A Pathetic Blog Entry

How is writing like falling downstairs?

Last week, I met with the TriMu for pizza and Woodchuck at a local eatery. It had been raining, and I was mentally composing an email when I started down the short flight of concrete stairs at the back of the resautant. In the immortal words of the old-school Batman TV series:

KERPOW!!!!

I hit the stairs, bouncing my tailbone down each one. My laptop, in its backpack, flew out to the side as I tried to slow my fall with my arms (thankfully, I had slung the backpack over one shoulder instead of wearing it properly, or else it would have crunched under me and this would have been a different kind of blog entry). My first thought was, my back is broken. My second, my laptop is broken. Neither turned out to be true, but I am somewhat angry with myself for worrying about the spasms of pain in my backside and spinal column more than the computer. Sigh. My priorities need some reevaluation, I guess.

Anyway, the pain and swelling on my tailbone seemed to disappear in a day or two and I had a fine weekend with no problems at all, even with a long ride in a car and a 6 hour movie marathon. No worries.

Then Monday night hit and I hurt again. It was as bad as it had been when I hit it first. Icing my bum all evening did little to dull the pain. I don't know what happened that day, but it was like my brain finally cought up to the fact that I bruised my tailbone, four days later.

So, what does all this have to do with writing? Nothing at all, I just didn't have anything to blog about. ;)

Not, gonna cut it, eh? Alright. Hold on, let me figure something out.

How about this? Some ideas come like falling downstairs. They hit you when you're thinking of something else, slapping you flat on your back and leaving a mark that sometimes flares up at odd times. Good enough? Or do you have a better answer? ;)

Pass the Plot 3: Scene 10

"Ellie?" Nara stared at the woman before her. "What's going on?"

Lieutenant Eloin shouldered a laser cannon twice the size of the drone, Darrew's, old weapon. Ellie's gaze shifted to a point above Nara's right ear and slipped out of focus. "I'm doing what I was programmed to do." She pulled her focus back onto Nara's eyes. "My people will rise again."

"The conversions don't take as long as they used to, I see. They've gotten you already, Ellie." The other woman raised a thin black eyebrow. "Wait a minute." Nara swore. "You were one of them all along! You and Darrew together!" Nara placed her hand in the small of her back and made a fist. She hoped her crew would get the clue that they should figure out where to hide before the laser cannons started firing.

"No, not together," Ellie said. "He never knew what I am. I had his links connected to my colony's sensory node, but the surveillance only went one way." Her lips curved. "Malkur always liked to put his colony comms in the forehead, for convenience. Fool. It was always so fun to open Darrew's ship's comm when he was, shall we say--too busy to talk."

"So you're not a Garid?"

"No."

Nara eyed the cannon on Ellie's shoulder. "Why haven't you killed us yet?"

Ellie's smile widened. "You're the only one left."

Nara glanced behind her. Pinpoints of purple light met her eyes, making her squint. Five purple-skinned humanoids with LED eyes blinked at her, all fingering giant cannons like Ellie's. And Thompson, Jennings, Schmidt, and Graziano lay at the creature's feet, eyes wide in shock, blood dripping from mouths and noses and ears. Nara swallowed bile and turned back to Ellie.

The laser cannon was trained at Nara's chest.

A Lack of Focus

"Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration"
--"Four Quartets" by T.S. Elliot

I'm starting to think that I have allowed myself too easy access to distractions. Email, chat, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube, all contribute to mental over stimulation and lack of focus. If my muse rebels against working on a particular page on my manuscript, then it is so very easy to jump over to check gchat and see who is talking to me or to facebook to see who has posted a pithy status message. I waste not only time, but mental energy bouncing around the Internet.

So, I'm now trying my hand at rationing my media usage and giving my mind long swaths of computer-free time to remember how to focus again. I have my AlphaSmart word processor which is great for Internet-less writing, and I might even drag out a good old fashioned pen and paper. I've also purchased a bunch of books that I want to read.

How do you avoid getting distracted?

Pass The Plot 3: Scene 4

Darrew stumbled against the wall as the ship jerked beneath his feet. High alert lights flashed through the corridor, washing his vision in a strobe of red. He ducked into his and Ellie’s chambers and locked the door behind him.

They are coming. A tiny smirk curled his lips. He ran his forefinger over his left eyebrow. A beeping broke the silence.

“I’m alone,” he spoke the words into the empty room.

“Finally,” a voice, soft as a whisper, emerged from the comm implant. “That female causes us too many false alarms.”

“Well, you should have put the comm somewhere else, then.”

“Where exactly do you suggest?” The voice answered.

Darrew grunted. “It won’t matter now. She’s on her way to you with a boarding party.” He snapped the cover off his cryo bed. A fat, hand-held smart matter rocket cannon lay folded in the stasis sheets.

