Katherine Addison's Blog, page 42
April 16, 2016
UBC: Bates, The Poisoner
The Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Victorian England's Most Notorious Doctor by Stephen BatesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession."
--Sherlock Holmes, "The Speckled Band," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(The Annotated Sherlock Holmes I.257 [the accompanying illustration, btw, has them reversed: Pritchard is the one with the beard; Palmer is clean-shaven])
I'm starting with this quote because (a) it is likely the only time most people in the twenty-first century will have heard of William Palmer and Edward Pritchard, and (b) it's so freaking odd because it's 100% wrong. Neither Palmer nor Pritchard were "among the heads of their profession." Palmer (executed 1856), a surgeon (which wasn't quite the same thing as a doctor in Victorian England), had never been more than a small town GP and wasn't even practicing when John Parsons Cook died, and Pritchard (executed 1865) bought his diploma as a Medicinae Doctor from the University of Erlangen without ever having studied there. And even with the diploma, he, too, was nothing more than a family doctor and nothing to write home about. So, given that Watson notes Holmes' encyclopedic knowledge of crime more than once and thus we cannot believe that Doyle wants us to believe that Holmes is wrong, we have two choices: (1) Doyle, an infamously sloppy writer, didn't bother to check his facts, or (2) Holmes is wrong on purpose, because he's trying to point Watson at a clue. Both Palmer and Pritchard were poisoners, and they both poisoned (or were strongly suspected of poisoning) their friends and loved ones, just as the dreadful Dr. Roylott has poisoned one step-daughter and is trying to poison another. I also find it odd that the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is usually all over this kind of thing, doesn't even have a note trying to reconcile what Holmes says with the historical data. My suggestion #2 is pretty much the party-line the A.S.H. would have preached.
I don't have an answer, but that line is certainly where I first heard of Palmer and Pritchard--certainly the reason I was curious about both of them--so I thought I should at least observe that it leaves a notably misleading impression.
There's an account of Pritchard in Classic Crimes. The Poisoner is about Palmer. Bates is trying very hard to be fair and impartial. The case against Palmer was mostly circumstantial, bolstered by some somewhat suspect pieces of witness testimony and the appalling performance of Alfred Swaine Taylor. It's not that Palmer wasn't guilty (his own behavior is the most damning evidence available), but like Luetgert (Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Luetgert Murder Case of 1897), he did not get a fair trial.
Even trying his damnedest, Bates can't reach any conclusion other than that Palmer murdered John Parsons Cook. For money. Most of which he couldn't commit fraud fast enough to get his hands on. Palmer may not have murdered his own brother (Walter), but as Bates points out, he didn't need to. He just needed to give Walter access to enough alcohol that he could drink himself to death at the age of 32. And then collect on the staggering amount of money he'd managed to insure Walter's life for--which he promptly applied to his even more staggering debts and did not even come close to paying them off. Bates does an excellent job of explaining just how deeply Palmer was in debt (his crimes, which are mostly fraud with some murder thrown in, are all aimed at paying off the money-lenders) and just how futile all his efforts were to extract himself, since he never once tried to give up horse-racing, which was the root cause of all his financial troubles.
This is a very good book, clearly written and easy to follow through the thickets of Palmer's lethal folly.
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April 8, 2016
UBC: Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger
Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder by Steve HodelMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Steven Hodel sets out to prove a number of things in this book:
1. His father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was an abusive, controlling, sadistic, egotistical whack-job, with a thing for incest, pedophilia, and Asian girls, who was criminally involved in an abortion ring, every illegal depravity you can think of, and also tax evasion.
2. His father, with his friend and henchman Fred Sexton, killed Elizabeth Short.
3. There was a serial killer preying on women in Los Angeles in the 1940s.
4. This serial killer murdered Elizabeth Short.
5. THEREFORE, George Hill Hodel and Fred Sexton, together and separately, were this serial killer, and continued their "work" on into the '50s and even the '60s.
6. The person who killed Elizabeth Short, aside from being George Hill Hodel, serial killer and tax evader, was the person who sent all communications to either police or press about any of these killings and also left the words written in lipstick on Jeanne French's dead body.
Okay. So.
