Writing Wednesday: The Futility of Combatting Ignorance

Once you put a book up for sale, one of the most annoying things you have to put up with are reviews.  At least they're often annoying for me.  Other people get nothing but 5-star raves all the time I'm sure.  My luck is that I sell hundreds of a book and the only person to review it gives it one star and says, "I don't know what I was expecting but that wasn't it."  Which as an author and a customer I have no fucking idea what good that is supposed to do anyone else.  I think my sister summarized the problem the best when she said that negative reviews are more fun to write.

Part of the problem is that you're at the mercy of stupid assumptions people might make about your work.  They come to wrong conclusions and then punish you for their errors in a bad review.  An epic example of this was last month when Andrew Leon ranted and raved about "middle school errors" in my opus Where You Belong.

Here was the first point:

First, it's written in first person. (I haven't been shy about how I feel about first person. But it's worse, because it's written in first person omniscient and, well, that's just not a thing. I mean, unless your protagonist is God (or, maybe, Charles Xavier), omniscient and first person do not go together. That's the whole reason for writing in first person, to have a limited view of what's going on. A view limited to only what the protagonist knows and observes. That's why first person works so well in detective fiction, because the whole point of that is the protagonist trying to work out what he doesn't know from his rather limited perspective. This issue of allowing the first person protagonist to know too much is very pervasive in first person stories, but I'd never seen full-on first person omniscient before. Yes, it set me against the book right from the start, because, again, first person omniscient is not a thing.

[Note: Dilloway has spoken on his blog and various other places that the book was originally written in third person and that he later went back and converted it. I think he must have done this through a simple replacement of pronouns, because he didn't do anything to adjust the viewpoint. I'm saying this based on my experience with my middle school students. There have been many times when I have given writing assignments to write from a particular perspective. It is not infrequent that I will get stories that were originally written from a different perspective so the student just went in and changed the pronouns. That's not enough when making a perspective shift and, anytime I have asked, for instance, "Did you originally write this in first person," the answer has always been "yes."

So that would explain the omniscience problem. He originally wrote it in third person omniscient but didn't narrow the viewpoint to first person when he converted it to a first person story. I'm just going to call it what it is: a middle school mistake.]

Then there's the issue of the voice, and this, also, is probably related to the shift the author made from third to first person. When you write in third person, the voice can be whatever you want it to be, because it's the narrator's voice, not the character's. When you write in first person, though, the voice needs to be the character's voice and, thus, reflective of the character. The protagonist starts out at age three or four, but the voice is definitely that of an adult. That would be okay if it was clear that it was an adult reflecting back on his childhood, but the feel of the story is that it's being told by the kid, especially since some of it is in present tense, but not in a kid's voice. Now, I get that writing from a child's perspective can be difficult but, if you can't do it, don't choose to do it.

I had a good laugh about his speculation about how I converted the book from third to first person.  As if I just went through and changed the pronouns.  LOL.  Sorry, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.  I wrote the entire book in third person and then rewrote it entirely as a first person narrative.  The third person version was called No Matter Who You Are after a Bob Seger song.  Here's the opening of the book:

Chapter 1

            Life comes in streaks.  For the first twenty-two years of his life, Jack Bentley’s life consisted of one solid cold streak.  Even the good things that happened to him like fucking Dorothy Lintner in the bed of her father’s rusty pick-up soon turned sinister when Jack felt a distinct burning sensation as he pissed two days later.  This dose of the clap was curable, not so the rest of his rotten luck.  At least not until deliverance came from the jungles of Southeast Asia and a new streak began.

And now here's the opening of Where You Belong:

Chapter 1

            For the most important trip of her life, my mother wanted to buy a new car.  Ever since getting her license at sixteen, and at least three years before that when no one was paying attention, she drove her sister’s battered Ford pickup truck.  The vehicle had been red at one time, though little of that paint remained; mostly the truck was mud, rust, and soot smeared into intricate patterns.  By the time I was born, the Ford had two hundred thousand miles on it and almost four years later it showed no signs of quitting.

