Inner voices

There are certain inner voices we all share. There's one that lurks in the shower and plays back to us stupid things we have said at parties or other public gatherings--the little inner voice that makes us punch the shower-stall wall.

Another voice common to most of us starts to whisper just as we are finally getting hold of the first tendril of a good night's sleep. That voice tells us what we should have said, the clinching phrase that would have swayed the meeting to our side in the debate, silenced the bully, stifled the person telling racist jokes on the bus. So witty, so incisive...and so impossibly too late. And, of course, after that voice has spoken we are too annoyed with ourselves to go to sleep easily.

I have other inner voices that are more welcome, though. My dad died a few years ago; but he had throat cancer early and most of his voice died in 1963 as a by-product of the surgery that saved his life. He had a hearty whisper from then on, but not the remarkable, rich baritone he had had before the operation. When I was small and we all crammed into the car for family trips, he would sometimes sing to amuse us (when he wasn't making up cribbage hands from the letters and numbers on the license plates of the cars ahead of us). Sometimes if I sing "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" I can sort of hear him singing along with me. That's a precious inner voice.

And there are other inner voices that just plain puzzle me. Back before I moved from guitar to banjo, I used to play a lot of Renaissance pieces that had originally been composed for the lute. I have the remains of the music book I wore to tatters over many years of practicing that must have been a sad trial for anyone within range.

Adrian Denss wrote one of those pieces, a "ronde", in 1594. Here's a snippet of it:

I plucked away at this thing off and on for a week or so, and finally had the fingering worked out. Then, the first time I tried to play it through without pausing, a voice spoke in my head when I got to the measure I have put in a red rectangle. Between the little run and the chord, the voice said, "Wouldn't it have been better if, rather than trying to capture more of the enemy, they had figured out how to take care of those they had already captured?"

I don't know what it meant, or what it means. And, of course, after the first time, the words were there as if printed on the page whenever I played that piece and got to that measure.

Maybe that's why I moved over to banjo.

Back before computers

I was hunting through a file drawer for something else entirely, and came across an artifact from a political campaign from about thirty years back. It's a sort of script I developed for doing a phone or door-to-door survey of voters in the first canvass during an election.

I typed this thing out five or six times before I had it the way I wanted, and then got out what must have been a purple felt-tip to draw the flow arrows.

Nowadays, of course, I would just fire up Gliffy or one of its online design cousins and drag-n-drop until I had the flow I wanted, in a chart I could edit as needed. And then I could launch Apache Flex (or the technology of your choice) and build a little app for mobile devices to display the script in an interactive form so the campaign worker wouldn't have to struggle with clipboard and paper and the app could throw survey responses back to a central database.

Time to run off the newsletter!

But I'm glad I had the chance to write on a manual typewriter with correction fluid near to hand, to painstakingly carve text into a stencil and then run off copies of key documents on a Gestetner duplicator. Since it was so hard to correct something once it got typed or drawn, you learned to compose in your head to near-final quality, rather than just flinging words at the screen and editing afterwards. You might even write things out by hand with a pen and a pad of paper before turning to the typing machine.

I think having to do mental composition, and then the tactile exercise of forming the words in ink, before typing what others might see helped me think more clearly about what I was writing and why I was writing it. It also means I have an endless stock of boring pre-computer stories to stun younger people with.

Lost in the maps

I have been working on a fun freelance project for a UK company, Anquet. Part of my work has involved creating image maps off huge images of Britain, Scotland, and Wales. You can click on a sector on the image to download a detailed map of that sector.

The client just told me the first feature is live, so I went to check it out and am having fun both with the map and the company's downloadable app. Next time I'm in UK, I'll have this on my tablet.

One of the delights of the project was running into all sorts of obscure-to-me place names in the British Isles, names I had heard at some point in the past and filed without quite knowing where in the country they were. Some few I have visited, but the majority of these odd but old friends I know from historical novels and other sources.

Or, of course, from the Flanders and Swann song, "The Slow Train", made up of names of now-closed train stations across England:

Passionate

I've added "Passionate" to the short story page.

 I had a drive-by review of this story once. I had read/performed it as part of an evening of storytelling put together by Image Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts. The next day we were crossing the parking lot at a mall on our way to the grocery store. A car zoomed toward us and screeched to a halt, and the driver stuck his head out--it was a guy who had been at the show, an author of several books. "Loved that story, loved it!" he said. "New Yorker quality." Then he zoomed away.

Short Story page

I've added a short story page that will have links to stories I have written and am happy with, but that for some reason have not had a lot of circulation.

As your Advent treat, the first story added is "Proper Tennis". I hope you enjoy it!

Freelance page updated

My adventures in freelance-land are continuing, and continuing happily. As soon as I can catch my breath after completing the current fascinating jobs I will share the fun with you.

In the meantime--one of my clients asked me for a detailed list of what writing services I offer, so I have updated my writer and editor page. Have a look!

