I need to say that I really can’t thank blog commenters enough for taking the time to write. Not only do they often add useful information beyond what I know — thus adding incredible value to this blog — but they sometimes post questions or comments that get my mind going and give me fodder for new blog posts.

I received such a comment this morning and it prompted me to write a new article for my Writing Tips series.

The Importance of Accurate Descriptions

I touched upon the topic of accurate descriptions in fiction in a post I wrote last month: “Facts in Fiction.” In it, I explained why I thought it was important to get the facts about the “real” parts in fiction correct. I talked about the depth of a fictional world and how it would determine what facts and descriptions needed to be accurate.

My goal in that piece was to urge fiction writers to get the facts straight. Errors, when noticed by readers, can seriously detract from the work. For example, I believe I cited the example of a bestselling author who claimed that when a helicopter was low on fuel, it would be safer to fly lower than higher. This is downright wrong, no matter how you look at it. The author’s reasoning proved he knew nothing about the thought he was putting in a character’s head — a character that should have known better. This absolutely ruined the book for me, making me wonder what else he’d gotten wrong.

You can argue that fiction is fiction and that the writer can make up facts as he goes along. I disagree. My “Facts in Fiction” post explains why, so I won’t repeat it here.

Today’s Question

Today’s question comes from a comment on my recent blog post, “Dan Brown Doesn’t Know Much about Helicopters,” in which I painstakingly (and perhaps nitpickingly) point out a bunch of errors in Brown’s latest literary masterpiece (and yes, that is sarcasm), The Lost Symbol. The errors revolve around the inclusion of a helicopter as a repeating plot component throughout the book. Brown used his descriptive skills to make several claims about helicopters that simply were too far fetched to be believable. (But then again, isn’t that what Dan Brown’s work is all about?) I detailed them for blog readers.

One reader found the post useful. She wrote:

I just wanted to let you know I found this blog immensely helpful as I am writing a chapter in my book that involves a helicopter ride. I must say that I am striving to find new ways to describe the sound a helicopter makes. It’s rather unmistakable when you actually hear it, but to describe it to a reader is much more difficult. I recently wrote… “the deafening drill of the helicopter’s rotors made conversation impossible…” and one of my proof readers balked at the use of the word “drill.” I’d love to hear your comment on that one!

I started to respond in a comment, but the length of the comment soon bloomed into blog post length. So here’s the response.

First, I definitely agree about the word “drill.” Now here are some points to consider:

• Have you actually heard a helicopter close up? Or at the distances you’re trying to write about? First piece of advice is to go someplace where you’re likely to hear helicopters and listen to them. Then describe what you hear.
• Does the word “deafening” really apply? I think Dan Brown used that one, too. Deafening is a strong word. Unless the listeners were standing/sitting right outside the helicopter or inside with a door open/off, I don’t think deafening would be accurate. Helicopters are not as loud as people think — unless you’re right up next to them.
• Lots of folks think it’s the rotors making all that noise. Close up, it’s the engine you mostly hear. Piston engine helicopters sound like airplanes; turbine engine helicopters sound like jet planes. Are you trying to describe the sound of the helicopter’s engine or spinning blades?
• The tail rotor on many helicopters actually makes more noise than the main rotors. Why? The tail rotor blade tips are sometimes traveling near the speed of sound. Maybe it’s the sound of the tail rotor you want to describe.
• How fast are the blades spinning? Is the helicopter just winding up? Is it at idle RPM (usually around 70%)? Is it fully spun up to 100% but still sitting on the ground? Preparing to lift off? In flight? There are differences — significant or subtle — in the sound depending on the blade speed and what the helicopter is actually doing.
• How many blades does the helicopter have? You’re more likely to hear a rhythmic “wop-wop” sound coming out of a large helicopter with a two-bladed system — like an old Huey — than a smaller helicopter with four or five blades — like a Hughes 500C or D.

As you can see, it’s not as easy as asking someone if you can use the phrase “deafening drill” to describe a helicopter’s sound. There are too many variables. And at least three components are making that noise: engine, main rotor, and tail rotor. You need to hear the sound to describe it.

Do Your Homework

As I writer, I’m more bothered by the introduction of stereotypical descriptions — even if they’re not actually cliches — than inaccurate descriptions. Yes, it’s easy to ask a pilot whether a description you’ve written about flying rings true. But it’s lazy (for lack of a better word) to use a stereotype or cliche to describe a sound when you have the ability to hear it for yourself. And its irresponsible, as a writer, to expect a pilot or proofreader to come up with a better descriptive word for you. That’s your job.

If you want to write about the sound of a helicopter, for example, get your butt down to an airport or police helicopter base or medevac base. If you’re writing about a helicopter ride, as this commenter is, go for a helicopter ride.

Talk to the folks at the helicopter base about flying. Be straight with them — tell them you’re a writer and are doing research. (That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?) Let them read a passage or two from your manuscript if you think they can check it for authenticity. Then wait around until a helicopter operates in the area and listen. Get the permission (and possibly an escort) to stand or sit where you need to be to hear the sound as you need to hear it. Record it if you think it’ll help. Make sure you get the right sound for the right phase of flight. After experiencing this, you should be able to accurately describe it.

Do not rely on what you see/hear on television or in the movies. Many sounds are usually added after the fact. I’ve seen clips where the sound of an aircraft didn’t match the type of aircraft being shown. Movies also show helicopters departing almost straight up or landing almost straight down — a pilot will only do this if he must. (Read “The Deadman’s Curve” to learn why.)

Authenticity is Worth the Effort

There’s an added benefit to doing your homework: authenticity now and in the future.

For example, a visit to a helicopter base or ride in a helicopter will give you all kinds of additional details about the helicopter or flight operation. Do people really need to duck when getting out of/into a running helicopter? How is downwash different between an idling helicopter and a helicopter that’s just lifting off or arriving? How strong is the downwash from a hovering helicopter? What does it feel like? How does it smell? What does a turbine helicopter’s engine sound like when first starting up? (Think of your gas barbeque grill and you won’t be far off.) What are the pavement markings like on the helipad or helispot? What’s the pilot wearing? What’s he holding?

These little details will not only add authenticity to what you’re writing now, but they’ll give you plenty of useful material for the next time you need to write about helicopters.

It’s Not Just Helicopters

I’ve used the example of helicopters throughout this post because that’s one of the things I know from experience — and that’s what the question that prompted this post was all about.

But the advice in this post applies to anything that’s outside your realm of knowledge.

You know the age-old advice about writing: Write what you know. Well, you know what you experience. The more research you do — the more things you experience firsthand — the more you know. And the more you can write about accurately and authentically when you need to.

A few weeks ago, I forced myself to slog through Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I’m trying really hard to understand why people like this guy’s work. He’s a gawdawful writer. Have we become a nation of illiterates?

As a helicopter pilot, I’m really sensitive to errors about helicopters that appear in fiction. The Lost Symbol was chock full of them. Apparently, it’s too much to ask Dan Brown to take a peek at Wikipedia or talk to a helicopter pilot when writing passages that concern helicopters. It makes me wonder what other “facts” he got wrong.

