Ripping Starlight Apart

One of the hardest things for any human to do is accept the fact that they’ve made a mistake, which is why we growl when someone tells us we’re wrong. Even worse is realizing that they’re right.

I’m not the Grumpy Writing Coach because I’m grumpy, though I often am. I’m called that because I make people grumpy by finding fault with their writing. What makes a critique hard to accept is that our writing is so personal. We invest so much of ourselves in creating the perfect story that having someone read it, shrug, and then rip it apart hurts…a lot. We forget that we learn nothing from those who agree with us. And, of course, there’s the not-so-small issue that if we can prove them wrong, we no longer are.

Making it worse is the feeling that this person, if they are right, never had to endure such pain.

So, it’s only fair that I demonstrate impartiality by doing to my writing what I would do to yours. But to do that, I need to travel in time:

Recently, while cleaning out a closet, I found a copy of one of my novels, Starlight Dancing, that was home printed and comb-bound, somewhere around 1993. I mailed it to my son, Michael, using him as a beta reader, and hopefully, impressing him with dear old Daddy’s writing skill.

What he wrote on the cover page shown was: “As revised by the author’s elder son.” He also added a dedication, supposedly from me, that reads: “I couldn’t have done it without him,” signed with my name.

He was kind in his evaluation, and, very helpful. So, when I finished the changes that he and other readers showed were necessary, I submitted the manuscript to a series of publishers. The result was a nice collection of well-deserved rejections. Though I didn’t see it that way at the time.

I’d written five novels by then, and already had enough rejection slips to wallpaper my office. Still clueless as to the realities of writing fiction. I was using none of the specialized knowledge and techniques of the profession. Like so many of us, I was certain that I was on the verge of being publication-ready—while in reality, I was a living demonstration that you’ll never learn the necessary skills of a profession by practicing with the wrong set.

So, looking at that manuscript today, nearly three decades later, I found that the approach I was using, then, is identical to that of the vast majority of what I see posted on the various online writing sites. And since doing a critique of my own mistakes won’t hurt the feelings of a hopeful writer, I’ve used the opening paragraphs of Starlight to both show how different the approach to fiction writing is from the one our school-day training guides us into, and, to point out some of the most common problems. The edit that identified and polished the errors I’ll be talking about was done in 2015. In the more than 20 years since the piece was written, I’d learned just a bit, and had signed seven publishers’ contracts before deciding to go the self-release route.

Because I no longer have the file for the original version of the story, I’ll use pictures of the printed text:

This isn’t bad as description, and my son said he liked it. But it is not Zack looking at the eggs. It’s me telling the reader that he did—a far less personal thing, and one that distances the reader from the events. But after that opening line, with him standing in that unknown place, and ready to move on, I pulled the reader aside and began to explain what happened before the story opened. But do you, as a reader, care if it’s the fourth site, the tenth, or the first, when you don’t know where we are or what’s going on? Of course not. Who cares what the narrator, who isn’t on the scene, finds interesting? It’s Zack who’s on the scene and making the decisions. So only what matters to him in the moment he calls “now” matters.

But look deeper. The first thing I told the reader was that Zack is unhappy. So before anything else, the reader will want to know why. But instead, I change the subject and blather on about things unrelated to that opening line. But…if it’s important enough to be the first line, shouldn’t it be meaningful enough that what follows results from it?

My point? Who cares about nesting sites? We don’t know what kind of creature laid those eggs, or why he’s looking for them. So… Why is Zack tracking the meteor? And where are we? Who is he? What in the hell is going on? That matters because it provides the context to make the events meaningful. But the text is presented as if the reader already knows all that. So here, in this paragraph, is where this novel was rejected. That’s it. One unprofessional paragraph and the audition is over. In the view of a publisher, if you can’t get the first page right, why read on? And here, I screwed the second line.

So, what did I replace the paragraph with in the published version?
– – – – – –
More eggs? What the hell is going on? Zack frowned at the fossilized eggs. This was the third grouping he’d found as he traced the course of whatever had carved the gully. Ruler straight, it had probably been cut by a meteorite, eons ago. But if so, the thing had come in at one hell of a shallow angle.
– – – – – –
The changes are small, but significant:

1. We begin with Zack’s reaction to finding the eggs, rather than a report that he did from a dispassionate observer.
2. The second sentence is his reaction to finding the eggs. Instead of me telling the reader that he did it, he’s reacting as part of realizing what he’s looking at. And we learn what he learns, as he perceives it. So, the narrator is no longer a distraction. Instead, our guide is working to support the protagonist.
3. I left the mention of the multiple egg finds, but shortened the description for a quicker read and more punch. I deleted mention of a forest because he doesn’t know what the scene was like. And if he doesn’t, and we’re him, we can’t either. In any case, the scene is focused on his “now” not a tour of eons past.
4. I removed the statement, “he now guessed,” and replaced it with his actual guess. Again, the narrator is in the prompter’s box, not on stage commenting.

Paragraph 2&3

This needs tightening. It’s verbose and unfocused. Saying “some time ago,” but then talking about millions of years, is the author being cute and conversational. But that slows the story, while eliminating the feel of being on the scene moment-by-moment. That long description of what had been torn away, or even noting that it was temporary, pulls focus from Zack and his eggs, slowing the narrative and diluting its impact.

And finally, the second paragraph, while accurate, is uninspired, and external.

So…what replaced these two paragraphs is:
– – – – – –
He squatted far down, arms wrapped around his knees and lost in thought. Millions of years before, during the time of the great lizards, a ball of flaming rock had come to Earth at this spot, tearing out a swatch of wilderness and creating a nesting site for a variety of fauna. The stony lumps clustered at his feet were the result of that celestial accident, but they weren’t the cause of his introspection—the meteorite was. There was no excitement in finding more petrified eggs. A meteorite, though, that, he didn’t have.
– – – – – –
1. I simplified “some time ago” to “millions of years,” then specified the era, followed by a prettier version of why the eggs are there.
2. Rather than a statement of him wanting the meteorite, I gave his reason for frowning.

Paragraph 4:

“Slowly coming to his feet?” Have you ever come to your feet slowly, for effect, when no one was there to watch? Neither would Zack.

So. Zack pulls down his hat brim, something you or I might do. But then, leaving him standing there, hand on his hat, the author interjects that he finds a hat useful. Really? Why else would he wear it? So that gets the ax.

What follows the hat-touch began as a 1000-word long dissertation on the land and its history, with the narrator babbling on about things that have not a damn thing to do with the scene. Still, it was beautiful. And I cried as I flushed it, because from start to finish, it was irrelevant to the scene and the story. They were eggs and the gully was a gully. I left these 130 words of the description because he’s looking at the scene near him, and possibly thinking about it, so a bit of scene-setting, limited to what he might think about, gives the reader an orientation on the factors that led to what he’s seeing, and make what comes later more meaningful. Foreshadowing, in other words. And, how could I toss 1000 beautiful words without leaving a just bit of it?

So, what remained is:
– – – – – – –
Coming to his feet, he pulled down the brim of his old-fashioned cowboy hat, shading his eyes. He gazed out over the wasteland before him, a humped vista of dry and useless earth, fit only for growing chaparral and cactus. It had been carved and twisted again and again, by water, weather, and even the endless slow-motion dance of the Earth itself. Since the time of the dinosaur, the land had seen both freshwater seas and the rock-gouging creep of glaciers. Before that, the country to the west had tilted skyward to form the Great Western mountain ranges, spilling its soil onto this area, only to have most of it scrubbed away by the slow passage of centuries. The land had lately known both Indians and settlers. Neither stayed. Neither learned to love it. Now, the land knew only loneliness and silence, save for Zack’s occasional visits.
– – – – – – –
Paragraph 5:

Again, the narrator is visible. And again, the action is stopped, something to avoid. Story happens, it’s not talked about. Yes, the reader needs this background, and should know why he’s there, and, the important things in his situation that will drive the plot, like the artificial heart. But calling his wife’s death discourteous? That’s the author being cute, so it, too, got the ax. So, here’s the paragraph, after the silly parts were chopped:
– – – – – – –
But he wasn’t searching for the remains of the distant past. He’d come there to die. After nearly forty years of marriage, finally ready to retire and show his wife the world, Amanda was stolen by the Covid-armed angel of death, leaving him with little reason to live. His own heart died soon after—a result of losing her, he liked to think—only to be replaced by a thing of tubing and motors, riding his left shoulder like a pet beast, humming and thumping to itself as it simulated the pulsing of his lost heart. An experimental model, not yet approved for installation within the abdominal cavity like the production model—soon to come.
– – – – – – –
It’s very like the original. But, I did get some things right.

Paragraph 6

Lots and lots of unneeded detail here. Do we need to know if the house was abandoned or for sale? Do we care that he had to pay a bribe to get it? No. He went there to die. That’s plot. That’s necessary knowledge. The rest? Gossip. So squeezed and tightened, we have:
– – – – – –
     Three months after surgery he turned his car west, looking for solitude, and for a place where an old man could die in peace. He found it in a deserted ranch house, twenty miles from the nearest town, on the eastern edge of the American desert.
     He made a deal with himself: he would charge and care for the unit, not go out into the desert and wait for the batteries to die, as he’d planned. Instead, he’d wait for fate to intervene. It had been over six months since he left the hospital, and since the unit had been serviced. He might have a day, a month, or a year. But whatever time he had was out of his hands.
– – – – – –
1. Forget that he had rehab after the operation. Everyone in that situation does. Never tell the reader what they already know.
2. Do we care whose car he used, or if he stopped home first? Of course not.
3. Do we care that he stopped to fill his wallet?  Who wouldn’t, in his situation. So that’s all backstory, and we need to get back to poor Zack, standing there, bored,  and looking at the desert, waiting for this to finish so he can get back to tracking that meteorite.
4. I cleaned and tightened the paragraph ending.

And with that taken care of, it’s time to see what Zack is doing:

Paragraph 7:

But we don’t see what he’s doing, because this is more irrelevant backstory. In fact, there are ten more paragraphs of backstory, defining Zack finding a fossilized bone, going to the museum in town to learn more, his deciding to study paleontology, what he saw on his walks, even an episode where the heart machine had a partial failure that a push of the reset button fixed. But here’s the thing: Did any of that set the scene? No. Did it develop character? No. Did it move the plot? Not really. The reader will know he studied the subject, either when he shows he’s knowledgeable about it, or by mentioning the fact of it in conversation. He didn’t die because of the machine problem, and it doesn’t happen again. So who cares? Through the six standard manuscript pages it took to spoon-feed that backstory to the reader, not a blessed thing was happening in the story, so all sense of realism was erased, and the reader has probably fallen asleep. The star of the show should have been Zack,  but in reality, it was the narrator, who was alone on stage and talking about the events, not making them real.

And when you do that, it’s very easy to fall into a mindset where you just talk to the reader, providing a history lesson, not a story. If you’ve heard the traditional advice to the new writer: “Show don’t tell,” another word for telling is nonfiction. And by showing, we really mean to place the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist. We show the reader by making them live the scene as the protagonist.

But…there is one problem that comes as a result of trimming all that backstory. The reader does need some of it to clarify Zack’s reason for abandoning his life and heading west. One might reasonably wonder why he didn’t spend his remaining time with friends, the joys of family, volunteer work, or travel. And a bit of character development would make him both a relatable character, and his actions far more understandable. So how should that have been handled?

The answer lies in one simple but critical admonition that authors need to keep in mind: Begin your story where the story begins. Don’t open it only to take the reader back to before it began for a history lesson. Crap like that makes me grumpy. And the rejection that will bring from an agent or publisher will do the same to you.

In this case, I added a new chapter one, which opens with Zack waking in the hospital, just after the operation that gave him the artificial heart. There, in his viewpoint, we learn of his situation through a discussion, and argument, with a woman from the hospital’s Psychiatric Services. Instead of reading a summation of his life, we eavesdrop on them, as he is forced to defend his state of mind with, ”I don’t want to die. But when my heart gave out it was my time. It still is. I don’t have a reason to live, and that’s not the same thing as wanting to die.” That’s critical character development, as is much of their discussion. And as part of that argument, we learn that he has no family, that he’s a successful businessman, is financially comfortable, but, has lost his zest for life. And that places the reader in the position to understand, while at the same time, wanting him to recover it. And because it is a story, and he is our protagonist, the reader knows that he’s probably going to do that. The question is, how? And that’s reason enough to turn the page and learn of Zack and his desert hideaway.

That new opening chapter ends with him in the hospital, recovering from his heart attack, connected to a variety of medical devices. He’s depressed, and believes that he’s had an unwanted heart-transplant, which places him into the mindset that will result in him coming to where he needs to be, at exactly the right time to rescue the woman who will rescue him, then join him in adventuring. His true situation only hardens that decision. The chapter ends in the doctor’s viewpoint with:
– – – – – –
Dr. Malvern studied the man on the bed. He was stronger than he thought. His medical history, other than his heart problems, was unblemished. It was his state of mind that worried her. Still, this wasn’t a good time to tell him he no longer had a heart.
– – – – – –

° ° °

So there you are…a bit of a chop job, done on writing that deserved every cut. As you can see, the reason I’m qualified to tell you of the most common mistakes is that I’ve made every one of them. Who better to say, “For God’s sake, don’t do that.” Who better to see those same mistakes in the work of others?

