Boston Globe review

There was a very favorable review of SOMETHING MISSING in the Boston Globe today.  Among the many pleasing lines from the piece was this gem:

Though the book is essentially a high-concept caper, it is deftly constructed, really exciting at a couple of junctures, moving at others, and very, very funny.

It’s the “very, very funny” descriptor which always surprises me.  Though I’m not absolutely certain, I cannot remember a single moment during the process of writing SOMETHING MISSING when I thought that the book would be funny.  There were moments when my wife would laugh while reading the manuscript and I would have to ask her what she thought was funny, wondering what the hell she could be finding so amusing. 

I think that in the end, Martin’s approach to life is amusing, and as the writer, I merely benefited from this good fortune.

I can’t help but wonder who is the funny one in this relationship: me or Martin?

Is there value in publishing a first draft?

Print Magazine has a terrific look at the cover art on a handful of books, along with some explanation from the designers.  It’s a fascinating look into the world of cover design.

Along a related line of thinking, I’ve often wondered about the value of an author’s first draft.  For example, I have about a dozen different versions of SOMETHING MISSING, beginning with the first draft that I submitted to my agent almost three years ago.  I haven’t looked at that draft since then, but is there any value in posting this initial draft online for public dissemination?

Could a fledgling novelist garner any valuable insights in comparing the first draft with the final version of the book?

Are there book geeks and bibliophiles who would be curious to see the original version of a story or the development of the protagonist or some of the secondary characters from first to final draft?

Would anyone even care to read the first draft of a book like SOMETHING MISSING, as opposed to a classic like THE GREAT GATSBY or SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE?

Or would an author risk embarrassment or mortification in making a first draft available for public consumption? 

Would reading a first draft ruin the story by revealing its skeleton, its internal organs, and its previously-excised warts?  Would it undo the perceived reality of the story and make the process more clinical than magical?    

I’ve had the pleasure of examining the first drafts of some of Robert Frost’s poetry, but is there other material like this out there to be had?

Thoughts?  Because clearly I don’t have any.  Only unanswered questions.

A change in style

I contacted my editor last week, inquiring about the current view in the publishing world on the number of spaces after a mark of punctuation.  Like The Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook, and the Modern Language Association, she informed me that the industry is moving to one space as opposed to two, and in most cases has already adopted this style. 

On her recent podcast, Grammar Girl explains that computers use proportional fonts, meaning that the space that the letter “i” occupies is smaller than the space that the letter “m” takes up, therefore a single space after the period is adequate.

“Most typewriter fonts are what are called monospaced fonts. That means every character takes up the same amount of space. An "i" takes up as much space as an "m," for example. When using a monospaced font, where everything is the same width, it makes sense to type two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence to create a visual break. For that reason, people who learned to type on a typewriter were taught to put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence.”  

I’ve never been one resistant to change, but this adjustment in the way that I type will be a difficult one to make, particularly because the two spaces have become the  automatic and unconscious way that I construct sentences. 

Fortunately, my editor also informed me that my entire manuscript is re-typed upon submission, for reasons even she doesn’t understand, so if I double space between sentences, some poor, probably overworked and incredibly bored typist will correct this.

What I would like to see in terms of spacing is for Microsoft Word to adopt the iPhone software feature that inserts and period and a space after a word if I double space, thus indicating the end of a sentence.  I use this feature so often on my phone, while emailing and texting, that I sometimes fall into the habit of doing it on my laptop as well, resulting in scores of missed punctuation on a page.

Like I said, I may not resist change, but that doesn't make it easy.

Subconscious naming of characters

Have I told the story of Martin’s name before?

Martin is the protagonist in SOMETHING MISSING, and my choice of his name has an interesting story behind it. 

As I was writing the book, I was in therapy for post traumatic stress disorder, the result of a violent robbery from about ten years prior, and in discussing the book with my therapist, he asked how I decided upon the name Martin.  I told him that "it just popped out.  No thought at all.”  And that was true.  The first word of the first sentence of the book is Martin, and that sentence, like most, just eased its way onto the page without much thought on my part. 