This bugged me so much at the time that I wrote a post title “Facts in Fiction,” where I discuss the failure of novelists to check the real-life components of their fictional worlds. I wanted to include a discussion of Brown’s failures in that post, but didn’t have time to complete it. Instead, I’ll cover them here.

These are the passages that bugged me most:

Without warning, Omar felt a deafening vibration all around him, as if a tractor trailer were about to collide with his cab. He looked up, but the street was deserted. The noise increased, and suddenly a sleek black helicopter dropped down out of the night and landed hard in the middle of the plaza map.

Deafening vibration? We get it: helicopters are loud. But do they deafen with their vibrations?

Public domain image of UH-60L by SSGT Suzanne M. Jenkins, USAF from Wikipedia.

The “sleek black helicopter” he’s describing is a “Modified Sikorsky UH-60,” which is basically a Black Hawk. I’m not sure what kind of modifications Brown is talking about — there are many versions of this helicopter. I’m also not sure I’d use the adjective “sleek.”

But what bothers me more is how it “dropped down out of the night and landed hard” — if it “dropped out of the night,” it would indeed “land hard.” This poor helicopter “landed hard” three times in the book. I think the CIA should consider getting a new pilot.

CIA field agent Turner Simkins was perched on the strut of the Sikorsky helicopter as it touched down on the frosty grass. He leaped off, joined by his men, and immediately waved the chopper back up into the air to keep an eye on all the exits.

“Perched on the strut,” huh? Not perched on a skid? Oh, yeah, that’s right: A Black Hawk doesn’t have skids. It has wheels. If someone can tell me where a Black Hawk’s perchable strut is, please do.

High above the National Cathedral, the CIA pilot locked the helicopter in auto-hover mode and surveyed the perimeter of the building and the grounds. No movement. His thermal imaging couldn’t penetrate the cathedral stone, and so he couldn’t tell what the team was doing inside, but if anyone tried to slip out, the thermal would pick it up.

I honestly don’t know if there’s an auto pilot in a Black Hawk or whether it has an “auto-hover mode.” I suppose I could research this and find out. But I do know that there’s no way in hell that a CIA Black Hawk pilot (if there is such a thing) would be responsible for flying a helicopter and doing overhead surveillance using thermal imaging at the same time. Pilots fly, on-board observers observe.

As they rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, Katherine stopped short and pointed into a sitting room across the hall. Through the bay window, Langdon could see a sleek black helicopter sitting silent on the lawn. A lone pilot stood beside it, facing away from them and talking on his radio. There was also a black Escalade with tinted windows parked nearby.

Hello? Mr. Brown? A Black Hawk has a crew of two pilots. The original Black Hawk had a crew of four pilots. Yet the book consistently uses the word pilot — a singular noun — when referring to the person flying the helicopter. I guess it’s easier to write one character than two.

The modified UH-60 skimmed in low over the expansive rooftops of Kalorama Heights, thundering toward the coordinates given to them by the support team. Agent Simkins was the first to spot the black Escalade parked haphazardly on a lawn in front of one of the mansions. The driveway gate was closed, and the house was dark and quiet.

Sato gave the signal to touch down.

The aircraft landed hard on the front lawn amid several other vehicles . . . one of them a security sedan with a bubble light on top.

Google Maps shows Kalorama Heights to be a densely populated area of Washington, D.C. filled primarily with embassies. This is an especially poor location for the bad guy’s lair:

Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk dimensions public domain line drawing from Wikipedia.

• An area filled with embassies is likely to have very, very tight security. It’s unlikely that the events Brown reports could happen at a “mansion” there without anyone noticing and calling the police.
• Properties are not large — not in relation to the buildings on them. The fronts of buildings are generally right up on the street. It would be a stretch to park multiple vehicles on a lawn.
• The area is heavily vegetated with lots of tall trees. This makes me wonder how a helicopter that’s almost 65 feet long and has a rotor diameter of nearly 54 feet can land on a lawn full of parked cars in this area.

So we’ve got a big helicopter and some loud activity happening in a densely populated, heavily treed embassy area of Washington, D.C.

Sato moved the group toward the dining room. Outside, the helicopter was warming up, its blades thundering louder and louder.

Warming up is a function of the engine. The blade sound would not be different. Spinning up is a function of the blades. In either case, the sound of the blades would not get louder. If the helicopter were spinning up, the sound of the blades — the rhythm of the blades — would get faster.

Sato could hear the whine of the helicopter blades at full pitch.

Pitch is a poor choice of words here. “Helicopter blades at full pitch” literally means the collective is full up. The helicopter should be flying, not on the ground (as it is in this passage). Full speed — meaning that they’re spinning at 100% RPM — is probably what Brown meant here.

Langdon felt his stomach drop as the CIA helicopter leaped off the lawn, banked hard, and accelerated faster than he ever imagined a helicopter could move.

This is a classic ignorant writer passage. If the helicopter could leap off the lawn — which it might, depending on load — Langdon’s stomach wouldn’t drop. He might feel pushed back in his seat. The only time you’re likely to feel a helicopter motion in your stomach is if the helicopter entered autorotation, which feels — especially the first time — as if you’ve crested the top hill of a kiddie roller coaster and are suddenly zipping downward.

As for accelerating fast, I don’t know much about Robert Langdon’s imagination, but helicopters generally don’t accelerate quickly. It’s not like slamming down the gas pedal in a Ferrari in first gear. (In fact, one of the challenges I face when photographing car and boat races is catching up to a high-speed car or boat that has passed us while we’re hovering.) Can’t say I’ve flown a Black Hawk lately, though.

Langdon held his breath as the helicopter dropped from the sky toward Dupont Circle. A handful of pedestrians scattered as the aircraft descended through an opening in the trees and landed hard on the lawn just south of the famous two-tiered fountain designed by the same two men who created the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s that hard-landing helicopter again. Maybe the problem is that Brown — and most of the rest of the population — doesn’t understand that helicopters don’t just “drop out of the sky” to land. There’s a thing called “settling with power” that will basically ensure a very hard landing if you descend too quickly straight down.

And don’t even get me started on the encyclopedic fact that has nothing to do with the plot, fouling up the end of that sentence.

Once everyone had jumped out, the pilot immediately lifted off, banking to the east, where he would climb to “silent altitude” and provide invisible support from above.

Silent altitude? What’s that? About 50,000 feet? I don’t know of any altitude above a point where a helicopter would be silent — especially if it still had to provide “invisible support” — whatever that is. I look forward to the day when the words silent and helicopter can be used in the same sentence as adjective describing noun.

The UH-60 pilot threw his rotors into overdrive, trying to keep his skids from touching any part of the large glass skylight. He knew the six thousand pounds of lift force that surged downward from his rotors was already straining the glass to its breaking point. Unfortunately, the incline of the pyramid beneath the helicopter was efficiently shedding the thrust sideways, robbing him of lift.

He threw his rotors into what? What the hell is that supposed to mean? And what’s with the “six thousand pounds of lift force” surging down from this rotors? Is he trying to say that rotor wash is exerting 6,000 pounds of force?

