Hindsight on my very first novel

"These are the things we'd burn, if we remembered they existed."
From OF A DEMON (2002)

Last week I emailed my mother an apology. Some years ago I sent her my very first novel-- a 50,000 word NaNoWriMo masterpiece-- and asked her to read it. She did.

Again, Mom, I'm so sorry.

I remember the joys of that book. I started writing on November 5th and ten caffeine and trail-mix fuelled days later I had my novel. My mom sent me flowers, which my landlord intercepted. When I told the landlord I'd finished my first book she got very excited. I was also very excited. Everyone was excited. Finishing a book is an exciting thing.

Fast-forward to last week when I decided to experiment with the new "iBooks" app (Is it interesting that I wrote that first book on an iBook? Or just confusing?) I converted all my old files to .epub and loaded my iPhone. And then I had to start reading.

My first reaction: This is awful. Bless my mother for telling me she loved it. The first thing I saw was that the characters were 50% either me or my fantasies, allowing me to become a Mary Sue in my very own universe. I saw my little experiments (changing from first to third person perspective, past to present tense, allowing the narrator to butt in, using line-breaks for peculiar emphasis) and stereotypes, cliches, archetypes pretending to be well-rounded. Owch owch owch.

But something strange happened as I continued to read. I got sucked in. I started to get an idea of who had written this book, and they weren't that bad a writer after all. Inexperienced, yes, but there's evidence of real skill. The story is strong. The characters grow in depth and they're sympathetic. They're honest. The vocabulary is amazing (I was studying a minor in English Literature that had me reading Shakespeare, the Romantics, Austen, Melville-- One of my characters has a brother named Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not an accident.) There's passion in a lot of the text, and though meaning is sometimes obscured for the sake of poetry, the emotion is inspiring. Certain turns of phrase are beautiful, insightful, and unique.

Eventually I realized I love the book. It's a picture of my talent at the time and that isn't negligible. It exists. I have learned a lot since then and become something that the author of that first book would be proud of. And I'm proud of that book, because nothing that came after would have come without it.

I want to celebrate it again. I want to print it out and wallpaper my writing area with its limitless promises.

But I won't do that. It would be a waste of paper. Because it's still pretty bad, you know?

Here are some excerpts that amused me. Laugh if you must:

"Why can't it just be books, loads of books with all the knowledge anybody has ever known anywhere or anytime just right at your fingertips? Why does it have to be people?"


The Patrick Abaddon Institute is an innocent looking building, shells not being responsible for the ugliness of the oyster...


The elevator doors open. Out steps a man.
This is the largest understatement allowed by moral law.


...once in a while someone was willing to listen, but it usually ended with a school counsellor or the suggestion to "write a journal, get it out."
Some things have no words, just bright flashes of understanding.


"I feel like I've been led through understanding to complete confusion."


"Yes, alcohol was a factor. He will pay for his crime."
Pay.
Price is such a relative thing. A hand-crocheted masterpiece of design, from a New York artist with a penthouse flat, five hundred dollars. A hand-crocheted masterpiece of design, from a Chinese worker chained to their workstation, a dollar fifty. Price is not rational. It isn't fair. Nobody can tell you what one hour of your time is worth when you could be dreaming, or running, or dying tomorrow. Is that last day worth more? Children saved first, their potential for life not yet wasted and strained. Are the first few years of our life worth more? Fair. What's fair?


Within Will Hawthorne, there is a myriad of explosions.
He sees, in an instant, the city rearing up beneath him as a megalith of potential, promise, and disaster. He sees himself tied to it, one small figure fooling itself huge.

And the last lines:

Marie watches through the window as he walks down the street, turns a corner, and disappears. The thread between them stretches, slides, and does not break. It is a warm hold, a tiny link to something good.

She smiles, and turns back to the shop. The people within it glitter to her in startling rainbows of colour. Beyond, in the city, endless variations of shade and bloom move through their separate lives, mixing and clashing and complementing.

Marie opens up, past doubt and fear, stretching out of her shell, and shines.

