Big Ed's Place

Recently, I attended a technical conference that I first attended 15 years ago. A lot of ghosts came flowing back, and not all of them were pleasant.

The first time I attended this conference, I happened to call the up-until-then-love-of-my-life, who I will call “Alicia” for simplicity. We’d broken up 2 years earlier, she’d move to Europe to pursue another romantic relationship, but that had ended badly and she was back at her parents’ house. That was about a 3 hour drive from the conference.

We had a very pleasant phone conversation and tried to figure out how we could meet in person. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out the logistics. It was clear then that we were both entertaining ideas of getting back together. Six months later when we did meet, though, the window for reconciliation had closed. Would we have gotten back together if we’d been able to meet that night? I sometimes think we would have, but of course there’s no way to know. It’s just my memory of the conversation and what life was like for both of us at the time.

So… why didn’t we get together if we both wanted to? Because the technology didn’t exist. We knew we’d have to meet in the middle in order for both of us to make our next-day obligations and we couldn’t figure out the logistics. Sure, there was a map that showed a town halfway between us, but we knew nothing about what was in that town that might be suitable, and we had no idea how we’d get in touch when we arrived.

Two problems that are completely irrelevant in the age of the internet and cell phones.

Today it’s yelp followed by mapquest and we’d have a place. Then cell phones to ensure we connected. No problem, no missed connection.

Now my life has turned out pretty well and I don’t begrudge the lost connection. I wouldn’t have met my wife, after all, and she’s a much better match for me than “Alicia” was. So I don’t have a lot of regrets about the lack of technology then, but it does make me wonder…

…and while there are obvious analogs in writing (certain stories could only exist in certain times or the available technology would render much of the plot moot), I’ve also started wondering how the technology changes affect our memories.

Ya see, memory is often more emotional than rational. We often have clearer memories about things that triggered strong emotions than those that were just intellectual. So what created those states?

I clearly remember the frustration of not knowing how to connect with “Alicia”. I remember how overwhelming it was when we finally quit trying. And I remember the angst when I realized later that the window for getting together had closed.

Similarly, I remember times in my youth of giddy nervousness, waiting for the phone to ring. I didn’t dare go out because I didn’t want to miss a specific call. I got cranky when my dad got on the line. Of course, answering machines and call waiting made those issues moot long before cell phones. Do kids have that anxiety today? And how does it color their romances?

Which calls into question some of my own memories. I remember all the drama of teen romance. How would the drama have been different if I’d had better technology? I don’t know. But I do suspect I’d remember those times quite differently.

I don’t have answers, of course. It’s just one more reminder of the fungibility of the human memory.

I’m an outline guy. I like to have an outline before I begin a story. If it’s a long or complex story, the outline is written down and sometimes fussed over quite a bit before I begin. That said, I recognize the trap of rigidly following an outline. Sometimes better ideas crop up. Sometimes the characters seize control of the story and drive it somewhere else. Sometimes the flaws in the outline aren’t apparent until well into the actual draft. The outline is, after all, nothing more than a map of where I want to go.

Which means suddenly I’m offroading and hoping my tires can handle the worst of the bumps.

I managed to do the detailed outlining for five more pages of Deep Dish, bringing me to 25 pages fully scripted and pages 26-48 with the detailed outline done. It’s not as quite as much as I’d like, but since I was on business travel with very little time to myself for most of the week, it’s not bad. But the outlining has ground to a halt with the offroading. I just don’t know where I want to go with pages 49 and 50.

I’m sure I’ll eventually figure it out, and I’m convinced that the pages I’ve just finished are better than my original path. But it’s certainly got me stumped for the moment.

Where was that highway again?

So my last post referred to two situations where the art form requires cardboard villains. But what about realistic villains? John Ringo makes an argument that it is perfectly fine for a realistic character to see themselves as a villain, in contradiction to my assertion that no one’s a villain in their own mind.

Ringo writes (here, in the comments):

The truth is that many people who choose to be in positions of conflict are, at some level, what most people would call ‘truly evil.’ They are infested by demons if you will. (Strong id if you prefer.) But they CHOOSE to manifest that side of themselves only when necessary. They keep it in a box and bring it out when they face others who don’t so choose, who revel in their own evil. It is their Killer, their Machine, their Stranger. (Billy Joel song.) Cops, military, what have you. They are ‘the rough men’ who keep us safe in our beds at night and many of the very best… are more like Mike than they care for.

