Progress Report

Hey, all. It's three-thirty in the morning, and I'm kinda stuck for something to do while my back gets into a fit state to return to bed. I realized that I've been neglecting the old blog. I do have a number of ideas for posts, but they're all fairly heavy essays, ones which would require my actually thinking about them ahead of time, possibly even giving them a second draft before posting.

Thing is, is that lately I've been fixated on the novel. I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of the way through this draft, and honestly? I'm doing what feels like the best writing of my life. It's certainly a distinct step up from the last version. What I learned at Taos Toolbox is paying off, big time.

It's having an interesting second effect as well. Because my work is better, all of a sudden a whole different class of flaws has become apparent -- and by addressing them, there's another level of improvement. This is why I love the arts. I'm a damned good prose stylist, and I have a hell of a lot of room for improvement. What more could you ask for?

I was initially worried that I was hurting the novel or, on some ridiculous level, selling out by making the decision to write it as commercial fiction. Instead, I'm finding that a) this shit is to weird to be domesticated, and b) working within a conventional form has clarified the material in ways I'd never expected.

People who have been reading the same passage over and over for years now are actually fucking reading the damned passage. One person just realized the lead character is mentally ill, another that he's an artist -- that kind of thing.

By pruning away everything that does not contribute to the story in a substantial fashion, it forces the reader to take everything in much more conscientiously. My continual struggle to pare down my prose helps with this as well.

One of the main reasons things are working better this time around is because of something that I learned at Taos. I didn't learn it from the teachers; rather, I learned it when there was a particular critique I think I delivered at least once a day and usually two or three times.

"If your plot depends on an imaginary situation, tell us the fucking rules of the situation as soon as possible."

I realized that there was a difference between systematically constructing a world for the reader and being parsimonious with the fucking facts. Then we were given a lesson that cast another light on the situation, and I realized something.

You plot with tension not by withholding information from the reader, but by giving them information as fast as you gracefully can, in the proper order.

So when I started thinking in those terms, on returning to the novel I became aware that certain crucial areas in the story were almost fucking nonexistent. Because I used those moments as opportunities to introduce mystery. By writing fancy.

Fuck me.

So now I'm using every opportunity to give the reader more information about the world, about the characters. I'm looking for the areas where I've got deadwood that's been sitting there for years -- just had a good four, five pages worth pointed out to me last night.

One last thing about plot before I go. I wasn't plotting incorrectly before. I was doing good things. I just hadn't done enough of them. While there were some very specific things I learned about plotting at Taos, the most important were techniques for working harder and more effectively at the task.

Over and over again, this is what I find in the arts. Techniques are good and important and a serious artist pays serious attention to their toolbox.

But nothing. Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing is as important as hard work.

Good Friends

So when I saw this cereal in the 'let's get rid of this crap but pronto' section of the supermarket, my immediate thought was, "These folks were trying for lesbian, but they overshot and hit Marxist instead."

So my horrible, horrible brain said, "Don't you think there should be a cereal like THIS?"

I think my horrible brain is right. I think the world is ready for a breakfast cereal featuring commie pariah dictator-types. I think those jackoffs on the Wheaties box have had their fucking day.

Ghost Rock

This last spring, my pal Deborah and I started sketching outdoors. Here's a blog post she did on the subject. (Yeah, that's me in the bottom photo, and yeah, my back gave me merry hell for a good three weeks after I sat on the ground like that.)

At first I felt as though I'd lost all my drawing abilities and they were never to return, but I've had that feeling plenty of times in the past and it's nothing that hard work can't cure.

Finally, this last time I got in a couple of halfway-decent bits. Nothing impressive, but it's nice to know the old muscles are there. My copy of Painter is screwed up so I had to do this one in Photoshop -- it was fun.

Sorry to have vanished like that. I've been doing some very hard cognitive work. See, when I came back from Taos Toolbox, I was on fire, writing thousands and thousands of words a day, totally re-working the novel from the ground up. I was trashing everything that slowed the reader down, inserting interconnections between sub-plots, really seeing the whole thing at one time.

There was a faint concern -- a paranoia, merely -- that by taking out all the richly observed autobiographical material, I was cutting the guts out of my novel and reducing it to a potboiler mostly notable for the degenerate nature of its lurid subject matter.

But this was but the faintest whisper of doubt. I knew I was on the right track for the first time.

