Heroine Speak!
Posted by: authorguy on: January 24, 2012
- In: Funny | Promotion
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Book Title: St. Martin’s Moon
Heroine Name: Candace (and Bing-Bang, via Miss Miho Tanaka)
What were you like before the story began? (Tanaka) My client was dead then, and is still dead. I’m a medium, appearing in the novel Ghostkiller, but I’m taking a break now. (Candace) I was the Communications Officer for Coventry Base, which sounds like a big deal except we didn’t talk to anybody.
Who are you in love with and why? (Candace) Nobody, until I met (sigh) Joseph. (Tanaka) That’s ‘Joey’, my client says.
Possessive, aren’t we? (Tanaka) He’s mine! I mean, he’s hers. Bing-Bang’s, that is. (Candace) You’d never think she’s been dead four years already, would you?
So how did you meet? (Candace) Two of our guys were found on the surface of the moon, looking for all the world like they’d been slaughtered by a werewolf, and we were a little upset by this. We couldn’t see how it could happen, and we really, really needed to, so we asked the System authorities, and they sent him. (Tanaka) My client met him at work, they were partners. I like Candace’s story better.
What was your immediate reaction to Joseph? What did you first think of him? (Tanaka) He was my client’s teacher. Naturally she was terrified of him. She got over it. (Candace) I thought he smelled nice. And he looked nice. And he sounded nice…
Surely it wasn’t that easy? (Candace) Well, no, remember I was head of Communications, a certain professional, um, decorum… (Tanaka) I think she means she didn’t drool. My client, of course, did not drool either. It messes up the space suit. (Candace) Not to mention that I had to keep secrets right and left, it got so I forgot what lies I was telling to whom!
So you had some little bumps on your road to romance? (Candace) Well, it didn’t help that all sorts of people were spying on him. One of them activated a bug in our systems, and I thought it was him, and well…And of course there was the sex. (Tanaka) What about the sex? (Candace) We couldn’t have any. You know, throes of passion, love bites…
So it was hopeless? (Tanaka) My client took an asteroid to the chest, and is currently incorporeal, so I’d say yes, it’s hopeless. (Candace) I’d hoped it wasn’t, but the station started to come apart and they were going to throw him out no matter what. I never thought I’d say this but thank God for Dr. Ron, and even Bertrand.
I interviewed him earlier. Isn’t he a psychopath? (Candace) Betrand is, yes. The important part is that only Joseph could attack them from the rear, and he did. Our savior. (Tanaka) Your idiot, you mean, going up against a werewolf in a locked room. Didn’t take him long before he went my client’s way. (Candace) Yes, well, it all came right in the end.
Any regrets? (Candace) No, none at all, not even the vat-grown whiting in tofu sauce over rice. (Tanaka) I’m sorry, my client is howling in my ear. I don’t think she has anything more to say.
Beyond description
Posted by: authorguy on: January 12, 2012
I think I may have mentioned at some point in the distant past (like last week) how much I dislike description. I look at it as the author showing off most of the time, displaying his vast ability to visualize the scene and blah blah blah. I’m not sure what the ‘blah blah blah’ stands for since by that point I’ve skipped on past it and started reading the next bit of dialog.
Which reminds me, by the way, that dialog tags also fall under the heading of descriptive prose. ‘He muttered’ is a dialog tag with descriptive content, which looks like a verb. ‘Muttered’ is a verb too, of course, which works just fine when it’s not a dialog tag, i.e., you don’t really care what it is he’s muttering. It’s the subvocalized expression of angst and/or perturbation that matters, not the content. Adverbs also fall under this heading. While one can make a case for them, and some have done so, I would still argue that while ‘speaking softly’ is not the same as ‘whispering’, really it would be better IMO not to use either one.
Nor is it especially hard to do this. As I pointed out here, it’s perfectly feasible to replace
Mary arrived late, which is why she wasn’t killed by the meteor.
with
Mary got out of the cab, checked her watch. “Late again.” Looking up, she spotted the giant crater. “Not that that’s a bad thing…”
It’s more active, dynamic, humorous, and engaging, at least to me. If you don’t find it so I’m sure you can come up with your own examples. It helps that the guy who wrote the post chose a particularly clunky sentence.
