NaNoWriMo Victory!

NaNo-2015-Winner-Banner

My explorations for possible plots of The Fantasy Novel I Will Likely Never Write was somewhat successful as I did discover at least one avenue to explore for what the nature of the grand conflict is. And far more important: I had fun writing.

My last sentence:

“All right then,” I said. “We dump this guy. We pack our stuff. Then we put this thing in the fire and run like hell.”

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Bundling Up

It was cold in the house yesterday morning…

meandbyng

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Whither the Sports Columnist?

ESPN.com has completely gone to hell; si.com’s not much better. Grantland has ceased to be. Where does one go to read sports journalism any more? Does it even exist?

The Wrong Way to Celebrate a Goal

I’m at a bar where mariachi is playing and the TV is showing sports. Sports in this case is the most popular sport in the world, the version of football that involves both foot and ball.

It’s a listless game, for the most part; I hadn’t even realized the game had started — players were just milling about. Then I noticed the clock was ticking. I went back to my writing.

I looked up again when the guy watching the TV to my right turned up the volume. “GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL!” There were celebrations and then the guy who scored the goal ran to the sidelines and began furiously unlacing his shoes. A flunky ran up with a new neon-green pair, and the player put them on with a great show of urgency.

While the clock was ticking. The other team waited for him to finish. Perhaps they had to, it looked like he was on the wrong side of the center line. If he was stopping the game by being offside, it seems to me it was a yellow card offense. If not, I say let the guy change his jock for all I care, but his team’s going to have to play without him while he promotes his own agenda. If the clock’s ticking, the ball should be moving.

And what about the rest of the team? This guy was busy immortalizing his own damn wardrobe (and no doubt profiting from it), with no recognition that a whole bunch of other guys worked to create that moment.

While this example was particularly awful, don’t think for a moment it doesn’t happen in other sports. American football even has rules to limit celebrations. But honestly, I have no problem with guys throwing a brief party after they accomplish something. I do have a problem with a player delaying the game to profit personally.

If if turns out he auctions his shoes to support an orphanage, then I will suddenly applaud the opposing team for supporting his philanthropy by not putting the ball in play. I’m not optimistic.

My Conflict Over the Attack on Rooftop Solar

Most of us now can become energy producers. We might not produce as much as we consume, but we can put solar panels on our roofs and reduce our energy bills. And if our panels produce more energy than we’re using at the moment, it seems like a good idea to put that energy back on the grid for others to use. Energy storage is inefficient. The burning question: how much do we get paid for that power?

The law differs everywhere but where I live right now, People can sell electricity back onto the grid at the same price they pay for it. While that is great for those with rooftop solar, I’m not so sure it’s great for all of us. The question is: Why is the electricity I sell back to the grid worth twice as much as the electricity utilities buy from other power generators? The utility is forced to pay way more for electricity homeowners produce than they pay anyone else.

The power companies are fighting back by imposing huge fees on solar homes. In some states now, like Arizona (which… solar… duh), if you put in a solar installation you’re slapped with a huge tax to pay for “your share” of the old-world electricity infrastructure. That is also ridiculous. The message in those states: if you go solar, go big enough to get off the grid. A total lose-lose scenario, since the surplus generated by homeowners goes to waste.

And in that battle, I am the biggest loser of all. My euphemistically-named ‘manufactured home’ can’t support the panels. Next-gen solar panels might be light enough. I hope so. But in the meantime, my rates are inflated because some of the electricity I’m buying was bought by my power company at a ridiculously high price.

If I make more electricity than I need, the price I sell that power back to the grid should reflect the cost to the power company to get that energy to its destination. Right now in my neighborhood the power company is required to buy electricity at a loss from schmoes like me. While I have no sympathy whatsoever for the assholes who run the power companies, assholes who endangered public safety to bilk Californians out of billions of dollars and then hid the money behind bogus bankruptcies, I still have to move forward on principles of fairness.

Brief aside: Documents sealed in the Enron trials could get a lot of energy executives serious jail time.

Back to the small. If I produce electricity I don’t need at the moment, I should be able to sell it. The value of that power should be a contract between me (or a collective of people like me) and the power company I’m selling to. The price could change minute-by-minute, based on demand. But it shouldn’t be retail. Sorry, my hippie friends, when I’m producing electricity I am just another power plant; I shouldn’t have an unfair advantage over any other electricity producer.

