A successful marriage is one where no one gets killed

So my wife and I have made a decision. We're not going to kill each other, and we're not going to divorce. We are going to respect each other's point of view. But damn was it close for a while there.

My wife has her copy of Roja, and is going through it with me, one paragraph at a time. She read it by herself first, making some notes and sending me a text that said, 'I hate you,' when she came to a particular point in the plot. That lets me know that I did that point right.

We started editing it together as soon as I got home from work Friday night. It took us less than an hour to reach the point where we were glaring at each other, staying silent to keep from saying things we would later regret. We have been married nearly ten years, and we have never had an argument like the one we had Friday night.

My beloved knows the rules of grammar better than I do. She has a very clear idea of what parts go where. She busted her butt to learn all this, and she has edited fiction before. Me? In my own humble opinion, (stop laughing) I know the story. I have a sense of not just the story we're working on, but the living, organic thing that gets into your head and makes a home there. I also have the opinion that you can wibble the rules a bit, if it helps tell the story.

It does not help that I am a native Texan, and my wife is from up north. Most of the dialogue in the book is spoken by natives, and so there are a lot of 'Texasisms' being used. Where dialogue is concerned, you go with how the person speaks. When a character uses 'got' where 'get' would be better English, my poor wife gets a twitch in her eye.

Also, most of the characters are male, and not bothered by coarse language. My wife isn't bothered by it, but she didn't understand the logic of the nuts. When a man has to swear on one of his testicles, he uses the left one, not the right. There is an unspoken but near-universal belief that the right nut is primary, therefor if you risk losing one, it's the left. My wife gave me one of those looks when I finished explaining this.

No one's dead, so we still have a good marriage. Also, I'm still writing.

The non-representative villain

For Christmas, I got the movie, 'Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.' It's not high art, but it doesn't try to be. It's good entertainment, and that's something that's not easy to make. The people who made it did a good job of crafting a fairly cohesive vampire mythology. It plays a bit loose with the real history, but that's how you make a real story out of reality. As the opening line says, 'History prefers legends to men.'

When you write a story, a cigar is never just a cigar. It probably isn't even really a cigar. It's a symbol of opulence, taste, coarseness, arrogance, toughness, weakness, masculinity, or faux masculinity. It all depends on how it's presented.

In that same light, a good villain is never just a foil for our hero. They are people in their own right, with strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and personalities. They also need color to make them live. A technique sometimes used is to borrow color from some available source. Our villain (and our hero, too) can be a priest, a mailman, a politician, or a shaolin monk, as long as it's something we have a bit of familiarity with. It's important to note that our familiarity does not have to be fact-based. Anyone who watches kung-fu movies will know what a shaolin monk is, though they probably have no idea what the real ones are like.

That's where it gets tricky.

When I finally broke down and saw 'Avatar,' way back when, I kind of liked it. Then little things like the casual way Michelle Rodriguiz character switches sides, and the fact that there was only one 'good' guy in uniform, and no bad guys with blue skin, began to bug me. When you use real organizations, real people connect with them. If your connection makes them feel good about themselves, great. It might mean they want to see your next movie or buy your next book. Or it might 'only' put a smile on their faces, and they go on to judge your work on it's own merits. If you manage to accidentally (Or deliberately) insult them, well, you've just lost a customer. How many do you have that you can afford to do that?

SPOILER ALERT!!

But it's more than that. In my own humble opinion, it smacks of lazy writing. In AL:VH, the villains are vampires who start the Civil War to create a nation for vampires, where they can finally stand tall and be proud of who they are. A lot of the other plot devices are solid, and Rufus Sewell's character makes some good points on the concept of slavery, but the Civil War was started by vampires. Ponder that for a second. Every man and woman who died in it, died fighting in ignorance. Also, these vampires are smart, ancient, powerful, and wealthy. They've survived by staying in the shadows, then they line up to be on the front lines of a war. The writers borrowed Abraham Lincoln, all the people around him, and the Civil War, (borrowing all the people around it) and while I understand they needed to make a story, they used real people. If next week's topic is what I'm planning on, I'll give my thoughts on how that can break the magic spell.

My long-suffering wife is working her way through Roja slowly, and I can't tell you how hard it is to not hover over her shoulder while she reads it. Why don't I? Because she's told me how annoying that is, of course. Also, she owns an ax, a large one.

I'm getting a short set in the Great Dustbowl rewritten, as well as working on a short that's not really horror, but that's been kicking around in my head for a while. So yes, I'm still writing.

I have a book

It's done.

