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Journal Entry: June 23, 2008

I have some pretty ugly business going on with the Tulsa house, involving insurance stuff and roof problems, but I don’t want to go into detail on that, because it’s horribly depressing. If you’re curious about it, ask me sometime when I’m in a good enough mood to handle it.

Anyway, Thursday afternoon my mom and dad came in for a visit. They had to take care of the van (as mentioned previously), and had dinner plans with an old family friend at 5:00 downtown. T– drove down and we all met up near the airport at 4:30, then we dropped the van off in hourly parking and headed to the Zio’s downtown for dinner.

It was nice getting to see Theresa again, and dinner was excellent. D– joined us so he could take AB home with him (he’d offered to babysit while we went to an exhibit at the museum), but he ended up coming with us.

The exhibit is a collection of ancient Roman art from the basement of the Louvre. It’s mostly sculpture and jewelry, but they’ve also crafted a walking tour through it that’s themed and presents all kinds of fascinating historical information. It was very cool. AB’s favorite part was the relief of a cow, sheep, and pig being led to sacrifice, but that’s just because she likes animals and doesn’t quite get context yet.

Afterward, Dad and I stopped at Byron’s to pick up some dessert (as it were), and we all stayed up late watching SNL and talking. It was fun.

Friday, Dad and I had made plans to spend most of the day writing together, but I ended up sleeping in until 10-ish, and then we had lunch with Mom and T– at Pizza Hut, and then I had a dentist appointment at 1:00 (small filling), so it was 2:30 or so before we really got started, and Mom and T– got home from their thing (painting pottery at the mall) around 4:00. We did make some good progress on a story idea Dad had come up with, but I didn’t accomplish much of anything.

Friday evening we went to dinner with D– and his mom, and my little sister brought her family including the in-laws, so we had quite a crowd. We went to this barbecue place called County Line, down by the Cowboy Museum (yes, we have one of those), and it was fantastic. The food, not the museum. Fan-freakin’-tastic.

Then we ran by the Family Fun Night at OC, and AB got to ride one of the ponies. T– has pictures on her blog. Unlike Thursday, Friday was a pretty early night.

Saturday morning, T– went to a tea room for brunch with Mom and my sister. I took Dad to the Texas Roadhouse, and we brought our writing stuff (he his laptop, and me my scribblebook), but we ended up spending the whole time talking.

Mom and Dad headed home around 2:00, and D– came over with a new tabletop came called Heroscape, and taught T– and me how to play while AB was taking her afternoon nap. We played for most of the afternoon, and then he went home and I went over to B– and E–‘s to watch some mixed martial arts.

Mostly, though, we talked. I was there for four or five hours, and it was a lot of fun. I need to spend more time with them. But, then, I think that every time I spend any time with them.

Sunday morning we skipped church because we had plans to celebrate Mrs. Huddleston’s birthday with her. She’s…umm…D–‘s childhood friend’s mom. It’s a little bit of a distant connection for us, but she’s also D–‘s mom’s longtime friend, and the two of them both fell in love with AB pretty much from the start, so we’re invited to family stuff, now.

Anyway, that was at the zoo. We got there around 11:00, and it was already hot. All the girls went on the merry-go-round to start with, and rode this silly little train that goes in a short circle, and then we had a picnic lunch, and talked for a while, and then it was 3:00 and we went home.

Umm…I’m sure T– will make it sound like a lot more fun. Watch her blog for updates.

Both before and after that trip to the zoo, I spent several hours working on a markup of my sister Heather’s first novel. It’s fascinating working on Fantasy again. Her book is a good one, too, so it’s fun to have a hand in that.

After I finished that, around 5:00, I invited D– over for dinner and called in a take-out order to Ole. We ate, and then spent the rest of the evening watching Boston Legal. We’re ten episodes in. It’s…fascinating.

I also had a couple truly bizarre dreams this weekend, but I won’t try to explain them here. Suffice to say, they have me thoroughly weirded out.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Sleeping Kings update

I’ve posted periodically about my plans and work on the series, since I finished Josh’s story last July (including, of course, obnoxiously thorough coverage of my work on Sarah’s story during National Novel Writing Month). But I just put together a single post on the old SleepingKings blog describing the current state of things, in case anyone is curious.

You can find it here, in case you don’t have the site bookmarked anymore.

