A (Writing) Year in Review

Someone once pointed out to me that I never take any time to celebrate my accomplishments because I am always anxiously, frenetically focused on the next thing I'm supposed to accomplish. The end of 2016 and first half of 2017 were pretty bad for me-- I was sad and didn't quite realize it, and I worried that my obsessively reading the news or working was going to cut into my ability to be creative. I don't think that turns out to be the case when I look back at what I did this year. 

In 2017 I queried two different novels, both of which continue to get requests. Regardless of what happens with them, I still love them both and they're both an accomplishment I'm proud of. 

Although I wrote a sci-fi novel last year, in 2017 I started writing my first sci-fi / speculative fiction short stories. (er.. novellas/ novelettes). Terrorcry is sci-fi noir I wrote as part of the Jenny McKean Moore fiction workshop at GW. Shortly after I finished Guava Summer which I can't really say is a sequel, but has the same characters and gets into some themes about totalitarianism. When I was at Breadloaf I attended a seminar on "Tell, Don't Show" which was SO UP MY ALLEY. I was tired of the parroting of "Show don't tell" in workshops, because sometimes telling is awesome. I became obsessed with the idea of having an entire story that was all telling, no showing. (to be fair I think the line between the two is fuzzy). I wrote Even the Precession of Earth Must Come to an End, which is all telling and takes place over about 7.5 billion years. Then one day I went to brunch and left a little drunk, wanting an ice cream sandwich. I went to this place that has good ice cream sandwiches but when I got to the counter she said they were all out. For some reason I can't explain, this is exactly the sort of thing that would embarrass me, so I ordered a cappuccino which I didn't really want. I don't drink caffeine that often (maybe once a week) because it makes me batshit, and because I don't drink it that often, it has an even stronger effect on me. So then I was pretty drunk AND really wired, and came home and wrote an entire story just based off the title which popped in my head, I Saw Goody McDerry With the Devil. 

Another awesome thing that happened? I went to VONA this summer, a writing conference for minorities. My class (genre fiction) was all girls AND THEY WERE ALL AWESOME. I had so much fun getting to know them and had so many conversations at that conference that I haven't had anywhere else. Black poets continue to blow my mind. I ate an entire Philly cheesesteak myself. I had some beers. We talked about how we were or weren't addressing race in our works and I hadn't really thought about it before. We danced really late into the night. Fun was had. 

A story that was accepted last year, The Derecho, got published. It's about a catfish catfishing a catfish, and is part of a growing pile of stories I've written that take place in DC. In other DC news, through contacts I made at various conferences, I started to meet other writers and go to readings in the area. I knew there were writers here, but for some reason hadn't tried connecting with them before. 

On the submission front, I started sending out my speculative stories, and judging from the response I'm getting from them, I'm confident they will be getting picked up soon. I wasn't sure if being a novelist (published, anyway) was necessarily in my future, but when I got back from VONA it occurred to me that I had enough short stories to form a collection. So I did that! And I like it! I'm starting to send it places! For some reason I never thought of putting them together before, but now that I have, it's interesting to see that 1) I have enough for an entire book and 2) how they fit with each other. Some of the themes are the same, even if the content is radically different. Some fit snugly into the standard literary realist tradition and some involve people getting their detached heads reattached. 

Then in the fall came the equivalent of an unplanned pregnancy. I must have been thinking of the Goody McDerry story. Or this thriller I had written a third of but put down for a while.  It took place in college and I continue to love books that take place in college.  My friend from Boston was visiting and we were walking home and I said, "What if there was like an entire school filled with psychopaths?"  I suddenly wrote a novel. It just appeared, like an unplanned pregnancy, and forced itself out with a really short gestation period. I write really quickly once I have plot figured out. The characters and voice lent themselves to a plot that seemed to write itself. I have to say, it was my first time using Scrivener, which I was initially really skeptical of. (Kind of like how I was super skeptical of anyone who bakes but doesn't mix things by hand. Only last week I bought my first Kitchen Aid). I liked the ability to move scenes around without it being a pain in the ass. The visual representation of scenes and chapters made plotting easier. I'll try it for my next book and see how I feel. The program isn't that expensive, and I definitely don't use all the bells and whistles, but I guess I would say it's worth the cost. 

