Marian Allen's Blog, page 455
October 31, 2011
Writing With A Net
When it comes to plotter versus pantser, I prefer to wear pants. I know that comes as a great relief to anyone who likes to visualize authors hard at work. –I mean, people like to imagine authors as creative and spontaneous. What did you think I meant?
Anyway, the problem with writing without an outline is that it only works if one's subconscious has a certain amount of logic going for it OR if one is writing something in which the story can descend into chaos and still be acceptable. If anyone knows of a market for that, please let me know, because I could make a fortune.
I plot under compulsion. I would SO much rather just sit down and write whatever situations and dialog come to me, throwing in new characters and complications at random. Maybe I should write serials or soap operas.
Or blog posts.
Yes, there IS a point to all this. ~rummages around~ Yes, here it is:
If you have difficulty finishing your writing projects, think seriously and clearly about why. "I just can't seem to do it," is NOT an acceptable answer. "I don't seem to have time," is NOT acceptable. "Another idea comes up and I get distracted," is NOT acceptable. People finish bigger projects under more difficult circumstances. "I guess I'm just not good enough," is WAY not acceptable! "Not good enough" is a decision, not a reality.
Me, I figured out a long time ago that the reason I wasn't finishing projects I enjoyed was that I needed to do some plotting. Driving around at random might be fun, and you might meet a lot of cool people and see a lot of cool sights, and you might decide you don't ever have to say, "Okay, I've reached my destination" because the journey is the destination– Okay, bad example.
A narrative is an exercise in shaping a part of experience into a logical, self-contained, meaningful, cause-and-effect storyline. When we tell somebody about something that happened to us, we decide where to start and where to end and what details to include. "Julia called me on Monday and wanted to go to that new restaurant." Opening. "So I said sure, but then Raoul called and wanted to meet me for lunch the same day." Complication. "We had been fighting, so I didn't want to say no, but I hadn't seen Julia in forEVver and I didn't have her cell phone number and she'd already left." Dilemma, complication, conflict. "So I told him I'd meet him at that same restaurant." First plot point.
After this, there are so many ways the story could go and so many styles in which it could be told, if you were making it up (which I am), you would have to start making decisions or the story would collapse under the weight of possibilities.
This is the spot at which I want to quit and start something new and shiny. This is why I plot. This is the part I hate. Because this is the point at which all the bright possibilities have to fly away and be somebody else's darlings and I have to choose one for my own (well, maybe with a couple more on the side, in case the first one doesn't work out). How did this technical post turn into a daydream about Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Adam Baldwin? And Nathan Fillion? And Mark Harmon?
I'm starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow, and I don't exactly have an outline, but I do have a three-sentence framework, a basic plotline and some subplots. I still have today to give myself some handholds. Here's hoping I don't lose my grip.
WRITING PROMPT: Write three possible outcomes to the restaurant story I began above.
MA
p.s. Boo!
October 30, 2011
#SampleSunday – Sunday Dinner at Mom's
My precious mother-in-law passed away too many years ago on All Souls Day, November 2, so I'm thinking about her more than usual. I wrote this piece for her. When I showed it to her, she read it and cried a little. She said, "How do you know all of this? How do you know what I do and what I think?" I said, "You told me, a little here and a little there." After a pause, she said, "I didn't think anybody listened."
Folks, if we writers do nothing else, let's do that. Let's be people who listen.
SUNDAY DINNER AT MOM'S
by Marian Allen
The alarm buzzed till it wound itself down. 5:30.
Naomi opened her eyes, not waking so much as focusing. She hadn't slept, or hadn't tasted sleep. She hadn't slept in the full, sweet sense for years. She pressed her lips together, tying knots in her will, making a handhold in it by which to pull herself into another morning.
"Lord Jesus," she said, aloud in her empty bed, "take my hands in thy nail-scarred hands and lead me through this day."
She levered herself onto one elbow; then, with the first of the daily heroisms, sat up.
Her hiss, from the pain in her joints, turned to a grunt of triumph. Someday her will would fail, or her bones, or her nerves, and the bed and the tomb would claim her. Today, she got up.
