Alma Alexander

(…yes, I’m in the middle of it. Why do you ask?)

Here’s the thing. First drafts are supposed to be awful. HTat’s what they are FOR. You simply give yourself the permission necessary to WRITE BADLY if you have to, for the purpose of getting the bones of the story down on the page. There will be time for fixups later. So you do this thing, and the story comes out, and there it is, staring at you. And yea, verily, in your mind’s eye it was ever beautiful – and it’s still marginally lovely – but now that it is outside of you it begins to be glimpsed in its true shape. And there. Are. Imperfections.

Let’s see. THIS can be tweaked. THAT can be fixed. THIS OTHER THING needs to go, really. SOMETHING ELSE needs to be written, and added in, to add clarity.

You know the drill.

For most of us, the architecture of the town of FirstDraft is familiar, and I have no real doubt that we’d probably recognise one another’s FirstDraftTtowns fairly easily. But a strange thing happens when each individual writer leaves the city limits, en route for the wilds of SecondDraftia. It’s a sort of dimension portal, and it sends everybody to a different place, unique to themselves, full or peculiar traps and difficulties that are never quite found in the same shape or form in any other writer’s world. To paraphrase a well-known bon mot, all First Drafts are kind of rotten in a similar way. Every Second Draft has its own unique problems.

Different writers react to the art and the craft (and it IS both) of rewriting in their own peculiar ways. Some tell me that they enjoy the act of rewriting and editing far more than they enjoy the actual storytelling – because for them the telling of the story is the hard part, and now that they have that, in however awful a shape, for them the real fun begins, and that is actually chiselling this raw and barely recognisable slab of marble into a real Michelangelo’s David, chipping away one tiny flake of marble at a time until it is all perfect and polished. Others, – and oh dear GOD I fall into this category – want to tear their hair out at the roots at this point. Because the story, you see, it is TOLD, and yes we who feel this way can SEE that it isn’t without flaw (NOTHING ever is) but in some senses it IS perfect, it has a shape and a form and a balance inside our heads, an changing ANYTHING tends to have consequences everywhere, and you are faced with continuity issues from hell itself, and AAAARGH.

It’s the difference in tone – having a character say something as simple as “I’m sorry” in a different tone of voice, an inflexion that might change it from an empty phrase of cold indifference (I’M SORRY but I couldn’t care less really) to a genuine and sincere sympathy (I’M SORRY that your goldfish died. I REALLY am.) – well – it changes that character. And it changes the way other people respond to that character. And THAT changes other conversations. And that changes what people might have known, and when they might have known it. And THAT changes the flow of the story. AND that…

Well, you get the idea. Before too long, you pull out one thread and you realise that you are suddenly hip deep in the Big Muddy and it’s all falling apart around you and you’re scrambling to hold together in a coherent whole something that looked perfectly solid just a moment before. It’s like the cement holding the story together suddenly turns to jello on you and the edifice starts tottering precariously and oops, there goes a piece you really didn’t want to lose but argh it doesn’t fit any more, and dammit, there’s all those words on the cutting room floor and wasn’t tehre something important there that you absolutely need to salvage – or rephrase – or do something constructive with…

 

Pardon the mess.

I need to go back to my own reconstruction now. There is a glaring piece of continuity error that I need to address right now.

And you know what the worst of it is? It’s that if you’re good enough you’ll end up with a seamless piece of prose that doesn’t look like it’s been tinkered with, that looks like it’s always been perfect, that it was born this way. A reader who never saw the original will NEVER KNOW. And they shouldn’t, that’s part of the point, but while you’re in the throes of working as hard as you know how,trying your damndest to change your beloved tale from passable to good or maybe even from good to great, you know that THIS part of your job is always going to be done alone and in the dark and without reward. It’s just a hard slog. Yes, knowing that there is something worthwhile at the end of it all helps but in the meantime you’re working on your own in the dark with a flashlight held between your teeth and with the right tools ALWAYS just out of reach in the shadows.

I am hoping that this thing I am working on now is going to fledge very soon, and that it is going to be an eagle, soaring high and powerful up there in the open skies. I’ve got a good story here, I know that much. I am trying very hard to make it better, and it can always be better, I know that. But still – this is one of those things that I will be glad to HAVE DONE and that I am far from happy to BE DOING. With luck those of you who might read it one day will never know what I changed, how I tweaked, what I had to lose and what it was necessary to graft on. And please, for the the sake of everybody involved… if you should happen to see a little dust on the floor, or a stray broken bit of a past imperfection littering the floor at the feet of the completed story statue, be merciful, and forgive. And kick it discreetly someplace out of sight.

Chisel in hand. Back into the fray. See you on the other side.

Well we writers are often asked were we get our ideas. So I thought I’d look around and see what caught my mind’s eye right now, and this just goes to show, EVERYthing is grist to the mill…

***
It’s Fall again, but this year it kind of snuck up on me. I don’t know if it’s just that this summer has been really bizarre (we kind of had our October in late July and early August, to the point that there was a snarky widget floating around the Internet which said something like, “Searching for Pacific Northwest Summer/Error/Season Not Found”) or if I’ve been doing other things and had my head down and no time left to look for the first turning leaves – but hello, all of a sudden we have… autumn. The leaves which I failed to notice changing are starting to litter the back deck; today has been one long drawn out mess of wind and rain with no end in sight, the first windstorm event of the season has ALREADY knocked out power to parts of the neighbourhood that I live in, from 8AM yesterday to something like 1:30 AM this morning which is a substantial power outage – and we haven’t hit OCTOBER yet. It’s been a long cranky summer, and autumn promises to deliver more of the same.

