A long week and a good book

I hate to have another three-day gap in my blogging, but in times like this I can kind of forgive myself.  It's been a long week, with an accreditation visit on Thursday in conjunction with 8 hours of substitute teaching for an injured instructor, followed by an accreditation report due on Friday that, in the end, only filled up 147 pages (I say "only" because by this point I'm kind of numb to it...the shipment yesterday brings the total pages for just this one agency in the past year to nearly 2600 pages of reporting).  I didn't even get to the end of month reports that were technically due on Friday; luckily on those I can sneak in and do them tomorrow when nobody is around, and most likely won't get yelled at. 

*sigh* the life of a Dean....

Anyway...the writing life of The Other Stephen King hasn't been all that exciting either.  Revising a story is entirely different from writing one, and so I've been slogging through seemingly endless pages of prose tightening up the language, cutting down on my use of synonyms for "said," finding adjective phrases to do the job better than jarring adverbs, etc.  It's productive as heck, and I think I'm pretty good at it, but the title of "editor" certainly isn't one I want anytime soon.  Those of you who do editing professionally, my hat's off to you.

At least my reading has been interesting.  I finally picked Water for Elephants back up from where I put it down several weeks ago. Part of the reason I put it down was that I had a lot of interesting books in the same stack to read, but the other part of the reason, the one I'm not sure I should admit, is really just jealousy.  I keep thinking of it as "the five million dollar book."  That's not precisely true, of course.  Sara Gruen did receive a five million dollar advance, but not for WfE...it was for the next two books after that.  And she received it in part because WfE did very, very, very, very well.  And that was because, as I'm learning now, it's a very, very, very, very good book.  Damn good, in fact. 

I'd read the prologue before I put it away in favor of the Darkover novel and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I have to say that the beginning scene didn't do an awful lot for me, mostly because I'm not much of a circus guy.  But I went to the next part a couple of days ago...and almost put it down again.  I'm not much of an old man scene guy either.  Yes, I know that some day I, too, will be forced to eat tasteless mush...if I'm lucky, that is.  But Gruen's description of the decision between eating corn on the cob and having sex was delightful, and she really does seem to have a good sense for what drives both old and young men. 

All that said, she knows how to characterize.  I think that's probably the biggest, most important thing I can say about the book.  After a little while--a very little while, in fact--I find myself laughing along with the main character, and feeling his pain in the appropriate places.  This experience, if nothing else, shows me how crucial it is to get the readers to know the characters in the book...unless, that is, it's a book about a pretty vampire and a well-built werewolf, but that's a subject for a different blog.  In any event, I look forward to continuing to see how the writing develops the character, and once I'm done, it'll be interesting to consider how the characterization process is different in first person versus third person writing. 

All that said...I know, I said that twice, but it makes sense here...it's time to get back to slogging through the editing job.  I think I'm going to skip around a little to make the job seem a little less tedious. 

Changes in tastes

I smooshed my car last week.  No, really...fact, not fiction.  It nearly made me cry.  My Hyundai Sonata that I purchased a mere seven months ago, and that was in beautiful condition, got the front all messed up.  Some lady was driving in front of me and had the audacity to stop in order to yield to the flow of traffic, and her car turned invisible and yanked out its tractor beam and MADE ME hit it from behind.

OK, that last bit might have a skosh of fiction in it.  So sue me; I'm an aspiring fantasy author.  It's what I do.

Luckily I'm old and crotchety enough that I carry good insurance.  I've been dealing with the same company, in fact, for longer than our kids have been on the planet, in part due to their amazing customer service.  The insurance company's amazing customer service, that is...not the children's.  Anyway, I got started with them back when they only served military officers and senior non-comm's, and they've always had the same strong service philosophy.  So...All gushing aside, anyway, they made it easy yesterday; I drove my car over to the body shop, they looked at it and said, "Nope, it's not safe to drive," and the good folks from the car rental company sent a driver to rescue me.  I'm now driving a rented Toyota Camry that's mine to use until my Sonata is all recuperated and healthy again. Which will hopefully be very, very soon.