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Journal Entry: June 4, 2008

Yesterday I started work on a review and markup of my sister Heather’s novel, Light in the Darkness. It reminds me of the stuff I wrote when I was younger — not in quality, because she’s made a really good manuscript, but in…I dunno. Message.

It’s fantasy, driven by the Christian myth. It’s not exactly or preachy (or, rather, it is in places, but only in a first draft sort of way — it’ll be easy enough to clean that up, and she’s wanting to clean it up). The book isn’t evangelical, not even as much as Lewis’s, stuff, but it’s still heavy with the fundamental ideas of a god active within the world and pursuing a highly localized agenda.

In fact, that specifically describes the plot of my first novel, The Scorekeeper. The plot is much different, but the feel of it, and the underlying theology of it, is remarkably similar. It’s…well, I’ve just recently read through all my old posts about the world as our dirty human sandbox, and I don’t personally believe in a god interfering in the world that way anymore, so it’s even more bizarre for me to deal with it in a novel form (and recognize so much of my own old agenda there).

Which is all to say, the experience has been a weird one. The book is good, though, and I’m excited at the opportunity to help her make it better. Dad ended up facing almost exactly the sorts of problems I’m stumped by, so apart from cleaning up his verb forms (which is boring work), I didn’t have a lot to offer him. Heather’s issues are an entirely different set, and one I’ve successfully dealt with in the years of my rewrites of Taming Fire, and it’s not a hard problem to fix. It’s always nice to feel useful, and I can definitely be useful here.

Anyway, I started on that yesterday. I also ate some delicious lasagna, dropped off a movie at Red Box, picked up some McDonalds desserts for us, did the dishes, and played with AB. That pretty much describes my evening. After AB went to bed we watched a couple episodes of Lost and I played AoC for an hour longer than I should have, but it was a good time.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Writing Workshop: Verily. Verily

An easy rule in good writing (or, specifically, rewriting) is this:

Steadfastly avoid using the word “very.”

Furthermore, when you go to cut it out, try to resist replacing it with a more specific adjective (“vastly,” “immensely,” “extraordinarily”). Any of those is better than “very,” but they don’t dodge the problem. It’s much, much better to say “She moved at a jog” or “She moved at a sprint” (see how much control over the visualization that gives me?) than to say “She moved at a very fast pace.”

There is a perfectly explicable reason behind the rule. When you are narrating a story to someone, your goal is to make them believe it. When you say, “The castle was big,” as the narrator, your goal is to make the reader think of a big castle. And, helpfully, the reader’s fist instinct is to believe you, and imagine a big castle. You can say it was “enormous” or “monstrous” or “ponderously large” and all of those evoke slightly different variations on the mental image. However, when you say, “The castle was very big,” it doesn’t actually make the image any bigger. “Big” already told the reader what to imagine. When you say “very big,” the reader’s first reaction is “How big?” And, immediately on the heels of that comes the thought, “Wait, how big was it really?“

In other words, the effect of adding “very” to any description in text actually serves to make the reader question the authenticity of the narrative. Your goal as a writer is to make the reader believe you (except in rare and artsy-fartsy circumstances), and by instinct the reader does, right up until you toss in “very.”

You can get into even more trouble using words designed solely to convey authenticity, throwing in “honestly” and “truly.” It’s natural for writers to do this — it’s exactly how someone would convey intensity when telling a story around a campfire — but there is a vast and inescapable difference between a campfire story and a novel.

It’s not just a matter of style or voice, either. It’s a matter of psychology. When your audience is reading a story, they process the information provided to them in a fundamentally different manner than they use when someone is telling them a story in person. Good speakers often have the same problem as good storytellers when they try to write down a story, because the rhetorical tricks that people use in speech, even employed flawlessly in book, just don’t work the same way in print. In fact, effect is often the opposite of what you intended.

Because, just like with “very,” when your narrator says, “honestly she was relieved that he had fainted,” the reader’s immediate reaction is to think, “Wait, how honest is that really?” And that’s the opposite of the effect you want. That’s the reader questioning your narrator, which means for a while he won’t believe anything the narrator tells him.

