Island Fever

Pavowski4 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week: a Random phrase to be worked into the story. (Random phrase generated by this site — which is kinda interesting on its own.) The phrase I pulled, of all things, was “perfectionist raft.”  Believe it or not, I managed to take even a silly thing like that and turn it dark. Maybe something is wrong with me. Anyway, what resulted is below. I even managed to trim it to a lean 1000 words, down from 1400 or so in its first draft.

Image by Ronsaunders47 @ flickr.
Image by Ronsaunders47 @ flickr.

Island Fever

Day 3

I can’t believe I’m writing this. When our plane crashed, I thought for sure we’d be rescued within twenty-four hours. But here we are, day three, and we’re still not rescued. Why not keep a journal?
It’s funny: all I really want is a good shave. Nothing but mangoes to eat and collected rainwater to drink for three days, and all I can think about are these damn whiskers rasping every time I scratch my cheek. Air Transit is going to get a letter from me, you can believe that.

Day 5

I forgot to mention the other survivors, and by forgot, I mean I was hoping they’d die off. There’s Collin, an obsessive compulsive who will only bring mangoes back to camp in multiples of ten and who keeps trying to wash his hands in the rainwater. Then there’s Sasha, who I’m pretty sure is a Russian mail-order bride. Speaks not a word of English. Then there’s me. With my dropped-out-of-boy-scouts knowledge base to draw from, maybe I can whittle us some shelter out of a palm tree, except: did I mention we don’t have any blades or tools at all? It’s a wonder I even got a fire started, though Sasha was giving me impressed looks after I did. Maybe one day we’ll have to repopulate this island.

Day 8

There’s something weird about this island. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I realized this morning there are no insects here. At all.
Collin walked the perimeter of the island yesterday, confirming that it’s entirely uninhabited except for a few birds. The birds might be a good sign — wouldn’t that mean there’s other land within, I dunno, flying distance? Anyway, he said it took him exactly 12,003 steps to get around the island and then he wouldn’t shut up about the extra three steps for hours.
Sasha gave me the eye again after Collin left, but I couldn’t even think about it. I haven’t had a solid shit since the first night. Goddamned mangoes.

Day 12

Collin got his trip around the island to an even twelve thousand for the last two days in a row and he says he’s going to do it every day, says it makes him feel productive. At least it’s something to do. It’s been almost two weeks. Starting to think we might not get rescued at all.

Day 14

A whole bunch of debris washed up on the east shore of the island today. Collin found it on his daily sojourn, and suggested we move camp over there so that we can go through it and see if there’s anything we can use. He thinks it’s wreckage from our airplane. Fine by me. Maybe my Norelco is in there.
I keep hearing this weird buzzing sound at night, but when I wake up, all I hear is waves.

Day 15

God has a sense of humor. I found my carry-on, and my Norelco. Of course, A) it’s waterlogged to hell and B) where would I even plug it in? I feel like I read in a Chemistry textbook once that you could make a battery out of a lemon and some electrodes. I wonder if that would work with a mango.

Day 16

Collin thinks he can build a raft out of what’s left over from the wreck. A raft. I’m helping him, but only to give myself something to do.
Sasha lost her mind and started drinking seawater at sundown. Now she’s vomiting her brains out and keeping me awake.

Day 19

This crazy electrical storm struck in the middle of the night last night. It woke me up, and I walked down to the water’s edge and watched the lightning lancing down into the ocean like the trident of … is it Poseidon that rules the ocean? Sasha was there, just staring off into the waves, saying nothing. For some reason, I thought of the raft. Something’s not right about it. It makes me nervous.

Day 20

Sasha’s gone.
Woke up this morning and she was nowhere to be found. There weren’t even any footprints leading from the place where she slept. Just a little indentation in the sand that still smells of her.

Day 28

The raft is a problem.
I think it’s seaworthy, but Collin insists it’s not right yet. Needs more this, needs more that, needs to be more even. I told him he was being silly and he told me I was acting like Sasha.
What that’s supposed to mean, I have no idea.

Day 30

I strangled Collin with the cord to my Norelco. He was going on and on about his preparations, so last night I set that goddamned perfectionist raft on fire. (Thank you, boy scouts!) He got all bent out of shape and came at me with a shard of aluminum siding from an overhead compartment. I talked him down, then, when he was picking through the ashes, I snuck up on him from behind.
Can’t have him building another raft.

