Offill – Dept. of Speculation

Posted on by May 30, 2015
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Dept of SpeculationLots of Nothing, Nicely Packaged

Offill, Jenny (2014). Dept. of Speculation. New York: Vintage (177 pp.)

The first 100 pages are almost entirely devoid of content, making this a 77 page “novel.”  What chutzpah and what a great marketing job (Random House/Vintage).

The book is composed of short aphorisms, narrative snippets, and anecdotes, each a paragraph or two, written by the main character, an unnamed married woman in New York. She’s a writer, has a baby, and is chronically anxious, self-centered, and neurotic. This could be construed as her diary, and it has an epistolary feel, but more like a letter written, but not delivered, to the husband.

The entries roughly follow the rise and fall of the woman’s marriage. In the early part, she meets a guy, gets married, has a baby. The daughter learns to walk, has a party, learns to speak. Why any human being would find such utter banality interesting is beyond my comprehension.

Examples of the entries:

I went to a party and drank myself sick.

Are animals lonely?  Other animals, I mean.

Some of the entries seem clearly directed toward the husband, although since he was present during the events annotated, the purpose of recounting them is unknown:

When we first saw the apartment, we were excited that it had a yard but disappointed that the yard was filled by a large jungle gym that we didn’t need…  

I remember that day, how you took a $50 cab from work, how you held me in the doorway until I stopped shaking…

After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.

As the entries continue, roughly chronologically, more nonsequiturs appear in the journal or letter, or poem, or whatever it is supposed to be:

What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer. 

 Three things no one has ever said about me: You make it look so easy. You are very mysterious. You need to take yourself more seriously.

Around page 100, the husband becomes alienated, then it is revealed he has been having an affair.  That’s no shocker, but at least it’s a relief from grinding quotidian banality.  The narrator starts referring to herself in third person so if there ever was a hint that this was a diary, that idea is shot.

So how come it took her a month to think of her own question?

 Is that what you think this is about?

 Thales supposed the Earth to be flat and to float upon water.

The wife thinks the old word is better. She says he is besotted. The shrink says he is infatuated. She doesn’t want to tell what the husband says.

On it goes, a distant third-person narrator quoting and describing “the husband” and “the wife,” interspersed with pithy irrelevancies from Wittgenstein and Sartre.  The entries start getting longer and actually more insightful, and in the last 75 pages we do start to get a feel for the narrator/character. Though she turns out to be a confused and unpleasant person, at least the reader has some interest in how she is revealed.

So, there’s no story to speak of, no character development, ordinary everyday language and mundane thoughts. What are the virtues?  Mainly, we have typography. The formatting is mildly interesting, and the idea of telling a story in terms of brief journal entries is somewhat unusual, although it was done much, much better by David Markson in “Wittgenstein’s Mistress.”  In the last third of the book there are some interesting character vignettes and a couple of moments of  insight and humor, but the content remains sentimental cliché. I can’t really recommend this book, but it’s so short and quick to read that it doesn’t take any commitment to thumb through it and extract the few moments of good writing.

 

Guest Post – Cathy Haustein Sells a Book!

Posted on by May 27, 2015
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Introduction by Bill: Cathy and I met at the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop in 2013. Everyone in the seminar read each others’ novel manuscripts and provided feedback, and we cheered each other on. Recently I learned that Cathy published her book and I asked her how she did it.

Haustein book

I didn’t intend to sell Natural Attraction without an agent. I was in the process of finding one and had gotten some friendly nibbles and even suggestions for re-writes along with a nice rejection (my narrator, a scientist, wasn’t emotional enough for that agent.) But my mom died suddenly and if there’s anything that tells a person that time is running out, it’s the loss of a parent. Suddenly, agent horror stories popped into my mind—querying fifty before finding a match, being interviewed by an agent and then not hearing from them. I didn’t have the time!

I’d had luck using duotrope.com, the writer’s search resource, to place a short story and there I saw the listing for Penner Publishing. It was what I was looking for—upmarket fiction for smart women. I’d decided to pitch Natural Attraction as a science romance and while it’s a top-selling genre, romance isn’t known for its huge advances, and not all romance or sci-fi writers use agents. (Not that I agree with his politics but Orson Scott Card has long maintained that beginning authors don’t need agents.)

