Oh, Vampires! Oh, Oh, Oh!

Because I've published two vampire novels (and there were supposed to be two more, sob!), and because I have an essay about vampires on my Web site, I get a fair number of hits via search engines (overwhelmingly Google, by the way) where the queries have the word "vampire" in them.

I tend to keep track of what search terms bring people to my site, and I've noticed a pattern in those vampire hits. I decided to take the time to filter out the hits from May that had "vampire" in the query. A few of them seem to be from people who think vampires are real and who also think that Google, which knows everything, will give you the real skinny on real vampires. Most of them, though, seem to fall into a very specific category. It's hard to detect. You'll have to apply all of your analytical skills. Hint: look for a certain word that appears along with "vampire" in most of the queries.

So here are the search strings that brought people to my site during the month of May 2007.

(Oh, and to the person whose search string was Vampire novels suck, I just want to say, "Yeah? You too, man!")


sexuality of the vampire
vampire sexuality
vampires have sex
how do you have vampire sex
vampire convert
vampire rules
what do vampires represent
what are the vampire rules
vampires and sex
vampires sexual
vampires sex
Vampire appeal
vampires and sexuality
vampire novels
vampires rule
Erotic Vampire Story
erotic vampire tales
vampire sex appeal
vampires sex
vampire sexual
sexuality vampire
vampire and sexuality
vampires sex
vampire zombie short stories
modern vampires
Vampire Rules
vampire novels
erotic vampire stories
erotic vampire stories
vampires sex
vampires having sex
vampires and sex
vampire erotica short stories
modern day female vampires
modern day female vampires
vampire sex novels
vampire sexuality
vampire sexual bloodlust
vampires sexuality
vampire sexuality
VAMPIRES HAVING SEX
vampire sexual
vampires having sex
do vampires have sex
vampires having sex
Vampire Novels
modern vampires
VAMPIRE SExuality
vampire rules
are vampires having sex
vampires and sexuality
vampire sexual beings
Vampire Sex Novels
Modern vampires
do vampires have sex
writing a vampire story
writing a vampire story
vampires and sex
modern vampires
modern vampires
modern vampires
vampires having sex
rules about vampires
Short Erotic Vampire Stories
vampire sexual
vampire rules
things vampires are afraid of
things vampires are afraid of
vampire romantic fiction
vampire romantic fiction
vampires sex
vampire sexuality
allure vampire
vampires having sex
vampire sexuality
vampires sex
VAMPIRES SEX
sexual vampires
vampire rules
vampire sexual
vampire sex
vampires sex
vampire sexuality
vampire sex fiction
vampire rules
vampires and sex
Vampires having sex
sexuality and vampires
Writing a Vampire Story
vampire sex
sex and vampires
sex and vampires
rules of a vampire
the modern vampire
modern vampire essays
vampire novellas
the modern vampire
the modern vampire
the appeal of vampires
a girl vampire controlling a human girl to have sex
Vampire novels suck
vampire and sex
vampire sexual
Vampire Rules
vampire sex
Modern Vampire
things vampires are afraid of
erotic vampire stories
vampire sex
vampire attraction symbol
rules for a vampire
what are the appeals of vampires?
vampire sex
Vampire and sex
vampire sexuality
vampires sex
sexual vampire
vampire novels
Vampires and sex
vampires sex
vampires having sex
vampire sexuality
Vampire Rules
vampire sexual
Vampire Sex
vampire rules
vampire sex images
vampires sex
vampire sexual
vampire rules
vampire sexuality
vampires and sex
vampires and sex
vampires love essay
modern vampires
can a vampire have sex
vampire sex
Vampires modern
vampires can they have sex?
vampire novel
can vampires have sex
vampires and sex
vampires rules
vampire and sex
sex of vampire. com
sex of vampire. com
modern vampire
vampire sexual
vampire sexual
modern vampire
vampire rules
Vampire's having sex
vampire sexuality
vampire
vampire sexual
vampires having sex
Vampire sexuality
modern vampire
vampires sex
Vampire: their hearts beat
sexuality of vampires
vampires sex
vampire allure
Sex vampires
vampire sex
vampires sex
vampires sex
vampire sexual
vampires having sex
sex and vampires
vampires and sex
vampire-sexuality
vampire-sexuality
vampires sex
vampires sex
vampire sex
vampire rules
vampires sex
vampire sex
vampire sexuality
vampires and sex
vampires having sex
romantic vampire novels
sex vampires
Vampire rules
Sex vampires
modern vampire novels
beautiful male vampire
appeal of vampires
appeal of vampires
vampire rules
VAMPIRE NOVEL
rules of the vampire
vampire sexuality
sex and vampires
sex with vampires
vampire sexuality
sex vampires
vampire sexual
vampire sexuality
vampire sex
vampire appeal
the allure of the vampire
vampires - sexuality
vampire sexual
vampire encounters sex
vampire sexuality
the vampire rules
modern vampire
vampires having sex
vampire sex novels
vampire have sex
vampires having sex
vampire rules
vampires having sex
vampire rules
vampire sex
vampire rules
vampire novels
vampire novels
vampire novels
vampires - sex
vampire et sex
vampire sex seduce
vampire sexuality
allure of vampire

Wings of the Heart

That's the title of a horror short story by yours truly, which will be published in World Audience Magazine #6. Brief description of the story: Great quantities of blood.

World Audience is a fairly new quarterly print magazine that has a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, poetry, and plays. It's a non-paying market for now, although the editor and founder, Mike Strozier, is hoping to change that eventually. He's always open to submissions. He's also a small publisher.

Their Web site: http://www.worldaudience.org/

Anti-anti-war

This one has been around for a while, but for those who haven't seen it, here's a photo of a dimwit who was demonstrating against a group of anti-war demonstrators. He wrote his own caption.



That's supposed to distract attention from the lack of posts describing my writing progress. They're lacking because progress is lacking. In my defense, we were away a lot - driving to Kansas City and then to Minneapolis, staying a few days in Minneapolis, then driving back to Denver, and only a few days later flying to New York to take the city by storm (it seems not to have noticed).

Right now, I'm doing some major Web site maintenance for a friend and student of Leonore's, something I had volunteered to do before we left on the first trip.

Then I'll get back to writing.

A Worldwide Phenomenon

Kinda cool. According to sitemeter, the counter I use for this blog, this map shows where the last 500 visitors are located:

Gawking Rubes

And just a small selection of what they gawked at.

First, the obvious. I must have passed this 50 years ago, when I was a wee immigrant child on the deck of a ship heading towards Hoboken, but I was too entranced by the neon lights along the shore to notice the heavy, symbolic stuff. That had to wait for sober late middle age.




Meanwhile, back in the city. Here's a nice contrast between grand old showpiece and new glass and steel.


Leonore was intrigued by the Chrysler building and took oodles of photos of it.


Gnarly, man! This is a tree at Wave Hill, an estate on the banks of the Hudson River. Mark Twain and Toscanini both lived there. Handsome old buildings and lovely gardens, of both of which our photos aren't as good as I had hoped. You can look across the Hudson at the Palisades on the New Jersey side. Naturally, as a Coloradan, my main reaction was, "Good God! Lookit all the water!"


This is the famous Wall Street bull, posed as you don't normally see him. In real life, he isn't sitting there all alone. Tourists are crawling all over him. Also, he's not on Wall Street, but rather on Broadway, a couple of blocks south of Wall Street.


Rather undignified for the poor chap, don't you think? But he looks like he's about to get his revenge via his hind end.

A Hell of a Town

We stayed in the Bronx, which of course is up, and went on a harbor tour that started in the vicinity of the Battery (down), and we walked around a fair part of Manhattan (in between).

We were in NYC for four days, getting back home last night. Unfortunately for us, the original forecast of cool weather was wrong. It was hot and humid (by our Denver standards, anyway) all the time. Nonetheless, we did lots of touristy things and walked great distances and ate much food. The food part seems to be a constant in our trips to other cities, which is probably why our bathroom scale covers its ears when we get back, so that it won't have to hear the cries of, "Oh, no!" and "However did that happen?"

We stayed with Lisa, a college friend of Leonore's whom she hadn't seen since Lisa visited us in Denver 30 years ago, and Lisa's husband, Andrew, whom neither of had met before. Anna Lee, another college friend of both of theirs, whom Leonore hadn't seen in almost 40 years, was able to come down for a day from Connecticut. I met Lisa at Indiana U. when Leonore and I were dating, but I didn't know Anna Lee in those days.