So now that I think about it, I did get a lot accomplished this year. I plan on chilling out for the next two months. Doing some baking, some editing, maybe beta reading for someone. Relaxing, I guess. 

Review: The Dinner

TLDR: Don't bother. 

This was a surprisingly bad execution of Herman Koch's novel The Dinner, which I read a few years ago. I enjoyed the book--this even despite it employing one of my least favorite tactics. The novel centers around two couples going to a fancy dinner--a former teacher and his wife, and a promising candidate for governor and his wife. I liked how the book rolled into the scene, quickly making you think that the main conflict is between Paul (the teacher, who is antagonistic towards his brother), and Stan (the politician). As the seemingly unendless dinner unfolds, you find out what the real conflict is: that the couples' children have done something really awful, and now they must figure out what to do about it. There are some reversals here which are interesting. 

Both the portrayal of the characters and the dinner itself are very good. Sad when you have a really competent cast and then give them crappy material. Steve Coogan plays Paul so effectively that I don't think I've ever wanted to scream "Shut the fuck up and let him talk!" at a TV more. He is the obnoxious relative that just can't keep his mouth shut when he has some political opinion, or wants to distract the argument from the point someone else is trying to make. You start out almost being sympathetic with him--a more humble man that thinks going to an ostentatious tasting menu (and then asking for a better table) is what's wrong with society. But then he spirals down from there. The other three actors are also good, Richard Gere in particular. 

The dinner itself is appropriately portrayed in a way that is infuriating. Occasionally you glimpse these super-bougie dishes and have to sit through the long explanations of the dishes. (This reminded me of the incredibly tense scene at the Mexican restaurant toward the end of Breaking Bad--where threats abound until an oblivious waiter pops in to offer guac.). You kind of want to pull your hair out because no one attending the dinner can actually sit in their goddamned seat for more than two minutes: someone is always taking a phone call, storming off, or just wandering away. (I hope they left a very, very large tip.) The dialogue is also good-- people talk over each other, things are alluded to but not explained for the sake of the reader. 

But the movie definitely falls flat when it comes to the fundamental skeleton of the story. For one, it's too long and there are parts where you wonder "why is this here?" There are also parts where I wondered "why did they cut this out from the book?" (SPOILER: mainly, they definitely made it seem like Paul had some mental health issues, but did not explicitly draw the connection to his son via the test results. Also the movie version of his wife says that his medication makes him "numb" and that she prefers the real him, but in the book this definitely comes off as more sinister/ fucked up, and less like "maybe we should try a different prescription. Also the ending, ie, the book had one). There's some scenes about the Civil War that were so long that I fast forwarded. 

Then the end, where it falls flat. It literally ended in such a place that when the credits started rolling I went back and rewound, thinking there was something wrong with my TV. A movie with no ending is worse than a movie with a bad ending because at least you feel like you got to a destination. 

Dear creepy guy at the gym

1. I'm wearing headphones. 

2. Above-mentioned headphones are an indication I am not interested in talking. 

3. I am half your age. 

4. Why do you always seem to be in the vicinity? 

5. Does my completely flat, businesslike attitude focused entirely on gym equipment not convey a lack of interest? 

6. Do you realize my trainer has moved me across the gym floor because your creeping was so obvious to everyone but you? 

7. You're staring at me when I do squats and deadlifts which is the most awkward thing ever. 

8. I'm going to do them anyway, because that's what I came here for. 

9. Stop trying to catch my eye. I'm legitimately going to get a towel, and it's not an elaborate excuse to be near you, and actually if you were paying attention you could tell that I took a long convoluted way to not be in your vicinity on the way to the towels. 

10. I know if I were a better person spiritually I would have some compassion for you, but that particular chakra is closed for business at the moment. 

A petty list of unrealistic things that frequently appear in fiction that drive me crazy...

