded an episode of Reaper. (I like the funny blond guy in it.)

Downloaded an episode of Chuck. Then I watched an episode of Chuck.
That was a mistake.

Chuck is apparently as addictive as chocolate cupcakes and made me laugh out loud. Always a startling thing in a quiet house.

Next thing I know, I've pushed the buy, buy, buy button.

Darn you iTunes and your entirely too easy to purchase shows/music. . . . You may be worse than Amazon, because there's much less waiting!

Agh!

Did I mention that all judgment seems to shut off at 3am? I wonder if people buy more per sales transaction at late hours than they do early ones.



reading: Finished The House of Many Ways, Diana Wynne Jones. A quasi-sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. Fun, easy to read, not one of her top books.
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happy post dammit!

 [07 Jun 2008|11:33am]
I'm crazy stressed so I'm going to make a list of happy things to remind me that jeez, life is good anyway.

In no particular order:

black nail polish. I love it. I love it on me. I love it on other people. I love it when it's beaten up and flaking off leaving fingernails looking like rorschach blots.

cats. Yes, this is a gimme. I love my pets. I love the fact that creatures that small can have such big personalities. I love the fact that my stand-offish cat decided to spend last night attached to my lap like a stripey swatch of velcro.

I love people watching. Writers are voyeurs, get over it. I love sitting in the windows at restaurants and watching people go by. I like looking shallow--fashion, appearance, mannerisms, and I like imagining deep--their histories, their likes, their desires.

Dogs. Someday I will have another dog. It will likely be crazy. I will love it anyway. My previous dog ate toilet paper from the roll and hated nearly all other dogs. The dog before that ate rocks and had a disconcerting habit of looking up and staring at the sky, brow furrowed. He was a rather paranoid dog.

I like aquariums. Someday I will indulge myself and spend an entire day at the Shedd Aquarium. Heck, maybe I'll ingratiate myself with someone who works there and spend a week! Once, as a teen, I spent the better part of a week in the Museum of Natural History, with my godmother who worked there. It was awesome.

Writing long-hand. Brainstorming. Writing scenes that are a mish-mash of dialogue, occasional "real" sentences and a lot of notes. I could do that forever.

Roses. Not in vases so much but the bushes themselves. I love the way they look, the splashy hybrid teas, the polyanthas, floribundas, sprawling climbers, and the new old english roses that look like crumpled tissue paper and smell like heaven. I love the names they're given; flowers carrying the weight of history on fragrant petals.

I love sitting quietly by myself. I am one of Those Writers who gets cranky if I don't get enough alone time. I like letting my mind drift where it will, playing with characters who will never have books but who have been around in my head long enough to count as friends.

I love songs about pirates. (space, air, or sea! And yes, I do know songs about each of those.) I love folk songs about the sea. Someday the world will make me extraordinarily happy and put out disc after disc of sea shanties sung by my favorite people.

Music in general is an amazing thing. If I start talking about it, I'll never stop.

Beaches. Really. Who doesn't love beaches? I'm sure there are people out there, but the smell, the sound, and that hypnotic wash of the waves coming in, foam sketching lacy patterns . . . . Some of the times I remember being the most purely happy were on the beach, just feeling plugged in to the world.

Poetry. It amazes me how a handful of words can have so much strength behind them. I don't read enough of it. I want to learn to write it someday.

See there. The world can't be all that bad if I can come up with a dozen things that easily.
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getting so old. . . .

 [05 Jun 2008|04:21am]
I'm a night owl by inclination and biology. Throughout college I pulled all-nighters and didn't sleep for days at a time. No problems--just a little caffeine and I was good to go. (I managed to stay up long enough a couple of times to start hallucinating. Mmmm brain, trying to kill me by giving me dreams when I'm awake. It's very hard to concentrate on your studies when there's a mariachi skeleton jiving in the window box. Just FYI.)

The point being. Long nights. Sleepless nights. I am accustomed to them. I even enjoy them on occasion. There's something so satisfying about being awake when everyone else is asleep, and then still being awake to greet them with the day.

