Where DO You Get Your Ideas

Don't you just love that question?


Right now, my Main Bastard has really found his groove. He's fiercely loyal to the Minor Bastard. He's charismatic in his way, a good friend.


He's also sadistic, murderous and terrifying. He moves through a world of pleasure, victims and opportunity. Pity anyone or anything the Main Bastard catches weak and alone.


Killing isn't enough for the Main Bastard. For some reason, he loves to play with his victims. He reenacts his triumphs with the dead bodies until the game bores him.


It's only a matter of time before he begins his search again.


Why?


It's his nature. Taking prey, he feels alive.


The Tiny Dynamo finds my work violent and dark. She often wonders where those terrible ideas come from.


Somehow, I don't think she'd believe me if I told her:

His fluffy, pretend victims aren't enough. He brought another bird in the house last night.... Gotta love him, though!

The Need for Christmas

One thing about being a Stranger in a Strange Land, you get an outsider's perspective on pretty much everything. Stuff you took for granted in your homeland and stuff the locals take for granted where you are.

So why a post about Christmas in June?

Here in the southern hemisphere, it's winter. The days are short, and the nights are long. The trees are bare, and icy winds come howling up off the polar ice caps with depressing regularity.

For the human psyche, this is a time of death.

In the northern hemisphere, our holidays ease the sting. Halloween (and then in the US, Thanksgiving) celebrate the harvest and turn nature's great dieback into a happy occasion. And right around the solstice, when the nights are longest and the sun may never come again, we light up that eternal night with Christmas.

Before there was a Christ there was a Roman Festival of Lights. Done with candles instead of lawn displays, but the idea was there. My father, a former Catholic priest and lifelong religious scholar, happily admits the theft. He contends that the date of Jesus' birth isn't the important thing, it's the death.

(OF course, when the subject of pagan roots of the festival of Oestre comes up, the discussion gets a bit more heated, but that's another story...)

Before the Festival of Lights even, there were blood sacrifices to ensure the return of the sun. Of course, the 'sacrifices' were (and sometimes still are) livestock too sickly to last out the winter. That way, folks got a good feed to help *them* last out the winter, and the surviving animals had more feed to keep them healthier so that *they'd* last out the winter too. Common sense and religion sometimes do run together.

Until our culture moved below the equator. Suddenly, these festivals, deeply important in our collective and individual psyches, were happening at the wrong times of year. Christmas becomes a midsummer beach party (Beltane, anyone?), which is great.

But summer doesn't need another excuse to party. And now winter has no relief, no promise of rebirth. I never realized the power of surrounding ourselves with twinkling lights and affirming our tribal bonds with gifts and communal food until it went away.

I don't get the Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I do feel the pull of those long nights. Since I got rid of my car, I bike everywhere, and even winter doesn't stop me from hitting the trails at Bottle Lake, or walking around Travis Wetland or Styx Mill Reserve. (Stalkers take note: an important clue to enacting your paranoid delusions!) I also ski and skate when I can, but dammit, I want my bloody festival, and I want it lit up!

Back!

Rested, recovered and once again hapily ensconced in Godzone.

Australia was lovely. I didn't get to see an opera in Sydney, or take a 4x4 across the outback, watch the sun rise on Ayer's Rock or dive the Great Barrier Reef. I'd love to do all of those things, but this time time and money were tight (especially since artists don't get holiday pay. If I'm not working, I'm not getting paid).

We did do a lot of this:

And a little of this:

I was dropped from and hurtled over an awful lot of iron in the last week. A lot of fun. Also went on my first water slide. And second, third, and eventually lost count. Sheltered soul that I am, I'd never been to a water park before.

The Tiny Dynamo, being part Selkie, is rather at home in the water. Being more of the Irish Setter model myself, I dog paddle and chase tennis balls, that sort of thing. I'll admit I went to the water parks mainly for the joy of of watching the Dynamo, slick and shiny and running around in her bikini. Turns out I like the slides, too!

And of course, we did get inland a bit for some of these:

Not once did I give in to that scratching at the windows of my soul. But there's this guy, see. He's got bloody knuckles on his left hand and he's taken out of the airport in cuffs, stuffed into the back of a cruiser and driven out into a tiny town in the rural South. The city cops hand the guy off on the cracked blacktop of a dark restaurant.

The sheriff unlocks the guy's cuffs. Explains it was all a misunderstanding. The guy isn't so sure. He's been gone a long time, and everyone's been happy with that arrangement. Now, he just wants to do whatever business brought him back to town and get back in the wind. But having him back, even for a few days, is making an awful lot of people are nervous.

There are secrets all over the place. And this guy, he's got plenty of his own.

And I kinda want to know what they are...

A Few of my Favourite Things

59,000 words (some of them torn out by the roots)

The paradox of this stage: the word count's high and mounting, but every new word makes me realize another five or six will have to come out somewhere earlier.

Last week I hit (and am still working through) a short but nasty little block. I got my 'missing scene' written, then stared at the screen for a day. I broke out pen and paper, because sometimes changing the physical act of writing helps the story flow. No dice.

