My life as a research monkey

Say what you will about us writers; we were readers first. Most of the writers I know got into it out of a love of the written word—sometimes a desperate one, as in my case. I began writing my first novel at the age of eight because I was burning through the children’s room at my local library entirely too fast, and I was afraid that I would run out of books to read if I didn’t start making some of my own, stat. So reading comes naturally to us, and we love it.

Which is a good thing, because ye gods, do we have to do research.

Masks is set in modern-day Los Angeles, my lifelong home, so a certain amount of the research is done for me. I know what the hills look like in summer, how a Santa Ana wind smells, where to find an abandoned aircraft hangar or an empty flood-control channel. I have a working vocabulary of curse words in four or five languages spoken by the locals. I can describe the subway without pausing to look anything up, and I know what it’s like to be packed into a Rapid bus hurtling down Wilshire Boulevard at foolhardy speeds.

At the other end of the spectrum, the world of The Novel is completely made up. I’ve devoted many hours to figuring out how the weather patterns work, and the literacy system, and the technology, and even what kind of birds you’d find in certain bushes. And I’m the ultimate authority on all of that. All that information is sitting inside my head or in my notebooks, and because no one else has lived in my fictional world, no one can correct me unless I get the real-world science wrong—make the rain fall up instead of down, put the wrong kind of birds in the wrong kind of ecosystem, that sort of thing.

In the middle falls the Street of Bakers project, and an awful lot of research.

While Street of Bakers has strong elements of science fiction and fantasy—it is steampunk—it’s also firmly rooted in a real time and place. Victorian London really existed, and modern London exists today. Millions of people have visited or lived in the places I’m writing about, an ocean away from me, and know millions of details that I don’t. I’ve never been out of my own country—I didn’t even have a passport until I was in my late twenties, and I’ve never used it. (This isn’t the American snobbery you’ve heard so much about, by the way—I don’t actually ignore other countries, or assume I wouldn’t get anything out of visiting them. I’ve simply never had the money to travel for pleasure, and I never get more than a day or so off work at a time, which makes it tough to travel to anywhere other than Mexico. Someday, though …) So I do research.

I haunt a nearby university library for books of maps so I can build up my knowledge of London’s geography. I’m reading my way through Liza Picard’s Victorian London, learning about sewers and velocipedes and corsetry and whatall. And then there are the websites—costumers’ sites for fashion tips, archive websites for street-level maps, even a botany website that can find me a white willow tree in modern London at two in the morning. (An early plot point requires Watson to get hold of some willow bark in a hurry.) It’s a good thing I’ve got that writerly love of reading; otherwise I’d never get through all this.

In some ways, though, I’m glad I’m doing it. I probably haven’t read this much reference material since I was in college, and I’m rediscovering the quiet joy of reading books I never would have discovered on my own. Ever since I was little, I’ve enjoyed stuffing my brain with seemingly useless but interesting information, and this project is giving me a magnificent excuse. I’ve recently discovered an urgent need to re-read Harry Houdini’s book on stage magic; how often can I pass that off as work? And that’s not even counting the sheer joy of Sherlockiana—from a deep re-reading of Doyle’s canon to modern pastiche collections like Michael Kurland’s Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years to outliers like Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars and Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File. How many people can legitimately say they’re doing research by reading a novel about Sherlock Holmes teaming up with Dracula? I haven’t had this much fun since I regularly had to study smallpox vaccinations and ancient Greek statuary.

And it seems to be paying off, at least a little. Recently a beta reader on an early chapter of the project complimented me on my portrayal of a completely made-up part of the London Underground; even though the design of the car was entirely fictional and the line I described didn’t open until a couple of years after the story is set (I added a historical event that moved up the opening date), she was impressed with how clearly I described the sounds, smells, and sensations of a short Tube trip. “How long did you live in London?” she asked me.

I just smiled.

If I can't say the words, then I'll sing them ...

