I've been spending some time each day the last couple weeks working at Lauderdale. I say working at, not working on, because I haven't actually written any words for it. Shoot, half the thing is written, I figure, by the time I root through and take the good parts from the existing draft.
There were at least two directions I could take that book, and I've settled on the direction it's going--crime novel--which means I need to reorganize and perfect the crimes themselves, how they fit together, Hank's role in solving them, and what the more significant background crime is. Funny, but a simple murder or assault is not an independent crime in these books; the crime is some underlying (or overarching) conspiracy, and murders simply happen as the conspirators attempt to keep things hidden. This is almost universal in crime novels--bodies pile up, but that isn't the real crime. Which is, in a sense, a real crime.
Bodies piled up aplenty in the previous version of Lauderdale but, partly because I wasn't sure what the book actually was, they didn't do so to any pattern or for any larger purpose other than to offend and sicken the narrator. Who deserved it, frankly, but that wasn't the point. The question was, is this the narrator's coming-of-age story, or is it a crime novel? Of course there was far too much autobiographical content in the book as it stood to easily change things around to focus on the coming-of-age aspect, and I think I made the right call--certainly the easy call--in deciding to proceed with it as a crime novel. Our narrator, Hank Lauderdale, is a somewhat different man than he was in the earlier version, but he is a unique protagonist for this sort of book, and I don't want to change that. Of course he's still a reporter, which is more or less the opposite of unique (ubiquitous?) in crime stories, but he's not a real reporter, and more importantly he doesn't actually want to solve this puzzle. He really just wants to get paid to support his partying habit. And how many crime novels feature a half-drunk grad student as the protagonist?
Plus, keeping the setting in South Florida gives me an excuse to reread a few Florida crime novels I have (I'm going to reread a few; I have rather more than a few) with an eye to maintaining some of the main aspects of that genre (yes, Florida Crime is an established subgenre... at least in my opinion. And dammit if I don't care about my own opinions why should anyone else? Come to think of it, why should anyone else anyway?). So I've changed up the "up next" listing on the right there, but I may not necessarily review those books, at least not in-depth, not here anyway. I don't think.
Showing posts with label On Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On Writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Monday, December 3, 2007
Lauderdale Returns
I've been thinking lately about Lauderdale. I've had three months here to do something with it and I haven't done a thing. Not sure why. During that time I haven't worked on much else writing-wise, either. But in the last two weeks I've taken a couple of days and worked mostly on writing. I've got three ideas in the pot right now and am dialing in on one of them. Two of them have titles (Wymer's Women and Lovebug Season), and the other one I've been referring to by the shorthand Adams-Koza--this is a really exciting project but one I won't be able to do alone. And there are about three other ideas behind those, things I've worked on in fits and starts and have some ideas for but nothing concrete enough to occupy meaningful space in my mind. I've rambled on for a long time after the jump, but I wouldn't post it if I didn't think at least some people might want to read it.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Friday I spent about four hours plotting Lovebug Season, enough that I've identified the three major problems I have to fix before I can timeline and start writing. One of them I've already solved, although I should probably write that down before I forget what it was. The third one I can probably start writing without solving, because it has to do with the epilogue and how much of one there should be. The biggest problem is with one of the characters; two of the three main characters in this story are amalgams of different people with fictional elements added. I like to say one is about half one person and half another, while a second is about a third me, a third another person, and a third nobody at all. But the third character is too similar to someone I know and needs a good bit of work before I can proceed. No big deal, though; I had the same problem with Gil Cass at first and he's unrecognizable as the person he used to be based on nowadays. Of course Gil Cass has yet to make an appearance in any story I've been serious about. He remains my second-oldest still extant character.
Last night though, lying in bed, I started mulling over Lauderdale again. The book had a lot of problems, I think at least five of my readers are well aware. I'd started working on several of them, in fact before I left Africa had written a fourth draft to solve a few. But the problems remaining were still fairly serious. At least one of my readers had mentioned that the entire focus of the book could stand a change, and when you get a response like that you know you have big issues. And I don't even want to talk about the problems like the puerile wink-wink treatment of sex or the narrator's obsessive cataloguing of mundane daily events early in the first third (or half) of the story. And the fact that about halfway through the book started to turn hardboiled and never figured out what it was trying to be. Ugh. I don't want to go into the whole mess.
