Servusamanu.com

I recently found out that my readership was slightly larger than I expected, that is, there are apparently more than two people who occasionally stop by Servusamanu.  That is unfortunate because I don’t usually put more than a few minutes aside for articles in any given week.  I’ve obviously been remiss toward my silent audience…

Hopefully I can rectify that now that the new year is upon us.  Unfortunately, I’m beginning the year without much of a running start.  I’m sitting here very much at a loss of what I could or should write about.  I am tempted to write a review of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, but I really prefer to review things that I like.  A scathing diatribe on its numerous inanities would no doubt flow easily, but does it really do me any credit?

I also watched Blood Diamond last week.  It was suggested to me and it was not a terrible suggestion, but I found it too to be a bit lacking.  The setting, Sierra Leone, was gorgeous and filmography was crisp and moving, but the story was half-rate and the dialog fairly insipid.  Blood Diamond is a period piece and a heart-strings work.  It wants to be a documentary half the time and does not make any rebellious choices with the characters or the plot that might make it more than a glorified history special.  I enjoyed myself watching it, but I’m not going to throw words away on a story that you could probably manage to piece together from the title a short game of 34 questions.

This calendar turning holiday of ours suggests I should write about resolutions or something along those lines.  Phooey!  My goals didn’t change because I tossed away my “pictures of Arizona calendar’ and put up my ‘pictures of really tall mountains’ one.  I’m still trying to teach myself french and have had some success.  I’m hardly fluent, but I can understand the news a bit and I’m fairly good at reading.  My web design hobby is going along perfectly well.  I’ve got a few jobs and a few more on the way.  Eventually I’m going to remake this website and robertdrake.net, but I haven’t even started so what’s there to say?

Work is proceeding as it always does, that is from 9-5 in a week day format.   I’ve yet to make any substantial push for Linux in the community, but I have nearly virtualized the entire server room.  The Gods of Good and Proper Networking should be smiling on me.  I am currently considering some classes above and beyond work and so far that looks to be coming together.  It all seems very far away and distant at the moment.

I have some mind that I might travel to Chicago for a baseball game sometime in the early summer and Louisiana in March.  Both visits depend on how generous my tax return turns out to be.  I always have eight restaurants left in New Paltz that I want to visit.  I’ve left the expensive ones for last…

That’s everything, yes, all my projects and goals?  Oh, writing?  Do I even do that anymore?  Yes, I suppose I do.  I finished my last novel, Lonetracker, just before Christmas.  I’ve got it chilling on ice for a few weeks.  I want to give it a last read through before I try to publish the thing.  It’s not good enough, but it’s not The Lost Symbol either.  My big problem is the length.  It comes in a nice word count: 110,000 words, but in manuscript format it’s almost 600 pages.   That’s a good 200 pages longer than a 110k word novel should be.  It’s all the dialog and I don’t feel too bad about it, but the overall length is well beyond what a publisher would normally consider for a first time novelist.  The hope is that I could pull them in with the first few chapters and they’ll take the necessary risks beyond that, but I’d prefer to play the odds and at least have overall length on my side.  I’m sure I can cut out some more…

I have another story planned for this year.  It is a huge departure from the science-fiction adventure of Lonetracker.  The new story is meant to pull together novels like A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer, or On The Road and spatter it with the intertextuality of anything by Eco and the simple, haunting musings of something from Camus.  Under no circumstance will thousands of words be italicized, will the character’s speak in blocks of wikipedia text, or will the character’s come to absurd conclusions after a few seconds of deep thought.  (I’m looking at you Lost Symbol).  This new story, untitled as of yet, has been bouncing around since at least the middle of 2007.  I’ve written the first chapter twice already, neither attempt succeeding at anything interesting.  Luckily, I’ve got a motley crew of character’s already have assembled so there’s plenty of the work right there.

Anything else I might write about?  Well, I cooked bread today.  Honey graham granola wheat.  It goes well with raspberry preserves, but no one really cares I’m sure.  I guess that just leaves the Seahawks game….

the Seahawks are trash.   Why would I even say a word more?

I’m finishing up the last of the ‘artifacts’ in my story.  Basically, I’m stuffing fictional primary sources between my chapters.  They’re meant to pull the reader in and give them the sort of background information that a person in my world would already know.  I don’t need to have a character write out how the local government works because that’s something every character in the world should already know.  The question becomes, how can I tell the reader things without dumbing my characters down?

My solution has been artifacts.  I’ve got one for each chapter so far, but we’ll see how many make it into the final draft.  I like the idea, but my worry is that they will become burdensome.  Not every reader wants to know everything about the world and if its not strictly pertinent to the story would it be better to leave it out?  Brevity is always desirable, but there’s a different between redundant wordage and ancillary knowledge.  The first is like wading though mud, the second is a short scenic detour.

So far I’ve been happy with the artifacts because they’ve given me an opportunity to play with a number of different styles.  I have a court transcript, journal entries, advertisements, a travel itinerary.  I’ve been able to write a poem, a few scripts, and even a short homage to hard-boiled noir fiction.

While I have enjoyed writing the artifacts, the same thing that makes them enjoyable is potentially a downside.  By changing the voice and tone so dramatically, I threaten to dilute the ‘brand’ so to speak.  My artifacts are relatively short, but in total they come to around 25,000 words.  That’s a good fifth of the novel.  Editing will cut that down some, but not enough if they aren’t any good.

I’ve yet to make a final decision.  That’ll be a decision for a later article.  THis weekend I’ll be starting the final edit so I’ll have a few things to say there I’m sure.

May 1st. March might welcome in spring but the flowers wait till May. It’s a good time to get outside and hike, play some tennis, do absolutely anything except for sit inside writing…

Which is why I’m happy I’m just over half done. I’ll hopefully have finished a rough draft by September. I’ll be looking to edit it until the end of the year and then make 2010 the year of publishing. These schedules of mine never seem to survive contact with whim.

I’m still enthusiastic about the story overall, probably because I’ve changed the plot around a dozen times already. It’s become a lot faster than my outline and so I’ve had to expand a number of sections. A few characters have popped out of nowhere and now they need some developing too. This has lead to a lot of rough chapters not much better than a lengthy outline and continuity errors abound at this point, but I’ve been taking notes. The editing process is already piling up tasks.

The second half promises to be even harder. The tension is really starting to build on a few characters, but it won’t be a graceful road to the end. And then, of course, I have to end it. That’s the monkey that rides my back for the first 90,000 words. The outline was meant to tie everyone’s story down nicely, but then the outlined changed, so the ending has to too. I’m not sure I’m prepared for that just yet.

So, that’s the update. It’s coming along. The most interesting part has been the different direction my research has gone. Most people do their research and then write a story around it. I prefer to write the story, leave things loose enough that I can change things as necessary, add in the research that I think will add verisimilitude, and then tighten the plot around that. So far I’m looking at a small library of physics books that I’ll need to get through before the real editing can begin.

Another update soon!