Speak, spake, spoke

I love dialogue. Or do you spell it dialog?
With one quote mark or two?

It's how people talk and that's the problem. Writing it whilst in the middle of a scene playing in your head, the words sound fairly normal. We like say like yeah you know like it's what I'm tryin' to tell you.

You hear people talking that way and in the scene, it sounds very real.

Read it back and wonder, 'what the fuck was that about?' Single quotes.

Or in italics.

The italics is a form that naturally didn't exist before the word processor was developed. The italicized word was underlined through a process that involves the wheel, axle grease and a backspace key.

I think stories are driven by dialogue, with a touch of 'he pinned the gardenia to her blouse' while he stared at her chest, proclaiming "My, I love the way you have your hair up."

"Thank you, I think," she implied.

Of course, the actions are considered trite and pointless. The 'she said' is good enough but not very often because the experts tell you it drags down the scene. You just need to plop in a pronoun here and there so you can tell who's being snarky and who's being Costello. 

And Who's On First.

It's cadence and if dialogue doesn't seem natural, just condense it to a paraphrased scene and move on to the moment she exclaims:

"Just because I let you put the flower on my blouse doesn't give you the right to have tricky fingers, buddy-boy!"

"Sorry," he whined.

Dialogue from my prospective Best-Seller "Tooth of Toad."

Hilly and Bonny are at the mysterious shed.

*

We found the same dirt pull-in from before and I could see the shed on the other side of the hedge apples that had looked so forbidding in the dark, even with an experienced witch as my guide. Same rusted fence posts, same little pathway through the cocklebur patch. 

“OK, Hilly, my honey bun, here’s our shed. I brought the journal, so we can do some real work there.”

“Is that the same journal you mentioned earlier? We gonna make the wheel spin?”

“You wanna? It’s broken. Grab that wooden slat over there,” she pointed. “We might need to swat down some spiders.”

“I thought witches were friends to spiders.”

Bonny gazed at me. “Maybe your witches are but they scare the fuck out of me. Be my hero, Hilly, and kill any that you see.”

“Another illusion, shot to hell.”

She stopped short of the shed. “If you hear anything, let me know.”

“Any limitations on what that might be? I mean, there’s a little plane flying this direction. If you listen close, you hear the train horn over by Bradley Lake.”

“Don’t be a butthead, Hilly. It needs to growl first.”

“Spiders don’t typically growl, Bonny. Screw this, let me kick open the shed and murder anything with eight legs or fangs.”

“Fangs would have a bad attitude, Hilly. Spiders are just creepy.”

x

Back-reading

I have a lot of manuscripts in my computer or on a flash drive. All of them were written in a voice or a point of view that said:

These are fun books. Read them and enjoy the stories. The stories aren't important and the characters are not supposed to inspire you to think. Occasionally, the dialogue hints at a form of self-appraisal. If not, oh well. 

I tossed off a version of "The 8th Soul" on a couple of people who instantly told me the story was confusing and that they didn't know what the main character's 'job' was supposed to be.

At that point, I realized the road toward legitimate publication goes through some small towns. 

"The 8th Soul" is a story about a newspaper man named Jim, his girlfriend cop named Mint, some unsolved murders and their quest to find the killer, the motive or the method. None of those are apparent.

What is left is the unknown. Clues come from places right next to that.

I have a lot of work to do on the story, and it's useful to know that spending a few hundred dollars just to make me feel better about a book is sort of -- well, what else do I need to spend my money on this year? 

The back-reading is useful to me, but it doesn't fix anything. 

More useful now are people who claim they have plenty of writing time to also have plenty of reading time. We can't make our work better without help. Establishing our objectives is important.

A blurb:

Sharon Sanders and Mary Baker, cousins.

Not sisters, as we first thought, and residents of Ravenswood Mobile Home Estates, as we first thought.

"Not hookers, not really,” Mint told me over the phone. “They owned the trailer and would meet guys in bars, or wherever, and take them out to Ravenswood to party. We found evidence of marijuana in their blood but nothing else that could have killed them. No wounds, punctures. It’s hard to tell, though, if somebody was just scared to death, literally.”

"That’s consistent with what Todd Murphy found on Coo.”

"Um-hum,” Mint said. “Todd’s a good coroner. He isn’t likely to miss anything unusual.”

"Mint, can somebody really be scared to death? I mean, yeah . . . fright might trigger a heart attack.”

"Todd would notice that.”

"Right, so what we have is . . . what?”