Message management

To my mind there are a few key elements to a message or marketing strategy. In rough order of priority, the key elements are:

1. Learn and listen to your audience before you speak. When you talk about what you find important, you have to connect it to what they find important.
2. Provide the value proposition: a clear, deliverable message that says what you want to say in a way your audience can hear it. The value proposition should identify a pain point for your audience and explain how you, or what you offer, will help make the pain go away.
3. Include a call to action (do this, contribute that). The action should be clear, do-able (“sign this petition” not “end injustice!”) and if possible make the audience member who acts feel good for having acted and more ready to act again.
4. Persist, but don’t pester. For each audience there is an ideal frequency of communications so that each contact reinforces your message and strengthens your connection with that audience. Less than that, and you drop out of memory; more than that, and you are a stalker.
5. Follow through (technical excellence, in that your communication should be of the highest quality you can achieve; timeliness, so you aren’t talking about stuff that’s going to happen so soon on the heels of you talking about it that your audience can’t react) and follow up. When people respond to your message (with a question, a suggestion, a contribution) you need to be ready to respond right back (with thanks, thoughtful response, suggestion of a way to become more active…). Keep a record of what you said, and what got a good (or a bad!) response.
6. Maintain message discipline. Everyone should stay on-message, without sounding like echoes. If you get asked a tricky question, it may be to trick you into an exploitable answer. We don’t need to be the first hose at every fire--it’s often better to get the facts right and make sure what you’re going to say meshes what the campaign is saying, rather than flail in front of the microphones. If you’re not an official spokesperson but you must speak out, make clear you are speaking for yourself.

I started to write this some time back, as I became more and more concerned about the messaging by a group that is very important to me. The current leadership of that group seems to focus obsessively on maintaining message discipline, which is the least important element of them all. The focus, after all, should be on communicating, not on controlling. 

If you are truly communicating, you have to be open to surprises. If what you have to say is important, it will survive occasional errors in the way you say it.

Scribble, scribble

I have somewhere an unfinished screenplay about the life of a freelance writer. I hear you yawning already. But there was a very funny scene with the client who...well, I guess you had to be there.

I will say, though, that working for a wide range of clients and potential clients is super agility exercise for the brain. I am currently working on economic news for the Persian Gulf, business plans for a British company, a screenplay about a hit man with no head for finance, a study guide for those preparing for a standardized exam, and a children's book set in West Africa. I am in conversations about possible jobs with five or six other clients, and not one of the jobs matches any other that I am currently working on or trying to get.

Although I have spent years and years multi-tasking, I am by nature a bear of very little brain. I value being able to contemplate the task, or the task just done, for a little while to understand the full savor of it, rather than just churning along. But the consolation of extended freelancing is that it is never dull.

And there is no point trying to complete that screenplay. The website Clients from Hell catalogs the freelancer's life much better than I ever could.

Not that any of my own clients would ever, ever appear on that site...

We're in Act 2B

A very wise person was just reading to me about Rose Schneiderman, a prominent labor leader in the US in the 20th century. She coined the phrase "bread and roses" to explain what the workers wanted. My wise friend read out from the Wikipedia entry, "Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans," and then said, "We're fighting the same battles she was a hundred years ago."

Some of the details have changed, but indeed this period is even more gilded than the Gilded Age, with the wealthy owning a bigger share than ever before and resenting the not-wealthy for owning anything at all. The "commons" of our shared assets as a people keep shrinking: as an example, the chairman of Nestle, one of the largest food companies in the world, is on record as saying that access to clean water is not a right.

I have to remind myself that the struggle for equity, for the greatest good possible for all people, is not a struggle against nothing, and it's not a struggle against what always must be. It's a struggle against well-financed interests who see nothing in common with average folks, much less with the truly poor and oppressed.

And I have to hope that we are in Act 2B.

What I mean is this: the classic movie follows a "three" act structure--really four acts of roughly equal length, but generally labeled 1, 2, 2B, and 3.

• In act 1 we see just enough of the hero's normal life to understand what he or she thinks is normal...and then the hero gets knocked off that stance by some event, intrusion, outrage, or opportunity. 
• In act 2 the hero starts trying to get back into balance by beating the bad guys, rescuing the prince or princess, winning the race, finding the cure, diverting the meteor, or finding true love. This is sometimes called the "fun and games" act, where it looks like the plot will be foiled or the true love will become available, or the bad guys will be conquered.
• Ah, but act 2b is when the bad guys roar back. The gains of act 2 turn into losses, the hero's best friend dies or turns out to be a traitor, the friendly wizard disappears, the starship runs out of fuel. The hero enters the long dark night of the soul when all seems to be lost--is there even any reason to keep trying?
• Why yes, there is! It's act 3, where somehow the broken threads of the story get knotted together into a net that catches the bad guys, scores the winning goal, stops the auto-destruct with just two seconds to go, and brings the hero face-to-face with the one true love. The dark clouds scatter and the hero finds a new balance and a new understanding. Cue the credits.

The super-powerful and super-heartless have roared back from the "setbacks" of the New Deal and financial regulation and are doing everything they can to reduce the commons, restrict possibilities for all but the already-wealthy, and use up everything the earth has to offer in one orgy of converting the wonder that sustains us into dollars. This is grim and heart-rending.

And yet, act 3 is just around the corner. You, I, and all the other heroes of our multi-faceted movie need to make the effort to overcome adversity, confound the bad guys, and get to the happy ending.

How do we make that happen? I'm counting on you to help me figure it out.

Tidal chess ratings

I love chess rather more than chess loves me. I love playing the game as a relentless amateur, but I don't love it enough to do the sort of careful study that would lead me to any sort of mastery. When it comes to strategy, I am forever saying, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, "What was the part in the middle?"

Back before computers, I used to belong to the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association. We played chess by postcard, one move per card. A game of any decent length could take 18 months to play. I had a fancy folder of flat game boards with little flat pieces that could be stuck into place, to track the 20 or so interminable games I had going.

Now it is shiny modern times, and if I wanted, I could go online whenever I want and play lightning chess games where each player has a timebank of maybe two minutes. That is a bit fast for my brain, however.

