Or you can donate to the Red Cross and receive a copy of BATTLE FOR TERRA from one of the film’s producers. Details here.
Just in case it wasn’t clear
Standard“I do shoot [guns], and I shoot them at things that can’t shoot back. And will continue to do that. And by that, I want to be clear, I don’t mean children.”
— Harold Ford
I have one beta reader
StandardThat would be my long-suffering agent.
While I’ve been going through Man Bites World, polishing it up, she’s been reading the first draft.* Yesterday, her notes arrived just as I finished my morning revision, and I read through them all.
Well, once the pouting and foot-stamping was over, I have to admit that they’re damn good notes. Almost all of them either make the work more commercial without cheating on the intent of the book, or they address elements that I’ve been uncertain about.
Mainly, they deal with unifying the book. Currently, there’s a “front plot” and a “back plot.” I’ve tried this before, but not in a long-form story that will ever see the light of day. It follows the two-antagonist[2] rule [3], but in this instance the first plot problem that the protagonist faces (ie: the “front plot”) eventually turns out to be caused by a plot problem (the “back plot”) which doesn’t appear until past the mid-point and is so much more important that it overshadows the front plot.
I hope I can make it work this time.
Anyway, the two plots are connected–which they need to be–but the connection is too tenuous. I need to make them more of a web than a strand; the disparate character goals make the novel too diffuse, at least until the last 70 pages or so, when it all dovetails.
Most of the other notes she’s given me are straight-forward enough: punching up this or that character, clarifying a relationship, hanging on to so-and-so’s essential appeal. There are also a few moments that break the tone. I’ll have another look at those.
There’s only one note that genuinely troubles me. One of the notes I got on Game of Cages was “too many secondary characters”–and I don’t mean that I got it once. I revised and combined and trimmed that book, but pretty much every set of notes included something like “I’d forgotten X by the time she reappeared.”
So, in writing MBW, I needed to a) delineate the secondary characters better[4] and b) have fewer secondary characters. Which I thought I did, but garsh, there’s that note again. I believe I need to start making character lists for books like mine, to gauge the point at with no amount of a) can make up for a failure to b).
Anyway, I’m on my lunch break, which means it’s time to take out my (paper) notebook and copy down her notes in my own words. I have lists to make and graphs to draw. Fun!
[1] Which means she’s been enduring my weird, semi-random paragraph constructions and word repetitions. Embarrassing for me, but I think it will help make me more conscious of the way I lay out my sentences as I write. I learn well through shame.
[2] Or more, obviously.
[3] Which I learned by watching endless episodes of DR. WHO.
[4] But god, I thought I already did this. I work really, really hard on this every time.
Domo-Kun Arrives in a New Neighborhood
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Randomness for 1/12
Standard1) Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (I realize this has been going around, but I collect these links over time, so just assume I found it first, even if I posted it last, okay?)
2) Readers send emails to writers. Heh. My recommendation: never email a grammar question to me. I’ll just copy and paste into Word and look for a green underline. Then I’ll replay with just a blank message, so you’ll think there’s something wrong with my email client.
For the record, I’ve gotten more than a few emails from readers, and they’ve been wonderful. Thank you. Someday I’ll get a snarky or nasty one, and I promise to post it on the blog, just as I include the slam reviews in my review round-up.
3) All of Great Britain cries out: “Atlantic Gulf Stream, come home! We miss you!”
4) Biosphere 2, falling into ruin. Amazing images. via James Nicoll
5) Early notes on the origin of Superman. If you’re like me, you find Jerry Siegel’s early ideas for the character fascinating. It’s so different from what it eventually became, even if he kept the “Man of Tomorrow” moniker.
6) How long will it last? Forget about Peak Oil. We appear to have reached Peak Indium already. Like the guy I snagged this from, I curious how accurate it is. It’s a bit scary, though. via mightygodking
Polish Progress
StandardI’m on page 156 of Man Bites World. In two hours, I’ll be putting my son in the bathtub. Let’s see how far I get.
Added later: Page 207! For me, that’s pretty good.
Living inside a movie
StandardTor.com guest blogger Don T. Careallthatmuch writes a ridiculous post suggesting that Pandora, the fictional planet that serves as a setting for the movie AVATAR is where people were meant to live.
Fun quote: “Isn’t this how we were meant to live, and might live again? Hunting the forest, leaping through the canopy, killing beasts, taming others, enacting meaningful rituals? It’s the same dream offered by Tolkien’s Middle-earth—to be peaceful, nature-bonded hobbits, quietly growing crops, smoking pipes, drinking ale and laughing. An alluring fantasy life to be sure. And one perhaps worth fighting for.”
Don left out “crapping in holes” but whatever. This reminds me of something I heard Spider Robinson say at the late, lamented NW Bookfest some years ago (I paraphrase from memory, of course). He said that he reads science fiction because he wants to read about societies of the future, advanced societies where he can imagine living. Fantasy readers, he assumed, were doing the same thing–which made them fools. The typical human in a pre-industrial Europe worked incredibly hard and was incredibly uncomfortable; he’d tried to live a self-sustaining farmer’s life, and it was a nightmare. Fantasy readers, he concluded, were idiots.