I've been to New York before, but only as a child, both coming to this country and leaving it, and my memories from then are faint and vague and childlike. This time, I was a sober adult. Well, except for when I was a gawking tourist, staring at all the big buildings and getting in the way of the rushing Manhattanites. Managed not to get run over. I learned quickly that traffic lights, including Walk signals, are just quaint things that New Yorkers ignore. I guess you learn that quickly or you go home to flyover country in the airplane's cargo hold.

We took absurdly many pictures, as we always do. I haven't looked at any of them on the computer yet, so I don't know if there are some good ones among them. If there are, I might post one or two here. Watch this space!

Update

On second thought, don't watch this space. I'll put a few photos in a new post. We'll see if Blogger objects to my uploading a fair number of bytes.

LAA - League of Arthritic Authors

We here at LAA have a few thoughts we'd like to share with you. But first, we have a question for you:

Eh? What was that, sonny? Speak up, God damn it! You young people today, you all mumble. And your music -- !

Okay, so I've been thinking about age a lot lately. Rather, I've been thinking about being old. More specifically, I've been fretting about being an author and not being young. Most specifically, I've been hyperventilating about being a non-famous, non-established published author who is not young.

Why? Because I have the impression, or perhaps it's really an irrational fear, that what I said about myself above will cause my next novel to be dismissed by agents and/or editors simply because I'm a non-famous, non-established published author who is not young.

Some months ago, I asked Miss Snark about this. My question was never answered, but another, very similar one was. (She said she had been asked this before, meaning that at least three of us are hyperventilating about this matter.) Her answer was that an agent you query of course won't know your age and, more important, won't care about it. Don't worry about it, she said. She ended with her usual, and very good, advice: Write well. Just concentrate on that.

However, over the years, I've heard of authors being dropped by their publishers because of their age. I've also heard of second/third/etc. novels not being picked up, despite a good sales record for the published books, because of the author's age. I just hope this doesn't apply to genre writers. We don't have to look young and beautiful. How often do you see one of us on a TV talk show? (And it's a good thing you don't....)

I can't quite help the fretting, but while fretting I'll also write well. (I'd say "Continue to write well, as I always do," but that sounds awfully conceited.) (Oh, heck. Why pretend! When it comes to my writing, I am conceited.) I'll also keep fretting.

You hear that, sonny? Eh? What? Speak up!

Living in the Next Book

(But first a beer digression. I've been buying Kokanee, a really pleasant, mild lager from British Columbia, almost a Koelsch. Had one tonight and felt so happy that I then had a Pilsner Urquell, which I don't usually buy, but I did last weekend. This one had gone skunky. Blech. Unsettled my stomach and left a nasty taste in my mouth. [I had to drink most of it, just to be sure, you see.] I was soooo tempted to, um, cleanse my palate with a third beer, but I managed not to. I'm almost proud of myself. Fortunately, I had made myself a pot of Serious Tea, and that seems to be helping.)

As I work my way toward finishing Time and the Soldier, I'm daydreaming increasingly about plot and character details of a planned forthcoming novel. It's not in fact going to be the next one I work on, but that sounded better as the post title.

Trollope talked about this in his autobiography. I downloaded a text version of his autobiography and tried to find that in there but couldn't, and I hope I'm remembering this correctly from when I read the book (in, gasp!, printed form) many years ago.

As I remember, Trollope said that he would start the next book right after finishing the preceding one. Perhaps he even said that it would be the very next day. He said it wasn't hard to do that because he had been living with (I think that was the phrase) the characters in the next book while finishing the preceding one, and so he already knew them well. That struck me as wonderful when I read it.

Years, or decades, ago, I used to daydream about books I planned to write, but it wasn't realistic. I was really daydreaming about having written them and being a success as a result. Nowadays, it seems more concrete. I'm not imagining the future book as a finished product. Rather, I'm thinking about the details that will go into it. Doing that keeps me excited about that future book, even while I'm immersed deeply in the current one, and it makes the future book seem more real and makes me feel that, like Trollope, I'll be ready to dive right into it when the time comes.

Or so I hope.

Enormity

This is David's Definitions for the July issue of Community News.

Enormity

This is commonly misused to mean "really, really big." "He was amazed by the enormity of the mountains." That is incorrect. Enormity does come from the same Latin root as enormous, but the two words drifted apart long ago. Enormity came to mean something extraordinarily evil or immoral or shocking. So you can speak of the enormity of a crime (meaning its awfulness, not its magnitude). Or you could refer to a major social transgression, such as behaving very badly at a very formal event, as a social enormity, although that meaning is somewhat old fashioned. If you simply want to say that something is really, really big, then talk about its hugeness or its immensity or its enormousness, but not its enormity.

Mysterious Minneapolis

As I said, we're back in Denver.

On Thursday of last week, we drove to Kansas City, where we stayed with one of Leonore's sisters (of whom no fewer than 52 live in Kansas City; the remaining 35 live elsewhere). (No, none of them is from KC originally. They all just ended up there.) A fine time was had by all, and we ate vast quantities of food.

On Saturday, we drove up to Minneapolis. It's a very attractive city and the freeway system sucks. I got lost numerous times during our stay there. Fortunately, thanks to the Norwegian/Swedish/other Scandinavian influence, even when you are lost and are driving around wondering why the street layout doesn't resemble the street map, you get many opportunities to remark on how clean the streets are. "Gosh, darling, look how clean these streets are!" "They certainly are, sweetheart, and, by the way, where the fuck are we?"

But we did like it. And we also liked the many restaurants we went to with Daniel and Becca, his fianceeeee (how many es in that word?). The food was excellent, and we ate vast quantities of it. The good news is that I think we each gained less than 50 lbs. on the trip.

Monday was the graduation ceremony. Unfortunately, it was also a hot, muggy day (the only one of our visit, though), which made things unpleasant, especially for Daniel, who was wearing a cap and gown. (For some details about the ceremony, see Daniel's Live Journal.)

Here's the freshly minted Master of Biostatistics:



On our last full day in Minneapolis, we spent a delightful time walking around Lake Calhoun, part of a string of beautiful lakes inside the city. 10,000 lakes, indeed!

We drove back on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Instead of going back through Kansas City, we took a right turn at Des Moines (which we managed to hit at rush hour, but fortunately it's a fairly wimpy rush hour) and then on through Nebraska. It's not widely known that Nebraska is 5,300 miles in diameter. Fortunately, the speed limit on the interstates there is 75 mph, which does help. We stopped for the night at Lincoln, Nebraska, and if you find yourself in that area and needing a place to stop, I highly, highly recommend the Countryside Suites motel (not the chain with a similar name; this one's independent) at exit 403 on Interstate 80.

Nebraska is greener and prettier than I remembered. Northeast Colorado is just as dreary as I remembered.

The route made for two days with a reasonable amount of driving in each. We got home last night (Thursday) at a reasonable hour. A notification that I had received a MacArthur grant was not waiting for me. This keeps happening, and I'm getting annoyed and impatient.

But it was not all fun and games and vast quantities of food! No, forsooth! I had my laptop with me, and I wrote. Yes, I did. I'm not making this up. I really did write.

I'm in the editing/whipping-the-monster-into-shape phase with the book, now. I have a file full of notes regarding plot problems, so I'm scrolling through the text, wondering where I can stick a particular item in without it looking as though it was stuck in after the fact. I have these notes stored in the notes file in the form of bullet points. For example:

• Farmhouse nice touch, but how and why is it there? You can't just have it in place because it's cool, dummy. Make something up to justify it!
  
• So when and how did Delia figure out her relationship to the mysterious young blonde woman? Damn.
  
• How to handle Pedro? When and how does he discover that he's actually the heir to the family fortune but was sent off while still an infant to live with a peasant family in Brownsville? How will this discovery affect his plans to destroy the family mansion on the secret island off the coast of Florida? What about his rivalry with Rock, and his passionate desire for Blaze (the woman, not the horse)?
  

Oops. Ignore that third bullet point. None of that's in the book. (Hmm. Maybe it should be.)

Back Home Again

Just got back from Minneapolis. We were away for a week. Drove. Having a beer. Feeling much better. Good tea is brewing. Some details to come.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dog

Recently, in an online discussion place, someone insisted that young male actors with muscles (the one under discussion was Tom Welling, who plays Clark Kent in Smallville) must be using steroids. I insisted otherwise. You can read the thread here . At least, I hope that works.

To try to finally win the argument, I decided to add a picture of myself. I posted:

I was a fat and completely inactive child and teenager. When I went away to college, I lost the fat, but I didn't become all that active. I had admired bodybuilders and fiddled very slightly with very light dumbbells occasionally as a teenager and did it a bit more when in college, but I didn't really get into it until I was almost 40. I'm now 63, so I've been lifting weights -- not often enough, not regularly enough, without enough self-discipline (sounds like my writing career!) -- for just about 25 years.

