Screen Time

For the past couple of nights, my exercise time viewing was a program I recorded last week about screen time. I was feeling a bit smug because I’m not one of those people who’s addicted to their phones. They were saying that people unlock their phones an average of 80 times a day, and I can go days without looking at my phone. I think I use it as a music player more than anything else. I don’t have notifications set for anything but texts or phone calls, and even then I mostly keep my phone on silent since I get so many fake calls every day that having a ringer on would be disruptive.

But if I’m being honest with myself, my screen of choice is my laptop. I don’t look at my phone very much, and the only time I do any kind of social media on my phone is when I’m traveling, but when I’m at home, I probably spend more time on screens than I should. It’s difficult to quantify, since my work involves being on my computer, and social media is to some extent part of my work. But I also recognize that it’s become something of a boredom crutch. The moment I’m not engaged in doing something else, my impulse is to check social media or otherwise goof around online.

On the program, they were talking about how sites like Facebook and Twitter are built around not giving you a logical stopping point. No matter how much you scroll, you’re going to run across something you haven’t seen before since they throw in posts that people you follow have liked or re-posted. That keeps you scrolling and scrolling for fear of missing out on something. I think that explains a lot. Back in the heyday of blogs, people posted once a day, so even though the posts were long, I spent a lot less time online reading them. The feed, whether using a feed reader or something like the LiveJournal friends list, was in chronological order and stayed that way, so you could easily find the first thing you hadn’t read, catch up on what was new, and then stop knowing you’d seen it all. If there was a discussion going on in comments, you could opt to get notifications about new comments without having to go back constantly. Going back a bit further into the days of Usenet, you could set your news reader to only show you new posts. Again, you could get through the new stuff you cared to see in a short amount of time and then move on.

But Twitter and Facebook seem totally opposed to just giving a chronological feed of the things you’ve said you want to see. They throw in things the people you follow like or comment on, and I think they withhold some posts to show up later if you check often. It’s all a jumble. And it does seem like this is why. They don’t want you to ever realize you’ve come to a stopping point.

I’m trying to be a lot more mindful about this and limit my impulse to just check online when I have a down moment. Yesterday, when I was taking a revision break between chapters, I started to automatically check Twitter and instead practiced my choir music, stepping away from the computer. That’s another reason I need to get my office in order. I want to go back to keeping my computer upstairs so that it takes more effort to go check it. I’ve tried trimming my lists to see only things I really enjoy seeing, which has helped some. I still think I’d be shocked if someone timed the amount of time I spend, the way they did in that program. The teenagers in one family were spending 12 or more hours a day on their phones. They were finding that schools that made students lock up their phones during the school day saw an increase in test scores and a decrease in behavior issues like bullying. And people who take a lot of selfies tend to feel worse about their appearance and more critical of themselves.

I’m guessing this is going to be a whole new area of psychological research in the coming years.

writing life

Origins and Influences: Spy and War Novels

Picking up on the discussion of my origins and influences as a writer … I have one category that doesn’t really fit in with most of the others, though I suppose you could see it as an extension of the girl sleuth thing: spy and war novels.

I went through a big phase in 7th and 8th grades of being really into spy/adventure/war stories. I was particularly into World War II. I still am, from a history perspective, though I don’t read as many novels about it. I think a lot of it stemmed from the summer vacation we took between sixth and seventh grade. We were living in Germany, and we visited the American military recreation center that was in Berchtesgaden. The hotel was on the Obersalzburg mountain, and it turned out that it actually had been the Nazi VIP headquarters when Hitler had his home there. We were in the middle of what had been the Nazi compound. We took a tour of the bunker system during our stay and learned where all the main buildings had been. I was already somewhat aware of the war. There were visible bomb craters near our home, and I’d heard about how the place we’d lived previously had more or less been wiped off the map by the RAF, but this really brought it home. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how anyone could have let it happen. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, so most of the adults around us had been alive during the war, and I couldn’t imagine the ones I’d met being so cruel as to support Hitler and putting people in concentration camps.

So, I started studying the subject to try to understand it. I’m still studying it, and I still don’t have a good answer. But I think I did find some comfort in the stories of people who did make the right choices, who were brave and self-sacrificing. Reading novels about that made it make a lot more sense. I wasn’t so interested in the military side of things, all the battles and strategy. I’m more interested in things on the individual scale, which meant I read a lot of spy novels about individuals doing their thing even if no one would ever know their contributions. I read authors like Jack Higgins (and his alter ego, Harry Patterson) and Alistair Maclean and many others I don’t remember and don’t still have on my bookshelf. In seventh grade, we shared a library with the high school, so they had adult books, and they were all mixed in on the shelves with the teen books, so that was how I started discovering authors from the adult side of the regular library.