My therapist then pointed out that Martin's name couldn't have been any closer to my own name without actually being my name, and that Martin's penchant for careful planning and obsession for detail were also coping mechanisms that I have developed over the years to deal with my PTSD.  Fire extinguishers on every floor of my home, first aid kits in my car, detailed plans on how to deal with an intruder if one ever entered our house at night.  My planning was obsessive.  I would run through conversations in my head prior to speaking.  Whenever I entered a restaurant, auditorium, or similar public space, I would immediately take note of all the possible exits and would then place myself in a position to face the main door, in order to monitor all who entered.

In short, it turns out that I as writing about myself more than I ever realized.  I even had an evil step-father and a real father who I had not seen for about twenty years until last week, when the book, in part, finally brought us back together. 

But again, I was too stupid to notice these parallels as well.

So earlier this week, I was contacted by a man whose last name is Railsback, wondering where Martin got his last name.  Apparently, Railsback is a fairly uncommon last name, so he and his family were curious about my choice.  Sadly, all I could say is that it also popped into my head, but thus far without any obvious psychological underpinning.  In fact, I did not even know that Martin had a last name until his father appeared in the novel, and when he did, the name came along with it. 

Perhaps someday a therapist will analyze the meaning of Martin's last name as well and explain why it popped into my head, but for now, sadly, all I have to report is that it just came along with the character without any discernible reason. 

Come chat with me

I started a two week chat on Library Thing for anyone interested in participating.

Work space

Quite a while ago, I posted photos of my office, where I occasionally work.  More often than not, I’m sitting at the dining room table, across from my wife, who is pecking away at her laptop as well. 

But compared to the offices and workspaces of some of these fantasy and science fiction writers, my office is downright boring.

I’m always so fascinated about the environments in which authors choose to write. 

Redundant

I thought that this week’s Grammar Girl podcast on literary redundancies was well worth a listen. You can also read the text of the podcast on the site as well.

A couple of my favorite points that she makes:

WHETHER OR NOT

Another quick way to trim a couple of words at a time from your writing (and your speech) is to keep an eye on the “whether” – the “whether or not,” that is.

I can’t decide whether or not to bring my umbrella. Lose the “or not” in that instance, and you’re fine.

A quick search of the working manuscript of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO found four instances in which I could drop the words or not for the sake of brevity. 

Isn’t Microsoft Word’s Find feature the best?

Also from Grammar Girl:

RSVP

…watch out for “please R.S.V.P.”  R.S.V.P. stands, of course, for répondez s'il vous plaît and that means “respond, please.” So, “please R.S.V.P.” would mean “please respond, please.” If you're begging, that's fine; but really, it's better to preserve your dignity.

Anytime I can avoid using the word please is good.  As Nicholson Baker so eloquently stated:

There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.

Just the facts: Redux

Just in case you were worried that the Alessandra Stanley piece on Cronkite wasn’t the least factual piece ever published by the New York Times, yet another correction to the story came out a couple days ago. 

I know.  You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. 

It reads:

Correction: August 1, 2009
An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

Just for the record, the story now has better than a 4:1 story:correction ratio.  This would seem to indicate that every fourth word of the story was inaccurate. 

Astounding. 

Thanks to twitter.com/stephenprosapio for alerting me to the latest correction.

Just the facts

One of the most surprising parts about publishing SOMETHING MISSING was learning about the fact-checking that goes into a work of fiction.  During the process of final revision, an editor was assigned to fact-check nonfiction elements of my book.  She went so far as to confirm my assertions about lock picking and verify the route that a character drove when traveling from Newington to West Hartford.  She even found a possible problem in timing due to daylight savings time, a factor I had failed to consider when writing the book.  It was quite a thorough examination of the manuscript. 

