Homesickness

It’s thanksgiving. I’m taking a day away from writing today, so I thought I would write a blog. Hmmmm… 

I am sitting in the living room in front of “The Parade”, listening to people argue about James Bond. I’ve now been pulled into the fray to google the first Bond movie. … and I’m back. Apparently, Casino Royale (1967) was loosely based on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel. So there’s that. OK where was I. Oh  yes. I’m doing the thanksgiving thing. It still surprises me a little how important thanksgiving is on your typical American’s calendar. It really means something here, if my now thoroughly Americanized Facebook feed is anything to go by. It’s so different in Australia. It’s hard to put into words but as a people we don’t tend to celebrate patriotic days - we certainly don’t in a fervent and impassioned way. 

There’s no direct equivalent of Thanksgiving in Australia (for obvious reasons) but I suppose it can be roughly approximated to Australia Day (January 26th) insofar as it is all about how that big chunk of mainly dusty land popped into existence as “Australia”. Sure, we celebrate it, but it’s so laid back compared to here. Nothing much happens in the morning. Basically we all just have a bit of a sleep in. At about eleven or so it’s time to think about lunch. If the propane tank on the barbecue is empty a quick trip to the service station might be called for, where we also pick up a bag of ice. The barbecue is a laid back affair. People show up, (mainly family with the odd waif or stray pulled in). People show up with meat, salads, beer and soft drinks and we just laze around avoiding the heat. Back yard cricket or the beach might lazily present itself as an option in the afternoon. Or it might not.

That really is about it. 

It’s unusual to feel surrounded by more earnest and motivated traditions. I enjoy it, but it definitely makes me think of my laid back, sardonic, patriotically unpatriotic homeland. 

Homesickness is an energy though. Next week I’ll be digging into that particular sweet pain to gouge out some inspirations for the protagonist of my novel. Nothing should be wasted!

Breathe

I spent the weekend gnawing around the edges of my novel. Several snippets of ideas found their way into Evernote, none of them spectacular, but all grist for the proverbial mill. My plan had been to be looking at a more or less complete story board by Friday last week. By mid-morning on Friday I had actually been in good spirits: the fractured scenes I’ve been working on for months all meshed together and I could hold in my head a story line which pretty much works.

But something happened.

I began to realize that I wasn’t happy. That familiar "yes, but" crowded in. As my eyes scanned the neatly ordered progression of cards I could see the chaotic rot peeking out from behind them. That sick, discordant feeling grew. I'm not there yet. My story doesn't quite track.

It hit me again how emotional the writing process is. At the point that I became conscious of my unease it was hard not to panic. Not again, my mind whined. Could all this work on ruthlessly refining my ideas have actually led me full circle back to a point of being hopelessly overwhelmed with plot points and motivations that don’t quite fit together? It’s hard at that point not to just shut the computer down and walk away.

But I didn’t! Instead of panicking and skulking to the kitchen in a frustration fueled carb frenzy I sat back and looked again, forcing myself to see calmly. Yes, I was disappointed in my story for valid reasons but I immediately saw that at the same time I HAVE come a long way and that my week was well spent after all. The plot has holes. The characters’ motivations are still opaque at times and I’ve worked and reworked the middle so much that it has become muddy. Further ruthlessness will absolutely be required. At the same time, there's good in there; a lot of good, actually. My villain is truly villainous. My hero is relatable. Most importantly, I feel that the universe I've built is fun and reflects me. There are twists and beats and unexpected collisions for which I'm beginning to feel genuine pride and ownership. All that has to be good!

What really struck me as my working week wound to a close was that pulling myself out of that hole was every bit an emotional challenge as an intellectual one. I had to force myself to remember that moments of disappointment are just part of the creative process. It is OK that I can see that my efforts haven’t led to a perfectly stitched up and compelling story. It is OK that this is an effort for me and that I’m still reaching and learning. Not to sound too self congratulatory but this moment felt like growth for me as a writer.

