Keep a record of what you're writing!

Years ago, a creative writing teacher told me about William Faulkner's method of keeping up with his characters.  Faulkner whitewashed a wall of his workroom and wrote the various characters' names and relationships on it as he worked.  When he'd finished the book, he whitewashed the wall again.  Given the density of his prose, I could certainly understand his using this method!

 

 Now, since I've created a whole universe, the lesson's come home in a big way.  I use the Excel expertise I built in the office to solve my problem.  The character list at the front of BEFRIENDING ALIENS is a spreadsheet converted to Word.  I wish I had done this for A TEST OF ALIEN ALLIANCE; the list makes it much easier for people to follow the story.

 

Now that I've helped my readers, I decided I'd better help myself.  I have a spreadsheet with a list of all the planets I've thought up, who lives on them, and a little bit about them.  In the same workbook I've set up a spreadsheet of all the space ships I've mentioned in both books, who controls them, and what they are used for.  This has proved to be a wonderful resource, and I'm going to have to add a character page for my current work.

 

If you write a series, as I'm attempting, it is horribly easy to forget people's names and the planets they live on.  Almost every series author has slipped up this way at one time or another.  Terry Pratchett has the best cover-up; he says they're just alternate realities!  Anyway, you can really get your fans confused.

 

Name mistakes like this are often subtle enough to pass unnoticed by proofreaders.  I discovered one in BEFRIENDING ALIENS that really bugs me and am hoping nobody notices it.  Tell me if you find it.

This Writing Life

Everybody needs to write - even if it's just a pocket diary.  For one thing, it's great to be able to look back and find when you last had your oil changed.  On a more personal level, it is good to log your daily experiences and feelings.  Sometimes it helps to write a rant and then tear it up.

 

Then there is the urge to write a story - any kind of story.  Personally, I have two self-published science fiction novels out through Xlibris.  This is a self-publishing company with a difference - they will sell your book on their own website and place it on the major book websites.  They have lots of other services - which cost money.  Apparently, either you charm an agent into taking your book on and selling it, or else you spend money.  One thing you do is blog about your writing and try to get tips from and share tips with others.  That's what I want to do now.

 

Book outlines:  I keep reading about those, but I can't seem to make it work.  Over the years, I dreamed up a group of science fiction characters and a giant plot arc.  From there, I go about writing a story in spurts of inspiration.  The characters have a life of their own and dictate part of the story; for the rest, I start with familiar concepts and situations.

 

The author who's been the most inspiration to me is one whose works I picked up fairly recently, Eric Flint.  He has done a lot of science fiction/fantasy types, but the one that sticks home with me is the 1632 series.  Flint is not only an excellent historian, he also has a Labor background that gives him workplace safety details at his fingertips.  The really amazing thing about the 1632 phenomenon is that he's invited and encouraged other authors - and even beginners - to play along.  Baen Publishing's online 'Grantville Gazette' has led to a series of novels and stories that touch every possible field of alternative history. I'm especially fond of his music specialist, who writes wonderful stories of 20th Century music happening to the 17th Century.

 

What I've built is a whole alternate universe.  Prudent people are now pointing out that we don't have a Planet B - a real problem that I try to help tackle in the real world.  In fiction, I've built a multi-planeted human universe with two groups of multi-planeted aliens around it.  Here I can play out passions and hint at practical solutions that would raise hackles if I tried to voice them in the real world.

 

If you write, why and how? 

Verdi's Don Carlo

I recently got CDs of this opera out of the library.  Unfortunately, I haven't yet found it possible to replace my old LP version.  Yet this opera means a lot to me - my son, too; that's his drawing - and I just had to hear it again.

Don Carlo is one of Verdi's later operas and a musically complex work.  It does not pretend to be a historical account of events during the reign of Philip II of Spain; rather, it was adapted from Friedrich Schiller's play.  Schiller, writing in the early years of the 19th century, had a revolutionary turn of mind and made the mentally challenged Carlo a would-be political hero.  Verdi, a true Risorgimento revolutionary, had it adapted for opera - all the drama he could ever want, and a lesson in liberty, too.

I, too, used this opera as a teaching tool, since I discovered my son would learn anything you could put to music.  The auto-da-fe scene, with the voice from Heaven welcoming the victims, was a great way to teach the necessity of separating church and state.  The scene in Philip's chamber, when he is forced to bow to the will of the Grand Inquisitor, is even better.  ("Then the throne must always bow to the altar," the king concludes bitterly.)