“Good. How many in the party?”

He grabbed the weapon and cocked it. It hummed to life. “Five that I know of. Most are eager young cadets.”

“Excellent.”

Darrew tapped glowing blue buttons on a wall computer panel near the door. A map of the ship schematics flashed into view. Shuttle Bay 1 showed a launch in progress. “Be careful of one named Nara. She’s a bit of a loose cannon.”

“Don’t worry, the conversion will take hold of even the most obstinate soul. Remember what you once were?”

“I remember nothing before my enlightenment.” Darrew’s voice took on an emotionless, mechanical tone, but his steel-grey eyes narrowed. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it.

“Exactly,” The voice replied.

“What do you want me to do from here?” He located the second shuttle bay on the schematic with his little finger.

“Just keep us updated on their progress.”

“Will do. Over and out.” He rubbed his forehead to turn off the comm. Shouldering his weapon, he burst back into the flashing lights of the corridor.

Working and Listening

I'm reading through Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, a collection of her ponderings on art, writing, and spirituality. L'Engle is most famous for her middle-grade novel A Wrinkle in Time. I came across a passage in the early chapters of Walking that felt like a good way to start off my writerly year.

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer. . . . Someone wrote, 'The principle part of faith is patience,' and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not, otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it."

Break a Rule

The ubiquitous they like to comment on the way things should be done. These armchair humans try to tell the world how to run itself according to the they philosophy. For example, they say, "never run with scissors." I say what if you have to cut someone's hair that got stuck in the ceiling fan and that person is getting really dizzy and might hurl at any moment? I say run with the dang scissors. They say, "don't chew with your mouth open." I say, how's anybody going to see your purple tongue after you eat a grape jolly rancher if you don't? They say, "never pet a burning dog." Okay, well, maybe I can go with that one. Don't start petting, grab the garden hose first. The point is, there are exceptions to every rule. Come to think of it, I think they say that one, too.

They also have a lot to say about writing. "Don't let your characters think too much." "Make sure every word advances the plot in some way." "Never begin your story with characters waking up in the morning." "Never make the romantic male lead a pimply red head." The thing about all the they philosophy is that as a general rule, they are right. A lot of the they statements about writing are good things to know. But some rules were meant to be broken. There they go again.

I say let your characters think for a change. It's not often that people do that particular activity, so it might be refreshing. Let some of your words be there just because they are beautiful, whether they do anything or not. Wake your characters up with a tsunami wave in the middle of the night on page three and see what happens. Let that red head get the girl. She'll buy him Clearasil anyway, and everyone will live happily ever after.

I say, go ahead, break a rule.

A New Procrastinateling

A few months ago, I blogged on the procrastinatelings that inhibit our ability to write or work on novels. One in particular, blogging, has not plagued me this summer. In fact, I have been so remiss in my blogging that I wonder the TriMu keeps my ugly mug up on the sidebar.

Although I have not been hounded by the blogging procrastinateling, I have met with a new one, so powerful, it ripped me away from my assigned blog days. The dread procrastinateling has a foreign and exotic sounding name--noveling.

Yes, friends, my novel (and those of other members of this group, but I'll let someone else blog about that) has invaded my brain to the point that the first thing I think about when I wake in the morning is that I actually want to open up Chapter 7 and rip into yet another scene revision. The last thing I want to do when I sit down to my computer is blog.

So, this is all you get for now--a brief recognition that, yes, I am still alive. And now it's time to feed my happy new procrastinateling while he is with me. If the past is any indication, he won't be here long.

Points of View - Part 1

I feel like being a bit school marmish with today's blog post. -- Stop passing notes! No chewing gum in class! Stop picking on the boys! -- Do you feel like you're in grade school again? Good. Here we go. Point of View is one of the most basic aspects of writing fiction, however it has enough complexity that it can change the whole course of a story. In a recent post, Kalayna described how she had to change points of view to find the right voice for a story. I experienced something similar with a short story I am writing. I started to tell it from more than one character's perspective, but I lost the tension and, in the process, the plot.

There are four key aspects of POV--person, ensemble, distance, and omniscience. Each of these categories contains a range of possibilities with itself and the combination of the four makes for wildly varied creative choices. Most writers make these choices intuitively while they write a story, but being aware of the options will allow a writer more creativity, help them be more aware of POV inconsistencies, and possibly reveal to them why a particular scene or scenes don't work the way and author wants. I will tackle the two simpler aspects of POV today--person and ensemble--and wrestle with the more obtuse ones on my next blogging day. Why do hard work now when you can put it off, right?

