The Mythology of Humanity

(Crossposted from Silk And Shadows)

In Ye Olde Days, a young boy destined to become a blacksmith would be set to the bellows, standing beside the grizzled smith, sweating and watching and learning.  Eventually, under his master’s critical eye, the apprentice would be allowed to make repairs, and then the simplest of spoons or plates.  After years of training, the master observing proudly, the journeyman would take his shot at creating Excalibur or the sword for the six-fingered man.  And finally, the new master blacksmith would fire up his own forge.

Yeah, I never found one of those mentors either.

I hear mentors still exist.  But I think they all live on a misty mountain somewhere, snapping at flies with chopsticks.  (Probably because they don’t appreciate being called grizzled.)  So in the end I found it easier to manufacture my own mentor, Frankenstein style, from a few disparate pieces.

1. Teach
The first task of a mentor, I think, is to teach.  Once I found Romance Writers of America and joined my local chapter, I had access to all the classes, workshops, conferences, databases, and listservs that an apprentice could wish for.  Plus a few.  Learning is a lifelong challenge, and I expect I’ll never get enough of checklists and spreadsheets since they make such excellent tinder for my habit of burning down bridges in chapter 7.

2. Support
Next, I found like-minded spirits to cheer and commiserate and compel as needed.  My critique group, of course, has an intimate understanding of the writing process.  But I also have friends – musicians, painters and filmmakers — who believe the creative call is every bit as legitimate as ”real” life.  Their triumphs and tragedies provide a welcome counterpoint to my own.

3. Guide
Last, there are the stories that form the path itself.  Some of the authors I consider guides, I’ve never met.  Might never meet, if they’ve passed the grizzled stage and gone to the grave.  Still, their works provide a way through the wilderness.  Wherever I’ve stepped off that path for my own nefarious purposes, still I know there are others out here, carving away, pen as machete. 

All of those pieces come together in my own story, which has been my first mentor, and my last and always.  As tough and inscrutable as any ancient blacksmith, it blackened my eye occasionally (no doubt I deserved it) and ultimately gave me my own weapon in the aforementioned wilderness.

One of these days — if my book hasn’t led me astray — I’ll hack my way up that misty mentor mountain and we’ll all have a drink.
 

(Crossposted from Rose City Romance Writers group blog
where the month's topic was Anatomy of a Book)

Topic of the Month:
"How do you find the beginning of your novels? How do you know where to start them?"

Teh Experts on writing say stories should start in medias res -- in the middle of things -- on the day where circumstances change for the main character.  This is exciting, They say, and engages us readers right away, sweeping us up into the tale's thrills and chills and whatnot.

I usually start my stories... oh, about four chapters earlier.
 

NPR did a story recently to try to help people grasp the numbers being discussed when it comes to the economy these days.  I’ve loved whimsical comparisons of apples to oranges ever since my grade school science teacher took us into the gym and laid out a rough, to-scale model of the solar system’s plants using:

• The sun: A five-foot tall & wide balloon
• Mercury: Marble
• Venus: Tennis ball
• Earth: Tennis ball
• Mars: Pingpong ball
• Jupiter: Basketball
• Saturn: Soccer ball
• Uranus: Baseball
• Neptune: Baseball
• Pluto (back when Pluto was still a planet): Marble

Outside on the playground, the solar system distances were laid out sort of to scale using a basketball for the sun, a pinpong ball for Jupiter, and marbles and BBs for the other planets.  About 1310 meters away (back when the metric system was still trying to gain a foothold) from the sun was tiny Pluto.  Wow, more than a football field away.  My young, non-athletically inclined mind was dazzled.

Sometime thereafter, a National Geographic came with the best map in the whole wide world, and farther than that actually:

It showed how our solar system (nestled down there on the right) fit into each succeedingly larger formation in space, right up to the known universe (the big column in the upper right).  I liked to stare at the map and think about how vast those outer reachers were, and how — in comparison, appearances notwithstanding — my colossal geekitude wasn’t that colossal.

