Hello World

Well, I guess I am a rather interesting man — refined, intelligent.  But that stomach, that stomach!  (Baron Cefalù)

You never know what caprice will keep you away from a movie, and what whim will draw you in.  Even during the last few years, when I’ve finally gotten around to educating myself on the remarkably rich history of Italian cinema, I’ve kept Divorce, Italian Style at arm’s length, thanks to a truly unfortunate title which, while essentially accurate, conjured up unpleasant memories of a specific type of insipid TV comedy in the 1970s.  And what finally convinced me to give it a try wasn’t its good reputation, or the recommendation of any number of film-nerd friends with excellent taste who assured me it would be worth my while; it was the fact that when the Criterion Collection released a fancy new edition of the film, the box design was by Jaime Hernandez, a brilliant illustrator and one of my favorite comics artists of all time.  It would pretty depressing to figure out how frequently we cheat ourselves out of pleasure for just such arbitrary reasons.

Anyway, to the matter at hand:  Divorce, Italian Style, filmed in 1961, was directed and co-written by Pietro Germi.  His early work was apparently in the Italian neorealist style that yielded so many gems in the post-war years, though I’ve seen only one of them (apparently his last) — 1957′s L’Uomo di Paglia, a solid but unspectacular romantic drama set in working-class Sicily.  The island is the place where Divorce unfolds as well:  southern Italy in a yellow-stained nutshell, a town of 18,000 with a literacy rate hovering somewhere around 20%, where the Communist Party hosts Sputnik dances, and where the heavy hand of the Church blocks movement in any direction.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Baron Ferdinando Cefalù, a down-at-the-heels nobleman, as either a perfect evocation of a louche aristocrat or a broad cartoon of a louche aristocrat.  (It’s a tough call for me, honestly, since my experience of louche aristocrats is confined to having once seen George W. Bush drive past during a St. Patrick’s Day parade.)  Cefalù is a slightly more well-behaved Gomez Addams:  he wears neat suits that are just beginning to frazzle, puffs on cigarettes through an ornate holder, and sports a trim mustache and heavily Brylcreemed hair.  In one of Germi’s more pointed satirical observations, the life of this broken-down aristo isn’t all that different from the deprived leisure of the town’s unemployed men, or the chattering old hangers-on who speculate about everyone’s love life.  In Cefalù’s case, he suffers from a deep resentment of his aunt’s bourgeois husband (who occupies half of his ancestral lands, having paid off Cefalù’s father’s gross gambling debts), but lusts after the man’s daughter, the utterly gorgeous teenage Angela (played by the utterly gorgeous teenage Stefania Sandrelli).

Unfortunately for him, Cefalù is already married to the randy but shrill Daniela Rocca, and in a movie saturated with notions of the Church getting in the way of what people want, what they’re keeping him from is being shed of Rocca and hooking up with Angela.  In an era when we’ve come to mistake complicated storytelling with effective storytelling, Germi does a fine job of presenting us with a lovely execution of the age-old trick of establishing the protagonist’s desire and forever yanking it away from him.  It soon becomes clear, through a series of luridly crazed fantasies, that Cefalù’s preferred solution is to have someone seduce his wife, catch them in the act, and kill them both — those fine humanitarians in the Church will forgive a “crime of passion”, but not the dissolution of a failed marriage by divorce.  That’s when it becomes clear that the title isn’t just a goof that loses its punch in the cultural translation:   in 1961 Sicily, an Italian divorce is a euphemism for murder.