An even better example comes to mind, which says paragraphs worth of description in just a sentence. The problem with these sorts of lines is that they depend on background knowledge, which, if you don’t have it, leaves you with nothing but a slightly funny line. In the movie What About Bob? Bob is trying to guess the names of the doctor’s family members in a portrait on the wall, and fails miserably. The doctor says, “This is my wife Faye, my daughter Anna, and my son Sigmund.”
Which tells us that he’s a) a psychiatrist, b) obsessed with Freud, while it c) hints at his complete domination in his household, implies that’s he’s d) egocentric and e) a complete ass.
The basic idea is the same in both cases. Rather than the scene being described, it is instead being perceived, related, processed. As the character is processing the scene so is the reader. What matters to him matters to you. What he misses you miss, so when he gets blindsided, so do you. It also tells you when you’re making a mistake. If you have to go to too great a trouble to set up a joke, perhaps you shouldn’t be going there.
Growing Your Book – A Christmas Metaphor
Posted by: authorguy on: December 28, 2011
I’m told that many new authors write too much. The first time I edited my first book I was told I hadn’t written enough. This can happen, of course, too much here and too little there. But since so many people blog about how to handle book bloat, I’m not going to bother. Less well covered is the problem of book anorexia. Unfortunately the solutions to this problem are far less clear.
In my case, which was in my novel Unbinding the Stone, I had a scene in which my MC, Tarkas, had been accidentally brain-blasted, his mind disintegrated, and he was taken to a healer god to be fixed. Things get…complicated, but almost certainly not how you think. As a result of these complications, other complications ensue and eventually the whole course of the book and the story was wildly altered. In fact the story grew to overflow one book and even a second. It’s still growing.
The problem was that I, in my youthful enthusiasm, assumed that all of my readers would see all the little clues I had put in, and deduce all the proper deductions. I really hate putting in unnecessary text, so I didn’t. My editor at the time, who had somehow missed all the unnecessary text elsewhere, felt that this whole sequence had no place in the story and should be dropped. Since this would have been disastrous to the whole course of the story to come, I took the opposite tack and added text, to make the little connections that I thought were obvious, more evident.
When I was writing St. Martin’s Moon I had a similar problem, although in this case I didn’t have any plot to speak of, and was simply following my characters around. The story was small because I could only portray what they were doing. Here, I was aided by the many episodes of revision, which forced me to read the story multiple times. Each time I would suddenly think of some little comment, maybe even a whole sentence, that flavored the scene far beyond the plain little meal I had started with.
My short story Bite Deep also has a bit of this problem, mainly because it was constrained by a word limit in the first edition. When it was later reprinted I expanded it a bit, and the story benefited from that. I mention these examples in the hope that you will be inspired to go and read them.
The problem is poetry, or in these cases the lack of it. My writing technique is to spin the story out of the characters’ own logic. What would Tarkas do here? How would Joseph Marquand (or David Broder) react to this development? Character logic can be thought of as a fusion of more straightforward logic and poetry. Logic is pretty syntactical, defining relationships between abstract entities. The usual example is ‘All things that are X are Y. Some A is an X. Therefore some A is a Y.’ If we assume that the first two statements are true then the third statement must be true.
Poetry deals with the meanings of words, basically all the parts that logic doesn’t, much like philosophy deals with all those aspects of human experience that science doesn’t. If logic is the string of lights on our tree, poetry is the set of ornaments. The lights illuminate the tree, but the ornaments enhance the light. They have to be hung, but logic will not tell us where. We have to use our judgment, with some guiding principles. All the red balls don’t go on the same side, that sort of thing.
The business of growing your book is maybe adding more lights, because maybe the amorphous tree-shaped object you’re trying to illuminate is larger than you thought. Perhaps it has crannies and hollows among its branches that you didn’t see when you were picking it out. The author defines the tree in the way he lays out the lights, but too many is as bad as too few, and they have to be visible.
Or possibly you need more ornaments. To be an author you’ve got to have more balls than most, in a greater profusion and variety, along with all the other weird stuff your parents left you, or that caught your eye on a vacation. But don’t feel you have to use them all, otherwise they block the lights. (This is the kind of metaphor that only makes sense at Christmas, when ‘trimming’ means ‘putting stuff on‘.)
