Pending Punishments and Goals for June

Just here to let you guys know that I have failed to complete the goals I set out for myself this month as well.

Now, I think I have some pretty good excuses for failing to meet them, but I'm not going to use those as a reason to get out of a punishment. My goals were thus:

1. Finish writing the new scene for "The Mark of Flight"   (90%)
2. Finish the first two lessons of "How to Revise Your Novel" with HELLHOUND  (60%)
3. Write at least three more blog-posts (100%)
4. Successfully move into new apartment (100%)--well, insofar as I now have a key and some boxes. I can't technically "move in" until the first anyway.

Also, the Twilight Punishment video is in the process of being edited. Yes, I completed the punishment, and it was painful, but not quite as painful as anticipated (team Jacob!). I actually ended up watching the Riff-Trax version of the third one with a friend while working on costumes for Animazement. I hated Windows Live Movie Maker so much I downloaded the far superior Windows Movie Maker of old to do all my editing. I'm going to make the completion of that video one of my goals for June.

SO THE PUNISHMENT.

I must do a cover of Rebecca Black's  Friday, complete with crappy music-video and choreography. I will probably need to recruit a few brave individuals to be my "homies". Corinna has generously offered to be my rapper, and Rachel will be her video-ho, so I'm looking forward to that.

OKAY, so my goals for June are as follows:

1. Finish at least 3 lessons of "How to Revise Your Novel" with HELLHOUND.
2. Write at least one blog post per week.
3. Attend two writing club meetings
4. Write at least ONE Flash Friday

I'm currently taking suggestions for punishments, so if you have any ideas, write them in the comments!


*Edit:


I just found this online. My suggestion for myself is that I have to do this makeup, including the mustache, and go somewhere public for one hour, and work on one of my failed goals. Vote on your favorite of the suggestions in the comments, or vote for the Old Age 
Makeup.

Traditional Publishing

A few weeks ago, I spoke with "a friend of a friend of a friend" who wanted to interview aspiring authors about publication needs and choices, and what authors might be looking for. He and a friend are planning to open a website that can act as a resource for writers looking to bypass the "gatekeepers" of the publishing industry by giving writers a link to other "indie" editors, artists, typesetters, etc. I think there's a great market for that, and I told him everything I thought would be helpful to those looking to do self/small/indie publishing.

Then the conversation got a little awkward. When I suggested resources and necessities, such as formatters for the various e-readers, cover-artists, and editors all willing to receive payment from revenue rather than up front, things were fine. Then he asked: "So, if you could take down all the barriers to breaking into publication, and have complete control of your work, and receive a huge portion of the revenue, would you do it?"

Clearly, he didn't expect me to answer, "No."

"But you would make a lot more money, and you'd have artistic freedom, and (blahblahblah)." He was scrambling, knocked off-kilter by the fact that I hadn't given him the answer he expected.

"I think your idea is awesome," I said. "A resource like that would make a significant difference to people who are looking to self-publish or for small-presses looking to find new talent. But it's not for me. I still want to do traditional publishing."

I explained that I wasn't interested in having 100% artistic control. As long as they don't make Jaesung, the Korean love-interest, blond and blue-eyed on the cover of HELLHOUND, I trust that the cover-artist will do a good job. I know for a fact that a professional editor will tear apart my story and find the nuggets of potential, probe the sore-spots in the text, and challenge me to make my story better. I explained that the marker of "success" I've got for my own career is to walk into a Barnes & Nobel and be able to buy my book off the shelf. Most self-published authors can't do that, nor can any small-press without a contract with the proper distributors. A Kindle version of my book isn't good enough for me to feel "I've made it" - I want to flip the pages, smell the ink and glue and paper of a physical book. My book. In print. Now, I don't hold other authors to this - there are plenty of indie press authors I consider extremely successful, but different people have different desires, expectations, and markers of success with their own writing. B&N is mine.