From the outside, the Camry is virtually identical to my Sonata, except that it's gold instead of silver and there's no cool shark fin for satellite radio on the top.  According to the manufacturers' specs, the similarities run through nearly every dimension.  The two cars are less than an inch difference in wheelbase, overall length, and width, and they're identical in height.  Head room is close, leg room is within a few inches.  The engine is a little different, and boy, can I feel it.  Have you seen the commercial where a guy, who actually looks quite a bit like me, is driving a Sonata making all sorts of happyfaces?  Yeah, that's me when I drive my car.

I love my car.  The Camry, despite its similarities, doesn't feel right. I mean, they do the same thing, serve the same purpose, have the same parts even, but they're not the same. 


Wasn't always that way.  I once owned a truck.  In fact, I bought it brand new when Dodge's idea of putting a great big powerhouse of a V8 engine into a mid-sized truck was still a new thing.  For many years, I drove it proudly, and other trucks just didn't feel right.  Cars certainly didn't feel right.  I loved my Dakota.  Funny, isn't it, how my tastes have changed over the years.

My tastes in books are kind of the same story.  I've always had authors that I loved reading, and authors that I felt pretty ambivalent with, and authors whose work I really just didn't enjoy.  Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, was always in the first group; at one point, I owned and had devoured nearly every Darkover book that had been printed.  I felt the same for Isaac Asimov's works...didn't matter the subject.  He could be describing a far-off civilization in a make-believe empire, or discussing real, modern(ish) conundrums in astronomy...didn't matter.  I ate it up.  Piers Anthony was an interesting case.  I absolutely loved the Adept series and the Incarnations set, but I couldn't stand the Xanth novels.

Here's the thing...they all use the same parts of speech.  Every author uses nouns, verbs, adjectives, and yes, even adverbs, to create sentences which then coalesce into paragraphs which, over the course of several chapters, tell stories.  In Piers Anthony's case, it's even the same fingers on the same typewriter.  The cars I mentioned above have the same parts, the same dimensions, different feelings...books have the same parts, same dimensions, different feelings. 


Fast-forward to today, and I'm thinking I need to go back and re-read all of what I read once upon a time.  I just finished a Darkover novel, and...I don't know how to say this...MZB is a grand master, MZB is a grand master, MZB is a grand master...whatever, I didn't like it.  Sorry, MZB.  But I've run into other like/dislike things recently.  I didn't much like The Eye of the Needle when I was younger, but I enjoyed it greatly last month.  Other books that I might have enjoyed when I was younger, didn't make it through the first disc. 


I could probably analyze the difference if I wanted to get that technical.  I don't, though I have made a quick observation.  I recognized, for example, the same sentence structures in the MZB book that I've been going through ripping out of my own book.  It used to be the way I wrote...long flowing sentences that I wanted to think carried a lyrical air.  Problem is, I've spent too long lately immersed in a world where "terse prose" is praised.  N.K. Jemisin is a great example of this...her "voice," to use the standard writer-ish term, is very concise. I like it...both to read, and to write. 


It's funny, then, how our tastes change over the years.  And, at the same time, it's sad that my car isn't repaired yet...they had all last night with it, after all.  "Patience" is my middle name, so long as you don't look at my birth certificate for verification.


Yours patiently,

(PS...sorry for the multiple posts.  I just can't get the extra random spaces out of it)

Revising by the (text)book

One good thing about being a college dean in my day job is that I get more "review" or "desk" (aka "free") copies of books in my mailbox than you can throw a one-armed paperhanger with broken metaphors at.  The bad side of that is that most of them never actually get opened, and thus represent a waste of the poor trees that died to allow them to be printed.  Ferinstance, I'm not a Chemistry guy; stoichiometry makes me wish to stab #2 pencils into the eyes of whoever wrote the text I happen to have in front of me.  Yet because several months ago a publisher's agent and I had a discussion about a chemistry class that I didn't really want to offer in the first place, I now receive book after book on the topic.  Yes, I could send them back.  Yes, I should send them back.  Yes, sometimes I actually do send them back.  Usually, though, I just put them on my bookcase for the off chance that some day somebody will walk into my office and say, "Oh, goodie goodie, chemistry textbooks!  I was desperately seeking another chemistry textbook to read this weekend!" and I will be able to make him the happiest chemistry geek on the planet.  Which probably isn't all that grand, come to think of it, but hey, I usually hope for small but achievable things.

