Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Writer’s Life
I think I can, I think I can
I had a student dream last night. You know the one: you’re late for the final, can’t remember where it was supposed to be held, forgot to cram for it anyway, and when you finally get there you’re naked, the proctor is your great aunt Helen in a black corset (with red trim), and she intends to punish you severely, young man if you haven’t brought three sharpened #2 pencils —
Well, maybe not that dream.
My all-time favorite student dream: after racing around trying to find the final, I get there an hour late. The first question is
1. Tamarind is to homily as espresso is to
A) 2.01
B) 5,134
C) 0
D) pi
E) all of the above
and the rest of the questions make no sense at all.
If I remember my Freudian bullshit correctly, and I doubt that I do, student dreams are an indicator of performance anxiety. So here’s my analysis. Karen isn’t getting pregnant any time soon. I’ve already done my tough surgical cases for the week. The only ‘performance’ I have to be anxious about is my novel.
Tomorrow, I start righting my second-to-the-last chapter. You need a sense of scale. This mother is going to be at least 270,000 words when it is finished. I have five major POV (point of view — although I think most of you out there are either writers or writer-wannabes like me, and knew that already) characters, three almost-major POV characters, and two characters who are important enough to require a bit of time in the big climax. I’m wrapping up a trilogy. This is my Battle for Gondor (if I’m mangling that, forgive me; I like Lord of the Rings, but I’m not a big enough fanboy to remember the details).
So far, I have thirteen scenes mapped out. It’ll have to be twelve or fourteen, since I’m superstitious about thirteen*. After I finish a-bloggin’, I’ll reread all my notes and do what I always do before starting a new chapter — I’ll sleep on it. Here’s hoping I’ll have better dreams tonight.
D.
*I dated a girl in college who wore a gold necklace — a ’13’ — her grandmother had given her. Gran was a Northern Italian witch, Carmela told me, and the villagers burned her workbook after she died. Carmela had recurring dreams that she was a young virgin living in ancient Greece. The girl in the dream aged along with real-time Carmela.
My Catholic almost-girlfriend Carmela told me (repeatedly) that her father would kill her if she got pregnant. She left to my imagination what he would do to me. How Carmela would get pregnant is still something of a Catholic mystery to me, since we never even kissed.
We didn’t last long. Nevertheless, I think of her fondly.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles by Kenney Mencher
Good writing day. Fixed one scene, wrote another; 2K words in all. That means I get a little break from the ol’ blog. Here’s a bit of sleaze to tide you through your weekend. Apologies to those who have read this before.
The Psalmist
by Doug Hoffman
Sun-blessed
Child of light
Sin-eater
I bask in your youthful fire
Thy noble loins have cheered me
Filled me with renewed force
Thou hast anointed me with fragrant oils,
Rubbed away my old cares
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I shall fear no evil
For thou art with me
And the death is but little
I am not Tim Robbins
Yesterday, while doing my 45-minute shvitz on the elliptical trainer, I watched CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview Tim Robbins regarding his play, Embedded. The play has been out since 2003, but a film version was just released on DVD; hence Wolf’s urge to hold Tim accountable. But I’m guessing here.
My ears pricked up as Wolf ran down the play’s premise: five reporters embedded in Iraq must decide whether to report the truth or succumb to military brainwashing (as well as pressure from their own networks). This, with a few changes*, is the core of my novel-in-progress. I desperately need to know how much overlap exists. Have I been scooped? Will publishing house readers throw out my manuscript, calling it “a thinly veiled Embedded”?
CNN showed a few clips from the play. Painful stuff, and by ‘painful’ I mean ‘Saturday Night Live ever since Eddie Murphy left the show.’ Satire with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, characters that give cardboard a bad name. But wait (says I): CNN and their ilk are the targets of Embedded; perhaps they’re showing the crappy bits on purpose.
Enter Tim Robbins, in two days’ growth of beard, black tee shirt and brown sports jacket, left eyebrow permanently arched — possible evidence of a forehead lift gone bad (although, thanks to Jacko, the bar for celebrity plastic surgery disasters resides somewhere in the Kuiper Belt. But I digress). Unflappable, he deflected Wolf’s criticisms by pointing out (repeatedly) that two of the play’s five journalists are stand-up folks who risk all to report the truth. Two of Wolf’s guests, both of whom did their time as embedded journalists, provided counterpoint. One, a young woman who had actually seen the whole play, was sympathetic to Robbins’s satire and said there was a lot of truth in it (as well as some distortions). The other journalist hadn’t seen the play and basically read from a prepared statement.
