The film crew came to make a video for News Of The World, and at the same time Dolly my elderly white horse got ill, the truck cratered and I had to have it hauled off and buy a second-hand newish truck, thank God from our Methodist minister, and Evelyn O’Hara came to help, also thank God.

So it was all okay.

The film guys Alex and Skip were great. I hope it all turns out all right and I don’t appear to be too frantic.

The day after they left finally got a vet to come, Dolly had to be put down. Very hard. My editor Jennifer Brehl sent me a kind note and a glass heart, that was just the epitome of Dolly, all brightness and flash and heart. Even at twenty-seven years old.

That was Karen Janny riding her years ago  at Fort Sam Houston. Karen barely had her under control. She was a wild thing! When Karen’s husband, Colonel Janny, was transferred to Washington state, Karen asked me to take Dolly, since she wouldn’t find a way to ship her out there. So I took her, when I divorced and bought this place she and Melody came with me. She had ten happy years on this place. I have had her for eleven years. Rarely rode her — she was too crazy. But she was sweet when you were on the ground. Loved baths!

Learned ‘Land of Rest’ for the pennywhistle and our group had our last performance for the summer, it was a very high, energetic evening. Good audience and cake! Hallie came to take pictures and I will post some soon.

Then my water pump went out but our fiddler Tom, who can do anything, came and fixed it. Thank God for friends.

I miss beautiful Dolly every day. When you gave her a bath with purple shampoo her mane and tail were like white silk. She put me on the ground twice in our decade-long relationship, when I was foolish enough to try to ride her. Adios mi yegua blanquita.

That is all.

SHE’S IN COMMAND SHE’S IN CONTROL SHE’S BAD AND MEAN AND ON A ROLL!

     Mary Sue gets where she gets without training, without experience, without bothering to learn anything about armaments, science, geology, terrain, or people. She becomes an officer without learning anything about leadership skills, she becomes a commander simply by commanding things be done. Hardened space sergeants rush to do her will.

My friend and author Caroline Woodward wrote a book with a truck-driver main character, and she actually found somebody who would teach her to drive an 18-wheeler, at least for a short distance, and she learned to back it up.

That’s Woody pressure washing the fuel tanks at the lighthouse landing pad. She and her husband Jeff are lighthouse keepers.

My last experience with a Mary Sue type in sci-fi was a doozy. I will not name the book because the author is actually pretty good. And as I said in my last post on this subject, the e-book list is actually the new slush pile.

And the Amazon commenters, bless them, are the new ‘junior assistants’.  I noticed on this latest Mary Sue I just read that many were giving advice to the author,  they were trying to be helpful, giving her compliments as well as pointing out absurdities, making suggestions etc. It was really nice. Heartwarming.

Different stories require different toolboxes. different skills.

So — tools: — Pace your book. Use narrative summary to slow it down (probably in a flashback) or an alternative scenario. The Martian‘s hero is constantly in danger of his life. This is very tense reading, and it is all in direct scenes told in the first person. It is slowed down by — not narrative summary — but by shifting the scene to the space center where at least people’s lives are not in imminent danger and it shifts to third person as a relief from the intensity of first person. The pacing — shifting between these two scenarios — is excellent.

—- Science fiction inevitably means world-building. This means you are going to have to know something about different classes of people, different geographies, perhaps about weapons, vehicles, food sources, perhaps even animals. It seems to me that most of the new sci-fi e-books are written by people in urban middle-class, upper-middle-class, comfortable surroundings who never get out of their small social circle. So work at it. If you have never been in a slummish area, if you have never worked with large animals or hiked mountains or driven heavy equipment or been around military people or people of other cultures, think about it.

All in all, the e-book list is exciting and promising:  the reviewers on Amazon are really quite generous and helpful. That in itself is amazing.

This essay has to do with science-fiction, dystopian and fantasy fiction; balancing your narrative. Ballast and avalanches.

I have been discovering the ‘Mary Sue’ character often discussed on the sci-fi blogs. More about her later.

New e-book authors have no editors. I can, however, live with typos. But there is other sorts of advice that editors can give which will not be available, nor will the readers at the publishing company be there to give advice. However, the commenters at Amazon, I find, are really quite helpful and nice with these self-published e-books. At any ate, there are no university/college classes teaching people how to write action narratives, and so of course I had to jump in.

Balance. All action narratives should be balanced between narrative summary and direct scenes. Read Making Shapely Fiction. I try to include at least three to four pages of narrative summary for every ten pages of direct scenes. It has the effect of a sonata, moving between slow, meditative music to a second movement far livelier. Pick up, slow down. Pick it up, slow it down.  You will soon enjoy the dance. Your reader will not put down the book in exasperation.

Because this is a truth; the reader becomes dulled and exasperated by chapter after chapter after chapter of direct scenes. I have seen e-books that have had three chapters, one after the other, all in dialogue. And since your e-book is cheap, expendable, and the reader can order a long sample, you don’t want to exasperate and bore them right away.

