The Last Chapter Three

The Last Chapter Three

First of all, I want to thank all those who listened to my long reading of the first three chapters of "The Majik of Spark" at the writer's group meeting on January 2nd. I truly appreciate the encouragement and comments.  I'm a bit squeamish at doing readings, but it was a lot of fun, thanks to all of you.

Since then I have spent considerable time on an extension to the third chapter, which I felt, in its current state, left too many things hanging. I didn't want that to complicate later chapters. I almost decided to let it stay undone while I worked on some big picture things, but since the chapter was already two-thirds completed, I ultimately decided to get it finished now. It took me three tries before I was finally satisfied. I will give a hint: Patient readers of my earlier version of the novel get closer to finding out what happens with Kalydice's locks. I also begin what I labeled the "Artifact thread" that turns up periodically throughout the story.

It may be awhile before I pen the next chapter. I plan to flesh out my chapter synopses into more detail so that the pieces interlock better. I hope that will reduce the amount of re-writing I need to do, which will ultimately speed up the work. That's not to say that things won't change. New ideas can always crop up. My characters always seem to have something to say about their role as well.

I'll be sending out Chapter Three for critique shortly.

Androids Don't Dream Electric RTF

Androids Don't Dream Electric RTF

Yes, the title is a play on Phillip K. Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which became the movie Blade Runner.

I was thinking about my dead Windows XP backup computer. I don't actually need it except when the main computer is down. It was painful having them both out of action at the same time, but now that the main computer is up and running again, I haven't done anything about the backup.

I'm partial to desktop computers because I like having a specific place where I go to write, which is my little upstairs office. So, my first thought was that I needed to replace the dead desktop with another desktop. A cheap one I'd only use in an emergency. My second thought was that the only truly critical things I have on my computer is Jarte Plus, an enhanced version of Wordpad that I do all my writing with, and the files that go with my writing projects. I love Jarte's simplicity and excellent, easy to use features. It's Word without the Microsoft clutter. I can get email and Internet access from my Galaxy 3 android smart phone. Everything else I could live without for a few days - I just proved it. 

Feeling a little bit like a dinosaur, though, I felt I should at least consider other options, those being laptops and tablets. I like the idea of having a device for writing that I can easily carry around with me. I could write wherever I happen to be. Such as when the Missus throws me out of the house to get me out of her way, or when I have to drag the dog off to the dog park that neither of us like. Ever had a dog that hated to be walked? Never mind, that's a different story.

A laptop would do the trick, but I've tried that in the past and I just didn't like lugging it around, or the heat it generated, or the time it took to boot, or how awkward it felt using it. Maybe I could find a laptop that I did like.

I am also considering a tablet. I'm immediately saying no to the Windows Surface. It has the worst of both worlds - the lousy Windows 8 O/S making for a poor faux tablet, coupled with an expensive, oversized laptop. I might have still considered it, except that it was more expensive than comparable tablets and it forces everything through the Microsoft website for all apps and programs. No thanks.

 My wife has an Apple iPhone, and for Christmas I got her the iPad Air. She loves it. As for me,
I prefer an Android tablet since my phone is also Android. Not to mention the cost of switching from Android to the iPhone. I'm also a Kindle reader, which led me to consider the Kindle Fire HDX. Coupled with a matching keyboard (purchased separately) I though it might do the job of small, light and functional. It couldn't use Jarte, though. 

Jarte, I was sad to find out, does not have an android or Apple tablet version of their program. There are specific reasons for this. First, Jarte is nothing more that Wordpad with extended features. Wordpad doesn't run on the Android. There is a Google app version of Wordpad that is new (still in beta) which might fit the bill that I could try on my phone. Google also has it's own word processor, free on the Kindle, called QuickOffice. I'll try that one out, too. There are some others, but most of them are focused more on simple note taking, not lengthy writing.