Describing the comedy in Divorce, Italian Style as satire is accurate to a degree, but Germi puts a lot of the sharper edges in the background.  A lot of the jokes, and especially the character work (as with Rocca, Cefalù’s wallflower sister and her gurning clown of a fiance, and many other of the village idiots), are pretty broad, but other times, he slips in some unexpectedly sophisticated humor.  (One moment early in the film, where Mastroianni modulates the volume of his voice-over, as if he fears his wife will hear him thinking about Angela, really caught me by surprise.)  His background in realism, too, colors the humor, especially the topical bits about the commie sock-hops where men dance grimly with one another, and a screening of La Dolce Vita stirs up the town like a broadcast direct from the Planet of the Decadent instead of a movie made less than an hour’s flight away.  It also carries into the visuals:  the cinematography, mostly by future Woody Allen D.P. Carlo di Palmi, mixes a keen eye for architecture with some sharp, stark noir lighting, but it’s Germi’s eye that, even with two stars as photogenic as Mastroianni and Sandrelli, he gives plenty of space in front of the camera with various town grotesques that give it all a natural look — making the descents into jolly dark fantasy all the more effective.

There’s also some fairly subversive work bubbling under the script; it’s no Dr. Strangelove, but both visually and narratively, Germi and his team are telling us things aren’t always as they appear.  Cefalù disdains the half-literate romantic gabble that comes out of his wife, even as he pines away for Angela, who has got her to a nunnery; he presents an impeccable public spectacle, all right angles and Persols, but at home he loafs around like the bums who are beneath even the notice of the lively Reds, looking like a disheveled oaf with even less vigor than the workmen who are always clanging around his estate.

There are a few unforgettable shots; my favorite was that of Cefalù staring through shutters — the film’s recurring motif for the just out-of-reach — with a deadly boredom in his eyes and acrid fumes from soapmaking in the courtyard swirling around.  It shocks, coming just before his first gruesome murder fantasy, and could have come out of one of the better American crime dramas of the late ’50s or early ’60s.  (The ones that follow are increasingly ridiculous, and include blasting her off into space on a Russian rocket as she cackles gleefully.)  The plot takes equally strange turns, both towards the broad and the narrow:  Cefalù’s murder plot is an overly complicated wheeze, but Angela’s father is a brute straight out of early Fellini, and Cefalù’s trial, where his attorney argues that his old man didn’t love him enough, plops right down in the middle of farce and tense realism.

Taking it in at such a far remove from its history, Divorce seems like a genre mash-up before its time, something the Coen Brothers might have done if you tossed them back half a century and replaced their arch formalism with more of the middle-class realism that sometimes burbles through in a movie like A Serious Man.  Neither fish nor fowl but with a fine supply of flesh and some good red herring, it doesn’t entirely work as the culmination of a tour through neorealism into crime drama, nor is it completely successful as as a wide-ranging comedy.  But as an ambitious amalgam of the two, it’s a bit ahead of its time, which is both a compliment and a criticism.  Though more cunningly competent than transcendent, it’s absolutely worth seeing, and seems at its best to point forward to a new development in Italian cinema that never quite arrived.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

During Clarion, I coined the phrase “busking on the wrong corner” to describe the phenomenon of “entertaining writing that doesn’t serve the story.” It’s the reason writers have to  kill their darlings.  It’s the trap that stops a lot of good writers from making the transition to great.

“Busking” is the practice of playing in public spaces for donations – you know, that guy playing the guitar, his guitar case open before him, full of scattered singles and quarters.  Buskers are often some of the most talented musicians.  But the buskers’ art is also partially a knowledge of where the crowds are.

You can sing your fucking heart out on a corner where there’s no foot traffic.  If you’re really good, you might make a few bucks.  But if you’re really good and really smart, you’ll position yourself near the subway where people are pouring out by the hundreds as rush hour ends, a place where even a mediocre musician can clean up.  Part of your strength is not just the raw force of your musicianship, but knowing where to place that skill so it’s maximized with silver rains of spare change.

Writers (me included, oh so included) are often putting their talents to use on the wrong corner.  This chapter is brilliant writing, it’s got great characterization, it’s exciting.  But underneath, the scene is at odds with what the story is trying to do, and what you’ll wind up with is a great scene that advances the story in the wrong ways.

