Traveller's Tales

I’ve invested a lot of bitching into the painful process of ripping out a first person present tense  narrative and re-tuning it for third person past tense.  The tense is psychologically tough; the character has been a first-person thinker for quite a number of years now, so that’s what’s causing so much of  the ‘go back and re-read it, and correct all the tense mistakes’ process.  Maddening, as I generally consider my grammar to be moderately polished, and mistakes like those look seriously grade-school.

I think I’m done bitching about switching into third person though.  In fact, since I’ve already given away the game in the post subject, I’ll say I think it’s not only necessary, but it’s fixing a lot of what I didn’t realize was broken.

Yeah, stuff was broken.

Among many other things, I’m an actor.  Unlike my writing, which is on the brink of professional art, I’ve been paid many times in the past for my acting, and I’m told I’m pretty good at it.  Because of that skill set, I do a lot of dialogue in my head before I commit it to paper — give myself a little private performance, lay the characters and the scene out, figure out what dialogue sounds awkward, that sort of thing.

For the first-person narrative, I’d do the same thing to get the character’s thoughts nailed down before I wrote them.  Unfortunately, I now realize I was acting more than I was writing, and that’s where the bulk of the disconnect — which is resulting in the POV shift — took place.

It’s taken the last few reviews of the manuscript to realize it, but the first person POV was actually robbing that character of depth, because I was failing to weave external expressions and unconscious mannerisms into his internal ruminations.  I hadn’t realized it because, when I ‘did the part’ in my head, he was plenty deep, plenty conflicted, his physical confidence and mental competence short-circuited by severe disorientation, physical conflict and psychological horror.

But many of the acting cues I ’saw’ while I was doing my own internal performance failed to make it to the paper, because he was thinking to himself and I didn’t know how to fit the action into his internal dialogue.  The fidgeting, the nervous glances, the smiles a bit too wide — very, very few of these kinds of things made it to text, and so he came off as a much shallower jerk than he really is.

And really, turning people off from one of your primary POV characters isn’t such a smart thing.  Donaldson may have been able to do it, but I’m not Donaldson, and I did not want this character to be anywhere near as disliked as Covenant.

And so, I’ve made progress.  Much yet to do, but the work continues.

“So now that we have the interruptive crap out of the way, how the hell is the book coming?”, one might ask.

Were one to ask, I’d answer thusly:

The new version went out in mid-March and got read quite thoroughly.  There were a few basic bits of feedback which I agree with enough to accept, incorporate and move on without question, and they’re on the edit schedule right now.

And then there was one major piece of feedback that absolutely made me piss fire.

There’s been this bit in the story that I was always really in love with, but that I’ve always known was a bit of a controversial (and possibly foolhardy) thing to do.  While the rest of the story reads in third person past, the fellow I’ve always imagined as the primary character reads in first person present.  The story was, when it wrote it this way, more about him than any of the others, and he’s a more modern-feeling character, so having him available as a stream-of-consciousness narrative made perfect sense.  It’s always been important to me that people understand and empathize with him, and I figured the best way to do that would be to have the reader right in his head.

Naturally, the feedback this time, incontrovertibly and inevitably, was ‘Lose the first person crap for crying out loud.’  Nicer than that, of course, but that was how I decided to interpret it when I first read it, and boy did I get lit.  I probably set a personal record for chain bitchery that day.

And then I sat my sorry ass down and really thought about all of the feedback instead of throwing a little kneejerk tantrum.

The novel has changed considerably over the years.  Not so much the story itself, at least not since the first big rewrite, but the structure has had some serious overhauls.  What was once a story about one guy, with two other characters thrown in for timing and interaction, really had turned into a story equally about three main characters.

So point the first: I realized I was shortchanging two of my three favorite guys by making the other guy different.  This was bad enough to give me pause.

Point the second was a painful but necessary detail.  One of the readers revealed that she was so thrown off by the change of tone that she found herself wanting to skip the part of the story I’d once considered central.  She graciously added that she enjoyed how the other parts were written, but the change in tone whenever the main guy showed up completely put her off that part of the story.

Wow.

A few bumps in the name of artistic expression are warning signs.  An engaged reader wanting to skip an entire part of the story is a massive all-hands-on-deck this-is-not-a-drill alarm bell.  It doesn’t matter how much I love the concept of doing things my way, if it’s kicking a reader out of the story, it’s broken.

My bitching died off pretty quickly after that.  My story had evolved, and what I’d loved years ago just wasn’t working anymore — and it reasonably took an external reader to see that, since I’ve been reading it pretty constantly in its current form for the last 8 years now.