Hello? Helicopters do not work just like big fans blowing air down to fly. They have wings, just like airplanes do. Airfoils create the lift that makes a helicopter fly. Downwash just helps a bit when the helicopter is near the ground. That’s called ground effect.

And let’s look at this in real life — the helicopter had only 2 or 3 people on board. It had already discharged its passengers. Is Brown trying to say that the pilot was depending on ground effect to fly? On a winter night (cold; it landed on “frosty grass” once) in Washington DC (sea level)? How did it get off the ground with passengers on board — let alone leap into the sky — if it couldn’t even hover out of ground effect when it was nearly empty?

And what’s all this about skids? Didn’t we already establish that the Black Hawk has wheels? If you can’t read the words, Mr. Brown, at least look at the pictures.

Errors like this just prove that the writer has no understanding of how helicopters fly. Yet this and many of the other helicopter-related errors in this book could have been prevented if the passages were handed off to an experienced helicopter pilot as part of the editing process.

But I guess a bestselling author is beyond all that.

The vast majority of people who want to be writers want to write fiction. While I don’t have the statistical sources to back up that claim, I don’t think anyone can deny it. There’s something about writing fiction that really appeals to people who want to write — including me. The only reason I don’t write fiction for publication is that I found that I could make a good living writing non-fiction. Making a living as a writer is more important to me than writing fiction.

With all that said, what many fiction writers don’t understand is the importance of getting their facts straight in what they write.

How Deep is Your Fictional World?

When you write fiction, you build a fictional world. The depth of your world — how similar it is to the real world — can vary.

Suppose, for example, that you’re writing a science fiction adventure that takes place on a distant planet that isn’t even very Earth-like. You’re making up the setting and all that goes with it. Is the sky on your planet pink? Are there four suns? Do the people have eyes where our mouths are and four arms instead of two? You’re making everything up. Your world may have nothing in common with the real world. You have license to make everything up as you go along.

Now suppose you’re writing a thriller that takes place in a Wall Street banking firm (if any are left). Wall Street is a real place in a real city. You’re not making any of that up. You might make up the firm and its customers. You’ll probably make up the characters and plot. But you’re still constrained by what’s real in your world. In New York, taxis are yellow and police cars are blue and white. (At least they were the last time I was there.) Wall Street is in Lower Manhattan and it’s crossed by Broadway. If you change any of these facts — or don’t get them straight — you’re making an error. (Of course, you could cheat by setting the plot in the distant future, thus adding a SciFi element to it. But do you really want to do that if it’s not part of the story?)

In many cases, you can ensure the accuracy of the facts in a piece of fiction by a lot of Googling or perhaps even a visit to Wikipedia. Other times, you need better resources — possibly even an “expert.”

I bring this up for two reasons:

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Question from a Writer

The other day, someone posted the following comment on my post titled “How Helicopters Fly“:

I am writing a novel in which a helicopter goes out of control and starts spinning. How would a pilot pull out of a spin? Gyrating.

This is a good question — kind of. It’s good because the person who asks does not understand the technical aspects of what he wants to include as a plot point. He realizes that he lacks this knowledge and he’s actively trying to get it. Great!

Unfortunately, it’s not a question that can be easily answered — even by someone who knows what the answer might be. (And I’m really not sure why he included the single word “Gyrating” at the end of his comment. What does he mean by that?) My response to him tries to get this point across:

It really depends on how the helicopter got into that spin. Normally, the rotor pedals will stop a spin, but if the tail rotor’s gone bad (or chopped off), the pedals probably won’t help. Sometimes flying straight at a high speed can keep you from spinning with a non-functioning tail rotor.

It’s not at all like an airplane. You don’t “pull out of a spin.” You prevent yourself from getting into one; if you start to spin, you use your pedals to stop it before it gets out of control.

A better way for him to approach this problem would be to sit down with a helicopter pilot or instructor and ask him/her what might cause a helicopter to start spinning and how a pilot might recover from each cause. He can then fit one of those causes into his plot and have the pilot stop the spin.

But he shouldn’t stop there. After writing the passage concerning the spin and recovery, he should pass over those manuscript pages to a pilot and let him read them. Does it ring true? Is it feasible? Are the correct terms used? Doing this will ensure that the passage is error-free.

Errors in Best-Selling Fiction

As a writer and a helicopter pilot, I’m especially sensitive to helicopter-related errors in popular fiction. A while back, I read a Lee Child book that included scenes with a helicopter. It was full of errors. Here are two that come to mind:

• The helicopter was in a fuel-critical situation. The author stated that it was better to be lower than higher if the helicopter ran out of fuel. (The exact opposite is true; you want to be higher if your engine quits so you have more options for autorotative landing.)
• The helicopter pilot is killed by a character breaking his neck. The author has the helicopter pilot land on dirt before he kills him so it looks like he broke his neck when the helicopter crashed-landed when it ran out of fuel. (But the helicopter didn’t crash. It landed upright on its skids. If it had been a “crash landing” — even on its skids — the skids would have been spread and the helicopter would have had other signs of a hard landing.)

These are absolutely glaring errors to a helicopter pilot. They ruined the book for me. How could I slip into the author’s world when its connections to the real world are so screwed up? If he got this stuff so wrong, what else did he get wrong?

I found more errors like this — although admittedly not as bad — in the latest Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol. I’ll go through them in some detail in another post.

These Are Just Examples from My Real World

These are examples from my world, which includes helicopters. Maybe your world includes flying an airliner or managing an office building or designing computer security systems. Or anything that’s a lot more complex than it seems on the surface. When you read a piece of fiction and the author includes “facts” from your world as plot points — and gets them wrong — how do you feel? Doesn’t it bug you? Perhaps ruin the book for you?

The most commonly repeated advice to writers is to “Write what you know.” Although I agree with this and believe writers should start with what they know, there are often times when they have to stretch the boundaries and write a bit about what they don’t know. I believe they should make an extra effort to get the facts straight whenever they do this. And then go the final extra step in having an “expert” review the final written passages as a fact check before the book is published.

What do you think?

I haven’t done a thing to prepare for NaNoWriMo since my last “journal” entry about it almost a week ago. That’s got me thinking: how committed am I to this project?

There’s plenty to do. I still need to review my notes and refresh my memory about the characters I created five or more years ago. I have to remember the rather complex mystery genre plot, which needs to be presented properly to give readers a solvable puzzle that’s not too easy to solve. I still need to go over the outline and make more detailed notes about the scenes — including the scenes I wrote that were lost in that hard disk crash.

Instead, my days have been filled with getting my helicopter charter business ready for the fall season and entertaining house guests. Evenings like yesterday’s — which I’d be spending on my NaNoWriMo project during November — were taken up with modifying the never-ending collection of forms I need to provide concierges with paperwork to sell tours and day trips for me.

Will I be disciplined enough come November 1 to spend each evening working on the novel? Or will I be burned out by 4 PM from a full day in front of the computer or dealing with flying or passengers?

And that brings up what’s really on my calendar for the first week of November: a 6-day helicopter excursion. It’s my last scheduled excursion for the season and I meet my passengers on November 1 at 10 AM. I’ll be responsible for their transportation and making sure they complete their itinerary smoothly. So for the first six days, I’ll be on the road. Will I be able to bring my notes with me? Sit down to write every evening? Although I think I will, I’m wondering if I’m committed enough to really do it.

