Still idling

The traffic light may be broken, it's been red so long. But sometimes you aren't in a big hurry and you have stuff to think about, or songs to listen to, so a forced hiatus at the intersection feels more like a reprieve than a delay. But now I'm getting the sense that I should be moving on, and that I've got the switch that runs the light in my hand. If I don't flip it, then it's foot-dragging.

I wanted a tone that was more striking, more distinct and even idiosyncratic, not just accomplished. Though perhaps I should not be worrying about such things at this moment. Better to get the boat back in the water. I also wanted to learn everything, but I probably don't need to know everything.

I want to talk about geology and changes in the earth on a much larger temporal scale, so that in comparison, jumping a couple hundred years back and forth, as an individual, would not seem so special.

I want to make Bloem more vibrant, put her at greater risk, interpersonally, put the controls in her hands, and put her at the mercy of forces she can't control.

The last day of the year

Happy new year to me! Congratulations on successfully completing my Fulbright fellowship, for becoming part of the Romani research community, for some interesting teaching experiments, for actually working through the preliminaries to a novel and writing 150 pages. NaNoWriMo winner! And on Monday I get a hearing aid so perhaps trying to figure out what everyone around me is saying will require less energy in the new year.

But where am  I today on my writing project? I have completed a satisfactory draft of the four chapters, plus a good deal of a fifth, and of a prelude. I have a good but not completed idea of what this will all be about. Some of that develops in writing itself, some needs to be planned and considered ahead of time. I have some realistic and ambitious goals. My longer term goal is to complete the first draft of this volume of the three-volume novel by the beginning of the summer, at which point I will do a editorial but not comprehensive re-write. Instead I will commence on the second volume (Havel's Bridge) over the summer and hopefully be ready to write a major section for NaNoWriMo next year, while at the same time re-writing Bloem more thoroughly so as to cohere with its companion volume. I want Bloem to be in submittable manuscript form one year from today, with perhaps a couple hundred pages of Havel done too. I'm not looking to seek an agent or publication -- beside contests like Amazon -- until I have two complete volumes, and a good plan and beginning for the third. I have a job, so I can take the time necessary to do this correctly. My longest long-term goal is to sell this book and to eventually make some living out of writing. Unrealistic? No, not with persistence and vision.

The new season

The month-long writing marathon was very invigorating, though exhausting, and was perhaps the most important thing I've ever done as an aspiring novelist. That is, I wrote. I put other things aside, I made time when there was no time, I was not discouraged by the lack of a coherent plan,  I made stuff up as I went along, and I believe that my writing improved. I also demonstrated to myself that it was possible, even in what is probably the busiest month in the academic calendar, for me to write fiction.

Since then, though, it's been difficult to get back on the horse. I had all this other stuff I had to do, related to the paying job. There was some other stuff that I thought I ought to do, like work on research papers. And there was the fact that I had written myself off my map, literally. So, while I have put few words in the narrative down over the past three weeks, I have done some preliminary research that hopefully will allow the narrative to proceed in a good direction. Having read a lot of young adult fantasy/sci-fi novels recently, I know that there are underlying themes and motifs and mysteries to be revealed and problems to be solved and that the whole thing needs to hang together and make some sense. And a world with "magic" needs to a magical world, and the magic has a history.

Now I am ready to begin again. I have completed most of my necessary work, and with some sadness, crossed out plans to work on projects I in which I have invested a great deal of time and energy. You can't have it all.

Creating a magic system

There's magic of a sort in this book, but I haven't conceptualized in any detail how it works, or how it will contribute to the story. Right now, it has mostly been used sociologically, as a means of marking the one with magic.

Here's Stuart Jaffee from Magical worlds on magic systems as a way to develop characters.

"Think about how you build a character when you are doing the ground work before you write the tale.  Part of it is simply sitting back and letting your imagination play.  And part of it is asking questions.  How does this character feel about hard work or religion or putting herself in dangerous situations?  What does this character fear?  What’s this character’s favorite food or color or movie?  In fact, the majority of character building can be summed up as asking yourself questions.

