I’ve gone on a rampage lately, destroying the biggest remnants of reality from Coincidence so as to lessen any potential damaging passages from the people involved therein.  When I started writing the novel, I kept the names or nicknames of the people involved, thinking that either a) no one would read it and/or b) who cares?  I’m not painting them as monsters.  These are the actual stories of actual people.  If they can’t handle their own pasts, well, screw ‘em.  That’s the life of a sineater though.  The community’s not supposed to remember what it’s blocked out or rejected from its own narrative.

But recently I realized that we live in the age of Twitter and possible employers looking up our names, etc., so I’ve been trying to eliminate the obvious ties to people I know.  In the end, I can’t make completely unique names unless I change the entire story’s setting to Episyncia, the tenth planet from the Morck, where the prophasia flows like blomix and the children weep at the loss of their vladexes.  Is there a Michael Mizdail in Levittown?  Maybe.  Is it my responsibility to change the names until it’s something that’ll never be found in the Lower Bucks County region?  Well, I certainly hope not.

I guess this is why people write of fictional towns and such.  That certain has its upsides.  But for this story, I wanted reality.  This is suburbia, at least the version I grew up with.  Could it be placed in a fictional town?  Of course, but Levittown has a particular connotation with it.  A friend from Stroudsburg once called me after her day of classes at high school was over, saying, “We learned about your town in history today.  What the hell is wrong with that place?”  I still don’t know, sug.  I just know I miss it terribly.

The fun part of this whole switcheroo, though, is the research.  It’s another one of those levels that I’m not sure anyone would ever notice but me.  Does it enrich the novel commercially?  Probably not.  Does it amuse me that a main character’s first initial and last name make up the term for a Filipino demon?  Definitely.  She’s not the first to get a name from folklore / exocultural terms for evil. 

It’s like a numbers station.  One person, who definitely knows the translation, is sending out the message, hoping at least one other person out there knows what he or she is talking about.  The signal’s loud and clear to those with the background necessary to find it amusing.  Otherwise, it’s simple background noise that can be tuned out.

“Survival is the only way, my dear” – Lunic’s “Self-Destruct”

I went to B&N for the first time in months today so that the future-wife could find a daily planner for 2012.  And while she perused every clearance rack, I moseyed through the aisles seeing what was considered “popular” by the good ol’ brick and mortar.  Did I see any of my favorite bloggers, podcasters, or writers I’ve edited for?  Of course not.  Plenty of James Patterson though.  Good god…the amount of Patterson.

And as the misses was taking her third trip around the store, clutching two planners in her hands to see which she’d be able to handle for the next 362 days, I noticed the terrible truth:  There was an entire row of Teen Paranormal Romance.  Really, people?  Really?

As someone who has always enjoyed reading, I’ve never understood the “Well, it gets them to read” explanation.  A line has to be drawn somewhere.  Maybe blame lies in the fault of the educators.  Thankfully, the love of novels was already ingrained in me by the time we spent two months analyzing, line by line, the symbolism of “The Scarlet Letter.”  Did it push me to look for the underlying themes and imagery in novels?  A little.  Did it make me want to read any more Hawthorne?  Hell no.  And how many in my class (who weren’t already book lovers) were pushed farther from the art form? 

The good news is that this is a trend.  The teenage paranormal romance novel will eventually be replaced by steampunk zombies, graphic novels inspired by Chick tracts, or whatever else the print industry deems the next metaphorically phallic object it can cram down YA readers’ throats.  The bad news is that these are the same people most writers are trying to pander to.  It’s easy, relatively speaking, to write genre fiction and be beloved by that genre’s readers, but most authors are trying to (and need to, if they want any money) tap into the popular fiction territory.

Maybe, if the current trend is inspired by “Mormon anti-abortion sexuality,” the next big hit will be the Amish.  “He had an automobile.  She never went to high school.  Theirs was a love beyond social or religion confines.  Also, he was a mummy.  When Mennonite meets Amish, only one choice remains: The Wrap Shun, available at bookstores this Spring.”