And that’s what NaNoWriMo is all about: setting aside time for an entire month to force yourself to get a project done. Forget excuses, forget procrastination. Take a month, make the time you need, and get it done.

In this point in my career as I writer, I know I can finish a book-length work in a month. I’ve done it before. But I’ve never done it for fiction. So the question is: how important is this to me? Important enough to make it happen when I’ve clearly demonstrated that I can?

I guess I’ll know for sure at November month-end.

Back in 2007, I realized that I’d lost the manuscript for a novel work-in-progress. The working copy was lost in a hard disk crash. I thought I had backups, but it turns out the backups had not been created. I detail the steps that led up to this disaster and my thoughts about it at the time here.

When I realized that the manuscript had been lost, I spent a lot of time trying to recover it. I still have all the “recovery” files. I put “recovery” in quotes because although the file had contained 97 pages of text, I only recovered about two pages. Not much of a recovery.

Gathering the Remains

Yesterday, I went through those files again, trying hard to extract some more text from them. No matter how I tried, the only thing I could get was the same two pages: about a half page from somewhere in the middle of the work followed almost immediately by the text at the very beginning. Just the fact that the text does not appear in order should tell me something. The hard disk that crashed was almost full. Chances are, the recovered “files” are not whole files but bits and pieces of other files mixed in with my manuscript text. In other words, what I recovered was all I’ll ever recover because the rest is gone forever, written over by other text.

This is the book I’ll be working on for NaNoWriMo this year.

I extracted the usable text from one of the recovery files and put it in a brand new document. Then I tracked down the other files I’d been keeping with the manuscript as I worked on it: a FileMaker Pro file that neatly recorded the details about eight of the main characters and an outline that broke down the plot into chapters with lots of notes. Although I had this outline in Scrivener as well as Microsoft Word — I likely created it in Microsoft Word and then imported it into Scrivener with the idea of writing there — I won’t be using Scrivener to write. I’ll stick to Word.

I also tracked down some index cards I’d been using to keep track of the plot and characters and make detailed notes such as maps. The book is a mystery and the murder takes place outdoors, so maps are an important part of my preparation process. I’d done quite a bit of preparation when I began the project back in 2005 (I think) and just about all of that material was still available. It’s just the manuscript itself that I lost because of my own stupidity and carelessness.

Warming Up

And this brings up the point for today’s journal entry: in the weeks leading up to NanoWriMo, participants should be preparing for the task of writing. Create your characters and build your plot now, before crunch time. Take detailed notes on index cards or in a computer-based outline, or with some other tool. Visit the world of your characters and story in your mind and take detailed notes about what you see and hear and feel.

This should be an excellent warm-up for NaNoWriMo’s writing process.

Here are a few other suggestions for those who are participating:

• Decide now what kind of schedule you’re going to keep for NaNoWriMo. Will you write first thing in the morning, while you’re still fresh? Will you write after work? After you get the kids off to school? Before you pick them up? Or are you lucky/unlucky enough to not have anything to prevent you from writing all day? No matter what your time is like, decide now when you’ll write and be prepared to stick to it.
• In the days leading up to NaNoWriMo’s start, spend your scheduled writing time preparing to write. Organize your workspace. Get out your notebooks or index cards or computer-based outliner. Do whatever research you need to do. Make notes about your characters and plot. Draw maps and diagrams. Spend at least 50% of the scheduled time doing this every day you plan to write.
• Think about the things distracting you during this warm-up period. Are Twitter and Facebook and your e-mail client calling out to you? Turn off your router or WiFi card. Are you getting phone calls from friends wanting to chat? Shut off the ringer or take the phone off the hook. Is your family making too much noise or interrupting you? Close the door or explain that you need to work during this scheduled time every day. Learn about these distractions and how to handle them now, before the month begins.
• Get your need to participate in NaNoWriMo writer’s forums (or other writer’s forums and blogs) out of your system. Some folks claim that the forums give them support and ideas. If you’re one of these people, now is the time to check in and participate. Use the other 50% of your scheduled time to do this. But get it out of your system now, before crunch time. Online forums are a procrastination tool. Every minute you spend online, is a minute you’re not writing. You know this is true. Don’t make excuses to waste time.

This is what I’ll be doing (and writing about here) in the days leading up to NaNoWriMo’s start.

Any comments? Use the comments link or form for this post to share them.

As I finish up a crazed month and a half that included of two 6-day helicopter excursions and a week-long trip to Ventura, CA to record a new video training course for Lynda.com, I find myself with an almost empty schedule — right before the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in a month. The quality or marketabilty of the novel doesn’t seem to matter. Apparently, it’s more important to get the words out, preferably to complete a story, than to write something that might one day be published.

Whatever.

I commented extensively on NaNoWriMo back in 2005. I didn’t have much to say about it that was nice. I expanded on my thoughts in a post a few days later. You might want to read those two posts before you continue. My opinions haven’t changed.

In fact, my opinions were confirmed just today. I happened to be in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, AZ. On a little table near the coffee shop area was an arrangement of books for and about NaNoWriMo. Despite the fact that November is still two weeks off, publishers and bookstores are cashing in on the needs of wannabe writers, offering them guidance for writing a novel in a month. I counted eight titles, from a small paperback to a shrinkwrapped “kit.”

I didn’t buy any of those books. I’ll never pay for anything branded as NaNoWriMo merchandise or in support of NaNoWriMo or even designed to help writers succeed in their NaNoWriMo efforts. I detest the very idea that organizations and individuals are trying to cash in on NaNoWriMo.

I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo. My excuse is that I’ve just been too busy. When you spend all day writing about computers or something equally dull, you don’t want to spend your evenings writing.

I don’t have to prove I can write a book in a month — I’ve already done it. More than once. And my books have been published. And I’ve even made money on them.

But this year, I’m thinking I might use the ticking clock of NaNoWriMo to write the novel I started and lost. Maybe NaNoWriMo can motivate me to finish it.

So this week, I’ll pull out my notes and look them over. I’ll track down my outline and blow the digital dust off it. I’ll remember all the loose ends and how I planned to tie them up. And maybe — just maybe — I’ll be a NaNoWriMo author this year.

Anyone else out there thinking about giving it a try?

I’m a big fan of pulp fiction — the hard-boiled detective kind. I’ve read just about everything I can get my hands on by the big names of the genre — Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain — and lots by the lesser known names that, frankly, I can’t even remember. There’s something about the language used in these stories from the 20s, 30s, and 40s that I find pleasing. It’s the slang, mostly, and the quick sentences and sharp dialog. The rough characters who are described by their actions, rather than a bunch of author-injected descriptive prose. The stories that suck you in in true page-turner style. The morals, which are somehow questionable and right at the same time.

I thought I was relatively alone in my taste for this kind of writing until the other day, when a Twitter friend, @MikeTRose, sent a few photos to TwitPic of a friend’s pulp fiction collection. This made me feel that liking pulp fiction wasn’t something to be ashamed (for lack of a better word) about. I could come out of the closet and greet other pulp fiction lovers who might drop by and visit my blog.

