Draft 2 - complete!

Finished the revised draft of my mystery novel Undertow, and it's now ready for distribution to the Constant Reader Brigade for feedback and comments.

I feel good about this one. I really enjoyed working with a first-person narration, which was new to me. The intimacy of that POV is nice, though I miss the chance to jump into other characters' heads. But first-person suited that particular story best. Third-person would not have worked nearly as well. 

First-person is ideal for mysteries because the reader finds things out as the narrator does, and it can prevent the reader from seeing things the narrator doesn't and then wondering why the narrator doesn't know that Character X is a red herring and Character Y is the murderer and how can the narrator be such a doofus, anyway?

In other writing news, I'm up to 51,000 words in the work in progress (don't worry, I'll think of a title). 

Books into Celluloid: The Painted Veil

My latest book vs. movie comparison column takes on The Painted Veil. 

Review: Stanley

My review of the snake horror film Stanley is now up at Horrorview.com. Enjoy.

Focus on the manuscript

The other weekend I did a do-it-myself writer's retreat, taking the manuscript of my mystery novel Undertow and holing up in a hotel room in Solvang. Armed with red pens (for corrections) and black pens (for major revisions) and lots of coffee and Milano cookies, I went through the entire manuscript and gave it a thorough edit. Once those edits have been implemented, I'll be able to distribute the MS to my Constant Reader Brigade and get their feedback.

I highly recommend this to all writers. Especially if, like me, you have to juggle writing with day jobs, family, and other responsibilities. The benefits are numerous.

To sum up: Focus. Total focus. I cannot emphasize this enough. You don't have to worry about getting dinner on the table, about helping the kid find his Crocs or the hubby find his glasses, or about anything but your manuscript.

My advice is to go somewhere a reasonable distance from your house. However, make your destination someplace familiar, that way you won't be tempted to go exploring, and you won't have to wonder where you're getting dinner that night.

Try to avoid distractions. Leave the iPod at home. Bring your laptop, but leave the internet cable at home. If you bring books, make sure they're old favorites you've read before so you aren't getting caught up in them. 

I find that even in my downtime, I'm not worrying about any of the myriad of things I normally have to think about. I can focus on one thing: my book.

In addition to the edits on Undertow, I brought Boswell The Laptop with me and was able to get work done on the work in progress. Up to 48,000 words now (technically I passed 50,000 but I realized that a chapter needs to be narrated by a different character and so I have to redo it).

I also did a bit of book shopping. Yes, I know I'd said I wasn't going to buy anything new until the Festival of Books in April (you in the back, stop laughing). But times are tough, Solvang is one of my favorite towns, and I supported local businesses like The Book Loft  and the newly opened use book store, Valley Books. Came home with books by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cormac McCarthy. Good times.

Oh, and I ate a lot of pancakes while I was at the retreat, too. Editing makes you hungry.

Now that's what I call writing: Tom Stoppard

Before I depart for a few days to do intensive editing on my manuscript Undertow, I'll leave you with a quote from Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which, to me, sums up nicely why so much of fiction consists of bad things happening to people.

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Guildenstern: Is that what people want?

The Player: It's what we do.

Writing craft: How Not to Write a Novel

In preparation for my writing retreat to edit and revise my manuscript Undertow, I'm reading How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. 

Mittelmark and Newman know that writers can learn more from bad examples than good ones, and describe 200 classic mistakes in fiction. They use hilariously exaggerated examples to demonstrate such blunders as "I Complete Me: Wherein the novel is a work of auto-hagiography" and special sections on sex scenes ("The Purple Blue Prose: In which the sex is cloaked in lyricism"), jokes, and postmodernism.

Every writer should get this book; along with the good advice, it's very funny. An excerpt to get you interested: 

"It is as if the author had said, 'Oh, I just realized my plot doesn't work, so I'm going to add something from outside of my plot, okay?' This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for 'Are you f---ing kidding me?'"

Review: Freaks

My review of Tod Browning's movie Freaks is up at Horrorview.com. Take a view if you're so inclined.

Birthday wishes, creativity, and more

I forgot to mention this on Tuesday what with the Inauguration and all, but 1/20/09 was the birthday of one of my favorite creative people, David Lynch. Happy birthday to him! And here's a very creepy short film (slightly NSFW) by Lynch!

Lynch is not just a film-maker and artist, but an author as well. His book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is an insightful, humorous, and surprisingly practical guide to fostering creativity. While focusing mainly on transcendental meditation and how it's aided his creative process, the book also gives insight into the making of many of his movies, his inspiration for art, and ways in which everyday people can make better use of their creativity. For example, Lynch dismisses the cliche of the starving artist, correctly noting that it is difficult if not impossible to be creative when you're worrying about keeping a roof over your head or where your next meal is coming from.