I feel good about this change.  It’s been a long time coming (sorry, Shelly, you were right!), but now that I’m at this stage I feel like it’s one of the last big hurdles I’ll have to leap — it really has come a long way in the last few months, farther than I ever thought it needed to, but excellent progress that has only made the story stronger.

So just a little longer… just a few more changes… just over the next hill…

TLDR: Big changes are big, but give it another two months and I’ll have something that looks a lot more like a final draft than I do right now.

I had no idea that the latest versions of WordPress were usable through my crummy little BlackBerry* (yes I have one, yes I hate having one, or at least one where people who are not my friends know its number, and no I can’t throw it into the East River without having to pay for a new one, so I may as well just get used to the leash instead of trying to gnaw it off).

So this means that, one, I have no more excuses for not making dumb entries here. Check.

And two, I’m betting that I can even use this little trick to get Real, Actual Writing (in the context of the novels, that is) done.

And yeah, it’s been since, what, July? For what it’s worth, that’s kind of how life in general feels right now: autopilot to survive the bullshit that seems to have suddenly become the norm and not the exception. Work-life is hugely imbalanced and weighing in at totally the wrong end of the scale, but for a wageslave like myself this isn’t a smart time to start getting overly precious about being overworked.

Anyway, done bitching. Here’s to using my new discovery for evil purposes!

* and no, the default browser can’t handle it. Thank you, copy and paste, and thank you Opera Mini.

I’m not sure who the hell fired all the competent HR people I used to work with back in the day and hired smarmy buffoons in their place, but I want to find that person and turn him into a teambuilding exercise by placing him in front of a large bullseye and letting people throw things at him.

Apparently, we have somehow gone from the logical approach of ‘hey, people aren’t happy, let’s tie performance to pay so they’re motivated to excel’ to ‘hey, nobody’s happy, let’s make muffins!’ while I wasn’t looking. By which I don’t mean actual, literal muffins (though I’m sure, in some sad circumstances, this does actually happen), but figurative muffins, bizarre little activities or items intended to distract one from one’s actual work issues by creating and promoting a false sense of misdirected satisfaction via chotchkies, stupid games, and, occasionally, free booze. I don’t mind the free booze, but don’t for a second expect that it’s working as a distraction.

I’ll give you an example. The place I work just had a celebration of their re-branding. Never mind that they originally promised that everyone would have off to reflect on the brand and their business (a lovely idea that lasted an entire year before someone cut it off at the knees — naturally, because it had a chance of promoting actual good will towards the brand) and instead now we’re in for a day of business as usual. Never mind that nobody’s had a raise in as many years as I’ve worked here, and the word ‘bonus’ is used to describe hitting the urinal instead of extra money at the end of the year. Never mind all that: they gave us heavy metal cubes with clever sayings, attached to roach clips on springs. Three of them. Because suddenly management is terribly concerned about the quality of life of their employees, and motivational sayings on roach clips will surely do a better job of that than oh, I don’t know, letting people leave at a reasonable hour.

These cubes are muffins. Not as tasty or good-smelling, but with the same desired effect: they attempt to generate good-will with a minimum of financial outlay, while avoiding the core issues of employee dissatisfaction (and they wonder why places like despair.com make so much money). Sadly, their effect is similarly transient: even the most credulous consumer of these goods will find themselves over the experience in eight hours or thereabouts, and those of us who are more cynical bastards won’t even bother partaking.

Naturally, I fall into neither the group of poor credulous innocents nor into the cult of cynical bastards, but actually into an elite force of ultra-cynical subversionaries; not only do I not fall for this shit, but in fact I quite enjoy figuring out how to use these wretchedly conceived toys contrary to their intended use. Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but I do carry a hope that someday, someone else may also realize how utterly full of horseshit this crap is, and wonder aloud, “Why are the people nominally in charge wasting money on crap like this when they could be giving people things they actually want, like, you know, raises, promotions, bonuses and days off.”

I know, I’m really hoping way too much, but that’s just the kind of guy I am.

Anyway, while I do have plans for these specific muffins, the point of this rant isn’t to share those plans, but to remind anyone who might be reading this that no: muffin-making as a HR policy is not, in fact, an HR policy. There are real ways to motivate people and retain talent, and they have nothing to do with muffins. And, if you find yourself eating a muffin today, for crying out loud make sure it’s a chocolate one.

Damn, now I’m hungry.

