Storytellers

What's playing on the ipod: Read My Mind, The Killers

There's a wonderful children's book called Frederick, about a family of mice preparing for the winter. When the other mice ask Frederick why he's not working, the apparently daydreaming mouse gives cryptic answers about collecting colors or sounds. In the middle of winter, when the food has run out, Frederick tells stories about the summer. He's the clan's storyteller.

Having storytelling skills no doubt conferred an evolutionary benefit to oneself and one's tribe. Tribes who shared a myth of origin, who enjoyed the cohesiveness of a shared religion, and who bonded with the entertainment provided by shamans, storytellers, and minstrels prospered until they spread from one end of the earth to the other. Those people with this skill always had a niche in every tribe and probably survived many lean times by bringing these storytelling skills to bear.

We now live in a single, English-speaking tribe of hundreds of millions of people. The best storytellers now enjoy the ability to reach millions of people with the self-satisfaction, prestige, and wealth this implies. Unfortunately, we have tens of thousands of frustrated actors, musicians, and writers, who would have been in great demand in a clan of thirty or a village of five hundred, but whose skills are no longer needed. Evolution has made them storytellers, but modern society has rendered their skills redundant.

Cell

What's playing on the ipod: (BBC Enfoque)

Finished CELL last night. What a difference between this book and some of King's doorstoppers. I bought the book Thursday evening and finished it last night.

The book was obviously gripping enough and I appreciated that it ended on a measure of hope. Most of King's books offer hope at the end, but not all. Here are my favorite King books.

THE STAND
THE SHINING
THE GREEN MILE
THE GUNSLINGER (the first book)
EYES OF THE DRAGON

If you're a fantasy fan, be sure to read the last one. It's a straight fantasy, written, I suspect, almost on a lark, but King brings his considerable talen to bear and the results are impressive.

Habits

Ever noticed how it takes heroic effort to build and establish good habits, but a minor lapse to either stop the good habit or start a new, bad one? I worked like hell to finish my first draft of THE DEVIL'S DEEP this last week and even though my current layoff is intentional, gosh it feels easy. It's no wonder that I've sometimes gone months and months without writing a blessed thing; if I stop for two consecutive days it feels like this is the way it should be. But when I start a new project, it's as painful as a new exercise plan or a diet. I have to keep plugging away for week after week to get it going.

I think the same holds true for almost anything in life. My other experience with laziness overwhelming desire and good intentions is language study. I'm motivated and relatively good at language study, but my progress is measured in years and not months.

Playing the Trump Card

LOS ANGELES - "Grey's Anatomy" star Isaiah Washington said racism was a factor in his firing from the hit ABC series after he twice used an anti-gay slur.

Washington, who initially used the epithet during an onset clash with a co-star, told Newsweek magazine that "someone heard the booming voice of a black man and got really scared and that was the beginning of the end for me."

link

Of course it was racism. Couldn't possibly be that you're a jerk that nobody wanted to work with. And the booming voice...that's why nobody wants to work with James Earl Jones, right? Oh, never mind.

The interesting thing to note is how he thought he'd play the trump card of our politically sensitive society: racism. The problem, in this case, is that his anti-gay tirade bumps up against another of society's no-nos.

CELL

I'm reading CELL, by Stephen King. The characters are good and the story engaging, as King always is and yet I can't help but feel I've read this before, only better. Oh, yeah, THE STAND, a superior novel about civilization collapsing almost instaneously. I'm not sure why he decided to visit, in weaker form, what he'd already done to perfection earlier in his career.

And yet, this being King, it's still more than readable. I read a hundred pages without even noticing it.

More on Recent Reading

I was remarking to M yesterday that I don't remember the last time I read back to back novels as good as FINN and THE SPARROW. I read books like that and I get excited about the whole process of reading. As I've mentioned before, one downside of writing is that it affects your ability to enjoy reading. I frequently find myself noting the craft behind the writing, in the same way a director might be watching movies and noting the camera angle, the editing, etc. It takes a darn good writer to make me forget that I'm reading fiction.

It's interesting that both FINN and THE SPARROW are first novels. Neither writer was a beginner by any stretch, but still. Wow.

Resting Period

Other than reading the book, I'm taking a week off from writing to rest the brain a little, have some fresh perspectives when I come back for the rewrite. I have two scenes that I want to add and need to think about them. Often these additions are among the most important parts of the book; they fill in the cracks, expand on characters and themes, and build tension for other stuff.

There's also a chance I need to rewrite some of that stuff that I thought drooped a bit toward the end of the book, but I haven't yet decided what or to what extent.

The Sparrow

I'm finally getting around to reading THE SPARROW, by Mary Doria Russell. It's as good as everyone has been telling me for the last ten years, but also very depressing in parts. I'm about half finished. The thing that I don't like is the ominous sense of forboding, that everything is going to turn out bad.

I also read through THE DEVIL'S DEEP from top to bottom. The good news: I was engaged, had no problem continuing to read, and the middle that I'd worried about held up well. I often have a tough time making the transition between the setup and the resolution. The bad news is that I was a little disappointed in my ending. It wasn't as gripping or as exciting as it could be. This is usually my strong suit. So there's some work to be done there.

First Draft Finished

What's playing on the ipod: Hunny, Hunny, Book of Love

So I'm arbitrarily declaring a completion to the first draft. I still have to write that final scene, but I'm having some second thoughts about what should happen. It involves the resolution of one of the antagonist's stories and I need to decide whether he's killed, escapes, or is arrested. I'd decided to have him initially escape but get captured due to a quirk in his personality. I'm not so sure anymore. The plan, instead, is to write the other missing scenes (missing only in retrospect) from earlier in the book and see if they jog anything loose.

So, uhm, congratulations to me, I guess. I feel strangely deflated, perhaps because I've finished my favorite part and now face an endless series of rewrites. Or maybe I'm just too close to the story and worrying that it's not as good as it should be. Yet.

More on the Late Night Caller

What's playing on the ipod: Cuts You Up, Peter Murphy

The drunk woman from last night called back this afternoon. Sober, but definitely the same woman. She said, "Hi, I visited a friend in room 13 last night and think I left a pair of sunglasses. Did they turn up?"

No, they didn't, but thanks for clearing up a mystery. I'm thinking now that the other workers were gone (it's a variable-sized crew), and it was just this one guy. The "married man" referenced in her call must not be married to her, or she wouldn't have called him a "friend."

She must not remember her inebriated attempts to contact her "friend" or I can't imagine she would have had the chutzpah to call back today.

So Very Close

What's playing on the ipod: Rooster, Alice in Chains

I've almost finished the book, but have run out of gas for today. I wrote 4,400 words today, which might be the most I've produced in a day since working on THE DARK CITADEL nine or ten years ago. I've only got one more scene to write, then a couple of missing scenes to fill in earlier in the story, but those latter ones I'm going to count as second draft stuff.

The upshot is that I should finish tomorrow.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 78,700 words

The Joys of Running an Inn

What's playing on the ipod: Bonny Swans, Loreena McKennitt

The phone rings at 2:55 last night. Once, then it stops. About two minutes later, it rings again. Very sleepily, I pick it up and before I can say a word, a drunk-sounding woman informs me, "I need a married man to f**k"

Great, some sort of prank call. I hang up.

About two minutes later, it rings again. This time, when I pick up the phone, the drunk woman says, "Room 13, please."

There is a group of workers staying in room 13, one of our efficiencies. As I transfer the call, I hope that, a., the intended "married man" was the one who picked up the phone, and b., drunk woman was the wife of same, and c., the phone did not ring again.

