Nobody Here

Overheard yesterday at the playground. Mother has already told small child, I think more than once, to come down off the slide-play-thingie because she wants to leave.

MOTHER: Please? I'm asking you nicely.

Things I read and watch over and over again. But not really thirteen.

1. Lord of the Rings, obviously. Every 1-2 years since I was 8. I watch the movies too, but not nearly as often as you'd think.
2. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Only once or twice in my adult life, but several times a year between the ages of 6 and 9.
3. Anne of Green Gables. Same as above, except the ages of 10 and 12.
4. Rebecca. I don't know why I read this one so often (I'd say every 2-3 years on average). I mean, once you've read it once, the trick is up, right? But I just love it. Maybe it's all those descriptions of food.
5. Pride and Prejudice. Read the book and watch the miniseries (the Colin Firth obviously) probably once a year.
6. All the Harry Potter books - I read them all before a new one comes out. I doubt I'll stop reading them once the series is done, but I guess that depends how it ends. I don't really watch the movies much.
7. The Stand, It, and Rose Madder by Stephen King. I just like the way he pulls you into a good yarn.
8. The Royal Tenenbaums. If you've seen it, you know.
9. Fight Club, the movie not the book. I actually think the movie is a little better.
10. Old movies and cult classics: The Quiet Man, Big Trouble in Little China, Equilibrium, Python's Holy Grail, Spinal Tap.
11. The Matrix. I love The Matrix, but I have to pretend the other two never happened. Shh!
12. I tend to watch comedy over again vs. drama. Probably my most frequent: Pirates of the Caribbean, A Knight's Tale, Ocean's Eleven, and Dodgeball. Also Anger Management but that's not my choice (though I think it's funny).
13. Every Christmas: When Harry Met Sally; the George C. Scott Christmas Carol; We're No Angels (the Bogart, not that crappy remake).

Bonus shameful confession (as if some of you won't find A Knight's Tale shameful enough): I don't have the DVD, but I watch The Cutting Edge every time it's on cable and fie on anyone who laughs at me for it because that movie just rules. I love it so much that last weekend when I had a headache I watched the cheesy made-for-tv sequel. That was, um, not as good.

I could go on. If I like something, I nearly always repeat it at least once.

Do you re-read or re-watch?

*Note: I took all the italics out cause they were freaking annoying.
*Post title sort of ripped off from Casablanca, although that line never actually appears in the movie.

Tagged by Paula.

1. One book that changed your life?
You all think I'm going to say Lord of the Rings, but The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe edges it out by about 2 years. That's the first book that really taught me that you can go away and live in a book. I've been carrying that around ever since, and it's made me a completely different person than I'd otherwise have been.

2. One book you have read more than once?
Okay, let's put Lord of the Rings here, since I've probably read it the most times. I'm a very big re-reader.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
This question is crap. If I'm allowed to pack a book, I'm allowed to pack a laptop, and I can store plenty of books on that. Okay fine. Lord of the Rings.

4. One book that made you laugh?
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

5. One book that made you cry?
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

6. One book you wish had been written?
None. If there's a book I wish had been written, I'll write it.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
Also none. If I don't like it, I just don't read it.

8. One book you are currently reading?
Right now today I'm reading Enchanted Inc. by Shanna Swendson. I read her query over at Kristin Nelson's blog, and I thought, well forget learning about queries, this book sounds right up my alley. So I picked it up. I like it.

9. One book you've been meaning to read?
A River Runs Through It, by Norman McClean. I heart the movie.

I don't tag, but I want to see everyone's answers. If you see this, do it.

*Post title ripped off from dur where do you think?

Jeff has a post about developing character. No, not his own, I mean fictional characters. Go read it. Okay. So I went off on a tangent in his comments and said this:

I also wanted to add that at this point in my development as a writer (and I still have a long way to go), I still think those peeps who claim to have these unruly characters with minds of their own who do the craziest things, and they just can't control them, they just have to give them their heads and see what they do next, even if it's something they don't want them to do... are insane, or liars. My characters are fictional, and they do what I say. If it's crucial to the plot that someone say "Hey, let's go ghost-hunting this weekend," then one of my characters will become the sort of person who says "Hey, let's go ghost-hunting this weekend." Then I have to go back and make sure they're consistently that sort of person throughout the entire story.

By which I mean, I build who my characters are based on what I need them to do, instead of deciding what they do based on who they are. As a reader, I approach fiction the same way I approach the real world: I see preexisting personalities who find themselves in a particular situation. But as a writer I have the freedom to approach it from the opposite direction, to begin with the situation and populate it with the personalities I need to drive it.

There are people who sniff at this and insist that characters must be kept pure, that once created they are not to be manipulated in any way. The author must simply put them in the situation and, if they are well conceived enough, they'll show the author what they're going to do with it.