A while back, I treated myself to The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler. This huge, 1,168-page volume has dozens of classic pulp fiction stories. It’s sitting on my bedside table and each night, before I go to sleep, I treat myself to some murder and mayhem where the good guys might spill a little blood, but always do the right thing.

Each story begins with a half-page introduction that tells you more about the story’s author and how he — and yes, they’re just about all men — got his start as a writer. A remarkable number of these authors had their books and short stories made into movies — I guess the movie industry could really churn them out in the days when plot, dialog, and acting was more important than special effects.

The mix of authors is amazing. One author might have good, tight prose and dynamic, slang-filled dialog. Another author might be long and rambling, as if he knew he were being paid by the word and wanted to stretch it out. The stories range from basic get-the-bad-guy plots where you know what the bad guy has done and follow along as the good guy gets him to plots that are true mysteries, right up to the end.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in pulp fiction who wants a compendium of stories that cover the entire range of the mystery/detective part of the genre. Although it’s not the kind of book you’d want to lug around on vacation or bring to the beach, it makes a good addition to your bedside table or reading chair.

Anyone else out there enjoy pulp fiction? Use the comments link or form to share your favorite authors, stories, or compilations.

The other day, I met a 20-year-old guy named Doug. (Not his real name, of course, but it will do.) Actually, he introduced himself to me. He’d heard I was a writer and wanted to meet me. He thought I wrote novels and when I explained that I wrote computer how-to books, he seemed disappointed. He told me he was going to school to be a writer. He wanted to write fiction.

I asked Doug what he’d written so far and his response disappointed me: “Nothing,” he said. “I’m only 20.” He then went on to tell me that he was still learning how to write. That’s why he was studying it in school. So far, he’d learned that stories had “a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Wow.

To understand my take on this poor misguided soul, you need to understand that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And I began writing when I was about 13.

I didn’t always want to write computer how-to books. Computers — well, the desktop kind, anyway — didn’t exist when I was a kid. I wanted to write fiction, just like Doug does. But I didn’t have any illusions about going to school to be a writer. (At 13, I didn’t expect to attend college when I finished high school.) So I started writing on my own. Practice makes perfect, right?

Years later, after following a career path that didn’t interest me and paying my dues, I found success writing computer how-to books. I didn’t go to college to become a writer. All I had was two semesters of creative writing. (I was able to skip English 101 and 102 because of my ability to write an essay that proved I didn’t need these basic English courses.) But I had years of practice — and am still practicing here.

So when I met a 20-year-old who wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t writing. After all, how can you be a writer if you don’t write?

I was disappointed and, in all honesty, a bit disgusted with Doug’s lack of insight and drive on his chosen career. (At 20, I already had my BBA and a full-time job.) But I didn’t want to be rude, so I thought I’d venture a suggestion. Doug was working at a part-time job that had a lot of down time — time he wasn’t particularly busy with job duties. I suggested that he spend his down time people watching. “Keep a journal,” I suggested. “Jot down bits and pieces of the character traits you see and conversations you overhear. You might be able to draw on these real-life characters when you develop your own fictional characters.”

As you might imagine, he didn’t seem very interested. And that’s when I decided to stop wasting my time.

What’s strange about all this is that I’ve been invited to speak to my local high school’s journalism class about writing. I’m not a journalist, but I’m pretty sure that the kids taking this course have writing interests besides journalism. I plan to share with them some of the “secrets to success” for being a writer. I think they’ll be surprised by what I’ve got to say.

I guess what I’m thinking about all this is: if you’re 20 years old and you need to take a college course to learn that a piece of fiction has a beginning, a middle, and an end, you’re probably not going to be much of a writer.

To be a writer, you need to be a writer. The only way to do that is to write.

Way back when, I subscribed to Bookmarks magazine. It’s a magazine of book reviews for readers of fiction and non-fiction. The subscription was expensive and the content was primarily a regurgitation of reviews in other magazines and newspapers with a summary rating system. There would also be articles about specific reader groups and a featured author or genre or both. Based on what I read in the magazine, I’d choose books I wanted to read. But more often than not, a glowing book review would point me to a hard-to-find book or a book that simply wasn’t up to par.

Revenge by Stephen Fry is both of these things. What attracted me to the book was the claim that it was a “modern-day Count of Monte Cristo.” The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic story of revenge, written by Alexandre Dumas in 1844. Dumas, the French author of The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and Man in the Iron Mask, weaves incredible, well written and thought out tales of intrigue, adventure, and even love. The movie and television adaptations of his work offer shallow hints of his complex story lines. The recent Man in the Iron Mask movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio is an example that made me cringe, from the moment Leo uttered the word “Huh?” in his role as King Louis XIV to the revealing of the king’s true father at the end. (Readers of The Man in the Iron Mask know that the story has quite a different ending and is, in fact, the final book of the musketeers trilogy.)

In any case, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my very favorite books. I’ve read it two or three times, which is no small chore, considering its length and the writing style. So when a modern day version of the same tale appeared in Bookmarks with good reviews, I immediately put it on my reading list.

It took about two years to track down a copy of Revenge. (Remember, there’s no real book store here in Wickenburg and the local library doesn’t read Bookmarks. It wasn’t very high on my Amazon.com wish list, either.) I finished it on Saturday.

To understand how I rate books, you need to understand my “can’t put it down” test. These days, I read before bedtime. In most cases, I’m horizontal, propped up with a pillow with reading glasses perched on my nose. One light is on. I’m tired; it’s the end of a long day and I’ve been up since 5 or 6 AM. Most books I read these days can engage me for a dozen or so pages before I’m ready to pass out. But a good book can actually keep me awake and reading long after Mike has shut off the television, come to bed, and begun to snore. (For the record, he doesn’t snore all the time or any more than I do.)

Revenge started out a bit worse than usual. It was one of the books that I start and then put aside while I work on another one. It was well-written, but not very entertaining. The “setup” — which is where the author introduces a protagonist that you can feel real sympathy for as well as antagonists you really want to hate — was too long and drawn out. I put it down for about two weeks.

I finally got back to it when I took it to Howard Mesa. The wind was howling up there all weekend, making it very unpleasant to be outside. There’s no television there and Mike had a lot of work to do that I couldn’t help him with. So I picked up Revenge and finished it up.

I found Fry’s writing style perfectly fine. In my mind, when you can read a book without frowning at the way sentences are written or dialog is composed, the writer has pulled you in. In those books, the author has stepped back, out of the picture, and you’re just reading an account of what happened to his characters. Stephen Fry did a great job of stepping back, letting the reader get the story without interference from awkward constructions, idiotic dialog, etc. (One of my main complaints about The DaVinci Code was Dan Brown’s awful writing skills.)