I don't know about a and b, but I was lucky enough to enjoy c.

Favorite Time of the Year

What's playing on the ipod: Second Hand News, Fleetwood Mac

This might be my favorite time of the year. The weather has been great and we've been quiet enough at the inn that I can enjoy it. I've got some great lettuce from my garden already and today we ate some of the first strawberries. Of course, soon enough we'll have to start taking in some more customers so we can pay our bills.

What I'd like is a four season place with skiing, but where summer and winter only last for a couple of months and temperatures never get below 20F or above 85F, and where spring/fall temps are about 50-70 for eight months of the year. Not sure if such a place exists, but I doubt it.

I don't have a word count for DEVIL'S DEEP because I'm on the downstairs computer, but I want to say about 74,000. I wrote around 3,500 words today.

What Do You Know? There's the Finish Line.

What's playing on the ipod: Fingers and Thumbs, Erasure

And here I am at last. Or is that already? I'm in the heart of my final set piece. The main actors have come together and are having it out. After this, it's just a few scenes to wrap up my story and I'll be done.

I've skipped a couple of scenes that will need to be added. That will be the first step and will preclude printing out the novel and reading it through, looking for flaws. I'll then finish up my list (already at 50+ items and counting) and give myself a few days off before starting the rewrite.

Assuming I finish my first draft sometime in the next three days, I will have written my first draft in 53 days. It's odd because I never felt like I was pushing myself, just writing at a good pace every day. But 53 days? Not bad at all.*

*I just looked and the first draft for THE RIGHTEOUS took 54 days. That surprised me, too. For some reason I thought it had taken 70 or 80 days.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 73,400 words

The Nuts and Bolts of Novel Writing

What's playing on the ipod: You Just Haven't Earned it Yet Baby, The Smiths

I just finished the Patricia Highsmith book about writing and during the section where she talks about how she physically produced drafts, it struck me just how much this has changed over the years.

She was writing before the age of word processors, of course, so it was a much bigger deal to complete a draft. She would type her first draft (cigarette dangling from her lips, no doubt), then print it and read it straight through, making notes as she read. So far, so good.

The second draft, however, was a careful, meticulous effort, with almost everything figured out ahead of time. Why? Because Highsmith didn't want to have to type the thing a third time. Early in her career, she did this third draft(the one with carbons), but careful work later helped her finish at two. Lots of time saved.

Because if you think about it for a minute, just to type a 80,000 word novel at 60 wpm would take over twenty hours. Typing the third draft and making occasional changes, plus typing carefully enough not to make errors, you'd be looking at a week of nine to five days. You mess up a scene or two, together with stuff that needs to be backfilled for consistency's sake and you've just cost yourself a week of finger exercise.

This is all very different from how I work. To start at the top, my typing skills are poor. My fingers move quickly enough, but there's plenty of backspacing, lots of transposed letters, etc. I compose through my fingers; Highsmith thought of the sentence first, then typed it when it was just how she wanted it to sound. What's more, my spelling leaves something to be desired; study of Spanish and French has messed up a number of cognates and I'm frequently letting the spellchecker remind me of when words have double letters or not. If you were working on a typewriter, you'd have to look up these words in the dictionary and would soon learn how to spell them properly as a result.

As for the drafts, I have a vague idea of how many versions I've done, but it's such a fluid thing. Every time I open the document I'll make a change. Sometimes I'll make a change just to see how it looks; I frequently revert to a previous version of the same scene. It's the luxury of working on a computer.

Finally, Highsmith mentioned reading the galleys and how her contracts allowed a certain number of changes before she would be charged for excess typesetting effort. Very foreign to us now, when it's quite easy to change an electronic document.

So is the end result of this change in the mechanics of writing better prose or worse? On the one hand, the skill of self-editing becomes much more important. If you're a good redrafter, you can keep working at something until it's right, instead of worrying that you've just caused yourself another twenty hours of typing. On the other, the act of reducing the physical effort required to finish a manuscript only reinforces the idea that anyone can write a novel. Maybe anyone can produce 80,000 words, but all these extra novels have overwhelmed editors to the point that most of them no longer accept unsolicited submissions. Not only have they rid themselves of all that fresh crap, they've also cost themselves those occasional jewels they might have otherwise uncovered.

Even in the best writers, having a word processor might induce a certain laziness. After all, there's always one more draft. Let me send this to my editor or agent and see what she thinks about it. Maybe it's good enough already. And maybe it makes it into print because it's just good enough; in an earlier era, the writer might have been more careful putting the words on the paper in the first place.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 70,700 words

Professional Jealousy

What's playing on the ipod: Black Hole Sun, Soundgarden

I came across the web site of an old writing friend yesterday. We'd belonged to the same writing group about ten years ago. M was a prolific writer, producing as much stuff as the rest of us put together. Her stories had lots of interesting stuff, but they always read like rough drafts. She was great about taking critiques, and when she left with her critiques, she got right to work. A month or two later and she'd turn in a new draft.

The new version would be totally different. It was as if the critique itself had uncovered the real meaning of the story. That's fine; I've done that myself. But with M, what we were seeing was another first draft, but of a completely different book. She'd completely started over, but the thing was still flabby, unfocused. So our critique would give her an entirely different direction to start.

Learning how to take criticism and then direct it to your story to bring out your own, best vision of same, is a critical skill to learn. It was one that M had not yet learned.

But as it turned out, M is now a professional writer. She's still incredibly prolific, but she's obviously learned some lessons about how to focus her writing.* Her books are YA fantasies and she's published several already and they'd done well with strong reviews. It looks like her career is taking off.

I almost never feel professional jealousy, or any jealousy, to be honest. Sure, I have twinges of envy, wanting what other people already have. But I'm always happy when my friends succeed. Other people's successes don't diminish my own. In fact, it can only be a good thing for me when people I know are successful.

But I won't deny when I looked at where she has come from nothing to being a bona fide pro over these last ten years, I felt a stirring of resentment. It was as much anger and frustration with myself as anything. Couldn't I have written more? Couldn't I have had a lucky breakthrough during those near misses that I suffered? Why has M succeeded and I haven't yet?

I recognize some of this stems from the needy, anxious feelings of the moment. Knowing that any moment could bring an email from my agent sharing rejections, or conversely, a call telling me about an offer for THE RIGHTEUS. I think I suffered a moment in considering M's success where I realized that my life could change in a moment, putting me in the same category as my long-lost friend. Or, the opposite could happen. A year could pass and I could still be where I am now, on the outside, looking in. The audience for my books numbering in the single digits instead of the six figures.

*Maybe not entirely, as it would appear that she's still producing multiple novels for every one that gets published. Still, given her drive and production, and the fact that she's already got a strong foundation of professional success, how could M not continue to reach new heights?

Devil's Deep Word Count: 69,500 words

More Depressing News from Iraq

What's playing on the ipod: Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, KT Tunstall

I wish we'd thought about this sort of thing before we invaded Iraq. There's no way we change that country through a half-hearted invasion/occupation. I bet we could change the country the way the Romans did, by butchering several million people in the rebellious provinces, then setting up American, English-speaking cities to show the benefits of American civilization. Pretty sure we're not interested in that kind of solution.