The first key to POV is person. Person refers to the grammatical categories of first person (I, we), second person (you, y'all), and third person (he, she, it, them). Contrary to appearances, person in fiction does not define whether the reader is inside or outside of a character's head. Person does dictate perspective to a degree, but distance affects it much more. Person really comes down to pronouns--to what pronouns you use when you are writing. Most fiction is written in third person. Third gives the writer a greater choice in the other three aspects of POV, as well as being well known and well tolerated by the reading public. The next most popular person is first. First gives the reader full access into the mind of the character. First is limiting though, because it must be by definition close in omniscience and subjective in distance (see Part 2). Some readers are uncomfortable with first person because it is close to a loss of self or an invasion of someone else. Second person is rarely used in fiction, and it usually meets with poor results. People don't like being told what to do. Well, unless you're reading a blog. I personally write and read just as well in either first or third person. I attempted a second person story once, but I think I purged those files from my computer (I hope).

The second factor in POV is ensemble. Ensemble deals with how many characters will define your POV. We call the characters the POV character of the scene. The simplest ensemble choice is to go with one POV character--the writer follows one character all the way through the story. This can be done either through first or third person. Another popular tactic is to have an ensemble cast written in third person. This means that the entire book is written in third person and each scene or chapter follows a different character. The writer decides how many different POV characters they swap back and forth between. The POV character usually changes at the scene break. In omniscient view (again, you'll have to wait for Part 2), a writer can change POV character within the scene because the narrator keeps a distance from the action, but I'll get into that later. I wrote my first Nano novel in first person with an ensemble cast--the whole novel was in first person but I switched my POV character every chapter between the two main characters. Their voices were fairly distinct, so I think it worked most of the time, but the stronger, more sarcastic of the two definitely overpowered her sister in some chapters. She was just so fun to write.

The class bell is ringing, so you'd better stuff all your junk in your backpack and get out of here. I'll warn you, if you leave something behind, I'm keeping it. And if it's a caricature of me with dragon wings and snout, spewing fire, I'll hang it on my fridge, you sweet thing you. See you next time for more lessons in points of view!

Screenwriting for Better Novels

One of my smaller works in progress is a short story adaptation to film that I am undertaking for a friend. I have some (basic and quite pretentious) experience in writing screenplays, including a foray into the annual Script Frenzy, but screenwriting for me is nowhere near a honed skill. However, I do love the challenge of writing for screen as it forces a writer to impart character, plot, and setting through visuals alone. I am always amazed at how my writing improves through the experience.

For example, in novels, the writer is the director, location scout, camera operator, editor (for the most part), etc. You as the writer, are virtually the only name in the credits of your novel (unless you're like Sarah and have your own live-in craft services chef). However, when writing for screen, the writer only serves a small part in the creative process. While screenwriters are allowed to describe the general appearance of their characters and settings, they can only put in the few details salient to the plot. Even though you have to show the world you building, it's not your job to dress it fully. Your job is to get the foundation laid, and the rest of the crew will put up the walls and the plumbing and the crown molding. And you have to be prepared for the house to look completely different from your vision.

Also, there is no interiority in screenwriting. You can't go on and on in an internal monologue about how the salt shaker on the restaurant table reminds Dan of his favorite stones to skip during childhood summers with his now-dead drug addict uncle. We have all read and written interiority like this, and it can work in a novel, but a screenwriter would have to creatively attack this idea in another way. For example, there could be a scene showing Dan and his uncle in flashback, or Dan could talk about his childhood in expository dialogue, or, because Dan is a secondary character anyway and we are talking about salt shakers here, the writer should leave it out and use precious space for more important details.

Screenwriting challenges a writer by restricting choices and forcing new paths of creativity. These restrictions are not appropriate for every story or tolerable for every writer, but they do focus fiction writing in interesting ways I have learned not only to see my world more clearly, but to focus on the most important parts of it. If you want to join me in the screenwriting world, check out Celtx for open-source screenwriting software and go to Script Frenzy's resource guides for a crash course in screen formatting. It's definitely worth a try.

Attack of the Procrastinatelings

Writers are the best procrastinators on the planet. We are creative people, so we can come up with some great excuses for it, but it usually comes down to fear and laziness. We fear failure, (what if I'm really just a hack?) and we fear success (what if I never have another good idea again?). Add to the fear a general state of malaise and you get a sweet breeding ground to grow procrastinatelings--all those fun, creative excuses we use to avoid writing.

Procrastinatelings come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. They even talk. There are the procrastinateling peoples--friends, family, knitting clubs, critique groups, etc. Then there are the necessities--sleep is the biggest drain, cleaning house always seems so important when you sit down to write, and eating comes in a close third in this category. Moneys are procrastinatelings that always seem to disappear right when you need them so you have to go out of your fictional worlds and get a job to breed more. My favorite procrastinatelings are the entertainments, including, but not limited too, gchat, facebook, movies, television, walks in the park, reading books, knitting and, of course, blogging. The most painful, but also most effective, procrastinatelings are the obligations--usually caused by peoples or moneys, they demand your time and they want it all right now. Actually, all procrastinatelings eat time. It's their favorite food.

