Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 17

A beginner’s mind at 47

I’m not going to lie, 47 sometimes feels pretty old. Joints are creaky, I can’t jump as high or run as fast as I used to, and eating a whole pizza in one sitting is far behind me. (I probably shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place, but yes, there was a time when I could eat a whole pizza, usually thick crust, and not feel even the least bit sluggish the next day. That was probably the only good thing about my twenties, however.)

The one time I don’t feel old, though, is when I’m writing. That’s not to say that writing makes me feel young. But it does make me feel like a beginner.

This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to the writers I know. A scroll through the Facebook or Twitter timelines (which I don’t do very often and definitely don’t encourage, especially during election season, unless you want to find reasons to end friendships) shows a lot of my writer friends struggling with characters, writing themselves out of corners, or just plain trying to figure out what their title is. (Hi, ’Nathan.)

I think this is a good thing.

Why? Well, confirmation bias, for one thing. I experience it, therefore I look for it; I find it, therefore it’s legit. To me, anyway. This is just my way of reminding that this is one (older) guy rambling into his keyboard, so take it all with that in mind.

So why do I think it helps me? Beginner’s mind is what keeps me writing. Even when it’s eye-wateringly difficult, approaching a book or a story is never the same drudgery that working a 9-to-5 job, even the best one, can be. (I’ve experienced both.) The challenge is always shifting with every new project. You do learn how to write a book, eventually; but with each new one, you’re learning how to write that book. Right now, I’m learning how to write a sequel, and between you and me? Not easy. But it’s definitely interesting, which is what keeps me doing it.

For another year, at least.

They can’t steal it if you give it away

This is a post about pirates. No, not pirates of the “arr matey” and “shiver me timbers” and walking the plank variety. These are the digital kind. I’ll explain.

It probably seems pretty egocentric of me to have a Google alert set up for my name, right? Not so fast, though. First of all, I don’t think Google’s algorithms for this tool are very good; most of the time, they don’t even pick up the posts on my website. But anyway, the real reason I have it set up is for things like this:

This is a link to a site online where you can download a story of mine for free. This story was for sale through Untreed Reads for a number of years, and this past year we quietly took it down along with two other stories. It’s been years since they were first published, and the market for one-off short stories is giving way to one-off novellas or long-form essays (Kindle Singles are an example), and I figured, well, I’ve made my money off those, maybe I’ll do something with them later.

And then I got that notice.

Now, usually, if it’s one of my novels that pops up, I send a takedown notice (which sounds like a wrestling move, right?) in line with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, owner of the copyright, good-faith belief my rights are being infringed, yada yada. Usually it works, and sometimes I get back a mealymouthed “well that’s not actually on our servers so we can’t do anything about it” yeah kiss my grits. But in this case, for this short story, you know what? Here.

I’ve been meaning to start learning how to format stories and books for epub format, and this was as good an excuse as any. (By the way, I figured it out from this post by Jane Friedman, in case you’re interested. I was using Calibre before, but the Sigil user interface is much friendlier and requires less time in code view.) Here it is in PDF, if that’s more your speed. Of course, I haven’t had time to think about creating cover art for it, so all you get is the story, but maybe later I’ll see what I can do. Also worth bearing in mind is that I wrote this in 2012. I think my writing has changed a little since then, but I still think it’s a fun story. It’s somewhat Christmas related, so if you want to be truly seasonal, save it until December.

Suck it, pirates.

How revision looks from here

As you know, I’ve been revising the as-yet-unnamed sequel to The Unwanted. Actually, it’s gone through several different potential names but I’m still not happy with them. I’ve thought of a Wrath of X title but a) would that give away too much? and also b) Khaaaaaaaan! So maybe something else.

Wait, where was I? Revising, right. I’m about at the halfway point in the novel right now, and this is a section that I was having a bit of trouble with while I was writing the first draft, so I wrote it in script format. It’s a trick I read about on Chuck Wendig’s blog so I wanted to try it out, and it really helped me maintain momentum. I knew it would mean extra work in revision, and sure enough, I was right.

But what I’m doing in this section is reminiscent of what I’ve done in every other section up to this point. That is, I’m cutting huge chunks and rewriting a lot more wholesale. If you’re in revision mode, I thought it might be helpful to see some of what I’ve done as an example.

Here’s a passage of script from the first draft—click to enlarge (and no, I don’t think it gives away any more than you’d be able to figure out from the book jacket):

Now here’s the rewrite (it’s a little long):

Mrs. Rose dropped us off at Stratton’s garage. Before she left, she leaned out her window and beckoned me back to her SUV.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to wait?”

