Jae Walker’s Neighborhood

I finally figured out, late last week, that I was just coming up with excuses not to write. 

I hate it when writers do that.  Some people don't enjoy writing, and there, I can see some reason to make excuses.  But people who love writing, then make excuses not to write? 

I don't believe there's anything difficult about writing.  The notion that you have to know exactly what you're going to say before you sit down to write is inherently silly; if you knew what you were going to say, it wouldn't be writing - it would be transcribing.  Writing is about exploring ideas and creating something that doesn't exist until you type or scribble or encrypt it into existence.

But you always have something to say. 

Somehow, I managed to talk myself into wasting time.  Now, not everything I did before I started in on Prophesied was time-wasting.  Some idea of how things develop and who all is going to be there is good.  But once there's an outline and cast of characters in existence, the only reason not to write is because you're afraid what comes out won't be up to your own personal standards.

Here's a hint, though:  It never is.  What you're going to write is going to be first-draft, and it's going to require revision.  There will be things about it that are good, and things about it that suck.  However, until you write it, you can't do anything about the things that suck, and you don't have the good things to look at and go, "Hey, that's pretty good."  So you have all of the anxiety, but none of the reward.

Even after all these years of writing every day, I still manage to get myself into places where I put off starting new projects.  I do the same with research that's part of my job.  I'll find excuse after excuse to not start a new research project, and every time I put something off, it only increases the anxiety that goes along with doing it.

Writing is about the last thing that should be like that, if it's what you love.  The fear that you'll produce something crappy shouldn't be an impediment to doing the work; I'm sure I've quoted JBB before, but I'll do it again:  "No great writer has ever been a wimp."  You take risks.  Those risks start with admitting to yourself that you think you have something worth saying, and then sitting down and trying to put it into words.  The risks continue as we put our work out there to be critiqued.  Some people are going to brutalize you.  That's a fact of life.  There will be people who absolutely hate whatever it is you do.  No good reason why - you just aren't their kind of writer/composer/painter/pediatrician/pet groomer/bricklayer/boom mic operator/etc.  They will hate your guts.  They will call you unpleasant names.  They will tell you that you don't know what you're doing.  They will insult your lineage, tell you not to quit your dayjob, and so forth.

These people suck.  I won't say that you should ignore them, because if you ignore any part of your audience (even the jackass part) you give up the opportunity to learn why they despise you and grow from their critiques, but anyone who uses the word "suck" as part of a critique has a somewhat limited amount they can teach you.

I've wandered a little bit afield.  I'm finishing up the first chapter in Prophesied.  I like where it's starting; there's a decent hook, I think, it brings Mack back in a recognizable form, but it gives him something different that he's working on.  I want to finish establishing that he's still acting under the assumption that he's smarter than everyone around him (because if he weren't operating under that assumption, he wouldn't be Mack...), give him something scary to send him rolling forward (but not too scary, because I don't want to fall into the trap of writing a horror story, which I'm no good at), and then transition into the next chapter and introduce the second PoV character.  Well, re-introduce her, since she was in the first book. 

Here's an excuse not to do that immediately, though:  I don't know how old she is.  She was 14 last time I wrote her.  That was two books ago.  Mack can't go beyond age 39 (or rather, he won't admit to it), so I have to figure out if I actually stated how old he was in either of the first two books.  I also need to figure out how old one of the new characters is, based on the established timeline in the previous stories.  Freaking continuity.  See, this is why I need a book deal and a large fan base and someone who obsessively follows my stories, so they can put all this stuff together for me.  It'd be so much easier than doing it myself!

But those are all excuses.  I can find whether Mack's age has ever been mentioned in 10 minutes or less, probably by searching on the word "thirty" and seeing what comes up in the earlier manuscripts.  I've only got a thousand or so pages of text from the other books, total (the first is probably 1.5x longer), so going through and continuity-checking isn't hard.  It's not as easy as just sitting down and writing, but it also doesn't get in the way of sitting down and writing.

There can't be excuses.  Writing is a joyous activity that has no down-side.  The fact that I manage to make excuses to not do it just astounds me.

It's time that I ought to be writing, but I'm not quite ready.  Well, I may not end up "ready" to write tonight, because I'm fairly exhausted.  Hope it's not swine flu.

I doubt it, though.  See, I got home from work and started testing some software.  I can't talk about what kind of software it is, because it's a product that's in closed beta testing and I do in fact take NDAs seriously, but testing is really tiring for me.  Especially when it involves doing the same thing over and over to gather data that the company that built the program hasn't been willing or able to provide.

I think I put four hours into testing.  I have no idea why.  That's four hours when I didn't do much other than sit and stare at the screen, clicking buttons and pressing keys to see if, somehow, when I did the same thing over and over enough, a different result would occur.