"Honestly, and I say this out of a total lack of expertise, I’d say these women have simply been removed of their life. It was like . . . if you open a can of beer under water and hold it there. All the alcohol will flow out of the can. Then you take the beer out of the water and pour it into a glass. It looks and acts like beer, but there’s no alcohol in it. So when you drink it, it tastes like . . . nothing.”

"The alcohol flows out?”

"It just rises, separates itself from the rest of the ingredients.”

I considered the experiment. “I might try that. So, what you are saying is, the alcohol is effectively the soul of the beer.”

"Nothing quite that philosophical, but what makes the beer a beer is that it has some alcohol in it. Otherwise, it’s just liquefied grain.”

"So the gray people snatched the women’s souls.”

Mint laughed into the phone. “I thought you told me Coo didn’t have one.”

"I just said she was a bitch at times.”

All said what?

Incoherent rant:

Or, the art of knowing when people are just full of it and noticing who doesn't know the difference.

The health crisis has, of course, created an event that has never happened on any level ever. No global economy has ever existed on this platform and no platform of any sort has ever collapsed. Godzilla is a piker.

Even if it's resolved soon (whatever that means to you) there is nothing about the future that will be the same. It's just a clock, churning onward.

The fun part, I suppose, is writing about it in advance and knowing that there was only one George Orwell, one Jules Verne, one Aldous Huxley. Those who point to literature and affix a sense of premonition to those works are stretching the point. You can make any prediction you want. Observe the real world, add some nuances, some hyperbole ... you got your dystopian society.

I suppose I will endeavor to contact people who will somehow claim they will work with me to improve my writing, which doesn't make any claims at all about being able to predict the future. To that end, fuck the future. There are no editors, no readers, no nothing. They expect you to treat them well so long as you give them permission to treat you like crap.

I find it interesting, though, that benign comments that do indeed project the future are mostly overlooked. Such comments are the future. Pay attention to them and who says it. The nuggets of your life are embedded in the flippancy of the people who rule your life.

Is the cure worse than the disease?

What the hell does this mean? It means the wealthy and connected are considering ways of doing to you what they always did.

We keep listening to people who don't have answers, only solutions that benefit them. I will fix mine and here's a list of shit you can study in case you want to fix yours.

Meanwhile, they will build the wall across the Mexican frontier.

Because they said they would.

This is not about government control. This is about the absence of government control. You are entitled to be rich, but you don't get to play by the same rules. You are not rich enough.

Madness

Percy sits poised on the edge of his chair in the kitchen, his 12-gauge shotgun at his side, loaded and primed. He gazes at the wall where the thing hangs. He calls it a thing because it's there to steal his soul.

It will soon lure him near, and he will pick up the receiver. A voice will enter his ear and move slowly into his brain. He will go mad and the voice will snatch away his soul and send it tumbling across the wires, where it will land and lay devoid of meaning. The soul will turn to dust and Percy will be eternally lost.

I just got a phone call from a spammer who hung up when I answered. I have no idea if the spammer (maybe it wasn't a spammer, but a scammer) connected with my soul. It was perhaps a long enough call to have achieved that. They know who we are now. We aren't safe. They can find us, even if we aren't in the phone book. They don't even need a phone book now. They just call us. We answer. We're victims, lost in a world owned by aliens. We need protection.

Once, the telephone was a marvelous new invention. I found no references to it in 1875. Two years later, Bell's masterpiece was the talk of America. Since then, the telephone has been one of the most useful tools in story-telling because it allows for conversation. And blackmail. Mostly blackmail.

Or threats. Or other scary stuff. Don't answer the phone!

Percy was right. Aim the shotgun, Percy ... and blow the damned thing to smithereens.

It's not like life at all

I recently read an allegory by Johanna Stoberock called "Pigs," about a group of children on an island that is the world's receptacle for all its trash. The kids gather the garbage and feed it to the pigs, who eat anything.

There are grown-ups on the island and a disadvantaged man named Amos. And a boy named Eddie. A few other interesting things and symbols you'd recognize.

The interesting part of the allegory, not unlike the fabled "Animal Farm" by Orwell, a thoughtful foresoother, is that it is one of those 'it's just like life' premises. Everything means something.

Like baseball, which somebody tried once to tell me was a lot like life. I wondered how that was and his answer was that, like life, some things are the product of luck.

Baseball, as a chameleon for life, is a horrible example. Unlike life, it's on a field with the parameters established. The rules are clear. The participants have been selected.
If you chose 18 people off the street and found enough to play a game, those who didn't decline because they don't know the rules, you'd start with the rules.

