pbray

6500 words written on the new project this weekend. And I liked both writing it, and reading it after it was done.

It's a good place to stop, and there's stuff I need to research. No idea if I'll get any writing done this week (crazy day job hours run through Thursday), but I hope to get back to this by the weekend.

Yesterday, in the span of a half-hour, I came up with not one but two new story ideas. Different genres, different tones, even different POVs, the only thing they have in common is me.

I drove to the Cybercafe, whipped out a notepad (silly me, I'd left the laptop at home since I was supposed to be running errands) and wrote them up.

This is the part of being a writer that most folks don't understand, as they sidle up next to me at parties and offer to let me have the privilege of writing up their great idea. Having ideas is never the problem, the hard part is picking just one to work on.

When you go to the shelter, you can't take home every puppy you see-- you've got to pick one. And the same goes for story ideas. Even if I live to be five hundred years old, I'll never have time to turn all of my ideas into stories. So I have to choose carefully--adding up all the disparate factors from my passion for the story to market conditions and timing-- a cool idea for a short story can be tucked in between contracts, a three book series can not. I'll ask friends and colleagues for their advice, and then, when brain and heart agree, it's time to start writing.

And to hope that this puppy will be easier to housebreak than the last.

Ran errands this morning then stopped by Waldenbooks at the mall, where I kidnapped the manager for lunch. (The staff later mocked me when I returned her, pointing out that a real kidnapper would have at least demanded a ransom.)

The store is literally a shell of its former self. Some fixtures have already been sold off and removed, and the empty back half of the store echoes. In the front, the remaining stock takes up only a fraction of the shelf space.

Tomorrow is the last day the store will be open. Over the next few days the staff will box up whatever scraps are left, and supervise the removal of the fixtures. And then that will be it.

I'll miss the store and getting to see my friends there. I'll miss their keen knowledge of books which made it a joy to shop there, even as their selection dwindled.

I find it hard to imagine a mall without a bookstore. Cicero said "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Surely the same holds true for a shopping center. When I moved here the mall had not one but two bookstores, and there were a host of thriving bookstores--both chains and independent--in the surrounding towns. Now, for new books, there are very few options. There's the Barnes & Noble in Vestal. For those with a literary bent, there's RiverRead in Binghamton. Fat Cat Books in Johnson City is still hanging on, though the mix of new books versus comics and gaming continues to inexorably tilt towards the non-book stock. And, of course, Wal-Mart, Target and the like will continue to carry the latest bestsellers, but they can't take the place of a bookstore.

Even in its heyday, Waldenbooks was a good store, rather than a great one. But it was what we had, and I don't see anything coming forward to take its place. Ultimately the mall, and our community, are poorer for its loss.

There hasn't been much snow this winter, but earlier this week Greenwood Park was finally able to open up their cross-country ski center. I'd been hoping to get out this weekend, but when I called to check the hours, I learned that they'd closed it yesterday, due to the warmer weather. Reopening depends upon conditions-- some recent winters they haven't opened it at all.

Sigh. So now that's two strikes for my weekend plans-- no Lost Dog, no getting out to go XC skiing. Mind you, I could drive an hour or so north and find snow, but I'm not quite that ambitious. Usually when I go out by myself I like to keep it local--in case I do something stupid, I don't want to have a long drive home on top of any self-inflicted injuries. Not that anything's happened so far, but it doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution.

I suppose I could always hit one of the walking trails. Or maybe head up to Ithaca for the heck of it.

But first, I'll get another cup of coffee.

Not only do I have to work this weekend, I also have to write up my 2009 accomplishments for my annual performance review. It's part of a bogus corporate game--management emphasizes how important the writeup is in determining your rating, so if you don't get the evaluation you wanted, they can put the blame back on you for not doing a good enough job describing why you were vital to MegaCorp.

In reality, of course, the ratings are already decided, and there's little chance that anything I write will change the results either way. But there's so much stress given to this process that many of my coworkers literally spend days working on their results.