Well, I’m sure you see where this is going — the same can be said for building a magic system.  The initial part is just letting your imagination go.  Let it play a game of “What if?” and see what happens.  But the second part is the crucial “asking questions” phase.  What does this magic look like?  Can anybody use it?  What is the cost of using it?  What are its limits?  Is it something people and/or animals are born with or is it something developed over time?  Do you have to go to school for it?  What are people’s attitudes towards the magic and those who wield it?  The more questions you ask, the better you will understand how the magic works."

Time for a little horror

I was thinking ahead to the next section, when Bloem is a captive of the New Order deep in the salt mine, because I hadn't given any thought to what she would be doing there, or why. So I've come up with the grisly idea of medical experience, a la Dr. Mengele, on Talented children and youth, to figure out how they work, or how to make more who will follow orders. Somehow, amber is involved. I see that I can buy amber necklaces guaranteed to drive away arthritis pain, and that amber has been a part of alternative medicine for millenia. Ibn Sina, in his Al-Qanun ti l-tibb identified amber (kahrubá in Arabic) as a magnetic substance useful in curing many diseases.

In 12th century Poland, amber was thought to be the most efficacious of medicinals. Here is a recipe for tincture to cure all that might ail you:

• Crush 15 grams of amber chips in a mortar.
• Add it to 250 ml of vodka.
• Store the vodka for 10 days in a warm dark place. Be sure to shake it at least one a day.
• After 10 days, more is better, the tincture is ready. You do not have to decant or filter it. You just pour off what you need. When it is almost all used, crush the amber again and start a new batch.

Here's a bottle of Dr Fenners Kidney & Backache Cure made from amber, produced in Fredonia, NY, from 1872-1898. It cost a dollar a bottle!

Here's a bottle of Dr Fenners Kidney & Backache Cure made from amber, produced in Fredonia, NY, from 1872-1898. It cost a dollar a bottle!

According to the GemStoneDeva,

Amber (Chemical Composition: 75% C, 10% H, 15% O + S) cures and protects the bronchial tubes, helps the teething of babies. Against fears, phobias, depression, hysteria, asthma, bronchitis, whooping cough, infections, fevers, yellow fever and malaria. Strengthens teeth, stops bleeding, against rheumatism, laryngitis, fatigue, for a trouble free pregnancy, against shingles, intestinal problems, poisoning, good for bladder and heart, metabolism, spine and viral diseases. Amber prevents goitre because it stimulates the energy flow in the thyroid. Works fantastic against Graves' disease (formerly known as Basedow disease). Amber is a stone that attracts love. As an amulet Amber protects against negativity, sorcery and witchcraft. Amber has always been associated with witchcraft. Put a large piece of Amber on your altar to enhance your magic. This is also one of the reasons why many wiccans wear necklaces of Amber and Jet during rituals. Amber is used for all magical purposes.

Here's an amber mine in Kaliningrad:

Re-start

After the mad rush to 50,000 words in November, and the need to take care of some deferred business lately, and not nearly finished with that, I'm gearing up for the next phase. Last night I finished chapter 5, and I plan to finish chapters 6 and 7 (the whole Wedroniczki section) before school recommences. My hope is to have an entire first draft by the end of the second semester. Though that may depend on whether I take April to do Script Frenzy -- it would be a good way to jump-start that portion of my projected new career, and to get me going into the summer.

I have less then a complete plan for the rest of this section, though I must say that the plan I started with for the last section does not correspond to where things eventually went, in many cases. The general outline is for Bloem and Yuma and a couple of the male scouts and scout leader, to become involved in the smuggling of amber from Kaliningrad into Poland. Besides its value as a jewel, there must be some connection between amber and talents. The amber is going to the Agathi to enrich them, and allow further suppression of the resistance, and the Talented. There's some more to work out about this, but it sound potentially plausible. Perhaps the goal is for Solidarity to smuggle the amber in, for its own purposes, and Yuma is involved in this illegal trade through Kaliningrad. This leads to some kind of skirmish in which Bloem has to choose a side between her Wedroniczki colleagues and Yuma's smugglers. In the "battle" (details to be imagined, but it ought to have some coolness factor, Bloem must choose between the two. She chooses Yuma, allows herself to be arrested in place of Yuma, but is surprised when it is Pavel who takes her into custody. It is in this section that she experiences some kind of push-back to her powers, some force that can undo what she can do. The sense that she is chosen, for reasons as of yet unknown to her, to play a role, not yet known to her, becomes more pronounced.

