The Day I Started Working for God

So I totally missed National Coffee Day. I hope you all enjoyed a cup; if you haven’t, feel free to grab one now! It’s not too late; and while you’re ruminating, check out bookcraft.etsy.com for some awesome, coffee-stained home-made décor items!

Somewhere around yesterday, 19 years ago, I began working for God. Is that the day I came to Christ, you ask? I tend to think I must come to Christ every day, renewing the covenant my itinerant heart made ten years ago, and again 17 years ago, and again seven years ago....

But it was around this time, 19 years ago, that I wrote my first short story. It was one notebook page in length, and dealt with a selfish leprechaun who horded lucky four-leaf clovers. In a bit of logic that only my six-nearly-seven-year-old brain could come up with, he came to realize the errors of his ways, and began spreading the luck around instead of keeping it for himself.

Though my walk with God has been...broken, many times, His walk with me has been ever-faithful. And at times when I wouldn’t consider I was thinking of Him, he has been with me, infusing my stories with His will. Though I do it intentionally now, it was present in shadow form even years ago in very, very rough drafts.

So even though I shy away from “salvation” stories, leaving that work for the Scriptures to accomplish, I do write stories that privilege Christian morals. Where many TV shows these days value sex and pleasure, my story values the respect of women, and hard work that lead to a stronger mind and body.

So while I do write stories that I enjoy, they are not for the sole purpose of enjoyment. While I hope to be published, my sole purpose is not to make money. I do the work I feel called to, that I have talent for; God will provide my daily bread, as he consistently has, whether in season or out of season.

Here’s to another year, and approaching twenty years of working for God. See you Monday.

Six chapters revised, thus far. And going well.

Writing Like The Dickens

A practice which I had recently begun, and will probably end all too soon, was to go to the local café and run down their list of coffees, trying each once and keeping a log of how good (or bad) it was. But, my fiancée is moving into a new apartment after this week, close enough to the college for me to run there for some coffee. Today’s brew is Canaan Conquest. I don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s cinnamon atop the foam, and it’s delicious. Highly recommended by me.

There is a stage in my writerly life that I might imagine happens to many young writers; certainly I’ve seen it other places. In composition classes, they might call them run-on sentences, because, typically, they run on and on and on. Now, there’s the grammatical run-on sentence, in which the subject changes between the first half and the latter half. That’s easier to catch by simply searching for how many subjects there are in a sentence. (Hint: there should only be one...)

What I’m talking about is a little more difficult, unless you read Dickens. These sentences are, strictly speaking, grammatically correct. They just employ copious amounts of commas, semi-colons, and colons in order for one sentence to run the entirety of a six or seven line paragraph. Dickens was the master of the aside. I envy him, in certain ways, for his ability to cram four facts into one everlasting yet grammatical sentence. I don’t have the specific example with me, but there was a paragraph in Oliver Twist in which the actual sentence of action was infused with no fewer than four asides. You could untangle it like bad knitting, with some work, and speak the sentence sans aside rather well. And it was about a fourth of the actual sentence.

What possible use might this serve today’s budding author? You gain a very critical command of commas, semi-colons, and colons; because, truly, commas and semi-colons are the most misused punctuation. Now, I could spend the time to work this out for you; however, there are plenty of books (not to mention Google) to help you out with that. My objective here is to remind people that writing is fun.

(I did see once, in a class, a bit of dialogue wherein the author abandoned the period point, and instead enclosed each sentence with quotations. Writing is fun, yes, and you can push boundaries; that’s excessive.)

So let your asides flow. Write as long a sentence as you can, and make sure its grammatically correct. Just, do everyone a favor: before you have anyone else read it, divide it up normally. Do the opposite, and write in as tiny of sentences as you can. Mix the two; write a humungous one followed by a stupidly short one. Have fun with it. Be subjectively flowery, then objectively terse. And, of course, have fun. You can’t have fun if you don’t have fun.

See you Wednesday.

More On Revision

So when you change something about the main character, something about him upon which the whole plot hinges, you need to prepare yourself to rethink the entire plot before beginning to write. As I’m discovering.

This hit me last night, as I realized my character lost a major motivation to advance the plot. Motivation comes in at least two forms: plot, and personality. Plot-based motivation for travel is quest for an item, or a location, or because one is summoned or banished, to name a few. Character-based motivation is to find comfort or solace, or sustainment, to name some there. In literary works, it is best to use the latter more often. Obeying a summons can speak to human character, if there is personal motivation not to obey; but depending on what is driving the character internally, it may teach the reader nothing if the character obeys. “Oh, he was banished on pain of death? Good thing he left, then.”

