Assorted Nonsense

Okay, I’ll blog both here and there. Wildebear will be devoted to science fiction and fantasy and everything to do with Wildebear’s (almost complete!) memoirs. Assorted Nonsense will be for everything else.

Yes, I am a fool, to attempt blogging in two places at once.

You’d almost think I have free time on my hands. Alas, it has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with this cursed passion for writing, which only seems to get worse as I age.

Et maintenant je passe le coq au l’aine.

Something I’ve wanted to mention for some time is a new blog I’ve discovered. Up until today I’ve only ever checked it out on my Blackberry. One day I was waiting at Union Station for the Go Train to carry me home to a lovely home-made chicken broccoli casserole. The train stubbornly refused to come. Bored, I whipped out the Blackberry and did a random search for something, anything, I don’t even remember what. It may have been “something interesting.” And what should pop up but this blog entitled “It’s Our Time on the Edge.”

A young woman (Catherine, let’s call her, what with that being her name and all) blogging about random elements of her life. To me it has come to represent this odd time in our species’ history when we’re able to observe one another’s lives from afar, without ever actually knowing one another, without ever necessarily making contact, just checking in from time to time to see what we’re up to. And not uninvited, because although at times it feels a tad voyeuristic (although there is nothing in the content of her blog to warrant such a feeling), Catherine has explicitly invited me into her life to this limited extent (just the same as I have done here), deliberately sharing with me the circumstances of her single life (a little bit lonely), her subsequent engagement to a gentleman she had previously broken up with (a frequent characteristic of subsequently successful marriages, I’ve observed over the years), and now her young married life, pre- children (which perhaps will be the next thing, although let’s see how many blog posts she gets in then!).

If I’ve made poor Catherine’s blog sound a bit boring, it’s not. I keep coming back, often while waiting for the train, sometimes while waiting to pick my wife up from work. Always on my Blackberry. She is my Blackberry blog. My only Blackberry blog, I might add. I keep coming back because I like her writing. Never juvenile, always clear, usually thoughtful. Judging from the comments, read by a close circle of family and friends, and who knows how many lurkers, like me.

I wonder if Catherine monitors her traffic. Will she notice and wonder about this link that has suddenly appeared in her stats directing perhaps a handful of more potential readers to It’s Our Time on the Edge? Might it prompt her to increase her (recently erratic) blogging rate? Or will she continue to blog mercifully oblivious to the benign yet inane ramblings of this fan from afar?

We will see…

Well folks, while I’m not abandoning this blog entirely, I am redirecting my efforts to assist my good friend Barnabus J. Wildebear over at his new blog. He’s not much of a technophile so he’s going to need a lot of help for a while.

Barnabus plans to write specifically about his passion for all aspects of science fiction and fantasy, and also about certain recent exploits of his that, although difficult to believe, he insists are every bit as real as (ahem) he is.

So I hope you’ll join me in migrating over to Chez Wildebear for awhile.

He promises to post every single day, or at the very least, every eighteen days.

Good luck Barnabus!

And perhaps I’ll see the rest of you back here in the not-too-distant future.

So long…

Yes, you’re all quite right, it’s time I picked up the blogging again.

To answer Mr. Lozinski, the novel is not quite finished, but we’re getting there, certainly another eight or nine years and I’ll have it. Sigh. But seriously, I am just tidying up the second last chapter, after which there is the last chapter to sort out, then a brief epilogue. My main accomplishment over the last little while has been jettisoning an entire section having to do with seagulls, which I tried desperately to make work but was, in the end, clearly a digression that could not be made to work because it just didn’t belong.

I’m on vacation now for a couple of weeks. Not doing too much of anything, family visiting, off to Stratford to see Peter Pan this time next week. Reading an excellent book by the name of The Annubis Gates by Tim Powers. It’s the first Powers book I’ve read but I quite like it, quite similar in tone (if not content) to the novels of his good buddy Blaylock, author of several terrific, rather understated reads.

Nothing of tremendous import to report or relate, sadly, perhaps why blogging has been minimal of late.

Perhaps I will attempt the odd deep thought later in this vacation…

Talking to someone on the bus yesterday who told me he too was writing a novel. Admitted he’d been working on it several years.

“Sure hope it’s worth it in the end,” he said.

Now maybe he didn’t really mean it the way it sounded, but it SOUNDED that if his book didn’t sell and/or make him a pile of dough after all that hard work that all the effort he’d poured into the book would have been a colossal waste of time.