Narrative summary is ballast. Direct scenes and dialogues are avalanches.

No matter how interesting your characters or fluid your writing, nobody can long endure three chapters in dialogue. And no matter how fascinating your action figure, readers will tire of endless action.

What is a direct scene? Dialogue or narrative that takes place moment-by-moment. Narrative summary is an overview, either as a flashback or continuation of the narrative, in which time is compressed. It works very well for flashbacks. Here’s an example from Pawn In Frankincense; by Dorothy Dunnett;

About half-way between Aleppo and Chios, it came to Jerott that he hated ichneumons. Afterwards, with the mountains, the steppes, the gorges behind them; having lived through the sleepless days in the stifling heat of the tents and passed the laboring nights in the saddle of his small Turkish horse which could walk or gallop but was unable to trot, or on the jolting back of one of the two hundred camels in their long caravan, Jerott was prepared to admit that for many reasons that long journey, six weeks in all, between Aleppo and Constantinople was one of the worst in his life. Through all the miseries of mosquitoes and dust-storms, of stale meat and sour milk and brackish water, through the perpetual cries of the camel-men…there rode at his side Pierre Gilles discoursing in Latin on the glories of Constantinople… 

So you have six weeks packed into a paragraph or two. This is slow time. Direct scenes are fast time. If you care about your craft — and there is a reason for each — you will learn narrative summary. For some reason, many people struggle with it. Other people seem to be able to write nothing else.

There are a lot of people who would like to write a few things, learn a few things, but true writers are rare and they are not getting a lot of help.

Writers who want to move into the lands of imagination learn by reading other writers rather than in seminars or creative writing classes.

At any rate, the magic words ‘Once Upon A Time’ still send people into a state of hypnosis, the construction of a magic realm where unaccountable things happen.

Tools.

When action occurs, your sentences must grow shorter and shorter. No interior monologues or memories flashing back while the action is going on. It looks ridiculous. It doesn’t make your character ‘layered’ or ‘deep’ or anything of the sort.

Read books which have dealt with the above problems (or sections of books) and learn from the old writers.  Two recommendations; the chapters dealing with the invasion of Atlanta in Gone With The Wind and the escape from Paris in Tale Of Two Cities.

Harper Collins put me up at the Mansion Del Rio, right on the riverwalk, where I could walk to the festival at the Central Library.  I didn’t used to like the new Central Library but I changed my feeble mind. Some of the architectural gimmicks are not gimmicky but actually nice. Met Nancy Cook Monroe and her husband Mike Monroe at the cocktail party and then went out to dinner with them, we talked and talked, I had such a good time with them! I have known Nancy since King William days and Mike is a sportswriter on the Rivard Report.

The children’s part of the book festival was held over at the Southwest school of arts and crafts, which is in the old Ursuline Girls’ Academy, I think the buildings are about 1870’s, the stained glass is still there in the old chapel, it was beautiful.

And the bird (pigeon) fountain…

Kids kids everywhere. I have no idea what that little girl in yellow has on her head.

And below that, a children’s activity area where kids could build something from sort of huge tinkertoys but the dads got so caught up in it, the kids just  sat around and watched them.

Below is the courtyard. A beautiful place.

And here I am nattering away about something to John Kerr, another historical fiction author, and that’s Javier Martinez on the other side, a good talk was had by all. No pictures from the Bulverde Library event but it was fun. Saw Jim LaValle-Havelin, he surprised me when he introduced me by reading from Rum and Karma-Kola, he loves it! Good Lord, such a long time ago that I wrote it.

And then drove home and fell into Animal Planet here on the Ranchito. Glad to be home. Saw Evelyn as she was driving out, talked to her about moldy round bale, she said she and Pat were coming back Thursday and they would help me burn it — it ought to be burnt. But I went ahead and did it myself because I was worrying so much about one of the horses inadvertently eating some of it, which as Evelyn said would kill them dead.

Don’t want anything to happen to my beautiful Buck horse. The donkey? Mehhh…

Just kidding.

That’s me with the hat, April on the Whitehorse and Evelyn in the middle. June took the picture. This was the country right at the place we rented. We just rode out the front door. Coming back June and I left the road and cut cross-country to get back to the house, and that was fun.

Me. We hiked on foot to a place called Cottonwood Springs. Amazing beautiful clear springs, flowing from a great jumble of rocks, hidden in a cleft in red desert mountains. Rather egotistical of me to put in me instead of springs. But here I am. And here I am again below with June and April. Yes, yes, I should change my name to May.  We had such a good time.

Oops, didn’t get this one cropped. At any rate, this is April and Evelyn ahead on the trail to Cottonwood springs. the cleft we are walking toward hides the springs and a very large live-oak and plentiful clear water. Amazing. Evelyn is a wonderful addition to our riding confraternity. she has a good little mare named Anna, and is great fun to be with.