That’s not to say that the story didn’t have its faults. My main problem with the book was the way it finished up — far too quickly. In The Count of Monte Cristo, main character Edmond orchestrates a complex revenge scheme that gives his betrayers what they deserve. It almost goes exactly according to plan — in other words, there was still some suspense near the end of the book. In Revenge, main character Ned begins to plot his revenge 2/3 of the way through the book, leaving only 1/3 of the book’s pages to complete it. There’s no complex scheming; he’s simply put himself into a position to extract revenge at his leisure. While I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who may want to read the book, I will say that it’s too quick and easy. While Ned doesn’t get everything he wanted, he also loses the sympathy of the reader by the cruelness of his revenge on some characters. In contrast, at no point in The Count of Monte Cristo do I feel that Edmond has stepped over the line. And while I don’t have the book in front of me now to consult, I’m pretty sure that at least half the book’s pages are devoted to his plotting and the manipulation of his characters before the final “gotchas.”

Revenge, of course, is one several age-old plot basics that can be found in books, movies, and television dramas. Dumas did it best. Fry tried and, in doing so, may have exposed a few people to Dumas’s work. But if you have to choose between the two to take along on a journey or relaxing weekend, leave Fry behind and take the classic. It’s a far better work.

As for Bookmarks — I let my subscription slide. Frankly, its self-promotional content urging readers to buy subscriptions for their local libraries was annoying me. I had also begun to suspect that many of the lesser-known titles the magazine highly recommended were planted there by the books’ publishers. (If I wanted to read advertisements for books, I’d browse the New York Times Book Review.) Coupled with the high subscription price, I decided it just wasn’t worth it.

Besides, I already have a pile of books to get through. I don’t need anymore recommendations!

I’ve been a writer since I was 13. I always had a story inside me trying to get out. I started with college-ruled notebooks, writing on just one side of the paper in my printed handwriting, just to keep it neat. As the computer age began, I moved to word processing.

Somewhere along the line, I went pro and began being paid for what I wrote. But it wasn’t the stories that earned me money. It was the technical non-fiction, the prose that explained how to perform tasks with computers. With no formal training in the computer field — after all, it was in its infancy when I graduated from college in 1982 — I had become a computer “expert” (whatever that is) and I churned out books at an alarming rate. Sixteen years after getting my first check for a writing assignment, I now have 70 books and literally hundreds of articles under my belt. (And no, I don’t I don’t think that explains my current weight problem.)

A number of conversations with people within the past few days has made me think about writing and why writers need to write. I thought I’d set my thoughts down here. And the timing couldn’t be better, with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starting today.

Kinds of Writers

The way I see it, there are different kinds of writers:

• Born writers are people who just feel an overwhelming need to write. Obviously, no one is “born” to write. They’re born with the equipment to get the job done — a good brain, etc. — and are molded by experience and education in such a way that they enjoy writing. They may not be good at it, but they like it and they do it. Whether they can successfully turn it into a career depends on their personality, willingness to learn and improve, ability to meet editors’/publishers’ needs, and business sense.
• Made writers are people who, through circumstance, find themselves writing a lot. Most of these people do it for a living or derive at least some part of their income from writing. This might be someone who steps into a management job that requires writing a lot of reports. Or someone in marketing who writes a lot of ad copy.

The Need to Write

Born writers often need to write. They have these ideas rolling around in their heads and they need to get them down on paper (or pixels). Sometimes just getting them out there is enough. Other times, they need to work the words, to fine tune them, to perfect them. Some people write prose, others write poetry. Some of it is very good, some of it is crap. It doesn’t matter to them. They write because they need to get those words out.

I’m pretty sure that I’m one of these people. I feel a need to write something every day. That’s why you’ll find a new blog entry here most (but not all) mornings. Throughout the day, I think about things going on in the world and in my life. During quiet times — while driving, flying, showering, or doing other “automatic” or mindless tasks — my brain shifts into high gear and really thinks things through. That’s when I get ideas. It’s also when I accumulate enough conclusions about something to begin writing about it, often for the next day’s blog entry.

If I go several days without writing, I get cranky. It’s like going through withdrawal.

Blogging — which I’ve been doing for four full years now — really helps me get those words out. From the very start, I looked at my blog as a journal of my life. It’s only within the past two or so years that I combined my personal blog with entries and information to support my books. My life is multi-dimensional; shouldn’t my blog be the same?

But the more I blog, the less I work on the fiction that got me started as a writer all those years ago. Earlier this year, when I lost the manuscript for a novel I was working on (read “Death of a Manuscript“), I simply stopped writing fiction. I don’t feel the need as much, if at all. I think the blogging I do fulfills my need to write.

Insight from a Professional Writer

Years ago, before I went pro, I was friends with a professional copywriter. He wrote mostly advertising copy — the kind of text you’d find describing products or services in a full-page magazine ad. He also did some technical writing. He made a very good living.

I was young and foolish then. I thought he’d be interested in critiquing my fiction. I sent him a story. He critiqued it. Like most wannabe writers, I wasn’t happy with his comments. (Have you ever met a wannabe writer who actually likes honest criticism?) I don’t recall all of his comments, but I do know that he had an issue with my use of the word pretty as a modifier, as in, “It’s pretty cold outside.” He claimed that it wasn’t professional. I think I used it in dialog, where it could be an indication of a character’s background, maturity, etc. But he didn’t know dialog. He was a copywriter. He was looking for high quality, polished prose. I didn’t deliver it.

He did tell me that I had some talent — that I knew how to write. This was enough praise and encouragement for me.

But the biggest thing I learned from him was that there was more to writing than writing fiction. While writing fiction could be enjoyable and a nice way to spend my evenings, writing non-fiction could earn a living and pay my bills. And while wannabe novelists could look down at a technical writer as a “hack” or someone who had “sold out” and no longer practiced the “art” of writing, professional writers know better.

Every word I write — whether it’s a how-to article for using Microsoft Word or the opening paragraphs of a novel — makes me a better writer. So isn’t it better to have someone pay me for all that practice?

Writing for Money

The other day, I had a conversation with my friend, Pete. We were talking about the writing I do and he wanted to know how advances and royalties — he called them residuals — worked. I explained it. (I also explained it on this blog in “Royalty Statements.”) Pete said something like, “That sounds like a good deal. I’d like to write a book.”

I explained to him that it wasn’t such a sweet deal if your books were about timely topics and had short shelf lives — like mine. It isn’t as if every author can write Gone with the Wind and collect royalties for the rest of his or her life. But we did agree that it was nice to get quarterly checks.

I reported this conversation to my husband by saying something like this: “Pete wants to write a book. He likes the idea of royalty checks.”

“That’s stupid,” my husband replied. “That’s not the right reason to write a book.”

What?

That, of course, almost started an argument. I asked him why he thinks I write books. I reminded him that writing about computers isn’t exactly the most engaging or creative thing a person could do. I asked him if he thought I’d keep writing computer books if no one would pay me to do it. At first, he didn’t get it. But then he did. And he wisely backed off.

A Conversation with a NaNoWriMo Participant

And that brings to me to a “conversation” I had with a fellow Twitter user yesterday. She was pushing NaNoWriMo, which I wrote about in “NaNoWriMo ‘€˜05” and “NaNoWriMo Expanded.” (If you follow those links, be sure to follow both of them for both sides of my opinion.) I followed a few of the links in her posts and was pretty turned off by what I found. Maybe it’s because I’m cynical and hard-minded about writing, probably because I’ve seen too many wannabes waste their time. So I tweeted:

Dare I ask it? Do any of the novels actually completed each November ever get published? Or am I missing the point?