Lemme give you the real-life example: the lead character of the novel I’m plotting right now, Autumn Akeley, is a taxidermist.  In the beginning of the book, Autumn is deep in the woods on a rumor, searching for the Hulk.

Why the Hulk, you ask?  Because she’s not just any taxidermist – she makes wild viral videos online parodying recent movies in order to drive business to her online taxidermy shop.  Autumn’s latest planned video (“The Bearvengers”) needs a gigantic, light-skinned animal she can dye green to play the part of the Hulk.  Autumn does not kill animals for her entertainment (she takes the death of any creature very seriously), but she just got a tip from a hunter that there’s a decaying grizzly in the woods she might be able to use.  She tracks it down with her friend Karla and examines the corpse – it’s a little too moldy for her liking, but it has very light fur.  She thinks she can salvage it.

Then a shot rings out across the forest: there are poachers in the woods.  As someone who hates to see an animal killed senselessly, she does not take lightly to poachers.  She sets off to investigate, starting the chain of events that sets up the novel….

…Now, that’s a pretty good scene.  It’s got an interesting character doing something we’ve never seen done before in a book, it displays her odd compulsions, it allows us to watch her work (if you have a character with an odd profession, people love to see the fine details), and for a short intro it’ll do quite nicely.

And yet we are busking badly here.  Why?

Because this novel is about Autumn’s friendship with Karla.

Okay, unfair, I didn’t tell you that – but the whole point of the novel is that a new man in town with a shadowy past begins to romance Karla, causing a rift when Autumn discovers the man’s past as a serial killer.  And this scene, while good in a vacuum, utterly fails to set up the dynamics of Karla and Autumn and their friendship.  In fact, you’d be excused for forgetting the existence of Karla in this summary, because while we can put in some nice dialogue and characterization to set up Karla’s character, the underlying structure of the scene is not about her at all.

This is a great scene for a novel featuring bold Autumn Akeley, bold adventurer.  It’s a terrible scene for Autumn and Karla’s big fight – especially since the next scene involves Autumn tracking down poachers, which has even less to do with their friendship.  And if you’re not a careful writer, you’ll think this is an awesome scene because it’s got it all – humor, good characterization, a quick hook to action – without realizing that it’s an awesome scene that’s structurally at odds with what you want to do in the long run.  It doesn’t set up the things that need to be established.

It’s a good scene in isolation.  In context, it’s a darling that needs to be killed… Or at least dramatically changed so that Karla does something so interesting here that the scene metamorphosizes away from Autumn’s search for the Hulk and into an expression of how Autumn and Karla couldn’t get along without each other.

The point I’m making here is that had I written that chapter, I’d have been very proud.  It’d be a nice, 1,500 word opener that would grab the reader, full of lovely details and fun stuff.

And then I’d have to place it into my trash folder, because ultimately it doesn’t do what it needs to, then hunt for the right scene to write.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

I’ve been quiet here as I’ve been slogging through the usual Seasonal Depression, but I did post two essays over at FetLife (TheFacebookforkinksters) that you may be curious about:  “Depression. Fucking. Depression.”, which deals with how depression affects my sex life, and “Ropeweasels,” which deals with the issue of me being tied up. (There’s also “Fireplay and Me,” an oddly poetic musing on setting women aflame, which I don’t think I linked here but maybe I did.)

In addition, my humor essay “So I’m Going To Become A Dom” may be my most popular essay ever, with 612 comments and 965 loves.  I guess it’s all about the specificity.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

Back in The Day, when I had infinite people reading me on LiveJournal, I’d post an entry and the comments exploded.  I’d hit “post,” and five minutes later I’d have fifteen comments.

Now, I make a big ol’ important post and sometimes I don’t get a comment for half an hour.  That used to unnerve me – is this a bad entry? Did I say something wrong? – until I realized what was happening.  English LiveJournal is slowly dying.

