Hooky day

Enforced idleness is hard on a writer. One of my favorite authors, Sol Stein, was fond of saying, “A writer is someone who cannot not write.” That’s me all over. My fingers get itchy if I’ve gone more than a day or so without jotting something down, or plotting a scene to a song on the radio, or having a conversation with an imaginary person.

But having sent Teh Novel out to the beta readers, I pretty much had to sit down and rest for a while. For one thing, I wanted to do my own light polish while I let a group of readers do the heavy lifting of figuring out whether the story really works as well as I think it does. (It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have that particular stress-boulder sitting on your back.) So I couldn’t run off and work on another project. But I was also physically exhausted. I’d had to stay up until 3 in the morning (my most productive writing time usually ends around midnight, or 2 a.m. at the latest, which tells you more than you need to know about my circadian rhythm) just to make the final changes and get the manuscript ready to print on Tuesday, October 15. I’d spent that whole Tuesday sleepwalking through my commitments, chugging cinnamon black tea and Coke Zero as I emailed PDFs and dropped off 300-page printouts in floppy binders. So Wednesday I was pretty much a lump—moving slowly, feeling sore, still not all the way recovered. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. I’m old.

And Thursday was my day off work. So naturally I set off a bug bomb.

I knew I needed to hit my mental reset switch in order to make those polishes before the beta period was up, and I’ve been having trouble with moths lately, so I set off a noxious lavender-scented moth bomb in my closet and ran off to play hooky. My sensitive nose ensured that I wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon.

So what do writers do when they play hooky? Well, my first stop was the nearest kayak-rental place. And unlike my last kayak adventure, this time I had my camera along. So here’s what the world looks like from just above the waterline of a banged-up yellow kayak:

 

I only crashed the boat once. Progress!
 
My next stop was a local independent bookstore, where I wanted to pick up a copy of Shadow of the Alchemist, the new Crispin Guest noir by Jeri Westerson. I was hoping to hit one of her signings over the coming weekend, but I wanted to start reading early. Hooray for the inimitable Book Carnival! (They have more signed copies if you want to buy them—hint, hint.)

  

And Book Carnival is a couple of doors down from Altair-4, a store that specializes in science fiction and military books. I ignored the tanks-and-guns side of things, but I did manage to find a Shadow pulp novel I hadn’t read yet and a collection of sword-and-planet stories that I’ve been looking for since 2005 or so. The store owner thought the really important part was the Frank Frazetta cover. Having skimmed over the stories, I’m pretty sure he’s wrong. 

 I then finished up the day with the most important part of writer-hooky …

vacuuming!

 Yes, I went home, tossed the moth bomb outside to finish airing, and vacuumed pretty much the whole apartment. I am a bit of a compulsive vacuumer—I run the vac when I’m stuck on a story, or stressed out, or any of a hundred different varieties of distressed—but cleaning tends to fall off my to-do list when I’m in the final stretch of a book project. By the time a manuscript goes out, I’m lucky if I can find my floor. And at that point the general state of mess begins to stress me out, which makes it that much harder to do anything else … you get the idea.

But I also put new strings on my guitar over the weekend, so I wasn’t totally responsible. 

Okay, here are more kayaking photos. You can drool over them while I go work on that last round of polishing … the manuscript goes to somebody who wants it around November 1, and then it’s back to Masks… 

Paddleboarder with dog. Yes, dog is in midshake.

Pretty.

I swear I didn't run into all these landscapes I'm pointed at.

I imagine rogue paddleboarders graffiti-ing the retaining walls
of these obscenely expensive bayside homes. Atlas!

Why yes, that IS a freeway bridge off the port bow (between the palm trees).

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 …

Lessons from a fever

This picture has nothing to do with anything. It's just a favorite image of my friend and favorite opera singer, Amber Peters.

If this blog is a little strange, blame the cold medicine.

I woke up on Thanksgiving Day and, as usual, got to work helping my mom with the preparations. I didn’t drop the turkey this year or commit any of my usual holiday atrocities, but that’s mostly because I noticed, around midday, that I had an ache high in my throat that two mugs of  my favorite ginger tea couldn’t banish. Shortly after that, the dizziness and the aches arrived, followed by something that felt a lot like fever, though I’ve always been bad at noticing when I have one of those. By evening, I had what looked like white colonies on the inside of my throat, but a rapid strep test found no actual bacteria—it’s just one hell of a flu infection. Further evidence that God is an iron.

I should explain that last bit, shouldn’t I?

It’s stolen from a Spider Robinson book—from a short story, in fact, called “God is an Iron.” The reasoning goes like this: if someone who commits gluttony is a glutton, and someone who commits a felony is a felon, then someone who commits irony is …? Ah, I hear the groans of understanding.