Until I got in my first critique on the new material. One person said it was the best I'd done so far, hands down.

The other person hated it. I mean, it was as if the lead character in the book was a friend of hers, and I'd killed him. She was actually upset with me.

This was very interesting. First off, it totally played up to my worries. And secondly, she said that the character came off as being someone who was batshit crazy rather than someone who was coping with mental illness.

Interestingly, all the material I cut consisted of fairly unpleasant episodes of mental illness. And yet removing them threw the balance of the story off in ways I hadn't expected.

The woman who was bothered by my revisions is the least experienced writer I work with, and she was reacting emotionally rather than intellectually, which was unusual for her. She wasn't able to say exactly what I had done that wrecked things for her -- only the effect that it had on her.

This may have had to do with the fact that she's also the least experienced reader I work with. She and I met in class, hit it off, and wound up becoming friends. She was a non-reader, former non-writer who was trying out writing for personal reasons. While she's since started reading for pleasure, it's still a new thing in her life -- which made her strong reaction that much more interesting to me. I'll be honest. It messed with my head -- I was convinced I sucked.

The next set of reviews was very positive, and that came as a great relief. But one person thought the pace was too rushed.

So I thought. And thought. Lay in bed in the dark and thought, thought while I washed potatoes. And then something Nancy Kress had mentioned at Taos Toolbox came to mind. I won't go into it in detail -- I suggest you attend next year -- but the basic idea is that there are aspects of fiction that you have to pay the reader to plow through. And you earn the cash to do that by giving the reader dialog.

The draft of the novel in questions started off with six pages before there's any dialog.

I also remembered something my sister had said. She was in conversation with the missus.

The missus said, "It's really a compelling read (yes, she said that for real), but it's so disturbing."

"Well, it puts you right inside Sean's head." My sister turned to me. "You know, your head is a really shitty place."

Those first six pages took place inside the protagonist's head. Right, right, right. He doesn't like himself, the reader gets sick of him fast. What makes the reader like Matt? Seeing him interact with his friends.

So I went back and inserted an extensive dialog section between the protagonist and his best friend, resubmitted it, and it passed. There is some grumbling that the pace might still be too fast at first, but frankly? I think 'you could slow down a little at the start' is the kind of advice an editor would love to give an author.

I can't tell you how it felt to be able to do that. To get a complaint, analyze the work, and arrive at a successful solution to the creative problem. I felt like a regular pro there. Thank you, Taos Toolbox!

So the first chapter is nearing completion. I mailed it off to the hon. Mr. Richard Talleywhacker for one last set of grammar and punctuation edits, and then I am through with it until it's been through a brace of agents, damn their eyes.

Thing is, is that I had to go back and do a major rewrite on that chapter even after it passed muster. I realized that my lead character had an out-0f-body experience in the first chapter and nowhere else in the book. So I had to fix that.

I'm at the point where there are fine details of worldbuilding that are now becoming very important. I just spent three days where, while I did plenty of other stuff, the bulk of my energy was spent imagining the topography of my imaginary world. I thought I'd already nailed it, but the current plotting is tight enough to demand new levels of detail in order to maintain continuity. I have been busting my nuts linking everything, making everything make sense and be consistent. I'm operating at a new level, and it is a pain in the bee-hind.

I mean, dang. This stuff is hard. But it's paying off. On Monday, the dude I work with who just got signed by Donald Maass said that this was the first time in all the years he's been working with me that the voice of the novel shows up on the very first page. I knew what he meant, and I was damned glad to hear it.

So among other things, I've been poddling about with the start of a project that hasn't been worth being anything but secret up until now. I'll tell you about it soon.

Who Writes My Stuff

I just put up a small paleo-art gallery at Redbubble -- go ahead and take a look!

So Catherine Schaff-Stump posted a link to one of those hideous internet sell-your-soul-to-the-devil thingies. You'll have to check it out for yourself, but it's exactly the kind of brain candy I can't help but gobble down. You give it a chunk of text, it tells you who wrote it. I had to give it a shot; the results were interesting.

I began by feeding it the current first chapter of the novel, one scene at a time. The first scene involved a conversation between two friends, a man and a woman. It was supposedly written by Steven King. Look, I respect King, but he is not my god of prose. No flies on him, I read and enjoy much of his work and wish him well, but he's not the kind of writer that makes me wish I'd done what he'd done.