The attached picture shows the results. Please ignore the busy background and the embarrassed smile.

The point of this picture is that I've never used steroids and I started relatively late. I do (as far as I can tell) have good genes going for me. So a healthy young man, starting lifting in his teens or early twenties, with good genes, can expect much better results much more rapidly. There's no reason at all to assume use of
steroids.

Here's the picture:

Show, Don't Tell, and Other Silly Advice

Show, don't tell

That could well be the most often repeated advice for writers. Rubbish, I say. Poppycock. Also, bushwah. (Which I believe is the sound made by Pretend President Georgette when he doesn't get his way.)

It's not that the rule is inherently silly but rather that, as is often the case with occasionally useful rules, it leads to silliness if it's followed in all circumstances. Some rules really are made to be broken.

Surely no one would write

John placed his hands on the arms of the chair and exerted downward pressure, simultaneously leaning forward and straightening his legs. Then he straightened his back. Thus he brought himself to a standing position. Once he was standing, John raised his right foot slightly, leaned forward, and placed his right foot down on the floor a few inches ahead of him. Moving steadily, he then raised his left foot, which was now behind him, advanced it to a position a few inches ahed of him, and ...

instead of

John left the room.

Arguably, the second version is telling, while the first is showing. But of course we all do that all the time in our writing. What matters is choosing what to show and what to tell.

What prompted these rather obvious thoughts was my realization that the crapocious section of Time and the Soldier that I was whining about a few posts back is crapocious precisely because it consists of boring and irrelevant showing. What happens in that part is relevant to the story, but how it happens isn't. So on some future pass through the ms., I'll chop it out with a meat cleaver (literary liposuction won't do the job with that fat deposit) and replace it with a very brief bit of telling. The book will be much improved.

And the world will rejoice. Well, I will.

Write what you know

Or maybe this is the advice most often given to writers. Thank God no one worth reading follows it.

If they did, we'd have very little genre fiction. Almost all fiction would be mainstream and would mirror the writers' lives, which means it would mirror our own lives, and so fiction would no longer serve its main function, which is to enable us to escape from our tedious, boring, pointless, aimless lives for a few hours.

God, do you realize how much of that fiction would be written by college English professors and would be all about college English professors having midlife crises? Aaaaiiiieeeee!

This rule becomes a good one if restated as, "Try to know something about what you're writing about before you write it. Don't just make stuff up. Google is your friend." But that's pretty obvious, surely.

The exception is if you're writing about the pretend president, who is entirely a creation of some PR firm and not an actual human being at all. So anything you write about him, no matter how invented, is acceptable, in the same sense that the syllogism

Whenever John eats refried beans in the morning, it rains at 6 p.m. that evening.
John ate refried beans this morning.
Therefore it will rain at 6 p.m. this evening.

is valid even though it's absurd.

Wind and Rain

Denver is experiencing a few days of on-and-off heavy, cold rain and high winds. Normally, that sort of thing lasts for an hour or two here. It's unusual for it to go on for hours on end, as it has today.

So I was walking from the office to bus stop after work today, feeling cold and wet and inadequately dressed, with my umbrella in one hand and my very heavy briefcase in the other (very heavy because I've been taking my antique laptop to work every day, so that I can write during lunch), trying to switch the umbrella and briefcase from time to time because the briefcase keeps trying to pull my arm off, dealing with winds constantly changing direction and strength.

I was crossing a street. In the middle, my umbrella turned inside out, and I staggered around dealing with that. By the time I reached the far sidewalk, not only had the WALK sign changed to WAIT, the green light had turned to red. (Surprisingly quickly. I suspect that the rain had done something to the light's timer.) I heard a loud honk. Looked up from fighting with my umbrella to see that the traffic in the street I was crossing had started moving, and one yob in an SUV was honking and gesturing angrily at me because I was in his way.

So I apologized immediately, as loudly as possible, in hopes that he would hear me over the rain and wind. It was the standard apology one uses in such cases. The one that begins with "F" and ends with "u!"

I do hope he heard me.

The Healing Effects of Sleep

Whew. The book improved during the night. All it needed was a break from me.

I hope that doesn't sound (too) psycho.

Crapulosity! Crapociousness!

Overnight! How did this happen?

I was performing literary liposuction on TimeSold at work during lunch yesterday and again at home in the evening, and both times the book was solid gold, converted to platinum by my careful surgery.

This evening, when I got back to it, it was crap. No one in his right mind would want to that garbage. What the hell happened? Someone sneaked into my computer and replaced that work of brilliance with this pile of, well, you know what. Aiiieee!

I'm going to bed now. I hope the literary philosopher's stone passes by during the night and effects a transmutation.

(This has happened before. Probably with every book, although I don't remember for sure. But one always fears that, with this book, the change back to wonderfulness won't happen.)

Literary Liposuction

(Which I thought was a terribly clever and original phrase, but when I Googled it, I discovered that while it is terribly clever, it ain't original. Not surprising. There are a lot of terribly clever writers around.)

I'm continuing to snip and trim and tighten up the prose in Time and the Soldier. I decided that "murdering your darlings" isn't really appropriate for what I'm doing. Some of what I'm cutting out is indeed material that I thought was really good stuff when I wrote it, but most of it is extraneous words and phrases junking up my prose. I've always found a lot of that when proofreading my own writing, which is distressing, because I'd have thought that, by now, even my first drafts would be more tightly. Still, there it is. Extraneous junk. It dilutes and weakens and obscures sentences rather than enhancing them, and when I'm proofreading I always wonder why I thought it was such a good idea to include that unnecessary crap in the first place.

I used to think of this process as trimming the fat. But that applies to, say, cuts of meat - steaks, chops. A book ms. is a living thing. It's horrible to think of using a sharp knife and cutting fat off it!

No, instead one is carefully extracting that unhealthy, soft, wiggly, pudgy, obscuring excess so that the true lean, hard, shapely, healthy, active being is freed and exposed. Hence, literary liposuction.

It's much better than real liposuction. There's no question of medical danger, it's not likely that the ms. will be left with weird dimples in strange places, and, most of all, one is not left with giant tubs of horrifying, bloody fat.

I mean, insanguinated lipogenous tissue. (I made that up, but it sounds about right.)

The Way It Ought to Work

I'm already thinking ahead to the query letter I'll send out for Time and the Soldier. Mostly, I'm thinking about the hook such a letter has to begin with.

Ugh. I can't imagine writing a hook, even though I'll have to.

It shouldn't be that hard. The whole process should be much simpler. The query letter should be, "Me author. You agent. Here book."

The agent should then reply (almost immediately!), "Me agent. Love book. You client."

Not long after, the following letter should show up: "Me editor. Big publisher. Book stupendous. Reaching waaaay down into company piggy bank."



Update: I just thought of the perfect hook! Short, snappy, catchy. Just generally terriffic.

The book opens with a building blowing up. So now my query letter will read:

BLAM!

Me author. You agent. Here book.

Man, that's a killer.

Arrogant? Moi?

Today I got another attack e-mail from an observant Jew trying to explain to me the error of my ways. He didn't mention my essay Why I Am Not a Jew, but that's always the one that prompts these e-mails. He explained at some length why, because I'm intellectually arrogant, I'm the wicked son mentioned in the Seder service. Yeah, okay, nothing new there.

But the astonishing part of the e-mail came at the end, where he illustrated my arrogance one last time:

I have only read some of your posts on your website. Your essay, David Dvorkin - George W. Bush caught my attention. Now, I am by no stretch of the imagination any huge fan of our president but my lack of confidence in his competency as President of the United States probably comes from a different place than yours. Be as it may, you listed comparisons and contrasts between yourself and Mr. Bush and I thought that I would add another distinction. While Mr. Bush has many failings, he seems to me to come across as someone who is willing to engage in dialogue and contrary to popular liberal notions, someone who is willing to take suggestions.

What universe is this man living in?

Oh, and he ends with:

[I]t is pretty apparent that your god is David Dvorkin. It’s a shame because your god with all your god’s accomplishments is seriously limited by his being human and all. You may be well read, but your humility to learn from anyone seems to be seriously lacking.

David you probably will not find G-d this way. Something tells me you’re not really seeking the truth anyway.

Dude! I am God! The Flying Spaghetti Monster told me so!

I'm Murdering My Darlings

"Murder your darlings" has been ascribed to a number of famous British and American writers of the past. It's also been ascribed to one who's not so famous nowadays, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. I've decided that line must have come from Sir Arthur because, of all the writers who've been given credit for it, he has the coolest name.

