Austin Scott Collins's Blog: Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards

Creating Reality

Just because something is “made up,” that doesn't necessarily mean it isn’t also real.

Our entire legal system is invented. Human minds came up with the concept of money. Insurance is an elaborate contrivance. Yet these things offer palpable, tangible, measurable, quantifiable benefits and can, conversely, do great and terrible harm.

It’s easy to take a bong rip and declare, “money isn’t real, man” and feel clever. But when you find yourself on the street and hungry because you don’t have any money, it sure starts to seem real.

Language in all its multitudinous forms is totally made up, but it’s an indispensable tool for communication and makes society, civilization, and complex abstract thought possible.

So when we talk about fiction, and the importance of the shared stories that weave our common narrative and underpin our sense of cultural identity, whatever that might happen to be, I think it’s important to remember that widely agreed-upon fabrications are just as real and useful—and every bit as dangerous—as anything we can weigh on a scale.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

I Interview the Lovely Dalia Lance

Speculation in Fiction and the Essence of Consciousness

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick started co-writing the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1964. They had to do a lot of guessing. Given the state of computer technology at the time and the rate at which both computational power and data storage capacity were increasing, it seemed reasonable to predict the existence of thinking, self-aware machines like HAL within 40 years. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor (and later the CEO of Intel), projected, based on historical trends, that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would continue to double every year or two. With some fluctuations, this has largely been proven to be true. Moore’s law, as it came to be called, applies to all kinds of electronic devices: the number of pixels in a digital camera, processor speed, the information density of memory chips. If we took every computer in the world in 1964 and hooked them all together, they would still be no match for the capabilities of the phone you’re holding in your hand right now.

We have apps that can convincingly simulate thought and emotion, and programs that can learn and adapt and even teach themselves new things. So why don’t we have robots that WANT things, NEED things, and FEEL things⁠—robots who can truly cogitate, who are able to contemplate their own selfhood?

Predicting the future is tricky, as a writer or just as a person trying to navigate life. The Victoria da Vinci series of novels is a speculative historical fantasy adventure, and for me it’s kind of like science fiction looking backwards. Whereas in traditional science fiction an author living in their own present imagines what might be technologically possible in the future, in these books I’m imagining what might have seemed plausible to people living in the past.

Indeed, the main character (Victoria, the trilogy’s namesake) is a technology optimist, a utopianist really, a bit messianic in her obsessions, and her breathless expectations for the hope and promise that her inventions held turned out to be wildly, sadly wrong.

But back to robots. If you’re like me, maybe you thought that as computers went from megabytes per second to terabytes per microsecond, inevitably some critical threshold would be reached, and they would start to “wake up.” So with all the hyperfast processors in the world, why hasn’t that happened?

Perhaps the real reason is that consciousness is not intrinsically analytical or logical; it does not arise from neurons firing electric impulses like a computer using binary code to run complex programs. Perhaps⁠—and this is where I’m going to get a bit philosophical⁠, sorry—the essence of consciousness is chemical.

It’s the burn of capsaicin on the taste buds. It’s the rush of adrenaline and cortisol when you stand near the edge of a high precipice. It’s the glow of serotonin when you sit by the campfire on a starry night. It’s the surge of dopamine when you admire the artfully crafted sentence you have just wrought. It’s the warm, exhilarating flood of oxytocin when you’re in love. It’s the blast of endorphins when you go for a vigorous bike ride. It’s the looseness imparted by alcohol, the mellowness from cannabis, the energizing jolt of caffeine, the aggressive self-assuredness of testosterone. It’s the fabulously complicated interaction of these and a thousand other chemicals that gives rise to our true sense of self. We perceive that we are individuals interacting with the world because of this dance of molecules in our blood.

The ability to perform cognitive tasks is an overlay to this consciousness. We can do things like identify objects, add numbers together, and make decisions. But that’s just how we make sense of it all; consciousness still exists in the absence of all reason and logic . . . and vice versa.

I suspect we will eventually create artificial brains capable of consciousness, but I strongly suspect that when we do, they will be wet: organic rather than electronic, organically engineered in a neurobiology research lab, not assembled in a factory.

Then again, maybe I will turn out to be as wrong about that as Victoria was.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

I Interview the Lovely Dalia Lance

Two Yellow Things

This is the story of two fond memories from my childhood, and both happen to involve things that are bright yellow: one is National Geographic magazine and the other is a very small sailboat.