Hodel actually convinces me of (1) and (3) and I'll put an option on (2) even if I don't entirely buy it. (4) I have serious doubts about. (5) and (6) I'm not touching with a ten foot pole.
The basic problem with Hodel is that all of his logic looks like this:
1. George Hill Hodel was a sadistic whack job.
2. The serial killer was a sadistic whack job.
3. Therefore, George Hill Hodel was the serial killer.
Or:
1. (a.) The newspaper editor who talked once on the phone to a man who claimed to be the Black Dahlia Avenger described his voice as "soft" and "sly," the voice of an "egomaniac" (271)
(b.) This man's claim was true.
2. (a.) Many witnesses across the various crimes described the suspect they saw with the victim as having a "suave" and "cultured" voice. (271)
(b.) Therefore, the serial killer had a "suave" and "cultured" voice.
3. George Hill Hodel had a suave, cultured, and distinctively arresting voice.
4. THEREFORE, the man on the phone, the Black Dahlia Avenger (i.e., the murderer of Elizabeth Short), the serial killer, and George Hill Hodel are all the same man. (Because no other man in Hollywood could possibly have a suave and cultured voice.)
Hodel consistently assumes that things that are probably (or even only possibly) true ARE true. He consistently proceeds as if stating something to be true makes it true. Evidence for his premises is taken as evidence for his conclusion. (E.g., further evidence that Fred Sexton was a child molester is taken as further evidence that he was a serial killer). Anything that that does not disprove his thesis is proof of its truth. And he has the special conspiracy theorist's version of the argumentum ex silencio: the absence of evidence is proof that someone destroyed the evidence and THEREFORE is proof that his thesis is true. He takes an all-or-nothing approach to witness and victim testimony that I find singularly unhelpful, my prime example being his sister Tamar, who at 14 was the victim of statutory rape, incest, and abortion (like I said, I totally buy that George Hill Hodel was an abusive whack-job) and who also got caught up in the DA's panting eagerness to pin something on Dr. Hodel. It's clear from what Hodel says that Tamar was being bullied into testifying, and probably being coached on what to say, so that while I believe her initial claim, that she ran away from home because her father forced her to have an abortion after himself impregnating her, I just can't exclude the possibility that the DA's men were tampering with the witness for her subsequent testimony. This is not to say that Tamar was a pathological liar--the (successful) defense position--just that she was 14, in a cataclysmically horrible place (being the star witness in your father's trial for incest is not ANYBODY's idea of a good time), and being leaned on pretty hard by the DA. Without corroboration (real corroboration, not Hodel's version), I don't feel comfortable believing 100% of what she said. But for Hodel you either believe her entirely (prosecution) or disbelieve her entirely (defense). He doesn't allow for any middle ground.
And then there's the part where he simply assumes that something he has not proven is true, and proceeds with his argument as if its truth were incontrovertible. For example. On p 325, discussing another of the possible victims, Jean Spangler, Hodel says, "Spangler, while working on a movie set at Columbia Pictures with actor Robert Cummings, told Cummings that she 'had a happy new romance' and was having the time of her life. She did not tell Cummings her new boyfriend's name." And then, six pages later, "Or perhaps things are exactly as they appear on the surface, and Jean Spangler, as she represented to Robert Cummings, did meet Father only a few days before her kidnap-murder" (331). But that's not how things appear on the surface, since p. 325 tells us explicitly that Spangler did not tell Cummings her new boyfriend's name. Hodel, having suggested the possibility that Spangler was killed by George Hill Hodel, is now simply forging ahead as if it were true and had been proven conclusively to be true.
After a couple of these maneuvers, it became increasingly impossible for me to trust Hodel or to believe anything he told me.
