Paul Briggs's Blog, page 3

Fresh New Clichés and an Ideal Dream Cast

I’m trying to cut back on the use of clichés in my writing. It’s harder than you might think, because it means that instead of using a familiar simile, metaphor or general turn of phrase, I keep having to invent entirely new ones that might not work or might just sound silly. “I don’t want to say cool as a cucumber. Maybe cool as a… rock in a stream? Rock in a streambed? Rock in a riverbed? Marbled floor?” Or as another example:

Having [spoiler] see you naked was only slightly worse than having the dog see you naked. He was harmless. [Spoiler], now… that opened up a whole new crate of creepy.

Too much alliteration? (And yes, it’s still a climate fiction novel. People can’t talk about the weather all the time, you know.)

On a completely unrelated note, every new(ish) author dreams of seeing his or her books made into movies, although when you see some of the movie versions, you wonder why. Sometimes when I’m writing the Locksmith Trilogy, I sort of picture Uma Thurman in the role of Lee Smith. There aren’t a lot of stars who really look the way I picture the characters in Altered Seasons, but sometimes I like to fantasize about a perfect, ultimate, never-gonna-happen-but-wouldn’t-it-be-awesome dream cast.

For the role of Isabel Bradshaw… Jennifer Lawrence. She doesn’t exactly look the part, but she’s got the beauty-without-frailty quality that Isabel possesses, plus the whole no-nonsense demeanor. She looks like if she volunteered to carry a man out of an ice crevasse on her shoulders, the audience wouldn’t laugh. A lot of actresses couldn’t pull that off.

For the role of Sandra Symcox… Ellen Page. Again, she doesn’t quite fit the description, but she’s close enough — young and small, but with the gravitas of a much older woman.
She can be vulnerable or terrifying as the role demands (if you don’t believe me, watch Hard Candy, if you dare) and I think she could convey a genius-level intelligence.

For the role of Carolyn Camberg… Melissa McCarthy. Also not a perfect fit, but comic actors can surprise you — and Carrie does have a comic streak to her. Since her daughter Thel goes from 11 at the beginning of the novel to 18 at the end, I have no idea who should play her.

For the role of Henry Pratt… Ed Harris. Again, not a perfect fit, but he’s in the right age range and can be both commanding and cultured.

For the role of Walter Yuschak… Michael Chiklis. Finally, somebody who really does look the part.

For the role of Jerome Ross… Evan Peters. I thought at first it should be Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, but he has too much built-in cool. This role needs to go to somebody who has to make an effort.

For the role of Holbrooke Morgan… I’m kind of split between Tilda Swinton and Nicole Kidman. Although it would be awesome if Lady Gaga got the part.

For the role of John Lyman Darling… maybe Costas Mandylor. I actually pictured him as looking like Aaron Eckhart, but that’s too big a star for this role.

For the role of Robert Quillen… maybe Ian Bliss. I pictured him as looking kind of like Bane from the Matrix sequels, but older, with glasses and with less air of menace.

Random Thoughts the Week Before the Bay to Ocean Conference

About a week ago, Altered Seasons passed the 110,000-word mark in length. According to this web site, that makes it officially an epic novel. It also makes it harder to keep my Twitter followers informed on its progress, because I’ve decided to stop posting updates on its word count — it occurs to me, after all, that “This book is gonna be SO FREAKING LONG!!!” might not be the best way to whet the public’s appetite. (I’m planning on it being about 150,000 words. Given the scope of the work, it really should be a lot longer.)

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Recently on Twitter, Stephen King issued a bit of advice: Never use the phrases "for a long moment" or "for some reason."

Going through Altered Seasons, I was mortified to discover that the phrase “for a long moment” appeared about a dozen times. Sometimes my characters just needed that long moment to think of something new to say (a lot of them are introverts) and sometimes they needed it to absorb what they just heard. You’ll notice the phrase in this snippet, but in the draft I’m working on now, I’ve embellished it to “a long, awkward moment.” Not a big change, but I’ve rewritten most of the other “long moments” (not all — let’s be reasonable here) to something else: “Hunter stared into his brownie for a few seconds.” “For the space of several breaths, she just stood there, desperate for anything to say.”

