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It’s hot out there

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There it is again. You could make an argument that it sounds about like any other prop-driven aircraft, excepting the DC-6 has a low throbbing growl, perhaps owing to the weight 3,000 gallons of fire retardant it’s hauling. In some respects that sound should be reassuring. It means that someone is looking out for us, yet it’s thoroughly disturbing, because you only hear them when there’s a fire nearby.

Fire season comes every summer. Around here the worst of it usually seems to be in the springtime when folks are trying to clear away brush and the tinder-dry trees have yet to get a few good rain-showers. Further north, it tends to be worse later, in large part, because of increased lightening activity and much hotter, drier conditions.

As I listen to the fading hum of the aircraft engines, I start to wonder. Is this the year? I mean, it could be. Everything is green and we’re hardly in to May. In spite of repeteted threats, the daily appearance of ominous looking clouds have failed to do more than spit a few drops of rain for the last several months. Is this the year of the fire?

I’ve lived in Alaska for over 35 years, and I can’t recall ever having had spring this early. As a child I can remember hunting easter eggs in calf-deep snow. I may have been short and it was the granular dessicated snow of late winter that has a way of working it’s way into the top of your shoe and causing ankle freeze, but it was still snow. This year, my kids didn’t have an Easter egg hunt, but if they had, it would have been in above-freezing weather without snow under the swelling buds of the birches.

For years we’ve been hearing the phrase ‘early fire-season’. It’s been said routinely enough now I reckon it’s safe to just call it normal. Every one of those years I’ve heard it, I’ve wondered if wild fire will devastate the Anchorage hillside, reaching even into mid-town, displacing tens of thousands of residents. Perhaps, it will be Wasilla instead, burning through the sprawling suburban neighborhoods and even across Lake Lucille where flaming ash could alight on Sarah Palin’s house, causing even her to eat her words on climate change.

I don’t know, but what I do know is that every year, the feeling of danger is lurking just at the edge of my conscience. Sometimes it’s just general discomfort. This year, it’s a little worse. As I drove home listening to a report of the evacuation of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a northern city with a population of 80,000, I saw a jaw-clenching sight from the highway. A column of smoke, much too close to home, rising from the patch of land between the Knik arm and the Talkeetna mountians. It was not the smoke of a controlled burn. It was a wide band heralding the arrival of a potentially dangerous wild-fire.

As I thought of those people in Canada, with so little time to gather their most precious belongings and head for safe ground, I wonder, is this going to be my lot this year too? What will we do with the animals? If I have only 45 minutes to evacuate what to I take? Where will I go? How will many thousands of people evacuate on only three routes, two of which are only two-lane highways.

It also begs the question, how the hell did we get here? March used to be a bitterly cold bitch of a month. The past few years have been pretty damn mild, really. I understand that it’s an El Nino year, a year where warm ocean currents poke much further north than usual, but I’ve been through those before. They’ve been nothing like this. Is this what we can expect from climate change? Is this the shape of things to come? Will the fires continue to close in our our Alaskan urban centers until disaster? I expect the answer is yes. In spite of all caution and tireless heroics of our wildland fire crews, we could very well find ourselves watching as any one of the most populated areas of our state burns.

I know, perhaps this is all a doomsday scenario, after all the story is hardly a 3rd line note in the local news outlets, failing even to beat out an electronic-device sniffing dog, but as I sit and watch the thermometer outside my window with disbelief, listen to yet another DC-6 rumble overhead, and wait for the golden sky to turn hues of pink and orange, I wonder just how unrealistic it is. After-all, green trees before the end of April? Who ever heard of such a thing?

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Severe writer’s apathy

For the past couple of months, I’ve taken a few tentative dips into the boiling acid oceans of literary agent querying. If I’m being honest though, it’s really more the equivalent of French-kissing a dementor and may very well be the reason boxed wine was invented in the first place. Unfortunately for me and my enormous hydrogen-filled ego, I haven’t even gotten into the meat of it yet, querying agents is just the first bit. Apparently, it gets a hell of a lot harder – the book still has to be picked up by a publisher! In any case, even from this point, I’ve still managed to collect a few observations.

First off, over the past couple of months I’ve spent all of what would normally be my writing time on rewriting synopsis, query letters, and researching agents. The ‘best’ advice I’ve received on this process is keep at it, someone will eventually be interested. In the mean time, keep writing. – What? Keep writing? With what time am I going to do this?!

Second, don’t ever tell a writer this: ‘Even J.K. Rowling was rejected 3.75 million times before finally getting published.’ THIS is supposed to make me feel better? The one thing I know for a fact about my book is that it’s not the next Harry Potter. If it practically took an act of god to get Harry Potter into print, there really isn’t any hope for me.

When I started this process, I loved Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. I enjoyed the characters, the writing of it didn’t take much time at all (comparatively), and I was chomping at the bit to start a sequel. It’s literally been a couple months and I’m starting to really hate the book. Not because I suddenly think it sucks (which it probably does by the way. See fig A.). No, it’s more like having been savagely attacked and left for dead by a beloved pet. The reason for this is that for each hand-crafted form rejection that comes through within minutes of having sent out the query, I am forced to face the real possibility that what I’ve written falls into one of a few categories:

  • This work is brilliant and nobody can see it
  • This book sucks
  • Nobody will ever buy this book
  • There is not, nor will there ever be a market for this story
  • I’m a terrible writer and should spend more time playing video games and programming

On the whole, the last category might be the easiest for me to take because I like programming and playing video games. Perhaps not as much as writing, but I will never be querying an agent for how well I cleared that dungeon.