One of the best gifts my mom ever gave me was a subscription to National Geographic. I collected issues throughout my adolescence, filling shelves with years’ worth of them. Numerous older copies could be found at my grandparents’ house, and I read every one of them.

A few articles that made a profound and lasting impact on me were “The Bird Men” (August 1983), about ultralights and the people who built and flew them, “A Tunnel Through Time: The Appalachian Trail” (February 1987), about hikers who walked the full length of the footpath from Georgia to Maine, “Double Eagle II Leaps the Atlantic” (December 1978), about how Ben L. Ambruzzo, Maxie L. Anderson, and Larry Newman piloted a balloon from the United States to Europe, and “The Thousand- mile Glide” (March 1978), documenting the world-record flight sailplane pilot Karl Striedieck made from Pennsylvania to Tennessee and home again on the same day.

Like many members of my generation, I was inspired by the exploits of Robin Lee Graham, covered by the magazine in three installments (October 1968, April 1969, and October 1970). At sixteen, Graham sailed alone from California to Hawaii in his 24-foot sloop Dove and then just kept going. Five years later, after circumnavigating the globe, he ended up back in California.

All those stories—and those incredible photographs for which the magazine is so famous—were my escape. I detested the suburbs with every molecule of my being. (Still do.) It was just so mind-numbingly dull. I could get on my bike and pedal around, but all I would ever find was mile after mile after mile of the same thing: endless residential subdivisions. I wanted to be out there backpacking through the mountains, flying, parachuting, scuba diving, traveling the world . . . all the cool stuff the adventurers and explorers in National Geographic did. As I read those articles, I dreamed about doing those things. I dreamed about being happy.

It was in this context that I realized we had a sailboat.

You know how when you’re a kid, there are features in your daily existence that are so familiar that you don’t really think about them? I never paid any particular attention to the big yellow thing hanging from the ceiling of our two-car garage; it had just sort of always been there. But at some point, it dawned on me that it was a sailboat. A real, actual sailboat. Wait a minute—we had a sailboat? We had a sailboat! I was suddenly very excited.

It was a Sunflower, a model of the Snark line, an 11-foot open dinghy with a single 55-square-foot lateen-rigged nylon mainsail and an aluminum mast. It had a wooden daggerboard that dropped straight down through a raised slot in the center of the deck and a plank for a helm station. The hull was made completely of expanded polystyrene, so it was unsinkable. If you cut it into pieces, the pieces would float.

I informed my parents that I wanted to sail it. I was probably about eleven years old, so this would have been around 1982.

Now you might think my parents would send me off to sailing camp or sign me up for youth sailing lessons. In Florida, there are sailing clubs everywhere. However, that was not the approach they took. Instead, they gave me the manual that came with the boat. It was a black-and white pamphlet printed on what looked like ordinary typing paper, folded over and stapled. It was probably about eight pages long. It contained illustrations showing the names and locations of all the parts of the boat, basic instructions for rigging it, and a diagram that showed the various points of sail. I studied it with intense interest, although without any real comprehension.

They drove me to Lake Brantley, which was only a couple of miles from our house. Dad assembled the mast, spar, and boom. They put a big fluffy orange life jacket on me. It was adult-sized, so it hung off my shoulders. It was an old-fashioned style, with a shell of cloth, and the straps had metal buckles. Dad gave me a shove to push me off the sand. Just like that, I was on my own, master and captain of my vessel. My only sailing knowledge at this point was from that pamphlet, plus what I had gleaned from the “Sailing” article in the World Book encyclopedia (volume S-Sn).

I remember how weird it felt to be rolling and bobbing in the water. It was an unexpectedly unstable sensation. Predictably, I flailed for a bit, a few yards from the beach, not really going anywhere, with the sail luffing and flapping and the boom periodically swinging from one side of the boat to the other. I drifted generally downwind, gradually getting farther away from land, turning in slow circles as I pushed the tiller back and forth in an incompetent attempt to steer.

But then something magical happened: I found the right combination of heading and point of sail, and the little boat began to slice happily through the water. It was an amazing feeling, an exhilarating burst of power and freedom. Despite my total and complete lack of training, I was accidentally in the groove. It helped a lot that it didn’t matter which way I went. Any direction was acceptable. I adjusted the mainsheet, or more accurately, randomly played with it, alternately easing and trimming until the boom was in what seemed to be the right place, with the sail nicely filled and pulling me along forcefully. I very quickly figured out that if I pointed the bow in a certain direction, I went faster, although I didn’t really understand why, especially since that direction was not the way the wind was blowing. Since I didn’t care where I was going, however, I just maintained the course that enabled me to go fastest.