Wow. Yeah. That’s a long time in between posts. In my defense, I had the house I was renting sold out from under me and had to both find a new place to live and to move in there; my boss of 6 years flew the coop and left utter chaos in his wake; and, lastly, I’m a lazy negligent bastard anyway and have a hard time writing blog posts regularly even under the best of circumstances.

It’s a lovely 2-story converted log cabin complete with fireplace, spiral staircase, a loft for sunbeams, a balcony for drinking coffee (or scotch) and watching the sun rise (or set).

(Pictures courtesy of my wife, who’s much better at blogging than I am.)

It’s in a great place, not far from friends and very far from the things I didn’t like about my previous home, specifically the ‘urban environment’ thing and the ‘zomg my house is seriously old lol’ thing. There are still way too many boxes to unpack, but it’s starting to shape up. Yes, my desk is already a mess. No, I’m not posting a picture of it.

Speaking of messes, the job has entered a bit of an interesting period. I work at an ad firm, and the part of the agency I belong to is undergoing catastrophic change at roughly double the rate that the agency at large is undergoing catastrophic change, which is to say, quite quickly. Strangely, my job is not at risk; in fact, I’m more in demand now than I ever have been as people struggle to rebuild the organization and realize that not only do I have a clue or two between my ears, but I actually have a metric crapton of well-considered clues to offer. Add to this there are several outside influences who are, purportedly, interested in my roughshod, bum-rush methods of creative management, and suddenly it’s nice to be an ad man again. Go figure. I’ll post more once I have actual details I can share, but it looks as though I’m going to get to work with one of my favorite people again, and that makes me excited to go to work again. Hey, it beats waking up and having a hard time figuring out which excuse I haven’t used for a while to play hookie with.

Lastly, and this is quite exciting, there may be exciting news on the very near horizon with regards to the book. Now I have to figure out where the hell the latest manuscript is — more specifically, which box the laptop is hiding in.

Boxes. Ugh.

Not many posts lately, I note! What the hell? I’m supposed to be a writer, for crying out loud, what gives?

Life. Stuff. Crap. “How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” That kind of stuff. I’ve stared at the new book every week, I’ve gazed at my list of target agents for the first book, and then stuff like my wife’s green card (which she finally has!), or our living situation (which desperately needs to change), or work gets a little batty, or various and sundry government agencies start commanding personal documentation from twelve years ago (which is as likely to surface from my horrid files as a giant squid is from Lake Hopatcong), and the energy must flow in a direction that’s not creative, that’s not where I want it to go, but it’s where it has to go.

I wish I were better at multitasking, but it’s tough for me to give the proper amount of focus to one thing when the others are cooking my brain into an omelet. It’s been a rough year for large-scale disturbances. I think I may need to re-think how I write, because ultimately I know that a lot of folks write and deal with this kind of stuff. Vacation would be good to re-center myself, but I’m screwed there until I can suss some of the work stuff — so for now it’s a holding pattern while I deal with everything except the writing.

TLDR version: Bah.

you have too much to blog about. Fitness, writing, politics (egads, but yes, politics) and movies would each make good entries all on their own. Not sure what to do about it, but I may as well start somewhere.

Writing! Doing more of that. Got a very pleasant and thought-provoking rejection from Agent Candidate #1, and I’m still considering what to do about her feedback, which was excellent. In addition to having some very insightful thoughts as to how I might approach my issues, she highlit some areas I’ve received consistent criticism about, so I’m thinking I should perhaps tinker a bit more on the original manuscript. I may add some prequel-esque chapters to the fore of the book. I may not. In a way I kind of hate going back to Knight, because I like where it is right now. But every time I’ve tinkered, I’ve been pleased. So, back to the beginning!

So yes, I’m still writing. I’ve been doing renovations over at the Codex as well — there are a few more entries now — but work continues, and I really wish I had a service provider who was running a version of PHP that was compatible with the newest MediaWiki software. Sigh.

Fitness and politics will just have to wait for tomorrow, but I’ll get all of this out of my system by the end of the week.

Man, I miss those days back in ‘02 when I could write all day. I had the best schedule ever. I’d wake up at 5am — 5am! I’m not a morning person, but I’d get up religiously at 5am, do my workout, grab a shower, shave, all that stuff. By 7am I was fed and coffeed, and I’d be on my couch with my little mini Sony laptop and typing blissfully away. I’d type until I was done, which invariably ended up being around 11am or so, and I’d have the rest of the day to run errands, take care of chores, fart around playing games, visit friends, whatever.

I wrote so much and so fast that way I still boggle a bit thinking about it.

I’m not doing that anymore. I wake up at 7:30 or so, catch the 8:30 train in, steal an hour of writing going in and coming back on the train. I still get some great scenework done, and great character work, and overall I’m still pleased with my progress, given my circumstances.

