Mark Twain Free Month

October is the best of months in the Rah household. Ruby Hazelnut has her birthday. The second weekend brings us the absolutely fabulous Richmond Folk Festival (now in its 11th year and one of the most well-attended folk festivals in the country), and the fourth is my favorite weekend of the year, spent at the Central Virginia Celtic Festival and Highland Games (kilts, pipers, shepherd's pie, Scottish dance and large men throwing stuff).

Plus we usually have gorgeous weather here in Richmond: a little cool, sunny, bright and fresh. Perfect fall days.

So there are a lot of things that come together to make October the Best Month Ever. But October wouldn't be October without the blissful lack of Mark Twain.

Don't get me wrong: Mark Twain's a fine guy. Or so I assume; I've never met him. But he wrote some good books, and he did say some pretty funny things. In fact, he said so many funny things that people give him credit for a lot of funny things he didn't say. To wit:

The saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics" is frequently attributed to Twain, but even Twain said he didn't say it. He said it was Benjamin Disraeli, a British Prime Minister, who said it. The only problem is that Disraeli never wrote it, and he was pretty well dead before anyone said he said it. Which just goes to prove what I've always said: You can't believe anything Mark Twain ever said.

But the fact that Mark Twain was such a liar is not why we have Mark Twain Free Month. We have Mark Twain Free Month because the Poet-Accountant is obsessed—obsessed—with Mark Twain. He reads Life on the Mississippi like some people read the Bible. He scours Wikipedia articles for opportunities to improve articles by inserting in them notes about Mark Twain. He is probably one of only two or three people who has actually read, in their entirety, the first two volumes of the fully annotated Autobiography put out by the Mark Twain Project. Barely a twenty-hour period goes by that Ruby Hazelnut and I are not tortured—I mean regaled—by a pithy saying or hilarious anecdote of Twain's.

'Til we meet again, Sam.
Which I'm sure will be at 12:01 a.m. on November 1.

Thus: Mark Twain Free Month. In which the Poet-Accountant must refrain from reading anything written by or about Mark Twain. In which the Poet-Accountant must refrain from quoting Mark Twain or otherwise making any references to "Mark," "Sam," "the bard," "a wise man from the nineteenth century," or even "my friend."

Because as Mark Twain surely once said, "A happy marriage is one without me, at least for one month out of the year."

Or maybe that was Benjamin Disraeli.

In any event, when Ruby Hazelnut and I wake tomorrow, it will be to breathe in the fresh, crisp, Mark Twain Free air of October. Please join us.

Proofreading Doesn't Take a Holiday

[Because I recently learned that one of the Poet-Accountant's colleagues has actually never even heard of the movie Sleepless in Seattle, I feel obliged to mention, as a kind of public service, that the title of this blog post refers to the 1934 movie Death Takes a Holiday. It is a classic movie. You should go watch it (and then let me know how it is).]

Ruby Hazelnut, the Poet-Accountant and I just spent a lovely weekend in Charleston. It's been some years (some many many years) since the Poet-Accountant and I have been there, but it's still lovely, and Kaminsky's is still there.

It does appear, though, that since I stopped frequenting the city, it has become the Typo Capital of the World. Check this out:

On Saturday evening, we went for a sunset sail on the three-masted Schooner Pride. After we motored away from the pier, the crew got ready to set the sails. Which is when I saw this on the t-shirt of the crew member untying a rope in front of me:

Look at that very last line. It's USCG licensed for what? Forty-nine passongers. Awesome. I pointed this out to the crew member, and he rolled his dreamy eyes. Yeah, he knew, and what was worse was that the owner of the boat had recently ordered a new batch of shirts. Without fixing the spelling. I was apparently the only person ever to notice, so he gave me my very own shirt for free. I am proud to sport the Schooner Pride's licensing for 49 passongers. So proud.

Next up was on Ft. Sumter, home of the first shot of the Civil War and of a typo on a National Park Service sign. I'm very sorry to say I don't have a picture of that one; we had spent too many wonderful minutes listening to Ranger Antoine give his park spiel (he was a total tie with the guy at Alcatraz who was our previous holder of the title Best Park Ranger Ever). But the typo was along these lines: The canon at this spot was was a 92-pounder.