By now, I was confused as all hell. Is the play any good? Is it garbage? Can I trust FoxNews.com’s review calling it “not so realistic”? (Stop laughing. Jeez, just because I said trust and FoxNews in the same sentence.) Would I be wasting my money buying the DVD? Our contractor delivered the most recent bill today for our remodel; do I even have the money to waste on this DVD? It wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’d done to research The Brakan Correspondent. That would be buying The Alamo on DVD (the John Wayne version, naturally).
Embedded is being distributed by the self-styled Emperor of marginal film marketing, Netflix. They’re the people who brought us “Eve Ensler’s ‘Until the Violence Stops,’ a look at the global effect of her ‘Vagina Monologues.'” Is this relevant? No. I just really like the phrase, “the global effect of her ‘Vagina Monologues.'”
As I read the story of the DVD’s release, reported in LATimes.com, all of my problems were solved. It turns out Embedded will air on the Sundance channel this August. I can hang on to my twenty bucks for a few more days.
I promise to get back to science fiction. I promise.
***
Karen News Flash:
Female tarantulas groom frantically after doing the nasty.
Karen figures I can work such details into my story line; I keep trying to tell her that she and her arachnid-lovin’ e-buddies are the only ones who would understand these in-jokes, and I don’t know how many of them read fiction. About a year ago, she posted a link to my sixteen-legged love scene, and did any of her spider pals come by to take a look? Noooo. I ain’t gonna be selling too many copies to that crowd, even though I’m pandering to them like there’s no tomorrow.
D.
*As far as I know, Robbins’s play doesn’t have any birds. Or pigs. Or flies. Or spiders. Or Colonel Kirbys.
Between one thing and another . . .
It’s past 10. I was home late from the hospital (had to remove a hazel nut AKA filbert from someone’s esophagus), then I had to have a fight with Karen over cleaning the litter boxes, and THEN Jake decided he wanted to work on his Lego website. Jake and I have a lot of work left to do on this one, so be forgiving. In particular, the jpegs could be a lot nicer. Just the one page, by the way.
I’d intended to ruminate on the subject of political subtexts in fiction. For tonight, I’ll merely pose the questions: how important is it to understand the historical backstory for a novel — or short story, or film, or play . . . ? Can you appreciate Dr. Strangelove if you’re ignorant of the Cold War? Is your experience of Orwell’s Animal Farm poorer if you don’t know your Trotsky from a hole in the ground?
Can a political subtext ruin a novel? (Will Republicans boycott the upcoming Star Wars movie just cuz it equates W with the Emperor?)
Can a writer pen a novel with a clear political message, yet be unconscious of that message?
Coming soon . . . Karen gets a wild hair over Old Man’s War; Fantasy & Science Fiction publishes Wonkophilic Fan Fiction.
Stay tuned.
D.
What’s your favorite first contact story?
So we’re watching Alien Planet* on the Discovery Channel, and I’m asking myself: how do you take such an intrinsically interesting subject and make it boring?
Here are the problems, dramaturgically speaking:
1. No protags. In Alien Planet, what passes for protags are two robotic probes, ‘Ike’ Newton and ‘Leo’ (Galileo). They’re cute bots, but they’re not human. Not even close.
2. No plot. Funny thing, a lot of SF novels suffer from that same problem: as if exploration alone were enough to drive the story forward. I had that problem with Ringworld, for example.
3. Few new ideas. Many of these critters look alike: roughly mammalian, with tiny heads (or no heads), and no discernible eyes. They have a few birds, too, but these look like flying versions of the mammalian critters.
Their heart is in the right place. They’re trying to teach terrestrial biology in a new and interesting way, and they’re also attempting to depict such an expedition in a scientifically reasonable manner. In the real world, you would explore such worlds robotically; in the real world, you wouldn’t have much more of a plot than ‘let’s go out there and see what we find.’ But that doesn’t necessarily make for good entertainment.