These realizations percolating I sat back and realized what I need to do next. My plot is close now and gratifyingly, the large amount of material I have tucked away in my notes conforms neatly to the major story beats I know I need to hit. What I need now is crispness. I need clarity at key parts in the story on what needs to have been established:

* what do the characters need to have worked out?
* what does the reader need to be aware of?
* what presents itself as the next challenge the main characters need to overcome in order to move forward?
* what is the emotional state of the key characters at this point in the tale?

So, I will return to my ever expanding story board and at key points, I’ll insert a green card which neatly summarizes where I need to be. Armed with this clarity I hope to go back and further refine each scene. If I can have this done by mid week I think I’ll be in a really strong position to resume my writing process.

I also feel a little more durable to disappointment. It will happen. This is part of this. Breathe.

Magic, Coffee and Corkboards

So this week is less about meeting a daily word quota and more about making some big, lasting decisions about the universe I’m building.

Today I’m cork boarding. That is to say, I am going to sit down and think about my whole story arc and make sure everything makes sense, is paced well and conforms to the characters I have in my head. I’ve discovered I’m really, really bad at this part. I end up creating cards that are incredibly broad or which delve far too deeply into detail. Still, this is a learning exercise. I’m reminding myself constantly that the slow, painful steps I make with this story will hopefully become the ... ermm... somewhat less slow and marginally less painful steps of story number two.

If cork boarding is the grueling cold water swim that excites me least about the writing process then the raw, anarchic freefall of inventing something new excites me most. I’m talking magic. I need to think more deeply about how magic works in this hybrid fantasy / reality world my characters are inhabiting.

Key questions are:
- what limitations exist on magic. What can’t it do?
- what are the risks of using magic?
- will there be different “flavors” of magic and if so, how will they interact?
- how are magical abilities acquired? or are they simply innate?
- a more writerly question is, how do I make sure that my version of magic is not trite and hackneyed. Eek!

I have the beginnings of answers to these questions, but now is the time to really begin to make firm, binding decisions. Decisions that will inform not just how this story works but how my entire series of stories will work. No pressure or anything.

While I am thinking about all this, I’m dwelling heavily on three approaches to magic that other writers have used, simply because I admire how effectively their rendering allowed their stories to progress.

Patric Rothfuss - The Kingkiller Chronicles. The mental process involved in making magic is so crisply articulated in these books. The author manages to make the reader so aware of the constraints and limitations of magic in his universe that when something “big” happens, the reader has an “oooh” moment.
Kevin Hearne - The Iron Druid Chronicles. I love how fallible and imperiled the protagonist is in this series. He frequently uses magic to augment his abilities, but ultimately his survival is dependent on his wit and personality.
Naomi Novik - Uprooted. The guiding metaphors for two kinds of magic are at odds with one another. One is rigid and formulaic, requiring rote memorization and years of practice. The other is akin to foraging in the woods, finding a way that is different every time. These conflicting approaches form a solid foundation for character development.

So, with these beautiful approaches in mind it’s time for me to try to come up with something equally compelling yet completely mine. Hmm, may require much coffee.

Checks and Balances

This week was a pretty good week for writing, all things considered. I have my brand spanking new MacBook Air set up for writing and little else. This business of little else is key. If I’m sitting in front of bells and whistles I will tweak and twiddle, tirelessly. I’ve set a target of 3000 words per day and since getting back into the swing of things I’ve met that goal all days but one.
So let me jot down a few ideas about the book I’m working on right now. Forgive me if I’m a little vague here and there. I’m secretive! My story is an urban fantasy, set in Las Vegas (more on that later). A creature formerly in hiding is drawn into a mystery about men going missing around town. It’s a simple plot for a range of reasons, chief among them being that I can feel to my bones that it would be a mistake to be too ambitious for this first in what I hope will be a series of stories. The bulk of my effort right now is in building good characters, developing their motivations and defining their limitations. This last point, I think, is going to be especially important. The problem with magic in a story is that it can draw color and life out of a plot if not used judiciously. It’s really important to me that the abilities of my protagonist are not so game changing that she can get herself out of any predicament with the wave of a hand. Where’s the fun in that?
Next week I’ll be doing a lot of brainstorming to fine tune how magic works in this universe I’m creating. I’ll also be thinking a lot more about the map I’ll be drawing from. Yes, I’m setting my story in Vegas but it’s not quite so simple and literal as the Vegas you’ll find on a map. My version of urban fantasy will require that some people can travel to places that others can’t reach. Whole slabs of city, from back alleys to stores to entire casinos, will exist around corners and through doorways speckled throughout the streets of Vegas. Gah. It’s exciting but a little daunting.
Tomorrow I think I will write a little more about magic: the inspirations I’m drawing from and how I intend to construct my own unique rule book of checks and balances.

