Wyatt at Pan Historia

I'm Just a Rambling Man

2011-11-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

The writing has been kind of slow for the last week. There has been a 50% improvement in the chaotic conditions of my family obligations, but finding that still eye of the storm is still proving to be difficult. As soon as I feel like I'm close to it I get caught in an updraft and find myself hurtling away at impossible speeds from what I would really like to be doing.

That said - I have mastered some plot threads that needed tying together. My iPhone, unlike the previous clunky yet small Blackberry, is proving a bit of a helpmate. I was able to download a pages app for it that allows me to edit the most recent chapter on the go. I don't foresee any solid writing time on it unless I get the keyboard that I mentioned in the last post, and I am waiting for my finances to improve for that, but I can edit, add ideas, and not lose rolling trains of steamy thought.

One of my plotting solutions involves a famous historical character, Harry Houdini, who has now gained importance in the novel, and thusly I am forced (oh what terrible pain and joy!) to read the recent bio of him that I got. Sadly it is not available on the Kindle... wait, it wasn't but maybe it is now... let me toddle off and check...

Back. Ah, wonderful. I feel like a walking, talking, typing advert for the iPhone, but I am a convert. So I have downloaded the Kindle app to my phone, and my copy of the Houdini book is now there, on the page I was last reading, and I'm ready to snatch minutes from my workday to learn all I need to know about the amazing magician, contortionist, and escape artist. Amusing note on the side: on my wall, by my desk, is my Houdini Action Figure. It was a gift from one of my relatives - the same year I gave them one. We exchanged.

Ok, well I was away from this for about an hour because my cat pissed on the laundry again. It's such a joy to be able to add the mental and emotional and maybe physical aberrations of an animal you swore to look after and love for all his days to your list of distractions from writing. Mostly he's been urinating on the wife's things, seems he's pissed off at me now too. I am also hearing about the chores and programming/design tweaks I need to make at Pan Historia... it never ends. And just when I have the list all organized, and all the things I have to do on it, I'll head to work for nine hours, because that's how I pay the bills.
Tune in next week to find out more about how my iPhone helps me to conquer the madness of modern life, and enables me to write a novel in the middle of it. Or not. You choose how you distract yourself from your own writing.

Perhaps you might join a revolution?

Have Keyboard, Will Travel

2011-10-27T10:29:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to say that after my last update I made some time in my life for writing my novel again. This is quite an achievement because the distractions and tornado keeps on building around me. The whole world seems to want to go up in flames, and perhaps it should, and I've got wandering random family members in transition in this funnel of frantic windy energy needing a couch to sleep on. Thusly I have no private space where the mind can be fertile and still enough that it suddenly freely sprouts words, one upon the last, building and building, until there is a tower of words, wobbly, but upright.

As a matter of fact I am writing this now instead of working on my book in the precious morning I have before work because I can manage this kind of personal writing with the distractions, but not the real hard work of writing a novel. I've set myself a quota of words each day: a measly 500. This can count towards that goal, as well as the collaborative posts I do at Pan Historia, but it doesn't feel as satisfying anymore, not as compelling as getting into the heads of my characters. I miss my book when I'm not at it.

I just took a break from writing this to browse computer tablets. I started to wonder, since I have lacked a private space of my own, a space with a door that shuts the world out, if I were to go fully mobile could I pick up stray pockets of time and privacy from my maelstrom days to dash out those few measly words, make those notes, build that tower...

Nope, they lack the essential tool that I crave: a keyboard. I could go retro and try the notebooks, and I have done that before, but unlike those folks that love freehand and the pen or pencil, I'm a sucker for the keyboard. I can type about 50pm if I factor in the mistakes, or maybe faster by now, and I need the speed because that's often how fast the words flow. When I write by hand I miss words, phrases, even passages, skipping over them as the next word crashes into me. I paint the same way. I can't do it slow. Which of course begs the question: why isn't my output greater? The answer is frustrating: I fritter away much of my free time (little and precious though it is) in frivolities. I resolve, every day and every minute, to do better, but when you're a speed freak, like the hare, you need a lot of breaks.

I have seventy more words to find... then I'll have fulfilled my quota for the day.

Oh my god... had another idea, took another break - could this be the solution:

Freedom Pro Bluetooth Portable Folding Keyboard

It's a bit pricy, but so far the reviews are good. I can whip this sucker out of my backpack, hook it up to my phone and be on my way. Hmmm... this could work. Have keyboard, can travel. It seems I'm on the eternal quest to be completely hooked up until my excuses have no where to run and hide anymore, and either I write, or I admit that I'm not a writer.

Haha. 556 words.

I Have Never Shot a Gun...

2011-05-27T11:13:00.001-07:00

"Write what you know."

Boy, that's getting to be the old chestnut of writing advice. It's also hugely misleading. The kernel of truth in it is that whatever you writing should have authenticity. Don't let people catch you out in ignorance. It trips up the reader when they totally figure out that the author has no idea what they are talking about.

This advice is not about, however, only writing from personal experience. If we all did that the fictional landscape would be one helluva a boring place. The whole point of fiction is to take you someplace you don't know. At least it is for me and probably the majority of readers. Very few people pick up a book to escape into a reality so like theirs it is indistinguishable. What they want to do is be able to relate to the characters in the book, but not meet any old regular joe. They want to go to the far reaches of the galaxy, or to ride the Pacific Union Railroad with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid waiting for them around the bend to blow up the safe.

Even if you're reading something that is contemporary you want to peek into the mind and heart, or maybe the madness, of someone you don't know. You might be able to relate, but you aren't them, and they aren't exactly anyone you know either.

The real key to writing what you know is to research and make sure you get the details right, even if it is pure and utter fantasy, and then inject your personal experience into the story to render it authentic. You might not have been born in the 1900s but you can relate to something so tight fitting it makes it hard to breathe, you understand what riding a train is like, and you know the fear that the threat of violence brings.

Every character should be a little bit of an autobiography because you're reaching inside yourself to imagine something completely, but that doesn't mean you know what's like to be a serial killer, or vampire, or a space cowboy 400 light years from home. Every character is also a little bit of biography because you're grabbing stuff from people you know. Even the most ordinary friend has a bit of the extraordinary you can pilfer to bring your characters to life.

Always authenticity is key, so really the old chestnut should read: "write from the heart, and then even what you don't know will come to life for your readers".

Procrastination Bites!

2011-03-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

You know the score. You're supposed to be writing. Instead you find your eyelids drooping and a powerful urge to sleep coming on. Or you start clicking those stupid little games in FaceBook or you open your version of Spider Solitaire. Just a few games... honest. Then you'll get back to writing. Or maybe you're the type that will start cleaning the house or doing the laundry... oh shit, hold on, I just have to put the wash in the dryer now, be right back...

Ok, now where was I? Oh yes, procrastination - the bugbear of the would-be writer. Or maybe even the nemesis of all writers? Possibly so. Wait? Do I hear the siren call of a completely different writing project all my name? You know, something like a blog, or maybe even a new collaborative writing project at your favorite online writing community? Whatever it is - something is always keeping you from finishing your novel, that is, if you are at all like me.

So what are your favorite distractions? What's your laundry list of things that suddenly need doing urgently every time you sit down to write and how the heck do you conquer those distractions and interruptions?

Games? Close the program. Delete the software. Social networking? Turn off the Twitter. Other writing projects? Perhaps time management is required. Too tired? What do you need to eliminate from your day that is a waste of your time so you'll be able to find the time, space, and energy to write?

I want to hear from YOU.

Jerk that Pistol: Firing into the New Year

2010-12-31T10:33:00.000-08:00

I was talking with someone the other day about New Year's resolutions. The person I was talking to was negative in response - citing their unwillingness to succumb to peer pressure to state unattainable goals. I made some kind of blithe return that I didn't necessarily believe in 'resolutions' as such, but I did try and set myself some goals. Here is one right now: I resolve not to talk out of my ass so much. The concept of resolutions and making goals are so similar as to be totally interchangeable.

Having stated I would make no resolutions (but would have goals, insert eye roll here) I immediately started making resolutions. This got me curious. Where does this tradition of New Year's resolutions come from? A quick google around the internet revealed that it goes back to Roman times, and involves making promises of good deeds to the Roman god Janus. Janus is the one with two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. Ok, I can totally get behind a Roman tradition. Romans kick ass (please don't tell my Egyptian characters how much I love Romans). Of course for hundreds of years New Year's resolutions were quite attainable: I will a pile of gold to the poor, I will return the chariot I stole from my neighbor, I will marry the girl I knocked up, etc.

Somehow, over the years, the resolution came to be some personal goal of self-improvement. Which is, apparently, the reason that fewer and fewer New Year's resolutions actually get followed through on, with most people giving up after just a couple months. Giving a charitable donation is a very achievable goal; becoming a better person is not. Just think of all the people determining right this minute that they will lose weight, write every day, be nicer to the people they despise, or exercise more? Are you going to be one of them?

I resolve to write a novel this year. I already started it. I have the books I need for research. I'm not going to tell you how many hours a day I plan to write, or any other writerly self-improvement resolutions that I will probably break before I get a week or two into the New Year. I am simply going to set myself an achievable goal: I will finish my book.

There. Done.

What about you?

Pan Historia Technical Status Report

2010-12-05T09:15:00.001-08:00

Here is the latest news as best I know it: Pan is protected by a uninterrupted power supply (UPS) that can keep Pan's server running even when the power goes down because it has a battery backup. It is programmed to shut Pan down automatically when battery power goes low. It seems that this battery is getting old and needs replacing, or we need a new UPS, whichever comes first, and it is shutting Pan down even though there are no power outages.

Unfortunately the man, Pandaman, with the technical expertise to determine exactly what is needed and how to program a UPS, is currently on a much needed vacation in the wilds of New Zealand with no internet access, so it's just me doing the best that I can. Until the problem is resolved there will be frequent interruptions of service as I shut down Pan to try and work on a solution. Right now I'm running around looking for a new powerful UPS so we can get Pan back online. I was able to confirm that Pan's status is good. There are no problems with the server itself and the backup server looks healthy too.

Please be patient and understand that any interruptions of service are far better than Pan crashing. Automatic or manual shutdown is good, crashing is BAD.

Please subscribe to our Yahoo Group in order to be kept informed about Pan's status updates:

Christmas Present, Christmas Past, Christmas Virtual

2010-12-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Do I scream or do I cry? It's that time of year again. I love the holidays and I hate the holidays. Remember being a child? It was all so uncomplicated then. Santa came in the middle of the night, ate up all the cookies you left him and sucked down on the cream sherry (yes, we were that kind of household), and then left a humungous plethora of joy wrapped in silver, red, and gold paper.

Year after year it grew more complicated. The first Christmas away from home, spent in another family's home as an outside was like a dash of cold water that sent my youthful emotions spinning into darkness. Later on changing family dynamics changed the holidays from my uncomplicated joy to harrowing nightmares that might involve drunken binges (not mine). Expanding connections and networks produced an overload of spending, responsibility, anxiety, and stress as big business pushed ever harder for us all to succumb to an orgy of consumerism at the holidays. As a single parent there were those mornings when I knew I had failed my offspring because I couldn't afford those excessive gifts that were commonplace, it appeared, in every household but my own on Christmas morning.

Now I have a family that demands to be together, and yet collectively sighs and moans at the difficulties inherent at fulfilling the expectations of the season. I'll be doing a little of the same, but in the middle of all the chaos and tears, there will also be hugs, and moments of genuine gladness in each other.

Now if only the holidays could be like they are at Pan Historia: full of fun and games, where gift giving may be real or virtual, but it hardly counts which because everyone is just happy to be involved. No one worries about the stresses of real life too much because it is where they come to escape such concerns. The tree is big and gaudy with plenty of love decorating it, but no needles to sweep up at the end. The food is fun, but will not make you fat or give you indigestion. And it really doesn't matter what the holidays mean to you. We have something for everyone.

Oh, and I love our red cardinal and snow theme this year, simple and elegant.

To Publish or Not to Publish - That is the Rub

2010-11-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

Having spent quite a few months working on the Panthology it's time to ask myself: what's next? I'm happy to get back to reading and writing in my collaborative novels at Pan Historia, but ultimately I thrive on goals and projects that can yield tangible achievements. Writing on Pan is the most pleasurable form of exercise I know, but I still consider it exercise. It's social, it's fun, it's interactive, but the end of the day it's building things that last that I enjoy the most. Tinkering with the structure of Pan is something that gives me great satisfaction and joy as I strive to increase membership and participation by increasing the ease and functionality of the site. Of course I'm only a tinkerer when it comes to site construction but I believe that Pan reflects its users to a large degree. It's not so much about bells and whistles and high tech apps, but about being a comfortable place to express one's imagination. Writers just need to write, ultimately.

Perhaps that explains my mild obsession with publishing Pan Press books? I mean the logical conclusion of a writer's work is to be published. It's as old as the hills—or as old illuminated manuscripts anyway. To be published is to be real, genuine, accepted, legitimate. Technically it's considered a form of publishing to post material, such as this blog, on the internet for others to read, but both you and I know it's not what WE mean, as authors, when we say we are "published." Even when we boast, as I have done, of my status as a "published" author deep down in my heart I want that book with pages of vellum, binding, rabbit skin glue, and black ink. This is probably why authors, as a group, are the most resistant to the idea of eBooks. It's not quite... printed... is it? Of course it is, and I would be thrilled to be selling millions of copies of my novel in eBook format, but that will never cure my schoolboy crush on the first object of my desire: the book; either paperback or hardback.

So what is next? Besides going back to work on my own novel, a supernatural/horror adventure, I think I will prepare one of my collaborative novels, FLESH, from Pan for publication. Like the Panthology it will be a collection of writers, but this time we will bring the whole stories. It will be a challenge to edit the pieces together in order to tell each story (it will be a collection of about 4-5 stories set in a post-apocalyptic world where a virus has turned people into zombie-like killing machines). Zombies are hot items, and some of the stories are really very good with some great writers from the site. This is a piece that I feel has merit beyond the site, and can engage a larger audience of readers from hardcore zombie fans to general horror lovers. I would love to see if I can expand beyond members of the community and engage the interest of other readers for our publications. If it's even mildly successful it opens the door for any number of such projects for any number of genres represented at Pan.

Illustration by Jack Knight

Panthology

2010-11-26T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've been gone from the blogosphere a long time. Life got a wee bit hectic (marriages, moves, family, and much much more!). But here is the most interesting (for my bloggie buddies) reason for my absence:

I have been compiling, editing, and designing Panthology: A Celebration of Ten Years of Pan Historia. I'm really proud of this second volume of Pan's creativity. We published The Pan Historia Birthday Book in 2004, and the second anthology has been long overdue, but how wonderful to be celebrating ten full creative years online as a collaborative writing community.

Here is my preface to the piece (and I hope it whets your appetite):

Trying to explain to bemused friends what I spend so much time doing online is a challenge mostly likely ending in mystification whether they are writers or users of social networks.

Media is increasingly filled with alarm calls that the internet is destroying our minds, our children, and our ability to interact with one another. Few people dare to challenge that notion. People apologize for spending time on their computers. Studies (skewed to the bias of the researchers no doubt) show that we are all increasingly unhappy, particularly when seated at our computers.

I cannot address these concerns except to counter with my personal experience, and then present the evidence to you with this anthology of one community's creative soul. There is at least one place on the internet where the mind is stimulated, the soul is fed, the imagination set free, and people find genuine warmth and community: Pan Historia.

The stories and excerpts that follow are eloquent testimony to that assertion. Every day for ten years I have logged into Pan eager to see what the day will bring: forays into outer space aboard a derelict spaceship; a gunfight in a dusty silver boom town; romance in medieval times; blood feuds between faery races; fan fiction; good conversation; a new recipe for the best chocolate cake; battles with slugs and snails in the garden. The possibilities are endless, and in ten years, always changing.

It is not just the writing, but the companions that you take with you along the way. Read the story "Farewell My Heart" on page 499 by KhemumRa Hatshepsut to fully discover how imagination, fiction, and reality intersect. This heartfelt piece was the end of a long
collaboration between good friends, both at Pan and in real life, due to the death of one of the writers, Meritites. "Farewell My Heart" is a tribute, an ending - a perfect example of how deeply a community like Pan can touch people's lives.

In Clio's blog entries: "Musings" on page 497, the writer chronicles for her friends at Pan, one of the most grueling and painful experiences of her life - because she trusts us.

Behind most of these stories is another, true life, story. Marriages have been made, friendships have grown, children have been named in honor of Pan friendships and associations, and people have found solace for their real life afflictions and troubles. Young writers have literally grown up on Pan, maturing into seasoned adults. I could write a whole book about the incredible interactions I have experienced with my friends in this community. I have been moved to tears on more than one occasion when someone has confided in me how much the site has meant to them, and how it has helped ease them through a difficult period in their life.

There is so much to Pan Historia that one anthology cannot possibly encompass it all. When the Publishers were faced with the daunting task of choosing pieces for this collection it was simply impossible to include all the great stories, writers, and friends, that have graced our virtual world in the last ten years. We simply had to do the best we could. Hopefully we captured enough to give a window into our soul. At Pan Historia we don't just write the stories, we live them.

The Slow Progress Report

2010-03-10T09:31:00.000-08:00

I resolved to slow down on January 31st. We're well into March and I'm still no master of the art of taking it slow and easy. The tortoise would still run the race and I'm still a bit like that hare: rush, rush, rush, crash. The road to the finish line is paved with good intentions, but we don't always come in first. That said I can definitely state that it's not a waste of time to slow down. I think today I'll try not to gulp my lunch so that I send burning cheese down my shirt front and burn the roof of my mouth. Easier said than done considering my lunch, today, will fall on a ten minute break. Not burning my mouth or incurring another dry cleaning bill to get the oil stains out of my shirt are both positive results - if I can swing them - of slowing down.

In what ways do you believe you could see some results if you slowed your own life down? If you took the time to prepare your own food from good ingredients you might not only see a result in increased health but perhaps increased pleasure and satisfaction? Maybe taking meals with your family instead of eating in front of the computer or TV might increase the value of your loved ones in your life. Don't let time run away from you. You might have a paper to write, an exam to study for, or just trying to fit all the stuff you want to do between the times you have to punch the time clock, but think how much more energized you'll approach those tasks if you had some good relaxation or pleasure between?

I got a good night's sleep, but I didn't sleep in. I got up early. I drank coffee. I didn't rush into my tasks. I allowed my brain to catch up with me, and then I wrote this morning. Man, that felt good. It wasn't a marathon writing session, but it was a productive one. Then I made a nice breakfast that a hobbit would be proud of (it involved mushrooms). It so energized me that... oh look, I'm writing a blog post even and it's not even 9:30 a.m. I still have time to take a nice hot shower and dress for the job. Of course it helps that I start late today. Tomorrow it's just going to be: up, coffee, fire up the brain, breakfast, shower, dress, drive - but I'll take my time and be ready to start on the job with all synapses firing. Taking it slow doesn't necessarily mean not doing stuff. We all still have to do our things. Life is not something that will wait for you, or rather not too long. But taking your time, getting in your relaxation, and focusing more should lead to greater productivity and creativity rather than less.

Avoid that heart attack. Take your time.

Taking Responsibililty for the People in Your Life

2010-03-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

The definition of insanity, or stupidity (I can't recall which) is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I, at times, suffer from this. I am self-aware enough to realize it so maybe I'm not insane or stupid but simply a perpetual Pollyanna? Recent events in my life and around me have caused me to reflect, again, on how people in your life can effect you, from the most casual of online acquaintances to the most keenly bonded relationships.

I like to think of myself as a pragmatic optimist and so eventually I always have to back away from my optimism in a negative situation and assess. It's important in life to realize that we cannot change other people; we can only change ourselves. If something keeps happening to you over and over again you can either whine, bemoan everyone else's stupidity, or you can ask yourself: "why do I attract this to myself?" Once it becomes your responsibility and something you did or created or attracted it suddenly becomes a problem that is solvable rather than a perpetual source of anxiety. In the instance of someone in your life that continually reflects back negativity you have to ask yourself what about you draws that? Are you being negative? Are you too defensive? Perhaps you open yourself up to perpetual criticism because you feel inadequate in yourself?

This swings me to my other character defect: wanting to fix everything. Much as I can take responsibility for the things that happen in my life, and then do something about creating better results and situations, is equally important to understand that some things, like the weather and tides, cannot be changed. If you find, after careful self-examination, that you have taken all the steps you can to ensure the most positive results it's time to step back. I don't mean you should resume the blame game however. I can't foresee every possible problem and ensure that it doesn't come up and disturb the glass-like surface of the sea on a calm day I would like to create in the world around me. Waves happen. There are Tsunamis. When such events occur in your life it's time to get out the surfboard and ride it out.

But you don't have to ride out bad behavior when it comes to people. The people in our lives are there by our choice. People, as much as events, influence us. We can't always choose our family ties, but we can pick our friends. If you have a friend or acquaintance that always seems to be drawing bad feelings to you through their criticisms or dramas it's time to assess their true value to you in your life. Some people just do not add value. Don't allow people around you who continually make you feel bad. Healthy criticism is one thing. Harping discontent is quite another. Family is one area where I often endure more than I would from people not related, but even within the family boundaries must be drawn. Even there you have to state your position and require good behavior, or possibly, in the end, withdraw. Even with your family you do have a choice, even if at times that choice is a painful one to make.

Again it's not about blaming. It's about taking responsibility. If there is a person in your life that brings you bad feelings or continually causes disruptions it's not about blaming them. It's about asking yourself why you allow them to behave in negative ways towards you? If you have clearly stated your boundaries and they still ignore your needs, then why are they in your life at all? Some people may require interventions, others just a good talking to, and some you might just need to brush off like mosquitoes, but it's all still about the choices you make in your life. As long as you know you have done what you can to right the balance and take responsibility for your actions, you can feel free to remove those negative influences, maybe once and for all.

Start Some Slow Connections

2010-02-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

Four days into my resolution to go slower in my life, take a little more time over my actions, and chew experience like it was a meal by Bobby Flay, I'm seeing only the most intangible of results, and yet... I do feel better. I seem to be just a bit more relaxed, and just a little less stressed. As a result that is highly desirable, but, of course, like with anything I want more. I'm not beating myself over the head for my lack of writing, instead focusing on the positives that I have achieved by taking tasks one bite at a time.

The biggest obstacle is going slower at work. Around me my coworkers are rush rush rushing while their clients rush even faster; everyone falling all over themselves to get more done, seem more efficient, get onto the next task. With the bathwater of apparent inefficiency goes the baby of connection. Exchanges are superficial. Even evaluations tend to quick catch phrases that are modern shorthand to get to the emotional heart of something without actually doing the foundation work that should proceed it. Things get broken; other things get neglected. Sometimes what gets neglected is anything meaningful at all. We're not on this planet to provide services or sell things. We're here to live each our single life and hopefully in the course of that life achieve an experience of richness through our personal achievements and meaningful relationships.

You can't have a meaningful relationship with a person in a quick and hurried uber-efficient conversation or in a five second tweet. I'm not suggesting that every client, every customer, every time you pump gas, that you stop and make friends, but certainly with those people that you touch throughout your day, day after day whether it be family, coworkers, village, or just your tribe, that you take it slow, savor it a little, and by doing so making some connections that can enrich your life and your work.

And don't worry about the time wasted. Once you truly take everything slower with more focus there will be less time wasted, less mistakes and mishaps, and less time spent cleaning up the split milk. By slow I mean deliberate.

Slow Down Slow Before You End Up Like a Bug on a Windshield

2010-01-30T10:23:00.001-08:00

If I had sat down to write this piece yesterday morning it would have been very different. As it was, since I was forced to wait by virtue of being at work, I had time to ruminate for many an hour on this simple thought: people need to slow the heck down. Everyone is running too fast. Certainly they are in my neck of the woods. By the way how do woods get necks anyway? After ruminating, chewing the cud as it were, I was handed a magazine called Good. I haven't seen this magazine before but I bought this issue immediately because the cover proclaimed: Slow Down; perspectives on a smarter, better, and slower future. Leafing through the articles on driving slower, Slow Food, and building things to last reflects many of the thoughts that had been tumbling like stones in my brain, slowly being polished in anticipation of this essay.

Was it serendipity or fate that I was thinking 'Slow Down' just before someone handed me a magazine of the same thought? I think it was synergistic. It's time we all start slowing right down before we grind to a messy halt altogether. Drive too fast and you risk crashing. Oh yeah, you think you have to get somewhere in a hurry? You need to save a few minutes of your precious on the go multitasking lifestyle? You save no time when you end up in the emergency room, or on the mortician's steely slab. Worse yet you save no time when you put someone else there. Are you saving time when you rush through all of life's experiences to get to the next one? We're choking on our fast food lunches. We're giving ourselves ulcers and cancer and diabetes. We're speeding by so fast, all so we can get to the grave just that bit faster. And fast people are cranky people. Trust me. I have to deal with them every day at work and on the road.

Life expectancy might be higher than ever, but I have a feeling that the humble farmer of a century or two ago, plowing the soil, moving through the seasons at a sedate rhythm, even if he lived less years than you will, had a longer life for he was there for almost every minute of it, rather than rushing through them so that they die like bugs on your windshield.

I've looked at some of the other sites and articles about slowing down, and most of them seem to focus on relaxing more and doing less. I'm not necessarily going to say you should stop reading your email, or spend more time in bed, but I am going to say that I am determined to do everything with a little more deliberation, a lot less rush, and always allow time for stopping, smelling the roses, and just plain breathing while I absorb the experiences I'm having, instead of always projecting my thoughts into the future, ignoring the now. I'm going to cook my food, eat less of it on the run, spend time in the garden, write without distractions, drive at the speed limit, not honk or cut people off, or drive so fast through the pouring rain I take out someone's beloved pet. I promise to appreciate the moments of my life. No matter how I do the math I'm at least halfway through my life and many days, weeks, months, and maybe years of it I have spent in a speedy blur where I can't remember what I did or why I did it. I promise not to waste what's left. I'm going to slow down slow.

Join me in slowing down on my new Facebook page: Slow Down Slow - let's see if we can start spreading the word and making a difference to the quality of life. I'll also be including other articles on slowing down, multitasking less, and related topics here on my blog in the future.

