DeConstruction of the Sekuatean Empire

25 May 2021

The What-If Game

Science fiction is fiction in which the story has a strong foundation in science, most often related to outer space or what may occur in the future. The category has expanded to include stories set in the past (think mythology) or the present (alternate contemporary realities; think vampires). A contingent advocating for the many variations of the Fantasy genre also acknowledge a cross-over. Sometimes magic is just science we (or characters in the story) don't understand, so Fantasy can be included with Science Fiction works on the shelving of your local bookstore. It's all really a kind of reality show, a game of possibilities akin to Dungeons and Dragons.

Another name for this game is What If. For example, what if the Black Death in Europe during the 14th century killed not one-third of the population but ninety percent of the population? I recently started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt which explores the possibilities that follow this premise. This what-if premise becomes a thought-experiment, obviously, because it did not actually happen. A thought-experiment can still be entertaining and educational. In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy, we ponder the idea of what if scientists on Earth were to make contact with an alien race and then help that alien race conquer Earth? Both stories start with historic moments in real places then pose the fateful question that changes everything: What if...?

In earlier blog posts I've maintained that even contemporary literary stories rely on a what-if foundation. The author chooses the setting and the characters and gives them a situation. A relationship story like Francine Prose's novella Three Pigs in Five Days begins with the what-if premise of the guy sending his girlfriend solo to Paris and booking her into a whorehouse set for renovation into a tourist hotel. What would she think of that? Why did he do that? What if he had booked her into the usual kind of elegant hotels they always stay in when together? One what-if story goes left, the other what-if story goes right. In my own contemporary literary novel A Beautiful Chill, I put two different characters together in a place where certain rules apply (a college campus) and ask them to figure out the what-if conundrum they face when they bump into each other. A famous Russian novelist (Dostoevsky, I think) once stated that he liked to put different characters together and see what they would talk about. The same factor is at work: What if...?

This is what I enjoy about writing stories. I like to suppose. I like to play what-if games. What if a rich, handsome, young CEO invites the young woman interviewing him for her publisher over to see the "pleasure room" in his mansion? That's a game, certainly. What if she says "no thanks"? What if she goes there and it's him who likes being dominated? Anyway, my what-if games do not require pleasure rooms - unless that is where you read. But I digress....

I think other people would enjoy playing along, so I write my ideas out as novels. It's my way of playing the game. Putting a puzzle together. My latest novel, Year of the Tiger - which began as my first novel many, many years ago (but don't worry, it's been heavily revised to bring it up to my present high standards) - is a prime example of the what-if thought-experiment. In the system of reincarnation, what if a soul was somehow split between two bodies such that they were mentally connected? What would that be like? How would that conundrum play out? What implications emerge from that strange situation actually being real? (Who knows that it hasn't occurred somewhere in the world at some time? Nothing comes up in Google.)

(More on anthropomorphism in this blog post.)

However, with my forthcoming novel, The Masters' Riddle, classified as science fiction, I take the what-if game one huge step further. From imagining what it would be like to be a man whose mind is connected to the mind of a man-eating tiger and vice-versa, I move to imagining what it would be like to be a non-human being from another world. Yes, we have some examples of that already. I can think of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Although we don't get to experience his thoughts and feelings directly from his (her?) point of view, we are invited to see the situation of being stranded on Earth from E.T.'s point of view via third-person exposition. But what-if our protagonist were a non-human? How would he/she/it/they see the situation?

So I get to play in the garden of God, creating bio-forms, geographies with flora and fauna, an astrological arrangement, and the history, mythology, culture, and language of that being's home. This might be enough to keep me occupied and out of other people's business for quite a while, granted. However, because I'm also creating a what-if scenario, I put my character as the lead in the story of his capture by a mysterious race of invaders. What would this non-human character do? It's another thought-experiment, but this time thinking as some alien would think - or might think; who can know for sure? He (she?) might have to escape confinement first. Then perhaps try to fight back. Or maybe focus on just returning home - if that is even possible. More and more what-if twists. The fun can only be expanded by adding more non-human beings from other worlds, each with their own backgrounds, bodies, languages, and so on. I'm getting giddy just thinking about the creative possibilities!

All right, take a breath. More on the sordid history of writing The Masters' Riddle (mind the apostrophe placement) next time. As of this posting I'm still looking at a late June, early July launch.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2021 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

25 April 2021

On the Art of ASMR

April is known as National Poetry Month so naturally I shall avoid discussion of poetry this month, because I am by nature a contrarian. Most of my poetry the past few years has been limited to drabble posing as tweets on Twitter and based on the daily prompt word. Some of these are clever (and get no likes) but most are drivel (which are well-subscribed), so there is no way to know if I am advancing in my career.

However, one such poetry-related topic about which I wish to wax poetic is the Art of ASMR, an acronym which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. What is that? Well, have you every heard certain sounds or felt certain textures, sniffed a certain smell, or you have a session of close attention with medical personnel or salon workers especially up close? In those situations you may feel a tingly sensation at the back of your head, or perhaps the back of your neck and down your spine. You might even flinch. ASMR is that sensation. It has become something to which some people have become addicted and a whole industry has risen to accommodate them. I confess I'm hooked on it, and indulging in the YouTube videos of several ASMRtists (=ASMR artist, get it?) has helped me get through the past year of pandemic anxiety.