What used to happen was that the LJ friends page was like Twitter or Facebook now – so constant a stream of data that you just refreshed your friends’ page and wham, new entries.  Maybe you didn’t check it twenty times a day like I did, but the friends page was a ritual where my latest entry popped up in real time.  I was a part of the info-stream.

As LJ use has declined, though, the traffic patterns have changed for me.  People no longer read my blog as part of a daily pulse; it’s in their RSS feeds, or bookmarked separately, or they wait for me to post the interesting links to Twitter (since I don’t Tweet-spam every post).  I still get roughly the same number of comments, but as opposed to arriving in one explosive comment-dump, they now arrive scattered over the course of two days, like late passengers departing a red-eye connection.  I’m read at their convenience, not the convenience of LJ.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a little weird.  Some days I post a SRS ENTRY and then wait until I get one comment just to ensure someone’s listening.  By the time I get out of the tub, I have like three comments, which used to be the sign of an entry falling on its face.  Now, I’m patient; the user feedback will arrive in due course.

If you write it, they will come.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

Thanks to recent “data”, I am sad to report that it is no longer permitted to talk about the following topics until all the other problems in the world have been completely solved, beginning with global poverty and ending with the fact that there is nowhere near my apartment to get Slurpees.  I understand that this will be a difficult adjustment for many of you, and I sympathize, but “data”.  Here is the list of embargoed discussions:

- Any complaints about the War on Christmas.  This is not a thing.  I promise, you can celebrate Christmas in any way you choose up to and including drinking three bottles of Old Overholt and puking yourself to death all over the local crèche.  No one is taking your Christmas away.  You can talk about Jesus until His surely imminent return and the law will do nothing to stop you.  The cashier at Wal-Mart saying “happy holidays” is not a form of oppression.

- Similarly, no more talk about the Obama Administration taking your guns away.  It’s just not going to happen. As long as you keep shoveling money at the NRA, and you will because you are an easily manipulated dunce, not even the tiniest little baby steps will be taken toward the slightest bit of firearms regulation.  All you are doing by stockpiling ammo is helping put the children of Winchester executives through college.  The government — or a Republican one, anyway — is more likely to take your Medicare and Social Security away than it is your guns.  Just…just calm down.

- Complaints about being asked to press 1 for English.  In fact, complaining about anything that “inconveniences” you for less than five seconds is forbidden from this point forward.

- Hand-wringing over the fact that there are now more ‘minority’ babies than there are white onesˆ.  Look, honkies:  the only reason you would need to worry about this is if you have consistently treated non-whites like shit for all of recorded history.  And you haven’t done that, have you?  You have?  Oh.  Well, in that case, there are two options for you:  either stop reading this and get fucking so you can shore up the stockpile of Cadens, Makaylahs, Brysons, and Dakotas; or start treating the dark-skinned kids decently so they won’t want to put you up against a wall once they’re old enough to start buying the guns Obama didn’t get around to outlawing.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which will be easier.

- How Muslims are taking over the country and will soon impose their evil Sharia law on us.  This isn’t even remotely happening in Europe, where there are a lot more Muslims than there are here.  Muslims, on the other hand, would be pretty justified in worrying that Americans are going to take over their country and impose their laws and standards, but let that one drift.

- The disgraceful manner in which everyone but you chooses to raise their children

- Decrying the death of pop music.  Look, I understand.  You’re old now.  It took me by surprise, too, and there was nothing pleasant about it.  But let’s not pretend that there’s been a cultural apocalypse that just happened to coincide with the appearance of your first gray hair.

-  The defense of worthless garbage on the basis that you “don’t want to have to think about things” or that “you just want to turn your brain off for a while”.  First of all, if there is one problem America most certainly does not suffer from, it is thinking too much about anything.  Second, what do you do that your brain is so fucking taxed?  Rough day down at the copy-editing factory?  Lose a thumb entering numbers into that Access database, did we?  The whole idea of the necessity of escapism is sheer bafflegab; as my friend Tom Block put it, “an escape from what?  We live in Disneyland, for crying out loud.”  If exercising your brain is causing you that much fucking grief, stick an ice pick in your earhole and be done with it.