Sounds like insanity, right? 

I agree.

So I'm not at all in the right "head-space" to be writing, and since I'm still without my own laptop (I'm using Christy's for the time being, until we get mine back; 2-4 weeks means between now, and 2 weeks from now, but I really hope it's not a full month to repair, since that would stink) I don't have quite the ease of access to all my data that I need to get my thoughts organized before I start writing Prophesied.

I've got (and I may have said this) a full, functional outline of basically what happens.  All scenes are subject to change, but the arcs for the two leads make sense to me.  I need to figure out how a few other characters fit in, who a couple of characters are, and who's coming back from previous stories - I need to finish re-populating his world, since it's been 4-5 years since his last adventure, if not the last time I wrote about him.

The thing with Mack stories is that I really feel a need to be organized, because I know the kind of chaos that the character himself generates.  I may go out and grab some more note cards, or I may not.  Thankfully, a lot of existing characters already have cards, and lest I sound like I'm patting myself on the back, that was a great idea.  (That I stole.  From some book on screenwriting, and an image in my head of what Robert Jordan's workspace must have looked like.)  Being able to pull out an index card that has a brief description of the character, key phrases, sample speech patterns - it makes it easier to go back to the character if it's been a while, or to differentiate him/her from other characters and prevent populating the world with a bunch of people who all have the same purpose and mannerisms.  (See?  I do actually read a few books about writing.  I'm not as bad as I used to be at avoiding anything anybody else had to say on the topic...)  So I figure, I'll do up some index cards, integrate them with the characters I'll be bringing back, maybe do up cards for scenes but maybe not, since doing that would make them more difficult to manage - although I do need to get a couple of characters placed appropriately.  I hate it when characters just kind of float around my stories and I don't know exactly when or where they're going to show up.

I lie.  I actually love that.  I just have to remember to let them arrive whenever they feel like it. :)

The video card in my laptop ate itself last night.  The signs were there, that it might be coming, but I recently started testing a game on my laptop and had assumed that the occasional screen-flickers and pixelation (which corrected themselves when I closed other programs) were just bugs in the code.  Turned out, not so much.  Last night, while idling in another game, I crashed.  When I loaded it back up, I crashed again.  When I tried to load a third time, I got to the login screen and everything went blocky and off-color.  Then everything went black.

And stayed black.

The laptop being my primary writing tool and repository of everything worthwhile that I think, I was concerned.  I rebooted - had to hard-boot using the power button, since I couldn't see anything to tell me if I was going to be able to reboot manually - and I got the black screen.

I went and got the recovery disks I made before taking it in to be service last December, after the video card ate itself but only gacked the 3D render capabilities.  Booted using one of those - black screen.  Rebooted again without recovery DVD - black screen.

Now, there are two things that immediately come to mind.  The first is video card/screen, since both the video card and the screen have been replaced in the last year.  The video card died after a Thanksgiving trip, and the screen was the subject of a recall HP had because they put a meltable part of the left hinge too near a heat source, causing the cover to split.  I think I've talked about that before. ;)  Regardless, those were my first thoughts, but I didn't rule out the possibility that my hard drive was fried.

Of course, it was booting, and sometimes spinning after it booted, so I had to figure out for sure what the problem was.

More importantly, I had to get my data off it.

You see, I neglected part of my "done with the ms" ritual.  When I finished  A Circle, Broken, I didn't email a copy of the completed draft, and its attached notes file (where I track progress and write notes to myself about things that I am thinking or planning, or things that need to be revised when I go back and re-draft), to myself.  I also hadn't backed up the week's worth of detailed outlining I'd done on 25 chapters of Prophesied.  And then there are all the other things that I wanted to get off the computer, lest I have to go and re-create them.

I brought the computer upstairs, to where my desktop lives, in the hope that I'd be able to jury-rig something between the use of various flash drives, external hard drives, and the wireless home network.

The first was a bust.  To use a flash drive, I need to know what drive letter is being assigned.  I also needed one that didn't require me to install software.  I have an 8gb drive that's been sitting around since Christmas that I cracked, but when I tried it in my desktop, it wanted to install some programs and I had to point and click with my mouse to tell it, "No, I don't want your crappy software."  So that wasn't going to work.  Another of my flash drives, which works just fine on the computers at school, apparently doesn't read as being formatted on my desktop, and the computer asked me if I wanted to format it.

Uh, no.  So that one was out.  I was left with a pair of 128mb flash drives, and an external hard drive where I also wouldn't know what drive letter it was being assigned.

I was beginning to despair.  It was after midnight, and I had a lot of stuff I really wanted to save.