If, however, there is an internal struggle whether to stay or go, that you can make bread off of. In changing my main character, much of the external motivation was gone, and putting it back would be too easy to contrive. So instead, I sat up for some time last night, notebook and pen in hand, and figured out different motivations for his movement deeper into the story. I had to scratch off some, because they were as cliché as his being an orphan. But a number of them could be combined rather well to give him some complex motivation that grew from his character, not simply the need for conflict.

And so I forge on. Chapter three had a lot of axed material; 2,000 words, to be precise. That’s the “focusing the plot” part of it. And it gets the reader to the meat of the story much faster, even from a simple numbers perspective.

So it’s all good. Three chapters revised. See you on Monday.

Stank Wars

Three hours ago, I turned on the A/C as I prepared to blog. My fiancée was at my house, doing some homework nearer the foot of the bed. As I thought about what to write, my reverie was broken by her request: “Honey, there’s a stink bug near the window; would you mind getting it and killing it for me?”

At least, this is how I lovingly interpret her exclamation; she’s a little less articulate when the only signal her brain is sending her mouth is: “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I leapt up from the bed, grabbed some toilet paper, and squished the bugger before tossing him disgustedly into the trash can. Quick and dirty, I managed not to get his stink on my hands, and enveloped as he was by Charmin, not much escaped into the air either.

At least, that’s what would have happened if I was not so busy calming my frayed nerves and exclaiming: “You have got to stop doing that, babe!”

Over the next few minutes, despite my best wishes, it was clear the stink bugs were nearly pouring through the running A/C unit. It was now time for it to be gone from the window.

We cleared the area near the window of hiding places, and sealed up the dilapidated bed against them flying in and hiding between the springs to crawl over my body as I slept. Spiders I can handle swallowing in my sleep, provided I never learn of it. Stink bugs will probably wake me up on a trip down the esophagus.

The curtain was pulled aside, and I had five sheets of toilet paper folded in preparation of pulling the unit and shutting the window. Courtney had escaped the room to wait in safer environs as her valiant knight battled the stench-breathing dragon-bugs crawled once more from the sulfur pits of the Middle Ages. I peered ‘neath the unit to see what lay where I would need to grab; sure enough, about five of the prehistoric incensers were huddled there. A knife, I thought. I can stab ‘em with that.

I was not worried about stinking up the room; that was going to happen. But, oddly, their armored bodies resisted the blade, and like proverbial cockroaches they swarmed from under their aluminum porch-roof and began crawling across the window. In fifteen seconds, my stockpile of TP was gone, and I had yet to remove the tape and pull the unit. The night was going well.

Getting pretty thoroughly stinked, I unraveled more ammunition and prepared. I pulled the window open a little bit, pulled the unit from it and quickly set it on the floor. I tried to shut the window, but foiled! The little tabs which held the unit against the sill stuck up about an inch, and kept the window from shutting entirely. No matter; about fifteen of the brutish bugs were stuck fast against the back window frame, unsure what to do in the sudden light. Grabbing my paper, I squished and grabbed and squeezed and pitched; the stench of the slain filled my nose, than faded as olfactory nerves grew insensate. I opened the window once more to remove the tabs, then shut it fully once more. There was still the unit to contend with.

Wedged into the vanes, and hiding within the unit itself, were another ten or so of the critters. As they appeared, I spooled off tissue and grabbed and squeezed. It had been hot before, which was why I turned the A/C on in the first place. Sweat now rolled down my back as I shook bugs free, rolled TP, squished and pitched.

I don’t know how many lay slain, but I was victor on the battlefield. The unit is outside, where it will remain for a couple good frosts – and maybe a blizzard – to kill everything inside it. The window has been thoroughly sealed with Gorilla Tape. And I sit and write this now with a fan blowing on me.

Inside the fan is nowhere to hide.

Ah, Revision!

Day.....I don’t know which, of revising book one. Big time. Sort of. In rejecting my novel, and explaining why, an agent made me cringe. Not that her rejection was particularly scathing – it wasn’t – but because I said, inside, aw, I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to address that! Silly, lazy me; write as well as you can, cliché is cliché (are you writing this down?), and clutter is still clutter.

So, my main character is gaining some parents; and, in the process, the plot is tightening and focusing. And some major revisions are forthcoming. That scene where the news arrives? Completely irrelevant. Perhaps the entire visit home is as well. So far, it’s been rather painless; change some dialogue here or there, delete a line or two, shazaam: new plot. Tomorrow, it gets worse; storm clouds are gathering, and they’re in the form of chapter three.

Is it going to be worth it? Heck yeah. I may have started writing this novel just to write a novel, but it has gone way beyond that now. This isn’t genre fantasy, dagonnit, this is literature. And it’s important. So I take a month or two and rewrite a couple thousand words, maybe fifty; if the end product is published, I call that a win. When I marry my girl, it’s for life; whatever needs to be tweaked, whether it’s my nose, my elbow, or my back – and especially if it’s my mind – it’s worth it. Because she’s important. So if I need to tweak some things – whether it’s a scene, a chapter, or the main character – to make this novel live, it’s worth it because it’s important.