Exception!
Whenever I give rules on the construction of sentences (and, just, generally the way you say things in a book), there is a major exception in place for dialog. In dialog, your only goal is to realistically represent the way people sound when talking. You can do characterization by having a character use weak verb forms. You can cast doubt on the credibility of a character by having him say “honestly” and “truly” every other sentence. You can use mixed metaphors and sentence fragments all you want in dialog, because it’s supposed to sound how that person sounds, and most of our bad writing habits come from perfectly acceptable speech.

So you don’t have to go through your book and delete every single “very,” because some of them will be in dialog, and people say “very” all the time in speech. Actually, that’s an important point. The reason we don’t bother teaching people (other than writers) to avoid “very” is because you don’t have the time to pick the precisely accurate noun and verb for every sentence when you’re rattling off ideas one after the other in a conversation. That’s also why I clarified at the top of this post that avoiding “very” is a rule for rewriting. It is perfectly fine to use in a rough draft narrative, but needs to be cleaned out in the rewrite, when you do have time now to pick the right words.

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Fostering Creativity

I just read an excellent article on fostering creativity, and I wanted to share it here, for my own reference and for any of you interested in the topic.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-creativity&print=true

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The Magic Architect

Okay, I keep reminding myself that the whole point of my blog migration was for my own personal archives, and that it’s not an excuse to make you guys reread all my old posts, because how boring would that be?

But, for anyone who wasn’t reading my blog back in 2006, I do recommend that you read my short parable “The Magic Architect.” I’m not saying it’s the best thing you’ll ever read, but it did get a pretty strong reaction from those who were reading at the time.

As I go through all the posts, cleaning them up, I’m rereading them all. It amazed me how much I still seriously believe the things I wrote back then, even though some of it already struck me as college-age idealism at the time.

It also continues to astonish me how substantial my blog was, back before I turned it into a diary. That makes me a little sad. But, then, it also makes me glad to have these old writings saved somewhere — that, at least for a time, I was writing these sorts of things. So at least there’s that.

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Journal Entry

Okay, it’s done. They’re here. My blog is now 232 posts more content-rich.

I’ve got at least a week’s work ahead of me, double-checking them all and adding tags, but it will be fun work. I always enjoy reading through my old material, even when it’s just diary stuff.

So…hmm. Let me start with this. Whenever T– goes over to someone’s house for the first time (and more so back when she was just out of college), and they know she’s an interior designer, the first thing they say is along the lines of, “Oh, god, you must think this place looks terrible.”

Not because T– puts on superior airs or anything. It’s just a common response to specialists. Anyway, that’s always been kind of a sore spot for T–, because she doesn’t walk into a house and just immediately start judging it. She can look with a critical eye when she’s working (or someone asks her advice), but she’s not in that mode all the time.

I’m exactly the same way with reading. I don’t read through every book I pick up looking for the mistakes, unless I’m specifically working on editing that book. Sometimes bad story elements will jump out at me, but they should for anyone who regularly reads (or watches) stories.

So, lately I’ve been reading The Cat Who books, as I think I’ve mentioned, but I’d put that on hold to do the markup of Dad’s novel. Now, obviously, while doing the markup I was in editor mode, and since I finished that and picked up the next Cat Who book, I’ve noticed it hasn’t gone away. I read every sentence in the book and think how I would rearrange or rewrite it to make the verb stronger.

It’s rather distracting. The book isn’t awful (although the writing is kind of weak), but I’ve gotten in the habit of giving advice and now it’s kind of got me in its grip. I’m just glad I’m not reading one of my favorite authors at the moment, because that could be depressing.

Anyway, yeah, yesterday I read a couple chapters of The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern over lunch, picked up AB from E–‘s after work (because T– had spent the day working in Tulsa), and then completely decided to skip the gym. I’d done my running on Monday, and I just didn’t feel like going.

Instead, I hit the mall and picked up some new running shoes (that I’ve been meaning to get for a couple months now), then had dinner with T– and watched an old episode of Lost, and then headed over to D–‘s place to check out Age of Conan, the new MMO. It’s pretty dang sweet.

I got home late, and got up late this morning because of it. Still, way worth it.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry

After work yesterday, I spent a while on the phone with my dad, discussing his book. He’s deeply embroiled in trying to find an agent, and I’ll probably do a couple posts in the near future talking about that.

Anyway, as part of his quest, he also asked me to do a thorough critical and editorial review of his NaNoWriMo book, Chop, Grind, or Puree. I’m about two thirds done with that, and we spent nearly an hour discussing the issues with it.

