The Obnoxiousness of Fantasy Characters

Fantasy characters are dicks. In fiction, in D&D adventures, anywhere "adventurer" is available as a life choice, people are dicks. You see it all the time. Main character meets Douchebag McAsshole and DMcA immediately starts talking down to him. I'm a wizard. I'm a barbarian. I don't bow before anyone. I don't show any semblance of etiquette that lets me function in a social environment. Blah blah blah.

With so many dangers in the world (waking gods, monsters, demagogues) and everyone seemingly armed to the teeth, how do these people not get left for dead on the side of the road?

Only in fantasy can "Hello" be answered with a recitation of all the reasons why DMcA is better than you and how you're not even worth the time he took reciting his better qualities, and then the two of you can go on a quest together. Together you go over to the tavern where DMcA insults the tavern keeper's food and beer and finds out he's the brother of the merchant DMcA threatened to kill if he didn't receive a 50% discount on some bauble he wanted to buy earlier that day. He gets the best food, drink, and women in the house and everyone steers clear of him because anyone that large of a douchebag must be powerful and could kill them all and DMcA can kill an entire tavern full of people without repercussions in fantasy because anyone that goes into law enforcement is a complete tool unless he's a hero in which case he's gone on a quest and unavailable to teach DMcA a fucking lesson.

Never once does the tavern keeper throw DMcA out, send a scullion for the cops, and join with the rest of the patrons to show DMcA what happens when one person is a dick to an entire town. Main character is then either tarred and feathered for having shared a drink with DMcA or gets to watch while DMcA is thrown down a well and collectively pissed on by a dozen men who have been drinking all night.


Because of this, I am incredibly sensitive about characters, specifically how they react to one another. I could speculate why so many characters are written this way, and I would touch on those points you would expect me to touch on (social deficiencies of the writer, attitude norming of the genre over the course of decades of DMcAs). This morning working on JH, I took Jehovah in a direction I never planned on taking him. At first I thought it was a mistake. It wasn't a "DOUCHE RAGE!" moment, but a tangential angle. I'm cautious to have characters get angry for much the same reason. The exaggerated Hulk reaction is a second-place finisher to the character as a dick thing.

"I ASKED FOR STRAWBERRY JAM BUT THIS IS JELLY. I WILL KILL YOU AND ALL YOUR RELATIVES!!!!!!"

If people lost their temper that often in real life, we'd all live in an episode of Buffy.

Losing time is usually representative of some kind of mental ailment, a la "Primal Fear" (Ed Norton, Richard Gere). But it can happen in great moments of stress, car accidents and the like. Today, Rae stated Jehovah's greatest fear (being abandoned again) and said she would do everything she could to make sure it happened.

Where do you go after that? In a setting where you kill a person for a pair of shoes, how does one remain calm? The obvious answer is one doesn't. But I didn't want a Hulk smash scene either. Jehovah needs Rae and any conclusion to such a situation would be dissatisfying to say the least. And in fact, given the POV of the story, I don't believe Jehovah would remember anything that happened.

So he doesn't. Rae launches her attack on Louisiana Avenue and he comes back to his senses on Maryland Avenue, alone and totally confused how he got there.

This is a risky move. At this point in the novel Jehovah has killed nine people and there will be more to come. This could be the last trick to make him appear a sociopath instead of an empathetic main character. My gut instinct was to backpeddle. Just don't have Rae say what she said and his reaction becomes unnecessary. But given their own relationship and the truths Rae revealed to him, this was the appropriate result. And the more I think about it, the more I think Jehovah's reaction is appropriate as well. The trick is that it's balanced with his experiences up above on the platform, something that won't be coming for awhile. I gotta keep the reader reading to get to that point and he balances himself out.

So in the end, this is a good but tough decision. And even if the reader decides that Jehovah is too much of a killer, at least he's not a Douchebag McAsshole. I really hate that character.

Testing Your Mettle

One WIP at a time. There's a reason I have that rule, a very important reason. When you're writing your novel and things get hard, your imagination is your worst enemy. When people talk about ideas of how to get inspired, they're ignoring a greater problem: only writing when you're inspired. You need to be able to write even if you're not inspired. There are going to be entire chapters that don't thrill you. You just have to slog through. If you only write when you're inspired, you'll finish a tiny fraction of your proposed manuscripts.