Recently I had an idea for a book in which the main character is one of these fact-checking editors, and it’s now competing in my mind with one other idea to be my next book once THE CHICKEN SHACK is complete.  If it wins, I hope to spend a couple days in New York meeting a couple of these fact-checking editors, in order to learn more about the job.

And apparently fact-checkers are in demand, at least at the New York Times, where a piece by Alessandra Stanley about Walter Cronkite included an astounding correction:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBCin the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

How is this even possible?

How my writing was interrupted today

A local lawn company sent a solicitor to my door today.

TruGreen man:  Hello, I was treating your neighbors lawn today and was wondering if you might be interested in our lawn care service.

Me:  No, thank you.  We’re all set.

TruGreen man:  Are you sure?

Me: Yes.

TruGreen man:  Can I ask what you’re currently doing for the lawn to keep it healthy?

Me:  Keeping TruGreen employees off it.  Now leave.  

It should also be noted that TruGreen ChemLawn dropped the second half of its name about two years ago, becoming just TruGreen. According the company’s website, the name was changed because:

“…one word is all you need for a great lawn. We have shortened our name to make it easier for you to remember that we are the experts of lawn care.”

Thank goodness for this blessed bit of corporate wisdom. I have to admit that the lengthy, two-word name was tricky to remember, so one word, albeit a compound one, is much better. 

I’m sure that it had nothing to do with the implication and constant reminder (through the use of the word Chemlawn) that this company is routinely bathing our lawns and shrubs in chemicals so potent that they necessitate the planting of little yellow warning flags after each treatment.

First sentences, now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem!

Back in March, I wrote about the first sentences in books. I’m expanding on that post a bit here as the topic has recently been tickling my brain cells again:

I like the first sentence of THE CHICKEN SHACK, the book I’m currently writing, a lot. 

They tried not to receive corpses on the same day as chicken, but since it was impossible to predict when a logger might fall from his bucket truck and break his neck, the two deliveries occasionally coincided.

I like to think that it works because it’s unexpected, a little mysterious, but contains enough specificity to make the initial image real for the reader.  Why chicken and corpses would arrive anyplace on the same day is strange, but the specific image of the logger’s fall is enough to also establish the reader within the story. 

At least I hope. 

I also like the first sentence of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO:

The moment that Milo Slade had attempted to avoid for nearly his entire life finally arrived under the sodium glow of a parking lot florescent at a Burger King just south of Washington, DC along interstate 95.

Again, the sentence contains that combination of mystery and specificity that I like.  The moment that Milo has been trying to avoid for his entire life is left undefined, but the setting is clearly established.  In doing these two things simultaneously, I like to think that I both intrigue and ground the reader in the story at the same time. 

However, this sentence was not originally the first sentence of the book.  Prior to the addition of the prologue, this sentence appeared closer to the end of the book than the beginning.  The original first sentence was:

When he spotted the video camera the first time, sitting on the end of the park bench beneath the dying elm, Milo didn’t take it.

While I like the new first sentence better, this isn’t bad.  The use of the phrase the first time lends an air of mystery, yet I again attempted to make the specifics of the scene (end of the park bench beneath the dying elm) clear to the reader. 

The first sentence of SOMETHING MISSING reads:

Martin opened the refrigerator and saw precisely what he had expected.

I don’t like this one nearly as much, but it accomplished the goal at the time.  Compared with the other two books, I put in significantly less thought into the first sentence of SOMETHING MISSING, but my intention was to begin with action, knowing how much of the story would take place within Martin’s head.  I also revised the sentence much later to include the words precisely and expected, knowing how appropriate they are to Martin’s character. 

One of my favorite first lines of a book comes from CHARLOTTE’S WEB:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

It’s probably my favorite because author EB White appears to have the same goal in mind as I do when writing a first sentence.  "Where’s Papa going with that ax?” is certainly intriguing, but White also firmly establishes character and setting in the second half of the sentence.

My wife’s favorite line is the classic line from PRIDE AND PREGUDICE:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

I recently attempted to challenge this line, claiming that it may have a foundation in sexism, patriarchy, and/or materialism, but my wife threatened to go out to the shed and get Papa’s ax if I said another word.