What I wrote for NaNoWriMo

Progress has been made, no repatriation done! Here's most of the work to date: chapter 5 almost done. But now I need a new monthly goal.

Bloem in Flight 12-07-10

SO: this month, I'd like to finish chapter 5, complete chapter 6, and make a good start on chapter 7. This will require some bit of planning, though I never got to plan much last month and it was hardly missed.

NaNoWriMo

Winner. Bloem in Flight -- 50,000 words, 5 chapters, 150 pages

I'm not giving up, just repatriating

That's it. I'm not.

My new thought is to move it all to America and become an American writer with an American setting. We have lots of mountains, lots of cities, and it's a lot more accessible to me than Poland or Slovakia. Where could I put this story and retain some of its geographical essence. Originally, I was going to be right here in Wisconsin, and use the Great Lakes and bring Indians into the story. I could do all the research necessary for that in a car on weekends. The starting point is then Chicago, the two other endpoints are West Rock, WI (now that the Rock River has become nearly impassable from the east), and Traverse City, MI, home of cherries and salt. There's not much in the way of mountains, but there's plenty of wilderness in between, wolves, Indian Country, water, magic ...

My original title was Dazhiikewin.

NaNoWriMo

Lately, every post here needs to read, "I'm still alive." As a writer, potentially. Notwithstanding the ravages of class projects to grade, academic papers that won't die, sinus infection, child-related events that must be attended.

But this potential "I" is still alive and perhaps a period of thriving is upon me. Even though it is undoubtedly a terrible idea, I intend to write my 50,000 words this November. Perhaps I will set a personal goal of 60,000 so that I might be permitted to fall short. As far as I can determine, only in young adult or juvenile fiction would 50,000 words count as a complete manuscript: let that be my guide. My copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is in the mail!

In the past few days I have despaired of being able to complete a book set more than fifty miles from Beloit, WI, because it seems that my ability to travel is so limited. But that is truly untrue and just signifies cowardice, indecision, and general pusillanimity. (That last word is hard to spell and hard to say.) In fact, I do have the resources to trip along the route of my heroes' journeys; all that is required is a bit of creative fiction about my intentions, or at least some minor concessions to academic pursuits in my pandering, and I can make at least one extended visit, and perhaps two shorter visits. I am drawing the line at a ten day faculty seminar because after that I would probably be inclined to hole up in a bar in Warsaw for a week. What I need is a plausible long-term project that never has to be finished ... Perhaps a history of the Gypsies in the Slovak lands. That would put me just in the right place and the project is potentially endless, and even possibly valuable.

But what shall I write for NaNoWiMo? Since I have done so little actual writing of prose so far, though a great deal of planning, almost nothing related to Karpatia is off-limits. I did want to include dogs, I decided that this week when I went to a Newfoundland pulling contest. The story I'm liking is Bloehm's, starting in the parking garage in Bratislava, transported to Poland, joined up to the Wedrowniczki as a scout, sees something she's not supposed to see, imprisoned in Weiliczka Salt mines, escapes with younger child and dog (Casimir), and begins the trek southward along the Salt Road back to Bratislava.  This story ends with their capture and "detention" at Spissky Hrad by the Rromii -- Bloehm does not let on that she is Rromii by adoption, if not appearance. The rule of the In-Between is that nobody leaves.