So I was minding my own business one day - the usual way things begin for me - and I was searching for a video recitation of a famous poem for my Romantic Literature class. I thought a dramatic reading would pique my students' interest in John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame sans Mercy" (click title to see video). I found such a reading, but I wondered why the speaker's voice was so low. It was relaxing and I found myself about to nod off into nap land while listening to it. I did not feel any "tingles" as the ASMR aficionado likes to say. But I returned to that video several more times just to relax; indeed, the voice was so low that I had to focus to make out the words. I realized that I had already encountered ASMR-type sources, such as the soft voice of Bob Ross as he paints or the steady tintinnabulation of rain.

And as YouTube is wont to do, other videos were recommended to me: videos that were distinctly labeled as ASMR. Literally an endless supply! So I dove right in. I got the main idea quickly enough: to listen to or view activities which are designed to induce "tingles" - but I more often than not simply felt my body relax as I viewed slow movement from the artist's hands or various objects close to the camera and/or listened to the artist's soft voice or a plethora of sounds from everyday objects. Sometimes the artist would role play and I would feel less relaxed but just as entertained. It was as though individuals were creating short videos just for the entertainment or "therapeutic" use by anonymous strangers . . . for the artist's own enjoyment. (Note: I must put quotes around "therapeutic" because we and they are not doctors and cannot claim the video is any kind of treatment for any disorder; otherwise, YouTube takes the video down.)

So I have by now gone through the complete catalogue many times. I have not quite found exactly what produces "tingles" for me, but perhaps that is not the point. Relaxation is the point. However, some of the role play videos are stimulating rather than relaxing. They can be rather sensual. ASMR videos of odd sounds may be irritating to me rather than cause tingles. The most popular seem to be the "cranial nerve exam" in which a medical person examines the patient's five senses using various tests. Also popular are videos in a spa setting, which may include the hair salon or barbershop or they may be almost like a tutorial of hair care or make-up application. A lot of cosplay videos, too (=costume role playing, e.g., dressing up as an anime character). Sometimes massage videos cross over into ASMR. One soft voice artist I found a while ago has recently switched to doing close-up cooking/baking videos where the minute sounds of cracking eggs or crunching cookies is tingle-inducing (click to see video).

I have found that what comes closest to making me feel tingles are accents. The soft voice is good but if the artist speaks with an accent (real or in acting), I just might feel the tell-tale tingle traipsing down to my tailbone. Being an English teacher/professor/know-it-all and trained in linguistics, perhaps that is where my affectation by accented English originates. There are artists creating around the world so there is no shortage of accented soft voices - which may be used in role plays or other types of videos such as brushing hair or tapping on ceramics while speaking softly. I also studied music in college so having some gentle music in the background, like what you might hear during a massage or yoga/meditation/reiki video, is also good for my tingles. By the way, my Russian is improving.

Well, I suppose I touched on poetry in a tangential manner, after all. Like a lot of things, one tends to believe everyone knows about it already but in this case, I wanted to introduce this strange obsession many of us have to those who do not yet have this desire for tingles or to relax. I usually watch a video or two just before going to sleep, selecting it by the artist or the topic. I am constantly discovering new ASMRtists even as my interest in those who once were my favorites drifts away (although I occasionally return to them). Perhaps you could make use of this art form, too. Perhaps, like many artists have stated, you could move from being a fan of ASMR to being a creator of ASMR. Many artists have moved to pay sites and make it their main or sole source of income. Anything is possible in the amazing world of ASMR.

But I warn you: many, many hours could be lost in an ocean of tingles if you are not careful.

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28 March 2021

The Idle of March

Time is fleeting if I am to include a blog entry for March. This may be my last chance to pen a few words on something arguably trivial. Or it may serve to jab a blade into precisely that niche where it will do the most damage. Sort of wake you up. But that's March for you. Never know what you'll get.

So I looked at posts in March from past years of this blog. The way those posts have gone, I was well underway in new novels, vampire stories for the recent years. Before those years was an epic fantasy novel. Usually I would get the idea for a novel in the fall and dabble with it, working out the plot and doing research, so that by spring it had form and function. Then I would write fast and furiously through the summer and edit/revise during the fall.

However, the great swath of sloth I experienced during this past year threw off that timetable. Because of the general malaise impacting the reading public, I delayed the launch of a new novel (EXCHANGE) from March (pre-spring break) to late May (pre-summer vacation). That shift threw off my next novel, which had been written years before, thankfully, but had been undergoing recent revision so that I believed it was finally ready. I put out YEAR OF THE TIGER in October, keyed to the time at the story's climax.

Thus I did not get a new idea to play with for Christmas. What I did do, while working on the publication details of the other two previously mentioned books, was to work on finishing a novel I started in a National Novel Writing Month competition a few years back. I've blogged about that process previously. What this all means, however, is that I have nothing ramping up for the coming summer rush. This new science fiction novel will come out by the start of summer, just in time for pool and beach (or cabin and motel) reading. More on this exciting new book next time.

Given these time-adjusting events, I mistook yesterday for Friday. I also mistook Friday for Saturday. Everything is mixed up now. March begins with Pi day, which I only acknowledge by helping myself to a reasonable slice of pie. Or three. Then comes St. Patrick's Day when I serve myself corned beef and cabbage. Then comes my school's spring break. No break this year. Many schools elected to skip the week off and eliminate a week at the end of the semester. The thinking is that it is better to not have students go away, pick up some infection, and return to campus with it.

