Bob Defendi's Blog, page 5

The Eight Thousand Word Wall

We missed recording the audiobook last week. My nose ran and I felt a cold coming on and I feared that if I sleep deprived myself like I do for a normal recording session, my voice would not just be shot, but I'd get fully sick and I'd miss multiple weeks. So this week I came back strong and we recorded for a solid one-and-a-half to two hours.

We got a good session. At the end, we recorded a two-page chapter and I completely fell apart. I hit the wall, hard. An error on every line for the first two or three paragraphs. It was seriously a bridge too far, and we barely finished it, so I learned my limit for a single sitting. If I were to do longer recording sessions, I'd need to take a break at that point, at the very least. Something to clear my mental palette.

I checked when I got home today (yesterday when you read this.) We recorded just over 8,000 words, which works out to be a hair under a tenth of the book. So we didn't quite hit my goal for a session but the progress pleased me a great deal.

I'm grinding on the outline for DbC 6 right now. It's a little a tricky. Not as tricky as 5, which is the hardest thing I've ever plotted and probably ever will plot. But it has its challenges and I'm grinding my way through them. It's the end of a trilogy that started with DbC 4, and I need to get it right. It also fulfills a few promises about the universe in general, and how some of the characters interact with the fact that they live in a game.

On a personal note, I bought a new mattress, a memory foam affair that I hope with decompress my back and release some of the perpetual back pain that I feel. So far, so good. Last night, I went to bed with a hard knot of locked vertebrae in my mid-thoracic. It felt like a fist in my back. In the old days, that would have remained locked until I saw the chiropractor. In this new bed, it loosened up over the night.

The downside is my overall pain levels have gone up while I loosen up, but that's a process I expected. I intend to up my trips to the chiropractor starting this week. Just until we get through that trouble patch where things start moving but they haven't settled into their new configuration.

Well, that's all for this week. Talk to you next.

Working Through the "Stall"

We're in that no man's land of writing. DbC 2 is still five months out from release. DbC has been out for a year, so at this point, there are few surprises on that front. I've turned in DbC 3 and still await a response. DbC 4 sits fallow at the moment. DbC 5 stands at about a quarter done.

We missed about a month of writers' groups in a row, what with conventions and illness and commitments. Then I missed last week due to a new sickness at the house where we meet. This week it falls on my birthday and people have made plans for me.

It can be easy to feel like you're stalled. As if nothing moves forward.

This is where professionalism becomes important. I'll produce less during this time, sure (especially the periods where I'm sick or we're missing group because of my commitments), but during this time, I need to build up a writing buffer for the next time I'm sick or I'm busy but writers' group isn't cancelled. Those weeks will happen.

It's easy to say that it's all about discipline, but it's really about knowing your own limitations. I've personally discovered that my weekly writers' group is my discipline. It's a deadline that I will almost never miss. Without one, I'll go a year and a half without writing. Now how would it be with a publisher? I don't know. Things might be different, but I've known a lot of writers who miss deadlines from publishers. I know that when I started my game company, it was much easier to motivate myself to put in 120 hour weeks at the beginning than after I realized that it would never be a great success. So here I am in this "stall" moment. The writers' group is the cause of part of the feeling of the stall, but that's just an illusion. I'm mid-book and still have some momentum. What would I be doing if I didn't have that writers' group (or another like it)?

I'm not willing to find out.

My mother sent me a quote last night. It was a variation on "It takes ten years to become an overnight success as a writer." For many writers, this has a lot to do with finding out their limitations and their capabilities. Learning what routine works for them and what doesn't. I know that if I discovery write, I'll restart a book three times, like Tolkien. I can't afford that. I've learned that I'm more productive after everyone's gone to sleep, but I can write any time no one's bugging me. I've learned that I'm a night person, but I can retrain myself to any schedule if need be. I've learned that being sick is about the worst thing for my productivity. Being in pain, thankfully, is not that bad (because I spend a lot of time at near-unmanagable levels of pain). I've learned that I can write or record an audiobook on three hours sleep, but I shouldn't edit that way.

