Over in The Atlantic, David Litt argues that Congress should be much larger than it currently is:

In the 90 years since the cap [on the number of reps in Congress] was put in place, the number of House seats has stayed flat while the population has boomed. To put it slightly differently, each member of Congress has become responsible for several times more constituents. District populations have doubled since my parents were born, in the late 1950s. In my own 33-year lifetime, the number of Americans per lawmaker has increased by about 200,000—the equivalent of adding a Salt Lake City to every district in the United States.

Believe it or not, I've been working on a similar post, coming at the argument through looking at the ratio of people-to-reps in other countries.

Litt makes the case much better than I ever could (for example, I didn't know that the number of House Reps was commonly increased after every census until 1919!), but here's a plot of person-per-rep vs population for about two dozen democracies, from Mexico to South Korea to Nigeria to Norway:

You'll notice most countries are clustered together in the lower-left-hand corner.

See that outlier, waaaay up in the corner, far away from everyone else? That's the United States.

It's here! The new issue of Galaxy's Edge is out, and along with stories by Joe Halderman and Robert J Sawyer, it has my very first short story sale: "Wishr"!

It's been a long road for this story. I wrote the first draft in September of 2016 (!). Since then it's been through five major revisions, and multiple edits on top of that.

Several of those were prompted by early rejections. I'd submit it, get a rejection, revise the story, get beta reader feedback, and send it back out. Over and over and over again.

A slow process, but a necessary one. I'm proud of the story that's resulted, and very proud to be a part of Galaxy's Edge magazine, which was edited by Mike Resnick until his passing early this year.

Many thanks and congratulations to both the editor, Lezli Robyn, and the publisher, Shahid Mahmud, for keeping the magazine going, and his legacy alive.

So check out the new issue, and let me know what you think of the story!

Current writing streak: 50 days.

50 days! That's 50 consecutive days of working, bit by bit, on the novel, several short stories, and essays for the blog.

50 days of laying bricks, one at a time. Of sending out stories and getting rejections. Of wrestling with file formats, and Scrivener settings, all to conform to the particular submission guidelines of each market (sometimes "always follow the directions" is hard advice to hold to).

50 days of shoving the pandemic out of my mind for at least thirty minutes, each day, to go visit somewhere else in my imagination. A dearly needed mental vacation.

So, what's new this week?

I've taken up the habit of alternating days in which I'm working on the novel with days where I work on something else. It's a way of giving me a break from the general slog of the book without going too long without thinking about it. And it lets me make progress on some other projects.

Like the short story I started submitting to markets...two weeks ago? One of the rejections I got resonated with me. It took a while, but eventually that resonation joined up with some things my beta readers said, and crystallized this week into me thinking up a different ending for it.

The new ending changes the meaning of the piece. Shifts its emphasis. But I think it's stronger, and more cohesive with the rest of the story. And it adds a little bit of just desserts for one of the characters.

So I'm going to give it a shot.

I say "give it a shot" quite deliberately. It might flop. It might make the story worse, not better. I might fail to execute properly. Any of which would mean I'd go back to sending it out with the original ending.

But I'd like to try, so I've been using my alternate days this week to brainstorm and outline the new ending. Sketch out scenes, decide sticky plot points, nail down questions that arise as I think it through.

It's a different way of working for me -- usually I just throw down the short story, outline be damned -- and it's slower, but I'd like to be more deliberate in the way I craft things. I feel like the more plot holes I can fill during the outlining, the smoother the actual writing process will go. It should let me focus on the writing itself, because I've thought through the action and character beats already.

We'll see. Wish me luck.

I'm having trouble sleeping.

I wake up multiple times in the night, thinking I've heard our dog bark or someone move in the house beneath our bedroom.

Sometimes I fall right back to sleep, but often I'll just lay there, my brain chewing over some problem from the day, unable to rest.

When I do sleep, I dream. But nothing comforting: I dream of the world we've lost.

I dream of going to a pub for dinner. Of going on a trip at the airport. Seeing a movie.

Mundane things. Well, mundane before.

Even there, the pandemic intrudes. I go to a pub, intending to meet friends like normal, but my wife and I take masks with us, and sit 6 feet apart. The airport we go to is mostly deserted, and the planes never arrive. On our way to the movie theatre, someone yells at us for being outside.

So my dreams bring no comfort. No escape from reality.

In truth, I know I'm lucky. Both my wife and I have been healthy so far. We've had enough food and toilet paper (though it was touch and go the first two weeks). And our current house is new enough that nothing major has broken on us (yet).

I just...I wish I could relax enough to rest, and sleep, again. And dream of something else.

Intro

Henry Herz intimidates me.

He's written and sold ten children's books, along with numerous short stories, and he's one of the few writers Jonathan Maberry trusts to run the Writers Coffeehouse when he can't host it himself.

Did I mention he frequently runs panels for Comic-Con and WonderCon? And that he edited an anthology that includes stories from Peter S Beagle, Jane Yolen, and Jim Butcher?

Thankfully, he's as friendly and approachable as he is super-organized (more on that later). He recently spent some time with me over Zoom to talk about his writing process, children's book publishing, and his dive into the world of middle-grade novels.

Writing Process

What is your writing process like for a picture book? With something that short, does pantsing vs plotting come into play?

I'm a plotter by nature, and because of my background in industrial engineering, I don't like wasting time. For me, being a plotter is more efficient than being a pantser because I don't write myself into corners.

But it's an artistic endeavor, and it may be that someone who loves to be a pantser can't plot. They would actually be slower, so every writer must discover what works best for them.

For a picture book, there's usually 13 to 14 two-page spreads, so I'll just do an outline to show what I want to have on each of these spreads. Then I can look at everything and go, "Okay, do I have rising tension? Do I establish the problem in the first one or two spreads? Do I have a resolution about three-quarters of the way through?" And that's easy to check. Then I can draft each of the pages and go from there.

With a picture book, you could easily get away with pantsing, because the word count is so low. And picture books typically go through a lot more revisions than a novel.

Really?

Well, how many passes are you going to make through a novel, realistically?

Three or four. Maybe.

Yeah, exactly. I have picture books that have gone through 25 revisions, but that just means me making a pass and making changes and tightening things up, or me soliciting feedback from critique group members and integrating the feedback that I think is constructive.

How does your writing process change for a short story or novel vs a picture book?

So I'm organized in both cases, but I'm a lot more organized for the novel or the short story, because it's a bigger word count. I just feel like I'd be flailing if I pantsed a novel. I would be very likely to write myself into corners or spend too much time in one area.

I found a resource that I really like. It's called Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, by Jess Brody. There was originally a book by Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!, which analyzed how movies are structured, and Jessica Brody took the same idea and applied it to novels.

So her book gives you a template, a starting point, which was invaluable to me, since I've only written one novel. I used her structure for that novel and about half-a-dozen short stories in the 3,000 to 6,000 word range.

It guarantees you have the arc that you want. The character development is still obviously up to you, but it helps with the pacing and the arcs.

There's also a great resource for character development, the book that Jonathan Maberry always touts, which is the Writing the Breakout Novel Handbook, by Donald Maass. There's a bunch of questions in there that help you understand your own characters.

In my idealized process for writing a novel, I start with a rough idea of the story just in my head through inspiration, but then I flesh out the characters using the Donald Maass workbook, and then I come up with an overview and story beats from Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.

And that helps chunk it down, because I'm a picture book writer used to writing 500-word books. The first novel, the first and only novel I've written, is a 30,000-word middle-grade novel. 30,000 words is intimidating to somebody who's only written 500. If you're an adult novelist, you're like, "Pfft. I do 100,000 words all the time. It's no big deal." But for me, it was a lot.

So staring at a blank document that I know will have to contain 30,000 words is pretty intimidating. But if I use the Save the Cat template, then the writing is broken down into anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand word chunks, and that makes it much easier. "Okay, I know how to write that. I don't know how to write the whole thing, but I know how to write this little piece."

Like the parable about how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

What does your novel outline look like?

Jess Brody breaks the novel up into about 15 beats.

Beats like "The Opening Image", "The Theme Stated", "The Set Up", and then there's "The Catalyst". Then you break into Act II.

So having a couple of sentences about each of these beats, it gets me far enough to start writing.

So you had all the beats mapped out first? Or did you map out a beat, write it up, then map out the next beat, etc?

I map out all the beats up front, before I start writing.

Only somebody as ridiculously organized as me would pay attention to this, but Save the Cat Writes a Novel suggests roughly what percentage of the word count should be in each beat. Obviously, you fiddle with it. But that really helps me.

For example, The Opening Image, I think, is 1%. It's just an opening image, right? So if I have a 30,000-word novel, then I know, "Okay, I have about 300 words to play with." Now, they're not strict limits, but it tells me what I'm aiming at. There is a big difference between writing 300 and 3,000 words.

