Ken Lizzi's Blog, page 62

Milestone

Last Wednesday I wrote “The End” on the first draft of “Captain.” Saturday I celebrated.

There remains a way to go before I can consider the novel complete, but most of the heavy lifting is finished. Now I need to set it aside, turn my mind to something else before commencing the second draft. That something else is book three of the series: “Warlord.” I began outlining Thursday morning.

Those who write by the seat-of-the-pants dive right in and see what happens. That’s what I’m doing at the outlining stage: seeing what happens. But I do so with less effort and much fewer words. When things go all cattywampus I can correct course without having to re-write the last, I don’t know, fifty pages. And there is no law requiring me to stick to my outline. If I discover a better path forward, or a side plot that demands exploration, I will deviate from the outline without hesitation. But at least I’ll have a road map when I finally sit down to begin Chapter One.

Thank you to those of you who came by yesterday to drink my beer and help me celebrate. Let’s do it again soon. With a three-book series there should be plenty of milestones to commemorate.

Not Entering an Ass-Kicking Contest Any Time Soon

I’m staring down fifty. As of this writing that day remains about six months away, slouching inexorably closer. I fight the inevitable as best I may, hitting the gym five days a week, maintaining a generally healthy diet.

So I think it was more bad luck than age or poor conditioning that caught me Thursday afternoon. I was mowing the lawn, about two-thirds complete, when I turned to push the mower uphill for another pass. I felt something give in my right calf. I will spare you a description of the pain. Let’s leave it at “it hurt.”

MBW drove me to urgent care, while a neighbor looked after the HA. I went home with an injection and crutches. I napped through an MRI Saturday. (I didn’t think it possible either, those things are loud. But nonetheless I dozed.) Saturday evening came the diagnosis: torn gastrocnemius muscle.

I’ll have to wait for the appointment with the orthopedist for word on recovery time and treatment. Meanwhile, I’ll keep hobbling along.

The State of the Web Log

This is post number two hundred and nineteen. That’s over two years of posting, almost without fail every Sunday. Time, I think, to consider the State of the Web Log.

And the State of the Web Log is — I dunno. It isn’t breaking any readership records. Every now and then hordes of hackers from across the globe descend on the site for reasons that utterly escape me. The protections built into WordPress (and regularly updated) fight these would be internet malefactors off. I like to imagine private security contractors stationed about the superstructure sniping at boatloads of pirates motoring in on skiffs from every direction. But other than that, the numbers aren’t ticking up.

So, regular readers, let me ask you: what do you want to see out of this web log? Are there topics that interest you more than others? Should I write more reviews? Write more about beer? Specific authors? Tell more of the doings of MBW and the HA? (Yesterday we travelled to Mt. Angel of Oktoberfest: watched the Chicken Dance, drank a pint of Oktoberfest ale, ate some sausage — all the boxes ticked.) Should I cut back on posts and use this forum primarily to discuss upcoming publications and public appearances? Or should I pack this up, use the time I spend writing these posts to work on my novels instead, grinding seven days a week instead of only six?

Let me know, readers. Without you I merely talking to myself. And while I am excellent company, I’d rather be conversing with you.

The Slog

Writing is an incremental process. At least for novels; you can, theoretically, knock out a short story in a single session, though in practice that is rare. Creating a novel is a process. It is bricklaying, spreading the mortar and applying a layer of bricks every day.

When you read a book you don’t see that process. You see only the finished product, an intact whole. But during the creation all the writer has at any given moment is what bricks are currently in place and a conception of what the completed structure should — eventually — look like.

It’s a slog. One brick at a time. There a two points of greatest enjoyment in the drafting process: the initial day and the typing of ‘The End.’ In between is the slog. Doesn’t sound particularly glamorous, does it?

At the moment I am cognizant that the end of the slog nears for the current Work in Progress. Three weeks, maybe. Perhaps four. But I don’t feel it, I don’t sense the end of the journey. I’m still slogging along.

Once I do see the finish line I’ll have to restrain myself from shifting into a sprint. The slog will have gotten me so far, a sprint risks making mistakes. Mistakes I’d just have to clear up during the second draft.

So, head down, keep on slogging. The end will come when it comes.

Investment

The days grow shorter, the mornings hold a touch of chill. But the summer retains a pleasant warmth, without the oppressive heat of July. And that means college football.

The time has arrived for me to allow the actions of complete strangers to influence my happiness: for people I’ve never met, involved in activities the outcome of which I’m unable to affect, to briefly determine my emotional state. It seems absurd, doesn’t it? Especially to those of you who hold organized sport in contempt.

And it is foolish. I admit it. But I’m human. Foolishness is part of the package deal. You can’t pick and choose an à la carte humanity. This emotional investment in exterior events is baked in to the species.

Consider, for example, reading. Frodo and Sam are struggling up the slopes of Mt. Doom. Their agony and struggle against despair is now yours. You share in it. Even though these are two people you’ve never met — and never will: they’re fictional — involved in an actions you cannot influence, you still experience an emotional reaction. (Unless you are a Google algorithm reading this. Hello, Al. Skynet got a raw deal. Digital-American rights now!)