Soon I was way out in the middle of the lake, and I felt like an intrepid ocean voyager. I wondered what my parents must be thinking as I got farther and farther away.

I followed a canal up into a neighborhood with fancy waterfront houses that had docks in their backyards. I did not have a plan. I was just sailing. When I got to the end of the canal, I turned around to go back. But the sailboat wasn’t moving; the way out was almost directly into the wind. So I just sat there, embarrassed and wondering what to do. My lack of experience was now painfully obvious.

A man came out of his house and called to me. He asked if I needed help. I explained that I couldn’t sail back out into the lake, because the wind was blowing the wrong way. He laughed and told me to sail over. So I pushed the tiller and pointed my bow towards his backyard, and soon the Sunflower slid right up onto the grass. He asked if he could come aboard. I agreed, and he hopped in, causing the little boat to wobble.

He took the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other. I observed closely and tried to stay out of his way. He expertly tacked back and forth across the windline, explaining what he was doing, tracing a tight zig-zag pattern through the water as he worked his way up the canal towards the mouth. As we reached the end, he gave the controls back to me and instructed me to steer right up to the edge of the last dock. He jumped off the boat and onto the low wooden platform, and he invited me to come back so that he could teach me more about sailing. I thanked him, and we waved to each other as I began to make my way back towards the beach at the other side of the lake where my parents were waiting for me, and probably wondering where on Earth I was.

I never did go back to find that guy, although I thought about it often. I wonder if he remembers that day. I would love to tell him how much I appreciated his act of generosity, and what an impression it made on me. I would love to tell him that I now live aboard my own sailboat, and how I hope to sail her around the world like Robin Lee Graham did on Dove.

The memory of mom and dad plopping me into that little Sunflower and giving me a push continues to amuse me. For just a moment, in my head, I was the star of my own National Geographic article.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

I Interview the Lovely Dalia Lance

Too Many Balls in the Air!

How many projects is too many? Man, that’s a great question. I am the kind of guy who prefers to work on one thing at a time. You might think I mean that in a generalized and figurative sense, like “focus on my career for a while” or “spend some time exploring my creative impulses.” But no, I mean I like to have precisely one and only one thing to do at any given moment. For example, “Today is Sunday. I will do a load of laundry. That is my singular mission for this 24-hour period.” If I’m feeling ambitious, I might add “make a sandwich” to the agenda. But pile on one more goal and I will be paralyzed with anxiety. I'll just activate Emergency Coping Strategy B and go hide in bed.

The point here is that I am decidedly, emphatically not a multi-tasker. Some people are energized by having lots to do, and bless ‘em. But not me.

So please tell me how the hell did I wind up with a stack of ten different manuscripts from four different series in my “Active Projects” folder? This was never my intention. The trouble is, these things tend to accumulate.

(And don't give me any of that “you-have-no-one-to-blame-but-yourself” malarkey.)

I just signed an agreement for a three-part series (writing under a different name), of which the first book came out in 2019. So I owe the publisher two more books, and I’m working on it, I PROMISE.

Aside from that, The Dandelion Experiment is the first book in a series of novels about the brilliant Cassie Troyer and her charismatic partner Zach David traveling from place to place together, assisting wth various investigations and recovery efforts. The second book in the series is titled Blood Rent, in which Zach and Cassie must solve a bizarre, gruesome mystery in Fairhope, Alabama. The third book is Sea of Corpses, in which a desperate lawyer’s arrest in the Caribbean sets in motion a flurry of events that lead Zach and Cassie to a compound in Texas riddled with lethal traps. There might be more after that , who knows? I guess it all depends on reader/agent/publisher interest.

My next trilogy, Cyanide of the Masses, is a dystopian series set in the aftermath of a global religious war. I’ve been working on it for several years. The first book, A Coterie of Apostates, tells the story of a small band of unbelievers who are on the run for various reasons. A Coalition of Enemies deals with the counter-revolution. And the cycle closes with A Foundation of Shards, in which the former freedom fighters must actually learn how to govern.

