Shaken & Stirred

Huh.

Fixing this book may actually be fun.

Getting Things Done

That would be my Siouxsie-pale hands literally attacking the keyboard for the next month. Yesterday I turned in the last packet of the third semester for my MFA program. And saving my advisor's response and a bunch of paperwork, that means I now have a month off. The next residency begins in scenic Montpelier on July 9.

During the semester, I finished a 16,000 or so word critical thesis (called, perhaps boringly, "Eye for a God's Eye: The Bold Choice of the Omniscient Point of View in Fiction for Young Adults"), which, while it took me away from fiction for a good chunk of time, also turned out to be a tremendous learning experience. (Oh god, did I really just use the words "learning experience"? My apologies. I'll get back to the hedonistic kind forthwith.) I also wrote about 16,000 words on a new (old) project, oddly enough using the omniscient POV--or the OPOV, as I now call it, which is, thus far, an even bigger learning experience. (Last time I use that term, I swear.) And did brief annotations for somewhere north of 50 books that I read, mostly not including the theory books I read bits and pieces of for the thesis. My advisor, the fabulous Leda Schubert, who is so smart her brain may actually throw off sparks at times, kept the faith and prodded me forward and endured the whining that comes from serving on two juries (the Tiptree and the Cybils) during the same period of time as writing a thesis and doing freelance stuff and the normal day job/life stuff, etcetera.

I'm saying this because I have a nasty tendency to only focus on what I haven't done. Which, in this case, is to revise the novel I wrote during my first two semesters. I managed to do a bit of it, but for the most part it got set aside. (This will undoubtedly turn out to be a good thing, but some of us like to enforce insane standards for ourselves, or at least indulge in self-flagellation.) Anyway, that brings me back to attacking the keyboard. Doselle--whose ear I bent for far too long one night in Madison, answering the innocent inquiry "so what are you working on?"--will be glad to hear that I plan to take this month to Finish That Damn Novel.

Yesterday I printed out the first draft and got my pen and notebook ready. Mostly, I already know what needs doing, but I'm sure some other stuff will occur to me coming back fresh to it. The most major surgery is writing a new ending, but I know what the right ending is and that's always the hardest part. For the next month, that's what I'll be doing. And then I will send it off to my genius first readers, who will tell me how to make it even better, and then I will send it to some agents.

But, first, the finishing of a coherent draft.

What I won't be doing this month is taking on any freelance assignments, saying yes to anything optional, keeping up with e-mail or returning phone calls in a timely manner. I've already downsized my feedreader subscriptions by about a hundred (so if something really important is happening in your life and I should know, e-mail me). One of the most important things I know about my own proclivities is that I require time to goof off, in fairly large measure, when I'm working really hard on something. So I will be playing Defend Your Castle (yay, Wii Ware!) and making it through the last couple of seasons of Angel (after getting bogged down by that whole Darla's return storyline) and catching a stray movie and posting random stuff here and going out to dinner and that kind of thing.

I will just also be working very hard on making le novel and not keeping up with some stuff. Wish me luck and fortitude.

Also True

A couple of weeks ago, Roseanne Cash was blogging about her songwriting process at the NYT. This week it's Suzanne Vega (who I was listening to in the car just this morning). I like this:

Many times a song will begin with a clear image in my mind, but sometimes a song can begin with a melody popping into your head. How does it come? On an instrument? With a voice? On something unearthly that is neither, maybe. It could be a clear voice that says, for example, “Men in a war, if they’ve lost a limb, still feel that limb as they did before.” I heard that line clearly in my mind and it sounded like a voice to me.

But voices and visions are scary to admit to.  And also you have to make time for them, or they go on to someone else.

Like what Cash had to say, this strikes me as equally applicable to the writing of fiction. Which I should get back to right now...

Word Count

  Word Count 
  Originally uploaded by gwenda

Before you judge, I wrote 1900 words--and they weren't half-bad.

Blurriness should be attributed to the photographermy cameraphone. A couple more snaps at the old Flickr, including one of Puck licking the keyboard.

The Neo is my favorite thing since EVER. Proper post soon, but it works sweetly with Scrivener. A winning combination.

Also, please admire the edge of our new table!

Oh, and I have a question, for you smartypants types: Is there a special name for the center of a labyrinth?

True Things

Jenny points to wise words from Roseanne Cash, who's guest blogging at the NYT this week. I am stealing her excerpt whole cloth and even adding a chunk, because I'm lazy like that and might want to be able to find it again sometime (whole thing behind the cut):

Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote "Black Cadillac" six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.