Still, he argued. I started to get irritated, but I maintained my ground. Being able to keep 70% of the profit from each sale doesn't make up for having to do all the marketing and advertising myself. If I can provide the raw, creative material and work (till I'm sweating marrow) with a team of professionals to make it into something awesome, THAT'S what I want to do. Because to me, in the end, "artistic integrity" isn't about having complete control over the end-product. It isn't about not "selling out". It's not about receiving 70-90% of the profit from my work. It's not even about B&N. It's about making these stories that I care about so much as fantastic as they can be, and about getting them in the hands of as many people as I can, and traditional publishing is unarguably the most effective way to do that.

And I'm not sure how many willing, pro-level resources there will be for translating THE MARK OF FLIGHT into Japanese.


Today, David B Coe of the Magical Words blog wrote a post on why he continues to choose traditional publishing over the e-pub/self-pub/small-press models chosen by a few of his fellow bloggers. Aside from the advance an author receives upon acceptance of their manuscript by a publisher, he gives us a list of ten things a traditional publisher will provide at no cost to the author:

1) A professional editor who will read through and critique the manuscript, suggesting changes that will, without a doubt, make the book better. They will also shepherd us through the revision process, providing free online and phone-access technical support for our writing. No extended warranty purchase necessary!
2) A professional copyeditor who will further refine the manuscript, taking care of typos, syntactical errors, inconsistencies in plot, character, setting, etc.
3) Professional proofreaders, who will finalize the editing of the manuscript.
4) Jacket art by a professional artist.
5) Jacket design and layout services, as well as jacket copy (those plot summaries that we see on the backs of books) to help lure readers to the book.
6) Formatting, typesetting, and printing and/or electronic generation of the book, again by professionals.
7) (and the importance of this one simply cannot by overstated) Review copies compiled, printed, and distributed to journals, magazines, professional reviewers, and other publications often of the author’s choice, in order to garner reviews in advance of the book’s official publication. In addition, earlier in the process, publishers will send out review copies, or even bound manuscripts, to established authors in order to get cover blurbs that can be helpful in drawing readers to the books.
8) Advertisements of our books in magazines, journals, newspapers, and other print and online venues.
9) Nationwide (and at times worldwide) distribution of our books to physical bookstores, online booksellers, and ebook vendors.
10) And finally, accounting of our sales, shipments, returns, etc.

(You can read David's full post here.) Just the first point - the professional editor - usually costs somewhere in the ballpark of $1,000, often more, and I don't believe in half-assing anything when it comes to beating my stories into shape. If I did, I would have given up after the first draft of MARK OF FLIGHT.

This is not to say that I don't think e-pub/self-pub/small-press are not viable options. In fact, Pendragon Variety is working on a new venture called "Pendragon Express" as a way to try circumventing the distribution problem for independent authors. I've also read several books by small-press or self-published authors that I thought were awesome, but which might have been a little too "niche" to appeal to the current market. Abigail Hilton's "The Guild of the Cowry Catchers" comes to mind. Seriously fun story, but I can see why fauns, foxlings, and other half-beast main-characters battling it out on the high seas amidst a web of intertwining conflicts might not appeal to everyone. And that's before we get to death, sex, slavery, and tongue-removal.

Hey, *I* sure enjoy the heck out of it. But is it mainstream? No. Could Abbie have remained true to her vision of the story and changed enough of it to make the book mainstream? Maybe if it were a manga, but as a novel it definitely feels a little left of the target. I think Abbie made the correct decision in self-publishing her work; otherwise a really awesome story might never have seen the light of day. Now I can listen to Norm Sherman deliver the deliciously cutting lines of Silveo in the free podcast version of the novel.

But let's be clear about something: Abbie pays a lot of money to get tons of artwork for her story. She pays the other podcast talents that read her characters. She's explained again and again that the money she makes from selling the illustrated e-books and short-stories and extras just about lets her break even. And this is a super-popular story.