But mostly, I've learned that there's a slacker deep inside me, and that I have to work hard to keep him in check. New words are the hardest for me to motivate myself to create (they aren't the hardest when it comes to the actual work), so if I can just keep the pipe full of them, the 120 hour weeks of editing that follow, by necessity, will come naturally.

Did I mention I can write and record audiobooks on three hours sleep?

Audiobook Back Underway

We took a week off for Easter. Families. You know how it is. Today (well, yesterday when you read this), we started recording again in earnest. Discovered I'd forgotten to record the dedication of the book and that I'd probably better add a reader's note about ellipsis because I do things with ellipsis in book two that I'll just need to read aloud in the audio version. Then we launched into recording.

I talked about this the first time, but it's been a while. We use "bump and roll" editing, where we correct mistakes as I make them. Basically, if I flub a line, we back up right there and I take the line again so that when he starts editing, he's starting with one more or less good performance and just processing the finished sound and taking out weird, incidental noises. (I bet I make that sound way easier than it is).

So my judge of how well I'm doing is how often I've stopped momentum with one of my mistakes, and I can tell you right now the number one thing that causes me to make a mistake. It's acting. If I make a mistake, it's ten times more likely to be in dialog or in more impassioned POV narrative than a wind-up introduction. I think I went two or three pages in chapter one without a single mistake, and every one of those involved me voice acting dialog. When you're acting, you speed up a little. Your emotional brain connects and begins to anticipate words more, and those aren't always the words actually on the page. Often you find yourself halfway through a sentence and realize it isn't the sentence written. At least I do.

But for how we did? We hit our stride. We probably did better today than we did most days in book 1. I feel like we're getting better at this, and I had feared we'd have to learn how to do it all over again.

Anyway, we had a bit of a run up to get started again, but we recorded one fifteenth of the book today. I'm happy with the progress. I'll try to get a full ten percent next time. If I can hit that every week, I'll know that my sleep Sunday mornings are numbered.

And also, I won't have to read Fox in Sox two times a day every damn day like the producer makes me do while recording. I hate that damned book. Hate it. Hate it.

On Mass Effect and the Purpose of Humor

You probably think that I'm going to comment on humor in the new Mass Effect game, Mass Effect Andromeda. For that to be true, however, the game would have to actually have a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it does not. I have laughed out loud once in the first 24 hours of the game. In the past games, I would have at least chuckled ten times by now.

Why? Well, it's pretty obvious the authors just aren't that funny. The characters still banter. Their conversations are at least moderately clever, but they don't come off the mark into being witty. My friend Dan Willis put it best. He says that the game has spectacular story, but only workman writing.

No, instead I was just going to point out that I've been playing Andromeda since Wed night. I'll probably do two playthroughs before I do a new draft of DbC 4. That assumes the first playthrough doesn't take too long. In the first few days, I've played 24 hours and 8+ multiplay matches. I hope to finish the first world, post-prologue, tonight (last night when this posts.) I love these games and I didn't really start in time to see the bad animations, except in youtube videos, which seem exaggerated. Compared to Mass Effect 3, they are amazing. I spent the first hour and a half of ME3 nauseated by the uncanny valley.

But back to humor. Why do we need it? Well, at its core, I believe humor is an interrupted defense mechanism. It's what happens when our brain's natural defenses short circuit. The horror mechanism. The fight/flight mechanism. This is why in almost all jokes, someone gets hurt. We're taking the human mind's normal revulsion to that topic and subverting it.

And this leads us to the most useful aspect of humor. Humor tears down our brains' normal defenses and allows us to accept information that we'd normally reject. Jokes allow us to discuss topics that venture into the taboo. So much humor is transgressive because it can be. Humor, by its nature, pushes back the borders of what the listener considers inappropriate. A lot of comedians use this just as a mechanism of the humor itself. Transgression triggers our humor reflex in an of itself. I've heard black comedians say that certain offensive words make a joke six percent funnier, and they are probably right. There's a certain "I can't believe they said that" factor in any offensive joke.

