The big chop

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working intently on making some revisions my editor had requested to the third book in the Cassaforte Chronicles. (Its former title, A Traveler to Nascenza, has been shelved, by the way, in favor of The Nascenza Conspiracy.)

For those of you who read The Glass Maker’s Daughter, the third book in the series focuses on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the first novel’s heroine. After spending four years of increased scrutiny and expectation thanks to his sister’s fame and connections to the the country’s ruler, Petro is tired of constant attention. When he’s selected to represent his insula on a religious pilgrimage, he and his best friend decide to play a practical joke by swapping places. Petro gets to be a nobody for the course of a couple of weeks, while his friend gets to enjoy all the imagined privileges of being the glass maker’s son. But then everything goes wrong when political insurrectionists wishing to put pressure on the crown kidnap the friend, believing he’s Petro Divetri, and Petro’s left alone in the wilderness to stop them.

The book’s really a play on a familiar theme these days, that of a political group utilizing tactics of terror in order to frighten a population away from a popular leader. It’s a story of the extremes to which a political minority will resort when their candidate doesn’t assume a nation’s control—though I don’t necessarily think any of the young adults reading the book might pick up on the Obama vs. the teabaggers parallels, any more than they picked up on the echoes of 9/11 in the first book.

My wise editor enjoyed the book immensely, but made the suggestion that moving the kidnapping forward in the narrative would benefit the book’s structure. I didn’t disagree. What it meant, however, was that a lot of material needed to be cut. As any author can tell you, cutting can hurt. The chunk of pages I wanted to remove represented not only days and days of work, but great conversations, vibrant minor characters, detailed descriptions, and all kinds of information that might have to be relocated to other places and woven back into the novel’s web. Cutting substantially is not just a matter of lopping off a number of unessential words and hoping it adds up. It means judging every sentence, every paragraph, and deciding what’s essential and what’s merely colorful.

It’s hard.

I did it, though. In the end I chopped about thirty pages from the first one hundred. The first chapter I left more or less intact save for a little streamlining. From the second chapter I chopped the second half. The third chapter that originally took place with Petro and some of his insula-mates became a much shorter episode that took place in the headmistress’ office, and all of Petro’s classmates vanished. (That was the loss that stung the most, probably—a couple of the kids were really nicely drawn.) The fourth chapter I left alone, but the fifth, detailing the pilgrims’ first night on the road, I excised completely.

Although on a certain level I was a little sad to lose my minor characters, mostly I thought it a great intellectual challenge to figure out how to accomplish it. It was like a big game of Jenga. I removed as many sticks as possible to lighten the tower, but not so many that it lost any of its integrity, much less had any chance of tumbling down.

It’s unwise for a writer to think of his novel as untouchable. There’s always something that can be improved or polished. Sometimes an editor is going to make a request that sounds difficult. Approaching it as a game, however, or as a particularly tricky puzzle to solve makes it less daunting. Even fun.

The hard questions

A little later today I’m giving a talk to college students enrolled in a course about writing fiction for young adults. I know. Why am I not teaching this thing? I’m not really convinced that writing is the sort of thing that can be learned by everyone enlisted in a semester-long three-credit course, personally, but the good thing about a seminar is that the very presence of academic structure gives students every chance to succeed. The regular checkpoints, the guide markers along the way, the evaluations—they all give aspiring writers a solid pace to follow, and a sense of achievement by semester’s end when they’ve produced their three short stories or their workshop-vetted novella.

I’m not being asked to talk about the actual crafting of novels, at any rate. I got called in to talk about having a career as a published author. And this year, when I was looking over my standard outline of what I call The Fabulous Author Speech, I found myself scrubbing out roughly half of the old talk and adding a completely new section titled, Are you really sure you want to seek publication?

Much of my talks in the past, you see, have assumed that everyone listening to me blathering on naturally wants their volumes to appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. It’s the dream that aspiring authors confess when they approach me shyly. I know it’s the goal of many fine writers of my personal acquaintance. As an achievement it’s all well and good, but I know perfectly well that not everyone wants to go through the rigors of seeking publication, nor the exposure, nor the mental gymnastics it requires. The publishing business, as I stress in my talk, is not the ultimate reward for the most deserving; it’s merely a delivery system for writing that has a market and is at least competent.

