Balls and Walnuts
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Fictional characters adrift in the uncanny valley
Think about the times you’ve wanted to scream at a character in a book or movie, “No, that’s all wrong!” I’m not talking about characters who, in the interest of the plot, seem to have had their brains replaced with tapioca. I’m referring to those times when a character who felt so real to you a moment ago now . . . doesn’t. The former situation is all too common, because lazy writing is everywhere. Author Staci McLaughlin at The Ladykillers suggested two reasons for The Stupid Move: the author may want to heighten the suspense (as in Alien, when the crew insists on splitting up), or she could be stubbornly wedded to her writing. Laziness either way, really.
It's not like they teach you these things in school, after all.
The latter situation may be a unique problem of good writers. How can you leave a reader or viewer in open-mouthed shock at your* criminal lapse of judgment if you haven’t created a convincing character in the first place? You can’t. You have to have the skills to create a living, breathing, fictional being before you can make the error of turning that being into something not quite human. If you make that slip, if your character says something he’d never say, or does something he’d never do, or fails to say or do something the reader expects him to say or do, then he has just fallen into the uncanny valley.
My most challenging patient
As any pediatrician will tell you, the scary thing about infants and toddlers is how fast they can go down the tubes. Humans are complex systems held in check by a variety of buffers and homeostatic feedback loops (there! four years of med school in 16 words), and the smaller the human, the more delicate those buffers and feedback loops. It doesn’t take much to go from eating-drinking-pooping to starving-dehydrated-feverish when you only weigh eight pounds.
How much worse, then, to weigh a fraction of a pound?
This week, our ferret Buehler (named by DCR in this contest, and pictured below — as a much younger weasel) went from eating-drinking-pooping to starving-dehydrated-feverish overnight. I noticed the problem in the morning, and by the time I got home in the afternoon, he looked moribund. We lost Buehler’s pal Harmonica last year, possibly because I underestimated how fast these little guys can plunge. And Harmonica only had an eye infection, whereas Buehler looked much, much worse.
I dithered on the question of taking him to the vet. He looked hopeless. He lay motionless in my arms, breathing fast, hot as a poker. I was able to get him to drink some water, but not much, and he wouldn’t take any food.
Makes it that much more real
Working with 99designs has been a fun experience. I didn’t get a huge number of designers, possibly because my brief called for several character models. That had to have been a lot of work. But I did attract some great talent, and I am very, very happy with the finished product from designer Soheil Toosi:
Let me know what you think, but remember, I love it and will bite to the bone anyone who disagrees with me. (But do let me know if this does not display well on your browser. I have a wide screen, so I tend to max things out quite a bit.)
For those of you who have an earlier version of the manuscript: if this cover art encourages you to get readin’, let me know, and I’ll email you the most recent version.
Back to editing! Eventually, I’ll have to stop fussing.
D.
The Twitter
Don’t laugh . . . I don’t think I owned a cell phone until 2004.
Since this blog is my auxiliary memory, I’m going to catalog useful Twitter links in this post. Feel free to add useful links in the comments, and if you want to “follow” me (isn’t that what the kids say? I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chased them off my lawn), I’m dshoffman. That’s what I’ve decided to use as a by-line, too: D. S. Hoffman. Sex-neutral, so I can pub the romance!
On second thought, maybe I don’t want that romance traceable back to me.
How to find the best Twitter hashtags (includes link to “how to use hashtags“).
Another “best hashtags” link.
And yet another, this one aimed for writers.
Google search on using Twitter to promote your book. Because you know how easy it is to forget to Google.
More to come, I suspect.
D.
Frontier psychiatrist: the samples
Remember when folks used to gush over Moby’s sampling techniques? I’ll bet Moby never sampled a John Waters movie . . .
D.
Frontier psychiatrist
I challenge you to watch this without your jaw dropping. Probably several times.
D.
The books we don’t read
I dreamed last night that I heard a big van pull up outside my house, and something heavy hit the ground. Went outside and found a huge shipment from Amazon — hundreds of paperbacks delivered to me on two large wooden thingies (damn, what are they called, those squarish wooden platforms that heavy stuff sits on?) All of ’em, authors whose names I didn’t recognize. A la Roy Scheider, I thought, “We’re gonna need a bigger bookshelf.” Didn’t give one second’s thought to how I’d find the time to read them.
