everyone loves blue dog

Quick links and notes

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First: I’ve mentioned before that I cut my writing teeth on Wordplay, a screenwriter’s site, and I maintain a friendship with many of the people I met there. Well, another Wordplay alumnus, Keith Calder, has a movie coming out this weekend: Battle For Terra. His previous film was The Whackness, and if that doesn’t say “this producer has a wide range of skills and interests” what would? It opens this Friday, and I’m planning to take the whole family.

Next: this is what the term “office hijinks” was created for.

Next: I passed the halfway point of the revision of Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and I’m about to start a scene that will need heavy changes (for the better, I suspect). As soon as I finish this post and a little more kitchen work, I’ll be back at it.

Next: Tonight we have a taste test of the three pizza crust recipes posted in my LJ last week. The family decides tonight!

Next: Andrew Wheeler posts the genre bestsellers of 2008. Hmm. If each hardback sale earns about two bucks for the author…

Next: The deadline to opt out of the Google/Author’s Guild settlement is May 5th. Find out more about it.

Next: I’m on Dreamwidth as burger_eater. Currently, I have no idea what I’m going to use the account for, but once a WordPress cross-poster comes into the world, I may start copying everything over there, too.

Finally, on Saturday we took a couple buses across town to check out the final weekend of Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur. It was beautiful, and I loved the idea of paintings where the same characters appear several times in different places, each different image coming together to tell a story. Amazing stuff.

You’re the expert

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Typing this quickly, because it’s sunny and I want to go for a walk on my break.

This morning’s work session was terrible. I read a particular sequence in Everyone Loves Blue Dog over and over, trying to find ways to trim or improve it.

But you know what? I think it works pretty damn well just as it is. I’ve decided to take the stance that I am the expert on my own story. It works, and I’m not going to break it.

Hell, I even have the T-shirt, which isn’t available any more (but other items are). I think I’ll take that T-shirt out of my bottom drawer for my trip to San Diego Comic-Con.

Have I ever mentioned that I started off in screenplays? Most of my learning-to-make-story training happened on screenplay forums (ask me why if you’re curious) and I spent years on it. That’s why my IPSTPW Day offering was a horror script. I learned a helluva lot on the Wordplay site, back in the day.

Tomorrow, I’ll be up extra early and start on the next section of book. I’m already giving Important Supporting Character additional juice in her scenes, and I have a couple of other changes in mind.

Now, I’m off to the sunshine!

Bleh

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Not feeling all that well today. This morning’s work on my (final?) revision of Everyone Loves Blue Dog was cut short by a need to return home early. It didn’t help that the homeless lady sitting right next to me was clipping her nails, swabbing beneath her bandages and wiping her toes clean. Uck. Starbucks, please don’t be gross.

Today’s work involved the first really major sequence in the book. It’s supposed to be a transition from one section to another–changing the setting, the relationship between the leads, and expanding the stakes. Unfortunately, the last round of notes pointed out a problem there.

Now, as a reader, I have certain kinds of text that I skim. Those long travelogues in Fellowship of the Ring with detailed descriptions of the landscape? Skim. Car chases? Skim. Super-tense slow-moving characters checking out that strange noise in the basement? Skim. Some fight scenes, too.

I skim right over them until I get to something that might actually change the story.

That can cause problems. I skipped over the dream sequence in Red Harvest because I didn’t realize that some of it wasn’t a dream, and later had to backtrack to review it. Still, it’s how I read and how I think a lot of people read.

And the latest round of notes indicated that this whole sequence was skimmable.

“Be interesting,” is the number one law when I’m writing, and I’m not seeing the skimmable parts here. I’ve trimmed some minor sentences and reordered paragraphs to string like information together (which also slows the pacing, but that’s okay right now) but I’m concerned that I’m just too close to the text.

Hell. I’ll power up the laptop and sit by the big window. It’s a beautiful sunny day today, and even if I’m not feeling well, I can listen to the birds and look at the blue sky while I fret.

6 things make a post

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* Check out this short “video” which I guess is supposed to advertise a new TV. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have quote marks around that word, because this is a digital video at 30 frames a second, but it’s really more of a technical acheivement than a short film. Basically, it’s “bullet-time” on red kryptonite.