BUT! While I accept that I should sell my electricity at wholesale, that doesn’t mean I accept the ridiculous taxes on energy-producing households to maintain the grid. The power company can profit from the power I generate the same way it does with power it purchases from big producers.

Power companies across this great nation wish to punish the small producer. They have brought forth taxes to combat the little-guy-friendly laws in many states. Solar power is starting to make real economic sense, even with the government underwriting of fossil fuels.

I think the key was in a parenthetical a couple of paragraphs back: millions of rooftop solar owners combining to form a collective — a single power company that negotiates its rates with the power companies the same way all the other generators do. As solar technology improves, the cost of generation goes down, where the cost of the fossil competitors may enjoy periodic drops, but ultimately must move upward.

If our nation were to say in the meantime that poisoning our water and killing our children is illegal again, even for frackers, that would dramatically increase the leverage of alternative power generators.

Let’s make solar power officially just another source of electricity. Solar is ready to compete on its own merits, without price controls, and despite the staggering portion of our taxes that is spent to maintain the oil industry. PG&E is not going to impose wacky grid taxes on its most cost-competitive supplier. But it’s the people making the electricity who need to speak, not governments. It’s time to take the training wheels off and let solar ride.

Gulp

Today as I was driving to work (really had planned to bike today, but…) I was in stop-and-go next to a Maserati. “That’s a handsome automobile,” I thought. About then I caught a whiff of the oil going out my tailpipe and that brought to mind the mortality of all useful machines. I stopped to look at one of the Maseratis that parks in my structure. It is indeed handsome, even on extended inspection. “I wonder of there’s a Maserati convertible?” I pondered.

There is a Maserati convertible, it turns out. And it’s also a handsome automobile. And… it’s pricey.

Ha. “Pricey.” OK, I know a prestige marque commands a premium, but I wasn’t ready for a price tag that’s damn near twice the Jaguar F-type. That’s the competition, I figure. And while I find the Jag a little butt-heavy (I have heard that the trunk had to be expanded to meet the marketing requirement that it could hold a big-ass set of golf clubs – but if it can only hold one set, that’s what the passenger seat is for), and the Maserati is allegedly a four-seater, there’s just no way to justify spending absurdly too much for the Maserati (assuming you are already reconciled to spending far too much for the Jaguar).

Unless, unless, the Maserati has fewer stupid gizmos. There’s stuff on most modern cars I’d pay to not have. It would take a lot of not-having to justify that price, however.

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Writing for Social Media

It used to be that here at Muddled Ramblings I would just develop ideas at my own pace and trust my readers to hang with me for a few sentences to let things get going (there is actually no evidence that they did that, but I like to believe). Lately I’ve become (perhaps detrimentally) aware that most of my audience is only presented the first couple hundred characters of my ramble before they are presented with a go/no-go decision.

I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that it has changed the way I open my episodes here at MR&HBI. I’m fishin’ for the hook.

Last night as I posted episode one of TFNIWLNW to a new social media platform, I was compelled to add a little preface. The thing is, in all these platforms, what shows to the casual feed-grazer* is only a couple of sentences. TFNIWLNW starts with sexual assault. So, aware that said assault is going unhindered for the first 250 characters of the story, I decided to graft on a little intro with two goals: tell readers that the asshole’s gonna die before we learn what the asshole’s doing, and to introduce the audience to the narrator’s voice. I’m pretty sure I had only a partial success, but you’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong.

Then, not knowing the culture on this new Social Media site, I put in a little parental warning that also used a pretty sweet metaphor and accelerated the understanding that our narrator is, in some fundamental ways, not a nice guy. From a literary point of view the extra words serve a good purpose. From a “goddammit tell me a tale” standpoint they come off as masturbation.

Writers have always needed to put a hook at the start of a story, but the hook now has to catch in the first few words. I’m pretty sure I unhooked TFNIWLW:1 in an attempt to fix it. But if I’m going to keep it up over there, i’ll have to be very careful with the first 70 words of each episode. Maybe that’s a good thing. A book where every scene starts with a hook is the kind of thing about which reviewers say “I could not put down.”
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* I am a little bit proud of the phrase feed-grazer, so please don’t tell me how many times you’ve heard it before.

