My mother was an avid reader, growing up. It was thanks to her voracious appetite for serial fiction and seemingly unlimited teenaged babysitting funds that as a kid I inherited her Stratemeyer Syndicate collection. There were the Bobbsey Twins, insipid and seemingly shoehorned into a mystery format that even they seemed to resent. There was Tom Swift, whose gee-whiz plucky grin and can-do attitude made me a little ill.
And then there were her obvious favorites, the sparring teen detective titans: the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys always made me feel uneasy. Fenton Hardy was obviously the pushy type who was trying to plump up his sons’ college resumes, and resorted to withholding approval and affection unless Frank and Joe did him proud by figuring out the mystery of the sinister signpost. It was perfectly obvious that the Hardys were doomed to a life of solving mystery after mystery just for that one token of their father’s love that was perpetually out of reach. Nancy Drew, on the other hand was self-motivated. She and her gay band of chums solved mysteries for the love of it, sometimes in their clam-diggers! Nancy Drew had Ned Nickerson. Nancy had titian hair, and a roadster. Nancy Drew had Hannah Gruen making German pastries in the kitchen.
I was surprised to find a television show this fall that pushes all the same pleasure buttons as the Nancy Drew stories used to. I originally tuned into The Good Wife because it starred Julianna Margulies, a lovely woman whose performance was about the only thing I used to enjoy on ER. In The Good Wife she stars as Alicia Florrik, a woman whose husband has resigned as State Attorney after a scandal involving hookers and corruption. With her husband in jail, back to work she goes, for another favorite actor of mine, Christine Baranski, a senior partner who walks around the sets of her swanky law firm with a pole wedged firmly up her fundament. At first I must confess my heart sank when I saw that most of the show’s action was going to be within the law firm and in the courtroom, because courtroom procedurals are among my least favorite genres of television.
The show makes it palatable to me, though, by giving it all a citrusy, Nancy Drew-like girl detective twist. The character of Alicia, thanks to the public rigors through which her husband has put her, has a decided empathy with the put-upon pro bono cases to which she’s assigned as a junior associate. Like Nancy, she’s almost supernaturally observant, and always manages to spot the critical difference between an original memo and its photocopied duplicate that manages to thwart the evildoers trying to wring pension money out of mourning widows. With her chum Kalinda, played stubbornly and opaquely by the excellent Archie Panjabi, she snoops and detects and finds the loopholes in cases that others cannot.
The writers have given Alicia two adolescent children who have a detection plot of their own, as they try to figure out exactly who has been leaving mysterious photographs of their father with other women on their doorstep—and who exactly has been haunting their landing to take photographs of their apartment. Alicia’s son is a smart cookie armed with his computer software, his internet research, and his video-recording iPod; he and his younger sister are conducting their own investigations without their mother’s knowledge.
The cases on which Alicia works are not really any more complicated than the average Encyclopedia Brown mystery, but the acting is compelling and the way the series mingles Alicia’s personal afflictions with her everyday work is quite well done. Sure, Alicia Florrik is thirty years older than Nancy and much more worn and tired, and she may have swapped in her roadster for an SUV, but within her breast beats the heart of a true teen detective. When she’s sniffing around, she’s never more alert and alive.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Final Map
It was only Friday morning that I was crowing about receiving the draft of the map my illustrator was doing for The Buccaneer's Apprentice. I got a copy of the final map—missing only the labels for places that my publisher will add—less than twenty-four hours later. It's totally gorgeous.
(There's a big picture behind the link.)
I always envy people who've skills I haven't.
(There's a big picture behind the link.)
I always envy people who've skills I haven't.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Cartographers and why I love them
After the torture I went through with The Glass Maker’s Daughter, when it came to making a draft the map that appeared in the front of the book, I learned my lesson. When I was writing both The Buccaneer’s Apprentice and A Traveler to Nascenza, I was completely aware of the geography I was traversing in a way that I never had been with the first book in the series. I kept things straight, so that I’d have a finished draft done when the publisher needed.
But I still can’t draw. That’s why I’m always delighted when I encounter the work of someone who can make sense of my scrawls. I submitted the map draft for The Buccaneer’s Apprentice a long while back.