For the past decade I have been playing most of my chess on a site with the fetching name of Red Hot Pawn, You can play casual games, join tournaments, or even be on a team in a league. I usually have 30 or so games going at any given time.

I was looking over my game history, and I see I have won just a few more games than I have lost over this decade. This is reasonable, since as you win games your ratings improve, and they match you up with players with higher ratings than the players you were beating before. You get more ratings points when you beat a player who has a higher rating than you do, and fewer when you beat a lower-rated opponent.

But what has always puzzled me are the peaks and troughs--the winning streaks and the bleak weeks--of my game history. Over and over again I win a bunch of games and my rating climbs like the pitch of a roof, and then I go into a tailspin for five, eight, ten games. You would think the outcomes would be more evenly distributed, as at the left of the timeline, rather than clumping so much, so often:

Perhaps it is related to C.S Lewis' great insight in The Screwtape Letters about the Law of Undulation. As the senior devil in the book explains to the trainee devil:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

Not sure how this insight helps me play better chess, but it helps me (a little bit) reconcile to my timeline.

Small victories

Of course I would like to have wealth and lots of pairs of socks and clean underwear and a cello banjo and renown and to have made my mark on the world. I know I can't have them all every day...but on good days I have some of them, or one. Today was a good day, because I helped make a little tiny mark on the world.

The matter was the documentation and onscreen texts for a little application someone has made for mobile devices. It's an earnest effort, and was being handicapped by the somewhat shaky English of the app's description and instructions. I was happy to spend a few hours suggesting alternatives, and today I see the revised text in the online store. The app's creator is happy, and presumably the app's users are less mystified.

Your day has its little victories, too, and as I cherish quiet delight in mine I hope you do in yours. You can build an interesting and useful life by carefully piling up many, many, little tiny victories; and for most of us the chance to operate on a larger scale comes rarely.

Onward, now. I have another editing task: the second part of a children's book about a woman in West Africa and an elephant caught in a trap. I can't wait to see how it (the book, the elephant; maybe both) comes out!

Greetings from Singapore

No, not really; but in the phantom world of freelancing I spent a good part of the day in Southeast Asia.

The situation was this: I got a contract to do a text and functionality review of a website that is going live very soon. This is work I love to do, and do really well, so I was happy with the job.

One little hitch: the person offering the job was on the other side of midnight from me, and the freelance site where I found the job wouldn't let me start tracking my time because the job was not supposed to start until "tomorrow" (the client's today). We spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out, and found that the only immediate solution was for me to change my location on the freelance site to Singapore.

So I did and all worked well. I found lots of text issues (team in India writing under the direction of management in Germany) and not a few functional errors. You know that trick where you copy all the text of a long, long document and paste it into the text entry field that's supposed to hold a short title for something, and then try to submit the form? I love the error messages you can get to show up when they weren't prepared for you to try that.

I imagine that when I change back to my real location sometime tomorrow, all my hours worked will unspool themselves and the freelance site itself will crash.

But in the meantime, now that I've tested as far as I can until they fix what I already found, I will stroll over to Upper Buckit Pimah Road and visit Beauty World Center. We had friends who lived here in Singapore once, and I always had meant to drop in on them...

A slow-growing idea for a play

I think I have an idea for a play. Not saying it too loud, as I don't want to panic the idea and make it evaporate. But I understand its contours just enough that I can start making notes and asking myself questions on a mind-map.


For me, nurturing an idea to the point where I can begin to ask questions about it is often a long, slow process. Something comes into my mind, and I make myself a little note about it; maybe do a couple of thought experiments about how this thinglet might seem as a short story, a play, a song...And then I set it aside and just let it be there.

I revisit the idea, by accident or on purpose, from time to time. And every once in a while an idea lets me know it might be ready for a closer look.

This particular idea first came to me in its fledging form at least 30 years ago. And it has stubbornly stuck around all that time, slowly gaining facets and and depths, so I guess I should do it the honor of trying to wrap a play around it.

A nice thing about being a writer is that you don't really have to know why you write about certain things, why certain ideas make your eyebrows wiggle. If you get good enough (and lucky enough) as a writer, people will do that work for you in their reviews and doctoral theses. If your body of work never gets so prominent that critics want to dissect it to see what makes it tick, that's just fine, too. It's the body of work that's the primary thing, not the analysis of it.

The writer, unless he's Henry James, is more inside the story he is writing than outside it. He is as avid (and maybe as scared) to find out what happens next as is any of his characters. And that's how it should be. The writer should pull critical functions off to one side during the writing process, and bring to bear a naive enthusiasm for the unfolding story. Time enough for critical scrutiny in the second and further drafts.

The why of Black Friday

In the United States, the day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the gift-buying season leading up to Christmas and Hanukkah (and, more recently, Kwanzaa). It's hugely important to merchants, who tend to make the money that makes the year profitable from the end of November to December 24. Calling the day "Black Friday" seems to have started as an observation of the crowds filling the sidewalks in Philadelphia as they went from store to store.

I was getting ready to hold forth on how this US event has leaked into the assumptions and practices of Canadian merchants and consumers...but I found that the excellent Tim Bousquet had gotten there ahead of me.

Tim, a super journalist, runs a website called The Halifax Examiner. You can subscribe there to a daily newsletter with juicy information and observations; for a modest fee you can subscribe to the site and get access to the really powerful articles where Tim fully deploys his investigative and writing skills. A site like this restores my faith in the art of journalism.