This left me with the home wireless network.  Now, I was able to see a "Shared Documents" folder on my laptop, so it was giving information to the wireless network, which is why I kept trying - because I was pretty certain everything was still there.  The problem, of course, is that I don't keep my personal files in the "Shared Documents" folder.  That would be dumb, if somewhat convenient for situations such as this.  (Setting it to do regular backups of my writing files to the Shared Docs is not a bad idea, though...)

What I finally figured out will work for xp-based computers. I don't know from Vista, but I want to lay this out, because I feel like I ought to get some kind of geek merit badge for it.  So if you ever need to get data off a computer with absolutely no video output, and are using XP, here's what you need to do.

Step 1:  Get Windows Explorer open.  To do this, hit your Windows/Start key in the lower left of your keyboard.  Arrow up three times and hit Enter.  What you've just done is opened the "Run" dialogue box.  Type "explorer" and hit enter.

You've just opened windows explorer.  Go ahead and try it on your computer.  Make a note to yourself of exactly where the "Run" box is.  It may be higher or lower on your menu, depending on your version.

Step 2:  Navigate to the proper drive and directory.  Windows Explorer, at least on my copies of XP, starts in "My Documents".  That's useless.  Unless, of course, all of your documents are stored in "My Documents," in which case you can skip straight to step 3. 

2a. Arrow left one time - this should close the list of folders under "My Documents". 
2b. Then arrow down once.  This should move it onto "My Computer".  You should also hear a CLICK.  That's confirmation that you are, in fact, in the Explorer.
2c. Arrow right once.  This opens the list of drives you have available to you.  Hopefully, you at least know how many drives you have, and whether there are any before your C: drive (or wherever you keep your data).
2d. Arrow down to the drive where your data are housed.  (At this point, you could try to just make the whole drive shared; Windows doesn't encourage you to do that, for security reasons, so I won't recommend it, but you could make it work.)
2e. Arrow right to open the directories on that drive.
2f. Type the first letter of the directory you want to go to.  I wanted my "Writing" directory, so I hit the W-key.  I then had to hit it a second time, because the first W-directory is Windows.  So make sure you know what directory you're looking for, and how many other directories share its first initial.

Step 3:  Set the directory of interest to be "Shared".  Once the directory is shared on your network drive, you can copy anything and everything in it to another computer.

3a.  Hit Alt-F to open the "File" menu, then arrow down 4 times.  This should land you on the "Properties" sub-menu.  Hit Enter. (Note: It's helpful to have another computer with exactly the same operating system running at the same time, so that you can watch what you're doing on one machine, and replicate it on the "blind" one.)
3b.  Hit the TAB key five times.  You do this because in the properties menu, you start out in the folder attributes - you need to get to the three tabs at the top, to switch to "sharing".  Five tabs gets you to the "General" tab. 
3c.  Arrow right.  You've now opened the "Sharing" tab.
3d.  Tab twice.  This gets you to the "Share this folder on the network" box.
3e.  Hit the space bar to turn on sharing this folder in the network.
3f.  Tab 7 times to get to the "Apply" button.  Hit ENTER. To be safe, arrow left two times (which would be back to "OK" and hit ENTER again.

Step 4:  See if it worked.  On a live computer that's connected to your wireless network, go to "My Network Places".  Look for the folder you were just trying to provide shared access to.  Even if it worked, it may take a few seconds to get populated onto the list, so don't give up.  If you got the wrong folder, try again.

Step 5:  Lather, rinse, and repeat for as many folders as are needed.

I'm sure there is an easier way to retrieve files from a laptop that's "gone blind," where plugging in another monitor doesn't work.  I just don't know what it might be. :)

So, that'll be the title for the third Mack story.  I've known that for a little while.  It was about all I knew, finishing up the second one - that if a third happened, its title would be Prophesied.  It follows from a few things in the second manuscript, is vague enough to be interesting, and keeps with the p-theme I've got with single-word titles.  I do recognize that having another story at all makes the title of the first manuscript - Penultimate - an utter lie, but that's okay.  In thinking about how Mack would view naming conventions and what he would say if someone were to accuse him of being misleading, I don't get the impression that he would give much of a damn.

That's kind of generally true of Mack, though.  Irrelevant opinions are irrelevant.  As I think I've said before, that's one of the things I admire about him.

I'm working on sketching out how the story is going to progress.  It's a broad sketch, a paragraph or so per scene, and I'm trying to think about how each scene builds on the core conflicts.  I see a number of elements coming together, which is exciting, and I'm looking at drawing on some of the other extracurricular reading I've been doing of late.  I'm also thinking that there are certain entities in the world - places that often have three-letter abbreviations and offices in the Washington D.C. or other mid-Atlantic regions - that have decided that there's something interesting about Mack Judas and the things he's doing, and are taking a more active interest in his work.  Or rather, they've been interested for a while, but are now going to stop being covert about it.  That should give him something mundane to deal with while he's dealing with the less mundane threats.

