From Where Does This Stuff Come?

Used to be that when I wrote I could identify the source and the reason for every single word and phrase. The going was slow in those days, slaving over every paragraph in hopes of getting it right, thus avoiding tedious rewrites.

Now, having learned to enjoy rewriting as much as writing, I just type onto the page the first thing that pops into my head. Surprisingly, after much practice, this method is now producing text less in need of rewriting than the old method. What's even odder is that I can't tell where any of it came from. There are some moments of recognition and remembering, but most of it seems to have sprung from nowhere.

Why does this bother me? Because, what if it isn't mine? If I don't know where it comes from, might I be stealing it from someone else? My Inner Critic won't let me believe that is all fresh, organic material harvested from a fertile imagination. So while I've managed to gag the inner critic while I'm actually writing, he comes back with a vengeance when I read what I've written. He's a tricky bastard.

Lessons From November

I spent most of November participating in National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo for short. I managed to complete the required 50,000 words with two days to spare, though I estimate that I have at least another 20,000 words to go before the novel is finished. The most surprising thing is that I have a novel that I think is worth finishing. I thought by the end of the month I'd have a useless pile of verbose unrelated sentences compiled into chapters of nonsense. If I had written the novel I planned that is what I'd have.

Fortunately, after two days of writing, I accidentally started a sub-plot. That worked so well I started another, then another, to the point where my imagined marathon or pretentious ramblings evolved into a compilation of intersecting story lines. Each tangent proving more interesting than the last. Now, with the bulk of the novel done, the only story line I'm not satisfied with is the first one, my original idea.

I learned many lessons about myself and my writing during this process. The main ones are:

I need to write every day

Well, not quite every day. After nine or ten days straight I get a little burned out and productivity wanes. I find that if I write five days a week I'm able to keep the thought process and creative juices flowing. In the past I've written sporadically, thinking about scenes for days or weeks before finally setting them to paper. This method has created scenes less in need of reworking, but also left me with far less scenes. By letting go the need for perfection, which I now realize is impossible in a first draft anyway, my mind is freed to spit out the story and get on with it.

Multiple story lines

In the past I have always tried to write out one complete story line before starting the next, assuming that the sub-plots needed the major plot to be in place to maintain the structure. What I find instead is that the sub-plots have much more influence on the main story than expected. So by writing all the story lines, in almost chronological order, I'm able to weave a much more organic structure.

On a more practical note, I find that in a single writing session I'm good for a single plot point per story line. Anything more than that and the writing becomes forced and pretty mundane. With multiple story lines though, I able to move to another sub-plot and keep writing. In draft form, a single plot point for three story lines works out to be two to three thousand words, which is a nice word count for a three hour writing session.

Outlining on the fly

I hate outlining because I become a slave to the outline, spending all my writing effort on making my scenes and characters fit the outline rather than exploring where they want to go and seeing what they can reveal. In the other hand, if I work entirely without an outline the stories wander off into a nowhere land of stuff that nobody would want to read. Fortunately, with this novel, I discovered pretty early that the story takes place over six days, plus a seventh for an epilogue, so I would map out where each story line would go for a single day, then write that day. As I wrote I would adjust the outline as needed. Then when a day was written, I would do the next day's outline. Of course for day six, being the climax, has some built-in structure towards which the story lines must aim, but while the final conflict is in place, the conclusions of the story lines are still unknown. Pulling this off will be what makes the novel work or not.

So that's what I've learned. Turns out I knew a lot less about writing a novel than I thought.

On line and selling

My new novel, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY, is now available on amazon.com

Novel in a month - Day 28

1612 words. That gave me 7 words past 50,000. I did it! I'm taking tomorrow off. Then back to work.

Novel in a month - Day 27

2335 words. One more day should do it, but that's not the end. I'm guessing another 20,00 words will finish the book.

Novel in a month - Day 26

2176 words. Major plot points revealed themselves tonight, all hinting at satisfactory resolutions.

Novel in a month - Day 25

2316 words. I should hit 50,000 words on Sunday. The end is neigh.

Novel in a month - Day 24

2642 words. It's hard to figure out what a dozen characters eat three meals a day every day.

Novel in a Month - Day 23

1645 words. Finally managed to work in the requisite "no grits" reference.

Novel in a month - Day 22

1487 words. Several plot points to work out so a bit low on words today. Building to the climax. Oh boy!

Novel in a month - Day 21

2515 words. Odd thing. I used more vulgar language tonight then the whole rest of the book so far.

Novel in a month - Day 20

1395 words. A bit slow tonight. Had to work out some plot points.

Novel in a month - Day 19

2242 words. Some nice surprises tonight. The characters did not do what they were told, but it worked out better than I had planned.

Novel in a Month - Day 18

2095 words. Not all words are wonderful, but they are words nonetheless.

Novel in a month - Day 17

0 words. Migraine. Couldn't write.

Novel in a Month - Day 16

1903 words. The skull of the muse was working overtime for me tonight. Not just words, good words.

Novel in a Month - Day 15

1683 words. Tonight's work included lots of dialogue which comes slower than explanations.

Novel in a Month - Day 14

2463 words. I have fallen in love with these characters. This has moved beyond an exercise into being a real book.

Novel in a Month - Day 13

0 words. Took the night off. It helped.

Novel in a Month - Day 12

2851 words. Big push tonight. I've finished act one of the book. I'm about a day ahead in word count so tomorrow I rest.

Novel in a Month - Day 11

3012 words. Managed an extra writing session today. I am very tired. This seven-nights-a-week writing thing is wearing me down.

Ding Dong the Book is Proofed

I'm getting better at this. My new novel, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY only needed two proofs to get it right. So everything is approved and it is currently available for sale on CreateSpace (https://www.createspace.com/3492694)

It will be available on Amazon by the end of the month. I will also be working on getting it in some bookstores. I'll be sending copies to some of the book review sites. I'll let you all know when the reviews are available online.

Novel in a Month - Day 10

1793 words. Down a little, but above target. Some of the session was spent outlining and planning. Useful stuff.

Novel in a Month - Day 9

2680 words. Holy crap batman. I got on a role tonight. Characters keep crawling out of the woodwork, and I actually have an inkling of a climax. Yee ha!

Novel in a Month - Day 8

1930 words. A little below what I expected. The lesson for tonight is that I can't take a break in the middle of the session to watch my favorite sitcom, then expect to be able to get back to writing again.

Novel in a Month - Day 7

2045 words. Hazzah! I broke 2K! I've gotten so good at not obsessing that I'm even leaving mispelled words alone.

Novel in a Month - Day 6

1985 words. I like this trend. A few more words every day. Tonight's session was effortless. The changes I made yesterday have set off more ideas than I have to write.

Novel in a month - Day 5

1802 words. A good day. Not just for the word count. I actually like what I wrote today. I've changed the focus and added some great characters and situations that will make the book much more interesting.

Novel in a month - Day 4

0 words. Another evening spent in the emergency room with my daughter. She's OK.