I find it helps with the pacing, to make sure that things are happening at the right times, and that there are head-fakes, that you're moving in a direction and something shifts. You're building tension, and then you ramp it up even more. It's just helpful. I know Jonathan [Maberry] has done this so many times that it's instinct for him, but since this is my first novel, it was really helpful to have a tool.

How do you go about building a scene in your head? Do you think cinematically, or...?

Let's take Stephen King's novel, Carrie.

So if I was writing Carrie, and I'm doing the opening scene, how do I want to set the stage? Would I want to have Carrie in her room levitating something, or would I want to have Carrie in the high school locker room getting picked on by the other girls?

But once I made that decision, then I would envision the scene in my head. "Okay, what's going on? Who's going to say what?" Make sure that the dialogue and the action is consistent with what the characters want.

In the end, these are stories about characters, so you always have to make sure that you're being true to those characters.

I probably pants that more in that I have a general idea of what the character's like, but I let the character's voice emerge as I'm writing as opposed to having it all worked out ahead of time.

I can think, "Okay, this character is smart but a little self-centered, has a good sense of humor, mouths off in class when they shouldn't." And then having those rough guidelines, then I can let the character's personality take shape, let it flesh out as I'm writing.

Do you use beta readers? Or maybe a critique group?

I'm a member of a group here locally that I like. It's some experienced writers, and we do 3,500 words a week that we share and critique. I got through my novel in nine sessions, nine weeks, which feels slow to me as a picture book writer, but I know as a novelist that's pretty fast to get detailed feedback from multiple people on your novel.

Do you all email out your selection to each other?

So this group uses Dropbox to pass out the pieces and then to give feedback. But then we were meeting face-to-face on a weekly basis until coronavirus, and now we're doing it all through Dropbox. Just sharing marked up versions of the manuscripts.

No Zoom meetings where you read aloud something and critique it?

No, that would take too long also to read aloud. 3,500 words times five people, that'd be a long meeting.

Oh, it's 3,500 each for each person, so each week you're reading 15,000 words or more?

Yeah, but it's a lot easier to read and critique somebody else's stuff than to write 15,000 words.

Fair enough. To get back to the critiquing real quick, how hard is it for you to switch between the draft brain and the editing brain?

Oh, for my own stuff? Very easy, very easy, because I draft until I have a complete draft, so I'm not context-switching on a daily basis. I'm drafting, drafting, drafting, drafting until I have a draft completed, and then I switch to revision mode.

Some people edit as they draft. I'm guilty of that too. But I try to discourage myself because it is important to get that first draft out.

But with short stories, I allow myself to edit as I go. That also means that when I'm done, the first draft is tight.

The last three I short stories I wrote, I was ready to submit after version two. One revision pass, and I was ready to go, because I had been editing them as I typed them in. So they were close to finished in the first draft. Then it's just a matter of polishing.

When you get feedback from your critique group, do you always make the changes they suggest?

It's a good question, and the answer depends on context. Sometimes I just get, "Hey, this isn't working," and sometimes I get, "Hey, this isn't working. Have you thought about this?"

And I will consider what they say, but I'm not feeling bound to do it. My choices are reject it completely, do nothing, accept it as is, or accept that there's a problem, but fix it a different way. Any of those are possible. It just depends on the situation.

I don't feel constrained by a critiquer's proposed solution, but I'm happy to hear it. The suggestion might be really good, or it might prompt me to go, "That's a good point, although that won't work because of something the reader isn't aware of," but it gets my brain spinning. "Okay, yeah. I do need to address that, and I know how to do that. I've got to go back a couple of chapters and plant something so that I foreshadow that."

Publishing

Have all your picture books earned out?

No. Some of them have, some of them haven't.

Oh. Is that hard to do for a picture book? I guess it depends on the level of advance.

Yes, it depends on the level of advance, and it also depends on how much effort the publisher puts in.

Because there's an 80/20 rule that applies to a lot of things, and I think it also applies to how publishers market their books. I think 80% of their marketing budget gets focused on 20% of their books that they have a really good feeling about. These are their top authors, proven authors with good track records, who get the lion's share of the marketing budget.

I've sold 10 picture books, but I am nowhere near the top of the field, not even close. I get a modest amount of help marketing-wise. They solicit professional reviews, and they put it on their website, and they do the things they do for everybody, but it's not like they're paying for me to go on a tour around the country.

I'd say the most critical thing is can they get your book in Barnes & Noble, because that's the biggest chain.

And they can't always do that. Just because a traditional publisher produces a book, it doesn't mean Barnes & Noble will take it. They have finite space, and they're going to pick the books they think will sell the best. It's perfectly logical from a business perspective, but it sucks if you're not a well-known author.

Do you have an agent?

I don't have an agent currently, and I think the novel is a good opportunity for me to approach agents, because there's a lot more picture book manuscripts floating around than novel manuscripts floating around in children's literature, I think.

And if an agent likes my middle grade novel, then I can say, "By the way, I also have a number of picture book manuscripts."

Some agents specialize in picture books. A lot of them skip them, because unless you're at the top of the field, the advances for picture books are small, and the agency gets 15%. The agent gets less than that if they're not the owner of the agency.

So imagine seven-and-a-half percent of a $4,000 dollar advance. That's not a lot of money for a picture book agent. $300 isn't going to pay the rent.

I'm hoping that this will increase my appeal because now I'm a dual threat, I can write picture books and I can write novels.

Do you have a list of agents already in mind for the middle-grade?

I have a list of agents who I like for picture books, and what I'll probably do is go through that, because I want somebody who works for a reputable agency and somebody who's interested in the same genres.

You have to align with what the agent is interested in reading, and I tend to write a lot of science fiction and fantasy.

So I will start with my list of picture book agents and go through them again, and go, "Okay, does this agent also represent middle-grade," and if they do, then "do they like fantasy and sci-fi?"

How do you feel your background in process improvement engineering helps you with your writing?

It doesn't help me with writing, but it helps me with my career in terms of being organized and being efficient about all the non-writing things that I have to do: submitting, soliciting an agent, and tracking when markets are open that you can submit to. And what you sent and whether you've heard back or not.

If you're being active, you could easily just drown in all the data. If you don't use a spreadsheet or something to manage it, you'll just completely lose track of what you're doing. I'm a pretty prolific writer, so I have to do that.

How do you keep track of it all?

For my picture books I have a spreadsheet. The columns represent the different manuscripts, and the rows are for the different publishers.

For each cell, there's really two dates, when I submitted it and when I heard back, either a rejection or an acceptance.

So that's a helpful thing to have, because then you know who've you sent to. I can put notes in there too, like if they rejected but they gave me some feedback, then I can stuff that in there as well.

And then I do something similar for my short stories, which are submitted to online magazines, print magazines, and anthologies.

Has your system evolved over time?

I didn't used to have that spreadsheet. I used to just have the Evernote list, organized by market.

For example, I scroll down past Amazing Stories, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies to Clarkesworld. I can see that I submitted ABC to Clarkesworld on this date. It was declined or accepted on that date. So under each market, I list every one of the stories I've submitted. I may also list stories I'm planning to submit.

But many of these markets don't accept multiple or simultaneous submissions. That makes it really hard to know at a glance "Can I submit there? Where else have I submitted that story?"

That's when I built a short story spreadsheet, where each row is a story and each column is a market. That format makes it easy to see at a glance where I've submitted it, and where I might submit it. You can use color-coding to show which markets allow simultaneous submissions and which ones don't.

I want to push my writing out into the world. There are some markets that will give you a fast response, within a few days. But most of them, it's weeks or months. I think, "Okay, which one do I want to send to in what order, and if I send there, that means I can't send it over to these other markets until I hear back."

So it's like a three-dimensional chess match. I've found that I needed the spreadsheet just to retain my sanity and get these stories out in as expeditious a manner as possible, get responses, and then if it's a no, move on to the next market.

Field Trip to Earth

Why go for a middle-grade novel after having written and successfully published so many picture books?

I've been published more than once in the picture book market, but writing a middle-grade novel makes sense for a couple of reasons. First is career-wise, it's better to be able to write in more than one market. But also, when you're writing picture books, your vocabulary is tied behind your back. You're writing for young readers, and are constrained by what words you can use and what concepts you can cover.

You also have to very carefully leave room for the illustrator, because picture books, at roughly 500 words, don't give you word count to describe the scenes. You have to leave room for the illustrator to do a lot of the scene description.

Writing middle grade lets me use my full vocabulary and describe scenes and incorporate motivations that are too mature for a picture book. So writing for older markets supports both self-expression and career growth.

I chose middle-grade as opposed to young adult or adult, because I'm also being practical. I've written a number of picture books of anywhere from 500 to 1,000 words. I sold an early chapter book, which was 6,500 words, so that was a step up. But nothing longer than that.

I thought, "I don't want to jump to a 100,000-word epic fantasy. That's just a bridge too far. Middle-grade novels can be as short as 30,000 words.

I figured I would hone my novel writing chops by writing a shorter novel.

It's also closer in tone to picture books than an adult novel would be.

So, what's the novel about? What genre is it in?

