Shall We Tense?

I’m thinking about recasting the IF story I’m working on, switching from second person, present tense to third person, past tense. I wish I was sure what would be best. The story is less than half written, but even so, it’s a big job. (If I wait until the story is all laid out and then decide to switch, the job will be far bigger!)

Eric Eve’s game “Shelter from the Storm” lets the player choose tense and person freely … although future tense and plural person settings are not included. That might be fun to try sometime – a hive-mind (or simply royal) narrator. Here’s an actual output from “Shelter from the Storm” as it might appear in first person plural, future tense:

   >i
   We will be carrying a theatrical magazine, a piece of paper, and a long
   wooden pole, and we will be wearing a beret and khaki battledress.

That has a kind of eerie charm. More to the point, though, Eric’s experiment seems, from what I can see, to have extended no further than

Can Interactive Fiction Be Literature?

I don’t often think about literature as such; I only think about whether I like a given book. But there is such a thing as literary fiction, and it’s not the same thing as commercial fiction. Some literature is commercially successful, of course. I don’t mean to imply that if it sells well, it can’t be literature. But there are differences.

Before we can look at the question of whether a work of interactive fiction could ever qualify as literature, we need to have some sort of working definition of how a conventional novel qualifies as literature.

I’m aware that there are people who find this sort of question insulting. The idea that anything might be inherently superior to the stuff they happen to like is, in their view, profoundly

Oops! Never Mind….

Picked up the new Michael Connelly novel (a two-fisted Harry Bosch LAPD mystery) at the library. It’s called Nine Dragons. It’s a page-turner, no question. Lots of danger and intrigue. Mysterious Chinese gangs. Guns blazing, knives drawing blood.

And then you get to the very end, after Harry Bosch has left a trail of bodies in Hong Kong, and you find out that the entire Hong Kong angle of the plot was purely a coincidence. Nine people are dead because of something that had nothing whatever to do with the case that Harry was investigating in L.A.

Sorry, Michael. You’re off my A-list. This kind of thing is pathetic. There’s no excuse for it. Yeah, you have to keep the reader guessing. An unexpected reversal at the end of the book is always fun. But when, 1/3 of the way through the story, Harry receives two dire threats in quick succession, and then at the end it turns out that the two had nothing to do with one another … no. That doesn’t work.

I’m going to spoil the book for you here. The reason there are nine people dead in Hong Kong, including Harry’s ex-wife, is because their 13-year-old daughter has staged her own fake kidnapping in order to get her father to fly from L.A. to Hong Kong. Now, granted, 13-year-old girls are somewhat impulsive and don’t always recognize the consequences of their actions. But even so, this stunt is pretty far over the top for a girl who shows no other signs of mental instability. In fact, she seems to accept her mother’s death with remarkable equanimity. The gut-wrenching pain of a girl who is carrying the terrible secret that she has just caused her mother’s death simply isn’t there. She sheds tears, takes a long shower, and then she’s fine.

Not only that, but in the course of staging the hoax, she and her friends rent a room in a seedy hotel to shoot what is supposedly to be a ransom video. They had no earthly reason to rent a room for this childish hoax. The only reason they did it was so Connelly could add to the plot suspense.

The Hong Kong gore-fest is the middle half of the book, and it’s the only part that has any action or suspense. We’re led to believe, and indeed Harry assumes, that a Los Angeles branch of a Chinese gang sent word back to Hong Kong that Harry’s daughter was to be snatched in order to get him to back off instead of going ahead with an investigation. Now, on any rational level this makes no sense whatever. The guy Harry has in custody as a suspect in L.A. is a low-level bagman for a routine shakedown, and seems to have popped a storekeeper who was late making a hundred-dollar payoff (which makes no sense either — and indeed, he’s innocent).

Why it would be so important to free the bagman from custody that word would travel like lightning up the gang’s chain of command clear to Hong Kong, where somehow the gang already knew how to locate one particular policeman’s daughter and was able to arrange a kidnapping on extremely short notice – I’m not a cop, but I can tell that that makes no sense. And when we reach the end of the book, we learn that, indeed, that wasn’t what was happening at all. But clear through the book, that’s what Harry Bosch, a 25-year-veteran of the LAPD detective squad, thinks is happening. Bosch is behaving like an idiot. Okay, he thinks his daughter is in mortal peril (as, indeed, she is, thanks to her own screwball impulse), so he acts a little rashly. Even so, as a plot device, it’s a dead fish.

The actual culprits in the original murder are just as inexplicable. A young Chinese man and woman, brother and sister, are frustrated because their father won’t sell his liquor store in the ghetto.  The family also owns a much more upscale store in a suburb, and the store in the ghetto is losing money, but out of pride and stubbornness Dad won’t close up shop in the old family store. So they convince the assistant manager at the upscale store to murder Dad, with the promise that then they’ll be able to open another new store and make him manager.

