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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
  This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| Shades of Meaning Yesterday on Fox I heard a discussion between Neil Cavouto and some ex-campaign chief and they were talking about what the candidates needed to do in order to secure the nomination. In the process of the conversation the old adviser said words to the effect that this or that candidate needed to achieve some tactical momentum and secure some regional victories. Cavouto replied with words to the effect that this sounded more like a strategic than a tactical objective. The Veteran responded that winning a hundred and forty some odd delegates was strategic, everything else was tactical. Now this shows a bit of a lack of understanding about the meaning of the words, tactical, operational and strategic. In the EWW course I am trying to get the students to understand the meaning of these words and how they apply them to writing a longer work. In a political sense the analogy is similar. In a political contest a tactical victory is to win in a state. An operational victory is to win in several states that have a regional connection… Like the South or Midwest. Strategically a victory is to combine the operational successes into a national one that secures for the candidate the required number of delegates. Anyway these words get bantered around by the experts who don’t always have that clear an understanding of what they mean. To a writer a tactical piece is a chapter sized work. Operational writing is the stringing together of chapters and strategic is completing the entire book. Strategic in this sense is having all the overall ingredients and devices common to good writing. Tactical writing can sort of blossom on its own but operational and strategic writing requires a cold and calculated consideration. It doesn't happen by accident. Just as a political candidate doesn’t get elected by accident, a writer does not produce a stage, screen play or novel by accident. It just doesn’t fall from the sky as you push the pencil or pound the key board. For a writer to think that since they can write a vignette, chapter or essay and that producing a longer work is simply more of the same withexpanded word count is wishful thinking on a grand scale. What the EWW hopes to accomplish is posturing a writer so they have an opportunity to achieve success. This whole notion is hard to get across but some students seem to come by it easier than others. I think that those who have been overwhelmed and had to struggle hardest grasp the underlying premise quicker and better. |
| ...And the Beat Goes On. This is Sunday Morning and I still have two reviews left to write. I am amazed by what a bright group of talented writers I have. Linda is harping that I get it in gear. We have to go to Church and she wants to watch the Playoff Games. Plus I need to get up and put some wood in the outdoor wood stove… It was cold last night and I suspect the fire is long gone from the box. One of my students had a vignette I couldn’t shake from my mind. It germinated my own version of her story which I provided to her. It risked taking liberties with content that many writers resent, but I did it anyway and she thanked me politely but said it wasn’t her story… What the experience showed me was that when we are doing Exploratory Writing our thoughts are fluid enough to demonstrate the vast array of radiating possibilities that flow from a single idea or concept. That we quickly choose one to the exclusion of all the others which then wither on the vine. One of my concerns about the course is that many of the students are bringing to the table a story line and characters that are already well developed. They are using the workshop to test a story and characters that are already matured. In doing this they lose much of the benefit of what the course offers. That is doing sketches and getting a sense for all the possibilities that radiate from the vignettes. I need to make a point of stressing this potential shortcoming in the Welcome Letter, introduction and Class Forum. I won’t proscribe it but I need to discourage using the class to refine a work that is already well developed, somewhat rigid and already set up in the mind of the writer. It is like someone facing a problem and deciding the answer is the first thing that pops into their minds. The Problem solving process was created to insure a problem solver looked at all the possibilities rather than what appeared to be the most obvious solution. Thus using the Workshop to refine the “obvious solution” does not garner the full potential of its utility. It is a question of how well developed the material is…if it is still fluid enough to accept change and flow in new directions. One of the things about exploring is that you find out things that go beyond what the writer expects to uncover. That is the real benefit of the course. ...To hear the plaintive voice of our muse crying out…. “Turn left at the junction Dummy! Not right.” Anyway it is fun to see the dynamics of what is happening and how each of the students responds. Some are barely in the ball park and others have slam dunked the first lesson and most are fumbling around with their lights trying to cope as best they can. We have created a great Workshop with some interesting dynamics. What Karen did batting clean-up with her organized and disciplined mind keeps popping up in unexpected places and ways. Thanks Boss |