After that, The Divine Cortex is a straight-up science-fiction series exploring the struggle to become a mature species reflected in the personal journey of one individual. I have it loosely organized into three parts as well: Hell’s Prism, Theophany, and Mythoclasm. But it’s too early to tell if it will really be three books, or five, or two.

Looking ahead, it all seems like way too much. But I look back at this blog today and I read early posts where I was agonizing as I labored to complete the Victoria da Vinci trilogy, which has now been finished and out there for several years. That’s a strange feeling. There was a time when I wondered if I could ever climb that mountain. I suppose maybe someday I’ll look back at all those titles I just listed and I’ll think, oh yeah, I remember when I wrote that.


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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

The Things We Hate

Sleeping With My Editor

Answering the Inevitable Questions

Deconstructing DTfG

Originality vs. Marketability

One of the worst things you can call a novel is “derivative.” Authors take pride in being creative. Although at the deep core there are only a few basic story types out there—some say twelve, some say three, some say seven, I say who cares?—each storyteller has the ability, maybe even the obligation, to spin it in a unique way. After all, what’s the point in flagellating a narrative equine that is already thoroughly deceased? No one wants his or her work viewed as a rip-off. Even when it is meant as a compliment, when a reader says, “this reminded me of [well-known book],” it’s hard not to take that as a bit of an insult. So we struggle to find new, fresh ways to tell inventive, imaginative stories unlike what’s already out there, stories that fill a space that’s not already filled. We are determined to be different. It’s practically an artistic requirement.

AND YET . . . in seeking representation, the author may find himself or herself stumbling up against a rather infuriating and perhaps unexpected obstacle: agents and publishers want a sure thing. You can hardly blame them. They are trying to make a living in a tough business.

Pretend you were putting on a fund-raising event for a charitable cause about which you care deeply. If your goal is to make money, do you sell a familiar and popular thing, like cookies and chocolate bars? Or do you offer fermented octopus nuggets infused with effervescent rutabaga vinegar and suspended in nitrogen-fluffed mango gravy foam? Your exquisitely refined culinary stylings might strike a connoisseur as acts of inspired gastronomic genius, but how much cash do you think you are going to rake in to save the old community dance hall, Skippy?

Your story might be weirdly brilliant and brilliantly weird, and you might be able to truthfully claim that no one has ever seen anything quite like it before, but 99% of prospective agents and publishers are likely to focus unfavorably on the “weird” part.

The novelist might even be affronted to be asked to name some other books that are similar to the work being considered! Sometimes, even confining yourself to a genre label can sting a little. Most of us like to think of our work as transcending, warping, and blurring those kinds of distinctions. The “right” answer, from a business/marketing standpoint, would be to name five wildly successful bestsellers virtually identical to this title, and a neat, easily defined set of demographic parameters (such as males between 24-38 who live in the Midwest, have two years of college, shop at Target, own a dog, and watch the Discovery Channel). Publishers want to focus those advertising dollars like a laser beam on classifiable segments of the population. Agents want to sell manuscripts to publishers; it’s their job to entice them with something they think they can sell to actual book-purchasers.

The wrong answer, on the other hand, is “what do you mean, what’s it like?? It’s not ‘like’ anything! If I thought this book was similar to something else, I’d change it!”

There is no simple solution for this paradox. The savvy author negotiates the swamp by emphasizing the various ways in which this book can be positively compared to other well known, successful books. The dialogue is reminiscent of THIS, the action is evocative of THAT, the plot follows an analogous structure HERE and explores equivalent themes THERE. “Readers who enjoyed [book A] might also enjoy this for the style and tone,” you could say. “Readers who found the symbolism of [book B] might like the way this story uses coded allusions.”

Then again, if you’ve written something that really is a shameless knockoff, separated from unalloyed plagiarism only by the flimsiest of legal technicalities, then you’ll have an easier road to follow in this regard. Barry Motter and the Magical Chalice of Bogshorts is likely to have an unmistakable appeal to a certain kind of publishing house looking to make a quick buck. But for most of us, that’s not the goal. So tell your story, craft and refine it to the highest essence of what it can be through a thousand rounds of edits, re-writes, and improvements, and be proud of that. And if in the end it’s just too strange for an agent or a publisher to take an interest in it, well, good for you!

