Nailing it Shut

I have emerged just now from the labyrinthine bog of multiple rounds of editing and revisions on my book. My new novel A Year Owed is done, and I'm releasing it to the ruthless public in less than a month.

The infinite maze of editing. 

This is good. 

I am not afraid. 

Fear is the mind killer.

What I am doing, however, is tensing my gut. I must admit that at this point I cannot tell if any of it is actually good. My editor said it is, and even I have had moments of surety during which I am able to recognize a respectable story and maybe even some hints of real talent. Other times, I'm worried it's contrived drivel. I suppose its just the impossibility of judging your own work with an objective eye that's keeping me from knowing for sure. Still, as I was about to release my novella, renatus, two years ago, I was much more convinced that it would be well received. 

Aside: Let's be clear here: by "well received," I mean that the hundred or so people I figured would read it wouldn't hate it and that some of those might actually enjoy it. 

Maybe that optimism was just inexperience--not to say I'm all that "experienced" now. On the other hand, I think that my current trepidation may also be because renatus was a much less vulnerable work than A Year Owed. It didn't cut itself open and bleed. The new book is different. I don't think it is what people would expect from me. A Year Owed is about loss, regret, hard choices, and some seriously callous behavior. It's not renatus; it's a very different beast. And it exposes me as an author and a human being much more than renatus or any of my shorter works ever could.

My main focus in writing it was to build up believable, flawed, yet likable characters that I hope readers can connect with. Without that, any work of fiction is largely meaningless. I've also tried to craft an interesting plot layered over-top a setting and back-story that I intend to amplify the reader's feelings and engagement level. It's taken heaps of persistence and lots of rewriting to get it to the point it's at now. I began this back in early 2014, and here it is early 2016.

In the end, the important thing is that it's done, and soon you can judge it for yourself. I'm not sure its great. I'm not sure its awful. It may be neither. It may be both. But I'm putting a nail in it and handing it over to you.

Read the first chapter here.

The Gulls

My fingers searched out and held to the lips and bumps of the algae-slick rocks, pulling me ahead. The splash of the waves had been cold as I had entered, but now as I floated on my stomach, the water felt only cool, like a shady spot in the grass. The breeze gently dipped and crested as did the sea, though neither seemed to pay mind to the other. Sun flared off the boundary of water and air.

A broken pier stood ten feet away in the surf. The walking-planks had been removed or lost to the ocean, and only a few sagging beams were left, corralling a clutch of weather-beaten columns. The unceasing action of the sea had eaten away at the base of the posts, leaving them tapered and ragged where they met the water, like a colony of termites had gnawed away at them for days until finally becoming full and drying into crystals of salt. Along the structure, browned nails backed out crookedly from their holes, some headless, some bent, some at the core of a comet of rust, cast into the wood. Barnacles lined the underbelly of the beams, dripping, though they hovered feet from the water. I could not say how long the construction was like to remain standing as it seemed that it should have already collapsed.

But it was this decay that the gulls had marked for their own. They had made of the pier an outpost, a fishing perch, perhaps something of a resting place. I stopped and watched them as they swooped and lighted and cried into the wind. Their heads and breasts gleamed white while their wings and tails tapered to the color of an evening storm. Feathers caught the breeze, lifted a bit and fluttered and then fell back into place as bony webbed feet somehow held the gulls fast to their perches. Their beaks, sharp and yellow, led their gazes this way and that, always cutting the air in confidence.

They all stood equally apart, preening and surveying, each at a distance from the next that could easily have held two more birds had such been required. As it was, though, they filled the space they had been offered on that pier perfectly and completely. At intervals one would leave, deciding at random, it seemed, to stretch out its wings and go sailing off like a kite. In kind, others would arrive, briefly upsetting the established order with a flurry of squawks and lunges and feints that always died down in seconds. Legs would take a step, heads would swivel, wings would fold, and a new equilibrium would settle.

Those gulls, I knew then, as they stood sentinel in the sun on that failing work of man, cared nothing of the past or the future. They did not contemplate their own fears or anxieties, nor any sadness or guilt, nor prior wounds or shortcomings, nor any inflated surety of doom as we are always so eager to do with our overstuffed primate brains. They cared not where their next meal would come from nor even considered the need for it, much less what troubles the next day would bring or the next second. Instead, they watched the sea, they allowed their eyes to close, they groomed their feathers, and they rested, unknowing, in the wholeness of creation. Those birds were content in each and every moment in a way that I knew I could only strive for. It is in them to live and only to live.