The irony here is that I just put in my two weeks’ notice at a job I don’t particularly like, and ordinarily I wouldn’t feel too bad about calling in sick. But I did just submit my resignation, and now my sense of honor refuses to let me sit back and be sick. I don’t want to be one of those lazy people who puts in their two weeks and then stops caring about the job. This employer has treated me quite shabbily, and in some ways getting sick makes me feel like they were right about me. I am lazy.

Except I know I only get sick when I’m massively stressed and running myself into the ground. If I’m sick, I know the one thing I haven’t been lately is lazy.

Anyway, what’s sticking in my head this week—and what may interest you writers, and perhaps even me when my brain clears—is music. I’ve  never been a terribly musical person, mind you; I took voice lessons in college, and when I filled out the form explaining why a non-music major wanted to study singing, I remember writing in the blank, “So I will no longer be shushed in church.” You know your singing’s bad when little old ladies turn around to shush you during “Amazing Grace.”

But I do enjoy singing, at least when I’m by myself, and after two years of vocal instruction I can carry a tune, at least if I have a bucket. Among other things, I can harmonize pretty well; I have a relatively low mezzo-soprano voice that makes a good backup to a higher mezzo or a full-blown soprano. I’m sort of a natural bass line.

But with a sore throat, I can’t sing. I can barely talk, and breathing and swallowing become a chore, too. So I find myself listening to my favorite bands, especially the ones with distinctive lead singers and lots of harmony in the vocals, and wishing desperately that I could sing with them. Even though I normally don’t sing along with recordings unless I’m trying to write a story to their lyrics, something about not being able to sing makes me want to sing more than anything.

So there’s your story idea. Have you ever noticed that suddenly losing an ability makes you want to use that ability like crazy? You break your leg, and all you want to do is run, even if you’re a couch potato. You lose your command of a language, and suddenly the world is full of people speaking and writing in that language that you never noticed before, and it’s driving you crazy that you can’t understand them.

So what would happen, I wonder, if a character in such a situation suddenly regained that ability—but in a completely new and different way? Suppose I got my voice back, but it was someone else’s voice. Would I still want to sing? Would I sing the same songs? Or would I quit singing altogether because it wasn’t my voice anymore?

Something to think about. Perhaps when the fever subsides. 

And if you're weirded out by all this, then here's a sneak preview of the art for Wednesday's chapter. Now who could this be?

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 3

Believe it or not, I’ve always had a hard time writing school stories, even when I was in school. I’d throw in a classroom scene here or there, but there was nothing especially scholastic about it—my characters could have been talking on a street corner as easily as in a classroom or a hallway. I never had any really good ideas for stories that could go on in a school, perhaps because I regarded school as a place to keep my head down so no one would notice me writing. But when you write stories about American teenagers, you have to deal with school somehow—either explain what they’re doing (or not doing) about their education, or why education is not a factor. Mention their schooling or homeschooling, or set your story in a post-apocalyptic world where all the schools have burned.

Or, in my case, set your story during summer vacation and have your characters be really weird people.

This chapter introduces the Hawkins Foundation, a scholarship program that will become very, very important in the lives of Rae, Trevor, and my other characters. It’s a lot more than an honors program, as you can see, and it’s a bit more than a school for superkids, too—but we’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll content myself with a little behind-the-scenes anecdote: in the first draft of this novel, Rae and Trevor were high-school seniors and going off to college in the next book, where they would meet Soleil, Tammy, and all these other characters. Then their ages got dialed back to sixteen, but I still needed the Walker University tunnels and other features, so the summer program was created and I got my main cast all together in the first "season."

This chapter also gives us our first glimpse of Rae’s family in the form of her remembered argument with her father. Rae’s parents will not be terribly present in these stories, but the fact that she has a family and is mostly estranged from it will be a big part of her character. Masks is very much about people building substitute families—Trevor and Rae, Golem and Moon, Soleil and Tammy, and eventually others as well—and so there’s some groundwork for that going in here. Masks are the kind of people who don’t quite fit in with normal life, and so they tend not to fit in with normal families, either. They build their own, eventually, and because these masks are young, they’re just starting that process.

Brief random notes on Rae’s new friends at Walker University …

1. Tammy is based on a real person, who is actually named Tammy and dates from when I used to randomly write my friends into my fiction, usually because they asked me to. The fictional Tammy is considerably more perky than the real Tammy, but no less loud and random (watch for the phrase “invisible clowns” in a later chapter). The real Tammy came up with the line about grubbies, partly as an in-joke—she is something of a fashion plate, while I live my life in black T-shirts and tatty jeans. I don’t think she’s ever had the bad grace or cluelessness to suggest I “change out of grubbies” when I’m wearing my favorite outfit, but she might have done it at sixteen, and that’s all that matters to me.

