Another List!

Elizabeth Poole loves Westerns. I love Westerns! TOP FIVE WESTERNS!

1a. "The Outlaw Josey Wales" - Aside from giving me my namesake, this movie has a lot of things going for it. It was the first Western where all the Native Americans were played by Native Americans. They were also portrayed as the threat they were to settlers rather than just people on horses who charge forward and run away. Josey Wales the character is the essence of Clint Eastwood's Western career boiled down to pure awesome. It's long and may drag a little at times, but when you see him glare and then spit, you know it's on!

1b. "Unforgiven" - Much like Rocky/Rocky Balboa, this movie allows Eastwood to add some craft to the whole creation. The case could be made that William Munny is Josey Wales as an older man. There is one scene in particular where Munny talks about how he doesn't know how he kills so well, he's just always been good at it. That's the exact opposite of Josey Wales who can read a gang of four soldiers and know who to kill and in what order. It's more an exploration of how two different men ended up in the same spot. And the end? With Ned? GOO!!!

3. "High Planes Drifter" - WOW! This one is all about atmosphere and hate and revenge and if I ever needed a movie to epitomize the Deadlands role playing game, it's "High Planes Drifter." With such big-name movies like the two above, this one is often left off of the must-see lists of Clint Eastwood movies, but if you haven't seen it, go rent it right now. I can't even tell you without spoiling it and you'll hate me if I do.

4. "The Specialist" - Yes, I said "The Specialist" and not "Rio Bravo" or any of the other myriad John Wayne movies (despite its inclusion of Dean Martin of whom I am a huge fan). John Wayne's characters had a certain style, much like Clint Eastwood's. In "The Specialist," he breaks that style and how! I would never have thought to see John Wayne play that kind of character. I expect Clint Eastwood to play that kind of character, which is probably why I like this one so much. :)

5. "Pale Rider" - Some people claim that the character from this movie and the character from "High Planes Drifter" is the same. I disagree for reasons I can't post because of spoilers. I do think the premise can be similar and that's all right because the premise is so awesome Clint is allowed to tell it twice. Any time you see a story quote Revelation about a man riding a pale horse? Yeah, a poor comparison to this movie. This is where that awesome was born. (It also has the tall guy from Happy Gilmore, and that's always interesting.)

Honorable Mention - Young Guns Emilio Estevez (Estevez), Keifer Southerland, and Lou Diamond Phillips? Nuff said.

In which I post a second time about semi- and/or unrelated topics

My wife went to Philadelphia this summer to see a men's regional Barbershop competition. (My wife is a competitive Barbershopper.) While there, she bought me some barbecue chicken seasoning. The odor was pretty strong and I was unsure if I would like it. DEAR LORD THIS STUFF IS GOOD! I only bring that up because I'm on my lunch break right now and I'm eating some barbecue chicken. I thought you all should know how delicious my chicken is and how awesome my wife is. I can't remember the name of the market she bought it at. Some place in the city, perhaps Union Station or the like. It's a vendor cart full of spices and the barbecue chicken is delicious.

My wife who loves me calls me Joe (among other personal endearments). So do most of my friends and everyone I work with. When I write, I go by Joseph L. Selby or a derivative thereof. (I picked jlselby for twitter as a means of saving character space for replies). Most people online call me Joseph because that's how they see my name. Recently, both online and at work, I've noticed an increase of people calling me Selby. Not Mr. Selby, which would be formal but acceptable, but just Selby. Now for colleagues, this may normally be appropriate. For strangers, I can't imagine referring to someone by their last name only and thinking I was doing so politely.

For me personally, whether I know someone or not, I hate being called by my last name. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I don't hate my last name. But I am one of many Selbys. I have a large family and they all have the same last name. (Granted, Joe is a common name, but I am Joe Selby and the only one of my name in my family.) So, please don't call me Selby. Especially if you don't know me. Who the hell thinks that's acceptable?

Recently, someone called me JL and that just tickled me to no end. It was on twitter, so it makes sense that they may not know my name if they only ever see me there. And of course there is the need to conserve character space. I intenionally chose jlselby for this blog URL hoping someone would do it again. It's a name I never imagined being called and I smile with amusement every time I think about it. Not that I would permanently adopt that as a professional name. That would take funny to weird, which I reserve for the second date.

