The clay takes a while to dry

Ah, yes. That's what summers in Houston are supposed to be like. Air so humid that it feels like you're wading through wet cement when you go outside, and temperatures so high that after a few minutes you look like someone has dumped a bucket of water over your head. How could I have ever forgotten?

We've had a bit of respite from the heat these past few weeks. Lots of wind and rain, coming once every two or three days, kept things from being too bad. It was almost bearable.

All that's over and done with. I can get up at eight o'clock to take the dog out for a walk and be sweating before we make it to the gate. At work I have a fan blowing on me, a cup of ice water within reach, and find a reason to step into the air-conditioned part of the building every thirty minutes or so, and I can still feel sweat running down the backs of my legs where no cool air reaches them. It's hot.

I'm making what will hopefully be the last or next-to-last run through In The Dark. Getting the brackets cleaned out and making sure I don't have our hero sneering at someone at the beginning of a paragraph and they're best friends at the end of it. When you have to change what people say throughout a story because you've altered a small part of the plot, it can happen. In fact, I can't remember a story that I've written where it didn't happen. This is why it's so important to have a new set of eyes look something over before you send it out into the world in the hope that it will convince people to support your writing habit. Which brings me to my main point.

I still have an idea of how In The Dark was supposed to run. Way back at the beginning I thought I had a nice, clear plot all made up that would grip the reader and pull them in at the very first page. That perfect plot lasted right up until I had to put it down on paper. (well, a screen that's made to look like paper) Anything that only exists in your head may or may not be able to stand on its own two feet after being born. I've had one or two short stories that could do it, but nothing longer than a few pages. Ideas are little dreams that you have when you're awake, and as anyone who has ever tried to live them has found out, reality is very unfriendly to dreams.

In this reality a lot of characters that I never even thought of have come to life, wearing faces of people that I used to know. The place where they live is a little bigger, and no longer reminds me of my old high school. Little details, like knowing the color of the sky, and picturing parts of the world that none of the characters will ever see, bring it into sharper focus. Those details make it real.

I was able to change it because it hasn't been all that long since I first typed in the last words of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the first draft. (and I have to tell you, typing those words felt damn good) Of all the conflicting versions and explored possibilities that I've written down and erased, no one story has shoved the others out of the nest and let them die. Time or inactivity will do that, and both together will do it faster than you think. Form the clay into a shape that nudges your imagination, but your first result probably won't match what you pictured. So reshape it. Step away from it for a little while, to give the first image and what your hands have made a chance to merge into one entity. But don't wait too long. Picking up something you once smiled at and finding it shriveled into a dead, lifeless lump will kill something inside you. You'll feel it die.

That's why you'll probably never read any of the first stories I wrote. I remember the shivers that came when I was gathering my clay, going over bits of the stories just in my head, usually when I couldn't sleep. But that first time I finished a story and really read it with as much detachment as I'll ever have, it was a hell of a shock to get that sour taste in my mouth that comes whenever I read something that should have been quietly smothered at birth. I didn't walk away, I ran. I started other things, but I never came back to those first attempts. See my entry about crap if you think you want to read them anyway.

Now here's where I hedge my bet. I did say probably. Letting those stories die still gnaws at me, and I'm possessive enough that I will never let anyone take the seeds of those stories and write their own versions of them. We'll meet with drawn swords on some moonlit beach before that happens. Could I hook those withered things up to a taser and shock them back to life? That's a scary thought.

But not as scary as not writing.

Playing Whack-a-Mole

That's really what it feels like. Every time I think I'm coming to the end of the rewrite of In The Dark, I notice three or four more places where I've started to say one thing and then finished some completely different sentence. What if you had to take an existing house of cards, and go through them to make sure all the faces were oriented the same way, without just knocking the whole thing down and starting over. Oh, and when you get halfway done, you realize it looks better with them facing the other way. Yeah.

A bit late posting this. Claudia was vending at San Japan over the weekend and just got home. I wasn't able to get the time off to go with her, so I got this weekend to myself. Nice, but I'm glad to have her back.