I shook my head. “We’re just picking up Dad’s car and heading out.”

She frowned. “Somehow, I doubt it’ll be as straightforward as that.”

I turned to stare at the garage entrance. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” I tried to smile when I turned back to her. “But what can you do, right?”

She looked over her sunglasses. “What you can do is be careful. And if you run into any trouble please, please call us.”

She reached out the window and touched my cheek. “And tell my daughter to call her mother if she wants to stay in the will.”

Winking, she drew back her hand and rolled up the window. I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight, then faced the building again.

Carlos and Artemis were standing off to the side with Dakota and our bags. Now, Carlos edged up to my side.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

From outside, the garage looked dark and cave-like. Inside, though, it was bright and—not what I would expect for a garage—clean. There were three bays, each two cars deep, and they were all full. There were pits in the floor under each car so mechanics could work on whatever you worked on under a car. (I don’t know, mufflers and stuff? So not a mechanic here.) Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, though you could only hear that every so often when the banging of tools and that vweep vweep noise of pneumatic thingies died down.

The gray tile floor was slick and clean—I wondered how long it stayed that way—as I walked in and started peering over and under the cars, looking for Mr. Stratton. It’s weird how you can recognize a person just by seeing them from the wait down (and I know yes that sounds weird and kind of pervy but shut up), but from the jeans and the workboots of the man leaning sideways under the open hood of a car in the back, I could tell it was Billy’s dad.

“Mr. Stratton?”

Okay, not such a good idea to practically sneak up on a guy who’s into a car practically up to his waist. He banged his head on the hood.

“Ow! God damn—”

“Sorry, sorry!” I rushed forward. “Are you okay?”

Rubbing his head with one hand, Mr. Stratton looked up at me and dropped the wrench he was holding. On my foot.

Yeah, guess I deserved that, right?

I hadn’t even stopped hopping around, trying not to let my now-throbbing foot touch the ground, when Mr. Stratton hugged me hard.

“Of everyone who could’ve walked in here,” he said, “I never expected to see you again.”

“Me neither,” I said.

There’s not a lot left from that first draft, is there? As I’ve been going along, I’ve been cutting text in five or six-hundred-word swaths; more, in some cases. At one point, I realized most of chapter 4 was tedious introspection (pro tip: most introspection is tedious), so I cut it. The whole chapter. Boom. Gone.

The same problem came back in chapter 8, so I cut just about everything except two paragraphs, combined it with chapter 9, and now what was chapter 11 in the first draft is chapter 9 in the second draft and, well, let’s just say I’m glad word-processing programs exist to make keeping track of all these changes so much easier.

There was a lot of stuff that it seems I put down on the page just because I had to get it clear in my own head, but it was—let’s not mince words—dead boring when I reread it. And if the writer’s bored reading it, imagine how the reader would feel. So cut it. Still need something in that empty space? Then write something different. Figure out what would make it more complicated for your characters, and that’ll probably be more interesting for the reader too.

I have no idea if I’ve managed to do that, and I know that this section will probably change further before I’m completely satisfied with it. What I know for sure is that I don’t miss the parts I cut.

Writing prompt: You’re the coyote

Some people talk to their therapists, or their bartenders. I talk to the people who cut my hair. When I was getting a trim earlier this week, we got on the topic of tattoos. She had lots, and I only have a couple. I want another one, a larger one, but I want it to be something meaningful to me, and I haven’t quite figured out what.

“I have this recurring dream, though,” I told her.

Snip snip, comb, tug. “What’s your dream?”

“Well, I’m in this desert landscape, and I’m following a coyote.

(Awesome coyote photo courtesy of Josh Felise, Unslpash)

“And he goes into this house that’s out here in the middle of nowhere, and it’s kind of surreal because it has openings for windows but no windows, you know?”

“No windows. Weird. What next?”

“Well anyway, he goes inside and I follow him in, and he goes into a bedroom where there’s a bed, and he crawls underneath the covers like he’s hiding. But when I walk in, I can see the lump under the covers that’s him, so I say, ‘You know I can see you.’ And he says, ‘I know.’” (Because if a coyote talks in your dream, that just makes logical sense, right?—ed.)

“And that’s when I wake up. So I’ve been thinking a tattoo of a coyote, but I want to figure out what he stands for first.”

“Naw,” she said. “You’re the coyote.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. And the desert, that’s so surreal and barren, you know? Have you ever been to the desert?”