Her mind flew to the kitchen. It was Sunday, and on Sundays she held open house. Naomi's house was open every day to anybody who showed up on her doorstep, but Sundays were the gatherings. The kids came on Sundays, and their children, and their children's children–three great-grandchildren now, and another on the way.
She had a chicken thawed out. She'd cook it real tender, so it would just slip off the bone and, if her hands felt up to working the rolling pin, she'd make those thin, hard, noodle-y dumplings the kids called "slicks." She had two quarts of green beans from Big Lots, and fresh potatoes from Paul and Edna's garden. She had the heel of a ham to flavor some dried beans… had she remembered to buy corn meal at Krogers? Her memory rummaged in the pantry… Yes, she had; she'd make a pone of cornbread.
She didn't think she could manage a pie, but she'd clipped a cobbler recipe from yesterday's paper; she could put that in the toaster-oven and she wouldn't have to stoop.
Well, that would do, then.
She stood slowly, pushing with night-stiffened knuckles against the top of her bedside table. She stifled a moan at the cramp that knifed through her side, sharp as the scalpel that had gutted her, and shuffled as quickly as she could into the bathroom.
After fifteen years, she thought, a person should get used to something, but I'm not.
She dealt with the colostomy mechanically; detaching, emptying, cleaning, attaching a fresh bag. She treated her own mutilation with an impatience and disgust she would never have shown–would never have felt for–another sufferer.
When she'd been a nurse's aid, at the hospital, she worked with ill and injured infants. They transferred her to the well babies, but she asked them to transfer her back. She came home from the sick baby ward and cried herself out every evening, but what did that matter, when she thought of how their wasted little faces lit up at the sight of her?
Now, Naomi eased herself into a housedress, glad of the big ugly zipper, so easy to work with unresponsive fingers.
She massaged her hands as she went back through the bedroom and into the kitchen, rubbing a little life and suppleness into them.
She clicked on the radio. Just in time. She wouldn't listen to any of those phoney gimmee-gimmee radio evangelists anymore, but this was a real church. First Baptist broadcast its regular Sunday services so people could listen. Her eyes brightened as she joined the opening hymn: "Will the Circle/Be Unbroken…"
More than her health, more than activity, more than all she'd lost and let go, Naomi missed church. She couldn't get to church anymore; couldn't sit in a hard pew, all done up in her good clothes, worrying about that colostomy bag (did it show, did it smell, did it need to be changed?). Plenty of people did, she knew, but she couldn't, just couldn't.
She moved more surely now, taking the chicken from the refrigerator, putting it in the pressure cooker, mixing and rolling the dough for the "slicks."
She frowned as she worked, glancing at the clock. She'd barely have everything done in time, and they'd all start trooping in, picking out of the pots, standing around the kitchen in each others' way, talking to each other about things she didn't care about, not talking to her…
Somebody was sure to ask her why she went to all the trouble, somebody else would actually say she was stupid to do it, and another one would tell her it was a sin to work on Sunday.
What else was she going to do? Sit around alone and stiffen up and rust out, no good to anybody? That wasn't her way; she'd do what she could, as long as she could, and hope The Good Lord had better understanding than Some People.
But, People is what they were. Her People. And you don't love people because they're perfect, you love them because they aren't.
Friends of hers, other widows with children, envied her. They told her so at Seniors' Club, and during phone calls that never seemed to end. They never saw their children. They floated through their days, unanchored by any demands but their own. They were drifting toward the grave.
Naomi didn't drift, she inched: pilloried to life by others' needs. Comfort, advice, food, love–they could get all those from other people. Mom was Home. While she lived, The Family lived. With her death, The Family would break to pieces: "my family," "your family," "We should get our families together sometime like we used to do at Mom's."
But she couldn't stay forever. My God, she was tired!
Almost time. Everything was ready.
Naomi got herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, waiting for the keys in the lock that spared her shuffling to the door. She took two pain pills; not the strong ones that made her goofy, but the over-the-counter ones that just took the edge off. Sundays were too precious to miss.
I'm very happy to say that the family gets together every month, and we often remark how pleased Mrs. Allen would be to know it.
