Writing

My Truck Stop Writing Haven

/ David / Leave a comment

In one of my early posts on this blog, I talked about how I love to write in restaurants. It basically comes down to this: I’m more productive when I write just about anywhere but at home or my regular work environment. I’ve tried many times to actually figure out why this is the case, but in the end I just learned to accept it. I write best when I “go to work”—as long as it’s not the place where I do my regular job.

My requirements for an away-from-home “writing office” are as follows (and in this order):

  • I need to be isolated in the middle of other people.
  • I often stay late into the night—so the place should be open past midnight, if possible.
  • A little background noise/movement is great. People-watching opportunities are welcome. Too much of either … not so good.
  • Caffeine, caffeine, caffeine.
  • Wi-Fi access is a definite plus.
  • Power outlets are my friend.

I’m not a morning person. I write best at night. When I lived in Phoenix and then later in Salt Lake City, there were plenty of places around where I could take my laptop and park myself for a two- to four-hour writing session. As I’ve mentioned before, more often than not I would end up in a late-night McDonald’s restaurant. They all have Diet Coke on tap. They all have Wi-Fi. Many of them have almost a one-to-one table-to-outlet ratio. With a large drink costing just a dollar, that’s a bargain in every sense of the word.

DraperMcDonalds

Image courtesy Google Street View

I wrote almost all of my first NaNoWriMo novel (the one I’m currently shopping around to agents) in the McDonald’s at the intersection of Bangerter Highway and I-15 in Draper, Utah. Technically, the dining room was only open until midnight, but the lady who ran the joint allowed me to stay as late as I wanted. (Their drive-through stayed open 24 hours, so it wasn’t like they were sticking around just to let me pound out words on my keyboard.) They cleaned around me. I bought a drink (and sometimes an apple pie) and I was grateful. Often they gave me free food.

Now I live in Cedar City. Our family loves it here. It’s a small town in southern Utah about three-and-a-half hours south of Salt Lake City and two-and-a-half hours north of Las Vegas. We have a large state university (Southern Utah University) and world-class theater (The Utah Shakespeare Festival and the Neil Simon Festival) and we’re not far from even more amazing entertainment down at the Tuacahn Amphitheater. We also have clean air and amazing scenery and beautiful sunsets and phenomenal hiking trails.

What we don’t have a lot of is restaurants that stay open late. We have two McDonald’s-es in town. One closes at 10:00 p.m. (11:00 p.m. on weekends) and the other is in a Walmart Supercenter. That one has a metal gate that rolls down every night at 9:00 or 10:00.

So what’s a guy to do?

My 24-Hour Options

I have two:

Subway/Love’s: My go-to “writing office,” Subway is open 24/7 and I can buy a bottomless drink for $1.50. It’s less than a mile from home and provides almost everything on my list above. When I say “almost,” I’m talking about the Wi-Fi. There are six networks in the building, but not one of them is for public use. The Carl’s Jr. next door supposedly has Wi-Fi, but it hasn’t worked in several months. Power outlets galore. Friendly workers.

Valerie’s: A 24-hour taco shop on 200 North just off I-15. This is a three- or four-mile drive for me. Valerie’s used to be a Sonic Drive-in, but they now only do drive-through and eat-in. There’s a room in the back that is rarely used—except during their lunch rush and by me. The place has strong Wi-Fi and all-you-can-drink Diet Pepsi, but no available outlets.

That’s it. If I only want to work until midnight, there are a few more options: both taco joints. If I don’t mind driving, I can go to the 24-hour KB gas station in Parowan, 15 miles away. They have a grill that serves pretty good food and a huge assortment of fountain drink options. I can get caffeine, but no Wi-Fi. But sometimes the trek is worth it just for a change of scenery. Also, there’s an adorable cat that digs in the garbage outside, and I sometimes watch him/her when I get stuck on something.

“Close to His Office”

Image courtesy Google Street View

You know how sometimes it’s hard to recognize people when you see them out of context? Last year, I was trying to place this guy I’d seen several times at church. I finally figured it out—he worked at my Subway. Daniel and I got pretty friendly. We’d sometimes talk when he was on a break. Sure, it cut into my writing time, but he was a good guy and I didn’t really mind.

A few months later we were at a church function and someone asked Daniel where he worked. His response:

“I work right by David’s office.”

My actual office (in downtown Cedar City) is about three miles away from the Subway out at the junction of I-15 and North Main. But I got it. He worked at the Subway counter, making sandwiches while I toiled away at my laptop a few yards away. Daniel and I shared a good laugh about that.