Sex and romance

What I've learned most is that if I'm writing a young adult fantasy novel, these books are not relevant, because of their unrelenting dystopic perspectives, the third-person point of view, and the seemingly obligatory graphic sex scenes. The latest one -- which I put down after about 100 pages -- was Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand, which I'm sure many people liked a lot. In fact, there's a lot to like. But there's a lot not to care so much about either. First, there's the two or three male anti-heroes who are not really likeable. After 100 pages I didn't care one way of the other about them. And I gathered that they were the good guys, since their "nemesis" (and seducer) was a really unattractive character. The main main character, a Christian rock star, kept getting unsolicited blow jobs which had the effect of destroying his faith. The premise of the book was promising, and the "end of the world" as we know it was interesting. But the third person subjective viewpoint seems rather dusty and ponderous much of the time, more literary and polished and less stylized than many popular novels, but not so literary or imaginative to suggest "writing for writing's sake." One might predict that this middle ground would be a good place to tell a story from, but for this reader, I either wanted someone who moved things along like Elmore Leonard, or someone who can REALLY write. Ian MacDonald can really write, and River of Gods is for the most part a really fascinating read, but it never seems to decide whether it wants to be action-adventure, soft porn, of high theory sci fi. There's so many characters and such a great machinery of plot and idea behind the scenes to keep them converging ... I wondered if it was all at the expense of telling a story, and creating characters that were memorable. The Krishna Cop and his wife from the country, with her romance with her gardener around cricket, were quite memorable, but there's several others who got equal space on the page who I can hardly remember at all. I did like Tal, the transgendered character. And the world they all lived in seemed so totally unattractive in every way, just like Elizabeth Hand's world, and Paolo Baciagulpa's futuristic Bangkok. Aside from being sort of depressing, it doesn't seem like good futurism to predict that everything bad about our current world will persist, and nothing of the good.

So I dropped all that and this morning started reading Skybreaker by Keith Oppel (I read the first volume a couple years ago) which I guess is some sort of steampunk, as the main characters run around the world in zeppelin-like airships. There's romance between Matt and Kate that's always just at the brink of sex, there's high adventure, colorful characters, lots of great settings and gadgets, and the action is unrelenting. So it's probably completely unsuitable for a grown man, but I can't get enough, and this is exactly the kind of book I'd like to write. Maybe my narrators will be a little less pure-of-heart and sincere than Matt and Kate, but still the reader will like them, and I'll like them too. I get the feeling that many of these characters in the adult sci fi are unloved and unloveable. I think back to Ursula LeGuin's Ged, who she obviously adored, and to Sabriel and Lirael, who are sufficiently complex, but who you would never think of not rooting for. Harry Potter, well sometimes you'd just like to see him fall off the broom. The key might be the certainty of a happy ending, or heroism, or good prevailing over evil, all that stuff. Whereas, the best you can do with the adult novels is what happens at the end of Earth Abides, which is that the main character dies but with the knowledge that things go on.

So I will make you love both Havel and Bloehm.

I'm not dead yet

That's all I have to say. That despite my silence in these here parts, I have not gone away and I have not succumbed. Though I am sore afflicted by those who would take my time, my mind -- and I am chief among the assailants, spawning new open commitments on the basis of a moment's thought, beating dead horses, bailing boats already sunk.

But I have been reading, and perhaps even reading what I ought to be reading! The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Earth abides, and now something called The Glimmering. And I made several pages of world-building kind of notes, based partly on what I've been reading. It seems that I am not taking the full apocalypse route, convenient as it is a premise, wiping the slate clean that way. Mine is more of a future history, or the post-decline, with local catastrophe, probably as similar to historical fiction as to science fiction. In the history of Europe and the world there have been many moments of collapse, abrupt change, but never has the effect or the locale been global. To imagine a completely global catastrophe is somewhat grandiose, I think. Even a nuclear war is more likely to produce great gaping holes in the world, and less than optimum conditions everywhere, but life for most will go on, however altered, and forgetfulness and the grind of evolution and planetary history will continue.

So my world offers me the opportunity to imagine a number of outcomes to global and more localized processes. The end of oil, it seems to me, will have its most traumatic effects at the centers of global commerce, and on the mechanisms of globalism itself, travel and telecommunication. Climactic and geological catastrophe are likely to have very different effects in different places, and these effects are likely to be transitory, in the big picture. So that, for instance, in my world a geological event (super-volcano or something) in the context of global warming, could produce floods and famine in one part of the earth, and drought in another, and intemperate temperance in others. My flood-prone Danubian world might go under water -- as it has before, and transportation to and communication with the Karpathian region could become greatly limited, but the weather could be different in a small degree that makes a big difference, and differences in terrain, fauna and flora, could also make for a very different development. At the same time, a small ice age in Poland might occur. (As a writer of fiction, there's only so much scientific credibility to be responsible for). There might also be overlaid some pestilence -- in fact, disease is a likely companion of flood and being cut off from medical supplies, particularly in an age of genetic and other kinds of experimentation. In a little story by Stephen King, the side-effects of a "calmative" turns out to be senility, and when applied globally, results in the stupidification and disappearance of humans. In order to account for the hostility toward the Misabled, we only need to make a connection between pharmaceutical and genetic innovations that resulted in both misability and some kind of plague, or some of the misabled themselves became culpable in producing the plague, but poisoning the water system or engaging in biological terrorism or something like that.