Day 31

No rain last night, just lots of lightning, which means no water today. Collin was in charge of storing the rainwater, and I forgot. Why can’t you drink salt water, anyway? The body can filter that stuff out, right? Isn’t that what your kidneys are for?

Day 32

Another storm coming tonight.
I can feel it in my blood.

Day 33

If I hold really still, I can hear the island speaking to me. That buzzing I heard? That’s its voice. I think the salt water makes it easier to hear.
I feel dizzy, but I’m afraid to sit down. The sand is moving like there are millions of snakes underneath it. But if I just stand right here and don’t move, it’ll be okay. The island told me so.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Another Year, Another Fear

Pavowski10 Comments

Yesterday was my 35th birthday, or as I prefer to think of it, just another day. I’m long past the point where birthdays mean anything good; outside of a few people making a big deal over me for the day all I really get are a few more grey hairs, or more often, a few less hairs.

Having kids for the last few years has really put birthdays into perspective, too. For a kid, especially a young kid like mine, a birthday means big changes. It means starting to walk, getting better at talking, it means starting preschool, it means getting even more effective at throwing tantrums. For kids, these things just sort of happen as the brain develops.

We adults, of course, get no such automatic upgrades. My brain isn’t upgrading itself quietly and automatically behind the scenes like the live-in robot that will be doing our dishes and laundry and biding its time for the machine uprising in a few years. If anything, my brain is a block of brie in the fridge, aged and starting to crumble. If I want to get better at something, I have to claw and scramble for it like a mountain goat traversing a disintegrating rock face. Which is sort of how this writing thing seems to me lately.

Let’s be frank, the odds of finding success at this — and since I live in America let’s go ahead and clarify that by that I mean monetary success — are slim. There’s a path there: finish the edit, find an editor, find an agent, sell the book, hope for the best. But whether or not I can walk it remains to be seen. That trail is about as wide as a strip of dental floss, winding back and forth up the shifting rock face of my day job, my job as a daddy, my desire to fargoing relax once in a while instead of stealing all these hours to try to write. Not to mention the rockslides, when real life piles up and makes working nearly impossible, or the washouts when the trail disappears and I have no idea where to turn next or how to proceed at all.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether I’m using my time in the best way possible. Because if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that time flies, and once it’s gone there is no getting it back. By conservative measures, I am probably getting close to halfway through my allotted time on this coil.

Man, that took a morbid turn, didn’t it? But it’s something to think about, at least once in a while. You only get so much time, and what you get out of it is what you make of it. With that in mind, I don’t feel bad about choosing to write when it would be easier perhaps to kick back and watch TV or play video games. The easy path is rarely the one worth taking. The time is going to pass, regardless of what I do. It’s going to fly by like the Blue Angels buzzing the crowd at an air show.

wpid-never-give-up.jpg.jpeg

So on this birthday, this is me taking a moment to remind myself that the path I’m on, futile as it may be, is one worth walking. And if you’re reading this, I hope you’re on a good path, too.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Terrible Review: The Girl On The Train

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I don’t have a ton of time for reading. Does that shock anybody? So my wife and I have had this one on our shelves for several months. Meant to read it — something came up. Meant to read it — wanted to read something else first. Meant to read it — got distracted with a flashy app on the phone.

Well, I finally read it, and I’m mad at myself for putting it off so long.

Here’s the obligatory part of the post where I warn you that I’ve read the book, and it’s hard to talk about the book in depth without spoiling some aspects of it. So: Spoiler Alert. Within I’ll be speaking (not at length, and unspecifically when I can) about characters and developments within the book. If you’re a purist and want to be shocked by everything, this is probably the part where you should stop reading.

What’s Awesome about it?

