textiplication.com

The more I’m loving revision. 

This too shall pass, my son.

I switched one chapter from Ven’s point of view to Tita’s, and I love the way it works now.  A bunch of stuff is better-explained than before.  The only downside is that I had to give up on the closing image of the chapter, but, on balance, that may be good as well; the new chapter close seems to have a lot more movement in it, despite conveying the same events in the same order.  The magic of POV..

Or small section thereof.

Wordpress is going to make me learn some PHP, I can just feel it.

is a word I just made up to describe the process of removing from a fantasy novel a chapter about attacking and disabling a funicular (Wikipedia definition; many cool pictures, including the one below at the right).  In other words, a process I just went through.

I’d really been looking forward to the funicular sabotage chapter.  Great opportunity to forward the revolution, develop the relationship between two of the primary characters, cool magic-engineering tech.  And there’s no reason you can’t have a funicular in a Renaissance-era story with metallurgical magic. Take a look at page 31 of Philip Ball’s wonderful biography of Paracelsus, The Devil’s Doctor (click on the link that’s on page 31).  There are some marvelous woodcuts of huge, intricate mining machinery from the fifteenth century, built and used entirely without the aid of metallurgical magic!  The main obstacle to creating a really useful heavy-cargo funicular using Renaissance engineering would have to be the rails; slap on a little metallurgical magic and off you go! 

But, darn it all, the contrast was just too great.  The book already flows well without the chapter I wanted to add; the funicular attack was just so dramatic, it deserved to be the climax of the book, not a relationship-building exercise that gets tossed aside as soon as it’s done.

Hey, Tita, you want to go blow up the funicular?

Ven, you romantic dog! Just let me grab my purse!

So I completed the defuniculation last night.  Started the evening at 76K words, with the prospect of 80K before me; now I’m down to 73K, probably ending at 78K.  I’ve started to move some of the less funicular-specific good stuff into other chapters.  The great thing about novel-writing is how much good stuff can just spring into existence while you’re working out other things.  I probably did as much prep work for this chapter as I had done for all of the rest of the book combined.  I drew maps of the city to figure out where the funicular would go; I designed the workings of the funicular, invented magical terminology for metalworking, and plotted not one, but two strategies for attacking the funicular (as well as a counterattack that derailed (as it were) the first attack.  And, for all that planning and outlining, what I loved about most about the chapter were the following lines:

“May I also introduce Tita Panteknika, an accomplished [air wizard] who will be assisting us today.”

Cirapo snorted.  “An [air wizard]? I did not know we were planning to murder anyone today.  I would have worn different clothes.”

If you had any idea how much those two lines did to support later events, ah, well, you might like them as much as I do.  And there’s no way I had known they would crop up until I wrote them.

So I thought that I would lay down a couple of Writing Laws that I’ve learned to date.

First Law: The writer makes the rules. 

Corollary: The writer doesn’t break the rules; the writer changes the rules.

In other words, I don’t have to have a funicular if I don’t want one.  The only person who thought that a funicular would look good running along the southern border of Heathness was me.  I think that there’s another law lurking in this experience, though:

Second Law: No good novel was ever improved by the late addition of a funicular.

In other words, a funicular is too cool a thing to be a seasoning on the dish; it’s got to be the meat.  So, someday, you may see Knave of the Funicular from me, if everything works out.  Knave of Yes, though, will have to do without one.

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?

Quantum Storytelling has a great post debating  how to deliver backstory for an unfamiliar world without doing an infodump.   Subscribed.

An interesting example he cites is the beginning of Star Wars:

they simply tack a universe intro onto the beginning of the story, almost a prologue. Think of the rolling text at the beginning of Star Wars

When I thought of the beginning of Star Wars, I forgot all about the famous crawling text - I was thinking of the first ship, seemingly huge, gliding overhead, getting shot at, then the really, unimaginably, incredibly huge destroyer following it.  That’s what establishes the setting of the movie - high-tech, vast imbalance of power, space travel, all that.  If anything, “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”,  &c. is distracting, disconcerting. 

Maybe the scrolling text adds some portentousness, or is that pretentiousness?  I dunno. 

With Craig Shaw Gardner and Jeffrey Carver!  Ten weeks, this fall, workshopping with two people who have written and published dozens of books.  I’m really excited; my friend Chis & I are both going.  Here’s the link to Craig’s announcement. 

Here’s Pandemonium Books in Central Square, Cambridge, where the class will be taught.  It was the first time I’d been there since they moved from Harvard Square, and the first time I’ve ever been able to wander the stacks at Pandemonium without getting hip-checked by other geeks and nerds.  Tons more room.  Great location, lots of room, same great store.

Since I’m starting from scratch, yet again, I thought I’d try out the new MSFT blogging tool, Windows Live Writer.  Its configuration is by far the simplest I’ve ever seen - you tell it the address, user ID and password, and it figures out for itself which interface to use.  It shows you a progress meter while it goes through a series of steps, something like these:

Connecting…

Determining format…

Determining editing style…

Editing style? What th’heck does that mean?  writes short posts, revises each one six or seven times… What else could it do?

Determining writing style…

That would be good. 

Microsoft has classified your blog as Trivial Quotidian Modern, and created the following sample posts for you:

Statue of Britney Spears Giving Birth…

on bearskin rug! Yuck. Check it out!

That guy playing Pachelbel’s Canon on an Electric Guitar!

and twenty other guys who did the same thing!  YouTube! Check it out!

….

Press OK to accept these blog posts, or Cancel to switch to LiveSpaces.

Well, actually, this thing seems to work pretty well.  No real complaints, so far, which means it beats th’heck out of everything else I’ve ever tried.

Welcome to my new blog. I’m a software architect and an ardent consumer of fiction and unusual pop music, and I’m finishing my first novel. You may already be reading theophrast.us, the writing blog of my friend Chris Howard, but then again, you may not.