That's the element I haven't quite wrapped my brain around, though.  I know the mundane storyline.  I've not got anything weird/supernatural/fantastic for him to be dealing with.  Not quite yet.  To be fair, I'm only 30% or so of the way into the outline, so there's plenty of room to develop that, and I don't want to go to it too quickly, for a variety of reasons.  It also needs a different "entry point" than the last two books, which were a little similar in how the problem was introduced.  The stakes need to be different, this time.  They can't exactly be "higher", since last time it was kind of a "save the world" situation, but they need to be different.  I have some ideas how that might happen, but I'm still working on fleshing them out.

Hence, tonight.  Doing a little mental organizing and committing myself to this as the next project.  I don't know how into the "planning" piece I'm going to get.  As far into it as I need to, in order to have a feel for how the story needs to develop.

It's odd, thinking about starting another manuscript.  I can never quite decide how much work goes in on the front end.  If you go back through what I've written in the past, I've had stories where I did a huge amount of planning (Penultimate) and ones where I tended to play it, if not by ear, then at least much more "fast and loose."  I had some notes, for example, on A Circle, Broken, but in the end those didn't go quite far enough in telling me how everything developed.  And, frankly, may have limited some of my character development early on, since I didn't feel like at least one of my characters really came into her own until the last section of the book, where the outline was the shallowest.  Do I over-write the story and under-write the characters when I plan a lot?  That's something to consider.

If I do, though, can that be dealt with by planning out not just plot points, but character points?

I feel like that's some of what I'm doing, with Mack.  I like that I've inhabited him several times in the past, because it gives me an idea of what kinds of situations would challenge him, and at what point he might get frustrated or bored with the life he's living.  I think that I'm finding him, this time, at a transitional place.  Whether that says something about me or not, I'm unsure; it probably does, but I'm still a bit young for a midlife crisis and am generally fairly happy, so if there's subtext here that I'm trying to convey to myself, I'm missing it.  The things Mack is dealing with are things that I worry about, but never quite experience.

And I wonder if that might be true of him as well.  Is he experiencing the things that he thinks he's experiencing, or is he just worrying about experiencing them and creating anxiety for himself?  (Yeah, I know.  Vague author talking about things in a way designed not to spoil what he's talking about for a story that very few people are likely to ever read, if said author does not get off his butt and actually start editing manuscripts and sending them out to agents/publishers.  I can't help it.)  To be more concrete - because it really doesn't spoil much of anything - is Mack actually burned out on what he does, or has he hit some kind of plateau where he thinks he's burned out, but really just needs to approach what he does from a different place?  I worry about burnout a lot, but have never gotten there, so I know some of what I can draw off in writing this perspective, but I'm just not sure how much of his burnout is actual.  I guess that's something to explore.

I like that I'm going back to two primary characters.  The thing about both AC,B and TMS was that I had just a ton of characters vying for face-time.  I tend to populate Mack's world pretty heavily, but that's because it needs people around.  Most of them are incidental, and are presented in the way Mack thinks about them.  The really valued employee who can do anything with the physical bits and pieces that make up a computer has a name, but he's only ever referred to as "Hardware Guy".  Mack makes use of my (rarely utilized!) gift of brevity to describe people in a way that creates a set of expectations that's fairly broad in relatively few words.  So it doesn't take a lot to build a character that Mack interacts with, because he makes use of so many heuristics in dealing with the many folks he comes across.  Multiple primaries with different perspectives doesn't work that easily; with Mack, a plus-one is more than enough to handle.  And I've written him with his plus-one before.

Anyway, it's late.  We've got a flight in the morning, so I'll be off now.  Maybe somewhere along the way, I'll figure out what exactly it is that's prophesied - that would be good to know, before I start writing...

Last night I finished the first draft of A Circle, Broken.  I wrote the last portion of the climactic scene twice, recognizing when I finished it the first time that it hadn't quite worked.  I'm still not completely convinced that it's the best it can be, so when I get around to editing the MS, I'll see if another pass makes more sense.  The material leading up to that, in the last 2-3 chapters, is good, though some of it perhaps ought to be set up a little bit more, and there are questions that get raised towards the end that never get addressed really well.  I want to leave some elements of it open to interpretation, but there's at least one big-picture thing that I left open that is going to have to be addressed. 

Which is fine.  I'm generally pleased with the story. It works better for me than TMS did, which is good since I blatantly harvested a character from TMS and wrote him into an alternate timeline.  I still think he's one of the less interesting characters, but this time I at least stuck him in a group of strong personalities that can carry more action than his cerebral self is capable of managing.