Of course, this is a mixed bag, because everyone has a different idea about what's too transgressive. My mother's favorite joke contains a shocking amount to implied spousal abuse. My grandfather used the f-word as punctuation, but comics like Eddie Murphy and George Carlin could offend him with their swearing (not in the seven dirty words routine, ironically).

But here's the practical use: a joke can drift into areas where a civil conversation can never go. People are willing to laugh at things that they can't discuss rationally. Politics. Social issues. Touchy themes. You still can't go far with these things, but you can address them.

I remember a moment in The West Wing where flag burning finally came up. I braced myself for a giant political argument on free speech. Instead, Bartlet just said, "Is this really a problem? Really? Do we have a flag burning epidemic going on that needs to be brought before the president?"

In another show, I would have thought that a dodge, but The West Wing usually tackled those issues head on. This time, however, they took the time to use the scene as a giant comic drop on everyone arguing about the issue, and it did it in such a charming way that I, who had very strong views on the issue at the time, just chuckled and felt foolish about myself. So foolish that I've rarely thought about it since, outside the context of that scene.

However, humor used as a polemic must be funny. It must be well done. If it's attacking cherished beliefs, it should be subtle and light handed. (If it's attacking ridiculousness, just go to town). The fact remains, the funnier you are, the more you can get away with. If your jokes aren't landing, you can't pull this off. If your jokes kill, you can get away with a lot. If you only care about preaching to the choir, you can get away with more than if you're actually trying to reach across to people who disagree with you, but if that's the case, are you just pandering? Then again, there's something to be said for punching Hitler, as it were.

If you really are trying to reach across an ideological gap, this kind of delicate work requires a lot of test reads. You likely need to get a disparity of viewpoints in your readers. If you attack someone's belief's and you don't want them to be offended, you damn well better have them over-represented in your readers, and you need to listen hard to their advice. I've never written a story that I've taken that far, but if I did, I'd probably do multiple drafts with multiple sets of fresh readers, guiding me until you got the tone perfect because it would have to be perfect.

I personally go for a lighter hand, using humor to deliver a payload of theme that the reader might not notice at first. It's not typically a shocking theme, but the humor acts a delivery mechanism used to implant it more deeply in the reader's mind than it would have landed without the humor. Probably because the most shocking political message I have to deliver is something along the lines of, "Hey. Let's not fight so much."

So, yeah. Shocking.

On Critiques and Humor

Here's the thing about humor. Everyone thinks they are funny. It's one of the oldest truths in comedy. Some people even are. A few can be funny reliably, but even then, there's a big jump between that and writing humor.

Some of it comes with experience and some can be trained. I posted on joke forms a few weeks back, after LTUE. I stole that from Howard Tayler.

The problem with critiques, in general, is to know what to take from them. Most good critiquers no not to be prescriptive when critiquing. They explain their problems as best they can and allow you to fix them. All of that goes out the window with humor. Even the most careful critiquer can't help but try to get a joke into a manuscript. I know. I've done it. It's one of the oldest traditions in humor, older than writers rooms, probably older than vaudeville.

The problem is that most people are really, really bad at it. I receive many joke suggestions in my critiqued manuscripts and its amazing just how few I can actually use. I suspect most of them aren't serious suggestions, they are just the critiquer feeling the need to interact with the text in a humorous way, and I take that as a compliment. But sometimes they get quite prescriptive. "You need to put X joke here." "Make a joke about Y." "How did you not make a joke about Z?"

You need to be aware of this if you try to write humor because it's the biggest pitfall before you. Almost every one of these jokes will be terrible, and by the time you get them, you might have lost all perspective on your own jokes. But trust me. They will be the most obvious joke possible, and the obvious joke, by definition, is almost never funny. The heart of humor is the unexpected. The very fact that the critiquer expected the joke is your biggest warning that you can't make that joke. So take careful note of these suggestions, and then do the opposite.

