Golden Beam from the Darkness

There's nothing like a sudden hit of inspiration. Usually mine comes from my drive to improve things, either my own work or the execution of others'. This time, the ball was in my court, deflated and moldy from being left in the rain too long. Time to pump it up with some perfect words in their perfect order!

The brunt of my classical training in creative writing is in poetry, and it just wouldn't due to publish (yes, someday, I'm getting to it, shut up) Orphans with a poem-fragment in it that wasn't, you know, good. The poem I refer to is one that must evoke a sense of worldliness and a distinctly masculine sexual viewpoint. My placeholder is:

Stretch’d before my eyes,

the radiant tie of your heart to mine.

In the palm of this hand

blood. In the other,

a puddle of pearls.

Tomorrow brings naught but crimson.

But tonight the moons are up

and you are beautiful.

Okay, yeah, there's the reference to the plural moons for an "it's not Earth" nod, and the goofy semen image. But "stretch'd?" Who talks like that? Stilted, randomly archaic and dumb.

Yesterday this occurred to me, instead: 

Launch a ship from my harbor heart
Fleet and fine.
Solid, sleek. Mast and plank
Drenched, adrip but never sinking
And all sails full beneath the sun
An arrow in the sea between us.

If that doesn't make you want to have passionate, urgent sex with the person who wrote it, I don't know how many moons orbit the planet you come from. Such yearning! Such lusty saltiness! And best of all, its author has never been to the ocean or seen a seafaring vessel (in the book, not yours truly, that would be silly).  Success!

The Merest

Today I wrote the phrase "the merest bite" in a piece of short [fan]fiction. Word underlined it in green as an "uncommonly used word, consider revising." I think I broke my index finger, I stabbed "ignore" so hard. Harrumph, is all I can say to those quashers of old, weird wording. Harrumph!

And Now For Something Completely the Same

Well... that was complainy. And it was almost a month ago. During that month, I moved on, almost made my original deadline, didn't, but didn't care. Now I'm here, and it's time to share.

And by share I mean give some huge spoilers for the next two books of... well, that's the thing...

Due to the sudden, recent death of a friend's father, I have once again had my little aminal brain collide with mortality and the concerns thereabouts. I suddenly realized as I thought about the death of a stranger that superficially touched my existence, that I am, once again, writing a story that heavily involves {spoilers coming}

Boo

Well...

It's not going well. Every time I realize how energetically I wrote the book (7 months start to final rough draft) and how much time has gone by without much change (4 months) I feel very sick and depressed about the whole thing.

I know I can't make it come. I know (now) that setting a bar like I did for this month was not conducive to my creative process. I know The Wide and Burning World is 90% there, and that most of the changes are just icing on the cake.

But I was quite proud of my progress until now and with my ego deflated, I'm reduced to a puddle. Lots of other stuff in the works, of course: New writing for TRO, especially, and I've been working harder at my job than ever before. The "it will happen when it happens" idea leaves me a bit hollow, knowing that once I am finally satisfied, the real work of finding a publisher begins. I toil on.

...but maybe not today.

The Curious Man/ Arlo's first three

Not much to add or change here, just packing in a little more description. First person creates some pitfalls in describing other characters. Normally people don't stare at and mentally describe the individuals they encounter. if this sort of description isn't handled with care, it can come off as a meet-cute, which gets awkward when it's guy on guy, or you're wrestling with not making "love at first sight" happen because it can seem like weak writing if not done purposefully (or, in this case, both). That being said, I love describing my characters, so perfecting this skill was a must.
--
In Arlo's first three chapters, by contrast, my conceited little hog farmer can go on at leisure about how he looks, which given the above-mentioned obstacles not only lets me avoid the usual problems, but comes as a characterful rarity (You wouldn't see Larkin standing around looking in the mirror). I keep referring to these chapters as a lump because I have lumped them. In total, they came to ~3600 words, and I think the simple change of grouping them together cuts down on the it's-another-Arlo-chapter phenomenon. They were written well after the rest of the book was (basically) set, since I decided to include Arlo in the first book only after I came up fairly short on my word count. I started writing them in little chunks to keep it modular enough to be placed in the already-arranged book, but they ended up all going in a row. No matter, the only real loss here are the original chapter titles, Cream, Trough and Axe. I decided to call them all Farm, the counterpoint to Home, his final chapter. Which no one will notice, but I don't care.

