MetaWriting

Moving to TypePad

2003-08-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

I've neglected this site for almost a month for a very good reason: After TypePad, Blogger can't compete. So I'm keeping a journal about my novel projects at Writing Fiction. The blog also offers a lot of practical advice about writing and marketing fiction.

From there you can access my blog on writing for the Web and several others that I've built quickly and easily.

Maybe at some point I'll import MetaWriting, but for now it's served its purpose. It taught me a lot, including the limits of Blogger.

2003-07-28T22:27:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a few days since I've posted here--mostly because beta testing TypePad has been so much more fun than posting here. When TP goes commercial, I intend to export this blog and create a few more.

Meanwhile, Henderson's Tenants is moving slowly but comfortably. I'm up to 20,000 words now--not bad for a story I started six months ago, while doing a couple of other books. We're getting close to the construction of the nanobots and the rapid transformation of Henderson, John, and Patty Paek. I have some idea of what happens next, but I expect to be surprised.

I'm going to have to get back to Deserters as well. Sometime in the next week or so I'll pitch another publisher on it, and send what I've got so far plus an outline. By the end of September I should have an answer, and if it's positive then I'll drop almost everything else and focus on finishing it.

This is the upside of having a short attention span--when I get bored with one project, I can always turn to another one. :-)

2003-07-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Even though I'd spent most of the evening on my Webwriting blog, I managed to finish Chapter 6 and get a start on Chapter 7. Bringing Espinosa and the evil feds back into the story. Can't let Mike and the nanotech team have things too easy...

2003-07-21T22:14:00.000-07:00

Finally got some more work on Henderson, after a couple of weeks of holidays and other stuff. Had to review a lot of the current chapter, just to remember what's going on. But the new material worked pretty well.

I need to give the reader a sense of what's going on outside the apartment building and around the world. Life isn't getting any easier for most people. Espinosa and the other FBI types should also be keeping track of Mike, and we need to bring in the homeless people from the park. Lots of strands to keep weaving into the plot...

2003-07-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

A warm Sunday afternoon in Vancouver. I've been working not on fiction but on an article for the Globe & Mail--a commentary on US gun fatalities, which over the past 40 years have been about one and quarter million. It's full of statistics, which I love, but they're sometimes a hard sell in the freelance market. Still working on a good kicker for the article--something to bring it up to about 750 words and end it with a bang (so to speak).

Might get some fiction done tonight. But after all those years of freelance nonfiction, I really miss it.

2003-07-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

No writing done in a week. It was mostly hiking, and driving vast distances across BC and northwest Alberta. Gorgeous country, but the experience wasn't conducive to sitting down in a motel room at the end of the day and scribbling in my binder.

Now that I've been home for a couple of days, though, and the cleanup chores and errands are just about done, I can turn back to the novels. But tonight's not the night. I'm tired.

2003-07-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I might get some writing done later this evening, but I still have packing and organizing to do for our trip to Jasper tomorrow. You'd think that after doing the same journey every summer since 1979 that we would have it down to a science by now...but no.

Well, it'll go all right.

Spent much of my day (when not packing) working on not one but two TypePad blogs. Created a new one from scratch for our musician friends Andre Thibault and Qiu Xia He, who run two superb world music groups here in Vancouver. You can visit Jou Tou and Silk Road Music and see what I managed to cobble together in about an hour.

If I'm really energetic and get some writing done tonight, I'll try to post here again. If not, then be of good cheer and I'll be back in a week and a bit.

2003-07-07T21:59:00.000-07:00

No time for fiction tonight--went back to the other blog and learned a little more about creating links. Works pretty well, but not perfectly.

So I'll think about the novels and try to get something done on them tomorrow before we leave and I'm doing all my writing in a loose-leaf notebook.

2003-07-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

This has been an unexpectedly busy day. First, I got cc'd by my editor at Self-Counsel Press, who was writing to FictionPress to tell them to cease and desist with the plagiarism. Very intimidating, and I'm glad he wasn't aiming at me!

Then FictionPress wrote back to say the plagiarist was gone, history, forget about him. Well, that was nice.

Then I got an alert from TypePad, another blogging tool, saying that I was now one of their beta testers. When I signed up I should have realized my holidays might complicate matters, and such is the case: I'm gone on Wednesday and not back for over a week.

Still, I went in and whipped up a new blog with surprisingly little grief. It's not perfect, and I won't have time to correct most of my errors (not to mention the built-in problems of the beta version). You can see the results at Writing for the Web.

Hope to get some time tonight to work on Henderson...

2003-07-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Not a bad evening's work...Chapter 6 is pretty well finished. We've got John Dwyer on board as a guinea pig, and Mike has been talking to Patty Paek and her father about what's being planned.

In the next chapter they'll all be together in the lab for the meeting. Some of the team will be alarmed and baffled about Mike's new ideas for a virus-bot, but he'll persuade them. We also have to pay some attention to the outside world, which should be increasingly unpleasant: not just water shortages and epidemics, but the perennial War. Need a glimpse of how the rich are coping as well; I haven't said enough yet about the fascist-welfare state of 2030 North America.

Well, that's all for tomorrow and the day after--and then on Wednesday we're off for a computer-free holiday in the Rockies, and I'll be scribbling in my notebook for a week or more.

2003-07-06T13:31:00.000-07:00

Maybe this is a good time to repeat my free-book offer, which is now buried in my April archives.

In the past year while on paid educational leave, I put together two books: Work in Progress: Collected Essays 1972-2002, and Bring the Jubilee: Fifteen Years in Computer Education.

The first is a compendium of everything from grad-school essays to speeches on education to a memoir about growing up blacklisted in Mexico.

The second is an annotated collection of similar pieces dealing with online education--from the primitive days of telephone conferencing in 1987 to the primitive days of Web-based courses in 2003. I've learned about online education by making lots of mistakes, and those in turn have taught me about face-to-face education as well.

Each book is a PDF file of about half a meg, and I'll be happy to send you a copy of either or both of them.

2003-07-05T22:47:00.000-07:00

Making more progress on Henderson. Mike has just enlisted John Dwyer as a fellow guinea pig. The old guy's going to make quite a recovery, I suspect. He's a former officer in the old Canadian Airborne Regiment (now disbanded), and his military skills may be useful.

Pretty soon I have to bring Patty Paek back into the story, so we have a sense of what she's up against. She's paralyzed, unable to speak, but still able to communicate by smiles and other body language. She's really feeling trapped in the prison that her body has become. I also need to think about what part she'll play when the bots have rebuilt her brain...and gone on to rebuild the rest of her as they also will with Mike and John.