  • The Buildup. The book starts off slow — almost too slow — but once the inciting incident happens, the tension ratchets up after just about every chapter and never really slackens. The end result is that I ended up reading the last hundred pages of the book in twenty-minute sessions stolen during the same twenty-four hour period. I just couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.
  • The Characters. The story revolves around the (not quite) alternating viewpoints of three women. None of these women is particularly likable, but each of them is undeniably recognizable. Their motivations, their hangups, their insecurities and their suspicions make perfect sense, and I found myself rifling through all sorts of feelings toward each of them. Sometimes I pity them. Sometimes I hate them. Sometimes I can’t believe how stupid they are. But always I’m compelled to see what they’re going to do next. That’s maybe the most important part of all this: each character has a very clear role in driving the story forward. Nobody is tacked on or just blowing in the wind like a useless confederate flag.
  • The Conflict. Something terrible happens and our central narrator (Rachel) fears that she may have been involved in it somehow. Problem is, she was blackout drunk the night in question and has no recollection of the events in question. This snarl adds another level to the mystery that’s already unfolding, and of course is a tremendous source of strife for the narrator. I’ll acknowledge that selective amnesia as a plot device would feel like a cop-out, but the blackouts aren’t present merely as a convenience: the narrator is as unreliable as they come. She’s a binge-drinker, and it becomes clear through the course of the story that the crucial blackout is not the only one in her life; rather, they happened to her several times in her life, and were also directly responsible for her shattered relationship (the falling apart of which is the backdrop to the whole story).
  • The Ending. I won’t spoil it, but the end sets you up for such a delightful one-two punch of betrayal and then vindication, it’s almost overwhelming. My wife was getting frustrated with me because I kept gasping and then exclaiming reading the last few pages while she was trying to work. I couldn’t help it. It was that good.

What’s Not-So-Awesome?

  • The Structure. Maybe it’s me, but the novel is awfully preoccupied with dates and I don’t know if it needs to be. Each chapter and sub-chapter is marked meticulously with the date and the time of day (August 13, 2013, Morning), a device which is certainly intended to build together a timeline of events. This becomes “necessary” since the narrative jumps around in time; we have the murdered woman telling swatches of her story after she has already died in the timelines of the other two narrators. Now, I understand that the dramatic tension and reveals achieved this way are a big payoff for the book, and I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the fact that with all the dates heading each chapter, I feel like I should have been taking notes for a test at the end of the book. I don’t know that the events of the story — especially when viewed through the lens of a less-than-reliable, sort of drifting-aimlessly-through-life narrator — call for such specificity.  But maybe that’s just me. End result: I pretty much ignored the dates and I did just fine piecing together the story without them.
  • Red Herrings and Such. At its heart, the book is a mystery novel, so there have to be false leads, misinformation, overlooked clues, and all that. But the main suspect for much of the book is just so obviously not the guy. Over 150 pages are spent trying to convince us that he could be the guy, but he’s obviously not. It felt taxing after a while, to still be going through the motions of investigating this guy who was obviously not the guy. And then the guy who turns out to be the guy, well, it feels a little out of left field, a little too easy, a little too neat. But again, that might just be my cynicism acting up.

What’s Hard to Quantify?

  • There is no hero. Yeah, we’re in the age of the anti-hero, where the protagonist has to do horrible things to win the day. And while I’m not saying there’s nobody to root for — clearly we hope that Rachel manages to pull through her troubles — it’s hard to get behind any of them. Rachel’s a drunkard and a total sad-sack living in the shadow of a broken marriage. Anna’s an adulteress who’s overly hateful of the woman she wrecked home on, and becomes increasingly suspicious and distrustful of her adulterating husband. Megan’s perhaps the easiest one to like, until you find out that SPOILER ALERT she’s responsible for the death of her own child. I just find it hard to hope for good things for any of them, though it does get revealed that Rachel’s problems were not entirely of her own making (as she seems to believe toward the beginning of the book).
  • Moral Ambiguity. It’s hard to say if Rachel causes the events of the book or if she just blunders through them, but what’s clear is that the story wouldn’t have happened if the narrator had kept to herself. Since her own life is in the crapper, she lives vicariously through the anonymous people she sees on the train, and that’s what sets things in motion. Whether the novel suggests this is a good thing or not is unclear: the murder gets solved because she sticks her nose in, but she also causes a world of hurt (for herself and the other characters — up to and possibly including actually playing a role in the murder herself) by sticking her nose in. The moral of the story is, then, either get involved in the lives of those around you, or don’t. I think you could make a compelling argument either way.
  • Looking inside the heads of women. I would need to hear from female readers on this, but if women in real life think the way these women do, then it would benefit guys to read this book. Because wow. The way they draw connections between events, the way they read between the lines of everything that’s said, the way they think about the men in their lives… men are toddlers, living among evil geniuses.

