Monthly Archives: December 2003

perfect system

Home from San Francisco. Had a fantastic time up there. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world.
Arrived Sunday afternoon beneath sunny skies and puffy white clouds. Checked into hotel, and too a walk. Sat alone, in Union Square, watched young couples and familes pose for pictures in front of the giant lighted tree and missed my wife.
Ate Dinner with Loren and Kelly, coveted their flat screen TV.
Spent all day Monday with a camera crew and filmed a hilarious segment with Drew for Tech TV’s Unscrewed. It will air in a couple of weeks. Video should be streamed when the show airs, and is very much worth watching. Finished Dark Tower IV. I’m in love with Susan Delgado, and want to be Roland when I grow up.
Spent most of Tuesday with Drew, Storm, Heather, and her parents. Went to Alcatraz, froze nearly to death in the rain, took tons of pictures. Filed BBC report for Radio Five, taped show, drank Guinness in hotel bar with Drew until last call.
Confirmed suspicion, hatched long ago, that Drew is one of the greatest people on the planet. Wish we lived close enough to hang out often.
Slept in perfect eddy of open window and radiator. Fell asleep listening to rain and sounds of the city.
Arrived at airport early. Flight cancelled, flew out at 1130 instead of 1050. Started ‘Salem’s Lot on plane. Flight was windy as hell, very bumpy. Sat across aisle from two pilots in uniform, nervously looked at them for reactions whenever plane lurched too much.
Paid 19.00 in extended parking lot, sung U2 loudly with sunroof open on drive home.
In clean empty house now, catching up on 250 e-mails. Haven’t checked comments from previous entry, yet.
Unsure why I’m writing like this, but quietly pleased.

ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind

When I woke up this morning, the very first thought shouted at me by my brain was, “What if Death rented a room in your house?”
Neil Gaiman says that most of his stories start out with “What if . . . ” or “If only . . . ” so I immediately wrote down my “What if . . .”
. . . and didn’t know what to do next. Normally, when I want to write a story, I take my idea, and just start. Something like:

Dorothy Hansen sat in her living room and did The Jumble. After Loretta went mad with Alzheimer’s the previous Fall, Dorothy vowed to keep her 75 year-old mind sharp any way she could. She wasn’t going to win any Major Awards, but she completed The Jumble more often than not,

Then I get stuck, because that’s shite. But it’s good information for me to use inthe building of this character. I would almost certainly cut that stuff before I even made it to an editor’s draft.
The story really starts when I get here:

There was a knock at the front door. She pulled herself out of her chair and called out, “I’ll be right there!”
The wooden floors of her living room creaked and popped beneath her as she walked. Her steps echoed down the hallway ahead of her.
She turned the deadbolt and pulled the front door open, revealing a tall young man.
“Yes?” she said.
“Do you still have a room for rent?” he asked, pointing to a sign in her front window.
She studied him briefly. He wore a dark coat and a white shirt. His hair was to his shoulders, and he held a small bag in one hand. He smelled nice, like old spices and leather.
“I have two rooms,” she said, and motioned him into the house. “Upstairs, or down?”
“Let’s take a look,” he said, with a smile.
“The downstairs room is off the kitchen, down this hallway,” she said.
She walked into the house, and he followed. The floorboards were silent beneath his feet. His footsteps were like sand blowing across dunes.
“I’m Joseph,” he said.
“Mrs. Hansen,” she said, “pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.”

