The Celebrate Literary Offenses of David Weber

This isn't a post about him. He is a good enough craftsman, and he is popular (both of which could also be said of Twain's target). There is a hilarious little pastiche called "David Weber Orders a Pizza," but it is really more about how SF can and does handle an info-dump badly.

I did just read a book-length review which was both a bit of a fannish appreciation of Weber's work, and a calm but intense rant about how things went wrong. But this isn't really about that, either.

No, the problem is that when I'm reading or watching criticisms of an author, my reaction to half of it is, "That doesn't seem that bad!"

Now, it is larger-scale issues I tend to think most about. I glaze over, over most sentence-level errors. It takes something rather sparkling like "Celebrated author Dan Brown began his book with the title of a walk-on character." (He's famous for this.)

But it leaves me thinking that I may be writing horrid, horrid prose on a sentence level, stuff beyond even the best editor to fix. And I have little enough confidence in the first place. Because if I barely understand what the thing that a BookTuber or a NYT Review of Books writer is talking about, much less why it is such a bad thing...

And it is all part of a pattern. I tried for so many years to become an author. Finally went the self-publishing route. The series didn't take off. It hit pretty much where you'd expect a self-published series by someone of basic competence would hit; a smattering of sales outside of friends and family and nothing.

That is making it hard to keep going. And confidence is part of it. And imposter syndrome, in various flavors. And I've realized that far too many days, I come home from work tired with just an hour or two of creative work left in me.

And I walk in the door and my first thought isn't desire to write, but embarrassment. What am I doing? Who do I think I am fooling? I can't face the book, any book. Any creative work. So I watch YouTube or read something or catch up on the news, and by the time that dread and self-loathing has faded and I'm willing to be the Boob again and do more of my Nowhere work for Nobody...it is bed time.

***

That all said, I've pretty much hit the golden spike and joined the new rail to the old rail. I'm still grinding down the joint, but I am finally moving forward in the novel again.

Chapter Two

I finally have a draft of the revised Chapter Two.

Now maybe I can get a little further with the Paris book. It has been well over a year on this one. Paris, I believe, is a rock that many writers have foundered on. So many want to write a Paris book, and so many discover the impossibility of capturing the place.

What is it? Just a city. A modern city, of concrete and convenience stores, just like any other. And yet it is still Paris. Or maybe we all lie to ourselves, convincing ourselves that there is something more to it. Something intangible that goes beyond the architecture or the history or the people.

If the term "je ne sais quoi" hadn't been invented yet, then Paris would have made it necessary.

On EVA

We were working on a demo unit at work and there was a gap that needed to be filled...lots of discussion later the engineers found a solution, but we brainstormed through a bunch of different materials and processes before we got there.

I mentioned EVA foam. Which I'd mean meaning to experiment with for a while but never got around to. Well, I broke down and ordered a pack of 6mm sheets off a certain company named after a long river.

Tried cutting. A snap knife worked best. X-acto for fine work but the blades dulled very quickly. Hot knife made nasty smoke and was hard to control.

Tried detail carving. A Dremel sanding disk did best. Coarse Dremel grinding wheel, a bit, but it wouldn't cut into the foam unless it "grabbed" and then it took too much. Neither wood rasp or other Dremel bits did anything useful.

Sanding was hit-or-miss. Bending with a heat gun was fine, and could do a very slight compound bend without buckling too badly. Contact cement worked absolutely great at bonding.

Did my usual paint test by quarters; painted half with plasti-dip, sprayed half of those with plasti-dip spray, and painted chrome paint over everything. The only place where it coated smoothly was when there was painted plasti-dip as underlayment; neither raw foam nor spray plasti-dip was a good prep.

Then bent and prodded and otherwise abused it to see if the paint adhered. Some creasing developed, but no cracking or flaking.

And I'd say at this point I know what EVA foam does and how to work it.

