Something I just wrote

So I play this game, called Urban Dead.  It's a fun little time waster, and I have a character in a group modeled after a police department.  The game is based in a city combating a zombie epidemic.  Survivors get killed, rise as zombies, and can be brought back to life as survivors again.  Meaning death has little meaning beyond some frustration at having to wait for somebody to revive you.

Anyway, the group I am in started a challenge.  A weekly 'drabble', or short work of 100 words or less, based on the game, and a single line, or statement.

This week's theme was "Death be not proud", a line from John Donne's poem of the same name.  Go read Donne, by the way, he's brilliant.

This was my entry:

Cold.

Cold and wet.

The sticky-sweet smell of candied apples gone rotten in the sun.

Hunger, like a lion in your belly, growling it’s discontent through your every nerve. It drives you forward, shambling steps and awkward momentum.

Searching, always searching. No grave, with the warm embrace of the earth around you. No weeping widows or frightened children. No friends to laugh and cry at tales of your acts, or silent mistresses hoping not to be noticed in the pew farthest back.

Only the gnawing, overpowering need to devour.

Death was a time for grief, once. Solemn.

No longer.

Annoyances

As a passionate lover of words and language, I get very annoyed very quickly at a lot of things.  Little things, that most people wouldn't even notice.  Things so insignificant that my wife doesn't understand my anger, and just rolls her eyes as I rant about it.


You've all seen it, and likely had the conversation about it.  A handwritten sign in a small shop window, advertising some sale with the following text:


Come on in!  All "items" on "sale"!  Only $5!


Do you see what's wrong with that?  


Quotation marks are used for very specific things.  Ideally, they are used for dialog only, to differentiate the words that a character is speaking from the words in the descriptive text.  They can also be used to emphasize certain words or phrases, generally to indicate that the writer is using them for humour's sake.  It's like using air quotes in a conversation with a friend.


"Yes, that dress looks air quote nice air quote on you."


If you do that in conversation, it's a way for you to tell your friend that she looks like a bag of shit without actually saying it.  It gets the point across, and gives you a thin barrier of deniability.


So, in the example sign above, there's no sale.  Or, if there is, it's only on something intangible, like a smile from the cashier, or something.


To all of the people writing these store signs, I want you to do something.  We all understand the air quote, so when you are preparing to write your sign, say it out loud, and wherever you want to write a quotation mark, throw up some air quotes.  You'll realise in a hurry how retarded your sign is making you look.


Now, onto something else.  Facebook statuses.  I know, it seems a little low-brow, but with the pervasiveness of the site nowadays, it is the most common thing that a lot of people read.


Which makes me sad, and would cause Papa to kill some folk.


Anyway, I want to talk about emphasis on certain words here, again.  An example status in my friends feed from this morning:


"uppppppp , EARLYYY!!!!! soooo collllddddd... class 10-1:30 today ;) gym later with  ?? ahahaaa. txt the cell I LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!"


I..... I don't even know where to start, here.  This individual obviously wanted their text to read like they were drawing out a lot of these words.  Let's ignore the spelling and grammar issues, and just focus on that.  I can get my point across using just the first word, here.  The letter 'p' is a sharp consonant.  There is a clear break at the end of the sound.  Say the word "up", and you'll see what I mean.  The letter 'u' is not.  It can go on forever (well, as long as you have breath in your lungs, that is).  Some of the words in this status seem to follow this logic, but I thing that was just luck.  


Read that first word, out loud.  Right now, you are sounding like a stuttering lawn mower.  What this person should have written was:


uuuuuuuuuuup


Say that one out loud, and you can see what annoys me.  


The words that you write down, no matter where you write them, are there to be read.  And when people read, they hear the words in their head, generally the exact same way you write them down.  So, if you throw in an extra letter, or fuck things up as entirely as this individual did, you are making other people sound ridiculous, and you are making yourself look like an asshole.  


Stop it.  Grammar is awesome.  It's there for a reason, and you should have paid attention in English class.  

Dusting Off an Old Manuscript

So I've been getting the itch to do some actual work lately. But starting a new novel is daunting, and I've been avoiding it. This evening, though, I remembered a long-abandoned manuscript, only half complete, that has been dying on my hard drive.

I opened it up tonight, and have been plugging away at it, off and on, for the past few hours. It's rough, getting back into something so long unused, but it feels great at the same time. I may actually finish this book.

Which is good, seeing as how it is one of my favourite story ideas, as well as one of the first ideas I ever had for a full length novel.

The Importance of a Good Desk

I do all of my writing on a laptop, in Roughdraft 3.0 (great, great software, I highly recommend it). Theoretically, I can write anywhere with these tools. Going for coffee? Take the lappy with you, bang out a few pages in the Horton's.

In practice, however, this is not really possible. I need to be in my chair, at my desk. The reason I need my chair is, as I have mentioned, that I need a specific squeak to my chair when I'm writing. When taking a break from the keyboard for a few seconds, I lean back, and if I don't hear that squeak, I lose my train of thought entirely.

For the past ten years or so, I have had the same desk. It was white pressboard, with two drawers, and was generally pretty terrible. But it served me well, and I wrote my first novel at that desk.

When my grandmother passed away, my aunt, with whom she was living, was giving away some of her possessions. My sister, bless her heart, took Nan's desk for me. She took it home, stripped it entirely, and revarnished it. It is old, solid, and absolutely beautiful.

