Karma must be exacting a little payment from me today. First I went down with my bike—again while not going anywhere. This time it was that my right foot didn’t clear the trunk bag as I dismounted. Why hello thar, driveway pavement!

This afternoon I was walking down the steps to the French Broad Co-Op’s back parking lot, thinking how pretty that little area is, a garden oasis between two parking lots, and bam—twisted my ankle. First word out of my mouth: “Fuck.” Next: “Ow. Ow.” Then, as I hopped around: “I’d better be able to ride tomorrow.” I think I’ll be okay. I’m more concerned about the heel of my right hand, which I apparently bruised on the driveway. It hurts most when I’m shifting in the car. Can’t wait to see how it feels on the handlebars in the morning. Meanwhile I’m alternating an ice pack between the two owies.

My plan for this morning was to buy Lewis Black tickets as soon as the public on-sale started at 9:00 and then bike down to the tailgate market for yummy fresh produce, but at 9:00 I realized that the on-sale was actually 10:00, leaving me with an hour to…do what with? It was enough time to ride to the market and back, but not enough time to browse all the yummy produce. If I waited till after the presale to ride, it’d be hot outside, and I’d be in a rush then, too, because we had plans for lunch. So I headed out around 9:10, went my usual route to the dead end, then came back and cruised past the mouth of our road, kept going past my previous turn-around spot, climbed a new hill, and came home. In all: 4.1 miles, and I was back in the house by 9:50.

We scored seats in the center orchestra pit for the Lewis Black show in Charlotte. Badass.

After I showered and drank breakfast (mmm banana peanut butter smoothies) and got some reading in, we met Neil for an early lunch at Nine Mile on Montford. The place just opened about a month ago. Jamaican food, tasty, and the meals are very reasonably priced, especially for lunch.

After that, we headed downtown to catch the kick-off of this year’s World Naked Bike Ride. Except it started pouring rain. We got soaked and missed seeing any bikers. We might have been there at the wrong time, too. The website I was going by said 1:00pm; others say 2:00pm.

(Incidentally, I got an email from my step-daughter, who’s interning at SCAD this week, with a link to info on the bike ride and one line: “don’t take dad.” Hahaha. Whoops.)

This afternoon, I finished reading Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own (about writing and working as a housecleaner) and started in on Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills. Mark shook his head about that one. He figures once you get past getting the bike moving without falling over—something both of us licked years ago—the rest comes naturally. He could be right; I don’t, after all, have any plans to start racing. But it’s what I do: “Get into something; read up on it.” So there you go.

After my eyes tired of reading, I lubed my chain and adjusted the front shifter, which I’d been having to push waaaay to the right to shift. Should be better now. I wanted to level my saddle, too; its nose is pointing just a touch upward. No luck, though. I’m probably missing something stupendously simple. Something so simple they didn’t feel the need to put instructions for it in either the bike’s manual or my road bike maintenance book. I’ll mess with it again when my new saddle arrives (I took advantage of a sale and free shipping at Performance Bike this weekend to order a woman’s saddle—it’s a little wider where your sitbones go and has a bit of a cutout where your delicate bits go, which I think my delicate bits are going to appreciate).

Finally, I haven’t been writing, and I should have been writing, but I haven’t. I’ve figured out why, though, so tomorrow I’ll be back at it. The reason I’ve been avoiding working on the Rot rewrite is this: I keep thinking about it in terms of its ability to be commercially viable. Viable, schmiable. For now it’s more important that it be engaging to me. So I’ve tossed that pressure off and will dig in with renewed excitement tomorrow after my ride and before we go see The Happening. M. Night Shyamalan is one of my guilty pleasures.

Tonight it’s dinner with some other couples at La Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz. I’m totally looking forward to the bacon-wrapped jumbo shrimp with coconut rice.

Which of course means they’ll have taken it off their menu.

Here’s a problem my brain’s been spinning its wheels on as I rewrite Rot: Derrel Thibodeaux is black; that’s pretty clear from the get-go. If the name doesn’t get you leaning toward that conclusion, his voice will tip you. That’s chapter one.

Chapter two, meet David Priest. He’s at Richie Fisbeck’s house. Richie’s a beanpole who’s always hooking his lank hair behind his ears. Jeff shows up, too, red-faced from the heat and, like Richie Fisbeck, more or less obviously white.