What’s your favorite first contact story? I’m not sure which one I would choose, but here’s an old, but not-half-bad list I found on the web. Lots of novels I haven’t read here.
***
Jake’s Medford pediatrician called me late yesterday to give me the LP results: no meningitis. We’re back to square one, a presumptive diagnosis of ‘chronic tension-type headache’, with little left to do but try him out on Elavil and — get this — biofeedback.
Karen and Jake came back this afternoon. Jake has a sore throat, upset stomach, and headache, making me wonder whether he caught a virus at the hospital. I pushed the fluids and he rallied enough to eat some dinner.
The apple pie turned out okay. Store-bought puff pastry is about as good as it sounds (not). My bottom crust, a galette from Baking with Julia, was far better than my puff pastry top crust. Live and learn. I may be a foodie, but I’m not nuts enough (yet) to make my own puff pastry.
D.
*If you missed this program, here’s the idea. A manned mission to an Earth-like planet, Darwin IV, encounters one new organism after another.
Pushing through to the other side
Today’s subtitle comes from Special Inspirational Mentor-type Person Geneen Roth, whom I’d never heard of until this very moment, having recently googled the phrase “the only way out is through.”* And I’d always thought Lewis Carroll said it. (No, but he did say, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful voice, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ . . . which is better still.)
“Otch**,” my mom is saying right about now. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Well, Mum, it’s about to get even worse. This afternoon, while torturing myself on the elliptical trainer, I thought about how much exercise had in common with writing, and how quantum tunneling provided such an apt metaphor for both. Here’s a short bit from Wiki on quantum tunneling:
Quantum tunneling is the quantum-mechanical effect of transitioning through a classically-forbidden energy state. The classical analogy is for a car on a roller coaster to make it up and over a hill which it does not have enough kinetic energy to surmount.
Think about how hard it is to sit down with that blank page and get moving. Better yet, don’t think about it, just do it. Because I know you do — the writers out there, anyway. Have you ever been able to will the words onto the page? In the moments between blank page and written page, something happens. You tunnel through that energy barrier and find yourself on the other side. Conscious effort has little to do with it.
Same with exercise. Every time I get on that elliptical trainer, I’m convinced I’ll never make it past 20 minutes. By 25 minutes, I’ve hit my second wind; by thirty, I’m thinking, “Ten minutes until cool down. I can take anything for ten minutes.” Finally, I get my five minute cool down; and before I realize what has happened, I’ve sweated off 450 calories.
If I stop to think about writing, the task seems insurmountable. If I stop to wonder if I really, really feel like exercising, the answer is always no. Without fail, I have to do these things automatically, without forethought, so that they’re done before I’ve even had time to bitch.
***
Jake update:
He had his lumbar puncture this morning. Sailed right through it; his biggest gripe was having to wake up at 7AM. (Hey, he’s home-schooled. ‘Nuff said.) Clear fluid, normal pressure. What galls me is that I know they’ve done a Gram stain by now, and (if someone’s bothering to check!) we could have some useful information. Namely, does he have chronic viral meningitis? But, no. I’m only the patient’s father, not his doctor (although I have lanced his ears and pulled red string out of his nose). I’ll have to wait.
Monday morning, I’m calling.
Jake convinced Karen to stay another night in Medford, so I’m ganz allein yet again. He’s doing okay. No spinal headache, but his baseline headache is still there. If we come up with bupkes on the LP, I’m not sure what we’ll do next. Perhaps we’ll go down to the mecca (Stanford).
***
Menu for tomorrow: focaccia, oxtail stew (I make it with navy beans and smoked ham shank), and apple pie for dessert. I’m going to make a fairly standard bottom crust, but for the top I bought some puff pastry. It’s high time I tried to figure out Marguerite Slater’s* apple pie recipe.
D.
*According to Wikiquote, Geneen Roth is also responsible for “Be fully present for five minutes each day.” There’s something pathetic about that, don’t you think?
**My father’s name is Arthur, nickname Archie, further shortened to Arch, transformed further still by my mother’s thick Bostonian accent into Otch.
***Lance Henriksen’s mother, and my surrogate mom during my first year at Berkeley. And if you’re exceptionally nice to me, one day I’ll tell you the story of how Lance reunited his mom and dad after they’d been divorced for umpteen years. You won’t get that story on IMDB.