I’m growing to be quite a fan of Grace Franzen, a YouTube user with the handle mendocinodragon, for her trock songs and other things. But recently she posted a pretty little original tune called “Thinking of You,” apparently an ode to the high-school friends she’s losing touch with now that she’s in college. And the title of this blog was one of the lines (at 3:24):

It got me thinking about the ways we express ourselves. I’m a fairly awful singer myself, but as I’m working on revising The Novel, I’m finding lots of little bits of my life woven into it, things I can’t say very well in person. I used to be quite skeptical of English teachers who lectured me on themes and “what the author is really saying”; I tried to imagine authors sitting in their garrets somewhere (all great authors write in garrets—right?), trying to find ways to put their innermost feelings and philosophies into obscure literary form. It just didn’t seem a likely leisure activity for anyone trying to pay the bills with words.

And I was right, at least when it came to my own writing. I don’t sit down and think about ways to express my feelings in elaborate metaphors. It just happens sometimes; little private symbols and fragments of personal conversations ease their way into my work. Most of the time it goes unnoticed, even by me, until much later. (Although here’s a tip: anytime you see a bird, it’s probably important, if only to me.)

Things I think I might be trying to say through The Novel:

-Sometimes the people who matter most are the ones who aren’t there.

-Dogs are important. Even the crazy ones. Especially the crazy ones.

-Books can reshape the world, but only if you read them.

-Sometimes you just have to jump off a cliff.

-Free will is worth dying for.

-Porridge is pretty much always disgusting.

-It is possible to smother someone to death with the best of intentions.

-Libraries are a nearly universal language.

-If you’re going to die, dance first.

-Folk singers are dangerous.

-When something doesn’t fit, pay attention. There’s a world you’re not seeing.

-Sometimes stew is a matter of life and death.

-Two people can make a family. That doesn’t mean they make a functional one.

-Sometimes love means doing the thing you hate most.

-Most people can’t see their own potential.

-Songs matter.

More updates as I find them …

Game face

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the difference between writers and wannabe writers is that writers write. They sit their butts in the chair and scratch away in a notebook or hammer away at a keyboard. Most of it’s crap. Most of it you will never get to see, and you should rejoice in that fact. Writers know that it’s their job to pull diamonds out of dungheaps, and that most of the dung will be theirs.

All writers know this. But this week I was reminded.

I think of my “normal” writing pace as three chapters a week. That’s first-draft speed; my revision speed varies widely. But in an average seven-day period, I can usually hammer out three 2,000-to-4,000-word chunks of whatever story I’m working on. Call it the product of several years of writing for people I saw every day; I developed one hell of a first-draft work ethic.

But this week, I got handed a little extra motivation.

I’m currently running chapters of The Novel past a lovely writing circle called SandScribes that meets every other Tuesday night in Huntington Beach. The group is a nice mix of writers and illustrators, all with an interest in producing books for young readers—from picture books for preschoolers to novels for young adults. I came blundering into the group in December so I could get The Novel whipped into shape and tell prospective agents that I’d run it past a serious writing circle.

And at the rate of one polished chapter every two weeks, I could just about handle the workload. I had to send chapters in a week before each meeting so people would have time to read them, but I didn’t mind that. One of my fellow writers had even complimented me on my work ethic, and told me I was encouraging her to work harder on her own book just to keep up with the new kid. She clearly didn’t realize how slowly everything was moving for me this time around!

Then they changed the schedule. One member of the group needed to shift the alternate-Tuesdays arrangement to the other set of alternate Tuesdays, with the result that last Tuesday’s meeting will be immediately followed by this Tuesday’s meeting. And almost every head at the table turned my way, and someone asked, “So, do you think you can send us another chapter by Friday?”

And being myself, I said, “Sure. No problem.”