Next part may get a bit self-indulgent. Be warned.

I'm also getting to that point where I'm doubting every single thing about the book, from the title, through the opening line, and all the way to the part where nothing look the last sentence that I was thinking 'Damn this is good' when I first typed it. I've read and reread the same lines over and over again, and am nearly at the point where I want to pull up the file and just click 'Delete.' My thoughts keep coming back to something I saw back when I regularly watched TV. I don't know if it was a one-shot show or part of a series, but at some point a few years ago I saw a documentary about the struggles of a salvage crew as they tried to float a ship that had run aground somewhere on the coast of Alaska. They planned out their tactics in good detail, had enough experience to know what they were doing, and were ready with a backup plan if something went wrong. They went in there ready to take charge and kick some butt.

With a set up like that, you know what happened. Everything, and I mean everything, went wrong. The ship was deeper in the sand than they had thought it was, equipment failed, and the weather turned against them. After trying everything they could, the captain had no choice but to cut his losses and head for home. Before he did, he said, “Right now I'd just like to take this thing out to the middle of the ocean and blow some holes in it.” I keep seeing an image of what the captain's face would look like at that exact moment. The troublesome ship is floating in the water a safe distance away, his crew have planted the explosives and are back on board to stand with him, and the detonator is in his hand. He takes a long, deep breath to savor the moment, then he pushes the button. Flash, boom. Sound and fury. How long would a big ship take to go down into that cold, black nothingness? I have no idea, but I know what expression would be on the captains face while he watched, and I have an idea that it would last for quite a while.

Click, select 'Delete,' click. Close my eyes and breathe a long, contented sigh. I am free.

Yeah. Then spend every remaining second of my life regretting that one click. I know myself that well, at least.

Now let me get back to rewriting.

Still not real

So when I decided I wanted to be a writer, what did I know about the craft itself? Why I knew everything, of course. You have to tell an interesting story, and tell it in an interesting way. What else could I possibly need to know?

So a lot of today has been spent looking up what units a Geiger counter displays, how many different types of radiation there are and what they're made of, and what the minimum number of people you can have on a generation ship if you need it to actually be self-perpetuating for more than one generation and how likely it is that those people will decide to throw the plan out the window after the third generation of children who grow up never seeing a planet, or a star. Could I just make all of this fun stuff up and get on with it? Sure, and everyone who put any time and effort to study those subjects would drop the book in the trash when they reached that point in the story. Will I put more than a couple of hours into researching these points? No, especially not at this stage. If I discover any big facts about these subjects that contract what I've already written, will I change the storyline? Only if I see a really cool possibility that I can put in without too much rewriting. Otherwise I'll just include some minor plot point to get around that barrier and get on with the story. That's the whole point of all this pounding of the keys.

So it's now all over the Facebook page. Burnt Offerings Books has released 'Hard Luck,' and 'Dirty' is the next to last story in it. Just now I looked the title up on Amazon, and there it is. I have the page up while I'm writing this, and it's causing another of those weird moments where it feels like the ground has dropped out from under my feet and I'm falling in slow motion. There's the title of the book, there's the title o f my story, and there's my name. I'll let you know when it starts feeling real.

Guess what I'm doing, right now.

Today's lesson: Goats Don't Grow On Trees

Sorry about not posting last weekend. I was working on In The Dark, and because I'm the head of the safety committee where I work, I also had to put together an action plan for next year. All part of making sure no one gets killed which is something I do believe in, despite rumors to the contrary.

As opposed to my writing, where people regularly get killed. Speaking of which (writing, not killing), I'm at that point on In The Dark where the going is slow and grinding. All those little bits where I just wrote disconnected action sequences? Well, now I have to not only fill in all the bits between them, the whole thing has to make sense! I forget who said it, but the adage of 'Books aren't written, they're rewritten,' has proved itself twice in a row now. I really think it takes more work the second time around.