But…am I the one to tell you how to write? Nope. Were I to “teach you,” you’ll end up writing exactly like me. And the world certainly isn’t seeking another writer who’s exactly like me. My talent is in seeing problems, and knowing where to find the solution, even if I’m not capable of using that information as it should be used. That’s part of the reason why I’m so grumpy.

And in the end, I didn’t do anything that you can’t do. All you need do is dig into the techniques of writing fiction for the printed word, practice them till they’re as intuitive as the nonfiction skills we’re given in our school days, and there you are.

Easy, right? Naa. But you’ll like the result. And, you’ll go back to what you have written, and find yourself shaking your head and taking out your blue pencil, wondering how you missed seeing so many obvious problems.

As for how to acquire the necessary skills, as I so often do, I recommend beginning with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It’s an older book, but I’ve found none better at clarifying the hows and whys of writing fiction. A professor at Oklahoma University, the Commercial Fiction-Writing workshops he taught had a student list that read like a who’s who in American fiction. Mr. Swain is gone now, and the book has aged out of copyright protection, which means that it’s now available for reading or download on several archive sites. An alternative is Jack Bickham’s Scene and Structure. For an easier read, but one that’s nearly as good, there’s Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. And for tips on style, after you perfect the basics, agent Donald Maass has penned several excellent books from an agent’s viewpoint.

 

Amazon Screws the Customer…Again

If you’re an author, and plan to publish via Amazon’s KDP program, you need to read this. If you have a friend who does, they need it, too, because Amazon will, and does, mislead and misrepresent their service. And they will not show you an accurate image of what your cover will look like on the author’s approval page.

The short version? No matter what artwork you provide for your book’s cover, they will butcher it.

At present, I have 29 titles on Kindle, but have never produced a paper version of them. Recently, though, I decided to add a softcover option to all titles, which was also a good excuse to do a general clean-up edit.

When I finished the first one, and approved publication, I ordered an author’s copy, then went on with the work. And when it came, I took a deep breath and opened the package, realizing that holding your own work in your hands is a very different, and more emotional act than seeing it on the computer’s screen.

But then, I saw the cover, and that happiness drained away. It was far darker than was the picture I uploaded and approved, and the contrast was significantly reduced. And though I’d not noticed it, because my color vision is a bit off, the colors were shifted in hue.

Deciding that I could compensate by adjusting brightness and contrast, I made the image I uploaded overly bright, maximized the contrast, ordered a second copy, and continued the project. That was a mistake.

The second copy arrived and though it wasn’t what I hoped for, it was acceptable. So, after adjusting the other cover images, I began uploading, approving, and ordering.

For each cover image, I used the template that Amazon supplied, to show the placement of spine-text, cover size, etc. And for each, I checked the preview/approval page carefully. For all, the cover image they displayed as that of the book that would be produced, matched that which I’d uploaded. And when no errors were reported by Amazon, I approved each book for printing and ordered an author’s copy.

Silly me. I expected Amazon to produce a cover that looked like the image I’d approved. I expected buyers to receive a book that looked like the image Amazon showed them. But in a word, those covers sucked. Lifeless, dull, drab… Those all applied. Colors were muted, and shifted significantly in hue.

Upset, I contacted KDP help, and was told that it was my fault, because I’d uploaded RGB images, but should have sent CMYK. When I mentioned that image files indicate which color identification table they use, and asked why—given that the image files weren’t acceptable—their approval page specifically said that there were no problems, their help desk representative had no answer, other than that had I sent the cover images in the proper format there would have been no problem. She also had no answer as to why the template they supply, and which the customer uses to create the image, made no mention of a required format.

Her answer didn’t satisfy, because all but the cheapest printers do an automatic conversion from either RGB or CMYK to that printer’s method of producing colors. But she’d said that the file type was the problem, so, after having spent over $100 for the books, I converted all covers to CMYK, uploaded and approved them, ordered replacement copies of the worst, plus, the four final covers I’d not yet seen. As expected, when the replacement cover was displayed on the Amazon approval page, it was identical in appearance to the one it replaced.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed, when the books arrived, the only changes to the existing covers were where I had brightened the image before uploading. Other than that, there was not the slightest difference between covers produced from RGB and the CMYK files. And neither matched the supplied image. So, the Amazon help desk lied, and I spent money based on that lie, for no useful purpose.

I’ve contacted Amazon, trying to get them to address the problem, given that they are shipping books to KDP customers with a cover very unlike the one the author might have paid significant money to have created. Obviously, as a company, they don’t care. Yes, if I jump through a series of hoops, and supply data they already have, they might refund the money I paid for the poor covers I bought. But they won’t address, or acknowledge the actual problem. And were someone to purchase a softcover version of one of my books, they’d get a book with that same crap cover.

The picture, above, is a comparison of what was approved for publication and what was shipped. The received book is leaning against the monitor screen. And while you might assume that the difference between room light and the screen’s backlighting is the reason for the dramatic difference, it’s not. What you see is what the cover looks like in normal room light. Note the huge difference in the water’s color between the cover design that was uploaded and the printed version. Aside from the fact that the approved image is tropic blue and the produced book is North-Atlantic drab, the uploaded cover image had to be brightened, dramatically, and the contrast multiplied, to where the boat seems to be in bright sunlight while in a storm—which makes no sense—in order to get even as much contrast as the printed cover shows. Also, note that the paper quality is so poor that the cover of a book that’s not been read has the top right corner already curling.

Note that, As Falls an Angel, has had its image colors shifted, so that the white lettering on the supplied cover image is printed as yellow on the delivered cover. Amazon called that a slight change. The image displayed on the screen is the actual Amazon preview page, with their “approve” button visible at the bottom right. So, what you see, and what you approve, is not what you get. Not even close.

Samantha and the Bear also has had the colors dramatically shifted. It’s interesting to note that when printing, any white area of the picture will have, and need, no ink applied, given that the paper is already white. Yet the white areas of the clouds in the original artwork have, clearly, had ink applied, while the paper color on the inside of that cover sheet—the color of the front side before printing—is aspirin-white. So, the improper color is not due to a limitation in the printing process. It is, clearly, a poor translation of the color the customer wants into the programming instructions sent to the printer that produce the miscoloration. In other words, a programming screw-up.

Does Amazon know it happened? Of course. I can’t be the only one to notice and call attention to it. So it appears they literally don’t care.

There is no excuse for this. Plain and simple, it’s incompetence and mismanagement on Amazon’s part. Obviously, they have no functioning quality assurance department, and those who run the KDP program—who have to be aware of the problem—have neither the needed programming skill, nor, the authority to assign the task to those who do.

Can we blame limitations in the printing process, even in part? Absolutely not. Today, I received a photo-on-canvas print. And the portrait I got matches the picture uploaded. Their printer can do the job. KDP clearly, can’t.

So… Jeff Bezos has the money to fly into space, financed, in part, by money saved by not taking the time to create a quality product. And that stinks.

 

Thoughts on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Mention science fiction to the average reader and you conjure up one of several images:

But the field is so much more than that.  Before we turn to what it is, though, let’s define some terms.  Science fiction is any story in which some major element of the plot depends on an event or technique not commonly available in our current society—but which is plausible, given current thinking.  It need not actually be possible, just reasonable and logical. Science fiction has presented us with dozens of ways of getting from one planet to another, from folded space to warp drives.  No one, today, will say such a device can be constructed using known technology, but as yet, no one has proven them impossible, either.

The heart of the story need not have any direct connection with science. For example, it could be the result of it having been used in the past. This may seem a contradiction, given the name of the genre, but many have suggested the true name of the genre should be Speculative Fiction. 

The writer of a science fiction piece often begins with the thought, “If this goes on…”  That could be the result of space exploration. It could also be a non-technological story set in a post-apocalypse world, and focusing on the recovery of a more normal society, like David Brin’s, The Postman.

Fantasy, on the other hand, need have no connection with anything real.  It often starts with the thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if…”  Dragons, therefore, may fly with the speed and agility of a fighter plane, while having truly awful aerodynomic characteristics and a fire projecting mechanism that’s guaranteed to fricassee their tongue with every blast.  Magic has often been defined as a product without a process, but that doesn’t take into account one important fact:  Technology, when it’s far enough in advance of current knowledge, is indistinguishable from magic.  Listen to the average person’s description of  how a television set works and you’d be hard-pressed to tell it from magic:  “Well, the TV station has cameras that take a picture and make it into an electronic signal, that gets sent to your television set through the air or on a wire.”  Ask how that’s done, and you’ll get a shrug, and, “I dunno…it’s magic to me.”

So, the division between the genres is far from clean, which probably explains why they’re so often racked together in the bookstore.  Anne McCaffery’s Dragonflight series provided fire-breathing dragons who functioned in the physical world.  And there have been science-fiction stories in which magic was treated as a science.

Confused?  I can’t blame you.  So maybe it would be easier to talk about handling the writing of the stories, themselves.  The late John W. Campbell almost single-handedly took the existing field of science fiction and remade it into what it is today.  There are many reasons, not the least of which was John’s ability to recognize and nurture talent.  The most important factor, though, was John’s dictum to his writers:  “The story should read as though it were published in a magazine of the society in which it occurs.”

Why demand that?  The answer lies in the style of such fiction in 1937, when John took over as editor of Astounding Magazine.  Sci-fi stories almost always centered on some science breakthrough, and how amazing the device, itself, was.  John’s authors told about the people who used them, daily, instead.  He turned the genre from plot-driven to character-driven fiction.  That left the writer free to envision how the people in such an environment would behave. An excellent example of that is the first Star Trek show.  Had it been made a few years earlier, the camera would have focused lovingly on the transporter, and half the dialog in that first show would have been concerned with that device, and how amazing it was.  Gene Rodenberry’s genus was in recognizing that in Captain Kirk’s society, and to the people living in it, a transporter was like a bus—a means of getting people from point A to Point B in minimal time.  The fact that such devices allow the writer to explore situations no one has thought of before is a plus.  As a result, we get Lloyd Biggle Jr’s All The Colors Of Darkness, which explores both society’s reaction to the introduction of matter-transmission, and, the question of: What might happen if someone else already has that technique?  How would they react to the possibility that we might use a matter-transmitter to visit them, uninvited?

Another unwritten rule of both sci-fi and fantasy concerns suspension of disbelief.  Start a story about living on the moon and the reader, of necessity, says, “Hey, wait a minute how did they…” 

To avoid that, the reader and the author make a compact.  The reader will ignore small inconsistencies, necessary if the story is to work, if the author agrees to stick to the rules they’ve agreed to.  In the movie, Dark Crystal, the protagonist and his lady, both gelflings, are trapped at the edge of a sheer cliff, with no means of escape.  When all hope is lost, the female wraps her arms around the protagonist and leaps from the wall, gliding to the ground on wings that appear from under her cape.  Forget that they were far too small for the load imposed.  The important thing is that the writer violated the rules and forced the reader to suspend disbelief “on the fly.” They tried to get around that by having the male be surprised, observing, “I don’t have wings,”  while the female replies with, “Of course you don’t…you’re a boy.” A male of the gelfling race didn’t know that? Seriously? My kids didn’t buy that one, though in fairness, they did like the escape.

So…if possible, establish the rules early, and stick to them.  As an example, in your story, magic works.  Okay? Now, establish the rules for its operation.  Can anyone do it? Or is it necessary to study for years to achieve even a small skill in its use?  If it operates by potion and incantation, paired, you can’t have our hero saving himself by shouting “Kudabux” to animate a sofa to fight for him.  In the L. Frank Baum story, Return To OZ, Dorothy and the Wizard have a series of adventures under the Earth’s surface, going deeper and deeper until they are finally trapped, with no hope of escape.  Baum had written himself into a corner. But then, he cheated, and had Dorothy “remember” that Ozma of Oz, her friend, has a magic mirror that can show any spot on the globe.  It seemed that Ozma had promised to look into the mirror every afternoon at a certain time, to check on her.  If Dorothy were to make a certain gesture, Ozma will use her magic to bring Dorthy to her.  Problem solved, but at the cost of having my kids say, “Hey…. No fair. That’s cheating.”

And think of the ramifications of your suspension of disbelief points. If your story has magic carpets, it follows that people will open a delivery service with one, use it to pull a plow, as a ski-lift, and a host of such things.

In the end, and simply put, science fiction deals in stories of the possible, while fantasy deals in stories of the impossible.  But no matter which you choose, the important thing is—as always—make it real. Make it consistent, and make it fun to live. Not to read, but to live. Your reader wants to become the protagonist, not hear about him/her. Why? Because, in the end, we’re not telling the reader a story. We’re not chronicling a series of events. We’re providing a way for the reader to live the adventure, in real-time, and as-the-protagonist. And that’s where the joy of reading lies.

 

I Saw it First – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Here’s a small but critical issue that most hopeful writers miss, one that explains why our school-days approach to writing won’t work when we turn to fiction:

Before anyone in the story learns what happens, the reader is aware of it. Why? Because they read it, react to it, and then learn how the protagonist reacts—which means they’ll react based on their impression of the situation and their assessment of the resources the protagonist has available. Unfortunately, that reaction is where most hopeful writers will lose the reader, because it’s a rejection-point, in both the bookstore and an agent/publisher’s office.

Why? Because when a reader’s reaction differs from that of the protagonist, it means that the reader sees the situation differently from the protagonist. If that happens, you’ve just created a “wait a minute,” moment, where the reader will stop to think about the difference between their reaction and the protagonist’s. And the very last thing we want a reader to do is to stop reading and argue with the protagonist about what that character should do next.

