Iron Road: Her Brother Frank, His Fiancee Ellen

I have now passed the 25K mark, one day early!

"Frank," Nancy joked, "I'm unpredictable. Ellen just does things for reasons you don't understand. I think it's because she likes people and she wants them to be happy. Me? I could care less."

"You?" Frank asked. "I know you too well. You're the predictable one."

"Am I?" Nancy asked. They were almost to the old railroad bed. "What will I do next, Frank?"

Frank stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, leaned over, and kissed her on the head. "Let it be a surprise."

Musical Interlude: Daft Charleston

I had no idea that 1) Daft Punk has been around that long or 2) the tropes in the Charleston were so similar to modern dancing (including breakdancing).

Musical Interlude: Kid Beyond

Back in college, I had some friends that were always joking about making "organic techno," or electronica-sounding music just using their mouths. (They weren't very good. They only had one song, which went on interminably. But it was funny.) This is actually called beatboxing these days. Mix Bobby McFerrin with techno, there you go.

Kid Beyond is an incredible beatboxer.

But he's even better when he starts looping on himself, adding tracks and making songs. (I like "Wandering Star," a Portishead cover.) They're real songs. But you'll find yourself wondering whether he can really make all that noise by himself. I did. But here's a live clip that shows him building the layers. Cooool.

Factoid of the Day: Chateau

What's a chateau?

A château (plural châteaux) is a manor house or residence of the lord of the manor or a country house of nobility or gentry, with or without fortifications, originally - and still most frequently - in French-speaking regions. Where clarification is needed, a fortified château (that is, a castle) is called a château fort , such as Château fort de Roquetaillade. Care should be taken when translating the word château into English: it is not used in the same way as "castle" is in English, and most châteaux are more appropriately described as "palaces" or "country houses" in English than as "castles". For example, the Château de Versailles is so called because it was located in the country when it was built, but it does not bear any resemblance to a castle, so it is usually known in English as the Palace of Versailles."

(via Wikipedia.)

Table

As I sat down to supper, I noticed that Ray had left long, purple marker streaks on the table when she was making elephant pictures last night. This led, naturally enough, to experiments: what takes purple marker off a Southwestern-style table?

Water doesn't.
Murhy's oil soap doesn't.
But magic erasers do.

After seeing exactly what the magic eraser did take off the table top (ewww), it was necessary to wash the whole thing with Murphy's oil soap. The water turned yellow, then orange, then brown, and finally black, after which I tried the magic eraser again...ewww. I eventually had to stop; the eraser was shredded.

I washed off the table with clean water and took some lemon oil to it. It didn't look like I was doing much, but when I stepped back, I could tell where I'd oiled and where I hadn't. I discovered a purple spot that I'd missed, but the magic eraser was too filthy to rinse out anymore. Next time. Lee came in and asked me whether I wanted help: he could work on it this weekend...

I told him no, it was a pretty comforting thing, being able to clean the top of the table. I've liked the smell of Murphy's oil soap ever since we had to use it on the pews and woodwork in the Stephan church, and the lemon oil was much subtler than I thought it would be. Doing something simple, repetetive, with more or less immediate results? I'm selfish that way.

I considered buying a plastic tablecloth, but I don't think I will. What's a table? What's a table for? An investment? An heirloom, to be passed to future generations, without blemish or particular character? When you have a table with wood that beautiful, you're supposed to be able to see it. You can't see if it you only take the cover off when company comes. If then.

I think I'll find a few largish placemats for projects, though. The one we have is being used to put the plants of questionable life span closer to the window, and has a crack down the center that looks like it was cut with an X-acto knife. I'm not sure whose fault that was.

PPW Workshop: Scaring Your Readers, Part IV

Carrie's presentation.

She showed a scene from Medium in which a mother and daughter are waiting in a doctor's office. The daughter is called in and tells her mother she doesn't need to come with her, she'll be fine. Too much time passes, the mother asks what's taking so long, the nurse discovers the door is locked. Upon finding someone with a key, they open the door and discover the room covered with blood. The girl is dead, covered with a sheet. A large dish filled with intestines is sitting where her right leg should be. The doctor is sitting in the far corner of the room, reciting his Hippocratic Oath. The door pulls further into the room, and a man in a dark suit tells the nurses and mother to wait outside, he'll be right with them--in a cockneyish accent. The main character (the medium) wakes up in a start.

