Archive for July 2014

Writing dialogue (#5 in the series of “classic posts” on writing)…

Thursday, July 31st, 2014

If you’re an avid reader (I read more than I write, if you can believe it), you know there are certain things that slow you down.  One is what a prospective agent of mine long ago labeled in a critique of my MS (after sitting on it for many months): “…too much narrative.”  I wrote and asked her to define that, but received no response—not surprising, because it required more than a form letter, so she couldn’t bother.  I was left to figure out what she meant, naively giving her the benefit of the doubt instead of thinking it was a lame excuse pulled from a list of similar lame excuses she maintained (you’ve already concluded what I think of the phrase now).  The novel, a lengthy sci-fi tome, later became “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  [Note from Steve: see the webpage “Books and Short Stories” for a complete list of my books.]  Back then I figured she was complaining about the world-building—it tends to lengthen hard sci-fi, but needs to be done—and also that there wasn’t enough dialogue [Note from Steve: I now put the blame squarely on her inability to understand the difference—there’s no guarantee that an agent knows anything about writing].

Lots of narrative—lengthy description or back story about characters and situations, or world-building in sci-fi—can slow a reader down.  I’ll admit that.  One of the worst examples is Melville’s classic Moby Dick.  [By now, you’ve probably got the idea that I hate this novel.] You’re reading speed slows down from whatever a normal fiction [reading] rate is for you to one comparable to a snail crawling uphill in a molasses spill.  The book is partly a how-to book—How to Hunt Whales Unmercifully and Turn Their Blubber into Lamp Oil should be the subtitle (today whale meat is for Asians [in Japan and China, mostly] who feel sexually inadequate—they need to complement the ground rhinoceros horns and tiger gonads).  If that’s not boring enough, you have endless pages of description and very little dialogue.  I’m not sure Melville knew anything about dialogue—many 19th century writers didn’t.  These literary wunderkind wouldn’t have a chance in today’s competitive publishing arena.  (And Einstein wouldn’t have ever left the patent office, let alone have a paper accepted by Physical Review—but that’s another story.)

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Character names (#4 in the series of “classic posts” on writing)…

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

I’ve discussed naming characters in other posts to this blog, but today I thought I’d dedicate a whole post to the subject.  I probably spend an abnormal amount of time fretting over titles and names of characters.  Here I want to throw a wee bit of mud at my fellow authors: don’t be so politically correct!  Readers and writers both might enjoy the mudslinging.  Or not.  (It’s really not a strong critique, so don’t get all snarky—and read on.)

When I’m reviewing a book and an author’s description of a character shows he or she is Latino, for example, I have a hard time identifying with the character if he or she is named John or Jane Smith.  Many authors, desiring to offend no one, make the mistake of using bland and generic names.  Consequently, their writing becomes bland and generic.  Sure, the U.S., and to some extent the rest of the world, is one big melting pot.  I would never use names as a code to promote a prejudicial agenda.  However, parents who can be identified as having one dominant ethnicity still tend to give their kids names that are in sync with that ethnicity.  We’re socially very far away from changing this, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to try.

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Location, location, location (#3 in the series of “classic posts” on writing)…

Tuesday, July 29th, 2014

Last Tuesday’s post was a bit heavy on Catholic humor—I’ll admit it.  [Note from Steve: I don’t have any idea about what I’m referring to here, but I must have had a brain fart.]  All churches, synagogues, and other places of worship are often home to well-meaning people who enjoy giving a helping hand to people in need.  The emphasis is on “well-meaning people” and not the actual building, of course.  (In Soldiers of God, for example, one of the main protagonists is a priest who thwarts a terrorist attack by radical Catholics.)

No, in line with the interview yesterday [ditto ?], I thought that today I’d stay on the topic of writing and the writing business.  Don’t worry, though.  The title doesn’t mean that I have an old Borders or B&N store to sell you, though they’re generally in great locations for anything from an Apple store to a Victoria Secrets store or S&M store featuring “Fifty Shades literature.”  No, I’m going to write about setting or choosing locales in your writing.

You can find one aspect of how stupid the advice “write what you know” is in an author’s fiction locales, those settings where the action and drama take place and transport readers around the world, through the solar system, and into the far reaches of the Galaxy.  While it’s clear that I know nothing about what will be found in the 82 Eridani star system (a location or setting for my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”), for example, I can imagine it.  Even if it’s hard sci-fi, that just puts logical constraints on what I can imagine, but doesn’t hinder me otherwise. The same holds for more earthly venues of my fiction.  In short, what I know is what I can imagine!