Things were kind of tight on Thursday and Friday for my WIP. So what happened over the weekend? I had ideas for THE RED SOCK SOCIETY, THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, and WHAT'S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR? I was incredibly creative on every project except the one that needs my attention.

Why? Because inspiration is easy. If I write to inspiration, I'll die with a thousand half-finished novels. No, I need to pocket those other mss for when their time comes and buckle down on the one that has 50,000 words and needs another 50k so it can be complete. I want to finish this thing so I can start work on one of those others and finish that one and so on.

It is the substance of a writer that he can write. Period. Not write when the mood strikes him or when it's easy. You understand your craft and you can take it to the appropriate conclusion. New ideas are like will-o-wisps. It's easy to get lured off by the exciting and easy, but when you've sated your writing enthusiasm on this new wellspring, you find yourself standing in the middle of a swamp, sinking in the mire of incomplete work.

Focus. Prove your mettle. Finish what you started. There will be time for the next work when you're done with this one.

Beware the AYRTD Bird and Invoking Rule 2a

This has been a reading week. I finished JULIET1. I'm almost half-way through CRYOBURN. I've finished the first disc of ARABIAN NIGHTS. I keep taking my Eee PC to work because I feel the need to write, but when I think of what to write next, it's not clicking. I know what I need to do, but because I've been enjoying reading, I haven't been stressing forcing myself back into things (60k and JH is complete, a mark I can hit in November if I want to posture for the NaNo writers2. What I need to do is invoke rule 2a.

I've done this once before and it proved incredibly effective. Going back to the beginning and revising the current WIP after stopping to revise a completed draft both improves the ms and gets you a feel for the voice and rhythm of the work you're continuing. It's the one time I let myself go back and revise before the entire thing is finished. I updated my first 250 words on Nathan Bransford's forum to JH given how old BM&BBQ is. It seemed a wasted opportunity to post content from that work since I am no longer actively querying it. Those new 250 words needed some serious revision. I overwrote JH's first chapter and couldn't even make it off the first page without scolding myself. (The new 250 words are derived from the original 500 words and are much better.)

So this will let me rebuild a rhythm, improve the existing work, and maybe think of some new ideas for what's still to come. This is only daunting because I don't usually have this much already complete on a novel when I invoke 2a. I have 40k words in JH. Normally I might only have 10. I don't want to get stuck at the beginning and never get to the end. That's the whole reason rule 2 exists!

1 Not as bad as the AYFKM moment, the AYRTD is when you look at the main character and shout, "Are you really that dumb?" I really enjoyed the first 350 pages of JULIET, but pages 351-400 are just one AYRTD moment after another. The entire climax is impossible if the main character didn't have the mental capacity of a bag full of hammers. She would have realized that everyone had something to gain from manipulating her and no one had been honest, and thus no decision could be made. Thankfully, she chose to mistrust people in a specific order, allowing each of them to shepherd her closer to the finale, leaving the humble reader to ask why he should care about someone unfit to produce offspring less the gene pool continue to be watered down.

Much like the entire plot dependent on the main characters miscommunicating, a plot driven by the protagonist not realizing clues that slap him/her across the face is enough to make me pull my hair out. It's one thing for clues to be cryptic, or riddles or double entendres or genuine intrigue. But when character A gives you a clue and then character B gives you a clue and they both wave the big Clue Flag and you still don't get it? I'm sorry, you're too stupid to have your own book. Go be a supporting character.

2 Really, I'm so hard on NaNo because my first experiences with it were from communities not dedicated to writing. I wasn't part of a group of writers that liked to participate. I was among the majority of NaNo participants, people who wanted to write but never found the time. The excuses were the same every year. They'd sign up to do it and then never start or only write for five days or use anything they write (like this blog post) as their word count. Whatever they could do not to do the one thing they said they really wanted to do. Sorry, but if you want to do something, do it.

NaNoing My Problem

When I finish revising a novel, I feel like the train from the climax of Back to the Future 3. Doc Brown threw in those special logs and now I'm going twice as fast as a normal train. Reall, that works for when I finish the novel the first time and when I revise it again after beta reading. Each version is relevant to the color in the movie: first draft = green, second draft = yellow, third draft = red. Then I travel through time or fall into a gorge.