And yet… I can’t help it. I LOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR. When the sun does come out it’s crisp and cool, and everything turns golden, and apples are out, and the sky is that perfect peculiar shade of autumn blue which doesn’t really happen at any other time of year because it simply doesn’t have the red-and-gold backdroup of the fall foliage to set itself up against and preen in its cerulean glory. People start complaining that the days are shorter – well, yeah, they start getting that way, and that means that the twilight comes earlier and the lights go on, and everything turns into a scene from some strange suburban fairy tale with the golden gleams coming from windows and outside house lights reflecting off damp driveways, and the quiet sense of things starting to feel drowsy, ready to close their eyes and dream their way through winter that is coming. I don’t mean I am particularly enamoured of Halloween decorations coming out in mid-September, but that isn’t AUTUMN, that is pure naked commerce, and I refuse to let it spoilt anything at all.

So. Even today, then. I’m sitting here looking out over a wild wood, swaying in the wind, with rain lashing into the trees. And it’s Fall. And I’m weirdly happy.

***

The other day I had to go to a gathering of local writers and give a talk on stuff – the State of The Industry and All LIke That. I don’t really get that much of a chance to play dress-up, so I dug out a pair of heels which I wear pretty rarely – not that I wear heels very often because they tend to make my feet hurt in both the long- and the short-term (I wore pretty high heels to a friend’s wedding just over a year ago – the friend in question is Jewish – if you’ve never danced the Hava Nagila in high heels I would advise that you don’t try – it took me a fortnight to get feeling back in my toes…). But these particular high heeled shoes were a special case. I remember that I bought them at a heavy sale for some RIDICULOUS price, they were (for whatever reason) being practically given away, but they’re Italian shoes, they’re really rather beautiful, and they are (more importantly) well-balanced, so that it doesn’t FEEL like I’m standing for hours with a pair of chopsticks stuck into my heels. And I wear them for special occasions, and so – well – out they came.

I discovered that something was wrong fairly quickly because I kept on getting caught on the carpet, like a cat with too-long claws. I’d take a step and either the heel would be caught so solidly that it almost pulled the shoe off my foot or else the carpet tried to follow my shoe as I lifted my foot off the ground. Upon examination, it turned out that there was a sort of small nail in the heel of the shoe and on both the shoes it had come out of the heel itself or the heel had worn sufficiently down for it to protrude to the point that it became a carpet hook. So, no problem, I packed up the shoes and I took them to a shore repair place to get the matter attended to.

The shoe repair person took one look and barked, “How OLD are those things?”

Reader, it would appear that I now own a pair of Obsolete Shoes. Because lo, the heels are not DONE that way any longer and have not been done that way for some time, and it would take something pretty special to fix the thing so that it would be wearable again. I would have thought it was a matter of pulling out the old nail, chainging the heel pad, and putting in a new nail to hold it so that it was flush with the heel surface – but what do I know, and apparently it is more complicated than that.

I don’t know how to feel about that, really. Those shoes are vintage 1980′s, it isn’t as though they had dragged their heels (heh) around since before the war. But if my shoes are that old, that obsolete, that throw-away-able, jeez louise, how old and throw-away-able am *I*? What happens when some nail in my own carcass comes loose and some doctor looks at me and barks, “How OLD is this body?”

That wasn’t the first time I had this brush with “mortality” – a decade or more ago a visiting young child who was being given a tour of my family’s home with his parents was introduced to my teddy bear, the one which had been given to me on my first birthday on which occasion he was bigger than ME. I still have him, threadbare and belowved, the old-fashioned kind fo bear with the articulated limbs and the solid sawdust fileld body and buttons for eyes, and the only place you can now see his original brave golden colour is on the remnants of fur behind his folded ears. In any event, the kid was told that the bear and I kind of shared a birthday, after a fashion – since his was counted from the day that he came to live with me. And that the bear would be turning thirty six years old on his next birthday.

The child turned round and horrified eyes on me and spluttered, “How… how old are YOU?”

I still have that bear, as it happens, and in a couple of years’ time it will be turning fifty years old.  That’s a grand old age for an old teddy bear to reach. I may have to throw him a party.

He’s still here with me… but I suppose everything has its hour.

I’m gonna miss those obsolete old shoes. I am, really. It isn’t that I wore them all that often, but they were a pretty pair of dress shoes that I thought I could always count on, and now… well… they’re not there any more. Unless a miracle happens and I find some old-time cobbler who still has a supply of old-fashioned heel nails at hand to fix a pair of old and loved shoes which I am so very very loath to lose…

***

Hey, go take a gander at some of the Amazon reviews that have accreted to the “Midnight at Spanish Gardens” book here. Some more reviews are coming in soon (I know because the reviewers have been emailing me to tell me to keep an eye out for them) but those that are already on the Amazon site are from readers… and I’d love more… so if you are hankering for something new to read on your Kindle (or, well, visit Snashwords for other e-reader types – and the book is also available electronically through B&N) go pick up a copy and leave me word of what you thought. I’ll be here, waiting. And if you’re wondering what else I’ve been up to of late, check out the Alexander Triads (the first two – “Once upon a fairy tale” and “Cat tales” – are available both on Amazon and on Smashwords. They would LOVE a nice review from a friendly reader, too…

***

Happy reading. Happy Fall. See you next month.

 

 

 

I… have a new book coming out. As in, the day after tomorrow.

I got a bit busy, with promo and stuff. I was doing interviews, guest blogs, what have you, for most of this month. In fact – and here’s where the value for money comes in – you can go here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/534046.html

and you’ll find links to a bunch of guest blog essays for various blogs, a handful of interviews, and more are to come – so if you go and you like what you see, keep an eye on that blog because I’ll be posting further round-ups there as things happen.

But in the meantime – the new novel.

It’s called “Midnight at Spanish Gardens.” It’s about a real place, a place that once did exist, a magical place. A place where the Veil Between teh Worlds is very thin indeed, and it is easy to step through it, and into a strange new world. And in case you think I haven’t been busy enough with the direct guest-blog-and-interview blog tour promo, I’ve also been doing a series of blog posts collected under the tag “Veil Between Worlds” and you can go read those essays here:

http://anghara.livejournal.com/tag/veil%20between%20worlds

It’s all about the special places of our lives, the special experiences. Let me tell you some more about the cafe called Spanish Gardens – I wrote about it in an essay, and this essay eventually became the foundation of the new book. I give you… a glimpse behind the Veil:

 

AT THE SPANISH GARDENS

Evening. You walk down a shuttered street; there are “Closed” signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past. Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you’re likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn. The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist – I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, the Spanish Gardens.

