Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Writer’s Life
On the up side,
I’m writing again. Two days in a row and I’ll do at least a bit more tonight. It’s slow going, but I’ve put together all the old files, things I have not touched in nearly six years, and I’ve started adding new material to the beginning of Chapter One.
You can thank Maureen for this (folks from Writer’s BBS might remember Maureen . . . she hung around the Fiction section and kept clear of SF or Horror, but still managed to enjoy my novel). We were chatting on gmail the other day, and she told me she would reread the novel if I managed to finish editing it. And she told me it was really good and I really shouldn’t drop it.
You’d think I would be able to tell myself such things, but I can’t. It’s way too easy to pick up the old manuscript and think, “What a load of bollocks,” but it wasn’t. Not entirely. Just for fun, I took a look at something I haven’t read in over five years: the last two scenes of the novel. And you know what? It’s good.
So who knows how long this will last. Hopefully longer than my excitement over turning the novel into a web comic, which ran into a wall over my lack of artistic talent. I mean, it takes me HOURS to finish one drawing, and I just don’t have that kind of time.
Wish me luck . . .
D.
Sad blogiversary
Tomorrow, April 11, Balls and Walnuts turns six. I’ve stuck with this longer than many of my blogging friends, for what that’s worth; that blog roll on the left is full of sites that haven’t been updated in over a year. I miss them. Jona was one of my first readers. Ishbadiddle was great at finding off-beat stories. Invisible Lizard (who writes great movie reviews) posts infrequently. On the upside, I had somehow convinced myself that Jim Donahue had closed up shop, but no, he’s posting regularly and he’s still on point with his sharp, quirky sense of humor. How the hell does he do it?
I keep wondering when I’ll get my mojo back. But as I’ve speculated in the past, I suspect my early drive, what kept this place hopping for years, was fueled by dissatisfaction with the life I’d built for myself and my family up north. I’m in a better place now (with regard to work — Bako is most definitely NOT a better place than the North Coast) and I can’t seem to generate enough angst to want to create.
No, that’s not quite right. I want to create, but the paint on my palette has all dried up.
The only silver lining: since I’m not writing, I have had a lot more time to read some great fiction.
D.
First efforts, tough audience
Hours of grinding, and here’s what I have to show:
What I like about it: it does not look completely unprofessional. The composition isn’t terrible.
What I dislike: just about everything else. I don’t feel that I am producing a “convincing” devolved bird (one whose wings have become arms and hands, rather similar to their hands and feet). The proportions are wrong, unnatural. Isen (the bird) is too dark, you can barely see his eyes.
My resident Web Comic expert, Jake, wouldn’t look at my efforts until I had a completed panel. I showed him the source photos and how I had doctored them and put them all together.
“What did you draw?” he said.
“The desk under the book.”
“So you’re making a cut-and-paste web comic.”
“Well –”
“I’d be impressed if you had drawn it.” And that was that.
Next, I’m going to try using this as a faint layer, over which I can sketch a different draft. This will allow me to punch up the detail on Isen and hopefully fix his upper body proportions. I’m hoping that the many-hours-if-not-days-per-panel is a consequence of the learning curve and not intrinsic to the medium.
Meanwhile, I’m having fun learning Gimp.
D.
What’s this then, an actual idea?
I can feel the muse stretching her arms. She might turn over and go back to sleep, but for the moment, for this evening, she’s been a lean brown bear rising from her cave, grunting at snow, wondering if she might pilfer some poor campers’ freeze-dried lasagna. Not sure what the lasagna is in this metaphor. Other people’s ideas, maybe? Yeah. And my own.
Here’s how it came to me. Karen’s been heavy into anime (and to a lesser degree manga) for some time now, and Jake is into his own favorite medium — web comics, and in particular, the web comics over at MS Paint Adventures. He’s been hyping Homestuck to his parents for some time now, and cajoled his mother into reading. And now I’m into it, too.
It took me a while. Homestuck takes a good long while to sink its hooks into the reader — the author has little concept of narrative drive. You have to stick it out until nearly the end of Act One before getting the sense that hey, maybe the author really does have a plan here, maybe this is a story worth spending time with, maybe, in fact, I’m experiencing a medium far different from anything else out there.
Okay, so maybe that last is hyperbolic. Still, Homestuck strikes me as being quite other. It’s a spoof on text adventures, and in its inception it was interactive, inasmuch as some of the content was reader-generated. According to Jake, the author had an idea where he was going, and so he likely accepted reader-generated suggestions that were either consistent with his story arc or at least not damaging to it.
