J. Anderson Coats

Took the Boy to see Religulous this weekend. He's a big fan of the documentaries, so he loved it.

I did as well, although I dislike movie theatres with an intensity that borders on mania. (The crowds. The greasiness. The smell.) I'm not even that big a fan of movies in general, but this one was too good to pass up.

An amusing moment was when the Boy surveyed the tickets and remarked anxiously, "I'm not sure these are right. I don't see our seat numbers on them anywhere."

I think this is the third time the Boy has ever been in a movie theater. Once for Nemo, once for Sicko, once for Maher. Movies are not his thing either, unless they're documentaries.

Although I must admit this film was borderline inappropriate, so people who aren't more-or-less bolshie with regard to what might be suitable for ten-year-olds should be forewarned. (Although the kid did point out that all the "adult" themes in the film were covered in Genesis, and therefore no big deal.)

Good movie, though. Worth my eight bucks. Of course, it might make the conversation over Thanksgiving dinner, er, interesting.

So yesterday I had a ten-minute project in mind: clean the gutters. I put this one off because it's a pain to haul around the sixteen-foot ladder, but it's going to be winter soon and I'd rather clean gutters in the still autumn cold than the horizontal rain of a Puget Sound winter.

So I drag out the ladder, extend it to its full length and slam it against the house. I crawl up, steeling myself to pull out handfuls of rotting leaves and dirt.

What do I find?

The gutter is hanging off the house.

The aluminum pin which is supposed to be holding it on has bent completely out of shape. So I spend half a hour rigging up a temporary support with an eyebolt, some fencing supports and a part of an old curtain tieback.

Gah. I finish the gutters on that side of the house, then drag the ladder around to the other side.

And I bet you can guess what I find there.

Yep. Only this time I couldn't rig up a temporary support because the gutters are plastic and drilling makes them splinter into little plastic shards. The cheapass plastic gutters are now wired to the soffits with big ol' tenpenny nails and picture wire. Classy!

My ten-minute project took most of the day and left me feeling incompetent and worried.

So now I will propitiate Saint Bob and Saint Norm, Patrons of Home Repair. I have laid out coated drywall sinkers and deck screws in a calling pattern and whirred my cordless drill. Please let the patch job hold till we save up two grand for new gutters.

It's not often I love a book this much.

But this is, hands down, one of my top three books of all time.

It's Castle Waiting.

It's a fairy tale that isn't a fairy tale. Yeah, there are supernatural creatures, a princess cursed at birth, some heroes and an unhappy marriage. There are your "wise women" who live in the woods and your bad guys who get comeuppance.

But there's also a bearded female Christ figure. A baby with a tail. Character-driven flashbacks which reach around the globe without feeling contrived. And countless tiny moments of homage to other works of literature that are purely visual and tangential to the plot but fun to spot anyway.

And the art is breathtaking.

Castle Waiting, people. Read it. Right now.

The weirdest thing about this book? The author doesn't have a website.

I didn't think such a thing was possible in this day and age. But I guess it proves that if something is good enough, it's good enough not to need anything but word of mouth and good publisher copy. It means the work stands on its own.

My new goal as a writer is to produce something half as good as Castle Waiting.

Day 43: Escape from the Trunk

Today I have 77 pages of story which I would potentially be willing to show to another human being.

To be honest, I'm surprised I got this far.

After my initial enthusiasm, this project got exceedingly slow and in danger of stalling outright. I was cutting and pasting like mad, moving paragraphs from one slush file to the next, up to page twenty and back to page fifty. As I tried to write new words, I forgot how much preface I had to give them. ("Have I introduced Gruffydd yet?" "I'm pretty sure this isn't September anymore.") I spent more time reviewing scene order than putting in new stuff.

Then I hit upon a stupidly simple idea: Start a new document.

I gave it a nondescript code name to fool my backbrain into disinterest. Now I'm cutting and pasting paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene. This lets me take stuff from any slush file or any place in the text and not worry about order - I'm rebuilding the order from the ground up.