After receiving The Call from Penner Publishing, I had a lawyer who is also a published poet look over the contract. At this point many authors will seek out an agent but I was eager to move forward. I had my advance and was published within seven months.

Having Natural Attraction professionally edited and part of a publishing house helped me understand myself as a writer and my strengths and weaknesses. I spent the two previous decades doing science writing for a company and following a forty-page book of rules. One thing I discovered upon being edited was that I was a little drunk on my fiction writing freedom and had too many plot lines. I want readers laughing, having hope for the world and maybe learning a little science, not scratching their heads in confusion. The process of being edited and published gave me the focus and confidence to write another novel.

So would I recommend selling without an agent? It depends on your stage as a writer. I have an enjoyable day job as a chemistry professor and simply want the pleasure of entertaining others with my writing.  I was able to accomplish this without an agent. The time I gained not finding an agent was spent writing a second book. However, writers love their agents and if I keep writing, I’ll probably want one.

Natural Attraction is an adventure told by Clementine, a young Dutch American scientist in 1871 who must pose as a man to further her career as a naturalist. With the help of a mysterious tonic, she transforms into a man, discovers new species, and falls in love with a preacher. Available from Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, ebooks, Lybrary, and other major booksellers. Published by Penner Publishing.

— Cathy Haustein

Androids are the New Vampires

Posted on by May 25, 2015
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Vamp2Literary agents may not be aware of this trend yet. Androids (human-like robots), are everywhere. Recent android movies include AI,  I Robot, Ex Machina, Age of Ultron, Chappie, and let’s not forget the whole Terminator series, topped up with the forthcoming Terminator Genisys.

I’ve been trying to get a literary agent interested in my new android novel, THE NEWCOMER.  So far, no luck.  One problem may be that it’s a character-driven story, set in a realistic near-future, and the android is really just a device to explore human consciousness.  There are no explosions, no robots on the rampage. There is no plan to take over the world.

There were plenty of “sensitive” vampire movies, and they did well during the vampire epidemic, which I believe is winding down. I just watched a sensitive vampire movie last night, an Iranian film called “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Good movie, but if the Iranians are picking up a trend, it’s over.

I don’t know anybody in the publishing business so my strategy is the classic cold-call. I send out my one-page query letter to lists of agents who claim to be interested in sci-fi. I cull the names from agentquery.com and querytracker.net. Even so, nearly every agent claims to be interested in every genre, and why wouldn’t they be? They’re not about to turn up their nose at any decent opportunity to make a buck. So I never know how much an agent’s expressed interest is interest! or just interest.  Especially if there are no rocket ships or death rays.

Some agents say they want only the query letter. They’re so swamped with submissions, they can only absorb a few paragraphs, probably only a few lines. It’s sobering to think that the fate of a manuscript that took years to build, depends on some assistant’s mood when they read one or two lines of an email.

If there’s a tidal wave of manuscripts inundating agents, don’t we need more agents?  The problem is, of course, that 95% of those manuscripts are not immediately salable, and that problem arises from the structure of the publishing industry, which must sell into the middle of the bell curve of the reading public, a public which is shrinking every year, and whose members are less able and willing than ever before to purchase new books. No wonder writers prefer to avoid the business side of the profession. It’s discouraging. It’s depressing.

About half of agents ask the author to include a writing sample, anywhere from the first five pages to the first fifty.  About a quarter ask for a synopsis, just to see if you really have a full story with an ending. About ten percent ask for an author bio, although I’m not sure what they hope to learn from that. It’s probably just to make sure you’re not somebody famous that they shouldn’t pass up.

Ninety-five percent of agents are female, and most say they are keen to publish children’s books, young adult, new adult, and books from women writers, with women’s themes, involving female characters. That makes intuitive sense, and while I’m sure no serious agent is going to turn down a good manuscript because of gender bias, the whole book industry leans that way because the vast majority of novels are purchased by women. They are the target market, and everything else follows from that.

It is utterly self-defeating, I believe, to write to the market. A writer must write what needs to be written regardless of what’s hot at the moment. Still, if by chance you happen to catch a wave, like androids overtaking vampires, why not advertise it?