But I digress.... As I've been working on edits and revision of my forthcoming sci-fi novel, titled THE MASTERS' RIDDLE (mind the apostrophe placement), I've gotten ideas here and there for other stories. So I open a file and jot them down. Barely three sentences for most of them. I note that I've now collected about a dozen during the past year. One of them may interest me enough to give it a go, and perhaps it will prove to be novelworthy. One never knows. That's the drawback of being only one.

So here it is, a blog post at the end of March. Enough, I dare say, to qualify, yet short enough so as to not waste too much of one's time. While I wait patiently for book cover art, I shall wish you and yours a very merry April - which happens to be National Poetry Month, thus providing me with ample blog post fodder in the form of doggerel I shall dabble anew!

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27 February 2021

The Skinny on Anthropomorphism

The clock is ticking on my chance to post a blog in February, so here it is: something weighing on my animal brain. What am I talking about? Animals acting like people. How? Why? Why not?

My last novel YEAR OF THE TIGER and my forthcoming novel THE MASTERS' RIDDLE both make use of that ten-dollar A-word writing gimmick we learned back in 5th grade: Anthropomorphism.

Don't be afraid. We have all experienced anthropomorphism since our earliest days of toddlerhood. We grew up on cartoons. We had to read books full of animals that talked like people. It's all around us. Some of us speak to our pets as though they were our children. Others speak to children as though they were animals - probably. Sometimes we assign human qualities to inanimate objects, too, but that is more likely personification.

Think of such famous works as Animal Farm by George Orwell, a description of the Russian revolution - which wouldn't have been nearly as understandable if it had not involved farm animals. Think of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and the talking animals in that book. Think of the movie The Lion King - essentially Shakespeare's Hamlet reset in Africa. Or Pinocchio, in which an inanimate doll comes to life! Read more here.

Why do it? I never understood the tendency to make children's books and movies feature animals or objects acting and speaking as people. Who first thought that children could relate to those substitutes for people better than to people themselves? There must be some twisted psychology behind that decision. But it stuck and we grew up on Saturday morning cartoons: Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and other Looney Tunes, up to the introduction of anime - about the time I turned off the TV. (I also grew up watching the original Flintstones but they were humans not animals.) My guess is that animals (soft-focused, cheery hued, dull-toothed) are kinder, gentler for children to relate to - unlike the evil human adults in their lives.

How? The process of anthropomorphism requires that we imagine how a certain animal would think if it could think as a human. Of course, the variety of ways a human could think is myriad anyway, given the wide ranging cultures we have in the world, so...well, uh, anyway.... Let's take a dog. What fills a dog's average day? What might you think about throughout the day, following your usual activities, if you were a human? Try to think of yourself in the four-legged, long-snouted body of a dog. What would that be like? Talk about your life as a dog. There are movies and books where that happens.

I think the purpose, in many cases, is to try to engage some kind of empathy in the reader or viewer. We get to understand another "person" who is even more different than us acting in our normal situation because that "person" is not even a person but an animal with all of the animal characteristics zoologists have enumerated for that animal. Introducing a character who is an animal adds a special new angle on the events of the story. That angle can be merely metaphorical, as in the case of most animated tales, or can be realistic and sincere - as I have done with my two novels.

Obviously a novel involving a tiger can go only two ways: let the tiger be a tiger or have the tiger be confused by some human characteristics. You can read about the origin of this novel here, but I will add that back in those early days I was reading a lot of Roger Zelazny and also books about Hinduism and reincarnation so it's entirely possible my idea came from that mix: an animal who had somehow gotten a bit of human when born into his next body. Then the age-old mantra takes over: What would that be like?

YEAR OF THE TIGER has parallel story lines which eventually merge. In the tiger's arc, he acts like a tiger should act (I did lots of research on tiger behavior!). Then I gradually introduced anomalies which the tiger doesn't understand - not until it is too late. This allows readers to follow the tiger's journey, empathize with the tiger, and get a sense of what it is like to be a tiger, especially once it decides to hunt men. It was never intended as a trick or gimmick but, rather, me incorporating a cast member on equal billing as the human characters. How do I know how a tiger would act if it had human-like thoughts? Well, there's a Disneyland ride where you get to pretend you're a tiger and.... (Kidding!) I'm a writer, a professional imaginer, that's how!

Then, just to make life even more of a challenge, I had to go full-anthropomorphism by writing a character who is not human at all, also not exactly an animal. That required a kind of deep-imagining in a deliberately uncomfortable way. THE MASTERS' RIDDLE involves an intelligent being, living on another planet with a different civilization and different ways of being and thinking, who is captured and must fight to escape and find his way home. The difference is that with a tiger, I have recorded tiger traits I could use and I had human traits to employ with the tiger. Here, however, I have an alien who must, by definition, be very different from our everyday human. It is a kind of anthropomorphism although we have the equivalent of a human being, hence not an animal. Our alien hero encounters other captured aliens, many of whom are not the typical two-legged upright humanoid beings often considered to be the intelligent ones. We have been trying to address diversity, after all. The entire novel is a study in what it's like to not be human.

