Schizophrenic writer wanted

by: Joelle Charbonneau

This is one of those weeks. The husband is out of town for a trade show. College auditions are approaching for some students. The tot is sick. My grandmother is in the hospital. A snow storm hit Chicago yesterday making things a little scary out on the roads and I’m racing to finish a manuscript. Which of course means this is the week that two sets of revision letters arrived. One was for MURDER FOR CHOIR which hits shelves on July 3rd. The other was for THE TESTING, my post-apocalyptic young adult novel that will make its appearance in the spring of 2013.

Now, I love revisions. I happily dove into the revisions on MURDER FOR CHOIR and had them out the door in lightning speed enjoying every minute of the revisions. (Yeah – go ahead and throw things. I’m betting I can duck faster than you can throw.) Fun, quick revisions are great, but I also I love revisions that challenge me to think harder, go deeper and work like mad to make the story the best it can be. So, I was totally stoked when I got a revision letter from my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that does that. They are the kind of revisions that scare the hell out of me when I first read them and then challenge my brain to work overtime. I’m having trouble sleeping because I have all sorts of great ideas rolling around in my head. Only—I can’t work on it yet.

Why, you ask? Well, I have about 4 or 5 chapters left of the current book I’m working on, END ME A TENOR. Why does that make a difference you ask? Well, if I keep to schedule, I should be typing THE END on the last page sometime in the next 10-14 days. Because of the family issues I’ve been dealing with, I’ll admit that getting this book done was a struggle. While it hasn’t taken me all that much longer to write (I started the first page near the end of October) it feels like it has taken years. I want to climb the last stretch of the mountain, plant my flag at the top and do a happy dance celebrating the completion of this round.

Of course, I could write on END ME A TENOR during the tot’s nap time and then work on revisions at night. In fact, I ache to do this. Only, there’s an even bigger issue.

My mystery voice is punchy and a little off the wall.

My YA voice is dark, taught and a bit plaintive. (At least, I think so…who knows what the critics will say.)

While some people excel at writing two projects at the same time, I’m mostly a tunnel vision kind of girl. I affix my eyes to the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how small, and step by step work in a single-minded fashion until I get there. Aside from page proofs and copy edits, nothing interrupts that hike to the finish line. And while this week I was able to edit MURDER FOR CHOIR while also writing on END ME A TENOR, I was able to do so only because they were the same voice. There was no transition. No worry that one would bleed into the next. Last year, I made an attempt to write the opening to THE TESTING while I was writing the beginning of SKATING UNDER THE WIRE. Um…not such a good idea. Every time I sat down I had to work hard to keep my mind in the correct tense. It took twice as long for me to get that day’s work on the page. The minute I decided to focus on one project things fell into place. The first three chapters of Rebecca Robbins 4 were finished and polished in about 9 days. I then turned to THE TESTING and watched my fingers fly.

So I will wait. I will remember that while other people can write on two projects, and in two distinctly different voices, at the same time I am not one of those people. I have to stick with what works for me.

But of course, I am curious to know what works for you. Can you work on two projects at once? Are the voices similar? Or are you like me who looks at longing with that second project knowing no matter how much you might want to play, doing so will only make things more difficult?

Reading With a "Pencil"

by
Scott D. Parker

It's amazing how technology can change the way you read.

I'm not sure when I started reading fiction books with a pencil in my hand. When it comes to non-fiction, it's a given that I read with a pencil or a highlighter to mark important passages and write notes to help me remember things that strike my fancy. Ditto for Bible reading. It became extremely important during graduate school and having to learn all the minutiae of history.

Fiction is a different animal. I read fiction for fun. Natch. But the more I write, the more that I realize that published books are the curricula of the School of Fiction Writing. Yes, it's obvious, but I'm someone who sometimes has to have Obvious Things hit me over the head before I see it. Moreover, I'm a relative latecomer to this mystery genre, so every new book I have read in the past decade usually contains some nugget from which I can learn.