As you can see, they are completely different.  If you're really paranoid I can send you the Word file of the original story.  Though someone would probably accuse me then of rewriting a 163,000 word book just to show up a bad reviewer.  I'm a fast typist but I'm not that fast.

Honestly, can you imagine how long it would take to change the pronouns in a book that's 550 pages?  It would be a lot easier to just rewrite the whole book than to try doing that.  I'd have probably driven myself crazy by the end of the first chapter.  That's an idea that probably would work better for a 10-page story, not a whole freaking novel.

Also, it was pretty amusing to think that after almost 20 years of writing I would just plum forget the difference between first and third person.  Maybe if I were one of his 13-year-old students that would fly, but not someone who had been in the game for a while.

Anyway, that first paragraph from Where You Belong illustrates the style of narration, which while not entirely "omniscient" is not as limited as first person often is.  The reason for this is very simple:  the book is written like a memoir.  If you want, you can think that the main character, Frost Devereaux, is an old man and writing down his life story.  This gives him the freedom to add in things he found out later, like when his mom got her license, or to speculate on other things.

I like to reference Doc Brown in Back to the Future:  You have to think 4 dimensionally!  What's the fourth dimension?  Time.  In this case the time factor is when the book is being written.  This first chapter isn't being written when Frost is 3 years old.  That wouldn't make any sense unless he's a prodigy like a literary Mozart.  Thus there's no sense writing it as if he's a 3-year-old.

If you're wondering I didn't make that stuff up.  I've often cited John Irving books as my inspiration and if you read The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, or Until I Find You, you can see examples of cradle-to-grave stories written in first person.  None of them have the character writing from a 3-year-old's perspective.  Because really, that would just be silly.

You'd think someone who reads so much science-fiction would have a better understanding of temporal mechanics.

And then there was the second "middle school error" I was supposedly committing.

The next issue with the book is that it shifts back and forth from past to present tense, but not in a way that makes sense. For instance, it would make sense if part of the story was being told "now" and part of the story was being told "then." However, what we have are clearly places that are "then" that are being told in past tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but now in present tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but back in past tense. These are chronological events, so the shift in tense didn't work for me.

When I asked where these shifts were, Andrew Leon told me to find them myself.  Fortunately one of his sycophants was more helpful and indicated this section:

I can’t remember much after that.  Sometimes in my dreams I see bits and pieces of what happened next.  I see a black blanket stamped with the head of a yellow hawk, which someone from the Impala used to beat out the flames that otherwise would have roasted me alive.  I see a chubby, tired woman in a white shirt leaning over me, pressing me down against a padded table—a paramedic.  I see a doctor dressed in blue scrubs, a mask covering his or her face.  “Jesus Christ!” I hear a muffled voice say.

            What I always remember is waking in a darkened room, a bit of light coming in from the crack under the door.  I’m strapped down so tightly that for a moment I think I’m still in the backseat of the Pinto.  That is until I see a face outlined in the light from under the door.  That light gives her hair a copper tint while her skin looks sallow and her eyes like the black holes of a skull.  She is at once terrifying and comforting.  Terrifying because of how she looks in the light, but comforting because I know her.  I am named for her.

And at that point I had to laugh again because it was another "error" that was so freaking easy to explain.

The first two sentences actually back up what I said about the first person narration.  Especially when he says, "Sometimes in my dreams..." then we know that he isn't communicating from that moment when he's 3; obviously he's relating this from some future point in time.

Anyway, the reason this is written in present tense is that the first two sentences are being written from Frost's present, whenever it is.  (I never really go into when exactly that is.)  The rest I wrote in present tense because I wanted to separate it from the normal narration.  Strictly speaking it's not a dream, but with all the pain he was in, the memory is like a dream to him.

It wasn't an "error;" it was a literary device.

When confronted, all Andrew Leon could say was:

It doesn't matter what your intent as the author is. If you can't make your intent understood, it's on you.

Which is also pretty amusing.  I mean if that were true, all of us authors would have to write books so babies could understand them because otherwise someone, somewhere might be able to misinterpret it.

