More stuff you don't want to hear at work

When someone comes up behind you and says, "My meat is screaming."

In which I suck

I'm not very good at keeping to a writing schedule, which may have something to do with the fact that I don't have one. A million years ago (i.e., like, 15 or so) back when I was still chugging away on Dark Side, I would write a little every night. But then, I wasn't married, and probably wasn't particularly employed either. Free time was plentiful.

It took me about 17 months to write this book, which, really: is not great. Being reasonably productive, I should have done it by the end of last year. I just read back and found that I'd finished chapter 12 probably last October, so the final 6 chapters took me 8 months, after writing the first 12 in only 9. Yeesh.

Next time...

The End?

I finished Running Forward last night, or whatever it ends up being called. And by "finished" I unfortunately do not mean "completed." I mean "figuratively typed the words 'The End.'" Actually completing it will take a bit longer. Here's some stuff I still have to do before I get to that point:

I need to re-write the first half of Chapter 1, more or less. There's nothing wrong with it, but I didn't really find my voice until halfway through -- meaning, it took that long for Samantha's snarky, wise-ass personality to appear -- and it kind of drags compared with the rest of the story.

I want to add another chapter, probably right after Chapter 5. I need to establish more getting-to-know-you between Sam and Alex. I want to include another confrontation between Sam and Greg Bierko (and maybe Jaz as well), since Greg kind of vanishes for most of the story between Chapters 5 and 15, which isn't the proper way for an antagonist to act. And I want to add a scene where Sam visits the school's track circle, and maybe talks to her old coach about returning to the team once her knee has healed.

Sam's frame of mind is pretty well set by the end of the story, so now I have to do some backfilling to make it all match. That could be a little tricky: I know where she ends up, so I have to make her start off a lot worse than that, while also keeping to the correct state of emotional ennui I'd created at the beginning. It's also very possibly that I blew it a little at the end, piling on the bad a bit much. I tend to abuse my characters entertainingly, but I'm concerned this time I just forced it. We'll see.

Related to that, I've got to go over the whole thing a few times and smooth out the narration. I've been doing that anyway all along, so most of the story is currently up to snuff. Especially the parts I really like, which I've re-read many times.

I also may split the final chapter, 18, in half. Or not. I haven't decided. It isn't that it's too long; it's that too much stuff happens, and I'm concerned it rambles a little. That may be related to the smoothing that needs to be done, which is very fixable, but it's also related to my tendency -- oft mentioned here -- to blather on if I don't reign myself in. And it's also related to my having perhaps piled on the bad a little think towards the conclusion. Fortunately, the same solution will probably fix both problems.

I also may move some scenes around. I've already done a little of that, taking a brief conversation that takes place between Sam and her parents in Chapter 13, and moving it in a modified form to the end of Chapter 18 where it fits better in the narrative. I will do the same to a talk between Sam and Alex near the end of Chapter 5, but I'll have to wait for the New Chapter 6 to have a place to put it.

And...that's about it. It sounds like a lot -- even to me -- but it isn't really. Other than a chapter and a half of new stuff, it's just fixes and tweaks. That, I'm very good at. Unfortunately, I'm good at it because I do it a lot instead of, you know, actually writing new stuff.

Chapter 14, finished at last

I never actually finished Chapter 14, for the usual reasons: I had written myself into a corner of blah, and couldn't figure out how to finish it off. I just bypassed it, churning out Chapters 15, 16, 17, and now most of 18 while I waited for inspiration to strike.

*WHAP!*

Ouch. Oh hey, thanks! So I started it up again last night, and completed it just now. I never finished because I was worried I was just having the characters talk to each other without advancing the story, but I think I've taken care of that now.

Now to complete Chapter 18, and the book. This one will take some thought, since there's a Big Revelation, and I want to get it right. I'm certain I'll be massaging the dialogue there many times before I'm satisfied.

I didn't end up outlining 18, and it's going pretty good all the same. I think because I've thought about it so much over the past year, that I know more or less exactly what's going to happen. The only thing I really have to do is figure out how it's going to happen.

17/18ths finished

I finished Chapter 17 last night just before 11. It's a little rough at the end -- the tone isn't quite what I'd been shooting for. It'll take some polishing, but I'm almost done!

I may have to sketch out chapter 18 too. I might as well; I've now done it for the 3 previous chapters, and it made writing them a little easier. I have ideas for big scenes in my head for 18 -- a few of which had been there for a year or more -- but I'll need to see if they all fill out the size the rest of the chapters seem to have been, which is about 9-10,000 words each.