It all seems to come down to love. Abbie tried to publish through traditional venues first, but her story was "too long" (bah). She loves her story enough to put in the time, effort, and money it takes to bring it to the audience that wants to consume it (read: me). I love my stories enough to do whatever it takes to make them the best they can be, and in my opinion, that is with as many of the services in David B Coe's list as possible. If I end up having to pay out of pocket for them, then I will. It will take me forever, but I will eventually do it.

Of course, I'm going to try to go through traditional publishers first, because that means the cash is flowing towards ME. I hope I don't have to explain why that's preferable.

INTERACT: What form of publishing do you feel is right for your work? Have you looked into various options for publication? Which ones strike you as the most appealing, and why? Do you think a resource for writers who want to self/e-pub is a good idea? Would you be willing to provide a service (such as editing or art) for a percentage of revenue on the back-end?

Goodbye, Momoko

Momoko (Left), me, and Krista, on the day when I got my apartment in Shimokitazawa.

I received an email this morning telling me that my friend, Momoko, passed away in a car accident. The message had been translated into English by someone outside her Japanese-speaking family, and I received it first thing upon coming in to work.

I moved to Japan in August, 2007, which was the whole reason I even started this blog. By October, I was thoroughly lonely, immersed in a job I wasn't good at, with coworkers who were all much older than me and always compared me to my predecessor. I was in a fairly large neighborhood where there were mostly families with young kids, where the people my age had either moved to Tokyo or college, and my coworkers only occasionally spared time for me. I'm pretty good at being alone, but more than a month of solitude was too much. I had made friends immediately in the city where I did my training, but for some reason, it was much harder in Omiya.

On one Saturday, I was sitting outside the station and an American girl approached me - she couldn't speak Japanese and was having trouble figuring out what the girl at the cell-phone kiosk was trying to say. I helped her translate with my (admittedly still bad) Japanese, explaining that the sales girl was trying to tell her she could pay her phone bill at the convenience store. That girl was also named Lauren, and a week or so later, I saw Lauren at the Starbucks and she introduced me to her new Japanese teacher - Momoko Okayama. Long after Lauren left, Momoko and I chatted. Her English was good because she had spent some time in Canada. We exchanged cell-phone numbers and hung out several times after that, talking in a mixture of English and Japanese.

Before I knew it, it was Christmas. In Japan, Christmas isn't a holiday - kids still go to school, their parents still go to work, and the celebrations are mainly held between couples, who spend Christmas Eve on dates far more elaborate than Valentine's Day or White Day. But I had only been away from home a few months, had spent my birthday with a guy who worked at the Starbucks, whose birthday was also in November, and none of my coworkers much cared that it was Christmas, or that I might be lonely.

Christmas with Momoko and friends.

But Momoko called me, told me she and her friends were having a party, and invited me to come along. She literally saved Christmas for me.

About six months later, I was looking for an apartment, and Momoko and my friend Krista came with me. Momoko helped me translate, helped me figure out what all the kanji meant and what the contract asked, and she even volunteered to cosign for me. In Japan, a lot of places require that foreigners have a Japanese citizen cosign on their lease, and Momoko was willing to do that for me. I didn't even understand what the real-estate agent had asked, but Momoko said, "Okay, I'll do it," and pulled out her inkan (name-stamp used on official documents). After that, we played in Shimokitazawa and took the picture at the top of this post.

I don't know what I would have done without Momoko. Having lived abroad herself, she understood what it felt like to be in a foreign country, how sometimes being surrounded by thousands of people makes you feel so much lonelier than simply being alone, how painful it is not to be understood, not to be able to communicate what's in your heart.

And then there are times, like now, when no language can convey the ache. I feel like someone is pinching me beneath the jaw. There's a pressure at the back of my head that won't go away, and tears keep sliding from my eyes before I even realize they're back. They skate off my cheek and soak into my shirt, disappearing like they were never there. They, like words, are too impermanent to describe my feelings. They're no relief for the knot in my chest or the guilt in my throat when I think of how long it's been since Momoko and I talked.

