Middle Grade Musings

One of the books I ordered from that amazing BN.com sale was categorized under Young Adult but was really Middle Grade. I read it yesterday with an eye toward whether or not I could write straight-up MG, since I already tend toward the young end of YA.

I'm not going to name the book here, not because I have anything bad to say about the novel per se, but because I'm focusing more on my own reaction to it, and I'd hate to come across as being critical of the book when that's not my intention.

In tone, this felt a lot like pieces I *have* written--just not long pieces. I don't know if I could write like this for sixty or seventy thousand words. I think I could; I'm not sure how much I'd like it, though. One thing that helped mitigate that twee-ness I often pick up from MG writing is that it was in first person. The young narrative voice helped keep it from having that grandmotherly voice that grates on me. Actually, it reminded me of short humorous pieces I wrote when I was about the same age as the protagonist--when I was a ninth grader.

It was innocent in content--not that this comes as a surprise. High school freshmen in MG books apparently crush all the time, but they never think overtly sexual thoughts or make overtly sexual statements. Or even much innuendo. They say "damn" and "crap" and possibly "hell," but nothing stronger than that. These don't read like real-life freshmen--they read like middle-schoolers (and innocent middle-schoolers at that), which is to be expected, given that middle-schoolers are the target readers.

There are other considerations beyond tone, though. I think the biggest one for me is the scale of the conflict. This book was about beginning high school, and all the changes that come with that. Now I know some MG books have higher stakes--life and death, even. On the one hand, the relatively low stakes in this book worked with the faintly humorous voice of the narrator. On the other hand, it made it hard for the book to grab my interest at first. There wasn't much happening beyond middle school friends drifting apart, crushes, new friends, and so forth. I would have liked a bit more adventure. Eventually the emotional stakes got high enough to carry me through to the end, but I could see some readers not making it that far.

So the bottom line? I don't know any more than I did before whether I could write on the MG side of the divide. I think I could hit that tone and keep the content down. What I'm not certain of is that I could come up with a plotline that would hold my own interest. In the bookstore, YA's are far more likely to intrigue me than MG's, but I'll keep my eyes open and keep learning the genre. Maybe Barnes and Noble with have another awesome sale.

Tension on Every Page

A couple years or so ago, I was reading a writing resource that advocated listing various elements about each scene in your novel--I no longer remember exactly what, characters, time, whatever, and conflict. That is, what conflict was occurring in each scene. It said, in passing, that any scene without conflict should be scrapped.

At the time, I blew it off. It was just the sort of impracticable writing advice that vague how-to's were full of. How can you possibly have conflict in every scene? Sometimes you have other things you need to achieve in a scene--bring characters together, have a character investigate something, lay the groundwork for something you're going to need later, you name it.

Of course, that's how I ended up writing a 120,000-word YA novel with lots of boring scenes that didn't carry their weight. *grin* Over the course of cutting off forty-thousand words, I slowly and painstakingly learned that this was actually pretty good advice. But conflict doesn't have to be between people. And even if it is between people, it doesn't have to be overt. So what we're talking about here isn't so much conflict as it is tension. If I'd understood that, I would have written a better novel in the first place, and the revision process wouldn't have been as painful as it's been.

I've done a pretty good job of pulling unnecessary scenes, but this week I ran across a bit that wasn't working for me. Chris is staying with Michelle and Paul Adams, the marks. He needs to stay with them long enough for a relationship to form that will make it hard to con them, and I need to show this relationship developing. Chris also needs to learn the location of the key to a rifle case in which the Adamses keep some Civil War-era rifles Danny and Steve want to steal. So quality-time relationship-building, and finding stuff. The scenes are necessary, but where's the conflict come in?

In retrospect the answer is pretty obvious. What I'm doing is trimming back on the description, of which there's too much, and ramping up the tension. The tension comes from Chris misinterpreting every signal he gets from the Adamses, based on a lifetime of interaction with Danny and Steve:

Paul obviously wanted to chat, but Chris had no idea what to say. Paul seemed nice and sort of funny, but other than baseball, Chris had no idea what he was interested in. And Chris knew next to nothing about baseball.

Well, it was something, anyway. “So do the Braves play again soon?” he asked.