And it's a pity, because two of his theses I think are true and worth pursuing in different ways. (1) That George Hill Hodel was a criminally abusive parent and husband, as well as being up to his eyeballs in the corruption of 1940s Los Angeles. (2) That there was a serial killer active in 1940s Los Angeles and at least some of the horrifying slew of unsolved rape/murders can be laid at that unknown man's door. (1) is the memoir Hodel (pretty clearly) needed to write to come to terms with his relationship with his father, with his siblings, and with his mother. (2) would have made a fascinating piece of true crime writing, even if it never came to any definitive conclusions. (Notice that neither of these books is about the murder of Elizabeth Short.) Or, if he really wanted to try to pursue this cat's cradle of intertwined theses, he needed to slow down, separate them out--the man who killed Elizabeth Short, the man (or men) who preyed on Los Angeles in the '40s, and the man who claimed to be the Black Dahlia Avenger have to be proven to be the same man, never mind the idea that one or more of them was George Hill Hodel--and distinguish much MUCH more carefully between things he could prove and things he couldn't.
(I see from his bibliography that he has gone on to claim his father was also the Zodiac killer. That may tell you everything you need to know.)
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March 26, 2016
UBC, Prejean, Dead Man Walking
Dead Man Walking by Helen PrejeanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., is a polemicist.
I don't say this as a condemnation, just as something I was never able to forget while reading Dead Man Walking. This is a woman making an argument; her goal is to persuade. As a reader, I was always able to feel her persuading me as I read, and even though I agree with her--the death penalty as practiced in the American criminal justice system is an abomination and a farce--I had to keep reminding myself not to dig in my heels just because I don't like being persuaded of things.
Which is also not to say that she is not extremely persuasive. Sister Helen is an excellent storyteller, and she is always careful to keep the other side of her story in mind: the Bourques and the LeBlancs as well as Pat Sonnier, the Harveys as well as Robert Lee Willie. She's perfectly open about her own rhetorical purpose, and she's willing to show the people who don't agree with her as being good and morally upright people who are able to turn their daughter's horrible death into purpose that is not simply about supporting the death penalty, but about advocating for the rights of the families of murder victims. She's sometimes a little disingenuous, but I never felt she was dishonest.
The movie conflates Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie, which I think does a disservice to the moral complexity of the book. Sonnier, who expresses remorse and accepts responsibility for his terrible crime, who loves his brother fiercely enough to forgive him and (in a sense) to die for him, who is open to and accepting of Sister Helen's message. Who is enough of a man (unlike Willie, the narrative suggests) to drop his machismo and admit his emotions. Sonnier, who thanks Sister Helen for loving him, is just about the perfect poster child for her purpose.
Willie is not. He is not remorseful; he shifts responsibility to the other guy. (Willie & Sonnier are interesting mirrors of each other; both had a partner in crime, and both received the death penalty while their partner got life. Sonnier, in something that was either a clusterfuck or a very shrewd manipulation on Eddie Sonnier's part, confessed; Willie says consistently that it was all Vaccaro's fault, that Vaccaro did it. The closest he gets to admitting culpability is saying that he shouldn't have followed Vaccaro's lead.) He clearly likes Sister Helen, but he's resistant to being molded and he maintains his exaggerated machismo to the end. No confessions, no mention of love (except of course for his mother), no sign that there's anything in him that could be salvaged or rehabilitated or that is even capable of recognizing the idea.
There's a really weird moment where Sister Helen tells him, while they're waiting for his execution, that when she first met him she thought he was a sociopath. And I said (I think even out loud), "You mean you think he's not?" She fails in her project there with me, in the sense that her project is to persuade readers that even the most hardened criminals are still, as her abolitionist lawyer friend says of Willie, "a child sitting inside [a] tough, macho dude" (119). I don't believe that about Willie--Willie makes my skin crawl, first to last--and in any case, that's not why I believe the death penalty is wrong.
I believe the death penalty is wrong for many of the same reasons Sister Helen does. E.g.:
(1) Our government, corrupt, inefficient, and even incompetent as it so often is, should not have the power of life or death over its citizens.
(2) The imposition of the death penalty in America is grossly skewed toward African-Americans, the lower classes, (reprehensibly) the mentally disabled, and towards criminals who murder whites. If we're going to claim it's justice, then it has to be administered justly.
