There are as many theories about novel outlines as there are novelists. I've never worked from an outline, which might be one reason (among many others) that I've got a file cabinet full of unfinished manuscripts. It does not, however, explain their noisy lovemaking what keeps me up at night. Worse than peacocks in a cement mixer, they are.

When I finally decided to seek a guide and find my way out of my rut (no ordinary ditch, this was a vast untrammeled wilderness of fear and stalling, well-populated by nasty mole ratses with red eyes and dangerous leathery flying things with mocking cries and loose bowels), the first task she set before me was an outline. That didn't take very long, because I've had the bulk of the tale floating around my head for quite some time. There were only a couple of plot surprises, minor new happenings that I didn't know about.

The true surprise was the mere fact of the outline itself. It was only twenty-three pages long. But once I committed the full story to paper, I could see that it actually had a coherent shape. There was a beginning, rising action, a climax, a dénouement. I discovered that I had done a much better job of story creation than I thought. There it was: love! Explosions! Transsexual hijinks! Oh my, yes.

Prior to this, I had been thinking of an outline as a supporting structure, skeletal, something to hang the meat of the story on before sending it off to shamble about the landscape. When I finished the outline, I saw it as more of a flume, something to contain the rushing waters of the tale as they bear the reader along through high-banked curves and precipitous drops towards the end. Some authors see an outline as too restrictive, preferring to ramble along and let the story find itself as they write. But I do all that rambling in my head. Late at night when sleep flees and teases like a...fleeing, teasing thing...I review plots and, more importantly, characters. Who is this person? I would ask myself. And myself would chide me, saying, You know, she really wouldn't react this way...you're forcing her to behave in a way that serves the plot, which is nonsense. Stop it at once! Likewise, I snapped out of a near-doze and killed off an entire sub-plot at 2:30 in the morning when I realized that it was the desperate and insecure flailing of someone who lacked narrative confidence.¹ Once I had the outline before me, I knew that I'd made the right decision.

Every writer has different methods that work for them, and any Expert who tells you that This Is How It's Done is full of crap. You'll only know what works for you after you've tried a method and discovered its utility for yourself. At best, reading several variations of Successful Writer Person Writes About Writing will provide you with a variety of choices. Yes, there are certain immutable truths--writers write, James Patterson is a conglomerate, agent's assistants like chocolate--but nobody can tell you how to get your words onto your pages. You have to figure that out for yourself.

For me, this outline marked the end of the story development process. That's not to say that the plot won't continue to evolve. But the flume course is laid out now, the water is pouring down it, and I'm in ready to ride it and flash my tits at the camera during the big drops.

Let's see...amusement park metaphor...tits...yes, my work is done here.

---

¹Killing off a sub-plot is a highly technical and writerly operation that involves removing the 3x5 index card with "Headshot in the park" written on it from the center column of plotty 3x5 cards and tacking it in a lonely corner of the cork board, where it sits and thinks about what a naughty distraction it's been.

I do!

First, I failed to acquire a Time Turner that actually works (these people are deceptive thieves who need a beating). I also failed in my bid to slow the rotation of the earth, mainly because I couldn't get a decent grip on the Santa Ynez mountains. Thus! Stuck with a mere 24 hours in every day and no way to slow them, I had to make a choice, and my choice was to actually get serious about The Book.

So, with the ongoing assistance of a swell development editor who promises to kick my ass, I've got the outline outline for Walk of the Night People committed to paper. I know what's going to happen, and when, and why. I've got eleven existing chapters to revise mightily, another fourteen chapters to write, and a schedule to drive me. The first draft should be complete in six months at the outside.

I still believe that maintaining an online presence is a necessity for the mod'ren author. I also believe that maintaining a balance between public writing and private creative effort is crucial. I've been out of balance, and Writebastard was siphoning off energy that I needed to pour into my fiction. Without fiction output this blog devolves from somewhat pointless to utterly superfluous. I took the first month of 2010 to decide what I actually wanted to do with my creative life, and then implemented a plan to get it done.