Except. . .

It's four am, I've been up since seven am; it hasn't even been twenty-four hours, and the body? It's rebelling. I am seriously Put Out.

It's not even the tiredness, the random vertigo, the loopy lack of spoken vocabulary. (is it peculiar that I lose spoken language skills first? can't pronounce words or get them off my tongue, but I can type them without thought?) It's not even the fact that the cats are trying physically to herd me toward the bedroom--apparently I'm throwing off their schedule or something, I don't know, I haven't been up long enough to speak Cat yet.

It's the horrified feeling that even if I go to bed now--I'll pay for this tomorrow, and the next day. And maybe the next.

I want back the days when the brain had final say, when I wasn't being bossed around by a collection of sluggish sleep cells and scheduled bedtimes.



reading? DK Broster's short story collection: Couching at the Door (and no that's not a typo, it is Couching)
Creepy reading, early 1900s supernatural stories.
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The world is weird

 [26 May 2008|03:23pm]
Things that I just find fascinating. . . .

Apparently there are random right feet washing up on Canada's coast? Random body parts washing up on shore, okay, these things happen. A childhood in Miami will teach you that. The oceans are big; currents are strong; body parts appear. But only right feet?? It's the perfect example of a specific detail making so much more of an event. Leads me to grisly musings on how on earth this can happen.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/world/05/25/0525feet.html

I mean, four right feet in a row?

The world is a strange strange place.
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[15 May 2008|11:51pm]
Been buried in writing, writing, more writing and somehow READING has fallen by the wayside. This is a deeply unusual and distressing state of affairs for me. It's made worse by the fact that I didn't recognize what was missing, just that something was. Then [info]gwyndolin sneakily left A Companion to Wolves on my dining room table/writing desk. So I picked it up, as one is wont to do with a book, and I flipped it open to read the first sentence (again, as one must do), and then. . . . I sat down and read it cover to cover. The book- reading monster that had been quietly grumbling in my head sat up and roared for MORE.

So, despite the fact that I have 57 books on my TBR shelf (all sadly tainted with the sense of "meh" that can surround new but unread books after a month or so), I went to Border's today to see what was new.

(I hadn't been there for over two weeks! And they noticed! I can never tell if that makes me feel warm and fuzzy like friends saying "We missed you." or cold/squirmy like a junkie's secret life being revealed.)

I walked out with four books, a manga, and F&SF. Now I'm sitting here deliberating on which one to read first. A Companion to Wolves broke me out of the Urban Fantasy groove I'd been in. Monette and Bear created a whole new world to play in and I remembered how much I loved books with extensive world-building. And hey! Non-talking wolves! That still managed to communicate and be characters in their own rights.

So having read the manga (After School Nightmare #7--there are no words to encompass the strangeness) while cooking dinner, and set the magazine aside for lunch break reading, I'm down to the books. I went in blind, trying to pick authors new to me.

One Urban Fantasy--couldn't shake the addiction that quickly. A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, about a detective who was once an angel. The Angel of Death is missing! Have to love that. But there's a talking dog. . . . Always a tough sell for me.

I cheated when I picked up Un Lun Dun, which has been a nagging temptation since it came out. I'm dying to see how China Mieville writes for kids. The Scar filled me with equal parts wonder, glee, exasperation, and total book-hurling frustration.

There's Bone Song, which just looks all manner of strange and wonderful. The dust jacket promises a fusion of futuristic noir and gothic fantasy. The cover is lovely and it leaped off the shelf into my arms.

But I think the one I'm going to read first begins "Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever." It's The Somnambulist and it sounds so exactly what I'm in the mood for. Victorian detectives and the occult trappings of the time mixed up with murder.

Off to the reading chair! On with the reading light! Collect the purring cat! It's off to Victorian England I go!
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Why the realworld can make for more interesting plots.