Through the night with the light from a frog

 Another atmospheric river hit, along with a flood of air — high winds that knocked out power over the whole city. I’m writing now on iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard, as unless I share connection the laptop and its 64% of remaining battery I can’t get online with that.

For light I have an Afrog reading light with a rechargeable battery. And appropriately, I am working on the Paris novel on the laptop as I write this. I’m running the gas stove to try and get a little heat here (the thermometer is also reading 64) and heat up a little rice-noodle soup.

I’ve almost forgotten how to cook without microwave and electric kettle (something I went out and bought after learning about them during research on the London novel).

Oddly enough, my last play session in Satisfactory was chasing down a power issue that had brought down my grid. Either something hadn’t loaded right from the saved game or something changed in a patch, but it wasn’t until I deleted the main fuel line from my refineries to my row of gas-fired generators and rebuilt it that it all worked again.

But then, Satisfactory is still on early access. So a few bugs are to be expected.

And just as well the real-world power is still off. Because otherwise my gaming PC would probably be on as I worked on my new “Tower of Power” mega-structure until far too late in the evening.

The only thing keeping me up tonight is hoping that either that gas stove or a return of electrical power will get my room to the point where I’m not up half the night shivering. Low circulation sucks when it is your own body, too. My feet start hurting at temperatures a Minnesotan would call balmy.

Abysmal

I like to get brunch at this place just down the street on weekends. I bring my folding keyboard, and for whatever reason, it often ends up being the most productive writing session I get all week.

I've been working on this one chapter for so long they closed the store.

No, not that one. One at the Louvre. When I went into rewrites, part of the plan was to expand the scene I'd set in the Carrousel du Louvre, trying among other things to achieve more of a build-up to the Inverted Pyramid (which figures so prominently in the ending of The DaVinci Code.)

I looked up the shops they have in that underground mall. Took notes on anything I might get a word or two from. Unfortunately there's not really any clothes shopping on the route from the Metro to the entrance of the museum -- the closest I can come to a remark in that direction is Fossil, a chain that does watches and other accessories (the shops down there, minus one assumes the food court and the McDonald's that went in with some controversy, tend towards the higher end.)

There is a rather bizarre foodie place called Comtesse du Barry. It is sort of a truffles and foi gras in gift wrap place, but with their own spin -- if you couldn't tell from the name. So I might use that, if only to have Penny drop, "There are so many people at Versailles today" while threading the crowd near it.

Or not. Every step of the way through this chapter I've had to debate with myself if it is right to go into something, or if it pulls the narrative off track. At least I've got the new version of the Drea conversations in draft and it looks like it is going to work.

(So...the excerpts from Huxley's book are set out with white space and italics, unless it is a short quote in the body, for which it is set out in quotation marks. The flashbacks to her first night in Paris are done without any typography, slipped into with introduction; "I remembered when I had..." and with the first lines in past perfect; "I had walked..." and then a definite "brought myself back to the present" at the end of each. And they get more Proustian as the novel unfolds. The Drea conversations, meanwhile, are real-time but in text chat. They also only take place when Penny is in spaces that aren't quite the Paris of most of the body text. Such as, while riding trains in the metro.)

Anyhow...between doing all this research, and finally writing the scenes, it looks like the store moved. Because the official site of the Carrousel du Louvre no longer lists that store.

Will no-one rid me of this troublesome abbess?

I hope I am turning the corner soon on the very slow, very late novel. I'm still wading through chapter 2 (3?) and only 6K in on a planned 70K book. But once I've solved the last of the hiccups and figured out how to tell this story clearly, I should be able to lightly revise the existing chapters that takes me up to around the 2/5 mark.

Right now, she's still on the Metro out of Abbesses station in Montmartre, headed for the Louvre and having a discussion -- text chat -- with her manager/friend Drea.

This evening I started with a quick read-through and light edits. Stopped at the wingback chair to look those up and make sure that is the word for what I'm thinking of, and appropriate to the scene. Then stopped again to check the rules for punctuation around parentheses.