The Librarian

It's Larkin's first chapter, woo hoo! Yes! And, I know I didn't update yesterday. I'm okay with that, and I hope you are too.

This one was a snap. I had some world detail to sprinkle in, and while that took some careful crafting, it was quite rewarding. I made my first name change, as well. I tend to pick names out of the air as "placeholders." Sometimes I get attached (hence the similarity between Daniel Larkin and Davidson Lasche remains) and other times I thank my lucky stars for find-and-replace. Amusingly enough, this was supposed to be all of Larkin's POV in the book, but that was back when there was only going to be one book, Lasche was going to be the main character and well...admittedly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

A Red Road

I was not looking forward to working on this chapter. There's a lot of expositional prose in here and as with much of my early work, it is both a little weaker and a little less correct than the rest of the book. I thought I needed to explain more than I did. Sometimes I exposit in ass-covering fashion, so when people are like "When is that mentioned?" I can say well, Lasche referes to it briefly here. But putting in one sentence thousands of words earlier than ideas come into the story-proper really isn't useful to casual readers. Usually it represents insecurity in my storytelling, lack of faith in my readers or the desire to display that yes-I-had thought-of-that. I was envisioning lots of chopping of lots of writing that I was embarrassed to admit to having written. Dread!

It didn't go as badly as I expected. I was able to delete most of the patches that were awkward, even if it took me trying to rewrite a few of them before deciding they just couldn't be saved. Best of all, I decided to surrender a little on the issue of tense continuity. I'm getting TWaBW proofread professionally before I start shopping the manuscript around, so someone else can ref the "this versus that" battle royale. It was getting in the way of my creative process, and that's what professional helpers are for: Fixing what they are great at fixing, so you can do what you're supposed to be doing. I am the peanut butter, they are my jelly.

One dead darling: I can’t even recall if I was in my right mind or not on that given day; I was drunk a lot back then.

Man, I loved that sentence. What an achy little punch. But the person he's telling the story to doesn't need to hear it because, well, that's for Book 2. Out it goes.

And a chunk that's a little riskier to remove: There were four other places like it back in those days: the ones out east in Haman and Hoen, the one down the way in Suthy and the one up north in that armpit, Greengate. I’d been working out of the capital for seven or eight months, as it was the biggest. They knew me there, by then, which was the best way to get paid quick.

I like seeing Haman and Hoen set next to each other like this, but that's beside the point. This was in the description so that I could name all the major cities in the first chapter of the book. But, I really don't like how dispersed this makes the Talent collection program. I need it to be more localized and tighter; knowledge is power, and power is a big deal. Gone.

Tomorrow is Friday and I'm into Larkin's first chapter, much revised already. I've got targeting reticules locked on removing some bloated darlings (I'm looking at  you, descriptions of food) and smooth sailing the rest of the... oh, wait... there's my first-ever attempt at world-building in this chapter, isn't there? Damn. I might need to kick-and-punch this, now that I have some golden perspective on which details matter. Onward!

Sun and Clouds

Today is the first day of my month-long editing marathon. Woo! The compulsion to jump all over the book is fairly staggering, but I've resisted successfully, and begun with the Prologue.

The prologue is, rather uniquely, considering the non-linear way I tend to come up with stories, the true starting point of the book. It was a short story I wrote in reaction to some really obnoxiously predictable character/narrative development in (siiiiiigh) the Privateer Press fluff for Warmachine. I wanted to make it mo' bettah--and I wanted to make it have gay sex in it, because, hey, why not? (In all seriousness, erotic fiction is a standpoint from which a lot of my ideas come. I think sex is more key to understanding ourselves and our world than more literature is willing to display) I was also concepting an RPG setting at the time with the ludicrous working title of Special Forces. Then Sun and Clouds came out really good, and was the longest thing I'd ever really created. It was also a big enough departure (written intentionally with very few setting-specific details) that when I started building a larger story around it, I decided to "put my hands together" as it were. Soon, A Barber of Great Renown The Wide and Burning World was born.