One place where I hadn’t used the phrase “for a long moment” was this line from Year Seven: “The clock registered the passage of four or five seconds while Quillen was taking that in.” The reason I hadn’t used the line there was that even then, I sensed that this particular occasion called for a new phrase, something potent and descriptive. (Not to give anything away, but this is a memorable moment in the story.)

As for the phrase "for some reason," it turns out I very rarely use it, and then only from the POV of a very confused character. (I'm the author. If I don't know what's going on and why, who does?)

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Yes, I promise I am also working on Locksmith’s War.

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Shout-out to the awesome people at Salt Water Media. I ordered eleven copies of my books for the conference bookstore and had them delivered to my door in two days.

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Circumstances too complicated to go into here require me to jump back and forth between using a mouse and using a touchpad, and man, there is no comparison at all. I love the feeling of taking hold of the mouse again. It’s like getting my hands back after I’ve learned to use hooks. Hooks made by an American Revolution-era blacksmith. Who was drunk as all hell when he made them.

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So you think being a writer means you don’t have to be good at math? While writing Altered Seasons, I had to calculate what percentage of Earth’s surface is north of 60°N. More recently, I had to make the following calculation — given a radioactive isotope with a half-life of eight days (meaning it’s half gone in eight days, three-quarters gone in 16 days, seven-eighths gone in 24 days, etc.) how much of it is gone in four days? After thinking about it for a while, I decided the number I was looking for was 1-1/√2. Any good calculator can tell me how much that is as a percentage, but I’ve never heard of a calculator that could tell me that was the number I was looking for in the first place.

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I miss phone books. The kind you could leaf through when you were looking for a good surname for your character. Search engines just aren’t the same.

This Skunk May Never Die, But Rises Again Harder and Stronger

So what is this “Dead Skunk” thing I mentioned last week?

It’s a timeline on alternatehistory.com, done partly in the form of narrative and partly in the form of false documents — history books and so on. The point of divergence from our own history (the PoD, as it’s known in AH) is that during the British invasion of Louisiana on December 23, 1814, Major General John Keane is briefly held up by a skunk in his path, which is immediately killed by an owl swooping down on it. This illustration of the military effectiveness of striking quickly and out of nowhere inspires him to move up his plans for the invasion of New Orleans considerably.

He attacks that very day, before Andrew Jackson has finished preparing. Realizing he’s losing, Jackson decides to torch the city before he goes (he’s that kind of guy) and the Louisiana militia turns against him and kills him. So now the British are holding New Orleans, not knowing the Treaty of Ghent is about to be signed. They advance further up the river, but are stopped at Natchez. By the time they finally get word of peace, the New Orleanians don’t want them to leave, and have declared Louisiana an independent republic under British protection.

In London, Lord Liverpool, realizing that things have taken a turn for the strange and there may be some benefit in it for Britain, decides to pull the Duke of Wellington out of Vienna and send him to America to determine what the situation is and if it’s worth tearing up the new treaty to gain advantage. Just in case he decides on war, the British also pull out the little army Wellington has in the Low Countries and send it with him.

Then all hell breaks loose. Actually, it’s just Napoleon escaping from Elba, but hell pretty much follows with him, since the army that in our timeline (IOTL, as we say) was supposed to stop him at Waterloo is now en route to the wrong freaking side of the ocean…

So how does it end? Well, the trouble with TLs is, they’re like history — they don’t really end. They keep going until the writer either picks a stopping place or gets tired. I’m thinking of stopping at 1859, but by then I’ll probably have plenty of ideas for a sequel.

Every five years (as the TL progresses) I write a synopsis of the state of the world. The one for 1829 is so long I had to split it into two parts. They’ll give you an idea of where things stand in this crazy world.

Don't Bother Looking for a Common Theme in Any of This

First of all, that book that just appeared in the list of books, Catch My Breath, coming out in September, is not being written by me. I assume it's by a different Paul Briggs and there was some sort of confusion in getting it into the Goodreads system. (I'm also not the Australian boxer Paul "The Hurricane" Briggs, more's the pity.)