| The Rollercoaster Ride I am halfway through the reviews, of lesson 1, the EWW and what I tend to see, as the most common deficiency, is a lack of balance between character and story line development. Both these are obviously important but most writers seem to focus, at least to begin with on story line. When I read a vignette I am attuned to three things. To me a story is like riding a rollercoaster. There is the ups and downs of the structure and how it meanders about, there is the car that negotiates the rails from start to finish and finally there is the resonance, the exhilaration of the ride. What I normally see most at first is the structure of the rollercoaster. This is the story line beginning to rise up, the world of the story and an initial sense of foreshadowing as to where the story is heading. I will not denigrate the importance of story line or say an author is wrong to focus on it to begin with. What I will say is that concurrently the writer has to think about the course that will be negotiated and the vehicle that will carry the passengers. The passenger is of course the reader and the vehicle is primarily the central character but also the supporting characters. Concurrent with a beginning effort to weave the threads of the story line, a writer has to reveal some depth to the characters. On a roller coaster ride, like reading a novel (hopefully) these three things are happening together and the writer needs to write about them concurrently…. Not sequentially, but concurrently. Now I am not going to discuss resonance here. I believe that what made Shakespeare great was the resonance of his writing more than anything else, however that aspect of writing appears almost forgotten. Now-a-days this aspect has been relegated to the world of the poet but it wasn’t always this way. I suggest that aspiring writers take some poetry courses whether they feel they need them or not. When a reader comments that Stephen King writes “beautifully” it is not exclusively his story lines, interesting as they are, nor his characters that really get your attention but also the way his words resonate. Resonance is a bit much for a beginning novelist to think about and is perhaps a graduate level course on writing. For now I hammer hard in the EWW course, Character Development . The cart that carries the reader along….that offers that vicarious opportunity for the reader to climb into the CC’s head and enter into an adventure that transcends our everyday lives. |
My wife Linda is from Atlanta. I attended a Military College in Georgia. I will tell you that there are some bigtime differences in the culture in Georgia and the One Here in Wisconsin. My wife loves the TV Drama, Justified with Timothy Olyphant. What the writers have done is a particularly good job capturing are many of the nuances of life in the south as opposed to other parts of the country. These nuances are expressed in the casting of the characters and the way they speak and interact. For example there is a scene where the family of Boyd Crowder, the local drug cartel, is trying to sell some spoiled Marijuana to a dealer from Memphis. Representing the Local Cartel is Ava and this skinny little guy. The Memphis buyer is backing out of the deal because the pot is essentially spoiled and the skinny guy is indignant because he assumed they had a sale. Ava tries to be the peacemaker and has a conversation with the Memphis buyer distinctly different from her partner. In it we see a polite exchange that is gender induced between Ava and the buyer interspersed by one of hostility, and implied threats with her cohort. It was one of those scenes where the viewer gets wide eyed and says “Oh my Gosh…I have seen those types of conversations myself….and it wasn’t up North.” Then there is Mags Bennett, an enigmatic old woman who is a local Dixie Mafia leader. She is a charming terror who has her bad dude sons living in mortal dread. She often appears so empathetic and normal, while hiding a side to her character that is dark indeed. What is unnerving is that this woman is another one of those characters that resonates as someone we have all seen before. This is an exceptional series, going into its third season and it is fun to sit back and quietly watch the reruns and soak up all that good stuff that was in some of the missed episodes or overlooked in others. |
| The other side of who we are. At conception but for the toss of a coin you might have been created in the other gender. But for a wiggly little sperm with a plus or minus sign you might be speaking in a baritone or fluttering around like a blond. This begs the question what happened to that part of you that was told to go sit in the corner. I write about this aspect of a person’s persona from time to time however most everyone realizes that they have an opposite gender aspect to their personality. Now I am not suggesting that everyone has latent homosexual tendencies, however true this might be in about ten percent of the cases. What I am referring to is someone firmly entrenched in their preferences but who comes to realize that there is a part of themselves that got shut out a long time ago and didn’t get voided with the placenta or discharged like a menstrual fluid or a waste product. It is still there lurking in our souls and exercising a subtle influence on who we are. For my part the thought of a homosexual relationship sends a chill of aversion running down my spine. However I do not consider myself a homophile. But for the grace of God I might be wearing those shoes (heels?) and I am grateful to my creator that I am not inclined to late night walks in the park or clandestine relationships in a bathroom stall. My life is complicated enough without having to deal with that. Actually I like my female side and do not feel threatened by the realization it is there. My mother wanted me to be a girl so she could have someone to do girly things with. I won’t go into that except to say that I got taken shopping frequently and asked whether I liked this dress or blouse better than that. I remember once being embarrassed by being asked to choose between a pink and black bra. Still that was my mother and as I look back am glad to have been of some service on her frequent shopping sprees. Sometimes she went too far however like the Christmas she gave my brother a toy truck and me a doll. The family is still talking about that special moment under the Christmas tree. Now a writer has to be able to put on the male and female hat interchangeably. Shakesphere is