"You have a right..."

So the whole Amazon pedophile thing has stirred up an argument I absolutely hate. It begins when someone says "You have a right..." and trails off into some moronic thing you don't actually have a right to. So for all you American readers/writers (as a number of modernized countries don't offer a right to free speech), know the law. Your rights have limitations. And even if you are within those limitations, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. You are free to be a dick, but that does not mean people have to like you or even listen. It certainly doesn't mean a vendor has to sell your dickitude.

Your speech cannot harm others or put others in harm's way. Your speech is your ability to say and write what you want. It does not require others to listen, print, or read what you say/write.

The first amendment of the constitution of the United States of America affords me the right to say that George W. Bush is the worst president in our nation's history without fear of the government arresting me for that voiced opinion. It does not mean people who love George Bush need to listen to me or that a newspaper, magazine, or publisher must afford me the opportunity to publish my onion of George Bush.

Know your freedoms. Know your freedoms' limits.

Don't Make the Pimp Hand Angry

A proposal: Stop being passionate about your writing.

Writing is not dating. You are not trying to find a spouse or get to third base with your manuscript. You may find yourself enthusiastic about a project, passionate or even obsessed, but those feelings will fade over time, much like when you were dating in high school. You don't just break up and move to the next girlstory. You finish the manuscript.

I know I just posted about this. Perhaps it's NaNo, but I'm seeing more and more people commenting about how they're not passionate about the story they're writing. WHO CARES? You think you can only write when you're passionate? That's no different than writing when you're inspired. Do you think you can go into work and tell your boss that you want to keep getting paid but you're not going to do any work because you're not passionate? No. You go into work and you do what you do because that's your job.

Writing is your job too. Stop trying to date your writing. Your writing is on the job. It's your bitch, and you'll cut a bitch if she don't do what she should.

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.

Minimum Word Counts

When I lived in St. Louis and began to finally put genuine effort to a career in writing, I began the Third World, an epic setting required of every major fantasy author. To that point, I did not read critically. I read what I enjoyed and read for enjoyment. I did not stop to ponder word choice or sentence structure, pacing or plot. I just read. And because of that, I just wrote.

I wrote chapters for the story of that chapter and gave no thought to reader fatigue1 or for that matter writer fatigue. Both CAUSE AND CONVICTION (originally titled THE END OF BLISS) and A CIRCLE OF CRIMSON STONE have chapters that are 10,000 words long. So when you look at the Queue and you see a word count of 40,000 words, that means that book only has 4 chapters written.

Shortly after this, I joined my first writers' group. The response was the same as everyone else's response would eventually be: shock. One chapter is 10,000 words?! Are you crazy? That's so long? Is it? I didn't think it was. Perhaps it was just a difference of genre. They wrote thriller, sci-fi, women's paranormal and...well, not sure about the last lady. But none of them wrote epic fantasy. So clearly mine was more appropriate for my genre.

Was it? I was sure I had read plenty of epic fantasies with similar word counts. But there would only be one way I could know for sure. I went home and pulled books off my shelf. Martin, Williams, Rothfuss, and others. All epic fantasies, the bellwethers of word count. 250k minimum per manuscript. Then I did a cast off2 on a sampling of chapters in each novel. I got the evidence I needed.

The average word count was 2000 to 2500 words per chapter. In the monsters of the genre, the chapters were still only 1/4 the size of the chapters I was writing. Instead of having 25 chapters, they had 100 or more. So, in my next work, I decided I'd try writing shorter chapters.

My next work was BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE which ended up with chapters as short as 500 words, though most averaged about 2000. This proved to be a good move on my part because--as you can imagine--writing 10,000 word chapters can be exhausting. So now, as a rule for first-draft writing, all my chapters will be 2000 words long (minimum). This has been a great yardstick to use. 1100 words and I'm not fleshing out the scene enough. 4000 words and I've included too much back story. 1800-3300 words seems to be a great sweet spot.

