Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Harriet Miers has a blog, Michelle Duggar fulfills her destiny yet again, & more linkage
File this under: Damn, why didn’t I think of that first?
I’ve been pissing myself laughing for the last half hour reading the Harriet Miers blog. For you non-Americans, Harriet Miers is Dubya’s most recent pick for U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Her main qualification seems to be her near total lack of qualifications. But who knew she had a blog?
Elsewhere in the political humor realm: Jurassic Pork has hatched a great meme in today’s President Magoo post. Bush as Magoo: blindness explains a great deal. JP’s Assclowns of the Week (yesterday’s post) is a fine read, too.
Note to any newbies: I’m a Berkeley boy, and my political leanings are a bit to the left of Ted Kennedy. If you’re at the opposite end of the spectrum, don’t bother to follow those links. It’ll only piss you off.
The next ones are filed under: Hey, that ain’t funny, that’s serious!
My beloved added to her blog last night with Burning Bush (sorry, no sexual double entendres there).
Last but not least, if any of you haven’t checked out Jeff Huber’s blog Pen and Sword, today’s post is excellent: Taking Back Our Country.
I’m not feeling terribly creative tonight. I had to run in to the hospital at 3:30 AM to take care of an emergency, so I’m feeling a wee bit post-call. I really really hope my patient doesn’t give me a repeat performance tonight, for her sake and mine.
Today is Yom Kippur. There’s a Jewish concept, pikuakh nefesh, which means “to save a soul”. It’s a great loophole for doctors. It means we can work on holidays and the Sabbath if we’re saving lives, because life is more important than the law (which is to say, The Law).
If you’re a regular here, you know what a half-assed Jew I am. While I might be able to justify working on Yom Kippur, I can’t justify fressing all day. It would take a lawyer of Talmudic proportions to claim I had to eat those coconut-covered brownies to keep up my strength, right? Right.
Half-assed or full-assed, I’m aware of the holiday nonetheless, and atonement is on my mind. I’d thought about blogging on my inability to let go of grudges, which I suspect is one of my nastier sins. I may still do that some day soon. Consider it a belated Yom Kippur post. For now, I’m more focused on eating dinner, waiting the requisite three hours, and then going to sleep.
Have I mentioned that I’m thinking of NaNoWriMoing? I’d like to blame it on peer pressure, but to be truthful, I’d rather be writing new stuff than editing my BFN (Big Fat Novel, which sounds a whole lot less stuck-up than magnum opus).
Anyone else doing the NaNoWriMo shuffle? We ought to cheer each other on.
Michelle Duggar, she of the iron uterus, popped today. Remember the Duggars? Johanna Faith Duggar is number sixteen. From the Seattle Post Intelligencer article (Intelligencer. WTF kinda word is that?):
“Their children include two sets of twins, and each child has a name beginning with the letter “J”: Joshua, 17; John David, 15; Janna, 15; Jill, 14; Jessa, 12; Jinger, 11; Joseph, 10; Josiah, 9; Joy-Anna, 8; Jeremiah, 6; Jedidiah, 6; Jason, 5; James, 4; Justin, 2; Jackson Levi, 1; and now Johannah.”
Look carefully at that list: Janna, Joy-Anna, Johannah. They’re not even trying to come up with unique J names for their girls.
Reminds me of our friend Kira, who used to call her parents “parental units”. I think the Duggars need to be honest and call their daughters “reproductive unit [number]”, in which case Johanna Faith is reproductive unit 6. Oops, I mean 7. I forgot Mrs. Duggar — she’s not done yet!
D,
Editing update
Like my pal Michelle, I’m editing my fat mothah manuscript. I punched it in earnest this morning and revamped the prologue, turning it into chapter one. This involved selecting the word “Prologue”, deleting it, and typing “ONE”. Aah. The feeling of accomplishment.
But seriously, folks. I can’t dredge much humor out of the editing process, so I’d rather not post on it too frequently. Here’s the plan. I’ll put up a ditsy graphic on my right sidebar, and I’ll post the stats in this entry, which I will update as needed. Aforementioned ditsy graphic shall be linked to this post.
Debi, you’re probably the only one who gives a damn about this, since you’re fool enough to want to read TBC a second time.
One other thing. I’m still feeling a bit shaky on this prologue — erm, Chapter One. If there are any TBC virgins out there who would like to read a 4600 word first chapter and give me feedback, email me privately. Let me know what file types you can read. (I don’t need a line crit. A simple “this works for me, this doesn’t” will do.)
10/16/05: Slow-going. I’ve been working over Chapter One, trying to get it just right. Many thanks to those of you who sent me your comments on this chapter; I think I’ve incorporated a great deal of those suggestions.