 [10 May 2008|03:24pm]
I have a pet project I work on, every now and then, a few hundred words here and there, one larger burst about once a month.  It's a pleasure-to-write novel, one that has no deadline and no audience but myself.  It's a suspense thriller of sorts, a futuristic world, where two characters are busily trying to fall in love while fighting the evils of their society.  And there are superpowers.  (Hey, I said this was for myself.)  And there's time travel? And, um, psychic abilities.  And space stations.  Um. . . .  Best look away now.  It only gets stranger in ways I'm not going to begin to detail. 

The best thing about this book?  I'm learning so much while writing it.  Despite the crazy trappings of the world, I want it to feel very real.  I want to have realworld rules, realworld consequences, and that changes things so much.  I come up with fun scenes: here's where John goes berserk (PTSD soldier threatened with a --toy-- gun) and tries to kill a student and his love interest, the teacher.  He takes the toy gun away from the boy, shoots him between the eyes with a dye pellet.  I loved the idea of this scene.  The menace beneath the vulnerability.  The idea that wanting to help wasn't necessarily enough.  But the problem came when it was time to move on.

In the quasi-outline, this scene makes Z (the teacher) decide to investigate John's past.  That's it.  That's the entire end result.  It sends the plot off neatly in the direction I wanted it to go.  I was happy with that.

Then I wrote the scene, fleshed it out beyond the basic notes.  The kid was screaming, scared out of his wits. Z was freaked out.  The principal was appalled.  The parents. . . .

Wait a minute.  John just SHOT a kid on a school campus, and though it was only dye, it was with full intent to kill.  Then he shot Z.  This has to have more consequence, if I want it to be believable.  At the very least, he's been banished from the campus.  More likely?  Police intervention.  While they probably wouldn't have anything to charge him with: you took a toy gun away from a kid and shot him with it?  Maybe we can change him with issuing a threat against persons.  And while the police can't do much, I imagine that the kid's parents can.  And this, this makes me extraordinarily happy.  If they try to press charges (and fail), if they try to sue. . . so much of John's world unravels.  The fake address on his brother's school records, the fake name he's living under, and even his relationship with Z is threatened because if he's banned from campus, it makes it that much harder for the two of them to interact.  And, if they continue, Z's job could conceivably be at risk.  And though I have a) no interest in putting John through a lawsuit and b) don't have the space in the plot for it, it's all good.  Lawsuits take some time: I get the lovely ramp-up in tension without having to deal with it immediately.  Hell, the book's main events will be done before the lawsuit really gets into gear, and by then, John will be out of reach, sucked back into the world of the supersoldiers.

As Joss would say. . . . "How come things never go smooth?" 

Because it's so much more interesting that way.
And, if you let the realworld through, that much more convincing to your audience.  Even if it's an audience of one.
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brooding

 [06 May 2008|02:00pm]
I don't usually post about dreams.  By the time I wake up, they're rarely of interest to me any longer, much less to other people.  I will say that I tend to have very strange dreams.  This is the norm for a writer, I assume.  Our brains running around, collating the world in our sleep, just as we do during the day. 

That said, in my teens and early college years, I became very interested in lucid dreaming.  Partly, it just sounded wonderful--the idea of deciding what you wanted to dream about or trying to control the dreams (screaming nightmares) you might have.  Partly, it was a bit of a necessity: when stressed I sleepwalk.  This is acceptable in one's own house--though a little disturbing to your family--but it's not acceptable when you go off to college and wake up sleeping in the quad in your nightgown.  I wanted to learn to tell sleepwalking dreams from normal dreams, so that I could prevent such a thing from happening more than once.  (Hey, it was Wisconsin.  Besides the embarrassment factor and the general risk factor, it gets damn cold there. Sleepwalking in Miami?  No worries.  In the snow?  Worry.) 

