It’s Impossible to Edit My Own Writing!

I’m in the process of editing one of the three most complete books I’ve published: The Music of the Stars, and I’m seeing terrible, embarrassing mistakes of all sorts!

I have read this book at least five times, since it was published in August 2015; I love the story, despite its flaws (about which you can read elsewhere), but in spite of intermittent corrections and repairs, there are still errors; sometimes entire words missing.  I read a paragraph, and I’m at the next paragraph before I feel an odd sense that something is wrong, and backtrack.  Evidently my mind puts in the missing words, and I ‘see’ what I want to see, rather than what’s actually on the page.

A few weeks ago, I had a sudden recurrence of a craving to have one of these stories actually printed out, on paper, and in my hands.  I contacted a friend who works at a printing company, and she said, sure, send it over; she would print it in paperback form, or at least send me a cost estimate.  It’s going to be some 600 pages (mostly because I have not had it professionally edited; most editors would slice out massive chunks of it), and I would have to think long and hard whether I could afford to print out a single copy.  It’s expensive to print out a single proof copy; only the fact that a few hundred are printed out makes them affordable at paperback prices.  Also, my friend is very likely to print the book out on fairly good paper, rather than the typical crap on which mass-market paperbacks are printed.  Also, I have to get ready a nice cover image at high resolution, because this girl is a perfectionist, and she will pester me until she gets a cover image up to her standards!

Oh well.  Stars is full of impossibly nice people; one reason that I love to read and re-read it.  Interestingly, it seems very much as though the typical reader is not happy reading books full of nice characters!

Kay

Philosophical Problems in Writing Fiction

When I'm zooming along, writing a story, unexpectedly a spiritual issue raises its head.

I'm not at all a religious person; in fact, I am probably closest to being a complete agnostic, or more accurately a don't-care-ist.  It's not that I want to actually declare that there is no god, but it seems very much a non-issue.  But sometimes it becomes important for one of my characters to at least think about what drove him or her to do something.  Of course, this makes me have to think about it, and I have to temporarily suspend not caring.  For instance, I think of Helen as being someone with strong moral values that flows from her religious upbringing.  But her mother is dead, and her father is probably an agnostic, though he never gets asked the question.  But Helen has strong feelings about things that seem to amount to a de-facto religiousness, and I have to write appropriately.

Most of my other protagonists are essentially non-religious.

Jane, who starts out being a reluctant rebel, quickly reveals herself to be an extremely empathetic woman, who simply can't turn away from a person who needs help.  She likes to attend church with her girl friends, but simply to enjoy their company in yet another way.  I think she connects church attendance with domesticity, which she craves.

Maia, the slave in Prisoner, is a sort of religious cynic.  Her approach to religion is to consider it a cultural thing, and a soothing ritual.  She urges the princess to allow her and her fellow slaves to observe the midwinter Festival of the Sun, simply as a comforting ritual.  Remember, this is the Bronze Age, and most people were not accustomed to thinking about religious philosophy.  Of course, she was in exile, and I considered that she could easily believe that both her gods and the gods of the local people were in charge, each in their own way.  Complicated.

Alexandra, the young queen in the story of that name, is a passive Roman Catholic.  (Catholicism has evidently survived into our distant future, and is the state religion in this story set on a colonized planet several centuries in our future.)  Being young, and her responsibilities occupying most of her thought processes, with just a little mental energy left over for her to worry about her personal relationships, she has absolutely nothing to spare for religious conjectures.

Helen in The Music of the Stars is essentially the same Helen as in the Helen stories; she is just technically a different person, because the facts are not consistent.  The future of Stars is much more front and center than the future of Alexandra, for obvious reasons.  In Alexandra, the fact that the story takes place on another planet only serves to support the fact that it isn't Earth.  In Stars, the environment of Space, the fact that they're traveling between the stars, is central to the background of the story: we need new thoughts to handle these circumstances!  So Stars-Helen's philosophical base is probably very much like my own: the moral principles that religion supplies —especially Christianity, since that is the most familiar— are crucially important, because shipboard society is so fragile, but the superstitions that accompany religious beliefs are a mere nuisance.

Lalitha, in the Helen stories, and her sister Sita, are a pair of Indian girls, sisters, who are closely involved with Helen and her activities.  Lalitha believed in a very personal god, or rather goddess.  Without consciously meaning to, I emphasized the fact that Lalitha saw, in Helen, the goddess Saraswati.  This is not too far-fetched; becoming a vehicle for one of the gods is something that many Hindus perceive in people they feel are good, or being good for a particular purpose that they themselves might not be aware of.  Because Helen was so good and kind to Lalitha, and because she seemed to glow with unearthly beauty, (and I always imagined Helen as being larger than life,) she immediately concluded that the goddess was residing in Helen.  It was always temporary.  Sita was an outsider to this whole Goddess business, except that she was horrified when Helen cursed the goddess on one occasion.  (Helen disguised herself as a fictitious actress, Sharon, in order to act in a movie that might have compromised her reputation.  In the end, her reputation bites the dust anyway, for a mostly unrelated reason.)