But I don't see why you can't go the other way and still come up with a good character. Let's say in order to advance your plot at a pivotal point, you need someone to insist they all go squirrel hunting even though everyone else wants to go to the bake sale. Well, you could build a whole guy around just that moment. He's selfish. He puts his own desires above those of his companions. And because of charisma, or intimidation, or some external authority (which is it? whichever works best for the plot), he's able to impose that will on others. He has no compunction about killing harmless cute little animals. He's outdoorsy. He knows about guns. He loves to eat squirrel. He loves to eat squirrel because of a sensory memory trigger, the smell of a baking squirrel pie wafting through the room while Great-Uncle Melvin, dressed in drag, performs the entire second act of West Side Story, speaking and singing every part. He adored Uncle Melvin. He's never going to rest until he gets the bastard who killed him in that bar fight. He was so inspired by Uncle Melvin, in fact, that he dreams of a career on Broadway, a fact that makes him that much more resentful of every day that finds him stuck (financially? emotionally? due to family obligation? whatever works for the plot) in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of lazy-ass yahoos who won't stop whining about brownies.

Okay, it needs work, but you see what I'm saying, right?

So what's wrong with that? Educate me.

Okay, last lines this week. Same deal. Title, author, and hilarious guesses in comments. I picked these because I like them as endings, without regard to how hard they are, so some are really really easy and some really really aren't.

Hint: as a treat for peeps who are getting bored with my usual, absent from this list: Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and all Brontes.

SCORES AND ANSWERS:
Archer - 4
Lynne - 3
Paula - 1.5, because yes, #6 is a song, though also the last line of a book
Writerperson - 1

1. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

2. Walk forward into the light.
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

3. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

4. "I think it's time we were starting out," Will said. "We've got a long way to go."
Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree, end of the Dark Is Rising series

5. "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," whispered Anne softly.
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

6. I know this much is true.
Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
(I mean, seriously peeps.)

7. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

8. And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home...
S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders

9. "Well said," replied Candide, "but we must tend our garden."
Voltaire, Candide

10. I been there before.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

11. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
(Also I'd like to say, drat that Evil Editor for also using TotS this week - I did not copy off his paper.)

12. But they never learned what it was Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone.
Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

13. The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King

*Post title ripped off from The Return of the King, which I obviously had to cheat and work in someplace

I'm going to go out on a limb and express the very unpopular opinion that adverbs are not responsible for world hunger, a threat to our national security, or the reason the Bills never win the Superbowl. Adverbs really are not all that bad. You shouldn't overuse them, but you shouldn't overuse anything, should you? And yes, it's true they're often used sloppily (Get it? Used sloppily?). But look, just because you can cut yourself with a kitchen knife doesn't mean you throw them all away and try to tear up your tomatoes with your bare hands. Maybe I don't want a "stronger verb" okay? Maybe "ran hard" better fits the tone of my story than "galloped" or some such shit. Let's face it, the stonger verb is often a stupid freaking word that nobody would really say. It's a part of speech, folks, it's not the devil. Get a hold of yourselves.

*Post title ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock's "Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here"

Isaac is on his last lap. It should just be polishing from here on out. I hope. Well, polishing and the query. And the synopsis. Polishing, the query, and the synopsis. And the submissions. Polishing, query, synopsis, and submissions. Right. Also plotting the next book out entirely and completing all the research in time for November. Because I noticed some of you already manufacturing your excuses, but I am not a weenie.

There are a couple of parts I'm leaving deliberately unimproved. In one bit, a couple of pages, I make some leaps and there are opportunities to slow down, put in some snappy dialogue that would reveal character and really show how things evolve rather than just telling how they came out. But when I tried it out that way, I decided that while that little part was improved by showing, the overall story flowed better with the telling. A book is like a spouse really. The compromises you end up making, the final acceptance that it's not going to be what it was in your head. In the end it's going to be who it is, and sometimes it will be better than you ever imagined, and sometimes it will be less than you hoped, but you need to love it anyway, and support it, and make it snacks, and clean up the dishes it left in the sink.

*Post title ripped off from Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition skit

Okay, here's how it works. I give you a first line. You tell me the title and author. No bookshelf peeking, Googling, using Amazon, or other forms of cheating. Credit will be given for hilarious guesses. I'm dispensing with my usual single men in possession of good fortunes and hobbits in holes in the ground, on account of their being too obvious.

UPDATE:
Here are the final scores and correct answers. And you didn't let me down on the hilarious guesses either (I said I'd give you credit for those, and I do, but credit is not the same as points).
Archer:6
Writerperson: 6
Sal: 6
Lynne: 5
Sour Grapes: 4

And the answers...

1. Where's Papa going with that axe?
Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

2. Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.
The Shining, by Stephen King

3. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

4. Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

5. I Will Not / Drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.
Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding

6. I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up.
Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

7. I am fourteen years old.
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

8. These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

9. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

10. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

11. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
Holes, by Louis Sachar

12. My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

13. 1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Next week: last lines. That should definitely bring about some hilarious guesses.