I can also cheerfully delete anything because I'm working from a backup file, not a master. It's remarkably freeing to just Ctrl-X vapid paragraphs and have them be gone forever. This fools my backbrain into believing it was never written at all, while my writerbrain is comforted by the knowledge that everything is safe in the master file just in case.

I'm just surprised how little I'm keeping. I wonder if this is really a valid exercise in trunk reclamation anymore, whether this story I'm producing is a whole new animal.

Maybe trunk books can't really be reclaimed. Maybe they can only be rewritten.

The Boy came home on Friday looking bummed out. Feeling ghosts of last year, I asked him what was wrong.

"I don't think I can be friends with G anymore."

Uh oh. Why not?

"He thinks John McCain should be president."

Double uh oh.

The Boy has been interested in politics for a long time. When his peers were learning to read, the kid could tell you about branches of government, universal suffrage and the electoral college. I still have the map he made during the 2004 election returns, each state carefully colored red or blue.

I've encouraged this interest with some reservations. If this is what he's into, so be it, but at the same time, he's a kid. He should be playing Pokemon and debating the merits of video game platforms, not worrying about climate change, financial collapse and big oil. It's easy to start feeling powerless watching it all go down from afar, and that's scary even for grown-ups.

At the same time, though, we've been talking about how politics is all about people. We took him caucusing earlier this year. We've been to the state legislature building. We've talked about petitions, referenda and grassroots action. That people make politics go. It isn't some strange force that happens to us. We control it, at least to some extent.

And on Friday, the fact that people can still be friends and not agree on things like politics.

"Look at it this way," I told him. "Both of your grandfathers will probably vote for McCain. Or whatever libertarian they trot out of storage. But we love them anyway. Right?"

The Boy looks unconvinced. "I guess so." Then he brightens. "Hey! I can get G to change his mind. We can talk about the issues and maybe he'll see why I'm right."

Nnnnnnot exactly.

But we're getting there. Every bit of dialogue helps.

You know what I miss?

Art.

Kids do art like a second language. Then you grow up and suddenly art is off-limits. It's the preserve of artists. If you're not any good, don't bother.

I want to bother. I want to create for the sake of creation. In the commercial world we live in, that's a subversive act as far as I'm concerned. There are far too few subversive acts of this kind.

When I was younger, I did art like a second language. I knew lots of people who were better at drawing, painting, cartooning than I was, but I was decent. What's more, I loved it.

I worked in pencils and charcoals as a gradeschooler, then moved on to pastels. I won prizes for my ceramics when I was a teenager. I was just getting into painting when I went away to college and everything took a nose dive.

Then the Boy was small and it was a good day when I got a shower. Then I was in college for the better part of ten years, writing papers and reading like crazy and trying to build a resume and a work history while wrangling a high-maintenance kid.

Now that he's getting older and there's no way in the purple bowels of hell I'll set another foot in a higher-education classroom, I'd like to pick up art again.

Piece by piece, I'll rebuild the girl I was.

Day 34: Escape from the Trunk

The hardest thing about this project is the fact that it plays hell with my record-keeping. I keep track of my writing stats on a crappy calendar given to me by the Boy's school. I record the number of pages written or line-edited or amount of research done. This allows me to feel productive. I can glance back over a month's worth of work and see progress.

But the kind of work I'm doing in this trunk reclamation project defies my ability to record it. Today, for instance, I excised paragraphs, respliced them and added new words to ratchet up the tension. I did this sort of thing over about twenty pages.

I can't say "line-edited twenty pages" because the work was much more intense than that, and it involved a significant number of new words. Noting "tension improved" doesn't satisfy my need for quantifiable data. And it doesn't tell me where, or why.

Keeping good records for this project is especially important because it feels like I'm blundering stupidly along and getting nothing done, even though I've taken almost fifty pages of boring and listless garbage out and replaced it with twenty or so pages of words that advance the plot.

It's not quite rewriting (even though there's a lot of that) and not quite line-editing (even though there's a lot of that as well). The resulting narrative is so much better, but trunk reclamation requires much more effort than I thought it would. And I'm not sure it'll produce anything salable.

But trunk reclamation as an exercise? I totally recommend it.