The draft clocks in at 115,981 words, which counts things like my author's header on the first page, the chapter headings, etc.  So, probably about 115,900 words, which translates to a completely irrelevant number of pages in the font I was using.  It's a little long, if I were to try and publish it as a first novel, but it's nowhere near as long as the book that I think ought to be my first novel, and it's probably fine for a third or fourth novel.  It's not connected to the ones I want to/think will publish first, story-wise, other than existing in the same genre family, it just isn't the story that I think is most likely to land me a publishing deal.

Do those still exist?  I wonder sometimes.  There are a few authors who publish a lot of books, and a lot of authors who publish very few books.  I may look into online publishing one of these years, depending on how the industry goes.  I know folks who made print-on-demand deals with Amazon, which is great if you want to see your book in print and let people who know you have a chance to buy it, but not so great if you want things like marketing or name recognition.  I don't think it's quite vanity publishing any more, but it isn't too far removed.

At any rate, I'm now in that weird "in-between" place again, where I've finished a story and am not sure what I want to write next.  This generally means more blogging for a little while, followed by starting to explore story ideas, followed by both my blogs falling off to nothing for weeks or months at a time.  I think - I think - that the next story may be my final return to Mack, since I miss that sonofabitch and he's a great character, but I'm also pretty certain that he's only got one more story that I need to tell about him, and I'm not positive about all those little "plot" details yet.  But I want to bring back the other protagonist from the first Mack book and work on expanding both of their worlds, hers and Mack's, so that they both feel complete to me.

Part of what's holding me back is that I need to jump Mack ahead 2-4 years, maybe more, and I've not had that much time pass since the last time I wrote him.  There's no need for a real-world analog to time passage in a fake world, I just feel the need to do some maturing as he's doing the same.  And when we're talking about Mack maturing, he's got this somewhat slow timeline that he tends to operate on.  My favoritest profanity-spewing man-child isn't going to grow up overnight, so I need to figure out what's changed for him and what hasn't and what's working for him and what isn't.  He's definitely trying to be more responsible, and not just because of what he's almost done to the world on a couple of occasions, but again - "more responsible" is a phrase that offers a lot of wiggle room.

So I may do some short pieces, or go back and work on revising some stories, or just start writing down his thoughts so that I can find where his thought patterns are at.  Maybe do the same with my other protag, and start defining what her arc would be like.  I need to go back and check out how old she was in the first book, so that I know what my timeline actually is - may be more like 5 or 6 years, since I want her to be on the edge of making her first big career decision, and before she was just in high school.  I think.

Yeah, I like my ingenues.  Me and Joss Whedon have that in common.

All of which is to say, I'll probably be stopping in here from time to time to babble about process and reflect on what stories need to be told and which ones I feel like I'm ready to tell.  If there weren't a Roland Emmerich 2012 movie coming out, I might want to go down that road, but I think we're about to get inundated with 2012 pop culture and New Age crap (not a slight to the New Age movement, but a definite and intentional slight to the people who crassly market crap because they know that a market exists of people who legitimately want to believe, and will explore almost anything to that end) that will cause most stories that use it as a thematic element to get lost - plus, there's that whole, "It takes me 6-7 months to write a first draft and it's already 2009" issue.  The themes that get brought up by the 2012 crowd are fun to play with, though.  And I've got other thoughts, which I'm sure I'll talk about as I move forward.  Smart money, though, is on Mack III.

Christy and I started doing yoga a few weeks ago.  I'm pretty impressed that (a) I'm still able to move when we're done and (b) I look forward to the class.  I mean, it can be pretty intensely painful, and I currently have what looks like a hickey on my forehead from pressing my face against a towel while in a pigeon pose, but when I'm done I'm really glad I did it.

The thing the instructor talks most about, the thing he really tries to get us to focus on, is our breathing.  Because in yoga, that's where everything starts.

I've found that to be true in a lot of traditions.  Whether we're talking Eastern mysticism or modern middle-American Occultism, there's an awareness of breathing that comes before everything else.  I may have talked about that before, so I won't go into it now.

But it's relevant to writing.  Sometimes, in writing, you need to just sit back and feel the rhythm of your story's breath.  Let it slow down when it needs to slow down, let it speed up when it has to speed up.  And then there are days when what you really need to do is let the story breathe.  Let it sit in a corner of your mind that is relaxed and working around it, so that the details don't get mangled in a crush of other thoughts and emotions throughout the day.  Just breathing is one of the best things that can be done, heading into an important scene.  I'm not saying that because I like to put such scenes off; quite the opposite!  I just like to be sure that, when I write them, I'm writing them from as fresh a place as I can.