(3) It is absolutely cruel and unusual punishment, despite the fancy footwork the Supreme Court tried to hide behind in Gregg vs. Georgia. Towards the end of the book, the father of one of Willie's victims says, "Know what they should've done with Willie? [...] They should've strapped him in that chair, counted to ten, then at the count of nine taken him out of the chair and let him sit in his cell for a day or two and then strapped him in the chair again. It was too easy for him. He went too quick" (235). What Vernon Harvey doesn't recognize, and what the narrative doesn't point out, is that that's what the torturous system of appeals and retrials and more appeals already does. Stays of execution, temporary reprieves, courts considering appeals only to reject them, the awful, awful cruelty of the power the governor has to commute the prisoner's sentence up until the literal moment the switch is thrown . . . these are torture just as much as the strappado or the rack. It shows more clearly, actually, with Sonnier, because we see more of the process and because Sister Helen (Helen-Prejean-the-author painting Sister-Helen-the-character as the raw naive newbie) doesn't truly believe Sonnier's going to die, that nothing she can do can save him, until 8:40 on the night of his execution (Sonnier officially died at fifteen minutes past midnight). This tug o'war with hope as the prize is dreadful, excruciating for the victim's family and excruciating for the man waiting to die. It's not justice.
There are any number of ethical questions that neither this book nor this review have touched, infinite delicate delineations of gray between Sister Helen and Vernon Harvey (shades of black between Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie), and I do in fact applaud this book for not shutting any of those down.
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March 20, 2016
UBC: Dan Schultz, Dead Run
Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West by Dan SchultzMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a good book with some flaws.
1. It badly needed one last going over by a weapons-grade copy-editor to fix the persistent punctuation errors, the persistent confusion of "lie" and "lay," the equally persistent confusion of "may" and "might" (why do people even make this mistake? it baffles me), and the occasional use of the almost-right word.
2. It is not Schultz's fault that the narrative he's trying to tell is confusing. The crime, the manhunt, and the investigation all proceeded on different timelines, at different paces, and criss-crossing each other in knotty nodes of unanswered questions. But he makes it more difficult to follow by trying to save important information for a big reveal. (E.g., because they found Mason first, in his hypothetical reconstruction of Mason's death he posits two men whom he labels "the commando" and "the accomplice." As a reader, I naturally assumed that those two men were Mason's co-conspirators, McVean and Pilon, so that when he gets to the discovery of Pilon's body and presents his hypothetical reconstruction that Mason killed him, I got very confused. I actually had to go back and reread his reconstruction of Mason's death to notice that when he describes the two men escaping downriver in a raft, one of whom was identified as McVean, he never actually puts a name to the other guy. And isn't until much later in the book that he coyly presents the idea of a fourth conspirator. It's clear he can't name names, presumably for legal reasons, but, dude, this is what pseudonyms are for. Call him "John Doe" or "X," whatever, that's fine, but give me some kind of clear antecedent that I can use to sort things out in my head.)
3. It's clear that the manhunt was a clusterfuck from start to finish, and when he's discussing operational problems, Schultz is tactful and impartial, but he presents the evidence about who failed to do what part of their job and how jurisdictional squabbles took up a stupid amount of everybody's time and energy. The choice to sideline the Navajo Nation Police trackers, for instance, stands out painfully as a decision reached for all the wrong reasons. The contrast between the FBI behaving like the worst caricature of themselves: smug know-it-all bullies demanding first crack at evidence and witnesses, hoarding information away from all the other investigators and alienating witnesses by their antagonistic interrogation techniques: and the local cop who went in later, not treating the encounter as a battle for dominance (but instead, deliberately and cannily, offering tokens of submission), and not only got those witnesses to talk, but got information that could have been valuable if it had been elicited the first time around--that contrast also hurts. But when Schultz is talking about the parts where forensic evidence was deliberately ignored in order to maintain the story that Mason, Pilon, and McVean were all suicides, suddenly it's "the police" thought this and "the police" said that, like "the police" is the monolithic shadowy reified institution that his description of the manhunt emphatically shows American law enforcement is not. (Also, above, note that while he names the local cop, the FBI agents are just "the FBI." The Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents are likewise "the CBI." So even at the operational level, he's not consistent.) His volte-face means that the book is only about half of an analysis of why the manhunt for Mason, Pilon, and McVean was such a dismal failure (that subtitle--"the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West"--is ironic in a way I seriously doubt anyone involved intended).
