Category: People

Rita and the Cold Man Timeline

July 9, 2005 /

Because I promised Will I would. Keep in mind that this is only my personal ordering! If you find another way to arrange these that makes sense to you, that’s equally valid, and probably better.

  1. Part 1
    1. The boy who will be the Cold Man sees people he shouldn’t.
    2. The man who will be the Cold Man is imprisoned and tortured for information. He negotiates his temporary release.
    3. He presumably goes to the Numismata, becomes the Cold Man, and returns to his captors with five of his new friends.
    4. According to one of the Numismata, the Cold Man leaves their order at some point hereabouts.
  2. Part 2
    1. Rita joins an elite squad of operatives composed of Tina, Sandra and Mary, directed by Lou.
    2. On a mission, Rita meets the Cold Man and discovers a little of what he can do.
    3. Rita and her squad go on a different mission, in Chile. At some point, they become separated, and she meets the Cold Man again. Together they hide in a foxhole and end up in a cave. They discover that Rita can see the Cold Man, just as the Cold Man could once see the Numismata.
    4. The Cold Man finds that someone’s learning to counter his abilities.
    5. He meets with an Ad Hoc, who extracts a work agreement with threats against Rita.
    6. Something goes horribly wrong for him, and Rita dreams about it.
    7. The next day she receives a pointless surveillance tape. She investigates, solo, and an Ad Hoc warns her off. She investigates further and discovers the Numismata.
    8. Rita undergoes the Numismatic ritual, giving up warmth and color vision–and maybe more–in exchange for power. She wonders if it’s worth the Cold Man’s life; what she intends to do with that life is ambiguous.
    9. Rita returns to her HQ, which promptly blows up. She avoids death with her newfound abilities.
    10. Rita takes on the Ad Hocs.
    11. Rita kills the Cold Man.

No, Slatt and the one with the Great Zaganza don’t appear in here. Yet!

July 8, 2005 /

I have a girlfriend! Her name is Maria Barnes.

July 8, 2005 /

Today’s Hitherby Dragon, The Land Where Suffering Is Remembered, is one of the best I can remember. It reminds me of a story we used to listen to in the car all the time, about frogs and a witch and three dogs and grains of magic corn. My mother knows a magic trick, which she used when telling this story aloud, to make a glass of milk turn blood-red.

My mother is flying to London now, with my great-aunt and -uncle and her best friend. Be safe, Mom.

Epiphany Meal #2

July 7, 2005 /

Yesterday my sister Caitlan arrived in Cincinnati, home safe from a three-week (I think) trip to Greece and Italy. Caitlan sucks. But actually she rules.

Before we let her sleep, my family went to dinner at Le Relais, where Ian’s roommate Jesse is a chef. Jesse had arranged a “tasting” for us, which was pretty cool–we got VIP treatment at what is widely considered the best restaurant in Louisville, if not Kentucky.

I was expecting a selection of small courses, which is kind of what we got, only there were six courses plus dessert, and even with small portions that was still a tremendous amount of food. Every bite was incredible. Duck breast and paté with whole-grain dijon, pan-seared sea scallops and hyacinth bulbs (!), medium-rare fillet in veal reduction sauce, five kinds of cheese and pistachio pound cake with saffron ice cream. And I don’t even like cheese! My favorite was the pan-fried red grouper in lobster stock reduction, which was like eating butter if butter was a fish.

Like the first Epiphany Meal, I felt a bit transformed afterward (and not just because I could barely move). I never really knew I liked French food. Maybe it would have been better for my waistline if I still didn’t.

July 7, 2005 /

I’d always thought that the route I ran–when I ran–was about three miles: my average plod is about 6mph, and I ran for roughly half an hour. Also it kind of… felt three-milesish.

This morning Leonard delicioused the GMaps Pedometer, which allowed me to discover that my route was… 3.0165352158455165 miles!

At least I know that for a while, I was still in reasonable shape to run a 5k (for which half an hour is a hideous time).

July 7, 2005 /

NOT COOL. My mom is supposed to leave for London tomorrow. That is quite enough with the bombing.

Only two fatalities so far, but as of this morning there were still people trapped underground.

Update 1046 hrs: Thirty-three.

Update 1329 hrs: Thirty-seven.

I’m stealing the idea of the photo-caption story.

July 1, 2005 /

I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:

“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…

My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”

All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.

I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with

  1. Contractions!
  2. Cut out the first paragraph.
    • And probably the second.

Toward Transparency

June 29, 2005 /

Writing transparently is hard–harder, I’ve discovered, than just relaxing copyright or creating collaboratively. Most of the time I still can’t bring myself to do it.

Most writers don’t even consider transparency an option; for that matter, neither do most readers–witness spoiler space. There’s a very strong trend in Western culture toward the idea that a) all good stories must have mysteries revealed within them and b) to reveal such mysteries to someone else when that someone hasn’t read the whole thing is taboo. Mentioning that it’s a sled, for example, is synonymous with “ruining” the relevant work.

But it wasn’t always so, and it isn’t always now.

British playwright (producer, director, agit-prop rabble-rouser) John McGrath, in his classic theater text A Good Night Out, makes the point that such authorial sleigh-of-hand is unnecessary: it’s a device we’ve come to expect because it’s valuable in making a certain segment of your audience feel their expensive education is worthwhile.

Go ahead, try to think of the last movie, TV show or novel you watched or read that didn’t feel the need to hand you a Shocking Twist in its third act. Police procedurals and courtroom dramas are desperate for this, as are reality shows. Sitcoms depend on inducing revelation in both audiences and characters within the show. I think it’s impossible to find a modern horror movie that is not also a mystery–to the point where some such movies now add a third pseudoconclusion to fake out the people who were prepared for the second one.

I submit to you that this is weak and unnecessary writing.

By now you probably have thought of a story you know without a big revelation, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, or the second. My own exemplar is The Laramie Project, and it was Dr. Tony Haigh’s commentary on my Drama senior statement two years ago that made me understand why it was different. I talked a lot about our production of Laramie in my speech, and Tony came up to me afterwards–only a little drunk–to say “I hope you learn to write with that same transparency.”

I was like “oh, I don’t?” and then “Oh. I don’t.”

So there’s transparency in what you’re writing, which makes it stronger by eliminating the weakness of Shocking Twist gimmickry. And then there’s transparency in creative process, which not even McGrath proposed, but which the concept of open source has made a sudden possibility.

What if you let your readers see the story developing as you come up with it? Anathema. Scandal. They’ll realize it didn’t just burst from your forehead! They’ll see the stupid things you did in drafts. They’ll know about the Shocking Twist. There won’t be any anticipation, any hunger! So let’s print our script on copy-proof red paper and post guards around the soundstage; let’s pollute the rumor mills and drop hints without context in our blogs. As Zed Lopez points out, it’s hard to imagine a writer letting you see his or her process the way some painters do.

I submit to you that these are weak and unnecessary choices.

Which isn’t to say I do it well, or at all. Like I said, it’s hard. But I don’t believe that hiding information makes it more valuable in a positive way, and I’m going to try letting go of that. I’m not going to talk about the process of every story I write here, because it would be boring, but I’m going to try not to be coy about where they’re going.