I had spent some time last week going through in my head what needed to be fixed. The first novel I ever wrote, The Tragic Kingdom, once I finished it and had someone read it, I basically put it away and never tried to edit it or anything. And I doubt I ever will, it remains what it is: a warm-up. At least I want to view it that way. After I finished that I spent about eight years noodling around on different projects, including a sequel/rewriting of that book that took up gobs of time and produced a half-dozen projects that made it to about chapter five or chapter fifteen before petering out in a mess of political-junkie detail. I wasted three years trying to get a college book off the ground; I have at least four aborted attempts stored on my hard drive, two or three of which produced characters I very much like, but none of which looked capable of turning into anything useful. Three of them were too autobiographical; the fourth seemed like it would go somewhere and had a good cast, but I never got a handle on the plot and gave it up. I could go back to that one.
In any event, when on a 2005 deployment I sat down and returned to the long-cold ideas folder that contained one essay and an introduction and decided to give a go to writing about Fort Lauderdale, it came easy. I knew by the time I was halfway through, or more, that there was going to be serious reworking required on the first half, if not the whole thing. But it was so much fun to write, so easy to write. I so enjoyed the time I spent at the cabin writing it, and when I finished it up within three weeks of arriving in Africa I knew I had something that had to go out to readers so I could at least get a good idea of what it felt like to somebody who wasn't the inspiration for the narrator.
I knew it needed more help than I let on, so I'm apologizing for that now to my readers. I appreciate your help nonetheless and your comments have informed much of the changes I'm going to be making. The key thing, though, was this. It's been a year since I finished the second draft and sent it to readers. For most of that year it has sat and gathered dust (literally, because I printed the damn thing at Staples).
The question, really, is, am I going to write a novel? Am I ever going to be serious enough about this to publish something, or am I just one of those people who thinks they can write so they talk about how they're working on a novel, and maybe by the time they're fifty they actually produce something and give it to their spouse to read, and their spouse smiles and humors them and says it's wonderful, and it just ends there. Is that what I'm going to do? I don't need any reminders that I'm more than halfway to 50 and haven't actually published anything longer than a newspaper editorial.
After I got up and spent an hour putting down my thoughts about how to fix Lauderdale, things I've known for a while but hadn't collected in one place, I went back to bed--after two, so I've been dragging this morning--and I continued to think about it. Not about Lauderdale specifically anymore, but about what I was actually doing. Was I going to sit down and rescue this piece of fiction? It's not everybody who can commit themselves to writing a novel-length piece of fiction and have it all hang together, and I've done that twice now (although whether The Tragic Kingdom actually "hangs together" is a judgment perhaps best made by Ayzair and not by me), and though the quality isn't the best plenty of lousy novels have been published. Some have been hyped and made into bestsellers and made their authors a lot of money.
It is hardly a secret to regular readers here that I have no fucking clue what to do with my life. Law school? Grad school? This job, that job? Raging bender? Flying? Teaching? You name it, I've considered it, and I probably think it would be fun. And I also can't commit to it, either. Sometimes it's outside factors; I mean, I'd be in law school right now if the AF could get its act together, but I've said all there is to say about that. But if events don't conspire against me I still am incapable of settling on a course of action to guide my life.
In the past, at any of the innumerable opportunities I've had in life to sit down and say, damn, I don't know what to do with myself, and ponder the future, I've always known that I wanted to write. It's one of the few, if not the only, consistencies in my life. Shit, I used to want to go into politics, but I've decided that even decent politicians are shitheads and the system is too broken to be worth wasting one's time in. Even voting seems barely worthwhile anymore, but it's the only thing I can do. Speaking of which I need to change my registration.
Anyway. Last night I was thinking. The problem I have with writing... well, there are several, but one that kept me up for a while was this. I abandon finished projects and half-finished projects because they don't measure up to my standards, which are ill-defined at best. Actually, my standards change to suit the subject. If ever I write something good, like the Everglades piece, I find reasons why I can't publish it. I can find a reason not to try to publish anything, everything in fact that I've ever written. It's either not very good, not good enough to be worth trying, or it's good but nobody would want to publish it, or whatever. A thousand reasons.