Had fun this evening not only with the writing, but with learning how to jazz up this blog with a comments feature and even a visitor-count meter...not that this is intended to be a major public site. Still, it would be nice to get some feedback from the occasional visitor.

Being Plagiarized

2003-07-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

After decades of warning my students against plagiarizing their essays and reports, a couple of days ago I found I'd been plagiarized myself.

Some kid had created a series of columns of advice on writing, "Utopias Unbound," for a site called FictionPress.com. Two of his columns included straight cut & paste from the material on symbolism on my Fiction Writer's Page. Someone dropped me a note about it, and I in turn wrote to the kid and to FictionPress. So far, neither has replied and the material is still up--both on FictionPress.com and on the kid's own Website.

It would be flattering if it weren't so depressing. The kid obviously thinks writing has some kind of glory attached to it (he seems very proud of his own stories), but where's the glory in stealing someone else's stuff?

I tell my students they wouldn't accept a salary paid in counterfeit money, and they wouldn't pay for their tuition with counterfeit money either. So why should they think that counterfeit writing is OK?

2003-07-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Henderson seems to be moving in 500-word steps. Another 500 words tonight, and we're picking up speed. Mike has worked out the basic design for a virus-type nanobot, and his Korean colleagues see how it'll work. Mike is also intending to be the first experimental subject, but he's about to ask his octogenarian buddy John Dwyer to join in; John's dying of prostate cancer and doesn't have much to lose.

Didn't get anything written last night, because we went kayaking in Indian Arm on a perfect summer evening--must have paddled close to 10 km, and my arms were still sore this morning. But it was worth it!

2003-07-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

I've had a headache all evening, and I'm going to bed early. But I managed about 250 words on Henderson, so that's something. The ideas and formulas that came to him the night before have now impressed his colleagues, who recognize that the formulas describe components of a self-propelled nanobot that, like a virus, can force a human cell to make copies of itself. They'll soon realize that it's a highly organic kind of bot, capable of using the human nervous system to communicate with its copies...and with its human host.

More tomorrow, I hope.

2003-07-01T22:29:00.000-07:00

Happy Canada Day!

Spent much of the day uploading and formatting materials for an online course I'm going to teach in the fall. Took a while to get the knack of the Webcourse software, but it's not too difficult.

Finished chapter 5 of Henderson and moved into chapter 6--now just over 16,000 words. It's almost too much fun; I've been neglecting Deserters for a week now. Well, maybe tomorrow...

2003-06-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

After spending the day on the textbook, I finally got around to Henderson this evening and wrote a very nice little scene that led up to Mike's getting an idea for "three-dimensional" programming of his bots...in effect, making them perform like real viruses only better. It even feels like the end of a chapter.

So I'm very pleased about that. We're up beyond 15,000 words now. I'd be happier if I were turning out 2,000 words a day, but it's moving right along at about the rate of one typescript page a day for the last ten days. Can't complain. And no doubt more tomorrow.

2003-06-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

Made some good progress on Henderson tonight...a little bit of extra detail in chapter one, the removal of the last few paragraphs I wrote last night, and the addition of a whole new scene that works quite well--feeling awful, Mike gets a request from his buddy John Dwyer, down the hall, to come and rescue him. Way past 80 and dying of prostate cancer, John has fallen and needs some help getting up.

That's enough for Mike to break down and take one of the painkillers he got in chapter one, and it's going to help him not only to rescue John, but to get a couple of critical insights into the nanobot problem. That's a much more satisfactory way to get him to deal with his pain; Mike is too damn macho to do himself a favour otherwise.

More tomorrow. We're getting close to 15,000 words, which would be about 20% of the full novel.

2003-06-29T12:29:00.000-07:00

As if I didn't have enough writing projects in hand, I'm also thinking about radio drama...almost 30 years after writing my last one!

In this case, it's thanks to the CBC Freelancers' Forum (see link to the right) set up by a former student of mine. It's been very informative about CBC radio markets open to freelancers. So I've made some rough notes about a series for The Mystery Project, which runs 30-minute radio dramas in series featuring the same main characters.

My series would be about a black barber in gold-rush British Columbia. I first met Wellington Moses while doing research for my book about the black pioneers of BC, and learned about his key role in identifying a murderer in the mining town of Barkerville. He was quite a likable guy. With that as a springboard, I'd propose a series in which Wellington solves a crime while cutting hair and selling his anti-baldness tonic. Could be a lot of fun.

2003-06-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

Made a little more progress on Henderson this evening, with Mike going back to his apartment and collapsing from the pain of his cancer. The scene needs more work--he's listening to the radio (built into his computer which is permanently attached to his arm), picking up part of a newscast. The newscast needs to be more detailed, surprising, and disturbing--not just for the reader, but for Mike.

I also need to bring John, the dying octogenarian, into the chapter. He inspires (or provokes) Mike into making more of an effort, which will require taking the painkillers that Mike has ignored for weeks.

And that in turn will oil the hinges on some of the doors in Mike's mind, letting ideas mingle...

2003-06-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

Just a few minutes' work done this evening on Henderson, but it takes me to the end of a chapter. It also leaves Mike feeling more pain than usual as his cancer advances. He's going to continue in some distress and will finally take the painkiller his doctor gave him back in chapter 1. At first I thought it was just that, a painkiller, but I think it's also going to affect Mike's brain just a little...and let him get some strange and wonderful ideas about how to design the virus nanobot.

I also posted the first of my "alternate reviews" on another blog site: Counterfactual. These reviews are really just a distraction from other jobs--but so was Henderson, and now it's almost 14,000 words long.

2003-06-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Managed to get some work done on Henderson's Tenants last night, just a few hundred words, but now we've moved into a critical area--describing how Mike and his colleagues develop the nanobots that will cure his cancer and heal Patty's damaged brain. In the process I should also be able to make some distinctions between nanomachines and the more or less organic devices that Mike's going to build.

I'm also wearing myself out trying to decide which blogging system to go with. I could stay with Blogger Pro, and upgrade...but they're switching systems right now, so would I please wait a while. Or I could get hosting through any number of other outfits, and then order Movable Type or pMachine and go crazy learning them...not sure why I do this to myself, but it's worth learning.

2003-06-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a little over-blogged.

For the last few days I've been trying to acquire a hosting service, a domain, and then a blogging tool like Movable Type. Not much success so far, mostly because the hosting service is having trouble with the payment software.

So instead of getting any writing done, I'm surfing around trying to get a bunch of blogs set up...which of course will eat into my fiction-writing time. But it's like an itch--I really want to get a handle on the technical end of blogging, and get the experience of publishing four or five with different formats and content.

Then I'll feel confident enough to write about blogs in the third edition of Writing for the Web, and maybe even to run workshops on how to blog.