So instead of having all the drawbacks of empire with none of the benefits, why don't we just disengage from the Middle East, trade with them in the same way that Japan does? Nobody in the Middle East cares about Japan and the only countries that hate the Japanese do so from the collective memory of their misdeeds in the 1930s and 1940s.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 68,100 words

The Death of Science Fiction - Part II

What's playing on the ipod: Precious Things, Tori Amos

The first real blow against the dream of technological utopia came with Hiroshima. Sure, conquering the atom (the so-called Atomic Age) may have promised "electrical energy too cheap to meter" as people claimed at the time, but it also showed you could vaporize thousands of people at once. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the U.S. and the Soviet Union had arsenals great enough to annihilate human civilization with a single hasty decision.

Worse, the big, noticeable technological changes crawled to a halt in the latter part of the century. The Wright Brothers flew their first airplane at the end of 1903. Twenty-four years later, Lindburgh flew solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. Jets came near the end of World War II, the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and sent Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961. A mere eight years later Americans were walking on the moon. Sixty-six years from Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Sea of Tranquility. The moon.

As a child of the 70s, let me tell you I was expecting colonies on Mars by now. Yet thirty-eight years later and we haven't been to the moon in decades, let alone sent out colonizing expeditions. We've also stagnated in every other facet of transportation, from high speed rail to supersonic commercial flight.

The problem, it would seem, is a stubborn shortage of energy. Takes a lot of juice to escape Earth's gravitational well or zip to Australia in sixty minutes. We're afraid of fission and we have made little progress in fusion or even solar energy. We're still digging up or pumping fossils out of the ground and burning them.

The biggest advance of the last fifty years has been in electronics. Early SF stories imagined starships with Einstein-defying engines, their trajectories calculated by dudes with slide rules. Computers of the future would be the size of the Empire State building, not embedded in wristwatches, pacemakers, and personal audio devices. Even the internet didn't become a staple of science fiction until the late 1980s, when it was almost on us. Computers are more powerful, more ubiquitous, and more essential than anyone imagined.

But let me tell you something. This stuff has changed our world, but not in the superficial stuff we do every day. Look out your window and you'll see something that is more or less unchanged since the end of World War II: cars, power lines, houses of the same shape, people walking on their own two feet. That many of us go plop ourselves in front of the computer to game, write, chat, or surf, doesn't make for gripping fiction. Not like jetpacks and underwater cities.

Coming soon: Part III

Devil's Deep Word Count: 66,700 words

Some Early Feedback

What's playing on the ipod: Wildflower, The Cult

I've had a few negative responses to THE RIGHTEOUS so far. Rejections, that is. I was feeling fairly down about it at first, but I remembered my experience in finding an agent. There were several agents who declined, often quickly, to consider the book past the firts few chapters. There were a couple who requested larger chunks, but then passed, and finally, there were several who read the book, loved it, and wanted to represent me. Including Kim, of course.

It's naive to think that even a good book will be all things to all people. It's also foolish to get down about someone saying, "not for me," when many others have really enjoyed the book. The key is to find the sweet spot, the intersection between plot, characterization, and idea that THE RIGHTEOUS hits. This is just as true of agents and editors as it eventually will be for my future reading audience.

The optimistic thing, then, is to say great, we've eliminated some of the wrong editors and publishing houses. I wonder which of these remaining houses will be the one who ends up being my publisher?

Or, as the fox said, those grapes were probably sour anyway.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 65,500 words

The Death of Science Fiction - Part I

Science fiction isn't the first genre to suffer an untimely death. The Western was effectively dead by the time I became aware of such things in the late 1980s. There were still the obligatory Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey sections of every bookstore--still are, in fact--but almost nothing new was seeing print in the genre. When you thought of Westerns, you thought of old stuff, of 1950s films, of Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

There's a good reason for the death of the Western. The middle part of the 20th Century was a time of nostalgia for the frontier that had defined first the colonies, and then the United States for the first 250 years of its existence. People still had grandparents who had crossed the plains in covered wagons, and this period was not yet history, but dimly remembered past. By now, however, the frontier myth of our country has transformed into something else. Bereft of meaning, deconstructed, the West has become just another period of history. Sure, you can write novels that take place on the 19th Century frontier, just as you can write novels set in ancient Rome, but there does not exist a genre that features tropes such as the stoic lawman, the gunslinger, the whore with a heart of gold, and the savage Injuns looking to take some scalps.

There was another myth that took hold between 1850 and 1950, and that was the idea of glorious, never-ending technological advance. The opening of outer and inner space, the rapid advances in travel, and the conquering of disease--the very cheating of death--captivated the minds of millions and found itself a voice in the genre of science fiction. Stories promised adventures on the frontier worlds of space, or featured the larger than life figures who would conquer same. The heroes were scientists and explorers. Writers saw not just continued progress, but accelerating progress.

Of course, there were always cautionary tales in science fiction. Indeed, Frankenstein, arguably the first science fiction novel, dealt with technology run amuck. But the heart of the genre was technological optimism; everything else was counterpoint to this theme.

Some Stuff

I'm drawing steadily closer to the end of the book and I realize there are a few holes that will need to be resolved in the second draft. I keep thinking that as I improve in skill and experience that I'll get better at this, but it seems that in order to maintain momentum I need to fumble my way toward the ending, discovering along the way what is really motivating my main characters. I was talking to a friend of mine with close to 30 books under her belt and her first drafts are pretty close to her final drafts. Once she finishes, it comes down to edits and tweaks. I'm not sure this will ever describe my writing practive.

How to Think Yourself Out of the Church

What's playing on the ipod: She Sells Sanctuary, The Cult

As most readers of this blog know, I was raised in the LDS (Mormon) church. Someone recently asked me how I ended up out of the church. In my first years out of the church I spent a lot of time thinking about this question and started the site Zarahemla City Limits (currently maintained by a couple of friends of mine). This is a short essay I wrote for that site.

"When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish." (The Book of Mormon, Second Nephi 9:28).

I had always known that there were problems in LDS history. It struck me as too convenient, even as a child, when I asked my primary teacher what ever became of the Gold Plates, and she told me that an angel had taken them back into heaven. I learned enough details about polygamy in high school seminary to unsettle me, and reading National Geographic articles about the origin of Native Americans was enough to cast the Semitic origin of these people (as told in the Book of Mormon) into serious doubt. Yet I was told, and believed, that the best solution for dealing with these problems was to put them into a box on the shelf. Some day—the implication being in the next life—these questions would be answered. Until then, why not focus on the safer part of the gospel, the feelings of the spirit.

Within the last few years, however, the box on my shelf had begun to spill over. I heard once that Joseph Smith had been imprisoned for destroying a printing press claiming that he was practicing polygamy. But wasn't he? I wondered. And I heard someone claim that the gold plates would have weighed over two hundred pounds, given their dimensions and the specific gravity of gold. But wait? I thought. Didn't he go running through the woods with them tucked under his arm? And didn't people claim to "heft" them in their hands? I didn't do the math myself—I didn't want to—but it was an unsettling detail to tuck away for later.

Eventually, I decided the best thing to do would be to get some serious scholarship about the church. First, I shied away from official church histories, although much of what I read was written by faithful members of the church. Second, I avoided anything written by obvious anti-Mormons, or people with agendas of their own, like Evangelical Christians. I wanted serious, unassuming scholarship. The history of Mormonism was much richer than I thought. It was also more troubling.

Because alas, the issues that I thought would have easy answers did not. Instead of closing off each issue one by one as I studied more, I discovered more and more troubling details. Polygamy? The truth of it is much more disturbing than I thought. The First Vision? Not the neat package we are taught in church. The temple ceremony? Masonic in origin and evolving over the years. Hardly the restored endowment of Solomon's Temple.