When a reader stops, for-any-reason, they will resume reading with any momentum the scene might have had, gone.

Complicating things even more, bear in mind that every reader, because their backgrounds differ from each other, will see the situation differently. So unless you take steps to prevent it, at some point, every reader will have that “wait a minute,” moment—which is why, when writing fiction, we must calibrate the reader’s perceptions to that of the protagonist, and do that before the reader must react as the protagonist. In other words, protagonist’s view of the situation and the reader’s must match.

That way, every reader is the protagonist, in outlook, knowledge, and even personality…which means that, if there is a difference of opinion between protagonist and reader, the most likely cause is that the protagonist has had an inspiration that will make the reader say, “What? That’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?”

In fact, if, the protagonist screws up because of a misunderstanding, or lack of data, we want our reader to do so, too. So later, when the protagonist realizes their mistake, the reader, learning of it before the protagonist does, will, realize it, and react, too. Fail that, and your reader will only be learning of the events, not living them.

But…do that—cause your reader to respond as the protagonist is about to—and your reader won’t learn that the protagonist has fallen in love, they’ll fall in love, too, and for the same reason. They’ll live the adventure vicariously, not learn of it. And in that difference—living the adventure, not learning about it second-hand—lies the joy of reading.

But…while it makes sense, it raises the question of how to do that, because it’s not something we received even a hint how to handle, in school. It also raises the question: How many other simple but critical issues have I missed? Or, as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” It’s bad enough that there are questions whose answer we don’t know. It’s worse that there are questions we need the answer to, but don’t know to ask.

So…if you were hoping for a nice simple, “do this instead of that,” to cure the problem, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you, because the answer is that, as I’ve said so often, the writing techniques we spent so many years perfecting in school are the skills of nonfiction, where fact-follows-fact, and the only goal is to inform. And for many reasons, that approach can’t work—the top one being what I just discussed. As E. L. Doctorow so wisely put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And how much time did your teachers spend on how to do that? Mine spent a big fat zero on any of the techniques of fiction, because professional skills, like those of Engineering, Carpentry, and Fiction-Writing are acquired in addition to the general skills that ready us for the needs of employment that we get in our public education years.

My goal with this article was to make you aware of the problem, and, the need to upgrade our writing skills from those of our schooldays. It’s because so many of us fall into the trap of assuming that we leave school ready to write fiction, and the number of writing careers that never materialize because of it, that’s a good part of why I’m so grumpy.

° ° °

Author’s Note:

These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Was Was Was – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Far too often I’ve seen people railing against the advice to avoid the word, “was” when writing fiction. And since there’s so much misunderstanding as to why, I thought it worth a few words on the subject.

Part of the problem is that we mostly write our stories in past tense. What people miss is that though we use past tense when describing the scene, our protagonist who’s living that scene, perceives their world in the moment they call now, their present. But if we say something like, “she was happy,” using the word “was” takes us out of the protagonist’s present, because it’s an external comment about her state of mind by the author, who is not on the scene. And that’s true no matter the personal pronouns you use, because the narrator, be it the author, or the author pretending to have once lived the story as the protagonist, cannot appear on stage with that protagonist. Why? Because they’re describing those events after they occurred. So, if you’re presenting the story in that character’s point of view, having the narrator step on stage to interject a comment about that character is a POV break. Every time you appear on stage with the players you still the scene-clock and kill any momentum the scene may have built. That matters, because once you start that clock, it needs to tick, beat-by-beat until either the scene concludes or there’s a time-break in the action.

Think of it this way: We might say:
– – – – – –
Beth went to the window and checked. The water was still rising, and was within an inch of topping the steps to the porch. “It’s still rising, Ken,” she said.
– – – – – –
That’s her observation, yes, and it’s about the moment she calls now, but presented that way it interjects the narrator, who tells us—as an outside observer— that she went, and, what she saw when she did. And as such, it’s dispassionate, because Beth isn’t on stage, only being discussed by the narrator. Were it in Beth’s viewpoint, it might be expressed as:
– – – – – –
“I’ll check,” Beth said, as she went to the window. After a moment she sighed, resignation strong in her voice. “The water’s within an inch of topping the porch steps, Ken, so it’s still rising.”
– – – – – –
Which, of the two, seems more like we’re on the scene experiencing that rising water? Which one includes Beth’s response to what she saw, to calibrate the reader’s response to her emotional landscape?

Using “was” in dialog is natural. We use it in conversation all the time. But when not in dialog, far too often, that word interjects the author. Present it as, “there was,” and we distance the reader still further from the action. Look at a few examples of “before and after,” and decide which one better supports the realism of the action:

a. There was no other conceivable explanation.
b. No other explanation fit.

a. All in all, it was a surprising meal.
b. In all, a surprising meal.

a. There was silence in the room again. This time for so long that she was worried she might have touched a taboo subject.
b. Again, silence. Had she touched a taboo subject?

a. Above, gulls called in a sky that was a pure cobalt blue.
b. Above, gulls called in a sky of cobalt blue.

So, can we use the word, “was” other than in dialog? And if so, when?

The answer is: any time the narrator’s presence on stage isn’t a distraction. A perfect example is when a time period is skipped because what happens in that time contains information the reader needs, but the action, itself, isn’t worth a live section of prose, and so, is presented in summation. For example:
– – – – – –
For the next week time dragged endlessly for Simone. Martine did his best to cheer her up, but it was wasted effort. She was focused only on the steadily growing fissure in the cliff-face above the cottage.
– – – – – –
Make sense?

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

The Great Misunderstanding – The Grumpy Writing Coach

How many hopeful writers check their sales stats on Amazon, wondering why the count of new sales for their self-published novel is still near zero?

How many are pecking away at their computer’s keyboard each night, typing a truly great story idea onto the page, while dreaming of success? How many are reading their own words as they edit, living their story and wondering why such brilliant writing hasn’t been acclaimed as it should be? But…how many times has that same hopeful writer looked at work they produced only weeks before and wondered why the words have lost the life they had when written?

And how many hopeful writers have said,  “I learned how to write in school; I have a great imagination; I love this story, so…why doesn’t everyone else?”

The problem is, you can’t fix what you don’t see as being a problem. So, unable to pin down why it’s not mesmerizing the reader, we shake our heads in frustration and try a succession of fixes: Perhaps first-person or present tense will make the action seem more immediate? Perhaps, make the language more vivid and evocative? Perhaps, tell the story in a “stream of consciousness” mode? Perhaps more description? Perhaps…perhaps…perhaps.

And while we try everything we can think of, and harden ineffective writing habits into concrete, the misunderstanding we all leave school with—the reason behind our problems—sits unnoticed, and invisible, but still, a very real, “elephant in the room.”

What is that misunderstanding? It stems from the fact that we all learned to write in school. In fact, we spent more than a decade perfecting that skill, practicing our writing techniques till they feel intuitive and natural. And because the profession we wish to practice, Fiction-Writing, carries the name of that skill within its title, we make the reasonable assumption that the skill we were given and the profession are related. But sadly, they aren’t.

Think back to your own school days. From the day they placed a pen in your hand till graduation, did even one of your teachers explain why there are significant differences between a scene on stage and screen and one on the page? More to the point, did they explain what a scene is on the page, and the elements that make one up? Because if they didn’t, and our view of what a scene is, is shaped by the films and TV shows we’ve watched, how can we write what a reader will see as a scene? On stage and screen, as in life, visual and audible events are what matters. But on the page, who cares if the car is red or black, unless it matters to the plot? On the screen, in a single glance—literally, in only milliseconds—we learn how everyone is dressed, where they are, and things like the weather, the season, and more, all in parallel with what matters to the plot. And in that same glance we know the expression every character wears, their body language, and much more.

Add to that, in parallel with the visual, we get the soundscape. So in a single glance we have context. But, if we try to give the reader all that they would hear and see were they on the scene, we’re working against a single long known fact: one picture is worth a thousand words. To give the reader what a viewer gets in a fraction of a second would take a thousand words, or to put it another way, four-standard-manuscript-pages—which takes several minutes to read, during which, nothing happens in the story. Worse yet, you’re giving the reader a static picture. And in the end, how much of what can be seen matters to the protagonist? Damn little, which is why, on the page, what matters to the reader isn’t what can be seen, it’s what the protagonist is actively paying attention to, in that fleeting moment that character calls, “now.”

Let’s go back and question our schooldays education a bit further: We’ve established that we didn’t learn what a scene is, but that’s only part of it. Did your teachers talk about how to present a conversation, and the niceties of tag usage? How about a basic issue, like why every scene but the last, usually ends in disaster for the protagonist? Of course they didn’t. Only those actively writing fiction need that information.

Here’s my point: If virtually all our writing assignments during our school years were reports and essays, how well prepared are we to write fiction on the professional level our reader expects to see? Answer? Not at all. And why is that? Why didn’t we learn more about writing fiction? The answer to that lies in one simple fact that we know, but forget: professions are learned in addition to the skills we call The Three R’s: Reading, ’Riting, and, ’Rithmatic. Those are a set of general skills, chosen to provide our future  employers with a pool of prospective workers who possess a predictable, and useful skill-set. And what kind of writing will the average business writer produce? Reports and essays. Just like the kind of writing we practiced so diligently in school. But Fiction-Writing is a profession, one for which there are four-year courses of study leading to a degree. Surely some of what’s taught there is necessary. Right?

So there you are. Almost universally, we leave our school days exactly as well prepared to write fiction as to perform an appendectomy on our neighbor. Luckily for our neighbors, we understand that we’re not ready to perform surgery. But since writing is a skill we use every day, and no one tells us that Fiction-Writing methodology is dramatically different from what we were given, and use, when we turn to writing fiction we go with what we have, of course. But who’s to tell us?

Our teachers learned their writing skills in the same classrooms as we did. Yes, like so many college students, they probably took a Creative Writing class. But, the goal of that course is to teach students to write creatively, not professionally, in any of the various writing specialties. So not only aren’t we given the skills of the fiction-writer, our teachers believe that we, like they, left our school days with the skills needed to write fiction, professionally. And while reading fiction absolutely does give us an appreciation for well written prose, it no more teaches the necessary skills than eating teaches us the skills the chef, or walking though a sculpture garden teaches us the techniques of that profession.

But since you want to write fiction, or you wouldn’t be reading this, can the problem be fixed? Of course. Every successful writer faced the same situation and overcame it. So why not you? As the great Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So, to get rid of some of those “just ain’t so,” issues, the first thing to do is dump several ideas:

1. Our goal is to tell the reader a story.

It’s not. Our goal is to make the reader live that story, in real-time, as-the-protagonist. No one cares deeply what happens to someone they barely know. Think of yourself. Were someone to come into the room where you are and say, “Did you hear? Some guy was hit by a car at the corner.” You might react in many ways. But compare that to your reaction had this person said, “Did you hear? Your mother was hit by a car at the corner.”

If you want the reader to say yes to more than a page or two before turning away, you have to make a good start on that relationship between your reader and your protagonist before three pages have passed, and continue to maintain that bond till they reach “the end.” What happens matters little if the reader hasn’t been made to care.

2. The most important thing is a good plot, one that will grab the reader.

Plot? Who cares? In most cases, your reader will decide to buy a given book or put it back in three pages or less. And how much plot have they seen in those three pages? Damn little. So if they buy it, it’s because the author gave them “the joy of reading,” by making the act of reading entertaining. They involved the reader, and before the end of page three, made that reader lean back in their chair and say, “Hmm…. Okay, tell me more.”

Were I to give a successful writer the average new-writer’s plot synopsis and say, “write this,” the result would keep the reader turning pages. But, give the best plot ever conceived to the average hopeful writer and they’ll be rejected before the end of page one. Not because of talent or how well they write, but because, being written with nonfiction techniques it will read like a report. Of what arrives in the agent and publisher’s offices, fully 75% of it is deemed unreadable, because the author is still using their school-day skills. Of the rest, all but three are seen as less than professional. And of those final three, two of them screwed up and didn’t target the right agent or publisher for that story.

3. The various online writing sites are a good place to get advice on writing.

Think about it. Asking someone who hasn’t been able to sell their own writing to a publisher, how to write well enough to sell to a publisher makes no sense. All you’ll get from them are the mistakes that get them rejected every time they submit.

So there you go. Take the time to learn and perfect the writing and business skills of the profession and you are, literally, ahead of 99% of your competition. That doesn’t guarantee publication, because less than one in ten of them are chosen. But if you don’t take the time to learn, you’re not even in the game.

So the question is: how do you fix the problem?

There are lots of ways. There are workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, and even cruises for writers. But since all of them expect you to have a basic knowledge of the objectives and methodology, my personal suggestion is to chew your way through a few good books on the tricks-of-the-trade. And they’re no further from you than the local library system. In their fiction-writing section you’ll find the views of successful professionals in teaching, writing, and publishing. So take advantage of that. As Wilson Mizner put it: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from two, it’s research.” So, since knowledge is a pretty good substitute for genius, do your research.

To quote another wise man:

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
~Ernest Hemingway

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Amazon, What In The Hell Are You Doing?

The toy pictured is EXTREMELY dangerous. Avoid it, and warn others against it.
 