Verdi's vision of civil liberty is represented by Carlo and his (fictional) friend Rodrigo trying to get Philip to stop the persecution of Flanders under the Duke of Alva.  (This particularly vicious persecution, combined with the actions of the Conquistadors in America, ruined Spain's reputation in history.)  

I find it particularly fitting that the ghost of Charles V plays a pivotal part in the opera.  The fink who founded the Holy Roman Empire did withdraw to a cloister before his death.  In the opera, he has remained as a spirit, posing as a friar.  "The woe of the world follows us to the cloister," he intones.  "Only heaven can calm the war of the heart."  My son's drawing shows him calling to his startled grandson.  To have a good operatic ending and satisfy an old revolutionary, he appears if full regalia to Philip and the Grand Inquisitor and drags Carlo off to the safety of the cloisters.

This is wonderful, multi-leveled music, with especial beauty in the horn parts.  The characters - too many to mention here - are well drawn and believable. 

 

My New Book

If I haven't been around for a while, it's because I've been working on the publicity for this new book written under my pen name of Norma Druid.  I've actually got some publicity of the thing this time around!  My son Lawrence did the cover for me, so I've even got a great cover going for me.

 

Dailymotion        : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/56059050

Youtube               : http://youtube.com/watch?v=SXdDPc12_vs

Metacafe            : http://www.metacafe.com/w/9857436

Here are three websites for my book trailer; I'm really pleased with it.

I've also done an interview with Toginet Radio, which you can find at toginet.com under my name in their library.

This book is a prequel to A TEST OF ALIEN ALLIANCE, and I've included in it all the things I didn't first time around, like a list of characters and chapter headings.  Since this book covers 20 years and an entire galaxy, I needed a lot of characters.

Basically, it is the story of a doomed diplomatic colony with one ten-year-old survivor.  Did the aliens they were liasing with destroy the colony - or was it somebody else.  Only ten-year-old Licinio knows the truth, and he would never get the chance to tell it if he hadn't befriended aliens. 

I have also stopped trying to sell retail craft supplies at peaypatch.com.  It just wasn't working.  I continue to sell items on ebay and have great hopes for this book.

 

The "Free Market Entrepreneurs" & the World They Made

My Father's Memories

A bit later, 1931 as I recall, my maternal grandmother took me along with her to the Hippodrome on West End across from Centennial Park to see a 'Marathon Dance Contest'.  Today I remember the dancers, moving like the sleepwalkers they in fact were, and the recorded dance music they were supposed to dance to.  It was an outstanding example of The Free Enterprise For Profit System at work, and one I have never forgotten; poor out-of-work men and women going through the motions of dancing almost without stop for days until only one of the couples was able to more or less stand on the floor.  These completely exhausted people were then rewarded with, I think, one hundred dollars.

 

The Free Market Entrepreneurs, following time honored custom, charged viewers (most of whom were only marginally employed if at all) a dime to view other poor out-of-work people so desperate as to engage in this legal torture.  What a system, and so strongly supported by the poor!  I'm sure the promoters all made money on the deal, which produced not a single thing of value to a suffering society but had the virtue to be an example of the free market system approved by God - or so the Bible thumping preachers all declared.  I should like to point out here that a dime then would have purchased a loaf of bread and would have been more humanely spent.  But the gods of the market place had spoken, and the prosperity we were assured was just around the corner remained there.

 

The economic destruction of the first world I hoped to grow up in is clear in my mind.  The concernit brought to my childhood home was of huge proportions, and I can still hear my father, closeted with mother in their bedroom at night, crying aloud "What am I going to do?".  Then the deply concerned voice of my mother would reassure him "god will provide a way".  Indeed, in the passage of time a way developed and, if it was not quite the way they would have liked, it was a way to make a living and keep the family together and educate me - not a bad deal in those horrid days.  I was there, and the churches could not help, for their members were as bab off as any.  The state could not print money and was flat broke as well.  What happened?

 

What happened was the 1932 elections, and FDR became president.  While the righteous and the Republicans tried hard to blunt everything he did, we began a slow recovery.  How the church people hated FDR and the New Deal, but all who could took the Relief offered, the CCC and the WPA jobs they preached against even as they ate the government's salt.  It has been a long lasting lesson to me, and I know how the Christian gentlemen then returned good for ill.  Nearly all tried to bite the hand which was feeding them.  I may not remember much, but that I will remember as long as I live.    