Now, I am so planned and implemented. I am the most planny implementarian this side of the Tigris. I am a locus of negative entropy so deep and vast that teacups broken within three blocks of my desk reassemble themselves in deference to my creative singularity. If I moved to D.C. you would soon receive notice of your free national health care coverage and a request for tissue samples so that they could begin cloning the replacement organs you'll need when you're 114.

A very exciting time, bookwise. Even though there was nothing truly surprising in the outline--the plot's been mostly set, in my head, for a few months--putting all of the pieces together on paper was revelatory: there's a shape to the tale, which wasn't entirely apparent while I was doing the mental work. A beginning, middle, and end, a proper pattern of action and character that unfolds in the way that People Who Know About Such Things say it should. That's not to say I've conformed to some standardized method of plotting a novel. But the arc of the tale I'm telling feels like a good one. I'm done with the mental heavy lifting. Now I get to write, and have fun. Watch this space! I'll tell you all about it, right here (you are so very interested, I know).

Actually, of course you are. You wouldn't be here if you weren't. That's how it's supposed to work...unless you're like this guy Günther I met in Munich who was devoting his life to the singular pursuit of boredom. I last saw him in a café on Einsteinstraße right after the Wall came down, wild-eyed and chain-smoking shitty French cigarettes, half out of his mind with the notion that his pursuit of ennui had become interesting.

Poor bastard.

...due to the arrival of a savage bunch of tattooed Picts, who are apparently here to avenge the death of King Drust IX.

Here it is. A pale and mottled corpse-eater crouching on the still-slumbering chest of the week, picking its spotted nose and glaring at us from beneath its gnarled and flaking brows: the last Monday of the year. Come Friday morning, what is arguably one of the the largest piles of worm-ridden feces ever to masquerade as a decade will be over.¹

Early on it gave us catastrophic mass murder in New York (I had front row seats for that), then birthed two wars which have yet to wind down (I chose not to attend), and finally ended with a near-total collapse of the economy that wiped out the entirety of its bubbling gains (I invested after the pop so that I could be a voracious capitalist profiting from the misery of others and among the first against the wall when the revolution comes).²

During this decade I choked on corpse dust, bought and sold a house, pedaled around the country on a recumbent tricycle, and relocated from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, returning to the city of my birth after a 33-year absence. I acquired many books, several pedal-powered vehicles, four synthesizers, a like number of guitars, two trumpets, a mandolin, and a home recording studio. I drank a lot--to wash some of the aforementioned dust from my throat, at first--then I stopped. My mother was diagnosed with a chronic, progressive, multisyllabic disease, which means I'll be staying where I am for several years, until Science!™ produces a cure (not bloody likely) or the inevitable (quite certain).

So over the course of ten years I've arced from an impersonal experience of mass death to an intimate experience of singular physiological decline. In the middle there was travel and adventure. All accented throughout by certain baubles hung within a weave of what I persist in calling creative malaise. People who are not me can algebraically attribute such perceived stagnation to the difference between creative ambition and actual output, and be happy about solving the equation. I use that unpleasant math as a sort of motivation, although I'm sure there are other ways that are healthier for the mind and more effective at increasing productivity.

As for positives, towards the end of this decade I started making eggnog from scratch.³ I focused more on my writing and got my first publications since Home Planet News published "Where We Met" in 1995. I made some mindless pop. If I squint real hard, the index card-covered cork board in front of my face resolves into the blurry shape of something that vaguely resembles a novel. Depending on the day, I'm halfway convinced that I can actually produce such a thing, and that other people might want to read it. In general my clothing looks good, although it'd be swell if there was less of me to put into it.