I'm still unhappy with italics, but it doesn't seem reliable to try to switch fonts within the Kindle system to set the book excerpts out. So all of Huxley's words are in italics unless he is being quoted. But also text chats and some foreign word are using italics.

And that's a problem; if I italicized the bits of French in Huxley's text, they'd be flipped back to plain text. I never feel that italics for other purposes really feel right when you are italicizing the whole text. Plain text is still plain text. It doesn't magically become emphasized or "hey, I'm a foreign word" just because it is surrounded by italics.

And oh yeah, my quick bit of research on Hawaiian comfort foods was still open on the browser and this time I noticed the discussion of Plate Lunch, which led to Meat and Three, which I just had to look up because it seemed like something I could use with my Tarheel, Amelia -- if they have those in North Carolina.

And, yes, they do.

But so it goes. I think of it this way; a writer is one person. The readers are legion. (In my case, a very small legion. Not even a full cohort.) So Reader A doesn't notice all the stuff you messed up about the Napoleonic Wars, because that isn't their thing. But they know all about how to prepare a proper cup of British tea, and will be unhappy with you when you get that wrong. Reader B, of course, has a completely different set of blindnesses and their "own special skills," which make them a nightmare to people like us. That is to say, writers.

There is a terrible lot of fact checking.

And not to harp (too late) but the main reason I've been doing rewrites for the last several months is not, as some of my readers seem to think (and certainly do opine) trying to get more stuff in there. It is trying and trying to take more stuff out. Trying to find the parts that are essential for the story and trimming down to that.

Over time, though, I've realized you rarely get that one perfect detail or the one perfect way to tell a scene. Instead they are always compromise, and you will drive yourself crazy trying to find that one optimal solution. You really do have to accept something that will work, and get on with the story.

The Lost Tomb of Maui

Come on; legendary figure and hero-god. Why not on the front of what seem to be called in the trade "Archaeological Thrillers?"

Plus, I've been reading up on Wahiawa, Dole plant and everything. But I've decided that Sometimes a Fox isn't the book for Drea to get some time on stage (she grew up in what she calls the bad part of Oahu, and never went back.) The Paris book is going to stay in Paris.

I've worked through most of my a-chronological loops now. The Drea conversations are the last one to get on paper in this latest revision.

But in all of that work, I also figured out, finally, where I am on branding and how I am really trying to place the books.

It isn't this:

 Actually, few of those are really the format "Former SEAL teams up with hot scientist to uncover deadly secret of a mysterious past civilization." The first is a rather delightful series that is very travel-oriented and the history is solid, too (the writer is an actual historian) -- and takes only small liberties with the stuff.

What I'm doing is Romancing the Stone, or any of those episodes of a long-runner TV show where the cast goes on a treasure hunt or archaeological excavation and conveniently falls into all of the tropes of rolling boulders and so on.

Played for comedy, in short. But also for the fun shenanigans you can get into it; almost all of these, right up to the recent The Lost City with Sandra Bullock as an ex-academic who sort of regrets all the money she is making by writing archaeological thrillers with a bodice-ripper twist -- until she and the hunky photo model for her covers are abducted from a book release party...

The Athena Fox books aren't a series about tomb raiding. This is a series about a otherwise normal young woman who keeps falling into situations that even she recognizes are ridiculous.

Well, okay, I knew that. What I wasn't sure of is whether I should be branding in that direction and selling in that direction.

And this also settles where I am going with the character and future plots. Elements of the Japan book (A Fox's Wedding) were a struggle for me, and the struggle was that I was trying to push her out of the status quo of ordinary girl with the intention of making her eventually a seasoned adventurer.

I think it works a lot better if she is a singed adventurer. She's still "ordinary" Penny Bright, but as she learned in Japan she doesn't need to don the mask of "Athena Fox" in order to get out a scrape. Because she may not like it, but she's been there before...