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to write those words. Roja took a lot longer than it should have, in part because I put it aside to write short stories for a bit, but also because I was stumbling my way along in the dark as I wrote it. It isn't just making sure that I don't describe someone's eye color as brown on one page and blue on another, (although that did com up) it was making sure that the people stayed the same people through the whole thing. Because a reader has to assemble their own characters from the directions that the writer provides, we have to give directions that work. If you put a good coat of conservative flesh on the skeleton of a 'nuclear family' upbringing, you need to include a special attachment for that friend who's a confrontational, pot-smoking, liberal arts professor. If you don't, that friend won't fit.

So is it, Roja, any good? Well, if you ask me, I'll say it's damned good. Then again, I may be just a wee bit biased. My long-suffering wife is going to be my first test subject. She already endured me hiding up in my study until thirty minutes to midnight on new year's eve, when I came downstairs ready to bludgeon someone to death because as I was cleaning stuff off my printer, (I tend to use it as an extra shelf) I bumped something on my CPU, and my monitor went black. Be glad you weren't in the room with me just then.

After all that, I had to print it out in batches. I upped the font size to make it easier to read, which upped the number of pages. My poor printer hates me when I make it print a lot of pages at once, and it's kind of got me where it wants me, so I baby it.

On top of that, my poor wife read the first chapter, and found a lot of brackets and incomplete paragraphs that I hadn't noticed on my read-through. Last night, I finished the last of the fixes, and printed the last of the pages. I take comfort in the thought that if anyone tries to shoot my wife while she's proofreading my first book, all she has to to is hold up the manuscript. The damn thing is about six inches thick.

What's next? Well, I plan on going back to my old drill of writing something new while re-writing something else. I have short stories that have been collecting dust this whole time, and of course, it's time to look around for an agent and/or publishing house that will take Roja. I also won't be neglecting this blog like I did.

Whatever happens next, I'll still be writing. Thank you for reading.

Runs in, finds a seat at the back, and hopes no one noticed

Okay, this is late, and it's short on top of that. The cool, insightful post that I had in mind is currently only half done, and I need to go to bed.

Roja is coming together. I can't tell you how cool that is.

The other day I got an e-mail from Grey Matters Press, letting me know that 'Dirty' passed the first culling to be in their Dark Visions anthology. When I read that, it was like getting a shot of adrenalin right in my heart, after someone left the hypo in the freezer overnight.

I asked for a Kindle for Christmas, if only so I can join the Brave New World of publishing and see what poor, innocent victims are available to flog my wares to. Now I just have to figure out how the blasted thing works.

Wow, this post isn't short. It's a severed stump.

Don't blame me, I was writing

Reacting, and preventing.

I had an idea for this week's post, a good one about a necessary quality of horror. I was going to make a few points, then complain about how hard I've been working on Roja.

But on Friday, a twenty year old boy in Connecticut killed twenty-seven people, including his own mother and twenty children. The police are working on trying to understand why he did it, but I'm not holding out hope for a reason that makes sense. Despite my odd interests, I think I can grasp the concepts of 'sane' and 'normal' that most people use when they get up out of bed in the morning and go through their day. I may not live there, but I can see it from my window.

The problem, as I posted not too long ago, is that people's hand-made realities don't include everything that everyone else's has. They can't. Your world may not contain a reason to go do what that boy did, and mine doesn't either. But I guarantee you, his did.

People are naturally wanting to do something to prevent this from ever happening again, and already some are calling for more gun control. After all, if the boy hadn't had guns, he couldn't have done it, right? Look up the news from China, about how they've started posting guards at schools because of recent attacks on kids over there. The same damn day of the attack in Connecticut, a man went after kids in a school in Henan province with a knife. Not too long ago, another man did the same thing with a machete. 'Doing something' about guns is an easy answer, and I'm sure the people of China have their easy answers, too.

How can we keep this craziness from ever happening again? We can't. Take away guns, cars, planes, and baseball bats, and the people who think they have a reason to hurt children will use sticks and stones. People have their own reasons to do everything, and we're pretty clever at finding ways around obstacles. We wouldn't have survived as a species if we weren't.

How can we decrease the chances of it, then? Well, I thought of a couple of ways, but you tell me how likely they are.

First, we mind each other's business. I pay attention to you, you pay attention to me. Instead of just waving to the old man across the street, you walk over and say hello some Saturday afternoon, and ask to meet all the people who live under his roof.

Quick note: You show up at my door and try that, and you'll be soaked with the garden hose before I throw a plugged in, frayed, extension cord at you.