Today, in what should completely not surprise you by this point in the blog, I received a "free" book that actually sounded interesting to read.  I opened the package to find The Bedford Guide for College Writers, 9th Ed.  Oooh, a writing text!  This whole time, the majority of my learning has been from two sources: first, random and sometimes unknown people posting valid-sounding information to unverifiable web pages; and second, what some people call the School of Hard Knocks, where I pick a topic based on something I'm actually doing, right or wrong, or something I'm actually reading, right or wrong.  These are actually kinda tough learning sources, as it were.  In the case of the former, there's a TON of information out there, and I have to assume that some of it is correct.  I also, of course, have to assume the opposite.  The trick, then, is to figure out which case a site belongs to.  I've discovered a nearly foolproof method for this, but read the next part only if you want the spoiler: I say "eenie meenie miney moe" and then ask myself if I believe the site.  If the answer is yes, then it's clearly a case of either truth or lack thereof.  That wisdom aside...in the case of the latter, it can be tough to really determine how much of what we learn in the School of Hard Knocks (SOHK for short, which is an interesting acronym, yes?) is true. 

So...bring on the texts.  The joy of textbooks is that they're peer reviewed, which means that many experts in the field looked through it after the first expert wrote it.  There's a funny story about peer review, in fact, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, regarding when he served on a curriculum review committee for math education in California.  Everybody on the committee ranted and raved about how wonderful a three-volume set was, which left Mr. Feynman baffled because Books 2 and 3 had been shipped with blank pages.  Not some blank pages, mind you...two covers, and a table of contents, and the entirety of the book blank for each one.  Hey, I've been in education long enough to agree with the assertion that most math students would get as much out of that as they would out of texts with actual squiggly things printed on the pages, but apparently it bothered Feynman.  I guess I must admit that it would bother me in any topic other than math, a subject whose students would rather eat a live zombie one limb at a time than open the actual textbook, and this, then, lends some suspicion to the veracity of peer review. 

All that notwithstanding, I got a book today.  It was a textbook, and it was on writing.  Hallelujah!  I couldn't wait to open it once I got home, in part because I knew that by the time I opened it I would have a cold beer in my hand, but also because I wanted to see what was inside its 903 pages of wisdom. 

Where to start?  Since I'm doing revision, I decided, I should start in the chapter on revision.  All...hmm...18 pages on it.  I was already confused...revision is one of the most important things I do, I think.  Yet the topic only merits 18 of 903 pages?  Two percent?  Yeah, it makes for kind of crappy milk, too.  Still, the number of pages doesn't always indicate the relative importance, so I dove in. 

The contents were really relatively straightforward, and...well, what I already knew.  For example, in the "revising for purpose and thesis" section, it asks:

• Does each part of your essay directly relate to your thesis?
• Does each part of your essay develop and support your thesis?
• Does your essay deliver everything your thesis promises?

Good questions, really, whether you assign the word "essay" or "novel" to them.  Then again, they're covered on nearly every Writing101.com/org/net/info/xmen/whatever page that exists.  Does every part of the novel advance the storyline?  Does each part support the storyline?  Bottom line: does it tell a dang good story? 

The rest of the chapter, sadly, reads the same way.  This book?  Going back to work to sit on that bookshelf, hoping that a writer comes in one day and says, "Oh, goodie goodie, a writing textbook!  I was desperately seeking another writing textbook to read this weekend!" and I will be able to make him the happiest writing geek on the planet. 

Fight scenes

If we assume for the moment that a topic's relative importance is indicated by the relative frequency with which people discuss it...an assumption clearly invalidated in today's news by counting the relative frequency of mentions of the economy versus Sarah Palin's knowledge of Paul Revere's ride, but let's just go with it for now...if we do, then we know that writing fight scenes is one of the most important aspect of literary pursuits.  There seem to be hundreds of pages out there where people tell us how to tell them the story of a fight.  The advice varies in scope, too, from a detailed discussion of planning and mapping the fight out (including figuring out how high the ceilings are if weapons are involved) to "go read R.A. Salvatore's fight scenes." Not that there's anything wrong with Salvatore's fight scenes, of course, but the advice is a bit anti-helpful.  Unsurprising, really, since quite a few of those sites describe fight scene prose creation as a difficult task. 