Novel in a Month - Day 3

1726 words. I'm getting there. That's above the daily average target so now I just have to make up for a couple short days. My daughter is home from the hospital so life should settle back into its routine. Also, tomorrow I start working on one of the sub-plots. That should help increase the word count.

Novel in a Month - day 2

1300 words. Still short of hopes, but considering most of that was written in my daughter's hospital room I think it's pretty good. The story sucks. The scenes are obvious. The characters obvious and boring. Severe rewrites are ahead, but that's for later.

100 Words - Eraserhead

Karen's mother gave birth to her in a movie theater just as the lights came up after a midnight showing of ERASERHEAD. The site of the bloody screaming child caused a variety of reactions. The stoners ran screaming into the night thinking that they had been sucked into the movie. The filmistas chortled assuming the theater was attempting some sort of film/reality crossover gimmick. The drunks puked. Finally one punked-out med student stepped forward, cut the cord with a switchblade and wrapped the newborn Karen in a Black Flag t-shirt. Karen still has the shirt but she's never seen ERASERHEAD.

Novel in a Month - Day 1

1245 words. A slow start but it's OK. I expect to ramp up the output as I get rolling. It's going to be hard for me though. I already want to go back and redo some parts of what I wrote but I simply do not have the time to do it. Must push forward.

Manufactured Drama

Soon after the movie THAT THING YOU DO came out I saw an interview with Tom Hanks where he was defending the movie's light tone. He mentioned that he didn't see the need to add drama just for the sake of having drama.

This past week I spent a rare evening watching TV dramas and found Mr. Hank's words to be wise. These shows were full of manufactured drama. It was painful to watch. I'd seen these shows in the past and while they aren't my preference they weren't bad shows. This night however, they stunk. All three shows summoned forces from outside the show, even from outside the story, to come and ruin the lives of the characters. It was so artificial and wrong.

So why do I care? Because these extreme examples have shown me that I also have committed the sin of manufactured drama. Several stories I've written, apparently when I got bogged down in the action, are propelled in new directions by inorganic circumstances.

Forgive me dear reader, for I have sinned.

100 words: Leather Lady

From a distance she was beautiful. Long blond hair. Leather jacket, pants and boots. The biker's dream.

Then the picture went wrong. She pulled one of those rolling cases like the bimbo saleswomen pull so clumsily through doorways. A biker sales bimbo?

She stopped and stooped to pick up a styrofoam box off the sidewalk. She opened it, pulled something out and shoved it in her mouth. She dropped the box and walked on. She passed right by me. Methed-out eyes focusing on nothing. Deep scars pitted her face. She staggered away.  

From a distance she had a great ass.

Why can't I be a drunken asshole?

 A comedian friend of mine once did a routine pondering why so many famous talented writers were drunken assholes. Charles Bukowski had just died and he was the main focus of her rant. Good example I thought. It made me do an inventory of my own favorites and found that many were indeed drunken assholes. 

 I have since been dismayed that perhaps my own writing career might be doomed to obscurity unless I started boozing and copped some serious attitude. I have attempted both on occasion with feeble results. Much to my horror it turns out that I'm a very quiet and subdued kind of drunk. Hardly the stuff that attracts legions of cult-like readers.

 So what's a sober, mild-mannered writer to do? Where's the passion? What gets the blood pumping? 

 For me, it's cycling. We're not talking a casual ride in the park. When I'm on my bike I'm always pushing as hard as I can, going as fast as I can. An adrenaline rush? Yes. The stuff of legends? Hardly. It's depressing that the only narcissism I can muster is actually good for me.

 At least I still have the blood curdling nightmares so maybe there is hope for me yet. 

A Perfect Moment

One day last week I sat at my computer keyboard in my RV parked on the Oregon coast in the middle of a heavy downpour working on my latest novella. I looked up from the screen and out at the wind-swept sea just as some sea lions frolicked their way south. A perfect moment.

100 words - Snake Raisins

Up and down the radio dial. Nothing excites so I watch the snakes eating raisins on the back porch. When I was young my father fed the raccoons through a hole in the screen door. He stopped after he discovered that the raccoons had discovered that their claws were stronger than the screen. No raccoons out here though. Just the snakes. Neighbor Steve says that they aren't poisonous but he drinks store-brand scotch straight from the bottle and eats vanilla frosting straight from the can so I'm not sure he can be trusted. The snakes sure do like raisins though.

Writing as Revenge

Can I hold a grudge or what? My new novella-in-progress has the best bad guy I have ever written. The levels of his cruelty and manipulation have continually surprised me. Till today that is. Today I realized that this guy is an exaggerated amalgam of two teachers from my youth. They both managed to inflict some severe emotional damage on my already shaky self-image. Took a long time to recover these assholes. Now it looks like I'm not as over them as I thought. I hate that more than thirty years later they still have this power over me.

Perhaps this will be my exorcism of them. As painful as this has become, as I said, this is the best bad guy I have ever written. Maybe some good will come from my pain. Take control of my memories of pain and sadness and build some positive revenge.

Building a book

I'm working on prepping my novella, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY, for publication. Much fun. Compiling all the chapters into a single file. Setting all the margins and borders and stuff. Converting a pile of words I've written into a "book." The dreams made real.

Now I just have do one last proof read, decide on a cover, update my bio, and send the files off to the printers for a proof. Oh boy!

Ride for a Reason

I'm doing this charity bike ride on Aug 14 to benefit Parkinson's research.
My goal is to ride at least 36 miles, which is 85% longer than my current longest ride.
The company I work for, Blue Shield of California, will match 1-1 donations of $20 or more.
I would appreciate any help you might be able to offer.
To donate: http://www.active.com/donate/tomflanders
For more info: http://www.rfar.org/

Self Publishing - How to measure success

My first self-published book, a collection of short stories rapidly assembled to serve as a present for my parent's 50^th wedding anniversary, sold a whopping 36 copies. I consider that a success.

Now I'm preparing to self publish my new novella, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY. How will I measure its success? I have set what I think are some realistic goals.  

• I want to sell 100 copies. That's a nice round number and only about three times the sales of my first book.

• I want to get the book into a least one bricks and mortar bookstore. With all the independent book stores here in San Francisco that shouldn't be impossible to achieve.

• I want to get at least one review of the book, favorable or not, into print or on the web. Perhaps I'm naive, but that doesn't seem like it should be too hard.

So that's how I'm going to measure success. Nothing earth-shattering. Humble beginnings and all that.

And if I fail, then I fail, but the failure will be my own. I don't have to apologize to any publisher or agent or anyone.

Taking the Fun Out of Writing

"Why do you write?" asked character one.

"To impress people." answered character two.

That little interchange is from THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY by Edmund Crispin. I'm embarrassed to admit that I could be character two. Much of what I've written over the last few years has been assembled solely to impress people. Who am I trying to impress? Agents and publishers. Strangers whose attention is fought for by the huddled masses yearning to be published.

So what can I do about it? If I want to be published, to have the public read my books, I must play the game. I must persuade them that vast numbers of people will want to read my books. Of course I must first write the book that I believe will interest those vast numbers, and that hasn't happened yet. I've just been going through the motions because it's what I believed I was supposed to do.