That afternoon, we came back over the Ashley Bridge from seeing the very cool (and very empty) Drayton Hall plantation, and right there on Cannon Street was a bright yellow triangle that read CONCTRUCTION.

When we went back the next morning to get a picture, all the construction signs had flung themselves face down on the sidewalk overnight in absolute mortification.

Then, because the drop of ink doesn't fall far from the red pen, it was Ruby Hazelnut's turn to get into the typo-finding action. That night we had dinner at the Charleston Crab House, which has a fantastic shrimp po-boy and this description of the Black Grouper on their menu:

(It's there in the phrase characterized by its has firm.)

And finally, because the rotten stepchild that is North Charleston couldn't bear to be left out, there was this gem as we left town:

Fabulous.

One place we didn't see any typos? The wonderful Hyman's Seafood, where we sat at a table that had previously hosted the band Phish, the actor Matthew Broderick, the super-dreamy Timothy Dalton (if you don't know him, please please go watch him eat up the screen as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre) and the amazing (and amazingly modest) Neil Armstrong. The man who walked first on the moon.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Multiverse of Editing

I've been thinking a lot about editing, mainly because I've been immersed in it myself. It turns out that, astonishingly, most people don't like to edit. Writers I know talk about it as a necessary evil or tedious or painful or all three. Since I told The Three that our next step together was to work through entire pieces—including editing—they've been as silent as me on Twitter.

So why is it that my idea of a perfect day is an intense session of editing, followed by an intense session of rock climbing, capped off by an intense session of taco-eating? (Hey, I just described yesterday! Sometimes life really rocks.)

I considered that it might be my German blood enjoying bringing order to whatever craziness my Celtic blood poured all over the page—and there's probably something to that. But what it really is, I think, is the way that I started writing in the first place, writing the same characters over and over in different stories. Sometimes the characters didn't change much from story to story; sometimes a story needed them to be slightly different people; sometimes they had to be very different people.

Nine out of 10 adorable baby turtles prefer left-handers.

There's this theory in physics called the multiverse, which is the idea that there are an infinite number of universes (universi?) out there, so there are an infinite number of variations of all possible realities. In one reality, humans might not exist at all; in another, things might be exactly like they are in our universe, except that I'm right-handed instead of left-handed. (We don't like that universe.)

We only see the universe we live in; we can only deal with the reality we have right now. But characters don't have just the one life like we do; characters live in the multiverse. There's an infinite number of lives they could lead, an infinite number of variations—big or small—that affect the stories we tell about them. One life could be almost indistinguishable from another or seem absolutely unrelated.

(I say seem because there's of course always the heart, the essence of the character, and that doesn't change, regardless of which story you tell about them.)

There are those times when the story you drafted is just a starting point, when you have to throw out the middle or the end (or even the beginning). When it turns out that the journey you wrote first was really just to lead you to the journey you really need to write. It can be sad to lose paragraphs or scenes or entire groups of characters, but every time you make a change, you're just opening up another universe, another set of possibilities.

In the universe of this galaxy, the barista who makes
my flat white looks just like Hugh Jackman.

In the physics multiverse, there is no one right universe, but in the writing multiverse we eventually edit our way to a right universe.

Maybe this seems esoteric, but all this is just another way of saying: Let your characters breathe. Let them explore. Don't let them get stuck in your first vision. Think about all the decisions you've made in your life and the places you might have gone (good and bad) if you had taken a different path at any of those moments. Your characters can do that—and you don't lose anything: All the other possibilities are still out there.

That's why I love editing. There's so much possibility, so much demand for creative thinking, for following the thread of a change and seeing where it takes you. If you're standing there with Robert Frost at the two roads diverging in the wood, you only get to pick one. Your characters can go anywhere.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: New Writing Digs

I'm pretty sure it was Tennyson who wrote, "in the spring a cranky Rah's fancy frantically turns to thoughts of getting the heck out of Dodge." Or something like that.

In any event, it's true: When the weather starts to get nicer, I want to be free. Free! I want to shake the dust of this heavily scheduled life and go somewhere—and not always Scotland, by the way. (Okay, always Scotland, but Rah is reasonable. Rah is rational. Rah knows that she must be way, way richer before she can go always to Scotland.)