I actually wrote more about it than I sketched anything. My email to the editor was full of cautions, like, The island of Gallina is supposed to be an active volcano, not a quesadilla, or I have drawn Cassaforte so that it looks massive when it should be weak and small compared to the country of Pays d’Azur, can you shrink it?
This week I got from the artist a rough and very preliminary sketch of how’s he interpreting my scribbles. Holy crap, is it ever nice.
I am always amazed when someone has skills that I don’t personally possess, and the fellow who has been doing my maps for this series has them in abundance. I would name children after him if I could.
But I still can’t draw. That’s why I’m always delighted when I encounter the work of someone who can make sense of my scrawls. I submitted the map draft for The Buccaneer’s Apprentice a long while back.
I actually wrote more about it than I sketched anything. My email to the editor was full of cautions, like, The island of Gallina is supposed to be an active volcano, not a quesadilla, or I have drawn Cassaforte so that it looks massive when it should be weak and small compared to the country of Pays d’Azur, can you shrink it?
This week I got from the artist a rough and very preliminary sketch of how’s he interpreting my scribbles. Holy crap, is it ever nice.
I am always amazed when someone has skills that I don’t personally possess, and the fellow who has been doing my maps for this series has them in abundance. I would name children after him if I could.
Monday, November 9, 2009
A Musical Morsel Supreme
My favorite toy during my single-digit years was probably the Toot Sweet.
One can tell by the strange, Victorian-broadside-meets-psychedelia packaging and the orange-and-purple color scheme that Mattel released it in the late sixties, shortly after the Summer of Love and roughly concurrent with the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Toot Sweets” is the name of a musical number within the film, in which Sally Ann Howe waltzes around in a long Edwardian skirt whilst playing melodies through a candy cane with holes in it. Mattel, desperately searching for something to sell while slapping From the Movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! on the front, abandoned the candy cane idea and decided to introduce kiddies into the wonders of injection mold manufacturing.
And I loved it.
The basic idea behind the Toot Sweet is to make whistles out of Tootsie Rolls. The Toot Sweet machine itself is fairly simple, consisting of a sturdy base, a lever that retracts a plunger, and a screw-on-top to hold various molds included with the toy.
To make a whistle required two miniature Tootsie Rolls, which would have to be warmed and rolled thin in order to fit into the machine’s narrow bore. Once inside, one would pick a mold for half a whistle, fasten it on the top, and then very gently push down on the lever in order to force the candy into the mold. When the top was unscrewed, viola! Half a whistle.
When you’d made two halves, all you’d have to do would be to press them together to complete your edible musical instrument.
As my mother could have attested, and my cat Fred, who was hanging this morning around to leave cat hairs all over the candy and who went running when I blew through the slightly crushed glob of Tootsie Roll, the whistles actually work. They emit a loud and shrieking toot that, while not perhaps as melodious as what Truly Scrumptious produced in the movie, is probably more delicious than any ol’ candy cane.
But the fun of the Toot Sweet doesn’t stop there. Oh no. The machine came with other molds with which you were supposed to decorate your whistles, by affixing them to the whistle’s butt.
So if you really wanted to personalize your sticky, spitty whistle by giving it a skull, a fish, a teddy bear, a mouse, a scary clown, or a child molester in a trench coat, you could!
Trust me. When you’re six and your father is a sugar freak who keeps a never-ending supply of miniature Tootsie Rolls in the house, the Toot Sweet was the delicious gift that kept on giving.
One can tell by the strange, Victorian-broadside-meets-psychedelia packaging and the orange-and-purple color scheme that Mattel released it in the late sixties, shortly after the Summer of Love and roughly concurrent with the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Toot Sweets” is the name of a musical number within the film, in which Sally Ann Howe waltzes around in a long Edwardian skirt whilst playing melodies through a candy cane with holes in it. Mattel, desperately searching for something to sell while slapping From the Movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! on the front, abandoned the candy cane idea and decided to introduce kiddies into the wonders of injection mold manufacturing.
And I loved it.
The basic idea behind the Toot Sweet is to make whistles out of Tootsie Rolls. The Toot Sweet machine itself is fairly simple, consisting of a sturdy base, a lever that retracts a plunger, and a screw-on-top to hold various molds included with the toy.