It started slowly, with me making notes that I'd need for the review I planned to write. Soon, it migrated to notes as well as highlighting. Depending on the novel, outright annotation emerged. All of the annotations, understandably, happened on paper. These were the years before the e-book explosion, before the iPod, before the Nook, before the Kindle. After I finished a book, I could skim the pages, see my annotations, and remember the things I liked about the novel. And that book lived in one place: the bookshelf. If I wanted to look up a note, I needed to go to the bookshelf.

Now I have an iPod and a Nook Touch. I have the Nook app, the Kindle app, the Stanza app, and the iBook app. Given these new tools, new expectations emerged.

If I'm carrying around an iPod, I should be able to bring up my annotations wherever I am because, frankly, we're in the age of instant access and that's what we want. Does it really make a difference? No, but it's become important to me. I should be able to highlight good passages of prose as easy as I would if I were reading the paper book. I should be able to write a quick note with own thoughts as easy as if I had a pencil in my hand. And, most important for me: I should be able to extract those annotations out of the e-book.

Of all these apps listed above, I have found that iBooks works the best for me. No, I'm not an Apple fan boy. Up until iBooks upped its capabilities, Stanza was my go-to reading app. Now, iBooks is my go-to app. The highlighting is super simple. Heck, you can ever have different colors if you want. And it's fast, as fast as a pencil on paper. Notes are easy to insert and write. I can, within ten seconds, highlight some lines, write a quick note, and get back to reading. And, while you cannot sync the annotations via a separate file through iTunes, you can email yourself all the notes. It's a really good, usable reading app.

And, armed with iBooks, I now have a new favorite way to read a book: listen to the audio version with my iPod handy, loaded with the ebook. I get he story told to me while I can do other things and annotate along the way. It's a great way to read.

Do y'all have a favorite, non-traditional way to read?

Song of the Week: Bruce Springsteen's "We Take Care of Our Own" Yeah, as if I was not going to pick this song. To my ears, it's got a nice flavor of the Human Touch/Lucky Town era, my first new Springsteen albums after I "discovered" him. Fellow DSDer puts it bit more cleverly: "[The song] is like a fight between 1992 Bruce and unreleased '78 Bruce." Springsteen tends to neglect these songs in concert, but I still like those records. And I'm very much looking forward to the new record. Best thing about Springsteen: on one day, there is literally no news. The next day, you've got a new song, new album, and new tour.

Fact Or Fantasy?

By Jay Stringer

I'm tugging at another thread that's way above my level today. I've been thinking of them sexalism issues again. I've written before about my feelings when writers accuse other writers of things like misogyny in interviews (coughGrantMorrisoncough) because it can be a cheap and nasty gimmick.

We've also talked on DSD before of the responsibility of dealing with racial issues (if memory serves, it was a great post from Sandra that kick started that conversation.) But I've noticed that terms like sexism and misogyny get thrown around a lot on the net at the moment, particularly in the days following popular television shows.

Quite recently there was a bit of a storm -largely an internet one, until The Guardian newspaper picked it up in print- about the first episode of Sherlock's second season. Now, I know the show hasn't aired in the U.S., so I'll avoid saying much more than that, but I couldn't sit on the issue until it turns up over there. What I will say, is that a lot of people raised questions about the decisions the writer, Steven Moffat, made about a woman in the show.

There was one post on the subject in particular that was a well measured and intelligent approach to the questions raised, and if you don't mind having the episode spoiled, you can click on over.

I certainly don't belittle the questions raised by the whole affair. In the specific instance of that episode, I can understand why people were concerned with the decisions made. I draw the line at making any personal assumptions of the writer, but I do understand why people had issues.

On the whole though, I often find myself concerned with the tone and the aim of the Internet criticism that seems to whip up so easily.

I wonder if people often fail to draw a distinction between then world they want to live in and the world we actually live in. Or that they have expectations that writers should deal with the former rather than the latter.