This last idea I like and will incorporate.

Complexity of adult and young adult language

Or it is the difference between the first person and the third person? Just finished Canticle by Ken Scholes which is third person adult and have now started reading Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan, first person young adult. Two of the six or eight main characters of Canticle are young adults, and the rest of adult adults. Those parts that are about the two young adult characters -- Neb and Winters -- would be very much at home in a young adult novel. In fact, I often wished the novel were just about them. The third-person limited POV was not so far from first person, though it allows for a more expansive, elaborate narrative voice than would have been the case with a first person narrative. Carrie Ryan's narrator (Mary) tells her story in much more simple, though still subtly complex, poetic language. There seems to be no particular reason why the first person young adult narrator cannot feature in an adult book: I'm sure I could find many examples. All of my big three of YA fantasy novels -- LOTR, His Dark Materials, and HP -- have a subjective third person pov, though Pulliam stays pretty close to his two young protagonists. Mrs. Coulter's behaviors and actions are seen only through Lyra. LOTR is not a young adult novel at all, it's just a favorite of many young adults. Does that make it a young adult novel?

For my own little project, I've chose alternating first person, though I may use a subjective third person in the last volume. The language of my characters must be different, and I can see no reason why these characters can't make careful observations or use language in inventive ways. Who would want to read it if they didn't?

Slovakia

Bloehm in flight

I wrote the first page of the part of the book about Bloehm and the words just flowed, and a voice was created. It's important I think that I work on the two narrative simultaneously because it's essential that I make their voices and viewpoints distinctive, and that I coordinate the action. Bloehm and Havel share the curse of being Misabled: he can teleport others, and perhaps himself, she can fly, though neither knows the extent of their ability or how to exercise it at the beginning. It is thus potentially dangerous to themselves and others. As Misabled, they are subject to apprehension by the Bounty Hunters (Polyovniky). What I hope is that the juxtaposition/alternation of these two converging narratives will provide impetus for the story, keep the "romance" alive even during the long separation of the characters, and also provide some suspense because each narrative can be left "on the brink" to pick up the other. The first section of Havel's Bridge leaves him on the river, nearly in the clutches of the Polyovniky. The story then moves to Bloem, and her first section leaves her also apprehended by authority figures. I've a good deal more to do to fill out the story for that one: now I have only a shape. Given my own anti-authority bent, it is probably inevitable that my main characters will find themselves in conflict with the powers-that-be. I want to have some parallelism between the two stories, but I will try to avoid mirror images.

The process of writing -- aside from its vulnerability to being pre-empted by work and other stuff, like our taxes -- jumps for me from one things to another. I am finding it very important to write the actual prose before all the world-building and planning is done, but then to stop the writing to resume world-building and planning. When just writing, I imagine a world more fully that when I focus on the task of just imagining a world, or a character. But then, I find myself in corners and not quite knowing where I am going, so it's necessary to go back to laying foundations and roughing out some walls and doors and windows.

Welcome back!

School started, my health went to hell, and I stopped working on my writing project. Go figure.

But I have evened the keel somewhat with respect to my professional work, and now find that I have my Tuesday mostly free to write. This requires much more discipline about my time than I am used to exercising. Now I must get all, or almost all, my work for Wednesday done on Monday. It also means consciously not making work for myself in my classes. Today I am also going to send a story off to a magazine, because I must start thinking of myself as a writer, not just a college professor with a hobby. It is similar to convincing my student teachers to stop thinking of themselves as students, without any real responsibilities) and start thinking of themselves as teachers, with real responsibilities.

