Buddha Cat

I have Marie's installment of the round story here in front of me, and I am about to read it. Of the all of us, she seemed the most apprehensive to add to our little binge of a crazy-ride. But several days before our last Sunday meeting, she e-mailed me out of whatever blue area she was in just to tell me she had seven pages of it written. So yeah, here goes. Page one...

Ooh...

Hee. Cool. Whiff...

Ha. Siegey cat turds. Storm the manor!

Egads! She spelled Aston Martin correctly! I think it should be el Scottish way. Hush from thee, John! Thine is a whiny whine! Keep it lowly!

Ho. Deserter Greyling...

Ah. Fixed the Scottish spelling. Good.

I say, English slang terms. Gracious sakes...

Omuhgawd! Meddling Buddha Cat!

Good old Digby. Gotta love the guy...

Goodness me; Buddha irony!

Heh. Naïve Hannah...

WHOA! And WOW, I feel impelled to add! Drama! Suspense! And a freaking awesome twisty, screechy, huge whacking left turn at the end.

The gods of literature be with you, Bob.

Oy vey. I love the possibilities of tomorrow.

So we've gone eight chapters. And I'm not sure, but I think it's just about night time.

Marie did a good job, folks.

There...finished

I have just finished my foray into new and untested grounds. Now they are less new, and need beta-testing. I don't think I'll make a habit of this thingy--sort of unsettling. And now I'm going to go eat lunch.

The King of Cowboy Boots

WM excerpt:

"Heads I win. Tails I win too," said Ashley Ekuban.

---------

The Writing Marathon wasn't a creatively unproductive experience for me. The people, the places, quite encouraging; and I thought a lot, and I planned a lot. But I'm mostly in the middle of things right now, and I didn't do much writing on the day.

I like that first line, though. Heads I win, tails I win too.... From that sentence, from thinking about it, and making that name--Ekuban, Ashley...shaken, not stirred--I have a character, and I have a first scene.

Ashley Ekuban is going to be a freaking awesome dude. I've always loved cowboys. I've told people before that I wasn't one of these kids that wanted to be a cop, not really, or a fireman, or an astronaut. And I never wanted to grow up and be a cowboy. I sort of just wanted to be a cowboy.

Ekuban...

That's da Motto

"[G]et out of the way! I have a high dive and a teaspoon of fantastical idealism, and I know what to do with them."--Me

I would just like to say, that makes me feel accomplished. I think I have a motto now.

Sweepy Thingy

Remember a few days ago when I wrote that middle length blog which said, in a lot of words, almost nothing? Well, this is sort of a lithuanian continuation of that.

"Your setting and beckgrounds veritably suck!"--Practically everyone.

I think a lot about smoothness. I don't know how successful my powers of written smoothness are, but I think about structures which are more smooth than others. A lot of the time, when I stand up from writing, it's because I've got to a somewhat transitional point, and I need to go think about it for a while. Like in this one super-secret story I'm writing in the genre I've never tried before. I've gotten two thirds of the way in, and written a conversation, in which the main character made an important decision. And, at the end of the conversation, the main character must walk away. The way that this away-walking will be depicted will determine a lot of the mood that arises from the important decision that the main character has just made. I can make it sound final and grim, or triumphant and justifyably angry, or obnoxious and a lost cause, depending on the language. In movies, this is the point when there's no more talking for a bit, and just music, and the music dictates how the audience feels. Because I writeth, there's no music to put in.

I'm thinking this way: near the beginning, I described the surroundings. A third of the way in I did again after things changed. So I think I drop out this description of walking away--because all the ways I can think to do it sound lame and unaffecting--and describe the surroundings again. In a big, sweepy, overview way, so it's different than the last one. I've been pushing myself to do this whole surroundings description thingy because I've tended to leave setting out.

Yep. I never thought, before I wrote a lot, that so much technical thinking could go into arranging books. They always read like they'd just been sort of written out pell-nilly. Now I like the technicallity of arrangement.

And their coming up to the starting gate...

"I shall now begin this novel. It shall have no prequel, and no sequel, and shall be independent of any other saga. And I shall call it 'Unbeknownst to most people'."--Me.

I don't start a lot of novels. I've just realized this. The first thing I ever started was a novel about Jedi, but I meant it as the beginning of a series. And after that everything was practice while I worked out what exactly it meant to put words together and form ideas and communicated thoughts and tell stories. I wrote beginnings and I had no plan where they were going, and I didn't really think of them too seriously as having a point. I made characters, I made scenarios, Jedi fell to the wayside, and I mostly thought about magic. And then I had a breakthrough--a really "ah-hah" moment, which sent me into a run around, snapping of fingers, unable to stay still, style of minor adrenaline rush.

Fantasy has always been one of my favorite style of story. And, rather intuitively, I wrote a lot of fantasy. Independent fantasy thoughts--no characters, no places, in common. But something they had in common was magic. Or, more accurately, a lack of knowing how magic worked. There was a piece here, an attempt at explaination in that bit with the lost king, some ethereality in the outline about the blind hunter, and a lot of ambience. But no real understanding. A good third of everything I wrote for a few years had this similar ambience, and this similar question, "Magic? Egads!"

There was a story of a lost king, who was thrown from the womb of his mother in the fantastical and magical world, and swapped with a child of Earth. And then, when he came of age, he made his way back, to his throne in the wake of several great heroes.