*Post title ripped off from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol

Thirteen covers that are better than (or at least as good as) the original:

1. 10,000 Maniacs's More Than This
2. Bobby Darin's Mack the Knife
3. Bonnie Raitt's Angel from Montgomery
4. The Alarm's Knocking on Heaven's Door. U2's is okay. GnR's bites.
5. Corey Hart's Can't Help Falling in Love. Many of you will think this blasphemy, but I just like it better, okay?
6. UB40's Red Red Wine, but not UB40's I Got You Babe, though it's close.
7. Run DMC's Walk This Way
8. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World
9. Nazareth's Love Hurts
10. No Doubt's It's My Life
11. The Bangles's Hazy Shade of Winter
12. The Counting Crows's Big Yellow Taxi
13. Billy Idol's Mony Mony

Honorable mentions for Iggy Pop's Real Wild Child, Great White's Once Bitten Twice Shy, The Black Crows's Hard To Handle, Motley Crue's Smoking in the Boys Room, and Aretha Franklin's Respect.

And there could be a whole separate list for Christmas/Holiday songs, but most notably, The Pretenders's Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Madonna's Santa Baby, and Aretha Franklin's Winter Wonderland.

In the opposite category, everyone who's ever covered a Van Morrison song has failed to be better. I'm not saying some of them weren't good (Mellencamp's Wild Night was okay), but they just couldn't touch the real one.

*Post title ripped off from the Goo Goo Dolls's Another Second Time Around. Bet you thought I was going to rip off Springsteen's Cover Me instead, didn't you?

*I just read in On Writing how Strunk and White decided the possessive should always be s's and not s' so I'm trying it out but it looks so wrong doesn't it? It's hard to reverse anything you learned in 8th grade.

Editing is fun. You'd think by now I wouldn't have people calling the deaf person on the phone (she wasn't deaf in the earlier drafts). And, for the record, it isn't really necessary to say "speaking for the first time since Wendell came into the room." You can just say "speaking for the first time" and trust your reader is alert enough to realize the person being referred to is ten years old and therefore probably not speaking for the first time ever.

But at least nobody looks in the mirror for a description opportunity, so, improvement over the last book!

This book is so lame. By which I mean, of course, I am so lame. It's been 9 months and this is like the fifth draft (you can call it the fourth if you want, depending on how you differentiate "drafts"), and I haven't really focused on the language until now. It's just taken me this many revisions to cobble the story itself together, and some of the stuff I'm looking at now was just stuck in there a couple of weeks ago.

And what I've learned from this book is: this is too many freaking drafts. By now none of it looks fresh or interesting to me, making it hard to edit. And although I love my story and my characters, of course I do, I also, you know, loathe them. This is exactly how things like the Hand of God coming down to wipe everyone out happen. I used to think that was a crappy ending, but now I get how much he must have hated those peeps by then and how satisfying it must have been to kill them with his bare Hand of God. And dur, if you don't want to know what that's a spoiler for, don't click the link.

Okay. So I'm crabby. How's everyone else doing?

So I go out for my run, even though at 8:15 it's 87 degrees and 70% humidity and a heat index over 90, because it's August, which means, every night for the next six weeks will be 87 degrees with 70% humidity and a heat index over 90. But I take it easy. I'm about done, only two more songs left on the iPod, which is how I time my runs. I'm coasting along, and I see something black out of the corner of my eye. I look down. It's a wasp. Okay. It's paying kind of special attention to me. Okay. I run faster. It flies faster. It flies around my legs. I kick at it, and run even faster. Things escalate. I end up running flat out for a ways, I wish I could tell you how far, but the iPod hasn't got an odometer, so the only way I measure distance in my neighborhood is in units of "from the pool, all the way around the corner, to like two houses past the Sand Man's," which just happens to be how far I'm sprinting as hard as I can to outrun this freaking wasp, who matches my pace the entire time. Finally, my throat has constricted to the diameter of the tiny blue pills Tom Cruise is surely slipping into Katie Holmes' Diet 7-Up to keep that glassy look in her eye, and I can't breathe even a little. My sister-in-law the personal trainer is convinced I have exercise-induced asthma, see, but that's a post for another day. So okay, what's worse, passing out or getting stung by a wasp? Right. And besides, if I pass out, the wasp will sting me anyway. So I stop. The wasp darts around me for a second or two, me gasping and wheezing but still managing a half-hearted little jig to try to get it away from me and/or kick it senseless. A car's coming down the road, and even in my weirded out state I'm thinking, that lady can't see the bug from her car, so she just thinks I'm high on the aforementioned little blue pills. Guess I won't be invited to the next buy-something-from-me party.

The wasp never does sting me. After those last few jabs, he gets bored with our little game and just flies away, leaving me to wonder: was it really a wasp, or was this simply a physical manifestation of the Guardian Angel of Girls Who Eat Too Many Cupcakes, saying, "Step on it, sister, you're never going to lose that ass at that pace."