Echoes in a Hollow Space

I am tired of trying to write serious stuff. It doesn't help my present state of mind, or the state of the world. So yesterday I wrote something silly,  more words than I've been able to write for at least a week, and today I wrote something silly again, using the same world and characters. I don't know if this has legs but at least it's walking.

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Dragons Are Overused

 

“Dragons are overused, don’t you think?”

“They are the backbone of the fantasy industry.”

“And all that stuff about people riding on their backs! The g-forces would rip humans off within seconds of flight.”

“Well, it is fantasy. And people are very fond of seeing and imagining people riding dragons in their stories.”

“Pfft.” The dragon used the tip of his long, sharp nails quite delicately to pick at something lodged between his long, sharp teeth.

Maynard, the poik with whom he had been speaking, watched with fascinated queasiness hoping that whatever was lodged there wasn’t leftover poik. “Humans will be humans.”

“Lawd, won’t they, though.” The dragon shifted on his bed of ash and straw, craning his neck so he had a better view of the meadowlands outside the mouth of his cave. They were quite nice, as meadowlands went, bucolic and dotted with sheep. He made a tsk sound with his tongue to test his teeth, but apparently wasn’t satisfied he’d gotten what was lodged there for he returned a nail to his delicate work.

Maybe it was sheep, Maynard ardently hoped. “Have you been raiding their habitats lately?”

He smacked his tongue several times and seemed finally satisfied that he’d dislodged the irritant. He huffed and belched a small puff of smoke. “You know very well that isn’t a good idea these days. Too much surveillance equipment out there and jets with nasty armaments.”

“I thought bullets couldn’t pierce your hide.”

“Those heat seeking missiles hurt like crazy, though.” The dragon turned his face away from the meadowlands and laid his head on his folded paws with a disconsolate sigh. “Times are hard.”

“Yes,” agreed Maynard. “Fantasy isn’t what it used to be.”

Maynard himself had a taste for contemporary fantasy, but he’d never admit that to the dragon who, by his very nature, must be heavily invested in high fantasy. At least, that’s what Maynard assumed. Poiks fit well in urban environments, resembling large shaggy dogs as they did. Of course, there were many subtle differences, but most humans didn’t possess subtle perception and never looked twice at poiks. Unless they were fanciers of large, shaggy dogs. Of course, any self-respecting denizen of the Otherlands could shapeshift at least a little. Enough to fool even the rare perceptive humans. Most of them, anyway. Seers would always be a problem, but at least they glowed golden to Otherlanders so were easily avoided.

“Do you suppose my time has come?” asked the dragon, releasing a melancholy and smoggy sigh.

“What do you mean?”

“Am I obsolete?”

“Uhhh…” Maynard wasn’t sure what response would cause him the least pain. Dragons were mercurial at best. No guessing what this one wanted to hear so he turned around three times and laid down on a spare pile of straw.

“I mean,” the dragon continued, clearly not really interested in Maynard’s answer, “several of my relatives have given up altogether and gone into deep hibernation. Some have even allowed themselves to die, which seems excessive, but no accounting for taste. Or strength of character.”

“Mmm hmm.” Maynard scratched his floppy ears with his hind paw.

“As long as I can still fly now and then, snatch up a sheep or a cow or a horse without being observed, life still seems worth living.”

Maynard was relieved that it probably wasn’t poik that had been stuck in the dragon’s teeth. “I can imagine. And how exactly do you manage to fly without being observed?”

“The human mythmakers have invented this marvelous new creature called a yueffo and I can easily pass for one of those.”

Yueffo. At least that’s what Maynard thought he’d heard. “What is a yueffo?”

“It’s an acronym. Humans are so very fond of acronyms. U-F-O. Unidentified Flying Object. Covers a multitude of shapes and sizes and basically boils down to any strange thing seen in the skies. As long as I can surround myself with enough light they can’t really make out my true form and they can’t capture a good image of me on those nasty cameras of theirs. Anyway, most of the time I’m flying over remote areas at night where I can pick off livestock with ease. Although I understand real UFOs only take parts of the cattle and horses they capture and leave the rest, perfectly good meat, behind to rot. Really bizarre behavior.”

“What constitutes a real UFO?”

“Haven’t a clue, Maynard. They must come from the Otherlands, but I’m not sure which kingdom, tribe, or caliotrope they belong to.”

“Very interesting.”

“Yes. They’re all the rage right now amongst the humans. Always something on their televisions and social media about them. I don’t know how they can make something so remarkable so boring, but they bang on and on about it until you just want to scream with tedium.”

“I’m taking a media break at the moment,” Maynard admitted. “Always another tragedy, always some internecine warfare amongst the opinionated set. Gets tiring.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Mind you, the internet has its advantages. You can say whatever you like and no one knows you’re a poik.”