The response came back immediately:

Yes, there is a whole list of published authors from NaNoWriMo on the site — €”will go fetch URL. I’m talking w/several agents now.:-)

Ok, the list of published NaNoWriMo authors is at: http://urltea.com/1y4e Scroll down on media kit page.

I looked at the list and found 17 novelists listed with their NaNoWriMo books. One of them was Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which was hot last year. It was good to see something published, but I admit I wasn’t convinced that these were NaNoWriMo works. (I really am a cynic.) And, frankly, with hundreds of thousands of writers participating since 1999, 17 published works wasn’t a very impressive result.

Now you can rightly argue that publication isn’t everyone’s goal. To which I can argue that any idiot can type 50,000 words in a month. Publication is one of the true measures of the value of those words when taken as a whole. That’s the way I look at it, anyway.

But I tweeted back:

Thanks for this. I’ve written 70 books since 1990 but still don’t have a novel out there. One of these days…

Was I bragging? Probably. (I can be such a jerk sometimes.) But I’m proud of that number, proud to be a published and paid professional writer. And I want to make sure that people don’t confuse me with the wannabes. I’ve got my medals and war stories to prove I’m beyond that.

The response:

You’ve written SEVENTY BOOKS since 1990? :-O OMG, you could teach the rest of us! It sounds like your year to write that novel!

No, I couldn’t teach the rest of them. I’ve realized that I have a knack for what I do and that a “born writer” couldn’t learn it from me. And although I’d like to write that novel, I’m pretty busy this month.

I replied:

It sounds a lot more impressive than it is. I think NEXT year will be my novel year. Hold me to that, will you?

I was hoping she’d agree and remind me a few times next year. But instead, she replied:

Everyone says “next year will be my novel year.” That’s why THIS year is when we encourage you to Just Do It, ala Nike.;-)

And I think that’s what separates me from the NaNoWriMo crowd. “Just do it” isn’t a battle cry I apply to something as important as writing a novel. I know I can write 50,000 words in a month. I don’t need to prove it to myself. I’ve already proved it. I wrote my third book, which was 300 pages, in ten days. I routinely plow through revisions of 400+ page books in less than a month.

And yes, I realize that a novel is different. But how different is it? Start with an outline (like I do for all my books) and character notes and write the damn story. I was 100 pages into the novel I lost when my hard disk ground to a halt. I’d done all that in less than a week. But that wasn’t what was holding me back from taking the NanoWriMo challenge…

I replied:

It’s a lot easier to write a book when you know there’s a check (and an impatient editor) waiting for you when it’s done.

And that says all. I finish writing projects because I’m paid to.

Her reply:

Deadlines and a check are motivation to be sure. What I love about NaNo is rediscovering my inner motivation to just love writing.

I don’t think that being forced to write 50,000 words in a month is a good “inner motivation to just love writing.” But I didn’t say this. Instead, I said:

I think that’s what my blog does for me. Since losing a novel manuscript to a hard disk crash, it’s hard to get started again.

She replied:

Ooh, that’s every writer’s nightmare, a reminder to all of us to keep backing up our novels. I can understand why it’s hard then.

On the other hand, it might be fun for you to start a completely different novel and see where that goes.

Fun? Hmm. I’m not sure about that. Another thing holding me back is what I do at my desk all day: I write. Do you think I want to spend my evenings doing the same thing?

I will write that novel. But not not this month. Sometime when I have a clear head and no work stacked up on my plate. If that day ever comes.

Why Do You Write?

Are you a writer? Why do you write? What motivates you? Inspires you? I’m always looking for input from readers (and writers) as food for thought. Use the Comments link or form for this post.

And if you’ve ever participated in NaNoWriMo, I’d love to hear your honest feedback about it. Did you achieve your goal? Did it provide “inner motivation”? Would you do it again? My Twitter friend showed me another side of the NaNoWriMo scene. What do you have to add? Comments are always welcome.

Prepare yourself for the usual author rant — but with a difference. This one is coming from an author who just completed her 69th book. An author who has worked with about eight different publishers and dozens of copy editors over the course of 15 years.

So no, this isn’t a newbie writer griping about a heavy-handed editor on her first or second book. It’s coming from someone who has been doing this for a long time and feels as if she’s “seen it all.”

I’ve taken this topic and split it into three parts. In this part, I’ll start off with an introduction to the topic of copy editing and tell you what I believe it should be.

What is Copy Editing?

The purpose of copy editing should be to ensure that the original text is:

• Free of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Note the use of the word “error” here; that’ll be important later in this discussion.
• Consistent with a publisher style guide. A style guide, in the world of publishing, is a document that sets forth usage in those gray areas. I’m talking about capitalization issues such as web vs. Web, hyphenation issues such as email vs. e-mail, and design issues such as boldfacing figure references.
• Clear and easy to understand. This usually involves breaking up long or complex sentences or possibly rearranging sentence components.
• Unlikely to be misinterpreted. For example, when you say the “Color in pop-up menu,” do you mean a pop-up menu named “Color in” or are you talking about color in a pop-up menu?
• Consistent with the writing style of the established book or series. This only comes into play when you’re writing for a series that has a predefined format and style. For example, Visual QuickStart Guides (VQSes) tend to be short and to the point, so I don’t have room for personal stories, as I do in other books. VQSes also have level 2 headings that begin with the word “To” and are followed by numbered steps, each of which presents a single task. (I could list about a dozen style issues specific to a VQS, but you get the idea.)

Of course, what you’re writing should determine how much of the above is required. If you’re writing a novel much of this may not apply at all. Consider the book, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. The book’s first person narrator is a retarded man. The book is in journal format and the first few chapters are so full of spelling and punctuation errors (or omissions) that the book is difficult to read. But that’s because of the author’s choices and the method he uses to communicate. Would you expect a retarded man to have perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation? Of course not. The author is using the character’s shortcomings as a writer to make his character more real — as well a to drive home the changes in the character as the story progresses. This technique was used again more recently in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which featured an autistic first-person narrator. If a copy editor had done a thorough job on the grammar or punctuation in either of these two books, he would have altered the characters. The same can be said for dialog in most novels, since few people speak using perfect grammar.

So copy editing of fiction is a different subject — one I’m not addressing here. I’m discussing copy editing of non-fiction, primarily technical or how-to books, since that’s where my experience is.

More to Come…

This is the first part of my discussion of copy editing. There are at least two more parts to go. In the next part, I’ll rant a bit about my experiences with one particular book over the ten-year course of its life (so far). You’d think that after 10 years, the process would be trouble-free…

Why not take a moment to tell us what you think copy editing should be. How do you expect it to change or improve your writing? Use the comments link or form to share your thoughts.

Last night I had the pleasure of watching the latest Harry Potter movie on a full-sized screen at Wickenburg’s historic Saguaro Theater.

Our Saguaro Theater

First, a few words about the theater. It was originally built in the 1920s (I believe) and, like all theaters from that era, only has one big screen. The theater was never cut into pieces by greedy theater owners, anxious to max out their profits on available real estate. (Unlike the old Closter and Tenafly theaters I went to in New Jersey as a child.) The seats, which are replaced every 10 or so years, are always replaced with another theater’s cast-offs, so they’re never quite new. But they’re comfortable and the current seats not only recline but have cup holders. The place is clean, too.