“She’s my favorite piece of plastic held to my ear” – Filter’s “It’s Gonna Kill Me”

I sent out an email to my beta readers last night.  To me, it came across as a friendly reminder that Coincidence is still there, waiting to be read and critiqued.  Hopefully the fact that I’m an impatient, paranoid sufferer of the “imposter complex” didn’t come through too much.

Two of the three writers acting as beta readers got back to me in the morning, and one (the gentleman I expected to be my harshest critic) gave me a nice dose of early morning praise.  However, he said that if he had to critique one thing, he’d have to comment on his uncertainty as to what is “real” in the story.  I found this disconcerting as the entire story is supposed to be extremely limited third person, without any dream sequences, feelings, etc.  The example he cited was rather crucial to the narrative, so I revisited the scene as soon as I got home.

I wound up adding a couple choice words and a couple sparse lines of dialogue to clear up the confusion without shoving it down the reader’s throat that “Hey, this character is misinformed!  Believe the descriptions, not her one line of shouted dialogue!”  In the process, I found the words coming out for the scene (found in the first tenth of the novel) tied surprisingly well with the exact middle of the novel (where the antagonist shows he has an ethical code, albeit severely shallow and distorted) and the very end (where the antagonist shows he had a reason for doing some of his most vile acts in the last half of the book).

Does it radically change the story?  No.  Does it give a particular scene a little more…oomph? something special? depth?  Well, I certainly hope so.

“How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore” – Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”

I sent Coincidence to 4 individuals who volunteered to be beta readers. 3 are writers, two primarily fiction and one mainly poetry. If I recall the original email correctly, I said I simply ask if they like it, with the caveat that if they could not finish it, they tell me (for instance, if it was so terrible they had to put it down). Any editing or suggestions beyond that would be their decision.

From my understanding, it takes some trial and error to figure out exactly what you expect from a beta reader. But the way I looked at it, I see beta readers as I would a professional editor (despite not using one for this project). I’ve edited a few documents, including 3 novels for 2 authors, and I know how I like to receive a novel: complete. The one author gave me a Word doc filled with 20+ beta readers’ tracked changes and a print copy with another reader’s illegible notes.

Now, the strangest part about this was that none of these notes or changes were actually made. Maybe it’s me, but I expect the editor to “master” (in audio terms) the “track.” Maybe some commas need to be removed or some details need to be expanded or rearranged. An entire character should not be told to be removed. This is poor writing. If the author is all right with the character and the character passed the beta readers, then he or she is probably ready for an editor.

By the time it reaches the beta readers, the story should be complete in the writer’s eyes. You wouldn’t hand an editor your scribblers on a bar napkin, so why give your beta readers anything less than a full tale? The expectation, to me, is to ensure the less obvious parts of the story get across. As Mur Lafferty likes to point out, you couldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) fight with a reader over whether a theme gets across.

The point is that no matter how well-trained you are with the English language and/or human psychology, you just can’t know whether your subtle choices will get across to the reader unless you test them on a set of selected lab rats first. How else would we ever find out whether the final chapter germinates within the reader’s mind?

I received a Kindle Fire from the future wife for Christmas, and the geek in me just loves it. I’m not usually an early adopter, not to mention this is far beyond our holiday spending limit, but…meh. However, due to the price, I’ve been trying to find (free) apps to justify the expense. I found Inkpad and…well, Angry Birds. As far as writing apps are concerned, there aren’t many options, even in the less-than-free options. Inkpad should cover me nicely should inspiration strike randomly.

What I’m looking forward to, though, is reading. There are a number of classics available in an epub format that I just couldn’t force myself to purchase in print. I already picked up a copy of Machievelli’s “The Prince,” for instance.

I foresee this as being a good social networking tool as well. Normally, I just can’t get into sitting at the computer and doing the “face time” thing. After 8 hours staring at a monitor followed by however many working on my projects, I just find it difficult to banter with someone on, say, Twitter.

We’ll see how things go, and I hope more apps become available. Suggestions are welcome, as are any anecdotes of how to make this a productive purchase.

Update: Posting through the Tumblr website is nearly impossible, but there’s a great app for that. The app has a number of poor reviews, but that seems to be because it has issues liking/reposting posts. As I don’t do either, I’m not concerned.