That’s how David comes across as well: more or less obviously white. Except he’s not. So how do I make that come across? The scene’s in first person, David’s POV, so while it’s easy to show Richie hooking his hair behind his ear, it’s not so easy to show David, who doesn’t even have the good grace to sound black like my man Derrel. While we’re at it, how do I get across that he’s a guy, before Richie finally says his name three pages into the chapter. I worry that readers will automatically apply the author’s gender to the “I” in the story until told otherwise, so for nearly three pages they’ll be thinking the character’s a she, and then whoops—everything stops so they can reimagine the character as a David. And then whoops again in another couple chapters when they realize David’s black.

I may have to switch to third person because a subtle first-person way around the problem just isn’t presenting itself.

I finished reading Old Man’s War (John Scalzi) late last night. Enjoyed the hell out of it. (I couldn’t find it anywhere as an ebook, though. That’s not right. Every sf book should automatically come out as an ebook edition, no questions asked.)

This morning I read a novella-length bandfic¹ AU² that took place in an open, integrated cell block system reminiscent of the one on HBO’s Oz. Featured bands were Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Nine Inch Nails, Mastadon and Zico Chain. I devoured the story. It had angst and gay smex and dark pasts (and dark futures) and did I say angst? Lots of angst. Angst is my guilty pleasure. If you’re into that sort of thing (bandfic, gay sex, angst, prison AUs), check out duffnstuff’s “Misfit Love“.

In addition to reading, I installed a mod on the Bandsmut message boards that allows users to get syndicated feeds of any or all of the forums and topics there. (ETA: Now if only the feeds would update in Google Reader…. *sigh*)

In and amongst all that, I retitled the novel I’m working on—it’s Rot now. I’m also playing around with its structure (in my head), how I can pull off doing in other-than-chronological order. I’m thinking back on William Goldman’s Control, though…differently.

Finally, an idea for a new novel popped up in my imagination today. I don’t know where it’s going yet, but I’m interested to find out. It’s not bandfic, though, so I won’t be doing it for Biffno in March, but that’s a’ight—I’ve already got a bandfic horror story to write for that (with fictional bands ’cause real ones don’t work for this….). It’s tentatively titled Below.

¹”Bandfic” is short for band fiction. Learn about bandfic on FanHistory.com.
²AU is short for “alternate universe.” Learn more about AUs on FanHistory.com.

Today’s resource you can add to your f-list: literary agent Jennifer Jackson, aka arcaedia, regularly blogs about publishing and agent-y thing on her LJ.

And speaking of agents who blog, Miss Snark stopped actively blogging last May, but her archive is full of useful information. You might also check out Bookends, Nathan Bransford, Jonathan Lyons, Kristin Nelson and nephele.

The first part of Deadlock Rot follows the bad guy¹, which means, I think, that he can’t really look like The Bad Guy. He’s not a super villain, and he’s not picking raw baby meat out of his back molars, so if I treat him like he’s the bad guy in these early chapters, I think he’d just come off looking like A Cardboard Jerk.

I’m not saying I want to trick people into thinking he’s a good guy either. I’m aiming more for Ambiguous Guy—is he the hero? the villain? an anti-hero? Maybe an anti-villain? I’d rather have the reader unsure of his place in the book than going, “Oh, yeah, this must be the baddy. Look, he’s kicking a pregnant dog in the stomach. La-de-da.”

What sets Deadlock Rot’s main story into motion is that this guy receives a phone call with some good news, which leads him on a journey, blah, blah, blah, death, destruction, voodoo, gay sex, chain saws, etc., etc., etc. But we don’t know this guy from Adam, so what do we care about his god-damned good news? Whoop-dee-do, right?

But you’ve gotta care, because you’re stuck with this guy for the first part of the book, and I don’t want you to put it back on the shelf and buy someone else’s book instead! I’ve gotta make you care. (And you know what? I’ve gotta make me care, too; otherwise I’m just doodling facial features and clothes on a piece of cardboard, aren’t I? AND YOU CAN TELL!) So for the first chapter, instead of having his phone ring, I put him into some trouble. Now when he gets that phone call in chapter two and thinks it’s going to get him out of that trouble, whew! That’s a good thing! Let’s see how this phone call is going to manage that! The reader doesn’t see it as “Yeah, yeah, lucky him, what do I care?” anymore because now the phone call doesn’t just come—it comes as the solution to a problem (that leads to many more problems–yay, story!).

And…I still have today’s writing to do (I’m in the middle of chapter three) and grocery shopping and twenty minutes of hating the concept of “fitness,” plus dinner to eat and time to spend with family and alla that, so…. Laterz!

¹I’m writing chronologically. Once I have the pieces all down, I’ll shuffle them around and see if it works better in some other order. But for now it’s chronological, and chronologically the bad guy comes first.

