The feeling that I had with the last book, which was a first in some time, was that when I had finished for the day, I wanted to continue. My fingers just hurt too much, or I knew I had other things to do, or whatever, I had to stop. I have that again now. Hal is great for me. Today I did about four thousand and change. I probably could have gone farther, but I like to process, I’m forcing myself to process more.
I’m going to take the time and maybe work on the comic a little bit. I have some other stuff to do. Things are rolling along. I realize that this is indeed going to be a longer one. The last book had a major plot, and a major subplot, and this one I’m kind of taking a cue from Scudder and inserting random subplots that aren’t necessarily related to the major plot and making them weave their way through. One essential realization of what makes House, Holmes, and Watson so great is the fact that you can inform the resolution with the character direction and improvement that occurs. With that knowledge, I process the tertiary characters with a much more careful flare, but without losing the flow, I’m finding. It’s really quite a cool (if complex) interaction in the brain, and only maybe 25% of it is conscious until you later analyze it. I was looking back on chapter three and going, “Holy shit! Look! That’s in there!”
I was soured on the comic medium by something for the better part of six months (personal, not going into it, sorry charlie).
I’ve been trying to fix that, because I do love comics. It’s like the time when I took a poetry class and had a bad teacher, and didn’t want to write poetry for many months. Or when I was forced into Shakespeare, and didn’t want to touch his work for many years.
Anyway, point of that being, I just wrote an outline for a small OGN Hal Taylor mystery. I’m going to block it out a little better tomorrow, but my thinking is that since I’ve been finishing my three thousand words with some time to spare, it couldn’t hurt to write 3-5 pages of an OGN after, even if it turns out to mean nothing.
I also like the idea of what a visual medium could do for Hal, in particular his gross proclivities and the proclivities of the people involved in this case. Let’s just say it involves a sex club and some very strange fetishists. And Bankers. Notoriously good combination. Add a little bit of alcohol, and you have some sweet pandemonium.
I also truly relish the idea of a scene showing just how crazy Bitch can be. I have labeled it “CRAZY SUPERTIME BITCH REVENGE ACTION SCENE”, and though I won’t do it, in my head I have this image of the whole comic suddenly dropping into anime with motion lines and naked people with knives.
The only real story bit I want to share of yet, before I even begin it, was an interesting little thing I noted. Hal walks into the sex club with a beer in his hand. He takes a swig, and a mammoth fat woman with a riding crop and electrical wires stuck to her nipples turns to him, points to the beer, and says, “Hey! We don’t allow that shit in here!”
So I had a tire I knew needed replacing, turns out it was two. Yesterday, I hit a bolt of some kind in the road, BLOOEY, tire is screwed. I go to a Midas, and they give me two tires for 150. Not great, not unreasonable, but the long and short of it is the savings are wiped a little. I keep saying to myself, that’s the whole point of savings, even if you had a million bucks in it you’d still have to pull 150 out of savings for this, you just showed why it’s important to have it. Still, annoying.
They pull me aside and say, “Et-hem, sir! We can’t help but notice that the boot on your front axle is ripped! It’s totally dry! You could cause metal fatigue and you could be disabled! Avoid that 200 dollar towing fee and protect yourself!”
They showed me a picture of the part. I said I would take it into consideration and left.
Because of my studies of the last month, I knew the part, I knew its relation to the rest of the car, and I realized immediately that they were trying to fuck me out of cash. I found the replacement boot, with grease, at Shucks for 26 bucks. Labor? Extraordinarily minimum.
Midas wanted 185 bucks, plus labor.
I am pleased with myself. I feel very prepared for more things now. And I have a spark plug gapper on my fucking keychain now. Even my chest hair is growing chest hair now. BWA HAH!
At any rate, that’s not what I set out to write to day. What I set out to write today is done, and that is this:
This novel is FLOWING. There is no hesitation, no worry. Unlike the last draft, I am quite pleased. The only thing that irked me is the fact that the novel’s symbolism doesn’t fit with the title in the same way, because the Weak Sister in the last one was another entity (I won’t tell you about it, because it’d spoil a novel I may eventually write some day).
But it still fits. And it still, in the ways that the good novels I’ve read do, gives a subtle hint as to who the bad guy is. As another layer, I like the bad guy’s flaw and Hal’s to reflect each other, so they learn something together via a different process of nature vs. nurture. It’s kind of like what Lost did when Lost was doing things well. People learning from their past mistakes to solve a dilemma in the present.
In the last novel, Hal has to deal with the fact that he’s afraid that his unconventional way of living is becoming like that of someone he doesn’t admire, as does the villain. They both have extraordinary examples of who they don’t want to be that they fight against. One succeeds, one miserably fails.
In this book, Hal is trying to decide what’s okay to do in order to serve justice. Can you kill a guy who rapes? Are you just as culpable if you tell someone else you KNOW would kill a guy who rapes that X man is a rapist?
