My last post here was in October. There's a reason for the long silence, and I'll give it in my usual fashion, by going the long way around. So please be patient.
Dylan Thomas has a poem that he wrote for his father. This is the first stanza:
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I'm a great admirer of Dylan Thomas; he and W.B. Yeats are probably my favorite poets, although whenever I try to name favorites, no sooner than one name comes into my head another comes too, and on and on. Still, that poem about not going gentle has stayed with me through my life and I always thought I would be one, when it came my time for old age, who would "rage against the dying of the light." It's how I believed I would want to go out, raging.
Now that old age is upon me, I find I am not that person at all. To "go gentle" is much more what I do want. Rage is not what I want to feel now, in years where I'm declining more rapidly than I might have wished. Therefore, whatever anger or frustration I may feel at what I'm about to post here, I reject it, I make a choice for the gentler feelings.
The reason I haven't posted here since about mid-October is that was the time when I first came down with what became a recurring infection that was resistant to antibiotics. I was never acutely ill for more than 24 or 48 hours at a time, but I never got entirely well either, and week after week of that kind of thing will drag a person down. I was going to my doctor, of course, who reminded me that I should keep in mind the fact that, under whatever other physical ailment I might have at any given time now, I do have congestive heart failure, and the ever-hovering asthma. Eventually, in mid-December, I apparently passed a kidney stone, in spite of not having had specific kidney pain before that. Then my doctor changed me to a different antibiotic, which appears to have done its job. But my energy level is still somewhere down in the pits. And all of this has meant that I haven't been able to write and my attention has been on other things.
A word to the writers and to the avid readers: The writers will know, and I expect the readers may suspect, that writing only appears to be a sedentary, non-energy-consuming activity; you just sit in front of a blank screen or piece of paper and fill it up with words. But in actuality, a great deal of a peculiar kind of energy is consumed in that process of putting the words onto the blank surface ... and I simply do not have that kind of energy anymore. I have barely enough energy to do the necessary things to care for myself and to keep up my little house.
So I've changed my focus. I've let go. Let go of that vision I had of me writing until I could no longer get even an elbow above the grave; of me raging against the injustices I've always raged against and using my writing as an indirect expression of that rage. You didn't know there was rage behind Fremont Jones? Read again. It may have been filtered considerably, but it's there.
The concept I was working on and writing about here, THE HALLOWS, was filled with my particular sort of rage, thinly disguised in the main character's quirky sense of humor, and transmuted in a secondary character into another mode of expression. At the point where I stopped writing, I was working out what specific crimes best suited a plot dealing with the things that make me rage. There was much to choose from, I hadn't made up my mind. And there it will remain, because I ... am ... letting ... go.
It's a matter of focus, where I want my focus to be now that my body is not able to do for me what I want it to do anymore. To put it another way, I might say that I'm teaching my mind to accept, to want, to need only what my body is able to do. My focus now is no longer on what I want to accomplish in any remaining months or years. I do not want to accomplish anything. I want to appreciate the accomplishments of others, and learn from them.
I do have a willingness to share with others whatever I may have learned over the years and along the way, when and if that happens spontaneously, but even that much sharing is not my goal. My goal is whatever comes next.
I'm not yet dying, not in any sense that Medicare would accept as a reason for calling in Hospice. But my body is losing its usefulness, even in some ordinary functions we don't normally think about (such as breathing), and I choose to let that happen without any but the most commonplace intervention. I do not think of death, when it comes, as an end to anything but a body. This is because I believe the essence of a person resides not in the body, but in one's soul. I think of death as a transition, and more than that, a transcendence.
And I believe it is possible to begin a process of transcendence now, by changing my focus to a point beyond that I can't even begin to describe. I will need to learn how, and this will be its own adventure.
I'm taking the first step, a baby-step, by letting go of THE HALLOWS, my work-in-progress. It is in progress no longer, and I'm moving on.
I won't stop Nonny's Blog, because there may be things that come up that call out to be shared, and if that happens I'll let you know. Thank you for reading my stuff.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Writer vs Author
Whether you're a writer lucky enough to be published and out there talking to groups, or a reader who frequents groups that talk about books, face to face or online, eventually someone will ask, "Which term is preferable, writer or author?" Which of course leads to the further question -- is there any difference?
I used to think "Who cares?" and I can't remember what I answered whenever I was asked that question. I thought of the two terms as interchangeable and I still tend to use them that way myself. However, just recently as I've struggled with whether or not to seriously start writing again after almost ten years of retirement, and particularly within the past week, it has occurred to me that there is a difference between a writer and an author. And I do care. And what I am, for better or worse, is a writer.
So what's the difference? (This is according to me, you understand, I have no clue what the correctness police would say.) The difference is, a writer is a person whose natural and preferred form of expression is to write, and who practices that form of expression often, in various different ways. An author is a person who writes, who has published what he or she has written, and who works hard to see that her book or poem or play reaches as many people as possible. The distribution of the work -- which usually involves selling -- is only slightly less important than the act of creating it.
Where I fall down is in that part. I am no good at selling stuff, particularly when it's basically me have to sell. The publicity side of writing always was hard for me. Yes, I do like to talk to people and I've been told I'm even good at speaking to large groups, but it scares me, every single time. And because it scares me, I used to dread it -- even to the point of sometimes it made me physically ill. That's not something I like to admit, but there you have it.
