Pat’s Comments (group member since May 06, 2009)

Pat’s comments from the Second Wind Publishing group.

Yes, I do believe a person can become out of touch with reality over grief of someone who was deeply connected to him, such as a child, especially if the bereft person had a tendency toward instability. Grief throws such a tsunami of emotional, hormonal and physical responses at the bereft, that even the strongest, most stable, and most stoic are bewildered and often feel they are going crazy. Someone who is not especially strong, who doesn't have a staunch support network, and who isn't in touch with himself wouldn't stand a chance.

Actually, I lied about the fifteen items or fewer at the grocery store. Apparently it was just that one store. The others still have signs reading "fifteen items or less." Perhaps for items that are partially eaten? Then there would be less.

Grocery stores must have really gotten complaints -- they used to have a "fifteen items or less" line. Now it's "fifteen items or fewer."

Even if you say what you mean, people generally understand only what they want to understand. And you will always be in the wrong. If you don't understand what they say, that's your problem for not listening correctly. If they don't understand what you say, that's your problem for not talking clearly. It's amazing anyone ever manages to communicate with anyone else!

Betty wrote: "At that age, kids just said I was afraid of the ball.

I got that, too, about being afraid, but my eyes couldn't adjust fast enough to see what the ball was doing. I could read books, though, so that's what I did. They were my lifesaver. Still are.

Sheila wrote: "One day he told me he hadn't realized before that birds made noise. His life must have had a curious soundtrack.

Must have been a thrill for him when he first heard the birds. I got glasses when I was very young, and I still remember how astonished I was that there were street signs. I always wondered how people knew what street we were on since I hadn't a clue.

Carole wrote: "I can relate to that Betty. I hear voices but not words. The overall sound in my head is that of a distant male voice choir singing. I can't influence the tune, or change the volume,and it's never ..."

How fascinating! That would be so much more interesting than the constant conversations in my head. (I'm always arguing with someone for some silly reason.) Like Penelope, I used to hear echoes of the last song I heard, but I stopped listening to music, so that solved that problem! Now I'm trying to be aware of the pleasant sounds outside of my head -- leaves, like rain, falling on the roof, the crunch of my shoes on the gravel paths where I walk, the whoosh of raven wings as they pass overhead.

Angela wrote: "The soundtrack of my life starts with thumping of feet pounding against the walls each morning when my disabled son wakes up. Then it's pandemonium as objects are thrown and broken, voices rise an..."

Sounds heartbreaking.

The soundtrack of Light Bringer is much lighter in tone, though the story itself is almost as dark as A Spark of Heavenly Fire. (Odd that I use such light-sounding titles for both these books of dastardly deeds by unfeeling governments and corporations.)

When my two main characters meet, they make beautiful music together, (and sometimes discordant music if their moods don't match). Others can hear these eerie sounds, so they learn to keep their distance when they are around others. They also hear sounds no one else does, such as flowers beckoning for them to come play or grasses whispering in the wind.

The soundtrack of A Spark of Heavenly Fire begins with normal city noises but with a cacophany of sirens. This noise fades into silence as the city is brought to a standtill by the epidimic. The silence becomes punctuated by the sound of gunfire, army tanks, helicopters, and fighter planes. And as the military sounds fade, the sound of voices and traffic slowly make their presence known.

I never paid much attention to the soundtrack of my life until a few months after my life mate’s death when I realized all the things I wasn’t hearing.

Every morning for decades, I woke to the motorized whine of his blender as he made a protein drink, the shushing of running water as he filtered the drinking water for the day, the clink of weights as he did his exercises.

We were quiet people, but occasionally I’d hear the soft hum of his music or tinny voices from the television in the other room. In the summer I could hear the rustle of the hose in the weeds as he watered the bushes and trees outside my window, and in the winter I could hear the stamp of his boots when he came in from clearing off snow. And always when we were together, there was the lovely sound of his voice as we talked and talked and talked -- we talked of anything and everything until he got so sick he couldn’t carry the thread of a conversation any more. At the end, there were the scary night sounds of his falling when he struggled to get out of bed to escape the pain, and the even scarier sounds of his yelps when he woke and couldn’t remember who he was or where he was.

Just from those sounds, you get an idea of our life together and how it ended. What is the soundtrack of your life? And more important, since this is a group for discussing reading and writing, what are the soundtracks of your characters’ lives or the characters in the book you are currently reading? What do those sounds mean to the characters, and how does the soundtrack change during the course of the book to reflect the changes in their circumstances.