There is one issue in using any non-Windows tablet that surprised me. Just as I use a simplified version of Word for all of my writing, I prefer to save those files in .RTF format. That format is universally accepted, retains all formatting, but isn't bloated by all the gunk of .DOC and .DOCX. Unfortunately, Android devices don't support the .RTF file format. There are apps that claim to be able to read .RTF files, but none support writing to or editing those files. It's a disappointing mystery to me.

What that means is that any files I want to use on a tablet would have to be converted from .RTF to .DOC and back again. Conversion between the two is pretty good, but it's not perfect, and I worry that I would be forever tinkering with it.

However, before I get ahead of myself, I'll test the two apps I mentioned above: QuickOffice and Google Wordpad. And I'll take another gander at those Windows laptops.

Update: After all that research I ended up almost where I started. I purchased a Lenovo Ideapad. It's a 10.1 inch tablet that runs Windows 8. I went with the 64GB version that came with a slot for an SD card as well as a micro-USB port, plus the usual connections of a tablet PC.

I also got a case including a keyboard that also works smoothly. The tablet can be separated from the case/keyboard when I want to just use the tablet.

I love the tablet. The touchscreen is very sharp and responsive. I am quickly getting used to not having an actual touchpad, which is a plus for me. I miss my mouse, but if I get to pining too hard I can install one from the micro-USB port. I sent an email to the Jarte folks about compatibility with Win 8 and they were quick respond that their version 5 of Jarte Plus, which I have, already has touchscreen capability built in. I haven't tested that yet, because of a number of issues that always seem to come with a new device.

Some things have to be changed. I need to replace Windows Explorer with the Firefox browser. I need to strangle Bing and replace it with the Google search engine. I need to wring the life out of MSN so it will stop bothering me. I prefer AVAST! as my virus checker, but McAfee is already installed and working so I'll keep it - at least until it reaches expiration. I did get Microsoft Office running.

I still haven't been able to get my email flowing. Judi says that could be a blessing in disguise. She has her email coming into three devices: her home desktop, her iPhone, and recently on her iPad. I never liked getting email on my phone (texting is so much easier), but I do want to be able to get my email to the tablet. It may take a call to the Cox cable folks, who handle our mail server. Jarte is also installed, but I'm having a license issue with Jarte Plus. I have Jarte Plus on a thumb drive, which works just fine. However, it's awkward on the tablet because of the cable attachment to the micro-USB port, which is very inconveniently placed on the bottom of the tablet, right where the tablet sits on the keyboard case. Sigh. I'll figure it out.

I'm firing this off before I think of more things to add.

Cobbling it All Together

PS - The formatting looks awful, I know. I am having issues with blogger.com. Hopefully I will get fixed soon.

While it may not look like it on the surface, I've been actively working on the novel. In terms of real pages completed, I've cleaned up the first two chapters and added additional content to carry forward several threads that have been added. The plan is to read those two chapters during the next writer's group meeting. Most of the work, however, has been under the hood. Several main characters have been better fleshed out with detailed descriptions about their backgrounds and personalities. I also spent considerable time mapping out a chapter by chapter synopsis. That's been a lot of work, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results. The chapter synopsis is my guide. As a result of that work, I was able to tighten the story arcs considerably. The thirty chapters of the latest completed version of the novel has been compressed into eighteen chapters. I hope the changes will move the story along at a faster, more exciting pace.

The book doesn't end at the eighteenth chapter. I have synopses of new chapters nineteen and twenty completed, and I'm not quite done yet. Don't panic, though, a great deal of the original content is still there, so it's not like I'm re-writing the whole thing. Content has been moved around and unnecessary pieces have been set aside (ie, things that don't progress the story). There is a lot of writing still to be done, but a good bit of it is just tying the moved around pieces together and adding connections to the new threads I'm weaving in. I am currently walking through the main threads looking for consistency and relevance. One of my problems is that I've changed my mind a number of times about how some things work that are pretty critical to the story, and I have to nail those things down and get on with it.