WRITING PROMPT: Does your main character have close and/or extended family? Are they bound together or scattered? If they're bound together, who or what binds them?
MA
October 29, 2011
Posting While I Can
I'm setting this up to post tomorrow (Saturday) because I don't know when or if I'll have internet access. I have it now, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster might not favor me tomorrow. For details, read the Southern Indiana Writers post about the motel where we're staying while attending the fabulous and flawless Magna cum Murder.
See also this post on The Shuttle That Would Not Be, which is still in non-operation.
WRITING PROMPT: A character needs a place to spend the night and has difficulty obtaining it. No fair using Jesus, we already know how that one turned out.
October 28, 2011
Friday Recommends – Cooking, Booking and Learning
So today I'm on the road, but here are some recommendations I'm dropping on you.
First, especially for my gluten-intolerant friends, The Cook and the Cardiologist. Joyce Schneider, the cook, and her husband, the cardiologist, have a content-packed site for healthy–and delicious, that's very important–eating.
Joyce Schneider is, yes, THE Joyce Schneider, the author of "creepy, fun" books STRYKER'S CHILDREN and DARKNESS FALLS. I just ordered both of them and can't wait to read them! I love Twitter, which is where I "met" Joyce. 
Kadijah was born in the USA but now lives in Yemen, where she homeschools her children. At the moment, they're "building" a permaculture village, which I find fascinating. Join her on her Yemini Journey. I am.
I just discovered Holly Lisle, whose books look right up my alley and whose How To Write courses look most interesting. Too late for me to take an 8-week plotting course in preparation for NaNoWriMo this year. Le sigh.
WRITING PROMPT: A character who has, with great difficulty, prepared for something discovers, on the eve of the thing prepared for, a shortcut or assistance.
MA
October 27, 2011
Road Trippin' to Muncie
I leave tomorrow for Magna cum Murder, a wonderful mystery writers-and-readers convention in Muncie, Indiana. This year, for the first time, I'm a registered author (along with several past guests of this blog) and a panelist. This is a dream come true for me, as a long-time attendee of Magna.
Don't panic, if you're thinking of attending and the price is too high–all meals are included, and they're MOST excellent meals, too. Well, unless you can't tolerate gluten; in that case, you'd better get your own breakfast. If I could only go to one convention a year, it would be this one.
Here's a funny thing: The two novels I have out are a fantasy/sf (EEL'S REVERENCE – Click here to read more about EEL'S REVERENCE) and a crime/sf/farce (FORCE OF HABIT – Click here to read more about FORCE OF HABIT), but I ran into an immovable force field in trying to interest people at speculative fiction conventions when they found out the books are only available for Kindle, Nook, Sony and other eReaders.
"I like to hold a BOOK," they said. I'm like, "What do you think you do with an eReader? Strap it to your forehead and absorb the words directly?"
But the folks at Magna all had eReaders last year. The booksellers were all like, "Yeah! Burn 'em to a disk and I'll be glad to see if I can sell 'em!" The Guest of Honor this year, Parnell Hall, wants to be the King of Kindle.
So I'm going to set up tomorrow's post to automatically go up tomorrow while I'm on the road, and I'll set up a Sample Sunday to go up automatically. I hope to post something about the convention on Saturday, but you know how those things go: maybe no internet access, maybe too hung over busy.
See you on the flip side!
WRITING PROMPT: A character confronts an unfamiliar technology.
MA
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October 26, 2011
Falling Off The Turnip Truck
Terry Pratchett's character Granny Weatherwax says that, if you're going to break rules, break 'em good and hard. So when Charlie and I, who are practically vegetarians, fall off the turnip truck, we go straight from blameless herbivores straight to something as fat and salty as possible without actually eating straight salted fat.
I'm talking jowl bacon, people.
I always thought jowl bacon was country food–I mean down-south in the USA country food. My mother, though, was raised in the city (a borderline-southern city, to be sure), and she tells me she was nearly grown before she knew there was such a thing as side meat.
Jowl (rhymes with bowl) bacon is cured and smoked meat from the cheek of a hog. Yes, technically it violates my food taboo against eating heads, but I make an exception for jowl bacon. It's fattier than bacon from the side of the hog (if you can imagine anything fattier than that) and has a very rich taste.