I’m not saying this could never happen. One trouble is, Connelly doesn’t give us any psychological insight into these people’s character that would make it believable. They seem like a perfectly nice middle-class Chinese family, up until the point when we learn that they’ve engaged in a bizarre plot to kill their own father. (Ross MacDonald didn’t make this kind of mistake. His middle-class and upper-class murderers were visibly unbalanced. You could understand how they might be that screwed up.)

Another issue is that the clues that lead Harry to unmask the murderers are so gosh-darn far-fetched. The dying man does something utterly bizarre — he puts an ejected shell casing in his mouth, though he has already been shot through the heart. And Harry happens to notice a college diploma hanging on a wall. If it weren’t for those two details, the murderers would never have been brought to justice. Certainly not through anything resembling actual police work.

Also, in the last chapter, Harry’s flaky partner manages to get himself killed, for no particular reason. It’s just a sort of childish impulse on Connelly’s part — “Gee, can I manage to add a little more blood and gore? Oh, sure.”

This is not the first time Connelly has fleshed out a novel with a long and intricate red herring. I believe it’s in Trunk Music that Harry Bosch goes roaring off to Vegas on what turns out to be a wild goose chase. But when the wild goose chase is prompted by a pure coincidence, when it leads to mass carnage, when the results of the mass carnage seem to occasion so little reaction on the part of the character who provoked it, and when the real murderers are so implausible, it’s pretty obvious Connelly is slipping. The perils of success, I suppose.

Tell Me a Story

Today I uploaded four more short stories to my humble website. For years I resisted doing this type of self-publishing, and for a very simple reason: Most of the fiction people put up on the Web is utter crap. It’s beyond awful. Who would want to be associated in the mind of the reader with such drivel?

But in the end I decided that modesty was foolish. I’m the exception that proves the rule. I’m certainly not Chekhov or Cheever, and never will be, but I do have a reasonable grasp of the art and craft of storytelling.

There are eight stories on the site now, of which four were previously published in well-known science fiction magazines. The other four are not previously published, but I’ll bet you won’t be able to tell which are which. They’re all pretty darn good. I have about eight more that I plan to upload before too long, and the percentage will stay about the same — half reprints from magazines, half previously unpublished.

For a while I was planning to do a print anthology, which would be made available through a print-on-demand publisher like lulu.com. I may still do that. But I have no marketing or promotional structure through which to sell books, so I’d probably sell no more than a few dozen copies. Besides, a print edition wouldn’t have the lovely color photos that I downloaded for free from Stock Xchg. I think they add something to the presentation.

If you enjoy the stories, I hope you’ll drop me an email and let me know. The probability that I’ll write a few more rises exponentially with each positive response that I receive.

Channel-Surfing Through Life

I’m happiest when I have a project to work on — something fairly structured, with parameters that I can understand and a clearly defined goal. I don’t insist that the goal include bringing in a bit of money, but money is nice.

Also, the ability of a project to earn money is a useful measure of its actual utility in the real world. This is not always the case: I wrote The Inform 7 Handbook, and it’s a free download, as are all of the interactive fiction games I’ve written. But if a project isn’t going to earn money, it needs at least to have, as a goal, a clear function within a defined community. I felt there was a clear need for a handbook on Inform, and the feedback I’ve gotten indicates that I was right.

When not engaged in a project, I have activities. Practicing the cello is an activity: It’s enjoyable, but it has no particular goal, other than to keep my calluses from getting soft. Composing music in my computer is an activity. Sometimes I finish a piece that I’ve started, but sometimes I get distracted and never get around to finishing it. If I fail to finish it, there are no consequences, because it was never a project. Likewise, if I do finish it there are no consequences. I can upload a finished piece to my website, and maybe three people will download and listen to it, and maybe they’ll even like it – but so what? If it wasn’t there for them to listen to, they wouldn’t know. Their lives would not be impoverished one whit by the music’s absence.

I have lots of interesting activities to distract me. I can jump from one to another on a whim. But there’s a cost to this freedom. A lot of music never gets finished, and at the end of a year all I’ve managed was to have a little fun. Compose some music, or rent a movie? It’s a coin toss.

This is channel-surfing through life. I don’t really care for it. I’d rather have a project. But defining a project that’s actually a project is difficult. All too often, a “project” turns out to be no more than an attempt to grit my teeth and stay focused on one activity without getting distracted. If there’s no real goal, it’s a fake project. “Record six pieces of music and finish them all” is a fake project.

Last fall I wrote a novel. That was a real project. It’s starting to look like I may have trouble getting it published, which is discouraging — not because I want to be a famous author (I have mixed feelings about that), but because getting a novel published is a central part of the goal. If it’s not published, I have no reason to undertake a similar project in the future. And what I need, for life to have meaning, is a project.