That was the "ah-hah" moment. I had already written about several great heroes in quests before a lost king. Well, one; and a couple other characters fit the mould with perfect continuance. This put five stories all together all at once, and after that I found a few more, and some more. Pretty soon, a third of everything I'd written for years had become a purposed style of monster saga, far to big to have anything much done with it yet. But I began defining the magic by leaps and bounds. And I continued adding to it, till this past year when I got the critiques for Shivers, and finished answering the question, "Magic? Egads!"

So in one fantasy universe, I know how magic works. I have thought of it, and it makes sense to me, and it pleases me.

From that "ah-hah" moment, I pretty much had two projects: the fantasy saga, and my sci-fi saga. I didn't really have them set up in my head as series, but more as universes from which to fish out various stories to tell. In my sci-fi universe at least I've discovered one series that's just a pretty straight forward point A to point W piece.

But just recently, I've realized to myself that I've never really put forward in my mind a novel, which I mean to be entirely self-contained.

I think it's time, though.

Now I must relearn starting.

I have a first chapter, I have a situation and characters which intrique me. To work!

Le SHRIEK!

I am setting out on something the whither of which I have never set out upon before. It is a particular moody something, with moods, and somethings. And shalt, if successful, be the first enterprise of its kind the whither of which I have ever set out upon. And if unsuccessful shalt be acredited to Ted. Ted is a dunce. I have just made him up. He has no girl, and does not want one.

That which I am doing requires talents which I don't know if I have them. If I do, I shall utilize them. When I utilize these talents, I hope to accomplish something the whither of which is impressive; that is to say, compels impression. More impressive than that which Ted sets out to do. Ted seeks lunch meats. When I seek lunch meats, they are not spam.

Spam is useful for feeding the troops. Who march on each other's stomachs. That's why many of our troops are so good at digging foxholes.

So wish me luck. When I have finished what I set out to do, I will be done with it, and you all may find fortunes in oreos.

And this all makes sense to you. *Jedi hand wavey thing.*

Character Design Complex

"What's your favorite type of character?

• Perfectly wholesome and good
• Mostly good, but flawed
• Ambiguous
• Mostly bad, but potentially redeemable
• Consumately evil"

--the poll on Ali's blog.

One of my favorite characters ever is the Joker, from batman--almost any iteration of him. The Joker has no redeeming qualities. He is not a good guy. But I don't know if you'd call him quite consumately evil either. Probably, if you wanted to describe him in five words or less, consumately and evil could be two of the five words. Easily so. But so could the words "funny" and "insane." Insane is different.

Another of my favorite characters is Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the starship Enterprise. A complicated, well rounded character. And he is essentially perfectly wholesome and good. But not really, because his fundemental beliefs are imperfect. Those beliefs he will follow almost without deviation, but by virtue of their being imperfect, he has made wrong decisions. Furthermore, he has flaws: he tends to be grumpy, among other things. So I would put him in this scale of five character types someplace between, "perfectly wholesome and good" and "mostly good, but flawed."

Another great character is Batman himself, in his current state. Batman began as the world's second biggest boyscout--right after Superman--sometime in the thirties or forties of last century. And now, after decades of evolution, he's a dark, rough around the edges, generally scary, bad cop style of guy, who you know for damn certain you don't want as an enemy. A guy with questionable tactics, who intentionally uses fear to his advantage. But he won't kill. He will not kill. No matter how much people label him as bad guy, no matter how many terror tactics he adopts from his enemies, no matter how genuinely unpleasant a person he is, he's a good guy. You couldn't label him ambiguous, but I wouldn't call him, just as a bystander, a mostly good guy, but with flaws. I would probably call him a bad guy, to look at him, and consumately evil if I were impressionable and believed things that the Gotham media said about him. Batman is almost invariably wanted by the Gotham police.

When I create characters, I start with a voice, with a posture, and with facial expressions. Everything else--morallity, history--comes later. So far, most of my characters seem to be pretty ambiguous, at least superficially. People themselves are ambiguous. Mostly folk don't know enough to always make the right decision or to always make the wrong decision. They do their best or do their worst, and how much they know and how many people are involved determine how much good or evil their actions end up bringing about.

So many people are doing right in their own eyes, that a scale like that is pretty difficult to determine for your characters as well. I'm writing this series of stories right now almost exclusively from the perspectives of the people who would be termed mostly simply "the bad guys". But I find myself sympathizing with them a great deal. They don't know they're the bad guys. They're doing their jobs as well as they can. In their eyes, those who would be termed most simply "the good guys" are terrorists and criminals, living on the fringes of society and attacking the sanctity of the state.

I find that my favorite characters to watch on TV and in movies are the mostly bad, but potentially redeemable--Riddick, in Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, and Darth Vader, and Jack Sparrow--and I love to read about the utterly ambiguous ones. In reading you can see so much more of the thinking, and seeing the thinking of those who you cannot predict just fascinates me. But when I write, I find myself most fascinated most quickly with the perfectly wholesome and good characters who I set in really crapshoot situations: places where everything conpireth against them. It's just occurred to me that you put a perfectly wholesome and good character in a situation like that, there's the chance of their slip-sliding the slippy-slidey path to evil. Or at least ambiguousness. That would be character development.

Things you want to hear from your dentist

Boring. You are a thoroughly unexciting patient.

The Secret of Life

"Studies have shown that your average american spends forty minutes a day thinking about cookies."--David Letterman

I have discovered the secret of life. But I'm not telling anyone what it is--it doesn't have...very much to do with cookies. I am living proof that to know it is to be insane.

So try and figure it out, but do so at your own risk.

Don't come crying to me later on, when you have figured it out, either. I warned you. Don't say I didn't.

Nay--much happier to simply mozy along in a happy-go-lucky sort of way. Lackadaisical. Devil may care.