ご家族に心からお悔やみ申し上げます。桃子ちゃんは私の第一日本に出来た友達。私の最初の日本にいるクリスマスに、一人で祝いすると思ったんだけど、桃子ちゃんが私の事を思ってクリスマスパーチーに誘ってくれたんだ。彼女の心は深くてやさしい。その後に、アパートを探す時に、桃子ちゃんが一緒に付き合ってくれた。あの時も力になった、彼女は。桃子ちゃんが海外にいる人の寂しさをよく分かるくて、いつも私の事を心配しながら電話する。そんなに暖かい人が私のそばにいてよかった。

最近は話ししなかったけど、桃子ちゃん、大好きだよ。もういないか信じられない。別の世界に会える日まで、さよなら


Rest in peace, Momoko. I will remember you always.

Scribe's Average Work-Day

My cat runs my life.

Scribe’s Average Work Day

7:30 - Wake up to cat massaging face to life with claws.

8:00 – Zombie-crawl out of bed. Trip over cat on way to dresser.

8:03 - Convince self pajama pants are not, in fact, business-casual.

8:10 – Say prayer of thanks for grandmothers who give coffee-pots with timers. Get: coffee, food, leg shredded by cat.

7:12 – Feed cat.

8:30 – Leave house (attempt #1). Inevitably forget something. Usually coffee. Or shoes. Surprising fact: slippers are ALSO not business-casual).

8:35 - Leave house (attempt #2). Usually go anyway.

8:40 – Drive to work. Have iPhone clipped to sun visor, set on voice-memo. If inspiration strikes, RECORD AWKWARD MEMO.

9:30 – Arrive at work. Inevitably leave something in the car (usually coffee or phone…or shoes…)

Now, it would be terrible of me to say that I sometimes glance down at my phone to check twitter or facebook, but I think that’s just something that most social-media savvy workplaces come to accept. Rather than taking a smoke-break or filing my nails, I stop by the “Internet Water-Cooler” and take a few swallows. The important point is this: I try never to let it interfere with my productivity.Try.

1:00 – Lunch.

Lunch is a key time. I pack my lunch so that I can surreptitiously eat it before my lunch hour, and then I whiz off to Starbucks from noon to 1:00 and write, outline, read, or catch up on blogs. Sometimes I’ve had a thought brewing since the car-ride that morning that I can’t wait to get down on paper. I have to brainstorm in a visual/tangible format, because I don’t do well just brainstorming in my ...brain. #inkstorm #ADD

5:30 - FREEDOM.

6:35 - Arrive home.

6:36 - Feed cat.

Once I get off work, time flows in a weird way. My first priority is usually food for myself and my cat. After that, it depends on the day. If I'm going to the gym, I don't start writing until I get home, because I'm one of those people who doesn't like interruptions. In any given workweek, there are about thirteen possible hours (more if I sacrifice sleep) when I could be writing or revising. Of course, a lot of these are used up in bathing, decompressing, blog-writing, or things that don't actually require much brain-power, like watching vlogs on youtube (I recommend vlogbrothers, charlieissocoollike, mikakitty, wheezywaiter, and rhettandlink (NC represent!).

The manuscript - I haz stolen it.

On a slow week, I might spend five of those actually writing or revising. On a good week, I'll spend five hours in one NIGHT revising or writing. It all comes down to stress-level, energy level, and amount of sleep. Also, my cat has a large amount of control over my writing. He decides when it's no longer time to write, or when I need to take a break.

Honestly, if I'm on a roll, my cat is the one who reminds me it's time to get up and take care of that nagging call of nature. I like to imagine him in a coal gray suit, and reminding me in true Kazuo Ishiguro fashion, "Miss Harris, I believe you might be more comfortable with an empty bladder." More likely, he's wearing sparkly black skinny jeans and too much hair-gel, snapping his fingers and saying: "Bitch, drag that string across the ground before I cut you."