It's one thing to write a new book when armed with the lessons culled from writing trunk books. It's quite another to take something trunked and undo all the clunky descriptions, cliched character traits and scaffolding that your whole plot once relied on, and do so in a way that satisfies plot, character development and craft.

It's draining and slow, but I'm feeling writing muscles flex that I never even knew I had.

Boy: "I had a fight with G today."

Me: "Aw, that sucks. What happened?"

Boy: "He doesn't believe in my religion."

Me: "Um. . . we don't have one. We don't go to church. Agnostic, remember?"

Boy: (giving me a well-duh look) "No, I mean my religion. Bluism."

Me: "Bluism? You. . . made up your own religion?"

Boy: "No, Mom, you can't make up a religion. Geez. I'm the prophet for Bluism. Well, Blue Light worship, I guess you'd have to call it."

Me: ".......tell me about it."

So the deity is a ball of blue light. It requires no sacrifices, and there's a Lutheran-flavored "salvation by faith alone" vibe to it. Basically, it's just there. You don't have to worship it. All it wants is for people to live well, and it judges whether or not people do.

Bluism is apparently based on reincarnation. You get nine lives. If you're good in each life, you can influence what you're reincarnated as. You can be a person or an animal. (I choose pampered housecat!) If you're good overall, at the end of nine lives, you get to have another cycle of nine. If you're bad, your life force dissipates forever.

I asked to scan the holy text and post it for you here. Apparently the prophet has not gotten around to transliterating that, so please stand by.

The new definition of "intimidating":

Attending a social gathering at the residence of someone who has his own small winery. In his backyard. That's nicer than my house.

So about a week ago the coffee maker died, right? The day after that? The friggin washing machine quit on me.

Is there such a thing as a brown thumb for appliances?

I'm not washing ball bearings. I didn't run molasses through the coffee maker. What is up with this?

And when I say the machine quit washing, I mean it stopped mid-cycle, full of water, and wouldn't drain. I had to load handsfuls of sopping clothes into my dishwashing tub and wring them out on the lawn, then empty the g*ddamn washer with a child's plastic cup gakked from Round Table Pizza.

Now I know why women used to be so burly. Wet cloth is friggin heavy. So much for the myth of the dainty country maiden. She would have been built like a brick you-know-what-house. She probably could have twisted up 90% of twenty-first century men like pretzels.

At least that load of wash was socks and underwear, not sheets.

So I called repair people. $200 just to show up at my house.

Of course we need to have the stackable system because of the size of our laundry space, so we can't buy a nice simple inexpensive side-by-side set. If we want a new set, it's gonna be $1500. If we call a repair guy, the fix-it bill could rapidly surpass that amount. If we do nothing, we'll start to smell.

If I wash clothes by hand, I could get really buff. A prospect not without appeal, mind you, but capitalism has provided me with the option to have robots do this work.

Unfortunately, capitalism insists I provide financial renumeration to the company which produces said robots. And it's a lot of renumeration, especially for someone still seeking gainful employment.

Some of you playing along at home know my mailman is extremely attractive. The Husband and the Boy regularly tease me about the Hot Mailman. It's one of the nice things about writing all day again.

However.

Recently I was watching the Boy's two small cousins. We were in the yard kicking around when the Hot Mailman came across the lawn. In shorts.

Preschooler Cousin was drawing on the walk with chalk. She looked up, blond pigtails bobbing, and asked loudly, "Aunt J, is THIS the Hot Mailman?"

Of course I'm gabbling ha ha kids say the darnedest things don't they ha ha they're always mishearing stuff ha ha well you must be in a hurry and there's the Hot Mailman SMILING in his Hot Mailman way and I hustle both kids inside while apologizing and stammering like a ditzy teenager.

Man, I was hoping to outgrow stuff like this.

Now it will be hard to invent excuses to be outside around noon.

So this weekend I loaded up on groceries. When I went to pay, the total was forty-something dollars, which kind of surprised me based on the volume of crap I bought. Still, I shop at a blue-collar grocery store which prides itself on sales, so I didn't think much of it. Besides, I've had $40 shopping weeks before.

I get home, examine the receipt and realize that the total should have been $90, not $40.

My first thought is whoo hoo, free groceries!