It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn’t look anything like a garden.

The outside is utilitarian. The door is  an ordinary metal frame with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening ( late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight is not kind). Next to it a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like you see in cafés or neat suburban kitchens,  leaving the top part of the window open; through it, you can just see the top of the till. Through the glass door you can glimpse a narrow room, one side taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as you would find in a deli, the other crammed with a couple of narrow tables covered by red and white checked tablecloths, flanked by old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them exactly alike. Over in the corner, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hang signs indicating this is the way to the toilets, a tall stool with a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. Sometimes, Friday or Saturday nights, there are people here strumming guitars, singing songs like “Starry Starry Night” and stuff by John Lennon.

There doesn’t look to be enough room to swing the proverbial cat, but next to the first table there’s an arched opening, and there is another room beyond. It has a further cluster of red-check-tablecloth tables and mismatched wooden chairs. There is a large blackboard on one wall, on it graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display; above the entrance archway a picture of a bullfight, a charging black bull, a matador in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, just about, if you don’t count the guitars.

The tables have smoky oil lanterns, the old-fashioned kind. There is other occasional lighting but it’s muted, covered in shades which make the light reddish, dark. In that light the inside metamorphoses somehow. The floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows in this second room are covered with a thin, cheap red material – upholstered with it, almost, a whole wall, a gathered fall of red curtain. In a more garish light it would look cheap and contrived; in what light there is it looks mysterious, theatrical, inviting.

The glass cabinet out front has delicacies on display, and you can order pies and puddings from there. You can order burgers and fries, and pasta, and it’s all cheap, because a lot of the people who come here, who pass the knowledge of this place in whispers from senior to freshman through time-honoured secret channels, are students. But the cheap and plentiful food is not the only reason that the Spanish Gardens is famed. This place makes the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

You would come here for your celebrations – your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of the event is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose (I was taken there twice, for that purpose). You go there in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees (“Keep ‘em coming!”) and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner wove his way through “House of the Rising Sun” on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you could remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, “Ah, yes. I know the Spanish Gardens”.

It’s gone now, it’s been gone for many years – the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, the picture of the bullfight. It lives, however, still. In me; with me.

Ah, yes. I knew the Spanish Gardens.

 

 

You want to come visit?…Well, you know where you can find ME. My main website is at www.AlmaAlexander.com  and I I blog regularly at http://anghara.livejournal.com  and if people want to get to know the real me that’s the more dynamic site right now. I’m also on Facebook .

Happy reading. Enjoy your summer.

My own most recent experience, with a just-finished novel only now beginning to make its rounds to beta readers and agent and such, illustrates  an interesting point.

Readers like rogues.

Think about a more famous situation than my own story, right now. Think Star Wars. (No, the ORIGINAL Star Wars, not the latter three abominations.) They had their protagonist all nicely set up – there he was, a pent-up wannabe hero-boy trapped on a nowhere-world just waiting for a chance to show his mettle in a situation where it matters. And lo, he is given the chance – off Luke Skywalker goes, to seek his glory and to get his girl.

But oh. Wait. Enter Han Solo, stage left. And people kind of grin and sit up and raise their eyebrows, and we’re off. In that deathless scene where they rescue the Princess from the prison cell even she is instantly and immediately sarcastic to Luke who kind of stutters and stammers and yanks off his stolen startrooper’s helmet and kind of babbles about being there to rescue her. Yes, Solo stammers and babbles too – but he ends HIS stint at it by simply blowing up the com link. Enough talking. Let’s DO.

Off goes Luke, seeking Jedi-ness, seeking wisdom, seeking Yoda, doing yoga on a steamy jungle world and getting metaphysical revelations.Solo?… goes off on adventures. The adventures get him into trouble. And yet even when Leia and Luke and the cavalry come to rescue him from Jabba’s Han Solo is still the man of the hour and everyone else is just dancing to his tune.

He’s a rogue. Just keeping this genre – so’s Captain Mal in Firefly. So’s Captain Kirk, really (when was the last time he played by the rules?) Inigo Montoya. Captain Jack from Torchwood, anyone? For that matte, Doctor Who? Paul Atreides?

As the saying goes, nice guys finish last. They seem to be difficult to write believable stories about, stories which show them in the best possible light without putting the reader to sleep. It seems we aren’t – at least when it comes to fiction – interested in reading hagiographies; we like a little bit of spice to our protagonist, to know that our lead character is capable of doing something underhand if it needs to be done while staying  BASICALLY honourable and upright.Don’t get me wrong, there ARE villains, and there are places for villains, and we loathe a properly moulded villain as we should – and there are signs and portents telling us who the truly BAD people are in any given tale so that we can respond to them in proper vise. But there are people for whom we root, instinctively, passionately, BECAUSE they  have a Past, or have a Secret, or have a Flaw. The Rogue. The Bad Boy. The one that comes in dressed in black leathers riding a Harley and waits, silently, while the heroine looks from him to the wet-blanket hero who’s standing there wearing a white had and whining about how he deserves her undying devotion and then turns her back on the white-hat and runs, not walks, to the promise of danger and excitement and adventure and not-quite-safety that the guy on the black bike represents.

Shifting into a slightly different genre… It’s no accident that Elizabeth Bennett falls for Darcy. It’s no accident that Jane Eyre runs to Rochester. It’s far from an accident that Cathy can’t let go of Heathcliff. It’s no accident that in so many romance novels the hero is less than holier-than-thou – at the very least until he meets and is tamed by our heroine’s devotion and goodness – the surfeit of goodness that she carries, because it has to suffice for BOTH of them during the happily ever after which will ensue after the consummation of the romance. But dammit, that’s what keeps it INTERESTING – which romantic heroine worth her salt wants to spend the rest of her days with someone who is ALREADY all nice and reformed? What’s the challenge in that?

