Angst, Semicolon, and All

The "discovery draft"--which I'm calling the White Draft because of all the white noise in the storyline (and because it sounds cool)--yielded a number of issues that I wrote about a couple of days ago here.  Today I'm starting the new outline and synopsis.  Probably the biggest change from the White Draft is the shift to first person viewpoint.  I think this is critical as a way of getting closer to the world and really seeing it through the eyes of the protagonist.  To be sure, third person close could work too, but for this I'm trying to channel Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and Raymond Chandler's Marlowe books.  In all of these the distinctive character voice and commentary open a clear window on the respective worlds, punching up the "eyewitness" aspect to the story.

Plus, I'm comfortable writing in first person.  The commentary in particular offers certain advantages in hitting the tone I'm looking for.  At this point, my instincts want the rewrite to assume a close-in camera view.  So done and done.

I suspect the bulk of my prep time this week will be spent clarifying my plot structure and making sure I don't leave any loose ends, as I did in the discovery draft.  One of the big needs-improvement points in the White Draft is that the unique characteristics of the world played zero role in the story other than as scenery.  In other words, this story could have played out as it was in any generic dystopian or even space opera future.  That needs to be fixed, and I think doing so should be pretty easy.  This world features a huge amount of environmental flux, which makes a classic source of opposition or complication for characters.

One thing I was pretty happy with in the end phase of the White Draft was when I beat up my main character.  Even superhuman protags find the going tough after a couple of serious gunshot wounds.  One of the challenges in this novel has been to find ways to hamper the mutant characters.  In the course of the White Draft, I came up with a lot of ways to do so, but implemented them in a more haphazard fashion than I'd like.  In the rewrite, I want to communicate a clearer sense of the hero's limits to the reader.

According to Glenn Greenwald, Fox is broadcasting a show with retired military and CIA guys wargaming the uprise of militias to overthrow the tyrannical Obama regime.  I mean, come on.  As Greenwald concludes:

So I've been out of journal circulation for awhile, working on the draft of a tie-in novel for Blueshift, a videogame in production at Seed Studio out in Taipei.  I'm happy to say I just finished it at 97,800 words.

This project has been a considerable challenge for me, as I'd only written a couple of novel drafts previously.  Those were good efforts, but compared to this one, they were much, much simpler.  Writing for someone else for real...is different.  I'd really struggled, fell far behind my schedule, and finally pulled off a decent first draft with a final push of some 30,000 words in about a week.  I'd concluded as I hit the last 25% of the book, that I had taken a wrong turn on structure back in the first 20% and that my struggles were in part due to a lack of awareness of novel meta-structure (e.g., mid-point, set-pieces, etc.).  Put another way, my outline was plot heavy in terms of sequence of events, but the finished work feels (to me) sort of slammed together.  It's a great world, a fun property, but I just wrote what amounts to a discovery draft.

I learned a hell of a lot in the process.  For instance, I can reliably produce about 4,000 good words in a day, but going over that amount risks a sharp decline in quality.  My last day I laid down 8,500 words of new text, and to my great luck, there's some good stuff in there.  Scaling back to a rough target of 3k per day seems more reasonable.  Also, I discovered that 90,000 words sounds like a lot, but when you split that among four major viewpoint characters, it's less than you might think.  The story seems to need to be a lot tighter with more viewpoints.  At this time, I don't have the skill to juggle all of them.

Now comes the rewrite.  I think it's going to be almost a complete retake, collapsing to one POV, maybe even going to first person.  I'll see what I can salvage from the first draft, but there's a lot of structure and loose ends to tie up.  I need to pay a lot more attention on this draft to a clear outline, but not one that locks me in too far.  My first outline went chapter by chapter, and I veered off the rails at about 20k words in and never really made it back.  The crafting process has to be a lot more intentional about structure.

On the other hand, I hit my groove (finally) in the last week, and am looking forward to a much swifter and more confident rewrite.  Jay Lake once told me the way to learn how to write a novel is:  "Write a novel.  Put it aside.  Write another one.  Put it aside.  Now write a third one.  By this time, you'll start to know what you're doing."  If I call the first two novels I've drafted "novels" (which would be a generous interpretation, honestly), then maybe I'm starting to know what I'm doing.  I hope so, because reading other novels lately, I've been struck by this wave of "WTF?  I can never produce something this cool."  Richard Morgan, I'm looking at you.