I'm not sure I'm on the TM bandwagon, but for a person whose art can be so dark and disturbing, Lynch comes across as a serene person.  Learn more about the book and about the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace here.

Writing craft: Tips from Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, has these tips for writers. (They're geared to screenwriters but much of the advice is applicable to novelists as well.)

I especially like the "Finish it" tip. I spent years on my very first novel and few things have made me feel better than actually finishing the damn thing. Of course, it's a first novel and as such has a bad case of being a first novel, but I finished it, and learned a lot in the process. It's all about going from "I'm writing  a book" to "I wrote a book." Many people say the former, not nearly as many say the latter.

Now that's what I call writing: C. S. Lewis

Posts tagged with "Now that's what I call writing" will feature quotes from others' works that I've found particularly interesting or inspiring, or that make me throw up my hands and wonder why I bother writing at all.

The excerpt below is the opening of C. S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for. My crown passes to my nephew.

Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will dare to write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me. Terrors and plagues are not an answer.

The book isn't one of Lewis' better-known works, but it is definitely worth seeking out. By all means, do so.

Be seeing you, Number Six

Patrick McGoohan of the delightfully surreal TV show The Prisoner, has passed away. Obituary here.  

I remember watching The Prisoner when I was very young. I'm sure I didn't grasp 99% of what I was seeing (though I was terrified of Rover) but the show nevertheless made a big impression on me. (In my novels Ashes and Reckoning, I made The Prisoner's catchphrase "Be seeing  you" the farewell words used by two of my characters.)

Here's the opening sequence for The Prisoner. You're a free man now, Number 6.

Writing craft: Show, don't tell

Anyone who's taken a creative writing course is familiar with the "show, don't tell" admonition. It's a phrase that's easy to repeat back but sometimes hard to grasp in actual implementation.

First off, like any rule in fiction writing, "show, don't tell" can be broken - provided the breaking is done well. When it's not done well, what should be a lively, involving story can become a dry recitation.

To see how "show, don't tell" is done, look no further than Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.* You'll probably be too involved with the characters and the story on the first read-through, but on a subsequent re-read it becomes apparent that many of McMurtry's characters suffer at one point or another from depression.

McMurtry can't point this out to the reader directly because of the narrative format of the book and because no one at the time the book is set recognized clinical depression for what it was. So rather than telling the reader that "Character X felt depressed that day" he'll show us that character's psychological state through the character's actions and thoughts.

It's a subtle yet effective tool. Put the reader in the mindset of a character who's drinking to dull his emotional pain, or who is so overwhelmed by the turn  his life has taken that he can't bring himself to eat or to get out of bed in the morning, and you'll have conveyed the character's state of mind successfully and increased the reader's empathy with the character as well.

*Everyone should read this book anyway for its involving characters and affecting yet non-flashy prose style (be forewarned that McMurtry just loves to smite characters in awful ways).

Look familiar?

The perils of typing too fast and furious.

Especially relevant now that I've busted the 30,000 word mark in the current WIP.

Writing craft: Inspiration in unlikely places

"Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air."

That quote's from the TV show Twin Peaks; the music (revealed in a later episode) is Julee Cruise's "Into the Night". The song, like the others on Cruise's Floating Into the Night CD, is written by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.

The other day I was listening to the album on my iPod. I hadn't heard it in years and had forgotten how good it was. But the song "Into the Night", particularly its opening words, not sung but spoken by Cruise - "Now it's dark" - clicked with me and with the scene I'm writing for one of my characters. The music has a feeling of eeriness and isolation that's sad and beautiful at the same time. What I liked most was the ambiguity of the phrase "now it's dark" (it's also spoken several times by Dennis Hopper's character in Lynch's film Blue Velvet). It's almost Zen in its simplicity and can mean so many things. 

That's what writing's all about - not just finding inspiration in unlikely places, but recognizing inspiration when it strikes. Don't question it, just run with it. 

Books into Celluloid: A Christmas Carol

My "Books into Celluloid" column is up at BookBalloon, this time taking on A Christmas Carol. 

Happy 2009

Hope everyone had a safe and pleasant New Year's.

I've never been keen on New Year's Eve - I'm not much of a partier and less of a drinker. This last New Year's I was in bed by 10:30 and the most excitement of the evening was me doing a coffee spit-take while watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on Parts: The Clonus Horror. Wheee. 

Personally I'd like to abolish New Year's altogether and reinstate the 12 days of Christmas - nothing but feasting and presents from Christmas Day until Epiphany. It's not like any of us get anything done during that time anyway. 

But as it stands, New Year's really is just a signal to us that the holiday time is over. So let me assess what the New Year holiday means to me.

Return to day job: Ugh.

Return to eating sensibly: Bleagh.