Christine and Kelly, in Christine's Amazing Christmas.  These are two young girls, around 15, who are chosen to sing in a Christmas choral festival.  They would consider themselves mainline Christians, but ones who are just beginning to look closely at what that means, and how they feel about it.

Of course, each book contains numerous characters, for instance the Czech model, Sofia, with whom Helen's sister Tomasina makes friends over the Internet.  Sofia turns out to be an utterly affectionate young woman, a total doll, as they used to say in the fifties.  I get the impression that they don't take religion quite as seriously as we do, out there in Eastern Europe; again, it is mostly comforting ritual.

Kay

The Dark Materials Trilogy (Golden Compass, etc.)

I was reading The Subtle Knife a couple of days ago, and was once again caught up in the story.  The one thing I regret is that my mental image of the central characters of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel, as well as Lee Scoresby, are all dominated by those of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Sam Elliott, but honestly, there isn't that much regret on that score.

If you haven't read the books, you should; Philip Pullman is an excellent writer.  The characters are wonderful, and likable for the most part.  But that's not saying much; I think my own characters are just as great, but this next component is what I struggle with: the story.  Pullman's story line is brilliant.

I picked up the last book in the trilogy: The Amber Spyglass, and to my disappointment, the narrative gets a little confused, especially in the parts with a lot of action.  Despite everything, including the highly ambitious philosophical background, the trilogy seems to be a success.  I'm still not through the last book, and I must confess that a complete endorsement of the trilogy must wait, because the end of a large work of fiction must be reasonably satisfying, to receive a star.  In a short story, the ending is almost everything, but not so in a novel.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here are the word counts of some of the more interesting fantasy series as reported by https://griffinpauljackson.com/ :

• His Dark Materials (trilogy) by Philip Pullman – 329,000
• Lord of the Rings (trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien – 455,000
• Harry Potter (seven-book series) by J.K. Rowling – 1,002,000

Writing merely a long book is not a praiseworthy achievement, but I found it difficult to write Music of the Stars, 236,000 words, and Alexandra, 329,000 words.  Helen, the piece of writing with which I began is reported by Word as 1.3 million words, not including some enormous gaps in the middle, for which my careless editing is to blame; I ripped out vast chunks of text before replacing it with something decent, and now I can't remember what's supposed to go in there.

News and Commentary

Hello everyone!

The Eclipse
I ventured forth to try and get a glimpse of this thing, but my eyesight is poor, and everywhere I tried, I could only see a blurry image, so I gave up.  As soon as I got home, it began to become overcast, and that was the end of that.  I must place on record that I have seen an eclipse some years ago, and it was very impressive.  I had some sort of equipment then, like a darkened glass, which really worked well.

A local support rally
The progressives in our town got together in a quiet town park, and I quietly attended, trying not to be very visible.  I have a retiring nature, and the last thing I need is to be identified as one of these "libtards" who are supposedly destroying American society for everybody.  I'm not sure what to make of such claims, but more on that later.

I was deeply moved at what happened at the rally.  It was not called a rally, simply because that is almost an invitation for anyone opposed to tolerance and racial harmony to come out and disrupt it.  There was no march, no slogans; only appeals for reaching out, forgiving, and patience, and (brace yourself) love.  I never thought of myself as a very loving person, but I began to remember the mood of love and peace from the seventies, just as it was beginning to be shut down in the eighties.  But warmhearted people are still out there, trying to spread peace and love, but some of this seed falls on barren ground, as they say.

What conservative ideologists have to say
I discovered a paperback for sale in our local supermarket, outlining what one conservative writer thinks is happening in the US.  He says that
(1) Liberals have gone overboard about animal rights.  Obviously (he says) pets and animals do have some rights, as they would in any decent society.  But it looks as if some people want animals to have the same rights as people!  This is true, and perhaps it is this sort of thinking that is not yet widely accepted that bolsters the notion that liberals are running away with everything.
(2) Liberals (he says) have some arbitrary principles about how things should be done, and they are forcing everyone to fall in line with these.  I suppose he means things like marriage for same-sex couples, and bathroom privileges for trans individuals, and so on.  Well, we were on a roll, but some people are frustrated to be on the losing side.  It is no longer the losing side; it seems that the present government is comfortable with repealing many of the most progressive laws that were put into place in the last few years.  This is the danger of going far and fast; everything can be undone.  If you thought Obama was moving too slow, you realize now that consensus building is a very important thing.