Writers Fight Ostentatiously

Well, not really. But over at Contemporary Nomad, Kevin Wignall does have a great little post about the controversial, rarely humble adverb. He offers the last paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead" in the adverb's defense:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

At least one other writer would agree. (There's some interesting conversation in the comments.)

In writing, as in life: Everything in moderation, except when excess is demanded.

Catch-up

I have a cold. It comes and goes. For Christopher, it just stays, so I'm not complaining (too loudly). And we haven't even begun to Xmas shop yet. But a post on recent writing stuff, anyway...

Turkey City 2007.
For those of you who don't know, the Turkey City Writer's Workshop is, to quote the home page, "a long-running Texas science fiction institution," held in Austin. It is, of course, the genesis of the infamous Turkey City Lexicon. When Chris Nakashima-Brown graciously invited Christopher and me to attend this year's incarnation as guest workshoppers, we immediately said yes. (Or it would have been immediate, were I better at keeping up with the e-mail.) Plus, any excuse to impose on Maureen's hospitality is thoroughly welcome.

The thing that makes Turkey City a bit different than the usual workshop is that it takes place over one day. The format involves spending the hours up to lunch reading everyone's stories (we had 12, I believe, a few of which came a day or two in advance via e-mail), grabbing lunch, then indulging in the standard Milford-style critique circle until every last story's been given the royal treatment. It's kind of like Survivor: Workshop. Sounds brutal and hellish, I know, and, well, it is brutal, but thankfully not so much with the fiery torture. We didn't see a whole lot of TC's legendary acid and scrappy critique stylings, for which I'm grateful. Instead, we read a bunch of really good stories and had very cogenial discussions about how to make them better. I got some excellent feedback on my novel's opening. Afterward, there's a party, which was fun (if sort of a blur due to the complete and utter exhaustingness of the day). (C-Nak's house, btw, is basically the coolest pad in the world.)

The next day we slept in, then went for a delicious lunch at local staple Las Manitas Avenue Cafe. After that, we paid a visit to the extremely excellent Harry Ransom Center to see the current exhibits; one was about the trend for costumes and staging in Victorian photography (including a whole bunch of Lewis Carroll's stuff that I've loved for ages), the other about Arthur Miller's theater and featuring some amazing letters written during the McCarthy era about his refusal to name names. Christopher and I both had our pictures snapped in the interactive part of the Victorian exhibit and they can be seen at those links--we'd have done something more interesting if we hadn't been so wiped. Then on to Book People, where I overindulged in the stupendously wonderful children's and teen section. (Seriously, best staff recommendations and selection EVER. What a great bookstore.) Airport, ice cream, hellish flying experience that at least involved free booze from the flight attendant, and home home home. Needless to say after this report, Maureen and Chris are the best hosts around.

Revision. & Again.
Yes, we all love Scrivener. I'm finding it's really and truly worth its weight in gold (or more, actually, because it probably doesn't have a weight in gold) as I go into revision mode. Not that it's not wonderful during composition, but it seems there are so many functions I'm only discovering now.

Which is a short way of saying that things will probably continue to be sporadic around these parts until next year. My intention is to turn around the major revision of Monster Nation in the next month or so (I leave for my next MFA residency January 13, and more on the First Year of the MFA soon), which will be lots of work. I'm working on my revision outline the rest of this week and then will dive into it. Luckily, as I said, Scrivener makes rearranging and tweaking your story spine and managing the overall task of stuff so much more intuitive. This is a very good thing. Then, I'll circulate it to some people and see what they think. (And start something else.)

Oh, revision, my favorite favorite part of the writing process. The part when you get to make stuff good.

Write Porn Meta

So over at Seven Imps, Jules posts:

At the Southern Festival of Books a couple weeks ago here in Nashville, I heard author/illustrator/novelist Rosemary Wells speak briefly. She said — and I quote this exactly — "process doesn't exist. Any good writer will tell you that." What say you, authors?

Now, you may find my response shocking, what with the process questions and the write porn around these parts and all. But here's what I said over there in the comments:

Oh, I definitely agree with her! The reason I’m so fascinated to "talk process" is because I think it's all lies — seriously, I think we all make up our processes as we go along, and that we probably aren't even right about what we think they are. Plus, there's the not wanting to embarrass one's self when discussing such things. I mean, honestly, so much of it is just thinking, wandering around, taking things in and reforming them into something else. Life is the real process, right?

