Novel’s complete at 50,122 words!

At least, I think it’s complete. Last time I thought it was done, there turned out to be another 45,000 words of story to tell in there.

The cut-off point this time felt more natural, but could seem just as arbitrary to a reader.

Only way to find out for sure is to hand it off to those brave friends willing to read and offer feedback on something so rough and ragged (bless you all).

Till then, it’s back to editing my other projects. I’ve had some ideas for how to trim my first novel into a better shape. cracks knuckles

Hope you have a Happy New Year! May your words sparkle, your stories captivate, and your edits be painless :)

Other people have more and better things to say, so I’ll just link to my favorite, an article highlighting Fisher’s talents as a writer.

What Went Wrong

Let’s start with the protagonist. Throughout the movie, she is almost completely passive. I don’t know if the actress is any good or not, because most of her screen time consists of her gazing gratefully at the men that are doing things for her.

Compare this with Rey, who we see surviving just on her wits and her skills in her first few minutes of screen time.

An example of how blatant her passivity is: in one scene, there’s a glorified claw game that needs to be manipulated. Not difficult, certainly something that anyone with any manual dexterity at all could use. But rather than grab the controls herself, and execute the mission we’re supposed to believe she passionately wants to succeed, she hangs back and let’s the nameless guy next to her take over.

Her actions are just one piece of the story that’s problematic. At several junctions, characters make decisions that are out of step with what we know about them, and don’t make sense within the world as a whole. Why assassinate an enemy scientist, when you could capture them? Why send a signal to a fleet that you’re on the planet surface, when the reason they’re there is because they know you’re on the surface?

Why film a 2-minute scene with one of the classic villains of cinema, just for him to throw puns?

Perhaps the film as shot would have better explained all of these inconsistencies. But the edited film is so choppy, so eager to hop from place to place and set of characters to set of characters, that it becomes a confusing mess. We never spend enough time with the protagonist to care about her, or any of her companions (save for two, which I’ll get to later).

Again, I can’t help but contrast it with Episode VII, which used long takes and wide establishing shots to give us a sense of mood and place. And for the protagonist, it takes its time letting us know who she is, following her for a day before the main storyline gets going.

We get no such chance to learn about the protagonist of Rogue One. Only 2 min scene followed by 2 min scene, emotional beats chopped off at the wrist, ad infinitum.

How To Fix It

That’s a great story. It directly addresses the moral problems in the Star Wars universe, where we’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of a battle station on which hundreds of thousands of people were living and working. Were they all worthy of death?

Unfortunately, that story has been buried underneath disconnected characters, sloppy editing, and a tension-free plot.

We need to make some major plot tweaks, trim several characters, and bring the focus back to the central character.

We open by fleshing out the party scene that was a 10-second fuzzy flashback in the film. It’s a good-bye party for her dad, one last night of drinking and dancing in his Imperial uniform before moving out to farm country. Jyn’s sneaking downstairs to grab some extra dessert after bedtime, mostly oblivious to the dialog between her father and the Director (who is trying to convince him to stay, ribbing him about getting his hands dirty, etc). She gets caught, of course, giving her father a chance to sweep her up in arms and dote on her, calling her by her nickname.

Right away, we establish that we’re going to humanize the Imperials a little, and that our protagonist’s allegiance might be ambiguous.

Next we show the family at work on the farm, years later. Jyn doing chores, eating with her parents.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s their old family friend, the Director.

Her father invites him inside, outwardly friendly but it’s clear there’s tension between them.

They talk. The Director pushes her father to come back to work. Says he can’t do it without him. When her dad refuses, the Director responds with a threat: “You won’t like it when I come back tomorrow. I won’t be alone.”

Her dad again refuses, and the Director leaves. Her parents stay up late, talking about what to do. They decide Jyn and her mom should leave at first light, heading to the shelter.

But when the Director returns the next day, with troops, as promised, they’re ambushed by a rebel squadron. Jyn and her mom flee as her dad is captured, but her mom is killed in the crossfire – by the rebels.

Jyn gets to the shelter, waits as she was told, where she’s found by Saw.

Now we’ve established a lot of backstory in just a few scenes: the ambiguous relationship her father has with the Empire, the dangers of living in a civil war, and why Jyn might hate the rebels as much as she mistrusts Imperials.

Next scene: Jyn a little older, running a scam for Saw. We learn Saw is a scoundrel, one of those living just outside the law that sometimes help the rebels, sometimes the Imperials, as suits them. She returns home, flush with cash, when she sees a rebel leader leaving. She confronts Saw, finds he’s been helping the rebels out, sometimes without pay. Angry that he’s working with those that killed her mother, she strikes out on her own, leaving Saw’s home and his friends.

So now we have more backstory, another layer to Jyn’s personality. And we’ve introduced Saw, and know who he is and what he’s doing in the movie. We care about both, the protagonist and her surrogate father. We can take either side in their argument, and feel justified.

Next we see Jyn, a little older now, committing another theft. She gets caught this time, and sentenced to a labor camp for her crimes. It’d be nice if we could see an example of swift-but-cruel Imperial justice here. It would give the audience a reason to lean toward the rebel side later on.

The rebels attack the prison transport, freeing everyone, including her. Most of her fellow prisoners are rebels, but she curses them. They restrain her, take her back to base – can’t let her go, she’ll run right to the Imperials and give them away – where they find out who she is, and her connection with Saw.

Saw, it turns out, is their only connection with a mole deep inside the Emperor’s Death Star project. The mole’s used Saw to pass intelligence to them for years. Saw’s holding the last message for ransom, though. He says it’s too important to let go without getting properly paid for it.

The rebels make Jyn a deal: if she meets with Saw, and negotiates a fair price, they’ll let her go.

She agrees. They assign her Cassian and the droid as her minders (jailers), and send her off.

She still meets Chirrut and Baze, but not as strangers. She knows them both, because she grew up on their planet. They know where Saw is, and readily take her there (after disposing of the Stormtrooper patrol that tries to grab them).

Notice: we don’t need any backstory on Cassian, or the pilot, or any mysterious goons working for Saw that capture them. Since everyone knows each other, we can spend more time showing what matters. Also, the stakes are higher, because these characters all have relationships with each other.

We also don’t need any scenes showing Director Krennic and his problems. Why do we care? It’s enough to see the Death Star looming over the horizon, and firing on the city. We can find out later they did it just to test-fire it.

So, we have Jyn reunited with Saw. This scene is filled with tension now: will he welcome her back? Will she put aside her antipathy for rebels long enough to get free?

And: what’s the message Saw’s holding on to?

Saw is glad to see her, still feels guilty for letting her go. Won’t stop working with the rebels, though. He’s seen too much of the Imperial yoke to want to wear it forever. Jyn says she doesn’t want to negotiate, that her jailer should do that.

Saw tells her negotiating won’t be necessary. Because the message is for her.

That’s when he takes her back and plays it for her. She hears her father for the first time in years, explaining how he was taken from her, and how he’s been working against the Empire from within.

This scene is the turning point of Act One. The moment when Jyn starts to have something to live for besides herself. And when she starts tilting toward the rebel side.

We still have the Death Star blow up the town, and Saw’s people have to leave. He doesn’t hang back to commit a pointless suicide, though.

Instead, the pilot kills him.

We don’t know anything about the pilot at this point. We’re told he defected, and so Cassian breaks him out of jail when things start collapsing around them. He breaks off from the group, though, and finds Saw gathering some last-minute things to take with him (including the message from Jyn’s dad).

The pilot shoots Saw, then hurries to the transport. Tells everyone Saw died under a pile of rubble. Too bad the message was lost.

Because the pilot’s a double agent. The Emperor’s set one of his classic traps for the rebels: give them what they think they want, but be there to snatch it away at the last minute.

Now we’ve got a reason for the pilot to matter, for the audience to care about him. And to worry about Jyn’s survival.

They get back to the rebel base, where they’re assigned to go fetch Jyn’s dad, now that they know he’s the mole.

Cassian still gets secret orders, but they’re to kill her father only if it looks like he’ll be captured and interrogated by the Imperials. Since he’s been their mole for so long, if they fail to get him out, the Empire can learn exactly how much they know, and change it so their knowledge is useless.

They get there, stage a rescue, but it all goes bad when Imperials bomb the place. The pilot, forced off his vantage point by Cassian (who was readying his sniper rifle), used the opportunity to sneak off and radio them what was going on.

So no Director Krennic, but we still have Cassian make a choice not to kill Jyn’s dad, when it’s clear the mission has failed and the Imperials know about their mole. He and Jyn still have a fight as they take off in a stolen shuttle, but this time it’s him as the only rebel against her crew of rogues, instead of Jyn the captive against a group that Cassian leads.

When they get back, there’s more reasons for Jyn to abandon the rebel cause. She makes her case to the Council – shrunk to just a dozen people, instead of seemingly everyone in the rebellion crowded into one room – but they decide not to go after the Death Star plans. They want to prep for a conventional assault on the station, they don’t want to waste people and resources on a likely suicide mission with dubious benefit.

She’s crushed, wondering what to do, when Mon Mothma takes her aside. She can’t give her any official backing, she tells Jyn, but she can see that she gets off the base safely and has access to enough equipment to pull off her raid to get the Death Star plans.

So there’s hope. Jyn gathers her crew – the defecting pilot, the two temple priests from her childhood – and starts prepping the raid. Cassian comes to her, asking to be part of it, to prove to her that he can be trusted.

She agrees, and her crew is complete. There’s no group of redshirts going with them. They’re going in stealthy and quiet, using the pilot’s knowledge of the facility and her ability to get into places she shouldn’t to pull it off.

One more change: as they’re stealing the shuttle for their mission, and asked for the call sign, she tells the pilot: “Tell them our call sign is Rogue. Rogue One.” It’s a symbol of her independence, her refusal to submit to authority of any kind, no matter how seemingly benign. She’s on the rebel side, for now, but she’s not really a rebel. She’s a rogue.

When they get to the planet, things still go pear-shaped. The pilot betrays them again, radioing Darth Vader that the rebels are there.

His betrayal turns out to be a boon, though: since he’s connected them to the Imperial network, they’re able to get a signal to the rebel fleet that they’ve gotten the tape, and they should send a ship into orbit to receive the transmission.

So we still get our space battle, with the rebels sending in more and more ships to both get the plans and then try to get their people off the surface (which is the real reason they need to drop the planet’s defense shield). We still have Jyn’s squad being picked off one by one, as they race against time to both get the plans and get them transmitted off-world.

But having spent so much more time with them, as a group, we care more. The victory – their victory – comes at a high price.

Amazing. I had no idea Wonder Woman was so directly connected to the history of American feminism. Lepore’s account shows how Wonder Woman joins the feminism and suffragist movements of 1910-1920 to the second wave of the 1970s.

Weaves together family histories, feminist politics, and all the messy complications of love without pulling punches or demonizing any of the participants. An incredible book.

Three things I learned:

• Feminists (word arises around 1910) distinguished themselves from 19th century reformers by saying women and men were equal in all ways, that neither sex was superior to the other in any way, and that women therefore deserved equal rights.
• Not only did the Harvard of 1910s not admit women, they weren't even allowed to speak on campus. When the Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage invited British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to speak, they had to book Brattle Hall, in nearby Cambridge, because she was not allowed on campus.
• Margaret Sanger and Ethyl Byrne (sisters), both trained nurses, opened a birth control clinic in New York in 1916. Women lined up for blocks to get in, till the two were arrested: it was illegal to even talk about contraception in New York (!)

Novel’s at 39,412 words.

Decided to brainstorm my way out of being lost. I took the climax I’m working toward, and mapped out short, medium, and long ways to get there.

They all had scenes in common, but only the long path gave me the chance to wrap up all of the plotlines I’ve got going.

So I’m taking the long path.

It’s still likely to end up a short novel. I’m definitely in the final third of the book, so I know I need to pile on the pressure to build things toward my climax.

With luck (and a lot of work), I’ll be finished somewhere around the first of the year.

Then I can turn back to editing my second novel, and maybe doing another pass on my first novel, and another edit on this short story I wrote in September…

sighs Maybe best to ignore that for now. One story at a time.

Riveting. Perlstein’s book is long, but moves at a fast clip; I stayed up late three nights in a row to finish the last half of the book.

He doesn’t explicitly draw any analogies with our last few elections, but the parallels are there: disillusioned voters; party elites that ignored insurgencies until it was too late to stop them; division of the world into good people and bad people, with any tactics that stopped the bad people allowed.

Not exactly comforting, but it did make me feel better to know that these problems are not new, and they can be overcome.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• Republican Party of 1976 was much more liberal: party platform that year supported the Equal Rights Amendment, like it had every year since 1940.
• The idea that there are still hundreds of POWs in Vietnam is based on a lie: Nixon inflated the number of POWs from 587 to 1,600 so North Vietnam looked worse. Once the real POWs came home, he didn't reveal the truth.
• New York City almost declared bankruptcy in 1975. When the city asked President Ford's government to bail them out, Ford (and Reagan, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney) not only said no, they were glad to see the great city brought low.

Novel’s at 33,986 words.

I’m at a point where I’m not sure how much story is left to tell.

I could be two-thirds of the way through, and so on my way to the end. If so, I should be quickening the pace in each scene, pushing the narrative forward faster and faster to reach the climax.

Or I could just be halfway through. In which case, I should be steadily building toward the next major turning point in the story, pacing things so that the reader’s not exhausted by the end of the book.

I feel like this is something I should know.

I’ve got the rest of the book outlined (even if it’s in my head). I know the scene for the story’s climax. I know the characters that are there, and what happens afterward. But damned if I don’t know how they got there, or how much time there is between the scene I’m currently writing and the last one.

It mystifies me that the only way to find out is for me to write it. As if I weren’t writing a story, but reporting on events. And until those events happen, I’ve got nothing to report.

NaNoWriMo’s over. Final word count: 30,836.

So, I didn’t make it to 50,000 this year. But I don’t want to dwell on that.

Here’s what I did do:

• I started a new novel, which is still not easy for me.
• I proved I could still write 4,000 words in a single day, like I did last Saturday.
• I learned that starting with a short story set in the world does help when it comes time to write the novel. I've written more each day, and more easily, for this novel than the previous one.

More modest than NaNoWriMo, true, but I think it’ll keep me focused, keep me pushing forward on the book. I’d like to have this first draft done in three months instead of twelve, so I can spend more time revising it.

Wish me luck.

Life changing.

It’s changed the way I watch movies. As I watch I’m now looking for the beats within each scene, paying attention to the rise and fall of emotional charge throughout the film.

It’s altered the way I’m approaching the novel I’m currently writing, helping me to think more clearly about each scene and its purpose in the book.

It’s even got me thinking about going back to outlining everything before starting.

If you’re a writer, I think this book is essential. It’s forever altered the way I approach my writing, and somehow made me more confident in what I’m doing, even as it’s shown me what I’m doing wrong.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Archetypal stories uncover a universal human experience and wrap it in a singular cultural expression. Stereotypical stories do the opposite: dress a singular experience in generalities.
• An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.
• California scenes: two characters that hardly know each other share deep secrets about their past. It happens, but only in California. Nowhere else.

What Went Wrong

Unfortunately, they had enough material for at least three movies. Stuffing them all into the same film just squeezed them all so they couldn’t breathe.

But we can fix that.

How to Fix It

There’s at least three plots I can see that could carry their own films. First, there’s Scamander and the gang searching for the fantastic beasts that escaped from his bag. Second (the least-fleshed-out plot), there’s Langdon Shaw (son of the newspaper man) and his attempts to impress his father with a big scoop. Finally, there’s Graves and his hunt for the obscurus' host.

Each one of these could easily be their own movie. It would give us more time with all the characters, allow their relationships to deepen, and give more time to setup Graves as a friend that betrays Scamander and the gang, instead of leaning on “oh that’s Colin Farrell, he’s definitely the bad guy.”

So how would we fill out each of these plots, to make them a full movie?

The first plot doesn’t really need anything. Having Scamander come to New York and meet the other main characters while trying to re-capture his fantastic beasts is enough. This time, though, we make Graves a friend of the group, someone who understands them and argues with the President (who is the antagonist for this first film) for leniency.

Of course, Graves is only doing it because: a) he wants to use Scamander’s knowledge for his own ends, and b) the beasts in question are illegal, and anyone willing to break laws is a potential ally of his.

Also this way, we don’t have to have Kowalski lose all knowledge of Queenie. We can give them a proper happy ending, with them starting a secret romance.

