one more draft…

The lone laptop blinks uncertainly as shadowed, backlit legs run past it, heading for the resort’s main building.

“Did you just-”

“No!” I didn’t mean to snap at him, but this is nuts. The one has nothing to do with the other. I was just trying to shut down my computer. That’s it. “They can’t be connected. That’s im-”

Down in the command prompt window, the blinking white cursor begins to write on its own: thanks, michael.

“-possible.” My lungs suddenly feel too small for my body. They know me?

“Dad?” Patrick’s voice is cautious. “You know these people?”

there was an outline. and it was, well, i thought it was good, anyway. what it truly was, though, was my first concrete step to writing a complete book, and it was a success for that reason alone, regardless of the fact that it only distantly resembles Witness in its final form.

in preparation for buckling down on Book 2, and the outline process inevitably connected (for me) therein, i thought i’d post a pic of the original outline for Witness, in all its hand-written, recycled paper glory:

(click to zoom)

if memory serves, this was written above the garage in late summer, in the days between a job i couldn’t live with anymore and a new (then) job as adjunct english instructor at the local community college. i’d made the decision to do it, and, unlike all other previous such decisions, i actually followed through and wrote this outline.

warning: soapbox monologue imminent

the outline was my saviour. i cannot say enough in praise of the outline. through high school, i’d never used such a thing, preferring instead to wing it the night before and revel in the procrastination high and generally successful results. it had worked for years.

(once i’d realized i was never going to attend MIT [thank you, algebra], i found much more success in the written word)

then i hit college, and had my first several papers, using the old winging-it method, butchered, skewered, and otherwise torn apart and dismissed. i think that last verb was the most painful. i felt i could write, and well, and to have someone tell me i couldn’t put together a clear, cohesive argument was a bit of a slap. (obviously, these posts have no such fears, as the only coherence is that of my momentary mind, which, as you can see, is anything but coherent)

it was a necessary slap, though, and well-intended. i had an excellent freshman college professor, as well as an anthropology professor who refused to accept crap. when my english prof introduced us to the outline, i was initially resistant, but my grades were suffering significantly, so i tried an outline. i think it was an essay on the variations of Don Juan in literature and theatre. it was like magic. it wasn’t without effort, but once my logical mind grasped the fundamentals, it aligned the wanderings and occasional inspirations of my creative mind with a clarity i had never known before.

within a couple weeks, i was helping other students develop outlines for their essays (and, yes, i’ll admit to writing several of them myself, sue me, i was a wallflower and people were paying attention to me). it was a genuine ‘moment’ for me, and every piece of academic writing that followed was either preceded by an outline, or succeeded by a poor grade. it was that simple.

it took a few more years for my creative writing to accept this possibility, however, and as a result, my stories were mostly dream-style, wandering, half-built constructions. i continued to write, holding firm to the idea of inspiration, until i found myself in a junior-year creative writing class, my first formal instruction/workshop/course of this kind.

the professor was a published author of short stories and a novel or two, and well received by critics for his work. his description of his writing process, as a strict adherent to detailed outlines, made the connection for me. unfortunately, this individual espoused such a rigid obligation to the structure of outlines, that it made the writing sound like work, not fun; like an office job, not a career; like a math problem, instead of the wonder and discovery i imagined writing to be.

while this only furthered my internal separation of fiction and outlining, for several years, it never truly left me. i wrote a number of stories in the meantime, most of them plot device driven pieces without real characters, clear voice, or emotional depth, and were duly rejected by the handful of magazines i submitted to.

i say handful, because that’s all i did. instead of feeling like i’d written something fantastic and absolutely had to be in print, i knew, in a place i didn’t really listen to, that my stories were still largely missing something. i still wrote the way i had in high school: several pages at a time in a rush of giddy inspiration, then bang my head against the wall for weeks on how to write the next page.

i can’t now recall which story i first used an outline for, which is odd, but it was several years after college, i think. i’d started to write an outline for stories after i got into trouble with my muse, but while this was better than nothing, it was still too little, too late. it did give me a framework to hang my varied and inconsistent inspiration from, which then let me continue to work in between. still, it was slow going to overcome the ‘work’ i connected with outlining.