TFNIWLNW on tsū?

I’ve been pondering how to make it easier for people not interested in this blog per se to follow my serial fiction projects, without all the other blog stuff and without my commentary.

I’ve also been curious about a new social media thing called tsū, which shares ad revenue with its users. Get a lot of clicks, get a wee bit of cash. So if I were to publish things there that lots of people liked and shared, it would be cool.

As far as I can tell, tsū is really not suited for serial fiction, or even posts of more than a paragraph or two. It may be completely impossible for people who stumble across Episode 3 to find Episode 1. But maybe, just maybe, it’s a growing platform that would embrace words as well as pictures and memes and whatever the kids are posting up these days.

More likely, I’ll have to find a different platform. But it’s worth a shot.

I’ll keep posting TFNIWLNW here, so don’t fret, kids, you need do nothing to continue to enjoy the upcoming twists and turns, and maybe even a plot. Maybe. But if you’d like to check out what this tsū thing is all about, click this link and you can join up as my personal guest. Or just sign sign up and when they ask you who invited you, use the code ‘vikingjs’.

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What’s In A Name?

This morning I rode my bike to work for the first time in a good long while. To commemorate the event, I thought I’d give the ride a special name in Strava, one of the apps* I use to track my pedaling. The default name for rides in the morning is, remarkably, “Morning Ride”, but this seemed more significant than that. As I rode through the graveyard, appreciating only peripherally the mist clinging to the ground as I huffed along rather slowly, I thought “Back in the Saddle” might be a good title.

By the time I was pulling my sorry ass up Willow, I had changed my tune a bit. “It’s like starting over,” I hummed, as it seemed I was in no better shape than I had been when I first bought the bike. Somewhere along Los Gatos Creek Trail the title changed again, to “Holy Crap”, and a few miles later on Prospect it was “Oh God Oh God it hurts make it stop.”

By the time I turned onto the benign stretch of Miller Ave. heading north, the name had been simplified to a nice concise “F***”. (I figured Strava wasn’t a place to go saying things like “fuck” where just anyone might see it.)

And now, were you to go to Strava and look me up, you would see my effort this morning is called “Morning Ride.”

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*Yes, one of the apps. It’s a long story, the rough draft of which is already in the system.

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A Fine Way to Start the Week

Fortunately I planned ahead and started stretching the Miata’s top last night — it had been down so long that it had forgotten what up was like. Then on the commute this morning: Thunder! Lightning! (Not necessarily in that order!)

California freeway in the rain? This isn’t So-Cal but the rain still makes already-awful traffic awfuller. Except this morning was the lightest traffic I’ve experienced in weeks, with drivers showing a little extra courtesy I’ve long since given up expecting. Go figure.

Tomorrow back on the bike, but welcome, rain. Don’t be a stranger.

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My NaNoWriMo Helper

My NaNoWriMo Helper

My NaNoWriMo Helper


I don’t know what I’d do without her.

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November 1, 2015

It has become a tradition for me to post my first day’s efforts for National Novel Writing Month here each year. Some years the day-one spew is more interesting than others; this year my approach to NaNoWriMo is somewhat different and so the product is different as well. What I’m doing is more like research than it is the actual story.

You know how you pick up some stories and you start reading and all of a sudden you’re “treated” to chapters of “how character X got to be here” junk? It’s all stuff that happens before the real story begins, but the writer doesn’t trust himself to show you the character organically so he feels compelled to go off on a huge tangent to explain who the main people are in the story. But it’s not part of the story, and if you can’t make a character’s behavior in the here and now make sense without first presenting a complete biography, then maybe it’s time to review that behavior.

There’s nothing wrong with writing a full backstory for characters, just remember that it’s for you as a writer, not for the reader. Write it, but don’t publish it.

Or, if the backstory is interesting, you can publish it on your Web site as a supplement to the core story. That can be fun for everyone. Just let people meet your characters in the story first.

Oh, by the way, this episode is all backstory. I’m writing it to answer to myself one simple question: “What’s the story with Bags’ pretty sword?” I wrote that in as an interesting detail all the way back in episode one, but I have no more idea what it signifies than you do. So I better figure that out. For the next couple of days I’m writing a story for me only, to hash through Bags and to try to find ways to make him interesting. After that I’ll do the same for Kat. Martin, maybe, maybe not. He lives so much in the moment that the past doesn’t seem to matter to him. He just is.

