“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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

Most books on writing you’re lucky if you pick up one good tip. I’m serious about that. In one book I learned to be careful with the verb “To be” (it’s better to say “the birds flew” than “the birds were flying”). In another book I learned that the maxim “show don’t tell” is not a one size fits all piece of advice (sometimes it’s better to sum up crucial facts quickly than add a chapter to your manuscript). In yet another I learned to use a single name for your characters (don’t keep changing the name from Fred to the red haired youth to the budding gymnast back to Fred again) and in another I learned that tension does not exist in the manuscript but rather in the reader, and is generated by constantly posing questions that must be answered.

In McCormack’s text, although not quite one-stop shopping, I garnered many such tips.

McCormack is a former editor for St. Martin’s Press. In fact, he ran the joint for many years, and in so doing turned its fortunes around (it was on its deathbed when he inherited it). But he was always a budding writer (dramatist mainly) and clearly empathised with the writers with whom he worked, relating strongly to their needs. And what many of them need most is a good editor.

McCormack’s main premise in The Fiction Editor is that good editors are few and far between, and this is primarily because editing has always been mostly an intuitive endeavour. Editors have a few tricks up their sleeves but mostly they seem to go by their guts. They might recognize that something doesn’t quite work, but they don’t necessarily know why it doesn’t work, or how to fix it. McCormack argues strongly for a more disciplined, almost scientifically rigourous approach to editing.

I’ve always felt myself that there are a million hidden rules in writing, that I’ve gradually been unearthing one by one, almost like panning for gold. I have yearned for a teacher who could lay those rules out one by one, clearly, sytematically, a process after which I would know how to write not only clearly and quickly, but well.

McCormack goes on to divulge a few tricks of the trade, a mere handful compared to what must be out there, but far more than in most books. I suggest you purchase the book (now in an expanded second edition, available at Amazon.com) to find out what they are.

One caveat: The Fiction Editor is slightly self-indulgent. McCormack was the most powerful man in his company (I suspect) when he wrote it; it could have benefited from at least one more pass (hence the second edition… I own the first). I wonder if his underlings were afraid to point out a few things. For instance, he loves to make up words (neologisms, for which he apologizes). Actually, I quite like many of his neologisms, such as “gad factor” (the extent to which characters conflict). Others (such as “somacluster”) don’t work quite so well (I’ve read the book twice and still can’t quite remember what somacluster is supposed to mean).

The worst is “master prelibation,” which is really just an unfortunate and distracting choice of words, and which, were it not for McCormack’s otherwise earnest tone, I might almost suspect is a joke on his part (although I suppose it’s possible my own twisted sensibility might be at play there).

But I wouldn’t let that exceedingly minor caveat put you off. This really is a terrific little book on the art of fiction editing.

We couldn’t get in at the Provincial campground, so I booked us a spot at a nearby campground called Bon Echo Family campground.  It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from the Provincial park, so that’s worked out well… every second day we get a day pass and spend it at the provincial park canoing, swimming, hiking, exploring.  And there’s canoing available where we’re staying, along with a beach that’s even better than at the provincial park, so we have the best of both worlds in many respects.

And the weather has been fantastic, especially considering it looked quite dodgy the day we got here, cold and rainy.  But every day since then has been better and better.

And that’s all the time I will spend blogging today, as this is not supposed to be an electronic vacation.  In fact, I just hooked up to the campground wireless to see if Mr. Schmidt had read my submission to Analog yet… but no such luck.

No news is good news, I guess.

And tomorrow it’s back to Whitby, and the following Monday back to real life.

Not thinking about that, though.  This afternoon is all about swimming, canoing, and ice cream.

I just finished reading a memoir by Larry McMurtry called “Books.”  Although McMurtry is an Academy Award winning screenwriter (Brokeback Mountain, with Diana Ossana), the author of 28 novels, including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove, he is also the owner and operator of a used bookstore, and has been for about thirty years.  “Books” is about this alternative career.

That’s not what I find sad.