There is another thing you need to know about critiques and humor, and that's the fact that your own humor will seem stale to as you revise. The most important critiques you can get, early on, are which joke are actually funny. I don't know how many times my editor or copyeditor hasn't gotten a joke in the 6th or 7th draft that killed with everyone else. If I hadn't known those jokes killed, I would have cut them. Jokes are subjective, and you need to know if a joke is popular, because by that 7th draft, when they tell you it isn't funny you will believe them. It will have stopped being funny to you about three months prior. You won't even be able to remember when it was funny. Whenever that happens, I just put a comment to the effect of "That joke is a crowd favorite" and my editing people, who are smart enough to know that humor is subjective, just shrug and say, "OK" and move on.

Of course all of this goes out the door if you have a really funny person critiquing your manuscript, or, like I do, a professional humorist. In that case I recommend stealing their jokes, making them your own, and never looking back.

Because that's actually the oldest tradition in comedy.

Death by Cliché 3 Turned In, and a New Rule

First the good news. Today (well, yesterday when you read this), in a sleep-blurred haze, I turned in Death by Cliché 3. So that's done. The last draft had a bit of a rocky edit, and it's because of a joke I made in the chapter quotes.

You see in one of the chapters I needed a quote and so I had the narrator mention that he'd cut a superfluous chapter, and that should make it easier for me to hit the total number of chapters in the outline, which was 70. (This will almost certainly not be the same number of chapters when it releases). Then, as a joke, I have you hit Chapter 69, then 69.1, then 69.1.1, then 69.1.1.1, etc, until I get to the end of the climax and I move on to 70. A little meta joke. I didn't think much of it.

Well both my beta readers came back confused. The ending made no sense. Major plot points were missing. They thought character were dead who walked around, interacting with people at the end. I just couldn't figure it out. The setup at the end is tricky because the main characters never completely figure out what is happening in the novel, so there's a lot on the reader to keep straight. I can't just have a character think about how it's all working to remind them. Still, it seemed to be more than tricky. It seemed to be a train wreck.

Then I got to chapter 69 in their notes.

I keep all my chapters in separate word files until I combine them for submission. With chapter 69, however, I put them all together because I was afraid the numbering would make it hard to keep track of the read-order when you had them up on a computer screen. Then I noticed that no one had any notes after chapter 69 itself. They'd just arrived at that first pagebreak and stopped. They hadn't paged down and discovered 69.1, not to mention all the rest. So no wonder they were confused. They missed ALL of the resolution and most of the action of the climax.

I got a good new scene out of it trying to re-explain the theme, though, so it wasn't a total waste of mind-numbing panic.

On top of that, throughout all of the last two weeks, I've had pneumonia. This isn't terribly new, I'm a bit prone to it. It runs in my family: my father got pneumonia once a year. I used to get pneumonia after every con. Literally, 100% of the time. Then I learned that if I took an extra day off afterward, I stopped getting pneumonia. I still get con crud once in a while, but even that's rare, and when it comes, it rarely turns into pneumonia anymore.

Not after FanX. FanX put me down hard. It wasn't until the pnuemonia had me operating at about 40 lost IQ points that I finally realized what was going on.

See, the weeks before FanX I'd been in full work mode. I'd promised Wymore a critique and I had to turn in DbC3. I did my standard "crunch mode" 100-120 hour weeks. With five hours sleep a night. I pushed and pushed and pushed. It wasn't until I got sick that I realized the whole point in the extra day of rest was so that I didn't have to fight of convention sicknesses with a compromised immune system. Driving myself to the point of exhaustion before the con is a great way to get really, really sick.

So now I have a new rule. Not only do I take an extra day off after the con, but I have to go into the con well-rested. If I'm in crunch mode before the con, I probably need to suspend it at least a few days before the con itself. Because I like many things in this world.

Breathing is in the top five.