We discussed different moments in the scene that increased suspense. Different people first picked up on the tension at different points--"I'll be fine, Mom"--the time was after five o'clock at a doctor's office--when the mother and nurse passed a vase of red orchids--when they discovered the door was locked. I noticed that the scene really wasn't out of the cliche until the moment the man in the dark suit jerked the door open. We talked about the power in reversing/undermining cliches.

CV: Withholding information can sometimes backfire. Also, remember the POV of a victim isn't usually that interesting. A piece of meat. I like to use implication to form a kind of creeping dread. Then there's the Wash Effect (having a beloved character die to show the reader/viewer that anything might happen). I like to introduce a second problem before I resolve the first. Escalate problems.

Something to be wary of is the idiot plot. Like The Blair Witch Project. I was telling a friend of mine about the movie. He said, "They're in the woods?" "Yeah." "There's a stream?" "Yeah." "Why didn't they follow the stream out of the woods?" Punishing your characters for just being stupid is a letdown. Aliens was much scarier. A movie about these marines, they were all ready, at the top of their game, and it still wasn't enough.

Pacing is what you are telling the reader, when you are telling the reader, so they can figure out what's going on.

PPW: How much is too much? (Increasing plot problems.)

CV: The point where you say, "Can they still get out of it" and it's not believable anymore, that's too far. If it's in service of the plot, I say go for it. Like Lois McMaster Bujold. All these terrible things happen to one of her characters...but there's always room to grow at the end of each novel.

PPW Workshop: Scaring Your Readers, Part III

Carrie Vaughn read a suspenseful scene from her third book, Kitty Takes a Holiday. She explains the techniques she used:

CV: I use pacing. I like little cliff-hanger chapter breaks. I like to end with a "gunshot moment," a shocking image or event. Let the reader absorb it. Smell, memory is tied to smell. I try to ask myself "How long can I draw this out?" Very slow. When your worries are actually confirmed, the suspense is over.

Steve Rasnic Tem read from their forthcoming book, The Man on the Ceiling, a metafiction novel about writing. Melanie Tem provided comments regarding the chapter, "Down the Dark Stairs."

MT: Suspense is in the language. The use of time, as non-linear, non-chronological, even just the verb tense can add suspense. It invites the reader to fill in the gaps. A series of images [starting with crashing planes] moves from things that are scary in real life toward fantasy characters with spoolky elements. Juxtapose a beautiful image with "I want him alive." The use of detail--observe something closely, then take it into a fantastic or mystery realm.


Writing exercise: Write down something that doesn't scare you. Find a partner. Now turn that image or situation into something scary.

[I wrote, "Picking out good chocolate at the grocery store." My partner Carol turned it into a mystery starter--chocolate with which to conceal the taste of poison.

Carol wrote "I look in the mirror, examine my aging face, once again, with dismay."

I said, "That's too easy."

She said, "I'm not happy about it, but it doesn't frighten me."

I wrote this:

I look in the mirror, examine my aging face, once again, with dismay.
It doesn't frighten me anymore, knowing that I will die, watching the
changes in my face, and the accompanying changes in the image behind me:
the old cottonwoods I used to play in as a child are gone, replaced with
an apartment building, hundreds of miles from the ocean, decorated with
an anchor, plastic, painted black. The sky has a quality, a
dis-quality, dull brownness, dust. Bright colors--I've grown used to
losing them, replacing htem with a rainbow of browns, tans, beiges.

It's the mirror. It's become hazed. Did I always look this way? Do I
really look this way now?]

One of the writers said that the writer needs to make your characters uncomfortable [beforehand] if something terrible is going to happen.

PPW Workshop: Scaring Your Readers, Part II

A caveat: I tried to catch everything I could, but I missed a lot and paraphrased even more.

PPW: How can scaring your readers be combined with other genres?

CV: Horros can be found in anything; it's a trope rather than a genre. Like suspense. There's scaring someone versus grossing them out. Making readers think something bad is going to happen.

SRT: The word horror suggests an explosive reaction, but it's really part of being a normal human being. That anxiety exists in all fiction, and finding ways to deal with it.


PPW: What do you think about this quote from Tim Powers. [To wit, someone asked him about different themes that might be found in Dracula. He replied that Dracula was about a guy that bit people and lived forever.]

