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A Major Change in the Novel

8/29/2023

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There have been a number of changes to the business in the last few months including a major change to the book. At this point in time, “Stefan’s Owl from Oblivion” is approaching 657,000 words. There has been a large pushback from various sources to divide up the book. I have a professional edit sitting in the queue to be edited into the book, and that professional edit was sort of the last element that pushed me over the edge. The editing agency has a length limit for what they will edit and it is a bit less than the book’s length. So I had to scissor out of the book a meaningful length that could actually allow the editor to get an accurate feel for the structure and writing of the book. The professional editor ended up editing 287,000 words approximately.

They could have edited more but there is a certain risk and some inefficiency in doing a larger edit. The larger the edit, the more risk you take on because you never know what editor you may get and if they turn out to be a bad one, then you have wasted an enormous amount of money if the edit is a long one. There is a certain inefficiency as well because if you get a good editor (and I did this time) they may point out some systemic problems the manuscript has. So even before applying the sentence level changes, there is a change in the way of handling internal thoughts and telepathy that the editor has suggested.

The editor told me they felt like they were being “beat to death” by dialog tags. I already use different fonts for telepathy. The editor told me that 50% of the book happens in people’s heads. So if I simply use a different font for the thoughts, I could eliminate many of the dialog tags. The font change does the work and allows the use of much fewer tags. They also established the convention that thoughts should not appear in quotes. Only things spoken aloud should be quoted. This is a systemic change and once the editor had sold me on the change, then the change can be applied to the rest of novel… the unedited parts.
 
This led to another related change. The Sun God characters exchange information between their minds and between their minds and the Sun God hive data systems in a way similar to people exchanging texts and video clips. Unlike telepathy, it does not transmit feelings. It is similar to a digital communication. The Sun Gods were originally beings comprised totally of energy, so it made sense to have this form of communication. However, the Sun God teens in the story are a mix of flesh and energy, largely appearing to be humans. But they still use this form of digital-like communication, called Sun-net, to stealthily communicate with each other and the enormous hive data systems, which actually records each Sun God’s life in complete detail. Any Sun God can do a query and view an episode of another Sun God’s life from within their own mind.
 
The Sun God communication represents another form of thought. I decided the font for Sun God Sun-net messages needed to be a font that represents their unique form of digital communication. I wanted a font that would mentally queue and remind that the communication is digital, with all its limits. In the image topping this article, you see an example of the font I chose. I hope it reminds the reader of digital plus Sun God unique communication.
 
This brings me to the big change I made in the novel. I have decided to split the novel into a series of seven novels. The original novel was destined to become even longer because I felt that the last chapters of the novel were weak. The split allows each novel in the series to be close to the mainstream publishing word count of 70,000 – 110,000 words. 

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Pondering Art While Writing

7/22/2023

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I found this piece of artwork when I was looking in my archive the other day. I had forgotten I had done it. Seeing it instantly started the wheels turning in my mind. You see, for me, writing and art are intertwined. Sometimes when I am trying to figure out something about the story, I will import the scene into art and think about it there. Likewise, I might draw a character so that I can get to know them better and in drawing them, things are revealed about them that I might not have realized when I am just thinking about the words.

I originally did this piece as a promo. That much I remember. But I put the Sun Medallion on Paul25 of the same design as the one Tyco wears, one that was carved by some ancient people long ago, in the likeness of the Sun God, Lifegiver, who happens to have the same face as Tova. The nine-year-old Sophistan-human, Paul25, never wears a medallion like I picture him with. But Paul25 has been around for over a millennia so he could have been around when those ancients made the medallion for the first time.

Maybe they made more than one. When Tova was twelve-years-old, a Native American made one of these medallions and gave it to her. Whether Native American or Mayan, the people knew the Sun God, Lifegiver. It was a common concept, a common vision propagating through these cultures, one strong enough that an artisan in the culture could just carve one of these medallions stone cold from memory. So, looking at this picture, what would it mean if Paul25 really did have one of these. 