And since traveling through time doesn't work as a metaphor, when it's all done, I fall into a gorge. I'm just going and going and going and I don't want to give up any momentum. I try to switch to a different novel, either something I was already working on or something new. The problem is, each novel has it's own voice. I can't maintain that momentum and switch between mss. I need to slow down. But I can't slow down. There's a chemically infused log that is sending me speeding down the track.

I never want to take off, but I always have to. With the completion of TSS's second draft, I had the good fortune of being sick. So even though I wanted to keep writing (and have 38k of JH to go to), I had to take a few days off. Only a few. Monday arrived and I trying to keep some of that momentum going for this wip. It did not go well. I had trouble capturing the voice and had reservations of the quality of the story over all. It feels a bit thin. There's no complexity or depth. It's just a "go here do this, go there do that" story. It reminds me a lot of THE BLACK COMPANY in that way.

So I pondered this on the way home Tuesday night after producing only a few hundred words. I fell into the gorge and didn't realize it. Now I need to climb back up so I can get back on the tracks. But do I stop and try to wash my pants, or do I just soldier on? Yesterday morning I decided to take the NaNoWriMo way out. I ignored any quality concerns I had for the chapter and just pushed through to the end. Sometimes you just have to say, "I'll have to fix this in revision." This risk is that the quality is so bad as to derail the proper direction of the story. You'll just have to come back later and redo it and then redo everything you wrote after. It's a gamble, and not one that always pays off.

Elizabeth Poole and I have differing opinions on NaNoWriMo. She enjoys it. I do not. I accet that she finds a fun community there, but I do not participate in the community and do not want to lend myself to the activity just to explore the community. I think writing without any concern for quality is bad writing. I think 50,000 words counts as a novel in one or two genres. I think not enough effort is made to explain to participants that what they produce during NaNo is not something that should be sent to agents without revision and review. But most of all, it's that first part. No, I do not go back and revise until the entire manuscript is complete, but I do make a concerted effort to write the best possible first draft. To write with complete abandon is to shit diarrhea on the page. It makes a mess, it stinks, and isn't good for anyone but the flies.

I'd rather see someone write 25,000 first-draft quality pages than 50,000 NaNoWriMo quality pages.

So chapter 15 of JH is shit. Hopefully it's not so runny that it was a waste of time. I'm on chapter 16 now, and that's what I needed.

What if Books Were Like TV

Following the recommendation of many, many people, I finally got around to renting the first disc of season 1 of "White Collar" (that's the USA show that stars Chuck's Bryce Larkin as a conman working for the feds). I have to say, the pilot really hooked me. It wasn't as flimsy as I thought it was going to be. Characters got some depth and there was a really interesting supporting cast.

One of my favorite things to do with television is to watch a series pilot and then see what changes when the pilot is picked up. For those of you that don't know, a pilot is shot and given to the studio to determine whether they're going to pick up the show for a season (or a half season or a handful of episodes, etc). This means, a pilot may be good enough to get the series picked up, but certain tweaks happen when the series begins, usually with the supporting cast or particular character traits.

(Look at Agent Gibbs' team when he appears in JAG compared to when NCIS became its own series. Those people are never mentioned again. Likewise, compare how much pop culture Gibbs knows in Yankee White compared to the rest of the series.)

What amuses me the most about this juxtaposition is that the show so rarely acknowledges the people that are no longer there. They might get a one-line good-bye if they're acknowledged at all. Or, if the effect they have on the plot is relevant (such as June giving Bryce a place to stay), that effect may remain while the character vanishes.

Can you imagine what it would be like if books were like that? More and more, authors are gimmicking out the book-by-chapter sales. Or the choose the direction of the story contests. Can you imagine what it would be like to read a story where certain characters are determined not to be best and just abandoned or completely retconned in later chapters?

Is it because it's in print that we'd be upset? Or is it just that television has done it for so long that we're used to it? I can't imagine reading a book where a secondary character is replaced by a similar but distinctly different character in chapter 5 without explanation. Or perhaps we accept that the entire story is told in a book and the author is given time to go back and revise; whereas, it would not make sense to reshoot a pilot episode with new characters. Still, I always want to turn the network and say, "You know I see that. Right? I see the difference."