-  Saying that anything, especially the pointing out of obvious racism, is the new racism.  No.  It is not.  Racism is the old racism, and is also the new racism, on account of its being racist.

-  Defending the shitty behavior of anyone, but especially famous people, government officials, or huge corporations, by pointing out that “they didn’t do anything illegal”.  When did we become a nation of unpaid trial lawyers?  Unless someone’s paying me at least three figures an hour to do so, I’m not particularly interested in acting as a loophole detector for some million-dollar cretin.  And for a country that is relentlessly and drearily moralistic about just about everything else, we seem to delight in doing free PR when it comes to letting rich people off the hook.  It may come as a shock, but people like this literally make the laws, so explaining in a patronizing tone that some egregious misdeed that would shame anyone’s grandmother wasn’t technically against the law isn’t the dust-off-your-hands-and-walk-away defense that people seem to think it is.

That’s it for now.  Carry on.  Data!

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

I am full term this week (37+ weeks) and exhausted. AND super cranky. Oh, man, SO cranky. I still have a million things to do before the baby is born, but most of them involve organizing and cleaning... so I need a distraction. A fun one. This is where YOU come in!

I think pretty much everyone knows that we haven't found out the baby's sex. We thought it would be fun to have it be a surprise (who knows what we'll decide for subsequent baby-havings) and we also knew it would keep me from buying pink tutus if it's a girl (or, you know, blue tutus if it's a boy) and from having the bedroom next to ours end up looking like Strawberry Shortcake horked in there (kind of like this blog layout... heh). So, there's that. There’s also the fact that in spite of my due date being June 12th, the doctor shakes her head every time I have an appointment and just says it'll be born any time between NOW and the end of June. (How I am surviving with this much suspense when I like knowing everything in advance baffles even me. George, on the other hand, adoooores surprises.)

And this is where the game-playing comes in. Let's play guess the delivery date and sex! Just a few rules...

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.  (Elie Wiesel)

I’m not especially familiar with the work of Scott Kurtz.  Cursory investigation reveals that his webcomic, PvP, is quite successful, though, which may explain why his recent post regarding creator’s rights and the Avengers movie shows such a staggering lack of empathy and an inability to understand why anyone might seek redress for an injustice.  This is America, after all, land of Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, where everyone assumes that success is a birthright and that any protest against the powerful is nothing more than the hurling of a bunch of sour grapes.  What is harder to understand is why Kurtz wraps his argument in robes of nobility and altruism, as if he is doing quite a wonderful thing by exhorting his readers to abandon the very notion of pointing out injustice.  Every self-flattering moralist likes to dress himself up in a mantle of optimism and faith in the goodness of mankind, but Kurtz’s bewildering deployment of the concept of cynicism suggest that his biggest problem is not one of belief, but of simple comprehension.

Kurtz gets entangled in definitions right away, when he characterizes as “slacktivism” the notion that it would be a good thing for anyone who enjoys Avengers to donate the cost of a ticket to the Hero Initiative.  ”Slacktivism”, as it is commonly understood, is the process of mounting a protest or sponsoring a social cause by doing something that costs nothing in terms of money or time, such as retweeting a feel-good statement or tinting your Facebook icon a meaningful color.  Donating money to an organized charity, conversely, is just plain old activism, since it requires both action and expense.  Perhaps Kurtz is angry at the Hero Initiative plan (started, by the way, by my good friend Calamity Jon Morris; you can read more about it here) because, benefitting as it does hundreds of comics creators in financial need, it blows a hole in his already-flaccid argument that this is all about Jack Kirby, who at any rate is too dead to enjoy it.