I didn’t have much time to say anything as he was just getting off the bus at that time, so all I got out was a sententious, “The writing itself is the reward,” which earned me a sceptical look before we parted ways.

I really mean that. I know full well my novel may never sell (if I even ever finish it) and that even if it doesn’t sell it may not earn me much in the way of money or accolades. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and when I finish it that will be a major accomplishment for me. I will be proud of it for what it is, whatever that may turn out to be in the eyes of others. I will also thoroughly enjoy the process of trying to sell it, whatever it amounts to.

And I will immediately start writing another one.

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” someone once asked.

The labour itself, saith I.

Of all the writing I’ve ever done, all the time I’ve taken with some of it, the editing, the revising, everything, this piece, which I dashed off in a matter of minutes and lightly revised once if at all, may be my favourite.

If only everything I wrote came so easily.

By Joe Mahoney

I want to tell you about my cat. Actually, I have three cats, but the one I want to tell you about is named Blossom. The story begins with my father-in-law, who decided to move out of his house in the country into an apartment in Moncton, New Brunswick. He needed a new home for his eight year old cat… Blossom. So my wife generously decided to add Blossom to our already (in my opinion) full roster of felines.

They decided to fly Blossom from Moncton to Toronto. They drugged her and packed her up and somehow it became my responsibility to pick her up at the airport, after work.

I’m at work on the day and it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m starting to feel ill. Stomach flu kind of thing. I tough it out to the end of my shift, but I can’t go home. No, I have to go pick up this cat at the airport. But before I do that, I’ve also agreed to pick up a Disney doll as a birthday gift for a friend of my girls. I’m feeling increasingly sick, but I hightail it off to the Eaton Centre or whatever they’re calling it these days to pick up the doll. Then it’s back on the subway to where I’ve parked the car, and off to the airport.

Traffic getting out of Toronto sucks bigtime. It’s bad enough going east to Whitby where I live, but west on the QEW to the 427 up to the airport is worse. Fortunately, there’s a plastic bag in the glove compartment that I can barf into if I begin to feel even worse. It’s stop and go until about half the way up the 427. I make it to the airport without woofing my cookies. Thinking all the while, I don’t even really like cats (more of a dog person, really).

I find the proper gate at the airport with the help of a friendly seventy year old fellow whose job it is to give directions. At the gate I ask an attendant if my cat is likely to be unloaded there. She says yes. I wait. Everybody gets off the plane, including several dogs. But no cat.

I approach the attendant and inquire about the cat. She says, you mean the cat was travelling alone? I say yes, it’s a very sophisticated cat. She says, well in that case you must pick the cat up at the special cat delivery terminal located approximately three kilometres west of the airport proper. I ask her how to get there. She has no idea.

I visit my seventy year old friend. He has never heard of the special cat delivery terminal. I revisit the attendant. She unearths a phone number for the special cat delivery terminal. I revisit my seventy year old friend, who lets me use his phone. I phone the special cat delivery terminal. I get an answering machine. I leave a message asking them to phone my seventy year old friend.

I wait. I refrain from barfing. I imagine being home in bed. I really want nothing more than to be home in bed. I refrain from barfing some more.

The phone rings. It is the guy from the special cat delivery terminal. He gives me directions as my seventy year old friend spreads an enormous map across his desk and marks on it with a red felt pen. I repeat the directions aloud. “Turn right at the second Sunoco,” I say. “No no no!” the guy says. “At the second Su NO co!” I’ve pronounced it wrong. Apparently you can’t get there if you pronounce it wrong.

The directions make little sense. I decide to take a cab. I approach a cabbie and he’s all set to take me until I mention the cat. “No cats!” he cries.

Armed with my seventy year old friend’s map, I hop in my van and pick my way across north Toronto in search of the special cat terminal. Lo and behold there’s the second Su NO co. I turn right and wend my way down an enormously long, desolate road, past large, eerie buildings and arrive after much head scratching at what can only be the special cat terminal, where, one can only suppose, they land the planes and disembark all the cats before taking off again to fly the human passengers three kilometres further on to the special people terminal.

Inside the special cat terminal is a long, L shaped desk at which several unsmiling people are busy clicking away at special computer terminals. I’m feeling even sicker if such a thing is possible and not a little annoyed. “I’m here to get my cat,” I announce to one unsmiling face. He gets me to fill out a form and tells me to go around the corner and wait and somebody will get my cat.