An author has a sort of persona, a public reputation, to maintain. I was so naive about this when I went to my first Bouchercon, in Minneapolis in I think the fall of 1995, I didn't have a clue what to expect -- the crowds, the people, the lines, the noise. Most of all the noise -- I felt unreal a lot of the time. And that was only the beginning. I did enjoy meeting people but I was totally unprepared for it, and for how strange it would make me feel, kind of awed by the whole thing, and vaguely embarrassed. It's hard to describe. That feeling never quite went away, and over the years when I made mistakes and alienated people, as inevitably happens at least a few times, it was out of an awkwardness I never got over, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I'm so impressed by people who carry off the author persona thing well. There are a lot of them who do; I started to name names but decided not to, for concern I might cause offense. You just never know about that.
But: I was supposed to be an author. I had responsibilities to my editor, my publisher, my agent, and so I tried to do it right. There must have been more of an author in me than I ever realized, because I just found her again during the past few days.
I found her while I've been trying to understand why it was so important to me to have a surprise element to my "tales of the latents" idea, why I cared so much when I found out that other, much bigger people are going with a concept I'd thought was unique, and thus the surprise is gone. Cared so much, the Muses help me, that I almost gave up. Only, I didn't. because guess what? It was only the author in me who cared. The part of me that once learned it's important not just to write it, you have to sell it too. And it's going to be a much harder sell now than it would have been if it had stayed unique.
This is how I know now that what I really am is a writer and not an author: Because I'm going ahead with my tale of the latents anyway. I have a story I really want to tell, and I'm going to tell it, no matter what. There are real-world tehnicalities to be considered, such as an agent who has his own standards to uphold, and a publisher who has an option on my "next work of fiction" (quoting the contract), apparently until the end of time (I'd been hoping there might be a 10 year limit, the way you can't prosecute some crimes after a certain number of years have gone by, but no such luck). So they can have their say, but I'm sticking with this regardless. Because I'm a writer, and writing is what I do, and this is what I'm writing now.
I make you guys, who are good enough to be reading Nonny's blog, a promise: If I can't distribute this story, when it's done, any other way, I'll put it up here chapter by chapter. For free. So hang in there with me. Meanwhile, from time to time when I get writing-type thoughts that seem of broad enough interest, I'll continue to put them here.
I used to think "Who cares?" and I can't remember what I answered whenever I was asked that question. I thought of the two terms as interchangeable and I still tend to use them that way myself. However, just recently as I've struggled with whether or not to seriously start writing again after almost ten years of retirement, and particularly within the past week, it has occurred to me that there is a difference between a writer and an author. And I do care. And what I am, for better or worse, is a writer.
So what's the difference? (This is according to me, you understand, I have no clue what the correctness police would say.) The difference is, a writer is a person whose natural and preferred form of expression is to write, and who practices that form of expression often, in various different ways. An author is a person who writes, who has published what he or she has written, and who works hard to see that her book or poem or play reaches as many people as possible. The distribution of the work -- which usually involves selling -- is only slightly less important than the act of creating it.
Where I fall down is in that part. I am no good at selling stuff, particularly when it's basically me have to sell. The publicity side of writing always was hard for me. Yes, I do like to talk to people and I've been told I'm even good at speaking to large groups, but it scares me, every single time. And because it scares me, I used to dread it -- even to the point of sometimes it made me physically ill. That's not something I like to admit, but there you have it.
An author has a sort of persona, a public reputation, to maintain. I was so naive about this when I went to my first Bouchercon, in Minneapolis in I think the fall of 1995, I didn't have a clue what to expect -- the crowds, the people, the lines, the noise. Most of all the noise -- I felt unreal a lot of the time. And that was only the beginning. I did enjoy meeting people but I was totally unprepared for it, and for how strange it would make me feel, kind of awed by the whole thing, and vaguely embarrassed. It's hard to describe. That feeling never quite went away, and over the years when I made mistakes and alienated people, as inevitably happens at least a few times, it was out of an awkwardness I never got over, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I'm so impressed by people who carry off the author persona thing well. There are a lot of them who do; I started to name names but decided not to, for concern I might cause offense. You just never know about that.
But: I was supposed to be an author. I had responsibilities to my editor, my publisher, my agent, and so I tried to do it right. There must have been more of an author in me than I ever realized, because I just found her again during the past few days.
I found her while I've been trying to understand why it was so important to me to have a surprise element to my "tales of the latents" idea, why I cared so much when I found out that other, much bigger people are going with a concept I'd thought was unique, and thus the surprise is gone. Cared so much, the Muses help me, that I almost gave up. Only, I didn't. because guess what? It was only the author in me who cared. The part of me that once learned it's important not just to write it, you have to sell it too. And it's going to be a much harder sell now than it would have been if it had stayed unique.
This is how I know now that what I really am is a writer and not an author: Because I'm going ahead with my tale of the latents anyway. I have a story I really want to tell, and I'm going to tell it, no matter what. There are real-world tehnicalities to be considered, such as an agent who has his own standards to uphold, and a publisher who has an option on my "next work of fiction" (quoting the contract), apparently until the end of time (I'd been hoping there might be a 10 year limit, the way you can't prosecute some crimes after a certain number of years have gone by, but no such luck). So they can have their say, but I'm sticking with this regardless. Because I'm a writer, and writing is what I do, and this is what I'm writing now.
