No One Likes a Dumb Protagonist

The subject line says it all. No one likes a dumb protagonist. We accept flawed characters and we accept that situations can be shrouded in mystery or so layered that a character cannot comprehend it on spec. They need time to peel back the layers or let the whole thing soak in before it finally clicks. This is all well and good. It's even better. No one wants a story so superficial that there's no depth or complexity to the challenges the main character faces. They need to unravel it all.

HOWEVER, as they unravel it, you have to be cautious about how you give them clues or what clues you give them. They need to figure out what's happening at one of two possible times. Near the end to propel them to the climax. Or near the beginning where they realize X is happening and thus need to begin the investigation that will lead them to the climax. If you are going for scenario A but give them a clue large enough that they should figured it out closer to the beginning, you have officially made your character stupid. Some clues are such a fish to the face that anyone with an IQ of 100 should be able to figure it out. So when your character doesn't... yeah, exactly.

I'm reading CATCHING FIRE (sequel to THE HUNGER GAMES) and Katniss just got slapped in the face. In a single paragraph, she said the fish was in fact a badger and continued on as if nothing happened. No, see dear, when you do that, I care for you less. When your obliviousness leads you to trouble later, I figure you deserved it because you were too stupid to realize someone just hit you in the face with a fucking fish. That kind of thing hurts. The scales scratch you all over. They used to use that as a punishment in biblical times. It's not a badger. They're furry and shit.

Decide when your character is going to figure things out, beginning or end, and measure out the progression accordingly. Do NOT switch the two because any later emotional conflict caused is completely deserved and then your reader is not engaged with your character. And if your reader is not engaged with your character, your reader is not engaged with your book. That's when they set it down and go read something else. You don't want that to happen. You want your book to be the one they read instead of finishing their own manuscript because it's that good. Use your fish appropriately.

Cover Cover Cover

I love me some covers. Until I have an actual published book to pimp in the Inkwell, I put up those books that I have finished a first draft on. But to be put up, they must have a cover. We will not have text about books that do not accompany covers!

It's not a rule. I just love covers.

So after wading through some severe Obama hate by googling guns and bibles, I managed to find a picture I could repurpose for my own design. I present to you, the placeholder cover for JEHOVAH'S HITLIST¹.




¹ That whole section will be rebuilt into something a marketing professional would approve of once I have something to market. For now that stuff is there to designate that area as a place to learn about the work I am finishing (unlike the Queue, which may have something with some or no word count for years on end--which it does).

Dystopia, Genre, and Finishing the First Draft

You may find yourself asking, where has Joe been? He hasn't been posting three times a day. That's night like you.

You may also find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself in another part of the world.

If it's the former, December is when I have to work. And not just show up at the office, but actually work. If the latter, you have a beautiful wife, so congratulations!

So what's been going on with you? With me? On Friday I finished JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. On Sunday I began revising. I am into chapter 4 of 39 (technically 38 with an epilogue, but that's pretty much the same). I decided on voice (HUCKLEBERRY FINN is in first person, which is why its voice works when it bleeds over into the narration). I have to align later chapters with early chapters in that certain resources (like glass) were referenced early and then effectively removed due to their scarcity. At two chapters a day, I should be done in just over two weeks. Of course, Christmas is in there. But then, I hope I can manage more than two chapters a day. That might be difficult with the voice clean up, though. Lots of weres need to be changed to wases.

With all luck, by the time it's done, sent to beta readers, and revised again, I'll have an agent and won't need to query. But if I DO have to query (boooooo), I'll need to list the genre. And that's awesome because this work's genre is well timed.

Dystopian fiction is a thing right now. Because it's such a new subgenre¹, there is still some debate over just what does and what doesn't qualify as distopian². Here's the general breakdown

A dystopia is considered the opposite of a utopia, an oppressed existence usually caused by an overbearing state. Think 1984 or the United States in 2004³. ;)

In JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, it began as a conceptualized post-apocalyptic world, but I reduced the scope because the main character had no reason or need to know what happened to the Asian coastal cities when the oceans rose, the ice age-like temperatures that killed Europe, the draught that killed the United States, or the middle east that killed itself. He knows the Nation, 53 avenues east to west. 53 states north to south. That is his world. It's a violent world with a lot of rules, none of them documented, all of them reinforced by the barrel of a gun.