When did he get it? Where did he get it from? Could he have something to do with the creation of this symbol, since he actually predates much of the Mayan culture? Could he, not Lifegiver, have instilled the vision into the minds of the culture. And if he did, how did he know what Lifegiver looked like? So I start to wonder: is their yet a subplot left to tell?

So now finding this art has set me off thinking about another dimension in the story. Both art and writing are largely driven by the subconscious. Maybe this is how the visual mind and writing mind communicate.

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No Eye Candy, Just the Facts

7/2/2023

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Just when you think more shit couldn’t happen, it does. That pretty well describes things since the beginning of 2020. I’m reading this morning about all the people bailing from Twitter (today’s problem is the rate limiter problem) and really, certainly for the authors and artists... it’s pretty much a dying platform. Even before the current problems, the algorithm had the sustaining problem that in terms of discovery, Twitter right now is pretty close to a zero. Slowly but surely anything intellectual is just disappearing there. The people that would be the targets of promotions: they are just gone. And why not. If Twitter will show your book to 10 people despite having hundreds of followers, well what is the point? What this means is a heavier reliance on the search engines of the web. And there is at least some hope that the new AI enhanced search engines will pick you out of the noise.
 
Yes, I’m gradually turning off on social platforms in general. I had all sorts of problems with Facebook to the point where I foolishly invested something like $16,000 in advertising there, got an extremely large following, and then found the money was wasted. It did nothing for me. That’s because Facebook made a rule change and suddenly, all those followers my advertising had collected, I would now have to pay to talk to them. The algorithm for just discussing things with those interested people shafted me to be sure I would be frustrated enough to pay them more. But I didn’t buy.

Likewise, on Twitter, now being skeptical of social media, I paid $1,000 to advertise and I collected not followers but some people who were interested in my books and art. And then Elon came along and pissed all those people off and they left. I’m left with the dirty house while everyone else moves somewhere else to party.

I guess I’m pretty dumb since it took 2 times to teach me but despite all the “oh my god, it just went viral on social media” yack that goes on, really, this is a loser’s game. And why not? If you hang out there, you’re really not getting things done and you are certainly not getting entertained. You are getting frustrated so that you will engage for the sake of engaging or in the case of Twitter, if you have no fame you have already built up at your own expense for Twitter to attach to like some giant sucking parasite, then you are not heard at all. Like most social media, today, they are not into developing the conversation, just leaching off the rewards for free. Advertisers are not being fooled. You’ve seen all of the concept ads from large companies disappear. What you see now is the same ads that appear in ad boxes of the scummiest, crappiest websites out there.
 
Publishing has taken a turn towards this kind of thing, too. No one in publishing is interested in developing anything: not the publishers themselves, not those such as would-be editors and certainly not anyone servicing the self-publishing industry. Everyone wants to take your money, feed you a certain psychology, but really in the hard light of pragmatic, logical reality, you are getting nothing. If you publish with the mainstream, you do all the work for free now a days including the promotion of the book. If you happen to land a popular book, one that is unbelievably popular, then the publisher will perfume the reamer before they use it… make you feel you are among one of the blessed. But what did you have to do to your writing to hit the numbers in mass market that the cash-hungry conglomerate wanted? Is the sole purpose of an author to provide meat for people who don’t really want to chew?
 
It is a very negative time in terms of the “artform of literature” progressing. For those very few authors that turn big numbers, they make pretty good money. But I’m talking big numbers, repeatedly. And the publisher of those authors still just wants to ride on the gravy train. Really, their service is taking care of the logistics of fulfillment and the contracting of cover art and the limited (legend in their own mind) editing they do. One thing that is a spoiler in that whole psychology, that whole brainwashed mindset of the literary industry, is the knowledge that as a decent engineer in technology in Silicon Valley, I made more than those poor bastards captaining that industry and almost all authors (except for the Stephen King variety). I don’t have to fall prey to the industry forcing authors and everyone else to beg for recognition, beg for money. Sure, I definitely could use the money. It’s not trivial the amount of money I have invested in my publishing company. I mean my Silicon Valley cohorts think I am out of my mind. And perhaps they are right. We will see how the future plays out.