To make a whistle required two miniature Tootsie Rolls, which would have to be warmed and rolled thin in order to fit into the machine’s narrow bore. Once inside, one would pick a mold for half a whistle, fasten it on the top, and then very gently push down on the lever in order to force the candy into the mold. When the top was unscrewed, viola! Half a whistle.
When you’d made two halves, all you’d have to do would be to press them together to complete your edible musical instrument.
As my mother could have attested, and my cat Fred, who was hanging this morning around to leave cat hairs all over the candy and who went running when I blew through the slightly crushed glob of Tootsie Roll, the whistles actually work. They emit a loud and shrieking toot that, while not perhaps as melodious as what Truly Scrumptious produced in the movie, is probably more delicious than any ol’ candy cane.
But the fun of the Toot Sweet doesn’t stop there. Oh no. The machine came with other molds with which you were supposed to decorate your whistles, by affixing them to the whistle’s butt.
So if you really wanted to personalize your sticky, spitty whistle by giving it a skull, a fish, a teddy bear, a mouse, a scary clown, or a child molester in a trench coat, you could!
Trust me. When you’re six and your father is a sugar freak who keeps a never-ending supply of miniature Tootsie Rolls in the house, the Toot Sweet was the delicious gift that kept on giving.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo
November for me is the great prelude to the bleakness of Michigan’s winters, a month of damp and chill and leaves that fall and then are quickly crusted under ice. I know that to many others, however, it’s thirty days of industry and self-recrimination known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.
I have a few minor objections to NaNoWriMo that I’ve made known in the past, though they shouldn’t stop anyone from participating. For one thing, the fifty-thousand-word goal to which people aspire is only half a novel, really. It’s a novella. Or a longer-form project. For another, NaNoWriMo's advertisement of writing a mere fifteen hundred words a day makes the composition process sound like a cakewalk, when even fifty thousand words is a marathon. It’s easy for people to miss their daily goal. What I end up seeing on the pages of my friends’ journals, starting even as early as the fourth day of the month, is usually an unending stream of self-reproach and even outright scolding for falling behind. Often that leads to people writing filler, padding scenes with unnecessary dialogue or utter nonsense in order to make a word count.
And finally (and probably most upsetting for me), NaNoWriMo tends to act as if the writing of the first draft is really all there is to completing a novel. The month’s over! You’ve got a novel! Call Random House! To me, revision is an essential part of the process. I usually go through three drafts of a manuscript before I dare submit it to my publisher. And I’m not talking about minor word correction and polishing. I mean rigorous, front-to-back deconstruction of the infrastructure I’ve created and taking the time to make it right.
Somehow, though, National Longer Form Project First Draft Writing Month, or NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo, isn’t as catchy.
Those quibbles aside, NaNoWriMo does give people an easy-sounding structure to work with. A deadline can be helpful for many people to give them the momentum to work. It makes writing approachable, and the results satisfying. It fires people’s imaginations and creativity and sometimes inspires people who might not ordinarily attempt a novel to sit down and write, and I’m all for that.
As the author of sixteen published novels and therefore allowed to claim the status as An Authority In The Field, I therefore offer a few little tips for my friends who are attempting the Herculean feat of writing a long manuscript.
1. Be aware that the first third of the novel is likely the most difficult stretch of writing you’ll encounter. You might have a vision of your story in your mind, shining and bright, completely with richly realized characters and scintillating dialogue, but the moment you start writing, it comes out kludgy and drab. Or else you have a brilliant start for a few pages, and then it all seems to fall apart. Yes. It’s going to be like that for a little bit, until you get into the rhythm of your characters and their patterns of speech. You’re also going to be trying to figure out the voice of your narrator, who is a character to himself, even if he’s narrating in the third person. There’s also the chance that you’ve overanalyzed all your characters so that once they start doing their stuff, they seem dull and lifeless. If that’s the case, you need to let them do something unexpected and see where that carries you.