Some might say that the absence of a government precludes the story from being dystopian, but I disagree. In fact, the utopia/dystopia comparison is overtly made by the existence of a platform city above the Nation. These are the people that drop a provisions box 10x20 once a week full of food, medicine, clothes, weapons, and ammunition. The urban jungle environment is propagated by the utopian society supposedly helping the refugees that live below it.

I enjoy this kind of dystopia more. There's some irony of the situation going on in that the character is oblivious to the larger menace of the regular insertion of firearms and ammunition in a limited-resource environment. His enemies are rival gangs, the Lawrence Park Jayhawks or the Manhattan Park Mongrels. Up Above doesn't really factor into it. The drop box has been the drop box his entire life. What cause does he have to question the positive or negative effects it has on his society?

If I spelled it all out, JH would be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic, alternate-history science fiction. Here's the trouble with that. Too many genres look like you don't know what you're writing. What is it? If you boiled it down to its essence, what is the genre of your book? With modern writing blending genres, it's easy to tell an agent you've written a young adult, dystopian, sci-fi thriller. But you look dumb when you do. Make a pie chart and pick the biggest piece of pie.


¹ Sure dystopian stories have been around for a long time, but we've never segmented publishing into specific metadata for easy online searchability like we do now, so the subgenre is itself new.

² Yeah right because age has anything to do with it. Epic fantasy is still being debated and it's been around for decades!

³ Yeah, I went there. I'm such a hippie<sup>4

4</sup> Although in 2004, I was called a pinko commie because I didn't believe we should have invaded Iraq, so...yeah, I'm a contradiction.

Time Out

I have two thousands words left before I complete JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. I just bought SHADOWHEART, the fourth and final volume of the Shadowmarch Tetralogy written by my favorite author, Tad Williams. This is a time for writing and reading a big ass book.

...yet SHADOWHEART sits on my table (damn that thing is heavy to carry) and I haven't opened my computer since yesterday morning. Why?

A book came out earlier this year, MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins. The tweet-o-sphere erupted in various expostulations of worship. No genre is more represented on Twitter (or the internet, really) than YA, and there was no one that didn't love this series. I'm not a big YA reader myself, limiting that to Rawling and Hardy and that's about it. So when I see such a one-sided outpouring, I tend to stay away. Especially since a lot of the outpouring began with agents. Popular online agents tend to have a trail of sycophants behind them, so I find their corroboration of the agent's opinion to mean little.

Then a few actors hired a production company to film them in an 8-minute trailer in hopes of landing parts in the forthcoming movie. This trailer spoke to me. I downloaded the book preview (a genuine previous and not some front matter plus two pages crap I so often find) and immediately bought the book.

Dude!

DOOD.

Finishing a novel? That can wait. SHADOWHEART? That thing weighs a lot. Why wasn't there an ebook?

THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins? Believe the hype. This thing is good.

He Makes the Turn! He Approaches the Finish Line! ...OH NO, HE'S TRIPPED!

So all other obligations were set aside for this evening. Yes, I'm supposed to be making left overs so my wife has something to eat for lunch tomorrow, but she'll understand. This is ART!

I'm flying along and get to the last chapter (now considering making it the second to last). I'm about to have the protagonist parachute from a platform city after killing a few people when I realize...

These two people can't be here at the same time. And those two items which I just described can't be there at the same time. In fact, none of these people can be here. Dammit! This entire scene isn't possible!

So, end of the book is postponed until tomorrow. Poop.

The Hardest Harder Part

You'll often hear that this or that is the hardest part of writing a book. Writing a good beginning. Writing a good first sentence. Writing the middle. Writing the end. Rewriting. Revising. Querying. Being rejected.

The thing is there is no hardest part, just harder parts in relation to other parts at that moment. In my opinion, the most challenging part of a novel is actually the middle. However, the hardest part for me right now isn't the writing at all. It's the fact that I have a regular job with obligations and paychecks and etc etc. I have 4000 words or less to write before this thing is done, and I have to stop so I can go into the office and work on someone else's book.

