Adventures in the Coconut Mall

A friend of ours this weekend held a small and slightly early party to help celebrate the Mont's centennial birthday (I know! One hundred years old this very day and looking forward to his birthday shout-out on The Today Show!). A couple of his guests, whom we’d never met before but who were playing around on our host’s Wii, looked up as I walked into the room and waved in preparation of introducing myself.

“Oh my gosh,” said one before I could get a word out. She blinked at me. “You’re Vance. You look exactly like your Mii!”

“I know!” I replied. Because it’s true. I do look like my Mii.



I’m used to seeing friends of mine on my Wii. There’s sometimes a giant statue of my friend Lonnie looming over one of Mario Kart tracks. Our sidekick Ford Girl is almost always backing her car in and out of a parking space and being obtrusive when I’m trying to make a mad dash through the Coconut Mall. (Which is odd, since that describes her driving in real life, too, if you throw in excessive cell phone use.) And when I’m exercising, and are forever tossing hula hoops at me. Usually, however, I have to think a little before I associate the little Miis with the people they’re supposed to represent; it takes me a few moments before I recognize that the silvery hair and big eyes and smile are supposed to be the Mont, or that the reason that Lonnie’s Mii looks like Lonnie and not like Matty is that Matty is the one wearing the hat. As cute and customizable as Miis can be, they don’t, for the most part, often resemble the person they’re supposed to represent.

To walk into a room and be recognized because of your digital avatar is, frankly, a little weird, even for the digital age. Does that imply I have a shiny, egg-shaped head?

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

The Mont and I made a quick overnight trip to Saugatuck on Michigan’s western coast last week. Quick, but lovely. We drove out there Thursday morning. In the afternoon, I read a book outdoors while he practiced at the tiny, musty church where his recital was taking place. Then we roamed up and down the streets of the town, had dinner, and spent the evening walking the beach and watching the sun gradually lower itself to the lake’s horizon. Then we went out to a local bar—for karaoke, of course. By the time we hit our beds, late at night, we both instantly fell into heavy and uninterrupted slumber.

It wasn’t until the next morning, though, when we were in our room chomping down cold bagels from the motel’s so-called continental breakfast, that I realized something about my vacations. I can eat out as much as I want, or dig my feet into sand up to the calves, or visit all the shops selling jams and jellies or impossible knick-knacks or gourmet spices and olive oils that I want, but nothing is going to have that real vacation feeling until that inevitable moment when I’m lounging around on messy sheets, mid-morning, and watching Jerry Springer on TV.

Now, I could lounge around at home, most mid-mornings. Although I like to call it ‘working,’ I think most people would call it ‘lounging around with a laptop.’ I prefer the den sofa to my bed, but it’s still pretty relaxed. I suppose I could also watch Jerry Springer and Maury Povich if I cared to, but I never, ever have. On vacation, however, there seems to be an unheard imperative to leave on the television after The Today Show is over and to let the circus begin.

Jerry and Maury always seem to have the same episodes playing when I watch—or at least they’ve refined their niches so well that I’m unable to discern the exact shades of difference between them. I think on Friday morning Jerry’s topic of the day was YOUR MOM’S A DRUNK!!!, though I didn’t actually see any moms in any of the family tableaux, in which warriors of Wal-Mart glared, shouted so many obscenities that there were minute-long stretches of nothing but bleeps, and then lunged at each other, prompting Jerry’s impressive squadron of ropy-armed bodyguards to leap in and restrain them from punching each other . . . sort of.

Maury was doing the same thing I’ve only ever seen him do, which was to read the results of paternity tests. It goes a little something like this: the mother of the child tearfully confides to Maury that she was seduced by a bounder who made her pregnant and then abandoned her for some cheap whore. Maury tsks, shakes his head, and then asks the woman if she wants them to bring the alleged father onto the set. “Bring him out!” she screams. “Bring him out!”

The father walks onto the stage, cocksure and proud, dismissing the jeers and boos of the audience with sneers and claims of “Nah! That ain’t my baby, y’all.” He then reveals to Maury that the poor victimized mother is nothing but a ho’ who’s after his money. A fight erupts, and Maury’s bodyguards (fewer in number and not as hot as Jerry’s, I’m sorry to say) step in to keep the pair from ripping out each other’s hair by the roots . . . sort of.

Finally the moment arrives. “Michelle,” Maury says. “We have the paternity test results of baby Darnell and they show without a doubt that Jamal. . . .” A long and pregnant (so to speak) pause follows. “. . . Is not the father.”

Jamal leaps up and makes victory punches in the air. Michelle bursts instantly into tears and runs off the set into a holding room, where both the cameras and the crowd’s jeers follow her. After a cut to commercial, another tearful mother is trotted out and the entire process is repeated. It always seems as if the mother turns out to be wrong, too, and it makes the enduring litany of sympathetic coos for her story and the boos for the supposed sire all the more curious; you’d think the audience would catch on to the show’s chauvinist slant eventually.

I don’t know what it is about fist fights, baby mama drama, and sensationalized misogyny that spells v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n-! to me, but whenever I’m in a bed and they bring out the bald bodyguards, I’m the one feeling great about being away from home.