The theater owner, Brian, owns two theaters in Arizona. The other one is in Payson, where I believe he lives. He’s a great guy. Although he could stick us with older movies that have been around for weeks or months, he manages to get us a good bunch of first run movies every year. When we get a first run — like Harry Potter this week — we keep it for two weeks.

The theater is open every night for one showing and has three showings on Saturdays and Sundays. There’s a refreshment stand with the usual popcorn and candy. Everyone who works there is extremely friendly and pleasant. I get a discount because I run advertising slides in the theater and they actually recognize me when I come in and give me my discount without asking. Regular ticket prices are $8 per adult and $5 per child or senior. (I pay the child/senior price.)

The Saguaro theater is the only theater in Wickenburg. In fact, it’s the only theater within about 40 miles. So if you want to watch a movie and you don’t want to spend a lot of time driving, this is is.

Harry Potter

Now I know a lot of people don’t like the Harry Potter phenomena, but I’m not one of them. Sure, I think there’s entirely too much hype about it — but isn’t there too much hype about everything these days? (Think iPhone and Paris Hilton.) The truth — at least the way I see it — is that the books are pretty well written and tell great stories that appeal to young people and adults looking for a fantasy escape. While the hype has pushed book sales far beyond what’s normal for books of this genre, I think most readers come away satisfied, if not pleased, about their reading experience.

Watch the Trailers

The movies are well done. They’re true to the books, while cutting out a lot of the extra stuff that J.K. Rowling seems to have added to the later titles in the series. It’s a real pleasure to see the scenes from the books come to life on the screen. Casting is very good, special effects are incredible. What else could a reader want in a movie based on a book?

What I’m also enjoying as I watch each movie seeing the young cast members grow up. They were kids at the beginning of all this; now they’re becoming young men and women. The current movie features many flashbacks of Harry’s life and the footage is there to show him at every age. The characters are supposed to be 15 in this story and although they’re older in real life, they can pass as 15-year-olds. (The character that plays Malfoy does look considerably older than the others, though.) I’m hoping the production folks can keep up the pace and deliver the last two movies with the same actors.

As you might imagine, I highly recommend the movie to anyone who has been reading the Harry Potter books. It’s meant to be seen on a big screen (or as big a screen as is available to you) rather than on a television screen. We’ll probably see it again before it leaves town, perhaps from a seat near the back of the theater for a different view.

Did you see the movie? What did you think? Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts with the rest of us.

And in case you’re wondering, I do have the last Harry Potter book on order at Amazon.com. I didn’t spring for the overnight shipping — I’m not a complete fangirl! — but I do look forward to reading it when it arives sometime next week.

Last week, I discovered that a file containing the manuscript for a novel I was working on was gone.

The file lived in my laptop, which is what I was using to write it. It was backed up on my main computer’s hard disk. I had decided two or three months ago to keep working copies of all my fiction on my iDisk space. (iDisk is part of the .Mac services available for Macintosh users. It gives you 1 GB of storage space on an Apple server that can be shared among all of your computers.) The idea was that by keeping the files there, I could work on them from any computer and always have the most recent version.

Somewhere along the line, while copying the folder containing this file to my iDisk space, the file was lost. I’m not sure how it happened, but I do recall getting an error message when I made the copy. I should have investigated more closely, but I didn’t. The file was gone and because I didn’t work on it for months, I didn’t realize it was gone.

The backup copy, of course, was lost in my February hard disk crash.

I spent most of a day playing with file recovery software to get the file back. I managed to retrieve about 2 of the 97 pages I’d written.

Obviously, I’m not very happy about this. I’d been working on this project on and off for about four years. There was a lot of me in it. I’d written a lot of good dialog and some pretty strong scenes. It wasn’t perfect — the characterization on a few of the characters was just not good enough — but what was good was very good. A lot of “keeper” stuff in there.

And now its gone.

I find the task of recreating this work daunting. Lately, I just don’t feel that I have the writing skills I need to write fiction. I have my outline, my index cards for scenes, my character notes. I can clearly remember lots of the scenes and even some of the dialog. But I don’t feel confident that I can rewrite what I lost. I know that when it comes time to sit down and type it all back into my word processor, there will be something lacking. It just won’t be as good or as complete.

Fortunately, this was the only manuscript I lost (other than the partially completed Chapter 6 of my Excel for Windows book, which was easy, if not tedious, to recreate). My other fiction manuscripts remain safe, now backed up to three places. But although I’ve been toying with them for far longer — one of them originates back in my teenage years when I wrote longhand in spiral bound, college ruled notebooks — the loss of this one seems to hurt more. It was a more mature work, a more marketable work. It, unlike my other fiction scribbling, had a future, possibly in print.

Time is now my main obstacle to picking up this work and recreating it. I’m juggling two jobs: as a technical writer and a helicopter pilot. I’m having a hard enough time getting both of those jobs done. At the end of a working day, I’m mentally exhausted and not prepared to tackle a recreational writing assignment. (That’s one of the reasons I do 90% of my blogging first thing in the morning.) So who knows when this work might be resurrected?

Perhaps it’s something to look forward to in my retirement years.

I’d read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy some time ago and probably even read a few of its sequels. But when The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was released, I added it to my Amazon.com wish list. Within two weeks, I had it in my hot little hands.

Douglas Adams has a great sense of humor and a wonderful way with words. There’s a joke in every paragraph, if not every line, of the book. The story is a mish-mash of science fiction/time-travel adventures that are beyond far-fetched. The result: a fun read that’ll entertain, enlighten, and confuse you.

I’m a pretty big fan of Ayn Rand, having read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged at least two times each. (I’m due for another round.) So when I found The Art of Fiction, a book edited by Tore Boeckmann from audiotapes of Rand’s 1958 lectures to about 20 friends and acquaintances, I grabbed it. I’m now making my way through it, page by page.

The book covers Rand’s ideas about writing and reading fiction. I’ve just finished the first two chapters, and so far, it’s mostly from the writer’s point of view. And I have to admit that it’s taught me a whole different way of thinking about writing fiction.

In Chapter 1: Writing and the Subconscious, she discusses how writers draw upon information stored in their subconscious for descriptions and mood-setting words. A writer who can write well without struggling for the words knows what he’s trying to say and has mastered his subconscious.

In Chapter 2: Literature as an Art Form, she pretty much bashes writers who break the rules and attempt to write “nonobjectively,” resulting in text that’s impossible (or nearly so) to understand. She cites Gertrude Stein and James Joyce as examples. She asserts that a writer should choose every word carefully to convey the writer’s exact meaning. She also approaches the topic of “show, don’t tell” by discussing concretes (descriptions) and abstractions (the message the author is trying to communicate).

The next chapter is on Theme, which I’ve always struggled with. It’ll be interesting to see how she tackles the topic.

When I’m finished reading, I may update this entry or compose a new one with my final verdict. It’s not a quick read — Ayn Rand never is. But I am enjoying it. And learning.