I want to write about what I have learned from reading Ken Scholes' Lamentation, and now, Canticle. First, Scholes sticks to the Vonnegut principle of offering only sentences that advance the action or reveal character. In fact, I think he follows nearly all the rules pretty faithfully, except that he keeps a lot of information from the characters and from the readers, which mystery is what gives the story its its impetus. There are a lot of major characters, and you can root for just about all of them, and those who are not attractive are always interesting. There are a few characters, particularly the secondary bad guys who are a bit cartoonish -- their actions are very important but they are not perhaps well-enough developed to squeeze the most out of their involvement. Sethbert, a man without good qualities, could have been made less odious and more complex to the benefit of the story. But there are a whole bunch of other interesting and engaging characters. The book is written in consistent third person, with constant switches between focus on the five or six main characters; occasionally I found myself wishing for a little less back and forth, but the changes from character to character (and place to place) serves as a major way of moving the story forward. The world and its history are very fully imagined -- at heart, this is in the tradition of the post-apocalyptic, though the apocalypse happened a long time from the present action -- and there is a great combination of magic, old-fashioned Medieval world, and technology that does not actually belong to the world. There is also an undercurrent of philosophical/religious speculation that makes it all seem relevant, juxtaposed to action, sex, intrigue, etc. For me, the most interesting characters are the two teenagers, Neb and Winters, who I believe will turn out to be the central characters as I get closer to the end. This brings me to ask who this book is actually for, or what fantasy/sci-fi readers are. The presence of these two young people at the center of the narrative, plus the magic and the steampunk technology, marks the book as interesting for a young adult audience (which includes a lot of grownups who like happy endings), and there is not so much adult material to turn anyone away or to make it inappropriate for a younger reader. In this way, I am reminded of Ursula LeGuin and Philip Pullman.

For me, this serves as a reminder that I can generally think of my project as "young adult" but not write down in any way. The sort of violence, sexuality, and philosophical gravity of some of the science fiction books I've read recently is not what I want to write anyway, though I like reading it well enough. In the end, I'm probably more of a PG-13 kind of guy, doing my best to avoid reality not to make it more intense or unpleasant than it already is. But for my narrative, this means that I do not need to shy away from developing full adult characters, evoking "big ideas," or a creative and expansive use of language. Since I have chosen one very typically young adult tool, the first-person narrative, rather than the third-person which seems dominant in so-called adult fantasy/sci-fi, the scope of my narrative is limited by the identity of my narrator, in this case, adolescents. But adolescents have more vivid ideas and feelings than they are represented as having in most third-person adult narratives, where they tend to be represented as somewhat more innocent and wondrous than the adult characters. I may have to read some more non-fantasy young adult fiction to remind myself of the range of personality and experience I might allow myself. Much wider than maybe I'm imagining.

In any case, today there will be words on the page. And a map too, because every good fantasy book has a map.

The beginning of the work year

With being sick and the beginning of the teaching year, my resolution to write every day has gone wanting. I must be patient with myself, and make sure that next week when things are a little more regular that I have organized my time so that I can do some writing. Actually, I have put some more words on the page for the beginning chapters. And in doing so, and starting Ken Scholes' Lamentation, I've gained some insight into how this process is going to work.

First, I'm really out of practice and just turning out quality sentences that move the story along. Or perhaps it's just that I am overly concerned with each word, and each sentence, because the going is slow. I believe part of this is not being sure what the first chapter is supposed to do, even though I have outlined it pretty thoroughly. I am happy with the words I've put down so far, but I'd like to see them appearing more rapidly! First, I had started with this idea that I could write what was basically a short story as the first chapter, but as I've gotten through the first ten or so pages I realize this is a bad idea, because a short story does not carry the burden of building a world in which the succeeding action will take place. Using a first-person narrative, and staying true to the voice -- I don't like those narratives where the speaker breaks away from the story at hand, the present, to provide historical background or social analysis. Maybe that works when the speaker is an erudite adult with an interest in theory, but not when the speaker is a sixteen year-old outcast with minimal education and a lot of minute-to-minute issues to deal with. Whatever details are provided must move the story forward, but there must be enough of them to convey the shape and sound and smell of the world in which he lives.