I had a couple of moments of serendipity while reading Argentum by Debbie Manber Kupfer. Early on in the book, there was a reference to the traditional Passover song “Had Gadya” and various elements in the song such as the goat and cat. Not being Jewish, I never would have known about this song if I hadn’t been reading Unsong. Later, there was a reference to the old PG Tips tea advertisements featuring chimpanzees, which I (not being British) only know about from an episode of “The Hard Sell,” Matthew Harris’s wry commentary on advertising. This is one of the few times in my life that my bizarre and eclectic tastes have actually come in handy. (Incidentally, the third book in Kupfer’s series is coming out in March. I recommend you start with Book 1.)

I haven't been posting much, because I’m not doing much lately besides writing. I’m making some progress on Altered Seasons, although I’m still behind where I meant to be. My new goal is to have Year Four finished by the end of January, along with the first ten chapters of Locksmith’s War. That second book is turning out to be slower going than I thought, partly because I’ve had to rearrange some stuff and partly because Chapter 7 is deep, deep dark. We’re talking “Detention with Dolores,” Bolvangar, Tartarus dark. The kind where it stops being fun, where it makes you uncomfortable to write, where you keep thinking “what the hell did this character ever do to me?” Writers like to joke about all the horrible things we put our poor heroes through, but when you’re bringing a strong and likable character close to the breaking point with psychological torture, it isn’t funny.

On a happier note, The Dead Skunk (what the hell was I thinking when I picked that title?) has been nominated for a Turtledove award. I also have a new computer, which has Apple Pages on it instead of Word. I wouldn’t say Pages is a better program than Word, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to do everything I need to do. (And for the things I really do need Word for — proofreading and such — my old computer still functions well enough.)

Here are some more books to check out while waiting for me to finish something.

All the While (I mentioned this one before)
Dark Fire
Dark Humanity (coming out tomorrow)
The Other Inheritance (This one has a new cover, which looks so good I'm including it below.)

Today's Theme: People Hiding In Other People's Houses

Happy accidents play a certain role in writing. While working on Locksmith’s War, I tried to type the words “hiding in the attic” (a phrase which the character in question was texting) and it came out “hiding in the attack.” I realized this was exactly the sort of mistake a phone’s autocorrect would make, so I threw it in and made it part of the story. (That’s why Chapter 6 is called “Hiding in the Attack.”)

Something similar happened while I was trying to write a scene in Altered Seasons. This was how I intended it to go:

“Anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
“So you’d tell the Nazis where to find Anne Frank?”
Gus actually stepped back a pace at this point. His eyes went wide.
“Believe it or not, there are some philosophers who’d say you should,” said Pratt. “They’d say it’s your job to tell the truth, and what other people do with that information is their responsibility, not yours. You know why’d they say that? Because they’re really bad philosophers!”

Every single time I rehearsed the second line in my mind, it came out “So you’d tell the Nazis where to find Ayn Rand?” Which doesn’t make any sense, but which would be the perfect verbal screwup for an overbearing man trying to score points in a debate, especially if he were making an effort to intimidate and overawe the other party while at the same time giving the corpse of Immanuel Kant a good kick in the junk.

In other news, I’m doing a promotion of Locksmith’s Closet this week, and both it and Locksmith’s Journeys are down to 99¢. Results so far have been less than impressive, but it’s early. The weird thing is that I’m selling as many copies of Journeys as Closet, which is the opposite of what happened during the last promotion, when I was actually trying to sell Journeys and ended up mostly selling Closet. Now maybe I’m bringing the existence of Journeys to the attention of people who read Closet and liked it but didn’t know it had a sequel, but why would you click on an ad for a book you’ve already bought?

Finally, here’s another very short Reenie the Giant Christmas story. This one’s called “Venison.” (And I just now realized how bad that sounds. Don’t worry. No reindeer were harmed in the making of this story.)