Still, sometimes what we perceive as the process of creating any given thing can be illuminating, and it's always an interesting procrastination tool.

I suspect process is just another story we tell ourselves. Thoughts?

Now back to the actual process of TYPING.

Updated: Okay, so I was a bit flip yesterday -- I didn't actually mean it's all lies. And, besides, note the probably(s) and things in there. Sometimes I forget that this is not actually a window into my brain and so if I don't frame the whole thing, there is no context.  Here's a bit of a clarification from the comments, which only convinces me I should have made this the longer, more fleshed out post about process I've been wanting to do:

Oh, I'm definitely _not_ saying that none of it can be described, that the _entire_ way we say we work is a fiction. That's not it at all. And I'm using process in the (yucky arty term alert) "creative process," sense, which is larger than habit.

What I'm saying, I suppose, is that the magic is _part_ of the process, and so we can only describe the most mundane aspects of it? So someone saying they sit down for two hours every day and write for 500 words describes something (and definitely captures _part_ of the process), an action that either happens or doesn't, but it doesn't say anything about the rest. Or about the six months in which not a word was written immediately before that. :)

And, Dave, yes, yes -- all I'm saying is that most quantifications of this stuff are missing a lot at best. For instance, if you answer a question for me about your process today, you give me an answer and it's "true." But how about when your biographers dig that out fifty years from now -- was that your process? Because often what a writer said at one certain time gets reprinted a million times and this one's a moving target for most of us, I suspect.

We want to be more in control of it than we are.

And I will add that the big revelation in terms of my own "process" this year was the discovery that I basically have to write every section of my novel about four times, to get anywhere approaching something I'm happy enough with to move on to the next bit. Honestly, the four times thing is probably inaccurate, but it feels right, to Dave's point below. (And the flip one I was making yesterday.) At any rate, the reason why this was a big revelation is that it staves off the utter despair that comes during the third revision, when the chapters still aren't right and I don't know why. The next novel will probably be entirely different.

Novelization for Dummies

I love it when I discover that I buried something extremely useful and necessary in a crappy first draft ... just as I'm getting ready to delete that part.

Some Days

It's a victory just to talk yourself into opening the file.

(Why, yes, Gwendagras -- defcon subdued this year -- is Thursday and I'm also preparing for departure to Vermont for two weeks on the 15th, so, yeah, busy ... but tomorrow I will manage to make an actual post with content about books. Pinky swear.)

Elsewhere on Writing

Maureen McHugh (my yoga hero) on thickening the plot:

We are so hardwired to make assumptions about other people's interior states, that we make assumptions about all sorts of interior states. We personify stuff. We describe houses as 'happy' or 'gloomy'. We think that the grocery cart has it in for our car door. We think that characters in fiction are people. We can leap to rather complex assumptions about them on the basis of fairly flimsy details. The details that we find most telling tend to be their actions. So in fact, part of character is what I describe them doing, and if I think of situation and describe characters acting in the situation, I am in fact characterizing as much as I am generating plot.

Alan at the LBC on poetry and fiction informing each other:

Which is a roundabout way of saying, I think, that the poetry reading and writing that I was doing post-MFA was beginning to have an effect on my fiction--but not in sense of a specific technique, but rather a mindset--or let's even call it a position--that I wanted to take with my writing. That I wanted to push myself into real engagement with the world, and how I was situated within it. Sometimes, but not always, that led to a more political type writing; it also, for sure, helped open up the aversion to philosophy that I'd harbored for some time, and began to read philosophers speculatively, in ways that could open up new ways for me of looking at both writing poems or stories. These are obviously tenative baby steps, and when I mention being "comfortable" earlier, I should make it clear that this involved being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And, finally, David Lubar says it short and sweet:

An insprirational message for any writer who has gone online to procrastinate: There is nothing on the internet as interesting as the book you are supposed to be writing. Get back to work.

Routine Pleasures

It seems like whenever I resolve to post more about writing, it just doesn't happen.

My packet was actually due this morning -- I wrote down the wrong date on the calendar. But it was almost done and I got it in around noon and Tim was, of course, a champ about my space-out, which is only to be expected. This is my fourth packet; I believe the last one I talked about in any detail was number two. That's because my third packet fictioneering consisted of the kind of crap you occasionally crank out in a novel when you know what happens in thirty pages, but not exactly what happens in the thirty pages you have to write now (I can't write out of sequence, just can't). I gave myself a couple of good breadcrumbs in those pages, but it was mostly treading water -- some nice, entertaining dialogue, but where was the tension and action?