I don't want to work on someone else's book! I want to work on mine dammit!

It would be nice if you could write a good first sentence and think to yourself, well at least I'm past the hardest part. But you're not. You're past that part, and while it may be harder than the part you're on now, there's other hard parts still to come. And once you're done, the waiting is the hardest part.

Look at the Tree

I am 5' 7". I have been told since I stopped growing¹ that I am short.

I am not short.

The tallest person in my family after me is 5' 1". I am six inches taller than anyone else in my family.

I am tall.

When someone tells me I am short, (s)he is not looking at the tree with the proper perspective.


¹: Stopped growing up. I'm still growing out.

The Known Unknowns

Between my own experiences in the industry and the years I've spent participating in various industry blogs (pubrants, the Bransford, etc.), I am not too worried about what will come after I get an agent and sell a book. Or at least, I feel like I have a pretty solid understanding of most aspects.

Except one. The next book. Sure agents talk about the challenges of a sophomore offering and the effort people put into it and the mistakes people make because of the pressure and blah blah blah. All fine and good. I can't speak to pressure until I'm feeling it and I can't feel the pressure of a sophomore book until I've published the freshman one.

What I don't know about the next book is the next book to the agent. I've heard so many conflict things and agents seem to rarely speak on that part of the process. I've heard proposal used as the nonfiction alternative to a query, but then I've also heard it as what a represented author sends his/her agent for new story ideas. And pardon me, but a proposal sounds like a query and by god, I never want to query again once I get an agent.

I've also seen some authors that send the agent an outline. An outline? I don't outline. I never outline. I took half a page of notes yesterday and that's HUGE. I'm a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants. I write by the seat of my pants so much that there are holes in the seat of my pants from all the writing I do there. I can tell you the beginning (though it might change) and the ending (though it might change) and maybe a few ideas of the middle (though they might change). How the hell do you expect me to write an outline? That will destroy my process?!?!?!

So yeah, this is a known unknown. I get representation for, let's say, THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I already have two other novels that did not attract an agent. Given some blog posts, I think he or she might read them just as a matter of form and tell me if they can be revised to publishable quality or just need to be permanently shelved. But I'm also finishing a new wip right now and will have another one in a few months. What do I do with those?

And I even read once that an author would pitch a book to the agent before it's written and if the agent said no, the author might not even write the thing. I don't think I've ever written a book that was so much like my original proposal as it was when it was finished. Not writing it at all seems like a horrible presumption. And even if that's a good method, I write two novels a year. Can't I just write one of whatever I want and one that gets a thumbs up? I mean, some people take five years to write a book, so I can see why it might be important to figure out its saleability beforehand. I wrote THE TRIAD SOCIETY in three months (to the day¹). I'll write ten novels in the time that other guy writes one, so can't I write the quirky thing that I love even if no one else will?

Some of this is probably exaggeration, but this really is the one topic I've never seen covered on any of the blogs I follow.


¹ Actual writing time was less, as I started on May 25th and I took off most of June because I was working my ass off at my really real job. I finished the first draft on August 25th, though, and I think that's pretty awesome.

Let's Talk About Sex

Tiffany Reisz is one of Sara Megibow's erotica authors. She wrote a guest post for Fiction Groupie that just blew me away, so I thought I would bring it to your attention.

Now, as a liberal adult, I have been instructed to be open about sex, and I am. So is my wife. We're cool like that. But this post gave me pause because really, few people I know, liberal or otherwise, are comfortable talking about sex, certainly so if it involves a discussion with more than one person. Impossibly so if someone under 20 is in the room and we are doing anything but an instructional lecture of the dangers of sex.

Yeah, not so much.

The specific comment that Tiffany made that I found so profound was:

Really?  I’m the only adult who has ever told a super smart beautiful young woman that sex was good?  That’s troubling.  Sex IS good. Why is that a secret? Marriage is good too. Nobody hides that fact from kids. Nobody thinks that by telling a fourteen year old girl that marriage is good, that fourteen year old is going to run out and immediately get married. So why all the secrecy? Why all the shame? I want her to know sex is good so she’ll know it’s worth taking seriously, it’s worth thinking about, it’s worth doing right.