We, for our part, are blessed and cursed with more, though. We know what we are; we see into ourselves as the birds do not; our minds transcend the time and space we occupy; and as such we are troubled in equal measure more.  The useless rumination that chews at the inside of our heads and the words we mutter for no one but ourselves to hear could fill volumes. Yet to what end? Are we fashioned so that we need such burdens when the gulls do not?

Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 

Luke 12:14

The Past Come Present

The past comes on hard sometimes.

A face follows you out of your dreams, someone you haven't seen in years, decades. Their features are at once young, as you remember them, and aged too, as you imagine they are now. The sound of their voice has been lost to time, but a hint of their perfume, or the way they moved, or the feel of the deep gravity well of their presence beside you has lingered, though you didn't know it. A thin blade flicks at your heart, drawing a beaded thread of blood.

Do they think of me? You wonder. They must, if you are thinking of them, but you do not know what they feel. Does it cut them, too, when they see me in the eye of their mind? You hope so, yet not to wound, not really, but only to leave a tiny salted slice, something that causes their thoughts to hang. Perhaps they see you through the same blurred, auroral haze of nostalgia and distant loss through which you see them. Perhaps they still know you as you were and imagine you as you never will be.

Perhaps they are looking back at you now in the same long passed memory.

In your car, in the passenger seat as you drive along an empty country road, flood-lamps twinkling at the end of long dirt driveways. In the glow of the Christmas lights that you draped on your front porch, bundled in your jackets. On the hood of your car, the stick of their spit on the bottle of whiskey you shared. On the beach, hair twisting in the wind, eyes hidden behind glasses of black. In the lawn, hot summer heavy on both of you as you gaze up at the cotton-balls in the sky.

What if 'no' had been 'yes'?  What if a frown had been a grin? What if a question had been answered with the truth? You think of these things as the past reaches for you. And though you do not want a different now, you see at once how many possibilities there had been.

R, S, T, L, N, E, and All the Rest

Because I sometimes like to busy myself with interesting frivolities, I have done a bit of research into the statistics of alphabetical letter use and word length in the English language. Now, no method of deriving these statistics is inclusive of everything ever written in the language, obviously, and each estimate will have some bias depending on the source texts from which it is drawn. Even considering that, though, the estimates I have found have all been quantitatively fairly similar.

First, let's look at the ordering of the most common letters. You know how nowadays on Wheel of Fortune on the final puzzle, you get certain letters for free: r s t l n e? Well, you used to get none for free, and everyone would always select those. Why? Because those are the five most common consonants and vowel in the Oxford dictionary. Here's the list in order from most common to least (from http://letterfrequency.org/):

e a r i o t n s l c u d p m h g b f y w k v x z j q

Not surprisingly, when Wheel of Fortune starting giving out those first six letters for free, and offering for the contestants to pick three more and another vowel, people started choosing c d m a, the next most common three consonants and vowel. Makes sense, right? Because, after all, the game is about figuring out hidden words and phrases from the least amount of letter choices, and those letters maximize your chances. Interestingly, if you look at actual written English, this particular order varies depending on what specifically you are looking at—scientific work, fiction, advertisement, etc...  For example, in general fiction the order becomes:

e t a o h n i s r d l u w m c g f y p v k b j x z q

which is slightly different than before because when we write we don't just type the dictionary.

Beyond just ordering the letters, we can look at some hard numbers regarding their relative frequencies. The the numbers I'm going to show here are based on an analysis of about 9,500 literary works from the Gutenberg Project (https://www.gutenberg.org/ as far as I can tell) and reported here. I have plotted the results in the table below as the red bars under the label "Avg English," and for kicks I also plotted the statistics from my novel-in-progress, A Year Owed (blue). So, for example, the letter e is used about 13% of the time, or in other words, there is about a 13% chance that a given letter in any word in English is an e. For whatever reason in A Year Owed, I seem to favor the letters d and h more than would be expected based on the "Avg English" data. Perhaps this is because I enjoy using dilapidated and the name Hugh beyond what is traditionally acceptable.