Tonight, I'm letting Circle breathe.  I can hear its rhythm in my mind.  I can see the darkness that waits at the end of the tunnel for my characters.  It's pulsing -- very slowly. Things are about to get even more interesting for them than they imagined. :)

I once had a physics professor who loved phrases like, "You got the cat by the tail on a downhill pull."  Now, to make that sound right, you need to say it with a Texas accent (so southern, but not hillbilly) and it helps to imagine a mostly-bald guy standing in front of a green chalkboard with calculus stretching from one side almost to the other - because only when the end is in sight and you know how to get there does the saying apply.  The hard work is done.  Just yank that kitty down the hill and over the finish line.

I find the saying more than a little amusing, since I've never imagined that pulling a cat anywhere by its tail would be all that easy, to say nothing of pleasant for either you or the cat.  Still, when I reach a point in a story where things suddenly begin to click into place and I know all the things that need to happen before the story can end, the saying invariably comes to mind.

I currently have the cat by the tail, on a downhill pull.

If you can forgive me for doing so, I'm now going to dissect that saying.  Even putting it out there in pixels makes me nervous, because I know just how many things can still go wrong.

Start from the end:  Pull.

I've got this story in hand.  I didn't know, initially, how it was going to get from point A to point B.  I wasn't even completely sure what the point of point B was going to be.  The characters aren't quite in the right place, yet.  They have the current scene, they have at least two action scenes, and they have one or two scenes that create the climax of the story, where they end up faced with a massive moral dilemma.  I haven't decided if I'm going to let the reader know how the characters resolve it.  It would almost be more fun not to do so.  But I want the resolution, so it will get written.  Right now it's just a matter of pulling the characters through those last three scenes.  I need to throw mayhem and danger and destruction at them.  These are important things.  This is when everything starts to come crashing down around them and the world looks both unfriendly and ready to implode.  If I write a sentence more than two lines long, I'm not thinking coherently.  Short sentences.  Punctuated action.  Clipped dialogue.  Quick visuals and danger and when I need long lists of things minimalist punctuation.

Since, you know, pacing is key.  That's why there has to be some pull (and maybe some push).  This is not a time to just let things happen.  I'm great (or bad, depending on your perspective) at Just Letting Things Happen.  I like to allow some organic elements to my writing, but at a certain point, you have to understand what the story has been building to and get it there.  So from here on in it has to be fast, it has to be visceral, and it has to be cerebral.

I can pull that off.

Now, "downhill" is definitely a misnomer.  It implies that it's easier at this point than it was before.  If you're pulling something downhill, though, life is not necessarily easy.  You're not exerting huge effort to make it move - it's often going to move on its own.  If it's working against you (like the hypothetical cat, I guess), then it's easier to pull downhill, but a lot of the time if you're trying to pull something downhill you kind of have to worry about getting run over.

So that whole thing about fast and visceral and cerebral?  It's easy, I can see already, to over-do that.  The story still has to maintain integrity; whatever it was about to begin with, it needs to still be about that same thing.  Just moreso.  I've had stories where I started pulling them downhill and got flattened by a plotline that I never planned to pursue, that suddenly careened down the mountain, reached the valley below, and ran up the next mountain.  (Yeah, cats don't work with this metaphor.  Not feline ones, at least.  I never claimed to be able to stick with a single metaphor.)  Which is fine, if you want to write a series, or have some never-ending bunch of stories you want to tell. 

The problem is selling a never-ending bunch of stories.  With the passing of Robert Jordan, never-ending stories have a whole new way that fans may look at them.  The current story, I'm pretty sure, resolves itself in 100-110k words.  That's about ideal, if I ever want to shop it around.  I don't need it to run up the next hill and tell me, "Look, there's another plotline here!"  I know there are more plotlines.  They aren't the plot of this story, though.  Maybe I'll climb that hill eventually on my own.  Maybe not.  There are a lot of years and a lot of stories and I plan to continue to be picky.  It's no fun to put six months of my life into something only to decide that it's just not quite a project I want to pursue.  When I was 21, sure.  Not now.

Next up, "tail."  I know why it needs to be a tail, in the metaphor.  Because a tail doesn't bite or scratch, and allows you to keep the biting and scratching bits at arm's length.  I'm pretty sure that when you're talking about dragging an angry animal around, though, there's not a "safe" body part to hold on to.  And having to drag something around by its ass is hardly a great way to visualize yourself making progress on something you love.

Cats in particular are notorious for not liking to be messed with.  The idea that there's anything easy about grabbing a cat by the tail and making it do something it doesn't want to, like I said earlier, is kind of ridiculous.

So, if we finish deconstructing the metaphor, what do we have?

An angry critter that we're grabbing by the ass and forcing to go somewhere it doesn't want to go.  Fortunately, we're doing it the "easy way".

The work isn't done.  Being able to see the end clearly doesn't mean it's all lilies and cheddar.  I've still got a lot to do, but at least I know what it is.  I'm not willing to start the pull tonight.  Soon, though.  Very soon.