With all that said, this is in fact a good book. Schultz's narrative style is engaging and he presents a staggering amount of information without ever getting bogged down. His discussion of why McVean, Mason, and Pilon did what they did and were trying to do what (he conjectures) they intended--and why so many people in the area supported them or were sympathetic to them or actually helped them evade the law--is thoughtful and careful, both in its discussion of the culture of the American West, the specific beliefs of the conspirators (the way that reactionary white men have worked themselves around to believing that they are the oppressed never fails to boggle my mind; see also Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith), and the weird ethical clash between the scale of right vs. wrong and the scale of government vs. the individual that ends up with people sincerely believing that shooting a police officer in cold blood is the right thing to do. He makes frequent reference to the legends of the "Old West," particularly those who have come to have a Robin Hood like mythology around them: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, especially Butch Cassidy, who hid from the law in the same canyons that these modern conspirators use. I don't know if it's intentional, but McVean, Mason, and Pilon make very tawdry hero-outlaws (just as the real outlaws of the "Old West" were more like the Clantons of Tombstone ill-repute than Newman (Cassidy) and Redford (Sundance)). I found myself wondering, if they'd actually succeeded in what Schultz hypothesizes their intent was, to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam--and it's important to remember that, despite the certainty with which Schultz presents his theory, it's still only speculation--they would still have been regarded as heroes by anyone. (Probably, the answer is yes, because our species is like that.)
There's a lot of Peter Pan in Robin Hood, and Schultz's examination of the short lives of Jason McVean, Bobby Mason, and Monte Pilon brought that out very strongly for me. These were men who were resisting taking on adult responsibilities, who were trying to carve out a space where, Lord of the Flies-like, they didn't have to answer to anyone, where they could quite literally play with guns and have camp-outs and never have to deal with the ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion that--like it or not--is inherent in being a sapient, self-aware adult in modern (quote-unquote) civilization. I am repulsed by most of their beliefs, but even so I can feel the draw of the freedom they imagined they were winning. (Sherwood Forest=Neverland=Cross Canyon)
But their ideals were ugly and violent and narcissistic and led not to freedom but to murder, both as murderers and (if Schultz is correct) victims. After Dale Claxton was gunned down on McElmo Bridge, Pilon lasted maybe a couple of days, Mason a week, and McVean an unknown number of years (probably five or more). McVean was probably happy before karma caught up to him; he was living exactly the way he told his friends he wanted to: on his own, in the desert. McVean, the ringleader (it is so very clear that Mason and Pilon were followers; McVean was the one with the ideas), the man who pulled the trigger, used up and discarded his friends like pawns sacrificed on a chess board (it's very telling to me, somehow, that when they split up, McVean went one way on his own, and his "best friend" Mason went the other way with their fat geek hanger-on: Pilon is a weirdly perfect allusion to Piggy, even though I know better to allegorize real people), and forged onward. If he felt remorse, we don't know it, and I suspect his self-repairing ideology of persecution, oppression, and millennarian righteousness (McVean believed the Apocalypse was coming; he just got tired of waiting) kept his self-esteem intact.
Obviously, I found this book very thought-provoking; for all its flaws, it has a lot to say about one of the major fault lines in American culture.
[I apologize for the gross abuse of parentheses in this review. It's a sickness. --Ed.]
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March 14, 2016
How to Hack the Wetware
[Storytellers Unplugged, March 29, 2008; awesome reader=awesome]
The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.
When you start writing, everything is easy--it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.
This is--yes, Virginia--deeply unfair.
Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday--but never writing to-day.”
The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.
What makes it harder is that--even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects--outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like--for instance--having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program--as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that--you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.
You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.
Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.
I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.
It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.
Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.
Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.” And we would complete that task. In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.” (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.) “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.” And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task. (Overachiever, remember? In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.) This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done. Nothing left. Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words. Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.
Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it. The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory. (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.) But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy. It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel. It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.
I don’t know what my next novel is going to be. But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.
The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.
When you start writing, everything is easy--it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.
This is--yes, Virginia--deeply unfair.
Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday--but never writing to-day.”
The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.
What makes it harder is that--even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects--outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like--for instance--having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program--as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that--you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.
You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.
Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.