Cheap Thrills

This week my literary agent told me he couldn’t get excited about my new novel. He described the characters as “wooden and predictable.”

I try not to take this sort of thing personally. He’s a businessman. If he thinks he can’t sell the book to a publisher … well, he has a much better idea than I do what publishers are looking for.

I did my best to write a story about real people. They’re muddling through the way real people do. There are several murders — it’s a mystery novel. An innocent man is thrown in jail. At the end, the detective has to fight it out with the villain hand to hand. I worked hard to build a solid plot while having all of the characters do things that they could actually be expected to do in the circumstances. But somehow the story failed to be compelling for a knowledgeable reader.

And then last night I watched Indiana Jones & the Crystal Skull. The movie opens with an entirely gratuitous atomic bomb explosion. It includes a guy with a bullwhip (we know who that is) and a villainess equipped with a cruel haircut, a foreign accent, and a team of soldiers with submachine guns. Also, she’s an expert fencer, so there are swordfights, one of them between two people who are standing in the backs of open vehicles that are racing side by side through the jungle on a flat two-lane road that has been thoughtfully constructed for the benefit of the sword-fighters (there being no other reason why such a road might conceivably have been built through the Amazon jungle). There’s a crazy guy who has carved clues into the walls of his cell in the asylum, for no reason other than to give Indie (or anyone else who reads and speaks ancient Mayan, I suppose) ideas about where to go next. There are Amazon savages with poison darts in their blowguns, and they’re pointlessly hostile, of course. A guy who rides a motorcycle and is an expert fencer. Army ants devouring people. Scorpions. Quicksand. People going over waterfalls in an amphibious vehicle (three times) and somehow never getting knocked on the head by the vehicle as it tumbles through the air. Aliens from another dimension. A guy swinging through the jungle on conveniently placed vines. Several chase scenes in which the guys with submachine guns shoot at Indie and somehow never hit him. Giant alien machinery made of stone that’s 500 years old and yet somehow still functions perfectly.

And one more thing: The plot didn’t make a lick of sense. It was filled with idiocy from one end to the other. People do things for no reason, other than to provide the movie-goer with cheap thrills. Things happen that are never explained.

Yeah, I can see that my novel is seriously out of touch with mainstream American culture.

Novel Possibilities

I sent my new novel off to my agent several weeks ago. Today I got around to printing out a complete copy of the final draft. I print out chapters as I write them, in case of computer disaster, but in 8-pt type so as to save paper. And not all of the revisions make it into those piecemeal printouts. Having a readable copy of the whole thing is a good idea.

This is not my first attempt at a mystery. I’ve written two in years past, both unpublished … and that’s probably just as well. This time I think I came much closer to hitting the nail on the head. I’m already thinking of making a few minor changes, but the story is solid.

If my agent can sell it, I’ll turn it into a series, of course. That would be fun, and possibly even lucrative. If he can’t sell it, I doubt I’ll ever write another novel. It’s a lot of work. Also, I’ve got this idea for a screenplay. Probably a miniseries, as I can’t see shoehorning the whole sprawling story into a two-hour movie.

I’ve never written a screenplay. It’s a very different discipline! And a very difficult market, too. But if I have a good story to tell, it’s worth giving it a try.

Reading: Strangers

Stayed up ’til 2 in the morning finishing J. D. Robb’s Strangers in Death, so I may as well admit it was a good story. The plot is borrowed from an old Hitchcock movie, but Robb (Nora Roberts in real life) has the good grace to admit it.

About halfway through the book, police detective Eve Dallas figures out who done it, and of course her gut instinct is on the money. The tricky bit is getting enough evidence to nail the ingenious killer’s hide to the wall.

The packing material, which is plentiful, is less satisfying than the story. Robb is writing exclusively for women: There are at least four long, steamy scenes (one in a swimming pool) in which Eve has enormously satisfying sex with her husband. Male genitalia are referred to again and again and again, in a variety of contexts, including castration with a carving knife. We might imagine the howls of protest from feminists if a male author wrote about women’s anatomy for a male readership with such unabashed gusto.

Eve’s husband is straight out of a romance comic book. He’s phenomenally good looking, extremely rich, macho enough to scare off muggers, sensitive to Eve’s every mood, and — for dessert – an expert computer geek who cheerfully pitches in to help her solve her cases.

The main characters are all more or less romance staples. Most of the men are rich and good-looking (though not as rich or good-looking as Eve’s husband). The women, likewise, tend to be rich, good-looking, and virtuous, except for the murderers, who are suitably creepy. There are two virtuous poor women. One bakes Eve a lemon meringue pie, the other is a hooker who is turning tricks to pay for her daughter’s ice-skating lessons.

Let’s just say Robb’s moral universe is not extremely nuanced, and leave it at that.