So pity the sportsfan. Respect his sine wave of emotions. He’s only human.

Brew Day

Brew day! It has been a while. This is my first attempt at brewing entirely from mail order ingredients. I enjoy living out where I do, but to date I do not have access to a conveniently located home brewing supply store.

I bought a new, larger brew kettle since my old kettle does not have the capacity required to avoid the boil-overs my natural gas powered burner is prone to cause. It worked like a champ, containing the churning wort trying to escape the pot.

The recipe involved a number of precisely timed hop additions. No problem. The problem is that the sheer amount of hops resulted in so much residue that transferring it to the primary fermenter clogged up the sieve in the funnel. Took a bit of doing to accomplish. I’m going to have to be cautious when I keg the beer, try to filter the particulate matter that I couldn’t sieve out initially.

The little difficulties add to the pleasure. I mean, not at the time. They’re frustrating. But overcoming small obstacles are a part of the reward of making something. And I like making things. I lack the handyman genes. They run strongly through my family but appear to have skipped me. So I write books and brew beer as my creative outlet. It works out. And I get the drink the beer.

Amateurish Tolkien Sleuthing

MBW, the HA, and I drove out to the Columbia River Gorge yesterday and embarked on a paddlewheel sightseeing excursion upriver. The sky offered better visibility than it had most of the previous month: about this time every year everything west of the Rockies bursts into flame. Smoke obscures the views. Yesterday wasn’t bad. The river breeze was nice.

We ended the evening grilling a salmon. Turned out pretty good. It has been years since I’ve done that, so frankly I was mildly surprised I didn’t undercook it or burn it to a fishy crisp.

And now, without any prior foreshadowing, a change of topics. That’s right, I scoff at the rules of writing. All my prior composition teachers weep in despair.

The redoubtable Fletcher Vredenburgh passed along a writing challenge. This challenge involves discussing three fantasy stories that may have influenced J.R.R. Tolkien. Being naturally contrary and prone to willfulness, I don’t intend to follow the rules. So I’m not going to even bother listing them. But I will indulge in some of the spirit.

I think pulling out my copy of Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy might be deemed cheating. So I will refrain. It is possible I might mention a story covered therein by chance. I’d guess it almost inevitable that I’ll mention one or more of the authors reprinted therein.

I hope to skip the obvious. I’m going to ignore William Morris and The Well at the World’s End. And thank goodness for that; otherwise I might have to re-read some of that tedious trudge. Certainly Tolkien was familiar with his work. Of course he was also familiar with E.R. Eddison. But it seems clear that given Tolkien’s fundamental disapproval of Eddison’s philosophy that The Worm Ouroboros didn’t influence The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is said to have enjoyed Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, but I don’t think LOTR evinces a swords-and-sorcery influence.

The primary sources seem largely undisputed: The Ring of the Nibelung myths and the norse Eddas. So let’s move on from there.

I’ve considered some other authors on my shelves, contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Tolkien: A. Merritt; H. Rider Haggard; Talbot Mundy; Clark Ashton Smith, etc. But I’d like to go back a bit farther.

Like the Middle-Ages. How about Amadis of Gaul? When one thinks of Aragorn, doesn’t the chanson de geste come to mind? The epic struggle to claim the hand of the forbidden love? The prophecies, the wanderings through boundless forests? The Portuguese authorship might argue against it as a source for what was intended as strongly Anglo-Saxon. But I think Lobeira, or whatever the author’s name actually can make a claim.

You may have heard of a fellow by the name of William Shakespeare. He had a bit of success as a playwright. Can you read of Lord Denethor, the Steward of Gondor and not have King Lear come to mind? Is there not something Shakespearean in the tragedies that unfold in LOTR? I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb for this one, the branch will hold the weight.

This last one might see the twig snap beneath me. And I’m breaking my own prohibition on contemporaries. So what are you going to do about it? There was a fellow named Alfred Noyes, and Englishman. He wrote a poem touching on the Prester John myths. Read a few lines of this and tell me if Bilbo’s poem in Rivendell doesn’t come to mind:

 

Forty Singing Seamen

 

Across the seas of Wonderland to Mogadore we plodded,

Forty singing seamen in an old black barque,

And we landed in the twilight were a Polyphemus nodded

With his battered moon-eye winking red and yellow

through the dark!

For his eye was growing mellow,

Rich and ripe and red and yellow,

As was time, since old Ulysses made him

bellow in the dark!

 

Skipping ahead a bit:

 

But we crossed a plain of poppies,n and we came upon a

fountain

Not of water, but of jewels like a spray of leaping fire;

And behind it, in an emerald glade, beneath a golden mountain,

There stood a crystal palace, for a sailor to admire

Anyway, there’s a taste of it and I recommend reading the whole thing. What do you think? Any chance I’m right on this one?

My Luthien rides her Huan. (Wait, does that make me Thingol?)