The middle-grade novel is science fiction with a good dose of humor.

It's called Field Trip to Earth, and it's basically an alien middle school student finds herself in academic trouble, and she needs to take an unauthorized field trip to Earth to collect data for her school report.

Some of her friends go with her, and hijinks ensue.

That sounds great.

It's been fun to write. Soon I expect to be done with my second full pass, and then at that point, I'm going to throw it out there and see if an agent wants it.

Have you gotten any feedback that made you completely rewrite part of it?

Partially. So in my sci-fi novel, the main character is a middle-school kid from Proxima Centauri.

And she realizes she needs to go to Earth. Now, she has attended driver's ed, so she knows how to fly a spaceship, but she doesn't own one.

In my original version, after school ends, she basically hijacks a school vehicle and flies it to Earth.

I got feedback from more than one person saying, "That's a little too dark. It offers a behavior that's not one parents would want to encourage in their kids." I can't pull off what Eoin Colfer did with Artemis Fowl.

So instead, she has a nemesis at school. Now, the nemesis is wealthy and has his own ship, so she enlists his cooperation into doing the trip.

Oh, that's a neat solution

Another piece of feedback: In my early version, the two of them would have verbal sparring, and the nemesis was a different species and chubby.

I had my protagonist teasing him about his size and his eating habits. The feedback I got was, "Your protagonist is being kind of a bully there."

Even though it was in reaction to the nemesis' actions, my protagonist's responses felt too mean and bullying. So I toned that down.

Those weren't complete rewrites, but they definitely were significant changes to the character and for one plot element. But that's the idea, right? I'm making it better.

Definitely. When making those changes, did you revise the outline first, and then the text?

No, because the structure is still solid. I don't need to change the structure. The beats are the beats.

In the way that I am operating, following the Save the Cat! Writes a Novel structure, the beats come in a specific order, and the relative size of those beats is unchanged. I just go into the individual chapters and tweak what I need to tweak to make the desired changes.

I don't have to rewrite the whole thing. I may have to insert pieces that I needed to set the stage in an earlier scene, but that's it.

This week has been...strange.

I received the contract (and check!) in the mail for my first short story sale, which is getting published soon in Galaxy's Edge magazine after being accepted last August. That's been an emotional roller-coaster ride all its own, but it's going to work out in the end.

The same day, riding high on waves of optimism, of the proof that I can write something someone will pay for, I received the latest rejections for two of my short stories that are out circulating.

I know I can't take any of it personally, but it truly felt like one step forward, two steps back, that day. Made me wonder if perhaps the one sale is all I've got in me. It's nonsense, of course -- I've got twenty or thirty years of writing left (with luck), and surely can improve a little in all that time -- but it's hard to stare self-doubt in the face and insist you know the future when everything is so uncertain, for everyone.

So, I'm going to do the only thing I can do: Write more, and revise it, and send it out. The only thing I have control over.

How about you? What do you do, when you feel like you're getting conflicting signals from the outside world about your writing?

I haven't truly binged-watched a show in a long time. Yes, even with the epidemic, I'm more often working or doing chores than watching something on streaming.

But The Boys is so irreverently good, so twistedly watchable, that I started it on Friday and spend Saturday finishing it off.

There's currently only one season, and when the last episode was over, I thought: Well, they just blew everything we knew up. Where could they go from here? Could a Season Two be even close to as good as this?

Dear Reader, I think it can.

Below is my outline for a Season Two.

Major Spoilers for the The Boys Season One follows

Butcher

Butcher starts Season Two with everything he's built his life on for eight years suddenly knocked out from under him. His wife's alive, she's been raising the kid she had with Homelander, and she's never, not once, tried to contact him about it or tell him the truth.

He's going to struggle to come to grips with that. He'll be in denial at first, and then angry when his ex-wife (and is she even his ex?) lays it all out for him. There'll be fights. He might try to move in with them -- insisting on a husband's prerogative -- he might try to "rescue" Becca (which she'll resist, confusing him more).

He might even try another attempt on Homelander's life, using his new family as bait.

All of these efforts, this raging at the new reality, will fail.

Finally, at the end of the last fight with his ex-wife, when the bleak truth has settled in, he'll remember something Homelander dropped at the end of Season One, when he was talking to Stillwell (who was all tied up with explosives at the time): The name of the scientist who created Homelander.

Butcher will shift gears at that point, away from Becca, and towards a new goal: To track down this scientist, and guilt him into making a formula to undo his greatest mistake. Something that neutralizes the effects of Compound V, making Supes normal again.

Homelander and Becca and the Kid

Meanwhile, Homelander has been trying to play house with Becca and his son.

But he's bad at it. Incredibly bad at it. Becca doesn't really want him there, the kid wants a dad but can't relate to someone raised in a lab, and Homelander himself has no role models to imitate.

Butcher himself might help here, in a scene where he's feeling low and takes pity on Homelander for once. Gives Homelander an in, something he can do to bond with his son.

But it's too little, too late. In an attempt to show "tough love", Homelander ends up killing the kid's favorite pet. Becca drives him out of the house, tells him not come back.

The Seven (as was)

With Homelander distracted, Maeve steps in to lead The Seven.

It's a literally thankless job. Their new manager at Vought feels nothing but contempt for Supes, seeing them as just more dangerous versions of spoiled celebrities. And every interview Maeve gives, someone asks her about Homelander. Even when he's gone, he overshadows her.

So she begins making some changes, to get some attention. She brings back a disgraced Supe, makes them part of the Seven. She gets back with her ex, and comes out of the closet.

It all unravels, though, when she finds out how Starlight has betrayed them all (in working with Hughie to take down Vought from the inside, tracing the route of Compound V to supervillains) and Homelander returns, all in a rage from his failed family experiment.

Hughie and Starlight and the Gang

Finally, "The Boys" has stopped being an all-boys' club. Kimiko and Frenchie are an item, and more and more Kimiko is willing to help them in their crusade against Vought (though reluctantly at first).

Hughie and Starlight's relationship remains fragile. They're friends and allies, but arguing constantly about the best way to go about things. Each time of them reaches out to rekindle their romance, the other pulls back, wounded and mistrustful from their last fight.

Because of all this back-and-forth, Starlight doesn't realize how deep she's gone to the other side until Maeve confronts her about it towards the end of the season, framing everything as Starlight's attempt to undermine her and take over leadership of the Seven.

The Climax

Everything comes to a head all at once.

Homelander returns in the middle of Maeve and Starlight's fight, pissed at everyone and everything.

Starlight's fight delays her helping Hughie and the gang getting into Vought's headquarters for the final piece of the evidence, making them think Starlight's betrayed them.

They break into the lab themselves, where they find Butcher, happily switching everything over to churn out the Compound-V antidote. He's carrying a rifle that's been modified to fire doses of the antidote, so he can make Homelander mortal.

And everything goes to shit when the world's first supervillain team chooses that moment to assault The Seven in their Vought HQ.

Another week. I've kept the writing streak going; currently at 36 straight days.

Managed to pick up work on the novel again. I worried I might not be able to get back in the headspace that easily. But it turns out if you've worked on something for two years, you can dive back into it without too many issues :)

Had to think back through the chapter I was working on, though. The plot I'd had when I last put it down didn't fit with the setting I'd established, and -- to be perfectly honest -- wasn't that interesting.

This new version I'm writing is harder, emotionally, but it's better.

Which seems to be true about a lot of the rewrites I do. The ones that are harder for me to write, to push my characters through, are the ones that make the story shine.

I'm keeping my daily goals modest, though. Sketch out a conversation here, set down a turning point over there, and that's it. Slowly stitch it all together over the course of the week. Review it -- but don't edit it yet! -- and mark the progress made.

It's these little steps, little victories, that keep me going.

What about you?

I've tried both Logitech and Zagg's versions of the iPad keyboard/case combo before, and neither of them worked out for me. The Logitech version was rugged and had a good keyboard, but it was too hard to get the iPad out of the case when I wanted to use it as a tablet. The Zagg folio felt cheap, and wasn't comfortable to type on.

I'm currently using the Apple Smart Keyboard Folio, and it's...fine. The angle that it sets the screen at is too steep to be comfortable, and it doesn't sit very stably on my lap, but it works, and I can type on it fast enough.

But I've heard a lot of good things about the Brydge keyboards, especially the "it makes it work just like a laptop" line. Comfortable to type on. Holds the screen at any angle you want. Easy to pull it out to become a tablet again.

So when they recently went on sale -- because the new version, with a built-in trackpad, is coming -- I snapped one up.

First Impressions

First off, this thing is absolutely gorgeous in the box. Like, I didn't want to take it out, it was so pretty.

And the box itself is pretty impressive; it's got a cheatsheet of what all the different function keys do printed right on the inside cover. There's almost no need to refer to the included QuickStart instructions.

Getting the iPad in the clips isn't too bad. They're stiff, but moveable. Ditto taking it out again. You need a firm grip, and a willingness to pull hard on something you might have paid $1,000 for, but it can be done.