To get back to where I started this blog post, you put a book out there and it's a crap shoot on who is going to read it.  You'd think people would read the descriptions and such so they would know what a book is about and what kind of book it is before they put their money down and then feel compelled to rant and rave about "errors" that exist only to them.

Unfortunately as an author there's not much you can do about this.  When you try to explain yourself (like this blog entry for instance) people take umbrage because you're not supposed to defend your work for some reason.  That's mean!  You're just supposed to let people say any stupid thing they want, no matter how ignorant or off-base it might be.  Because free speech.  I can say whatever I want!  Which I always laugh and remind them that free speech goes both ways.  Or it should.  Personally I think it'd be kinda awesome if John Irving wrote me to tell me how fucking stupid my review of his book was.

Of course it helps when you're reviewing a book if you aren't on a vendetta against that author.  That typically doesn't make for the most objective writing.  Captain Ahab was a good whale hunter until he got obsessed with bringing down the white whale.  A white whale would actually be a perfect way to describe me.  Arrrr, matey!

Anyway, I hope you learned something about literature.  If you want, you can buy Where You Belong for $2.99 for Kindle or the paperback is like $17.99 from various retailers.  Or there's usually that one person selling a used copy on Amazon for like $99 for some reason.  I don't know how that guy makes money, but I suppose if just one person buys it he's swimming in cash.

Authors Being Dicks: Harlan Ellison & The City on the Edge of Forever

A long time ago I had bought the original version of the famous Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever" on sale from Amazon.  I got around to reading it a little over a month ago.  I thought it'd just be the script with a brief introduction.

Instead the first 28% of the book is author Harlan Ellison ranting about how everyone from Gene Roddenberry on down screwed him, how Star Trek fans are idiots, and how his version of the episode was so much superior to what aired.  Which OK he made some good points, but it just went on and on and on.  The worst part was he kept saying, "Read it for yourself!  Read it!"  I wanted to scream, "How can I when you won't shut the fuck up?!"

It's a good reminder of how unattractive it can be when authors go on a rampage.  Which is ironical coming from someone who has been involved in many a flame war.  But then my flame wars are confined to out-of-the-way message boards and blogs; it's something else when you're putting it in a book that is being pushed by Amazon for thousands of people to buy.  It'd be like--to a much lesser extent--I dedicated the first quarter of my next book to how much I hate Andrew Leon.  Any reader picking that up would think at best that I'm an asshole and at worse deranged.  (Which you probably already think both.)

And OK maybe Ellison is right that Roddenberry (and others) badmouthed him for years without him saying much, but why bother including your whole little expose (smear campaign) in the book?  You want to do that, write an op-ed or have a magazine interview.  Besides, if you really think your version is so much better, why not let it speak for itself?  With maybe a brief introduction on what changes were made and why.  Going on for probably a hundred pages though just wears the reader down and it certainly didn't make me like him as a person.  I mean he has a point but going on that long he just sounds like a dick.

It's like when I read John Irving's autobiography as part of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed and he wrote about going to the White House in the 80s and some ex-football player (Joe Namath?  Joe Thiesmann?  Someone like that) kept saying how awesome it was to be in the White House and how much this annoyed Irving.  The story was supposed to make me think the football player was an idiot, but really I just thought the author sounded like a dick.  I mean come on, if I were at the White House I'd be pretty impressed too.  It served as inspiration for a short story about a guy who goes to meet his literary hero and finds out the guy is a dick.  So something good came from it.

From my long history of flame wars, I could see where sometimes Ellison let himself get caught up in exaggerations to try to make his point.  Most notably how he kept saying that in the episode that aired, Bones McCoy "injected himself" with something that made him go crazy.  In reality he had just injected Sulu with something, the ship hits turbulence, and the syringe stabs him.  Though in the 23rd Century you'd think accidental discharge would be harder.  Stuff like that makes it harder to believe some of the rest of it, though I suppose that's why he felt the need to include memos, fax pages, etc. as if he were exposing Nixon on Watergate.

