writing

Fantasy Language

One thing that gets tricky about writing secondary-world fantasy set in the past is figuring out what to do about language. Since the story takes place in another world, you know the characters aren’t speaking modern English, so the author can be seen as translating the whole story so that people in our world today can read it. But how strict should that translation be? Do you go all-in and truly translate it into modern English, or do you try to keep some flavor of the time period the secondary world is based on?

For instance, the word “okay.” It didn’t come into use in our world until the 1800s, and only came into really common use in the 20th century. When I read that word in a fantasy novel set in a pre-modern setting, it throws me out of the story. And yet, if we’re going by the “it’s all being translated, anyway” idea, why not translate their word of agreement to “okay”? I don’t have an answer for this. I just try to avoid using it unless I’m writing contemporary works set in our world. Katie and Lexie say “okay,” Verity does not, and the heroine I’m currently writing doesn’t.

Then there are the things where the truth sounds wrong. For instance, “hello” is more modern than “hi.” “Hello” didn’t come into use until the 1800s when it was introduced as the way to greet people on the telephone. “Hi” dates to the middle ages and comes from an Old English word, “hy.” The Norwegian word is “hei,” and since there’s a lot of crossover between old Norse and Old English, I’m sure they’re related. But if I wrote a character in the 1600s saying “hi,” it would sound wrong and “hello” may sound right. The way I understand it, “hy” was more about getting attention than it was a greeting the way we say “hi” now.

The other tricky thing is common words that come from proper names. Like “sandwich,” which is named for a person. Can you use that term in a world where there was no Earl of Sandwich? An ottoman is named for the Ottoman Empire, which doesn’t exist in a secondary world. Does that fall under the “it’s all a translation” rule, or do you have to find another word? It’s really hard to find something else to call a sandwich without it getting awkward. The Norwegian word is smørbrød, which seems to translate literally to “butter bread,” and that doesn’t really say “sandwich” to me. And then there’s the metaphorical use of it, saying something is “sandwiched” between two other things.

Or there are words that come from technologies that don’t exist in that world. I had to stop myself from using the term “sidetracked” when my character was distracted because if there are no railroads, there shouldn’t be any concept of being sidetracked. I did once read a book set in a pre-industrial secondary world in which a character who was hiding out talked about staying under the radar, and I can’t believe the editor let that one go because that concept would have been totally foreign to the characters and I don’t think even the “it’s all a translation” idea works there.

Another issue is keeping the flavor of the language. If you’re basing your secondary world on, say, the early 17th century, you wouldn’t want to write your whole book in the style of the King James Bible if you want modern readers to actually be able to get through it. But you also wouldn’t want to translate it into language that’s too modern and casual. Your scheming prince saying, “LOL!” when something bad happens to his enemies would break the spell.

I once read an essay by someone who was a grand master in the field of fantasy complaining about a new author’s book that she thought sounded too modern and mundane (this author went on to be in the grand master category, but she was a young first-time author at the time the essay was written, so I think singling her out like that was a tacky move on the part of the more established author). She took a scene from the book in which a pair of noblemen who’d just left a council meeting were discussing the events and showed how she could change them to politicians who’d left a committee meeting by only changing the specific references. At the time I read that essay, I hadn’t read the grand master and was a fan of the newer author, so it made me mad, but even now as a reasonably experienced author, I think the grandmaster was wrong.

If you’re taking the “translated from that secondary world language for modern readers” approach, you’d stick with language that would be appropriate for the modern equivalent of the people depicted in the story. In that case, members of the royal council would equate to members of Congress, and therefore the fact that you could change the character names and titles and change “palace steps” to “Capitol steps” would be a sign that the author did it right. Where you’d have problems would be if you could change them to student council members and palace steps to school steps and it still works. Then your language might be too casual for a high fantasy.

I don’t think you need a lot of “hark” and “prithee” type language, but I think you can go too far the other way. There’s an author I’ve read recently whose characters and stories are great, but his use of language keeps taking me out of the story because he’ll have a medieval-equivalent chieftain say something like, “Okay, guys, we’ve gotta pull together on this.” Then again, that would possibly be the equivalent of a CEO in our world, and some of them do talk like that.