When I was creating my own “bad boy” character, I was writing about a young man in his late teens who has been damaged by a number of things that happened during his formative years. He was uprooted from his original home and his family, he is failing at something that the rest of his family consistently succeeds at, he is racked with guilt over his perceived role in his older sister’s death, and when he takes matters into his own hands and tries to put things right everything goes spectacularly wrong for him… and yet so far every beta reader who has picked up this story has a consistent favourite character, and it’s this guy. He’s a rogue, you see, and rogues (especially those whose intentions are basically okay-to-good) attract us all because there is some part of us all that thinks that we, as readers or viewers of a story told in a book or seen on a screen, have the actual power to wade in and rescue these characters from themselves somehow. And failing that, their adventures, even if filled with heroic and catastrophic failures, are that much more EPIC, more fascinating, than the good boy’s stepping up all bright eyed and bushy tailed to receive his little gold star from his teacher for a well-done piece of homework.

In a well-told story, characters change. With a protagonist who is poisonously good to begin with, that change cannot go anywhere at all that is remotely in the right direction – that kind of protag cannot get GOODER than he (or she) already is. With a rogue whose heart is in the right place… well, there is always the possibility that the call of the Dark Side will prove too strong, of course, but the far more tantalizing possibility is that things will go the other way, and we root for that… and in the meantime, we enjoy the hell out of the journey. With a rogue possessed of charm and wit and the occasional leavening stab of bright-eyed malice, life is never dull.

There is a whiff of something that smells like Redemption, and we are suckers for Redemption. Even the most cynical of us lapse now and then and believe in a smidgin of it. It’s hardwired into us. The basic underlying plot of any tale is the road to redemption, someone’s redemption. It makes us feel better to see it, to sense it, to be a part of it. Rogues have more fun – always assuming, of course, that they won’t slide all the way into the pure evil on the far side.

Which book are you reading RIGHT NOW? Does it have a rogue in it?…

Muggers are a fairly common occurrence in my life. And I kind of welcome them when they come, despite the drama and the inconvenience they bring in their wake.

No, I am not talking about the guy with the gun in a dark alley, desperate for what meager pickings he might glean from you in the shadows. No, I am not talking about the snub-nosed man-eater crocodiles of India. I am talking about the stories that sneak out of the woodwork when you aren’t looking and, well, MUG you – they sit there between you and the screen (which bears traces of your having tried to do something quite different) and leer at you and whisper, “Me. Me. Write ME. Everything else can wait.”

When people ask writers where they get their ideas, these ideas are often not mentioned or given short shrift – and perhaps that’s because they are impossible to transfer a knowledge of to somebody who’s never been a victim of one. Mugger stories are triggered by the most incredibly unbelievable things, a stray word, a phrase out of context, a line of song lyrics only barely paid attention to, a glimpse of a creature vanishing into the woods, a set of tracks on new snow, someone (jokingly) asking a silly “what if” that pushes an unexpected avalanche of thoughts down quite a different slope than the original question-poser might have intended. What they generally have in common is that the moment of inspiration is a subliminal flash, that some connection gets made instantly and generates a large electric spark, that they are IMPOSSIBLE to forget or lay aside once they have appeared, and they tend to be written very quickly, leaving trails of fire behind them as they accelerate away. And they will quite often be the best things you will ever write, which is so cruelly unfair to all the other things which you have put oodles of thought and planning into and which fade into insignificance while these comets of inspiration streak across your sky.

One of my mugger stories turned up when an anthology editor posted a note on his blog that one of his keynote authors had had to drop out because of unavoidable reasons and he was chewing his fingernails – there was a set of ideas he needed to have conveyed in a keystone story, and he listed them, and lo, the mugger stalked out of the night and parked on my shoulder and began whispering into my ear. I wrote that story in less than two hours, sent it in to the beleaugured editor immediately, and had confirmation of a sale less than 24 hours after that. It made my head spin, it did. That just happened again, recently, with another anthology which I had originally had no interest or inspiration to submit to – but something that an editor said struck something THIS time and the spark was there without my quite knowing how it had appeared, and yes, here we are, another mugger, written and sold in the space of a handful of days.

To any muggers waiting for me in the year to come – hi there. I’m looking forward to meeting you

…I am thinking of honey.

More to the point, of harvesting the honey.

My grandfather used to keep bees; so did my great-uncle. That was a thing that the two brothers had in common – the basic activity – but the way they went about it was very different. Great-uncle had a bee-keeper’s gloves – I cannot be certain now, it was too many years ago, but I think he may even have had a proper beekeeper’s hat. Grandpa… had nothing. Grandpa would open the lid of the hive, roll up his sleeves, reach in bare-handed and haul out the honeycombs – and the bees would swarm on him and around him, crawl on him, hum, be wary, but never ever ever sting him. They’d sting my DAD, who was just standing there kibbitzing at one time without being anywhere near the hive at all but he got half a face that looked like an over-inflated basketball for his pains while Grandpa calmly put the honeycombs back into the hive, put the lid back on, and let the bees get back to business.

I’ve never seen it done but I’ve heard of beekeepers who were able to stick their entire arm up to the shoulder into a swarm of bees hanging from some tree, grab hold of the queen, and transport the entire swarm safely to a new home without losing a member of the community or getting one sting for his pains.

Then there are the African bees, whom we had the, um, pleasure to make the acquaintance of during our sojourn in Swaziland many years ago. We never did find out where they were based – all we knew was that for a really painful period of time we had to stop up every orifice in our house (we stuffed cardboard boxes up the fireplace to stop them coming in there), and going out of the house for any reason became a race between us and the bees who would attack anything that moved. They disappeared, eventually, as mysteriously as they showed, but they caused our then-gardener to yelp “Madam! Bees” and then, in full and mystified sight of my mother and myself, take off at an Olympic sprinter’s pace and clear a six-foot fence with daylight to spare in order to get away from the angry hive of swarming bee-shaped velociraptors intent on his hide.