Act Natural!

So I mentioned in my first post that I consider the partial paralysis of my face to be an important catalyst for my beginning to take writing seriously.

Going back a few months to when it all began, the ER doctor explained to me that I have bell’s palsy. The sympathy in his eyes was not because I was dying, or that I could expect to remain disabled for life, thank Gnarlak. It’s simply that I can expect to be mightily inconvenienced for anything from six months to several years. Bell’s Palsy is therefore exponentially better than a permanent disability and significantly worse than the flu, rot gut or a mildly burned scrotum.

I won’t bore myself or you with a detailed catalog of the various inconveniences an unresponsive mug creates, but for the big one. It severely hampers my ability to communicate. Oh I’m much better now, but when my tribulations began I couldn’t really speak without planting a finger firmly on the left side of my mouth. it was the only way I could get that elastic tension needed to make words. I’d dribble, my lips would twist and careen off to the right. The sound “f” would come out as a whooshy gushing exhalation of futility, like a bicycle pump nozzle trying to inflate a kitchen sponge. Raising my voice would send my lips into a pathetic bubbling frazzle of burbling meaninglessness. The moment I attempted to raise my voice AND attempt to say "f" (take as an example, "Fuck I hate my failure to form fluent phonemes") my immediate vicinity would become completely drenched in spittle and my body would be drained of half its fluids.

I got sympathy. THAT was the thing that enraged, embarrassed and humbled me. I’d see a flash of it in peoples’ eyes when I spoke to them - oh shit poor guy. He’s had a stroke. Quick, act natural!” Again, this is not me complaining. I’m way more of a bitch when I’m sorry for myself trust me! But it made me realize that so much of who I am, so much of what I enjoy and pride myself in is bound up in being able to talk to people. I’ve always wanted to write but I never understood just how deeply this forms me.

I need to do this, and if waking up with paralysis does anything for a person, as surely as velvet trousers are a poor choice in hiking attire, it wakes them up with a start. So here I am, fully awake, mildly lopsided and ready, as we Australians say, to give it a red hot go.

Follow me, she whispered

Two AM. I’m sprawled on my sofa, grumpy at time and jealous of the self satisfied bengal cat curled up beside me and twitching rhapsodically in the throes of a dream (probably of eating birds). When did I become so bad at sleep? I remember the time that drifting off was just that. I lay there, did nothing for a few seconds and then it was morning. I’d get up then, (on knees that didn’t complain creakishly) and eat three pop tarts (which magically didn’t make me fat). It’s funny, my experience of getting older is not so much that I can do less, but that doing the same stuff is an exercise in logistics and opportunity cost. Anyway, enough of this. It’s the dead of night - hardly a time for sensibleness. Pfft. Sensibleness.

Instead, I’ve decided I shall begin a new story with you. It is called “The Shoebox of Dead Lady Underpants”. It took me a while to get the title right, actually. I began with “The Shoebox Full of Dead Ladies’ Underpants” but sensed that something was amiss. The added clarity of the possessive apostrophe and the heightened detail of the shoebox being “full" of dead lady knickers somehow blurred the meaning of the tale with extraneous faffery. No no, that won’t do at all. There is a shoebox. What it looks like is unimportant, but in my mind’s eye it is a pale, indifferent red - possibly bordering on salmon. In it there are an unspecified assortment of undergarments once belonging to a woman who is now departed, each of which had at some point been put to the purpose for which they were intended, namely to encase said dead lady’s fragrant (that word is for you, Hilda) nether regions.

That’s where the story begins. No less and no more.

The story is quite simple really. It goes something like this.

