More detail! More words!

I am in the middle of what will amount to the thirdish and finalish draft of my novel, tentatively titled A Book of Ferryman's Heralds. What is most interesting to me about it, aside from how there seems somehow to be those weird "character" things and "story" things and even some "plot" things is that the third draft is already as long as the second draft. That would seem logical, except that the story is halfway as far in, and this draft has taken less than half the time to write. It's a fascinating thing to contemplate. While I feel that I haven't gotten as far, since the events I wrote today aren't even to the story's technical "midpoint"--an important storytelling term I learned recently--at the same time I feel like I've gotten much further. I think these are the reasons:

1) I'm using twice as many words. That doesn't mean I'm throwing in a lot of "gasps" and adjectives, which is what it could mean. What it means is that I'm taking my time to be thorough in describing things. I did not, as I usually do, rush through and assume that my brilliant images will communicate psychically, my concepts and designs will be clear even though there's no reason they should make sense. Rather I take my sweet time with all the little pieces and use sufficient words and time to describe how they all look, smell, sound, and fit together. Every moment can last a lifetime.

2) I'm giving my characters space to contemplate and to expand on their situations. In the past, I've always assumed that my characters would take care of themselves. I tended to write quite cinematically, just describing what it would look like people did and I'd assume that readers could keep up. That would work all right in the movie version when my characters are acted out as well as they are in my mind, with all the emotional states sort of dancing across their faces. My descriptive powers are not yet where they need to be to keep up with my imagined acting skills, however. And besides, I'm writing a mythologically inclined fantasy. Putting in poetic thought process lends itself to the storytelling.

3) I'm including damn subplots. I've always left subplots out of the novel proper, assuming that the hints and vagueness with which the main characters treated the subplots would be sufficient for the story. Subplots often feel less interesting to me than main plots. But when I started to explain the actions of my main characters to myself during my world-building kick recently I realized that the subplots I needed were really good and very interesting. In exploring my subplots I've managed to discover that my novel as it is can be a good conduit for me to expostulate and explore something I really like, which is various classical story structures. If I imagine character X as the main character, my novel is a classical tragedy--if character Y is the lead it becomes a stereotypical Hero's Journey with a personal touch--and the rest. I now enjoy subplots.

Those are the main reasons. I explain the doubling in words briefly as an increase in thoroughness.

Why I'm explaining: The way I see it, care and thorough treatment are often lacking in creative endeavours. Sometimes we meet writers with a proclivity toward intentional fantasy bloat, and we should not err in their direction. However, if you find that your attempts at novels often seem to stop on page twenty-four, and you don't know how the story goes from there, you may be leaving out half of what needs to be said. I suggest relishing the moments.

And some sweet tunes.

Page 2 - The Unfortunate Life of Frank Smith

Page 2 - The Unfortunate Life of Frank Smith

My friend's webcomic. She's called Abi. She's awesome.

And Gorillaz.

Why Kids Are Rude, the 21st Century by the Chili Peppers

I believe that it's a defensible statement to say that kids these days--meaning me especially--are more rude than kids ever have been. We conduct ourselves with the confidence of a people who live in an unshakable world. We might screw up our own lives, we seem to think, but that won't affect too much, so why worry about it? As a result we treat our elders with less awe than we ever have. Our elders are as they have always been better educated, more experienced, possessing greater qualifications. As in all ages before, the generations that precede the youth built the world as it is, its badness and all its greatness. As ever, our parents, teachers, grandparents, bosses, and all those old folks deserve our respect. Unlike ever before my generation acts per capita with less decorum than any other period. Refinement is falling away. We are rude kids.

It's a truth I think, if taken objectively. We are rude kids. As with many behaviors, something motivates our lack of refinement. There is a reason for how we seem to be so awfully ungrateful and inconsiderate. It's different, I have discovered from my research, than the motivation behind what they called the "Me" generation during the '70s. Hippies had a pretense of rebuilding what they saw as a broken system. It is the wont of every generation to rebuild the world as they see fit. Accepting this sociological fact simplifies things. In the '70s there was a mood of pacific revolution--all you knucking need is cucking love, let it be and all that jazz. The difference here between my generation and the flower power kiddos has everything to do with attitude. Gone seems to be all sense of amorphous "we need to do something!" Do what? we ask. "I don't know. Something!" That's gone.

