You'd think that setting up a channel on Pandora to listen to contra dance tunes would be easy, wouldn't you?

Pandora really can't tell the difference between contra and country, likes throwing in contemplative piano pieces as well, and generally doesn't get this idea of "repetitive dance tune."

I like the contra dance tunes for work as I can tune them out while listening to them. Perhaps its better to say that they don't crash my ability to work while I'm working.

Happy birthday, Origin of Species.

Hers Truly keeps showing new behaviors. They're normal among adults, but they are both surprising and astonishingly cute from a toddler. Her new favorite toy is her stuffed-animal kitten. This morning, she was slamming back in the rocker, saying, "You know better than that." I told her, "And the kitten knows better than that." She then looks at the kitten and tells it, "You know better than that."

Hers Truly has also been doing so much better at potty. To review, last January, we had potty training meltdown and had to start over from the beginning. This summer, we achieved pee breakthrough. We are finally getting there with the poop. She is finally not panicking over the prospect, sitting through it, and claiming her reward donut hole and sticker. Even her external musings now support, "It's good to poop on the potty." The last few mornings, she has seen the whole process through on her own. * phew *

May we never get a setback like that again.

Meanwhile, the cat has been dealing with these gray and rainy days. Last night, he decided to sleep under the sheets, which he never does. He stayed there for hours.

The novel has drifted back up to 63k. I was down at 59k just a few weeks ago. At this rate, I won't wrap up this draft until February. I had hoped to turn this draft around far faster, but that just isn't going to happen. Just the restructuring, the text fixed caused by restructuring, and the restructured end sucked down three months.

The in-laws came down over the weekend and much good eating was had. Yum. Hers Truly had grandma read her to bed twice over the weekend. Both parents got kicked out.

Hers Truly's story du jour is "The Cat Who Walks By Himself." She also now has a stuffed cat, and she has named her Jojo. (I once had a Raggedy Andy called Jojo, so this makes my daddy heart proud.)

I think that I am finally through replotting the novel. Again. Now I'm back to polishing work.+

The book du jour remains "All the King's Men." Reading is slow.

The D&D game actually happened, and all went well. The party utterly failed to kill itself, which is a first. Even better, we wrapped up a bit early, and I escaped Baltimore before the Ravens game let out, letting me avoid the awful slog.

The lawn finally got mowed, so I'm getting caught up with the autumn chores. Now, I just need to get the leaves all composted.

For my little NaNo writers out there: you've got seven days left. If you haven't panicked yet, this is a good time to start.

First, congrats on NaNo writers who have now surpassed 30k words.

I finally got the new impeller onto my leaf sucker. It came off with a single bolt and was fairly painless to change. Much of the massive leaf pile has been chomped up.

I keep forgetting to mention some of Hers Truly's speech oddities. She pronounces "yellow" as "yawllow." Sometimes, she switches "d" and 't" as sometimes I do. Baltimorons use "d" for "t" in many places. However, "datty" for "daddy" is not one of those places.

Joy has been running about with a blanket claiming to be a bat, saying "Bats Bats. Fire. Fire. Panic." The goal is to have her saying "Bat. Bats! I'm on fire. I'M ON FIRE! PANIC!!!" [It's an in-joke, folks.]

I finished out ye-new Thomas Covenent novel. To by utter disgusts, I can summarize the book in three words. I don't even care if I spoil it for you. Linden resurrects Covenant. Yes, that's it. It took that bastard 350k words to tell me that.

In response, I'll be finally be rereading "All the King's Men." In college, I called that book the best book that I have ever read. Let's see if that holds up. I was going to read a Jack Keroac, but the one that I found doesn't have the cadence of the "On the Road." I really, really, quite specifically, want the cadence for that particular book.

Writing has been slow. I keep forgetting where I've been editing.

I woke up early on Sunday and wrote until the girls woke up. I wound up getting two hours of work in before 8am. I busted out to the end, then I resketched the end. Things may still change, but I think that I got the mid- to late-book sorted back out.

I've made some use of interpolation. In essence, I had three events going, but none of the sequences work. My solution was to break up one sequence between those other two sequences, which really helped create some tensions. I also move one event from off-stage to on-stage.