Let's talk.

How much of a story do you have in mind before you start writing it?

I start with a protagonist and his conflict; most times I have the ending in mind and simply write to it, although often the ending is amended depending on what happens prior to my getting there. Everything before that -- the digressions, the journey -- are discoveries that, hopefully, translate as discovery for the reader. I’ve never written from an outline. I haven’t even tried to work from an outline; I feel it would be too restrictive to me.

What is your writing schedule like? Do you strive for a certain number of words each day?

Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite novelists, despite Faulkner (no stranger to drink himself, Faulkner butchered the screenplay for The Big Sleep) calling him a “world class drunk,” wrote Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off. My writing schedule is like that: the first sentence is magic, the second intimate, the third settles me in for the session, and after that it’s like taking the girl’s clothes off. I used to set a word count but learned to accept what comes. Some sessions produce more word count than others; but I focus on the content as my goal. Certain parts of the story are going to be more difficult to put down on paper than others. Some sessions result in 1,500 words, while others end with 4,000 words. I’m grateful for it all.

Do you have any rituals that you follow before sitting down to write?

Oh, yes, I do. We laugh at our pets for being creatures of habit, but we are, too, if we’re honest. My morning sessions start with a pot of coffee and a trip to my humidor to select a cigar. (In the evening, substitute bourbon and beer for the coffee.) The cigar is all about the ritual -- selecting the right cigar to go with my mood, the time of day; taking it out of the cellophane, inhaling the fragrance of the wrapper, admiring the label, the workmanship (the better cigars are still handmade by someone with skilled hands in another culture thousands of miles away), snipping its head, lighting it, those first few draws, and watching the smoke infiltrate my den. The ritual helps get my creativity flowing.

Do you prefer to write at a particular time of day?

Yes, my preference is for Sunday morning. I schedule my entire day around my session. During the week, in the evening, I’ll polish or edit what I wrote on Sunday; but sometimes, if I’m really humming along, I’ll push the story forward during the week. But it’s difficult to do that consistently with a day job, especially one that puts me in front of a laptop writing. Sometimes the last thing I want to do when I get home from work is switch on my own laptop and be creative.

What are you working on right now?

I just finished a major project -- A Retrospect in Death. It begins with a man’s death, and the reader is taken to the other side where the narrator encounters his higher self—the part of him that is immortal and is connected to the creator. The protagonist learns (much to his chagrin) that he must return to the lifecycle. But first he must be “debriefed” by his higher self, and so they set about discussing the man’s previous life -- in reverse chronological order: knowing the end but retracing the journey, searching for the breadcrumbs left along the way. I’m just now tinkering with a concept for my next novel, a period piece during the golden age of motor racing—the 1960s—with the Indianapolis 500 as the centerpiece.

What is the most difficult part of the whole writing process?

When I started my first novel, nearly twenty years ago, the hardest part was sitting down to write the first sentence—even though I’d written it in my head several weeks previously. I was intimidated by the whole process and feared that I’d never complete it. I only talked about it to friends. Finally, someone asked me when I would stop talking and do something. It was the kick I needed to set pen to paper. Now, when I near the end of a project, I begin to worry about my next one. What’s the story? Who are my characters and what are their conflicts? How can I top my last novel? Today I find the revision process the most difficult part. I love polishing a text; but sometimes I get carried away with the tinkering. At that point I go back to the original draft and determine whether the tinkering adds something, some new dimension, or does it get in the way?

What is the easiest part of the writing process?

The late great sports writer Red Smith wrote Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed. Opening a vein is never easy, but it’s essential, in my opinion, to great writing. It separates the great writers from the mercenaries, who write simply for the masses, for profit. Unfortunately, that seems to go against what many creative writing courses are teaching young writers today. They’re told that they must allow the reader to experience the text in their own way. I understand that, but one must still lead the horse to the water. What if your reader has never experienced what you’re writing about? For example, I’ve never fathered children, so it does me little good to read about a character’s joy over holding his newborn son for the first time by writing, “He was proud.” I like metaphor and so I could relate to something like, “Holding his son for the first time he felt as if he’d just hit the walk-off homerun in the seventh game of the World Series.” Raymond Chandler was one of the greatest stylists ever to write, and I consider myself somewhat of a stylist, too. It comes natural to me. I love language, and to me how something is said is as important as what is said; yet sadly, the publishing industry seems to frown on anything that might take a reader out of the story. Well, commercials do that on TV; but it doesn’t lessen our enjoyment of our favorite shows, does it? If the industry is losing money, perhaps they should reconsider the cookie cutter mold stories they seem to want to publish.

