Big Relief

Well, it’s done.

I finished my final pass at copy editing Goliath yesterday, got all the elements of the cover art in place, and now the files are at CreateSpace waiting for approval. Being the obscure author that I am, I don’t imagine the world was breathlessly waiting for this announcement. I’m just sayin’. Okay, well, I’m going to say that maybe there’s a tiny bit of interest. Anyway…

The point is, I have to figure out what to do now. The sensible thing is to get some promotional ideas in place for the novel (and to get more promotional ideas in place for my previous novel, The Hermit.) My problem is that I don’t have the temperament to do that kind of thing. I want to move onto the next book and let the previous ones sell themselves. Yes, I know know it doesn’t work that way.

That’s why I have this blog. I don’t mind writing it, and I can feel I’m doing something positive to get the word out. (Yet it just moves the problem one step farther back. Now I have to promote the blog if it’s to do me any good!)

Sandpaper

There’s a saying among painters that you never finish a picture. You just stop working on it.

The same is true of any creative work. I’ve been copy editing my upcoming novel Goliath for several weeks. I’ve taken pass after pass on it; the first couple times included some fairly drastic changes involving moving scenes around to improve the flow of the story. I’ve rewritten a lot of sentences, deleted paragraphs, and added a few things here and there to improve clarity and the overall flow of the story.

Now, I’m down to nitpicking over words, or, as I think of it, “taking sandpaper to the novel.” I’m smoothing it out. Yesterday I searched for  the word “just” and deleted, I’m guessing, something on the order of thirty to forty instances of the word. It had struck me that it was in the novel too many times. I simply deleted many of them without any problem at all. In every instance, the deletion improved the sentence. In a few instances, I had to rewrite the sentence. I think I still have more “just”s than you’re likely to find in a randomly chosen novel, but at least now it’s within acceptable tolerances.

Novel Ideas

I have lots of ideas for novels. Ideas are cheap.

Going into the final copy-editing and book design stages of my second CreateSpace novel, Goliath, I’ve been spending some time scoping out ideas for the next one. The thing is, judging how viable an idea is can be difficult. In some cases, it’s apparent that an idea sucks after about thirty seconds of thought. In other cases, I might write ten to twenty pages and not like what I have. When that happens, I’ll usually plow ahead and see if I can get it to morph into something I like. That’s how Goliath got started — I threw out the original first two chapters long ago. Where it begins now, in the final version, was actually chapter three in the first draft.

And there are other times when I have fifty or sixty pages, and it’s just not happening. I look at it and say, “so what?” Still, I keep the pages. I might be able to make it work some time later.

So now, looking for the next novel, I’ve resurrected a screenplay I wrote years ago, a story called Blind Faith. Things are going well. In fact, it’s going so well that the screenplay seems as if it were written for no other reason than to serve as an outline for the novel. As Jim Cramer would say, boo-yah!

Influences, Part 2

Let’s talk about influences again.

Shortly after I got out of high school, some friends turned me on to Philip K. Dick. Now, I had been quite the science fiction reader as a kid, with a library boasting loads of Asimov, Bradbury, Clark,  Ellison, Heinlein, Sturgeon, and so on, but this was about the time I started branching out into other forms of fiction. SF, by this time, wasn’t quite as compelling to me as it had been. (To give a reference point, I’ll mention that I finished high school in 1975.)

What set Dick apart? Why was I once again excited about a science fiction writer? Well, this was dark, disturbing stuff. Now, some of these other writers got into the dark areas when they wanted. For example, Ray Bradbury. But his darkness was the fun, Halloween-type darkness, and it was effective because he was one of the great masters of his craft, especially in the early stuff when he was at his creepiest. Harlan Ellison’s dark stuff was clearly allegorical and effective mainly because (at his best) it was written with the passion of a thousand suns. (And these two men will probably get their own posts as influences, but Dick comes first.)

At that time I didn’t know anything about Dick’s personal life. But his books were disturbing. His work up to the late 70’s had some flavor of the old-school “space opera” science fiction, but there was much more to it than that. This stuff had a clear philosophical grounding. He played with reality in interesting ways. These were nightmarish worlds he was creating, and one didn’t get the sense that he was creating them in fun. In fact, maybe he wasn’t creating worlds so much as reflecting one. If we were rooting for the protagonist to prevail, it wasn’t so much because we identified with him. It was because Dick made us feel we had something personal at stake in seeing things come out all right.

Ray’s Philip K. Dick recommendations:

All four novels contained in the volume Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik

A Scanner Darkly

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Eye in the Sky

A Maze of Death

Music and Writing

When I’m writing, i don’t like to work in a vacuum. I like to have the TV on, or some music. With the TV, I’m not picky. Just about anything will do, although I’ll generally settle into one of the cable news channels, or a ball game if it’s on. That is to say, I find some sort of programming that doesn’t require constant attention, even though I end up not paying attention to it, anyway, regardless of what might be on.

It it’s music, I usually go with long, instrumental jams. Music in a “standard song format” will too often demand my attention. If “Shattered” starts playing, I’m listening for the duration. I can’t leave it in the background. That’s not to say the music I’m about to mention in the next paragraph is good for nothing more than background music. I find it very much worthwhile to listen to it attentively at other times. It just has the extra dimension of being able to go into the background if I want it to.

So anyway, for writing, I like the Bitches Brew-era Miles and some of the other be-bop artists. Charles Mingus. Or maybe some free jazz with Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton or Last Exit. Sometimes I’ll find something with a psychedelic tint, such as Heldon some of the harder-edged Djam Karet stuff. Or maybe I’ll find a Dead show that that has a long “Dark Star” or “Playing” jam. Often I realize the music has ended and I haven’t heard the last thirty minutes. But I have to have something playing.

