Rick Just's Blog, page 240

The Elevator Pitch

Someone asked me yesterday what the book I’m working on is about. The flip answer is “80,000 words.” I don’t blame people for asking that question. It’s the natural one to ask. It just happens to be very difficult to answer. 
Think of books you’ve read. What is APrayer for Owen Meany about? What is Angleof Repose about? Could you explain, on a moment’s notice, what Nineteen Eighty-Four  was about? In three sentences?
Of course, you would not be prepared to do that. As the creator of a book, perhaps I should be. Certainly I will need to invent a book blurb at some point to entice people to read the book. That is quite different from what people are looking for when they ask that difficult question, though. So, here goes.
It is a book about the origin of a tribal culture’s world view and how a nearly forgotten historical event misshaped their entire understanding about life.
Boom. Give the man a peanut.

The archaeology of writing

I would not be the first to bemoan the loss of the art of letter writing. I love email and even understand the utility of texting. Those methods are rarely considered communication. The very act of writing a letter made you stop and think. It took some effort, not just the effort of finding a pencil or rolling paper into a typewriter, but the effort of gathering your thoughts to put them into some cohesive form.

Your investment in a letter in terms of time was magnitudes beyond what one usually devotes to an email. In our heads, email is free. We don’t stop to do the math that takes into account the electricity, the computer, the broadband and the frustration that has gone into that free email. But a stamp, there’s something that has a price tag. You made a commitment when you wrote a letter. It was something that might be around for 200 years and it cost you a visible fraction of an hour’s wages to send it off on a physical journey across the country.

Recently I have been helping a California writer who is doing a book about the artists of that state, one of whom was my delightful cousin Mabel Bennett Hutchinson. He has a thousand questions, many of them about her early years. I wasn’t around in the 20s when she was just starting her art career. But she saved her correspondence from that time, and later used those letters to help her recreate her life for an autobiography she wrote for the family.
There are letters and papers still around from my great grandparents. It is through those that we learn about their lives. They are the core of more than one book.

Where will the novelists and historians of the future look to learn about our everyday lives? Emails, I suppose, if some of them survive. Few of us make any effort to preserve them. Even if they are available will they simply portray us as shallow and frivolous? Where is today’s considered communication between friends and family? Facebook? Please.

I love email, texting and even Facebook. If they are the record we leave behind, though, tomorrow’s archaeologists will be poorer for it.

The Pasture

For a little change of pace, here's a new short story I wrote a couple of days ago.