Oh beware!

Hey kids! Guess what? Well, I was watching the news—I know, you’re thinking, “Hey, Vance, what’s up with watching the news? Isn’t it all like, talk about Barack (yawn!) Obama and high prices and stuff?” And you are totally, one hundred percent right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe it was because I was flipping around and trying to get to some other station, one that had like, house flipping techniques or dancing celebrities, and I kind of phased out for a minute. You know how that happens.

Anyway! It’s a good thing that it did happen, because if it hadn’t, I would totally have missed out on some information. I mean, really important, life-changing stuff! Okay, okay, don’t get upset. I’m going to tell you.

Apparently . . . and it was on the local news, so it has to be true . . . you know how you go outside and you put on your shoes? Yes, I know it’s summer and you don’t put on your shoes in the summer because only Yankees do that, but pretend. Well! On the news, they had a guy just do that, with the shoes and all, and then he came back in the studio, and they. . . .

No, don’t get ahead of me here. They didn’t cook an egg on the soles of his shoes. Though that would’ve been cool, right? No! They took a swab and rubbed it all over the shoes and then took it to like, a fancy scientist in a white lab coat and everything who did one of those scientifical investigations and guess what he found?

Germs. Oh my god. I almost puked. Germs! On the shoes! Apparently the sidewalks and dirt aren’t as squeaky clean as we all thought! In fact, they’re seething with things like dog poo and grunge and tiny insectizoids and bacteria, and they somehow get on your shoes! YOUR SHOES!

Well, thank god for the local news, because you know those yummy little appetizers Rachel Ray makes on her shows? I would never have thought about how it’s not safe to serve them to your guests from the bottoms of your Converse. And I’ve been doing all that yoga, too. Now I know just to like, take them off at the door. Like the Japanese do! (I mean the shoes. Not the appetizers.)

Thank god for the local news! Because if I hadn’t seen that life-changing segment, well, gosh. I might have just gone on thinking the local news programs are put together by total dipsticks, like I usually do.

The Itchies

The primary reason I quit my doctoral program right after I completed all my classwork and my qualifying exams, lo these many years ago, was because I didn’t want a career in academia that sucked up every moment of my waking day. When I looked at my parents and their academic careers—particularly my father—it seemed as if all he did, from breakfast to midnight, was sit in his home study and pore over his notes, laboring over his little index cards and always slaving over each new article. The only time he seemed to leave the house was for his classes, and then he’d be right back home to work on his monographs or addresses again.

When I got to the point where I realized I'd irrevocably be locked into that career path, I balked. I didn’t want to have to spend every moment of every waking day working, or wondering if I should be working, or itch all over from the guilties because I wasn’t working.

So in that grand tradition of never escaping the traps that our parents have set for us, eventually I’ve became a full-time writer instead.

I have never, ever worked so hard in my life as I have these last ten weeks, with my two-book deadlines last month. All during February and March, the only things I did seven days a week were to get up in the mornings, plant myself with my laptop, write until lunch, eat, write until dinner, eat, write until bedtime, and then sleep and start the whole thing over again. My ass was glued to the sofa in the den. When I’d go to bed at night, all I could do was think about the work I wasn’t doing and that needed to be done. There were nights that my brain was on fire enough to keep me awake until two in the morning; the day I was working on the climactic next-to-last chapter of Crate & Peril, I pulled an all-nighter just to have that chapter done with.

Writing is one of those activities that, while one might be enormously proud of it after it’s done, is miserable actually to do. That mess in one’s brain, no matter how grand and glorious it seems, has to come out one word at a time, in a single, simple stream. It feels like trying to use nothing more than a pastry tip and an icing bag full of coal nuggets to squeeze out a very fine line of diamonds. Fourteen hours a day of it makes one weary to the bone.

So I’ll be taking a little bit of time to myself, these next couple of weeks. I’m going to goof off! And do nothing! And watch movies! And play World of Warcraft! And maybe even do some pleasure reading!

Already I can feel the guilties prickling at my skin. They’ll just have to lump it, baby.

The Glass Maker's Daughter

Yesterday I sent in to the editor what I hope is the last big revision to the young adult novel now known as The Glass Maker’s Daughter.

The book, a political fantasy adventure set in an alternate-world version of Renaissance Venice, has had a long journey. It was the first work I wrote (under the title The Horns of Cassaforte) after finding an agent, but before I’d sold You Are SO Cursed! or any of the thirteen books that followed. It went without a home for five years until the nice people at Flux decided it would be right for their line.

Though he is enthusiastic about the book, my editor wanted some revisions—and he was right to ask for them. Although The Glass Maker’s Daughter is probably my most intricate and sophisticated novel in terms of plot construction, it had one gaping flaw that I never really noticed: the antagonist didn’t appear until nearly the last chapter of the book. He was talked about, certainly. The results of his actions are what fueled the plot. But either he should have been completely absent and thus an abstract and malevolent threat, or present throughout.