With DbC 3 turned in and myself recovered, I'll enter a bit more of a relaxed time. I'll play a couple games, then get into a full edit of DbC 4. Probably when I finish Mass Effect: Andromeda. In the meantime, I'll probably work on my novel Kill dash Nine, but at a relaxed rate, maybe a chapter every couple days.

Well, that's all. TTFN.

Second Sick Week

I am still sick. While the cold is gone I get headaches and dizziness when I have to move. Or speak. Or, you know, think. So no witty blog posts from me. All my brain power goes to the work I haven't been able to shirk. Sorry. Hopefully next week.

Sick Week

I have this tendency to get pneumonia. My father came down with a case every year. I get it every con if I don't take an extra day off after and once in a while if I do and I'm not careful. Post FanX, my lungs have started to fill and I'm in full on rest-so-it-doesn't-become-infected-and-become-a-real-case mode.

So I'm taking a sick week. It will take most of the week to recover. I'm still working on DbC3 but I've curtailed all other projects, including this blog. Instead, I'll steal a Schlock Mercenary Comic for your enjoyment.

www.schlockmercenary.com

DbC 3 again, and More Villains

First of all, this weekend is FanX. My schedule has already changed slightly, so if you're planning on attending events, I suggest getting the phone app. It updates as they make changes and tracks your schedule for you. You can also set alerts to remind you when you have an upcoming event on your schedule. I live by it.

Also, if you want to be my assistant at FanX this year, you can apply. I'll be picking from submissions this week. It isn't a paid position, but it's light work. :) You can find out how by checking out the World's Greatest Comic Book Podcast on Tuesday.

Now on to business. I've started the rewrite of DbC 3. The front end and the back end will take the most work, which is pretty much the inverse of my usual books. Typically, it's the section between the Act Two Twist and the beginning of the climax where I flail about without a purpose. So that's a pleasant change. Anyway, I haven't made it very far yet, as I had to put a critique for Wymore to bed first, but I started Saturday and have officially hit the first section where two bits need to be rewritten and combined for brevity. So. Yay?

Okay, so that's out of the way. Last week I spoke about villains, but I only really discussed the more down-to-earth villains. The kind of villains you could have a beer with. Even Darth Vader had to get out of that armor from time to time and really did everything because he desperately feared being alone. But what do you do about the big evil's, like Sauron. Or the Devil. The evils which are more elemental forces than people?

The only thing I don't like about The Lord of the Rings is the treatment of Sauron. I need something to sink my teeth into with a villain. With the big, elemental evils, you might not be able to give them and sympathetic point of view, like you might with a more human villain. That doesn't mean that their POV can't be interesting.

I start with brilliant dialog. If I'm writing a ten thousand-year-old villain, he will always be the wittiest person in any room. His dialog will captivate. More importantly, it will show a point of view that is slightly outside our way of thinking. Above everything we know. Beyond us.

Let me give you an example from a book I think unlikely to get published. In it the villain is an eleven-thousand-year-old fallen angel. I wanted to play with all the fallen angel tropes, so he spends a great deal of time talking. Endlessly taunting the main character as they fight. Now there are plans within plans withing plans here, and the main character finds out later that there's a tactical reason for every word he says, but early in the conversation, hero calls him out on it. The fallen angel tells the main character that all of those stories where the villain taunts the hero... every one, since the beginning of time...they've all been about him. The hero mentions that in the stories the hero always wins, and the fallen angel says, "That's because they're stories."

It's in that moment that the main character realizes that he's not just fighting a fallen angel, but an archetype of evil so iconic that he's warped the way humanity has communicated for as long as humanity has used narrative to comfort themselves. He also realizes that while in the stories the hero always uses the villain's monologue to beat him, in reality, the fallen angel indulges himself because he can. In reality, he's never lost. The monologue, a terrible cliche in most cases, has become a terrifying reminder of just how powerful the villain actually is.