I make you guys, who are good enough to be reading Nonny's blog, a promise: If I can't distribute this story, when it's done, any other way, I'll put it up here chapter by chapter. For free. So hang in there with me. Meanwhile, from time to time when I get writing-type thoughts that seem of broad enough interest, I'll continue to put them here.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Those Perverse Muses are At It Again, Big-Time
There is one word for this: Aaaaarrrrgggghhh!!!
Please recall two posts ago, about the perversity of the Muses. Now they've hit prime time tv: ABC at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, a new show starring none other than the great Michael Chiklis, late of The Shield. Titled No Ordinary Family.
All these people in the family have a special power, a different one for each. Mother is super-fast. Father (Chiklis) is super-man, can fly, lift trucks, etc., wants to be a crimestopper. Daughter can hear thoughts, son is a budding math genius whose teacher thinks he's cheating because suddenly he's doing higher mathematics.
Maybe I really should give up. By the time my great, I thought unique, idea has gone prime time on such a scale, all the surprise factor is gone and it becomes hohum.
Not sure what to do here.
But, this blog is about writing and a work in progress. Doesn't necessarily have to be any particular work.
Your comments are welcome.
Love,
Nonny
Please recall two posts ago, about the perversity of the Muses. Now they've hit prime time tv: ABC at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, a new show starring none other than the great Michael Chiklis, late of The Shield. Titled No Ordinary Family.
All these people in the family have a special power, a different one for each. Mother is super-fast. Father (Chiklis) is super-man, can fly, lift trucks, etc., wants to be a crimestopper. Daughter can hear thoughts, son is a budding math genius whose teacher thinks he's cheating because suddenly he's doing higher mathematics.
Maybe I really should give up. By the time my great, I thought unique, idea has gone prime time on such a scale, all the surprise factor is gone and it becomes hohum.
Not sure what to do here.
But, this blog is about writing and a work in progress. Doesn't necessarily have to be any particular work.
Your comments are welcome.
Love,
Nonny
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Creativity and the Subconscious Mind
A couple of people have asked me to say more about how I come up with those characters that stick in your head, and then become the sort that leap off the page once you write them into a novel. If you were one of them, I apologize for how long it's taken me to get this done; the truth is, I had to think on it for quite a while, because I don't really know the answer to the question.
The best I can come up with is this: I believe such characters come straight from my subconscious mind. From the part that gives us the content of our dreams. For example, as I used to say when talking on request in bookstores and libraries, the character Fremont Jones came to me first in a dream. It was one of those you dream right before waking. There she was, clear as a bell, that very same voice that comes through in the opening pages of the first book, STRANGE FILES. In my dream she said, "My name is Fremont, and I am a typewriter." I woke up immediately with that voice in my head, plus the interesting fact that she didn't say "I'm a secretary," or "I'm a typist," she said "I am a typewriter." It wasn't later until I found out that back in the time when she lived (that is, if she had really lived at all), the person who did the typing was indeed called by the same word as the machine, typewriter. I've never understood that, how I came up with that, and I still don't know. Which is why I think these things have to happen via the subconscious.
That doesn't mean they can only come in dreams. Other characters who are equally off-the-page-jumpers -- one that comes to mind is a restoration contractor named Paul Starbuck who appears in a little book I wrote for Harlequin Intrigue called LAIRD'S MOUNT, which I wrote with the pseudonym Madelyn Sanders -- can come to you in a waking state. Paul appeared in my head when I was doing some research for the book, before I'd started actually writing it. I was walking around in a very large house that had once been turned into a restaurant, then allowed to go into decline after its owners death. This building had been constructed as a sort of replica (meaning it was a far from perfect reproduction) of the Isabella Stewart Gardner House Museum in Boston, so I was already having some deja vu kind of things going on, which I think is another thing that gets triggered by the subconscious. And suddenly, I could see this man, almost as if he were walking right along by my side, and I knew he was a contractor specializing in that kind of restoration. I also knew his name was Paul, and that he had a dog that was a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf, that the dog was in fact named Wolf, and was waiting for Paul outside in his truck. This was such a vivid experience that when I got done with my walk-through (which I had been allowed by the realtor to do on my own, because I had explained to her why I wanted to see it and that I am able to do the kind of thinking I need to do for that purpose if I'm by myself) and went from the late-afternoon gloom of the no-electricity indoors to the outside light of day, I was surprised there was no truck with a very large dog waiting in the parking lot.
There have been other such experiences, with other characters, but I won't describe any more of them because I'm sure you get the picture.
How is this useful to anyone else who might already be writing a piece of fiction, or who might want to do it? I'm not sure, except that we all do have the subconscious mind working for us all the time. And there are ways we can each increase our acceses to its contents. The best way to do this is to make an organized effort -- such as keeping a notebook and pen by the bed -- to remember our dreams. Even if you think you don't dream, you certainly do because sleep researchers have found that if people are deprived of their ability to dream by being awakened every time REM sleep begins (rapid eye movements beneath closed lids signal a dream state), they will soon show symptoms of irritability and accident proneness at the least, and irrationality and even hallucinations at worst. A resolution to recall and to record dreams will help even someone who says he doesn't dream begin to remember them. That's one way.
Another way is to meditate. Although the purest form of meditation involves no thinking at all, there is a stage on the way to getting to the no-thoughts place in which the contents of the subconscious will begin to bubble up. If you practice meditation and pay attention to that, you will find access. It can quickly become habitual enough that such access is not hard to achieve, you just sort of put yourself into an abstracted frame of mind. There are plenty of people who go into that kind of frame of mind naturally, all the time. It's commonly called "daydreaming". Just don't do it when you're chopping onions or driving a car.