BookFigure

Yet another observation is that many agents ask for a bio and past writing accomplishments. I don’t have any previous writing accomplishments. Loads of past writing, but nothing that could be called an accomplishment. As for the bio, someone very kindly informed me that the bio is more about you as a person, rather than your writing-specific experience. I tend to think this is, at best overly optimistic thinking, and at worst the equivalent of telling me that even J.K. Rowling was rejected so many times she had to be reincarnated before she could get published. Publishing is a business. What they want to know is: Will this book sell? and are you the sort of person to participate? My lovely bio is excellent for research or might be an asset if I were writing books about Alaska. I can not, however, bring myself to believe that it is helpful to point out that I have more hobbies than a craft-store and once seriously investigated cooperage as a hobby because it sounded interesting. As a hiring manager for a number of years, I didn’t care that much about someone’s history unless it told me something specific about how they were going to do the job. I’m (obviously) not an expert at publishing, but when it comes to business and making money, irrelevant skills are actually a huge distraction that tend to gloss over the fact that the applicant has no relevant skills. On the whole, I think my distinct lack of writing accomplishments seem to cover that ground pretty well. So, with all of that non-accomplishment burning a hole in my back pocket staring at an agent profile requesting a query letter, the first 7 ½ pages, a bio, and all past accomplishments along with the advisement that she only takes best-sellers, I’m really not super-motivated to continue.

So now, where does this leave me? We all know there’s a fine line between stupidity and stubbornness, though really it’s less of a line and more the phrase “well that didn’t go as expected” written in blood. As I haven’t discovered that point just yet (I think) and I haven’t yet spent half the life-age of the universe querying, I suppose I need to keep on it. Some folks say they get advice from agents, I have yet to get more than silence & form letters, but hey, even J.K. Rowling got published right?

achance

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Review – Book 2 of Embracing Entropy

You know what I never do? Review a book. Mostly, it’s because I generally suck at it. I want to say things like: Read it, you’ll like it. That’s not a review. I’m also one of those jerks that usually gives books I like 4-stars, with a few exceptions. I mean, like, Harry Potter, yeah, 5 stars, but most everything else I like – 4 stars. It’s just how I think. As a writer, I know nobody wants to see that, they want to see 5 stars. With that in mind, I read a book over the weekend that I want to talk about. Yes, I gave it 4 stars, and I like it and think you should read it. The book I want to talk about is a novella, Wish for survival, by Jessica Marie Baumgartner. It’s really the middle part of a trilogy of novellas that have been turned into a book Embracing Entropy which was released today (03/15/2016). I haven’t finished the 3rd book, yet.

I did a couple of brief reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, about the book itself, to be honest, these reviews are only a little bit more informative than: read it, you’ll like it. I’m not going to directly re-hash those because this blog is supposed to be about writing, and one really interesting thing about this book is the writing itself. Don’t get me wrong, the story is good too, and if you want to read it for just the joy of reading a good book, do that.

First off, it’s in first person present tense. If I were forced at gunpoint, or knife point, or just asked politely to choose a single piece of writing advice to dole out it would probably be: “Don’t ever, ever, ever write a book in first person present tense”. However, and this is truly interesting, Jessica M. Baumgartner pulls it off. It works. Why does it work? I don’t know for 100% sure, but I’ve got an opinion, but first another observation. The book isn’t just a series of events that builds to a climax where, against all odds, the hero pulls off a win. I mean, it is that, that’s what books do, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s from a completely different angle. It’s for this reason, I think, that it works. So what is the angle?

As a reader, you experience events through the ‘right now’ emotion of it more than a description of events that have already occurred. Thinking about first-person past tense, I’d argue that the focus on emotion wouldn’t be nearly so complete and might even be a little distracting. This style gives the flow a slightly clipped, raw feel, where the reader is bouncing through the emotions of the main character, it’s a bit like each event being a slightly larger wave crashing into the reader.

In spite of the unusual approach, the story is engaging and doesn’t prove a difficult read, it reads quite as well as anything else. As with so many cleverly constructed books, I did find myself stopping to ask: “What about…?” This happened to me when I read the Martian. For the first pat of the book, I found myself being not super impressed, until I realized that the writer was being intentional and, in fact, it was all very well done.

For most of us (writers), having a reader stop to ask a question is a bad sign. You don’t want that. In this case, I think that’s the point, perhaps not intentionally, I don’t know, but the reader isn’t meant to know the answers to a lot of questions. The main character doesn’t know the answers to the questions we’re asking, she’s asking the same questions, or would be if there weren’t more important things to think about. We’re supposed to be experiencing her part of the story through her feelings and the narrow band of what she can see. By the end of the book, I reached the point where I realize that the questions I was asking myself: Why are the bad guys attacking? What do they look like? What sorts of weapons are they using? didn’t matter. What really mattered was what the main character was feeling, the immediate need to resolve the right now concerns. Who cares about the motivations of the bad guys when a close friend might be dead? Does it matter what they look like if there’s no future for the children? That’s what is important in the moment, not motivations or the mechanics of the enemy weaponry.

See that? It’s the right now that’s important, and that’s why this story could pull off the first-person present tense, and actually, in order to have the same impact and feel, it almost has to be written from this perspective. We as readers are meant to be standing in the moment where we’re blind to so many of the events going on outside the direct sight of the main character.

So, from that perspective, I’d recommend reading this one. Not just because the story is solid, but because the execution of the story is unique and compelling.