frequently criticized because he was clueless about writing child characters. There are some writers that tend to do better in one sphere or the other but this is no surprise to an experienced reader. In a writers voice we soon get a good sense of what the level of comfort is. At WDC I have worked to do a better job at expressing intimacy in my writing and often feel inclined to share with a reader more than the shutting of a bedroom door. It is an extremely difficult thing to do well and everybody has their own threshold of tolerance. For most a little goes a long way. I don’t know how I got on this topic but it is one we all seem to carry a lot of baggage on. Most people I think have some bad early experiences that come to taint their perspectives which are too bad because sex is a pretty cool experience. Anyway WDC offers a writer an opportunity to test the waters of intimacy in human relationships and some members have emerged who write some pretty good sensual prose. |
| Let up on the Reins Yesterday I had some good thoughts for a blog but I let them slip away. I should carry a note book and write them down when they come to mind. Oh! I remember, one of my students mentioned in the lounge that she is worried about not being able to come up with the required number of “Crisis.” This got me to thinking and actually dreaming last night. In my mind when a person faces a life changing event and decides to launch their life on a new path what they are doing is breaking with the flow of their life. Nature has decided how the current is going to carry them along and has everything planned out by default. It is a type of predestination where nature has everything written and if you do nothing to intervene this is the way your life is going to play out. Thus when a person faces a life changing event and they decide to get off their duff and resist the flow, there is turbulence in the force. The irrestable course of nature is no longer postured and in equilibrium, and for the the future to now unfold, there are some realignments that will have to happen to get everything back on track. Another word for these realignments is “Crisis.” They are inevitable when a person decides to get serious about restructuring their lives and that is when the hiccups and bumps really begin to happen. Actually they are quite easy for a writer to anticipate. In such a case we don’t have to go about looking for a crisis, the crisis comes looking for us. So for a writer to say "I am writing a novel and there is this life changing even but I am having trouble deciding what the crisis will entail..." is not being very imaginative about the way reality works. For example assume a character to escape an abusive relationship decides to flee to a shelter and file for a divorce. Is it that hard to see what sorts of crisis will spring up as a consequence.? I think that the problem with many writers is that they try and tell the story to their characters instead of the other way around. We get this idea in our heads and come hell or high water we are going to spoon feed the lines into our characters instead of turning on our listening skills and paying attention to our inner voice. Make up your mind as a writer... accept the fact that you are not going to be able to regulate and control your story and characters and let the story flow into the realms of the unanticipated and illuminate your awareness with a host of events and circumstances you could never think up for yourself in a million years. |
| The Contest Component As Karen and I were developing the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) we had frequent discussions regarding the contest component. We went back and forth over whether or not to include it. Actually the EWW didn’t need it. The classroom forum could have easily served that purpose and the class could have gotten along quite well without it. At several points she had me convinced that we should do away with it altogether and I was persuaded to her point of view. Then for some reason neither one of us could bring ourselves to put it to rest. What we decided to do was not make it a WDC contest but an in-house NHA contest. I am glad we left it at that because the idea for the EWW had its genesis in the WDC contest forum. It was there that I got the idea for the course from my own submissions of vignettes that had a common backstory and characters. It was to test drive these characters that I got interested in the contest’s to begin with. At this point I think I need to encourage my students to enter their vignettes in the NHA contest. I want to do this for the following reasons. 1. A writer needs to make a work all it can be and if they know it is going to get a contest scrutiny they will be more inclined to turn in a quality submission. 2.There is something about a competition that brings out the best in a writer. 3. I am sure I have entered over fifty (50) contests and can count my wins on one hand. That, however, is not the reason I enter. I do it to see what others will say, see how many views it gets, and experiment with ideas, story lines and characters. So winning is not a big issue with me nor should it be with my students. 4. If a writer’s goal is publication, then they need to start writing in a manner that represents the best they can produce. Writing something sloppy and thinking that later you can clean it up just doesn’t work for me. A contest forces me to submit early and make constant revisions right up to the time of review. 5.It could be that some students in other NHA classes might want to participate and thereby help them develop an interest in EWW and possibly take the course in the future. 6. Finally it might offer a new direction. That is that each semester one of the classes in session be responsible for a weekly prompt. It could be a way of advertising to all the students the full range of courses being offered and test the waters. So these are the reasons I think the contest is a good idea and I hope by testing it in-house this semester, we can discover if it has a broader application than just the EWW. |