But still, doesn’t it?

I’m currently reading PRIDE AND PREGUDICE AND ZOMBIES, the retelling of the Jane Austin classic with “ultraviolent zombie mayhem!”  Expectedly, the famous first line of Austin novel was re-written for this retelling:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

No question of sexism there.

Do you have a favorite first line to share?  If so, please do.

Tool of the trade

Since I spend a good portion of my day on a keyboard, its design is important to me, and especially important is the specific placement of the keys. I have five laptops in my home right now, three that I no longer use because the hard drive is too small, the screen is cracked, or some other issue, one Mac Book Pro that I use only for video editing, and my current machine, a Dell Studio XPS.

All of these machines have served me well and have offered me a variety of excellent features, but for me, the most important feature of all on any laptop is the placement of certain keys on the keyboard: Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, Shift, and most especially, Delete. Though it makes no sense, these keys are located and sized differently for each of my laptops, even though all but the Mac are made by Dell.

The Mac does not have a delete key, of course, but instead relies on the user to use Backspace in its place. This is annoying and stupid and one of the reasons I do not write on this machine. The lack of the second track pad button, providing me with the ability to right-click, is the other.

Steve Jobs needs to get over his issue with buttons.

The keyboard on my current machine is my favorite by far, with the Delete key located in the top right corner, easy to find and strike, and all the other important keys (PgUp, PgDn, etc.) stacked along the right-hand side of the keyboard, also easy to find. The keyboard is also backlit, and being a person who types with four-six fingers at a time and often is forced to look at the keyboard while doing so, this is a great feature.

Lenovo recently came to understand the importance of keys like Delete and made a change in their keyboards, the first significant alteration in years. Recognizing that Delete and Esc are used quite frequently, they increased the size of these keys. This has led to a decrease in accidental tapping of the keys surrounding these two and improved efficiency and speed, at least in the tests they conducted.

This is good, since the keyboard is actually designed to be inefficient. In the nineteenth century, when the original keyboards were being designed, fast typing would jam typewriters, so the keyboard layout was designed to purposely reduce a typist’s speed. This is why the “A” key, for example, was placed on the far left of the keyboard. If the keyboard was designed for speed, more frequently used keys would be centered in the middle of the keyboard, but a quick look at the keyboard shows you that this is not the case.

This is exceptionally frustrating for those of us in the twenty-first century who have keyboards that can now keep up with the fastest of typists, yet with no way of improving the design of the keyboard. Imagine if the tool you used most often at work was specifically designed to slow you down.

A hammer that misses the nail every fourth time.

A thermometer that requires you to take a patient’s temperature three times and average the totals.

A computer program that inexplicably shuts down once an hour. Well, many of us suffer with this already.

But despite its poor design, my biggest complain in terms of the keyboard is the Caps Lock key, which has always been the largest key on my keyboard (save the space bar). For those of us who do not always look up when typing, it can be exceptionally frustrating when you finally take a peek at the screen and see that the last 400 words have been typed in capital letters. From what I understand, Caps Lock is important to programmers, database managers, medical staff, and other work-specific tasks, but do we really need to keep this extra-large button alongside the second most frequently used letter in the alphabet? Are people really switching Caps Lock off and on with a rapidity that requires the key to be so prominently placed on the keyboard and with such great size?

To write or to revise?

My manuscript for UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO arrived in the mail today along with a letter from my editor, Melissa, detailing her suggestions for edits and revisions.  Some are broad and will be difficult to manage and others are small and simple.

Overall, I agree with Melissa’s assessment of what needs to be done to improve the book, but much of it involves “killing my darlings,” which is never easy for me.   