Bombs Bursting in Air

2010-01-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

I suffer from multi-taskitis and project-overload. No matter how I try to trim down on activities and interests and procrastination it seems I keep on piling them on my head until I'm in danger of drowning. When that happens I find myself stuck on mindless distractions (anyone that is a FaceBook friend of mine will know exactly what I mean) to turn off the anxiety or napping, but of course both of these end up giving me twice as much anxiety in the long run because I become more self-critical of myself for wasting valuable time. I feel like I'm on that proverbial treadmill at the gym, going nowhere fast.

Another symptom of my over-involvement and the impossibility of focusing on one task at a time is the increasing tendency towards losing the thread, brain stutters, and memory lapses. When I sit down to work I make repeated resolutions that this day I will start to focus my energies, cut out my time-wasting activities, and structure my day. I never follow through. The miracle remains: I still get shit done.

I'm like a poor mule beaten about the back to keep on pulling in the traces, but the whip hand? That's my own. I beat myself black and blue every day just to get through the day and get something accomplished of the long list of projects I have set myself due to the incredible firing of my brain. Basically I get ideas. It never stops. Day in day out, night time too, I'm getting ideas. I find almost everything interesting. Inspiration sparks me where ever I go, from the slow times when I actually walk somewhere and have time to smell the gardenias, to the crazy overload times where my fingers are racing across a keyboard to get the ideas down somewhere before they vanish in the ether.

Of course the key to all of this is two-fold: make a plan and stick to it; and pick less projects. Maybe even schedule projects to be consecutive instead of all at once? How to reject great ideas though? It seems such a shame to consign interesting little tidbits to a murky "might never get around to this one" file.

Hey, I know. I could gain 32 hours a week if I quit my job.

Who Cares What Color Their Eyes Are?

2010-01-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

Really - who the hell cares what color their eyes are? Heck, most of us don't even remember the color of our own spouse's eyes. I think they are sort of a grey green and mostly I remember that because she told me and it's important when picking out colors for her to wear. When I meet a person I don't say "gee, it was nice to meet Bob, he had brown eyes." I don't remember people by their eye color or their hair color or their height; unless it's unusual for some reason. So why is it so many writers write lines like this:

Darkly handsome Antonio, with bronzed biceps and chiseled jaw, gazed deeply into Allura's violet eyes, so big and moist, fringed with thick luxuriant black lashes.

Yawn.

I'm pretty much done with a book right there, aren't you? This kind of description tells us nothing except that the characters are artificially good-looking and probably going to be one dimensional. I bet he's sardonic and prone to misunderstanding the heroine until he takes her roughly, and she's rebellious and spunky, but she'll yield in the end.

Writing the introduction for a character that starts with a physical description is, generally, a pretty good signal that whatever follows will be clichéd and hackneyed. Yet I have seen decent young writers make this mistake and follow it with a ripping yarn. They're going to be fortunate indeed if they can get away with this and expect someone to keep reading. I don't know about you but nothing about the color of the heroines eyes tell me much about her personality, and eyes simply are not windows on the soul. You can't see anything in their depths. All the nuances of expression we human beings observe in each other is caused by hundreds of muscles in the face causing the skin around eyes and brows to crinkle and furrow, the turn of a mouth. Body language is a whole body affair and so the tilt of a shoulder, the jut of a hip, or a slouched back is telling us more than a study of an iris.

Here is a great quick sketch of a person:

He is not a guy who cares a lot about how he looks, unless he cares a lot about appearing not to care. He has angular eyebrows, and tousled hair. His disposition was serene, but you could sense a prickly, Jesuitical undercurrent coursing beneath it. He speaks softly with a gentle Texas twang.

No hair color there, no eye color either, but you get a real sense of a living breathing person with personality. I took this quote from a description of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey by Nick Paumgarten in the January 4, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. The writer has picked out some salient features because they stand out and they tell us more about John Mackey than a mere physical description. After reading the article I know a lot about Mackey but not a thing about the color of his eyes. Tousled hair: he's not fastidious about his appearance. Angular eyebrows: gives him an intense look that accents what the author said about the prickly undercurrent underneath the serene casual appearance. Speaks softly? As Whole Foods CEO he's knows people are listening. He doesn't have to shout.

Here is how F. Scott FitzGerald describes his tragic hero Jay Gatsby for the first time:

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression he that he was picking his words with care.

No idea what color his eyes are - well probably he's blond and blue-eyed and that's because he was portrayed by Robert Redford in the movie, old sport. This description, that concentrates so much on the smile and how it affected our narrator, while seeming spare in physical details actually tells us a great deal about Gatsby. He's self-made, very self-conscious, and yet he has a gift of making someone feel very special. Gatsby himself is very concerned with the external: his appearance, his speech, his house, but at the core there seems to be something empty. This image of Gatsby is then amplified and then drawn to its tragic ending throughout the rest of the book. Even more cunningly FitzGerald doesn't even introduce Gatsby until he's fueled our interest in through several chapters of mystery and gossip about the elusive Gatsby.

The fact that the movie version tends to stick in the mind of anyone that has seen and read the book is another good example of what it really shouldn't matter what color your heroine's eyes are. Casting Robert Redford as Gatsby was an admirable choice because his boyish good looks, so blond, really mirror FitzGerald's characterization of his protagonist. Movies are a visual medium that need to make the choice about exactly what a person looks like whereas books do not. But once that choice has been made it becomes fixed in the mind. I cannot read The Great Gatsby without seeing Robert Redford but if I had read the book prior to the movie I might see a dark Gatsby, a small Gatsby, a burly Gatsby. My own mind would add details to the important clues that FitzGerald has drawn me and this internalized version of Gatsby would hold far more meaning to me than one created for me of whole cloth.

If you do end up picking an eye color or hair color for your heroine or hero it should mainly be a detail for your own imagination, and unless there is a pressing reason otherwise, probably isn't important for your reader. How many times have you heard a person exclaim over the movie version of one of their favorite reads that the director got it all wrong? It clashes with their own internalized version of the story. What the author does is paint enough of a picture to grab their reader's imagination and desire to know about the character, and then the reader fills in the rest, creating a truly original symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. You need to know more about your characters than you write down, and what you end up giving the reader should be revealing of their inner nature, what makes them unique, not what color their eyes are. Better you should tell us just how they organize their sock drawer.

Letting the Genie Out of the Bottle

2010-01-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

I just watched an amazing presentation on the source of genius and creativity by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, that I want to share with you all on my writing blog this morning. Not only did it answer a few questions for me as an artist but it confirmed some of my own beliefs about art and the myth of the tortured artist. Elizabeth talks not only about writing but writing as an art form and the writer as an artist but about the other arts as well so this talk is essential for all creative people.

As a student majoring in fine arts (I have a Masters in painting) and as the offspring of artists I'm, more than most, fully aware of our stereotypes, culturally, about artists as tortured souls that pay for their genius (modern definition of the word being that genius is being really smart or creative) with terrible mental and emotional problems. The quintessential poster boy for this viewpoint is, of course, Vincent Van Gogh. The viewpoint is so all prevailing that I know artists who have considered themselves failures when they didn't die young, or bemoaned the fact they haven't had a nervous breakdown yet.

Normally sane people, in other words, will drink, take drugs, cultivate disruptive and destructive behaviors, just to fulfill society's prophecy that the creative individual is doomed. There are, naturally enough, tons and tons of examples. As I was studying art, being a rather sane individual that really didn't want to booze myself to death or suffer from mental illness just for my muse, I had plenty of cause to think about this topic. I was also studying art history at the same time and it's pretty easy to trace the history of the idea of artist as tortured individual from its origins. Great art has been produced of it, but is it really that useful of an idea? Can we change it?

Elizabeth wants to give us a new myth about artists and creativity and it's actually a very old myth. Watch and rejoice:

Counting to Completion

2010-01-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

As of this morning I'm 14,460 words, 28 pages, and 6 chapters into writing my first novel. I also have 1,667 words of saved cuts.

What's with the numbers I hear you ask? It's not about cranking it out there, but about the writing, man. Alright, that's not what you're asking - that's what I'm asking myself. I have often criticized the whole NaNoWriMo phenomena as a way of pushing output over quality. I think I understand better, now, why it's a good idea to overcome writer's block by short circuiting the whole anal retentive "it must be perfect" self-editorializing funk. Still my new obsession with numbers is not about writing 50,000 words in a single month. I am editing as I go along, and I started this particular resolution back on November 8, 2009.

I have long known that I needed something to push myself out of my own personal procrastination cycle when it came to writing my novel. I have written of my process here a couple of times in past blogs. Then in November I had the idea to start a writing group at my community web site, Pan Historia, which I dubbed Write Together. The purpose of the group, in all honesty, was twofold. One obvious reason was I felt that maybe a writing group of my peers where I was expected to show results would be a great way to give me a kick in the pants I needed. My other goal was to show that Pan Historia was not just a site where people fooled around and wrote purely for fun (though those are perfectly good and acceptable reasons to be there!) but also was a great hot house of creativity that could be a positive way for serious writers to have fun and improve their writing while doing it.

To prove that I needed to make myself a good example of it. It wasn't enough for me to know that there were a few published writers on the site, and a few people that had taken their writing to the next level after sharpening their tools at Pan. I needed to be one of those people I talk about. So here I am to tell you that I am 14,460 words farther along on my goal than I was on November 8, 2009, and that feels damn good. The counting is a game that helps me to keep my eye on the ball, and my feet on the trail. It's not about quantity, but the act of moving forward and having something I can measure to let me know I'm getting somewhere.

What game do you play to keep yourself on track with your writing goals?

The Bones of a Leaf

2009-12-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

The human mind is an amazing instrument capable of processing data from multiple inputs at speeds that make the fastest microprocessor look like a slow moving cement mixer. Not only that but many of the functions it performs are sorted and prioritized without the owner even seeing or sensing the processes involved. One of the astonishing abilities of the mind is the interpretation and creation of symbols: one thing standing for another thing. Letters form words that the brain then interprets. A picture of shape that is roundish, red, and has a sticklike appendage near the top becomes an apple. I catch sight of a piece of leaf with just the stem and a small part of the base and I see a tadpole swimming on my carpet.

Art, whether written, pictorial, or musical, is the mind's conscious manipulation of symbols to create images, emotion, and meaning in the mind of the observer/listener. I take something that is not there, create symbols (words or images), and deliver it to you so that you have an experience. Creating words from letters, then forming sentences, all of which describe the world, exterior and interior, is really an astounding activity and yet so many of us, from children to the most humble, can do it. Of course a lot of people tend to stick to the literal, the true, the tangible. It takes another flight of fancy to make stuff up - to make beautiful meaningful lies.

But even the entirely made up should be full of truths eternal. They may be very small, but I believe that even in the most lighthearted or humorous or fanciful piece of fiction writing there should be yet another layer of meaning underneath the obvious. I should be able to paint a picture for you of another reality and underlying my fictional reality is yet another substrate of meaning, of symbol. A really satisfying work of art lingers with you a long time after experiencing it. It's the movie that makes you keep thinking days later, or the novel that resonates years in the future so that you have to pick it up again, and lo and behold there is even more there than the first time around. It's the painting that haunts, or the musical refrain that moves you to tears and you don't know exactly why.

If I can ever write just one novel that has the ability to resonant in the reader's mind long after they put it down I'll have succeeded as an artist. If someone reads my words like I can read the remains of a leaf as a tadpole on my carpet then I have done my job.

Writing Goals for 2010

2009-12-26T11:04:00.000-08:00

As we approach 2010 I have an opportunity to reflect on my goals. It's been a month since I wrote anything in my blog here - and what a busy month it's been. My last post here was about my new writing group hosted at my interactive fiction/collaborative writing & role-play site Pan Historia called Write Together. I'm here to report that even in the middle of switching jobs and surviving the crazy holidays it's been a great success for me so far. I re-committed myself to a writing regime and am currently twenty pages into a new novel. Not only have I written several chapters but I have been enjoying a great deal of inspiring research for the project. The novel is fiction, but it's set in a very specific time period (mostly 1926) with lots of exciting historical characters that need to be authentic to make the story work.

With the holidays over (I don't count New Years and intend to spend it sedately as always) I am recommitting myself to my blog as well. My New Year's resolution, if you will, is to complete my novel in 2010 but also to maintain a steady stream of collaborative fiction and blog posts. Now I just have to remember all the good ideas I have had over the past month that I have been too busy to realize. I have a far better note taking system with the audio and notebook functions on my Blackberry as well as a nice little pocket Moleskin notebook, but somehow I still have to get ideas from brain to my devices, whatever they may be. I've been pretty diligent when it comes to the new novel but less so when it comes to other ideas, including poetry ideas, I have been slacking. Developing new habits is a matter of practice however and with all the ways that I can take down my thoughts for later I have no excuses this year for not improving.

My new job is going to help a lot. I haven't really posted much personal stuff in my blog and that remains my intention, but I can share that when you are in a negative place, worried about finances and bullied by bosses that are less qualified than yourself, it sure can handicap your ability to be creative and productive in other spheres. My new job was a step back on the hierarchal ladder since my move across country, but it is a return to the sector that I excel in and where I have opportunities for advancement. My new bosses and coworkers all seem to be people I can respect, and I look forward to relaxing into my new position. My primary ambition in life is as an artist. Whether it is with paints, pens, or pixels, I have to remember that my job is not my career and sweat the small stuff a little less. I think 2010 promises me that freedom.

Write Together

2009-11-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

I've been even more quiet than usual when it comes to my blog and twitter but I have an excellent excuse. I had a brainstorm of an idea - one that helps to make Pan Historia an even better destination for writers as well as one that is helping motivate me to write my own novel. I started a writing group at Pan for those of us who want to move from just writing ongoing collaborative fiction to finally finishing and publishing a novel of our own. This concept does not exclude collaborative projects (I hope to include a version of my zombie novel in this mix one day) but does focus on story structure, discipline, craft, and actually sitting down regularly and making time to write.

For those of you who know me or know me through my blog you'll be aware of my intention to write a novel and how I have been working on one based on the life of Wyatt Earp for just about forever. Mostly it's been in the endless research phase with a sort of Mobius strip of trying to work out my new 'fresh' angle on this particular subject. When I started the new writing group Write Together at Pan I fully intended to finally write and complete this work. Our group is really fortunate to have a published author of a sort of mentor consultant and the first thing she asked me is "why am I writing this particular story" and I could no longer answer the question. I got some good feedback from my fellow writers and had worked out some possible interesting twists on the Wyatt Earp story and how to tell it in an engaging way, but there was no real purpose for me. I ended up answering that question with "I've been researching it? I have a book case full of books on the topic?"

Beep. Not good enough.

So I decided to shelve the project and immediately begun work on another novel idea that had been flitting around my mind for a while. This time I jumped into a genre that I have come to love writing in: horror. I've started work on a sort of supernatural thriller set in the 1920's full of glamorous characters, many of whom are historical, and dark sinister magic. I'm very excited about the story and using all the resources of my novel writing group as well as the many great resources I have found since using twitter and blogging, I have already got a good working synopsis, a stable of interesting rich characters, and the beginning of an outline using a classic story structure. The basic storyline and characters has been something I have been working on for quite a long time on Pan as a collaborative novel, but my focus will be on my own ideas and characters and developing a plot that has not been told in the collaborative forum so it's all original.

Gratifying Our Inner Child

2009-11-15T15:13:00.000-08:00

"Little Wyatt, if you want your another piece of your candy from Halloween, you have to clean your room first."

It's a common command. Children are taught to delay gratification from the bassinet and stroller and onward to school. Learning self-control and how to defer pleasure is essential to becoming an adult human being capable of making responsible decisions that enhance quality of life and ensure survival. Some of our oldest fables and folk stories demonstrate the same principle from the hard plodding tortoise that knows he cannot rest until the job is done and thus beats the hare at a race, to the three little pigs where the one that knows to do the hard work and build his house out of brick doesn't end up pork tenderloin for a hungry wolf. Of course it's hardly kosher these days to scare children with stories of pigs being eaten by wolves is it? And how does Little Red Riding Hood fare?

In fact not only are we less likely to tell children cautionary tales of what happens to the selfish, lazy, greedy, and irresponsible, we, collectively as parents, are less likely to teach our children to be anything but greedy, selfish, lazy, and irresponsible anymore. Out the window went spankings and consequences, and while I'm happy to find an alternative to physical violence as a parental disciplinary option if you can show me a better happier way, I'm terribly loath to go the way I have seen this nation tumble towards. Television sets are baby sitters that teach mass consumption. Lack of public approval for discipling children has either led to screaming harpies that don't care how they are perceived in public or the greater majority of well-meaning parents that hand that children whatever it is they are crying for as soon as they are crying, just to stop the socially embarrassing moment of a child making a scene in public.

Rewards are handed out as incentives for self-expression rather than self-discipline and we're all lauding the freedom we experience as our entire nation, as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald, grows ever younger and more immature. Our entire financial institution is now centered around the principle of enjoy now, pay later (or at least have someone else bail you out). Don't defer. Get a credit card. Credit cards getting a bad rap? Well now you can use layaway at some of the major stores just to be sure you can get what you want now and worry about the consequences later. No matter than you're now paying much more for it than you should be because all the added interest and fees. Can anyone remember far back into the dark ages when you know, if you had no money in your account, your card wouldn't let you have any, or wow, your check would bounce? Now instead it lets you go on blithely spending and slams you with fees later - because, of course, you gotta have it now. We have all sunk deep and deeper into a quicksand of instant gratification.

Of course it would be easy to say: don't use credit, save, only buy what you can afford - except that the whole crazy system of instant gratification has had the domino effect of creating massive inflation (yes, I know there are complex issues and myriad causes, but it is one of those causes). How many years would it take to save for a house, when of course when we are young and raising a family is exactly when we need one? Rising health care costs and the wonderful fraud of insurance of course accounts for huge chunk of change making it impossible to get what we need without credit.

Every where you choose to cast your eye in regards to our culture the cult of childish instant gratification has left its indelible print of banality, self-centeredness, and immaturity: music, art, relationships, media, and our economy. Is there a way, I wonder, to reverse that trend or are we doomed like Benjamin Button to fade into black unable to remember our own name?

Retrieving the Wonder of Childlike Eyes

2009-11-08T13:43:00.001-08:00

I recently watched a couple of young boys, probably around seven or eight, explore an area of a garden center unsupervised, and I suspect they also thought themselves alone. I was amused to observe them get excited over some plant specimens (succulents of course, weird and wonderful) as well as become totally distracted and unhinged at the sight of some bug. I smiled to myself as I remembered my same joy of discovery at the amazing world around me, and the same lack of discrimination as to what was worthy of notice and what wasn't. It was not an unusual thought that came to my mind: how sad is the loss of the wonder of youth. My next thought was a congratulatory one: I'm so glad I haven't lost my wonder. Only a few minutes later I was proving this point by collecting up some unusual pine cones that looked like old-fashioned cabbage roses and some spiky and strange seed pods, all the while wondering how I could use them in some creative way. I often stop to watch the humming bird feed, or to touch an interesting plant with an unusual texture or scent. While dead heading the cyclamen the other day I snipped a seed pod in half to see what it looked like inside, curious because I had never observed their fruit before.

Of course my musings on the wonder of youth led me to reflect that creative people always seem to retain some of that childlike amazement and curiosity at the world around us. I started to pat myself on the back, but then I had another thought: perhaps it's not some innate specialness that allows us to retain our senses when others become smoothed to the world around them, like over-used sandpaper. Observe adults with children and you'll see the smoothing away process in action often. For every parent that is encouraging their offspring in their explorations there are at least two others teaching their children fear and/or indifference. To be honest most parents belong in both categories. We tell our children what is important to pay attention to all the time with every little caution and gesture.

"Dad, what is this pretty flower?"

"I don't know, it's just a flower, now do up your shoelaces."

"Mom, I like this squishy slug."

"Ugh! Put that down, it's dirty."

Or better yet - just ignoring all the observations, questions, and wonder - or even better yet - criticizing, mocking, or laughing at the child for their pleasure at life's wonders.

One of my personal favorites is misinformation. The largest dissemination of crap information is from parents to their children. It can be minor as in identifying an ape as a monkey, or it can be major as in stating that all people of a certain colored skin or sexual preference are inferior.

Of course I once failed to correct a couple of little boys as they made some wild assumptions: they were identifying some marks on the side of a ship docked in a harbor as being the result of 'shark bites'. I loved that. That was not misinformation but a sign of the wonderful imagination that all human beings are born with. Seeing some places where the paint was missing from the hull down at the water line their young minds, still not trained to ignore or classify as uninteresting or useless, imagined huge Great Whites with gaping jaws full of sharp and horrifying teeth as the fish leapt up out of the water in a feeding frenzy.

Perhaps if you have found yourself rubbed too smooth to wonder at life any longer, too harried to pass on your own wonder to your kids? I present no answers here, but I hope to have fueled some thought that might lead you down a path of rediscovery, and maybe what you find there, on that yellow brick road, might rub off on your little ones.

Multidimensional Writing Experience

2009-11-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

There is a lovely multidimensionality in starting up a new character for a collaborative writing/role play project at Pan Historia that feeds all my creative urges at once, nearly. There are two main roads into a new character: getting an idea for a character and then finding a place for them to dwell; or finding a story you really like and then finding a character to fit in. Creating a new character from scratch is the most creatively demanding because of the added dimensions of home page design. I love kitting out a new page for a new character from finding the right graphics, or creating them from scratch if one has a bit of tech savvy with a graphics program, and then designing a fun informative home page from all the different components.

Home pages are useful. I think of them as character biographies where you can get your decorating urges taken care of and impart something useful about your character in turn. My Wyatt Earp home is both western in theme and includes useful historical quotes about Wyatt from people that actually knew him. My Gabriel Oak home is less about the personality of the character but is very informative about some of my inspiration for the character. Gabriel is an interesting character inspired both from literature and from the movies. Those familiar with Thomas Hardy will recognize the source of the character's name, and of course the face I use is from the movie version of the novel "Far From the Maddening Crowd". I'm not a fanboy however and Gabe is his own character. In one earlier incarnation he was an artist with a supernatural angelic side living inside him. When he moved on to a different story he became a drunk, the human mask, of the Archangel Gabriel.

Of course some characters live in many different role play and collaborative stories and one home page can hardly do justice to all their diverse lives. That's why the profile pages were originally added as a 'room' off the main home page. These pages include sections for each novel that a character appears in so that the owner can give a little biographical detail. The beauty of a site like Pan, though, is that with so many interactive features the creativity of the individual takes over and tools are always adapted to the needs of their owners. I don't try and force people to use Pan the way I anticipated. Instead I'm often adapting Pan to fit in with the needs of the users.

A lot of people reserve their character biographies for the forums of the novels themselves and use the home pages as a place to show off all their awards, prizes, badges, and the little graphical gifts that people make for one another. This is probably a similar approach that many users of MySpace employ, but it's fun nonetheless. Of course it doesn't really help me, as a writer, when I click on their home to see more about their character, but usually I can at least some kind of sense from the avatar they have chosen to represent their character. Other people actually write out character sheets. I have never employed one of those. I like to get a general impression, and then let inspiration take its course when I'm writing. If I get too locked down on who I think a character is I find that the work become stifled and creativity shuts down.

I guess I can sum up what I'm trying to say is that using the internet and a web site like Pan Historia allows me and my fellow writers to add layers and dimensions to our writing experience, like creating images and home pages to enhance the experience. The way that any particular writer or role player chooses to implement these tools is often going to be as unique and different as the perspectives we bring to our writing and characters.

My Top Eleven Romantic Heroines of Literature

2009-10-20T11:40:00.001-07:00

1. Tess Durbeyfield - Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 1891
2. Sarah Woodruff - The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, 1969 (but inspired by an 1823 novel)
3. Catherine Earnshaw - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, 1847
4. Elizabeth Bennett - Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813
5. Anne Elliot - Persuasion by Jane Austen, 1816
6. Scarlet O'Hara - Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, 1937
7. Sophie Zawistowska - Sophie's Choice by William Styron, 1979
8. The Marquise de Merteuil - Les Liasons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, 1782
9. Countess Ellen Olenska - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 1920
10. Roxane - Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, 1897
11. Jane Eyre - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, 1847

Not included on my list but available for discussion: Anna Karenina - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, 1877

These are my top eleven (today anyway) favorite romantic but flawed heroines of literature. You might have others that don't appear on my list, but I had a couple of binding rules for including characters on my list:

1. I had to have actually read the book, not just seen the movie or BBC adaptation.
2. They had to be smart and not just victims or ciphers for the male character to show off to.
3. I had to find them sexy.

Curiously this set of rules nearly knocked Jane Eyre off the list. Much as I admire her spunk and passion, she never set my pulse racing, but on deep consideration she's too well written of a heroine not to include. Tess might be on the list for the opposite reason - she's hot, but I'm not sure she's not more of a victim than not. Of course considering the time periods all of these heroines had to live in it's not at all surprising that their lives are often tragic, and that fate deals them hands that no one could raise above, no matter their inner steel.

Taking my heroines one by one I will give a brief explanation for their inclusion on my all time favorites list; however please bear in mind there is no particular order to the list. Tess is there because of her struggle. Viewed through the eyes of the men around her we see her vulnerability and desirability, and yet... she's so badly treated by them all. She keeps getting kicked down, getting back up, and getting kicked back down again. Sarah Woodruff, on the surface seems a similar sort. Her mystery makes her desirable and then Fowles plays with us by giving us all possible versions of her, and yet not revealing which is the true Sarah. Cathy Earnshaw is elemental in her passion. Who wouldn't fall for a woman that death couldn't even hold down? Elizabeth Bennett is one smart cookie, but prone to understandable blindness. Her beauty lies in her essential goodness and her ability to learn, grow, and her loyalty to those she loves.

Anne Elliot is a more gentle heroine, trapped by social mores, she retains dignity. In the end she wins deserved love and redemption. Scarlet O'Hara is maddening. She's beautiful, passionate, and fiery. She's strong-willed, an idiot, and irritating as hell. Who hasn't fallen for such a woman? Sophie from Sophie's Choice is so beautiful and tragic, she makes my heart bleed. I suppose in the literal sense The Marquise de Merteuil is not a heroine. She is spiteful and scheming, and yet I feel that she is such a woman of passion and intelligence she deserves her place here. She is merely having her revenge for the status her gender demands. She uses her wit like poison, and in the end it is she that suffers.