in time, though, i found enough distance from that professor and his seemingly complete devotion to the outline, allowing me to see the value in what he’d taught, rather than react negatively to the perceived ‘work’ and ‘restrictions’ he described. just like my academic writing, i found myself achieving a clarity and coherence to my stories that had not previously existed. further, as i spent time organizing the structure (plots, story arcs, etc.), i realized i could keep the outline to whichever level of detail suited me. i could get down to individual scene details, or i could stay in broad scope. it was up to me. this was an important discovery, and one which has been the cornerstone of how i understand my writing.

for me, then, writing is controlled chaos. if i have no boundaries, then i find myself unable to make decisions. i need boundaries, guidelines and so on to frame my work. they may be self-imposed (a particular genre, world, character, plot), or externally imposed (writing prompts, deadlines, etc.), but i work best with a sense of the landscape i’m working in, and an outline formalizes that landscape.

this has been a personal discovery in my daily life, as well, as i work best in environments once i understand how things work. i feel it necessary to find out the hows and whys of my work as it is, before i can confidently perform effectively. understanding this about myself on a basic level has only further proved the validity of this process in my writing, and helped me develop it.

this isn’t to say that i am stuck in that landscape, however. it’s my touchstone. like i always tell my english students, use spell check, but never trust it. i use my outlines, but i allow myself the freedom to change my mind. more accurately, i allow myself to follow the story where it must go. without my initial outline, however, i don’t even know where to start and my writing immediately reflects that.

that, though, is a meandering post for another day, as i’ve fairly beaten this one to death.

3

Manadan stood in front of his apartment, his hook-topped walking stick tucked in the band of his waistcoat, his fragile fingers crossed neatly in front of him, his thin ears listening to every movement on the street before him. On his shoulder, Hazhi sniffed and scented, his serpentine head swooping and swaying beteween the wavering uprights of his wings.

Three tenements away, Gupti just spotted them through a chance gap in the throng and a sudden grin glittered in his eyes. Quickly, before the man or the Sik-wa could pick his scent from among the rest of the dust-covered people, he slipped down the next alley between buildings. The crowd had lessened considerably, as many had reached their homes by now, but there were still plenty of people and shadows to hide among.

As he slipped along the backs of the next two homes, he lifted his eyebrows high and raised a finger to his lips to forestall the greetings. This wasn’t their regular area, but most tenants here knew him from his association with the foul-tempered Manadan, and they treated him like a martyred saint as a result.

Smiling satisfiedly to himself, Gupti hurried quietly down the last alley between the houses. People moved past him in the other direction, but all obeyed his furtive silence; Nasra and Qini, the old Jamba twins with ropes of grey hair hanging to their knees, held each other’s hand as they smiled in return and gave him encouraging signs.

Padding softly to the front corner, he took a long slow breath. He could move quietly when he had to, and the people moving along the street would further deaden his movements, as well as distract the obsessive little bee-keeper.

As he slid his head slowly around the wooden corner, Manadan walked purposefully past the alley entrance, joining the crowd. “You’re late.”

Un-dismayed, Gupti moved after the gaunt little man. He’d been trying, off and on, to catch Manadan by surprise for more than a year, now, without success. It was as much habit, now, as anything else.

Passing Manadan, he lifted a hand to Hazhi, whose forked tongue licked at the faded remnants of honey on his fingertips. “Did you tell him, little one?” he asked the Sik-wa playfully.

“You are too well known and too well liked,” Manadan said without pausing, “while I am universally loathed. When the rest of the slaves notice you trying to sneak up on me, they cannot restrain themselves. One could hear their ignorant, excited whisperings in a dead sleep.”

Gupti didn’t reply. It was probably true enough, but there was no need to rub it into the rest of Manadan’s wounds. Also, though Gupti certainly did not know all Manadan’s thoughts, he had learned early on the cursed man was always touchiest at the beginning of the shift.

He took his place a pace ahead and a little to the left. From time to time, Manadan’s cane would graze the side of his sandal for reference, or Hazhi would emit a small squeak or hiss to help his foster father right himself or avoid an eddy in the stream of people, but for the most part, Manadan made his way by his own meticulous sense of direction and years of counting the steps of most every road in Salah al-Din.