After that I’ll probably start gushing out versions of what TFNIWLNW would be like if I were to actually write it. The main thing I need now is a plot. Characters and setting will only get you so far. (Though there are plenty of big-name authors who coast on character and setting once people are hooked to their interminable series.)

Anyway, all that backstory I just said one should not publish? Here’s some of it now. One thing about writing backstory just for the sake of backstory: it’s almost all exposition. I’ll be getting into more character development later tonight, but this part is already pretty long to expect a blog audience to read.

I will say, what with it being a series of events, a lot does happen, even if I haven’t examined very much yet what the significance of those events is. At the very end of this bit I finally start getting some traction in that arena.

Anyway, here’s the first part of the first day:

The Fantasy Novel I’ll Likely Never Write: Research

When Baxter Mongret was enjoying his fifth summer, his father went off to war and didn’t come back. When news of father’s death reached the modest cottage where Baxter had been born, all were pleased — but not surprised — to learn that he had died well. “Die young but well and leave plenty of offspring” might have been the family motto, were it not, “In Glory, Everything.”

Each generation of Mongrets saw a few of the men survive long enough to enrich his family with the spoils of war and the favors of grateful nobility, but Baxter’s father had so flawlessly embraced the family’s unspoken credo that he had died gloriously, slaying many enemies and saving the life of a bastard son of a minor prince, but expiring before any of the rewards of such heroism could be conferred upon him.

So it was that Baxter, his still-beautiful mother, one younger brother, and two sisters, found themselves living under the care of his uncle Traistin, one of his departed father’s older brothers.

The next few years were the best of his life. Baxter was set upon by his older cousins, beaten, taunted, and tormented in every way that the nefarious minds of children can invent. He fought them with fist, boot, tooth and words. He always lost. But sometimes he would pause, surrounded by the larger boys, and see Uncle Traistin watching, with a faint smile on his face, and he would give a nod of approval aimed at Baxter alone. Those moments made everything else worthwhile.

One by one the older boys were given over to the master at arms, to begin formal training, and were no longer allowed to tussle with the children. It was a grave and solemn graduation from child from youth, and later from youth to young man. Young men could serve warriors, and would eventually achieve that station themselves, somewhere around their twentieth birthdays. The only step that followed that one was ‘corpse’.

By the time Baxter, or ‘Bags’ as his unkind cousins had taken to calling him, turned seven there were no longer any cousins who could best him. He wasn’t the biggest, though he had the bones to suggest he would be. He wasn’t the most skilled; he moved with the awkwardness of a large puppy still trying to gain control of his skeleton. But he was strong, and he was fast, and more than anything else he was releltlessly untiring. Combined with a patience born of being overmatched, of enduring and waiting for the one chance to strike a blow that might turn the fight, he had the discipline of a mature warrior.

His younger brother William, or “Worm” now to most of his cousins, did not recieve the same attention. He was still too young to be involved in family politics, and as he got older he grew into awareness of his surroundings already knowing the cousins his age. Worm was small for his age, and while he shared his brother’s quickness, he was obvioulsy never going to be a great warrior. Luckily, you don’t need to be a great warrior to die bravely. It might even hasten the path to glory.

On Bags’ seventh birthday, then, one year ahead of when most boys were sent for their arms training, Traistin stood to speak in the family mess hall, and solemnly announced that Baxter Mongret was ready to join the master at arms for formal training. There was much cheering, because Bags was popular among the adults and respected by the other children, but some of his cousins did not like it. Their own father was showing some interloper greater respect than he ever had shown for them.

“You better watch your back, Bags,” Clyde hissed across the table. “We’ll be using real weapons next time.”

Bags smiled. His life would once again become what he was accustomed to. He was going to be the target again, and he was going to learn how to fight all over again.