On Black Friday and consumerism, Tim touches on the counter-suggestion of Buy Nothing Day, and how it is utopian at best. But he continues:

But Buy Nothing Day is important all the same because it introduces thinking into the equation.The point isn't to rag on consumers per se, but rather to ask broader questions: How'd we ever get into the situation where people flocking to malls to buy crap they don't need on credit is the foundation of the economy? What can we do about it? How do we introduce values like economic justice, environmental protection and simple respect for craftsmanship?

What he said. And he said more than what I just quoted. Go look for yourself.

The Weekly Wednesday Storm

We had some slippery sleet last night, and at that we were much better off than our New Brunswick neighbours across the Bay of Fundy. Tens of thousands of customers there are without electric power today.

We discovered the sleety conditions as we were getting ready to go to a class we attend on Wednesday evenings, so we cancelled out of the class. This is the same class that had to be postponed or cancelled something like eight times last winter--it seemed like a storm blew in and made driving treacherous every Wednesday, and on few other days, last year.

Being Canadian means you take the weather seriously. You aren't appalled by a few snowflakes, but you don't bull through things regardless of the conditions.

When we were in the Arctic, in one of the villages where we lived there was a sort of elephants' graveyard of broken trucks and cars. There weren't all that many four-wheeled vehicles in that part of the north in those days anyhow, and certainly the means to repair a truck were very, very limited. But a lot of the vehicles looked like they had suffered something catastrophic, as opposed to being laid up for the lack of a spare double-sided positronic choke release valve. I remember people telling me that most of the wrecks were the result of people from "the south" (by which the locals meant Toronto or Montreal) driving around as if they were in the south, rather than north of the tree line.

When you're in the south, the clock rules you far more than when you're in the north. In the south, if there's a meeting you're supposed to be at, you head out for it even if the roads are a bit skiddy. The alternative is to take a sick day or look like not-a-team-player. In the north, the weather trumps the clock. You may have an appointment, but if you look out the window and see nothing but flying gray pellets and cannot make out even the shape of the building next to yours, unless lives are at stake it is generally expected that you make a pot of tea and find something that needs doing at home.

In this shiny digital age, we can do a lot online that we used to have to do in person, so we can often cock a snook at the weather. We no longer absolutely have to brave the elements and drive an hour or two to the meeting (and an hour or two back, natch) in order to watch and respond to somebody's 20-minute Powerpoint.

This is not a solution in every case, alas. In our part of Nova Scotia, the areas of really good wifi are interlarded with areas where you are lucky to have dialup access. Oh, and our Wednesday classes are in tap dancing.

F-ing the ineffable

I used to have a recurring nightmare where I had to fight someone, as in a physical brawl, with fists. And in my dream I would try to hit the person, but my fist would get slower and slower, as if moving deeper and deeper into a pool of rubber. Then the other person would start to punch me and I would snap awake in a sweat.

That experience comes back to me whenever I am trying to deal with bland inanity. I never, ever mind an energetic exchange of views that has the possibility of some middle position appearing that is actually better than where I or the other person started out. I come very quickly to the end of my tether, though, when the other side's position is either "never mind the facts" or "because I say so, is why."

Last night, in a meeting, we were looking at a set of proposed rules for an event. One of the rules says something like, "Under no circumstances are you allowed to do A before date B. However all the expenses of A that you do before date B must be recorded in the following manner..." I can't even find the best way to sink my teeth into that thing. With my editor hat on I could say, "Let's lose the first sentence, since you seem to be presuming that nobody will follow that instruction." But I anticipate the response will be, "But if we don't say not to do it, folks will do A before date B, and we can't possibly have that."

Decades ago I was completing certification for a thing (a different "thing" than the "thing" at the end of the previous paragraph). At one step in the process they wanted to see evidence that I had done some other thing (yes, a different, earlier, thing), and the evidence was to be a document. I didn't have to send them the document; I just had to say it existed and where it might be found if they really wanted to see it.

The line in the form was "Document sighted: _________________"

Uhhhhh.

I spent more brain cells than it was worth trying to get the issuers of the form to see that the word they wanted was "cited", to no avail. Just fuel for nightmares.

Tangled loglines

I am updating the loglines for my plays. This is a task that very few script writers enjoy, and even fewer do well. I am not among the few.

Loglines started out as a little summary for busy film executives. They were pasted along the edge of the bound manuscript and the executive--always with many more scripts submitted than time or money to produce them--could browse a stack of scripts and grab the one with most enticing logline.

a logline tries to tell you, Mr Short Attention Span, what this complex, rich tale that the screenwriter has slaved over for months--the screenwriter's baby--is "about". It tries to tell you before your eyes flick away in search of something more interesting.

So there's a real art to writing a logline. Richard Polito imagined a logline gone bad for The Wizard of Oz:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to do it again.

As you can see, there's even artistry in doing it badly :). Patrick Kirkland says it's an art the scriptwriter has to master unless he or she is relying entirely on luck to get produced, "Because if you can’t get people on your side in one sentence, then you’re not going to get them in a hundred pages."

Kirkland provides examples of loglines that would encourage him to look at the actual, you know, script, like this one for Titanic:

A young man and woman from different social classes fall in love aboard the ill-fated voyage of the Titanic.

You have to tell enough, but at the same time you can't tell too much. You don't have time in maybe 25 words; and anyhow if you tell the producer how it comes out, he won't have an itch to find out how it comes out by reading the damn script.

I am thinking about loglines because I have added a page to this blog listing some of my recent plays. These are all (mercifully) short plays. If one of these loglines makes you say, "So what happens?" click the link to see the first page of the script. 

And if that makes you say, "But what happens next?", and if you are connected with a theatre, contact me and I'll send you the whole thing. I may even hand-deliver it.