 Let me use a real example. One fundamental element of the story changes considerably. That change concerns Flea. The character, Flea, was never really fully defined. What is he, exactly? Currently, Flea appears both as a young man and as a musical instrument, a mandolin. The explanations for this phenomenon are lacking in the story, and that creates confusion. Taking a step back, I had to look at the idea of Song and it's effect when present and when absent. Song comes from the Well of the Worlds on Chord. It doesn't reach Spark. However, Song does exist on Spark. Flea is a creature of Chord, stolen from Caretaker Melody by Mela-nnee, and taken to Spark. Flea IS Song, which makes him both precious and dangerous. This new Flea does not play music or transform into a musical instrument. Flea is a sentient receptacle of Song in the shape of a young man. What more he might become will unfold over the course of the story.

Cross Country Safari . . . Maybe

Cross Country Safari . . . Maybe

A little off the subject, but I wanted to let readers know we will be traveling (I think) next week. I will have all my writing comforts with me, but I don't know how much time I'll have to write.

The family has been waffling back and forth for a couple of months now trying to decide whether we will make our annual trip (although it's been two years, not one, since our last trip) to visit relatives in Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Just to make things a little more interesting, we are also planning a stopover in Paris, Texas, just because ... well, just because.

Our preference is to use the RV for such long trips. We bring along a few cats to keep us company and enjoy the rituals of a leisurely drive and nightly stops at each RV park. Our responsibilities to our foster cats as well as our own brood have put some constraints on how long we can be away this time around. We have two cats on medications. We are also concerned that our foster cats will backslide on the progress we've made socializing the skittish ones if we are away from them for too long.

We've settled on three weeks as the maximum time we can be away. "If" we go, we will have a lot of help from some great friends who'll be coming by the house regularly for cleaning, feeding, and playing. While we know they'll do a great job, we have a parent's worries for our four footed kids that will be left at home. To cut down the travel time and give us more time for visiting, we are taking the car this time. Two cats, Jonesie and Jackson, and our dog Sheila will be coming with us.

We are less than a week away from our planned start, and we have done most of what we need to do to be ready. Mostly. Maybe. Umm, well  . . .  We still haven't pushed the "GO" button, yet. Two days ago one of our younger cats came down with the sniffles. He seems to be getting better, though we are keeping a close eye on him.

Oh, I do have a little bit of news from the Writer's Conference. They are still compiling and editing the audio from the conference, but expect to have that done in about two weeks. By the time we get back from our trip I should have it.

Playing in the Snow Flakes

Playing in the Snow Flakes

With the conference now behind me, it was time to make use of what I've learned and get back to the business of writing. The main project, of course, is the novel. I also want to make some time to revise the short story "The Hallway" based on the excellent advice I received from my private read and critique with literary agent Jill Marr. More on that in a future post.

I am now on my third draft of "The Majik of Spark." That means I have two 80k+ word novels and a partial third stuffed into my files as well as probably triple that in notes, background, alternatives, and who knows what else. The linear writing process I use (also known as SOTP, or Seat of the Pants writing) is, for me, good for my creativity, but not very conducive to good organization. I just haven't done a good job of organizing the project. When I started coming across old content that looked suspiciously like something important that should have been in the book, I had to take a step back and reassess the plan/non-plan I was using. Having no plan is, by default, a sort of plan, and there is probably someone somewhere who could say it better than I. Aha! Let's let Winston Churchill give his version: "He who fails to plan is planning to fail." Change "plan/planning" to "prepare/preparing' and you have Ben Franklin's quote, "If you fail to prepare then you are preparing to fail."

What I'm leading up to is that I need to do some desperately needed planning and preparation before I jump back into pounding out chapters. In our last writer's group there were mixed views about how formal or informal this should be. There are specific guidelines (such as the Three Act process) that a great many writers, agents, and publishers insist on seeing when reading manuscripts. Then there were some who felt that guidelines restricted creativity and turned the art of writing into a cookie cutter process.

I can only comment on my own efforts, based on my obviously limited experience in writing a novel. I did not follow or even know about such guidelines when I wrote the first draft. In my opinion, the faults of the first draft included a failure to inject a sense of danger and conflict early enough in the book; ie, it lacked the first disaster called for in the three act process. There were lots of other mistakes, of course, but the lack of a tempo that is comfortable to readers was a major flaw. The second draft, while much better in a lot of ways, did not address that fundamental issue from the first draft.