The second plot needs the most filling out. We already have a hook to get it started, though: Scamander comes back to New York to hand-deliver his book to Tina. While there, they go to see a circus, where there just happens to be a magical creature that’s been captured. It’s on display as something other than it is, and everyone thinks it’s fake.

But: Shaw’s son suspects it might be real, and starts investigating. Meanwhile, Scamander and Tina are arguing because he wants to rescue the magical beast, while Tina (and her bosses) want to keep it under wraps, for fear of revealing magic to society at large.

Eventually, the creature escapes, forcing all four of the gang to join forces again to track it down and trap it before it causes so much damage that Shaw’s son gets his scoop. After they succeed, we get to see Scamander’s mass obliviate trick (just not the whole city, that’s ridiculous). Shaw’s son, frustrated and angry at being embarrassed in front of his father, stumbles upon the Second Salem group, who tell him what he’s come to suspect: witches live among us.

The third movie is the hunt for the obscurus. Scamander is again visiting Tina – maybe to ask her to marry him? – when Creedance’s powers start to spin out of control. This time, when Senator Shaw is murdered, we’ve got a lot more invested in the newspaper family, and Langdon’s step forward with the “solution” for his father will carry a lot more emotional weight.

We get the same climax, the same reveal of Graves as the villain, etc. But now we’ve spent three movies with all these characters, and everything that happens means more.

Novel’s at 19,170 words.

Limped along with 500 words a day through the week, then managed to crank out 2,000 words yesterday. Hoping to do the same today, and tomorrow, and Sunday.

I need to be writing about 5,000 words a day, to make the NaNoWriMo deadline. That’s…probably not going to happen.

I have to try, though. Even if I don’t get to 50,000 words this month, I’m still going to finish the novel. So every word still counts.

You’re a nurse. You go in to interview for a new job at a hospital. You’re nervous, but confident you’ll get the job: you’ve got ten years of experience, and a glowing recommendation from your last hospital.

You get to the interview room. There must be a mistake, though. The room number they gave you is an operating room.

You go in anyway. The interviewer greets you, clipboard in hand. He tells you to scrub up, join the operation in progress.

“But I don’t know anything about this patient,” you say. “Or this hospital.”

They wave away your worries. “You’re a nurse, aren’t you? Get in there and prove it.”

….

You’re a therapist. You’ve spent years counseling couples, helping them come to grips with the flaws in their relationship.

You arrive for your interview with a new practice. They shake your hand, then take you into a room where two men are screaming at each other. Without introducing you, the interviewer pushes you forward.

“Fix them,” he whispers.

…

You’re a pilot, trying to get a better job at a rival airline. When you arrive at your interview, they whisk you onto a transatlantic flight and sit you in the captain’s chair.

“Fly us there,” they say.

…

You’re a software engineer. You’ve been doing it for ten years. You’ve seen tech fads come and go. You’ve worked for tiny startups, big companies, and everything in-between. Your last gig got acquired, which is why you’re looking for a new challenge.

The interviewers – there’s three of them, which makes you nervous – smile and shake your hand. After introducing themselves, they wave at the whiteboard behind you.

“Code for us.”

I refuse to believe that Trump’s election is a moment of ‘crisis’ for liberalism.

We’ve always been under siege. We’ve always been fighting uphill.

We were fighting uphill when we were abolitionists. We were fighting uphill when we worked to win the right to vote for the women of this country.

We were even fighting uphill when we wanted to stand with Britain in World War II. Not many people know this, but many in this country wanted to stay out, to let the Nazis and the Soviets divide up Europe between them, and let Japan have Asia. It took liberals like FDR to stand up and say, “That’s not the world we want to live in.”

Every time, we have been in the right. It has just taken a while for the rest of the country to see it.

I am reminded of MLK’s phrase, “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” I remember the victories of the recent past, when we expanded the right to marry to same-sex couples. When we finally decriminalized a drug less harmful than alcohol. When we made health insurance affordable for 20 million more Americans.

This is not a crisis for liberalism. It isn’t the last gasp of conservatism, either, a desperate attempt by the powerful to stave off change.

They are always fighting us. And we are always winning.

This time will be no different.

Novel’s at 12,104 words.

I’m seriously behind. About 18,000 words behind, to be more specific.

Trying to tell myself that every word written is a victory, and it’s enough to just have the novel started. That works. Sometimes.

And sometimes I just want to take the day off work, so I can write.

Because I’m also looking at the short story I’m supposed to revise, the previous novel I should be editing, and the one before that that I should be sending round to more agents.

I put all that on hold so I “focus” on NaNoWriMo. But if I’m already slipping behind on this month’s writing, maybe I shouldn’t have?

How far behind am I going to get on those projects, while I struggle through this one?

Fascinating. Covers the first Roman millennium, from ~750 BCE to 212 CE, but with the specific goal of highlighting where our common conceptions of ancient Rome are wrong, and how many of our current political and cultural debates go back to the days of the Republic.

This means the chapters aren’t strictly chronological, and sometimes double-back on the same period to illuminate a different side of it. Each is written well, though, and offers interesting facts of its own.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Many of the things that make us squeamish about the Romans (gladiator fights, Caesar's brutality during the wars in Gaul) were criticized at the time by the Romans themselves
• Unlike most ancient empires, Rome was welcoming to immigrants and former slaves (in fact, their system of manumission was the first of its kind)
• Ancient Romans were clean-shaven, going back as far as 300 BCE

Haven’t been able to write since Tuesday. I’ve been too hurt, too confused, too angry to spin up my imagination and write about what’s happening in that other world.

It doesn’t help that it’s supposed to be a light book, full of whimsy and humor.

I don’t feel very funny anymore.

But I’ve got to get back to it.

Maybe the book will turn out a little darker than I’d intended, now. Or maybe I’ll find a way to recapture the fun spirit I started with, and use the book to remind myself of the good things that are still out there: the wife that loves me, the friends that support me, the peers that understand what’s happening, and forgive.

But most of all I need to finish it because this book has suddenly become more explicitly political than I intended.

My main character is a lesbian, which when I started out was just the way the character came into my head. Now it feels like writing her is an act of defiance, a way of pushing back against Trump and his ilk.

No one else may ever read this book, and it may never be good enough to be published. But damned if I won’t finish it, and make it as good as I can make it.

Because the importance of minority representation in fiction has just hit home to me, and I want to do my part.

How can I write, when my heart is broken?

How can I work, knowing my country doesn’t want me, or my wife, or my friends, to live how we want to live, or believe what we want to believe?

How can I stay, when staying means accepting?

How can I speak, when every word marks me out as different?

Tomorrow may be better.

But today, today my heart is broken.

Went back to finish the short story, as prep for converting it into a novel for NaNoWriMo…and found I couldn’t finish it, because there was too much more to tell.

Which is a relief, actually, because it means I don’t have to throw the short story away and start over, or worry about having enough depth in the setting and the characters for a novel. The short story is the intro to the novel, the opening scene(s), setting the stage for everything that follows.

This has never happened to me before. But then, it’s only my third novel, so what do I know?

Now I’m working up the outline of the book, discovering plots and subplots I didn’t know were waiting inside the short story.

It’s a process that’s both fun and terrifying, like doing improv sketches in front of a video camera instead of an audience: you have to hope the jokes land, because you won’t know until long after you’re done performing.

It’s 50,000 words to win NaNoWriMo. I’ve got a head full of ideas, a half-finished short-story, no outline, and no plot.

Hit it!

Made good progress on three different projects this week.

First, the finished fantasy novel. I’ve pushed my first query letter out to my first choice of agent!

I don’t know how hitting Send on an email could make me so tense, but it felt like I was walking on stage in front of a crowd of thousands. But now it’s done, and I can use the synopsis from that letter to build other queries for other agents.

Second, I started workshopping a short story for the first time.

A fellow writer recommended LitReactor to me last year; this week I finally worked up the courage to join and post something for review. It’s a story I wrote on the plane home from New York last month. I’ve already gotten some good feedback on it, and will probably post a second story there soon.

Which brings to me to the third project: NaNoWriMo prep. I finished the short story (!) that I wanted to use to test out the concept. I think there’s definitely more to tell, there, though I’m not sure if I have enough for a full novel. Maybe just a series of stories.

Guess there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to dive in and see how far I can get.

I really want to do NaNoWriMo again this year. Last time, it helped me finally dig in and start a novel, pushing me to get 50,000 words in before the end of November, and then finish it over the following months.

That same novel is now edited and ready for querying. I’ve spent this week drafting a query letter, one I’ll be editing this next week before starting to send out.

At the same time, I need to prep for NaNoWriMo, so I’ve also begun writing a new short story. It’s from an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a few years. I think there may be a novel’s worth of story in there, but I don’t want to dive in to one without some prep work.

So I’m writing a short story set in that world first, to see if it has legs. It’s something I did (without knowing it) for my first novel, and skipped – because I didn’t know it was something you could deliberately do – for the second.

Since I found the first novel much easier to write, and I’ve heard other writers mention using the short story as a way to explore a novel idea, I’m going to try it out.

If it works, I’ll have something solid to work with as I build my outline for NaNoWriMo. If it doesn’t, then at least I’ve only invested a week or two (instead of months).

Continuing on to the next language in the book: Factor.

Factor is…strange, and often frustrating. Where Lua felt simple and easy, Factor feels simple but hard.

Its concatenative syntax looks clean, just a list of words written out in order, but reading it requires you to keep a mental stack in your head at all times, so you can predict what the code does.

Here’s what I learned:

Day One

• not functions, words
• pull and push onto the stack
• no operator precedence, the math words are applied in order like everything else
• whitespace is significant
• not anonymous functions: quotations
• `if` needs quotations as the true and false branches
• data pushed onto stack can become "out of reach" when more data gets pushed onto it (ex: store a string, and then a number, the number is all you can reach)
• the `.` word becomes critical, then, for seeing the result of operations without pushing new values on the stack
• also have shuffle words for just this purpose (manipulating the stack)
• help documentation crashes; no listing online for how to get word docs in listener (plenty for vocab help, but that doesn't help me)
• factor is really hard to google for

Day Two

• word definitions must list how many values they take from the stack and how many they put back
• names in those definitions are not args, since they are arbitrary (not used in the word code itself)
• named global vars: symbols (have get and set; aka getters and setters)
• standalone code imports NOTHING, have to pull in all needed vocabularies by hand
• really, really hate the factor documentation
• for example, claims strings implement the sequence protocol, but that's not exactly true...can't use "suffix" on a string, for example

Day Three

• not maps, TUPLES
• auto-magically created getters and setters for all
• often just use f for an empty value
• is nice to be able to just write out lists of functions and not have to worry about explicit names for their arguments all over the place
• floats can be an issue in tests without explicit casting (no types for functions, just values from the stack)
• lots of example projects (games, etc) in the extra/ folder of the factor install

Revelatory. Deliberately covers all of Jobs' flaws from his early days at Apple, to show how he learned and grew during his years away to become the kind of leader that could save the company.

Along the way, builds a strong case for the importance of mentors, and for the very capable hands Jobs left the company in when he died.

Three things I learned:

• NeXT once had a deal with IBM to license their operating system to Big Blue, but it fell through because Steve couldn’t handle playing second fiddle
• All of the original five “Apple Renegades” that founded NeXT with Steve quit
• Toy Story spent four years in development before its premiere. Went through at least twelve different versions, including a “last minute” rewrite that delayed its release by a year.

Opened the novel this week to continue my edits. Flipped open my notes, looked for the next thing that needed to be fixed.

There wasn’t one.

Which means: the edits are done, hooray!

But also means: it’s time to query agents. And suddenly I have the urge to hold onto the manuscript just a bit longer, to do just one more editing pass, before letting anyone in the publishing world see it.

That won’t do. So I’ve been researching agents open to submissions in my genre, compiling a list of five to start with. I’ll find more once I’ve heard back from these five.

I’m already steeling myself for the rejections, but there’s really no choice here: it’s either face rejection, or never have a chance of it getting picked up by a publishing house.

Surprisingly deep and engrossing. Reads like total fluff, but wrestles with real issues: debt, addiction, and substituting daydreams for working toward a goal.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Tension can come from a character's inner dialog, instead of from events. With the right narration, a night of watching tv can become high drama.
• Obstacles don't have to come from outside the main character; it's just as satisfying to watch them overcome situations they've created for themselves.
• Don't always need to hear both sides of a conversation. Sometimes it's more fun to imagine the other side for ourselves.

Working through the last chapter that needs to be trimmed down. So far, I’ve cut about 12,000 words off the novel, close to my target of 14,000 (10% of the original length).

So this weekend I’ll be able to start fixing the multitude of other errors I’ve found in the cutting.

Thankfully my previous fixes – the patching over of the plot hole, making certain things explicit earlier in the book – have held up on this second read-through. In fact, I think trimming off the fat of the book has made the fixes better, bringing the stitched parts of the narrative closer together, in a way, so they reinforce each other.

Strange to think that deleting words not only improves the pacing, but makes the other parts stronger.

Realized I haven’t learned any new programming languages in a while, so I picked up a copy of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks.

Each chapter covers a different language. They’re broken up into ‘Days’, with each day’s exercises digging deeper into the language.

Here’s what I learned about the first language in the book, Lua:

Day One

• table based
• embeddable
• whitespace doesn't matter
• no integers, only floating-point (!)
• comparison operators will not coerce their arguments, so you can't do =42 < '43'
• functions are first class
• has tail-call-optimization (!)
• extra args are ignored
• omitted args just get nil
• variables are global by default (!)
• can use anything as key in table, including functions
• array indexes start at 1 (!)

Day Two

• no multithreading, no threads at all
• coroutines will only ever run on one core, so have to handle blocking and unblocking them manually
• explicit over implicit, i guess?
• since can use functions as values in tables, can build entire OO system from scratch using (self) passed in as first value to those functions
• coroutines can also get you memoization, since yielding means the state of the fn is saved and resumed later
• modules: can choose what gets exported, via another table at the bottom

Day Three

• had to add Homebrew's Lua include directory (/usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/include) into include_directories command in CMakeLists.txt file
• when compiling play.cpp, linker couldn't find lua libs, so had to invoke the command by hand (after reading ld manual) with brew lua lib directory added to its search path via -L
• basically, add this to CMakeFiles/play.dir/link.txt: -L /usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/lib -L /usr/local/Cellar/rtmidi/2.1.1/lib
• adding those -L declarations will ensure make will find the right lib directories when doing its ld invocation (linking)
• also had to go into the Audio Midi Setup utility and set the IAC Driver to device is online in order for any open ports to show up
• AND then needed to be sure was running the Simplesynth application with the input set to the IAC Driver, to be able to hear the notes

Comprehensive. Explains 7 of the biggest ideas underlying the dominant economic model of the world, then demolishes them. One by one, each is shown to be based on false assumptions and a complete lack of evidence.

Ties everything together by showing how policy shaped by these ideas has damaged the world economy.

Three of the many things I learned:

• The modern concept of using defense contracts to spur industrial innovation was invented in the US, in the 1800s.
• For Adam Smith, prosperity came from increased productivity (usually from a better division of labor), not from the Invisible Hand, which was a guide to where to invest, not the engine of growth itself.
• Multiple Acts of Congress (notably the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978) direct the Federal Reserve system to pursue policies of full employment and low inflation. For the past thirty years, the employment mandate has been ignored.

Trimmed another 3,000 words off the draft this week.

Only three chapters left to truncate. Then I can start in on the growing list of problems I’m seeing as I go: personality quirks that got dropped from later chapters, items whose properties changed without reason, place names that got swapped.

At this point, I’m starting to look forward to doing the final copyediting run-through, because it’ll mean all these other issues have been dealt with.

Till then, I’ll keep cutting.

Compelling. Read the last half of this 900+ page monster in a single day.

Still amazes me how King’s writing style is so slight as to be non-existent, but with it he creates these incredibly long, involved, gripping stories. Truly a master of the craft.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Horror stories lean on senses other than sight: smell and taste, in particular. These senses are more intimately connected with our bodies, making the texture of the story more physical.
• A simple task can have tension if the reader is kept guessing as to what might happen, and if the character thinks things could go horribly wrong; if the character has a goal-threatening freak-out, that's even better.
• Horror needs a temptation: an invitation to follow a compulsion the character normally wouldn't, with promises (usually false) given that make it seem ok.

Labor Day weekend was awesome. I spent most of each day editing: reading through the novel and hacking away at anything that didn’t need to be there. I’ve trimmed a few thousand words off the draft already, and it feels great.

Except that every time I read it, I find more things wrong.

On my way to cut down a stray paragraph, I noticed one of the characters' dialog sounded like a really bad imitation of an accent. Had to stop and fix that.