So back to the economy.  NPR’s  Chana Joffe-Walt suggested that at a rate of counting out one dollar bill per second, it would take you 11 days to count out a million bills.  Not so bad.

But it would take 32 years to count out a billion dollars, and 3200 years (the beginning of cave drawings) to count out a trillion dollars.  In the comments section at NPR, reader Chipley broke it down thusly:

• A dollar bill is 6 inches in length.
• 1 mile is 63,360 inches, or 10,560 dollar bills long.
• The sun is 94.5 million miles away from the earth.
• If you were to line up dollar bills end to end, it would take 997,920,000,000 dollars to reach the sun. That is 997 billion 920 million dollars, or 2 billion dollars less than a trillion.
• Given this analogy, our national debt is longer than 5 round trips to the sun.

Just to bogglefy the notion, I’ll add that light from the sun takes 8.3168708 minutes to reach Earth.  So if the light from the sun were to run out as quick as that trillion dollars, we’d be stuck in the dark in about 42 minutes.  Yeah, that wasn’t helpful at all, was it?

A trillion dollars would buy 1000 boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies for every person in America.  At 160 calories per 4-cookie serving (guessing at 24 cookies per box), that’s 960,000 — almost a million! — extra calories.  Since a pound of fat is about 3500 calories, that’d be 274 extra pounds — an extra American for every American.

Good thing we didn’t get those cookies.

A few months ago, NPR did a similar story with author David M. Schwartz, a numbers guy, who discovered that a stack of 100 $1 bills compresses to about a 1/2 inch.  A million dollars worth of $100 bills would stack about 4 feet high, while a billion dollars in $100 bills would tower 4000 feet high — about 3 Sears Towers.

And a trillion dollars in $100 bills would summit a staggering 789 miles high — about 144 Mt. Everests stacked end to end.

In good news, the Agriculture Department’s Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center found that mountain climbers burn an average of 5,148 calories per day on Everest.  Considering that an Everest climbing season is about 9 weeks, we could burn off that nearly a million extra Thin Mint calories — our portion of a trillion dollar cookie investment — in a mere 3 summitings.

Back to contemplating the universe.

(Crossposted from Silk And Shadows
This week: Good and bad reviews)

My XY, a musician, is a champion heckler.  His theory is that since the audience shows up with money in one hand, they’re allowed — even obliged — to threateningly heft a proverbial rotten tomato in the other hand.  Comic Auggie Smith out of Portland, Oregon, made an equally painful observation about working artists when he said (I’m paraphrasing here) “It’s not a healthy thing that I go out every night seeking the approval of strangers.”

Yeowch.  Don’t we get any credit for sharing?  At least writers, unlike comics and musicians, perform at a polite (or should I say safe?) distance.   Thanks to the dubious miracle of Google Alerts, however, you can be instantly informed whenever anyone says anything about you.  It’s the high-tech version of “your ears must be burning.”  No, just my inbox and my ulcer.

Google Alerts is how I received the first — and so far only — review of my debut novel.  For maximum effect, do note that my book doesn’t come out until October and no one has received any advanced copies yet.  The review was this:

Meh.

Yeah, that was it.  Meh.  That faintly — but only faintly — damning analysis of my pweshus work was based on the Publishers Weekly one-sentence recap of recent transactions in bookworld.  Sob.

The urge to reach out and connect is intrinsic to humanity, I think, and part of the secret to our survival.  To be rebuffed, ignored or reviled is to be denied our very existence, to be banished from the tribe, where we will surely starve.

Hmm, that comes off a touch melodramatic, not to mention self-pitying.  So I should also share the best review I’ve ever received for a work-in-progress:

More, more, we want more!