I like to take long walks in a quiet place. Or, lately now that I'm not so mobile, simply to sit in a quiet place. If I have a particular writing thing I'm working on and needing to make some progress, I'll hold that in my mind and soon some answers will begin to flow. It doesn't always happen, but usually it does.
I'm pretty sure any creative process works, or happens, because there has been some connection between the subconcious and conscious minds. Scientiests, neurologists and such who study the workings of the mind and brain and processes like sleeping and dreaming, tell us that we use less than half the capacity of the brain. Since they now can do scans that show what areas of the brain are involved in certain activities, such as reading or speaking or recognizing faces, this fact that much of the brain goes unused at present has now been documented. All the thoughts and observations we make but have no immediate use for get stored somewhere, and I personally think that's where the contents of the subconscious come from. The conscious mind can access them if an effort is made.
I also, being a child of the 60s (but I think I'd be this way even if I hadn't matured, at least sort of, in the 1960s), believe there is, as Carl Jung said, a Collective Unconscious. This would be the contents of combined knowledge and experiences over many cultures, coded into universal symbols and stored somehow in the DNA, and passed on. I think in Jung's time they didn't know so much about DNA so he may have not used that terminology, but that's the idea. The creative process taps into this kind of stored stuff, even if it's not overt. The most powerful themes and ideas in any kind of literature will carry echoes of these shared universal elements, even if they are not blatantly expressed.
In recent years, I've thought a lot about the nature of conciousness in general, and I expect in this book I'm working on now, FIREFLASH, because of the latent unusual ability idea, at least some of that will get in somehow.
That's the thing about writing -- nothing you've ever done will go to waste, which is OK, so long as you don't bore people to death with it. And if you can do it right, it might be a good thing. As I think I said, and surely intended when I began this blog, anyone who wants to write should go ahead and do it. Bring up those ideas whether they are in the conscious or the subconscious mind, because you never know who may enjoy sharing what you put on a page. Or how much it may benefit you just in the writing thereof, even if you decide to keep it to yourself.
The best I can come up with is this: I believe such characters come straight from my subconscious mind. From the part that gives us the content of our dreams. For example, as I used to say when talking on request in bookstores and libraries, the character Fremont Jones came to me first in a dream. It was one of those you dream right before waking. There she was, clear as a bell, that very same voice that comes through in the opening pages of the first book, STRANGE FILES. In my dream she said, "My name is Fremont, and I am a typewriter." I woke up immediately with that voice in my head, plus the interesting fact that she didn't say "I'm a secretary," or "I'm a typist," she said "I am a typewriter." It wasn't later until I found out that back in the time when she lived (that is, if she had really lived at all), the person who did the typing was indeed called by the same word as the machine, typewriter. I've never understood that, how I came up with that, and I still don't know. Which is why I think these things have to happen via the subconscious.
That doesn't mean they can only come in dreams. Other characters who are equally off-the-page-jumpers -- one that comes to mind is a restoration contractor named Paul Starbuck who appears in a little book I wrote for Harlequin Intrigue called LAIRD'S MOUNT, which I wrote with the pseudonym Madelyn Sanders -- can come to you in a waking state. Paul appeared in my head when I was doing some research for the book, before I'd started actually writing it. I was walking around in a very large house that had once been turned into a restaurant, then allowed to go into decline after its owners death. This building had been constructed as a sort of replica (meaning it was a far from perfect reproduction) of the Isabella Stewart Gardner House Museum in Boston, so I was already having some deja vu kind of things going on, which I think is another thing that gets triggered by the subconscious. And suddenly, I could see this man, almost as if he were walking right along by my side, and I knew he was a contractor specializing in that kind of restoration. I also knew his name was Paul, and that he had a dog that was a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf, that the dog was in fact named Wolf, and was waiting for Paul outside in his truck. This was such a vivid experience that when I got done with my walk-through (which I had been allowed by the realtor to do on my own, because I had explained to her why I wanted to see it and that I am able to do the kind of thinking I need to do for that purpose if I'm by myself) and went from the late-afternoon gloom of the no-electricity indoors to the outside light of day, I was surprised there was no truck with a very large dog waiting in the parking lot.
There have been other such experiences, with other characters, but I won't describe any more of them because I'm sure you get the picture.
How is this useful to anyone else who might already be writing a piece of fiction, or who might want to do it? I'm not sure, except that we all do have the subconscious mind working for us all the time. And there are ways we can each increase our acceses to its contents. The best way to do this is to make an organized effort -- such as keeping a notebook and pen by the bed -- to remember our dreams. Even if you think you don't dream, you certainly do because sleep researchers have found that if people are deprived of their ability to dream by being awakened every time REM sleep begins (rapid eye movements beneath closed lids signal a dream state), they will soon show symptoms of irritability and accident proneness at the least, and irrationality and even hallucinations at worst. A resolution to recall and to record dreams will help even someone who says he doesn't dream begin to remember them. That's one way.
Another way is to meditate. Although the purest form of meditation involves no thinking at all, there is a stage on the way to getting to the no-thoughts place in which the contents of the subconscious will begin to bubble up. If you practice meditation and pay attention to that, you will find access. It can quickly become habitual enough that such access is not hard to achieve, you just sort of put yourself into an abstracted frame of mind. There are plenty of people who go into that kind of frame of mind naturally, all the time. It's commonly called "daydreaming". Just don't do it when you're chopping onions or driving a car.