From what I've been reading lately, I think I need to keep Time and the Solder to 120,000 words tops. It's rather longer than that now, and I still have stuff to add. Not huge chunks of stuff. Rather, I have a long list of notes -- missing or inadequately treated plot points, basically -- to take care of, and doing that will surely increase the length of the ms. So I need to trim and trim. I also need to read it from the beginning and get a new, fresh grip on the whole thing before I take care of some of those notes. So I'm starting from the first page again, reading through the ms., and while I go along, I'm wielding the author's bloody knife and murdering my darlings.

Sob. Some of them are sooo darling.

It's more than a matter of length, though. There's too much introspection and internal monolog and auctorial meandering and philosophizing and stuff like that -- fine for the mainstream, but not acceptable in genre fiction unless one is well established and has a large and solid fan base. So in addition to shortening for total word length, I'm also trying to make sure the story moves along rapidly. Carrying the reader along with it, one hopes.

The underlying image in the novel (I hope I didn't say all of this before) is that of the onrushing river of time, carrying the characters helplessly along. I'd like the writing to convey that feeling. Without drowning the reader. Or bashing him against rocks. Or submerged dead tree trunks. Or carrying him over a waterfall. Or --

Christ, it's just a metaphor, okay? Jeez!

Folk Etymology

David's Definitions for June:

Folk Etymology

Etymology is the history of the evolution of words over time. Look up a word in a dictionary, and, in addition to its definition, you'll find a brief version of its etymology - how it changed from a Latin or French or German or other word into the English word we now use. Folk etymology is a popular but mistaken idea about a word's etymology. It often seems to make sense - for example, the origin I gave for bistro a couple of months ago. Or it may be amusing - for example, the story that the sirloin steak got that name when an English king was so delighted with his steak that he knighted it, saying, "I dub thee Sir Loin." (Actually, sirloin comes from the French "sur," above, and "longe," loin, and used to be spelled surloin in English.) In some cases, the folk etymology catches on and the spelling or meaning of a word changes as a result. An example is shamefaced, which didn't start out referring to shame in one's face but rather as shamefast or shamfast, meaning "held fast in shame." Which is sort of how I feel about that bistro definition.

Home, Sweet Home

I've often not been crazy about our house, but it always seems like a nice one after a trip, even a short one. We got back very late Monday night from Baton Rouge, then got up early the next morning to go to work. It was a short first night back in our own bed, but it was very nice indeed to be there.

Baton Rouge is growing and spreading like mad, while New Orleans looks smaller and far less a major city. Wonderful seafood in both places, though. And beer is overly available, which made me feel obligated to consume lots of it. My father-in-law, the retired English professor, seemed astonished, offended, and a rather angry that neither Leonore nor I has read James Joyce's Ulysses and - even worse - don't want or plan to do so. But I know that he's woefully unfamiliar with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his literary successors, so there.

I was wrong about the taxes. There was more to do than I had fooled myself into believing. Tonight, I finally finished entering everything into my spreadsheet. Tomorrow evening, I'll check all the formulas and then begin copying to the IRS forms. I noticed that one of those forms is available as a PDF form on the IRS site. I.e., it's a PDF file you can type numbers and text into and then print the result. I hope all of them are available in that format. That would help the final step immensely. In any case, I'd like to have it ready to go to the Post Office on Saturday morning. Then I'd actually be able to - gasp! - get back to writing.

Taxed

Finally got the taxes essentially done. There are a few deductions I have yet to add to the spreadsheet, but the hardest part is over. Phew. Now I can get back to writing.

I suppose I could take the time to answer the three e-mails I got from the rightwing wackoes, but I doubt if it's worth bothering - especially in the last one, whose writer informed me that the Nazis were socialists, because, like, just look at their name! Like, ya know, I've never heard that dumbshit argument from brain-cell-challenged wingnuts before. I've run into that bullcrap claim for decades; I wouldn't be surprised if it started in the 1930s.

The hits from that site, both here and on my Web site, have tapered off. No doubt some new bright, shiny object has caught their little piggy eyes.

I'll probably take the novelizing route, not the pointless e-mailing one. I'm waiting for advice on the matter from my high-powered advisory committee. Meetings are now underway at Dvorkin Intergalactic HQ regarding the issue.

Attacked by Rabid Rightwingers

How they do foam at the mouth!

A rightwing Web site discovered one of my essays, "We Are the Nazi Hordes", and they're ranting about it here.

They have a lot of time on their hands. I guess preschool isn't in session.

Update: One of them linked directly to this blog, which explains the troll comment. (And thanks, Daniel, for the excellent reply.)

If that essay made their little potty mouths foam so much, I wish they'd all buy and read my novel Business Secrets from the Stars. That would make their little fascist heads just exploooode! And make me some money, in the process.

I've also received a couple of e-mails from that direction today. One of them wished that my family and I would be attacked by Islamic extemists, so that maybe I'd realize blah blah blah. Oh, those wacky kids!

Business Secrets from the Stars

Is one of the books that went up at Fictionwise.com as an e-book. A fairly long excerpt is posted on that site - something they seem to do for a lot of their e-books.

Reading that excerpt, I find myself feeling again that it's a damned good book and that it should have been the one that did the job for me. Ah, well. It's silly and pointless, of course, to continue mourning a given novel's lack of success.

And I really am largely over that failure, thanks to the passage of time, working on Time and the Soldier, and this blog.

Now if I can just get the damned taxes done, so that I can back to TimeSold.

Central Heat Cover

At least, I think it is. This is the cover of the e-book, which has just shown up on Fictionwise. My other e-books that are for sale there have the same covers as the print editions, so I'm assuming that this the cover of the Central Heat print edition, as well.


Wildside modified it from my original, but I'm happy to admit that they improved on what I sent them. I'm also happy that they kept the nifty background illustration as well as the basic theme from my version.

Close vs. Not Close at All

I just got a rejection for a story, and apparently it was a close thing. The previous rejection for the same story was also close, really close.

Of course it feels better to come close than otherwise. Or does it? Mostly, it does, and yet there's the frustration of thinking that if you had done something ever so slightly differently, the story would have been accepted. (Leaving aside the question of whether you know what that something is - and whether you would want to change the story, even if you did know.)

I was wondering how other people feel. Which do you feel is worse/better: coming close but not making it, or not coming close at all?

Mickling and Taxing

I haven't been posting about writing, but I have been writing. Not lots and lots, because I've been working on the taxes.

Our taxes are cumbersome, and every year I let everything slide till close to the deadline, despite promising myself, after filing the taxes, that this year will be different, because this year I'll keep up with the organizing and processing and spreadsheet entering on a weekly, or at least a monthly basis. Well, I've finally learned my lesson. This year will be different. ...

So that takes care of my free evenings. On and off, I've been taking my laptop to work and writing during lunch. The novel has reached the point where that's not so easy to do, though. I don't have large sections to write. Now I'm going through it it and tweaking and adding and subtracting small bits. I find that hard to do at work on the small laptop screen, for some reason. I need to be at home with hours to spend. So that's a bit of a problem, right now.

Also, we'll be going to Baton Rouge over the Easter weekend for a humongous gathering of my wife's family to celebrate my father-in-law's 85th birthday. (For his 80th, we all gathered at a fancy restaurant in New Orleans, but Katrina has changed things.) I might take a laptop, but I doubt if any writing will be accomplished. Maybe a grumpy blog post. On the bright side, seafood! Also, Abita beer, which is not bad at all.

I want to/must get the taxes done before we leave on that trip, and then when we come back, I'll be all freed up of immediate obligations and will be able to dive back in properly. That sounds just a little bit like, "Some day, when I have time, I'm going to write a novel, too." But not really.

Henpecked

David's Definition for the May edition of Community News. I wonder if there'll be negative feedback for this one.



Henpecked

Chickens are nasty creatures. It's no wonder we consider them food instead of pets. They peck at each other, and I'm not talking about a love peck. Under some conditions, such as overcrowding, they may even peck each other to death. If one chicken is injured, the others may peck it to death. Under more normal conditions, they have a social hierarchy, called a pecking order, in which the top chicken pecks any other chicken it wants to, and each chicken pecks the chickens below it and is pecked by those above it. The ones at the bottom can be pecked by any of the others but can never peck back. A husband with a nagging wife can find himself at the bottom rung of his household pecking order -- cowed, dominated, unable to peck back. He is said to be henpecked.

Sure, I'll Read and Maybe Blurb Your Novel

And I'd tell you that, if I hadn't deleted your e-mail.

