S. R. Wood

The Giant's Skull

2012-01-03T09:40:00.003-05:00

Last week I decided to burn some holiday calories with a bike ride into the mountains. So I bundled up in winter gear, packed map and snacks and extra clothes, and climbed up leafy trails, crunching through frozen mud, sliding across brown ice, crisping through snow patches.

Up and up, until the views expanded and I saw the world ringed with lines of blue mountains. Uphill and downhill and uphill and downhill. A few creek crossings, much bushwhacking through fallen trees and tangles of thorny brush, heated curses at the terrain, thorns, shoe soles caked in ice, my own lack of energy.

When I came out on top after a climb so steep I had to push my bike, I was rewarded with the long views I'd glimpsed through the trees earlier, except now the sun was out. Ridges of blue mountains marching west to the horizon, into West Virginia. And then I saw a gleam of white: the most distant and highest shape was a mountain covered in snow, no larger than a fingernail peeling but bright white against the blue sky. Like the skullcap of a giant three hundred miles distant, or maybe the Rocky Mountains.

Satisfied at at least this glimpse of winter, I chipped the ice off my shoes, clipped in, and started pedaling. Downhill at last.

And we roll on

2011-12-07T10:28:00.002-05:00

Where is all the writing? Thousands and thousands of words appearing not here in this neglected blog but on the creeping growth of my work-in-progress. I've always known that consistency and moderation are the keys to smart exercise, like marathon training. But it turns out the long slow burn -- for me, anyway -- is also the way to write a novel.

Actually, in this case, I am re-writing in a complicated and risky way that I hope will pan out. "Just wait until the re-read," I keep telling myself. You have to kill the doubts, because even though they may be justified, they will douse the creative spark.

I am unraveling the threads of the book and weaving in a new character, new perspective, additional thickness that should make it more real and more compelling. Many scenes are new; a few are rewritten from another point of view, which involves (I'm learning) more than a simple copy-and-paste of pronouns. Different characters describe things in different ways. They notice different things, use different vocabularies. They are different cameras through which to see the world.

Right now I'm rushing to get it all down in a way that makes rough sense. Later I'll shape it. Will it work? That's what I'm gambling on. If I didn't believe I wouldn't work at this solitary mind game.

Hellfire in blue and gold

2011-11-02T17:36:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time I wrote a book that featured a lean and rakish ship called the Hellfire. She was based on the nineteenth-century pilot schooners featured in Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail and, more recently, embodied by the Pride of Baltimore II, Lynx, and others.

Just look at that photo of Lynx in a thundering reach on their homepage!

I put a ship called Hellfire in the book because I always wanted to name a ship that, I've always loved the look of these old schooners, and because I needed a dangerous and unmistakable vessel.

So when I got a chance to join Steve Earley for a sail this past weekend, I bundled up against the cold. Just after dawn we tacked up and down along the Chestertown waterfront, where the tall ships had gathered for Downrigging Weekend.

Steve's boat Spartina is the same Pathfinder design I'm building, and it's always inspiring to see that familiar shape in a completed boat. And even better to sail in a fresh breeze! OK, we had to tuck in a reef. And by "we" I mean "Steve."

As a clear sunrise warmed the frosty air, we slipped past Pride II and I shot a stream of photos.

Inspiration for the Hellfire:

Take that, inertia

2011-10-24T08:53:00.002-04:00

Book revisions continue, but today I took the big step of leaping from reading and researching, jotting notes and thinking, to actually writing. Starting is always hard -- nearly paralyzing. I got over it by reasoning that it's going to be awful no matter what, so why waste time looking for the best way to start?

If you can't avoid crap, well, full speed ahead. Getting past that hurdle of my own expectations is like knocking the first shackle off my legs. Now I can get started. Is it bad? Yes, I hate it. Just as I expected, and just as it's been every other time.

Writing: the cure for hubris. But at least I started.

Limits

2011-10-13T17:22:00.006-04:00

Okay, I think I may be able to manage one posting per month. This even takes into account my boycotting of Facebook as just another time-suck. I mean it!

We all have limits. Sometimes those limits are physical, as I learned a few days ago after cleaning out the garage.

I have a large pile of scrap lumber, mostly plywood, leaning up against two 6x6 beams of oak that are probably 12 feet long. Why do I have these? No idea, but why would I get rid of such massive timbers?

When I moved all the scrap plywood out of the way, I saw that the previously covered side of the oak beams was crawling with a half-dozen cave crickets. After a soothing beverage to cool my screech-torn vocal cords, I returned to the garage to find all the crickets still in situ with one. Important. Addition.

A very large wolf spider had approached them.

TEE HEE HEE! I giggled, putting my hands to my mouth and getting very wide-eyed. TEE HEE HEE!

I watched the crickets stupidly and suicidally crawl in their disgusting way closer and closer to the waiting spider. TEE HEE HEE! I may have clapped my hands.

Closer and closer ... but the spider didn't move. I sprinted into the house for a camera, and when I returned I saw that the arachnid-hellbeast standoff had continued. So, moaning, I approached, camera in hand, to get a better look.

I have seen some beauteous and wonderful sights in my short life, but nothing as delightful as this: a cricket was hanging from the spider's jaws.

TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! TEE HEE HEE! I gamboled and capered about, pointing and gibbering like a chimp. The spider sat there, calmly draining her prey's liquefied innards through the fang holes in its spotted carapace.

I adjusted the light and snapped a few photos. Hooray for wolf spiders! HOORAY!

What about limits? The cricket discovered the limits of sharing a stack of wood with a wolf spider. Because once in a while your neighbor gets ... hungry.

I said, You can keep my things, they've come to take me home

2011-09-23T08:41:00.004-04:00

Well, well, well. Been a long time, what? After some disruptions with my day job and a change of seasons I have rediscovered this blog. Doors swing open that had been shut.

It's a rainy fall day, like someone is wringing a sponge out over the trees and lawns and puddled driveways. I can hear it ticking on the roof; the view outside is a clot of green leaves and mist.

I have coffee, a one-inch stack of revision notes, a second and completely different novel in progress, my favorite pen, a new desk lamp, a boat project in the garage, a bike in the shop, another bike in the garage, and list of things to do running the length of a legal pad.

In the past five weeks I have ridden over 200 miles of backcountry mountain bike trails; discovered an outstanding new beer; said goodbye to a young friend; attended two glorious weddings; considered new career paths; considered moving across the country; returned to boatbuilding; and rethought some of the fundamental structure and meaning of my book.

There is much to do!

When I Was Young

2011-08-03T12:31:00.002-04:00

When I was young, I didn't believe in the real world. Not really, anyway. The world where I got up and went to school and looked at cars and heard boring conversations about politics was, I was certain, a front for something deeper, richer, and much more wild.

If I could just break through!

There were signs everywhere, I told myself. The whispers of wind; a falling leaf arranged just so on the forest floor; a cat that looked at me a little too long. The constant belief that this world wasn't all there was kept me going through the mundanities and frustrations we all forget about as we grow up.

I didn't yearn for this other place to exist; I knew it did and I yearned to get there somehow. How? How? Through dreams? Hypnosis? Travel? Time travel? Astral projection? How do I break through?

And the saddest thing of all was when that started to fade and I grew up.

But even now I catch myself wondering: what if that tree bending in a storm is a signal; what if that dark little hollow in the forest is a doorway; what I touch this boulder and my hand presses on through?

It turns out I have found the way through, after all: what we call "fiction" is really just my way of communing with that Other Place. I close my eyes and imagine it, and then I write it down and try to bring back some of the wildness and strange beauty.

Because, to roughly quote Tennyson: All experience is an arch through which gleams the untravell'd world.

And another thing

2011-07-25T12:30:00.002-04:00

... Where was I? Ah, yes. Boatbuilding. Fools and optimists set schedules for building boats; realists know better. All summer long the boat skeleton swelters in the garage, swarmed with cave crickets and sawdust. I peek through the window and say goodbye every morning on my way to work, humidity fogging the trees and a chorus of late-summer cicadas already swelling the air.

But unless you measure progress by "thinking," there's been little progress.

This weekend I rode past a salt marsh, that almost electric jolt of green grass and blue water that always feel like coming home. The oily, musky, fecund stink of the mud, ospreys soaring, cattails drooping in the heat. How nice it will be to drift past those grass-whiskered shores someday.

(One learns that one does not plan to "sail" on the Chesapeake in July except by some divine intrusion on the natural order of things. It happens, but like miracles, it's best not to count on it.)

I rode past the lost ruins of a house that was built over 350 years ago, by a man who likely cursed the calms and reveled in the seasonal gales just as I do; who skated his vessel over oyster beds and sandbars; and who perhaps looked at the far grey line of the horizon and thought: there.

Lambert Wickes, born where I road, grew to be a naval captain of the very young United States of America. He harried British ships, carried Benjamin Franklin to France, and had all manner of heroic exploits before his vessel, the 16-gun Reprisal, was lost in an autumn storm off the Grand Banks.

Eastern Neck is silent now; but under the marshes and thick trees lie the remains of a that old house from so many years ago.

Clamps ahoy

2011-06-05T18:46:00.006-04:00

Clamping the port lower sheer stringer -- an eighteen-foot piece of floppy fir that curves in three dimensions (and some days, four) -- requires clamps. Lots and lots of clamps:

What you see here is:

The stringer itself, or its lower half at least, going diagonally across the shot. It fits into a notch in a frame.
The frame itself is braced and clamped to withstand the Herculean forces applied by my muscles and the stringer as I torque it into position.
Two pinch clamps holding cedar wedges in place. So I cut the notch too big and had to wedge it out. What?

Multiply this by a half-dozen frames or so, and it adds up to a lot of clamps.
What's neat about this stage of the build is that the shape of the boat -- a leaf, a cockle, the curve of a gull across the sky -- really starts to show itself. Squint if you can, and look past the clamps and bracing to see the edge of the boat, arcing up toward the bow.

And later, lo, the boatbuilder was tired and retired inside where the lion hath laid down with the lamb. For lo, he opened a beer and all was right with the world.

Glimpses

2011-06-03T13:51:00.002-04:00

I recently re-read Francisco Stork's excellent Marcello in the Real World. Even though I'd read it a year or two ago, and this time was reading for technique, like a surgeon watching an operation, I was still pulled into the story.

But even as I was tumbling and roiling along, I noticed something that I've never seen before: There is no wasted narrative.

This is an epiphany for me, as I tend to write circles around what I really want to say. And then, having said it, I write my circular way back out to the story. The result is a fatty first draft that always needs to be tightened.

At first I worried that readers wouldn't able to connect the dots. First a character is eating dinner and then he's doing dishes? What? How did he get there? So I diligently (and tediously) would narrate the whole thing. Bo-ring.

What Francisco Stork does reminds me of some study that proved how little of a word has to be there for us to recognize it. Or of those stories of B-17s that returned, critically damaged, to airfields in London, somehow able to limp home.

Marcello in the Real World has only the bare number of scenes to carry the story. I don't mean that it's sparse: it's anything but. No, I mean that the gaps between scenes -- so invisible when you're deep in the story -- are actually pretty big when you stop and analyze them.

The magic here is that the reader fills in those gaps without even noticing.

And what it means is that the amount of narration I thought was the absolute minimum ... can be even less. The result will be a tighter story that's not ruined by being over-told.

So now I ask myself: what is the absolute minimum I need to show in order to carry the story forward? It's less than I think.

Now I have a fly swatter. Ho ho ho.

2011-05-27T12:40:00.002-04:00

The trouble with hitting, or trying to hit, cave crickets with scraps of wood is that I get worried about banging up the boat. And if I end up damaging the boat while attempting to dissuade cave crickets from whatever it is that they do, my rage will be Biblical.

So I picked up a fly swatter. Fly swatters are kind of hard to find. Maybe the Internet has made them obsolete; for all I know there's some kind of e-swatter everybody's downloaded. But I was able to find an archaic "real" fly swatter.

I'm not sure it will be able to withstand the crispy, horned carapace of a cave cricket, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Except that, now that I've hung the fly swatter in the shop, no cave crickets have shown themselves. Which means that either I've found the right deterrent ... or they are planning something.

Meanwhile, Steve and Bruce, in Steve's boat (the same Pathfinder design I'm building), are rocketing across the Bay in Small Craft Warning conditions. Like I said to a friend once: Small Craft Warnings just mean there's finally going to be some good wind!

Port Sheer

2011-05-18T13:46:00.002-04:00

Lately I've been working on the long, gently curved piece of wood that forms the upper left-hand side of the boat. Ugh, just using that lubberly language is like hearing fingernails on a blackboard.

Port sheer stringer. That's better! This is a actually a pair of 18-foot noodly pieces of wood, about 3/4" square in cross section, that arcs from the top outer corner of the transom, out along the side of the boat, and then up and in to the point at the bow. It rolls and spirals, it sweeps down and out and then swoops up and in, a crescendo of fine-grained fir. This defines the shape of the edge of the boat, so it's important to get right.

It's also very difficult to persuade wood to bend in what seems like five dimensions at once. This morning I was struggling with the aft end, where it snugs into a carefully angled notched trimmed into the edge of the transom. What to clamp it to?

Small C-clamp: fail.
Large C-clamp: fail.
Small bar clamp: fail.
Long rope: moderate success.
Long rope with crush-block and bar clamp: moderate success

But not close enough. There's a millimeter of space still to fill, and I'm not going to sink the screw in until that gap is closed ... even though I could get lazy and fill the gap with epoxy.

Just as I threw up my hands this morning and headed inside for coffee (come to think of it, boatbuilding before coffee may have been part of the problem) my eyes fell on Klamp Korner.

Aha.

Klamp Korner is a magical land filled with the boatbuilding equivalent of rainbows and fat-hoofed unicorns: a section of the workshop filled with clamps of all size. Do I have enough clamps? Never. But I do have The BFC: a six-FOOT pipe clamp I used to use to close up 10-by pieces of oak.

I applied the BFC to the problem at hand. It's long enough that it actually extends all the way across the boat to the starboard sheer stringer. A few twists and the port stringer suddenly saw the light of reason. Gap closed.

Now I just have to figure out how to drill through the clamp, or how to move the clamp to access the screw location.

Cave Crickets Beware

2011-05-09T12:10:00.002-04:00

For I have returned to boatbuilding.

After some schedule-shuffling, I was in the shop at 6 this morning for a quick spot of epoxying before starting the day. Unfortunately this was also before coffee, but I figured resin and silica powder are not the ideal taste to combine with dark-roast Sumatra, so I was blinking owlishly while mixing the goop and counting to sixty.

I installed the forward port bunkflat supports as the sky cleared into dawn. It was a cool 55 degrees, but warm enough for epoxy to kick, and now, as I happily watch the temperature climb into the 70s, I am wondering why it is that I can still smell epoxy. Occasionally a nub will lodge on my scalp -- a frequent consequence of bending around pieces of wood and bumping into them.

And now that I've returned to the boat, and cleared away the cobwebs, I am going cricket-hunting with a bat of seasoned locust. Attention cave crickets: stay away from my boat or you feel the business end of what I learned in physics: momentum equals mass times velocity. And I can swing a heavy piece of locust.

Back to Work

2011-05-03T12:44:00.002-04:00

Yesterday morning, post dog walk, post coffee-making, but pre-breakfast, I slumped down in my desk chair for a quick look at the news before starting writing. I call it "ritual" but it's really just procrastination. Hey, better than Procrustenation, right? Look that up, kids, it's an allusion.

In any case: Osama bin Laden dead? Wow! I skimmed headlines, scrolled through pictures, sat back and pondered ...

... and then shut the laptop, opened the notebook, and took a sip of coffee. Seventeen minutes available of sweet unbroken writing time. Time to get to work.

Inconveniently for this story, I didn't have much of anything to say, and the story meandered along in its unhurried way. Still: it's one ratchet-click of the wheel closer to completion: the great wheel whose circumference spans months or years, whose curve is so vast it's like the curve of the earth, clicking one tooth further each day.

The smell of water

2011-04-26T12:38:00.003-04:00

I was in the desert the first time I smelled water. We were camping in a little orange-cliffed bend of the Gila River, a thread of green in that red country of New Mexico, and bullfrogs and dragonflies danced above the rocky shallows.

In the Southwest you can smell dust and warm pine bark and hot stone, so when that liquid and unmistakable scent bloomed out at dusk, I realized I was smelling fresh water.

I thought of this on Sunday, when I was hosing water into a bucket to water some new plants. There's something magical about the sound of water plunging into water, whether at the top of a breaking wave or a the trickling ripples of a shallow creek. And as I stood there, musing, holding the hose, I smelled the water for the first time in what has felt like a very long winter.

Later that day, the temperature climbed into the eighties and we took a happy dog to the lakefront park to gallop around with his equally happy friends. I stood and breathed in the warm watery smell of the lake and the rain-heavy clouds gathering their skirts above the mountains.