Scribe's Subconscious

Either way. I don't mean to be masochistic when I write, but sometimes I feel like a SIM, and my story turns off the "free will" controls. I imagine there's a subconscious SIMS2 version of me doing the pee-pee dance in the back of my brain. You KNOW you know what I'm talking about.


Do you have a writing schedule? Do you get carried away when you write and revise? Is writing a priority for you, or do you let other distractions get in the way? Free will on or off?

Goals and Punishment for May

Last month I failed to meet my goals, but I'm going to give it the good college try this month. In case you're wondering, I have already watched "New Moon" and am currently in the process of editing the video. Team Jacob!

So, without further ado...

MAY 2011 GOALS

• Finish writing the new scene for "The Mark of Flight"
• Finish the first two lessons of "How to Revise Your Novel" with HELLHOUND
• Write at least three more blog-posts
• successfully move into new apartment

Now, I know what you guys are all waiting for, and that's the punishment. So here it is:

If I fail to meet my goals this May, I will do a cover of Rebecca Black's "Friday", complete with dance choreography and costume.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, click the video below, take two Tylenol, and call me in the morning.

And it will be in my head for a year. *shudder*

If I succeed in my goals, however, I will do a spoof of "Friday" called "Monday":

It's Monday, Monday, gotta work hard on Monday

Everybody's wishing it was still the weekend

It's Monday, Monday, gotta chug my McCafe

Cause I've got bags under my eyes like they are packin'

If you have any further suggestions for my punishment, please leave them in the comments!

English Teacher Called Out For Writing?

I could sit here and explain this to you, but I think I'll let this guy do it:

More on this when the rage-blackout is over.

Update: Extended reading on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
Facebook support page

Interpreting Conflicting Advice: Part II

      In my first post about interpreting conflicting advice, I talked about "Having an Open Mind vs. Stick to Your Guns". In that post, I mostly discussed receiving criticism and how to both understand and address the underlying problem and fix it in a way that stays consistent with your vision of the story. Recently, as I've been rereading and editing The Mark of Flight, one bit of conflicting advice has been coming up over and over in my head:

Be Passionate About Your Work vs. Have Distance

Now, I don't usually have issues being passionate about my work; a more apt description of my relationship to my writing would probably be "obsessed". I always think about at least one of the stories I'm working on, to the extent that I create specialized driving playlists so I can direct my attention-deficient brain toward thinking about my characters, envisioning new scenarios, and teasing new motivation possibilities from song-lyrics on my one-hour commute. But despite that passion, I sometimes lose that battle against my inner-critic.

Time for a trip to the anecdotal ward! Yippee!

In university, I joined a writing workshop that nearly made me quit writing. I won't go into the details, but after my humiliating first session, I set aside The Mark of Flight and started writing literary short stories, trying to prove to everyone in that class that I wrote genre fiction because I liked it, not because I was incapable of writing something else. The resulting stories were decent, I guess, but writing it didn't excite me, didn't set me dreaming, and didn't make me happy.

Best example.

So I stopped. I hid behind fan-fiction and RPGs, leaving the "real writing" for when it no longer hurt so much to face the opinions of my classmates. It took me a while to get over the feeling that The Mark of Flight was un-salvageable crap. Eventually, however, the gravity of my world and characters drew me back in. Getting a full-manuscript request from an agent was a good boost to the ego as well, especially when one of my classmates announced it to the teacher in class, and everyone made the *shock!face* (right).

There were a few things I did wrong. I mean, really, the first thing I did wrong was to submit a piece of my novel to a writing workshop rather than a short-story. It's really hard to critique independent chapters of something, but I hadn't written a short story since high school. The larger mistake was letting the opinions of my classmates make me embarrassed to write the genre I liked.

I'll let you in on a secret: writing is a lot of work.