I fill out the form and go around the corner and wait for somebody to get my cat. I wait. I wait and I wait and I wait. I am waiting in a huge hanger type space, filled with mysterious boxes and zero human activity. Finally I hear a shuffling. I spy an elderly security guard approaching. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m looking to get my cat. Can you help me get my cat?”

“Your cat?” he says. “I can’t get you your cat.”

“Look, I just want my cat,” I tell him. “I’m as sick as a dog and I’ve been trying to get my cat for about three hours now and I just want to get it and go home.”

“Come with me,” he says. “I can show you your cat.” And he leads me across this vast space to a special door, which he unlocks, and ushers me inside. And there’s Blossom, whom I recognize from visits with my father-in-law. Filled with relief, I pick up Blossom’s case and prepare to take her home with me.

The elderly security guard, seconds before a paragon of peacefulness, freaks out. “What do you think you are you doing?”

“I’m taking my cat home with me.”

“You can’t take that cat home with you!”

I can’t believe my ears. She’s right there… I’m holding onto her case, perhaps I could make a dash for it… I sigh, a sigh perilously close to a barf. “Why can’t I take my cat home with me?”

He gives me this song and dance about procedure and I’ve had enough. I storm back to the L shaped desk and all the dour faces and I shout, “Look! I just want my cat! Will somebody please give me my cat?” And I storm back to the place I had been told to wait.

I do not recall actually receiving the cat or exiting the building. I can only hope the process was carried out peacefully and with a minumum of vomit. I do recall travelling home on the 401 with Blossom on the passenger seat beside me. I spoke to her soothingly. As tired and as sick as I felt, I suspected she felt even worse. I tried to be friendly, to welcome her to her new home, to make her feel better. I don’t know that I succeeded.

But I did get her to her new home. Where she lives with two new cat enemies, er, friends.

All three of whom I’m allergic to.

Last night I was hanging out with some science fiction buddies, one of whom was (and still is) the inimitable Mark Raynor, author of The Amadeus Net and Marvellous Hairy, as well as The Skwib, his irreverent, absurdist, satirical and highly amusing blog, when Mark dropped the following bomb:

“You’re about to become a Malingering Macaque, Mahoney.”

At first this sounded like  something to strive for with its undeniably attractive alliteration, until Mark put it in context.  Turns out he was talking about his blogroll, which is neatly arranged in order of how frequently the folks on his blogroll blog:

“Right now you’re a Bonobo in Space,” he said, which actually didn’t sound anywhere near as appealing as a Malingering Macaque, until he explained further:  “You see Bonobos in Space are people who blog every now and then.  But you’ve been blogging hardly at all.  I’m going to be forced to demote you from a Bonobo in Space to a Malingering Macaque.  The only thing worse than a Malingering Macaque is a Primate of the Past.  And you definitely do not want to go there, good sir.”

Immediately following this threat Mark’s brother Mike launched a nearly lethal volley at his elder brother,  accusing him of squandering his not inconsiderable literary skills on blogging as opposed to crafting yet more of his fabulously satirical novels.

Leaving me utterly confused.

Should I blog more and thus avoid the dubious fate of becoming a Malingering Macaque?  Or should I heed Mike’s advice to his brother and cast aside this folly once and for all in favour of potentially more lucrative literary endeavours?

I don’t know either.

Alfred Hitchcock used to call people who cared too much about logic in stories the Plausibles.  He thought the Plausibles were looking for the wrong thing in his movies, that instead of looking for flawless narrative logic, they should yield to the narrative.  And it was the job of the storyteller to give the narrative sufficient momentum to compel the audience to do that.

A while back I finished reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids.  Afterwards I thought, wow, that was some really solid plotting on Rowling’s part.  In my opinion she really set up the ending nicely. 

A couple of months later I sat down and rewatched the end of the movie with the girls.  And I thought, okay wait a minute.  How did Quirrel get through the chess match?  It was completely intact when Hermione, Ron and Harry came across it.

The movie doesn’t say how, and neither (I believe) does  the book (I haven’t gone back to check yet). 

This, of course, makes me a Plausible.

But Rowling produced sufficient narrative momentum that I didn’t notice this logical gap until well after I read the book and saw the film.  And I must confess that it wasn’t until after I’d read the book for a second time, and seen the film for a third time that I gave this omission any thought (perhaps I’m not a Plausible after all).

