BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

So, my kid is brilliant.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. In fact, I’ll repeat it again right now for good measure. My kid is freakin’ brilliant. She’s in the gifted & talented program at her school, she has a reading comprehension level umpteen jillion grades ahead of her own, and a vocabulary that will sometimes astound you. Not always on top of the slang, as evidenced by an earlier blog entry, but hey, I’d rather she not be.

So, why am I telling you this? Believe it or not, it actually has something to do with the story.

You see, being brilliant – I did mention that, right? Anyhow, being a brilliant child, the O-spring is also enrolled in the College For Kids program at a local community college campus. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s kind of a neat deal. Gifted kids from all over get to come and take classes in all sorts of things – from oil painting to biology to robotics to chess to geo caching, and a ton of stuff in between. They have two sessions – winter and summer. Winter happens on Saturdays for 5 weeks. Summer happens for one straight week in August.

See where I’m heading?

Yeah… See there, you’re brilliant too… Anyway, the O-spring managed to pull the three classes she wanted this session, (like the real deal, it doesn’t always work out that way), which means we have to head out the the college right around morning rush hour.

Being a bit anal retentive about punctuality, we tend to leave a little early, just in case something happens to slow us down, and then we spend 15 minutes sitting in the lecture hall doing that Dad – Daughter bonding. This means she talks to me about Pokee-Man cards and I listen. Sometimes we even talk about things that old dad actually knows something about, such as writing. She has it in her head that she wants to be a writer. I have yet to find a suitable way to discourage her from that folly. Who knows? Maybe she will actually be successful at it, unlike her pops. Time will tell… But, I digress as usual.

On the day in question we were heading up the main drag, only a couple of miles from home, and we ended up stuck behind some guy in a four door sedan who either had no idea where he was heading, or simply wasn’t awake. From what I could see, the only thing of real interest to him was his cigarette. Well, that’s not entirely true. He was also deeply involved in some sort of driving game which entailed speeding up, slowing down, and going from 40 to 0 in nothing flat for no apparent reason. Another apparent part of the game’s strategy was to make sudden swerves to the right, then jump back into the lane.

This went on for a good mile or better, with me unable to get around him due to other traffic. Eventually I began to mutter all manner of expletives, some of which I had been using for years, others of which I had learned from Luets (my multi-lingual buddy). I even made up a few names for the guy and issued detailed instructions – upon deaf ears, of course – about what he needed to do with his car if he wasn’t going to take the time to learn how to drive it.

The O-spring watched and listened in silence. She’s heard ol’ pops rant before, so this was no big deal. She just watched the idiot in front of us, and waited to see what would happen.

Finally, cigarette man screeched to a halt, turned on his blinker, and made a painfully languid turn into the parking lot of the McDonalds. Thankful that I was now going to escape the rolling roadblock and still have plenty of time to arrive at the college for the first class, I sped up and pushed us along on our way.

My 10 year old daughter, still quiet, swiveled her head to watch the lurching car putter around the McDonalds parking lot as we drove past. Before the arches had even made it into my rear view mirror, she clucked her tongue and in a matter-of-fact tone announced, “Well… Apparently somebody hasn’t had his Frappe yet this morning.”

Told ya’ she was brilliant. How could she not be? With a sarcastic mouth like that, she’s obviously got my DNA…

More to come…

Murv

I recently rambled about the -30- at the end of manuscripts. If you happen to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social networks I have linked to my ping account, you are most likely well aware that I just finished a writing project. Hence the sudden interest in the number 30…

But, while typing that symbolic notification of “the end” draws my “work in progress” to a close, I’m never quite finished. There are tweaks, editing, final revisions, and all that jazz – not to mention hopping onto the promotional bandwagon and “selling” the book. However, those aren’t the things I am talking about either.

Anyone who has been around me when I am working on a manuscript knows that I go through phases. Simply for the sake of explaining my process, I’m going to try to break them down for you here. By the time you are finished reading this, you will likely believe I need to be living in a padded cell.

PHASE ONE: I start out by diving into whatever research is necessary for that particular work. For instance, when I started the Miranda Trilogy, I knew next to nothing about Vodoun and Hoodoo. While I’m still no expert by any stretch of the imagination, I came out on the other side of that first book in the trio with more than just a passing knowledge of both. Granted, there are times throughout the penning of a manuscript where the story will take a direction I hadn’t foreseen, and this will require me to stop and take a day to research something in order to be accurate. But, for the most part, the reading, interviewing, and info gathering generally comes at the beginning of a project.