She finally had a chance to bring it to me, yesterday. I cleared out a space in the office, set it against the wall, and transferred everything into it yesterday afternoon. I then spent the rest of the day sitting at it, organising it and just getting used to the difference. The thing is older than I am, and you can tell if you look closely. But my sister and her husband did a magnificent job restoring it, and I can't thank them enough.

This is a desk that I can get some serious work done on, I think.

Another One

You never know when an idea will hit you. See my earlier post, about always keeping a notebook handy. You could be driving to work, you could be watching the clouds, or playing in the backyard with your kid.

That last one just happened to me, over the weekend.

You never know what will trigger an idea, either. It could be something as innocuous as the position of a rock against a fencepost. Or more obvious, like a couple fighting for three hours next door, then going suspciously, and immediately, silent.

For me, it was the neighbour's garden. In their backyard, which faces my own, they have two decorative garden doors, right on the edge of their property. The way my backyard is laid out, these are in a small grotto, behind an aggressively overgrown dogwood bush, and under the low hanging, and far-reaching, boughs of a very old maple tree.

To look at it, it's a gorgeous sight. You're standing by a patch of daisies, looking into a shaded and secluded little clearing, and there are two doors, just standing there. There are no walls, no glass in the windows, and no handles on the doors.

I've been looking at them every day for a month, and nothing came of it. Saturday evening, though, I was outside playing with the Weenit, and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. The complete framework for a teenage-oriented fantasy novel. No meat to it, of course, that takes time, but the basis for it just fell into my brainmeats all at once.

I immediately wrote it down, of course, and will get to it when I can.

The point is, always be open to whatever comes into your head. You can't force an idea to come (unless you're Chuck Palahniuk, of course.... the man is a machine), which can be frustrating at times. But you can increase your chances by following those random thoughts that pop into your head. Follow them relentlessly, because you never know where they will take you.

The Library

No, not the public one that smells like hobos, though that one is awesome, too.

I mean your personal library. The one you have in your bedroom, or your living room, or, like me, in your office.

A person's library says a lot about them. Some people don't even have them, and that makes Neil Gaiman sad.

Why do you want to make Neil Gaiman sad?

What you have in your library, or, in my case, what you have room to display in your library, is pretty much a visual representation of yourself. Your interests, your hobbies, your deepest, darkest secrets are there, for all the world to see.

If only they could decipher it.

Mine is spread across seven bookshelves of varying size and description. This includes one shelf devoted entirely to The Weenit's books, granted, but I don't mind, as seeing her purple fuzzy Dora chair permanently sitting next to a shelf filled with her books makes me happier than I can adequately describe.

The rest are mine. Well, mine and the wife's, but mostly mine. I am shamed to admit that there are several shelves that are double-stacked*, which annoys the shit out of me, but there's no room, otherwise.

The two main shelves are about as tall as I am, containing five and six shelves. They are narrow, but that just means they fit in the room better. One one (the six-shelfer) I have the majority of my fiction, loosely categorized by genre and alphabetized by author's last name. The bottom shelf and a half is devoted to anthologies (Grimm's fairy tales, Norton Anthology textbooks from university, collected works of various people, etc...). The second is for non-fiction, categorized by topic (psychology, biology, history, occult {yes, this is non-fiction}, biographies, war, etc....). The remaining shelves hold, mostly, pocketbooks. Though my Robert Jordan set (almost entirely in hardcover, I'm working on the rest) is proudly on display. These shelves are the smaller ones, limited to two or three shelves each.

Now, the reason I'm describing this.... well, I'm not really sure. My fingers were itchy, and I needed to type something, to be honest.

When somebody looks at these shelves, they can immediately discern a few things about me. One, I like to read. A lot. Two, and more importantly, in my mind, is that I don't really care what I am reading about. I like to read on just about any subject, and often sit down in the bathtub with a university textbook just to read it.

Just because.

I get a lot of weird looks when I tell people that.

Regardless, what I'm getting at is this. You need to read. A lot. And you shouldn't care what you're reading about. Unless, of course, you're working on a specific subject. But if you're stuck for ideas, and you're looking for inspiration, just reach out to your shelf, grab a random book, and start reading.

*Double-stacked is when you have a line of books at the back of the shelf, and a second line in front of these, blocking them from sight.

It's My Book, Dammit, Not Yours

So, some recent drama over at a blog I read (The Over Educated Nympho, great read), has brought a few things to mind. Primarily, the notion of entitlement. A lot of readers will tell you that once they read a book, or a story, that it no longer belongs to the author. Hell, a lot of authors will tell you the same thing.

They are all completely wrong.

No matter what happens with it, anything you write is yours. Not only in a legal sense, but in a more personal, wholly intangible way.

When a reader has their mind blown, or their life completely changed by a book, they will hold it up as an example of great writing. Hell, I consider Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to be the absolute pinnacle of English literature, unsullied by lesser hands. It has completely changed my life, and the way I approach the English language.

But it's not mine. Not even a little bit.

It's Papa's, and it always will be.

A writer puts more than just mental effort into their work. It's far more than just words on paper to them. It's far more than a moving story that punches you in the gut and fucks with your mind.

It is them. Body and soul goes into it, and a good writer, one who takes their craft seriously, will be able to look at any passage in one of their works and tell you everything about the moment when it was written down. Where they were, what they were feeling, what was going on around them. Which one of their kids was sick that day, and whether or not they were fighting with their spouse.

There is a connection there, existing between a writer and his work, that transcends just about every other. The only comparison I can make that would do it justice is that of a parent and child. It's fundamental, and forever.

So yes, you paid your $15 to have a copy, and you've read it three dozen times. But it's not yours. Physically, you own a copy, but it belongs to the author entirely.