By the time I got done with my draft, I was able to look at the same novels and think, "Yeah, OK.  I'm on my way."  Cool stuff.

Well, this is depressing.

And in counterpoint, an article in the U. of Oregon student newspaper offers a slew of right-wing talking points slamming the notion that climate change could be man-made.

Today's the day.  As I drove the kidlets to school and pre-school this morning, I let them know people were voting in the new president today.  Senior moppet replied, "Wow" in a hushed voice.

I should confess that after my angry note to Senator Obama about his FISA vote, I had a change of heart.  Two words: Sarah Palin.

I was always going to vote for Obama.  Would drag myself over broken glass to vote Democratic this year.  That hadn't changed, but I started contributing directly to his campaign again instead of to various third-party groups after McCain chose Palin.  Why?

Short answer: Palin is an ignorant wingnut.

Longer version:  Palin is a culture warrior in the lowest Rovian sense, one who peddles hate and intolerance and division.  She's an authoritarian religious zealot, a hypocrite who inveighs against behavior she freely indulges in (earmarks, state subsidizing of her living at home, family travel on the taxpayer's tab).  She is willing to use her office to settle personal scores.  She is more concerned about subordinates' personal loyalty to her than about their competence and merit.  She's a liar who can't string a coherent sentence together on the fly.  She carries herself with a hearty ignorance about policy and our Constitution along with a general lack of intellectual curiosity that masquerades as folksiness.  She is wholly unqualified to serve as President.  Her views echo those of an extremist margin of American citizens.

The fact that McCain chose her speaks to his own judgment in the worst possible way.  In June, he told an interviewer that the most important quality of a vice-president is for that person to be able to step up and assume the presidency.  By choosing Palin, he shot his argument against Obama's experience right through the braincase.

There are a a lot of other reasons to reject McCain at the voting booth this year, and a lot of great reasons to vote for Obama and Biden.  But if you were to condense the decision to a single point of data as a tipping point, Palin would be it.

I'm off to do phonebanking for Obama.  VOTE!
 

www.youtube.com/watch

Enough said.

Shimmer notified me they're buying my story "The Jackdaw's Wife" for their upcoming Clockwork Jungle issue, out early next year.  Steampunk fable, anyone?

Shimmer is a fantastic magazine.  I'd picked up some of the back issues at World Fantasy last year.  I'm psyched to be a part of it.

Check this for a little Friday night reading to ease you into your weekend with a chuckle.  Once you're there, scroll down to find The Beeg List of McSame's flip-flops.

Dear Senator Obama,

I am deeply, deeply disappointed in your caving to the Bush administration on the FISA bill, thereby permitting years of lawlessness to go without consequence to the lawbreakers and putting a seal of endorsement on warrantless surveillance by the president that eclipses in scale and time any of the similar trespasses committed by the Nixon administration.  Instead of using your position and pulpit to protect the 4th Amendment and defend the rule of law, Senator Obama, you turned out to be all talk, no action.

Unlike Senator Clinton, ironically enough.  She voted against passing the president's FISA bill.

Rather than a mere policy disagreement, I believe this vote and this issue go to fundamental principles of governance and accountability in a democracy.  Further, and just as troubling, your about-face on this position from what you had articulated during the primary campaign is equally discouraging, as it indicates that this candidate is willing to sacrifice core principles when convenient.  There's always a fine line of reason that accompanies any compromise, and I understand that compromise is frequently how one gets things done in a democratic society.  But there should be limits to what one is willing to give up.  One hopes, for example, that you would not vote for a bill authorizing torture, a policy unfortunately too far from the fantastic under our current president.

I no longer feel certain of you, of who you are and what you really stand for.  By tacking so aggressively to the center, you are once again--in the tradition of prior Democratic candidates, moving away from any real promise of change.  Contrast the tone of today's post with where I was a little over a month ago.