So today I plan to give these students a few hard questions to ask themselves. What are your work habits? is the first. If you’re being completely honest with yourself, I plan to inquire, can you look at your past writing history and affirm that you’ll be able to finish a three-hundred-page book without stalling out after the first three chapters? Will you be able to finish it on a deadline? During the Christmas holidays when everyone wants you to be social and fun and keep the house clean? Will you be able to sit at the computer from eight in the morning until midnight when you know that deadline is approaching and you’re scared pantsless than you won’t be able to finish?

Do you have the financial resources and the time to write? I worked full-time when the first twelve of my books came out, drudging at my day job from nine to five and then writing from six-thirty to midnight all week. Sometimes I wrote four novels a year. One’s first (or second, or third) book is not going to make one financially independent overnight, and it could be several years before that first manuscript makes any money for you at all.

Are you able to write more than one novel? Because publishers don’t like one-trick ponies unless their names are Harper and Lee. And I’m pretty sure Lippincott would’ve loved a Mockingbird follow-up. It’s common for people to stall after writing one manuscript, but for the vast majority of writers one single completed product does not a career make.

Are you willing to be flexible? I’ve had an editor tell me, “I love your characters and setting and tone, but can you change the entire plot of the book?” I am currently working on revising a novel in which the editor has asked me to excise thirty to forty pages from the first one hundred. Painful as both scenarios are, they require jumping into them with enthusiasm and a sense of experiment and play, not regarding a manuscript as untouchable holy writ.

Are you writing for the right reasons? If you’re writing with the dream of having an editor call with the news that she loves your first book and that you are the most favored and talented person on earth, as a heavenly chorus of angels carol around you, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. If you dream of a beautiful book signing in which all your friends show up and fawn, and your foes have to grit their teeth over the catered appetizers and agree that you are the most fabulous person they know, or if you’re dreaming of a smart Manhattan luncheon in which you get to sip margaritas and reject dozens of book cover designs while your editors attempt to curry your favor, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. Same if you’re writing to get on Oprah. The reality of the writing life stinks: people will make fun of your pen name and not realize or care that they’re hurting your feelings. The book signings are often deadly dull and make you feel as if you’re a leper thrown into Borders in a quarantined area where no one dares to tread. You get stuck with book covers you hate, sometimes, and Oprah is never going to call. My father butchers the titles of my books; my partner does not read them. Very few of my immediate friends buy or read them. Most people will not realize how exciting it is to write for young adults, and look down upon you for writing for mere children. Or for writing fantasy. Or for writing for girls. Or for writing fiction. Most people think writing in general is like girls’ cheerleading in high school. It’s all very well to have fun with, but it’s not something one really considers as a full-time, acceptable, grown-up career. If you’re writing for the glory, or the fame, or for validation from your family and the public, you’re only going to be sadly disappointed, and disappointed quickly.

Finally and most importantly, Are you willing to pursue a bumpy path without shortcuts, even with no guarantee of success? That is, are you honestly willing to endure dozens and even hundreds of rejection letters—some of the quite cruel—that can debilitate your psyche? If not, perhaps now is not the time to follow the path. Are you willing to commit months and years of searching for your agent and publisher without giving in to the temptation of self-publishing just to have the momentary gratification of seeing your name on the cover of a book-like facsimile? It may resemble a book, it may be special-ordered through Amazon like a legitimately-published book, and it may give your mother something she can put on her coffee table, but precious few people are ever going to get their hands on it. Professional writer’s organizations will not recognize it when you apply for membership. Agents for future books you may compose will think twice about you, when you submit it as a credential. If you’re not willing to take the hard knocks gracefully, and keep sending out those query letters and synopses and to keep working on new projects for as long as it takes, now is not the time to follow the publishing path.

Because really, I want to say today, learning how to write is an admirable goal in itself, inside a classroom and without. Being published doesn’t make me a better writer; only challenging myself to develop my craft can do that. Being a published author just means I’ve managed to master the few self-promotional and marketing skills necessary to attract the attention of an agent, some editors, and a few publishing houses.