Cold Case and True Crime

Posted on by May 23, 2015
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AMW LogoCold Case and True Crime

I’ll be congealing out of writerly fog for the next Arizona Mystery Writers’ meeting in three weeks.  We’ll have a police crime scene investigator tell us about a cold case he recently solved. In 1987 a body was found in the desert near Tucson. It was unidentifiable, but the police were able to reconstruct the skull and then in the computer, rebuild the whole head, based on anthropological principles. Recently the case has been solved and the principal investigator will tell us how.  Great detail for writers of mysteries!

The second speaker is a an author of true crime stories who’ll talk about the technical differences between writing fiction and true crime, and about dealing with hostile investigators and prosecutors, reluctant witnesses and arrogant police.

I enjoy these monthly lectures, and my writing colleagues, and the luncheons, and, since I’m the emcee, I control the microphone, so that gives me plenty of opportunity to promote my own books. Naturally I invite others to do the same. Lately I have taken to offering a free copy of each title to any member who promises to write a review.  The response has been enthusiastic. The two reviews I’ve received so far have been positive.

In exchange, I offer to sign the review copy, and to reciprocate by reading the other member’s book. Sometimes that presents an interesting challenge, but there’s always something good to be said if you look hard enough.  Sometimes I’m reduced to declaring that the scenery was wonderful, but that still counts as a positive review.  Who knows, maybe my colleagues are thinking the same about my books. But it’s how the game is played. Reviews are hard to come by.

See http://www.meetup.com/Arizona-Mystery-Writers-of-Tucson/events/222719270/?a=ea1_grp&rv=ea1

Revising a First Draft

Posted on by May 21, 2015
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Hemingway2“The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway

When I complete a first draft, I know I have created something out of nothing, no trivial achievement. I never throw first drafts away. I’m generally not too worried about quality. To make a rabbit stew, first catch the rabbit.

Hemingway’s pithy advice came to mind when I submitted a short story to my writing group recently.  The feedback, both written and oral, was merciless, which is what we demand of each other. Still, the instinctive fantasy machine wants applause. The toilet-training child gets it when he “produces.” Why not me?

Some members of our group won’t submit something until it’s polished to a high sheen. The result is often dreadful anyway but often, sparkles can be seen within. That’s how writing goes. I wanted to submit my story to a contest whose deadline was only a month out, so I gave my group a first draft. I needed to know what I had, if anything, and I was willing to take the lashing.

Lashing I got. Although competently written, with a beginning, middle and end, and a main character with clear motivation, the story was bad. Everyone in my writing group knows how to write. The troubles went much deeper. Comments included:

“The first two pages are inert.”

“The opening line is flat.”

“Dialog is far too expositional.”

“Characters are not well-located in space.”

“The lawyer takes up too many words for what he does. Summarize him.”

“The husband needs to be either much more aggressive or entirely non-supportive. Otherwise, he’s just an echo chamber.”

“The story needs to rise to its theme, not be held down by it.”

“The big gap in this piece is that there is no second layer, no depth below what’s on the surface.”

“Your lists contain too many abstractions.”

“Hard choices are deferred. Get right to it.”

Ow, ow, ow! Our rule is that the person receiving the critique cannot say anything. No defensive explanations of what was intended. The piece speaks for itself. At the end, I’m allowed to ask questions. Then we all go out to dinner and laugh our heads off.

I put my meeting notes with the printed criticisms and stuffed the thick stack of paper onto a bookshelf and left it there for ten days while I worked on other projects.  When I was feeling strong again, I retrieved the pile, went through every page, and considered every comment. I reflected on each one, evaluated it, sometimes reconceptualized it, noted when several people had said similar things, and discarded comments that seemed off base or idiosyncratic.  I ended up with six pages of very pointed criticism.

I started a conceptual analysis of what I had intended the story to be, based on my original idea and the criticisms, which told me where execution had failed. I asked myself several questions and answered them.

  1. What was lost for MC?
  2. What does she want?
  3. Why can’t she attain her goals?
  4. How does she proceed?
  5. What are the outcomes?

I realized, with this exercise, that I had muddled my character’s motivation in the original story. She thinks she knows what she wants, but she is deeply conflicted and resents having to pursue her nominal goal at all. She solves the nominal problem in a way that’s not satisfactory, and that leaves her feeling worse than she did before. In the end, she doesn’t understand what happened, but hopefully, the reader does.