10/22/05: I finished Chapters Four and Five, which includes Bare Rump’s first POV chapter. She’s such a wonderful character.
10/23/05: I finished Chapters Six and Seven. Looking gloomily forward to next weekend, when we move back into our Harbor house. I doubt I’ll have much chance to edit during the move.
D.
NYTBR Odds and Ends
I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Heinlein (I think I hit the limit with Stranger in a Strange Land), but it’s nearly impossible to read SF without becoming aware of Heinlein’s influence. He’s a controversial figure. Over the years, folks have accused him of being sexist, racist, fascist, you name it.
In this week’s New York Times Book Review back page essay, author M.G. Lord argues that Heinlein’s earlier work qualifies him as a feminist (Heinlein’s Female Troubles, NYTBR 10/2/05). It’s an interesting (and well written) essay, and I encourage you folks to take a look at it, even if you are not SF fans.
Elsewhere in the NYTBR: Eric Weinberger reviews George Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil without ever using the words science and fiction in close proximity of one another. The plot is plainly SF (um . . . all the action takes place on another planet, and concerns a variety of weird aliens), so what’s up? Weinberger chooses to call it satire.
I don’t know if I have a problem with this.
I asked Karen yesterday, “When are you going to blog again?” Since we’re an old married couple, she heard me when I telepathically added, “You know, you’ll never build your readership if you only blog once a week.”
“I’m not blogging to get more readers,” she said. “I do it to help organize my thoughts.”
I suppose that’s what I’m doing right now — trying to figure out how I feel about this. As SF writers, should we cheer when one of our own gets reviewed in the NYTBR, even if the SF-word isn’t used? Should we give Margaret Atwood a big stage wink when she slams science fiction?
Okay, Romance lovers: do you have a Margaret Atwood in your ranks, i.e., an author who aspires towards the literary and shuns the Romance label, even though that’s exactly what she is writing? How do you feel about her? (Or him. As Stephen has taught me, there’s a few blokes out there.)
Here’s what I think. Although some science fiction novels are written purely for escapism, many authors are writing social commentary. Hell, a good novel can do both. Just because the author has something to say — as Atwood did in The Handmaid’s Tale — the novel should not automatically pass Go, collect $200, and rate as satire (don’t nobody say SF).
If “genre” has any utility at all, it’s to help the reader know what to expect. To me, “serious literary fiction” is, as I mentioned to Pat recently, “boring pointless stories about characters with boring pointless lives who, in their inevitable epiphanies, find meaning in said lives.” The last thing I want is for a bunch of truly excellent SF writers to worm their way into the ranks of those literary doofuses. Because, you know something? If they do, I’m not reading them any more.
Thank heavens Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music was filed in SF. That’s all I’m saying.
D.
Porking the zeitgeist
About the time I began Shatter, I read this old piece by Bruce Sterling, wherein he explains why his blogging days were numbered:
To my mind, blogging is like stand-up comedy — it’s a performance art. In that line of biz, you should always do your best to scamper off the boards while they still want more.
No, I’m not thinking of calling it quits. I’m merely reflecting how very weird this business is, and how Sterling’s assessment is right on the money. We’re all a bunch of stand-up comics. Some of you folks are channeling Steve Martin, while the rest of us are getting booed out of Open Mike Night at the Y.
What makes a humor blog outrageously successful? Tapping into the zeitgeist, that’s the conventional wisdom. Not only does the blogger offer his audience something they can’t find elsewhere, but also, they believe they want this ‘something’ desperately. Whether they really need it or not is beside the point. Did anyone really need Wonkette’s below-the-Beltway gossip? No. But it felt so good.
Yeah, it’s about entertainment, and there are as many ways to entertain people as there are people. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the humor which really sizzles is the stuff that not only taps the zeitgeist but gives it a thorough all-night porking. Take this remixed movie trailer to The Shining (which I plugged a few days ago, but y’all were sleeping): it works because it riffs off the rigidly formulaic style which seems to possess all movie trailers these days. Unless you’ve never been to a theater or watched trailers on television, you’ll recognize the satire. And if you’re familiar with The Shining, the joke is complete.
Maybe this is a tough gig for me because I don’t watch network TV, nor do I watch the videos on MTV (do they even show videos, still?) or listen to pop music on the radio. Between rentals and going to the theater, we probably see less than twelve movies a year. And so I’d love to be porking the zeitgeist, but hey, the zeitgeist and me, we don’t have much to talk about these days.
That’s why I need to win the lottery: so I can quit my day job and do nothing but go to the movies, watch TV, read People, scratch my ass, and write the funny stuff.