Oh, the title of the post? My wife has a sense of humor something like mine. I frequently tell people that I just don't have a sense of humor at all, especially at work. That's because at work I'm usually focused on something, and because I work in a warehouse environment, that something is often the sort that can get you seriously hurt. So I don't let my mind wander.

But I do have something that I call a sense of humor. Today my wife and I were out and about, and we saw some people begging on the side of the road. We both sometimes give money to people in need, but only when we don't feel like we're being taken advantage of, and this time we didn't give. But we did start talking about it, and I started putting different scenarios to her, trying to find the point that she would part with her money. I got to where the hypothetical beggars were kids in a school band, and one of them was out on the median, in a kilt and playing a set of bagpipes. Then, she admitted, she would contribute. “Because goats don't grow on trees.” Makes perfect sense, right?

Still writing.

Grinding, recreating, and dealing with squatters

Rewriting a book is like opening your mouth in front of a mirror, picking one of your molars at random, and then pulling it out with a set of tweezers. I know I've said that a couple of times before, but until I find a more apt metaphor, we're all stuck with that one. There are a trillion little places in 'In The Dark' that need patching, smoothing, or nuking and paving, and going through it is slow.

While I'm at work I'm cruising around a warehouse on an order-picker, sometimes muscling ninety-pound reels into a cart while fifty feet up in the air, so I can't keep a paper or digital copy with me. Not that I would ever write when I should be working. Never.

But I do get breaks, and it's not worth it to haul stuff from my car and then back again. So to fill those voids that would otherwise be spent talking to my co-workers about baseball or football, I've started rewriting an old story of mine, from scratch. I had the damn thing done and finished some years ago, but I think it was one of the ones that never got typed in. It was all on paper, and somewhere during a divorce, a move, and then another move, those pieces of paper ended up somewhere besides where I can find them. So I'm slogging through familiar territory and hoping I can remember all the cool parts. Of course I won't be able to, but the fun part is that I have another chance to not write all the mistakes that the first version had, whatever they were.

With Handsome Devil coming out in January, I've been putting thought into promoting it, and myself, in every single way that I can. Which means it's time to get dragged another precious few inches into the twenty-first century. So one night I wrapped my security blanket around my shoulders, and (with the help of my wife, who has mumbled more about this type of thing in her sleep than I will ever know) tried to buy a website with my name on it. Now imagine the look on my face when I found the dot com address already taken. I've known that other Stephen Pope's exist for a while now, and some of them even have my middle initial, but there was nothing about a person on the site. Just a colorful, cheery-looking ad for all the great stuff a certain web company offers. Nothing at all to do with the site name.

Was the site mine to begin with? Heck no. That company could and probably has made the claim of just taking the initiative and getting their name out there. But of course, the old, childish argument of 'I didn't see your name on it,' comes to mind. Websites are organized according to our language system, and that means some have people's name on them. That makes them not interchangeable, as it makes no sense for Ed Gruberman dot com to be a page dedicated to the life of Albert Einstein, and it was about Mr. Einstein hardly anyone would ever find it.

Should we have to pay for those sites? Yes, because that's how the computers that store the sites are paid for. That company paid for the site, and they got it. There's not really a right or a wrong at work here, I believe. Just that sense of recognizing, again, that the universe does not take our feelings into account.

So I bought Stephen Pope dot net. Now all I need is to pay someone who knows what they're doing to make me a really cool website on it, full of zombies, ninja, and sparkly unicorns that twerk. Fame and fortune are bound to follow.

Until then I'll keep writing.

If I was head of PR for the church of Satan

Claudia has been off at San Japan this weekend, so I have the house to myself. I would love to say that I've been frantically pounding away at something the whole time, but I suspect my nose might knock a hole through my monitor. What I've been doing is wasting time playing Wow and watching some old movies that I appreciate seeing once in a while.