This is also why I'm able to write in order and so quickly. I write 1000 words on my way into work. I write 1000 words on my way home, completing one chapter. 5 chapters--10,000 words--a week, and in 2-3 months, my novel's first draft is complete.


1 It's a weird psychological effect, but readers don't seem to handle long chapters well. They get mentally tired and want a break. Even if they don't take a break from reading, a chapter break seems to reset the internal clock, give them a sense of advancement, of knowing the story is moving toward its end. I could take the same ten-thousand word chapter and split it into two five-thousand word chapters, and the response from readers would be more favorable toward the latter. It's weird, but I've found this to be the case regardless of region or reader level.

2 The whole 250 words/page thing? Yeah, that's crap. That's the metric you use in a meeting when you're asked for the total page count and you haven't done a cast off yet. If you want a quick but accurate measure of how many words there are per page, you take a book of like design (you may not realize it, but books have different interior designs allowing for greater or fewer words per page), and do the following. Find five to ten pages that have a fair balance of dialogue and description (not all description and not all dialogue). Count how many words appear in the first five or six lines and divide by the number of lines. This gives you a word-per-line average. Then count the number of lines on each page and divide by the number of pages: lines-per-page. Divide the total word count by wpl average. Multiply this result by the lpp average and that is your projected page count.

There are ways to get even more precise page counts, but this one can be done in 5 to 15 minutes and is accurate enough for our purposes. For adult fantasy, the word count per page is closer to 300 to 350 per page rather than 250. Over the course of 100k-250k, that extra 100wpp can make a big difference.

Reject'd

I was kind of down on the way home today. Thinking about my (very few) experiences with my father. Specifically, when they took me to the hospital to see him right before he died. I was three years old and he was in the ICU. Children aren't allowed there because they're petri dishes of germs. They told me I needed to stay behind my sisters so as few people saw me as possible. Why, I wanted to know. Well, because you're not supposed to be here. You have germs adults don't and there a lot of sick people here. You could get them sick and they could die.

In the mind of a three-year-old, these various bits of information added up to me trying to kill my father because I was different. I didn't buy that I had germs any different than anyone else. I didn't get sick more or less than they did. They thought I was some sociopathic kid bent on fulfilling an Oedipal impulse (okay, I didn't know sociopath or Oedipus, but on an emotional level, that's where I went). I was intensely pissed off until I went into that room and saw my father totally zonked out on morphine. Then I was just scared shitless and had no problem hiding behind anyone.

This spiraled into a lot of other morbid thoughts during the drive home and I was pretty down by the time I pulled up to my home. I grabbed the mail and sifted through, looking for a letter I had been looking for for awhile, one with my own handwriting on it. BAM! There it was. I had queried JABberwocky Literary on THE TRIAD SOCIETY and here was the reply I had been waiting for.

They rejected the query.

And I felt a lot better. You'd think I'd be bummed. One more to add to the pile, but I felt quite good. It grabbed me by both my ears and pulled me back to the present. What's done is done and there's not much point in worrying over the frustration of a three-year-old. Plenty to worry over here in the present, like getting published. :)

Rejection, a much needed slap upside the head. :)

50,000 words

If not for a dead battery, I would have passed 50,000 words yesterday in my WIP. I instead passed it this morning. Making a similar comment on Twitter yesterday, I pondered why I put so much stock in 50,000 words. Certainly it doesn't represent the end point of the manuscript nor the midpoint. I have never written a 100,000 word manuscript coming under or over that mark. I wouldn't have to do with NaNo because I do not participate. So what then?

And then I remembered why. Before--and before I mean when I would try to write but never finish--no matter how good a story was, no matter how clearly I could visualize it, no matter how much work I put into it, I would always quit before passing 50,000 words. The closest I ever came was with CAUSE AND CONVICTION, the first book of the Third World. That topped out just over 40,000 words. Then I wrote BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE and hit 110,000 words. Since that first success, I have been able to work to completion on any novel that passes 10,000 words (with the exception of THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE, which I will be doing over once I finish JEHOVAH'S HITLIST).