Books I'm Reading

So with all this writing I’m doing, what am I reading? Here are some of the things:

A Bell for Adano, by John Hersey
I looked for this book after meeting the author’s son at a social function. It takes place in World War II, in 1943 when the Italian campaign is just beginning, and it’s about an Italian-American major who’s put in charge of a small coastal town in Sicily. It won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

A Bell for Adano doesn’t go into the political events of the time — the fall of Mussolini’s government, the German invasion and so on. I think this is because Adano is meant to be such a sleepy and out-of-the-way place. In spite of this, the novel is more of a glimpse of a particular place and time than a study in characters. I’ve read some criticism that the Italian characters in the novel come off as a little stereotyped, but it reminded me a lot of Bill Mauldin’s descriptions of Italy and its people in Up Front. Remember, at this point Italy had been through twenty years of fascist dictatorship. Under fascism, dignity is not a survival trait.

The ending is a little unsatisfying. I kind of want to know what happened to the major after he was sent to Algiers.


Losing Nuka, by Kayla Howarth

Her name is Nuka
She lives on the second floor
She’s got those purple eyes
Yes, I think you’ve fought her before…
Sorry, couldn’t resist. One of these days I’m going to do a proper review of Kayla Howarth’s Defective series. She’s taken the old X-Men concept of the superhero as discriminated-against minority and reworked it completely. Her “Immunes” or “Defectives” don’t wear costumes, don’t have secret identities, and above all, don’t try to use their powers to defend the people who fear and resent them. They’re just trying to get by, and their powers are not as much help as you might think. (Really, if you had the ability to microwave things with your hands, how much would it actually improve your life?)

Losing Nuka is the first book in the Litmus series, the sequel series to the Defective trilogy. Nuka James goes in search of her birth mother and manages to find herself in an underground ring where people with various powers engage in MMA fighting. It ends on a cliffhanger, so now I’m going to have to buy the sequel, Protecting William. (I, of course, would never do anything like that to my readers…)


Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville

I’m actually reading this for my alternate history writing project, "The Dead Skunk." It was written at about the right time, and although the Skunkverse is a very different place — a U.S. that lost the War of 1812, a Britain under Queen Charlotte I, a France under a post-Bonaparte Regency Council until Napoleon II comes of age, an already-united Italy under Joachim Murat — there are still some commonalities.

This is the hardest book to read, because I can hardly turn a page that doesn’t have a concept on it that makes me want to stop and chew it over for a while. The ruminations on the effect that even a small change in estate law (primogeniture vs. partible inheritance) can have on families, the state and society are an example of this.

And then there’s everything else on my Kindle that I’m in various stages of reading — Jasper Barlowe’s The Red Crow, Greg Chapman’s Hollow House, Ethan Edgewood’s The Roads We Take, Thomas Hollyday’s Slave Graves, Kate Miller’s Karma Patrol, Nerys Wheatley’s Twenty-Five Percent trilogy, and many, many more.

NaNoWriMo: I Did It

This is the fourth year I've done National Novel Writing Month, but the first year I actually succeeded. (Unfortunately, I can't personalize the certificate with my computer stuck in safe mode.)



What I can do is the things you can't do when you're writing at a blinding pace, like edit chapters in a way that might shorten them, or plan out the parts of the book you're still a little vague on. Not that I'm going to be completely inactive — I also plan to finish Year Four of Altered Seasons by the end of this year, and there's a large "Dead Skunk" post I have to finish as well.

I have two more things to share with you. First, a short story, Brenner's Christmas Tree Farm, the first of the Reenie the Giant Christmas stories. It's very short — just over a thousand words long, as Reenie looks back on a little job she once had.

Second, an announcement from a fellow author. Gina Azzi has revealed the cover of her forthcoming book All the While , Book 3 of the Senior Semester Series, coming January 17.

Consumed with grief for her twin brother Adrian’s death, Maura Rodriguez is spinning out of control. To cope with Adrian’s loss, she numbs her pain with bottles of vodka and sex with random men.
Harboring guilt over his best friend Adrian’s death, Zack Huntington is yearning for a past that no longer exists. Reaching out to the familiarity and comfort an ex-girlfriend offers, Zack aims to recreate what once was but can never be again.
When their worlds collide while running on the trails along Boathouse Row, Maura and Zack find comfort in each other and in the memory of their shared connection—Adrian.
An unlikely friendship brimming with undeniable attraction blossoms into an unexpected romance. While Maura and Zack struggle to heal, to forgive, to accept, they also learn how to let go and allow themselves to fall in love, a truth they’ve both known but resisted all the while.