Paul chuckled. What, was it a stupid question? “From April through September, they play nearly every day.” Of course it was a stupid question. Chris felt his face heat up. Whatever, I don’t really like baseball anyway.

Later:

Chris got the sense Paul was trying to get him interested in something--several times, he offered to buy Chris whatever he was looking at. Chris declined as politely as he could each time--although it was particularly hard to say no in the bookstore. He’s not really being generous, Chris reminded himself. He’s trying to buy you. Anyway, it was easy to be generous if you were rich; it didn’t really mean anything. Chris’s father would probably have loved to buy him all sorts of things, if he had the money. Probably.

and:

When they got to a store that sold nothing but baseball caps, though, Paul insisted on buying Chris a fitted Atlanta Braves cap, and would not listen to his objections. Fine, thought Chris. You’re not buying it for me. You’re buying it for you.

Here's another bit:

Finally, mercifully, the game was over. Paul made a show of throwing away the scorecard, saying it didn’t matter who won or lost, they were just playing for fun.

“Fifty-three to eighty-four,” muttered Chris.

“What?”

“Fifty-three to eight-four. You won.” In case you weren’t sure. “If you didn’t care what the score was, why did you write it down after each hole?”
Paul held out a placating hand. “I don’t know. They give you a card and a pencil, and it’s just what everyone does. It didn’t even occur to me not to. But it’s not like it matters. Who cares who won?”

“Sure,” said Chris. Whatever you say.

Last one, I promise:

Ah, so that was it. “Well I’m sorry,” said Chris. “It looks like you’ll have to find some other kid to live out your sports fantasies through.”

Paul’s eyes widened. He’s going to hit me now, thought Chris.

Anyway, these aren't quite as cleaned up as they could be--I see some repetitive phrasing and way too much use of the characters' names--but the point is that I get all the interaction and relationship-building. In fact, the relationship-building is arguably deeper because now it repeatedly sets up Chris's expectations and repeatedly showcases how the Adamses are different from the kind of family he is used to.

I wish I'd had a better understanding years ago of how conflict and tension could--and should--underlie any scene, even one that wasn't overtly about disagreement.

Juno Good Characterization When You See It

I just saw the movie Juno for the first time last night. I remember hearing it was very good when it was new, but I don't get out to theaters much and I miss a lot of movies. Eventually this movie slipped out of theaters and out of my consciousness. Just one more flick my artsy friends liked that I never got around to seeing, along with Bend it Like Beckham and Whale Rider. But then one of the cable channels, I forgot which, started advertising that they were going to show the film, which reminded me of its existence, except I don't like to watch movies on broadcast TV because of commercials, editing, and lack of widescreen, so I rented it on iTunes instead. See industry people? Make stuff available for free and people will pay to enjoy it instead. Paradoxical, but seemingly true. (It's funny how I can't stand iTunes for music, what it's intended for, but absolutely love it for renting movies.)

I enjoyed the movie the whole way through, but at first I was enjoying it as just another quirky comedy. Somewhere near the end it dawned on my that I was actually seeing an excellent movie. Afterward, I read up on Juno's critical reception and box office performance. I saw that it won the Oscar for best screenplay for Diablo Cody, which surprises me not at all, and I saw discussion of its portrayal of abortion--which it really did handle sensitively enough that you can think it's pro-whatever-your-side is, regardless of what side you're on. I saw praise for its humor and its dialogue and the performances. What I didn't see much mention of was its characterization.

This may be the best example of characterization I have ever seen. All the stock sentiments about how to create excellent characters, which never come with specifics on how to accomplish them, are carried off here. No major character is a villain, even when some of them are at odds with Juno. The primary and secondary characters are all dynamic, and we gradually learn bits about them, and can see the strengths and flaws of each. The canard that each character is the star of his or her own story is actually brought to life here, as each was treated, again, with respect and sensitivity and none was merely a stand-in for the author to beat up for the sake of making a point.

When I was done watching the movie I tried to mentally retrace how Cody accomplished this--I mean, these are the things everyone says to do, but I rarely see them accomplished this well. It's one thing to say you should treat your secondary characters, and even your adversarial characters, with respect, but actually accomplishing this is rarer. How can I learn from Juno?

Um, here there be spoilers, obviously.