Don’t get me started on tinsel.
Commencement, or Life part 2
Posted by: authorguy on: December 23, 2011
- In: General
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Yesterday my son graduated from college, Stony Brook University to be precise. He has a bright shiny new BA in Anthropology (he wanted to be an archaeologist when he started) and probably no place to use it. Very few BAs are useful in the real world, most of them have to be traded up into MAs or even PhDs. I don’t see him going that far, he couldn’t wait to get out of school and into the real world.
In addition, the girl my son is involved with already has an advanced degree. What happens when two degrees start pulling in different directions, if his career takes him to Washington, or Arizona, while hers takes her to Michigan? We’ve seen this happen, two people with a perfectly fine marriage divorce solely to pursue their careers, or if they don’t, who gives up their dreams? I recommend that at least one partner should have a portable job, the kind they can do anywhere. My son likes to work with his hands.
Sometimes we put too much faith in the college degree. Once upon a time they were much harder to get, and stood for much more. Having one meant a great deal. Now we bend over backwards to get people into college, so much so that no one is willing to do grunt work anymore, to the point where there’s a shortage of blue-collar labor. I’ve heard more than one person say “My father didn’t put me through college so I could work in a laundry.” If the idea behind the degree is that it’s a means to an end, probably not, but that’s a bad way to look at a college degree.
I graduated with a degree in Philosophy way back when, a degree I think was and is remarkably useful when it comes to building my life and writing my novels but not really good for much else. I went out into the real world even more unprepared than my son is, because I had no one telling me how unprepared I was. I worked for quite a while in the ‘real world’ and I eventually went back to school. There’s nothing wrong with going back, provided you can afford it time- and money-wise. That’s the benefit of collective living, by the way. I could go back because their were others also contributing to the family income, freeing me and others to do what we wanted rather than what we had to do.
One of the best moments in the ceremony was the speech by the Student Speaker, Alison Becker. She mentioned at one point how she failed a particular test that she would need to qualify for a teaching degree, and how this failure freed her. She hadn’t really wanted the degree anyway, but somehow thought she had to or ought to get it.
(I was immediately reminded of one of the stories in the novel Kobayashi Maru, a Star Trek novel which told the stories of how several of the crewmembers took that test and how they failed it. The test is designed to be failed, the question is how. Some fail spectacularly, taking everyone with them. Some fail by never getting into the scenario in the first place. In one story, Scotty fails by tricking the computer into doing something he knows won’t work in real life but also knows the computer will accept. His failure was so egregious he was punted from the command track entirely, and shifted to the Engineering track which was where he wanted to be all along.)
Do I think the degree is worth getting? Sure, if only to show that he can do that sort of work, and there is much of that work that needs doing. Do I think that it’s the be-all and end-all? Absolutely not. My hope for him is happiness, not necessarily success. Life is a story, and happiness results if you, the author, tell the story of your life correctly. Success may be a part of that story and can lead to happiness, but more often I think it leads in the opposite direction. The question is whether success is merely a plot-point in your life, or a minor character that displaces your life’s proper lead.
With truth and logic for all!
Posted by: authorguy on: December 19, 2011
We got into a discussion of the first Terminator movie yesterday, on Twitter, and today I made the related point that logic points to truth, which is why people don’t like it so much. The connection might not be so easy to see, so I’m writing at somewhat greater length to fill in the blanks. We start with the Terminator, a great movie with a great sequel. T1 and T2 both start off with time travel, by which means a hero is sent back in time to prevent the death of a man at the hands of a villain who is also sent back in time. I assume everyone here knows the basic story, mainly because I do. Spoilers ahead, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I pointed out that the first two movies were ‘better’, in the sense that they adhered to a philosophy which the later ones did not. That philosophy is stated as ‘there is no Fate but what we make’. T1 and T2 were about Sarah Connor and John Connor doing whatever they had to do to prevent the Judgment Day war. In the later movies this belief is discarded, with the claim that Judgment Day has always been inevitable, it’s just the form and timing that changes.