There are many procrastinatelingocides in the world (duct tape is a key tool in some of them), but I procrastinated too long to mention any in this blog post. I'm tired (necessities), Mom wants to chat (peoples), I need to look for another job (moneys), I am at the climax of a book I'm reading and I really want to get back to it (entertainments), and I should be writing my short story instead of blogging (obligations)*.

What procrastinatelings are eating your writing time these days? Have you developed an immunity to any of them? If so, please share your recipe.

*Note: Two procrastinatelings can act against each other. Usually this has the effect of canceling each other out and nothing get's accomplished.

The Book and the Scroll (and the Computer)

Last week I attended a lecture entitled "The Book as Computer" given by Peter Stallybrass of the University of Pennsylvania. I thought, based on the name, that it would be a look into the future of books as they relate to the internet, ebooks, portable readers, etc. I was excited about the lecture. I was also completely wrong about the lecture. It was actually a look into the past, into the history of books.

Stallybrass's premise is that throughout history there have been two basic modes of reading -- the scroll and the book. The format of a scroll forced readers to follow the text from beginning to end. You had to scroll through it one inch at a time. There were no ways to bookmark a favorite passage in a scroll, or at least it was very difficult to do. And referencing related passages was impossible without a really good memory. Books, on the other hand, have historically allowed for more discontinuous reading. Marking passages, skipping chapters and bookmarking sections for easy reference were made simple by the book. The book also gave people the ability to index information. Tables of contents and indexes allowed readers to find the specific parts of the book they really wanted to read, what Stallybrass calls "indexical reading." The reader took control of what they read.

Many people fear that the computer is bringing about the death of the book, but Stallybrass suggests that the computer is actually an extension of the historical concept of the book. Like books, computers allow for discontinuous reading, bookmarking, and skipping unwanted information. What is Google if not one giant index? The computer is pushing indexical reading to its limits.

According to Stallybrass (but I'm not so sure about this, myself), the concept of reading a book straight though did not come into fashion until the advent of the modern novel. In fact, the early novels were criticized precisely because they took the control of information away from the reader and put it into the hands of the author. To be engrossed in a story, to be passively carried along wherever the author wanted to take you, was considered a dangerous thing. The novel, therefore, changed the way people read, not only fiction but almost everything else as well. For example, people used to read newspapers from cover to cover. In effect, the novel returned the world to reading scrolls.

Stallybrass calls the novel a "brilliantly perverse" interruption in indexical reading. Movies and TV have for many people replaced the novel as the their preferred scrolls, and people seem to be returning to the habits of indexical reading on their computers. As an audience member asked, are we witnessing not the death of the book but rather the death of the novel? I hope not. This brilliant perversion is what we writers of fiction hold dear. I, personally, cannot see novels dying, but as technology changes the novel will have to change with it.

Finding a Purpose for Passives

Most writers who listen to any writing advice at all, know to avoid passive voice. It’s an excellent piece of advice, because what most writing mentors mean when they say it is “strengthen your weak writing.” The writer who receives this advice doesn’t quite know what to do with it, though. They usually go on a hunt, brutally murdering all passive construction in their writing. However, what writers need to understand is there is a difference between the esoteric concept of passive voice (i.e. weak, mushy writing) and passive construction. Passive construction is a concrete grammatical process, which can be utilized to create focused, strong writing. I hope this blog entry will give writers a tool for working with passive construction in their writing.

The first thing I need to do is define passive construction. It is not simply using be verbs. The sentence I just wrote used a be verb as its main verb, but it was not passive construction. The hallmarks of true passive construction in English are threefold: (1) the direct object is “promoted” to the position of subject, (2) the verb takes on an auxiliary be verb, and (3) the main verb becomes intransitive (not requiring a direct object). The former subject may not be mentioned in the passive sentence at all. However, when it is, it does not become the direct object but usually becomes the noun in a prepositional phrase starting with by.

For example, look at the following active transitive sentence: Kalayna slew the dragon. The sentence has a subject, Kalayna, a transitive verb, slew, and the required direct object, the dragon. To passivize the sentence, we first promote the dragon to the position of subject. Now the sentence is about the dragon, not Kalayna. Second, the main verb takes on an auxiliary be verb, was. Third, the verb is transformed from a transitive into an intransitive, slain. We end up with The dragon was slain. I know you’re asking “but what about Kalayna?” If a writer wanted to show who did the slaying, she could say, The dragon was slain by Kalayna but acknowledgement of the former subject is not necessary in passive construction. The point of passive construction is that it focuses the reader’s attention on the receiver of the verb’s action, rather than on its cause. Writers can use this function to their advantage.