But back to me. Remember my SF trilogy, the one I got blocked on while editing, which is when I started writing that romance — oh, ages ago? It’s always seemed to me that The Brakan Correspondent (or reconceived as the trilogy, Nest, Flight, and Shrike) would work far better as a graphic novel than as a novel. Ideas like that wither fast, though, especially when (A) my artistic talents are limited — not to mention my time, and (B) I could hardly invest that kind of effort into something that would likely face an even steeper climb to publication than a novel.
What about a web comic, though? Updated a little bit every day. With quite a bit less requirement for high quality artwork (with most web comics, it’s the story and not the art work that draws people in).
The art work is still the greatest barrier for me. I’m not talentless, and I suspect I would get better as time goes on, but the whole thing seems daunting. On the minus side, I’d be looking at a Herculean task. On the plus side, I could stretch it out over many months (if not longer) and I could just maybe attract a whole new batch of readers. And really, readers are what it’s all about, since I still think it’s a fine story that deserves more readers.
Yes, it has occurred to me that I could set the novel up as a PDF and give it away for free as an ebook, but I feel it still needs a good edit before reaching even that stage. And it’s editing that blocked me in the first place. If I reinvented the task in this new and different form, a form which apparently pleases the muse since I can feel her inside my head saying yes yes yes, then I could edit on the fly. Who knows, maybe a whole new story would spin out of the work.
I’ll sleep on it. The muse has gotten hot and bothered before, only to return to her cave, so I’m not gonna run out and buy Photoshop (or some other graphic software) any time soon.
Speaking of which — any suggestions on drawing software?
BTW, I finished Kraken tonight. Great book . . . I’ll try to muster up a review sometime soon.
D.
Slowly
I feel the muse stirring like an arthritic dog. A seventeen-year-old arthritic dog, begging me with her eyes, Put me down already, will you? But I’m stubborn. She’s not getting off so easily.
Mind you, all of this is happening in idea space. Nothing on paper yet, electronic or otherwise, but notes. Notes on culture, slang, plot, etc. Notes.
I have a setting and a roughed-out plot. It’s a trite plot, which isn’t always a bad thing. I’m hoping it will develop some freshness the more it molders in my brain. But anyway, what I’ve been missing is character. So let’s say we have two policewomen, call them, oh, Cagney and Lacey, and Cagney’s my main character, and yet the only one who is talking to me is Lacey.
But Cagney has to be my main character. She’s the outsider, so she should be best able to see through this foreign culture’s paradoxes and hypocrisies. And yet it’s Lacey who is coming alive in my mind while Cagney remains a few notes on mental paper.
As I endure this process, I’m rereading another alt history SF, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And I’m wondering if Chabon had a similar problem, since his main character is really pretty simple when you get down to it: he’s an alcoholic cop, a divorcee who pines for his ex. Not too many layers there. He’s stubborn and brave, two musts for a hard-boiled cop protag. Meanwhile, his partner is a hoot — a bear of a man, a Tlingit Jew (hey, you’ll just have to read the book!) who carries around a whopping huge hammer as a sort of enforcer, who has way too many kids, whose wife alone threatens to steal every scene she shares.
Maybe that’s all I need for my Cagney: stubborn, brave, and broken. Maybe I should just let Lacey be the one with all the color.
D.
It’s freaking reboantic, I tells ya
Jake’s reading Dante’s Inferno for school (and to digress before I’ve yet to ingress, why do English teachers love Inferno so much? The only thing I can recall about Dante’s Inferno: one of my English teacher’s husband’s ancestors appeared in the book, or at least someone with his name appeared in the book, probably for the sin of shagging tiresome old AP English teachers) and came across the word reboantic.
Before I enlighten you as to the meaning of reboantic, I’d like to say that I have no hatred for obscure words. Obscure words are fun. Obscure words were the only redeeming feature (features?) of Reginald Hill’s Dialogues of the Dead, a book I otherwise detested. Hey, I like knowing that a zyzzogeton is a large South American leaf hopper. And so does Ammon Shea, author of Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Which sounds like a fun read, or at least a better read than the OED.
Reboantic: reverberant.
Know what pisses me off about reboantic? It has the same number of syllables as reverberant. Then why the hell didn’t the translator use reverberant? I do recognize that reboantic has its accent on the third syllable, reverberant on the second, so perhaps reverberant didn’t scan as well. But isn’t there something to be said about avoiding a word that sends its reader scurrying to the nearest internet dictionary, thus disrupting the reading experience?
Or did the translator really expect us to know reboantic, a word I’ve never seen before in my life?
As the fool says all the time in Christopher Moore’s Fool (a ripping good read): Fuckstockings.
