Why I don't read Ray Bradbury

Actually, I do. So should you. If you read his work, hopefully you'll know what I'm talking about here. If you don't read his stories, you should. Right after you finish reading this posting would be a good time to start.

I do read Ray Bradbury, but I don't read him the way I read King, Matheson, Poe, David Nickle, and most of the stuff in Cemetery Dance. With those guys I can put myself into the story and just enjoy a good scare. That's the purpose of a story.

But Bradbury wrote damn well, and he wrote in a way that made each story personal, and brought it out into this life as opposed to the paper one. That's the purpose of a story, too.

At Fen-Con I picked up the graphic adaptation of The Martian Chronicles. I haven't read the print stories themselves yet, but I saw the mini-series that came out on TV many, many moons ago. So I thought I had an idea of what I was in for.

Yeah, I was wrong. Bradbury hits a nerve that no one else does. He makes us remember what it was like to be a kid, and to dream like a kid. Then he makes us remember what it was like to get too old to hold on to all those dreams. He shows us how beautiful we all are, and all the hideous things we do. He makes us happy, sad, and scared all at once. He feeds us every flavor of life, and reminds us that the last course is graveyard dirt.

Compare him to another great writer that I can only take in controlled doses, Robert Heinlein. I recently finished Starship Troopers, and although Heinlein was able to keep from preaching to the reader at the beginning of the book, he gets right to it toward the end. By the time I finished it I wanted to get out the ouija board, bang on it with a complete edition of Stranger In a Strange Land to get his attention, and ask, 'What crack pipe did you dream up this version of the military from? Everyone in here is good, honest, clean, honorable, and mindlessly loyal! They're goose-stepping boy scouts with bazookas!' Heinlein loves to tell us how great the world would be, if only we would all give up our own opinions and follow his vision. Bradbury is more honest with us, and he won't tolerate us being dishonest with him, or with that person we always see in the mirror.

The reason that I don't regularly gorge myself on Ray Bradbury, is because his stories always feel so sad. I have a mental image of him, (blissfully formed without checking any facts) as a really happy person. How could he not be happy, when he bled all his sorrow out on paper and send it straight to everyone else in the world? For personal reasons, I don't like sad thoughts. Ask me why sometime, and I'll either say, 'I'll tell you later,' or, 'I already told you,' depending on what books I've written.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to writing them.

The wife has returned!!

Okay, short update this week. My Lady Love just walked in the door, returning from Oni-Con, where she rocked. She dutifully reported all the cool sights to me, including the ridiculously cute Little Red Riding Hood that she would have sent to me just to get me to blush. (She has done that in the past with everything from little Japanese girls in French Maid costumes to REALLY nice-looking Wonder Women)

I spent pretty much the whole weekend pounding on Roja, including filling in a gap where I looked at the outline I had made, after writing the book, and realized, 'Oh, there's a whole chapter where one character seems to stop existing.' I'm borrowing, in the Doctor Who sense of the word, a technique from IT where I tell two different story lines at once. One part had what happened in the spring, but not in the summer.

I was finally able to find some of the mini-chemlights that I've been looking for. The plan is to pop them in some helium filled balloons on Halloween night, and let them sway in the wind. If I can figure out how to post pics on here, I'll show you how they look.

Still writing.

A bit of real life

Took a bit of a breather yesterday. My wife and I went down to Galveston, and after driving around for a while, we found a spot by the sea wall where we could just sit and look out over the ocean. It was warm, but the wind was blowing that fine salt spray in our faces, and I think a small storm was brewing out there too. It's nice to just sit down every once in a while and do something to remind yourself that you're on a planet, you're on a ball of earth and stone with a good amount of water on it's surface, and that ball is spinning and whirling through an empty, cold void. It puts a lot of what you have to deal with into perspective.

Tor turned down 'Welcome Home,' and I'm probably going to send them 'Stilling the Demons,' today when I get a couple of other things done. Stuff keeps piling up faster than I can do it.