How about the historicity of the Book of Mormon, then? Turns out there is none. In fact, it was worse even than I had imagined. Not only are there no archeological details to back up its claims, there are dozens of anachronisms from steel swords, to brass plates, to horses, elephants, and other animals that did not live in the Americas during the time in question. Further, errors in the King James version of the Bible are transmitted to the Book of Mormon, elaborated on, even, instead of corrected. There is strong evidence that the Book of Mormon is a 19th Century artifact, and is no more historical than The Lord of the Rings.

My readings are too great to sum up here. There are other sources for that, and you will find them easily if you are interested. That is not the purpose of this essay. Suffice it to say that they did not quiet my concern. I began to seriously consider the possibility that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was not what it claimed to be. The question was, what would I do about it?

First, I held long conversations with M, who was reading the same material that I was. Turns out that she was coming to the same conclusions that I was. She would be no help to shore up my testimony, nor did I consider this her duty. Next, I turned to my best friend, an intelligent man with whom I have spend hundreds of hours discussing all manner of philosophical issues. We had a brief conversation about the matter.

I say brief, because I was unprepared for his shock and yes, outrage, at the path I was taking. Because I respect this friend's intelligence and because we share the same skeptical approach to information, I suggested he read some of the books that were troubling me. I thought perhaps he could point out flaws in the reasoning, could smooth over the growing cracks in my testimony. I was not prepared for a comparison between the books I was reading and cheating on my wife. Here is what he said,

I'm not going to take up your invitation to immerse myself in the very same anti-Mormon propaganda that has brought your own testimony to the breaking point. I believe that the church is true. I also believe that I should not cheat on my wife—but I suspect that if I went out to the strip clubs with my colleagues every time I was on a business trip, that belief would start to waiver. I'm no more sure of my testimony than I am of my loyalty to my wife. No matter how true something may be, if you subject it to a sustained-enough attack, your belief in it will falter.

Is this true? Are true ideas so fragile that they will wilt under serious scrutiny? There are Moslems who have constructed elaborate scientific arguments to show that the Earth is, indeed, the center of the universe as the Qu'ran says that it is. If I were to read enough of this literature would I start to doubt Galileo and Einstein? Or, rather, would a serious study of Galileo and Einstein in comparison serve only to show the fatal flaws of the Earth-centered arguments? One can extend this theory into a study of evolution versus a literal reading of the Garden of Eden story, or a comparison between germ theory and the medieval belief that disease was caused by bad air.

Goodness, did my friend really mean that the ideas in some books are so dangerous they should not even be read? Given that logic, I should stay away from Das Kapital because it would make me lose faith in market economies, or that reading Mein Kampf would make me want to shred the United States Constitution. Those are the most dangerous books on Marxism and Fascism I can think of; they are read in universities across the country, yet we are not turning out a nation of believers in these ideologies. That is because they do not stand up to the free market of ideas. If so-called anti-Mormon literature is false, would it not then, also wither under scrutiny?

And yet, the church teaches that we are to avoid anything that is not faith promoting. Boyd K. Packer teaches that some things that are true are "not useful," and should not be told. He claims that there can be no "objective" history of the church. There is only that which furthers the cause, and that which is damaging to fragile testimonies.

I utterly reject this claim. Truth has nothing to fear from lies. Truth will stand up to the most rigorous of inquiries. It will look better the more it is examined. It will strengthen under the most aggressive attacks. In a conflict with Truth, Lies will always lose in the end.

I urge you to make your own studies into these matters. Read widely and from a variety of sources. Do not immerse yourself in one kind of writing, or one author for an extended period of time. Try to be as balanced and as fair as you possibly can. And for goodness sake, do not make snap judgements about changing your religious path. There is no rush to make decisions. Remember, what is true will still look true after all of your studying. What is false will break up and drift apart like so much rotten pack ice.

Post Hike

What's playing on the ipod: Hands Across the Ocean, Mission UK

By the time we finished serving breakfast to guests and drove down to the trail head it was almost 11:00. You never know how these things go--your pacing, the number and duration of breaks--so we moved aggressively to start.

The first .7 miles started with a steep ascent to the top of Mt. H. Some of it was so steep that the trail was just a series of fieldstone steps set so high above each other and it was real effort to get from one step to the next. We climbed about 2500 feet in that .7 miles. There were a few flat spots, but that just made the grade steeper elsewhere. By the time we got to the top I was already pretty tired and worried how I would manage the next 9 1/2 miles.

It was raining a little, threatening more, but little of it penetrated the forest canopy. That rain later stopped and left us with cool weather. Unfortunately, the clouds blocked many of the best views but I'll take that over blazing sun.

There were a few other hikers in this first stretch, including one pair of older men with heavy packs for multi-day hikes. After Mt. H, nothing until we got to the shelter at mile 5.4.

The trail undulated up and down over the next several miles with few serious descents or climbs. E set into his snacks right away and had finished almost everything but his sandwich by the time we reached the shelter. There was a group of hikers doing to the same exact hike as us who were just leaving the shelter when we arrived. We rested for about twenty minutes, and filled the canteen from the brook, just in case.

Right after the shelter we began the second major climb, which duplicated the vertical of the first, only over about 2.0 miles with occasional descents. Each time we reached an intermediary peak and began to descend, it felt like we'd passed the summit, but I knew from the map that we still had more climbing. Nothing was as steep as that first climb to Mt. H, but it was longer and we were more tired. We eventually passed the other hikers, but not as soon as I was expecting.

At mile 9, we came out onto a ski area where I was able to reach M. on the phone and call her to come pick us up. Unfortunately, crossing the ski trails I somehow missed the AT and we ended up descending to the road and our pick up place via some rather steep trails that were more than a little difficult given the state of my calves and knees at that point. Nevertheless, we finally got down and had a pleasant rest waiting for the car.

I slept very well last night and my muscles are complaining fiercely this morning, but all in all it was a great hike. Good weather, just strenuous enough, and good one-on-one time with my son.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 62,900 words

Hitting the Trail

As soon as we finish breakfast, we're hitting the AT. The weather looks good, I'm feeling energetic. Should be a great day, assuming I don't sprain my ankle in some mountain ravine.

The Difficult Guests

The difficult guests arrived and pitched a fit. We're replacing the roof in that building. The work was supposed to finish on Friday. Actually, I spent most of the spring trying to get it done, but it only started happening last week. Nevermind that there's only one day of work left to do, that they're on the middle floor with a room between them and the roof, and that they'd be out playing golf all day when the workers are busy.

I told them that I understood. They could find another place and I was very sorry. We thought it would be done in time. They were just irate that I didn't call that I didn't schedule it a different time, etc. The woman was angry that we'd raised the rates this year. We raised the rates 5% and since they're getting a grandfathered discount from the previous owner (plus a bunch of other perks that other guests don't enjoy), frankly I didn't feel too bad. Have they seen our fuel bill increases? How about the skyrocketing property taxes? Insurance increases? Etc., etc., etc. Believe me, we ain't gettin' rich on this gig.

But I digress. I kept telling them I was sorry, they could find someplace else, and eventually they did. I don't know who else will give them two adjacent rooms with a kitchen, do housekeeping around them and their adult handicapped daughter while they play golf, and include breakfast. They came back awhile later, after they'd left and found another place, asking if they could borrow the tv/vcr combo we have so their daughter could watch her videos during the day. Did I mention we bought this device just for their once a year visits? The thing is, if we give them the t.v., the room is darn near unrentable. Who wants a room without a t.v. So we'd be taking one of the two rooms offline for the week while they stayed somewhere else. Sorry, but no.