Now I understand the ‘infested with demons’ part–I’ll come back to that in a moment. However, I don’t think that’s the same as id. Because id and self-awareness are incompatible in my view.

That’s partially because I interpret id as truly unconscious, like Freud’s original definition. It’s also because those folks I’ve encountered who are indulging their id really aren’t reflective about who they are or what label to apply to themselves.

Now admittedly, I don’t personally know many ‘villains’, but I have known a number of addicts, and addicts are near the top of the heap when it comes to id indulgence. Someone in the throes of an addiction rarely has any conscious thoughts beyond “how am I going to get my next fix?” It’s “I”, “I”, “I”, with little thought of those around them.

Which in many cases is a good definition of villainy–being so wrapped up in their own desires and wants that other people are either irrelevant or little more than pawns/obstacles to getting what they want. Many villains are outright sociopaths, and in fact one could define ‘villainy’ as such callous disregard for others as to truly be causing evil.

For example, a kid who tortures a cat is thinking about how much pleasure he’s getting, if he’s thinking at all. He’s not about the suffering of the cat, because that’s not relevant, or he’s created a justification for why it’s okay (“it’s just a cat.”). To most observers, that’s evil. But the kid doesn’t see himself as evil because he just doesn’t think about good or evil in that context. It’s pleasure for him, end of story, right?

So… from my perspective, if someone is indulging their id, they may be evil, but they’re not self-aware enough to think of themselves as evil. Instead, they’re in their own world where ‘heroism’ is getting their ‘needs’ met. They “win” if they succeed, and they’re miserable if they fail. It’s a solo video game in their mind where the rest of us just happen to be in a real rather than virtual world.

So what about ‘infested with demons?’ I think Ringo has a good point that many ‘heroes’, especially in literature or other art forms, walk the edge between heroism and villainy. This, I think, is a good thing for fiction as it enhances the art. The struggle to stay on the right side (or the right side most of the time) adds drama and realism to the story. I think most of us have struggled with doing the right thing and resisting temptations. For most of us, though, that’s a struggle against sloth, gluttony, or other of the subtle deadly sins rather than struggling to avoid mass killing or rape.

Furthermore, bringing that ‘dark side’ out by choice to stop others (as in Ringo’s example) is clearly a case where the character sees themselves as heroic and not as a villain. It’s bringing that ‘dark side’ out for purely selfish reasons that’s in question.

And for me, the question is less, “will he or won’t he give into the dark side?” but do they think of themselves as a villain if they do choose the dark side?

An addict may make an ‘evil’ choice to surrender to the addiction. Once they’re in the throes of it, though, they don’t think about it anymore. There may have been a passing moment of ‘I’ll be a villain if I do this’ but that is quickly submerged as the appetite takes over.

A more interesting question is what levels of rationalization will a person go through to convince themselves that a choice wasn’t evil? Or that on-going action isn’t? George Lucas tried to explore this for Anakin Skywalker, and I’m not happy with the job he did. But I do know of two real life examples that shed some light on such a descent–Albert Speer and John Dean.

Speer, Hitler’s architect, made the conscious decision to avoid learning about the concentration and death camps. If he could force himself to be ignorant, then he could maintain the facade that he was a good guy and not contributing to the evils of the Third Reich.

Dean, Nixon’s legal counsel, wrote an autobiography of his years in the Nixon White House and discussed how he got so caught up in the trappings of power and the wonderfulness of it, that he didn’t want to look closely at what was going on. He tells a story of being in a hotel room and hearing Nixon tell reporters that he (Dean) was looking into Watergate, when Dean knew he was doing no such thing. Dean’s reaction was, “he mentioned my name on TV!”

Now I happen to think the whole ‘seduction’ into thinking that way is great fiction fodder. But my point was, the perpetrators didn’t see themselves as evil. They’d constructed a worldview in which they were either separate from the evil or that what they were doing wasn’t evil.

