Sick today, but I'm going to write anyway. I never found my sticky note, and never remembered exactly what it was about. However, I now have a new sticky note that I wrote this morning in the car, about something else--something smaller and less big-picture than the gloriously comprehensive sticky note I once had and still mourn. But still. I have something to focus on.

This is not a networking or promotional blog, so I don't like to mention names of current authors or their books, usually. However, a writer friend just told me of yet another book with an autistic character who speaks without using contractions. This reminded me that there's a book coming out this fall called Episodes, by Blaze Ginsberg. I think it bears mentioning because Blaze is a young adult on the autistic spectrum, and the book is about his life, in his voice, from his POV. I highly recommend it over any books by people who magically had an autistic character's voice pop into their head, and therefore wrote a book with said character as MC.

I also see this as a warning to those of us who ever have a character's voice magically pop into our heads: just because you dreamed it don't make it real. I know that there's been a lot of storm and fury on the internet re. writing outside your own experience. Of course most of us write outside our own experience. Otherwise we'd all be writing autobiographies. However, my feeling is that while we have a right to write anything we want, our good intentions don't have to count for squat in anybody else's eyes. The farther outside my experience I go--and the closer to hitting someone else's raw nerve--the more I'd damn well better be prepared to take it in the you-know-whats after the book is out.

I also think there are a lot of crazy people on the internet, who will gladly give it to you in the you-know-whats, heartily and often, if they don't like something you did. So, write whatever you feel you must--but go in with your eyes open, is all I have to say.


Disclosures:

Yes, I have an autistic son.

Yes, I blurbed Episodes.

No, I don't know Blaze.

No, nobody I've ever met who is on the autistic spectrum speaks without contractions.


Side note: The formatting/structure of Episodes is extremely interesting and unique. Hmm, now that I think about it, I wonder if it's subliminally influenced me. Could be.

I'm a big slob. I just don't notice mess most of the time; my eyes sort of skim over it because I'm thinking of other things, and it doesn't register. When it does register, it's only briefly, like, "Wow, that's messy," and then I move on and forget about it. For some reason my brain doesn't go the next step like most people's brains seem to: "Hmm, I'd better clean that." I have to deliberately focus and work to get to that step.

So yesterday on the way to tutoring I had one of those moments of creative clarity, and I stopped and wrote down what I need to do next on this ms on a sticky note pad I keep in the car. Hours later, after tutoring, I brought the sticky note in and put it somewhere, probably on the kitchen counter while I did family stuff. Then I decided I didn't have time to work on my WIP, and I may have moved the sticky note close to my desk, probably even onto my desk.

Anyhow, the point is, that today is recycling day, and out of alllll the papers I haven't straightened or picked up, I apparently picked up and THREW AWAY this one very important sticky note. It was probably the best damn sticky note of all time, and as I look back on it, I feel certain it would have solved all my problems and I would have shot right to the end on this ms and it would have been finished and ready to send off within, oh, say two months. But my sticky note is gone! I cleaned it! Oh, the irony!

I know what part of the ms it was about, and vaguely what it had to do with. Now I have to dig in and try to find the place in my head that originally came up with it. It kills me to think that my wonderful, priceless, ms-saving sticky note is being smushed in among the useless junk mail and discarded plastic milk cartons on the recycling truck.

The ending section I have for the former GN is all fluff. It's fun fluff, but I'll need to tie it to the front part better. Maybe one thing to do is keep track of issues raised (i.e. stumbling blocks thrown in the MC's path) in the front part, and try to show them being relieved them one by one at the end? Not sure. Somehow I want the reader to be rooting for the MC to make a choice that maybe isn't the wisest course, and in retrospect will turn out to be a very bad idea with dire and far-reaching consequences. Somehow I need to get past all that and make the reader want her to make that choice.

The formatting I have (at the moment) for the main story:

paragraph breaks rather than indents
text of each page centered top-to-bottom
border around the text
as the story progresses toward the last chapter, margins get wider, text gets less space, borders get tighter--all still centered

Formatting for the out-of-POV clips:

same, but no borders and the margins are always standard.

And at the moment the title is Boundaries. Don't know if this will hold up; none of the other title ideas have. But it's working for me at the moment, and so is the formatting, although I know I probably can't submit a ms that looks like this. However, if the clips end up remaining in the ms then the formatting may have to stand till an editor sees it, because so far I can't think of a better way to show the differences between the clips and the main story. Right now I feel that changing fonts is not strong enough. I know it's best to standardize the format and let the words speak for themselves, but that's not enough here. Here, the form helps tell the story.