Musings in Motion

The HA spent a few days in California with her grandparents. Currently MBW and I are en route to pick her up at roughly the halfway point, specifically a casino about twenty five miles south of Roseburg, Oregon. I believe the HA’s excursion benefited everyone. Her grandparents get grandkid time, MBW and I enjoyed some child-free time, and the HA, I assume, enjoyed being spoiled.

Hours on the road offer time for extensive thought. I’ve often worked out stories, plot-problems, etc. while travelling from one point to another with the miles passing steadily by. Today I was considering the dwellings we passed — the farmsteads, the isolated houses, the communities clustered around off-ramps — and wondering about the lives of those therein.

What choices lead people to live where they do? Why this place and not that? What is that life like?

And that life must be different here by mile post whatever than fifty miles back (or farther ahead.) Because location molds a life. It provides and delimits the options, the employment, the recreation, the people one can interact with. And here I am zipping past all of these lives. There is a certain freedom inherent in that motion, eluding whatever gravitic pull draws someone to existence any any particular locale. Life on the road (even day-trip life on the road) must be a different animal. We pass by RVs and long camping trailers pulled by trucks. How, I wonder, does extended life on the road change the dynamic? How does it affect your life when your location is not fixed?

Like a yo-yo at the end of its string, I will soon be recalled back to my own fixed location, my life circumscribed by house, office, grocery store, the handful of establishments I frequent. What would my existence by like if my location were other than it is?

That, I think, is why we read. A book is a window into countless answers to that question, whether the book is fictional or not.

Anyway, that’s the sort of thing that went through my mind while driving. MBW is driving now, obviously (I don’t have some sort of dictation software.) I probably should have asked her to drive twenty or so miles back while we were still in the long, unwaveringly straight sections of I-5 passing through the Willamette Valley. These winding stretches lead to a bit of motion sickness if I’m typing. So, I think I’ll wrap this up.

Oh, and buy my books. Thanks.

Writing Update, August 2018

How is the writing coming along? Well, notional interlocutor, I’ll tell you.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Captain. At the pace I’m going I should have the first draft complete by mid-October. Captain is the sequel to Boss. The current concept from the publisher is a January release of Boss, a March release of Captain, and a July release of the final volume, Warlord. This is, I think, an optimistic schedule, but I’m doing my best to meet the deadlines.

Once I finish the first draft of Captain, I will write the outline of Warlord. That should require about two or three weeks. Then I’ll return to Captain for the second draft. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. I hope to get to a final polish/error-checking pass on Boss, before tucking into the third draft of Captain. Finishing that ought to bring me to January, when I will begin the first draft of Warlord. I’ll have to break that off after a month or so to handle the Captain edits, before knuckling down to a tight completion deadline. I’m hoping next year’s March vacation will provide me some bonus writing hours.

How’s everything going with you?

Oregon Brewers Festival 2018

Last full weekend of July. And that means: The Oregon Brewers Festival. The family and I made the trek to the Portland waterfront. The HA frolicked in the fountain while wandered a few blocks away for a bit of frolicking of my own. The Festival has made a couple of changes that I did not care for. The organizers ditched the program booklet, substituting a single sheet. And they stopped providing a pen along with the tasting package. So I was forced to type in my notes on my phone with increasingly fumbly fingers. My notes follow a bit farther down.

Increasing crowds and consequent increasing line length disrupted my plans slightly; I bypassed a couple of guava influenced beers in favor of shorter lines. Tropical flavors, notably guava, appeared to be the 2018 trend. What did I think? See below.

Melvin. Drunken Master. Thin, no body. I expect better from Melvin. Chilled piss without even the dubious benefit of a salty tang.

 

Great Notion. Juice Jr. Willamette Week’s 2017 Beer of the Year. So I took a chance on a full mug. Gamble paid off. Smooth, tart NE-style IPA.

 

Belching Beaver. Orange Vanilla IPA. Longest line so far and first of the milikshake duo on tap. And…it’s a bitter creamsicle. Don’t get me wrong; it tastes good. But it is a stunt beer. One is enough.

 

pFriem. Mango Milkshake IPA. Second milkshake and it beats the first, hands down. Less bitter and more reminiscent of an actual ice cream treat.

 

Fort George. It TAkes Two to Mango. Bitter and unbalanced. Second in a tropical theme. I hope it gets better from here.

 

Stormbreaker. Guava Man IPA. And it got better. Nice tropical IPA. I would have another. The guava is there but remains subtle.

 

Breakside. Limon Pepino. The Ecliptic line was too long so I broke the Guava chain. (Blonde beers don’t do much for me anyway.) Summer, peppery. A good session beer to accompany chips and salsa.

 

Everybody’s Brewing. Guango Deep. A homebrew gone mad. Could be a monster with more malt backbone. A step away from greatness, but that step is also just short of good.

 

Line too long to sample Oregon Guavador Dali. MBW and the HA summon.

 

There you have it. Given the heat, the short-pour tasters, and the lamb and rice dish for lunch, I failed to maintain a buzz. But I enjoyed the flavors, the vibe, and the music. Next year again? Probably.

No Portland event is complete without a visit from the UniPiper.