December 2008 Archives

I like eggnog. I'm a nog kinda guy. Like to get all noggish. As a kid my holidays were accompanied by eggnog in a half-gallon carton produced by a local dairy called Halo Farms. They operated a barn-like storefront on Spruce Street in Trenton, with a packaging plant in back of it. One wall of the store's interior had been replaced with a floor-to-ceiling sheet of Plexiglas through which I could watch the encartonment (ha! new word!) of whatever they were running through the stainless steel production line that day: milk, cream, half and half, orange juice, iced tea, or one of several different colors of juice-style drinks produced, no doubt, by exotic juice-style cows. Every December they'd package eggnog, and I'd watch an endless line of festive green and red cartons soldier under the nog nozzles on their way to the sealer. Good stuff: thick and noggy. Nog nog nog!

Nog.

Anyway. This year, I decided to make it myself, for no particular reason other than a certain boldness imparted by the smashing success of my Thanksgiving efforts. I was uncertain about it at first, not knowing whether I'd have time in the midst of replicating that Thanksgiving dinner and calling it Christmas dinner. I even bought a quart from the grocery store as backup, just in case. However, I became determined to produce my own when I saw that every brand of eggnog on the local shelves had high fructose corn syrup as its second or third ingredient. I don't like HFCS. It's weird and leaves slime in the back of my throat and mutates babies. It does not belong in eggnog. I don't know whether Halo Farms used it, but I doubt it. That was quite awhile ago, before the corn lobby began telling us that we should put corn in everything we eat, fuel our cars with it, and use it to enhance our mutual sexual pleasure. Monocrop craptacularity!

The recipe is simple: eggs. Lots of them, separated. Also, cream. Milk, sugar, vanilla extract, nutmeg, and, of course, some sort of booze, or more than one sort if you're so inclined. I used brandy, but not as much as the recipe called for, so that it wouldn't interfere with the Southern Comfort my mother likes to add to her own glass. I eliminated the dark rum entirely because she thinks it ruins everything, especially Coke.

Some recipes call for mixing some of the ingredients over low heat in a saucepan, but the one I used was all about the beating of cold ingredients and the folding of a bowl of stiff-peaked cream and another bowl of well-abused egg whites into yet a third bowl of thick yolks and sugar.

It was fantastic. And still is, because I made approximately eight billion gallons of it. Frothy! According to Wikipedia, it's supposed to be frothy. The big pot of it I made has a pale top layer of very light, almost meringue-like foam about three inches thick. You plunge the ladle through that, and then the familiar rich, yellow liquid burbles up.  If I hadn't decided to make eggnog myself, I might have gone to my grave thinking that eggnog was just some sort of thick, nog-flavored cream without the slightest bit of froth. Terrible, just terrible.

I drank a bit of the store-bought eggnog yesterday, and after a couple of glasses of my own this afternoon, I decided to try another swig from the carton for comparison's sake.

Oh. My. Cthulhu.

I could taste the weirdness of the corn syrup. The dingy flavor of the spray-dried egg yolks. The odd tang of glycerides, both mono and di. The squeak of the anatto (for color, you know). Before I'd tasted my homemade nog, the store-bought had seemed fine. Not as good as Halo Farms, but okay. Now, I tasted eggnog "notes," but it was mostly an anemic imitation. Something you'd find at 7-11, like artificially eggnog-flavored Yoo-Hoo or Nestlé SportsNog Xtreme!

A similar thing happened when I discovered Tito's handmade vodka. After that, Absolut tasted like kerosense, and I never drank it again.

Next year, I'm going to try one of the recipes that involves a bit of heat. As good as this eggnog is, it's not quite as thick as I'd like it to be, and using a bit of heat on yolks and milk will produce a light custardy type of thing, so I'll have a thicker nog underneath that top layer of foam.

It's one AM now, officially Christmas Day in my part of the world. I hope you and yours are well and happy and relatively un-snowbound, because it's a Holiday and that's when you say that sort of thing to people you don't know and have never seen. And if it's just Thursday for you, well, you know, whatever. Have some eggnog anyway. Put a lot of bourbon in it.

Bang-bang-bang.

It's amazing how much easier it is to get somewhere when you have some vague semblance of an idea about where you're going.

No, I'm not going to post every time I scratch out another crumb or two of story. But I've been in "percolation mode" for many months, so I'm excited now that the words are happening again.

Many people who want to be writers actually want to "have written." And even though the actual process of writing is work, will always be work, and will sometimes be brutal, soul-crushing work...it's very cool to arrive at a place where I am once again excited about this project.