This bothered me a lot, especially since I have a basic idea for a story that could easily have been developed to not only prevent Judgment Day (as T1 and T2 claimed), but do so in a way that ended the cycle of movies, by ending the conflict between us and Skynet. This is good for the story but bad for people who want to make more money by making more movies, and torture the story by making it stay alive past its normal and natural end point.
I see this a lot in movies, by the way, tropes of the genre, such as time travel (TT) or teleportation (TP), being used by scriptwriters who don’t really know how to use them properly. Highlander 2 has much the same problem, an explanation for the immortality of the characters, and the logic of the story in general, existed in potentia in the script but the writers didn’t put the pieces together. Plus the plot sucked.
This is where story logic comes in. Using the tropes properly is not easy, they sometimes have possibilities inherent in them that are larger than one story can handle. T1 was brilliant, using TT just once and spun the rest of the story out of that. The whole movie was revealed (in the deleted scenes, anyway) as a loop that existed because it existed. Even without the deleted scenes the internal logic made perfect sense. T2 is a little worse in that respect, but that’s where my idea for T3 comes in.
My respondent proposed that one could become a better pantser, and avoid these errors, by learning plot and structure. I replied that I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to learn, although I think in terms of story logic and not those other elements so I don’t really know. It may be the difference between Art and Craft, that elements which are fine by Craft standards are completely unacceptable by the standards of Art, and no Artist who sees it could ever explain the problem to a Craftsman who doesn’t. Lots of people think the T3 they actually made is a perfectly fine movie, although no one likes Highlander 2.
My respondent proposed that people were so bad at logic that it just seems like the ability to use it is somehow naturally occurring in some, but not in others. I doubt this, since I’m a philosophy major at heart and learned symbolic logic in a class room. What is needed, though, is a desire to use the logic once one has learned it and apply it to the world outside the classroom. This is where the problem arises.
Logic leads from premises, given statements, to conclusions, which we may call conditional truths. Many pantsers have stories that go off on their own, characters who do what they want, and demand the author follow. They no longer know where the story is going to end, but when they get there, that story is a ‘truth’. Not many people recognize that the things they think of as facts are really fictions, so those same people probably fail to recognize the conditional nature of the truths these ‘facts’ logically imply, and a lot of the time, truth is uncomfortable. (The only enemy Buffy could not defeat was the truth, as wielded by the singing demon in Once More With Feeling.) I admit I would like to know where a story is going before it gets there. It would be easier, and I’d probably write the book faster, but I think it would be an inferior book, a ‘lie’. Truth is a product of logic, not of the will, and we’re stuck with what we get.
Happy Midwinter Solstice Festival
Posted by: authorguy on: November 27, 2011
I was just involved in a rather long-drawn-out Twitter exchange with Laura Gilman (@LAGilman) on the subject of, of all things, holiday greetings. Not because I think either of us is particularly uncivil, but because we seemed to be talking at cross-purposes about what civility is. And because Twitter limits us to a mere 140 characters so it’s hard to get your point across.
The question as I understood it was what is a proper greeting for this season, between two strangers. The reason I understood it this way is because two acquaintances presumably already know each other’s holiday preferences (or can at least reliably infer them) and should already know how to greet the other. In this case I think both she and I would agree that the correct thing to do when Marc meets his acquaintance Laura is to greet her with a greeting appropriate to her holiday preferences and not his own, and she would do likewise. So for non-strangers this is a non-issue.
The problem comes when Marc and Laura don’t know each other. Two strangers meeting on a street corner have far less to go on, which complicates matters.
There is a simple way out of this, of course, simply have both players use generic salutations. “Happy Holidays.” “Season’s Greetings.” These have the advantages of being abstract and generic. They also have the disadvantages of being abstract and generic. There are places and times when abstract and generic is good, but two strangers on a street corner isn’t one of them. People are not abstract. Neither Laura nor Marc is generic (at least I hope they aren’t). These sorts of greetings are perfectly fine when being used by abstract persons to address abstract persons. For businesses and their target audiences, they’re fine. “Happy Holidays, all of you out there who occasionally buy the product(s) that we over here collectively make and market.” Yay, I guess. “Seasons Greetings from us in England to all of our cousins in America” is also okay.
