Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Obama 2008!

I am profoundly moved by the results of the election last night. When I was watching Obama's acceptance speech I was in tears.

It is amazing that such radical changes have occurred in our lifetime. One of the announcers on the BBC coverage last night mentioned that Robert Kennedy predicted 40 years ago that a black man could become president within 40 years. It seemed impossible then, but it's happened.

I have been reading Obama's biography on Wikipedia, and also that of his wife and his mother. What an amazing family and an amazing story! Reading about his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, almost had me in tears again. She was a feminist, an activist, earned a PhD, worked to help the impoverished, and died of cancer at the age of 51. An amazing woman. It is very sad that she did not live to see her son's political career. It's very sad that his grandmother died before the election too.

My cousin Terry said she has confidence that "his advisers will be the best caliber." He's a very intelligent man who appears to exhibit remarkably sound judgment; I, too, have confidence he will choose well.

I have great hopes for the coming years, but I also recognize that this country is like a giant ship and it is not possible to make it change course rapidly. And we can't forget the turmoil in other parts of the world, some of which occurred at the hands of our current administration, and which will not be easily quelled.

Obama has a daunting array of challenges ahead, as does the entire country. But last night was a brilliant start.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Amos and his shifter kart

Just posted a video of my nephew Amos racing his shifter kart at Rocky Ridge near Barre, VT. And winning.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The weaker sister

In recent years health problems have devastated my life and forced me to stop doing the things I most passionately love. First flying, then racing were lost to me. My beautiful home is gone, my beloved airplane lies in pieces, my Cobra sits silent in a lonely storage unit, likely never to have my hand on its wheel again.

As my life disintegrated, a new pursuit emerged: writing. Writing is less susceptible to the health problems that have plagued me. As long as I can sit up and move my fingers, as long as I can think clearly, I can still write. Even if I lose my computers again, as long as I have adequate offsite backups I should be able to recover the fruits of my labors.

Still, I've always regarded writing as a pale substitute for the real thing. The weaker sister. I would never have chosen to sit around writing about racing if I could be doing the real thing instead.

So I guess you could say that if it weren't for the illness, I'd never have started writing my novel. Slaving away over a hot computer for hours, only to produce a few flat colorless pages of prose? Give me a drive in a real race car on a real race track any day.

And every hour you spend on the track requires many hours of preparation of your equipment. When I was involved with racing - and before that, flying - there just wasn't time or energy left over for writing.

This feeling has persisted since I had to stop racing and flying. I never stopped longing to be back on the track, seeking the elusive limits of adhesion; back in the air, upside down, pulling G's.

The writing was just a way to experience vicariously what I'd formerly been able to do in real life. Pale and lifeless by contrast, it was the best I could do.

But recently that perspective changed. A few days ago I had something of an epiphany about the writing process.

I've begun to get an inkling of the power of words and the satisfaction which can be had from engaging in the process of forging them together. I've started to believe that performing a writing task well could actually be as exciting and rewarding as hurling a car through Turn 2 at Mosport or Turn 10 at Watkins Glen.

Granted, the experience of crafting a glowing chapter isn't as dynamic as what happens behind the wheel. There isn't the sensory overload, nor is there the elation of cavorting on the edge, peering for a moment into the abyss of physical disaster and then dancing away, eluding the jaws of the demon one more time.

But there is something else. With words you can do things you simply can't do any other way. You can entertain, yes. You can inform. You can appeal, seduce, cajole.

But you can go deeper. You can peel back the facade, the veneer of civilization we all wear, and reveal essential aspects of the human psyche. Fundamental truths which might otherwise remain hidden.

And to do this well, to explore the deepest darkest most hidden corners of the human psyche, you have to plumb your own.

The risks are high; I believe that to write convincingly about the evil men can do, you must explore your own potential. Dig in the muck of your own psyche. Channel the deepest currents of sorrow. Ride tsunamis of howling rage, taste the level of fury that drives the most savage acts.