Self-confidence has never been a strong suit of mine. It's why I lift weights, actually, it's what I'm compensating for (I maintain 100% of weightlifters and bodybuilders and so forth are compensating for something; not "most," all. Some of them are short, or have little wangs, sure, and some of them got picked on as kids or didn't get enough love from Dad growing up, but even the ones for whom that's not the case, and I think that's most of us, are still compensating for something, and it's just a question of whether they know what it is, are willing to admit it, and whether that stops them or not). I had hoped the military would help with this but it didn't, really. Yaay, I can fly a plane. I almost washed out of pilot training on three or four separate occasions and at one point in February of 2003 desperately prayed that I would wash out just so I wouldn't have to fear it anymore. Really. I've never told anybody that. It was a hard month. I did hook a checkride during that period of time. I could have washed myself out then, but I was too chicken to SIE (self-initiated elimination) and, when the chips were down, I was too proud to fuck up the 85 ride because I knew I was good enough to pass the damn thing. I am so goddamn screwed up in the head sometimes it's not even funny. I know now I was a better pilot than I ever let myself be in UPt and should have finished better than I did. That's not to say I was great; I'm too easily distracted and the sky and the cockpit both are just full of shiny objects to break my concentration. But I could have been middle-of-the-road instead of barely competent, and I proved that to my own satisfaction in the 135 and learned to actually enjoy flying most of the time.
Anyway. I think you can see where this is going. Writing isn't that hard for me. What's hard is the idea that I'd have to sign my name to a thing and send it out there for other people to decide whether it's worthy or not. And it's not like the industry is easy to break into or anything; hell, about a year ago I recall an agent copied word-for-word some of Jane Austen's lesser-known novels and sent them out under a fake name to a bunch of publishers as a first-time writer trying to break into the game. A couple of them caught on, but the ones that didn't, every single one of them, rejected the "manuscripts." Classics all, of course. Fucking asinine industry I want to break into, isn't it? Part of what's wrong with the world. You know one of the biggest first novels of recent years, Cold Mountain? I read that. I didn't really like it all that much, but it got so much damned press it was a fucking bestseller for weeks, and they made a movie out of it (which I watched with my folks, once... and sold it later because none of us had any desire to see it again, although it did convince my father and I both to look for the Foxfire books), and author's sophomore effort was roundly denigrated by the reviewers. Of course whether the reviewers have any fucking clue what's good or not we have no idea, really. Anyway. I hate this industry, that's the point here, but for the last 15 fucking years it's the only industry I've consistently wanted to be a part of.
I just lack the confidence to do it. And I'm never going to just magically develop it, either; that ship has sailed. I never picked that up in my childhood and you don't get it when you're thirty. You either accept it for what it is, and you lift weights and remind yourself of it every time you do and get on with your life, or you don't accept it and turn your back and spend the rest of your life in therapy wondering why you never seem to succeed at anything. Fuck that. I've tried the therapy thing. It worked for what I needed, but I don't have free access to a psychologist anymore, or won't soon, and anyway people who spend their lives in therapy are just the saddest sort of people I can imagine. When the economy goes in the tank and we're all living with half the standard of living we thought we'd have at this point in history are you going to be able to go to a shrink? No. Self confidence or not, the ability to get up in the morning and do what you have to do comes from within you, and that ability has only a small foundation in self-confidence. The rest of it comes from knowing you have to do something whether you believe it'll work or not.
Anyway. At one point last night I debated whether I was just avoiding the obvious and this was in fact what I was "supposed" to be doing with my life, writing. And then I slipped into what has been my standard philosophical debate of late, whether indeed there is any "supposed" at all, whether the notion of humans having prechosen paths that we need only follow to find happiness, a notion I simply cannot square (are we really to believe that some people are called to be garbage collectors while others are called to be billionaire CEOs?). This was not necessarily a productive area of debate and thankfully I drifted off to sleep eventually, although by the time Smittygirl was up and getting ready for work I was still unable to rouse myself from bed having had only a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile I've used three separate spoons to stir the milk into my tea this morning, each time carefully setting the spoon aside so I'll know to use it to stir milk into the next cup.
So. I'm at an interesting juncture in life right now. Soon I'll be married, and we're planning to move to a more favorable climate. I can't take work right now because I'm still on active duty, despite the fact that my resignation's been in since September. I've covered all this and the situation isn't likely to change soon. By the time I can get a job, I'll be looking at a wedding and honeymoon in the very near future, and then a potential move, so I won't be trying to get a long-term career-oriented job. I'll just need money. That should be a relatively stress-free thing, then, whenever it comes to pass, and as a friend of mine has pointed out in the past it's often easier to be productive at writing (or whatever else) when you have a lot to do than when you have nothing significant to occupy you.