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Photo: Stack by Horia Varlan on flickr

Friday Flash: "Somewhere Else"

"Somewhere Else"
by Jen Brubacher
Lisa found a skirt at the outlet mall off Highway 60. It was short by her standards, denim, with a pink stripe around the hip. She had no idea if it was nice.

In the narrow changing room she slipped it on past her feet and over her white legs, and held the cloth tight so the zipper didn’t snag her skin. Looked in the mirror and saw someone else. She shrugged.

She pulled off the tags, brought them to the cashier and said she’d wear it out of the store. As if ripping tags off unpaid merchandise was something normal that she did all the time. She offered her credit card and crossed her fingers as it was authorized.

The cashier offered her a bag for her old jeans.

Lisa drove to the beach and let the Atlantic lick up her white legs and the honey sun drip down on her shoulders until she realized she was going pink and ran for the shade.

Alone at a crab restaurant off Highway 1 she saw a man at the bar staring and she crossed her legs beneath the denim skirt. Dried sand brushed off her feet onto the wood slat floor. She smiled at the man and blushed deeper than her sun burn.

The days were so humid her skin was slick all the time. She stopped wearing sunscreen and tan-lines warred over her shoulders. One evening a wind picked up and took her hat off and up, over the mangroves and into the wilderness where insects shrieked together. Her eyes were raccooned with white circles.

Two postcards made her laugh. Lisa mailed one and spent an hour trying to think of another address. She propped it on a fence and took a photo: beach within beach. She longed for another within another. So many they'd never find her.

Home again Lisa pulled the skirt down over her brown legs and kicked it off her calloused feet. She stretched her shoulders back and yawned as if a week in the sun was something normal that she did all the time. As if back to work wouldn’t kill her, at least not this time.

Long trousers felt rough on her skin. Lisa looked in the mirror and saw someone else.

She shrugged.

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All right yes, I just got home from a holiday, but I promise this isn't autobiographical. Much.

Click here for my previous flash fiction.

Insanity justified

I adore this BBC article.

"Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought."

It's great because it gives a scientific explanation for what I've known all along: that my creativity, my writing, is a little bit like crazy.

It goes on to say that this may explain why some of the most notable geniuses in history have been nutty and that it may be a "barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark."

"Schizophrenics share this same ability to make novel associations. But in schizophrenia, it results in bizarre and disturbing thoughts.

UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.

'Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.'"

Look at that: Creativity is uncomfortable. Our angst is justified! I sound like I'm making fun, but honestly I find this revelation extremely satisfying. Like an alcoholic surrendering to a higher power, I'm freed by the knowledge that I'm not just doing it to myself. It's not me, it's my thalamus.

Ahhh.

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Photo: Scribble widly by atibens

The Curzon Group & Writing a series

On June 2nd I got to watch a panel of crime and thriller writers talk about their books and writing lives. The Curzon Group-- Leigh Russell, Richard Jay Parker, Matt Lynn and Tom Cain-- spoke at New Shepherd's Bush Library and entertained a good sized audience until the library closed around them.

Together they write about serial killers, assassins and SAS-style commandos. On the panel they brought up interesting aspects of writing thrillers: choosing a police protagonist over a PI, the sense of place created by a few choice words, whether you need to have visited a setting to write it, and the importance of continually giving your readers a reason to go on to the next paragraph.

One of the most fascinating discussions they had, for me, was about series. Three of the four writers were at least three books into a series and discussed the drawbacks of that as well as the excitement of getting to continue with a loved character.

They also mentioned frustration at not being able to kill too many of their loved characters, but hey-- they're thriller writers, remember?

As a fledgling novelist the choice between writing stand-alones and writing a series is still an academic consideration. I have written a sequel and I worried about spending a lot of time and energy on something that might not pay off.

But readers love series. As the panel joked, readers want to know what to expect from you, and when they do and they like it they'll begrudge you any other work. Tom Cain contrasted the type of book he wanted as a reader versus as a writer. As a writer he wanted to write something new. As a reader, he'd want the series.