* Health care reform without a public insurance option=the German model. Money quote: “Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.”

* Seven year old boys prefer store-bought lemon-lime soda to the homemade variety.

* On NPR this morning, the father of Roxana Saberi, the journalist sentenced to 8 years in prison in what appears to be an Iranian kangaroo court, has been trying to make waves by telling people that his daughter was tricked into confessing to spying. According to him, they promised to let her go if she admitted to the crimes, which he thought was illegitimate. I hope someone explains to him that this happens in the U.S.A. all the time–the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the Central Park “wilding” case were nailed because of exactly this tactic, and that the FBI wanted Richard Jewel to confess to the Olympic bombing as part of a “training video.” While the Iranian government is deeply fucked up and in desperate need of reform, there’s no point in criticizing them for doing the same thing we do.

* I don’t have whatever cable channel showed THE WIRE, but I know it has a lot of fans. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and series bible. (Warning, that’s a .pdf file) I haven’t looked at it myself, because I plan to watch the series someday.

* Finally, putting my wife on a bus for her second day at her conference pretty much wasted my writing time today. My son is up, too, and once that happens I’ll have no time to focus on the book at all. Which sucks, but hey, that’s what family is about. Now we’re off for our Saturday library run.

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Today, I pored over Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and accomplished nothing. Also, the book my wife gave me to read couldn’t be renewed. I had to strip out all her bookmarks and slip it into the conveyor belt at the library.

As for the LiveJournal feed for Nathan Bransford’s blog, it turns out that Mr. Bransford himself ask that it be suspended. I have no idea why; LJ syndication is just another kind of RSS, but whatever. No more “This Week in Publishing” I guess.

At work, I discovered that the intranet policy book pages I’d spent a good part of last week working on were completely useless now. The manager copy and pasted them into .mht files elsewhere on the network, breaking all the links. There were good reasons to move them to another part of the network–our system is criminally slow–but damn.

Finally, do you know what my company and I both pay, per month, for the basic health insurance my wife, son and I have? Not just what I contribute, but everything?

Over $1,600. Per month.

We need reform in this country, and we need it now.

Links! The Top 16 Worst Movie Quotes to Utter During Sex. Is it wrong of me to laugh so hard at this?

Next, another amazing animation, this one done with stop-motion. Sorta. Check it out.

Finally, tweenbots, a video art project via Jay Lake. His link described it as teh cute, but I think that misses the point. The really, really cool thing about this is that the robot is a cute, nearly helpless little thing that relies on complete strangers to help it get where it needs to go. Even if you can’t watch the video at that page, the write up is fascinating.

It seems that a lot of my posts lately have been straight link farms. I feel boring. Is there something I should post about? Something I said I would talk about but haven’t? Let me know.

A post on a sunny day

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Agent Nathan Bransford is running an Agent for a Day event. Basically, he’s posted 50 queries in his blog, and his commenters get to reject or ask for more. Three of the queries are for books that went on to be published.

It’s pretty interesting stuff. I could never be an agent, because I would reject everything. Still, I wish the LiveJournal feed for his blog would be fixed.

Today I went back (yet again) to Everyone Loves Blue Dog. The changes that need to be made are pretty straightforward and shouldn’t take more than a week or two, depending. And for the future, I’ll have to be aware that I need to prompt the reader’s memory when a character re-enters the story after being out of it for 200 pages or so. An unusual name simply won’t cut it.

State of the Writer (and the writing, too)

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Taxes are done. Yesterday, I emptied most of our CD to cover the check (which is why I opened that CD in the first place) but it’s not going to be a hardship. We’ve been socking it away, just the way the internet recommends.

Page proofs are done. I actually finished them yesterday morning, and spent today’s writing time scanning the corrected pages and backing them up. If something goes wrong with the usps, I’ll have pages to resend or email. Paranoid? Moi?

Tomorrow I start back in on Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and I have to admit I had a little epiphany about one of the notes I’ve been getting. There’s a secondary character who’s not as… vivid as some of the others, and folks keep asking me to bring her out more.

For me, the problem is that she’s a reserved person and a bit of a cipher–she changes her outward personality to match the situation, and she doesn’t want to be too noticeable.