Something I got called the other day that I haven't been called in years is Josey. This was my nickname for a long time. No, not Josie (the female name a la Josie and the Pussycates), but Josey (the male name a la the Outlaw Josey Wales). I was sixteen when I was first given that nickname by one of my managers at Burger King. I had a tendency to get in trouble a lot when I was younger (I know, a big surprise, right?) and the Outlaw Josey Selby took hold and held on until I was 25 or so. I never minded it. I love Clint Eastwood westerns (with the exception of Joe Kidd which is a lame movie) and being named after such a seminal movie was all right by me.

Now it's Joe or Joseph, either are acceptable.

I watched Invictus for the first time last night, a Clint Eastwood-directed movie (see how I tied that all together? natch ;). There were (a lot of) trailers before I actually got to movie itself. Among them was the 35-years/35-movies box set from Warner Brothers. This piqued my interest until I counted just how many Clint Eastwood movies I already own and realized it wouldn't be worth the money. They had clips from the interviews with Clint that are included in the special features. I thought I'd share a few (althought not direct quotes, as close as I can get).

The first one that caught me was a discussion on how he made movies like The Outlaw Josey Wales, which were a turn from the kind of westerns that were made at the time. He said he never thought to make movies that other people liked. He made the kind of movies he wanted to see and it turned out that other people wanted to see them too.

For a fantasist who writes with little/no magic and little/no fantastical creatures, this kind of thing is huge. I write the kind of books I want to read! Maybe other people will want to read them too.

The other one was his first offer. He had been rejected so many times over and over and over again that he jumped at the chance when someone finally made him an offer.

WHAT? Someone rejected Clint Eastwood? They rejected Josey Wales? They rejected William Munny? No one rejects William Munny. They get shot by William Munny then they go talk about how exciting it was with all the other people that just got shot by William Munny. There is no rejection of William Munny!

Clint Eastwood got rejected. A LOT. This is exciting. Thirty-five years from now I can talk about how much I got rejected and someone can make a blog post asking how anyone could reject Bastin the Bold or Otwald d'Kilrachen.

I don't know kid, but they did. Keep your chin up. ;)

Description is Tricky

Hannah Mosk commented recently that her first drafts are very short. They end up being mostly dialogue. She goes in during revision and fleshes the story out to its full potential. I'm getting better at this, but it used to be incredibly hard for me not to do anything but dialogue. That's where the story moves along. That's where the excitement happens, the test of wills between protagonist and antagonist. Oh sure, you can write about Indiana Jones running away from the boulder, but it isn't until he runs into Beloch and the Ubutu that things really heat up.

I receive complements on my description and it always confuses me. I don't think I'm very good at it. In fantasy especially, it is customary to describe everything from the sky to the scent of the air to the dew on the grass. Perhaps I'm tired of over-description and that's why I limit what I describe. Or maybe I'm just not good at it, so I avoid it. I don't go into a lot of detail about what my main character looks like (I think this is a reaction to all the time spent trying to make the "cool hero" when I was a younger writer). I've received complements from people who said they prefer to envision the hero how they want to envision them and the author forcing a description on them lessens the character. I don't agree with that, but...um...thanks? Our appearances say a lot about us, the hardships we've faced, the decisions we've made, the nuances that distinguish us from others. Amorphous beings running around interacting with other amorphous beings isn't appealing to me.

(I will note that unless it improves the situation/description, I intentionally don't describe characters' skin color. If you want the hero to be black or Arab or latino, I have no problem with that. That kind of thing is infrequently relevant to the stories I tell.)

So I try to walk that line of just enough description. I don't talk a lot about the sun or the wind or dawn or whatever. I use similes to put it into a context the reader understands (without breaking the verisimilitude of the setting) and move on. Skewed similes are a great way to show the differences between the story setting and real life. But I don't dwell. Forward action. Is that good? Is that too Michael Bay? Is that a product of a life spent in front of a TV/movie screen as much as in front of a book? *shrug* I don't know. I do know that I was reading ROSEMARY AND RUE by Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire. She crafted an awesome paragraph of description. Awesome in the Eddie Izzard sense of awesome not the hot dogs and socks kind of awesome. It was so awesome that I stopped and admired the craft of the paragraph.