Of course, there was a problem. I was trying to finally finish the first draft of The Novel so I could start revising the whole darn thing, en banc, and send it out to my group of beta readers. I had three chapters to finish that week, and as of Tuesday I’d only written one. I knew my undiagnosed OCD wouldn’t let me work on revising Chapter 4 (the chapter I happened to need for next Tuesday) until I’d finished writing Chapters 19 and 21. (I’d written Chapter 20 the night before, in a rare deviation from strict chapter order.) How was I supposed to polish up the beginning of my story while my head was full of its ending?

But there’s no motivation like an audience. Chalk it up to my years in amateur dramatics; you shove me out onstage and I feel absolutely compelled to do something entertaining, lest I be booed off. I was once stranded onstage during a production of Our Town, dressed as the Stage Manager, with absolutely no lines; I’d just finished my monologue, and of the two actors who were supposed to be in the scene after mine, one couldn’t be found and the other wandered onstage alone, gave me a meaningful look, and froze artfully in place. I improvised an entire monologue on the spot so the audience wouldn’t realize what had happened. I think I doubled the size of the imaginary town of Grover’s Corners, and I know I went on for quite a while about crickets. So when a few trusting souls turn to me and say, “You can meet this deadline—right?” … I really have no choice.

 

Chapter 19 was like ripping out my own fingernails, but I wrote it in a haze of caffeinated tea (mostly the Watson Blend from Adagio). Chapter 21 turned out to have half of it sitting around in a notebook, but the rest I scrawled out in a different notebook and then I attacked the whole thing at the keyboard until it cried uncle. I hammered out the revisions on Chapter 4 as the day was ending, and sent it out to the writing circle with half an hour left in Friday.

I honestly can’t remember half of what I did, except for the bit where I was pounding the printout of Chapter 4 with my fist in excitement because it was finally working. Over the weekend, I started working on the full-book revisions. Tomorrow night, I’ll find out whether Chapter 4 was as good as I thought or not. But it’s great to be working with a deadline, and an audience. Genius is 99% perspiration, they say—and in my case, it’s probably flop sweat. 

And soon I’ll have to start banging out Volume 2 of Masks. After all, I can’t disappoint my audience …

What happens next. Also, thank you.

… I’m just going to wait here for a second while you scream at me for how Chapter 32 of Masks ended.

Got it out of your system? Good.

Yes, I will get around to showing more of the Black Mask’s hideout, and yes, I will explain what’s in those envelopes and how they got into the hideout well after the Black Mask got himself blown up ten years ago. All of that will come out in Book 2, which will begin serialization this summer (I’m aiming for July again). But considering some of the hysterical emails and comments I’ve been getting on this project, I think I should take a Monday to explain what’s going to happen next.

First things first. If you’re suffering from Masks withdrawal, I strongly urge you to buy the paperback or (if you can wait a week or two) the ebook when it comes out, for the sake of your own sanity. There are several nifty special features in there that I think you’ll enjoy, but probably the most relevant to those of you jonesing for more Rae and Trevor are the Hawkins Foundation Secret Files and a short story called “The Missing.”

The Secret Files feature is loosely based on something the Big Two comic companies would sometimes do in annuals—jumbo-sized bonus comics that came out once a year to supplement the main monthly title. In the back of an annual, which would usually include a main story and several backup features, there would often be little capsule bios of the hero and his major allies and enemies, just in case there were new readers who were coming in a little lost. The files would include things like the hero’s real name, his powers, his origin story, his history, and his affiliations with any major superhero teams. Because I designed Masks with the idea that every major character would have an arc—that everyone was the hero of his or her own story—there was lots of material to choose from, but I wanted to do something more than the usual biography. So I decided that these files would be Robert Paine Hawkins’ secret files on the various young masks who appear in the story, including his private analysis of their psychologies and possible futures as heroes (or not).