I never got really good at it, unfortunately.  I learned to tell my sleepwalking dreams apart by the simple appearance of a light switch.  If, in my dream, it was dark and I tried to turn on the lights and nothing happened?  Wake up!  Usually that's the point where I'm opening a door.  If the light comes on in my dream--it's okay.  I think it's pretty much akin to a small child dreaming of toilets in strange places so they wake up and go find the bathroom instead of wetting the bed.   So, yeah, I knew when I was beginning to sleepwalk, but all the fun stuff?  Not so much.  I never had a single moment's luck in setting the dream beforehand, as lucid dreamers say they can.  My mind always wandered where it would.  I could never really control the dream, but that, I figure, is because I'm so rarely in my own dreams.  It's always other people and I'm only an observer, or I'm an actor, playing a part of someone who is most definitively Not Me.  This is all right.  I have nightmares frequently, and this ensures that they don't really bother me much.  Like watching a horror movie rather than participating in it.  Makes a difference. 

Then there was yesterday.  I took a nap, exhausted all at once mid-day, fell directly into stupor, and had the first lucid dreaming experience ever.  You know what?  I hated it.  I was in my own house (sort of--the houses we live in, in our dreams, are never the houses we think they are), and kept telling myself I was dreaming.  I could paint walls with a thought, rearrange the landscape, the garden, ignore the doors that flew open to show me more normal dreaming fare: the cannibal eating his own legs with a spork.  The random stranger walking through my house.  The spider-monster in/on/through the ceiling. I could push them all away.  The woman who lived there before me, sinking into the lawn, hatcheted into loose bits.  The one thing I couldn't do was wake up.

I walked all over my house and every single thing was concrete and real in a way dreams rarely are: a muddle of mixed sensation and synesthesia.  But this, I could feel the carpet beneath my feet, the glass against my hands, smell the new paint I'd made appear, hear the radio playing over the computer--it felt so real and yet I knew it wasn't.  And that--I hated.  Weird as it seems, the writer hated the beautiful lie. 

I'm not really sure what the point of this ramble is.  Maybe it's something I've just been vaguely thinking about: the fantasy writers who don't believe in magic, the romance writers who are hard-bitten misanthropes.  Maybe it's nothing to do with that either.  It might be the fear that the words consensus reality are too true, that we build the world we live in, and we can take it apart with nothing more than a thought.  I wondered about that last year, when the final Harry Potter book came out and a good chunk of the world was absorbed in reading it.  Wondered if we would all wake up to a world changed by what we were reading.  I've never really been sure of how much reality is real.  Douglas Adams talked about it in his inimitable way when Fenchurch is explaining how a painting she'd looked at and worried about all her life was suddenly different.  The Matrix gave us deja vu in the form of a sneezing cat and a glitch in the program.  And the other day, a friend and I sat down to lunch with tan plates and got up with blue ones. 

If the world feels this precarious to me already, I really want my dreams to feel like dreams. I want them in murky colors, in muddled sensation be it terror or elation, in nonsensical or ridiculously implausible settings.  (Truck stop on Mars, anyone?) I'm a writer, dammit.  By nature, I have a hard enough time telling fact from fiction.  Who wants their dreams to get into the act? 


Reading: The Hundredth Man by Jack Kerley.  Interesting premise for a serial killer story, broader in scope than many, but a little uneven in style and execution.
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writing, the stuff they never tell you. . . .

 [14 Apr 2008|11:13pm]
Titles are going to kill me dead.   How is it possible that it's easier to come up with 100,000 words than four or five? 

Part of it is expectation: titles have to a) encapsulate the story b) be memorable c) be sexy (for the value of making you want to pick up the book and clutch it tightly to your chest), and d) if part of a series, be able to be built upon.  That's an awful lot of weight to put on four or five words. 

Especially when you're me and have a taste for titles in the same way some girls have a taste for bad boyfriends.  I come up with a title, rush around introducing it to everyone, ignoring their stilted "isn't that a nice try." and the "wouldn't something else (anything else) be better for you?".  But I'm enamored, in that first flush of infatuation, no no no this is THE title, the PERFECT title--the one I'll get tattooed on my skin when the book comes out. . . .