With as many experts as there seem to be on the topic, though, how could anybody still think it difficult?

OK, that was a bit snide.  Any writing is difficult.  Creating effective fight scenes?  Difficult.  Creating effective sex scenes?  Difficult.  Creating effective dialogue scenes?  Difficult.  Creating effective difficult scenes?  Difficult!  But what I don't understand is why it apparently seems so much more difficult to write fight scenes.  They really don't seem too hard compared to any other writing.

Come to think of it, most of the instructional sites read much the same as sites detailing other aspects of writing.  "Show, don't tell," is a common mantra in both groups of sites, for example.  Don't use the same word or sentence structure over and over, either, unless that word is "said."  Those two suggestions seem to pretty well set up most effective writing, really.  Some of the forums I saw in my research for this post had people complaining that their fight scenes read like this: "He swung.  Then he swung.  Then he swung.  Then he swung...."  If you focus on describing the scene, rather than just telling about the swings...thus, showing, not telling...you avoid the repetitiveness.  One site had a very effective combat-specific way to think of prose generation: each action in combat has a reaction.  The hero swings, the villain blocks.  The villain swings, the hero goes down in a heap of gore and blood.  Or whatever.  But fighting isn't just a matter of "I hit you, I hit you, I hit you," unless you're fighting a punching bag. 

So what about rhythm?  I used to, as a kid, read fantasy books with battle scenes, imagining a sort of rhythmic dance that the combatants get into.  It makes good fantasy, I guess, but...it doesn't really happen like that.  Granted, I'm not the world's greatest expert in actual combat.  I'm a Combat Veteran, thanks to my participation in Desert Storm, but as far as I know I've never had a real bullet fired at me in anger.  I've been in plenty of mock battles, though, and I have to tell you that peering down the wrong end of the main gun on a tank belonging to your foe is an emotional moment, even if the foe is what the Army calls OpFor, for Opposing Force, in training exercises.  I've also stood toe to toe with guys (and girls) in the boxing ring, the wrestling ring, and close quarters combat stations.  One key observation: girls are mean, man.  Don't fight them if you don't have to.  But more to the point of this post: combat doesn't have a rhythm.  If it does for you, then you're about to get beaten because the other guy is gonna recognize your patterns. 

That said, the writing about combat must take on a rhythm of its own, to a certain extent, but that's true of all writing.  Specifically with combat, you as the writer want to build suspense and keep the action going, and the way to do that is with short sentences.  Thus, combat writing has to, as much as or more so than other writing, be lean and crisp.  The fewer words you can describe an action in, the better you'll be. 

And...that's about the extent of what I know of combat writing.  Hopefully I'm up to the task of doing it well.  None of my reviewers have really complained about the combat, though, so I guess if nothing else I do it better than sex scenes...which really isn't saying a lot. 

Till later! 

A synonym for (censored)

The book revising is going along at a quick clip; I'm already a quarter of the way through.  I think I'm...no, really, I know I'm significantly improving the story.  For one thing, there's the language.  I really don't know why I wrote so much crap earlier, and I also don't know why all that crap made it through three revisions up to now.  Here's an example:

Wordless assent rippled through the crowd as the thrakkoni approached.  RJ admired their beauty.  Each of them was perfect.  Perfect eyes, perfect skin, perfect muscle tone…everything.  Their gait was lithe and smooth, and RJ realized as he watched them move as a group without any of their heads bobbing up and down that he was bothered a little by their uniformity.  Not only did they all walk alike, but they also all wore the same style clothing.  Each, regardless of gender, was clad in trousers over simple sandals with a wrap-around tunic tied at the waist by a cord.  He wondered to himself what manner of creature they were.  Before he had time to ponder it much, though, the thrakkonis’ long strides brought them to the group, at which point they all stopped, kneeled, and bowed as one, foreheads touching the soft billowing grass on the hillside. 