Probably my next novel, if I should have the strength to write one, will return to having ordinary people living in an ordinary neighborhood somewhere in an ordinary pandemic-free preserve far from any crumbling cities. What would that be like?

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26 January 2021

Greetings & Salutations!

I see you. I know what books you are reading. And which books you have avoided reading. Perhaps you only read certain genre, particular themes, about characters much like yourself...or quite the opposite. Either way, I forgive you. It is not too late to pick up a copy of one of mine. The odds favor you enjoying them.

So after lazing through a dull and dreary holiday pause, I pondered the first blog post of this, the year of 2021, that of the Ox. I've been thinking of "years of" for several years and finally have brought out my novel of a similar name: YEAR OF THE TIGER which is set, as you may guess, in a year designated for tigers; in this case 1986...before computers, cell phones, social media, and TSA checkpoints and a pandemic. Although the first inkling of the complete story was composed in 1983, I waited to share it until I thought the world needed it as a profound distraction for the viral dilemma filling our lives in 2020.

Which leads me to this blog's topic: How do I get the titles for my novels?

As 2020 turned surreptitiously into 2021, I realized that I have been at this writing effort for ten years. Sure, I wrote before, but it was not until 2011 that things began to improve exponentially. (You can read about this career arc in earlier blog posts.) I dared offer a "weaker" work to an untried publisher, willing to throw this story away if the deal fell through or I got burned by unscrupulous purveyors of publishing pomp. AFTER ILIUM is a contemporary tale of misdirected romance in the exotic setting of northwest Turkey and the ruins of ancient Troy. Troy also had the name Ilium. The 'after' part refers to what happens to our hero after he visits the site with his new, older lady friend. Much of the story is how he struggles to get back to her after they become separated. So...after Ilium.

(Click the link in the upper right corner of this blog page to get a copy of any of these books for yourself.)

At the same time, my offering for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition that year caught the eye of another small publisher and we tried to make a go of a career launch. A novel I had already written and submitted to the ABNA became our focus: A BEAUTIFUL CHILL. While working on a revision of this campus relationship novel, I also got another novel, AIKO, involved before the publisher dropped both books, and me, over creative differences. The title of the first novel refers to a phrase the heroine says, describing a feeling of loneliness or a melancholia which can only be alleviated by brief random encounters, such as with a professor on her campus. The second novel is, obviously, a Japanese girl's name, who is the center point of a story involving a man's search for the daughter he suddenly discovers he has. He goes to Japan to claim her but it is not an easy mission.

At that time I wanted to bring forth my magnum opus, a science fiction book revolving around interdimensional voyaging, an alternate universe, and the twisted reign of a pair of high school science nerds who find their way there. I called it THE DREAM LAND, later with volume two and three, The Dream Land trilogy. Originally titled simply Dreamland, I found a book in a bookstore one day about the Coney Island amusement park in New York City which had the same title. So I changed mine to The Dreamland. And wouldn't you know it? Another book already with that title, so another change to what it is today. The three volume epic is quite the tour de force of interdimensional intrigue with a lot of steampunk elements and a fatal comet, a personal favorite.

With the vampire craze reaching its peak, I became enamored with the medical side of the condition and swore to write a medically accurate story of transformation into a vampire. I titled my novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN after the first noticeable symptom which marks our hero's descent into monstrous madness as he seeks a cure only to surrender to his family's curse. A couple books later, I had ideas for continuing the story, making it into a trilogy, so I sought matching titles for two books and came up with SUNRISE for volume 2 and SUNSET for volume 3. They fit: Sunrise tells about his rise and reintroduction into polite society. Sunset sets the theme for the downfall of his vampire empire.

Between volume 1 and the other two of the Stefan Szekely vampire trilogy, I wrote a novel based on the real childhood of someone I met online (a relative of a Facebook friend) whose experiences I believed would make a good story. Because the heroine's name meant "wolf" in her native language, we agreed on the title A GIRL CALLED WOLF - slightly different than our first choice A Girl Named Wolf which was already a nordic folk band's name. I crafted a novel from a list of her adventures gleaned from many interviews and added a fictitious conclusion sequence.

My colleagues at Myrddin Publishing have championed the fantasy genre so I boldly declared I would write a fantasy, too. In fact, I asserted, I would title it Epic Fantasy just to make clear what it was. I was further challenged to include dragons in the story. No problem. I made the title of my longest novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS - yes, with the asterisk, just to be a little tongue-in-cheek. While starting off in an easy manner, the tale of an unjustly exiled dragonslayer on a quest to find the dragons' breeding ground and kill them all to regain his position, I found myself exploring all kinds of big ideas and profound themes by the end of it. I declared when I had finished it that I would never write again because I had "said" everything I had to say in this tome. Then I returned to the vampire theme....

In summer 2019, I had an idea burst into my head that I had to write - and put aside what was trying to be the 4th book of the vampire trilogy. EXCHANGE was a contemporary drama revolving around a mass shooting and the surviving husband/father who must put his life back together while dealing with the arrival of a Chinese exchange student who doesn't know what has happened to her host family. You can guess where the title came from, and yet there are several kinds of "exchanges" that occur throughout the story, including a couple big twists as we rush to the final pages.