I'm also trying to figure out why, since I'm on Blogger Pro, I don't get the Pro features like image uploading and titles.

Nonetheless, tonight I intend to get something done on one of the novels. Reading an interesting but annoying book about nanotech. It's called Nanocosm, and it provides some good glimpses into the current state of thinking and research. But the author is so determined to be entertaining that he's just the reverse. Where's a cold-hearted editor when you need one?

2003-06-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

No fiction today. Instead I worked on content for the soon-to-be-revised Web site of our Communications Department. Dull but oddly satisfying work: mostly just keying in URLs of sites that give advice on how to write well, a free service to anyone kind enough to pay us a visit. More such chores tomorrow.

I also spent some time trying to organize materials for an online course I'm going to teach in the fall, and running into some minor trouble with the software. You'd think that after all these years, it would be self-evident how to upload files to a Web site. Nope.

I also did some research about blogging tools. Blogger is really not very satisfactory--especially their nonexistent tech support. So I'm hoping to learn enough to create a proper blog, with lots of links, graphics, etc.--and in fact create several of them for various purposes. Just another time sink, I know, but it beats watching TV.

2003-06-21T22:06:00.000-07:00

Just a little progress on Henderson this evening, but the scene I wrote last night is now much improved and moving right along. Patty Paek and her dad are moving in, and next comes the bad news about Patty's brain damage and what's going to be needed to repair it.

Meanwhile, Mike's pain is going to increase, making it harder for him to concentrate and think. It's going to be a struggle for the next few days.

I have a deplorable fondness for "weekend wasters" -- SF novels that are really pretty dumb but that shut me up for a day or two when I could be doing much more productive things. Just finished a fairly stupid parallel-world story, the first volume of a series that I don't plan to read more of. Now I'm starting the third volume of another epic (I missed volume 2), and it's pretty bad too...bad enough to provoke me into putting it down and getting my own writing done. Having been shockingly undisciplined for the past two or three days, I hope to get a lot more done tomorrow.

2003-06-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

After a couple of unproductive days, I went back to Henderson tonight and got about 500 words done. Nothing too thrilling, just moving Patty Paek from the hospital to her new home in Mike's apartment building. Tomorrow I'll go back and add a few details to make it more meaningful. But it's going OK.

Meanwhile I'm going to have to do some more research on Canadian battles of 1915. Stackley had to have been at Festubert in May, but I've skipped over that period to deal with the death of an officer in August. Festubert is going to be very important to Stackley, even more than the experience of seeing the effects of gas in April.

Looks as if I'll be spending part of the weekend in the past, and part in the future. I'm jumping around in time as much as Jack Auslander is.

2003-06-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

Less than 100 words on Deserters tonight, but that's OK--I spent the evening re-reading the manuscript so far, catching a couple of minor inconsistencies, and trying to get a sense of the narrative flow of this deliberately jumpy story.

Despite the flashbacks, I can see the story developing; the plot is much less obvious than in most of my stuff, but it's there, working away below the surface. I've been worrying about the sequence of flashbacks, thinking they might be too random, but they're going OK. Jack is gradually learning about Stackley, about Sid, about himself.

But I can see I need to do some chores: rough out a plot of Stackley's novel, do more research on real deserters in the Canadian army, figure out when Stackley had to deal with such a deserter in the 18th Light Infantry. Also need to get him out of the trenches now and then for extra training, convalescence, whatever--if he's always in combat, he doesn't have a chance of surviving the war. And while I'm thinking about it, I need to learn more about Stackley post-war--what he was doing while writing his novel, how he adjusted to civilian life, and so on.

Similar kinds of research into Sid Gardiner's life, especially in the weeks before his suicide...and into the news events of the summer of 1996.

2003-06-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Here's the post...hope it works this time!

Today was all textbook revision, dull but necessary. I'm not going to work on the novels this evening, because I need to spend some time and energy thinking in sentences about Henderson.

I've stuck on the techie transition: What do I write about that makes the nanobots (and their transformation into thinking creatures) plausible? Well, I'll work on that, but the story beyond the transition is still very vague--a few scenes, not much else.

So let's consider what has to happen:

Mike Henderson has to develop nanobots to cure his own cancer as well as other bots to re-grow Patty Paek's lost brain cells. His Korean sponsors want both, and he's reluctantly agreed (he thinks he'll waste valuable time on his cancer when he could be tackling the much bigger challenge of neuron regrowth).

Meanwhile we can assume that the FBI is still watching him, probably planning to step in and seize his work when it's succeeded. His old buddy John is dying of prostate cancer, and the community is suffering from the ongoing effects of decades of war and economic stagnation.

When Mike finally roughs out the anti-cancer nanobots, and injects himself with them, he spends several days asleep. The Koreans are watching him closely but don't interfere. Then he rises into a kind of semi-conscious state in which he simply surfs the Web at a high rate, mostly sites full of information on genetics and physiology.

At last he's fully awake again, and feeling pretty good. But he keeps blacking out--losing consciousness, then regaining it. The Koreans are getting alarmed by now, especially since the second stage of their project has gone nowhere during Mike's sleep and twilight state.

Rather than go into a scene-by-scene outline, I'll just point out some key events:

A medical exam that shows Mike's cancer has vanished...and that his hair is growing back in, he's put on 15 kilos, and that strange little organs are appearing in his bowels and elsewhere.

Some upsetting episodes when various impulses, the kind he could normally suppress, suddenly erupt--temper tantrums, sexual advances, that kind of thing.

Eventually, he finds himself communicating with the nanobots, which have been not only growing but learning. His programming means they take care not to harm him, but that also means making him much more, uh, durable.

He learns that his impulses come from "sub-personalities," aspects of his mind that normally don't reach consciousness--or if they do, they get suppressed very quickly. Mike realizes that he has tenants, who contribute a great deal to his mind without his being aware of them. He and the nanobots have to come to terms with these tenants.

The nanobots quickly figure out how to repair Patty's brain and tell Mike how to do it. But by now the Koreans are getting really nervous; this project seems to be getting out of control. Still, Mike manages to inoculate Patty with a new form of nanobot that will multiply in her body, merge with her nervous system as Mike's bots have merged with his, and then proceed to rebuild her.

The FBI steps in, arrests everyone, and puts Mike in a cell in downtown Vancouver. They're astounded at his recovery, and at some of his physical powers.

Mike soon breaks out (not a major problem) and rescues the others as well. They disappear into Vancouver; Mike and Patty easily change their appearance, and the Koreans have their own escape routes.

Around this point we're going to have to see Mike and Patty transforming themselves (or being transformed by their bots). They remain human, but must sort out their inner conflicts and come to some kind of agreement with the nanobots about who's in charge. While the bots have most of the power, they realize that they function best with the conscious help of their hosts.