It reminds me of sailing, that river-smell. Sunlight flashing on big water, the muddy marsh odor near shore, and the gusty fresh breath of wind as the boat leans, the sail catches, and away you go.

Indulge me

2011-04-21T12:29:00.002-04:00

Indulgence: disciplined indulgence. That, I'm discovering, is what's necessary for a first draft.

Too much discipline and you're paralyzed: your arm a rigid arc of bone, fingers crooked, words frozen in your mind because they're not ... quite ... right. They're never quite right.

Too much indulgence and you close up the computer and go eat chips instead of writing. What, that's just me?

You have to find a way, and I struggle with this every day, to force yourself those indulgent explorations of the story, to go down paths that hadn't occurred to you when you started writing the scene or the paragraph or even the sentence.

See where things go. You're exploring. There will be time enough later for the merciless gimlet eye of revision.

So the early draft stinks? So does organic fertilizer. But it's great for when you need something to grow.

Did I just compare my exploratory draft to excrement? Yes I did. Sometimes you have to just roll with it.

I wrote today

2011-04-07T13:25:00.003-04:00

And yesterday. And the day before. When I look back on it -- a few pages of dense black scribble -- it seems like such a small thing. But anyone who has faced the dead nothingness of a blank page knows how hard that is.

The thing that finally kicked me into gear was the realization that I try too hard in rough drafts. That is: I start out writing with the finished goal in mind, and when my draft is NOT that finished version, I despair. Stupid! Like most mistakes, this is crystal clear when I stop and think about it.

In fact what we should compare those exploratory drafts to is not the finished masterpiece ... but the blank page.

When I look at it that way, these first fumbling pages are a huge step.

Something else that's surprised me: in just a few days of writing (but, I'll grant, years of thinking) I have started to care about these characters. I can see the street they're standing on; I can taste the air.

This was not the case when I started, but I pushed on anyway -- not out of any defiant belief that that spark would appear, but because I couldn't figure out what else to do.

When in doubt, sit your ass down and work.

And suddenly the characters are coming to life. It's almost as if I'm not creating them, but uncovering them. Discovering them.

Sunblock and black coffee

2011-04-04T13:11:00.003-04:00

Sunday morning I was up at dawn, walking the dog and brewing coffee as cool night became deep blue morning, filled with birdsong and the promise of a warm spring day. Black coffee and oatmeal were followed by a liberal application of sunblock, with its heady and evocative smell.

Salt, honey and walnuts in the oatmeal, another swallow of black coffee, sunblock caking my arms and face ghostly white, more coffee, a few sips of electrolyte drink from my water bottle to make sure it tastes just right, and I loaded the car with a full stomach, blinking sleepily into the sunrise.

An hour later (and another cup of coffee, half a bagel, and a fistfull of pretzels) I parked at the foot of the mountains, tasted the air and squinted at the clouds, made some clothing decisions, and swung my leg over my bike and clipped in.

Clif bars and electrolytes had to sustain me for the next few hours, as cloud shadows chased me up and down mountain roads and past green-gushing, rock-filled rivers of snowmelt, through fields of late-winter dead grass and early-spring riots of blossoms, under speck-vultures circling in the bright sky, past herds of unmoving cattle, mile after rolling mile after rolling mile.

Afterwards, at home, I unloaded the bike off the car, carried in the empty coffee mug, and raised my dirty arm to my nose. Yep: still smelled like sunblock. I love it.

Heroes

2011-03-25T12:36:00.003-04:00

Heroes. Most stories have 'em. Charming heroes, flawed heroes, heroes who are cruel, or brave, or young, or old.

I see a hero as a dark silhouette on a foggy hill, grasping the hilt of a sword and drawing it from stone. A frightened boy who no longer has to live under the stairs. A mole who saves his friends. A woman who defies convention and rides to war. A rascally smuggler who returns after everyone has given up on him.

What makes them heroic? We sympathize with them, want to be them. Often they are heroes because they defy expectations. They look at a situation, weigh the soft whisperings of temptation, and say: no. I will not go gentle into that good night.

I am hungry, I am scared, I am alone. I am in the dark, in the attic, in the cave. Nobody knows me; everybody needs me. I will probably not survive. This will hurt. I could still escape. But I will not go gentle into that good night.

Is it only defiance, then? No, I think there's more to it than that. Often the heroes who are most compelling are the ones who didn't start out that way. Because, really: what good story starts out with Once upon a time there was a total bad-ass who destroyed all evil.

Defiance; sacrifice; growth. And we have to know the hero. Feel their uncertainty because we've felt it ourselves in the school hallway or lunchroom or cold and distant wilderness. Feel their fear, the anguished choice ... and their resolve.

Even if that resolve is beyond us -- or especially if it is beyond us. Heroes do what we cannot or will not do. Maybe that's why they are so compelling.

Corpsey the Squirrel

2011-03-14T13:12:00.004-04:00

Hi! I'm Corpsey the Squirrel! I got run over by a car about a week ago, or maybe more. It's kinda hard to keep track of time passing when your head is half an inch thick, ha ha!

Anyway, ever since "the transition," as I call it, I've been hanging around on the side of the road, just kinda watching the world go by, you know? At first crows picked at me, and once they even flipped me over so I could see out of my other eye. Just kidding, I don't have any eyes.

Oh, Corpsey, I told myself. You may not be a "living" squirrel anymore but chin up! Oops, never mind, you don't have a chin either. Well, stay positive, Corpsey. You may be talking to yourself but something is sure to come along sooner or later.

Then one day it rained, and what did old Corpsey do? Well, I drifted over to the gutter and hung around under the leaves for a while. Then IT happened! A big friendly dog found me and we became best friends!

By "best" I mean "delicious" and by "friends" I mean "a chew toy." This was great! And boy, was this dog happy! He carried me all the way home, chewing away. It would have tickled but those things don't really bother me any more. I think he was going to take me inside the house. Maybe even wipe me on the couches and people's faces: delightful!

Then there was some sort of commotion and I was drenched with a stream of water. Some blasted human was spraying my dog-buddy with a hose! Disaster for Corpsey! The dog -- Benedict Arnold, I'm calling him -- eventually dropped me and was taken firmly inside. "Hey!" I called out, sort of. "What about Corpsey?" But they ignored me.

So now I'm stuck in the leaves, waiting for my next adventure. Where will I end up next? Maybe another dog will come along and save me!

Think of the one

2011-03-02T12:03:00.002-05:00

I recently read that one in ten manuscripts sees success. I say: ignore the nine and be the one.

Or is it one in fifty? In three hundred? In ten thousand? One in ten thousand? "So you're saying I have a shot!"

Each of us thinks we're that one. Why bother doing anything if you assume you're in the group of nine who get ignored? Half-effort is a waste of time.

No: you have to believe. And then get to work.

Because, sure, patience is a virtue. But so is diligence. After all, to paraphrase Steve Martin, how else can you "be so good they can't ignore you?"

If you go

2011-02-25T12:43:00.002-05:00

If you go outside of town to the junkyard on a warm spring day,when everyone else is at work and the ground lies open and bare-brown for acres, and you drive past the washing machines and couches, empty pallets and stare-eyed dolls, past rusting yellow metal contraptions and broken glass shimmering like ice, startling the hulking shapes of vultures, you may find a group of empty oil barrels collected like muttering old men.

And if you dig in your pocket for a five, press it into the glove of the site overseer, and hump the barrel into the back of your car, it will roll around and deposit showers of rust and spider carcasses.

And if at home, you wonder how to get it open, wishing you had a giant can opener, you may instead settle for a cold chisel, sledgehammer, and brute force, and by the end of the afternoon, as winter reclaims the air while the sun sets behind bare trees, you peel the top off the barrel.

Inside it is slimed with oil residue, aromatic and rotten and industrial. The steel smells like ice, like industry, like cooking oil, and you think of clanking machinery. Gouts of black smoke. Mechanical contraptions never seen in our world: strange and ungainly walking machines, ships floated by a thousand balloons.

And always, always you hear the steady footsteps of the man with the bats limping his way through the fallen bricks of the old city.

And you think: there is a story there.

Stop saying query

2011-02-16T12:43:00.003-05:00

Query the Third lies jumbled at the bottom of a notebook, coiled like a sleeping snake. When the time is right I shall release it to strike!

What surprises me is how similar these all are. That suggests two possibilities:

1) I have Hit The Mark, and now it's just a matter of reworking sentences. Sentences which must be reworked. I need to revise sentences. Certain sentences demand improvement. Fixing sentences. Reworking phrasing. See what I mean?

2) I've deftly avoided an effective query, but can't jump out of the rut because I've gotten used to it. Human beings can adjust to almost anything: this is our salvation and our curse. In this case I worry that I'm so accustomed to this basic query that it's blinding me to possible alternatives.

Meanwhile, winter's bite is gone from the wind and trees are showing their first tentative buds. Spring trickles in and reminds us that the clock of winter ticks away, ticks away, ticks away.

Yet the boat languishes, a victim of cold weather. How can I glue things -- I bleat plaintively -- when it's too cold for the glue to set? How convenient, I answer, that cold weather arrived just when the revision and query process jolts into high gear.

But with winter ticking away I find myself peering into the garage at the skeletal boat. Soon.

Query the Second

2011-02-11T12:12:00.004-05:00

The trouble, as you will soon see, is that different versions of the query don't seem all that different at first.

At first.

It's hard to say whether I love the sentences so much I'm loathe to revise them, or whether I'm keeping what works and changing what I can, but probably half of this is similar to the first version.

This one focuses on my the character's emotions and perspective more*. It also shrinks the focus to his immediate motivations ("strike back against the invaders") and avoids highlighting the larger themes of memory, guilt, revenge, etc. This is because in something this short -- 200 words or so -- it's hard to do much more than just list those larger themes. And lists are boring. So this one follows the principle of: "If I can't evoke the emotion in the reader, it comes out."

For three hundred years, the great sailing vessels have called at the port city of Quartermoon Bay. Until one bright morning, when six strange ships arrive carrying not spices, timber or silk but an invading army.

Thirteen-year-old Rigel’s first instinct is to resist. That’s how he’s overcome every other problem, from Da leaving to learning the old fairy tales Grandmother insists are so important. But the soldiers -- some of them children with terrible power -- burn Quartermoon Bay to the ground. They slaughter the weak and the old, and enslave Rigel along with anyone else strong enough to work.

New prisons rise from the ashes of the city, and Rigel’s world shrinks to hard labor, public executions, and whispered escape plans in the dark. As his fellow prisoners succumb to exhaustion and madness, Rigel’s determination withers into despair.

Then he learns Grandmother’s final story: across the mountains, hidden in a sea cave, lies the last Ship of the Light, a half-mythical relic of the old wars. Now he has to do something even harder than fighting: he has to believe. Rigel escapes the work camp, abandons his ruined city and flees into the mountains, chasing the wild hope that he can find the Ship and strike back against the invaders who have destroyed everything -- and everyone -- he’s ever known.

*Yesterday morning I found a way to go deeper. Closer to his emotions. Stay tuned.

Query quandary

2011-02-08T13:24:00.006-05:00

Okay. How many ways are there to write a query? How wet is the sea?

I've settled -- FOR NOW -- on three. First, from author Jodi Meadows, a technique posted last summer to the Writeoncon site, and reposted on Elana Johnson's blog. Second, the approach which, as far as I know, agent Kristin Nelson developed, focusing on the inciting incident. Which had better be found in your first 50 pages.

And lastly, the hideous and rarely spoken-of Third Method, where I build sentences through sheer force of will and stubbornness. If the first two methods are shiny-faced children performing piano recitals and eating politely, the Third Method is the thing under the stairs that keeps eating cats.

In any case! The result of many hours of brow-furrowing, talking to myself, gesturing at the cats, and consuming Stygian amounts of coffee is that I have three separate queries. All for the same book.

In the coming days I'll post them here. Note that each will have an opening and closing -- these are letters, after all -- but what you see is really the meat of the sandwich. Or the peanut butter and jelly if, like me, you have tasted this food of the gods.

Ready? Here we go. We'll begin today with The Third Method. I should note a strange situation: this query was originally written for a much longer book, which I've since revised, focusing only on the events in the first third. That first section has become the standalone book I am now querying.

Oddly, the original query for the longer book still applies, as it refers to events and situations which still endure in the new book. I myself am often surprised at life's little quirks.

So. Here is the Third Method query: a taste of the world of the book, the character and his conflicts, a few seasoning details, building up to what seems to be an unresolvable situation.

The port city of Quartermoon Bay teems with shipbuilders and captains home from the sea, fishermen and priests and menders of nets. People call fire from the air with a twist of their fingers, and an old woman’s storytelling silences a pub of rowdy sailors.

Thirteen-year-old Riga has never seen much point in the stories Grandmother keeps trying to teach him. Until one bright morning, when six strange ships attack and burn Quartermoon Bay to the ground, slaughtering the weak and the aged, and enslaving the rest. Grandmother has time to whisper one final story to Riga: across the mountains, hidden in a sea cave, lies the last Ship of the Light, a half-mythical relic of the old wars.

Riga escapes, killing two guards and fleeing into the mountains. He’s driven by the wild hope that he can find the Ship and strike back against the invaders who destroyed everything -- and everyone -- he’s ever known. But as he grasps the terrible significance of the ancient stories, and his role in them, he must weigh revenge against survival, and loyalty to his friends against the true burden of carrying the stories of the dead.

Here is what I love about writing

2011-02-04T12:39:00.004-05:00

It's better than a movie, watching these ideas -- scenes -- visions -- go flitting past my mind:

A flock of crows explodes like shaken pepper from the stubble of a November cornfield.

A fiery old woman with the map tattooed on her tongue.

Tap, tap, step, step: a tall figure dressed in black and crowned with a well-worn top hat, picking his way through the brick piles of the old part of town. He may wear an eye patch and a monocle. From his moleskin vest hang three small bundles that upon closer inspection prove to be slumbering bats, swinging as he favors his right leg. The left was torn open by a six-inch claw in the old wars no one likes to remember.

Only the very old and the very young show their true expressions; in between we learn to hide what we feel. On the very old the lines on their face are a map of their lives, all the experiences, every pursed lip or guffaw, clenched jaw and knotted brow, all worked into the hanging skin until they look exactly like what they've always felt. Which is why when I realized my son had frown lines at the age of nine, I called the police, my wife, and then the psychiatrist.

Winter seawater smells like salt and iron. Swamps stink of life.

Baby's teeth are the size and shape of sweetcorn kernels. But, thinks the monster, they taste different.

In a small and old town in Europe, the sun sets over a landscape of snow and spires. On the hill leading past the butcher's and the old church, a townhouse leans against its neighbor. The windows are dark, the glass hanging in fangs, but smoke dribbles from the chimney. Inside the floor is too old, the boards spongy and curling up at their edges. Upstairs there is a room where the furniture is covered with sheets turned yellow with age. In this room is a small closet. Inside the closet ...

On and on and on....

Two steps forward, one step back

2011-02-02T11:58:00.002-05:00

At least it's better than "two steps forward, three steps back."

It's occurred to me that writing a query is not unlike kick-stepping up a steep and somewhat loose ramp of snow (which I spent much of last week doing): You plant your foot hard, hoping to pack down the snow for more traction, then lean up and onto it. If you're lucky the snow holds, if not ... it slides and you end up either falling over or crossing your leg behind your other as you half-collapse into a squashed X-shape.

Either way it's a struggle, and the trick is to step up MORE than you slide down. And so as I grind through the caffeine-fueled early morning conversations with myself I call "figuring out the query," it often seems like what I'm doing is trying new things and eliminating options that don't work.

So far I have found many things that do not work.

The scary moments come when the whole slope threatens to slide away and send you snow-gusting and pinwheeling downhill. Moments like the one where I wondered if the reason I was having so much trouble describing the book in a compelling way is that the book isn't that compelling.

Uh-oh! Negativity alert! Stand up, stretch, swing the arms, sip some coffee, and focus. Put away thoughts of turd-polishing and remember what I first loved about this story in the first place.

Focus.

Focus.

Focus.

Two steps forward, one step back.