The first third of a novel is always a tough haul for me. I usually give myself three and a half months to write a manuscript, and my manuscripts tend to be about a hundred thousand words, or three hundred typed pages. Usually it takes me a month and a half to write the first hundred pages, another month to write the last two hundred, and then a month to revise everything. Notice how disproportionately long it takes me to write that first third of the book? I accept it now, after doing it so many times. But in the beginning, it was awfully frustrating.
2. Picking up from the day before is difficult. You will want to do anything but write, when you sit down to your computer at your appointed writing time. You will want to surf the web or clean the toilets or give yourself that colonic you’ve always thought about, but you will not want to write. You may even feel vaguely nauseated at the thought of stringing words together. You will feel uncreative and void of any ideas. This is totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily go away, either. I still encounter the same feelings each and every time I sit down to work.
However. If you’re serious about getting your word count in for the day, you will need to hold yourself to it. Disconnect your ethernet cord or turn off your WiFi. Don’t let yourself open up that Bejeweled application. Sit there in front of your word processor and stare at it until grudgingly your brain taps out a few words, and then a few more. It might take a half hour or even an hour to kick in, but eventually the rusty pipes will groan and a trickle will emerge. Eventually that trickle will turn into a steady flow. Maybe not the gush you were hoping for, but enough to get by.
Want to know my simplest tip for picking up on your narrative the next day? Tempting as it may be to finish out a chapter at the end of your writing period, resist. Stop writing in the middle of a fiercely exciting scene. Oh, you might be tempted to continue, but that’s the entire point. Your mind will work on that scene in your downtime, even as you sleep. When you sit down the next day and open up your document, you’ll be itching to continue and get to the exciting resolution. The carrot-on-a-stick of completing something exciting is more potent a lure day-to-day lure than having to start something fresh. Trust me on this one.
3. And finally, be kind to yourself. Jesus, are you a professional novelist with a deadline? Some of you may be, but the vast majority of you aren’t. Sure, you may want to have the satisfied glow of knowing you’ve made your word count, and be able to show off your fifty-thousand-word badge on December first. But honestly, it’s more valuable an experience to write, to continue writing regularly, and to enjoy and learn from the process than it is to pound out random words and hate every minute of it. It’s better to take a year to write fifty thousand words than it is to feel guilty and berate yourself for thirty days for not keeping up. Your manuscript will be better for it, too.
Writing a novel is difficult enough. A writer needs to have confidence in what he or she is doing, or else the project will fizzle. Drowning out the litany of self-reproach—all the internal editor’s cries of Well THAT’S no good! and This chapter is going nowhere!—while listening to the story and its characters as a reader might, is nigh on impossible as it is. Pummeling oneself for not adhering to what is (let’s face it) an arbitrary and meaningless deadline is not going to make your compositional process any easier.
So be kind to yourself. Enjoy NaNoWriMo for the creative kick in the ass that it is, and don’t fret about the daily word count. Make it the start of a year of writing on a regular basis. In the end, you’ll be a better person for having followed your muse.
I have a few minor objections to NaNoWriMo that I’ve made known in the past, though they shouldn’t stop anyone from participating. For one thing, the fifty-thousand-word goal to which people aspire is only half a novel, really. It’s a novella. Or a longer-form project. For another, NaNoWriMo's advertisement of writing a mere fifteen hundred words a day makes the composition process sound like a cakewalk, when even fifty thousand words is a marathon. It’s easy for people to miss their daily goal. What I end up seeing on the pages of my friends’ journals, starting even as early as the fourth day of the month, is usually an unending stream of self-reproach and even outright scolding for falling behind. Often that leads to people writing filler, padding scenes with unnecessary dialogue or utter nonsense in order to make a word count.
And finally (and probably most upsetting for me), NaNoWriMo tends to act as if the writing of the first draft is really all there is to completing a novel. The month’s over! You’ve got a novel! Call Random House! To me, revision is an essential part of the process. I usually go through three drafts of a manuscript before I dare submit it to my publisher. And I’m not talking about minor word correction and polishing. I mean rigorous, front-to-back deconstruction of the infrastructure I’ve created and taking the time to make it right.
Somehow, though, National Longer Form Project First Draft Writing Month, or NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo, isn’t as catchy.