What I find sad is McMurtry’s admission that he never wrote a “great” novel.  Here’s what he has to say about his novels:

Most were good, three or four were indifferent to bad, and two or three were really good.  None, to my regret, were great, although my long Western Lonesome Dove was very popular… popularity, of course, is not the same as greatness.

Lonesome Dove is one of my favourite novels.  Maybe McMurtry is right… it’s not great.  It’s awesome!  If my novel were even one thousandth as good as Lonesome Dove I would be ecstatic.

I don’t think that McMurtry is being modest.  He’s been surrounded by books for so long that he has too many to compare his to.  He’s comparing his books to the likes of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.  It’s apples and oranges.  Newton’s is great for one reason, and Lonesome Dove is great for another.

It may be that the quality of your work is inversely proportional to how good you think it is.

I think my novel is coming along quite well.

Oh.

Damn.

They’re all so darned friendly and approachable. A few examples… I met John Scalzi back at Torcon in 2003. Interviewed him briefly and was left with a positive impression of the man. He was there promoting his first book, Old Man’s War, which was just on the verge of being published. So he was an unknown at the time. Since then he’s become something of a phenomenon. He won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, at least one Hugo, I think he’s on his fourth or fifth novel now, you get the picture.

So I had every reason to believe that Scalzi would have no memory of me at Anticipation, or even if he did, no reason to acknowledge my existence if he happened to set eyes on me.

I ran into him on the Friday night. My friend Fergus hailed him and they exchanged a few words. I extended my hand and began to introduce myself. “Of course I remember you Joe,” he said (this feat of memory may have had something to do with my nametag. Or not…). And we had a pleasant little chat. And I met up with him again later and another pleasant chat ensued.

Why does this matter? He’s not a rock star — outside the science fiction field he’s a mere mortal, like you and me. Okay me, at least. But at one of these cons, a guy like him IS a rock star. Despite this, if you click on the link a paragraph or two back and read his abbreviated bio, you’ll see further indication that this guy has his feet firmly planted on the ground.

Like Scalzi, I met Robert J. Sawyer before his first book was published. And then watched in awe as he completely conquered the field of science fiction over the next twenty years. I worked with Rob at CBC Radio a bit and discovered that despite his success he also has his feet firmly planted on the ground. At the con I asked him how he was finding the experience (he has experienced many). He commented that it takes him a long time to get from one panel to the next as fans are constantly introducing themselves. He doesn’t mind this one bit, of course, but it is a fact of life for him at the con. I told him I was aware of this, and as a result tried to leave him a wide berth despite our acquaintance, feeling he had enough on his plate without having to kibbutz with people like me. “Don’t worry about it, Joe,” he told me. “You’re a friend, it’s different with you.”

I appreciated that, especially because he could easily have written me off at any point following our work together at the CBC. There’s not much I can do for his career anymore. But he hasn’t written me off, because he’s a genuinely decent guy.

I met several writers for the first time at Anticipation, and they were all equally friendly. We were all amongst like-minded people, with a common frame of reference.

In stark contrast I offer up one odd exception. I once met a writer and was introduced to him as somebody from “the media.” I was gathering tape at the time (it was around the time I interviewed Scalzi and several others). We hit it off right away. I really like this guy, I thought. I got some tape of him but never did a proper interview, I’m not sure why. We parted ways, and I thought so well of him that I purchased his first book and read it.

Afterward, I wanted to let him know what I thought of it, offer a few words of encouragement, so I found his web page and dropped him a line.

Never heard back.

Dropped him another line.

Never heard back.

Honestly, I don’t know what the deal was there. I just told my wife that if somebody makes you feel paranoid, the truth is it probably has nothing to do with you or your actions, it’s something on their end. Maybe he didn’t get my missives, or there was something going on in his life, or what have you. I hope it isn’t that I was just a potential means of publicity for this guy, and when that didn’t pan out, I was of no use to him. At the very least he did manage to sell one copy of one of his books to me.

But this is the exception. Except for this blog with its limited (but, ahem, exceptional) readership, I’m not in a position to enhance writers’ careers anymore. I never really was.

And yet the writers remain friendly.

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…