Lawrence Block goes into this in a number of books, what Matthew Scudder is willing and unwilling to do, and I find it utterly fascinating. Atticus Kodiak is another firm and strong model for this behavior trait, because sometimes a fucker just NEEDS to die, but you’ve got to find a way to serve justice, too, without becoming who you condemn. That’s the fine line of a hero, often times. It’s why I can’t dig the Punisher, but I wrote a novel about a guy who vettes and kills people who need to die (Renegades, coming soon, I hope).
My character, however, is neither as subtle or nuanced as Atticus or Matthew. My character is a blunt weapon. BUT, he has two things that ultimately redeem him, in the way Fletch is constantly redeemed. He has the luck of the drunk, and he is clever at getting out of trouble. So he’s got two people coming at him, one with a knife, one with a machine gun, he’ll say, “She said something about your momma!” and the knife will turn on the machine gun as he runs.
In this next novel, I’m just doing that on a broader scale. There’s actually a triple cross that Hal causes that indemnifies him and punishes a lot of guilty bastards. I love it. The only thing I’m having trouble with is Hal knowing he might be causing the death of some people who ABSOLUTELY deserve to die, but he doesn’t know if he should play God.
I’m toying with having a proxy do it for him, without his permission, but I think it might be a gold character step to have him do it himself. But, as I found reading A Dance At the Slaughterhouse, it’s a pretty big step, even if you can bring things back to status quo. It changes a fundamental attitude of the character.
But some people, sometimes, they just need killing.
Like these guys:
Well, okay. Maybe we can keep them around for amusement purposes.
These and other adventures, now being written in No Weak Sister, the second Hal Taylor novel. For real this time, not that other novel which I now disavow.
I’ve spent the last few days re-evaluating and, more importantly, getting back into the Hal frame of mind.
Started over today with some great ideas, and now I’m going to pause and read more. I have 3,000 words or so I’m pleased with. I’m gonna wait on the counter for a few days until I’m sure, though.
I think I’m going to toss No Weak Sister. Start Over.
I’m twenty thousand words in, but I’m not getting the vibe I want. It’s a good story, and a good idea, and I even enjoy what I have, but it’s just not fitting my vibe right now. It feels forced.
That’s a hard concession, but I had doubt last weekend, I woke up with doubt today and yesterday, and as I read it, I realize there are some critical components of Hal that are missing in this script. He’s there, but he’s not Hal. Initially, I thought that I would make that the payoff. You spend the novel wondering where Hal is, what’s happened to him, and BAM, there he is, at the end, coming back with a vengeance. I think I missed the fact that people don’t want to wait for what they want, and I as a writer don’t want to wait. I want the joy that is Hal being Hal.
Yesterday I didn’t write at all, for a combination of reasons, but mostly because I was dreading working on the book for the first time. A Hal book. It was probably external factors that caused that, but I had a day where I basically biked for 10, 12 miles, completely cleaned my truck top to bottom, pressure washed it, did everything I could to take my mind and turn it off. Find out what’s up. I hate days like that more than I hate practically anything, because they’re days you can’t logically suss until after the fact, and days where (most critically) no work gets done.
In my head, I have the attitude that if Kristen can’t just up and leave work because she’s not feeling in a good way, I can’t. But that ignores a few truths. She can, if she needs to, call in sick. People can take mental health days. And the working out of this shit is part of the job. But I’m doing the typical American thing, trying to quantify my value in a number of words, a number of words that has shrunk in the last few years as I think more before I write.
I’m going to take the afternoon and work on a new outline that incorporates some of the elements of the old outline, and see if I like it tomorrow more than the last one. You might see the counter reset.
But given that I have set my goal as the end of the year for this novel, and given that this will be my first year where I produce two novels instead of one, I don’t feel so bad about that. I have the feeling I had when I was first learning construction and, like a dumbass, didn’t ask any questions, and built the wrong kind of wall in the wrong kind of way and wasted three hundred dollars and two weekends.
It’s a learning experience, but it doesn’t take away the pain of lost time.
Okay, so I got to writing, and I started laundry, and I was so taken with an idea that I started the washer, then went upstairs before I added any laundry. Any of you ever do that? Forget to load the washer after you start it? It’s a first for me. Hopefully the little remaining groundwater for a massively populated MMORPG that we call Earth will forgive me, because it led to this:
“The damage doesn’t look as bad from up here!” -C3PO
I have one line in my outline: “Hal goes home, tries to get to sleep before his first day, and is kept awake by the five-shot salute.”
Hal is in Tacoma in the second book. I suppose that’s a bit spoilery, but there’s an arc to it. He starts the first book in Salt Lake City, for the second book he’s in Tacoma, in the third and fourth I know where he’ll be, but I want to mention Tacoma because it’s part of the war of writing this novel.
Blue Collar Slut sees Hal in a very happy place. He’s doing some things that aren’t very pleasant, and he’s confronted by some truly awful human beings, but he knows his place in the world.
In the second he doesn’t. Half of that is because of plot factors, but the other fact is simply being in Tacoma. It unhinges him. He doesn’t know how to react to the different culture, the different life. It’s definitely been a through the looking glass experience so far, because I know Tacoma, and I know how Hal handles life, and we’re just different in many respect. Tacoma is unhinging him. That lone sentence above turned into an entire chapter where he flails around rather helplessly and tries to figure out the place I used to live in.