Not obvious in the picture, the chair has two pairs of fins on the rear side, each pair protruding from the chair by about a finger-width, and separated by the same amount. In other words, the chair rests on plastic knife-blades. Those fins run downward from the top of the chair, to end at the far end of the seat—which rests on, and rocks on, those fins. And there lies danger. If a child’s finger comes between the floor and the seat, half the child’s weight is applied to that finger by what amounts to a finger-chopper. You can see the outer of that pair of fins at the bottom of the chair’s picture.
 
If second child falls onto the one sitting in the chair, pushing them backward, the natural reaction of the one in the chair will be to reach back and brace a palm against the floor to keep from falling back. But the chair is DESIGNED to fall back, which means the weight of two children will be applied to what amounts to a plastic knife-blade against the child’s finger. This is unacceptable in any product. It is unconscionable in a child’s rocker. And in addition to that, the chair edge is shaped to encourage the child to wrap their hand around the chair edge, which, while wider than the fins, is also a narrow blade shape that can pinch the child’s fingers if the chair is rocked to the side
 
I bought this chair for my grandchildren, and within ten minutes of play, exactly what I outlined above took place. Fortunately, the second child’s weight wasn’t against the chair when my granddaughter’s finger was trapped, and there was carpet under the chair to absorb the impact, so she didn’t lose the finger. On a hard surface floor I have little doubt that she would have had a serious injury. But her shout of agony, her tears, and the time spent icing the finger were real—as was the residual pain that took days to abate. But that, as bad as it might be, isn’t the end of it.
 
Visit the chair’s Amazon page, and you’ll find you can’t view any one star reviews that are shown as being there. Nor can you add another bad review, as I tried to do. In fact, because I tried to add such a review, Amazon has blocked me from posting any reviews for that product. So they not only sell a dangerous toy, in this case they are actively preventing parents from warning other parents of that danger.
 
I’ve reported the toy to the government, but any action there will be slow in coming. So pass this on to those you care about. You could be saving a child’s fingers.

 

Story Ideas – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer

 
 

People sometimes ask where story ideas come from, as if by learning that closely held secret—by finding that magical font of stories—they too may drink from it, be inspired, and thus, able to append the term “writer” to their name. In fact, almost everyone I talk to about writing believes that all that separates them from success is that elusive but necessary idea…plus a bit of practice and some luck.
     If only.
     Sad but true, ideas are the easy part. We have them ten times a day, triggered by casual events and stray associations. Witness the anatomy of a story:

° ° °

      I was talking to one of my son’s classmates in high school. He asked where I got my story ideas, and as I noted above, I said that ideas are easy. When he looked puzzled, I went on to say, “Last weekend I saw Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. In it, Red Riding Hood, after an encounter with the wolf—who was charming but who saw Red as the blue-plate special on his dinner menu—realizes that, as she puts it: ‘Nice is different than good.’ That’s something we so often get wrong in life that I thought his using the fairytale setting to illustrate it was brilliant, and it’s stuck with me.
     “You could,” I said, “expand that into a million plots. “For example, our popular culture holds that someone you find pretty is desirable, and desirable is good. In romance stories, it often means that characters who strike sparks every time they meet are going to fall in love before the story ends. It might be fun, though, to stand that idea on its head. So there, in that thought, you have your story idea.”
     John looked unsatisfied with such a simple example, so to expand on that I said, “In terms of an actual story, based on that idea, let’s assume a new employee shows up at our hero’s office, a woman he finds desirable, but who drives him crazy by arguing with him about everything. Whenever they meet there are sparks. They don’t hate each other, they just have opinions that differ, and a belief that their view is “right.” So day-by-day, co-existence in the same office becomes harder.
     “But then, one night, when they’re both in the office late, and screaming at each other, the man shouts, ‘You’re driving me crazy. You’re beautiful and you’re smart, but you drive me crazy!’ And as expected, the result of that outburst is they’re all over each other, with the same level of passion they showed in arguing.
     “So the man hurries to marry his nemesis, expecting his happily ever after. But of course, being what they are, a few weeks later they’re back to arguing over everything because they are, and always will be, oil and water.
     In fact, the point of the story is about his buying into those silly societal norms, as we all do, and then having them rubbed into his face. And through it all—in parallel with that story—his best friend is the woman he really should be in love with because they complement each other in every way. But he can’t let himself see that, because she isn’t beautiful so, obviously, isn’t what he should be seeking. It takes him most of the novel to wake up and realize that she is the perfect woman for him, as he helps her become a success in everything, except for her desire for him to love her as she loves him.”

° ° °

     And just like that, in the five minutes it took me to tell that young man what amounted to a synopsis, the plot was complete and the story was written, at least in my mind. Was that hard to do? Not a bit. You could do the same. Anyone can. What was hard, was deciding how to organize and present that story to a reader. We can’t simply tell the story as an expansion of the plot description, no matter how we expand and polish it, because that would be the author talking about the story in overview, not presenting Drew from within his moment of “now,” as he learns the lessons that will bring him to realize he’s been an idiot, and should have married Zoe in the first place.
     So where do I begin the story that comes from that idea? That’s where the craft of the fiction-writer comes into play. Shall we begin with him meeting the woman he’ll do battle with—or with the model he also pursues under the assumption that pretty and nice are synonymous? No. First, we need our reader to know Drew and what makes Drew tick if they’re to understand his reaction to those women on a gut level—so that reader will buy into it his viewpoint, share it, and urge him to go after the women, as-they-would, and then, learn the lesson, as-he-does: that nice, and pretty, are very different from good. We also need to know how he and Zoe interact, to realize what an idiot he is, and how important to him she is. But even in that, the realization should come late, as it does with Drew, so that about the time we’re saying, “Drew you’re an idiot. Zoe is the one you really need,” Drew is realizing that, too. That will give the feeling that it’s us making that decision, and that Drew is following our advice.
     The most difficult task is writing so the reader, rather then just being informed, is enticed, and made to become a participant rather than audience member. I had to arrange the scenes so the stakes kept rising for Drew, and the options narrowing, until he was alone and despondent. He has no job, he has no wife, and all that’s left is the single rock that has brought stability into his life year-after-year: Zoe. That way, when Zoe’s life is threatened, and he is forced to look at what the future would be without her, Drew is forced into the realization that she means more to him than life, itself.
     So Drew, to acquit himself, and to make himself worthy of her love—as poetic justice requires—rescues Zoe and gives her reason to commit herself fully to him, as he has just done, to her.
     It’s coordinating the elements of Drew’s epiphany that are the hard part of writing, because they have to be invisible to the reader on a conscious level, while at the same time seeming necessary to what’s going on within the scene. Done right, the reader will recognize that Drew is being an idiot only when all the elements are there for Drew to make that same realization. On some level readers will be aware that in the end Drew and Zoe will get together, but because they buy into his reasons for taking his actions, will worry more about the effect of those actions on Zoe, and her reaction to them. That reader must never be aware that you’re manipulating them to urge the protagonist to do what the writer is about to have him/her do. They must never have unanswered questions that nag and pull them out of the story. And, they must never be confused or bored, not even for a single line.
     Any competent writer can spark off story ideas. The only difference between theirs and a non-writer’s is that theirs are pre-shaped by the knowledge of how to present a story idea in an exciting and natural way. And that’s craft—the learned part of writing—not talent.
     So, if writing for publication is your desire, forget the idea that you’re being held back by the lack of that great idea. Ideas are easy. Presentation is the hard part because it’s not something we learn in school, where they’re teaching us to be a responsible adult, with skills an employer finds desirable. There, we focus on how to present reports, and the basics of writing on the job. In the stories we tell each other, aloud, we’re alone on stage and playing all roles, so to speak, which requires that there be a listener who can hear the emotion we place in our voice and see that in our facial expression, to make up for there being no other actors. But none of that makes it to the page when we try to write a novel, until we school ourselves in the craft and specialized knowledge of the fiction-writer.
     So, where do I get my own ideas? How in the hell should I know? It’s how to stop them that stumps me.
     And as for the plot I outlined that day, it became the basis of the novel I call, Zoe.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

God’s Children

      Recently, I had a thought that may have world-shaking implications, and change the way we look at genetics, and genetic manipulation, forever.
     For no reason in particular, I began to think about Christian dogma, and the concept that God gave his only son to the world, a child conceived within a human womb, with a bit of human and some divine aspects in his DNA that would allow the child to grow up with an innate sense of right and wrong, plus abilities we would attribute only to a divine being, like being able to revive the dead, to change water to wine, and to walk on water.
     The Bible clearly identifies God as male, and says that the child was his son, not just someone he created, like Adam and Eve, so the implication is quite clear, that God, the one in who’s image mankind was created, had some pretty special DNA to contribute, even were that contribution not made in the usual way.
     Interestingly, the abilities of the human/divine hybrid didn’t manifest immediately, but required the attainment of full maturity for the more magical aspects to be observed—though from childhood he was said to be pious and admirable.
     My first thought was that God sacrificing his only child wasn’t the great thing it had been made out to be, because, after all, being God he could cause another, or a million children of equal capabilities to be born. The “only child” thing, therefore, was personal choice, and obviously must serve some purpose other than simply sacrifice. What did hit me as unique was that it was all accomplished through genetics.
     God took one of Mary’s eggs, and either cloned it, while at the same time, changing the genetic coding so as to produce that magical child, or fertilized that egg with chromosomes of divine origin. Either way, in doing so he changed the history of the world. But of more importance: he left mankind a critical clue that is only now apparent, because now, we have not only the technology to clone, we can change DNA. And that means that with care, diligence, and research, it is entirely possible to recreate that miracle. It is within our grasp to have every single woman on the face of the planet give birth to offspring who can truly be called a child of God, and who will innately know right from wrong.
     Think about the result of that fact, alone. No more wars. No more strife. “Turn the other cheek” will be the rule, without it even having to be taught. And the ability to feed the multitude with only a bit of food will conquer hunger. And that doesn’t touch the effect of being able to raise the dead, and survive a shipwreck by simply walking to shore—or calming the storm with an act of will.
     Assuming that the mutation breeds true, the cloning and genetic manipulation will need be only a one-time thing, bringing peace and plenty to the planet in one single generation.
     Any woman would be overjoyed to bear such a child. Right? And what man would not be honored to be raising God’s child?
     Once this amazing opportunity is pointed out to the faithful, I am utterly confident that Christianity, as a whole, will support the necessary research, and help usher in the era of endless perfection.
 
     Is that cool, or what?

 

Addiction – A short story for all writers

 
 
 
     The meeting room was small, with that seedy drab sameness possessed by service organizations the world over. Its graffiti flecked walls were a dirty pastel green and mildly in need of paint, and the dusty light-fixtures absorbed rather than reflected what came from the old bulbs.
     The audience, scattered among rickety chairs, numbered less than twenty. As a group they were unexceptional, a cross section of American culture, though something, perhaps a tenseness around the eyes and a reluctance to indulge in conversation, said this was not another Monday night literary association or religious group. These people were gathered for more serious purpose.
     A rickety podium presided at the room’s front, while a coffee pot burbled to itself at the rear, preparing for the social period at meeting’s end.
 
     The ritual of opening the meeting completed, it was time to introduce the newest member.
     The chairman checked behind him, to verify that the man hadn’t fled. Those who stood to testify couldn’t be coerced or cajoled into speech. When it was the right time for them they would know it. Until then, nothing on earth could drive them to stay, and Sam appeared to be someone on the edge.
     He was typical of those on who spoke for the first time: poorly fitted and and patched pants sagged below a shirt that displayed a menu of his encounters with life. He wore shoes of a sort—cast off sneakers with gaping holes through which his toes peered. Socks were a luxury he obviously couldn’t afford.
     His eyes, too, gave him away—the shifting distrustful eyes of the street-person, overlaid with the driving urgency of his need. He’d hit bottom, and in his despair had finally admitted to himself that he couldn’t go it alone. At last, he was ready to turn to others for help.
 
     The chairman turned back to the podium, choosing his words with care. The man sitting behind him needed reassurance that could find both understanding and support from those in the room.
     “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new brother with us tonight, a man who needs us, and the help we can give. I’ve explained that each of us in this room have stood where he does now…that we have each taken the step of unburdening our souls to those who understand our suffering.”
     He turned, motioning the man forward—urging him, when his resolve seemed in danger of giving way, with, “Even I took my turn here, Sam. It’s easier than you think.” He smiled reassuringly. “Believe me, only the first few words are hard.”
     The man hesitated. Then, seeming to steel himself against what was to come, stood and moved to join the chairman who patted his guest on the shoulder, whispering reassurance as he motioned toward those seated and waiting.
     “Go on, Sam. I’ll be right here.”
 