So my job is simply to try to write the finest Literary Fiction novel I can using the best tools I can find. Just like when I wrote code in Silicon Valley, my goal is to push the state of the art. And not to succumb to the discouraging psychology of disaster after disaster that has occurred since the start of 2020.
 
 
 

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Confronting Doom

3/12/2023

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I just finished Chapter 32, “Confronting Doom,” and this chapter really represents a transition for me as a writer. For a while, I was feeling guilty because “Stefan’s Owl from Oblivion” is getting so long. I was reluctant to say more because I still was feeling the page limit shackles of traditional publishing… the guilt trip they apply to all writers. But after a year of work, so far, on this revision pass of the book, I realized that already the book is eight to ten times longer than a publisher would like. They have to think of the cost since they are trying to sell to the lowest common denominator of readership. Frankly, those readers will never read this book, even if I gave it to them for free. Let me just say up front, this book can be difficult to read. Because it is Literary Fiction, the characterization, the details about the characters are an extremely in depth look at them, so much so that you will feel that you personally know them. This is one of the things that distinguishes Literary Fiction from Genre Fiction. Genre Fiction needs only enough details about the character so that you understand the plot. Its goal is to get somewhere. For Literary Fiction, you are taking a ride, for a period of time, on the lives of the characters. The goal is to feel what they feel and to fully understand their nature.
 
Despite this book being an eclectic combination of science fiction, fantasy, Norse mythology, Mayan mythology, and fairies as  beings that exist in reality, the writing is designed to make you believe that this is happening, today, right now… that it totally is reality. In a former book I wrote, one reader was annoyed at me because it was so real to them that they were looking everyday in the news for signs that the characters really existed, that alien-human children had entered human society in some unknown way. I couldn’t tell them that they had just given me about the highest praise my kind of writer could receive.
 
So getting back to this chapter, I used an added style I had developed in the first of the book where I added several background chapters: a more gritty Earth culture theme, really, as I figured finally  in this chapter, a geopolitical spy thriller theme, because who else would be the first to get involved with alien-human immigrants but the intelligence agencies: wanting to befriend any extraterrestrial life long before everyone else found out. The goal would be to control the narrative, to be a friend, to not repeat the mistakes of people colonized in the past… namely not to be conquered such as the natives Columbus encountered, but to try to be viewed as a partner commanding at least some respect. One of the things I explored in earlier chapters is what would it mean, what would it require to gain the respect of a superior extraterrestrial being and what might their motivations be in coming to this planet.
 
The following excerpt is the last two pages of the chapter. In this chapter, Tova is the fifteen-year-old, human looking, Sun God, the reincarnation of the original Sun God, Lifegiver, who originally created the Sun-God-human hybrid life-form. Carol, is the twenty-four year old friend of Tova and is a CIA agent. The CIA is secretly working with her and some other alien-human children because they want gain advantage for the US and have the US appear as a friend to the extraterrestrials. Tova has already been murdered by the Russians but then brought back to life by an alien culture seventy-three light years away known as Sophista. Carol, who was a human looking fairy life-form, adopted as a child by parents working for the agency, was also murdered by the Russians when they murdered Tova’s father. She was also brought back by the Sophistans and though she doesn’t fully realize it yet, was recreated as a Sun-God-human hybrid. Professor Kettil is the youngest professor to ever achieve tenure at Cambridge and is one of the first naturally occurring human telepaths. He is a professor of evolutionary neuro psychology and serves as a sort of therapist, helping these alien-human hybrid children adapt to Earth and its hostile culture. As part of this, he is studying the children to determine how these children’s brains have advanced in this new form and what that will mean for humanity.
 
