Memory Lane

So, I recently re-read my ebook, Crossroad Blues. I wanted to see how it played out on Kindle, correct any formatting errors, etc. I did find a few (corrected now), which was good.

Thing is, I also found something more.

I started out reading with my editor's hat on. But as the book progressed, I found myself actually sucked in to my own work. It was a strange experience: on the one hand, I wrote the damn thing. On the other, I couldn't wait to see what happened next.

Not to pat myself on the back, but Crossroad Blues hums. I love the pace of it, the action, the murderous intensity of Maeve, the overwhelming arrogance of Jack Terraboone and the sheer creepy monstrosity that is Harlan Winters.

I read that book, and I hated the novel I'm working on. Right now I'm lurching from scene to scene. I can see revelations coming, but I have to write my way through where I am before I can get there. If where I am even leads me there at all. My current novel is nothing like the streamlined mayhem of Crossroad Blues.

And then I remembered:

At one point, Jack Terrabonne had a wife. She was the real genius, stifled by her husband's success and terrified of his fixer, Harlan.

At one point, Kane was in a love triangle with Maeve and Beth. Sometimes he was with Maeve and attracted to Beth. Sometimes vice versa.

At one point, Harlan Winters was a dapper little gray man, sharp and slick and looking to capitalize on his employer's indiscretions.

By the end of the book, things changed...

Jack's wife left. There were some great scenes between her and Harlan, real scary stuff. But as Harlan developed, I realized there was no way in hell he'd keep his hands off something he wanted. She shows up off-stage as a soon-to-be-ex, with a younger boyfriend, a hit album and a scandalous photo spread in (I think it was) Vanity Fair. It was the least I could do for a woman who suffered so much only to be written out.

As Kane revealed himself, I realized I was writing a Western. He's the classic cool-eyed stranger in town, a gunslinger who doesn't pack a gun. He was honest and decent and upright, a solid moral point in a wicked, wicked world.

That guy couldn't be in a love triangle. I lost scenes where he met Maeve and traveled with her for a time. Where he found himself disgusted by her wickedness (back then she wanted to hook a rich man, which is how she fell afoul of Jack) and was increasingly attracted to local girl Beth. I lost something like 30,000 words of that plotline.

And Harlan. What to say about Harlan...

He started out dapper and smooth. In those days, Jack's sexual appetites led to the death of the French girl and Harlan stepped in. He covered up the crime and began to extort Jack for his own purposes. There were some mighty nice scenes where the balance of power in that house shifted.

And I cut them all.

The Harlan who stepped up about halfway through the book was half based on a ruthless predator in my family, and half based on a family friend who used to babysit me-- a man now wanted for questioning in the rape and murder of one of his neighbors.

What I'm getting at is, Crossroad Blues came to be streamlined. It grew into something fast-paced and coherent.

This memory, this process, helped me. My current novel is nowhere near such a mess as that one was- and look how that turned out!

Just for Angie

Angie said in the comments that she'd heard of escrima/kali but hadn't seen it.

Turns out, she probably has:

It's all over the Bourne movies. (The jerks disabled embedding, so you actually have to, like, click on it.)

The arts also feature in Fight Club, Tomb Raider 2 and The Book of Eli... :)

Resolved

One of the finest martial arts I ever studied was Kali/Eskrima. It's the art Kane uses in Crossroad Blues, though the bit where he talked about it didn't make the final cut of the story. Kali's a Philippine fighting style, and a big component involves taking the other guy's (or guys'-- dealing with multiple attackers is definitely something they work on) machete/knife/broken/etc away from him and making him regret he was ever born.

There's a tendency to push people behind you as you cut their throats. One reason is not to have flailing bodies in the way or blood spray blinding you as you deal with the dead guy's buddies. Another, maybe even more important reason, is so that the fighter doesn't have to actually see the results of the damage they do.

With that in mind, I'm not looking back at 2010. Too much blood on the floor, a lot of it my own.

So what's next for 2011?

Resolved:

I will bring out AT LEAST THREE more novels as e-books. (Since I've already got one *almost* ready to go, this one's not that hard)

I will bring out SERINA Vol. 1 as an e-book. (Graphic novels are an *enormous* pain in the ass to e-book, but it'll be nice to see them again)

I will finish my current WiP (I wanted another easy one-- of course I'm going to finish the latest novel)
and last, but not least...

I will build that online awareness that will help people find my work. (This one's going to be the hardest for me-- I'm happy toiling away at all my various projects, but I suck when it comes time to market them. This year, I'll do whatever it takes!)

That's it. No resolutions about languages or classes, diets or exercise or love or sex. I want more people reading my books.

How about you?

Attribution

So I noticed something on my latest WiP (working titles A Madman's Mercy or Wrecking Ball): I'm most of the way through Act I and there's not a single bit of dialogue attribution. No 'he said' or 'she said', let alone 'whispered', 'shouted', 'muttered', 'growled' or any of the rest of it. It was an odd thing to notice.