All I had to do was destroy Seattle!

That will make sense later.

Happy Holy Daze to y'all.

I eked out about 500 words yesterday, amid the slow grind of mental machinery firing up again. It seemed best to start writing down the fresh scenes that are bouncing around whole in my head, regardless of where they belong in the tale, just to get them out and into the world as objects I can mess with. That indicates, I think, a kind of narrative critical mass: I can manufacture certain parts before the overall structure is complete, because I know where those parts are going to be needed. It's a flaky way to build something, but it seems to be working, and the more I do it the more it happens.

Like so:

          So what do you do when the head of the guy who's about to blow you explodes? What's the etiquette? That depends on whether you're alone or not, and I can't tell you what you should do if your incipient face-fuck blows up while you're at a party or in a shared box at the opera. Here, instead, are my recommendations for those who find themselves in this situation, alone.

          First: yell, "Fuck!" It's important to get this right. You can choose another exclamation if you must, but it should be short and punchy, because you're not going to have a lot of time before the red laser dot skitters across the latticework of the gazebo, seeking your skull. Next, hurtle yourself backwards over the railing, just before another ffft! happens and a burst of wood chunks and fibrous splinters erupts from where you were just standing. Make sure you get your landing right. The adrenaline will help some, but if you put a rock into your kidney you're going to spend valuable seconds with red-dimmed vision, staring up into the dark leafy canopy overhead. Then, run. Fast, and away, and try not to think too much about whether you'll feel the bullet puff your head into mist. Trust me, it's distracting.

          Keep running, and don't worry if you run right off the path and into the dark forest. You may surprise a few couples getting down to business behind this bush or that, but you'll be at speed so you won't disturb them for more than a moment or two. Head towards the lights you can see glimmering through the trees, and don't stop until you find something you recognize, like the seventy-foot tall granite obelisk from the reign of Thutmose II that's behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

          Pause here. Then remember that there's someone behind you who's trying to kill you, and run off to the right, around the south end of the Met, until you burst onto Fifth Avenue near 79^th and bounce off the hood of a cab. If you've executed all of this with exceptional skill, the cab will be unhired, and you can simply roll around the side, yank open the door, and clamber inside before the driver notices your blood-spattered shirt and jacket.

          To finish it all off with panache, make a quip to the driver so that he'll grin and forget your peculiarity. "The Costume Institute Gala is appallingly dull this year. Drive!"

          So he did. Down Fifth avenue's diode-illuminated length, while I stared at the cab touchscreen's dancing advertisements, my heart throbbing in my chest, pumping tingling blood to my fingertips and the soles of my feet, every inch of me alive, thrumming with keen panic, all thoughts stopped and vanished save one: faster. Faster. Faster.

Now, I just have to keep doing that, bang-bang-bang: build the various components and weave them together, pull the setups in the new first and second chapters through the other eleven chapters I've already written to bring everything in line with the revised narrative, then sail out into uncharted territory once I've reached the end of the current material.

Lotsa fun, if you can stand hours of solitary work with no promise of any reward beyond simply finishing the thing.

I read an anecdote somewhere about the revelations supplied by various drugs. In this minitale, a fellow took his dose of whatever and, in the throes of the impartation of divine wisdom by the universe, managed to retain enough sense and motor skills to write some of it down. In the morning, he grabbed his notepad, eager to solidify the already-fading sense of acquired wisdom and Great Truths. In a shaky, barely legible scrawl, he had written: Feet go into shoes!!!!

When I woke up at 2AM last night for no apparent reason, I started thinking about the novel to pass the time until my brain decided to turn itself back off or the sun rose, whichever came first. At some point--being not drowsy, not half-awake, but WIDE AWAKE--I got up, fussed with the laptop and wrote down some important things about the book.

In the morning, I opened the file and read what I had written:

The plan:

Intersection of the shadow group that's after Putnam (formerly Phil), Nelson's pursuit of Putnam, and Shelley's incipient love thing with Cabie. Cabie kidnapped by shadow group?

Ends up: $250M from Nelson (gov't), $250M from the Reverend. Putnam does his thing: the government ends up paying itself, and Putnam snags high-grade ghost software and disappears.

Everything hackable! Shelley's drugs, Putnam's warez.

Use grading of student essays to portray culture/world? ONLY IF IT ADVANCES THE STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brilliant, yeah? Total monster best-seller, that.

What?

Of course it doesn't make any sense to you. But that right there represents the intertwining of two major plot arcs, the proposal of no less than four plot elements in support of that weaving, the revamping of a major character, an idea that may lead to a significant structural element of the entire narrative, and at least one portion of the end of the whole frickin' book.