And even then it won't be "finished," as in, ready to send of to a publisher. The first half of Chapter 1 is a little rough, since it took me that long to find my voice. I'll probably end up re-writing a lot of that, if not all of it.

And there are some scenes I want to add, scenes that flesh out the characters a little more. For example, there needs to be a little more of Sam and Alex getting to know each other right after they meet. I'm also going to write a scene where Sam walks the cross-country course behind the school, remembering what it was like before she got hurt. She'll probably have a talk with her old track coach too, about coming back to the team in the spring if she can.

And there needs to be more of Greg Bierko scattered through the story. He suddenly shows up at Jen's party as this menacing figure, but I don't think it's set up well enough, since the only time we meet him before that is the scene with Sam's detention in Chapter 4.

There also needs to be more of Emily in the story. She's basically the axis around which Sam's misery spins, and as it stands right now she shows up when it's convenient to advance the plot, but no more.

Other than that, it'll mostly just be tweaks and smoothing out the wording here and there. All I have to do is write about 9000 more words, and I can start.

But of course it's never just the one thing

Of course, it's not just Gone percolating in my head. There's also this new idea named Ratline.

It's about a girl and her mother in 1945, who have flown to Germany to meet up with the father/husband. They have always assumed is a mere diplomat, but he actually spent the war working for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

While in Germany, she befriends a local girl and her family who are trying to emigrate, meets a young soldier she starts to like, sees the horrors of the war from the other side, and ends up stumbling onto a plot to smuggle Nazis out of Germany -- the Ratline. A plot her father may be opposing, or may actually be a part of.

That's all there is right now of that one, but it's got a lot of potential. It won't go away, for one thing, which is always a good sign.

So you say you want an evolution

I've been thinking about Gone lately, although for once not to the detriment of Running Forward, or whatever it ends up being called.

Originally, the plot went something like this: my protagonist wakes up one day to find out that everyone over the age of 18 has simply vanished from the world. The only humans left are her, her friends, her sister -- everyone her own age and younger.

The vague, foggy idea in my head was already turning this into a series of books, even before I'd written the first word. The books would cover Anna and the other survivors reacting to the loss of their parents and everything they'd known, then struggling to survive, and finally trying to figure out what had happened.

Tied into that were clues scattered here and there: all the adults she knew were acting weird the day before and the night before the vanishings; visions either her or her sister are having, of their parents, still alive and trying to communicate with them; and suggestions that some of the adults had known what was coming, and were leaving messages to try to help.

Which of course led to -- who did this? Aliens? Supernatural beings? Some diabolical, near omnipotent government experiment? And answering that question -- or more to the point, completely failing to answer that question to my own satisfaction -- has me wondering if the plot should be simpler in scope, but remain a tale of survival.

The alternate plot would only be that the adults had vanished, perhaps due to some catastrophic cosmic event. Perhaps there would be prior clues about lights in the sky, news reports about something glimpsed on radar; some kind of foreshadowing.

I like that too. And, I have to admit, it would allow me to indulge (or as much as the constraints of writing to a teen audience would allow) my penchant to abuse my characters in grisly ways. Not that the aliens-or-whatever plot wouldn't.

I like it, but I like the other one a little bit more. And that's really annoying me, becuase as much as I can come up with nefarious, semi-plausible explanations for what happened, I still can't come up with an explanation for why it happened. What would be the point of engineering a calamity like that? How would it benefit a group or a being or a group of beings?

(Of course, trying to concoct a plausible explanation for why someone would do it, while just blithely accepting that they could, might just be me overthinking this a little.)

Anyway, if I can answer that one, I'll be onto something. Fortunately, in the meantime I can keep stretching out the plot in my mind like taffy, and it will end up working no matter which way the setup finally points.

However, in the meantime I need to finish...whatever it's called. Progress on that one is...progressing.

Derek Jeter...Iron Man?

Over the weekend -- during at-bat in which he struck out against the Red Sox -- Derek Jeter passed Mickey Mantle to become the New York Yankees' all-time leader in at-bats. Here's the top 10:

1. Derek Jeter 8106
2. Mickey Mantle 8102
3. Lou Gehrig 8001
4. Bernie Williams 7869
5. Yogi Berra 7546
6. Babe Ruth 7216
7. Don Mattingly 7003
8. Joe DiMaggio 6821
9. Roy White 6650
10. Willie Randolph 6303

I'm not sure why I was surprised to learn that -- Jeter's been playing since a mid-season call up in 1995 -- but surprised I was. Since then he's been a reliable fixture at short in the Bronx, never player fewer than 148 games in an injury-free year. (In 2003 he was injured, and only played 119 games.)