We dream, write, rewrite, fret, brainstorm, edit, rewrite again, scrap, shred, cobble-back-together, and if we're lucky, we get something that's good enough to be looked at by a professional. That professional will then point out all the areas we still need to improve before that puppy can ever see the business-side of a printing press. Do you really want to waste all that time writing something you don't care about, just because you think it's more literary/marketable/socially-acceptable? I don't, and that's where "be passionate about your work" comes in. You'd better love it like that song you never stop playing, because you're going to be spending a lot of time with it.

HAVE DISTANCE

My second mistake in that workshop was submitting a piece of work I wasn't ready to receive criticism or opinions on. I address this a bit in my post about being ready to receive criticism, but I'd like to take it in a different direction now.

CRITIQUE POINT: criticism is a constructive analysis of what is and isn't working in your story; opinion is a subjective assessment of the quality of your work.

Criticism: "The motivation for your villain isn't clear"/"You have a very independent heroine"
Opinion: "Your villain sucks"/"I love your heroine!"

Negative opinion has no place in a workshop. The understanding is that the work being submitted is not perfect, and therefore is not ready to be judged. I would also argue that positive opinion does little good without being supplemented by an analysis. It would be like looking at a half-finished sculpture and saying "OMG it's so great don't change it you're so amazing!" Which is what I imagine happened with the Venus de Milo. Just think, if someone had offered a critique, we could have had this:

Not cool, people.

Anyway, I had assumed that the instructor of the workshop would try to mitigate opinions and direct my classmates toward making constructive critiques, but that turned out not to be true. The first comment I received on MoF in that workshop was: "I hated it". (Coincidentally, that was from the same classmate who later announced to the class that I had gotten a request for a full.)

But guess what? If I get published, no one is going to mitigate opinions on Amazon or book review blogs. They key here is to have enough distance from your work that you can let those negative opinions go without making you want to chuck your laptop out a window a la Psychopomp and Narfi.

My reason for submitting the chapter I did was because I had written it recently. I thought having a sample of my most recent writing would be better than a sample I had already edited, but I didn't have enough distance from the work to see it clearly. Writing is like getting a bad haircut. While you've still got it, you'll probably feel pretty sensitive about negative commentary. You don't want everyone to tell you it looks like crap, even if it does. But a few years later, you can look at those pictures of yourself, and when your friend points out that your bangs are uneven, you can laugh.

It's not that I've gotten loads better at taking negative opinions, I just realized that the very first draft is still too ugly and vulnerable for me. I need to realize some of my own mistakes and hack at the piece a bit more before I feel comfortable handing the sword to someone else.

PLAY WITH ME: When do you think it's necessary to have distance? What methods do you use to gain distance? 

It's Gently-Wafting Curtains for me...

Well, it's the 26th and I'm not quite at the half-way point on revising "The Mark of Flight". There's no way I'm going to achieve the goals I set for myself in this post, so I'm going to have to bear the consequences.

Now, I could just skim through the rest of MoF, half-ass the first lesson on HELLHOUND, and send out a bunch of queries for a manuscript that isn't quite ready, but everyone knows I'm not going to do that. I've invested too much time in both of these stories to give them anything but my best.

With MoF, I realized there are two scenes that need a bit of rewriting now that I've changed the beginning. I'm also a little concerned with how the relationships of the three main characters appear by the half-way point, when they've all gotten split up. I don't know if they've spent enough time together to care about each other yet, or if they even need to care about each other. Duty and guilt is enough to fuel most of the forward action, and the relationships can develop later on.

I decided it was time to get some professional help. (For my manuscript, shut up!) I've contacted a freelance editor I found linked on another author's site and am waiting for a quote and sample. Apparently, her novel edits can be as low as $200, which is really reasonable considering some of her clients have recently been picked up by agents. So yes. As soon as I rewrite those little bits I need for continuity, I'm hoping to ship it off to someone who can take a look at it from an outsider's POV and give me some good advice.

I haven't started on HELLHOUND yet, but I've been brainstorming some great revisions for it, which involve playing laser-tag for the first time since high school. Anyway, I don't want to rush through either revision just to avoid my punishment, so I guess you guys will get to see me torturing myself with the New Moon movie. At least there will be booze involved.