I decided to take the latter route. Since I had room to expand, I went back and wrote an entirely new chapter for early in the book, in which the antagonist pays a visit to the heroine’s family. I had him make an appearance mid-book. Of course I kept the scene toward the end, but I noticed that once it had more support beneath it, it had more resonance and meaning than before.

All the other changes my editor suggested I make were minor in nature. Smoothing some characters, giving others some tics. He proposed, for fun, that I give a secondary antagonist some kind of substance abuse problem, like an addiction to an exotic opiate. It was a brilliant suggestion—I ended up having the character constantly opening a silver box and dabbing a creamy herbal snuff paste into the hollows above his canine teeth. Not only is it a dislikable habit, but it allows two of the characters to smell him coming at pivotal points in the book. Additionally, after the snuff addict is, well, snuffed, his silver box can be discarded in a callous way.

A late-timeline revision like this one takes a lot of time and brain-work. It’s not a matter of simply breezing through the manuscript and correcting a few typos. Instead, it requires the writer to read the book with the eyes and expectations of someone who’s never seen it before—to be willing to re-conceptualize, edit ruthlessly, and to stop treating his work like a sacred text. There were points in my revision in which I felt as if I’d taken apart a vacuum, confident that I could put it back together from memory, only to find that suddenly all the pieces looked a little alien. And maybe from someone else’s vacuum. When everything’s pieced back together, the end result is a better work than before.

The book still makes me cry at four points. I weep near the beginning, when the heroine encounters her life-changing setback. I really start to cry at the end of the book’s first third, when she makes a temporary triumph over adversity. There’s a romantic encounter near the end that makes me sniffle. But then the waterworks really start at the book’s climax, which is so neatly engineered that it’s as if some master storyteller (and not me) created it. I was up at two in the morning finishing the revision the other night, tears pouring out of my eyes as I tidied up the last two chapters!

I love this book. I’m glad it’s being given a chance.

Writing Lesson #412: The Three Stages of Insanity

When I’m writing a three-hundred-page novel, I struggle through three distinct, predictable stages.

Stage one: Grief
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Forty years
Number of pages it actually consumes: 140
Symptoms: Excessive moaning, groaning, and general inability to write, accompanied by frequent complaints of “How in the world does anyone ever put together all these words?!” and “Oh my god I have to write a zillion pages more!” Attempting to remember how I’ve already written a dozen novels that indeed have appeared on the shelves of Barnes and Nobles nationwide only convinces me that those were only a fluke. Obviously Or maybe magical pixies wrote them for me while I was sleeping. Because god knows that I am not talented or patient or crazy enough to write them myself.

Stage two: Elation
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Pages 145-150
Number of pages it actually consumes: Pages 145-150
Symptoms: A general feeling of peppiness, euphoria, benevolence, and goodwill to all. It’s accompanied by a confidence that all the struggle heretofore has been for the best, that the heavens have bestowed upon me a lovely premise that is going to turn out to be the finest book I have ever written. It is that moment that every writer lives for, when all is clear and lucid. And it lasts for roughly three hours before plunging into. . . .

Stage three: Panic
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Remember in college how you pulled all-nighters and kept awake sheerly from brute force, caffeine, and nerves? Like an entire week of that and no sleep whatsoever.
Number of pages it actually consumes: Pages 150-300
Symptoms: Screeching, irritability, and a certainty that you have created too much plot to fit in the amount of space you have left oh my god it’s all just going too fast and how in the world am I going to . . . Jane, stop this crazy thing! Sure signs you’re in this phase: your friends and loved ones shun and/or divorce you.

Gee, writing’s fun!

And you thought cat hacking only mean hairballs.

Fred is the most wired cat I know.

She has absorbed the fact that my laptop is constantly on, and feels it is her sworn duty to keep it busy when I’m off doing something else. She’s relatively well-behaved when I’m writing; she’ll simply sit on my chest and keep an eye on the screen and proofread for me, or point out when a scene is going wrong. When I close my word processor and move on to some other activity, however, there are no holds barred.

If I’m playing a game like World of Warcraft, for example, she’s right there with me, front elbows resting on the trackpad and eyes fixed on the action ahead. The other night when I parked a character in Honor Hold and abandoned the laptop for a few minutes, I came back to find my screen resolution changed, several mysterious messages typed into guild chat, all my bags open, and my poor character running across the surrounding desert at half health, with a train of five pigs attacking. She’s particularly on the alert for gnomes as she watches me play; if she sees one cross the screen, she’ll lunge and bat they away, a ferocious gleam in her eyes.

I’ve come back to the computer to find applications open that I definitely had nothing to do with. Once she managed to find the keypad combination (I don’t even know what it is!) to open Front Row, so she could listen to my music. She runs Google searches for me on a regular basis, usually on random topics that interest her, like F\\\\\\\\\\\FFFFFF (I think it’s hacker language).

And then yesterday, while I was making dinner, she parked herself on my keyboard and began sending instant messages to my friends. One of them was something like ten lines long and consisted entirely of random gobbledygook . . . or she’d have me think. Because at the very end of the last one, right before she pushed the enter key, she typed, and I quote: j/k.

As in just kidding.

Don’t tell me she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

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