Of course, there's always the worry that I'm just being Russell Crowe in that shed in the backyard in A Beautiful Mind--that my ms will end up being only the sad and strange evidence of a disordered mind. And I know from Beating Heart that a lot of people don't get formatting that's tied to story.

Nevertheless, I press on. Now that I think about it, I need to go through the entire back half of the ms and reconsider each scene. That part was all written as a GN, so of course it comes off as a little glib now, when all that's left is dialog. The front part was conceived as prose-ish, so it's more...I dunno what to call it. The ideas are more concise, concrete, and separate, whereas the later ms flows from scene to scene and you can't tell them apart without pictures. I need to fix the later ms so it's a series of punches, and I can get my mind around each individual punch.

So, where to start? At the moment, I am clueless. First order of the day: get a clue.

No writing today. Had jury duty. I have been reading two books for a long, long time, because I can only read in drips and drabs these days. One book is Jane Austen's Letters, the other is The Iliad. I've been reading JAL straight through, very slowly, but I've been jumping around in the Iliad, reading whatever catches my fancy, because I can't stand the stupid gods. They keep interrupting the real story, when whatever truly happened would have been so much more interesting. If I saw a current writer inserting these kinds of interruptions in a book, I'd call it bad writing. I'd say that the writer is either protecting the characters or fading out to protect him/herself from having to write an emotional scene.

So I took the Iliad to jury duty, which meant I read a long chunk of pages in a row, including god stuff. And I was trying to figure it out--because obviously I'm not a classicist, although I know people who know classicists, and I'll bet they would know why the damn gods are all over the place messing up the book, so maybe I should ask around, or heck, just read the Sparknotes--and I thought maybe the gods step in where the author had to explain why a hero suddenly disappeared from a fight and ended up elsewhere. Lord knows a hero couldn't have run away. But then, Paris get "disappeared" by Aphrodite, and it's quite clear that the author(s) had no love or respect for Paris, and would not have minded showing him running away. So, I dunno.

And there's this part where an archer, Pandarus, breaks a truce by shooting Menelaus with an arrow. There was this setup with Athena (I think it was Athena, but don't care enough to check) going to tempt Pandarus into breaking the truce. Blah, blah, blah. But then there's this in-scene description of Pandarus thinking, "Hey, yeah, I'll do that," and how he gets his bow set up and where the bow came from and how he shoots it and where it hits Menelaus and what happens after that. That part is all very compelling and real. It's real people, doing real things. The god stuff was so limp and feeble compared to the real stuff. It makes me want to go back in time and smack somebody. I want to see Pandarus coming up with the idea on his own--because you know he did. You can just see him itching to do it, realizing that if he has the cajones to break the truce by sniping this one key guy--and he's talented enough to do it, too--the war will be over.

And then some pages later--maybe it's the next chapter--Pandarus gets mowed down by another guy. We get to remeet Pandarus, get to hear about how he's pissed at himself because he brought his weapons but left his horses and chariots behind and joined the war on foot, because he was worried about his horses having enough to eat during the siege. We get to see him again as a person and a comrade--and then boom! he gets killed and he's out of the story:

(this is from the Robert Fagles translation)

...the shaft...
split the archer's nose between the eyes--
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.


And this is a guy we liked. Or at least I did. This happens over and over; there are no red-shirt guys like on Star Trek where they're just in there to be killed so the main guys can do their storyline. The guys in this war are introduced in emotional detail--we get to hear about how their mother loves them or how they grew up side by side with their brother--and then we're told how they died in detail like above. Often there's a little comment afterward, like how now there's no one left to take care of the dead guy's father, now that his only son is gone. It makes war very real, in a way movies and most books don't. All the soldiers count. None are just cannon fodder for the story.

And I have to say that I noticed when Menelaus was wounded by Pandarus' arrow, his brother Agamemnon was very concerned that they might have to stop the war if Menelaus died. The excuse for war would be gone. You--or at least I--very much get the sense that these guys wanted to fight and collect loot, and any excuse would do. I was surprised to see that Paris even offers to return his loot from Sparta, adding to it from his own bank account, if the Greeks will just go away and leave him Helen. They say no. I'm thinking it's because they wanted to loot Troy. They wanted the women, the horses, the armor, the gold. If Paris gave back the Spartan goods, nobody would get it but Menelaus. The rest of the army wouldn't get anything that they didn't take with their own hands from the ruins of Troy.