As a result of your vote on FISA, my enthusiasm for you and your promise of change has been badly tarnished.  The only course I feel I can take at this point to emphasize my concern is this: I will no longer contribute to the Obama campaign, but will focus my energies and financial wherewithal toward electing other progressive candidates.  I voted for you in May, but if the Oregon primary were happening today, I would  cast my vote for Senator Clinton instead.

You remain a far, far better candidate than John McCain, but significantly less so than before your FISA vote.  Once again, it appears we are held hostage to vote for the lesser evil, and that is a bitter thing to taste...again.

Best,

Blake Hutchins

I've been feeling a rant coming on in light of Republicans yammering about the purity and virtues of the free market.  Honestly, they come to the defense of the market faster than they do democracy.  Not really surprising, given their classist, hierarchical set of values, but let me not digress.

Let's get this out of the way: the "free" market is generally a very efficient means of distributing goods and services between fluctuating levels of supply and demand, an automatic mechanism mediating an extraordinarily complex system of varying inputs, actions, and reactions.  It is not, however, "moral."  Put another way, it is outcome-neutral so long as profit is being made somewhere.  Another word for it is "amoral."

It may be true that some form of free market is a necessary precondition for a functioning democracy.  The alternative--a centralized market--would require a level of government control over citizens that would be antithetical to a democratic society.  However, that condition, even if true, does not in itself make the free market "moral."  The political equivalent of the free market may well be anarchy.  Or perhaps communisim in the utopian form envisioned by Marx.

By itself, the unregulated free market supported (and still produces) centuries of slavery, genocide, child labor, pornography, child pornography, contaminated food, contaminated water, contaminated air, etc.  To be sure, the feudal economy brought us those as well.  But capitalism hasn't changed them.  What changed them was government action, government regulation, government leadership.  Democratic governments, for the most part.

I'm freelancing on a very fun videogame project, writing dialogue and corralling the other story stuff.  All I can say is that Excel is your friend.  I'm in the midst of constructing a huge Excel sheet for tracking scenes and dialogue, very similar to the ones I used on previous projects.  Each of these monster sheets is different.  You can borrow techniques, but each project tends to be different enough that it becomes easier to build it from scratch rather than try to use a template.  That's my experience, anyway.

The very first time I worked on a project with this much voice, I used Word, and let me tell you, that was Purgatory in a box.  Since then, I have become an Excel devotee for this kind of activity.  Paired with Scrivener for composing and managing the actual scripts, the organization for this project is going smooth as silk.  It appears I may have to pick up Final Draft, though.  The ability to produce character-specific word count at the touch of a button is a feature my clients would really appreciate.  I imagine it's much easier to negotiate with voice talent when you have exact figures on line frequency and density per actor.

Since I posted my digital preferences yesterday, it seemed appropriate to add the dead tree versions of stuff I really dig.

Planetary:  Warren Ellis mixes the X-Files with a retrospective metacommentary on comic books, through the perspectives of a dysfunctional trio of metahumans discovering the "secret history of the world."  Where else can the Fantastic Four be portrayed as the most chilling conspiracy of villains evar?  Hint:  The Reed Richards analog got his start in the post-WW2 Nazi scientist assisted rocketry program....  The writing is sharp, the art excellent, and the concepts often mind-blowing (from a comics standpoint).  An example of the deconstructionist approach can be seen in the covers, which vary the banner and art style each issue, with some being art deco, others pure pulp, noir, or whatever.  Excellent, excellent stuff.  Don't miss the annual special wherein the characters encounter all the different versions of the Batman, from the Adam West incarnation to the huge, grim Frank Miller take.  Hilarious and fascinating.

Nextwave:  Another Warren Ellis title, this one diametrically opposed to Planetary, though oddly attempting a similar kind of metacommentary on comic books.  Where Planetary looked at genres and heroes from both Marvel and DC, often exposing the creepy themes and assumptions beneath the concepts (again, see "The Four"), Nextwave offered 

Had a great time at JayCon VII this weekend.  Nice to see Jay up and around.  I got a chance to exercise my pipes with a couple of stanzas of spontaneous song competition.  Nobody died, nobody went deaf, so it's all good.  My friend Gra rode up and back with me, which was really fun.  We caught up and chatted about all sorts of geekery.  The four-hour round trip just whizzed by.