So, I spent this last month on tension and action. You know, making Actual Things Happen. Letting the antagonist(s) show up for work, etcetera. For a little while, I was feeling as if I hadn't gotten enough done this month, but that was only until I remembered that I was expecting to have gone on to the next 50 pages or so rather than rework these. In reality, I messed around with a short story (that I still need to get into better shape soon), substantially reworking it, and turned out about 50 pages of mostly brand-new novel. That's a pretty good month, all told. Especially since I did the PW piece somewhere in there.

I still feel like the slowest writer in the world, but, oh well. These pages are still a little rough, but better (I hope -- will find out soon). The thing that turned it around was getting back to my lunchtime hour of writing in the corner at work with my headphones and no wireless. I probably wrote half of the new stuff this week and it was the key stuff. As a concept, I have always hated routine with its associations of boringness. But really, what is it except a rhythm you get into? I'm not advocating writing every day for every writer -- I certainly couldn't manage it forever. But.

It does make a real difference when you show up at the page most days. It really, really does.

Now, to keep doing it. Which should be somewhat easier because I mainly know what happens from here on out -- when I stop working as much as I should be it's because of one of two things: 1)too busy and stressed or 2)consciously or subconsciously hung up on some detail that always turns out to be much easier to solve While Writing Than While Thinking About It. On number one, I just have to keep doing the yoga, the magical, magical yoga and on two, well, I'll fall down, but I need to remind myself it's always eventually solved at the keyboard. Or while sleeping.

Now to figure out what the hell I'm submitting for the summer workshop (and write my fingers off on MN so I make my last packet of the semester really count) ... something old, something new or something in between?

Anyway, cheers. Good weekend, everybody.

Headbang Your Pen

Y'all will remember that making playlists can be a useful outlining and writing tool for me. And I hadn't made one in awhile, not since way back when the novel had an entirely different name. I prefer writing to certain kinds of songs, so that's the kind of playlist this one is, not necessarily one I hear as a soundtrack to the novel.

Well, it is, but not in an overt way. There's way more slow, drawn-out quiet songs on here than there are chapters like that in the novel (I hope), but I like those for thinking and writing. They blend into invisibility easier. So, without further ado, here it is. Remember that my iTunes is all stuff I've downloaded since I got my computer last summer, so it's all from music blogs and albums I've bought since then.

Warning also: It's long. That means I don't have to keep hitting repeat. Most tracks findable online at the Hype, if you're intrigued by something.

Hotaru - Kama Aina
She Was a Girl, She Was in Love - Matt Baldwin   
Splintering - Arizona       
The Funeral - Band of Horses   
Mushaboom (Postal Service Remix) - Feist       
Minors - Flying       
My Dad Is Rich - Brian Ross    
This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life - Born Ruffians
True Affection - The Blow       
I Turn My Camera On - Spoon (Live at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on 8-12-2006)      
Cursed Sleep - Bonnie "Prince" Billy 
Crowd Surf Off A Cliff - Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton      
Hunters Map - Fionn Regan      
My Head Is Blank - François Virot       
Hello Hello Hi - From Bubblegum to Sky       
Rich Man - Ghostland Observatory         
Holy Cow (demo) - Margot & The Nuclear So And Sos      
On a Neck, On a Spit - Grizzly Bear       
Wild is the Wind (Nina Simone Cover) - Cat Power                     
My Heart Is An Apple - Arcade Fire   
I'm Just a Child - Coming Soon         
Bonnie & Clyde - Headset       
Citizens of Tomorrow - Tokyo Police Club   
Gotta D.J. - Hot Springs                   
Strange Desire - The Black Keys       
Winchester Gun - Katamine   
Under the Gun - Kristin Hersh       
Elephant Gun - Beirut       
Vertigo - Kristin Hersh       
Alaska - Camera Obscura       
Everything's Just Wonderful - Lily Allen                   
We Were Sparkling - My Brightest Diamond       
I Can Get Us Out Of Here - Lucero       
To Go Home - M. Ward   
Volcanoes - Islands       
Dancing Queen - Mantissa                   
Up To My Neck In You - Mark Kozelek       
I Am Not Willing - Moby Grape               
I Was Wrong - The Morning Benders      
Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case   
Breathless - Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds      
Shade And Honey - Sparklehorse       
Something of an End - My Brightest Diamond       
Home As A Romanticized Concept Where Everyone Loves You Always And Forever - Woodpigeon   
Scientist Girl - North Atlantic       
Cross My Heart, Hope You Die - This Is A Process Of A Still Life 
The Fatal Flaw - Lucinda Kruy & The Sun-Ups   
Song for Augustine Pt. 2 - White Flight       
Celebration Guns - Stars      

P. 123

The vacationing Carrie has a work in progress meme:

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven't gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven't gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

So, here's page 123, paragraph with sentence five in it:

She issues the cyborg an order. "You. You drive us home."