Some of my earliest attempts at actually writing a novel — typing out “chapter one” and an opening scene — were actually spy novels. I had a tendency to make up scenarios starring whatever actor I had a crush on at the time, casting him as my hero. I don’t think I ever got beyond the opening scene of any of these stories because I hadn’t really learned to plot yet. I just knew the situation, so I had the briefing scene in which the spy was given his mission (which may not even have needed to be in the book), but I had no idea where to take it from there. The main thing I learned was how to type. We had a manual typewriter that I found when we moved back to the States and got our stuff out of storage, and I taught myself to type on it as I wrote out these attempts at novels.

I don’t read a lot of those kind of thrillers these days, and I have zero desire to write one, but the idea of spies and secret missions still manages to make its way into my stories. And I do still love war movies and documentaries.

movies

Revisiting Star Wars

Since Saturday was Star Wars day (“May the Fourth be with you”), I rewatched the original movie for the first time in ages. I’m not sure how long it’s been. It holds up really well. I even think the somewhat more primitive special effects look pretty good because they look a lot more real than all the slick CGI stuff.

I have that movie more or less memorized, but I still got really tense during parts of it, as if I didn’t know what was going to happen. I guess that says something, when you can recite the lines along with the actors, but you still find yourself holding your breath about whether or not the good guys are going to win this time around. I’m not even sure how they did that. I suspect it has a lot to do with all the emotional subtext, with the music and the editing that trigger your brain to feel tense.

There’s a part of me that almost wishes it had been left with this little gem of a movie rather than building a whole mythology because the mythology doesn’t quite work for me. It made something that was just a lot of fun into something pseudo portentious. Plus, a lot of that mythology was added retroactively, and the series then had to try to make it fit, but it doesn’t always fit well. For instance, making Luke and Leia twin siblings. That was not originally intended (Alan Dean Foster wrote a romance into Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and Lucas made changes to that book based on the idea that it would be the sequel if the first movie was successful, but he didn’t change the romance). The first movie is clearly setting up a romantic triangle and that revelation came totally out of the blue later. Then there’s the issue of “hiding” Luke from his father by giving him his father’s last name and taking him to live with his father’s stepbrother. They’re lucky that Vader apparently put home way behind him and never checked up on what was going on with those people and never seemed to have considered that Padme had her baby(s) before she died.

At the same time, there are moments that really seem to fit the overall continuity even though they couldn’t possibly have been planned, so it’s fun to look at them in that light. Like Ben’s reaction when Luke mentions that R2-D2 was looking for Obi Wan Kenobi. I guess they roll ‘droids off an assembly line, so there could have been others like R2, but Ben does a double take, looking at R2 again with a look of realization on his face, as though realizing that this actually is the R2 unit he once knew.

I think in the fall, before the next movie comes out, I’m going to have to watch the whole series chronologically. Although I haven’t written any space opera (well, not that’s come close to being publishable), this series has been a huge influence on my desire to write and tell stories, and it’s a fun universe to visit.

writing

Misidentified Tropes

It has been interesting this week to see the reaction online to a certain big TV event earlier in the week (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers — if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t, this is still about writing). It looks to me like a significant portion of the Internet is unclear on the concept of what a Mary Sue is and skipped class the day they talked about deus ex machina when studying literature.

A Mary Sue is not a female character who’s at all competent. It’s a mocking term for a fan fiction trope. The term was coined in a satirical piece mocking the trope of the author’s self-insert character who takes over the story. “Ensign Mary Sue” in a Star Trek story was the new crew member who could navigate better than Chekov, pilot better than Sulu, outthink Spock, quickly solve engineering problems that baffled Scotty, and had a beautiful singing voice and was a brilliant dancer. Everyone loved her, and Kirk, Spock, or whichever character the author was in love with fell madly in love with her. Since fan fiction is written mostly for fun, I really have no problem with someone writing a Mary Sue. I think that’s how a lot of writers begin, in imagining a role for themselves in their favorite stories. It’s just not a lot of fun for anyone else to read because they’re reading for the characters they love, not for someone else’s self insert. To be totally honest, I’ve mentally “written” tons of Mary Sue stuff. That really was how I started making up stories, creating roles for myself and imagining how an idealized version of myself might fit into that world. I hope mine weren’t quite that egregiously perfect, but there’s a reason I never wrote them down and never shared them with others. They were for my own amusement.