Bring winter gear STOP

2011-01-20T12:38:00.002-05:00

Urgent from H. A. Richtoven, Univ. Belknapp STOP Come immediately Urshaven Sta STOP Pack winter gear END

From Larsen Jen, Univ Belknapp STOP En route but curious STOP Have brought warm gear and dogs STOP Food and fur STOP Weather poor STOP Explain urgency END

From Richtoven STOP Weather worsening STOP Borealis expanding STOP Most peculiar STOP Have you astrolabe octant photogram materials double goggles END

From Larsen STOP Unable to understand yr last STOP Request speak English END

From Richtoven STOP Larsen you boob STOP Last was gear list STOP Astrolabe STOP Octant STOP Photogram materials STOP Double goggles STOP Evidently dictionary too STOP

From Richtoven STOP Belay last STOP Also need 40 qts frozen blood STOP And mittens END

From Richtoven STOP Borealis obscure STOP Patssnn STOP Patterns STOP Ice in air STOP STOP STOP Wolves I think no Borealis END

From Larsen STOP Richtoven repeat yr last STOP Are you in danger END

STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP

LOST and Presumed Dead, this Eighteenth Day of Foreyule, in the White Lands, Professor-Esquire Harold Armodius Richtoven frmly of University of Belknapp, explorer and scientist. Professor Richtoven had voyaged from Tumlar Station north to study the Borealis. He had advanced a theory called "wicked" and "degenerate" by his sponsors, and we must only presume he succumbed to madness or to the dreadful weather or to both. Body unrecovered.

The Witchy, Twitchy Art

2011-01-12T12:22:00.005-05:00

After attempting a bike ride in sixteen degree temperatures, I have discovered the following fact:

That although the solution to numb fingers and toes might well be better gloves and socks, it is more likely that the solution is: don't go bike riding when it's sixteen degrees!

And so I return to the indoor trainer / stationary bike. Though the weather is much improved indoors, the views are not, so I have been working through DVDs this winter. Last week was the Princess Bride, where I was delighted to find that the whip-smart dialog still makes me smile.

"I mean, if only we had a wheelbarrow."
"Where did put that wheelbarrow the albino had?"
"Over the albino."
[Sighs.] "Well, why didn't you list that among our assets in the first place?"

And there are more, so many more. Writing smart dialog is an art. You have to advance the story, demonstrate each character's viewpoint and specific idioms (accent, word choice, sentence length), thread some emotion into it (this can be humor, as above), and avoid boring the reader.

Even real dialog rarely measures up: take note of what we talk about at work, at the grocery store, while cooking dinner. BOR-ing! Thus we turn to fiction.

Here's another favorite: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

"Is that what you call giving cover?"
"Is that what you call running?"

We have William Goldman to thank in both cases. He has a rare ear for the witchy, twitchy art of dialog. It's hard to define it when it's right, but Lord, can we tell when it rings false.

"I knew you would come. Somehow I always hoped for it. Right here, in this kitchen of the house we built and where I grew up and then met you before everything else happened. And I-I-oh Samuel, the pain -- and I think -- no, I must finish, you must carry on, lads, don't give in to laziness and folly, you must -- carry -- on!"

Sheesh, writing bad dialog is almost as fun as writing good dialog. It's just MUCH EASIER.

Odysseus Strings His Bow

2011-01-07T12:29:00.003-05:00

Wily Odysseus, wandering Odysseus, canny Odysseus. He fought the Trojans for ten years and took another ten years journeying home to Ithaka. The Odyssey has been noted as a story of adventure, of the often-comic adventures and trickery of Odysseus, of the pleasures of homecoming.

All of this misses what to me is the pivotal moment of the story. The point upon which the whole lumbering and picaresque narrative balances.

Odysseus has returned home in disguise. Suitors, dozens of them, have been living in his house, eating his food, slapping his servants, romancing his wife. Penelope, having lived practically as a widow for twenty years, is on the verge of marrying one of them. But Odysseus waits.

He comes into his house, clad in white beard and dirty rags: a bent and decrepit beggar. The suitors laugh. Jostle him. Pinch the servant girls; perhaps bed a few more. But Odysseus waits.

Penelope, her will and faith in her husband pared away by two decades of absence, announces she will marry the man who can send an arrow through the ring-shafts of a row of axes. Odysseus hears this, and waits.

The suitors demand Odysseus's great bow. None of them is strong enough to string it.

"Oh please, let me try," croaks the old beggar from his stool. The suitors laugh, tossing him the bow. He stands. He takes the bow and strings it with long-practiced hands. His arrow flies clean through the ring-shafts.

He nods to his loyal servant. "Lock the door." He turns to the suitors and casts off his tattered rags.

--STOP.-- The long buildup of pain, of indignity after indignity, the looming loss of his home and his wife and everything he's been striving to return to for twenty years: all of this hinges on this one moment, suspended like a note from a violin.

This is a story of revenge, of justice, of scalding rage and the white heat of righteousness.

He kills them all.

The story doesn't end there, of course: war looms; Athena intervenes; Odysseus takes Penelope to the bed he built so long ago.

But maybe one reason this speaks to us, thousands of years later, is that Odysseus does what many of us cannot: face his demons and destroy them.

Now, then!

2011-01-04T12:27:00.003-05:00

Cue AC/DC (as if we all didn't have "Back in Black" running on a continuous loop inside our heads all the time anyway). I'm back!

And now that I am back I've received literally some e-mails asking where I have been and what manner of wondrous things I've been up to. Ready? Here we go.

I danced a surreptitious flamenco on a sun-flamed Barcelona beach. I extracted nineteen lark's tongues but lost the recipe for pie. I learned to carve life-sized effigies of myself and set up tea parties which I then proceeded to karate-kick. I gulped saltwater, choking, and burst through the surface into a sour sheen of spilled diesel.

I dotted yellowed vellum with spots of squid ink by candlelight. The pen came from a Denrovian eagle; the vellum from Basque lambs. The notes I scratched trailed across the page and became a symphony, a dirge, a jumprope chant, seventh-grade doggerel, a libretto, a haunt.

I built a church and prayed to a god who worked, and breathed, but knew not me.

I smacked a pan of water; I shook the roof with my rage; I burned a loaf of bread; I turned wood to fire, then to smoke, then to ash.

I saw cities of men, and empty skies, and the cold glittering stars. Squirrels chattered, jays fussed, the dark gnawing wet things gnashed and shrieked at the sound of wings in the air.

I punched an egg; romanced a wisp of cloud; watched the stars wheel. It turns, it all turns.

And now: I am back.

Awesomeness of Things Past

2010-12-17T12:21:00.003-05:00

My wife and I have recently started watching reruns of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

(That's the title, I mean. We're still here in 2010.)

Now, when this was originally on TV in the early 80s, I was not blind to its sillier elements. Those helmets make people look like Q-tips! Why are everyone's pants so tight? Shut up, Tweaky. God!

But mostly the impressionable eight-year-old me thought it was totally awesome. I was building a spaceship in my backyard, after all, so this was all important source material and / or motivation.

And today? Mostly I see the campiness but there's a part of me that says: This. Is. Awesome. Especially the theme tune: that crackling macho voiceover, the tentative strings as Buck hurtles through time, the plunging bass note and then, and then: a squadron of fighters and the crescendo speeding towards New Chicago. Who am I kidding? I love it.

This morning, the office opened late due to snow (thank you, winter) so I hopped on the stationery bike and watched quite of a bit of The Empire Strikes Back while spinning and sweating like a furious ape. I scored the original version a year or two back, and just like Buck Rogers, it's still ... well, cool. The special effects are better, too.

The stories stay with us: and the music, the looks, the gestures. They are, I think, laid down one by one, over and over until we can see them with our eyes shut. But then to go back and watch the real thing after so many years?

Still awesome.

Ten pages

2010-12-09T08:32:00.004-05:00

I'm grinding through edits at ten pages an hour. That's about twice as fast as I wrote them the first time. Does this mean editing only takes half as long as writing?

Ha ha, what a hilarious question! I wish revisions only took half as long as writing the damn thing in the first place. For me, revision is much slower. In the first draft I'm easy on myself.

But now there is no mercy. No "I'll just figure this out later," or "I think that word is close enough." Close enough ... isn't.

This morning I tried to calculate how many pounds of coffee beans I've ground into coffee during these revisions, but couldn't carry the four or figure the square root gerund participle of eleven or something. And I'm not sure I want to get to a "coffee per page" count. That is a lot of coffee.

I wonder: without the various drugs of history -- stimulants, narcotics, the Internet -- would we have the same vast field of literature we have today? Let me sip another cup and ponder that....

O Coffee

2010-12-06T08:13:00.003-05:00

When the alarm goes off at 5 I discover through a fog that my clock radio has station-drifted from to soft static like a distant ocean.

This is why I set a second, backup alarm. Ha! It beeps every second until my arm shoots out and hits snooze. I press the button a few extra times for good measure and then retreat, slug-eye-stalk-like, back under the covers.

It's not getting up at 5 that's the hard part. It's staying up. Coffee and editing until 6:30, sure, no problem. The time flies by, marked by a snoring dog, leaves blowing against the patio door, and cats pawing at things in between (their) naps.

But when I get to work, as bleary-eyed as if I just rolled out of bed, my hands still numb from the walk through the parking lot to the office, I heft my not-nearly-full-enough travel mug and think: gonna be a long one today.

And tonight: more edits!

Fifth Base

2010-12-01T12:29:00.002-05:00

I'm learning that writing and revising (repeat as needed) is like sprinting around the bases. You think you're heading for home, the manuscript looks good, everything is going great, and then SURPRISE! That's not home plate, it's a fourth base. You're running in a widening spiral. On to fifth base!

I've been hesitant to update on the revision process because it seems so repetitive. All the hackneyed metaphors come crowding in: honing the knife until it's sharp; chipping away at the sculpture; running in circles.

But the fact is that with each revision the story gets a little. Bit. Better. And that's what it's all about: truly the first (I almost said "only") measure of success.

Early morning is the only time I can make for this maddening and revealing process, so that's when I work: up at five, make coffee, step over the cats, put on my glasses, and get to work.

These days I'm doing one last look at the bones of the story. Chapter-level and scene-level changes. Paragraph-level if absolutely necessary, but I'm trying not to go deeper than that, because it's too easy to get distracted by line-edits.

Instead I satisfy my inner critic by swiping an impatient underline to mark clumsy text, problematic text. Because I want the words to go sliding past fluidly in exactly the way a cat does not swallow a pill. Or exactly the opposite of the previous sentence.

In any case, with each pass it gets better. And I think I can see home plate, up ahead in the outfield, where kids stopped playing years ago, and tortoises wander in the tall grass. Or do I see more bases?

Night Harbor

2010-11-17T14:36:00.002-05:00

(More microfiction)

NIGHT HARBOR

He's holding a lantern, with just a candle inside, and the wind makes the flame dance against the glass, blackening it with soot.

-- War is coming, he says.

I look at the stars and swirl the coffee in my mouth. He's full of it.

This year the dark came early. Down in the harbor a spattering of white light shows where Torvald's still welding.

Diesel and seawater. The stars turn.

He has to go, he says, touching my palm.

Cross my palm. Numb hands.

Damn this, damn him, damn the war. Damn all of it.

The candle gutters and goes out.

Then one time

2010-11-15T13:26:00.004-05:00

Microfiction: very very short stories. I think of it like a baseball player standing at the plate and fungoing quick shots to the infield. Low-stakes practice.

Then one time, I was at the beach with Mommy and it was SO hot. She thought it was going to rain later, but not thunder because I'm afraid of thunder, so I made a sand castle for the crabs.

Mommy had her book out but I don't think she was reading it. Sometimes I could see her looking at the ocean, so I looked too, but all I saw were big blue clouds like giants. They looked like thunder clouds but I didn't want her to feel bad so I pretended not to see them.

Sometimes she sniffed like she was going to sneeze but didn't. Sometimes that happens to me too.

"What about Daddy?" I said. Daddy always made us his special sweet potato fries. Special sweet potato fries, you always had to call them that.

She sniffed again and pulled her sunglasses down from her hair to cover her eyes. She didn't answer and I knew she didn't want to answer. So I just played with my castle and watched the giant clouds.

City of Lights

2010-11-10T13:42:00.003-05:00

Imagine that you are building a sand castle, but instead of raising it you are uncovering it, brick by sandy brick. When you have finally revealed it you discover that it's really not much of a castle after all, but more of a ... cruller. Do you get to work slapping and shaping the gritty monster into a castle? Do you make it a better cruller? Or some combination unseen by the world and which may turn out to be ghastly ... or brilliant?

You have been asked to make a meal for people you do not know, using ingredients whose faded labels you cannot read, using knives and a stove and pans you cannot hold right. Yet you are compelled to cook, and think only of the feast. This image sustains you through the mess, the rinds of oranges and gristle, spills, dirty dishes, and the grueling and unglamorous labor.

You are dreaming. You must be. Because all you feel is warm air, holding you up, up in the night and you realize you are flying above a moonlight landscape: tiny blots of trees, and winding streets, and the silver shine of the ocean far off. It's a town, spread out below you like a quilt, and in the warm-lit houses people have their own lives, their own fears and joys and quietnesses.

No, it's a city: a great and broad glittering city of lights. The wind rustles and you sail higher, high enough now to glimpse the distant glows of ships tracking across the horizon. Below you is a carpet of stars: the city lights and streetlights and cigarette lights and campfires and rain puddles in the moonlight and bits of mirror and everything shines.

Everything shines.

And you think: that spot needs a light. A tiny spark glows. And that spot. Another one.

One by one, far above the city, you point and sparks glow brighter or dimmer, until everything is just as it needs to be.

You sail higher. It's colder up here, but you need to be able to see the whole thing. Now the dark ocean dwarfs the small city, but the lights ... the lights are patterns. Strings like tiny pearl necklaces, threads of lights, cold blue and warm yellow sparks and silver drops like sugar against the night.

And now you rearrange the threads just a little: straightening this one, pulling that on into a more graceful arc, connecting this one to that one.

This is revision to me: arranging the all the glowing pieces to make sure the patterns I see are truly there. Sometimes it's exhausting but it is always rewarding.

The Narrowing Gyre

2010-11-03T12:31:00.002-04:00

Turning and turning....

Revisions continue well. Or at least, not face-punchingly terrible, which is pretty good. This is the third book I've revised and I have never scraped away quite so mercilessly. Sometimes I'll find a glittering little piece of prose and I'll take it out, hold it up to the light, and toss it aside or fit it in somewhere else.

There is a general sense of tightening. Not just tightening language, removing fatty words and making the prose more direct, but also a winding of tension, threads of plot spiraling closer and closer into a knot I can't quite see fully yet.

This has been the process so far. I had a list of, let's say, a dozen fairly significant changes I wanted to make. Things like character motivations, or deeper implications, or even arguments that needed to be expanded, or moved from one scene to another.

As I cogitated on these changes, they suggested others, and at this stage I followed every lead, indulged every conceit. Because I didn't want to discard any ideas until I was SURE they were no good.

So now, many bad ideas and a few good ideas later, I have a 16-page "notes" document filled with cryptic questions and answers, bulleted ideas, and the self-indulgent chatter of the overcaffeinated.

From those 16 pages there are maybe five new elements to weave into the story. At this stage those new additions are not huge: clarifying conversations, names, showing things that are important but perhaps not quite clear.

And the strange thing is that I feel like I'm excavating my own story. I don't know what it will look like or what I'll find when all the slobbery mud of the process gets cleaned off it. But I hope it's a little more appealing than what Saruman's minions dug out of the ground!

Lice

2010-10-28T12:43:00.003-04:00

This morning I was trying to write a scene where lice play an important role. What are lice like? I am lucky enough to have no idea. No, really, I don't!

So although I eschew e-books, I happily went online to research lice. Of which, it turns out, there are many sorts. My arm itched a little just looking at the pictures.

Lice are small. They are bugs. They are itchy, and lay eggs, and can carry diseases. But what do they FEEL like crawling up your arm? My head itched. Do they skitter like tiny ants? Do they bite with a piercing red itch, like a flea (now those I have had)? My elbow itched. Do they just wander around causing general itching, like poison ivy (ditto)? Can you eat them like monkeys do? What do they taste like? Crunchy? Salty? Squirmy or so tiny you can't even tell whether you're biting down on a louse or a poppy seed?

Pretty soon I was scratching myself all over but still no closer to understanding, truly, personally, in the flesh, what it's like to have lice. And soon I may have to face the question: how far am I willing to go in the name of verisimilitude and accurate writing?

The answer makes me itch.

Redraft, thou saucy varlet!

2010-10-25T12:13:00.003-04:00

How much change does a draft go through before it's not an update but a REdraft? Significant change? Well, I've stripped out all the velociraptor helicopter pilots and flaming robot soldiers, but the battle moths and proselytizing garden slugs are still intact.

Kidding! Or am I?

No, a redraft is when you remove the second two-thirds of the book to save for later, and focus on the first third.

If there's a scary part, make it scarier. Turn-your-stomach-to-water scary, I hope. Sad parts get sadder. I want readers to feel pierced by grief. Hey, the characters are; it only seems fair. Beauty? Make it ache.

But it's not just turning up the volume on drama and emotion. It's clarity. Clarity. Clarity.

Lots of mud gets scooped up with the first draft. I try to clean that out. Fragments of plot ideas that ended up going nowhere: take 'em out. Unclear motivations, or ideas that grow out of sequence: fix all those.