I don’t really have any firm answers. I just have to go by what feels right for the story, something that gives the flavor of another time and place but that’s still readable. I try to have “invisible” writing, where you don’t really notice the words. The words inject the story into your head, and you experience it that way without feeling so much like you’re reading. Part of that is using language that doesn’t draw attention to itself and that feels like a natural part of the story. I think for the book I’m working on, that will mean finding something else to call a sandwich, not letting a character get sidetracked and nobody saying “hello” or “okay.” Another author might make different decisions.

memoir

A Lifetime of Reading

I’ve been reading a book that’s part how-to book about how to have a writing career and part author’s memoir, and since I’m planning to start doing more how-to stuff, I thought it might be fun to do a bit of a retrospective on how I came to be an author and some of the wacky things that have happened in my career. That way you’ll have a better sense of where I’m coming from when I give writing or career advice.

Like many (probably most) writers, I was a reader first. I don’t remember not knowing how to read. My parents are big readers and read to me pretty much since birth. I memorize things easily, so I quickly memorized my favorite books. In fact, my whole family can still recite my favorite book from when I was a toddler by memory. It was a cloth book called Doggy’s Day, and I have tried searching the Internet to find it and learn something about it, but I can’t find it. There are a lot of things that come up in the search, but none of them are the book that starts, “Doggy eats his breakfast, just like you. Then he plays the whole day through.” I was pretty young when I figured out that the words on the page matched the words you said when reading aloud, and from there I was able to read those same words when I saw them somewhere else.

This actually got me in a bit of trouble in kindergarten. Because I’m old, kindergarten was a fairly new thing when I was that age. That was the first year they offered it in public schools in Texas, and I’d already been enrolled in a church school. It was pretty much like preschool is now, just half a day, and we were still learning numbers and letters and things like that. The teacher refused to believe that I could read and told my parents I was lying about that. Then when my parents said that, actually, I could read, the teacher had me prove it. I was reading chapter books in first grade.

We belonged to the Dr. Seuss book club, so we got a new book every month, and that may have started my tilt toward reading fantasy because they were certainly fantastical. Even the ones that weren’t actually Seuss books still had fantasy elements, or at the very least involved talking animals. I don’t think I ever had the “but that can’t happen!” reaction that some people have to fantasy. I liked my stories a bit unrealistic.

I tended to read by theme. I’d get utterly fascinated by a particular topic and read everything I could find that looked like it was on that topic, both fiction and non. The post library at the place we lived when I was in second, third, and fourth grades had a children’s room that had the fiction around the perimeter and non-fiction in the middle, and I remember walking around the room, starting at A, and reading the spines to find the things I was looking for. I remember going through a dance phase, when I’d read anything with “dance” or “ballet” in the title. Then there was the horse phase. The girls in my neighborhood all watched syndicated reruns of Bewitched, so there was a witch phase. Then there was the Nancy Drew phase that got me into mysteries, in general — Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames, and I think there were some others.

Fourth grade was a big turning point for me because several things happened that year. First, I saw Star Wars early in the school year and became obsessed. I don’t know how many times I reread the novelization. That started me reading other science fiction books and looking for stories with spaceships and robots. It also meant I started reading books published for adults because my parents began sharing their science fiction books with me. Meanwhile, I had a teacher who would read to us every day after recess as a way of getting us to calm down, and she tended to read us things like Roald Dahl and the Oz books. I’d get impatient with a chapter a day, check the book out of the library, and read the whole thing. That meant I read a lot of fantasy that year, including The Hobbit. The animated TV movie version came out that year, and our teacher read the book to us.

I don’t remember a particular phase in fifth grade. That was the year we moved to Germany. I guess I was still reading whatever science fiction I found. I do remember finding the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in sixth grade. Later in sixth grade and into seventh grade I was really into spy stories and books about World War II.

Oddly, I didn’t even start to think about writing books until after seventh grade. I just liked reading. I carried a novel with me to school every day to read whenever I had a chance. I read at bedtime. I read on weekends. Books were what got me through the “new kid” phase whenever we moved. One of the first things we did when we moved to a new place was find the library and get a library card, since that was a lifeline. But even if I wasn’t thinking in terms of being an author all that time, I was absorbing stories and characters, so I’m sure I was preparing myself that whole time.

Up next: Storytelling

Publicity

Promo Push

Since I don’t know when I’ll be able to get another book published (I’m in the middle of writing), I need to boost the sales of my existing books, and that means doing promo.