The Age of Innocence is the one book on this list I did not read until the end, but not because it wasn't worth reading. I had seen the movie first, and then intrigued picked up the novel. It was great, but for me the repressed and thwarted passion of Ellen Olenska was more than I could bear a second time. I wanted her to win against society, when no winning was possible in that time period. I think Roxane is an overlooked heroine. Everyone focuses on Cyrano, and with good reason, but Roxane is the lovely woman with the understanding to adore beautiful words, and in the end she would have loved Cyrano as well or better than Christian, if she'd been given the opportunity. Jane Eyre... everyone knows her: mousy governess with a wild heart capable of great and passionate love. It's the dark eyes, luminous in a pale face, that does it.

Anna Karenina is not on the list because I hated that book. The story of Anna was powerful and provocative, but cut with a very boring second story about some landowner and his wheat crops. I have no idea this far removed his name or why he was there, but I didn't finish the book and it pissed me off. I did, however, read the incredibly lengthy War and Peace, so it's not big wordy Russian novels by Tolstoy that put me off.

Which brings up another question I have about my own list. Why are all the books so old or even if written in this century set in an earlier age? Where are the modern heroines to make my blood boil and my heart strings sing? I don't know if I have the complete answer to that question. I know that I read a great many classics in my teens and twenties - exactly at the time when the hormones were raging the most - so it's entirely possible that my concept of what was romantic was crystallized by my reading habits. I also know that I don't often read modern fiction, and when I do I don't find a lot of romantic writing there. I won't pick a 'romance' because they are often, for me, of very limited scope and reading quality as genre fiction. Has a good modern romance been written? If so please tell me about them so I can expand my horizons. Also feel free to post your own list in my comment box. I want to hear more about it.

Sex & Romance: Let's Write It!

2009-10-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

Romance. We all love it, even those of us that suggest otherwise. Sex. Ditto there, folks. But is there any deeper quagmire that a writer can sink in? I'm talking about experienced authors as well as first time writers. It's a morass. How do you write about sex and romance, either together or separately, without coming off like something from Penthouse magazine or worse just plan repetitive, dull, or clichéd? The topic is so sticky with cliché and innuendo that often people don't even recognize when something is clichéd. They're programmed to either go 'ahhhhhh' or blush, or sneer, or mock, or even giggle inanely.

For a writer, if we are writing some pure romance, or want to create a great sex scene that warms the... heart then we certainly don't want to cause our readers to put the scene down with a humph, a yawn, or a ridiculing laugh. If that scene is part of a greater whole than we sure don't want our readers to rush through uncomfortably, knowing that they won't miss anything of great import. Sex, like any other human activity, needs a reason to be in the story. If you're writing a romantic novel where boy meets girl, or girl meets girl, the sex is part and parcel of the narrative. No need to agonize whether or not to include it. The only question that needs to be in your mind is "how spicy, how explicit". In this case that judgment call is more about your audience. Some readers like their sex soft, romantic, vanilla, and veiled in pretty words, and that's just fine for that kind of novel. This blog isn't about that kind of writing.

Sex, just like romance, can be rude, quirky, dirty, sloppy, hurried, insane, intense, funny, and clumsy - and it happens for a reason. In our fiction writing it happens to reveal something about the character, or lead the characters where they need to go. These are all elements that once included make the reader associate more intensely with your characters and not reject the sex as gratuitous fluff. When it comes to awkward moments we've all been there and done that - and good sex is like good wine: it can combine flavors that seem madly disparate like blackberries and charcoal. The trick is knowing what is sexy and what is not out of those elements. If you're looking to turn up the heat you can be inventive and silly, but you have to know when any particular element is gross or makes your hero look like an unattractive ass. My trick is to imagine the scene completely: would I be turned on or off if a particular thing happened during sex?

Falling off the bed during the intensity of love-making can either be funny, tragic, or sexy. It will depend on the telling. Accidentally farting will always end the heat, even if the laughter kicks in (in real life you might get over it, but I can practically guarantee your reader won't). It's like overflowing trash in your kitchen when you're cooking. It spoils the appetite. It's important to keep it real, and yet, for the heat, you have to keep it from getting too real. It's always got to be a little bit of the best sex you ever had, and not necessarily just the best sex you ever imagined.

Truly great love affairs are never easy. They're not about candy, Hallmark greeting cards, soft focus, or soft love-making from incredibly virile men with a sardonic smirk and a searing kiss, who knows when the heroine (who is unbelievably lovely, spunky but submissive in bed) says "no, no" she means "yes, yes". Truly great sex is often memorable for the details. Where you were, what you were doing before hand, how you felt at the time, and that warm laugh you shared when you broke your coffee mug as you swept it off your desk in the heat of passion. It's that wonderful little bit in When Harry Met Sally when she fakes an orgasm in the deli, or Bridget Jones's Diary where Hugh Grant strips off the cute little cocktail dress only to find granny panties. Or it's that bit that makes you want to crawl out of your skin in The Age of Innocence where the passion of the main characters, so repressed by the societal mores of their day, is entirely expressed by Newland Archer removing the glove from Ellen Olenska's hand during a carriage ride and pressing her fingers to his lips.

So let's talk language for a second. I'm a fan of no beating around the proverbial bush. I find words like 'member', 'tool', and other such euphemisms amusing so they spoil the moment for me. Those that don't like their sex written so explicitly will, violently on occasion, disagree with me. If you have to use euphemisms be cautious with them, and choose the words with great care so that you're not accidentally inspiring laughter instead of sympathetic passion. You might be sparing your less sensitive readers much blushing but instead causing your more bold readers to laughter or worse, to feel boredom. Telling a sexy story need very rarely ever go right to the finish either. This is not porn we're talking about. The 'money shot' is seldom really called for in any scene. An orgasm is only an orgasm in real life. In fiction it's the lead up that counts. Make me squirm and shudder. Take me to the brink and I'll fall over the edge all by myself with the aid of my own imaginative juices.

Progress on the Pan Historia Birthday Book

2009-10-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

Work has commenced, as promised on the second Pan Historia Birthday Book. The title needs a little explaining. Pan Historia is a community for collaborative and role-play writing, as well as history buffs, and a place for people with a whimsical or literary sense of fun to hang out and make friends. It's like a non-stop costume party (which is why October is such a popular month with our members and writers). We first went live around May 2000 and were in beta forever (it seemed at the time) due to a some what rocky start and no capital investment. Our first collection of work by our writers and artists was prepared and published in time for our 3rd Panniversary (yes, we do awful plays on words at Pan) - which is held every February because our official launch date was Valentine's Day, 2001. I think. Record keeping is not my strong suit. I forget my own name sometimes as well.

Hence the anthology was named "The Pan Historia Birthday Book" with every intention of creating a new collection each and every February. This turned out to be a laughably ambitious concept. Shortly after the publication of the first book we had a major server crash that ripped the site apart, and it took many months of hard work to re-establish trust and fun as usual. I cannot stress how amazing our members were throughout that whole ordeal. Our second effort which was to be a cookbook: it died before delivery. After that it just seemed like the idea was to be shoved to the back burner every year.

This time, however, determination has returned, and the small press world has radically altered. Back in 2004 I had to order several boxes of books, and we never did sell every copy. This time print on demand has developed to the degree that I don't have to take that kind of risk again. By affiliating myself with another small press I'm planning to open the work of our talented writers and artists to a wider audience and have the book available on Amazon. It should be exciting to see how our labor of love and fun does in the 'real' world. I have pushed the publication date to prior to December in order to take advantage of Christmas sales, but I might be too ambitious. There is a lot of work still to be done.

The deadline for entries to be included in the book closes tomorrow. After that we'll be judging the entries so that we have the best and the book isn't the size of Lord of the Rings. Following that is the process of editing. Thankfully we have a number of people qualified to edit who are members of the site. All in all this is a terrific project with great potential, and I can't think of many other writing sites that give their members an opportunity to be published.

Why I Blog Less So I Can Write More

2009-09-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that my blog postings are getting fewer and farther between - even the 'easy' ones where I repost already written fiction from my collaborative writing community. It's pretty hard to maintain a good blog. Anyone that says "you need a blog" is making a suggestion that has merit, but also entails a whole butt load of work. There is the essential component of having a good idea that hasn't been covered to death, then finding something to say abut that idea that hasn't been said five billion other times in the exact same way, and then the craft of writing the piece. Once you've done that you have to do it all over again, maybe not immediately, but certainly within a timely fashion; say, once every couple of days.

For some people that process can take days right there. And if you're an expert on something, or even just trying to be informative and give people value for their click, there is all the research that many topics entail. Oh - and you have to do all the links, the attributions, the editing, the keywords, and maybe even a nice little summary. Of course you're trying to stand out too so you'll grab hold of some images to pepper your writing with and catch the wandering eye and short attention span of your target audience. You need to promote your blog, post the link on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and perhaps Digg It, or Technorati it, and at the end of the day, after you've checked all your stats to see your traffic a whole fifteen people might have checked you out.

And if you're like me and you're hoping that your blog will alert people to the fun of your true love and get them curious and you find that you're not driving any traffic there, you gotta start wondering: is it worth all this damn trouble? You have to start asking yourself "why do I blog?". If the answer is "to advertise" than maybe it's just not all that useful after all. The standard advice for writers and other professionals is that you have to self-promote, self-promote, self-promote, but is that incredible cacophony of sound that is the world-wide-web really doing anyone any good?

On Twitter, which I actually enjoy for more than it's potential to advertise my wares, the majority of people that follow me are bots looking to advertise products. All the 'in the know' blogs by the 'smart people' tell you not to be a bot, but give value, but even those value-laden pundits can become overwhelming and tedious. Link after link is advertised sending you off to sites that tell you how to market, how to create great ads in Photoshop, how to sell, how to write, how to yell louder than anyone else, and it's all just becoming noise, noise, noise. And we all know what happens next: we drown it out. We tune it out, we drop out, we find a secluded beach somewhere.

The only things that really give value in this life are the things you're passionate about. I'm passionate about Pan Historia. I'm passionate about gardening, writing, reading good books, good games, good food, art, the people I love, and so if I don't have the passion to tell you something interesting on this blog - I'm not going to waste my time and yours by making sure I post every few days to keep my blog on the top of the list.

It Takes a Village to Create a Good Monster

2009-08-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

Most of my adult life I have not signed up for cable TV. It's been a time sucking temptation I didn't need or want. But that's not because I'm some kind of stuck up puritan deeming the viewing of comedies and dramas on the small screen as sinful or wasteful. I just know myself - I love the distraction of a tale well told or a meal well cooked. In consequence my viewing of popular series has been as a customer of Netflix. I tell you this to explain the next part: I watch TV series after everyone else as seen them because I watch them on DVD.

I'm a big fan of the hit Showtime series Dexter and gobbled up Season 1 & 2 with avidity of appetite that left me with a very long wait for Season 3. I had to fill that time somehow. Dexter, serial killer with a code, is such an engaging and fascinating character that when I discovered that he was actually inspired by a book I was delighted. I'm one of those who love to read and believe that most books are better than the shows/movies made from them. I understand that it's hard work to adapt a book to a totally different medium and realize that the result often diverges enough from the original that the reader is left unsatisfied: their imaginative take on the events and characters far different than the script writer and director's. So to say that I was excited to find that Jeffrey Lindsay was the creator of one of my favorite television character was possibly an understatement. These were not books based on the hit series, but a hit series based on popular books, bound to be as good at the show if not better. I must be in for a treat so I bought all three extant books at once.

Here is where I'm going to offend Jeffrey Lindsay and all his fans. These were definitely the worst three books I have ever read as a series. I confess that I hated the first trilogy of Thomas Covenant by Stephan R. Donaldson nearly as much but for very different reasons, but in main if I have bothered to read three books by the same author about the same subject I'm probably hooked. I was not hooked; I was desperate. I wanted to be in Dexter's world and this was the best I could do while I waited for the series to return (thankfully they were both short and easy to read). Lindsay created an engaging character, a bold premise, and a convincing setup, and for that I will always be grateful. But after that he let me down with pedestrian writing and cheap tricks.

One huge mistake: his sister Debra finds out he's a killer in the beginning of the first book, but she loves him anyway in the second book. Where is the alienation that so defines the character? Doakes gets all his limbs cut off but clumps into the office anyway? Was that mean to be humorous? And the third book... I'm rolling my eyes at this one. In the third book Lindsay blows away his own brilliant premise by making Dexter possessed of a demon, rather than the interesting psychology that is hinted at (not actually explored because Lindsay is not that good of a writer) in the previous novels. The device of Dexter's inner monologue has its source in the books, but whereas it is very interesting and well done in the TV series, after three books you're tired of the boasting and whining:

"Gosh I'm a smart guy without any human emotions, why can't I do my normal brilliant analysis of this challenge right now?"

That was a paraphrase because I can't access the books anymore. Disgusted that I read all three I passed them onto another Dexter fan - who then did precisely what I did - read them all in disgust and then dumped them off somewhere like a dead body that needed disposal. I have googled around the web for evidence that others viewed Lindsay's hack writing the same way as I did, but I have not found it. I believe that Dexter is so arresting as a character in fiction that Lindsay is easily pulling the wool over the eyes of his readers, but the glamour can't last forever.

What is the point of trashing Lindsay's books in my blog since this is not intended as a review? I think, for me, that it's that the collaborative effort that took flight from Lindsay's brilliant starting point shows that the artistic process, even for crafting stories, doesn't have to be a lonely journey. We all know that movies and TV shows are the result of the work of a lot of people, but we always think of them in terms of a 'a writer', 'a director', or 'a star', but the fact is that all those people and more work together to produce a show like Dexter. Every link in the Dexter chain, from Lindsay's premise, to the uncanny performance by Michael C. Hall, is part of a greater whole of people coming together to create something unique in the world. At least that's how I like to think of it when I collaborate on my fiction projects - that we are bringing something unique into the world through our collective creativity and vision. Lindsay conceived Dexter, but it took 'a village' to raise this monster.

Reading to Be Write

2009-08-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

Reading is to writing like water is to a fish. A couple years ago I realized that, somewhere around my middle thirties, all my reading had metamorphosed from fiction and poetry to research and essays. I was reading thick tomes on Ancient Egypt and the Wild West with a collector's avidity and little focus on the writing. The irony is that my abandonment of reading fiction coincided with my eager beavering at writing fiction. I was reading to learn about the places and periods that inspired me to write.

It took me a while to realize that I was no longer in touch with the storytellers that had created a love of literature in me in the first place. A couple years back I pledged to make the time to read novels and short stories again. I decided that as a writer I need to breathe in and absorb the work of other artists; not to mimic them but to learn from and be inspired by them.

As a kid I totally absorbed the classics and many of the great writers of the last couple of centuries from Dostoevsky, to Dickens, to Hardy. I read Lord of the Rings about ten times (yes I was that geeky child) before the age of sixteen. As an adult I have had far more difficulty getting into novels. I'm still looking for good writing but I also need good stories and a lot of modern novelists of the literary variety leave me cold - yes, I'm that kind of luddite. I still believe in story and plot. It's all style and in the head when I want something to actually happen. So from the classics of my youth I have been reading more along the lines of Stephen King and Elmore Leonard.

Much as I admire King's storytelling ability and craftsmanship (and have tried to absorb the lessons in writing that he can deftly apply) he can be lacking in the sheer beauty of words. Elmore Leonard is the king of 'spare' dry bones fiction and I'm finding that isn't what I want either. It's highly praised by editors and other writers at this moment in time, but I consider it just one style and just one possibility and not necessarily the pinnacle of literary mastery. I recently read No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and it was excellent - the writing both hard edged and lyrical at the same time. McCarthy is an author that inspires me to be a better writer, and to pick up more of his books.

The key to reading fiction in order to learn to write better yourself is to read more thoughtfully. It doesn't mean you have to lose the rhythm of the story. It's more akin to enjoying fine wine. You just don't pour it into a jelly jar and gulp it down; you breathe in the aroma, sifting through the myriad scents, sip, roll it over your tongue, and then drink that baby all up. Feel free to mark passages that strike you. Query word choices that pull you up short and take you out of the story. Go back and read excellent bits again.

You should even feel free to mimic as a writing exercise, just remembering that all this reading and even mimicry is just a passage to finding your own style and rhythm.

So which writers inspire you? I would love to hear back from you all - so that I can find other gems and continue on my literary journey of discovery.

Slugs and Snails

2009-08-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

The other day I was out in the garden, cleaning up the dead leaves, making nature look sexy instead of messy, when I came across some garden slugs. Ugh. Slugs.

I hate slugs; even their name is repellent. They're slimy little squishy eating machines: gross miniature monsters eating holes in the beautiful leaves of my imagined perfect garden. Though I hate to touch them I had no qualms about crushing them under the heel of my boot to rid the garden of their pestilence. A few minutes later I came across the common garden snail (escargot to you) and my reaction was quite different. It's still a garden pest and eating machine but instead of active repugnance I pick it carefully up by its stripped tortoiseshell-like spiral home where it brings a smile to my face as it starts to uncurl its little noble head from its body to peer at me inquisitively from its extraordinary eyestalks.

I couldn't crush it: I carefully carried it out of the garden. I never have been able to harm a snail. They're slippery, not slimy. They have beautiful shells. They have an elegance when fully extended, a sort of equine grace to their heads and the arch of their body as they navigate their world with a slow steady curiosity. I'm sure many of these are imagined qualities in my head, but my love affair with snails has been going since I was a kid when I would collect them to keep as pets, and carefully release them before I had them too long.

The same kid that showed such gentle devotion to his snails once stuck a match stick in the air hole of a slug, lit it, and watched it burn down until it melted the slug in a searing sizzle of outraged twisting writhing slugginess. I'm not proud of that moment and it didn't give me any fiendish pleasure but rather taught me not to torture animals - even ones I despise.

The irony of all of this is that slugs, to most people, are snails without shells. In the mind of most people they are quite similar, if not nearly exactly the same, and the slime of the slug is the slime of the snail. Each has the same disastrous effect in the garden as they munch their way across your favorite shrub, veggies, and flowers. Even biology bears out the opinions of most people: they are both gastropods that got out of the sea and crawled on the land. Slugs developed mucus to protect their soft bodies designed for aquatic living and snails have a shell, like many of their relatives. Sea slugs are some of the most beautiful creatures on earth, nudibranchs, and even some land slug species are quite extraordinary.

The fact is I'm prejudiced. Like most prejudiced people my reasons seem perfectly reasonable: slime, squishy, plant-eating. And just like most prejudices I can't see what I don't want to see like the fact that the snail is the same creature but with a shell. My prejudice is so ingrained it's visceral, but with open eyes can I cease my ridiculousness? I don't mean that I should cease to remove slugs from my garden or that I should love snails any less, but that I should simply stop hating the simple slug, humble relative of creatures like nudibranchs and snails, and give it the respect it's due. It's the respect that all living creatures deserve just for being what they were born to be. It's not layering my hatreds and fears on their backs until I can't see them anymore, but stripping away the layers to see that they are just trying to make a living the best way that they can.

What prejudices do you hold so close you can't even see them anymore?

Writing the Good Guy: Give Them Black Hats

2009-07-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

A casual exchange in #writechat, Twitter's Sunday writing discussion, led me to think a little bit more about writing the good guy in fiction. I stated that I found writing a hero more challenging than writing about the villain. Villains are fun. They are people I don't need to make likeable, honorable, or virtuous, and yet we are all a little predisposed to get a vicarious thrill out of that bad boy doing what we wish we could. The hero might have flaws, even fatal flaws (one that leads to her demise), but we still need to be relating to her and rooting for her.

A good writer friend of mine at Pan says: "People adore Dexter. He's a serial killer. How can you like him or hope he doesn't get caught? Because he fights his insights and sticks to his code." Dexter is a good example of the hero role turned upside down, or an anti-hero because even though he seems to be a prime example of a bad guy, he has an unshakeable code of conduct.

But what about a good old-fashioned hero?

Clementine Proulx (a nom de plume of one of our excellent Pan Historia writers who is also a published author in the real world) advises: "Readers have to care about your "hero." She doesn't have to be lovable or even likable, but she has to have something that makes them want to invest in her."

I write the historical character of Wyatt Earp. I use the historical record to provide him with the flaws needed to make him a believable human being and not a TV show stereotype. The controversy surrounded Earp supplies me with plenty of ways to show that my hero is not just a nice guy. He was a gambler who consorted with prostitutes, but he was also a fearless lawman who was prepared to crack a few heads along the way. He even arrested a judge. His brother Virgil arrested Wyatt once. That kind of single-minded adherence to duty is both honorable and a flaw. Rigidity is not a likeable character trait.

Back to Clemetine Proulx:

Almost all the best heroes are essentially not so nice people overcoming their not-so-niceness. They do it throughout the story which in Hollywood is a character arc. Really "nice" people or "good" people are rather uninteresting heroes unless thrown into a plot driven story. I think of a Stephen King---The Mist---where the decent dad faces unbelievable situations. A hero is always reluctant at first, has character flaws, but eventually makes the satisfying choice. The more flawed the hero, the more he struggles, the more we care for him...so yes, Dexter could be called an anti-hero (like Hannibal who only eats rude people), but he is still a hero because he can't help who he is, formed by one of worst childhood experiences I can think of, but he struggles against it to do - ultimately - good. Sure we all want to kill bad guys. Actually we all want to kill people in our way. But Dexter follows a code that is essentially the code we all follow...only his is obvious and spelled out.

Clementine really knows what she's talking about. In the collaborative fiction novel FLESH she writes a character that is notable for being everything you don't expect in a heroine. She's old, ugly, pudgy, a fanatic fan of Tom Jones, with few social skills who was overjoyed when her mother was consumed by flesh-eating zombies, but her wit, spunk, and ingenuity gets the reader rooting for her nonetheless. In fact it is her flaws and her history (she was picked on mercilessly in school, had a sad and lonely family life) that causes the reader to love her with a passion.

In the same novel FLESH we have started a new chapter and my personal challenge is to create a hero that is essentially pretty unlikeable and yet, in the end, it is my hope that the readers are rooting for him to succeed. Michael is proud, pompous, prejudiced, and overly rigid in his thinking and actions. He's about to be thrown into a situation where he has to help the very people he's been alienating for years: his neighbors. You can check out my writing for this character here on my writing blog. I would love feedback, as the story progresses, about how well I'm doing at creating a flawed hero that you might hate to love.

Other People's Characters and the Voices in Your Head

2009-07-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

As those of you that read my blog regularly know by now I write collaborative serial fiction. I got to thinking, recently, that writing with other author's characters is not so different than writing solo. It's certainly not what I would consider the main difference between writing a novel or short story and what I do. One of the most common experiences I have noticed with all fiction writers is that they talk about their characters coming to 'life' and having a voice of their own. Often writers will claim that they cannot force their characters to behave in a certain way - that each character has a will of their own.

This is totally true for me whether I write the character or someone else does. The only difference between my characters and the characters of my co-writers is that I don't hear the voices in my head. I have to have conversations. Since I do all of my collaborative fiction interaction online that comes in the form of e-mails, message-boards, and instant messages so it's damn near to voices in my head or my general writing experience. Just like when I'm creating my own characters it has its ups and downs. I have to work to be fluid enough to accommodate a writer being true to their character's personality, and keep us on plot, as well as not make my character the 'star' all the time. Just like with any successful living character I can find that they can bring something new to the story that I hadn't imagined but is better than before, and since this is collaboration their character has equal billing.

It's the same whether you are writing by yourself, maybe trying to stick to a plot and a synopsis, or whether you are in discussion with another person - sometimes a better idea comes along and you need to be flexible. In the case of a novelist it might be your own inner critic but it could equally be an objective reader, an editor, or an agent. You also have to know when to stick to your guns. Sometimes characters are wrong - what they think is good for them is not good for the overall storyline. It really doesn't matter who the author of that character is at this point.

My biggest problem with characters written by someone other than myself is not them being true to themselves but when they are out of sync with how my characters are. This doesn't usually come up with people I write with regularly, but with newer collaborators. When I first started out on this path and style of writing it used to happen far more regularly particularly because my main character was an historical person Wyatt Earp. People had very set preconceived notions of Wyatt based on their previous knowledge of the character whether from fictional accounts like the movie Tombstone or from skewed historical perspectives. More than once I had to 'buffalo' a few tough skulls to get it through to them that they needed to be reacting to my version of the character, not one previously written and engraved in their head.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a disparity in the way that one character views another. I think that can be very convincingly done in collaborative writing as long as each writer remembers that they might be omniscient but their characters are not. I still write fiction set around Wyatt Earp and I encourage those that write Cowboy characters to view Wyatt as a bully and a pimp, even if Wyatt sees himself as a righteous upright citizen. There is a huge difference in perceiving an event or set of behaviors through your character's spectacles and another between having characters act out of character.

What I think I enjoy the most about working with other author's characters is that they often have backgrounds and sets of experiences that my characters have no inkling of. Much as I might be able to imagine a full pantheon of unique characters with interesting backgrounds they all still share one common denominator: me. Other authors bring in their own unique life situations and that gives them a range of choices that can often be surprising to me. Sometimes it's unpredictable, but after the taste is acquired, collaboration can be a beautiful and inspirational exercise.

The Decade of Our Youth

2009-07-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

I went grocery shopping last night after work. Exhausted though I was we were completely out of food and I'd gone to work in the morning with a stale croissant from Safeway and Starbucks (possibly the worst supermarket and worst coffee franchise ever) so I was resolute in my desire to fill a shopping cart with a basket of good food from a different food chain. Taking my time I was drawn to the magazine rack as I strolled by leaning heavily on the handle of the cart. People Magazine had put out one of its glossy special editions "Celebrate the 70's". The cover features the Bee Gees, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Bo Derek, and Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in Grease. The back cover is: Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Nixon, Mark Spitz, Star Wars, Patty Hearst, Donna Summers, David Cassidy, Burt Reynolds, and the Village People. I mention the cover images in detail because with the exception of Mark Spitz I could, without hesitation, name very single celebrity on the cover and the movie or show they were famous for or being featured in. This is particularly a feat considering Bo Derek was pretty much solely a phenomena of the 70's - known for one bouncing boob moment and a, at the time, unusual hair style. It's also amazing because if you gave me a cover of the 80's, 90's, or the 00's I would be lucky if I got 25%.