Bittermint is creeping along. I never realized how something gets set in my head until now. Doing a partial rewrite on a story or even on Roja wasn't this hard. I had the initial idea for it, and that idea stayed the focus until I had to change it to give the adventure a little more zing. Now it's like any time I have it in front of me and my fingers are about to press the keys to change some of the words, the me from all those months ago opens a time-portal right behind me and screams, 'What are you doing? Leave it alone!' Because when I write something, I will pound on it until I think it's pretty good. Then I think about all the stories that I really like, the ones that I re-read once every couple of years. Then I take a long, honest look at this thing that I've created. More often than not, I quietly close the web browser window where I was about to submit what I had written, then start ripping it apart again. It's hard to do that, so I don't stop until I can read the whole thing and not say to myself, 'Maybe it could be better there.' Not once.

That's not just a matter of principle. It's to keep myself sane. If I send something out, unless it's to one of the VERY few places that will give you a yes or no within a day or two, I have to sit and wait. I get up in the morning, go to work, and have a few hours after work before going to bed. The whole time, there's this little voice in the back of my head that's whispering, 'Did you fix that one comma? Sure, you thought about fixing it, but did you ever really get around to it? Also, now that you've had time to consider it, wouldn't that one scene sound better from the other guy's point of view? It wouldn't take long to fix it and send it in again. I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'

You get my point. When I send it, it's my brave little story, and it's ready to go out into the big mean world. I don't want to be one of those parents who hover, and then turn on the TV years later to hear all about how my little baby has driven a bus full of nuns into a wood chipper.

It could happen, I'm sure of it.

So that's how Bittermint Tea and Ironlace Orchids is shaping. Some point in the near future, I'll finish it, it will hopefully come out, and if I get it right, I'll be inspiring some of the same kind of hate that I felt for all the folks at TSR who wrote those AD&D modules when my character overlooked something that was staring me in the face the whole time.

Oh, the title of this post? One of the harsher facts about living in Houston is that we have quite a few folks down here who don't have a roof over their heads. Drive pretty much anywhere in this town and you'll see them standing by the side of the road, asking for money. We also have some people who stand there asking for money who wear clean clothes, who don't have a bag or bundle of their possessions tucked nearby, and who might be unshaven but never have that built up coating of sweat and dirt that you get when all you have to wash yourself with is some water and a cloth. These people are the ones who usually have a sign that contains the phrase 'God Bless.' Seeing a guy with one of those signs today, the same place I've seen him before, I got a seriously warped idea for a commercial. A picture would open with one of those guys walking up and down a line of cars waiting at a stop light. He holds up his sign, and then a man in an all-black suit with a blood red tie steps in to view, speaking right to us. He says, “Seems everyone who's down on their luck these days is a devout follower of you-know-who. But you never see anyone begging with a sign that says, 'Hail Satan,' do you? Have you ever wondered what we've got that the other guy doesn't? Why don't you stop by some time, and we'll talk.” He walks up to the first man, puts his arm around his shoulder, and they walk off. Fade out.

If you laughed at that, you're going to hell. Don't worry, I'll hold the door open for you.

Still writing.

Criticism

I got a rejection Saturday. Not something new, but this one was a personalized response, which are pretty rare even in these days of e-subs and e-replys. The editor enjoyed the suspense and mystery of it (The story I sent in was 'Roaming'), but felt that the writing itself needed some tightening. I've been pretty much pounding back and forth on 'In the Dark' and 'The Red Man Burning,' so I haven't even scribbled on a short for a while. But I pulled up the version that I sent in and took a look at it.

I have a quiet reaction to criticism. On one hand, this is an opinion from one of my primary targets, but on the other, if I didn't think the damn thing was perfect I wouldn't have sent it in. I write for the reader, but it's the editor who makes the decision to toss money at me, or not. When you go looking for advice on writing, you find there's an endless supply of it. But one bit that I found by Marion Zimmer Bradley more or less smacked me in the head when I read it. As it settled in to become a permanent note in my mental book, it also reduced my sense of humor about this business by just another fraction. Without quoting too much of it, because that's called violating a copyright, the sentence that was printed in big, bold script said basically this: Editors don't buy good stories, they buy stories that they think their readers will pay to read.