Dear lord yes! I've known this and have expressed this but never articulated it in such a simple but powerful manner. Anyone that says sex is bad or shameful is either a liar or doing it wrong. This right here is how you communicate the importance of sex, safe sex, self-respect, and respecting others. This is going to be an awesome part of your life, so pay attention.

Kudos to Tiffany.

The Drawl

I've mentioned before that I've been struggling on voice with JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. It's not so much struggling as I can't find it. It's struggling in that I keep changing my mind, so the narrative text is horribly inconsistent.

Here's where I've been flipping. Take a nice classic rural drawl. Change of to a, drop the Gs off of ING (remindin' me a somethin'), swap was/were (he were/they was), add 'n to the ends of certain words (if'n), and the like.

At first this was only dialogue, but a lot of narrative text focuses on Jehovah's thought process. We think the same way we speak. Someone's grammar doesn't magically improve just because they're speaking instead of thinking. But that's easier to choose to do than to actually do.

For one thing, a lot of us drop the G off of ING anyway, but seeing the apostrophe makes us slow down and identify what's missing. That can be a big distraction when reading narrative text, so that switched back to normal ING. The next was the was/were relationship. I've tried to maintain this, but no matter how actively you write your verbs, you'll still use WAS more than any other, sometimes multiple times in the same sentence. What was quaint and distinct to begin with became burdensome and distracting.

Jehovah were certain he'd a seen such a thing afore. The last'n had kill't Lil' Petey and ate off Rick Rick's right foot. That all made no nevermind here.

Quaint. Distinct. But for 90,000 words? I just don't know.

Speaking of 90,000 words: I'm usually one that says the book is as long as the book needs to be, but seeing just how depressed the sci-fi¹ market is, this isn't something I want to thumb my nose at. The thing is, I thought I was coming in too short somewhere around 35k and kind of fleshed things out. I'll have to go back and chop some of that out because I'm actually at risk of going over 90k, which I'm using as a hard ceiling for this book.

Approaching the end, I reached the book's thesis statement. The exchange includes more than one racial epithet. And while both the character and the setting make it an appropriate word choice, as a writer, it is SO hard to include. A thousand and one times I started to just scrap the entire chapter, but forced myself to finish it. It still makes my skin crawl, though.


¹ And in terms of genre, I wanted to bring up dystopian fiction, but will do so in a separate post later after I've gotten some work done. Interesting things. There will be questions, so all a you that have been quiet lately prepare yourselves to comment. :)

No Sympathy for Bookstores

The general premise is that if you want to be a writer, you should buy books whenever you can, whether they are for yourself or gifts for others (this sentiment most often comes up around Christmas). I don't have a problem with this, to be honest. Support the business you work in. Makes sense to me.

This then moves on to the "and buy at your local independent bookstores." There are a lot of assertions to be made about the benefits of independent bookstores versus national chains and online purchasing. These claims are almost always made by people who live in large cities (notably New York) where independent stores like the Tattered Cover have well established their awesomeness¹.

For the rest of the country, the reality of the independent bookstore doesn't call for such unprecedented love. Of all the small towns I've lived in (five in three different states), the independent bookstore is much the same: used books, limited selection, disorganized or poorly defined space, a limited new release section that only includes names like Grisham or King, and prices set at full value or higher. In my current town, there are two independent bookstores, both conforming to this description. They open at 10 and close at 4, so even if I felt obligated to patronize them, I would have to take a day off of work to do so.

Not growing up in a place like New York where an independent bookstore might have a large enough market to survive the B&N onslaught, I am not enamored with the notion of the underdog². Now don't get me wrong, I don't dislike them. There are stores like the Tattered Cover that have so well established themselves that people can mention them online and others know exactly what they're talking about. Two thumbs up for those places. It's the presumed obligation that rubs me wrong. A business needs to earn my business. If you cannot provide me the book I'm looking for at an hour in which I am able to patronize without requiring vacation spent, you won't get my dollars.

Not that the large chains are doing any better. My experiences with the last two paper books I've purchased have been miserable. I skipped my hometown Borders and B&N and went to the Borders on Boylston in Boston. This is one of the better Borders in the country, so I should be able to find Tad Williams' new release, SHADOWHEART, without much difficulty.