All that was left to do here, editing-wise, was to remove a few niggling sentences and the very last vestiges of the original reason I wrote the story. There was nothing crucial to take out, the details being blown out enough that they were neither story-important nor not my own, but I knew there were a few word choices and phrases that I just didn't want as they were. All fixed. No major additions.

The best nugget to come out of the edit: When we were alone together, he shared his lore with me, taught me the ballads, the sagas and songs, and limned the necessity of quiet thought in the grim thrill of war.

I'm nervous about my next chapter, though. Find out why and what I do about it tomorrow!

The Plan

I've got a plan. I'm going to edit a chapter of The Wide and Burning World a day--no more no less-- for all of August. By the end of next month my book will be tied up with a neat little bow. Why not start now? Because not every plan has to be hatched as soon as possible. This is the August Plan: 31 chapters, 31 days...and 31 blog posts about the process. Wish me luck!

The Dark Knight Rises "Preview"

No, I didn't sell any of my precious bodily fluids to see The Dark Knight Rises in pre-release. This is my pre-review, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Save $10. (This will pay off at the end, I swear...somehow this got ranty... And the Kubrick reference goes throughout. I dunno, I just like Kubrick.)

It's Always the Quiet Ones

I didn't become a writer. Silly as it sounds, I was born with the bug, and have always been writing in one form or another, the subconsciousness of the action as validating as the act itself. Now I talk about it, proclaim it as part of my life-boildown.

How long might it have taken me to embrace it, without the encouragement of those around me? Not forever, but a long time at least. And now I have that same power, the gift of "You should write more."

Here is where I got my breath stolen away in surprise. I didn't know he wrote wrote, you know? I don't think he really knows it either. Not yet, he doesn't. But someone should tell him.

Several New Ones

There's really no sense in spending this post tearing Ridley Scott's "effort" Prometheus the...criticisms it deserves. I can only count my stars lucky that this was not the film that emerged in the stead of Alien, given that the strong, independent, yet achingly feminine Ellen Ripley might have been replaced by a shrieking female lead defined by little more than an obsession with pregnancy and a fuzzy understanding of the important difference between belief and proof.

What to learn, what could it be? I like characters that attempt--even in vain--to lift themselves above their emotions when the situation requires. I like love stories: It's love that moves the mountain, or at least, what makes you want to move it. But there are more interpretations of the love-drive than the howling abandonment of reason in the face of loss. It's a good first step to realize this as an author. The next step is allowing your characters to learn the same lesson. Sometimes there is work to be done; suck it up, leave your boyfriend in quarantine and go do it.

Credo

When the weather changes, sometimes it's time for a little "poetry." Poetry without the caveat is how I started writing, after all. True fact.

It's going to rain again
Get grey
Monday's the new Friday, but Tuesday's always next
It's raining again
Don't think too much about it
Gut punch, fever-pitch
Swallow back the snot
I must not stop.

What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You

10% hardline facts 

20% wiki-research

>5% references

<5% personal experience 

60% imagination

This is how I roll, especially when doing established-setting-based writing (you say fanfic, I say to-mah-to). You want to know enough to not come off as a n00b, but not so much that you get beholden to others' ideas. If I'm inspired to write a piece directly based on something existing, it's because I'm interested in an idea of my own, set in a particular context. Get inspired and don't let outsidership stop you. Embrace it. Originality comes from innovation.

Brews for the Brew-god

Okay, okay. Instead of fussing with the very long post I've been working up about Chaos Space Marines (yes, I purchased a book from the Game Novelizations section of Powell's), I'll post something short-n-tasty that I wrote this week. It's sort of a work in progress, but I just know it's going to yield some great results. Snort. So, along with my first comics and my first novel, this is my first homebrew recipe, after my 5th batch of beer and 2nd batch of mead (which is winding down now. I predict July bottling). In the words of the late-great Heath Ledger, Here... we... go.