Would I want to here these greetings from a person? Not a bit of it, any more than I’d want someone to keep me company as I recuperated in a hospital, simply because he felt it was his duty. I’d rather it was friend come to chat, or even an enemy come to gloat. Any level of human connection is preferable. Otherwise, it’s like ‘The people of the universe who are not in hospital, in the person of myself, sympathize with the people of the universe who are in hospital, as epitomized in yourself.’ Gee, cheer me up, why don’t you? What does ‘sympathize’ even mean in that context?
Real people start with the assumption that others are like themselves, otherwise there would be no point in trying to communicate at all. Real people have real relationships, even if they’re no more significant than crossing paths on a street corner. So when Marc meets Laura, about whom he knows little beyond the surface details, but whom he assumes to be like him, what salutation should he use? There’s only one he, as a real person, can use.
Are the good guys really good?
Posted by: authorguy on: November 21, 2011
Yes, it’s a serious question.
When I first started my Flame in the Bowl series, the intention was to create a hero who epitomized the philosophical concept of the Holy Will, a will that was only motivated to do the right thing. Tarkas was such a man, and he was drafted by the gods to do things that even they could not do. (I remember a comic book I read long ago pointing out that ‘Hero’ is a greater word than ‘God’ since heroes takes risks that gods, being gods, do not and cannot take, like dying on the job.)
But I recently saw a movie called ‘The Boondock Saints’, which raises the question of the goodness of the good guys. If we assume for a moment that the Saints really are doing the right thing, killing off evil people without the trials and procedures which allow the bad guys to escape justice by the system, we still have to think about the consequences of these acts. The movie has a rather facile view of the justice being meted out, and neglects serious inquiry into its actual goodness.
Some evil men actually stabilize a situation that might otherwise inflict great suffering on many innocents. If they are killed as they deserve the situation becomes unstable and innocents are harmed. That’s the simple view, often found in fantasy novels such as mine, where heroes and divine guidance are readily accepted.
More troubling is the case of lack of knowledge. Either the Saints don’t know who the bad guys are and may start killing innocents, or they do know, in which case the question becomes ‘how do they know?’ In the movie they are led to their victims either by a phone call from the bad guys themselves, or by an insider with whom they are good friends. Without these aids, how are they supposed to know? The sensible thing for the bad guys to assume is that the police are helping them, at least some of them. This leads to a war on police in self-defense. Not a good thing. It is possible, of course, that the phone call, which leads them to a nest of villains, where they meet the insider, are all signs of God’s favor and that he will send them more such divine guidance, such as the FBI guy who agrees with their purpose. This is not clear in the movie, and I would assume that the bad guys are not going to make this assumption.
It is pretty much the way Tarkas operates, though. He goes where the gods tell him to go, he does what needs to be done, he leaves the turmoil behind him. The problem is the turmoil. Society as we know it demands compromise, and these guys don’t compromise. (I saw this in the Paksennarion trilogy as well, that paladins and Elves don’t compromise with evil, and it comes as no surprise to me that they are being crowded out.) I can see having a world with people like this, but I can’t see that it would have a lot of people in it. If the world is like this from the beginning, that’s one thing, but if the world is allowed to get corrupted, to the point where whole societies depend on it for their stability, then introducing a Hero is almost cruel.
P.S. There’s a different version of this dilemma, in which the existence of villains depends on the existence of heroes, but that’s a topic for another time.
Villain Speak
Posted by: authorguy on: November 17, 2011
Book Title: St. Martin’s Moon
Villain Name: Bertrand (and Dr. Ron)
What were you like before the story began? (Bertrand) Who wants to know? (Dr. Ron) He was a bloodthirsty monster then, he’s a bloodthirsty monster now. I, on the other hand, was a chiropractor, a respected medical professional, until the night one of his kind attacked me. They said I was lucky – lucky! – to be alive. If you can call this living.
Who are you opposing and why? (Dr. Ron) I don’t oppose anybody. I just don’t think we should continue with this, this charade any longer. (Bertrand) Everybody. You’re all just meat.
Do you think maybe you should just lay off the caffeine a bit? (Bertrand) Are you kidding? We haven’t had anything with taste since forever. If I didn’t bite my own arms every so often I’d go crazy.