But here's what has surprised me the most. During the first "exploratory" draft, I'm improvising. Testing out ideas, phrases, ways to describe things. I try not to feel too attached to anything I'm writing, because I can "easily" go back and change it, either in revisions or right there as I save the first draft and begin "draft 1A." And 1B, 2, 2B, etc.

I cribbed this idea from Laini Taylor and it's worked wonders. It's like writing with a safety net.

In any case, in the first draft, the stakes feel nice and low. When I can't think of the exactly the right word, I use the closest approximation: Characters are running and trying to talk? Do they gasp? Breathe? Pant? Grunt? Gulp? Shudder? Cough? Gag? Hack? Stutter?

But in the redraft: Ah, the redraft. Every. Word. Matters. It's the opposite of the wild freedom of that first draft, where I'm so frantic to get the words on the page I don't even check spellings.

No, at this point, I'm working with scalpel and forceps, needle-nose pliers and long thin tweezers, removing a word and trying another, and another, and another, until it's just ... right. It's painstaking work, but slowly, very slowly, the needless layers slough off and what's left is the story I've been trying to write since that first draft many months ago.

Workspaces

2010-10-22T12:47:00.002-04:00

Coming back from a two-week vacation and launching right into work has meant that the house is full of stacks of (clean) laundry; half-unpacked laundry, water bottles, nearly empty containers of sunblock, shoes and sandals, boarding passes and dinner receipts, national parks brochures, guidebooks.

All great stuff! But it's meant that my normally only-half-messy workspace has become an obstacle course that forces me to high-step through debris to get to the computer.

I deliberately set up my writing space in a small and dark room, facing a bulletin board rather than a window (which is closed most of the time anyway, since I write before dawn). I like the idea of not having a view or a beautiful room to distract me. But when I can't even see the carpet, the mess itself is a distraction. So it has to go.

The same thing goes for "the shop" (garage) where I'm building the boat. How many cars fit into a two-car garage? None, if it's already filled with one boat, a second half-built boat, a kayak, two bikes, a table saw, a workbench, and stacks of lumber. To say nothing of the crickets.

And I can tolerate drifts of wood shavings; clamps not put back in their correct spots (hung to the right of the bench, if you please), dulled pencils in nearly every little crevice of the boat, and so on. But when I spend more time avoiding obstacles than working, it's time to clean up.

It always seems aggravating to be cleaning instead of working, so I'll usually clean a little, work a little, clean a little, etc. Here's the secret, though: cleaning never takes as long as I think.

Still, on a bright and cool October day, with the wind tearing through leaves the color of fire, I think of glittering blue water or the frustrating and beautiful intricacies of my book, and wish I could just get down to work.

Taken home

2010-10-19T12:41:00.004-04:00

Get taken a lot. Taken when I was little away from motherlap, motherwarm, mothermilk. Taken from others, wiggling and warm and crying like me.

Taken to a new place, didn't know, didn't like it. Food but not hungry. Blanket but not tired. Scared. Dark. No others.

Taken outside sometimes. SMELLS sweet grass sour road warm squirrelpath, dog dog dog dog dog dog, marking here. Taken away from trash smell, from food smell, from motherlap smell.

Lived with others, not so cold anymore. Not so dark. Sleeping, outside and in, sometimes on the couch until the big ones made scary noises at me. Hiding, sometimes, under porch under bed under bed.

Same for long time. Everything the same, everything good, understand it all now. Walk. Outside. Smell. Mark. Eat. Sleep. Outside. Big ones scratching ears, scratching neck, rubbing head good good good.

Taken again. Big ones gone. Taken to a different place, full of others, loud and smells and scared and scared and strange others, fear and anger and hate and fear and alone alone alone.

Loud. Screaming others. Always loud, always strange. Smells different, food different, big ones different.

Not hungry. Not loud. Not eating. Everything coming at once, everything closing, everything crushing closer closer closer.

Loud and loud and loud everywhere. Not eating. Not sleeping. Not drinking. Loud screaming smells and screaming.

Taken out. Two big ones, and quiet. Waited. They came again. Taken out again, taken into car. Noise and bumping and can't stand, can't eat. Smells and strange and smells and noise noise noise.

Taken out of car. Grass strange. Sun strange. Smells strange: cat and bird and squirrelpath and dogs street leaves mouse woodsmoke creekwater lowflowers treeflowers dirt mud trash big ones.

Taken inside. Catsmell strange. Blanketsmell strange. Floorsmell strange.

Eating. Sleeping. Catbarking. Outside smelling.

Good now. Sleeping sleeping.

Escape into Print

2010-09-29T12:06:00.004-04:00

I readily admit that I prefer printed books to reading online. Hey, I also build wooden boats from hand, and cook pizza from scratch. I like doing things that way. But because I also pretend to be living in the 21st century, I've been known to spend time online. Such as, um, typing this right now.

This means I try to be objective --agnostic, really, is a better word -- about whether people prefer to read online or in print. I know what I like, which is all I can control anyway. But even so, today's story in the NY Times caught my eye.

Children, a study has found, are more comfortable reading online than anyone had expected. Evidently the scientists didn't consult babysitters, teachers, or anyone who's spent more than a few days with a child.

However, book lovers take heart: most of them would not give up printed books. Hooray!

Because I can't help but feel that when a society prints its last book, it ends its own story. Printed books, like libraries, are vital to democracy. As I noted before: sure, you can burn a stack of printed books; confident moral despots can cry for their banning; and bookstores can fail to carry them.

But they can and always will be snuck under covers; read instead of Algebra; slid into lockers, smuggled across border; printed on basement presses. A printed book holds the fire of revolution. Because -- and this will come as no surprise to anyone who loves to read as much as I do -- stories have power. And printed books ... well, they have magic.

Plus, I have to admit what triggered this entry in the first place: the sudden awareness, as I clicked "close" on one more pop-up ad that appeared as I was trying to read the news online, that maybe web advertising will become so intrusive that people are ANNOYED BACK TO PRINT. Can you imagine reading a news story without animated ads dancing around your peripheral vision, or the screen suddenly going dark so you can see a video for a luxury watch?

I can. It's called the printed paper.

Work work work work work

2010-09-23T12:21:00.002-04:00

Each day that my boat does not explode is a good day. Maybe soon, with this warm weather, the epoxy will cure and I can remove the forest of clamps holding on the starboard sheet stringer!

Meanwhile, as the mood-pendulum swoops from despair to euphoria, I'm at the "happy" stage with book revisions. It's rare and delightful to feel anything but gloom about a project (while I don't expect the manuscript to explode like the boat, there are times when it feels trite, melodramatic, and unfocused).

But these days the book seems ... well, good. And though that may be little more than Caffeine Euphoria thanks to the brimming cup of Sumatra I drink from my lucky blue mug, I am crossing my fingers.

And waiting for epoxy to cure.

Book surgery

2010-09-21T21:49:00.003-04:00

There are some old ships of such value, historical or sentimental; or built with such care and love that their very shape is worth preserving like a museum or a painting. When these vessels decay, as we all must, often there is debate about how to repair them.

To preserve them? To rebuild them? To replace them with chrome and gas-powered motor boats?

If every single piece of wood in an ancient ship is replaced, is it still the same ship? If one piece is replaced? What if it is carefully measured before it sinks, and then rebuilt as an exact replica?

I mention this to illustrate the lengths to which people go to preserve things. Sometimes, I have even heard, an ambitious or stupid builder will obtain a boat and proceed to cut out the middle. The resulting two ends he will then graft onto a different midsection, often shorter or longer or fatter or thinner than the original.

This would be like replacing my chest with someone else's, and is about as easy. But sometimes it works, and the resulting boat is actually an improvement. Success!

This is what I'm doing with my book. Not so much replacing the middle; that would be too easy! But pulling out a big section, expanding parts of it, moving in aspects of other books and other sections of the same book, pulling and tugging at the poor fragile thing like it's a piece of pizza dough.

Which makes my valiant sheer stringer gluing efforts seem easy!

Workspace from this morning: coffee, eyeglasses, and the stack of ideas I call the next draft:

Steve is Oscar Mike!

2010-09-17T12:37:00.002-04:00

Oscar Mike = on the move. I know, I know. But it's snuck into my vocabulary and I can't shake it.

Steve Earley, builder of the same Welsford Pathfinder design I'm building, sailed off for his fall cruise! Thanks to technology run by tiny elves, dynamos, and soup cans, or perhaps some other form of engineering, we can track his progress into the watery wild from his SPOT page.

Very cool. And very inspiring as I slowly progress with my own build.

Last night's progress? Ah. Well. I "prepped" the sheer stringers for gluing. This meant walking around talking to myself, planning where to rest the 18-foot bendy strip of wood when it's covered in sticky epoxy, where to store clamps so I can reach them one-handed, clamping sequence, wax paper location (it keeps epoxy from sticking in places it shouldn't be), and so on.

It's all very cerebral, you see.

I Find Your Lack of Explosions Disturbing

2010-09-13T21:55:00.003-04:00

I may have mentioned how bending the spring-loaded sheer stringers on the boat puts the whole thing under enormous stress. As in, I have to huff and puff and make squinty faces and squat-lean all my weight against the wood to get it to curve into place. Still seems like it should explode all over the garage. Odd.

Today I was fitting the starboard sheer stringer, and eventually, after swatting mosquitoes and braving antediluvian crickets, claimed victory, the whole thing creaking and taut like a room full of catapults.

Getting the strips to lie flush against the bow was no small challenge, what with the quadruple-helix twist they went through, and the soul-flexing forces I had to apply. But fit they did! Here you see, in center frame, clamped in place, the flush fit of the top layer of the starboard stringer. Oh, just trust me, it's flush:

Also note, three wedges slipped under the rope to tighten it up. Much more effective than any knot.

And now, behold the army of clamps that made it possible. Spring clamps, bar clamps, C-clamps, and today's favorite: scrap rope wrapped three or four times around the wood and secured with a lazy half-hitch. Holds tight, can be installed with one hand (unlike certain bar clamps) and gives as much as I need it to.

Next step: gluing.

Unreal

2010-09-09T15:45:00.004-04:00

"This isn't real," the child whispers, hiding under his covers. "This isn't real," as his closet door creaks open.

"This isn't real," he groans, looking at his test.

"This isn't real," he scoffs, alone, from the corner of the party.

"This isn't real," he says, gritting his teeth in a meeting.

"This isn't real," bursting out of the office and into the spring brightness.

Talons of the hawk. Bite of the fish. The long drop off the side of the trail. The bone-deep cold of your last night. The wrong choice. Lost balance. A careless decision.

This isn't real, we all whisper in the dark at least once in our lives, when the arrogant certainty of day is gone like a dream, and all the demons come roosting home where they belong.

Butter scraped across toast

2010-08-31T12:59:00.003-04:00

"I am old, Gandalf," Bilbo says, his voice withered and soft. He feels, he notes, like butter scraped across too much toast.

Not only is that metaphor so perfect for the situation, it's perfectly English as well, and so hobbity and true-to-tone that I smile every time I read it. Butter and toast: it makes me think of sunny mornings, crumbs on a white tablecloth, the sweet bitterness of marmalade.

These days I am spread a little thinner than I'd like. Between bike training, boatbuilding, hoarding the One Ring, and writing, there are just not enough hours in the day. I snatch moments of work when I can, but apart from bike riding, I've haven't spent much more than an hour or so doing any of these.

Crickets scramble across the boat. Book revisions exist in my mind and on marked pages of research books (shelves and shelves worth) and on scraps of paper and on a typed list.

In any case, after this weekend I should be able to reshuffle -- no, re-balance -- priorities again. But then what will I complain about? Not to worry, I will find something!

It Has Probably Exploded By Now

2010-08-24T12:08:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's boatbuilding began with me discovering two mating camel crickets as I was moving plywood in search of a Torx wrench for my bike. I calmly re-swallowed my lunch, selected a long piece of scrap wood, and BANGED THE BEJABBERS out of the other side of the plywood.

A second inspection showed the in flagrante disgusting situation had ended and the crickets were nowhere in sight. Teach them to join carapaces near my boat. What I need are some raccoons, snakes, and wolf spiders to eat up the crickets.

Then I worked more on the starboard sheer stringer: a long, bendy piece of fir that -- in defiance of all laws of physics, wood properties, and sense of moral rightness -- stops being bendy as soon as I clamp it along the frames, and instantly becomes a spring loaded-piece of fragrant (it is fir, after all) death. Every time I struggle to get it into the frame notches I feel like I'm slowly cranking a crossbow into high tension.

Well, I shot a few clamps through the air and dropped a few more on my feet, but finally got everything lined up into a nice fair curve. So far the stringer has not ripped the frames out of the boat. Then, as if things weren't precarious enough already, I drilled it for 30mm x #8 countersunk bronze screws. Now my spring-loaded, just-reached-maximum-bend, did-you-know-a-crossbow-bolt-can-drop-a-velociraptor-at-forty-yards, fir stringer has been further weakened by half a dozen holes.

Despite the mortal terror of the stringer and the crickets, I managed to keep all the clamps in place and scuttle inside. I was afraid to check it this morning before work.

And I never found the Torx wrench.

Neither Fire Nor Ice

2010-08-20T08:49:00.004-04:00

Frost's poem about the end of the world notwithstanding, I believe I've found one of the signs of the Apocalypse: Ralph Lauren has launched "the world's first shoppable children's book": "The RL Gang." And somewhere in the world another child closes a book; only this time it's not because the story's no good, it's because Mom (it's always Mom, never Dad) cannot afford the $250 ruffled wool blazer.

Fortunately for my blood pressure their site appears to be down, but here's a YouTube clip of ... what, a trailer? an ad? the "shoppable" experience itself? A lurching hybridized horror assembled by a committee of overpaid ad executives choosing focus groups over the courage of morals?

Maybe I'm not being quite clear enough. I have noted my ambivalence toward e-Books (they're not for me, but what do I care as long as people are reading?); my impatience with the rote vampiromances that I feel like I've read and seen before even hearing about them; my vexation at books that don't try, that don't take risks, that don't carry us to places outside our normal comfortable lives.

But this -- a "shoppable" children's book -- tops them all. "It's never too early to teach kids to shop online," crows one executive. My response? "What you mean is that it's never too early to teach kids there's no escaping the pressure to consume, even in a book."

My god. There's only one vaccine against this sort of thing: to write good -- and I mean good -- literature to stand in opposition to seductive and powerful advertisements cloaked in the still-warm skin of a book.

Slow Progress Is Still Progress

2010-08-18T21:57:00.004-04:00

A week since I worked on the boat? It's not ideal but somehow the days fill up, from strong coffee to dozing on the couch before trundling up to bed.

But today I came home from work, changed into boatbuilding clothes, and spend an hour or so wrestling seemingly spring-loaded strips of fir and noisy clamps that were intent on leaping off the boat and hitting me in the face.

But I DID succeed in clamping, measuring, checking and double-checking, and finally cutting the complex angles at both the bow and stern ends of the first sheer stringer. This wasn't the old fat-grained practice piece. Nope, it was the real thing, though what 16 rings per inch doug fir was doing at the local lumber yard is beyond me. In any case I snatched it up and now it's MINE ALL MINE!

Pictures:

Not all frames have a close fit to the stringer. That's what fillers and epoxy are for.

Others are nice and flush.

Completed stringer clamped in place (starboard side; do not be fooled by the decoy pieces all around. Some are scrap; most are bracing the starboard frames):

I call this one: "Help, I Am About To Be Run Over By A Skeleton Boat":

Back to the boat

2010-08-10T13:18:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm back.

(Special Contest for Alert Readers: name the book whose final line that is.)

Back from mountain climbing under the vast and dry skies of California. Returning to humidity was a bit of a shock (how do people SURVIVE here?) but my sweat glands have kicked back into turbo-mode after a few bike rides. And it's good to be home.

One of the things I missed, without even realizing I was missing it, was the smell of fresh-cut wood, sawdust, spiderwebs; the short scraping sound of sharpening a pencil with a knife; the clean thin vibration of trimming a piece of fir with a very very sharp handsaw.

So it was that I was up at 5, coffee in hand, for a return to boatbuilding. This morning I was wrestling with the starboard sheer stringer. This one piece of wood defines the top edge of the boat -- arguably the most important curve in the whole thing.

It's also so long I had to open the garage door so the end could stick out into the insect-singing darkness. (It'll be trimmed to length later.) So it was clamp-spring-clamp-drop clamp-swear-clamp-bendy wood-clamp-drink coffee.

Altogether an enjoyable way to spend the dawn.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2010-08-07T05:12:00.005-04:00

Dawn at 13,000 feet, Mt. Shasta.

Seven in Black

2010-08-05T12:41:00.003-04:00

Driving through the high desert of Northern California a few days ago, I daydreamed a nightmare:

Imagine: the land is flat and immense under a sky like hammered lead. The hard ground almost rings in the heat. Crumpled brown mountains line the horizon, shimmering under the sun.

