Broken Bits of Fiction: strays from my new novel

I've got some random prose to post, things I did to start getting a feel for this new novel. Maybe because these didn't matter, or maybe because I wasn't trying so hard, these stray scenes have a fluid, casual tone to them that I'm not sure I've retained in the rest of the book. Crown Center             Winter was a delight. Water froze solid. It was still tricky—hiding in black like night spread over the dark asphalt. Your bike would slide out on it. You could break a bone (and that might be death in itself) but you wouldn’t drown in it. It didn’t wet the plants that were a lace shawl draped around the city. The plants held off their tirade and left the buildings alone—left them another season before being swallowed. In the winter, water froze—except in the Crown.             Fountains, ringed by glass skyscrapers, spurted year round. It was funny; the Grand road speared right through downtown and also passed close enough to that strange water that you would feel its moist breath on you, if you were brave enough to try the ride through the courtyard.             That water was hot too. In all seasons but summer its frothy head of mist rose above the buildings and spilled over like foam out of a beer mug. It rode from the gates of the courtyard like a white snake. It wasn’t no real snake, but there were teeth in that fog at times. There were teeth in that courtyard that you’d never guess were sharp. Billy said the Crown was off limits—but trapped like it was in a collar of concrete and steel, people couldn’t help wanting to get close. Get a look at it. Some of them saw something good. Some just walked out into the water—and that never was good. But Billy’s order or no, people knew there was something special there. Not like the water from the sky, definitely not like the ol' Misery, but something different and magical.

Lost somewhere between Awe and Irritation with China Miéville--Embassytown ((tags: Audio books, China Miéville, writing))

The first time I came across China Miéville, my wife brought home an ARC of Iron Council. It was a fascinating read for me, both eye-opening and frustrating. His writing style was so singular, some of his concepts (time golems, secrets gained for knowledge lost, speedy paths) are as vivid for me now as when I first read them, but the ending was grinding halt rather than active conclusion. Granted that is his prerogative, and in retrospect I do admire him for it, but I didn’t pick up another of his books for 7 years.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer, I’ve been thinking I could learn more from another reading of Miéville. I downloaded the Embassytown audio book, narrated by Susan Duerden , and found myself in the same split of awe and irritation with his writing style that I remembered from Iron Council.
Setting a novel in a unique world is difficult because if you want it to be a truly new setting there is so much detail that you have to generate fresh for the reader. Miéville has this way of passing over some of this with one quick watercolor brushstroke. He just throws proper nouns out there as if you’ve grown up knowing about them. He describes something new with a few arcane adjectives that give the slightest glimpse of characteristics or traits and moves on.

As a writer, I find this incredibly liberating. To just state something foreign as known fact allows one to not break pace with the story—to keep with the plot and action and just go full steam ahead.

As a reader, I keep finding that often this makes me feel talked down to. I glean as much information from it as when something flashy and bright goes skimming past my head, “What the hell was that?” New, and possibly fascinating, details are getting thrown at me and if I’m not scifi hipster enough to know what he’s talking about, well, too bad for me. I feel like I’m stuck in a conversation with a bunch of grad students where they turn to you and finish with, “you know what I mean, right?” and I’m stuck with, “oh, yeah, yeah, sure, exactly…” There is a case to be made that I shouldn’t feel so slighted, but I can’t help thinking that I’m being left out on some inside information.

There’s no debate though whether Miéville is an A-list writer or not, he’s certainly one of the best scifi/fantasy cross breeders out there. There’s much of him I wish to emulate and if I’m smart, I’ll set aside my envious quibbles and read the rest of his work. Not sure if that’s seven years out, or not.

Since my book reviews don’t tend to tell much of the books I read, here are some proper reviews from Vaguely Borgesian and The Alternative.