See what I did there? Made you think it was going to be gibberish with the lead about the psychedelic guy's revelation, and then it turns out that what I wrote was important after all.

Ah, forget it. You'll see what I mean when it's all done. It'll be awesome.

It's an obvious question, almost trite (but not quite as obvious or almost-trite as "Where do you get your ideas?")

George Orwell wrote because he wanted to expose lies. Orhan Pamuk writes because he has an innate need to do so. Stephen King writes because he believes he was made to write stories and because he loves writing them.

Some people write for another reason, and I tend to encounter it at workshops and conferences: I'm a smart motherfucker. And I'm going to write this book so that you can know what a smart motherfucker I am.

I call it the Jules Winnfield method. Check out the big brain on me!

I used to write that way. I would come up with my Big Clever Idea and spend the whole story trying to hide it, so that I could eventually reveal it to oohs and ahhs and great acclaim. The stuff I wrote that way sucked. A lot.

Kurt Vonnegut's eighth rule for writing fiction directly addresses this:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

That won't make much sense to you if you think that your fiction project is all about your Big Clever Idea. But, as a reader, I don't care about your Idea, and I don't care about how clever you are. If I'm reading what you've written, I don't even want to know you're there. To be quite honest, I don't care about you at all. Not the slightest bit. If I see you, I may stop reading. If I see you and get the sense that you want to be seen, I will stop reading and throw the book across the room, cursing you for wasting my time with your masturbatory nonsense. (Which is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I blog: there is little chance that you will hurl your computer or laptop across the room to protest my endless self-involvement. That doesn't mean that you'll finish this post, but it does mean that you will get no more satisfaction from shutting me up than whatever you can derive from clicking a mouse button. Petty victory is mine!)

People who write primarily to please themselves tend to write crap. This is not at all the same as being pleased with what you've written. The difference is one of emphasis: if you're pleased with what you've written because you're confident that it will hold the reader's interest and provide him with a satisfying experience, then the odds that you've actually written something decent are much better than if you're pleased with what you've written because there's no chance your reader will discover your Big Clever Idea before you've revealed it in the way that best demonstrates your skill and talent.

There will be objections to this. I hear, "What about mysteries?" Or, "What about science fiction? That's all about clever ideas!" First off, do you tend to remember how the murder happened, or the fact that it was Hercule Poirot who figured it out? Second: yes, there's a lot of science fiction that seems to be centered on ideas, but one of the criticisms that the genre has had to work extremely hard to overcome is that it is all about ideas or gadgets or societies organized in a particularly interesting way, with no attention paid to character development or plotting. The best science fiction is about real people (whether they're human, mechanical, or otherwise) undergoing transformation against a backdrop of intriguing ideas and wonderful gadgetry.

To put it another way: it doesn't matter how smart you are or how brilliant your ideas are if you can't craft a tale that's interesting enough to engage the reader. If your goal is to be interesting as an author, then chances are I'm not going to care about your story, because it won't be about the characters. It'll be about you.

In the same way that there is no atheist more vehement and bitter than a former evangelical, there is no critic of a particular method more earnest than a former practitioner of it. I've got a file drawer full of manuscripts in various stages of completion, all centered around a certain idea that I had, or a world that I created, or a witty conversation I imagined. It took me a long time to figure out that each big idea that I had, every world that I built, and every line of dialogue that I wrote had to serve the story. Not the other way around. It took even longer to figure out how to use that understanding in the course of my work. Every time I came to a dead end, and sat staring dumbly at the screen wondering why I just didn't give a shit anymore, it would eventually dawn on me that I stopped caring because the people in my story were serving me and my fat head rather than the story and the reader.

Telling a good tale requires a certain kind of selflessness. I'm not talking about an Eastern-style state of egoless perception and calm, I'm talking about the removal of your self, as an author, from the purpose of your creation. That purpose is to engage someone else's attention and hold it. Without that interaction, your ideas, even if they are exemplars of genius, won't get communicated.

Opinions on the matter will differ, of course, but this is my little corner of the web so I get to pretend that I am absolutely correct in this matter. Changing my perspective on my work so that the reader is foremost instead of me has resolved all sorts of problems. Why is the narrative stuck? Because I'm forcing it into a direction that will reveal this nifty concept I've got, rather than the direction that will support the unfolding of the story. Why is this character flat and lifeless? Because he's a mouthpiece for my philosophy about this that or the other instead of an individual who's developing in an interesting, tale-worthy way. Why is this project dying on the vine? Because it's based entirely on a world I've created rather than on characters who are undergoing transformations that a reader can relate to.