NaNoWriMo: To the Finish Line

Getting down to the wire. 45,000 words written. Two more days to go. It's going to be tough, but I can do this.

Here's something I posted on Facebook a while back that you might get a kick out of.

Things that only happen to writers: Having to tell your villain he's being demoted.

"Sorry, but I'm going to have to turn you into the assistant villain. One of the side characters has turned out more interesting than you and has more compelling reasons to do what she does."

"Come on, give me another chance!"

"I've tried, but I just can't make you anything but bland and unmotivated. The most interesting thing I can think of about you is that you don't play golf. You gotta admit that's pretty weak sauce. You're like an evil Commander Chakotay."

"Weren't you going to give me an old war wound or something?"

"Yeah, but somebody else already had one of those and I didn't want to create a situation like in the first season of Legend of Korra where it seemed like everybody's parents were killed by firebenders."

"You realize this means three of your main characters and the villain are all female? This is turning into chick lit. Do you even know how to write chick lit?"

"That's just how it turned out, okay? I'm not going to throw in a bunch of random dudes just to maintain the gender balance."

NaNoWriMo: The Third Week

Well, here we go. I'm at 38,467 words, but here comes Thanksgiving to put a huge dent in my writing time. (Also, one of the drawbacks to this approach is that I keep hitting chapters I can't finish because they need editing, and that might bring down the word count.)

Here are the next five chapter titles:
5. The Caged Hummingbird
6. Hiding in the Attack
7. The Golden Hour
8. Contact with the Enemy
9. Deluge

And here's another snippet of Altered Seasons:

Isabel was jarred awake by the sound of two hands clapping about a foot away from her left ear.
She sat up abruptly, and was rewarded with a jolt of pain from the back of her neck as she pulled her head up from the pillow on her desk. The thin, bestubbled face of Luke Roth, her supervisor for the morning shift, was looming over her.
“Sleeping on the job?”
Isabel did a triple-take. First she was horribly embarrassed at having in fact been caught sleeping on the job. One second later, while her face was still halfway done turning red, she thought I sleep at my desk because I can’t leave my damn post! HOW DARE HE and then she noticed the look in his eye and realized he was kidding. Figuring that witty banter was called for at this point, Isabel tried to think of some.
“I could sleep a lot better if they hadn’t taken the beds out,” was the best she could come up with. She gestured toward the end of the RV where the beds had been replaced by extra hard drives, giving her computer more storage space. For a moment, Isabel glared out the window at yet another beautiful, sunny Louisiana morning which had come to mock her for having to spend yet another day cooped up in this air-conditioned veal pen. Then she turned back to her computer and sent a file to Roth’s smartphone.
“Here’s the latest projections,” said Isabel. “They’re not good. We’re looking at a flow rate well over 2.5 million cubic feet per second. There’s a 96.2 percent chance the river crests over the top of the ORCS after midnight tonight, and a 62.5 percent chance the structure fails completely. That’s up from 96.0 and 61.4 from the 1 a.m. data. Have you heard if they’re going to open the Morganza the rest of the way?”
“Haven’t heard a thing.” At this point, the little microwave at the end of the table turned itself on, the light inside showing a single cup. Roth glanced at it.
“I set it to start at six minutes before seven,” Isabel said. “When it’s done, the alarm app goes off and wakes me up. That gives me five minutes to drink the chyq and get my brain back in gear before the data comes in.”
“That’s efficient.” Roth glanced under the desk, where there was a wastebasket with a dozen energy-bar wrappers in it. “Have you been living on those things this whole time?”
“Since Brian left. Speaking of Brian, when’s that replacement going to come?”
“It’s hard finding a qualified candidate. If we’re still here on Monday — which isn’t looking too likely right at the moment — and if Brian isn’t back by then, we’ll try to bring somebody in.”
Isabel was really starting to think it had been a mistake for her to accept this job. To the task of helping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keep the Old River Control Structure standing, Eveland-Blades Consulting, Inc., had brought half a ton of computer hardware, two engineers, three supervisors and their in-house “social/interpersonal networking specialist,” a man whose job description consisted entirely of schmoozing with Lieutenant General J.L. Martineau and any other important decision-makers who happened to be in the area. On Monday, Brian Dalrymple (the other engineer) had taken a leave of absence so he could go back to Michigan and help his mother evacuate. He was supposed to have been replaced, but the teams in Greenville, Baton Rouge and New Orleans swore they couldn’t spare anybody. Which had left Isabel subsisting on chyq, meal replacement bars and about three hours of sleep a night in 30-to-45-minute servings.
She glared out the window again. The skies were still clear and cloudless. You would never imagine that six hundred miles to the north (and nine hundred miles, and twelve hundred miles) such torrential downpours were taking place that all her efforts here were probably futile.
“Has anybody told the general about the problem with the simulation?”
“What prob— oh. That thing you keep mentioning in your e-mails. Look, Martineau knows this structure better than anyone alive. He knows how much it can take. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Which wasn’t an answer… which was an answer. “You know, Isabel, you’re really being a trooper about all this.”
“Thank you,” said Isabel, not sure if Roth was being sincere or if he was trying to convey please don’t blow it by turning whistleblower on us.
“I mean it,” he said. “I kind of wish we had a provision for overtime pay, just so we could give you time and a half.”
“So do I,” said Isabel. The microwave’s alarm app started ringing.