1. Incredibly intelligent characters who lack basic reasoning skills.
There's a draw to having whip-smart characters, but readers get pissed when the aforementioned brilliant characters miss obvious clues or repeatedly make dumb decisions for no other reason than serving the plot.  This does raise two interesting questions: 1) How do you write a character who might be smarter than you? [hint: you need to have a mystery that is actually difficult to solve and have your smart character navigate through it reasonably] 2) Why aren't there more books about people who aren't whip smart?  How about Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights solving mysteries? (Billy can help... when he's not getting in the way.  Twist: Jason Street turns out to be the killer.) I am, by the way, writing a whole other post about the overpopulation of brilliant people in contemporary fiction.  More on that later..

2. Buff characters who never work out. 
Buff doesn't grow on trees.  You have to schedule a lot of your life around the gym. You book hotels based on whether or not they have a gym.  Active people feel uncomfortable if they go several days without being active.  Corollary to this: thin women who never seem to work out and eat a lot of junk food because they just happen to have a high metabolism--I think this is a feeble attempt at being girlpower by not wanting to depict a woman who watches what she eats. But if you want to be progressive by not having women want to change their bodies, you don't get to also default to always having thin characters. There are people of all sizes who go to the gym, ones that don't, people who watch what they eat for whatever reason, people who don't. Real women in America, or at least a lot of them, talk and think about food in ways that are deeply fucked up.  Some of these women are strong, intelligent, complicated, and interesting.  There's nothing wrong with showing that.

3.  Scholarships don't exist.
Non-rich teen has no money and/or screws up their chances for a single scholarship by winning the spelling bee/ sheep-shearing contest/ ironic beauty pageant, so now they can't go to college!!!!  Their life is ruined!  Actually, it's called a FAFSA.  You can go to college, but welcome to the world of student debt we all live in.

4. Character is a CEO / high-powered attorney / neurosurgeon but never seems to be working.
This shit takes time.  And often times, lots of schooling.  Son who inherits company from his father and is a lazy ne'er-do-well--? More believable that Mr. Career awesome who never works.  

5.  Characters don't use cell phones the way they are actually used.
That is to say, to look up just about anything.  Realistically, the introduction of cell phones and the internet in general is a massive game changer in any mystery, horror, or danger type situation.  This is related to why I've been disappointed in horror movies in the past 15 or so years: the villains got smarter but the protagonists didn't become more clever. 

6.  Lame excuses for not telling the authorities/ cops/ parents when a dead body is discovered. 
Please provide a reasonable explanation as to why these people wouldn't just tell their parents or call the cops.  Remember HBO's The Night Of? If that ever happens to you, don't run away from the dead body, then go back, break in, get your keys, and then try to keep it a secret. He probably should have just stayed exactly where he was, touched nothing, and called the cops.* Lots of people don't actually trust the police, for legit reasons, but too often the excuse is, "but we can't call the cops because we can't!"  (*On second thought, if your name is Riz Ahmed, maybe call your dad and a lawyer first, and I guess I would say when a chick wants to play that knife-hand game, it is time to say you're going to the bathroom and run far, far away).

7.  Newbies handling guns with amazing accuracy and no fatigue, often holding them with one hand sideways.  Guns are heavy and hard to handle and even people who are highly trained professionals miss their targets. 

8. Cities devoid of minorities. Actually, this isn't petty but serious.  I can't stand when I read a book that takes place in a city I've spent a considerable amount of time in and the actual racial makeup of the city is depicted as wildly off.  California has a ton of Asians.  The real Beverly Hills High, from Beverly Hills 90210, has a large population of Persians, as does Los Angeles in general.  New York City is not just filled with 20-30-something aspiring hipster writers having epiphanies. If you want to write about an all white city, pick one that actually demographically looks that way.  Writing and talking about race is super awkward; at least we are at the point in time that we are starting to have the conversation. I admit I'm cautious about bringing up race in my own writing, both because I'm afraid of getting something wrong, but also because even being explicit about it sometimes makes people uncomfortable. I'm working on this. 

8. People die for literary sweeps week.  Remember on TV when you knew good shit was going to go down because it was sweeps week?  Similar to this, I hate how death is always a plot device in books.  Someone only dies if it serves some dramatic purpose.  In reality, sometimes death is a random wrench thrown into a machine that was originally headed in a different direction. I think this would be a really awesome way to get rid of Frank Underwood in House of Cards.  All this intrigue is going on where the journalists are closing in on all the shady stuff he has done. Chess pieces are being moved. Then, in the middle of everything, he up and has a heart attack, or his fucking rowing machine breaks, sending the fan part directly into his face and impaling his brain. Claire becomes president. All Claire all the time!!!