In the middle of this desolation, near nothing at all, is a disturbance in the ground marked with a crooked stick.

Bad place, you think. This is a bad place.

The hard soil has been lumped and raised into a long grave; the stick its only marker. You approach. Tiny birds wheel far above. The huge space is silent.

There's a fluttering sound, like a flag snapping in the desert wind, and the scene changes: instead of an ancient mound, there is now a long box on a raised bier. Strange shapes and writing writhe around the coffin. Ceremonial sheets of white fabric hang and billow.

Seven figures, wrapped head to foot in black, stand before the bier, unmoving and silent as chessmen.

Bad place, bad place, bad place.

You lean closer to see. The coffin -- closer -- the coffin is empty and you start.

Seven black-wrapped heads snap in your direction. Seven pairs of withered hands appear and tug the hems up. Bony bare feet, grey and pockmarked, and stringy calves.

They run at you, and the tight wrappings blow back, and they are seven old women, and they are smiling.

Books for the Mountain

2010-07-27T14:57:00.004-04:00

I'm heading out of town for a week to do some mountain climbing out west. Much less exciting than it sounds, this will still involve snow and camping, long views, and the clean sweet scent of the high country. O to escape the miasmic lowlands for a few days!

In any case, the most urgent priority is not camping gear or food, but -- what else? -- the selection of books to take.

I'm halfway through Catherine Fisher's excellent Incarceron. I love how things aren't explained to us and they're not fully explained to the characters, either. There's a fine line between letting your readers share the characters' emotions and just plain confusing them, and this book nails it.

Trouble is, I'd finish it during my first airport layover. Sorry, Incarceron!

Another possibility: Thomas Mann's weighty Buddenbrooks. Yeesh. I've been trying to read this in the evenings before I fall asleep, and that may be the problem. How hard should I have to fight to get into a book? Isn't it supposed to hook me? This one may not make it into my luggage.

What about Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler? This one's the wild card. I've heard good things about it, and it's no flash-in-the-pan, having been in print since the late 1970s. It's thin enough not to be a burden, and it could be fascinating ... OR a self-indulgent romp through avant-garde goofiness. Verdict: undecided.

And now we get to my two shoe-ins. Two books by David Michell, author of the wonderful Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Ghostwritten. My cup runneth over! Somehow I imagine both of these will be taken, squeezing out optional equipment such as socks and my backpack.

What else? Surely there are others. As soon as I get home and browse the stacks on the dining room table (I know, I know!) I'm sure other books will clamor to be taken. On a trip like this, the only thing worse than running out of something to read is accidentally packing the wrong book. In which case I need to run not walk to the nearest bookstore and support my fellow writers.

Purple Shirt

2010-07-20T12:24:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I wore my lucky shirt. Let's call it purple. Somehow this shirt has become a magical talisman of confidence and luck. Who am I to argue with that?

When I wear Purple Shirt I burn with the charisma and power of a thousand suns! Nothing can go wrong, thanks to Purple Shirt.

People encountering Purple Shirt have only two choices: to submit, or to flee.

Chuck Norris doesn't wear a purple shirt. Purple Shirt wears Chuck Norris.

Often Purple Shirt will cause: fire alarms to ring; cats to deliver kittens; moonpies to eclipse; spontaneous tromboning; hedgehog arbitrage; and baloney sandwiches to become prosciutto on rye.

It got me thinking about other talisman-like objects in some of my favorite stories. Sylvester had his magic pebble; Boy had his one small blue bead; Frodo had ... well, we all know what he had.

What value is there is bringing an object into a story; an object which then becomes so meaningful that it's essentially its own character?

Unbraiding and braiding

2010-07-16T13:22:00.002-04:00

After some incisive comments on my latest draft, I'm going to try something I've never done before: untangling -- no, make that unbraiding -- a few of the plot strands that really carry the story, pulling them out, and rebraiding them into a cohesive whole: a standalone story.

The other strands I will rebraid as well, so the events and choices, characters and their growth, all continue mostly as they stand now, but with some more context and detail. The story, I think, will become richer. More powerful. More moving.

Which, after all, is what ever writer (or most writers, at least), hope their stories to be.

Keep in mind these "strands" aren't the consistent, smooth, and abosolutely clean lines of 1x19 stainless steel (316 if you please) cable you use to hold up a mast.

No, I picture an aged seaman in a fire-lit pub; smoke-darkened ceiling beams and a plank floor dented by the heels of ten thousand seaboots. Our old sailor sits on his three-legged stool by the fire, hunching his shoulders against the draft that sweeps the smell of a snowy gale through the crack under the oak-timbered door.

In his lap his calloused and immensely powerful hands move ceaselessly, picking at a hairy coil of rope as thick as his thumb. The rope might be as old as he is, prickled with stray strands, stained with tar or bleached by sun and salt air.

He teases a strand open, un-splices a loop, smacks the line across his narrow thigh and palm-rolls the round shape back into it. Pauses for a drink or three. Returns to his ropework, picking and fiddling and reshaping.

Reworking.

I will push

2010-07-14T12:42:00.002-04:00

This past weekend I rode in an eight-hour backcountry bike race, mostly on rocky and steep trails. I have ridden farther, mileage-wise, but not for eight hours. The black, flitting demons that plagued me were:

Fatigue
Heat
Bugs
Falling off the bike
Hunger
Thirst
Dehydration
Cramps

All pretty much what I expected, except for the cramps: both legs! All at once! Hip to ankle! Where are the invisible dwarves stabbing me with battle axes? Quit it, you!

Many of the uphills were so steep that I, especially after six hours of pedaling, couldn't claw my way up. So I would hop off the bike, punch my cramping thighs, and push the bike up the rutted trail, gasping for breath.

About 48 miles in I realized I was going to make it to the finish, despite the fluttering demons listed above. I said:

If there is a downhill I will ride down it. If I fall I will stand back up and keep going. If there is an uphill I will ride up it until I cannot, and then I will push the bike until I can't go any farther, and then I will rest until I will continue.

This wasn't some heroic Eye-of-the-Tiger moment of pure defiance against a backdrop of soaring eagles and crashing kettle drums. It was just a simple realization: I. Will. Push. No different than remarking on the color of the sky (clear blue) or the singing of the locusts (chirring).

Boatbuilding? I will push. Writing? I will push.

It's risky quoting from memory, but I think it was Epictetus who said, "First say what you would be, then do what you have to do."

Can't Hold Back the Vampires

2010-07-06T12:19:00.005-04:00

I am slowly starting to realize that vampires are popular. No, really, they're like catnip! So it seems fitting to take advantage of this new trend by writing some vampire books.

Many of the tried and true vampires stories have been done to death. (Get it?) High school vampires struggling with angst and pimples, New Orleans vampires, Gothic vampires, steampunk vampires, and so on.

Clearly the solution is to go further. Vampires can be paired with anything, right? What about Boy Scout vampires -- call them campires. Where's Vlad going with that axe? Or an infestation of blood-drinking baseball players: The Vumpire Chronicles.

Not sassy enough? Yes, that's a criticism I often receive. That, and "not snarky enough." Well, here's the solution to both problems: Desperate Vampires. They don't just struggle with purse-dogs and Botox, but how to get blood by the quart.

More? Heck yeah I have more! Vampire cavemen: Cavampires and neander-vamps. Toddler vampires, doomed to remain pre-verbal, bloodthirsty toddlers forever in Kindervamp and Kindervamp II: Nap Time for Everybody.

Wait a second, I half-remember some sort of boarding-school-themed fantasy about a boy magician. What does it need? It needs more vampires. Teen Vamp. No, Freddie Figglebottom and the Vampires of Math Class.

Sometimes vampires go into space. They DO, okay? Inconveniently they usually try to eat all the science experiments. Coming soon: Vampronauts.

What about vampire animals? Oops, already been done. How about vampire plants? Wait, vampire stuffed animals! Mommy, why is Teddy drooling?

Or fairy tales: the Ugly Duckling doesn't grow into a beautiful swan, but a vampire swan, who then slaughters the arrogant ducks. "Ugly beat-th dead," he lisps around a mouthful of duck feathers.

By the way, do you know why all the Stormtroopers in the Star Wars movies had those sweet white outfits? So you couldn't see that they're all vampires! True story.

Somewhere a vampire is wishing he could read a book to take him away from his daily bloodthirstiness and angst and all-around awesomeness. But I will not write that book.

Everybody together, preferably in a Christopher Walken voice: what do we need? More vampires!

I forgot that it didn't happen

2010-07-02T15:07:00.003-04:00

I've been carefully following the recent sailing trip of Steve and Bruce in Steve's Pathfinder, the same boat design I'm building. Reading about their adventures and daydreaming continues to be both a distraction and an inspiration.

Today they updated the blog with Day 2 of their eight-day trip through the marshes and bays of coastal North Carolina. (Dang it Steve! I will be there someday too, if I ever get this boat finished!). In one of the pictures a very sleepy Bruce is taking it easy as the boat thrashes to windward, and I thought: that looks familiar. Have I done that? Has someone napped while I sailed?

Then I remembered: it didn't actually happen, it was a scene in my first book: after working feverishly to rebuild an old sailboat in time for an all-day race, Grandpa and Alton are finally on the water. Grandpa dozes off, leaving Alton in charge.

I must have imagined that scene -- really seen it, tasted the air and heard the slap of waves -- so intently that it's nearly as strong as a real memory. Strange. And a little alarming. Maybe when I was young I didn't drop a torpedo into a two-meter hole on the Death Star, after all.

Time For a Change

2010-06-30T13:26:00.004-04:00

It's not that querying isn't fun. It's more fun than a water slide. Euuwaahuah!

And it's not that boatbuilding isn't rolling along in its crickety, gluey, sawdusty, wood-bendy way. Though I admit it's inconvenient that my progress these days looks little different from months back, except that what was temporarily clamped or braced into position for the photos in those days is now permanently installed.

No, it's the husky voice, the quiet voice, the fingernails-down-your-neck voice. The dark-hallway-at-night voice. The glimpse of blue moonlight and shadows under the bushes. The sound of a train across miles of frozen cornfields. The ... where was I?

The old memory, so quickly staled, of writing. Not revising, or tinkering with query sentences, or thinking about plot structure. Writing.

And writing something different. I've lived in the world of Quartermoon Bay, with its tragedies and joys, piercing sorrows and the slow-burn of defiance, for so long that I'm ready to stretch and hop sideways into another story.

This one, maybe. I see a yellowed advertisement from a centuries-old newspaper: Sought: Brave Men Unafraid Of Cold. What happens next? What happened before? I have to write it to find out.

Or this one, which continues to buzz around my head like a bumblebee trapped in a jar. I'm tempted to lift the glass and see where it bumbles.

It's time for a change: to start something new again.

Someday I Will Remember All This

2010-06-23T12:12:00.002-04:00

Last night I applied the first fillets to the boat! A fillet is a goober of peanut butter-thick epoxy that reinforces the seam where two plywood pieces come together, usually at an angle. The fillet is then covered with fiberglass tape and painted with unthickened epoxy.

It's kind of like attaching two index cards together with a bead of chewing gum and then a strip of tape along the inside of the seam. I'll need these fillets all over the boat, to provide extra strength in high-impact areas, but these were the first I installed, in and around the motorwell just to give it extra strength (along with stainless steel through-bolts, high-grain-count yellow pine, and plenty of epoxy glue.

The other reason to start with these is they'll be less visible than nearly every other fillet on the boat, and I want to get the ugly practice fillets out of the way before putting in the visible ones. For these you'll have to grope around inside the aft lazarette (storage compartment) even to feel them.

And with that the thought struck me: Someday, when I'm sailing a hard reach across blue water, or drifting off a marshy shoreline under the heavy thunderheads of August, my hand will graze that first fillet and I'll be transported back, across the years in an instant, to the hot garage with its boat skeleton, and the smell of epoxy and plywood sanding dust.

Notice How I Didn't Soil Myself

2010-06-18T12:05:00.002-04:00

Sometimes an event will take place that is so earth-shattering, it knocks aside my typical writing and boatbuilding self-indulgences. This happened last night, and it involve a four-foot dowel and a shot of single malt!

Everybody knows the spider armies have been massing in my lawn, preparing a nightmarish assault on the world of giant bipeds (us). For a few nights now I've been shiveringly shining my not-nearly-bright enough flashlight on the driveway next to the garage, where a palm-sized, starfish-lookin', kitten-eating wolf spider flexes its arachnid biceps and makes faces back at me.

Ha ha, I tell it nervously, hopping sideways to avoid turning my back on it, ha ha, there's a good spider, you just staaaay there.

So when I came home after work yesterday to find a spider curled inside the top corner of our entryway like a brown fist, I calmly changed into biking clothes and rode as fast as I could for an hour and a half.

Later in the evening I (my wife) decided the spider had to go. While it was great that our house was instantly cleared of bugs, one of our cats was unaccounted for and that wouldn't do.

At this point I discovered I have a mild phobia of spiders, and that things I thought I was afraid of (heights, biting deer, grinning old men in the dark) were in fact not phobias whatsoever. I found a four-foot dowel and a large glass bowl, and, sweating, tried to knock the spider off the ceiling into the bowl.

Was the bowl in my hand? No it most certainly was not. It was on the floor, where the non-web-spinning spider would fall into it.

When the dowel approached the hell-spider, it curled up, then reared back and attacked the dowel. The thing was fighting the dowel. This would be akin to me, upon encountering, say, the Eiffel Tower poking at me, assuming a kung-fu pose and beckoning fifty stories of steel to come dance, mofo.

The spider fought; I clenched and sweated, and eventually knocked it down the wall. At which point the non-web-spinning spider lowered itself on a strand of silk and dangled there. So much for bug identification. We looped the strand, dropped it into the bowl, and I took it far, far away outside to release into the darkness.

I dried my palms and decided the salty brown fire of Talisker would be the best thing for the shaking. And it was.

Book Gluttony

2010-06-17T12:18:00.002-04:00

The only trouble with reading British children's books like Swallows and Amazons is that they tend to go quickly. Since last week I've churned through my third or fourth re-read of Winter Holiday and -- though I was pacing myself -- just finished Terry Pratchett's excellent Nation last night.

(Morning reading: Worse Than War, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Part of my ongoing attempt to understand human and institutional cruelty. Also finished that yesterday).

Which means that in the evenings I've moved on to Pigeon Post, another Ransome classic. This morning I started Suzanne LaFleur's Love, Aubrey. I read a review of this (recent) book and its quiet tale of sadness, independence, and determination seemed similar to my first book. Plus I like the voice.

"That's all great," you might say. "But what about when you go out of town, or need something bigger to read?" Ha, I'm ready with Victor Klemperer's diary of the Nazi years, I Will Bear Witness. Which happens to be one of the themes of my recent book, so I'm curious to see how it's expressed in nonfiction.

It was only last summer that I read David Mitchell's superb Cloud Atlas, a book that defies genre and even tidy explanation. I can best describe it as the series of rings left by a plunging stone in a pond. Is it too early to re-read? Probably. But I think Mitchell has a new book out. And then there's Alan Furst's atmospheric mysteries: I've never been a mystery reader but man oh man do I love the voice and scenery in those.

There are more, there are always more.

Garden Parties and Lime Candy

2010-06-11T13:13:00.004-04:00

Someone whose theology includes healthy doses of Katzanzakis and Jagger should not claim to be an authority on tropes in literature. So I won't! But in re-reading the Swallows and Amazons books, I'm struck, as I am each time, by the singularity of, well, British children's literature.

Arthur Ransome, Edith Nesbit, Barrie, Kenneth Grahame ... and surely countless others (Lewis, Tolkien, some of Susan Cooper) write characters that somehow all form part of the same world for me. And while surely parts of that world should be critically examined, for me it is a delightful retreat.

I think of leaf-shadows dancing on table cloths, floral-print dresses, tinned milk and oilcloth. The sweet sharp taste of jewel-like green candies. John and the Swallows meeting Nancy and Peggy Blackett for the first time; the pebbly beach of Wildcat Island; the sense of potential, almost like a breath held, of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy when they explore Professor Kirk's mysterious empty house.

I suppose it could be twee, if taken too far. And it seamlessly merges, as these things do, into what came before as well as what comes after. Victorian novels, gritty YA.

Someone once said a book is another country, and the precious (precocious?) charm of British literature is a place I've been happily spending much time lately.

Now, back to Winter Holiday. Dick and Dorothea have stumbled to the North Pole ... but it's empty. Meanwhile the others launch a rescue expedition across the ice at night!

Solution to Boatbuilding Manliness

2010-06-08T12:46:00.005-04:00

I frequently find myself being too manly. Fortunately, I've found a solution: gender-specific hardware tools! I always buy the ones meant "just for ladies" to bring myself back down to a level appropriate for polite society.