Trimming a different chapter, another character had somehow developed a verbal tick, repeating the same phrase with every sentence, like some sort of crazed parrot. I had to stop and fix that, too.

Each round of edits is revealing more edits that are needed. I’ve had to stop changing things as I notice them, because it ends up derailing the edits I originally went in to make. Instead I’m jotting each one down in a notebook, so I can go back through later and fix them.

What I thought would be a series of nice, orderly editing rounds has become a game of whack-a-mole, where three more problems rear up with every one I knock down. At this rate, my internal deadline (Oct 1) for finishing the edits won’t be a deadline so much as the day I put down the mallet in defeat.

Until then, I’ll keep hammering away.

Today is Editing Day.

I’ve patched the holes in the plot. I’ve gone through and made the language more consistent. I’ve checked the character’s backstory to make sure it all hangs together.

Now it’s time to do the cutting. Time to trim away the fat from my descriptions, to cut the unnecessary dialog, to skip over any boring action sequences.

It’s good I have the day off. I’ll be spending it making the first cuts, and planning the word culling to come.

Uneven. The company profiles are interesting, if sometimes sparse on details, and present views into a more democratic form of corporation.

They’re constantly broken up by vague premonitions of disaster, though, a new kind of Malthusian faith that we’re stretching the Earth to its limits.

No evidence is marshaled in support of this belief, and the effect is to weaken the author’s otherwise well-made argument: that the current way of organizing corporations is not the only way, and some of the alternatives are better.

Despite the hand-wavy references to mysticism and quantum physics, I learned:

• The John Lewis Partnership in the UK is its largest department store chain, and is entirely employee-owned, with an elected employees' council that governs the company alongside the Board of Directors
• The Bank of North Dakota is state-owned (!), the only one in the US
• Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work proving that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable, and can be avoided while preserving the commons as community property.

Brilliant. Wallace’s writing is as lean and focused as ever, keeping the action moving and the laughs coming.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Background action can be sped up, to keep focus on foreground.
• It's ok to stand up and cheer for your characters once in a while. It gives readers permission to cheer for them, as well.
• Seeing the consequences of a weird event (transformation, spell effect, etc) before seeing the event itself can make its eventual description less confusing and more interesting.

Non-anglophone authors you should know

• dr schaff-stump: japan and russia
• kastersmidt: born in texas, living in brazil
• dr lyau: specialty is french sci-fi
• takacs: hungarian, lots of hungarian sf has not been translated yet
• schwartzmann: reads russian, ukrainian and polish; has done translation work
• schwartzmann: russian writers: bulgakhov (magical realism, 1920s and 1930s)
• takacs: strugatsky brothers; stanislaw lem, especially the cyberiad; rana ras;
• lyau: france produced second-most varied scifi tradition; planet of the apes; their golden age was the thirty years following jules verne's heyday; maurice renard; french new wave post-1968; robita; de nizorres
• kastersmidt: hector hermann oesterheld (argentinian, was killed by junta for publishing comic)
• schaff-stump: has handout with japanese names; since japanese novels are often turned into manga and anime, can often find those in translation even if the book hasn't been
• schwartzmann: for chinese scifi, start with three-body problem, first volume had to adhere to communist standards, second was a little looser, third volume he completely jumps out of the box; tor is releasing "invisible planets" collection of chinese short stories translated by ken liu
• takacs: yerg dragoman (the white king; bone fire); adam bodor (the sinister district)
• fantastic planet: was based on french novel called "humans by the dozen"
• lyau: start with the pulp novels to brush up on your french
• kastersmidt: if you haven't read borges, do so; camilla fernandes (brazilian); also check out the apex book of world science fiction, runs to four volumes, collects stories from new authors from around the world
• schaff-stump: hex (from dutch author) was rewritten for us edition, not available in strict translation
• tiptree award is going out of its way to bring non-english scifi to anglophone attention (check past award winners)
• takasc: african sf: afro-sf anthology series; african speculative fiction society website will soon go live
• first emeriati science fiction publishing house is opening its doors
• omenana: african sf in english (online)
• german scifi: andres eschbach, the carpet makers (?)
• ukrainian literature: vita nostra, available in english, by sergey and marina ____, basically the magicians

Promoting Yourself as an Introvert

• tamara jones: writing since seven yrs old
• doesn't leave the house much
• lives in small town iowa
• has four novels, first won compton cook award
• had to suddenly start speaking to a lot of strangers and big crowds
• hard to relax
• introverts are like onions, have awesome core, but many many layers of protection on top of it that prevent people from getting to know your core
• on panels, need to let hair down, but you can hide behind the table for safety
• editor liked just first 66 pages of first book she bought, had to rewrite everything else, which completely changed her plans for the second book; so: don't write the next books in a series until you sell and finish the first one
• some people don't want to let you talk on a panel, but don't get aggressive, that doesn't come off well
• readings are the worst
• but: get your ass out of the chair, gives you better diction, more control; move around, even though there's no where to hide; it's performance art: talk about self, talk about book, read short pages (two pages), then talk about it, then two more pages, then talk about it (make it different works or passages for variety)
• find whatever it is that gives you feeling of safety (small sweater, lucky socks, etc) and wear that to the reading to help you feel safe and able to be yourself
• has had three stalkers already, so no one knows where she lives (deliberately)
• tries to avoid the parties; but when you're starting out you have to go because editors and agents will be there; grab a drink, wander around and listen, take a drink if you get nervous
• what do you do when drained? Find a capsule of solitude somewhere: a quiet corner, maybe even the restroom stall, close your eyes and be alone for 15 min
• editors love to talk about their work; her typical question is "what's the best thing about your job?"
• need one sentence description of each of your books
• also need one sentence description of yourself "i slaughter people on paper for money"
• thinks introverts should not moderate, have to insert self and take control, which introverts are not good at
• don't overprepare for panels; whatever you prep for will probably be thrown out the window as soon as the panel starts
• at end of the day, selling self, if you do that people will want to buy your books

Flash Fiction: Short but not easy

• betsy dornbusch: writes mostly epic fantasy, used to buy flash
• anna yeatts: flash fiction online owner/publisher, also writes flash
• caroline m yoachim: just launched collection with fairwood press
• flash: definition varies greatly; over 1,500 wordsis definitely not flash; something you could read in five minutes
• yeatts: want a full complete story in a coffee break; still want a complete story arc, pared down to the essence
• vonallmen: looking for the pop of "oh, wow" in just a five minute read
• wowell: couldn't write GoT in flash
• yoachim: now i want to write that
• wowell: customer service call for death ray works really well in flash format; sci-fi comments thread works really well as flash
• dornbusch: don't do vignettes about the sun, they don't get bought
• yoachim: great focusing on small piece; focused emotion, etc; great for putting hints of the larger world in the story, rest up to reader's imagination
• favorite stories?
  • yeatts: grobnak ama
  • running of the robots
  • first story from daily science fiction: story with three substories, and the meta-story, all in 1,000 words
  • strain of sentient corn writing to monsanto
  • if you were a dinosaur, my love
  • six names for the end
• what skills are important?
  • dornbusch: editing; revision; the shorter the length, the more powerful
  • dornbusch: likes humor in flash, but not the punchline
  • wowell: need to recognize how many plots and subplots you can fit into each story length
  • vonallmen: ability to focus on tone
• send mothership zeta your cat stories (joke)
• yoachim: so much needs to happen in the first paragraph: need to tell reader what they're in for, little about their world, the action, tone, everything
• dornbusch: try telling story where reader knows the secret, usually it's better than hiding the secret from the reader
• wowell: if you like twists, do it at the beginning, not the end; starting with the twist will get me reading
• yoachim: remember can play with your title, do a lot of setup there
• current markets?
  • flash fiction online; daily science fiction
  • unsung stories (uk)
  • fantasy and science fiction takes some flash
  • mothership zeta
  • vestal review
• lots of calls for flash, but don't give it for free
• yoachim: targets markets that specialize in flash fiction
• uncanny magazine does flash
• fireside fiction does flash and shorts
• nature runs flash fiction
• flash one of the few markets where second person won't overstay its welcome

The Art of Worldbuilding

• amanda downum: necromancer chronicles
• luc peterson: runs civic innovation office
• peter tieryas: fiction where japanese won world war ii?
• downum: need fresh ideas, sense of wonder, in showing this new world
• bear: burroughs first to do world-building in science fiction
• downum: likes to start with character and scene, let world unfold from there; likes characters to pick up and interact with objects in the world, rather than just moving on a sound stage
• patel: starts with what a society values most, and what they fear most; what do they invest in, what do they build walls and defenses against
• bear: receives a vision; might take years to stitch visions together into a story
• what do you need to know? How many doctorates?
  • bear: english major, don't know anything
  • downum: ditto
  • patel: need to know what touches your characters; need to have lots of prior work done to know what this is before writing
• downum: has someone ask her questions, to reveal those things she hasn't thought of, those pieces she hasn't built out herself; really good if someone that doesn't read genre, they come at it from a completely different angle
• tieryas: even things (research) that don't show up in the book can be valuable
• bear: history of asia a target-rich environment for mining world-building ideas
• how do you put limits on the research?
  • downum: hard, but do a little at first to get started; when come across detail to fix later, mark in brackets and keep going; do more research afterward to fill in details, etc
  • patel: timebox your research time so you push yourself back into writing; can be iterative, don't have to answer all questions at beginning, questions that come up during writing can give you chance to do focused dive into research again
• patel: shorter work is, less research you'll have to do, but you may have to do very detailed research into a single focused topic
• downum: likes first person for short form, but at novel length it's like being stuck in an elevator for a very long time, so prefers third person multiple perspective
• patel: look for opportunities for drama and conflict in all worldbuilding; how would your characters tell their history? How would their enemies tell it?

How to Handle Rejection

• gail carringer
• wallace: stopped counting at 1,000
• worst rejections: ones that are really really close to acceptance
• wallace: never count on money until the check clears
• carringer: rejection is evidence that you're trying, that you're sending stuff out
• best rejection?
  • carringer: rejection was so nice, went back with later work, has been her agent for ten years
• carringer: don't fall in love too much with a particular book, be willing go move on and write more and try something else
• reader reviews are not for you, they're for other readers
• carringer: would tell younger self to try different genres and styles earlier
• carringer: never ever ever respond to a rejection
• wallace: btw, anything you post online, anywhere, is a response, and is a bad idea
• carringer: some agents/editors will be full up with authors in your genre, and so will reject you because they don't want to take on any more
• remember that they're rejecting the product, not you

Enjoying urban fantasy

• diana rowland: white trash zombie
• melissa f olson: tor.com novellas
• what do you like about uf?
  • city as character
  • looking at things just a little differently
  • what if your gross terrible neighbor was a real monster?
  • a way to crack open the puzzle of the weird world we're in and understand it better
  • it's a way to be sneaky: can talk about deep things in a fun way, with people that don't notice
  • perception: history has been edited down from multiple conflicting perspectives; urban fantasy lets you deal with these different perspectives for more immediate events
  • no real bad guy: bad guy is someone pursuing their goals in a fanatical sense, still think they're the good guys
  • people are always writing urban fantasy from their primary experience; in feudal days it was fears from lord of the manor, today it's shopping malls and steelworks (instead of fairy rings)
  • changeling stories are ufo kidnapping stories, just told in a different time
  • uf is the intersection of contemporary fiction and fantasy fiction
  • danger: to cover over real experience with a fantasy gloss; example: the magical homeless people of the 80s)
  • can use unreliable narrators to try to avoid the problems with covering over messy experience
• why first person?
  • immediacy
  • tight perspective
  • noir influence: almost all first person, huge influence on urban fantasy and its style
• adrian mcinty: leicht's favorite irish noir writer
• rowland: j d robb's books

Finance for writers

• put 40% away for federal govt, 10% for state, pay quarterly income taxes estimate, will usually get something back at the end of the year
• most first books don't make back their $5,000 advance
• don't quit your day job, even after signing tge first contract
• some contracts don't last past 2 or 3 books
• not a steady income
• be careful with your money; lots of authors aren't good with their money
• get good agent: writers tend to not read contracts, approach it very emotionally; good agent will catch things and get you the best deal possible
• okay to lose money on your craft at first, but have a budget and be aware of it
• spend money on your craft (take classes, do workshops) and your network (attending cons, etc)
• but: if you're at cons, write down what you want to accomplish before you go
• if you self-publish, spend money on quality: an editor and a cover designer; everything else you can half-ass, but not those
• keep all receipts for your craft in a shoebox, use them (plus your spreadsheet) to fill out your schedule c for your taxes
• if you don't make a profit every seven years, the irs considers it a hobby, not a business
• average income for writers is $5,000
• don't quit your day job until you have 2 years' worth of living expenses saved up
• rule one: write, finish, send it out
• one benefit of incorporating is the ability to defer income from one year to the next (should you score the $70,000 advance)
• 78% success rate for publishing projects on kickstarter if they get 25 backers; difference between people that are prepared and know what they're doing and those who don't
• bud: turns profit every 5 years; how? Doesn't report all his expenses that year
• lots of ways to use kickstarter: events, book tours, playgrounds inspired by literature, self-pubbing books, magazines; can get really creative
• margot: think of marketing as sharing these stories you're passionate about with others and inviting them in, not "selling yourself"

Idiot's Guide to Publishing

• all scifi community on genie network at the time
• doctorow hadn't written a novel yet, so got karl involved
• patrick: liked it because it was very practical
• rejectomancy: shouldn't read too much into rejections; form rejection could be from someone that loved it but didn't have time, personal could be from someone that doesn't like the story but likes you personally
• schroeder: never sold any short stories to the magazines, has only ever sold stories to anthologies
• at the time, discussion over ebooks concerned fact that they never go out of print, so publishers argue that they don't have to revert the rights to the author
• would not try to write today, because has no idea how to get into the field now

Nifty Narrative Tricks

• bear: what character is like matters less than how you handle the character
• kowal: people want the familiar in the strange; familiar makes you feel smart, the strange is compelling; when have character engaged in activity or emotion that readers find familiar, then when i engage them in something weird they already have a hook
• kelly: characterize people by what they own. before walking them on stage, go into their room, or their car: what's there? is it messy? neat? what's hanging on the walls? bonus: gives you things to use later in the plot
• walton: writers get some things for free, and some things they have to learn; easy to teach the things you learned, but almost impossible to teach the things you got for free; she got interesting characters for free, so...story is contract with reader, try to get what story is right up front so reader doesn't feel betrayed
• bear: beginning writers make mistake of writing passive characters
• bear: give the character something to love; instantly makes them more engaging
• gould: best way to intro tech is to show it when it breaks down; very engaging to intro character when frustrated
• kowal: frustration will show what character wants, what they love, and give you a measure of their competence
• kowal: figure out what character wants, and smartest way for them to get it, and then you block off that way (and keep blocking off ways)
• walton: __ starts with character really having to go to the bathroom while giving speech on history; is pure exposition but you don't care because you sympathize with having to use the restroom
• walton: farmer in the sky (heinlein) has similar trick, with tons of worldbuilding done in describing a father and son making dinner
• term: incluing
• kelly: how can you tell beginning from middle from end? beginning -> middle: character goes through one way door, and can't get back to the start; middle -> end: character goes through another one-way door, and story has to end one way or another
• kowal: stakes are something particular to the character; we're all going to die, so death is not great stakes; "you're going to lose your right foot" is more personal
• kowal: focus indicates thought; what you're looking at is what you're thinking about; rhythm and breath: same action at different speed gives you different emotion; how long you linger on something shows how important it is to the character
• walton: pacing very different between genres; same story told at different pacing can change the genre of the book
• kelly: look at the story; if you see a section of solid text or solid dialog, that's probably a pacing problem
• common mistakes?
  • bear: starting with bloodbath, before you care about the characters
  • kelly: end of story is not the climax, you need a moment for the character to come to grips with what the climax means for them
  • gould: leave some things for the reader to figure out from context
  • kowal: starting with way too much backstory; solve by getting deeper into point of view
  • walton: too fuzzy, character not in focus; can fix by switching to first person, forces you to focus on personal experience
• walton: often rushes endings, has to go back in and fix pacing after draft finished
• kowal: best trick: dumping exposition into a sex scene
• kelly: world-building will happen almost without trying; less you can do of it, the better