No subtitles: we're knitting

I am occasionally known to take up needles and knit. More than half of the time I manage to turn out something that someone can say, "Oh, thank you!" about with a straight face. For the other projects I learn a lot about un-knitting.

Last winter my office was in the downstairs part of the house, an area which the builders obviously worked on during the summer as they paid no regard to the need those rooms might have for HEAT in certain months. So I knut myself a pair of fingerless gloves to keep my hands warmer while typing away on the keyboard. They work beautifully! I am tempted to open an Etsy shop.

Having knitting underway almost always makes me think of plot points or bits of dialog for the current play that I really need to write down before I forget them. This is generally when I am making my first pass through some subtlety in the pattern (Row 5: K5, M1R, K21, M1L, K5) and my hands are cat's-cradled together. If I had needles that incorporated a roller-ball pen at the blunt end I would be better off.

I am rather fond of cable knitting, and that often involves a pattern that repeats over as much as 20 rows. I keep track of what row I am on with a little stack of coins--get to the end of the row, move a coin from the left stack to the right stack. Inevitably, some need will come up (the fish man at the door with fresh-caught haddock) and one or both of the piles of coins get scooped up to be counted out in payment. I then have to try to figure out where I was in the pattern: this is what gives my cable-knit sweaters their distinctive, if somewhat unsettling, visual quality.

Knitting also affects my cultural development. I am nowhere near as good as my mother was: she could clack away on the needles without hardly looking at them. (When she got to the end of a row, if she felt like it she would knit the next row backwards--that is, without changing which needle is in which hand. If you don't appreciate how cool that is, you need to get some knitting needles.) I, on the other hand, need to inspect every stitch with some suspicion and dread. Is that a purl stitch? Is that supposed to be a purl stitch? This means that, if we are watching a movie, it had better not be a movie that relies on sight gags or subtitles.

I miss a lot of punch lines, but at least I am less likely to incorporate the sweater I am wearing into the one I am knitting. Where have all the radio plays gone?

Tweaking the text

Like most creatives, when I am making something I find it hard to think about what I will do with it when it's done. If you're a painter, part of the decision is made for you: it's got to go on a wall, ideally a wall where people can see it. A website with thumbnail images is a modern-day extension of that wall; but usually people actually have to get intimate with the painting, close enough to smell it, before they can decide to buy it.

Not that painters paint primarily to sell--they paint because they must. But it sure is convenient to sell a few works, both to get the means to buy more high-quality ultramarine blue (made of ground-up semi-precious stones from Afghanistan, dontcha know) and because the artist's house only has a finite amount of wall to hang paintings on.

I write because I must (although I manage to resist the mustness of it for long stretches), and I almost never know when I start writing what I can possibly do with the new play or screenplay once it is done. The idea snugged down over my brain is to get it done--to find out what happens next, and next, and next until the conclusion happens.

I'm fortunate because my characters generally take over the script within the first few pages and improve whatever half-baked idea I started with. Sometimes I can't wait to get typing to find out what they say and do next; sometimes I dread the keyboard because of what they may say or do next.

But that's the creating part. This morning I am pondering a wrinkle in the process of getting works out before the world: tweaking a text for a specific market.

There's this little play I wrote about two people who meet on the "quiet car" of a commuter train. I was near Boston when I wrote this and a daily commuter (See Mayor of the commuter car). So it was obvious to me and to the folks who did a table reading of the script what a quiet car is and what might happen in one.

But now I'm thinking of submitting this play to a contest in a more rural part of North America. I'm not sure if they even have commuter trains there. Do I insert a little explainer at the start of the play; and, if so, how? Does one of the characters turn to the audience and do a David Attenborough whisper-voice ("We have just left the quiet car, one of a rare breed of rolling stock that migrates in urban environments")?

Similarly, I have a play where a character talks of going off to Alberta to seek his fortune. Perfectly clear, and possibly poignant, to any Canadian audience. But is it going to be clear at all to the readers for this contest in Texas, or for this one in West Virginia?

Mind you, this is a good problem: the plays I have mentioned are complete, make sense, and will eventually find their audience. But I am still puzzled by how much I need to torture their details in order to get productions for them.

More than just the right word

I've been doing some proofreading recently of documents by authors who are "subject matter experts", but who aren't all that good about transmitting their knowledge. For some, English isn't their first language; others have been so intensely educated that they can't stand to use a short word to describe something when there is a seven-syllable alternative that does almost as well.

Sometimes proofreading is sort of mechanical: a matter of pulling twenty or thirty commas out of a paragraph like burrs off your trouser leg after a walk in the meadow. At other times one could use the Bletchley Circle to help decode what the writer could possibly be trying to say.

There are perfectly respectable phrases in common use in English in India, like "do the needful", that have to be re-rendered into something like "do what is necessary" or "follow the normal procedure" for a global audience. Working with texts like that makes me ponder how often I write and say things that are only truly intelligible to that subset of the English-speaking world who are me.

Sometimes you run into an error in the text so painful that, if the intended reader met it, he or she would just quit reading. I love tracking down those errors and correcting them—preserving at the same time the author's credibility and the reader's sanity. I remember a Kansas romance I edited some years ago: the manuscript as I got it was about 70,000 words long, and I sent back a memo of suggestions and questions that topped 20,000 words. Although the author declined many of my suggestions, as was her right and duty, she picked up many others and made a much better book than it would otherwise have been. The correction that sticks in my mind has to do with a day on the farm when some cattle are being encouraged to go from one place to another, and the author had them going down the "cattle shoot". I was tempted to leave it, but in the end pointed out that "cattle chute" was not only correct, but would distract the reader less from the romantic glances the main characters were throwing at each other during the scene.