I stopped and admired the paragraph and immediately realized I had left the story. The description was so literary that I left the story as a result of its literariness. It wasn't over-written, that's bad writing. This was good writing, but it was just dropped in the wrong place. The story was on a roll and I came to a screaching stop to admire the majesty of the paragraph's sunset when I should have been worrying about the protagonist and what happened to changelings at sunrise.

It's those moments that make me think that maybe I don't suck at description. Maybe I put as much description in a story as I want to find in stories I read. I still think it's a weak spot of mine. Am I shorting my setting? Or worse, will all my settings seem the same because they don't have enough description to tell them apart? Time and manuscripts will tell. This has been on my mind, though. I'm writing JEHOVAH'S HITLIST (or DOWN BELOW THE UP ABOVE), a walled city beneath a giant platform city in the sky after the oceans have risen and the world has transitioned into the cities above and the ghettos below. Am I describing Down Below enough? It's tricky. None of them have been up on the wall. Almost all of them were born well after the oceans rose and don't know anything except their little city. How do you describe the microchosm of their existence when they themselves don't understand it? There are only so many times I want to know that the city is dirty, full of trash, absent of wood or plastic, etc. At some point, we need to get on with the story.

How about you? Is there a particular feature of storycraft you have difficulty with?

Fear and Cold Water

I made a mistake today. I posted a list of agents who actively participate in social media that I would like to work with. There was discussion on the list and whether it was appropriate. Checking my email quickly while I was at work, I found the discussion continued by an agent whose opinion I value. I disagreed with the opinion, was in fact hurt and offended by part of it, but nonetheless I deleted my post. She said that such a post would inhibit my potential to find an agent. It may. I'm okay with it now. In my hurt and in my shock, I deleted it. I questioned everything I had been working toward and the community I was attempting to become a part of.

In a way, her post was a good thing. It was a splash of cold water to wake me up from the dream that is the internet. A digital play has formed that mimics real life: friendships, relationships, knowledge more intimate than strangers have of one another but less than true friends do. It's easy to forget through daily blog postings and 15-minute Twitter updates that you don't know any of these people, and they don't know you. They are not your friends and are not attempting to be so. It is a business. It is all business. We all know this, but it's so easy to forget when people are talking about books you've read or trips to Starbucks or reading on the Subway, things you do. It's even harder on media such as Twitter where you can watch whole conversations unfold if you're following all the participants.

I was not prepared for that illusion to be shattered so coarsely, especially not by someone I respected. I panicked. I deleted the post. And was depressed about it all for the entire day until I just sat down at my computer and typed out a response to the comment that was repeated as a blog post. I do not know if that comment will ever be posted. The absurdity of it all is that my list of six agents (because I included but Kristin and Sara at Nelson Literary Agency) was taken from a total list of 11 agents. Of those that specifically ask for fantasy and actively keep a blog/LJ/Twitter account, there are a whopping 11 people.

If you are an aspiring writer, you should have a list. It's up to you whether you post it, but you should have a list. You should research agents and find those whose vision, goals, and personality are a good compliment to your own.

Frankly, I don't think I'd like to work with an agent upset at not being on my list. If I am not included on a list, I look at those that were and see what they do that I do not that earned them their place on the list. It's an opportunity for improvement. Anyone who takes offense rather than saying thank you is not someone I would work well with.

Post Script: It was also said my original post was condescending. It was not intended to be so, and I apologized to those agents that took offense.

Filling in the Middle

I still haven't started revision on THE TRIAD SOCIETY. Things keep cruising along with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. One of my original reasons for getting TTS squared away was because I wanted to go to World Fantasy Con in Columbus. I've gone over the con website a dozen times. As con websites go, nothing on it has sold me on going there. What did sell me was the presence of Sara Megibow from the Nelson Literary Agency. NLA is at the top of my list of agencies I want to work with and has been for some time. The opportunity to meet Sara in person and perhaps overcome the suckitude that is my queries was appealing.

Of course, I just started a new job and rather than being busy in the summer, it's busy in the winter. I also took a slight pay cut. All this combined to have me withdraw from attending my wife's competition at Harmony, Inc's international barbershop competition in New Brunswick. Now, World Fantasy Con is a month earlier, so a case can be made that I could go to it and not IC&C. Of course, when the one is supporting myself and one the other is supporting my wife, I think it's a little selfish to withdraw from the one only to do the other.