Next, I made a list of movements, or general beats, that I would need in a story to express in a clear way what I now saw as the main thread of the story. I did not go back to the original. I knew it from memory, and from what I intended, but I didn’t want to allow “what is” to subvert “what could be.”

I refined my list of high-level beats down into nine scenarios that might accomplish what I wanted. The story is only 2500 words, so I had to economize severely. I wasn’t satisfied with that list of scenes, but I couldn’t do anything more with it, so I left it. There are still almost three weeks before the deadline.

I went back to the original story and made a numbered list of its paragraphs with a very brief description of what each was supposed to accomplish. There were 72 paragraphs, combining some lines of dialog. That reduced the whole 10 page story down to 65 lines.  I could immediately see that two secondary characters were superfluous.

That’s where things stand now. I’m not ready to rewrite. I need to revise my list of scenes and make sure they are going to tell the story I want to tell. I need to reconsider my narrative voice. It’s in third-person now. Should it be first?  I need to juxtapose my characters to extract the inherent drama from each scene. I need to figure out how to say more by saying less, which is what’s going to happen when I re-do the dialog. In a couple of days, I’ll be ready to go.

Back to Hemingway. Are all first drafts shit? Yes, compared to what you intended. So do you polish that turd until it looks better?  No. You reanalyze, reconceptualize, rethink, rewrite. The first draft holds the original idea or inspiration. Producing an artistic work requires more than inspiration. The process also requires materials, craftsmanship and persistent work. I’ve got everything lined up. Can I do it? I’m not completely sure that I can.

Portis – Dog of the South

Posted on by May 23, 2015
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dog of the southDeadpan Originality

Portis, Charles (1999). The Dog of the South. New York: The Overlook Press (256 pp).

I enjoyed the utter originality of Portis’ sentences.  How does anybody spin out such interesting details that do not have the stink of being “writerly?”  I wish I knew. Random samples:

…an old school bus that had been painted white and rigged as a camper. The bus had been given a name, “The Dog of the South,” which was painted in black on one side, but not by a sign painter with a straight-edge and a steady hand. The big childish letters sprawled at different angles and dribbled at the bottom. (p. 47)

There was a bandstand in the central square, and some wrought-iron benches and some noisy flocking birds with long tail feathers. I took them to be members of the grackle family. There were elegant trees too, of the kind that architects like to sketch in front of their buildings. (p. 49)

“…Ski will be driving. He’s a pale man with no chin. Tattoos on his forearms. He wears a little straw hat with one of those things in the hatband. I can’t think of the word.”

“Feather.”

“No, I can think of feather. This is harder to think of. A brass thing.”

“Who is this Ski?”

“Ted Brunowski. He’s an old friend of mine. They call him Ski. You know how they call people Ski and Chief and Tex in the army.”

“I’ve never been in the service.”

“Did you have asthma?”

“No.”

“What are you taking for it?”

“I don’t have asthma.”

“Have you tried the Chihuahua dogs in your bedroom at night? They say it works. You might try it anyway.”

“I have never had asthma.”

“The slacker’s friend. That’s what they called it during the war…”

(p. 75)

I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve heard of this fellow. I’ve handled news accounts about this man. This is the well –known ‘Vicar of Basin Street’”

“No, no,” she said. “This is another one. Father Jackie has a steel plate in his head. He plays the cornet. He’s an amateur magician. He claims he has no fear of the Judgment. I don’t know anything about the other fellow.” (p. 145)

I could go on, but I’d end up quoting 75% of the book. It’s unrelenting in its originality, intrinsic interest, and sense of humor.  Looking back over those sections I quoted, I see that a prominent characteristic of the writing and of the dialog is the dissociative nature of the interactions. It’s like everyone is engaged in parallel play, no character really tracking anyone else. I like that as a dialog technique.

There’s also a Faulkneresque quality to this meandering, thinly plotted story about lowlifes in the south.  As a rule, I don’t enjoy “southern gothic.” Descriptions of stupid people doing stupid things don’t interest me much. I like Faulkner for his outrageous language, and I like  Portis, in this case, for his deadpan humor and for achieving such originality with ordinary language.

