textiplication.com

Well, not too, too, novel, since I tried it after reading Justine Larbalestier’s fascinating post on her use of spreadsheets to track important metrics of her ongoing writing process.

Now that I’ve gotten to the end of Knave of Yes (my first novel), and halfway through it again in a second pass, I went through the same exercise:

It was very interesting.  I learned a couple of things:

• I have three POV’s, and I had been concerned that I was favoring one of them over the others.  It turns out that the three are as balanced, chapter by chapter, as they could be.
• I’d been aware that my chapter length was all over the map, and that turned out to be the case; however, two of the chapters I’d thought were the longest are, in fact, not; I’d also forgotten that one of the key chapters is still somewhat underwritten.  I would have gotten to it next, but this really makes it stand out.
• I’d been concerned that I might have too high an ongoing level of action, but my quick, subjective 1-4 *’s metric shows a pretty nice balance. 

I don’t think anything I learned was terribly surprising, but I think that this kind of breakdown can only help.

I have a number of clear memories of this day five years ago:

• My company setting up a TV in the main conference room where the whole company was invited to watch.  Being surrounded by sobbing coworkers.
• Bryant Gumbel announcing, in portentous tones, “Important news from Chicago.  The Sears Tower…” Long pause for dramatic effect. Moans from around the conference room. “…has been evacuated.”  I think that made Bryant Gumbel the first person to leverage the fall of the Towers cynically for personal or professional benefit.  Way to go, Bryant!  To this day, I feel a twinge of nausea whenever his face comes on screen.
• Interview outside the Capitol building with two Republican congresscritters, who lambasted the Clinton administration for unexplained failures which were, in their opinions, to blame for the attack.  I don’t remember who these were, but they were the second and third figures to take cynical advantage of the attacks for personal or professional gain.

It goes back that far - the manipulation of 9/11 by Republicans with their willing accomplices in the media.  It’s going on this week on ABC, whose miniseries invents counterfactual scenes in which Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright take deliberate actions to allow bin Laden to survive - didn’t happen, folks.  Same miniseries DOES in fact omit that Bush received a memo titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States” while on vacation - and blew it off with the statement “OK, you’ve covered your ass, now.”  And that it was in fact the Bush adminstration that more or less allowed bin Laden to escape from his mountain base in Tora Bora, and that continues to prop up the one government that continues to support him - Pakistan, of course.

Meanwhile, many of the same lawmakers who insisted that perjury in a civil case amply met the Constitution prescription of “high crimes and misdemeanors” now strives mightily to paper over the Bush presidency’s open, admitted, and grotesque violations of the very civil liberties we hold most dear, to grant retroactive legality to invasions of privacy, imprisonment without charges, and torture.  These same leaders now plan another war of conquest, in Iran, having failed any conceivable standard for success to pacify a much weaker, tactically vulnerable, impoverished nation.

My people! What has become of you?