...or so I thought. The book wasn't on coop or on the shelf. There wasn't even space made for it on the shelf. The first three employees ignored me, talking to themselves. The fourth one had never heard of it but was able to confirm that they had six in stock. It ended up being on a cart because it hadn't been shelves yet. What kind of store doesn't have new releases shelved the day they're supposed to be released? When I worked at Blockbuster, Tuesday new releases were shelved Monday night after closing like any common sense business would.

If I had purchased the book online, it would have been delivered today and for $13 less than what I paid for it at Borders. This brings me to the fundamental aspect of book shopping in any store, whether you're a local indie or a national chain:

You have to earn my business.

Amazon is the big bad wolf because that's how we roll in America. If you're the biggest, you're evil. Support the little guy. Fist in the air. Do the right thing. Go to your local independent bookstore and give them your business.

I don't give any business charity. If a local bookstore earns my business, it's on them and good luck to them. That's the kind of place I'll support and speak well of (and often--have you seen how many times I reference Jackie's Diner on my website?). Spare me the guilt trip. I was raised Catholic. It doesn't work.

I really wish Nashua (or even downtown Boston) had a place like the Tattered Cover. There's an antique bookshop near where I work, but that doesn't do much for me. Otherwise, it's online purchasing or continued bad experiences with the national chains (I ranted on twitter what happened when I tried to buy Bujold's CRYOBURN, so I won't repeat that, but it was even more annoying than this time around).

More so than ever, I am pleased with my decision to go e-only in my book purchases³.


¹ I lived near the Tattered Cover when I lived in Denver. It is indeed awesome.

² Which is weird, because usually I'm a sucker for an underdog.

³ SHADOWHEART is the last in the Shadowmarch tetralogy, so this should be the last paper book I buy, depending on how much farther Bujold takes the Vorkosigan series.

Grooving

Things on JEHOVAH'S HITLIST slowed down for a couple weeks. It occurred to me that I was fast approaching maximum word count and the pacing was too slow. I also was bored as a writer, which means I'll probably be bored as a reader. I pushed through what I had and sped things up. That has yielded some fresh and fun ideas (I love making iconic secondary character types¹). I am now grooving along. Jehovah is about to go up above to which the book will end when he returns.

Since my wind sprint on THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, I have decided that will be my next work. If complete, it should also be my largest book to date. I will revise the first chapter with some suggestions from Nate Wilson and move on to chapter 2 which is already percolating in my brain. Hopefully that will get the ball rolling and will yield an awesome fantasy story².

Yay for writing. If this all goes to plan, I should be starting the new wip the week before or the week of Christmas.


¹ In TTS it was the Triad Society itself. In JH it is the tinkers. ... in fact, in the first draft of 7Sac, it was a completely different type of tinker³. In Wanted it was the Baker Boys and in BM/BBQ it was Cyrus the cat.

² I'm making a genuine effort to include magic in this one too. Huh, woulda thunk it, magic in a fantasy book!

³ It started with a genuine intention to get certain themes I like into a published book. Since the previous book wasn't selling, I might keep something for the new work. What happens is you can draw a dot-to-dot of my manuscripts where I've taken something (like tinkers) and reimagined it in a new world. I kind of enjoy it.

The Roast Beef Sandwich...FROM HELL!

I held onto this comment because I wanted to maintain the positivity of Thanksgiving, my second-favorite holiday of the year. Five days later, it's still such a wild ride that I'd feel horrible not sharing it with you.

It is Wednesday evening, the night before Thanksgiving, and my wife has been preparing various foodstuffs for our forthcoming celebration. I've been cleaning and organizing and making pumpkin pie. As meal time gets closer, we decide that we do not want to cook. We've already been doing that. It's time for delivery! There is a nearby restaurant called Giovanni's Roast Beef and Pizza that I had been to a couple times before. While the service had been a bit scattershot, the food was absolutely delicious. I had spoken of it and Jen was in the mood for a sammich of some kind. We decided to order here and continue with our preparations rather than picking it up.