After several minutes of walked in the relative silence of the shuffling crowd, a wide circle of lampposts at the far end of 24 came into view, illuminating the two-story patchwork of wood, stone, and iron within. Great rectangular blocks of pale red sandstone and milky quartz, ranging in size from large to monstrous, sat bolted into a brackish iron girdle that formed the foundation. At the gates, the grey, petrified stumps of trees extinct hundreds of years ago framed the wide doors cobbled from the wreckage of more recent fires. Mortared hilt-first into the top of the first story, a wicked medley of weapons confiscated from generations of criminals formed a vicious crown of thorns.

Above this barbed deterrent, ran a waist high railing of tar-covered planks. The tops of the reinforced boards had been cloven into points which gouged upward like a magnified version of the lower jaw of a Goar rat Manadan used to have in his study. Like those of that long-dead animal, each of these teeth had tasted its share of blood.

Revolt was less an act of sudden explosion, here among the bottom of the bottom, than it was a fact of almost predictable regularity. Had someone cared to record the events of the Salah al-Din, an unlikely event in the best of times, that record would not mark such occurrences as upturning the steady routine and constant fabric of daily life, for there was only one fact of life in the times before: pain. All else was illusion.

The only change revolutions had ever brought was in how much pain was endured. Revolutions were short, savage, and powerfully crushed every time. Thus, it was not before the memory of the last revolt could safely be colored in the memory, not of those precious few who may have survived, but of those who came after, and those who came after them, that the threat of another revolt could rear its head. Only then could even the angriest of the populace rationalize the need to destroy their oppressors and the tools of their oppression.

Indeed, every piece of the North Quarter Barracks had been burned up, blown apart, or torn down over its lifetime, as often from within as from without. Before, it had housed jailers as well as criminals, and from time to time, the one was not enough of a match for the other.

Not surprisingly, the last major expulsion had ripped through the barracks when news of the end had come. At that time, the jailers had still been King’s Guards, brutal, angry creatures assigned from ouside the slums by those who only set foot within Salah al-Din to satisfy some private thoughtless whim or some long-meditated act of malevolent depravity which could only be overlooked when no victims of any consequence were involved.

Thus, when news came of the end of existence, when it was finally understood by all to be the truth, those that had placed the Guards in power immediately turned away to save themselves, and there was no hope for those now abandoned, regardless, or because, of the power they had wielded up to that one moment.

“Dad?”

The vague fear in his voice turns my head and I shake my head dismissively, hiding the yawning pit that’s opened in my stomach. “It can’t be.” It can’t.

Turning around, the feeds show mostly darkness, though blurred as shadowed shapes are now running in all directions, ghostlike in the slight, cool light. In the beach are, grey-colored couples run past the video camera and out of view. Their faces are in shadow, but their mostly bare bodies show clearly against the infinite, star-speckled blackness of space behind them, separated by nothing more than a few inches of floor-to-ceiling ferriglass.

My eye catches on the man’s laptop screen, a rectangle of bright white in the greyness as it lay on its side, discarded.

This isn’t just folks turning off their lights or the resorts simulating night in areas, but a complete blackout.

On the edge of a crater pool, a woman looks up while the man in the chair beside her stays buried in his laptop. A girl in another lobby pull her older brother’s hand and point. A resort attendant puts a calming hand out to an elderly couple as he reaches for his communicator.

Barely five silent seconds pass as Patrick and I stare, then the entire collection of resorts are almost completely black. Starlight glints coldly off steel edges and glass faces. The entire scene looks like an old photo negative of an empty construction site.

Except it’s not empty.

“Type something!”

My hands are already moving.
run shutdown /a /z

I hit Enter and the prompt disappears, but nothing more. It should’ve brought the system down immediately; a hard stop. Instead, we’re still watching the same feeds.

“Why didn’t it-” Patrick starts to ask, then stops. “Oh, shit.”

I hardly register his language as I stare at the flickering feeds. In each of the views, the lights in the resorts are going out.