My dream scenario is that the work finishes up on Monday and they start thinking about what a hassle it is that they don't have us there to keep an eye on their daughter and that it's a pain without that VCR to play her videos all day and gee, they have to go out and buy breakfast somewhere every morning and isn't that an expensive pain in the butt? So they come by, asking if they can have their rooms back but oops, we've already rented them to someone else. Maybe next year...

Alas, being in hospitality means you have to keep a grin plastered on your face and take people treating you like servants, and that, sadly, you rarely get to gloat, not even privately.

Doubling Up

What's playing on the ipod: Scarborough Fair, Joel Grey

I've come up with a solution to my problem with taking tomorrow off to hike the Appalachian Trail. I'm going to pretend that this afternoon is tomorrow. I did my thousand words on DEVIL'S DEEP this morning and I'll do another thousand this evening and count it as tomorrow's production.

It's all a mental trick, but I think it might work. I already feel the slight tension, the stress, of knowing that I haven't yet done my writing for today, even though I wrote 1,200 words this morning.

I'm getting better at pacing my novels, but I'm still not sure how long things will take until I write them down. This morning I was going back and forth between thinking that I had another 40,000 words left and that I'd wrap things up by the time I hit 70,000.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 61,600 words

Twinkies and Tiramasu

What's playing on the ipod: Obsession, Animotion

I was at Romancing the Blog and saw a post where someone mentioned in an off-handed way the common complaint that people don't take the romance genre seriously.

I think the reason romance isn't respected as a genre is the same reason why Hostess Snacks aren't respected as deserts. They may be tasty, you may love them, may even prefer them to something like tiramasu, but they fit within a narrow band of possibilities: Twinkies, HoHos, Ding Dongs. You know what you're going to get, and if you bite into a Twinkie to discover some sort of coffee-flavored chocolate filling, you're going to say, "This is not a Twinkie."

For better or worse, Harlequin, et al, have put themselves in the business of turning romance into a small number of recognizable and reproducible shapes. It constrains the author but it also means that a reader knows exactly what she's getting when she picks up a novel. The publishers further refine this by coming up with narrower labels. Say, Silhouette Intimate Moments, or Harlequin Intrigue.

The thing is, romance fits so nicely into all those other genres. You can put it in science fiction, in adventure, into suspense. You can make a startling, unexpected movie, like Shakespeare in Love, that is, at its heart, a romance story. The non-Romance reading public simply would not see a connection between a movie like this and the bare-chested, bulging pants heroes in the racks of romance novels they see at the supermarket.

The Weekend Hike

What's playing on the ipod: Desamores, Alejandro Filio

I was talking to some hikers who came down from the mountains for a couple of days to do laundry, eat a decent meal, etc., about our planned hike this weekend. It's 11.9 miles with a lot elevation and they kind of raised their eyes. As a comparison, they're doing thirty miles in the next five days. Of course, you can push yourself harder in one day than you can day after day. One of the guys has hiked that stretch several times and said, "Your knees will be barking."

An alternative would be to stay overnight, and go to the next exit from the trail, at about eighteen miles, but the main consideration is the book. During this draft stage I really have to keep writing on a daily basis. I'm going to risk taking one day off, but if we overnight, I'll lose two days.

Approaching the End Game

What's playing on the ipod: Pop Goes the World, Men Without Hats

I'm approaching the end game. My main characters are coming together for their final confrontation. I figure I've got about 20,000 more words to reach the final set piece, have the knock-down, drag-out fight, and then another 5,000 or so to wrap up loose ends, etc. With hard work I should meet my self-imposed July 10 deadline.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 60,400 words

Moving In

What's playing on the ipod: When We Where Young, Dolores O'Riordan

We have some of my least favorite guests moving into the inn tomorrow. Okay, so they're not the worst guests in the world, but they have a variety of quirks that annoy me. They get two adjacent rooms at a discount (based on an arrangement with the previous owner) and from the moment they come they are asking for special favors, making little "friendly" suggestions or complaints that they insist are no big deal, "but if you wouldn't mind..." Special requests at breakfast, extra towels, etc. We usually take payment at check-in (usually with credit card, occasionally cash), but these people pay with a whole stack of small denomination travelers checks when they leave, which are just a hassle. Finally, we have a rule that we need any dogs to be crated and guests to be out of the room before we come in for daily housekeeping, but again, the previous owner made an exception. They go golfing during the day and leave their adult handicapped daughter to watch movies, together with a nervous little dog who doesn't seem to be happy to be on vacation, and we have to clean around them. And unlike most guests, who are gone after the weekend, they always stay a whole week.

And I always feel guilty about disliking them. For one, they seem to like us a lot, in spite of all their little comments. And for whatever reason we're fairly slow up here until late June, when the weddings, bike races, and other events kick into gear; we can always use the extra money this time of year.

More Adventures in Roofing

What's playing on the ipod: Rooster, Alice in Chains

The fun continues with the roof project. We found the source of the rot in the plywood. Turns out that one of the bathroom vents isn't carrying away all the air, leaving some nice mold colonies on the underside of the plywood sheets. More cost, more material to dispose of. On the plus side, the missing insulation is not as extensive as once thought, so we only have to blow some under one small part of the roof instead of the whole thing.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 58,600 words

Subway Swing

Such a good idea, why doesn't everyone do it?

Subway Swing.

Waiting, Waiting, WAITING!

What's playing on the ipod: Nothing (and I don't mean the Depeche Mode Song)

I hate waiting. I hate being patient. I've always been a clock watcher whether it's been boring classes, work, waiting for my next vacation, etc. It makes me a poor match for the publishing world, where things move at a glacier pace and it can take years to get something from concept to publication. I wrote an article once that took six months to get a response to the initial query, three months to write the blasted thing and two more years until it saw print and another three months until I saw my check. You know it's been a long time when inflation starts playing a role in how much (real) payment you're going to receive.

And so here I am, my book on the editors' desks for one week now, and the blush of excitement is gone and I'm just impatient. Only I'm still jumping every time the phone rings, thinking it might be my agent, and checking my email every twenty minutes. I know, I know, it will probably be several weeks, maybe months, before anything happens. That doesn't make it any easier to be the world's most impatient person.

Roof Replacement

What's playing on the ipod: Africa, Toto

It never ceases to to amaze me how people try to get away with shody work. We're replacing the roof on the lodge and it turns out there is no insulation down there; to blow celulose is going to cost an additional 1,000 - 1,800 dollars on top of the extra 700-800 for new plywood, bringing the total to roughly 10,000. Ouch.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. The first year, we remodeled the lower levels of that same building only to discover that there was no insulation down there either, and last fall we redid the ceiling of the middle level in part to put in insulation. You'd think that in Northern New England, where the winters occasionally send temperatures to -20F or lower maximum insulation would have been de rigor since the days of Franklin Stoves.

Progress on Two Fronts

What's playing on the ipod: Russian Radio, Red Flag

I'm feeling significantly better today, although still with a scratchy throat and a little congested. Also, I've written that missing scene and think I know how this thing is going to play out over the next 30,000 words. I've got another scene I'll need to write at some point to fill in another missing piece, but it's more background than critical setup.

Note that I've officially changed the name of the book below. It will henceforth be known at THE DEVIL'S DEEP.

Devil's Deep Word Count: 57,200

Under the Weather

What's playing on the ipod: Alive and Kicking, Simple Minds

I thought I was having one of my periodic bad allergy days, but my throat has grown progressively more sore and my eyes are watering. An achy malaise is settling into my bones and I'm tired and lethargic. I finished my writing and went downstairs to clean up the kitchen but couldn't muster the energy. The little guy seems to be sick, too, which is a bummer.

