WWQ: Fictional Deaths

Writer's Weekly Question #27:
Have you ever killed one of your characters before? If so, what was the motivation behind the death?

Some kinds of fiction actively require that characters die. It's tough to have a murder mystery without a murder, and classical and Shakesperean tragedy often involve multiple deaths. War novels and spy thrillers are two more examples. People die in war, and fictional spying is more exciting if it's terribly dangerous.

I don't write in any of those genres. The truth is, I'm ridiculously tender-hearted when it comes to killing characters. I've told you before about Keni, who was created specifically to be killed, only to immediately make himself indispensible to the story. The only non-villains I've killed off in the Mâvarin novels so far were one minor selmûn character in Heirs, the Second Minister of Defense in Mages, and unnamed combatants in a couple of battles. Of my antagonists, several major villains die over the course of two books, but two of them hang around afterward, at least for a while. Rachel in The Lives and Times of Joshua Wander does this too, dying early in the story but haunting JW as a semi-science fictional ghost. Even Josh himself is sorta-kinda killed, at least as far as his original reality is concerned.

When is a death not a death? Well, there are "comic book deaths," where a character who supposedly died returns, accompanied by some unlkely explanation. There are also symbolic deaths, part of the whole Hero with a Thousand Faces thing. I do have a few symbolic deaths and rebirths, most notably with Rani. He "dies" as a human in the first chapter of Heirs of Mâvarin, and is reborn as an animal, a monster. In Mages of Mâvarin, he undergoes an experience so traumatic that someone on the AOL sf/f writing boards once asked me whether I really wanted to "destroy" the character. Yes, he undergoes another symbolic death - and he's not the only one. Another major character is irrevocably changed, so much so that he ends up a completely different person. Still another character gets the beginnings of a funeral after lying in state, despite not having died at all. Mages is filled with symbolic deaths, along with a few real ones.

Jess and Pat both wrote about J. K. Rowling reportedly killing another major character in the final Harry Potter book, possibily Harry himself, supposedly to prevent other people writing about her character when she's dead. First of all, is she planning on dying soon? Second, why should she care what's written after she's dead? Third, that sort of gambit won't work, anyway. There will almost certainly be a whole body of fan fiction (at least) that will hit the "reset button" to undo whatever they don't like in the final book. Fourth, and possibly most important, the death of a character should arise from what's happening within the story, or at least be dramatically valid. Imposing it based on non-story reasons tends to damage the credibility of the story. There were a few decisions Rowling made for the sixth book that rang false with me, and the major death at the end was one of them. I shudder to think what that final novel will be like.

Speaking of non-story reasons, though, I do have a character I've been thinking of killing off, in the book that takes place after Mages. Rutana is based on my mom, and it's weird to me that she's still alive, several years after my mom's death. Even when my mom was still around, but not well, I was thinking about whether and when her fictional counterpart should die. Rutana's death would make sense in strictly character terms, because all along I've shown her as old and frail. But unless there's a good dramatic reason for her to die, she may have to survive the next book after all.

*****

Testing! One...

I've dipped my toe into the waters of podcasting, or rather sermoncasting. From the main St. Michael's blog:

The following link should be to an audio (wma) file of Father Smith's sermon from July 30th. Your best bet for listening to this is to download it to your computer (right click and save as...) and then doubleclick to listen on your favorite media player.
Sermon: They Didn't Understand About the Loaves!

This was basically a half hour download for me, but it worked. It's not really a podcast, 'cause it's not streaming audio or an RSS or atom feed, and 'cause there's only one of these so far. But parishioners will be able to listen to sermons at home now, which was the point of the exercise. If anyone has some advice on doing it right, please feel free to share!

Karen

Art by Sherlock

Technorati Tags: Writer's Weekly Question, Writing

Writing Male Protagonists - Yeah. So?

I'm a question behind again!

Writer's Weekly Question #26:
Unless you are writing about a world populated by only men or only women, you have probably dealt with characters of the opposite sex in some form or another. Which sex is easier for you to write for? Explain what makes that sex easy to write for. Also explain what makes the opposite sex more difficult to write for.

From high school onward, I've had a strong tendency to write about male protagonists. I've never been quite sure why. Perhaps it's because I'm old enough to have been raised on mostly male heroes in books, tv and movies. Perhaps it's a way to get out of my skin just a little more completely, and explore the inside of someone else's head. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly. Perhaps there's no significance to the fact that Jon the telepath, the guy in The Simian, the title characters in "The Disc Jockey" and "Dreamsong," Carli Selevar, Rani Fost, Fabi Stok, Bishop Nicholas and Joshua Wander are all male, with only Cathma and Crel, Black Rose Kate, and now Jace and Sandy to balance things out. And it's not as if those are all fully fleshed out characters who carried their stories, either. I remember almost nothing about who Jon was supposed to be, and never got more than a few pages done on The Simian. The fact is, I can't really answer the question of why I've written more male point of view characters than female ones. I only know that I have.