Evolution of Epic Fantasy

• tessa grafton: the united states of asgard
• sarah beth durst: queen of blood
• epic fantasy: need close in shots, and medium shots, and landscape shots, all mixed in
• leicht: research into irish time of troubles taught her everything involved in world-building: how economics is tied to politics is tied to religion is tied to class is tied to language
• kate elliott: crown of stars
• leicht: viking skeletons found in bogs: no one checked if they were male or female; many of them (warriors) are female
• elliott: archeologists finding statues mostly female, labeled one male statue as priest-king and all female as just "fertility", then were mystified as to why they kept finding female statues

Writing fight scenes

• perspective of character that has been in a fight versus one that never has is completely different. People who experience regular combat (bouncer) have different frame of mind and see things differently
• also person not in fight can see things that those in the fight can't
• can use training sequence to describe the moves in great detail, and then keep it brief when the actual fight happens
• daily exercises or training routine can serve a similar purpose
• fight's aftermath: talk to emts and paramedics about the kinds and causes of trauma they've seen
• think of fight musically, with rhythm of blows and building to resolution in a limited amount of time
• don't forget: characters that have been in a fight are going to carry injuries with them for rest of book
• remember that fight is happening because of conflict, two or more characters that want different things, and they'll be thinking about their goals during the fight

50 years of star trek

• people knock the new movies, but even old movies were often about finding someone to fight instead of exploring; classic series had fights, but central theme was exploration and making friends
• jar jar abrams
• star trek at its best when its about discovery and making friends
• what would you want in new series? snodgrass and gerrold: shut down holodeck (or find out it causes cancer)
• no media? snodgrass: they tried, wrote episode where they showed wesley's cabin, with pinups on wall, and they were not allowed to show it
• snodgrass: in original series, their time in rec room created sense that they liked each other and hung out together; she created the poker game in next generation because she felt that was missing
• snodgrass: please ditch the bodysuits from TNG, they limited who they could cast in each role because they were not forgiving; much prefer the uniforms from the first few movies
• star trek: new voyages: fanmade series that gerrold did an episode for
• star trek: continues: finn fancy necromancy author really loves it
• could we do non starship star trek? Gerrold: yes, if about star trek academy, or federation council, etc
• house of picards

As you know, bob

• hiding the infodump: article in april 2015 analog
• tamora pierce: works in genre where extra exposition gets cut mercilessly
• "teenagers pay my bills, i don't explode them" pierce
• exposition can get too detailed because in first draft writers are figuring out what's happening as they write it. It's fine, so long as they take it out later
• know as much about your background as possible, tell as little about it as you can get away with
• know your audience: some them can really get into detailed exposition, while others will skip it
• don't load it in as a block, slip it in as part of the action, because it's fatal
• tnh: expository chunks can happen because authors with clout can be late, and rather than push book release out, editors will edit book less than they normally would because they ran out of time
• tnh: don't tell people things before they want to know it; rowling is a great example of how to do it right: she intros sorting hat as just talking hat, only later introduces other properties when they're needed
• conflict can also be a driving force of exposition
• or: new guy comes in, has to have everything explained to them
• pierce: usually starts with character at cusp of new phase of life, transition drives exposition, will drip exposition into story as it goes, have characters act it out rather than infodump
• tnh: technical master of exposition of our time is joss whedon; watch first few minutes of serenity, within ten minutes you know everything you need to know about the universe
• pierce: early stephen king, elizabeth bear
• jodi shapiro: new books, well done exposition and context
• reader can infer a lot from context, can trust them more than you think
• when chapter has ended, preferably with a hook, it's clear that something new is coming, you can get away with slipping a little omniscient viewpoint exposition in there
• tnh: get a 14-yr-old beta reader. Their brains are fully developed but they don't have any tact
• tactic: when people are angry, they'll state obvious things ("look! Water *is* wet!")
• tnh: every time you explain something to the audience, you give them a chance to argue with you; great example is time machine: don't explain how it works, because they don't, tell me how it smells, how much cargo it can carry, how much time it needs to recharge between trips

How to write a mystery

• clues can be great, but if characters aren't three-d, will feel hollow
• misdirection: all clues have to be there, but distract reader at same time
• mystery great tool for other genres, can reveal aspects of world for spec fic using mystery tools
• why is it important that characters solve this?
• would this mystery have happened in any other world? What does this crime reveal about the greater society and the people that live in it?
• harris: beat, beat, beat; explication, explication, boom! Follow the rhythm of the book
• try/fail cycle: characters try something, fail, try something else, fail, etc
• harris: have to provide false suspects, but not so many that you wonder why the victim didn't get killed earlier
• harris: when you have something that you think is too mean to do to your characters, you should do it!
• small mystery and large mystery: can add texture to the book; small mystery small stakes, answer can be humorous; can also tie the two mysteries together, link the two mysteries
• thematic echo: guinea pig squealing in the night out of fear; person had murdered another because they thought (wrongly) that they were being threatened
• turn tropes on their head to try to get something new (no more detectives with tortured pasts)
• harris: people love to talk about what they do. Undertakers? Don't nobody ask them what they do.
• amateur detective: has to have compelling reason to get involved and not leave it to the police
• randall garreth; darcy series
• the last policeman
• nora roberts' detective novels set in the future
• do you read mysteries? Yes, all the time; new j d robb; anne bishops's written in blood series; expanse series by james a corey; mike connolly; steven hunter; stewart mcbride; ben aaronovich rivers of london series

Crafting and Editing the Short Story

• how involved are you in the process?
• datlow: will buy imperfect stories, but will dig in and ask for changes, work with author to make it better; harder with new writers that may not take editing well
• clarke: take everything from slush, always open to submissions, often working with new authors more; will work with author if they believe in the story
• uncanny: usually buy more fully-cooked stories; there are enough submissions that they just don't take the story if they don't think it's ready
• swartzmann: often buy ready stories, but will sometimes pluck out a rough diamond and polish it, which makes him very very happy
• williams: will work more with authors she hasn't seen before; still rare though
• what stops you from reading?
• datlow: bad writing
• swartzmann: pacing
• uncanny: has to care about the characters
• clarke: zombies...really anything that indicates they haven't read the market guidelines
• datlow: have to want to spend time with the character; don't make them boring
• what about problem endings?
• datlow: usually means 3/4 of the way through they took a wrong turn
• clarke: very frustrating for good story to have bad ending
• uncanny: the sigh of having given up on a story
• williams: wait to send stories out; your subconscious can come up with things to improve it if you give it a chance
• uncanny: problem she often sees is the tendency to describe everything instead of only the things relevant to plot and characters
• datlow: not supposed to do talking head stories, but can use descriptions of events around them to prevent it from being boring
• clarke: seek out slush reading opportunities; good way to see what's out there and what mistakes people make
• williams: buys 6 stories a month; receives around 1,000 submissions a month
• swartzmann: in humor, don't try too hard, and make sure reader can enjoy story even if they don't find it funny
• uncanny: take chances, don't reproduce what you see out there
• datlow: humor a harder sell for her because she usually doesn't find it funny
• uncanny: many stories are bittersweet, so will look for whimsy to lighten the mood

Mind of villains

• psychopaths are born not made
• reactive attachment disorder comes from environment, inconsistent caregiving before age of 2
• not good or bad caregiving, just inconsistent
• passed around from caregiver to caregiver, start to view people as providers of services, not worthwhile as individuals
• pdf from doj on problems with criminal justice in the united states
• most psychopaths choose to follow the rules of society for their own benefit
• if you have a psychopath as your villain, you need something to kick them out of their natural rule-following
• don't know what fear is or what love is
• but can have long-term relationships or get married, just don't feel love
• 10% of murders in US are committed by children (under 18)
• kids released at 21 have no higher incidence of crime as adults than anyone else
• children kill for different reasons than adults; when take them out of that environment, they stop (take them out of abuse, teach them anger control, etc)
• in court cases, often someone sitting in the back crying; usually the mother; "why are they picking on my child?"
• hitler attached to his dog, attached to his cousin; would he have had anyone killed if he'd gotten into art school?
• there's a way to raise a psychopath: reward good behavior immediately and punish bad behavior immediately; give them the praise that they crave
• BTK killer was church leader, good husband, good father
• tend to see people that do evil as "really" evil: he was a good father but really he was a serial killer. It's not but really, it's *and*.
• most people that do evil are people, with good and bad that they do
• bones is a great example (in early seasons) of a successful psychopath
• psychopaths are normal: 1 out of 100 people is one
• psychopaths can empathize with other people
• if you call psychopaths on their bs, they'll try to spin it with them as victims or play it off as an accident
• psychopathy and high intelligence are not correlated, but intelligence and being in prison is: prison population of us is more intelligent than general pop (though with lower education level)

Wife and I are heading off to WorldCon today!

It’s in Kansas City this year, which is only a 4.5 hour drive for us. For once, no plane tickets to buy :)

This’ll be our first WorldCon, so I’m both excited and nervous. A lot of our friends will be there, but so will many – ye gods, so many – of the authors I admire. I’m going to try to keep my squee to an acceptable level.

Also, thanks to the efforts of Tanya Washburn and the Accessibility Committee, there’s going to be multiple ASL-interpreted events! The Masquerade, all Business Meetings, the Hugo Awards Ceremony, and the Paul and Storm Concert will all be accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing.

They’ve even arranged for a personal interpreter for my wife for one day of the Con, so she can enjoy that day’s panels as much as anyone else.

It’s going to make a huge difference in my wife’s independence during, and participation in, the Con. The Accessibility Committee has been very responsive and welcoming, and I’m quite thankful for their efforts.

Allons-y!

Eye-opening. Brings two hundred years of Central Asian history to life through a series of vignettes, describing individual lives spent among the cities and caravans of the Silk Road. That technique lets the author pack of a lot of detail into a slim book.

Three of the many things I learned:

• 9th century Buddhist monks would setup stalls in the monastery, offering spells for healing or insight into the future or advice for what to do
• Chinese histories of the time portray surrounding empires as vassal states, when in truth China often paid tribute to those empires to stave off war.
• Even in the eighth century, you could come across ruins and abandoned towns in the Tarim Basin. People had been living there for 2,000 years, and with water so precarious, often had to pick up and move as the climate shifted

Biggest three flaws in the novel are fixed!

Or, at least, I think they are? Hard to tell without getting another round of beta reader feedback.

In any case, I’ve made edits to fix the largest plot holes. 

Moving on to problems with world-building. Those range from big things like: does the background for the two main characters make sense? Is it treated consistently? Does the behavior of the villain at the start of the book hold with what we learn about them by the end? To smaller pieces, like making sure the monetary system used holds up and the curses the characters utter fit the world.

It’s a little more scattershot than the first editing pass. Almost wish I’d made notes as I wrote the first draft, breadcrumbs for me to follow back so I’d know exactly which sections of the text would need to be checked later. Maybe something to try with my next novel?

Disappointing. Starts out strong, with several good chapters covering how the replicator enables Star Trek’s cashless society, and what could motivate competition and work in such a society.

Starting with the middle of the book, though, the author indulges in multiple digressions, ranging from a chapter covering how Isaac Asimov’s work influenced Star Trek (true, but way off-topic) to one listing all the ways the Ferengi represent 20th-century humanity (also true, but obvious). 

Ends with a chapter claiming that interstellar travel is an economic dead-end, a fantasy, and the only way to get there will be to enable a Star Trek-like society beforehand. Not exactly a perspective to inspire exploration and discovery.

Still, I did learn a few things:

• Currency-less society wasn't part of original Star Trek; the idea was introduced in Star Trek IV, and fleshed out in Star Trek: The Next Generation (and later series, like Deep Space 9)
• President Reagan opened up GPS to the public because the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner in 1983
• In the US, from 1970 to 2012, GDP per capita doubled, while energy use dropped from 2,700 gallons of gasoline (equivalent) to 2,500

Fantastic. Many of the essays are very, very personal – sometimes painfully so – but that only makes the advice they contain more powerful.

Her writing is both clear and funny, making this book both a quick read and a fun one.

Three things I learned:

• Jeremy Renner got his start as a make-up artist (!)
• It's ok to ask for help when something happens in your life (your career, your marriage, etc) that you don't know how to deal with
• Writing fan mail isn't cool, but that's ok: if you like something someone else has created, let them know!

The major flaw in the novel is almost fixed. I’ve been editing around it, working my way from the scenes where the initial cracks in the story start showing through, down to where the plot hole opens up a mile wide.

I’ve started building a bridge across that chasm, a way to connect what happens on both sides so that it’s no longer an abrupt fall.

Today I made it up to the turning point itself, the central event at the heart of the flaw. I’ve finished editing that scene, and will continue on past it, smoothing things over until I feel the problem is fixed.

Once that’s done, it’ll be on to the next issue, and the next. Those are much smaller, so I’m hoping their edits go faster.

Onward!

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, vol 2: Still hilarious, easily one of my favorite comics. The characters are fantastic, the art is clear and pops, even the fan letters are great.

Thor, vol 1: Hail the Goddess of Thunder! Great voice for the new Thor. The art is generally good, but sometimes confusing in action sequences. The villain’s plot is just ok; it’s the layers of mystery around Thor (old and new) that made these issues interesting to me.

D4ve: Maybe too juvenile? Overall good, though the plot was generally cliché. Still, funny in parts.

Pretty Deadly, vol 1: Took two reads for me to get into it. The panels are cramped and hard to read for first few issues, but I stuck with it and things clicked into place. Turned into a fantastic story by the end.

Masterful.

Jemisin’s mentioned in several interviews that this was a hard book for her to write, one that she almost deleted and quit on several times. Given the difficulty of what she’s achieved – weaving second-person narration together with multiple storylines that take place entirely in flashback – I can understand. I’m glad she persevered, though, because this is a wonderful book.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Using second person can be useful for handling certain situations: when a character has amnesia, for example, or when they're shifting from one identity to another. Saying 'you' eliminated the need to juggle multiple names, or even care about them.
• Sadly, prejudice and cruelty in characters can make them seem more, not less, human.
• When introducing new terms -- as one often does in sci-fi or fantasy -- it helps to have different characters use them, each in their own way. The repetition with slight variation colors in the definition for readers.

With the first draft of the children’s book done, I can at last turn to editing my first novel, the one I started as part of NaNoWriMo 2014.

The problem, of course, is that I have no idea how to edit a novel.

A short story, sure. A blog post, definitely. Those are small things, though, easy to hold in my head and thus easy to find contradictions in, easy to re-read and catch typos, easy to control.

I read in The Kick-Ass Writer that you shouldn’t go into editing without a plan, and that you should make several passes: a pass for grammar, a pass for plot, a pass for descriptions.

So I made one plan, and threw it away, because it was too detailed and intimidating.

I made a second plan, and then threw it away, because it was too vague.

I made a third plan, and then decided I needed to stop being afraid of diving in and fixing things. So I re-read all the alpha-reader feedback I had, picked the most glaring flaw they all mentioned, and decided to start there.

Granted, it’s two-thirds of the way through the book. But it’s something that worried me when I wrote it, and if they also had issues with it, it’s something I should take care of.

Once that’s fixed, I’ll move onto the next biggest issue, and then the next, and the next. Along the way, I’ll tweak wording here and there, fix typos, etc, so that hopefully I’ll have caught them all before I do my “official” re-read for those kinds of mistakes.

Practically perfect. Preserves a fairy-tale feel while subverting fairy tale tropes; I can easily see why it was nominated for a Hugo this year.

Three things I learned about writing:

• First person with naive narrator learning about the world still a great way to introduce that world to the reader
• Can show evil influence on thoughts by transitioning those thoughts from normal to wicked slowly, taking the reader along with you
• Short descriptions can (and should) be opinionated descriptions

First draft of the children’s book is done!

I’m way over the target word count, but at least I’ve got the story beats and page layouts done. And I did manage to hold it to 28 pages, so revisions can focus on cutting words from individual scenes (hopefully).

Now to send it out to some alpha readers, see what they think. 

In the meantime, I’ve gotta get started on editing my first novel. It’s been almost a year since I finished that draft, so I should have enough distance from the text to fix what needs fixing.

Making good progress on the children’s book. Taking each page as a single scene, a single beat in the story, is helping, as is thinking of the image I want on the page and using that to substitute for most of the description I would normally put in text.

But man, is it hard to be that brief.

I read that children’s books – the ones made for the age group I’m targeting, anyway – are usually somewhere between 400 and 500 words. For a 28-page story (again, typical target length), that’s only 17 words per page!

I’ve found it’s really, really hard for me to say anything significant in so few words. With each page, as I write it, I keep an eye on my word count, but several times now I’ve blown right by it.

It’s one more thing I’m telling myself that I’ll fix “in post”; that is, in the next draft. I imagine I’ll be cutting every scene down to the bone to fit within the limits. 