Oh . . . and, by the way? Just thought you ought to know that I’m Bikini Bettie.
You’re Bikini Bettie, you love being warm and
cheery. Hanging out with your friends is great
because your so fun to be around!
Which Bettie Page Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
D.
Various and sundry
We’re watching a Xena: Warrior Princess marathon on Logo, a network dedicated to gay viewers. I always knew there was something special about those Gabriele-Xena bath scenes. Hey, I was just looking for the soap.
Maureen is hosting a 72-er at Writer’s BBS. Kinda like the NFG 69-er, but with three more words. Click on over if you want to read; if you want to play, you’ll need to join Writer’s BBS, but hey, it’s free.
I finished my first read-through-and-edit on my novel, The Brakan Correspondent. It took a while — 651 single-spaced pages, and I can only get some decent editing time in on weekends. Now for the last step (I hope): I need to fix all the problems I’ve found on the first read-through. I’ll be losing scenes, adding others, patching plot holes, axing evil wases, and replacing as many lame speaker attributions as I can with action tags.
At the risk of sounding arrogant (of course, when has that ever bothered me?), I think this story is something special. I’m feeling confident an agent will pick this up and get it published. Will it make it into Paperback Writer’s 2% that sell more than 5000 copies? Hey, right now I’m high enough on it that I can see it pushing LaHaye’s Left Behind schlockfest off the shelves.
Ya gotta dream big.
D.
Adventures in story space
Hands up, people: who out there understands Hilbert space?
Karen, if you wave your arm any more vigorously it’s going to fall out of its socket. Good heavens, you’re not in high school anymore. Show some dignity.
For the rest of you (other than my quantum mechanically ept* wife), Hilbert space is a mathematical concept which has great utility in quantum mechanics. Here’s the relevant bit from Wikipedia:
In quantum mechanics for example, a physical system is described by a complex Hilbert space which contains the “wavefunctions” that stand for the possible states of the system.
There. Doesn’t that help?
Let me bring this down to earth before I lose every last one of you. I believe there is a theoretical story space which is a fictional analog to Hilbert space. In other words, there’s a ‘space’ out there where all stories exist side by side. Mathematically, the story space S is defined thus
Let me ask an easier question: any Jorge Luis Borges fans out there? (At the very least, Gabriele should be waving her hand.) Do you remember his story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”? Here’s a quick reminder from enotes:
In the form of a scholarly article, it tells of one Pierre Menard, a French symbolist recently deceased, who had undertaken the absurd task of rewriting Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a product of his own creativity.
This story — as well as a few others in Borges’ stable — convinced me that Borges believed in story space. Pierre Menard didn’t want to write just any Don Quixote; he wanted to write THE Don Quixote, word for word. Imagine picking up a grain of sand, then tossing it down again, not just on any beach but on any random beach in the world. Picking out that same grain of sand is considerably more likely than accomplishing Menard’s task.
What’s the point? Well, we’re not plucking just any story out of story space. We want the good ones, the ones that are entertaining, that perhaps bear a kernel of truth, that convince us we’re a little bit better for having read it. But — and here’s the real point — near every good story, there exists an infinite number of close cousins, some of whom are even better.
The trick, I think, is to never lose sight of this fact. To use “A Pirate’s Dilemma” as a silly example, I could have made Jack Sparrow the villainous British agent. Instead, I chose to leave Jack as a red herring** and put Hugh Grant in there instead. I did that because I thought it would be funnier, but I know, I have complete faith, that I might have pulled something even better out of idea space. I don’t know . . . it boggles the mind what I might have done with Margaret Thatcher in that role.
To continue with the sand analogy, I look at storytelling much as I look at beachcombing. I don’t pick up every interesting piece of flotsam I find on the shoreline, only the ones which appeal to my own peculiar sense of aesthetics. That’s the original story idea, but it doesn’t have to stop there. With my imagination, I can picture a stone, a shell, a bit of bone that’s even cooler than the one in my hands.
Folks with far more publication experience than I have pointed out that you eventually have to stop editing and call it a story. Otherwise, you risk spending your life wandering the beach, picking up one piece of crap, tossing away another, perennially dissatisfied.
Even still, sometimes it’s fun to take that ‘finished’ piece of driftwood and wonder how it might be different. Better.
D.
*You know — the opposite of inept.
**For you folks who aren’t crime novel buffs, a “red herring” is a distractor, something to divert the protagonist’s attention from the truth.