Those quibbles aside, NaNoWriMo does give people an easy-sounding structure to work with. A deadline can be helpful for many people to give them the momentum to work. It makes writing approachable, and the results satisfying. It fires people’s imaginations and creativity and sometimes inspires people who might not ordinarily attempt a novel to sit down and write, and I’m all for that.
As the author of sixteen published novels and therefore allowed to claim the status as An Authority In The Field, I therefore offer a few little tips for my friends who are attempting the Herculean feat of writing a long manuscript.
1. Be aware that the first third of the novel is likely the most difficult stretch of writing you’ll encounter. You might have a vision of your story in your mind, shining and bright, completely with richly realized characters and scintillating dialogue, but the moment you start writing, it comes out kludgy and drab. Or else you have a brilliant start for a few pages, and then it all seems to fall apart. Yes. It’s going to be like that for a little bit, until you get into the rhythm of your characters and their patterns of speech. You’re also going to be trying to figure out the voice of your narrator, who is a character to himself, even if he’s narrating in the third person. There’s also the chance that you’ve overanalyzed all your characters so that once they start doing their stuff, they seem dull and lifeless. If that’s the case, you need to let them do something unexpected and see where that carries you.
The first third of a novel is always a tough haul for me. I usually give myself three and a half months to write a manuscript, and my manuscripts tend to be about a hundred thousand words, or three hundred typed pages. Usually it takes me a month and a half to write the first hundred pages, another month to write the last two hundred, and then a month to revise everything. Notice how disproportionately long it takes me to write that first third of the book? I accept it now, after doing it so many times. But in the beginning, it was awfully frustrating.
2. Picking up from the day before is difficult. You will want to do anything but write, when you sit down to your computer at your appointed writing time. You will want to surf the web or clean the toilets or give yourself that colonic you’ve always thought about, but you will not want to write. You may even feel vaguely nauseated at the thought of stringing words together. You will feel uncreative and void of any ideas. This is totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily go away, either. I still encounter the same feelings each and every time I sit down to work.
However. If you’re serious about getting your word count in for the day, you will need to hold yourself to it. Disconnect your ethernet cord or turn off your WiFi. Don’t let yourself open up that Bejeweled application. Sit there in front of your word processor and stare at it until grudgingly your brain taps out a few words, and then a few more. It might take a half hour or even an hour to kick in, but eventually the rusty pipes will groan and a trickle will emerge. Eventually that trickle will turn into a steady flow. Maybe not the gush you were hoping for, but enough to get by.
Want to know my simplest tip for picking up on your narrative the next day? Tempting as it may be to finish out a chapter at the end of your writing period, resist. Stop writing in the middle of a fiercely exciting scene. Oh, you might be tempted to continue, but that’s the entire point. Your mind will work on that scene in your downtime, even as you sleep. When you sit down the next day and open up your document, you’ll be itching to continue and get to the exciting resolution. The carrot-on-a-stick of completing something exciting is more potent a lure day-to-day lure than having to start something fresh. Trust me on this one.
3. And finally, be kind to yourself. Jesus, are you a professional novelist with a deadline? Some of you may be, but the vast majority of you aren’t. Sure, you may want to have the satisfied glow of knowing you’ve made your word count, and be able to show off your fifty-thousand-word badge on December first. But honestly, it’s more valuable an experience to write, to continue writing regularly, and to enjoy and learn from the process than it is to pound out random words and hate every minute of it. It’s better to take a year to write fifty thousand words than it is to feel guilty and berate yourself for thirty days for not keeping up. Your manuscript will be better for it, too.
Writing a novel is difficult enough. A writer needs to have confidence in what he or she is doing, or else the project will fizzle. Drowning out the litany of self-reproach—all the internal editor’s cries of Well THAT’S no good! and This chapter is going nowhere!—while listening to the story and its characters as a reader might, is nigh on impossible as it is. Pummeling oneself for not adhering to what is (let’s face it) an arbitrary and meaningless deadline is not going to make your compositional process any easier.
So be kind to yourself. Enjoy NaNoWriMo for the creative kick in the ass that it is, and don’t fret about the daily word count. Make it the start of a year of writing on a regular basis. In the end, you’ll be a better person for having followed your muse.
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