The current conversation is taking place in Tova’s spaceship, called a Sun Needle, which by design looks like an extremely advanced, Earth business jet. The idea is that only some humans will know that it really is a spaceship. The spaceship is currently located one-hundred miles above Cambridge and has such an enormous amount of power that it can hold itself in that position without orbiting. I hope you enjoy this speculative look at humanity’s future and will stick around as the book is created.

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Twitter Disaster and Sun God Children

2/16/2023

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I haven’t written a blog post in a while, but I suspect the blog postings will become more frequent now that Elon Musk has decided that Twitter is his own, private, entertainment software. For a while, I have been posting on Twitter, trying to generate interest in the book that I continue to work on (almost 10 years now). But there is no engagement there anymore. I guess rather than being for creatives, the forum is for outlandish statements and controversial political viewpoints, which is not a place that’s likely to be a pillar of intellectual discussion or entertainment. I know this sounds a bit like sour grapes and if it is, so be it. Part of being a writer/illustrator is being fiercely independent so that I feel free to push the bounds of creative endeavors, such as traditional boundaries with my writing of Literary Fiction. Sometimes my writing makes people feel a bit disturbed when they read it. It’s called “feeling something”, a ritual much needed into today’s homogenized, stereotyped content. Literary Fiction is acutely known for helping people learn to feel empathy and Literary Fiction works struggle to fulfill that promise in a strong way. Many movies on the screen, today, struggle with this. You can tell the ones that fail to make you feel something when you start getting that feeling that you are watching a video game on Autoplay.

There have been a number of really great movies that have flopped recently simply because you watch them and feel nothing. This especially happens in movies where the creators have really cool ideas and really great special effect that scream, “Hey, I’m cool. You should want to live in my world.” One that comes to mind is Disney’s recent “Tron Legacy” movie. That movie is really cool on the surface. I really don’t think they could have done a better job on special effects. But in terms of emotional connection… it was like watching a rockem sockem robots video game. The character, Cora, actually does break through all the blather with her expressions and body language. Those two elements were so strong she could have been screaming emotional dialog yet she accomplished the same thing with just a glance. As they say in the movie, it’s her innocence, her naivety on the treachery of humans, yet her seemingly, quiet, profound intelligence that made her communication so strong. The fact that she could operate and understand all of the technology of the world, be well read for the real world, yet so gullible screams real, live, sensitive human being. You can’t help but be on her side… be empathetic. The Flynns… well, robot father who creates robot world that traps robot son. They are so busy trying to convince you that they are so cool and profound that really, they come across as spoiled people who you couldn’t give a shit about. On the flipside of this equation is Disney’s Andor series playing on Disney+. I was stunned that anyone, let alone Disney, would make a series based on something that, at least script wise, seems like Literary Fiction. It’s well worth a watch. If you think it is too slow and boring, go visit TikTok. They have content for you.

So as I sit at 592,000 words on “Stefan’s Owl from Oblivion” and wonder how to make it better, I leave you with an excerpt from the book. In a sense, I am experimenting on you to see what you will do with it. And by the way, if you have JavaScript turned off on your browser while you read this, then you don’t exist. My web statistics software will not see you as a human, but as a robot or some hacker. Certainly not as a flesh and blood reader.

In the excerpt below, Patrick and Syon look like normal fourteen-year-old boys except that they have yellow patches in their otherwise blue eyes. What the world doesn’t know (and Syon doesn’t know yet) is that they are Sun Gods. Patrick and Syon are twins raised apart who can hear each other's thoughts, with Patrick being raised by an Air Force General (the one who shot down the ship bringing these Sun God children as a gift to humanity) and Syon has been adopted and is being raised by a perpetually drunk person in the UK who frequently beats him bloody. In this scene, Syon has been released from the hospital after being treated for a severe fall down concrete steps. Ty is an eight-year-old boy adopted by Fredrick Docherty, a former British assassin. Docherty would like to get Syon away from his abusive father and mother, and adopt Syon as his son. Right now, he is temporarily sheltering Syon.