The Year of the Rat (2020) was not anything like what we wanted. I delayed launching Exchange until finally I decided to hit the button. People had plenty of time to read but it seemed few were, aside from the apocalyptic plague novels. I read a few of those myself; I even tried to start writing one. Instead, I worked on yet one more revision of my YEAR OF THE TIGER novel which I had kept putting off because other books poked me more. With not much going on and nobody buying books anyway, I did the only thing I could: I put it out there onto the bookshelves of the world. I will let you guess where the title of this book came from. Hint: all the action occurs during the year 1986.

The kitschy cover for my 2014 NaNoWriMo effort.

My next novel started in the 2014 National Novel Writing Month competition, where I wrote the first 55,000 words of it but still unfinished. It is a science fiction tale of alien abduction (the alien is abducted, not a human abducted by aliens) and his escape and attempt to return home (but not at all like that movie E.T.). I'm nearing the end of a final polishing. It should be coming out by summer 2021. The title is THE MASTERS' RIDDLE - which refers to the question of why the evil captors took our hero away from his home world. It may be my last novel.

Oh, I'll keep writing, but I may not get to the end of what I have left to work on during my idle days of retirement. Stay tuned for the amazing conclusion.

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22 December 2020

The Holidays Post

Following the National Novel Writing Month debacle, I expected to post immediately to debunk my rambling missives or, more likely, to vent a few high-brow words I'd not been able to use during this year, to whit: debacle, debunk, missive, vent, whit. But each weekend came and went like the remaining quarter of pie in the fridge. I had thoughts to share, yet also the whiff of extra sleep that bade me back to bed. Then I imagined leaving the month of December as a blank slate, given how so many of us were left sad and alone, surrounded by stacks of holiday gifts or locked onto our online video confrontations, leaving no time for putting weary eyes upon this weary page. However, there is still time before Stille Nacht bangs through the playlist again.

Christmas, Yule, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, D'uoppo, sLari'i, Ma-Em-To, or whatever you celebrate. It's all good. Main thing is to get together with family and friends, usually at the excuse of a communal meal, often with added rituals, concluding with blessings and wishes for the next year to be better than the current year ending not-soon-enough. So it goes, year after year. And I always believed it would be the same, exactly the same as when I first experienced it: full of wonder, hope, and cheer, with a few toys added. But gradually, it becomes tiresome to get up and do the rituals again, feeling less and less fulfilled in the doing, and more cynical each time I try to trick myself into feeling that holiday mirth.

So it's easy to become bitter - and let's not even consider the special effects of this present year - but bitter is just another taste, or as we see on the TV ads, another "Taste Sensation!" Yes, it's a little like that: the desperate search for sparks (the opposite of triggers) which cause memories to fire and burn bright in our minds. And for an all too brief moment we can feel that same feeling as before, back when this time meant something, when we knew where we were and who we were and everything was right with the world - or, at least, our little corner of it. Then we always slip back, back to the reality we must deal with, strike a bargain, slip some cash over the transom, or write a post-dated check to Dr. Fate, the ultimate debt collector.

Ok, it's not the best holiday season this year. I recommend reading a good book. I have a few which you might enjoy. They're distracting enough that you may forget your troubles for a while. That is probably the main reason people read - more so in troubling times. Whatever works for you. I shall turn off the alarm clock, stay up late writing and editing my next book, and consume much of the dessertary substances around which I may come into contact, for whatever indulgences I indulge in at this time of the year, the follow year provides ample opportunity to forget my lapses and, indeed, to forget everything that does not fit into my perfect world view.

Happy Holidays to you and your associates, short and tall! See you on the other side.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020* by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America. (*The year 2020 only counts as 1/4 of a year.)

28 November 2020

That NaNo Thing (2020 edition)

So, ladies and gentlemen, each November there is a competition for writers who strive to compose a story of 50,000 words (or possibly a little more). The National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for insiders) is the Super Bowl for those who have no athletic skills [sic] but have an idea often expressed as "You know what would make a great movie?"

NaNo was brought to my attention by my writer friends in 2014. Usually it is not a problem to write 50,000 words, even in a month, if I have a lot of free time and a hot idea. So I gave it a go, writing most of a sci-fi novel by the concluding tally of 55,396...which was not the end of the story. I put it aside and finally this year (yes, in 2020) I picked it up and finished it at 95,000 words. It will be available early in 2021.

Usually, I start something in February and write through the spring and summer and finish at the beginning of autumn, then edit and revise through the month of November, precluding my participation. But sometimes it works out. In 2016 I worked on a sequel to my epic fantasy tome and "won" with 52,077 words...but it remains unfinished. In 2018, I worked on a cynical autobiography, based a lot on Grandma's notes of her ancestors and my vague memories of childhood. Again I got to 54,275 words by the end of the month. Lots more to finish that book.

Last year (2019) I was engaged in preparation of my crime thriller novel EXCHANGE (out in May 2020) and skipped the NaNo. But this year...I had no alibi. So I looked at what projects I had started and needed to finish. I picked up my screenplay for a "1984" rip-off and decided to novelize it. We are allowed notes and an outline for NaNo so novelizing a screenplay is not cheating. With 2 days to go, it sits at 49,996 words. I think I can cobble together another 4 words in time.