I like to take long walks in a quiet place. Or, lately now that I'm not so mobile, simply to sit in a quiet place. If I have a particular writing thing I'm working on and needing to make some progress, I'll hold that in my mind and soon some answers will begin to flow. It doesn't always happen, but usually it does.
I'm pretty sure any creative process works, or happens, because there has been some connection between the subconcious and conscious minds. Scientiests, neurologists and such who study the workings of the mind and brain and processes like sleeping and dreaming, tell us that we use less than half the capacity of the brain. Since they now can do scans that show what areas of the brain are involved in certain activities, such as reading or speaking or recognizing faces, this fact that much of the brain goes unused at present has now been documented. All the thoughts and observations we make but have no immediate use for get stored somewhere, and I personally think that's where the contents of the subconscious come from. The conscious mind can access them if an effort is made.
I also, being a child of the 60s (but I think I'd be this way even if I hadn't matured, at least sort of, in the 1960s), believe there is, as Carl Jung said, a Collective Unconscious. This would be the contents of combined knowledge and experiences over many cultures, coded into universal symbols and stored somehow in the DNA, and passed on. I think in Jung's time they didn't know so much about DNA so he may have not used that terminology, but that's the idea. The creative process taps into this kind of stored stuff, even if it's not overt. The most powerful themes and ideas in any kind of literature will carry echoes of these shared universal elements, even if they are not blatantly expressed.
In recent years, I've thought a lot about the nature of conciousness in general, and I expect in this book I'm working on now, FIREFLASH, because of the latent unusual ability idea, at least some of that will get in somehow.
That's the thing about writing -- nothing you've ever done will go to waste, which is OK, so long as you don't bore people to death with it. And if you can do it right, it might be a good thing. As I think I said, and surely intended when I began this blog, anyone who wants to write should go ahead and do it. Bring up those ideas whether they are in the conscious or the subconscious mind, because you never know who may enjoy sharing what you put on a page. Or how much it may benefit you just in the writing thereof, even if you decide to keep it to yourself.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
A Perversity of the Muses...
If you're an avid reader, or a writer, or if like me you're both, then you may have noticed there are years when it seems that a whole bunch of books come out with a certain same word in the title, or with very similar titles, or even sometimes with the exact same title by different authors (publishers are supposed to watch out for this but they don't always succeed). I first noticed this in a particular year when it seemed like every mystery author was coming out with "Bone" books. This is an interesting phenomenon, I think.
My explanation is this: The Muses, who are responsible for the ideas that come into writers' heads, sometimes get together and decide on a word-of-the-year. Who knows why they do this. Maybe they're just bored and want to stir up some action, something slightly different they can keep watch on. Maybe they decide to have a competition among themselves, with a different muse throwing out a different word, and at the end of the year they count up to see who had the most authors choosing their title word. It could happen.
Sometimes those same Muses maybe throw out a whole concept instead of a word. Thus we hit years when a whole bunch of people seem to be writing about, say, the Shroud of Turin, or anything to do with Leonardo da Vinci. This doesn't always -- maybe doesn't even usually, there's no way to know about usually -- happen after one author hits it big with the idea, the way Dan Brown did with The Da Vinci Code. I'm pretty sure there was more than one author who had a similar idea, but Brown got there first and perhaps best. I know for sure I'd been playing with those concepts myself but I hadn't gotten serious about them yet. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to the Muses. Anyway, how else do you explain whole decades when everybody seems to be writing about vampires? Or how else did so many people seem to start switching to fallen angels in addition to (I wish it were instead of, but that isn't happening) the vampires. I think the Muses are behind it.
And now, oh curses, damn and dang it, the Muses may be doing it again, with something I thought was my idea.
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know I thought I had a whole new idea going with the concept behind this thing I've begun calling FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents. Remember The Great What If? That's in post #2, I think. Over the weekend, I discovered another author, more extremely well-known and much more highly paid than I've ever even dreamed of being, has already experienced a very similar What If. Not only that, she's got a new book out on such a concept and it immediately went onto the bestseller list, which is how I found out about it. OK, so her main character is a 28 year-old pastry chef from Marblehead, not an older woman from the Northwest Coast; also, her book is intended to be hilariously funny whereas mine is intended to be only occasionally amusing, while provoking deeper thought later on, but still....
OK, because I don't want to be a tease, the name of the author who has done this is Janet Evanovich.
I'm bummed. And I'm ticked off at the Muses, because I thought it was my original idea. They sure know how to put a person in her place, darn it.
My explanation is this: The Muses, who are responsible for the ideas that come into writers' heads, sometimes get together and decide on a word-of-the-year. Who knows why they do this. Maybe they're just bored and want to stir up some action, something slightly different they can keep watch on. Maybe they decide to have a competition among themselves, with a different muse throwing out a different word, and at the end of the year they count up to see who had the most authors choosing their title word. It could happen.
Sometimes those same Muses maybe throw out a whole concept instead of a word. Thus we hit years when a whole bunch of people seem to be writing about, say, the Shroud of Turin, or anything to do with Leonardo da Vinci. This doesn't always -- maybe doesn't even usually, there's no way to know about usually -- happen after one author hits it big with the idea, the way Dan Brown did with The Da Vinci Code. I'm pretty sure there was more than one author who had a similar idea, but Brown got there first and perhaps best. I know for sure I'd been playing with those concepts myself but I hadn't gotten serious about them yet. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to the Muses. Anyway, how else do you explain whole decades when everybody seems to be writing about vampires? Or how else did so many people seem to start switching to fallen angels in addition to (I wish it were instead of, but that isn't happening) the vampires. I think the Muses are behind it.