I'm guilty of this. I haven't yet read anything Ian Rankin has written that doesn't involve DI Rebus. His series is synonymous with his name. This is good because I'll read anything he writes in that series. It's bad because although I often see his other books and think, He's a great writer, I'm sure they're good, that hasn't yet extended to me actually buying one and giving it a try.

Series or stand-alones, the panel proved great stories are out there. I now have my reading pile ready for the holiday season.

It looks like I'd better have a very, very long holiday.

Friday Flash: "Quota"

"Quota"
by Jen Brubacher

The writer kept his hands on his lap. He dared not touch the keyboard in case he wrote without thinking. In case he used a word and then realized it was wrong.

Ever since words had been rationed he’d been unable to start a new story.

The outline lay on his desk. Thirty careful chapters that would traverse the life of one character, from early childhood in Manitoba to her sudden death at the hands of an acrobat: a tragedy with a moral. The writer had created a brainstorm mind-map of themes— courage, betrayal, forgiveness— and it lay in a knot within a nearby notebook. His handwriting scrawled so much he had to squint to make out each concept. But that was okay. Those words were expendable. He could waste them, mangle them, and still not worry because they didn’t count toward his quota.

It was the beginning of the manuscript that froze his momentum. The first step on a journey he knew would take thousands, tens of thousands of his precious words. And what if he journeyed in the wrong direction? What if he took his character one way, brought her via the incident with the salmon when she was nine years old, and then realized it wasn’t right, he should have focussed on her relationship with the gardener? What then? The words would be gone. Culled. So many brave soldiers at the crest of a charge. Their uniforms bloody, their widows forgotten.

What if he used a metaphor that didn't make sense?

And the quota was severe. Would he have enough words left to start again?

The writer placed his fingertips on the keyboard. He tested the weight, the springs within the keys, not wanting a typo— the worse kind of waste. He cleared his throat and pushed thoughts of red ink and rejection from his mind. He took a mental breath.

“It was,” he wrote, “the first…”

He blinked. The first? But—

The writer took his hands from the keyboard and sobbed.

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This is for everyone who ever tried to write a book, or edit one. It's kind of my love letter to the editing process. Thank goodness we're allowed.

Click here for my previous Flash Fiction.

Photo: I tend to scribble a lot by Unhindered by Talent on flickr

Ebooks versus Pulp

I received a Sony Reader for Christmas. I overdosed on ebooks. But this last month I've had a few paper books to read, and I've been surprised by how it feels to go back to that medium.

I always try to finish a book when I've started it. But there's a lot to read out there and my life is finite, so if I get to 50 pages and I'm still uninterested (or worse, antagonized) I quit. Sorry, Little Women. Sorry, Gormenghast.

I hadn't been quitting very much since I got my ereader. But when I bought a few paper books again I found it much harder to keep going.

At first I thought it was because I could physically feel the length of the book. The little page number sitting at the bottom of the ereader screen is not as much of a psychological barrier as holding 600 pages for hours at a time. My ereader is also a lot easier to carry around with me than a book. I already know it fits in every purse and bag I own. It isn't difficult to balance on one hand on the tube.

Then I realized the truth. It's not about length. It's that if I quit reading a paper book, I still have the paper book. It's visible on my bookcase and I can always tell myself, "Well, I'll probably read it sometime," whether that's true or not.

With an ebook, if I don't read it quickly I'm probably not going to. It's not that I'm unable to save the file, but I lose the buzz that got me interested and it's just a filename in a long list. It's off the front page, and like a lot of information these days, it gets lost. So I'm more inclined to go ahead and read it right away. I've paid for it, after all. I want the story.

What does this mean for ebooks and paper books? It might mean that paper books still have one up on the digital: they have some value beyond the reading experience itself. But it also might mean that ebooks are in fact more valuable because I'm more likely to read them, and it's a good thing to be more about the reading experience than owning a chunk of pulp.

What do you think?

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Photos: #28/100 by northnorthwest & Webster's 1956 Dictionary by aj marx on flickr