To reveal the truth through fiction, you must put yourself inside the character, live her every thought and emotion. You must become the hero, become the villain.

And when you do, there is no place to hide. They say if you can dream it, you can do it. Is this true? Murder? Or worse?

To write fiction well is to know yourself. And this may be very dangerous.

This is the power of words.

Writing well is, among other things, a craft. No matter what level of talent you're blessed with, you can improve. With practice, with instruction, with guidance.

With a lot of hard work.

Honing your craft, I've discovered, can be a real thrill.

Drowning your kittens

Ever since I can remember I've had a fear of revising my own writing. I can't seem to rid my mind of the image of the artist who keeps working and working until the painting is ruined.

While I've been working on my novel I've been apprehensive about the revision process that lay in wait for me at the end of the first draft. Lately I've avoided confronting this by focusing on completing the last few chapters.

The other day my excellent avoidance strategy broke down. I was trying to resolve a compatibility issue between MS Word and Open Office Writer that had arisen when I replaced a dead computer. During this process I was opening, saving, and closing various documents.

I found myself rereading a chapter of my novel I had not yet incorporated into the main manuscript. Hmm, I thought. Let me just fix this sentence here. Soon a few minor revisions escalated into a major rewrite of the chapter.

Gee, this revision stuff didn't seem so bad after all. I was pretty happy with this new piece. I decided to incorporate the newly rewritten chapter into the manuscript.

One thing led to another. By the the wee hours of the next morning I'd rewritten the book's prologue and the first two chapters, revised several others, written a whole new one, and composed the first draft of the cover flap notes.

As a result of this experience I've gained a new appreciation of how I've grown as a writer. After three years of reviewing others' work and having my own work reviewed in Joni Cole's workshops, I understand a lot about the process of refining a piece of writing that I didn't know before.

Under Joni's guidance I've learned about getting rid of all sorts of flab, like adverbs, introductory clauses ("As she slid around the corner she..."), and words like "then", "it", "things" and "there are" which weaken the text.

I've learned to make actions more direct ("the phone rang" rather than "she heard the phone ring") and to cut excessive stage direction ("she glanced at her", "she picked up the glass and said").

I've realized you have to "drown your kittens". You look for words that seem out of place or the turn of phrase that doesn't quite fit, bits which stand out, perhaps because they're a bit too vivid, a little too clever.

These are often the parts to which we're most attached, which is why cutting them out is a little like drowning kittens.

Editing my own work was a revelation. I discovered I didn't have to be afraid of destroying its freshness and vitality during the revision process. Instead, the essence of a good scene would be brought into sharper relief as I pruned.

This was an exciting moment. It was as if previously I'd been flailing in the dark; now the light had come on and made plain the sharpness of the instruments I was wielding: the power of words to not just entertain but to reveal and illuminate fundamental aspects of the human psyche.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Judging your own writing

Recently another writer read part of the novel I'm working on. Afterward she wrote me to say:

OK - here's the trouble with reading your stuff. After I read I don't want to write because my stuff seems one dimensional, shallow, ill-crafted. OK, enough of my pity pot!!! I'll go write some trash...

Here was my response:

Thank you! That is such a compliment.

However, you are not the only one to have that reaction. I often feel the same way when I'm reading or listening to other peoples' writing, including yours. My own stuff seems shallow and one-dimensional by comparison.

I think it's because we know what was behind our own writing, so it's actually more difficult to fill in the blanks and flesh out the characters in our imagination beyond what's on the page. We know damn well we made the whole thing up.

Whereas when reading other peoples' writing, we automatically imagine what the characters are like, what's behind their thoughts, dialog and actions, etc. We're conditioned to do that. It's easier to fill in the blanks, because the images, characters and other triggers didn't come from our own imaginations in the first place, so there's more room to add dimension.

It may also have to do with self-belief. I think it's natural to feel that somebody else must know what they are doing when they create art, whereas we know what we've gone through to create our own, and we know how tenuous it all is, or was, when we started.