The other option? Well, we listen. All of us, to all of us. We also sincerely, completely accept one another. You take the guy next to you at the bus stop, who likes to have sex with women's purses, as he is, and I listen to the woman in front of me in line at the DMV as she tells me what really bothers her, so that then she won't go home and cut herself under her clothes where it won't show. Would the boy in Connecticut have told his reasons to someone, if he knew in advance that they might listen? I don't know, because I don't even know his reasons. But the next one might.

Tonight, during a break from writing, I made my regular call to my daughter. I told her I loved her, and that she means the world to me. Please go do something similar.

Date night, Santa Claus, and truck owners without chainsaws

So my wife asked how the book was coming. After pondering for a good, solid metaphor, I asked her if she had ever heard of someone carving a statue from a tree trunk using a chainsaw. Because my wife is someone who can appreciate the level of skill required, she said yes, she had. Then I asked her to imagine if that person had been really inspired to create something, only to find his chainsaw was gone. Does he give up? Obviously not. He uses what tools he has, a pick up truck that can go a hundred miles an hour, and a buddy who's willing to drive it. He puts the tree trunk in the bed of the truck, hops in back with it, and has his friend take off down an asphalt road. By strategically leaning the trunk out and letting it rub on the asphalt, he slowly and laboriously grinds away anything that doesn't belong on his statue.

My wife gave me one of those looks.

Because I've been cooped up here in my study pretty much non-stop this month, she also took me out to the movies Saturday night for a date. Our local Alamo Drafthouse was having a graveyard shift double feature of 'Rare Exports' and 'Silent Night Deadly Night.' I hadn't seen either before, so at the very least I was expecting a bit of a treat.

Alamo Drafthouse is a fun place. They have good theaters, serve good food, and really do kick people out if they talk through the film or can't/won't control their children. They also make a point of having interesting pre-show entertainment up on the screen. Last night they showed bits of a Christmas themed 'Tales From the Crypt' episode, as well as a hilarious short from Yer Dead Productions titled 'Treevenge.' For this holiday-themed show, they also had a couple of audience participation games. My lady love declined to enter the eggnog chugging contest, (though she did initiate the cry of 'chug chug chug') but when they announced the 'wrapping competition' she went right up to the front of the theater. They gave her and another girl each a tee-shirt, and the one who wrapped theirs the fastest won. For extra points, my wife busted into some free-flow rapping, which got her an extra shirt of her choice. Then she gave them both to me. She always finds a way to make my life better.

Rare Exports is a fun movie from Finland about the real nature of the Santa Claus figure, and Silent Night, Deadly Night is a reliable 80's slasher flick that came out the same time as Nightmare on Elm Street. The former was a nicely original story that was almost, but not really, safe for kids to see. (Honestly, it would probably be considered safe for kids in Europe, where they seem to have a few less hangups) I initially wondered about the wisdom of showing Rare Exports first, since it looked to be the film with the higher production values. But it's definitely the 'softer' of the two movies, and seeing it after you've seen jolly old Saint Nick decapitate someone would be a bit of a let-down. It was a fun evening.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I need to get back into the bed of that pickup truck.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

When I can't write, I think about writing. I imagine myself talking to someone, anyone, who wants to know what it's like. I explain that I write in chunks, little scenes and bits of scenes. Those bits are like bricks, and I try to build a wall with them. Problem is, they're not all the same size, and they don't fit one right after the other. I don't always know how a story ends before I start writing it, but I usually know by the time I'm half-way done. That means I have a starting point, and an ending point. Then the story goes where ever it damn well pleases, never mind the fact that it's supposed to be headed toward the ending. I also write pieces that get put down in the middle, never mind where the beginning and end may be.

So I have a bunch of bricks spread out all over this big field, and I need to make a wall out of them. To do that, I make a map of where each of them is. Open Office has a spreadsheet function, and I've made one that's set up like a calender. Now I'm going through the draft that I have, and putting each important scene on the calender. You know how you say, 'The next Saturday, the family gathered again.' Well, I need to make sure that the next Saturday wasn't the very next day, and that one of the family members who gathers is still alive to show up. This will help me get a better grip on the whole book.

Claudia and I finished season one of 'Bedlam' this week. It's a series about the old Bethlam Royal Hospital being converted into an apartment building. Unfortunately, some of the prior tenants aren't quite as dead as they should be. (See? If they'd just had a spreadsheet, everything would have worked out fine) So far it's a good series, but it's also another reason to hate the Brits for only having six episodes to a season. In the last episode, you get the sense that things are just starting to heat up.

Kind of ironic that a post about keeping track of days is a day late, don't you think? Don't blame me, I was writing.