I also like a story with a plot, or, wanting that, with at least one compelling character, or as a last resort, at least some larger theme that illuminates a way of life or humanity in general. This novel is mostly of the road trip genre, and while the characters are original, they’re unmotivated, one-dimensional knockabouts. The plot is next to nonexistent. Themes? I don’t know. Stupid is as stupid does?  There isn’t a takeaway. But for writers, and readers who enjoy good craftsmanship, Portis’ fine sentences and dialogs reward close reading.

Doerr – All the Light We Cannot See

Posted on by May 16, 2015
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Doerr All the LightA Wisp of a Tale

Doerr, Anthony (2014). All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner (530 pp).

This novel is is composed of dozens upon dozens of short, one-to-five-page chapters of very digestible, easy to absorb, pleasantly written prose. In the beginning, chapters alternate between two characters’ points of view, a 14-year-old girl living in Paris in 1944, and an 18-year-old, German boy living in northeastern France. She is blind; he is gifted at building and fixing radios. As the Nazis invade, she and her father flee to the west coast, he joins the Hitler youth.

As the war progresses, the short chapters start to include other points of view, such as the young man’s superior officers, the girl’s father and uncle, but those two youths remain the main characters, even though they don’t meet until over 400 pages into the book. Instead, the short, alternating chapters make them close and somehow connected in the reader’s mind, and since the story is sentimental, you know they must meet eventually, even though they are not even aware of each other’s existence. The reader, not the characters, supplies the emotional glue that binds these two over the pages and over the war years, and that’s a neat narrative trick.

When the two principals do finally meet however, the interaction is extremely abrupt, tentative, and truncated. Barely a dozen words are spoken and the story suddenly fast-forwards thirty years into the future. For me, that was an awfully long way to go for no payoff.

There is a sentimental, contrived story about a rare, centuries-old diamond with a curse on it that serves as a Hitchcockian MaGuffin. The girl has it; the Nazis want it. But unlike a true MaGuffin, it evaporates into irrelevance. There’s another long journey with no proper end.

The story line is severely chopped up, not by the POV shifts, but by time cuts. The story jumps ahead several years or months, then back to a previous period, then forward, then back, all this for no purpose except to avert boredom by introducing artificial suspense where none actually exists in the story. I found these jumps unnecessary and annoying.

On the plus side, the writing is thoughtful, with bright, clear imagery, even though one of the main characters is blind. Cliches and stereotypes are scarce, despite the sentimental scenes, so the writing has a freshness that pulls you through the pages, at least to the inevitably saggy midpoint, where in a 500-page book with no substantial plot, you realize that nothing is going to happen. At least the short chapters and changing POVs keep you from getting too bored.

All told, it’s a World War Two story with nothing new to say. Germans: bad. French: good. Bombs: awful. Suffering: painful. There is a wisp of insight at the end, when the surviving characters are elderly adults, enjoying children and grandchildren in comfortable postwar worlds. Questions, references, and memories of the war come up, but they cannot be communicated to succeeding generations, and have become only faded dreams even to the survivors, as time and change inexorably obliterate even the most intense memories and meanings.

That’s a useful observation about life, not just about WWII. Personally, I’ve had it up to here with Nazis and would have preferred that the novel were set in a less shopworn period, but the war does import built-in, easily recognizable conflict, sparing the author the trouble of having to create it.

As for the power of marketing, this slightly-above-average novel made the New York Times’ Top 10 for 2014, was a National Book Award Finalist, and a 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner. Nice work.

Taking Inventory

Posted on by May 6, 2015
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inventoryA book without readers still has value. The process of writing it was a journey. New vistas were opened, discoveries made, surprises encountered, lessons learned. It’s better if the book has readers, though. Long ago I decided to focus on writing, ignoring marketing, until I had enough inventory to work with. It’s been ten years now, and I do have a fiction inventory.

 

Hunter & Hunted

Hunter & Hunted Cover

Hunter & Hunted: This was my first novel-length effort, a novella really, at 51,000 words. It’s about a Seattle woman who buys a stone-age artifact that turns out to be a forgery. Somebody thinks it’s real and is hunting her, even while she tries to find out who cheated her. It’s a kinetic international thriller, with a modest body count, but my heroine is not Jamie Bond. There’s no car chase and no exploding helicopters. The story stays within the bounds of plausibility, more-or-less. The ongoing commentary by the ancient Greek gods, Artemis and Dionysus, isn’t realistic, but winks ironically at the main story.