Someone asked me why, in the end, I like editing and proofreading. It's because I am happiest when the words and the grammar line up with the meaning of the text, and am all itchy when they don't. I hate it when people—even people I disagree with—undercut their own arguments by bungling their word choice or their sentence structure. I like a document to flow so well, delivering the author's argument in the author's unique “voice” so smoothly, that the reader never, ever thinks, “Well, that was well constructed.”

Presenting a document speckled with typos, misplaced modifiers, and suchlike is like showing up for a first date in a grubby shirt and with broccoli between your teeth.

And I hate it every time I do that.

Different kind of tenterhooks

I mentioned that I had taken part in a theatre workshop and was waiting to learn the results of the tune-up the five participating playwrights did on their plays under the guidance of Stephen Massicotte. We worked with Stephen on our scripts, did feverish rewrites based on his wise questions, and then enjoyed a table reading of the scripts with local actors.

I just learned that my short play, "Sprite Fight", will be part of the production Script Happens at the Saint John Theatre January 22-24, 2015. They will present three of the plays, including one with a very engaging devil and another where the main characters are two pigeons. This will be the first production for "Sprite Fight".

You never know that you get the gig until you get it; but once you get it, you land on a different kind of tenterhooks. Between now and January I can't do any rewriting, and probably the director would not appreciate a flow of helpful suggestions from the playwright. So I just need to get on with writing other stuff, and enjoy the tingle of anticipation of opening night.

See you there!

Blame it on everyone else

C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is about a tour bus trip from the gray outer edges of hell to the bright beginnings of heaven. The narrator starts in an endless rundown small city, finds a line of people waiting for a bus, and joins the line. One of the people ahead of the narrator in line tells him about the great and famous who reject the bus trip and linger on in the outskirts of hell:

‘The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back.’ …. 
     ‘But they got there?’ 
    ‘That’s right. He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light….’ 
    ‘Did they see Napoleon?’ 
    ‘That’s right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right.’ 
    ‘What was he doing?’ 
    ‘Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’ 

This passage came into my head ysterday while I was thinking about what to do about a collision I am involved in with some powerful people in an organization I care about. The organization suffered a major setback recently, and recovery may take years.

I have been getting worked up about how little the leadership seems to have learned from its recent debacle. But this morning I decided to see if I could find and propose some sort of new position so that instead of colliding with the folks I disagree with, we can all start pulling on the rope in the same direction.

I sent off a proposal a little while ago, an elegant piece of writing I wish I could post here :) . I was moved to do it because I sat up in bed in the dark hours realizing that the Napoleon passage is about me, too. It is not always the other people who have to see the error of their ways, who have to revisit their positions and revise their texts. In fact it is on me to stop the squabbling far, far more often than I am usually willing to acknowledge.

Approachable

I had to cold-call an icon yesterday.

Okay, so it wasn't an actual, like, call. I availed myself of email. But I still had a question that I had to ask of a well-known and much-admired writer. The last time I spoke to this fellow I was in my twenties and didn't know yet how much I didn't know, and he even at that time had such a reputation and following that he was part of "what people knew" about Nova Scotia, even people who would not be caught dead reading a book.

So I wrote my note, drawing on two tiny threads of relationship, and I asked my question. And, lookie: the fellow wrote back right away! He provided a thoughtful, friendly, and open-ended answer, just as if he wasn't famous.

This is, of course, not the first time I have had a gracious response from a famous person. As a teenager I wrote a letter to novelist Arthur C. Clarke about a point of science in one of his novels, and I had a faint typewritten response (because the typewriter ribbon was near the end of its days, not because the text was timorous, which it was not) within a week, all the way from Sri Lanka (and possibly typed on that custom typewriter that he had with the added blur key that he could use when uncertain whether the word was spelled "i-e" or "e-i").

I keep having to re-learn that lots of accomplished people have not let fame go to their heads: they have not become aloof and snooty and unapproachable, If that's how they are, that's probably how they were when they were more nobody than I am.

What happens is that I let their fame go to my head; I set up importance-barriers around accomplished folks that they generally have had no intention of setting up for themselves. I probably miss some very interesting conversations that way.

Where I was when

I am filling out a form that asks at one point where and during what periods of time I have lived since I  turned 18. That's a lot of places, although nowhere  near as many as it would be if I  had served in somebody's  military or had run away to the circus.

Having to make a list of where I was when, and what I was doing there, has been a very interesting exercise. At one level, I have had quick snapshot reminders of events, conversations, discoveries that happened in each house I have called home. Nice to revisit in my mind the various cats that have curled up on my lap, the bicycles the hall, the early morning sounds of a wide range of neighborhoods.

At a second level I am forcibly reminded of how thin a path I have walked. My family came to the Colonies in the 1630's and got kicked out of the United States to Canada in the 1780's. We (me included) moved back to the States in the 1950's and I have lived on both sides of the border since. However, with a couple of excursions (notably living in the Arctic for four years), I have not really lived anywhere that my great-great-great-whatevers could not conceivably have walked to from West Hartford, Connecticut. I am not sure what to draw from that, except to suspect that my understanding of the world and of people is much more constrained than I tend to assume it is.

Literary chef

When we lived in the Arctic and I needed to be able to function in both Inuktitut and Cree, washing dishes was my favorite chore. I would prop on the window sill my daily file card of ten words or phrases, and work my way through them while cleaning away the remains of whatever meal we had just had. Competence in Cree is closely associated in my mind with the smell of dish soap.