| Moving Right Along Today I finished the last input to lesson 1 and posted it in the Workshop Forum. I now have the lesson 1 vignette, The practical exercise written on the Central Character template and lastly I wrote a the weekly evaluation of the vignette. I know it sounds lame to write something and then write the review on it but I wanted to show the student an example of the three to demonstrate what they look like. I really think that after all the lesson material is completed nothing demonstrates better than an example. I used to work for a guy that insisted upon practical examples after seeing the theory of something explained. Karen jumped in and updated the appropriate page with the "Contiguous" chapter explanation I talked about yesterday. I am really getting spoiled having somebody like her around. I am continously amazed at how well she can fix things. Mark came over this afternoon and dumped some trunks in my yard next to the stove. It is getting cold out there but then it’s the 14th of January. We have actually had a mild winter so far. We usually get about four weeks of sub zero weather and with the snow deep… that is cold. Last year I ran out of wood and had to get another truckload. I hope the workshop is working out for the students as well as it is for me. It is really taking me in unexpected direction on the Volusia Manuscript. I am finding that many of the things I talked about in the objectives are finding expression in the vignettes. Today I started on Vignette 2 and have about a thousand words. Another thousand plus and then I will make sure I have all the requirements in the prompt. I have four students I am sure of working on the class. I asked them to respond with how they want to be reviewed, in the forum or by private e-mail. I got four responses. That tells me who is working and who isn’t. Am I a sly old dog or what. I hope they don’t try and put everything off until the last night and try and wing it. Well if they do they do…. The students will get out of the workshop what they put into it. I am seeing a lot of activity on the forum and with the objectives so somebody with access is reading and doing something. |
| Finding the Thread and the Characters I am sure that most realize that it is next to impossible to write a longer work without an outline. The problem with this is that most people hate outlines and I think the reason they do centers upon the eternal question… “How do you outline something you don’t have a clear mental picture of?” This is a valid concern. Many people, once they start writing, are more or less locked into the very fuzzy plan they had to start with. Let’s say you have a vague idea for a story and you force yourself to do an outline and write half dozen chapters and decide you don’t like it? This has happened to me in building street rods…. I get halfway through and discover I don’t like the car enough to finish it. It seemed like a good project to start with but the further along I got the more I realized it wasn’t turning out the way I expected…. That the fuzziness when it began to dissipate, and coalesce into something finite was not what my imagination had it cracked up to be. The same is true in my writing and I realized the need for more structure but how does one go about structuring something that is amorphous to begin with? Anyway the Exploratory Writing Workshop evolved as a consequence of my frustration and determination to find a better way. Why not write a half dozen vignettes and then try and pull the thread of the story out the backside rather than trying to push the thread of the noodle (story line) from a standing start? So, with a lot of help from Karen we developed the class. Yesterday as I began to shadow write my vignette to lesson one it occurred to me that there was still some explaining to do. That’s OK, in a regular classroom that’s where the teacher steps in and explains things and answers questions. In an online course it isn’t quite so easy…. In an E-course the instructor has to anticipate more. What I need to do, is a better job explaining how the pulling of the story line thread is going to happen. In order to explain this I need to tell the students that these six vignettes do not need to be sequential. In other words they do not need to be in direct sequence as in chapters one through six. The student needs to expand their minds starting from a page with chapter one through thirty listed and take the thoughts for whatever vignette comes to mind and put it into a context somewhere along that continuum. It might well be that the six vignettes belong in chapters 1, 7, 11, 19, 23 and 30. I realized this after I wrote my instructor sample of lesson 1. I will mention this before I open lesson two next week. There are some real advantages to taking a course you teach along with the students the first time around. The danger, in my case, is they will realize their teacher is not that much further advanced than they are or worse….I won’t say it….  |
| First day of Class Today I opened the workshop. I went back and unlocked all the links to all the pages and levels in the course starting with this weeks lesson. I mentioned that I intended to shadow take the course concurrently with the students. In that way they have examples of what I am looking for in the form of an output. Well I decided to take the Volusia series I started some weeks ago and stopped writing on it in anticipation of using it for the purposes of this class. So I took the first two vignettes and combined them into my lesson one submission. As a part of the assignment I also filled out the character sketch template and prose sketch of the Central Character. So the first posting in the classroom forum is the first vignette in my own Exploratory adventure. Since all my students are mature adults I have decided to up the content classification to the 18 plus and leave it 13 plus on the discussion forums. If somebody wants to write about abortion or