Much as I thought I hated the 70's at the time it is clear from this example that I am a child of the 70's. While I was born in the 60's and have always sort of revered that particular decade and felt the one that followed was really a pallid and sometimes laughable shadow of the previous epoch shattering decade, it is the 70's that stand out in my mind with a clarity that no other set of years will ever achieve - no matter how important personally to me. It's truly the nature of the beast that is called human. When we come of age is, for the majority of us, marked permanently in our brains in a way that no other time of our life ever really can match. We are marked forever by the intensity of our youth. We are moving from childhood to adulthood on a cresting wave of hormones and adventure. The life in front of us is full of the unknown and of promise. We are actualized hope and we soak up life like a sponge.

As artists, whether writers, painters, poets, musicians, or sculptors, we need to soak up the world around us with the same intensity all the time. For those of us mature in years enough to have gotten some distance from the decade of our awakening the line might seem quite clear from when we were almost entirely alert (though maybe not terribly self-aware) to the years that followed when, no matter how we tried, the lights became less bright, and the world started rushing past us so fast we couldn't hope to catch every image, every emotion. We all get tired out from so many hours spent washing the same dishes, going to the same supermarket, working the same job, but as artists we have to recapture the wide-eyed all-encompassing gaze of our youth. Your mind should be like a camera recording snapshots of life that you can paste into the album of your work. Age is what makes the selection of the images more discriminating.

I bought the special edition of People Magazine only to find that what I had once found to be banal and boring (oh the irony that when we are most awake we are also at our most opinionated and jaded!) to be bright, full of hope, and yes, even innocence. The 70's now seem to me to be halcyon compared to the decades that followed and I challenge anyone to disagree. I won't be watching reruns of Charlie's Angels anytime soon, but I can remember watching them the first time around far more clearly than I remember what I watched last night.

Announcing the Pan Press Project

2009-07-12T10:41:00.001-07:00

Plans are moving ahead for the re-launch of the Pan Press as a division of a small publishing house. We had our first business meeting to discussion the structure of the operation. We have a couple designers ready and primed. My idea is to start with some of the best of the best of Pan Historia for the long overdue second Pan Birthday Book.

The Pan Birthday Book was published in 2004 as an anthology of all the various writing that could be found on the collaborative community's forums. It included sections from the role-play novels as well as essays from the reference book section, poetry, and in addition some great original artwork from some of our more graphically inclined members. It was sold solely on the site to the membership of Pan. It was a great fundraiser for the site and a great snapshot of where we were then.

It's five years later and I want to take our second Birthday Book just a little further. First of all it will be available via Amazon and other online booksellers and give our authors and artists a bigger potential audience. Because of my desire to showcase our creativity beyond our 'borders' I plan to run a contest for the entries with specific guidelines. The entries should be short stories that can stand alone for the pleasure of the reader. They can be collaboratively worked, based on storylines from the established novels at Pan, but tailored for inclusion in an anthology that might be read by people that have never visited Pan Historia.

If the second Birthday Book goes as planned I will start work on published versions of several of our collaborative novels, and hopefully members of the community will join in to create a shelf of work that can be treasured forever. The potential is limitless. Imagine being able to take your favorite online novel with you to the beach next summer? Imagine running your fingers over the pages of a novel you helped to write? I know I can't wait to see my first edition of my original fantasy story The Midnight People or my zombie horror collaborative FLESH And yes, I plan ebook versions if possible.

I Love the Smell of Paper Pulp in the Morning

2009-07-01T19:58:00.001-07:00

I think about it sometimes. How would I feel if my work was published in an eBook format? I mean it's publication right? It's getting my stuff out there? So what that it's electronic? After all most of my work appears on the internet as pixels vibrating on your computer monitor, exactly as it is happening right now as you read this blog, so how would it be different? And yet it is. @mikecane is a huge advocate of eBooks and he's got me convinced that I need to invest in a reader - but still something more emotional and archaic tugs at my heartstrings when I think about myself as a published author.

I want to hold a book in my hands. I want the smell of paper, possibly the stain of ink on the pads of my finger. If I could have it I would want rag paper with watermarks and a stitched binding with a nice sturdy hardcover and fancy dust jacket. On the cover itself it would be nice if there was embossing, say in that beautiful glossy ink, or maybe in gold. Remember that scene in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) shows off his business card only to be outdone by his rival? Here was something so low-tech in a high powered high tech environment but the touch of the rag card, the subtle embossing, the texture of the raised text with the right depth of ink...

Ok, I admit it. I could get worked up over a paperbound edition of my work way more than I could over a virtual facsimile downloadable from Amazon.com. So while I would get very excited to see big fat royalties checks because my novel was selling in the thousands across the world, I would miss it if it were not also sitting on my book shelf. Just ask @fannyfae has she feels about 'real' books as opposed to eBooks.

With all this in mind I hope to relaunch Pan Press by the end of the year - creating beautiful editions, print on demand, of work by collaborative and solo writers from the Pan Historia community. Of course I will be looking into the option of eBook versions, I believe that most people, myself included, will want a copy of their own book on their bookshelf. While I appreciate that much of the sales of such volumes will be to friends and families, it's not inconceivable that full length novels and anthologies of completed works could garner wider appeal - who knows? We may one day produce a best seller. There is certainly enough talent on the site.

Why I Love What I Do

2009-06-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

Several times I have hit on the topic of the isolation of the writer. After all it's pretty much just you and your word processor (or for the Luddites amongst us: typewriters or yellow lined pads and a Number 2 pencil). Of course the cliché of the lonely writer pounding on his keyboard is a myth created around the lives of previous writers. Reading an article in the recent New Yorker issue about the teaching of Creative Writing in America breaks through that stereotype to how many writers have learned as part of a group. Self-taught writers might go to local community college workshops or join a writing group on or off line. On Sundays writers join in #writechat on Twitter. The internet has, for many writers, stripped away the isolation and allows for writers to enjoy relationships with their peers and their readers directly.

While I regret the need for writers to be their own publicist these days I don't regret the moves towards uniting writers with other like-minded people or allowing writers to bridge the gap from written word to the person that is reading that word.

Last night I was logged into my community site Pan Historia and I got a wonderful example of one of the myriad reasons that I love to be involved in a collaborative writing community. One of the members came to me to ask me about whether or not I thought that women during the 19th Century in the Old West would bathe naked or whether they would wear their undergarments. I don't believe this is a question that could be answered definitively because of the nature of the record from the Victorian Era, but the interaction was fun as we tried to determine what would make a believable historical scene. The person that instant messaged me got immediate feedback and help on what they were writing right in that moment.

When I write a fiction post for one of my collaborative role-play novels there I can get instant feedback - which I hugely enjoy. It's not always critical feedback, but that's ok. As writers we need to expand and grow, hone our skills, but more often than not we just want to know that other people are enjoying the tales we spin. By writing and publishing at an online community with like-minded people, both readers and writers of tales, I can interact with my readers and with my fellow writers in one fell swoop. I can get advice, I can find research sources (more on that in a later blog), and I just plain jump up and down to announce my latest effort.

Besides the feedback I get my other pleasure on the site is giving feedback to others. The excitement of logging onto Pan Historia to find a post by one of my writing partners in one of my favorite collaborative novels is akin to seeing the latest book by your favorite author showing up at the local bookstore. With some people it's just about the pleasure of reading their stuff, but I might enjoy a more critique based relationship with other trusted writers so that we might comment on each other's work. Another added benefit is that I might get a fresh eye to catch those typos and other errors that slipped by me even though I edit all my work before posting it online.

I know a lot of this sounds like an ad for my own site (and yes, there is an element of shameless plug here) but it's also probably true for other writing sites that you might have heard of or be involved in. I really think that the potential that resides in the internet is all about social media, interaction, and networking, and not about static information. I actually believe that all this interaction has allowed me to be a writer in a way that I don't think I could have managed before it. I am far too social an animal to write alone. Having my peers and readers right here at my fingertips, whether on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, or at Pan Historia, actually liberates and inspires me to write, and to write better.

#WriteChat on Twitter

2009-05-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm participating in #writechat - which is a rather cool Twitter phenomena. Every Sunday writers form a free-wheeling chat group in the Twitter stream that weaves in and out of other conversations. Topics are about writing: inspiration, mood, tips, techniques, publishing, etc. For those new or unfamiliar with Twitter, the chat/microblogging platform, hashtags are used to separate out topics and make them easily searchable. If you have software like the Tweetdeck on your computer you can actually create a 'group' for any topic you want to follow and it separates them out for you, regardless of whether you follow that person or not.

One of the recurring topics on #writechat is often how such conversations help inspire writing or writers. I don't really find that to be true. Actually I tend to think of such activities as a bit of procrastination from the act of writing itself. After all if you're reading a bunch of 'tweets' about writing and then jumping in yourself you can hardly be busy at work.

That said I still think it's a very valuable tool. One of the reasons I'm a big fan of collaborative writing is that I'm a social animal. Traditionally writing has tended to be a lonely business with its fair share of misanthropes in its austere and often dusty ranks. Activities like #writechat connect up different writers to each other and shake out the cobwebs. So even though it doesn't always lead me to more or better writing, I would be the last one to deny the benefits of just hanging out and getting to know other writers.

And for those that argue that they can see no point in Twitter it's definitely one of the better uses of the application. It is an excellent Petri dish for meeting and breeding new writers and just one of the examples of how Twitter can be used in a good way to increase connections between people, rather than magnify the modern malaise of alienation, as many detractors of social media claim.

Thoughts on Immortality

2009-05-27T12:32:00.001-07:00

I received a copy of a trade magazine in the mail that I used to write a regular feature for as part of my last job. My feature was also always the cover story. The new issue included the latest of these regular features, now, of course, written by my successor. To read the magazine presents a seamless tradition. There was and is no byline on this feature. To the casual observer there has been no change at all. Life goes on within and without me. Holding a copy of this magazine in my hand led to some bittersweet reflection about the footprint that we leave in life.

I am one of those vain animals that has always longed to leave my mark upon the world - some tangible proof that I was here, that I existed. Perhaps it's not just simple vanity or a purely self-centered self-interest. I have always been captured by history, and in particular art. Beginning with the evocative fossilized remains of the first human footprints to the air-brushed (yes, air-brushed - they would blow the pigment from their mouths over the back of their hands as they pressed them to the cave wall) outlines of human hands along with graceful renderings of animals in the Lascaux caves we leave our prints on the more durable materials that compose our world.

Pharaohs and Kings had their names and idealized images carved into monumental stone so that they would live eternally in the hearts and minds of those that followed, but even the humbler of our species created marks to trace their path by. If you observe closely the stones upon which ancient stone masons worked you can see the lines of their tools etched into the stone like you can see Van Gogh's brushstrokes on canvas, even the bristles from his paintbrushes, more tangible even than the signature. Greek potters began the cult of personal identification by beginning to mark their wares with a signature much like earlier Ancient Egyptian stonemason crews also left their 'team' mark on the stones.

As we advance in time artists, scientists, philosophers, and more began to leave their names more indelibly than kings and priests. Eventually even more humble people make footnotes in the history books, the images, and the remains of our various civilizations. In my research of the American West I come across hundreds of such people, moments of their lives captured in birth certificates, newspaper reports, tintypes, and inscriptions in the family bible.

Our popular culture worships celebrity and notoriety, which is sort of the dark underbelly of the shining desire to leave a tangible traceable mark upon history; a trail that can lead from one moment in time to another and allow people to make connections between the past and the present and feel the wash of history flow through them as something real and relevant. Celebrity can be a vanishing thing; here one moment and gone the moment after.

My impulse to write or make art is inextricably tied up with my desire to one of the threads of the fabric of the world. It's a desire for a tangible immortality that transcends time or fleeting fame. I was here. I existed. Perhaps it stems from doubt about the existence of an afterlife, or perhaps it's just natural hubris, but when I look around me at my achievements past and present there is really only one way that I feel I have made a unique contribution to the world, and that is my community site Pan Historia.

However how indelible can a web site be? I know that I have touched hundreds of people, and that I have made a difference in some of their lives that will be remembered all of their lives, but how about the future? I believe this question can be asked of the whole of the internet. It's very nature is ephemeral and ever changing. Who tomorrow will remember communities like Pan Historia or even MySpace or Facebook? Where are the graceful strong carved lines in stone? How can I rest assured of my immortality when in a the flip of a switch all that I have worked for is gone forever with one electronic wink? Achievements on the internet seem as brief and fragile as human life itself.

Proud as I am of my personal achievements I do feel like I am rushing headlong to the abyss, and I don't know what is on the other side. Desperately I crave the book that I can cradle in my hand, put on my shelf, and know that it will be here after I am gone. Books burn, degrade, rot, or get recycled, but surely one such tome can survive the ravages of cruel time to carry my name long after I am gone? Some future person will happen upon it on a dusty shelf in an obscure second-hand bookstore, a throwback to a gentler slower past, and there will be my name, my words, and it will be as if I still live.

Jack of All Trades

2009-05-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

"Jack of all trades, master of none."

There is something compelling about being considered good at everything, and yet... I long to be a 'master' of my trade. The problem, for me, is my own nature. Neither side of my brain seems entirely dominant, and the entire world is full of wonderful things I want to do. Having started a new job my head is now full of botanical genus and species and tables of environmental requirements and micro climates.

I'm in the middle of a re-structure of my volunteer staff system at the community interactive fiction and role-play site I own and run. The ins and outs of refocusing people to create an even livelier and more community orientated site is a highly creative and rewarding task for me. Dealing with all the different personality types is challenging but in a really good way.

I still have a ton of little programming tasks to complete.

So when I sat down about fifteen minutes ago planning to write a little fiction for one of my collaborative novels I found myself unwilling. Over and over again I have pushed the agenda that to be a writer you need to write. Fortunately for me I have other outlets for my writing. Fiction is the left brain of my writing persona. Writing my blog or composing clearly written legible staff agreements that communicate my intent successfully is the right side of my writing self.

Writing is the one thing that I do that ties all the other areas together. Since my community site is online my only method of communication is through the written word. It has forced me to hone my skills. That, in turn, has synergistically impelled my fiction writing to new heights. Talking about any of my activities via my blog whether it be gardening, writing, or painting allows me to continue to sharpen my quill day by day.

The act of writing in all its forms has become essential to the core of me. I may be jack of all other trades, but in the end I aspire to be master of one. Wait ... what does that remind me of?

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Bwahaha!

The Evolution of a Collaborative Role-Play Character

2009-05-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

I recently posted another installment of fiction from my character Red King on my fiction blog and it occurred to me to explain why the character was named the way he was named in a short introductory note, but when I reflected upon the answer it occurred to me that there was a more there than a short sentence could reveal.

My character 'Red King' is quite old. I have been writing him in various collaborative fiction pieces for almost nine years now. He has had various incarnations. The story of his development is a good example of the creativity and fluidity of collaborative fiction characters as well as the various inspirations that lend a hand.

Starting with his name: I always thought the name 'Red Adair' was rather dashing. For those of you that don't remember Red was a famous firefighter dealing with highly dangerous oil rig fires. Not only was he a real life hero but he had a great name. Naturally I couldn't just lift it from him since he was a living person at the time that I was inspired so I started looking for a last name that would fit 'Red' as well as Adair did. 'King' came to mind easily as I am a poker player. At first I resisted the poker/chess connection but it presented such great visuals to my mind it was irresistible.

At Pan Historia we use 'avatars' to visually represent our characters. The sources for these avatars can come from movies, art, advertising, or television, as well as original artwork by those that are graphically talented. I favor movie actors for the diversity of images available. It gives me the pleasure of feeling like I am casting a movie. I have always used Sean Connery for Red. When Red was first created he was a detective for a fun little collaborative game we used to write at Pan Historia called The Marlowe Detective Agency (the less details the better, I always want to revive this one).

After that collaborative novel expired he went on to appear in various other novels that required a detective or cop character with varying degrees of success. He started aging quite naturally and over time the avatars reflected an older Connery. When I had the idea for story behind The Midnight People it wasn't obvious which characters would fit for it, but I still wanted to use my regular stable. I have a tendency to keep a good character and use him over and over. Other writers at Pan often opt for creating a new distinct character for each novel or story they participate in. I like recycling because I like working on a character over the long term. By placing them in new settings I can explore other aspects of their personality that might not be revealed in one set of circumstances over another. Putting a detective into a fantasy novel was something new and challenging for me.

The premise of The Midnight People is that faeries and the stories about them are real. They exist in a dimension just outside of our own. Their world is fading and dying because of the lack of belief by humans and our negative impact on the environment as the faery kind are closed linked to nature. To solve their dilemma they create themselves as changelings in the human world, and once 'awakened' to their true selves they begin a great war against humanity. The Midnight People takes place in two intertwined storylines both before the faery invasion and after it: the waking and the dreaming. The Waking is in the past and the Dreaming (that the wakers dream about) is their future.

In the past, the Waking, my character Red King is Red King a retired detective with tragedy in his past. In the Dreaming he is King Nuada, the Red King of the Tuatha de Danann, once known as The Silver Hand.

For inspiration for his 'faery' persona I grabbed some Celtic myths. King Nuada was the first king of the Tuatha de Danann who lost his kingship when he lost his arm. He was able to regain it when a new arm was fashioned from silver for him. I presumed that much of the history from mythology was my character's back-story, but I then I added a great deal more as there were several thousand years in between until we arrive in our own century where the Waking and Dreaming storylines take place. Thus he has a new younger Queen, Aisling, when the story of The Midnight People takes place, as well as relatively young daughters in faery years. It turned out equally well, for my choice of Connery as avatar, that Connery has frequently appeared in movies with an Arthurian theme.

For the same novel I recycled my Ancient Egyptian villain Itet. Itet was an odd name for twenty-first century character in the Waking half of the story and so it became Ian Itet, but some of the Egyptian influence remained in the Dreaming when I assumed that if faeries were real they existed back in Ancient Egypt too, albeit with different names and beliefs around them. In my mind there needed to be an explanation for Itet's odd sounding name that didn't match any known faery belief system. It seems, then, that recycling characters can actually help me find solutions to creative fiction problems that bring new ideas and new concepts to the stories adding a little more originality.

For those of you experienced in collaborative role-play fiction writing I hope I have shed some light on my ideas and inspiration. For those of you new to the genre I hope you will be curious enough to explore it more.

Is It a Rose by Any Other Name?

2009-04-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

Naming a fictional character can be a tricky business. The right name can make a character greater, and the wrong name can derail all your carefully drawn details. The importance of a name on people's perception of a character or even a real person has long been understood. In literature the Bronte sisters were originally given male pseudonyms in order to render them more serious and palatable to their potential readership. The author George Sand was born Amanda Aurore Lucille Dupin. Later on Hollywood was following a similar practice. Only in their case they weren't hiding gender but often accentuating it with what were either considered lovely memorable feminine names or manly names befitting a man of action. Who doesn't now know that Cary Grant started life out as Archibald Leach? They did hide, however, ethnicity in many cases. Theda Bara was actually Theodosia Burr Goodman, a good Jewish girl from Ohio.

Historically a name can make or break whether or not someone is remembered. In Allen Barra's examination of the fame and notoriety of Wyatt Earp, Inventing Wyatt Earp, he devotes a section of the book to speculating on why it is Wyatt Earp more than his brother Virgil Earp that is remembered as the upright lawman with the Buntline Special Colt .45. He quite congenitally points out that, besides a few other details of Wyatt's fame, 'Wyatt Earp' just rolls off the tongue better than 'Virgil Earp' does. Keeping to the western theme 'Doc Holliday' is a magical moniker that gives the owner a permanent password to fame. In the town of Tombstone at the very same time lived a medical doctor who was known as Doc Goodfellow, and while the name appears to be nearly as good, and then good doctor was, in fact, a brilliant physician and innovator, it is the gunfighting tubercular dentist who's name really sings in the memory.

In fiction, as in fact, it is a great boost to memorability to have a great name. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote in his early memoir Pumping Iron of his intention to keep his funny sounding Austrian name that was hard to spell, despite Hollywood practice, because he believed that it's very unusualness would ensure that people remembered him. It seems to have worked in his case though many actors and actresses have discarded their own prosaic sounding names. After all would Cary Grant have been quite so suave and sophisticated as Archibald Leach? The name shouts his working class roots as well as having an unfortunate association with small blood-sucking invertebrates. I have come across many unfortunate names in real life such as Doreen Wonderlick and Dick Swet. You have to wonder what the parents were thinking.

Unless you want a comic character you want to avoid doing the same thing to your own 'children' of your imagination. I can't tell you how to choose a good name, but I do several things. I collect names. When I hear a good name I keep a note of it. I, of course, mix and match. It's very important to say the name aloud a few times to make sure it sounds right. You might want something melodious or you might want something guttural and punchy. It is good to consider whether or not it fits your character. Like A Boy Named Sue it could be ironic or it could be a perfect match; something that suggests that your character just couldn't be named anything else and be the same person.

When I write collaborative fiction at Pan Historia I often find the name coming first - surfacing out of the depths of my mind like a leviathan breaching. The name draws the rest of the beast out into the open sea of my imagination until I have a fully realized character. Most of the time though I think writers will have a character in mind and need to name them after. In your short story or novel there will be many supporting characters - each will need a name. I would give as much thought to the smallest bit part as to the hero or heroine. A small character with a funny or unusual name well thought out can become more vivid in the reader's mind. Who can forget Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy? Now tell me what John Voight's lead character's name was from the same movie? Can't? It's Joe Buck - a name very suitable for the character but completely upstaged by Ratso Rizzo. All of these factors should be of consideration when you're naming characters. Whatever you do, don't just open up the White Pages and randomly pick a name.

Be armed with names ahead of time. Keep a notebook with all the great names you come across including the names of family members or friends that you find evocative. You might not have occasion to use them right away, but in time they might be just the right moniker for some well-crafted character. It's ok, in a manuscript or draft, to play with different names, or versions of a name, until you get it right. It's a little more difficult in collaborative fiction because you create the character before you start writing, but be prepared to delete that which does not work.

Writers: I would love to hear your tips and techniques for picking out the right name for your characters. Feel free to comment and keep the discussion going.

When Writing Becomes a Chore

2009-04-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

When you have to write your 1000 words for the day of your novel or even a short but essential blog post and all you can think about is doing the dishes instead or doing that project in the garage that you've been putting off people are apt to call it 'writer's block'. If you overcome that block to actually sit down and do the writing you have pledged to do then that's when you become a writer. At this moment I'm really talking to those that would like to become professionals. As an owner of a site like Pan Historia I am fully a champion of those that come to write just for the pure fun of it. If you're a surfer you don't grab a surfboard and head to the beach on a day you're not in the mood. In this post I am addressing those of you that want to be professional writers, and I place myself among you.

My inspiration this morning came from my own disinclination to write a blog on writing. Over the short time I have maintained this blog I have written a number of short articles on the craft of writing, both general and for the relatively new field of collaborative self-published fiction. All the standard advice for bloggers contains the advice to keep your blog fresh with new content, but what happens when you run out of ideas? There are only so many topics right? Or is that just me avoiding writing when I know I should? It's very probably the latter. Actually it's definitely the latter.

Whenever, as a writer, you feel 'blocked' it's time to write around it, or through it. Several things can happen: 1) you can spend hours writing a crappy post/chapter (and I still say hooray for you because there is growth in failure, perhaps more so than success) and have to throw it away. 2) you find yourself picking up speed and really getting into your topic/story. 3) you can discover what is that is really blocking you in a particular piece. If the result of writing through a block is number one you still have to do it all over again your next writing period. You cannot let that hurdle cause you to stumble - not if you want to be a professional. Remember writing as a career has deadlines and schedules just like any other job. Because most writers are their own supervisors (if not their own boss) that means developing a strong writing discipline.

Even if you are as of yet unpublished it's a really smart idea to establish good working practices. If you're not being paid yet (oh, grasshopper) then it's often even more difficult to overcome the roadblocks put in your path by your own mind and by others... oh yes, others. If you work from home you know how many times friends and relatives will say "you're not doing anything, can you help?" If you have a significant other, even a supportive one, there will be lapses. "I was at work all day, and you were at home, why didn't you clean the __________?" You can fill in the blanks. Creating a strong and regular writing schedule for yourself, that you don't cheat on, means sticking to it, regardless of the views of friends and loved ones. You might have a lot of diverse responsibilities such as kids, jobs, or looking after a relative, but if you are serious about being a writer you still need to carve out the time.

I have talked on this subject before, and at length, but I don't think it can be repeated enough. I have several friends who are published writers and when a novice comes to them for advice it's always the same: you wanna write? Then write.

There: I have written.

Writing Scumbags and Bimbos

2009-04-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you just have to do it.

You have to write about characters you don't understand, you don't like, or you even hate. I'm not just talking about the vicarious thrill of writing that demonic bad guy that gets all the women and does all the stuff you wish you could do if only you weren't a nice law-abiding citizen (i.e. if you had the cajones). I mean the kind of person you just don't get or want to get. Of course, for me, in collaborative writing there really isn't any 'must' or 'should'. If I want to I can avoid it, but then I would never grow as a writer, and I would never have a full pantheon of human variation.

Maybe it's just a supporting character, or a character that walks on once, but there comes a time when you do have to try and get into the head of someone very different than yourself. It's said that ever character we write (or every portrait we paint) is really just autobiography, but I'm here to challenge you to pull the rabbit out of the hat and write a character so different that it might even make you uncomfortable to put the words to blank virtual page.

It's an old chestnut that you should write what you know, I have dealt with my feelings on that elsewhere in this blog, but you can use other people you know or have met as a template: the bully in school, the weird guy at your last job that creeped you out, or the shallow ingenue. It's all too easy, however, to get bogged down in predictability and cliche if you're not careful. If you watch TV you will all too often see the stock set of character types brought out for every new episode, but if you want to convince your readers that your character is a living breathing human being you need to delve a little deeper than stereotypes.

You can start with the exterior action, but you have to find a way to get into the head of your unpleasant or unlikeable character just as much as you do with your main protagonist. What works for me is to start imagining myself as the character, doing the actions in my mind, then maybe running some interior dialogue. Your base might be close to a stereotype (after all they exist for a reason) but as you imagine the character more fully they come alive for you and might do some surprising things. If you only view them from the outside you will find yourself just sticking with cliche - stuff you have seen before elsewhere. We are all natural mimics. But going from the inside out you might achieve some unique insight that allows you to jump out of the stereotypes into a real portrayal of an individual.