Then my Dudley Do-Right kicks in and I start feeling guilty. That poor checker is going to be in trouble when her register comes up $50 short. Besides, the Boy is standing right there waiting for me to set a good example.

So I drive back up to the store, a good twenty miles away by interstate, and go to the customer service desk.

( In which I attempt to do the right thing )

In other news, the Father-In-Law has left. While he was here, he drank almost two pounds of coffee. That sound you here is me getting some writing done.

There is nothing left for the Father-in-Law to fix.

I'm seriously considering breaking something.

Now he's reading aloud from a Major Conservative Rag.

My mah-jongg clicker-finger is getting tired.

Only three and a half hours till the Husband gets home.

Must. . . not. . . kill. . .

Headed into the kitchen this morning to start some spaghetti sauce in the crock pot. Picked up the basket with half a dozen tomatoes from CSA.

Each had a tiny bite taken from it.

Said bites roughly match the teethspan of eighteen-month-old Baby Cousin who spent part of Labor Day here.

As if he thought they were apples and bit into each one, found it distinctly lacking in apply goodness and carefully replaced it in the basket.

*

It's the Boy's first day of fifth grade.

Met Mr. Teacher last night. I didn't expect him to be so nice to look at. Can't wait for conferences!

But I don't have the same feeling of impending doom I had last year, meeting Mrs. Teacher. Mr. Teacher will definitely present the Boy a challenge. I'm just worried the kid has learned too many bad habits in the interim and will not find challenge worth rising to. The kid is so bloody hard to motivate. Grades don't work. He's not competitive with friends or a sibling. He'd rather do his own thing, screw the rest. I have grim visions of him still living in the basement at age 23.

*

With the Boy in school you'd think I'd be writing today, but the Father-in-Law is here. I've occupied him with fixing the shower head, but he's still managing to explain to me from the bathroom exactly why I'm wrong for not sharing his wingnut libertarian-flavored political ideas.

He'll be here aaaaaaaall week.

Day 12: Escape from the Trunk

Prologue: Friggin gone. This story started nowhere near where it should have. I think I was going for some kind of flashback a la The Handmaid's Tale, but it wasn't working.

Do prologues ever work? Or are they an artificial way to infuse adventure from the "good" part of the story at the beginning where the hook needs to be?

Chapter One: Cozy infodump on the character's home. Axed.

Chapter Two: Aha! Here's where the story starts! Chunks resurrected from the shallow Word file where lies the corpse of Chapter One, rewritten tight, given a hook and pasted at the beginning. Now the confrontation which kicks the story off is on page three instead of page thirty-three.

Lesson from the trunk: details, when chosen well and painted in subtle but striking colors, work harder than whole pages of prose.

When I was a baby writer I only had a three-inch paintbrush, and I painted everything in these broad, flowing strokes. These scenes were not without beauty, but my only paintbrush provided so little opportunity for detail. Everything was so blocky and square, so I had to write more to convey the level of information I thought I needed.

I've come to realize that stories progress and worlds are built with very small things, tiny and deft strokes from a paintbrushes sometimes only three hairs wide.

Now I've gotten more brushes. And I'm off to the races to paint happy little trees.

My coffee maker is no more.

I've had it longer than I've had the Boy. Hell, I've had it longer than I've known the Husband.

I mourn its passing because it's all but impossible to find a four-cupper anymore. You can find coffee makers that make two cups or twenty bazillion cups. You can find ones that use little funky coffee packet pods. You can find email-enabled, remote-capable gold-plated fancypants coffee distribution systems which funnel coffee into thermally insulated mugs using extrasensory powers.

Plain vanilla is surprisingly difficult to find.

I don't need my coffee maker to tell the time. I don't need automatic shutoff. What I would like my coffee maker to do is force water through ground beans into the carafe, creating coffee. Four cups of it, preferably, because it's roughly how much I consume in one sitting.

Perhaps I should see if the thrift store has such a coffee creation product.

Of course, purchasing appliances at the thrift store is something I tend to avoid. There are some things one doesn't purchase at the thrift store. Underwear is one. Appliances are another.