“I lived there for four years when I was growing up.”

“Maybe there’s something you still need from the desert. Maybe you should go back.”

She kept cutting and combing, and I said, “Maybe I should.”

So, there’s your writing prompt, which is kind of a mad-libs type prompt: take an animal, a landscape, and a building—they can be of any kind—and write something incorporating all three. Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can’t figure out what my coyote tattoo should look like.

Stay on the horse

I’m always impressed by artists in one medium who can excel in another medium as well. This recording by Philip Glass (Spotify link) has got me thinking about playing the piano again.

I’m not sure why I’m drawn to this so particularly. I’m pretty sure it’s in a minor key, and I’ve always felt more like a minor than a major; there’s something sort of conditional about the minor keys, like they’re getting away with something and they’re trying to keep you guessing which way they’re going to go next.

Sounds kind of like writing, to me.

I don’t have access to a piano at the moment, but in grad school I got to play nearly every day on a pretty nice grand piano (that would quickly go out of tune because people would leave the windows near it open all night; cold and humidity? Not a good combination for pianos). I took lessons from my friend Anita, a wonderful PhD music education student, and I miss that (and her, and lots of people from grad school). At that time, I knew writers who were musicians, architects who were painters, and musicians and scientists who were painters and musicians and poets, and I pretty much envied them all—and at the same time felt like this one-trick pony who could sort of string words together and make them fake sense.

The thing I’ve realized is I’m not a one-trick pony, though. I’ve played piano off and on since I was about eight; it’s just that I never stuck with it or had the consistent opportunity to do so (pianos are, after all, a) big, and b) expensive). Likewise, I was able to get out of gym classes in high school and keep taking art instead, something I continued to do when I got to college where I took drawing and ceramics classes. I had a drawing instructor ask me once, “Why aren’t you an art major?” And I had to stop and think about it. Why wasn’t I?

In the end, I think it was arbitrary. If you want to learn something, if you want to get good at it, you’ve got to keep doing it. I didn’t start out making decent ceramics or drawing recognizable faces, but I stuck with it long enough to become competent. Same with the piano. When I was eight, I played long enough to reach the point where I’d start playing the teacher accompaniment, because her part was always the most fun. But then I’d stop for a while—in this case, “a while” being seven years—and I’d lose that competence.

True confession: I don’t know how to ride a horse, so maybe I shouldn’t be using this analogy. I’ve only been on a horse once that I can remember. They’re beautiful animals, and I’d love to know how to ride. But I’d have to spend a lot of time on horseback, I think, to accomplish that.

I haven’t even stuck with writing consistently since I started. There were years in my twenties, when I was just out of college and trying to make a living, where I didn’t sit down at the keyboard or pick up the pen to work on stories. It is, however, the thing I’ve stuck with the most consistently, for the longest time, throughout my life. (The other things I’ve stuck with most consistently are running, Star Trek, and beer, but at least two of those don’t count, and the other one I do mostly out of adrenaline and spite.) It’s the horse I’ve ridden the longest.

If you want to get good at something, stay on the horse.

Upcoming story in Foglifter

If you follow me on the Twitter or the Facebook or the Instagram, you might have heard about this already, but I figured it was worth mentioning again here. I’ve got a story coming out in Issue Two of Foglifter Journal. It’s a relatively new litmag published in San Francisco and dedicated to writing by queer writers. My story, “Shepherd,” is a little queer and a little strange, and features (surprise, surprise!) a dog. I’ll share a snippet of it a little closer to publication date, but in the meantime, go check out the magazine.

And hey, check out the list of contributors for Issue Two. Look who I’m just below: Jewelle Gomez! I read that and thought, “OMG, I’m going to be in the same magazine as Jewelle Gomez? Am I worthy?” Not only that, but five (FIVE) writers I met when I was a Lambda fellow. It’s gonna be like old home week in print!

What I’ve been reading lately

I’ve heard of some writers—I’ll be honest, I can’t remember their names at the moment, so this might be one of those “My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it’s pretty serious” kind of things.