And now, oh curses, damn and dang it, the Muses may be doing it again, with something I thought was my idea.
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know I thought I had a whole new idea going with the concept behind this thing I've begun calling FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents. Remember The Great What If? That's in post #2, I think. Over the weekend, I discovered another author, more extremely well-known and much more highly paid than I've ever even dreamed of being, has already experienced a very similar What If. Not only that, she's got a new book out on such a concept and it immediately went onto the bestseller list, which is how I found out about it. OK, so her main character is a 28 year-old pastry chef from Marblehead, not an older woman from the Northwest Coast; also, her book is intended to be hilariously funny whereas mine is intended to be only occasionally amusing, while provoking deeper thought later on, but still....
OK, because I don't want to be a tease, the name of the author who has done this is Janet Evanovich.
I'm bummed. And I'm ticked off at the Muses, because I thought it was my original idea. They sure know how to put a person in her place, darn it.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Continuing on...
Yes, I was free. But I was haunted, haunted by two characters I'd created back in the very beginning of this process of writing something "next." Remember that priest who saw the apparition in Chartres Cathedral? I told you about him. His name is Frank, and he won't go away. Then there is the mysterious Maggie, who is coy about her name. I think her mother named her something she didn't really like and so she changed her name when she got older, and then when she was older still, she might have changed it again, because she has also sometimes been Trini and Cat. She just won't go away; this may be because she and Frank have been friends, and never lovers, for a very long time....
Here's the thing, a general principle about writing that I want to share: If you've often thought "There's this book [or short story or poem or memoir or whatever] that I want to write someday," do it now. Don't keep putting it off. Otherwise you might, like me, end up with both too much to say and somebody else may have said it first, better than you think you could ... whether that's true or not.
Another thing: The characters you make in your head come to have lives of their own, and the more they won't leave you alone, the more they deserve their own space. The ones that won't leave you alone are the very ones that will "leap off the page," much to the delight of some editor someday, and perhaps of some readers too.
Having that in mind, and feeling free, I eventually found my way to some new possibilities that involved, of course, Maggie/Trini/Cat and Frank. And one aspect of my continuing interest in those unseen things: ghosts. Have you noticed how many ghost hunting programs there are on television these days or maybe I should say nights? I began to do more contemporary research into this area, and it was totally fascinating. Having no deadlines, I let myself spend as much time on it as I wanted.
Research is tricky, particularly if you enjoy it and I do. I'm sure one reason I liked writing historical mysteries was that I had to research them. You learn so many interesting things. Best of all, you can go someplace else in your head, you can totally live in another time. Especially when there are the so-called primary sources, like a diary written by someone who lives in the time period you're researching, or letters. Or newspapers printed on the very day of some important event. Or, if you're going back further in time, like a painting that was done by the person you're writing about (that lucky Dan Brown!!!), a statue he carved, and so on. The two trickiest parts to research are knowing when to stop, and then knowing how much of what you learned, you can actually put into your book without messing up the narrative, the main story you want to tell.
Another less happy aspect to research is that sometimes you learn too much, and the story you wanted to tell becomes tainted, no longer viable. And that's what happened to me with the ghosts. You see, it's not possible to mess about with individuals -- in this field they are generally called entities -- who have no visible body, for very long without discovering that they come in two types: the ones that did once have a body, and therefore were human, and those who seem different somehow. These latter are called, by people who've been messing about in this field for a long time, non-human entities. The non-human entities come in two types: benevolent and malevolent. ... And along about this time (if not before) in the learning/research process, it's inevitable that religion is going to begin to assert itself. This need not necessarily be a problem, because interestingly enough, almost all religions recognize these two types of entities. The Christians call the benevolent ones angels and the malevolent ones demons. But it was a problem for me, and the essence of that problem is another thing that may be of general interest to any writer.
Here's the thing: In order to write anything at all, fiction or non-fiction, I have to be able to completely believe what I'm writing. It has to be either true insofar as truth may be known, or it has to be something that falls into an area about which not enough is known for anyone to be sure, therefore an area in which it feels -- to me -- acceptable to speculate. [That was the only way I was able to write about Clara Barton in what came to be CUT TO THE HEART -- I wrote about the things she rather conspicuously did not say in the journal she kept while she was in Hilton Head. Her Civil War journals, from the first I laid eyes on them, seemed to me to be written with an awareness that she might someday share them in a big way.] This is because the writer constructs a world, and then lives in that world for every moment the writing is being done. This world may be a reproduction of the one we live in every day, or it may reproduce the past, or construct a future, or even a different planet or universe altogether. That's the setting, and it won't work for me, I can't live in it, if there's anything going on to me that's unbelievable. There are going to be plenty of times I take what I know to be true and go off from there into what I can speculate about, but if I'm going to be able to take anybody with me, I have to be writing what is to me truth, or most certainly could be.
Back to those entities: I'd learned a lot about ghosts. I began to research demons ... and I ran into a whole lot of things that are scary in a way that's quite different from what you might expect. Anybody with their eyes open today knows there's currently a huge interest in vampires and werewolves, but did you know that in one European country in 2006 there were over 200 exorcists recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, whereas back in the middle of the previous century there were something like 26? I'm sorry those figures aren't exact, but I didn't keep my notes once I'd decided I didn't want to go down that path, but the 200 vs 26 is close. This is a perfect example of how research can take you to places that you might rather not have known about. I felt my story had been tainted when I finished with the demon research.