I’m afraid I’ve become my own nightmare PR client. In my PR agency days, I used to gripe about the clients who didn’t want to do anything about publicity (in spite of them having hired a firm, but it was usually the company that hired the firm, while the people I actually had to deal with were opposed to publicity) because they thought their work should speak for itself. Or they were willing to try one thing once, but if they didn’t get immediate, obvious results they’d give up. Or they weren’t willing to do what needed to be done to have a good PR campaign. I’ve been doing all those things. I’m especially bad about trying something once or twice and giving up right away when it doesn’t seem to do any good.

So, I’m going to spend the next few months trying to be consistent about my marketing and publicity efforts. I have to do at least one promotional thing a day, and I’ve got a few tasks that I’m going to do consistently and regularly for these three months to see how it all adds up. I can’t just do it once and give up.

I’ve been trying to do some graphics for some of my blog posts, and I’m putting them on Pinterest. If you’re on Pinterest and want to pin or share them, or whatever you do on Pinterest, that would be lovely. I’m also going to get my newsletter going again. I’ve let it fall by the wayside because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’m working to get my books up on the Google Play store (they’re taking forever to get that up and going). And I think I’m actually going to do that video project I’ve been musing about. I figure if I’m still thinking about it months later, that means it’s something I should do.

I even made a chart and a checklist to keep myself honest. The chart is for tracking those activities that I’m trying to be consistent about and doing at least once a week, and the checklist is all the tasks I need to get done to have my ducks in a row.

Now, will my enthusiasm for this last more than a couple of weeks?

writing, movies

Seeing the Structure

Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed a routine of Friday and Saturday movie nights. On other nights, I don’t just sit and watch stuff. When I’m “watching” TV, I’m usually also working crossword puzzles, reading, knitting, exercising, or doing embroidery. But for movie nights, I make some popcorn, turn out the lights, and just sit and watch. It’s an exercise for my attention span and almost like meditation in that I force myself to be in the moment and just watching what’s going on.

Of course, I can’t turn off my brain entirely. I can’t help but think about what I’m watching, and I’m usually analyzing the story structure. I make note of when I start the movie and how long it is so that I can find the various story milestones and see how closely it aligns to story structure.

If you don’t want to have the way you see movies changed, don’t read beyond this. Once you see this, you may not be able to unsee it whenever you watch a movie.

I recently read a book on story structure that said at the middle of a story, you’ll find what they call a “mirror moment.” That’s a moment of self-reflection in which the hero has to face the person he is and decide what person he’s going to be. This decision is critical because it affects the way he’ll deal with the final crisis in the story. Quite often, this moment of reflection involves a literal mirror or other reflective surface.

The Middle of the Story An ordeal that’s the mid-term exam for the hero May be: First attempt at achieving story goal that fails because the hero’s flaw still holds him back Part one of achieving the goal, but the hard part is still to come A stepping stone — a smaller-scale version of what the final battle will be A false victory — the hero thinks he’s achieved his goal, but either he’s wrong or he soon loses what he achieved

But I’ve generally found that the midpoint of a story is some kind of ordeal. It’s like the midterm exam of the story. The hero can’t reach his goal at this point or the story would be over, but he may make his first attempt at reaching his goal and fail because he hasn’t yet fixed the flaw that’s holding him back. Or he may achieve part of his goal but still has something else to do. This shows up in a lot of “get the thing to the place” plots. At the midpoint he gets the thing, but he still has to get it to the place. The ordeal could be a stepping stone, an initial test that somewhat reflects the ultimate challenge but that’s a bit easier than the final challenge will be. Or the hero may think he’s achieved the goal but then turns out to be wrong about that or loses what he achieved (like Indiana Jones getting the Ark away from the Nazis after an extended midpoint action sequence, only to lose it again). In general, something big and exciting or tense happens in the middle.

So, I started tracking this when I was watching movies, and I did start noticing the mirror moment. Something that would fit the idea of facing oneself is in just about everything I’ve watched recently. It very often does involve a mirror or other reflection. There’s a moment when the hero pauses and reflects on what’s happened or on his identity and has to be totally honest with himself or someone else. But this isn’t the midpoint. I’ve been finding it at the 3/4 or 2/3 point, right before the final “battle.” The exact point depends on how long and involved the final “battle” (literal or metaphorical) is. If it’s an extended sequence and there’s a long resolution, it will be at 2/3. If it’s a fairly quick bit of conflict and there’s not a lot of wrap-up, it will be at the 3/4 mark. I’m still finding an ordeal at the midpoint.