THE LIE began long, long ago in a high school far, far away. Fresh from a class reading of George Orwell's "1984", I said to myself: "I think I can do better." So I wrote a story about a police state but mine was set in the United States instead of London. I had my own twists on the story so it wasn't entirely a copy. I typed it out on a manual typewriter until the ink ribbon was spent and the typed words faint. Single-spaced, it went to 66 pages - the longest piece of writing I had ever done to that date. I stapled the pages in the top left corner and shared it with a couple guys in my sci-fi nerd circle. They liked it. Others asked to read it so it was passed around for the rest of the semester.

However, I got busy with other things. You know, the usual: college, jobs, relationships, other writing projects, travel, career, family, more writing projects....

Back up. In a return to college to take a screenwriting course, I used the story as the plot for my screenplay (see above). The professor of the course had Hollywood ties and he helped some of us get attention. My screenplay was "optioned" by a production company, which meant they paid me for the rights to it for 1 year; if they did not move forward on it within that year the rights reverted to me. Guess who got reverted?

So it went back to the shelf. I ran the high school pages through an OCR system to try to make it able to be edited on a word processor but the optical character recognition system did not recognize very much of my typing. Now (NaNoWriMo 2020) I cannot even find that poor OCR'd file, but I do have the screenplay. So I read the scene in the screenplay format, then write it out as a novel scene. Lots of description needed to be filled in along with the thoughts and feelings of the characters - which the actors and director would take care of in a film production.

Like past projects for NaNoWriMo, I will not finish it by the time I complete the month. But I will get my 50,000 words to win the competition. The project interests me, has a unique take on the basic dystopian themes, and so I will likely finish it eventually - unless a new idea hits me from out of left field.

So that is how I have been spending my November, if anyone wondered where I was. I was assuming you were deep inside one of my latest novels, EXCHANGE or the just launched YEAR OF THE TIGER (read more here), and simply did not realize I had not posted on my blog until now. Next month I will return to that first NaNoWriMo novel, the sci-fi story, and prepare it for launch in 2021.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

31 October 2020

YEAR OF THE TIGER Launches!

Yes, tonight is Halloween, which still comes every October without fail. The customs and rituals remain the same. The weather may be different (we suffered through an ice storm here a few days ago), and nobody has invented new candy. If you want to read a Halloween post, I can recommend one I wrote previously (click here).

Instead, because nothing is normal this year, I've launched my latest novel, YEAR OF THE TIGER, an action / adventure story about the hunt for a man-eating tiger in 1986 (which was, in the oriental calendar, a year of the tiger). Of course, it is much more than that simple straight-forward plot, as compelling as it may be. The theme of hunting can also be taken as the search for pride, power, revenge - anything a human desires and is willing to fight for, including love.

What makes this story special (you may quote me in your review) is the magical realism aspect in which the main character and the tiger seem to share a consciousness. I say "seem" because we are left to wonder whether it is real or if it is only the man's delusions. In the end, does it really matter? Or does it make everything that has happened up to the end matter deeply?

One Beta reader (two revisions ago) remarked that everyone in the story is corrupt and unlikable. I took exception to that characterization of my characters. Everyone has good reasons for the way they are and why they act the way they do. I chalk it up to basic human foibles which in some of us are taken to extremes. They all have some redeeming quality, too, whenever the situation allows.

Not even our tiger protagonist (part of the story is told through the tiger's point of view - yes, anthropomorphism run amok!) is saved from the curse of being a bad actor. He is, after all, a man-eater - but not without plausible reasons which drove him into that role. Still, he wrestles with himself over his actions and whether they are right or wrong. A tiger that shares its consciousness with a human mind can do that.

Some have described this tale as a "slow burn" while at least one colleague has elsewhere eschewed the "slow burn" description for wasting readers' time setting up the final section which actually is interesting. Yes and no. In the case of YEAR OF THE TIGER, tension does build more or less continuously throughout the story as our heroes get closer to achieving their goal, but events interspersed throughout ratchet up the violence and anticipate the next event. There is no wasting of readers' time with trivial side tracks. That is what revision is for.

If you like your Halloween with a side of something scary, this novel has its frightening moments - scenes as visceral as any I have ever written, and, perhaps more unsettling, the moral dilemmas which unfold as a result. In the end, we all die a little and yet feel strangely reborn.

Of course YEAR OF THE TIGER is available on Amazon in both ebook format for Kindle and in paperback. In time, the paperback may be available from Barnes & Noble's website - but not in their brick and mortar stores despite me being a "local author". You can read more about the history behind this novel in previous blog posts beginning with this one.

(Note: There seem to be a few other books on Amazon with the same or similar title. Do not be confused. Mine is the only one, it would seem, that actually involves hunting a tiger. You may need to scroll down a bit - or just click on the link at the top right corner of this blog page.)

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25 October 2020

YEAR OF THE TIGER proofs arrive!

This may be the season of ghosts and goblins, with Halloween at the end of the week, but over here in book land, it's a countdown to a launch! In this case, I refer to my forthcoming action/adventure novel YEAR OF THE TIGER.

As a kind of scary tale, our reluctant hero finds himself in dire straits, faced with a slow death by insanity or the very real possibility of death if he goes out to kill the tiger that haunts his dreams. Imagine the situation - the great conversations you would have - if when you closed your eyes to sleep at night, your eyes opened in a beast half a world away and you lived its life - even as it hunted and killed people. How to rid yourself of this terror?

