Over the Wall

I don't have any big insight on how it feels to have finished this book, except that I am divided strongly between the desire to kick back and chillax for a while and the desire to get going on another project. KUFC is meant to be the first book in a series, and in theory I could get to plotting the next one. In theory. I could also revisit the Greenland book, which has a premise I really believe in and an execution that kinda reeks, and see if rewriting it from scratch is going to be as nightmarish as it seems from this vantage point. Or I could go back to my idea about Marilyn Monroe, a book which exists only in research and a general plan at this time, and try to outline it. Or I could write any of a handful of short stories or essays I have ideas for. And I have this completely insane idea for a Wikipedia/Choose Your Own Adventure book that could use some development, although I feel like I need to wait until I'm a much better writer to do that one.

Or I could just do nothing. Yesterday, when I was finished with money-work, I watched Erin Brockovich and Prometheus, neither of which I'd seen. [Thumbs medium-up on the first (enjoyable, engaging, but no great timeless art), thumbs down + raspberry on the second. Prometheus earned ire of a rare sort from a few of my friends when it came out, and I was curious about what made people so mad. I'm not sure it's worth getting pissed off about, except that it looked a hell of a lot better in its first ten minutes or so (once we get into space, I mean) than it delivered upon in the following two hours. I thought it was more of the same frustrating go-nowhere toss-money-at-it bullshit from Ridley Scott that we've been seeing for decades now, but this is not a popular opinion.] It was nice not to have any other demands on my time, to be able to spend four hours with movies without guilt. I kind of want to roll around in that for a while, rather than getting my saddle back on right away. Yes, I reversed that on purpose. 

I haven't been reading much in the past couple of weeks. Now that I have the time again, all I seem to want to do is crossword puzzles. Oh, well. That'll cycle out too, as my interests always do. 

In case you missed it on Facebook, this article on Slate about novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros is...unmissable. She is potentially the worst novelist of all time, and her existence and reactions to criticism of her work brings up a number of questions for me about the role of confidence vs. the role of self-doubt when  making art. Despite how bad I feel laughing at someone who took herself so very seriously (people may be laughing at me, and my presumption at being a novelist, after all), I can't help it. Her syntax is hysterical. She reminds me precisely of Alpha, the Doberman from Pixar's Up. "You too shall have much rewardings from Master for the toil factor you wage." Her poetry, as quoted on her Wikipedia page, is evidently just as amusing:

Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer.

I downloaded one of her books from Gutenberg and I look forward to tackling it as soon as the crosswords get old.

I couldn't sleep on Sunday night after finishing the book, and one of the things I did in my insomnia was make an iTunes playlist of all the music that either fit the mood of the book, is specifically mentioned in the book, or I played on repeat while writing the book. I kind of love the mix and wish I could send it out as a supplement along with the draft if/when I send it to friends. This is one of those mood songs. A little slow jazz for Wednesday. 

Only Good News Can Cool My Desire

Here's a little Boss for you. Cracked recently taught me that this song was banned by the BBC and Clear Channel due to the conflict in Iraq and after 9/11, respectively. Neither I nor Cracked understands what this personal, crazy sexy song has to do with world conflict.

I post it here because, you see, I'm on fire. I got an acceptance on Friday, for an anthology related to women and body image. Although I'm really excited, because this project is such a wonderful, necessary idea, I don't want to yell and scream too much about it. I've known anthologies not to pan out; my work was accepted on spec, on a paragraph rather than the full piece; and I'm to be paired with an artist (in theory), which I freely admit might make it all go wrong (fault mine). If it does pan out, I will be thrilled and honored to be a part of the project.

But that's not the only reason for the burnination. I finished the first draft of KUFC. Finished it. Done. Finito.

