caught in a bad romance

Her bad mood did not abate on the ride back to the hotel. Once through the door she began to throw things—her hat, her gloves, her purse.

“Look, it ain’t that bad,” Trace said, despite his instinct to leave her alone. “Just because they ain’t coppin to it don’t mean we have to believe ‘em—“

“Ain’t, ain’t, ain’t,” she mocked viciously. “Do you believe that boorish grammar makes you sound frank and unaffected? Because I know better, Mr. Tracy—and your attempts to brush off the issue as insignificant are insultingly transparent.”

Trace bit his tongue, grimly. “All right,” he said after a moment. “It isn’t insignificant. We are up against a wall. But it isn’t over yet. Neither of us is dead. If we can’t get this woman to help we’ll do it ourselves. We never expected to have help, anyway.”

 “Gods, can you not—“ She pressed her hands to her brow as if she had a headache. “Bloody hell. This is just what I did not want.”

“What?” he demanded.

“You—managing me and coddling me and telling me all will be well!”

“Well what am I supposed to do? Throw my hands in the air and give up?”

“You can leave me alone for five bloody minutes so I can think. Go wherever it is that you go, when you men go to enjoy your freedom and privilege. I’ve been trapped in this room with you for three days and I cannot stand the sight of you anymore.”

Trace got up, struggling with his temper. “You know, if you want some privacy, all you have to do is tell me.”

“I’m telling you now. I cannot breathe with you here all the time. You smother me. Is that what you want to hear?”

“No, but thanks for bein so ladylike about it,” he said nastily. 

KC Planet Comicon 2013 Part 2: the show must go on

This is the second part of my write-up of Planet Comicon. For Part One go here.

I was talking to a friend last night about luck, and I said I'd always considered myself lucky, but when you get right down to it, I think optimists will usually say they are lucky, while pessimists will say the deck is stacked against them. Myself, I maintain that luck is simply being as prepared as you can be, and then rolling with the punches. If you know who you are and are good at what you do, you will be well-prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, and equally well-prepared to recover from setbacks.

KC Planet Comicon 2013 part 1: pussycat fantasies and the rat in the maze

First of all, fellow writer, Lawrencian and attendee Jason Arnett wrote up a terrific overview of this year's Planet Comicon, talking about the new venue and the pros and cons of that, so I'm going to direct you over there first and then you can come back here and I'll talk about the more specific things on my mind.

Done? Ok.

This was, I think, the sixth year I've done Planet Comicon, and the second one since I've been a full-time costume designer and author-in-waiting. (The Curse of Jacob Tracy comes out next spring, according to the current plan, and I dearly hope to have copies in time for KCPC2014.)

There were a couple of things that made this year extra-special. Or extra weird, depending on how you look at it.

can't deny that

Mereck pressed a finger to his lips. “I can see this is a difficult decision for you. But you need not make it tonight. We will be in this city two more days. I give you until Sunday night to consider.” 

“What if I say no?” Trace had to ask.

Mereck’s eyebrows lifted. “Why, then, we leave you here and go on our way. But young Emma will give up her future as a doctor to become a hardened whore, old before her time, teeth and skin ravaged by disease. Mr. Bosley remains a mindless beast, savaged in the pits, with no memory of what he was or ought to be.”

“And Sabine?”

“I told you. Sabine is mine.” The Russian’s face darkened in warning. “I put my mark on her years ago—I should think you had noticed.”

Trace declined to pick up that particular barb. “So you don’t want her for yourself, you just don’t want anyone else to have her.”

“My friend, if the whore had been content to leave well enough alone, you and I would not be at each other’s throats.”

“Can’t deny that,” Trace said.

the real downfall of western civilization

Call me an elitist, a snob, judgmental, whatever, I don't care, but I have come to the conclusion that Americans are ugly, dumb, fat, and mean for one simple reason: They have no taste. In fact, they are trained to reject anything that suggests good taste, because 'taste' smacks of elitism and judgment.

distraction and affirmation

Been really busy lately. When I get stressed I tend to have crisis dreams, or apocalyptic dreams. Last night I dreamed that some sinister (cursed? demonic? alien mind-controlled? I dunno) children were menacing me and my husband and we had to walk very quickly out of the schoolyard and across the street to get away from them. We knew they'd be coming after us so we ran to my mother-in-law's house and hid in her basement. Knowing the school administration would soon come after us, we spent a lot of time putting together our escape plan--clothes, food, weapons, plane tickets--but before we could go we also had to clean up the basement, rearrange the furniture and get everything ready for the garage sale. (My stress dreams frequently involve moving furniture, for some reason.)

Finally we hopped in the car and started for the airport. On the way there, however, we found that downtown Kansas City had been bombed and several of the interstate overpasses were rubble. We had to reroute to Liberty, because my old college advisor had called and informed me that there was some question about the legitimacy of my senior project.

At this point in my recitation my husband stopped me and said, "So the world is ending and we're on the lam, but first you have to clear up your academic record."

"Yes, exactly," I said. "It's possible I'm feeling a little overwhelmed."