Naturally, though, it’s nowhere near my jobless glory days when I could (and did) write a novel in four months. The nine-to-five job burns all my energy away — good or bad, all jobs do this. Instead of five solid hours, I get two, broken into vaguely useful chunks. It’s not enough, but it’s enough, you know?

Any job would do this. I need to pay bills, and I’m thankful that I hang with decent people at work. But…

Yeah.

It’s oddly saddening to realize that when you enter “Notebook” into Google’s image search, the first two images that appear are of notebook computers.

I’ve started dragging a real notebook around with me lately, of the paper variety, and I’d almost forgotten what a great means of expression it is. Arrows drawn without finding the draw toolbar, tables without adding or subtracting columns, bad scrawl, worse diagrams — and all creative.

I wrote a lot of Knight in notebooks. Sure, I did the last long slogs entirely in a word processor, but the sheer amount of scribbling with pencil and paper (yes, I use pencil — mechanical pencil at that!) I did over its creation is really pretty amazing.

I haven’t written any of Lord in a notebook yet… but I think I’m working up to it. The notebook I have right now is unlined — better for thinking on paper, organic concept work, determining relationships, but not so good for writing text. Lord is a lot more complex, so having an unlined notebook is just right for now… but dialogue is starting to emerge, and it may be approaching the time to break out the lined notebook again.

So why is it sad that notebook computers pop up first in Google image search? Maybe it’s just me being a Luddite, but it strikes me that notebook computers are more often used for business and entertainment than for self-expression. Sure, there’s photoshop artists, and musicians, and modellers and animators and writers, myself among them, who all use notebook computers.

But a notebook, a sheaf of bound, blank paper, is always for self-expression. You can’t entertain yourself by staring at a blank notebook. Unless you draw little guys in the corners of the pages doing silly shit and flip through it fast — but even then, it’s not blank anymore, and you had to draw it, which means you exercised your creativity.

So with the notebook itself slowly losing dominant ownership of its own noun, is this a subtle hint that, as a culture, we value entertainment over expression?

Or is it just that notebook computers are a lot more interesting to look at?

Regardless of one’s conclusion, the subtle irony I’ll leave this with is that the first entry in google text search for ‘notebook’ — after the inevitable ads for Dells and Sonys — comes up with a movie.

What a weird few weeks I’ve had.

It all started when my laptop died. Hard drive went into seizures, threw a fit and melted down in flames and a rush of ozone. I exaggerate, but that’s pretty much what it felt like, watching all my lovely files go WAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa……. down to the place even /dev/null can’t go.

Seems all in all it’s been a solid positive since then, though. For one, it looks as though my novel’s getting published — that’s The Grey Knight, for all you Amazon-watchers, though you can damn well bet I’ll post a link here when it’s actually going up for sale. Waiting with all the patience I can summon for my editor to tell me “THEY BOUGHT IT” or “THEY CALLED YOU SILLY NAMES”, but I know she’s presenting it to the team with a proposition to buy, so I’ve got all my appendages crossed. That can be crossed without causing pain. Et cetera. I’ll ramble more about that stuff later.

Also got contacted by a company that’s doing a massive online game (yes, for those of you who I know via independent game development, an actual company with actual money). Friend of a friend sort of thing, but I’ve gone through the preliminary stages of design tests with them, they like what I can do and we’re doing the contract negotiation dance to see if I can do some work for them on their next up-and-coming game.

And lastly, I got the new hard drive from Dell very quickly; was a breeze to install, and instead of coming pre-loaded with NTFS (gah, spit, bleh) I was able to load it up with FAT32 in two partitions, which, as any gamer will tell you, is the ONLY way to format a drive. NTFS = No Two Files Survived, in my case, so I’ll stick with the simple but elegant solution. I had a backup from a month ago on my external drive, so most of my shareware and licenses are intact, so I’m pretty much back up to speed now. And yes, I’ve missed my World of Warcraft!

On a sad note: nothing that uses the Unreal Tournament engine seems to want to run properly on my laptop. *sigh* My favorite fragging game apparently uses reported processor cycles instead of a proper timing mechanism to determine framerate, and thus my laptop, which reports 600 cycles from its Pentium M but actually runs more like 1600 cycles, is just impossible to play. I’ve changed drivers, set compatibility modes, all to no avail. I may be forced to install UT2003. So sad.

Good enough for an opening blog. If anyone can figure out how the hell to get UT running on a Pentium-M on reasonable speeds please, please, let me know!