No rudder
Karen and Jake drove to Ashland this afternoon. They met with the pediatrician who will be doing Jake’s lumbar puncture tomorrow morning. The procedure will be done under IV sedation, so the worst part of the whole affair will (hopefully) be the IV. There’s always the chance of spinal headache, however, and those are no fun. (Just what he needs: another headache.) On the other hand, when I had viral meningitis a few years ago, I thought the procedure relieved the headache. Or it might have been all the Demerol they pumped me with.
This leaves me home alone without a rudder, or an anchor, or a sail, or all the above. Ideal writing opportunity, huh? Yet all I can manage to do is surf Wikipedia. I’ve done this a hundred times, but this time, for the first time, I looked a bit deeper.
Here’s where all the technical wonks (like Pat) are going to be stunned by my neutronium-like density . . . but maybe some of you will find this interesting. You see, Wikipedia is a dynamic encyclopedia. It changes constantly. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article; anyone can write a new article. Anyone in the world. After you’ve written (or edited) an article, any other palooka can come along and edit your stuff. One other thing: Wikipedia articles are intensively hyperlinked to other Wikipedia articles.
Two things strike me. First, the only error correction mechanism (as best I can tell) is that someone smarter than the writer will happen along, find the error, and correct it. I imagine this works fine if, for example, someone calls a Russian tortoise an amphibian, but what about more subtle errors? (Note to self: have Karen check out the entries on quantum mechanics. For my part, I looked up the entry on ear wax. Aside from an annoying tendency to write both ‘earwax’ and ‘ear wax’, ‘eardrum’ and ‘ear drum’, I didn’t catch any obvious boo-boos.) What about urban legends, or hot button issues like Darwinism or abortion? The abortion discussion page is illuminating; I get the sense that this article shifts on a day to day basis.
Second, when is this bit of software — with its vast fund of knowledge, its enormous number of internal (hyper)connections, its ability to ‘forget’ untapped articles, and its ability to correct errors — going to achieve sentience?
Reminds me of a story I have yet to write. Premise: a new internet craze pops up, a website with animation so crude it makes South Park look like Allegro non troppo. The animated sequence depicts a young man showing up at a young woman’s apartment to take her out on a date. All across the world, folks log on to give ‘advice’ either to the girl or the guy. In real time, the software synthesizes a consensus which then generates the actions and dialog of our cartoon protagonists. This happens once each evening; people become obsessed to find out what will happen on tonight’s date.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. In my original conception, one night the boy and girl come to blows and murder one another; the following day, a world war begins. I dunno, but this feels awfully Twilight Zony (not a good thing, in my opinion). I could also go the Spielbergian route (night after night, the couple achieves a deeper and deeper love, a more mature, enduring relationship . . . and world peace breaks out). Feh. And then there’s option three: folks of mating age become so wrapped up in the website they forget to have sex in real life. Egad, that’s triter than the first two!
I guess that’s why I never finished that one. I’m still casting about for an ending. I have a few of those, which reminds me: one day, I really must get down to writing, “Borges, the Undead”.
D.
As the gears turn
Even though I’m not working on the novel during the week, I’m still thinking about it. More to the point, my subconscious is hard at work. Tuesday morning in the wee hours, I woke up and realized I’d figured out the solution to a choreographic problem in my climax. The interesting thing is this: I didn’t know the details of the solution; I awoke with the conviction that my subconscious had it all figured out, and that I need only begin writing to find out the solution.
Back in the dorms, people would be calling me an airhead right about now (or worse), but I suspect the writers in my audience know what I’m talking about.
Yesterday morning, I woke up with a better understanding of one of my villains’ motivations, and I had several snippets of dialog spinning around in my mind, too. Again, this is not too terribly unusual, although it hasn’t happened in an awfully long while. I’m somewhat suspicious of these little gifts. This used to happen all the time back when I was writing my aborted novel Karakoram, so often that I kept a spiral notebook around to jot down these flashes of supposed brilliance. In retrospect, much of this stuff has all the radiance of the ideas you get while stoned. I sometimes wonder (A) what my muse is doing up there, and (B) why she won’t share any of the good shit with me.