     With an effort of will, Sam forced fear aside and centered himself behind the podium’s feeble protection—approaching, while at the same time distancing himself from, those in the room.
     After a moment in which he fought to keep from running he slumped. There was nowhere to run. All he could do was clamp down on emotion and hope that kept despair from his voice.
     But be that possible or not, he was committed, so he took another breath, and said, “My name is Sam, and I’m…” He sighed, then bowed his head, shaking it in shame. “… I’m a writer.”
     The words were said at last, and they hung over the room, the shame in them almost a living presence. He raised his head then, and stared at those facing him, daring someone to laugh. But there was no laughter, only the warmth of support for his pain. Shared pain.
     He had named the devil, though, and now the words came easier.
     “I started small: letters to the editor and stories for my kids. They….well, they never published the letters, but I assumed it was because there were many responses on the same issues.” He hesitated, shaking his head at his own stupidity, then squared his shoulders and forced himself to go on, with, “I couldn’t see…wouldn’t see…that it was because I have no talent for the written word.”
     Ignoring the stir from the audience he plunged on. “I tried to improve the quality of my letters—to add humor and insight that might have been missing. It took a year, but then a disaster happened: I was published.” He leaned forward, gripping the podium. “My words had appeared in print! No matter that the letter was heavily edited, it had been printed, and read by thousands. I was no longer a writer, I was an author.”
     He snorted in disgust. “That simple letter was my undoing. After that it was just a matter of time. I began carrying a notepad, so I could capture story ideas and thoughts for articles. I bought a computer, and writing software, and learned to type. Slowly, the devil began to rule my life.”
     He paused, breathing hard, the chairman’s steadying hand on his shoulder helping to maintain control. Now that he was started, the story was bursting to be freed, a catharsis of his agony.
     “I began to write short stories in the evenings, ignoring television, and my family, submitting my work everywhere.” He laughed “I wasn’t rejected, I told myself, there were simply too many other stories that month, written by a closed circle of published authors. I…I couldn’t see.” He sighed, unable to meet the eyes of his audience as he added, “I didn’t want to.
     “I’m sure you know what came next. I turned to writing novels, and spent even more time at the keyboard. Soon a few hours in the evening became entire nights, as my life began to center on my addiction.” He shook his head. “Though I could never see it as an addiction. I still thought of it as a hobby.”
     He sighed. “One by one I lost my friends. Not only did I stop returning their calls….” He spread his hands. “When I did see friends I saddled them with manuscripts that I expected them to praise.” He couldn’t hold back the bitter laugh that came with that statement “They began to avoid me. I can’t say I blame them.”
     He hung his head for a moment, before continuing, his voice devoid of emotion.
      “My job performance began to suffer as I daydreamed plots and story lines instead of paying attention to business. As time went on, and I sank deeper into addiction, I began to sneak a half-hour here and there to make story notes. Finally… Well, in the end I abandoned all pretense of work.”
     He closed his eyes in remembered pain. “When I lost my job for the first time I tried to put writing behind me. I knew what it was doing to me, even then. But I’d sunk too far…too far. By that time I was carrying short stories with me, maneuvering conversations with strangers to the subject of writing and then forcing copies on my unsuspecting victims.” He looked at nothing for a moment, lost in memories, then snorted, adding, “The money I wasted on printing them, alone…”
     He pressed his face into his hands as he gained strength for what had to come next. When he lowered them he made no effort to keep the resignation from his voice.
     “It went quickly after that. My family left me, of course. They still loved me, I think, but they really had no choice. I know it was hard for them, but I, well, I hardly noticed when they left.
     “With no job, and no other source of income, I found myself on the street, begging for food money, but in reality, using it to buy paper and pencils to feed my addiction.
     “Even that didn’t last… It couldn’t.” He stopped for a moment, eyes focused on nothing. Then, returning to the present, he shook himself awake with a short bark of a laugh. “I woke this morning to find myself under the platform of the subway. I tried to make myself get up and get something to eat, but I couldn’t. I had to write something first!” His voice was a reflection of the darkness inside. “Do you know? Have you felt the soul-searing need that grips your very being?” He stepped around the podium, arms stretched forward in supplication. “I-wrote-on-a-wall! I had no paper, but still…I couldn’t stop writing!” He sank to his knees, reaching out, pain a tearing shriek within his words. “Please…please help me before I write again.” He collapsed on himself then, a miserable figure of a man, alone in his need, sobbing, face pressed against his hands.
     But he was not to remain alone. Heedless of the stinking filth of his clothing, a woman hurried forward to gather him in her arms. Quickly, the others came forward to form a human bulwark against his pain, helping him to his seat and remaining for a moment, whispering individual words of encouragement before slipping back to their places.
 
     Once more the chairman stood at the podium. He spoke to the group, but his words were really meant for the man behind him, as he said, “We all share that affliction with Sam, and well know his pain. For so many years, the disease of writership was unknown, masked by the success of that small group of people who possess an actual talent for writing. It was assumed that those of us who suffered and starved for the written word were simply misguided. It has only been a few years since Stafford’s great discovery that writing is an addiction, one as darkly destructive as alcohol or drugs…one that destroys more lives each year than even tobacco.”
     He paused, nodding. “But now that the sickness has been identified for what it is, we can treat it, and even identify it in the young, preventing its taking hold in children…possibly the worst tragedy of all. With understanding, faith, and help such as we can give, those of us who have fallen may rise once more, to control those terrible urges and become productive members of society.” He leaned forward, his eyes bright. “There is even hope that in time we’ll find a way to allow social writing by addicts without triggering a relapse.” That statement brought a stir of interest from the audience. He held up a warning hand. “Nothing definite yet, I’m afraid, but in the latest issue of Writer’s Anonymous, there was an article on just that possibility.”
     The meeting dragged its way to an ending, the closing prayer signaling a release from the hard chairs. With a final comment of, “Don’t forget to feed the coffee kitty,” the chairman turned to Sam, only to find him gone, unable to face the group on a personal basis. He shrugged, then turned to the podium to collect his things. But the podium was bare. His notebook and pencil were gone. For a moment there was a flick of anger, but he suppressed it. This wasn’t really unexpected—though he had hoped the man was ready. Still, it was a start. There always had to be that start: admitting that the problem existed. When Sam was ready he’d be back. They always came back.

***

Author’s note: Please, help me. Stop me before I write again.

 

Thoughts on the Nature of the Universe

     How do I make you believe? Where can I find the columns of data that warm the hearts of scientists, while retaining the turn of phrase to move the dreamers?
     You who worship at the shrine of science will reject my words because I deal in a subject relegated to the trivial—the voodoo realm of the spiritualists. You who favor spiritualists will discard my words because there is no room for karma and old souls in what I say.
     Still, I must try.

     I don’t believe in ghosts, or any of that class of events collectively referred to as “The Supernatural.” I don’t doubt there are strange and unexplained happenings but I cannot attribute them to the wandering spirits of the dead. Any explanation that says: “People may ‘hang around’ after death, for unexplained reasons, and for an undefined periods,” is too much to swallow.
     For example: for us to “see” a ghost they must both absorb and reflect light (we see colors because all but the color reflected is absorbed). But to absorb light there must be mass. And, if they both absorbed light and had mass they would cast a shadow. Plus, since what we call sight is a chemical process which requires a metabolism—which ghosts can’t have—they couldn’t “see.”
     Yes, I know that ghostly sight can be “explained away” by saying that ghosts must use another way of seeing that just happens to mimic life in both form and function. But that’s, well…not all that believable.
     And that’s just one of the infinite number of things stacked against ghosts.
     And then, there’s reincarnation. Lots of people love that one. And I suppose it’s comforting to believe that we go on living in some form after our current life is finished. But think about it:
     There is this thing (call it a soul if you must), that looks out through my eyes and records everything I see and do. It contributes nothing from my “past lives” that I will be aware of,. So does it matter who I was before my “current” life? No, because I’m not like that person now, and I’m not aware of my “past lives.”
     This internal hitchhiker doesn’t even have my personality, which is the absolute core of my being. Given that, I cannot accept it as being, in some way, “me.” As far as I’m concerned, it could take a lifetime’s vacation and I’d not care. But according to those who believe, I have no choice in the matter, and there it sits, enjoying the view as I stumble through life.
     As if that isn’t enough, when I finally die, this soul thing hops from my head to the head of a newborn, accumulating knowledge for some “higher purpose.” In other words, it’s some kind of a cosmic brain-sucker—a parasite. That, I can most definitely do without. Worst of all is the claim that it gives me most of my good ideas. I have few enough of those as it is without taking all of the credit away from yours truly.

     Events classified as paranormal, though? That’s a different matter. Though there’s plenty of room for debate and doubt, for some, the effects are demonstrable and repeatable—something that with time and research may become the explained and commonplace. Of more importance, they don’t depend on “magic” and coincidence for their operation.
     Nearly forty years ago I took the time to satisfy myself that dowsing rods work. When the late John W. Campbell (editor of Analog magazine) was espousing their cause, I made a set for myself, and was amazed to find that they worked reliably for me. I can find water pipes, underground water, and even electrical conduits with them.
     I’ve even conducted successful experiments on the binary transmission of data via mental telepathy. (I never was able to determine whether I was a good transmitter or my wife a good receiver, as it worked only one way, and only between the two of us).
     All of the above is why I’m glad to report that I have found a reasonable cause for the belief in ghosts and reincarnation, not to mention the reasons behind the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the missing mass in the universe, and, one of the most pressing mysteries of our time: what happens to the socks that turn up missing in the dryer?

     Right now I imagine you’re expecting a story, one that fits in with the claims I’ve been making. You won’t get one. This is a fact article, or at least a speculative one.
     The genesis of these words is a short story I’d been planning to write. It was to be based on something we’ve all experienced: We drop something, it hits the floor, and apparently vanishes. In spite of a careful search it can’t be found, yet is found days later, lying right were it should have been seen, immediately.
     For a good many years, I’ve been espousing what I have always called “Greenstein’s Theorem.” Simply put, it goes like this: The object cannot be found, because it’s not there. Due to reasons that are unknown at this time, when conditions are right, the object travels in time.
     It was a good basis for a story, but for one reason or another I kept putting it off, using the concept to entertain friends…until I had the functionality of the theorem proven to me, not once, but several times. I’m no longer joking.
     I know exactly what you’re thinking at this point, and I can’t blame you. Just bear with me, though, before you make any judgments.

     Over the next few years, I got laughs, many strange looks, and even a few believers out of the thing. I was in the funny position of almost, but not quite, believing it myself. It certainly seemed to fit the facts, but so did the greater probability that the things dropped weren’t found because they were overlooked, or had bounced into an obscure corner of the room. There were more than a few people, though, who told me stories that supported the theory. As time went by, it became harder and harder not to take it seriously, myself.
     Notably, one of the men with whom I worked, reported that after hearing of my theory, his family became convinced that he worked with a lunatic. Some weeks later, however, he took me aside to report that his Mother-in-law had dropped an antique earring on the floor of a bedroom. It was valuable so she, and the family, searched for it—in vain. They even went so far as to vacuum the floor and check the vacuum cleaner’s bag for the earring.
     As you can guess, the earring showed up the next day, in plain sight, right where it had been dropped. His family now believes.
     It went like that for a few years, until I witnessed the events recounted below.

° ° °

     Late one Saturday afternoon, the electronics lab was empty save for me, testing circuit boards that would be needed on Monday. Each unit was placed in a metal channel at the top of the test fixture, and held in place by two small screws. This time, I placed the module. Then, as I reached to secure it in place I dropped the screw. That resulted in the tiny “tink” of the screw striking the fixure, then nothing. I lifted the module, but the screw was gone. I remember mumbling, “At last, proof of Greenstein’s Theorem.”
     I laughed as I turned the fixture over and shook it, fully expecting the screw to fall onto the table. I shook it again. Nothing. The screw had apparently bounced out of the channel, on to the table, and then to the floor, where it had vanished—a tiny black screw on a black tile floor—lost among the scattering of wire clippings and debris of a busy electronics shop. I couldn’t help looking for it as I continued testing modules, though. I should have heard the second bounce of that screw, on either the floor or the tabletop.
     I didn’t replace the missing screw, though, as one was plenty for testing purposes. Mildly amused, I continued with the testing, and at five, with most of the modues finished, I went home, then returned to finish-up on Sunday.
     Once again, I was alone, as I searched for that missing screw before beginning work. I was being foolish, but still, I couldn’t help checking the fixture and the area around it. Of course, there was nothing. I even shook the fixture, inverting and tapping it on the tabletop to dislodge the screw if it was stuck inside. Again, nothing.
     But then, after testing several modules, I removed the latest one from the fixture and froze. You guessed it. That damn screw was lying in plain sight: a single black oxided 4-42, pan-headed screw.
     I was alone in the building, and that screw could not have been carried to the fixture with the module. In my right hand lay the second screw, the one that had been holding the module in place. There was no mistake. The lost screw had just reappeared.
     I must have stared at the thing for at least three minutes before I went to sit down. I had to. I was too shaky to stand.

° ° °

     That was the beginning. That event started me thinking on an interesting string of “what if’s.”

• What if time might be thought of as a loosely coiled spring, or helix, in which a coil occasionally “touches” another coil?

Could it be that under special conditions an object might “cross over?” As silly as it sounds, it explains why socks are lost in the dryer, only to show up later, after you’ve thrown away the survivor. A friend who uses a laundromat tells me that she occasionally finds clothing she doesn’t own, mixed in with her own laundry. But she always looks in the machines to be certain they’re empty before she uses them. And think about it: you might lose underwear or handkerchiefs too, but as they don’t come in matched pairs you probably wouldn’t notice.

• If the above is true, what if the same person happens to be at the crossing point in both times?

Is it possible that there is some leakage between the future and past mind of the person to whom this happens? This explains hunches, Deja-vu, and a lot of other things of that general class of events.

• If all of the above is true: Is it possible that there are people who can “receive” memories from an entirely different person, one who happens to occupy that crossing point in either the past or the future?