Meanwhile, I've been reading the poster-child for wordy fantasy, Stephen R. Donaldson. His latest work weighs in at 350k words, which is more than his entire first series. My strategy for reading it is just to skim for dialog. My guess is that I could randomly delete 1/2 of all paragraphs and still come out with a coherent book. I do believe that SRD is using the RAID method of writing - redundant array of inane developments. Quite honestly, I could cut the first half of the book and have almost no impact on the work.

First half: main character goes on a side-quest, gains a level, a weapon power-up, and a one-use ally, all in 175k words.

And this, my friend, is a shining example of why I think that fantasy literature has done a double-backflip into the empty swimming pool.

But really, no, that's not it. The real reason is that SRD invents new people and new magic, but the world itself has nothing new to offer. It feels as if he's touching all the bases or phoning in the development.

First off, if anyone out there wants to get on the Christmas Card list, drop me an email with the info.

Friday night was BBQ. Jenny and I shared a rib order and couldn't finish it. We are such bad Americans.

Saturday went well. The highlight for Joy was seeing the train pass by at the Farmer's Market. There were even lights that flashes and clanged.

Also great fun was leaf raking. Hers Truly duly threw herself into all piles.

We were in the middle of mulching leaves when the leaf-sucker broke. A impeller blade broke, rendering the thing useless. Part ordered.

Sunday should have been a D&D game, but was cancelled due to a critical mass of player outages. Instead, I raked more leaves, discovering that big plastic lids that cover sandboxes make for terrific leaf scoops.

The un-fun part of the weekend was getting a milk-headache from a tootsie-roll. They contain evaporated milk and whey. Milk is bad. Whey is milk on steroids.

To top it all off, the washer broke mid-load. $200.

No talk of fantasy literature is complete without Joe Campbell, and there's the problem in a nutshell.

Let's talk about the Hero's Journey.

I watched a random episode of Seinfeld, the I successfully applied to the Hero's Journey concept to it, and BEHOLD, the episode was laden with meanings of mythic proportions.

Do you see the issue? The Hero's journey is a useful concept, used in context, but we don't keep it in that context. We overapply it. We connect it to every journey and every revelation in every possible context. That's a sure recipe for trainwreck, which is what I consider the theory of the Hero's journey in modern useage. When every Seinfeld episode is a possible Hero's Journey, we have a problem.

In context, the Hero's Journey is one particular form of a narrative, containing specific actions, while avoiding other actions. Compare that to a saint's journey, which contains many of the same actions, but also contains different actions, leading us to a different place. Then let us compare this to a flood story, which contains some elements of those things, but also leads us somewhere quite different. Each of those story structures could be confounded into one structure, but that would not serve us, as we labeled these story structures differently to make them different. These distinctions help us to better identify those stories which are hero stories vs. those that aren't.

In over-applying the idea of the Hero's Journey, we confound all those structures back into one over-arching structure, making it seem as if the hero's journey is the only journey, applying equally well to Lord of the Rings, the Ring Cycle, the Ring film series, and Ring Ring (the Abba song). That confounding makes us poorer, rather than richer, in our stories.

So when thinking about your story, think about the structure. The Hero's Journey is one structure among EQUALS, and those many equals may just contain structures that are more useful to you.

Revising is that monster that doesn't exist to the newer writer.These days, I consider revising part and parcel of the writing process. You can not think of writing without revising.

As far as I'm concerned, the point of a first draft is to get your basic idea down onto paper. The purpose of revision is to spot the strengths and themes of that work, amplify the strengths, prune the weaknesses, and rearrange whatever needs to be rearranged.

At this point, I would say to NEVER underestimate the revision process. I just added the best 1500 words that I've ever written to my novel, all in the name of revision. Quite honestly, I could not have thought of what I just did without the basic work being under my fingers.

So while writing your NaNovel, don't be determined to get everything right. You don't need to do that. Get what you can knowing that you are always stuck with revisions.

Also, don't get stuck with linearity. If you are ready to write a section, then write it. If you like starting with the end, then start with the end. If you like to write lots of snippets, then assemble them, then do that. It's the rare human that can sit down at a typewrite and bang out a story, page 1 to page end, in one draft, and call it a publication. Even Clemens couldn't do that. And look at Shakespeare, he kept refining his plays through his entire career. So do what makes sense for you and have no shame about it. idiosyncracity rules!