Last night at the store I was reading the cover of a collection of Washington Irving stories, and learned that he was the first American to make a living exclusively from writing, something remarkable then and still not terribly common today. There are of course a number of very successful commercial fiction writers who make their living exclusively by writing books, but that number isn't terribly large, probably fewer than 100 in the whole country. Most writers teach or have other work on the side, and even many of the very successful ones supplement their income in that way. It's life, you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. I'm lucky; my gorgeous fiancee happens to also be smart as a whip and enjoys her work, so I don't have to worry about supporting a family solo. I will have time, in my life, even though I'll have to work, to write. And if I'm going to be serious about it, now is a great time to start it. I can't do much else, and with the move completed, much of the wedding planning accomplished, and things set for a while, I have little reason not to jump into it.
Lovebug Season remains deeply intriguing, but I feel a compunction to revise and finish Lauderdale, to not simply leave it and move on, because if I do that, if I continue that trend, where will it end? Probably never. I'll get to a point with Lovebug Season, maybe even finish it, and decide it's not good enough and move on to another project, and so on. Bad idea. Whether this is what I'm supposed to do or not, whether indeed any of us are meant for anything particular at all, the fact remains that self confidence be damned this is what I want to do.
The real question is why has it taken thirty years for me to reach this point? Have I been here before and failed to capitalize on it? I hope not; if so, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Now, if I miss this opportunity, it's not like I'll never have another. But I will kick myself, and I've been doing that for most of my life. It's time to grow up.
Monday, August 20, 2007
A Name Selected
Thank you all! Based on suggestions--Attenborough was particularly good--I have decided on Overbury. Probably Ted Overbury, not sure. The Life of Sir Thomas Overbury may give you some inclination of the direction this character is headed...
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Name Suggestions Needed
I'm looking for a 4-syllable surname that sounds English. Or, if not English, at least not blatantly ethno-specific: no Takahashis, no DiSalvatores, no Hackensteiners. The only thing I've come up with is Neverwinter, which I like, but is not a surname anywhere I can find. All suggestions welcome and appreciated.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Can You Kill Your Muse?
I'm wondering this lately. Last night I sat down to write a blog post, and nothing would come. Nothing. Not that big a deal really, since I frequently have trouble putting anything on the blog that abides by my self-imposed restriction on political content—a restriction I'm no longer particularly interested in maintaining.
But now I'm worried about whether my muse hasn't taken a permanent vacation. More after the jump.
This inability to come up with decent blog posts has become a bigger problem of late, as regular readers may have noticed. Again, by itself not the biggest concern.
But then, there's Lauderdale. I haven't really done anything to it this year. I did a little work on a new draft in December right after I got home, but since that time I haven't even really looked at it. I printed the thing out, in April, on the theory that it would be harder to ignore in tangible form. Nice theory, but it hasn't worked.
I've written two paragraphs in The Reporter since I got home. I even read the whole thing a couple times but I never felt called to write any more.
I did manage to come up with a new idea earlier this year, in the spring. Two of them, although both had been percolating for some time. I did about 1000 words worth of framing back in May, after Memorial Day weekend. I was inspired by lovebugs. But since then… nothing.
It's not that I don't have the time. If I want the time to write, Smittygirl always lets me take it no questions. If I wanted to write at work… it's not like I'm doing anything else most days. What I do is usually pretty wasteful. But I just don't have the inspiration for it. I'm not feeling it. Even when I was inspired to write something after Memorial Day, it took me two hours to put together 1000 words. The idea was there but I couldn't focus on it and bring it into form.
I've been depressed lately, certainly, but only about work. It's strange… the last two weeks I've actually been extremely happy—outside of work. This week at the office I've just been so irritable I can't do anything. I fly off the handle at nothing. I can't even focus on my work, I'm just so angry about having to be in this job any longer. It's a waste of my time. I can't control my own situation there, I've done everything—hell, most of the people around me have done everything—I can do, frequently two or three times. I've brought it up repeatedly. No one I can talk to can do anything to move my case forward. It's just… sitting. There's nothing for me to do. And yet nothing is happening.
And that constant frustration has to no surprise turned into depression about work. And that depression has morphed into anger and irritation. So at home, sometimes I get depressed or sad, and at work, frequently I'm angry and frustrated. And in no place am I inspired enough to write.
Okay. This is a temporary situation. My depression is related to this short-term environmental situation. I don't want to go on anti-depressants to fix this (the suggestion by my employer that I do so I consider tantamount to forced drugging; welcome to the Brave New World), since they would just be a band-aid designed to cover up a problem that will not be solved until the temporary environmental situation is alleviated.