Which is what brings me back to Ringo’s quote. I still assert that realistic characters (vs. melodrama or Mary Sue characters) don’t ‘revel in their evil’ and see themselves as villains. They may have given into their id and lost self-awareness. They may have defined ‘good’ in a new way that justifies their actions. But even sociopaths just see themselves as heroes in their own mental universe.

At best, there is a moment, on the cusp of the choice, where a realistic character or real person may realize that one choice may make them a ‘villain.’ But once that decision is made, I think the internal thoughts of villainy disappear and the person becomes a hero in their own minds once again.

Recently, I had a reader point me to an argument by a popular science fiction author that contradicts my “no one’s a villain in their own mind” philosophy. I’ll address that, but I realized there was a topic I needed to go through first, which was when fiction really does have true villains.

Because there’s a certain pleasure to simple villains. It’s entertainment without having to do a lot of thinking.

The best example I could think of was a theatre troupe I know that specializes in Melodrama. While the scripts and shows change, the basic format does not. They start each performance by introducing the characters to the audience and teaching the audience their queues. When the heroine comes out, everyone sighs. When the hero comes out, they cheer. When the villain comes out (always with a thick black mustache), they boo. It’s simple, it’s hokey, and they’ve been in business for over 25 years.

I myself have been a couple of times. It’s just fun to allow oneself to be swept away with something that is so transparently unreal. Yes, the characters are cardboard, but nobody cares.

The second case where it’s acceptable to have a villain who’s cardboard thin is in a Mary Sue story. I use this term in the sense of ‘the author creates a character that is essentially their avatar.” Usually these characters are amazingly perfect or good at what they do and that idealization means, of course, that those characters who oppose them also have to be idealized as evil.

Now, while such stories are often poorly written, they can be a lot of fun. They’re particularly enjoyable to that segment of the population which shares enough with the author to easily slip into their shoes and see the avatar as themselves. For example, “Nerd overcomes popular jock, wins hot girl.” Hey, I like those stories. The erotica equivalent is usually “nice guy finds some trick that allows him to accumulate a harem of hot babes who don’t mind him fucking all the other women in the harem.”

Again, pleasant simple entertainment without having to do a lot of thinking.

In these genres, the cardboard thin characters are part of the package. They can still be poorly or well written. Honestly, it also doesn’t take much to keep them from being too thin either. Take the harem novels–all the women don’t have to be incredibly busty blondes with hair trigger orgasmic capabilities. Mix it up a little!

Which is ultimately, I think, where the threshold is. If the story’s a cartoon, be it because it’s melodrama or Mary Sue, it’s okay to have pure villains. The problems come when either the characters are too flat for even a cartoon, or the story is intended to be more.

I’ll tackle the “more” case next week.

Well, the laptop went to work with me every day this week. I didn’t get as much chance to use it as I’d like, as a couple of the lunch periods became ‘eat and dash’ affairs to get enough in me to return to work.

That said, I think it’s working out. I managed to get four more pages scripted and four more outlined, which is certainly better than recent weeks. That means I’ve got the script done for pages 1-25 and the detailed outline for pages 26-43. Furthermore, by being 2/3 the way through the detailed outlining, I think I see how I can bring it in at 64 total pages. I’d still like to go even faster, but c’est la vie. I’m peddling as fast as I can these days.

I found an enjoyable set of blogposts by Dean Wesley Smith on “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.” The one that caught my attention most was on practice, and included the quote that headlines this post.

The premise of the post is that every story and every novel should be practice, preferably focused practice in which the author is trying to consciously get better at one aspect of writing. That doesn’t mean the works aren’t published along the way, because gawd knows that perfection is the enemy of good enough. It simply means that instead of doing writing exercises, one makes all writing an exercise.

I like the philosophy. A lot of that is because I don’t see the value of writing exercises for the sake of putting them in a drawer. If I’m going to ‘practice’ I should give it enough of a shot to have something I can put out to readers. At a minimum, that makes me take the practice seriously. More likely, it gets me feedback on how well I did (even if I didn’t solicit it).