This morning, I shot him a list of the webcomics I follow, and thought I might as well share.

Crimson Dark (the Firefly-clone):  Snappy, Whedon-esque dialogue and dysfunctional crew.  CG with a sort of cell-shadish overlay.  Mostly M and F posting, though it's erratic.

PVP (humor, gaming & comic focused):  Nice mix of geek humor, soap opera.  M-F regular schedule.  PG to PG-13 for occasional strong language, sexual innuendo.

The Dreamland Chronicles (fantasy):  Serviceable plot, if generic.  Main character a bit on the generic/bland side, but is growing over the course of the story.  Plastic-y CG art, not bad.  Cartoony style.  Probably G or PG rated.  The creator posts as regularly as the tide, M-F.

Atland (WRONG fantasy, just wrong...):    Oy.  :-)  I don't even go this far (mostly) in my stuff, though the crude humor is definitely up my alley.  This is R-rated humor, folks.  Not office-safe.

Cool Cat Studio (contemporary soap opera with fantastic elements, explicit sexual scenes in later material):  The later art is MUCH better than the early stuff FWIW.  The plot is...meh, but this one's really all about the relationships and who sleeps with whom.  That part's done pretty well.  Mostly PG with spikes into R for explicit sexual content.

Penny & Aggie (high school soap opera):  By the same people who do Cool Cat Studio.  This is teen angst stuff, but done well from a relationships standpoint.  The focus is on rival social factions in a high school arena.  PG to PG 13, mostly.  Some sex, though not as in-your-face as Cool Cat's.

Sinfest (just...um...Sinfest):  Shotgun blend of religious satire, geek humor, hip-hop and anime sensibilities.  The subtext for this strip ought to be "Nothing is sacred, bitch!"  Varies from G to R rating, depending on the creator's whim du jour.  No explicit sex, but plenty of strong language.

Started this post back on May 1 and mothballed it for reasons related entirely to my busy schedule.

It's Beltane again, the pagan holiday celebrating life, the universe, and everything.  I've always enjoyed having my birthday in the spring when the world is coming back to life.  And so...hey, the ol' bod turns 45 next week.  Whooo...feels like a noteworthy milestone.  Don't get me wrong.  I feel great, I'm active and healthy as a horse, but I'm a year away from being as old as my father was when he died, which feels oddly unsettling.  I wonder if I'll eventually envision my father as a younger man, or whether I'll always see him through the eyes of a child.  Now that I have my own children, it's like being on the other side of a fence.  They're still young enough to see me as mostly infallible, whereas I often feel like I'm tap dancing and improvising and creating material for a future therapist to decipher.

Observation number 2.  I'm likely well past the halfway mark for the lifespan meter.  It's true that at some point, one's perceptions of time tilt away from how long you've lived toward how much time you have left.  Elder moppet thinks I'm incredibly old.  I might as well be a thousand years old to her eight-year old mind.  I'll be 55 when she graduates high school.  Younger moppet periodically asks (out of the blue, 'cause I don't meander on about this stuff around the girls)  if I'm gonna die "a long time from now, wight?"

"Yeah, honey," I tell her, "a long time from now.  I'll be with you as long as I can."  Then I knock on wood.  Because as my friend jaylake knows, you never do know.

Happy Beltane!

The Junior Moppet commented that her butt was itching the other day whilst I extracted her from the car seat at her preschool center.  I, ever the etiquette-minded father, replied that "butt" was not the preferred term.

"Try 'bottom,' honey.  Or 'posterior.'  If you want to try French, you can say 'derriere.'  Can you say derriere?"

"Dewwe-aiwh."  Her eyes lit up.  "Daddy!  That's like diawwhea!"

"No, hon, it's, err, not like that at all.  You don't want to say that when you mean your bottom."

"But dey both come out of the bottom, Daddy!"

Ah.  Right.  That would be checkmate, Dad.  I cleared my throat.  "Let's get your shoes off, hon, OK?"