9. "As you know Bob" dialogue in general. NCIS is a perfect example of this. One biologist explaining to another what DNA is. One thing I loved about The Wire: there was absolutely no hand holding. 

10. No one ever has their period. Or almost never. And it's too often used for comedy rather than this thing that is there for a huge segment of the population. 

Review of Thor: Ragnarok

Worth seeing. This is what big budget movies like this are supposed to be: fun. 

Cate Blanchette steals every scene she's in--it's worth seeing just for her. The movie is self-aware and makes fun of the franchise. Also makes Thor less boring (let's face it he's one of the more boring Avengers.) Chris Hemsworth is legitimately funny and I don't think he had a chance to show it off in the previous movies. (also, it was recently brought to my attention that there is more than one Hemsworth. I thought they were all the same person and just dyed their hair sometimes. Mind blown. I do not read US Weekly unless I'm lying on a beach, which hasn't been for a year or more.) 

I'm a little skeptical about what's over the horizon for Marvel. One of my issues with the Avengers, however fun it is, is that it's a hodge podge of people (or beings) with grossly different levels of power. So when they're fighting I'm not sure what meaning there is. Like if a dinosaur steps on Thor, and he's a god, does he actually get hurt? (Clearly he CAN get hurt.. but what exactly does it take if he's a god? Does Odin actually die, or is a more like an Elves leaving Middle Earth by sailboat kind of thing?) 

Yet again had to sit through the trailer for Justice League. I'll show up just for Jason Momoa and Wonderwoman, but I'm super skeptical after the cringefest that was Batman V Superman. (Oh Henry Cavill, can someone please give you some good material??) They also showed the trailer for The Last Jedi, which I have never seen before. I guess Oscar season is rolling up, which means I will be hitting the independent theater a lot more. 

Review of Alias Grace

We're living in an awesome time where both Margaret Atwood and Stephen King--two of my favorite writers--are getting tons of love. 

I completely forgot that Netflix was turning Alias Grace into a series until it popped up on my TV. I originally read the book in 2002 and apparently I devoured it so quickly that I forgot the ending. One thing I love about Margaret Atwood is how lovely her prose is--she can take even outlandish premises and deliver them seriously. But the thing I love more is that she is the antithesis of what I'm currently disliking in literary fiction: a hyper focus on delivering a true representation of "realistic" life. (If I have to read another book about an upper middle class marriage falling apart with no larger commentary about the world, I may die on the spot). Writers like Atwood and King seem to have no bounds to what their imagination can dredge up. 

The series is incredibly well-filmed and acted. Grace is rendered with enough depth that she keeps you wondering. Like the Handmaid's Tale, you can't walk away from this series without thinking about all the constraints women are forced to live under. Creepy bosses, creepy neighbor boys, the complicit woman who sabotages you because the creepy boss you're not even interested in wants you. The bed as a place of violence. The ending of this killed me. I mean, of course it wasn't going to have a happy ending--I should have known better. (I went to go see Thor: Ragnarok after, mainly because I heard it was funny.) 

Also, slight aside: books often translate better to series than they do to movies. They have more room to stretch out and give people some backstory. 

Data Dive: The Derecho

I've only had a couple moments of my life where I thought I might actually die, and the derecho of 2012 was one of those moments. I was driving some friends home and the weather was perfectly normal, until it suddenly got really windy.  In less than 60 seconds it had gone from "relatively pleasant albeit grey" out to violent winds, torrential rain, and pieces of trees and garbage flying around. We ended up trapped on a narrow road that lets into Massachusetts Avenue that is thickly lined with trees.  All the cars were at a complete standstill because a tree had fallen in the road.  Some people had gotten out and were trying (in vain) to move it--it also seemed like a dangerous move because trees were still coming down.  And this is exactly what happened.  A huge tree branch broke off and fell on the roof of my car, denting it significantly.  It felt like another one could drop at any second and I could neither move forward or backward.  It occurred to me suddenly that I was responsible for all three lives of the people in my car and that this would be a dumb, ridiculous way to die. After all the horrific ways I had pictured my own death, a tree branch hardly seemed a poetic ending.