Overall? There is a myriad of small things within my control. That glimmering constellation is easily overwhelmed by the world-bending things that are entirely beyond my influence. Jihad and illness occupy the opposing global and living room ends of the uncontrollable events spectrum. But as with almost all such things, their most fearsome aspects belong to the past and future. The towers have tumbled, but that azure Tuesday morning is over four million minutes in the past. The end result of an idiopathic Fuck You from the universe to my mother will take place at some unknown point in the future. Today, I watched The Incredibles at her house. I drank eggnog and made a ridiculous burrito out of leftover turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy.⁴

And that's enough, for now. I have hope that the next ten years will be an improved and creatively inspired arbitrary span of time for myself and the world. But hope belongs to the future, so right here and at this moment I am going to go into the kitchen, get a paper towel, and discreetly mop up the bit of cranberry sauce that fell onto the living room rug.

---

¹Although, to be fair, for me personally 1340-1350 wasn't much better. It started out fine enough with Edward III getting to be King and all that, but the Great Pestilence at the end kind of ruined it for me. That, and a certain syphilitic Florentine bitch who turned out not to be a Medici cousin at all and made waiting 600 years or so for Fleming to notice Penicillium notatum an absolute joy.

²And all of that was just for our first world entertainment. Among numerous other frivolities elsewhere, the Indian ocean turned reaper and killed nearly 100 times the number of those who lost their lives on September 11. But I wasn't there, so its tsunamic horror was filtered through the media and my own trauma-induced myopia.

³Through the magic of bloggery, I went and got some of that decadent stuff and am drinking it right now. I would totally give you a glass but TCP/IP does not currently have a Nog Layer. That said, this Christmas I made a kind of Frankenog by combining two previous recipes and the results, though properly rich and heart healthy, aren't the best example of my nog artistry. So maybe we'll have better nog together next year.

⁴Which is fantastic. Again, sorry: no Burrito Layer. Otherwise there would be sharing, because I like you well enough to give you eggnog and burritos.

I've had this in my head all day. A bunch of scruffy miners, standing before a looming coal tip, clenching their fists and tunelessly bellowing:

AWAYYYY IN A MANGER NO CRIB FOR 'IS BEEED THE LEETLE LORD JAYSUS LAID DOWN 'IS SWEET 'EAAARGHG!!!!

No particular reason for that mental scene, other than the season, and we all know who the reason for that is, don't we?

Yes indeed. Bertrand Russell.

A pleasant, culturally sensitive and seasonally appropriate greeting to you all (unless you're a Scientologist), and to all a good nocturnal anomaly (except to you, Roger, you kleptomaniacal bastard).

I'll be back in a few to several days.

"You'll hate school for a while, too, but I'm glad you're going to St. Regis's."

"Why?"

"Because it's a gentleman's school, and democracy won't hit you so early. You'll find plenty of that in college."

"I want to go to Princeton," said Amory. "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes."

Monsignor chuckled.

"I'm one, you know."

"Oh, you're different--I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic--you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors----"

"And Yale is November, crisp and energetic," finished Monsignor.

"That's it."

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

I like that scene because of the last line. But apparently the word "sissies" offends the delicate sensibilities of certain Yale administrators and some leaves in the local sexual letter salad:

It started before the Harvard and Yale teams flailed against each other on the football field last month; Yale's freshman class designed and voted to produce an anti-Harvard T-shirt that actually had some literary merit. According to the Yale Daily News,

The original design, which won out over five other entries, displayed an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote in the front -- "I think of all Harvard men as sissies" -- in bold white letters. The back of the long-sleeved, navy blue T-shirt said "WE AGREE" in capital letters, with "The Game 2009" scrawled in script underneath it.

But the term ‘sissies’ is considered offensive and demeaning, as well as a “thinly-veiled gay slur,” said Julio Perez-Torres ’12, a member of the LGBT Co-op.

[...]

“What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable,” [Yale College Dean Mary] Miller said in an e-mail to the News.

HuffPo's Lukianoff writes,

...yes, I understand that Yale considering banning an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote for using the word "sissies" is not the most important event in collegiate censorship this year (I think my vote goes to the Southwestern College "Free Speech Patio"). But given Yale's recent complicity in the censoring of the Muhammad cartoons in a book specifically about the Muhammad cartoons, it represents just one more mark against Yale's noble promise to allow students "to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable."

