Motivations

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a character good.  What really makes the character latch onto the reader's mind and burrow in and drives the person to read on.  For some markets and age groups, just a simple desire and the drive to obtain and fulfill that desire might be enough.  It's not enough for me.  I want to understand the character.  I want to know where he or she is coming from.  What drives them to get out of bed in the morning and put on their crime fighting shoes, or their evil villain cape (and no, just looking good in a cape doesn't work).

That's what I'm going to be working on before I rewrite the first draft for the increasingly muddled novel of pieces and sorts that I sort of completed for NaNoWriMo.  It's a complete mess.  The first 60 pages makes some sort of sense, but I worry that it's just too slow thematically.  And I'm struggling to find the right voice for the female lead still.  So it needs work, but that's not what I wanted to ramble about today.

What is it that makes our heroes and villains get up in the morning?  Villains, I'm finding, are easier to deal with. It's a sinister desire.  They have a want for control, for accumulation of both money and power.  They may want fame with that power.  That I can understand and potentially write about.  It's the less ominous and more subtle motivations of the heroes that I'm still working on.

For instance.  What motivation could a wizard private investigator have to save people he hardly knows?  There's the standard, "it's just doing what is right" nonsense, but I don't buy it.  There must be a reason for it.  Even for the police officer type characters; if I want them to have any depth, I need to give them a reason for upholding the law?  Questions I'm asking myself are almost self-searching.  Why does a person uphold a law?  Is it a sense of duty or honor to a meta-morality?  Is it self guided or selfish?  Even then, I'm having issues buying it.  In my world, there is nothing that is 'just because that's the way it is'.  The world I'm trying to portray is not black and white, it's grey, and that's my hurdle.

Invested - Part 4 of Fate Adjuster

I apparently forgot to post part 4 of my short to post last week.  I'm trying to bury myself in the NaNo project and it's getting to my head.  Oh well, I'll get it done and then the rest of this will go up as well.
Rest of it's after the break.

Mourning - Part 3 of Fate Adjuster

Part three of Fate Adjuster is below the break.  It's a bit short, but it's the full section.  I'm adding the sections around the same time as I post them to additional pages on the side bar.  Take a look there if you want to see it all in one place.


NaNoWriMo is off to a good start on my end.  I hope it's going well for everyone else as well.  Over target by a fair amount for 2 of 3 days.  2k a day is the mantra, but I'm shooting for 2.5k a day.  Sometimes I question my sanity.  Part 4 of Fate Adjuster up next week.

The Rabbit Hole - Part 2 of Fate Adjuster

Right, so part 2 on this short story thing.  I've decided to not try to sell this yet, so instead I'm just going to post it so that people can still read it.  Again, I haven't done much revision yet, so hopefully my quick grammar/spell check will have been enough.  I'm going to start posting these by working section titles.  I'll come back next week with Part 3.  Read on after the break for the section.

The Deal - Part 1 of Fate Adjuster.

I'm currently writing a short story and wanted to let people know about it.  It's mostly so that I can sort out just exactly the character that will be central to my NaNoWriMo book for next month.  So here it is, unedited and completely raw.  Find it after the break.


-Edit-  I've decided to post the rest part by part.  I'll make an index et cetera once it's completed.

Green-thinking masked bandits

So I have raccoon that are frequenting the tree outside my bathroom window.  It had previously been only a single one with a long slender noise, beady eyes and a desire to massacre the local bug population.  I don't blame it at all.  Or, her rather.  For she seems to have given birth this last spring and has a little one still tagging along.  Two nights ago there were supposedly two little tag-alongs, but I didn't see them.  For certain there is one that mom is still dragging around with her.

I probably would have missed them entirely had they not made a ruckus and roused the local canine population (my dogs), who proceeded to bark back at the screeching.  Anyway, mom and kid (kit?) hung out and climbed the tree for a while before running off to wherever they make their bed.  I'm just happy they don't use our yard for their latrine.  I've not smelled it, but by all accounts it can be rather obnoxious to the olfactory sense.  I think I'll keep to watching through the window for the time being.  I suppose for some people this isn't really that odd of a story.  Having local wildlife running through their yard and making a tiff.  I'm much more used to the local coed population making noise pollution in the early hours of the morning after the bars close though.  For I live in the city, and not anywhere near the country regions.

It made me think though about adaptation.  The natural habitat for raccoon is not exactly the backyards in the middle of a city.  Maybe if a city contains a very large park they could find some solace there, but I'm not used to sharing the concrete jungle (aside from suburbanites that like to create traffic 'situations').  At least not sharing it with other species (see previous parenthetical).

Indeed I've been thinking quite a bit lately on how we use the space we have.  Most of us don't share it very well.  Sure, may have little gardens in the backyard, but even just on a cursory look through my neighborhood on walks with the dogs there are very few gardens in backyards that we can see when walking down the alleys.  It may be poor statistical methodology, but I would imagine we as a society don't do much more gardening than mowing the lawn.