As a writer, I have learned that the struggles with my writing center upon my tendency to ignore plot in favor of character, my propensity to digress and obsess on areas of the story that I find interesting but others do not, and an overall blindness and disregard to pacing.  In Melissa’s notes, for example, she suggests the elimination or serious reduction of chapters dealing with two minor characters who I adore but admittedly do not serve the plot as well as others.  In sort, they slow down the story and serve as digression rather than progression.  Of course, my agent, Taryn, made similar suggestions as we revised the manuscript prior to submission, but I attempted to deflect Taryn’s concerns by wrapping these two characters into the plot more cohesively, though in my heart, I knew that these two characters, a man and a woman, were still guilty pleasures, characters who I loved who might not be right for the story.

To Taryn’s credit, she tried to alleviate my sadness over the possible loss of these characters by suggesting they might be right for another book.  Just not this one.

She’s an excellent manager of my emotions.

So begins the dance between the revising of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO and the writing of THE CHICKEN SHACK.  Do I put THE CHICKEN SHACK aside for a few weeks and focus on my revisions, or do I attempt to work on both, dividing my time and energy evenly?  Or should I give  UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO the majority of my time but leave a little bit left each day to peck away at THE CHICKEN SHACK? 

My wife suggested I prioritize: If I want to see UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO out next summer, I should turn my attention to my revisions first, and then get back THE CHICKEN SHACK later.  While this may make sense, the problem with this strategy is that I am enjoying my work on THE CHICKEN SHACK immensely and would hate to put it aside for even a day.  Besides, I told my wife my latest aphorism:

Prioritizing is for losers who can’t get their stuff done on time.

I’ll just do both.  

Is there an aesthetic to the written word?

Bonnie Trenga, guest-writing for the Grammar Girl podcast, recently asserted that the standalone use of a which clause is acceptable when the author is attempting to slow things down and create emphasis. The example she provides is this:

I stepped onto the train. Which had finally arrived.

While I’m not about imply that this is wrong (as a novelist, I use sentence fragments all the time for a variety of reasons), I must say that I find this particular use of a sentence fragment to be ugly and overstated. Sure, the message is conveyed effectively by allowing the which clause to stand alone: The speaker has been waiting for the train for a long time. But I would contend that there are more effective, more elegant ways of conveying this idea, including altering the actual dialogue, using italicizes or capital letters, or even utilizing the suggestion of body language in the speaker to convey his or her impatience or frustration.

Like I said, it’s not wrong to use a sentence like this in your fiction (though it would certainly be incorrect in formal writing), but just because something isn’t wrong doesn’t always make it right.

In this case, I believe that the standalone which clause hits the reader over the head like a sledgehammer, overstating the speaker’s position and sounding amateurish. It’s the kind of writing I would expect to see from my students, most of whom do not understand the use of subtlety at this point in their writing careers.

But I also said the clause looked ugly, standing there all alone, and I meant it. I believe there’s an indefinable aesthetic to the written word, an inherent understanding of what looks right and what doesn’t, though I’ll also admit that this can differ from writer to writer. For me, a sentence ending with the word with is ugly. Yes, there was also a time when it was also considered incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, but those days are long gone and I am more than willing to end a sentence with a preposition, especially in dialogue, but never with the word with.

It just feels wrong.

The following is a sentence that I am currently wrangling with in my manuscript for THE CHICKEN SHACK.

For years, kids would collect these lost balls and sell back to the course at a quarter each, for use at the driving range or for resale as a refurbished ball if it had been especially costly to begin with.

See the with at the end?

I hate it. Not because it’s grammatically wrong or structurally problematic. Not because it makes the sentence awkward or incomprehensible. It just doesn’t look right. The aesthetic of the sentence is completely wrong.

Am I crazy? Is this belief in the appearance of a sentence just something in my head? Let me know.

Either way, you won’t ever catch me using a which clause on its own, as Bonnie Trenga suggests is fine.

And by the time THE CHICKEN SHACK has an official title and can be found in your local bookstore, the sentence above dealing with the golf balls will surely have changed as well.