Those of you playing along at home may know that the Husband is into complicated board games. Right now we're playing a favorite of the Boy's about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The Boy has liked the game ever since he learned how this rebellion ended.

Today he braced over the board and hissed, "I will make Charlie flee the country wearing a dress. And it will be pink. And FRILLY. And I will hang Lord George Murray from a tree."

It got me thinking, though, about historical fiction. How one of the hardest things I have to do is make things and events from the past comprehensible.

The nobles didn't abandon Charlie after Culloden even though he'd just blown off their sensible advice and gotten thumped soundly. They didn't want revenge. They didn't shrug unhelpfully and tell him he was on his own. They helped Charlie get out of Dodge, back to France, at the risk of their own personal safety.

That kind of loyalty is hard for us in this cynical century to identify with.

Portraying that in fiction, then, would require not just an accounting of the world and its events, but a critical emphasis on motivation. It's not enough to know the nobles are loyal. We have to see what in their world causes them to be so loyal, and it has to be acted out in such a way as to avoid it seeming deus ex machina to jaded modern readers.

Same with my medieval characters, and the medieval mind is even further from us than the nobility of the eighteenth century. Creating sympathy for the medieval mindset is probably my biggest challenge. It's a razor edge between getting them right and making them readable.

So it's late August, and time for the Husband and I to argue about whether or not we should attend the state fair.

I detest the fair. I'm completely uninterested in farm animals and I think the rides are a waste of money. Most years we go, it's hotter than ass. And crowded. I don't do crowded very well.

The Husband loves the fair. Loves the rides. Loves the variety of overpriced fried foodstuffs. Loves everything about it.

The simple solution would be, of course, for us to go to the fair and compromise. He rides the rides, I look at the quilts, everyone's happy, right?

Except the Husband wants someone to go on the rides with him. So if we even set foot on the fairgrounds, there is instant conflict. I'm sure you can imagine what this looks like.

Fortunately for me, Boy tends toward my point of view. He also dislikes the rides, although he does like the animals. The carny games are undignified unless goldfish are involved.

The Husband says everyone loves the fair. I guess it has some sort of childhood resonance with a lot of people. Not me, though. No warm-fuzzy images of cotton candy and ferris wheels. The fair just leaves me feeling tired, stressed and a whole lot lighter cashwise.

Day 2: Escape from the Trunk

The first thing I've done is read the story all the way through, trying not to cringe. This gives me some idea of what I have to work with.

Plot: Spunky heroine is put in a challenging environment. She is rapidly accepted and soon makes a place for herself despite impossible odds. By the story's end, she is loved by all and sundry.

The first thing that's got to change is this plot. Before I can even address this treacly character, this plot needs some tension.

I can keep the challenging environment. That much works really well. It's a rebellion that eventually fails, so it lends itself to a story arc involving a lot of opportunities for the protagonist to screw up and watch friends die and alienate people she loves.

What's keeping the story tidy and boring is the fact that the protagonist's road is so easy. I have to put the challenging environment to work. What if not everyone likes her? What if she has to work to become accepted? What if she's eventually accepted, but grudgingly, and not by everyone? What if, by making a place for herself, she ticks off half the army camp and makes a raft of enemies, and has to decide if her actions are worth the grief she's causing?

The ending can be much darker this way, which will let me reflect on the nature of communities and what's good for them, where individual wants and needs intersect with what's best for the many. It's better than the protagonist falling into the arms of a cute admirer. (Don't laugh, it's a freakin trunk book after all.)

Today's Lesson from the Trunk: make sure you need every character. Don't introduce one-off characters who walk on from the sidelines, advance the plot for a scene or two, then disappear. Not only is it lazy writing, it's frustrating to the reader, especially if the vanishing character is charming and likeable.

Upstairs, rotting my brain with computer mah jongg.

Up comes the Boy. He's bringing a pop tart on a plate.

Boy: "I've got good news and bad news."

Me: "Okay, what's the good news?"

Boy: "I made this pop tart all by myself."

Me: "What's the bad news?"

Boy: "I think I inherited your cooking skills."

Me: "That pop tart looks okay to me."

Boy: "Um. . . it's not the first pop tart I made today."