Inspiration

I was discussing the idea of “inspiration” with a couple friends earlier today. My take on it? In my experience (with writing in particular), inspiration just gets you started. Everything that follows–development, revision, polishing it up, etc.–is just work that’s not much different from digging a great big hole in your back yard.

Taking a Break

Sometimes you just have to put your work-in-progress down and take a break. For example, I’ve lost a certain perspective on my own WIP that I think can be regained only by forgetting about it for a few weeks and coming back to it fresh.

Looking for a follow-up to my recently-released novel The Hermit, I found a years-old first draft of a novel titled Goliath. Reading it was wince-inducing in many ways, but I discovered I still liked the underlying material. It just needed some reworking. It needed a couple extra scenes for better development and a whole lotta copy editing. It also needed some of the events to be “re-sequenced” to give the whole thing a better . . .  oh, let’s call it a better “time flow.”

Fortunately,  this re-sequencing didn’t require any major changes in the  structure of the story. All I had to do was move some blocks of text around and rewrite some of the transitions.

But now, I’m not sure how it reads. I’m pretty sure the new sequence of events makes more sense, but only because I think it should. After going through the novel beginning to end numerous times fairly quickly, it’s no longer clear to me how all the events line up in the story. Every event, every scene, every little piece of business that happens is all equally vivid in my head.

So I’ll let it sit until January rolls around. There’s no hurry.

Influences, Part 1

Let’s talk about influences.

Let’s talk about Kurt Vonnegut. Just as the Beatles are often said to have influenced every rock musician who followed them, Vonnegut has very likely influenced (to some extent) every American writer who has followed him. He came to my attention when I was an impressionable young kid and his novel Slaughterhouse-Five was making a big splash.

This was supposedly a science fiction novel, I thought. But it was nothing like the Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, etc. books I had been reading. Not to put those guys down, because they’re masters of the genre, but Slaughterhouse-Five was a completely different game. It was strange and wonderful stuff, a mixture of time travel, space aliens, personal tragedy, the fire bombing of Dresden, ponderings about free will, and more, much more. The passage in which the war movie runs backwards is one of the most memorable and haunting pieces of writing I’ve ever run across.

After reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I collected and read the back catalog as quickly as I could. For years, Cat’s Cradle stood out as a clear favorite among his early works. If Slaughterhouse-Five told me a writer could let his imagination run wild, Cat’s Cradle confirmed it and rubber-stamped it (but only if you maintain the discipline to tell a coherent story). More recently, Mother Night, a less fanciful but equally powerful story about the consequences of personal choice, has taken first place.

His books tell engaging stories in an entertaining, easy-to-read style that more-or-less invites you right in. A profound wisdom runs throughout his work, yet you don’t get the sense of anything heavy or ponderous going on. The wisdom just sort of seeps in as you’re being entertained. One can’t help but be enchanted by his gentle humor in spite of (or perhaps because of) the worldview of a universe that’s completely impersonal and indifferent to our needs and wants. And everything—every word of it—is uniquely and distinctively Kurt Vonnegut.

I’m not going to be so bold as to claim you should see a Vonnegut influence in my writing. But I’ll say that if I had never read him, my writing would be much different than it is.

Great Big Dog and CreateSpace

First, let’s explain the name Great Big Dog, just in case you’re wondering.

Well, actually, there’s very little to explain. It’s bold and simple and creates a strong image. I think it’s memorable. And a bit silly-sounding. Just right for my purposes. But it has no particular meaning.

Now, on to the business at hand, which is books in general and my books in particular, such as they are. The launch of this blog follows closely the publication of my book The Hermit through CreateSpace. (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that sounds sinister or not.) Regardless, some of you might know that CreateSpace is a print-on-demand service for writers who are self-publishing their books. If you didn’t, you know now.

So what brought me to the decision to go with CreateSpace? Nearly a year of querying agents without seeing much interest. I got a few comments like “Interesting concept” and “Your writing is engaging,” but these comments were always followed by a phrase like “not right for us.”

Did I give up too soon? I don’t know, but I can tell you I got tired. It can be tough to find an agent and/or publisher under the best of circumstances. I believe I made the task harder on myself not by producing work that’s bad, but by producing work that’s quirky. Or maybe even beyond quirky. If you want to say “relentlessly weird,” as I vividly remember someone in a critique group saying years ago in response to a different story, I won’t argue. But I can’t help it. That’s just what comes out when I sit down to write. I would love to write mainstream crime thrillers. I try, but I can’t get very far. My hat’s off to Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton.

Regarding quirkiness, I have this goofy idea that anything you do, provided it’s (a) honest and (b) well-done when judged on its own terms, will have an audience. No matter what it is, someone, somewhere, will like it. To the extent that I’m able to judge my own work objectively—and you might very well question the judgment of a guy whose brain would concoct something like The Hermit—I contend that it meets these requirements. (Hey, you can judge for yourself. Click on the link to greatbigdog.com and download a pdf version for free. Yes, it’s stark, raving free!)

And so, CreateSpace gives me the opportunity to get the book out into the world via a major retailer (Amazon.com), at no cost to me. The downside? Maybe a loss of credibility, as traditional publishing is (and perhaps rightly so) generally seen as somehow validating a novel as… well, as worthy. The editorial process implies some degree of quality control. As to self-publishing, any fool with a computer can type up a bunch of incoherent stuff and publish it through CreateSpace. That’s part of the reason for this blog, and part of the reason for the aforementioned pdf download. You can take a look at my work, at no cost. If you think it sucks, no big deal. If you read the entire pdf and like it, consider a donation. Or if you read just enough to decide that you’d like to order a printed copy, you can.