Find that in your OED.
D.
At least part of the allure
In retrospect, I took a haphazard approach to writing. My goals varied with the season or with my current project: finish a novel, get something published, get something published in print, get a novel published. I’ve managed all but the last and I know (mostly from reading Kate’s blog) that even if I succeeded at that, it wouldn’t end there, it would likely never end.
So I’m goofing around trying to kill three hours while Jake satisfies a bit of his school’s community service requirement. While he runs a concession at a local church fair, I’m in an old Woolworth’s. Still sports the name but inside, they’ve converted it into one of those multi-vendor antique stores. You know the type: they sell LPs and 45s, back issues of LIFE or Popular Mechanics, grandma’s china, great-great-grandma’s china, countless tchotchkes, tinder-grade furniture, pocket watches that don’t work, jewelry that has gone in and out of fashion a half dozen times since it was first crafted.
And books. Innumerable series of “great classics” — Ibsen, Voltaire, Flaubert. Hard cover first editions of the last thirty or forty years. And the only interesting thing, to me: musty brown-leaved fictions by authors long-dead and long-forgotten, with oddly boring names like Where Men are Men and Pandora Opens the Lid, or dog-eared pulps with Murder in the title. There may be some gems among them; who knows? If you tried to find the author on Wikipedia you’d likely be at a loss, and even the Amazon booksellers would probably scratch their figurative heads.
It seems to me that the desire to write would not stop at the success of publication. That merit badge would be shelved and another grander one desired: to be immortal. To not be the author of The High Cavalier’s Lady, but of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
I don’t imagine this is every author’s dream; I’m sure some would be delighted simply to know financial success, to be able to make the pin money or, gasp, quit the day job. But no one does this who is not also a lover of great books and an appreciator of great writers. Can I be forgiven such a grandiose dream, even while struggling to write a daily blog? Well, it is what it is. You can’t censor your dreams.
D.
Here’s an odd trope
Funny how you start noticing things.
I’m reading Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, and am on book two at the moment. (Mild spoilers follow, if you care.) Interesting stuff, what with its hardboiled protagonist who is still so clueless at love, its curious mix of violence and romance. In book one, I thought I had it pegged as a romance variant of some sort, but then Collins trashed any chance at the HEA.
So Katniss, the protagonist, is torn between two guys: baker’s son Peeta, whom the fascistic Capital plans for her to marry, and Gale, the boy she has hunted with ever since her father died. Both are strong, noble, likable, yatta yatta. Both are nuts about her. I suspect Collins’s fans fight amongst themselves as to who Katniss’s true love should be.
Then I remembered Twilight‘s Bella, and how she is torn between the sparkly vampire guy and the werewolf guy. Choose the suave bloodsucker or the dog? Hmm. I suspect I’d go for the dog, especially since the bloodsucker can’t even bring himself to kiss her, for fear his idea of deep kissing might not be compatible with her survival.
And then I remembered Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, who has her Italian Stallion Joseph Morelli, and strong-dark-quiet Ranger. And Princess Leia, torn between Han Solo and Luke, until they all discover that icky incest thing. But still.
It’s probably more widespread than that, but what I’m wondering is this: are their mirror image examples? Male protags with two equally hot and lovable women vying for their attention? Would romance readers even want to go there? How about gay romance, with characters struggling to determine who to do?
I think I’ll get the birthday girl over here to comment.
D.
Ars longa
The other day, one of my patients said, “I bet you’ve already blogged me.” Which surprised me a little because I wasn’t wearing my “I’m blogging this” tee shirt, haven’t mentioned to anyone at work that I blog, and certainly hadn’t mentioned it to him. Turns out he was just ribbing me, but before I realized that I said, “I NEVER blog my patients!”
Yes, yes, this is patently false. Although if you’ve paid attention, you’ll note that I don’t blog my patients in any identifiable way. I would prefer to think their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them in these posts.
Anyway, I started to realize that this blog is all the writing I have anymore. I’m not creating anything, and I miss it. I really do. It’s hard to believe I could have written something like three-quarters of a million words, and now nothing. Like the reservoir has dried up.
I’m not lacking ideas. The ideas are there, but the words are not there. The voice is not there. The drive is not there.
And something inside says that if I could just start, the words and the voice and the drive would come. It’s a bootstrapping operation. I need to re-read some old work, perhaps, or set aside a tiny block of time every day and make it longer and longer, do one or all of those little tricks I’ve read about but just can’t bring myself to do.
It’s an awfully weird state of paralysis. But I can still blog, after a fashion.
D.