When the alarm went off at 5:30 that morning his first thought was, I didn’t get up during the night to pee. His second thought was, They can never take that accomplishment away from me.
He took his blood pressure pills and child-sized aspirin, tossed his shorts in the laundry basket and shut the door to the bathroom so the light wouldn’t bother Janet. He turned on the light, hung his towel on the hook next to the shower, put down the mat and started the hot water running. Next, he slide the scale to where he could stand on it, let it zero out and stepped on. One hundred seventy six. He kicked the scale back into its cubby next to the toilet and stepped over to the shower. The water was hot enough now to turn on the cold and twist the control that shot the mixed water into the showerhead. He did not have to test the temperature.
He peed in the shower. Hey, why not? It saved water, and urine was practically sterile. One pump on the shampoo dispenser gave him more suds than his thinning hair could use, so he spread it around to armpits and none-of-your-business. Rinse, don’t repeat. You didn’t need to lather your hair twice. That was a scheme by shampoo companies to sell you more product. He was in advertising himself, so was just that savvy.
He toweled himself dry with what Janet called a shower sheet. It was a big flippin’ towel, was all, but he liked it and she could call it whatever she wanted. He slathered on lotion, practically head to toe. If he skipped that for a day or two, he itched, simple as that. His face got a lot of extra lotion, because he used it instead of shaving cream as whisker lube. A few quick swipes with the razor took care of the hair. Except for the head hair, of course. He combed that into shape and let it air dry while while he brushed his teeth, 30 seconds per quadrant thankyoumistertoothbrush.
He picked a shirt he hadn’t worn lately, facilitated by his clever method of using separators in his closet for shirts worn once, twice and thrice. The big choice of the day was what color of socks to wear, khaki or blue, which in turn determined which color of pants he would wear, khaki or blue. The socks always went on first before the pants, because otherwise you had to fight with your pants legs to pull them up. Next came the belt, black or brown, which determined the color of shoes, black or brown.
The shoes and belt were the tricky part. If he made too much noise with either--we’re talking any noise--the dogs would take that as their signal and start barking. They’d start barking the minute he opened the door, anyway, but he always wanted to keep that to the bare minimum.
There were multiple dogs--three--but actually only one barker. The hound expressed every emotion and every opinion through barking. The two schnauzers had their moments, too, but feeding time for them required only butt wiggling.
He stepped down the stairs, part of a canine avalanche, buttoning the sleeves of his shirt as he went. The hound darted out the dog door to the back yard. Schnauzer one sat quietly in the entry, while he and schnauzer two went out to retrieve the paper. Before they got back to the door the hound was always back in the house barking her enthusiasm for being fed. She continued the enthusiasm through the measuring of food. By this time drooling accompanied the barking, so it was always a good idea to step with care in case an extra slimy pool of drool had puddled beneath the hound flews.
The food disappeared in under 30 seconds. He thought this was perhaps the quickest single diminishment his paycheck suffered in an average month.
He grabbed his lunch, pre-packed the night before, and was out the door by 6:01.
About 7,500 times. That was the quick math he did on his way to work that morning. Take out weekends and ten or so holidays a year... wait, he forgot vacations. Subtract about ten days a year, and it came out to 7,200 times that he had gone through pretty much that same morning routine. He planned to beat the crap out of that alarm clock with a sledgehammer when he got home that night.
To his not-at-all surprise, his office was draped in black crepe paper. Helium-filled balloons--black, of course--were doing their trivial part to deplete the world supply of that gas. He thought he would probably take a couple of those home tonight to drive the dogs crazy.
Someone had abused the office plotter by making a colorful sign, complete with beach-themed clipart, that said “Bon Voyage, Bill!!!!!”
Clipart. Did they even call it that anymore? Back when Bill started in the Biz they had subscribed to a service that sent them big sheets of artwork every month. They would use scissors to cut out the art they wanted for a newspaper ad, run it through the waxer and paste it down on a blue-lined sheet of paper which, in turn, would be pasted onto a bigger sheet of paper that included the news stories and other ads which would be photographed, then turned into a negative, which was turned into a positive on a sheet of aluminum, which then went on the press to make a magic newspaper.
When was the last time he’d even seen an X-acto knife? Everything was digital, now. He did not lament that. Far from it. Bill was there to see the first crude computer typesetting machines, the first layout programs, and the first newspaper websites. The younger crowd had nothing on him. So what they were born knowing how to run a keyboard. He was there when email was a new concept. He’d picked it up and welcomed every other change computers had brought with them.
Bill was not a fossil. He was a vital part of a dynamic organization. He would be a fossil a week from now, or a month. Things happened that fast.
They had the obligatory cake and ice cream that afternoon. Stories were shared. Rebbeca, who he had never quite had the nerve to sleep with after that single Christmas kiss, cried.
Through it all, he thought about his mother. It had irritated the hell out of him when he went to visit her in the assisted living center not so many years ago. She obsessed about food. She talked constantly about what they had for breakfast, dinner and supper. Holiday meals were a subject of special importance, where the menus were anticipated for days ahead of time. Until that moment it had not occurred to him, the busy ad executive, that she had nothing else to talk about.
Right now he was who he had always been. In six months he would be some geezer at the front desk if he stopped in for a visit.
It made him want to bark.

And Now, a Little Diversion

I have talked a bit in this blog about the advantages of E-books from a publisher’s standpoint. Free distribution, no returns, no storage, no unsold copies, etc. I have also acknowledged that paper still retains some charm.
Digitized books may or may not completely replace paper books one day. Either way, there are some uses for paper that will probably never go away. To wit:
http://vimeo.com/61275290

Tomorrow I'm going to try something different. I'll be posting a complete short story on the Anjels blog.

Weighing Words

Writers are less obsessed about word count than they once were. That may be to their peril.

Word count is one way to measure writing. It is, perhaps, the worst way. In general, there are three length categories in fiction, the short story, the novella and the novel. There is no universally agreed upon length for each. No one can say which word puts you over the line from short story to novella or novella to novel. Various prizes for literature place the novella as somewhere between 7,500 and 40,000 words.

Most of my novels have run about 100,000 words, give or take the length of a novella or two. The novel I’m working on now is likely to be about 75,000 when it is finished. In draft form I’m up to about 50,000 words now. So, hurrah,  I have a novel. By length alone, this blog would qualify as a novella at more than 10,000 words to date.