You'll note it's still in present tense because I haven't gotten that far in the revision yet. (The cyborg is a Secret Service agent, by the way.)

And, since that was so teeny, here's the paragraph in question from page 23, which has been revised (for now):

It wasn't like I'd fainted or run a marathon or anything hard, only lost everything I thought I knew about the world. Except that it was falling apart--I was apparently right about that.

Now you.

Oh Woe: Time & Sanctions

So, usually I hate maxims and wise little sayings, etcetera ad infinitum, but I make an exception for Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project because I often find myself nodding my head at her posts. The other day, she posted a list of the secrets she'd learned in adulthood that changed her life once she figured them out. One in particular stuck out to me, since I was in a fit of multi-day procrastination:

What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.

I decided I was going for force myself to put this into practice. The three things that offer the most instant rewards when I do them every day, but which I have the hardest time actually being consistent about are: 1) WRITING, 2) eating and drinking sensibly, and 3) exercising. Pretty basic stuff, right?

Since the spreadsheet for a novel doesn't actually appeal to me, I made a Word document with some tables in it -- because I want some sort of spreadsheet, even if not one specifically for my book. I put the quote from Gretchen at the top and made a table with numbered entries for 1, 2, and 3 with Yes or No check boxes for each. Each day, I have to honestly assess whether I did all three of these things. If the answer is NO, then I don't get to watch any TV the next day, not even if it's a Veronica Mars day or an Office day or whatever. (Two days a week, I am allowed to take off from any one of these things without sanction but must still do two of them.)
(More after the cut.)

Clues of Revision

Ben had a great post the other day about becoming reticent about posting about the writing process before things are done or sold--and about how BORING not talking about it can become. He says:

Like, you know how you don't, traditionally, tell people about the first trimester of a pregnancy? So that if you're going to miscarry, you can miscarry in peace?

But not talking about trouble and dismay, dead ends and trashed story beginnings and terror, makes this blog, frankly, duller.

And, well, yeah, I agree. (Um, not that Ben's blog is dull, because it's not, but that his point is right on: The possibility of failure is exciting. Always, in life and in fiction.) And I'd intended at one point to move those sorts of posts over to the teeny LJ, but I just feel differently about that space than I do about this one. This is my blog, that's just an annex. It seems weird to exile my posts about writing, and I never really managed to make such posts over there anyway. (It should be solely for friendslocking and commenting and possibly metrics and whining, I've decided. Basically, what it is now.)

I was also thinking about this in trying to decide how going through the MFA program was going to change Shaken & Stirred* (or if it would). And how can it not? I'm writing a lot more, and I'm thinking about writing a huge amount more (both my own and other people's), so it follows that I'd be posting about how fucking hard it is and what I'm learning more than occasionally. I think this place would get dreary pretty fast, otherwise. Also, it seems like MFA programs in general come in for a lot of casual slamming and my experience so far has been nothing but amazing. So I want to inject some honesty about my own impressions into that sea of carping.

That said, posting about work-in-progress and the Process still feels dangerous, for the reasons Ben describes, but screw it. My lone New Year's resolution was to stop second-guessing. Feel free to skip these write porn posts if you like; I won't be offended. Sometimes I think a writer's process is only interesting to that writer, but then I remember that I actually find other people's processes endlessly fascinating.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post, or at least the second one:

Revision. (Clicky below to follow.)

Let's Go Shopping (updated)

And it's even writing-related! I need warm boots for my first MFA residency in Vermont this January. The dynamite Haddayr Copley-Woods pointed out some excellent options at Zappos and I think I've narrrowed it down to the following fabulous selections:

crunchy
tall
flowery
gray
these (I keep going back and forth between tusk and rootbeer -- possibly too short; opinions requested, but I kinda like these best at the moment) (or here's a slightly taller version)
taller

Which is where you come in. Preferences? Other candidates? (X-posted at LJ, which is the usual writing nattering spot these days.)

