B is for Blooms

                              

                        April 2, 2014     B  is for  Blooms

 

      We have two blooms today. Our hibiscus is sitting in the front doorway to catch what ever scrap of sunshine comes her way. Alas, no sunshine today.

       My mother didn't keep hibiscus in the house. In Oklahoma she had hardy hibiscus outside. She did have house plants that lived inside in the winter and outside in the summer.

      Momma was very like her plants. She thrived in the sunshine. Cloudy, winter days were not good for her. Daddy built her a dining area that had a wall of windows facing south. There was a big open yard between the house and the barn with woods all around. She had bird feeders and pans of water for the wild animals sharing her living space. They had chickens and rabbits and dairy goats. And sometimes a couple of pigs or steers. One to sell and one to put in the freezer. And Daddy always had a big vegetable garden.

      She would sit at her table smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and watching her world. And she would think. She wasn't much to talk about what she was thinking, but she wrote. Letters, mostly. This was in the days before facebook and blogging.

       Her sister lived two and a half or three hours away, so they didn't often get to visit. Momma didn't like to talk on the phone but she and Aunt Dorothy visited regularly by mail. Long newsy letters about the animals around them, their children, the weather.

      Both were readers so they knew how to tell a story. They evoked the senses. The way the sunlight glinted off the brilliant yellow of the cottonwood tree in the fall when the world around them was going grey and brown.

      The scent of old fashioned roses, of honeysuckle, and lilies of the valley. The deafening clatter of hail on the metal roof. The taste of English peas right out of the pod while she stood in the garden.

      The shock of a bobcat snatching one of her chickens and leaping the fence with it before she could get to it.

      The humor of a squirrel dropping an ear of corn it had stolen out of the garden. The little thief dropped it on the patio and proceeded to quarrel at the humans because they were sitting on that patio and it was afraid to come down and retrieve the corn.

      I don't know what my mother thought about the questions our culture seems obsessed with -- politics or religion or celebrity foibles. If they interested her, I don't remember her ever saying. But I do remember experiencing the world around us through her, and I learned to pay attention to that world myself.

A is for Antepenultimate

A to Z Blog Challenge -- Day 1 A is for Antepenultimate

 Into the Tunnel

by DragonWolfACe 

My Antepenultimate Re-Write

 

     I thought I was done. I sent my manuscript to my editor. I knew I'd have a re-write when she finished with it. There'd be grammatical errors, errors of continuity, conceptual errors, and errors I didn't even imagine. But I am a writer. I can fix them.

     This was to be my final re-write before sending it to my beta readers. When they finish with it, I might need to polish it a bit, then send it to press. That shouldn't take long. Right? And I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

      At some point I understood that there'd have to be one more re-write before I could send it out. I would read the whole story in its edited form and do whatever re-writing it needs. That light at the end of the tunnel was a bit farther away than I'd thought. But I've been writing it this long, a little longer will make improvements that make it worth doing. So this was my penultimate re-write.

      Penultimate is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as the next to the last.

     Then my editor dropped a bomb, "but you have to add three more scenes including a completely new final scene." But my final scene is perfect. I love my final scene just as it is. And that light is around the curve in the tunnel. And I can't tell how far away.

      "Kill your darlings," she says.

      That tunnel's floor is rutted and the walls are jagged. My way is not smooth or short. Well, damn.

      Words are my life. So, this is my antepenultimate re-write. Antepenultimate is defined as coming before the next to the last.

      Wish me luck.

Self-Publishing

 

    Friends, neighbors, and kin there is great danger out there for the would-be-published writer. Just like this selfie, the self-published book is likely to fall victim to the vagaries of amaturism.

      If a professional had taken the above photo, they would have at least suggested closing the bathroom door. Though I am relieved that my bathroom looks fairly clean. There would have been a suggestion that I comb my hair and put on a little make-up. And, without a doubt, the photographer would have made my face the focal point of the portrait. There may even have been an attempt to catch some facial expression other than this wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look of surprise. How I could have been surprised when the camera flashed, I cannot explain, since it was I who pushed the button.