Here's what I've come up with: For the first half of the movie or so, every character actually slides right in to a stock role. Juno is your typical intelligent, brash-mouth, eccentric, sassy teen heroine. She mocks pop culture and high school life and gives us a cheeky narration of the world as she sees it. I've seen her at least a dozen times before. Bleeker is the typical sweet nerd who straddles the line between boy friend and boyfriend. He's awestruck by Juno, obviously in love, and she can't see it. On the other hand, he's too passive to do anything about it. Juno's father is the standard over-indulgent beleaguered dad. Her step-mother is your typical slightly-theatening, not-entirely-welcome step-mother. When she meets Mark and Vanessa, the prospective adoptive parents of Juno's baby, Mark is that sweet, understanding adult who can see past Juno's quirkiness because he still hasn't lost his connection to his own youth. He's the cool dad figure. Vanessa is his shrewish wife who forces him to confine his youthful expressions to one room in his house that she has granted him, where he can keep his guitars and his posters and stuff. She seems a little flaky in her intense desire for a baby. She reads all the baby books and prepares months in advance while Mark advocates a little more common sense. She is the working woman who criticizes work-from-home Mark for not holding up his end of the workload even though he appears to earn more money than she does. She's too serious, while Mark hasn't lost his playful side. We can see that they're headed for problems, but the problems all appear to be Vanessa's fault. All very stock characters in stock interactions. If the movie had kept going in the direction it was headed it would have been entertaining enough, but not necessarily a Very Good Movie.

Sounds like I'm undercutting my point here, huh? But the thing is, it felt to me as though Diablo used those stock roles as our introduction to the characters to give us a handle on them. And maybe that answers the question of how to pull off deep, dynamic characters. Because you can't really front-load all the things that make your characters unique snowflakes, can you? You try to give it all at once and all you have is a messy hodge-podge. But isn't the way it plays out in Juno actually more like how we get to know people in real life? You meet someone, and you immediately pigeon-hole them, not because you're bad or shallow, but because your brain needs to figure out how the world fits together. So this person is a jock or a joker or an artist or a brainy type or an asshole or a drunk or dumb or a minority. I think we first see people as typical whatevers, and I'm not convinced there's anything wrong with that. Then we get to know them as individuals and see how they diverge from that typical role we've classified them as, and the people who become important in our lives become far too complex to possibly boil down to a central characteristic. The loudmouth drunk at the bar that we never see again, though, remains nothing but a loudmouth drunk, as though he has absolutely nothing else going on in his life. The teacher whose class we couldn't wait to get out of remains nothing but a bitch who finds fault in our best efforts, and we neither know nor care about who she is when she leaves the classroom. (For that matter, Beeker's mother is never anything but a nasty, judgmental lady, because she's not central to the story. If she were, we'd probably see the reasons for her bad characteristics and we'd also see her redeeming virtues.) We do stereotype, and I think this is a necessary feature--our brains' only way of making sense of the world. We are freed from those stereotypes to the extent that we remember that they aren't actually the sum of anybody's being, and to the extent that we remain open to revising our generalizations with specific information.

So what I think Cody gives us those easy characterizations on purpose so that we have a starting point, and spends the second half of the movie subverting them one by one. I kept seeing a scene begin and thinking I knew exactly where it was going, and then being surprised when it went somewhere else instead.

The first moment that surprised me was when Juno's stepmother accompanied her to the ultrasound. I was a little surprised to see her there at all, because I had the impression that Juno and she were not close, but I chalked it up to her wanting to have a woman-to-woman moment with her. But then her stepmother reams out the ultrasound technician for making a judgmental remark--it's a beautiful thing, not a hysterical shouting fit but a cold, calculated verbal take-down--and I think, whoa, she's not such a bitch! Or rather, she's a bitch, but she's a good bitch! She doesn't hate Juno or see her as a distracting reminder of her husband's first marriage--she actually cares for her.