I was working at the Subway/Love’s last night and took a photo of my “writing office.” So here you go, folks. Here’s where the magic happens:

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#AmWriting

The Postmaster – Not My Biggest Fan

/ David / Leave a comment

I’ve been sending out queries for my young adult novel, Spelunkers. I’m taking it slow, submitting a couple of queries a week. A few weeks ago I did something really extreme. I sent out some letters … via the United States Postal Service.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with query letters, they’re an art for in themselves. You have about a page to hook your reader (in this case, a literary agent), summarize your story, and give a little information about who you are and why you wrote the book. With email queries, the agent you’re querying simply responds in kind. With queries sent through the mail, it’s necessary to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope so the agent can send your response.

Today I got one of my old-school responses. It came in what was left of my SASE, sealed inside a plastic bag:

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The mailman killed my query. Here’s what was left of the rejection letter from the agent:

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At least I’m guessing, from what was left of the response, that it was a rejection letter. I’m used to that, after several weeks of queries. What I’m not used to is the postal people voicing their own opinion of the quality of my query. The letter from the agent is obviously a form letter. Coincidentally, I also got a form letter from the post office:

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When you’re querying, it seems that everyone—the Postal Service included—is a critic.

Poor Man’s Copyright – My Copyright Box

/ David / 2 Comments

There’s this box sitting in my basement. I’ve been carrying it around for 22 years.

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It’s a white media box, sealed with paper tape which some helpful post office worker stamped like crazy with his date seal. I was living with my aunt and uncle when I originally sent it, and both the TO and FROM addresses point to the same address in Tempe, Arizona. The meter is postmarked April 20, 1994—just when Ace of Base’s “The Sign” was getting a lot of initial airplay and The Hudsucker Proxy was still in theaters:

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Every once in a while, I look at the box and think, “Why haven’t I opened this thing after all these years?”

Good question.

Poor Man’s Copyright

Someone told me once, a long time ago, that the best way to protect creative materials is to seal them up and send them to yourself, then keep them unopened.

The idea, I guess, is that if Sneaky McStealer happened to find one of my masterpieces, ripped them off and turned them into a major motion picture blockbuster or a New York Times bestseller, I could take McStealer to court for infringement of intellectual property.

How It’s Supposed to Work

I can just see it now. My lawyer gets McStealer on the stand and asks him where he came up with the idea for “his” movie. He lies through is teeth and says it was his original idea. Then plaintiff’s attorney brings in this battered box and sets it on the railing in front of the defendant. I can see it now…

Attorney: Mr. McStealer, what is the postmark on the box in front of you?

McStealer: Looks like April 20, 1994. It was a Wednesday, I recall…

Attorney: Please, just answer the questions, sir. And does this box show any evidence of having been opened?

McStealer: (glaring suspiciously across the courtroom) Uh, no, I guess it doesn’t.

Attorney: (producing an X-acto knife.) Would you please open that box, Mr. McStealer?

Sneaky McStealer slits open the paper tape and opens the box. With his back to the defendent, plaintiff’s counsel asks the next question.

Attorney: And can you tell the court, Mr. McStealer, what’s inside that box?

McStealer: It’s a copy of that screenplay I st— I mean, I wrote.

Attorney: Can you please tell us, sir, how it is that the screenplay you supposedly wrote in 2016 happens to be inside a box sent to David S. Baker in 1994?

Music hit: Dum dum DUUUUMMMM!

The slimy rip-off artist opens the box and—voila!—sitting inside is the novel that made him millions. Sneaky swallows. He looks at the judge. He looks at me, then slowly raises his hands.

McStealer: Okay, okay! I admit it! I snuck into his house and stole that old novel and claimed the story as my own. I’m sorry, Mr. Baker, I really am. I’ll dedicate my life to making sure you get the credit for your brilliance!

It Doesn’t Really Work

I guess that’s what I was thinking, anyway. The problem is, it doesn’t really work. According to copyright.gov:

I’ve heard about a “poor man’s copyright.” What is it?

The practice of sending a copy of your own work to yourself is sometimes called a “poor man’s copyright.” There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration.

Of course, that’s from the government. What the heck do they know? But even Snopes.com, Internet debunkers extraordinaire, have weighed in on the topic:

Mailing one’s works to oneself and keeping the unopened, postmarked envelope as proof of right of ownership to them (a practice known as the “poor man’s copyright”) has no substantive legal effect in the U.S. We’ve yet to locate a case of its use where an author’s copyright was established and successfully defended in a court of law by this method. At best, such mailings might serve to establish how long the author has been asserting ownership of the work, but since the postmarked-and-sealed envelope “proof” could be so easily circumvented, it is doubtful courts of law would regard such evidence as reliable.

Oh.

Rats.

Copyright Basics

The thing is, anything you or I write today is automatically copyright. It might not be registered, but it’s automatically protected from the moment of its creation until 70 years after you or I die.