Usually the structure goes: Midpoint ordeal, celebration (we made it! There’s often a love scene here), realization that they still have to face the hard part, big setback, mirror moment, climactic “battle” scene (may be literal or figurative battle) that’s essentially the hero’s final exam.

It’s really easy to track this in a movie. I find it a bit harder in books because time gets wonky in books. Movies take place in real time. There may be gaps between scenes, so not every movie story happens within two hours, but once a scene starts, the amount of time it takes is the amount of time it happens. A two-minute dialogue scene takes the same amount of time as a two-minute action scene. In a book, that dialogue scene that would take two minutes on the screen may take five pages, while the two-minute action scene could take two paragraphs or ten pages, depending on how detailed the description of the action is, whether it’s “they fought” or a blow-by-blow telling with thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations described.

That makes it a little harder to open a book at the midway point and find the ordeal. Then there’s the issue of multiple viewpoints, so that one character’s ordeal may or may not happen at the same time as other characters’ ordeals, depending on whether or not there are subplots. A movie is closer to a short story in structure so is less likely to have multiple braided plots. There’s one ordeal and one final “battle.” A book may have this for each character, and each character may be on a different timeline. Usually the subplots wrap up before the protagonist has his final battle, since the resolution of the secondary characters’ plots may be what leads to the final battle.

Still, this kind of structure is helpful in planning a book. I’d originally plotted the book I’ve been working on with the idea of that mirror moment coming halfway through, which is part of why I’ve been feeling like I’m slow getting into the story, but if it’s at the 2/3 or 3/4 mark, then I’m closer to being on track. Now I just have to figure out what the ordeal really is.

fantasy

A Royal Scam

Since the book I’m working on falls roughly into the category of “historical fantasy,” I did a lot of reading about history to research it, and a lot of that involved reading about various royals. The more I learn about royalty, the more I think that the concept of royalty is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated by and on mankind.

The earliest royals were probably tribal chiefs who won their position through some kind of conquest, whether defeating another leader and taking control or helping defend the group against someone else and being acclaimed as the leader. But then from there it became an inherited position, and they supported the idea of this as a divine right. If they’re in charge, that must mean that God wanted them to be in charge, and therefore any rebellion against the king is a rebellion against God, and therefore a sin. And then there was the idea that royal blood was somehow different from regular blood. The royalty, nobility, and gentry were physically superior to the peasantry. As late as the 1800s, the quite progressive for her time Charlotte Bronte had her character surprised that the coarse peasant girls in her school were capable of learning in spite of being of inferior birth.

And yet if you look at the actual royals, it’s hard to imagine these as superior human specimens. I don’t see how royalty stayed in power in Spain after the later Spanish Habsburgs who were so inbred as to be barely functional. They actually looked at these people and thought God wanted them to rule, and they were superior to the people they ruled? Well, probably not. This is a case of what I mentioned last week, where there was an infrastructure in place of people who benefited from the power structure and supported it. Most of the people didn’t know how sickly and deformed their rulers were, and the people around the rulers were hanging on to their own power, so nobody said, “You know, I don’t really think God is blessing this guy’s rule.”

Where it gets really wacky is the idea that royalty is so important that it supersedes ability or even being from the country they’re going to be ruling. For instance, when the British ran out of Stuarts they wanted anywhere near their throne, they reached back to the great-grandson of a previous king, someone who didn’t speak English, had never lived in England and knew little about it. Ironically, that previous king got his claim to the throne via an ancestor whose claim to “royal blood” was somewhat dubious (though his wife did have a bit more of a claim). I guess your blood suddenly becomes royal once you’ve put on a crown and your descendants forevermore are royal.