Word length frequency is another statistic that will change depending on your source material. If you took just the dictionary, for example, you would tend to see longer words showing up more often than if you took, say, a childrens' book, for obvious reasons. I found some word length statistics here which are based on the books scanned and digitized by Google (don't ask me the specifics 'cuz I don't know). I have plotted those numbers below along with the word length frequency from my book. It looks from this like I tend to use 3 to 7 letter words in A Year Owed more than the average. The reason word length frequency may at first seem skewed to relatively low letter-count words is because of the prevalence of common words like the, and, but, is, of, a, was, to, in, I, he, she, it, etc... in almost every sentence we use. Relatively rarely do we use a word like reconceptualization, for example. Anyway, the upshot here is if you really like words that are 3 to 7 letters long, I've got a great book I can recommend to satisfy your strange fetish, though it's not quite out yet.

There's a lot more that could be said about this and why certain letters and word lengths appear more commonly in one form of writing or another, but that would get a little long winded, and I'm not going to pretend like I actually know. Just remember r s t l n e and c d m a if you're ever on TV.

Here, Let Me Forget That

(As you were certainly hoping, I've done absolutely no research for this blog post, and all of this is just flotsam from my brain. It may all be wrong, is what I'm trying to say.)

This may sound clichéd, and I'm sure every generation thinks this, but we as a species are getting dumber. Granted, we're also getting a whole lot smarter. I mean we have smart-phones and smart thermostats now as evidence, right? And we have the internet, and cars with backup cameras, and cures for diseases, and probes flying around Pluto, which may or may not be a planet. But think about mental greats of the past: Newton, Galileo, Tesla, Socrates, etc... (I know I'm leaving a few out). I imagine that these people were the intellectual "real deal," and they knew a whole lot about a whole lot of things. There were less things to know back then, for sure, but they had it all in their heads. We don't have anything in our collective heads - nothing useful, at least.

Huh? Yeah, just dip that stick in the pile of ants
 and then you can eat them like a kebab.

Nowadays we've offloaded all the hard stuff to the internet, effectively. We no longer have to truly know anything; we can just Google it or Bing it or Webcrawler it (sorry).  Need to remind yourself of just enough calculus to figure out a problem before you forget it again? Wikipedia. How about finding out where the Maldives are? Google maps. I feel like those people I mentioned above would have known those things, not simply known where to find out. (A skeptic asks: But isn't that, in the end, just as good?) College should really just be condensed to a two day course about how to effectively use the internet. Why bother learning anything, digesting it, correlating it with other facts, or forming opinions when all of that is available online for you, at your fingertips? I'll admit I'm exaggerating here a little. You do, after all, have to know what to do with the information once you siphon it out of the aquarium of the Web. But I'm trying to make a point.

Instead of useful things, we load ourselves up with facts about celebrities or spend hours watching Youtube videos of puppies falling asleep.  We know all about the wackos on those Housewife shows, but we know nothing about how our government works, why it works (worked?), or who we are electing. In every spare moment we stare at tiny screens that stream trash directly into our heads, like we're bottom-feeding catfish hoovering up whatever's fallen to the lake-bed. It's amazing that we choose to focus on such dross given that the sum total of human knowledge is available to each of us with a few clicks.  Even if you make an effort, and you happen to turn on the Discovery channel or Nat Geo or the Science Channel, and happen to catch an actual documentary between episodes of The Next Most Coldest Fishermen Star in the Wilderness of the Yukon, you will only be filled with semi-correct factoids that don't even scratch the surface of the topic you're trying to "learn" about.

So here I am preaching down to the collective "you" from some high place, right? I don't claim to be better. I went to college, yes, but I've forgotten most of it. I have an engineering job, yes, but I feel my knowledge is narrow. And this is probably, unfortunately, necessary for the world we live in now. I think that for us to make advances, people must study in very narrow fields because those fields of study are so deep. We can no longer be generalists, we have to be specialists, because it takes that much more effort to "get up to speed" on a subject. This is what I find magnificently frustrating. In the end, some of us may know a lot about a little, but very few of us know anything useful about a lot. We are a bunch of ignorant geniuses that would at once amaze and horrify our ancestors.