I figured I would never be able sell the story to a publisher. The length wasn’t right and it didn’t fit into an obvious genre category. So it was destined for self-publication. It’s out there now. See ordering information at http://billadamsphd.net/books4u/. I sell  the occasional ebook online and a paperback version a few times a year at festivals and fairs. It exists.

Wasnt Me Cover OnlyIt Wasn’t Me: My second outing also featured a female protagonist. For Hunter & Hunted, I chose a female just to make sure I was getting outside my own head. For It Wasn’t Me, the story itself called for a female lead. I sketched it with a male and it didn’t work.  This is a Jekyll-and-Hyde story of a young woman with a split personality. Her alternate personality horrifies her but eventually she learns to make a partner of her other self to seek revenge on the uncle who abused her as a child.

It’s a just-barely plausible tale (since there really isn’t any such thing as multiple personality disorder, except in the popular imagination), but it’s an interesting story of psychological suspense, and an allegory for how difficult it can be to find an integrated self-identity for anyone who has been traumatized in childhood.

At 72,000 words, it qualified as novel-length. I tried to sell it with cold-queries to agents, and got about ten interested nibbles, but in the end, no takers. That told me it was destined for a self-published fate, and it, too is now out on the internet, at Amazon and Smashwords.  See ordering information at http://billadamsphd.net/books4u/. Once a manuscript is self-published, it is, alas, considered tainted by traditional publishers, who won’t touch it – except in extremely rare cases where the online version is a runaway hit. Mine isn’t.  Maybe it could be, but no one knows about it.

Desert Justice: This is my third novel, starring Quinn, a righteous Tucson Police Detective who believes every single lawbreaker should be locked up forever. The badge and the gun define his morality. When he sees his son, also a TPD cop, go into a meeting with a major crime boss, Quinn is stunned. He impulsively and anonymously warns his son that a police raid is imminent, and everyone escapes from the meeting. But now Quinn has crossed a line. Tormented, he tries to discover the truth about his son and meanwhile falls in love with a beautiful Indian woman working at a casino run by that same crime boss. She reveals a staggering money-laundering operation that Quinn begins to investigate.  In the end, Quinn’s heart and his moral rigidity are softened by his son and his new girlfriend. A fun extra feature is that Quinn writes pulpy cop fiction as a hobby, and scenes from his writing reflect his changing state of mind.

This novel, at 75,000 words, has been revised seven times and is currently going through the workshop process. No doubt it will need more revision, because workshops often point out deficiencies I can’t see on my own.  It’s within six months of being ready for… what?  I guess I’ll try to sell it, though experience has taught me that the probability of getting the attention of an agent through a cold-call email is very close to zero-point-zero.  But putting it out in the self-published queue effectively kills its future. It’s a choice between no readers and some readers. Don’t know yet.

Another Way To Live (Working Title): The first draft of this manuscript was completed six months ago and has been marinating in the dark since then. It’s about time to bring it back to the light for major revision.  This one also features a male protagonist, Scott, an affluent New York advertising man who likes to cook. He accidentally creates a special chocolate that causes people to abandon competitive consumerism and turn to self-reflection, empathy, and sustainable happiness. It bestows enlightenment like magic. Scott quits his job, seeing the potential to change a dysfunctional society, and for a while, he does, by establishing a foundation promoting new values and distributing the special chocolate to donors. But Scott’s brother, a businessman, persecutes him and the foundation, saying that easy happiness is immoral and anti-American. Legitimate happiness is earned only through suffering.  Scott is defeated and mindless consumerism returns triumphant, though the story ends with his children discovering the chocolate recipe and vowing to try again.

As a college teacher of many years, I despaired at the ineffectiveness of education in showing ambitious students that there is a way to live with sustainable happiness, but it became clear that a change in brain chemistry would be needed for most people to grasp the point. This novel, at 78,000 words, articulates that insight with humor and compassion, I hope. I worry that the theme is too obviously doctrinaire, but I won’t know until I reread. In a year, when it’s ready to show the world, I’ll have to face that same old decision: self-publish and die, or, another way to die, make the almost-futile effort to sell it.