I wrote the last chapter on Friday, and then on Saturday I rewrote the prologue completely. I originally wrote that prologue last summer, and I made it all fancy and beautiful, with embroidered prose. But the rest of the book didn't get written like that, and some other aspects of the book changed along the way from what I'd written in the prologue, and two test readers didn't like it anyway, so I decided to redo it altogether once the whole draft was done. On a nice walk on Saturday, Matt compared the function of my prologue to a tutorial mission in a video game, which is an ideal analog. And that means I might have to rewrite it again and again, a bunch of different ways, to communicate everything I need to communicate so you're not jumping into the game without a clue about the mechanics.

But the point is, I'm done with the draft. I spent nearly all my waking hours on Sunday, from 10 AM to 9 PM, polishing it. I still have much more to do (as they say, writing is rewriting, much as I wish it weren't so), but there. It hovers at 92,500 words. I am dying for someone else to read it, because I am sofa king excited about Berra Thorntree and her death-defying adventures that I want to introduce her to other people, too. Of course it's not ready to go out yet, because Matt needs to tell me about the things I totally forgot to notice and it needs to sit for a while so my self-indulgence can be recognizable. But SOON. When I was done with the first read on Sunday night, though, I posted a remark to that effect on Facebook, and a bunch of people jumped in to like it and tell me they wanted to read it, which made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Matt claims to be excited to be the first other person to meet Berra, but I've been telling him repeatedly how much I look forward to him reading the thing for many weeks, so if I were him, I'd pretty much be playing along by now.

Anyway! Acceptance! Completion of fourth-or-potentially-fifth novel! BIG YAY!

Or Even Glynis or Ashok

For a while now I've been collecting a list of names I want to use in fiction someday. The name is always one of the hardest parts for me in putting a new character in a scene or a story or a book. Sometimes I'll sit there with the blinking cursor for minutes on end, bursting to write the scene, blank for a decent name. Sometimes I'll get stuck altogether and have to hunt down the little book of baby names I bought when I was living in England for this very purpose. But lately I've just been collecting names I like and copying them in a .txt I save on my computer desktop.

Every time I add to my names list, I'm amazed at all the ones I've added before. They all seem so unusual and weird, yet perfectly plausible in isolation. Like Kieran. Not an unrecognizable name, but when you set it in a list next to Charmaine and Augusta and Felix, it starts to seem like no one in my books will ever be named Mike or Julie. My favorite so far is Corisande. (Say it out loud, "Corisande." Isn't it wonderful?) Picked that one up from a Georgette Heyer novel and I don't know if I'll ever even use it, it's so delightful. I'll have to find precisely the right lady on whom to bestow it.

On a similar topic, I also had cause to look up an old-timey synonym for "bitch" the other day. When I ran through a mental list of old-fashioned insults for women, like roundheels, slattern, etc., I realized they were all synonyms for "slut", rather than actually "bitch". Insulting a woman in an old-timey way inevitably entails casting aspersions on her sexual behavior. Which is depressing, because women do lots of bad things that don't relate to sleeping around (which is debatably not even such a bad thing to do). More words like ruffian and jackanapes and blackguard are needed for women, if you ask me. A wider variety of insults for period writers to choose from.

In any event, my slang dictionary didn't list any synonyms for "bitch" and my Googling didn't help much, so for the time being I'm stuck with that word. It was certainly in use during the year I've set this book, but I'd've preferred something more expressive and less common.

Random lines from yesterday's work:

"Carys," I said, "do you know every important person in town?"
"Yes," she deadpanned. "And all the favors I owe them seem to go straight to your benefit." 

In other news, tonight there will be Manos, the Hands of Fate Rifftrax in the movie theater. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Next week is Plan 9 from Outer Space, but I saw that one a couple of years ago and I'll live without seeing it again. You should go, though. "Future events such as these will affect you in the future, for that is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives." A Jonathan Coulton performance is part of the package. Details here.

Meet You All the Way (??)

Yesterday morning, I revised the first 15,000 words or so of KUFC. Since I'm not finished with the full draft yet, this might have been premature of me. But in the course of writing the book, some things about the world have changed, so I wanted to get a jump on the more mechanical revisions. Plus, I finally found a website with an architectural glossary, so I could use words like "lintel" instead of saying "the horizontal beam over the top of the door."