We don’t even have to write “Copyright 2016” and try to remember the weird Windows Alt-code for the copyright symbol (or the HTML character entity, if we’re working on the web). But for the record, in Windows you hold down the Alt key and type “0169.” If you have a Mac, it’s Alt-G. In HTML, it’s “©” or “©.”

What’s in the Box?

Here’s the funny part. I have no idea what’s actually in that box. I honestly can’t remember. I have to guess it contains the screenplay I wrote that year (the one that’s already been made into a movie). My one-act play Inside Al might be in there even though it’s already registered with the copyright office, plus several other plays I wrote as a high schooler and colleger. The two novels I wrote in my teens, one of which won an honorable mention for the Avon Flare Young Novelist contest, may be in the box as well.

What else? Essays from my early years? Poetry, heaven forbid? What else is in that darned box?

Still Unopened

I don’t have any idea … and I won’t likely know for a long time, because I can’t bring myself to open it. Don’t ask me why.

So here’s my commitment. I’ll open the box on the day I get my first novel published—the day I go into a bookstore and find a book I’ve written sitting on the shelf. When that finally happens (and I think I’m getting closer) I’ll get a camera rolling and do an “open box video” of my little time capsule of sad literary output.

Stay tuned…

Genre Angst — Science Fiction vs. Fantasy

/ David / Leave a comment

I’ve begun the process of querying a young adult novel I’ve been working on. While writing and rewriting and re-rewriting my query letter, I discovered something entirely unexpected. I might have a different genre of novel on my hands than I originally thought.

sugar-cubeSo, a quick spoiler alert. The idea for my book, Spelunkers, came to me after reading the much-cited fact that the the entire human race could fit into a space the size of a sugar cube if you could remove all the empty space in between our atoms. That’s because matter is almost entirely empty space. I imagined the possibilities if a person had the ability to ignore the nuclear forces that hold particles together in order to mesh their own matter with other matter. Thus: a Spelunker is a person who can walk through stone.

Since the idea of Spelunking is based on scientific fact, I have always assumed that Spelunkers (the book) was science fiction. But is it?

According to “Sci-Fi & Fantasy Expert” Mark Wilson at About.com, “Humanity can look forward to the kinds of achievements postulated in science fiction, while with another part of our brain we can dream of the impossibilities conjured by fantasy. Science fiction expands our world; fantasy transcends it.” This sounds to me like we’re talking about possibilities vs. impossibilities. If I’m reading this correctly, he’s saying that science fiction is about things that are possible (or plausible), given our understanding of the laws of the universe. In contrast, fantasy is about things that impossible (or implausible).

If we take this perspective, we find that lots of stories we always assumed to be science fiction (like Star Wars and Dune) are actually fantasy. I think we have to assume and accept that the categories have a lot of overlap. Many authors blur the lines. Orson Scott Card famously said in an interview, “… Look, fantasy has trees, and science fiction has rivets. That’s it, that’s all the difference there is, the difference of feel, perception.” Ender’s Game (and all of its tag-along books) clearly fits the definition of science fiction. But some of Card’s other books, like his Alvin Maker and Pathfinder series, are definitely fantasy. Similarly, Robert A. Heinlein is known as a sci-fi writer. He wrote Starship Troopers as well as probably the best sci-fi book of all time, Stranger in a Strange Land. But his books Glory Road, Magic, Inc., and Job are clearly fantasy.

Another way people tend to define the genres is based on magic vs. technology. This is problematic, though. Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, stated that “magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.” Clarke explored the idea of possible versus impossible and came up with three laws:

Clarke’s first law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke’s second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So when Albus Dumbledore casts a spell in a Harry Potter novel, do we just assume he’s using some kind of advanced technology? Probably not. When the spaceships in Star Trek break every rule of science and travel faster than light are they using magic? Who knows?

The problem with genres is that they are malleable. They’re blurry. They have only two real uses:

  1. To tell librarians and bookstore employees where to shelve the books.
  2. To help people who enjoy certain books find other books they’ll like.

The former mostly applies only to bricks-and-mortar stores and libraries. In a virtual library or bookstore (like Amazon.com), a book can be “shelved” under several different categories. The latter is problematic, because it doesn’t account for other factors. For example, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books (fantasy) are more like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books (sci-fi) than they are like anything written by either of the “R.R.” authors (Tolkien or Martin).

And sci-fi and fantasy aren’t the only options. There’s “paranormal,” which Wikipedia describes as a subgenre of romance that mixes in “elements beyond the range of scientific explanation.” Luckily, I’m not writing romance, so that’s not an option. Another classification is “speculative fiction,” which includes fantasy and science-fiction and horror and some other stuff. (Annie Neugebauer explains more here.)