      I bought a book yesterday from a self-published author. He was selling them cheap because his wife found some typos in them.

      I had high hopes for him and his book and terrible fears. I am completing my own book Murder on Ceres and plan to also self-publish. Oh, bless his heart, if the only problem with his book had been some typos.

      I believe writing a book is like building a house. You can build a house without experience or training as a carpenter, plumber, or electrician. But having always lived in a house does not qualify you to build a house that works. The same is true of writing a book. True, reading books is essential to writing them, but it's not enough.

      Where to begin? Desire always comes first. Always. Because everything else is hard, lonely work. Next is a good teacher. That can be expensive both in time and coin, but if you're serious, you will make arrangements. That's where desire comes in.

      I had the good fortune to find William Bernhardt. And it's not important what the teacher writes, only that they do write. And that they understand the mechanics of writing inside and out and upside down. Otherwise, unless you are a much quicker study than I, they won't be able to explain it so you can understand it.

     And then you have to listen to what they say. Personally, I do not like to be told. Anything. So my first reaction to any kind of instruction is negative. I never follow instructions until I discover for myself that my way won't work. After all, without the concept of mid-course corrections, we'd never have made it to the moon. And my mid-course correction involves arguing with my teacher, going away and thinking about what he said, and finally seeing that he is right. Then I apply it to my work.

     Bill Bernhardt has several pet sayings, one of which is "show, don't tell." The author of the book that started me on this rant, spends pages dropping brandnames and fancy places to tell us that his hero is rich and cool. There are ways to do this in a line or two. When an older woman is announced by her butler as "the Dowager Countess," we know we're looking at old, English money. When the hero climbs out of a natural gas powered Humvee, we've got a pretty good idea he's a former California-governor-type and his first name may be Arnold.

     If your hero's socio-economic status is not the main point of the story, please don't bore us with constant reminders of it. I promise we will remember that he drives a brand new Lexus even without your saying it every time he gets into or out of his car.

     Oh, yes, and that can easily get to be too much choreography. If he starts the page in Manhattan and ends two pages later on Long Island, we don't need a turn-by-turn narrative of his trip. Unless it somehow shows up later in the story and we were supposed to remember it because the bad guy takes a different route. In which case, the writer will have to make this clear some other way, because I will not remember all those turns and probably won't continue reading long enough to get to the bad guy. 

     There are lots of other opportunities to fall on our butts when we self-publish, but you're probably as tired of reading this right now, as I am tired of writing it. Besides, I have a re-write to finish.

     Bill has a website with his seminars listed and he has several good books and videos on the art and science of writing. Check him out at www.williambernhardt.com/



Editors! Who Needs 'em?

 

   I do. That's who. Everyone who writes for public consumption does. And we need editors for lots of reasons.

   This is a picture of a page from Murder on Ceres, my science fiction murder mystery. Please note all the red ink. That's from my editor. The green is mine.

   I use Spell Check, Google, The American Heritage Dictionary, and Microsoft's Synonyms. I read Isaac Asimov and John Lescroat. I watch Neil deGrasse Tyson and Masterpiece Mystery! on PBS. I am prepared to write (and rewrite) this book.

   Still my manuscript comes back from the editor with blood all over it.

   I read and watch lots of other things, all of which increase my vocabulary. A large vocabulary, unfortunately, does not guarantee clear communication. The picture above is an excellent example.

   In this scene my protagonist is verbally assaulted by his aunt as she takes him in to talk to his uncle. I wrote, "Unaware of his wife's broadside, Dmitri stood and extended his hand."

   My editor wrote in red,  "of her what? It sounds like you're talking about her butt."

   Obviously my editor was crazy. Where did she get THAT?

   Did I mention that I have a long history of reading naval war books?

   So, enter a twenty-something man. I read to him the passage as I had written it, assuming his reading background was sufficient to make familiar to him the term "broadside." And he blurted, "What did he do to her butt?"

   Definitely a laugh-out-loud moment.