I can see that Mike and Patty are going to spread their "contagion" far and wide, while the authorities desperately try to close them down like the virus carriers they are. They're prepared to destroy anyone who's "infected," and anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. The bots, meanwhile, are determined to survive and protect their hosts, as they've been programmed to do.

Well, that clears up a few points, anyway.

2003-06-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

Posting problems tonight--I wrote a long summary of the plot of Henderson, but Blogger didn't want to preview it or publish it. Will try again tomorrow.

2003-06-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

Deserters is cooking right along. I'm up over 24,000 words on the main section, more than I had in the old version before I ripped Maddy out of it. I thought about Jack inviting Jen Park out to lunch, and then decided he wasn't anywhere near ready for chatting ... or chatting her up.

So instead he's got the fonds (the list of documents, books, etc.) of Sid Gardiner, donated by his widow Astrid after the suicide, and lo and behold, Jack is amazed to find Sid published books Jack has never heard of before. That's because Sid was getting a little past his youthful egotism, and trying to come to terms with his life...very much as Jack is.

One of the books is a memoir called Saigon Days, about Sid's time in Vietnam. Jack will probably get a hint of what Sid was up to that led to his fathering (and then "adopting") Maddy. But the book will have a good proportion of lies.

Gee...I didn't even know about this stuff myself, until Jack took the fonds with him to lunch and started reading it over a pint of Granville Island pale ale.

I've also started an "alternative review," something I've been meaning to do for a long time. It's the first of a series of reviews of books and works of art from other timelines--one of them may be a review of the controversial recording by Leonard Bernstein of Beethoven's Tenth, and another will be about Scott Fitzgerald's autobiography, Three O'Clock in the Morning, published just before he died in 1947. These will go into a new blog I'll create just for them.

The first one, about half finished, is The Making of the President 1964 by Theodore White...only in this one, JFK loses to Goldwater after a string of horrendous sex scandals become public in the spring and summer of '64. In this world, Jackie was killed in Dallas, becoming a huge cult figure as a result. We'll see what else happens as a result of this strange and dramatic election...

Also reading a new book, Nanocosm, about nanotechnology--should give me lots of ideas for Henderson, who's been patiently waiting for some attention while Jack Auslander rummages around in dead people's lives.

2003-06-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

For once I managed to do some work on Deserters during the day, instead of in the evening when I'm usually pretty tired. It was mostly just the tidying-up of the Nov. 22 scene, but it went fine. Having ripped the whole Maddy plotline out of the story a few weeks ago, I've now managed to recover the lost ground--I have about 23,000 words plus the isolated chunk of story involving Jack and Jen--so it's close to 30,000 words altogether, or about a third of the total.

Beginning to think of submitting what I have to a couple of publishers--McClelland & Stewart have the early version and ought to get the revision, but a Vancouver publisher might also be interested. Well, we'll see what happens.

Also reflecting on Henderson, and still not sure how to get through the techie chapters immediately ahead, when he and his colleagues are cobbling together a set of nanobots that will do what they're supposed to, but then go far beyond their specifications. Well, it's mostly a matter of doing some research, so I'm just being perversely disorganized about it.

2003-06-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

Another night, another 500 words. The Nov. 22 scene is almost finished. That is, I've come to the end of it, but it needs small detail work here and there. It ends with Jack's training company double-timing off the firing ranges to the Fort Ord parade ground, where they'll get the official announcement about JFK's assassination.

I want to intensify the last paragraph or so, describing the recruits scrambling up a hill, very tired, but screaming at the guys ahead to hurry up. I also need to find a way to heighten the irony of all these guys learning to use rifles on the day JFK gets shot--without beating the reader over the head with it.

Thinking about what should happen next...Jack's gone through some very intense flashbacks between dinner at Astrid's and then the memories of Nov. 22. I suspect he needs to talk to someone, and maybe this would be a good time for him to invite Jennifer to lunch. Well, let's see how that works out.

Interesting how just writing about writing leads to useful thinking about writing.

2003-06-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Got quite a bit done today, mostly on the November 22, 1963 flashback. Writing it was quite a flashback in itself, a trip 40 years back in time. Oddly consoling in a way--20 years earlier, Hitler and Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill bestrode the world, but in 1963 only Churchill was still alive. JFK had dominated the previous three years or more, and suddenly he was gone. The people and regimes that seem eternal are mere spindrift, gleaming for a moment and then vanished. Now we have the arrogant jerks in Washington, and they too will pass.

Tomorrow I should go back through the present version and make it more kinesthetic--I want readers to see and hear and feel what it was like to be in the US army on that long-ago day.

2003-06-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

Five hundred words a day...that seems to be as much as I can do. Not a great output, but night after night, it all adds up. Deserters is moving along pretty well. The next flashback will be to November 22, and there it should go faster since Jack and I had the same experience on that day.

Meanwhile I'm also making some progress with the communications textbook, making occasional corrections or changes. The report chapter will be the biggest chore, so I'm putting it off until the small stuff has been cleaned up. All in all, not a bad day.

2003-06-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

Well, last night's post did me some good...I've just got going on a scene involving Stackley's account of seeing gassed trenches in April 1915, with Jack's recollection of a much tamer gassing in basic training in 1963. The diary will go on to describe the death of a highly admired officer in Stackley's regiment, a man who Stackley thinks might have become a Canadian prime minister. That will set up the flashback to November 22, 1963. I have to go back into my research about the first gas attack in 1915 (which the Canadians endured with astounding courage and few defenses), but we're well started on this part of the story.

2003-06-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

This was another textbook day, full of the kind of dull, detail-oriented work that I perversely enjoy: typing URLs, correcting typos, making minor changes. (But I did remember to write to a textbook publisher who's been considering this book since January...maybe this project will make a little money some day.)

Also got the page proofs of an article that will appear this fall in Writer's Digest. It looked pretty good, with a change or two needed that the editor agreed with. So that was nice too.

But now I need to think hard about where Jack Auslander goes after his dinner with Astrid. He should be tempted to explore Sid Gardiner's papers, having learned about Sid's possible CIA past. Or will he just think about that for a while, and carry on with Stackley's papers?

I need to maintain a lot of resonance between all these wars and causes, so I don't want to neglect Stackley. And I don't want to let Jack's own military experience slip away. Sometime soon he'll flash back to November 22, 1963 and the Kennedy assassination. Watching Old Jack wandering around Fort Ord on that day, warning everyone about what's going to happen next, should be fun.