Here's My Fiction: I don't want to be an excellent marketeer

I started this blog and joined all the proper social networks because that’s a necessary step to building readers right? I’ve been reading more blogs and meeting more people (as much as you can with the brush-past hello that is much of tweeting and liking and becoming friends). I’m reading about trends and new developments, passing them on to my nearly non-existent followers. I’m building a platform, right?

Now much of this time, my mind has been screaming from deep down, “you barely find time to write fiction. Why are you wasting time here?!” So when I ran across a guest post by Stephen Leathers, on J.A. Konrath’s blog (of course). It really hit home for me.

“When I hear “Indie” writers talking about their books, all they seem to talk about is how they go about marketing their work. How they blog, how they work their Facebook contacts, how they post on the forums. I never hear them talking about how they want to improve their craft. For most of the ones I come across it’s all about the selling. I get emails all the time from “Indie” writers asking me what the secret is to selling a lot of eBooks. I don’t get any asking how they can become better writers.”

This clicks for me in a big way. I don’t want to be an great information aggregator. I don’t want to be a great marketeer. I want to write great fiction. I’m raising two boys, running a household and maintaining a neighborhood church. I don’t have time to be socially savvy.

So here is the deal. I’ve said to myself a long time that you can only call yourself a writer on the days you write. So, I’m going to spend my time here posting fiction. It’s going to be messy—some of it will be embarrassing first drafts—but it is the only thing I want to get good at. Here’s the first bit—a selection from the first draft of my unfinished post-apocalyptic Kansas City novel.

FICTION

            In the Newtonian pockets, Sleepers dreamed their own memories as their world died around them. Outside, Scientists fought the Summer—its evolutions so far leaping that it seemed a season of Magic trapped them in Kansas City.

            [Carl has recently woken from cryogenic slumber a few decades after he was put under.]

            Carl was disappointed when the Standard had placed him with the unhealthy, but not surprised. Now inside, under the bright LEDs, he could see just how yellow his skin had turned. Whether his plastic kidneys hadn’t taken, or if they’d failed over the years, he wasn’t sure. “Maybe they didn’t even put them in—figured they’d leave that up to someone else,” he muttered.

            The old lobby was empty. The Standard pushed the twelve of them into an elevator. Carl was glad the thing had stayed outside the closing doors. It was packed enough, not to have to be swallowed in the thing’s fog of intense body heat. Carl thought the elevator had malfunctioned when, after a moment, the doors reopened into a salty cloud full of green light.

            “Come on everyone,” Carl said. “Hot food and soft beds, remember?” Carl wasn’t sure what was through that elevator. He bet hot foods and soft beds were unlikely—but what choice did they have?

            Carl stepped out of the elevator through the fog, feeling two separate Standards on either side of the elevator doors. Clearing the fog, he almost crashed into their host.

            For a moment Carl thought he was seeing a ghost. The image of a woman, white dress and smiling, was shimmering in front of him. She was almost liquid, her clothes sliding across his vision and pooling in the crooks of her elbows where she held her arms up and her palms out.

            “Welcome. My name is Pearl,” she said. Her voice was too smooth, too schmoozing--like he had just stepped up to a beauty counter at Macy’s.

            “These kids are hungry, Pearl, and tired.” Carl nodded to his side, but in turning noticed that the autistics were already gone. The fog of a Standard drifted down a hallway to his left, and he assumed the children went with it. There was blood under the fog, moving away on his right, and Carl guessed the guy with the bleeding side, and the sallow faced woman must have gone that way.

            “Are you hungry, Carl?” Pearl asked.

            “I’m hungry, Pearl. But I’m more curious.”

            “I should imagine,” Pearl said. Her body turned, her hand motioning to follow, and Carl saw that the clothing was just a projection on pale white skin. His hand cast no shadow on her as she walked—there must have been multiple projections to get the illusion. Lots of cameras or not, he could still see a little through the image. It was just a touch of silhouette under the false image.

            “You didn’t take many of the Sleepers. There were plenty of old injuries and half-a dozen amputees. They going to be much use outside? I’m not guessing there are many desk jobs left.”