A book isn't just a book, it's a profit-making venture. You need to understand that first and foremost. No matter how good your book, if the publisher does not see profitability in it, then they won't publish it. This idea exists entirely independent of excellence. If you want a book that's good for a commercial venture, you want it to be 75k+ words (about 300-320 pages). Different publishes have different lengths. It's good to go out there and find out what they want before you get too committed.

When I began my novel, it began as a novella. I missed the shorter F/SF works of my youth. I have increasingly come to the conclusion that the industry's over-concentration on long works is bad for the genre. (Mind you, I'm not poo-pooing the long works. What I'm poo-pooing is the industry's myopic attention to those works.) To no small extend, that limited the professional viability of the endeavor, so I cast off any idea of this being anything but self-published.

I have come to recognize two important things about myself since I began the latest work: 1) I am happy writing, but I am not happy writing all day long, and 2) I don't think that I will ever be fast enough for a book contract.

As for independent publishing (or vanity press, if you like), I am well aware that print runs of 100 are "normal." There's a few success stories out there, but they are few and far between.

I am also aware that independent publishing is the kiss of death vis-a-vis commercial publishing. No matter how professional you are, independent publishing puts the mark of Cain up you as forever unprofessional for the rest of your life (unless you prove that you can make money).

For now, I'm still not committed to any plan. I'm exploring Amazon books on demand and Lulu. But first, I need a manuscript that I am happy with.

This is not the first novel that I am writing. My first was code named "My First Bad Novel." I eventually gave it the title of "Silence and Rain." The original idea was to place it in the D&D world of Greyhawk. As I wrote it, I eventually decided that I liked something about the whole work, and I shifted it to an "original setting." OK. I changed the names of places, and used the new liberties to make up all kinds of new stuff.

Sadly, some folks referred to this as fanfic. No, it was not. I won't get into the details of what makes/does not make fanfic. That lies beyond this little post and dwells in the land of endless flamewars. It is not fanfic because I assert that it is not fanfic, and we must leave it at that.

I did the primary draft of this piece longhand, from 10pm until I got sleepy. I don't remember how long the draft took. That wasn't important. My primary goal was writing something of novel length, but not being TOO serious about it. Thus, I named it "My First Bad Novel" to keep me focused on accomplishment rather than excellence.

Somewhere along the line, during my first revision, I left off revising and never returned to it.

The work had serious issues. These days, I refer to this book as "Three Characters In Search of a Plot." The work never really gelled. My cool idea was in exploriing cyclical time, and events that recurred over and over. Unfortunately, Battlestar Galactica used the same theme, independently, so I gave up on the work. At best, others would see the theme as derivative of BSG, then conclude that other bits were derivative, and that the work was just a fantasiation of the BSG series. No, it was just unfortunate timing.

My First Bad Novel taught me many things. Most importantly, I can't write something once. I must revise and revise considerably. First revisions are for getting the basic idea out. Second revisions are where I take the raw ideas and actually have them make sense.

Some things I do well, no matter what the draft. If you need a character sketched out and realized, I'm your man. Character is my strongest suit. I'm also excellent at making shit up. Cool shit, at that. Plot and story, on the other hand, there's a problem. It was the primary problem with my first book, and it has been the most brutal part of the current book.

My first book also taught me that I can't run at a book. Generating a work takes time for me. I can't just slam through writing unless I'm using a particularly verbose style. That greatly helped my approach to my current work, where I knew from going in that story would be an issue, that I would need to revise, and most importantly, I would need development time.

Having written a book-length manuscript already, it gave me the freedom to really think about and decide how I wanted to write my current book. I found that good. Most importantly, I am writing this work for ME, because this is something that I like to do. I will write books whether I have a publisher or not, contract or not, income or not. This is what I do. This is my pleasure. In the end, I keep up my discipline because I like to write and it pleases me.

So while you are busy in your NaNoWrite month, think about your pleasure. If writing is your pleasure, then make it part of your life, not just this month, but for all months to come. Make writing a part of your life, not apart from your life.