Photo By: Robert Goodwin

This is saddening.  I know with a clock-time society and the increasing disparity in wage structures that many people just don't have the time to commit to gardening, even at a base level.  But just think about how many vegetables could be grown, how much we could offset our own carbon emissions by just growing squash in a patch in the yard.  Or maybe something that takes up less space.  How about a 16 square foot potato garden (just a 4x4 square).  Over the summer you can build it vertically and have enough potatoes to make a lot of potato salad.  Or maybe some cucumbers and then make pickles.  Or some self-contained watering tomato plants.  I mean really, there is a lot of innovation of the square foot gardening variety and even a cursory search can give you days and days of reading material.

It's something I would like to try, and hopefully I can convince the association that the sunny part of the backyard could use a good dig up and garden transition.  Not for this year, but perhaps for next.  Until then I have to figure out what to put in the planters on my porch.  I wonder if 2 months is long enough to grow anything with shortening days of sun.  Probably not, but I'm not done searching yet and let's hope the squirrels keep out of the pots if I do.  The masked bandits I might consider sharing with yet.

Disconnectedness

Space.  I'm not particularly always pleased with the location in space I find myself.  It's far too hot for my liking, way too much humidity, and not nearly enough good snow in the winter.  It's on these occasions I find it more palatable to remove my consciousness from this spatial location and imagine the pleasant immediate surroundings to be located spatially elsewhere.

It's not that everything in my immediate vicinity causes an angst-ridden existence, but there is certainly enough to cause daily discomfort and dissatisfaction.  The suburban feel of the urban is enough to drive me mental on most days.  And if I were to try walking more than a couple blocks in any but a handful of very specific directions I would find myself surrounded by the idealization of the American dream.  Or at least the one from the 1950s.

For those who know me well, you by now surely know that I don't particularly buy into that dream.  There is no white picket fence for which to house the small nuclear family with 2.1 replacement fertility children and a lovable guard/family dog to play inside that fenced in yard.  This isn't me saying that the dream itself is ridiculous, realistically without it we would be decreasing in population and that isn't particularly a good direction to move.

What I am saying is that I can't stand it.  There's far too much compromise in the faces that I see.  Far too much sadness and dissatisfaction with the world.  Or maybe it's the face of an absent mind.  The question for me is, can happiness actually be obtained in the world of compromised ideas?  In a world where the media directs us to what to think and believe?  If so, why do we make believe so very much?  There seems to be a very basic logic problem.  Either I can believe that zombies are real and were invading my neighborhood the other night, or I can suspend my sense and state of being and participate in the illusion that zombies are real and are walking the street.

This question seems to boil down to a very specific point for me.  Can we suspend our 'self' from our 'Self' often and long enough to navigate the world around us?  The lowercase 'self' in this case is being used to define the person that we show to the world around us.  The thoughts, ideas, feelings, and opinions that we choose to share with the social world around us.  The uppercase 'Self' is the person that we truly are when we introspectively understand our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and opinions.  It's not the person that we share, but it's who we really are.

If we suspend the two from each other and create a large enough disconnect between them, are we just lying to ourselves or to each other?  In the same way, who am I lying to when I imagine the space around me to be located elsewhere?  Myself or everyone else?

Hallway Photo:  jeffk  Zombie Photo: Lousiville Zombie Walk

Lights in the dark

This isn't some ominous post, and I'm not talking about anything high fantasy.  There is no ring and no short hairy-footed hobbits that need to toss it in a giant volcano.  No, this is far less world changing in sorts.

The electricity went out in my neighborhood and city yesterday.  It wasn't until 20 hours later that the power and lights came back on.  We weren't particularly prepared for the eventuality of losing power for an extended period of time and had only a single candle in the house.  No batteries for the old flashlights to speak of.  Just a single candle found as the last rays of sunlight were illuminating the dark streets.

It was the first time in my adult life I'd been without electricity for an extended period of time.  Sure, I've had the power go off for a few minutes at a time, but never before 20 hours.  I can think of once or twice I've gone without power because I was camping, but that's an intentional choice to be without and care is taken in planning for it.

It got me to thinking about electricity and the roll it plays in our lives.  It cools us.  It warms us.  It cooks our food often enough.  It's there with us from the moment we wake up to an alarm clock to the moment we fall asleep to the timer on the radio.  We spend so much time using and being with electricity that it's the silent partner to our daily routines.  Most people have a cellphone, or a digital phone.  Rotary phones are few and far between these days.

It reminds me of the robots in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (Penguin Classics).  Only instead of us fighting the robots.  We have become part robot - or cyborgs.  It's not that we've put computer chips into our bodies, or we run partially on electricity, but rather how we operate and move through life.  We have lights in all our rooms for illumination.  We have computers, televisions, satellites, cellphones, and DVD players.  All of these things have become part of what makes us who we are.  Do we fight these inclinations as the humans fight the robots?  We certainly do, but at the same time we also embrace the advancements that make our lives easier and more filled.