            “They will have their jobs,” Pearl said. She turned into another corridor, and in the jump between hallways, in the doorframe, Carl saw the round rise of the top of her buttocks. The spine sloped in gently as it climbed the small of her back. The skin was smooth, flawless.

            “What is this place?” Carl asked. “I find it odd to see a functioning skyscraper surrounded by ruin. This place is high functioning, I assume?”

            “You assume correctly, Carl. Let me show you.” Pearl turned left and stopped at the wall. An image was cast on the white, a live feed from parts of the building. There were lots of people—way more than he saw outside. “One Kansas City Place is a large community,” Pearl explained. “The Kansas Citians provide a variety of material to us. We recycle and process these materials at a level they have been incapable of since the collapse of our parent entity.”

            “U.S. civilization?” Carl asked.

            “In a way. Specifically, the federal government, and the country’s major corporations,” Pearl answered. Carl watched the people, all dressed in the same white flowing clothing as Pearl, moving about manufacturing floors. He could see them making computer boards, wiring small bits of electronic devices. Everything was white, sterile.

            “And you sell it back to them?” Carl asked.

            Pearl laughed, a light frolicking sound. Carl was now sure he was standing at a Macy’s counter. “There is no selling, Carl.” She said. “We give them back goods they need for their own operations; chemicals, medicines, LED bulbs, microparts, etc.”

            The image shifted, and there were the workers now at play. It took Carl a moment to see it—how do you recognize a bar scene without the bar, the pool table, the neon lights, the waitress? The people just shuffled about each other. Some were talking in groups, many talking alone and Carl wondered if they weren’t all talking alone but standing near someone by coincidence.

            “Oh—they’re all borgs, aren’t they.” Carl said. He turned to look closer at Pearl, to see if there were the dark feedshades under the happy blonde projected across her face.

            If there was a list of complaints for grunts in the Alaska Campaign, they joked you would have to wind it on a scroll and carry it on a 2-tonner. Maybe that was true, but Carl had always thought the top ten complaints had probably been about the same since the dawn of organized ass kicking: too little food, too little sleep, too little booze, no women, nothing to do, too much to do, etc. The one added just for the Alaskan Campaign was really an adjustment from a citizenry that bitches about what they don’t have the guts to do—to a citizenry that doesn’t even know their asses need saving.

            Lack of oil, plus war on home territory, had crushed the country’s economy thoroughly. One-quarter of the population signed up for infantry, or was drafted, rather than starve. Half the population was working 16-hour shifts at half-pay, stuffing lead shells and powder into casings, or refurbishing beat up body armor. The last quarter were still rich enough to enjoy the American dream—opulence without distraction.

            Information overlay wasn’t a new concept. Hell, pan the first iPhone around and the camera would show you the ratings on the two Chinese takeouts to your left and the churrascaria on your right. The borgs just took it a step further. Sunshades let you overlay everything on top of reality. Not only could you see the restaurant reviews, but you could tell if the cute girl in front of you had anything good to say in her blog. The guy serving your coffee was selling a classic ’10 Charger.

            The borgs took the net, which brought all things new to the forefront, and turned it static. They bought apps to brighten up their neighborhoods. If their apartment building looked like crap, through the shades it looked 40’s, or Post Modern, or Gilded Age, or Plastique. Whole neighborhoods got wallpapered over—then whole cities.

            It was amazing how fast shit fell apart when the only people looking at the real version didn’t have money. Advertising was gone—all moved inside the feedshades. Painted houses, mowed yards, boulevard landscaping, city lights—why pay for the actuality when you could see it overlaid?

            Carl signed up for infantry about the time it became a federal crime to attempt to contact a borg outside of net channels. If you walked up and tapped someone on the shoulder—it was a federal disturbance of the peace that could cause “detrimental trauma from reality disorientation.” The borgs had not just prettied things up around them, they’d blocked out everything else. As far as they were concerned—if you weren’t on the net you didn’t even exist in the world.