Typing

The typing experience on this keyboard is, in a word, miserable.

My accuracy immediately plunged when I tried typing anything at all on it. The keys are both small and very close together, making the whole thing feel cramped. I felt like I was typing with my hands basically overlapping, it's that small.

On top of that, the keys sometimes stutter, or miss keystrokes. I had to strike each one much harder than I'm used to, which makes their small size and tight spacing even worse.

And the keyboard itself has a noticeable lag between when you open it to use it, and when it manages to pair with the iPad. It's a small thing, to be sure, but when you're used to the instantly-on nature of everything else on the iPad, it's a drag to have to wait on your keyboard to catch up.

Oh, and did I mention the whole thing -- keyboard, screen hinge, everything -- lifts off the table as you tilt the screen back? So the further back the screen goes, the more the keys tilt away from the plane of the desk. Yes, that means you have to adjust your typing to the angle of the screen, which is...not normal?

Still, a proper Inverted-T for the arrow keys is nice to have back.

And controlling screen brightness from the keyboard is cool. Not worth losing all that space that could have been put into larger keys or better key gaps (or just better keys, period), but here we are.

Portability

Jesus, this thing is heavy. I mean, it feels as heavy as my 16" work laptop. Definitely not feeling footloose and fancy-free while the iPad is locked into it.

As a bonus, it's really slippery when closed, making it both heavy and hard to hold onto. Just an accidental drop waiting to happen.

And I don't see how the tiny rubber things sticking up from the case are going to protect my screen when it's closed, especially as the thing ages and those rubber nubs become...nubbier.

Using it as a Laptop

The clips holding the iPad in place are really stiff, except when they're not. That is, anytime you forget it's not a real laptop and pick it up by the ipad.

There's also no way to open it when closed without knocking any Apple Pencil you have attached out of place.

It's fairly stable on my lap, so long as I don't tilt the screen back too far. There's a point where the whole thing just starts to wobble.

While the iPad's in it, it's kind of hard to hit the bottom of the screen to dismiss the current application and get the home screen back. Thankfully, they included a dedicated Home button on the keyboard, a nice touch.

However, the "On-Screen Keyboard" key doesn't work. At all.

Comparison with the Apple Smart Keyboard Folio

Using this made me realize things I want in an iPad keyboard that I never noticed before:

• I don't want to have to worry about plugging my keyboard in.
• I don't want to worry about having it come on and re-pair it with my iPad every time.
• I don't want to have to jerk on my iPad every time I want to convert it back to a tablet.

And the Apple Smart Keyboard Folio checks all of those boxes.

It's also lighter, and the keys are spaced further apart, making it less cramped. They also don't need as much pressure to activate.

Final Thoughts

So, yeah...I've returned the Brydge, and gone back to using the Smart Keyboard Folio.

I always thought of Apple's version as the "default," and that third-party keyboards would naturally be better. But it turns out weight, portability, and ease-of-use (no charging, always on) matters a lot more to me than I thought.

Current writing streak: 29 days.

Another week of forcing myself into the chair, every morning, for at least 30 minutes. Am I writing new words all 30 minutes? No. But I'm working all the same: planning, outlining, brainstorming, and finally putting fingers to keyboard.

When I feel the usual terror setting in, I tell myself: Write one sentence. Just one. One sentence is a victory. One sentence is enough.

It turns out that once I have one sentence down, I can usually write another. And another. And before I know it, I've written a few hundred words.

Sometimes. Sometimes it really is just one sentence. And I have to treat that like the achievement it is; because that sentence didn't exist before, and now it does. It might be terrible, it might be great, but I can edit it later. It exists to be edited later, only because I've written it.

So while forcing myself into the chair, I've finished a few projects:

• Finished editing the short story I worked on last week
• Sent that story out to beta readers for feedback
• Submitted two more short stories to markets, one for the very first time

Next up: Back to the novel. I really, really, really want to finish the current draft; I feel like I've been working on it forever. It'd feel so good to have it done to the point where I could send it to beta readers, or at least have enough raw draft material down that I can whip it into shape via another editing pass.

Weird to have a birthday during a pandemic. To have a day when I'm supposed to gather my friends together and celebrate. Now there can be no gathering, and any celebration feels macabre.

People have been asking me, what are you doing for your birthday? And the honest answer is the worst one:

• First thing in the morning, I'm going to check the LA Times page for updates on the spread of Covid-19 in California, paying particular attention to the shape of the curve for San Diego. Today: it's bending down, and has moved to doubling only every 3 days (last week it was doubling every two).
• Next I'm going to check the latest news from The Economist and The Atlantic. The Economist because they're going to put things in a global perspective. The Atlantic because they employ Ed Yong.
• After dumping all that in my brain, I'm going to try to write. I may fail.
• Later I'll go to work, where everything is normal since we were all working remotely before the virus. Except we all know it isn't, and it can't be.
• At some point I will probably take thirty minutes -- alone, in my office, where no one, including my wife, can see -- and just grieve. For what's been lost, and how much more we will probably lose before this is over.

None of which is really something you can confess to someone who just casually asks that question.

So instead I try to smile, and just say "We'll think of something."

And who knows? Maybe we will.

Current writing streak: 22 days.

Switching from tracking words written to time spent writing seems to be working. So far this week I've:

• Finished the script for an 8-page comic as part of Gail Simone's Comics School
• Finished writing up an interview with a local author
• Finished revising 3 of 5 scenes in a short story
• Submitted a flash fiction piece to a new market

I'm trying to use one of the tools Gail Simone said we need in our toolbox to make it as professional writers: Focus.

For Comics School, it meant keeping the overall goal modest (an 8-pg story) and working each day on just one piece of it, till it was done.

For me, I'm thinking of it in terms of goals per piece. This week, my goal is to finish editing the short story I mentioned above. Then I can submit it to beta readers, and move onto the next thing while I wait for their feedback.

Next week, I think I'll finally return to working on the novel. I'd like to take it chapter by chapter, with the goal of finishing one per week. We'll see how it goes.

How about you? How are you measuring success, during the pandemic?

We're halfway through the third week of shelter-in-place here in California.

It's starting to feel almost normal, this staying home and avoiding other people thing. Natural to move aside when walking on the sidewalk to avoid passing within six feet of someone else. Odd to think about leaving the house.

But then I think about going out for coffee and donuts, or driving out to the bookstore, and I remember. What we're doing, and why. And what we're trying to prevent.

I hope you're own stay-at-home is going as well as it can. That you're safe, have enough food, and don't have to worry about being kicked out by your landlord.

Here's a couple more shows to keep your mind occupied while we wait for the viral storm to pass:

Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist

I didn't want to like this show. True, it's about a programmer, which should immediately draw me in, but it gets everything about being a programmer at a startup wrong, right from the very first episode. It's the equivalent of the lazy "enhance" trick we've seen on too many shows, drawn out into an entire plot point. It rankles me, every time.

And the lead is....let's say bland, shall we? The main character is the least interesting part of the show.

But the rest of the cast is phenomenal, the musical numbers are both weird and fun, and it nails the mix of guilt, hope, and love that comes with caring for a terminally ill family member.

So I've been gritting my teeth through the software-world bits, and enjoying everything else.

Source: Hulu

Birds of Prey

Ok, not a TV show, but have you seen this movie? It's currently battling it out with Thor: Ragnarok in my head for the best superhero movie of the last ten years, and I thought nothing would ever get close to Thor.

It's got goofy comics action -- one scene has Harley shooting people with glitter bombs -- fantastic fight scenes, a crazy sense of humor (wait till you see what Harley will do for a breakfast sandwich), and incredible sets (one scene takes place inside multiple rooms in a fun house).

The cast is phenomenal, with the exception of the kid playing Cassandra Cain (but she's young, so can be forgiven).

My wife and I found ourselves watching it twice in a row one night (the second time with the director's commentary on) and I didn't even mind. It's that good.

Source: Online Rental

I won't be shy about admitting this: Dianne's one of my personal heroes.

A trained scientist, turned science writer, and now indie publisher, Dianne's one of those people that makes me wonder how they find the time for it all.

Did I mention she also has two kids, did a cross-country tour to promote her books, and was on a panel with Cory Doctorow at Wondercon last year?

Dianne was kind enough to take some time -- over Skype, given current circumstances -- to talk with me about her writing process, going indie, and what's it like to work on one long story for thirty years.

The first two books -- Heliopause and Ephemeris -- in her Questrison Saga are out now, and the third's on its way soon.

Writing Process

Let's start with your writing process. Are you a pantser or a plotter?

I would say that everything is in my head. I already know what's happening. I basically just sit down and write it out. I don't really follow an incredibly structured situation, I just write it. Things can come up as I write that influence where I think things might go and the characters have minds of their own. They might do things I didn't expect.

But I don't do outlines.

What about editing? Do you do multiple editing passes or do you do everything in one big push?

For the most part, I will go through the book and I will do my first pass, and then I'll go back and do it again.