Am I any good at writing accurate depictions of male sensibilities? How would I know? All my beta readers in the past decade have been female. If you're a male reader of my fiction blog, perhaps you can tell me whether Rani and Del and JW are believably male. All I know is that they're real to me. I know what they say and how to behave, not because they conform to some standard of male or female behavior, but because they act like Rani and Del and JW.

Rani is a special case, of course. One of the many things that make him so intruguing to me is the non-human part of his brain. Heck, if I can write from the pov of a tengrem, how much harder can that of a male human be?

One thing I will say is that I generally don't believe that all guys are like this, and all women are like that. Yes, male and female brains do function differently, and yes, certain kinds of behavior do turn up mostly in one sex of the other. But fiction isn't about stereotypes or sociology. Fiction is stories about particular, individual characters, who try to resolve specific conflicts, and probably learn or change or grow in the process. They may have archetypal qualities, but a mere label of male or female tells us little about these characters. They have to be explored and written about, not tagged.

Which reminds me, I really need to explore Jace and Sandy some more - even if they are female.

Soon.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Writer's Weekly Question, Writing

Books Books Books Books Books

Or, One Book, Two Books, Old Books, New Books!

I found my Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs book tonight, looking, at John's suggestion, on the shelves next to the bed. I couldn't have looked there last night, because John was already asleep in the bedroom when my search began.



It's every bit the way I remember it, chock full of tail-wagging doggie goodness, barely protected by a loose book cover with no spine. I asked John about repairing it, but although he learned about book binding many years ago when he worked at Morse Road Public Library in Columbus, he doesn't have the materials. "Something like that, we would have sent off to be rebound," he told me. That's not an available option for me, so I guess I'll just have to handle my poor, damaged book carefully instead.



That's just one of the books vieing for my attention right now. We went to B&N tonight, and came back with the latest of volume of The Complete Peanuts reprints, plus the new McCaffrey Pern book. Todd McCaffrey's been co-author (with his mother Anne) of two of the last three Pern titles, and wrote the one in between by himself. I like them fine, but like all the books in the series that don't take place in the time of F'lar, Lessa, Mennolly and Robinton, I have trouble remembering any of the characters from one book to the next. I could refresh my memory by rereading, but that seems like too much time to devote to this. Maybe I'll look up the plots of the other titles on Wikipedia or something - or just reread the dust jackets!

Being pretty much incapable of leaving a new Pern book unread for more than five minutes, I've already gotten through about fifty pages of Dragon's Fire. I won't pull an all-nighter reading it, though. Not this time. I'm way too tired for that, and I'm giving blood at noon on Saturday so I can't do my usual sleep-until-3PM lie-ins.

In the photo above, the book with the spaniel on the cover is my old Dogs Dogs... book, of course. The paperback of A Wrinkle in Time is one of my many copies of the book, a reading copy. I've read Wrinkle so many times that there's no urgency to get through it again. I started in on it again about a week ago,after unaccountably losing my reading copy paperback of a later L'Engle book, A House Like a Lotus, somewhere between my office and my bathroom.

And of course there's my own second novel to resume editing, and a story I promised to read by a certain talented blogger, and Jace and Sandy to catch up with. And I'm starting to get a little antsy about my three chapters and synopsis for Heirs, which have been at Tor for neary 5 1/2 months now. Okay, 5 1/3. It's almost time to research the best way to contact the publisher and say, "Excuse, me, but is my submission somewhere in the pipeline, still unopened, or lost in the mail?"


I was too busy with dogs to give you any rain or sunset photos in my previous entry. Here's one I took in Thursday night. I did not boost the saturation on this one, but I did do an autocorrect and then lighten it a bit.

Speaking of dogs, Tuffy was especially affectionate today. You don't suppose she read what I write about her last night, do you? ... Nah!

Good night!

Karen


Technorati Tags: Books, Writing, Sunset

Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs

Weekend Assignment #123: Dogs. Cats. There can be only one! Choose which you prefer and tell us why. No weaseling out, people -- you can't say "oh, I like them both." You must choose! Don't worry: In real life all the cats or dogs won't disappear if you choose the other species. Honestly, as long as you keep to food coming, everything will be groovy with your pets. So pick one, already. We promise we won't tell. And pets can't read. Extra credit: Isn't it obvious? Cat pictures! Dog pictures! Go nuts!