Writing can be like that, sometimes.

Often you just work the hives with all the required paraphernalia (and yet you STILL get stung sometimes. They’ll find their way through, the little so-and-so’s). Sometimes, and for rare individuals always and they know no other way, you simply *know what to do* and for those watching you doing it you’re performing miracles – hauling vast beeswarms off of trees or stealing honey without the bees being upset about any of it. And sometimes you’ll get attacked and driven away no matter what you do, simply because you’re THERE and you don’t ought to be.

Bees are ideas. They’re stories. They’re words. Handle them right and they’ll come up with honey. Push them, dismiss their presence or their message, treat them wrong, and they’ll turn on you. And sometimes they’ll just turn on you for no discernible reason at all and sting until you run screaming from the field with your arms protectively around your face crying out, “I give up! I give up! I’m going now!”

I’ve been having trouble with a troublesome swarm lately. My arm feels a little warm, inside that swarm, and I believe that means that I’ve been stung several times. But I also think I have the queen held between my respectful fingers now, and that all shall yet be well.

Excuse me while I tiptoe away and try and settle this particular recalcitrant swarm into that brand new hive I have had waiting for them for so long. And then I’ll go put salve on my stings, go have a glass of champagne, and wait for the honey.

If you’re the sort of writer beekeeper who does likewise with your life and career, I wish your bees a safe home and a good harvest to come.

Happy new year.

When I was young, we travelled on European trains.

They were old-world trains. They had compartments (think Hogwarts train). You wandered down a corridor, peering into the glassed-in compartments, seeking space; sometimes the grey utilitarian institutional pleated curtains were drawn, blocking your eye, and those compartments you passed quietly by; other times you’d catch the eye of some solitary occupant, and there would be a lift of an eyebrow, a minute nod, and you would push aside the door (they were more often than not often wooden, too, back then – no squealing metal in here, just the velvet rush of wood on wood in its groove) and lift your small square suitcase – no wheels! – up onto the rack, and sit down. You might strike up a conversation with the stranger. You might not, simply sitting there staring out of the grimy windows at the passing scenery, your chin cupped in your hand. There’s a photo of me somewhere, doing just that, a child with her elbow on the narrow windowsill, her eyes distant and unfocused, seeing who knows what. The seats were upholstered couches – at least in the classes that we travelled in – with ramrod stiff backs – no such namby pambyness as reclining seats here. You sat up, with your back straight, like a gentleman or a lady should.

People would take packed lunches – boxes or baskets of carefully wrapped cold chicken, or salami, or sandwiches, and sometimes a piece of apple cake or an actual apple for dessert. Good wholesome food, cooked at home by mothers and grandmothers, lovingly packed, gluttonously consumed when you got hungry. There would be a conductor with a peaked hat and sometimes a salt-and-pepper moustache and round glasses – or was there only one of those, and he went around all the European trains, a super-conductor (heh) who existed only in hyper-relativity space, like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. He’d come in with a punch attached to his belt with a silver chain, and punch a hole in your ticket, and tip his cap to you, and walk out again. And you would go back to the scenery, or perhaps playing a game of cards on the back of a suitcase fetched down from the rack for this purpose, or a book.

And night would fall outside, like a curtain, and things would fade away into the darkness. You’d see just lights passing by, like fireflies, enigmatic human habitations flickering like distant suns in some unknown galaxy, just as mysterious and far away as those stars in the heavens. Sometimes the moon would be full, and there would be a spill of old-gold or bone-white light on the landscape, casting eerie shadows. And then you’d pull into tiny little stations you often never even knew the name of – but they were home, for somebody, because you could see people getting off the train, or hugging those left behind on the platform as they climbed in. And then there would be a shout – that bespectacled conductor, hanging off the steps of one of the carriages – and the train would begin to move again, slowly, jerkily, leaving the flickering lights of the tiny station and the lives it harboured behind in the night. (There was a perfectly wonderful story about an Eastern European football team who was travelling by train into the heart of Europe for a match, and they had delegated one of their number to keep an eye on what stations they were stopping at – but every time the train stopped the poor sap would look out the window and announce they were stopped at Station Ausgang (which, of course, means “Exit” in German) until someone else woke up to the unlikely fact that they had just passed their sixth Ausgang in a row and while it might be conceivable that there might be several places with the same name it was probably not going to be six places strung out one after another on the same railway line… by which stage, of course, they were way past their intended destination, and the game they were supposed to be on their way to play had receded into history…)

If we travelled by night, we took a sleeping car. The private compartments would have attendants who would come by and politely turn the couches into sleeping bunks; somebody would always have to climb the velvet rope ladder and tuck themselves into the top bunk, just underneath the ceiling, where you couldn’t sit up without braining yourself – but I tended to be tucked into the lower bunk, with my ear against the soft lullaby of the wheels on the track, something that lulled me to sleep on many a night. Quiet, melodic, rhythmical, occasionally skipping a beat as the train passed a place where rail lines met, or a siding turned off, or a switch waited to let us through – ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-tat-tat-DAM, ta-da-ta-dam… And I slept, and I dreamed, and stories came crowding like night butterflies with midnight-black wings spangled with stars.