My intent with the third draft is to pay homage to the Three Act process. Frankly, when I looked at the novel in that way, the three disasters fairly jumped out at me. They were in there even before I knew that was what they were. Two were pretty solid, but I could see that one was weak and would need reinforcement. Is that a cookie cutter approach, or an understanding of what gives a novel the ebb and flow it needs to have? That will be up to readers to decide.

I know that I am good at organizing things, when I decide to do it. I also know that I have trouble realizing when organizing should end and writing chapters should begin again. That will be my challenge going forward. I'm going to use a well known method of organizing called the Snowflake Method. I've spent the week since the conference crafting the first two steps, which I'll explain in a moment. I have made some alterations to the storyline based on input from the conference as well, so I hope the changes won't be too jarring to those who have patiently waded through all of these drafts. The first step is to write a one sentence summary of the whole book. The second step is to expand that to a paragraph that captures the story setup, the major disasters, and the ending. All of the emotion is essentially wrung out of this process in order to get to the basic framework from which all the good stuff can be built upon it.

It was hard not to try to fit in Song, or Conductors, or the Well of the worlds, or explain how magic/majik works in Spark but not in Chord, etc. The first thing this process did for me was help me to separate the book I was writing from the book that I will write down the road (ie, Chord). Too often I've confused those two, and this process cleared it up for me. So, below is the result of those first two steps. I'm interested to see if you can imagine how The Majik of Spark can be built, layer by layer, from this beginning.

Step 1 - Write a one sentence summary of the novel.

"A teenaged girl tormented with horrific visions joins a mysterious expedition to restore a shattered, life-giving well."  - 17 words [goal, 15 words]

Say what? I can imagine that reaction. Let's take it by the numbers. [1] Philly is the girl, of course, and the story now centers on her as the main character. [2] The "why" that brings her into the expedition is now explained - she has horrific visions of the shattered well that drive her. [3] Those visions come from the wizard Reskin, who plays a more vital role than before. [4] The expedition itself now has a more concrete goal. [5] I've reversed the idea of breaking the barrier between the worlds to restoring the shattered connection, a more positive goal.

Step 2 - Write a paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel (roughly five sentences). NOTE: I am only going to include the first two sentences (of seven) since entire plotlines and the ending are spelled out. I'd like to save that for eventual readers to encounter when they read the book. For our writer's group, I'll make more details available so you can see where I am taking this third draft.

Here's the teaser:

"A teenage girl befriends a wizard who, on his deathbed, floods her mind with horrific visions surrounding an immense, shattered well beneath a sky raining blood. Convinced by a wakened goddess that her visions are real, the girl joins a mysterious expedition to find and restore the shattered well and stop the evil forces that covet it's power."

Superb 2013 La Jolla Writer's Conference

Superb 2013 La Jolla Writer's Conference

I've been to many conferences in my career, but the 2013 La Jolla Writer's Conference was my first as a writer. The conference was packed with three very full days of lectures and workshops while still finding a way for authors to meet and share with each other and with the knowledgeable faculty staff. Huge kudos to the organizers, led by Mr. Jared Kuritz.

The conference certainly had it's "Wow!" evenings listening and talking with respected, best-selling authors Joseph Wambaugh, Christopher Reich and Dale Brown, among others. The focus, however, was a roll-up-your-sleeves immersion in the craft of writing. The schedule was jam-packed and carried well into the evenings. Authors, agents, and publishers from every genre generously volunteered their time and expertise. From mainstream to the far edges of the eclectic, from the basics of plot and character to the almost surreal discussion on how fear drives both characters and authors, there were knowledgeable teachers to offer advice and debate on every question.