Which I guess will be good practice for me: can I hold on to some form of my writing voice, even in so few words?

Uneven. The publication stories from the first half of the book are very depressing, and made me think going indie would be the best way to get my novels published. Stories in the second half pick up a bit, but still have the air of persistence in the face of repeated abuse.

Three things I learned:

• One author's book was published 6 years after receiving an initial rejection, but only after the editor that rejected it died (!) and the person going through his office found the manuscript and liked it.
• Many authors at one point took a break from writing -- for 5, 8, 10 years -- and eventually came back to it, then stuck with it long enough to be published.
• Even after you sell your book to an editor, that book might not be published. The editor might get fired, or the publisher could close shop, or they could get bought out, and then your book is "orphaned" until you can get the rights back to it.

Spent the week working through the rough outline, filling in details as I go.

I’m writing up each page like a comic panel, describing the image that should be there and what’s happening in each scene.

This next week I’ll do another pass and add the text. I’ll try to keep my vocabulary simple and the words brief, but I won’t worry about actual word counts until the first draft is done.

After working on two novels, it’s a bit of relief to have something this small to write. I feel like I can hold the whole story in my head, and more easily see its structure and how everything plays out.

Moving. Robinson conveys both the triumphs and the horrors of interstellar colonization, covering hundreds of years in a single book. Almost cried at the end of the penultimate chapter.

Three things I learned about writing:

• The experience of agoraphobia (possibly all phobias) is something the written word is much more suited to portray than film, allowing us to think what the sufferer thinks, feel what they feel, better than other media.
• In a longer work, you can structure chapters as stories of their own, with a cold open, development, slow crisis, resolution, and a reveal
• When narrating long periods of time, zoom out to establish rhythms or patterns, zoom in on unusual or unique happenings (or things that have an impact on the larger patterns)

Had a realization this week that’s guiding how I outline the children’s book I’m working on: it’s a comic!

…in a way. Instead of multiple panels per page, there’s just one. But it’s got a similar interaction between words and images that a comic does (with the images doing a lot of the descriptive work), and a two-page spread in a children’s book is similar to a splash page in a comic, a chance to break out of one-page-one-scene and do something sprawling and dynamic.

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at a comic for a while now, so I’m thinking of this as a kind of warm-up, a practice run. I’ll think of the book in terms of layout, of how the words and the pictures will work to tell the story, rather than relying on just the words themselves.

It’s good timing, because I’ve got the basic outline done, and now I’ve got to drill down into each scene (page/panel) and work out the details of what should be in it. With a little luck, I should have a draft ready by next week.

Intimidating. Martinez mixes bits of Cthulhu Mythos with Norse mythology while maintaining a comedic slant throughout. How does he do it?

Three writing techniques that I think helped him pull it off:

• Use the mundane to ground bizarre events. That could be the relationship between two characters, or the rhythms of work, or the ubiquity of bureaucracy.
• When describing weird things happening, a deadpan tone with a bit of sarcasm can both help the reader sympathize with the characters and help them see the humor in the situation.
• Voice goes a long way in defining a character. If each character has a very distinct voice, then the reader doesn't need as many vocal tags, they don't need as much description of the character, they can build it in their mind from the dialog.

This week I’ve started outlining a children’s book my wife and I came up with last month.

Which means I’m back to not knowing what I’m doing, as I’ve never written a children’s book before.

So I’m looking up average word counts, learning about vocabulary levels for the age group we’re targeting, and trying to wrap my head around thinking in terms of pages instead of chapters.

But hey, at least kid’s books are short, right?

Here we go again.

Fantastic. It’s Robinson Crusoe in space, executed so well that what should have been boring and cliche is instead full of tension and humor. I sped through this book, consuming the whole thing in two days.

Looking forward to watching the movie. Oddly enough, since I know Matt Damon plays the title role, I heard his voice for all of Mark’s journal entries. Felt like a good fit.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can mix regular narrative with journal entries, but it's best to introduce it gradually, and only once the main storytelling mode has been established.
• Relative dates will do just fine. Most of the time, they don't really matter.
• Humor (in the characters or the narration) makes a bleak or depressing situation much more palatable.

I’ve been thinking about how I wrote this last novel, and what I might need to change about my writing process.

It felt a lot harder to write this one than the last one, and took longer, too. Maybe there are sone things I need to beware of, danger signs I should watch out for, when starting my third?

I think my first mistake was not writing a short story set in the world of the novel. I did this – accidentally – for my first book. Didn’t know it was an actual technique until I saw an interview with N K Jemisin (an amazing writer whose most recent book is up for a Hugo!)  where she mentioned that she always – deliberately – writes a short story in a new world before starting a novel set there. Her reasons lined up exactly with my experience: writing the story gave her a sense of the world and the kinds of characters and conflicts that might happen there. Even if she doesn’t use the characters from the short story in the novel, all the world-building she’s done helps.

My second problem was trying my hand at science fiction. My degree is in physics, so my Inner Editor gets all fired up when I’m writing something set in “the real world,” rejecting ideas left and right because “it doesn’t work that way.” It’s something I’m working on, because it blocks my writing flow, constricting my choices and making me doubt that I can write anything that maintains consistency.

Third mistake: writing through trauma. I mentioned this at the time, but trying to write through the events of the latter half of last year was almost impossible. I was distracted, I was angry and frustrated and scared, I was in no way ready to push through a novel like this. I’m glad I did, in the end, but without my wife and my friends to lean on, I don’t think I would have.

So, lessons learned:

• Write a short story version first.
• Don't worry about matching current scientific understanding in the first draft. Save consistency for the edits.
• Don't force myself to write through a traumatic event. No extra pressure needed.

More a series of biographies than a proper narrative history. Still well-written and interesting, though.

Holmes' use of language and choice of examples illustrates the Romantic belief that science and poetry were not opposed, but complementary disciplines, both seeking to understand and explain the world around them.

Three things I learned:

• Caroline Herschel, William Herschel's sister, was a great astronomer in her own right, discovering numerous comets and nebulae, as well as compiling the most comprehensive star catalogues of the 19th century.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1816, can be considered the first science fiction novel, as it took curent theories of biology and chemistry and extrapolated them into the future, then constructed a narrative around the consequences.
• William Herschel was originally an organist in Bath; astronomy was a hobby he indulged in on the side. It just so happened that his homemade telescopes were more powerful than anything any one else had constructed before (!)

Taken the last few days off from writing. That’ll likely extend into the weekend, when my wife and I go out to celebrate completing the draft.

But I’m feeling a little listless, like I don’t know what to do with myself. So I’m already thinking of what to work on next, what project to use to keep the writing part of my brain busy.

There’s a children’s book idea I’ve had recently that I’d like to take a swing at. Should be very different from writing a novel, and something I can hopefully complete a draft of fairly quickly.

I’ve also got a draft of my first novel (working title: The Hungry Cold. don’t judge me) that needs editing. Gotten lots of feedback from first readers about it, including several spots that need fixing.

Those two projects should keep me pretty busy for a few months (at least). I’m thinking of starting the children’s book next week, as way to clear my head before starting in on some edits. I’ll be traveling, though, so probably won’t be able to do much more than outline.

New novel’s done!

Topped out at 111,733 words yesterday morning.

I feel proud, relieved, and confused all at the same time. Proud for getting it done, relieved that I can move on to the next project, confused that I might actually be done with the first draft. There’s a part of my brain that’s circling the last few chapters, going “are you sure we’re finished?”

But I am, thank goodness.

Next it’ll be on to editing the draft of my previous novel, whipping that into a shape I can send out to agents.

But that’s later. For now, the order of the day (of the week?) is to relax, recharge, and regroup.

Novel’s at 103,532 words…and it’s still not finished.

Wrote about 10,000 words in the last five days, pushing to uncover the ending. But there’s more story left to tell than I thought. Blew right past 90,000 words, then 100,000, and it’s not done.

My revised outline – yes, I’m still revising it, thank you – points to five more chapters, and then I’ll be finished. That means somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 words to go.

So I’m pushing my deadline to July 1st, and setting a target of 1,000 words per day until it’s done.

One way or another, I will finish this draft.

No real blog post today (or likely on Friday or Monday), as I’m focused on wrapping up the novel before June 1st.

Wish me luck!

Amazing. Desan pulls back the myths about money’s origins, demonstrating in the process how boom and bust cycles are built into our financial system.

Feels weird to call a financial history a page-turner, but this one was compelling reading.

Three of the many things I learned:

• In medieval England, you had to pay (!) for money. Merchants would bring silver bullion to the mint, and the government would convert it to coins, keeping some of the coins generated for themselves as a fee.
• Bank of England notes were used as currency for over a hundred years before they were legal tender (first issued late 17th century, made legal currency only in 1833).
• Metal coins are often used for money, not because of the metal's intrinsic value, but because of how well it fulfills money's needs: the tokens used for money need to be non-perishable, portable, and hard to fake.

Novel’s at 88,796 words.

I’m pushing myself to write at least 400 words a day, stretching to 500, instead of my usual 250. I’m writing every day now, instead of taking weekends off. I’ve even shifted my work schedule – heck, shifted the dog’s feed schedule – so I can put in more writing time in the morning.

All so I can hit my deadline.

Don’t know if I’ll hit it. It’s looking like the book will blow past the 90K word target I’d set for myself, back in the heady days when I thought 50,000 words was more than halfway through.

But how far past 90,000 words? 2,000? 5,000? 20,000? No idea. (Note to self: please try to get it done before 120,000 words).

So: 12 days left. All I can do is keep pushing, and see where it ends up.

This movie was surprisingly good. I’ll admit I know nothing about the comic book character aside from his appearances in Squirrel Girl. But it felt like Ryan Reynolds has been working his whole life to be able to play this role, and it fits him like a leather gimp superhero suit.

There’s actually nothing to fix here. Honest. It’s funny, irreverent, and personal, exactly what it needed to be.

Nothing to fix.

What Went Wrong

Vanessa getting kidnapped because the bad guys can’t find Deadpool, I understand. Vanessa getting tied up, I understand. But Vanessa helpless until Deadpool can rescue her? Felt too typical, too normal, for any movie, let alone one that was going out of its way to be different.

How to Fix It

There’s a perfect moment, after we first see her tied up, and then Deadpool shows up. The villains' backs are turned while they banter with Deadpool. That’d be a great moment for Vanessa to suddenly color-shift, and then become invisible.

When the villains turn back to sneer at her, she’s gone. They pop open the container, wondering how she escaped, but then get distracted again by Deadpool.

She uses the fight to wriggle her way free of the constraints, then hides, coming out to deliver her sword blow to the villain just when needed.

It’s a small change, but giving her a mutant power – one that she’s presumably kept from Deadpool – gives her character a little more depth, a little more mystery, and letting her use it to free herself is both more in line with her character (strong and independent) and subverts the clichéd ending.

I loved this movie when it came out. It was interesting, well-paced, and felt like it did justice to all of its characters, no matter how minor. Not to mention the events of this movie aren’t just taken seriously, they pushed the ongoing MCU TV series and movies in a different direction.

But re-watching the movie revealed a few flaws.

What Went Wrong

The camera is moving throughout the movie, jostling and shaking back and forth constantly. Its particularly egregious in most of the fight scenes, where the trembling camera combines with super-quick cuts and bad framing to render them illegible.

The scene where Black Widow and Captain America are sitting talking inside Falcon’s house? The camera constantly dips down and tilts, so that different parts of Black Widow’s head are in frame every couple of seconds. What did the shaky-cam bring to this scene?

It seems the camera only stands still for the CGI shots, like when the heli-carriers are taking off near the end of the film.

How to Fix It

We’ve also got to reframe most of the shots of the movie. The sequence where the Winter Soldier, Cap, and Black Widow are all fighting around an overpass is in particular need of a re-shoot. Most of the shots are at odd angles, with any background that could help orient the action completely out of frame.

This is a great movie. It deserved to be shot clearly, without the headache-inducing edits that chopped movies like Quantum of Solace into a boring mess.

Managed to quiet my inner editor long enough to push the novel to 86,126 words this week.

The puzzle pieces are starting to come together for my protagonist, which is making things a little easier. Each part of the solution they come across leads them on to additional questions, which reveals more of the solution.

All I have to do – I tell myself – is write down what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, and let the events I set in motion earlier play out.

It’s not that easy – it’s never that easy – but the lie helps, somehow.

I also keep reminding myself that: a) if it turns out that what I’m writing is crap, I can fix it in the next draft, and b) the only way to get better for the next novel is to finish this one.

I’ll admit it. My wife and I are re-watching all the Marvel movies in preparation for Civil War.

Like Iron Man 2, Thor is mostly good. On this re-watch, Loki came across as more of a tragic figure to me, a son trying to prove his worth to his father, but choosing the wrong way to do it. Thor grappling with his newfound weakness on Earth is still my favorite section of the movie (I’m a horrible person, and laugh every time Jane hits him with her car).

But there’s one glaring weakness in the film: Thor’s Asgardian friends

What Went Wrong

Sure, one is female and one is big and hairy and one is Asian and one is dapper. But that doesn’t tell us anything about them as people, as characters and personalities.

We never get a sense of them as individuals, and we don’t get a sense of them as a team. As a result, every scene with them in it lacks emotional weight. We simply don’t know who these people are, or why they’re friends, and we don’t care.

This is important because several key points of the movie involve them: the expedition to Jugenheim, their betrayal of King Loki, the fight against the Defender in the Earth town. Leaving these characters as bare sketches, as stereotypes, lowers the stakes in all of these scenes, weakening the movie as whole.

How to Fix It

We should see each of them exhibit their abilities. Using the Big One’s gregarious personality and Loki’s lies, the two of them talk the group past some guards. The Asian One and the Dapper One do some scouting, which requires them to scale some stone walls and do a little acrobatics. The Female One sticks by Thor’s side, stopping him just as he’s about to step on a trap. Thor can lost his temper halfway through the mission, putting them all in danger and causing his team to bail him out of trouble.

It doesn’t need to be long, just enough to give us a sense that these people have been working together for a long time, they trust each other (mostly), and they’ve all good unique histories. Maybe each one is from a different world, and so they can all give us some sense of how the Nine Realms work together?

To make room for it, we drop the intro sequence about the war with the Frost Giants. It’s confusing, it’s backstory, and we don’t need it. We do need to see Thor’s team in action.

The mission sequence also gives us a chance to show Thor’s second of three strikes. Odin welcomes them home after the successful completion of their mission (it’s the reason for the celebration in the beginning) but chastises them for taking a risk, etc. He can mention a previous (recent) strike, one that Thor thinks of as an adventure, but Odin sees as a mark of his immaturity.

We still have the Frost Giants sneak attack in the middle of this, and the Defender does its job. But now Thor and Loki get to ask what they were after, and Odin gives them the history, but abbreviated, and without the Earth piece.

With that change, the stakes are higher throughout the movie. When Thor goes to Jotunheim, we understand that he’s disobeying his father again, and dragging his team – who we know and care about – along with him. When Thor starts fighting, we understand that not only has Thor put peace between the worlds at risk, he’s put his team in danger, since we just saw Odin warn them against crossing him a third time.

We totally understand when Odin appears and takes them home, then yells at Thor and takes his hammer. It’s the culmination of a chain of events, not a father suddenly turning abusive because his kid stayed out past curfew.

And when Thor’s friends face off against the Defender, we care a lot more. They’ve broken the terms of their freedom in Asgard to find their friend, only to discover he’s no longer the strong fighter he was. The fight against the Defender will likely be their last, but they’ll fight it together.

Re-watched this one over the weekend, and it holds up better than I remember. Rourke’s villain is still over-the-top, and Rockwell’s industrialist is so sleazy and incompetent it’s hard to believe he’s in charge of anything, let alone a large company.

But overall this is a fun movie, despite dealing with heavier subjects, like Stark’s relationships with Pepper, Rhodey, and his mortality.

A few things could have been done to make this movie even better, though.

What Went Wrong

At the end of the movie, we think that Pepper Potts is giving on being CEO, and Tony’s going to take over. This undermines the sense of Pepper as being the more competent of the two, and is misleading: Tony doesn’t return as CEO.

We also think his best friend stole one of the Iron Man suits just to punish Tony for getting drunk at his birthday party, which makes him seem petty and mean.

How to Fix It

For the Potts plotline, all we need is for Tony to talk about how good she is at the job. He can drop a compliment into his failed apology when he brings her the strawberries. The comment bounces off her anger, of course, and rightly so, but it’ll reinforce the idea that she’s the right CEO.