   I think my choices are to change the word or send a copy of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander to all who buy my book with the requirement that they read it first so they will be properly prepared to read my book.



November 22, 1963 -- November 22, 2013

 President Kennedy's Grave

with the Lincoln Memorial in the background

 

   I knew this year would be worse than last year or eleven years ago or forty-three years ago. I knew the media would fill the days leading to my birthday with questions and comments and constant reprise of the Zapruder film. That's right. My birthday.
   Sometimes Thanksgiving falls on my birthday, but the anniversary of President Kennedy's murder always falls on my birthday.
   November 22, 1963, my sixteenth birthday. My world was already dangerous. We were in the middle of the Cold War. My best friend's father had flown in the Berlin Airlift several years before and we had been afraid a Third World War would start then. President Kennedy had threatened the Soviet Union if they did not remove their missiles from Cuba. And we had been afraid of nuclear war then. Women's magazines had recipes and diets and articles about home bomb shelters. We had tornado drills at school and bomb drills.
   Fear was already a backdrop for my life. But like other almost-sixteen-year-olds, backdrops are just that. Mind catching each time they change, but quickly moved to the background as the activities of  life took center stage. And each time the scary moment passed, somehow my sense of security was recovered and all the dangers of the world receded.
   And then a man murdered President Kennedy. An English-speaking, white American whom I would not have recognized as different from my neighbors or me had I met him on November 21, 1963. And he did it in Dallas, Texas, a city more like my Oklahoma City than any other major American city. It was too close to home. It would not recede into any background.
   The murder of President Kennedy was the end of my sense of security, just as Pearl Harbor must have been the end of my parents' and the murder of President Lincoln must have been for Walt Whitman's generation and the burning of Washington, D.C., must have been for the young people of the War of 1812.
   Each of us must surely come to the realization that the concept of 'security' is false. That the concept of ideal is illusion. For me it came with the assassination of JFK. For my son it was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. For my daughter, fifteen years younger than my son, it was September 11. I don't know what it will be for my grandchildren, but it will surely happen. And the event will be just as shocking and just as threatening. It will not recede into a backdrop but become the next layer of tragedy on which our human condition rises.
   For every tragedy that reminds us how fragile and flawed we humans are, there are countless triumphs. The English burned our capital city, but with each generation we come closer to achieving a class-free society. And truly, so do those English and the rest of the world. President Lincoln was murdered and freedom and equality for all may have been delayed, but with each generation we come closer. And Pearl Harbor did not begin the end of human civilization, but began the end of another in the list of tyrants who would subjugate humanity. A long list that each generation faces.
   I gave up on security and ideals a long time ago. Fifty years ago, to be precise. But I do not give up on humanity. And hope is a great replacement for security.

On Re-reading The Wheel of Time

 

 

I do not have a history as a re-reader of fiction. Nonfiction, certainly. But there the point of re-reading is obvious. To check a date, to confirm a fact, to pursue a deeper understanding. But fiction? I do not feel the need to recheck fictional facts or fictional dates. And, for that matter, if I didn’t understand it the first time through, I only read it because of some obsessive-compulsive need to complete the damned book once I started it and I surely was not going to start it again. There are too many good novels out there and too little time. And I have not historically considered fantasy very high in that endless list of good novels.

But something is different about The Wheel of Time. The first time I read it, I was in such a hurry to find out what happened next that I missed the construction of the plot. I did not consciously appreciate the character development. I was only dimly aware of the author drawing me into an addictive relationship.

The story-line is straight forward. The hero grows to young adulthood in The Two Rivers, a simple agrarian society. An egalitarian culture that respected work and common sense. Where social status was determined by an individual’s contribution to the community. A narrow society that had little contact with the wider world. The hero and his hometown friends are pulled away from their comforting and comprehensible way of life and thrown into the fascinating, exciting, and always dangerous rest of the world.

The fourteen volumes of the series add up to one long chase scene. The author chivvies us along as the characters flee certain death or chase dangerous villains. From battle to battle with no time to rest, until we miss our reasonable bedtimes and delay our real-world duties. Until we get to Tarmon Gai'don, the final battle, and find out if the good guy wins and preserves The Wheel of Time and saves the whole world.