This wasn't a conscious decision. I mean, I have definitely been moving away from the attributive excesses of my early work. In its recent rewrite, my first novel lost over eight thousand words of useless attributions alone. In the beginning, I was absolutely said-happy!

I certainly reined that impulse in early on, and apparently the process continues. These days I'm favoring what I call stage-business attribution:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off." Jackson's fingers brushed the butt of his gun. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

It's a way of sneaking in character, mood, tension, layers of extra meaning, whatever the scene needs right then, and I don't have to bother with said.

Try these:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off," Jackson said. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

and:

"The fat man promised us Christmas off," Jackson said. His fingers brushed the butt of his gun. "We always get Christmas off."
"You want to be the one to tell him?"
"Shit, I look like I got a death wish?"

Now, this is all down to individual style, but for me that second one (just using 'said') still delivers the 'punch line' at "death wish", but these could be Wal-Mart employees for all we know. The third does up the tension and the stakes with the gun, but it's just that teensy bit more flabby than the first example.

And I do try to keep my work lean.

Occurs to me now as I type, two of my recent Kindle-reads were No Country for Old Men and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Written forty or fifty years apart, in neither work will you find a single instance of 'he said'. The voices are clear and easy to distinguish, and if I found myself a bit lost for a moment, I usually caught up with a line or two more of dialogue...

Just thought I'd share. :)

Bit Like Hiking

So recently I (or one of me-- see my Facebook pages for the schizophrenic details) was moved to post on the wall of the Mighty Miss DeBow:

"This isn't a sprint, you. It's a long, grueling cross-country race, through forests and mountains and stretches of desert where the sand burns and the harsh winds shred your flesh. Run if you like, crawl if you must. No one cares that you entered until you reach one of the finish lines, but if you stop moving, well, the bones of others before you are piled high on every side..."

This may have been a little bleak, a little harsh. I've been pretty bleak and harsh of late. These things happen.

Thing is, there's some truth in there.

So often, we creative types feel like we're in some kind of race. Like we should be going faster, harder. Like if we haven't made (insert milestone here) yet, we're somehow failing.

Fact is, this crazy life is not a race. It's not even the long-distance race I referred to earlier. It's more like a hike.

I'm a big fan of hiking. Here in NZ we call it tramping. (And yes, I'm also a big fan of complaining about hiking, but that's human nature, innit?) Thing about hiking is, you know you stand at the bottom of a bloody great hill and say to yourself, yeah I'm walking to the top of that thing.

So you start. One foot, another. A few steps and a few more. You walk until you start to get tired, or the sun starts to beat down on your head, or you decide you really, really need that drink of water. You look back. Hell, you've barely moved. That damn hill is still just as high, and your car is still terribly, terribly close.

So you turn your feet uphill and start walking again. One step after another. One stupid foot at a stupid fucking time.

You come to hate yourself. You wonder what you were thinking when you set out. Your life becomes a tiny, hyperfocused prism of movement. Step by plodding step. Every time you stop to look around, the peak still seems just as high, the car in the parking lot only marginally smaller. You don't even know WHY you keep going, only that you do.

After a time, you no longer look back. You don't look ahead either. You look at your feet, willing left and right and left again to carry you forward, step by step by stupid fucking step.

You curse a lot.

Bugs bite you. You sweat. The sun becomes a hammer against your skin. Sweat prickles and dries and itches. Your water bottle grows lighter, but you are no less thirsty. You forget about the summit. You quit thinking about walking. Every little piece of you is concentrated on lifting one knee, and then the other, just lifting it high enough to fall that little bit further forward.

You wonder why any sane human would do such a thing. And you suspect the answer is that no sane human would.

This isn't a race. It isn't a competition of any kind. If you were to say fuck it and turn around, no one would know or care. You're doing this for you, for reasons you neither care to name or describe.

And please, never mind those senior citizens who passed you on the way up and are now wishing you a good morning on their way back down. Don't even think about them. Just keep lifting those goddamn knees...

Every novel I've written has been like this. Hell, my whole writing career is like this. And my art career. And more than a few of my longer, cooler paintings and tattoos. The compressed narratives of Hollywood condition us to expect that success comes at the end of a montage full of 80's music. Real life is about bugs, and sweat, and long hard effort.

And yeah, it's effort no one cares about. The world doesn't care if you quit. It doesn't know you're the next Stephen King or Nuryev or Mozart or MC Hammer until you actually ARE. In the meantime, you're just another hiker on the trail. And don't for a moment doubt that they too are just hikers on their own trails. Just trying to lift one foot in front of another....

It's long. It's hard. There's no end in sight and there are probably better things you could be doing. But this is what you do. So do it.

And yeah, there are rewards along the way!

100 Books, Sort Of...

At a loss for a topic (or beleaguered by too many potential topics), I stole this meme from Candy's blog. The idea is, go through the list and bold the ones you've read.