Kurtz really tries to push the unmade-by-anyone point that this is just about Jack Kirby getting credit for creating the Avengers, when it is, of course, about the fact that artists and writers for all Marvel books are routinely cheated out of money, credit and a decent degree of compensation for the success of the characters they helped shape.  He does this, oddly enough, by displaying panels from the original Lee-Kirby Avengers and the Millar-Hitch Ultimates and asking the reader which more resembles the version of the team they saw on screen.  This doesn’t make the profound point he seems to think it does; indeed, it’s hard to tell what point it’s intended to make at all.  Baz Luhrmann stranding Romeo Montague in South Beach and equipping him with a silver-plated handgun does not stop the play from having been written by William Shakespeare; and, more to the point, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch no more own those characters than Jack Kirby did, and will receive no more compensation from the film’s gargantuan profits than I will.  (They may, indeed, someday find themselves in financial need, and will no doubt be met with sneers from Kurtz telling them they’ve got nothing coming.)

It only gets worse from here:  once again mischaracterizing the argument of the compassionate defenders of creator’s rights that so infuriate him, Kurtz notes all the other people — Walt Simonson, Bob Layton, Jim Steranko — who helped define the characters we think of as Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury.  This is fine so far as it goes, but no one is arguing that Kirby and Kirby alone be compensated for his work on the characters.  Those of us who are repulsed by Marvel’s treatment of its writers and artists would be just as happy to see Simonson, Layton, and Steranko get a bigger slice of the pie as well, something that is in no way incompatible with the simple factual admission that the characters were originally created by Jack Kirby.  His examples are somewhat bewildering on their face, as well; Steranko frequently feuded with Marvel, Simonson is a board member of the Hero Initiative, and Bob Layton has recently struggled in the indie comics field that Kurtz cites as evidence that creator’s rights is no longer an issue.  All three are outspoken defenders of creator’s rights.

The attempt that follows to argue that creator’s rights issues are no longer worth our attention is beneath mention.  Especially coming from a successful webcomics producer — one of the few — it smacks of successful women who spurn feminism, or bourgeoisie blacks who argue that racism is dead.  The I-got-mine argument is essentially irrational and selfish, and ignores the greater shape of the industry in which everyone must work. Citing things like Kickstarter and the B&W comics movement of the 1980s is arguing that a minuscule portion of the overall business excuses the egregious abuses of the two companies that dominate the industry, and doesn’t even address the central issue, which is that Marvel’s creators still do not own their creations.  Pretending that things are much better now is quite daring in light of recent developments; the case of Alan Moore and the “Before Watchmen” books alone should argue that the multi-million-dollar corporations that control the vast majority of paying comics work are in no way ready to give up one inch of their control of the material that fattens their bottom line to the people who make it.

Now that he’s really wound up, Kurtz ends his nonsensical tirade by really going for the gusto:  ”It’s not as simple as ‘Give Jack’s estate some money, Marvel. You can afford it.’ That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.”  Actually, it is as simple as that — that is the very definition of pragmatic.  Take a small amount of money you don’t need to correct an injustice that was all your fault; you score a huge public relations coup that will buy you enough goodwill to weather the next 20 years of screwing your employees, while still coming out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead. It’s as practical as can be.

As far as the line about cynicism, I’m frankly flabbergasted.  Supporters of the Hero Initiative and creator’s rights advocates are attempting to get comics fans to donate money to the creators of the books they love, to compensate for how they they were routinely underpaid, overworked, and cheated out of the financial gain their bosses got from their hard work.  Kurtz, meanwhile, is arguing that it doesn’t matter who got screwed, because things are better now probably, and besides who cares, the Avengers movie was awesome, so everybody shut up about who screwed who.  And we’re the ones being cynical?  What we’re asking for has nothing to do with cynicism. It has everything to do with justice, or at the very least decency, which are the opposite of cynicism.  Cynicism is saying what Kurtz says: this has always happened, it will always happen, we can’t do anything about it anyway, let’s all shut up and pretend it’s fixed and move on. That is precisely cynicism.