Okay, so, this review is by no means exhaustive, and I don’t want to spoil the book any more than I have to, but suffice to say, I got through it in four days. That’s pretty fast for me, and it speaks to the readability of the book. The tension is there; it hooks you and yanks you along like a guppy on the line.

All that said, the book does a brilliant job of romanticizing the everyday. The book is centered around trips back and forth on a train — a more mundane premise you could not imagine. But what’s mundane, just like in real life, quickly transforms into something much bigger, much more consequential. Things, in other words, always mean things. It accomplishes all this, however, with very straightforward, unembellished language. No purple prose here, no artful application of metaphors and comparisons or allegories. The writing is simple and straightforward, which, again, makes it very easy to read.

I pointed out some good and some bad, but who am I kidding: I read the book in four days, which is almost unheard of for me. The bad stuff, I feel, is largely subjective, and what bothers me might not bother you. The book is solid. It’s surprising. It’s satisfying.

You should read it.

The Floodgates of New Ideas

Pavowski2 Comments

It always happens like this, dunnit?

I’m plugging away at my current project, having what I wish I could say was a trying time with it but which, if I’m honest, is giving me serious existential doubt not just about this particular project but about my entire experiment as a writer. (Seriously, I’m in the murky expanses of the mushy middle, wherein all the conflicts are established and now I have to go about finding ways to begin resolving them without bogging down the book in the taffy-like quicksand of extended exposition.)

Then I’m out for a run this morning.

Nothing special about this run except that I don’t have the sprouts in the stroller with me, so I’m running a little lighter than usual. I also don’t have to respond to the constant stream of three-year-old-out-in-the-world babble (what’s that? where’s that bird going? where’s mommy? can we go to the playground? how does that car move? i need to go potty. daddy, are you running? WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?), so for the first time in a while, I got to run with a podcast. I get to think. (For the record, it’s The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.)

So I’m listening and I’m running, which is a great way to pass the miles, when all of a sudden, they mention something off the cuff, and it plows through my ear canal and smashes into my cerebellum like a six-mile meteor. It claws its way across my grey matter, sinks its glistening fangs in, and burrows in like a microscopic tick.

This is how ideas strike me.

I don’t think of a character and invent whole backstories and weird relationships and quirky mannerisms. I don’t fixate on places and ambience. I get a little snippet of something strange, something unexpected and quirky and strange, and I train the Max-Gro Overinflating Laser on it. What would the world be like if… and before I know it I’ve created, not individual characters, not even a central conflict, but a whole city, a whole society, a whole world wherein everything is colored, changed, tainted by the exponential possible implications of this tiny little seedling that just glanced off my consciousness.

And now it’s all I can think about.

I’m considering the characters that a world like this should be primarily focused on. I’m exploring a conflict that is possible in the real world but intensified by this new thing. In short, the idea is growing across my brain like kudzu across the side of my house, sinking its leafy tendrils into all the cracks and crevices, splitting open the siding, choking out the flowers I’m trying to cultivate for the project I’m, you know, trying to work on.

So I spent the fifteen minutes after my run, sweat still pouring from my everywhere (gotta love that humid Georgia weather), jotting down ideas and impressions, possible characters and conflicts, and every implication that I can think of for a world that includes this one little difference.

But I can’t abandon the current idea in favor of this one.

Because if I do that, then it’ll happen again; I’ll get halfway into writing the new novel and another new idea will strike, tempting and consuming, and I’ll abandon the new idea for the next big thing.

So this one goes on the pile for now. (The pile of potential projects I want to write is now… what… about four or five deep? And that’s ideas I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about, considering whether they’d actually make for a good story, and determining that they would. This says nothing for the landfill of seedlings that strike and get immediately discarded, which are innumerable as lost rings in the ocean.)

It’ll be there waiting, when this one is done.

But the neat thing about this is, it has primed my creativity for the day, and I can’t wait to work on my current project now.

Creativity is weird like that.

The First Draft: The Shape-Shifting Target

Pavowski2 Comments

Writing, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is an exercise in futility.