One important thing to remember: whether or not a character is the hero or the villian, or a walk on bit part, everyone is the hero in their own life. If your creepy nose-picking bike messenger does something 'evil' why are they doing it? Maybe it's spite because they feel unloved or slighted? Whatever the motivation ends up being it's something you can relate to. Deep down inside of every thoughtless shallow ingenue is a girl looking for love and validation. The base ingredients of every human being are pretty much the same. Once you get inside your unlikeable character's heads you'll probably start to sympathize with them a little, and when you do that you start to bring them to life for your readers.

Big Organics is Lying to You

2009-04-13T11:53:00.001-07:00

I read a particularly shocking piece of information the other day in my copy of Newsweek. The article was about the shameful practices of 'puppy farms'. I use quotes because the outrageous practices on these so-called farms are more akin to the atrocities of factory-farmed meat than what we would imagine by the bucolic word 'farm'. While I was appalled at the treatment of our canine companions it was not their abuse that caused me to throw down the magazine and come to my computer, open up Word, and commence to rant again. It was the fact that many abusive puppy farms are run by the very same farmers that supply Horizon with 'organic' milk.

It is the whole Horizon saga that burns my britches. The story is not only shameful in the way that this company cynically abuses the organic label but in how the public, including respected natural food stores everywhere, allow them to get away with this travesty. The sad fact is that it's just the visible cold sore on the face of corporate organics. The whole body is riddled with disease, and we turn a blind eye to it so that we can believe we are doing right, helping the environment, helping out the poor animals, by buying brands like Horizon. Here is a link to an article about the complaints The Cornucopia Institute, an organic watch dog group, brought against Horizon, owned by Dean Foods (a huge corporate giant).

Part of the problem is perception. While there are large numbers of people who can neither afford organic foods nor understand the need for organic agriculture, there are large numbers of people forking out lots of extra cash to do what they think is the right thing. Their perception of organic is actually probably decades old. They imagine a real farm with committed, idealistic people, happy cows, and green grass.

Indeed when the organic movement started it was just such idealistic people that headed to the country and started small farms to do something radically different. Agriculture and traditional farms had been swayed by the claims of chemical giants long before and America's farmlands were toxic leach fields with the cocktail of pesticides and herbicides poured out upon them. The hippy farmer in the seventies, driving his VW bus, was bucking the concept that better living came from better science. Early attempts at organic growing yielded small malformed vegetables with bug bites and high price tags due to the small scale and the high level of labor needed (ever tried hand picking Colorado potato beetles from an acre of potato plants? I have).

But that new-age peace and love granola eating hippy persevered until he or she became a good and innovative farmer offering vegetables and then meat that was every bit as beautiful as the conventionally grown offerings but was often more nutritious, better tasting, and wasn't destroying habitat for wild animals, or stripping soil of its valuable nutrients. Sure it cost a little more at the checkout but it was worth it.

Of course for organics to truly make a difference in the world they needed to be more than a niche market and therein lies the rub. Today the business of putting organic food on your table is more and more just that: business. Big business like Dean Foods, Unilever, General Mills, etc is in the business of organic and they have rapidly changed the face of organics, diluting standards so that they can make bigger profits. It would be naïve to think that Dean Foods got into the business of organic milk so that your children could drink healthier milk from happy cows. They got into it because the profits are larger. What does that mean? That means that organic doesn't cost that much more to produce anymore, but they can jack the price up because of that organic seal on the label. You're not paying some small family farms with enlightened farmers and a back to the land ideal when you grab that cartoon with the cute black and white cow on it. You're buying agribusiness for twice or three times the price of the same product next to it.

Oh sure, it has some organic standards in place. But most of the ideals and benefits of organic are lost when you have a huge mono-culture conventionally grown, just without the harshest pesticides. Many Horizon farms, like Aurora, are huge feedlots. Cows have 'access' to green pasture, on other words some times some of their sisters get to graze outside but most of the time they are in huge sheds, up to their knees in shit. And to just prove how cynical these 'farmers' are now they're raising puppies in cages of their own shit to sell to you for hundreds of dollars a pop.

If you still want to buy organic milk I suggest Organic Valley as they are an organic Farmer's Cooperative, or better yet, find a farmer. Visit the farm. See the cows in the pastures, because labels lie. Big business Organics is all smoke and mirrors.

Gullible Consumer Rant

2009-04-10T12:12:00.001-07:00

You hear a lot about how we are a consumer society, a throw away society, and how we keep buy buy buying. But what I want to know is when we became so totally undiscriminating about it? Has Homo Sapiens Americanus lost the ability to question and reason? Ok so I'm watching cable TV these days (it came with the cave - I have ants and cable TV). I'm being exposed to mainstream advertising in a way I have not had to put up with for twenty years. Most of the ads are terrible. People are paid to write and perform this shit? It's awe inspiring, really. And since the ads are so deplorable you ask yourself why do companies pay for them?

It is because, just like the "please let me send you a billion dollars, just send me your bank info" spam emails from Nigeria, they WORK. Now that is truly frightening. Ever asked yourself why you get so many telemarketing calls at dinner time? Because some people, instead of hanging up and eating their dinner and talking to their family, actually buy the crap the telemarketer is selling.

One of my current peeves as far as ads go is the one for some Oil of Olay skincare cream where they promise you if you buy this cream you can stop having dry skin and stop using so much cream. Well duh. If that actually happened Oil of Olay wouldn't be able to sell any more product. I won't even go into the pharmaceutical ads (except to say is possible DEATH and EXCESSIVE GAMBLING actually worth it to clear up your skin?).

Ok, so we get past the ads and we buy the product. Most of the stuff is utter and total crap. Remember the days you could buy a tea kettle and it would last long enough to leave to your kids? I'm not even talking high technology here, just a kettle. How difficult is it to make a kettle that holds water, looks nice, and whistles when the water boils so you don't burn your house down (or at the very least don't melt the kettle all over your stove top, been there done that). About six months ago I stupidly didn't put the whistle on my kettle… you get the idea. I have bought three kettles since then. The first one was so cheap it didn't whistle even though it was supposed to, the next was expensive but too small, and the third now reposes on my stove. It's black, it has a whistle, it's made by Kitchen Aid. It sucks. Really it does. The whistle is so faint it's more like a slow leak and there is physically no way to pour boiling water out of it without sloshing scalding water all over the place.

Will I take it back? Probably not, it's not worth the trouble, right? Right - and that's why they can get away with making schlock.

Back to the cable TV for a minute: last night I watched a movie on one of the stations. The commercial breaks were so long that I had time to read five pages of my book without missing any of the movie.

Isn't it time not only to question how much we buy, how much we spend, but stand up and demand that we get quality for what we spend? Remember cable TV isn't free. I pay for the privilege of being sold to in my own home, interminably.

A Little Home-Cooked Half-Baked Literary Advice

2009-04-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

Writing a good story is like cooking a great meal - only with less clean up afterward.

(You can tell what I'm thinking about as I roll up my sleeves to tackle a huge pile of dishes)

There are an amazingly diverse number of ingredients for today's cook: foods and spices from all over the globe, from every culture. You can throw a meal together, you can buy pre-packaged crap, or you can cook a great meal. What does it take to prepare something memorable that lingers not only on the palate of your audience but in their minds well after the meal is done? There is the traditional or classical route where you combine time-tested ingredients with tried and true methods of preparation. Often such meals draw on more than just flavors for the impression they make on the mind and stomach.

I had such a meal last night full of traditional and family variations on the Jewish Seder meal for Passover. The use of bitter herbs and matzoh recalls Passover stories to mind for the diner. The spiritual significance enhances the act of eating just as allusion to myths, religion, or classical authors can do the same in a work of fiction. The combination of traditional ingredients, each one made unique by the particular cook and family, makes each meal distinctive and yet successful. This is true with works of fiction using the classical elements of writing - those techniques extolled by agents and publishers and books on writing.

The other way to prepare a great meal is to find new combinations and flavors and like the Iron Chef amaze the palate as if with a revelation. Of course bear in mind that such rule breakers have to be highly trained and very experienced. Their talent as innovators is matched by their skill in the kitchen. I would maintain that is so with the literary innovators. It's not so easy to break all the rules and actually present something edible.

If you don't believe me let me relate a little personal experience. I once was served a meal by a woman that had not bothered to learn to cook. She decided it was easy and thus all she needed was some ingredients. She microwaved lamb wrapped around sage stuffing, served it with mashed potatoes and followed up with a dessert of her own devising. The lamb was like leather with crumbled cement filler since she'd given it no juices to cook in. The mashed potatoes included raw lumps of potato as she'd cut the tubers to different sizes and some had not cooked all the way through while others had dissolved in the water. The worst was the dessert, however. It was mandarin wedges served with chopped dry roasted peanuts on top.

Writing like cooking is a skill. Learn your ingredients, learn your cooking times, and practice what is time honored and known to work, and then you can start experimenting with breaking the rules.

Quick Comcast Update:

2009-04-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

My local technician arrived within the time alloted and was great. I don't know yet if his fix solved the problem but he did find that I was receiving too strong of a signal. He gave me his personal number so I could follow up with him and asked me to keep a log if the problem reoccurred so he would have sufficient data to troubleshoot. Really nice guy.

I'm also impressed that Comcast monitors the social media. I received a good comment on my blogger post and via Twitter so that I could contact someone to help me further. I will only do that if I need to as I'm satisfied with my local technician at this point.

Comcast Rant

2009-04-06T09:16:00.001-07:00

It started so well.

I had never used a cable company for my internet services before so I was very pleasantly surprised when Comcast immediately sent around a tech with a cable modem for my cave in the woods (more about that in another blog). It's quite a hike and in other parts of the country I doubt I would even have internet service in such a situation. My new modem was installed in minutes. The setup with my static IP and my Linksys Router didn't go quite as smoothly but it wasn't Comcast's fault and I got a charming woman on the line for tech support that though not able to help me was incredibly friendly and professional. When I did figure out the problem and called her back to have my IP reset (yes, I was part of the problem) I got the same woman and she quickly had me up and running.

For those of you new to my blog let me tell you that I pay for business high speed internet and a static IP because I host my own server for my web site www.panhistoria.com and while I'm not Facebook or even one millionth of the size of Facebook I have a loyal and vocal customer base. Without the funds to run a mirror server if my internet is down my web site is down. I have to maintain a Yahoo group just to make sure that my membership can be informed if there is a power outage or any other disruption of service. When my site is down I'm just like that cat on the hot tin roof or even me barefoot on black tarmac when the mercury hits the nineties and I left my shoes in the car. It's not a pretty sight.

Three days ago I started having problems. People were having times when the site was running extra slow to the point of timing out. At first I was unaware as I was navigating the site fine, and my Twitter and ICQ messaging software was functioning just fine. Suddenly people started dropping off the server. Disaster! Then I found I was unable to browse the internet. I get on the horn to Comcast pronto. Only I have a little problem - due to my move and all the organizational issues of setting up in a new location I'm out of minutes - my call is going to cost me 45 cents a minute. Not a serious problem because of my priorities, which is to get my site back up, but it does mean I don't want my time wasted.

I could rant about automated answering systems at big companies, but why bother? You have all been there. Choose the wrong option and you're caught in a cycle of spiraling despair as you get routed to the wrong place again and again. Finally I get somebody in tech support. I assume, since I had to punch in my zip code time in and time again, that they are in my area. That was my second mistake. My first mistake was still having a Vermont cell phone number. They wanted to route me to Vermont.

"No, I moved. I live in California but I kept my cell phone."

"So you're not at the computer that is having the problem?"

"Yes, I am at the computer that is having the problem. I have a cell phone."

"You're in Vermont?"

"No, I'm in California; I have a Vermont cell phone number."

"Can I please have the phone number that is associated with the account?"

"This is the phone number associated with the account. I don't have another number, just this one. This is my only phone, I don't have another."

"So you're not at the computer associated with the account. Can you get to the computer?"

Ok, you get the gist of this conversation.

Now just before I finally got this genius on the line the automated message had informed me that there was a higher than normal volume of calls due to interruptions of service in my area. This was satisfying to me and I assumed that was all I needed to know but I just wanted this guy to confirm it - only he was in Denver and knew nothing about the status of service in California and apparently had no way of knowing.

Oh, and he couldn't help me because he was home tech support not business tech but could he just take some notes? I was begging him to transfer me to the right line because it was costing me 45 cents a minute and he just kept scribbling and asking me the same questions over and over. Finally he was ready to transfer me to the correct tech support line, but first he said:

"Would you like our digital voice services?"

Bear in mind he'd already had me on the line for 15 minutes at this point. He would have been in danger of his life if he'd been in physical proximity.

"No, and I don't want to hear about them as it's costing me 45 cents a minute to talk to you. Please transfer me to tech support."

"But if you had our digital voice services you could…"

I think I was rude at this point in the conversation.

The next guy insisted there wasn't any problem in my area and it had to be my modem and scheduled me for a Sunday after 5pm appointment.

So Sunday I sat around and waited at the appointed hour. My connection had been good all day, but the tech guy didn't turn up. At 6:15pm just when I was wondering if I should call and find out where he was my connection dropped again.

I called.

"Oh yes, we recalled him because the outage is actually in your area and not you at all. It went down at 6:15pm. It can take them up to 4 hours to fix the problem. I'm sorry he didn't call you to let you know he wasn't coming."

Wow - it was them after all! At last something concrete!

At 7pm I got a call.

"This is Comcast; we're sorry that we're running so behind but is it ok if our technician comes this late?"

"Uh, sure, but I thought he had been recalled?"

"I know nothing about that sir."

At 7:30pm another call:

"We're running two hours behind can we reschedule for tomorrow morning?"

"But the last call said he was on his way?"

"They recalled him. It was the wrong technician."

Now I'm waiting again.

I'll let you know how that goes.

Auto Rant

2009-04-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

What is it with Americans and their giant cars? What possible purpose is there in the huge boxes that are the current fad? I'm not merely talking about hideous cars such as the Honda Element, the Scion, or the really horrendous Nissan Cube, but the pseudo-jeeps, hummers, and all terrain vehicles like the SUV and the honking great huge pickup or the family van.

There are a few people that are exempt from my derision at owning these vehicles in these times of rising oil costs (environmental and out of pocket) and these exemptions are: contractors, military personnel (and only if your vehicle is standard military issue), farmers, and moms with giant broods. The rest of you are just wasting gas and wasting space on the road. There is no sane or rational use for a Hummer on a regular road (though I'm thankful to be able to use Arnie's in my post-apocalyptic zombie novel over on Pan Historia) when there aren't hordes of ravening zombies you need to drive over in a hurry.

Perhaps I'm particularly bugged about it at the moment because I have moved onto a tiny winding road into the hills where parking is a premium and even passing another car going the other way involves complicated maneuvers and often a handbrake start. Half the people on this road are hogging the space with vehicles so wide that they have to dangle half off a cliff to fit. By law you need a 12 foot clearance for emergency vehicles to get by, but with a gigantic extra-wide gas-guzzling GMC pickup there barely room for my Honda Accord to get by and I still get briar burn.

With the guys I used to assume it was to make up for some imagined (or real) inadequacy but these days it's just as likely to be a woman driving a tank around, hogging the road, and paying at least twice at the pump just for the privilege of polluting the planet. I managed to get around San Francisco a couple years ago in the car poll lane with great ease because no one else was using it. These enormous cars are mainly empty. Few of the trucks are carrying load and the SUVs have just one passenger. The European Smart Car, which you would think was a no-brainer with its fuel economy and the ability to park in half a parking space or even nose to the curb, is a tough sell to Americans.

I'm not saying anything new here. I'm venting - but having moved to the Hippy and Eco-Friendly Capital of the Universe I'm having a hard time dealing with the fact that my aging hippy musician neighbor who talks to his trees and won't allow anything but organic in his yard drives a massive SUV, and no, it's not a hybrid. Does he really carry that many instruments around for when he busks?

Keeping Notes... or not

2009-03-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

In my friend Jerry's blog he talks about taking a notebook with him to write down inspiration. Humorously he mentions taking a pen next time. It made me think about some of my own efforts to record inspiration so I don't lose it. It has, for me, often been a losing battle, and yet I still find much of my inspirations coming out in my writing as if by magic. I'm pretty sure that much is lost however.

I tend to lose notebooks and pens. I have, on numerous occasions, pledged to carry one with me. I have nearly a whole box full of journals, dream journals, and notebooks where only the first few pages have been written on. All of these were started with the intention of keeping notes for inspiration and practicing my writing. They all ended up in the slush pile of Wyatt's lost and lonely things. My next plan was equally short-lived: I bought one of those little tape recorders so I could speak into it. Two problems came out of that one: I lost it, and I never transcribed the notes I did take.

I have been told over and over again to keep lists and take notes. I lose my lists or forget to take them with me. I have had some better success with notes for projects I'm working on, but eventually those notes, too, get lost and every time I start a new project it's like starting from scratch. The only thing that saves me is the computer and not a laptop either. I'm talking about my big old honking pc. I can't lose it because I can't move it. Which reminds me I did see a guy bring his pc, monitor, and the whole kit and kaboodle to an internet café a few weeks back. That's determination for you. Anyway back to me. When it comes to my computer I always know where it is. I can keep track of the notes I keep for myself in their little folders (search if I lose them), and suddenly a whole new world of organization was opened to me.

But what happens when I'm driving in my car or walking through the woods and an idea strikes me? Generally, if it's any good, I try thinking about it a lot, repeating the words in my mind, and then I hope like hell it's still floating around in my skull when I get back from my trip so I can jump on the computer and write it. More often than not I forget before I get home, or I have something else to do before I log onto the computer. Actually even the act of firing my programs can lose it for me as I start to read email, read tweets, or begin a discussion with someone online at my community site Pan Historia.

So what do you do to keep track of your inspirations and ideas? What works for you and what have you tried that didn't work?

The Internet is Killing Your Brain

2009-03-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Casually my son informed me that as a species we were breeding out the redhead and soon they would be no more. I assume he meant because of the melting pot that is the portion of humanity that the Westerner is privileged to be part of rather than the rest of the world that still has its pretty sharp ethnic and cultural divides. Sweeping statements are pretty popular with people as a whole, as are the latest pet theories on what is wrong with us, or what is bad for us.

Cell phones are going to give us all cancer and the internet is killing our social skills. I have read a number of dire predictions, mostly targeting Facebook (because it has gone completely main stream and you can even find your Granny on it now), that we will lose our ability to socialize face to face. The rise of socially inept geeks is all due to the internet. Yes. That's you reading this. Right now your brain is rotting and your social skills are ebbing away with each click of your mouse.

I'm here to say: Balderdash.

Yet again it's a bunch of eggheads blaming the symptoms for the malady. The majority of us are using the internet as a useful tool. Even those of us, like me, that find themselves online for a great deal of time every day, aren't necessarily losing track of our real lives. We still have spouses, kids, birthday parties, and game nights, trips to the beach, hikes, and a myriad of other activities. It's a relief to get up from the computer and head out to the garden and get my hands dirty in soil.

The problem is serious and it's out there, however, but it's not the internet's fault. That's another case of saying guns kill people rather than people kill people. Kids and social loners spending all their time online and losing track of reality is a problem with their home life, and society at large. It's easier and easier for people to feel isolated and removed from other people in our mega-malls and sprawling urban or suburban areas where we emphasize commercialism as the true god of our society. The fact that our TV sucks and the shows are often crude, crass, and mindless banal is a symptom too - not the source. Our media reflects us, not the other way around.

The problems in our society are so deep and pervasive that I can't address them in a short blog, nor do I have the expertise to suggest the answers. All I can say is that when someone suggests a social networking site is bad for you ask yourself the question: do I spend too much time online at the expense of friends and family? If the answer is yes don't blame your computer. The answer does not lie in your Ethernet cable. There are other issues at stake.

A Fire in the Belly

2009-03-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

I have often been accused of being 'too hard on myself'. I'm the first to admit that I like to set the bar high. I even set it so higher than it is possible to achieve - when it comes to art and fiction. In writing this blog my advice has often verged on aggressiveness in regard to my stance on what writers should do. In other words I tell them to write. No matter what just write. A few people have taken me to task for this. It's true - not everyone has room in their life to take as much time out for writing as I do now, or enough time to get into the studio and paint, or sculpt, or whatever is they do, but that is because they have set other things as higher priorities.

When I was a single parent of a kid under the age of his majority I had to set a couple things as higher priorities than my writing or art. I had to make sure he had a roof over his head, food on the table, a good school nearby, and a pair of the right shoes to fit in with his peers. This often meant some sacrifices. Back when he was quite small I decided to become a painter. At times I was able to indulge myself, but when times got harder I had to cut back to the point that I didn't have a studio to paint in. For me to do oil paintings meant that if I didn't have a studio I didn't tend to paint. I find landlords tend to keep your security deposit when you have ruined the walls and floor with paint and solvents (I'm a messy kind of painter). Oil paints and canvases are expensive. Their acquisition interfered with buying food and paying rent. Working freelance for a time meant that I found myself with less time as well. This was okay - because my priority had to be the young life I was responsible for. That didn't take away my urge to create though. I found a way to do both.

I found myself on the computer a lot. This is when I began to write more earnestly. When I first started it was definitely only an outlet for my frustrated artist-self. Gradually, however, I found it was something that I could manage as a single parent and sole support of my difficult offspring. Collaborative writing, in particular, was suited because I could write in small chunks when time afforded, which was between work deadlines or when unmanageable demon-spawn offspring was finally restive (passed out or zoned in to his then obsession with Wrestlemania).

As I began to learn the craft of writing, I was beating myself up a lot over not painting. How could I call myself an artist if I didn't do the one thing that qualified me as an artist, i.e. make art? I still wrestle with this problem since I have found that my inspiration for painting is either on or it is off. I don't dabble. As a writer I have shown far more consistency. It fits in with my life style better. I can find room for it in my day. I can get up an hour earlier or stay up an hour later. It's true I haven't written the novel that I planned so many years ago, but I have maintained a pretty decent writing schedule for years now. Now the child is grown and I can change my priorities back to the creative life so it's even easier than before to justify the time, but that doesn't mean other things don't get in the way. I just have to remember to move them back out of my way again.

Setting the bar high is my way of keeping a fire in my belly and a goad at my back. I don't beat myself up for not achieving my goals; I beat myself up for not trying to achieve my goals. So again I say to you: you want to be a writer? Find the time to write. Even if you have to take a notepad to the crapper and lock the door, write. It's just that simple.

But don't forget to live - yesterday I spent the day at the beach combing for interesting stones - because you have to write about what you know.

Warming Up

2009-03-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

If you follow my blog regularly you know that I recently moved. Life has radically altered, and yet… it must, by the nature of what I do, remain the same. I still need to get up in the morning, log onto my computer and begin my day. Besides any paycheck job I might eventually get I brought my work with me when I moved. I still need to work on my community site Pan Historia, I still need to work for any clients I get online, and I still need to be a writer. The challenge is fitting in the old into the new without losing why I came west in the first place.

There have been a lot of disruptions to my writing and Pan schedule. It's been harder for me to find the time to do my fiction writing, or to write for my blog. New family obligations have popped up - and then there is the draw of the outside. Back east so much of the year was spent in cold, sleet, snow, ice, and wind that I had little temptation to unseat myself from my writing and take up other activities. Even in the summer I was rarely moved because I dislike humidity and New England summers are often very humid. I can't even image what it's like down south so don't start with me.

The upshot is that it is very easy to get up from my computer and to take myself outside (which I wanted in my life, a big part of why I moved in the first place), and very hard to get back into my routine which I need to keep as well. It's my writing that has suffered the most. While I have not completely succumbed to writing inertia I have only completed three posts for my collaborative fiction stories at Pan since moving into my new place, thus my stories are languishing. It's not easy for my fellow writers to work around me. My blog has also suffered. Not being in the full flow of writing and thinking about writing means that I have fewer ideas for my blog. I hate to just write for the hell of it. Yet, here I am.

The purpose of this blog post (for me) functions just the same as warming up before an athletic event. Even though the sun is shining on my garden right now, even though the guest bed needs folding up and putting away, even though there are still boxes to unpack and sort and decide what goes back into storage, I am going to write. Even if I have to work later into the night to meet my deadline for my client, Bardic Web, I am going to write.

The lesson in all this for any writer is that no matter what you need to make time in your life to write. It doesn't matter if you love the outdoors, or if you are on a job search, or if you are a single parent (I know of what I speak) you have to make that time and keep to it. It may not be as much time as ideal, but make it regular and make it priority.

There. Now I have warmed up my fingers a little bit. It's time to go slip into the skin of a man who has endured natural disaster and a nuclear holocaust and is now living under a bitter sky.

Wyatt's Fiction

2009-03-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's come to my attention that I got a lot less traffic over on Wordpress than I do here at Blogger. Understanding as I do that sometimes people are reluctant to click links or just don't see them I thought I would write this post to introduce you to my fiction blog over at WP. It's a collection of posts from my collaborative fiction writing at Pan Historia. I am reposting writing from three stories at the moment: The Midnight People, Turnskin, and Tombstone. The Midnight People is an original concept in the fantasy genre that derives inspiration from Celtic folklore and Tolkien that I consider a modern fairy tale. It often has horror elements and is written with an adult audience in mind. Turnskin is another original concept in the horror genre, this time, and features werewolves. Again I hope to appeal to an adult audience. I kept some pretty strict rules about lycanthropy and preferred to use a blend of both Western and American Indian folklore for inspiration. The last genre I'm reposting is the western genre with my posts from Tombstone. In this version of Tombstone we are moving much slower towards the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. It is a broad mix of fictional and historical elements with an emphasis on being true to the period, though not necessarily dates. In all of these role play collaborative fiction stories I'm just including my own writing (copyright reasons of course) but I do write from various points of view by using different characters to tell the tales.

So I hope I can encourage some of you to visit my fiction blog. Please feel free to leave me comments and even critiques. I don't mind. Some of this fiction is several years old but in revisiting it I have already seen that there is plenty of room for improvement. My goal is to become a better writer whether or not it's in a traditional format like writing a novel or in the area of collaborative fiction.

Don't Lose It in the Details

2009-03-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Reading some sound advice in another blog about getting the details right caused me to think about those things in your writing that can rip your reader right out of the reality you're trying to create for them.