An interesting aside: regarding the psychology of the book mix: in a study where subjects were presented with a list of high-brow (Schindler's List) and low-brow (Mask) movies, high-brow movies made up a very high percentage of their lists. When they were told they'd actually have to WATCH those movies, the high-brow choices were suddenly 13 times less likely to be chosen.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of fine films you keep passing over for Chopper Chicks in Zombietown. And why every 'Top 100' book list is full of books people think they 'should' like...



Without further ado:


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Notes From a Revolution

So I decided, if I'm going to be selling these ebooks, I really should have an ereader.

At the time, the only ereader available in New Zealand was the Kobo. I bought one, and I was delighted.

The Kobo came with 100 books loaded, free-domain classics. More were available through Whitcoulls's website, the Kobo site itself in Canada, or pretty much anywhere else books were sold in .epub or .pdf format.

I made a few quick purchases, loaded that puppy up through the USB cable and I was off and running. The Kobo only has one control-- a soft blue square that lets you toggle directions and middle-click. It's your book-selector, your page-turner, your menu-caller-upper. With the Kobo, your right thumb does it all...

Fast-forward a month, and Amazon's Kindle is available here. Naturally, I ordered one of those too! And just as naturally, I began to compare:

The Kindle boots a little faster than the Kobo, and it lets me turn pages with either hand. Ebooks are easier to find for the Kindle (Amazon seems to have pretty much everything)-- I had to do a bit of hunting to find titles in .epub for the Kobo. On the other hand, the library on the Kobo is easier to navigate, and there's less chance of accidentally turning twenty or thirty pages because you stuck it in your pocket or set a bowl of peanuts down on the button. Overall, I kept the Kindle, though I do still miss the Kobo.

Now, the Revolution:

First thing I noticed was that my ereader was doing to my bookshelf what my iPod did for my CD rack. It only took a couple of days to go from the 'shock of the new' to regarding my books as heavy, clumsy, unwieldy antiques. Only the best-printed pages matched my ebook, and even then the font size simply refused to change. Mostly, my paperbacks and softcovers are brownish paper and grayish print, and even my new James Lee Burke featured paper so thin I could read the back of each page through the one I was looking at.

An ereader is also portable. Wildly, madly, beautifully portable. I can set it on the table or balance it on my knee while I eat, lay it on the counter while I cook, even set it on that shelf at the back of my shower so that I can read while I wash. (Yes, I'm an addict. And these gadgets are the Cadillac of crack-pipes!)

And when I read in bed, one arm out above the covers? Well, no more thumb-and-pinky page spreading, no more laying the book on my chest to turn the pages with my thumb. Just click. Click. Click. Page after page after delightful page...

That's the good. Now, the bad...

DRM: *Fuck* DRM. I want to be diplomatic, but this blog isn't titled 'Moderate Speeds and Caution'. Basically, the idea that I can't read a book and enjoy it enough to pass along to friend strikes me as bullshit.

Think about your favorite authors and how you found them. That second-hand bookstore or garage sale, that battered paperback left with the magazines in a coffee shop, that book a friend passed you after she finished it, telling you how great it was. Those 'pirate' (in the sense the publisher didn't get paid for my reading it) books led me to 'real' purchases. Often several times over, as I passed my favorites on and replaced them, passed them on and replaced them. None of that is possible with copy-protected ebooks, and if you ask me, it's a fine example of publishers stabbing themselves in the eye. An artist's greatest enemy isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

The corporations pushing for DRM say they're protecting the rights of artists, but the fact is they don't mind costing an author a sale as long as it keeps them from losing a dollar. And yeah, there's a very special mindset out there that thinks of second-hand sales as a form of theft. Public libraries must make these folks foam at the mouth.

Formats: As I mentioned earlier, finding .epubs wasn't always the easiest thing. And buying them online was often like pulling teeth. Amazon's got it all over their competition in that regard. Fortunately, there's a free program called Calibre that converts between formats with no trouble. Look into it.

Geography: Now, this is another rant at the asinine behavior of major publishers. (I can almost hear the print deals being taken off the table now) Why is it that I can buy a paperback by, say, Duane Swierczynski from Amazon and they'll mail it right out to my house, but if I try to download THE SAME BOOK they give me a song and dance about how it's only available in North America?

Is the publisher going to get paid? Yes. Will they get paid MORE for the ebook? Yes. Is there any compelling reason for me to wait for an Australasian version of the ebook to come out? No. So why the fuck are they dicking me around? I don't know.

Writers, let me ask you this: How many readers would you not have today if no one could ever lend your books out, or give them to friends when they were finished? And how many sales would have been lost if you had to wait for your publisher to sell foreign rights before an overseas customer could read your book?

There's a revolution underfoot, and the old tyrants are trying to use it as an opportunity to tighten the noose...