So I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm going back to writing what I want to write. Maybe someday I'll have something that people will want to read. Until then I'll just inflict my works on family and friends, at least till they stop summing up my work as, "interesting."

A Promotional Experiment

In a rare excursion from my shell of introversion, I built a web site to promote my latest novella BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY, which is still in search of an agent and/or publisher. It's odd, for me at least, to be hyping something that isn't for sale yet. Heck, the car companies do it all the time. I guess it's not so weird.

So anyway, the site is http://brokedownbook.com. It contains all kinds of info including; a sample chapter, character bios, story synopsis and much much more. Take a look. If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies.

Coping With the Day Job

"Your files have been published." A simple sentence. A passive sentence. The kind of sentence I email to my fellow employees dozens of times a day. An exclamation of boredom. A cry for help. Save me from the abyss! Do they hear my plea? They do not. Unless there is some hidden meaning to "Thanx Tom" that eludes me.

Then there is our director. Every email I send him is written in an A-A-B rime scheme. He's never noticed. Messages to the legal department have only one and two syllable words, yet they always respond in their over-blown fluffy language.

So why do I play these games? Well, there's the sheer evil pleasure of subversion. There's the ego-boosting arrogance of getting away with this stuff. Mostly though it really is a cry for help, building a wall in defense of my sanity. I'm not sure it's working.

Killing an Innocent Character

Tonight I killed one of my characters. It was weird because up until tonight I didn't know that there would be a murder in this book. I knew it was a psychological thriller, but didn't know the stakes would be raised that high.

On the bright side, she wasn't that great a character in the first place. She was merely the bridge between two of the main characters, girlfriend to one and roommate to the other. Now though, in death, she becomes a major source of conflict and launches the story easily and definitely into act two.

The weird thing is that I feel guilty. Not that I killed her off, but how great I feel about killing her off. Her death has helped the story so much that I'm giddy with delight. How sick is that?

Rediscovering Your Own Work

Today I was cleaning up the writing folder on my had drive, moving bunches of old stuff to subfolders like, "needs work", "bits and pieces" and of course, "pretentious garbage." In the midst of all this I came upon a rather large file I had completely forgotten about. It's a 25,000 word story titled HEAVENVILLE about a professional wrestling promoter who own an RV park that was once a drive-in theater. Surprisingly it's pretty good. It needs a major rewrite, but it's all there.

How could I have forgotten about this? I searched my memory and seem to recall that i wasn't able to resolve problems with the plot, particularly the climax. i must be maturing as a writer because I now see simple solutions for what was, at the time, insurmountable difficulties.

Encouraged by this gem I spent several hours reviewing all my old work for some other salvageable beauty. Unfortunately all this yielded was the movement of a great many files to the "pretentious garbage" folder. Ah well.

Suffering From Character Envy

My characters have much more interesting lives than my own. Every day for them is an adventure. Oh sure, occasionally they're murdered or dismembered, but they will never die of boredom or suffer the unending horror of having a day job. Many of them have cool cars and nice houses and get to have sex with lots of people without worrying about getting a disease. 

Does all that balance out that their existence relies on my whim or whimsy? Perhaps they must live life out loud in an attempt to find favor with me, their creator. To avoid having some new horror befall them, or worse yet, being left forever, hopes and dreams unfulfilled, on the unfinished page as has happened to so many of their kind before them.

Well, that still sounds better than sitting though two hours of budgeting meetings.

I Hate Good Advice

Many people give me advice. Mostly I ignore them. I'm an I-know-what's-best-for-me DIY kind of guy. You either know someone like that or you are someone like that.

However some advice just can't be ignored, no matter how painful it might be. I've been working on a novel for over a year now. It sucks, but quality isn't mandatory for a first draft. For a long time now my inner critic has been telling me that it doesn't suck because of its draft status. He says it sucks because it sucks. Of course that's just my inner critic talking. It's his job to be an asshole. The problem is, lately my more positive writing forces, the skull of the muse and the dream lizard, are agreeing with him.

I've lost all focus. The book is a collection of unconnected scenes. My villain has lost all his edge. My heroes their whimsy. The story arc has become a slinky in an Escher drawing. It's a mess and I just don't want to play ball with it anymore. Worst of all, I realize that this isn't, even if it didn't suck, a book that I would want to read. I realize that this isn't the book I want to write. It is the book I thought I was supposed to write.

In the midst of my inner critic's victory dance I considered, "What now?" So I sat at my desk, did my meditative breathing, and starting writing out a recent dream. Then I wrote some notes on the possible meanings of this dream and filled a page with "what ifs" and came up with a possible conflict/conspiracy. Looks like I've got a story write.

Am I My Critic's Keeper?

My inner critic won't speak to me. He sits on my desk with his head in his lap, weeping. The Skull of the Muse keeps telling him jokes, but he won't laugh. The glass rabbit, who I think represents my feminine side, keeps telling me in German that I need to feed the critic. She says that he will die if I don't write something soon. Quite a dilemma.

Can I survive without the inner critic? Sure, he trashes my work and makes me doubt and question everything, but he also keeps me from hoisting confusing and unpolished drek upon the unsuspecting reading public.  

Can I survive without writing? Sure, if I don't mind becoming an alcoholic flesh-eating zombie. Such a choice.

The Dream Lizard is no help either. Last night he had me trying to impress a bunch of skateborders by bragging about my clothes only to realize that I was dressed like Herb Tarlek from WKRP. I know there is a message in there somewhere but the allegory escapes me.

Writing Was Easier When I Sucked

Ah the days of bliss, happily pounding out drek with no responsibility to the readers that did not exist. The resulting stories would be so bad that it would be immediately obvious what was wrong and what must be done to fix it.

Then I started getting better and everything went wrong. Now when I read what I write it's not bad, but it's also not great. There is always something missing, something to add, something to take away, but it's a subtle something lurking unknown in the shadows.

So I try to fix it through trial and error hacking away at characters, plots and scenes, till the whole thing is transformed into something brand new, but equally not so great. Lately all my rewrites seem to take me sideways rather than upwards in quality.

The Guilt of Leisure

Maybe it's the puritan upbringing, but I've come to realize that I feel guilty about spending time writing. I feel like I should be doing something practical and productive like cleaning the back room or repairing the deck or feeding the homeless. 

I know this is just my inner critic trying to devalue my writing. Hey, just the money I save on therapists makes my writing worth it. Still. I can't shake the feeling that I'm not serving the world as I should. 

I think the main problem is that I enjoy writing, so how could it be of any value? In my underlying belief structure things that are fun are not important.  Being important is important. In my school days I was often accused of having my priorities mixed up. Who knew I was listening?

Prep

Just decorated my desk with the dream lizard, Kokopelli, the Skull of the Muse and the inner critic fetish. Now I can write.