Strong writing does, in fact, use much more active construction than passive, and it is a good rule of thumb to slay passives. That said, I think passives in a first draft can serve a good purpose in strengthening our writing. Let’s say you found the sentence, The dragon was slain by Kalayna, in a manuscript. Your first reaction would probably be to replace it with the active construction, Kalayna slew the dragon. But think about the function of passive construction. It focuses attention on the receiver of the action. When you wrote that passive sentence, your mind focused on the dragon. Why? Before jumping in with the first active construction that comes to mind, a writer should ask herself two questions, (1) “what is this sentence doing?” and (2) “where should its emphasis lie?” Maybe you want to put Kalayna at the fore: Kalayna slew the dragon. Then again, you may want the reader to focus on the dragon: The dragon was slain or The dragon was slain by Kalayna. There is a third option, though. Kalayna may not be important to the scene and you do want the reader to think about the dragon, but you still want an engaged, active tone. Therefore you could use a completely different intransitive verb: The dragon died. That last option may never have come to mind if you had not thought about why you used passive construction in the first place.

Written v. Spoken English

I just started taking a graduate course in linguistics and I wanted to pose one of the discussion questions that came up in class for blog readers and mythmakers alike to ponder.

One of the students commented on the text's examples of how language changes over time. He said, "rather than seeing these examples as 'language change,' I see them as examples of the distance that printed English always needs (for one reason or another) to put between itself and spoken English." I so wanted to ask him what his reasons were, but since I didn't I'll ask you. Why would spoken English need to be different than written English? To go even further than that, since we are writing fiction, especially dialogue, does there still need to be a disctinction between the grammar of written and spoken English? This includes pauses..... ah, and maybe how we, er, stumble over our words when we speak. Should these be part of written dialogue? If so, how much?