[Strawberry Blonde]
7 lbs. dry light malt extract
2 lbs. 14oz orange-blossom honey
1 lb milled crystal malt (something sweet!)
2 oz Hallertauer hops (pellets)
1 tsp Irish moss powder
3+ lbs whole frozen strawberries
11.5 g packet of dry ale yeast (your choice, I'm experimenting with Safale S-04)

1. Sanitize all your gear: brewing pot, thermometer, ferm. lock and stopper, mesh strainer, funnel, plastic bucket and lid. Normally I sparge right into my glass carboy, but not this time because...
2. In your bucket, combine the frozen strawberries and 2 gallons of water (try fitting a whole strawberry down the neck of a carboy. Yeah... now try getting it back out again! Bucket is bettah). During the time it takes to brew your wort, they'll thaw out somewhat and basically make strawberry ice water.
3. Bring 3 gallons of water to a boil in your big brewer's pot. Once it's hot, add the crystal malt. Steep for 30 minutes, keeping an eye on it (mine got foamy, nothing major, but still). Fish out as much as you reasonably can with your mesh strainer and discard the spent grains.
4. Add the malt extract, the honey (I put a little hot water in the near-empty jar and shook it, so I could get out all the honey-goodness) and 1.5 oz of the hops. Boil for 60 minutes.
5. With 15 minutes to go in your boiling time, add the Irish moss powder.
6. With 5 minutes to go in your boiling time, add the remaining hops.
7. Put the lid on and sparge through your strainer-and-funnel into your bucket. 
8. Pitch your yeast when cool. I did mine at 70F. Put on your fermentation lock.

Note: I was beer-prenticed under someone with a broken hydrometer, so I (ahem) often neglect to take OG readings. Lazy is the word for it.

Here's where we get into the theoretical part. I pitched the afternoon after I sparged. The night after I pitched, the yeast was fermenting away. Hooray, it's going to be beer! But, that was only yesterday, so who knows what kind of shenanigans will arise? I'm planning to rack into my glass carboy after a week, and bottle after (at least) a week in my secondary fermenter. I'll update this if there's some cataclysm and that doesn't happen. I always bottle with 1.5 cups of malt extract dissolved in a pint of hot water, and rest after capping for about 10 days.

I name all the beers I make, and in nerd-honor of the book I was supposed to be writing about, I think I'll pick a WH40k-themed moniker, this go-round. I've heard nothing but mockery of a Warmachine theme drink list. Apparently blue curacao featured prominently and the recipes were for chick-drinks, all. Nuts to that! A frosty homebrew is the beverage of choice in my meta. What could be more macho than beer, right? Well, maybe beer without strawberries in it... Drink up, Night Lords, it's always summer somewhere.

Girl Power

I said ladies. Ladies.

It can be super-hard to be a woman writer. Hell, it can be hard to be a woman fill-in-the-blank. I'm so proud to be a part of SHE, the new division at Creative Entertainment Management. Check out this noise.

Big Shock

You'd be surprised what domains are out there for purchase. For example, I was shocked to discover that I could just "walk right up" and buy anarchistcat.com. But I did. A comic is going there. You have been warned.

(A bit less shocking, but bigger news: tightrope.com was unavailable, so tightropecomic.com, it was. And Tightrope, my circus-noir OGN, is going to be solid gold.)

The Clever Club

It's all over modern narrative: The practice of writing a long-form piece and making every single loose end tie in by the end, causing seemingly throwaway characters/plot lines to balloon into what-a-tweest surprises and/or forcing casual readers to flip back hundreds of pages to remind themselves of insignificant details which are now inflated with meaning. It's so endemic in a certain author's work, I call it Gaiman-ing. This is bad writing, for a number of reasons, but it's alluring as hell. In the process of creating my world for Soil, Ocean, Air, I found myself skirting this approach. Time to "Stop, breeeathe, think," as my mother (and Blue's Clues, I believe) would encourage.