This was our first mistake Giovanni's is right down the street from us. I'm not exaggerating that. I can walk there. It's a three minute drive and half of that is spent at red lights. But delivery is convenient because the pie is in the oven and boxes are being brought out of the basement so we can be fully prepared for our Black Friday tree trimming. We'd pay the few dollars extra for delivery.

The order goes in! A Texas chicken melt sub (marinated chicken, cheese, pepper, mushroom, and barbecue sauce) and a gyro (not from a Greek place, and as such not as good as it could have been).

Ordering was a task. After being put on hold for a considerable length of time, the person had trouble taking down my address. Drury. This is a challenging word. On the phone it can sound like Drrrry. Of course, when you spell it. Three times. And the person says "D?" that's not a good sign. I might have complained to the manager if the person I was speaking to was not the manager.

I had hoped that being down the street might expedite the time we waited, but to no avail. 45 minutes later, the driver showed up. No problem. I'm sure other people had the same idea. I take the slip and sign my name, giving a fair tip. Ummm...excuse me miss, who's the pizza for? She hands me a pizza and a bag that in no way feels like it has two sandwiches in it. She realizes she has the wrong order and makes a big show of being upset and embarrassed. This is where I make another mistake. She seems so genuinely upset in delivering the wrong order, I give her the signed slip back when she says she'll run back and get the right food.

She doesn't do this. She instead calls and gets the address for the order she had and delivers that instead. Twenty-five minutes later, she returns to the store. I know this because I'm on the phone asking how it can possibly have taken this long to go down the street and back to get my food. She says that she delivered our food. Oh no you didn't!

This results in a fun back and forth with the manager (yes, the woman that couldn't spell Drury) and she says she's going to make our food again and send it back out. Thirty minutes later, we call again, at this point, if we hadn't paid for our food, we would have abandoned the attempt and made our own meal at home. I have also started and baked an entire pumpkin pie. We're on the phone, explaining once again that the first driver never delivered our food and that she's a horrible liar, especially since I gave her a flipping tip. The food comes. The manager stays on the phone to make sure it's the right food. It is the right food! And it's still warm! Finally. Let me off the phone so I can go eat. ...what? you hope I enjoy the complementary onion rings? (At this point, they had made no effort to make amends for the bad service.) We didn't get any onion rings. The driver was supposed to give us onion rings? Well, he didn't. He must have kept them for himself. Whatever, I don't care. I want to eat.

I drops the shades, lock the front door, and away to the basement to continue watching the second season of Lie to Me (an awesome show based on real science). I'm just about to eat when the phone rings again. This time it's the owner. He wants to know what's been happening. He says that the guy did try to deliver the onion rings and that I locked the door in his face. Well, given that he neither rang the doorbell nor knocked. I don't know why you would call back and accuse me of being rude. It certainly doesn't make me want to forgive you. And that, I assumed, was the last straw. I tell him I don't care whether the driver tried to deliver me onion rings or not. I cannot think to patronize their store again. Total time for delivery of the correct food was 2 hours and 25 minutes. This included no less than 6 phone calls to and from the store to which three of them accused me for being at fault.

The food, incidentally, was delicious. At least mine was. Jen realized you have to get Greek food from Greek restaurants, but it was at least passable, and Lie to Me continued to rock, so we could just let that all get behind us. Really, if they had just said sorry (or better yet, refunded my money), I'd continue to go there. The food really is that good (and you may say, just pick it up, but the first time I did that, they let me stand at the counter for ten minutes before anyone even spoke to me).

But yay, it's over! Or so we thought.

The next morning I open the door to go down to Boston to pick up my niece for Thanksgiving dinner. What do I find but a greasy bag of onion rings that was left on our doorstep overnight.

How this place remains in business, I cannot fathom. The events of the evening are not exaggerated for the retelling and even now, I cannot believe they happened. Or more precisely, continued to happen. I worked pizza. I delivered. I know the crazy shit that can happen. But 2 hours and 25 minutes later, they had only managed to make things worse, and I woke up in the morning with the food-equivalent of a flaming bag of dog shit at my front door.

The absurdity of it all makes me laugh. I will miss their food, though. Too bad I'll never go there again.