In the end, what got me through was a sense of retrenching, of asking myself what my work's really about. What sets me on fire and shows up in my work again and again?

The pain of the young: So many of the world's small evils track back to the messed-up stuff that happens to kids. Child abuse, child neglect, addiction and plain old bad parenting all create adults with scar tissue on their souls. Some medicate their pain (and create a multibillion dollar industry of fear and violence and greed and betrayal). Some use the cops and the courts as replacement parents, fucking up and being disciplined for it over and over. Some lose their own pain in that of their victims.

The predators: Not just the small-potatoes, one-victim-at-a-time predators working the bus terminals and cruising around in vans and so on. I'm talking about the *really* nasty motherfuckers, the ones in five thousand dollar suits and mahogany board rooms. They live in a moral freefall defined only by their own rapacious greed, and the rest of us pay.

Humanity's endless capacity to fuck up: I've seen a lot of people take 'geographic cures': someplace warmer, someplace nicer, someplace where every dealer in town doesn't already know their name. Mostly, it only spreads *their* mess to another place. We take our darkness with us, and usually recreate it.

And last....

Hope.

Every minute of every day, every damn one of us wakes up with a choice. And new choices are right there the whole time we're awake. Mostly we use that endless, wonderful choice to do what we know and what we're used to, however painful. It's easier. But we don't have to. All over the world, every minute, somebody somewhere's turned a corner. They chose a new option, and their lives will change on the back of it.

I guess at the end of the day my work is about the struggle between light and dark in every human heart.

And that little essay above is why I let my characters do the talking and acting instead of trying for a career as an essayist. Once I reconnected with those themes and struggles, my characters started doing their part again, and the book began to move on greased rails!

Back out of the Blocks

53,500 words (pedal to the metal once again...)

Dylan and I've been friends for years now. When my last book stalled last year (seemed like forever but actually a couple-three weeks or so), he was surprised to find out I get writer's block the same as anybody. I just try to nip it in the bud.

This one wasn't the Inner Critic. I wasn't worried my words weren't good enough, though if I'd let the situation continue, I might have started.

It wasn't What-Happens-Next. I've got a good sense now of where I'm going, even if I don't know how I'll get there.

Problem was, I was trying to write forward while my mind was writing back. That is, I sat there asking for the rest of the current scene, and what started playing was an earlier scene I knew I would need but hadn't written yet.

So last night I sat down and made a start. Fifteen hundred words and a couple of hours later, I had my earlier scene and a lot of surprising revelations that streamlined the plot and made stuff I didn't understand make sense.

Now I've got to sit down and do it all over again today...

What's it All About, Alfie?

41,000 words (back on track, sorta)

There are at least a few different kinds of writer's block. My most frequent one is 'Driving with the hand Brake On.' That's where I spend more time second-guessing what I just wrote than I do writing more. It's my inner critic gone mad.

It's also not the subject of today's blog.

Today's about a second, more brutal form of writer's block. You know the one: you've come too far to turn back now, but no matter hwo hard you try, you just can't work out what happens next.

You're blocked.

Near as I can tell, it happens to everyone. It's not happening to me right now, but it has in the past. My last novel, for instance. And the one before that.

When it does, I get away from the keyboard. Long walks, bike rides, tramps up the sides of damn mountains are favorites, but it doesn't matter. The key is to give the body something to do so that the mind can wander. And ponder.

And ask, what the hell am I writing about, anyway? What's the point?

Literary professors get to used high-falutin words like central conflict and theme. But I am a bear of little brain, and prefer simple, working class words. I want to know what the story that's stumping me's supposed to look like when it's at home.

But really, central conflict and theme are what's getting lost in those white-out, writer's block moments. Writing is like building a forest one tree at time. The inner critic wants to see that every leaf and pine needle is just so. The white-out is when you've lost track and started building up above the ridgeline, or onto thin, rocky soil where your story doesn't properly belong.

There's something you love in your story. Something that puts that particular wood (whether a 2000 word grove or a 350,000 rainforest) in that particular place. After all, if you don't have the love, there are heaps of other ways to spend a day. The love of that story, wanting to see how it turns out -- to see it told -- is what makes writing worthwhile.

Find the heart of your story. You'll also find the key to your dilemna.

Writing, a Tale told in Allegory

39,400 words (with good reason)

Today was the Tiny Dynamo's birthday. By ancient and venerable tradition, she got to pick the Honored Activity.

Being both Tiny, and Dynamic, she chose to haul our asses up the side of a damn mountain.

I'm not out of shape (certainly not for someone who remembers steam-powered zeppelins), but when my most recent brithday rolled around, my choice of Honored Activity involved a well-made coffee and a big slab of cheesecake. A visit to a bookstore followed.

There were inducements. At the top of the ridge sat a volcanic-stone camping shelter abandoned in the 1920's and only recently renovated. It sits in a desolate place, and no roads reach it.

Damn it, I wanted to see that hut.

It started out sweet and lovely. A pleasant lark on a summer's day. We passed over sunlit pastures and sparkling streams. It was a little bit uphill, but then, I knew it would be a climb, right?