Updated: Thanks to all who played! Cleary, crunchy has won the fantasy boot competition. But the actual cold weather-livers have confirmed my opinion that these or a taller version of these (why is the taller version not available in tusk? gnash) are probably going to work best ... especially when wearing pants. I like pants. So I'm gonna try those first and see if they work. Next stop: warmer coat that does not look like a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man costume!

File Under, Research I Can't Use

Awhile back I posted a gross yet interesting thing from my Aztec Dance Tunes' research that I couldn't use. Here's another remarkable tidbit of unusableness from an interview with Christopher Faraone about Ancient Greek love magic:

The other thing that struck me about these spells is that they are used by men to inflict great pain and suffering on women, but the men want the pain and suffering to stop when the women arrive at their door. Thus a common formula reads something like this: "Burn, whip, torture the heart, the liver, the body of Ms. X, until she leaps from her home and comes to me, Mr. Y." The assumption of the users of these spells is that these women are not going to make love to them or even look their way unless some supernatural torture is applied to them to force them to come. One of the ideas that I explore in my book is that you have the same kind of assumption and the same application of force in a certain type of marriage in the Greek world called bridal theft, or abduction marriage, a form of kidnap or elopement that was still practiced in Greece and the Balkans even in the 1950s. In more traditional places where a man was interested in a woman and there's no way for them to get together--maybe she's from a higher socioeconomic bracket--he might get a bunch of his buddies together and kidnap her. In some cases, however, he might do this with the tacit agreement of her parents, who might be glad to forgo the expense of a wedding or a dowry. There is not enough evidence for me to actually prove this, but I suspect that erotic spells were a kind of supernatural form of abduction marriage. That's the sociological frame, but when you're working in the ancient world there are no certainties because we don't have a lot of good evidence even for this kind of marriage.

Of course, maybe I'll use some of it in the next one... in which I will definitely be modeling the heroine's father sorta, kinda on Professor Faraone himself. An idea of great joy.

Whisper Don't Laugh

John Crowley posted about the dangers of writing as if you're transcribing a movie in your head. In an exchange in the comments, he says:

It may be a skill thing indeed. Writers of the "show-don't-tell" school have to find a way to tell without seeming to tell. They have given up the deep richness Tom Disch talked about and yet because it's a necessary and central part of fiction they have to win it back by other means, often at great effort. It's part of the reason why that directive can produce bad writing, or is at least not unambiguous as a prescription. Wayne Booth famously pointed out that the distinction is hopeless: there is nothing in fiction that is shown and not told -- it's all told.

And later:

If you could make mental movies like Hitchcock made actual ones, you would be in a different mode. And the "layered way" IS the glory of fiction and not available to film; it is the way that books are made as rich as the best films. But many inexperienced writers try to skip that step, proceeding directly form mental image to recounting. "I come in the room. The mangy dog is standing by the refrigerator. His eyes are on me. I hear a noise behind me, and turn. An even mangier dog is standing in the doorway. Turning to the window, I see a face looking in at me. Fear takes over my body, and I run to the left of the mangy dog, past him and out the door. Scenery rushes past me as I flee down the dark street," etc. Even good or potentially good writers who have fallen into this trap and are faced by their own production of stuff of this kind and know it's no good don't always see the reason, which I called Mental Movie Transcription.

It's worth reading the whole thread.

Incoming!

My slush bomb submission (finished pell mell at the last minute) has been sent. Let it be rejected forthwith! (And here's Charles Coleman Finlay's running tally of submissions.) And now for photographic evidence (the cat was watching the return of the mailing voyage):

Refusing the Call, or Devices of Potentially Limited Use

I don't believe in observing all the "rules" of storytelling all the time, but when I become aware I'm breaking one, or decide to break one, I do like to acknowledge it and think over why I'm making the choice and whether there's a trade-off and if it's the right choice/trade-off for the story. I want to throw out something I'm thinking about, but not have the discussion really be about rules and conventions, per se; I want to talk about this specific one.

So.

One of my very least favorite things in a quest narrative (or, if you want to be all prissy and Campbellian about it A Hero's Journey) or any sort of story where the protag has to take up a torch of some kind is the initial "refusal of the call." So often, it strikes me as story water-treading. I, as a reader and audience member, know the call will be accepted. If the call's not accepted, then there's no story. The reasoning for the refusal often becomes perfunctory for just this very reason.