If you enjoyed that, here's another snippet which has been on my mind a lot lately for some reason.
Politicians Talk Shop

NaNoWriMo: The Second Week

With the month half over, the good news is that I’m more than halfway to my goal of 50,000 words. (Of course, there’s still going to be a substantial gap next week over the Thanksgiving holiday.) I’ve also completed the first four chapters. Here are the titles:
1. No Service
2. Meanwhile, a Hundred Years from Now
3. Just Because You’re Paranoid…
4. …Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You

I’ve also rewritten a couple of parts of Altered Seasons to reflect recent unexpected developments on the political scene. On the plus side, the one thing I’m not going to have to worry about is the book’s whole premise suddenly being forestalled by effective action on the international level. (Note to self: re-check definition of “the plus side.”)

I have a confession to make — there’s a substantial swatch of the second half of Locksmith’s War that I’m still a little vague on. However, I had this same problem with Locksmith’s Journeys and I’ve had it three or four times while writing “The Dead Skunk,” and I always managed to put the thing together in the end. I’ve developed a certain confidence in my ability to write my way out of the messes I write my way into. As we Quakers say, the way opens.

I feel like I should be including snippets of my own writing on this blog. Problem is, there’s not a lot of snippets of Locksmith’s War I can include that wouldn’t spoil the first two books. So here’s a snippet of Altered Seasons. This is Isabel Bradshaw right after a TV interview goes… badly:

Isabel’s face might have been turning a malevolent shade of pink, but she kept her composure until she was off the set and well away from the cameras. Then she stomped into the green room, yanked her jacket off the coat rack and picked up her purse. The only person who was even trying to meet her eyes was Lisa.
“Um… don’t forget your gift bag,” said Lisa, holding it out nervously. Isabel snatched it out of her hand and glared inside. There were a couple of books, a T-shirt, a hat, a “medical” pot brownie and a couple of bottles of liquor that were just the right weight to smash over somebody’s head. Or to drink from until she blacked out. Either would feel pretty good right now.
Lisa was biting her lip again, looking at Isabel as if she wanted to apologize for having been in the building at the time. “Is there something else?” Isabel said, trying to keep her voice neutral.
“Yeah. Um… I’m sorry that ended like it did, but… the thing about Walt…” Lisa bit her lip again. There was a long silence.
“What about him?” Isabel finally asked.
“He wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t… um… if he didn’t think you could handle it.”
“Yeah, he’s only nice to people he doesn’t respect,” said Adam from the corner.
“Thank you,” said Isabel flatly. “I have to go.” Lisa stepped out of her way as she left the green room.

If you enjoyed that, here are two more snippets:
Isabel's Awkward Thanksgiving
National Governors Association Smackdown!