     At this point, the “what if’s” were arriving at a rate too fast to follow, but one in particular brought me to a halt: What if there were more paths than the one we follow? What if there are lots more?
     And with that thought, time stopped being a spring that’s lazily coiled on itself. Instead, it’s jammed into a box, along with an unknown volume of other springs. The really crazy part of it is that logically, it hangs together.
     Before I explain that, though, let me relate a story, told by a good and reliable friend:
     She’d returned from the hospital with a new baby a few days before. Hearing a noise from the baby’s room, she went in and was surprised to find a man standing by the crib. With a start, she recognized her father-in-law. He’d laid back the covers, and was smiling as he looked down at his new granddaughter. The only problem with that was that his being there was impossible. The man smiling at the baby was dead and buried. Yet she swears that she watched him straighten the covers then turn to her and smile. He put a finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, smiled again, and walked past her and into the hall. When she recovered her wits and followed him into the hall it was empty.
     I have another friend, one of the steadiest and most reliable men I know. He swears that he was part of a group of men who stood in a row-house in South Philadelphia, watching water gush from a plaster wall, as though from a waterfall, drop, then run across the floor and vanish into the next wall. The problem, other than the impossibility of a waterfall inside a house, was that the water, though it was real to the eye, couldn’t be felt, and the floor was dry.

     Those memories led to a thought: Suppose that under some special circumstances, we can see into that adjacent coil of time? That would be the most sensible explanation of ghosts I’ve heard. It means that the ghostly woman seen walking down the castle steps is a living woman walking down those castle steps at-some-other-time, or on some other path. I’ve always rejected the tortured soul explanation for ghosts as silly. Think about it. If violent death or great suffering was the cause of haunting, the ancient battlefields of our war-torn planet would be swimming with ghosts. Our oldest cities would have so many haunts they would get in the way, an expected annoyance, not a reason for fear.
     Those stories though, suggested a new possibility. Perhaps there are alternate worlds of a sort, in which there are differences from our own? This multiple branching world idea has always been a popular concept in science fiction. The cause is usually attributed to a decision that could have gone either way. I suspect, though, that the cause—if it is possible—is far more subtle than that. Decisions are made on data, even if you might think it was a flip of the coin kind of a thing. Given the same data, the same conditions, and the same person deciding, the decision will always be the same. Take a small thing though—down at the quantum level where probability is very real—a lightening-bolt that triggers a few nano-seconds late or early, for example. That may be in the range of probability. But that small delay might change the target of the bolt, and eventually have a significant effect on the world at large. A gross example might be the case of the child who wakes in fear of the storm as the bolt strikes closer to the house, due to the nano-second delay in triggering. The child is frightened, and is visited by Mom for a few seconds. But that small delay in her returning to bed results in a different sperm cell meeting with an egg that night, so a different child is conceived—a forking of time tracks to accommodate the dual event.
     The lightening delay is, as I said, a gross case, and subject to a great deal of argument as to it’s being possible. I cite it only as an example of the kind of thing that might cause a branching. I suspect that the actual causes are smaller, and may require years or even centuries until the differences manifest.
     Adding in the element of multiple time-tracks caused a lot of odd data to fit together. The thought occurs that in another time-track, my friend’s father-in-law didn’t die, and that on his track he was happily visiting his new grand-daughter that night. But because conditions were right, he was such a close fit for the situation on our world that he almost transferred into it, and thus was seen, not as a transparent ghost, but as a living breathing man.
     In our history, we record a man walking around the carriage horses and inexplicably vanishing. Perhaps in another track, he appears from nowhere. There are recorded cases of people found wandering, who speak no known language. People who, after learning the local language, cannot explain how they got to that place. Perhaps in another world, the crew of the Marie Celeste doesn’t vanish on the high seas, they move to a new plane of reality. It’s worthy of note that the most likely candidates for being seen as ghosts would be people who are removed from one branch but not another, as in the case of my friend’s father-in-law. Ghosts, then, might be the result of death by accident or murder, etc. In other words, the traditional cause of ghosts. Some time ago, I read that an aircraft carrier of the United States Navy was haunted by the ghost of an ex-seaman. The fact that the one seen as the “ghost, will eventually age and die in all branches of reality, explains why a ghost eventually stops appearing, and why our older cities aren’t teeming with them.
     As an even more interesting idea, suppose an alternate time-line formed before our species developed—or where it never developed. Visual contact between those tracks would show apparitions that look like deformed humans, or unknown creatures. Try a few simple explanations:

• Poltergeists – A partial crossover from human or other worlds.
• Ghosts – People in either our own, or other time-lines, simply going about their business. Perhaps they occasionally see us, and wonder at the strange events they view. It would explain why some ghosts ignore the people who view them, and others try to communicate.
• Spiritualists – Disregarding the legions of fakes and the self-deluded, there may be people who can more easily read, or see across the boundaries of the reality streams. It would explain how they could locate missing people. With no proof, I suspect that this condition occurs when a given person is closely paralleled in many streams.
• Monsters – The Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, and Bigfoot may be as common as squirrels on-some-other-track. As an object seen many times, but never touched, they easily fall into the category of ghosts.
• Past life regression – The more simple explanation would be that the people in question are making contact across a track with either an actual person from our past (same track, different “coil”), or, more likely, someone from a concurrent track, though with a different history. This also explains “Out of body experiences.” Note that in many cases, although the “regressed” person is able to give detailed information on the day-to-day life in the village where they supposedly lived, and the village itself may exist, the person in question is not recorded as having lived there. This could well be because the supposed “past life” is actually a living, breathing, current resident of a version of the village, not the ghost of a past existence.
• Speaking in tongues – Simply, contact with someone whose language you don’t speak. It would also explain why the occasional rare individual suddenly understands a language they’ve never learned, or heard spoken.
• Possession – A “lock-on,” between people of two different tracks. In the event that one of the people in the “lock-on” surrendered control, the other would be able to directly converse with the people of the second track, and would report to his or her own people, on break-off of the lock, that they were transported to a strange world.

     There are still things that don’t fit—things like people who can bend keys, and make pots bounce around, but I think that’s because I’m missing data. So here, you’ll have to excuse me if I extrapolate a bit. Still, it hangs together nicely:

     If there truly are different ribbons, there’s little doubt that the atmospheric energy potentials, at least in a localized area, would be unequal. These unequal potentials could result in apparently unexplainable effects, which might explain such manifestations as poltergeists and other events. And if you’ll allow me this, several things suggest themselves:

• Assume a large electrical energy potential difference, caused by atmospheric conditions, and a person who finds himself at the same place in two or more ribbons. Should a leakage of electrical energy take place between the ribbons, there might be an inter-track lightening bolt that would result in the unexplainable, and spontaneous, combustion of anyone at the crossover point. Note that there are many, well documented cases of spontaneous human combustion. This might also be the reason for unexplained fires. A slow transfer could be one of the causes of St. Elmo’s fire, or the fabled “bolt out of the blue.”
• It may be, for physical reasons, or perhaps because a person appears on a multiplicity of closely aligned tracks, that they become a focus for the energies involved in the creation and maintenance of the tracks. These are the people to whom strange things happen. Keys bend, pots fly, and things go bump in the night when they’re around.

     Try it for yourself. Find some other explanation that fits the facts as well, and doesn’t resort to “faith” to explain what’s happening.
     Perhaps I’m simply fantasizing. Perhaps there are other explanations. Perhaps I’ve tried to tie together things that can’t be connected. I grant you that. Of one thing though, I am absolutely certain: that screw was not there until just before I found it.
     Truthfully, though, even after the incident with the reappearing screw, I didn’t really believe. I wanted to, but I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let myself. And truthfully, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I talked about the things I’ve reported here. I even wrote most of what you just read with a great deal of reservation as to my conclusions. Then, as I was editing, I had the truth of it demonstrated so clearly that I can no longer deny it:

° ° °

     I had a problem with my Suburu’s heater control cable. To repair it I had to remove the radio, the glove box, and a good deal of the dashboard. I placed them in the back seat as I worked, with the exception of the heater control knobs, which I placed in the center console’s tray.
     I used one of the knobs to test the repair, then reached out to drop it into the tray as I thought over what to do next. Unfortunately, I missed and the knob fell between the console and the passenger seat. There was an unusually loud “clink” as it landed, which seemed odd, but I left the search for later and went back to work.
     When everything had been reassembled I began my search for the knob. It wasn’t there. Eventually, both front seats, the center console, and even the parts removed for the repair were out of the car. No knob. I looked under the car and around it. No knob.
     But it had to be there. Both logic and reason insisted on that. So, I had my wife search, and did so myself, again-and-again, until there was no possible doubt. A two-inch diameter plastic knob had truly vanished. And though I would love to find some other explanation, here is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the knob is gone. I virtually disassembled the seats after removing them, and there is no place in the car that could hide that knob. Nor was the knob under or around the car. It was gone, and I have no choice but to believe. None.
     I bought a replacement knob, but each time I got into that car I had the horrible certainty that the original knob would roll out from under the seat and lay there, laughing at me. It didn’t, but it seems likely that another Jay Greenstein, on a different time-track, found it and believes the knob was dropped there in the factory.

° ° °

     I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in witches and the occult. I do, however, firmly believe that there are explainable natural forces at work, whose detection and function is, in part, masked by human fantasies and desires. Most “ghosts” are the result of human fear, fantasy, and daydreaming. There are, however, too many well-documented events and sightings to dismiss.
     Who knows, perhaps I’ve just found the true explanation for flying saucers. Perhaps they don’t come from “Out there.” Perhaps they’re “neighbors,” passing through the area on the way to visit another neighbor.
     A last thought: According to the latest theories, most of the mass in the universe seems to be missing. They’ve accounted for it by calling it “Dark matter,” and scientists are in a race to find it. If by some chance the things I’ve postulated here are true, I’ve just found that missing mass.
     You are welcome to join in on the exploration of the field. It’s brand new, and wide open. Just remember, it’s called: “Greenstein’s Theorem.”

 

A PayPal Warning

Several years ago I joined, WritingForums.com a writing site. I was impressed, and enjoyed it enough that I was moved to donate $25. I didn’t make it recurring, but fully expected to donate each year.

A year later, the site asked if I wanted to do it again, and I said yes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t watching my bank account closely enough that month, because they made two deductions of $25, a day apart. I’m guessing that even though I hadn’t selected the recurring option, the site owner checked it for me. And when I said yes to the second year, he established a second $25 yearly donation. But I didn’t learn that until May 5th and 7th of this year, when both “donations” repeated. Making things even worse, because I wasn’t expecting a $50 charge, that account had insufficient funds to cover the unexpected withdrawal, which meant a $37 overdraft fee.

Making matters worse, I was no longer a member of that forum. Because of a dispute with an overzealous moderator, my account had been closed, weeks before.

I initially assumed that the charge was a mistake, and wrote the site’s owner. When I received no response I opened a dispute with PayPal. But a week later, with no request for data, or any communication from PayPal the dispute was canceled. And, though I have tried to contact them more than a few times, my communications have been ignored.

So here’s the problem, and why it relates to you: PayPal is not a bank, and not based in the US. So they can do pretty much what they care to with your money. If you’re a seller they can freeze your account and lock up your money. And there’s nothing you can do about it. As a buyer, if someone makes a charge you dispute they can ignore it, as they did mine.

In this case, a man has stolen $75 from me by means of fraudulent billing, and cost me an additional $37. And PayPal? They literally doesn’t care, so they are obviously comfortable with being complicit in the commission of a crime.

And of course, for you writers, The WritingForums site is a good one, But be very careful about donating money, because, like it or not, they will take it as permission to tap your card over and over again.

Spread the word, because anyone using PayPal should be aware of how they do business, and of how little protection we have.

 

The Ballad of Roland Skye

Roland Skye, unhappy boy. No friends to meet, he owns no toy.
Orphan poor, with face so plain, his life so dark, he knows such pain.

So small and meek, he’s pushed aside. From bigger boys he has to hide.
From jeers and taunts, from trick and fake; his life, his goods, are theirs to take
And take they do, just to annoy. Poor Roland Skye, unhappy boy.

At age sixteen he runs away. To seek success; to find his way.
His hopes are bright, he’ll do his best. He packs his bag and faces west.
He tramps the road in search of love. For tenderness, that soft white dove.
But all’s the same, he’s failure’s toy. Poor Roland Skye, unhappy boy.

At seventeen he turns to crime. He learns to steal. He does some time.
As years go by, he fails at all, till now his back is to the wall.
Too many years all filled with strife. It’s time at last to end the life.

He takes his tears to Harrow hall, and from its top he’ll take his fall.
His feet on stairs seem filled with lead. His hopes and dreams, now finally dead.
His final words on midnight’s bell. “For one good day, I’d deal with Hell.”

Then on his arm—like touch of air—soft fingers fall, so pale, so fair.
He turns to look, and in surprise, is trapped and held by wondrous eyes.
By lips and nails, and hair of flame, as voice of honey speaks his name.

“Your words were heard, oh Roland Skye. And we took pity, he and I.
Your fortunes sad no more will be. For if you wish, I come to thee.
I’ll give you life, though it be late. Forget your past, my name is Fate.

“For seven years I’ll give you aid. Your soul is all we ask in trade.
No man could ask for more than me, but more I’ll give than what you see.

“I’ll guide your life, you’ll have your dream. Success will follow every scheme.
When seven years have passed away, then I will go, but you will stay.
Long life you’ll have, till final roll. Then come to us, we own your soul.”