Romantic comedies are the worst offenders, or one of the worst anyway, in that the resistance is sometimes silly and sustained for wayyyyy too long. But that's not really a quest narrative in the way I'm talking about it here, unless you view the romance as the quest, which would really make it an incredibly lame quest. I think of quest, I think Big Stakes and Personal Stakes, not just one or the other. I'm pretty sure you'll instantly know the kind of story I'm talking about.

I'll say again. I hate that refusal to the call business, at least when it's given more than an inch of space. I'm thinking about this because Aztec Dance Tunes is a quest story. I don't want to get too far into the details, because I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but for the sake of clarity there is a girl and she is given a huge, impossible task with huge, impossible stakes if she screws it up. And I think she can skip this step, the refusing the call step.

Because I think a character can be reasonably expected to know when something like this falls on top of them that there's no easy way to get out from under it. I think it's believable emotionally for a character to think, "Yeah, got hit by that. Even I know I have to do this now." And there can still be all the rational fear and doubt and why me? of it, but the story doesn't stop for this step. I might also say that this particular character has been around some pretty weird things and is a reader (in other words, she knows how stories go) and whip-smart.

Why I bring this up is that you are a pretty savvy lot of readers and I want to see: Do you feel like you do need this step to buy into a character taking on a quest in a narrative like this? (And yes, I realize that execution is everything and there are no details here; it's not something I'll hold you to!) Or are you impatient with this dithering step too? Discuss.

p.s. I promise, swear, cross my heart and stick pins and needles in something nearby, that I'll catch up on email before I leave for BEA. Because after that, comes Wiscon, and after that, sleep. So if I don't answer now, there will be no answering!

More Aztecy Goodness

(This is a post to skip if you aren't interested in my obessive ramblings while working on this book. I wouldn't blame you.)

I'm still loving the hell out of Aztec Dance Tunes. It's a hard book to write, sure, but aren't they all? Anyway, here's a couple of fun things.

I made another playlist, this one with a few of the long songs I wanted to put on the first one but which wouldn't fit. (I couldn't get all of them on this one either.) This playlist isn't necessarily made up so much of songs in which I hear the novel as songs which aren't off and strike me as good writing background music for this book. Or at least that I think will be. It's mostly long songs. And a few short ones because. I'm now rotating out the two discs (still Podless, oh wealthy benefactor).

ADT Long Songs #1 Playlist

Scatterheart / Bjork
Car / Catherine Wheel
April The 14th (Part I) / Gillian Welch
Draining The Pool For You / The Go-Betweens
The New Cobweb Summer / Lambchop
23 Minutes In Brussels / Luna (Live)
The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be / The Magnetic Fields
I Think I Need A New Heart / The Magnetic Fields
Miles Away / Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fourth of July / Galaxie 500
Your Dirty Answer / Kristin Hersh
Limbo / Throwing Muses
I Dream A Highway / Gillian Welch

In general, the music I'm putting on these is slightly older than what I'm listening to the rest of the time. And I'm recycling several of the same artists -- people who have made a great deal of music that I love -- maybe because this book is also drawing on all sorts of things I've loved for ever and ever and ever. I like the familiarity and also that little buzz you get from hearing something you haven't been listening to a million times a week already but still love. I'm mostly sticking this one up here because some of you cottoned to the first (and there will be many more, I'm sure, before this sw-et b-tch is done), but also to see what long songs you have to recommend... (Long song = 5 minutes plus.)

And here, as a bonus, is one of the best, grossest bits of my research reading that I don't plan on using and can't help but share. I like to call it "The Misunderstanding":

As discontent arose, the Mexica themselves precipitated their own violent departure. Obeying the promptings of Huitzilopochtli's priests, they had approached Achitometl, one of the Calhua magnates, asking for his beautiful daughter as their "sovereign" and "wife of Huitzilopochtli." Not understanding the implications of this request, Achitometl acceded to the honor; his daughter went to Tizaapan, where she was splendidly arrayed and sacrificed. Following an old custom, the body was flayed and a priest donned her skin in an ancient agricultural rite symbolizing the renewal of life. The unsuspecting chieftain Achitometl, invited to participate in the concluding festivities, suddenly recognized the skin of his daughter on the body of the priest. The outraged Culhua took arms and were joined by others and, in the wild melee of javelins and arrows, the Mexica were once again driven into the reeds and brackish swamps of Lake Tetzcoco.

From The Aztecs by Richard F. Townsend

I know you're wondering why I wouldn't use such a spectacular gem. But, you see, Aztec Dance Tunes is funny. It's not just funny, but it's supposed to be funny enough that this particular anecdote won't quite fit. Misunderstanding or no. (Oh, to be a fly on the wall of an Aztec bar.)