Inside that, you could project luck to some degree if you didn't factor in skill.

Skill is always better than luck.

Creative ways of describing the life experience are what makes literature enduring. All the way back to "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Alice," writers have found interesting ways of exploring the politics of their time, both social and economic. The Yellow Brick Road is not just a song.

But the pigs that eat everything also leave something behind, and the author of that book didn't mention it.

You can't leave out the parts that don't fit the narrative.

Hi, we love diversity

"It only serves to make sure we can separate ourselves according to our differences because after all, we're the same inside."

Barnes & Noble, that big fake library on the edge of your favorite shopping plaza, came up with a brilliant idea at the beginning of February. They took some 200-year-old books and colorized the characters on the front covers. By colorizing, they made white people brown.

Critics said it was 'literary blackface' and came equipped with the are-there-any-smart-people-in-the-room?

B-N said they were just celebrating Black History Month by turning Captain Ahab into Captain Crawdad in hopes that little pickaninny kids would roar in and take a gander at Herman Melville's classic tale about a black, er ... white whale.

The company maybe beefed up its overall sales by doing this but it's likely that was in spite of the ill-advised (stupid) decision. As one critic put it: Were there any people of color involved in the discussion? It's like, the way to prevent a bad idea from happening is to ask people who are inclined to have an alternate opinion.

As I said in my days in the newsroom: Somebody has to take the other side.

Still, B-N pulled out of the deal after of course producing a number of books that might get sold before they get shredded. Seeing Frankenstein's Monster turn black with envy knowing the contents of the book are still white as rice ... I mean, what kid wouldn't want a black Dracula as his role model? Drac didn't go black, but he was in the shadows at the time.

There are a lot of stupid ideas and not all of them should be left in the conference room. There are a lot of people who walk out of these conferences thinking, "Wow, we did society a service. We're about diversiity."

Um, don't try to fix what's not broken. Forcing people to be diverse is racist.

It just is.

All politics is local

A very long time ago, I wrote a smut novel about a young woman who decided to run for mayor of her city because the incumbent had been in office her entire life. The premise was that the young woman had no political party, no real political agenda and no reason to even begin the process.

She was just out of work and wanted the job.

I put a lot of dots in a row and came up with the idea that she'd have to win a primary in order to be taken seriously in the November election. As local stories go, there's not much separating that novel from a lot of real political scenarios across the country.

At times, teenagers are elected to run their cities, all of which contributes to the overall premise that government is gridlock and that the people who run government are just actors on a stage.

It's the stuff of legend, the corrupt senator who is trying to evade detection by somebody who knows that the senator can ill afford to watch his empire crumble on the backs of a few white lies that ended up in somebody's chemical discharge into Lake Watapinkus.

There is not much about that trope that intrigues me now. Politics isn't about corruption; politics is about political parties. Knowing what the party wants is what matters to the candidates.

It isn't a very interesting topic anymore. And to use the current political backdrop for nurturing fiction is at best amusing. I'd move on to something more sinister -- and if you can't find that inside your mind, you aren't paying attention.

The art of politics is about manipulation of money, fondling the data and projecting. The problems are that the money is hidden now and there aren't limits on who spends it or where it comes from. Nobody is being polled now and the polls are designed to make the political parties look good.

Even the most objective analysis of politics is based on guesswork.

That has nothing really to do with writing, does it? Dunno, what if she just needs the job?

Dracula, scarier than the movie

The fabled Bram Stoker novel "Dracula" has become the "Kleenex" for horror writing, and since it's likely nobody who knows the story has ever read the book, to say it's about the stereotype ... yeah, he's sort of the guy from the cartoon.

If you have no idea about the book, it was written in the late 1800s by the Irish novelist and from all I've learned, was considered great literature for its time, but a commercial flop. Several reasons for that, but the main was that Stoker's character was too damned compelling to ignore.

So everyone wrote their own version of it and as the new century turned into a form of technology with the advent of the motion picture, the character came to life. Stoker died broke. Everyone had stolen his story.

Sad that his own masterpiece sucked the blood out of his creation.

Bela Lugosi -- not the real Dracula

What's emerged since that 120 years is a pithy repetition of the vampire, a sullen creature with latent homosexual tendencies and an urge to overpower helpless females. God forbid, romance writers can't profit from that!

Dracula as a character is an asshole. He turns his solicitor Jonathan into a virtual prisoner and makes plans to spread the wealth of bloodsucking across all of London, not unlike that of the capitalist banker who ... oh, ever mind.