In Lamentation, which is growing on me with each chapter, the pov is third-person omniscient, or rather, there are several main characters, with different chapters focusing on their actions and perceptions. In each case, the third-person narrator knows what the main character knows and sees and thinks: through this mechanism, a great deal of detail about the fantasy worlds in which the characters live is revealed in a reasonable unobtrusive way. The different characters have access to very different kinds of information. Perhaps as the intertwined narratives continue, there will be less need to provide background information. Another things I generally don't like in fiction of any kind is the sort of  imbalance of popular movies, where there's a lot of meditation and conversation for about half or two-thirds of the book/film, and then someone turns up the speed, like we used to listen to the Allman Bros. at 45, and the last couple chapters proceed like a car crash. It's sort of like bad sex. A good amount of foreplay, and then a rush to climax. A different way to say that is that I prefer a pace that is more even, or variegated according to the perception of time, with some effort to slow things down when they threaten to run away, or to speed things up when the breath nearly ceases.

I also in this time of not actually writing as much as I would like came up with some more of the plot motivation, in thinking about the world at the beginning. In this world (Bratislava), the waters of a great flood have receded considerably, but there is a reduced population due to a pestilence that either preceded or accompanied the disaster of the flood. Let's imagine rather than a doomsayer's litany of the bad things that are destined to happen, more of a series of unfortunate events, in the context of peak oil et al. So as society and political structures begin to unravel relative to, say, the economics of energy -- e.g. the EU comes apart, communist parties take control of some governments, some ethnically compromised nations split or go to war with themselves. Maybe even Russian becomes the lingua franca on the region. Then, in a somewhat unrelated way, there is a climactic or geological event, like the explosion of the Yellowstone volcano, that disrupts the climate, and in the aftermath, a very ordinary old-fashioned illness like small pox or something descends on what's left of the population, a plague. As the people move back into the city and re-establish the rudiments of civil society, an economy, and government, there is a prohibition enacted against what are called the Magiks, due to the dubious relation between this group of individuals with strange abilities and the class of bio-scientists who are believed to have made the errors that led to the downfall of the previous order. Our two main characters, both possessed of less than well-controlled or even useful, abilities, become the targets of bounty-hunters (in the absence of anything like an organized police force.) It's fantasy or science fiction and I can make up whatever shit I want, as long as it seem reasonably credible. Having re-acquainted myself with contemporary sci fi and fantasy, I realize that credibility is more a matter of imagination than it is scientific probability.

The dynamics of wanting

On one of those advice-giving blogs I've been reading -- there's undoubtedly a good short story there -- one the writers (Edmund Schubert, author and editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show) has written a couple times about making sure your characters want something, and that this desire shapes the story in a way that sets up expectations and interest for the reader. He quotes Vonnegut, who says somewhere that a character can just want a glass of water. I was thinking about his while I was doing my daily walk yesterday and it started to make more sense and to connect to stuff I do in my teaching life on motivation.

So you start a story with "More than anything, I wanted a glass of water." And this can set the whole mouse-trap in motion. What I was thinking, though, was that desire is always preceded by need, or lack, or anxiety, or something psychological, that is, he wants a glass of water for some reason. He's thirsty, he has a terrible taste in his mouth, he's trying to recover from alcoholism. So there's always an unsaid sentence before the first sentence that sets the stage, that only the author knows, or ought to know, and say to himself. I tell my students about motivation -- which is related to want and desire -- that we tend unfortunately to think of it either in a passive sense or as a character attribute. Someone is motivated to drink a glass or water. Someone is motivated to get off the bottle. I recommend that we think of motivation as X causes (or some derivative) Y to do Z, and that this helps us understand behavior and its related thinking and feeling better. Thirst makes me want to drink a glass of water. What happens next? Well, that depends on the environment, and it depends on "thirst" (as a physical and/or psychological demand) and its depends on how Y responds to his own desire. In a situation where Y has just come in from a long walk in the sun, and gets a glass from the cupboard, and draws some water from the spigot, and drinks it, not a lot is going to be revealed. If the environment offers no water, then the situation is different. If Y's thirst, and his relationship to his own desire, is problematic is some way -- let's say he is always thirsty and his survival depends on drinking water only when he actually needs it -- then we have a different kind of story. If we replace "water" with "Jack Daniels" we have a different story. And we can play with the "more than anything" part, by asking, "really, more than anything?" 