That even continues into modern time. When Norway got its independence from Sweden in 1905, they decided they wanted a king. Instead of finding someone in their country who would make a good leader, they imported a Danish prince — I guess because royalty was all-important. The current king is the first king of Norway to have actually been born in Norway in something like 800 years. His grandfather was Danish and his father was born in England (his father’s mother was a daughter of the English king). And the next king of Norway will be the first one in a long time who’s at all Norwegian, since his mother is Norwegian. Until now, they’ve been Danish and Swedish (and English, but in the English royal family, that meant German at that time). Greece also imported a Danish prince to be their king, back in the 1800s, which is how Prince Philip was a Greek prince without being at all Greek (he was Danish, German, and Russian).

I wonder if this kind of stuff is why there’s such a tendency toward “chosen ones” in fantasy. We’re trying to make sense of the idea of royalty, where there is actually something magical about it, some supernatural reason why this person is elevated above others. It makes it feel like the person might have actually earned it. That farmboy who turns out to be the long-list prince proves himself somehow, usually gaining acclaim from great deeds before anyone knows who he is, so it’s like he’s earned his throne rather than merely inheriting it. I love what Terry Pratchett did with the trope, where the long-lost “one true king” is just a cop. Everyone kind of knows who he really is, but no one talks about it. He’s capable of rallying the people when necessary, then goes back to working his beat after the crisis is over. He’s worthy because he’s a good man, not because of his ancestry or the fact that he has a birthmark in the shape of a crown, and because he’s a good man, he has no interest in taking power.

writing

Writing Status Update

I’m still plugging away at the book I’ve been working on. I’ve passed what should be the halfway point, based on my targeted word count, but I’m not yet really at the midpoint of the story. Either this book is going to be a lot longer than I planned, the “midpoint” event is actually going to be at the 3/4 mark, or I’m going to have to do a lot of editing. Possibly all of the above.

I’m going to try not to worry about that for now. I’m going to just keep writing and then I’ll know after the first draft is done what I need to do in the second draft — if I’ll need all the setup scenes, if the subplots I set up early in the book will actually come to fruition or if I can cut that setup, if there’s stuff I can trim. Or I can reconsider some things and pull back to just one or two points of view and let the readers have the same amount of knowledge as the main character does instead of showing what’s really going on through other perspectives.

I feel like the book is starting to hit its stride. I’m enjoying the main characters, and the humor is starting to really come out. I hadn’t thought of this book as a comedy, but it’s got more funny stuff than I expected. I just can’t seem to help myself. But funny is good. It’s part of what I’m known for. In fact, it’s kind of a relief that funny stuff started showing up.

This book seems to be coming more slowly than usual. I’m spending the usual amount of time writing every day, but have fewer words than I usually get from that amount of time. And yet I’m also spending a lot of time planning each scene before I write it. I guess I’m having trouble translating those ideas into actual words.

I’m planning to have at least two books in this series written before I start worrying about publication, so I have no idea when it will make its way out into the world. It will depend on whether things speed up and how much revising I have to do, and then whether I can use my planned book 2 or if something else will come up. So I’ll just keep writing and see what happens.

Life

Frustrated Gardener

Over the past five or six years, I’ve realized that I’m a frustrated gardener. Gardens are my happy place. I like to be around flowers and plants. I read gardening magazines and watch garden tour travel documentaries.

Alas, I don’t have a garden or even a yard. I have a very small patio that only gets a few hours of sunlight a day. I can maybe get a bit more by moving the plants around the patio to follow the sun. I have about a foot of dirt between the concrete and the fence, but that gets even less sun, so there’s not much that will grow there. There’s some jasmine planted there that seems impossible to kill (it even came back after last year’s deep freeze), and I planted some mint last year in one of the bare spots left after the deep freeze, and it’s coming back this spring. Nothing else I’ve tried in that spot has done well. So, potted plants, it is.

I usually plant a few morning glory seeds because those bring me so much joy. I have a big pot with a trellis in it, and it’s on a wheeled dolly so I can move the pot around the patio to get enough sun. The last few years, I’ve had celosias, thanks to a “cutting mix” packet of seeds and then the plants re-seeding themselves. I guess I’m a lazy gardener because I don’t plant much. I just let whatever grows on its own grow. I might start some celosia seeds I’ve saved and then put the seedlings in pots.

But aside from herbs (the mint, basil, parsley), I haven’t been able to grow vegetables. I tried lettuce a couple of years ago, but between rabbits (there’s one that sneaks under the fence) and just general life, it didn’t do well. I got maybe one salad, and that required mixing in some store-bought lettuce.