Take as long as you need for that to settle in. It's still settling in for me, and I read it months ago. That doesn't just add another hoop for you to jump through in order to get your work on someone else's paper. That means you need to churn out a finished product that will please one person, and then go on to please the final audience. You need to please the readers themselves because they are the ones who will end up spending money on your piece in the magazine, and who will later see your name and buy the next magazine, or your book. But they will never see your story unless you first defeat the editor. In a perfect world, the editor has the exact same taste as the readers. Guess which world we live in.

Here's the article, and I owe a debt to Ms. Bradley for it.

http://www.mzbworks.com/why.htm

When I re-read 'Roaming' I did see some places where the editor may have been on the money. He said that the writing itself needed to be tightened up, so I'm going through and cleaning out anything that might be ambiguous, or repetitious.

So I'll rewrite it, and send it in again.

Good news and bad news

Some time, back in the distant past, I had a spiral notebook in front of me and I was trying to figure out what a middleaged-plus dockworker would do if he suddenly became near-omnipotent, when I had a giddy rush and thought to myself, 'Holy crap, I'm writing a novel.' It was a major power-trip. I mean, a novel? War and Peace is a novel. Jurassic Park is a novel. The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, and Hell House are novels. Those are examples of novels, and I'm writing one?

Of course, the reality is, writing anything that size is serious work. Writing anything that size that is coherent is a lot of serious work, and writing anything that size that's any good, well, I'll wait until someone hands me money for Roja before I make a claim to knowing what writing a good one is like. I will, however, say that rewriting a novel, even before you know whether or not it's any good, is like breaking a hole in a brick wall by throwing individual grains of sand at it.

Now imagine how I felt last week as I started scribbling on the top of a blank page and thought, 'Oh wow, I'm writing my second novel.'

I've actually had the opening section written for a while, now. But thanks to my 'special' method of organization, I may have to re-create it. The first full-sized chapter opens with two young boys enjoying their summer vacation, and that's where the wholesomeness ends. Pondering a couple of events that I want to put in it, I realize this going to be a really nasty one.

If you've read the title of this entry, you're no doubt waiting for the other shoe to drop. On Monday, my wife got up after getting one night of sleep to recover from FenCon, including the moment when some idiot in one of the elevators hit the fire alarm, and she went to work. An hour or so later, she came home. Seems the higher ups at her company decided that had a few too many employees on the payroll. They laid her off.

To say that she is upset, or that I am upset, is a bit of an understatement. They were actually pretty nice about it, giving her a bit of a safety net. But as I told her, that's like someone putting a pillow under your head and applying ice to your nose after they've kicked you in the face. It's a nice gesture, but it's a nice gesture from someone who has just kicked you in the face. Now she's looking for a job, and at the same time prepping to run her booth at Oni-Con. She's pretty damn incredible.

Still writing, and by the way? I still get that same, 'Holy crap, I'm writing a novel,' feeling as I rewrite Roja.

By the way, this week is Banned Books Week! So go read something you shouldn't!

The next part

Man, I really stink at updating this thing.  That's on the plan to change.
So the first draft was finished.  I've picked up something else in the meantime, a little bit called 'The God Box,' and it's coming along nicely.  But the book needs to be rewritten, and the more I look at it, the more I realize just how much of it needs to be rewritten.  There are parts that when I read them I blink, and then mumble, 'Who the hell wrote this crap?'  The good news is, when I start all the way at the beginning, and skim completly through to the end, I've got a grin on my face that goes from ear to ear.
Thanksgiving was fun.  My wife and I prepare the traditional holiday pasta instead of cooking a bird, and this year we invited any and all of our friends who likewise didn't have plans to come over and relax.  There was a ton of food, and many a conversation about good movies, bad movies, and bad film/TV adaptations of comic books.
A full week of work to get through, and then my wife and I have a date at the gun range so she can get some time in with her Christmas present, which I gave her a month early.

Keep daydreaming.