Those days, I suspect, are long gone, even in Europe, in these modern times. Trains today look more like the Amtrak trains that crisscross America – and THEY look rather more like an airliner cabin than the trains that rumbled through my childhood, and what’s more are proud of that. Brochures show lines of seats in an open compartment, just like in an airplane. People don’t really do the kind of thing that they used to – it’s kind of difficult, and not a little embarrassing, to be seen unpacking a lunch of cold chicken and apple pie out there in the open where anyone might look and judge and scorn. You go to the buffet car instead and you buy coffee in cardboard cups too hot to hold, and those tiny single-serving pizzaz which you KNOW are bad for you for a half-dozen good reasons, or sandwiches industrially wrapped in cling-wrap (turkey and mayo, chicken and pesto, roast beef… oh, sorry, we’re out of roast beef…), or large chewy chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies which leave you still hungry moments after you’ve finished crumbling them with your sticky fingers. People are more likely to sit there with earbuds in their ears and nodding to music only they can hear – taking isolation and insulation where they can, in the absence of the privacy of those compartments – or, worse, talking loudly on the ubiquitous cellphones that everyone seems to be carting around these days. Cranky babies or toddlers in the train car? Too bad, the parents are going the same place you are, you’re all going to be sharing this car for the next five or six hours, and the kid probably won’t be quiet for more than thirty minutes of that as (s)he falls into an exhausted nap to replenish their energies for the next bout of cranky they’re about to generously share with you. Sleeping cars are available, but all too often priced out of anyone sane’s budget – so you sleep sitting up, knees cramped against the back of the seat in front of you just like in the worst airplanes of your nightmares. Sleep, if you can; if there are no people bickering in the seat behind you, or there is nobody who’s imbibed a little too much and has lost his off-switch and doesn’t even realise how loud and obnoxious they’re being, or somebody who’s started to hum annoyingly with whatever’s playing on his iPod without even realising that they’re doing it.

But outside the land still passes by, in sunlight or under the moon, with rain leaving streaks of water on the windows or with nothing left to look at but the reflection against the outside darkness of the pallid overhead lights in the cabin or (if they’ve dimmed those) the occasional glitter of someone’s overhead reading light somewhere behind you.

When I travelled to Japan a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, a long sinuous double-headed white snake of a thing, pointed at both ends, whooshing along at hundreds of miles an hour. You barely have time to look at anything out of the window, there – you glimpse something and whoosh, you’re past, and its way over there behind you. I was in Tokyo as a typhoon came roaring down the throat of the city, and the trains were stilled until the storm passed, but there were shots of them on the news, hunkered down and gleaming wet in their berths in the rain looking like a nest of sleeping dragons; once they were released again and we went to board ours, it was an entire cultural experience. They ran like clockwork – they remained in any given station a precise number of seconds, and the doors would open at a predetermined moment, and close after the requisite number of seconds had ticked by, and it was your responsibility to be on or off that train in that period of time. The trains did not wait for the tardy. There was a confectionery seller in the shape of a young Japanese woman in a frilly apron and kitten-heeled shoes and her glossy black hair tied back in a huge Minnie Mouse ribbon – she would push her cart into the train car, bow politely to the passengers at large, serve those who indicated that they wanted something, and then, on the way out, would turn and bow respectfully to the oblivious backs of the seats facing away from her, a bow which no passenger would notice or see unless they were specifically looking (as I had been) before pushing her cart into the the next train car to repeat the procedure. The signs by the doors, where we waited to disembark, at the ready, knowing the short stops in the stations, were a precious mess of entertaining translations – my favourite was the English version of the sign underneath the emergency brake – “If you pull this you will be inquired by the crew”.

Sometimes I miss trains. I left an uncounted number of sunglasses on European trains, I left books behind (by accident or design) in my wake. I picked up the debris of meals, both homemade and purchased on board. I dreamed many a dream, asleep in my lower berth listening to the train sing to me.

I learned of land, and of sky, and of light, and of motion, and of people.

Stories. Stories, everywhere. Lost, in a train of thought.

Oh, please. It’s October. There’s “gravestones” in every suburban garden. The spiderweb/ghoul/pumpkin/candy/spookycreakynoises day is almost upon us, and the dead are about to rub their eyes and wonder if it’s time to wake up, after all.

Graves are a natural, given the time of year.

We have a cemetery not too far from us – some ten miles or so down the road. It’s one of the most obnoxiously CHEERFUL cemeteries I’ve ever seen – in spring, its main gate is awash in nodding daffodils and scarlet tulips and the cherry trees within the cemetery itself burst into bright extravagant bloom, and when October rolls around the trees around the perimeter and along the alleys within the cemetery itself turn all sorts of wonderful colours from burnished lemon yellow through bright orange bronze into deep russet reds. It might sound rather morbid to say so, but it’s a joy to take a walk in this area in the fall, actually, especially on one of those crackling cool autumnal sunshine days when the sky is an unbelievable blue and all the hues of fall pop against it just crying out to be photographed. I”ve done just that, many times. The place is nothing if not photogenic.

It also contains plenty of fascinating stuff in and amongst the graves themselves. There are a whole bunch of gravestones in there which are no more than a plaque – often moss-overgrown, when it comes to the older ones – set into the sward with simply the word “Mother” incised into it. Now, that’s all very well, but dear God in Heaven, *was that all that she was*? Who was this mysterious “mother” sleeping in the ground here? Might she also have been someone’s daughter, sweetheart, lover, wife? When was she born? When did she die? Was she a doting grandmother when she passed from the mortal sphere, or was she a new mother with babes in swaddling clothes left behind her in the world? There’s a STORY here, an untold one, and it bugs the storyteller in me something terrible. Inquiring minds want to know, as it were, first and foremost my own. Of course, given that there are no details whatsoever might also imply that I am free to make up my own version of this poor woman’s life. That could work…

There are other stones.

Poignant ones, which you pass by and you read the inscriptions and you find yourself tearing up. You pass by the stone marker, all askew now, and you take a closer look at the dates of birth and death… and you realise that the human life which this stone commemorates lasted less than a year, that the small body lying underneath this green grass and the soft autumn leaves was a babe in arms, that someone somewhere loved this baby enough to raise her this memorial. You wander pass a stone which gives only a name, a couple of dates, and a single incised line of two words: “Only sleeping”. There’s a stone – for a woman who was born in the late 1800s and died in 1934 – which has a balloon attached to it, which says “happy birthday” (someone’s optimistic. or someone loved this woman very very very much).