            If most of the grunts hadn’t come from parents working the 18-hour shifts, there would have been no army to bother fielding. Who would fight for people that had written off your existence? Why fight for people that even wallpapered over being under attack?

            Carl started to laugh, and then stopped. He just wanted to find some release for this kick in the gut. How long he’d slept didn’t mean squat now. It was all just the same.

            “Christ—do you even know what the world is outside this place,” he said.

            “Much of it has remained because of us, Carl,” Pearl answered.

            Carl turned and slipped his hands underneath her face. Her eyes went wide on the back of his knuckles. Carl went for the feedshades but they weren’t there. There was nothing there. Smooth scars covered the eye sockets. Two small buds, like the round, silver pushpins that ran down the arms of his grandfather’s upholstered chair, sat on her temples.

            “Please remove your hands,” Pearl said with a disjointed rhythm that was either fear or irritation. Carl felt her lips not move with the words. His hands ran down her neck, fingertips pricking on a fence row of small antennae on her spine.

            Pearl took his right hand and twisted it hard. Carl spun around on his heel to keep the wrist from breaking. The woman’s other hand pulled his head back, two fingers pressing his eyelids shut. He clutched her forearm with his free hand, but it was like a steel bar, like he’d just been mounted on some piece of machinery.

            The woman was driving him now, a steady walk down the hall. Carl was arched back over the hand that pinned his own near the should blade. His feet were whispering on the floor—all his weight born by her arms.

            “Materials to be processed? Is that what I am, Pearl? The autistics, too?” Carl grunted through the pain. Pearl let his feet come back down to the floor, but kept him bent backwards, off balance.

            “We are all human beings, Carl. But we are all essential tools in the hands of KC1. She needs us borgs, as you say. She needs the autistics. She needs you too. Your body has an astonishing potential for accepting donor organs.

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at my skin, you daft bitch. It’s piss yellow!”

            “True, your organs did not reset properly upon waking, but that can be remedied in a matter of minutes. There has been no sleeper with an artificial organ that woke alive out of their crèche, Carl. Our own attempts at organ transplantation have resulted in total rejection between one week and two years. The subjects run such a high fever, they almost cook themselves trying to heal.”

            “The steam man,” Carl said, first with a whisper. “You want to make me a Standard!”

            “Please, Carl. Don’t struggle. We are nearly there.”

The Windup Girl

I clean a small stone chapel in my neighborhood a couple times a week. The simple pace of sweeping and dusting is ridiculously peaceful after a day of juggling children, laundry, dinner and writing. For about a year now, while my hands are working, my ears are sucking in the narration of about any book that catches my eye. I listen to a lot of stuff—anything from Something Wicked This Way Comes, to AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War, to the Master and Commander series, to The Golden Compass, to Isaac Newton, to The Forsyte Saga. Maybe I should read more in the genre I write, but I like wandering afar. We’ll get to more of that later.

My wife, a children’s librarian, brought home Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi, a while back. I’d just started into my post-apocalyptic novel and thought it would be good to check out his teen version of the world’s decline. It’s a good book, definitely teen in nature as intended, but I enjoyed it. (I’ll admit I did do the usual writer thing and decide that my work was a good as that. Since it won the Printz, I’m not so sure.) So when The Windup Girl crossed my path, I noticed the name (how could you not!) and snatched it up.

The Windup Girl dragged me in fast, and in no small part to a great narrator, Jonathan Davis. The Windup Girl in question is a Japanese made new human and Bacigalupi describers her so perfectly with words like “stutter-stop flash-bulb strange”. His version of Bangkok is equally odd and fascinating and his future quite believable. I won’t give it a full review—it came out in 2009 and there are plenty to chose from (look to my last link).

I will say though that one reviewer (I’d link to it, but I can’t recall where I found it) didn’t like the fact that the characters, and city population in general, hadn’t seemed to learn anything from the downfall of the world. I thought that Bacigalupi handled his characters quite well in showing that those who seek profit will always do so, and those that are scrabbling to survive have little time to contemplate environmental morality. It seems to me that Culture may shift and evolve quickly, but man’s Nature is pretty static.