Redecorating Your Brain

With the successful completion of yet another NaNoWriMo by all the members of the TriMu, I thought this entry would be appropriate. Someone recently asked me "How do you go about writing a story?" and you know if you ask a novelist a question like that, you get . . . well, you get a novel.

~~~

The idea flies into my brain. It's shiny and cool to the touch. It glows with an inner light that fascinates me. I find myself staring blankly at it while I should be doing real-world things like working or sleeping or driving.

The idea begins to redecorate my brain. It asks to be taken on a tour of my mind, so it can steal furniture from other rooms. It also likes to travel with me and steal from the rest of my life. Feeling insecure at work? Great! Let's put that in the character portraits. Listening to an interesting accent? That will go well in the conversation nook. Reading the story of Jacob's ladder to heaven? Fantastic! Let's make that into a lovely metaphor for the coffee table.

Soon the idea has filled its room in my brain so full we can't see each other through all the stuff. The idea suddenly discovers something. It is claustrophobic.

There is a frenzy to organize. We go through all the idea's junk, trying to find patterns in the piles and piles of objects it has collected. I try to take notes, to categorize, to plot out a diagram of the room as it should look. I write on post-its, 3x5 cards, spreadsheets, but the lists are just as messy as the room itself.

"That's it!" I say. "Let's just start working and see what happens."

The process moves slowly, and my friendly idea refuses to help. All it does is sit there looking sulky. It doesn't shine. It doesn't glow. Every day it begins to look more and more like the proverbial pebble in the proverbial shoe. I match feats with Psyche's mythic moving of the sand pile one grain at a time.

Finally I make the room appear a bit more like a room, and less like an overflowing storage unit. There are picture frames on the wall, empty, but on the wall. I place two mismatched chairs in the corner for a conversation nook. I find the coffee table--no metaphor, though. Where is that blasted metaphor?

Giving up seems like the best option. My brain's a disaster. That stupid idea stole all the best parts of me and jumbled them all up. The idea itself has lost all its luster. I wonder if it was ever shiny at all. The story room is worse than ever. At least the piles of junk held more potential than this. What a waste of time.

I leave the room. Pulling the door shut behind me, I say a soft goodbye to my idea. Then I see it. On the floor, by my shoe. My idea, all dull and tarnished, is carrying the metaphor. The idea holds the metaphor up to the light of the blinking fluorescent bulb. They melt together. They merge. The hallway fills with light as my idea shines again--brighter than before.

Smiling, I pick it up and go back into the room. We have work to do.

The Bard Queen - Part 3

The doors opened to a dank hallway that smelled strongly of moldy socks. One of the dingy yellow florescent lights flickered from a bad connection. A tilted direction sign in front of the elevator showed a faded left arrow and the words "Incantation Technology."

Office Wench raced through the halls. The air seemed lighter in the dungeons, but she was still panting when she reached the Helpdesk. Reception Witch didn't look up when Office Wench gripped the edge of the desk and asked, "I need to see the Sage."

"The who?"

"The Sage. He's from Truth. I need his help to..." Office Wench stopped when Reception Witch glared at her over purple-rimmed reading glasses. "To look at my Mail Merge Magic. It's not working right."

"The Sage, huh?" She tapped a button on her phone, "Brown Noser, you know of any IT Guy called the Sage?"

"That's the crack pot in D875. He's a real piece of work! Always got his head in the clouds!"

Office Wench didn't stop to listen to the platitudes Brown Noser was venting. She knocked an IT Guy and his stack of laptops into the wall as she passed. Finally she reached the door to D875. She pushed open the door.

Office Wench expected the Sage's office to be filled with a glowing green haze and flashes of purple light. But instead, she found a clean, well-lit room with the lightest scent of vanilla latte.

"Hello." The Sage sat upright in his chair. "May I help you?"

Office Wench stared at her shoes. "Um, I need some help getting my Mail Merge right."

He backed away from his desk and stood."Sure, what's the problem?"

Office Wench looked up as he walked toward her. His deep brown eyes held her gaze firmly.

"I want to go to Truth."

He smiled. "You already in it."

Office Wench glanced around the room. It was true that the air felt a little fresher, a little lighter, in the room, but she couldn't see how this could be Truth.

"Not just here. We are all in Truth." Office Wench furrowed her brow and he continued, "Reality is only a country, Truth is the world. You need to get your head out of the clouds."

Office Wench moved for the door. "I should have known."

He grabbed her arm. "Wait. Listen to me. The clouds in Reality are what keep you here. The air is thick with enchantments. Wicked spells that keep you trapped inside your slavery, trapped inside your own head. Getting your head out of the clouds is exactly what you need to do. Then you will see Truth all around you."

Office Wench stared at his hand gripping her elbow. "How?"

"You have to remember." He looked wildly around the room. "You have to remember who you are. Let me see..." He walked over to a wall of bookshelves. "Have a seat. I need to find the right spell."

Office Wench positioned herself on the edge of the Sage's vinyl couch. He rifled through several books before carrying one as thick as a dictionary back to the couch. He sat next to her, their knees almost touching.

"All right. Close your eyes."

Office Wench obeyed. But as soon as she did a feeling came over her that Brown Noser or Reception Witch would burst through the open door at any moment and send her back to her cube. Why was she here? Why humiliate herself in front of this crazy dude with the deep eyes? She should go back.

"Repeat after me, 'Once upon a time...'"

Office Wench stood and moved toward the door. Her heart pulsed rapidly against her lungs.

"You have to fight it!" The Sage stood with her. "Reality is still in your lungs. You have to resist it."

"I'm not like you. I'm not strong!"

"Do you think that I don't feel it? That I don't gasp as my lungs close with the heaviness and despair. I'm as much a slave to Reality as you are. But I fight with everything that is in me to remember who I am."

Office Wench stood very still, her head hung low.

"You have to fight it, or you will never find freedom."