 
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A Renaissance in Long Form Literature?

11/23/2022

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Here is one of the ads I recently ran on Twitter that contains a book excerpt. The context of the excerpt is that Paul25 is a boy whose age is frozen at nine-years-old, and he is immortal. He is a Sophistan-human from the planet Sophista and has traveled the Earth for many millennia. Here, he is in the Renaissance Era of Earth's history.

​The goal of this ad was to give people a taste of the book and mainly to let people know that the book project exists. This kind of advertising is important because part of the challenge in getting support for a book, whether it be getting crowdsourced money to support the initial printing or even getting people to try the book once it is out, is making people aware of the book. There are literally millions of books released every year, especially when you consider all the books thrown up on Amazon, many of which are people's thoughts transcribed to text with little editing.

To formally produce a book is very expensive. I say formally meaning that you perform the requisite 3 edits by a professional editor and layout/design the book with something more than the default word-bucket design Amazon does with their word processor to book page default. On Amazon, if the words in your bucket match the fantasy the reader wants to have, you score. That is, if they find your book among the millions there.

There is another side to literature that increasingly gets lost in this cacophony, and that is that literature is also meant to expand your mental perception of the universe. Sometimes that expansion can make the reader a bit uncomfortable. It is not their fantasy. And understanding a new point of view for gazing at the universe, a point of view that might require contemplative thought, is becoming less appealing than it used to be simply because the world is becoming so stressful that people just want to let their mind hide on some hamster wheel in the pleasure of a mindlessly repetitive tasks, which caters to soothing their minds. The US culture, at least, seems to read less and less. In my advertising, I have seen more uptake from the UK and possibly Japan, which makes me feel a bit strange since I am writing in California. It has a feeling of being on a small island in the middle of nowhere, writing via a satellite terminal to some internet forum.

I chose to advertise on Twitter because there are a number of authors on Twitter, and so there is a sort of "safety in numbers" vibe. But one thing I should have foreseen is that Twitter is a sort of narcistic place, where people customize things to what their mind wants to fantasize about and to be a hamster wheel of short-form bites for their tired, stressed-out minds. It many ways, people that go there are looking for low effort, high impact experiences, not ones that require thoughtfulness.

One exception I found to this was those youth that followed Disney on Twitter. They seem to be signing up to be taken to some place quite different than ordinary experience. The interesting thing was that when they scooped up my ad, they took the information to other social media forums. Basically, they scan Twitter for links to information... the news function of Twitter, rather than wanting to have any extensive embrace reading or discussing the contents there. 

For me, the whole Twitter experience is problematic, for how do you build a following of people that are interested in your project when your project will long outlast the platform itself? How do you build that persistent following that will share your experience in creation and then reap the rewards of your effort in the end? How do you spend the years required to make people aware of your existence in such a transitory world? 

Right now, especially considering what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, I am trying to find ways build a more persistent interaction and find a slow way, spanning a few years, of letting people know of my existence. The only proposed solution I have is to make this site into a more interactive site... perhaps advertise the site more. I'm not sure really what to do. 



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Plans for the Work in Progress: "Stefan's Owl from Oblivion"

11/5/2022

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I want to talk some about the plans I have for my work in progress, “Stefan’s Owl from Oblivion.” Now, in this race to the bottom, book-quality environment, where each book is just another blob of words to be read and discarded, similar to a newspaper, this may seem strange. And frankly, if you are just wanting to read something to see what some new twist of plot there might be, you can stop right here.

For one thing, I write literary fiction which means, in this case, you are going to take a ride on the lives of some alien-human hybrid kids as they try to fit into human culture and in many cases, try to survive the exploits of profiteering humans, whom would like to take their little bodies apart to find out how their unusual talents work and to increase human scientific knowledge on what’s possible in a life-form. I want you to feel what the kids feel, and to know how strange human thought, when held in relief against other life-forms and the way they think… how strange human thought truly is.