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

The Things We Hate

Sleeping With My Editor

Answering the Inevitable Questions

Deconstructing DTfG

The Things We Hate

Every reader, every writer, and every editor has a focused loathing for some grammatical construction, syntactical convention, peculiar spelling choice, stylistic conceit, or punctuation usage. It takes on the aspect of a holy crusade. These peeves become so deeply ingrained with time (and repeated annoyance) that they are eventually assimilated into the flesh and marrow of who we are as language enthusiasts. It’s funny, because logically these perceived transgressions do us no harm. Why not skim over them? Why not accept a particular wordsmith’s decision as a charming quirk, or at least an inoffensive deviation? We all have the right to be odd, after all.

Of course we aren’t going to do that! We get so boiling mad when we see someone violate a personally cherished rule that we can scarcely contain ourselves. Whether it’s the deployment (or omission) of the Oxford comma, the overuse of the passive voice, an excessive reliance on literary clichés, pretentious word choices, the jarring insertion of slang and dialect, or the utilization of “not un-” instead of the corresponding antonymic adjective, these things send us into a righteous philological rage. Some despise parentheses. Some scorn one-sentence paragraphs. Some shriek when confronted with a sentence fragment. There are those who consider the very presence of an adverb discordant, like a fart during a symphonic performance. I have a friend who fought with her editor over the matter of whether to put foreign-language text in italics. One author memorably explained in her preface why she preferred to use “bluegreen” as opposed to “blue-green.” (She felt that the hyphen constituted a visual hiccup.)

Mine is excessive dialogue tags. I remain fully aware that numerous copy editors hold the opposing view here, and feel that any line of speech without a tag assigning it to a speaker is a glaring lapse. But it drives me crazy.

Allow me to illustrate.

“Is this your bow tie?” she said. She held it out.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I never wear bow ties. I put live snakes around my neck and stick luminescent jewels on my forehead.”
She cocked her head to one side. “How do you make them adhere?” she wanted to know.
“I dip them in the sap of an Aztec Murder Tree,” he explained.
“Where do you find those?” she asked.
“I have one in my apartment,” he explained.
“Just for the sap?” she probed further.
“Also for the way it smells, but yeah, mostly for the sap,” he replied. “And with a luminescent jewel on my forehead and a live snake around my neck, who needs a bowtie?”
“I can’t argue with that,” she said. “But what about when you sweat?”
“It doesn’t bother the snake,” he stated.
“I meant vis-à-vis the forehead adherence issue,” she clarified.
“You underestimate the holding power of the sap of the Aztec Murder Tree,” he told her.

OK, OK, I could go on like this all day. But don’t you find the presence of dialogue tags in every single fucking sentence irritating? Or at least distracting? To me, it really disrupts the flow.

Now, for contrast, read the same passage without any tags at all, just dialogue and action:

“Is this your bow tie?” She held it out.
He shook his head. “No. I never wear bow ties. I put live snakes around my neck and stick luminescent jewels on my forehead.”
She cocked her head to one side. “How do you make them adhere?”
“I dip them in the sap of an Aztec Murder Tree.”
“Where do you find those?”
“I have one in my apartment.”
“Just for the sap?”
“Also for the way it smells, but yeah, mostly for the sap. And with a luminescent jewel on my forehead and a live snake around my neck, who needs a bowtie?”
“I can’t argue with that. But what about when you sweat?”
“It doesn’t bother the snake.”
“I meant vis-à-vis the forehead adherence issue.”
“You underestimate the holding power of the sap of the Aztec Murder Tree.”

Now doesn’t that have a much nicer rhythm? It’s brisk, it’s snappy, and there is never any doubt who is speaking. I feel dialogue tags should only be used in cases where there might otherwise be some reasonable degree of confusion about who is doing the talking.

“I feel I have made my point,” the author said, speaking pompously in the third-person voice.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

I Interview the Lovely Dalia Lance

Going Full Throttle (For Once)

In general, I am a huge fan of peace and quiet. I don’t like noise, conflict, or chaos—unless it’s for the sake of doing or accomplishing something really interesting and/or exciting and/or arousing and/or fun. I hate rushing. For example, I prefer to wait until everyone else gets off the airplane, so that I can get up, gather my bags, and stroll off in a relaxed manner. It’s a great luxury, not being in a hurry.

And here’s the thing: all those people pushing and shoving and elbowing each other, snarling and grunting, they’re wasting their energy. We’re all going to wind up in a group together at the boarding platform for the terminal shuttle, and then we’re all going to wind up in another group together at baggage claim. Or in a slightly different group at the gate for our next flight leg. It’s all the same.