She lifted her eyes to his. "Once..." The haze before her seemed to melt in curling wisps before her breath. "Upon a time." She could see his clear, bright smile before her. No fog separated them now. "I was royalty. I was a story-weaver. My life was lived to speak counter-spells into the haze. My life was lived to free the slaves of Reality. I am a Bard Queen. "

THE END

The Bard Queen - Part 2

Office Wench stopped by Keyer of Edits's cube on her way to her own. "It was just like you said. She didn't leave the office."

He squinted at her. "Huh?"

"Data Entry. She never made it to Truth."

"What's all this about?" A booming voice called through the haze behind her.

Office Wench stiffened. She hadn't noticed Boss Man coming their way.

"So, how is everything?" He put strong emphasis on the last word and made a half wink with his left eye. Boss Man positioned himself well within Office Wench's personal space. The scent of his pastrami sandwich hung in the air, staining the haze with a tinge of puce. "Is everything all right?"

Office Wench held up her mug. "I was just getting coffee before I..."

"Good, good, good." Boss man slapped his left hand with a thick stack of papers. "You know, our office brings out the best in its slaves. All our employees are loyal and dedicated to the company. They may have discontented slaves in other divisions, but I know for a fact, there aren't any here. Slaves here take their jobs seriously because the company takes their jobs seriously." He glared at her through another half-wink. "I know you're going to be with us for a long time."

Office Wench nodded. " Sir, I was just going to..."

"Good, good, good. I want you to type this." He slapped her full mug with a stack of yellow legal paper, spilling scalding coffee down her leg. "And when you're done with that I want you to find the addresses for all these slaves." He slapped it again with a stack of white computer paper, pouring the rest on her chest. "And when you're done with that I want you to mix it all together," He swirled the air in front of her nose with a stubby forefinger. "And do that Mail Merge Magic you're so well known for." He winked for real this time and stalked off, leaving the soggy papers on Keyer of Edits desk.

Office Wench turned on the spot and walked the other direction.

Keyer of Edits called after her, "Hey, I'm not going to do the Mail Merge for you! That's not my magic!"

Office Wench almost ran to the bank of elevators. Her lungs burned with the effort just to drag the semi-solid oxygen into her lungs.

She slapped the down button. Several slaves trudged past while she waited, but no one looked up. Finally, the elevator halted on her floor and opened. Data Entry Maiden stood in the doorway.

"Where is the Sage?" Office Wench asked.

"What?" She blinked several times as if to clear the fog from her eyes. "Oh, he's in the dungeons. That's all I know."

"Where in the dungeons?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I thought you talked to him about Truth."

"Get your head out of the clouds."

Office Wench pushed her way into the elevator. She remembered hearing that the IT guys were kept in one of the lowest levels of the dungeon, so she slapped D8 with her palm and watched the doors close.

Data Entry Maiden still spouted platitudes. "Reality is all there is. Suck it up and deal."

***

To be continued....

The Bard Queen - Part 1

"Reality hates me"
- Kalayna Price

Once upon a time, a young slavegirl lived in a faraway land called Reality. This slavegirl, like all the slaves of Reality was known only by her function - Office Wench. If she had a name, she did not know it. Office Wench lived a normal life in Reality. She picked at her Real food, slept fitfully in her Real bed, and trudged to her Real job every morning.


One day, while Office Wench crouched over her keyboard, she overheard an argument in the next cubicle.


"You should come with me," said a voice Office Wench recognized as Data Entry Maiden. "We'll all suffocate here if we stay any longer."


"Stop talking like a baby," said Office Wench's neighbor, the Keyer of Edits. "There is nowhere else to go."


"I can't take another day in this place." Data Entry Maiden lowered her voice to a whisper, forcing Office Wench to press her ear against the padded wall to hear. "I leave tomorrow morning, meet me at the water cooler at 9 a.m."


The Keyer of Edits laughed. "You won't make it out of the office. Get your head out of the clouds."


This last statement was a favorite phrase of the slaves of Reality, for there were lots of clouds to get one's head stuck in. Reality was an odd country. The people walked with their gazes fixed to the ground straight in front of them. Therefore, they could see only what was right there, in full view.


If their gaze ever crept upward, they saw nothing, for the entire land was covered in a haze that floated just above the ground. The fog was thick and still and windless. Walking through Reality felt like walking through vaporous rock. Nothing stirred Real air.


The well acclimated often bragged about how "Real air is heavy. Only the strong truly appreciate it's full weight." Then they would throw out their chests and swallow huge gulps of the stuff, choking all the while.


Office Wench went to fetch water at 9 the next morning, as she did every morning. Data Entry Maiden stood in front of the water cooler rocking back and forth on her heels, a rucksack over her arm.


"Where are you going?" asked Office Wench.


Data Entry Maiden glanced back and forth down the halls before answering, "To find Truth."


"But everyone knows that Reality is all there is."


"That's not what the Sage says." Data Entry Maiden turned her back on Office Wench.


"The what?"


"The Sage who lives in the dungeons. He is from Truth, and he says there is a way to get there."


"Did he tell you the way?"


"Like I need some crazy IT Guy telling me what to do!" She muscled her rucksack higher on her shoulder and walked past Office Wench. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have somewhere to be."


Office Wench could not focus on her keyboard that day. She kept imagining Data Entry Maiden walking out of the fog, finding Truth. But the next morning, Office Wench was disappointed. For there, in her padded cell, sat Data Entry Maiden curled over her keyboard.


"What happened to Truth?" asked Office Wench.


"Get your head out of the clouds!" Data Entry Maiden said without lifting her eyes.


***

Continued in Part 2

Inspirations and Secondary Characters

