Nobody Here

True enough. So you buy the "Reading is Magic" wristband at Borders for $2, and $1.60 of it goes to CARE. No word on the other 40 cents, but who cares, the wristband is purple.

790 words short and 2 days early, this draft is done.

I'm not sure how it came out. I'm at the point where it all looks flat, like words on paper rather than a story.

Stephen King will tell you that while stories may be written by writers, they’re actually created by the guys in the basement. Jasper Fforde will further specify that in my case, it’s the eighteenth subbasement.

People like this idea of writers as mediums at a séance. Having succeeded somehow in contacting the story, they need only conduct it, slack-jawed, white-eyed, with a little drool at the corners. To mix some metaphors, real literature springs fully-formed, Athena-like, from the godly hungover heads of artistes, who are then charged with transcribing as prettily as they may.

I’m not (and have never aspired to be) an artiste, so even though I have a strong suspicion it doesn’t really work that way for them either, I can’t speak to that. What I can speak to is that Sunday comes a lot to my basement, finding the guys down there half-dressed, unwashed, and busy watching the ballgame. They don’t send me much in the way of sudden flashes of light or dreams that solve my story’s problems. They don’t encourage me to go ahead, have a nap, we’ll whip something up and have it ready in an hour. I work out my stories consciously, laboriously, in the shower, on walks, and at my desk. It’s a job. I go to work.

Except for this: I was thinking just such unflattering thoughts about the guys in the basement last night, because I’m lazy and find the idea of them doing stuff for me kind of appealing, especially when the stuff is hard. I was having a long, slow, frustrating time trying to write the scene that is supposed to be the book’s spookiest. Mind you, it’s children’s book spooky. It’s not like I watched The Sixth Sense and then went to bed. There was no reason for me to have nightmare after nightmare after nightmare all night long. But I did, and even though the dreams weren’t book-related, when I woke up this morning it was with an idea for how to give that scene a little more edge.

So I guess the moral of the story is not to mess with the guys in the basement, and the upshot of it is I’m glad they dropped by, if for no other reason than to give me somebody to blame later.

*Post title ripped off from Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess Around With Jim"

Toddlers in Easter dresses, chocolate, ham, Arleen’s return to blogging. All that plus the season finale of Carnivàle. How lucky can one girl get?

Carnivàle is a weird story excellently told. The style, direction, editing, acting, and visual appeal have kept me watching through some rough spots in its plot development. It’s got some serious quality going for it, but it’s also an interesting case study in the fantastical/supernatural story’s most common problem, which you might think is all those busty women in chain mail they put on the covers, but which is actually that there’s too much backstory to give to the reader/viewer in any way that isn’t awkward.

Many books solve the dilemma by just giving up and devoting long pages to exposition. Carnivàle creator Dan Knauf solves it by not telling you anything, except in internet chats. I won’t go into detail, in case Zen reads this, because he’s a day ahead but a season behind, and also because some people, inexplicably, don’t care about Carnivàle. But my basic point is this: Unraveling slow, good. Unraveling without spoon feeding, better. Staying raveled too long, bad. Sure, if you’re enough of a dork you can find transcripts on CarnyCon that will fill in some of the gaps, not that I would know anything about that, because I am the coolest. Am too. But a lot of this is stuff they should have found a way to tell the viewers of their actual show, and by this point in the story.

The proper balance of exposition is very difficult to achieve when the rules you’re operating under and/or the world you’re operating in aren’t the reader/viewer’s own. I cannot think of many stories that do it without some clumsiness. Nearly every book in my genre does it by having a wise mentor explain everything (or nearly so) to the protagonist, generally in one big honking hunk of dialogue. Blah. I, being the genius storyteller I am, am bucking this trend in The Book With No Title by having an unwise peer explain everything (or nearly so) to the protagonist in three semi-honking pieces of dialogue. Doubleblah.

I look to my shelf for people who do it well. I find very few. Tolkien comes close, barring the history-through-crappy-poetry, because it’s done best by just putting the reader there and letting them figure it out as they go. That means trusting the reader as well as yourself. Also, it means fitting the world inside the medium and format you've chosen to tell the story (and in a space of 25,000 words you need to keep the gassy guys off the elevator). Also, really what it means is being compelling enough that they'll hang in there, even if it doesn’t make sense at first. This works for Carnivàle. But could I pull it off? Improbabàle.

You probably think writing in the first person as an eleven-year-old would be hard. But then, you’re probably a grown-up. Me, not so much. Eleven is often more real to me than 33-going-on-34.

It is hard, but not as hard as it would be without the wonders of auditory association. I’m taken back by way of the 80’s channel on spinner.com, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. When I was eleven, me and my best friend Sandy ran around in the woods by ourselves, and our parents didn’t think anything of that any more than we did, because The Lovely Bones hadn’t been published yet. We went roller skating, at an actual roller rink, and the 80’s being what they were, were the cooler for it. We sang “Jack and Diane” dancing around her living room, pretending we knew, and understood, all the words. One night during a sleepover we secretly watched Friday the 13th Part II on HBO in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep, even though we were so totally not supposed to, and I would spend at least a year afterward sprinting the distance from bathroom to bed in a hot choked panic.