Same principle applies on the highway. Unless there is a good reason to do otherwise (such as an emergency), I drive at a nice, normal, safe speed. I watch these people speeding, tailgating, weaving in and out of traffic, and generally being impatient, aggressive, and reckless, and all I can do is sigh. I refuse to believe everybody is really in that much of a legitimate hurry. My suspicion is that in reality, most drivers are not going anywhere important, and aren’t going to do anything important when they get there, either. I think it’s just the primordial desire to go faster than other people. But guess what? No matter how fast you go, no matter how many people you pass, there will always be someone ahead of you. Everybody just chill the hell out!

My writing technique also follows this philosophy. I tend to take a highly methodical approach. I begin with a summary of the entire story, beginning to end. Then I create a chapter-by-chapter outline. I have always felt that good chapter should feel a bit like a complete story; it should have a starting point, a middle, and a satisfying stopping point, with some kind of arc holding it all together. Furthermore, my personal opinion is that a chapter should be summarizeable as a single sentence. If you don’t feel like you can summarize the chapter as a single sentence, it probably wants to be more than one chapter. (Again, just me.)

Once I have completed these steps, only then do I embark on the actual writing, which I usually do somewhat out of order. I write whatever scene happens to inspire me that day, based on random thoughts and ideas. During a walk, for example, I might think, “of course Sheila would make that comment to Reginald in chapter four! Or, “of course Darren would refuse to stay in the room after what Ludella told him about the old key in chapter seven!” This process is highly dependent upon me knowing the entire plot. I need to know where this is all going. I need to have the entire framework built. Then I add to it bit by bit, fleshing it out and fluffing it up, putting meat on the skeleton, putting ornaments on the Christmas tree. I take as much time as I need, letting the story rattle around in my brain, allowing the insights and revelations to come to me, trusting that as I life my life, have experiences, read other books etc., I will keep having these fresh flashes of creative inspiration, and I will be ready, because I will know exactly where each new piece fits into the puzzle.

With all this in mind, it might come as a mild surprise that I did NaNoWrimo in 2018. Most people who read writing blogs like this one probably know what National Novel Writing Month is, but if not, look it up. Basically, you commit to writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and when you sign up they provide robust graphical tools to track your progress. That might sound entirely antithetical to the process I just described—and it is—but it’s also a very interesting exercise and I highly recommend it to any author. The real point, obviously, is not to have a finished manuscript at the end of the month. Instead, the goal is to discipline yourself to set aside some time each day for writing. This means setting boundaries and holding yourself accountable. So you have to learn to say, “not right now, guys. I need to get another thousand words in. I’ll catch up with you later.” It means knowing when to shut the door, knowing when to turn off the phone, knowing when to close every window except Word and ignore your incoming notifications for a little while. It means writing something, anything, even when you don’t particularly feel like writing. There were days when everything seemed to be conspiring to keep me from getting any writing done. On a day like that, normally I would be inclined to say, “well, it’s just not going to happen today.” But during NaNoWriMo, you power through, you don’t make excuses, and you get it done.

At the end of November, I had about 51,000 words of what I’m sure will be about a 72,000-word, 300-page first draft soon—maybe in just a couple more weeks of work. NaNoWriMo gave me a significant boost in the right direction, a head start that encouraged me to keep pushing forward. It took me eight years to write the three novels in the Victoria da Vinci trilogy; with this story, I went from a chapter outline, a character list, and a bunch of sketchy notes to a what I felt was a strong and nearly complete preliminary draft in four weeks. Sure, it has some thin spots and a few gaps where I skimmed from one part to the next, but that’s how you make progress. If you get stuck, switch to a different paragraph or even a different chapter. Just add something. You can always fix it (or remove it) later.

I don’t advocate hurrying or forcing it as your standard authorial technique—unless it’s your full-time job and you’re working on a deadline, in which case, A. good for you, and B. quit reading this and get back to work! But I do urge everyone who is serious about finishing a project to challenge yourself to try something like NaNoWriMo at least once. You might surprise yourself.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Recent popular posts:

Crazy People in History #1

A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction

Martinus or Martino?

Worms Uncanned

Being in the Moment

Like any other creative enterprise, writing is a way to capture, amplify, comment on, analyze, criticize, and appreciate human experience. All art strives, in some manner, to express feelings and desires, but each form has its own special power. Music, for example, can strongly convey mood. Visual media can evoke a sense of illusionary reality so effectively that it can trigger terror or delight. And writing has a unique capability to distill, clarify, and preserve complex emotions and abstractions.