On the writing front, I still haven't returned to that missing scene, but I've almost got a handle on what needs to happen there. Once I get that nailed down, I'll come up with the events themselves without much difficulty.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 55,200 words

Missing Scene

What's playing on the ipod: When We Were Young, Dolores O'Riordan

I almost never do this, but I wrote past a scene today. That is, there is a hole between one scene and the next and I'm not quite sure what to put there. I know it has to involve some specific characters of the book, but only because it's been awhile since I've visited them and I sense that they need some sort of complication or conflict. I need to figure out what this is and what information I need to reveal to the reader.

But I generally write in a linear fashion from one scene to the next, trying to arrange them in the proper order from the get-go. I almost never change this order, although the rewrite will typically see some added scenes to fill in the inevitable hole. Since I didn't know what the above scene would be, and didn't want to disrupt my momentum, I took a chance and skipped the scene. I'm going to have to figure out what goes here within the next couple of days.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 53,500 words

Ego and Writing

What's playing on the ipod: Kiss From a Rose, Seal

The peak creativity post below made me wonder about the role of ego in the writer's career. Let's face it, if you want to be rich and famous, there are more fruitful venues. But the thing about professional success as a writer is that people listen to what you have to say. Even as a novelist, I'm free to explore all sorts of ideas, heresies, etc., even if sometimes I put them in the mouth of repugnant individuals to express their inherent distaste. Every reader is a captive audience.

So to even think you should be a writer is to believe that what you have to say is so interesting, so important, so entertaining, that thousands, maybe even millions of people should listen. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise--seeing your name in print is an ego-stroking, arrogance-inspiring event. The temptation for professional writers to use this platform to commit assorted assholery. It's one reason why so many people behave badly to being passed over for rewards, for poor sales, or for negative reviews.

The flip side--and here is where it gets weird--is that to reach professional status, you have to occasionally accept that your writing is shit. You have to think it's shit, because you have to keep throwing it out, unpublished. You have to submit your work to fellow writers, to editors, and to reviewers to point out all your flash. You have to harshly examine your own work with a degree of self-criticism reminiscent of the self-denouncers during the Cultural Revolution.

"This is why I am bad. This is why my work sucks. This is what I need to do to improve."

Because, size of your ego notwithstanding, there's always someone better than you out there. There's someone better and hungrier and a harder worker. And their prose is going to sparkle where yours only gleams. The same editor who yawned and looked out the window when you ended your chapter, wondering when you were going to get to the point, is even now up past midnight, unable to put down some other first novelist's book.

So, ironically, it's your ego, in large part, that makes you want to tell stories. But it's your humility that will turn you into a good writer.

Peak Creativity

What's playing on the ipod: Ordinary Day, Dolores O'Riordan

It's interesting, but it seems that writers and musicians seem to peak sometime in the first ten years of their career. They peak professionally and they peak creatively. Musicians tend to be young when they get their break, so they might peak in their twenties, authors in their thirties or forties.

Is this peak inevitable? Is there only so much creative A-material available? Or is it the result of success? Before success, hunger to create and need to win acceptance drive the artist. But maybe as the best authors and musicians age, they grow tired. From a money perspective, nobody cares if they produce their best material anymore. The mere echo of same, combined with name recognition, is enough to maintain sales.

Worse, as time goes on, the true superstars are surrounded by sycophants and others who have tied their fortunes to those of the famous and rich. Criticism grates on the human ego; the leeches of the world know this and keep their words honey-sweet. Sincere, insincere, it doesn't matter.

And like a medieval king, increasingly out of touch with the real world, the top artists lose touch with the common people. They lose touch with what made them great artists in the first place.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 52,600 words

Current Reading

What's playing on the ipod: She Sells Sanctuary, The Cult

What I'm Reading:

Finn, by Jon Clinch*
Scuba Diving and Snorkeling for Dummies**
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction***


*I'm almost done with Finn. It's fantastic, just the kind of mix of literary, strongly plotted fiction I like with a great setting and strong voice. I'm almost done with this and will finish after the kids go to sleep tonight.

**I don't usually go for the Dummies books. In general, I don't like products that insult their purchasers. But my memory of certain dive related terms was hazy and this seemed like a good resource for Devil's Workshop.

***This feels pretty dated and spends a lot of time on short stories, the markets for which have largely dried up since the book was written 40+ years ago and which I don't write much of these days anyway. I haven't read any of Highsmith's books (probably because she's been dead since 1995), and found myself irritated that there was no indication of the book's age until I held it in my hands. Still, it's interesting enough that I'll finish it, as I do all books about writing.

Check out her photo on wikipedia. Who's that guy reaching around to hold up her cigarette? Seriously, talk about man hands.

The Bozo Tax

What's playing on the ipod: Hunny, Hunny, Book of Love

Just as it is foolish to gauge the general fitness level of Americans by walking the aisles of Walmart, so it would be wise not to make assumptions about the intelligence of flatlanders based on their behavior when they come north. So whenever I want to shake my head at someone’s foolish behavior, I’m reminded that it is usually another, more intelligent guest at the inn who points it out to me.

Yet there is no denying the ability of one person to create unnecessary work for another. The best night of the year for this would appear to be Christmas Eve, or more accurately very, very early on Christmas morning. Two years ago, the phone rang at 4:30 in the morning, which is the worst time to get pulled out of the bed. If I have to get up or think at all, it will take at least an hour to get back to sleep. By then I’m thinking about breakfast and how I’ll only have a few more minutes of sleep before I have to get up and figure out how to feed thirty hungry guests.

So the phone rang. My wife listened, and told me, “It’s room fifteen,” then rolled over and went back to sleep. I took the phone with little enthusiasm.

“We have no heat down here,” the man’s voice said.

Instantly, I was awake. No heat? What happened? Was it just that unit or was everyone in that building going to be wake up cold and cranky? I told him I’d be right down and slipped into some clothes. Oh, and I’m very sorry. No problem, he assured me. No problem at all. Considering the circumstances, he was not at all put out. It didn’t yet occur to me to wonder why. I started thinking clearly by the time I made it down the stairs and grabbed a flashlight and some matches. The heater in that room (since replaced) was old and creaky; there was a good chance it was nothing more than the pilot light going out. Which was true, as it turned out. What was more interesting was why the pilot light was out.

When someone comes into a room and it is too cold for their taste, they don’t turn up the heat to seventy or seventy-two, or wherever they want it. No, they crank it as high as it goes. They think of a thermostat as they would a gas pedal. The harder you stomp, the faster you’ll get up to speed. Of course, thermostats don’t work that way.

This is what happens to the guests in room fifteen. His wife jacks up the heat full throttle when they arrive. They then go to sleep, but the dinosaur of a heater, all 40,000 BTUs of it, keeps working. Before long, the family is baking in their sheets like so many Christmas hams. The father gets up, cannot find the thermostat on the wall and goes directly to the heater itself. Does he turn the heater off directly? Of course not. What he does is lie on his back and grope around underneath until he finds the gas line itself and then turns it off. By early morning it is freezing and he calls me.

And I spend the next twenty minutes trying to get the stubborn pilot light lit again.

But at least there was no damage. Last year, someone called at three o’clock Christmas morning to tell me that water was leaking from the ceiling in their bathroom. After a frantic search I discovered the source. The guests above them had gone to sleep with the sink plug pulled and the water still running. It was the barest trickle, but after a few hours it did the trick, overflowed, soaked through the carpet and subfloor and found its way to the downstairs neighbors.