Isn’t the author human? Sometimes I wonder. But in any case, I can slip outside my skin to write from the viewpoint of another life-form. That talent is actually derived from writing some rather unusual software in my two decades of technical work that did require me to mentally simulate things outside the normal realm of human experience. My goal is to make you feel what these kids feel, to think in the philosophical way that these kids think. When they cry, perhaps you will cry with them. Reading this book will be an *experience*.

And part of that experience will be how the book itself is made. The picture at the top of this article is an “illuminated manuscript” hundreds of years old. It is still around because it was a total experience of writing and art and an illustration of the highest skill of the bookmaker’s craft. You don’t have to even read the Latin text to be fascinated by the book. 
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In the closeup picture above you notice that this is hand done. A large chunk of this monk’s life was spent on making this book. Notice that the monk used gold metallic ink probably made with gold leaf. Only a chosen few were going to read this book so they spared no expense in making this book a memorable… a great experience. Another thing to notice is how beautiful, how vivid the royal blue in the picture is. That monk uses a great royal blue ink.

Outside of a display screen or possibly an art or photography book, you have probably not seen that vivid royal blue. That’s because a standard, modern, four-color print process can’t make that color. You could come close to that color, but the ink density put on the paper would not allow the ink to dry in time before it got smeared all over the place by the printing press. My book will be adorned by these kind of features but it will not be done by hand, since I don’t want to spend my entire life doing it, though by the time this book comes out I will have likely spent about 13 years of my life on it. I will create this book by the thousands. There are presses that can do what appears to be a handmade book.

Offset book presses (as opposed to inkjet self-publishing POD presses) can generally do quite a number of amazing things. Four color presses are generally not limited to four colors but could print with up to eight ink colors. Beyond the standard Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks, usually mixed in the printing process to create all the different colors you see in an illustration, you can buy special inks to load into those other, normally unused “print rollers.” For example, there is a company, called Pantone, that creates precise ink colors.  I can load metallic gold color ink into one of the unused rollers to print the metallic gold like the monks did by hand. I can also load a clear colored ink, called a varnish. Varnish dries faster and harder than normal ink allowing higher ink densities to be printed by overprinting them with varnish to harden them up rapidly.

There is more to varnish than that, though. Different varnishes can provide different textures and glossiness on the illustration. Choosing the right varnish can give an illustration a magical quality like you are looking at a picture in some ancient book. And I shall try and use that, if possible. A full service press can do other things, like put a leather or simulated leather cover on the book, mix that up with front cover illustrations with parts highlighted with thick acrylic plastic. I will use a number of these press features to provide an experience that is unique for this book. So stick around and see how the story and the experience built around the story evolves. 

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Fight for Life

1/16/2022

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We live in a civilization in which so many things we use magically appear, and we just need money to get them. The facts of our existence are not tangible. Like outside, you see rocks and dirt. That's what the laws of the universe wants everything to be: dirt, containing random junk... the more random the better. It's hard to conceive how many lives had to build with their hands the stuff that magically appears, being a force against the randomness, extending the organization of our bodies to organizing the environment around us.

​If the organization in our bodies falls back to randomness, we die. If the order we create falls back into randomness, people die or live very poorly. Covid is part of the counterattack of the universe in an attempt to destroy our organization, returning things to being rocks. Without the life it destroys, there is no Covid. It is a response to us. It isn't alive. It's simply a randomizer.

It's the perfect response. It not only convinces our bodies to destroy themselves but randomizes the supply chains we need to live. The organization of our institutions... Covid is doing a pretty good job destroying that. The diseases that were trying to randomize us and were flagging are now raging, because we are busy fighting Covid. And if we escape Covid, there are people with guns ready to randomize us.