Aargh! It's been a stressful few days, and today was particularly stressful, and I appear to have deleted the e-mail someone sent me asking if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb his novel. Maybe he reads this blog. Or maybe he'll dismiss me as a stuckup twit who won't even take the time to respond to a polite e-mail request.

Aargh.

More Son News

And this is a followup to the post about my son's recent visit.

Daniel just received the official invitation to the PhD program in bioinformatics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center here in Denver, and he accepted. So he'll be moving back here at the end of the summer and will be in Denver for the next two-three years.

After that, of course, who knows?

If I'm remembering correctly, he got acceptances from Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Ohio State, and the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus (where his grandfather finished his academic career as head of the English department).

Ancient Engineers

This is sort of a followon post to the one titled "Immense Spans of Time".

One anniversary that I should included in that post is this one: This year marks 40 years since I went to work at NASA in Houston, primarily on the Apollo missions.

I'm on a mailing list for news about people I used to work with at NASA. I was contacted about it, and signed up, quite recently - just in time to start getting e-mails about people being in the hospital or dying. Not from accidents but natural causes, which is to say, old age.

Sometimes there are photos of the people. Oooooold people, impersonating the youngish folks I worked with back then.

Shiver!

I should mention that I was younger than most of my coworkers. I was in my mid- to late-twenties when I worked there, and most of the other people were a few years older than that, with a few as much as ten or twenty years older. So those e-mails are scarcely surprising. But they still make me uncomfortable.

Bistro!

The way we should all produce, I suppose.

This is the April installment of David's Definitions in Community News:

Bistro
A type of restaurant, typically small and with a fairly simple menu and reasonable prices. My Russian teacher in college told us that the word comes from the Russian word bistro, meaning quickly, because Russian soldiers occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon used to yell that at the French waiters, who weren’t as easily intimidated as Russian serfs. Bistros evolved to serve the Russians but then became popular with the French, who decided that this Russian idea of fast service and low prices wasn’t such a bad one, after all. I’ve since read that linguists dispute this origin of the word, but it does make a nifty story.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

What writer hasn't been asked that?

You can answer flippantly ("Anonymous e-mails!"). You can stumble around and blather for a while, sounding remarkably confused about the matter. You can say, "From everywhere, from the news, from reading." None of those answers will satisfy the non-writer who asked the question.

And, yes, the questioner is not a writer, although he may think he is. If he were, he'd understand where you get your ideas.

More to the point, he'd understand that that question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates a writer.

A writer isn't someone who wants to have written or someone who is fascinated by the imagined glamor of the writer's life and therefore decides to become one. "Some day, when I have the time, I'm going to write a book." I bet you've heard that one, too. Odds are, people who say that will never write that book. Somehow, they'll never have the time. Or they'll have the time, but when they try writing a book, they'll realize that writing consists of lots of sitting down and, well, writing. It ain't glamor. It's words. Lots of them.

Writers don't decide to become writers and then start searching for ideas. Writers are people who keep getting ideas and feel driven to express them in writing, and so they become writers. The ideas drive the writing, and not the other way around.

Well, that's the way it is for me, anyway. I spent my childhood in a fantasy world - much more interesting than the material world outside my head - and very soon wanted to start writing my daydreams down. Oh, and of course I read oodles, so I knew that you can write your daydreams down and have other people read them. Not that I knew about the nature of the publishing biz, back then. It's surely a good thing that I didn't.

I wrote a longish essay on my Web site about why we write. It's from a different perspective than the above.

Curtains of Spots

In the comments under the Nitpicking post, Lahdeedah mentioned how hard it is to walk up stairs when you're new to the altitude of Colorado's Front Range.

When we moved here from Houston in 1971, I was in my late twenties and had been moderately active - or as active as the ghastly Houston humidity and heat permitted. I considered myself a fairly fit fella. Right after we got here, Leonore and I went to the mountains with a friend. Not very high in the mountains, either. I was overcome with the beauty of it all and went running happily along a trail. Born free! As free as the wind blows! As free as -- In seconds, I was sitting on a convenient large rock (lots of those around), gasping, and watching the curtain of spots waving in front of my eyes. Golly. Fitness is relative, isn't it?

The relationship to writing is a bit tenuous, but it's there. Just like the protagonist of John Denver's great (but often absurdly and unfairly maligned) song, "Rocky Mountain High", I felt freed from my previous life, reborn. I started writing seriously instead of mostly just nattering and whining about it. The following year, my first published short story, "Adam's Servant", appeared in the December 1972 issue of Cavalier, a men's magazine. Brilliant story, of course, but I think they bought it because of the sex. That same issue also contained a short story, "The Mangler", by some kid named Stephen King, who I understand has sold a few more things since then.

Nitpicking

This will be fun.

The editor of a local free magazine, in which Leonore has been publishing articles about exercise and nutrition, asked me to do a monthly, brief definition of a word of phrase, under the heading David's Definitions.

The first one will be in the April issue. Here it is:

Nitpicking

Or nit-picking, or nit picking, or picking nits.

Nits are lice eggs. In the old days, people used to get rid of lice infestations on their kids' heads by shaving off all the hair and then picking off the nits, so that there wouldn't be another generation of lice. (The parents had to pick the nits off because lice use their saliva to glue their eggs to your scalp. Lice don't find that disgusting.) So nitpicking is looking for tiny details.

Immense Spans of Time

I recently realized that this year marks 50 years since I came to the U.S. and 30 years since my first novel was published.

Those are two immense spans of time and are not consistent with the fact that I'm only 23 years old. Something is awry.

Son Visit

Our son, Daniel, who has been in Minneapolis, in graduate school at the U. of Minnesota, will be back in Denver this weekend, courtesy of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

In addition to Minnesota, he applied to the PhD programs at a few other schools, the Health Sciences Center being one of them. When he left Colorado, the local program in bioinformatics was just getting under way and wasn't very impressive, but it's been considerably beefed up since then. He's doing biostatics at Minnesota, but he started out in bioinformatics, and I think there's a big part of him that still gravitates toward that field.

The Health Sciences Center flew him and a few other candidates into town for the weekend for a mutual dog-and-pony show. We won't see him till Sunday, and we're eager to see how he feels after a weekend of being treated well and being back in his hometown. There will, however, be absolutely no parental pressure of even the most subtle variety. This is our solemn vow, sworn on the altar of progressive parenthood. I can't swear for our unconscious minds, however.

Daniel did receive an acceptance from the PhD program (biostatistics, I think) at Ohio State U. in Columbus, so he does that have that waiting, at any rate.

Oh, blog-relevant addition. Daniel and I coauthored two novels and have always wanted to do more together. His time is overly full and probably will be for years yet, but if he did decide to squeeze in another collaboration, it would be much, much easier to do so if he were living in Denver again. So while that's not a factor in his decision, it might be an effect of it.

The Incredible Shrinking Publishing Industry

In her blog, agent Lori Perkins said this:

"When I started as an agent in 1987, there were 23 publishers."

Reading that reminded me that I recently came across the sheet of paper on which I listed all the publishers I planned to send my first novel to. The one that bought the novel, Pocket Books, is outlined in red with "2/25/76!" written next to it in big, red letters, and if I understand my cryptic marks, I had queried four publishers on the list before Pocket, so I'm guessing that I made up the list in the summer or fall of 1975.

I don't remember where I got the names from, but I do remember that the publishers on the list were all independent and all said, in some reference book or other, that they were willing to look at science fiction. Many of those names no longer exist at all; some are still in business, but only as imprints or divisions of other publishers. I think there are also a few on the list that still exist but no longer publish fiction. There are 71 names on this list. Probably, an agent of those days, having much more knowledge of the market than I did, would not have been interested in some of those houses, but it's still a long list.

This illustrates how far the number of available markets had shrunk in the twelve years before Perkins entered the business. In her post, she says that it has now shrunk considerably more.

So here's the list. (Some of those names are guesswork, because I can't read my own handwriting!)

Abelard-Schuman
Ace
Antheloon(?) Press
Ashley Books
Atheneum
Atlantic Monthly
Aurora
Avon
Award
Ballantine
Bobbs-Merrill
Branden Press
Chilton
Charles Irwin
Coward, McCann
Criterion
Thomas Crowell
Crown
Dasein
John Day
Dell
Denlinger's
Dial
Doubleday
Eriksson
Evans
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Fawcett
Frederick Fell
Harcourt Brace
Harper & Row
Holloway House
Houghton-Mifflin
A. E. Knopf
Seymour Lawrence
Lester & Orpen(?)
Libra
J. B. Lippincot
Liveright
Living Books
Longman Canada
McMillan
MacRae
Manor
Maryland
Mason & L(?)
New American Library
O'Hara
Pacesetter
Paneth
S. G. Philip
Pinnacle
Playboy
Pocket
Popular
Porter
Prentice Hall
Putnam
Pyramind
San Francisco
Scribner's
Simon & Schuster
The Smith
Stein & Day
Vanguard
Walker & Co.
Warbrooke
Warner
Westover
Weybright & Talley
White Star

Free at last!