Wait, where was I? Oh, right. Some writers don’t like to read heavily when they’re deep in their own writing. Me, I don’t think I could function if I stopped reading for that long. I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction recently because, surprise, that’s also what I like writing a lot. Here are the three that have captivated me the most recently:

Binti

This novella by Nnedi Okorafor won a Hugo Award this year. (If you’re a fan of science fiction and fantasy, you may have heard some of the controversy surrounding a bunch of frightened straight white guys who have been outraged that speculative fiction by people who are—gasp!—writers of color have been getting published and actually winning awards.) Part of me read it simply to be contrarian—I like tweaking the sensibilities of straight white guys sometimes, who mistake equity for discrimination. Here’s the thing, though: it’s just a really darn good story. It’s about a girl who’s the first of the Himba people to get a place at Oomza University, the best institution of higher learning in the galaxy. On her journey there, things take a bit of a left turn at Albuquerque, and she suddenly finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict that has nothing to do with her, but she might be the only person who can stop it before more bloodshed occurs. It’s edge-of-your-seat reading that’s also beautifully written.

Neuromancer

The William Gibson novel that is credited with starting the cyberpunk movement may be a little bit dated in terms of some of its technology—it was published in 1984, after all—but it’s absolutely prescient when it comes to our always connected society, and it’s also a gripping story of data thieves, sentient AIs, and a shady and reclusive business clan overseeing their affairs from orbit, and often cryogenic sleep. Think a smarter version of The Matrix about twenty years before anyone thought of The Matrix.

勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace)

This science fiction story by John Chu, I choose to read as a love story, really. It’s between Jake, a cyborg—whom a peace treaty now classifies as a weapon—and Tyler, a substantially modified human, both at odds, one of them very likely for his own survival and that of his kind. It’s tense and flirtatious and the game Go plays an important part in it. I’ve never played, but after reading this, I’d be interested in trying.

So, what are you reading?

Do the difficult thing

I’ve been thinking a lot about revision lately, mainly because I’m in the middle of a big one. When I do my revising, I always start with a hard copy. This is probably old-fashioned—really, I’m not a Luddite; no, I mean it, stop laughing—but it serves a purpose, I’ve discovered. First, I think it allows me to step back from the actual process of writing. When it’s literally on paper, I treat it differently than I do when the words are on screen. You’d think I’d approach them with a greater sense of finality, right? I mean, it’s concrete when it’s on paper.

Instead, I end up doing things like this:

I can see the bigger picture when it’s on the page. Literally, I spread out several pages at a time and can see more of the whole story than I can in the rectangle of text viewable at any given time on the screen.

But something else happens when I transcribe those handwritten edits into the file. I rethink, second-guess, mull things over, undo my changes combine chapters, and sometimes, I’ll delete entire pages at one time. That one revision step, then, turns into two or three or, sometimes, more. So, for example, while I’ve made revision notes on the manuscript up to chapter eight, I’m also working on transcribing chapter four, after deleting half of chapter three with a plan to cut down chapter four and combine the two. Because what I noticed as I was revising is that the pace needs to pick up, a lot.

I don’t know if I would have recognized that if I was strictly working on the screen. Maybe I would have, who knows? All I know is, this works for me. Because it’s the way I make myself do the hard revisions. The things where you’re looking beyond just moving a sentence, deleting a dialogue tag, or fixing a continuity error.

And sometimes, something will come at you right out of left field—or maybe right field, depending. It’s been a while since I played baseball in Little League. Anyway, my point is, as I’ve been working my way through the edits I’ve made so far, I hit on an idea for my main character that would change how much he knows (or rather, how much he doesn’t know) at the start of the book. It would really put him in the soup, which would be a lot more interesting, I think. However, it would also put me in the soup, as it would require rewriting everything I’ve already revised.

I’m going to at least try it, because I can’t know for sure if it’ll work until I see how it works out on paper. If it makes a big difference with the first couple chapters, I’ll know it’s worth going to the effort the rest of the way through the book. And I think it’ll pay off when I get to the middle, which is always the trickiest part of a book for me.

Wish me luck.

The curse of the plot bunnies

When it rains, it pours, I’m telling you. And not in the bad way, either. Ever heard the phrase “plot bunnies”? It’s a story idea that refuses to go away until it’s written.

Here’s what I mean:

I’m working on revising the sequel to The Unwanted. (No, it still doesn’t have a title. I’m hoping that by the time I reach the end, I’ll have thought of one, otherwise I may just put a bunch of random words in a hat and start drawing them out.) At the moment it’s eighteen chapters long, and I’m just about finished editing the sixth chapter. This doesn’t exactly mean that I’m a third of the way through the novel; there are broad narrative stretches in later chapters where I’ve scattered random bracketed notes that say helpful things like [MORE HERE] and [FIX THIS]. I think by the time I reach chapter thirteen, I’ll be pulling out my hair. (And since I’m growing it long again to donate, pulling it out’ll be so much easier! But anyway.)