A few weeks ago, when gluing the slippery three-layer port chine, I decided to install a temporary, narrow through-bolt just to help hold everything together. After the glue set, I reasoned, I'll just back it back out.

What happened instead was that I torqued the head right off the bolt. It was a very thin piece of steel -- maybe 5/32 diameter (because I didn't want a huge hole through my chine), and, naturally, it's stuck to the glue inside.

No worries, sez I, I'll just heat up the bolt, soften the epoxy, and draw it out. One pastel-blue glue gun later, and I've discovered that glue guns do not get very hot at all. Only hot enough to melt glue, you could say.

Next step: a soldering iron. Off to Michael's, our local craft shop. The heady scent of pressed flowers and old perfume always makes me think of a pillow-carpeted and water pipe haze-filled harem, with pale eunuchs lolling on velvet, and inbred royalty painting moles on their sunken chins.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Bravely in I went in and found a soldering iron. It's Designed For Her®. Sweet.

With this manly tool I shall heat my bolts and draw them from the chine like young Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone! With any luck I'll ding it up, maybe spill some epoxy on it. You know, just so it fits in with the other tools.

I just hope nobody finds the empty blister pack among the used paintbrushes and wood chips in the trash.

Swine-opsis

2010-06-02T12:12:00.004-04:00

I have described a 109,000-word novel in a 1000-word synopsis. How did that feel, you ask? Like extracting my skeleton from my body, standing it against a wall, and -- using my boneless rubbery hands -- sketching a picture of it with a sharp rock. In thirty seconds.

People complain about writing synopses all the time. It is, without doubt, a difficult thing to take months (if not years) of planning, suffering, writing and revising; the agonies and triumphs of characters; twining subplots and symbolism ... and compress it all into a hard little pellet.

But it's necessary. Let's be realistic: two single-spaced pages is a lot of text. And sure, you may have to remove the art and the joy and all the subtlety of which you're so proud, but so what? The synopsis isn't the book.

Defying the expectations of the publishing world and refusing to write a synopsis could be the start of a brave new defiance! Brave new voice! Look, he has thwarted the litero-industrial complex and toppled the fusty paradigms!

Of course, refusing to play by the rules is also the shortest path to rejection. Second shortest path? Writing crap.

So I take my synopsis and I take my knife and I trim. And I trim. And I trim.

Boat Dreams

2010-05-25T21:50:00.003-04:00

He would wake up, sometimes, in the nights after Grandpa died, and open the window to hear the wind in the trees and smell the river's thick sweet muddy scent. Stars and mud and the whiskery scrape of long grass in the yard that even now needed to be mowed.

And he would remember that loud voice, sharper than the howl of a saw or the screeching planer, and the stubbed fingers and dirty nails, old hands stronger than his young hands would ever be.

All the bottles with their faded labels sat on the sagging shelves, covered with sawdust.

Dust to dust.

He leaves the window open and in the morning the little bedroom in his grandparents' house is filled with birdsong, and he creeps downstairs in his socks, peeling them off before he reaches the dewy grass. Leaves silver dew-tracks in the long grass, a trail to the river, wraithed in fog.

And the dew-tracks lead up to the garage, with its stacks of wood and ancient tools. And there in the center, on sawhorses older than him, the beginnings of a boat. A new boat built by an old man and a young boy.

He whispers the unfamiliar words. Frames. Stringers. Chine. Bilge. Runs his finger along a curving piece of fir, jumps back at the splinter's pain, pops his finger in his mouth, tastes the sweet crumbly dust.

Dust to dust.

He swallows, twice. Clears his throat. Picks up the tools and returns to work.

Hey! What's your favorite planet?

2010-05-21T13:44:00.003-04:00

Mine's the sun.

Rejected blog post ideas:

I have lost control of my eyebrows.

What if cookies grew on trees and you had to construct tomatoes and bananas in the kitchen? Hey you kids, get away from my tree, the cookies are almost done!

Cats: Nature's consolation prize.

The Dialectic Epistemologies of Funk, or, How I Escaped Academics and Gave Myself to the Music

"Donkey" is pronounced differently than "monkey." Why?

We all know that animals can't get much bigger because the physics of weight-bearing structures would, for example, cause a two-story ant to collapse. But how small could animals get? I would like a flock of moth-sized bats fluttering around me. Take notice, world. I await compliance.

Do deer scream?

What are Tootsie Rolls made out of and how can I convince myself they're all-natural?

Bending properties of scarphed fir.

"This boat is fully operational": would my boat sink if I launched it right now? It has no sides but is completely made of wood. Except for the 45 pounds of lead in the centerboard.

Speaking of the boat, why haven't I see any crickets in the shop? What in God's name is hunting them?

Imagine a world of sentient bats and stupid but powerful humans. The bats might have stories about the superhero Manbat, who has all the normal attributes of a bat but also some hominid superpowers (ability to walk on hind legs, burp on command) and features (nose, thumbs).

"Who are you?"
"I'm ... Manbat!"

Fear in the Desert: Revision

2010-05-17T12:14:00.002-04:00

Done? It's never done. But I've tweaked this a little following the notes below, plus made a few other changes. This version is, I like to think, cleaner and more closely approximates what's in my head: the movement, the colors, the smells, the taste of dust and fear.

FEAR IN THE DESERT

Curtains of red and blue beads swayed as the caravan lurched across the burning waste. A hand the color of dried leather parted the fall of color. Three v-shapes of blue inked the spaces between the copper knuckles: three wolves’ heads.

Gripping the hand was a falcon; hooked talons ended in four spots of blood. The falcon flew across the sand and rock. The curtain closed. Of this the driver, perched atop the caravan, heard nor saw nothing: a mute since birth, he had been blinded for this task. Rags of no color wrapped his head save for an opening at this nose, and he twitched his head, snuffing the shimmering air.

“The falcon will not return,” said the man who had released it, licking the blood from his wrist. The figure facing him made no response. He expected none. For him this was a humor.

“She will not,” he said again.

The figure was slight, hunched, and showed no skin nor, in fact, any sign of life. Its head was draped in thin fabric that perhaps had once been patterned with a thousand tiny images, or words to a forgotten language.

The man pursed his lips. Ran his dry tongue across his yellowed teeth. Folded his hands so his left fingertips rested on the blue wolves’ heads.

He had been tempted, oh, how he had burned with temptation, to lift the faded fabric to see the passenger’s face. This passenger who had never spoken and who sat, day after day, in the darkened caravan while he performed the necessities to keep it alive. Keep it happy? Keep it subdued?

Alive, he decided.

“Faster, up there!” he called to the deaf driver. At this the figure leaned forward, as if it was going to speak, or even rise, and he tensed. When he realized it was falling he tightened his lips and, wrapping his hand into the deep indigo of his sleeve, pressed the thing back upright.

He jerked back. Even through the fabric he could feel it. Warm.

As he had a thousand times, across a thousand miles, he swallowed, stroked the wolves’ heads, and reached to pull back its hood. And as he knew he would, he stopped.

Instead his hand went to a brass carafe stopped with a wooden plug. When he opened it the liquid stank of urine and old milk.

He leaned forward and poured the unguent over the figure’s wrapped head. The liquid soaked the old cloth instantly, gluing the fabric to the figure’s features. He narrowed his eyes. Leaned forward. He could almost make out its face.

The fabric moved.

He was struck, motionless as stone.

The fabric moved as a mouth opened below the ancient pattern,. The yawning hole was outlined in faded colors through the wet cloth.

He breathed through his mouth. There was a smell, a strange and bad smell. Yet familiar.

He tried to swallow but his throat was too dry.

He raised his fingers, shivering. Then he pulled back the terrible veil.

Fear in the Desert: Problems

2010-05-14T12:14:00.003-04:00

Stories and boats: two things that aren't ever quite done. The "Fear in the Desert" piece below continues to rankle me. So for a window into the craziness of revising, I'm going for a public self-flagellation.

Come with me, won't you, on a journey up the creaking attic stairs to the cobwebbed place, boarded-over and dark, where the darkness is crowded with shapes that may or may not be hungry. Revisionland.

First step in revising is to go through and write angry and insulting notes to myself about practically everything. (Next time I'll look at fixing the problems; today the challenge is to find them.)

Here we go:

FEAR IN THE DESERT

The [why 'the'? couldn't they be any curtains? seems needlessly specific] red and blue beaded [this is an adj. may be stronger as a noun: curtains of beads] curtains swayed as the caravan lurched across the burning waste. A hand parted the fall of color [have to admit, I love this], a hand [repetition seems precious; too clever for its own good?] the color of dried leather [great, implies mummies]. Three v-shapes of blue inked the spaces between the copper knuckles: three wolves’ heads.

On the hand was a falcon [is this a tattoo too?] and the falcon flew [evidently not. but the dreamlike language is distancing and makes things a little unclear. OK if intentional.] across the sand and rock. The curtain closed. Of this the driver, perched atop the caravan, heard nor saw nothing: a mute since birth, he had been blinded for this task. Rags of no color wrapped his head save for an opening at this nose, and he twitched his head, snuffing the air.

“The falcon will not return,” said the man who had released it. The figure facing him, nearly shimmering [isn't it dark inside the caravan?] in the incandescent heat, made no response. He expected none, but for him this was a humor ['a' humor seems contrived.].

“She will not,” he said again.

The figure was slight, hunched, and showed no skin nor, in fact, any sign of life. Over its head was draped [passive voice] thin-woven [isn't it enough to say 'thin'?]fabric that perhaps had once been patterned with a thousand tiny images, or words to a forgotten language.

The man pursed his lips. Ran his dry tongue across his yellowed teeth. Folded his hands so his left fingertips rested on the blue wolves’ heads.

He had been tempted, oh, how he had burned with temptation, to lift the thin [word repetition] and faded fabric to see the passenger’s face. This passenger who had never spoken and who sat, day after day, in the darkened caravan while he performed the necessities to keep it alive. Keep it happy? Keep it subdued?

Alive, he decided.

“Faster, up there!” he called to the deaf driver. At this the figure leaned forward, as if it was going to rise, or even speak [reverse; speak is less interesting than rise, so end with rise], and he tensed. When he realized it was falling he tightened his lips and, wrapping his hand into the deep indigo of his sleeve, pressed it back upright.

He jerked back. Even through the fabric he could feel it. Warm.

As he had a thousand times, across a thousand miles, he swallowed, stroked the wolves’ heads, and reached to pull back its hood. And as he had [seems like a lot of As and Ds here. Clumsy wording], as he knew he would, he stopped.

Instead his hand went to a brass carafe stopped with a wooden plug. When he opened it the liquid smelled of salt and new milk [almost evocative but mostly just weird.]. It was time [melodramatic; makes me think of Thundercats or something equally cheesy].

He leaned forward and poured the unguent over the figure’s wrapped head. The liquid soaked the old cloth instantly, and it clung [misplaced modifier: the liquid clung? even if correct it's unclear = no good.] to the figure’s features. He narrowed his eyes. Leaned forward. He could almost make out its face.

The fabric moved.

He was struck, motionless as stone.

The fabric moved as, under the ancient pattern, a mouth opened. The yawning hole was outlined [passive] in faded colors through the wet cloth.

He breathed through his mouth. There was a smell, a strange and bad smell. Yet familiar.

He tried to swallow but his throat was too dry.

He raised his fingers and, shivering, [wording sequence not quite right here. call out 'shivering' more with its own sentence?] pulled back the terrible veil.

Fear in the Desert

2010-05-09T16:14:00.005-04:00

I can't shake the image of a caravan, alone in the desert. Where is it going? Who's inside? I can see it but I know nothing about it. Here's one answer: this week's Sunday Scribblings topic, which is Courage.

FEAR IN THE DESERT

The red and blue beaded curtains swayed as the caravan lurched across the burning waste. A hand parted the fall of color, a hand the color of dried leather. Three v-shapes of blue inked the spaces between the copper knuckles: three wolves’ heads.

On the hand was a falcon and the falcon flew across the sand and rock. The curtain closed. Of this the driver, perched atop the caravan, heard nor saw nothing: a mute since birth, he had been blinded for this task. Rags of no color wrapped his head save for an opening at this nose, and he twitched his head, snuffing the air.

“The falcon will not return,” said the man who had released it. The figure facing him, nearly shimmering in the incandescent heat, made no response. He expected none, but for him this was a humor.

“She will not,” he said again.

The figure was slight, hunched, and showed no skin nor, in fact, any sign of life. Over its head was draped thin-woven fabric that perhaps had once been patterned with a thousand tiny images, or words to a forgotten language.

The man pursed his lips. Ran his dry tongue across his yellowed teeth. Folded his hands so his left fingertips rested on the blue wolves’ heads.

He had been tempted, oh, how he had burned with temptation, to lift the thin and faded fabric to see the passenger’s face. This passenger who had never spoken and who sat, day after day, in the darkened caravan while he performed the necessities to keep it alive. Keep it happy? Keep it subdued?

Alive, he decided.

“Faster, up there!” he called to the deaf driver. At this the figure leaned forward, as if it was going to rise, or even speak, and he tensed. When he realized it was falling he tightened his lips and, wrapping his hand into the deep indigo of his sleeve, pressed it back upright.

He jerked back. Even through the fabric he could feel it. Warm.

As he had a thousand times, across a thousand miles, he swallowed, stroked the wolves’ heads, and reached to pull back its hood. And as he had, as he knew he would, he stopped.

Instead his hand went to a brass carafe stopped with a wooden plug. When he opened it the liquid smelled of salt and new milk. It was time.

He leaned forward and poured the unguent over the figure’s wrapped head. The liquid soaked the old cloth instantly, and it clung to the figure’s features. He narrowed his eyes. Leaned forward. He could almost make out its face.

The fabric moved.

He was struck, motionless as stone.

The fabric moved as, under the ancient pattern, a mouth opened. The yawning hole was outlined in faded colors through the wet cloth.

He breathed through his mouth. There was a smell, a strange and bad smell. Yet familiar.

He tried to swallow but his throat was too dry.

He raised his fingers and, shivering, pulled back the terrible veil.

Starboard Chine

2010-05-03T12:20:00.004-04:00

To me the words "starboard chine," if I squint with my mind, call up images of some foreign harbor at night, with colored lights reflecting on muddy water and the creaking mooring lines of big wooden ships. Yar, it just sounds nautical.

Of course, the starboard chine is also the part of the boat that lines the corner between the (flat) bottom and (nearly vertical) side. This is a critical part of the boat: if your chine unzips you're in trouble. Solution: three long pieces of fir, layered to take the gentle corkscrew shape of the side of the boat as it swoops into the bow.

I wanted to minimize fastenings here so the wood -- under severe strain as it bends -- didn't break. I'd shattered several pieces when mocking this up, so it was a real possibility.

I mixed up what felt like several gallons of epoxy and got to work in the 82-degree shop. While I was securing the inner strip, the epoxy, which is exothermic, got hotter and hotter. As I was holding the plastic container (nee Eggdrop Soup), I noticed it was actually burning my hand.

At this point it started to smoke, and I, like a safety-goggle-wearing ballerina, leaped through the frames and scrap wood, twisted past the table saw, vaulted the worklight, the old air conditioner, and the bucket of other scrap wood, and went galloping through the yard with the smoking pot.

Hose; water; fire averted. Back to work!

Installing the inner strip was easy, since a dozen screws hold it to the bottom of the boat. The inner strip and the outer strip are held on solely through epoxy and force of will. After much fidgeting, and only a little dropping-pieces-and-covering-them-with-crud, I stood back, sticky with epoxy, and surveyed the carnage:

Mess everywhere, and the starboard chine installed. Success!

Done with revisions!

2010-04-27T12:22:00.003-04:00

I have finally completed revisions! Forever! That's it!

[waits for laughter to stop; wonders why there's sharp cheddar but no such thing as dull cheddar; wishes he could have another look at that last MS page.]

Ha ha. Phew. What a comical way to start a blog post. A book is like a pencil: the more you use it the more it needs to be sharpened. So what I'm done with are the CURRENT round of revisions. The book is now closer to my vision than it ever has been.

At least, until the next revisions. It never stops.

Now all I have to do is decipher my notes; disagree with nearly everything I decided to do; un-disagree; write "stet" and cross it out and write it again and cross it out; and type thousands of glittering little improvements that accumulate and make this story burn and shine. Because this is what I want:

I want the story to catch fire in readers' minds.

What's the difference between published and not published?

Wait, I'll make it even broader. For any endeavor, what's the difference between successful and not successful?

It's not intelligence, or society-shattering good looks (trust me, if that were the case I'd be selling books like crazy. Am I right, ladies?). It's not the ability to whistle while inhaling (handy for long solos) or wiggling your ears individually (check and check). Special judo-like cat-claw-clipping techniques? Watermelon seed-spitting accuracy? Freakish adherence to a single brand of coffee? Kindness to stray dogs and small children? Lackadaisical approach to gutter-cleaning-out?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

The difference between success and failure is one thing: work.