All the characters are haughty, irritable, relentlessly negative. After about forty pages I realized this was going to go on forever. It is of a pattern. The narrative is told in several first-person voices but they all sound the same. One voice is from Texas, male, 1840’s. Next voice is Texas, male, 1915 or so. Last voice is female, mid 20th century.

They never stop being critical. Therefore the characters all have a very narrow emotional range. Also, therefore, the characters are all without agency. Things happen to them and they respond with acerbic observations. Also, there are many sexual references and all sex is unloving, graphic and apparently not very enjoyable.

Okay so I wasted my money.

It has been a while sine the lower pasture was filled with verbena but we are going to get flowers this year. this is Dolly and Buck and my dog Berkley who has passed away since this picture was taken.

There have been two funerals where myself and the bluegrass gospel group have been asked to sing and play. We did well. The first was the sister of one of our best vocalists, and we did our best for Jan Saunders. Afterwards a big barbecue was held on the Donoho land on the Sabinal River. Jan and her husband had known each other since they were five years old. They raised horses, trained them for the track. Her husband was just enduring it all. Shaking hands and accepting consolations as best he could. It was heartbreaking.

Then Frank Jones, a rancher, who was ninety, had about seven sons and all the sons had sons so the church was filled with big tall men and they were all dark-haired, and they all knew the words to It Is Well With My Soul so that when the hymn started it sounded like the Red Army Chorus.  Very moving.

The publicity for the book is moving along although they want to take the figure of the girl and wagon off the cover, so there is some discussion about that. Went to Austin to meet the sales and publicity team who were there for a meeting. Good people.

Hope to keep this blog up better. (Weird alliteration/syntax there).

Interesting to run through a lot of science-fiction/action shorts on YouTube ; you can instantly tell if it’s going to be a snoozer by just running the red button forward through the whole thing, or even halfway through. Some exciting title like; Blowback; The Attack makes you click on it but running it forward all you see is closeup after closeup of the hero/main character reacting to things. He or she is horrified, terrified, sad, discouraged, rarely elated. The main character/hero doesn’t do anything.

Script writers at Film Riot are terrific for this. I recommended them before; their little short Losses is very good indeed with minimal plotting and very good action and believable characters. Their latest is Portal Combat. Very funny, very fast. I laughed very hard at the sound of one of the characters eating Doritos.

The difference between works of fiction that are primarily about action, and those that are in the main concerned with relationships. There is neither ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about either one, merely personal taste. But get them straight and save yourself a lot of confusion and grief. And they key is external events, or lack of them.

 By Michal Karcz see his website michalkarcz.com

If you wish to write a narrative primarily about personalities and their clashes, internal motives, misapprehensions, misdirections, failed love, greed and selfishness and all the grimy depths to which people can sink, then your background has to be fairly stable so you can do this. Here is excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s review of John Updike’s Toward The End of Time, a novel which completely ignored the above.

(From Consider the Lobster, Wallace)

Toward the End of Time is being marketed by its publisher as an ambitious departure for Updike, his foray into the futuristic-dystopian tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-fi. The year is AD 2020…A Sino-American nuclear war has killed millions and ended centralized government as we know it…local toughs charge fees to protect the well-to-do from other toughs…the Midwest is depopulated…there are tiny but rapacious ‘metallobioforms’ that go around eating electricity and the occasional human. Mexico has reappropriated the US Southwest…(but) What 95% of Toward the End of Time actually consists of is the (the protagonist) Ben Turnbull describing the predominate flora (over and overagain as each season passes) and his brittle, castrating wife Gloria and remembering the ex-wife who divorced him for adultery, and rhapsodizing about a young prostitute he moves into the house when Gloria’s away on a trip. It’s also got a lot of pages of Turnbull brooding about senescence, mortality, and the tragedy of the human condition…

In case that summary sounds too harsh, here is some hard statistical evidence of just how much a ‘departure’ from Updike’s regular MO this novel really is;

 Total # of pages about Sino-American war —causes duration and casualties —0.75

total # of pages about deadly mutant metallobioforms —1.5

total # of pages about flora around Turnbull’s New England home plus fauna, weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons —-86

total # of pages about Mexican repossession of US Southwest —0.1

total# of pages about Ben Turnbull’s penis and his various thoughts and feelings about it —10.5

total # of pages about what life’s like in Boston without municipal services or police, plus whether the war’s nuclear exchanges have causes fallout or radiation sickness —0.0

total # of pages about golf —15

And so on. Thank God for Wallace and all he gave us in his short life-span.

So for today, I will merely note that for your sci fi novel, your dystopian novel, which deals with robust external events, should have a balance between narrative summary, and direct scenes with dialogue, direct scenes which are narratives, and description. I’ll go into that within the week.

There are also the questions of info-dumps and plotting.