This will be a short entry because it's late. I have been at a loss creatively for about six months now. And after that long hiatus, I have begun writing and creating again in the last few weeks. I understand it may just be time for my creative dry spell to end (for now), so I'm not going to give sole credit to one writing technque or force of will or anything that pretends to be useful to others in the same situation. I do, however, want to share a craft tool I have been playing with during this spurt of inspiration.

As I mentioned last month, I am going through the Snowflake method for plotting my new Nano. Over the past few days, I have been writing one-paragraph story summaries from the POV of each character. This task has helped me immensely with uncovering the overall plot of the novel. I have always struggled with thinking up plot events (Vikki, by the way, is very good at that). But this process of learning from the characters, what happens and how they all respond, has breathed life back into my novel. With every character, even minor ones (in some ways, especially minor ones), I learn something new about the story, the characters, and the large-scale structure of the novel. I can see the parallel stories occuring simultaneously and interweaving with each other. Minor characters have forced their way into important roles. I have subplots emerging, which is a first for me as well. The story has begun pulling itself together in ways I did not expect. For the first time, I feel like this novel might just work after three years of fiddling with it. I'll keep you posted.

When was the last time you had a creative dry spell end?

The countdown begins

Less than three months lie between now and the world's biggest writing frenzy - National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as Nano (or "the month I stop existing in a conscious state"). The question is, since you can't officially write until the fated first day of November, what are you going to do for these remaining months of sanity?

Tie up loose ends: Several of the Tri Mus are working to finish up writing projects they started long ago. Kalayna has been working through a full rewrite of last year's Nano manuscript. Vikki is, as she announced in her recent post, trying to finish her work in progress before the Olympics are over in two weeks. Also, someone really ought to tie up the old Pass the Plot we had going...

Plot: I'm going to work on this one. I have several tools in my arsenal, including the fantastic tools from Advanced Fiction Writing. The "Snowflake Method" has helped me in the past and I am definitely going to utilize the principles in "Writing the Perfect Scene" for plotting this Nano. I have never plotted a novel before - I usually fly by the seat of my pants (it's called being a pantser in Nano terminology). After pantsing my way through two Nanos only to realize I have no plot whatsoever, I think it's time to graduate tothe world of preplotting.

Develop Characters: This goes well beyond the basic physical characteristics for me. I have spreadsheets that list things like mental ability, character arc, motivation, worst fear, etc. I personally love personality tests. I like to get in my character's head and answer the questions for him or her. Not only do I discover what my character's Myer-Briggs code is, but I also learn something about how he or she react to circumstances by paying attention to the questions themselves. For online (free) tests, Similar Minds is my favorite site. They have a bunch of different types of tests. Aslo, to determine your character's Hogwarts House (which could be interesting even if you're not writing fan fiction) go to Personality Lab's House Sorting Test for a very detailed exam.

Skive off: Another great way to spend the three months until Nano is to ignore it completely! There are plenty of things to do if you plan to wait until October 31 to start thinking about your novel. Here are a few suggestions: blog, knit a sweater, bake a pie, go skydiving, rope cattle, find the cure for cancer, learn Mandarin Chinese, scale Everest, etc. Be creative with your procrastination. I mean, come on, Nano is three months away!

So, how are you going to spend your countdown?

TotW: The AHA moment - Darlene

Two books, two AHAs

These two books illustrated writing concepts I already knew in my head, but had not taken to heart. They may be common ideas – i.e. books need suspense, every scene has to do something – but I needed these books to bring the concepts out of the abstract world of ideas and into vivid reality.

Jane Eyre: I was not forced to read this in high school. I don’t know if I would have appreciated it as much as I did if I had picked it up before I was in my 20s. I listened to the book on cassette tapes in my “beater” car while driving back and forth to Charlotte for work. The story enthralled me. I didn’t read the back cover copy or look for a synopsis online, so I experienced all the twists and turns of Jane’s experiences in a fresh, unaffected way. The mystery of the in the attic was really a mystery, Jane’s love affair with Rochester really seemed hopeless when he told the truth of his past. The book’s level of suspense and growing conflict drove me through the chapters while I drove to Charlotte. I had to take the tapes out of my car and keep listening in my room when I got home at night. It gave me a taste of the pleasure of a good on-the-edge-of-your-seat mystery. I felt inspired to write, so I started playing with ideas for a first person novel that eventually became my NaNo novel and thereby my first complete manuscript draft.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: One of the most fantastic summers of my reading life was when I worked through the first six books of the Harry Potter series. I confess I started with book six. I had listened to the audio book in the car with a friend and got hooked. I read book six until right before the black moment, stopped, and read the whole series in order from book one. I have since read the series three times at least (mostly on audio book, I do love being able to hang out with Harry while I’m waiting in traffic). I can actually place my “aha” moment for this book in space and time. I can see in my mind the parking lot where I walked through the rain thinking about what I had just heard in the car. I was reading Prisoner of Azkaban, and I suddenly realized how everything in a book works together to complete the plot – how J.K. Rowling masterfully used each and every scene to do something for the story. I knew this conceptually, but suddenly I could see it in beautiful detail.

As an aside, yes, I listen to a lot of books on audio. The mental and emotional experience for me is the same, if not better in some cases, than reading a book off the page. It does depend on personal style though, because there are a lot of people (like my mom) who cannot follow a book if it is presented in an audio format. I must be a little kid at heart - I like being read to.