Sure, some people can go all Emily Dickinson and whatnot. Me, I want to be read while I'm alive. I want to give the reader something for the effort. I want to divert and entertain, to draw someone away from their everyday life and into a place that's worth visiting.

Which means that I don't write for me.

I believe it's a good sign when you have to get up out of bed at 1:30 in the AM to go find the laptop on the couch and write down a couple of paragraphs that resonate in terms of character and story, and then make a revision which solves a certain descriptive problem that's been bothering you for six months. I believe that when such compulsion is the result of lying in bed for an hour and half and thinking about the tale instead of sleeping, one can take a chance on feeling reasonably certain that somewhere deep within one's brain, the important parts of a novel are coagulating and oozing about each other in a kind of subconscious lava lamp. I believe that for some people, such sneaky oozing is a necessary prerequisite to the hours of ass-in-the-chair toil that will actually produce said novel.

I believe I will write this thing.

I believe that when it's done, it will be a good yarn.

I believe I need to go back to bed now.

Perusing Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, and getting no hits. Maybe...Deviant Behavior: a Text-Reader in the Sociology of Deviance? No...no, couldn't care less. How about Charles Spurgeon's 1859 sermon, The Blood of the Covenant? The learned reinforcement of the old man's sincere Calvinism isn't really drawing me in. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament? Flat-out uninterested.

Some Philo? Or Josephus? Perhaps K.J. Dover's definitive study, Greek Homosexuality? Not even the barest glimmer from any of them. The Meno, then? Oddly, the discussion of whether virtue can be taught, even when buttressed with geometric diagrams, just doesn't seem to be sparkling with entertaining promise this evening.

Well!

Vampire porn and frozen strawberry cheesecake it is, then.

It is in fact a test, to see whether I can post from my fabulous phone which is, functionally, a very tiny laptop.

Obviously, I can.

Witness the Awesome.




[For those interested in the technical details, the phone is a Samsung SCH-i760 running Windows Mobile 6.1, and I'm posting using the Skyfire browser.]

and I went zzzzZZZZWORRRG! and he was all "Ahh, my arm!" and I was like "Taste the heat of my lightsaber, beeyotch!" and then he did the force thing and threw a bunch of crap at my head with his mind and I was all "Oh no you d'in't!" and burned his face off with my mad skilz and then he went "Arrrrghoooo!" and fell down the ventilation shaft, so I went and had some coffee and finished up some paperwork and went home early, 'cause it's Friday and most people at the office slack off a little more during the holidays anyway.

One of the main reasons I made my recent trip back east was to do some location scouting for the novel. Actual locations for certain scenes, in some cases, but mostly I wanted to wander the streets in specific neighborhoods and soak in the bits and pieces of subtle detail that create the illusion of place in the reader's mind. It doesn't take much: a few choice details are generally enough for the reader to hang his own stage backdrop upon. Too much fussy description can have the paradoxical effect of pulling the reader out of the scene by focusing his attention on what you're writing rather than what's actually going on. Better to let him do some of the work, which will create an easy engagement with the setting that leaves a more vivid impression than a torrent of precise details.

You must choose your details carefully. I wanted to reimmerse myself in the locations and gather a nice catch of sights, sounds, and smells in my mental baleen. Because...my mind is like a whale. And details are...krill. Or something.

Instead, I spent my detail-gathering time puking. I managed one night about town, but because I failed to anticipate the next seventy two hours of brutal gastric upheaval, I was taking it easy on the observation and focused on enjoying a couple of key lime martinis (which sounded better than they turned out to be) instead of looking for sparkling prose in the streets. I anticipated returning with an SD card full of digital images, backed up by a full weekend's worth of fresh, writerly memories.

But I didn't get that, and I am thus missing what I had hoped would be a motivational bounce fueled by purpose-driven experience. This evening I eked out the first lines of a shiny new chapter two, like so:

So we did. We fled to the east, away from the cops and the mob and the flames, because Putnam's brownstone was to the east and it seemed wise to run somewhere in particular rather than just away.

Then I stopped, thinking, It would be fab if I had some vivid impressions of the evening streets, wouldn't it?

It's one of those tricks my creaking, recalcitrant brain plays. If only I had this bit of knowledge, or that particular experience, or this kind of desk chair, or maybe a proper espresso machine, this whole novel thing would be much easier, and the words would fountain forth into a work of engaging genius.

Which is, of course, a load of procrastinatory camel droppings. It's about getting your ass in the chair and writing the thing. The first draft is always shit. You polish the shit later.

Anything else is just an excuse.