Patrick slides into the chair, but I roll it and him back from the desk before he can start in.

“Dad-”

“No. This isn’t a game.” I tilt the chair forward, tipping him out of it, then settle myself in front of the overlapping windows. “There has to be…”

A sudden splash of windows spreads across the screen, feed after feed of the various lunar resorts, aglow in their impermeable bubbles. Inside, tourists are lounging by the crater pools, gambling at the casinos, and golfing through the special courses. Outside, rovers cruise the nearby surface on short excursions and the particularly daring folks take guided space walks, linked together in short daisy chains.

The next moment, a command line prompt appears just below the rest of the windows. The cascading seems to have stopped, but the feeds are still running at the top of the huge stack of images and charts filling the screen.

The white cursor blinks quietly for a few moments on the plain black background.

no matter how good or bad a day is, there’s always tomorrow. so here i am, at another tomorrow, with a pair of new (spell-checked!) query letters ready for the post office.

we’ll see what Eleanor Wood at the Spectrum Literary Agency and  Matt Bialer at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc. think.

in a couple months.

next!

okay, so after last night’s energy and excitement, despite being declined, i was jazzed today to get to more query letters. i had a couple snail mail letters done last night, too, but it was so late (early!) that i didn’t have the energy to print them out. in doing so tonight, however, i found the most hideous of oversights.

“Witness was just self-published through iUniverse. I understand the prevailing opinions regarding self-publishing and agree with many of them, particularly regarding the quality of most such works. I believe Witness is different, of course, and look forward to proving this exception.”

i thought this paragraph came out rather well, actually. i’m trying to break through the perceptions of self-publishing with the quality of the work in Witness, but i also entirely understand that agents and publishers must receive countless self-published works which only further the stigma, and can’t necessarily expect them to take my word for it. i also want to be up front with it, for two reasons: 1) i don’t see it as an inherent negative, and 2) they’ll find out easily enough anyway with a click on the link to this site which i always enclose, so a sin of omission would be worse, in my eyes.

so, for the above reasons, i think the paragraph works. except for one thing.

change the word ‘opinions’ for ‘opintions’.

yes, that little snuffing sound you just heard would be the sound of my credibility going up in a puff of smoke.

guess i won’t be hearing from the notable Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. And rightly so.

here, then, is an example of the danger of revision in excess. i drafted and redrafted that query letter, read it aloud to my wife, asked her comments, revised again, had her read it, further discussion and revision, read it aloud again, and so on, until we were both satisfied that it was solid. of course, that was only moments before i had to run to work and she had to head out to a week-long conference, so it waited until i got home last night.

home alone, un-supervised, i printed, re-read and made some small changes, then spoke with my wife on the phone and read it to her. again, some tweaks, and reivision, and voila, an even better result. excellent! except, after i hung up, i noticed one more small phrasing change in the above paragraph. making the change, i then sent it.

without spell checking it again.

how many times have i told my students, “go ahead and use spell check, just don’t trust it” ?

so, here i am, back at the bottom of the pile.

at least i found it tonight, before sending out the snail mail ones.

what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger, right?

right?

I stand on the stairs for another moment, stuck between the self-driven deadbolt and the hint of understanding in the screens Patrick’s describing.

The lock can wait. Maybe the hack was deactivated. Anyway, I still have the hardkey.

I try to take the stairs two at a time and only succeed in stopping at the doorway to catch my breath.

Inside, though, Patrick’s seated at the desk, watching a cascade of photos, geomaps, planar grids, and other items pop, one over the other, on the screen.

Even at this distance, I can see he was right.  A series of flashing yellow co-ordinates tied to a three-dimensional grid map overlay of the solar system point with successively increasing detail straight to the moon’s surface. A heat map of the specific area, still several hundred miles above the surface, sets incandescent blobs of orange against the crisp grey-white of the vast external lunar surface. A video feed from one of the resorts displays the lush warmth of the bio-sphere inside the crisp perfection of the glass-walled geodesic domes, complete with rich, swimsuited tourists lounging on lunar ‘beaches’ surrounding craters converted to lakes.

Then another cascade of images and graphs, filling the screen with window after window.