Then I hand it off to beta readers.

Then the beta reader feedback, I get back. If there need to be edits or anything expanded upon, then I incorporate that. I read through it again.

Then at that point, I need to hand it off to the editor.

Do you mind going into a little more detail about your editing passes? I know some writers will break it up, so first they do a dialogue pass, then a consistency pass, etc

No, I just go through it all. It's just in literal order, line by line, chapter by chapter to the end, and I fix things as I go.

Do you take any time between writing a draft and then doing the edit?

I don't like to, because I feel the fire. I feel like I want to get this done. That's very much a "me" thing. I'm very much like that. Once I finish something, I want to make sure it's really, really done. I can't stand waiting on stuff like that. I tend to just jump right in.

Do you give any guidance to your beta readers?

Well, I don't like to frame things for them in advance. I do it more after they read. I do ask them, I say, "Hey, if you see anything blatant, let me know. If you have any questions, let me know." I keep it simple.

After they're done, that's when I really ask them the questions, because then they read it. That's what I want to know about, as a reader, what worked for you, what didn't work? I'll ask things like, "Who is your favorite character? What made you laugh? What made you cry?" Different things like that. "Do you think that this particular passage worked?"

Do you do an editing pass per beta reader?

No, because they're finishing at varying times. I thought, well, I want to ask my questions now that it's fresh on their mind, they just read it. Then because of that, then I'll go ahead and incorporate right after that, their feedback, if I felt that it merited changing.

Not everything does. In some cases, I've had to say, no, this is the way it is supposed to be.

You have a lot of really strong characters in your books. Are those based on real people?

Some of them are.

Sumond, the alien chef in Ephemeris, I based on this chef that I knew from San Francisco from when my brother lived there in the early '90s. This guy, this chef was hilarious. He had been an opera singer. That's where Sumond comes from.

Or take Troy in Heliopause. We all know Troy. He's a lounge lizard kind of a guy. He's loosely based off some people I know and he's named after my dad's cousin, Troy, who was more like an uncle to me than a cousin. It's a little bit of family nod there.

Then who else? Let's see. Even Veronica is influenced a little bit by people I know. I won't say who.

Everybody's got a little bit of influence from here and there, but nobody's an outright translation now.

Aeriod, though, is full-clothed from a dream that I had as a young teen.

Wait, what?

I dreamed that this alien Brit rocker had taken me up in basically a boat with some friends of mine up to this island in the sky, this land that he had with palaces. He showed me around and he talked to me.

There are some direct lines in Ephemeris from that dream, when Galla is dreaming about Aeriod showing her around. That dream was my dream.

Aeriod was just straight out of my head like somebody I knew. He seems very real to me. That's one reason I guess people say he's complex. It's because he's been in my head this whole time.

Does that happen often? You dream of characters for your stories?

I have very vivid dreams, and sometimes they do lend themselves to stories.

In fact, the first little scenes of Forster in Heliopause, where he's walking along the soft floors with the dim lights, that's from a dream.

I had already made his descendant, Kein, but Forster himself I dreamed separately later. It's funny.

Indie Publishing

You're publishing the Questrison Saga yourself, rather than go through a traditional publisher. Why go indie?

When I had worked on this for so long and then didn't really know what to do after that, I knew I should submit to a publisher. I realized that, oh, you can't really do that anymore, that there's a gateway to publication and it's called a literary agent.

That was about 2017, around the time that I started going regularly to the Writers Coffeehouse at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. I was going to get an idea of what I needed to do.

I started there and I queried quite a few agents. I got some bites.

At the end of it, there were four that I came very close to using.

One of them turned out to be a shyster.

The other one was just really sitting on it, and sitting on it, and not getting back to me.

The third one had a very strange reaction to it. She's like, "I think it has too many characters," but then she kept going back to read it. I'm like, "Just make a decision." What's the decision? She couldn't make one.

Then the fourth one, I really hit it off with, and she had loved the samples that I had sent her. She read the whole book. But she actually wanted me to kill more people than I was ready to kill at that time.

That was when I decided: I don't want to do this anymore. It's my story. I'm going to tell it the way I want it. I've had it in my head for years.

I can write other stories and submit to this process all over again, they won't matter as much to me. This particular one, I'm doing myself.

Plus, I was uniquely positioned in a time in which you could make a really good quality independently published book by having professionals do the covers and having professionals edit it.

When you set it side by side with a traditionally published book you can't tell, that was the goal. That was accomplished.

Would you do it again?

I will not do this again, because it is a lot of work. It is expensive. You are the publisher, the agent, the promoter, and all these other things when you're still a writer.

If you're taking a lot of time to promote this book yourself, that's time taken away from your writing. Even though I'm a very fast writer, it can be exhausting to keep on top of it.

I still feel that it was the right decision for this series.

But for everything else I'm doing, I will submit to traditional publishing.

How much did it cost you to produce Book One? Was it any cheaper to finish Book Two?

About the same. It is actually a little bit more expensive for Book Two because the editing, it was bigger book.

Do you mind talking about those costs?

I don't remember exactly all the costs. For the first editor of Book One I think was $1,200 and then the copy, the final proof was mostly $600, the art was $600, and then I actually had to buy the books myself from IngramSpark to be able to supply to bookstores and to conventions. That's a significant expense.

Advertising, promotional materials, posters, everything ranging from postcards to business cards to just all kinds of stuff, it was a few thousand at the end of the day.

Have you made that back?

I have made it back for Book One.

I have not made it back for Book Two, I don't think. Not yet.

I think what was interesting was that the minute Book Two came out, more people bought Book One. I think people just like a series.

How did you find all the people that you've ended up working with: the editors, the artists, the graphics people, and the web designers?

Well, everything about this process has been throw something at the wall and see if it sticks, literally. Because I didn't know what the heck I was getting myself into, piecemealing it, but I figured it out.

I got the website going first. For that, I had gone through a couple of web design people and logo designers.

I ended up asking a food and lifestyle blogger, Michael Wurm Jr., who runs "Inspired By Charm", because he had a really sleek website. He gave me the contact information for Dash Creative. That's who I've used the last couple of years.

In terms of the editing, I had gone to San Diego Writers Ink. They had a class on book publishing.

The woman who hosted the class, Laurie Gibson, said she was also an editor and so I contacted her after I'd finished the draft of Heliopause. That's how I met my main editor.

Then through her, I met Lisa Wolf who did the proof edit who is actually the editor for Book Three.

It's a chain of contacts, basically. My cover designer was a parent at my kids' school and he knew the artist, Leon Tukker. That's how that happened.

Can you talk about distribution? I think you mentioned you use IngramSpark?

IngramSpark prints and distributes most of the books that you see.

When I upload a book and it's ready to go and I purchase the option for both paperback and eBook, they upload it to everywhere: Kobo, Amazon, Google Books.

They do all that and they also put the links up all across the world on various international bookseller websites.

I chose Ingram because of its reputation, it's worldwide distribution, and the fact that it would not be limited to Amazon. I wanted independent bookstores to have my books and not feel competition from an Amazon published book.

Did you have to form your own publishing company to own the copyrights or deal with IngramSpark?

I filed copyright. I immediately copyrighted it through the U.S. government.

If you're an indie author, I highly recommend that you get an entertainment lawyer to help you with policies because we don't have big publishing companies behind us.

We need legal help. We need contract help. That's what an entertainment lawyer is for. I secured one of those.

He recommended that given the uniqueness of the name Questrison, that I trademark the Saga. I did that. That was extremely expensive, but I feel good about it.

Because now I can put the circle R, it's a registered trademark. The Questrison Saga. You can't use it. It's my baby.

Questrison Saga

You've mentioned before that you've been working on these books for thirty years. Can you talk about why you decided to finish these books when you did?

All through college, even though I was overwhelmed with schoolwork, the stories were always in the back of my head. I had also drawn a lot of the characters in them. I sometimes would still sketch those while I also learned how to do actual watercolor art from classes.

After I had graduated college, it was a nightmare just entering the workforce. I ended up moving to the West Coast from Tennessee in 2000, and did work for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle for a number of years.

Then after that, I briefly lived in San Francisco. That's when I thought "I have to get back to these stories." They're been in my head all this time.

That's when I started working on what is now Ephemeris. I even made a brief little comic of it with my own sketches, outlining the story a little bit. That was the closest thing I've ever come to an outline, was this storyboard.

After that, I had children. And I was very busy with them. laughs I worked as a science writer for four years. I felt that I was preoccupied by writing nonfiction.

After the recession, I was laid off. I decided to apply to graduate school and I chose epidemiology, which is very topical at the moment.

I came to San Diego to start a Master's Degree in epidemiology. I would have finished it, but I never saw my family and my younger child, who at the time was two, did not cope well. I chose to withdraw from the program. I have no regrets about doing that, because it was the right thing for the family.

Then I meet another parent at my kid's school, who was an editor. He edited scientific papers, not fiction. I mentioned I had these stories, and I showed him the first few chapters of what become Heliopause.