During the week, I came up with an idea for my Halloween costume. Now all I have to do is make it.

Just a minute ago, I watched a vid on Youtube that showed Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a balloon that was up so high, when you looked up, you didn't see sky, you saw space. You could see the curve of the earth instead of it looking flat. Incredible doesn't even begin to describe that.

Still writing, and about to get back to it.

What would they do if...

Hey there! Good to see you again. Let me introduce you to a couple of people. This is Dale. He works out at the beef-packing plant as the loading dock supervisor. He's been working at that place for over thirty years, at first to support his mother and sister, and then later his wife and son. He's not quite as content with that fact as he used to be.

And this is Frank, a deputy with the local sheriff's office. Back when he first joined the department, one seriously evil SOB was running it. But he stuck to his guns, even though it cost him his marriage. Now he wants to be sheriff.

Whats going to happen to them? Well, that depends on you and me.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it's more important that you know your characters during the rewrite than when writing the first draft. On your first trip through the story, you're seeing the big picture, and making sure the ground under your feet is solid. The characters are there to prop up the plot. Whereas you and I (unless the Rutan are reading this) get our structural support from our skeletons, these folks start with what they contribute to our tale. If you took a close look at them the first time they get mentioned, they would probably look like wax statues, not even shaped into good detail on the back. They don't have any life of their own at that point.

On the second pass, they need more life. We're not just appreciating the scenery at that point, we're taking note of how clear the path is, whether the plants look green or brown, and if the area smells like rainforest or store-bought fertilizer. Assuming you're writing something that you want people to read, you better make it a worthwhile investment of their time. If you say the mailman did it on page 483, say it was done with a knife on page 101, and say the mailman faints at the sight of blood on page 257, someone's going to notice. Heck, some people will notice if you misspell one word out of a hundred thousand. People are like that. (See an older entry about writing or filming crap)

What will they do if you get it wrong? Depends. If you're Stephen King, and you put an electric chair in a novel set a few years before they were actually used, every amateur critic and rabid fan in the civilized world will take to the internet and froth at the mouth over it, and it won't affect your sales one bit. If, on the other hand, you're an unknown, and you write 'cleaver' when you mean 'clever,' or worse, you miss-type it and your autocorrect changes it to the former, the editor may well throw your story in the trash, and you'll only get a form letter with 'not what we're looking for at this time' pre-printed on it.

So think about those characters. Wait until you have the story set in your head and the frame of it on paper first, but try this thought in particular: What would they do if you didn't use them as cannon-fodder? If the martians didn't land, or the dead stayed content and quiet in their graves, or that little piece of a deadly crystal didn't show up at just the right time, what would those people do on what would otherwise be the opening day of your story? As far as the two men you met a few paragraphs ago, Dale would get a little more bitter, just as he did yesterday, and the day before that. His birthday's coming up, you see, and he hasn't lived quite as much as he expected he would have at his age. What about Frank? Well, I told you he wants to be sheriff. I might have glossed over the fact that he's already run once, and that he actually held the office for a short while under less than ideal circumstances. He already has a firm picture in his head about how the people in town feel about him, and he tends to ignore anything that contradicts that image. Frank won't be disillusioned any time in the immediate future. He'll just go about his business, being wrong about some very fundamental facts.

But of course, we know what's really going to happen. We've known all along. But also knowing what they might do if they existed without us lets us plot their actions a little more consistently, and it makes them a little more sympathetic to us, which helps us make them more sympathetic to everyone else.

Speaking of which, could I ask for a bit of sympathy? I went through all that chest-puffing last week about how The Red Man Burning was going to be my next book, but between then and now I pulled up that other one I mentioned, In The Dark, and used the word count function. It pulls up at around 43,000 words. At that length I might as well fatten it up and serve it with some flourish. Dress warmly if you read it. It's a bit cold out there in the dark.

Still writing.