It took me until nearly lunch to edit, and then after lunch I sat in the red chair and wrote. I had an hour or so's worth of false starts, and I took several long breaks, but I didn't quit for good until about 11:30, at which point I had finished both the action-y part of the climax and the confrontation-y part of the climax. So all I have left to do now is denoue. Wrap up all my loose ends. Possibly threaten my character's life one more time. And then the [first draft of the] book will be done.

It was hard as fuck to write yesterday's work. Not just because what was happening was impactful and upsetting for these characters, but because it was thrilling. My heart was pounding and I had adrenalin in my stomach. My mood tends to echo what I write when I'm writing it: if a character gets snide or angry, that's what goes on my face and in my mind. If I'm writing a sex scene...well. And this was an action scene, so I got excited, with my heart in my throat. (Silly, perhaps, but I hope it means the writing's more effective.) Because of this it was hard to sit down and concentrate instead of pacing out all that energy. But I did. And then, when I was finished, I slept like the dead.

Today I have pages and pages to type. I'm certain I'll be over 80,000 words when I finish typing yesterday's work, which means to you and me that the book will be book-length in its final draft. Which is always a relief.

That's all for now. I have carpal tunnel syndrome to contract. This cover of "Rosanna" is greater than the sum of its parts. Enjoy.

Regarding the Black Hole Principle

Once, when I was in high school, I was talking over books with my boyfriend at the time, and he introduced an idea that I've found useful ever since. His name, like my husband's, is Matt, which is a whole other story, but his nickname is/was Westy. One of my favorite books during my teenage years was Brave New World (which, by the way, is a whole different book if you're a teenager than if you're an adult). When I brought it up, Westy said oh, yeah, that one has a really fast black hole.

What? I asked.

The black hole is the page when you don't want to stop reading, he explained. Not the page where you get interested, or the page where you decide to read the whole book. The page where the book becomes the main thing you're thinking about when you're doing other stuff and want to be reading instead. The point where the book sucks you in.

Some books never have a black hole page at all, and for some books, the black hole is on page one. It's a super-subjective thing, because one person's hook is another person's sharp shiny death. But all of the spine-prickling terrific books I've read have had this quality, a point where I'm like, okay, you got me, I'll follow you anywhere.

I'm reminded of this concept all the damn time. In part because I read a lot, and I know a black hole when I see one, and in part because I'm a writer and want to know how to be sure I've written a black hole myself. I think about it a lot. I wonder how it applies to short stories. I wonder how some books (not many, thank goodness) manage to reverse polarity and make you drift right back out after the black hole snagged you a couple hundred pages earlier.

Usually when I start reading something, my brain's clicking away with half a dozen other functions, keeping track of time and blood sugar level and surroundings, interpreting what the writer's up to both in front of and behind the curtain, wondering how long it took the writer to write this and get published, how many trunk manuscripts he'd gathered before he wrote this, etc etc. Sometimes, though, those things drop away in whispers, one by one, and I'm totally absorbed in nothing else but what's on the page. This is a magic moment, getting lost in a book, and I mourn for people who "don't like to read", because nothing compares to it. Nothing.


Recently I started reading Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, and I had one of the clearest black-hole moments I've had in years. The prologue (? first chapter? it's numbered zero) is so beautifully written, such a perfect, perfect hook, that I want to photocopy it and send it to half the people I know with "ISN'T THIS AWESOME???" written in the margin. It was an absorbing few pages, and when I was finished I wanted to e-mail the writer all the clapping gifs I knew of.

Well done, sir. 

As good as an opera with Susan Alexander. 

My kicky scarf grudgingly accepts that you write well. 

Another one I remember from recent years is the first chapter of The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I haven't read the entirety of that book, just the first couple of chapters and then skimmed some of the rest. I believe it might be one of those sad reversed-polarity books, because although the first chapter hooked me like a trout, the rest of it seemed too Crichton-y in structure for my taste. Good in its individual scenes, but then you have to reboot everything to switch back to the other cast of characters.