The free Notebook personal notebook application (available for both Windows and Macs) is what I’m using to keep track of character back story, locations and anything else that needs keeping track of while I write Deadlock Rot. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Ignore the IMPORTANT NOTE on the page I’ve linked to. It will bring you to a site that’s about the development of the next version of Notebook, but what you want is the current version of Notebook, available from the “Downloads” link on that page.)

What Notebook really is is a personal wiki. You’re not really going to get excited about this application if you’re not already addicted accustomed to editing wikis, but if you are addicted accustomed–whoa. It’s nice (if not slick looking). For the most part, Notebook uses the MediaWiki convention for marking up text (and offers HTML-like mark-up a well). And like yWriter4 (see yesterday’s entry), you can use the Pendrive Runtime application to run it off a USB flash drive.

The only annoying thing is that it won’t let you rename the “Home” page–at least not so far as I can tell. But it’s got these other cool customizable things, like you can define what you want to show up in the pop-up menu when you right-click on a page. You can also create “magic buttons” that execute commands. You can even do some scripting with it. And you can create “macros” (not the cat kind) that let you quickly add common information to pages, like say you want to add a link to the main “characters” page at the bottom of every character’s page–you’d make a macro once and cut down all that extra typing you’d have to do.

Most of these things you won’t find useful, though, if you’re just focusing on keeping track of information for your novel. For Deadlock Rot, I’ve set up the home page with a list of characters, locations, themes and plot notes, with each item in each section linking to more information about that. And of course since it’s a wiki, when I first mention Jeff’s name on David’s character page, I can turn Jeff’s name into a link to Jeff’s page. When I say that David lives in Marigny, I can have “Marigny” link to the info page on that neighborhood. I can also add images to the wiki pages–like a map of Marigny. (Notebook can only handle .GIF files off the shelf, but you can install an extension to add .JPG capability.)

As I progress, I’ll probably have to break the main page up into several pages–I’m sure I’ll be adding more sections as I go (in fact–there!–I just added a section for events going on in the area during the times the novel takes place).

I do wish it automatically created tables of contents for pages the way MediaWiki does, and I wish there was a way to sort the index sidebar besides alphabetically or by date (I’d like a hierarchy tree), but I can get by without these extras.

(One nicety I just discovered is that if you change a page name, Notebook automatically updates all links to that page throughout your wiki. This is great because I keep wavering on David’s surname.)

I spent the afternoon poking around “best of 2007″ book lists looking for stuff to add to my 2008 reading list. I’d set out to read 50 books this year but only made it through 37, so 2008’s goal is 37 + 6 (surely I can squeeze an extra half book a month in, right?). It’s frustrating how many titles aren’t available as ebooks (not even as Kindle editions–in a look at ten random books on my Wish List, only two were available for the Kindle), and it’s depressing how few of the “best” books of 2007 are catching my interest. (On the other hand, it’s not as though I’m running low on books to read. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME TO READ ALL THE BOOKS!)

The five books I enjoyed the most in 2007:

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (READ THIS BOOK)
Rant, Chuck Palahniuk
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michael Faber (despite the ending)
Cell, Stephen King (I even liked the ending)

¹This entry has no footnotes

I discovered this free software for organizing your novel back when it was just plain old yWriter, and now it’s up to version 4 (for PC and Linux only¹–sorry Mac users²). It’s actually more than an organizer–you can actually write your novel in yWriter4.

Every novel in yWriter is a “project,” and for every project you can include characters, objects, locations (settings), scenes and chapters. Dragging and dropping scenes and chapters makes it easy to reorganize the story.

Some screenshots (click for larger):

When it comes to scenes, you can get incredibly anal about them. In addition to a big block where you can type (or copy and paste) the actual scene is a set of tabs: Description, Status, Goals, Time, Scene Notes, Characters, Viewpoint Details and Overview. “Status,” for instance, is where you can say whether the scene relates to the main plot or to a subplot and say whether the scene is at this point an outline, draft, first edit, second edit or done. Under “Goals,” you can say whether the scene is an action scene or a reaction scene, and define the goal, conflict and outcome for the scene. “Time” lets you say when the scene happens and what time span it covers. “Characters” lets you select the characters who appear in the scene. All of this information helps you see the structure of your story.

This software is ideal for people who are anal and love to organize, but be careful: you can easily spend all your time working on information about scenes instead of actually writing the scenes.

Finally, if you already have a draft of a novel, yWriter can import it, provided you save it as RTF. Include chapter headings (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.) and scene breaks (***) in the file, and yWriter will automatically create chapters and scenes in the project as it imports.

Here’s the yWriter website: http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter4.html. Again, the software is free.