I hurt.  I don't know how much of the hurt is because I slept funny last weekend, when our AC was out and I spent a night or two on the couch downstairs because it was cooler, and how much of it is because Christy and I had our first yoga class this morning.

I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with yoga.  Sweet merciful pantheons of the East, what did I ever do to cause that kind little bald man to help me shove my knee up my nose?  I haven't put a knee up my nose since I fell out of that willow tree when I was six, necessitating a trip to the hospital - my only such trip in an ambulance, but not the only such trip I went on when I was younger.

I'm stiff.  And I hurt.  But I saw my chiropractor this afternoon, and he not only gave me the thumbs-up to continue doing yoga, he said my back felt GOOD.

Clearly, he doesn't have to wear it.  But, in terms of it not being totally crunchy with my spine stiff and locked up, I believe him.  Spending 90 minutes bending my spine forward, then backward, then forward, then backward, probably did a lot to keep it from being as locked as it has gotten in the past.

All of which is a long way of leading in to saying that I'm taking a break from working on AC,B today.  I'm pondering a new title for it.  I like the current title, but I think it may be too ... something.  What I've been doing (and I may have mentioned this before) is not writing chapters, but writing perspectives, and rather than having a chapter heading, I'd have something like this:

I like words.  That can become a problem when I sit down to write and words come out, without me pausing to think about what, exactly, I want to have happening.  That, in turn, is more likely to occur when I'm fairly busy and don't get to work on a particular writing project - like the current one - on a daily basis.  I used to force myself to write not just 1000 words, but 1000 words of fiction, each day.  I backed off on that a while ago, because I recognized that while it was great for output, it put me in a position of writing without knowing where I was going with a story.  It's fun and organic, but it's rarely a good thing, at least for me.

So I've been taking my time on AC,B - it's an interesting story, and I'm enjoying the dynamics of the characters, but I'm not pushing it.  I'm coming up on the first of two large setting-based elements that I'd been working on in my head, this one in a farm in rural Michigan (trust me, it's a much more interesting setting than you'd think...), and later this week I'll be doing research for the second (New Orleans...).  One of the things I hadn't quite settled on earlier was a structure for the story, so I went back to a classic element of fantasy literature structure and designed a series of quests for the characters to complete.  That makes things a lot more coherent, and forces me to stay on task.  Knowing that they have to do x, then y, then z, makes it easier to generate conflict and push toward resolution.

The one thing I'm still kind of shaky on, though, is the ending.  I think that's one of the reasons I find myself able to take time off to think about it and write about it - because while I know the steps they're going to take to get to the end of the story, I don't know exactly what the ending is.  Not yet.  So I take days like this where I work through the story, think about what they're going to be learning, think about the motivation of the various folks who are working with and against them, and try to plot out what it's all building toward.

I'm not too terribly bothered by not knowing how it ends, right now.  I've got a couple of images for scenes toward the end that I know will play out when the time comes, but am not at all certain that what I'm building toward isn't a massive "to be continued". 

I used to do that a lot.  I've gone back and read a few things that I wrote when I was in college, and it's clear to me that a lot of what I did, to teach myself how to write, was just WRITE.  A ton.  Not always very well, not always very coherently, and not always with much in the way of planning (probably why I tended toward never-ending stories that spanned multiple book-length manuscripts - because I didn't figure out in advance what the end-state was), but there was a lot of writing, and a lot of joy in the writing.

At this point, though, I don't want to write for the sake of writing.  I love it.  I can't not-write.  But I want to be able to do something with it.  I'm at a stage in my life where I have things to say, I have the tools to be able to say them, and I think the things I have to say are worth hearing.  So there has to be a little more planning.  There has to be some kind of desired end-state that allows me to say, "And now, this story is done."  If ending a story means that I immediately know what the next story will be, that's super.  But I need to be able to ensure that when I finish what I'm writing, I've reached a meaningful place of closure both for myself and for my reader.

So that's what I'm working on.  I know I've asked myself this question a few times, and come up with a few answers to, "How does it end?"  That none of them have stuck for me says that I've not found exactly the right way for the story to conclude.  I knew very early on, in the process of writing Purgatorium, what the last scene was going to look like.  I didn't get all the nuances of its meaning until I wrote it, but I knew what it would look like.

I think I have an image of what AC,B's ending will be.  I think I do.  Because it mirrors themes that have already begun to emerge.    But there is something I'm missing, and I know I'm missing it, and it's probably one of those things that's going to announce itself to me while I'm driving home from work, or sitting on an airplane, or falling asleep at 2 in the morning - it's going to catch me a little off-guard, and I'll laugh and make a note of it and it will be as if I never had any doubt about how the story needed to end.