I need a "Team Buffy" tee-shirt.

Research LOL

I may have done irreparable damage to my brother's emotional state.

As you may or may not know, my older brother (Bro-bot) is an upstanding member of law enforcement, and has provided me with ample fodder for stories were I ever to write a country crime comedy (which is tempting, despite my aversion to crime fiction in general). He's seen it all, and it's a good thing his sixth-sense for trouble comes with a seventh-sense of humor, because the list of what he's seen does not happen to come with a convenient censor-bar.

In the rough draft of HELLHOUND, I had to leave out a scene I'd planned due to both the constraints of word-count and the fact that I'd written another scene which accomplished similar things.Well, I couldn't get that planned scene out of my head, and I'm delighted to say that the revisions I've brainstormed include not only getting to write that scene, but picking my brother's brain for information.

Neeheehee. >:3

So last night I came home from work to find my brother and his roommate (let's call him Yankee Boy) drinking on the back porch. Yankee-boy had no idea I'm a writer, which left him confused for the duration of the conversation (poor Yankee-boy). I want you all to imagine dusk in the South, on a back deck looking out over trees and farmland recently redistributed by an F3 tornado. Bro-bot and Yankee-boy are drinking by a coal-fire, made in a three-legged iron grill.

The conversation was approximately as follows:

Scribe: So, Bro-bot, question for you.
Bro-bot: 'Kay.
Scribe: What's the procedure for picking up streakers?
Bro-bot: ...what?
Scribe: Like bored college-students.
Bro-bot: ...
Scribe: When you arrest them, do you slap handcuffs on them and stuff them in the back of your patrol car, or do you find them a towel or something?
Bro-bot: I cuff 'em, put them in the passenger's seat, and if it's a dude, I find something to cover up his junk so I don't have to look at it. If it's a chick, I take a real long time getting to the station. *shit-eating grin* Just kidding. I'd give her a towel or something.
Scribe: So, do you give them clothes at the station, or what?
Bro-bot: Uh, yeah. As soon as they get to the station, they get the orange jumpsuit and go in a cell.
Scribe: Do you finger-print them naked?
Bro-bot: No.
Scribe: Okay. So their bail is pretty low, then? For indecent exposure?
Bro-bot: Yeah. Well, women can't get charged with indecent exposure. North Carolina law only charges men.
Scribe: What the..? I mean, I guess most law-makers are men, so it makes sense, but really? That's not fair. But good to know.
Yankee-boy: So why do you want to know?
Scribe: Well, I don't have any plans this Saturday.
Yankee-boy: *LOL*
Bro-bot: *trauma-face*

God, I love research.

So, the scene I'm working in revolves around my heroine, Helena, being forced to shapeshift to get away from a pair of bounty-hunters who are attacking her. Upon arriving at her dormitory, she transforms back into a human, but her clothes are still at the scene of the crime. Just as she's trying to climb in through her window, she gets spotted by campus police and taken downtown for streaking. Oh, yes.

See why I wanted to write that scene? I'm so happy I can work it in. Truthfully, it was the introduction of bounty-hunters to the plot that allowed me to fit this scene in. I'm taking out the one I actually wrote, which was too melodramatic and not nearly as effective as this one. Plus, I wanted a shapeshifter to get in trouble over not being able to shift with her clothes.

Do you have a hilarious research story? What kinds of research-related questions have you asked friends/family/strangers that prompted great responses? Have you ever been picked up for streaking?


Photo by minifig

First-Person Present Tense in YA

Not even all of them.

Last week I declared a no-writing week, and set to work on the massive pile of books on my bedside table. Some of these are from StellarCon, and some of them are my first-paycheck treat.

I've taken to carrying books around with me, which has helped in the effort to read more. I always carry at least one general fantasy novel, and one YA novel. Recently, I've noticed that I finish three or four YA books per regular fantasy book, which is why I like reading young adult fiction -- I can finish a book in two or three evenings, and the prose isn't as thick as that of Tad Williams or Jaqueline Carey.