The next scene that didn't play out as I foresaw was when Juno and Leah see Vanessa at the mall. I expected them to mock her from a distance, since some antipathy between Juno and Vanessa has already been set up. Or I expected Juno to see that Vanessa was an unfit mother, as she ran around with . . . I think it was her young niece. It was actually a weird moment of . . . crap, I can't think of the right word. I'm going to go with paradigm-shifting: I'm watching this scene and trying to fit it into my preconceived notion of where it's going. Vanessa is running around with this kid and I think she's going to try too hard, show her desperation for a kid by smothering her niece with attention and create an unpleasant scene. But it doesn't happen . . . they just have fun together. Then she runs into Juno and I'm thinking she's going to display her paranoia by accusing Juno of stalking her, but it doesn't happen. Then Juno invites her to feel the fetus kicking, and it seems as though the fetus won't kick for Vanessa, though it will for everyone else, and this seems like it's going to make a point about Vanessa's unfitness to be a mother. Juno encourages Vanessa to talk to her fetus, and a tender-awkward scene ensues, and I'm waiting for Vanessa to screw it up, but she doesn't. And then the scene ends and I realize it didn't play to my expectations. It was awkward, yes--so's real life. In the end we see Vanessa not as this shrill rival but as a person, with faults and virtues, who happens to want very badly to be a mother.

But the scene that really subverted my expectations was Juno's last scene inside Mark and Vanessa's home. In keeping with my expectations of Juno as a sassy teen and Mark as a warm, friendly older guy, I'm expecting that Juno's mom or Vanessa are going to perceive something creepy about the friendship between Juno and Mark when there isn't, because they Just Don't Understand. But then Juno and Mark are alone in his house and they're getting closer and closer--uncomfortably close. And I'm watching the scene, revising my expectations, and thinking, okay, Juno, because she is naive, has fallen in love with Mark, but he doesn't realize what's going on in this scene because he thinks of her as a kid, or because he thinks nothing can happen with her because she's pregnant. She's going to embarrassingly cross some line, and he's going to have to pick up the pieces and that's where this is going . . . . Only that wasn't it at all. Instead, it's Mark who has developed an attraction for Juno, and Juno who didn't see it coming because she saw him as this safe adult, and it's Juno who is most definitely Not Okay with this. Because, sure, Mark is this fun-loving kind guy who has not lost his youthful side, but he's also, we now see, shallow and immature and not yet ready to act like a grown-up. And yet, he has a point when he defends himself in the inevitable confrontation with Vanessa--just because she decided she was ready to have a child didn't mean he was ready for the same thing. (Of course, a grown-up, a man, would have communicated with his wife before it got to this point. Vanessa is controlling because Mark can't or won't communicate.) Mark's the closest thing to a villain in this movie, because there's just no getting around his inappropriate attachment to a sixteen-year-old, but we do see his virtues and his side of things, even if in the end we conclude that he's kind of a jerk. (But again the reversal, because we spend half the movie thinking he's cool and Vanessa's awful.)

There isn't as clear-cut a moment of reversal with Juno's father. He's sweet throughout. But at first he seems to be played as your stereotypical Stupid Dad, and we see through his conversation with his wife when Juno's not there, and with how he deals with Juno throughout the movie, that he's not stupid at all. He's actually one of the few smart, loving dad figures in film.

So, to sum up, Diablo Cody seems to use standard character tropes to get us into the story, to introduce us to the characters, and then spend the rest of the movie subverting those tropes, and fleshing out the major characters through scenes that defy our expectations.

Can this be applied to every kind of story? I don't know. I think it necessarily changes a story when you portray all the characters as people trying to walk their journeys to the best of their abilities (whether they're flawed or not). In Vanishing Act, Uncle Danny is a villain. There's no doubt about that. I tried to flesh him out, and to understand his rationalizations for why he acts the way he does, but he's really just a jerk. Chris's father is half villain and half spineless loser. As the story progresses, you may learn more about the characters and why they are as they are, but I don't know that I ever really subvert who they seem to be. (And that's hardly unique. Most stories don't.) If I had it to do over again, where would the story go if I decided to make things not be as they appear? I guess I'd have to start with more sympathetic portrayals of Danny and Steve, if I want Chris to end up where he does. Maybe have Paul and Michelle seem more like clueless marks at first. (Now I find myself wondering if Cody planned the reversals at first, or if she got halfway through a typical teenage dramedy and then just decided halfway through that it would be more interesting if, in the words of Wierd Al, "everything you know is wrong."

I don't know. Food for thought, neh?

Nick and Norah Have Way More Glamorous Lives Than You

BN.com had a fantastic sale on YA books last weekend--basically the sort of stuff that usually ends up on the bargain shelf near the front of the the store. They had three books for $9.99, in many cases hardcovers, and so I decided this was a good chance to expand my reading in the field.