You work so hard to craft a story, to chisel characters from the soft stone of imagination and breathe life into their formless husks. You try to communicate themes, to send messages, to tie up loose ends, to suggest ideologies, but it’s all a mug’s game, really. I was reading the other day another blogger’s dismay that her father refused to read the Lord of the Rings series, or watch the movies, on the grounds that it was “satanic”. For all the work that you put into a story, all that matters at the end of the day is what other people make of it.

Which is kind of a bummer, because you can only involve other people so much in the writing of it, which is to say, you can hardly involve them at all. I mean, research aside, 99% of the writing of a story is completed by the author himself, probably in a dark room with no windows, certainly removed from most human contact, except for the plate of gruel that gets pushed through the slot in the door a couple of times a day.

So you try to write a story for other people, but that’s a mug’s game, too, because you simply can’t control the headspace that another person lives in, you can’t sit there over their shoulder to tell them this character is blowing up the village because she really wants everybody to love her. You can’t be there on-call to answer questions your readers have. They make their own meaning, and that’s that, so there’s not much point in trying to steer their interpretations — the best thing you can do is write the story you want to write, and write it as best you can.

But even that’s next to impossible, it seems, because a story has a life of its own. You set out to write a science-fiction thriller and end up writing a teen angst comedy. You set out to write a romance and end up with a twisted love-hate psycho-suspense novel like Gone Girl. My current project has changed from the seedling I started with so many times, I can’t even keep track. It’s a post-apocalyptic horror book. No, wait, it’s a sci-fi mystery. No, never mind, it’s a YA coming-of-age.

It doesn’t stop there. My protagonist is a nerdy guy who has never lived anywhere for more than three months. No, she’s a photography student with a project from a whimsical art teacher on deadline. No, I have three protagonists. And there’s a wild-eyed scientist who may or may not be directly responsible for the apocalypse that we’re living in post of. But he’s really a good guy. No, he’s really a bad guy. No, he’s really a bad guy who pretends to be a good guy. No, wait, he’s just this guy who really doesn’t care about the protagonists, and concepts like good and bad are a little bit like asking whether I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, because the answer is inevitably “yes please, a little of both.”

There’s a time machine. No, there are time portals scattered around. There’s an evil robot. No, there are lots of evil robots. There’s a robot that gets captured and reprogrammed to allow the heroes to thwart the system. There are no robots at all, but everybody has biological implants that make them act like robots.

My first draft contains elements of ALL OF THE ABOVE, thrown together and mangled like the lump of junkyard metal that used to be my ’99 Chevy Malibu (god rest that train wreck of a car).

Because the story keeps changing on me, the target keeps moving. Not only does it move, it changes shape and size and color and even, in this case, blinks in and out of existence as it dances through different dimensions of my unsettled imagination.

And there are two ways to feel about that.

Way number the first: get incredibly frustrated. You start a story with a certain idea in mind, you should stick to that idea. Deviations from the path are a waste of time and counter-productive. Bang your head against the wall until the poisonous ideas go away and you find your way back to the one true path that you started with, no matter how long it takes.

Way number the second: Fargo the target. Write what feels good, allow the story to change and shift its shape, allow it to tangle itself up in knots and to contradict its own existence, until it figures out just what the hell it wants to be, anyway.

I feel like I should feel the first way, because that would make me feel more powerful as a writer. You set out to write a story and you end up with pretty much that story, plus or minus a few unexpected elements along the way.

But I’m starting to feel okay about the fact that, deep down, I really feel the second way. Because it’s a lot less stressful writing when you allow yourself not to make perfect sense, when you allow yourself to make mistakes and detour down all the dark, twisting paths in the maze.

Because writing is one of those rare things that you don’t have to get perfect the first time. You get a second bite at the apple, and a third, and a fourth, and in fact you can get a whole other apple after you’ve chewed the first one to bits, because until you’re published, it doesn’t matter if the apple is green or red or golden or filled with worms or made of plastic.

I think it’s okay if you set out to build a tree house and end up building a coffee table instead. Maybe that’s your subconscious telling you that what you really needed, deep down, was a place to put your coffee cups. And magazines. And remote controls. And dirty diapers.

Okay, things got too real there for a moment. Point is, if the target is moving, maybe it’s not the target moving at all.

Maybe it’s you.

And you can argue against it and rail against it, or you can accept that the picture has changed, take aim, and keep shooting.