In additional to all this, there’s one more very cool thing about yWriter: you can make it run from a USB flash drive. This is perfect for people who write at work or school and at home. After you download and install yWriter on your computer, drag or copy the folder to your flash drive. Then download the “Pendrive Runtimes” application at the bottom of this page. When you run Pendrive Runtimes, it will ask where the folder is. Enter its location on your flash drive (for example “F:\yWriter4″). It will install some extra stuff on the flash drive, and then you’ll be able to run yWriter from any Windows PC.

All that said…I’m not actually using yWriter4 for Deadlock Rot (though I will be when I start the Growl Mercy revision in the spring–different books, different needs). I’ll show you what I’m using for Deadlock Rot tomorrow.

Speaking of Deadlock Rot, dialog scribbles and scene notes are beginning to accumulate in scraps of paper around my desk. I’m happy to see them. :)

Also, I’ve figured out how to sum up the book in one word. I’ve been reading James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure this weekend (Christmas gift from my mom–isn’t she great?), and there was a point where he did the ol’ “Describe your story in a sentence or two” thing, which…I’m so not prepared to do with this story yet. I think I need to get through much, if not most–if not all!–of it before I can compress it back down to a few sentences. But I have a word now (which means I’m probably onto a theme, too): obsession.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I realized that that was the one thing my three disparate main characters had in common. (Okay, the one of two things: they’re also all male. But anyway) Derrel is obsessed with something he believes is rightfully his that has been withheld from him all his life. Jeff is obsessed with collecting refuse. Or, actually, he’s obsessed with staying right where he is; collecting refuse is a mechanism he uses to keep his life from moving forward. And over the course of the story, David becomes obsessed with his Tragic Hero. I think he was looking for a Tragic Hero all along.

David’s my narrator. I think he’s going to do an all right job.

¹Linux users should read the note on the Download page on how to get it working on their system.
²There is a similar program for Mac users: Jer’s Novel Writer.

I’m gearing up to start work on Deadlock Rot (that’s what I’m calling it this week) on the first, and that has me poking around at all the great resources for writers on the web–websites, software, whatever. There are so many! And such neat ones! I thought I’d start sharing them as I go.

The first one comes from tasyfa, who posted a link to this on Rockfic.com: Storytellers Unplugged. Storytellers Unplugged, to crib from their “About” page, is a group of thirty authors, editors, booksellers and publishing professionals who share their love of writing and “behind the scenes” tips at the rate of one column a day throughout the month, each by a different author. I’m old skool, so I just keep the home page of the site open in one of my many “if I close this I’ll forget it exists” Firefox tabs¹, but for those of who’ve gotten the hang of RSS readers (which are probably fantastic things, like del.icio.us, that I just haven’t wrapped my head around yet), the site does have a feed.

Contributors include David Niall Wilson, John Skipp, Elizabeth Bear, Mort Castle, Brian Hodge, John B. Rosenman and more. The columns aren’t always of interest to me, but the ones that are are worth the time I take to read the new entry every day.

Speaking of Deadlock Rot, I spent some time today…coming up with names for the characters (and writing down the bits of back story that have been rattling around in my head). You’d think what with having written a (really really horrible and completely missing a beginning) first draft over a year ago, I’d know who these people are–at least the ones who were “original” characters from the get-go, but sadly only one person retained her name from the original version to the new one (but her role in the story grew by leaps and bounds, even though her appearance will only increase by a page or three). Character names aren’t the only things changing either. The story has jumped forward twelve years, one fairly major character who was alive through 98% of the story in the first go-round now dies in the first act and a different character is stepping up to narrate. Also all of the characters save one have different occupations than they did in the first go-round.

And I love this story like I never thought I would. It was riddled with problems when I dashed through it for NaNoWriMo 2006–unforgivable problems, niggling unanswerable questions of why: why is this happening to this guy? Why was this woman killed? Why is this guy being blackmailed when he didn’t even freaking kill her? Why are these guys doing something so stupidly out of character? Why why WHY?

Baby, this time I’ve got answers. All that’s left to do come the first is sit my butt down in this chair and start telling the story.

I hope it doesn’t fall too far short of the vision in my head.

¹ Whenever I go to put my computer on hibernate or need to restart or shut down for any reason, I “end” the Firefox process through Windows’ Task Manager. I used to run the Session Manager add-on for Firefox, but version 2.0 made this unnecessary. Whether you have 2.0 or use the Session Manager, if you end the Firefox process through the Task Manager, Firefox performs a little magic trick where it makes a note of what web pages you have open in what tabs so that the next time you start it, you can just “Restore Session” and bam! be right back where you were. This is one of the Best Things Ever.