To be honest, I may still use some of that. But the new story I'd been playing with, which was showing signs of being a YA, Young Adult, crossover, took a big hit. I felt fairly desolated. Some demon somewhere was laughing up a storm, I'm sure.
When something blows a hole in your story, especially in the early days, it might just blow some light in with it. You need to stay with it, stay open in your head, and bide your time. The YA aspects of my developing new idea had led me to read a lot of Young Adult novels. I really enjoyed most of it, and got a general idea (checked out with a librarian I know who works with high school readers) that interest in unusual powers of various sorts is a strong theme in YA fiction. Thus it was, one fine morning or maybe it was night, that something new came through the open space in my head, to fill the hole in my story.
What came in was the Great What If.
I just love that. What If always gives me the shivers, because all good tales are begun that way. And this one came through Big. Really Big:
What If ... an unusual ability came to a person, not around age 16 as was most often the case in those delicious YA books I'd been reading, but late in their lives? Late enough that a lot of the kinks have been worked out of the living process, many of the mistakes have already been made and might not have to be made again? Just give yourself some time and space to think about it. This first question, the first what if, will give birth to more, and then more, and more....
That's where I am now. That's how FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents has come to be.
Thanks for visiting, stay tuned, because if something that might be of general interest comes to mind, I'll post here again.
Love to all,
Nonny aka Dianne
Here's the thing, a general principle about writing that I want to share: If you've often thought "There's this book [or short story or poem or memoir or whatever] that I want to write someday," do it now. Don't keep putting it off. Otherwise you might, like me, end up with both too much to say and somebody else may have said it first, better than you think you could ... whether that's true or not.
Another thing: The characters you make in your head come to have lives of their own, and the more they won't leave you alone, the more they deserve their own space. The ones that won't leave you alone are the very ones that will "leap off the page," much to the delight of some editor someday, and perhaps of some readers too.
Having that in mind, and feeling free, I eventually found my way to some new possibilities that involved, of course, Maggie/Trini/Cat and Frank. And one aspect of my continuing interest in those unseen things: ghosts. Have you noticed how many ghost hunting programs there are on television these days or maybe I should say nights? I began to do more contemporary research into this area, and it was totally fascinating. Having no deadlines, I let myself spend as much time on it as I wanted.
Research is tricky, particularly if you enjoy it and I do. I'm sure one reason I liked writing historical mysteries was that I had to research them. You learn so many interesting things. Best of all, you can go someplace else in your head, you can totally live in another time. Especially when there are the so-called primary sources, like a diary written by someone who lives in the time period you're researching, or letters. Or newspapers printed on the very day of some important event. Or, if you're going back further in time, like a painting that was done by the person you're writing about (that lucky Dan Brown!!!), a statue he carved, and so on. The two trickiest parts to research are knowing when to stop, and then knowing how much of what you learned, you can actually put into your book without messing up the narrative, the main story you want to tell.
Another less happy aspect to research is that sometimes you learn too much, and the story you wanted to tell becomes tainted, no longer viable. And that's what happened to me with the ghosts. You see, it's not possible to mess about with individuals -- in this field they are generally called entities -- who have no visible body, for very long without discovering that they come in two types: the ones that did once have a body, and therefore were human, and those who seem different somehow. These latter are called, by people who've been messing about in this field for a long time, non-human entities. The non-human entities come in two types: benevolent and malevolent. ... And along about this time (if not before) in the learning/research process, it's inevitable that religion is going to begin to assert itself. This need not necessarily be a problem, because interestingly enough, almost all religions recognize these two types of entities. The Christians call the benevolent ones angels and the malevolent ones demons. But it was a problem for me, and the essence of that problem is another thing that may be of general interest to any writer.
Here's the thing: In order to write anything at all, fiction or non-fiction, I have to be able to completely believe what I'm writing. It has to be either true insofar as truth may be known, or it has to be something that falls into an area about which not enough is known for anyone to be sure, therefore an area in which it feels -- to me -- acceptable to speculate. [That was the only way I was able to write about Clara Barton in what came to be CUT TO THE HEART -- I wrote about the things she rather conspicuously did not say in the journal she kept while she was in Hilton Head. Her Civil War journals, from the first I laid eyes on them, seemed to me to be written with an awareness that she might someday share them in a big way.] This is because the writer constructs a world, and then lives in that world for every moment the writing is being done. This world may be a reproduction of the one we live in every day, or it may reproduce the past, or construct a future, or even a different planet or universe altogether. That's the setting, and it won't work for me, I can't live in it, if there's anything going on to me that's unbelievable. There are going to be plenty of times I take what I know to be true and go off from there into what I can speculate about, but if I'm going to be able to take anybody with me, I have to be writing what is to me truth, or most certainly could be.
Back to those entities: I'd learned a lot about ghosts. I began to research demons ... and I ran into a whole lot of things that are scary in a way that's quite different from what you might expect. Anybody with their eyes open today knows there's currently a huge interest in vampires and werewolves, but did you know that in one European country in 2006 there were over 200 exorcists recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, whereas back in the middle of the previous century there were something like 26? I'm sorry those figures aren't exact, but I didn't keep my notes once I'd decided I didn't want to go down that path, but the 200 vs 26 is close. This is a perfect example of how research can take you to places that you might rather not have known about. I felt my story had been tainted when I finished with the demon research.