I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.
It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.
Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.
Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.” And we would complete that task. In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.” (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.) “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.” And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task. (Overachiever, remember? In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.) This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done. Nothing left. Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words. Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.
Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it. The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory. (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.) But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy. It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel. It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.
I don’t know what my next novel is going to be. But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.
History Belongs to the Adults
[Storytellers Unplugged, January 29, 2008; originally titled, "If this ferments long enough, it may become a story"; awesome reader=awesome]
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
Narrative Efficiency
[Storytellers Unplugged, March 7, 2009; awesome reader=awesome]
We just got back from seeing Watchmen. I can tell you neither the first time I read the graphic novel, nor how many times I’ve read the graphic novel, so you may understand that it is something of a coup for the movie that I was by and large pleased and impressed. There are one or two matters where I was disappointed, but this is largely an inevitable effect of the translation from one medium to another. And there’s one matter where I think the movie improves on the graphic novel--which, as the title of this post suggests, is its narrative efficiency.
The graphic novel Watchmen is narratively a sprawling object; there are several different foci of attention (I hesitate to call them plot threads, because they aren’t plots), and one of the beauties of the graphic novel is the way these different foci are played off each other, the way Moore and Gibbons use each to comment on the others. It is not, to use a thematic image that both graphic novel and movie utilize, a watch. All of its intricacy and delicacy come on the thematic level. The movie, on the other hand, is a watch; the pared-down plot is actually far better constructed than Moore and Gibbons, and it achieves something which the graphic novel does not, in that the playing out of the external plot is also a playing out of the story’s central themes.
(As you can tell, I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything, since although the graphic novel is twenty-three years old, the movie is new, and I can imagine that many people may go see the movie who have never read the graphic novel. If you’re one of them, I do sincerely recommend the novel. For all the movie’s loving recreation of the graphic novel’s visuals, the book is not the same as the movie and it is a tour de force of its form.)
This is a very neat trick. It makes the movie feel cohesive; it makes the movie feel organic, as if this is the way the story always has been, the way the story has to be. Because it all fits together. Theme and imagery are reflected in the plot; the plot tells you something important about the theme. It’s coherent. It’s efficient.
Now, it may fairly be said that my novels are not efficient. They are large and sprawling (not unlike my assessment of the graphic novel of Watchmen). I don’t know if I have it in me to write a narratively efficient novel, one that works like a beautiful watch. But I can certainly admire it when I see it done, and I think that the fundamental thing that makes narrative efficiency possible is this idea that the plot itself is an expression of the theme, and that the theme, conversely, has something to say about the plot.
I’ve never felt very comfortable with plot--certainly never felt that it is one of my strengths. External action is rarely where my interest lies. Recently, in fact, I’ve been having difficulty writing short stories because the ideas come to me as themes and don’t bring any plot along with them, and because I’m not much good at plot, I’ve been unable to do anything with them. So this new way of looking at the relationship between theme and plot is exciting for me. In the dead end I feel like I’m stuck in, it gives me hope of a door.
We just got back from seeing Watchmen. I can tell you neither the first time I read the graphic novel, nor how many times I’ve read the graphic novel, so you may understand that it is something of a coup for the movie that I was by and large pleased and impressed. There are one or two matters where I was disappointed, but this is largely an inevitable effect of the translation from one medium to another. And there’s one matter where I think the movie improves on the graphic novel--which, as the title of this post suggests, is its narrative efficiency.
The graphic novel Watchmen is narratively a sprawling object; there are several different foci of attention (I hesitate to call them plot threads, because they aren’t plots), and one of the beauties of the graphic novel is the way these different foci are played off each other, the way Moore and Gibbons use each to comment on the others. It is not, to use a thematic image that both graphic novel and movie utilize, a watch. All of its intricacy and delicacy come on the thematic level. The movie, on the other hand, is a watch; the pared-down plot is actually far better constructed than Moore and Gibbons, and it achieves something which the graphic novel does not, in that the playing out of the external plot is also a playing out of the story’s central themes.