And I'm willing to concede that my muse is quiet lately because of the depression, frustration, and anger.
But it's been a long time. And last night, as I sat in front of a blank Blogger edit screen, I started to fear my own black dog: that my muse might not come back from this vacation. What if this situation has permanently depressed or destroyed the creative spark that I hoped would be my outlet for the rest of my life.
Is that possible? What do you think?
But now I'm worried about whether my muse hasn't taken a permanent vacation. More after the jump.
This inability to come up with decent blog posts has become a bigger problem of late, as regular readers may have noticed. Again, by itself not the biggest concern.
But then, there's Lauderdale. I haven't really done anything to it this year. I did a little work on a new draft in December right after I got home, but since that time I haven't even really looked at it. I printed the thing out, in April, on the theory that it would be harder to ignore in tangible form. Nice theory, but it hasn't worked.
I've written two paragraphs in The Reporter since I got home. I even read the whole thing a couple times but I never felt called to write any more.
I did manage to come up with a new idea earlier this year, in the spring. Two of them, although both had been percolating for some time. I did about 1000 words worth of framing back in May, after Memorial Day weekend. I was inspired by lovebugs. But since then… nothing.
It's not that I don't have the time. If I want the time to write, Smittygirl always lets me take it no questions. If I wanted to write at work… it's not like I'm doing anything else most days. What I do is usually pretty wasteful. But I just don't have the inspiration for it. I'm not feeling it. Even when I was inspired to write something after Memorial Day, it took me two hours to put together 1000 words. The idea was there but I couldn't focus on it and bring it into form.
I've been depressed lately, certainly, but only about work. It's strange… the last two weeks I've actually been extremely happy—outside of work. This week at the office I've just been so irritable I can't do anything. I fly off the handle at nothing. I can't even focus on my work, I'm just so angry about having to be in this job any longer. It's a waste of my time. I can't control my own situation there, I've done everything—hell, most of the people around me have done everything—I can do, frequently two or three times. I've brought it up repeatedly. No one I can talk to can do anything to move my case forward. It's just… sitting. There's nothing for me to do. And yet nothing is happening.
And that constant frustration has to no surprise turned into depression about work. And that depression has morphed into anger and irritation. So at home, sometimes I get depressed or sad, and at work, frequently I'm angry and frustrated. And in no place am I inspired enough to write.
Okay. This is a temporary situation. My depression is related to this short-term environmental situation. I don't want to go on anti-depressants to fix this (the suggestion by my employer that I do so I consider tantamount to forced drugging; welcome to the Brave New World), since they would just be a band-aid designed to cover up a problem that will not be solved until the temporary environmental situation is alleviated.
And I'm willing to concede that my muse is quiet lately because of the depression, frustration, and anger.
But it's been a long time. And last night, as I sat in front of a blank Blogger edit screen, I started to fear my own black dog: that my muse might not come back from this vacation. What if this situation has permanently depressed or destroyed the creative spark that I hoped would be my outlet for the rest of my life.
Is that possible? What do you think?
Friday, November 3, 2006
November Novel Update
It's been quiet lately at work and I've been doing a bit more reading in the evenings than the last week or so. One of the books I started was Bruce Campbell's autobiography, which has been great fun. And lately I've been engaged in a fierce (well, not really) debate about the correct taxonomy of one of the common trees on this base, Conocarpus lancifolius, which doesn't have an English common name but is called ghalab by the Somalis. It's quite a nice tree but there's a dearth of agreement as to what, exactly, it is. I'm going to post a couple pictures shortly along with a long and rather dry explanation of the naming controversy, which is not as yet settled (I've brought in the New York Botanical Gardens and the University of Florida Herbarium to help, and may have to try to get myself a wood sample to bring home). This is fair warning.
And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.
As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.
This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.
Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.
And I've been pecking away at my 50,000 word novel for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't quite managed the word count I'm going to need to reach 50k, and what with the safari coming up the last week of the month I'm thinking I need to at least give myself the first four days of December. Just to be fair, you know.
As of this writing I have 2778 words, not counting the title. I cheated, though, because the main character--acutally, it appears he's going to be peripheral--is named Ivan Marion Cartwright Harrison Templeton van Arden Telemann Romanostovich-Spastiziczisikowski. That's ten words right there. Of course, he goes by Van and his full name is only reported once.