other mature topics I don’t want to constrain them, but at the same time think the 18+ ceiling is appropriate for the workshop. I anticipate that there will be questions regarding the finding and posting of images… Where to go on the net to look for them, how to save them to your computer, how they have to be shrunk to less than 400 by 400 and how to get them from your computer to a WDC image that has a unique number. Then perhaps how one uses Writing ML to display them in the text of a document. Maybe tonight I will elaborate that process in more detail… at least explaining how I have learned to do it through much pain and anguish. Then I will post it as a link like the dictionary Karen and I created. This morning Mark showed up to clear the yard with his snow blower which we jointly purchased. Then the factory representatives showed up to inspect the cabinets. Now, after finishing this blog, I have to go get some tires for Linda’s car and have them installed this afternoon. Linda is doing fine at her parents cleaning the house, running errands and taking them on long excursions to the mall and visiting friends and old familiar places. She will be back on Wednesday and I plan to take her out to dinner at the supper club I often write about. I can’t wait to begin getting some interaction and feedback with the students. This is going to be fun and with what I learned in the One Act Play course, I should be able to do an even better job than in past semesters. I really like the keyboard on this Compaq laptop computer. I typed this whole blog without any red showing. |
| Moderation and knowing yourself, leads to Self Actualization We indulge ourselves in too much of the things that feel good. Contentment does not require that we go to excess but like teenagers we find that if one beer gives us a bit of a buzz, than a six-pack will surely be a harbinger of euphoria. Experience teaches that this isn’t true, however, there is no natural mechanism for controlling our insatiable need for pleasure. All we have is our will and the ability to discipline ourselves to a path of moderation. How hard is that…? Well it’s very hard indeed. As I tell my students, humans are driven by wants, needs and desires and the stronger the compulsion, the more certain you can be.... that too much is a bad thing. We need to learn when enough is enough. When we acquire this understanding we will know why the Greeks chose these two adages to write over their Oracle at Delphi… “Know Yourself” and “All things in moderation.” Now the Greeks figured this out and who can say the extent to which the “Mysteries” which were an unrecorded part of their religious beliefs emphasizes these points. We do know that the Greeks struggled with these two issues and were notoriously deficient, for all their wisdom, in these two regards. When I shadow take the Exploratory Writing Workshop I think this will be my Dramatic Premise. |
| Zealotry leads to what we deplore most. I just finished reading “Hunger Games.“ Whenever I read anything these days I ask myself, “what is the Dramatic Premise of the work?“ After thinking for a couple of days I decided on what is shown above as the title of this blog. In the military I started out as a youngster with my share of idealism. Over the years it got tested and I took note of the change. By the midpoint in my career I realized that I was in danger of becoming the personification of the worst of my role models. I resisted using a Christian model that teaches that the only defense against the corrupting influence of power is humility and remembering who you are and where you come from. Finally things reached the point that I had to retire (My decision) several years earlier than I anticipated. I was working at the time for one of those brilliant but socially bankrupt types who lost the vision on why he was where he was. It was the best decision I ever made because it enabled me to break free with some shreds human decency and self respect. Anyway I am all to familiar with the dramatic premise in Hunger Games. Actually it is a premise that is well grounded in history. The Greeks invented the Olympic Games and for awhile it had a lofty premise. Wars were suspended so the games could take place, until the Peloponnesian War came along. This was a particularly brutal war and Greece (Athens) was forced to do some things when one if its allies decided to switch sides. Pericles made a famous speech which I recommend my readers read…. While I know they won’t. Edith Hamilton, who in my opinion is the foremost woman of our times writes about it in one of her books….I think “The Greek Way” but it might be one of the later ones, “Echoes of the Past…” Anyway Pericles explains why it is necessary to deal firmly in such cases. However the Romans were took Greek thinking on “Firmness” to a whole new level in their Coliseum Games and this is the model the Hunger Games uses. One of the reasons I bought an Apple was because Microsoft has an annoying habit of shutting me down when they do their updates… Is anybody at Microsoft listening out there? I hate it when you shut me down to post your updates….I don’t give a rat’s petotti about your updates… So I bought an Apples so as not to endure your unwelcome updates! Be advised there is a cost to treating your customers like a commodity!!!! Anyway where was I…? Oh yes … Not only did they shut me down but they lost a page worth of data and ruined my train of thought. I am so mad right now I have to go chop some wood and when I boot back up it will be on my Apple. |