I now find that it's also used in Italy, under the name of guanciale, often an ingredient of carbonara. Italian cooks sometimes mince it and render the fat as the first step in making soup, adding a delicious if unhealthy richness to the broth. Joe, our half-Dalmatian/half-Lab, is always delighted when he smells jowl frying because the grease adds a delicious if unhealthy richness to his dog food, too.
ALSO, I have a post up today at the #amwriting website about plotting AND pantsing called Writing By The Seat Of My Baggy Pants. Hop over and take a gander at it, if you will.
WRITING PROMPT: What food did you grow up eating that people have subsequently expressed distaste for? Did that give you a distaste for it? Invent a character to whom that happens, or who resists it happening, or who rediscovers a fondness for a rejected childhood food.
MA
October 25, 2011
What IS It With GHOSTBUSTERS?
Watched Castle last night. It was their Halloween episode, so they had a ghosty plot. There were numerous references to GHOSTBUSTERS, each of which made me grin. I have songs from the GHOSTBUSTERS movie on my mp3 player and I always crank 'em up when they cycle through.
Now, my favorite Halloween movie is and will always be ARSENIC AND OLD LACE.
I also love HOCUS POCUS. I mean, Bette Midler? Lines like, "I always wanted a child. And now I think I'll have one. ON TOAST!"
But, you know…. And I'm sorry, but I have to say it, GHOSTBUSTERS makes me feeeel go-oo-od!
WRITING PROMPT: What scares your character more, the supernatural or creepy people?
MA
October 24, 2011
Two Good Newses
Leslie R. Lee, he of the fabulous photographs, gave me a 5-star review on FORCE OF HABIT. I invite you to scroll to the bottom of the FOH page at Smashwords and read the whole thing, but here's a bit: "The authoress has gifted her characters with superb dialog. The environment is different, alien but familiar at the same time. A quick and delightful read."
[image error]The second good news is that I got a contract from Stephen Saus, accepting my short story "Evergreen Gaze" into SPEC THE HALLS, the specfic anthology he's putting together to benefit The Heifer Project. "Evergreen Gaze" was originally published online at the now-closed E2K. All the authors are donating their stories and Stephen is donating all his time and effort. Heifer International helps people improve their lives by providing them with cows, bees, chickens or other critters.
So MomGoth is happy dancing today!
WRITING PROMPT: What makes your main character happy dance? Your bad guy?
MA
October 23, 2011
Sample Sunday – Blink
This was originally published by Bound Off Podcast and is still available as an mp3 download there.
Blink
by Marian Allen
Phillida Brown, teacher of 9th-grade English, made a face at her dumpy, rumpled reflection in the classroom window. The parking lot was empty, all the students were tucked dryly into cars or onto buses, and NOW the clouds turned afternoon into evening, and NOW lightning flared so thickly the thunder-rumbles got mixed up with one another. Philly cringed at every flash, every crash.
"Perfect ending to a perfect day." The kids, as if they had picked up energy from the approaching storm, had been barely controllable. Four more weeks, and I'm out of here. Early retirement, here I come. She was more than ready, after twenty frugal maiden years of diagramming sentences and holding the geniuses of literature up to the disinterest of the pitiless young. Twenty years, she had lived for quiet evenings, for summers devoted to her nieces and nephews, for the few kids each year who suddenly lit up inside – transformed, in the blink of an eye, by something in class that struck sparks off their brains.
She stumped into the hall, glad to escape to its fluorescent windowlessness. She snapped off the light and closed the door. The thunder was muffled here, and the lightning was reduced to small, regularly-spaced, square explosions filtered through the little glass panels set in the classrooms' doors.
Safe.
"Afternoon, Phillida."
She jumped. "Edward."
He stepped from the darkened classroom next to hers, looking as crisp and unruffled now as he had in the morning. His tie was still snug, his shirt buttoned, his cuffs buttoned, his jacket buttoned. Not a salt-and-pepper hair out of place. He taught science, and his name was Edward Plaistow. The kids called him "Mister Plastic".