“Or a dragon.”

“Exactly.”

They fell silent, looking out across the bucolic meadowlands. Large white clouds hugged the mountains in the middle distance. Three bright blue lights emerged from the clouds and zipped across the meadowlands at incredible speed, then up and over the mountain hiding the dragon’s cave.

“Show offs,” he grumbled.

In each novel I always seem to reach a place, generally somewhere in the middle, but not always, where I commit an egregious infodump outrage—pages and pages of IN-FOR-MATION. Sometimes, I'll admit, I commit more than one of these. It doesn't do any good for me to try editing it down in the first draft because if I try to limit or edit-as-I-go it stalls the novel. I just have to release that "breath I didn't know I was holding" and get on with it. Let it have its way and worry about fixing it after the first draft is done.

I'm an organic writer and used to writing on the fly, but even so I do a great deal of worldbuilding before I commit to a novel. Mostly the big stuff, but also quite a bit of minutiae. Since I find it impossible to work from an outline, this is my hedge against jumping off the cliff and not being fast enough to "build my wings on the way down." In the day to day of writing, though, "stuff" is going to come up that I haven't sufficiently thought through. It took me awhile to figure out that these infodumps were how my psyche chose to work through things.

My first drafts are always about me telling the story to myself. I am writing with an audience in mind and generally try to do a good, clean job, but ultimately, that first draft is mine—which is one of the reasons outlines don't work. If I've already told myself the story, I feel no drive to tell it again. I need to get caught up in the momentum of finding out and that's part of what propels me forward through the months of completing the draft. I know what happens in the end, but there are all these things in the middle that are surprises. These mysterious pathways remain obscure until I put one foot in front of the other heading for that far off ending, peaking like the pinnacle of a Mayan temple over the top of the rainforest.

So I have to "tell" these pathways to myself, often in painful and unnecessary detail, in order to internalize them like all the other stuff. I no longer sweat the infodumps. If they remain infodumps in the second draft, then it's time to sweat. Time to get out the machete and hack my way through the creeping lianas and strangler figs to that temple in the sky, waiting for me to discover it and liberate it from its jungle covering.

Metafiction elements have shown up in Charged with Folly. Not too much: there's nothing I find more irritating than self-consciously self-conscious fiction. But there is a device, an element, in the plot of my story that allows things to leak through now and then—ironic elements from my current reality. At least a couple of readers of chapter one when I posted it on OWW back in the misty days of yore commented on these leakages. So it remains to be seen if I can pull this off in a way that doesn't alienate readers until I can address the plot element which explains them.

My feeling is that I can address it fairly early in the story, but I don't always have ultimate control over when things appear. And I may have to scrap the idea entirely at some point. But that's why they call it a first draft! I'm on the road to Findout.

Another first draft thing that occurred to me today was, "I'll sure be glad when I can stop writing this boring stuff and get to the good stuff." Uh oh. If I'm bored with it, the reader will be, too. Maybe I'd better rethink some things. That's why I like to get about ten chapters ahead before I start posting the first drafts of novels to the workshop. It gives me time to feel things out a bit better, see if they really belong in the book, see if characters are important or just red shirts. The road to Findout.

Quotes of the day:

"He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either."

—Friedrich Neitzsche


"A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs."

—Mark Twain


Writingness of the day: So I'm trying to complete a new Dos Lunas story—yeah, that series of stories I was just talking about, the ones that have yet to generate a sale. But I haven't completed a completely new short story in well over a year, maybe more like two, and I know from past experience that sometimes I've just got to finish something, anything, in order to bust up that kind of creative logjam and move on. This Dos Lunas story probably has the best shot at getting written of any currently in the unfinished pile.

The other thing I'm trying to get past is that little voice of judgment that's been a pox on my house lately. That mini-magistrate is the voice of doom for finishing projects, always negative, and I've learned that if I don't figure out how to shut it up, I can't create. I'm not talking about creative judgment here, that's always got to be part of the process, I'm talking about that mean little fucker who mocks the first draft into incompletion.

It doesn't matter how crappy first drafts are. The first draft is the one where you just put it on the page, try stuff out, get in there and wallow, go over the top if you need to, and the judge and jury should play no part in it—at least not in my process. Because those negative voices generally have more to do with the people who have put me down in my life, tried to keep me in my place, or make me conform to their version of reality. They have to do with negative programming going back to childhood, as they do in most people's lives who share head space with a mini-magistrate.

We never lose those little judgers. That programming is so integral to the fabric of our childhoods that we can't rip them out of our consciousness without ripping out a part of ourselves. If you like the art you do, the life you're currently living, or even—miracle of miracles—the self you currently are, then you have to embrace the whole package. Everything that happened to you, every crappy little voice, as well as the good stuff, contributed to making you who you are, as an artist and a human being. You'd better learn to live with it all because ignoring it just doesn't work. It comes out in ugly ways if you try to hold it down, and it will come back to bite you bigtime on the ass. You'd better develop coping strategies, otherwise the judgers and the crap merchants inside you will make sure you don't accomplish anything at all.