Talking Too Pretty

An odd problem. I've been working heavily on my novel lately both at my keyboard and in my head during any spare moment. The problem is that I am so ensnared in writer mode that I can't carry on a normal conversation anymore.  I am constantly pausing to think about the best way to phrase EVERYTHING I say. Because of this I come off sounding very pretentious, not to mention the rather long silent interludes while I formulate my response. 

I'm losing the vernacular!

What I'm Reading: SHATTERDAY by Harlan Ellison

I previously read a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories and enjoyed it very much. Such was not true for this pile of stuff. Oh, there were a couple gems, but the rest seem like first drafts written just after a bad break-up.

The straight science fiction stories take place in one dimensional worlds where rules come and go on a whim. The fantasy is rarely fantastic. Strong female characters are few and far between.

All that I might have overlooked. The biggest problem is that each story has an introduction. (Which I skipped until I had finished the story.) Some things are better left a mystery. The problem with the introductions wasn't what was said about the stories, but what they revealed about their author. An ego grown beyond even fame's justification. 

I hope whatever fame I might achieve is gentler with my self esteem.

A new class of rejection letter

Today I got my first literary agent rejection letter. I feel even more like a real writer.

Wisdom is a Bitch

I have come to realize that a major problem with my self view is that I never had the delusion that I was going to be a great and famous writer. For most of my life I believed that I couldn't, nor would never be able to, write well. I believed that being a writer was something that you either were or were not.

Now that I understand the process of developing as a writer I see myself coming along nicely, though I can feel what Carlos Casteneda called the fourth enemy, old age, lurking in the shadows waiting to jump me. There is only so much time left to win what morsels of fame might come my way.

Thus I find myself longing for delusion. To be able to believe that the next novel will be the one that wins me that touch of immortality. The one that finds its target audience beyond my immediate friends and family. The Great American Novel of the post baby boom pre generation X literary cannon. Hell, even in delusionment my ambitions are pigeon-holed.

So without fame, why write? Because these stories are like rodents trying to gnaw their way out through my brain. It's write or go insane, and I'm just too anal-retentive to accept insanity.

Why I Like: JK Rowling

Oh, the stories! The action, adventure, romance and finally the overwhelmed underdog triumphing over impossible foes. What more could you want? But there is a problem. I dislike fantasy. Always have, probably always will.

So then, what part of Mr. Potter's tales worm their way through my defenses of preference?  

First, there are the characters. The complex relationships that develop between the friends over the series give new interest to every book. The emergence of minor characters, my favorite being Neville, to major players is something I've not seen in other series of books.

Second, and probably most importantly, a great villain. Just as Darth Vader is my favorite Star Wars character, the Harry Potter books would be nothing without the wonderfully evil Voldemort. And the fact that he is done in finally by his human flaws and fears is a wonderful capper on the series.

What I'm waiting to see for Ms. Rowling is; is there life after Harry Potter? I hope so, though as a writer, I can't imagine starting all over after investing so much time and energy into creating such a rich and wonderful world.

The Relief of Submission

So I finally submitted my first novel to a literary agent. I've been putting it off for nearly a year, going back and forth about how good I thought the book was. I should have done this a year ago. I haven't heard back yet, and that's not that point. I'm prepared for rejection. I've had it before. I'll have it again. It's just the complete and utter release of tension of having one less bit of drama in my head.

Of course it's not like the release of tension that comes from, lets say, sitting in a hot tub. This is more like the relief you get when your irritable bowel switches from constipation to diarrhea. The relief that just keeps coming till you are left as an empty shell.

OK, I lied. If it gets rejected I will cry. But I'll get over it and submit again.

What I'm Reading: IT WAS GONNA BE LIKE PARIS by Emily Listfield

There is nothing surprising in the story of this book. What is surprising is that this novel is written as a sort of free-form journal and that the format enhances the story rather than detracts from it. I've read several novels written in journal form, both structured and unstructured, and liked very few of them. For the ones I didn't like it seemed to me that the story had been forced into the format like a pair of uncomfortably small shoes. In the good ones, like Ms. Listfield's, the story seems to be organic to the format, in this case reinforced by the lack of quotation marks.

Throughout the book we maintain the impression that this isn't a book that was “written” but was jotted down over a period of time. However, when reflecting back you see the well-plotted story structure. Three acts. Character development. The whole deal.

I enjoyed reading this book very much. The story wasn't great, but they way it was presented was.

IT WAS GONNA BE LIKE PARIS
Emily Listfield
Published: 1984
Cost: $1
Bought at: SF Public Library big book sale

The Perfect First Draft

Have you ever finished a first draft and upon rereading it you say to yourself, "Yes, that's exactly what I wanted it to be." Me neither, till last night. I'm not saying it's finished by any means. Typos and unwieldy sentences abound, but the story turned out exactly the way I wanted it. I even reread it just before I posted this to make sure I wasn't in some delusional state last night. I still like it.

Of course, today's chapter remains unfinished. I just can't get it quite right. Ah well, back to work.

THE SAX HEALER eBook

My book of short stories, THE SAX HEALER, is no available for Kindle for a mere $1.95.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell random people on the street.

Why writers won't give you constructive criticism

Because they like you, and do not want to make you cry. Oh yes, they will make you cry. If they are as honest as you need them to be, they will, sooner or later, make you cry. That's a lot to ask of someone you hardly e-know.

You can ask my wife. When I'm into a story or novel she is forced to read my first drafts. I have come to know the look all too well, the drooped barely-making-contact eyes. She knows what she is about to tell me will make me cry. What I thought to be my latest and greatest gift to the literary world is actually incomprehensible drek. She knows it, and now I know it. She apologizes and tries to make me feel better. The horrid, "It's not all bad" speech.

Of course, an hour later, I'm over it. She was right. I figure out how to fix it. She reads it and likes it. I know she really likes it because I know she'd tell me if she doesn't. Having an honest reader is the greatest help to a writer, and I wouldn't wish that task on my worst enemy.

So does this mean, when you get no comments to your posted story, that your writing is bad? No, not at all. Even if we like your story, we fear what might come next. If we give you some insightful comment, you might remember us and send us your next piece of writing, and then we might have to make you cry.

Hope for Degeeking

I admit it. I'm a geek. Specifically, I'm an information geek. I am driven to know and understand as much as possible. Every topic gets dissected and deconstructed to the point where it no longer has any meaning as whole, but is merely the sum of its easily-understood parts.

But this is not how writing works. The story, if written well enough, is more than the sum of its parts. There are hidden, even unknown, meanings and feelings. There are often unexpected emotional responses. All this is very scary to someone like me who needs everything to be ordered and predictable.

But there is hope. I was watching TV yesterday and saw something that I did not understand and, for the first time ever, had no desire to understand. It was the first round of Winter Olympics Curling.  

OK, the rules are simple enough. The strategies aren't beyond my grasp. What I don't get is why anyone would even do this, and then, having done it, care to do it again, and further, create an Olympic sport out of it. It was at the point of having this thought that I realized that my opinion was based on ignorance. It became obvious to me that there was some zen of curling which I didn't get, and I realized that it didn't matter if I didn't "get" curling. I should just get on with my life and let the curlers curl in peace.