Stock still and froze was Roland Skye. A teardrop poised on either eye.
For with the tolling of his bell, no one would care, except for Hell.
He takes her arm, this Lady Fate. In pay for years of bitter hate.
For seven years, or just a day: His life, his soul, he’d gladly pay.

And to her word, her deed was true. Her love, his fortune, grew and grew.
The rich he saw, they bowed to him. He soon was given every whim.
The power brokers near and far, paid heed his name, they fed his star.

But all who see him have to note, the scar on face, fresh blood on throat.
It seems that he is unaware of cut and scar, or has no care.

But none could see, not even he, the shell of man he came to be.
For none could know of horrid deed; for none had seen his lady feed.
She blocks the pain of fang and claw, so blood and scar was all they saw.

*

For seven years her word was gold. Her love was his to have and hold.
But seven years did finally go, till now’s the ending of her show.
She sits with him, to say good-by. While he, in vain, tries not to cry.

But words she speaks now give him cheer, as soft she murmurs by his ear:
“Perhaps I might just stay a while. (He never sees the secret smile)
“For surely this is love I feel. (And you my lamb, my favorite meal)

A favor small, that you can do, will bind me always close to you.
Use all the wealth at your command, to draw to us a tiny band.
With skills and art at beck and call, to sunder chain and pierce the wall.

“My master seeks a tiny boon. To walk the Earth, to see the Moon.
For just a glimpse, he’s never seen, of plant and tree and grass of green.
For just a look, for one short hour: you marry me, and keep my power.”

For Roland Skye, there was no wait. He’d kill and more for Lady Fate.
He rushes on to do the deed. To doubts and fear, he pays no heed.
He thunders on, a blinded goat. While drops of blood trail down his throat.

He wastes a fortune, searching wide. For those he seeks will oftime hide.
But find and gather close at last, a band of men, with power vast.
They join his task, o’r records pore. While Fate gives aid, and oftimes…more.

They chant the words, they cast the spells. All locked within their private hells.
She guides their task. She fans their greed. She holds them close, to feed and feed.
They labor hard, their dying long. While she grows great, her power strong.

And on their throat, and breast and brow, the mark of beast is growing now.

*

And now they join to speak the name. To say the words, to fan the flame.
The deed is done on midnight’s bell, as cracks the lock on gates of hell.

Come forth oh fiend, oh succubus. Come tear and kill, come run with us.
Now come you zombie from your grave. The Earth is ours, there’s none to save!
Come fly, and fill the midnight sky. Come help us find the ones to die.

But Roland Skye cries out at last: “Begone, go home, your hour’s past.”
The Lady Fate just laughs at this. “Come close my love for one last kiss.

Oh mortal one, did you believe, we’d take a crumb, and then we’d leave?
Oh foolish man, how could you think, we’d satisfy with just a blink.
The earth is ours, oh slaughter’s lamb. Now see me as I really am!”

He stands transfixed, his eyes a stare. For gone is face and flame soft hair.
A female thing now holds him near. A thing of horror, fangs and fear.

“Come close my love, you’re mine for good. And now we’ll love as demons should.
My failing dear, all else above: I always hurt the one I love.”
The pain she held from him so long, now fills his world, now sings its song.

“You’ll scream my toy, but never die. It’s my wants now you’ll satisfy.
So come and kiss me, I’m in need. Hold tight and scream as now I feed.”

Poor Roland Skye, unhappy boy. Not ever more a search for joy.
For Roland Skye, how sad to tell. Because of him, the Earth is hell.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

On Maintaining an Uncongested Throne

For fun. A defensive strategy for the modern toilet.

 

Inside Out – The Grumpy Writing Coach

     As writers, we face a problem: We’re not the reader. This may sound obvious, but it has important ramifications. Our reader is, in many ways, unknowable, because we have no idea of who will end up picking up our work. We do know some things, though:
     Their background probably won’t match ours. Their tastes will be different. Their age group and education will be different to an unknown degree. And, there’s a 50-50 chance that their gender will be different, too. In fact, it’s unlikely that we and a given reader have all that much in common.
     Given that, how can we write anything that will be acceptable to all readers? The answer is, we can’t. It is literally impossible to write anything that will be viewed in the same way by all readers.
     So, do we accept the fact that the majority of people who read our work won’t “get it?” Or is there a way to eliminate those differences? Obviously, there is, or I wouldn’t be writing this article. The trick isn’t to make our work universally accepted no matter the reader’s background. It’s to make all readers the same.
     What we need to do is to make our reader become our protagonist. If we can make them see the situation exactly as the protagonist does; if we give each reader the same set of resources the protagonist will use; if all readers have the same desires, needs, and imperatives as our protagonist, then they will decide on what must be done next in exactly the same way as our hero will—and have that reaction before the protagonist does, and literally become our protagonist in the moment that character calls now.
     Do that and you avoid the impossibility of making the writing universal. Instead you’ll make your readers universal. So, with that as our goal, let’s see how we can make it work.

We’ve always relied on presenting the facts accurately, concisely, and dispassionately because that’s how we were taught to write. And it works well for book reports. But when writing fiction, instead of eliminating differences in viewpoint that approach encourages them. Everyone has their own interpretation of your presentation, based on what the words mean to them. Tell the reader, for example, that the protagonist is at peace, and each reader will take a slightly different meaning from the statement. To some, being at peace means there is no stress in their life. For others, that there is no war, or argument. In Islam, peace is, in part, based on submission and surrender to the will of Allah. And, there are hundreds of other shades of meaning to that one word. So expecting a reader to know our viewpoint by reading a given word is impossible unless we focus on that reader, and are able to interact with them, so as to refine our words to fit their background and preconceptions. But, make the reader know why the character feels they are at peace by making that reader view the protagonist’s world as the protagonists does, and the reader’s interpretation of the word no-longer-matters. They will feel as the character feels, emotionally, because for the moment, they will have superimposed the protagonist’s view on their own.
     Can we do this using the writing techniques we all learn in school? Hell no. Our teachers spent zero time discussing the nuance of viewpoint. They taught us how to write dispassionately, with our accuracy of observation being the most important item. Why? Because most people will do their writing in a business setting, where accuracy is critical. We were, remember, learning skills to make us useful to employers. Those book-reports we wrote were practice for writing business reports. Those essays, practice for writing papers and letters. No one explained how to use tags, how to structure a scene, or even basics such as the three questions a reader needs answered quickly when entering any scene so as to have context to make sense of it.
     Converting the reader into our protagonist requires skills that are unlike those used for telling a story in person, or for creating a story on the stage or screen. Our medium is different, and has different strengths and weaknesses. Instead of stressing fact and accuracy we stress emotional connection. Instead of presenting things from the narrator’s viewpoint we presented from the protagonist’s. Same story, but a very different approach to presenting it. And that means a very different tool-set must be used in creating the presentation.
     Our goal, remember, isn’t to make the reader know about the terror our protagonist may be feeling. Our goal is to terrorize the reader. We don’t want the reader to learn about the plot. We want them to live it, moment-by-moment. If you can make someone feel they must stop reading for a moment, to decompress, because the emotional situation is so intense they can’t handle it, you have a very happy reader.
     In the end, we have a name for this: it’s called viewpoint. And viewpoint is the single most powerful tool in your repertoire. It is the thing that makes all readers the same.
     John W. Campbell, a noted editor once wrote an article in which he presented a hypothetical situation involving an observer and a climber. It went something like this:

Observer: “Don’t climb that tree. If you knew what I know, that’s not just a tree, it’s being used as a power pole, so there’s dangerous high-voltage up there.”
Protagonist: “If you knew what I know…that I’m a trained lineman, doing my job with the proper equipment, you wouldn’t worry.”
Observer: “But if you knew what I know, that your safety gloves are from a shipment that contained defective product, you wouldn’t go.”
Protagonist: “Ah…but if you knew what I know, that we heard about the defect and have inspected them to remove the bad gloves—and that the gloves I use will be pressure tested just before I put them on, you needn’t worry.”
Observer: “But if you knew what I know…”

     Point of view is critical. In the example above, were the observer made to know the situation as the protagonist does, confusion would be eliminated and the conversation would never occur.
     Obviously, the protagonist could be wrong. He or she could be missing or misinterpreting data, as could the protagonist in our stories. But that’s okay, because both our protagonist and our reader will have the same misunderstanding and make the same mistakes, which drives our plot. And our reader will be just as surprised, shocked, or perhaps pleased to learn of the misunderstanding.

     So how do we do that? How do we gain those necessary skills? How can we turn our narrative around and make our reader view our story from the inside out, as against from the outside in? How do we change our own perspective of how to present a story?
     The answer to that is quite simple. We do that by learning all we can about point of view and the other important skills a writer needs. We add to our existing knowledge, just the way we did, grade-by-grade, as we built our current set of writing skills. And the more we know, the greater the number of viable choices we have when handling a given situation. The more we know, the better we know what a reader will respond to. And, the more we know the better we get at making our reader feel like our protagonist.
     Simple? Absolutely. Easy? Of course not. If it was easy we’d all be rich and famous. Any profession takes time and practice to perfect. So the question isn’t if it’s easy or hard. The question is, is it worth the effort? And that boils down to: should we continue to write using techniques inappropriate to the task, or should we add professional skills to our toolbox? I don’t think you need my help to answer that question.
     But still, that’s a lot of work, especially given that we won’t know if we have the potential to make effective use of those skills, and to be successful, until we own and apply them. And that’s a big if, especially since most of us are not going to have people lining up to buy our work. So in reality: do we want to be a writer badly enough to to invest lots of time, and perhaps a few dollars to become a writer as a publisher views that term?
     That’s a difficult question to answer, other than to say that if someone can talk you out of writing you aren’t meant to be one. Writers write. It’s what we do. It’s our curse and our blessing.
Something to keep in mind when making that decision: writing isn’t a destination. It’s a journey, one that lasts a lifetime. And if every day we write with a little more skill than we did on the previous day, and we live long enough…
     So…now that I’ve discouraged you with the news that you probably won’t get rich from your writing this year, let me make a suggestion as to how to begin your transformation from outside-in to inside-out writing.
     A very good article on creating a strong point of view can be found here. It’s based on the work of Dwight Swain, who is notable for having defined many of the techniques that professional writers use, in a clear and concise way. I’d advise you to read the article, think about it, and when it begins to make sense, check the fiction that made you feel as though you were experiencing it, to see how the author made the technique work for that story. And if it seems like something that would help your writing, pick up a copy of Swain’s book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It both expands on that technique and will show you many others, equally meaningful. Read it slowly, stopping at every point where a new concept is introduced, to think about and practice that point, so as to make it your own rather than to simply learn that it exists.
     And when you finish the book put it aside for six months. Use what you’ve learned, gaining skill and competence. Then, read it again. This time, knowing where he’s going, and better understanding the concepts being introduced, you’ll learn as much the second time as you did the first.
     Will it make you a published author? Naa. That’s your job. What it will do is give you the tools with which to become one, if-it’s-in-you to do that. And that’s the best we can hope for. Maybe it will turn out to be something interesting, but still, success will still elude you. Could be. Happens to most of us. But still, new writers appear all the time. Why shouldn’t it be you? And as they say, you never know till you try.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Author’s note:
These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

A Mirror for the Mind – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 
 

     One of the unique abilities humans have evolved is to mentally put ourselves in someone else’s place. We have the ability to watch someone doing a physical act and literally feel ourselves duplicating the action. It’s not a matter of saying, “I do this, and then that,” we physically fire off the proper neurons, but at a level that doesn’t produce overt movement. We are, in effect, debugging the procedure before we try it ourselves.
     It’s a handy ability, and allows us to learn quickly. And it’s so complete an ability that if the one we’re mirroring in our mind hurts themself we’ll feel that pain. Unpleasant though it might be, pain teaches us to be careful, and that mirrored pain teaches us what to avoid, just as would having made that mistake ourselves.
     So what does that have to do with writing? Everything. That ability to mirror action and emotion is what gives us the way to literally pull our reader into our stories as a participant. Done right, we can terrify our reader with a horror story, and make them afraid to turn out the lights—in spite of the fact they know it’s only a story. It’s why we weep when something terrible happens to our fictional friend, and feel triumph at the climax of the story.
     All the tools—the techniques we use—have one and only one goal, to evoke that empathetic ability that places our reader on the scene.
     Our hero is locked in combat, his sword weaving a protective shell around him. We could list each thrust and parry and leave it at that. But that won’t evoke the empathetic sense because it’s impersonal. Instead, as the fight goes on, we have our hero think, He’s better than I am.
     The character has that realization, but the reader mutters, “Oh shit now what?”
     Sure, our reader knows the protagonist isn’t going to die. If that happened the story would be over. So the question is, how can we avoid death? And with that realization, those thrusts and parries take on new meaning, because while we know things are going bad for the protagonist we need time. We need to stay alive till something presents itself as a solution. Now we focus on the events, while at the same time thinking over the possibilities—exactly-like-the-protagonist, which means we are the protagonist, and living that fight.
     Let’s assume that the reader thinks they know what stratagem can save our protagonist—will at least allow escape if victory is not possible. Now, in addition to fighting the battle we’re shouting to our avatar, trying to remind them of that solution. And when our hero is nicked on the hand we curse, and feel the pain. Done really well, we can cause the reader to have to stop and recover because it gets too real.
     And if in our brilliance we not only cause the reader to be shouting encouragement and advice, we provide a better solution, one the reader feels they should have thought of, we have a reader who saying, “I really like this book.” And what more can we ask for?
     Facts? Who cares? Facts only inform. But mirroring the action in our mind as we read—living the adventure. That entertains.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