And that’s just the way she rolls. I’ll keep you updated, as I had before (or intended to, if anything worth updating had ever happened) at the end of the week. In between – well, this is the itinerant me. But I would expect some more on coffee and writing.

See you Wednesday.

One Step Backward, One Leap Forward

Well, friends, we come to something hard; one agent I queried took the time to say more than “no thanks” and actually explained why she was passing on the novel. As it turns out, she rejected it for some reasons that were nagging at me about the novel that I hoped I could get away without addressing.

See, I started writing this novel...well, maybe that will get me into trouble. I wrote the first lines of what would become this novel when I was 16. Even now, I realized that the plot ideas I had for book two – which I began sussing out even back then – were pretty crappy. Somehow I hoped that plot ideas I had for book one, that I came up with at the same time, would be okay. Well, they aren’t.

There were two issues I noticed about my novel; first, that the protagonist was an orphan who’d lost his memory. Because, you know, very few fantasy books address that issue. Second, about halfway through the book, the focus shifts from the protag finding his parents and regaining his memory, it shifts from that to his facing the arch-villain. I worked with what I could, bringing up the conflict that would be resolved earlier on, but attention is still focused on another issue for about the first half of the book.

And, wouldn’t you know, the agent had the same issues. She only read my query, but still recognized that him being an orphan would make it cliché, and it seemed to her that I had too much going on at once. Brilliant.

So, now, to the extent that I want to keep this novel – and I’ve considered it closely, and considered just moving on with book two – I need to revise what I have. Tighten it up, make it a little less cliché, stuff like that.

So, for the next month or two (I already have ideas how to change, it’s a matter of going chapter by chapter and erasing all mention of the protag’s memory loss and lack of parents) I will be editing this book with the intent of resubmitting to agents by November/December. With God’s help, it’ll be done even faster than that.

But I must get to work. Onward and forward. See you Monday.

Lest We Forget

I realized I missed, somehow, an opportunity to speak to the tragic events of September 11, the tenth anniversary of which recently passed. It may have had to do with the fact that I spent the actual day in church and at a wedding; so when I came to write my last blog, it had already, somehow, gone from my mind. I was reminded powerfully of it today, at morning Chapel in school.

The college, bless their hearts, tried to play sound bites of calls made on that day; to make up for poor sound quality, they displayed in tiny print the transcript of the calls, but I was at such a ridiculous angle to the screen, I could not see it.

So I caught bits, here and there, of what was said; mostly I was struck by the reliving of that day through voices of people who were there. I do not know if those recorded calls were all from people who died, but I might assume at least some of them were. At the end, despite the static, one phrase came through. It was clear the man speaking was crying; and he said: “I love you so much.”

I cannot comprehend the loss that so many suffered that day; I was fifteen, about to turn sixteen at the time, at the YMCA with my family. Within four years, I was in Iraq with an artillery unit of the 101^st Airborne, at a place and time that would see the loss of six men from our unit. It was a time where, suddenly, I worried about my own life, if I would come back home. I thought Iraq would be a year that I would get through, and come home with a ton of money. But after one truck was hit and four of the five men inside it killed, suddenly I had to think about the fact that I might not actually make it home.

I don’t know what my mom went through, hearing me talk to her about this from thousands of miles away. And I don’t know what the mothers and wives of the men we lost went through when they found out their loved ones had been taken. And I don’t know what we go through that we so eagerly pursue the death of people.

As a Christian, to in any way claim, suggest, insinuate, allude to the idea that God does anything but mourn when a human being is killed especially when that person does not have a personal relationship with Him, is to believe that God’s love is conditional, based on actions. As a Christian, I know that is not the case. Jesus Christ died for Osama Bin Laden, and when he orchestrated the monumental evil that was the attacks of 9/11, I can guarantee Jesus wept, knowing Bin Laden would have to be punished for it. It is despicable to me, as conveyors of God’s love, that we should ever approach the killing of a human being with anything except the heaviest of hearts. Must it be done? Absolutely, evil must be punished. But to assert that we must kill because it “makes us feel good” is an act more despicable as Christians than the acts committed by Muslims, who do not perhaps carry the same knowledge that humans bear the image of God, and that God sacrificed His Son horribly so that we might be reborn into what He intended from the beginning.

We are all children, we are all fathers, husbands, mothers, wives, sons and daughters. There is always someone who loves us, who feels that we should not have died, whose life is forever changed by our absence. Americans are not the only ones who “love so much.” Keep that in mind the next time we punish someone for evil acts; carry it out, in Gods justice, by all means. But do not relish it.

See you Friday.