So maybe there's hope for me after all.

Finding your "Voice" vs. learning to write

Thirty years ago I believed what I was taught, that if you wanted to have a unique voice as a writer you had to avoid reading books and not listen to any of the "how to be a writer" advice. It took twenty-five years to shake that off.

I had thought, or perhaps hoped, that the theory of developing your skill/style/voice in a vacuum had been disproved long ago, but today I spoke to a young wannabe writer whose high school English teacher told him that reading too much would dilute his skill as a writer. He had me read a short story he wrote. There wasn't a single sentence that was properly constructed. The story itself seemed non-existent. When I asked him what he was trying to say, he responded that he didn't try to say anything, he just wrote.

My question is; from where does this illusion of spontaneous genius spring? Was there ever some wolf boy that emerged from the woods, pen in hand, scribbling magnificent prose? What made my teachers, as well as this young man's, think they were/are doling out good advice? My only explanation is that they, being frustrated writers themselves, are doing their best to prevent anyone else from becoming a successful writer.

100 Words: Onions

My hands smell like onions. I don't eat onions. I don't work with onions. There are no onions in my room. No one I know eats onions. Why do my hands smell like onions? This happens every time I drink tequila. You'd think my hands would smell like tequila, but they don't. They smell like onions. Are there onions in tequila? I don't think so. I think someone is doing something to me when I'm not looking. They come into my room when I'm passed out and make my hands smell like onions. Do you think this could be possible?

My Dirty little Secret

Maybe I'm an egotistical freak but I simply have to admit that I am my favorite writer. Is this normal? Of course this hasn't always been the case. I have not always had such a fondness for my own writing, but I really like the stuff I've been producing lately.

I should qualify my determination of what I call "favorite." I don't think that my writing is better than other writers. Favorite to me is a subject connection rather than a declaration of perceived quality. For example, my favorite movie ever is THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION, but I would never attempt to argue that this is the best movie ever. On many accounts it couldn't even be considered a "good" movie, but I still watch it every time it's on. I LOVE that movie.

So recently I have come to realize that I have developed the same connection with my own writing. I enjoy reading my own writing. Oh the hubris.  

My Book Collection: The Gandhi Pamphlets

An odd addition to be books of special interest. I got these three little booklets at the annual yard sale for The Little Sisters of the Poor. If you go during the last hour of the last day of the sale you get everything you can stuff in a bag for only $5. So I wind up getting some odd things.

This last year I scooped up this booklets, which I thought were about Gandhi. Turns out they were written by Gandhi. They are part of a series. I have numbers 3, 6 and 22. My favorite is #3, THE MORAL BASIS OF VEGETARIANISM, in which Gandhi expounds the virtues of avoid animal foods, but also explains that maintaining your health is also important. To this end he repeatedly defends his consumption of goat's milk.

That points out the biggest surprise from these booklets. They are all reasonable. Gandhi explains and understands the difference between the ideal and the reality. The way politics and religion work in this country it's surprising to see reasonableness applied to both.

However, what really puts my personal value of these booklets over the top is the inscription. No, they aren't signed by Mr. Gandhi, nor the editor nor the publisher. Each one has the identical inscription:  

To Mrs. Katherine Movius
with kind regards
M.Shastri
3.7.62

The signature isn't very clear, but it looks like Shastri to me, which according to Wikipedia is a title meaning scholar. So it's hard to know who really signed the things. I tried looking up the recipient but Katherine Movious is a surprisingly common name. No matter. I think the mystery of who these people were is as Important to me as the booklets themselves.

What I'm Reading: THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

Great book. Had some trouble with some parts, but that's to be expected. From my experience great books are not perfect, and perfect books are not great. However, and this is a first, my favorite part of this book is the Afterword.

First, I loved it because I hate forwards and never read them till I'm done with the book anyway, so afterword is perfect. Second, reading Toni Morrison's feeling towards this book, her first novel, was an epiphany of empathy. She writes about feeling that the book didn't communicate her intended message. She discusses difficulties with some of her technical decisions, and surprisingly she echoed my own difficulties as a reader.

The reason that her self-criticism is so moving for me is that I am going the same process with my own first novel. I keep tearing it apart, and I need to stop doing so. I may never think that this is a great novel, but it's as good as it's going to get and I need to move on.

I don't mean to compare my novel to Ms. Morrison's. She has a gift for language and character that I will never equal. However, that doesn't degrade my work. I'm more of the small cult following type of writer. What I need to learn to do is revel in that.

THE BLUEST EYE

Toni Morrison

Published: 1994

Cost: $1

Bought at: SF Public Library big book sale

The Joy of Tweeting a Short Story

OK, I'm not the first person to have this idea, but I'm having a ball doing it. It's like one prolonged writing exercise. The constraints of Twitter force some creative solutions upon sentence structure. The need to maintain the story context, and to have every tweet be its own mini story, has forced me to rethink my writing style. It's taught me that I've been rather lazy about my sentences. I have not been creating and/or releasing tension on a granular level. I've been leaving that responsibility to the chapter. I see now that have to bring that function to each paragraph and every sentence.

On a more practical level, one of my dislikes of the Twitter fiction genre is the lack of physical context. For example; with most stories if the tweets got reordered you would have no idea how to reassemble them. To prevent this I created a simple code. I add the initials of the story title and the post number to the beginning of each tweet. So for this story, INCIDENTAL CONTACT, now at the 20th tweet, today's post starts with, “IC#20”. It takes up some characters, but I think it helps the reader.

To see what I'm talking about, take a look at my Titter feed. (http://twitter.com/thetomflanders)

If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your enemies.

100 Words - BARBARA'S VEGA

Barbara was an instructor of high-impact yoga. She drove a white cam-backed Vega. That's how she and Bob met. He saw her car in the super market parking lot and he went over to check it out. It was identical, except for the color, to the one driven in bad weather by his fifth grade teacher. In good weather she rode a Honda 750 motorcycle. Bob remembers nothing from fifth grade except that he had a pretty blond teacher who rode a motorcycle and drove a red cam-backed Vega, and like all his other teachers her name was Mrs. Johnson.

Hating What I Wrote

Don't read your old stuff. It's just not worth it.

At the time I wrote these stories I thought that they were they best things I had ever written. Actually I was right, but fortunately they weren't the best things I would ever write. Some of them are just not very good. Some of them are stomach wrenchingly bad. It's embarrassing.  

So what do I do about this? Do I go back and redo them? What purpose would that serve? Is it my job to erase the mistakes of my past?

No, I don't think so. I think these stories served their purpose. They were my finger paints. The first step on the way to oils. Would you tear up the kindergarten drawing of an adult? Of course not. It's simply time to except that I wasn't born a perfect writer and move on.

Besides, the premises of most of these stories are so bad that they just aren't worth the effort.