To be honest, I may still use some of that. But the new story I'd been playing with, which was showing signs of being a YA, Young Adult, crossover, took a big hit. I felt fairly desolated. Some demon somewhere was laughing up a storm, I'm sure.
When something blows a hole in your story, especially in the early days, it might just blow some light in with it. You need to stay with it, stay open in your head, and bide your time. The YA aspects of my developing new idea had led me to read a lot of Young Adult novels. I really enjoyed most of it, and got a general idea (checked out with a librarian I know who works with high school readers) that interest in unusual powers of various sorts is a strong theme in YA fiction. Thus it was, one fine morning or maybe it was night, that something new came through the open space in my head, to fill the hole in my story.
What came in was the Great What If.
I just love that. What If always gives me the shivers, because all good tales are begun that way. And this one came through Big. Really Big:
What If ... an unusual ability came to a person, not around age 16 as was most often the case in those delicious YA books I'd been reading, but late in their lives? Late enough that a lot of the kinks have been worked out of the living process, many of the mistakes have already been made and might not have to be made again? Just give yourself some time and space to think about it. This first question, the first what if, will give birth to more, and then more, and more....
That's where I am now. That's how FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents has come to be.
Thanks for visiting, stay tuned, because if something that might be of general interest comes to mind, I'll post here again.
Love to all,
Nonny aka Dianne
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Onward...
I'm sorry it has been so long since I was last here, but the time away was well spent. Because, you see, I found the key that unlocked the true beginning of my new book. There will be no looking back, no turning back now.
Every single writer has a different way of working, a different way of getting to that strange point at which a book is born, and may continue to grow until it reaches the book's equivalent of maturity, i.e. publication. For me it has taken years, and a lot of attempts that have ended up in a folder on my desktop titled "Novel Frags" -- for fragments of novels, of course.
Before I go on here, I want to make it clear that this "work in progress log" is in no way meant for self promotion of anything I may write or have written. It is only to respond to people who've asked about what I'm working on, and sometimes, to tell more about how I write, the process. For anybody who is interested.
OK, back on point: The process of getting where I am now has been convoluted, and I guess because it has a happy ending, it may be of some value to anybody who finds themselves stuck in some sort of convolution to hear about it. I'm going to begin by telling the happy ending first: my new work in progress is titled
Every single writer has a different way of working, a different way of getting to that strange point at which a book is born, and may continue to grow until it reaches the book's equivalent of maturity, i.e. publication. For me it has taken years, and a lot of attempts that have ended up in a folder on my desktop titled "Novel Frags" -- for fragments of novels, of course.
Before I go on here, I want to make it clear that this "work in progress log" is in no way meant for self promotion of anything I may write or have written. It is only to respond to people who've asked about what I'm working on, and sometimes, to tell more about how I write, the process. For anybody who is interested.
OK, back on point: The process of getting where I am now has been convoluted, and I guess because it has a happy ending, it may be of some value to anybody who finds themselves stuck in some sort of convolution to hear about it. I'm going to begin by telling the happy ending first: my new work in progress is titled
FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents.
But you will have to wait a while to know why it's called that (unless you're one of a small group who helped me find exactly the right words, and you know who you are). Remember, this is about process.
OK, now we go back a few years ...
After my series was cancelled, and after my standalone CUT TO THE HEART, I'd been intending to write something contemporary. It would be a "big book," which means big in numbers of pages, numbers of characters, and in the scope of the story. I wanted the big book to be a thriller, about the kinds of things that have interested me all my life, with the result I'd collected a lot of research material I wanted to use. In addition, I thought it would be good to aim it at the year 2012, because of the Mayan and Hopi prophecies that the world we live in will end on December 21, 2012. Personally, I just want to live to see what happens that day, and the day after that ... because I do believe there will be a day after, but wouldn't it be interesting if something really big really did happen? Those afore-mentioned things that have interested me all my life include all the stuff that is often supposed to exist, but can't generally be seen with the naked eye, such as ghosts and apparitions, angels and demons, and all that kind of thing. So I started off with this disillusioned priest who sees an apparition in Chartres Cathedral at 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve, 2011. I got a plot. I got a title. I developed a few characters. The idea grew ... and grew ... and grew. It became somewhat unwieldy and so I broke it down into two books.
Now during this time of growing unwieldinss, other things were happening: One was that Dan Brown published ANGELS AND DEMONS and then, THE DA VINCI CODE ... and although his central bloodline idea had never occurred to me, much of what I'd been gathering in research over the years was also in his books. Yay for him, bummer for me. He beat me to it, in a very, very big way. The biggest. Then there were all the authors who were much more ready than I was to jump onto his coat-tails. A lot of what I'd written, I had to throw out. This became like rinse and repeat; I ended up with a whole lot of chapters in my Novel Frags folder. I became discouraged.
Another thing that was happening was personal: my health had begun to decline as early as ten years ago, and it continued getting worse. And worse and worse, and I became even more discouraged.
I gave up.
Now here is the really good part, which I hope makes all the mess above worth having read through: Yes I gave up, and that bleak, dark time lasted until one fine day I realized that what I'd given up was writing for publication. Writing with the idea that somebody else would be reading it someday. I hadn't given up writing entirely. I didn't have to do that. In fact, I couldn't do that, because for better or for worse, I could not stop telling stories, making them up in my head.
Suddenly, I was free.
to be continued...
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