Plotting or Wandering?

I’ve been listening to World Without End by Ken Follett the last week or so. (I’m a big audio book listener, as you’ll soon understand. It’s the only reading time I get, generally.) WWE is the sequel to Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, and a pretty decent follow up. Both books are multi-generational and I admire the plotting over such a length time and how he ties things together. I read a Writer’s Digest interview with Follett and David Morrell back in October where Follett explained that he works six months to a year plotting out a book before writing it. He and Morrell write in two different fashions, and it’s an interesting article to read. I write more like Morrell.

I’ve been trying to plot my story more lately and the results have been disastrous. I have never been so bored with my writing. My scenes seemed to devolve into dialogue—a blathering to get the story closer to the next scene I’d planned. Then that scene too would be boring. I had to use a come-along to winch myself to the writing desk a couple days (often I do, but this one was a much bigger winch than normal).

Maybe Follett enjoys plotting. Maybe I’m plotting wrong. All I know is that in the last week I’ve finally let go and allowed the story to flow on its own. It is doing some things I’m not sure how to resolve, but suddenly I feel like I’ve sunk down into the story. Meaning, in a lot of the last hundred pages I felt like I was drifting over the surface—barely seeing down into what was there. Now, in giving up, I feel surrounded by the setting and the characters again. I’m in that place I write best from.

I wish I could plot my novel and know the story before I write the meat of it, but I’d find no joy in that, I think. I like realizing the story as I go. So whether you’re a plotter and a planner, or a wanderer and explorer—I think you must write in the fashion that makes it fun. There is no other way you’re going to crank out 1000 words a day without some enjoyment. I can’t imagine Follett hates plotting and does it anyway.

So, I’m going to try and stick in my optimum groove between off-the-cuff writing and plotting. I’m sure it will shift back and forth between those poles from time to time, and I plan on staying in my seat day after day to find out. I hope you’re at your keyboard soon, doing the same.

dtgooden

Publishing in Kansas City - regarding ISBNs

I’m getting involved in a publishing group this month. I’ll introduce the others writers there in another post or two, but for now I’ll say they’re all authors who are self-publishing or working toward publishing. The focus of the group then is to help each other through the mess of hurdles one has to leap to finally land flat-footed with a book in hand (or in hand in your Kindle.)

As part of figuring out this self-publishing business, I’ve been reading a lot of JA Konrath’s blog. He recently had Mark Coker, owner of Smashwords guest blog. It was an Q&A about why he started Smashwords and what the future of publishing may look like. What I really enjoyed is that he later combed through all the comments and then spent a great number of words answering people questions.

One reply, regarding the importance of ISBN’s and Smashwords options, caught my eye. I know little about this (thus joining the publisher’s group) so I read carefully. Here is Coker’s explanation:

We offer three ISBN options: 1. A free ISBN. This identifies Smashwords as the "publisher" in the ISBN record. We're not a publisher (we're a distributor; we consider our authors the publisher), so that designation is more a reflection of legacy labels imposed by the international ISBN agency.

2. A "Premium ISBN," which labels the author as the publisher. There's a $9.95 fee attached to this, which is deducted from your earnings. Personally, I consider our $9.95 ISBN a poor option, even though the cost is 90% less than what a single ISBN would cost from Bowker. Why a poor option? Because of all the retailers we distribute to, only one that I'm aware of (Sony) polls Bowker for that metadata. Retailers simply don't care about the underlying ISBN record, probably because the data is often out of date and inaccurate. Why do we offer it? Only because many authors and publishers (for whatever their reasons, right or wrong) feel it's important to have their name in the record. Nevermind that 99.99% of the world will never care or see it there.

The third option is for authors/publishers to supply their own ISBN. My advice: Use our free ISBN. We paid for it so you don't have to.

