Where All the Ladders Start

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I have looked at the novel I’ve been working on in all different seasons, at all different times of day, and I have finally decided its title is Where All the Ladders Start. Readers of a poetical persuasion will recognize the quote from the ending of the Yeats poem The Circus Animals’ Desertion:

I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Deciding to give the books in my Last P. I. series titles lifted from poems is one of the many ways in which I strive to be a commercial failure. Couldn’t I have come up with something clever — liking naming them after numbers, or colors, or letters of the alphabet?

Anyway, I am declaring the novel “pretty much done.” So you’ll have a chance to take a look at it before very long.

“Shared Notes & Highlights” for Dover Beach

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Richard Bowker

How come I never noticed Amazon’s “Shared Notes & Highlights” section before? According to Amazon, these are “the thoughts and passages that Kindle readers have shared while reading this book.”

Anyway, here are the shared notes and highlights for my novel Dover Beach. Feel free to use them on Christmas cards, print them on t-shirts, etc.

“Solipsistic,” I suggested. “As if he were the only person who really existed.”

And:

“I know I’m dying,” he said, “but you’re dying, too, everyone is dying. All that matters is what you do before you take that last breath.”

And:

“Rituals are what bind us together. They shelter us from the terror of loneliness and death. They give life meaning and shape.”

I know I know, these don’t seem like quotes from a private-eye novel. But I’m pretty sure they work in context. And Dover Beach is not really a standard-issue private-eye novel.

Writers in movies: Third Star

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Haven’t done one of these in a while.

Third Star is an indie movie from 2010 starring Benedict Cumberbatch and three other young British actors. The main character is a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is dying of cancer. His friends take him on one last journey to a remote bay in Wales. Along the way they laugh, they cry, and they learn something about life, about friendship, and about loss.

I know what you’re thinking: This is just the kind of movie I want to avoid at all costs. And you would be right. The movie is nicely photographed, nicely acted, it contains no superheroes, no one meets cute . . . but it still feels very trite, very paint-by-numbers. Everyone has his own flaw, his own secret . . . and yet, at the end, we don’t really feel that we know them; instead, we feel manipulated by a screenwriter without anything deep to say.

There are actually two writers in the movie: the dying-of-cancer-so-he-will-never-achieve-his-life’s-ambition writer and the talented-writer-who-could-never-be-as-good-as-his-famous-father-so-he-gave-it-up writer. But there’s never a moment when we really see them as writers. Cumberbatch’s character feels a generalized sense of loss, of leaving this world too soon, but he never feels this loss as a writer, with stories left untold, with characters left undescribed.

Which is not to say that I can’t empathize with that loss. I sold my first novel when I was about 30; by that time Cumberbatch’s character would have been dead. And I recall that one of my strongest reactions was one of relief. I would never have to think of myself again as an aspiring writer. Instead, I could now think of myself as a published author. However unsuccessful my writing career might be, no one would be able to take that away from me. It surely would have been a cruel fate to be denied that satisfaction. I was hoping I’d get some sense of this from Third Star, but alas, I enjoyed The Two Mrs. Carrolls more.

Draft 3 of my novel is complete — am I done yet?

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Probably not. But at least now I have a draft I can give to folks without having to apologize and explain about all the stuff I’m going to fix, really, no foolin’, I know I didn’t explain what happened to the second car–I’ll get to that.

This draft took just about a month. It involved changing a basic plot line, which involved changing the characterization of a major character. Plus the usual tinkering. Everything seems to make sense now, at least to me. At least today. So I’m declaring a partial victory.

Why I’ll never get rich from writing, part xxxvii

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This is from Hugh Howey, via The Passive Voice — the way to become successful in online publishing:

The idea is this: Annual releases are too slow to build on one another. And not just in the repetition of getting eyeballs on your works, but in how online recommendation algorithms work. Liliana suggests publishing 5 works all at once. Same day. And she thinks you should have another work sitting there ready to go a month later. While these works are gaining steam, write the next work, which if you write and edit in two months, will hit a month after the “hole” work.

Why does this work? I think it has to do with “impressions,” or the number of times people see a product before they decide to take a chance on it. (In this case, the product is your name.) It also has to do with recommendation algorithms and how new works are treated on various online bestseller lists. From my own experience, I know that it was following WOOL with four more rapid releases that helped my career take off. I followed these five releases a month later with FIRST SHIFT, and I released a work every three or four months after that (SECOND SHIFT, I, ZOMBIE, THIRD SHIFT, plus several short works).

Here I am a year and a half into the writing of my new novel, and I’m close. But I’m not quite there. Maybe a couple more months… Will I have something ready to go a month later? Yeah. Sure. No problem.