Depending on my workload, I may not be able to do either regardless. So, the time crunch created by having a finished and finalized manuscript of THE TRIAD SOCIETY is gone if I don't go to WFC (and no, I would not pitch anything to Sara it wasn't in a state that I could hand it to her on the spot and feel confident it was an adequate representation of my skills.

This is good because I have not stopped working on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. I'm coming to the end of the edges. Writing a novel by the seat of your pants (vs plotting, pantsing vs plotting, I'm a pantser) is like putting together a puzzle. You have a scattered mess of ideas that you need to arrange and put together to form a coherent picture. Like any puzzle you start with the easiest pieces, placing the corners and then the edges. Eventually you have to fill in the middle. That's when you reach that point in the story where you can't skirt around the plot any more. You need to decide on protagonist and antagonist motivations, decisions, and outcomes.

In JH, the main character (aptly named Jehovah) is forced to kill five people or the Hanged Man will kill him and his entire family. Of those five people, I only know the name of one. I know the profession of two others. I need to figure out how these five people are connected (I have a loose understanding, like edge pieces with very distinctive holes that allow you to connect a middle piece) and how Jehovah is going to navigate his interaction with these five people to reach the climax of the story.

This is much harder (like the middle of a puzzle). So, once I get to that grind, maybe I'll switch back to TTS. But you know, right now, it doesn't feel like I will. This is really rolling. I have a good vision of this setting. I'll need to revise to make a lot of the character dialect consistent, but I knew that from the beginning. For a first draft, this is coming along swimmingly.

Straight Lines

I'm hanging out at Midas while my windows are fixed so my car can pass inspection. I'm posting from my phone, so please pardon the typos. The Pre has a small keyboard and I have fat thumbs.

I tried to begin revision on THE TRIAD SOCIETY today, but I felt compelled to continue with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. The story is ripe and needs picking. Regardless, I'm still thinking on TTS, trying to find all my errors. Something I knew I was doing as I went (something I hate), I was writing in a straight line. Adventure stories are often like that. A happens, B happens, C happens, the end. Done poorly, you get a movie like Jurrasic Park 3 where one dangerous situation follows the next but never overlaps or spreads out. The entire movie keeps a predictable tempo. Done well and you get Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is similarly linear, but who cares! We're having fun.

TTS falls somewhere in the middle. I have been writing adventure stories so far. I actually prefer intrigue, bit that's much easier to write in a series of D&D adventures, I've found, than in a novel. I really need to get back to that kind of writing. It didn't work in TTS and it's not right for JH (which is definitely an adventure story). I'm hoping to bust oit the intrigue in a major way in THE RED SOCK SOCIETY, but that story's a ways off yet.

Sometimes (like JP3), an adventure is too linear. It eliminates the sense of risk. It suggests that the character's decisions have no impact because he's being swept along with the wave of the plot. The way to break this up is to zigzag, to bend the line without completely turning away from your stort. I call them speedbumps, the interference that happens when going from A to B.

Now it's just as easy to overuse speedbumps. If something always goes wrong along the way, the pattern becomes obvious and the reader questions the protagonist's decision-making process. If things keep going wrong, why do you keep doing what you're doing? We only accept that from Malcolm Feynolds.

For example, in the current ms, Otwald goes home, climbs into his window, meets Princess Klara, chats, climbs out, and sees his father. Too straight. It's like a video game where he went to a quest giver. Quest givers are for video games. Keep them out of your novels.

The obvious speedbump is the guards. A princess is unguarded. That's a bad speedbump. What self-respecting guard wouldn't check on the princess? And what princess would send them away because some stranger just climbed into her window. Hello cliche. Nice to see you again. Instead, don't have the window go into her room. Have the entry elsewhere. Maybe split up what he learns when he sees his father, a little here, a little there. You get to reinforce the setting by showing what life is like there (guards, servants, tc) while avoiding the drive-thru quest giving

Not Enough Why

A double dipper! I try not to post twice in a day, but I need to get this down before I lose it. Setting is important, especially in fantasy. In fact, one of the first mistakes novice fantasists make is to spend more time talking about their story than the story. Setting is the canvas where we paint our pictures. Don't waste time describing the canvas. HOWEVER, it is still important to world build because that informs the decisions characters make.