Don't be growing some sense of hope that my generation has any idea what we're doing either. We have no idea. Almost less, maybe, because we're a bunch of coffee addicted sillies living a cushy life. We have a different idiom, though. The paradigm of amorphous passivity has been superceded by many different frames of thought and it has now taken a frame of situational skepticism. We are not a generation of doubters and we are not a generation of vaguely shifting take-what-we're-fed either. We've found some strange balance between the two. If given a proposition we almost always trust it and question it at the same time based on different circumstances, for instance what authority feeds us the information, what priod knowledge we have, our mood and the weather, if we're hungry and other physical factors, our upbringing. We might be a rude generation but in some ways we are more respectful than ever because we have actually learned from the past. We don't doubt everything, we don't hate everything, nor do we accept or love it all. Things, people, must prove themselves to us. Usually we will approach new situations without strong disposition. Maybe we'll be a little wary of things we think may go wrong or excited about things we've experienced that have gone right in the past. In general, though, we arrive and observe and wait for the situation to prove itself to us. That goes double for people. Sure we come across as rude. We're often neutral, waiting for newly met elders to invent themselves to us one way or the other. If you win our dismay then we will not feel it necessary to hide it. But if you win our respect we can be more loyal than the rising stars.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this and I think I'll write about them in a few days.

Tah.

Small-Time Fame, Fragmentation of Community, and the American Dream

In the 1950s, America went through an economic boom. That show Happy Days got it pretty close to right--ironically Happy Days was made twenty years after the Baby Boomer generation, in the seventies when everything about it was sarcastic and meant to justify discomania and to make America feel guilty about the Rolling Stones and doing drugs. In the fifties, a module of the ideal American family became created: two parents and one and a half kids. A stupid average, but that was the average. Suburbs started being built to support the average, McDonalds and the rest of the fast food industry went on a skyrocket trip, and America started to generate a particular image of "normal." You lived in a suburb with your mom and dad and your half a sibling, your dad went to work, your mom kept house, your half a sibling made do with one shoe, half a pair of pants, and a weird set of nicknames. You got a job by the time your were in high school and you started buying yourself cars and radios and records and clothes, and everything was happy days.

This model of "normal" endures in the American imagination, for some reason. A lot of people still live in suburbs, they go to Starbucks and shop at J.C. Penny's. They have a job when they're in high school and they start buying things for themselves as soon as they can. America is trying to be homogenized across the board. Whether you're in Chicago, Florida, freaking Denver, or Houston, you can still find those suburbs designed for one set of parents and their one and a half kids. These people expect that America is all suburbs. Suburbs hold a lot of America's population. One hot and steamy pile of happy to be normal.

All of this is made possible because of pop icons. Pop icons are only possible through mass media: TV and radio and internet make it so Californians and Dakotans and fucking Brits can have the same damn ideas about that Bieber kid and his ilk without ever trying very hard to discover what they actually like. Multi-national pop icons are not so because of talent but only because everyone knows them as such. They caught a marketing break. Good on to them.

Meanwhile there is a layer of fame below the international pop icon, probably six or seven steps down. This layer includes authors like Tim Powers and Diane Duane and David Brin and musicians like Coheed and Cambria and Cage the Elephant. At this level, the kids might have a fan base of several hundred thousand. These several hundred thousand are loyal as all hell, but scattered across the globe. So if you find that you're a huge fan of Coheed and Cambria, you might have a couple hundred Coheed and Cambria fans living within fifty miles of you but not many more. And you might not ever find many of them if you live in a reasonably large city. Additionally, this presents a marketing problem for Coheed and Cambria. Coheed and Cambria need to first market themselves to the masses in order to attract the few that really like them. That takes a lot of time, money, and energy. Hopefully the return on investment is worth it. In their case it seems to be.