Sometimes it's actually a good thing. Some characters don't work or the writers threw in the kitchen pot trying to make the network like them, and you get the most ridiculous characters. Sometimes, like in the case of Burn Notice, it's a step back.

I liked the pilot cast. I was actually shocked at how progressive it was. Sure the two leads were both white males, but the supporting cast was four black people and two white people. Of those six people, four of them were women. And of those four women, one of them was a lesbian. As American television goes, that's a whole lot of minority for a non-minority focused show.

By the third episode, we're down to two women and two men. One of them is black and one is latina, but the lesbian is gone. Now IMDB tells me June and Diana come back, but I'm disappointed at the loss of Denise Vasi's Cindy. I thought she acted well, I liked her confidence, and it was nice having a female that would be totally immune to the charming main character's whiles. I also appreciated how little emphasis they put on her sexuality. Too often the "gay" character requires quotes because the writers make such a big deal of it that it becomes a distraction, as if gay people aren't capable of working in a normal, every-day environment.

I'm not sure if I'll stick with this show. The episode I just watched failed pretty horribly as a procedural. And actually it failed worse than normal. It made an effort to point out that FBI Agent can't use the gold coin because it was obtained illegally, but then a confession is taken based on the stolen gold coin. Any evidence deriving from illegally obtained evidence would be thrown out. The entire episode is a road map of how to let two criminals escape any kind of prosecution.

If you're going to be a procedural, you have to get your procedures close enough to the truth that the armchair-lawyers don't see the gaping hole you drove your plot through.

The Satisfaction of Success

I am a success!

What? Did I get an agent? No. Did I get an offer of publication from a major publishing house? No. Did I get a date with Rosario Dawson? No.

Yet I am still a success. I have not accomplished any of the above professional goals (and if I never accomplish that third one, it'll probably go a lot smoother with my wife), but I have done the thing I perhaps love the most. I finished a novel.

This feeling right here, the mix of excitement and euphoria, is the big pay off for me. It's not the completion of the first draft. That's just a step in the road. It's finishing the revision where I feel confident enough in the manuscript that I can send it to other people to read. Of all the works that I have finished (and even JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, which isn't complete), I felt THE TRIAD SOCIETY was my weakest offering. One of the reasons I continued on to JH instead of TTS was because I was unenthusiastic about he ms. That extra time helped a lot, though, and I realized a lot of my mistakes. I tweaked here and fixed there and made one massive change (Herman to Annelie) that made all the difference in the world.

I just took something mediocre and made it great. ...or at least better. Good enough that I'm happy with it, feel it's representative of my talent. I have accomplished my main goal. That is a great feeling.

So whether my current partial leads to a full and (fingers crossed) leads to representation, it's not as important as what I've done write now. I wrote a novel from start to end, and I think it's good. I hope you get the chance to read it, and that you enjoy it too.

Trading at $1,365.00 an ounce

A good beta reader is worth his or her weight in gold. As of closing October 13, 2010, gold traded at $1,365 an ounce. An ounce is equal to 1/16 of a pound. (2.2 pounds equals 1 kilogram for you metric folks.) Assuming Elizabeth Poole weighs about 110 pounds (when she's soaking wet maybe), that means she's worth $2,204, 400.

Yesterday's exciting news is that an agent that appeared on the infamous List asked for sample pages from THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I wore myself out yesterday doing the Dance of Joy. But when I came to my senses, I realized I was unprepared! The thing is still in revision. It hasn't even gone to beta readers! I should email her and say sample pages will have to wait (this request came outside of the normal querying process as a result of the sample pitch paragraph submitted as part of the webinar I mentioned previously).

NO WAY!

I'm not waiting. This thing says I have seven days to submit the first 30-35 pages. They'll then take two months to review those pages. I can revise the first 30-35 pages in seven days (already finished first pass) and the remainder in two months. No problem. There's no reason to delay here. The thing will be done and polished before they (undoubtedly) ask for the full manuscript. I've revised 29/33 chapters already. Pretty much all I need is the beta read/revision. So if my beta readers can review the first 30 pages right now, this balls a rolling!

Sara Megibow has expressed her frustration at fantasy authors glutting the early chapters with world building. The reason I'm doing a second pass before beta? I'm worried I did the same thing. There are a few paragraphs in chapter one and a section in chapter two in particular that I think need to be moved or cut all together. Without saying any of this, I send the ms to Liz and she pings the EXACT chapters I was worried about AND the EXACT section I was worried about.