Finally, it is clear that conservative businessmen are convinced that the Liberals are taking all their wealth.  No, it is not the liberals, it is their fellow-conservatives.  When the government takes money in the form of taxes, it is spent, as wages, social services, infrastructure-building (construction), education, libraries, etc.  That money is spent in turn by people to buy various goods and services, which of course enrich other businessmen.  In contrast, when businessmen and other fat cats are allowed to keep their money without paying taxes, it sits in their bank accounts, making them happy, but out of the reach of their fellow-conservatives, who are anxious to increase their wealth.  Big money, is of course, at pains to convince the people that the money simply disappears into Government coffers.  If it did, we would not have such a deficit.

Work
I had taken on fewer and fewer teaching jobs over the last few years; I was getting increasingly frustrated with the abilities of incoming students.  A few of them are very good, but the vast majority of undergraduates are difficult to teach.  I must leave it to more capable people than myself to push through the material that they need to be given; I certainly can't do it.

Personal News
I don't like to reveal too much about myself, nor do I like to burden my readers with things that they would probably not be concerned about.  Suffice it to say that I had some minor health problems, but I am bouncing back pretty well.  I have not lost my sense of humor, yet, and I will start writing again in the near future.

Reading
You probably realize by now that what I love to read is books I have already read, and the latest are the books of the Anne of Green Gables series.  The first book was crafted brilliantly, but the remaining books are also amazingly fresh and rewarding to read.  Lucy Maud Montgomery had a delightful sense of humor, and I have to admit that she was able to create a variety of characters that really are three-dimensional, by which I mean that they were distinctive, recognizable types, with consistent characteristics and dialect that she carefully used to keep them alive all through a book, and all through a series.  And, of course, the younger characters aged very plausibly.  I know how hard that is to do: to make the descriptions of a character, their nature, their personality, their spoken idiom, all age continuously through a story in a plausible way!  Of course, the books were originally intended for young people.  But there is plenty in them for a mature reader to admire and appreciate.

Kay

Tricks Authors Use: perhaps we should reexamine these

It’s been a long while since I wrote about fiction writing in the abstract.

I was visiting at the home of a friend, and stayed overnight.  In the morning, I came into their television room, to find a particularly violent episode of a TV series playing.  I had seen earlier episodes of this series in another location, and I began to think about how TV writers become successful.

Success in TV series writing comes when a TV series grabs the viewers’ attention over several episodes, ideally an entire season.  How does one do that?

Increasingly frequently, at least some writers seem to be using hate as a tool.  How?  They create a character, or an incident, calculated to trigger intense indignation or anger in the viewers.  Of course, this has been a time-honored ploy in literature: you always make a favorite character have to suffer something really horrible, and that drives the plot along.  But now, with scores of writers competing for the attention of a fickle audience, the less talented among them must invent increasingly horrible things to happen to their heroes, in order to keep their viewers angry enough to tune in to the next episode.  On top of everything, drugs, crime and violence in reality seem to compete with fiction to be each more horrible than the other, so what with life out-horrifying art, TV viewers are seeing an fearsome volume of harshness and cruelty on the small screen, and inevitably, the audience becomes jaded, and inured to cruelty.

I, myself, have never been able to create a truly despicable villain.  This probably accounts for how little success I have achieved!  Still, I despise this whole business of calculatedly creating a villain in order to make a piece of fiction successful.  I think a story in which the cruelty is incidental is superior to one in which the cruelty or horror is calculated to arouse the desire to see retribution within the audience.

So, if there are authors among you readers, please consider toning down your imagination for horror, and deliberate cruelty, or ruthlessness.  It is a tough assignment, especially in these days when ruthless criminals are a dime a dozen; we almost have to invent a super-ruthless criminal to make any headway.  But don’t; the cost is too high.  My heart quails to imagine what psychic damage must result in a young person who sees senseless cruelty day after day.

Kay

A Unique Heroine from the Discworld

I decided to read a book by the late Terry Pratchett last week, and it featured one of Pratchett's most unique characters: Sybil Ramkin.

This is a spoiler, but the story is about the first encounter between Sam Vines, the head policeman with a bad attitude, and Lady Sybil Ramkin, a sort of local aristocrat cat lady, except that her passion was dragons.  She had scores of what were described as swamp dragons in her dragon kennels, and was a local authority on the critters.

There's a lot more to the story than that, but we hardly ever read more detail about Lady Sybil than in this book (except for one other story, Snuff, where we hear a lot about Lady Sybil as well).  There are leading female characters of many kinds that I have seen: the ultra-girly heroine who clings to her man or her woman, the feisty-but-feminine woman who is always ready with a cutting remark or a piercing glare; the tough woman who never gives up and is a match for most bullies; the elegant, sarcastic woman who is entirely above brawling with anyone; the motherly (or older-sisterly) woman who fiercely defends her brood and all underdogs; and the angry heroine with her back to the wall, who fights back like a cornered rat.  But Sybil Ramkin is a little different from any one of these.