This summer has turned out to be a little more heavily scheduled so far than Rah would like it to be, but the Poet-Accountant, Ruby Hazelnut and I did manage to get away for a few days to the beautiful Shenandoah National Park in western Virginia—where, between hiking and horseback riding, I managed to do a little real estating.

I like my cave, but one never wants to get too...cave-bound, you know. One must emerge occasionally from the cave to see what other caves there are out there.

Now, Luray Caverns had a really lovely spot. Lovely lighting; not too cool, but definitely not hot. Internet connectivity might be an issue, but I'm pretty sure I could run a line down.

There was one insurmountable problem, though: dealing with unwelcome visitors. Something like 400,000 people tromp through there each year, which is like 399,999 too many for me.

Next, I thought Why not think outside the cave? Maybe there are other options, some of which don't involve massive quantities of vitamin D to prevent rickets. (Some people say you should suffer for your art, but that's not the kind of suffering I'm into.)

Anyway, so we hiked up the strangely named Hawksbill Mountain (isn't it the case, the Poet-Accountant asked, that hawks have beaks and not bills?) to see what kind of residential opportunities there were at 4,050 feet.

At first I thought, Man, I could totally get into writing up here. The problem? Way too much vitamin D. You've seen my skin, right? I seriously don't want to end up with lobster skin that clashes with my hair. So far, we have rickets versus cancer. Not a pretty choice.

I figured that was it; There's no place like home. A cave in need is a cave indeed and all that. Then we went on our final hike. And there it was! The cave of all caves! Rah's new writing digs!

Do you see it there, tucked under that massive boulder? I'm telling you, this place has everything. Fresh water, a nice sunny spot above (take that, vitamin D deficiency!) and an impenetrable driveway:

Just the place to retreat to while doing that most horrifying of things: querying agents. Gulp.

Tree Climbing!

Note to self: Always choose to write books that involve fun research. Like going to Scotland. Or dating rock stars. Or climbing trees.

Okay, Cranky Rah has never actually dated a rock star, but two out of three ain't bad. I had a lovely morning out in a local park with Ruby Hazelnut, one-third of The Three and my best rock climbing buddies. And the Poet-Accountant, who preserved the moment in pictures.

The beautiful red oak we climbed.

The lovely ropes and knots that keep us safe.

Hooking on the foot ascender, because climbing
with only your arms is hard.

Ruby Hazelnut gets ready to climb.

Ruby Hazelnut doing some branch walking.

Cranky Rah and one-third of The Three hanging out.
The fabulous S served as one of my beta readers for the book involving tree climbing,
and when I came down from my first climb I said, "I'm going to have to totally rewrite that chapter."
S's response? "Yeah, you are."
This is why we research. And have beta readers who will tell you the truth.

Cranky Rah, looking not so cranky. Because, hey, rewrites are fun. (And no, I'm not lying. I love to edit.)

About 50 feet up. Do I have to come down?
Can't someone just send up some tea and shortbread?

Group Hug: Writing From the End

The Three and I had our last writing group of the school year last week, so it seemed appropriate to talk about The End and specifically getting past whatever blocks you have to get to the end of a story you're writing. And since we were talking about writing to the end, I thought it'd be fun to write from the end in our writing exercise.

First we warmed up by writing from the beginning. I offered The Three a set of opening dialogue options (from the random dialogue generator of my favorite random writing stuff generator):

• "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?"
• "H-how long have you been standing there?"
• "She's old, and it's about time she died."
• "If you leave now, you lose everything."
• "I knew you wouldn't be able to see it through."
• "He was unconscious when I found him."

Be safe: Squeeze your own lemons.

The Three chose "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?" and (after a lively discussion about the grammatical issues in that sentence—I totally la-la these girls) we spent 10 minutes writing the story that starts with that line. Amazing, there was not a death in every story written. Of course, some of the stories had more than one death, so it all averaged out in the end.

After we talked about Getting to the End of a story as a writer, it was time to write again. This time, The Three chose to write from "She's old, and it's about time she died." What I didn't tell them until after they had chosen it was that we weren't going to write from the beginning; we were going to write from the end. They had to write to the piece of dialogue instead of from it.