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When two parallel lines intersect (#2 in some “classic posts” about writing)…

Monday, July 28th, 2014

I shook the mathematical beliefs of my thirteen-year-old niece the other afternoon.  An elementary problem in algebra required knowing that the measures of the interior angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees.  That’s in Euclidean geometry.  [She’s sixteen now and through geometry too.]  I commented that there are other non-Euclidean geometries where that “rule” is not true.  In one of these geometries, parallel lines can meet.

Many of you might be yawning now, I suppose, but there’s a message about writing here.  That algebra help session with my niece started me thinking that a novel’s timeline is linear, but its plot lines can be parallel.  But plot lines are non-Euclidean—they satisfy a stranger geometry where they have to meet at least once by the end of the book, either in the climax or in the denouement.

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News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #68…

Friday, July 25th, 2014

Item: Borrowing v. buying.  I think I’ve talked about this before, but now it’s official: most ebooks you find listed on Smashwords, which already distributes to Sony, Apple, B&N, and so forth, are now available on Scribd.  Maybe in response to this, Amazon has created a new program, Kindle Unlimited, to complement its Prime lending service.  In other words, you can borrow my ebooks through Amazon’s Kindle Prime or Unlimited  (about half of them, the ones in Kindle Select) or Scribd (the other half of them).

Some FAQs: (1) While all my ebooks on Smashwords are covered by the Scribd service, these can’t be in KDP Select, i.e. Prime or Unlimited, because Amazon requires an exclusive for its special programs.  I’ve maintained my Smashwords listings as a service for readers with non-Kindle devices, but so far Smashwords hasn’t produced much movement on my ebooks.  Because of the Amazon exclusive restriction for KDP Select, that’s getting a bit old and it doubles the formatting cost for my ebooks.  I might revise my policy in the future.  (Sometimes I think it would be better to go the open software route and post .epub and .mobi files at my websites as free downloads, asking for a payment if you like the book, but that would require some babysitting that would take time away from my writing.  <sigh>)

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Russian separatists received Moscow guns…

Thursday, July 24th, 2014

There’s a lot of hype from multiple sources, each source putting its own spin on the problem.  From Moscow and Ukrainian separatists “Who?  Me?” to Ukraine’s “It’s them,” plus the Russian sympathizers limiting access to the crash site and carting off bodies to freeze them in railway cars (why? what are they hiding?), media outlets around the world echo the hype.  What do we know?  What are the facts?

Fact one: A passenger jet packed with 298 people was targeted by a missile; 298 innocents died.  That’s mass murder by anyone’s definition.  Fact two: In a briefing at the Pentagon two weeks earlier, a NATO commander informed publicly that Russians had placed vehicle-mounted SAMs in eastern Ukraine, the part controlled by separatists, most of them ethnic Russians.  Moreover, the Russians were training the separatists how to shoot the deadly weapons that can cover any altitude where jets can fly.

Fact three: On Monday, they shot down a Ukrainian troop transport flying at a “safe altitude,” one far above 10 kft, the altitude range of shoulder-carried missiles, proving effectively that Russian SAMs were in use by the rebels and that no altitude was safe.  Fact four: The Russian separatists in the Ukraine are hindering the investigations at the crash site and putting the victims on ice in boxcars.  Where are the boxcars going?  Probably Moscow.  Family and friends of the victims will never have closure, an obscene gesture by Putin and his thuggish sycophants.

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The Eightfold Way (#1 in a series of “classic posts” about writing)…

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014

[I wrote this quite a while ago and have repeated it once in this blog.  It made the rounds on other blogs somewhere in the dark past.  Why does this zombie rise again out of its grave to persecute you, dear reader?  Because I’m taking a brief hiatus from writing.  I’ve released Aristocrats and Assassins; finished Muddlin’ Through—it’s off to my formatter and cover artist; I’m in final editing mode for the new Chen and Castilblanco novel, The Collector; and I’ve finished Part I of a new sci-fi novel.  I need a break, so I thought I’d catch up on summer reading and veg a bit.

That said, in order not to deprive you of my rambling and varied blog posts, I’ve resurrected a few of what I consider to be my best essays about the writing trade.  You might remember some of them, but new visitors here might not have looked through my archives (there’s a lot there, including short stories).  I am a full-time writer now.  After fifteen books plus the ones in the works, I do have opinions about the writing business, running from cynical to maybe motivational.  You might agree or disagree, but comments are always welcome.]

The media has become fixated on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle,” a name that would surely make Mr. Higgs cringe).  The Higgs mechanism (i.e. the spontaneous symmetry breaking) is necessary to give mass to some of the vector bosons in the electroweak or weak and electromagnetic interaction theory.  [Note from Steve: Can there be more than one God particle?  Interesting question!]  Forgotten in all this media hoopla is the theory that led to the idea of quarks and gluons, the Eightfold Way of symmetries popularized by Mr. Gell-Mann.  (Note that I refrain from using the term “discovered.”  In theoretical physics, the math is “out there.”  You just have to figure out what math matches up to experimental data [not a trivial task by any means].  Experimental physics is where “discoveries” are made.)