In my own story, what does Havel want? The way I've set it up what he wants is (a) to get away from where and what he is, and (b) to get back to where and what he imagines he ought to be. Both physically being the same place. More operationally, X causes Havel to do something (or to think, believe, want, feel) something. Guilt about teleporting Bloehm and her not returning causes Havel to feel badly about himself and to want to separate himself from others. The animus of the community causes Havel to leave the garage. The betrayal of his father causes Havel to want to remove himself from the site of pain. The bounty hunter causes Havel to run. So there are a preponderance of causes for Havel to flee. But none of this answers the larger question of what Havel wants, or rather they complicate it. It seems he both wants to harm himself (by further separating himself from society and family) and to save himself (by preventing capture for his "crime," to which he admits). His almost immediate recontact with people demonstrate that his real need is to not be alone, but rather to reconnect, while the more existential dilemma of being caught becomes more acute and requires the help of others. At the higher level, Havel wants to find Bloehm, and to restore her, and thus to restore himself.

The next question, raised also by Schubert, is how I see the story ending, because without a sense of the goal, it's hard to go in the right direction. Because young adult novels have to have at least somewhat happy endings, I can't just have everyone die or go insane on the last page. I think I'd like to see Havel and Bloehm, together, returning to the parking garage to find it either gone, or with some completely other use. The notion would be that they are not in the same time-space in which they began the story. Probably they have gone further along. This is not an entirely happy ending, but it does leave space to go on with the story, on one hand, or just to go on with life, such as it is, on the other.

Marching orders

Despite all the good advice one can find about how to write a novel, and the self-talkings-to that occur at regular intervals, the business of getting the bus rolling toward a destination remains difficult. My problem throughout my scholarly writing career has been usually a lack of planning, an enthusiasm for substance over form, and a tendency to write myself into corners or corn filelds. For instance, I have this one paper that I think is probably pretty good, and informative and insightful, but I believe nobody will publish it until I completely write it into another form. Now I've taken that not so much as a reason to revise as a reason to abandon ship, mostly because I get so little personally out of writing to form, even when publication occurs. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't plan more and better for writing a novel, and keep the form and purpose and readership in mind as I do so, and as I write. It has also become apparent to me, as a novice novel-writer, that my narrative imagination is something like medieval maps, highly detailed at the local level, but tapering off into the distance, where one sees names like The Wastelands, or The Impassible Mountains. I don't really know what's going to happen next, or where it's going, except in the most vague sense, and I don't think this is enough to start driving the car down the highway, to return to my previous clichéd metaphor. The problem, for me, with planning -- which has meant doing the snowflake and other stuff -- is not that I mind doing it, or that it's not producing good results, but that I feel anxious that I will never really get "started." But my marching orders for the day are "stay the course," As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said (thank you, quotationspage.com, "A plan without a goal is just a wish," which I think is not really apropos, but does get me further toward what I wanted to say. It is through the planning that my wish is transformed into a goal. The simple plan to "write a novel" was just a wish, like the ones related to weighing 180 pounds, driving a Porsche, and cleaning up my office.

Making time

Even though today is my professional day, and I still have not done all the stuff I scheduled for myself, I decided to post something here. As a transgression. It's always been very easy to allow the flood of small jobs related to my work drown everything else, but now I would like to summon a countering flood of imagination related to writing. Similarly, it has always been easy not to exercise because I had "too much to do" and that also will change. It is possible to be efficient in one's work, and to put it in its place, not to allow it to put me in its place. Part of this resistance entails resistance to people, sometimes students but most often not, who have the expectation, the demand, that my priorities will be thus and so. This they demand even when, or perhaps because, their own priorities are not thus and so. But let me positive: today I finished one syllabus, along with many of the assignments, and a good chunk of the new reading for this course. Now I will commence to read the one book for my other course that I have not previously read and taught. And before that, I'm going to make a little start on my portfolio task for student teaching. Tomorrow is the fall conference, so the morning is wasted, but I will hold the line this weekend and in other weekends against working at home.