Inaccessible and annoying

My wife and I went to see Bob Dylan a couple nights ago for our anniversary. As he stepped on stage, a booming voice declared him to be “the great American storyteller” among many other praiseworthy monikers. While this may have been true at one time, this is simply not the case anymore as far as his live performances go. Try as we did, my wife and I couldn’t understand most of what the man was saying. His voice is completely ruined, so much so that the majority of the words that he sings are cracked and jumbled and utterly indiscernible.

My wife’s tweet from that night reads:

At a Bob Dylan concert. I can't understand a word. I think he's singing about scooby doo and eggs in bed...

Though I am happy to have seen the man perform, he should really consider hanging up the touring boots, as it’s unfair to his fans to pay a lot of money to listen to a performance as muddled as this. As a musician and a performer, your music should at least be accessible to your audience.

This got me thinking about writing. My book club just finished Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, the second book I’ve read by the author, and for the second time, I finished the book angry and annoyed with Saramago. Yes, he’s a Nobel-laureate, so it’s hard for me, with my one measly little book to criticize, but criticize I will.

I contend that Saramago writes in a style that makes his work utterly inaccessible to his readers. Specifically, his paragraphs often go on for pages and pages, he writes single sentences that can be a page long or more, he does not use dialogue attribution, he shuns the use of the period whenever possible, and he rarely gives any of his characters names.

Why?

Literary minds greater than my own, as well as die-hard Saramago fans, will claim that these stylistic choices are used to emphasize his ideas about identity, the universal human voice, and a bunch of other nonsense. While this may or may not be true, I contend that an author’s first responsibility to the reader is to produce text that is assessable and discernable. Stories that can be read without the constant need to re-read. Ideas that do not require page-long sentences to convey. When I read a Saramago novel, I feel like I’m reading a story that was purposely written in such a way so as to exclude a majority of readers from the work. I feel like I’m being bathed in literary elitism and authorial pretension on a grand scale.

I end up thinking of Saramago as a jerk.

This isn’t to say that I have not enjoyed his books. While utterly depressing, I thought that Blindness was an excellent story, wrapped up in a nearly indiscernible collection of words. And while I didn’t enjoy Death with Interruptions nearly as much, it was a compelling premise and a thought-provoking story, once one managed to conquer the lack of dialogue attribution and the endless array of endless sentences and paragraphs.

As an author, my greatest desire is for my stories to be read and enjoyed by as many people as possible. I want my novels to be assessable and intriguing works of fiction that a reader can put down and pick back up whenever necessary. I want the reader to understand my words, follow my thoughts, connect with my mind, and recognize which character is speaking without having to re-read the gargantuan paragraph three times!

Saramago chooses to be difficult for reasons that I will never fully understand.

Dylan can’t help but be indiscernible.

Saramago by choice, and Dylan as a result of the ravages of time. Both ineffective in reaching their audiences, in this author’s humble and perhaps overstated opinion.

Product placement

In reading some of my Amazon reviews (I know I shouldn’t, but they’re still very good), I noticed that two people commented on the specificity to which I wrote about certain brand names in SOMETHING MISSING, wondering if I received money from the companies mentioned as a form of product placement.

Certainly a fascinating idea, and one that I wouldn’t mind pursuing in the future, but the reason behind my specificity is two-fold:

Martin, the protagonist in SOMETHING MISSING, is more detail-oriented than anyone I know, and though he doesn’t tell the story first-person, I attempted to imbue the omniscient narrator of the story (me, I guess) with his characteristic obsession for detail as a means of enhancing and infusing the story with his character. My friend, Shep, referred to it as Martin-speak, and he heartily approved of the decision. So the use of brand names (Subaru Outback instead of station wagon, for example) was an attempt to do just this.

Also, I like to think that the reference to a Subaru Outback paints a different and far more specific picture in the reader’s mind than the word station wagon. Having grown up in the 1980s in the “way back” of a long, wide, wood-paneled station wagon, the word station wagon paints a very different picture than a station wagon of today.