Now, when I pass 50,000 words, it's a reminder that this isn't a fantasy. It isn't a dream. There are no excuses. This is what I do and I can see it through to the end. It's an incredibly satisfying accomplishment, one I have now accomplished four times in the last 20 months.

So, yay for 50,000 words!

I'd like a #3, super sized.

LurkerWithout reads a billion books a month. This is why I value his feedback as a beta reader. He reads a book a day, so I consider him a measure of the purchasing public. He's the target audience I'm aiming for, people who like to read fantasy. I have no delusions of being the author that makes fantasy sexy or being some phenomenal cross-over hit. I just want to grab the fantasy niche and make it mine. (If that niche gets bigger because of me, I won't complain, but it's not getting the attention YA, urban fantasy, or paranormal romance are, so let's be practical.)

Lurker just finished his read of THE TRIAD SOCIETY and he commented that Otwald's decisions as the story's protagonist are not driven by any fundamental virtue, but by noblesse oblige, his sense of noble duty. While I did not necessarily set out to make it so and it certainly doesn't hold any subtext on class structure, I can tell you that I am bored.

I'm bored with the same people being heroes all the time. We've created McDonald's heroes where you can order off the value meal menu. #1 gets you Captain America, the forthright and virtuous son of virtue who virtuously fights villainy. #2 gets you Deadpool, the wisecracking anti-hero who does what's right because of a pervading sense of guilt or convenience1.

I wanted to make a protagonist who didn't relegate the world into good and evil (or varying shades of kryptonite). And I didn't want a slippery snake oil salesman. I wanted someone who had chosen a path and walked it regardless of how difficult it was. Nobility has a specific meaning and he would be an example of such. That might not always sit well with other nobles as no one likes to have someone demonstrate their own shortcomings.

Noblesse oblige is used sardonically with growing frequency, but at the root of the phrase is the classic "power/responsibility" relationship, something that Otwald takes to heart more than anyone else in the story (except for a very minor character who gets a larger role in later stories.)

I like Lurker's assessment. I like Otwald. I don't find him to be a value meal hero, and that makes me happy.


1 This is why I didn't want Bastin to be the main character of WANTED. He's a #2 protagonist, the charismatic flimflam man who feels responsible for the death of his surrogate father. SEEN IT!

I Voted X

Along with telling me early on that her attitude toward minorities was incorrect, one of the other (few) appropriate lessons my mother taught me was the importance of voting. It was 1980 or 1982 when she took me to our local polling station (which also happened to be my pre-school). I got to watch while she voted and the old people gave me a sticker that said "I Voted" with a big red X in a box.

Now, my mother was a hardcore conservative (she will always vote for the candidate with the most reactionary position on abortion even if he would bring about armageddon). All our neighbors were like-minded Catholics. And all of this was during the height of Reagan's popularity (the man won 49 states in an election after all). Thus, everyone voted the same way.

So for the longest time--the longest time (I will not admit to just how long because it's that embarrassing)--I thought they had other stickers that said "I Voted" with a big red O in a box. LIke tic-tac-toe1. I thought the stickers read "I Voted X," as in, the X represented which party you voted for (heaven forbid there be a third-party option in America). Thus, when I began to shed my conservative upbringing and privately harbored liberal ideas, I wondered how liberal candidates could ever hope to win. Everyone in America voted for conservatives. I could tell because they all wore "I Voted X" stickers.

In my defense, I watched my mother vote and she did not mark an X. She filled in a bubble. So clearly a big red X in a box had nothing to do with voting other than to delineate your affiliation. Now they've changed the stickers to a check mark, but we don't make those either. Come on people! Pay attention! Don't you vote? If you don't vote, what are you doing making stickers for people that vote? That should be a requirement.