There’s a huge disagreement over whether there can be a Mary Sue in original fiction, since there’s no new non-canon character being inserted into an established cast. I think it does happen when there’s a character an author is incapable of being objective about, either because they identify too closely with that character or because they’re in love with that character. An original Mary Sue tends to be a bland character with little development because the author’s love means she already thinks the character is fascinating, so there’s no need to do the usual work of making the character interesting to the audience. The rules of the universe warp around this character, so she gets everything she wants, is good at everything just because she’s special, and other characters bend over backward to serve her (unless we’re dealing with a Victim Sue, who is unfairly vilified in spite of being perfect, with everyone hating her because they’re just jealous). I happen to think that Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels has more than a tinge of Gary Stu (the male version) to him. It really seems like Lucas overidentified with him, for whatever reason, and that meant he was just automatically good at everything, he was the Chosen One With Magical Specialness, everyone adored him even though he was actually kind of a jerk, and it was so very unfair when they didn’t give him everything he wanted that he turned evil.

A character can be incredibly skilled and competent without being a Mary Sue. We just need to see the work that goes on to gain that skill. Spending years in training and gaining experience in preparation for doing something big means the character probably isn’t a Mary Sue. We’re seeing the work and the struggle behind the skill.

Meanwhile, “deus ex machina” means “god from the machine” and comes from ancient Greek drama, in which situations were often resolved with a god coming down from on high (using rigs, and thus the “machine”) to resolve the mortals’ problems. That was kind of the point of ancient Greek drama, to show that the gods were in control, but in modern fiction, the term has come to mean some random thing that comes out of nowhere to resolve the problem. It’s some object that happens to appear that’s just what they need or some new character who shows up to fix everything.

When a character who’s been there from the beginning and has spent years training to do a thing uses a thing that’s been there almost from the beginning and that’s been part of the story all along, and when it was a plot point that this character was given this thing, and when there was even a prophecy years ago suggesting that this character might do this thing, it’s not a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina would be if the exact magical device they needed to resolve the problem had just happened to show up at the right time, or if the problem was resolved by some new random character just showing up.

I also find it amusing that people who boast about how great something is because it busts tropes get so upset when that thing busts a trope.

writing life

Today’s a double whammy blog day, as I also have a guest post at Fiction University on figuring out the best writing schedule for you.

Meanwhile, I think I need to give an update after my little meltdown from March, when I said I might quit writing. Strangely, I think that just giving myself that permission and letting myself consider other options made me feel a lot better about it. It may have turned it from something I felt obligated to do to something I was actively choosing to do. I think my social media purge also helped, as well as adjusting my ideas of what counted as “success.”

I said I might quit unless something happened to change the situation. I guess I was looking for a sign. Well, the next week, there was a Kindle Daily Deal on Enchanted, Inc., and my sales since then have doubled, and they’ve stayed at that level for more than a month. My May and June royalties on my independently published books will be a lot higher than they’ve been, and my next two Random House royalty payments should be pretty good, as well as possibly my audio royalties. And I sold book 9 to Audible. So, my money worries aren’t completely resolved, but my finances look a lot better than they did.

And I keep coming up with new ideas, which is a sign that my brain isn’t ready to quit. So, I think I’ll take it one book at a time. The book I’m revising now, the one for Audible, is coming out in the fourth quarter, and we’re looking at an August release for Enchanted, Inc. book 9 (so that I can release in e-book, print, and audio at the same time), so I probably won’t want to be juggling a lot of other work during all this time. Thinking about doing any other kind of job made me appreciate writing more, so I may address the financial issues by looking at other writing I can do. I keep joking about the low-stress, cozy fantasy thing, but I’m thinking in terms of maybe writing some “category” romantic fantasy — some short, light fantasy reads with a dash of “sweet” romance — and test the market for that. While I love a big, juicy fantasy epic every so often, when I’m busy and stressed, I would love something I could read in maybe a couple of sittings or on a weekend afternoon that’s just a fun escape with maybe some excitement but without a lot of additional stress. Sometimes you want a real page-turner whose outcome is in doubt, and sometimes you just want to run away to a magical place. Surely I’m not the only one.