Somewhere in this house, probably in one of the many white banker's boxes full of stuff for which we currently have no shelf space, is a book I've owned for forty years. I don't quite remember anymore whether I bought it from a remaindered books catalog, or from Economy Books at Shoppingtown, back before it was Shoppingtown Mall. The dust jacket is long gone, and the gray-beige cover is broken and loose. The title on the spine, back when it still had a spine, was Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs Dogs. Does that tell you anything? It should.

This was a coffee table book, a compendium of miscellaneous stuff on the subject of dogs. It had a few bits about the dog Flush, and a couple of Thurber pieces, pictures of the first dogs in space, something about dog training and something else about the RSPCA, the news that Lassie's original name was Pal, the story of Greyfriars Bobby, pictures of ancient dog sculptures and the volcanic remains of a dog from Pompeii, and paintings of dogs by Sir Edwin Landseer. (Mind you, I've just rattled all this off from memory, not having seen the book in years.)

I think my friend Cindy R. had Cats Cats Cats Cats Cats. I know she had Horses Horses Horses Horses Horses. We were in elementary school then, and horse crazy, like most girls our age. But I was even crazier about dogs, something that hasn't changed in all the years since. When I was about seven years old, I used to play with the springer spaniels next door, Sleepy and Molly. When a car-chasing collie turned up in my yard a few years later, Brad S. and I named her "Frank" and tried to teach her to stop chasing cars. (Her real name was Stormy, she lived around the corner, and, if I recall correctly, she eventually became a tripod dog.) When my mom took us to Europe when I was fifteen, Steve teased me that I came all the way to Europe to pet dogs.

But my dad was terribly allergic to dogs, so I had to get in my dog petting whenever and wherever I could, or pretend and plan and dream of the future. Cindy's family had two purebred golden retrievers, Brandy and Alexander. She understood about dogs. We both had bone china dogs to display and play with, and made up stories about the kennels we would own someday. I was going to get some pomeranians, and breed them back up to sled dog size. I frequently checked the price of AKC collie puppies in the local paper: $75 for years and years, $80 when I stopped looking.

It frustrated me that I still couldn't get a dog during my first three years in college. First I lived at home, and then I was in University housing: dorms and then The Vincent Apartments, where no dogs were allowed. But when I moved into one of ex-boyfriend Bob's rental properties on Westcott Street, my opportunity to have a dog of my own came at last. About a week later, Bob turned up with a bundle of fur under his jacket, a mixed-breed puppy he called Princess. I promptly renamed her Princess Guinevere of Westcott Street - Jenny for short.

Jenny in a rare Arizona snow, circa 1987.

John Scalzi can claim that Kodi is currently the best dog in the world, but Jenny held that title during her lifetime. She was smart, affectionate, and loyal. She loved to play with balloons, and would fetch sticks on request. She obeyed voice commands, gestures, and even whistles, all without obedience school. She hung out with me at Rockarama in Columbus, and came with John and me on our 1986 wanderings around the U.S. and eastern Canada. At the end she had Cushing's Disease, and eventually cancer on top of that. The day I had to have her euthanized, with John hundreds of miles away and not reachable by phone, was the second worst day of my life.

For about a month during my senior year in college (the first time around) I had a puppy I called Wafer, short for Wayfarer. She turned up at my apartment door one morning, and I took her in. Two puppies in a one-room apartment are one too many, though, and I gave her up to the Humane Association. When I called later, full of regret, they told me she'd already been adopted. Good.


Our next dog was Noodle. I got her from the pound in March, 1987, while Jenny was still alive but not terribly well. Noodle was a trash hound, a big, dumb dog, except for being a genius at getting a loaf of bread off the counter or yummy trash out of the cupboard. She didn't care for balloons or sticks, and didn't do terribly well with dog training. But she was affectionate, always glad to see everyone.

You know who this is. Tuffy isn't quite as smart as Jenny, nor as affectionate as Noodle, but she does all right. She's ten years old now. Her eyes are a little milky with cataracts, and I think she's slowing down a bit. John and I know that it's almost time to start breaking in a new dog.

Cats seem cute enough from a distance, but that's where I have to keep them - at a distance. Give me an hour in a house with a cat, and I'll have an asthma attack, even with medication and a freshly-vacuumed carpet. Cats probably won't rescue you from a burning building or pull you from the pond, and I doubt that they care whether Timmy's in the well. I'm not sure Tuffy would rescue me from anything, but I think she would at least bark, or go see John about it. The barking of Jenny and Wafer once helped me get out of a burning building, so I know that real-life dogs have at least the potential of doing something helpful.