I've zoomed through several YA books in the past two or three weeks, including The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Matched by Ally Condi, and White Cat by Holly Black.

I wasn't shocked to find that The Hunger Games was in first-person present-tense, because the immediacy of the plot really lends itself to that narrative mode. After obsessively devouring the trilogy, I picked up Matched because the premise was fascinating. I wasn't disappointed, but I was struck by the fact that this author had also chosen first-person present-tense. I thought about it, and decided that in a world where the future is decided, and all reminders of the past are removed, present-tense was the only option. By the time I got to Holly Black's White Cat, I wasn't even surprised. First-person. Present-tense.

 I'm sure by now we're all used to first-person, especially in YA, where the immediate sympathy of the reader demands a close perspective from the word go, but reading present-tense in genre fiction was a bit of a surprise for me. I see it in literary fiction sometimes, but where I first noticed the trend was in fan-fiction, especially short works. Now, I fell off the fan-fiction bandwagon somewhere around 2006, when I decided it was time to focus my writing on original work. But last year, while waiting for season 3 of Merlin, I skimmed through livejournal to see what was there. I clearly remember Skyping with Adryn one evening, and reading Merlin fanfic whilst waiting for her responses.

Scribe: Shouting to Corwin for cover, Zieke lunges forward and hacks through the foot-soldier's waxed leather armor...*blahblahblah*
Adryn: Are you reading fanfiction?
Scribe: @_@ How did you know that?
Adryn: Because you keep writing in present-tense.
Scribe: ...
Adryn: Don't you hate writing in present-tense?
Scribe: ...

It was pretty embarrassing. I'm the most grammar-conscious of my friends, and to have made a tense-shift error of that magnitude mid-scene was uncharacteristic. The funniest thing was realizing that Adryn had spotted the trend well enough to identify exactly why I had staggered over to the "dark side". (Since that mortifying slip, I have written one thing that includes present-tense: Goodbye Girl, the first half of which is f-p/p-t.)

I have to wonder why that's becoming such a common narrative mode. I find it to be spare, and almost too immediate in most cases. While the subject-matter of The Hunger Games and Matched were both well-suited to present-tense, I feel like White Cat would have been exactly the same book in past-tense. There was no clear reason why the book needed to be in present-tense. Black's faerie series is in past-tense, so it isn't just that she's a present-tense author--it was a clear authorial choice for this set of books. Maybe it was simply because she wanted to experiment writing in present-tense, or because that's just the way the character spoke to her--I get that. As the author, her choice is valid, even if it's not the choice I would have made. Admittedly, I would never make the choice unless the story would be improved by it (and you'd have a hard time convincing me it would), so my biased self is probably off the mark concerning her motivations. My point, however, is not why she made that choice, but the question of whether Holly Black or any author would have made that choice fifteen years ago.

Personally, I don't think so. I know there were f-p/p-t novels back then--there had to have been. I just don't think they made up such a large percentage of the YA section. I certainly don't remember reading any, and I read even more fifteen years ago than I do now. I think the recent trend probably has to do with the idea that immediacy lends itself to faster reader sympathy. Things beyond authorial (and even agent and editor) control are causing writers to need that immediate sympathy any way we can get it. The length of books is being cut, prose is being dumbed-down, and Tolkein-esque jaunts into the land of useless description are halted in their tracks. We simply don't have time for it...or so we tell ourselves.

Oh, what was the line? "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." But who is "they"? It's useless to try blaming anyone--authors, agents, editors, publishers, readers, Hitler--because the narrative mode of fiction is beginning to reflect our current culture, which demands short, fast, and now.

"Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please."

Have you recently read a book in present-tense? What did you think? Do you think the recent trend of present-tense will last?


GO READ Raven's response post on this topic - it's not only hysterical, but provides another layer of analysis on the subject, and the three novels.