It's in

My first novel is out in the world. Amazon has a contest called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and a few days ago Claudia discovered it and sent me a link. It took a lot of work, and a lot of help from friends willing to give up their time and test read Roja for me, but I did it, and they did too. Roja is entered as of yesterday.

It still doesn't feel real. Yesterday, anyone who saw me would have thought I was inhaling laughing gas. I walked around the house giggling every five minutes and not knowing what to do. For months that book has been the focus of every bit of free time that I had, and now, it's going to sink or swim on it's own merits. I wonder when it will feel real.

It would never have gotten finished without the help I received. Even after my wife and I went through Roja page by page, every test reader found other mistakes that we both missed. Just another example of how writing a book is a different game than writing short stories.

So what's next? I won't know anything on Roja, good or bad, for a while, so I'm going to finish a short story that I started, and rewrite one that has been sitting idle for a bit. Then, it's off to the next book.

That's how I'm going to keep writing.

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.