As I write this on Sunday night, my head is still bursting with all this new and useful ammunition to attack current (and future) projects with. It was truly a powerful experience that was both exhilarating and daunting. The daunting part was the realization of just how much more there is to writing than just the writing, and just how much work is required to create a truly worthy manuscript. I think it was Dale Brown (things start to blur quickly) who mentioned how lucky he was to get his first novel published in record time - three years from first draft to release. Similar revelations abounded throughout the weekend and gave me a much different perspective toward what I thought was good writing. That's a challenge that I intend to take on.

I have some favorite moments from the conference. Christopher Reich ran his class on hooking the reader from page one as if we were in the middle of one of his books, grilling us about our plot and characters and demanding the very best of us. It was inspiring and riveting, even when I was the one being grilled.

Dale Brown took a softer approach that was no less fascinating. As a group we talked about our writing habits and quirks and how they helped or, sometimes, hindered our progress. It quickly became apparent that writers could write just about anywhere, and that there were no cookie cutter descriptions about just what a writer was. The only thing we truly have in common is our love and obsession with putting words on paper.

I had a lively talk with literary agent Jill Marr, who worked with me on the manuscript I'd submitted for the private read and critique session. I must admit to bungling my simple assignment on the first page of the manuscript when Jill pointed out that my "horror" story was actually closer to science fiction. Jill Marr's website very clearly stated that she worked with a lot of genres, but that science fiction wasn't one of them. Jill read it anyway. Not only did she give me a number of tips to improve on the story and set it in the proper horror genre that I intended, she also offered potential sources that might be interested in the revised story. I went into the interview very nervous and unsure what to expect. I left with more confidence and armed with good advice.

I also must admit to dogging Eldon Thompson, who is a published fantasy writer participating and teaching at the conference. I liked his selection of topics, but I also wanted to get a perspective from a successful, published writer who is still somewhat new to the game. I cornered him more than once to talk about writing in general and about the ups and downs of the business end of it and truly enjoyed the conversations.

There are still a ton of things to cover, so expect more to come about the 2013 La Jolla Writer's Conference.

Second Helping of the Short Story Contest

Second Helping of the Short Story Contest

I received a second package from San Diego Writers, Ink last week and spent time over the weekend reading the fourteen new stories. In general, this second batch on the whole was better than the first set of stories I'd reviewed. However, none of these stories outshone the two stories from the first batch that had warranted a second look. Whether by design or the luck of the draw, most of the new stories were what I would call "family drama" stories ranging from "slice of life vignettes" to dark dramas of broken families, strife, and death. 

Trying hard to give the second readers something to work with, I culled two stories out of the pack as the best of the set of stories I had to work with. One was the "slice of life" vignette, which I enjoyed reading. There was nothing specifically wrong with the story, other than there were already too many stories just like it. It just didn't stand out compared to innumerable similar stories already written and published. The second story I took another look at hooked me at the start and maintained my interest right until the end - and then the author took the ending right off a cliff, totally destroying it. The surprise ending is a common tool that can be very effective. For it to work, though,  the writer has to embed clues that support the surprise at the end. Good surprise endings jolt the writer into a "Wow, I wasn't expecting that! But now I can see how that came about." The bad surprise ending is one where the reader goes "What!? That's stupid. You just ruined the whole story."

On the home front I haven't been able to write myself out of the mess I made of the first third of "The Majik of Spark." I enjoy the editing process even more than I enjoy writing, so I thought that editing my own work, even such a large chunk, would be quick and fun. I also thought that, as often happens with my shorter stories, the editing process would reveal even better ideas. I was wrong. Sometimes I wish I had started the trilogy with "The Song of Chord," for which I have a lot of background and which I actually began writing before "Spark." That's all water under the bridge now. I like the ideas I have to turn the story down a darker path, and I like the snippets I've already written to pave that path. I just haven't been able to see the whole picture, yet, which was the problem that ultimately sank my first effort.

I still have hope that I will be able to corral at least the first third of the novel into something good enough to pitch to publishers/agents at the conference. If it isn't solid, though, I won't risk a rejection simply because I wasn't ready. I have less than three weeks to be ready.

Note: There are new posts available in the  Wild Family Adventures Blog