Now that I’ve had some fun imagining your eyes glazing over as if you’d just had tequila mixed with sleeping pills [not recommended, by the way], let me say that this post is not about physics.  (My eyes are glazed too, because the above is hardcore physics and I’ve been sipping my Jameson’s while writing like a madman.)  [Little did I know back then how crazy I’d become.  I blame my muses who wield tasers.]  The Eightfold Way I consider here is the shining path that leads you to a finished novel that someone might want to read. It’s my distillation of rules for writing a novel—a distillation that is not the quality of a fine Irish whiskey, but I’ve put some thought to it and would like to share (I’d like to share the Jameson’s too, but the internet hasn’t discovered e-drinking yet).  [Only a matter of time, I suppose, for e-drinking to occur, even on your smart phone.]

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Unintended consequences from an immigration law…

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

The mess on our southern borders with the unaccompanied illegal immigrant children illustrates the Keystone Cops attitude of many bills coming out of Congress and/or proposed by the Executive Branch.  You’d think that most of these people who, after all, are usually lawyers (albeit failed ones, for the most part), could word the legalese and implement it in such a way that these things don’t happen.

The problem of child pornography and child prostitution in this country led to a “feel good” bipartisan bill back in the latter Bush era (i.e. not Papa Bush but Dubya) that promised to take care of unaccompanied minors until their cases were settled, all in order to protect them.  The law didn’t become effective until Obama became president.  Not knowing the details of that law, I presume “settled” means that immigration workers, judges, and their assistants would treat each case on a one-by-one basis to prevent abuse to these kids, or even sending them back to war-savaged homelands.

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Statistics, reader categories, and book genres…

Thursday, July 17th, 2014

This post is for writers…and readers!  Let me start by saying that men suck at reading.  Statistically, women beat us hands down.  This is a modern phenomenon.  You’ve all seen those movies and TV shows that are period pieces about the 1700s and 1800s, even early 20th century.  The rich old boys had their impressive libraries filled with leather-bound classics and even recent “popular works,” all in good order in exquisitely carved cases and shielded with sliding glass doors to keep them from the servants.  I don’t know how much those rich old boys actually read—the real reading might have been done by the wives and children or—heaven forbid!—those sneaky servants.

I’d guess that not much real reading was done back then.  They say Jefferson read every book in his extensive library (donated after the War of 1812 to help replace the Library of Congress’ decimated collection), but he most certainly was an exception.  But you never know—maybe Davy Crockett was reading Gargantua and Pantugrel as he waited for the Mexican army to attack the Alamo.  I think the Boomer years probably saw more male readers percentage-wise than now because women still didn’t have that much free time back in the fifties and early sixties—only rich women with servants and nannies found real time to read, if they weren’t playing tennis and croquet at the country club.  Women have a bit more time now for leisure activities, even working women and even some single mothers, and they’re doing more reading than men because men now spend their leisure time elsewhere .

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Review of the short story anthology Quantum Zoo…

Wednesday, July 16th, 2014

(Quantum Zoo, D. J. Gelner and J. M. Ney-Grimm, eds., Orion Comet, 2014, ASIN B00L0MZFVQ)

This is an anthology of similar-themed stories.  The theme can be summarized by one word—zoo.  Add to that the genre speculative fiction and you have the logic of the title, although quantum mechanics doesn’t play any role here except for making a catchy title.  Note that I said “zoo” is the theme.  Theme lurks behind plot and other writing elements in these stories as varied as the people who wrote them.  I assume the editors said, “That’s the theme—take it and run!”

Some people love anthologies.  Essays, memoir pieces, and, above all, short stories are often collected.  An anthology might have just one author; or, it can have a group of writers, solicited by editors or otherwise.  In either case, if it’s a short story anthology, the reader has the chance to read an author’s story in a minimalist context, one often emphasizing only a few aspects of the writing craft—plot, dialog, characterization, and setting, for example.  I prefer plot above all, but the point is that the reader discovers an author in a stress-free and minimalist environment.  Note that, in all this trade lingo, I haven’t mentioned that readers might like short v. long, i.e. short story over novel.  I think that’s less important—a casual reader can just as well read a chapter of a novel as a short story.

That said, I found the stories in this collection entertaining, some more than others, as is expected in any collection.  The plots are creative with enough twists and misdirects to hold my interest.  Characterization is a bit lacking at times, but that’s expected in a short story—the writer has to shorten things up somewhere.  Dialog varies from OK to A+, and some of the settings are just fantastic, in multiple senses of that word.

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