Then you get the amusing ones. There’s a stone in our cemetery which says that he who lies underneath it rejoiced in the name of “M__ Person” (I’ll redact the names. They may be dead but Halloween’s coming. I don’t want them after me) – as in, what else would be lying here? A beloved horse?… Then there’s a family monument, all marble and fake stone torches alongside the great slab, which bears a family name which begins with “Fuss” (no kidding). There’s a stone which trumpets that underneath it lies a “Distinguished Author, Scholar, and Renaissance Man of the 20th Century” – followed by a three-line-long quote by the great man himself which, um, doesn’t really add much to the equation – it says that man alone of all creatures can determine the fate of his species. The fact that it kind of leads inexorably to a graveside is, um, ironic. There’s a REALLY disconcerting one where a small cherub standing by the graveside blowing a horn is, um, holding the horn up in the required position but is minus a head bearing a mouth with which to produce a sound on said horn. Headless cherubim blowing the Last Post are kind of… interesting…. as and of themselves.

The thing is, for a certain small subset of people a graveyard is where a story ENDS. For those of us who come after, wandering the paths in golden fall sunshine and glancing at the graves, it’s where stories BEGIN. There are so many stories here. So many. Grave matters, to be explored, extrapolated, discussed, woven into tales.

Really old European cemeteries are even more interesting – the kind where the stones themselves have been worn away by time until all you can say with certainty that the buried one died sometime in the 1600s, for instance. And then there are other stories, like Greyfriars Bobby, for instance. I still think that it was churlish to refuse to bury the faithful dog with his master on the grounds that he was an unbaptised cur. They could have sprinlked holy water on the mutt and muttered something baptismal, if that was what it took. PLease don’t stand there and tell me that dogs have no souls and don’t go to heaven – because if that’s true then I don’t want to go there either. So there. All the holy rollers can have it all to themselves, without the joy of a wagging tail or a prodigious purr to leaven the long days of Eternity. There’s only so much angelic singing that you can do before you’ll probably wish you were dead all over again.

I suppose this particular meandering discourse might fall under the general heading of “where do you get your ideas”. Sometimes, other people bury them for you, and you can read just enough of a hint on a listing ancient grave marker they left behind to finish the story in your own inimitable way.

Happy Halloween. Don’t let the ghouls get you.

Just the other day an editor I like and respect – and have sold several stories to – wrote this on her blog:

“Some good stories but not good enough to send up the line. Most stories start too slow to catch my eye. More than one, if I’ve past the first or second page, I think, “This would’ve been a great story if it started here.” In other words, get to the point already.”

And I know what she means. I do. I do, really. But in one sense she conflates “slow” and “badly paced” – and I have to take a step back here, and speak up in defense of “slow”.

Yes, a story should have a point. Tales that meander all over the place – tales that go no further than internal angsting of the characters – tales that basically consist of a beautifully described setting (yes, Author, we know you love the place, but be done, already…) – these are stories which I have never personally been able to engage with at all.

At some point I christened them “New Yorker stories” because every time I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of New Yorker ‘literary’ fiction I’ve kind of found myself swimming with these myopic literary sharks, taking random bites out of anything because they can’t seem to focus hard enough or long enough to actually be dangerous. Don’t getme wrong, I’ve read stories labelled as ‘literary’ before and some of them were deeply brilliant. But on the whole, I do prefer my stories to be, well, you know, GOING somewhere, and taking me there with them. So yes, a point would be good. A point is essential. A story has to have something to TELL me, and something within it to change the characters who inhabit it to the point that I can tell that this has actually happened.

In many cases it is a purely beginner mistake, made fairly often when you are starting out on your writing life. You kind of wander into your story through a side door and poke around the place for a bit until you find yourself comfortable enough to get on with telling the story which you came here to tell in the first place. You grow out of it; experience soon teaches you to recognise when you’ve started a story in the wrong place, and confidence born of writing and writing and writing more will let you make the hard decisions – to abandon the side-entrance and the lingering in the back corridors, in favour of coming in through the front door with verbal guns blazing, as it were.

But this is a fairly specific problem, and “strating in the wrong place” is not the same as “slow” – because slow can be beautiful, and a story that is all point and nothing else is just as awkward and uncomofrtable as one that has no point at all.

Slow is depth. Slow is taking the time to know your tale. You take your story out and ply it with wine and roses by candlelight, you don’t slam it against the wall in a back alley and have your wicked way with it without first asking its name. Slow is waking to a perfect tropical day in a beach resort, wandering out to the verandah and stretching languorously as you watch the sun glitter on perfect pale-blue waters… and then remembering that you came here with the love of your life, that he wasn’t in bed when you woke this morning, and that he said that he might be wanting an early morning swim before breakfast, and that you’ve just caught a glimpse of something thrust under your door and half under the rug, a note from resort management which, when you pick it up, warns you that a hungry shark has been seen close to shore and that you should not go into the water until the problem has been sorted out. Cue ominous music.

But without that slow – without that first glimpse of paradise – the point of the shark is kind of lost. Unh, yeah, sure, there’s a predator in the water. But far more importantly than that, there’s a PREDATOR in PARADISE – and without the slow, without the establishing shot that gives you that paradise to begin with, all you’re left with is the monster.

Think of all those horrible B-movie slasher films, with bucketloads of fake blood and monsters killing for no particular rhyme or reason except that, im, it’s Halloween or something. There is no “slow” there. No subtle. Nothing but the bucketloads of fake blood and the teenage scream queen who’s about to become hamburger. Now think of some of the more subtle Stephen King efforts, where you are lulled by slow, where the small and pretty and innocent and innocuous Maine towns which King loves to set his stories in hide some ghastly horror beyond imagining – made all the more horrifying because of the way that it comes in and leaves bloody footrpints of Point all over the carefully and painstakingly manicured lawns of Slow.

In other words, it isn’t the slow that the problem. It’s a lack of proper pacing, a lack of sense of just enough “slow” to set up “sharp”. Give slow a chance to catch you, because it is the slow that will hold you in the end. The point, however brilliant it is, is sharp and swift – it stabs, and is gone. The slow, it lingers, and twists, and prolongs the pain and the pleasure, both.