Jigsaw Puzzles and Writing

Posted on July 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I am a sucker for jigsaw puzzles. My wonderful family got me a couple for Father’s Day, and they have been sucking up my time ever since. I really should be helping humanity by liking Facebook pages and retweeting hashtags. I really should be finishing my novel. But no, I have to be working on this.

Here are the ways that working on a jigsaw puzzle is better than writing fiction:

Each piece has one and only one place where it goes. Find it, and you’re through with that piece. None of this tiresome moving paragraphs around and changing motivations and fiddling with adjectives.
When you’re done, you’re done. You don’t have to look at it when you’re finished and think: Maybe that boat on the right should be bigger. Maybe the water in the middle should be a different shade of blue.
Even one of these hard 1000-piece puzzles only takes about a month in your spare time. You don’t look up at the clock and realize a year has gone by and you’re still not done.

Here are the ways that writing fiction is better than working on a jigsaw puzzle:

You don’t lose pieces.
When you finish a jigsaw puzzle, no one asks you to do a sequel.
Every once in a while you earn a tiny bit of money from your fiction. No one has ever offered to pay me for doing a jigsaw puzzle.

I’d say it’s about a tie.

The novel was pretty much finished on Tuesday, and then . . .

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Richard Bowker

. . . I woke up on Thursday with An Idea. But that was OK — the Idea was limited to one section of the novel, and it wouldn’t require much rejiggering.

Then today I squinted at the novel from another angle, and that resulted in Another Idea. This one would involve changing the motivation of a major character, with consequences through the story.

I think I need to follow up on both of these ideas.

But what will happen when I actually read through my draft?

John Steinbeck famously wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a few months. Where did I go wrong?

Life is stupider than fiction: robot politician edition

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

A friend sent me a link to this article, noting that “someone has been reading your book.”

“The election for U.S. House for Oklahoma’s 3rd District will be contested by the Candidate, Timothy Ray Murray,” Murray wrote in a press release posted on his campaign website. “I will be stating that his votes are switched with Rep. Lucas votes, because it is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike.”

On the website, Murray claims that Lucas and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members,” were executed “on or about” Jan. 11, 2011 in southern Ukraine.

“On television they were depicted as being executed by the hanging about the neck until death on a white stage and in front of witnesses,” the website claims. “Other now current Members of Congress have shared those facts on television also. We know that it is possible to use look alike artificial or manmade replacements, however Rep. Lucas was not eligible to serve as a Congressional Member after that time.”

The book in question is my novel Replica, whose basic plot is evident from its cover:

Replica was by far the most successful of my novels when it was first published. So far it hasn’t gotten much love as an e-book. Is it the cover? The price? It’s a pretty good book! Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly said when it came out:

While maintaining a highly readable pulp-fiction style, Bowker takes the narrative through a gripping array of turnabouts, doublecrosses and twists. Readers will be guessing the story’s outcome until the very end.

And here’s a customer review:

I’m not sure exactly what I expected when I bought this book, but I didn’t expect it to explore terroristic politics, development of artificial intelligence, and some of the challenges of AI/human relationships … all without becoming bogged down in the esoteric nature of the technologies involved.

It starts out more or less the way I thought it would, with various entities coming together to make it possible (and plausible) to substitute the President with an android. Almost everything after that, though, was a surprise … with plenty of twists and turns and misdirections and characters developing in ways you probably won’t expect.

This is a good read, and amazingly so given how long since its original publication. It’s not too often that near-future books involving technology or politics (and especially a combination of the two) are written such that they don’t become badly dated in a decade. This one is still fresh, a fun read.

The second draft is done!

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Richard Bowker

As I hoped, the second draft of my novel went a lot faster than the first. By the time I had finished the first draft, I had pages of notes about what I needed to change, and I came up with lots of new ideas before beginning the second draft. New characters showed up! Old characters disappeared! Motivations got rejiggered! New plot twists got twisted!

There’s more to be done, but at least now the thing feels like a completed novel. It exists; before it was more or less a jumble in my mind.

Here’s the kind of thing I’m going to have to do now: the last words of the novel used to be “Gwen repeated.” But this morning I decided they should be: “Gwen said again.” But as I say the words over in my mind, I’m not entirely happy with the internal rhyme. Will anyone care? No. But I think I better change them back. Or maybe not.

A note on the authoring process: somewhere on this blog I’ve talked about rewriting on a computer. Computers make it easy to use your original draft as the basis for the rewrite, but that lessens the incentive to re-imagine your content. This time around I started with a blank document, but I copied the first draft into it chapter by chapter. Often I would use a sentence from the original; occasionally an entire paragraph. But mostly the text was there to remind me of what was going on, and most of it got deleted as I completed its replacement. Overall, I managed to reduce the books length by about seven percent, which was one of my goals. The first draft didn’t feel quite streamlined enough for a private eye novel.

Now on to the tweaking!