He's only #4 on the Yankee's all-time PA list, because he doesn't walk anywhere near as much as the 3 guys in front of him: Mantle, Gehrig, and Ruth. Not a disgraceful bunch to be trailing, you'd have to admit.

Jeter hasn't won an MVP -- and at this point in his clearly declining career, isn't likely to -- but he did get completely hosed in 1999. That year Jeter led the universe with a 103.9 VORP, and was 4th with 8.8 WARP. In one of the stupidest results ever, Ivan Rodriguez won, with his 57.9 VORP and 8.4 WARP. Even this Sox fan can see Jeter got screwed.

It's easy to hate the Yankees -- or at least it was, before they got old and hurt; now it's just habit -- but it's not possibly to do anything except root for Jeter. I hope he plays forever, ends up owning most of the Yankee career records, and gets a good head start on his induction speech for the Hall of Fame.

Arlen Specter, D-Penn

This isn't what you'd call "surprising" news.

Specter was mildly caught between a rock and a hard place. He could either vote against WH policies, and thus risk very likely being vote out of office by his moderate constituents next year; or he could vote for WH policies, and then have the GOP throw its support behind Pat Toomey; or I suppose he could try to burn the candle at both ends, which I presume wasn't working very well for him.

I can't say this makes him look very good, not a month after vowing to run again as a Republican on a Republican ticket. If you have opinions and values, then stick up for them. I have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a move to assure he gets re-elected in 2010.

My friend Kevin, who hails from the other side of the aisle from me, to be delicate, put it a little more piquantly: "The guy is a narcissistic douchebag, pure and simple."

Hard to argue with that. The guy just basically crapped all over his political history for the sake of getting re-elected in 2010. That was no certain thing anyway -- Pennsylvania has been trending more and more moderately of late, and he was no sure thing against whomever the Democrats threw at him next year. And he was facing a hard fight against Pat Toomey anyway.

I'm tempted to rhetorically wonder if the Dems really want someone like this in their ranks, but I'm sure they'll hold their nose and be pleased as punch with their supermajority once Franken takes his seat. The Republics would do a similar nose-hold/embrace were the situation reversed.

Ahh, politics. That sausage-factory tour is looking better and better, isn't it?

RIP Pontiac

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/04/25/pontiac.reaction/index.html

GM keeps shedding marques; I don't think it's going to do a lot of good.

I personally think they killed the wrong brand this time. Instead of killing off Pontiac, GM should have rid itself of Buick instead. Buicks are completely, utterly superfluous. Except for the Lucerne -- a bizarrely nice-looking car that looks a lot like a Passat -- I can't imagine there's a single Buick car that anyone under the age of 60 would prefer over any comparable car from Mercedes or Audi or Lexus.

Of course, there only are 3 Buicks these days: the Lucerne, the LaCrosse, and the Enclave. Pontiac has -- I think; it's hard to tell -- 7 cars: the Vibe, Torrent, Solstice, G3, G5, G6 and G8. Or it might be 9 cars, since their web site lists the G5 Sedan, Coupe and Convertible separately. I can only assume the cold hard numbers won out, and 3 cars are cheaper to keep alive than 7 cars.

Not that Pontiac's current lineup is particularly worth saving. If you look at all their cars, what you see is a lot of pretty ugly rolling iron, which also all seems to look alike. Except for the Solstice, a nice sporty car I hope gets a resurrection as a Chevy, one would be hard pressed to tell any of them apart.

It's the brand that's worth saving, I think. No one thinks back fondly on the cherished LeSabre or Reatta of their youth (though the Grand National was awesome, and wow those Super Sedans from the early 50s) -- but the Bonneville, the Chieftan, the Star Chief, the Firebird, the Grand Am, even the Fiero. Call me soft, but there's something there.

GM does need to consolidate; they have too many cars in a shrinking market, and it's only going to get worse. They need to turn Chevy into the brand for all low- and mid-range cars; keep Pontiac and make it the brand of sports and touring cars (including the Corvette); dump Buick; keep Cadillac the way it is; and take all the trucks and SUVs out of the other marques, get rid of the duplicates, and consolidate them all in GMC. Saturn, Saab and Hummer are separate problems. Saturn is doing fine, through the cars are suffering from a severe case of the blahs. They need to get rid of Saab, for pennies on the dollar if they have to; sell it to the Swedish government if necessary. And as for Hummer, sell it off or let it die.

It might already be too late for GM. Chrysler might declare chapter 11 within the week, and Fiat might pick up the pieces. GM may not be far behind. It isn't going to just go away, unless people simply stop buying, but it isn't going to be a lot of fun.