My wife has hit upon a novel solution to these problems: the bozo tax. This is a surcharge that we apply above and beyond the room rate to anyone who adds to our work load through a shortage of their own cognitive abilities. Make your reservation after midnight? Ten dollars. Drag the hot tub cover onto the deck instead of following the easy instructions? Fifteen dollars. Five dollars for parking in front of the dumpster and ten for getting lost on the way to your room and then crawling into bed in the first vacant room you find. (Yes, that really happened, and no, we don’t always lock the empty rooms. This is the country, after all.) Need an explanation of the remote control? First time is free, additional times three dollars each. Flood the downstairs unit? Don’t even go there. You can’t afford it. Fines automatically doubled on Christmas, New Years and other major holidays.

Okay, okay, there’s no bozo tax. But gosh, it's tempting sometimes.

Test Hike Deconstructed

What's playing on the ipod: Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, KT Tunstall

Took a 4.5 mile circuit today as a test of my pacing, stamina, and that of my potential hike mates. Everyone did well (okay, so there was some whining for our snacks pretty much from the get-go), and we progressed over moderate grade in in a reasonable time. For the main mountain hike we'll need to do about 10-15 miles each day. I think we can do that and still have plenty of time for rest, lunch, etc.

I''ve blown through the mid-novel set piece of Devil's Workshop. A bit of resolution, some knowledge to pick up and I should be setting up for the final set piece of the novel. Hard to believe that in another 8-12 days I should be setting up the end game. From there it's all about execution and a satisfying deneoument. By this time next month I should be wrapping up the first draft.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 51,200 words

Novel Progress

What's playing on the ipod: The Gap, Thompson Twins

It's an interesting time to be distracted from the novel given that I'm in perhaps the most tension-filled part of the book. We have two violent crimes, separated in time, one of which we know and dread the horrifying outcome, and the other still in doubt. I just resolved the outcome of the first crime and am moving to the second. This section has been really strong and I'm happy with how it's coming.

Not to say that I'm not going to have a lot of work once I finish this first draft in bringing other sections up to snuff.

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think of the novel as THE DEVIL'S DEEP. I'll probably make an official change to my word count tallies in the next couple of days. The above section, which proves to be the seminal event of the whole novel, stretches about 10-15K words and gives meaning to that title.

Today is June 9. I typed "Chapter One" on May 4. Hard to believe it's only been thirty-six days the way I've become immersed in this novel and revealed on page and to myself the mysteries of Bajo del Diablo.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 49,400 words

What's playing on the ipod: La Grange, ZZ Top

I'm thinking about changing the name of my book. I called it Devil's Workshop from the old saw, "The idle mind is the devil's workshop." It fits, to a certain extent, but there is a place off the coast of Costa Rica called, "Bajo del Diablo,"which means, roughly, "Devil's Deep or Devil's Depths." I'm thinking, "The Devil's Deep."

I like the title. The only problem is that it sounds a bit like THE RIGHTEOUS. I have two worries with having Devil in the title. First, that people will think it's somehow connected to THE RIGHTEOUS. It's not. There are no religious characters at all. Second, that I'll be stuck in one of those silly, "A is for Alibi" things where all of your titles have to be related, even when the books are not.

On an unrelated note, it's been a quiet couple of days. I went through that flurry of activity with queries and such on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm imagining (fantasizing?) all these editors reading THE RIGHTEOUS late into the night or missing their subway stops and that they'll be calling my agent to tell her they absolutely must acquire the book.

Devil's Workshop: 47,700 Words

Getting Ready for a Hike

I'm going to be tackling a spur of the Appalachian Trail in a couple of weeks and have been extending my daily hikes. Yesterday I went about two hours at a good clip and could have easily gone longer if other duties hadn't called. Mainly, I was testing my feet, which have been prone to pain since I wore them to bloody stumps one trip to the UK about ten years ago. I've got some good shoes and it's easier for me when I'm not walking over pavement. No problems.

It was all fairly flat, however, unlike the spine of the mountains over which I'll be hiking. I'm going to take a longer hike this weekend with a little bit more elevation.

The main hike itself will be fairly simple. M. will drop us off (us being E. and me) a few miles from here late Sunday morning. We'll hike for about five to six hours, bivouac in one of the shelters along the trail and continue the next day until afternoon. I'm not sure yet what our pace will be, but there are decent spots for pickup at about 25 miles and 35 miles.

What I'd like to do is take a longer hike later in the year, perhaps September, and this will be a good chance to test my interest and fitness levels.

Forward Motion

What's playing on the ipod: Pop Goes the World, by Men Without Hats

THE RIGHTEOUS is out on submission as of today. Kim and I went back and forth yesterday with versions of her query letter. She made her phone calls this morning and sent out the submission package to the various editors shortly thereafter. She said the initial reaction to her call was "ultra-positive," which is encouraging.

Better yet, one of my two quote providers sent a nice email to her editor yesterday telling her she would love THE RIGHTEOUS. Suffice it to say, an endorsement by someone whose books regularly hit the top five of the NY Times bestseller list carries some weight. Her editor sent an email to my agent asking for a chance to look at my book.

Sharp eyes will note that my word count on DW is suspiciously low. I missed my 1,000/day yesterday and only just managed today. This whole business is rather distracting. In a good way...

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 45,300 words

Hello Toilet, Goodbye WC

Any of you who have travelled abroad will laugh at this little article about Chinese attempts to standardize English translations ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Good Online Article for Writers

The second part of the article I reference below. Interesting stuff.

Letter to an MFA - Part 2 on Buzz, Balls, and Hype.

Character Movement and Plot Movement

What's playing on the ipod: Bang and Blame, REM

From Buzz, Balls, and Hype:

I once had an undergraduate, a talented writer who wrote a story that could have been called “Stuff I Thought While I Was in my Car.” Her protagonist drove somewhere, passed places she recognized, people she knew, and gave the reader her observations, often quite eloquent and insightful, about what she witnessed. Line by line, the material was quite good, but in no meaningful way was it a story. I think subconsciously my student was hoping that the forward movement of the car would substitute for a deeper narrative forward movement. But it didn’t, and simply putting your character in a car will not make a story a story.

I mentioned once that my earlier stories had a lot of characters moving around at all times. After all, if things are boring where you are, the obvious (and often subconscious) desire is to move the characters to a new location where they'll be forced to interact in a new way with their environment. That's not to say that physical movement can't also be an important part of a plot in motion.

Think about the difference between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit, the majority of the book is episodic, with Bilbo and the Dwarves (and often, Gandalf), moving from one place to another and having scary or interesting encounters. Much of The Fellowship of the Ring is the same. By the end of Fellowship, however, the movement is very plot oriented. Instead of going through Moria because that's an obstacle in their path, they are riding into Rohan to rescue Pippin and Merry or hurrying to Helm's Deep to secure themselves against enemy attack.

Horse Latitudes II

What's playing on the ipod: Hello Again, The Cars

The thing about the middle of the book is that it's about 2/3 of your word count. Too far from the beginning and too far from the end. At the start of each day (that is, now), I open up my log file and confront something like this:

Chapter Thirteen
05/30/07 – 1,200
05/31/07 – 2,600
06/01/07 – 3,100 (38,500)
Chapter Fourteen
06/01/07 – 1,100
06/02/07 – 2,200 (40,700)
Chapter Fifteen
06/03/07 – 1,500
06/04/07 – 2,700

And of course, today is 06/05/07, so I have to enter another date. And while you can see that I've been hitting my word count day in and day out, it's still daunting. Every day I think, "Can't I just take the day off?" After all, I slept poorly last night, I'm unusually busy today, my throat is sore, I feel great and want to go for a hike, or whatever may be the excuse du jour. And I'm such a procrastinator in other aspects of my life; how do I manage it day after day. Especially mired in the Horse Latitudes as I've been these past couple of weeks. And yet, somehow, I do.