But a couple of weeks ago, I read an article online about vegetables from the grocery store you could regrow. They said you could put the core from a head of lettuce in a dish of water, put it in the sun, and it would re-grow leaves. I was near the end of a head of green leaf lettuce, so I gave it a shot.

A week later, I had actual leaves growing. It works!

Small lettuce leaves sprout from a lettuce core in a dish of water

So, on the next head of lettuce, I left the smaller inner leaves on to see if they would keep growing, and that seems to be working. I don’t think I’ll be able to stop buying lettuce at the store, but I’m curious to see how far it will go. I may be able to fill in gaps between grocery trips.

I may see if I can sprout some garlic, and I’ve heard you can get green onions to sprout again. That would be handy because I often have recipes that require just a little bit, and it would be nice to snip some off instead of having to buy a whole bunch.

I still would love to live in a place where I can have a real garden, a full vegetable garden and a real flower garden, but given the way real estate has been going, that’s not going to happen unless my career makes a drastic change. I’ll make do with my kitchen table lettuce garden and a few plants on my patio.

Life vs. Fiction

I think events of the past few years have killed a lot of popular plots for fiction. Maybe they were never actually realistic, but we could at least believe them. Now, I’m not sure they’d work anymore without a lot of adjustments or explanations of what the specific circumstances are that make them work.

First, there’s the “get the message out/publicly reveal the villain’s crimes” plot. In this one, our plucky band of heroes finds out about the villain’s wrongdoing and overcomes all the odds to spread the word far and wide, leading to the villain’s downfall. Or they might step up in a public forum with the key evidence that reveals the villain’s wrongdoing. Or they might trick the villain into saying the quiet part out loud, so that they rant about their evil scheme or say what they really think while on an open microphone, on the air, or in some other way that people can hear it.

Of course, as soon as the people hear this, it brings the villain down. The evil regime is overthrown, the villain loses all status, or the people rise up and make the villain account for his crimes. Good prevails!

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago when Arnold Schwarzenegger recorded his video aimed at the people of Russia about how their government is lying to them about Ukraine, and I allowed myself a moment of fantasizing about the people rising up and removing Putin from power. Then I realized how unlikely that was. The misdeeds of a lot of “villain” type people around the world are pretty well-known, and it doesn’t seem to affect their popularity or power. The realistic response to the heroes getting the message out would be for maybe some people who already didn’t like the villain to get angry and for everyone else to either not believe it or not care because they like some of the things the villain is doing or are getting something out of the villain’s regime. Odds are that all that effort to get the message out would end up coming to nothing.

It might work on a smaller level if the people hearing the message were victims of the villain and this information reveals that he was the one behind it, and if they had the power to actually do something. But on a larger scale, odds are that nothing would come of it.

Which brings me to the other popular plot: The evil overlord has been overthrown or killed, so we’re all free and there’s dancing in the streets.

The problem with this is that an evil overlord doesn’t get to be an evil overlord without having a critical mass of people in critical positions supporting him. I suppose if magic’s involved it might work. If the villain created a magical army or used magic to force his army to fight for him, then if he died the army would either dissipate or wake up and stop fighting. But otherwise, if the evil overlord is killed, likely someone else would step into his place, and there would still be plenty of true believers in positions of power to keep things going. The police force and military would still be out there enforcing the laws, and there would likely be plenty of people who benefited from the rule of the evil overlord who wouldn’t be happy about his death and wouldn’t want things to change. You don’t get into power or stay in power if no one else supports you and unless there’s been a massive war that wiped out all those supporters, those supporters would keep the regime going with a new leader.

I know a lot of Star Wars fans were mad that the sequels seemed to undo everything accomplished in the original trilogy, with yet another Empire-like organization to fight, but that was actually pretty realistic. What was less realistic was the stuff added to the end of Return of the Jedi in the special editions showing all the dancing in the streets. That might have happened in some of the places that were subjugated by the Empire, but in Coruscant, the capital, where people had it good, odds are they wouldn’t have been happy about the end of the Empire. A lot of the rank and file Stormtroopers might have been conscripts by the time of the rebellion, but there were probably still a lot of clones who’d been brainwashed to support the Empire. Then there were all the governors and officers and other elites who benefited from Imperial rule. Killing the Emperor and losing his henchman wouldn’t have changed society that much. There would have been a ton of clean-up work and re-education to do in order to completely rebuild society. And even then, a generation or so later you’d likely have people who didn’t experience the bad parts romanticizing the past and trying to revive it, working alongside the people who remembered it and liked it. That 37-year timeline for the rise of a new Empire-like regime is pretty realistic. Thirty years seems to be about the average between the fall of one totalitarian regime and the rise of the next one.