That's not just skill. That's peace of mind. Now I can skip worrying whether I was being overly strict with myself or risking this great opportunity by submitting something I was on the fence about (I liked the world building, but it mucked up the pacing a bit). Now I know. It wasn't me being hard on myself. It was me seeing a problem (not a glaring one, those are easy to pick out. The subtle ones are harder). I need to tool this stuff for the betterment of the story. I have confirmation. I have peace of mind. And that is invaluable.

Frenetic

I have stopped revising so I can read BLUE FIRE. I haven't opened my computer since Monday evening. This isn't too bad because I should finish the book by tomorrow. It's not a long-term delay or anything. And reading a good book is a great way to recharge one's batteries. Keep the juices flowing and the ideas fresh. Flowing juice can be difficult to handle, though. Fresh ideas just pop out of your head and demand to be put to paper (or in my case, screen). I've had some new ideas for THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE (and I still want to get to the end because I love it so much. I had a HUGE breakthrough for JEHOVAH'S HITLIST that requires I write another 30,000 words before I even get to it. I have some corrections I need to make to THE TRIAD SOCIETY once I start revising again--of course those come at the end as well, so I need to get that back in gear. I've even been having ideas for WINE AND VINEGAR, which I had forgotten about until I found the manuscript file the other day.

I feel absolutely frenetic inside. I'm really enjoying the book, and I want to finish it. But all these ideas! They demand attention! They demand appeasement! And the worst of it is, once I finish the book, I will still only work on one of them at a time. I'll need to finish revising TTS so I can send it out to beta readers so I can go back to JH and finish that first draft. Then when I set that aside, I can start back on T7S, which I'm effectively starting from scratch and aborting my previous attempt. So IF (and that's an all caps IF) I write WINE AND VINEGAR directly after T7S, that won't be until this time next year at the earliest.

GAH! Too much juice! Too much juice!!!

The Hard Part

I got a pass on WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING today. This particular agent has looked at BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE as well and is very good about giving feedback with rejections. What struck me today is that his comment was very similar to a comment Elizabeth Poole gave me when she beta-read the story.

Bastin is a more likable character than Nashau or Podome. This isn't disputed, trust me. Bastin is your classic high charisma, high energy flimflam man you find in many fantasy novels. That was one of the reasons he wasn't the main character. I've seen him before. Or at least, I've seen other characters with that attitude (Bastin keeps himself out of the cliche gutter, I think). And regardless, it wasn't his story I wanted to tell. It was Nashau's. It is a story about unemployment in a fantasy setting. I saw the story I wanted to tell and I told it.

But here is the feedback, this story would be better with Bastin as the main character. A story may be better with Bastin as the main character, but that story wouldn't be this story. And there's the hard part.

Completing a novel is difficult. Revising that novel is challenging. But rewriting the novel? That's flipping hard.

Revising makes a story better. It fixes flaws, improves weak structure to make it stronger. It's an essential element of professional writing. Rewriting is taking the fundamental aspects of a story: it's plot or theme or characters or setting, and telling a whole different tale.

Now, the agent did not say "If you rewrite this with Bastin as the main character, I will represent you" which saved me a lot of hand-wringing. But the implicit statement of "I'll look at this again" was (I think) there.

Since I received that email, I have pondered and pondered and pondered whether or not I could tell WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING with Bastin as the sole main character rather than 1 of 4 (with Nashau being the primary main character of the group with Jara being second). The first half is easy. There's a lot of stuff early on with Nashau and Podome that could be cut. If they're not main characters, those chapters are unnecessary. But that leaves me with stuff later...well, those chapters balance because of the foundation I built with those early chapters. I don't think I can revise my way to a Bastin-centric story. I'm too attached to the story I told and still believe it is better the way it is.

What happens when this happens later? What happens when it's an editor and I'm contractually obligated to deliver and they say something like this? I'm terrified. I've always known it's a possibility, but was able to ignore it because I'm still looking for an agent. It's hard to stifle that gut reaction of, "No, it's better this way" just because that's the way you told it. Really, rewriting is asking for a different story than the one you've told but with the same stuff included. Ugh! That's so hard!