They had almost no YA speculative fiction, though--or at least, almost none that wasn't about vampires or otherwise unappealing to me--so I ended up with a couple of books that are outside of what I write.

The books arrived yesterday, and I went ahead and read through one of them--the thin Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. I chose it partly *because* it was so thin--if this book is much over 60,000 words, I'll eat my laptop--and partly because I'd seen and been intrigued by the movie poster already. (Say, whatever happened to that movie? Did it come out and tank? Has it not come out yet? Also, why does every book get turned into "A Major Motion Picture"? If every book is "a major motion picture," doesn't that make it a little less "major"? Will I ever see a book cover boasting "Now a Run-of-the-Mill Motion Picture"?)

The title is an effective one, for me anyway; I think I was hooked from the first time I read it on the poster. It's hard to explain why it works for me, but I think the crux is that it's so unconventional, it suggests the movie/novel with have an offbeat sensibility that will resonate well with me.

The book wasn't really all that offbeat. The narrative was a bit unconventional, largely because of the way it was co-authored. Apparently Rachel Cohn and David Levithan took turns writing chapter by chapter, alternating the POVs of the two protagonists. (I'm under the impression that Levithan wrote Nick's chapters and Cohn wrote Norah's, but I'm too lazy to double-check.) I thought Levithan did a fantastic job of setting Cohn up with hooks at the end of most of the Nick chapters--it reminded me of that improv game where one comedian throws another one a total blindside right before turning the story over, just to see the other react.

As I mentioned, this was outside of my usual reading habits--which is cool. I used to read much more widely than I do now. This is very much in the genre of teen romance that has become so hot in the last two or three years. I have read a little romance, but not the teen variety. I also read enough *about* the teen romance scene on the blogosphere that it's refreshing to see one partly written by a male author, and featuring a sensitive male protagonist.

I've been hearing for two or three years that YA titles had gotten a lot more racy, and not really seen evidence for that in my own YA reading. But then, the YA I read is almost exclusively speculative fiction. With this book, I did see evidence for that. There were three instances of frustrated near-fellatio, neither of the protagonists is a virgin, and the casual assumption that virtually no eighteen-year-old is seems evident. The assumed audience for YA novels is two or three years younger than the protagonists are, so my own kids are a bit young for this book yet. Would I want them reading it in three or four years? um . . . I don't know. I can see parents of intelligent, well-read, sophisticated teens being okay with it. I guess it depends on the kid and the parent and the level of discourse that already goes on between the two.

There's also a sense, I think, that artistic lives are somehow more pure than more mundane lives, as evidences by the unquestioned disdain the characters feel for people with corporate jobs midtown. Hey, somebody has to do those jobs. We can't all be Bohemians.

I rather enjoyed the opening hook--Nick, a bassist in a "queer-core" band, sees his ex-girlfriend show up at the end of one of his shows, and, in order to avoid confronting her after the show, asks the girl standing next to him, Norah, to be his five-minute-girlfriend. The plot takes some interesting twists to extend their time together, bit by bit, until they end up spending pretty much the whole night together, going from one New York spot to another. The major tensions are more or less resolved two-thirds of the way through, and the remainder drags on and verges on anticlimactic. We have the last of the near-fellatios, the decision by the protagonists to wait before introducing sex to their relationship, and a rather contrived minor tension where Norah begins to wonder if Nick might be gay. But we pretty much know their relationship will continue beyond this first night.

I have to think I read this book the way it was meant to be read. I began reading it around eleven at night, and finished around two in the morning. I recommend reading it this way, as it lead me to feel that my own body mirrored the protagonists' tiredness, beginning their adventure at what could easily have been the end of an already-eventful night, and their happy exhaustion by the end of the story. It's such a short book that you can read it in a single sitting, and the extended denouement doesn't really bother you that much.

I also enjoyed the setting, since I love New York City so much--although Nick's ridiculous luck in finding free parking in the city strains credulity.

The insert of full-color photos in the middle of the book was a delightful bit of nostalgia for me. I can't remember the last time I read a book that included "scenes from the movie," but it's certainly been a long time. And yet, the photos irritated me because I could see from the captions that the filmmakers made significant changes to the plotline, and that those changes appeared to make the film more formulaic. It's funny how that always seems to happen, isn't it?