All God’s Children

 
 
 
     Recently, I had a thought that may have world-shaking implications, and change the way we look at genetics, and genetic manipulation, forever.
     For no reason in particular, I began to think about Christian dogma, and the concept that God gave his only son to the world, a child conceived within a human womb, with a bit of human and some divine aspects in his DNA that would allow the child to grow up with an innate sense of right and wrong, plus abilities we would attribute only to a divine being, like being able to revive the dead, to change water to wine, and to walk on water.
     The Bible clearly identifies God as male, and says that the child was his son, not just someone he created, like Adam and Eve, so the implication is quite clear, that God, the one in who’s image mankind was created, had some pretty special DNA to contribute, even were that contribution not made in the usual way.
     Interestingly, the abilities of the human/divine hybrid didn’t manifest immediately, but required the attainment of full maturity for the more magical aspects to be observed—though from childhood he was said to be pious and admirable.
     My first thought was that God sacrificing his only child wasn’t the great thing it had been made out to be, because, after all, being God he could cause another, or a million children of equal capabilities to be born. The “only child” thing, therefore was personal choice, and obviously must serve some purpose other than sacrifice. What did hit me as unique was that it was all accomplished through genetics.
     God took one of Mary’s eggs, and either cloned it, while at the same time, changing the genetic coding so as to produce that magical child, or fertilized that egg with chromosomes of divine origin. Either way, in doing so he changed the history of the world. But of more importance: he left mankind a critical clue that is only now apparent, because now, we have not only the technology to clone, we can change DNA. And that means that with care, diligence, and research, it is entirely possible to recreate that miracle. It is within our grasp to have every single woman on the face of the planet give birth to offspring who can truly be called a child of God, and who will innately know right from wrong.
     Think about the result of that fact, alone. No more wars. No more strife. “Turn the other cheek” will be the rule, without it even having to be taught. And the ability to feed the multitude with only a bit of food will conquer hunger. And that doesn’t touch the effect of being able to raise the dead, and survive a shipwreck by simply walking to shore—or calming the storm with an act of will.
     Assuming that the mutation breeds true, the cloning and genetic manipulation will need be only a one time thing, bringing peace and plenty to the planet in one single generation.
     Any woman would be overjoyed to bear such a child. Right? And what man would not be honored to be raising God’s child?
     Once this amazing opportunity is pointed out to the faithful, I am utterly confident that Christianity, as a whole, will support the necessary research, and help usher in the era of endless perfection.
     Is that cool, or what? Though I do kind of suspect that there might be some who won’t be pleased to read this.

 

Amazon *IS* Screwing You – The Grumpy Writing Coach

     A large part of Amazon’s business, these days, is with self-publishers. They don’t sell a lot of books per author, but they will usually sell copies to friends, family, and coworkers. And every million self-published writers who moves twenty copies of their book is exactly equal to the one author who sells twenty million copies. There are millions of self-published writers, so that’s a nice source of income. But that being said, Amazon has a way to add to their profit that most writers aren’t aware of.
Like Smashwords for their electronic book releases, Amazon accepts Microsoft Word files as input for a Kindle release. The only significant difference in the two files is that Smashwords requires an inside picture and a statement that they are publishing it.
There is one more difference, though, and it’s the one making Amazon all that extra money. Unlike Smashwords, Amazon, if you take their 70% royalties offer, charges $.15 per megabyte transmitted to the customer, so if your file is just a few bytes over 1 meg in size that’s $.30 in addition to their 30% cut of the profit. Sell a million books with that extra $.15 profit and it adds up to $150,000. A nice piece of change.
That size limit shouldn’t be a problem, because you have to get close to 135k words before you break the one meg file size in a Word file. As an example, an 85k word novel, as a Word .doc document comes in at about .75 meg, and should deliver to the customer for $.15. At least it should.
That same novel, with an inside picture included, for Smashwords, weighs in at .77 meg and yields a converted epub file of .619 meg—including that that internal picture. But when Amazon gets their greedy claws on that same file it inflates to a staggering 3.05 meg. That means a $.60 delivery charge. So if you charge $2.95, which many self-pubs do, Amazon gets:
Their 30% of the profit: $.88
Their delivery charge: $.60
Total paid to Amazon: $1.48 which is roughly 50% of the profit.
That becomes more interesting when you look at most published novels on Amazon, and check their Kindle files. They nearly all have a file size of well under a meg—or did in 2014 when this article was written. Now, they’re screwing publishers in the same way. As an example, My novel, An Abiding Evil as a word file, is .41 meg. Converted to ePub format it’s only .281 meg. And when that Word file is published on Smashwords the downloaded epub file, from Smashwords is .8 meg.

     But…. That same Word file, when sent to Amazon, results in a whopping Amazon file size of 3.81 meg! And if the .281 meg epub file is sent to Amazon, instead, the result is 2.78 meg.

    So, Smashwords, who do not charge the author for file delivery, create a .8 meg file from a MS Word manuscript, but Amazon, who does, creates a file that’s 3.5 times as large.

     We could assume that the programmers working for Amazon are inept, compared to those at Smashwords, rather than it being a case of Amazon finding a way to chisel a lot of extra profit out of the self-publishers—while claiming to give the author 70% of the price. But no onw believes that. In any case there’s a way around it:
1. Clean up your file and get all the headers, tabs, and other crap out.
2. Build your table of contents (more on how to do that, below).
3. Save the file, using Word, as a Docx file.
4. Download a copy of Calibre. It’s a free program, though they would like, and deserve, a donation as a thank you.
5. Open Calibre and paste or load the DocX file you created into it.
6. Highlight your novel and select, Edit Metadata. In the metadata screen that opens, enter your book’s title, the picture you just created, your name, the tags for the novel, and the “sort” data fields: If your title has “The” as its first word, enter the title minus “the” and follow it with the title, a comma, a space, and “The” (or, for novels beginning with “A” it should read something like: Change of Heart, A). Your sort field entry for Author Name, is your last name, followed by a comma, a space, and your first. If you already have the piece published via Kindle, copy the publication date and the ISBN from the existing Kindle page.
7. Highlight the file and select the Convert Books feature. Be certain that the output file (top right) is listed as epub.
8. At the bottom right press Okay.
The epub file that results is what you send to Amazon in place of your MS Word file, and the final size will be far smaller. And with a $.15 delivery fee and a $2.95 price, their share of the profit drops to 34%. And, you make $.40 more per sale.
As always, though, review the result via Amazon’s reader, and do that before you push the publish button.

° ° °

To build a table of contents for publication, we can’t use Word’s table of contents feature. Instead:
1. Bookmark each chapter heading. Use a simple name like ch1 for chapter numbers. No spaces in the bookmark name, and don’t bother with capital letters. And while you’re doing that, you might want to center the chapter’s title and make it bold, to set it off. This makes a neater separation on smaller screen readers. Some people go up in size to 13 or 14 point, but that’s personal preference.
2. Create the table of contents page by setting it off with a manual page break at top and bottom (Typing a Command/Enter on the Mac and Control/Enter on the PC creates a manual page break). Then, as you did with your chapter titles, center the “Table of Contents” title. Again, many also make it 14 point type, bold.
3. Under the title, type out the chapter numbers and whatever else should be included in the TOC, like samples of other books and author notes, using one line per. You can cheat and copy that text as a group from another book and paste it in, to save typing. It will come with the existing hyperlinks, but you’re going to replace that, so it doesn’t matter.
4. Hyperlink each line in the table to the bookmark for that chapter. Don’t be surprised if, when the hyperlink is added, the paragraph mark at the end of that line vanishes, and must be added back it. It’s another of Word’s charming foibles. When you finish, you can test that the links are proper by hovering over each entry to see that the hyperlink refers to the proper bookmark. You are going to push the button to see it work for yourself, though, both to be certain it works and because it’s fun, which is the reason for the next step.
5. Push the Add Bookmark button to get you to the bookmark page. While you’re there, find the “Hidden Bookmarks” checkbox and turn it on. If it’s already on, turn it off and back on because there’s a bug in the code and it won’t show bookmarks that have been added since the box was checked unless you turn it off and on again (don’t you just love MS Word? And people wonder why I’m so grumpy). Delete all hidden bookmarks and close the bookmarks window.
6. You’re ready to go. Just don’t use any hyperlinks now that you’ve cleared the hidden ones or you’ll have to do it again.

 

Honey? You’re Snoring Again.

 
 
 
 
      Tired of having your sleeping partner wake you with, “Turn over, damn-it, you’re snoring again!”? That’s especially annoying when, like me, you can’t sleep comfortably on your back or side.
     Hate waking to the sound of your partner sawing wood at high volume? Dislike waking the one you care for from comfortable sleep in order to increase your own comfort?
     There’s an easy, and close to free, solution that can provide nocturnal quiet in most cases. It’s fast, it’s painless, and, also helps prevent a double chin. Win/win.
     Try this: Open your mouth and do a false snore. If you’re like me, the loudest noise comes from the back of your mouth, at the roof, and exits through your open jaw.
     Now, try it again, but this time, as you do, close your mouth, slowly, and you’ll notice that just before your lips touch, the very nature of the sound changes, and the volume dramatically drops. You’ll probably no longer be able to make the noise from within the mouth. And that’s the magic secret. Keep your mouth shut (always good advice, I suppose) and you either won’t snore, or the volume will be cut to a fraction of what it was. Admittedly, if you already sleep with your mouth closed this won’t help, but if you don’t, this is the snoring solution. Any small noises you still make can be masked with a white noise generator that will also keep you from noticing outside noises like trucks and dogs barking. Those can be picked up at places like Walmart and Babys “R” Us for under $50 U.S.
     There are lots of easy ways of keeping your mouth closed during sleep. One woman reported that she used a sleep mask under her chin with the elastic band over the top of her head. A commercial version can be found here, but you can make one of your own in seconds.
     I first used a soft two-inch wide cloth, to which I added Velcro sealing strips I had in my possibilities box. Being lazy I stapled the strips on (staple ends out). The result is comfortable and effective, though a bit strange looking since it has a decorative motif. Pictures below if you enjoy a good laugh. The only drawback is that because the material gives only a small amount, it interferes with yawning to an extent.
     A later, and more effective version was made with a four inch wide Ace Bandage, two layers thick, folded so as to produce a two inch strip. To keep it from unfolding and separating, I placed a line of stitches across the four layers every three inches or so, since stretch will be in the other direction. You can see the stitching in the picture. To obtain the necessary length I wrapped it around my head as shown, pulling it just short of the limit of elasticity. Once I established that distance I cut the bandage three inches longer than that, then overlapped the ends by three inches and sewed it into a single loop. More complicated to explain than to do. I recommend the elastic version over the original because it’s a bit more comfortable. Modest pressure is all you need, because it’s okay to allow the lips to open a trace. It’s the position of the jaw that makes the real difference, not clamping the mouth closed.
     The solution is so simple I know many of you will be saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” as I did. But for some reason not too many people have been motivated to search for such solutions, and few people I mention it to are aware that commercial products are available. But it can be a godsend. One woman I told about it came back to say that I had saved her marriage. I’ve never saved a marriage before (if you don’t count my own, of course)
     So, as a public service, you might share this article with others. I’d appreciate that. I make no money from this, so it’s not a sales scheme. I’m spreading the word because in the past six weeks the only time my wife woke me to complain that my snoring was keeping her awake was the night the device slipped off my head. It used to happen nightly, so we’re both sleeping better.

The original test version. You can stop laughing now.

This shows the placement of one of the two Velcro strips. They had a self adhesive backing, but that failed in a night or two so stitching (or staples in my case) was necessary. If you do elect to take the shortcut of staples, a suggestion or two: 1) be sure the folded legs of the staple face out, so they don’t scratch you. 2) Press those legs down so they don’t catch on the pillowcase (in which case, I suppose it doesn’t matter if they face in or out).

For what it’s worth, I tried making one out of several layers of an old Ace Bandage, and it was more comfortable to wear. On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly as effective.

Sleep well!

 

Naked Bitch

Oh naked bitch with whip and chain
You flay my soul, you burn my brain
You give me hate, and only pain
(Yet here I am with you again)
 
Oh naked bitch with eyes of flame
It’s not for me your heart to tame
To you it’s all a boring game
(I cannot seize your secret name)
 
Oh naked bitch when will it end?
My dreams you break, my soul you rend
In hell with you, my time I spend
(It’s me who’ll break, you’ll never bend)
 
Oh naked bitch with hip and thigh
Oh hear my prayer, and heed my cry
You bind my soul, my life you tie
(Please stop the hurt, and let me die)
 
Oh naked bitch, my life you crush
My dreams all torn, their contents gush
And yet to you again I rush
(And when I cry, you tell me hush)
 
Oh naked bitch, I made you so
With deed and word, and even blow
The things I did you’ll never know
(Oh naked bitch I love you so)
 
Oh naked bitch who I adore
Though thousands lay upon the floor
We run to you and ask for more
Oh naked bitch
Your name is War
 
*****

This poem came to me for unknown reasons, and is one of the darker things I’ve written, though one of my favorites. I truly didn’t know where I was going with it, until the last stanza, when I found I wasn’t writing about a woman, after all.

And, like most people who foist their poetry off on others, I have other bad habits. Thankfully, those I do in private.