He also makes this big deal that in his script Spock was going to call Kirk "Jim" and how poignant that would be.  The thing about that is by the time the episode aired, Spock had called Kirk "Jim" a whole bunch of times.  I mean when he wrote the episode he probably didn't know that, but writing the book years later shouldn't he have recognized that?

Anyway, my point is unless you're writing a tell-all book, don't spend a quarter of your book raging about past wrongs.  It's really unattractive for an author.  If you feel the need to spew venom, do it anonymously on a message board, or in blog comments.

Movies! 5/8/15

Personally I think any studio releasing a movie this week is suicidal.  Avengers 2 is going to steamroll any competition this week at least, if not for the rest of the month.  It depends how good the word-of-mouth is.  I suspect really good.

Though I watched it yesterday and didn't like it all that much.  It's OK but I think the problem right from the get-go is that this is a placeholder movie.  I mean the end of Avengers introduced Thanos so everyone was psyched for the Infinity Gauntlet thing but then they announced Age of Ultron and that the Infinity War would be the third movie.  So really this movie was always just to bridge the gap.  Besides that is just the whole weight of the Marvel cinematic universe, so that really most of the movie feels like it's just setting up stuff (Wakanda, Infinity Stones, etc.) for down the road.  I'd give it a solid B or (2.5/5)

Anyway, perhaps in the spirit of counterprogramming one of the top movies being released is "Hot Pursuit" which is like "Midnight Run" with Reese Witherspoon and Sophia Vergara.  Watching the previews it looks like "The Heat," which I found really boring.  I'm all for gender equality, but does that have to mean women get to star in terrible buddy comedies?  Anyway, I guess women who don't want to watch Avengers 2 might drag their men to that.  Good luck, fellas.

Of other new releases, perhaps the most significant is "Maggie" with Ahh-nold Schwarzenegger.  First he was a bodybuilder popping steroids.  Then one of the two biggest action stars on the planet.  Then he tried comedy, with mediocre results.  Then he became a governor.  And after co-starring with fellow has-been Sly Stallone, now he's taking a run at something more dramatic.  At least that's what I heard.  Of course this isn't exactly "The Piano."  His daughter (the girl from "Little Miss Sunshine" and appropriately, "Zombieland") is turning into a zombie and so mayhem ensues.  It's the kind of movie that I'd probably get from Redbox or digital download, not the kind I'd go to see in theaters.  And of course if Ahh-nold wants to use it to get an Oscar nomination he probably should have released it in December.

Other stuff being released somewhere that I know nothing about:

• The D-Train: The head of a high school reunion committee travels to Los Angeles to track down the most popular guy from his graduating class and convince him to go to the reunion. 
• 5 Flights Up: A long-time married couple who've spent their lives together in the same New York apartment become overwhelmed by personal and real estate-related issues when they plan to move away. 
• Saint Laurent: Yves Saint Laurent's life from 1967 to 1976, during which time the famed fashion designer was at the peak of his career. 
• I Am Big Bird: A documentary about Caroll Spinney who has been Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969. At 78-years-old, he has no intention of stopping. 
• Noble: Christina Noble overcomes the harsh difficulties of her childhood in Ireland to discover her destiny on the streets of Saigon. A true story. 
• The Seven Five: Michael Dowd was a Brooklyn cop in the late 1980s who led his crew on a rampage through the streets, robbing dope dealers at gunpoint, and stealing countless kilos of cocaine and hundreds of thousands dollars in cash until his arrest in 1992. 
• Skin Trade: After his family is killed by a Serbian gangster with international interests, NYC detective Nick goes to S.E. Asia and teams up with a Thai detective to get revenge and destroy the syndicates human trafficking network.

Writing Wednesday: The Art & The Artist

At the end of March I got into a feud with a couple of (former) associates because one had given a third associate a bad review.  I don't like naming names, but you can find out all about it here.  Anyway, it was pretty pointless because you can't convince a jerk he's a jerk.  I mean people have been trying to convince me for 20 years and it still hasn't worked.