Sometimes, when the environment around us is crumbling, it's hard to see the big picture of how life exists, how life requires organization of our environment on a large scale. We see our local agendas. But the universe-wide agenda is to make us all into dirt. Fight for life.
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Update on “Who is Tova Chapter?” and Other Ramblings

10/16/2021

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Most authors experience a bit of soul searching as they are writing, but this chapter has caused a good bit of angst for me. It harkens back to my early childhood, where teachers wondered if I was retarded or something, because I had trouble writing cursive (not very readably) and had to be helped one summer to bring my reading up to standard. Then when I scored 10th grade on a 5th and 6th grade science achievement test, they wondered what kind of alien child they had been given to teach.

When I snuck under the door into a full-time gifted class in middle school, there was a different dynamic. No matter what kind of weird-ass person you are, there is a certain comradery, a certain realization that the outside world really doesn’t like us very much, and so we need to stick together for mutual protection.

And we did, with it saving my butt on more than one occasion. There was a certain amount of competition, encouraged by the teachers, so that we wouldn’t be totally lazy. But it was different than the normal world, encouraging more of a “do your best and let the cards fall where they may” rather than a sabotage of your competitor. It built a cooperative competition, which honestly, buried me in college where the name of the game was to come up with the winning trick that allowed you to dominate all others, keeping that trick secret.

The spirit of those years of my life flows through me while I write this chapter. It’s really a stereotype extraction, since all human interaction is not so altruistic. But Tova reflects some of the difficulty a gifted person has with the neurotypical part of the population. Some neurotypicals view us like a weapons system or a piece of unique industrial hardware for exploitation, while that exploitation is profitable. You can see some of that coming through in the various parties that try to dominate Tova’s life and exploit her, not necessarily for her benefit.

As far as this chapter goes, it’s already 22,000 words and I’m not done. The chapter itself is almost a novella, yet it can’t stand alone out of the context of the novel. I’ve written some other similar chapters, and they have really turbocharged the main novel because when you are done reading the chapter, you really feel, really care about the character, and the events in the main novel are no longer, “oh well.”

In terms of design of the book itself, having a book this long, with numerous illustrations, is going to force some changes to the design. As it exists now, the novel cannot be bound. It is just too thick. Reducing the font size will not be enough. I will likely have to change this to a real, coffee-table book format, which makes sense when you consider a lot of photography books are done in that format. It will be a full experience book. Perhaps something like 10” x 13” with a discovered ancient book feel to it.

I’ve included an excerpt below which gives quite a different feeling from some of my previous writing. This is an early snapshot, so it doesn’t have all the embellishments that truly make it Literary Fiction style. In the excerpt, Tyr is Tova’s father, Tova starts out eight years old and then the timeline jumps to when she is ten years old, Jacob Connelly was a military advisor that became her teacher, and Phil, who was with Tova when she was born then pressganged into being a doctor in the Air Force. The general is the head of the Air Force Office of Space and Extraterrestrial Research. Tova went to Africa to watch a cure for a genetic disease be administered to a tribe, a cure that she and her mom had invented, but she was confronted with a hostile militia. The excerpt starts with Tyr viewing a top-secret video of the confrontation as he was not there. When Tova refers to “she”, Tova is referring to something akin to a second personality, the resurrected spirit of the Sun God, Lifegiver, though others simply think Tova has a split personality. They believe Tova is so smart that her intelligence cannot reconcile with the empathetic ten-year-old girl that she is. There is a cold-blooded aspect to this “alternative personality.”

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The Concept of "Dailies" in Writing

9/22/2021

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One thing that drives the character of all my writing is the combination of the enhanced visual processing of my mind mixed with dyslexia. It is not an uncommon combination, but it does produce a unique set of problems. I think in pictures. I process data pictorially. Writing to me is a very conscious act, akin to writing music. There is a certain “song” to the written word, songs I explore to produce “music” of ever stronger intensity. Like a song, certain words, we call them, Philosophy and Poetry, can leave a lasting impression.