All of which is to say I'm not sure which strand to pick up next. That's one reason why I'm making this entry in MetaWriting--to goad myself into making some decisions. It would be easy to do the Nov. 22 passage; it would be a kind of set piece, almost too easy to do well. But maybe I should find something in Stackley's letters and diary that will prepare us for it...maybe the death of an officer who (Stackley thinks) might have made a wonderful prime minister in postwar Canada?

Well, I'm getting there...

2003-06-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

This was a chore day...but not a bad one.

Instead of working on the novels, I spent most of the day on a revision of our communications textbook, which three of my colleagues and I have put together and revised many times over the past ten or twelve years. For a few years it was commercially published, but then we took the rights back when the publisher didn't want to bring out a second edition. Now we print it on campus.

This project is going to try to create a multimedia version, with a lot of extra material available on a Web site. But the first step is to go through the whole thing, correct the inevitable errors and typos, do some updating here and there, and add a chapter or two of new material. It's going pretty well, at least for the first five or six chapters. I'm adding a lot of new URLs to guide students to additional information--for example, on proofreading and editing.

I've also promised myself to rewrite many of the sample sentences, which at present sound awfully stilted because their only purpose is to illustrate some usage point: "Yes, it was he/him who delivered the presentation." Ugh. The subtext of a book on good writing ought to be consistent with the explicit assertions of the value of good writing.

By the way, in the stilted example, it should be "It was he who..." But it should really be something like:
"Yes, he gave the talk."

2003-06-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

Not much writing on Deserters tonight--in fact, some very slight cutting--but I moved one section into a more logical spot. One of the challenges of this flashback organization is to keep it as "random" as one's ordinary memories tend to be, while still maintaining some kind of narrative coherence and flow. I suspect that when the draft is complete, I'll have to print it out and review the whole thing...and probably do more rearranging.

Still, I'm happy about the way the story is developing. But I'm 20,000 words into the beginning, and Jack has been at work in the library for only about five days! I may have to consider skipping some days...can't have Weighty and Significant Stuff happening to him every day of the summer.

2003-06-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

Did just a few lines on Deserters tonight, but they finished an important passage--Jack's recollection of Sid's suicide. It will need some minor tweaking, but over all it works pretty well.

I've also dug out my account of teaching Webwriting in Brazil--might revise it and send it off to Educom Review or some such periodical.

I need to do some research for Henderson. Maybe tomorrow...

2003-06-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

Went out of town to Hornby Island for a couple of days, enjoying walks on the beaches and lots of peace and quiet. Didn't get much writing done, but thought a lot about the current novels.

Last night I carried on with the dinner at Astrid's in Deserters, and it led (to my surprise) to another of Jack's flashbacks: this one to the November afternoon when he finds Sid Gardiner's body. Don't know why I said this surprised me, except that the dinner sequence is still unfolding in its own way. At the time of Sid's suicide, Jack still didn't know his wife Elizabeth was still carrying on an affair with her former prof. That discovery came (I now know) when Jack went home and told her.

Jack also found a couple of burned photos in Sid's house, and retrieved one--it's the only known photo of Maddy's mother, the Vietnamese woman Sid had been sleeping with in Saigon. (Oops! Just realized I have to tidy up the timeline--Sid has to be a very recent returnee, since the "adoption" of Maddy in 1972 happened when Maddy was about a year old. Or should I make her older?)

Most of my time since getting back from Hornby has been devoted to working on content for a revised Web site for the Communications Department at Capilano College--tedious but necessary work. But I'm also thinking a lot about Henderson's Tenants--the chief hurdle right now is the technobabble about the actual design and programming of the nanobots that will save both Mike Henderson and Patty Paek. Once those gadgets are actually going to work, the story will roll right along.

2003-05-28T22:36:00.000-07:00

Went to a monthly political discussion group at our local library tonight--a lot of aged left-wingers, moaning about the crimes of the ruling Liberals and the failure of the New Democratic Party to rally any kind of coherent counter-attack. A good time was had by all, and of course nothing happened that might move us from moaning to something more constructive.

Then came home and did some work on Deserters--almost a thousand words--about Jack and Astrid having dinner together. Astrid, to my surprise, revealed a lot about how she first got involved with Sid Gardiner, and how Sid had once in a drunken moment told her he'd worked for the CIA while appearing to be a professor at the university in Saigon during the mid-1960s.

I knew Jack would eventually learn this, but I didn't expect Astrid to reveal it tonight--the dinner conversation just took on a life of its own, including a comment about Stanley Ellin's classic short story, "The Specialty of the House." So I was sitting in the corner of the dining room, kind of like Jack himself witnessing one of his flashbacks, listening to the conversation and busily writing it down, quite unable to influence the characters' actions.

I think it's going to lead Jack to explore some of Sid's own papers in the library, and there, I suspect, he'll find the proof about Maddy's origins...as Sid's own daughter, by a woman in Saigon whom he abandoned after getting Maddy out of the country. And I suspect that betrayal is what finally led Sid to shoot himself. Well, we'll find out. I just have to eavesdrop on these people and write down what they say.

2003-05-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a while. I was knocked offline about ten days ago by a lightning bolt that fell entirely too close. Nothing damaged except my network card, so I had to get used to blog-free writing until the card could be replaced.

The writing has gone fairly well, though not as fast as I'd like. Henderson is up to about 12,000 words and ticking right along. Deserters (at least the main part) is close to19,000 words. Add the other section that fits in later in the story, and I'm around 25,000 words or about a quarter of the way through it.

Cutting Maddy out of Deserters hasn't been as traumatic as I'd feared. She's still there, but off stage. At the moment Jack is having dinner with Astrid, Maddy's mother, and before the dishes are washed he's likely to learn quite a bit about Maddy and her strange parents.

With Henderson the main problem at the moment is to learn enough about nanotech to offer some plausible talk between Henderson and his new Korean colleagues. Once the nanobots are actually going to work, the story will move very quickly (and surprisingly).

I've also done a fair amount of work on the workplace-writing textbook revision. It had seemed very daunting, but I stumbled on a solution: I saved it as text only, ditching all the formatting. Turned out to be much easier to read and revise the text this way.

2003-05-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

Moving right along with Deserters. After recovering from the schock of discovering Stackley's diary, Jack has chatted in Korean with Jen Park and then recalled Mr. Kim, who'd taught him Korean at the Presidio back in 1964. Jack eventually flunked out, of course, which meant doing the rest of his hitch in the infantry. (I cut a lot of orders for bright guys like him back in my days at Fort Ord!)

So Jack is dealing again with the attitudes that got him into the army and then into the infantry--he was a mix of self-righteousness and laziness in those days, always ready to find fault with whoever was in charge of him, and always finding excuses for his own failures. Not sure if he realizes that yet, though.