Why I Like: William S. Burroughs

Insanity channeled. So much stream-of-consciousness writing, my own attempts for example, rapidly degenerates into nonsense, like a schizophrenic rocking back and forth in the straight back chair that they're tied to for fourteen hours a day shouting lists of rhyming transgressions to nobody in particular. Ah, but Bill never falls for such folly. Staying sane inside insanity.

As with most Billophiles my age, my first experiences of Bill came not from his writing but from his performing. A strange man with a gun in the barn of an odd little film found at an odd little video store. A gravely voice shouting phrases somewhere in the background of a Laurie Anderson song. Then his written words are discovered.

And what words they are? Not light or easy reading to be sure, but glorious words all the same. Insane, sharp, scary but somehow comforting. It's OK to be insane. It doesn't matter that the world you experience doesn't match the one that everyone else describes. Write it down. The words will explain it to you. Bill is like my literary nightmare teddy bear.  

Book Collection: THE GREEN MILE by Stephen King

Most books I buy get read then donated. A few books I read and put on a shelf to be reread at some theoretical future date. Then there are those rare books that I collect. The funny thing is that, for me, the criteria of collection rarely includes my enjoyment of the book.

For example: THE GREEN MILE. Or rather the serialized version of THE GREEN MILE, all tucked into the nice little box designed to hold the books. I liked the book, though having previously seen the movie, I couldn't get Tom Hanks' voice out of my head, but it wouldn't be a book that I would normally keep.

Except for those little books in that little box. When I was very young we had a bookshelf full of my mother's father's books. Among those dark heavy books were piles of little unbound pamphlets containing one chapter each of many Victorian era serialized novels. I never actually read any of them, I have still not acquires a taste for Dickens, but I thought they were so cool. Something about their cheapness and immediacy struck a chord with me.

So after reading the little books of THE GREEN MILE I found a special place on my bookshelf for the little box. The first book in a slowly growing collection of books worth more to me than the words printed in them.

Books Vs. eBooks

I don't know if I'm a freak or what. I love books. This wasn't always the case. It used to be that I avoided books by any means, but a side-effect of trying to become a serious writer is that I have become a serious reader. However, when compared to other serious readers that I know, I have one major difference. I have no reverence for the concept of “The Book.”

To me most books are disposable items. Once I've read them they go into the donation bin. Only one in about twenty get put on the keeper shelf, and that gets culled every other year or so. So I have no inherent dislike for e-books as a concept. I do however doubt that I will ever buy an e-book reader.

Why? For the same reason that I don't buy new books. Money. My average outlay for a book is $1.50. Do they even sell used e-books? I know, I could get a reader and raid Project Guttenburg and spend a year or so in bliss, but then what? What if I want to read something written after the copyright became institutionalized? Tough luck unless I want to pay up.

The other thing; if I have a brain fart and forget my book on the bus, I'm out $1.50. If I lose my e-reader, I'm out hundreds of dollars. I'm too much of a flake to take that risk.

Books on Writing

I've now read three books on how to be a writer. One, a gift from my wife, was very useful. It wasn't preachy or formulaic. It didn't promise to make me a better writer, though I believe it did. Then there are the other two. (Which I bought myself.)

I should state here that I learned important lessons from both of these books. However all that I learned was contained in the first chapter. Past that was nothing of any interest or value. In the first case, chapters two through fourteen were nothing but rewordings of chapter one. In the second case, the later chapters were not related to learning to write at all. They were anecdotes about the writer's experiences about sitting at tables in cafes trying to write and the interruptions she experienced. Some were interesting, but none reinforced the useful lessons learned way back at the beginning of the book.

So what is the lesson here? Always sample multiple chapters before committing to a book you may be basing your career on. Or, more importantly, remember that most books found in the bargain bin are there for a reason.  

Another Book Unfinished

Today I stopped reading PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION by Randall Jarrell after only 30 pages. It's probably the best book that I didn't finish. It's not the first. There have been others, but they went unfinished because they were monumentally bad. Most of these were science fiction novels which lived up to neither of the genre's title words. In almost every case the book committed the unforgivable sin of assuming I was an idiot.  

But this book, does not assume that I'm an idiot. It assumes nothing of me. For that matter, cares not one jot for my being its reader at all. I am not its target audience. This is not the problem however.

The problem is that I am just not in the right state of mind to sit through a couple hundred pages of inside jokes and snide comments about academia in the early 50's. Yes, I did laugh with recognition at some of the characters and situations, and the writing itself is fine, though the overall flow is a bit choppy for my taste.

So why the guilt? I guess as a writer I would want my readers to finish my books. Not finishing a not-terrible book seems like a betrayal to the profession. A commitment of the sin of the whim of personal preference. Don't I have a duty as a writer and a reader to fulfill the sacred bond entered into when I read the first words of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the book?

No. Not today. I'm just not in the mood.

INCIDENTAL CONTACT

My serialized Twitter fiction story is now available on my web site in summary form. It is the story of Bob, whose short name is required of all Twitter fiction characters, a mild-mannered insurance company employee who reaches for the stars and is cast into the mud. Check in every day, or if your lazy like me, every week.

If you like it, tell your friends, if you don't, tell your enemies.

Writing Exorcism

I don't know everything there is to know about writing. In the universe of my imagination I do in fact know almost nothing about writing. With this in mind I search out the knowledge of others, attempting to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though I have quickly learned there are many false giants out there.

One of the stock tools of the writing adviser is the writing exercise, where you, the aspiring writer, are given a set of prompts, conditions, restrictions, etc. and are asked to produce a hunk of written material. This is all well and good and some of these exercises have given me insight to the creative process, but then what?

Then nothing. The exercise is over and it is time to move on, abandoning this child of my literary creation. I can't do it! I wrote this thing. It's important to me. I can't just turn the page and move on. I need to file this away for future use. Nothing gets thrown away.

Unfortunately, because of the premise under which the writing exercise was created, it is rarely of any use outside the context of its genesis. So I have notebooks full of useless material, that anal-retentive me plows through on a regular basis looking for some missed pearl. I know it's a waste of time, but I can't let go.

Am I the only person with this problem?

Why I Like: Tony Hillerman

Change. It seems so simple, but if you read lots of series detective books, change is not a common theme. Travis McGee is always Travis McGee. Nero Wolfe and Archie are always Nero and Archie, no matter how many decades separate their first and last adventures. Hillerman’s characters change from book-to-book. They grow, they succeed, they fail, they get weary of the evil they confront on a daily basis. Finally, they grow old and retire. They find love, or give up trying to find love.

The other thing I like is that with ever book there was rarely a predefined focus. Some were Leaphorn books, some were Chee books, many a mix of the two. The evolving relationships between the main characters, and the requirements and circumstances of the crimes, created a fresh dynamic for each book, which went a long way to keeping the stories from getting stale.

Looking back though, what hooked me first and probably with Hillerman was his first chapters. The last line of the first chapter of most of his novels should required reading for how to get a reader excited about the rest of the book. Gigantic juicy literary worms that we little reader fish just can’t resist.