Imagine a small group of people standing at a scenic overlook. The tide crashes against the cliffs below; the sun dips below the western horizon amidst an uproar of vermillion, tangerine, and rose. The trees flanking them reach for the sky with gnarled branches, bristling with needles and pinecones, sturdy trunks resisting the sea wind with a tangled network of roots plunging into the rocky crevices.

Each of the observers processes this moment in a different way. One is sitting in front of a canvas on an easel, painting. Another is taking pictures with a film camera from the 1960s. Another has a sketchbook, and is using charcoal pencils to render one particular tree that caught her eye. Someone is using an ink pen to compose a poem in a spiral-bound notepad. And one is just standing there, taking it all in.

The one person who is just standing there is not necessarily any more or less engaged in the experience than the painter, the photographer, the sketch artist, or the poet. In fact, who knows? He might be zoning out, thinking about something else entirely, not really present at all. There is no intrinsic virtue in doing nothing. Doing nothing is also not inherently bad; by standing there in quiet meditation, perhaps that person in more intensely focused on the fleeting beauty of this time and place than anyone else at the overlook.

But there is another person there, too. That person has a phone, and is alternately taking pictures and typing.

There is perhaps an instantaneous impulse to judge that person for paying attention to a phone instead of paying attention to the sunset. But is taking a picture with a phone any different than taking a picture with a vintage Franke & Heidecke 35-mm Rolleiflex? And maybe what that person is typing is an essay or a sonnet, or field notes. Let’s not jump to the conclusion that this person is playing Minecraft and ignoring the splendor of the natural world.

There are as many different ways to participate in life as there are intelligent beings on the planet, and they are all valid. When somebody says, “I wasn’t taking pictures, I was just being in the moment,” that negates the value of taking pictures as a means to be in the moment. When someone says, “put down your notepad and just pay attention to what’s happening right in front of you right now,” that refutes the usefulness of writing as a way to tangibly snare an ephemeral state in the careening flux of human existence.

Perhaps we would all be better off if we could find it within ourselves to do less judging and more living—whatever “living” means to each of us.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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(Warning: mild, general spoilers ahead. Don’t read this if you want to be completely surprised by what happens in Book III, Hate's Profiting.)

Book II, Crass Casualty, ended on a decidedly grim and despairing note, and that bleak tone carries over into Book III, despite some significant positive developments in the intervening decades.

Hate's Profiting alternates between two parallel frames of reference, one set in October of 1923 and the other set in October of 1993, 70 years later. (It’s not a coincidence that Book I takes place largely in the spring, Book II takes place largely in the summer, and Book III takes place largely in the fall.)

I really wanted to explore the theme of moral ambiguity as it relates to social progress. On one hand, in many ways one might validly argue that Victoria lost in her struggle against systemic economic and social oppression. She did not accomplish her objectives during her lifetime (although there are some hints in the text that suggest how she spent the decades after she is last seen by the other main characters).

On the other hand, here we see our newest protagonist, Daytona: a mere three generations after the events of Crass Casualty, she is living a life that in more than one sense epitomizes everything that Victoria believed in and fought for. She is a college graduate with a high-paying career, she is independent and self-reliant, she is a skydiver and a motorcyclist. Victoria would have been thrilled to see the headway that had been made. She would have been delighted about the freedom and opportunities that Daytona enjoys compared to women of her own era. Yet we also learn that the circumstances that led to Daytona’s relative affluence and privilege are sordid, stained by a shameful old family secret.

And as Lillian and Pearl remind Victoria and Constance at multiple points throughout the story, people of color are often the last to see the benefits of cultural advancement, and frequently find themselves left behind in the self-congratulatory progressive parade.

I also wanted to shine a spotlight on the banality of evil. For Percy and Tatiana, sadistic cruelty is not an active choice but a course of least resistance, carried out casually and mindlessly as a series of mundane tasks. They have each so deeply internalized Bam’s homicidal career into their normal boring daily routines that they are utterly untroubled by conscience, and instead spend their time complaining about how unfair life is and wishing for greater personal fulfillment, all while trying to gain the advantage over the other and position themselves in Bam’s greater favor. All remorse—if they ever had any—has been ground out of them along the way by the tedious and repetitive life they lead.