Fidelity… what a joke! Today Linda and I went to Madison. I had a one-hour “One on One” to get better acquainted with my new Apple Laptop Pro. The session seems like such a blur, however, I’m getting more the hang of the new machine. When we got home I dozed for a couple of hours. Last night I read until quite late and today I feel washed out. When I got home I had the letter from Fidelity telling me I had lost more than I anticipated. This is the same Fidelity that took a bath on MF Global in the EX Governor Corzine affair where they can’t find all that money. (He has no idea where the trillion plus went….duh!) Why anybody would hire a liberal politician from New Jersey as a responsible fudiciary is a real head scratcher. My suspicion is that Fidelity is trying to recover from their piece of the fiasco by spreading the losses over their entire portfolio. They claim that customer money was not involved but I don’t believe it. Can’t say for sure but my fund was supposed to be ultra conservative and no way it should have shown the loss they claim. Anyway I will be dropping them as one of my fund managers and looking for somebody I have more confidence in. The question is how do you know when somebody stupid or reckless gets appointed to run a firm that has traditionally been well managed and starts speculating on Euro-bonds and other dumb things. If anyone out there knows the answer to that one please let me know. Fidelity sure as heck doesn’t. |
| Middle of the day I don’t know if it is the new year or if my life force is slumbering. I need to go out and clean my shop. In a few minutes we will be going to church and I need to put some wood on the fire. Mark says our neighbor Tim was looking at a firewood processor that will split 26 inch logs into various sizes. I am intrigued but even used the machine is very expensive. I would have to start another business and that would cut into my writing. In my family the men all seem to have the “Wood” gene, even my brother. Otherwise we are completely different except for that common denominator. A couple of my cousings also share the “Car” gene. Anyway as far as I know I am the only one with an interest in writing and I have a little of the poetry gene, even though I don’t do much with it. I’ve always loved poetry though and used to do a little song writing. Some of it was pretty good… at least to my ear. For example Chorus In the middle of the day At work and far away… When I wouldn’t thing that you’d be thinking ‘bout me anyway. I recall the nicest thing I ever heard you say How you’re always thinking ‘bout me In the middle of the day Verse #1 Now I know in the morning When he lonely rooster cries Feel you stir beside me Rub the sleep out of your eyes Feel your hands go round my waist And watch you start to yawn… Yeah, I know you’ll love me In the early morning dawn But….chorus Verse #2 I know in the evening With the supper dishes through You come in the kitchen the way you always do Rubb my shoulders Squeeze my neck, And kiss me on the head I know you’ll love me When its time to go to bed… But… chorus Anyway it has a nice tune… A DJ friend of mine picked it out on a guitar a long time ago and his girl friend sang it….she had a pretty voice. It has a lilting melody. |
| Synchronized Sleeping Dogs I just finished the second book in Hunger Games. I thought the books were entertaining and look forward to the third. What I best was the relationship between the CC and Rue and how the story played out when the train visited her home district in book two. What the author captured was something extremely powerful that really touched me emotionally. Today Mark and I got a piece of equipment running called a “Holder Equipment Carrier. It was my shop project in tech school after I retired. The best way to describe it is as a small one person, articulating, diesel powered side walk snow blower used by municipalities to clean sidewalks and curbs in areas that get significant amounts of seasonal snow fall. I have used it as a tree cutting aid and to skid trees out of areas that have a difficult access. It has been very handy. After getting that up and running and over to Marks, he helped me get my 40 Ford chassis and engine loaded onto my trailer. I will be taking it to Pfeiffer’s on Monday. It is a beautiful day here in central Wisconsin and when I finish I’ll be watching the playoff games. Next week Linda will be going to Atlanta to visit her parents. I told her once that I can deal with her parents or I can deal with her but not both at the same time. Yesterday she repeated those sentiments back to me only this time I was the object. I suddenly realized that I make an already difficult task worse, just as she does for me… Is that convoluted or easy for others to understand? My two dogs like to sleep next to each other in formation. It is the dandiest thing you ever wanted to see. One will lay down a certain way and the other will come up and flop down alongside, duplicating the exact same position. My wife got her new kindle and gave me her old one. I guess she got tired of having me tying up her machine all the time. I usually read a book in one sitting, which means finishing in the early morning hours. This drives Linda to distraction and she says I lead an unregulated and impulsive life. I suppose compared to her way of doing things I am a bit streaky. We have a lot of bumps and edges and nobody thought our marriage would last. It has albeit with some heated and abrasive moments. More later… |
| Thought Process A writer, as a human being, understands the difference between themselves and those around them. A Reader understands the same thing. That is the basic human model of interrelationships. We are onto ourselves the central character in our lives. When a reader picks up a novel they enter vicariously into the mind of the Central Character (CC) in the novel. If they can’t find the CC, or the CC arrives late on the scene or not at all... or there are a host of supporting characters none of who seems to qualify as the CC, the reader often becomes confused or loses interest. Despite this, many good novels are successful despite having a flaw in this regard. One of the rules of thumb in writing a story is that only the thinking of the CC is revealed to the readers. Why do you suppose that is…? duh! It is because only a human being knows what is going on inside their minds and of course a reader who has entered that vicarious relationship. It is amazing how many good tactical writers fail to grasp this simple construct. So ideally we show the CC doing the thinking and the supporting characters, responding with words or body language. The supporting characters do not reveal what they are actually thinking. One exception is telepathy which is something I write about but which requires the reader to become quickly brought up to speed on how that particular mind process works. |