Then, on the roof scene, instead of offering to resign, Pepper should ask how he dealt with all the stress. She can talk about how it’s worse for her, since she has to worry about him, too, but she doesn’t even come close to quitting. Instead, this is a moment for Tony to support her emotionally, telling her she’s doing great, she’s better at it than he was, and she’ll make it through.

Small changes, but they’ll underline the emotional parts of the story, and strengthen what is already a good movie.

Novel’s at 83,370 words.

So I turned out to be wrong about sustaining the faster pace. Only managed 700 words this week.

I could say it’s because I’m doing more planning and outlining, and less writing. I could say it’s because I’ve started jogging in the mornings again, so I have less time to write.

But in truth I’m distracted, conflicted, and afraid.

I’m afraid I won’t have the book done by the end of the month. I’m afraid I won’t be able to edit it into something worth reading later this year. I’m afraid I’m wasting my time, that I should be spending more of what free time I have working on side programming projects, investing in my skills there instead of here.

In short, I’m afraid I’m making a mistake.

And of course, the lack of writing progress only makes the fear worse. It’s evidence, you see, that I’m not up to snuff, that I need to just move on to something that will pay more, something that’s more in line with my day job, anything other than this.

Right now, I’m just hoping the fear will pass. Till then, all I can do is force myself to sit down, stare at the screen, and push the words out. Even if they’re terrible.

We’ll see who quits first.

Addictive. Which surprises me, since I spend most of my time failing at individual missions, struggling desperately to keep my adventurers from succumbing to madness. And yet I keep coming back for more.

Three things I learned about game design:

• Art and sound design go a long way to selling the game. The mechanics of the thing can be familiar, while the art and the sound (that narrator!) really immerse the player in the world.
• Failure can be fun, so long as the player can anticipate it, and recover from it. With those two pieces, failing becomes a continuation of the play experience, not a detriment.
• Don't be dismissive of old game forms. Even the venerable dungeon crawl has some life left in it, yet.

Novel’s at 82,649 words.

Deadline seems to be working. I’ve been writing about 400 words a day since setting it, pushing myself to write more than just my 250-word minimum so I can hit the goal.

It also helps that I seem to have turned a corner in the narrative. My protagonist has gotten past the major stumbling block in her path, and is starting down the trail of the villain.

The book itself is picking up pace as she goes, heading toward the climax, and my writing is as well.

Let’s hope I can sustain it through the month.

I have a problem.

No, not my fondness for singing 80s country in a bad twang during karaoke.

I mean a real, nerd-world problem: I have too many books to read.

I can’t leave any bookstore without buying at least one. For a good bookstore, I’ll walk out with half a dozen or more, balancing them in my arms, hoping none of them fall over.

I get them home and try to squeeze them into my bookshelf of “books I have yet to read” (not to be confused with my “books I’ve read and need to donate” or “books I’ve read and will re-read someday when I have the time” shelves). That shelf is full, floor to ceiling.

My list of books to read is already too long for me to remember them all. And that’s not counting the ones I have sitting in ebook format, waiting on my Kobo or iPhone for me to tap their cover art and dive in.

Faced with so much reading material, so many good books waiting to be read, my question is this: What do I read next?

I could pick based on mood. But that usually means me sitting in front of my physical books, picking out the one that grabs me. I could pick based on which ones I’ve bought most recently, which would probably narrow things down to just my ebooks.

But I want to be able to choose from all of my books, physical and virtual, at any time.

So I wrote a bot to help me.

It listens to my twitter stream for instructions. When I give it the right command, it pulls down my to-read shelf from Goodreads (yes, I put all of my books, real and electronic, into Goodreads. yes, it took much longer than I thought it would), ranks them in order of which ones I should read first, and then tweets back to me the top 3.

I’ve been following its recommendations for about a month now, and so far, it’s working. Footsteps in the Sky was great. Data and Goliath was eye-opening. The Aesthetic of Play changed the way I view art and games.

Now, if only I could train it to order books for me automatically…

Fantastic.

Keyes juggles plot threads involving first contact, corporate espionage, traditionalists versus progressive technologists, power struggles, abusive families and grieving for recently-passed relatives, all without dropping a single one. Grounds everything, even the novel’s villains, in sympathetic characters that you may not agree with, but still don’t want to see harmed.

It’s an incredible feat. I’m awestruck by it, and more than a little jealous.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Sometimes just listening to a character's thoughts as they worry about their present and plan for their future is enough to tell us what we need to know about the world the story's taking place in.
• Spending time with villains, and sympathizing with them, raises the stakes of the climax for everyone.
• Always handy to have a newcomer to the world as an audience surrogate. As they learn and explore the world, so does the reader, without any info-dumping being necessary.

Novel’s at 80,577 words.

I’m closing in on my original 90,000 word target. I have a feeling the final draft will end up longer than that, possibly close to 100,000 words, given the ground I have left to cover.

I’ve set a deadline for myself, though. I want to have this draft done by June 1st.

It’s just a little over a month away, but I think I can make it. Partially because I’m in the final scenes of the book, and partially because I want to. I started the book last July, so wrapping up the draft in June would mean I’ve spent just shy of a year writing it.

I think having a target to hit will push me to write more each day, and finish it out. With this draft done in June, I can take some time off before diving into the editing of my first novel. And I want to get that done before the year is out so I can start submitting it to agents.

It’s Mad Libs crossed with Apples to Apples. What’s not to like?

Easy to learn, quick to play, and fun even if you’re losing.

Three things I learned about game design:

• Pulling mechanics from two successful games and combining them is a perfectly viable way to generate a new game.
• You don't need anonymity for voting mechanics to feel fair. In fact, letting the players present their choices can be very entertaining.
• Unplayed cards should present options to players; played cards should record choices they've made.

Eye-opening. Reminded me of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance activities, of the importance of the documents Snowden disclosed.

Schneier’s style is easy to read and straightforward, no small feat for a subject that takes in law, cryptography, and communications technology. I plowed through this book in a few days, but I’ll be digesting his points for a good while.

Three of the many things I learned:

• There are companies that sell the ability to send a silent, undetected phone call to a mobile phone. Call won't ring, but will cause it to signal nearest cell tower, giving away its location.
• FBI can (and does) collect personal data from third parties (phone companies, email servers, etc) via National Security Letters, without a warrant.
• NSA audit showed it broke its own rules against spying for personal reasons at least 8 times a day (!) from 2011 to 2012

Novel’s at 78,941 words. Which is an odd time to have finally figured out its theme.

Or rather, one of its themes. You’d think I’d have known this going in, the kind of weighty things I would be trying to deal with in the story.

Nope. I had a hook, a starting scene, and an idea of how I wanted to portray the characters. That was it.

Actually stumbled across the theme this week, while reading a different book. Something in what the author was talking about meshed with the upcoming events of the story my subconscious was chewing on, and that was it: I knew my theme.

It’s a little late to alter the draft much to accommodate it, but I’ll be writing the last third with the theme in mind. It’ll really come into play when I go back through for the second draft, and start making edits to bring it out more or eliminate passages that conflict with it.

Awesome. Easy to learn, quick to play, and ye gods, addictive. Reminded me a lot of Egyptian Ratscrew, in all the best ways.

Three things I learned about game design:

• A little chaos is ok, so long as it's not borne out of confusion.
• The simpler your rules are, the greater freedom you have to explore variety in the expression of those rules (e.g., the many, many different images you have to match against in Loonacy).
• A strong theme is important. We found the Retro deck to be more enjoyable than the normal deck, simply because the theme was 1) cool, and 2) strongly expressed.

Inspirational. Completely changed my mind on the tension between narrative and play in video games. Upton provides a perspective that shows narrative is play, just a different kind of it. In fact, play undergirds all the arts, from board games to paintings to novels.

Three of the many things I learned from this book:

• 5,000 year-old boardgames have been discovered inside Egyptian tombs
• Slot machines are programmed to pop up with near misses of jackpots often, so players think the big score is just around the corner
• Chinese narratives often follow a different structure than the Western. Where a Western narrative has some inciting incident leading to rising action and then a climax, Chinese narratives will instead establish a topic and then explore it in great detail before a plot twist throws everything into confusion, which is only resolved at the conclusion.

Novel’s at 77,376 words.

Writing’s been chugging along this week. My last major decision – read: stop and outline – point was a few weeks back, so I’ve been mostly writing out the consequences of that.

There’s another I-have-no-idea-what-happens-next point coming up, where the other shoe is finally going to drop, and right on top of my main character’s head. Not quite sure how they’ll react.

I don’t think I’ll reach it till next week, though.

Hopefully I’ll have it figured out by then?

(Probably not)

Southern Cross Vol 1 - Great art. Very creepy. Felt there were some strange jumps or discontinuities in the narrative, but overall it’s well-done.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol 1: Disappointing. Dialog is clunky, and none of the characters sound like themselves. Art gets confusing, especially during the action scenes. Final moments of the volume don’t land the emotional punch they want to.

Godzilla in Hell: Fantastic use of graphics over dialog. Only the 1st and last entries have an interesting story. The rest seem fine with rehashing monster battles in elemental locales, rather than exploring what Hell might be like for Godzilla.

Wicked + Divine Vol 3: Slow going in the beginning, then picks up later. Not nearly as moving as Vol 2. Feels like the heart might be missing from this one. Art shifts are possibly appropriate, but strange and off-putting. Best segments deal with the gods' pasts, though not all of them are coherent.

Pretty Deadly #1: Good writing. But the art, to me, is incoherent. Often can’t tell the people out from the backgrounds, and none of the lines seem sharp enough to distinguish objects from each other. Even the panels are cut off in odd ways that made it hard to tell what’s being shown.

Fun game with a hilarious premise. Rules were a little hard to wrap our heads around – when to pass cards, and who to pass to – for the first game, but each turn went fairly quick even so.

Three things I learned about game design:

• There's room for all kinds of games, even ones about zombies running a fast food joint.
• You can take a familiar game, like Go Fish, and -- with a few gentle twists -- make it into something new.
• Streamline your rules. Multiple paths to reach the goal make it harder for players to pick up and learn.

Came back from Boston with a lovely head cold that made me want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

I didn’t though, thank goodness. Instead I pushed myself to hit my word count every day this week, bringing the novel to 75,638 words.

And counting. I still feel like I’m on the tail end of the book, but I have no idea how close to the end I am. I could be another 30,000 words away, I could write through next week and suddenly discover I’m only 10K from the finish.

There’s only one way to know. So, if you’ll excuse me, sets hard hat on head picks up shovel it’s back to the word mines for me.

Absolutely fantastic from start to finish. Nominated it for a Hugo as soon as I read the last page.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Keeping chapters short not only gives you an excuse to read "just one more," it also lets you do abrupt transitions between place and mood.
• Characters grumbling to each other (or in their heads) can give you a very compact and fun way to explain aspects of the world that are unfamiliar to the reader.
• By shifting the metaphors used to describe a scene, you can sustain a difference of mood between locations. For instance, in a place of death and white, describing a series of building supports as "arched ribs" echoes the feeling you want to convey.

An odd mix of politics and brewing history. Gives an intro to several breweries, and how they got started, but spends several chapters going over arguments among the brewers on a blow-by-blow basis.

Really wish there had been more space given to individual breweries and going into their history. Even better would have been some chapters with advice for people thinking of starting their own microbrewery. What better way to support the craft beer revolution than to capture and pass on some of the wisdom of the pioneers?

Three things I learned:

• The larger national breweries, like Miller and Anheuser-Busch, use corn and rice additives to extend the shelf life of the beer and make it cheaper.
• Brewing beer at home was technically illegal until 1979 (!), a holdover from Prohibition.
• Stone's Arrogant Bastard Ale (one of my favorites) started out as a homebrew mistake. Before it had a proper name, they referred to it as the "hop bomb."

Not much progress on the novel this week.

I’ve been in Boston for a company meetup, which has messed with my normal schedule and kept me away from my desk.

Intending to get some writing done on the flight home tonight, though, and try to catch up on it this weekend. Can’t leave my main character struggling to escape from a trap for too long, can I?

Involved, complex, and tough.

We spent our time rushing around the board, from crisis to crisis, trying to stay one step ahead of the many enemies around us. In the end, we won, but barely. Victory felt more like a staving off of defeat than outright success.

Three things I learned about game design:

• For a complex cooperative game, leave out betrayal. It'll increase the difficulty without increasing any enjoyment.
• Tying your character classes to individuals (real, fictional, or mythological) is a great hook into the game world.
• Having enemies refresh after defeat is a good way to generate a siege mentality in your players, but it makes the game as a whole feel darker. Use it sparingly.

Lucid, detailed, and engrossing, much like its predecessor, The Plantagenets. Jones has a gift for converting a parade of names and dates into personalities and dramatic clashes.

Unlike the previous book, I could see many more parallels with events in Game of Thrones in this one. There’s a usurper claiming the rightful king is a child of adultery, there are minor houses parleying marriage to the royal house into more influence and power, there’s even a warrior king that becomes fat and indolent in old age.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Entire Tudor dynasty descends from Owen Tudor, a minor noble that Catherine of Valois (princess of France) married after King Henry V died.
• Wars of the Roses were less family feud and more power struggle between multiple great families due to the collapse of kingly power under Henry VI.
• The man who became Richard III was, until Edward IV's early death, one of the most loyal and honorable nobles in the kingdom.

Novel’s at 73,653 words.

Still pushing forward, thought the last few scenes have been hard for me to write. Usually that’s because I don’t know enough about something in the scene – how a bail hearing would be conducted, or the cooking techniques of feudal Japan – to feel comfortable writing it. This time, it’s because I know too much about what’s happening in the scene.

Specifically, I know things that, if my characters knew them, would make accomplishing their goals much easier. But they don’t work in the field, like I do, and so their knowledge is limited.

But how limited? How much should they know, and how much are they ignorant of? How much would just be common sense?

And even for the things they do know, or that they stumble on that work, how much detail should I go into as to what’s happening? How much info do I dare dump on the poor reader?

It’s striking that balance – between showing too much detail and not enough, between thinking the characters know more than they should versus not giving them enough credit – that’s been difficult for me.

Took longer to explain the rules than to play the game. Not that the rules are complex, just that the game itself is so quick.

Had a good time, but it always seemed like the werewolves had the hardest job. They have the most reason to talk during the day, if only to throw suspicion on someone else. In the games we played, whoever spoke first was probably a werewolf.

Three things I learned about game design:

• If you build discussion and argument into the game, set a time limit. Otherwise things can get bogged down, and drag on long enough to not be fun anymore.
• It is basically impossible for players to properly execute a team-based strategy if they don't know what team they're on.
• If you design gameplay that rewards players for screwing over their teammates, they need to be able to win on their own.

A bit complex to setup and rather awkward to learn. First game was really slow as we tried to figure out what we could do and what the best way to beat back the fire was.

Once we got the hang of the rules, though, the game’s speed picked up and we had a good time knocking out flames and rescuing pets (I mean trapped humans. Yes, the humans definitely took priority).

Three things I learned about game design:

• If your game is cooperative, you can get away with more complex rules. Everyone will be helping out each other on their turns, so it won't be as intimidating.
• Beware using tiny markers for important game mechanics. Unless they're anchored down, they'll shift too easily during gameplay (dice rolling, moving pieces, etc) and players will lose track of where they're supposed to be.
• Design your co-op player classes around the actions available to every player. The simpler your basic actions are, the easier it will be to balance those classes.

Novel’s at 72,337 words.

I’ve managed to fix last week’s mistake, and gotten back to making forward progress through the novel. There’s some small dangly bits of plot that are poking out around my patch, but I’ve decided to note them for now, so I can come back to fix them in the second draft.

Instead, I’m plowing forward.

Easy to pick up and learn, tough to win.

I made the mistake of playing it like a deck-building card game, only picking up mines that had victory points on them. These were few and far between, though, so I ended up with a lot fewer gems to use to purchase the more lucrative mines that opened up later on.

Three things I learned about game design:

• Don't rely on just color to distinguish sides or types in the game. I'm color blind, and had a hard time telling two of the gems apart, because their colors were so similar.
• Even a rather simple mechanic -- gems buy mines, which give gems to buy more mines -- can yield an interesting game, once randomness and competition enter into it.
• Introducing an unbalancing element can be ok, if it pushes the game towards a conclusion

Frustrating. Moving, often brilliant, but feels incomplete in many ways. Magical bits aren’t fully baked, as if he thought it was cool but didn’t want to flesh it out too much (because it doesn’t make sense). Ditto his portrayal of the future, which was scary as hell in the moment but on reflection is just another doomsday scenario from the 1970s.