CV: I should tell you I have a Masters in English Literature. With any great literature, you'll find that it's like a mirror.

MT: Readers will find things you didn't know were there.

SRT: It's like "The Old Man and the Sea." People say, "The sea is death." But the objects in the story have lots of different kinds of significance. Objects attract different meanings.

MT: The mysteries of Tony Hillerman. There's the tension of who killed this person and why, but there are different meanings. Partly the mystery, partly cultureal differences.


PPW: What do you think about thematic purpose. It used to be people talked about "Theme First!" but it's not talked about a lot anymore.

MT: It depends on how the story comes to me. If theme comes first, I'm in danger of writing an essay. My story "Revenant" is about getting stuck in grief and not moving on. But you have to figure out how to make it dramatic. But more often my stories come to me as a character.

SRT: Theme is important ot me. But it's kind of a backwards process that comes at the end. I have to start with something more concrete. I discover the theme.

CV: I wish people would talk about theme. I hate it when authors refuse to take a stand. I don't think about it before I start. I revise a lot.

MT: I wrote two short stories and a play script about the reaction of people to a public execution.

PPW Workshop: Scaring Your Readers, Part I

November 3 was the PPW workshop, "Scaring Your Readers." Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem, and Carrie Vaughn attended; Ed Bryant was ill and missed.

Turns out writers, both amateurs and professional, like to talk about random stuff that just happens to be interesting. I could get used to this...

A caveat: I tried to catch everything I could, but I missed a lot and paraphrased even more.

PPW: What drives you to delve into the darker side of things?

Melanie Tem: These things are of foremost interest to me, in theme and character.

Steve Rasnic Tem: I've always been interested in the dark and strange, things that nobody else wanted to talk about.

Carrie Vaughn: I always get the reaction, 'Oh, but you seem like such a nice person." I like to peel back layers. Stories get darker than you intend. I like to get a reaction out of the reader.


PPW: What were your early influences?

CV: Ray Bradbury is very atmospheric and has lots of twists. Charlotte's Web.

SRT: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Jules Verne, fairy tales. British ghost stories.

MT: My father wanted to be a writer but passed it on to me. My book Yellow Hound will be about that. It's coming out in 2009. My father thought genre fiction was not important literature. But we did read some page turners. Eugene Fields's poem, "Little Boy Blue." The Diary of Anne Frank.


PPW: Who do you read now?

SRT: Cormack McCarthy. Robert Parker.

CV: Moby Dick. Steven Ericson. Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Ian Banks.

MT: Francine Prose, "A Changed Man." Maria Doria Russell, "The Sparrow." Toni Morrison.


PPW: Where do you see your genres going?

CV: My genre is "urban fantasy." I've also heard, unfortunately, "Bit-Lit" (Chick Lit with vampires), but thankfully the term hasn't caught on yet.

SRT: I don't like genre classifications. Horror, other than vampire fiction, is death in the marketplace. My agent says they [publishers] want "Stealth Horror." It's a good thing creatively. Horror tends to be a very conservative genre.

MT: To me, you write what you ant to write. I know, it's an ivory tower approach, but it's an honest creative approach to write first and then look for a market. If you write for a market first, you can skew your style.


PPW: Are there any taboo subjects?

CV: I'm going to channel Ed here. Different people have different tolerances.

MT: We wrote a book about repressed memories of sexual abuse.

SRT: It depends so much on the editors.


PPW: What do readers take away from a good scare?

CV: Why do people ride roller coasters? They're in danger, but they're perfectly safe. It's a primal hindbrain thing.

SRT: It's a safe release. Readers can try out different lifestyles, situations they don't experience in real life.

MT; My day job is as a social worker. For me, I ten to go for disturbing people. Fearing the demons. There's a Buddhist [technique?] called "calling death out of shadows." You put it on your shoulder, where it will be less scary, more understandable at a primal level.

Untranslatable: Words from other languages.

A list of foreign words (and phrases) for which there is no good English translation, part of a book named Toujours Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod (a forthcoming sequel to The Meaning of Tingo).

"Snyavshi Shtany, PO VOLOSAM NE GLADYAT - Russian: once you've taken off your pants it's too late to look at your hair."

My favorite such phrase is, "l'espirit d'escalier" - French: the moment after a conversation when you think of the perfect comeback. Literally, "the spirit of the stairs" (on the way out).