2. Soleil is also based on a real person, although she’s departed much more from her original. I knew a girl in high school who happened to look exactly like Snow White and who had, if not the wickedest sense of humor I’ve ever encountered, something very close. She was brilliant, sarcastic, and inclined to drum her fingertips together and say “Excellent,” in the manner of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. To the best of my knowledge, she was not a were-cat, but I’m not sure she’d tell me if she were. Her name was not Soleil. I wish to state for posterity that Soleil Faulkner is much meaner than the person she’s based on. She just turned out that way—another case of my characters having minds of their own.

3. Mike Glass is not directly based on anyone I know. Probably. In my head, he looks like a teenage Michael Chabon, and I’ve never been able to understand why. Keep an eye on him; he is not your average RA.

4. Robert Paine Hawkins will get his moment in the sun before the book is out, so I won’t spoil too much here … except to say that his name still makes me laugh. Years ago, I was a fan of a comic book called Marvel: The Lost Generation, which was all about a bunch of Marvel superheroes who lived and died before the ones we know (Spider-Man, the X-Men, etc.) became active. My favorite character in that comic was a gruff and cunning cape-and-gadgets guy named the Black Fox, who died in the first issue (not that that kept him out of the story, which was told in reverse chronological order—it’s complicated). His real name was Robert (Bob) Paine. The name “Black Fox” triggered my auditory memory, which is excellent but random. I have accidentally memorized hundreds of hours of random noise, especially music and dialogue tracks from movies. And I can’t read the phrase “black fox” without hearing this song from The Court Jester, one of my favorite movies as a child:

So now Bob Paine was inextricably linked in my head with Danny Kaye’s character, Hubert Hawkins (who was not actually the Black Fox, but the hero of the film, so there). After that I really wanted to name a character Robert Paine Hawkins, and when I needed to name a scholarship foundation, the name surfaced. My Hawkins doesn’t actually have anything to do with either of his inspirations—he’s just named that to make me smile and because I wanted a mysterious old man with three names. And no, he is not secretly a retired superhero named the Black Fox, although he does have a secret or two.

And then we have the program-within-the-program, the alpha track. This came out of a true story, more or less. I was a major academic overachiever as a kid, top of the class in everything, even the subjects I hated—which were pretty much all math. I was good at math; I just didn’t enjoy it at all. However, I did two years in junior high in an annual competition called Math Olympics, mostly because the practices got me out of P.E. The first year I took top honors in the logic-problem category, but in the second year I got seriously skunked by a boy about half my size—and the fact that it was a boy was especially irritating; logic was where young male math geniuses traditionally foundered in that competition. A few months later, I entered high school as a freshman and found myself in an English class whose teacher asked each student to bring in an object that introduced him or her. I brought in a small wire-frame horse I’d made from random craft supplies, mostly because I wouldn’t have time to read an entire short story. And a runty boy in the front row brought in a logic medal from last year’s Math Olympics. My nemesis and I had landed in the same high school. I whispered to the girl next to me, asking who this brat was, and she whispered back, “Oh, that’s ___. You know, the freshman who’s taking calculus?”

I was on track to take calculus as a senior. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so bad about getting skunked, though I did feel pretty small all of a sudden. I think that’s where the alpha track came from—the idea of a high achiever discovering a level of achievement that’s completely impossible for him or her. I let Calculus Boy go academically unmolested, mostly because I still hated math no matter how good I was at it, but I think that if he’d been a writing prodigy, I would have set my sights on proving I was better than he was. That’s just who I was at fifteen. Anyway, that’s where Rae’s reaction comes from—and as you’ll see, it will get her in lots and lots of trouble.

This chapter’s track is the only Hoobastank song I like, “Right Before Your Eyes.” I decided when I first heard it that it was a great theme for the dramatic changes Rae goes through in Masks, and it eventually became a kind of theme song for her. I am not responsible for the Spider-Man fan video, although it does sort of rock. 

Would you believe ... ?

I have a weird, weird brain.

Case in point: I have laid out a sequence that will be the climax of either Book 2 or Book 3 of the Masks series (it’s still getting shuffled a bit) based entirely on this Jonathan Coulton song, “I Crush Everything,” about a self-loathing giant squid.

My sequence does not contain a squid. It may or may not even contain water. It is entirely about Rae’s relationship with Trevor. Nobody gets crushed, literally or metaphorically. And yet I tell you this—this song is note-for-note accurate to what happens in the sequence. No squid. No crushing. Probably no water. And yet it makes perfect sense, at least to me.

Peripherally, I have mapped out their entire relationship to a completely different JoCo song, “I’m Your Moon.” But the former planet (now dwarf planet) Pluto does not appear in my outline.

I defy you to figure out what either of these songs could possibly have to do with a superhero epic.

And while you’re doing that, I think I’ll go write some more …