So, that’s where things stand right now. I have too many stories I want to write to be able to stop, and if things keep going the way they have, I’ll be able to stick with it for at least a little while longer. I’m more at peace with where I am. I think I’ve also figured some of the emotional/psychological things that set it all off, but that’s fodder for another post. Thanks for all the support in the e-mails and blog comments. It was nice to be reminded that what I do brings joy to other people.

writing

It’s About Time

This morning’s fun was a dentist appointment, so now my teeth are all white and shiny but I feel behind on my day.

I feel like I didn’t make a lot of forward progress in my revisions yesterday, but what I did do was rearrange a bunch of events so that they now flow better and there’s a reason for conflict and tension in each scene. Of course, this makes me wonder why I didn’t do it that way in the first place. This is a definite proof point for the advice to let a manuscript rest before revising it. After a few months, you notice things you wouldn’t have noticed when the story was still fresh in your head.

Really, time seems to be the biggest asset to writing. I find that the more time between initial idea and actually starting to write, the better the book ends up being and the easier it is to write. The more time between first draft and revision, the better and more comprehensive the revision is. Unfortunately, today’s market penalizes taking your time and rewards fast publication. The only place where I find that taking less time helps is in the first draft. The faster I write that first draft, the better the book ends up being, though that might be a chicken-and-the-egg thing because I tend to be able to write a faster draft because I’ve spent more time between initial idea and starting to write. So, is it a better book because I wrote it fast, or was I able to write it fast because it was a better book?

I’m thinking that my ideal process would probably involved braided projects — do the research and development on one book while revising another book, then draft a book while letting a book rest. Or something like that. I know I can’t really work on anything else while doing a first draft, but preliminary research can fit in with other things, and it actually helps to write something while letting a draft rest before revision. I just need to get a pipeline going to keep the projects flowing like that.

But for now, it’s revision on this book.

Dreams and New Ideas

We’re supposed to get nasty storms this afternoon, so this morning was my rush around doing errands before it starts storming time. Now I have groceries, medication and other supplies, and have filled up my car, so let it rain! (But preferably not hail.)

I think I’m making progress on my revisions. I got four chapters done yesterday and figured out a big shift I could make to make things flow better. Today may be slower since I’ve hit a part that needs more substantial rewriting. I’m actually kind of enjoying this because it’s making the book closer to the vision I had when I came up with the idea. I seem to have been in a slump when I was writing it because it mostly seems a bit flat. I’m adding a lot of emotion and oomph to it.

Meanwhile, I’ve come up with yet another idea. I was afraid I was going to have nightmares after the very intense thing that was on TV Sunday night, but instead I dreamed a new book that had nothing to do with that intense thing and maybe owed more to the PBS Les Miserables, which I didn’t watch until Monday night. It’s in a category people have asked me about writing but that I haven’t had an idea for, and now I have an idea. As usual, when I wrote down what I know, I had about two paragraphs (though if I dramatized it, I might have been able to write about five pages), but I’ve got a title, a main character, a rough sense of the situation and world, the inciting incident and opening scene, and a general sense of the core of the plot, plus a scene later in the book. And it all still made a lot of sense when I wrote it down. It wasn’t just a wacky dream of an idea that made no sense in the light of day.

I know it’s nowhere near ready to write because it’s not distracting me from my revisions, like a lot of shiny new ideas do. There will be research required, and I think maybe even a trip.

But first, I have to deal with the things currently on my plate.

writing

When Your Characters are Too Smart

I’ve started on my book revisions, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a common thread of problems in my writing lately, and that’s that I don’t let my characters make mistakes or be wrong. Their ideas tend to be right, and the things they try tend to work.

I guess I’m going too far in the other direction from trying to avoid one of my pet peeves, which is Idiot Plotting. That’s what I call it when the plot can only work if the characters are total idiots — they trust the obviously untrustworthy person, they go alone into the dark basement in a horror movie, they don’t take common-sense precautions. So, since I hate that as a reader/audience member, as a writer I try to avoid it. I make my characters make good decisions and show common sense. I also hate messing around — why waste a chapter with the character doing the wrong thing before they figure out how to do the right thing?

But I guess that can make for less interesting stories. I need to find ways to challenge my characters even while they’re being smart. They can trust the wrong person — but instead of that person being obviously shady, they can act like a person who should be trusted. If I make the scene interesting, I can have the characters try something and fail, but the failure gives them the idea for what to try next. After all, even Nobel Prize-winning scientists have a lot of failures on the way to their breakthrough discoveries. There may be factors they’re not aware of when they make their plans that can through a monkey wrench into them.

And I think I need to get over my own perfectionism and quit applying it to my characters.

Books

Unbelievable True Stories

I’ve been on a nonfiction reading kick lately, reading a lot of history and biographies, and some of them are as gripping as any novel.