Overall…it’s good. It’s way too good, actually, for a first novel written in such a short timeframe. Completely unreasonable. He’s trying to do a little too much with it, I think, and needs some narrative focus, and there’s some minor but persistent problems that are just there because he didn’t spend four years getting a writing degree. But, for the most part, it’s excellent.

I got off the phone around 5:45 and found D– and N– waiting in my living room. We went out to Freddy’s for dinner, and then K– and N– went to church and D– and I went back to my place to finish up some software installation on my computer. That took less than half an hour, though.

Afterward, we watched a couple episodes of New Amsterdam, but it was disappointing. We swapped it out for The Best of Steve Martin from Saturday Night Live, and it was a major improvement. That’s a long collection, too.

While we watched TV, I was working on my blog migration project — writing a script to cleanly move all my old Xanga posts over here. Parts of it turned out to be much easier than I’d expected. Other parts are proving truly stubborn (particularly logging into Blogger via script). K– showed up just when I was getting supremely frustrated with Xanga, and showed me how to fix it. I just sent him an email about my current supreme frustration with Blogger, and I have no doubt he’ll make fixing that look easy, too.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry

Yesterday I got home from work and learned AB had just gone down for a nap, so I needed to kill an hour before we went to the gym. I spent most of it talking to T–‘s mom and then my dad, but I also wrote B– an email that I may come to regret. I dunno.

After our workout, we stopped by my sister’s place on the way home, because she had a present to give me. It was a silly little something — the toddler toy out of a Taco Bell kid’s meal — but it was a special little bit of nostalgia, too. It was a kid’s book with some silly little song that Shannon and I had both learned at Foyil Elementary School, and now I’ll be able to teach it to AB. How fun.

After we got home, I spent most of the evening working on my game and watching TV with T–. I keep finding opportunities to fix things that have been irritating me, but that aren’t on my To Do list. So my list of accomplishments gets longer and longer, but the completion of the project stays just as distant. I suppose that’s normal in construction-style projects (as opposed to creative projects, where you start at the beginning and head straight for the end). Programming is tricky that way, blending the two styles in unexpected ways.

I got to bed early enough, and had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a while.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry

Okay, obviously the waking up at 5:00 to jog thing was a bad idea. I’m sure everyone could see that coming, but I let optimism win out over reason.

The problem with hitting the snooze button once is that it makes it so much easier to hit it the second time, know what I mean?

I only woke up once during the night last night, but when the alarm went off at five I set it for six, and when it went off at six I set it for seven, and I didn’t really get up at seven. When I did finally get out of bed, I rushed through getting ready and got to work, instead of taking the morning off and going for a jog (like I did on Tuesday).

I don’t know what the solution is. I guess I’m going to get back to working on getting up right at six and getting to work on time, and find time later in the day for my jogging. That’s a little worrying, because I know I’ll have trouble being consistent at it, but I’ve done a good enough job going to the gym that maybe I can manage. If nothing else, I’ll just go back to aiming for five days a week at the gym (something I was planning to do a week ago).

Yesterday after work we went to Jason’s Deli for dinner. I’d been wanting to go for a while, but there’s not one terribly close to home or work, so it always made sense to put it off until we could get together with K– and N– at the one by their place. It was a little tricky working out the timing (and leaving enough time to get to church afterward), but we managed.

Afterward, I called B– and E– to see if I could come hang out, but B– is working evenings all week and E– was planning on going to bed early. Alas and sadface. I settled for doing the dishes and then working on my game while T– and I watched Lost. We’re into season two now.

I got a lot accomplished. Strongholds are now growing and changing over time, much like the character does. I’d guess I’m at about 70% of gameplay functionality, but when you factor in that I had to build the entire UI to get to this point, I’m probably closer to 90% done with the project.

Writing a game is remarkably like writing a book. The hard part is not coming up with an idea, or putting in the many hours to see your vision take shape. The hard past is putting in those last few hours to actually finish it. This particular game isn’t particularly good. I wrote it entirely on my own, in less than a month, using some pretty crappy tools. I don’t necessarily think anyone will ever spend an afternoon playing it and having a good time. Still, I want to see it finished, because I’ve worked on lots of programming projects before, and lots of those were games, and I’ve never actually gotten one done.

Anyway. Things are things. Maybe today will turn out good.