Earlier this week, I had a revelation while I was reading Bill Martell’s blog Sex in a Submarine (which is not a take on the SNAKES ON A PLANE film from a couple years back–the name of the blog comes from an entirely different clusterfuck). Bill writes low-budget movies, and one thing he’s always talking about is the pressure of getting a recognizable name for the front of the DVD box. It’s very difficult to market a movie without one.

What Bill does (and he talks about this often) is create a “confined cameo.” It’s a role for a name actor to play, with several scenes spread across the movie, but which all take place in a single location. So you have a general giving orders back at the command center, or the sexy barista at the corner coffee shop. Or whatever. The name actor has several scenes, but they can all be shot in a day or two because they’re all on the same set.

And while that keeps the price for that actor down, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll sign them. For that, you have to also make sure that it’s a juicy role. The actors are looking for ways to show their range and their skills.

I feel a little like a dummy. I spent so long studying screenwriting as a way to tell stories, but I never tried to translate this lesson from that form to fiction. Obviously, the character everyone wants to be stronger doesn’t need a confined cameo, but she does deserve a juicy, personality-defining scene–something that would startle and excite an actor reading for the part.

Now I just have to come up with one.

Finally, folks may have heard that Amazon.com has decided to stop listing certain “adult” materials on their best-seller lists, and the means to read that end was that they would no longer show sales rankings.

And one of the ways they defined “adult” was “gay.” Even YA novels with gay characters were too “adult” to be listed.

How could they be so stupid, you ask? I have no clue. See this post by an author affected by the change to read Amazon.com’s response, and Dear Author weighs in on the romance writers who’ve been affected, and finally here’s the start of a link farm to check out.

I’m so damn tired I feel a little sick

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I really shouldn’t still be up. In fact, a smart person would have gone to bed two hours ago.

Not me. I’ve been zoning out in front of the TV–I haven’t even had time to read all the online stuff I’m supposed to read.

Ah well. Tomorrow morning I will finish the page proofs and maybe take it a little easy. I’ll skim through my sorta-final-I-should-be-so-lucky revision of Everyone Loves Blue Dog and dabble at it, then pop over to the library for some quality wireless internet time. That’ll catch me up.

Meanwhile, check out this comment from SF archivist Lynn Thomas (aka: rarelylynne on LJ) all about the best ways to organize and archive your writing work.

Meanwhile, it’s after 10:30 here, and I’m wiped. I’m going to bed before I pass out on my keyboard.

“… All perfect light and promises.”

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I’ve been having a good couple of days on the writing-front. Starting on Saturday, Man Bites World has been coming together in a way that really makes me happy. The characters, the plot, all of it suddenly broke into a sprint. Even the long, talky conversation was working for me.[1]

But of course I knew yet another set of notes were coming for Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and I knew that the better things were going for book 3, the more likely book 2 would interrupt.

Well, things must have been doing even better than I thought, because the secret writing gremlins have not only arranged for the next round of revisions to hit today[2], but I’m also told I’ll be getting the page proofs for Child of Fire later this week.

Momentum is for breaking, I guess.

Still, the last couple days have been so good that I’m expecting to hit my weekly goal early. If so, I can take Saturday morning off (and sleep in!). Blessed, blessed sleep.

[1] My editor was curious how I was going to portray one of the antagonists, a guy who is planning wholesale destruction but still considers the protagonist his good friend. I’m hoping “Just because I plan to euthanize the world doesn’t mean I want to be a dick about it” covers that ground pretty well.

[2]The revision recommendations on ELBD do not include cutting my dark(ish) ending. Plenty of other work to do, though. We’ll see how the next draft is received.

Everyone Loves Blue Dog

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… is done.

I’ll email if to my agent when I get home. Since she’s going to get a fresh read of it from another agent, I imagine I’ll have more notes soon. And I’m not sure if my editor wants this version or wants to wait until I execute notes from this new read.

But it’s 5:30 pm, and I haven’t eaten a bite since six am. I’m just been working and pushing and doing on this thing all day. (And hanging out a Flycon 2009.)

Deadline, schmedline. I’m taking tomorrow off.

And… it’s been emailed to my agent. Goodbye, book! Have a nice long trip!