Not being a fiction editor, it wasn't really something he could work on, but he did encourage me to finish the story. I hadn't had that kind of encouragement. It was a kick in the pants. For that, I'll always be grateful to him.

I call him the man that saved Heliopause.

It's funny how encouragement or discouragement at just the right times can make a huge difference.

Yes, and I definitely had been discouraged a few times.

Some people would say, "Maybe it's time you just let that story go and work on something else."

I hated hearing that. I thought, no, I want to finish the story. It's been in my head for most of my life.

Positive encouragement is more powerful than discouragement. Because when somebody believes in you at the right time, and I hope that everyone has that person, it makes all the difference.

Having worked on these for so long, how many drafts do you think you've been through for Ephemeris in particular?

Well, it's funny because what is now Book Four was actually the first book.

I started with what is Book Four now and then morphed it around, and what is now Ephemeris then came after that.

Ephemeris is an interesting book because it takes place before, during, and after Heliopause. It's giving you a preview of things to come as well as things that happened in the past, and tying everything together later in the book with people from Heliopause.

I've had so many drafts of these stories over the years. In my closet here in the office, there are binders full of handwritten drafts from over 30 years ago, including maps that I made, travel guides, glossaries, everything.

My handwriting is just garbage, and that never got better.

There were some typed versions too. I had a terrible typewriter, but a lot of it was handwritten.

There's so many drafts. It's ridiculous. I kept a lot of them. I threw out a lot of them too. I don't even know how many there were to be honest with you.

Basically, we have to talk in terms of the Questrison Saga instead of just one of the books, the whole saga. I knew the endgame from the beginning when I was a young teen. Just the journey to get there changed along with me as a writer in developing the craft as well as maturing as a person in experiencing life.

When reading Ephemeris, it felt like I could point to certain locations and go, I think this is such and such a place that I know Dianne has lived. Like reading about Perpetua, is that Seattle?

Heliopause, I've often said, is a love story to Oregon. Because Forster keeps remembering Oregon, and the time he was with Auna in Oregon.

That's why when Aeriod presents him with the possibility of such a place as a planet [Perpetua], basically an untouched Oregon, he's delighted.

Aeriod sets him up that way. He's thought it out. He knows what Forster cannot say "no" to. He's already thought through all the scenarios. "How can I get Forster to do what I need him to do? Let's throw out everything that he could just never say no to." And that's what he did.

When I write about Galla on Perpetua, that's her first experience on a forested planet, near an ocean or anything like that. It's very instantly different than anything else she's experienced. That is similar to when I moved to Pacific Northwest in 2000.

Not Seattle per se, which I don't have a lot of love for, but Oregon I absolutely adored.

Are there other planets in the books that are also drawn from places that you've lived before?

Well, I've driven a lot of roads.

There's definitely some influence from my road trips because I have gone across the country several times in the past several years by car.

Now there's a world in Book Four that is heavily influenced by my time in both Tennessee and San Francisco. Because I know that planet the longest, it feels very real. I feel like I'm there when I'm reading it.

You'll see connections to a lot of the places I've lived in that book. It will seem very intimate. It will seem very real, I think.

Books One and Two are already out. When is Book Three due?

Early April for pre-order, with an intended release the end of May.

I think at this point I can admit to myself (and to you) that I'm not tracking how many words I write each day. There's just too much going on, too many distractions, and it's all I can do to get the words out, then to stop and try to remember how much I added this paragraph today or edited on that page.

But I am writing, and tracking that writing time. Inspired by one of V.E. Schwab's tweets, I'm using a habit tracker to look at how I'm spending my time. I've got a slot for "Write for 30 minutes," and I try to hit that every day, taking time in the morning, before the day overwhelms me.

And so far, I've hit it every day this week. My current streak is 17 days long, and I've no intention of breaking it.

Tracking time spent focused on writing lets me feel better about the times when I need to think through a plot more before writing down a scene, or outline a piece before revising it. That's writing, it's just not producing words immediately.

I am producing words, as well. I've got a new author interview almost ready to go up, and I've been drafting the last four pages of the comic I started for Gail Simone's ComicsSchool.

So that's what I'm focusing on, right now, while this lasts: putting time in the chair, counting each finished project as a win.

What about you? Has anything changed in your writing technique since the pandemic started? Have you adopted any new tools to stay motivated?

As we enter the second (or third, or fourth) week of hunkering down in our homes, I thought I'd rattle off a list of shows I've been watching to distract me from everything that's been going on:

Locke & Key

Loved the comic by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, so I thought I'd check out the new series.

The show is very different from the comic, both in the way the characters are represented and the pacing of the story. But it preserves the core idea of the comic, and damn, it's good. Even when the characters are making obviously dumb choices, it's compelling.

Fair warning, though: It's a bit intense at times. At several points in the season, I could only do one episode a night, because it was just...too much, right now.

Source: Netflix

Westworld

The new season is out! So I'm going back and re-watching Seasons One and Two, both to refresh my memory and to give them time to release more than just a few episodes of the new season.

I'm impressed by how well Season One is holding up, even after I've watched it multiple times. I'm discovering new depths to the performances of the actors playing Bernard and Delores, and seeing things that link up with future events that missed the first few times through.

Also Maeve. Who doesn't enjoy watching more Maeve?

Source: HBO Now

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

I discovered this one late, so shame on me. But Seasons One and Two were awesome, and I was worried about Season Three.

I shouldn't have been. Not only is it still damn funny, but I didn't need to re-watch any of the earlier seasons to dive right into the latest one. The characters are all there, sniping and helping each other, like always.

Just intimidatingly good writing in this series. Something to aim for in my own work.

Source: Amazon Prime

What a difference a week makes.

Last Friday, I still felt okay going out to my local coffeeshop for coffee in the morning. I thought this week would be much like any other week, that we'd have to take extra care to make sure people that felt sick stayed home, and not congregate in large groups, but that's it.

But then they closed the schools where my wife works.

And people started posting pictures of empty grocery store shelves.

Now everything is closing down: pubs, restaurants, coffee shops, the zoo, bookstores, publishers, everything is either shutting down or going remote-only.

It's a frightening time, and I'd be lying if I didn't confess that it's made it hard for me to focus.

So I'm not sure how many words I've written this week.

I've worked on something, every day. I've gathered statistics that I'm going to use in a blog post for next week. I've been working through Gail Simone's ComicsSchool, which has been fantastic, and should result in my first complete comics script by the end.

But I haven't come back to the short story I was editing. Or made any progress on the novel.

I will do both, though, and soon. But for now, I've just...gotta work on something a little more low-key, to leave room in my head for processing everything that's happening.

I hope you find the head space to keep working, whatever your project is, and that give yourself the time to feel the cocktail of emotions this thing is putting us all through.

Since moving to San Diego, my wife and I have had a tradition: On St Patrick's Day, we go celebrate at a Mexican restaurant, and on Cinco de Mayo, we celebrate at an Irish pub. We've discovered that both kinds of restaurants celebrate both holidays, but while the Irish pubs are standing room only on St Patrick's Day, the Mexican places are empty (and vice-versa for Cinco de Mayo). We call it St Pedro's Day (in March) and The Fifth of Mayo (in May). We usually rope a few of our friends in, too, and always have a blast.

Well. Going out this year was off the table. But we still did St Pedro's right, mixing margaritas at home and joining a group video chat so our friends and we could all hang out virtually.

And it was still fun! (photographic evidence offered above).

Hope you and yours are safe and well, and that if you celebrated yesterday, you found a way to connect with those you love.

Sláinte!

Got 1,224 words written so far this week.

Those are spread out over different projects. I added a little to the novel, started drafting several new essays, and decided to go back and edit a short story from last year.

The story was easy for me to write, but it's been hard to edit. It's quite personal, pulling something from my childhood and turning it into a horror story. It's the first story I've written about where I grew up, and as such is hard for me to see any other way than how I've written it.

So it's taken me counts on fingers about six months to digest some beta reader feedback I got on it, and figure out what the story needs.

And I think I do, now. I can see a hole in the story, a gap in the POV character's motivations that I tried to paper over with his personal flaws.

That might work for me, or for someone who also grew up in the kind of town I did, but it doesn't work for communicating that character's perspective to everyone else. That's a failure on my part, a failure of craft, and -- hopefully -- it's one I can fix.

What about you? Have you ever had a story -- or a novel -- that you simply couldn't edit into shape until after a lot of time (and maybe some leveling up in your writing skills) had passed?

The other day, I friend of mine tweeted something about Rage Against the Machine that tripped my political-philosophy sensors:

real talk, the Rage Against the Machine ticket pricing is unfortunate for many of their fans (esp fans in demographics their songs are about). but they’ve been on a Sony imprint since the early 90s. their per-show guarantee is easily in the six figures. they’re capitalists.

It’s that last part that bothered me. RATM are well-known advocates of socialism; are they really so hypocritical as to be capitalists?