Here's the improved version:

As the thrakkoni approached, several people whistled softly in admiration.  Each of them was perfect.  Perfect eyes, perfect skin, perfect muscle tone…everything.  Their gait was lithe and smooth, and their long strides quickly brought them to the group surrounding Matt.  They all stopped, kneeled, and bowed as one, foreheads touching the soft billowing grass on the hillside.

Here's the significant changes.  First, nobody really gives a crap what RJ thinks by this point.  He was never really meant to be a major character, and after the first scene he's really just a plot device I use to show how little patience Matt has for dumbassedness.  So...took him out of the point of view.   Also, nobody really cares what the thrakkoni are wearing.  You will, later, by the way, when they all strip down for a particular reason, but for now, does their wearing a wrap-around tunic tied at the waist by a cord mean anything to a group of folks who have just landed somewhere strange?  Nah.  Finally, everybody at this point is wondering what manner of creature the thrakkoni are.  Why rub the readers' noses in that wondering? 

Oh, yeah, and what the hell is "wordless assent" and how does it ripple through a crowd?  Snip...gone. 

With all this tightening of wording, then, you'd think the book had gotten smaller. It has, but not by a lot.  After ripping excess words out of a quarter of it, ish, it's down by about 100 words.  That's it.  But that's because I'm adding as I'm taking away.  There were several great questions my reviewers asked, and I'm endeavoring to answer them by grafting in short stubs of text at just the right spots.  It's harder than it sounds.  First, you have to find just the right spot.  Second, you have to figure out what the text is that you should graft in, and in my case, I have to keep in mind that I tend to add too many crap words.  Third, there's always changes you have to make before and after the addition to make the new text flow correctly in the now-altered conversation.  It's tricky and takes a bit of thought, but it's making the story better. 

For example, a couple of people asked why Crystal never asked about her daughters' status as demigods.  I really hadn't thought of it before; in my deity system, demigods don't exist, so the question never really occurred to me.  It would, however, occur to Crystal, who is having this whole deity system thrust right smack into her face to deal with all at once.  So I added it, and then moved on to the next question I hadn't thought of.  Overall, I'm thinking I may actually end up adding a little bit of length to the story. 

The other thing I did just now was add a sex scene.  Ick.  Not ick over sex, but ick over writing sex.  This book isn't a romance novel, and I ain't a romance novelist.  Several weeks ago I blogged about the joy of writing about sex, and there really isn't any in my world.  But several people pointed out, rightfully so, that I have this couple who's been married for fifteen years, and I toss them into a very stressful situation, and then I don't show a lot of intimacy between them.  OK, fine. 

But...one of my most commonly-used writing tools is Google; I'll, for example, be describing the color of Sorscha's hair, which is silver, and then I'll realize that I'm saying the word silver way too much.  Thus, I open my old friend and type "synonym for silver" and see what I get.  It's really quite useful, because instead of using one thesaurus at a time, I'm using several.  It just doesn't work really well for some words, like "clitoris."  Hey, it's a body part, and it's an important one when you're having (or describing) sex.  But it's kind of silly sounding when you use the A&P terms for the body parts in telling a sex story...for me, it reminds me of when my dad gave me "the talk," a few years too late, and described it in terms like penis and vagina.  Maybe that works for some, but when I've Googled "how to write a sex scene" that's nearly always one of the prescribed no-nos. 

The problem is, I also don't wanna use the Hustler-esque terms.  You know what I'm talking about..."little button of passion" or, for the guy, "one eyed trouser mouse."  That crap just makes me laugh when I read it.  I asked my wife, who has read romance books in the past, and got some ideas for words that are lodged somewhere on the spectrum of linguistic expression between "penis" and "dual-engine pocket rocket," but...this whole business of writing about lovemaking totally creeps me out.  I just want to make sure you know that.  When/if the book comes out, you'll be reading along and see the short slide into a bedroom scene, and you'll know, "Hey, Evan was creeped out here." 

Till laters....

Thoughts, Narration, and Point of View

The statue of the Greek goddess looking over her shoulder at her butt looked funny to Crystal.