But I also wanted to give him a slightly broken and ironic point of view, so in one of his monologues, he told a story. In this world, they had a war in heaven, but in it, the fallen angels had a moment of victory, and this fallen angel was the one who forced his way into God's presence and made their demands. He tells how all God had to do at that point was apologize, and all would have been forgiven, even then. If God had just admitted, even after all that pain and blood, that he'd just been wrong, that the fallen angels would have forgiven him and the breach could have been healed. But he wouldn't. God stood, too stubborn and too proud. And the world remained as it did to this day.

I never state it outright, but it should be obvious to any reader that the opposite was, of course true. That God is silent throughout this entire story because it is He who waits. Quietly. With forgiveness. Waits ready to be asked. Did the fallen angel deserve grace? Of course not, but as the book states later, that's the point of grace. It wouldn't be grace if we deserved it. Watching this broken creature rail and accuse God of his very own crime doesn't actually build sympathy, but it adds a bit richer texture to a character who could appear entirely two-dimensional otherwise.

You might not be able to actually make a character like this sympathetic. You can, however, add enough color to make them an interesting read.

DbC 3 and 5. Also, Villains.

Last week I turned in my first chapters of DbC 5 into writer's group. It was a bit of a hot mess, like first submissions often are, but it was a sufficiently entertaining hot mess. I'm happy with the response. We will push forward.

Friday I spent about three and a half hours in a car so that I could spend two hours doing RPG panels at SaltCon. It was fun. Their panel track is still in its infancy, so attendance was light. I think the administrator worried about that, but I've been doing this too long to worry about stuff like that. I've done 7 pm Valentine's Evening panels before. You make do.

After that came recovery and a fair number of pain pills. On Sunday if finally burned out on Blood Bowl II, which means that It's time I get DbC 3 in hand. I don't have an actual deadline on this one, nor do I have a huge pile of first draft notes to enter, so my goal is just to work on it an hour or more each night. It will take a little more restructuring than the second draft did. I want to cut about ten percent from the beginning, but we'll hit that at a good, solid pace and once I'm past that and they leave on their mission, the book should fly by.

I didn't want to just talk about news this time and this week's events don't present a natural theme, so I thought I'd borrow the theme from CQ's monthly topic: Villains.

A common problem we see in movies is that the villain is more interesting in than the hero. This is a bit easier to pull off in movies than in the written word, I believe, because of the lack of POV writing. Cracked has pointed it out several times, at least on their podcast. The reason the villain is so interesting in movies is that his motivation doesn't need to be well-reasoned. In many movies, if not most, if you actually examine things from the villain's side, things fall apart very quickly.

But in a novel, we tend to have large portions from the villain's POV. Their motivations and their plans need to hold together better than in a movie, and because of that, the villains in books fall flat a lot more often than in films. In movies they can be visually flamboyant and over the top. In a book, they have to make sense, and they are often petty and cruel, psychologically damaged, and rife with unlikeable traits that are unpleasant to experience from their point of view.

I think my view on villains was shaped by doing too much Shakespeare in college. I know it crystalized when watching The Rock with a friend with whom I'd done said Shakespeare. This friend pointed out that the movie was so compelling because we wanted Ed Harris's character to win as much as we wanted the heroes to win, just like in most Shakespeare plays. I realized at that point that I'd been doing the same thing in my own writing.

Usually, I do one of two things with the villain. Either I give them a noble goal and a believable reason they don't believe they can achieve it through noble means, or I put them in a much more evil organization and make them the underdog, so that the reader begins to root for them (because we always root for the underdog). It's not uncommon for me to receive notes early in a book where new readers express distress as two characters move toward an inevitable clash and the reader is upset that either of them will die.

This is, of course, exactly the response I'm going for. That tension adds all sorts of drama to story, and how it will play out in the end will keep a reader on the edge of their seat throughout good portions of a book. It can also make them hate you, of course. Use it with caution.

Of course, this takes you back to the problem you have in movies: making your hero interesting enough to face off against your villain. That is harder. Heroes can be as boring as bag of doorknobs.

Generic, industrial doorknobs. The bag is nothing special either.