(Excuse du jour: I really did sleep poorly last night. That's two nights in a row. Can you tell from my generally peevish tone?)

One Task Accomplished

What's playing on the ipod: Suite Española, Andres Segovia

I made it through the last of the book I've been editing yesterday. I typed up my comments for the author--about six thousand words worth--and emailed them. I'm going to FedEx the manuscript itself later today.

It was interesting work, but it still feels nice to have that load off my back. My goal this week is to get back on track with a few things I have to do around the inn. Oh, and continue the endless string of 1,000 word days on DW. More in a minute...

Another Quote for THE RIGHTEOUS

What's playing on the ipod: Wake Me Up When September Ends, Green Day

Here's my other quote for THE RIGHTEOUS, by Jeff Anderson, author of Sleeper Cell and Second Genesis:

Carr authoritatively and unsparingly tears open the veil shrouding a Utah polygamist community and its secret oaths of blood atonement, temple sacrifice, and angels with drawn swords. Inside we find a riveting thriller that recaptures everything lost from the original American religion.

Jeffrey Anderson, National bestselling, International Thriller Award nominated author of Sleeper Cell.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 43,400 words

What We Are Meant to Become

What's playing on the ipod: The Gap, Thompson Twins

I've seen a lot of life in and around the beaver pond in the last couple of days: frogs, toads, crayfish, newts, water dogs, foxes, beavers, deer, and dozens of birds and various insect species. All this life, so busy during these few months of northern summer, made me think of this little thing I wrote last year:

My son came to me one day with the cocoon that he’d dug up in the garden. It was the size and color of a kidney bean. When touched, it flinched instinctively from danger. The cocoon was translucent and you could see the shape of the larva inside, moving. I explained that it was an insect changing from larval stage to its adult form. But what kind of insect, he wanted to know as he placed it in my open hand.

I wasn’t sure, but I had a few guesses. Maybe it would become a moth, or one of the June beetles that whir like tiny helicopters through the summer nights. It could even become one of the beetles that lived in my flower bed, chewing the roots of the plants until they starved of nutrients and died.

There was so much to marvel at in the seed of life resting on my palm. Here was a small animal that knew when it was time to transform itself and built into its genes was the code for changing its very form. Most likely that change would be from subterranean worm to a flying insect. All of this would happen without thought or plan.

In comparison, humans are more direct in biology and yet so complex in motive. There is little to tell us who we are and what we will become. Those are decisions that we have to make by ourselves. Sometimes we become who we are told to be by family, culture, custom, or religion. Some never leave the ground, grubbing at a subsurface level for their entire lives. Then there are people who awaken to greatness at maturity or even in old age. Others dream big from the first time they look at the night sky or learn that the earth was once covered with dinosaurs.

Looking at the cocoon made me think of my own life. I used to be a computer programmer before I shucked the corporate world to move to the mountains of Northern New England. I worked for a pair of multinational companies, including a large defense contractor. My projects were cogs in a machine whose wheels turned slowly, year by year toward some distant conclusion that I would never see. I wrote code that might never be used, wrote documentation that might never be read.

And one day I wondered. What was I working toward? I just wasn’t that into stuff. I didn’t like to acquire things—certainly not big, shiny, expensive things—and I didn’t like working with things instead of with people. Indifference made me a mediocre programmer. Daydreaming about other ways to pass my life didn’t help my productivity either.

And so one day I bought an inn. People were either incredulous or envious. Someone told me that I’d be back before long, poorer and wiser. Someone else said that he wished he were younger so he could try it himself. Someone else sent me a series of emails after the move asking how she and her husband could do the same thing. It was either foolhardy or it was gutsy, depending on the point of view. In reality, it was a little of both, and yes, scary.

I soon discovered that I was working harder than I ever had in my life. A bad line of code doesn’t call to complain at two in the morning. And the money? It pours in during ski season and foliage, but when there’s nothing to see but sticks and mud, the money only flows in one direction, and that’s out. But if I’m not busy I don’t have to pretend to be. There are no time cards, no employee evaluations, no three percent annual raises, and no busy work. And there is a lot more time with my family.

Which brought me to one spring day with my eight year old son. I returned the cocoon to his hand. He squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. Don’t do that, I told him. You might kill it.

“But what if it’s one of the root eating beetles? Shouldn’t we kill it just in case?”

No, I didn’t think we should. Instead, we went back to where he’d found it, beneath an overturned rock. There was a shallow depression in the soil, hollowed by the larva in the form of its cocoon. It fit perfectly.

Let it grow, I told him as we carefully replaced the stone. Give it a chance to become whatever it was meant to become. With any luck I will do the same thing with my own life.

Devil's Workshop Progress

What's playing on the ipod: Panama, Van Halen

I'm at an interesting point in the book. I've got two sets of scenes that parallel each other, one in the present, the other five years in the past. It might pull about 10,000 words in total, which would be my writing for the next week. The trick is to end each scene at a point of maximum tension, and then bring them together in a way that will set up the last 25K or so of my novel (not counting the roughly 5K of denouement). It might help if I figured out how those final events are going to play out...

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 42,200 words

Busy Day

What's playing on the ipod: If Everyone Cared, Nickelback

Very busy day today. I did my writing in the morning and then planted my lettuce. They looked great going in, but then we had a quick thunderstorm this afternoon, so I'm a little worried. It's my fault for not looking at the weather ahead of time; I was more concerned with fitting the planting into my schedule.

I then spent most of my free time--with a few breaks to cook dinner and catch up on the Red Sox pounding the Yankees--reading LB's book. It's good and engrossing, but it takes a lot of mental energy to read a book as a critic/editor and not as a reader. I'm about 3/4 the way through and hope to finish or nearly finish tomorrow.

By evening I was too wiped out to do anymore work, so I went down to a local game place with E and we played a game called Alhambra, which is a tile-based game a little like Carcassonne. I made kind of a strategic error early on based on a faulty understanding of the end game (this being the first time to play) and ended up in last place out of three. We were all pretty close together, though, and I don't mind losing as long as I feel I'm competetive.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 40,700 words

Stuff

What's playing on the ipod: After All, The Mission UK

I got a great quote for THE RIGHTEOUS from NY Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner today:

"Deeply engrossing! Michael Carr delivers the thinking man's thriller while establishing one of the freshest male leads in crime fiction--Jacob Christianson, an aspiring doctor and cult elder's favored son. Jacob's analytic nature has him questioning everything, including the nature of God and the sexist politics of polygamy. It also makes him a perfect fit to track down a killer whose grisly crimes threaten Jacob's community, family, and soon, his very life."

Even better, she said she stayed up until 1:00 AM finishing it last night because she couldn't put it down. That's the best compliment of all.

Hopefully the quote will help Kim with her marketing efforts.

Midway Point?

What's playing on the ipod: One Headlight, The Wallflowers

I'm rapidly approaching the midway point of the first draft of DW. My main characters are in the midst of discovering what's going on. From that point it's largely a clash of my protagonists and my antagonists as they each try to accomplish their goals.

I'm about 1/3 through L's book. I'll need to make some serious progress this weekend to get it to her in time.

Devil's Workshop Word Count: 39,600