I found it interesting that Coker would offer an option that he felt was poor, especially since buying a single ISBN from ISBN.com is about $125, making Coker’s deal pretty good. And why would he offer a $125 ISBN for free?

Wandering around blogs tonight, I happened upon Walt Shiel’s blog—which happens to have ISBN as a header. Thank you random chance and Walt Shiel. Check out his blog for a full discussion on the topic. His take on why ISBN’s are important to an author makes a ton of sense to me:

Many subsidy publishers (usually, these days, calling themselves “POD publishers” or “self-publishing companies”) will offer to provide you an ISBN for your book. Be aware that any ISBN provided by them for your book (unless they are on the reseller list noted above) will identify that subsidy publisher as the publisher-of-record for the book.

Not you. Which means you are not really the publisher, regardless of what that publisher tries to tell you or might imply.

Why should you care?

Suppose you publish your book through Amazon’s CreateSpace or BookSurge service and allow them to assign it an ISBN. Two years later, you decide you prefer to print your book with another printer or even a different subsidy publisher. Your book MUST be assigned a new ISBN, since the original one was owned by the original publisher (CreateSpace or BookSurge). And that original ISBN can never be reassigned to a different book, even if the publisher declares their edition of your book as out-of-print.

From that point forward, your book will have two ISBNs associate with it. If a bookseller or library tries to order it, they will have to guess which one is the current one. You will have to rely on some (possibly clueless) clerk to make that guess. They may just pick the first one they stumble on. If that one turns up as OP (out-of-print) or otherwise unavailable, that’s what they’ll tell the customer.

And those two version of your book will continue to show up on Amazon with different publishers, possibly different prices, etc. An Amazon search on your title may not turn up the current version near the top of the results (or, possibly, at all).

You want to avoid this kind of confusion in the marketplace at all costs, if you expect to build your sales for the long haul.

Do I think Smashwords is trying to pull the wool over author’s eyes? Certainly not. But, they are happy to get their name permanently associated with a book and I can’t fault them for that. But the tidal shift of authors leaning toward self publishing rather than traditional publishing is rooted in owning one’s own work in its entirety for eternity. 
Maybe letting Smashwords be publisher on the ISBN is no big deal, but I can barely see what my plan is over the next six months, let alone six decades. I’ll decide what to do about ISBN’s when the time comes, but I thank Coker and Sheil for helping me make an educated decision.

dtgooden

Novel issues: Sometimes writing feels great. Other times it's being at the pool with hairy nipples--awkward and uncomfortable.

Haven't been feeling it with my novel for a while now. I've been plotting a lot, writing tons of notes, which is unusual for me. Historically, most my writing is done off the cuff, a broad outline but finding the AHA! moments as they come out on the page. That is exhilarating. Almost all my AHA moments, lately, have been on a note page. I'm seeing a distant scene and it looks all shiny and perfectly fitted to the story. Jot it down and write toward it, right? A couple weeks later, I'm writing out those pieces and they feel clumsy, feel all like work. They never feel as exciting as that AHA moment that put that scene on note paper. So what? So what, indeed. I'm not a plotter, I don't think. Maybe I'm just not good enough to set so many wheels turning in my head at once. I'm thinking about reinforcing themes, I'm thinking about how all the relationships are working at once, I'm thinking about rules of magic, rules of science, cultural dynamics of a post-apocalyptic island community. I'm thinking too much. Really, I think this is all part of being neck deep in a new book. It’s hard not to worry that the story isn’t what you thought it would be, that it might be far less than you envisioned. It probably will be—as first drafts generally are. Getting the most out of the work comes with revision. That’s what second drafts are for (and thirds and fourths). I'm starting a new section tomorrow. Spring is coming, here and in the book. I'm going to write every day (possible) and not worry where my notes say to go. I'm going to stop thinking and write. I know that's the way it works. I don't know why I try so hard to avoid it. dtgooden