Then the climb began in earnest. The land slanted up, and further up. The wind stopped, and the sun beat down on the land. Everywhere I stepped, I hit sheep shit.

I slogged on.

Here and there we came across a tree. Those lovely bits of shade, those chances to look out over what I'd done kept me going. Sometimes, the view up the trail ahead made me despair.

A couple times, I gave serious thought to giving up. Just turn and go back down. But, one does not draw so beguiling and wondrous a creature as the Tiny Dynamo to one's side by being faint-hearted, cowardly, or giving anything less than one's best. Giving up simply was not an option.

Besides, I wanted to see that damn shelter. I wanted to see how the walk ended.

And just when I was thoroughly shattered and wondering if I really could walk until I collapsed (again), a roofline came into view. A surge of energy ran through me, and the pack I carried didn't seem so heavy.

The surge to the end was quick. The view from the top was incredible. I was up in the clouds, on top of the world.

It was totally worth it. And on the trip back down, the walk up didn't seem like it'd been that bad.

It struck me then. This was *so* like writing a novel.

***

Except now I can't quit thinking about the axe on the chain...

Old Man River

34,000 words

Mark Twain used to tell a story about how when he was a kid he loved the Mississippi. It was a place of mystery and wonder to him, and he couldn't imagine anything better than to pilot a steamboat down its wide wet length.

He grew up and got a job sitting in the bow of the boat taking soundings. I can't remember if her eventually made pilot or not, but he did get to the point where he knew the Mississipi like the back of his hand. From St Paul to New Orleans, every sandbar and shoal, every rip and sunken root was as intimate to him as his teeth to his tongue.

And, he said, the river's magic had been lost to him forever.

Like a lot of us, books were tiny worlds of mystery and wonder sandwiched between two covers. Every new story held the potential to carry me away, every bit as much as the Mighty Miss might carry a little boy far from Hannibal, MO. I've never been able to imagine anything better than storytelling.

When I got serious about writing, I realized I was going to have to learn my river just as closely as Twain learned his. I stopped picking up books for entertainment alone and began reading them with a different eye.

"How did the author do that?" I'd ask. "Ooh, I bet she's setting this up for later," I'd say. "What do I like about this dialogue, and what don't I like about that?" I no longer fell so easily into the worlds between covers. Or maybe I fell so deeply that I saw the machinery behind the curtain.

At a point of high suspense, part of me might still be reading with the shivers, but another part was examining the author's use of adjective, adverb, metaphor and sentence length to build that suspense. And comparing it to other examples.

Research also meant branching out. Like a lot of the book-buying public, I sought security in authors with multiple titles on the shelf. "If he's written this many, he must be good," I'd say. Research meant buying every first novel I could find, making a special point to read every award-winning or nominated first novel every year.

Some writers can write just like they always have and still sell books. They're on they're ninth, or nineteenth, or ninetieth, book and it reads more or less like the first one they sold back in nineteen ought-whatever. Newcomers can't do that. The bar is always set higher for us and always will be. We have to be in step with the current voice and style. And we have to beat it by enough to make people notice.

I didn't care if I thought I'd like it. I got reading those books that had done just that. And y'know what? Not a bad read among them. So many fantastic, beautiful, haunting stories I read, I had to take several long walks around my typewriter (it was a typewriter back then) before I got my nerve back.

Sure, I don't read like I used to. I read now the way a magician watches a magic show, or a boxer watches a bout. It's the way a tracker looks at a wooded glade, or a painter at a painting.

And I've decided Mr. Twain was being more entertaining than honest.

The river would've changed for him no matter what. If he hadn't piloted down it, he might have ended up a drummer (salesman) using it to get from A to B, blind and deaf to its beauty. Or he might have ended up as so many of his boyhood friends did, holding a plow and walking behind a mule, the river little more than a source of vague resentment over dusty dreams.

As it worked out, decades later and half a continent or half a world away, Twain could close his eyes and conjure that boyhood love, that spirit of magic and mystery, in ways that a man who knew the river half so well never could.

And he could raise that love in our hearts, too.

Shock and Awe

Status: 30,000 words

Some writers don't read while they're in the middle of a book. Some writers read, but not in their genre. I can understand why. A couple years ago, all it took was one good book to shift my narrative voice. Suddenly, I was piling on the adjectives like Michael Connelly, or waxing poetic like John Connolly. Or trying to reel out the laconic, time-stretched action sequences of Sarah Gran, UPSIDE DOWN by John Katzenbach. Truly fine books, one and all. DOPE was the most intimidating for me, though. It's closest to my own writing style, and she's intimate with the same world I write in. If we weren't on the same bus ride through Hell, we definitely booked with the same tour company.

I'm glad I read it now, while I'm full of enthusiasm for my new work, and not in another month or two, when I'm lost and lonely and not at all certain this thing I'm doing will come together at all.

It will, of course, but a sleepless night or two is a part of that process.

Anybody out there have books/authors they avoid while writing? Or ones they seek out for inspiration?