Tacoma is a ghetto, and Tacoma is not a ghetto. By the wikipedia standard (COUGH) any area that has marginalized, largely poor minority populations is a GHETTO. But of course, ghetto isn’t a fucking status, it’s a state of mind, so when it comes down to it, it’s not Johannesburg, but it’s also not, say, even Seattle.
When I lived there, I heard gunshots at night. I feared for my life. There were drug deals I could see through my window. There was black on white adversity. There was gentrification. There was very low living standards, and I went to a school that was probably fifty percent white, 25 percent black, ten percent asian/pacific islanders, and five percent mutant sloths.
The population is working class, semi-military, and there’s a lot of alcohol.
Now, here’s the issue. I don’t have any statistics to back that up. I can’t say to you, “LOOK AT THIS HORRIBLE GRAPH!” And I know, in my heart, there are fifty worse cities all across America with residents who would pray to live in a place like Tacoma (including, ironically enough, the Salt Lake City area, which I hear has gangs up the yazoo).
But it’s a symbolic journey. Hal’s going from completely aimless, to hope, where he sees potential but doesn’t know how to go about it, to tragedy, and then back to where he started, but with a guiding light. That’s purposefully, maddeningly vague, but it’s my journal, so bite a dick.
I am living in a place now where my neighbors smile at me. Where there’s trees, and no smell. There’s no gang activity. Shit, even the taggers are pussies around here. You see a bike go by every thirty seconds, and I have yet to see anything even remotely scary or dangerous beyond assholes who cut right in front of bikes on right turns.
THE HORROR!
But at any rate, the reason I write all of this is because I know, in my heart, I’ll probably catch flak from people for my portrayal of Tacoma. People who live on the north side, hell, even the south side, might not see the level of craziness I experienced on hilltop. I grew up on the south end and I didn’t hear gunshots at night. It was a family area with a lot of working class problems, but relatively tame (if active) gang and drug activity. And by the time this is published, shit, it might have changed into the relatively safe area it was when I moved there, after gentrification had led to a pretty tame area in many respects while the housing boom was in force.
I just want to know what I was thinking moving there, I guess. What I hoped to recapture. With Hal, he’s there out of a desperate set of circumstances, and the question is not if he’ll stay, because in his heart he knows he won’t, it’s just more that he wants to know why the city ticks the way it does, and what he can do to fix it. And unlike his little fiefdom in the trailer park, he’s gonna find he can’t change shit in Tacoma, and perhaps the only solution is to abandon ship.
This is not to malign the good people of the city who fight to survive. It’s just chaos theory, dig?
I’ve been told (this is unverified, just what I was told) that the new Previews has a positive review of the Female Force Trade Paperback, which comes out soon!
This is the quote I was given by Steve:
“Perfect for the student or the everyday reader who wants to know more about the women that shape the world, this book is an important part of our history and an essential piece in your literary collection.”
Booya! Now I have to get ahold of that puppy and take a look.
Yesterday was a horrible mishmash of laziness and making time for myself. In my head, and in your head, likely, this is called laziness, but there’s a strange dichotomy that most people don’t understand about writing, and I call it trusting the gut.
It’s odd. Sometimes I’ll go for six straight weeks with no weekends, and I’ll be fine. And then sometimes I’ll write for one day, and need a day off. There’s a bit of a pattern to it, though, especially when writing a novel. When I’m hitting a hard spot, and yesterday I hit one HELL of a sloggy part, you step back and realize you can’t write it that day. Even if you’re geared for work, even if you want to, you can’t.
Last book, it was the scene with Bitch. I wrote a quarter of it, then yelled at it and left for a whole day. When I came back, I knew the problem, fixed it, rewrote, and it became one of my favorite bits in the novel.
This novel, I had to explain what happened to Hal to land him in a trailer park, and I didn’t have it until just this morning. I thought I had it, but I didn’t, and then I crunched it in my sleep last night.
The good thing is that I also figured out the end of the three book arc that constitutes what I’m thinking of in my head as the first trilogy of books. There’s probably more in Hal, but I have nothing in my head beyond the third book that’s concrete.
In the first book he’s a bit of a renegade, and gets caught up in stuff beyond his control. The second book, at least so far, begins with him examining how his life got the way it was, and along the way he gets mixed up in some bad shit again. The third book, the game is COMPLETELY changed, and by the end of it… I have this idea that’s just fun and fantastic. I’m quite pleased with waking up and having that in my head. Going to bed, waking up, there are always ideas there. I fucking love what sleep can do for a plot. Dreams.
Here we are:
And in other news… I have cable again, because the introductory offer ended, so I had to juggle around offers. Internet was 57 bucks, and if I got cable they’d knock it down to 44 and then give me cable for 30 bucks, so I figured, 17 bucks to be able to flip around each month? Why not.
Point being, when is Rachel Maddow on? And what channel? I’ve only ever seen her on the internet, and I love her to death.