I remember, as a kid and inelegant teen, how I would often bring my author parent a sample of my latest creation. I was eager for praise and generally disappointed in my expectations. My parents were never like that, regardless of the occasion. I had to earn my praise. Every time I turned in a short story or a poem it was subject to a scathing critique which always began with comments about the grammar and structure.

"But the idea… do you like the idea?"

After a while I stopped bringing my little mangled mouse offerings of juvenile writing to leave on the parental doorstep. My ego had been wounded too many times. For a number of years I didn't even write - why bother?

Now I'm here to tell you that all those little comments that drive you crazy when you ask for critiques are necessary. Bad grammar and structure will thwart your readers. Typos will exasperate them. Getting details wrong will wrench them from your world. If a sentence doesn't agree with itself or you forget to tell the reader who is talking you will lose their focus. Do your research. Nothing irritates readers and fans so much as a faulty detail.

You think I kid? I would have LOVED the movie 3:10 to Yuma only the movie makers insulted my intelligence and the intelligence of everyone that had ever gone to Bisbee, Arizona. In the movie they went for the old spaghetti western trope of the windswept and isolated dusty town in the middle of a flat bleak nowhere whereas Bisbee is built in a wooded gulch with crazy steep streets and houses clinging to the mountainside. All they had to do is name the town something else and I would have been happy. Because they called it Bisbee I was annoyed and then angry. It broke the spell. The movie became a mere movie.

A lot of things can destroy the illusion you are seeking to create when you write so pay attention to the little things, to make sure your sentence makes sense, to those stupid typos that creep in everywhere (he grabbed her by the waste is disgusting and will break the mood), to the details that reveal you know what you are talking about or you simply don't. When you are the author, you are the authority, so don't lose it in the details.

Life Without A Brain: Character Quirks

2009-03-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

Life Without A Brain: Character Quirks

More thoughts on writing believable and interesting characters from a Pan Historia writer.

Eating Cheeze Whiz While You Do Your Nails and Other Character Quirks

2009-03-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

Real people have quirks. I recently heard a story about a girl that was a nail artist with inch long fake nails and sprayed on designs that was also totally into the American flag and Cheeze Wiz. They say you can't make this stuff up - but you can. Writing believable characters might require you to start grabbing all these crazy anecdotes you've heard, filing them away, to bring out later and mix and match in your writing. One of my latest collectibles is about a woman that picked the lock when her guest was taking a shower because she thought someone left the water running.

I recently visited the house of someone that decorated their house with a combination of naive art and antiques, while feeding all of the neighborhood stray cats. They spent a fortune on cat food for animals they didn't own and couldn't pet. Or the wonderfully casual comment from the rich guy who has a huge house with multiple bedrooms, swimming pool, and a crew of migrant labor to clean his grounds and when you describe your 650 square feet of living space says "oh that's plenty big enough for two, what more do you need?"

If you want to be a writer you have to start to develop a strong streak of curiosity, a certain amount of objectivity (i.e. be amused by the comment by the rich guy and file it for later instead of popping him in the face), and a good memory - or a good filing system. Remember to avoid clichés. One person might like to bathe every day and moisturize their skin twice a day while another person might forego bathing for days yet they both are obsessed about beauty and aging. Pick the set of character traits that serves your character best, and preferably the one that is less common if it works. The important thing to remember, regardless of the well-worn adage that "fact is more unbelievable than fiction" is that if you can think of it it's probably true somewhere so just write it with conviction and you'll bring your readers with you.

Speaking of aging: older characters tend not to be as popular with collaborative fiction writers. Very often writers go for the young and physically perfect. It's good to remember that young people simply don't have as much life experience or cumulative time to pick up wonderful idiosyncrasies as older characters (though my example of the nail artist was a young woman). Older characters can provide a level of depth to your writing that might be lacking from your typical young and nubile. Adding just ten years to a character's age can result in greater opportunities for peeling back the layers of your character's personality to keep the reader engaged.

A character doesn't have to be likeable but they do have to be fascinating to keep a reader's interest.

Book Breeding

2009-03-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

A weird thing has happened to me. In the course of my new move, for reasons outside of my control, all of my books are now in a storage unit, packed at the back behind furniture and other assorted heavy objects. I will need, at some point, to break into this unit, with its similarity to King Tutankhamen's tomb before it got cleared out, in order to access my copious western research as well as my all important computer techie library.

For the time being, though, I'm stuck in this weird bookless limbo that is both strangely compelling and disturbingly empty. It may cause me to succumb to the allure of the Kindle 2 or the Sony Reader that much sooner (though part of me just wants to hold out for my iPhone when my current phone contract ends). Meanwhile I have four books. I have The Audacity of Hope by our current President, two new westerns I picked up at Borders (new to me, not new to publishing - both are classics), and a western mystery, part of the Holmes on the Range series.

It's kind of like one of those dreams where you arrive at school and you realize you forgot to get dressed that morning and now you're in front of all your classmates completely naked. I'm not sure why being bookless feels that way, but it does. It's both terrifying and liberating at the same time. I never intend to stop reading. I love books. I enjoy literature. I adore historical research through diverse periods. I want my art books so I can peruse the best the world has to offer right from the comfort of my own home.

But, good Galactic Bill and the Stainless Steel Rat, books are heavy sons of bitches. They weigh a ton, fill up many cartons, and then line your walls, demanding acres of bookcases (which also have to be carried). Perhaps if I was a naturally sedentary beast and never moved an inch but settled in one place, rooted like a tree (and not a tumbleweed), it wouldn't be an issue, but I don't see my tumbling throttling down just yet. The current apartment is a dream come true, but not an everlasting dream of contentment and retirement.

My bet is that, no matter how hard I try or even if I do get some form of e-book reader, that by the time I leave this place, whether or not I have transported books from storage to here, I will still be carting a couple hundred pounds of books out of here. Four books is quite a good start for any book breeding colony. They're like rabbits you know.

A Little Calisthenics for the Writer

2009-03-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Coming off any kind of enforced writing hiatus can be a challenge. In my case it was a move across country with all the accompanying handicaps and hazards. The end result is always the same. It's difficult to get started again. Just like when you have 'writer's block' (I put that in comas because I hesitate to believe it's anything more than mental laziness or a bout of low self-esteem) the only way back into the creativity is to plow straight back in - get on that horse and ride.

I have the added challenge that I do most of my writing in collaboration with others. When you write collaborative fiction one of two things can happen, in my experience. Either everyone wrote up a storm while you were gone and you have some serious catch up to play, or no one wrote and you have to get a whole bunch of people past their own little version of writer's block. I have the latter issue this time.

First step I'm writing this blog post. I consider my blogging calisthenics for the writer. I can do it fairly quickly and easily (there are no other writers to consider on my blog), and I can get out a few thoughts, organize them, and then get the sense of creative accomplishment when I hit the post button that will help motivate me towards my other projects. My next step will probably be to repost some of my old fiction on my other blog. While that might seem like a time waster in terms of writing it's actually not. By choosing, rereading, reviewing and editing, I find myself shifting back into the fiction writing mindset that I need. Often I am either happy with what I posted and thus inspired, or I think that my old stuff is crap and so I am motivated to do better. Sometimes I rediscover ideas that never got followed through and that will also goad me into action.

The one thing I will have to try and avoid is getting distracted. It's very easy when you've not been writing for a while to decide you just really have to do the laundry first, or fix the garage door, or whatever little thing is niggling at you that will keep you from your first and primary task (if you are a writer). Obviously daily life must be lived - chores must be done, but you know what I'm talking about. It's the chores that suddenly leap over into the time designated for writing until finally you are just too busy to write. Don't let that happen. The laundry can wait for an hour. Fix that writing time in stone, and make it sacred.

Notice how I didn't complete my set of steps I'm going to take to get into writing again? I got distracted not with the laundry but writing about the laundry. Case in point: anyway the next step in my process, because I am a collaborative writer, is to get out my bullwhip and motivate my fellow writers. That, in of itself, can be a distraction but I need my co-writers to get back on the horse and write as well. I'll probably jump all over my planning boards with ideas for new storylines or suggestions on how we can move forward. And then, finally, I will write something. Anything. But it needs to be done and it needs to happen as fast as possible because every day you prolong the hiatus, or the block, is a day wasted, and it only gets harder with more time.

Romance Returns at Pan Historia

2009-02-14T07:23:00.000-08:00

Romance returns to collaborative fiction site Pan Historia…

Everyone loves love so why did it ever leave? It's really a problem of gender expectations and preconceptions I think. Romance has the reputation of being a woman's thing, and yet, hey there blokes, you all know you love romance too. I have long suspected men of being the more romantic of the species, but I digress.

My original intention in removing Romance as a genre option was to tighten up the genres we have and make sure that each and every genre was active. It seemed, in the site design, that we were spreading ourselves too thin. We once had Comedy, Role Play, and World as genre options too. Last year I did a marketing survey of the members of Pan Historia and what I discovered was that many writers at Pan, male and female, loved Romance whether they were writing there or not. I also learned that many people come to Pan just to read. So it seems that a genre's popularity shouldn't be purely based on number of posts per day or number of novels populating the genre.

Having discovered that people often just like to read what is on offer at Pan has changed my thinking about the site design in a lot of ways. I used to be very fervent about cleaning up novels that had gone quiet, but now I think of them more like the books at the library that don't get checked quite as often. It doesn't mean it's time for them to go in the sale bin quite yet. I'm looking at ways to highlight the reading at Pan in different ways than it's been done so far. Right now it's all about what's the latest, hottest, and the newest, which is pretty much how it's done all over the net. My earlier blog posts sink under the weight of my newer ones until they're never read again. I'd like to find some way of bucking that system at Pan so that a novel that was written two years ago can still be a popular read now, and not just data languishing in the database.

With these thoughts in mind a genre like Romance doesn't need to meet posting quotas or worry about novels coming and going. Popularity shouldn't solely be judged on statistics. A good love story is timeless. It can be revisited again and again.

Writer versus Author

2009-02-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

I have a concern that there is too much control being asserted over the writer as artist these days. It is true that, contrary to the image of the solo writer tapping away at his typewriter with an overdose of five o'clock shadow, writers need the assistance of an editorial eye, but do they need to be told what is art and what is not? I'm not referring to the fixing of grammar and spelling - or even some structural advice when it is sore needed, but it seems that more and more, and I'm not merely talking about online resources such as my very own blog, that the final say and the final cut comes from agents and then editors.

Of course the nascent and inexperienced writer seeks guidance from the more experienced, and that is correct. There is always a need for advice and mentoring in the arts, any art. What I'm seeing, however, is a molding of writers to one limited model, and a muscular leveraging of outside viewpoints on what is, ultimately, a personal art form. Let me give you an example in terms of painting.

As a painter I went to art school to learn my craft. I was guided by my instructors, other artists who were earning a living by teaching, and then finally at the end of my journey I was let loose in the studio. It was the goal of both me and my teachers that once I was finished with instruction that I should be alone in my studio, master of my media, and the artist. I wanted the critics and teachers out of my studio once I was ready to fledge. Imagine that the art agent and the critic entered my studio at this point and grabbed a paint brush correcting perceived errors on my canvas. Perhaps they even took scissors to the piece to reduce its dimension because smaller art was more easily accessible to the viewer than a large piece.

It would be shocking and outrageous and the finished piece would no longer be mine. Increasingly it seems that the writer is losing control of their art form. Novels are written to have cookie cutters applied to them by experts that seem to have more control than the writer, more authority. If you want to be a good writer and be published than submit your art to another's scrutiny and final judgment is the message I read all the time. It's the same whether it's over the internet or the real life experience of my friends who are published writers.

Of course if you follow my thoughts in this you might well find yourself unpublished and unread. Many a painter has works of art languishing in spare rooms and dusty studios because no one wants to buy the art. Most art shows do not result in sales or a living for the artist. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I know that I would rather be a good artist than one that had compromised my art for what is currently considered saleable. When I think of the authors that are truly great very few of them conform to the well-worn maxims of today. Yesterday's authors were authoritative and their art had authority.

My proposal is that there comes a time when the writer is no longer an apprentice, but an author. As an author they should be the final arbitrator of what is excellent in their own work; even if they submit to a helpful critical eye the final decision is theirs. That day cannot be measured by some sort of marker like being published by a major publishing house because that privilege becomes an unlikely goal, but if a writer truly wishes to make a mark on the world then at some point they must, finally, become the author of their own creation.

Burning Down the House

2009-02-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

Ever since I can remember I have cared about wild animals and the environment. I didn't get it from politics or 'bleeding heart' liberals. It was just fundamental to my nature. I don't even remember politics discussed in the home or any form of activism being embraced. My home influences were always about art and literature more than politics and government. The themes that inspired my childish mind are still with me in much of my writing today. I was reminded of this when wandering through my list of blogs I follow this morning and I was presented with this video from YouTube at Historical Boys:

Even as a child I hated the killing of wild animals for no reason. I imagined a world where humans got in trouble from their wanton destructive ways and animals were relieved from the bondage, abuse, and killing. I would construct vast apocalyptic end of the world scenarios where only a few caring humans were allowed to survive but animals could finally live in the world in peace. Other imaginative games involved me taking on the persona of a wild animal and living in their world, far away from any human beings. I belonged to the WWF when I was in 6th grade.

Looking at the stories that I write today at the collaborative fiction site Pan Historia I realize that I haven't changed all that much. It seems I still dream of the end of the world in my new collaborative novel The Bitter Sky or in my slightly more tongue in check zombie fiction FLESH. While The Bitter Sky is grim and dark, set in a very long nuclear winter, FLESH retains some of my childhood ire at humanity: none of the animals are affected by the zombie virus. My other story Turnskin, my werewolf horror collaboration, has a very strong environmental theme and streak that has been embraced by the other writers. I have been posting some of that story on my fiction blog if you are interested. In Turnskin there are good wolves and bad wolves, but all of them are united in their belief that humanity is destroying wildlife and its habitats. For a second there I thought I was done with my post-apocalyptic and environmental themes but then I remembered my other collaborative fiction, the modern fairy tale The Midnight People. In this concept I created a world in the future where the Fae have battled humanity to submission to take over because of our abuses of the environment.

It's interesting how my childhood games have continued into adulthood via the media of the internet and online community. Thankfully I have an outlet for my creative visions, as well as a way to learn about, help out, and connect with other people when it comes to trying to make some real life changes for the better. To me I really feel that the protection of our environment and the other beings that share this planet with us should be paramount in our minds right now and should be outside of politics. It shouldn't matter what you think about taxes, gun control, abortion, or how much government we have. Don't burn down the house we all live in. It's just simple common sense and survival. Otherwise dark visions like The Bitter Sky could well be a reality that would lose all the fun when translated into reality.

Burning up about the wolf slaughter? Head over here to help.

Passing Away

2009-02-05T05:46:00.000-08:00

siteThe death of a long time member of my online community this week has, naturally enough, sparked some thoughts about the nature of intimacy on the internet. Over the ten plus (and that's a big plus, I just find it difficult to remember that far back) years I have been involved with community writing sites like the one I developed and those that preceded it there have been a few people that have passed away. In the case of some of our most stalwart friends we have been fortunate if the family remembers us, or if one of their online friends has bridged the gap between virtual and actual friendship. Other times people just disappear. With no word from the ether that is the great unknown of ceased communication there is no way to ever find out what happened to that person. They just vanish.

Of course people come and go all the time - that is the nature of what is essentially a hobby to most. For those of us that really love our communities and do not move away to a new neighborhood it would be more comforting to really understand and know where people go. I think many people, even people who frequent social media, forget the strange nature of the internet. Whether I know you as Wyatt at Pan Historia or by my Twitter moniker Panhistoria often all you have to go by is a screen name, a bit of personal history shared, and then poof one day I could be gone. All I have to do is not login again, wander off, embrace some other interest, and it's like I never existed.

It's a weird feeling because very often it means that online relationships do not have closure or even memorials, despite the copious feathery trails of chatter and correspondence, posts and images. Many people solve the issue by getting real and swapping names and phone numbers and taking the play off the stage and into the audience so to speak. But even for those of us that are very selective about making that transition, or who value the wonderful transformation from everyday to magical, we still value our online friendships just as strongly. It's important to know what happened to our friends, why they vanished from our circle, from our daily routine.

With that thought in mind I thank the family of Meritites/Mirjam Nebet for remembering her online family and letting us know so that we, like any community, can mourn her passing.

Do You Want to Be a Great Writer?

2009-01-31T07:52:00.000-08:00

I have sufficient hubris, as an author with no published tomes, to present writing tips here on my blog. My credentials are extensive but rather eclectic and unconventional. Like many that presume to teach I'm often better at theory than the execution thereof, but at heart I feel that I have had the best teachers that literature has to offer.

While it is essential to work at good writing, to learn the craft, to hone your skills, there are times when you just have to ignore all those writing tips out there in self-help books and blogs like my own. My tips are reflective of my taste in literature and what I consider to be good writing. Other people are writing from their own view, whether it is 'accepted wisdom' or personal taste. Sometimes people lose objectivity and can't tell the difference between the two. Some people even forget the soaring flights of breathtaking prose that attracted them to writing in the first place.

If you want to write just like everybody else then follow all the tips. Trim the fat. Grab up your thesaurus. Make sure you get rid of all those weak and floppy adverbs and all those ellipses before someone sees them and marks you as inferior. Tips are useful. Do read and consider them, but when it comes learning how to be a writer there is really only resource that I can recommend with certainty and that is from the writers you adore. Read what you like, read more of it, branch out and read some classics, and then read them all over again; this time analyzing the language and how it is used. Some writers will seem to adhere to all those writing tips you have read, but many more of them (greats) will be breaking rules all over the place.

Of course it takes experience to know when to break the rules so the other best writing tip I can offer you is: write.

My Love of Language

2009-01-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

My optometrist is an erudite man with diverse interests. Two years ago, the previous time I had reason to call on his services, we discussed in detail the history of the American West, Wyatt Earp, and the mythos of the gunfighter. He was delighted with my knowledge on the topics. Today we covered the movie Defiance, World War II, the Holocaust, philosophy, and I had the occasion to thrill him with the use of the words 'penultimate' and 'ultimate' in reference to the last and second to last of the letters on the eye chart. He simply enjoyed the use of language.

It caused me to pause and think. I have had many reactions to my casual usage of what most people refer to as 'long' words. The majority infer that I'm an egghead. Others are amused and tease me, but I've always assumed that was a way of covering up discomfort. It seems to me that most people are intimidated by the use of words outside their vocabulary because they are afraid that the user of such words will assume them to be stupid by their lack of familiarity. As point of fact I do not consider the use of an extensive vocabulary to be an indicator of much, except maybe a love of words. I happen to love words. When I read I absorb them, which has often led to seriously amusing mangling of pronunciation thus making me feel foolish or lacking in education when speaking to those who are easily able to correct me.

Why do I absorb words and then have the audacity to use them? Our educational system excludes the study of vocabulary once you hit college except as a form of jargon for the different fields. I confess to autodidactism in the learning of language. Use unusual words, however, and in conversation you can be dismissed as a swat, bore, or worse stuck up. I actually don't sit down to read up on new words to use, and in reality my vocabulary is no where near the level of a scholars, but it is the love of language that causes my brain to be attracted to good words like sunflowers follow the sun. They don't have to be long. Formative years in England added a fillip of Britishisms that often bear explaining to my Yank compatriots. I'm equally as likely to resurrect an archaic word as grab hold of a new one and make them fadge together. You can google 'fadge' to get my drift.

While I have been writing this piece I have been eyeballing my Twitter feed. There was a quote retweeted (ah, jargon how I love thee) that opined that Twitter helped people to write better because the 140 character limit forced people to be more concise and clear. Ah, if only that were true - it's equally likely to teach them to abbreviate. And who the heck says that brevity is the true yardstick of good writing? Soon a novel need only be a haiku. A love of words is not to be despised. The diversity of the English language, its veritable smorgasbord of linguistic delights, is what makes it such an incredibly powerful tool for art, wit, and communication.

Clarity is almost always to be sought, but that doesn't mean complexity is to be eschewed in the same breath. Nor is complexity and vocabulary to be mistaken for erudition. I have cast aside, as a waste of time, tomes of merciless labyrinths of grammar and word that overwhelm meaning with the sheer serpentine convolutions of an author hiding their dearth of original thought behind a wall of cornstalks.

In conclusion, I believe that good writing and good vocabulary go hand in hand. Embrace the diversity of your language, and don't be afraid to grab the dictionary or to try out that cool new word you read the other day. It's just like experimenting with spices when you're expanding your culinary repertoire, and I'll continue to delight my optometrist at every opportunity.

Grammar and Spelling: Pernicious Beasts

2009-01-27T06:39:00.001-08:00

Grammar is one of the most difficult of concepts for the average writer to master. Even the most fluent of authors, one whose words soar like Condors over the Andes, may fervently need the aid of one, two, three editors. This is because, unlike mathematics, grammar is an art and not a science. While many grammarians and pedants will scrawl many words of rebuke to all the miscreants who abuse grammar daily the fact is that even grammarians have much they cannot agree on.

Consequently the world has been blessed with the spell check and the grammar check in software programs such as Microsoft Word. I'm the first to tell you that I'm a big fan. I'm one of those writers, of which there are many, who has come slow to understanding the uses of grammar. I have read several books on the topic and taken many college courses that have dealt with it on some level or other, but like the concept of God, much of it I have to take on faith and go with my gut, or rely on my Word program.

Lo, and Behold, I am here to tell you not to rely on your Word program. It is no substitute for true knowledge or the sharp red slash of an editor's pen. I have a tendency towards being far too slap dash. I'm always in a hurry. I gulp down food with the same avidity with which I dash out my lines of deathless prose. Many is the time I have happily submitted my words to the light of electronic publication, hit the post button, satisfied by a clean bill of health from my grammar and spell check only to read again later and have my self-satisfied smile torn from my smug lips.

The most common error of a writer relying on the tools built into their writing software program is reliance on the spell check. Spell check cannot read your mind or know your intentions so it's quite common for it not to catch homonyms. There are a number of classes of homonyms from words that sound the same but are spelled differently to ones that are spelled the same and have different definitions, to ones that are similar in sound but not identical and so forth. Many homonyms can render a sentence not only nonsense but often create a humorous effect that you simply don't need such as substituting the word 'waste' for 'waist' in an erotic passage.

Coming back around to grammar the computer is even less of an authority. It can only be an aid, not a substitute for knowledge. Many is the times that my Word document will suggest that I change something when, in fact, I was correct but a little more complex than the software is programmed for. Unless I know grammar rules I cannot choose the right option: change or ignore. At other times the software generated suggestion is not the correct one, but my grammar is still wrong. What do I do? And then it is simply true that as a creative writer I might want to break the rules. For it to be art and not accident I need to know the rule first - and then disregard it as an artistic choice.

In conclusion I'm here to urge you that if you love words and desire to be a writer of any competence that you take to heart the study of words, their meanings and corrects spelling, and in addition attempt to tackle the mysterious art of grammar. You will never be perfect, not even the most erudite and astute among us is, but these are the tools of your craft. If you were a painter you would not eschew the easel, brush, and palette without at least first having excellent knowledge in their use. And then once you have competently crafted your piece submit it to the scrutiny of others because, unlike in painting, spell errors, typos, and bad grammar are pernicious beasts that like to skulk and hide to trip up self-satisfied writers.

My Love/Hate Affair with Research

2009-01-23T06:31:00.000-08:00

I came up against the great Research problem yesterday. It doesn't matter if I'm writing fantasy, historical fiction, westerns, or like now science fiction, eventually I always come up against that wall where I know something but not enough, or even that I know nothing at all. That means taking the time, and I rarely have enough of that nowadays, to do a little digging. But even if I groan with frustration at my lack of complete and instant knowledge of everything and anything, in the end I always cave in and do the leg work.

In order to create believable fictional worlds (that are not entirely self-indulgent) it is essential to get the facts right - or at least plausible.

I was having a discussion with a friend just the other day about terrible movies (I was loathing Sweeny Todd because of the Stephen Sodenhiem score, amongst other things) and he started mocking The Lady in the Water. One of his major beefs with the movie was the scene where Paul Giametti spends ten minutes underwater swimming around without needing to breathe. Now this scene really really pisses him off. He was quite vocal, maybe even for ten minutes about how ludicrous this is. Now you need to remember or be aware (if you haven't seen the movie) that the premise of The Lady in the Water is fantasy. She's some otherworld creature that's been stranded and there are monsters trying to get her.

None of this bothers my friend - and it shouldn't. What bothers him is the character of an ordinary human guy swimming around and around not needing to breathe with nary a sound byte of explanation. It broke the believability and took him out of the magic. Ok, potential magic, because we are talking about The Lady in the Water here which has far more flaws than a few logical discrepancies. It broke the rhythm and ripped dear viewer out of the illusion the movie makers were trying to create. By comparison it all became silly. That is what you really don't want to do when you writing fiction.

They say "write what you know" and that's a bit misunderstood at times. Obviously you can't just write what you know experientially in this life or we wouldn't have Jules Verne or J.R.R. Tolkien. Verne never went to the moon and Tolkien probably never met an elf, but in either case these writers went to great lengths to create something believable for their readers. Verne may seem dated now but to his Victorian readers his science seemed magical but perhaps plausible in a world that was rapidly changing faster than it ever had before, and with that he was able to draw them along into imagining the fantasy, strongly enough that people still enjoy reading Verne today. Tolkien went even further. It wasn't just the magic of his words and the consistency of his vision, but the amount of erudition he added to it, from his creation of new languages as a master of linguistics to his knowledge of the folklore of Europe. In the background of his own stories were copious amounts of back-story crafted from his imagination wedded to existing traditions.

Yesterday, for my latest vision, a science fiction story set not to far in the future that asks what happens if we were plunged into a nuclear winter for twenty or so years, had me spending two hours reading about the Coldstream Guards so that I could create a believable character who is a Lt. Colonel in the Coldstream in this grim London landscape that I and my fellow collaborative writers are working on. If I just fudged it, using my limited knowledge of the British military, at least one of my fellow writers (British of course!) would find my stories to be unbelievable. Lord knows how many potential readers I would put off and alienate. I might never use more than ten percent of what I have read about the Coldstream Guards, but the important thing is that I know what my character would or would not do, what rank is reasonable, whether it was likely that Coldstream Guards would have survived as a regiment, etc.