In the writing game, authors are told to keep ratcheting up the conflict - what some may call a "slow burn" - until the final climactic scene. Our hero here faces that upward climb to the final goal, from getting out of his present restricted situation, traveling half-way around the world, locating the particular tiger in all of India, passing himself off as a real shikari (professional hunter), then going into the . . . .

Wouldn't want to give away too much!

Suffice to say, the theme of this tale - the hunter vs the hunted - plays out with every character, human and feline, making this novel a taut, visceral polemic on the effect of human conquest upon Nature, and the dark heart of mankind. The tiger's world is bright, vivid, beautiful, while the world of the humans is rigid, full of deception, and consumed with greed. But there is hope following the carnage . . . .

Almost said too much again. Well, there's the start of someone's book review, anyway.

YEAR OF THE TIGER is due out on November 1, give or take a day or two, depending on the vagaries of the electronic publishing quirks. Look for it in both paperback and as ebook for Kindle.

You will have to excuse the "Thou shalt not resell" banner wrapped around the proof copy.

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10 October 2020

YEAR OF THE TIGER coming soon!

In my previous blog post, I gave you the whole sordid history of the story that became a novella then a screenplay then a novel and finally a Much Better Novel (read it here). It is the story of obsession, of desire, and of desperation as one man fights to possess his soul, a soul he believes he shares with a man-eating Bengal tiger.

Don't you just hate when that happens?

As a young sci-fi aficionado, I asked the what-if question that started it all back when I was a teen writer with a big imagination. What would it be like if a regular guy shared his soul with an animal. Of course, it is more (or different) than sharing a soul; it is sharing a consciousness - the ability to see each other's world, share each other's thoughts.

The story of working out a scientific paradox could only be expanded into the hard realities of a hunt for a man-eating tiger. Lots of reading and a lot of research later, I learned about hunting, about the lifestyle of tigers in the wild, all about India, and the operations of a mental hospital in the 1980s. Once the central conflagration is sparked - by the act which makes our feline hero into a man-eater - the hunters begin to converge.

So here is the blurb - now that I've pre-explained it - which goes on the back cover of the paperback.

In the lottery of souls sometimes mistakes are made. Sometimes one soul becomes split between two bodies.

Karl has strange, violent dreams. He sees the world through the eyes of a Bengal tiger and it's driving him insane. Fortunately, his sexy wife knows a hunky doctor who can help - help her have Karl committed, that is. Locked up, the nightmares worsen as the tiger hunts down the men who killed its mate.

Karl has a plan to save himself. All he has to do is escape, get to India, find that one tiger and kill it. Only then will he have the mind they share all to himself.

But others are interested in joining the hunt. The doctor who put Karl in the mental hospital, fearing Karl will reveal his crimes. And famous big game hunter Colonel John Barrington will come out of retirement, with worldwide media in tow, for one last chance at a man-eating tiger!

And the first page of the text, a prologue of sorts, which sets the stage and the theme: the hunter vs the hunted.

YEAR OF THE TIGER is in press as I type this and should be available soon - like, umm, before the end of this month. Because in a pandemic all we really have is a to-be-read pile which needs to constantly be restocked.

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27 September 2020

Origins: Year of the Tiger

Remember back to those heady days of high school science fiction? After reading everything I could get my hands on, mostly set off-world or in make-believe worlds, I decided I wanted to write science fiction stories, too. I wielded a non-electric Smith-Corona typewriter in those days and typed out all kinds of stories late into the night. Father was happy to hear the constant clicking of keys all evening but Mother had to knock on my door repeatedly and tell me to go to sleep. But I couldn't stop. I had stories the world needed to read.

My longest typewritten effort was a "1984" rip-off that went 66 pages, single-spaced. I double-stapled the pages together and passed it around among my circle of science fiction aficionados at my high school. Of course they loved it. That was not a time for criticism. I was encouraged to write more. One story I wrote was probably the result of cross-pollination of four stories I had read, likely by Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, and Isaac Asimov. Who can say for sure now?

That story had a regular guy - an adult, rather than a teenager - fighting with himself over a monster that torments him every night, haunting his dreams. (Shades of teen angst?) To rid himself of the unpleasantness of his sleeping hours, he becomes determined to go kill that monster. The problem is that the monster lives on another planet. Also, people on Earth think he is crazy and so he is locked away. (More teen angst, no doubt.) But in the futuristic setting, anything is possible and he does escape and boards a spaceship for a hunting expedition on an alien planet. I titled the story "Doubles".

I used that story in a Creative Writing class in college and got all kinds of constructive criticism. I got a B overall on it, along with praise for my great imagination. The professor suggested that I relocate the story to Earth because, with the amazing setting of the original story, what the protagonist does doesn't seem so difficult - and we want the protagonist to struggle. So I took my 35-page single-spaced typewritten manuscript and did a very hard rewrite to set the story on Earth. I thought of what creature on Earth would be close to the monster on that alien planet and I came up with... a Bengal tiger.

I tried. I really did. But such a drastic shift proved too daunting for a typewriter, even the refurbished IBM Selectric my parents got for me for Christmas. However, graduation and a return to college to learn something else gave me the opportunity I needed. I took a Screenwriting course with an adjunct professor who had worked in Hollywood. We all had dreams of getting a movie deal from our screenplays. (I actually got my "1984" rip-off turned into a screenplay optioned for a year; then the script was dropped.) I used what I learned in class on my "Doubles" novella and it became a feature film screenplay.