At one point the party in question said basically, "I only gave her book a bad review; it's not like I said anything bad about her."  Which I always think is a lame dodge.  This idea that the art and artist are somehow not one and the same strikes me as a copout so someone can justify being an asshole.  Again, I've probably done it myself a few times.

It's kind of sad when another writer says this, because he should know better.  If you've written a book then you know how long it takes--just ask Game of Thrones fans about that--and how much effort it requires.  It's not something you just toss off and forget about, not even when you've written as many books as I have.

All right, so it takes a lot of work to make a book.  And after all that work, who wants some jerk to come along and say, "That sucks?"  Especially when it's a jerk you know and whom you've been collaborating with for over a year.  Can you imagine if da Vinci finished the Mona Lisa and then some buddy of his walked by and said, "Boy that really sucks.  Why isn't she smiling more?"

But hey, don't take it personal because I'm just saying your work sucks, not you.  Like in The Godfather, it's nothing personal, just business.  Uh-huh, sure.  Where I come from, you're supposed to take pride in your work.  Even when your work is something fairly ridiculous like this:

I still took the time and effort to pull that story out of my brain and put it down on the screen and then send it out into the world.  Even if it's not my name on the cover, it's still my work.  Even if it's a ridiculous story, I still take writing it seriously.  So when someone says something bad about it, I get pissed off like they said something bad about me.  My books are a part of me; they're part of who I am.

But maybe you're a cold-blooded Vulcan or android or something and don't have emotions.  You can disagree in the comments, but be warned; I take blog writing seriously too.

Arrow & The Flash are the Batman & Superman of the TV Universe

A month or so ago on his blog, Michael Offutt was talking about "Arrow" and the recent plot involving Oliver Queen being offered the chance to become Ra's al-Guhl, the head of the League of Assassins.  I mentioned that really they're just taking an old Batman comic book plot and replacing Batman with Green Arrow.

Which really isn't a surprise because all along they've set up "Arrow" as basically Batman with a bow instead of a grappling gun/Batarangs.  I mean the character himself is a billionaire playboy who suffers a trauma (later in life than Bruce Wayne) and decides to fight crime in impractical, flamboyant fashion.  At first he killed people but then like Batman decided to stop killing his enemies.  So I guess adding a major Batman villain to the mix makes sense.

Then I got thinking that if Arrow is Batman then The Flash is more like Superman.  Where Oliver Queen relies on conventional weapons and ninja training, Barry Allen accidentally came into superpowers, like how Clark Kent accidentally got superpowers by landing on Earth.

In the two-part crossover episode they really played up the contrast between the characters.  Goofy, naive Barry is horrified to see Oliver torture criminals for information, while no-nonsense Oliver sees it as a necessary evil.  That's the difference that has been shown in comics like The Dark Knight Returns where Superman is the Big Blue Boy Scout, the tool of the establishment, while Batman is the outlaw who beats up, tortures, or even kills anyone he thinks deserves it.  You can expect that to be shown again in the upcoming Batman v Superman movie, but right now you can get a taste of it on the small screen on the CW.

It's ironic though that at least pre-New 52, Oliver Queen was an old-time liberal who abhorred torture.  Take this panel from Justice League: Cry for Justice Issue #4

Of course at the end of that story he murders a bad guy who killed his granddaughter and maimed his son, which would be more in line with the TV version, at least at the beginning of the series.

Here's one of those Cosmo type quizzes for you:  are you an Ollie or a Barry?  I think as a Grumpy Bulldog I'm definitely more of an Oliver.  As people on many blogs and message boards can attest to, I do what I think is right and I don't really give a shit if other people think it's cool or not.   If people don't like my methods, too freaking bad for them.  I also own a dark green hooded sweatshirt and my mom has a bow and arrow, so I could totally go out and start fighting crime.

I think a lot of other people are more Barry-ish though.  Let me know in the comments!

Sunday Sermon: Football! And Writing!

This doesn't fit into my schedule, but I thought I'd write it anyway.

This last weekend was thankfully the NFL Draft, which put an end to the interminable "mock drafts"...for about two days.  Which got me thinking about how the NFL Draft is a lot like the writing world.