My car, that is.

The snow is mostly gone, thanks both to warm temperatures and those humongous machines. I was finally able to get my car free yesterday evening. It's now resting in the driveway, looking weary.

The Spanish group is beginning to gather downstairs. Incomprehensible phrases are drifting up to my study. It's time to remove my hearing aids.

Chris asked in a comment about translations of my books.

My first novel, The Children of Shiny Mountain, was translated into German and Italian. It was strange and exciting when copies of those editions arrived in the mail.

The only other novels that were translated where the Star Trek ones. The Captains' Honor had a Hebrew edition. When that one arrived in the mail, Leonore thought it was a Klingon translation. Before that, I hadn't thought of the slight similarity between the Klingon alphabet and the Hebrew one. I wonder if that's coincidence? I can still read Hebrew well enough to make out my name and Daniel's name, as the authors, and also to be able to tell that they translated the title correctly: as Captains', not Captain's. References to the book in the U.S. often use the singular possessive for some reason. Makes me wanna go all Klingon on them.

Leonore read the German edition of my first novel and said it was an excellent translation -- even better in places than my original. Gasp!

It's more than snow

It's also ice.

However, what the title refers to is my realization that I've probably given the impression that I've been battling snow and ice and not writing. In fact, I've been lugging my heavy old laptop to work every day (uphill both ways, against the wind, over the ice, fighting off the dire wolves) and writing during lunch. Except for the days when I work at home - normally Wednesday and Friday - when I've been using my lunchtime to do the snow-and-ice thang.

I won't talk about my writing progress in detail because I'll end up repeating the overly optimistic stuff I said in my first few posts on this blog, and that would be silly. However, it's really taking shape! It's really getting there! It's getting really close to being a final draft! Etc.

At least, with the snow, I can see progress. No, that's not quite true. I see progress while I shovel and chip away, but then at night there's a big refreeze and everything is undone. We've always had a problem in this neighborhood with heavy snows covering up the storm drains, so any snowmelt forms small lakes in every driveway and even covering the sidewalks, and that refreezes at night, making the morning walk to the bus stop really exciting. We're in a warmup now, and it's supposed to stay above freezing tonight and tomorrow night, so that should help. Also, the city sent some humongous machines our way. They broke up the ice (and, I fear, the street beneath) and piled it in the middle of the street, creating two narrow lanes with an impressive wall between them. A day or so later, more humongous machines showed up to haul away the ice. So now there's a chance that the melt will actually drain away.

My car is still stuck in ice and is immobile. This Wednesday, I'll try to free it again. Wed. evening, Leonore will be hosting her monthly Spanish conversation group meeting. A big crowd always shows up, rain (a rarity in Denver) or snow (not so rare, this winter), and we need to have parking spaces available on the street. I really want my car out of the way by then.

Mighty Snow Warrior

Take that, Mother Nature!

Central Heat - My Cover

Oh, what the heck. I still haven't heard from Wildside about a publish date for the reissue and whether they'll be using my cover, so here it is:

Snow, dig. Snow, snow, dig. Snow, snow, snow, sigh.

It never stops! We're all going crazy! Send help! Or whiskey, at any rate.

Yesterday, I again spent my lunch time chipping and hacking and shoveling, taking advantage of warm weather (above freezing, anyway). I managed to break down and shovel away part of the ice wall created at the end of the driveway by the snow plows. Dug my car partly free, although I discovered that the wheels are trapped in fairly solid ice. I was hoping that the forecast - another installment of the regular weekly blizzard - would be wrong and the exposed ice would melt some more, or at least would soften a bit and lose some of its grip on the concrete underneath.

Nope. Snowing again, cold again. Self-pity again.

But at least I'm continuing to work away at Time and the Soldier. The finish line keeps receding, but I know it's really there and I'll reach it. I just don't know when.

Or what will happen when I do. But one must never think of that. Ya gotta keep focused on the book. At that, ya gotta keep focused on the part of the book you're currently working on. That's the key, and I know that, and I have to keep reminding myself of that.

Central Heat

Wildside press just sent me the proof for the reissue of my novel Central Heat. Last I heard, it was due to come out this month, although I suspect it may be February. For now, I'll be spending my time reading the proof rather than working on Time and the Soldier.

For this reissue, I made some significant changes from the version that was published by Ace Books. More accurately, I returned the novel to its original, brilliant form, which Ace insisted on changing. They cut it a bit for length, and they wanted me to tell the story in a more linear fashion. Originally, it jumped back and forth in time, but Ace said that would confuse readers. Now it jumps back and forth again.

I also created a cover for the reissue and sent that to Wildside, but I haven't heard if they plan to use that or if they're coming up with one of their own. Once I have the final cover, whatever that is, I'll replace the simple Web page in the link above with one that includes the original Ace cover and the new Wildside one (and maybe my proposed one, too), along with a couple of chapters from the book.

Whacker Smacker

I managed to move a huge chunk of the ms. to a better place. The whole now flows better (I hope). There's one more such move that might need to be made. I'd been fretting over both, so now I only have one to fret about. I think that once the second chunk has been moved, I'll have prose tweaking left and finding places to insert Important Plot Points that somehow got left out and which I now have in a Notes file.

I worked at home today, so I spent my lunch time trying to break up the wall of ice that separates the driveway from the street. It's amazing what a couple of weeks of snow and warmth and melting and refreezing can create. I worked at it with my ice whacker smacker (I don't know the proper name* for the tool; it looks like a hoe that's been straightened with a sledge hammer), assuming that it would break apart easily. Hah! I got the top few layers off and revealed a few inches of solid, granite-like ice. That stuff really grips the road beneath, too. Well, it's exposed to the sun now, when there is sun, so maybe by, oh, Sunday it'll be more responsive to whacking smacking. Or I'll whack smack one of my toes off. Which would give me a good excuse to lie on the couch and write on my laptop, while feeling sorry for myself. That almost sounds appealing.


* I bet it's something unimaginative, like ice chipper.

Nipping and Tucking

And mickling along.

I got sick on the way back from Baton Rouge, and Leonore got even sicker a day or two later. Neither of us has recovered yet. It's that thing that's going around.

In spite of which, in a display of awe-inspiring courage and self-discipline, I've been noodling away at the manuscript, taking it in here and letting it out there and rewriting and fiddling. I've had the same experience everyone else does when doing this: some parts are even better than I remembered, other parts are . . . very much not as good as I remembered. There's still a lot to be expanded or added, so my earlier deadline was absurd.

The weather has continued to be much worse than a normal winter - much lower temps and more frequent snow. Main roads are okay, but sideroads are mostly awful. Sidewalks aren't too bad where people have shoveled, but they're truly hazardous where people haven't. (The city has laws about keeping sidewalks clear, and it imposes fines on those who don't, but a lot of homeowners and businesses don't seem to care.) Local emergency rooms and orthopedic surgeons are doing a land-office business setting broken bones, according to a report on local TV news recently. It's sobering to think about, as one skids one's way to the bus stop or the office.

Speaking of which, my briefcase is heavier than usual because I've been taking my heavy old laptop to work with me and working on the book during lunchtime. Makes me feel good, but walking with that weight one side makes the trip even more an adventure.

We did have a warm spell. That's what we normally expect after a storm here, but this one didn't last the way our winter warm spells normally do. I got out and shoveled lots and lots, trying to clear some of the snow keeping my car trapped. That was on the assumption that the warm spell would continue and I'd be able to get my car free. Hah. It's trapped again. Anyway, I was doing the shoveling wearing hiking boots, jeans, a t-shirt, and a hat for protection against the sun. It seemed very Colorado to me.

The Second (and Last) Great Denver Blizzard of Ought Six

Really wasn't all that great. By itself, it would have rated as a storm people would have talked about for a day or two, after which they'd have forgotten about it. Okay, maybe three days. However, the snow from the Really Great Denver Blizzard of Ought Six was still on the ground in many places, especially sidestreets, so this one did create problems. And of course everyone was spooked because of what had happened at the airport the week before.

We were certainly spooked. We were in Baton Rouge and were wondering if we'd be able to fly back in, and if we did, if we'd be able to drive back home.

We left on Wednesday, in the space between the end of the major airport cleanup from the previous blizzard and the beginning of the next one. We got back late Sunday evening -- later than scheduled, thanks to American Airlines' incompetence with planes and luggage. We plan to avoid AA in the future, if we can.