Isn’t that sweet?  It was from my mom.  Tragically, moms are not to be trusted as book reviewers.  Although I love the idea of an all-mom review site.  They could do their rating system in mom-code:

Hotness scale:
Sexy = “I suppose I could let my of-age daughter read this.”
Smokin’ = “No way am I letting my mother read this!”
Erotica = “Really?”

Quality:
Great book = “I’ll call my book club about this one!”
Okay book = “I’ll pass this one to my sewing circle.”
Terrible book = “Well, at least you tried. I’m sending you cookies.”

There could also be a mom-based music review site:

Great album = “Look, I brought my own custom earplugs!”
Okay album = “Iron Butterfly had a drum solo almost that long.”
Terrible album = “You could play at weddings! Have a cookie.”

Ah well, cookies are better than rotten tomatoes.  What’s your comfort/celebration food?

Currently working on: Judging the 2009 Prism contest
Mood: Happily awash in books

It’s tough being a dark hero.  Sure, you’re sexy, powerful, sexy, and possess a seemingly endless supply of black leather jackets. 

But you’re also tortured.  The forces of evil are arrayed against you in ways that most cowboys, architects and veterinarians just don’t have to deal with.  Even billionaire sheiks wouldn’t put up with the brooding shadows that haunt your eyes when you’re a dark hero.

I know last week I said I was in love with my brooding hero.  But – oh fickle heart of mine — my loves only last about 400 pages, and then I’m on to a new love. 

This week, I’m enamored with this hottie:

If you don’t recognize him, that’s Joss Whedon, the creative genius behind Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and — most recently — Dollhouse.  Sure, “creative genius” is overused, but I don’t think I’m overstating the case to say that Buffy and Angel helped crack the floodgates for today’s feast of paranromal and urban fantasy romances.

While Whedon is most often lauded for his strong heroines, I think he does a smashing dark hero.  Emphasis on smashing.

Angel, of course, was the first.  (I’m skipping the movie version of Buffy, because apparently creative genius goes through a crawling stage before it can fly.)  The vampire with a soul, poor Angel had to pay endlessly (or at least through the five seasons of his own show) for his sins.  Love was granted him — with the absolutely wrong person, naturellement, a vampire slayer – then torn away (repeatedly).  He even lost his soul on occasion.

But he portrayed one of the important lessons of a dark hero: Redemption is so often a path, not simply a destination.

In contrast (the hair, if not so much the black leather), Spike was the unrepentant dark hero.  Reveling in his badness, he offered a delightful foil for the self-flagellating Angel.  

In Spike’s human past as a minor Victorian poet with a penchant for tearing up — and that’s tearing as in crying as opposed to shredding – we see another vital aspect of the dark hero: Vulnerability must be hidden from the world. 

Until, of course, the heroine rips you wide open.  Being a dark hero is sooo much more difficult when there’ s a heroine out there with your name stenciled on her love bullets.

Which is not to say that torture, remorse and vulnerability has to get a man down.  Whedon does the wounded warrior with a light hand, like the wise-cracking Captain Mal from the criminally cancelled, one-season space-opera Firefly and its movie sequel, Serenity.

Mal lives one of the dark hero’s most deeply cherished credos:  That which does not kill me gives me a right fine opportunity for target practice. 

Even when the hero is a villain (and, hey, villains are the heroes of their own stories), Whedon delivers a character of such depth that you can only hope a heroine comes along to set him back on that path of redemption.  (I will not spoil Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog for those who have not seen it — and why haven’t you? — but those who have know I am being very snide with that last sentence.)

Dr. Horrible taught us: It’s okay for a dark hero to sing.
 

All of this (except for that last example, which is probably undermining my efforts) is a thinly veiled attempt to interest you in Whedon’s work because I am thoroughly enjoying his latest, Dollhouse, and I’m fatalistically convinced it won’t survive the season. 

We’re only now beginning to unravel the layers of Whedonesque plotting, but already the dark-hero-in-the-making FBI Agent Ballard is suffering nicely.  He needs to be roasted a little longer to be truly dark, so I’m hoping more people find the show.  Soon.  I need my Whedon fix since he seems to know: Dark heroes, like dark chocolate, are good for the heart.