So yeah. You can have a universe full of cats if you like, but if it's got to be one or the other, give me a universe of dogs any day. After all those dogless childhood years, I'm not giving them up now!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Scalzi, Weekend Assignment, Dogs

Another Evening Shot to Heck

It's been a Disney evening for me. I foolishly watched a couple of Zorro episodes, mostly trying to get a screen capture of Henry Calvin as Sergeant Garcia. He doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, and like Moochie, I think he deserves one. He played one of my favorite characters on Zorro, a very different character in Toby Tyler (which also lacks an entry), and had a great voice. I'll need to do the research first, but I'm sure I can write a decent entry for him. But first I need to get a good picture - better than this one, anyway. It's an odd thing, but some DVDs have a screen capture button on WinDVD, and some don't. I did a bunch of captures from Disc one of Zorro, but the function is disabled on Disc two. My theory is that it depends on the amount of compression they use to fit everything on a particular DVD. There was a particular scene I was looking for, about chasing "a Fox through the rocks," but I guess I'll have to choose something earlier in the series. But not tonight!

Even more foolishly, I've been watching the first Spin and Marty serial. I didn't like this series as a kid, with its all-boy cast being mean to each other. At least, that was how I saw it back then. (I watched it anyway, though.) Yes, you could say I was way oversensitive in those days about kids who couldn't get along with other kids. But I saw these again in the late 1990s on Vault Disney, and they really grew on me. Now we have the first serial on DVD. The screen capture button doesn't work on either disc, so I did a Windows screen shot and cropped it instead.

Along the way, I've made minor changes to the Mickey Mouse Club, Annette Funicello and (incongruously) Route 66 (the road) entries on WP.

Now it's late - again! - and I have a dentist appointment first thing in the morning. I'd better get my shower and go to bed.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Disney, Wikipedia, DVD

A Writer's Weekly Question, answered briefly

I'm not in the best mood and I really need to sleep tonight, so this will be a short entry - I hope!

Writer's Weekly Question #25:
Have you ever decided to throw away a piece of your writing? If so, what was the motivation?

Well, for starters, I still have this:

I'm pretty sure I don't have that story about the mouse from elementary school, the one in which I misspelled "cheeze." That early poem that ends, "Birds are our friends," exists only in my brain, unless I've blogged it in full at some point. And I don't really remember, much less have on paper, the religious blank verse I wrote in third grade (or was it fifth grade?).

More recently, I've certainly deleted individual words forever, maybe as much as a paragraph or so. But if you mean, did I ever throw away an entire novel or short story written after junior high school, then the answer is, I certainly hope not! I have two or three boxes, at least, of old writing. There are pages of false starts to old stories, manuscripts for "The Disc Jockey" and other stories from high school and college (especially Clarion) and lots and lots of drafts of what became Heirs of Mâvarin. That doesn't mean I can find the stuff easily, as evidenced by the years of looking for that old Mâvarin map I found last week. Still, it comforts me to know it's around here somewhere.

I think I told the story before of a museum in Chatham, Mass., where many years ago I saw preserved copies of some writer's work in manuscript. I decided way back then that I would keep as much of my writing as reasonably possible, for whatever value it might have in tracing the history of a particular work. Maybe nobody but me will ever care, but I'm glad that I still have pages of The Tengrim Sword from my mom's manual typewriter, and other historical and literary curiosities.

The underlying question, of course is, "Do you consider your writing good enough to be worth keeping?" The value of a manuscript or file can vary from one person to the next, one year to the next, one project to the next, and based on who is doing the judging. There are people who write very badly, and yet I'm not willing to tell them they should throw away something they worked on, especially if they out in real effort and the writing gave them pleasure. As for me, I know I don't write very badly. Even so, some of my early writing was at least moderately bad, and at least a few pieces were stinkeroos. The key there, though, is that it was early writing. Writing gets better with practice and experience, especially if you pay attention to what you're doing and analyze it as you revise.

On the practical side of not throwing stuff away, modern technology makes it possible to junk part of what you've written, and still have it available for reuse, all without filling your study with paper. When I cut any largish bit of text from one of the novels in Word, anything from a paragraph or so up to an entire scene, I paste it in a "bits" file. That way, if I change my mind later, I can restore the cut text to the main document. It diesn't happen often, but it happens, usually because the plot changed again and now the cut scene fits after all, or the old version of something just worked better than the new one.

*****


I don't think I took a single photo today, so here are a few shots of last night's sunset.