It didn't look as bad as we had feared. The main roads were fine, and the sideroads were, well, worse than when we left but not horrible. It was after midnight when we were approaching the house. We passed a young man who had driven deep into the snowbank beside the road and was really stuck. We tried to help him push his car out, but that was hopeless. Fortunately, another neighbor drove by in a pickup truck with a winch, so we shook hands all around and drove home. I had developed a really bad head and chest cold, and Leonore was displaying some of the early symptoms of the same thing, so I thought we'd done our neighborly part. And my shoes were filled with snow, anyway, so the milk of human kindness was freezing in my veins.

At home, we discovered that the driveway, which I'd cleared completely after the previous storm, requiring hours of shoveling to do so, now had at least eight inches of new snow in it, and that the snow plows had actually been through and had built up a small snowback at the entrance to the driveway. I took the brute force approach and gunned Leonore's Subaru through the snowback and into the driveway. Eventually, we got to bed.

This morning, I reshoveled the driveway, with many pauses to catch my breath because I felt as weak as a kitten. Now I'm feeling sorry for myself because my break is over and I had great plans for it and it was overall not much fun. Took laptop but was able to do little writing, for reasons I won't go into now. On the bright side, we had much fine seafood, and I had one cup of gumbo that I think was the best I've ever had -- and I've had a lot of gumbo over the decades in various parts of the Gulf Coast. Beaucoup seafood, I garontee, and as for that gumbo, whoee, talk about good!

We also saw lots of rain while we were in BR. There was a monster storm over the entire area, accompanied by lots of tornadoes at the Texas end of the storm. I think this was actually the southern end of the weather system that gave Denver its second blizzard. We were staying with my father-in-law and his wife, and their house is on a small lake. Picturesque, normally, but during the storm we were watching the lake creep ever closer to the house. At the front, the street had become a lake, and that was creeping closer, too. The rain stopped in time, and both lakes receded slowly, but it was exciting for a while. My f-i-l mentioned in passing that, when we went out to look at the lake more closely (from the cover of the carport), we should keep our eyes open in the pitchy dark for gators that might have left a nearby swamp to go exploring. Earlier, before the pitchy dark set in, I saw a huge snake writing around in a neighboring driveway. Fantastic food in the South, but you can have the place.

Interesting number: After the first, main bout of rain, my stepmother-in-law went out to check the rain gauge. She said it held six inches and was full, so that hours-long downpour had dumped at least six inches. Normal total annual precipitation in Denver is under 13 inches.

Mickling along. Actually, rewriting along.

My initial unhappiness over the non-greatness of the old prose wasn't entirely justified. Some parts are stilted and ineffective, but other parts are fine. So rewriting is going faster than I initially feared it would.

There's much more to be done than I had realized, though. I wrote the first part of the novel without all of the plot details ironed out. Later, I pinned various things down and made notes. Now I find quite a few places where hints and foreshadowing and suchlike need to be inserted, which can require some fairly major twiddling with scenes I had written before and thought fixed and final.

But it's all fun. It's a good way to spend a vacation. We'll be off to Baton Rouge for a few days -- Wednesday through Sunday -- but I'm taking my laptop along in hopes of continuing this process while there. Maybe I'll do some of it at Coffee Call, a nifty cafe-au-lait and beignet place there. Well, it used to be nifty when it was mostly filled with studying and coffee-guzzling LSU students, but I wonder if it's now swamped because of the large numbers of people from New Orleans who moved to BR, pretty much permanently, because of Katrina. My father-in-law and his wife say that the traffic is far worse than previously.

Anyway, my original deadline for the novel was completely unrealistic, it's now clear to me. I'm not going to set myself a new one. As long as I'm making reasonably steady progress, I'll be happy. That would be a big change from the few years immediately preceding the starting of this blog.

Brilliant! Not.

After I'd spent some time looking over Time and the Soldier, trying to figure out what to cut and where to repaste it, and getting nowhere, I decided go back to the first page and start the tweaking and rewriting process, my hope being that that would refresh my overview of the whole thing and make any necessary restructuring clearer. So that's what I've been doing for the last few days, helped muchly by the fact that the Great Denver Blizzard of Ought Six forced my company to shut down for two days, and also by the company having closed at noon today. (It's now closed till Jan. 2.)

I remembered the first few chapters of the book -- the big chunk that I wrote initially, about 15 years ago, and had left untouched except for two short new sections I added recently -- as being brilliant. On rereading, I discover that, well, um, they're not. That's a disturbing revelation. So now I'm hoping that rewriting will make that chunk brilliant. After all, it has to match the parts I've written recently, which are, as I remember well, brilliant. I hope.

The Great Denver Blizzard of Ought Six

Why, you young people today. You have no idea what it was like, back in the Great Denver Blizzard of Ought Six. Why, back in those days --

Oh, wait, that's today!

The blizzard really got underway yesterday, Wednesday. We had to go out in the morning. I had a periodontist appointment (my boss joked that that sounded like one of those beasts that died out 65 million years ago), and then later Leonore had her annual physical scheduled. I drove her to that, and then to pick up a couple of prescriptions. We ran a couple of errands, since we were out, and I bought a new humongous bottle of Bulleitt Bourbon, since I was out.

Scary driving. Leonore's Subaru was fine, but I had to dodge some other people who weren't in Subarus and weren't fine. Visibility was not very far beyond the end of the car.

We got back around 1 p.m. I started a pot of tea going, poured myself a bourbon, read an e-mail from my boss saying that the company has shut down for the day, and I felt rather good. 1 p.m. was probably about the latest it would have been feasible to be out and about.

Today, the company, along with the rest of the state, is still shut down. We're still shut in. I'm still sipping tea and bourbon. Yesterday, I did some work remotely, but today the only work on my schedule is shoveling snow, which will surely be work enough.

Now, as long as the power and my broadband connection stay up, life will be okay.

Here are a couple of pictures. First, my car, parked on the street in front of the house:



And here's a view from the back door, looking toward a neighbor's backyard:



Click on the pictures to see bigger versions. In the case of the second photo, it's clearer in the larger version that the dark line across the bottom third is the top of a fence.

Well, I've been thinking about writing.

This will sound odd, but this evening I realized why I've been so reluctant to get back to this book. I was looking over the ms., wondering what large blue chunks might still be there, and I realized/admitted to myself that the next big task isn't eliminating blue but reorganizing, restructuring major parts of the book. I knew that, on some level, but I was refusing to admit it.

The story isn't linear. As it is now, it follows the three main characters, or four as it turned out, on their travels through time, focusing on one for a long time, then switching to another, etc. That resulted in overlapping stories and in some scenes being done twice, from different points of view -- something like the Back to the Future movies. I loved those movies and thought them brilliant, but that gimmick turns out to be confusing in places in this ms.

I have to reorder things now. The story still jumps back and forth, but the narrative flow has to have a more linear feel to it. As it is now, it's confusing and can jerk the reader out of the story. I know what's going on (well, at least I hope so), but someone else won't.

Without consciously realizing it, I knew all of that and was reluctant to tackle the problem. As it happens, I had a somewhat similar problem with my last novel, Business Secrets from the Stars. That book doesn't involve time travel, but the original version had two different stories that I had a lot of trouble combining properly. And yet, BizStars ended up, in my opinion, as far and away the best thing I've ever written, so I have to keep reminding myself of that and take heart from that experience.

Coincidentally, I was talking on the phone to my father tonight. He's 97 and knows nothing about computers and generally cares even less, but tonight he asked me to explain what a blog is. Given his lack of background knowledge, that was harder than one might expect, but I think I made it clear enough to him. I began to wonder if there are blogs devoted to recording the bloggers' conversations with their aged parents. Given the number and diversity of blogs, it seems highly likely that there are. I wouldn't want to read them.

What's It All About

Originally, I wasn't going to say anything about the plot or the gimmick of Time and the Soldier. After the last post, there seems no reason not to do so, and I thought that a very brief synopsis might be of interest. "Brief" is the tricky part. The plot is long and complex, and there's no point in going into it very far, especially since there are twists that are supposed to be suprises to the reader. So here's at least the first part of the story.

Near the end of WWII, three people are recruited by Tempus, a mysterious, somewhat sinister organization. Tempus has close links links with the OSS and other Western intelligence agencies. It's rolling in dough and employs some of the top scientists in the world, competing for them with some other big project it knows is underway but hasn't been able to penetrate. Tempus has finally managed to send people forward in time, but only for short distances, and only forward, not back. (The forward-not-back part is explained with appropriate pseudo-science and plays a part in the plot.)