I know that some people probably don’t care.  They assume that Voldemort must have helped Quirrel somehow, or because Quirrel was a professor he must have known some secret backdoor or the like.  But I find it interesting that Rowling doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to cross this particular T.  (I will have to reread that portion of the book to confirm this, but the movie certainly doesn’t make any attempt.)  And this omission on her part (or the filmmaker’s part) has done nothing to dampen audience enjoyment or diminish sales.

What does this mean?  It means a few things.  It means Hitchcock was right, for one thing.  Absolute narrative logic is beside the point.  Entertainment value, suspense and narrative momentum trump narrative logic hands down.  It means storytellers don’t have to dot every i and cross every t.

It also means I’ve spent way too much time sorting out the intricacies of the labyrinthine plot of my work in progress…

I read an interview with Stephen R. Donaldson the other day (author of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles, the Axebrewder mysteries, the Gap saga, and others).  In it he stated what an excruciatingly slow writer he is.

And instantly I felt a lot better about myself.

I felt even better when he expressed one of the reasons why he’s a slow writer.  He said its because he never comes right out and expresses the emotions of his characters.  This is one of the reason’s why I’m a slow writer, too (sadly, the comparisons probably end there).

Not expressing emotions directly means you have to find other means of indicating the emotions of your characters.  So easy just to say, Ridley came home all happy.  Much more difficult to express that sentiment in some other subtle fashion, in a way that makes the reader complicit in the story.   “Ridley fairly capered up the front steps of the house,”  maybe.

Why do this?  To immerse the reader that much more fully in the story.  If you tell the reader too much, if you don’t leave a little bit for them to figure out, they don’t get as involved in the story.  You want to make them think.  You want to raise questions that compell them to read further to get those questions answered.

Why is Ridley capering up those steps?   Does that mean he’s happy?  You don’t caper if you’re angry.  Do you?  I’d better read a bit further to see why he’s capering, to see if I’m right.

Once you get the reader thinking like that, they’re hooked.  I hope.  At least that’s what I’m counting on.

Also, honestly, it’s probably a bit of a game with me.  I can’t come right out and state things like that explicitly, even if I want to.  I will, sometimes, in early drafts.  But I always change it.  It’s my rule.  Never come right out and state what the characters are feeling.  Show what they’re feeling instead.

The downside, of course, is that it takes me a long time to finish writing a novel.

Here’s hoping it’s worth it.

Just for fun, and because I keep mentioning it, here’s a snippet of “A Time and a Place”.  I read this bit to a bunch of friends recently and the resultant scorn and derision was well within acceptable limits.  I don’t think posting this tiny little section is giving too much away.

The section starts at page one hundred and sixty-three of the novel, at the beginning of Chapter Eleven, a chapter entitled Vegetation Abounded:

It was awful – the light too bright and the sounds too loud.  I cried out and curled up into a ball to protect myself.

“Wildebear!  Can you hear me?  What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s not used to it.”

“Will he be all right?”

“He should.”

“Should?”

“He might not.”

“Will he or won’t he?”

“That’s what you’re here for, doctor.  To see that he’s okay.”

“Hmph.  What happened to him?”

“Not much.  Plenty.”

“That’s an infuriating thing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – just don’t say anything like that ever again.”

“I can’t promise that I’ll –”

“Okay okay, just — where was he, anyway?”

“Where he needed to be.”

“Oh for crying out – Wildebear!  Wildebear, it’s me, Humphrey.”

I peeked out from between my arms to see who was talking.  Humphrey – the name sounded familiar.  He had a lot of meat on him, this Humphrey.  He’d make a sumptuous meal.  And I just happened to be starving.  Although a part of me knew that there was something very wrong with the idea, I unfurled myself in anticipation of a feast.  Catching a glimpse of one of my front paws, I was shocked to discover that it was almost completely hairless.  My God!  Was I ill?  I emitted a most un-T’Klee like whimper and curled back up.

“Physiologically he’s all over the map,” a voice said.  “His pulse is racing and his serotonin levels are dangerously low.”

It had come from my front foreleg.  Something shiny and silver was attached to me.  I tried to lick it off.

The creature Humphrey leaned down to touch me.  Instantly I whirled on it, but something was the matter with my reflexes.  Before I could deliver the coup de grace the Humphrey creature grabbed hold of me and held fast.  I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been captured by my own prey.  It was like having been bested by a bandaloot.  I hoped that none of my brothers were around to see.