The Impotence of Proofreading of Proofreading

For those of you who do not know, my day job is in publishing as well. I commute to Boston (writing the majority of my manuscripts on the train in and out of the city) and toil away in a cube for a major publisher. This is not the first publisher I've worked for. The formula I put forward is: take the decade of your age (I turn 33 this Saturday, so my decade is 3), subtract 1, and that's how many publishers you've worked for. This holds true a ridiculous amount of the time. Publishing is an incredibly incestuous business.

Oh so long ago (going on 8 years now), I began in book production. These are the people who actually manage the typesetting and printing of your book. When you miss your deadline, it isn't your editor that makes up that time. No, it's the project manager that has to maintain your pub date with half as much time. Keep that in mind next time you're missing your deadline. If they have to make the same date, that means they have to cut things out (like proofreading, and let me tell you, that's one of the first things to get cut).

Anyway, I bring this up because I was ruminating on life as a lowly Associate Project Manager. My boss, in an effort to maintain the type of publishing she started in (back when leading meant something more than just a value entered in InDesign/Quark) made me proofread everything that came across my desk. We started with the red pen and then moved on to Track Changes in Word. I'm getting close to "graduating" and getting to act like a modern project manager and not the old-style project editor (a style the company had only just abandoned and which many publishers still use today despite the cost savings of using freelancers). I turn over a Word file. I've put a lot of spit and polish into this thing. I've used the company's style sheets (with the most bizarre rules for commas) and gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. This is a winner.

"Are you sure this is final? You're done with it?"

"Yes," I say with confidence--a confidence I gripped like a vice before it flee from that discerning stare she'd use on me.

She hits F7. I always forgot F7 is the hotkey for Word's spelling and grammar check. Really, I forgot about Word's spelling and grammar checker. I never used the thing because it always caught so many words that were actually words that it felt like a waste of time.

Wouldn't have been a waste that time. The thing didn't even get off the first page when it caught an error. She looked up at me, discerning turning to withering. Was that the end? Oh no, we went through the entire document, one error after another to show me how much I still sucked.

Being a fantasist, you can imagine how difficult spell check is (especially using OpenOffice, which has some pretty basic words missing from its dictionary). Fantastical names, places, monsters. Weapons that haven't been used for a thousand years or never at all on this world. Spell check seems like a headache. But let me tell you, friend, it's a worthwhile headache. It'll save you embarrassment down the line. Let my early publishing shame serve as a lesson for all: F7.

But how, Joe? you might ask. How can you ask us to wade through all those errors-that-are-not-errors? Because, I answer, you will create a dictionary for your wip.

Most word processors use a standard dictionary. Do NOT just add wip-specific words to this default dictionary. These words may be similar to real words that you may misspell later. Or they may be similar to other words you create for other wip and then everything goes to hell. No, sir, you're going to create a new dictionary for each manuscript you write (with a handy exception mentioned below). If you're using Word, a new dictionary is a copy of the default plus any new words you add. You can name this dictionary whatever you want. Hence, if I wrote in word, the dictionary I would currently be using would be "Jehovahs_Hitlist" or something along that line. When you click on a word marked as an error and say to add to the dictionary, it gives you a choice of which dictionary to add it to. When you are done with the wip, you can then change your Word processor back to the default dictionary.

This is one of the places where OpenOffice really shines. Rather than duplicating the default dictionary, you can choose which dictionaries are active at any time. Thus, "Jehovahs_Hitlist" is only the words I add for that manuscript (and I can go into that list and edit/delete terms as I choose). For series works, you can have have a series dictionary rather than a per-wip dictionary OR you can have individuals. Then, when events from those separate works collide later down the road, you can turn on and off the dictionaries relevant to the work you're creating. (OO also maintains the "ignore all" list even after you've shut down the program, so you don't have to do it all again when you restart later like you do for Word.)

What this gets you is that when you F7, you'll find genuine misspelled words, and your document will be all the cleaner for the effort (not to mention a list of all the custom words you created for your wip that you can then add to your stylesheet for the copyeditor to reference). Now, spellcheck isn't the end-all/be-all. Homonyms and Homophones still lurk within your pages along with the errant auto-correct-to-new-error. Always check your work before you send it off to beta readers or agents. You don't want to end up being this guy. When you finally send it off, it'll be much better for your effort.

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?

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.