Aztecy Goodness

I started writing a new book a couple of weeks ago. It's another YA and it's called (for now, at least) Aztec Dance Tunes. I'm head-over-heels in love with it. With the idea and the characters and the research and how weird it is. I'm so in love with it, I don't even feel guilty for setting aside Roanoke while I write it. Roanoke's just not where my head is at right now. It's in this other place instead.

I'm also trying to write it a bit more deliberately (though not snail's pace) than I usually do for a first draft. I'm focusing on a chapter at a time, trying to do a chapter or two a week, and fine tuning what I've written for a couple of days before moving on. All the while figuring out the larger arcs in the book. And finding little scraps of plays and poems and songs, etc., to start out the various sections with. And reading lots of weird, interesting research material about all sorts of things that may or may not make it in.

Anyway, I often pick out a working soundtrack when I start a new project. I choose songs that capture the feeling or theme of certain incidents or moments I think will be in the book, or sometimes it's a song that I associate with a character and what they're experiencing in the book. It helps. Christopher's work on digitizing our music has made it easier and even more fun this time. (BTW, thanks to all who have commented and sent tips for managing the library.)

Last night I burned my very first iTunes CD, which will serve as the initial soundtrack for writing this book (future playlists to come as needed). I thought I'd throw it up here, because I'm a little in love with all of these songs at the moment. If you were me you could totally see a book written between these lines:

The ADT Playlist

Mouthful Of Air / Catherine Wheel
Your Ghost / Kristin Hersh
Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft / Robert Pollard
Bucky Done Gun / M.I.A.
(I Was Born In A) Laundromat / Camper Van Beethoven
Galaxies / Laura Veirs
The Moon / Cat Power
Velvet Days / Kristin Hersh
Life Is But A Dream / Tanya Donelly
Monster Hospital / Metric
Service and Repair / Calexico
A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off / The Magnetic Fields
Low / Cracker
Season of the Witch / Luna
A King And A Queen / Okkervil River
Static On The Radio / Jim White
Wicked And Weird / Buck 65
We Could Send Letters / Aztec Camera
Humans From Earth / T-Bone Burnett
Run Devil Run / Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins*

(*Y'all managed to change my mind on this one; it's just that one track that's imitation Neko.)

Old & New Tricks

Hannah has had a series of excellent posts about writing in the last little while. The most recent one deals with "sidestepping the learning curve" and it reminded me of a section at the very beginning of The Green Book, but I'm only getting time to type it in now. I agree with it, especially since I believe that if I'd read what Koch has to say on rewriting earlier I'd have saved about a year and at least a draft on Girl's Gang.

This is fairly longish, which is why I'm posting it here and not there. Behind the cut.

Abandonment Theories

I'm here for a little process write porn and whining; how about you?

More on Storyteller

Cory Doctorow joins the chorus of praise for Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller (must read!); I suggest you check out his take. He excerpts some practical advice from the book which I now unashamedly steal for here:

When beginning a story, do not:
* Let your viewpoint wander
* Confuse immediate setting with background and let your camera eye wander in, out, and about randomly
* Start with a lecture in anything -- history, physics, biology -- anything. Expository lumps anywhere are to be avoided if possible, but they are deadly in the opening.
* Start in the middle of a scene. This is why flashback openings are a mistake almost every time. You interrupt an ongoing scene to tell us something that happened earlier that results in ongoing scene. Once started, the scenes should be concluded before you move on. An ongoing conversation is hard to catch up with. Who are these speakers, what is their relationship, what kind of voice should I be hearing in my head? Introduce them before they open their mouths.
* Mislead the reader with false information or try to create suspense or arouse curiosity by withholding necessary information. What you arouse is mistrust and annoyance.
* Sprinkle around neologisms or made-up words that cannot be found in a dictionary.
* Use words that only you and a few other people in your speciaility can understand.
* Use contractions if you can avoid them, and only sparingly no matter what.
* Have your character look into a mirror or other reflective surface in order to work in a description of her.
* Let your character talk to an animal or inanimate object in order to give information to your reader about what is going on.
* Play games with the sex of your character.

Related Link: Small Beer also has a page of "Memories and Lessons Learned at the Clarion Writer's Workshop" from Doctorow, Jeff Ford, Gordon Van Gelder, Jim Sallis, Kit Reed, Greg Frost and Nancy Kress. Check it out.