Probably the biggest surprise in writing those files was realizing that I hadn’t sketched out an origin story for Golem prior to the day he encountered Moon in that secret laboratory. How did a boy end up made of stone, and what sort of life would make him well-suited to being best friends with a chatty werewolf with poor impulse control? To my shock, I found his origin story taking shape almost immediately in my head as I typed—what his parents were like, what kind of student he’d been before he left school, how he came to be in that lab, and why he would never talk about any of it to anyone, not even Moon. Even his real name held a useful little secret. The exercise was a helpful one, not least because it showed me how his character would develop in future books, including a rather surprising romance. If you’ve enjoyed the mystery of Golem at all, you’ll probably want to check out the Secret Files feature. (There’s more dirt on Rae and Trevor, too, plus Soleil, Lady Luck, and Moonclaw.)

The second feature that might ease your Masks craving is “The Missing,” a short story that’s about as long as a chapter and a half of Masks and features four new Nicole Le sketches. The story’s about Rae and Trevor assisting in the search for a missing child—a search that takes them down into the side channels of the Los Angeles River just as it’s starting to rain, and a flood is building upstream. While they’re working against time to find and save a lost little girl, they must also hammer out a dent in their new relationship … and deal with the fact that each of them separately sees a bad omen, and chooses not to tell the other about it. Secrets and surprises abound, and I think you’ll like the ending.

Now, you may ask, what will I be doing while you’re stewing in your own juices?

Well, the picture at the top of this blog entry might give you a clue. I’m still working on revising The Novel, which has to go out to prospective literary agents before I do anything else. (I’ve promised to send it out by the end of March … fingers crossed!) After that, it’s full speed ahead on Volume 2 of Masks, and I’ll be dropping lots of hints and other goodies in this blog as I go. Remember, I managed to fill a blog with interesting content for years before my first novel came out, so I shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up with it for a couple of months.

And then, of course, there’s Free Comic Book Day.

I can spill a little more about that story now that Chapter 32 is out. The FCBD story will serve as a kind of appetizer for Volume 2—which will involve the Black Mask quite heavily. I know, I know; the Black Mask has been dead for ten years, so how can he be a factor in the adventures of Rae and Trevor? Let’s just say there’s more than a couple of manila envelopes in that hideout, and the Black Mask wasn’t quite the lone wolf he appeared to be. In particular, the FCBD story will introduce two of his companions from World War II and follow him and them on a daring postwar rescue mission that you definitely won’t find in any of the official histories of superheroics. That unlikely trio will cast a long shadow, and two of them will appear in person in Volume 2, with a few secrets to reveal. I wouldn’t rule out an appearance by a certain cowboy, either. The story will be available on Pocket Coyote, as a free download, and maybe in a limited print edition on May 5. Until then, watch this space and Pocket Coyote for hints, spoilers, and all the goodies I can cram into them.

And now, a more personal note.

1 a.m. self-portrait, with coyote. :)

I’d like to take a moment to thank all of you for reading along this far, and for being so supportive with your comments on the various pages and on Facebook and Twitter. I began writing what became Volume 1 in a pit of black depression, and your support and enthusiasm gave me a lot of the momentum I needed to climb back out. With all of you behind me and everything I’m learning from The Novel, I think I can safely say Volume 2 will completely blow your minds.  One of my goals in serializing Masks was to give myself a public laboratory in which I could test what did and didn’t work in my storytelling, with real-time feedback, and you guys have really gone above and beyond in helping me learn. I plan to pour all that new knowledge and experience into making Volume 2 utterly fantastic.

I don’t like to talk much about my personal life online, except in the past tense, both because I think some things should stay private and because blogging about my dirty laundry seems like a great way to get myself sued, arrested, or beaten to a bloody pulp. But I want you guys to know that when I’m having a really bad day, when things are at their blackest, I pull up your comments, your cheers and jeers and questions, and I remind myself that there are total strangers out there who willingly return to my website, week after week, to read little bits of my soul in the form of stories. And they like them enough to comment, and to keep coming back. That’s enough to silence the vampires in my head for a little while, and to let me create more of the stories I love. So please, keep reading, keep commenting, and invite as many of your friends as you think can stand to join you.

You are my friends.

You are my tribe.