This book has not led in any of the directions I considered in the last post. It's clearly straight farce. The action takes place in the city of Porktown, which is a state capital. The climate is uniformly warm and breezy because of the high proportion of state legislators and advertising agencies that call the place home, such that none of the characters are actually sure what time of year it is (it's the month of Checkuary). One of the other characters is named Melllllllody, although she doesn't pronounce the extra six L's (unlike her mother Ellllizabeth). Like all fifteen year old girls dream of doing, Melllllllody ran away from home and took work on the tugboats and garbage barges that ply the Dreary River, which runs into Gabba Gabba Bay at Porktown. The character I now suspect of being the central character in the story so far doesn't have a name. He goes about in a tweed smoking jacket and blue velvet cape and calls himself The Reporter. Clearly he's some sort of superhero, although at present his only superpower seems to be predicting traffic accidents.
Remember when I said, it doesn't have to be good? Right. I do take my own advice, even if no one else does.
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Write a novel in a month?
My esteemed friend mentioned over on his blog that November is National Novel Writing Month, the goal being to write a 50,000 word... um... piece of fiction, in the month of November. This boils down to 1667 words per day, which is significantly less than I did on Lauderdale on good days. But "good days," on Lauderdale, were days in North Carolina on the porch where the only thing I had to do all day apart from writing was fix and consume meals. I could put in 10,000 words on such a day if things were going well.
Now I have a job that keeps me busy from 0730 to 1700 or so. I should at least be able to get 1667 words a day at the speed I type. But what to write about? I've decided this is the perfect opportunity to explore science fiction, cyberpunk, or noir, all three of which I've considered trying my hand at.
Since the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a good novel, but just to write for the sake of writing (something too few people do), it seems a great opportunity to give one of those genres a shot. And I think everyone else should, too. So I'm challenging my readers--well, my readers who blog, and my other readers who have any sort of emotional connection to the little silhouetted tree there on the right and didn't just give birth, and my other readers who think it sounds fun--to join me, and apparently also Scanime, and at the end of the month we'll see just exactly how ridiculous the things we've come up with are and pass them around and have a good laugh. Come on, you know it sounds like fun. Admit it. Even if you don't hit the 50,000 word mark, you can at least try, right? Right. So it's settled then. And since the 1st is already almost over for me you all have a head start.
Remember, it doesn't have to be any good. It just has to be.
Now I have a job that keeps me busy from 0730 to 1700 or so. I should at least be able to get 1667 words a day at the speed I type. But what to write about? I've decided this is the perfect opportunity to explore science fiction, cyberpunk, or noir, all three of which I've considered trying my hand at.
Since the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not to produce a good novel, but just to write for the sake of writing (something too few people do), it seems a great opportunity to give one of those genres a shot. And I think everyone else should, too. So I'm challenging my readers--well, my readers who blog, and my other readers who have any sort of emotional connection to the little silhouetted tree there on the right and didn't just give birth, and my other readers who think it sounds fun--to join me, and apparently also Scanime, and at the end of the month we'll see just exactly how ridiculous the things we've come up with are and pass them around and have a good laugh. Come on, you know it sounds like fun. Admit it. Even if you don't hit the 50,000 word mark, you can at least try, right? Right. So it's settled then. And since the 1st is already almost over for me you all have a head start.
Remember, it doesn't have to be any good. It just has to be.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
The Holy Duckfire
This is sort of a disturbing article--Two Men Charged In Duck Beating--on a couple of levels (one of which is, it's illegal to beat a duck to death with a stick but not illegal to go bowhunting for a buck that can't be brought down with a single arrow; how do we determine where cruelty starts and stops?). But the most disturbing level is this one:
Still. The whole thing's a little weird.
Murcia-Rosa told investigators that he and two friends were fishing in a lake at Parrots Landing Apartments in the 1100 block of Sussex Drive when several ducks swam to the pieces of bread they used as bait.Parrot's Landing is the apartment complex that Hank Lauderdale lives at in Lauderdale. The ducks in the canal there feature prominently in one of the episodes in the story. One of the minor characters sacrifices a duck in a Santeria ritual. But he isn't cruel about it.
Still. The whole thing's a little weird.
Monday, September 4, 2006
Lauderdale Progress
I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.
Ahem. Excuse me.
I finished the second draft!!!!
I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)
Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.
It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).
I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.
Ahem. Excuse me.
I finished the second draft!!!!
I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)
Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.
It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).
I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.
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