It seems like there are some interesting stories to be told about the aftermath of taking out the evil overlord, the people who have to go in and dismantle all the stuff surrounding the overlord, deal with the power structure, and convince the people that there was a problem with their leadership, but we seldom get that part of the story. It’s just, kill the Emperor, we’re free, the end.

movies

Toy Stories

Over the past few weekends, I’ve rewatched the first three Toy Story movies and watched the fourth, which I didn’t see in the theater, for some odd reason. These films are so clever and imaginative, and it’s fun to track the progress of the Pixar technology from the first through the last one. But watching these has made me wonder if maybe I was a bad toy owner as a kid.

I don’t recall having a “best friend” toy like Andy had Woody. I might have when I was really little, before I have clear memories, but I certainly didn’t have one who stuck with me to the point I was planning to take it to college with me. I guess I did have my R2-D2 action figure, but that was more about showing my fondness for Star Wars, and R2 is kind of a personal mascot. I didn’t have any particular feelings for that figure.

My toys were generally my cast to play out stories I made up, so whatever feelings I had for them were for the roles they were playing at that particular moment. The object itself wasn’t that important to me. I didn’t sleep with toys. My parents didn’t do the “you can bring one toy with you” thing when we went to restaurants. If I ever did bring something with me, it was most likely a book. A toy on its own wouldn’t have been any fun unless I could have it acting out stories, and I couldn’t do that properly in public.

I was also pretty fickle. I might be really into a new toy soon after getting it, but then I’d move on. I suffered a lot from 70s TV commercial oversell (as the fourth movie so hilariously depicted), so the toy that looked like so much fun on TV, that I desperately wanted and begged to get for Christmas or my birthday, ended up not doing anything like what was shown on TV. I remember in particular the Baby Alive, a baby doll that would actually eat and drink and then you’d have to change its diaper (it came with this powder stuff that you made into a glop with water to feed it). I’m not sure why that sounded like fun, but I had a baby brother at the time, and I guess I wanted my own baby to feed. One time dealing with the grossness, and I didn’t use that feature of the doll again. As I recall, if you “fed” the doll, you then had to pour a lot of water through it to rinse it out, and it was more trouble than it was worth. Then there was the bride doll I desperately wanted, got, and then wondered, “Now what?”

When I was little, I mostly played with the Fisher Price “little people.” I had the house and the school, though the school also got turned into things like churches and auditoriums. My brother inherited those, and he also got the farm and the airport. One house where we lived had a full basement with a room we got to use as a playroom, and we set up a whole town for the people, with other buildings built out of blocks.

My Barbie dolls were mostly used to act out plays and musicals (I’d make up stories to connect the songs on my record albums, so I guess I invented the “jukebox musical” decades before that trend hit Broadway). They also served as models for clothes I designed and made. In that same house where we had a full room as a playroom, I set up a kind of town for my dolls. I had the Barbie Dream House, and I built all kinds of additions to it, including a fireplace and balcony. I was around 10 during my most intense Barbie phase, and I think I used that as a way to imagine what my ideal adult life would be like. I had a Malibu Barbie, but my primary doll was actually a Francie, who I think was Barbie’s cousin. She was brunette, a bit less voluptuous and had slightly flatter feet instead of being designed for high heels. Mine was the “quick curl” model, with wiry hair that you could curl with a “curling iron” plastic rod. But basically, her hair ended up all clumpy and frizzy, which meant she was just like me. At one point, I tried to fix this with scissors, and that never goes well. During that more intense Barbie phase, when that doll was pretty worn out, I got a PJ (a brunette Barbie), sent my Francie to a spa for a makeover, and she came home as that PJ, so I saw her as essentially the same doll. Then about six months later we moved, and I pretty much stopped playing with Barbies. We didn’t have a good place to put up the Dream House, and since I was going into junior high, I didn’t want it in my room.

