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.

Wet rain and blowing here in the Texas hill country.

For Readers and Writers Both

I have made a rough division between two types of fiction. You may like reading one or the other. You may like writing one or the other. Neither type is the ‘right’ one. Neither is better or more intellectually superior than the other, although the current fashion in ‘literary fiction’ is for the first described below. What is vital here, for the writer, is that you have two different toolboxes for the two different kinds of narrative. It is absolutely imperative that a beginning writer understand this.

I hope this helps. I’ll be here all day.

Relationship novels. These are narratives, or stories, about relationships between people. They generally have to be really bad relationships or there’s no story. Love/hate relationships, those of marriages, parents and children, children and their grandparents, people and their bosses, people and their crummy oppressive society (‘nobody understands me’). In general, the purpose of the narrative is to explore human personalities, which also have to be fairly chaotic in order to be interesting.

I am not a fan of these types of stories but many people are and I don’t intend to put them down.  They are often stories about how people are victimized by others. There has to be a fairly elaborate set-up for the main character to remain in a bad relationship. For instance someone taking care of an ageing parent and that ageing parent is a truly wicked and manipulating crone,  people stuck in a bad marriage, or locked into the family firm with a barbarian grandfather dominating his heirs at the Torvald Rubber Works, and so on.

If you are writing this type of novel, then you can’t have many important external events, believe me. Forget the devastating storm, alien invasions, wars, economic collapse, zombies, the living dead, The Rapture, banditry, etc. External events might be there but they take a back seat.

Once external events overtake your characters, you simply have a different sort of story.

Remember this is about fiction.

A good example of the contrast between an action novel and a relationship novel is one that everybody knows; Gone With The Wind. I take it as an example even though it is badly written, still it has the two sorts contained within one work. In the first half, external events (the Civil War) are paramount and account for truly gripping scenes. The love story between Scarlett and Rhett is relegated to the background and even though it is very important it hangs fire while the Confederacy is busy losing the war. The second half of the book, after Scarlett pays the taxes, the narrative calms down and explores the clash of personalities; the war is over and the background has become stable and so then we concentrate on a wretched mix-up in love affairs.

And even then, the novel suffers a let-down. Nothing can match that first half.

And happy riding to me this coming year. Big Bend in February! Many interesting thoughts on the movie Inside Out. Reading a history of the Byzantine empire.  Gray skies,much cold and storm coming, bringing up the horses tomorrow.

The year 2016 stretches out in front of us, may God hold you all in His hand month by month, moment by moment.

I think what a lot of people do on Christmas Day, say toward noon, is seek out some privacy. I suppose I am talking about people with a houseful. At any rate bad weather is coming, maybe actual snow!! and so I have to get in hay because I will bring the horses up to the corral, also unload a bag of oats in the garage so I can take it down to them, and reinforce the flimsy latticework surround on the loafing shed to something more substantial. Work!

To all! And  will get back to writing about writing in a week or sooner.