Every reviewer--every reader, for that matter--would tell you it is quality not quantity that is important. They are kidding themselves. Sure, you want quality, but you also want to purchase or borrow entertainment time. You literally weigh (estimate) the worth of a physical book. You feel like someone is trying to put one over on you if the book you’re considering is priced the same as its neighbor, but half the size. When you consider an audio book, the number of hours of entertainment it gives you enters into the decision. In the case of audio books it may be only that you’re driving to Pocatello and back and need a book of a certain length, of course.

I hear writers now talking about word count in a totally different way than in the past. The gist of this discussion is that you don’t have to write a 100,000 word book anymore. E-books let you get away with writing a 50,000 word book and dumping it on the market. You could write two books in the time it takes you to write one!

Books are a commodity, so writers can be forgiven for thinking that way. I believe they will eventually regret the pump-it-out philosophy, though. Readers are not stupid. They will begin to feel cheated by novels that are clearly produced just to provide a minimum amount of entertainment.

There will always be some who are reading just to fill time rather than to enrich their lives. For them, the novella, perhaps even one on the skinny side of the scale, will be good enough.

Dagwood has it Right

I rarely quote, or even reference, the comic strip Blondie. I read it just because my eyes have to move across that space anyway to get to the next strip. The other day, though, the situation of the strip struck a chord. Dogwood was on his couch trying for what was probably approaching his millionth nap, when Blondie rousted him. He was supposed to be painting. He tried unsuccessfully to convince her that painting involved some quiet time to visualize the finished project.

Hang in there, D. You are not so far off.

There is a land we all walk between sleep and wakefulness. In it our mind wanders where it will, or it may be nudged in a particular direction. Either way our curious thoughts sometimes stumble upon solutions to some problem of our waking hours.

I do this a lot with art, particularly if it is a piece that requires some element of invention. I think it through and think it through while relaxing on a couch or recliner or even in bed. Sometimes I will sit up with the solution never having gone to sleep at all. At other times, I’ll wake up at 3 am with the tendrils of three new plot lines threatening to fray away if I do not immediately write them down.

So, Dagwood, go ahead and visualize that paint job or short story. Doing so is the mind’s practice.

Picking a Title

As you may have noticed--probably to your everlasting irritation--I have been referring to the novel I am working on as Anjels (working title). I’m going to try out a couple of others today to get your reaction. They are:

1). Blood Anjels
2). Remember Me
3). Memory Keeper
4). Other Anjels

If nothing else, the jarring difference between the first title and the others will illustrate the importance of a title.

Note that not a single one of these titles is completely original. I did not take them from any other work, but I did google them and found that each one is associated with another book or movie. This is not unusual--you cannot copyright a title--but it is something that I will need to keep in mind when choosing a title. 

I flipped titles 1 and 3 around and found more books and other associations. It is nearly impossible to come up with a title that is not already in use for something else. Wizard Chase was an early online game. Wizard Girl(s) is an anime meme. Wizards End is a website in the UK where you can buy a nice cape. 

Pick your favorite, please, and tell me why you prefer it.

Breaking a Few Eggs

Why would a novelist have to research anything at all? They are just making up a story, right?

Yes, novelists are just making up a story. It should be a plausible story, though. Also, novelists would prefer not to look like complete fools.

For instance, when writing a scene about welding with an oxy-acetylene unit, you want to make sure the welder uses a striker to light the torch, not the tip of his cigarette, unless you’re trying to make a point about the welder’s inexperience, stupidity or devil-may-care attitude. If you’re writing a period novel you won’t want someone working on a PC in 1975.

A science fiction writer is seemingly free to invent whatever warp drive she wants to, without explaining how it works. I’ve used wormholes as time tunnels myself without fear of being called out by physicists, because no one knows that they could not be used in that way.

It gets trickier when you’re writing about biology. True, there could be extraterrestrial forms of life that would baffle a biologist. But if you’re writing about something common to Earth biology, you’d better have a plausible explanation for deviations.

That’s why I’ve been researching eggs. Laying eggs is part of a common method of reproduction on Earth, as it will be on the world in my novel. They are key to an important misunderstanding of reproduction my characters hold. That misunderstanding runs parallel to the metaphysical misapprehension that forms their basic world view.

The eggs in my novel have to grow. Eggs on Earth, once laid, seem never to do that (please correct me if you know better). Once an egg leaves its mother it already has all the energy it needs stored up inside itself to take its occupant to hatching.