The Newcomer (Working Title):  I finished the first draft of this manuscript two weeks ago. It is safely tucked away to steep in its own juices for a few months.  I don’t even have a good synopsis for it yet. Basically, it’s about an android, a sophisticated robot that looks and acts like a person. He’s so good, nobody realizes he’s not human, and he has no reason to doubt that he is either. Gradually, through a series of events, the truth seeps out and, being somewhat naïve, he asks a couple of his fellow engineers for advice. They scheme to capture him and reverse-engineer him, which would end his “life.”

It’s nominally a sci-fi story, but is written with the narrator close to the mind of the android, making him a sympathetic main character. The underlying question is, what does it mean to be a human being? Could a machine with all the right moves qualify as a person?  Why or why not? At 77,000 words, what makes this story different from your typical AI-Android sci-fi story is that it tackles some of the fundamental questions about the nature of human and machine consciousness, such as empathy, emotions, spirituality, and the role of the homunculus (the mythical little man in the head who pulls the levers of action.)

As with the other draft manuscripts, The Newcomer will eventually face its existential question: self-publish or twist in the wind?  But that’s a year to eighteen months out. Maybe the world will be different by then. Or I will be.

What is your advice for an unknown, unpublished, unconnected author with this inventory? Self-publish them all into oblivion, or try to sell them, one at a time?

Imagine Having Been There

Posted on by May 5, 2015
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Campfire3I wrote a story, something I haven’t done in a year. It’s for a contest associated with a conference I’ll attend this summer. Conference attendees don’t have to pay an entry fee so there’s nothing to lose.

My story is ostensibly about my wife’s struggle to care for her ageing mother. We have been horrified to discover that the elder health care system in America is designed mainly to extract maximum money from the family, through coercion, deception and bad faith. No surprise there, maybe, but it’s a terrible experience to fall through that rabbit hole. The psychological consequences are dehumanizing for everyone who touches the system.

So I wrote 2500 words with the daughter of the ageing mom as the main character. I asked my writing group to read it.  They had little positive to say. It was more of a polemic than a story, they said. Yes, you are upset at the injustice and callousness of American cutthroat capitalism, so write an essay.

Ow!  But after an hour-long, discussion and after reading their detailed written comments, I have to agree. The story sucks. The characters are not well-described, dialog is expositional, and narration tells instead of shows. I was motivated to tell my angry story, not the characters’.

This is where a writing group of trusted colleagues pays off. They saved me from myself.  I didn’t have enough distance on the experience to write a well-crafted story about it. Maybe I should wait six months or a year, but I think I’ll give it another go for the contest. I’ve got a month.

Re-thinking the story makes me realize, though, that the archetype of the old storyteller at the campfire or in the kitchen over a shared bottle, is not the right image for modern writers.  Real-life storytellers say, this happened, then that. I felt this way, Joe said that. We expected this but that happened.

A real storyteller rarely says, “Joe’s face went white. He looked left then right. His brow furrowed as he slowly stepped backwards away from the lake, his eyes never leaving the surface of the water.”  That kind of over-dramatization of events is an invention of modern fiction, the point of which is not to tell what happened, but to imagine having been there.

Can I get outside myself to write a proper story?

The Newcomer

Posted on by May 2, 2015
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movie_androidNew novel: The Newcomer

Have you ever wondered if you were really a robot or perhaps an alien? I’d be surprised. Nobody has reason to doubt their personhood. My latest novel, The Newcomer, is about an android, a human-like, human-looking robot. He’s a young man who believes he’s a person, and why shouldn’t he?

The narrator is third-person-close, so the story is told mostly from the android’s point of view, making him a sympathetic character, and trying to overcome readers’ bias against extending empathy to a machine.  It’s a tough character sell.

The android does eventually discover he’s a machine, and after many complications, comes to terms with himself as what he is, and isn’t.

While nominally sci-fi, my purpose in writing this was to explore the nature of human consciousness by contrasting it to an artificial consciousness. Unlike all the other books and movies about AI, I go to the heart of the important questions, such as the place of empathy, emotion, motivation, creativity, self-control, self-reflection, self-regard, spirituality and teleology.

The challenge was to make a non-human character sympathetic, and to make some difficult material regarding consciousness studies palatable to the average reader. Did I do it?  I don’t know. I just finished the first draft yesterday. I’ll let it marinate for three to six months before I evaluate it.

Would you be interested in reading a novel like that?