Permission to write crap

I've never been big on the whole philosophy of turning off your inner editor and letting yourself write crap and fix it later. Forever ago when I wrote Prototype I tried doing just that, and the results were disappointing. Writing had always tended to come easily for me, but I found myself stuck at the beginning of this book, feeling like someone had shut off a valve in me and the words just wouldn't flow. So I did what I'd always heard other people talking about and just plowed ahead, figuring I could fix it later. In the end, I wasn't very happy with what I wrote, and I don't feel like I ever quite fixed it either.

With Vanishing Act I didn't set out giving myself permission to write crap. That doesn't mean I wrote wonderfully polished stuff either. Many times crap is what I did write, but it was the best crap I was capable of turning out at the time. I've done a ton of revision, as I've attested to here, so this post is certainly not about writing stuff so good you don't need to revise. But I came to feel that if I gave myself permission to write stuff I thought was crap at the time, then crap was precisely what I would write, and I found decrapping crap to be excruciating and verging on impossible.

Years after Prototype when this whole NaNoWriMo thing came into popularity, I just figured "different strokes for different folks." Maybe some people really need the freeing effect of telling themselves to just get something down. That didn't seem to be how I worked.

I think I may be coming around.

I've put so much work into revising Vanishing Act, which used to be over fifty percent longer than it is now, that I think I've finally learned some lessons which couldn't seem to sink in before. I'm starting to get much better at finding prose that is not tight, and, more importantly, I'm starting to put my finger on what makes a scene boring or irrelevant. Revising was excruciating when it consisted of recognizing that something was crap but not having a clue in a bucket how to fix it. The other day it struck me that I've finally gotten a bit of a handle on how to decrap crap.

So next time I write something new instead of revising, I'm going to experiment with turning off that inner editor. It might be freeing. We'll see.

As for NaNoWriMo and the folks who preach "Give yourself permission to write crap," the one caveat I'll add to that is that if you don't spend a ton of time revising--as much time as you spend revising as you spend writing, probably, crap is still all you'll end up with. (Unless you're much luckier or more talented than I am.) I'm only now starting to feel like I have some of the tools to fix my own worst writing. If I were less obsessive, how would I pick up those tools? Books are wonderful, but I've learned that I can read advice that is true and useful and learn nothing until something makes me get it--not in my head, but down in my bones. (I know there's a NaNoReviseMo, but somehow I don't see as many people talking about participating in that.)

Revising is not a heady rush of artistic inspiration, but it may just be that it's in revising that you learn how to write.

If you get stung in your dreams, can you go into anaphylactic shock in real life?

I've always been jealous of my wife's dreams. She gets scenes, characters, hell, entire plotlines. She wakes up and says, "I had this awesome dream! I have to write this!" Her plots seem to just come to her, while I have to work for mine.

Like most people, probably, I tend not to remember my dreams, and to think I didn't have any. I've read that everyone has dreams, and if you think you don't you're just not remembering them, but it's probably not unreasonable to suppose the fact that I get so little sleep plays a factor in either my frequency of dreaming or my ability to remember them. Maybe when I do sleep I have to sleep more deeply or something.

When I do remember my dreams, they're of the most pathetic and mundane variety. I kid you not, I dream I'm grading papers, or teaching, or driving my kids somewhere. Maybe I don't remember 'em because they're so damn unmemorable. I also get the universal stress dreams. My most frequent one seems to be of the oh-no-I-forgot-to-put-on-pants variety. (What's odd about that one is I'm always terrified that everyone's going to notice, but pretty much nobody ever does. I become a master of misdirection and hiding. Hmm. Maybe there's a story there.)

Once in a long while, like maybe every year or two, I have a truly awful dream, and I discovered years ago that I had kind of an interesting ability when it came to dreams like that.

The night before last, for example, I dreamt that I was doing some spring cleaning (see?!) and while I was cleaning an outdoor storage compartment (which we don't actually have) I disturbed an enormous hive of wasps. Now you have to understand that wasps fill me with the most unmanly terror. The worst thing about being an adult is that I can't run to someone else when I find a wasp's nest; being the one who has to face them down pretty much is my definition of being a grown-up.