My approach is somewhat simpler. My first draft was easy. "Patricia Bray demonstrated her commitment to delivering global solutions by saving the Earth from alien invasion through deployment of her extended team of invisible robot warriors. This action ensured MegaCorp's survival and was key to MegaCorp achieving its 2009 corporate goals."

I'm thinking with a little polish, I'll be good to go.

Every time they show the Lord of the Rings movies, I get sucked in. I don't mean to. After all, I own the extended DVD version of all three movies. And yet, somehow, channel surfing stops and I find myself watching the movies, commercials and all. So far I'm three for three this weekend.

This time it was THE RETURN OF THE KING-- I caught the bit in the middle from the lighting of the torch ("Gondor calls for aid!"), the ride of the Rohirrim to aid Gondor, to the moment where Aragorn, wielding Andúril, confronts the army of the dead and demands their allegiance.

God, I love those movies.

Went to the library this afternoon to pick up reference books for current project. My normal tendency is to buy whatever I need, but in this case the sources that everyone was recommending were out of print with used copies being prohibitively expensive...

and then the lightbulb dawned. Sure enough, Broome County Public Library had copies of the two I really wanted to read, plus a third that looked interesting.

I miss the days when they used to stamp the front of a book with the due date, so you could see how often it had circulated. From the tags in front, I could see both books had been taken out in the early 90s, but no clue whether or not they've circulated since then. But now they're mine, all mine.

Until January 2nd, that is.

This summer I was a guest instructor at Odyssey, where I focused on the role of sidekicks as part of an overall discussion of characterization. The first half of the lecture was posted as a podcast last month, and they've just made the second half available on their website here.

Podcast #32: In this podcast, the second of two parts, Patricia Bray explains how the sidekick's characteristics can balance those of the protagonist, or contrast with those of the protagonist. She discusses the requirements for a good sidekick, and describes how the sidekick's character arc can complement or contrast with the protagonist's character arc. She explains the difference between a sidekick/protagonist story and a story with multiple protagonists. She also lists some of the very useful purposes a sidekick can serve in a story, such as making your protagonist more believable, providing an embodiment of the protagonist's motivation, and serving as the external conscience of protagonist. She also reviews the various mistakes an author can make in creating a sidekick. Patricia discusses sidekicks in short stories as well as novels, and explains when you might want to use the sidekick's point of view. You can find part 1 of Patricia's discussion of sidekicks in Podcast #31.

What could be better than an autographed book? How about a book personally autographed and gift-wrapped by one of your favorite authors?

In conjunction with the Magnificent Seven's* final booksigning at the Waldenbooks in Johnson City, NY, the store manager has graciously volunteered to take orders from anyone who can't make it to the signing. You can have your purchases shipped for free to your local Waldenbooks or to your home. Click here for details.

If you're in the area, please join us on December 5th for the signing. If you can't make it but would like to order autographed books to be shipped to you, you must contact April to reserve your copies by this Saturday (11/28). Let her know if you want your books wrapped-- I am supplying wrapping paper, but will likely not be personally wrapping gifts due to my insistence that the correct ratio of paper to tape is 1:1, and the correspondingly high probability that I'd accidentally tape myself to the book.

*The Magnificent Seven are: Patricia Bray, S.C. Butler, Barbara Campbell, Laura Anne Gilman, Jackie Kessler, Joshua Palmatier and Anton Strout.

Yesterday I finished the chapter I've been working on for a while. I'd been stuck for over a week at the same spot, making one false start after another as I tried to finish one scene and then begin the next.

I finally realized that the problem was two particular paragraphs. I'd worked hard on them. They were well-written, and had information that is critical for understanding one of the central character arcs.

And this was absolutely the wrong place for them. They functioned like speedbumps, slowing the pace down to a crawl. I hated cutting them, but once I did, the scene flowed the way I needed it to, and I was able to write the next scene and finish off the chapter.

The chapter isn't perfect, but it's solid, so I can keep moving forward. I've saved those paragraphs in my story notes file, pretending that I'm going to use them, but in reality we all know that I'll just visit them from time to time, pet the perfect prose, and somewhere in the new chapter or the next, I'll figure out a different way to get this information across.