Any fellow Browncoats in the house?  And speaking of brown coats, will someone please tell me what’ s sexier than a black leather jacket?  No, srsly, I need something sexier than a black leather jacket.

• TV (except for Dollhouse, but hey, it’s Joss Whedon, which is practically research)
• A ‘Real Simple’ magazine house (heh, like that was ever an option)
• Entire weekends of nothing but reading (yeah, this one hurts)
• Non-writing friends
• An honest career with financial security (sorry, Mom and Dad!)

I’m not saying everybody has to make these choices, but you’ll have to make some. Don’t kid yourself; the time to write is carved bloodily from the tender flesh of your life. And yeah, that’s gonna leave marks.

• Great writing friends
• A deeper understanding of who I am (yeah, this one hurts)
• A book deal!!! (er, financial security still not included — sorry, Mom and Dad!)

Do you want it or not?

If not, that’s fine. I’d love to play piano, but I just don’t want it bad enough to — you know — practice. I’d love to be a vegetarian, but then there’s bacon. Writing, though… That I want, and I choose it again every time I sit down in front of the computer and put my hands on the keyboard.

I’m probably biased, but I believe it’s fine to be a circus freak.

XY just got his first official review on his new album. 

Pop! Music said:

Each song is only comprised of vocals and guitar, but Arbogast’s unique and powerful voice that makes the album standout. Every track is charged with anger and passion, which is complemented by driving acoustic guitar arrangements. While this album is far from the normal image of alt-country or folk music, Arbogast has created a refreshingly different album that is worth a listen.

He’d be mortified to know I told, but we actually high ten’d over it.  Celebratory pizza’s on tap for this weekend.  Saving the caviar and Perrier-Jouet for the release party.

If you’re interested in supporting the arts (and — indirectly — my bucket o’cookie dough habit) the album is available at CDBaby and iTunes.

Or check out Rainstick Cowbell on MySpace for a gig schedule.  We’d love to see you out — especially since he’s supposed to debut a song inspired by SEDUCED BY SHADOWS!  Which I haven’t even heard yet.  Not that I’m pushy or anything.

(I’m saving pushy to make him take copies of my book on his European tour in the fall.)

Enjoy!

So I just watched the preview for the new Star Trek (okay, okay, can I call myself a geek if it took this long for me to find out the trailer was available?) and I'm thinking, is there a way to fly backward around the sun fast enough to move time FORWARD to May 2009 so I can watch this movie now?

Ha, I am SO a geek.

Which also got me thinking, who'd you choose?  Kirk or Spock?  Or Scotty?  Or Sulu (as opposed to Takei)?

I'm a Spock girl myself.  Never mind that warp-speed womanizer; give me the tall, dark and brooding one.  Are you allowed to rawr over a Vulcan?

Which also also got me thinking about a post I read from a writer who wants to create the new hero meme.  She wants to move past alpha, past beta (can't happen fast enough for me), past metro (who's idea was that anyway?) into the next generation (ha, Trekkie reference there) of male.

What could this new hero be like?  I'm intrigued.

Currently working on: Book 2
Wherein our heroine refers somewhat rudely to the hero’s “little dragon.”
Mood: Snickery

In honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving feast day and the more-or-less middle of National Novel Writing Month, our topic this week is “Favorite Writing Foods: The Recipes That Get Us Through “That Time” of the Month.” (That time meaning, first drafts, revisions, holidays, copy edits or other public events where we are expected to perform like fuctioning members of society.)

So here’s my writing recipe:

• Open bucket.
• Heft spoon.
• Bake if desired.

Yes, it is here, for the first time, that I will publicly reveal the secret of writing 50,000 words in a month: Bucket o’ cookie dough.