Being a better writer leads one to appreciate better the technical aspects of storytelling, and to recognize what makes a good story successful and a bad one dreadful to endure. Knowing how storytellers (and script writers) meticulously emphasize elements and manipulate their characters will spoil (let's say) every M. Night Shyamalan movie for you ten minutes into the screening, but it helps you appreciate how a script can work on a technical level (hi there, The Sixth Sense!) or help you understand why they fail (hello, Lady in the Water!). Being a better writer helps you understand why the people around you, from your eccentric aunt to your co-workers to your mate, choose the stories they share. The manner in which they relate those stories—do they rush for the payoff, or slowly relish the humorous ironies or rich details, or do they simply give the briefest and most perfunctory outline in order to conclude the conversation?—will educate you, the writer and the listener, in what is most important in their lives. Writing well helps you learn those things. Being published does not.

Even if your only intention is to write for yourself, or for your children, or in order to become the very best Spock-on-Malfoy internet fan fiction writer ever, good writing is going to help you become more observant, I plan to tell these people. It’s going to make you more insightful, and hopefully more understanding—both of yourself and the world around you. That, I intend to say, is no small nor negligible achievement.

And for the love of God, please include with your queries a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

We like Booklist

An advance review from the latest Booklist:

The Buccaneer's Apprentice: V. Briceland

Seventeen-year-old indentured servant Nic is cursed: all of his masters have met early, violent deaths (and deserved them, too). Nic hopes his luck is changing when he winds up with shrewd but jovial Armand Arturo, owner of the Theatre of Marvels—until their ship is attacked by pirates and Nic washes up on a deserted island. His quest for revenge becomes a quest to save the land of Cassaforte from invasion, aided by an unusual crew and an enchanted ship. Briceland’s spirited companion to The Glass Maker’s Daughter (2009) blends charismatic characters, magic, piracy, theater, and romance into a fantastical sea adventure.

Influences: Dickens

It’s largely because of Charles Dickens that I dropped out of my Ph.D. program, twenty years ago. Bleak House, specifically. No, I know what you’re thinking. Generations of grad school students in British literature approached Bleak House with a similar enthusiasm they might muster to an appointment for a root canal.

I wasn’t one of those students. I’d read Great Expectations in high school, and had been assigned Hard Times for a history class. I was of course familiar with A Christmas Carol, or at least the multiple adaptations of it for film and television. But Bleak House was revelatory. The moment I picked it up, I was gripped by the story with all its twists and turns, and was overwhelmed—in a good way—by the overabundance of characters and dialogue. I felt as if I’d been sat at a giant buffet table covered with all manner of exotic foods, all of them fragrant in their own special ways, and informed that I had all the leisure in the world to enjoy it.

Well, I was a doctoral student on a fellowship. I did have all the leisure in the world to enjoy it, and for long days and nights I plopped myself down on the sofa with my stereo on and a bowl of snacks at my side, while I raced through the pages. There were times I knew I should take a break at the end of a chapter, but I kept turning the pages, because I had to know what happened next. It was really just that good.

In class, the first night we discussed the novel, I listened attentively to the professor’s lecture about the British legal system, and took notes when he discussed the book’s unreliable narrator. I didn’t at all disagree with any of the cool, analytical comments that the other students made about the book’s twin narrative structures, or flinch much when the students who wanted to show off their familiarity with Derrida and Foucault invoked the names of their dark masters.

Something was missing from the conversation, though. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. Not until we’d had an hour and a half of dispassionate conversation about the book’s structure and technique, of tossing back and forth the names of famous theoreticians, and of discourse that was interesting yet dry as dust, did I ask a question at the end of class. “Didn’t anyone else think the book was exciting?” I asked around the table. “I mean, didn’t anyone else enjoy it?” I mean, come one! Bleak House has character die from spontaneous combustion, for crying out loud!

The rest of the students and the faculty member looked at me as if I were a lunatic. It was at that moment I realized that at a certain level, including graduate school, one isn’t supposed to admit to sensations such as enjoyment. To admit to being excited by a book’s plot is, well, juvenile. There’s an implication that if one’s relishing a story, it’s impossible to have one’s critical sensors engaged. Having fun is for kids. Serious professionals don’t enjoy what they do. It was then that I had the first inkling that perhaps I really didn’t belong in the academic world. Many more were to come.