The three recruits - Tommy, Frank, and Ellen - will be sent forward with two goals: acquire futuristic weapons that can be used to end the war quickly and ensure US hegemony, and find a way to travel backward in time to 1945 with those weapons. The assumption is that the scientists of the future will surely have discovered how to go back. Tommy and Frank were both transferred from the US Army, Tommy from the fighting in France and Frank from Italy, and Ellen is a civilian. Tempus has no idea what they'll encounter in the Wonderful World of the Future, so it will hedge its bets by sending them to different points: Tommy fifty years ahead, to 1995, Ellen to 2045, and Frank to 2095.

During their training, a love triangle develops. They know that if they don't back out, they'll very likely never see each other again. They also have reason to believe that Tempus won't let them leave alive, so they have no choice but to jump forward.

Two other characters are important: the head of Tempus, and the driving force behind it, a creepy guy named Hughes; and a brilliant woman named Dolores who is in charge of much of the research at Tempus.

The first part of the book follows the three protagonists to the point where they jump. After that, the story follows each one's adventures in the future. I'm reluctant to say more, because this is where it starts to get really twisty, with interrelated stuff and backward jumps and things getting blowed up real good and some blood and sex (not together! not that kind of book!). Even condensed to the degree the above is, describing much more would make this post absurdly long. Which may be a sign that the plot is overly complex and the book will be too long. All I can do is hope that's not the case.

Maybe, when the thing is in some final form, I'll post some scenes here. I dunno.

The Utter Evil of Steven Spielberg

I just read on scifi.com that Spielberg is going to write a pilot for Fox TV about a couple of young physicists during WWII who invent time travel and jump forward to 2007 to find something they can take back to end the war with.

So what, you say?

So, that's the gimmick in Time and the Soldier, upon which the rest of the long, complex, dense plot is built. So the book is DOA. That's the way things work in gimmick-driven genres.

I'll press on with it. Having put so much into it, I want to finish it. Also, I know it's going to be a terrific sf novel. But it'll be dead on arrival, anyway.

Of course I can't really blame Spielberg, even if he did read my mind and steal my idea. (Joke!) I had this idea 15 years ago, or so, and I wrote the first part of the book back then, and then I let it lie for many years before finally getting back to it. During those years, I often told myself that I should finish the book because someone else was bound to come up with the same gimmick, and then the book would be dead. But I told myself, "Yeah, yeah, whatever," and wrote other stuff instead. And this is the result.

Damn you, Steven Spielberg! You're evil, I say, evil!

Mickling along. Close to 800 words tonight. Clearly, I won't come close to making the optimistic deadline I set a mere two posts ago.

I think that at this point, instead of filling in the holes in the ms., I need to start rereading it from the beginning and mulling over the notes I've made about plot problems and the elements I've haven't yet pinned down. There's more of that than I'm comfortable with.

At the same time, the book now feels to me like a big novel - in scope and in terms of what's at stake for the characters, I mean, rather than number of words. It's looming large. That's rather nice. I like my books to feel big to me.

Ratcheting the quality knob

Just under 1200 words tonight. This is good, and I hope I'll be able to keep it up, but I know I won't.

In the previous post, I said I wanted to be done by December 18, and I also estimated that the book, now at 120K words, would end up at 150K. In the comments to that post, an anonymous poster* pointed out that I was saying I'd write 30,000 (good, final) words in 23 days.

Hmm. That does seem unlikely. So maybe I won't make that deadline. It would be very convenient if I did, but of course I can't let that take precedence over the quality of the end result. In addition to the new words, I do have a lot of fixing up to do. My file of notes to myself has grown unnervingly large. Taking care of those will take some time and may include some beating of head against wall.

The title of this post refers to something that happened at one of my previous places of employment. It was a (very major) software company, and we were all working madly to get the next version of one of the main products ready to ship by the dumb, arbitrary deadline (pulled out of thin air by the marketing department, as is normally the case in the software biz). One of the high-up managers said in a meeting that we had to make the deadline, and if we thought we couldn't do all the necessary stuff in time, we would just have to "ratchet down the quality knob." Wouldn't customers have loved to know about that!

Well, I ain't gonna ratchet down no quality knob with this book. Or any other.

* The post shows as anonymous now, but I just switched to the new version of Blogger, and I don't know if that caused poster IDs to vanish.

Talk about yer blister to yer eye!

Three and a half weeks since I last added any words to Time and the Soldier. Sheesh!

A bit over 2700 words today, which is pretty good. That largish number is due to my having had today off. I had yesterday off, as well, but Leonore and I used it to entertain ourselves rather than work at anything. We saw the new James Bond movie (much fun) and then went out to eat. But today, I wrote. Tomorrow and Sunday will be filled with the usual weekend chores, but I hope I can keep some of this momentum going.

After my previous bit of writing, I entered a weird kind of non-writing, lethargic, dull period that I can't explain. Then came the election, which put everything on hold for a few days. Then I got a flu shot at work and reacted badly with what might as well have been the flu. First time that's ever happened to me. I hope it's just due to this year's batch of vaccine and not some new age-related phenomenon.

During this hiatus, I was actually thinking plottishly, coming up with the stuff I spent today writing. So I can claim that, in a sense, I've been writing all along. But it's a sense that didn't result in anything that anyone else could read, until today, when I actually converted it all from potential stuff in my mind to real stuff on pap-- er, magnetic domains.

TimeSold is progressing nicely enough and the blue parts continue to diminish. Rereading chunks of it over the last couple of days, I realized that I'm going to have to move some parts around. I'm jumping around in the story too much. That was intentional, originally, but I've overdone it. In particular, the death of a major character happens much too early. Then, later in the ms., I go back some years in time and rehash parts of her life. It's unsatisfying and lacking in impact. Fixing that during the rewrite will be challenging.

I do have a self-imposed deadline. Leonore's break from her teaching begins on December 18, so that will be a perfect time for her to begin proofreading. (She's great at catching typos and prose infelicities.) Then I can incorporate her suggestions and have the book ready for the agent hunt by the first of the year. That fits with my schedule of having the book on the bestseller lists by the winter of 2008. Well, okay, that last part isn't included in my self-imposed deadline.

Currently, the wordcount, excluding the blue parts, is just over 120,000 words. So the final book could end up at 150,000 words, after all, as I was saying in one of my early posts. That's a bit longish.

The Perils of Confusing English Words

Leonore and I just came back from a quick Chinese lunch. My fortune cookie said:

You will be fortunate if you accept the next proposition you hear.

The next one! Jeez, I'm so old that I can't remember the last one, or even if there was a last one.

Okay, so what have I been doing? Not writing, obviously.

Last Tuesday, I spent an hour and a half at the dentist's office, having an old, cracked crown removed. Painless, really, except for the shot, and the new drills and saws and whatever he was using are virtually soundless. Nonetheless, I found myself shaky and depressed afterwards, and I realized it was a mild form of PTSD, resulting from the hours I used to spend in dentists' offices as a kid in South Africa, having my rotten teeth drilled with the old, slow, loud drills - and no effing anesthetic, because it was such a macho culture and they didn't believe in numbing you for anything short of an extraction. Fifty years later, I still remember staggering out onto the pavement, dizzy, disoriented, sick, and trembling. I not only remember, I feel it all over again, even after a dentistry session that should be non-traumatic. I should add that the dentist we have nowadays, Dennis Duvall, in Lakewood, Colorado, is outstandingly good, the best dentist either of us has ever had. Nonetheless, that reaction persists.

So I went home and e-mailed work that I was taking a sick day and sat around surfing the Web and feeling sorry for myself. Also drinking bourbon, one of mankind's greatest inventions, although not so great as beer, tea, and cheese. Then I wrote just over 300 words and felt as though I'd run a marathon.

Since then, I haven't written, but not because of the above dental thing, which I put here just because I wanted to whine about it. Instead, I've been obsessively reading news and political blogs about the upcoming midterm elections, feeling hopeful but fearing to hope. Will the fascist swine steal this election, too? Duh! Of course they will, to the extent they feel safe doing so. They don't dare lose, because a Democratic Congress, or even just a Democratic House, which is more likely, will surely hold hearings into their corruption and evildoing over the last few years. I hope those hearings include investigations of how the bastards stole the last three national elections (2000, 2002, and 2004), although I fear that the Democrats will once again make their old mistake of being gentlemen instead of going for the gonads.

When male wild boars do battle, the winner uses his tusks to castrate the loser. Hah, hah! Won't be seeing you here next mating season, sucker!

That's what I want the Democrats to do.

Metaphorically, of course.