The Eve Dallas books, of which there seem to be quite a number, are nominally set in the future — 2060 or thereabouts. But science fiction writers have nothing to fear. Robb isn’t even trying to write SF. Except for a couple of androids stacked in a closet and the notion that the killer will be sent to a prison “off-planet,” the whole book could have been set in today’s world by using a word processor to search-and-replace “link” with “cell phone” and “glide” with “escalator.”

As a sometime SF writer myself, I’m a bit offended by this, but I think Roberts has made a smart marketing move. Mysteries sell better than SF, and the average mystery reader would undoubtedly be baffled by half a dozen elements that SF readers not only take for granted but demand. The future is just another exotic setting to Robb’s mystery fans. It’s entirely on a par with Ellis Peters’s Medieval monastery and Lindsey Davis’s Rome, though not as well fleshed out as either of them.

The main reason I’m reading books like Strangers in Death is not, in any case, for the unalloyed pleasure that it affords; I’m researching the marketing decisions various authors are making. Robb’s decisions (cross-breed the police procedural with the explicit romance novel, stake your claim to an exotic setting that no one has used yet) are entirely sensible.

And on the bright side, there are no vampires.

The Middle 8

In jazz parlance, the middle 8 is the B section in a 32-bar AABA song form. In the middle 8, the chord progression turns a corner and the song moves off into a different space.

I’ve been working on a plot outline for a mystery novel. Like many mystery plots, it has a middle 8.

Or we could look at it as the second act of a three-act play. Crime caper novels and police procedurals sometimes have more complex structures, but a great many mysteries can be analyzed well as having three acts.

In the first act, we meet the main characters, and Something Awful Happens. In the second act, the sleuth Trudges Around, Interviewing Suspects and Following Clues. In the third act, the Truth is Revealed, the Culprit is Unmasked (which often leads to a Thrilling and Suspenseful Chase), and Virtue Triumphs.

Most mystery writers can come up with Something Awful. And Unmasking a Culprit isn’t that difficult either. But watching over the sleuth’s shoulder as he or she trudges around interviewing suspects can be fascinating and fun for the reader, or it can be deadly dull. That distinction is what I’m meditating on this morning.

In the classic Agatha Christie model, there’s not much action in the middle 8, although Christie’s formula relied on a second murder (usually the death of the person you think is the most likely suspect) along in there somewhere. Mostly, Hercule Poirot just asks questions and uses his little gray cells. In Christie’s capable hands, this formula worked well enough, or at least it was viable 75 years ago, when she wrote her best stories.

Another writer of the same period, Erle Stanley Gardner, probably offers a better model for the modern mystery writer. Gardner was, by some criteria, a dreadful writer. His characters were cardboard, his prose bland and pedestrian. But he sold millions of books — by some estimates I’ve seen, more than 100 million. He got his start in the ’30s and ’40s, before television really took off, and he was supplying for readers

Advanced Techno-Babble

Poking around in craigslist tonight, glancing at ads for writer/editors. A company called Sybase is looking for a writer. I don’t think it’s me, but I was curious about what they do. Their home page is designed with all kinds of little pop-up widgets — very sexy. One of the widgets says “Afaria.” I had no idea what that word might mean, so I clicked on it. Figured I might learn something.

Here’s what I learned:

“Afaria provides comprehensive management and security capabilities to ensure that mobile data and devices are up-to-date, reliable and secure.”

Mobile data — there’s a concept to make your head swim! What I think maybe they’re talking about is, your CEO is using his Blackberry while on a flight to Singapore, and Afaria makes sure he can access an encrypted database. But that’s a pure blind guess on my part.

“With Afaria,” the body copy goes on, “IT has the level of control and visibility required to proactively manage and secure multiple device types, applications, data and communications critical to frontline success, regardless of the bandwidth available. By putting control in the hands of IT, frontline workers are freed from the burden of management tasks, which increases user adoption and productivity. Afaria uniquely combines mobile device management and mobile security from a single console, providing the best protection against security threats and compliance issues.”

I think I’m getting a sense of why they need a writer. Not that I’m tempted to apply. What does any of that goop mean? I have no idea what a frontline worker is, but it seems clear that Afaria is going to ensure that they remain peons, “freed from the burden of management tasks.” And I guess we’re talking about orphaned frontline workers, probably under-age ones, if they’re in need of adoption.

Mobile security, that’s another interesting idea — now your security is here, now it’s gone somewhere else. And compliance issues are something a psychologist would have to sort out, right?

Teaching cello can be frustrating at times, but it has the enormous advantage that I’m dealing with utterly concrete matters. “You used your 3rd finger instead of your 2nd finger.” “You skipped ahead during that rest.” “You’re lifting the bow from your shoulder. You need to learn to use your wrist.” I seem to be on an entirely different planet than Afaria. And frankly, I’m very happy about it.