Except that… I had no brothers.  It was Cat’s brothers I was thinking of.

And I was not Cat.

Was I?

“Damn it Wildebear, what were you trying to do?  Slit my throat?”

Humphrey.  Humphrey!  It was my old friend Doctor Peter Humphrey – and I had been about to eat him!  What had I been thinking?  Awfully confused, flitting back and forth between two identities, one human, the other a cat, I could not have said with any degree of certainty who or what I was just then.

“You should think about cutting your nails once in a while,” Humphrey muttered.

A thin red line had emerged on the side of Humphrey’s neck.  My attempt to dispatch him had come altogether too close for comfort. I started to apologize, but couldn’t seem to get the words out — talking involved using whiskers I no longer possessed.

Humphrey let go and stepped back.  I desperately tried to pull myself together.  I had no fur, no whiskers; I was, therefore, not a cat.  I was a human.  And humans spoke with their –

“Humphrey!  I – I’m so sorry.  It’s – it’s good to see you alive!”

He touched a finger to his neck.  The tip came away red.  “Little thanks to you.”

I rose to my feet and took in my surroundings.  We were in a small room blanketed in luxurious sheets and pillows.  Frills, tassels, reds and purples abounded.  The furnishings would not have been out of place in a Sultan’s tent… or that of a T’Klee.  Humphrey and I were not the only ones in the room, I saw.  Iugurtha was there as well.

I began backing away slowly.

“You’re scaring him,” Humphrey told her.

“It’s not me he should be afraid of,” she said.

And with that everything fell into place.  Suddenly I knew precisely who I was, where I was, and what I had just been through.  It seemed incredible, but I had just spent several days, possibly weeks, living inside the mind of an alien cat.  I had witnessed the subjugation of a people I had come to love by a race of horrible monsters.  After an experience like that it was a wonder I was anything resembling sane.

“Wildebear.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“You’re licking the backs of your hands.”

“Ah.”  I stopped and considered.  “So I am.”  Then, because there really was no better way to relieve stress, I resumed licking in earnest.  “Please don’t ever throw me through the gate again,” I told Iugurtha in between licks.

“Once should suffice,” she said.  “What is your opinion, Doctor?  Is he in good health?”

“Nothing a little bed rest and years of psychotherapy won’t fix,” Humphrey replied.

Mention of rest made me realize how exhausted I was.  I excused myself, curled atop several of the fluffiest pillows I could find, and purred myself to sleep in a matter of seconds.

Thinking about my process today.

Which is so frigging slow.

I write in the morning on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

I write in the evening on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

Every now and then I’ll write in the evening at home, anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half.

I write when I take my kids to a lesson, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

There are a few other places where I’ll squeeze in some writing if I get a chance.  If I’m home sick, or waiting for an appointment, or on a day off when my kids are in school and my wife’s working, or on those rare, blessed occasions when I’ve deliberately set aside an entire day to write in a cafe (those days are few and far between).

So I generally don’t get a whole lot of writing done in a single sitting.

Which is why I’ve been working on my current novel in earnest from the Fall of 2005 and it isn’t finished yet.  Damn close, mind you, page 316 of 345 of the final draft.

But man it’s frustrating.  I feel like I’m doing claymation, not fiction writing.  Because the pace I write at I feel like I’m completing maybe thirty, forty seconds worth of work a day.  Two or three minutes a week if I’m lucky.  And that’s being generous.   What I mean by that is that on a good day I might complete a paragraph that would take mere seconds to read.  In a week, maybe three or four pages that would take a couple of minutes to read.

When Nick Park was first working on the claymation classic Wallace and Gromit in his basement he considered himself lucky to complete three or four seconds of material a day.  At that rate he’d probably still be working on the first Wallace and Gromit A Grand Day Out had not Aardman Animations helped him finish it.

Of course the reason I work at this pace is because I have a demanding full time job and a young family.  Sometimes I think, man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to write full time.  Then I think, well I wouldn’t give my family, that’s for sure.  Nor would I give my day job, which I enjoy, and which puts bread on the table.  So I will continue to work at this pace for some time.

The good news is this time last year I was on page 245-250.  So I completed about sixty-five final draft pages in a year.  With about thirty pages left to go, I should (knock wood) be done A Time and a Place in about half a year, if all goes well.

And in another ten or twelve years I’ll retire from the day job and THEN get to write full time.  By then, at the rate I’m going, I should have two completed novels under my belt.

Joe the eternal optimist…