Does writing come easy for you?

It comes a lot easier today than it did when I started twenty years ago! That’s a product of experience -- like an exercise routine, the first few workout sessions are difficult as your muscles rebel against the abuse you put them through. But in time, your body craves those workouts. Writing is like that for me. The more I do it the more I feel the need to do it. Raymond Chandler wrote Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. I hope I never reach that end because every session is an adventure. I learn something about the craft of writing and, more importantly, about myself.

What, in your opinion, are the essential qualities of a good story?

For me, the most essential quality of a good story is characters with whom I can connect. Finding a good story to write is easy; but writing about characters the reader cares about is more difficult. Hannibal Lecter is one of the most demented characters ever conceived, yet he was fascinating, a train wreck away from which we want to look but can’t.

Where can we learn more about your books?

My third novel, One Hot January , is soon to launch, through Second Wind Publishing. You can learn more about me and all my literary endeavors at my website.

TEA, in life, people often do things just because they feel like it. In a book, characters have to have a reason for doing what they do, otherwise it seems too much like author intervention. Take something like becoming an insomniac -- in real life, sometimes we lose the ability to sleep for no reason, but in fiction, there has to be a cause. Maybe she's worrying about something. Maybe it turns out she's sick. Maybe she lost her job. If there is no reason for the insomnia, and the insomnia plays a part in the story, readers won't accept that part. If the insomnia doesn't have a reason and doesn't have a part, it becomes an unnecessay complication. In real life, there are innumerable unnecessary complications for us to deal with. In novels, everything has to be there for a reason.

I don't like everything tied up into a nice neat package, but I like everything to make sense in that everything has to be motivated, even if the story is completely impossible. It's the motivations of the characters (why they do what they do) and the internal logic (consistency, cause and effect) of a make-believe world that make us draw us in and make the unbelievable believable.

In real life, there often are no motivations, no consistency, no cause and effect. Things just happen. But if things happened in a story for no reason, there would be no reason for the story, no matter how compelling a character.

I don't like a lot of dialogue, especially dialogue that goes nowhere, but I don't like a story that has long paragraphs of description, either. Narrative is fine as long as the author doesn't tell me what I should think or feel. As Lavada says, whatever moves the story forward.

My question was more or less metaphorical since not all books are overtly about escape, but it turns out I wrote a book about an escape. In A Spark of Heavenly Fire, my characters are trying to escape from a deadly virus in quarantined Colorado. Some characters try to escape from the state, others try to escape from their terrible predicament by creating a special world within the world of the quarantine. And me? I wrote the book to escape into a fantasy world that I could control.

"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape." Arthur Christopher Benson.

What is the escape story of the book you are reading or writing? What is the character escaping? What are you escaping by reading or writing the book? And how does the story propose that we escape?

As always, any topic that will help us improve our writing is fair game in these discussions.

Let's talk.

I lile the discipline of writing drabbles, and probably would continue to write them if ideas came easily to me. It's fun seeing how many words you can cut out and still keep the meaning of what you want to say.

About the only time I used word counts was in sending out queries. Otherwise, they didn't matter to me. (I did not have to write a specific number of words for blurbs and descriptions for my books.)

My preferred story-length is 80,000 to 90,000 words -- a full novel, though not an epic. The longest book I ever wrote was A Spark of Heavenly Fire -- the final draft clocked out at 120,0000 words, but I kept whittling away at it, and ended up getting rid of 30,000 unnecessary words. I do strive for a minimized prose, yet with minimal prose, one still needs vivid descriptions to anchor the reader in the scene, so I look for significant details rather than full-blown descriptions.

Thank you for hosting our featured discussion, L.V. The only book I've written that touches on any holiday is A Spark of Heavenly Fire. I liked the idea that as my hero got closer to Christmas, she became more giving.

Lisa wrote: "Yes, that's true. They get the intangible reward of having lived a life that was meaningful, that they did what they could to leave the world better than they found it. They might have done it with..."

I think this sense of importance is subconscious most of the time. It's just the way we deal with the immensity of life, a way of making ourselves matter. It in no way negates the unselfish way many people go about their lives.