I started grouping together the reasons why I crave such neat wrap-ups, but it turned out that they were all facets of one thing: Pay-off.

I get a little endorphin rush when I solve a puzzle. Doing so in a story with the fewest pieces possible feels economical and smart. Then I feel smart and I want to show it off.  "Wow," the throngs will cheer, "I totally see what you did there. That is so smart. I am in the Clever Club with you, Wirtz! What a great book!" Then they will do the thing I want most--more than reading my work once, they will read it again, now a little smugger because they are in the know. And then they will tell the people they know to read my book because they, like their dear author, will want their friends to join in the satisfaction with them. Gold!

Or is it?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

This film's title gets two (pesky) songs stuck in my head, Dandelion by The Rolling Stones and the old barbershop standard My Coney Island Baby. My mother used to sing the whole rhyme to me and my sibs while counting the buttons on our dress shirts, stopping (based on some rule I now forget) and determining which of the roles we "were". To top it all off, my sister actually watched the original miniseries one summer while we were growing up, flagging this version as a possible point of commonality between us (a bit of a rarity, these days). So TTSS has been nagging at me since I saw it a few weeks ago.

Beyond the stellar ensemble casting, intimate performances and exquisitely claustrophobic mise-en-scene that brought the Circus to life, TTSS offers a valuable opportunity: A reminder that British cinema is foreign cinema. It's harder to see here than in other foreign films. We've been fed most of the cast for decades, many in non-accented roles. And this being a period piece further muddies the water (though Gilliam's epic Brazil put a hyper-Brit, hyper-bureaucracy into the cult consciousness forever ago, and the source material, as it were, is well displayed in TTSS). Toss in the fact that there are swaths of Canada that require subtitles, and you've got about as subtle a genre piece as you can find (subtlety being an indicator of the film's foreign status, of course. Sorry Hollywood).

There are Others all over this film, and it is they who give the nod to the outsider in every Yank moviegoer. Gay men, spies, Scotsmen, women in the government--there's a social maze ancient and twisted for the characters to navigate, one so intricate that the audience might not even notice as we stride right over the top of it, from our modern, American perspectives.

But those of us who can sit in the theater and say, "Wow, England's really different," are actually invited in. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an outsider's film, for them, by them. And the moral of the story is that being an outsider hurts, really costs, but, hey, you aren't as alone as you think. Not a bad feeling to walk away with for the price of popcorn and a pint.

How Does That Even Work?

My acting experience is negligible, but it does exist (Cough, cough, high school, cough). I also know a few actual actors who have, y'know, talent and skill and careers. It is from conversations with them about their processes, as much as from my own limited knowledge, that I now ask this question of myself:

If I had a career and all the stuff that you need to get one, namely lots of training and practice (this is a hypothetical me, so let's ignore the luck/endurance/connections that getting a career in anything actually takes) and I needed to cry for a role, and I being a totally rad actor could cry for said role, how the hell would I force just one tear out of just one eye?

Is it skill? Luck? Faked by make up? I don't know. When I get weepy, my nose runs in a very undignified way. Can you... control that with acting? I heard a lot of hand-waving about Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and it was well-deserved. But Mark Strong cries a single, perfect tear of ultimate heartbreak and nuance, and the intensity of his performance has me almost embarrassed. (More on this next time)

It bears mentioning that describing the scene I'm referring to in prose sounds maudlin and trite. I mean, c'mon, "a single tear"? Snort. But on film it works. It's breathtaking. And if I see my man Mark getting type-cast with any more BS occult villain roles (Sherlock Holmes is a silly-ish movie with a serious-ish role, but, jeez, Stardust? He spends half the movie making the wtf-I-can't-believe-I'm-from-the-same-magical-realm-as-these-dopes face, and what else could he do?) I'ma make some casting directors cry.