PHASE TWO: Next, I move into the, “Gawd, this is like pulling hen’s teeth” phase. I’ve started writing and at about 10-15K (word count) I hit this imaginary wall. It’s a barrier that is built out of my own self-doubt and inner fears about whether or not the story is going to be worthwhile. Suddenly, squeezing out a thousand words in a day is laborious. Nothing has changed quality-wise, but I spend so much time doubting myself that the characters decide to go sit at the bar and wait until I get over my one man pity party. I have even gone so far as to say to E K, “I don’t know what made me think I could write in the first place.” This is usually greeted by a couple of slaps, followed by a stiletto heel to the head. She’s all about negative reinforcement, ya’know…

Then, we move into PHASE THREE. Words are flowing, the story is unfolding, and I look forward to sitting down at the keyboard each day. Oddly enough, Phase Three is the least stressful of them all. (Not that the stress is all bad, mind you. There are definitely good kinds of stress…)

PHASE FOUR hits at about 40-50K, and things change again. No longer do I  merely look forward to sitting down at the keyboard, I begin to dread having to leave it. The story has not only continued to unfold, but I am now sleeping on the couch in my character’s home(s). I’m sitting in the back seat of their vehicles whenever they go somewhere. I am standing right behind them when something happens. I am a part of their world, and I belong. This is generally the point where I become very hard to live with – not because I’m an asshole or anything, although you might want to check with E K on that just to be sure. The primary reason is that I am not here. Brainpan-wise, I am no longer a resident of the here and now. 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, I am living in a different world inside my head. I am seeing all of the things that are happening behind the scenes. What I mean by that is simply this: I see the manuscript happening in real time, and all of the stuff that never makes it to the page. The boring interludes where Rowan and Felicity might be sleeping, or Ben is fixing himself a grilled cheese sandwich using a folded sheet of aluminum foil and an iron.

I am an observer in their world, and even though only a small fraction of their time is chronicled on the pages of that particular novel, I am witnessing it all. Every last second…

When I come downstairs from my office I am told there is a vacancy in my eyes. It’s flat out noticeable. The lights are on, but Murv is long gone. E K will see it right away, and now that my daughter is older she sees it too. They both give me a wide berth, and talk to me only about what is absolutely necessary – again, not because I’ve turned into an ass, but because my brain is somewhere else entirely.

PHASE FIVE is even worse. Not only do I live with my characters, I form an empathic connection with them at the basest of levels. What happens to them, happens to me. I feel their pains – physical and emotional. I weep with them, I fear for them, and I even become physically exhausted with them. At this point there is usually only 25-30K left to write. Now, the relationship between the manuscript and me becomes pseudo-sexual. The “foreplay” as I like to call it, is hot and heavy. The “climax” is only a few short chapters away. Everything quickens, and my daily word count, which started at 1K, then progressed to 2K, is now in the 3K or better range. My wife comes home to someone she doesn’t know. A taciturn and at times almost catatonic individual who stares into space while moving through the motions of life in a purely mechanical fashion. I am like a junkie looking for a fix. All I can think about is getting back to the keyboard, and although I take notes on a constant basis through every phase, by now if I am not at the keyboard I am scribbling on anything viable with anything that will make a mark, just to be sure I remember. I begin to spend all of my time sequestered away, living the lives of my fictional “family.”

PHASE SIX arrives when the “literary orgasm” occurs. Everything has come together into an explosive, emotional ejaculation that leaves me tangled up in the proverbial sheets on a bed of my own making. I’m spent, as are the characters, but it’s not over.

PHASE SEVEN is the cigarette and cuddling. All of us – characters and me as well – have to debrief. We talk it out among ourselves, making sure we understand what it is we just experienced.

And then comes the -30-, the scotch, and the cigar…

But, like I said, it isn’t over. There is a PHASE EIGHT… For several days following that numerical end mark, I continue to sleep on their sofas. I dine with them, I walk the dogs with them, I watch them when they sleep, like some kind of nebulous, fictional stalker. Then, slowly, I begin to fade from their world. I feel myself being tugged back into reality by those who need me here. And eventually, my life with Rowan, Felicity, Ben, Constance, and all the others becomes a bittersweet memory, underscored by a longing for my next foray into their world.

And… There you have it.

I’m relatively certain some – if not all – of you will probably think I am insane now that you have read this, and to be honest, I wouldn’t blame you. E K did the first time I confided all this to her, but thankfully she didn’t have me committed. A year or so later she was reading a book by another author (she does that a lot) and discovered in the afterword that I was not alone. That other authors develop these deep seated relationships with their characters, and see them as very real – even if the “real” only lasts for a very short time.

Even so, I know it sounds nuts. I actually think all fiction writers – myself included – are by definition just a little bit insane. But, you know what? I think maybe I like it that way.

More to come…

Murv