And I doubt it's a coincidence that it's one of the few things we can actually control.

Violence and Stories

2010-04-22T13:09:00.004-04:00

I've pondered whether, and how, to write this, but that was taking way too long. This is a blog, after all, so I've decided I can get away with slightly meandering prose and incomplete

I'm not sure when a movie review became a springboard for social commentary (maybe when movies themselves stopped being the springboards) but A. O. Scott in the New York Times last week takes aim -- I think -- at violence in movies. Or maybe it's depictions of violence. Or maybe it's when children are doing it, or being subjected to it. It's a little hard to tell: if I were critiquing the article I'd advise the writer either to write more and fulfill the promise of the premise, or less so we don't get our hopes up.

In any case, here's my issue. There are some truly valid points raised here: inuring audiences to graphic depictions of violence; the message for children when they see their heroes committing violent acts, or subjected to them.

And the article, to Scott's credit, does throw one lifeline out of the quicksand of its own rhetoric: "It is, of course, the acts themselves that are cruel."

I know movies and books should be, at times, an escape from a cruel world, or a mundane one. I know we all, and especially children, are impressionable creatures. I know it's irresponsible to wantonly expose people to the message that casual violence is acceptable.

But casual violence exists. Random cruelty exists. Anyone who complains that it's unreasonable to show the torment of children -- or, and the author seems undecided on whether this is worse -- children committing acts of violent or vengeful cruelty -- should make that case to a room of child soldiers or traumatized war orphans -- pick your continent, pick your skin color, pick your century.

My point is that although I am opposed to shock for shock's sake (and shlock for shlock's), I find it reprehensible -- cowardly -- to pretend that any of us is somehow immune to cruelty.

The world has light and it has darkness; inexplicable cruelty and loss, and surprising joy; unfairness as well as delight unlooked-for. I guess what I'm advocating is balance: don't anesthetize us, but don't traumatize us either.

As far as movies go: watch them or don't watch them as you choose. But if you're opposed to violence and cruelty, perhaps a place to start is where those exist in the world, rather than in the stylized depictions of them.

This Coffee Tastes Catty

2010-04-20T11:55:00.003-04:00

From yesterday's New York Times: the revelatory discovery that not only can you make coffee from cat-excreted coffee beans, it's actually a sought-after delicacy.

What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

It's not just any cat, but the Indonesian quasi-cat called the civet. The civets eat the coffee beans (?), deposit them (??), they are collected with sighs of delights (???) and then ground into delicious coffee (!??!??).

Now. I love my coffee. After a vigorous campaign of sighing and feeling sorry for myself, our local grocery store finally caved and now carries Peet's Coffee again, so once more I have the strength to face the day.

But civet-crapped coffee!? I'm sorry, that's just ... I mean, can you even imagine ... Okay, who am I kidding, I would try it. There, I said it!

After all, when you're, say, wandering the jungles of Java, and you find some droppings that look curiously like coffee beans -- and you have a roaster, grinder, press, fire, and water -- why not just go for it?

In this vein I'd like to suggest some other untraditional uses for animals:

-- temporary tattoos made from butterflies that cling to you (the ink sinks in and they fly off, colorless)
-- clothes made from worm excreta (never mind, somebody's already thought of that.)
-- trained snakes to hunt rabbits (they're just the right shape for snaking down rabbit holes; also for finding lost socks behind the dryer)
-- horse trumpets (don't ask)
-- flying piranhas

Okay, Nature, get to work!

Pallid Cave-Dweller Reporting For Duty

2010-04-15T07:47:00.005-04:00

Yesterday was one of those rare spring days with bright sun and cool air; dew glittering on the pines. I had laudable plans to go for a long bike ride after work.

But then again, I AM revising a book. So I when I got home I walked past my pile of biking clothes, patted my wheel regretfully, stared through the garage windows at the dinosaur-like boat skeleton ... and sat down with my manuscript and a pen. There is work to be done here.

And lo, from outside I heard the shouts of children playing, and bike riders whirring past, and birds singing, and all the delightful and joyous hum of spring; and the late sun shone golden and the breeze caressed ... other people. Not me.

For I sat inside away from the sunlight world, growing pale and Gollum-like, blinking at the pages and my scrawled edits, grinding stone against stone to produce the fine dust of revision. We grind, and the work grinds us, and it grindeth us exceedingly small.

On the upside, though, I got to feel sorry for myself. Never a bad thing!

As far as the revisions go, I oscillate spastically from despair ("This is utter garbage") to trembling joy ("This will change the world"). Usually within the same breath.

Solution: up at 5 today to black coffee, a chilly sunrise and more revisions; then this afternoon I get to play outside with the other kids.

Stringers complete!

2010-04-13T12:31:00.002-04:00

Completely scarphed, that is, not completely installed. I've scarphed 18 of the suckers, each requiring a floppy ten foot by 1-inch square piece of fragrant pink fir, with a very, very, very delicate feather-edge angle trimmed into one end.

Once glued, the twenty-foot pieces are even floppier. But I have them. Finally! Sixteen plus two in case of breakage. 'Cause hey, wood breaks.

Then again, it also floats, so I figure we're about even with fiberglass, aluminum, steel, all those other boatbuilding materials.

Oops, and it won't kill you when it gets on your skin. Go wood!

Ahem. In any case, having liberated my workbench from epoxy shavings, sheets of plastic, two heat lamps, a digital thermometer, a few dozen clamps, heavy steel weights, safety glasses, ear protectors, scraper, chisel, other scraper, silica powder, rubber gloves, epoxy mixing station, mixing sticks, plastic container, and other gluing detritus, I can now proceed with next steps: bunk flat supports (these hold up the "floor" of the boat) and the bunk flats themselves (the "floor".

The chine stringers are still awaiting a stretch of warm days to coincide with me not being at work so I can glue them in. We've hit 80 a few times and I quit using the heat lamps on the stringers several weeks ago.

As the monkey said about his tail after he backed into the lawn mower: won't be long now.

O Spring, thou cruel minx

2010-04-05T14:10:00.003-04:00

80 degrees? In April? Spring blossoms have an actual smell; it's not just poetry.

Each year I forget and each year I remember again, and the smell takes me to the small house we lived in until I was in fifth grade. A small blossoming tree droops over a cracked sidewalk; three brown steps and a leaning iron rail. In the summer you could palm moths on the marigolds. Inside we watched black-and-white Superman reruns and, if it was a good day, TV dinner while Buck Rogers was on. I stood on those basement stairs and wept when I heard my grandfather had died.

I buried a pet in the back yard; we moved when I was nine and I always wondered if some curious child would find, ten inches down from the edge of the metal shed, the towel-wrapped tiny bones of a guinea pig. What pets would they have? Where would they bury them?

So now when I pause while taking out the trash, or walking the dog, or stretching after a run, and I close my eyes and inhale that breath of spring, thirty years flicker past like an eyeblink, and I think of that old house and that young family and the sidewalk with weeds in the cracks.

Then the wind blows, bending the snow-weakened pines, and I think of the sound of river water against a wooden bow. I can almost smell that low-tide mud. And I think of epoxy and curving wood, and the scrape of sharp of tools, and the sound of a man's voice now ten years dead.

How broad life seems on the first warm day of spring.

In Which I Explore Chapter Titles

2010-03-31T12:01:00.002-04:00

Revising a manuscript is like repairing dry rot from the hull of a boat. The deeper you dig, the more you find that needs work

For example, chapters. I am a notoriously fast reader (not just famous; I'm INfamous) and many times will not even consciously notice that I've crossed into a new chapter. This may explain why only now am I realizing how many ways there are to signal a new chapter. (I don't mean a scene break, for which I usually employ two hard returns).

Chapter 1

Chapter 1
The Harrowing of Edward Deane

The Harrowing of Edward Deane

Chapter 1
Edward is chased; his flight through the forest; he comes to a strange place; what befell him there.

Chapter One: In which Edward is chased through the forest.

Chapter 1
Twelve leagues he fled
the forest bare
His trail was red
His eyes they stared
-- from the Lost Book of the Sudmark

Okay, I KNOW it's doggerel. Point is, once I started playing around with chapter titles, it was as if I'd fallen down a long well with no bottom. I've settled on the simplest version:

Chapter 1
The Harrowing of Edward Deane.

Adding in fictional epigrams can always be done later. Which reminds me of my favorite, from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat,perhaps the funniest book I've ever read:

"I forget I am steering. Interesting result. Strange disappearance of Harris and a pie."

Soothing words

2010-03-25T12:47:00.002-04:00

There, there. Night-night. Rest your head on the pages of the book and...

...slowly...

..fall...

...

asleep...

No! Bad! Soothing words are for lullabies and corporate memos. I don't want my writing to put people to sleep; I want to scare them, galvanize them, make them weep and laugh and stare, shaken, into the distance. I want to keep them awake at night, reading under the covers until, red-eyed and lost, they stumble through the next day.

Stories have power; let us not anesthetize them with soothing words.

What do I mean by soothing words? Well, self, I'm glad you asked. This morning I half-seriously did a search of my manuscript for:

There
was
were
felt
thought
saw
looked

In some cases (like deliberately simple dialog), these are okay. In many (of my) cases, they are not. They are soothing! Drip by morphinic drip, they anesthetize and ... uh ... lull reader to ... to...uhh... zzzzzz.

Exactly.

My challenge, now that my manuscript is peppered with florid yellow highlights of these energy-killing words, is to replace them when possible. The scary thing is that I had no idea how often I fall back on them. I think most writers -- certainly including me -- are tired, or intimidated, or lazy, or confused, or insufficiently committed during the first draft. That's okay.

The problem comes when that uncertainty, and its attendant uncertain words, carries through into revisions.

We all have words we lean on like crutches. First drafts need crutches. But for a good story: stand up straight, hurl away your leaning stick like Odysseus in the great hall, and shake the reader out of the complacency of every-day life. Isn't that why we read?

Lessons

2010-03-23T12:12:00.002-04:00

Stringer gluing continues. I think I have nine or ten of the sixteen needed ... though if any more snap when I try to bend the complex curves I'm going to need more than sixteen.

First lesson of boatbuilding: plan for failure.

With this recent spate of warm weather it's been hard to make myself scrape glue in the shop instead of frolic outside. More frolicking, less building.

Second lesson of boatbuilding: it will get done if you work on it. If you don't ... it won't.

One of the things taking me away from stringer gluing is book revisions. I keep saying this, but I mean it this time! I think I'm in the home stretch.

Third lesson of boatbuilding: balance it with other hobbies.

Right now I'm outlining, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, every section of the book. It's generating a large spreadsheet that, even as I build it, is letting me see the rhythm of scenes (choppy? languid? tense? relaxed) and the balance of points of view, energy, and emotion. I only wish I'd stumbled across Anita Nolan's "The End is Only the Beginning" sooner. Because this outline method -- laborious as it is -- is proving to be incredibly useful.

In fact, sometimes I think the difficulty of something is the best indication that it's helpful.

Fourth lesson of boatbuilding: hard is not bad.

I Nearly Forgot the World

2010-03-17T13:11:00.002-04:00

As I swim through the quicksand slurry that is revision, I have found that it's time to further flesh out (not "flush out," as current corporate speak would have it) the world that embraces the story.

I've heard -- and felt the tidal pull -- of the desire to play God, to sketch maps and outline lines of kingly descent, to chart trading routes, ocean currents, street names, economies. To build an imagined world so richly complete that it can seem more real than our own. And this is now my task -- or at least, to continue this.

But the reason I haven't done too much of this already is that I wanted to tell the story first.

Story first, quoth I! Now that that story is written I can go back and fill in the blank spots on the map. I worried that if I did it the other way around -- world first -- I'd go so distracted and fascinated by it -- not to mention intimidated by the vastness -- that I'd never get around the story.

Plus, the story called to me.

So this morning I sipped you-know-what and made up city names, roads, cosmologies. It's a task that could go on forever. After all, look at our own world, where we still struggle to catalog and understand its complexity. But in this case my guide is the story. IT determines relevance, not me. Which is wonderful and humbling.

Stringer update: #4 is complete!

Attention, stringers

2010-03-16T21:44:00.004-04:00

Boatbuilding update:

Stringers built: 3
Stringers still intact: 2
Stringers still to be built: 14

But things are moving: #4 is clamped to the workbench as I type this, wrapped in plastic and heat clamps, curing away at a happy 86.1 degrees.

When I unclamped the last two stringers, they were long and rubbery-soft, unwieldy twenty-foot strips flopping all over the place. Kinda tricky in a 23-foot garage.

The great thing about these is test-clamping them in place to show the sheer (edge) of the boat and -- evidently -- to test their bendiness.

Breaking a stringer is a very clear signal that that particular stringer probably wasn't up to the job. Of bending. Which is the whole reason for a stringer's existence.

Luckily, although #2 is now in three pieces on the floor of the garage (after the first break I bent it again, unbelieving. It broke again. Now I believe.), #3 has been behaving much better and in fact has become a bit of a show-off, here arcing gracefully out of frame as the shattered remnants of #2 look on. See, #2? That's how it's done.

Did I mention I talk to myself while boatbuilding? What?

Finally, the GOOD stringer clamped in place. The shape of the boat is really starting to take ... shape.

Hi, remember me?

2010-03-10T21:34:00.002-05:00

The blog? The what now? Blog?

Ah, yes. Truth be told I've been too busy working to write about working. Then it seemed out-of-scale to provide tiny updates: after so long a pause, shouldn't the next update be truly momentous? Yes, I agree: it should. So here goes!

Explosions! Dinosaurs riding flaming motorcycles! Robot cowboys shooting flaming bullets! Planetary collision! DNA collisions! Tidal waves! Wowee-wowee-wow!

In other news, I continue to watch the sunrises through a screen of black trees (if I'm out on a run) or from over a cup of Sumatra Dark and a stack of manuscript pages (if I'm editing). I've nearly perfected my warm-up-wood-so-it-can-be-glued technique, just in time for the weather to warm up and thus render my technique unnecessary. Oh, spring, how vexing you are.

Tiny nubs are just starting to appear on the trees. I heard birdsong today and it felt like waking up after a long and restful sleep. I can smell wet dirt outside. Spring is coming: warm weather, boatbuilding and FINISHING THE BLASTED DRAFT ALREADY.

Ha ha! I kid. No draft is ever finished.

This n That

2010-03-02T12:02:00.002-05:00

La! I am back from the frozen north after several days of cold fingers, ice climbing, and mountain climbing. It was the first time I'd done any of that, and now all I want to do is strap on crampons and climb blue ice.

The trip gave me a much-needed break from book revisions; so much so that when my dad asked where I was in the process I had to struggle to remember:

"Uh, I made a list of five big changes. One of them involved ... the ending? I think?"

It also gave me a similarly much-needed break from boatbuilding (also involving sharp things and cold fingers, come to think of it). Upon my return to the shop I found it difficult to believe that I had ripped all those fir strips. That must have taken forever. Fortunately my brain just dumped that file so I barely remember it. Thanx, brain!

So now I find myself, post-summit, with a new desk (my grandfather's), five solid changes to make to the book (it's okay now; these will make it good), and what seem like three hundred long strips of fir to scarph into twenty-foot pieces.

How sad it would be to have nothing to do!

North

2010-02-17T12:37:00.003-05:00

[This weekend I am traveling north to climb a mountain, putting me in mind of piles of crated expedition equipment, the breath of dogs puffing at the train station, the smell of locomotive grease and woodsmoke on a cold day.]

Professor H. M. Wracksen, Univ. of Nordencap, 13th Jul.

Recv'd yr note of June last; original response to same lost in gale with tent and 6 brls walrus fat. No matter. Vry. disappointed to hear comm's response to proposal. Have they no imagination? Strike that. Have they no desire for knowledge? No greed?

Important: Am planning to cont. expedition even tho' without funding. Pls. communicate my resignation as adjunct professor effective imm.

Aynglisard Stremnius Bel, PhD, etc.

Wracksen! Urge calm and beg yr consideration of climatic factors in yr decision. Surely if you returned to warmer latitudes you might forthwith reconsider. Surely you see that to continue now is madness, spite even. Beg yr patience, I will try again with the committee.

A. Stremnius Bel

Two days later. Forgive me Wracksen but we are lost. Hemple seems to have a hold on them, all of them who once thirsted for knowledge and the mystery we suspect in the north, as I know you and I still do. Again, patience. I will find a solution. Do not begin alone.

Wracksen, expl. 57'20

Bel: send dogs, salt, and kerosene.

Wracksen, appx. 58'00

Bel: Send replacment astron. tables; Polaris not visible. Also Book of Days.