The world has changed a lot since then, and the trappings of eleven have changed with it. I defy you to find a modern eleven-year-old who would be even mildly alarmed by Friday the Thirteenth Part II. But some stuff is the same. Eleven is defined not by what’s important, but by the kind of importance. Nothing, in your whole life, will ever be important to you in quite the same way important stuff is important when you’re eleven.

Tagged by UV.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Mr. Darcy, naturally. I married him. And Gilbert Blythe of Anne of Green Gables fame. Mr. Rochester isn't bad.

The last book you bought is:
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde. The last (so far) Thursday Next. Can't wait to read it, but don't really want it to end.

The last book you read:
lost boy lost girl. See below. I enjoy a lot of Straub but this was a bit disappointing.

What are you currently reading?
A friend's manuscript. He'd not appreciate me going on about it but he's quite clever.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.
Is it a nice island? I'm not trapped there, right? It's more of a vacation? Are there coconuts? What about cookies, are there cookies? Literary has its place and all, but if I'm hanging out on an island, it's not to bang my head against Faulkner. I'd take fun stuff:

1 - Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (I'd get that single-volume edition so I could count it as one)
2 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3 - The Stand by Stephen King
4 - Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
5 - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

Who are you going to pass this stick to and why?
Ummm... Roy. I want to hear what he says about the island

Peter Straub’s lost boy lost girl was the winner of the 2003 Bram Stoker award. This is an award given, according to the Horror Writers Association, who ought to know, for “superior achievement.” It doesn’t say superior achievement in what, but I’m taking a stab (Get it? Horror award? Stab?) that it isn’t editing or internal logic.

The book has good points, several of them. It might even have been scary, which as you may know is the point of the Horror genre, if I’d been able to get into the story instead of being constantly yanked out of it by Straub’s clumsiness. But it just didn’t work out that way.

Some narrative inconsistencies were to be expected of this book, because it’s a Tim Underhill book. Like his friend Stephen King, Straub likes to write novels about novelists writing novels, and as with Koko, Mystery, and The Throat before it, the reader of lost boy lost girl is to understand that it’s Tim Underhill, not Peter Straub, who is writing the book. Because they’re presented as filtered, novelized accounts of Underhill’s true experiences, a lot of details and things you thought you knew change from book to book. Yeah, OK. Book to book, fine. Page to page, not so much.

The point of view alternates third person with first. The latter comes via the time-honored device of Underhill’s personal journal. Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes Straub just slips into first person, for a few sentences or a few pages. This doesn’t seem like a style thing. It seems more like an I-originally-wrote-this-in-first-person-and-missed-a-bunch-of-stuff-in-the-editing thing.

And then there’s the chronology. Inconsistencies. Things that don’t match up. Bigbig peeve of mine. Look, jumping around in time and telling the story in non-linear chunks is a cool and fun thing, especially when there’s a mystery going on, and it’s got a lot of advantages for the reader. But the thing is - and there’s really no getting around this - at some point in the process the writer has simply got to sit down and line up all the pieces and make sure they do, in fact, line up. Because if I’m spending three weeks with this thing on my nightstand, maybe twenty minutes a day, and I can keep the story straight enough to know what year and date and time stuff should be happening, I find it kind of irritating when the writer, who presumably spent months and hours a day, can’t. I’m just saying. No matter how challenging a book is meant to be, it should never be more work for the reader than the writer.

Now, if I presuppose that Tim Underhill and not Peter Straub is writing this piece, and I stipulate that due to circumstances in the story our boy Tim would be pretty darned stressed out during the writing, I guess I could more kindly conclude that the narrative is this way on purpose, because it’s meant to reflect his state of mind. It’s a mess because he’s a mess. Alright. Except the danger of that sort of cleverness is that it’s too easy to mistake for sloppiness.

Either way, clever or sloppy, what you end up with is the same: I’m noticing the author too much, when really I don’t want to know he’s there at all. Bad. The urge to show off (or slack off) so much that the reader is more aware of your writing than your story should in nearly every case be avoided. Please, don’t make me pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

It was certain that the old blog had to go.

It started as a trigger, something that would help me change gears between what I do all day and the writing I do at night. For a while, that worked. Then it didn’t. I was all over the place; what was originally intended to help me focus was having the opposite effect. It was fun, and I learned some things, but I was also spending way too much time and getting way too distracted from what it is I spend my nights sitting in this cold, cold basement for, which is not to talk about my dog or make fun of people. At least, not entirely.

Once in a while, I did use Blogger’s powers for Good. I’d use a post to organize my thoughts – to the extent I’m capable of organized thought – about something I was reading or writing, and smart people would comment. That would help me. That was good. So that, I’ve decided, I will keep.

This blog, then, is semi-retirement. Its updates will tend more toward the occasional than the daily, and it will be dedicated mainly (I’d never say entirely) to storytelling: reading, novels, writing, maybe sometimes a movie although frankly I don’t get out of the house much. And, where applicable, gloating about how I’m kicking UV’s butt, wordcount-wise. Winks aplenty.

Yes, I am capable of climbing out of my selfish head long enough to get that this will not be up everyone’s alley. That’s OK. While I love it when people talk back, I don’t expect that all the peeps who read and/or linked my old blog will want to do the same with this one. So don’t feel bad about it if that’s you.

*Post title ripped off from The Beatles' "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da"