Sybil is a distillation of all the delightfully ultra-healthy female aristocrats to be found in British literature; the Tally-ho types simply radiating enthusiasm and fabulous complexions, but are still inexplicably unmarried well past the age at which one expects marriage to take place.  They're not tomboys, exactly, but there's a little of that.  They're more likely to be indignant or occasionally censorious than bitter, or sarcastic, though Lady Sybil has been occasionally known to resort to sarcasm when taken off her guard.  She is Fiercely protective of Sam Vimes, until they're married, and they're blessed with a baby, when Sam is expected to take second place to the precious little brat.  Pratchett describes her as big, and in this book one gets the impression that she is bigger than is good for her.  In future stories, he moderates this description and conjures up an image of an ample sort of girl, but not one for whose health we feel anxious.  There is one odd feature of our fabulous heroine, namely that since her hobby is the breeding of swamp dragons, most of her hair has been flamed off, and she has to resort to wearing wigs.  I personally don't have a problem with this, but it conveys an impression of someone who is just a little more out of kilter than I'm willing to support in a heroine.  I imagine a hurriedly put on wig, and my mind rejects it.  If you're going to wear a wig, it has to be fastened down with the utmost care, and I don't see Sybil taking the time for it.  Finally, he describes her as having a big, fruity voice.  Booming is the word he uses.  Ok, for a piece of humorous fiction booming could be excused, but for a convincing heroine I think we need someone who may look like Liv Tyler, but has a voice more like Dame Maggie Smith, but louder.

It is interesting how Pratchett manages to support the fact that his character is an aristocrat.  If you think about it, the biggest tool in the aristocracy toolchest of an author is the aristocratic family.  Here, Sybil is an orphan, and her relatives (if any) appear to live far away, in Quirm, or Klatch, or wherever.  So Sybil has to be aristocratic all by herelf, supported only by old family retainers, and various ancient heirlooms scattered about her large castle.  Nevertheless, Pratchett is able to create almost the most aristocratic aristocrat in the entire Discworld Saga in Lady Sybil Ramkin.

Lady Sybil and Captain Vimes marry, of course, and they're blissfully happy; Pratchett goes to some lengths to portray this marriage as blessed.  And, to my mind, this unlikely couple is one of his most fortunate inventions.

Kay

News from Kay

Due to some serious injuries, for which I had to have surgery, I have had to take an extended leave of absence from work, without pay.  On one hand, this would seem to suggest that I have a lot more time for writing, but unfortunately it is very painful to type at the computer. I suppose I could try some voice-to-text software, but at the moment I'm just sitting here being sorry for myself!

I do think out plot ideas during these down times, so it's not all a complete waste.  But forced inaction is very bad for an author, at least this author.

More later,

Kay  

Trying to be a whole person in Trump’s America

That heading says it all, doesn’t it?

We all have to battle our tendencies to lie, and cheat, and be selfish, and take mean advantage of weaker people.  Some of the weakest people I come across are my students.  Some of them cannot do a single thing for themselves, but I just can’t make myself do those things for my students, because there’s a nagging feeling that sooner or later, these kids must learn to take matters into their own hands, and get their own answers.  But few of my colleagues really grapple with this problem; they just adopt, wholesale, some approach someone else has advocated.  I can’t be that objective about the matter.  When I throw them to the wolves, I want to have them watching me throwing them very carefully!

Our public radio station is now hurting for money.  At first, I thought, well, the more I support the station, the less the State and the Federal Government is going to support it.  If private individuals support it entirely, the government has that much more money for its slush funds, and of course they will just run out and lower taxes.  Apparently all the friends of members of State Houses are the super rich, and all they think of doing is lowering taxes at the highest income levels.  I just don’t understand it.  I would be embarrassed to be known as a friend of the super rich.  But not so for lawmakers.

Most of the characters in my stories are soft-hearted, sympathetic people who give, and give, and keep on giving.  I’m not that way, and so I suppose I had to make my characters that way, as one method of living a virtuous life vicariously.  The very first character I invented, Helen Nordstrom (my friends just could not understand why I chose her to be a Scandinavian-American, since I have practically no Scandinavian heritage whatsoever.  I believe that it was so that Helen would have no ethnic traits at all, since Helen’s ancestry plays hardly any role in her story) is an ultra-warm-hearted Polyanna of a girl.

I keep wanting to make Helen have ordinary failings, but I just can’t do it.  Her only failing is that she simply cannot resist any girl who makes a play for her; she just swoons right into their arms, with very few exceptions.

I was going somewhere with this, but I need to think it out a little more clearly!

Kay