I hope to share joy with you for many years to come.

Thank you.

Time is stolen

One of my favorite authors, Michael A. Stackpole, has said he has a Post-It note stuck to his bathroom mirror, where he must look at it every morning. It says, “Time is stolen.”

It’s true.

You want to write? Steal time for it. The time you spend writing is time you should spend doing the laundry, going to work, or socializing. Or sleeping. I find I need stretches of at least an hour without interruptions, so I do a lot of my writing in coffee shops with my phone turned off, or late at night when the rest of the house is sleeping. That’s time I could spend working, or looking for more work, or talking on the phone, or (maybe) sleeping more than five hours a night. It helps that I hate talking on the phone, but the rest of it I do miss.

Nevertheless, I steal the time. And I’m not especially sorry about it, no matter what I tell my friends when I make sad faces and explain that I just can’t make it to the party.

So this week I’m stealing time from this blog to work on The Novel. You’ll all thank me later.

Really.

Okay, fine, here’s a picture of two Pocket Coyotes to tide you over until I surface again:

Bye now!

Handmade stories

Once, I wrote all my stories by hand.

It was a matter of necessity; for some reason, I couldn’t think straight while staring at a computer screen, and couldn’t compose at a keyboard. I had to work out my stories with a pen, on paper, before I did anything else. I needed the smell of paper and ink, the scratch of a point along pale blue lines, the nervous fingering of pages if I was going to write anything of value. (All of my old notebooks have slightly dingy edges where I’ve riffled the pages over and over in order to think.)

I made three different attempts to learn touch-typing before I began using my notebooks for practice. Keying in my handwritten words, something finally clicked, and now I can type far faster than I can hand-write.

And now it’s the other way around. I have to compose at a keyboard because I can’t write fast enough to keep up with the sentences flying through my brain; typing is as close as I can come to thinking speed, because I don’t have to form the letters. Perhaps someday I’ll have to use dictation software and write at a speaking pace, although at the moment I can’t seem to compose out loud, and anyway I don’t live in a place that takes kindly to hearing me talk for hours on end.

But when I’m busy, or stressed, or unable to carve out that lovely hour or two to hammer out a chapter, I go back to the old methods. I carry around a notebook and a pen, and jot down sentences and paragraphs as they occur to me. Quite a lot of The Novel is getting written this way, just because it’s being sandwiched between other things … and also because it just seems to suit The Novel better. There’s something handmade about the story, and not just because a key plot point involves the hand-copying of contraband books.

I realized this recently when I noticed I had nearly filled up the spiral journal in which I’ve been keeping my notes on The Novel … and remembered that I had seen a duplicate of that journal on the clearance rack at Barnes and Noble months ago, and impulsively bought it as a backup. I dug it out of a box with surprising speed; I knew exactly where it was, as if it had been waiting for me. Normally it only takes me one notebook to make a novel, but this one’s taking two, because so much of it is turning out to be handwritten. And some nervous little part of my brain realized last summer that I was running out of pages, and that I would desperately need more. I’m not usually that prescient; this story has really moved in and colonized my brain.

There’s something different about this story—something tactile about it. I’m used to characters murmuring in my ear, but these voices have funny harmonies to them that remind me of my feeble attempts to play the guitar, so much so that I can almost feel the strings against my fingers. I’m currently working on a chapter in which the two main characters are trapped in a cave for several hours during a storm, with nothing to do but talk to each other; little bits of the scene often come to me as I’m settling into bed at night, and for a moment I can almost feel the body heat of whichever character is speaking, as if they were sitting next to me. I feel like I’ve left my fingerprints all over the characters and the world, even though it’s the most involved fictional world I’ve ever created, and the characters are the most vivid people I’ve ever written—the most not-me, in other words. And so perhaps it’s no surprise that I feel the need to have that pen back in my hands. The edges of my notebook pages are getting dingy.

They say handmade is best. I can’t wait to see how The Novel will turn out …