The small heart symbol on the label doesn’t actually say “perfect for romance writers”; it says zero grams of trans-fats. So bucket o’ cookie dough is good for you. Also I am in no way implying that the authors whose book spines appear beside this bucket are similarly inspired by chocolate. But I wouldn’t doubt it.

 

Preparing for my first NaNo years ago, I realized 1666.666 repeating words wouldn’t get written every day on inspiration alone. No, to achieve such a monumental goal I’d need chocolate. In a quick, convenient and plentitudinous form.

In loving support of my writing dream, my sweetie brought me English Bay Double Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough from a restaurant supply company he frequents for work. He has since come to regret introducing me to the bucket o’ cookie dough.

The 8 lb. bucket (they call it a pail, as if that somehow negates the mental image of a mid-NaNo writer with her head buried shoulder-deep in said bucket) provides enough cookies for breakfast  a writing session pick-me-up for the entire month. If you do the math (and I have), it comes to about ½ ounce of cookie dough per page. A mere .003 oz per word. Which, according to Yahoo Answers, is the weight of the average raindrop. (Not in the Pacific Northwest, of course, where the average raindrop weighs about the same as the entire bucket o’ cookie dough.)

Considering that my understanding of ounces in the English measurement system is based primarily upon an ounce of cocaine from the ‘80s TV show Miami Vice, I don’t think that four ounces of cookie dough to achieve my required eight pages per day is an unreasonable evil. At least addiction to cookie dough doesn’t somehow force me to wear pastels, boat shoes and oversized sunglasses.

Based on its weight of approximately one ounce and my average word count of 210 words per page, this cookie represents 420 words, my dears. To continue the drug references.

Wait? What do you mean opening a bucket o’ cookie dough doesn’t count as a recipe? Fine. If you MUST bake something for Thanksgiving just to prove to your friends and family that you are a Superwoman who can pull off 50K words PLUS a tasty baked good, I recommend The Cake Mix Doctor.  Frost any of her creations with melted Dagoba chips, and I promise you will sucker those friends and relatives into believing you actually dirtied measuring cups and spoons and such to grace them with your creation this Thanksgiving.

What? Lying about your baking mastery isn’t cool? We’re fiction writers, people. We’re EXPECTED to exaggerate. All right already. Here’s a real recipe. But it contains raw eggs. So if your friends and family who couldn’t be satisfied with buckets and box mixes get salmonella and ends up confined to bed while you finish your 50,000 words, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

French Silk Chocolate Pie
Ingredients
1 cup butter
1½ cups sugar
4 oz unsweeted chocolate (Dagoba!), melted and cooled
2 tsp vanilla
4 eggs
1 baked 9-inch pie shell, cooled
Whipped cream

Directions
1. Beat the butter with the sugar until very well blended. The mixture should be smooth, fluffy and pale yellow. (Jessa’s note: No really, follow the directions. Crunchy sugar butter is very yummy, but you want this smooth. Using super-fine baking sugar can help this process and then just keep beating. Hmm, kinda like revisions).
2. Blend in the chocolate and the vanilla. (Lick the chocolate bowl. That Dagoba isn’t cheap.)
3. Using an electric mixer at medium speed, beat in the eggs, on at a time, taking 5 minutes to incorporate each. (5 minutes is longer than you think so use an egg timer. Unless you’re doing timed writing, and then 5 minutes takes for flippin’ ever.)
4. Turn the mixture into the pie shell and chill for several hours. (Do I have to remind you to lick the bowl?)
5. Decorate with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. (Dagoba!)

Meanwhile, if English Bay would like to be my corporate sponsor (I’m imagining a banner waving gently behind me at book signings… or possibly a sweeeet zippy sportscar in a rich two-toned bronze tricked out with a built-in toaster oven and emblazoned with my name, my latest book cover, and the image of a mystery-eyed bare-chested man holding out a plate of three cookies) I can be reached at Silk And Shadows every Monday.