But I think as time goes on, that phenomenon may diminish. For me it's less pronounced than it was. I think I've gotten enough positive feedback that I've begun to believe in my own writing. So I'm sometimes able to hear it through other peoples' ears, especailly when I'm reading aloud in a workshop.

Also, I've written so much now, over 100,000 words on the novel alone, that I don't remember everything any more. So sometimes when I'm reading something I wrote a while ago, it seems fresh, almost as if I hadn't written it myself.

In fact, that brings to mind something a wise programmer once told me when I was starting out: after two months, it may as well have been written by someone else. He was talking about programming - and the importance of writing clear and readable code, and commenting it appropriately so the next person to work on it (which might be you) will be able to understand it.

But I think this principle may apply to writing fiction (or nonfiction) too. After you've written enough, you just can't remember it all. So it becomes somewhat easier to read it objectively.

Anyway, thanks again for the compliment. Don't get discouraged; keep on writing! And don't worry. It won't be trash.

Monday, March 3, 2008

An online lending library?

My friend "Raoul Duke" recently sent me this article, which makes an interesting distinction between review and criticism.

Reading this article sparked an idea: why not an online lending library?

When the author of the article mentioned that "Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is still considered an examplar of literary criticism," I felt a stirring of desire to read at least part of that book.

However, it's about $20 with shipping from Amazon (currently published as an addendum to The Last of the Mohicans). I don't want to read it that much. So I probably won't.

I often have this urge. I read about a book, want to read it, but it's not available at my local library and I can't justify spending upwards of $25 for it, since I know I'll only read it once.

So why not an online lending library? Call it NetBoox, say, or maybe OnLibe. You pay a monthly subscription fee, which allows you to "check out", say, three books at a time.

But instead of going to the library and bringing the hard copies home, or having them mailed to you, as a few libraries do, you download an encrypted PDF to your computer, read it, and then "send it back", which deletes your key to that PDF, rendering it useless unless you check it out again.

This addresses one of my pet peeves with the sale of electronic media, such as books and music. The publishers think they can get away with selling the electronic version of an item for the same price they sell the hard copy for, while their own costs for electronic distribution are actually far less than for the production and distribution of a physical copy.

So of course nobody buys the electronic version; if that's what they want, they download it for free via Kazaa/LimeWire/BitTorrent instead.

If, by contrast, the publishers passed on a substantial portion of the savings of publishing electronically to the consumer, they'd make a lot more money, because a lot more people would be inclined to buy the electronic version at a fair price rather than pirating it.

What about Amazon's Kindle? It's interesting. But you have to buy the $400 Kindle and then you have to buy each book as well.

I'd prefer the option of just renting the books I want to read. I don't need to keep every book I read lying around on an SD card somewhere.

That's why I get so many books from the library. I can't understand buying a zillion books that I am almost certainly only ever going to read once. Ditto with movies, which is why I like NetFlix so much.

Of course, my multiple chemical disasters, which have cost me hundreds of books as well as thousands of dollars' worth of other personal property, have influenced my perspective on this point, but I think it's still valid. Some people like to have shelves full of books to impress visitors. Others are more interested in just reading them.

Obviously, the royalties to the author (along with the publisher's cut) for each rental would be less than the royalties they'd get for a sale. But there'd almost certainly be a lot more rentals than sales lost as a result of the availability of rentals.

Are Blockbuster and and NetFlix hurting attendance at first-run movie theatres? Possibly. Are the movie studios unhappy about them - and the revenues they generate for the studios through rentals? I don't think so.

And, unlike checkouts from a local free library, which earn the author nothing beyond the initial sale of the book to the library, each e-book rental would pay the author something.

It seems to me that the publishers are missing a big opportunity here. As it stands, the publisher of the Fenimore Cooper/Twain book won't get anything from me.

But if I could rent the book from an online online library whose membership cost me a monthly fee on the order of my NetFlix subscription, they'd get a few pennies. Add this up over thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of readers, and they'd have a useful revenue source.