Never mind that many, many people do not read books because they’re daydreaming about living in the setting. Sure, I might imagine how cool it would be to fight like Aragorn, kicking monster ass and getting to be king at the end, but that doesn’t mean I’d walk through a portal marked “Middle Earth: Entrance Only.”
I think something that throws people about this is that these action movies are taking place in a wacky setting. If I read a crime novel, does that mean I want to have a knife fight with a junkie in an alley? Hell no. Do I want to drive an souped-up car across a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland? No and no again.
I enjoy the hell out of those sorts of stories, though. I may imagine myself standing alone on a bridge as the goblin warriors rush at me, or piloting a spaceship through a firefight, or confronting a vampire in it’s lair, but that’s part of enjoying an adventure story.
But to actually go there and do that? For real? Pass. And I think most sane people would agree.
At this point, let me tell you about a very good, very old friend of mine. At one point, he told me he was going to join the FBI. This was something of a surprise, because this was a guy who’d given up the chance to run his own martial arts school to pursue acting. He’d owned a bicycle repair business, repaired rental hardware for Lowe’s, produced documentaries and DVD extras, built movie sets, etc. But wear a suit and investigate people for the federal government? Where did that come from.
“The X-Files,” he said. Now, he knew it was a little ridiculous as he said it. He knew he couldn’t join the FBI to hunt aliens, but he’d enjoyed that show so damn much that he wanted to jump into it. (He cancelled his application midway through because he knew it was laughable, but still). There are scientists who were inspired by Star Trek, martial arts students who studied wu shu because of Jackie Chan, fencing students inspired by The Three Musketeers, kendo students inspired by Toshiro Mifune.
Yeah, there are people who love a story enough to try to make it part of their lives. But to give up everything and rush off to neverland? I look forward to Don’s future posts from the jungles of the Amazon. As for me, I’d consider it if it was an honest-to-god utopia and I could bring my wife and son. But probably not. I don’t hate my life that much, and I don’t want to crap in a hole.
Dammit
StandardPage 141. And to make things worse, I’m sure I’ve pissed off my wife by working later than I said I would. I’ll have to go home and see.
Why is it that every time I actually keep track of my work progress, I’m disgusted by the result?
“Lurking with intent”
StandardI’m on page 123. Check that against the timestamp from my previous post to see how slow I am.
In my defense (you knew I’d make excuses, yeah?) I happened to hit one of the delicate parts of the book. Certain scenes with elevated action–very powerful emotions, very intense magic, monsters, whatever–require extremely careful handling or they turn maudlin or ridiculous.
I’m not finished for the day, though. I’m going to take my computer across the street to the diner and work through lunch, then it’ll be time to work at the library.
There *is* something I’d meant to mention in my previous post that I completely forgot: One nice thing about the Game of Cages cover art (I’m not shameless enough to link to it again, don’t worry) is that you can see the guy, and he isn’t standing at the shadowy entrance to an alley or something.
For a lot of years, urban fantasy with male protagonists have been these “lurking with intent” covers, where the protagonist looks like a guy you’d circle the block to avoid. Does he have nothing better to do than stand around in the dark? Get that guy a job or a hobby or something.
Anyway, it’s nice to see Ray standing in the light, with no hint of skulking about him.
Now: food! And more revisions.
I’m supposed to be working
StandardSo of course I’m typing this instead. Here’s my life in convenient bullet-list form, which is how I experience it myself.
* I uploaded a larger jpg of the Game of Cages cover, so anyone who missed it the first time or thought it was too dark or small can really see it now. It’s practically actual size.
* I just put the signed contracts for Russian language editions of CoF and GoC in the mail. Yay! Last night I took a deep breath and sat down to read through them, only to discover they were a civilized two pages long, with one column in Russian and one in English. Easy-peazy.
* As evidence that I am still not caught up on my sleep, I just used the phrase “easy-peazy” for the first time in my life. No, I have not been transformed into an adorable urchin in a 1950’s sitcom. I’m just feeling odd and out of sorts.
* Yesterday I got back on the “read faster” bandwagon with my current library book. As I mentioned before, I read more slowly than any novelist I’ve ever heard of, and at this point it’s a real hindrance on my productivity. The polish of Man Bites World I’ve been working would have been finished long ago if I were someone else; as it is, I’m on page 115 of 381. After I finish this post and one or two other online duties, I’ll post how far I’ve gotten at the end of my work day. Shame is a great motivator.
* If anyone is curious about the book I’m reading, it’s Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why by Laurence Gonzales. It’s a bit of a narrative wander, but the subject is fascinating. So far, I recommend it highly, especially if you’re interested in why people seem to do exactly the wrong thing in stressful situations.
* Someone on Justine Larbaletier’s blog recommended Mac Freedom, a free software download that turns off a Mac’s wireless for any length of time the user wants. My eyes bugged out of my head, because this was the thing I’d always wanted without knowing it. I headed to download.com to read their review of it first, and was startled to see the review say it was a silly program because a Mac’s wireless capability was trivially easy to turn off already.
It took me a moment to realize they meant clicking the little fan in the upper toolbar. Yeah, it’s trivially easy to turn off, but it’s also easy to turn back on when I’m stuck or frustrated. Do they expect me to have some sort of self-control? I’m not made of stone, people!
Okay. More coffee, then on to page 116.