There would be evolutionary advantages for an egg and its occupant to grow after it leaves the mother. Chief among those would be that a hatchling could reach a much larger size without trauma to the mother. The disadvantage would be a long period of somehow nourishing a growing egg outside of a body. Also, such an egg would be fragile and exposed for a long time.

Providing some kind of medium in which an egg could grow doesn’t give me a lot of difficulty. I have settled on that. I’m working now on the shell. Is it simply leathery as it grows, absorbing nutrients through its surface? Does it then harden for hatching? My original vision was that the eggs end up with a hard shell, but I’m not certain why they would do that at the end of growth. Perhaps as a signal that they are ready to hatch. Maybe to protect some late-stage vulnerability.

I’m also toying with the idea of something like molting. That is, a soft inner shell grows along with its contents, forcing a harder exterior shell to shatter and sluff off. The inner shell would continue to expand a bit, then harden. The process would repeat until the egg was ready to hatch. This gives me the hard shell I’d like to have, but it seems evolutionarily inefficient.

Cook up some thoughts for me, please. You may have to break some eggs along the way.

Parasites, Fluffy and Not

What is your relationship with parasites? Before you answer 'none' let me list a few organisms or diseases you may have run into:
Mosquitoes, bed bugs, head lice, fleas, pinworms, roundworms swimmer’s itch, giardiasis, crab louse and scabies.
Free of those? Good. There are more than 60 other parasitic organisms that cause humans a lot of grief.

I bring this up not because I want to make you shudder, but because parasitic behavior is important in the book I’m writing about. There is also a fair amount of symbiosis, some of which can be just as creepy.

In general, creatures who are the targets of parasites do everything they can to rid themselves of the pesky things. Even when they do not act as a vector of disease (think malaria), they sap the energy of their hosts.

What a quandary, then, for anjels. They actually like their parasites.
Phlox (singular and plural) are flying parasites who seek long-term, but not permanent, attachment to their hosts. Their preferred hosts are anjels. Over time anjels and phlox have reached an accommodation. Anjels will generally pick one phlox at puberty and allow it to attach to them.

Phlox are furry, flying creatures who come in a variety of colors. They are one of the few decorations an anjel can “wear.”  Some anjels will go overboard, collecting phlox like some women collect shoes. Those anjels are called flaunters. Their colorful phlox make them quite dazzling. And constantly famished.

A phlox is about a foot long. It is snake-like, if you can imagine that in a furry, flying critter, and its tail is prehensile. Determining where its body ends and its tail begins is difficult. Phlox are based loosely on lampreys. They have the same head-topping nostril and circular, sucking mouth.

Anjels tolerate them because they are not just parasitic, but symbiotic. Phlox have evolved along with anjels and help them in their hunting.

There is an ambivalence about phlox among the anjels. Some pain--short and sharp--is involved in the attaching and detaching of phlox. There is a cost to having them, in terms of calories. Yet, they are pretty and they can earn their keep.

Phlox may remind you a little of the relationship you have with a furry little biter of your own. No, of course Spot is not a parasite!  And you keep Puff around because she is soft and beautiful and she hardly ever sucks your blood!

I maintain that our relationship with dogs and cats is symbiotic. I can get away with this partly because there is not complete agreement on the term’s definition. Most pet owners would argue that we do get something important from them, though it may often be intangible. Do they get something from us? Perhaps the same intangible? Perhaps just kibbles.

How Weird is This?

So, how weird is it to be blogging about a book so seemingly removed from the human experience as Anjels (working title)? There is a part of me that cringes a little when people ask what I’m working on. I know that to many this sounds like some teenage fantasy that I’m cooking up under the covers at night by flashlight. I wonder sometimes if I should just tell people I’m working on a detective novel.

L. Frank Baum probably had the same feeling when people asked about his work. “Yes, it’s about a girl and her dog who are swept out of Kansas by a tornado into a world filled with witches and flying monkeys.”
My book has little in common with The Wizard of Oz, except for how ridiculous it sounds in a sentence. “It’s about angels, only they’re nothing like the angels you think you know about, and they live on another planet and don’t understand anything about sex.”

I could probably buff that description up a bit for an elevator pitch. Still, your takeaway word would be “weird.” And yet, I plan to sell a lot of these.

A book is so much more than its elevator pitch. This one is about love and loss, the joy of flying, coming of age and, ultimately, the eternal question about why we are here. Yes, I answer that one. Obliquely. 

Perhaps I should say something like, “It is about a young girl discovering the agony and joy of life.” But I wonder if I could resist saying, “And she has wings instead of arms.”