Having thoroughly ensured that the boots of people he doesn’t even work for are well and truly spittled, Kurtz ends his flailing around by telling us who the real villains are:  internet commenters.  (As Calamity Jon pointed out, this is a man who calls it childish to define the Marvel vs. Kirby feud in terms of good guys and bad guys, but he ends his essay by comparing people who disagree with him to a comic book supervillain.)  People who want Kirby and other creators to get what’s due them aren’t decent people looking for justice; they’re “worms” trying to “make themselves feel powerful”.  (Never mind that virtually all the power in this scenario is held by wealthy corporate executives, as it pretty much always is.)  The real bad guys aren’t big business shot-callers or billion-dollar movie studios, it’s internet cowards “getting in a good dig” because they never had the courage to create anything themselves.  (Never mind that hundreds of the people supporting Kirby and the creator’s rights movement in general are themselves comic creators, making the quite rational decision that if they don’t stand up for creator’s rights for others, no one will bother to stand up for them.)  Scott Kurtz bases his whole argument on the idea that he is trying to break free from a hurtful cynicism; but there is nothing fresh, new and optimistic about defending the bosses when they try to step on their workers for the millionth time.  He may think he’s letting sunshine into the room by telling us all to stop living in the past and just take what we’re given, but the real cynics — the big shots his argument will ultimately benefit — have heard this song before; because they’re the ones who wrote it.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

The Seasonal Affective Disorder is really fucking with me this year.  I’m on medications, which helps, but not really.

See, the Paxil means that it’s not slamming me for ten days.  I’m feeling okay for a day at a time, and then the SAD slips in and WHAM.  The whole afternoon vanishes because I’m just sitting here crying and breaking down and I don’t know what to do.

With the old SAD, it sucked, but I got used to it.  A constant suck was horrid, but I could adjust, keep working, get everything done.  This is a horror show where I’m okay, I’m okay, then suddenly I’m through the trap door.  And I can’t handle this.

I’m struggling harder now that it’s lessened.  I honestly don’t know what to do.  And I guess maybe that’s not what a blog is for, but I try to chronicle my existence and today I was about to get back to work and then I was all like, “I shouldn’t be trying to sell The Upterlife.  I’m reading Saladin’s book, it’s so much better, I’m an awful writer, no agents are interested anyway and it’s just going to be a long slow haul to the inevitable stop of my talent, yes I lucked out once with the Nebulas but this book isn’t it and it sucks and I should just toss it away and hope the next one is better and oh God why am I bothering it takes so much fucking effort just to get anything halfway decent.”

How can I work like that?  When I’m just assaulted by ghosts?

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

So I’m 30,000 words into a new novel, and this weekend I realized that I have to throw out everything except for the first 600 words.  The last two months of work?  Completely erased.  Hit “Delete” and kiss that effort goodbye.

Normally there’s something to be scavenged from a manuscript collapse, but this is a total implosion.  My protagonist used to be a harried, frightened nerd, prone to punching when cornered; in this new novel she will become a nerd-king, the kind of super-popular high-school kid that has yet to realize that she’s peaking and that things have already begun to slope downwards.  The villain in my old book was a charming, well-meaning rogue; now he’s a sneering killer who’s only masquerading as human.  I’m reducing everything to such rubble that there’s nothing I can retain.

Such an exciting failure.

Failing is a good thing in writing; it means you’re taking risks.  But furthermore, it indicates you’re skilled enough to recognize that you’re writing something flawed.  Which is a sign of growth to be cherished.

A few years back, I would have looked at the scenes I’d written and said, “But those are good scenes!”  And indeed, they are; some of them are touching and beautiful and honest in a way that I’d never been capable of before.  There’s a scene where my protagonist faces down her reclusive, immature father to have to justify her expulsion from school – which was one of the subtlest and truest things I’ve ever written.  There was a lot of good stuff in that 30k, personal high-water marks.