Winner, Loser

I came back to a comic I wandered away from today (was reading it at work, no other reason), and I'll never stray again, things keep on like they are. Look Straight Ahead is actually doing something. There's a real understanding of how things feel and how to translate that into how things look. You can sense the theory, if you know it, but the experience--an experiential webcomic, now there's a rare bird--is rich enough that the thought process is never obtrusive. A seamless blend of execution and idea. Boom, yummy. Kudos, Elaine. I really like the simple truth with which you're writing Jeremy. Teens are hard; nicely done.

And I'm wandering away from a comic I've been reading for almost a year now. The Concrete World has great story, world and dialogue (minus a few nit-picky errors that crop up now and then). The art is riddled with a problem my illustrator and I call "squishy head"(go see what I mean). I read it diligently despite its miserly update schedule and occasional iffy drawing: Good story is a lot harder to find than pleasing art. And now they're going on hiatus, and I am disappointed and unsurprised. Momentum can be key in an undertaking as demanding as regularly updating your comic. Six pages a month is a dribble, and when you're dribbling it's so easy to just drop it.

The comic I work on updates around fifteen pages a month. It's grueling to produce like that, and it takes a big investment of creative energy and time. But in a medium where dropping off the face of the earth (hiatus is often code for this) is practically expected, it's invest or go home.

The Review Process

I've been thinking about how to put my own little touch on the movie reviews I'm slated to start writing for this blog. That's the "Opinion" part, you know, reviews of things. I've been trying to pick a rating system and a structure. Then I realized I don't want to write reviews.

That's not really what my training has made me good at. Academia teaches us to hunt for evidence, and to use it to either fashion a context or support a claim (or both). Each text is an opportunity to enrich the catalog of experience--both critical experience and vicarious experience. I love these experiences, crave the challenge of contextualizing and the pleasure of the immersion a good narrative experience offers equally. So I'm not going to review. I'm going to illustrate what the evidence inspires in me, be it the frustration of a poorly-constructed character or the delight of a well-crafted visual vocabulary (Or the sexiness of sex/maniacal laughter of watching stuff explode. It's not all snooty CS BS).

There's very little that I consume that I don't at least respect. Even trashy things. It can take just as much integrity to admit that something's enjoyable because it's cheesecake as to analyze high literature. Sometimes I find lessons in "what not to do," but others' mistakes have a lot of value. It's not fair to say something's terrible and not say why, but I intend to go a step further, if I've got something negative to say. If I read/watch something that's broke, I'll try to offer my fix. It's a rare case, I find, that is unfixable. "What if" is a sick game to play with your own work (once it's complete), but it's a productive analytical tool, when looking at someone else's.

Once you know what you like and why, you can start making what you like. And when you make what you like, your audience will feel your passion. That's what I'm all about.

The Orphans of Blade and Rose

I got coerced into posting a sample chapter. I guess that fits. "I love you, is why," being the stated reason. Well, love and coercion feature prominently in my forthcoming fantasy novel, the first draft of which I finished last night (this morning?)

Here's tasty sample chapter. Hope you dig it!

Cream

It was time to go; it just was. Bevvi was going to pout about it. He was sort of a priss, anyway. Not that I usually minded. He wasn’t like anyone I knew… no, not really, and that saucy mouth of his was plenty of fun. But he wasn’t going to like it.

The Challenges of Everything

I come to this particular revelation often: Anything can happen.

On the one hand, it's paralyzing. I find myself so overwhelmed with possibilities that I don't know which to choose. My mind burns twice as bright for half as long, and then goes dark.

On the other hand, what the hell kind of thing is that to complain about? Too many ideas? Bosh. The gut knows: Write, try, see how it feels.

My characters will tell me if it works or not. Recently, Arlo (from The Wide and Burning World) got angry. I wasn't expecting that to come of all those cycling directions, but it did. It was really comfortable. In fact, even though I never meant to go in that tract, I discovered that in order to keep him from being so angry, I'd need to undo a substantial amount of previous characterization. I'm rolling with it. Just keep rolling, that's the key. Because it only counts as written once it's wrote.