But the idea of product placement in a novel is an interesting one. Would advertisers be intrigued by this idea at all? Unlike commercials, the references to specific products in a book could not be skipped over, but then again, if taken to the extreme, stories might become a morass of brand names and commercialism.

But it might be something worth exploring. For example, in my current manuscript, my protagonist, Wyatt, will eventually be driving a car. Probably a pick-up truck. If Ford would like to pay me to make that truck an F-150, with at least six specific references to it in the book, why not? As long as it fit the context and original intent of the story, would this be bad?

The businessman in me says no, but the writer and artist in me is beginning to wonder…

Collection of ideas

I have a very important Word document saved on my desktop which contains ideas for blog posts, a long list of children’s book ideas, notes for a future memoir, a list of quotes that I might one day use in a book or blog post, a few inspirational emails sent to me through the years, revision ideas for MILO and my current manuscript, and a section entitled Book/Story/Research Ideas.

This is an odd collection of ideas for future novels (at least two that I am quite serious about), sociological experiments that I would one day like to conduct (an analysis on the number and type of compliments dispensed and received in a given week, broken down by the sex of the subjects, for example), reference material for future books, and some odds and ends like this:

• Serve doggie treats from the West Hartford doggie bakery to my friends (the treats look so much like human cookies and pastries that they wouldn’t know until after they had begun chewing)
• Take a typically stupid weather report of television and recreate it in my own vision
• Create a line of infant greeting cards that actually appeal to the infants

Like I said, it’s an odd but very important collection of thoughts, but some are clearly more important than others. 

Best place to think

I can’t explain it, and it might sound a bit cliché, but I make more breakthroughs in my writing while in the shower than anyplace else.

Today’s shower yielded an entire restructuring of my current manuscript, a means by which the story will reveal itself in a more logical, ordered way. I’ve discovered plot twists, new characters and the ending to at least one story while in the shower. Perhaps it’s because the shower is the only place where I truly unplug from my podcasts, my audio book, conversation with my wife and the other distractions of life.

Fortunately, I take at least two showers a day, so I always manage to get at least a little accomplished by way of productive thought.  Otherwise, I might be lost. 

Twenty-car pile-up of ideas in my head

I’m not sure how or when I’ll use this in a story, but I am fascinated by the idea of slugging, a term used to describe a unique form of commuting found in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Pittsburg and sometimes referred to as "Instant Carpooling" or "Casual Carpooling". It is the practice of forming ad hoc, informal, temporary carpools for purposes of commuting, essentially a variation of ride-share commuting and hitchhiking.

“The system of slugging is quite simple. A car needing additional passengers to meet the required 3-person high occupancy vehicle (HOV) minimum pulls up to one of the known slug lines. The driver usually positions the car so that the slugs are on the passenger side. The driver either displays a sign with the destination or simply lowers the passenger window, to call out the destination, such as "Pentagon," "L’Enfant Plaza," or "14th & New York." The slugs first in line for that particular destination then hop into the car, normally confirming the destination, and off they go.”

No money is exchanged because of the mutual benefit: the car driver needs riders just as much as the slugs need a ride. Each party needs the other in order to survive.

I have about a hundred different ideas on how I might use this unique form of commuting in a story, and at least a couple ideas on how this might be the centerpiece of a novel. It’s these odd, quirky and unique parts of our world that so enthrall me as a writer, providing me with a previously-unexplored landscape in which to place a character.

I have a bunch just waiting to be used.  In fact, they are starting to become backlogged in my brain.   

If only I had more time to write.

Solving problems

My wife recently described my writing process like this:
You approach writing like you approach life, as a problem solver. You create complex and elaborate problems for your characters, and then, after you’ve gotten them into trouble, you find ways to solve their problems. I think this is why you enjoy writing so much. You like to solve problems. In real life and in your fiction.

I’ve never thought of writing in this way, but I think she’s right. This is why outlining a novel seems so bizarre to me. The process must be organic. If I already knew the solutions to the problems that my characters will face, where would the fun be?