The overall storyline of following a character from the 1980s to the 2040s feels better, but gets sidelined so often that the final chapters have less emotional impact than they could. There’s also numerous threads that get introduced just for plot’s sake and then dropped, with not even their emotional impact explored, let alone their practical consequences.

All in all, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Using the present tense for the main narrative means that when you do a flashback, you can reach for the past tense as an easy way to distinguish the two.
• Stream of consciousness writing can help make a normally unsympathetic character more likable.
• Stronger to use vocabulary to give a sense of dialect speech, instead of punctuation. It's also easier to read.

Novel’s at 70,855 words.

Didn’t do any writing over the week of the cruise. With no internet, and no laptop, I decided to take the week off. I feel like I’m on the final third of the book, and I hoped taking a break would give me the energy for that final push.

Returned to writing yesterday, and I’m glad I stepped away from the book for a bit. Re-reading the scene I was in the middle of revealed a glaring hole in its logic.

I found a fix, but it means shifting the course of things going back a few chapters. So these past few days have been ones of revision, of snipping out the parts that don’t make sense and replacing them with explanations that do.

I’m hoping by next week I’ll be back to making forward progress. But for now, it’s patch, patch, patch, till the plot holds water again.

This was the first cruise my wife and I had ever been on. We weren’t sure what to expect. Would I get seasick enough to ruin the trip? Would we spend the trip as wallflowers, since we didn’t know anyone else that was going? Would our clothes for Formal Night be formal enough, despite our lack of fezzes?

Thankfully, everything turned out better than we could have hoped for.

Our good luck started before we even got on the boat.

While waiting to get into the terminal, we struck up a conversation with another Sea Monkey couple that had been on the cruise before. They were funny, friendly, and more than willing to share advice on how to navigate the new world we were entering. We had lunch together that day, and they introduced us to Redneck Life, a game they thought we’d appreciate since we live in Arkansas (we did, the game’s hilarious).

We ended up spending a lot of the cruise together; they already feel like good friends we’ve known for years. Thanks to them, we never felt lonely or out of place during the cruise. Can’t wait to see them again next year, so we’re already making plans to go visit them before then :)

Our second stroke of incredible luck happened when we found an interpreter for my wife. She’s what I refer to as “suburban deaf”: not hard-core inner city deaf, just living on the outskirts of the community. It’s enough so that concerts and stand up performances – in other words, the majority of the nightly entertainment on the cruise – are really hard for her, and she misses most of what’s said or sung.

But not this time. On the second (?) day of the cruise, another Sea Monkey introduced herself after watching my wife sign. She said she was an interpreter, and would be happy to sign for my wife during the shows if she wanted.

My wife accepted, of course, and the two became really good friends over the course of the cruise. She ended up signing for my wife for all the Main Concerts, and most of the side events my wife wanted to go to. At each one, she commandeered two spots near the front, and reversed one of the chairs so she could face my wife and sign.

She’s an amazing interpreter, with a very expressive face, and a great sense of storytelling through sign. She made the performances available to my wife for the first time, and it was amazing seeing her so happy: able to laugh at the same jokes as me, without me whispering to her or using my non-fluent sign to get the meaning across.

These were the two biggest instances of kindness we received during the cruise, but the entire Sea Monkey community was amazingly friendly and welcoming.

In the game room, you could just walk up to any table and ask to play. If you hovered instead, they would invite you to join.

In the dining room, you could share a table with perfect strangers and end up making new friends.

My wife and I decided to try organizing a couple of events ourselves, and not only did they get on the schedule, they were welcomed and successful.

I’m taking a lot of memories away from the cruise – performing stand up for the first time in 2 years, the view from the top of Blackbeard’s Castle in St Thomas, my wife going to dinner with a tiny fez pinned to her hair – but the best memory I have is a feeling, the warm glow of acceptance and support I felt from everyone while we were there.

It’s an incredible community, and I’m honored to have been allowed to join it.

Made it back home from JoCo Cruise 2016 last night.

I’ll do a more detailed breakdown of the cruise later, but there is too much for now, so let me sum up: it was amazing.

I met some incredible people, who let me play games they had designed, told me about their upcoming writing projects, and just generally accepted my wife and I with open arms. I heard someone say that it’s like going on vacation with 1,000 of the best friends you haven’t met yet, and it’s completely true.

Oh, and the performers were great, too :)

If you were on the cruise this year, thank you for helping to create such an amazing community. Huge props to Paul and Storm and JoCo and Scarface and the many others that worked hard to organize it and keep everything running smoothly.

If you weren’t on the cruise, signups are available for 2017. We hope to see you there!

Such a disappointment.

What Went Wrong

How completely boring.

How to Fix It

Take Dr Swann. As written and cast, she’s just another young Bond girl. So we’ll recast her, putting Amy Purdy – Paralympian snowboarder and double amputee – in the role.

We’ll introduce her much earlier, putting her on the ground in Mexico City, where she’s on the trail of the group that’s trying to kill her father.

Bond’s there, too, but they’re working at cross-purposes. His mission is surveillance, but hers is assassination. The chase across Mexico City is in part a race between the two of them, a race that Swann wins.

Bond spends the rest of the first half of the movie one step behind Swann. When they meet, it’s not like two potential lovers chatting over coffee, it’s two fierce competitors battling it out.

Our mid-point reveal is now multi-faceted. We reveal Swann’s prosthetic legs, and that getting them for her is the reason Mr White joined Spectre in the first place. She reveals her mission to Bond, who realizes his personal vendetta and hers are aligned. Reluctantly, they join forces to go after Blomfeld and take down Spectre.

Here we subvert another expectation: Blomfeld is actually the widow from the first half of the movie.

Bond still goes to the funeral, but the widow gently puts him off when he tries to seduce her. On his way out, Bond sees Swann, and goes chasing after her, and so forgets about the widow.

But in one of the final scenes – say when Bond and Swann crash a party held at a chalet high in the Alps that they hear Blomfeld will be at – he sees the widow again.

They flirt this time, playfully, with Bond clueless as to who she really is. That is, until someone else passing by greets her by name.

Bond naturally readies for a final showdown, but Blomfeld laughs at the idea. Why would she want to kill him? He’s been doing great work for her so far.

She proceeds to outline how well Bond has helped her: how his pursuit of low-level thugs has weeded out her weaker minions, leaving the organization stronger (Casino Royale). How he failed to prevent her gaining control of vast quantities of water rights in South America (Quantum of Solace). How he took down a thorn in her side who was trying to take over her computer systems (Skyfall).

She has no reason to kill him, since he’s been helping her all along. Even the MI5/MI6 merger has been good for her, since she only needs half as many moles as she used to.

She turns to leave, but runs right into Swann. Swann, of course, has every reason to want Blomfeld dead: for first ruining her father’s life, and then killing him.

A fight ensues, Blomfeld flees, Bond and Swann give chase. We get a great sequence of them skiiing and snowboarding down the slopes at night, Bond clumsy, Swann graceful and Blomfeld desperate. They finally corner Blomfeld against a cliff, where Swann, overcome with rage, pushes her off.

Both Bond and Swann sigh with relief, thinking its over, that they’ve put their ghosts to rest. But when Bond returns to London, Q tells him of a message he intercepted: of a meeting being called between Spectre’s remaining seven heads. They’ve injured the organization, but they’ve not taken it out.

Tense, claustrophobic, and dreamlike, a Lovecraftian tale as told by Borges.

Reminded me a bit of Lost with the exotic location, the exploration of a place where strange things happen. Also because it frustrated me like Lost did, introducing mysteries and building tension that it had no intention of resolving.

Three things about writing I learned from it:

• Repeating flashbacks in the middle of a mystery narrative can backfire. If you've built up enough tension in the main story, the flashbacks will be an annoyance, an obstacle for readers to overcome.
• Beware clinical detachment in the narrator. It's ok for a chapter or two, but over the length of a novel it drains any concern the reader might have for them.
• If you can remove half the narrative and your story still makes sense, consider leaving it out.

Novel’s at 70,684 words.

Final third of the novel is starting to take shape.

The plot’s taken two sharp left turns in as many weeks, but it’s ended up on a path where I can actually see where things are going now, and how they’ll wrap up.

It’s an odd feeling. Here I was trudging along with no end in sight, just a vague idea of how I wanted things to turn out. The plot – and my original outline – suffer two sharp shocks, and now I know where I’m going.

Let’s hope it lasts for the next 20,000 words.

Absolutely awesome from start to finish. Blends haute-cuisine, horror, and comedy into a cocktail that went down so smooth, I’ve already ordered the sequel. If you’ve ever wished Top Chef were more like The Dresden Files, this is the book for you.

Taught me three things about writing:

• With an omniscient narrator, you can just drop backstory on readers, instead of having flashbacks or waiting for it to come out through dialog. Keep it short, though, so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.
• Opening with action is tough. It's a good hook, but without really vivid descriptions, it's going to be hard for the reader to picture what's happening, since they don't yet have a feel for the characters.
• It's easier for readers to accept the fantastic mixing with everyday life if the characters take it seriously as well. They shouldn't be blasé, but having them face the weird head-on is a great way to make it feel more real (as opposed to, say, spending half the book in either denial or ignorance).

A mixed bag of interesting, well-thought out essays mingled with articulate but specious arguments in favor of traditional conservative opinions.

The first half of the book, made of the first 8 essays, is the better half. His arguments in these essays about the limits of law are based on evidence, as when he uses the conflicting conclusions reached by medical studies and the legal system in the Benedictin cases in the 80s and 90s to argue that courts are bad places to decide essentially scientific questions.

In the second half of essays, he begins to twist logic and ignore evidence in order to forcefully insist on the positions he’s adopted.

He claims that the states have changed since the Civil Rights Era, and so there’s no need to worry about devolving power from the federal government to them, ignoring the many groups – women, the LGBT community, non-Christians, immigrants – whose rights the states routinely trample on.

He dismisses Proportional Representation to elect legislators as absurd and unworkable, despite its use in the majority of democratic countries around the world.

In one of the last essays, he goes so far as to say that pushing power down from the federal level to the lowest level possible – county or city – is an alloyed good, a goal to be pursued even if the evidence shows that it makes things worse.

Despite the uneven nature of the essays, though, I did learn a few things:

• In product liability cases, defendants that rely on statistical evidence are more likely to lose in jury trials.
• Making employers check their employees' immigration status is an example of private gatekeeping: when the government delegates part of its regulation powers to private individuals.
• Modern mass tort litigation (in the US) is only a few decades old. It was basically invented in 1969, and continues to be a cobbled together reaction to the fact that a single company can now affect so many lives all at once.

Novel’s at 68,869 words.

My characters are smarter than me.

Throughout writing this book, there’s been a couple of weak links in the chain of my original outline. Places where various plot threads didn’t quite meet up. I’ve been debating – and discarding – different ways to resolve them, but never quite hit on the right way.

That is, until not one, but two of my characters told me the solution.

One of them did it quite early on, but I dismissed it as too easy a way out.

But this week, another character told me the same thing. This time, I listened.

It creeped me out a little, because they handed me both the solution and the justification for it. It ties all the plot threads together, makes sense of the entire chain of events, and deepens the conflict at the same time.

It’s beautiful, but even though it came from one of my characters, it doesn’t feel like my idea.

I’m using it anyway, though.

Fantastic. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve been a Chuck Wendig fan ever since Blackbirds (you have read Blackbirds, haven’t you?). Nor am I saying that because his blog is a fountain of NSFW writing inspiration (though it is).

I’m saying that because it’s a Star Wars book that tells a great story, fills in some of the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and manages to feel like a Star Wars movie in novel form. That’s a tough balancing act, and kudos to Wendig for pulling it off.

Here’s what I learned about writing from it:

• Don't be afraid to be opinionated in giving description. It can help keep things brief while still being vivid.
• Part of what makes a hero feel scrappy is not things going right, but things going wrong, all the time. Little blunders and bad luck that they just manage to survive make them feel more real and keep the reader rooting for them.
• You can frame the start of scenes just like framing a shot in a movie. Think of a character's head popping through a hatch, or opening on a lightsaber glowing in the darkness. Can be a visual hook into the rest of the chapter.

Almost done with the prequels. Thankfully this is the best of three, though given the generally low standards of the first two that isn’t saying much.

What Went Wrong

Most of the problems with Revenge of the Sith are carryovers from mistakes made in the first two movies, emotional beats that fail to land with as much impact as they should because the foundation work for them hasn’t been done.

For example, Padmé and Anakin’s romance should feel tragic, with Anakin’s concern for her driving them apart even as they try to keep their growing family a secret. But their interaction in Attack of the Clones was so still and formal, it’s hard to believe either of them would miss the other, except that the plot calls for them to. Instead, their “love story” feels like a piece of background that Lucas wanted slotted into place, as cold and unfeeling as a CGI’d starship.

Even Count Dooku’s death, which should be a pivotal moment, is treated so perfunctory that it feels trivial, just one more Sith slain by a righteous Jedi. No big deal.

How to Fix It

This means there’s no Count Dooku in this one. He died in Attack of the Clones, a tragic end for a renegade that thought he was doing the right thing.

We also have to continue rewriting the scenes between Padmé and Anakin. Two people in love, hiding their child from their superiors, should display a lot more fear and desperation than they do. We need to see their relationship deepen and grow, despite their need to keep it in the shadows.

It would help if we got some hint that Padmé made an effort to hide her relationship with Anakin. We should see her dating other men, or dropping hints that she was being courted by someone else, to deflect attention from the young Jedi that apparently spends every night in her quarters.

Ditto for Anakin. We need to see him lying to the other Jedi, making excuses and begging away from assignments that would make him leave the capital. We need to feel the danger that Anakin and Padmé are in, and how far they’ve already gone to maintain their relationship. So when we see Anakin slipping to the Dark Side in order to save her, its one more small step along the path that he’s been on for years.

We also need to see more tension between Anakin and Palpatine, preferably over Padmé. As a Senator that’s presumably alarmed at the direction the Republic is going, we should witness her at her work: campaigning for re-election (with Palpatine possibly campaigning for her rival), lobbying for support for bills from her other Senators (bills that would likely reduce Palpatine’s authority), giving interviews with the media to support her position.

All of this should make Palpatine grit his teeth, and Anakin should be constantly defending Padmé to the Chancellor. It’d be one more sign to the audience of his feelings for Padmé, and it would tip off Palpatine to the significance of Anakin’s devotion.

And once Palpatine realizes that, he decides to kill Padmé.

That’s the final change we make. The visions Anakin sees of Padmé dying are not of her “losing the will to live” – which is frankly insulting for such a headstrong character – but of Palpatine draining her life force.

We know Palpatine has manipulated the Jedi’s visions of the future before. He decides to kill Padmé, knowing the visions of her in danger will drive Anakin further down the path to the Dark Side.

His plan is originally to blame her death on the Jedi, pushing Anakin to break with them for good. But when he finds Anakin near death after his fight with Obi-Wan, he drains her life force and uses it to keep Anakin alive, in a single stroke sustaining his most powerful apprentice and sealing Anakin’s allegiance to him.

Novel’s at 66,694 words.

This week’s events have thrown more light onto the villain of the novel: what he wants, how far he’s willing to go to get it, and just how long he’s been planning to take it.

One of my protagonists is gone. The other has to carry on mostly alone now, and I don’t know if she can survive. She’s out of her depth, and she’ll need all the allies she can find – or cajole – to win this one.

Here’s hoping.

Another tall order. I like this one more than Phantom Menace, but it’s flaws are deeper, even if there aren’t quite so many mistakes.

Let’s dive in.

What Went Wrong

How to Fix It

Let’s start with the assassination attempt on Padmé’s life, which leads to Obi-Wan and Anakin guarding her and makes the entire romance subplot possible.

The assassination makes no sense. They put it down to Padmé being the leader of the opposition, but the opposition to what? The Chancellor is from her world, so Naboo is basically ruling the galaxy at this point. How could she be part of opposing her own government?

There’s also no tension in that first explosion. We don’t know what’s happening, suddenly things are blowing up, and now we’re watching a scene that should be moving and sad between Padmé and her guard. Unfortunately, since none of the guards even have names in the last movie (or this one), let along personalities, none of this works.

The explosion needs to almost kill Padmé. We need to see her coming down the runway, and watch it blow up, and her vanish under a pile of rubble. They dig her out and get her to a hospital, where we learn that several leading senators have had unfortunate accidents in the last few months. None looked like assassination attempts, until now. That’s why the Jedi get involved: to solve a genuine mystery.