Dickens has been one of my very favorite authors ever since. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I riffed on bits Great Expectations in my first novel for adults, Calendar Girl. My upcoming The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is an unabashed homage to what I consider one of my favorite parts of Nicholas Nickleby, namely the too-brief section in which Nicholas and Smike travel the countryside with the Crummles’ theatrical troupe. It might strike some people as odd, though, that I haven’t read all of Dickens’ works. I pick one up every three or four years and dive in, making it last for a month or more, relishing every well-turned minor role and sentimental scene and scowling at every villain. Dickens’ heroes and heroines are inevitably always a little bit of wet dishrags to me, but they’re surrounded by such a vivid swirl of action and colorful characters that it’s hard to dislike them.

I haven’t read them all because I’ve enjoyed knowing, for a couple of decades now, that I have a few more to go. I like knowing that sometime in the future, I’ll succumb and enjoy the familiar thrill of immersing myself into one of Dickens’ worlds and swimming in it for weeks. Right now, I’m fascinated with Little Dorrit, the riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of intertwined families and a French murderer. It’s kept me awake late at nights. I’ve had to restrain myself from watching any further in the 2008 BBC television adaptation than I’ve reached in the book. It’s difficult, because the cast (which seems to have been assembled from the casts of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Clatterford) is terrific, and because my actor boyfriend Russell Tovey breaks my heart in every scene in which he appears.

When I’m reading Charles Dickens, it is the best of times. It is the worst of times. It is . . . no, wait. I haven’t read that one yet.

Caprica

I was much too late to jump onto the Battlestar Galactica spacewagon when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi channel several years ago. By the time I really became aware of the series as a geek cultural phenomenon, it was already half-over.

Now, I like science fiction as a genre. Most of the new fiction I read tends to be SF. I’d seen the original Battlestar Galactica when I was a kid and had dismissed it as a Star Wars ripoff. I’d never been fond of Star Wars, even though my childhood occurred in the epicenter of its cultural impact. I’d never been a fan of Star Trek either, for that matter. My fondness for Doctor Who and Firefly notwithstanding, I think it’s fairly safe to make the generalization that I’m not a fan of the space opera, with its captains standing steadfastly in their bridges against the enemies to the human race, its babble about hyperspace jumping, and the shooting of big lasers between spaceships.

So when it came to the remake of BSG, I contented myself with following my friends’ excited LiveJournal posts about the series. By the time the show finished its run I had a general idea of its arc, and judged it safe finally to dip my toe in the waters, and watch the miniseries that started the whole reboot. And wow, was I impressed with it. I found the miniseries exciting. I loved its premise of a global holocaust caused by the human-looking, but totally mechanical, race of Cylons, and I really liked the notion of the only survivors being an unlikely assortment of officials aboard a decommissioned military spaceship turned into a museum and educational center. I was hooked.

Hooked for the duration of the miniseries, anyway. Almost immediately the series went off the rails for me. Fans of the show have tried to rationalize it away for me, but I see Battlestar Galactica as suffering from a contradiction in its premise set out by the miniseries—that the only scraps of humanity left to battle the Cylons are a disorganized, random group overlooked in the attack against their home planet of Caprica, who become the least likely heroes ever to defend a race against genocide—and the premise pursued in the rest of the series, which is that those aboard the Galactica are unique and special snowflakes who have been heavily infiltrated by Cylons years in advance in order to achieve some mystical goal. The series tries to have it both ways with both the notion of the humans as accidental spontaneous heroes, and the premise of this has all been planned, and the two never really gel for me. Plus, there are all the sequences in which spaceships shoot lasers at each other, which is usually the point in the program I pick up my phone and begin playing Puzzle Quest.

I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the DVDs of Battlestar Galactica, which is about the level of my enthusiasm for the show as well, so it was with a little bit of reluctance that I began watching its prequel/spinoff show on the renamed SyFy, Caprica. I’m happy to say, however, that not only am I totally hooked on Caprica, but that it’s probably the show I look forward to most these days.