Get back on the exercycle: Meh. (I'm actually OK with this, seeing as how I was getting results shortly before Thanksgiving, but said results are gone now thanks to the holidays AKA the month of slothfulness and gluttony.)

Get back to regular writing schedule: YES YES YES!! Now this I like. And I'm very proud that I'm 27,000 words into the project I wasn't even due to start until after the holidays. My muse cracks a whip, she does.

2008 in review - what I read

2008 is drawing to a close, and as is traditional it's a very dull New Year's Eve here, with the big festivities consisting of putting a dent in all the Christmas cookies and candy, and watching an episode or two of Mystery Science Theater 3000. 

However, in keeping with the year-end mindset, here's the list of books I read this year:

Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films - Joseph Lanza

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

The Shipping News - Annie Proulx *

Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham *

The Terror - Dan Simmons

Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

Courtesan - Diane Haeger **

Passion - Judith Morgan **

In the Time of the Butterflies - Julia Alvarez

Rogue Male - Geoffrey Household

Marathon Man - William Goldman

Duma Key - Stephen King

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett

Stick - Elmore Leonard **

The Thrall's Tale - Judith Lindbergh **

The Stand - Stephen King *

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity - David Lynch

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - J. K. Rowling *

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J. K. Rowling *

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling *

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway *

Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett

A Tan and Sandy Silence - John D. MacDonald

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J. K. Rowling *

A Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin *

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J. K. Rowling *

A Clash of Kings - George R. R. Martin *

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling *

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J. K. Rowling

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins **

A Storm of Swords - George R. R. Martin *

A Feast for Crows - George R. R. Martin

Shatterday - Harlan Ellison

Talk Talk - T. C. Boyle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

Wideacre - Philippa Gregory **

The Truth - Terry Pratchett

Michael Tolliver Lives - Armistead Maupin

The Preservationist - David Maine *

Loving Frank - Nancy Horan **

Clandestine - James Ellroy

The Nature of Monsters - Clare Clark

The Falls - Joyce Carol Oates

The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett

Sick Puppy - Carl Hiaasen

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury *

The Tea Rose - Jennifer Donnelly *

The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber *

The Road - Cormac McCarthy 

Zombies of the Gene Pool - Sharyn McCrumb **

Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes **

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry *

A Stir of Echoes - Richard Matheson

* = re-read

** = unfinished

58 titles for the year, which isn't nearly as impressive as it seems. Lots of re-reads this year, mostly because I was heavily occupied with writing my mystery MS. I have a harder time explaining the number of books that, for whatever reason (failed to click, I was distracted by something shiny) didn't work for me and were unfinished.

Overall I'm pleased with what I read. Terry Pratchett's Discworld books continue to be a joy. Duma Key was a fine return to form for Stephen King. Phallic Frenzy and Catching the Big Fish were intriguing peeks into the minds of two of my favorite movie directors. The Harry Potter and Song of Ice and Fire series hold up to being re-read. And there were plenty of new discoveries: The Terror, The Road, A Stir of Echoes, The Falls, The Nature of Monsters, and The Pillars of the Earth. 

I'm hoping for 2009 to make more of a dent in the To-Be-Read shelves, which are ridiculously full even by my standards. So far the first book to be finished in 2009 is Anne Enright's The Gathering - so far I like it but I'm not entirely sure I like where it's heading. Time will tell.

Review: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

My review of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is now up over at Horrorview.com. Go check it out if you're so inclined.

Gift cards are my friend

Yesterday I took the gift cards I'd received for Christmas to the Barnes and Noble, and came home with:

Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson (just started reading this and it's very creepy!)

Candy by Luke Davies

Claudius the God by Robert Graves

Young Master got a couple more Star Wars books and Mr. Cozy picked up two more of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander books. So we're all quite happy.

God bless us every one!

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate).

Had some friends over for a feast including a roast with a garlic-herb crust, potatoes gratin savoyard, spinach salad with roasted garlic and bacon dressing, creamed corn, Yorkshire pudding with sage and bacon, and for dessert a red velvet cake. Tres yummy. Oh, and assorted beverages including Framboise raspberry beer. I'd made all of this before save for the Yorkshire pudding, which was quite nice comfort food. 

For some reason I received only one book this year, Alison Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Looking forward to that. I did also get $40 in Barnes and Noble gift cards so I'll certainly put those to good use. (Post-holiday sales, here I come!)

Young Master got quite a good haul of books, including the pop-up edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and a nice hardcover edition of Charlotte's Web. However, he's most excited about some young-adult Star Wars chapter books that were in his stocking. I will be happy when he can read these on his own as they are not my favorite to read to him. He also got The Mouse and the Motorcycle, which is an old favorite of mine.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!