Speaking for myself, I build worlds with a loving touch – I like to think I am the kind of writer who can make a reader forget for just an instant that the story that they’re in is really just a stage play and all that surrounds it just stage scenery, painted plywood. To make the reader forget this just long enough to start believing in the truth of it all, to make that reader look at a painted forest and begin to feel the breeze picking its way between the trees, just barely stirring the leaves, lifting strands of the reader’s hair as though with tender fingers, to hear things rustle in the undergrowth.

I am a slow writer, a writer of slow and subtle. I’m kind of proud of that.

We’re going to take a step back this month, harking back to a question left at the feet of the “Eternal Questions 1” essay at the end of March.

In that piece, I wrote:

“It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.”

Then a comment asked, “The part that seems tricky, though, is where you talk about providing the “because” while leaving the “why” unstated. Any chance you could talk on that some more?”

So here we are, at the Why Fork, figuring it all out.

When we are very little, “Why?” is the ultimate question. (Oh, come on – you’ve all met the three-year-old who can keep it up for an hour…) And it’s legitimate – we need to know. We’re new on this world. Inexplicable things happen every day, and have to be questioned, and let’s face it, adults are sometimes sadly lacking in the explanation department. “Because I said so” leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t enough, when we are young, to know that the sky is blue – it’s brand new to us, that sky, and for all we know there IS no real reason why it shouldn’t be burnt orange or lime green, hence “why?”

But that is the beginning of the question, the shallow end of the pool, the very start of the road just before you come to your first Why Fork. It’s explaining the fundamentals, defining the parameters of a world. However, once you’ve taken your first turn down that first fork in the road you discover an interesting thing.

Answering a question may not satisfy you at all.

An answer may merely lead to another question. And another, and another, all the way down. And the deeper you go, the more complex the questions get and the harder it is to understand the answers.

“Why is this so?” is a basic building block of the scaffolding one needs to build a world, any world, because this is an empirical why, and there are usually answers which are cogent and to the point and can be used in a relatively scientific manner. But “why” is a multi-purpose question, and it’s when it dips its toe into the pool of philosophy and human motivation that things get really interesting.

Because – and this is important – there are NO EMPIRICAL ANSWERS when it comes to a human being or that human being’s motivations. There is no such thing as a right answer or a wrong answer. There is just an answer which is appropriate for the context and the timing of a patricular question, and this answer may change in time as the parameters of the question do.

Understanding this is important in building characters in fiction. The character and their story, you might say, are the brick-and-mortar, the stone, the shingle on the roof, the support beams, the great cathedral ceilings, the windows, the passages, the arches, the gates. You are bulding that story, brick by brick, stone by stone, slowly and with care – you are an architect of an edifice of dreams. But what you really have to have in order to build this solid thing… is a scaffolding of glass.

You will ask many questions on your way. Each answer you receive, or find out, or fight for, will provide you with a piece of scaffolding on which you can stand in order to build the next layer of your story. But these answers are not PART of the story. They must not lodge into the brickwork and spoil the patterns you are trying to achieve. They support your edifice while it is being built. Your reader will know when your next brick has been placed properly and with care; they will see that brick being cemented in, THROUGH the glass, and in an act of literary alchemy they will be able to discern the correct motivation for a character’s action because they’re seeing that motivation through a layer of support which is not in the actual story at all.

It’s hinted at, implied, you can feel its presence and you know its sturdy support is what’s holding the whole thing up – but you aren’t thrown out of the story by tripping over its rubble on the floor and stopping to examine each individual piece of the evidence. A great character is partly transparent, so that the reader who encounters that character may see the inner workings of a mind, but not so transparent for every action to be utterly predictable and boring.

The best kind of see-through scaffolding is to portray an event which doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything at all… and then use that event to shape a character in a manner which provides an answer for some action of that character’s some way down the line in your story.

Spoiler for one of my books here – and yes, I have used this example before, but it just FITS here –

I did something like this in “The Secrets of Jin Shei”. In the beginnings of the book, establishing character, I described one of my eight protags (who is still a child here) as someone who is so enamoured of the tenets of honour and courage and a sense of noblesse oblige that she takes on superior numbers and a superior force in defense of something weak and unable to defend itself. She didn’t defend that weak and defenseless object – in this instance, a kitten – because she was particularly attached to the object itself; it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

It is the principle of the thing that explains to that particular character, and the reader, why it is acceptable for her to lay down her own life, much later in the book, in circumstnaces which do not remotely resemble that first scene… until they suddenly, savagely, do. Until that scaffolding falls away at last and you, the reader, realise that you know precisely how and why that character is going to respond to a certain situation – because the scaffolding has built her in a certain way and there is nothing ELSE that she can do and remain herself. You, the reader, have NEVER asked the question “why” at this point. That’s because the scaffolding has already supplied that. What you get, in the story, is the answer, not the question which you never knew that you were really asking.

It’s this art of second-guessing a reader’s questions about a character and then providing the answers to those questions already built into the story itself, giving the reader those answers before they have the chance to be stopped cold by a question which pops up cold at an inconvenient time, that makes a story flow, a character become an intimate acquaintance about whose fate and welfare you as the reader passionately care about and are invested in. In its most fundamental form you will hear people pontificate to new writers: SHOW, DON’T TELL. And that’s part of it. Because you are SHOWING the answers, one little bit at a time, letting the reader piece together themselves what their original questions might have been.

Yes, this is a hard one to grasp, and tougher still to explain. But trust me, if you getit right… you will know it. These are the moments where you stare at your page with a frisson of astonishment and you wonder how on earth your story was clever enough to weave itself into this particular pattern.

But you wove the pattern. With the questions never quite asked. And the pattern is all the answers that your readers need.

The deeper you go, the more complex it gets.

Have a care, heading off the Why Fork. It might lead to deep and dangerous places. But you go there so that your reader does not need to – and if you tread gently, and know how to sidle past the traps and the alligator pits, the road will take reader and writer, both, to a destination that’s nothing short of breathtaking.