Two weeks later, I'm whimpering and banging my head into a wall, crying what was I thinking?  It was a stinker!  It followed me home, ate all my food, and tried to sell my cats to the labs for cosmetic testing.   It was a bad boyfriend.  I scuttle around, telling all the people who'd met it, that no, I'd changed my mind, everything is all right now. . . .

Until the next time. 

Part of it I blame on my easy to seduce ear.  I do love the sound of words beyond the point of sense sometimes; I get sucked into scraps of poetry that only tangentially applies at best, or exotic words that will be a bitch and a half for people to remember, thus violating rule b above.

One of my Odfellow classmates (James Maxey, author of the amazingly titled Nobody Gets the Girl, as well as Bitterwood) once told me to go through my stories and pick a phrase out of the work directly.  I think that's awesome advice.  For anyone but me.  I just tend to ramble (Don't pretend you haven't noticed), and come at my major points circuitously.  This doesn't lend to pithy excerpts that make snazzy titles. 

So it's me, a pad of paper, a pen, and a lot of frantic brainstorming and dismissal.  Nope, that one sounds pulp.  Nope, that one sounds like a murder mystery.  Nope, that one's a bodice ripper.  Nope, that one's a textbook.  Nope, that one's a gerund.  (I have an irrational prejudice against gerund titles.) 

It all comes down to this: by the time the book is titled, I've spent at least as long thinking of a title in cumulative time as it took to revise. 

Sigh.
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musical surprises

 [14 Apr 2008|02:33pm]
I love music, though I'm not particularly knowledgeable about it.   Still, I try to listen to lots of different kinds of music, so I'm at least reasonably familiar with what's out there. 

Then the bestest baby brother sent me three cds to console me in my growing decrepitude and I was just blown away.   I've never heard anything like this band.  Lots of elements of it, sure.  Bagpipes, check.  Chanting, check.  Massive percussion, check, classical elements, check, check, check. 

But the combination?  Is something else again.  Crawled right into my hindbrain and shook it hard. 

Check it out!  Corvus Corax.  And yes, I am predisposed to like any band that has a crow in their title. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7LVLt5NSu8

I am going to be writing to them for a long long time, especially during climactic moments. 



Reading:  my own scratchy handwriting as I try to decipher my notes.  
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Villains, Antagonists & the spaces in between

 [17 Mar 2008|05:54pm]
The weather outside is hideous; cold, dripping, drizzly, and industrial grey.  In the summer, I rather like days like this.  On top of a cold winter?  Not so much. 

But it does create a nice, philosophical environment to brood in while you kick at a recalcitrant character who's too repressed to actually allow you to get his feelings on the page. 

What I've been thinking about is my penchant for writing heroes that never got the memo.  They're not heroic.  They're bad people,  the kind of bad that if they weren't in a fantasy landscape would send you screaming for the cops, the FBI, or the gun by your bedside.  The question remains though: are my protags villains in disguise?


I've been doing a lot of thinking about what makes a man a villain in a story, and I think it comes down to simple malevolence. 

Antagonists are easy.  Antagonists don't even truly need to be people.  Antagonists are the obstacles your hero has to overcome to reach his goal.  If your hero, for instance, is a cat burglar (and yes, I am aware that a criminal should not be a hero, but it's the first thing that comes to mind, and yes, I am aware that this is a psychological glitch.). . . If your hero is a cat burglar, then the guards she's trying to outmaneuver are antagonists.  They want her to fail, but they don't care about HER failing.  It's not personal and I think that's what a villain has to be. 

A villain has to want your hero to not only fail, but to suffer for even making the attempt.  And we, as Americans, love our villains.  Think about it.  The basic sports movie formula shouldn't require villains: take a ragtag team and pit them against impossible odds, (better trained teams, etc: ANTAGONISTS) and their win should be perfectly satisfactory.  But you know?  There aren't a lot of sports movies like that.  No, we always have to have the opposing team spearheaded by people who not only want their own team to win, but for the heroes' team to fail miserably, preferably with broken bones as a result of cheating.  Villains and schadenfreude go together like S&M. 