One Tuesday morning, with a spring in my step and a barley sugar in my trousers I decided that I would pay a visit to my local thrift store. I took my time, feigning interest in an old set of golf clubs and a cardigan with penguins on it, but I knew why I was there. I was there for a shoebox of dead lady underpants. Finally the store was blissfully clear of hipsters, the simple and the decrepit. I smiled at the mousey, enormously bespectacled lady behind the counter, commented obligingly on the weather. These pleasantries taken care of, I took the plunge.

“Hello! I would like a shoebox of dead lady underpants, please!"

Miss mousey blinked twice and sniffed. She huffed and rearranged the pins and pens. “We don’t purvey the private pants of deceased persons at this establishment”. Oh her haughty chin, her scowl, the primly judgmental adjustment of her spectacles so that they perched high between her watery, lofty eyes. To a lesser judge of the human condition the display might have been convincing.

But for one such as I. Ha. I saw the furtive glimmer, that perverse little gleam, that twisted little glister that clung to her glance like globulous tears hanging from lashes. Oh I knew.
I permitted my smile to melt away. I planted my fists atop her counter and leaned forward, my nose bare inches from the first stray whisps of gray hairs sprouting from her hair line. I spoke slow and soft and deep.

“I would like a shoebox … of dead … lady … underpants."

A clock ticked uneasily on the wall behind us. I heard the old building timbers around and neath us creak and shiver. I watched dust motes spark in the air between us as a decision reached her.

“Follow me,” she whispered.

And that’s it really. Where you go next with it is up to you, but I prefer to leave it right there.

Of Chimp Mirth, Fear and Paralysis

One Sunday afternoon, not so many Sundays ago, I noticed that I was having trouble smiling. The left side of my face felt sluggish. Slow. Stiff.  At first my brain responded to this with little more than a “hmm. That is odd. Let’s file it under yet another weird thing my body does from time to time and get on with things, shall we?” As the day progressed though, my mild bemusement gradually turned into something else, something edging a little closer to unease. Still, Sundays being as they are I just got on with things. I ate, I faffed around with the Xbox, I made casual arrangements for sexy times later in the evening. All good mundane Sunday “stuff".

It’s weird how ridiculous that first tattered edge of a life rearranging moment can be. In my case that edge came in the form of a chimp on a bicycle on TV. As all sane people must on observing such a wondrous spectacle my face attempted a full-blown explosion of mouth merriment and … oh shit. On the right side it was business as usual but my left side had barely budged. In place of motion I felt something approaching static: a sullen, creeping buzz in my flesh and a feeling of clammy finger pads caressing from beneath my chin to the back of my ear, like a depraved granny with love on her mind and lube on her fingers. Then the real fear came - the fear you can't file away - the fear that grips your balls, twists and says "Hi. I'll be your emotion now. Would you like some pretzels? Well tough shit".

Feeling my heart pumping in the veins in my neck I rushed to the mirror and watched the left side of my mouth. Nothing. I think I may have managed “ffffffff” but the remainder of my hackneyed cussing fizzled away when I observed that I could barely blink. I tried to raise my eyebrows. The right one shot up on schedule. Lefty sat Spockishly transfixed.

Internal klaxons squalled their squallish alarms as the escaped convicts of my deepest fears crept with murderous intent along the prison rec yard of my consciousness. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

Fear coursing through my veins like microwaved onion juice I looked at myself and myself looked back. The right side of my face implored the universe to make this a bad dream, something I could please, please snap out of and be rid of.  The left side of my face regarded my distress aloofly - unblinking, uncaring, unmovable.

The friendly yet alarmingly sympathetic doctor at the ER performed his doctorish doctoring upon my person and hit me with the hard science. “It’s not a stroke”.

"Well that’s good right", my one expressive eye asked up at him. The “yes, but” reflected in his was unmistakeable.

Well that’s enough for day one of my blog. I’m going somewhere with this I promise! I’ll get around to explaining why I choose to begin things with a moment of chimp mirth, fear and paralysis but I like to tell my own story in my own way in my own trousers.

So I shall sign off here. Hmm I need some kind of dramatic flourish for post 1.

I'm Ash Calloway and this ... is my blog.