Please note that the Catalina Mountains are north from here, not west. I always get a kick out of sunset colors that show up to the north, east or south.

Good night!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Writer's Weekly Question, Writing, Sunset

Four Hours, One Sticker, Five Bucks - and other stories

I'm going to change the subject several times here.

Midnight out my Door

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show us something interesting on the porch or patio of your house or apartment. For those of you with neither, fire escapes and window sills will suffice.

Well, we don't really have a porch or a patio as such. Out the front door is a covered walk, though. We'll call that a porch. Out the back door is a concrete surface between the back doors and the pool area. We'll call that a patio. I'll give you one photo of each, and then move on to other subjects.

Front "porch": apparently the walk by the front door was poured in 1968 - by the Warner Brothers. Okay, maybe not by the Warner Brothers. We figure this was probably the same time that the front of the house was expanded forward toward the street. The house has clearly had a couple of major additions over the years, both in front and in back.

The little bit of greenery seen here is a vine that's trying to spread from the front yard into the "porch" area.

The back "patio"at midnight, with its most frequent inhabitant. The green and red metal chairs are vintage, but not in great shape. We've never quite decided what to do with them.

John tells me he has a cunning plan for redoing the back "patio" area. So far, all I know about this are that a) he had me help him with several measurements back there a week ago, and b) tonight he brought home the tiki shown to the right as part of the project he has in mind. This is no tiki mug. It's at least three feet tall. I'm hoping it's the first step toward a whole tiki bar theme - on the cheap, of course. There's a really cool Tiki bar set-up at Target that we both like a lot, but it costs way more than we want to spend to spruce up a place where it's 90 to 115 degrees a good chunk of the year - too hot to want to hang out there much.

Of course, with or without a Tiki bar, there are much worse places to be. Case in point:

Does MVD Count as Purgatory?

This is where I spent most of my afternoon: the local office of the Arizona Motor Vehicle Department. John says he put my new registration with the 2007 expiration sticker in my purse, weeks ago, but neither of us has a clue where it went after that.

So I checked online, which is where I renew my registration every year. Unfortunately, it specifically says that you have to replace the lost license plate sticker (or "tab") in person. So off I went to the MVD on the last day of July, along with many hundreds of other people.

I was there four hours. My number was F089, and at first that seemed like a lucky number to have. For a while there, all the numbers being called were F-something, starting with F068, all from a service window in the same room I was in. (This office has two large rooms, plus a testing area and a central entrance with an information desk.) Then suddenly that window closed up, and they started calling numbers that started with A and C and G, and eventually B and I. Several times I caught myself on the edge of sleep, despite the noise and the crowds.

They didn't call another F for an hour and a half. And there were a few more times when the F-numbers stopped dead before they finally got to me a few minutes before 5PM - closing time. I'd been there since 1 PM. Once I reached an MVD clerk, the transaction took two minutes and cost me five bucks.



Funny thing, though. There's a lit sign with a crawl of news, information and trivia - and ads, of course. Several times I noticed a little story on the sign about Dick Clark. The sign reported that he'll be honored at the Emmys this year, and mentioned his production company, and American Bandstand, that he's called the "World's Oldest Teenager," and that he's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The one thing the sign didn't mention was Dick Clark's first name! That was censored, replacd with ****. Okay, I understand that this once-respectable first name is sometimes the butt of vulgar humor, but really! Are they really afraid to mention the first name of this American icon? Or did some censorship program cut in, and go unnoticed by a human programmer somewhere? This crawl is syndicated to motor vehicle departments around the country, by the way.

Because I lost three hours (excluding lunch) at work, I went back there from 10 PM to midnight. I'll have to makeup the rest later. As you can probably guess, I really, really need to get to bed ASAP.

Round Robin: Summer Gardens


I'm overdue on mentioning that the next Round Robin Photo Challenge is scheduled for Wednesday, August 9th. The topic, chosen by rRose, is Summer Gardens. I'm not sure this photo is a good example for that topic, but it's kind of a xeriscape, a type of landscaping designed to conserve water. Ironically, this particular bit of xericaping was flooded this morning. I know some of you folks have magnificent gardens to show off, but if you're like me and don't do gardens, I'm sure you can find a public garden or other lovely green place.

As always, everyone is invited to join in on the Round Robin. We do have a few rules to make things run smoothly and be fair to everyone, so if you're interested, please read the Welcome entry on the Round Robin blog, and then RSVP on the Summer Gardens entry. You've got a week to get ready!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Scalzi, Monday Photo Shoot, Round Robin Photo, MVD, Tucson