This all makes me wonder about bipassing the attempt to draw a massive, multi-state/multi-national audience. I wonder why at least at first one might condense one's efforts. If, say, you live in Denver, as I do. The population of Denver is over six hundred thousand. That's just a bit less than the fan base of Coheed and Cambria--according to the facespace. I wonder how it would be if, rather than beginning by trying to appeal to the massive market of everyone, you tried appealing to the immediate market of your town and nearby towns. One of the things about marketing is that customers buy products from people they like. In my case, my product is my stories. If I'm going to sell my stories then they'll have to like me. I can't very easily nor quickly market myself to a massive audience. But I can more easily market myself to a local audience, an audience of six hundred thousand in Denver and more if I include the satellite states--which I will. Many of my favorite authors have quite small fan bases on the interwebs--less than ten thousand, by the study of a few moments. If I can get one in fifty people in Denver and the outlying areas to think I'm cool then I could be reckoned as successful as many of my role models.

I suppose that's a bit optimistic. Still, it makes me wonder. Conquering my hometown sounds much easier than attempting to conquer the world.

Which brings me back to my original thought: Homogenized America. See, the thing is about homogenizing anything is it makes everything the same. If everything is the same then how do you know what you like? It's all the same. So you don't know your neighbors because they're like you. Everyone wants to find what they like, but nobody can because there's just too damn much to sort through. So the pop icons become more famous because they've floated to the top so they can be found easily. Everyone knows of them, everyone likes them, so everyone feels as if they have this community because they can see that everyone likes what they like. The cycle continues as American homogenization continues.

The whole cycle makes originality very difficult. There may be a lot of people in the world who think that what you're creating is the cat's meow. Good luck finding them in the mass market. Unless--here's the clincher--you think about how big certain areas are, and, conversely, how they could still be manageable. If just the Denver and surrounding areas chunk is considered I could very possibly find a sizable amount of people interested in exactly the product I'm pushing, enough to make a scene.

This is exactly what the American Homogenization Comity--also known as the government--does not want you to figure out. What I could possibly be doing is setting out on the first steps of promoting local community. Le gasp!

'Tis a thought.

I'm not over!

Fish

In the name of efficiency, I'm shortening the damn word to "fish." So shut up.

"Fish" is when you get shit done fast without leaving shit out. (I'm listening to Keith Richards' autobiography read by Johnny Depp. Cope.) Ain't much needs be said about fish. Everyone's got their own idea about how to do it, but the damn word means doing shit fast without leaving shit out however the hell you do it. Weird part is when cats run around ignoring rules of fish for their own no doubt nefarious reasons. There's skeazeballs everywhere guilty of flagrant unfishincy--left-lane grannies, coffee shop nerve-wrecks, diner Sallies. In literature cats ignoring good fish spend their energies in fantasy, building worlds that ought to take care of themselves and explaining fascinating characters that capture the imagination and never do a damn thing till you've pissed off to watch some film or other. Fantasy bloat they call the act of spitting on good fish. Fucking annoying.

Whether I succeed or nay, my pledge to you my droogs, made with blood and piss and fuck all, is to make a hell of a charge at a smooth story. If it burns on reentry then it'll be a bright show.

"Immortality" by Seether Is a Cover

This is a skillful cover of "Immortality" by Pearl Jam. I like this song. I like the Pearl Jam version too. They're different but both good.

I'm featuring the Pearl Jam version in the sort of meditation soundtrack thingy to my novel. I'm not sure what purpose it will serve or how it will be executed but I'm compiling a soundtrack to my novel. I like music. It helps me think in pictures and I think that the poetry sometimes adds to the story. "Immortality" for instance is about the darker side of immortality, which is a major theme in my novel. I've decided to make Pearl Jam's "Immortality" the opening track of my novel's soundtrack--a decision I may rethink, but it's a good idea right now. This decision has led me to ask myself a few questions. First, is this too obvious a choice so that people will be tipped off about the whole rest of some of the more mysterious parts of the novel? Second, will anyone even notice ever? Third, does anyone ever think about this kind of stuff? I don't know.

Okay, yeah, go new year!

"Road Zombie" by Social Distortion