What I’m Reading: THE SHAPE SHIFTER by Tony Hillerman

It’s rare that a book in a mystery series can be so different from the rest of the series and yet still fit. THE SHAPE SHIFTER fits that description. Even its opening chapter is a departure from the get-the-action-going formula at which Hillerman excels. This book opens on our hero, the legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn in an awkward social position, paying a call the newlyweds Jim and Bernadette, apologizing for missing their wedding and bringing them a gift basket. Hardly the grisly imagery we’ve come to expect.

Most of the rest of the book is told as a flashback, another oddity for the series, but it works. Hillerman died two years after this book was published. I don’t know if he meant it to be the last book in the series, but if fulfills that roles very well. The book ends with Leaphorn seeming to make peace with his retirement. His use of Navajo legends and supernatural imagery as way of avoiding implicating himself on the crimes of which he might yet be accused was a wonderful counterpoint to his previous need to bring all crimes into real human terms. It shows him letting go of his defined role as a policeman and returning to his role as a Navajo man, who being forced to attend a white boarding school, missed out on his cultural childhood.

As with many character-driven mysteries, the actual mystery isn’t much of one, though the anticipation of the gathering of proof is engaging. While the gathering of proof is never actually completed, the end takes on a very satisfying Nero Wolfe like justice being done shortcut. Satisfying for the reader perhaps, but not for Leaphorn’s sense of right and wrong. He pays some dues, literally, but at the end of the book you sense that he’s pulling himself out of the game.

I’ve now read all of Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries, of course not in order. Some lazy time soon, perhaps after my next novel is written, I’m going to reread them in order. I can hardly wait.

Fear of Success?

I always thought that was a ridiculous phrase. To be honest though, success isn’t something I’ve had to worry about. That is, until recently, when I started promoting myself as a writer. The usage of my website, http://tomflanders.com, has tripled over the last few months. People are finding me on Facebook and Myspace. My Twitter fiction short story is slowly gaining readers. This is all great but now what?

One of the symptoms of fear of success is the worry of maintaining a flow of new work. That became very real this morning when I realized that I didn’t have a blog post ready for today. My first reaction was, oh well, I’ll skip a day. Then the raised-a-Catholic guilt kicked in and I realized that I had an obligation to my faithful readers. Of course that sort of hubris is equally unacceptable. I settled on posting so that I can maintain my search engine indexing rank, which is a technically valid point.

So here I find myself, following my ambition of laziness, working towards tossing off the shackles of work for a life of literary leisure, laying about the house throwing together the occasional creative masterpiece, now faced with the prospect of having to write 250 words each and every day with the sole purpose of keeping my name on people’s radar. Is this what I signed up for?

Of course it is. When I extract myself from my expectations I see that this is what I wanted without knowing what I wanted. My brain often hides such insights from me. The form of my ambition is to be a writer. The essence of that ambition is to have people read what I write. So this fear of success isn’t so much about that fear of the mechanics of producing work. It’s a deeper fear that I may not be as good a writer as I’d like to believe. The fear that the readers whose attention I’ve caught will tire of me and wander away.

Is anyone actually reading this?

Why I Like: Charles Bukowski

Mr. B is one of my dirty little secrets. I’ve actually only, long ago, read a few poems and one short story of his. I’ve also seen two semi-biographical movies about him. None of these made me much of a fan. To me he seemed like nothing but an obnoxious drunk with a gift for putting words together.

Fast forward fifteen or twenty years. I’m now an aspiring writer in the mid-to-late stages of middle-age. I happen across Mr. B’s bio on wikipedia and I fall in love with him. Though he wrote for much of his life, he didn’t quit the world to write full time till he was 49 years old. I’m currently 48, so I have twenty months left to match his example. And Mr. B worked as a sorter for the post office. That makes my job at the insurance company look like a carnival ride.

So I guess I’m more of a fan of Mr. B than I am of his work. Though my mental wish list of what to read next now has his works near the top. It’s kind of like how I like Lady Gaga, but don’t like her music, so I watch her videos with the sound turned down. No, I guess that’s different.

Fear of Writer’s Disease

The other day I noticed that many of my favorite writers were victims of the dreaded writer’s disease. People old before their times emerging periodically to pound out some prose before slipping back into the comfort of the bottle. Or punching out drunken babble submitted to, and cleaned up by, sympathetic editors. Now that I dare to consider myself a writer, and see on the horizon a time when writing will be my sole occupation, I worry and wonder what my relationship with intoxicants will be.

This is not idle chatter. I have had my experience with an overactive taste for tequila. During college, and for a short period afterwards, I disappeared into drink on a daily basis. However, at that time I had no direction in life. I was not yet a writer. I was completely alone and self-loathed. My relationship with the woman who later became my wife broke that cycle, but it wasn’t the last.

During my years of doing standup comedy I was always reliant on my liquid courage, beer being my drink of choice. Then I stopped doing comedy, so I stopped drinking beer. I’m such a creature of habit. I’ve always been better at avoiding temptation than resisting it. I’ve stopped drinking simply because I’m not going to places where beer is readily available, and was often free.

So we’ve established that I drink when I’m lonely or in bars. Such a cliché. Therefore all I have to do to not become a drunk is to stay out of bars and stick close to my wife. But what if? I’m a writer, my world revolves around what if. The fact is that I’m not really afraid of drinking. I’m afraid of loneliness, of which, drinking is a side-effect. The mere notion of having to deal with life without my wife terrifies me. I am such a coward.

Never Throw Anything Away

I’ve been told this many times about my writing. I have not followed it. I don’t think I ever intent to delete files, but the get put in obscure folders and as I move from old computer to new some of the folders just don’t make the transition.

From now on I’m going to be more careful. Working on a character study for my new novel, I realized that the woman I was writing about was actually the main character of a short story that I wrote four years ago, but didn’t like very much. So I went looking for the file of that story. Nope. Not there. Gone. I could have sworn I saved it to the “needs work” folder but it isn’t there. Extensive searching has produced nothing. So now I’m recreating it from memory. I will be much more anal about these things from now on

Visualizing Locations

I wrote a scene for my new novel that takes place in the den of a man who collects paper cars. Without effort I was able to visualize every aspect of this room. The rows and rows of shelves of mostly-white little cars. The dim room lighting contrasting the sharp work bench lighting. The smell of glue and color printer ink drying. These images came alive in my head and flowed down on to the page.

But what do you do if this doesn’t happen? What if you are writing a location that doesn’t just spring to mind? How do you explore this unknown place of your own imagination?

I had this experience writing the very first chapter of my new novel. It takes place in a bar that required a specific layout to facilitate the interaction of the characters. As I wrote I kept running into conflicts of space and would have to rearrange the furniture and sometimes even the walls to make the action work.

I finally gave up and started from scratch, but before I wrote a word a created a diagram of the bar. I used a free flowcharting program I download which had a floorplan module. And it worked. As I started putting things in place I saw immediately what was wrong. I changed the rooms from being square to being long rectangles, the depth of the rooms, front and back, being much longer than they were wide. Then everything fell into place. The cramped width created the tension that was previously missing from the room, and the exaggerated length gave the trip to the back room much more the feel of a journey.