I'm still only about a quarter of the way through this novel, and the time sequence is getting stranger all the time. Well, it's still easier to follow than The Sound and the Fury--this is a tale told by a slightly brighter idiot!

2003-05-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

Interesting to write Stackley's first diary entry, for October 15, 1914, and not really know what he's going to say until he's said it. He turns out to be caught up in the sheer scale of the gathering of forces at Valcartier--despite the ineptitude and confusion all around him, he senses the seriousness of the enterprise and of the men taking part. He's enjoying it, and already coming to admire the men he's responsible for. That admiration will cost him dearly.

However, I can't let Stackley seize control of the story. We'll look at diary entries from time to time, along with his letters, but they'll still be just part of Jack's life.

Don't know how much I'll be able to write tomorrow--a busy day coming up. But even a couple of hundred words every night will add up...

2003-05-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a week to get through a thousand words on Deserters...but it's been good, solid stuff. Jen Park, the librarian, has just turned up Stackley's war diary, on which he based much of his novel, and where he wrote the thoughts he didn't share with his wife until his return to Canada. I wasn't really expecting something like this, so I'm as grateful to Jen as Jack is.

Once he begins to get into the diary, the story should unfold a bit faster. And Jack also needs to talk to Astrid about Sid's death and Maddy's miserable career. Stackley is now sharing his experience with Jack; can Jack share his experience with anyone, at least before he gets involved with Jen? Well, we'll see.

2003-05-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

This blog is also about teaching, and last night I went to the Vancouver Public Library to hear Charles Ungerleider--a former deputy minister of education and longtime professor of education at UBC--read from his new book Failing Our Kids.

To my surprise, the room was big and full. Even Charles seemed suprised at the turnout, which I'd guess was between 150 and 200. He got a warm reception, made some witty remarks, and read well from the book. The question-and-answer session was brisk and intelligent, and when it ended people lined up for copies of his book--close to 50 sold. I got one.

Even though the book describes many of the problems assailing Canadian education these days, I took the event as an encouragement. The provincial government is bringing in several big changes to public education this week, all of them misleadingly presented as "empowering" someone or other. Before the government finally leaves office, the public schools here will be an even worse mess than they are now.

Still, a lot of people don't like what's happening. They don't have many outlets for their concerns, but I don't think they'll just sit and take it. It sure makes me wish I were writing my education column again.

After getting home I did manage to crank out just a couple of hundred words on Deserters. Multi-tasking can go just so far: I'm trying to complete too many projects in too little time, and this morning I've been working on an exam -- it has to be ready for a meeting with some teaching colleagues this afternoon. Well, maybe I'll find some time this afternoon or tonight.

2003-05-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

Gave a workshop today on "Selling Your Nonfiction Book"--8 people, very bright and motivated, with interesting ideas. It was great fun, and as always the day went fast. But I came home too tired to write, so today's comments aren't about today's progress on the novels.

But I did want to mention something that seems to get more important to me with every new book: The significance of even the smallest details in the opening chapter. In Henderson's Diaries, I found myself mentioning all kinds of things that at first seemed minor. Now I begin to think they're going to influence the whole course of the story.

Examples:
Mike Henderson's doctor friend, after diagnosing Mike's pancreatic cancer, gives him some new painkiller. Three chapters later, Mike still hasn't taken any. Maybe the drug is going to help liberate some of his subconscious selves and thereby advance the creation of the nanobots that will save his life.

The homeless squatters who live across the street from Mike's apartment building have kids who are considered cute but good pickpockets. One of them may end up picking a very useful pocket--but I have no idea whose.

Patrick, the apartment building's manager, keeps things running in part with the threat of the ball peen hammer slung in his belt...he's the "consciousness" of the building, guarding it against both outside threats and insider revolts. I keep thinking Mike himself is going to take over the job--and maybe the hammer as well.

The lack of water (in formerly wet and rainy Vancouver) is a concern in chapter 1, with signs urging conservation and everyone having to take rationed showers. This will certainly turn into something more than just another gloomy forecast of a miserable future. The bots will design some kind of water trap, solving that particular problem.

The first chapter is full of "interface" images: the doctor's stylus pressed against the flat computer taped to Mike's arm; the wall screen showing 17th-century Vancouver; the shades Mike is wearing on the Skytrain platform just before he's mugged; the digital radio programs he listens to all night. I thought these were just high-tech details, fairly conservative predictions of where the Net could go in the next 30 years.

But the human-nanobot interface is critical to Mike's success, so one of these other interface images is likely to come back as the means for communicating with nanobots once they're inside Mike's body. A virus-sized radio transmitter seems very unlikely, but something will work (rather badly) before the nanobot finally graft themselves right into his nervous system. At that point, Mike's life will get very hectic.

Well, the bots will be able to mop up the fatigue chemicals in his body before he even notices them. I wish I could say the same. Let's see what tomorrow brings...

2003-05-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

Another couple of hundred words on Deserters tonight, and I seem to have resolved my questions about Stackley's wounding and the letter. Stackley is beginning, Jack realizes, to acquire a "modern" attitude toward war: it doesn't matter if you're brave or gutless, skilled or not--you live or die by chance, by being in the wrong spot when the shell hits. But Jack realizes that most of Stackey's comrades (and their families back home) didn't share that attitude. They still believe all the nonsense about "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

So Jack is going to have to deal with that widespread attitude as he tries to understand Stackley's eventual suicide: whether from post-traumatic stress, or innate depression, whatever, Stackley by 1925 felt horribly isolated because he had ceased to believe in the war and his comrades in arms still did. Maybe Ethel too...wouldn't that be hard to take, when your own wife still buys the propaganda?

Well, it's a step further toward understanding both Stackley and Jack himself.

2003-05-07T22:36:00.000-07:00

Deserters is inching ahead--just a couple of hundred words tonight, and I'm not quite sure where the current scene is going. Jack is flashing back to a bad scene while trying to make progress with Stackley's letters. One in particular is about Stackley's first wounding, and it makes Jack think about how much more serious he and his generation were about getting wounded or killed than were Stackley's generation. But I'm not quite sure where he's going with his thoughts. Maybe by tomorrow...but tomorrow night I'm going to a retirement party for a colleague I've worked with for 27 years. Well, maybe in the morning...

2003-05-06T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm back working on Deserters, and enjoying it. Not a lot done, really just a couple of pages altogether, and much of it was adding a touch here and there. With Maddy now out of the story, it has a reassuring unity -- even though Jack is flashing back and forth in time. He's just accepted an invitation to dinner with Astrid Gardiner, Maddy's stepmother and Sid's widow. Not sure I know what she's been doing all these years, but we'll find out. She'll also have some stories to tell about the early days of Sid's womanizing, when Jack's first wife Elizabeth was one of his lovers.