In our current situation, I generally cook breakfast (early riser) and sometimes take on other meals, but the list of dishes I am comfortable cooking is quite limited. I realized today that, to recommend itself, a recipe has to include periods when nothing much is happen ("let simmer for twenty minutes, or until the buzzards start to circle above the carcass"). Because that's when I read.

I read at other times, of course. I always have a book or two on the go. But nothing beats the rhythm of, say, putting the next two pancakes in the fry pans over slow heat and then, since nothing can possibly be done that will improve the situation until the little bubbles form on the uncooked side of the pancake, going back to whatever book I am reading for a few more sentences.

In this way I am helping Caesar conquer Gaul, watching as a detective named Perez solves a murder in the Shetland Islands, and giving myself nightmares with the story of the way the current Prime Minister governs Canada.

We will not dwell on the occasional tray of goodies ("bake for twenty minutes at 375") that goes directly from oven to bin because I look up when a long chapter finally ends and, lo and behold, it is a multiple of twenty minuteses later. It happens only often enough to keep me, if not humble, then aware that humility should exist.

I wood be warm this chilly morn

I have become quite fond of the local seniors' newspaper--eight or twelve pages per issue on newsprint. I also keep my eye out for non-glossy circulars. Yes, I own a new wood stove--how did you know?

They say wood heat warms you three times: when you cut it up, when you stack it up, and when you burn it up. With the temperature dipping down and actual snow lingering on the grass outside from the first snowfall of the season, I am delighted to be able to coax the wood stove into warming us just one time when I get up in the dark of pre-breakfast in a chilly house.

It would be simpler to turn on the oil furnace than to spend time kneeling on the hearth and coaxing the paper-then kindling-then small chunks stack of fuel into consistent flame. But with the oil furnace we have a different kind of heat, and the accompaniment of a deep rumble as if the dwarves under the hill were rolling their darkling wagons toward our basement. The wood stove converses with itself, ticking and crackling and hissing, and we get to watch the flames. I also have come to see heating with oil as lunatic, spendthrift behavior, and want to move away from it as much and as quickly as possible.

Ironically, we bought the wood stove in a year when there is a firewood shortage in Nova Scotia. The province was late in granting licenses to cut wood on crown land, and a few seasoned woodsmen have left off cutting except for their own purposes. On top of that, over the past couple of years there was a well-intentioned but ill-thought-out move to provide energy for the power grid by burning "biomass". I won't go into all the details here, but the result is that a lot of wood that used to be available for residential heating use is now being turned into electricity.

We have enough wood on hand for this winter, although it is far from being as dry as we would have preferred; and next week a nice man will deliver another whole truck load. That wood will warm us for the first time this month, as we stack it in the yard where it can slowly dry out for a year. Then, around next October, it will warm us the second time as we split what needs splitting and smash some of it into kindling (interesting underused back muscles one discovers by using a splitting maul...). And then our winter of 2015-2016 should be warm and cheery in the living room as the stove chuckles and growls its way through the logs we feed it.

Ghosts under the floorboards

We have had occasion over the last few months to observe several local workpeople close up, and the ghosts of several others. The opportunities related to repairs and renovations we were doing to the house we have moved into.

It's well-known that one of Nova Scotia's chief exports is its youth. Its younger, more ambitious--and, yes, more capable--folks tend to head off to Alberta, Toronto, or the Boston States to experience the larger world and maybe make their fortune. That leaves behind many folks who are content doing what they do right here and do it well (or well enough); and a bunch of other folks who have not yet found the work or avocation that ignites them. Those latter folks take jobs that appear because they need the money, but may have no affection for the work they have to do, the structure or system that results, or the people who pay them.

Our household goddess

Our house was once a tiny summer cottage on a slope. It is now a somewhat larger year-round house with a ground floor tucked in under the main floor. The silent-movie actress Theda Bara spent summers here, which must have made a refreshing change from vamping around with Rudolph Valentino in Hollywood.

Every couple of decades the house has had some improvements: new windows here, new kitchen there; the aforementioned lower level. And the ghosts of some of the workpeople who made those changes come out to haunt us as more recent workers help with the changes that we want to make (even more windows! fewer frozen pipes in January!!).

We have had a couple of really, really solid craftsmen helping us, and it is a delight to look at the improvements they have made. It was less of a delight each time they showed us something previous slackers had done, a decade or decades ago, and then hidden behind wallboard or under gravel, some ghoulish bad idea now needing attention before things got even worse. Those are the ghosts of past workers who were just putting in hours, who couldn't be bothered to use a right angle if one walked up and volunteered. Our current, competent folk would sigh and look rueful on behalf of their predecessors, and then do the best they could to save the situation.

To add to the fun, we had a couple of modern-day slackers who seemed to spend a lot of time avoiding doing the sensible thing in order to do the half-assed thing and then cover it up real quick. I don't think they hate us, or really want the house to suffer. They just are not ignited, not engaged; would rather be anywhere else than where they were.

It takes a while to figure out what kind of worker each person is. And then, because we are kindly souls (and because we doubted the evidence of our own eyes) it took a while to get quit of the slackers so the craftsmen could do their thing. And I apologize in advance to some future owner of this house because, along with the pleasant and clever changes we have ordered up this year, this summer's slackers have laid down some nasty ghosts--ghosts we are barely aware of ourselves yet. But they will rise at some inconvenient time.

I only hope there will still be some solid craftsmen around to come to the rescue.