And then there was Pastoralia, the only book I've ever loved so much I was reading it at stoplights.

Anybody want to share their favorite black holes with the class?

Postscript: Concerning Vaas Cheesecake

Two people said they wanted to hear me expound about something I brought up in the last post after all, so, here it is.

This is Vaas Montenegro.

And to Think, All This from Jesus vs. Santa

And now I'm over 60,000 words. This is downright surreal.

There's so much I want to tell you about this book. So many details I want to share giddily with Matt while I'm writing. So many aspects which I feel are full of win, from character development to cool vocabulary I've invented. But I know it's not at all the thing to do, both because I'll give it away (on an individual level) and because I'll be opening myself up to thievery (on the wider blog-on-internet level). So I'm having to spin in my own little circle of happiness about what I'm writing instead of spreading the love.

This would all be a lot easier if I wasn't on such a flaming roll, writing thousands of words every day. All I want to think about is the world I've built, and all I want to do is create more inside of it.

Partly for this reason, I'm kind of dry for what to write about here. I thought of writing about this picture, which appeared on Kotaku the other day and spun up all kinds of interesting commentary in my head about gender and pinup art and what women are attracted to. But I didn't think anyone would be interested, so I chucked that idea. I thought of discussing my various writing plans in the near future, but they're all twisted up with my personal life and that was too far in the other direction, away from commentary and toward navel-gazing.

Oh! I know. Over the past few months, I watched the entire berth of South Park available on Netflix. I'd seen most of season one, some of season two, all of season nine (for some reason), and scattered episodes from all the others (the essentials, like the Scientology episode and the Scott Tenorman episode). In all, there were 221 23-minute shows available on instant watch and I'd probably seen a third of them. I loved the series, cheerleaded for it, but still hadn't seen the majority of it. I finished last week, with the last episode of season 15, and even I am genuinely astonished at exactly how good South Park can be. It's subversive to a level that little else in our culture is, it's intelligent to a degree that funny shows virtually never are, and the only adjective I can think of that sums it all up is necessary. America badly needs every effort possible to bring us down a few pegs, whether out of our own self-obsession or out of our strict prudishness about vulgarity and absurdity, and that's possibly South Park's greatest purpose.

One of the complaints I read over and over as I looked up context for the individual shows was that the series picked low-hanging fruit to skewer. This is not an unfair criticism, but the show also bothers to make it well worth your while to watch it skewer the topic in its own especial way. More than just "ha ha, Mormons are so funny," the approach is "let's make a musical about the real story of Mormonism, and the laughs will take care of themselves."

That's the other thing that frankly amazed me. When it wasn't being blatantly absurd (the U.S. military is probably not trying to open a Stargate into Imaginationland), South Park was always factually accurate. The retelling of Great Expectations, the basis of Scientology, various laws of the United States, certain history lessons: the creators unfailingly did their research, and everything was bang-on correct. That makes me respect them even more. A lot of creative types wouldn't bother, and I don't think anyone holds South Park to a particularly high standard of responsibility aside from its own creators.

Just as I was finishing up season 15, I read this article on Slate. If you're too lazy to read it, it lays out reasons why marathoning a TV show is a bad idea. I can't remember when I agreed less with every one of the basic foundations of an article (unless it was just nonsense, like this bullshit). Episodes have their own integrity? It's better to consider TV characters as pals who hang around in our living rooms once a week than actors whose performances we can watch at our leisure? And recaps and commentary are worth reading?? Dude must have been smoking some of the good stuff.

Matt thinks I should write a full-on magazine essay about why marathoning TV is so awesome and worthwhile, so I'm not going to blow my wad about it here. But after absorbing roughly 60 hours of South Park in the last couple of months, I'm here to tell you: in great ravenous gulps is totally the way to watch a series.

Now go watch South Park for yourself. I have writing to do.