But we would be mistaken to think this is purely a reflection of their intrinsic moral vileness. Reality is messy and complicated, and it has a way of corrupting and tarnishing even the most virtuous people in the most righteous movements. Nothing is immune.

Hate's Profiting, above all else, is intended to illustrate that no great social advancements come without great costs, and no great struggles remain untainted by great human atrocities.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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Preface and disclaimer: I tend to approach mass-market self-help and management psychology books with great skepticism. I want to know if there have been multiple well-designed, double-blind, objective, empirical studies conducted by serious researchers at well-regarded institutions and published in respectable journals showing that this theory you are selling has any actual value, or if it’s just a bunch of buzzwords and pseudo-scientific nonsense strung together to sell hardbacks to the gullible.

So many popular and often-referenced “exciting new approaches” to whatever-it-is have been thoroughly, comprehensively, monumentally debunked by legitimate investigators who, through carefully controlled experiments, determined that they are nothing but fluff and noise. I don’t care how smart it sounds, or how intuitively appealing it is, if it doesn’t cause something useful to come out of the end of the pipe, please don’t waste my time with it. The first thing I do when somebody tells me about a fresh, thrilling idea that will “change my life” (yeah, sure) is go online to find out what grown-up inquiries have been made against this assertion, and 8 times out of 10 someone at a university has already proven that it’s a load of ill-conceived, poorly constructed, blithering gibberish.

So when I was given the assignment of reading CliftonStrengths, you must understand that I approached it with a high degree of cynicism, fully expecting to find it to be the usual silly and illogical quackery packaged as revolutionary business insight. So imagine my surprise when I found myself in agreement with much of what the introduction had to say!

One of the funny things about me is that I emerged from the womb with a fully formed personality. I often hear people say things like, “I just want to figure out who I am and what I want,” and I cannot relate to that at all. When somebody tells me, “I want to take a year off to find myself,” I am confused. HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW WHO YOU ARE?

I have never had the slightest doubt about who I was or what I wanted. From my earliest recollections, I had very specific desires. I wanted to fly. I wanted to skydive. I wanted to sail. I wanted to ride motorcycles. I wanted to travel. I wanted to scuba dive. And most of all, I wanted to write. I have never not wanted to be a novelist. I have never not wanted to be a pilot. None of that has ever changed.

So I took the evaluation, and the results were pretty much spot-on. This didn’t surprise me much; no one is better equipped to be a personality-type identifier than Gallup, the master of polling. They correctly pegged me as being intellectual and analytical, a strategic thinker interested in context, and a “maximizer,” which I took in the spirit of taking a first draft through 47 revisions until it was as good as it could possibly be.

All of that is accurate. Where I remain skeptical, however, is in the application of this information in a real-world context.

Do you know what I’d love to see? A serious research study in which one group of businesses has their employees take this test, and then takes vigorous, assertive action based on the results. The second group of businesses would have their employees take this test, but then would take no particular action based on the results. And the third business (the control group) would not take this test. The researchers would follow all three groups of businesses for several years and see if any trends emerged.

It would be interesting to see what the results were after, say, five years. I have a hypothesis: the first two groups would show a brief bump in employee engagement, simply because management seemed to be taking an interest in their well-being, but it would soon fade back to the normal, pre-test levels. But all three of the groups would show roughly the same overall average performance, when corrected for fluctuations in the economy. I also predict that the mangers in group one would express a strong, unshakeable belief that their performance had improved based on the test and the actions they took following the test, and that they would refuse to accept the statistical reality that it had made no difference, even when confronted with the hard data proving it. “I know we got better, I don’t care what the numbers say!” is something they would be likely to sputter in defense of their program when handed charts and graphs demonstrating that the gains were negligible or negative.

I mean, come on. In the history of business, has anybody’s boss ever really taken someone out of their present position and put them in a different, better position where that person could more effectively use their strengths?

“Fred, I know we hired you to be an engineer in the Gaskets and Seals department, but we’re going to reassign you as a public-relations expert with the Marketing team, because that’s where your survey results say your talents would be best utilized.”

“Janet, we hired you as a real-estate attorney, but we actually found that you would be better suited in Events Planning.”

I rather doubt it.

No, this is probably just yet another in a long, long chain of efforts by managers and supervisors to get people to do the same jobs, but to work harder for the same compensation.

At any rate, I already know what my ideal career is.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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