 

Only it didn’t work out that way. First, all their fights were carefully controlled by their tutors. Even when the tutor was an older brother of the cousin Bags was fighting, they kept things scrupulouosly fair, lest they dishonor themselves. Nobody was prepared to diminish himself in the eyes of the master at arms. Second, After the first few weeks while he accustomed himself to the new tools of violence, Bags started winning. He fought with joy and daring, without ever being reckless, and he was steadily matched against older and older opponents. The graying men who presided over the training too notice, and gave him personal attention with more sophisticated attacks and defenses. The masters hoped, quietly, to themselves, that Baxter would have many offspring before his inevitable fall. Out loud they told Traistin that Baxter was going to bring great glory to the family.

They were wrong about both those things.

 

When Bags’ mother got pregnant again, Bags thought nothing of it. Pregnancy was someting that happened to women. Other people seemed terribly upset about it, though, especially Uncle Traistin’s wife Greta. Greta had come from far away to marry Uncle Traistin, and she had never much liked Bags’ mother. She didn’t seem to like anyone, for that matter — she went out of her way to make it clear she was unhappy pretty much all the time. But for Bags’ mother there was a extra special sort of hatred that Bags did not understand, as much as he was aware of it at all.

Most of the other people around the place didn’t seem to care all that much. It all went with the Unspoken Credo. Leave many offspring. A bastard could die gloriously just as well as any other.

Things only got worse when word came that Uncle Traistin had been killed in battle, hundreds of miles away, along with his two eldest sons, fighting for some prince Bags had never heard of. The messenger had ridden through sleet and rain and winter’s muck to bring the news as quickly as possible, as if another day of not knowing would have mattered. His horse died right there in the courtyard, while Bags looked on sadly.

His uncle had died a violent death, but that’s what it meant to be a man in his world. From Bags’ point of view, Glorious Death was the sole reason battles even happened, and princes only existed so that men could die for them. Without princes, what would his family even do?

Traistin was the last of his generation, and his oldest surviving son was a mere seventeen, only now starting on the “many offspring” part of his destiny. Just married and to be honest rather stupid, he was ill-prepared to be head of the household. Which allowed Greta to take control, at least until more distant testicle-bearing relations could make their way to the compund. While she had the ear of her sons, she made two decisions. One, that not all her sons would die in battle. Two, there was no room under her roof for beggars and whores. By whom she meant Bags and his family. Mother and sons she turned out into the winter; Bags’ sisters she sold to a caravaner passing through.

 

It was only a few weeks before Greta was executed by the men of her family for bringing Dishonor on the name Mongret, but by then the damage was done. Penniless and starving in the snow, Bags’ mother died giving birth to a little boy, who died hours later while Bags held it, crying helplessly. “They turned their backs on us,” His mother panted while she bled into the snow, her doomed infant son wailing in her arms. “Listen how your tiny brother cries for vengeance.” She shuddered. “If you share his cries, Bax, you must remember one thing. One thing…” She coughed and took another shuddering breath, her face as pale as the snow around them. “They must die the death of cravens, or your vengeance will merely hasten them to glory.”

 

Bags couldn’t even bury his mother and brother. The ground was too hard and he had no tools, and no way to get them. As night fell he heard the furtive sounds of scavengers and predators, drawn to the scent of blood. He woke his younger brother who lay pulled into a ball, shaking in his cloak. Bags pulled him shivering to his feet. “Never forget this place,” he told Worm. “We must always remember.”

Worm nodded. “Always.”

“We have to go now.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“She will become part of the forest.” Wolf shit is part of the forest after all.

“Like a spirit?”

Bags nodded, though he had no idea how these things worked. But there were spirits in the woods, and they had to come from somewhere. “Yes,” he said. “And we have to remember this place, remember her, or her spirit will fade.”

Worm, solemn as ever, said, “I will always remember. Even when you forget, I will remember.”

“I won’t forget.”

“You forget everything. Everyone in our family forgets. They forget what people looked like as soon as they’re gone. They forget the happy times they had together. I think we have to forget or we’ll be sad all the time.”

“But not you?”

“Not me. I remember everything.”

“I won’t forget this,” Bags said. “Not this.”

“I won’t let you,” Worm said.

The creatures of the night were getting braver. “We have to go,” Bags said. He took Worm’s hand and led him out of the underbrush and onto the deserted, moon-lit road. “Which way?” he wondered aloud.

Worm pointed to their right. “That way,” he said. “Away from anyone who has ever even heard the name Mongret.”

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