I will get the schedule up as soon as possible. Looks like I will have to be gone from home for two weeks! Auriel will take care of Gradycat, I am hoping to leave Buck and El Donko in Evelyn and Pat’s pasture down on the Seventy and Girl Dog? Haven’t figured that out yet. It all begins the first of October; first to Asheville NC, then Houston, the Minneapolis, then St. Louis. From St. Louis down to PB with Susan and Mark and then Susan and I will get our Ozark Trail ride in, a little early. Then home.

Of course you want to know what this is. Okay. The roundish object is one of the moons of Saturn, named Daphnis. Daphnis is about five miles in diameter. In the rings of Saturn, there is a gap of clear space. It is called the Keeler Gap.  This is a computer simulation of Daphnis sailing along in the Keeler Gap. You are richer for this, you know. Your mind has been expanded. Woooooooo.

Picture or photo by Kevin Gill/Flicker.

Looking forward to an e-conversation with Tracy Chevalier, an interview with an editor at Kirkus, opening the launch in Houston October 4th, a reading in Asheville NC, introduced by Charles Frazier (really looking forward to that), then Minneapolis, then from there fly to St. Louis the 13th for Left Bank books, then 4 days riding with Susan in the Ozarks, then home. It’s going to be a pressed, busy trip but I think I will be okay.

The video is up at newsoftheworldbook.com. I love it.

Haven’t been riding for a month except one day a week ago, when it was so hot, got on for 15 minutes but both Buck and I thought, ‘this sucks’ and turned around. Then all of a sudden, I think it was, August 11th, Thursday, after it had been 102 F. for a week, the rains came. The temperature dropped to the eighties, so far have had five inches or so. I am working down in the pasture when I can, clearing an area, it’s like landscaping or interior decorating. Exterior decorating. I am making a good place for the equines under two very large, old cedars.

The music group is going to have to do without Chuck for September. Working on my piano scales. Started a new work about a quartet in the post-apocalypse. What good is singing when the world is collapsing? Answer; a great deal.

The thing about inventing a world for sci-fi or dystopia is that the writer loses all that wealth and complexity of dialect and jokes and songs and references and slang that makes up much of our daily life. And you can’t invent that without it sounding false, so you must do without it, and your dystopian world is fall less rich in language and reference than that of a historical novel. Unless you have characters that incessantly refer back to the ‘old world’ — i.e. ‘this ancient song, called I Ain’t Got No Satisfaction’ etc. but that gets heavy and forced after a while.

Lovely, lovely rain.

It’s at newsoftheworldbook.com. What a time we had making that video! The truck died, Dolly became terminally ill, I was at my wit’s end, but all went well. Especially with Ev O’Hara’s help. I think it’s interesting, it has horses, running river, green trees, and so on. Not so much pontificating from me, but when people turn a camera on you and ask for your words of wisdom it is really tempting to blather away and get onto your favorite themes and inform the world of things the world ought to know. Temptation must be rigorously banged on the head.

So it looks good, the website looks good, and I am very happy with it all. Great quote from Charles Frazier.

And here we are — the POP band!

Much activity down at the park in the middle of town — a new rock wall and these lovely cutout sculptures are being put up. My guess is that the wide rock wall will become a sitting-place. The park is too open to be comfortable in the summer heat, but the wall will be entirely in shade. The only shade is the gazebo visible behind the central deer but, as I said, the rock wall will be shady.

The big cypress is the one that is lit up for Christmas.

This is my favorite. It’s on top of the rock wall at the south end. A scrub jay and quail and metal cutout sculpture of a fencepost and probably real barbed wire.  The building on the far side of the park is the volunteer fire department/EMS ready room, where they have their radios, classes, computers, some bunks I think for those on duty.

Buck is in the backyard this morning, mowing the grass. Nice to have him up here at the house with me. My air conditioner in the study died, and without it, it gets to be about 120 F up here. I bought a new one, but getting the dead one out of the wall up here in the second story was daunting and I had no idea how to go about it. It was a big 16,000 BTU monster. It was flush with the wall inside and stuck out of the exterior wall about two feet.

Thought of just shoving it right on out of the wall and into the yard below. Called Mr. Brundage and he came with his son and he looked at it, then removed the guts, or the interior works, out of the housing, the frame, carried up my new one, and just inserted it into the old housing/frame. Problem solved. Duh.

My bank account got hacked. It has all been very interesting. The bank will recover almost all of it but tracing down the names and entities behind the unaccredited withdrawals has been fascinating. I don’t think the bank expected me to go to much trouble but I was simply interested. One name, FlagshipCA, led to Western Union, who had no way of finding or tracing it. Another led to a rental property management software company in Salt Lake City Utah, Entrata, and a Utah bank, another to a really trashy apartment complex in San Antonio, Iron Horse Valley Rentals, so most of it seemed to have to do with rentals. They were withdrawing rent money, plus utility money on the San Antonio city electric company.

How did they get my bank account number? I guess through my debit card? I am so ignorant about this, which is why I find it intriguing. Well, off to the bank now to fill out the forms. My little bank here in West Texas is so great, love them.

A great photo by Jeff George, it’s on Woody and Jeff’s calendar they send out to friends every year of scenes from the lighthouse.  I need to put up the one from June, it’s of two bright red helicopters landing on their landing pad, I believe from the Canadian Coast Guard.

Back from St. Louis. Since I don’t watch TV I head about the killing of the Dallas policemen while standing in line at the airport to come home. People told me in a sort of dull, subdued way as if to say ‘What next?’ It all seems to be media-driven. The protesters are there for the camera, and the killer was on the black Panther social media sites all the time, posted pictures of himself being cool and defiant.  A group of young women Black Panthers marching with their fists in the air were dressed just like Beyonce’s dancers. They expected to get their picture taken and be on a front page or three-second shot somewhere they were not wrong. However, the media does not offer a paycheck to its watchers or change the weather or control the economy, and yet many people’s minds simply live in it as if it were a real world.

The trip to St. Louis was very good, met with bookstore owners and Robin Smith of Harper Collins and was interviewed by the Post-Dispatch.

Friend Laurel Water’s treehouse is going to be on a television program July 15th, on Treehouse Masters. It is beautiful.

Missed April Baxter’s birthday party, I got home about 4 but was too tired and frazzled to go. Now I have a new dog, whom I call Girl Dog, and Grady Cat not taking it at all well but have managed to keep them separated. The bluegrass group is getting together next Wednesday, even though we are off for the summer we’re getting together to play and sing and for the companionship.

Reading Jack Vance and find a deep interest in his change and growth from the ‘Forties and Fifties to works like The Dying Earth and Madouc when he finally hit his stride.

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.