After thinking things over for a while, I don’t believe they are. Wealthy, perhaps. Well-paid, certainly. But capitalists? I don’t think so.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to call my friend out here. But his tweet made me realize there’s a lot of misconceptions in the US about the differences between socialism, capitalism, and free markets. And the case of RATM makes a good jumping-off point to discuss the real relationships between those three concepts.

Because wanting to make money from their music, and specifically from their performance of music, does not make RATM capitalists.

F-- the G Ride, I Want the Machines That are Making' 'Em

First let's clarify something: Socialism doesn't mean the end of money, of private property, or getting compensated for work.

Socialism, strictly construed, only requires one thing: the common ownership of the means of production.

What does this mean? Let's break it down, going from back to front.

The means of production is just a fancy way of saying how things are made. It can be a factory churning out cars, or a recording studio putting out records.

Common ownership means there's no one person (or CEO-controlled corporation) that controls a thing. Sometimes this can mean government control -- like our public schools -- and sometimes this can be a co-op or community organization, like the urban gardens that have sprung up in some cities.

Putting these two together, it means in a socialist economy, no one person controls how things are made. Meaning they can't force you to pay for access to how things are made.

In other words: Socialists can't make money by being gatekeepers of some valuable resource, like time in the studio or the use of a 3-D printer.

But they can -- and must, since it's the only way to make money in a socialist economy -- make money from their labor, and from the fruits of their labor.

Going back to RATM, when they perform, they are generating value -- entertainment value -- via their labor. And they own the end result of that labor (the music itself, and any recordings that are produced), which they then sell to people.

To a socialist, this is how things should be, everywhere. People work to create something, they own that thing, and then can sell that thing to others and make a living off of it.

Now I'm Rolling Down Rodeo With a Shotgun

So if charging money for their work doesn't make RATM capitalists, what would?

Capitalists, in contrast to socialists, believe the means of production should be privately owned. This control over the means of production is what allows capitalists to exploit the labor of others. Because if you can own a factory, and claim ownership over every car produced there, then the only thing its workers can own is their labor, which they have to sell to you.

Do you see the difference? Capitalists don't make money by creating things. They make money by owning things.

So the investor that funds construction of a new building, and then claims ownership over it, so they can start charging people rent, is a capitalist. They didn't design it, they didn't build it, they didn't paint it or make any of the furniture that goes inside. But they still claim they have the sole right to make money off of it.

In Rage Against the Machine's case, in order to become capitalists, they'd have to go from being music makers to record label execs. People that don't make music themselves, but instead profit from the music that others create.

And more importantly, profiting because they claim ownership of the music (or at least, the recordings) that are wholly created by other people.

The Sisters are In, So Check the Front Lines

To make a more fully-fledged analogy: What would a music industry organized along socialist lines look like?

Well, the means of production would have to be held in common. So recording studios could not be owned by individuals or corporations. They could be government-run, they could be owned by a community association, or a co-op.

More likely, they'd be owned by artist collectives, who would rent space from a builder's association that constructed a suitable building. The artists would pool their funds and procure the recording equipment, and any instruments they'd like to keep in the studio. They'd each then have access to the studio, without having to pay someone else.

Individual recordings would be owned by the artists who performed on them, and any sound engineers or producers that helped make the recording. Again, if you put your labor into something, you own a part of it.

Distribution would be handled either by the artists' collective themselves, or by a co-op that specializes in distributing music (either online or via physical copies).

At no point would anyone that helped the album come into being be cut out of their partial ownership of said album. At no point would control over the album or the music be held by an entity that's beholden to remote shareholders.

That's not to say that everything would be free, or that any old album someone wanted to make would have to be recorded or distributed. Because the people behind and around the musicians -- the engineers, the mixers, the producers, etc -- wouldn't want to contribute their labor (in other words, take partial ownership of) something they thought wouldn't sell. Their ability to make a living would depend on the end product selling, after all; more sales means more for them via their cut, and fewer sales means less.

So people would be free to say no to projects, just as they'd be free to say yes. The knowledge that whatever they invest their time, their labor, their talent in, becomes theirs, makes them more responsible, not less. And that responsibility would itself become a market signal, as people flock together to make and distribute music that's popular locally, and still work to make music that's popular globally.

So a socialist music industry would actually be a freer market than a capitalist one. Free of the constraints of work-for-hire, of laboring on something and then seeing it enrich someone else. And free of the power wielded by single individuals at the top of corporate hierarchies.

Who Controls the Past Now, Controls the Future

By now, I'm sure you've guessed which side of the capitalist/socialist divide I'm on :)

But even if you think our capitalist system is better, my central point stands: Making money from the things you create doesn't make you a capitalist. In fact, doing so is more compatible with socialism than the alternative.

So RATM aren't capitalists. Just musicians looking to claim their just piece of the value they create.

Got back to exercising this week. Back to holding to a schedule in the mornings. Back to allowing myself time to outline, when I wanted it. Time away from the novel.

And it's working! I've written 1,540 words so far this week :)

The new scenes in the book are coming together. I've finally got things mapped out in my head enough that I can sit and write them out again.

Still might end up throwing them away, or heavily editing them. But at least I can get the raw material out now, to work with later.

I'm even allowing myself to start thinking about revising some short stories that I've had sitting on a shelf since the move. Time to get back in the habit of submitting.

So March is off to a good start. Here's hoping it continues.

We're mail-in voters, but between the move and everything else, I ended up heading to polling station yesterday anyway.

I wanted to be sure I got in, because San Diego holds its local elections on the same day as the primary. So I got to vote for mayor, some state reps, judges, etc, as well as some voter-sponsored initiatives that got on the ballot.

Oh, and I got to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary :)

Confession time: I really, really, seriously enjoy voting in California.

They send us a little booklet before the election, where every candidate who agrees to accept spending limits can issue a statement, laying out their case. (Naturally, I only vote for candidates who issue such a statement). It's also got the full text of the ballot initiatives, plus pro and con arguments, and a fiscal impact analysis for each measure.

It's homework, but it also means I feel much more informed going into the election than I would otherwise. Not only from reading the booklet, but using it as a jumping-off point for further research.

The last election we spent in Arkansas, I felt so disconnected and lost. No booklet. No easy-to-navigate state-gov-run website to look everything up. Nothing.

What does your state (or country!) do, to make sure its voters are as informed as possible before heading to the polls?

Sometimes what feels like a really good week is followed by a bad one.

For example, this week, in which I've only written 329 words.

It's frustrating. Just when I felt like I was getting back in the groove of jogging, writing, and work, two things brought progress to a shuddering halt: I got injured, and I switched from editing back to writing new scenes.

The injury was relatively minor. I had a planter's wart on the underside of my big toe that my dermatologist finally had enough of and burned off. Worth it, for sure, but that put a crimp in my jogging schedule.

And the new scenes are...maybe a mistake. There's a sequence towards the end of the book where the POV character travels from one of the station to the other, witnessing the disaster that's just befallen it.

She's mostly on her own, in the original sequence, which made it easier to write, but didn't feel as realistic to me. I mean, the chance she's going to go from one end to the other without seeing anyone are small.

Plus, I think it drains the whole stretch of a bit of tension. If most of the danger has passed, including the danger of discovery, then what's going to pull the reader through the passage?

So I'm trying out a version where she does get discovered, and has to talk (or trick) her way out of it.

I think it'll be better, but it means I've got to invent three new characters, their personalities, and enough of their backstories to make them believable. Oh, and also make up what they were doing when they discovered the POV character, and how they go about it.

Not to mention getting the POV character to tell me how she escapes from the mess she's now in.

I'm telling myself that it'll all be worth it once I've got the new version done...But until then, it's slow progress each day, as I spend more time outlining now than setting words on the page.

When my wife first suggested we put artificial turf down in the yard, I was skeptical. I remembered it as a plasticky, fake-looking thing that had all the charm and appeal of listening to that teacher from Ferris Beuller's Day Off call roll for hours.

I'm so glad I was wrong!

What we have instead is a soft, green, grassy place for the pups to romp and play. And for us to sit out and eat, when they allow it ;)

Can't wait to take it for a spin as a writing spot this afternoon during lunch!

Intro

I met Tone Milazzo through the San Diego Writers Coffeehouse group hosted by Jonathan Maberry. I've known him for a couple of years now, and I still don't know how he has time for all of his projects.

When not running the podcast for a local publisher or play-testing his own Fate Core modules, Tone's preparing for grad school, scripting comics, and writing novels.

His first book, Picking Up the Ghost, came out in 2011 from Chizine. A follow-up, The Faith Machine, will be out in May, from Running Wild Press.

Tone took some time out of his incredibly busy schedule to talk with me about his process, writing diverse characters, and how "Done is Beautiful."

Writing Process

To start, can you talk a bit about your writing process? When you're designing a novel or a short story, are you a pantser? Are you a plotter?