Mysterious Island
Mysterious Island, 1961
I grew up with Mysterious Island. In those pre-Betamax dark ages, you had to keep a keen eye on the TV Guide if you wanted to watch your favorite movie again and again. Then, inevitably, you’d have to run out of the room to go pee just as your favorite giant-animal-monster was about to terrorize the buxom heroine. Oh, DAMN! I missed the first thirty seconds of the giant bees!
Watching it nowadays, my finger is never too far from the fast forward button. Ray Harryhausen’s good stuff (note giant crab, bee, and chickenish thing in the poster above — and that’s not all!) is intercut with long, boring bits of dialog as our castaways struggle to survive on (badummm!) the Mysterious Island. I have no patience for this as an adult. As a kid, the talkie stuff functioned as foreplay, raising tension in anticipation of the orgiastic monster scenes.
When I set about the process of world-building for my novel, I think Mysterious Island must have been lurking through my unconscious mind, diddling my muse. My aliens are little more than giant Harryhausen-style critters. Big birds, dogs, pigs, spiders, and so forth. Sure, they have their little quirks that make them alien, but I wanted my creatures to be immediately imaginable by the reader. I dislike extraterrestrials which demand much from me in the ‘inner eye’ department. Moties? Feh. Niven’s puppeteer? Uh. I’ll take Niven’s Kzin (giant cats), thank you very much.
I suppose many readers are just the opposite. They crave the strange. Show me something I’ve never seen before. Yeah, I know there are SF fans out there who think that way. I cracked the problem in a different (and, I hope, equally satisfactory) way, by giving my readers situations they might never have imagined possible. Like, say, a giant fly going down on a giant spider. When was the last time Niven gave you that, huh?
D.
Review of Asimov’s, December 2005
For you SF fans, my review of Asimov’s December edition is up at Tangent.
I’ve been kvetching to my editor, Eugie Foster, about having to read so much mainstream SF, but honestly, this issue rocked. Two superb stories, and I mean top drawer (Damian Kilby’s “Earthtime”, and James Maxey’s “To the East, a Bright Star”), three good stories, and only one tale which required Mr. Snarkypencil.
I liked Kilby’s and Maxey’s stories best because of their rich sense of humanity. Which is a poofy way of saying, they wrote about believable human beings and made me care about them. I’m a sucker for heartstring-tugs, and both stories gave me lots of the good stuff.
Those two stories also gave me a better sense of what’s wrong with my current short, “Renee”. The damned thing lacks heart. I wrote it for one of Keith’s 500 word challenges, so I’d had to cut back on everything. Minimal description, bare bones characterization, everything pared down to the core idea. It’s a fine idea, but the story will be much better if I can give it a heart and soul.
Back to the drawing board.
D.
Page-turners
What makes a book a page-turner?
When I’m in the office, I have lots to do: read PC Gamer, Harper’s Magazine, Science, Nature, or even the random professional journal; surf blogs; catch up on my bottomless chart basket; feed the frogs. And I see patients, too.
That’s why it’s always remarkable when I find a book that demands I keep reading it no matter what. I’ll squeeze in a half hour of reading time before the patients roll in, five or ten minutes between patients, and my lunch break, all to finish the damned book. This is uncommon enough that I can count these books on one hand.
Dancing with Snoopy
Someone over at Miss Snark used the phrase Snoopy dance as an alternative to the more contemporary Homer Simpsonesque woo-hoo! I suppose Eric Cartman’s Sweeeet would be even more hip. Whatever.
Point is, Miss Snark liked my snippet. In fact, she used that other L word, the one you want so desperately to hear from your agent/editor/publisher. Here’s the link.
Aside from giving me a goofy smile for the morning, this also persuades me to rethink my plans. I’d gotten it into my head that I would have to sell my first story to a publisher before an agent would ever take me seriously. Hmm. Maybe not so.
I have a meeting tonight. Not one of those ‘pull out my wisdom teeth with rusty pliers’ hospital meetings, but a board meeting for the North Coast Nature Center. I wonder how Ray is doing with her moon jellyfish exhibit. She’s been having a devil of a time keeping them alive.
You lurkers who have known Karen and me forever (hi Kira!) are familiar with our creepy crawly love affair*. Our house is, as always, a menagerie. Unfortunately, we have way too many mammals for my liking: three cats, one ferret, and four degus.
What? Never heard of a degu?
Think big gerbil, but don’t think about it too hard.
Our cold-blooded collection, ignoring for the moment Karen’s tarantula mania, consists only of a Madagascar hissing cockroach colony, some freshwater fish, and a water dragon. For us, this is a mighty low census.
That’s enough for the morning. One Snoopy dance and one cute furry rodent. You’d get sugar toxic if I gave you any more than that.
D.
*Take that however you like.