So yeah, Obama had the temerity to say something the national media flacks could bite into and distort, namely that people who have watched their job markets erode over the last twenty years without meaningful help from our government beyond further deregulation have trended toward voting on issues about which they can feel empowered.  The narrative bundled with the "reporting" on this so-called gaffe is that Obama engaged in effete, out-of-touch, white wine sipping liberal classism.  Never mind that Bill Clinton said virtually the same thing while running for president in 1991. 

And never mind that Obama is right.  Folks in the Rust Belt and across the country who have worked their tails off for decades have watched their jobs fly overseas while the federal government obsessed with lowering taxes for the wealthiest 5% in this country and dismantling public oversight of private industry.  It happened in Oregon while timber companies closed mills and shipped raw logs overseas or automated mills and cut workers, then blamed the environmental movement for the job losses.  I think people have a right to be pissed, and Obama hit a nerve.

The thing is, the polls appear to show that people are resonating with his message.

Once upon a time, when I was a kid, we lived in Sweden.  Every year on the Fourth of July, we'd go to the house of one of the American Embassy crowd for a barbecue and afternoon of summer fun.  That was the plan, anyway.  I never got past the split-level stairwell of our friends' house, because a little two-shelf bookshelf located there was packed with a treasure irresistable to a ten-year old boy geek.

Comics.

I spent those afternoons avidly reading these beat-up four-color comics,  At the end of the day, I'd be surprised and bummed that I missed the festivities, the food, and the fireworks.  But I came away with my brain packed full of Silver Age stories, especially stories about this hokey group called The Legion of Superheroes.  By "hokey," I mean...jeez.  Super-powered teens with names like "Shadow Lass," "Lightning Lad," "Cosmic Boy," "Bouncing Boy," "Saturn Girl," etc.  The comic co-starred Superboy and dealt with the Legion's adventures in a fantastically utopian pulp future full of finned rockets, rubber technology, betentacled monsters, and Jetsons-style architecture.  Everybody looked and talked alike, as clean-cut, kid-next-door WASPs, with the exceptions of a chubby guy called Bouncing Boy and an anti-social loner who took the name Timber Wolf (also remarkable for the departure from the otherwise omnipresent naming convention--I still wonder why he didn't end up as "Wolf Lad").

I loved them, cheese and all.  These were the Legion's early run, I later discovered, the group making its first appearance in 1958.  Apparently they're the longest or second-longest continually running super-group in comic history.

When I started taking the then-current run, I discovered the Legion had changed with the times.  By the early 70's, their not-quite-skintight 50's outfits had transformed into the usual spandex muscle-paint--except the women were now dressed like porn stars, which probably helped jolt me into puberty.  The stories had grown more complex, the tech a bit more believable, at least from the space opera standpoint.  

I'm working on the for-hire novel proposal I'm turning in next week.  While I'm at it, I'm exploring more of a software tool I picked up a year or so ago.  It's called Scrivener, a novel and screenplay writing app for the Mac.  You can get it here for a very reasonable price.

Scrivener has a number of interesting functions that make it my go-to noveling tool.  What I'm making most use of for the present project is the Outliner, but it offers neat features for ordering chapters, tracking chapter and section word count, research, and the like.  You can even tag scenes and chapters with keywords to let you run searches on your manuscript.  My historical fantasy novel is on Scrivener, and I've packed the research folder with photographs, geographical and historical information, and timelines.  I love having everything available on one screen.  The sexiest feature for me is the index card corkboard view, which lets you reorder pieces of your manuscript in easy drag-and-drop fashion.

I've considered using Celtx, mostly for the novelty value, but I think I'll keep that for the videogame project as its features seem more geared toward movie or theater production, which is more appropriate.  Of course, most of my project management work starts and ends with Excel, but Celtx provides a number of all-in-one features, including character or setting templates, storyboarding, production scheduling, and the like.

For some reason, I've always had an easier time working on other folks' IP than my own.  With my stuff, I tend to dig into the setting foundations and root around overmuch, trying to nail down enough to fit my personal vision of detailed assumptions and command of material.  I think that can be a trap.  While I hit my goal for NaNoWriMo last November, I wasted a lot of time second-guessing my foundational assumptions and rewriting.  I have concluded there's a world-building threshold where you need to stop the pre-production and segue into an exploration of the setting through writing.  You have to transition into emergent discovery of the world via the story.  Otherwise you run the risk of subordinating the story to the setting.