Yet the novel as a whole wasn’t up to snuff, with character largely revealed through interminable interior monologues and backstory instead of action.  The fact that I recognized that was a sign of how far I’d come.  And figuring out how to fix it involved a combination of using every tool I’d developed as a writer and having the boldness to go, “No, this can’t be massaged back into position.”

Now, I’m trying a new technique: I’ve never outlined a novel before.  I’ve only written the scene that comes next, hoping my internal searchlight would find the correct path.  But in outlining, I’m having to use all sorts of techniques stolen from the theater – the three-act structure, internal versus external challenges, ensuring that character is revealed through action, explicitly raising the stakes with every chapter – and that’s a sweaty workout.

I’m learning so many new things that I feel revitalized.  This novel doesn’t feel like a slog any more, but a mountain to be climbed.  It’s tough, but there’s a certain masochistic satisfaction I’m deriving, a brisk slap to the face.

To which I say to you, dear readers, is that there are mundane failures and exciting ones.  The mundane failures you can’t learn from, you just did the same thing all over again.  But the exciting ones are the ones where you can break yourself and then reforge your shattered forearms into adamantium claw-laden superpowers.

What I encourage you to do is to fail big.  Write to the edge of your limits.  And when you realize you can’t pull off this tricky story you’re halfway through, don’t get depressed; take it as a sign that you’re recognizing flaws even if you don’t know how to correct them yet.  Writing’s full of invisible pitfalls where you think it’s brilliant, but your readers are unsatisfied.  Just understanding that something doesn’t work is a major accomplishment, one you should congratulate yourself for.

What’s important is not this story.  It’s your overall skill level.  And a failed story can teach you far more than that easy sale.

Today, I’m taking the first step in spending at least a month outlining my novel chapter by chapter.  Maybe it won’t work.  But I’ll learn, and if this collapses then it’ll be such a glorious failure that I’ll be harvesting new talent from the ruins.  Celebrate with me, people.  Go blast a story of your own.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

If you haven’t been paying attention, my wife Gini has committed herself to a mad project: riding 150 miles in two days to help fight Multiple Sclerosis.  She’s doing this because of her grandfather – read her touching essay on the topic - and because a friend of ours in town, Patti, has MS.

I wish you all could meet Patti, and if you live in Cleveland, you probably have.  Patti’s one of the sunniest, wittiest, cleverest women around, so much so that you occasionally have to remind yourself, “Oh, right, she has a disease that is stripping the motor functions from her body.”  She has good days and bad days, but retains her sense of humor.  Amazon.com once issued me an email that said, “People who liked [GINI JUDD] also liked [PATTI].”

As a way to fight this evil, Patti’s husband Mike has created the “Patti’s Paladins” biking group, which pedals out to a lighthouse once a year in a gruelling display of physical fitness.  Well, it’s not that hard for Mike, who is so fit that they literally had to give him amphetamines before surgery because his resting heart rate is below what a normal human’s heart rate is while sedated.  This, I believe, officially makes Mike a superhero.

Gini, however, was starting from scratch.  She wants to do this.  She’s been getting on her bike every day, pushing herself so hard she trembles the next day, reporting in: “Ten miles.”  “Fifteen miles.”  “Twenty, but I had to take a break.”  She’s up to forty-one miles, a three-and-a-half-hour sweatfest that left her wrecked, but she is determined to make it to the lighthouse.  For Patti.  For herself.  For all other sufferers of MS.

What she needs is sponsors.  Many, many sponsors.  As she says, “10 cents a mile is only $15 out of your pocket for 150 miles of my effort. Of course a dollar a mile would be quite lovely, but any pledge is money going straight to an important and worthy cause.”  So I would strongly request, if you can, to give some cash to my wife, who is straining her healthy legs and lungs and heart for those whose legs and lungs and hearts are slowly deteriorating.

It’s a good cause.  Help her, audience.  You’re her only hope.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.