But I shouldn’t give her such a hard time. When I open my manuscript at random, I’m usually delighted with what I see. This is either (A) a very good sign, or (B) further evidence of terminal egomania.
Close . . . so very close to the end. I don’t know what the very last scene will be. I don’t even want to go there. Gotta have faith in the muse.
D.
The twinkie method
Many of you writers have heard of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method for planning novels. Some of you, I know, are actively flakin’ away. Mr. Ingermanson makes no claim that his approach is the best; he freely admits there are other successful techniques.
Well, here’s mine: the twinkie method.
Unlike the Snowflake, the twinkie does not require many oodles of column inches of explanation. It’s a simple two-stepper you could do in your head, though I prefer to work it out on paper. My memory just isn’t that trustworthy.
1. First, figure out the novel’s outer shell.
2. Next, figure out what manner of creamy goodness you’re gonna use to stuff that shell.
I’m not sure, but I strongly suspect Terry Pratchett uses (and Douglas Adams used) this technique. Be honest: don’t most Discworld novels feel like a series of great set-pieces crammed into a rather loose framing plot? (Night Watch is a notable exception.)
For those folks trying to establish a correspondence between the twinkie and the snowflake, my step 1 is the same as Ingermanson’s step 1. My step 2 is Ingermanson’s step 2 through 10. Isn’t that helpful?
But, seriously, folks. I tried to start a snowflake last night for the sequel to The Brakan Correspondent. I hit on this 14 word* one-liner after an hour’s work:
Nothing will stop an unscrupulous extraterrestrial talent scout from snagging Earth’s hottest new writer.
Short and sweet, but it barely hints at what I have in mind. How do I tell the reader that the action will take place on Sylvanon, the galaxy’s ultimate Planet Hollywood? How do I keep the reader from thinking I mean me when I write ‘Earth’s hottest new writer’? (I mean, don’t you just hate it when Stephen King puts himself in his novels? Think Misery, which wasn’t misery enough.) In fact, the Earthling in question writes for Hallmark Greeting Cards (‘The next Kahlil Gibran!’ my protag will gush. ‘A Richard Bach’s Richard Bach!’) And how do I work in the fact I’ll be stirring in two characters from Brakan Correspondent to thicken the stew?
Here’s what I’ve managed thus far:
On planet Sylvanon, entertainment hub of the galaxy, an unscrupulous talent scout intent on snagging Earth’s hottest new greeting card writer finds himself in the middle of two Brakan expatriates’ deadly conflict.
Whew. Thirty-two words, and isn’t it a mouthful? I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’m too eager to move on to step two. Time to think up some creamy goodness**.
D.
*Ingermanson: “Shorter is better. Try for fewer than fifteen words.”
**No, I haven’t finished the novel . . . but it’s damned close, and I’m feeling some nascent separation anxiety. I think the birthing process will be less traumatic if I know I am already pregnant with the next novel. And how’s that for an over-extended metaphor?
It’s a Splendisaster
Last night, addled by caffeine, I lay awake trying to carve my novel’s final tableau from the killing fields of Story Space. (One nice thing about Story Space: resurrections are common.) I have no fewer than ten characters converging on one place. Ten named characters. I’m not counting all those giant spiders and killer boars. So it has to be stage-managed without looking stage-managed, inevitable, yet not contrived . . .
No small wonder that my approach to the ending has been asymptotic at best.
For several days, I’ve been meaning to write a glowing review of Dreyer’s No Sugar Added Vanilla Ice Cream. It’s Splendalicious! It’s Splendarific! I’ve gained three pounds in four days!
Maybe . . . I mean, just maybe . . . the Atkins folks are wrong, and calories do matter. Maybe it is a bad idea to douche my esophagus with saturated fat. Maybe I should go back to salads and boiled eggs for dinner.
Do three pounds show on me? You betcha. My son walked in on me last night after I’d taken my shower (we are still working on this ‘knocking on the door’ thing) and informed me that my ass jiggles when I walk. The horror.
Hitchhiker’s Guide opens tonight. If the family is willing, I’m there. A quick scan of the reviews suggests this movie may be a mixed bag, but with Alan Rickman voicing Marvin the Paranoid Android, how bad can it be? Watch this space.
D.