(As you can tell, I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything, since although the graphic novel is twenty-three years old, the movie is new, and I can imagine that many people may go see the movie who have never read the graphic novel. If you’re one of them, I do sincerely recommend the novel. For all the movie’s loving recreation of the graphic novel’s visuals, the book is not the same as the movie and it is a tour de force of its form.)
This is a very neat trick. It makes the movie feel cohesive; it makes the movie feel organic, as if this is the way the story always has been, the way the story has to be. Because it all fits together. Theme and imagery are reflected in the plot; the plot tells you something important about the theme. It’s coherent. It’s efficient.
Now, it may fairly be said that my novels are not efficient. They are large and sprawling (not unlike my assessment of the graphic novel of Watchmen). I don’t know if I have it in me to write a narratively efficient novel, one that works like a beautiful watch. But I can certainly admire it when I see it done, and I think that the fundamental thing that makes narrative efficiency possible is this idea that the plot itself is an expression of the theme, and that the theme, conversely, has something to say about the plot.
I’ve never felt very comfortable with plot--certainly never felt that it is one of my strengths. External action is rarely where my interest lies. Recently, in fact, I’ve been having difficulty writing short stories because the ideas come to me as themes and don’t bring any plot along with them, and because I’m not much good at plot, I’ve been unable to do anything with them. So this new way of looking at the relationship between theme and plot is exciting for me. In the dead end I feel like I’m stuck in, it gives me hope of a door.
On the Vile Habit of Thinking Too Much
[Storytellers Unplugged, June 29, 2008; awesome reader=awesome]
[N.b., sadly, Childe Cthulhu is no more. Never did figure its sex out for sure. -Ed. 03/14/16]
Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about on May 29.
This month, I find that I’m envying my fish.
I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus--which isn’t nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on algae. I don’t know whether mine is male or female [Holy crap, they come in veiltail? -Ed. 03/14/16], as it is still juvenile; we’re still waiting to see if its going to sprout that Lovecraftian crop of tentacles. Its name, insofar as it has one, is Childe Cthulhu, which in the twenty-first century I think qualifies as unisex. But in any event, I have a (currently) two-inch fish. It lives in a five-gallon tank on my desk and spends its life assiduously cleaning its environment--which in fact it is doing even as I type this. As multicelluluar organisms go, it’s a pretty simple one, and I feel certain that unlike the centipede of the notorious dilemma--and unlike me--it never overthinks.
I intellectualize everything. And while mostly this works in my favor, there are some critical issues on which it constitutes FAIL. One of them, with which I have been wrestling for most of a year, is the process of writing short stories.
I only figured out how to write short stories in 2000, and I had a good run (thirty-two short stories sold, my bibliography tells me) with, you know, no more traumas than any other part of my writing career. And then I started working on a short story called “The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool,” and the whole thing collapsed, as Eddie Izzard says, like a flan in a cupboard.
It took me three tries to finish it, and when I did, it was lifeless. I whined talked about it with my husband and with my writing partner, and finally figured out what was wrong, but when I went to try to rewrite it, like the centipede, I discovered that I had forgotten how to walk.
Theories of expertise talk about moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. But my problem is that I seem to have gotten two of the steps reversed. I’ve moved from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Because the stories that I wrote prior to this crash and burn were not incompetent stories: the slew of reprints in various Best Of anthologies reassures me of that. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t consciously working on my craft when I wrote them; “ Draco campestris ,” to name just one, is all about the conscious craft. But there was something I was doing that I wasn’t thinking about that was simply, painlessly working, and when it stopped working, I couldn’t find a way consciously to fix it.
Which means, of course, that I can’t stop thinking about it. Obsessing, even. And I know intellectually what’s wrong. Something has shifted so that my brain is presenting me with story ideas theme-first. And what I fail at, again and again, is translating that thematic idea into a viable story. If I get the story first, the theme takes care of itself, but this is breach-presentation, and thus far I have not found a mental equivalent of a Caesarean section.
(Interestingly, I have managed to write a few short stories since the crash, and what they have in common is that their structure came predetermined. Ghost stories have a pattern.)