Why have I been having so much difficulty with THE TRIAD SOCIETY? Because it was too simple. People are not simple. Heroes are not simple. Villains are not simple. We may not get to see the complex thought processes of the villain, but never doubt that decisions are made for more of a reason than just, "I am evil! Muah ha ha ha!"

In TTS, Otwald (the hero) is living a life out of sync with his home. Reliarach isn't the kingdom of honorable nobles and loyal peasants that it was in its past. It's a pre-steampunk society dealing with technology eliminating swaths of available work. How can people support themselves if machines are doing the work of men?

Here's where I made my mistake and I made it in chapter 1. The Hook and Hammer Society fought for worker's rights. When they were massacred by Otwald's brother in Kester Square, a violent offshoot formed the Red Sock Society. They speak openly of the dissolution of the monarchy and an establishment of a labor-based democracy. But it all stems back to the slaughter at Kester Square.

WHAT?

How short sighted is that. They were all peaceful unionists until their brothers were trampled by mounted horse? No, of course not. The hate for the nobility is ingrained. It's an injustice they see as existing their entire lives, really the entire existence of Reliarach.

How? Where does that division of labor come from? Where does Reliarach come from? It's a colony from a continent to the south. The original settlers sailed across the ocean not knowing what they were going to find. They landed in the modern city of Kilrachen, built the kingdom's first fortress which grew into its first settlement which is now the capital of the kingdom. No ships ever followed across the ocean and none that have attempted the return journey have been seen from again.

So how did this division occur? The first nobles were officers and their families. The first peasants were sailors and theirs. The ships arrived at Reliarach with clearly defined social stratification that has been enforced for the 1000 years since.

The Red Sock Society does not fight because of massacre at Kester Square. That's just the match that sparked the flame. The fuel is that their ancestors were slaves at sea that became slaves at land.

I did not ask the question why enough. And because of that, the decisions characters made were thin. Whether I describe all this back story in the ms is not as important as the fact that the characters know it. It is what drives them. The uprising of the working class, the failure of Torvald d'Bluefire to conduct himself as a noble should, are all signs of the crumbling foundation of Reliarachic society. Otwald is the person standing against that foundation attempting to hold it together with his bare hands.


...lord, this revision is going to be more extensive than I thought. Ugh.

Querying is Scary Shit

I like writing fast. I like producing a lot of stories in a short amount of time. I have a lot of stories crammed into this brain, and I'm starting later than I should have in my life (whole different therapy session about why that is). Regardless, I have somewhere between 10 and 30 years left and a crap load of stories to tell. So I write two novels a year. Two a year will get me 20 to 60 novels by the time I'm done, a respectable number that will have demonstrated my storytelling adequately.

Now, I would not write two novels a year if those novels were poor. This isn't some NaNoWriMo deluge of fecal matter with a title on it. I write complete and revised stories that I think others will enjoy. Plenty of authors have that level of output Jim Butcher, Hannah Mosk, etc.) so I don't feel like I'm cheating my story or the writer from finishing the first draft in three months.

Most agent blogs recognize that people write at different speeds, but sometimes still say if you haven't spent X number of months doing revision/letting it sit/critiquing/whathaveyou, you're not ready. Usually X equals a value higher than I will spend on a draft (or sometimes on the entire damn thing). And while I'm normally happy to ignore their comments as something for those authors that spend a year or more writing their novels, I'm starting to wonder if I was wrong.

BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE is weak on protagonist emotional evolution. The reason he does what he does in the end is more gut reaction or spiteful middle finger than any growth. And while that is perfectly possible, I think it shorts him on being a genuine good guy and not just the main character. WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING has a weak subplot with Podome and Nashau's discovery of the truth. If I had let these novels sit, would I have better realized their flaws and been able to affect a revision to correct them before I queried? (Note, neither of these things had any impact on the success of my querying, but you want to present the best possible manuscript when you start the query process.)

So now we come to THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I finished the draft 11 days ago. With the previous two, I think I took a week off (or less) before starting revision. By the time you get to the end of a 150,000-word manuscript, let me tell you, you want to go back and fix everything that no longer works at the beginning. The story evolves. And once you start doing that, you just roll through the whole thing. An 88,000-word manuscript is considerably smaller. The end is much like the beginning. So why am I taking so much time off?