Have you tried aromatherapy, then? (Bertrand) Flowers. Who needs ‘em. (Dr. Ron) The enclosed gardens are quite popular. With everybody else.
Alright, so what it is you plan to do once you have reached your goal? (Dr. Ron) If I achieve my goal none of us will be doing anything, ever. (Bertrand) Me, once I figure out how to get back I’ll have me a fine old time, see if I can set a new record on the evening news.
What would your mother think of all this? (Bertrand) Why should I care? She named me Bertrand! She deserved what she got.
Right. So, how would you describe yourself? (Dr. Ron) I’m a man, trying not to be a monster, while he’s a monster who plays at being a man. (Bertrand) I’ve had enough of it. Even if they kill me let me go out in style!
Who are your closest allies? (Dr. Ron) I have none. (Bertrand) Everybody in my pack is dead. They got sloppy. Good thing I didn’t go with ‘em. I’ll learn from their mistakes.
That’s great, but haven’t you heard the good guy always wins? (Bertrand) Who cares? I just want to have the high score before I go down. (Dr. Ron) That’s good to know, since I am the good guy here, even if the others don’t recognize it.
Hidden objects
Posted by: authorguy on: November 13, 2011
I don’t know if any of you like to play them, but I have become fond of a type of computer game called a Hidden Object Puzzle game. These are supposed to be stories, in which the player is a character who has to solve the puzzles to get clues to resolve the story’s central adventure/mystery. The basic puzzle is a single screen which contains a number of objects that are obscured by lots of other objects. There is a list of objects to be found. Once the player finds the objects one of them will be added to his collection, since it will turn out to be necessary to solve some other puzzle or otherwise enable the story to progress.
I like these games for two reasons. First is the simple visual pleasure of the games themselves, especially when it comes to finding the hidden objects. Some of the games, such as Death at Fairing Point, have scenes that are simply beautiful, such as the English Garden. The puzzles are often quite cunning, and finding the hidden objects a good challenge. My daughter and I often collaborate on these.
The other reason I like them is that they are stories. These games consist of scenes, which contain the puzzles, and which form the supposed story. The player follows the story logic, which enables him to find the puzzles and the clues to solve them.
Or at least they should. The ones that I like most are like that, but there are many that are not and those I don’t like so much. Going by the comments lots of other people don’t either. In many of these games there is no logical connection between one scene and another, no story logic to follow. The player can neither deduce nor reasonably guess where the clue he needs is, but instead has to check each screen, moving the mouse until something pops up and reveals itself. Very tedious.
It doesn’t help that I started with one of the hardest ones. I’m a big Phantom of the Opera fan, both the story and the ALW stage version (not the movie travesty, thank you). So when I discovered a HOP with a PotO theme I snapped it right up. Unfortunately, the game would only make sense to someone who knew the story, but the story logic was lacking. There were multiple discrete levels, but the player had to continually go back and forth with his clues to find the next clue. Maybe some people remember that an item found on level 4 fits into a picture seen on level 1 but I’m not one of them. Even worse, the game ends on level 4 with no way to get to level 5 and save the girl! I’m going to have to play it again and see if it makes more sense now that I know how these games work. Some of the others are almost as bad, fewer level, but with necessary parts in places where no one would ever expect them to look.
On the other end of the spectrum are the Redemption Cemetery games. These have multiple levels too, but each level has its own story, and the story logic is much tighter. Each story involves a ghost, imploring the player to save a child in danger or perform some other heroic act so that it can find peace. Death at Fairing Point has a different style to it, more visually attractive, but here too the story involves solving a mystery to allow two cursed souls to move on. HEAs all around!
What sort of games do you like to play? With stories or without?
Doing a guest spot today
Posted by: authorguy on: November 10, 2011
- In: Craft | Guest Post
- Leave a Comment
Elizabeth Craig is a wonderful lady. Not only does she have a terrific blog, full of craft tips and insights, she also devotes a considerable chunk of her day to finding and tweeting links to all sorts of blogs that do the same thing. When I mentioned that St. Martin’s Moon is November 10th, which means it’s tonight, she offered me a guest spot on her blog, so that’s where I am today.