One concerned HuffPo commenter writes,

The word 'sissy' is a word that heterosexual males use to insult each other by implying that the person they are insulting is gay or effeminate. Let's not pretend it is something else.

I think your time would have been better spent writing an article on heterosexual men and their need to use the lives of gay citizens to insult each other's masculinity without a thought in the world of the human lives they insult and degrade by doing so.

He is suitably smacked down by Lukianoff, who presents the actual current Webster's definition of the word instead of the curiously unsourced "Webster's" definition offered by the commenter in support of his offense. Furthermore, the proper word these days is "faggot," and has been for quite awhile. Being beyond insult in that regard, my response to that attempted slur usually resembles "And...? What? Are you feeling experimental, darling?" In fact, the word has become so diluted that all the cool netkids are using it to mean just about anything, e.g.: "What is this faggotry?!" I blame Larry Kramer.

It is of course great fun to mock the poofy-haired slick-suited gentlemen on television who insist upon the inerrancy and unchanging nature of the Word of God as written, apparently, in the original English. Yet within Yale University, the word "sissies" exists as a similarly ideal and eternal utterance, so paradoxically unbounded by time that an already-stale modern connotation can be projected back into 1920, there to shatter all context.

Perhaps the root of the Yalie discomfort is that Fitzgerald was a Princeton man, the equivalent of an illustrious acquaintance at a party who blunders into an established relationship and creates embarrassing tension with an uncomfortably accurate witticism. But that seems too ephemeral, too subtle for an Ivy League that's become somewhat coarsened since Fitzgerald's day.

It's more likely that this is a consequence of the persistent and academically fashionable belief in the mystical and fearsome power of oppressive words. But a bit of literacy and some cultural backbone makes the world a much less frightening place, don't you think?

Here is some verse for you, by Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Jiuling.

Here, south of the Yangzi, grows a red orange tree.
All winter long its leaves are green,
Not because of a warmer soil,
But because its nature is used to the cold.
Though it might serve your honorable guests,
You leave it here, far below mountain and river.
Circumstance governs destiny.
Cause and effect are an infinite cycle.
You plant your peach trees and your plums,
You forget the shade from this other tree

Listen to it in Mandarin here, read by David Barnes.

Find other poems by Zhang Jiuling and the Tang poets in the Tang Shi San Bai Shou here.

Listen to some of them in Mandarin and Hokkien here (and look up the Chinese translations of the English titles here, so you can locate them on the audio page).

Not the whole thing, just a bit of it - the hook, say - and that bit just keeps repeating over and over, so that it's the last thing you hear as your head hits the pillow and it's the first thing you hear when the sun peeks through the blinds, and all day it's in there, it just goes 'round and 'round in true cephalic echo-chamber style, over and over, and you can't identify it, oh no, you can't remember where it came from, you think it might've been from a movie but you're not sure, see, that's the thing, you can't be certain, and then after days and days you can feel the pressure behind your eyeballs, building and building, and then you know what needs to be done, oh yes, you've got to do it, got to let that scrap of music out, baby, set that sucker free, and you grab your cordless Makita and slap a quarter-inch bit in there, and you're ready to go, man, got it against your forehead, and you pull the trigger and it pffft does nothing because it's been sitting in your freezing basement for months and the battery's dead, so you slap the other battery in there, the second battery that made it such a deal when you bought it, and you're ready to go and pffft it's dead too, so you stick it in the charger that was also part of the deal and the light goes red and you make yourself some coffee while you wait, and all the while that little musical demon is swirling in your head, circling, a little needle-clawed bastard, and then after half an hour you realize that the battery doesn't really need to be fully charged, does it, so you finish your coffee and yank the battery out of the charger and you slide it into the drill and you put the bit on your third eye, right on there, and you squeeze the trigger and skrrrrrr you left the drill in reverse the last time you used it so it skitters across your face drawing blood but! But! But! You quickly realize your error and you flip that switch and then you go go go, and the drill bores into your face with a smell like burning hair and there's a little pop! as it breaks through the bone and then it slices through the dura mater, the arachnoid, the pia mater and then schlooop it's in your brain! It's in your brain! And you're screaming, "AAAAGGH! BLUAAAGGGG! IT WAS THAT FUCKING SONG FROM 'SHREK'!"