I should note that I have little artistic ability. The point isn’t the quality of the drawing I created, it is that using this tool helped me visual a space that I need to be just perfect, and it worked.

Why I Like: Hermann Hesse

Fortunately, the first book of Hesse’s that I read is still my favorite. DEMIAN was the first book I read where I had an emotional attachment. The title character’s attitudes towards, well just about everything, were frighteningly similar to my own. Tough my responses to those attitudes were quite unlike Demian’s. Only one other book has been even been close to this and that was Saul Bellow’s HERZOG, but that mirrored my life in my early middle ages, which was a much less conflicted time. Of all the books I’ve read those are the only two to reach me at the deepest levels of my brains secret rooms.

I use the word fortunately in my first sentence because, while I have read and enjoyed many of Hesse’s books, none have hit me like DEMIAN. That book gave Hesse a special place in my heart. For instance, if my introduction to Hesse had been ROSSHALDE, I may not have read another.

It was Hesse also that helped shape my own writing’s quests of spirituality. Though my journeys take place within the modern mechanized world, I may not have started these journeys without Hesse’s examples.

Most people when discussing Hesse tend to jump first into STEPPENWOLF. I have no dislike for the book, but it did not reach me like DEMIAN. Actually, what I consider my second favorite Hesse book is his last, THE GLASS BEAD GAME, a giant inside joke of a send up of education, biographies, epic stories and just about everything else that kept me from becoming a serious reader till I was in my forties.  

For me Hesse’s greatest strength was seeing the truth behind the veneer and exposing it without judgment. A skill I have yet to master.

Fighting the Inner Critic

My inner critic has multiple personality disorder. I’ve slowly been learning to deal with the louder, more obnoxious manifestations. The one that screams, “You Suck!” now gets the deflating, “It’s OK if I suck.” My belief in that statement is real and shuts him right up. The career-related taunts no longer get to me either. I’ve successfully transitioned from trying to be a success to trying to define my own place and writing persona.

So with the load-mouths silenced, what’s the problem? The problem is the sneaky little passive-aggressive voices that have taken me a long time to even associate with my inner critic. The lazy voices that don’t show themselves, sitting in the dark, staying under the radar and whispering dead-end detours to my subconscious.

The problem, I have finally realized, is the perceived failure of my two previous writing projects. What brought me to this realization was the decision to submit my first novel to agents. This action broke the spell. Of course, by failure I don’t mean the finished products themselves or their lack of sales. Both my novel and my book of short stories are as good as they could have been. My failure was a lack of confidence which prevented me from marketing them as aggressively as I could have. The relative success of this marketing is irrelevant, but if I don’t give it my all I’ll never get the closure which will allow me to move on to the next novel.

So the new novel gets put on hold again while I clean up some old business. I wonder what manifestation the inner critic will be forced to try next.

What I'm Reading

THE CURIOUS EAT THEMSELVES by John Straley

I'm not sure if I would have liked or disliked this book more if it wasn't so close in tone and execution to my own first, but unpublished, novel. In both this book and my own, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY, the hero and narrator just wanders through the story from lie to lie and manipulator to manipulator. Though Straley's hero, Cecil Younger, is supposed to be an experienced investigator he seems to have no more skill than my own hero, Alex Rebar, a mentally unstable used car buyer. That is the only valid criticism of the book. To complain about anything else would be hypocritical because my own book commits the same sins, if sins they be.

Here is the problem. I like my book. I have no delusions of its grandeur, but I like it. I thought it was unique. Now I know it isn't. It is very similar to at least one other book out there. Now I can't decide if my negative reaction to THE CURIOUS EAT THEMSELVES is jealousy of its success or seeing my own book's perceived faults in another.

Which ever it is it doesn't matter. I must recuse myself from a critical analysis of this book because of my obvious bias for and against it. Though I must thank Mr. Straley for one thing. I have been on the fence about trying to get my own novel published, but after reading his story the pendulum has swung me into action. I started working on a query letter for a literary agent last night.

Bad Rave Poetry

Ah the rain pain industrial jazz.
Japanese women and German men shouting American angst.
Lovely patterns spewing from drum kits.
Dancing with a girl in a gas mask.
Moving slow to fool the strobe lights.
Paranoid rituals, swarms of police cars.
Meaningless secrets told in sweaty release.
Discreet mistakes made at irregular intervals.
Sins and lies left on a mattress somewhere.

An outline ate my story

I never had any respect for outlines. Still don't. It's not the outlines tough, it's me. Trust me, I've tried. I read all the advice on how to write outlines and how they should be used only as a guide. It's OK to stray from the outline as the story develops. That's what the experts, writers I trust and respect, keep telling me. But I can't do it. Once the outline is written I'm locked. I'm stuck in the arbitrary cause-and-effect of my creative whim. No matter how hard I try I can't diverge from the plan. It's written on the page. To alter it would be a betrayal of the creative process. I am such a wuss! I am actually intimidated by authority figures of my own imagination. My inner critic is nothing but an anal-retentive bureaucrat.

Great Learning Resource

I started listening to these teleconferences found at the SF Writers Conference Site. The first one I listened to was an interview with Brenda Novak, a writer of romance novels. Don't get an attitude. I learned a pile of good stuff. Check them out.

This is a great example of how you need to be open to new things. Often when I'm doing research I am limited by my preconceived ideas. But here I opened up and took a chance and listened to what the romance writer had to say, mostly because her teleconference was the first one on the list, and I heard some great advice that I would have missed. It makes me wonder what else I might be missing out on.

Of course, there are limits. I spend some time every day trolling writer's forums and often come across very bad advice. I'm not saying that you need to take everyone's advice. Just don't dismiss out-of-hand people just because they are outside their comfort zone.

After all, who am I to be giving you all advice?

What I'm Reading

THE FLY ON THE WALL by Tony Hillerman

With this book I've now read both of Tony Hillerman's non-Navajo novels. The hero of this book is John Cotton, political reporter for a large newspaper in an unnamed upper mid-west city rather similar to Chicago. John isn't quite as endearing as Joe Leaphorn or Jim Chee, but he has his moments. I think Hillerman was going for the cynical but lovable rouge, but it took me some time to warm to the character, and while there were several ends left loose, I assume to be addressed in the follow-up that never happened, I found myself not all that curious about what might have happened next.

The murder, or rather murders, and the tale of their investigation by Mr. Cotton, himself the intended target of multiple attempts, was wonderfully told. While the actual killer's and the men pulling their strings were easy enough to identify, the true motive for the killings remained unknown until the very end. There were plenty of clues to this motive, but I was no better at picking up on them than our hero.

This book is a must for Hillermaniacs, and a good read for mystery fans in general, but especially fans of investigative reporter mysteries. Hillerman worked as a reporter before his novelist career so there is an air of authenticity about it.

Published: 1971
Found At: Bookman's on Grant Rd. in Tucson
Paid: $3.00 (More than I like to pay for a used paperback, but I HAD to have it.)
Favorite Inside Joke: Reference to the movie THE FRONT PAGE