I’m also going through the novel I wrote in grad school and discovering some problems with it. Mainly, it’s got a muddled middle. It needs a dramatic kick in the pants, plotwise. So I’ve been reverse engineering the outline.

I’m sure that the combination of these two priorities is why every other day it seems like I get a new idea for a short story.

Now, I love short stories. I love reading them and I love writing them. The Hugo Awards (big science fiction awards ceremony, in case you’re not familiar) were this weekend, and the list of winners made me add several short stories to my to-read list. And they’ll probably inspire me to think up more story ideas. Short stories are tough to write, but by nature of their shorter length, oftentimes they don’t take as long to write as novels. (That’s not always true, though. One short story I finished this year took me almost three years to write.) Every time I sit down to work on the novel, there’s a voice in the back of my head that says, “You know, if you worked on (insert title of appropriate story), you could finish it and submit it to that magazine this month.”

That’s the other nice thing about short stories: the potential for more immediate gratification by publication. (Although that’s by no means a sure thing, either. Some stories I wrote ten years ago still haven’t been published.)

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m actively working on something that has my brain hitting on all cylinders as far as plot goes, so I’m coming up with more ideas than I can work on at once. The ideas are multiplying like rabbits. Hence, plot bunnies.

This proliferation of ideas is great and all, but it doesn’t much help for maintaining focus. And focus is difficult for me at the best of times. I’m easily distracted by the next bright, shiny idea; the novelty of a new story is much more enticing than the hard work of going back to the story that’s already written (and rewritten maybe ten times already) and figuring out why it’s not quite working yet.

All good writing is rewriting, really.

I know if I change course and work on one of them for a while, though, I’m going to lose the thread of what I’m working on. So, for the moment, they get written down as a sentence in my notebook, and they’ll have to wait until later. Because the novel won’t stand for being ignored. And there’s a lot [MORE] that I need to [FIX].

(Psst. I have an e-mail newsletter. You should totally sign up for it. I might surprise you with stuff you don’t get to see here, or anywhere, for that matter.)

Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.

If you ask anyone who knows me (especially my partner, the poor guy), you’ll know that when someone starts to tell me a story I’ve already heard, I start nodding, sometimes in a bit of annoyance (I’m an awful person) and will quickly rattle off the end of the story they’re telling me. Of course, this gives them ample opportunity (not to mention justification) to say to me, “Oh yeah? Well, you repeat yourself all the time!” And they’re probably right.

Okay, they’re totally right.

I worry about repeating myself. Like, a lot. Any time I sit down to write something like this blog post, I’ll get to a point where I pause and ask, “Wait, have I written about this already?” This leads to an extended period of scrolling through old blog entries, journal files, and whatnot to see if whatever topic I’m writing about has come up before. This is its own form of procrastination, I suppose.

And yet, I love to rewatch old movies more times than is either necessary or productive. (Thankfully, iTunes does not keep track of the number of times I’ve watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) I’ve reread stories countless times as well (“Wants” by Grace Paley is high up there, not just because I often use it as an example in my classes). So why am I so irked when others repeat stories, and why does it worry me when I do it myself?

One of the things my high school art teacher said has stuck with me over more years than I care to count. I was getting into watercolors and spent a lot of time working in that medium, and she encouraged my progress. “Once you’ve done a hundred or so,” she said, “you start to get it.”

A hundred? I wondered. How long was that going to take me?

It turns out, it took me most of the rest of that year, and while I’m not sure I “got it,” I did get better. Then I started working in pastels and pretty much fell in love with those, although I don’t do any artwork these days. Still, I think her point has some bearing here, and since this week has been all about the Olympics on the news, I also recall hearing how swimmers like Michael Phelps will swim 40,000 meters in a single week of practice.

A year of watercolors, it turns out, is not really that much time. I write and revise stories, set them aside and revise them again, abandon them and then write a different story on the same theme that turns out to have more in common with that previous story than just a topic. In a workshop one of my peers said of a manuscript I submitted that it had the trifecta of love, longing, and loss, the common themes of my work. (I decided not to take this as a criticism.) Even if the characters, settings, and situations change, are they the same stories?

Repetition is practice. The stories we tell each other, on the second or third or thirtieth telling, evolve a little each time. Maybe we get closer to the truth—not of the events as they actually happened, but of their significance to us.

So if I’ve written about practice and repetition before, maybe it’s because I’m still trying to figure them out. And I’m going to work on being a little less exasperated when someone tells me the same story twice. Instead, I’ll see if I can notice how the story changes as they retell it. Maybe they’re getting closer to their truth.