Books seem ideally suited to a rental scheme like this, because, unlike movies, they are small and can be downloaded quickly, and unlike songs, you usually don't want to read them over and over.

So why hasn't it happened?

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Blind-sided by my own novel

I've been working on a novel for several years now. I've been assisted greatly in this by Joni Cole and her workshops, and by a writing group which sprung out of them called the 100 Page Club.

**** Warning!! Spoilers ahead! ****

If you think you may want to read the novel, if and when it eventually appears in print, and you want all the surprises in it to remain surprises, then you might want to stop right here.

On the other hand, if you're a reckless adventurer like me, read on...

Brief synopsis

The novel is an adventure story, a psychological mystery, and a romance: it's about two women, Kate and Rachel, who meet as teenagers, become friends, and develop an interest in racing.

They begin racing karts at a local dirt track, where Rachel demonstrates a precocious talent for driving and Kate begins to develop budding race engineering skills. But there's a sinister undercurrent, and at the end of the summer, one of the girls kills her father.

The story resumes when, as adults and professional race drivers, they step up to the top level of open-wheel racing. A catastrophic crash alters the course of their lives, and ultimately the reasons behind the murder are revealed.

So how did I get blind-sided?

Last fall while I was working on the novel, my friend Steve Cahill challenged me to write "the difficult parts" of the story. I'd already written a lot of racing scenes - which had gotten very good responses from other workshop participants - and I kept writing more and more of them.

But Steve said he thought that I kept writing the racing stuff because I was avoiding the more challenging emotional stuff - the back story, the reasons for the murder, etc.

I thought he was completely full of it. I'd have no trouble writing that stuff, right? It was just more dialog, lots of talking and maybe a little crying here and there. A dash of hand-wringing now and then. No sweat!

So I did it. And boy, was I wrong.

Well, at least partly. It wasn't really very hard to write the stuff; in fact, it was kind of fun, much like writing the other parts of the story had been.

It was what happened afterwards that was tough to deal with. I started having all kinds of emotional reactions to what I'd written. Feeling guilty, creepy, skeezy. How could I dream up such filthy, revolting stuff?

All the times I'd felt abused and betrayed started coming up, over and over, making it difficult to sleep.

I'd finally get to sleep and when I'd wake up, all the things I've done that I regret would come marching through my brain. Agonizing.

Crawling out of the muck

I was lucky. Feedback from other writers and Joni's writing workshops helped me work through it.

First I discovered I was not alone in having this kind of experience. A writer friend told me that he'd given up writing fiction because he found that it revealed things about himself that he didn't want other people to know. He said he said he'd decided to stick to non-fiction as a result.

He also said that he knew several other writers who had had similar experiences. Some had worked through it and kept writing fiction; others had not, and had gone back to writing non-fiction.

Shortly after that, in one of Joni's workshops I got some positive reviews for some of what I'd written, and realized that the writing had accomplished my original objectives: I'd created a very strong and understandable motive for the murder, one which put the murderer - Rachel, my central character - in a positive light, despite the fact that she'd offed her daddy in cold blood, while looking him straight in the eye.

Also, several people in the workshop suggested some books and movies which dealt with similar topics and themes. I watched a couple movies and read some books and realized that, in the grand scheme of things, my story wasn't so horrible after all.

Well, okay; it was horrible. Really horrible. Nightmarish, even.

But there were other stories out there that were just as horrible, and nobody seemed to think their authors/screenwriters/directors were satanic.

Almost nobody, anyway.

Suddenly, she chuckled, and then...*

In one of her workshops, Joni pointed out that it's always good to write outside the novel, so eventually I broke down and did something I'd been resisting: I wrote about the murder and the events leading up to it from the villain's point of view.

I'd been resisting this, because I didn't want to give voice to this creepy scoundrel. But the problem is that I seem to inhabit all of my major characters; when I'm writing about Kate, I become Kate. When I'm writing about Rachel, I become Rachel.