NASA imagery of the derecho moving east.

I am also, reluctantly, a huge fan of the MTV show Catfish. Something about the way it is filmed and the topic matter is really addictive even though each show is some permutation of the last. Also, the show is totally fake, and at this point they should push off into new territory--like actually investigating cases without permission from the offending party (ala the documentary Tickled, which if you haven't seen, you should because it is so batshit.) The one thing I do believe is that there are a significant number of people who engage in online relationships (even leading to engagement) with various absurdly improbable aspects. Your girlfriend is a super hot model who can never videochat but has an endless stream of Instagram posts. Your boyfriend meant to meet up with you three times but had an car accident each time. You have to wonder that these people actually know in their hearts that the other person isn't real. But that there's something they still get out of the relationship, and a fake relationship is always better than a real one.

Number of submissions: 7.  Ratio of positive feedback to number of submissions: 57%.  Time from completing story until publication: 1 year, 1 month.

Revising

This is how I revise long pieces. 

1. Finish book. Let it sit for some reasonable amount of time without looking at it at all. 

2. Print out a single-spaced hardcopy. Read it with no line editing- just making general notes like "fix this," "this conversation needs to happen sooner," "cut this?" etc. (Sometimes I do this by sending to my Kindle and reading it there, but it makes taking notes more awkward). 

3. Go back and do plot diagramming (see post from Friday). While doing this I take notes per scene that are more specific (eg, "he should be more suspicious here.") or just general notes that only occurred to me just when I was reading that particular scene. 

4. This is when I would plan major structural edits-- usually I have something I can physically move, like notecards or post-its that represent individual scenes. 

5. Next I make a list of the large-ish things that need to be fixed, drawing from the previous notes, or things I know in the back of my head need to be fixed. (eg, "cut out this character," "there need to be more hints that this person is the murderer.") I don't put in pretty minor things that are confined to one thing only (these are just in scene-level notes.) 

6. When I do a revision, I'm only doing one thing at a time. My original approach to revising was to start from page one and think "okay, fix everything." This is too much to handle at once. I heard this "one thing at a time" per revision thing from author Daniel Torday when workshopping with him once. I thought it was a fantastic idea and have been doing it ever since. Cutting out a character from an entire novel is a major thing--a thread that is probably tangled across different scenes throughout the book.  It's easier to go through the book only looking for and fixing this one thing--how to cut this character out. I found that it really focused my attention on one thing at a time. I did one revision that was about eliminating an extraneous plotline. Another that was beefing up one particular character. When I do multiple POV things, each character gets their own revision--I go through the book only reading their POV sections, making sure their character and voice are consistent, that they appear to have an arc over time. 

7. Final copyedit revision- this involves printing the whole thing out and reading it out loud. This is sort of a pain and hurts your throat, but is worth it. It catches typos and gives you a better sense of when the rhythm of your sentences is off. 

8. Save an extra Word and PDF copy somewhere else safe. Save separate Word files that contain only the first ten pages, first 50, and first 100. (It's easier to have these lined up for when you want to send it out to people, as opposed to copying X pages every single time out of your larger document.) 

Diagram Your Plot

This is tedious, but I'm a firm believer in doing it.  

If you're pre-Millennial the below may look familiar.  These are sentences that have been diagrammed-- broken down to the most basic components (who did what-- Boys (subject) like (verb) games (direct object). Maybe they stopped having kids diagram sentences because they thought it was a useless exercise, but I always liked it and found it helpful. 

Chloe + Yess go to SAE party. Left: C sees Will. Sees C and his girlfriend. Right: SAE house. How calm she stays. 

After I write a book, I always diagram the plot in at least one way. It is somewhat tedious but EXTREMELY useful. I diagram every single scene this way, which makes it really obvious to discover when I have extraneous scenes. Plot points go on the left of a notecard or post-it. A line is drawn down the center, and everything on the right is information that is probably needed to be somewhere in the book, but that technically does not move the plot forward. 