| Antique Malls I use three different laptops. If the room is dark I use my Toshiba. For some reason the screen is very bright on this one and easy to read. It is the one I am using now. It’s a dark and overcast day and the sun is just getting cranked up. The problem is that I have files on three machines and sometimes I forget which one a file is on. Once they are on the server at WDC I am good to go but most of what I write never gets that far. Then I see something and want to connect with something I wrote earlier and the fun begins. Now where the heck is that file? I think to myself. My wife is in a book reading group and yesterday took them to see “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She wanted me to tag along and keep her guy member, James, company so I did and saw the movie a second time. I don’t usually do that because I remember pretty well from the first time, but she promised a trip to the antique mall and a dinner at Cracker Barrel. For some reason I am drawn to antique malls like a moth to the flame. It is sort of like going to a museum but not really close… It is the bottom rung on the quality scale for items of artistic excellence however; I inherited an eye for that sort of thing from my mother and was educated by antique dealers from across Europe. They, one in particular, used to delight in showing me stuff I couldn’t afford but was exceptionally fine… Especially porcelain figurines. Sometimes I find a treasure but more commonly just a good buy. I won’t tell you how painful my education was and how many times I got taken. However, since I could never spend much to begin with the good experiences came to greatly exceed the bad. In a given antique mall I have a theory that there is at least one item of exceptional value that sits in a display case somewhere that is overlooked. For example I once found a Meissen Angel mixed in with a bunch of Hummel’s that had just been purchased by a dealer. He knew the value of the Hummel’s but the Meissen had a crack and was marked down to sell. I had seen a similar angel in a museum in Kaiserslautern and my heart clutched. How it got into a Midwest antique mall blows my mind to this day but it sits prominently displayed in my wife’s display case. Once a day I look at it and shake my head in disbelief. I had a guru in New York City repair it and he swore that no current technology would ever be able to detect it and offered to buy it at a tempting price. However I have also been scammed a time or two, particularly by Maxfield Parrish prints which I think I know something about but still can be taught a lesson on occasion. Photo copy technology is incredibly sophisticated and what can be done with good period paper boggles the mind. What saves me is that I don’t spend much if I’m not sure and occasionally something genuine turns up that isn’t a blatant forgery. Actually I have several forgeries hanging about that are exceptionally well rendered… They are clearly identified (On the back) for what they are but I still enjoy looking at them and it doesn’t take much to convince my subconscious that they are real. |
| Abuse of Power Before I come in for the night I have to feed the cats and fill up the wood stove. At last it has gotten cold enough that the fire can’t be stoked before dark and expected to have live coals and heat in the box come morning. If it was just the house I could easily get by filling it twice a day but the garage, while it has insulation, it also sucks up a lot of heat. I took a nap today and entered into the “Death” mode. I was gone for three hours. Working in the cold the last three days caught up and it was like being hit with a pole axe. (Whatever that is) I am still groggy. I had a nice conversation with Karen today. Sometimes, once or twice in a lifetime, you meet someone who you can network minds with. She and I are quiet different….duh! And our bio processors, while produced by the same manufacturer, were cranked out in different companies. However, they have the same connectors…. By that I mean we can work on something concurrently and instead of two hand held calculators we become a desk top. It is seamless how we work together and she brings to the table a powerhouse of talent and ability that takes what we are working on to the next level. She is one awesome lady. I find myself looking forward to the course starting. After reading material from the ports of my students I said “Wow!” In my earlier classes I had a blend of stellar, able and challenged writers. In this one they are all stellar. That doesn’t mean they will assert themselves but it does mean that if they choose to do so they have the ability to accomplish something. In the military I found that just because somebody could do something was no guarantee that they would….That was so foreign to me. Here I would struggle to become all I could be and I would see those to whom my struggle would have been effortless… fritter away their talents. It is a hard thing to watch but the higher one goes the more common it seems to become. There are worse things however than apathy. People who deliberately try to create turmoil and havoc are in my view even worse examples…When they are smart and eaten up with the wickedness you don’t want to have them anywhere around your life. I had a boss once who was like that…. When I questioned his behavior on one occasion he told me his motive was simply feeling wicked. We did not hit it off and I retired early. He was one of those talented jerks… The Army is full of them. They rise to the top because of undeniable talent but they have become corrupted and eaten up by the evil along the way. Power is a terrible