And in order to understand how he could have gotten to the point where he did what he did, I had to inhabit the villain, at least for a little while. I'd actually done this already; I just didn't want to give this character a voice.

When I finally did so, it turned out to be cathartic. Not only was this character's story great fun to write, but getting it out of me completely purged me of all the negative emotions I'd been having.

In the process, it revealed this character's, ah, character: his abuse at the hands of his
own father, his intelligence, his religious devotion, his good intentions, his love for his late wife - and his rage, his self-deception, his rationalizing, his denial, his lies, all of which allowed him to brutally abuse his own daughter.

Hah!

In the end it was a great experience.

But it sure was harrowing for a while!

----
* "Suddenly, she chuckled, and then..." is an inside joke, known only to the participants of Joni's workshops. If you want to be able to get the joke, you'll have to do one of her workshops, at The Writer's Center in White River Junction, VT.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Online backups

I'm a writer, and I recently was part of a conversation about backing up your writing files. We all agreed that we are scrupulously careful about backing up our important stuff frequently to either an external USB drive, a flash drive, or CD's or DVD's.

(And if you believe that one, I've got some seaside property in Nebraska that might interest you.)

Anyway, we all pondered what might happen in the event of a fire or flood. One person knew someone who had lost an entire book in a house fire.

((shudder))

This conversation resonated with me, because I'd recently been thinking that I should do something to guard against this very type of disaster. Or some burglar breaking in and taking all my computer equipment. (Don't laugh; it could happen.)

So I did some digging, and I found two services (recommended by major magazines) which will allow you to back up all you want for five bucks a month. One of them will also let you back up 2 GB for free.

Here they are:

https://mozy.com/?ref=B2AD6G - free 2 GB; $4.95/month for unlimited space (see note below)
http://carbonite.com - free 2 week trial; $50/year for unlimited space

Mozy supports both Windows and Macs; Carbonite only supports Windows right now, but say they'll be adding Mac support in 2008.

Both encrypt your data before shipping it across the Internet and encrypt it again once it's reached their servers. So your data should be pretty secure.

2 GB is a lot of space; if you can fill that up with your writing, you're incredibly prolific.

You do have to have a broadband internet connection, and you'll have to download a small program and tell it what you want to back up.

Also, if you have a lot of stuff to back up, it will take a while for the initial backup, during which time your computer will be fairly busy and your internet upload bandwidth will also be in use.

But after that the backups of any new or changed files happen automatically in the background, while your computer is idle, and should be pretty much invisible.

Also, this isn't just to protect against a fire or flood. Both services do incremental backups. This means you can restore the latest version, or you can choose from earlier copies of your documents. I think they save the old copies for at least a month.

This means if you make a major mistake while editing and inadvertently wipe out your entire first 15 chapters, you can go back to an earlier version by just restoring it from the backup service.

I'm using Mozy, and I like it a lot. The program is well laid out and logically designed, and pretty easy to use and specify what folders to back up, and which ones to not bother.

It allows me to dial in how much of the computer's CPU capacity it will use while it's encrypting files to upload, so during the initial backup I was able to let it go ahead and work in the background while I was working.

It also lets me specify how much of my upload bandwidth it will use while backing up, which lets me avoid complaints from my housemate about how I'm hogging all the bandwidth while she's trying to get her email, dammit.

Here are some links to reviews of these two services:

Mozy (see the section on Mozy Home):
PC World Business Center

Carbonite:
PC World Geek Tech

It will take you a few minutes to download the software and set it up, and you'll have to be patient while it does the initial backup. (I have a fairly slow DSL connection with upload speed of about 220 kilobits per second, and it took Mozy about a day to back up 1.5 GB.)

But it could save your butt, in which case it would be worth way more than the time you spend setting it up.

Note: If you sign up for Mozy, please use this link: https://mozy.com/?ref=B2AD6G or enter my referral code - B2AD6G - or my email address - alison@hine.net - during the registration process. This will result in both you and I being given an additional 250 MB of storage space for free.