Making adventures

I am having a lot of fun these days writing two choose-your-own-adventure games. You may remember print-based adventure books from years ago: at the bottom of a scene there would be a statement like:

If you attack the monster with the marshmallow gun, go to page 28.

If you jump into the laundry chute, go to page 40.

Here in modern times we can get rid of the "print-based" bit and make these games so people can play them on their phones or other devices. All the sound effects and most of the glitzy colors happen in your head, of course--just like when you're reading a novel or a poem. But it sure is faster to create than trying to make a game with satisfactory graphics and a user interface that pleases (collision detection, anyone?).

Fortunately, Choice of Games has put together a simple coding language called ChoiceScript that lets you concentrate on building the story without spending a soul-killing amount of time constructing if-statements and tracking variables. Choice of Games publishes a ton of games through the various app stores, and also hosts games civilians like me create.

One of the two games I'm writing takes place in modern times, in the world of software startups. There's deadlines, duplicity, dodgy behavior, and lots of other things that don't start with "d".

The second game takes place around 1800 with the British Army in Nova Scotia. I wrote the first draft of this game for a contest last year (write a game in a month), and finished second in a field that had more than two entrants. This game is sprouting all sorts of new story lines as I try to enrich it and make it more fun for the reader/player.

I'll write more about these games in future posts. To end for now, I wanted to show a bit of how you write a scene, and how the reader sees it.

You write using a text editor (I use EditPad Pro). ChoiceScript has strict rules for how you write commands, and indenting is very important, so your scene starts to look like this:

What the player sees is more like this:

Curious to find out what happens between you and the Prince? So am I!

Tiny tenterhooks

At the end of the summer I had the chance to take the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John, New Brunswick, for a weekend playwriting workshop called "Script Happens". The Saint John Theatre Company put on the event, and a gentler, more welcoming bunch of theatre folks I have not met.

The theatre had Stephen Massicotte, the author of Mary's Wedding and many other plays, as dramaturg for the weekend. He got to work with five nervous playwrights on short plays they had submitted. Each of us had time with Stephen, and then hours and hours (but far too few hours) through the rest of the Saturday to try to rewrite our scripts in light of Stephen's wise questions. Then, on Sunday, we got to enjoy table readings of the scripts by some of the theatre's regular actors.

The tenterhooks part is this: any day now we should hear which three plays will get full productions in 2015, and which will get staged readings. I would love to see my little script stood up. I can see it pretty clearly in my mind's eye, and there it is both funny and touching. But I am afire to know the affect it would have on an audience who is made up of people who are not me.

You send out scripts and short stories, and over and over again nothing happens. Nothing. But something nice happens just often enough that it adds Christmas-ornament glitter to the workaday hues of the writer's life. I would write even if nobody ever read what I wrote, you know. But having the chance to share what I write with others is really too good to miss.

Pull up your shorts!

King's Theatre in Annapolis Royal is looking for scripts for its annual King's Shorts festival of one-act plays. This is a great example of a really successful event that grew out of a let's-try-it-once bit of risk-taking.

When we lived on St. George Street in Annapolis Royal in the mid-1970's, the theatre was the sort of abandoned structure that looks like it must be on the list to be torn down very soon. Dedicated people and programs put the resources together to save and revitalize the theatre, and it now adorns not just the town but the whole region. People come from far and wide for plays, musical performances, simulcasts of opera, and all sorts of wild stuff. And, when the Farmers' Market is in its normal place during the season on Saturday mornings, the theatre bathrooms are where we all line up and say hi to each other.

I'm walking down to the post office to mail my first entry into the current competition (every playwright can submit two plays). If one of my plays gets chosen, members of the local theatre community will stage it. And the world will turn out to see it. Who could ask for anything more?

Getting there in one piece

One of the reasons we wanted to return to Canada was to be as politically active as I think every citizen ought to be. We haven't cornered the market on morals or ideas, but our ideas and our sense of what is just and right should be part of the political conversation. When we live in the United States we have to be pretty mute since we are not citizens.

The political party we align with, the New Democrats, was the government here in Nova Scotia when we got back to the province last year. And of course it promptly got walloped in an election about a year ago. The premier, who was also leader of the NDP, was defeated in his riding and resigned hi leadership.

Now we are starting to move toward a campaign to select a new party leader. The actual electoral convention won't happen until 2016, but folks interested in offering for the job are already starting to position themselves. This is right and proper: it's a big challenge and should not--cannot--be taken up on a whim.

So what I've been thinking about is how potential candidates should position themselves. The temptation must be to find the most inclusive and least offensive descriptors ("renewed leadership", "put the province on the right track", "end inefficiencies") so that people can gather under your banner even if they might not agree with every single thing you have ever said or thought.

The problem is, this seems to be what the NDP government did as it crashed and burned after only one term. There are some core principles of the NDP, and the government seemed unable either to articulate them or show how their actions harmonized with those principles; and so a lot of folks who might otherwise be assumed to support or at least be open to the NDP sat on their hands or voted elsewhere. (There were other factors at play, of course, including an incessant megaphone of negativity by the corporate media against the "socialist" government.)

It's a standard trope: you have to make compromises to get ahead in the world, and you can end up getting to, or near to, where you wanted to go having abandoned as ballast all the things you once stood for and worked for. And then you have to wonder, was the trip worth it?

Tomorrow night I go to hear one potential candidate, and then I meet with another on Sunday. There is a third who is testing the waters, and I bet there will be a couple more candidates who appear once the rules of the campaign are sorted out. I hope every single one of them stands up loudly and proudly for the party's core principles:

I'll revisit the campaign in future posts, to let y'all know what I'm seeing.