***

On the way home from tai chi class today we passed by Stroud's Fried Chicken on 56 Hwy/Shawnee Mission Parkway.

"Y'know, I heard somebody talking about Stroud's again this week," I complained. "And I just can't understand why people like that place so much. The only reason people like Stroud's is because so few places make fried chicken anymore, nobody has anything to compare it to. People don't know what they're missing."

"What I like about Stroud's," my husband remarked, "is how every time we drive past it you tell me how much it sucks."

I laughed. "I know. I'm sorry."

"Nope. It's ok--we'll be driving along and I'm thinking 'Here it comes: three... two... one.... F*CK YOU!!!' And all is right with the world."

how to become a writer

excerpts from Lorrie Moore:

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.

...

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin.

You will read somewhere that all writing has to do with one's genitals. Don't dwell on this. It will make you nervous.

Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands. Slowly copy all of your friends' addresses into a new address book.

Vacuum. Chew cough drops. Keep a folder full of fragments.

...

Occasionally a date with a face blank as a sheet of paper asks you whether writers often become discouraged. Say that sometimes they do and sometimes they do. Say it's a lot like having polio.

4 structural problems to consider, before worrying about petty grammatical and style issues

Once again one of those true-but-trite articles about writing style has flitted across my radar. Beginning and mid-level writers like to pass around articles like this, because the advice in them is concrete and easy to understand. Just pluck out all those nasty adverbs and to be verbs and you're a writer!

It's perfectly fine advice as it goes, but style isn't what sells a book.* Clean style might keep the agent or editor reading a little longer, but the gatekeepers of publishing are FAR more likely to take on a book with a strong story and 'meh' writing than the other way around.** How else do you explain James Patterson and Kathy Reichs? Their writing mechanics are functional at best, embarrassing much of the time. But they know how to put a plot together, and their copyeditors know how to clean up clunky sentences.

Examining and evaluating story structure is much more difficult to do. Here are four major structural problems I tend to see in unpublished manuscripts.

1. Motivation, lack of. What does your character want? Backstory is not motivation. Motivation is the reason you are telling this story through this character's POV. Something has happened to knock his world askew and he won't rest until he's resolved the problem. This could be a new problem or something that's been going on a long time and he just can't take it anymore. Even if your hero is going about his daily life for the first three chapters, unaware of the evil about to descend on him from above, we still need to see his daily stresses and wants and needs. Those stresses and wants and needs should not vaporize, either, once the Big Bad comes on the scene. The needs and wants of his daily life should become MORE important to him once his world is knocked askew; those are the things that give him depth and roundness and a reason to fight.

2. Cause and consequence, lack of. Your character's every action should have a motivation. And every action that he takes should have reasonable and believable consequences. Optimally, his actions will create new long-term complications. But don't make your character do things just because your plot says he must. Give him a plausible prod, a clue, a subplot that leads him to stumble upon the larger plot. Then play out the logical thread of events, even if it goes somewhere you didn't intend to go. Failing to show cause or consequence creates so-called "plot holes" where the audience knows something should have happened, but you didn't show it happening, so they lose trust in you as a storyteller.

3. Emotional development, lack of. Creating good characters is a tricky business. Some authors rely on physical description and backstory to denote character, and some readers respond best to that type of characterization. I tend to fall more into the method-acting style of character development, wherein I rely on dialogue/dialect, actions, and descriptions of business or body language to convey personality. But whichever method you use, your characters must go through a range of emotions, and ideally come out with a different worldview by the end of the plot. Maybe they fall in love, or learn to trust, or find a home. Maybe they lose their innocence, or man up, or realize the world is not as safe as they thought. But they must change, and you must show the events that lead to that change. It should be gradual, earned (cause), and believable (consequence).

4. Point, lack of. A plot is a series of events, but it is not a story. "The Moral of the Story" may sound like an antiquated phrase, because modern fiction is mostly written to entertain, not to teach. (Editors don't want preachy stories and readers don't want to be preached at.) Nevertheless, there has to be some payoff to the reader. The point, or payoff, comes when the hero a) resolves his conflict/gets what he wants/restores his world, and b) takes stock of how it has changed him. It's not enough just to come to the end of the plot. You have to show us what we learned along the way.


I'm not a big fan of how-to-write books, but one good title that discusses structural issues is Jack Bickham's The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them). If you really want to improve your fiction, I recommend taking a persuasive writing class, the kind that teaches good old-fashioned rhetoric: narrative essay, procedural essay, argumentative essay. Most colleges require such a class for their incoming Freshmen. Most people have agonized memories of struggling through such classes, but these are your ABC's of structure, folks. If you can't craft a simple essay, you can't build a scene, much less a plot.

Beyond that, you could do worse than to take some literature survey classes or Poetry & Prose 101. Reading the classics and discussing why they work is a lot more useful than aping the current bestsellers.


*Not most mainstream fiction, anyway. Style can certainly help you but it isn't the deciding factor.

**This is not to say, if you have a good plot you can just let your mechanics slide. I really would not recommend it, particularly if you are an unpublished novelist. Reading sloppy text really is painful and will probably get your manuscript rejected after the first page. Just as in grade school: neatness counts.