Last Time the Rich Hijacked the Economy - My Father's Story

These are my father's memories of the money woes of the 1930s - caused by the same type of people who are doing it today.

 

  Most know the movies were silent until the late twenties and that color came to the silver screen in the late thirties, but I doubt they grasp the shock most of us experienced the first time we heard voices from the screen.  What these folks don't understand is how hard it was to come by the 15 or 20 cents required to get in a movie house if one went early in the day - at night the cost might be as high as 35 cents, a staggering amount then for a picture show.  By the time I was scrounging for picture-show money, most workers were fortunate to be making twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, and there were a dozen men for every job.  The thirties were hard times, I can tell you, but for fifteen cents one could dream in a movie and forget the hard times for a while.

 

If one was laid off at work, there was no unemployment compensation nor job bank to turn to; you were on your own in a non-welfare state.  Until the FDR years, there was no minimum wage law, and you worked for whatever a business was willing to hand out.  These were indeed the 'good old days', but only for a very few.

 

The economic difference between the twenties and the thirties was almost one of daylight and dark.  Hardly anyone really understood the 'stock market crash of '29', surely not us children, but every home I knew of suffered greatly, and even we kids knew the world had changed indeed.  For adults, the crash and the resulting depression (which forever altered the meaning of the word) was a life or death struggle, and quite a few of them never made it.  My family was more fortunate than many, for, while Dad was out of work for some time, he did land a career job in the Madison Water Works.  The loss of the home on Fairfax was a disaster he never got over.

 

In the first years of the '30s, I was able to see a host of men and young boys 'riding the rods' as hard-time hoboes.  I had not then heard of Woody Guthrie, but I knew the bad times he wrote about.  Mother fed many of these formerly well off people on the back steps of our home.  They, and the people I saw at the improvised soup-kitchens set up in Centennial Park are still clear in my mind.

 

And we have people in Congress who would see us like that again.  Raise your voice!   

What My Parents Told Me About Religion in Public Schools

Okay, I've about had enough.  I opened my email today to find this notice from Faithful America:

And speaking live on Fox News, Mike Huckabee said that this shooting happened because "we've systematically removed God from our schools." He added, "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end, and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done."

These words are an insult to the victims, an embarrassment to sincere Christians, and a dangerous distraction from the national scourge of gun violence. Hateful and unchristian rhetoric like this has no place on a major television news network.

 Going to public school in the 1950s and early 1960s, I was exposed to plenty of prayers, special assembly sermons, and hymns with accompaniment - many of them contrary to what the Church of Christ taught and disturbing to me.  When the same rhetoric started up while my son was in public school, I decided to take a private poll of my parents.  Both went to Nashville Public Schools in the 1920s and 1930s.  Did they have God in school?

My mother recalled an occasional scripture reading and one address by a missionary just returned from China.  She also recalled a teacher stating that all the apostles were Baptists, which made her very angry because she was a Lutheran.  Regular prayers and Bible reading were definitely not part of her schooling.

My father's memories were even odder.  He could recall no scripture reading, public prayers, or religious assemblies that had made any impression on him.  What he did recall was that, when he attended Ransom School in the 1920s, the morning assembly always included singing of "Aurora, Goddess of the Morning".  How this came about, I don't know, but it caused no uproar from either Christian or Jewish students.  (Ransom at this time had a large proportion of Jewish students.)

Actually, I think Religion in School must have finally turned up when we started worrying about Godless Communism.  I remember well that I had just learned the Pledge of Allegiance when Eisenhower added the two new words "under God".  This was just like a grown-up, I thought, changing things when you'd just memorized them!

I was always taught the supreme importance of separation of church and state, and I saw for myself how religious exercises could make difficulties in school.  One year at Jere Baxter, we had Christmas and Easter pageants.  Being of the Church of Christ, I was forbidden to participate in these.  My mother arranged that with the teachers.  I felt cheated, of course - all those costumes!  The next year, no such pageants were presented.  I suspect this was the influence of the ever-vocal Jehovah's Witnesses, whose children attended public schools.

For certain, we have not always had the Bible and piety in public schools.