And then--this is what drove me to start the former GN--you get thousands of years of male writers saying it was all Helen's fault those men died, because she was such a slut. If Helen hadn't been such a ho, none of that would have happened to those poor innocent fellows. It's making me mad just thinking about it.

Worked on former GN yesterday. I went through tidying up and pulling it into something that reads like an actual book (that was the objective, anyway). I got through the first part and into the part that's been a sticking point, deliberately working with the idea that I need to undercut myself and drain some of the drama from the sticking point before it happens. This felt like it went well.

I think when you're working on problems in the front of your mind, the back of your mind is working on them, too. I think the back of your mind sometimes secretly works on things when the front of your mind is overwhelmed--and novels are overwhelming, no question about it. There's just too much going on, too many threads to keep straight. What sometimes happens with me is that the back of my mind deconstructs a problem and presents it to me when the front of my brain is relaxed; i.e. when I'm half-asleep and half-awake. This happened last night; my head suddenly sorted out several overlapping issues, organized them very simply and clearly, and presented them to me. Fortunately I got up and wrote them down, even though I was mostly asleep and it was a pain. So now if I can take that clarity and apply it to the ms and not get sidetracked or confused, I may very well be through the sticking point.

That's a big if. But I've mostly sorted out the notes I scribbled--they were almost unreadable--so that's one thing.

Come to think of it, it feels like I do most of my best big-picture thinking when I'm not at the computer, but am engaged in some kind of mindless activity like driving the same old route, or walking a dog or mowing the lawn. But it doesn't happen when I'm exercising hard enough to be breathless, like jogging or on cardio machines. Dunno why.

Got family stuff done, will work on former GN tonight. However, while walking Tyson I was thinking about the swordfighting ms, and sort of taking in the fact that the plot might not actually get started till halfway through the book. I thought, "That's a lot of setup--half a book--and how on earth can it not be boring?" Then I thought, "The story doesn't start halfway through the book, because the story isn't about what happens." The story--including the stuff that starts farther in (that used to be the beginning)--is this about MC's maturation, disillusionment, etc. His father getting killed isn't setup that spurs him to later action.* It's part of what changes him. What I was thinking of as setup needs to be considered with the same weight as the plotline that kicks in later. Every event in the so-called "setup" needs to be given the same consideration as events that happen down the road. I need to look carefully at each piece as I work on it; I think some may still be transitional/informational, but now I feel that plenty of them are going to be more concrete steps on the character's inner journey.

Now, I may have been already halfway thinking this way in the back of my mind, but I probably need to be more deliberately aware. What I need to do--probably--is to keep the big picture of the character's arc in mind as I work on these things, and not focus so much on how he felt/thought last chapter and what changes now that so-and-so happens in this chapter and how it leads to next chapter.

I doubt I'll absorb this idea enough to put it in play for a while; knowing me I'll have to realize it several times before it sinks in. I can't word it clearly enough yet for my mind to internalize what it really means as far as hands-on daily work. But thinking it is a good start.


*Well it is, but I need to stop thinking of it that way because it's causing problems.

No time for my own stuff, but the power went out today so I couldn't get much w-f-h stuff done either. I read a bit of a book a writer friend lent me, and actually learned something from it. What I learned is that I'm not being neurotically obsessive and self-sabotaging in my rewrite of the swordfighting ms, because in the book I started reading, the same thing was wrong. The story started out and captured my interest, but then it went off on a pre-determined storyline. Once the predetermined storyline set in, the book went dead. As a doornail. Nothing wrong with the writing, nothing wrong with the storyline, either. It all made sense and was readable. But the heart dropped out of it. I've never seen a book do that--or if I have, I haven't been in a position to notice it before.

No, scratch that--I've seen books do it at the ending. But endings are hard, and that's a different ball of wax. This was sort of near the front. It was a brain-born plot, and it left everything that tugged at me behind, and suddenly I. Did. Not. Care.

Usually if I get bored with a book, I get annoyed and frustrated, but this time I was like, "Oh, cool," and a light went on.