The upshot is that I wrote a book that blends elements of both science fiction and fantasy in a book for young adults. How to actually say that in a query is the problematic part.

It only goes to show that just as soon as you think you have something figured out, you realize you don’t.

NaNoWriMo 2015 – Final Thoughts

/ David / Leave a comment

WinnerStats

Winner! Yay!

This year was my fourth time participating in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. While the challenge is always the same—produce 50,000 words during the 30 days of November—each experience is slightly different.

Same Strategy, Different Book

This year was a lot more like my first year than my previous two. Because I’d been working on other writing projects, I didn’t really get a chance to do a lot of planning. Consequently, I pantsed the sucker. Basically, I started on Day 1 with a single vivid scene in my mind. That turned into two chapters, which spawned seven or eight earlier chapters leading up to my original scene. The plot bunnies multiplied and pretty soon I had a whole story on my hands.

Unlike previous years, I never got stuck. Even now, on Day 31, I still have plenty of chapters racked up and ready to write. I never really had to squeeze … instead, I just had to show up in front of my keyboard so the words could come out.

As always, I didn’t get a chance to finish a whole book. My books are just longer than 50,000 words (or 68,000, which is what I ended up writing). I anticipate that this draft will end up at around 120K words, which I’ll try to tighten up to 110K.

Once again, I kept my strategy of leaving home to write. I just can’t produce as well at home. So almost every evening in November, I left home at around 9:00 or 9:30 and sat somewhere else as I typed until 11:00 or 12:00. I wrote in seven different fast food restaurants, three truck stops, two different libraries, a bar/grill and a hotel room. It works for me, so I’ll keep doing it. The workers at the 24-hour Love’s/Subway by my house all know my name.

Writing Weekend

I’ve always wanted to try taking a few days by myself to see whether I could really crank out some words. This year, I actually did it. I took off a Friday, and spent Thursday night, Friday night and Saturday in a hotel in Las Vegas (which is 2-1/2 hours away from my house). To win NaNo you have to produce 1,666 words per day, every day, for the entire month of November. My goal was 2,000 words—more when I had the time and stamina.

My wife was in San Diego that same weekend, so I knew she would be driving to Vegas Saturday afternoon or early evening. That gave me about 48 hours to produce as many words as I could. The only gambling I did the whole time was a game of Bingo after my wife showed up.

I bounced around a lot, and I used meals as my reward. I started at a bagel shop, produced 1,000 words there, moved back to my hotel room and wrote another thousand. Rewarded myself with lunch, then went to a library to crank out another grand. Moved to a McDonald’s and got a Diet Coke and wrote some more. Friday was my most productive day, with over 6,000 words. Saturday was a 4,500-word day. Add to that the 2,000 words I wrote on Thursday night and I produced over 12,500 words in under 48 hours. I’ll take that.

NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program

I don’t think I knew before this year, but NaNo has a Young Writers Program. This year I got to do something about it. A good friend of mine teaches creative writing at a local high school. I was privileged to have the opportunity to talk to four of his classes about NaNo and what it has to offer a young writer.

If you want to look at my presentation slides, you can do so here. And yes, apparently it’s okay to use the word “badassery” when talking to high school students.

Of the 12 students who added me as “writing buddies” four won the 50,000-word challenge. Others likely set smaller goals and met them. I’m proud of my writing buddies; it was great to follow their success throughout the month.

The Value of NaNoWriMo

A lot of people question the idea of forcing yourself to sit down every day and crank out a certain number of words. “That’s not the way art is produced!” “That’s counter-creative!” To that, I say bull-puckey.

Unlike other kinds of artists, a writer can’t got to a store and buy tubes of paints or a box of clay. A writer has to create his or her own raw materials before they can be turned into art. The goal of NaNo is to give yourself permission to create a big pile of words that can later be turned into something wonderful.

In order to be successful, a writer has to learn to disengage the internal critic that prevents production and exploration and discovery. When I talked to the young writers, I asked them to visualize a cartoon devil on their shoulde, sitting there saying, “That’s crap—nobody’s gonna want to read that! Watch your spelling and grammar and punctuation! Don’t move on until it’s perfect!” If you commit to NaNoWriMo, you have to learn to kick that devil off your shoulder and just produce, because you simply don’t have time to revise.

NaNo is about drafting, and drafting isn’t about art. Drafting is about work and work ethic. To a great degree, it’s about developing writerly habits. It’s about applying your butt to a chair and then applying (digital) words to (digital) paper. The art comes later, but it never will come if you don’t have a pile of words to start with.

So yay! I’ve got me a pile of words … about 60 percent of a full draft. Next step: finishing the draft, and then making art.