This is frustrating. I like short stories. I like writing them. I like the sharpness and crispness of them; I like the way I can hold them in the cup of my palm. I like the fact that I can finish a short story in less than a week . . . when I can finish one at all. And it’s frustrating because my brain, lacking traction, continues to spin its wheels, thinking about something that I’ve already thought into a limp and wrung-out rag. And yes, I’ve tried writing without thinking about it, which (a.) I can’t do and (b.) you don’t want to see the results.
I can’t solve it by thinking, and I can’t solve it by not-thinking, and while I wait for some third solution to present itself, I sit and envy the small, simple life of my fish.
[N.b., sadly, Childe Cthulhu is no more. Never did figure its sex out for sure. -Ed. 03/14/16]
Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about on May 29.
This month, I find that I’m envying my fish.
I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus--which isn’t nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on algae. I don’t know whether mine is male or female [Holy crap, they come in veiltail? -Ed. 03/14/16], as it is still juvenile; we’re still waiting to see if its going to sprout that Lovecraftian crop of tentacles. Its name, insofar as it has one, is Childe Cthulhu, which in the twenty-first century I think qualifies as unisex. But in any event, I have a (currently) two-inch fish. It lives in a five-gallon tank on my desk and spends its life assiduously cleaning its environment--which in fact it is doing even as I type this. As multicelluluar organisms go, it’s a pretty simple one, and I feel certain that unlike the centipede of the notorious dilemma--and unlike me--it never overthinks.
I intellectualize everything. And while mostly this works in my favor, there are some critical issues on which it constitutes FAIL. One of them, with which I have been wrestling for most of a year, is the process of writing short stories.
I only figured out how to write short stories in 2000, and I had a good run (thirty-two short stories sold, my bibliography tells me) with, you know, no more traumas than any other part of my writing career. And then I started working on a short story called “The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool,” and the whole thing collapsed, as Eddie Izzard says, like a flan in a cupboard.
It took me three tries to finish it, and when I did, it was lifeless. I whined talked about it with my husband and with my writing partner, and finally figured out what was wrong, but when I went to try to rewrite it, like the centipede, I discovered that I had forgotten how to walk.
Theories of expertise talk about moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. But my problem is that I seem to have gotten two of the steps reversed. I’ve moved from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Because the stories that I wrote prior to this crash and burn were not incompetent stories: the slew of reprints in various Best Of anthologies reassures me of that. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t consciously working on my craft when I wrote them; “ Draco campestris ,” to name just one, is all about the conscious craft. But there was something I was doing that I wasn’t thinking about that was simply, painlessly working, and when it stopped working, I couldn’t find a way consciously to fix it.
Which means, of course, that I can’t stop thinking about it. Obsessing, even. And I know intellectually what’s wrong. Something has shifted so that my brain is presenting me with story ideas theme-first. And what I fail at, again and again, is translating that thematic idea into a viable story. If I get the story first, the theme takes care of itself, but this is breach-presentation, and thus far I have not found a mental equivalent of a Caesarean section.
(Interestingly, I have managed to write a few short stories since the crash, and what they have in common is that their structure came predetermined. Ghost stories have a pattern.)
This is frustrating. I like short stories. I like writing them. I like the sharpness and crispness of them; I like the way I can hold them in the cup of my palm. I like the fact that I can finish a short story in less than a week . . . when I can finish one at all. And it’s frustrating because my brain, lacking traction, continues to spin its wheels, thinking about something that I’ve already thought into a limp and wrung-out rag. And yes, I’ve tried writing without thinking about it, which (a.) I can’t do and (b.) you don’t want to see the results.
I can’t solve it by thinking, and I can’t solve it by not-thinking, and while I wait for some third solution to present itself, I sit and envy the small, simple life of my fish.
March 13, 2016
Choose Your Own Adventure
[Storytellers Unplugged, September 29, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)
Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for--loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?
The problem--I should make clear--is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.
The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.
So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write--or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voilà, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.
Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent--since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider--but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.
Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands [published as The Goblin Emperor--Ed. 03/13/2016] and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.
Now I just have to figure out the plot.
(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)
Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for--loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?
The problem--I should make clear--is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.
The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.
So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write--or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voilà, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.
Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent--since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider--but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.
Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands [published as The Goblin Emperor--Ed. 03/13/2016] and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.
Now I just have to figure out the plot.