But I was also hooked by the value of ‘focused practice.’ I’ve been spotty on that, sometimes being focused and sometimes not. A lot of my recent practice has been on maintaining a commitment to the ‘crappy first draft’ and not letting my internal editor get in the way of the first draft and sabotage the story’s flow. I’ve also deliberately aimed for length and deliberately tried to see if I could incorporate specific elements or techniques. The Devil in the Details, in my queue, is specifically there so I can practice writing erotica from a female point of view. Its predecessor, Dealing with the Devil was explicitly written to see if I could tackle morally ambiguous characters. And let’s not kid ourselves, Deep Dish is nothing more than jumping into the deep end of a new medium (graphic novels), which kind of goes beyond focused practice into focused trying-not-to-drown.

Unfortunately, the ‘nots’ have also showed, and I think those are the ones I struggle on the most. Like Unmasked. I pick it up and I find I’m wandering a bit too much. I’m not exactly sure what I’m practicing with that work. As a result, it’s harder to write and I question whether it will be as good.

Because, despite Dean Smith’s comments on another post about talent being just hard work and practice, I also think there’s an element of putting your soul into it. My better stories are more than purely intellectual affairs. I have to throw in something from the gut/heart/soul or it comes across flat. Now maybe other writers do this automatically, but my creativity really requires me getting my logical/language side of the brain out of the way. That’s the second hardest thing for me to do (finding meaningful time to write being number one).

Focused practice may be able to help with that. It’s throwing a bone (what I’m practicing) in front of that logical junkyard dog and letting the spirit sneak around the other side.

It’s something I will definitely keep in mind as I go forward.

So I tried my new approach this past week and took my laptop to use during my lunch writing periods. It went well, but I discovered a catch. One actually has to have a free lunch period. I had two working lunches and a third was cut so short it wasn’t even worth getting the laptop out of its case.

I managed a little bit of progress on Deep Dish. I scripted two more pages and did the detailed outline for two more, so I now have 1-19 and 23-24 scripted and 20-22 and 25-39 through the detailed outlining. It’s not much, but in two lunch periods, it was about all I could do. It was certainly a bit better than doing it longhand, though.

And unfortunately that catch of “available time” popped up in other places. What little evening time I had was spent on the ebook project (watch this space–ebook of The Ugly One coming sometime in the next couple of months) and working with Tzratzk on the art. I now have pages 1-3 from him, fully illustrated, and they look good. That’s the minimum for looking for publishers, so as soon as I get enough detailed outlining done to confirm my page length, I can start shopping it around.

Which brings that ‘catch’ back into play. I’ve got 25 more pages to do detailed outlining on. At 2 a week, that’s a couple of months, which is really much longer than I’d like. That also assumes the current pace.

Which is probably a bad assumption because work’s going to heat up again in September, and we’re going to start a major home renovation project (it’s needed and it’s time). So it looks like it’s going to be a constant battle for free time to work on my writing projects.

The solution is, of course, obvious. I just need to win the lottery. Of course, that would mean buying a ticket, which I haven’t done. I guess there’s always a catch.

This week I had the amusing experience of having one of my staff members at work talk about his attempts at writing fiction. He attempted the National Novel Writing Month a few years ago. He was also part of a support group that read and critiqued each others’ work and was apparently even based at our employer.

I had to really bite my tongue. Because I’m not ‘out of the closet’ about being an erotica author, particularly at work.

It’s hard sometimes. Writing can be a true passion at times, and I, and many erotica authors I know, have to bite our tongues and not admit what we do in our evenings and lunch hours. Heck, this past week I was scribbling away in a local restaurant and a different member of my team came in. I didn’t have my usual newspaper to use as a screen, so I found an excuse to leave before he could ask about my notebook. So I had a shortened lunch and writing period for the sake of maintaining some privacy.

But with my staff member, it was even harder. He was going on and on about how hard it was for him to write and how he struggled with plots and getting the words down. I could only nod my head. I just don’t know him well enough to tell him I write erotica and I’m not willing to let the chips fall where they may within my company. It’s just too conservative, with too many deeply Christian folks in upper management, for me to let my writing become company rumor.

But one of the things that makes writing less hard is having a community to commiserate with. My community is all online. Yes, there are a handful of people who know what I write in my daily life, but they’re not writers themselves and most don’t even bother to read my stories if I actually give them the url for this site. So to connect with someone in real life who does write and then have to be silent… it’s frustrating.