A. S. Bel, 26 Sept.

My dear Wracksen, I am coming with supplies and recording equipment. The autumnal gales have started early this year and I fear that which we seek may already be beyond us. Patience, Wracksen! In patience all things. Expect me 58'00 by 24 Oct unless locomotive freezes or swarmed by Kiv bandits. I joke. Perhaps. Send up a flare each midnight to guide---

Bel, 2 Nov

W, if you retrn. to yr. camp and find this I have cont'd. N in hopes of finding you or sign of you. The mystery ... how weak my hand grows, this thrice-Damned cold ... awaits

Professor Grindewald Q. Splinterbottom

2010-02-16T12:09:00.002-05:00

Guten TAG! Wie gehts! Permit me to introduction myself. My name is Professor Grindewald Q. Splinterbottom and I am a professor of the maligned, refined, and misaligned science of woodcraft, called, by the Philistine, wood butchery.

Und I am here to tell you today about how we cut a scarph! Ja! This it is true.

Ein, we must construct a mechanism, a contraption if you will, that holds the aforementioned wood at a specific, necessary angle. Ja? Ja. This we call a scarphing jig.

Then we must attempt a trial of this "scarphing jig" Vat is this? The table saw binds and trips the fuse? Donner und Blitzen!

The second "scarphing jig" turns out to be ineluctably improved, ja? No more smoking wood!

Ja!

Zvei, we must feed many, many long pieces of the wood into this "scarphing jig." Then we must reverse this "scarphing jig" so we are pulling wood through it. Ja. Pulling. Better.

Oops! You forgot to duck! You have been struck by a piece of wood! This is to be expected, especially when ze end of the long strip is trimmed off, touches the spinning saw blade, and is launched into ze air. You are wearing your goggles, are you not? I prefer welding googles because zey leave the most amusing rings around my ocular sockets afterward. Comedy!

Where was I? Ah, yes. Do not forget to stand to one side of the spinning blade.

Then you trim and trim and trim until the cows are coming home, making each piece of wood (ja?) ready to be scarphed to its mate.

Now zen. When I remember how to work the auto-photogram contraption I will take a picture to show to all of you. Until zen, study hard!

Strips of fir

2010-02-11T08:23:00.002-05:00

Spent yesterday evening ripping ten-foot lengths of fragrant fir, as cold blue dusk fell and the wind flung branches across the snow. The lights flickered a few times -- we lost power for two days in this last snowstorm -- so I clomped into the house, showering sawdust and snow, for my trusty small flashlight to loop around my neck under my clothes.

(Under my clothes because things hanging from one's neck are not conducive to retaining one's head when one is working around power tools.)

The power never went out, and I got a nice sore thumb from feeding the wood into the saw, as well as an even-nicer stack of bendy strips of fir I can scarf into stringers. Feel like some math? Come on, it'll be fun:

The Pathfinder plans use the metric system. I was skeptical at first but quickly converted when I realized that fractions would be a thing of the past. Hallelujah! What's 10 13/16 divided by three and don't forget to account for the saw kerf? Good grief.

The stringers are the longitudinal pieces running from bow to stern: one at the top (or sheer) where the edge of the deck is, one at the bottom (or chine) where the side planking meets the flat bottom, and two in between to give a healthy rounded shape to the hull. These are spec'd at 20x45 (millimeters). A 1-by is about 18mm thick, which in this case is close enough.

Trouble is, a 20x45 piece of wood -- about the size of a deck of cards viewed on end -- is not flexible enough to conform to the long and graceful curve that defines the sides of the boat. How do I know this? By breaking a piece that size.

Solution: glue the stringer from two smaller pieces, one above the other. That is: 20 x 22.5 and 20 x 22.5. Still with me?

Inconveniently, the boat is 17 feet long; the stringers -- because they arc out and then back in, need to be more like 18 feet. And it's hard to find lumber longer than 12 feet or so. Solution: attach two ten-foot pieces together and trim to the correct length.

This means that each stringer is made from FOUR 20 x 22.5 mm x 10' pieces. At this point I'm mixing Imperial and metric. Did I mention the metric scale fell off my table saw?

All of this means that now there is much work to make big pieces of wood -- 10-foot 1 x 6s -- into smaller ones: 22.5 mm wide.

Like many of these complications, sorting it out was the hard part, now it's just labor. But MAN it gets boring ripping these pieces.

Attention, Weather Gods

2010-02-04T15:20:00.006-05:00

I didn't mean no disrespect!

Repent, repent!

...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM FRIDAY TO 10 PM EST SATURDAY...

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM FRIDAY TO 10 PM EST SATURDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE... EXTREMELY HEAVY SNOW.

* ACCUMULATIONS...STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 220 TO 300 INCHES.

* SNOW TO BE ACCOMPANIED BY LOCALIZED TORNADIC DISTURBANCES AND FREQUENT CLOUD-TO-GROUND LIGHTNING.

* ALL CITIZENS REPEAT ALL CITIZENS URGED TO STAY CALM

Icelanders, Marcelo, Freedom

2010-02-01T13:07:00.004-05:00

Two more books of notes for my ongoing research: Sagas of Icelanders and the effervescent Marcelo in the Real World (Francisco X. Stork). Both of them very different books ... or are they? Each lets us join in characters' struggles with the divine.

Meanwhile, Amazon pitches a hissy and then un-hissies. Whether you think that Amazon delisting MacMillan books as a protest ("Look upon my works, ye mighty...") gives the online superstore a black eye (I do) and whether you believe the infernal e-Book pricing and rights model needs to be taken outside and given a firm talking to (I do) and whether you have expressed frustration that people just e-invent new e-words for new e-products is so much e-baloney (I do!) one thing has become startlingly, perfectly, beautifully clear:

Printed books have more freedom than e-books.

Printed books can be smuggled and read under the covers. They can be disguised inside math textbooks, left in barstools, wrapped in plastic and buried as treasure. Reading them can be an act of transgression. Subversion. They can be burned, yes; but also thrown over walls.

E-books, if I understand electricity and technology correctly, communicate with the store selling them. That's how you get them, after all. You can't give them away, or loan them, or receive them as gifts or graduation presents or heart-in-throat reminders of broken relationships. The store knows what you bought, what you browsed through, and -- potentially -- what you read, and how long it takes you. It can -- theoretically -- remove those books from your device.

Can you image if the manager of your local indie bookstore busted through your door and started taking your books from your shelves? Hold on, just let me get my two-by-four.

Look, I'm not nostalgic or short-sighted enough to close my eyes to e-books. Just because I prefer printed books doesn't mean that other people might not like e-books. After all, the priority is reading, and joining the author in spinning that magic that comes from reading a story.

In some sense, arguing about e-books vs print is like arguing about whether it's better to read while in bed or sitting in a chair. Shouldn't we be worried about sloppy storytelling instead?

At the same time, I very much like the fact that printed books, once released into the world, have so many possibilities that can never accrue to e-books. That is freedom.

Re-search

2010-01-29T12:35:00.004-05:00

This morning over a cup of dark-brew Sumatra I finished logging notes from Frazer's The Golden Bough. Jotting down bits of interesting text, ideas, or references from these books is taking longer than I thought, but the end is in sight.

Or is it? The more I read the more I'm interested in, and the more I want to remember and think about next time I'm writing something, whether it's the dim glint of a noonday need-fire in ninth-century Shetland moors, or examples of wolves from Aesop's fables, or Saint-Exupery's thoughts on sacrifice.

What I've been going through recently:

Janina David, A Square of Sky (a child's experience of the Holocaust). At war's end she was asked by a clueless German woman if she was, what, sixty? Sixty-five? She was sixteen years old.

Early Irish Myths and Sagas

Earliest English Poems

Poems of the Sea

John Keay, The Gilgit Game. History of the British, Russian, and Chinese maneuverings in the western mountains of Central Asia. Startlingly poetic.

Katzanzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ.

Adam Nicolson, Seamanship. Bumbling and well-meaning author sails the British coast. From the same author who wrote Seize the Fire, a history of the battle of Trafalgar. Also startlingly poetic.

Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men.

Dave Eggers, What is the What.

Robert de Gast, Western Wind, Eastern Shore

Seven Summits

Michael Alexander, A History of Old English Literature

Fagles, trans. The Iliad

Larrington, trans. The Poetic Edda. Just listen to this: "It is time for me to ride along the blood-red roads, to set the pale horse to tread the path in the sky."

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights

Laura Miller, The Magician's Book

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras

Liva Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Child's memoir of the Holocaust.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. One of the most interesting and unexpected books I have ever read. Terrible and ultimately uplifting.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Frazer, The Golden Bough

...and a few more still on deck. Whew!

Area Grouch Wonders What The Hell Is Wrong With Everything

2010-01-28T13:45:00.002-05:00

Okay. I've tried to hold back but HOLY CRAP there is so just so much garbage out there. Lest I offend somebody I can't even list the types of books I find inane and insulting through mere fact of their existence. But rest assured they are out there, being bought and sold in numbers to make a banker cackle and to ensure the continued stupification -- stupefaction? Stupie-size me? -- of readers.

And another thing. How hard is to make loaves of sandwich bread in, I don't know, a factory, and have some semblance of quality control? You'd actually have to make an effort to come up with loaves of bread made with the same ingredients, at the same altitude, in the same conditions and by the same machinery, staffed by the same monolith-worshipping, super-orbital-ridge having, vestigial-tail-wagging, atavistic carnival rejects each time. But evidently that is beyond the ken of some of our best known bread companies, resulting in me occasionally getting an "off loaf" that's like chewing an old tire. That ran over a squirrel. And the squirrel is still mostly alive. And the tire is on fire. And I'm being crushed by a giant boulder.

Attention cats: next time you beg for food and then hide when I put the food on the floor, I will permit you to eat each other. Solve two problems right there.

Attention moon: enough with the rising and setting by 2AM. We both know that's total bullcrap. Set at 6AM so I can have some freaking light during my run.

Attention fridge: Do not run out of beer ever again or I will end you. With a hair dryer. Yes, I have that much patience, because I'll be drinking beer from a portable cooler.

To my left knee: Go ahead and act up again. You think I need you? What do you think Righty's for? What's that? What's that? Run only in circles without you? Tracks are round, jerkweed.

Attention television: What's the point of having five hundred channels when 499 are showing garbage and 1 is not available? I know where you're plugged in, so shape it up.

That is all.

More on the Iliad

2010-01-22T11:50:00.002-05:00

From the Introduction in the Robert Fagles version:

"It is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command."

This from the translator of the three-thousand-year-old story. I don't know if Fagles was a soldier, or if he'd feel this way had he seen war in person rather than on the page. Dulce et decorum est....

At the same time, I wonder: is he right? Is there a rare and sharp magic to the terrible circumstance of war? Or is that little more than a tweedy post-facto justification?

Never having seen war myself, I can't answer, I can only ask. And maybe that's what good writing, good stories, should do: not answer but ask the question in the first place.

In which case: well done, Homer!

The smell of fir

2010-01-20T12:26:00.003-05:00

One of the things I love about wooden boats is all the ... wood ... involved. I like wood. It smells good. It's eco-friendly. I can work it with normal tools and rarely have to get suited up in a Hazmat suit or put on a respirator.

When I take a very, very sharp Japanese handsaw and cut through the end of a 20mm-square strip of Douglas fir, it smells like Christmas. I look at the fresh end, ribboned with tiny growth lines, polished caramel and salmon-pink, one for each year, and am humbled that something that grew in a forest, using sunlight and water and the loamy food of soil, is now going to be part of something else: a curved, angled shape that slips through the ever-changing barrier between water and air, the wave-roughened surface, the whale path, where the long ships and dreams have gone for millennia.

Or so I ponder, standing in my dusty garage in my boatbuilding clothes, staring at the piece of fir that will become the middle layer of my port chine. Months from now, knock on wood, it will be sealed in epoxy and paint, and tucked into the back corner of the under-deck storage space.

But I'll know it's there, knit together with bronze and epoxy and other wood into a thing somehow more than the sum of its lumbery and metal components: a wooden sailboat. Magic.

Verbs show, adjectives tell

2010-01-13T12:10:00.002-05:00

We've all heard the phrase, "Show, don't tell" for writing. Don't tell the readers what's going on, or how someone feel, or who someone is, show it.

Like many rules (forks on the left, spoons on the right; balance your checkbook; wash behind your ears), this one is so common I almost don't see it anymore. It had been filed away with other abstract, pithy, and seemingly meaningless catch phrases.

Show, don't tell, I thought. Well, of course. Next?

Then I came across Stephen King's point, though he may not have been the first, that adverbs weaken prose. They're escape pods, slippery little excuses when you can't find the right word, or the right phrase, or the right scene to -- you guessed it -- show rather than tell.

Again, I thought: No adverbs. Check. Next?

Then somewhere I read a similar rant against adjectives. They are weak excuses, poker chips that stand in for bigger and better things. No adjectives? quoth I. How can that be? How can you describe anything without adjectives?

The ball was red. The ball was the color of an October leaf. That's how.

Then it hit me. These two bumper-sticker slogans came together in one of my (all too rare) inspirations. Ready?

Verbs show. Adjectives tell.

Telling: Achilles was sad.
Showing: Achilles wept. Or sobbed. Or collapsed to the ground, his chest heaving.

As writers we don't just report on emotions. We have to transmit them. The story should be a vehicle for emotion. And for some reason, whether it's an obscure psychological tendency or a quirk of language, a rule of semiotics or a footnote in some literary critic's dissertation, verbs have more impact than adjectives.

(Note that I'm leaving adverbs out altogether, useless distracting slippery things.)

So who cares about reporting that someone is sad, or angry, or confused, or determined? Instead of telling those things, show them. How? Pare down adjectives to a minimum, and increase verbs.

Somewhere I read that someone (come on, brain, give me specifics!) counted verbs per written page in an attempt to maximize them. Presumably adjectives were minimized and adverbs were dragged out back and shot.

Maybe it's just me and this emphasis on verbs as the tools of showing is just one more platitude everyone's already heard of. But I tell you what, no exaggeration, it has changed the way I write.

Wait! Stop!

2010-01-12T13:18:00.004-05:00

It's not just the Iliad. I finally decided to take a look at the knee-high piles of books I keep stepping over, and lo and behold, there are several dozen that will be -- should be -- relevant to my own book.

All this time I've been doing micro-edits at the sentence and paragraph level, but either forgetting about or (more likely) avoiding all the behind-the-curtain research that can add such important details.

There are ethnographies of mountain tribes and accounts of polar and high-altitude explorations. Translated epics from Finland, Norway, Africa. Fraser's Golden Bough. Memoirs of Holocaust survivors. Sailing techniques and details. Theories on pre-Christian conceptions of time and the nature of reality. Victorian travelogues. On and on. It's like Christmas!

Now, I've written about this before (Good god, a year ago!?) at least twice: all the books I need to go read, all the research still to do. But I don't think I quite gave it the priority I should have. By immersing myself in all this background reading, even if each book only gives me something I can use in a single sentence, I can improve my book. Which is really the only measure.

I went through this when I wrote my plaguey master's thesis: sit down with legal pad and book, and write down everything that's interesting. Later, read through notes. Wait for monkey mind to put it all together.

(Or not. Lots of this stuff will get discarded. But the only way to figure out what will provide the killer detail and what's distracting fluff is to start taking notes.)

This comes first. Before the line edits I'd been allowing to take up my time since they allow the ongoing illusion that I'm nearly done. Ha ha, never in life!

Battle Fury

2010-01-11T12:07:00.003-05:00

I have recently finished reading The Iliad. I can't even claim to have re-read it, since I stumbled through whatever excerpts were assigned in high school andcollege, skipping much and understanding little.

But now! The rage of Achilles, his poisonous pride, the helpless skittering towards fate of Hector and Patroclus and Achilles himself. And the terrible gods, childish and petty and bickering. To me they were the real villains of the book.

What I found most fascinating was how war -- battle, fighting, hand-to-hand, with all the gruesome violence and immediacy of Bronze Age weapons -- was portrayed. It's terrible, no doubt, but there's also a kind of savage joy, a brotherhood of war that glues together even enemies.

It reminds me of "battle rage" -- a term I first saw in some Dungeons and Dragons manual -- that refers (we decided) to the tantrum-like fury resulting from a stubbed toe or an inoperative tool, or a sweater that doesn't fit right, or a too-small sleeping bag that constricts. Really anything can set it off; there is a kind of joyous release in roaring like a grizzly, baring teeth, and making little hook-fingers like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Not the sort of thing one does at work, though sometimes I am sorely, sorely tempted.

And it got me thinking about my own book, where the two main characters encounter a similar hazy berserker rage, not only in the villains but also -- worse -- in themselves.

Is there a cleansing simplicity in a fury that's so bright it blinds? Or does it simply insulate its bearer from the horrors of war until a different kind of cleansing is needed?