It’s the simplicity of Caprica’s premise that keeps me coming back. In the highly technological world of Caprica that’s blown up sixty years later in Battlestar Galactica, an inventor and tech whiz played by Eric Stoltz has devised the first of the mechanical Cylons. His daughter, the bratty and brilliant Zoe, has managed to create an enduring version of herself in (for lack of a better term) cyberspace. When Zoe’s accidentally killed in an act of terrorism, Stoltz’s character retrieves her online avatar and infuses it into the mechanical Cylon. He believes the experiment is unsuccessful, but what he’s done is to give the mechanical being Zoe’s sentience, with chilling results for the human race.

The show plays with the notion of the teenaged girl in the oversized robot’s body with both humor and suspense as it cuts between shots of the gleaming silvery hulk and Zoe’s diminutive form. Like so many adolescents, Zoe’s both a monster and a little girl at the same time. When she’s not blowing up multiple targets with her machine gun hands, she’s sneaking away and talking to her best friend on the phone. Cylon Zoe is as sullen and silent as a sulking teen girl (and it’s rather humorous to think of the Cylon war that’s to come as the apex of an adolescent brat’s temper tantrum), but when her father asks her to strut about his company’s boardroom, the robot does so with obvious relish, proud of her dad’s accomplishments. When he orders her to rip off her arm mere moments later, to prove her absolute obedience to him, it’s blood-curdling to watch. He has no idea what his daughter has become, and she has no intentions of telling him—the standoff of the generations, only in cybernetic form. A teen's cry of you don't understand meeeeee! only rings louder when the teen in question is two tons of metal and electronics.

The show’s rife with subplots involving the Adama family, with its roots in organized crime (and their equally-deceased teen daughter, whose linger cyberspace identity becomes the biggest gangster of all), and with a sect of religious fanatics whose terrorism provides the sparks of violence that pinpoint what’s otherwise been an intellectually-driven plot. Every week I keep coming back for more, and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

It seems to me, though, that there are two kinds of science fiction fans. There are those like me who tend to like their stories earthbound, or at least planet-bound, and then there are those who like the big spaceships with the big lasers. For fans who only like the space shoot-em-ups, however, I’m afraid Caprica might be a little bit of a disappointment. However, Caprica is the kind of science fiction I most enjoy: an interplay of ideas and science with a story that sucks me in on both cerebral and emotional levels.

Bagels, Einstein

The Mont was in Cincinnati for the better part of last week, so while he was gone I thought I’d try my hand at some baking. It’s easier to do such things with a little privacy, so I can avoid questions like, ‘What’re you making?’ or ‘What’s that smell?’ or ‘Why is the kitchen covered with flour?’

My experiment for the week was bagels. I’m not sure why, but I’d always assumed that bagels were tough to make—but they’re not. I already had three pounds of whole wheat dough I’d made sitting in the freezer, ready to go. I took a pound of it, flattened it out and sprinkled it with a cinnamon-sugar mix and some raisins, rolled it up like a jelly roll, then squeezed off portions that I formed into the traditional bagel shape. I let them rise a bit, dunked them in a bath of boiling water doctored with baking soda, then baked them on a hot stone.

I couldn’t believe how intense the smell when I pulled the half-dozen bagels from the oven; it was as if heaven itself had opened a bakery in my neighborhood. Even the cats lifted their heads to sniff at the spicy fragrances filling the house. When the bagels were cool enough to touch, I bit into one. The crust was hard and crunchy to the bite, and the middle moist and sweet and full of plump raisins. In a word, they were amazing.

A couple of days later I was inspired enough to try another variation with more of the whole-wheat dough. This time I filled the dough with a mixture of brown sugar, dried cherries, and crushed chocolate chips. The water bath turned out to be a lot messier, since the chocolate near the surface had a tendency to melt quickly. The result was a lot like boiling wads of dough in a vat of Swiss Miss—aromatic, certainly, but not exactly easy to clean up. The bagels themselves turned out to be just as delicious.

So in my sudden enthusiasm for bagels, I’ve been trying to think of other variations to attempt. I’ve always liked the cheese bagels, certainly. And I think a bagel with dried apple, brown sugar, and cinnamon (perhaps with a streusel topping) could be really tasty as well.

When the Mont came home yesterday, I pulled out the bags of bagels from the freezer to display. “Huh!” he said, peering at them closely. “Interesting. They look like turds.”

Martha Stewart never had to deal with these things.