This year, my polling place did not offer stickers. They saved a little money by not having stickers. Instead they had a bake sale. I think this is awesome2


1 I always wanted to get voters together with the "I Voted X" and "I Voted O" stickers and have a human tic-tac-toe game.

2 And it doesn't matter. This is New Hampshire. We all vote. Then we go to a diner and talk about voting. It's what we do. We love us some politics. Be thankful we're the first state in the nation to vote in primaries. We know how to do it.

Humility Has Its Limits

My routine on a writing week and a reading week are pretty similar. Spend an hour on the commuter rail either reading or writing. Spend 20 minutes on the subway reading. (Writing on the subway is very difficult, and I do it very infrequently). While I have a number of samples and one novel on my nook I still need to finish, I opted for this week to take a book off my bookshelf that I never finished.

Really, I only got a couple pages in and put it down. Having bought CORDELIA'S HONOR for the first time when I bought this other title, I switched to that and then promptly read Bujold's entire catalogue. Clearly it got left behind. But I'm back, aware of what I didn't like and trying to soldier past to get to the meat of the story.

The book fell open at one point and I saw the acknowledgments. I decided to give them a read. Ever since Nathan Bransford posted a link to another agent's blogpost saying that it was dangerous for writers not to include their agents and editors in the acknowledgments (and their assistants!), I look to see if they are included.

Thus, I've been reading a lot of acknowledgments lately. And while agents and editors do always appear, I've noticed another trend: over–self-deprication. It's one thing to acknowledge the people who made your work better. I certainly do. But it's another thing entirely to spend a page enumerating all the different ways you suck as an author. If you are incapable of forming coherent paragraphs, crafting related scenes, or in any other way forming a story that is capable of moving from beginning to end without other people performing life-saving surgery, what the fuck are you doing writing a book? No wonder editors never have any time. They take incoherent pieces of shit and rework them into books. Or so these acknowledgments would have me believe.

Humility has its limits, people. At some point you stop sound modest and start sounding lucky. You're lucky that a bunch of people took pity on your ineptitude and let you leech off their talent while still slapping your name on the front cover. Do you have talent? Do you have skill? These are not things to be embarrassed by. Did they make your work better? Give them the credit they've earned. But don't tell me, your reader, that you aren't any good. If you aren't, I'll return your book and go find someone more worthwhile.

And as an aspiring writer, this is even more frustrating. What the hell, people? Look at all these talentless hacks getting multiple books published. I wouldn't have thought them talentless hacks, but then I read their acknowledgments page and they told me so. It simultaneously offends me that talentless hacks are getting multi-book deals while I'm still getting rejected AND kicks me in the junk because talentless hacks are getting multi-book deals while I'm still getting rejected. You'd rather spend all that time working with a talentless hack than me?

Unless, of course, they aren't talentless hacks, in which case they really need to chill out on the acknowledgments page.

Clipping

Next time you're listening to an audio medium (such as the radio or a podcast), listen to how the person speaks rather than just what they're saying. Much like "he said" as a dialogue signifier, there are certain sounds that go along with actual words that our brain just ignores. The inhalation at the beginning of a word or the exhalation at the end are prime components.

When you translate all this to an audio file, it offers representation to these various elements of speech. A sound wave spikes from volume and different mouth formations (the plosive, P, throws a blast of air against the mic--it's the fastest way to spike your sound chain). In addition to the word, though, you see little squiggles before and after someone speaking. Now, little squiggles can represent a lot of things. It's a light sound, like noise in the background or the chair squeaking or your throat clearing. When a person isn't speaking, you want their audio wave to be flat otherwise it can distract from other speakers.

First-time podcasters often make the mistake of silencing the squiggles that appear before or after someone speaks, assuming that it makes for a clearer file. When you listen to it, however, it actually sounds worse. We expect to here someone inhale and exhale. Not only that, the vocal chords are still vibrating at the end, mixed in with the inhalation, and it can sound like someone has stopped speaking in the middle of the word even though the word is technically finished.