That happens to me a lot, and it's kind of a drag, you know?

This needs to happen here now.

The Tick vs. the Tick: Part One

...more amusing than a raging, half-naked circus clown strung out on crank staggering desperately down the median of the parkway in a futile attempt to catch the gleeful trio of tumbling Russian midget acrobats who have stolen his balloon pants and his big floppy shoes?

I certainly don't think so, but that's just me.

Also, it could've been a bunch of ducks, or an ice cream truck.

I was driving pretty fast.

After the football season he slipped into dreamy content. The night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away away and went early to bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Montmartre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read "L'Allegro," by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn, that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed on the streets of Eastchester. As the wing reached its highest point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

Anywhere near me? Is there a freshly-emptied demitasse with a bit of used lemon rind on its saucer? Have your keen eyes observed a still-damp brown ring on this stack of wretched pages? Do I smell of espresso, perhaps? Is there even the tiniest hint, the barest wisp of a suggestion, that I have in fact managed to put any amount of caffeine into my body? Does my general demeanor, my carriage, my haircut, present to you the aspect of someone who has had even a passing "good morning" with any kind of xanthine alkaloid whatsoever?

No? Say that again, "No." Listen to it. You hear that? That is the sound of the negative. It is the denial of all conjecture! The definitive answer to all of these questions. And do you see this? Yes, you should take a step back, I certainly would. This is my Pre-caffeinated Stabbing Knife. It was given to me by Alfred Dyos Romani, Lord of Issington and Heir To The Fortunes of Dunleavy, who relieved a Hottentot chieftain of both the knife and his head while on holiday in Bechuanaland. Upon presenting it to me, he told me that it has a peculiar but most satisfying excess of weight towards the broadening tip--you see that, here?--which gives it a surprising and smooth carry-through.

Now, be a dear and fetch me an espresso, would you? Thanks ever so much.

Mimesis is normal, particularly in youth, and my only demur is that today's models are, by and large, debasing. In the Forties, American boys created a world empire because they chose to be James Stewart, Clark Gable and William Eythe. By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Could we do it again? Are the private eyes and denatured cowboys enough to serve as exemplars? No. At best, there is James Bond...and he invariably ends up tied to a slab of marble with a blowtorch aimed at his crotch. Glory has fled and only the television commercials exist to remind us of the Republic's early greatness and virile youth.

ALL DAIRY PRODUCTS WILL COME UNTO ME THAT I MAY POSSESS AND INGEST THEM.

I AM LORD OF ALL FERMENTABLE THINGS!

ALL WHEELS, WEDGES, RONDELLES, AND TUBS OF NATURALLY-DERIVED OR PROCESSED CHEESE FOODS ARE FULLY WITHIN MY DOMINION, YEA, FOR I AM THEIR MASTER, AND UNTO ME THEY WILL MAKE SACRIFICES OF THEMSELVES, FOR THEY ARE WORTHY OF MY DIGESTION; AND BEFORE ME THEY WILL MAKE OBEISEANCE, FOR THEY ARE DAIRY.

BUT TAKE THOU THY CHEEZ-WHIZ FROM THIS PLACE, FOR IT IS NASTY IN MY SIGHT, AND USE IT INSTEAD TO SEAL THE HULLS OF YOUR BOATS, REPAIR BROKEN WINDOW GLAZING, AND CURE THE CONSTIPATION OF YOUR WIVES AND CONCUBINES.

AND SO ON. DON'T FORGET TO WRITE ALL THIS DOWN AND STORE IT IN A DRY CAVE SOMEPLACE. IN A FEW THOUSAND YEARS, IT'LL REALLY PISS OFF THE ORTHODOX.