14 Conjunctions, Consequences, Murderbot

In case anyone wondered whether I have ADHD, yes! This episode proves it, if there had ever been any doubt. Also I'd had five short nights of sleep in a row AND was having an asthma attack, which makes me panic and fear for my life what with how it can actually kill you. But no, I sat there quietly recording and then today edited out all the horrible wheezy inhalations.

Jeebus.

However! It's about great things! That terrible comma plus and construction that I hate so much! See this post for much more, in a much more articulate format.  

It's also about the Murderbot books. I ADORE Murderbot. Just writing that makes me want to go read them. So good! Murderbot!

It's mostly about connecting both grammatical thoughts and story ideas in a logical way that shows consequences, more so than just A + B + C. 

We need both, this is what I'm saying.

Take that nightmarishly awful but beautifully written novel I wrote about a while back. Gorgeous sentences that added up to nothing because the plot was atrocious and the character something you scraped off your shoe. 

We need to write well on all levels. Sentence level, character level, story level. All of it has to work.

I also get into that lovely duality of Murderbot, who thinks it's the worst (hence calling itself that) but will do anything to take care of its people, or even random strangers. Murderbot thinks it doesn't care about anyone but cares about everyone. I love that. I love it so much.

So enjoy!

The Geographic Cure is coming

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline. 

Oh my giddy aunt. 

Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out. 

Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope! 

Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knocked down. What are you going to do, just lie there in the dirt?

I always think I have been doing that, but no! I have not! I wrote a huge pile of books. I wrote a stack of short stories. I published things. I do all sorts of things constantly. Go go go! Work work work! 

Perception is a crazy thing, for real. 

Also if you're on the Titanic, it's going to sink no matter what you do, so you might as well have a good time. Just be aware of the lifeboat locations is all.

I'm editing as I go. Once I figure out how to make all the quotation marks curly instead of straight, and figure out how to break the thing into manageable volumes, I'll go ahead and put that out. I mean it's been out since 2006. But wouldn't it be nice to have a book in your hands? Or an ebook, where the entries are in the right order instead of backwards? I know!

Maybe year divisions are the way to go, come to think of it.

Anyway that's a good breakthrough in the retrospective sadness eradication department. It was so much fun being there. I was terrified and broke the whole time. But I kept on climbing mountains and doing bonkers jobs and going cool places and meeting amazing people. 

I just got accepted to the Bangor Authors' something or other in December. How cool is that? I already own a folding table. (They probably provide them.) I can have all these things out by then if I work like mad every hour of the day from now until then.

Seriously. 1.3 million words or whatever it was, that is just an unmanageable quantity of excitable prose. But it's delightful to read, truly, even if I say so myself. I mean I'm probably a harsher critic than anyone. At least I hope so. 

 

Character

Oh oh oh, I love character. I watch sports for character. I read for character. I watch television for character. And I certainly WRITE for character.

I have very strong feelings about character.

I recorded an episode of Sacred Cheese of Life yesterday about character and used Finn from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood as my example, even though he's the least characteristic (sorry) example I could possibly have come up with, because I built his appearance and voice on an actor from a show I was watching. 

I never do that. Do you do that? I know plenty of writers do, but I'd never done it before. 

It gives your character so much more life and volume and specificity. It's also somewhat creepy, I have to admit that, because here you are focusing on someone YOU DON'T KNOW in order to write something that doesn't benefit them. I mean it's not like you're writing that person a movie they can star in or anything. He got nothing from it. Except a dedication and a set of the trilogy, and I'm not even sure they ever got there. 

Character has to run like an engine or your story dies. Give me a person who wants to do the right thing and can't. Or wants to do the wrong thing and can't! Give me anyone who wants anything and is thwarted for reasons of cracks in their own foundations.

My characters tend to want homes and security, because those are my own major drivers, to the point where I'm STILL in this very nice house in rural Maine with not enough work because giving up my home and security are more terrifying to me than anything else. That's bad! That's a problem! It's also character, for sure. I make choices about that not based on what's best for me but what I perceive as more important short term.

It's no wonder I always read memoirs about overcoming alcoholism, when I don't even drink. 

I like to write characters whose lives are somewhat out of control. It gives the story a great drive and direction. 

I also insist on internal conflict. That can be almost anything, but there has to be an inner reason they can't achieve their outer goal. 

Finn is tricky this way because I wrote a confident character who makes choices and feels sure about them, something completely alien to me but also means he lacks that essential wants things and can't get them element. But he also has a very upsetting past, things that he couldn't stop happening to people he cared about, especially when he didn't know about it. Wouldn't that give you a complex? 

A character in Agents of SHIELD--oh, Skye/Daisy, of course--said: "Mistrust of home is kind of my superpower." She was taken from her family as a baby and put in foster care, then constantly moved around. Any time she got comfortable, she'd get yanked again, on purpose, to keep her safe from those who were after her. The result is that she doesn't TRUST. It's a major feature of her character and it underlies everything. What's the worst thing you can do to a character like that? Make someone she trusts betray her. Of course they did that!

Find someone's weakest point and attack them there is pretty awful as a way of life, but it's what we have to do with character. So give them strengths, but give them a weak flank, a vulnerability you can use to take them down. 

Time to edit the Character/Finn episode. Whee! Bonus Eleanor content.