Simple. Typical American, Abe Lincoln story. No high-born hero necessary.

But the plot. It’s only during this re-reading that I appreciate the true superhero of this story. It’s the author, Robert Jordan. Not only did he construct a coherent world, invent characters in numbers of which Cecil B. De Mille would have boasted, and imagine more daring exploits and dire circumstances than I can comprehend (even after having experienced them vicariously during the first read through) but he got me to read fourteen volumes of fantasy.

His characters are introduced in the first book. So many that during my first reading I forgot their names and their faces until they appeared again and again throughout the story. Now as I read, I remember what they will do, who they will prove to be. I see how the author has drawn them in 3D and full-color. It’s no wonder I cared so much about them.

Their own individual stories weave and wind, over, around, and through each other. When I read it before, I would be frustrated when Jordan left whatever character we were following to follow another. And then again, when he would leave that character to follow yet another. And then again and again, until they came together only to move apart again. A dance of stories, sometimes a stately minuet, but more often, a square dance that I would have to follow without a caller to say what the next movement would be.

This time, I do not worry about what will happen next. I watch the intricate steps and recognize the changes in rhythm. I see the story as though it were a dear friend’s face, at once familiar. And still intriguing as the light plays across angles and planes reflecting all manner of thought and emotion.

When asked in the past to name my favorite novel, I would say John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. But I think now I must say The Wheel of Time is my favorite novel, though it be fourteen books long.

Portrait of a Writer

 

 

 

 



Spoiler alert! I tell how my novel Murder on Ceres ends.
  
   It's been a long time coming, but I am a writer. What did it take? A novel.

   I've been writing since the Third Grade. In those days it was short fiction and poetry. I didn't know I was writing short fiction. It was just stories. But I knew when I wrote poetry because it rhymed. My teachers were always supportive. When the weather outside was too cold or too rainy we stayed indoors during recess and the teacher read my stories. My status among my peers was guaranteed--writing and tether ball.

   There was never a suggestion that I should submit my work for publication. I don't think anyone I knew had any personal experience with the publishing world. In fact, I was a Senior in High School before I met anyone who'd been published. I don't remember his name, but I remember listening to him talk about a story he'd had accepted by a major magazine. Playboy, actually. Such an exotic publication. Not available over the counter in my small Oklahoma town. And then he said that of the national magazines that published fiction, they paid the most money. Money? How cool was that! Of course not even he envisioned quiting his day job. He was the editor of the local newspaper. Journalism, however, did not qualify as writing as far as I was concerned. After all I wrote for our school newspaper and later for that same small-town, twice a week newspaper.

   But I came to understand there were writers actually living and working in the real world, right then.

   College expanded my world exponentially. I went to poetry readings. They read famous long dead poets like William Shakespeare and Emily Dickenson. They read recently dead poets like e. e. cummings. Antiwar poets like Amy Lowell from my grandfathers' war. And their own antiwar poetry from our own war. And sometimes it rhymed, but more often not. Somehow poets did not qualify in my mind as writers. After all I could and did write poetry.

   My resume became an amalgam of the American working life--office worker, newspaper reporter/photographer/editor, welfare caseworker,  fast-food store manager, oil field hand, etc., etc., ad infinitum. I took up saying I was preparing for a career as a writer or a stand-up comedian.
  
   Well now I've done it. I completed the first draft of a novel.

   Murder on Ceres  takes place in the future when the center of civilization is located on the many colonies off Mars. Humans continue their exploration and exploitation of the universe. They choose their own evolution. They live longer, healthier lives. Nations and wars of nationalism are things of the past. But, for all their progress, humans are still humans and murder happens.
   
   My hero, Rafe Sirocco, a newly-minted police detective investigates his first murder. Dedication to his job endangers his marriage, the lives of his young wife and their unborn child, and, in the end, his own life.
 
   And how does this who-done-it come out? I typed these final words.

"The   End"

 

   And became a writer.