There is no single story I can think of that I have ever written where I haven't had to dip into at least a smidgeon of research. Even for contemporary stories I need to research law, forensics, the cultures of other ethnic groups from my own, or how to site a good well. My most casual story will include me look up medical facts, how a hospital runs, or even how long it takes for a person to die of thirst.

It is all in the details.

Collaborative Fiction: Playing Nice with Others

2009-01-19T06:51:00.000-08:00

In collaborative fiction writing, as in life, not everyone is going to be the right 'mix' for your project. That doesn't mean that they're not a good writer or that they are a bad person. It just means that their personal style or their vision of the story is not working with the rest of the team. There are some simple things to do to try to get everyone working on the same page.

First of all: listen. It's essential to give everyone a chance to express their ideas and creative vision. If you're one of the project leaders (we call them Members of the Board at Pan) and this was your idea for a story you might be tempted to come down hard and insist that it's your way or the highway, but if you do you're also likely to be writing your story all alone. Sometimes even the most difficult writer will come up with ideas that improve on the original concept. If you're not open and you don't listen it will never happen. The case, much of the time, is that people are way off base. Say you want to write a hard core survivalist story and they start coming up with some more fantastic ideas like mega-warriors with super-powers that are hyped up versions of Mad Max on steroids. Hear what they have to say, see if there are any parts of it you can use, and then be firm but supportive. The fact is that what got them excited about your story might not be exactly what you had in mind.

The goal is to bring them closer to the concept without stifling their creativity. So in a realistic survivalist story a band of Mad Max types might fit, but tempered down to earth - would that work? Consider the idea before you just out and out dismiss it. With some working it might fit in - or not. But be sure you have listened first and not just playacted at listening. Keep a respectful attitude and a gentle demeanor in your written communications. In writing people can't see your facial expressions or hand gestures. Your respect needs to be OBVIOUS from your word choices and sentence structure. Unfortunate word choices can alienate. Always reread your communications before hitting the send button and NEVER respond in the heat of the moment if things are getting a little hot under the collar.

It's the case in all collaborations where someone with a very differing view of the story is going to decide to walk. That's ok; it happens. When it does you still have to be respectful, and it's ok to let them go. As long as you've done your job of listening, trying to work with their ideas, etc., as a team leader you hopefully avoided any negative conflict and commentary that can spoil the fun of a good collaborative role play writing project. This story might not be the right one for them but, who knows, another time you might find it fun to work together. Try not to burn bridges!

All the above advice can apply to the writer that is having trouble fitting into a story that initially interested them. You might need to be flexible if the story is not exactly what you imagined when you applied to join in, but remember it's ok if not every story is a good fit for you. Just approach every new story as a potential team member. It's not just the vision that you see in your head of the character. It's the sum of the parts, not just the individual parts.

The Bitter Sky

2009-01-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update on my nuclear winter science fiction collaborative fiction project at Pan Historia: I got the novel underway with title and right now the first new writers are joining up and putting in their ideas for the overall background scenario. I named the piece “The Bitter Sky” and it’s inspired by a line of a Shakespeare sonnet that reads “thou bitter sky” about winter. The graphics are still pretty spare but I stopped being quite as interested in window dressing as I once was and prefer to have the bones of a collaborative story well structured and strong before going for the rest. In this case I consider the bones to be the believable future scenario where two types of survivors clash over limited resources in a world devoid of sun, poisoned by ash and radiation.

I set the story in the United Kingdom because a) the initial cause of the natural disaster was the eruption of a mega volcano in the United States that would have destroyed most of the northern American continent and b) I used to live there and c) it would probably have avoided a nuclear strike in the crazy fallout from the volcano’s eruption. We have a very good writer from England on the new team and he’s been able to give us all invaluable suggestions that make the setting authentic to British culture and how it might have devolved in twenty years of nuclear winter. My memories of Britain are fading, sad to say, so I definitely need the tips and reminders.

So far the writers the story is attracting are some of the very best Pan Historia has to offer, particularly in the scifi genre, and I’m very excited to be working with writers both familiar to me (from 666 West End Avenue, FLESH, and Turnskin) as well as writers I have not had the challenge and honor of working with before. I’m equally excited to be working on an original science fiction story once more. The last time I wrote scifi at Pan Historia was for the much mourned novel Forever is Too Long (I think I got that write) which was created by a wonderful published author who occasionally frequents Pan Historia. It was set on a huge seed ship that had been drifting in space too long and some of the crew are awoken from stasis and cultures are developing within this massive labyrinth. It was very challenging for me, in particular, because I took a character that came out of the head of another writer, a scientist, and I had to make him both convincing and mine.

I might consider posting my fiction from The Bitter Sky on my writing blog once we get going, but for now it’s still in the planning stages.

Nuclear Winter Science Fiction Novel Idea

2009-01-15T07:20:00.000-08:00

Driving to New York City on Saturday afternoon I was inspired to start a new scifi story at my community site Pan Historia. The afternoon had grown prematurely dark from clouds that seemed heavy with snow. The forecast had been vague, anything from 1-12 inches depending on where you were, but the sky looked ready to deliver Armageddon. The afternoon light, as we approached the early evening of winter, became sullen and bruised with menace. I have a tendency towards motion sickness when I travel by car, if I’m not the driver, and so I looked out the window at the winter landscape of Connecticut and then New York State.

I imagined that this light would be similar to the light caused by a layer of ash in the sky – nuclear winter – and from there my mind started running over a future scenario where it the Earth suffered from such a nuclear winter for at least a whole generation. Could people survive? How did they survive? I could easily imagine that a small population could manage by using generators and other power sources to grow food in bunkers or underground facilities with artificial lights, but I also tried to imagine if there could be survivors on the surface. Would they live by scavenging, cannibalism, or what?

There was a section of woods on the journey where the trees had largely died and they were strewn around like dominoes tumbled. This is what nuclear winter would do to the woods over time as the trees died and then rotted. The idea caught hold so thoroughly that I spent a couple hours thinking about it. I imagined the Morlock type scavengers gathering wood to burn, as well as the survivors from the bunkers. There would be conflicts. When I returned home to Vermont and was able to again login into Pan Historia I started doing a little research on the science. My technological survivors would, of course, also have to be scavengers as well as act defensively against the dangers of the twilight world I envisioned. Most of the theories of nuclear winter did not suggest the length of time I imagined, at least not for nuclear bomb fallout, so I looked into mega volcanoes, and I could postulate a situation where that might keep up for some time, particularly if there were also nuclear detonations and perhaps fires burning for years, such as would happen at dumps and oil fields, adding to the dust filled atmosphere.

Those survivors that lived outside would be like sick animals, our Morlock types, scrounging for scraps of food. They would suffer from UV poisoning from what light did come because of the damage to the ozone, and of course water would be contaminated. They would be short-lived and reduced to brutal lives. The clash between the two groups could provide a great deal of drama for long-term collaborative story-telling which is my specialty and the specialty of the writers at Pan Historia.

For those of you new to the concept of Pan Historia but interested in collaborative writing, getting in at the beginning of one of our role play collaborative novels is a great way to get started. More experienced members of the community would be more than happy to mentor you, and you wouldn’t have to feel like you were intruding on an established storyline. I’ll be creating my new ‘novel’ just as soon as I have fixed on a good title for it. There has been good interest in the concept so I hope to see a broad range of writers bringing their ideas to the world we create.

Winged Mercury, and Dude, Where's My Internet?

2009-01-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

The moral of the story is two-fold: when you head off for the weekend don't forget to tell your mother that you're going; always leave the neighbors with a spare key.

Saturday I was bundled into a car, literally dragged away from the computer when my fingers were smoking with literary inspiration, so that I could make it to New York City in time for a family gathering of some importance. We had planned to go later in the day but there was a blizzard on its way - maybe we could miss it? We didn't but fortunately it wasn't a real blizzard. Unfortunately neither Connecticut nor New York felt like plowing our direction of the highway. There was definitely some careful yet white-knuckled driving for the entire trip but we arrived safe and sound at Grandpa's in the Bronx.

Dinner was extremely pleasant though - leftover chicken soup from last year's Passover (from the freezer) - and roast chicken cut up into scary chunks with a nicely dressed salad and the good company of family members reunited. My family has recently begun to merge with my lady's family and I'm being indoctrinated into a large and warm circle of wonderfully literate and engaging people. We were each shown to our accommodating beds for the night and I sank into mine with great relief after a harrowing drive. I had, briefly, attempted to access the internet with my laptop but there was no open wifi, and no dialup. However a couple days away from the computer is a welcome change I find.

I am also always sound asleep at 4:00 a.m. It's never a time you'll find me restless or in a book. I like my eight hours and I generally sleep like a bear in winter. The cell phone had to ring quite a few times to wake me and even when it did I found myself too late to catch the call. It was my mother in California. This is alarming. Obviously something is wrong - perhaps with my younger sister or my little nephews. I called right back. My mother is so hysterical she doesn't even realize it's me at first. She'd tried to phone me at home but my phone was dead - she'd tried Pan but it was down. Apparently she'd received word, all the way in California, that there was a fire that COULD be my house all the way in Vermont and once she found both my phone and web site offline she was sure I was burning to a crisp.

Amazing how news travels. She was ranting at me with various things she thought I should do to save the cats when she realized I was safe, but my mind was foggy and I was waking everyone else up as I got louder and louder in my confusion. Then it was reminded to me that I could simply phone my local police station and found out the truth of the matter before further panic ensued and we also woke up the octogenarians in the apartment. It turned out that my home and cats were safe, but a neighboring apartment building was, indeed, ablaze. Once I had calmed down my mother relief changed to chagrin because that is when it occurred to me that my community site was hosted on a server in my living room and when the fire department turned off the electricity to the block they shut me down.

The emergency power backup that I have hooked up to the server is designed to shut down the server safely if the power goes off and stays off for a long time. It's also designed not to go back on unless a human being tells it too - in case the situations of power fluctuations, etc., which means that I was now 200 miles away from the button to turn it back on. There was no way I could just turn around and drive back before attending the family function.

In the morning I expected to find dozens of direct messages from my Twitter network to my cell phone, but oddly nary a one. I tried DMing out, but it kept refusing to send them. I feared that either I was technologically a dunce, or that Twitter was down too. I think the real answer is that I am a dunce at times, but the fact remains that if I had a Blackberry or iPhone I would have been connected and able to let people at Pan Historia know what was going on. Finally I had to phone a real person to get the message out.

I managed to put my troubles out of my mind most of Sunday, instead enjoying being cut off from technology and enjoying spending the day in New York City's Museum of Natural History - I hadn't been there in years - and then later to a fancy Italian restaurant with the huge group of family gathered together. The day, however, was not completely unfraught. Frantic calls were made that upset my partner. It seemed that her car was not starting back in Vermont. There was much discussion of the ramifications of this as the car was needed for work on Tuesday as well as our impending journey across the U.S. Visions of exorbitant mechanics fees were the topic of much of the conversation.

It became obvious that we would just have to cut the New York City trip short so we shipped out early this morning, Monday, and headed back to the wilds of Vermont. Or rather it seemed like we had been in the wilds of Outer Mongolia with our lack of ability to get internet, Google the news about the fire, tweet, fix the car, or turn on the server, and now at last we were returning to civilization.

The car started. The server rebooted with the touch of a button. The coffee was made, the dinner was cooked and once again all is well with the world. Now let me Google a bit more about that iPhone contraption…

Oh yeah, and did I mention that Mercury went into retrograde this weekend?

Published Wyatt

2009-01-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

The world of publishing is changing day by day. Even though we have yet to reach the point when it will be completely passé and an act of sheer hubris to have a book in print on paper from trees there are still some incredible developments in how we think about being writers. While the majority of people are still buying their books at Amazon (though this now includes e-books) and Barnes and Nobles many writers are experimenting with self-publishing, small houses, and e-books. I'm fairly new to thinking about the world of publishing in any but the conventional sense. The author in my family went the route of all traditional writers - getting the agent, getting the book deal with the traditional publishers, book rights, movie deals, and so forth. That is until the misfortunes of the publishing world started to catch up with them and their last book remained under the bed for years. At some point they seized the opportunity to publish and promote on their own, which then led to a brand new agent and a brand new book deal, movie rights, and the whole circus show started up again. Once again this author, who just wants to write, not being a publisher and marketer, is caught up in the turgid state of the current publishing climate with all the hurdles and handicaps that entails. Of course the check is bigger when it comes, if it comes.

I have always been humble in their face of their success and chilled by their obstacles. I had decided to take up the option of self-publishing in the event I ever finish my book. In the mean time, for the last ten years or more, I have been writing my collaborative fiction with a group of fun writers online at my community site. You know the links if you have been reading this blog at all. My thought this morning was to realize that in my own fashion I have very much been a published author for the last ten years - even if my writing has not appeared in any kind of traditional format. Right now I'm reposting (with small edits) a number of my stories at my fiction blog, publishing them in a new location, as it were, and hoping for a wider audience, but the fact is that I have been publishing them online for years, and have been fortunate to have a small but very loyal following. I don't have royalty checks but I have always considered my writing to be part of what I do to make my collaborative fiction and role play community an attractive place for writers and readers to participate in.

It's a fun and invigorating realization - removing some of my self-esteem issues. That I prefer, for the larger part, to write collaboratively should not be something to hide or denigrate. It's a powerful new form of literary expression and I'm very proud to be part of the early history of such storytelling. Vive le Internet!

If Music Be the Food of Love, Eat Local

2009-01-08T15:28:00.001-08:00

I have a soft spot for love songs, which is a damn good thing considering it's the single most popular theme in popular music. All my love affairs have songs or entire albums dedicated to them - which is probably one of the reasons that I have such a great deal of fondness for the movie High Fidelity with the incomparable John Cusack - who I probably relate to more than any modern actor because of certain similarities in age and aesthetics. In High Fidelity Cusack, after breaking up with his girlfriend, reviews his failed love affairs in terms of the music of his life. He makes a list of his top five breakups.

In a way I could put together my own play list of failed relationships. I'm not even going to share some of the teen angst ones - but I can tell you that I can still feel a catch in my throat and catch the long ago scent of a lost sweetheart from some golden oldies. I am particularly amused, in retrospect, by my choice of You're the One by Paul Simon for a passionate affair I had some time back - primarily because I ignored the lyrics (you're the one, you broke my heart) and I applied it optimistically to the living breathing relationship because she was, you know, the ONE (you are the air inside my chest). I have found the same strange flip flop of emotion from hope to loss in many of my choices - almost as if I anticipated the end at the start.

What surprises me now is that no song or album has spoken to me in my current love. This time love came sneaking in on softly shod feet and wrapped warm arms around me and refuses to let me go. It's not the love of a young idealistic fool anymore and instead there are many songs, many moods, but not one song needs to be sung. I don't find myself moodily attached to a particular refrain because it's expressing my longing to be more complete with my loved one, it's also a good thing she doesn't get jealous when I slip an old lover on the stereo and reminisce some old pain I had.

Snow

2009-01-08T06:28:00.001-08:00

All you hear these days is how much people hate it: the inconvenience, the mess, the roads, the delays. It's all about how it hinders people from the routine of their daily lives or how dangerous the conditions are to get to work, to get to wherever the hell it is you are in such a rush to get to. Or maybe they do love it - because they can strap their skis or snowboards to their roof racks and drive to the trails, jostle with all the other people doing the same thing.

I plan to soon leave the snow behind. I will only miss it on mornings like this. This morning the snow falls softly, just gentle flakes that have rimed every dark branch with white so that the etched line of the branch itself seems like a shadow of itself. I will miss it for the one thing it does that seems to be so underappreciated now. It makes you stop and listen to the sound of a world muted to a primordial state. It makes you stop and look, really look at your world transformed. Snow is the haiku of nature.

All the chaos, rampant life and growth, outrageous flats or towering crags, have all be reduced to lines and shapes in monochrome and tones of grey. When you gaze across the snowy landscape you realize how many shades of white there are. The air you breathe seems clean for the first time since you were born into this dirty world. There is no distance because the world disappears into the white ice rich sky. Edges are soft and indistinct, and you are quite irrelevant.

It is only the fight against the snow that churns it to mud. Take a snow day instead.

Taking a Cliché and Turning It into a Bowerbird

2009-01-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

I started reposting a lot of my collaborative fiction writing over at my new fiction blog Wyatt's Writing (noticed yet that I love alliteration?). It's an interesting process for me because it's about the only way I can get myself to reread my work. I can also see how much I have developed. Naturally I often want to start editing and reworking, but because collaborative fiction stories can be constructed for years and years and new posts are always needed I resist the urge to do more than correct obvious typos. I don't need another distraction from new writing.

What I have reposted so far is only a couple years old at the most - this reminds me I should go back and date them for good OCD archival reasons - and yet I am finding myself mildly chagrinned. To me they seem a little pedestrian and full of clichés or obvious combinations of images. Cliché has always been one of my bugbears when it comes to writing, whether I'm writing for a magazine or whether I'm writing in my collaborative fiction community. Basically my mind collects clichés like a bowerbird collects twigs for the bower. Keeping with this simile if a bowerbird hopes to attract and keep his lady love he needs to make sure that his bower really stands out. On the basic structure of twigs he'll add bright and shiny objects. He is a connoisseur of the unusual in his little domain. I want to be a Great Bowerbird.

One of my tricks lately is when the cliché leaps into my mind a red flag goes up and I stop and consider. For instance in my bower bird simile becomes a useful analogy in the previous paragraph. My first thought had been 'magpie' because, of course, that's the first thought we all have when we think of acquisitiveness. In this instance coming up with an alternative bird created a more startling and original simile which then fed into an analogy which I could use to illuminate my point in a playful way. It might not be the most awe-inspiring example, but it's a good start in thinking about clichés. When I'm writing fiction I might diverge even farther from the original thought, traveling along interesting little pathways to find something a little less trite or common. At the same time it is important not to get too clever and yank your reader right out of the story because of the surprise, shock, or complexity of an image. It's also tempting to pepper your work liberally with similes and metaphors to spice it up, but just like putting too much oregano in marinara sauce less is often more.

Seven Basic Plots and Other Story Tropes

2009-01-02T11:52:00.001-08:00

Christopher Booker asserts in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories that there are (can you guess where I'm going with this yet?) only seven basic plots:

Overcoming the monster
Rags to riches
A journey - the quest
A journey - the voyage and return
Comedies
Tragedies
Rebirth

His rather large tome asserts that all stories can be boiled down to these seven and that they all contain Jungian archetypes. I'm curious how he settled on the number seven.
I'm not sure that I believe that all the stories that ever have been written can be reduced to just seven, but I agree that there are limited plots, and many variations on just a few themes. I'm sure Booker could have picked almost any number and then made a sound argument for it. Looking at his list you can see that the bones of his plots are very spare indeed, which means quite a lot of meat can be added to that bone to make each one look very different from one another, much as one human looks very different from any other while sharing a basic biological blueprint.

Even allowing for the great variation and apparent complexity of most stories we will get quite a short list of plot devices, and then within these plot devices there will always be a set of stock character types as well as a set of recognized tropes. I could, like Booker, spend thirty-for years analyzing all the books and movies I have enjoyed (or not as the case may be) and dissect these for you, but I think everyone understands story tropes. For example the hero and heroine get into a misunderstanding and so much comedy and action ensues: in Mr. & Mrs. Smith from 2005 they are assassins that get sent on the same hit and each thinks the other is out to get them and so they battle each other with guns, knives, and incendiary devices, but they end up back together again in the end, in love stronger than ever. In the 1941 version, one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, a loving couple with decidedly oddball rules of engagement gets into a Battle Royale of loyalties and deceptions until they make up again at the end, more in love than they started. It's the same basic storyline (though the 2005 version is not technically a remake of the 1941 version), but they vary in important details from what the couples do for a living, how they relate to each other, even the genre of the movies themselves.

It's the details that make each one a unique experience, but at the same time our recurring themes are important in our storytelling experience. As a writer you are going to be confronted with telling the same story over and over again (there are only seven or eight or whatever after all) but it's how you tell it - if you avoid the pitfalls of cliché and over-used tropes. Looking at another form of storytelling let's consider briefly the Legend of Zelda franchise for the Nintendo gaming systems. In each episode there are at least some of the same features: the boy hero Link, the princess Zelda, the villain Ganondorf, the Master Sword, the Kingdom of Hyrule, the Triforce, etc. While each adventure seems to be an open-ended exploration of the setting with various dungeons, monsters to defeat, treasures, and side games to divert, the basic storyline is pushed through with a series of recognizable tropes such as can be found in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These same recurring themes, or markers, can be found in such successful stories such as the Star Wars movies, or the ancient myths, or tales like King Arthur. These archetypes disguised can be discerned on analysis in many contemporary tales, movie or on the page.

On examination of the best loved stories of all time it is the combination of familiarity and archetypes that help to make a story engaging and universal so that many people can relate. It's the details, the flesh you put on the bone that makes your story unique and fresh. You can never hope to avoid tropes - they are as essential to storytelling as having a beginning, middle, and end (even if you like to mess up the order you tell them in) - but you can make sure that your tropes aren't clichés.

The Electronic Book Revolution: A Personal View

2008-12-31T07:11:00.000-08:00

This year my offspring gave me a Nintendo DS for Christmas with the little mini Zelda adventure on it. I admit I'm having fun. I also like the size of the contraption and the little stylus to control the action by touching the screen. I'm enjoying it so much that last night I had an amazing thought: if I like this little gizmo so much how would it be to read a book on one? Or something similar as I have no idea what a Kindle or Sony Reader looks like or any other electronic book reader.

Now if you knew me and mine you would know incredibly revolutionary this thought is. I may have been one of the first people on the planet to own a computer, but I only succumbed to either a laptop or a cell phone this last couple of years, and only this morning did I become the proud owner of an iPod for the first time in my life. It was an anniversary gift.

I love books. I love the weight, the texture, the feel, the scent of them. I love the way that the black ink print looks on the creamy or yellowing pages. I love paper. I love the musty used bookstore smell of old paperbacks. I love the artwork on the cover and I love to handle books and I love the look of a wall full of bookshelves full of books.

Replacing all that with a little handheld electronic device? Can I enjoy this? Will it satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities and my sensual pleasure in reading? More importantly how tangible is it? If I were to publish my novel would I feel like I have a book out if it was just puffs of ethereal pixels that I can't even see?

When I consider all these things, my Luddite self battling with my geek self, I remember that the vast majority of my authorial outpourings have always been published electronically and these days I do the majority of my reading online. Where is the difference? Furthermore how many trees could I save and how much easier to move without fifty cartons of books to hump around? Could I just reserve for my book collection art books and reference? The old beautifully bound book of poetry? Perhaps paper books become works of art in of themselves and the rest can fit on my electronic reader.

Of course the wheels of change can move quickly, or it might be a while before I take the plunge, but the thought is there and the journey begun.

A Cause Without a Rebel

2008-12-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

I don't find the myth of the starving artist to be alluring. I don't relish the idea of the writer in the garret, scotch bottle at his right, cigarette smoldering in the overflowing ashtray. I'm not drawn to self-destructive he-men like Jackson Pollock splattering his work over giant floor-sized canvases while his wife sacrifices her art and happiness on the altar of his genius. I don't need to die young, wrapped bone and sinew in the chassis of my Porsche 550.

There are days when I actually consider that might be why I'm not a better artist.

Then I remember this guy, a printmaker of some skill, which was a friend of the family. My mother and her husband were both amazing artists in their fields but both suffered from anxiety disorder as well as other emotional scarring and trauma. This printmaker actually said "I wish I could have panic attacks so I could be a great artist". Obviously he lacked the imagination required to move from 'competent' to 'great'.

When I have my moments of angst over my lack of success as an artist I like to think about Raphael. He was hugely successful, very prolific, handsome, and amiable. What more could you ask for? Oh wait, he died at 37 years old. Ok, but that wasn't too bad right? After all it was the Renaissance, more dangerous times and all.

Wait, hold on… I'm rummaging through my hard drive for more examples of happy productive artists (preferably ones that were slow starters because they were too busy just sort of wandering around aimlessly until their mid-thirties)…

Hmm… Rembrandt won't do because though he started out happy and successful (in love with his wife Saskia) he ended up with tragedy and poverty.

Maybe painters aren't the best source for the happy successful artists sans angst? I should turn to literature.

Ah! Henry Miller.

I'm sure he had his moments of angst but he lived a very long life, was successful during his lifetime, and screwed tons and tons of beautiful interesting broads. There you go. Oh and on the subject of long lives I did think of a painter: Picasso! So he was an asshole to all around him. I'm sure he was totally happy.

I, too, can be a happy successful artist. Of course if I'm not an asshole will that hinder me? Perhaps I should cultivate being more of a jerk?

Or maybe, just maybe, I should stop navel gazing and write something besides another blog post?

Oh, ok, I just have to share this will all three of you that read this: so last night I'm trying to go to sleep but the lovely lady has on her show because she's not quite sleepy yet and I'm trying to ignore it, but you know I can't ignore dialogue. I start to listen whether I want to or not. I'm not sure what show she was watching but I wish I had a photographic memory so I could share with you all (that's you five over there) the deathless bad writing. I never ever heard anything so hackneyed in my life. Without seeing the actors or other distracting visual content I could just focus on the clichés. It was horrendous. I had to turn on my light and start reading Elmore Leonard before I made an ass of myself and told her just how crappy the show was. Would that have qualified me as an asshole artist? Did my restraint forever doom me to be just another wannabe?

Little Boy with a Wooden Sword

2008-12-28T07:03:00.000-08:00

According to Helen Ginger's blog this morning "History Sells" and that's good news for history genre writers everywhere. I'm not really addressing the financial possibility of that because for me writing is an art form, and as such if I put a dollar figure on the activity from the start I'm doomed to write dross. But knowing that other people out there love to immerse themselves in the past as much as I do is a consolation and a motivation - but why do they?

My last blog post addressed how people from a hundred years ago would view the passage of time differently and that's just one of the numerous ways that our ancestors differ from us. I don't believe there is any one thing in terms of the details that singles out why historical fiction appeals to people. Certainly it's not the little things like time or clothes or what people ate or the weapons they used. Even though each history buff has a specific interest or period that draws their attention what makes a genre appealing to particular people is always something transcendent from the details. I believe there is something fundamentally different in historical fiction from all contemporary fiction and that is the presence of clearly defined roles and expectations. Whether or not we are talking about a heroine who breaks the rules the comfort lies in the rules itself.