Also spent some time developing a new blog at another location...just to see what the difference is. Don't know if it's that much better. I just need to learn a lot about this genre.

Otherwise, this has been just a pleasant spring day, with a trip to dog-obedience class as a reminder that the dogs understand a lot faster than their owners ever do.

Blogger appeared to have swallowed my post last night, and tonight it's simply refusing to put this post on the site. So I may have to wait until tomorrow to get this published. Something else I need to do is find a more reliable platform.

2003-05-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Henderson is going slowly, but it's going. In fact, I'm going to have to get back to Deserters pretty soon.

In a way, I'm doing things wrong with Henderson...I started it months ago as a kind of "periscope writing," getting into the story to see what I could find in Henderson's world. Usually I do just a thousand words or so before deciding either to lower the periscope and abandon the idea, or to get serious and start outlining the story.

But here I am, ten thousand words into this story with only the vaguest idea where it's going. I know Henderson is supposed to acquire all kinds of amazing powers and traits thanks to the nanobots' rebuilding him from the genes up. I know that's going to scare the daylights out of the repressive governments of the year 2030, and that eventually everyone in the world will become rebuilt. And I know the story will explore the idea of multiple "selves" in every subconscious, personalities that pose their own problems when the nanobots give them a way to express themselves.

But I have very little idea just how I'm going to do all this. It's still just peeking through the periscope, seeing what pops into view. Example: Tonight I described Mike going down to the apartment building's laundry and seeing that the former swimming pool, long abandoned, has been walled off by the new owners (who are also his new employers, a Korean chaebol). I had no idea what was beyond the wall, so Mike tried the door. It was locked, but a camera mounted above it recognized him and let him in.

There he found a lab consisting mostly of six "workstations" -- which are like dentist's chairs, with a few extra gadgets. One of his new colleagues is there, and shows him how these computers work...so I'm learning about future computer interfaces even as I'm typing. This is OK if my subconscious writer-self knows what he's doing, but he seems a bit surprised himself. I'll let him think about it overnight.

I've also got two new characters: Charley Kim, the colleague, and Hain--the Korean computer that's now giving him a tour of its abilities. Why Hain? Well, I gather it means "servant" in Korean. Pretty dull name for a very smart computer, but it will have to do for now.

2003-05-04T22:16:00.000-07:00

After a day spent doing other things, I got back to Henderson late this evening and got some work done on chapter 4. It's going well, but in short bursts: 500 words seems as much as I can manage at this point. Still, it's all adding up. I'm over ten thousand words now, and the novel will probably run to about 75,000 or so. I might write faster if a publisher expressed any interest, but I'm not even going to send out queries yet. Still need to work out a synopsis.

Also thinking about Deserters and how to fill in some of the gaps left by Maddy's overdue departure from the story. Maybe I can get some patching done tomorrow. Thinking about a couple of other publishers who might be interested, but again I prefer to wait until the manuscript is a little more presentable.

Reading a biography of Aldous Huxley with some envy: here he was, practically blind, running around Europe with a wife and child in the 1920s, conducting a busy social life, and pecking away on a typewriter producing text he could hardly see...and he was producing book after book after book. Americans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald did the same thing, plus drinking. How did they manage it in those days?

2003-05-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have three complete chapters done on Henderson, and the beginning of a fourth. Maybe this is a good time to mention a technique I sometimes use.

As I begin a new chapter, I think about what scenes ought to go into it. Usually I can think of three or four, each of them posing a problem to one or more of the characters, whose response to the problem tells us something about them and prepares us for the climax of the novel. I list them at the beginning of the new chapter. As I complete each scene, I erase it from the list.

Being very long-winded, I usually find that if I've listed four scenes, the chapter ends after three, leaving me with a scene to begin the next chapter with. It's not because I've hit some word limit, however. A chapter can be any length. It ends when the characters (or at least the readers) understand something important about the situation the characters find themselves in, so that the next chapter begins with higher stakes. Maybe the character has faced some challenge in the previous chapter, and must now face an even more serious one in the next chapter.

So at the end of chapter 3, Henderson has accepted an offer by a Korean chaebol to engage in secret research into cell-regrowing nanobots. He's done so because he's furious that a kid he likes has been beaten in a robbery attempt and left almost brain-dead. The chaebol (a kind of corporation) wants the research done because many Korean refugees have suffered similar damage from the chemical warfare that made their country almost uninhabitable.

So chapter 4 has to deal with Mike's realization that he's moving deliberately outside the law by accepting this offer, and that he must now work effectively with a small group of the chaebol's researchers. Finally, he must at least begin the procedure of building the nanobots, and do so in a plausible way.

Well, that's at least three scenes right there. Maybe more.

Meanwhile, I have gone back into chapter 3 to make the hospital far nastier than I've originally described it. Ran across a hair-raising description of what's currently going on in the last public hospital in San Francisco, which is already in horrible shape. North Vancouver's Lions Gate Hospital will have to be at least as bad by 2030, and probably much worse.

By the way, someone tried to e-mail me from this blog and got a bounce. If you've had that problem too, try to reach me at crof@shaw.ca or ckilian@thehub.capcollege.bc.ca and let me know about it. I may have simply mistyped the correct code.

2003-05-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Blogger was having problems last night, so my comments didn't get posted...mostly having to do with planning the scenes within each chapter. This morning I gave two long talks to a local teachers' association, and I'm more tired than I'd expected to be. So I'll post again sometime on Saturday--including the material about planning scenes.

2003-04-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Haven't mentioned what I'm reading these days: Just finished a long biography of the Emperor Meiji, by Donald Keene. Very interesting despite a rather plodding year-by-year narrative. Meiji was a better man than he should have been given his ancestry (and especially his xenophobic father). Striking to see that within a year or two of Admiral Perry showing up in 1853, the Japanese were already thinking about building an overseas empire. And they did so to avoid being pushed around by the Europeans--but imposed on the Koreans exactly the kind of colonial regime they didn't want imposed on themselves.

Also finished a book about Gabriel Garcia Marquez--it's a kind of reference survey, with bibliographies, plot summaries, and brief analyses of his stories and novels. Also some interviews and critical articles. A good, concise source of information. I finally learned a bit of how GGM gets away with breaking all the rules of fiction writing: in novels like Love in the Time of Cholera, he's using a kind of extended monologue. Like Conrad's Marlowe, the narrator is a participant or witness, not really the author, and this narrator doesn't bother with literary stuff like quoting dialogue. I wouldn't dare trying the same thing, but I admire it in GGM.

Now I've started a biography of Aldous Huxley, a writer I grew up reading. Brave New World was of course one of the two great British dystopias, the other being Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I've been making little references to Orwell in Henderson's Tenants; maybe I should allude to Huxley as well.