More death ensued. Of course.

Getting to the End

You might have noticed it’s a lot easier to start a story than to finish one. You’ve got a cast of fascinating characters and an exciting beginning, and you might even know the tragic end it all comes to. But somewhere along the way you get lost.

The Secret of Getting to the End

Here’s the big secret: Write a story you want to finish and decide to finish it. End of blog.

Yeah, yeah; of course that’s not the end of the blog. Because it’s really not that simple, is it? What happens when you hit a wall? You have to figure out how to break through it.

Problem: You’re Bored

If you’re bored with your character or plot, your reader probably will be, too. You know what bores you? Boring things. Duh, right?

I don't know about you, but I'd
find something else to do, too.

So what do you do when you’re bored? First you complain to your mom. Then she tells you she bets that cleaning a toilet would solve that problem real quick. Then you go and find something to make you unbored, because you definitely don’t want to clean the toilet.

So when you’re bored with your characters, find something to make them un-boring.

• Give a character an obsession or an interest. Make it something that seems, on the surface, out of character. How does that change how she behaves?
• Change a relationship. Maybe your characters are bored with each other. Maybe they need to break up or betray someone or reveal a secret.
• Change what happened last. If your protagonist succeeded at something, have her fail—or vice versa.
• Introduce danger. Maybe your characters are too safe. Hurt or threaten them. If something bad has already happened, make it worse.
• Get rid of what bores you. Go back to the last point in the story that excited you. Read forward, find that spot where you start to get bored and make something bad happen.
• Change something elemental. Maybe Brunhilda isn’t the right name for your character. Maybe Marcy is better. Or Skydancer. Maybe she doesn’t live in a faceless suburb but in a downtown building that’s about to be knocked down.

Skydancer is too happy. She needs to live here.

Problem: You Don’t Know What Happens Next

Everything’s going along swimmingly, but you suddenly realize you have no idea what’s going to happen next. You can use any of the tactics above to introduce complications, but you can also try something more structural.

• Skip ahead. If you know what happens further in the plot, go ahead and write that. Maybe that will help you figure out how to get there, or maybe it will just help you bury your head in the sand until later. (Warning: This is an editing-heavy approach.
• Trash your last scene. Even if it was working for you, temporarily discard the last scene you wrote, go back to the scene before it and head in a totally different direction.
• Go back to the beginning. Do you have enough conflict and characters for the long haul? Increase the stakes or add new characters who can cause trouble.
• Write from the end. If you know how everything ends up, start there and work your way backward.

Problem: You’ve Lost Heart

See, isn't outside better?

What if you find yourself bored with your characters and your plot and at a loss about what happens next? This is where you have to get outside your story and outside your house.

By getting outside of your story, I mean explore the world of your story in a way that doesn’t directly add to word count:

• Make a scrapbook. Go online and collect pictures that look like characters, locations or things in your story. Find your protagonist’s favorite hat or a special piece of jewelry. Immerse yourself in the physical details of your story’s world.
• Create a soundtrack. Find a song or put together a whole playlist of songs that reminds you of your story in some way. Listen to it over and over until you get into the mood. 
• Write an unseen scene. Write something outside the scope of your story: a scene from another character’s point of view; a letter from one character to another; a poem about or by one of your characters.

Cranky Rah likes the new flat white
from Starbuck's. Decaf, because she's
kinda...jumpy.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing, though, is to not write. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Get out of the space you’re in, and let your brain breathe. Meet up with a friend who’s willing to listen to you go on for a while about your story. (Buy her a tasty drink while you’re at it.) Getting someone else excited about your story will get you excited.

Let It Go…Let It Go…

What if, despite everything you’ve tried, nothing you do brings your story back to life? First, just take a break. Work on something else for a while, then come back to your story in a couple of weeks and look at it with fresh eyes. If even that doesn’t leave you feeling like Dr. Frankenstein—“It’s alive! It’s alive!”—then it’s probably time to let it go.

It happens to the best of us, but don’t let it get you down. Everything you write, even the things you don’t finish—sometimes especially the things you don’t finish—make you a stronger writer. Just keep at it, and keep everything you write. Old writing is great for two things: proof that you’re getting better—and a good laugh right when you need one.