Social networking for the younger generations is an ever increasing part of this cyborgization.  So without electricity for even 20 hours, the pain is easily felt.  And I still had my smartphone to get me through the hours.  Next time I'll at least have more than one candle.

Absolute Space and Perception

Isaac Newton had this theory about space and it's absoluteness.  He thought that space was basically a giant grid. And objects could be seen to be moving by their change of coordinates basically.  It's really not that bad of an idea.  Granted, he was eventually shown to be incorrect and now we even know that space itself is moving-sort of.  Expanding would be a better word for it.

That concept just blows my mind.  How can space, the areas of life that we perceive as empty, be expanding.  Scientifically I have fewer issues understanding the concept.  The emptiness isn't really empty.  On earth it's full of air which is more of a fluid than anything else (next time someone complains that they can't swim remind them that they're constantly swimming in air and watch for the slow reaction of realization).  Outside earth space is still filled-sparsely-with molecules, elements and who knows really what else, dark matter maybe.  Aside from the obvious issues with scientists not coming up with interesting names ('dark' matter?  really?), I tend to run into a conceptual issue with the word 'space'.

For English speakers and likely most of those of Western Europeans ideological descent space is the absence of everything else.  At least that's the first reaction typically.  It's what is out past that big blue sky.  The eternity of nothingness.  At least that's what we can perceive with the naked eye.  No optical or radio telescopes to assist.  Not even a sextant to guide us like Brahe and Havelius in their recordings.  How do we understand our universe then?

Perspective.

The numbers of writing

I'm writing a book.  I'm not trying to make it a very long book, nor is it non-fiction and requiring an abundance of facts and figures collected from outside sources.  It's purely fiction (as pure as fiction can be while rooted in reality).  And it's still not easy to do.  I have a good idea of where I want to be going with the book, but it's more an exercise in trying to actually write everyday and to a high number of words.

If you figure at only 350 words a page for a 200 page book it's 70000 words.  It seems like a lot, and depending on how well I'm writing on any given day I might be able to produce 1000 words.  Those are still the good days.  I'm hoping for closer to 2000 words a day.  I figure if I can average about 750 words a day over the course of a week if I'm doing well and actually able to write in the direction I want the story to go.

So with those numbers and assuming I actually average 750 words a day it will take me 93 1/3 days to write the book.  Or, at 5 days a week 18 2/3 weeks.  About four and a half months or so.  This isn't really fast enough to suit my liking as it's becoming more and more difficult to continue with the book I'm trying to write.

It's one of the reasons I've started writing here as well.  I wondered if perhaps my mind was starting to get one dimensional in my writing and I needed to add another facet to my writing to both pursue the other random thoughts bumbling around my mind like the people leaving a bar after last call.  In less metaphorical words, randomly with no discernible rationality to them.

That's my question then for today.  Is it possible for a person to become too lost in one idea or thought that even it starts to suffer in it's isolation?  And does anyone have any tips on how to write more productively?

Cooking chores

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking.  It's coming up with what to make that's the chore.  I even usually enjoy the time I spend at the grocers picking out produce and meats and mostly people watching.  There's never an end to the interesting people you can see at the store.

It's interesting to me to think about all the people in the chain of food process.  First we start with the farmers.  Ideally, it would be nice to get produce and meats directly from them, but that's not always an easy thing to do.  Sure I could buy a cattle and have it butchered, but without a big chest freezer that's impractical and I don't exactly have such a large chunk of change to spend.  Produce is easier if there's a farmer's market in the neighborhood, but even that is once a week and can be a little impractical in timing.

The next step-one that I wish was easier to come by-is the butcher and green grocer.  I'm not talking about a butcher in a grocery store or the produce section of the store, but rather a store that buys the meats and produce much closer to the source and locally.  Fresher product is a fresher dinner.  That and you can at least be sure that the money you're spending is at least taking another round in your local economy before getting shipped off to Arkansas.  There are other social benefits to this.  Getting to know the butcher and green grocer you'll start to know what's freshest, what the nicest cuts are, the freshest fruits and veggies.  You'll also get to participate in community building.  You may not meet the farmers, but you may know the guy who does.

Maybe it's just something that I like, but knowing who and where my food comes from is nice.  I'm not a huge fan of large corporations even while I use them for goods and services.  I think I'd need to be an actually economist to know whether or not there is a net negative impact.  It's part of society though, so I may take a more thought out go at it eventually, but not today.  Today I get to keep paging through cookbooks trying to figure out what to make this week.  And until there's a better solution I'll at least buy my groceries at my locally owned grocers.  They have the best produce in the area anyway.