I’ve been bad about this for some time now. A quick perusal of my library reveals I’m especially lazy in reading short story collections and nonfiction. It’s rare for me to leave long fiction unread, although Michael Moorcock’s Elric series lies dormant (never really grabbed me), and I never quite finished Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth. But short story collections? I have Gogol, Chekhov, Maugham (to name three off the top of my head). Maureen McHugh’s Mothers and Other Monsters, from which I enjoyed the first story, but never managed to reopen. Library of America collections from Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Dashiell Hammett. And in nonfiction, I could go on and on . . . numerous popular science books, Sara Benincasa’s memoir, T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (which exists unread in my library, as well as on my Nook).
I regard this as a form of shopaholism. See it, want it, buy it. A very mild form of the disease, given that my birthday prezzy Barnes and Noble gift certificate (from my sister) still lies unused . . .
D.
A singular lack of catharsis
For the last four years, I’ve had this court case hanging over my head. Now, despite the fact that this incarnation of Balls and Walnuts is not open to search engine spiders, I probably ought to be careful what I say. No names, for example. But the circumstances were plain enough: I was named as one of the defendants because my name appeared on the chart, not because I actually did anything to the patient.
Well, that was part of the problem — they said I should have done something. But I was in the OR when I got called (yeah, that’s the connection — the ER doc wrote in the chart that I’d been called and was unavailable). My patient was under anesthesia, and we had a policy stating that we MDs were responsible for patients under anesthesia, since our hospital had no supervising MD anesthesiologist. So if we buy the plaintiff’s argument, I should have abandoned my patient to respond to the call.
We prevailed. No money from yours truly. The case dragged on until jury selection was completed, and then the plaintiff settled with the other parties, and the case against me was dismissed with prejudice.
I expected some sort of catharsis, and it never came. Not even a sigh of relief. Perhaps it was because this whole game of will-they-settle, won’t-they-settle had persisted for the entire week, and indeed, had gone on for months before that. Or perhaps it was because, like so many such things (see: Santa Rosa), I take this shit way too personally. By the time the decision came down, I was already sleep-deprived and more stressed out than I’d been in a good long time. My sleep pattern, never what you would call normal, had become aberrant in the extreme (unless you’re my son, in which case, my sleeping pattern had become quite natural, thank you very much). My lawyer will never know how lucky he was that I never took the stand. God only knows what I would have babbled.
So, I’m home now. I’ve been home for the past 10 days, and I keep thinking, “Get over it already. Write a damn blog or something.” And here we are.
By the way: after the first day, I called my wife to tell her how different this was from Law & Order-type courtroom dramas. “Nothing is dramatic,” I told her. “It’s all terribly predictable, and in fact, everything seems designed to be boring.” Then the very next day, something dramatic happened: some anonymous person turned in to the hospital some stuff he or she had printed out from the internet. The plaintiff had done the social media thing, blabbing about this very case, dropping names etc. The surprising thing is, this seemed to change very little about the case — she has her right to say whatever she wants to say, after all. But was this a bit of unexpected drama? You bet.
Weird. It would even have been interesting, this experience, had I not been one of the worms writhing on the hook.
D.
Done! No, really.
I’ve finished the first major pass-through and I’ve sent the manuscript off to my betas. These are all folks who have expressed an interest in seeing the manuscript, so if I’ve overlooked you, let me know. It’s a bit big, 138K words. Sadly, I was not able to pare it down. I cut out at least three or four thousand words, but added back another three or four thousand.
The edit took a month less than a month. I’m pretty jazzed about that, considering I finished The Brakan Correspondent in — what? 2004 or 2005? — and have yet to finish editing past the fourth chapter.
I’m finishing just in time, too, since Terraria and Torchlight 2 are threatening to consume my life.
D.
What I’ve learned
A few times along the way, I’ve felt it necessary to write down what I thought was going to happen.
Once was at the beginning — first in August 2011, and again on 9/1/11, just before I started writing. I’ve reviewed those docs and the only thing that has any correspondence to the finished product: the names of the protagonist and her grandfather, and the basic setting (America, near future, highest level of the government). The current plot is a distant cousin to the original.
A doc I wrote six weeks before finishing, when I was trying to get a better handle on the ending? Still has little resemblance to the true ending.
What I’ve learned from this: it’s all well and good to write notes, but it’s no substitute for writing the novel.
For my readers, here’s an example of something from a year ago that has no connection with the finished story.
the US elects a president who is a progressive, and who is interesting in many ways: he is the youngest president ever, he is Jewish, single (his wife died perhaps 18 mos prior to his election to the presidency), brash and honest to a fault, quite apolitical. His candidacy was deemed DOA but when the front-runner flames out in a homosexual sex scandal and the second-to-the-front-runner is assassinated (he is black, and the racist elements don’t want to see another black president), our Jewish candidate manages to win the nomination.
That was my protagonist one year ago. He’s long gone.
D.