Basically agents and editors are like the GMs and owners of the various teams.  They evaluate the stuff in their slush pile and they pick out what they think will be a hit just as NFL teams look at all the game tape and workouts and decide who they think will be a good player for their team.  While we try to imagine there's a scientific method to all this, a lot of time it's just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.  Especially when the NFL Draft gets down to the 7th round at this point you have to figure they're just pulling names out of a hat.

And while the NFL and its lackeys would assure you that this process is infallible, we see every year that it is very, very fallible.  There's a long list of infamous "busts," the guys whose careers never matched the hype they received when they were picked.  One of the most infamous is Ryan Leaf, the quarterback the San Diego Chargers picked instead of Peyton Manning.  Leaf washed out a couple of years later while Manning set offensive records.  In the same way a lot of books agents and editors pick out of the query letter process end up being turkeys that lose money.  I'm sure someone somewhere has the list of those busts too.

On the flip side there are always those who are vastly underrated, the players who get picked very late or not at all.  The most famous example is Tom Brady, the University of Michigan quarterback who was picked in the 6th round, the second-to-last round.  Since many teams passed on him 6 times (and New England 5 times) he has won 4 Super Bowls and married a supermodel.  Not bad for a guy no one thought high enough of to draft in the big money rounds.  Then there are those who don't get drafted at all but manage to secure a tryout and end up making the team.  Those are like the indie authors like EL James or Hugh Howey who sell a bunch of books and wind up getting noticed by the big publishers.

My hometown team the Lions is usually pretty terrible, so it's no surprise their drafts usually end up sucking.  While the so-called "experts" might give them a good grade, after a few years it's usually pretty obvious they stink.  There might be 2 players left from their 2010 draft and 1 from 2009 and maybe 1 or 2 from before that.  Which means that all those other players they drafted from 4-5 years ago or longer have either been cut, signed somewhere else, or washed out.  The vast majority just wash out; the average lifespan of an NFL career is about 3 years, so what does that say for all this drafting "expertise?"

So as another cycle of mock drafts looms, just remember that really no one knows what they're talking about.  The same holds true for publishing.  As a guy once said about Hollywood, "Nobody knows nothing."

Revenge of the Themes! Your New Blogging Schedule

I was saying in my last entry that I really do better writing this blog when I have some kind of theme to focus on.  I got thinking about it and thought, what do I give a shit about?  I came up with a few things:

• Writing
• Movies
• TV
• Books 
• Superheroes

And writing books about superheroes that will never get to be movies or on TV.

OK, so here's the new schedule:

Monday:  What I'm Watching and/or Reading.  The reading part you can follow on Goodreads and most of it is my own stuff, but whatever.

Wednesday:  Writing Stuff.  Stuff about writing that in some way I've probably said a million times before but you didn't listen then or just assumed you know more than me so I guess I'll say it a million-and-one times.

Friday:  Movies!  I'll preview what movies are coming out that Friday (or Wednesday/Thursday depending on holidays and such), though I won't have seen them and probably won't for months.

Like today I'd be telling you my thoughts on the biggest movie in the world Avengers 2:  Age of Ultron and say that I have absolutely no idea what's going on.  It hasn't really gotten me that pumped up.  Actually I'm more ambivalent.  The way they shoe-horned the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in there seems kind of crappy, especially since they're rewriting the whole backstory.  And then it's like the X-Men where the more characters you jam in there the less time they each get, thus the less developed the characters get except they have to give Robert Downey Jr a lot of time because they paid him like $100 million just to do the movie.

But hey, who gives a shit what I think?  This movie will make like a billion dollars just in the opening weekend.  Maybe like 50 Shades of Grey it'll drop 73% after that, though I doubt it.  What I do know is it will have almost nothing to do with the comic book Age of Ultron because that involves Wolverine and Sue Storm going back in time and killing Hank Pym and none of them are in the movie because the first two are owned by Fox and the latter is Michael Douglas in Ant-Man and so they changed the whole Ultron backstory too, not that it'll matter to anyone but the True Believers.

That ought to get you psyched for the movie, if you haven't seen it yet.