This is called clipping. If you listen to a sound file where all the inhalation and exhalation is removed, the speakers sound like robots. We've developed social cues to tell others when we're going to speak, and as a listener, when those cues are missing, it just sounds like a bunch of words being mashed together rather than a conversation. The more seasoned you are at podcasting, the more annoying clipping can be (nails down a chalkboard, really).

I bring this up because I started reading THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I don't know why. I was struck by an overwhelming need to receive a full request from the partial that's out there. I wanted to make sure the three chapters that I sent are the best they can be. So I popped open my nook (I have a copy of the manuscript on there) and began reading with full confidence that I had knocked things out of the park. I received great feedback from beta readers, and I felt that I had really improved things before sending it on. I revised, I reread, I gave everything the thumbs up.

But you can miss things when you incorporate changes from multiple sources. Things blend together and even though you reread it, your brain might fill in holes with stuff that isn't there any more. Or you may change something and then change it again, not realizing that the second change doesn't quite fit.

I found three instances where the scene is clipped. I chopped stuff that had been too long, but now without any content, the transition doesn't make sense. It's not horrible. You can continue reading, but it's not smooth. It's clipped. And because this reading was spurred by a powerful need to succeed, my reaction is equally powerful. Oh no!!!1 Fingers crossed that the overall worth of the work survives the clipping.

As for you, give it a try next time you listen to DJs on the radio. You'll hear them breathing. It's a transitional sound that our brain recognizes even if we don't realize it. Make sure you have something similar in your writing after you edit.


1 OH NO!!!

Ink Failure

Up until 2006, you could look at me while at work and never know that I had a tattoo. Of course, at that time, I had eight tattoos. The only one that was ever visible was the one on the back of my neck and only then if I wore a shirt without a collar. It was at that point that I got a tattoo on each of my forearms.


This quote comes from a discussion on a role playing forum (Karl in response to a post by Bavix that was in turn a response to a post by Al Beddow). This statement pretty much defines my first 30 years of life. Of course, there are nuances to the statement that no one ever considers. There are plenty of ways to drop a hammer, not all of them nice for the person doing the dropping.


This one is an adaptation from a painting. I don't remember the artist. I'm told it's actually a poet who also painted scenes inspired by his poetry. In this case it was a gorgeous painting of a lion that I could not afford to buy. The righteous must be bold like a lion was written at the bottom. A modified the simile and here it is on my left arm.

The writing looks kind of odd on its own, so I decided to frame each saying. I had the below done in 2007. I lost my job the following year and decided that I would have the right arm finished once I had a full time job again.

The problem I'm running into now is finding a decent artist! I think the above knotwork is only okay. Certainly the artist who did my earlier work (Spider from Dreamcatcher in Columbia, MO) is far superior. My next design includes fire and it's shocking just how few artists can actually draw fire that doesn't look cartoony. The need for skill is exacerbated by the general attitude of tattoo businesses. They aren't businesses, they're artists who aren't good at doing anything else. Store hours are dependent on whether they feel like working when they wake up that morning/afternoon. 3/4 of them will try and cheat you. And unless you're a hot chick, they will approach you about a possible business transaction only if they feel like it. If there's a conversation about the crackwhore one of them fucked last night, you might be in for a long wait.

I have 11 total tattoos now and I'm about to get my 12th. It's hard enough coping with the not so subtle derision for being an office worker who gets tattoos (I started this before it was popular, assholes).  If you don't have sleeves, neck work, and a piercing through some non-standard body element, you're just a poser. Fine, I'll cope with that. I just want my tattoo. But when you try to rack up the bill because you think you're rebelling against the establishment, it insults me. Poor girls ahead of me were going to be charged $300 for lettering. FOR LETTERING! Are you crazy? I can see starting at $100. They come back at $50. You guys end up somewhere in between. But $300? For "Friendship"? You're out of your damn mind.

I really want a new tattoo, but the only artist I still trust is 1400 miles west of here. :(