and corrupting force. The only defense against its corrosive long term effects is humility and a sense of humor and the recollection of who you are and where you came from. I use the example of someone who is successful in business and begins to commingle corporate and private funds. They lose the ability to separate in their minds the difference between corporate revenues and personal revenues. At a visceral level they probably never made the distinction but they learned the difference in their accounting classes and they know better. The same analogy holds for power. As a person goes up the corporate ladder they begin to think that all the deference and bull they get told is true… That they are truly exceptional and they are free to use corporate power to influence personal matters….Its pitiful on the one hand and disgusting on the other to see brilliant people with such a remedial grasp of fundamental principles. |
| Central Characters One of my new students asked me a general question today about Central Characters. This was my reply. You hit on a good point. Let me suggest that instead of multiple, you think about having one central character. I know there are many novels that flit around with multiple central characters (CC) but for this workshop I want you to come out of it with one in mind. This doesn't mean you can't test drive some others and I encourage you to do so. In my Essense and the Stones I started out with a girl called Liope and somewhere in the middle Bedelia stepped in and stole the show. If you have read the "Girl With the Dragon tattoo," you will see that Michael started out the CC I but 'Lizbeth comes along and shoves him aside. Stephany Meyer in her twilight series had the same difficulties with her Native American buddie. These were (are) great writers and succeeded in a specctular fashion despite what I consider serious structural flaws in their works. Here is the problem. One of the reasons a reader often can't get into a book is because the CC shows up late or the story doesn't really seem to have one. A reader is looking from the outset to identify and enter into a vicarious relationship with the CC. This is especially true for a stage or screen play but holds for a novel as well. When the writer starts messing with this expectation they are asking for trouble. The way I identify a central character is.... 1)They show up in the first chapter, 2) They are in the middle of things, 3) The story revolves around them and 4) they are the object of the "Life Changing Event. "In my One Act Play course over half the students always miss the boat on who the CC is. This is where they start swearing at me and mumbling under their breaths. One, who I dearly came to love, began to question my competence. This group has some heavy hitters and there will be some pushing, shoving and maybe a scuffle or two. You're going to love it! So to answer your question, to start with just pick whoever you think is a likely candidate.... Then audition several iothers in your vignettes, test drive them so to speak... See what your muse is trying to tell you. When the course reaches the seventh week it will be decision time. However, think about it as you write your little "chunkettes"... stay fluid and don't shut out the possibilities during this developmental workshop. Finding out for sure who the CC is becomes huge after the course is over and you start pushing the pen or pounding the keys for record. That is an important part of this workshop. It will pay big dividends later in your novel. |
| A Father of Kings We had a good New Year’s Day. Linda fixed a turkey and traditional dinner and we invited Mark over. It was a feast. Then we watched some of the games that had playoff implications. Today is registration and I will be thinking about the class as I am out cutting wood. I have a friend who I am considering as an assistant, who has expressed an interest in putting her foot in the waters. I will have to ask Karen how we put assistants to the test. She is a writer from off site and I think I got her to join WDC. A very talented writer, she is. Anyway tonight I should know more about the class and some other things. It is cold outside this morning and will be one of those ice challenges. When I first retired I came home more times than I can recall with my “Ice Beard.” I have no beard now because I have difficulty when they get a certain length with itching. I’m an itcher, a tugger a twister and a puller. Hence I normally keep myself clean shaven or perhaps carry a two or three day shadow. I talked at some length with my daughters yesterday and they are awesome. My grandsons are growing and are showing signs of “gifts.” One is being recruited by the Naval Academy and is only a sophomore, however has already set some track records in his High School in Kansas. He is showing the running gene that is common in my side of the family. I used to enjoy running distance and so did my Dad. I tried to get into West Point but knew when asked to dribble and throw a basketball that I was in big trouble. Plus academically I was never a particular standout. Like Banqou in Macbeth I am rather ordinary but perhaps made a humble contribution to their makeup. My older daughter’s husband graduated from West Point and was quite an athlete in his own right. He is going to Afghanistan in March to work on a high level staff. My younger daughter’s Husband looks like a good old boy but is extremely bright and my grandsons on that side are equally talented. I will be using them as character stock in my novels. When I look at what my grandson’s inherited I see the crazy brilliance, the mixture of kindness and darkness that makes me glow with pride and tremble with trepidation all at the same time. They are powerhouses, all five of them, and I can’t help but wonder what life holds in store for them. My daughter’s and their husbands have done a good job raising them and I wish I could have been around more to watch them grow up. |
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