This is actually a really helpful divide in my head, helps me keep track of who the Big Bads are (thanks Joss! For completely infiltrating my language. . . ) The antagonists are the stop-gap problems, the ones that need to be defeated, but don't need to be defeated in depth.  These are the faceless bad guys, the named minions.  The villains are the ones we need to not only defeat, but trounce.  If you get this wrong--it reads wrong.   One of the major flaws in the movie Ghost Rider (and dear god, yes I am aware that it had far more flaws than actual film but its the first thing that comes to mind) is that the elemental bad guys, which should be fought in order of menace from least to most dangerous, are out of order.  By the time we get to the water demon, it's like what?  That's it?  It breaks tension, which means the final fight has to work even harder to get our blood pumping. 

The other thing that villains do, that antagonists can't?  Villains CAN be your heroes.  It's a funny little quirk of the reader's brain.  We'll accept a "hero" who does terrible things, because we're in their POV; we're identifying with them.  We want to like our heroes. 

Heroes want to win and win decisively.  Good beats back evil.  Not just puts it onto someone else's property.  Good wants to eradicate evil.  To burn the ring, to shoot the serial killer dead.  To make it all neat and tidy.  To make it all go their way.  They know they're right; that they can make the world a better place.  They know what's best for people. 

So do villains. 


Just finished:  Madhouse by Rob Thurman.  And oh, the ending is EVIL.   Luckily, all the rest of it is delicious. 
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business is all busy, no sense

 [12 Mar 2008|03:02pm]
Sometimes work just amazes me.  And not in the good way. 

For my (sane and normal) day job, I work at a retail department store, (one of the oldest west of the mississippi ) and this puts me in contact with all sorts of other businesses.  Some of them I am rather fond of--the ones who have invoices that are easy to read, the ones that actually MAIL the invoices and don't make me call them whining, "please, please, let me pay you. . . .", the ones that (gasp!) put contact information on the invoices.

Then there are the other businesses.  The ones I categorize as "businesses that make my life inexplicably harder".  Which includes such gems as the businesses that, when they receive a five page merchandise order from us, turn around and issue us invoices for EACH and EVERY item on the order form, making me weep for the trees they've used.  There are the businesses that randomly glue their invoices into their envelopes, making it a delicate surgical procedure to free them without ripping off, oh say, something petty like the TOTAL or the INVOICE NUMBER.  There are the vendors who get. . . confused during a move.  For an entire month Vendor S sent me into phone hell trying to contact someone, anyone.  The phone number on their invoice, when called, referred me to their NEW number.  The new number, when called, referred me to. . . yup, the old number.  Neither of which had voicemail.  There are the businesses who call the store, asking for the boss, and when offered voicemail, will hang up, and call back.   Ten minutes later.  An hour later.  Four hours later.  Sometimes I just want to point out that if they'd left the damn message the first time around, then they'd have gotten a call back between all the other meetings/calls/etc that eat up his day. 

Then there's this group, Vendor R.  They sent me an invoice.  I paid the invoice to their factor (W), applying the address given on the invoice, and forgot about it.  Today I receive notice from W saying, in summation,  "thanks for the money, what's it for?"  It took me several reads to figure out what they wanted since their letter is apparently composed by chimps whose only experience with writing is junior law manuals.  Readability, people.  Please.  

When I call W, they've never even heard of the vendor R.  When I call R, the very pleasant voice on the other end of the line has no clue as to what's going on, but hey, everyone's at lunch anyway, so can I call back?  Did I mention that W's on Eastern time and closes at four?  I'm Central.  And the vendor is Pacific.  By the time R's people get back from lunch, W's gone for the day.  Nothing I love better than dragging what will undoubtedly turn out to be a non-problem (ie missed keystroke somewhere) for days and days.  Especially since I won't be back in the store until Friday. 

Some days, I look at my store in microcosm and get really terrified about what's going on in the much much bigger business world. 

Reading:  Or trying to if I ever get a chance to sit down and sink my teeth into it:  Whitechapel Gods
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