The statue of the Greek goddess looking over her shoulder at her butt looks funny, thought Crystal.

The statue of the Greek goddess looking over her shoulder at her butt looked funny to Crystal, Matt saw.

As I get farther into what can only be described as Mad Writing Skilz (OK, not true...it can also be described as not sucking at storytelling), I hit on the sometimes subtle distinction between thoughts and narration.  Dialogue is, of course, something I've blogged about ad nauseum, and thoughts are kind of a small subset of that.  Specifically, dialogue is a conversation between two people, monologue is a conversation involving just one person, and thoughts are an unspoken monologue.  Happens all the time in real life, doesn't it?  I've had entire conversations with myself in my own head without ever speaking anything aloud, honestly, and so I have to come to one of two conclusions: either a) I'm normal and so all my normal characters will have the same mental monologues going on sometimes, or b) I'm stark raving mad and so all my stark raving mad characters will have the same mental monologues going on sometimes.  There are, of course, a lot fewer mad characters in my book, but I have to lean toward option a) anyway because, if it's b), then...well, why worry what people think of my book? 

Part of the issue, then, is when to use a character's thoughts to tell the ongoing story and when to use narration, which is by far a simpler method where I, as the guy writing the book, tell the story in the wonderful third party past tense that I've been using.  However, there's another part of the issue...point of view.  I've discussed that a touch already, since it's an important aspect of storytelling.  In a nutshell, as an author of a third person story I'm not beholden to any one particular point of view, but it is kind of expected that I'm not going to flippity flop between them.  In other words, I'm not supposed to tell you what Crystal is thinking one moment and then what Bob is thinking the next, and then the next paragraph tell you what Matt is thinking (matter of fact, you'll find, if you ever read the story, that I NEVER tell you what Matt is thinking.  That's on purpose).  Were I to let you in on what everybody's thinking, that would seem like God mode, honestly.  Even MZB put limits on the telepathic variety of laran.  It would just...feel...wrong. 

Writing.com has a good, short article on how to write the thoughts of a character.  Most of their suggestions snap in to other comments and warnings I've read about various aspects of writing.  Don't snap the reader out of the sense of tense.  Don't annoy the reader with too many Tags of Redundancy (he thought...he thought...he thought...he thought...done well, it's pretty dang obvious that the text written is what the character thought).  And only use direct "quotations," if specifically worded thoughts can be called that, if they actually add to the story. 

Still working on getting the text "just right," so back to it now.....

Thank God for the blogging

As I blogged last, the time has come for me to switch from writing to revising mode.  I've been slogging through the Part 1/Book 1 draft I wrote...and revised, twice, actually...as a result, starting along the path of making it publishable.  And you know what?  It stinks. 

Of course, I've been told that by several of my beta readers, in much nicer words.  There were quite a few wonderful people who ran through the entirety of the draft and were willing to write about all the things they didn't like about it.  Trust me, those literary saints will be mentioned in my Acknowledgements page if I ever get this mess published.  It takes persistence to read through something that is written poorly, and it takes courage to tell your friend that his poop stinks worse than he thinks it does already, and I am proud to say I have many friends with both persistence and courage. 

So yeah...it really does stink.  It's funny, actually.  I enjoyed writing it a lot.  I enjoyed reading it (though I now know that was mostly because I knew what the story was supposed to be).  I enjoyed revising it.  But along the way, I made a LOT of errors.  I said "said" in a lot of different ways--four on the first page alone--instead of just using the word "said."  I mixed up my point of view.  I wrote a horribad Prologue...really, I did.  I mean, it really is just crap, the whole thing.  Was, anyway.

Hopefully, if you've been following this blog as closely as I have, you know now how bad all of that stuff is.  Frankly, writing the blog has provided the education I needed to gain in order to understand, really, what stinks about bad writing and what is good about decent writing.  It's helped me, through the research I've done, come to grips with the enormous task that is telling a story. 

Now, I'm not saying I'm perfect.  Nor am I saying I'm going to knock this one out of the park.  But I do know that what comes out of this revision can't help but be much better than the crap I wrote at first. 

So...back to revisions.  And, as I go along, blogging.  Because blogging is fun.