Stoker's work has been analyzed. It's pure genius. It's scary as hell. Read it. Stop inventing new forms of the original.

Here's an excerpt, which might deal with the Count and might not. It's early in the book from the log of a ship that crashes ashore in a brutal storm.

... and in the dimness of the night I saw it, Him! God, forgive me, but the mate was right to jump overboard. It was better to die like a man. To die like a sailor in blue water, no man can object. But I am captain, and I must not leave my ship. But I shall baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and alone with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch. And then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain.

What was IT, you ask ... 

Don't write a vampire novel. Respect the greatness of the original Vlad the Impaler. 

Being sick in a book

The best way to remove characters from a novel is to have them die.

This can be achieved in several ways.

1. They can be murdered, which is necessary in a murder mystery.
2. They can die in a war, which is necessary for almost any book.
3. They can be killed in an avalanche, flood, earthquake, asteroid attack. That's pretty handy in an opus.
4. They can die of a disease, which usually happens as a means of creating sadness, angst or a sense of indefinite helplessness. I tried to save him but he was too far gone.

What we seldom see in books is attempts to save the infirmed. Oh, the good doctor orders up some tea or chicken soup, rest and "keep him warm and comfortable. The rest of it is in God's hands."

The crap about God intervening or having a role is useful because a recovery, regardless of how predictable, can be attributed to prayer or a divine miracle. Divine miracles, when actually in use, can make a difference in the outcome of the whole book.

What's missing are remedies that transcend chicken soup and herbal tea. Those deal with the bowels, the kidneys, the liver and continence overall. Do some research on this. You will learn that patent medicine killed more people than it cured.

Carter's Little Liver Pills are still around. You just need to watch more television.

And become a complete idiot by doing so.

Still, if you want realism in your books, going to the bathroom regularly can keep your characters alive. Although, asteroids might be a slightly more complex problem. The remedies are still being sold on the internet and on offbeat cable TV programs, mostly by borderline actors or sideshow celebs.

The doctors are mostly scoundrels who've managed to retain their licenses by convincing the AMA that they aren't doing any harm.

The difference now is that one traveled by horse and wagon in the olden days. This is not a character to be overlooked. At times, the treatment is more interesting than the outcome.

And it only costs $1.

RWA ... the bane of romance

Over the last few years, lately (2020) more pronounced, comes an internal battle with the arcane Romance Writers Association, which has been universally panned, dissected, drawn, quartered and burned at the stake by almost everyone.

It's easy to do that when you have people patting you on the back for joining in on the torch-burning procession up Frankenstein's Hill.

RWA is one of those demagogue organizations that was set up to promote an agenda and allowed the agenda makers to change the rules. Chief complaint evidently is about racism.

Well, that is the chief complaint about everything now. Success or failure depends largely on which side of the fence you choose to stand. Even if you don't have a fuckin' idea about racism, you get to have an opinion about it. If you don't have a fuckin' idea, the people who are being racism-ed will surely let you know this. (You can't know what it's like to be ................)

To RWA's credit, they've apparently come out publicly saying they intend to address the problem. That's not good enough for the steamroller faction, which insists that RWA is lying about that and the proof is .......... well, somehow out there.

Women of color or indefinite gender are the heroes of this story, since they apparently are the chief victims. The regular (white, racist, southern) writers are the villains because they allowed this culture to exist and thrive.

I reckon that's true.

Romance as a genre contains 4 characters -- the two would-be lovers and somebody on either side of that line who either promotes the relationship or is determined to see it fail. There's not much of a story line beyond that. They skip over the plot to get to the sexy scenes, then pretend they are doing the plot again until the climax, where HEA or HFN happens.

Being angry about how that happens is the current trend. The gayness of it all is apparently abhorrent to RWA and lord-forbid, a "colored" perspective should emerge.

The Inuits of northern Alaska are yet to weigh in on that, but as a representative group, RWA has caustically overlooked it in favor of Paula Dean southern fried chicken and the 21st century version of Rhett Butler.

Whatever RWA does to fix its image will never be enough, the critics say, because it will have been a sham and a superficial lie that will re-emerge later on. Of course, it's impossible to not be a member of this group.

Everybody else just thinks they need to file a lawsuit, which never fixed anything but the lawyers' bottom line. It's always better to sink the ship than inspect the cargo before it sails.

The Inuit are interested in seeing their romance stories explored. Anybody advocating for them this year?