What to do about it all? I don't know. Is it even really a problem? If it is, I didn't promise any solutions. I can only say that, personally, I wish I was more knowledgeable in a whole series of things. Here are a few of them:

• Statistics - Not knowing enough about this has haunted me in my engineering profession for years. It's a remarkably deep field with lots of strange quirks (seems like that to an outsider, at least).
• How to fix a car - Do people even do this anymore? Aren't cars too complicated now? Don't you have to hook them up to computers to even figure out whats wrong? Still, it would be nice to at least have a clue.
• American History - It's shameful how little I know really.  
• Writing and Literature - As a hopeful author, this goes without saying. I clearly need to keep improving and part of that is filling myself with more and more literature of every type.

So, that was my rant. I don't know if it actually accomplished anything, but it made me feel better, connecting yet another synapse in the bloated and pulsing brain of the internet. Let me know what you think.

Hard Truths for the Practitioner of Public Transportation

This is not my bus.

Brothers and sisters, I have learned some hard truths in recent days. So gather up the kids; here comes wisdom.

1. Do not get on the wrong bus in the morning. Do not get on the wrong bus in the morning even if it is the bus that you take in the afternoon on the way home. Number 26 is not the same as number 27, even though your mind will tell you that it is.  Number 26 will take you the wrong way. You will then have to stand up and pull the "Request Stop" cord and explain why you need to get off before the first stop. All the other passengers will shield their faces in shame. You will proceed to run back to the transit center but you will still miss the bus you should have taken.
   
2. The schedule posted on the Metro website is somehow more accurate than the live GPS bus tracking app. If you give it the chance, the app will lie to you. It will tell you that your bus is over twenty minutes late when, in fact, it's right on schedule. This will cause you to say, "To hell with it," and begin to walk home instead. The bus, bloated with climate-controlled air, will then blast past you less than two blocks from the station you just left.
   
3. You should not walk home from the bus stop in the summer while wearing dress clothes. If you do, you will be reminded by nature that when it rains in Houston in June it doesn't "cool things down" or "take the edge off." Instead it makes the entire city feel like a 5k-running werewolf's ass-crack. You will curse the month of your birth.

All that said, I really can't complain. These things were my fault, really. The bus and the train have been pleasant up to this point and quite liberating to boot. In a city where the car is still by far the most popular way to get somewhere, its nice to actually turn away from one.

A Step Toward "For Real"

Today, Wednesday, June 3, 2015, I am quitting my full time job as an engineer to more fully pursue fiction writing. Granted, I'm replacing my full time engineering job with a 24 hour/week contract engineering job, but still, it's a fairly big deal to me. This new working arrangement will give me two more full days per week to write, edit, and work on marketing my fiction. I sure hope it catches on, especially with the upcoming full length novel.

Besides, here's the deal: I'm not particularly interested in being an engineer anymore. Yes, I went to school for a LONG time to get my degrees, and I've worked engineering jobs for six and a half years now . . . but I'm just not that into it anymore. I'm not sure I ever was, to be honest. I was good at it, I think, but it doesn't hold a candle to the mind-flaming satisfaction I get from writing fiction . . . not even close. It's like eating a rice cake versus eating a smoking slice of deep dish pizza. There's just no comparison. Writing is something I look forward to waking up for. Cubicle farming and staring at math is not.

It's true that college and all the engineering stuff has gotten me to where I am now, and it's allowing me to have this opportunity, so I'm not knocking it. It pays the bills, for sure. Fiction writing doesn't . . . at least not yet. The world needs engineers, I realize. Lot's of them. So kids, go be engineers and scientists and doctors and technologists, because we need you. Maybe I'm being selfish thinking I can be more useful to society as a writer.

But you know what? (Perhaps this rhetorical question and following answer is an effort to convince myself that I'm not crazy/self-centered in what I'm doing). The world also needs writers. We need good, thoughtful writers that can leave a continuing legacy of human imagination. I hope - badly hope - to become one of those writers. It's my calling; I'm convinced - as convinced as I have been of nearly anything else. Maybe it's true that I suck at it now. Maybe I'll always suck at it. Only you, the reader, can tell me. (I have a nagging feeling that I don't suck, though, and that's part of what's pushing me.) Regardless, what I'm certain of is that I simply have to pursue it to the limits of my ability. I cannot look back on my life and regret having not gone after it. In the end it may not take off, but then again, it very well could. It's a bit of a gamble, but isn't everything that's worthwhile?

Now a bit of clichéd advice for those of you who like taking advice from sources that may or may not know anything at all: Do not pass up a chance at doing something you love, even if you are convinced that it probably won't work. It is only by trying that you will find out.