That took me about 45 minutes to write, and it’s still a mostly-naked skeleton . . . But there’s stuff in there that I like . . . I think maybe this guy will have all sorts of Egyptian smells and things around him, and I like the way he glides over the floors.
About halfway through that, I thought maybe it would be better to tell it from the perspective of someone who already lives in the house. Maybe a college student, or something. I also don’t know when it’s set — maybe that’s not important.
But the thing is, I don’t know what happens next. Oh, sure, he takes a room, Probably the upstairs one, so I can use the eerie silence of his walking on the staircase, but once this “scene” is done, it’s a mystery to me.
So I guess this is where that outline comes in handy, so I know where I’m going.
I think it’s interesting if a girl who lives nearby falls for him, I think he puts everyone at ease (that’s what Death would do, right?) and everyone likes him . . . but he makes them feel slightly uneasy, and they don’t know why.
Somehow, people have to start dying, and some suspicious neighbors decide that this guy is responsible. He’s not. He’s just Death, so he takes them, but —
OH! I have it!! Someone in the town is a killer. Someone respected or something, like a cop, or a priest, or something, and Death has come to town because there’s going to be a lot of souls to take care of. What if it IS the police chief, so he’s investigating himself? What if Death falls in love with someone in the town? I don’t think I’m going to let Death fall in love with anyone. I think that’s been done to . . . death.
Heh.
But I think I will let a neighborhood girl get a crush on him, and see what happens there.
What if? What if? Well, maybe I don’t have it. But that’s some stuff to build on.
Is that an outline? I still have no idea how the story ends, but now I have enough ideas to make me want to finish it.
I googled for “How to write a fiction outline,” and didn’t really find a definitive answer. However, I came across this site, where I found this very interesting and useful post:
Mileages vary, but I’m really glad I kept my day job. Writers who make their whole living from writing have a couple of problems:

  1. They have to write whatever comes their way, whether it’s interesting or not. On the couple of occasions when I had to write a novel for the money, it was like pulling my back molars with my fingers.
  2. They end up writing novels about novelists writing novels.

Still, Robert Heinlein did pretty well as a fulltime writer (until he got old and successful and self-indulgent). He also left us his five rules for writers:

  1. Writers write. They don’t wait until they “have enough time” or “inspiration strikes.”
  2. Writers finish what they write. No matter how much they hate the current project, they slog through to the last page.
  3. Writers never rewrite except to editorial order. Writing a novel is like building a deck or renovating a bathroom–you don’t want to rip everything up and do it all over again. So you plan carefully, do it right the first time, and don’t keep fussing with the story.
  4. (Kilian’s Exemption) When you’re starting out, you need your novel in progress to teach you a lot, so it’s OK to go back and revise your ms. on the basis of what you’re learning. (This is actually listed at 3a, but I’m using list tags. Sue me.)
  5. Writers put their work on the market. They don’t just inflict it on friends and family.
  6. Writers keep their work on the market until it sells. So the first 15 or 20 rejections don’t matter; you send it out again.

Heinlein argues that writers fail by breaking one or another of these rules, and he’s right. I wrote my first novel in the army in 1966, sent it to one publisher, got rejected, and never sent it out again. Bad as it was, some wretched publisher would eventually have bought it, and my career would have started a decade earlier than it did.”
I also found Something for nothing: advice for writers, and Ten Rules of Writing.
It’s a lot of interesting stuff, and I laughed out loud when I thought, “Wow, there’s useful information on the Internet, if you can get around the porn and shopping.”

the satellite, that beams me home

Our house is so goddamn clean, Anne and I are actually having my parents over tonight for only the third time in the five years we’ve lived here!
I’ve always been so embarrassed to have them here, and I’m real excited that they are coming. I think we’re gonna roast some chickens and puree some sweet potatoes . . . it will be similar to a traditional holiday meal.
Speaking of holidays, I have turned on the first holiday music of the season. It’s a CD I picked up at Bed Bath & Beyond called “A Jazzy Christmas.” It’s got Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn and Eartha Kitt . . . it’s really cool.
Two years ago, Anne and I introduced the concept of “Little Christmas” to the kids. It basically means we don’t go nuts with decorations and gifts and crap . . . we just “cheer up” the house a bit, listen to lots of holiday music, burn lots of holiday-scented candles, drink lots of spiced cider, and spend lots of time with friends and family. It started out as a financial necessity, but we discovered that putting the emphasis on the holiday “spirit” rather on the holiday “stuff” just made us happier . . . so that’s the way we do things now.
(Holiday note: if you’re a new reader, check out this story about Nolan’s last Holiday Program at school. It’s not the best-written thing in the world, but it always makes me smile when I read it.)
Anyway, I’m sure it will be interesting to me to look back at this post in a year or so, and mark that I officially got excited for the 2003 Holiday season at about 3:48 pm today.

Recent Posts