In other folks' IP, I don't question foundational assumptions.  I just take them for granted and write as cool a story as I can.  When I return to my two novel projects in the coming weeks, I'm going to try to write them as though they were someone else's world, just to see what kind of process emerges.

Barack Obama was in Eugene Friday night.  As the kidlets and wife were all struggling with colds, we didn't camp out to get in, but we caught his entire speech in the Pit at Mac Court on the news that night.  Guy's an incredible orator.  What struck me was not only how comfortable he looked, how relaxed, but his relationship with the audience.  As people cheered, he'd stop to say, "Yes, I love you too.  I love you too."  Even watching it on TV, I sensed a palpable difference between him and any other politician I've ever seen.  Yeah, you can draw the parallel with a rock star.  Sure.  But the connection was strong.  You want to believe in this man.  I surely do.

What he said resonated in substance as well.  One example: My wife's a teacher.  When he declared we needed to invest in teaching art and literature and not just teach to the test, so that we could give our children not just what they need to get jobs, but what they need to become good citizens, she pumped her fist and said, "Yeahhh!"

No candidacy is perfect, but I think we stand at a historic watershed, a unique chance to make a decisive choice about our collective future.  For the first time in a long time, I have the feeling we can make real change, that we can put a leader in place who will break the mold and help steer this country back to a progressive, humanist track, who will reinvigorate the notion of people working for the common good, not just for free market "enlightened" selfishness.  It will take a lot of work from all of us.  When I saw Jim Hightower speak a few years ago, he said every generation has its epic challenge, and that we should be joyful that we have this chance to fight to make a difference.  It's easy to be cynical.  And I'm the first to admit the Chimp's administration has made me so furious, it's hard not to let that rage seep into my political discourse.  Obama offers the high road, not with blinkers on a la Kerry, but a high road with a willingness to be sufficiently pugilistic when necessary.

No candidacy is perfect, but for the last seven-plus years, we've seen the disaster unfettered and unprincipled leadership brings.  It's past time to make a change.  I'm on the bus.

Like many people, I reacted to the news of Eliott Spitzer's downfall with shock and disappointment.  Here was a guy who appeared to have a rock-solid record as a strong progressive leader with a scrappy background as a prosecutor.  The first thing that went through my mind was, "What the hell?  How could he be so stupid?"

$80,000 worth of stupid, according to the reports.

My wife observed that the call girl in question earned more in three hours than she clears in a month.  A thousand dollars an hour is a pretty good rate, I must admit.

One of the fundamental attributes necessary for a democratic government is moral authority, wherein our elected officials provide leadership by example.  Spitzer, because of the inherent hypocrisy in engaging in the very acts he once so vigorously prosecuted, threw away his moral authority to lead, and threw it away on such a profound level that his continuing in office would have been unworkably disruptive (in no small part due to the endless shrieking of Republican harpies who seek to protect us from immoral leaders who do not belong to their own party).  The difference between what Spitzer stood for and his choices to hire prostitutes offers such a stark contrast that it puts him on an extraordinarily high level of scandal.  Cue critical mass of outrage.

I note that the calls for resignation of Larry Craig and David Vitter and even Mark Foley did not reach the frenzied pitch of those aimed at Spitzer this week.  Double standard, anyone?  Or maybe (since the Democrats seem to resign faster these days), Dems just hold themselves more accountable than the Republicans.  Hmmm.  Naah.

My second reaction to the news was, "Why so much effort on this sting?"  Given the very rare use of federal wiretaps in this sort of circumstance, the effort here seems...unusual.  I can't help but wonder whether politically motivated prosecution is in play, especially with the history of the current administration trying to push law enforcement pursuit of Democrats while shielding Republicans from the same standards of scrutiny.  Let's just say I view anything this administration does with the highest degree of skepticism.

Glenn Greenwald points out, quite elegantly, that how interesting it is that when two consenting adults engage in sex, but one of them pays, the act is shameful and wrong and illegal, but when two consenting adults have sex and both of them are paid, it's legal.  He does, of course, distinguish the circumstance of forced or coercive prostitution.