With this change, the confusion at the beginning adds to the tension. We care about Padmé, and we share her confusion at being targeted. Who is after her? Why are they targeting Senators? We want to know, so we want to watch the rest of the movie.

This leads directly into our first major change: the romance between Padmé and Anakin.

It has to be entirely rewritten, from start to finish. Anakin spends the first part of the movie glowering at Padmé like he wants to take her in the basement and do weird things to her with a pair of pliers. He spends the second half glowering at her like she’s just hit his favorite puppy. All of that, along with the lines about “teasing the Senator” and “I hate sand” and everything else, all need to go.

Instead, their feelings for each other should be a surprise to both of them. They should remember each other, and be friendly – but nothing else – at the start. As they flee Coruscant, they reminisce about their adventures from the first movie, and catch up on what’s happened in their lives since then (this sharing will also catch up the audience, filling in details on how Palpatine has taken Anakin under his wing and why Padmé gave up being Queen to become a Senator).

Once on Naboo, among the beauty of her retreat, they both start to relax their guards, and discover they enjoy talking with each other, perhaps too much. This should climax with the kiss on the balcony, as a mix of everything their feeling: the danger they share, their past history, the way they can confide in each other.

The very next scene is Anakin having his nightmare about his mother and waking up in his room, sweating. We skip the fireside scene and its awkward “I’ve brought you into this incredibly romantic room to break up with you” vibe altogether.

Instead, we let their decision about their relationship be ambiguous. Neither of them has decided to take things any further than that initial kiss. They could still pull back and stay friends, stay loyal to the causes they’ve pledged themselves to. Or they could take the plunge together, and damn the consequences. It’s not knowing that adds tension to the scenes that follow.

Anakin doesn’t tell Padmé about his nightmare at first, but over breakfast that morning she pulls what’s wrong out of him. And when she hears, it’s her idea to go to Tatooine and look for his mother, not Anakin’s. He wants to keep Padmé safe on Naboo, and doesn’t want to put her in danger. She sees a chance to distract both of them from their feelings for each other, while helping out a friend (she might even feel her own debt to the woman that sheltered them on Tatooine and allowed her own son to risk his life to help them).

She wins the argument, setting them on their course towards the final third of the movie and reinforcing our impression from Phantom Menace of Padmé’s willingness to take risks.

Now instead of the stiffness of the kiss between Anakin and Padmé before they’re led out to the Coliseum to die, a stiffness that comes from it being a kiss with no risk behind it, a “might as well say this because it has no consequences” scene, it’s one of mutual discovery, of the two of them realizing that they do love each other, and deciding to act on it.

So that’s Padmé and Anakin sorted. Now for the last major change: Count Dooku’s role.

As written, he screams villain at every turn. He dresses all in black, he speaks in ponderous “I’ve got you now” style, and he’s played by Christopher Freakin Lee.

While I’m a Lee fan to my core, the character as written is completely uninteresting. He’s a cackling capital-V Villain in a trilogy that’s all about how good intentions can lead you astray, about how evil can masquerade as virtue, about how hard it is to tell what’s the right thing to do.

Dooku should be an earnest renegade. Instead of being Palpatine’s Sith apprentice, Dooku discovered that Palpatine was a Sith, and broke with the Jedi Council because of it. He didn’t tell them because he didn’t think they would believe him, or if they did that it would be because Palpatine had already corrupted them. He went from system to system, cobbling together an Alliance to fight Palpatine and bring down the Sith.

He’s behind the assassinations, but only because he thinks the Senators he’s targeting are in league with Palpatine. In Padmé’s case, it would make perfect sense for him to add her to the list: she’s from Palpatine’s homeworld, she helped him become Chancellor, and if Dooku looks into her future, he can see the rise of the Dark Side.

Dooku thinks he’s the good guy, doing something hard but necessary to fight a greater evil. We should see him as being very similar to Qui-Gon, if Qui-Gon had lived and disagreed more with the Jedi Council.

He doesn’t want to fight Obi-Wan when he captures him. He makes an earnest attempt to get Obi-Wan to join him, to help him overthrow the Sith that have taken control. The scene between them should be fraught with tension, and we should actually wonder if Obi-Wan will join the rebels at this point, especially once he realizes that Dooku is telling the truth. When he refuses, and Dooku sentences him to death, it should be with regret and reluctance, not relish.

All of Dooku’s scenes should be shifted to show the conflict within him. When Mace Windu shows up with the other Jedi, Dooku should be horrified, not triumphant. He doesn’t want to see the Jedi Order destroyed, but he can’t let them win, either. He’s in an impossible situation, and his dialogue with Windu should be a plea for his one-time friend to join him, to stop doing the bidding of the Sith.

All the way up to the final combat between Dooku, Obi-Wan, and Anakin, he should be trying to get out of the fight, trying to find a way to work with the Jedi instead of against them. His reluctance should be clear at every point, and it should be the Jedi that act as the aggressors, that push him into fighting them.

This will inject a sense of tragedy into each scene Dooku’s in: we know he’s only playing into Palpatine’s hands, even if he doesn’t, and we can see how the Jedi are blind to how they’re being manipulated as well. Dooku becomes a much more interesting character, and we should feel sorry for him when he dies.

That’s the last change we need to make to the movie: Dooku should die at the end.

He should still take Anakin out early, by lopping off his right hand. He should still fight Obi-Wan off, and then move to escape. But Yoda stands in his way, blocking his path.

Here, Dooku refuses to fight his old master. He’s lost his way, but he’s not a Sith. He won’t go that far.

Trapped, he turns back to fight Obi-Wan, to see if he can get out a different way. Obi-Wan has gotten Anakin back on his feet, and together they manage to fight Dooku till he is on his knees, and disarmed. Helpless, he agrees to go back with them, to face trial and punishment.

Yoda turns to go back into their transport, and Obi-Wan as well. Dooku and Anakin are left alone for a moment.

This is when Anakin finds out Dooku was behind the assassination attempts. Dooku tells him as part of one last plea for mercy, for Anakin to help him, and as a warning about what he thinks Padmé will do. Instead, Anakin is enraged that Dooku would threaten Padmé’s life. Filled with anger, he kills Dooku.

Thus the movie ends with three things certain. Palpatine has grown so powerful that even the opposition to his rule is playing into his hands. Padmé and Anakin are going to act on their love while keeping it hidden. And that love, though unlooked-for and hard-won, is driving him towards the Dark Side.

Novel’s at 64,623 words.

My entire plot’s taken a huge left turn.

I’ve been off outline for a while, but not in a scary way. Most of what’s happening has followed on from what’s happened before, a nice logical progression of “this has happened, so the character would do that” kind of writing.

It let me forget that this novel has a villain. And they’re not sitting idle.

On Wednesday morning, they insisted on doing something so terrible, it’s thrown all my plans out the door. One of the characters might be dead. Another might be about to turn criminal.

And the villain? Well, they’ve taken a huge leap forward towards winning.

There’s no telling where the story’s going. It’s terrifying, but thrilling as well. I have to write it, now, if only to find out what happens next.

Stay with me on this one. Underneath all the Jar-Jar antics and the layer-cake of special effects is a good movie, I promise.

But there’s a lot of work we have to do to uncover it.

What Went Wrong

Let’s move on.

How to Fix It

First, Anakin needs to be older. Preferably pre-teen, say 11-12 years old. Just this one change by itself makes so much more of the movie make sense.

When Anakin meets Padmé for the first time, his lines are kind of creepy for a little kid. Make him a pre-teen, though, and suddenly he’s a very young man trying (and failing, horribly) to hit on an older woman.

The Jedi’s later remark that Anakin is “too old” to be trained is nonsense for a boy that looks no older than any of their younglings. If Anakin were 12, though, and already arrogant and head-strong, those objections would be sensible.

Second, we need a different motivation for the Trade Federation’s invasion of Naboo. I know, I know: the second movie gets bogged down in Senate procedure and no one cares. But that’s my point: the movie as written does a horrible job of making us care. The right explanation, embedded into the script, would go a long way to fix that problem.

Instead of some vague “trade dispute”, we should have a concrete problem. Naboo has an ore that gets mined by the Gungans and processed by the land-based Naboo into some material needed for making droids. Both the Trade Federation and a rival group buy that material from the Naboo and make their – rival – droids from it.

The Trade Federation comes to Naboo and asks them to sign an exclusive trade deal, so Naboo will only sell to the Trade Federation, which would give the Trade Federation a lock on the droid market.

Naboo refuses, of course, so the Trade Federation cranks up the heat: a blockade of the planet, cutting off all trade to the rest of the Galactic Republic. The Senate has to get involved at that point, since the Trade Federation are breaking the free flow of goods across the galaxy.

This is the dispute the Jedi fly in to resolve at the start of the movie: not a vague thing, but a concrete drama with greedy officials and brave (if naive) patriots facing off.

This scenario also sets up the “symbiont circle” between the Naboo and the Gungans that Obi-Wan talks about. Without the Gungans to mine the ore, the Naboo wouldn’t be able to refine it and sell it, generating trade. In return, the Naboo provide the Gungans both money – of course – and technology, by maintaining the systems that keep the Gungans underwater cities going.

The Trade Federation, with their invasion, break this circle. They not only take control of what industry the Naboo have, they start mining the planet themselves, using droids instead of Gungans.

This is why the Gungans have to flee their cities toward the end of the movie. No one is maintaining them – the Naboo are rather busy – and they’ve lost their main monetary supply. Not to mention all the extra drilling the Trade Federation is engaging in, to suck Naboo dry before the Senate can act.

Our final change is a series of small ones that add up to a big one: we need to shift both both Jar-Jar and Padmé’s roles in the story.

Jar-Jar needs a purpose. He’s a goofy-looking character that’s supposed to provide some comic relief, which is fine in theory, but he needs to serve some use for the other characters.

We should give him several things to do. To start, when he runs into Qui-Gon at the beginning, he should accidentally save the Jedi’s life: when they fall under the bot transport, Jar-Jar shields Qui-Gon from the heat of the transport’s engines using his large, floppy ears, keeping them both safe. When they leave the Gungan city to travel through the Planet Core, we should see Jar-Jar giving them directions, acting as their navigator. In their initial encounters with Trade Federation droids, Jar-Jar should take out a few, if clumsily and slowly. And when Qui-Gon goes hunting for parts on Tatooine, Jar-Jar should follow at a distance, unseen, “swimming” through the sand with just his eye-stalks showing, determined to keep watch over the human to whom he owes a life-debt.

Finally, Jar-Jar, not Anakin, should be the one locked in the fighter that ultimately – and accidentally – takes out the Trade Federation’s droid command ship. Taking Anakin to Naboo makes no sense, he’s too young (at any age) and should be left safely on Coruscant (perhaps under the watchful eye of Senator Palpatine?). Jar-Jar’s goofiness fits in perfectly with what happens in this sequence, and playing the hero here sets up his presence in the Senate later on.

Padmé’s scenes should all be shifted to show her headstrong, sometimes reckless, nature.

When the Queen and the Jedi are debating going to Tatooine, we should actually see the debate. Her Captain should make his case for not going, the Jedi should make their case for it, and the Queen should have her handmaidens weigh in. This last will frustrate the Jedi, so used to being obeyed without question, and give the fake Queen a chance to hear from the disguised Padmé what she should do.

And when Qui-Gon actually leaves the ship to search for parts, the Queen should send Padmé because he needs a translator: it turns out Padmé speaks Huttese. Instead of Qui-Gon playing reluctant tour guide to the handmaiden, we should reverse this. It’s Padmé who has seen poverty up close – which is perhaps why she ran for Queen in the first place – and the Jedi that has been coddled in the Inner Worlds. This change will give Padmé much more depth as a character, and reinforce the sense that maybe the Jedi are a little out of touch, a little too arrogant, to play their role properly anymore.

A final Padmé change: in the final assault on the palace, when she and her guard are pinned down by droids, she should be the one to shoot out the glass window and insist they winch up. It’d be a nice echo of Princess Leia’s garbage chute solution during her rescue, and again show us that Padmé is able to think sideways to get around problems.

With these changes, we take a movie that can be skipped without missing anything to one that is crucial to understanding the rest of the series.

Anakin, the young hotshot, both too old to be properly trained and too young to be left alone, shows both great potential and great risk.

The Republic is coming apart at the edges, its reach shortened and its ability to settle disputes peaceably in doubt.

Padmé’s recklessness in the pursuit of what she wants lets her reach her goal, but only at the cost of launching Senator Palpatine’s career as Chancellor, paving the way to his ascent to Emperor.

And the Jedi, assured and passive on the outside, are shown to have grown too insular, too used to their comfortable lives in the Inner Worlds to see the dangers to the Republic from within, or even to find a child as talented as Anakin in the Outer Rim.

Pushed the novel to 62,769 words this week.

I’m trying to worry less and less about picking the right words, about using the right sentences to get my meaning across. As I drift further from my original outline, I’m trying to focus on discovering what happens next, on keeping things consistent, rather than the particular phrasing I’m using.

That’s rough for me, since I’ve always been careful about the words I use when talking or writing, always worried about saying the wrong thing, about failing.

But in this case, failure means not speaking, not writing. So long as I can get something down, I can move forward, and discover more of the book. I try to remind myself of that, and to remember that only once the book is done can I go back and make it right.

Don’t change a damn thing.

Seriously, I’ve seen the movie twice now, and will go in for a third as soon as I can. It’s gotten me excited about Star Wars for the first time in years (you can date my waning enthusiasm for the day The Phantom Menace came out).

I think it echoed the original trilogy without aping it, subverted it when it could, and updated the whole thing to the 21st century without being preachy about its progressivism. It’s an amazing feat, and I don’t know how they pulled it off.

Already looking forward to the next one.

Novel’s reached 61,085 words.

New routine is still working. I’ve managed to hit or exceed my word count goal each day, by writing for thirty minutes each day, first thing in the morning.

Such a small thing, a small amount of time, and yet it’s made a big difference. I’m starting to see progress again on the book, scenes wrapping up and new ones getting started, new plot lines opening up ahead of me.

I’ve even allowed myself to take the weekends off from writing, so I can work on other projects. I think of it as both a reward and an incentive: reward for getting the writing done during the week, incentive to hit my word goal each day for the next one.

We’ll see how long it holds, especially as I head into the uncharted (unoutlined) territory ahead of me. But for now, it feels good to be making steady, if slow, progress.

Surprising, strange, and very well done. Manages to weave alien contact, game development, and anarchist politics into a story so good and smoothly written that I finished all 300+ pages in just two days.

Can’t believe I didn’t hear about this one until just a few months ago.

Learned several things about writing from this book, including:

• Little touches can go a long way to building both humor and character. For example, the narrator of the book is Jewish, so whenever a character says 'God', it's written out as "G-d"
• Using blog posts as the main form of narrative lets you cut out a lot of scene-setting description, get to the meat of each scene faster.
• Be careful mixing blog posts, real life narrative, and other written forms in one novel. If they all adopt the same casual, conversational tone (as this book does), they start to bleed together, and you lose the advantage of keeping them separate.

Terrible. Just terrible.

Wasn’t able to make it through this one; it was too tough a slog.

Every paragraph was a mess of unsubstantiated claims mixed with the author’s persecution complex and a dash of ignorance. Completely mis-represents everything from the history of rebellion to evolution.

I didn’t learn anything from this book. The author is too convinced of his own infallible intuition to do anything so mundane as deal with facts.

Novel’s at 59,195 words.

Didn’t get much writing done over Christmas break at all. Had all these great plans for cranking out mounds of text while I was off work, plans that got thrown out when my wife and I both came back from seeing my family in Texas with the flu.

Oddly enough, it seems the break was good for me. I’ve been getting up an hour earlier since the start of the new year, taking time to both exercise (nothing makes me worry about my physical fitness more than when my body breaks down on me) and write.

So far it’s working. I’m still sick, and now sore to boot, but I’ve hit my word goal every day this week. I feel like I’ve discovered an extra hour that was hiding from me.

I’ll also admit a small part of me likes writing despite my lingering cough, as if each word is me spitting in the eye of disease.

So here’s to the New Year. May we all use it to write more, to write better, to write, write, write.

Reads like a nineteenth-century fairy tale. Manages to weave these mythical characters into a bigger story about the immigrant experience in 19th century New York. Wonderfully well-done.

Taught me a few new things about writing:

• You can use multiple perspectives to build tension into the narrative, by giving the reader access to thoughts and feelings that impact the main characters later on.
• It's okay to give opinionated descriptions. In fact, letting your character's perspective color the way they describe the world around them is a great way to make both feel more real.
• Even an absurd premise, if taken seriously enough, can become drama.