First, TTS's length bothers me. It puts me in a GREAT position in terms of querying agents and appealing to publishers. Paper is a mitigating factor and word-count restrictions have become tight. There are people who wouldn't even consider WCONH because of its length. So this is a good thing. But if feels like I told an incomplete story. Certainly a number of things I had plotted at the beginning never materialized because the story went a different direction. It was originally going to be an intrigue story that turned into an adventure story. 88k feels too short to me. I write fantasy, dammit. Fantasy is long. At least, the fantasy I've always loved is long.

Did I do this subconsciously? Did I write a short manuscript to better my chances for consideration? And in so doing, did I tell a poorer story? I'll tell you write now, I don't think TTS is as good as WCONH. The latter is one of the best stories I've ever told and with a good copyeditor (*cough*DeannaHoak*cough*) would be even more amazing. TTS is a 1-2-3 adventure with its own damsel in distress (yes, I disdain the trope that much that I'd include it in multiple posts).

So, now it's time to revise, but I'm not. Is it because it's a lesser script? If WANTED didn't hack it and that's amazing fiction, how could this make it? Or worse, what if this did make it? What if a bunch of agents asked to read it and offered representation? It would erode my confidence in my own writing and my belief that there's an agent out there that likes the things I like and will see the value in my work regardless of the word count. Maybe I can get some luck with Joshua Blimes. He reps Brandon Sanderson and that guy's word counts are through the flipping roof. I look like a YA book in comparison.

But what if that's not it? What if I'm delaying revising because I want to delay querying. I posted this as a rhetorical question on Twitter and IoMTolly decided to answer. (IoMTolly is a gag account from a blog I follow, Ideology of Madness, which was okay when I thought it was my friend Andrew--you can be an asshat when you've known me for 15 years, but it's not him, so now I'm annoyed). He says that yes, I'm scared. I am, but that's not why I'm delaying. I'm delaying because the ms isn't good enough. Obviously, revision will make it good enough. A first draft is never good enough. Never. Understand that now. Your first draft is shit. Second drafts are where novels are born. But it's only 88k and if someone tells me what a great fantasy it is, I'll have to smack them because great fantasy is longer than 88k. (That is all bias, THE BLACK COMPANY was short, but I think there were some definite weaknesses in the story that might have been fixed with a higher word count.)

But I'm scared? Yes, at least somewhat. No one in his or her right might looks forward to rejection. And if you're querying properly, there will be lots of rejection (don't get me started on the 3/4 of your queries should yield results for more work, bullshit; that's a tirade for a post of its own). Now what IoMTolly has never experienced is querying multiple novels in a year and getting rejected. I didn't query BMBBQ until late 2009, so if I queried by October, I would actually have three novels worth of rejection in a single year.

Rejection is hard. It's cumulatively hard. The first round felt validating. I'm in the process! I'm working the system. The second was much harder. I had written a much better story but got the same results. Worse, other people were mumbling along and getting offers. This is the first time I've written anything, tee hee. I'm fourteen and I'm ashamed I didn't start at twelve, tee hee. These are people you grow to hate not because you know them or they need hating (well, maybe the fourteen year old), but because you hate being rejected. You hate that your work doesn't grab them and say, wow, I want more! You hate being told, you're not good enough.

And let's get one thing straight, publishing is subjective, and a rejection (especially a form rejection which is what you get most frequently) is not a statement on the quality of your work. But when you've run the list of agents to query and they've all rejected you, that feels like a statement of the quality of your work. It still may not be, but that's how it feels. And going through that repeatedly is hard.

Will I stop? Of course not. That's not even a question worth entertaining. It will happen sooner or later (sooner is preferable to later). But I won't lie. Each time I get to this point in the process, it's harder than it was the time before.

Ponderings and Plannings

A side note: I dislike "a novel" being included on a book cover unless the book's title is "a novel." I think it sounds pretentious. In fact, I think it's intentionally pretentious to appeal to that category's audience. I will, at some point, write a story and title it A NOVEL. Fuck your pretension.

So, with the first draft of THE TRIAD SOCIETY complete, I've been pondering the next story in the trilogy, THE RED SOCK SOCIETY. I had a little bit of trouble at the end of TTS because an event I had planned for the main character felt extremely forced. It may get cut out in revision. But if that happens, the event for that same character in TRSS can't happen. One is predicated on the other.