The one I just read was something I stumbled on in the library when I was looking for something else, and it reads like the kind of historical fiction in which the author’s fictional main character somehow manages to be present for every major historical event in that time period and meets all the major historical figures. Except, this is all true and it’s very well-documented.

The book was Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorhead, and it’s about a woman named Lucie de la Tour du Pin. She’s not famous and she didn’t do anything to alter history, but she lived during interesting times and was in a position to interact with a lot of the major players. She wrote a memoir of living through this time, which was discovered and published by a descendant about fifty years after she died, but there are also extensive letters between her and other people, letters about her, and there’s a lot of documentation relating to her husband’s position, so it’s pretty certain that she didn’t make it all up in her memoir.

She grew up during the Enlightenment in France and as a child went to the various Paris salons where the great thinkers shared their views. As a teenager she was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. She was at Versailles the day the “fishwives” raided the palace. She was in a rather awkward position for the French Revolution because she was an aristocrat with ties to the royals, but her husband and father had both fought in the American Revolution and had what were considered radical ideas about democracy. That made all the factions hate them. She and her family ended up having to flee to America during the Terror, and lived on a farm near Albany, where they became good friends with Alexander Hamilton and his family. Later, when they returned to France, her husband ended up as a prefect for Napoleon, and her half-sister married Napoleon’s aide de camp, so she interacted with Napoleon quite a bit (and once even bullied him into giving her husband a better position). When the royalty was restored, she ended up in that circle. They had to flee to Belgium when Napoleon returned from exile, and she was at the infamous ball the night before the battle of Waterloo. Oh, and she also knew the Duke of Wellington from when he was an ambassador in Paris when she was a child and he attended those salons.

Really, if you made all this up, people would roll their eyes and not believe it. It’s fascinating reading. But when someone is born in 1770 in Paris and lives to be 83, she’s going to have experienced a lot. There were multiple revolutions in her lifetime. And her husband was basically Ned Stark (for the Game of Thrones fans), who was utterly incapable of playing games and who said what he thought and did what he believed was right, which meant he was often trusted to be put in positions of responsibility, but he also got into a lot of trouble when people schemed against him and he was incapable of dealing with it or when he spoke his mind at a bad time, and his wife often had to step in and fix things, including one time rushing to Paris to browbeat Napoleon.

This book is more of a biography, using the memoirs as a basis but also bringing in a lot of other sources, so it’s rather objective, but apparently the actual memoir is available on Project Gutenberg, and I may have to read it. Someone needs to make a movie or miniseries about this lady. Basically, it really is Cat and Ned Stark in the French Revolution and Napoleonic era.

Not Avenging

This is the first day this week when I don’t have anywhere to go and have no appointments. I have plenty to do, but I don’t have to do it on a particular schedule. And it finally stopped raining (for a few days) — wouldn’t you know, on the day when I don’t have to drive anywhere after spending the week driving in the rain.

One thing I’m not doing is going to the Avengers movie or avoiding spoilers about it. It’s not that I’m boycotting or against it, or anything like that. This isn’t one of those smug “I’m too cool to be into this thing that everyone else is excited about” things, though I will confess to some superhero fatigue/resistance. I’m just so far behind on movies that there’s no way I could watch all the movies (I think I saw that there are something like 22) I’d need to see to build up to it. I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and I saw the first Captain America movie on TV when I was watching Agent Carter and wanted the backstory (and I really wish they’d done more in the WWII era before moving it to the present), and I’ve seen past Spider-Man movies, though not the ones that fit into the current storyline. But I’m clueless about all the rest of the stuff involved.

When these movies first started coming out (with Iron Man, I think?), I didn’t bother because I’ve never been a big comic book reader and was entirely unaware of the character. And from there it started mushrooming, but by then I was so far behind and didn’t have the background on most of this stuff to jump in. Now it’s taking over everything — my pastor even referred to the upcoming movie in his Easter sermon — and I feel so behind.

So, maybe when that Disney streaming service gets launched and it has all the Marvel movies, I can finally get caught up and see them all in story chronological order and I’ll get what everyone’s talking about. But with more than 20 movies, at my current rate of getting around to watching movies, it’ll take me half a year to get through them all, and that’s if that’s all I watch.

Meanwhile, I’m watching all my friends freaking out and getting excited and feeling rather out of it. Fortunately, I’ve absorbed enough info about all this from my friends that I actually understand my pastor’s sermons when he makes Avengers references.