But like a movie, the story first exists as a sequence of pictures or clips. These clips in the movie industry, viewed after each day of shooting are called “dailies.” Dailies give the director (and the actors sometimes) ideas about the direction the movie is headed, how the story initially looks. The script and the looks govern the next round of shooting, trying to reduce waste and make a “good take” happen the first time. Later, editing can assemble these takes into a sequence, then the special effects and postproduction work comes in and hammers it into a stimulating and professionally smoothed experience.

Because I am a visually processing person, my workflow resembles increasingly that of a movie. That produces its own set of problems and advantages. To see the problems, just sit down in front of a movie and try to write down the story you see. On the surface, it will sound rather yucky. There are channels of information in the movie you are not capturing.

Much of the ideas I use either come from Philosophy I have learned, human problems I have studied about in history, or from the movie/television streams I have watched. To get the additional channels of information into the writing, I have found that I almost exclusively must rely on the methods of writing Literary Fiction, combined with illustrations that I have produced. Someone once told me that a book must be a “total experience” not simply a flat read. I have really taken that to heart.
The process of producing the book starts in a similar way to producing the movie: if I am going to produce a pivotal, strong character, I first need all the prosthetics, costume, and makeup in place to try out the character, to find a look that I can reference in my writing. In the case of this Tova chapter, I had to produce an illustration of teen Tova that had all the physical features that were important to her and then give that picture a “presence.” Tova is an unusual mix of endearing person with a subliminal terror that you can’t quite put your finger on. The terror stems from how Tova looks at people. She loves nice people, likes to connect with their mind, but she also connects with their biology. She feels that the very structure of their physical form has generated thoughts that have a certain structural pattern. If she considers changing a person’s mind, she is not just thinking of having a discussion. She is also thinking of changing the person’s body. It’s the sort of thought that makes a person’s meat quiver upon their bones, no matter how much they like Tova.

Once I have the “costumed Tova,” the next step is to lay down the shots or the initial writing of the scene. In Literary Fiction, this writing contains as much of the person’s personality as you can project in the conversation combined with basic body language. This becomes your “daily.” It is useful to push through and get the daily done and then sit back and play back the daily, in my case, read the text aloud with emotion. In the writer’s mind, the writer is perhaps enjoying the banter, mainly because the other channels of information are in the writer’s mind. Those channels will have to be added, but right now, the goal is to see how the remaining scenes will be shot or how in subsequent writing, more of the other channels of information can be laid down. The daily also tells you when you might have to adapt your “shooting” or subsequent writing to get more continuity. At this point, perhaps you can see those secret scenes connecting the scenes you planned to write but implicit in your mind and required for the reader to fully understand and buy into the story. Then you can adjust your “shooting” or writing and see if you are able to get more into the next daily.

After the chapter is done, the next stage in the Literary Fiction writing is the equivalent of special effects. What are the important things that the characters are thinking while they are talking? How do the things the character has experienced in their past tie into each exchange, each verbalized thought?

The final, postproduction stage is putting in the sounds, smells, and sights that are not directly a result of superficial body language or expression. Those seemingly irrelevant things are apart of any live experience, and you want this to be a “live experience” that deeply impacts the reader, leaving an emotional experience that they can’t get rid of. That “deep to the bone” emotional feeling is one of the major features of Literary Fiction.

For the book I am producing, there is a net postproduction that happens for the book. Because I am using a true publishing method to produce the book, not only do I add illustrations, but special internal inks and varnishes combined with backgrounds upon the text to give the book a truly special feel. That treatment requires a significant effort all by itself. The hardware is up to the task, since the hardware I possess could do the special effects for an indie film. The question for me is whether I can drive the hardware to excellence.

I have included a “daily” from the “Who is Tova?” chapter below. In this scene, Tova is eight-years-old, Tyr is her father, and Sashashivalia is her mother.
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    Rusty Biesele

    Owner of the Children of Sophista Publishing and currently the author of books in the Children of Sophista universe.

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