I have that last doll in a box in my closet, and I guess it’s weird that the one I kept is one I didn’t play with all that much. According to the Toy Story films, that’s been a horrible fate for that doll, to be boxed up in a closet and never played with. I don’t have a daughter to give her to, and given that she’s more than 40 years old (yikes!), I’m not entirely sure how safe she’d be. There’s no telling what they were putting in toys then.

Now that those movies have made me feel bad, maybe I should find her and let her look outside, or something.

I did have a bit of a Toy Story 3 experience with my books. My parents cleared out their attic with boxes and boxes of childhood books. I knew I would probably never have kids, but my church works with a summer program that provides summer enrichment for kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods. As part of it, they have a reading program, and they like for the kids to be able to take home a few books of their own to keep. I donated all my old books to that program, and I felt like the end of Toy Story 3, in which a grown Andy gives up his childhood toys to a child, when I handed over all those boxes. I did feel attached to some of those books, and now I like to imagine children who didn’t have books of their own bringing those books home with them, and maybe getting even more attached to them than I was because these might be the first books they got to own for themselves.

writing

Pacing Perception

At the end of last week, I’d reached the 1/4 of the book point, if this one is going to be the length my fantasy books usually are, and I felt like I’d only barely started to really get into the story. I wondered if the pacing was all off and this book was off to a slow start, so I reread what I’d written so far.

That reminded me that writing pace is not the same as reading pace. It had taken me weeks to write that much, and I read it in about an hour and a half—and that wasn’t even normal reading speed. I was trying not to edit as I read, but when you see a typo, you have to deal with it immediately because you might not notice it again. What feels slow as a writer because it takes you days or weeks to write may feel fast for a reader. In fact, I find that the fast-paced, action-packed scenes are the slowest to write.

I’m still not entirely sure what I think about this book. It reminds me of the meme showing a beautiful oil painting of a horse as “the book in my head” and a child’s stick-figure drawing of a horse as “the book when I try to write it.” The weird thing with this one is that the story is pretty much playing out according to what was in my head. The scenes are all there. And yet they’re somehow lacking. I think part of it is that the book in my head was like a movie trailer. I wasn’t necessarily seeing the whole scenes. I was seeing the highlights, the key moments. It skipped the parts that are necessary for getting to those moments or for getting from those moments to the next key moments.

Then there’s the fact that as I write, the book becomes even more vivid in my head, so there’s a huge disconnect with what I can put on the page. I’m bad about not getting much description in during the first draft, but even in a final draft it’s impossible to fully describe every little detail of what’s in my head. It would be a boring book if I did. The trick is figuring out exactly what needs to be described and finding ways to fit that in so that it’s not an obvious chunk of description, and even then, what’s on the page can never be as vivid as what’s in my head because it requires putting images and sensations into words.

This book is a bit different for me because it has multiple viewpoints, and each of those viewpoint characters has his or her own story. The stories will eventually meet up and mesh in the main plot, but I have to get them started separately and get them all to the main plot. If I were only dealing with one viewpoint character, like in most of my books, then the story would have moved a lot more quickly, and I’d be long past the point of the main character “crossing the threshold” into the main part of the story. But since I also have to set up the subplots with the other characters, it’s taking longer than I’m used to. I think that there’s some tension in seeing how those subplots are coming together to create a situation that’s going to hit the main character like a truck. We can see the disaster she’s heading for, but she has no idea when we’re just in her viewpoint, so it feels like her story is only just starting, but we know from seeing all the other stuff that she’s in for some trouble. I suspect this book may be a bit longer, as well.

And then there’s realizing what I’m writing. In my head, I saw it as epic fantasy, but it’s really more of a courtly intrigue and comedy of manners story. There aren’t any quests or battle scenes, just scheming and plotting and trying to cope with new situations. Part of my brain is going “this isn’t very exciting,” and I’m reminding myself that this isn’t an action-packed story.

I’m sure I’ll do some trimming in later drafts. There are some concepts I’ve had characters explain multiple times, since there are multiple people who need explanations, but the reader doesn’t need all those explanations, and I can maybe replace one or two with something like “he explained how it worked” and then move on. But then I’ll probably also be adding description and detail, so the length won’t change all that much.