Steven King. Huh.

The next involved an encounter with a couple of street musicians and was written by Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club is a movie I love way more than it deserves, okay? And Palahniuk has a reputation for being exactly the kind of writer I treasure. But I've read Choke and gotten halfway through Haunted and I just don't seem to like his work. I'll try more but... Palahniuk.

Huh. Okay, I can see my stuff on the shelf with those dudes. It does make a certain sense.

Next scene? King again. Okay.

Then Salinger.

I mean, what the fuck? J.D. motherfucking Salinger. I write like J.D. mother-god-damned-fucking Salinger. I will be dipped in shit and then spit roasted.

Next up? Jack London. Okay, I can see that fitting into a certain sorta polarity with King and Palahniuk. The next one is by Ian Fleming. I read Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang as a child and enjoyed it; I read a James Bond novel and 007 was bound and spanked by someone named Blofeld. No, thank you. The last is by King again.

Then I run the whole chapter through the thing and it was written by Palahniuk. Okay. Right. Sentimental types, tough-ish, a tendency toward spare phrasing with regular decorations. I can see something to this.

So then I decide to try my published story, Tourists. You've read it, haven't you? If you haven't, go and fucking read it and come back.

Sorry about that, but unless you've read the story you won't get this. I mean, I busted my fucking ass on that story. I ripped my goddamned heart out for you people. And even if you don't like the stupid fucking thing, you've got to admit it's a rich mix -- everything from religious satire to sensitive observations of family relationships to science fiction horror embodying a critique of colonial appropriation of intellectual and cultural property and no, I am not shitting you on the last.

And who do you think wrote the damned story? Dan F.-is-for-Fucking Brown. The daVinci Code motherfucker. That goddamned jackoff no-talent --

Okay. Okay. I promised myself a long time ago to be moderate in my critical positions. I'm not one for the snark, you know?

But the missus made me read that goddamned book and it was just well-plotted enough to keep me hooked until the end. Oh, you should have heard me cursing and quoting and getting up to look up verification for my refutations of Dan Brown's repulsively boneheaded made-up factoid grout. It was a horrible, horrible experience and I took it very personally, so to find out that Dan Brown wrote a story so personal, so important to me... it hurt.

So I figured I'd try another.

I tried Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! That's an odd one. It's a deal with the devil story where the devil is the sympathetic character and winds up destroyed by interspecies culture shock. It's an attempt to portray a supernatural character that observes the classic rules for a science fiction alien -- as John Campbell requested, something that thinks as well as a man but not like a man. It's about love, fate -- the big shit.

It was written by William Shakespeare. Fuck you, Dan Brown!

Then I tried my tribute to tiny SF worlds and got Palahniuk again. There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

Then I tried my favorite of my stories, a straightforward vision of a man in hell and how he makes the situation worse. Oh, it is nasty. Very pleasing to see that it was done by Raymond Chandler.

Steven King wrote my most recent story about a single mom pestered by raccoons. Fair enough. But then he wrote the excised acid trip party clearance scene from my novel! No way! That was supposed to be by Hunter Thompson!

I decided to try something different, an old trunk story that's probably a spoken word piece in disguise. It was by Chuck Palahniuk again, so I gave it up.

But hark! One last throw of the dice... Let's see who wrote one of the dizzying cosmic trip-in-present-tense-and-italics passages from the novel!

Holy motherfucking shit. This is too perfect. It was written by...

(drum roll, please)

James.

The Mutilator!

JOYCE!

That is right, folks, my writing seems to rest in the Tough Guy section of the Sometimes Vaguely Literary department of Popular Fiction, but it officially runs the span from Dan Brown to James Joyce, taking in Jack London, Raymond Chandler, and William Shakespeare along the way.

Somehow this seems about right. Holy smokes, that crazy gizmo really works!

Trilobite!

I believe I may have neglected to send you to the latest Art Evolved extravaganza, The Trilobite Gallery. Go on, check it out.

Space Bear

I told you this was going to go badly. I'll explain this later, once all signs of danger have cleared. I will say that the biggest challenge this offered was the right eye.

Baffled

I'm not sorry I did it, but one has to wonder at the nature of a life that drives one to draw toads in diapers crouched on skulls. This all makes sense if you know the four -- or is it five? -- stories behind it.