Quote of the day:

"To rise and to fall. Fortune maltreats those who court her. Efforts to rise she awards with hot air and those she has risen she punishes by downfall."

—Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, No. 56

In other words, don't get cocky kid. :-(

Writing cockiness of the day: 2500 words today, to finish off another big section! Only three more sections to go and I can put a nail in the lid of this thing! Cockadoodle doo!

I think I wrote too much. Somebody died and I always get verbose over deaths in the first draft. Thank God for rewrites

This is one of those days when I really feel the weight of the novel on top of me. I'm sure I'm repeating images and character bits; the prose becomes more and more laden with placeholder clichés and deadish dialogue tags because I'm just too tired to think of anything else right now.

That's why I actually like the rewrite process. It gives me a chance to have new skin. The first draft is for pushing through, the second is for scraping away the dead cells.

Unfortunate juxtaposition of headlines on Netscape News of the day:

• Keep work stress in check: 7 tips

• Wine bars uncork nightlife trend

Cliché du jour: Bedwyr rode grim-faced beside me

Darling du jour: In the torchlight his face wavered like the moon reflected in black water

I'm not even sure that makes sense, but I like it. At least until I read it again some months from now during the rewrites.

Typo of note: The cursing of the ne... which of course made me think of the knights of Monty Python fame...

So the official word count on The Novel is now 90,000 words SMF.

I thought I'd be further along the road by this time—and I'm getting there, but not as far as I thought 90k would get me.

One of the problems is I keep running into characters and situations I had not anticipated when I pulled out of the driveway and headed for the highway. These hitchhikers have all been so damned interesting it's been difficult to pass them by. And when I stop to let them in the cab, they make a compelling case for me taking that little detour to let them off 500 miles out of my way.

"You shouldn't have mentioned me in passing twelve chapters ago," one of them said, "if you didn't want me to hijack part of the story. I am not someone you can just pick up and drop off in front of the bus depot, you know."

And he was right. And she was right when she said, "I'm no casual affair. You will remember me."

I did. She kept coming back like a song on the radio, fading out with distance and—I'll be damned—coming up again when I got close to the next town. What could I do but sing along?

That's all right. They'll strut and fret their hour upon the . . . road, and then be seen no more. Overall, they've made the story richer. Come the rewrites, they may find themselves left behind, but maybe not. Because one thing these unanticipated characters have going in their favor is that it wasn't until I got to them that I began to understand what the real story is about. I thought I knew, but you hit a few potholes on the road and poom! It jogs something loose in the ol' creative spark machine.

"Oh," I mumble as I make the turn onto the new road, "so that's what I was talking about."

So, anyway, I posted the first chapter of the new novel, Night Warrior, to the workshop last week. I didn't figure it would get much attention during the week between Xmas and New Year's, but I also figured what the heck. I was pleasantly surprised there. Reception's been pretty good. The chapter has first draft issues, of course, but so far nothing too insurmountable. At only one chapter in. We'll see how the rest goes.

Basically, I'll be happy if critters say, "Your premise doesn't suck."

I actually got more writing done than I thought I would over Xmas break. Every year I usually do a full body collapse, just let myself sloth it all over so I can regain my energy. I tend to burn the candle at both ends during my "real life." Typically, it takes me the better part of a week to feel vim and vigorated. This year was no different, but while semi-comatose I also managed to get most of the work done on chapter nine of Night Warrior plus some significant twiddily bits on earlier chapters, and wrote some crits (something I've been seriously behind on for months). So it was a semi-productive full body collapse. Writing always vims and vigorates me. It's all the other squanto that burns me up.

I'm glad about working out the problems on chapter nine. It was not working as I originally wrote it so I scrapped it and started again, then that wasn't quite working, and I finally realized I could use part of what I'd discarded to round it out. Good thing I never throw away anything. I haven't smoothed everything out yet, but I feel like I hammered through the major problems. It's taken the better part of three weeks. Hopefully things will run along smoothly for awhile. My local beta readers told me they expected new chapters when my vacation was over. I almost have one for them.

I dreamed about looking for a new job last night. Which is something I so don't want to contemplate. I also dreamed that I was a devastatingly handsome man. Hmm. Too much time inside Caius's head, I guess. I almost never write first person, so it's been an interesting experience all the way around.

So now I'm all rested and it's almost time to go back to the grind. *sigh* Such is life. It's feels like the world changed in the last week—but I suppose it hasn't really. Or maybe it has.

And compared with three-quarters of the world, I live a blessed life. I'm grateful.