As a result, I’ve often thought I should publish a few mainstream stories, simply to have the cover. It’s easy to discuss writing without discussing what the actual project du jour is, particularly if I keep more than one going at a time.

The thing is–erotica is really where my interest and passion is. The gut pull is here and the obsessive gotta-get-it-out-of-my-head is here. Yes, there are some mainstream stories in my queue, but the erotica dominates. It’s what’s next.

And, unfortunately, that means not talking about writing. Perhaps some day I won’t have my livelihood depend on the opinions of those who don’t like my hobby. But until then…

…back in the closet.

Work eased up this week, which led to a spate of productivity, both in the office and at home. It’s amazing how much more one can get done if one has half the number of meetings. Similarly, one can do more at home if one comes home after 8 hours instead of 10. Yeah, these are ‘duh’ statements, but it’s nice to be able to make them nonetheless.

I also tried a new approach. On Friday, I had to have blood drawn after fasting, which meant having breakfast out and being late to work. So I decided to take my personal laptop with me and write over breakfast. I then did so again over lunch. Between the two, I got a lot more done than I would normally longhand.

Part of that is I spent my time working on the scripting rather than detailed outlining, which really requires the computer. I’m sure part of it is that I didn’t have to type up longhand notes. Nonetheless, the result is that I’ve now completed the script for Deep Dish pages 1-17 and 23-24. I’ve also finished detailed outlines of 18-22 and 25-37. Unfortunately, I’m still looking at 3 pages over the limit, even with some rearrangements and streamlining during the detailed outlining. I think those streamlines will carry into the next section, but I haven’t actually reworked the outline yet to be sure.

That said, it was awkward having my laptop at work. For one, I worried I’d damage it, and for two, it’s heavy. I also think if I’d brownbagged lunch, it might have been better, but I have to weigh the productivity (and reduced expense of lunch) against my psychological need to get out of the office for a break. Sometimes I just need to see something different than a computer screen too.

So–a new approach? Or a flash in the pan? I’ll have to see.

My wife and I recently celebrated our fifth anniversary. It’s definitely been a “whoa–where has the time gone?” phenomena for us–the days seem to have flown by. But it did give us a change to look back at our seven year relationship.

The thing that I wanted to write about here, though, was a comment that was made to me when I was considering proposing, that’s affected my writing. A good friend told me, “Pick a partner that helps you go further than you can on your own.” It’s turned out to be incredibly good advice

Now by “further” he meant “makes life richer and deeper” as well as “helps you go where you want to go.” Richer and deeper are difficult terms to define, but most people have a sense of them, particularly spiritual seekers. There are times, when one is truly living in the moment and truly present, that the words takes on a hue and a sense that is more than it does in those moments when we’re wrapped up in our heads and our ego-selves.

It’s a sense of awe simply at living.

And I’m blessed to get that with my wife.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent the other definition of “helps you go where you want to go” from being operative as well. The tricky part is, of course, knowing where you want to go. What may be today’s objective and pined-for goal may be discarded five years from now. That said, there are exceptions, like the desire to have children. But my personal experience is that those exceptions are few in number and generally obvious.

But I’ve found that that doesn’t necessarily matter. A partner who helps you and supports you no matter what direction you are going is a blessing. Many people say that about our kids–”I want them to be happy, no matter what they choose to do.” How many of us say that about our romantic partners?

In my case, my wife’s support has been instrumental in me getting so seriously into writing (were you wondering when I was going to bring it around to writing?). For a while, she was my editor, but it hasn’t been her active support that’s been important. It’s really the emotional support and the trust. She provides a solid base from which I can explore.

And I think that’s critical for writers of many stripes. We need people who believe in us. We may not be in a place where we have patrons who support us, like days of old. But I think most authors have hit a point where they’ve thought, “what the heck am I doing?” Those moments are much easier to get through if we know that someone, somewhere, has our back.

We go further then, in what we can get done. With the right partner, we also go deeper, which can manifest in our writing. At least for me, it’s made a huge difference to be married to such a woman.