Much as I think that overriding appeal of the fantasy genre is the ability to have very clearly defined good and evil, something unbelievable in contemporary stories, historical fiction allows men to be men and women to be women. Before everyone screams at me and throws cupcakes (or is that cream pie?) let me elucidate a little further.

As a man working in an office four days a week the idea of walking down Allen Street with a Colt .45 Peacemaker in my holster and a clear purpose in my mind, to arrest the bad guy or shoot him if necessary, is a form of freedom from restraint. In my historical world I can dust up a guy with my bare knuckles over a matter of honor and not be considered a macho asshole with too much testosterone. For a woman, though she might be inclined to grab up a saber on occasion, I believe it is often equally liberating to be free from worrying that if she appears beautifully dressed in satins and velvets, with her hair done up in a delicate net ornamented with pearls that she is not being frivolous or submitting to sexism. After all it is 1600 what else would she be wearing? I simplify, of course, but I think you get the point.

Historical fiction makes dipping into the mores and culture of past ages sexy and safe. I really wouldn't want to be walking around in the French Revolution, particularly if I was a nobleman, nor would I want to be a woman dressed so tightly in a corset that I need smelling salts to revive me every time I had to breathe, but to have the freedom to imagine myself there through the writing or reading of historical fiction is a form of wondrous time travel that is, literally, timeless.

Returning to men and women - we can remake history in our own likeness when we are the authors. The heroine can pick up her skirts, trim them short with her dagger, and then take up saber to fight for her cause. We can make sure that the good guys really are good and that the cause was just. Or we can be gritty and endure the past and all its injustice and social inequality knowing that once we close the book we have returned to our own time, our own culture. How many women with two jobs, two kids, and a mortgage enjoy the adventures of a Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, or an Ancient Egyptian Queen? How many men with a cubicle existence embrace the single-minded duty of Richard Sharpe as he leads his small doughty band of men in the war against Napoleon?

Life might be rough, or dirty, but it's clear and uncomplicated compared to our daily lives - and we get to play with swords.

A Trip Back

2008-12-27T07:09:00.000-08:00

When I write historical fiction one of the biggest imaginative hurdles I have to overcome is to truly understand the nature of time as my characters experienced it. If you ever watched one of PBS's reality series where it takes modern volunteers and sticks them in the past as in Colonial House you might get what I mean. I came to this thought, this morning, because of the contemplation of my own day.

Yesterday some technical issues reared their head with the server I maintain. After a mid-length call to my tech guru last night I realized that I had basically graduated from the 'grasshopper' stage and he was setting me an assignment: do it yourself. So upon rising this morning the first thing on my modern multitasking mind was how to fit a lesson in MySQL into my already full schedule. I work four days a week at the 'job' and then three days a week I work from home managing and participating (both the same thing really) in my community web site, hosted on my own server (thus the need for lessons in MySQL management).

This being one of my three days in my home office I needed to cram all my writing in (blog, book, collaborative), continue to clean up after the holiday festivities, get my laundry done, and generally make myself useful around the flat since the other half of the equation works outside the home for all seven days of the week. The phone will ring, Twitter will chirp, instant messages will fly back and forth at Pan Historia, music will be played from a small plastic disc inserted into a tray in a machine capable of tasks that people didn't even imagine they would ever need to do one hundred years ago.

This is when I began to marvel at the quality of the day of one of my ancestors as little as one hundred years ago. Imagine I was that ancestor and my tastes were exactly the same. I would have to do my morning chores, probably at the crack of sparrow's fart because oil or candles or even electricity would have been a finite resource and I needed all the free daylight I could get. My chores would include bathing which would either require cracking ice, hauling water, or heating water on the stove, or all of the above. Personal hygiene alone would take a good chunk of time, perhaps an hour if I was fastidious or it was a long haul to the well? If I was the one doing the laundry (say I was a bachelor) that would take a substantial amount of time. There is the beating, scrubbing on the washboard, and hanging on the line. In the winter I guess my house would be full of my shirts and shorts vying for space by the stove? Dishes, like washing the face, would require much hauling of water and heating of water. I suppose I could peel some spuds while that water heated up.

Are there animals to be fed? How about cooking? I guess I might have one of those big cast iron ranges and it would need to be fed wood or coal - same with the stove to heat the house. That would involve chopping and stacking and fetching from the woodshed or at the very least a visit to the coal shed with the scuttle to be filled. I'm still working on the chores here. I haven't even gone to my day job yet or, even more interesting to me, sat down at my desk to write where I would take paper, costly and thick, from the drawer, get out the quill pen, dip it in the ink, and then laboriously compose my thoughts by written word in longhand.

Now it's time to go to the mill or the general store or wherever it is I work. I might walk or ride depending on the distance and my income level. If I walk it could easily be an hour or so from my home. If I ride I first have to take care of the horse in the morning: feed, water, clean out the stall. Then I have to saddle up and even my ride will take some time. There are no five minute car trips. With the exception of my peeling potatoes while the water heats up there is no 'multi-tasking' in this world. The day begins early and each moment is filled up with tasks from profound to laborious to simple. Only the wealthy had true leisure time because even making the simplest meal was work. It seems to me that time must have both gone slower for the me of a hundred years ago and at the same time have been so filled with labor of the hands that it went by as fast as a winter day turns back to night. Imagine going to visit your relatives for Christmas and taking a month to do it because after traveling for a week or whatever you certainly didn't want to just turn around again?

In 2008 my head is filled with too many little things so that my thoughts are like mayflies - destined to dance around in swirling and confusing storms for a short time and die. A hundred years ago my thoughts would have been like oaks, born of acorn, slowly maturing, and then a great spreading tree of ideas, all branching and of the same wood.

Getting Ready to Fire Up the Press

2008-12-26T06:29:00.001-08:00

Time to take a long and welcome stretch and then consider what the New Year will bring.

This year, for me, I anticipate many changes, but what goals might I set for myself in terms of writing?

As a collaborative writer I'm approaching something rather exciting at Pan Historia. One of my collaborative 'novels' is coming to an end. We are in the process of planning a conclusion and tying up all the loose ends. Ideally it can then be read just like any other novel with a beginning, middle, and end. I would like to also propose to my fellow writers at The Midnight People that we edit and then publish the work. One of the really exciting developments of the computer and internet age is the greater freedom that writers have to get published. Of course the Vanity Press has existed as long as the printing press, but nowadays self-publishing with all the trimmings of self-promotion and marketing is now a real possibility. I anticipate a fairly small audience for our fantasy novel, but I think it would be a great thing to hold the real life paperback version of our collaborative work in our hands. The sense of accomplishment alone would be worth it, even if we don't entirely recoup the costs of the project.

In addition to a print version of the completed The Midnight People I hope to extend the publishing option to all of Pan Historia. A number of years ago we put together a compilation book that we named the Pan Historia Birthday Book. I had planned for a new one every year but sadly that was more work than I could manage, but I think it's time for another. It sounds to me, reading what I have just wrote, that I really plan to enter the world of publishing, albeit in my small and quirky way. Pan Press here I come!

Which leads me to my own solo literary effort: it's time to get serious about my novel. My New Year's resolution will involve dusting off my research, and then writing at least a page a day. If I can write a page of blog every day… well you get the picture. I won't wait a week to start, I'll start today. There is nothing like grabbing the moment and not letting good intentions get away. I finally realized, in a blinding moment of revelation, what the block was to the novel and that was that I had character, no problem, but I hadn't really decided what the damn plot was. So I will work on a rough outline and try and hammer out the story arc.

Wish me luck.

Advice: Don't Always Take the Advice of Experts

2008-12-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

I read a lot of writing tips, and as you might have noticed by now I even write a few. My credentials might be slimmer than some of the other folks who tell you what to do and what not to do when it comes to writing, but I've been writing fiction for a long time and I have sat at the feet of some of the best. So here is my advice for what it is worth: do not always heed writing tips.

One of the most common tips for beginning writers is to trim out the fat, kill your darlings, and stick to the action. On the surface this is a great piece of advice. After all modern readers get bored quickly in our micro-blogging and text messaging age and beginning writers often make the mistake of including lots of dull and go nowhere description. But if you go back the basics and actually read the classics you will find that some of the most beautiful and inspiring passages of fiction are spent in consideration of a landscape, or describing the interior of a room, or even the rambling thoughts of the author suddenly intruding. Most of that wonderful description would be marked with red pencil and be left on the floor by conscientious modern editors getting to the action.

So if it's going to be cut - why include it? First of all there are other ways to get published these days, but second of all just the act of writing it can be a learning experience. Third of all if you're an artist you just might succeed in getting that description to be essential to the heart of your story and get it past the well meaning editors. We're not all meant to be mean, clean and spare as Elmore Leonard.

Don't add fillips of deathless prose description just for filler, and don't get caught up in something so mundane that it serves zero purpose, but do remember that you're painting a picture in your reader's mind. There is an art to what to reveal and what to conceal. You might well leave out detailed descriptions your character's appearance, but create a deep visual of their bedroom or workspace:

Scattered on Wyatt's desk were discarded pistachio shells. Weaving in and out of a tangle of electronic wires were opened bills, read then jammed into available spaces to be ignored. In a green glass bowl of pebbles laid the thick silver band he usually wore.

This tells us more about Wyatt than any description of his commanding brown eyes, agile capable fingers, or manly chest would ever do. There is a purpose to the description - to show us a bit about who Wyatt is without resorting to language like: "Wyatt was a slob, and never threw away or filed his bills. He loved eating pistachio nuts. He always took his ring off when working because it was too tight."

The best advice on writing is always from the best writers. If you want to know how to write, read and read from the best. Examine their novels, short stories, poetry. Take it apart to see what makes it tick. Ask your self questions as you read. Read it twice. The first time should always be for the sheer pleasure of it, but then read it again and tease it apart to see how that writer kept you enthralled and engrossed. How did they break the rules and get away with it? How did the flights of seemingly irrelevant description or musings on the meaning of life actually enliven the piece for you, or would you have used the red pencil there (not all great writers are infallible)? Writing tips are a place to get started, but don't let them mold you into a boring pedestrian writer that has no voice of your own.

And you know what else? It's ok if you write a few books before anyone ever wants to read them. Like any other art form else there is an apprenticeship to writing.

Where Do Ideas Come From

2008-12-23T07:30:00.000-08:00

Personally it always seems to me that ideas just pop into my head from no where at all. Seriously. One minute your mind is blank or considering your shopping list for the day (shit that reminds me I was supposed to look up the ingredients for Duck ala Orange today before I head out and here am I, still in my PJ's writing a frikkin' blog again) and the next minute an idea has burst out of your skull like Athena girded for battle. So clearly the ancients had it right and it is the job of the Muses to put that stuff in your head. Or is it?

Human beings are sponges and artists and writers even bigger sponges. We are constantly absorbing all the input that is rushing into our febrile brains; or we should be if we want to call ourselves artists. Observation is one of the greatest tools of art. We need to be looking around at the world around us all the time and taking it in, adapting it for our own creative impulses. I am influenced by the news, movies, books, other people, nature, you name it… and all that stuff feeds into my brain, gets melted down, re-mixed, and spews back out in the form of words, ideas, and colors (when I'm painting). I paint when the ideas are non-verbal. I write when the ideas are stories. It's ok to be influenced by what you have read or watched, but it's always good to take a long hard look at what you produce and ask yourself is it 'influenced by' or is it completely derivative? With all this constant feedback coming in it's sometimes hard to know when you're being original. Bearing in mind that you don't want to be a copyist remember that all literature and all art (movie, manga, pottery, whatever) is an ongoing conversation between creators and viewers/users. There is no single pristine piece of work that has never been touched by a previous idea. Even the Lascaux cave paintings are working off previous ideas.

They say there are only seven plots, and if you flense it to the bone that's probably about right so you can never be entirely original. Don't sweat it. You still want to be careful though that you're not just picking up something in its entirety and putting your name on it. Even fan fiction can be entirely original and yet be playing off of someone else's riff. Find your voice, your own ideas, and pull it in.

So back to ideas: I often get an idea from another work of art or entertainment. Often a movie will give me an idea for a character. I like the movie, I like the character, but what I really want to do is to pull that character out and put him somewhere else and see what he will do. And while the original movie I viewed might be my jumping off point by the time I have pulled in other source material it's all looking a lot different. It could be a book or a story I read in the newspaper, or even a memory of something I loved or was intrigued by twenty years ago. Some ideas have a much longer gestation period than others. I might buy a tube of paint, some particular hue I haven't tried before, and it might sit unopened in my paint tray for a couple years before it becomes just the right color for the job at hand. There is no rush to use up ideas.

Don't treasure ideas too much either. As I have pointed out they are unlikely to be entirely new and original to you. Ideas are like colds. They like to be spread about to bring joy to each new carrier. Someone might easily have the same idea or a similar one to you and they didn't have to even poach it from you in the first place. One idea is too trite and overused? Find another one. They are all around you. In fact they're literally littering up the place if you just open up your senses and take in all the data.

Dialogue Tips from The Postman Always Rings Twice

2008-12-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

I have been reading the sensible dialogue tips at the Blood Red Pencil and thinking about my own dialogue tips.

Dialogue comes naturally to me as a writer, maybe because I started out being interested in acting and took that to my role-playing, but even my childish note books with my scrawled scifi story has those tell-tale quotes. Now that I think about it one of my first completed pieces of writing was actually a play with hefty dialogue between the three characters. Now I wonder where I stashed that little gem?

I can literally hear my characters speak and I pick up on their cadence and rhythm. In fact if I can't hear a character speaking out loud in my head I know I'm in trouble with that character. They are not yet alive in my imagination.

My characters talk and jabber at me and I quite often run long monologues in my head from my particularly vocal characters. I have a friend who considers her own inner character monologues to be a form of channeling, and it may be. After all where does inspiration come from? The Muses?

Once I sit down to write a scene though the dialogue must not become a monologue however. It must reveal something about the story, conceal others if I'm still trying to keep my readers guessing, and it must interact with the other characters, even if they are only actively listening. The voice of my characters each must be distinct. It should be fairly clear who is talking even if you removed every tag, every reference to action outside of the dialogue.

For instance much of the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain is propelled by dialogue and little of it is tagged, yet the voice of his characters is so real and distinctive, each voice clear as a bell, that you know who is talking. And Cain does not write "he said" or "she said" either. I'm not sure, because I haven't read it in years, but I'm pretty sure if you counted you wouldn't find an example of either in the entire quick and explosive novel. He doesn't replace 'said' with adverbs or with other possibilities like 'growled, yelled, barked,' or 'throatily'. He lets the dialogue and the spare description do the work.

I'm now going to suggest something outrageous in the history of writing how-to tips: throw away the damned thesaurus. No good comes of a thesaurus. I have probably been guilty as hell in previous writing pieces in suggesting that people look for different words to say the same thing, but what you really need is to cultivate a love of words so that they are handy in your head, not fake it by grabbing the thesaurus. Do not, please I beg you, write 'amber liquid' instead of 'beer'.

Back to dialogue: actually never do the preceding when writing dialogue unless the character is some kind of odd pedant with a penchant for thesaurus cruising and then peppering his speech with oddities. Do clip out all unnecessary tags when possible. Leave just enough to indicate who is talking at the beginning of passage of conversation. Occasionally you will have call to write a little description of what the characters are doing, but keep it spare and keep it important to the dialogue and to telling the story.

From The Postman Always Rings Twice:

"He suspicions us, Frank."
"It's the same one, he knew there was something wrong, soon as he saw me standing there, keeping watch, he still thinks so…"
"What are we going to do?"
"I don't know. It all depends on the stepladder, whether he tumbles what it's there for. What did you do with that slug, shot?"
"I still got here in the pocket of my dress."
"God Almighty, if they had arrested you back there, and searched you we'd have been sunk."
I gave her my knife, cut the string of the bag, and take the bearings out. Then I made her climb back, raise the back seat, and put the bag under it. It would look like a rag, like anybody would keep with the tools.
"You stay back there, now, and keep an eye on that cop. I'm going to snap these bearings into the bushes one at a time, and you've got to watch if he notices anything."

It's quite clear who is speaking. Cain starts us off in this passage with the name 'Frank' and goes from there without any other indicator but the order of the line and tone of voice. The description is spare and to the point. It serves the story. She doesn't flick her auburn locks out of her eyes and give him a pert but 'knowing' look with her emerald eyes.

Of course not everyone writes like Cain nor should they. Your own style and unique voice is essential, but the basic principles of good writing are: show us, don't tell us, and keep all the words, even the dialogue and description, in service of the plot.

Gender Role Play and Collaborative Writing

2008-12-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

Traditionally it's quite normal for an author to speak for characters of a different gender to his or her own. Gender is usually inferred right there on the cover by the name of the author and then confirmed on the back with an author photo. Once the story is started it's quite alright for an author to slip on the persona of male or female and we are all quite happy here with our coffee, because we know we're being told a story. This has not applied equally over all genres however. Romance, deemed to be of interest only to women, often has male authors writing under female pseudonyms or gender non-specific names to leave the reader to make the assumption. The same has applied, in the past, to women writing in the Mystery genre, and I'm assuming it still could happen in the Western Genre.

It's quite different when an author leaves the safety of solitary authorship and joins the ranks of the collaborative writer, a group that has roots and relationship to role-playing games. Why it should have evolved to be so I'm not exactly sure because I often played a fiery sultry vixen half-elf enchantress who liked to wear skimpy clothes and could use a knife like a ninja assassin, but then a lot of guys got used to playing female back in the early days of D & D when nary a female dared show her face in that pimply testosterone heavy crowd (I see a relationship to Elizabethan theater here). Things are very different now, I know, but I'm talking over twenty years ago. Eventually women were allowed into gaming, I'm glad to say, and the last time I played was Vampire the Masquerade where half the players were women. The Vampire game involved a lot more acting and story telling, which I found even more fun than all that dice throwing and long character sheets and endless discussions of percentiles and weapon weight, but it seemed to involve less cross gender play. Perhaps because you were speaking the lines out loud and didn't want to appear foolish - but certainly my group tended to stick to their sex with the exception of the game master and their entire cast of thousands.

When a writer or role player comes online and logs into a site as his or her character there seems to be that same sense of gender association, but there begins a merging of the lines between fact and fiction. Without the visual cues all a person has to go are the written words. Thus when a person signs on to Pan Historia, for example, they are free to commit themselves to a fictional persona, of whatever gender, and then be accepted at 'face' (avatar, bio, etc) value. Meeting and greeting new people as they explore Pan we move people towards this association with character and discourage the standard sex and age questions that prevail in other forms of online social site.

The association with the character is so strong in the role play and related collaborative fiction world of Pan Historia that people often do not remember that the person playing that character and writing those stories is the author. The convention that the author can do as they please in writing for male or female breaks down and the character becomes the author. It doesn't seem to cross into other areas of the character like profession, for instance. If I'm writing a ninja mage (going back to my elf analogy here) no one assumes I'm really a ninja mage or elf. But if the first time they met me I was also presented as a female elf, the assumption would rest squarely that I was a woman in real life. I have to admit that my example breaks down a bit when I played a sadistic killer for the first time. I did have online friends decide I must be a sicko. I consider that flattery; I must have done a damn fine job of writing.

The interesting thing is that, quite obviously, lots of people are writing characters that are not their own gender online, or playing them and everyone knows that. The majority of World of Warcraft characters are not male, yet the majority of their players are. Some players are perfectly open in their forum and other out of character communications and some players choose to remain in character. People turn a blind eye until someone is 'outed'. The whole issue seems to have become less fractious with time as more people realize that it happens all the time online (and try it themselves), but there are still a surprising number of stereotypes and thus a lot of reasons for an individual to prefer not to 'out' themselves as one gender or another in their writing partnerships. We think it shouldn't matter - and it seems to me it really shouldn't - but gender identification is such a fundamental to the bone social programming that we seldom question our gut reactions.

For instance my female character that I had for many years as taken at face value as a strong woman while people assumed the writer was female, but later on people shifted their views and I found her far less successful to write with, including interactions with other collaborative writing partners. The example that comes to mind was her love affair with a male character where suddenly they were fighting and not having a passionate love affair once the writer realized I wasn't a proper woman. In effect his discomfort at writing romantic fiction with a male writer altered the way his character behaved to the point that the story changed radically. This was not an isolated incident.

One positive reason, though, that I can cite for total immersion identification with your characters of the opposite gender is what you learn about gender from it. It can only enhance your writing to really start to relate and understand characters of opposite sex. Of course when a male author sits down to write a novel with a female protagonist (or vice versa) they are doing exactly that: slipping into the skin of that character. It should be no different with any form of writing ultimately.

In online writing relationships I guess the best maxim is: do no harm but have fun and explore new things.

The Soundtrack of Art

2008-12-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

Ok, completely different tangent, or maybe a tangentially related tangent: I do not put music on to write or to paint.

I love music and have a large and eclectic collection in some varied styles that I enjoy. Another time we can talk about my favorites. Today I want to discuss why people listen to music for everything. I don't have an iPod. I didn't ever having a Sony Walkman (remember those, kiddies?). Right now, because I'm writing and not doing chores (there should always be a difference between those two), I'm listening to the sound of the train. The train sounds different in winter during a blizzard then it does in summer in clear skies. It is infinitely more eerie in winter. It's almost like a foghorn in tone. The bell to warn people off the track sounds much farther away, muffled by the snow that falls. I can also hear the sound the snow plow makes as it passes by, heavy shovel lowered, scraping along the tarmac. Very far in the distance, so far it's nearly inaudible, I can hear sirens.

It's much quieter when the snow falls because much of the sound is dampened by the thick blanket of frosty white. Sometimes you get that wonderful surprising 'thump' as the accumulation of snow grows too heavy for its precarious position on the slanted roof and it comes down in a wet lump and disappears into the snow below. Only a few days ago I was actually listening to birdsong because there were an earful of Cedar Waxwings outside in the branches of the old apple tree and partaking of the brilliant red of the sumac fruit. They would cling to the naked branches like dying leaves refusing to give up the ghost.

All of these sounds would be lost to me if I was sitting here with earphones pressed into my ears or blaring out of my speakers. My life rarely comes with a musical soundtrack. I often wonder if it's the movies that have changed the way people go through life, always with music. When I walk I like to be able to hear the blare of the car horn as I step heedlessly off the pavement, or snippets of a passing conversation made more tantalizing by the lack of context. I'm even amused by the cars that go by, steel chassis vibrating, bouncing on the tires, as the inmate destroys his eardrums. Sometimes I catch a phrase of a favorite song on a summer day as someone drives by with their windows down. Snatched from a random moment like that music retains its evocation.

It's the constant all pervasive and completely ubiquitous use of music that puzzles me. All at once it is the most popular art form and the one most abused. A quiet moment turns your head to a beautiful and provocative painting or sculpture; an erotically set solitaire diamond graces the throat of a pretty woman; a hand woven blanket is sprung from the hope chest and laid upon the guest bed to delight the guest; a bouquet of spring flowers is carefully arranged in the hand blown glass vase. Music we just put on and ignore. It becomes the background noise of the supermarket, the elevator, and then our lives. The lyrics become embedded in our brains, like the refrain, but do we really 'listen' when we're too busy doing something else?

The notes are often distorted or muffled - not allowed to speak with the clarity in which they were composed.

I went to the opera recently. The sounds produced by the orchestra and the crystalline voices were like a revelation. They entered through the ear but then poured into the soul and opened up the heart like a daylily to the morning sun. Each note was clear, even when woven into a tapestry of sound. The words sung became infinitely more meaningful for their clarity until it wrung emotion from the body like water from a towel.

It is, for this exactly, that I do not listen to music when I write or when I paint. I listen to music. I sing and dance to music. I let it fill me up and then overflow until the house is awash with music. When I sit down to write or stand before my easel I need to listen to my voice, not the muse of another artist. I want my own pure thoughts and emotions. I need to listen to the wind blow, the honk of the car horn, the laughter of a child passing outside. I need the soundtrack of my art to be my own life.

Writing Just for the Fun of It

2008-12-20T06:13:00.000-08:00

I read a lot of blogs these days about writing for profit whether as a freelancer, ghostwriter, author, or professional blogger, but I want to remember, today, that I write for the love of it. Of course making money at what you love to do is probably one of the most fantastic jobs on the planet and so all hail to that concept. My point, however, is that I can still play like a kid in a playground, by writing, and I never want to lose that.

When I log into my writing and role-play site every day I'm stepping into another world where the writing is for the sheer play of it. I can slip out of my everyday worries and cares, put aside that tired old hat, and don something a lot more colorful. Crafting a sentence to convey the thrill of old west gunfight or two starships in a firefight to my readers, knowing how they'll react and enjoy and then want their turn to respond and react, is a true pleasure. One of the greatest thrills of writing collaborative fiction, for me, is that interaction.

A couple of my friends are published authors. I know well the hard hours that they put into their work. Both of them work as much as they can, banging away at their laptop keyboards. CG works late, after his day job, alone in his room. PL works from the moment he opens his eyes on the day, and it's seldom that he's seen out of doors. For both they are in a very lonely profession. They seldom get feedback on their work until they are ready to submit it to the agent or editor. Even once the books are published they have to wait for book readings or the e-mails of fans to get any kind of response.

I'm not knocking the lonely life of the author. I would easily trade my day job for the chance to work at home at my own pace every day creating deathless prose, but I also think I actually enjoy writing than either of my published friends. Of course they are passionate about writing, but for them it's often a true "labor" of love. It's hard work and discipline. When I start to write it's pure play (even if I whine about "owing" posts). I get to playact some part and when I'm done, hit the post button; I get to socialize with my fellow writers who give me instant feedback.

PL, when I can get him to remember that life is fun too, actually comes to Pan Historia to write for simple play. I can get him to admit, at times, that he gets a kick out of it, even though he claims he does it just to be a good sport. I guess it's just a little like when he was a kid and he wrote his little stories in little handmade books he made. It was, of course, a bit challenging to get him to learn to play well with others after years of being the sole author and in control. I think he got the concept that you can't kill off someone else's character without their permission, but it took a while to wean him off of putting words in their mouths! He was far too used to having it all his own way with all of his own characters. Sadly I can't get CG to come and play. He says he just doesn't have time between the day job, writing at night, and having to do all his own PR these days. He says if he came to play he might have too much fun and forget to do the hard stuff!