Long after the class had ended, I was still working on that screenplay. With my parents away on summer vacation, I pushed myself to finish the remake of the hunting story, staying awake 5 hours and sleeping 3 hours...for five straight days. I thought I would be famous just for that determined effort. Fortunately, the result was a fully reset story opening in New York City and ending in India with a tiger as the antagonist. I was proud to have made the switch - even though it was no longer science fiction. Later I would learn about the genre called "magical realism" and feel much better about the whole project.

But wait! Not even close to half way yet. Not getting any interest from Hollywood, I realized I should turn the screenplay into a novel. The prospect of crunching out 60,000 words scared me. That's why a screenplay was so much better to attempt. Now I just had to fill in the scenes that were already outlined in the screenplay. Easy-peasy. Of course I worked on other stories through all of this, plus I was working at a full-time job, too. Life took a lot of my time but I returned and returned again to the "novel" many times during my young adulthood.

When I got the opportunity to live in Hawaii (Thanks, U.S. Army!), the tropical scenery sparked my imagination and the writing of the novel progressed rapidly. (Yes, I could not put my writing on hold for several months of full-time duty, so I packed my manual typewriter and a spare ink ribbon cartridge in my suitcase and my fellow soldiers in the barracks enjoyed the key-slamming after duty hours almost every night.) Out in the wild areas of Oahu, I could see a tiger and feel what it would be like to hunt and be hunted. When I returned home, I was close to finishing the manuscript. When I did, I sought an agent for what I had renamed YEAR OF THE TIGER, having learned about the oriental calendar while in Hawaii.

In those days of yore, still pre-internet, we printed out the manuscript, double-spaced, and put it all in a box and included return postage if we wanted it returned. (Later, agents would state up-front that they would "recycle" the manuscript rather than send it back.) Mailing a box of paper cost about $25 at the time, plus the $25 in postage stamps for the return, slipped inside the box - with a self-addressed stamped envelope for the letter accepting or rejecting the manuscript, sent separately from the 4th class postage returned box of paper. Sending that baby around took a lot of time (6 months was average) and costs added up.

Finally I got an agent who was interested and, after paying a modest reading fee because I was an unknown author, they offered to represent my novel to publishers. Hot diggity dog! My agent tried for a year to push it, then gave up. A list of criticisms had to be addressed. I fixed everything and sent it back - but that's not how real life works. No do-overs. Once rejected, always rejected. So I put the manuscript away and worked on other things. I let life take over, let it come close to ruining me. I moved on to other science fiction stories - and in my MFA program also contemporary, literary stories to broaden my oeuvre.

Much happened. Then, in 2011, I got excited by Amazon's novel competition (ABNA) and submitted what I thought was my best novel, A BEAUTIFUL CHILL, a campus relationship story that was my MFA thesis. I got a little ways through the competition before failing. Next year, same deal, different novel. I went sci-fi, using my interdimensional novel THE DREAM LAND, and got a little further before failing. But I got noticed and - long story highly shortened - I hooked up with a publishing group and my first novel, AFTER ILIUM, a contemporary adventure with age-gap romance and an exotic setting, which had been rewritten from a novella inspired by a graduate course in Classical rhetoric, was published. Thus, I was encouraged to go back to my manuscripts and see what else would be good to publish.

I gave them a good revision and sent them off. I finished a long-forgotten book and I wrote completely new books in several genre. But YEAR OF THE TIGER still sat on the shelf while newer ideas took my attention. When I went to Beijing, China to teach a summer class at a university there, I had plenty of idle time in my hotel room. I had seen the sites on two previous vacation trips so my desire to write and revise was stronger than my desire to go out in the smog and heat to see places I had already seen. So I took out that manuscript - on my laptop - and read & revised. It was pretty good in this iteration, just needed some polishing, some tightening. I felt it was ready to go.

But then I got involved with the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition and started something new. I put the tiger tale aside. A couple years later, I returned to it and gave it one more pass. A beta reader had some concerns so I addressed them. Magical realism covered some of them. My earlier research on India and tiger behavior was supposed to cover others. But I double-checked everything anyway. I checked the characters' accents, too: American, British, Scottish, Australian, and Hindi. (I'm a linguist, after all.) I decided on a new format which, I felt, would make the story more mythical - the "magical" part of magical realism.

Put it aside again to work on EXCHANGE, a contemporary crime thriller, based on an idea that suddenly hit me in 2019. I had to work on it Right Then! Ok, now it is YEAR OF THE TIGER's turn to hit the websites. For reals. It's finally going to happen. The long-awaited second-cousin of my all novels....

In fact, it was the first novel-length manuscript I ever produced. I did have a long post-nuclear apocalypse story (call it a novella) prior to YEAR OF THE TIGER. As an early work of mine, it is a favorite; perhaps that was the reason I keep returning to this story of madness in its many forms. There is a deeply human element embedded in the story which I kept pulling out a little more with each revision. I like how its beauty juxtaposes its visceral aspects. I like the obsession of its characters. I like the final twists. Now it is ready.

NEXT: The Blurb

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