I'm making progress, though.  A few pages at a time, a few thoughts at a time, a few explosions at a time (don't ask...) - I'm definitely making progress.

After writing the first few sections (I can't call them "chapters" because that's not how the story's organizing itself) of the ACB, I realized I needed to take a step back and learn a little more about my characters.  I'd been going into this wanting to let it be organic.  You know, write it and just let things kind of happen.  The problem is that I've got enough characters floating around that going "organic" seems most likely to end up with the kind of organic material you might pile in your back yard, then get surprised when it caught fire from the inside out.  I spent a couple of days thinking about it and writing other things, then picked up one of the books on writing I'd been sent for Christmas and decided to try an exercise out of it.  The exercise was to do interviews with my characters.

Of no particular surprise, being expressions of me, the characters tended to have a lot to say.  I tried to stick to some standard interview-type questions (I used "What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?" a few times), but also just let the interviews go wherever it made sense.  I've written interviews with characters in the past; some of my favorite things I ever wrote for LF were the interviews Yara conducted with various citizens of Cularin.  Rapid-fire back and forth is fun to write, and fun to read.  How many of us skip over dialogue tags and go straight to where the next set of quotation marks is, if we're being honest with ourselves?

This wasn't rapid-fire back and forth, though.  There was some amount of proselytizing, some amount of explaining, some amount of self-justification, and when I pushed past the veneer of how the characters wanted to be portrayed, a few key underlying traits that I tried to both understand, and keep from being trite.

One of the characters, I already knew.  Somewhat.  He'd been a major player in TMS, and since that story's unlikely to ever see the light of day, I had no problem lifting him bodily and dropping him into the new setting.  Hopefully he'll fare better.  He had some things to tell me about why his arc didn't work well last time, and how I was taking things that needed to be externalized/shown and keeping them too internal.  Which is dull.  Or at least, it was with him.  He pointed out that while it's okay for him to be conflicted, he really needs a little more to work with, and the things he was conflicted about just don't get resolved the way I wanted to resolve them. (If that sounds like I'm being cryptic, well, I am.  Let's just say that I finally understand the core disconnect in his struggle - and know that it was my fault, not his.)  I needed to make his struggle simpler, to show its complexity.  (Cryptic again.  Sue me.)

Then I had three other characters I needed to get to know.  There's Ashley, who's apparently fluffy and flighty but who likes to think deep thoughts when she's alone.  She's never really had a long-term relationship, but it's not because she's afraid of commitment.  She just doesn't see the point, and thinks that romance and love are nothing but trouble.  Life is simpler for her if she's just flitting through, letting people underestimate her and doing more or less what she wants.  She's worried about whether she inherited any of the addictive tendencies her parents showed, and is hyper-controlling of her own life and habits as a result.  She's an interesting dichotomy, because she both desperately wants to be a free spirit, but can't allow herself much in the way of emotional freedom. 

Then there's Kenton, who comes across as angry at first glance, but who isn't so much angry as ambivalent.  He's had to work for everything he ever got, harder than most people he sees around him, but it hasn't made him bitter.  It's disconnected him.  He doesn't think any kind of understanding can exist between people like himself (if there's more than just him - he isn't sure about that) and the rest of the world.  He does what he has to do, and when it's done, he goes off and does what he wants to do.  He legitimately has a hard time putting himself first, so lets the world around him dictate what his life is like almost all the time.  He can rationalize it by saying that when he's away from the rest of the world he's in total control, but he has to recognize it as a rationalization at some point.  He's fascinated by volcanoes, probably because he sees a lot of angry potential in them, like he visualizes in himself.  In some ways, he's the opposite of Ashley; where she doesn't want connections, he wants them but for a variety of reasons won't let himself have them.

The third is Esther, who still hasn't shown me much of a soft side.  That surprises me.  She's very pragmatic, and comes across as a little cold.  I think she over-intellectualizes almost everything - she's very clinical (for lack of a better word) in how she thinks about people, how she understands their actions, and so forth.  Unlike Ashley and Kenton, she's able to make connections pretty easily, but has zero trouble severing them.  She likes to think of herself as grounded and solid and satisfied, but on some level she feels like she's missing something - the ability to get excited about anything outside of her tiny piece of the world.  She doesn't experience - she analyzes.  She needs to move past that.

I'd thought I'd be done at that point, when I had 6-10 pages of interview with each of them (that was just how it worked out), but then I realized I had two more characters that needed to have a say, since the main four are all (at least to start) protagonists.  Not knowing villains, or what they want, can drag the heck out of a story.  Grind it to a halt, even.  So I did brief interviews there as well.

I have a better feel for almost all of it, now.  I'm going to give myself another day to let things gestate, then get back to the active writing.