Then I began wondering what story I would tell about him at all. There wasn't a lot there. The character I really wanted to focus on was the unrealized character from TTS, Princess Klara. Until THE TRIAD SOCIETY, I have always included a strong woman in my stories. Never a main character. Not yet (and no, that's not intentional. I write the stories that want to be written. A CIRCLE OF CRIMSON STONE, another ms of mine, has a female main character so just chill on your assumptions).

You see that? Right there? Defensiveness. That makes me nervous. Do I think the story would be better with Klara as the main character because TSS was so short on a worthwhile female? (Sadly, it became a damsel in distress story. My apologies for that.) I don't think so. I think the story will be better this way. But it's a lingering doubt. And doubt can cause problems. It makes you question. It makes you second guess.

...

Crap. That was all leading up to a situation I wanted to write down about something that would happen to Klara in TRSS, but now I've forgotten it. We really need to create a means to record our dreams. I'm losing quality stuff here! I will revise this section if it comes back to me at some point throughout the day.

Poop. :(

Struggling with Voice

As I get older and make a more concerted effort to write professionally, I do not write with the abandon that I did when I was young. A younger me wrote phonetically and with dialects whenever I wanted to express an accent. An older me mentions the accent, but only touches a few key words phonetically. It came from a discussion whether such abstract spellings were the best way to communicate the differences in language. Given that so many of my old stories were the quality of an inexperienced writer, I chose to go the opposite direction.

That's not the only reason. I like to include minorities. I lived in St. Louis city (demographically 66% black) and hung out in areas where I could absorb that kind of culture. Not wholly, of course, but enough I felt comfortable replicating it in words. People seem less willing to accept that, and the further I am away from living in St. Louis, trading it for the predominantly white northeast, I begin to question my own recollection of what was St. Louis living and what was from "The Wire." So, if I avoid using phonetic spelling or dialect, I avoid being called a racist or being laughed at (while they think I'm being racist but don't say it--I hate that one too).

I recently added THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN to my nook. Mark Twain is one of my literary heroes and reading the novel reminded me how much I've given up by not writing my characters speech the way they speak. I've become too scared of criticism, justified it by saying I don't want to support wrong thinking with my writing or that a person just revises the text to what they understand anyway so I'm just adding a step. But when I read the way Huck and Jim speak, I get more than the words. I get the person. I get how they think. What matters. How they process things.

THE TRIAD SOCIETY has a variety of accents, none of which I properly explore. I relegate it to urban being "it is" and rural being "tis," what I feel now is a ridiculous copout.

There is a lot of talk about the author's voice on blogs. Characters and characterization are part of that voice, but not the entirety. What I've found is that why I can maintain the novel's voice during description, I lock up when I express character voice. This needs drastic and immediate attention. Time to write with a little more abandon.

(And call me racist all you want. Go to St. Louis Ave. and Grand on May 1 [the May Day Celebration] and you'll think you've walked into a video. I shit you not.)

(If you're interested in a great people watching place for St. Louis culture, try Captain D's on Kingshighway. It's amazing how much happens at that place--or at least happened when I lived in St. Louis. If you want a darker side of the city that doesn't put you in direct gunfire, head down to the river and follow the tracks. There's some grim living down there.)

Another Transition

What? What? What?

What is this guy doing on Blogger? He's been on LiveJournal since 2003? What does he think he's doing here?

To be honest, I'm not sure whether I'm staying. The last time I fiddled with Blogger was for work three years ago. Things have certainly changed since then. A lot. Things have changed for LiveJournal over the years as well. There was plenty of drama and mass migrations, but that never concerned me. I had my personal account and then later I had my professional account. I like the functionality that LJ offers and kept with it over the years just for that reason. The catch is, I use it only for professional journaling. I don't do a lot of personal posts. (I also don't have the same drama I did when I was 25. :)

As a professional tool, LJ seems to come up short. There is a larger presence on Blogger, and that's what I need to tap into. So I'm going to experiment with this here blog--though it will continue to be a journal as I have no intention on doing daily posts!--and see whether I should take the plunge and move over here entirely.

Do you have any thoughts on the subject?