There are many, many poor representations of women in fiction, be it prose, films, TV or comics. But I also think there are people who don't actually want honest representations, they want fantasy. They want Buffy. They want myth. I enjoyed Buffy as much as the next teenager in the 90's. And often, when I go back and catch part of an old episode, I still find much to admire in the craft, the dialogue, the plot structure and the many bold, brave choices that the show took. It was very well made television. But the character herself is not a particularly brave bit of writing, in my opinion. I'm not interested in the super-powered ass-kicking "girl power" female characters any more than the shallow, cardboard Mary sue of the past. Neither version moves the argument forward.

I know some people simply want escapism from fiction, they want the fantasy of a better version of our world. But I also want social fiction. I want honest fiction. I want to read stories that treat me as an adult, and that face up to the fact that some groups of people get a shittier deal than others. Women get a raw deal. Immigrants, foreigners, children, the working class, the disabled, all of these people get the bad end of the shit-shovel, and they get it right from the get go, and to the benefit of people who are paler, taller, older, healthier or more male.

I don't see the benefit in fiction that hides from that. We don't have to like it, but we do have to be willing to show it. And I worry that, as the vocal minorities become more vocal, and less tactful, we will start to see writers scared of being honest in their fiction, for fear of being tagged.

Lets take the treatment of Steven Moffat as a example. There are my people who've articulated their issues without needed to resort to easy labels or making value judgements of the writer. But there are also people who want to make personal accusations, without any reproach or restraint, and these are the ones that tend to be loudest. The Guardian article itself, I felt, was crossing that line, and Moffat himself was clearly upset at the tome of comments being thrown his way.

I'm sure Moffat would welcome the fact that he writes popular (screen) fiction, that is seen by millions, and that encourages discussion of such serious issues. But can't we keep that discussion on a constructive level? A public figure might get followed around for years by a word that gets associated to them in Internet searches, and we should think twice before playing a part in that process.

Here's where the self interest comes in. As a writer, I take the representation of my characters very seriously. I work hard at trying to be as accurate as I can when I write a woman, or an immigrant, or someone who's politics are the opposite of my own. I don't always get it right, because none of us do. It's a constant struggle for all of us. And it's a challenge, to get out of our comfort zones and to stay out.

But with that honesty comes a trust. If we're putting in the hard work to try and get these things right, and to try and be accurate when capturing the worlds views of racism and sexism, I think readers and critics need to give writers the room to try a few things. Otherwise, why try anything?

Just today I was working on edits for the second book in my crime trilogy. The book takes on some big themes or gender, sex and race. At the moment I'm handling some of them more effectively than others, and the aim is to get the balance right by the end of the draft(s). It's on ongoing process, and one where you need to be willing to get things wrong on the road to getting them right. I was writing a scene today where a Muslim woman talked to a white male about her identity and views on mixed marriage. And I decided several times that I would probably be best served to simply delete the scene rather than risk looking like an idiot. But i want to keep fighting for the scene, for the characters, and for the story.

What we need is for writers to try and write real women and real men. Sometimes that means creating someone who is inspirational, sometimes it means creating someone who is cowardly, violent or needy. Often it means creating someone who is all of those things.

I get worried at the agenda of some the the people making these arguments. In talking of "better role models" and of the kind of characters they want to see, I again question whether they're wanting reality or fantasy. Writing the bold, strong, tough-as-a-man woman is the easiest thing in the world, but I don't see any art in it.

Perhaps I'm in the minority. Maybe most people come to fiction just looking to see a fantasy version of themselves cast back at them, like the best fun-house mirror ever.

There's going to be a level of personal taste in that, it's down to each of us where we draw the line. My personal line in the sand is character. I'm writing socially driven pulp, crime fiction that is a heightened reflection of the area I grew up in. I need to capture that immigrants often get treated like shit, or that women get manipulated by the system, or that we're failing whole generations of children. Where I try to earn the room to show that is in trying to give the characters some life. The first two books in the series are very much about how people get manipulated, objectified and traded, but I hope to at least make these people seem interesting along the way.

Writers need to be given the room to be honest. Sometimes that honesty hurts. Sometimes they (I, we) don't pull it off, and it's fair to talk about those times. As long as the conversation is open, honest and balanced, we can keep the issue moving forward. But let's play fair about it, eh?