Definitely a plotter. And the outline for Picking up the Ghost, was something like 12 pages long, which I thought was a full outline. But I definitely, as I got to the middle, I needed to stop and do some more outlining. The story was coming to an end too soon.

When I outlined my second novel, The Faith Machine, it was 77 pages long. That's a page per scene. Now that's an outline.

77 pages, wow! What do you actually have in your outline?

It's a bullet point list: plot points, foreshadowing, and payoffs. Sometimes there's dialogue snippets in there, if something occurs to me at the time. It's mostly about where the characters are coming in, what changes, and where the characters are coming out at the end of the scene. Kind of like a method or function in computer programming.

Kurt Vonnegut said every scene should either move the plot forward or move the character forward. So it'll be either one of those two.

Ideally it's nice if you can do both in the scene, without jamming too much in there.

When I first started writing, I would put way too much stuff into a scene. Now I'm trying to keep it to one or two changes or insights per scene.

Other things in the outline...Sometimes it's pop-cultural references, like I've put something in the scene that's supposed to evoke something from another book, classic literature or something like that. In Picking up the Ghost there was a lot of occult symbolism. A lot of tarot card stuff. There are some scenes that are supposed to evoke the Major Arcana.

Do you ever get feedback on the outline?

It's mostly for me.

Though if there's an idea that I'm not sure will work, I'll try to compartmentalize that idea and pitch it to people. Ask them: "Do you think this thing is going to be okay?"

That's about it. I don't want anyone to look at my outline or my first draft. It's too messy.

Nobody?

Yeah, it's terrible. Especially the first draft for sure. The first draft of Picking up the Ghost, there was a sentence in there, "He stuck a stick in the spot. The stick was stuck."

Oh God.

Yeah. I think I wrote the first half and got distracted and then wrote the second half, forgetting that I wrote the first half.

When outlining, is there any particular technique you use for building your plots?

So Picking up the Ghost was definitely me trying to invert as much of the hero's journey as possible.

The typical interpretation of the hero's journey in fantasy is an orphan with a destiny, who finds a magic sword, and has a magical mentor. It's basically King Arthur, right? People are cop-opting King Arthur.

So I decided to take that list and make it a manifesto for the book. Instead of an orphan, the protagonist is dealing with family issues. Instead of being some sort of knight, he's a shaman. And he has mentors, but they're not trustworthy mentors.

I also wanted to make it American instead of European. So that's where his ethnicity comes in. Being biracial: African-American and white.

The African-American culture, my attitude is, that's the most American culture. Even like what most books think of as American, which would be like a rural white culture, that's traceable in a straight line right back to Europe.

Whereas African-Americans had their culture stripped from them by the slave trade. They had to rebuild themselves from the ground up on this soil.

The Faith Machine isn't YA. How did you build that one?

So for the second book, I wanted it to be Hollywood friendly. I looked at something called the Save the Cat outline for screenwriting. It's a 15-point plot, and that's the spine of that story.

It's the first time I used that, and I discovered that it's probably a little short to fill an entire novel. A movie is about a novella in length. Fortunately, because I had an ensemble cast, I had a bunch of b-plots that I could use to fill out the page count.

With all this time spent on the outline, what's your editing process like?

Go over it again and again until my eyes bleed, and it's never enough.

For The Faith Machine, because the outline has such a deep understanding of what the story is supposed to be, I didn't have to do quite the extensive rewriting that I used to, like I did on the Picking up the Ghost.

When I wrote out the first draft of a scene, it was a scene I'd been thinking about for over a year, so I knew how it is going to play out.

And even when it got to editorial, I had two editors, one that I paid for and then one from the publisher. And the one that I paid for, it was mostly grammar and little details.

The one from the publisher, he lived on the East coast, and he had some thoughts about the opening scene. On The Faith Machine there's two characters who are in charge of the team traveling around the East coast, activating all the agents in person. But the order that they activated in was not a good commute. So stuff moved around just because I didn't realize that this place and that are more than a day's drive away. Minor stuff like that.

Picking Up the Ghost

In the acknowledgements of Picking Up the Ghost, you mentioned that it was a five year process to get the book together. Can you talk a bit about that?

I think for that one I found a publisher fairly quickly. I think the process of finding a publisher was under a year. Which was stellar compared to The Faith Machine.

The biggest chunk of time came when I had the book finished, and I workshopped it with three of my friends. None of them liked the second half of the book. So I had to rewrite the entire second half.

I had taken Cinque (the main character - ed.) into what I call the Halfway World. So it still looked like St. Jude (Cinque's home town - ed.), but there was nobody else there with him.

And what I'd done was, I didn't realize that they liked the supporting cast so much, and I took all them away.

How long did that take you to rewrite?

That was about probably about another year.

A lot of revising by myself. Some moments where I just wasn't writing for a few months at a time. Distractions, like World of Warcraft.

Most people's first book usually takes a few years though, from what I hear. Even Jonathan Maberry says he took three years to write his first book.

Working on the same book for five years, how do you keep yourself going?

It's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy.

How's that?

The sunk cost fallacy is the attitude of, we've put this much time and effort and money into a project, so we have to see it through. That's a fallacy, because maybe this isn't worth finishing and to throw more money and time and effort into that pit is not worthwhile.

Whereas in a novel, if you've written 70,000 words, then you only need 20,000 to finish. If you don't finish it, then you literally have wasted all that time.

And I think that's where the sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy. Because books take so long to write. And nobody's going to read a book that's 95% done.

An artist I knew said something they taught in art school is: Done is beautiful.

I take that as a mantra. Think about all your favorite pieces of art, what do they have in common?

They're all finished.

Exactly.

Why set Picking Up the Ghost in a town along the Mississippi?

So, I knew I wanted the protagonist to be African-American. And then I picked a location. I wanted it to be a living ghost town.

It was going to be Detroit. We all hear these stories about urban decay in Detroit, right? Which would have been a good choice, except a friend of mine turned me on to East St. Louis.

He showed me a book about East St. Louis's history. And it's like the Detroit situation, but far, far worse. It was literally a company town and the local government was in service of either the metallurgy companies or the mining companies, I forget which.

And then when the industry was done with it, it abandoned the place. Everybody who had money left. And there were people left who didn't have money, didn't have the resources to leave.

Consequently, it was the descendants of the African-American workers who had come to work the low-end jobs in the factories and production that are still there.

So did you actually go to East St. Louis? What sort of research did you do?

When I was in the Marine Corps I got to meet people from that part of the country, so I got some perspective there. I also found a great urban decay exploration website where the guy spent a lot of time in East St Louis.

The main place where all the magic happens, the meat packing plant, it's based on an Armour Meatpacking Plant on a hill outside of East St Louis. And it's still there. You can see pictures of it. So I was able to lift all that.

I read a few books about the education system in Middle America, its decline, and stuff like that. They had a lot of stuff about that city.

And that's also part of the reason I fictionalized it. I called it St. Jude instead of East St. Louis. That gave me a little bit of freedom to make up stuff. Whereas if I use a city from the real world, I'll never stop doing research on that city.

Why St Jude?

St. Jude is the Patriot Saint of lost causes. Good name for a dying town.

Did you have any concerns, as a person who presents as white, writing not just a protagonist who's African-American, but a novel where most of your characters are African or African-American?

When I started writing it, it was before this sort of increased awareness of appropriation. So I wasn't aware it was even a thing. I knew who Vanilla Ice was, but I didn't connect that to writing fiction.

And as I said before, I wanted to write an American story, and I think of African-Americans as having the most American culture. Then there's the fact that the town St Jude is based on (East St. Louis - ed) is something like 98% African-American. To put white people in that book would just be weird.

When I write about any kind of marginalized group, I'm not making a statement, other than I'm presenting people with these traits in roles that they've normally not had.

For example, in both books (Picking Up the Ghost and The Faith Machine), all my protagonists have mental disorders.

Cinque is schizophrenic, and then all the characters in The Faith Machine, except for Park, have mental disorders too.

So I'm not making a statement about mental disorder at all. I am taking this trait, which is normally relegated to villains or antiheroes or supporting characters, and assigning them to the protagonists. That's it.

So you, along with a lot of authors, recently went through getting the rights to your book back from ChiZine. Are you going to put Picking Up the Ghost yourself, or focus on The Faith Machine for now?

The eBook is up. I've already written a short story that bridges the two novels. I'm going to put that at the end of an ebook edition of Picking up the Ghost, and sell it for a buck.

And then if somebody gets to the end and they like it, there's a link to where they can buy The Faith Machine.

It's going to be a loss-leader. I figure that's the best use I have for it right now.

Did you get anything back from ChiZine, like the final manuscript or --?

No, they hold onto the formatting and stuff like that. And they also hold onto the cover. So I've had to make my own cover.

And I have to get my own ISBN number if I want to return to print, even print-on-demand.

When do you think you'll have that ready?

The Faith Machine comes out in May, so hopefully before that. A friend of mine volunteered to do the cover for it, so whenever he finishes.

For now, you can find Picking Up the Ghost on Kindle