Edward pulled his door shut. "Lovely storm!"
"If you like them."
He raised his eyebrows and – literally – looked down his nose at her. Philly felt, as she still did after years of conversations with him, trapped in one of those dreams where you're in a school you don't know, being asked for homework you haven't done, by a teacher you don't remember.
This is ridiculous! I'm forty-two years old! I'm about to retire! She lifted a defiant face and snapped, "I don't like storms."
"I can see that. I, on the other hand, find them quite bracing."
He had probably never been caught out in a storm as sudden and violent as this one was. He probably didn't know how it felt to be so close to a lightning strike that the metal eyelets on your sneakers scorched the canvas around them.
She had been ten, setting up a picnic on the hill behind the house. Momma had just stepped out onto the porch, carrying a thermos of sweet tea, and Poppa had followed her, bent over the picnic basket, pretending it was almost too heavy to hold. The sky had darkened between the time she left the house and the time they did, and now the wind whipped the blanket from the ground into the nearby oak, scattering plastic plates and flatware in all directions. She jumped up, just as rain broke from the clouds in floods and, with no preliminaries, the oak burst open and one of its roots erupted. One second, she had been laughing. The next, she had been stunned, light-blinded, unable to move. Poppa had run up and dragged her into the house, his bellowing fear for her more harrowing than the strike.
Edward lifted an arm and, astoundingly, burst into song:
"Volcanoes have a splendour that is grim,
And earthquakes only terrify the dolts!
But to him who's scientific,
There is nothing that's terrific
In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts!"
When she only gaped at him, he said, "Now you're supposed to say, 'Yes, in spite of all my meekness,/If I have a little weakness,/It's a passion for a flight of thunderbo-olts!' …Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikado. It's an opera. A comic opera."
How many years had she known him? Fifteen? He had been here when she transferred to be closer to her apartment…. Yes, fifteen years. And she had never known he liked opera. Never known he could – or would – sing.
"I know the piece," she said at last. "I know the song. I just don't agree with it. In spite of all my meekness, if I have a little weakness, it's a hatred for a flight of thunderbolts."
"Ha, ha," he said, but she knew that was the way he actually laughed, as if he had taught himself how by reading it in a book. "Ha, ha. Rather clever, turning it around like that. Very good."
The rumbling outside seemed to hold its breath, but then came a crash so tremendous it seemed to come at them from behind every closed door and down from the ceiling. The lights went out. The hall went black.
"Oh! Oh!" Philly reached for the only possible comfort around: Mister Plastic. Her hands slapped against his lapels and gripped them.
Then his arms were around her, and she was pressed close against him, her head nestled between his shoulder and his lowered face. He smelled of Old Spice after-shave and laundry starch. She felt his breath on her ear.
Light blazed through the windows in the classroom doors, and thunder cracked and rolled. Philly squeaked. Edward snugged her closer, one hand on her head, his palm shielding her ear, other hand on her back, issuing gently reassuring pats.
The next round of thunder, not quite ear-splitting, lagged behind the lightning. The next was tardier and more muffled.
Philly relaxed, though she kept her grip on Edward's lapels. "You sang!"
She felt his chuckle through the warm skin of his throat.
"I don't know what got into me. It must have been the storm."
The emergency lights came on, dim and slightly blue.
Edward cocked his head toward the ceiling. "I think the worst of the electrical storm is past, but it sounds like it's raining buckets."
"We could wait it out in the lobby. Get some milk and cookies from the vending machines. Watch the rain."
So they sat on a bench painted the school colors, hand in hand and side by side. Fused by lightning. Lives changed forever. Just like that.
I love Gilbert & Sullivan, by the way, and THE MIKADO is one of my favorites of their work. Here is a site all about it and here is a video of the song Edward quotes. You're welcome.
WRITING PROMPT: This story came out of an exercise wherein one writes about two characters, one of whom loves the weather/climate and one of whom hates it. So do that.
MA
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October 22, 2011
Saturday Picture
Busy day today, so just a picture and a prompt.
WRITING PROMPT: A character has a busy day, but is stopped and stunned by beauty.
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