Speaking of Henderson, I did a bit more this evening. Chapter 3 is finished and Chapter 4 well under way. Henderson will be on his way to building his nanobots in a few more pages. Once they get going, the challenge for me will be to anticipate the changes they'll make in my protagonist and his friends.

Tomorrow the college is holding a lunch to honour some of us old hacks. I think I'm one of just two of the original founding faculty. Thirty-five years go fast when you're having fun.

2003-04-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

This has been a fairly productive day...this morning I test-read one of the speeches I have to give on Friday, and realized I needed a lot more material for both of them. They just weren't long enough. So I restored a lot of stuff that I'd originally cut because I thought I'd be too long...better to be too long and skip some points, than too short and improvise new material.

Also sent a query letter to the Globe & Mail, pitching a story idea about SARS blogs, but didn't hear back. Probably won't, but it was worth a try.

Then this evening I opened up Henderson's Tenants and the writing went very well--about 1500 words in an hour or so, and we're getting into the story very nicely. I'm up past 9,000 words and now Mike Henderson can start developing his virus-sized computers. Very cheering.

Meanwhile I also got a note from a Dutch novelist, thanking me for the material on the Fiction Writer's Page, which is always cheering, plus a request from a grad student in China asking for help with the symbolism in The Thorn Birds--a book I haven't read. She'd found me, I guess, through a Google search for "symbolism," which must have turned up the symbolism material on the FWP.

But it's fun to deal with unexpected requests like this, so I answered and said I'd be willing to discuss the matter further. We'll see what happens. I'm doing a lot of editing these days, and enjoying it: proposals, academic papers, business letters. Gives me an idea about what's going on in the world outside Deep Cove.

2003-04-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

Most of today's writing was a polish job on the second of the two speeches I'm giving next Friday to the Surrey teachers. Printed them off and will spend some time tomorrow reviewing them, when the text is good and cold. Otherwise I don't even see the words on the page, just on the inside of my forehead.

But I did do some work on Deserters, filling in one of the gaps where I'd cut Maddy out. And it worked pretty well...in fact, I could even keep a memory Jack has of the funeral of Maddy's suicidal dad, with Maddy as a baffled little 8-year-old. She'll be back in the story at some point, but not for long.

So instead of Maddy moaning about her love life, I have Jack re-reading the transcript he's made of Stackley's obituary in the Vancouver paper of May 4, 1925..."Suddenly, May 1." I'm still as uncertain as Jack about what drove Stackley to shoot himself: some kind of post-traumatic stress, or guilt about not being able to save his deserting soldier from the firing squad? Or something else?

Same thing with Sid Gardner's suicide, which Jack discovered back on that awful afternoon in 1979, with brains and blood all over the bed. Sid had been some kind of CIA errand boy in the late 1960s before coming to Canada, and of course Maddy is his kid by a Vietnamese woman. But what made him, ten years later, shoot himself--something come back to haunt him, or a confrontation with one of his current problems (=numerous girlfriends, including Jack's then wife Elizabeth)?

Jack is going to talk to Sid's widow Astrid, but I don't know if she'll be able to explain matters; she was always half a bubble off plumb, and hasn't improved much. As a guy doing detective work in the dim and distant past, Jack may find that some things are just plain unknowable.

2003-04-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

I can't even remember when I first started giving my "Hour-a-Day Novel" workshop at Capilano College. Sometime in the mid-1980s? It runs two or three times a year, and everyone always enjoys it--especially me, though I end up (as I did today) with almost no voice. Seven hours of ranting will do that to you.

This was a small group, just 8, and it worked well. Lots of questions, some good discussion, and a sunny day as well.

So of course no writing got done today. Even an hour would be hard to manage when I'm this tired. Still, I've done some thinking about my current projects.

A couple of days ago I tried an experiment: I ripped 7000 words out of the 22,000-word main section of Deserters, a novel I've been fretting over for close to seven years. I realized that one of the characters was blocking progress...she comes in early, has an affair with the protagonist, Jack, and then disappears when she ditches him.

Off and on I've considered doing this, but never quite had the courage to kick her out of the story. And she'll probably stay in as a minor character. But it really feels as if I've cleared the air. Jack can now spend the first 50,000 words or so doing what's he supposed to: researching the life of his hero David Stackley, a Canadian World War I novelist, and trying to figure out how his own life went wrong thirty years before.

I did something similar a few years ago with another novel: pulled 20,000 words out of it. The rest of the story wasn't even affected; that's how detached this plot strand was, though it took me years to realize it.

So I have a lot of work to do on Deserters, but it's going to be much more constructive than what I've done in trying to make this annoying young woman fit into a story where she never really belonged.

I told the workshop a bit about Henderson's Tenants, my SF novel ... which is going slowly but well. I think it'll develop some remarkable surprises as it grows--surprises for Mike Henderson, my protagonist, but also for me. Having saved his own life by designing nanotech robots that eat his pancreatic cancer, Mike is going to find that the nanobots also want to re-design him. From the point of view of the rest of humanity, Mike is going to become the archetypal monstrous menace, something to be exterminated. From his own point of view, he's going to be a badly needed upgrade to ordinary humanity...not a view widely shared.

As serious as the subject is, I can see the story teetering into some kind of goofy humor from time to time. The nanobots, capable though they are, are going to be a bit naive about some things, which will get Mike into trouble more absurd than dangerous.

More tomorrow...including, I hope, a report on progress made on one or both projects.

2003-04-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

This is a blog where I'm going to try to keep a daily record of various writing projects--mostly so that I can talk to myself about what's working or not working in those projects. You're welcome to eavesdrop and to offer your own comments by e-mail.

I'll also talk about teaching, which after 35 years is still wonderful fun. And when I feel a rant coming on about political or social issues, this is where I'll put it. As time goes by, I'll try to add links to sites I think worth visiting: news, advocacy, blogs, whatever.

By the way, I'm also offering two free books, available in PDF files:
Bring the Jubilee: Fifteen Years in Computer Education
and
Work in Progress: Collected Essays, 1972-2002
Each is about half a meg, and you're welcome to pass it along to others if you wish.

These two books are part of a project I've been working on as part of a year's paid educational leave. The other two books include a novel, Deserters, and a revision of a textbook in workplace writing. I'll probably talk more about the novel than the textbook. But, blessed as I am with a short attention span, I have other projects going as well. One is a science-fiction novel, Henderson's Tenants, and I pick up other short-term writing jobs as well: speeches, reviews, articles. I'll talk about them too. Like teaching, writing is a skill you never master. You just get less bad at it.

So let us begin again...