An example to the left: the major focus of this scene is that Chloe goes to a frat party. Two major plot points occur: she sees Will, and she sees another boy, Charles, with his girlfriend. These things have to happen to move the story forward. To the right are things that need to be somewhere in the book, but not necessarily here (in this case, it works out well that they go here.) A description of the SAE frat house: we need to know what it looks like, but that description isn't part of the plot. (In other words, I would not have a scene that just describes the frat house and does nothing else). The second point is to demonstrate in this scene how Chloe tends to stay really calm even when a normal person wouldn't be. This is a characterization--her tendency to not freak out--not a plot point. It cannot hold up a scene by itself. 

Here's another example from a different story: 

Left: Team is kidnapped and offered by Riley a second chance to win their stars back. Tank.  Right: Base move occurring. NASAR (military) training. Intro Riley 

In the above case I color coded blue to indicate the narrator (blue= Dorian). The team is kidnapped and put into a diving tank rapidly filling with water. Obviously that is a clear plot point. Told along the way is an important setting issue--that the entire military base is in the process of planning to be moved to another planet--but technically that information is not a plot point, just something in the background. The packing boxes are laying around, and people are talking about it. Also relevant but not a plot point itself: escaping from the tank brings to Dorian's mind all the training he has endured over the years and how it could be applied to his current problem. Riley is introduced. His introduction itself is not plot--what Riley does is. 

When I've had to do serious structural edits, including needing to cut down a book significantly, doing these notecards is really useful. If you have stuff on the right side, but none on the left, this means you can take those things and move them to some other place that actually has plot points. Plot is like the skeleton in the body-- it needs to be there for structure, to literally hold the body up. Everything else can be moved around on the skeleton.  I'm of the opinion that there should not be any scenes in a novel that do not move the plot forward. Describing a setting is not plot. Describing a political context is not plot. Characterization is not plot--sometimes it seems like it is, but it should it be. "Bob is an asshole" does not move the plot forward. "Bob gets kicked out of the restaurant (because he is an asshole), getting his wife to realize that she wants a divorce." does move the plot forward. 

If I'm doing a multiple POV novel things get a bit more complicated: 

Don't bother trying to read this. 

On the right: You can see chapter numbers indicated on the left. This is color coded for four different narrators. Each row is one scene, each box colored in indicates one page double-spaced. This gave me a sense of how long each chapter was, how much space each character got, and how much stuff happened plotwise in each scene. 

On the right: on the left page is the entirety of a book color coded by POV, with one block of graph paper per each page. The right side is the same thing, for the next book in the series. The width is the same for each. The second book stays with narrators for longer segments of time (I switched to only one narrator per chapter for thematic reasons). This gave me a sense of the "shape" of the book, who was getting long segments and where (sometimes this needed to be rebalanced.) 

TLDR: It's useful to justify every single scene, and to physically see your plot with moveable pieces. 

Trope Story Generator

List your five favorite books, movies, or TV shows. 

Cats Eye, Breaking Bad, Shawshank Redemption, Cloud Atlas, Friday Night Lights. 

List the tropes/components  in each that you like. 

Cats Eye: toxic female friendships, relational aggression, girls who don't fit in with their gender stereotype. 

Breaking Bad: fish out of water, close male relationships, father-son dyad

Shawshank: close male friendships, stoic males, escape plots/ "I Love It When A Plan Comes Together"

Cloud Atlas: revolution, escape plot, reincarnation, notion of doing small good in a world of bad

Friday Night Lights: small town, healthy marriage, earnest learning of lessons

Take several of the things that appear more than once and just put them in the same story. My first novel has some fish out of water stuff with both main characters, an older brother-younger brother dyad, a stoic male (and female), a hell of an escape plan, and the notion of a world of bad and what we do with that. (Is Boston a small town? Kinda.) 

A different book, the one I'm revising right now, was generated this way. I loved when Veronica Mars went to college and just wish the show could have spent years and years there--it's such a perfect environment for mysteries. I'm also a psychologist and have noticed that many people have more than just a passing interest in the field because any person can relate it to themselves. I also like stories that take place in a closed environment. And will-they-wont-they flirty friendships. Thus, I'm writing a thriller that takes place in a college, involves a large-scale psychology experiment (somewhat based on reality), and a toxic dyad at its heart. 

When all else fails, click here and pick three random tropes.