Anyway, this nest seems to have been the deathstar of wasps, because I was being chased by dozens of them (I'm pretty sure bees congregate in numbers but wasps don't, but I didn't have time to argue with my dream logic, mmkay?) I was also dimly aware that I may have released other wasps into my home, but I had my own problems at the moment. In real life wasps aren't all that fast, and you can outrun them if you run ten or twenty feet or so, but these suckers were tenacious. I was sprinting (well, as best a two-hundred-and-mumblety pound guy can sprint, anyway) and each time I looked back, they were still on my tail. Most of them hadn't stung me yet, though two or three might have gotten me, but I knew that I didn't have a lot of endurance, and there was no way I'd be able to keep this up for long. Any second now, I would lose my steam and get stung by an epic number of angry wasps.

And then my brain did this strange thing it's done a handful of times in the past. As I was running, I had this moment of This isn't actually happening you know. This is a dream, and I don't have to accept this outcome. I can wake up.

So I did, and I lay there in the darkness with my heart pounding for a while before I decided to get up and get some grading done.

As I mentioned, this isn't the first time I've opted out of an unpleasant dream. I remember doing it once when I dreamt that my father was dying, and another time when I dreamt I was going to jail for something I didn't do. And other times I can't specifically recall. I always thought it was kind of cool that I could do that. I don't really know a thing about lucid dreaming, but this seemed to have that sort of quality of exercising control over your dreams.

As I was driving to work in the morning, it struck me that this "feature" had a downside. Maybe the reason I never dream storylines is because I can opt out of unpleasantness in my dreams. How can you have a story without unpleasantness? My wife's dreams have characters getting tortured, captured by enemies, accused of crimes, discovering they're clones. Hell, I wouldn't make it halfway through one of her dreams, and so I can't possibly make it to the cool resolution either!

I actually have gotten ideas from dreams from time to time, but they're always premises or things like that, not full blown plots with conflicts and resolutions.

I wonder if there's a way to train my brain to not wake up, but to work out the happy ending to whatever awful situation it generates.

Where do I begin . . .

I keep thinking of things I should post to my blog, and then I never seem to get around to it. Then when I finally get time, I sit in front of the computer trying to remember what amazing insight I had and coming up empty.

I've been getting a lot of great revision done on Vanishing Act lately. I've crossed another milestone on the way down, and now I'm at 82,000 words. I really am finding that now, months later, it's easier for me to make some of the tough changes.

You're not supposed to blog about this, because allegedly agents and/or editor sometimes look up the blogs of people they're considering, and you don't want them to know how long you've been looking for or how many people have rejected you, but I sent out my very first query/partial for Vanishing Act Friday. (I guess if a really long time passes without a bite, I can always come back and edit this line out.)

While I was out, I also mailed off submissions for a writing contest for me and for my wife. There's kind of a funny story, there. I wanted to keep working on making my manuscript better for as long as I could, right up until the deadline. There were some specific searches I wanted to get done for junk words, passive constructions, and so forth. Like any metropolitan area I'm familiar with, we have a late night post office at the airport, where I tend to run things when I'm up against a postmark deadline. So I went into Friday night fully intending to get our submissions to the post office some time between 11 pm and midnight. I worked backward, figuring I should try to get there by eleven, to leave some cushion. I figured on a half hour of driving, so I should leave home by 10:30. I figured I'd give myself an hour to do all the printing and formatting (that may seem like a lot, but the contest had very specific guidelines. Names removed from manuscripts, a thirty word bio, a thirty word logline, three copies of the first fifty pages, and so forth. So I figured I wanted to be done trying to revise by nine or nine-thirty.

Well I'm not sure where the time went--I think putting the manuscript together took even longer than I allowed for--but I ended up leaving the house at 11:30. I got to the post office at 11:56, and ran in with my four packages. There wasn't a deadline really on the agent submission, so I did the three contest submissions first. As each postmarked stamp came out of the machine, I checked the date and did a little dance for each one that came out April 30th. When I finally did the one for the agent submission, it came out postmarked May 1.

O_O

Okay, maybe that was a bit closer than I intended to cut it.

Then again, I have friends who congratulate you if you get a tax refund of zero, because that means you avoided giving the government any more of your money than they were entitled to. I suppose you could call this a win, because I literally got every last possible second of revision in on these contest entries before I sent them out.