10 February 2013

Spy in the Sky


by Leigh Lundin

Dones part 2: Spy in the Sky

Last week's article sparked debate both on-line and off. I hadn't planned a followup article, but from our friend Vicki comes another Hightower newsletter that addresses questions that have arisen. A couple of days later, the President announced he'd make available the legal justification for drones, presumably military UAVs. Now, a handful of officials in Washington, both liberal and conservative, are asking questions. How far can spying go?

unmanned Predator drone
Limitless, if we do nothing. Suppose your friend (because you wouldn't do such a thing), thinking her property is sacrosanct keeps a few marijuana plants in her back garden, away from prying eyes. What happens when her property's seized now that police eyes in the sky? Is this a warrantless search?

Sty in the Eye

What if a police drones sporting IR/UV capability peeked in your neighbor's house and discovered five people instead of three thought to be living there? It could mean Constitutionally protected free assembly, but it might also imply illegal aliens, a terrorist cell, or… visiting cousins from Michigan or a private prayer meeting.

Of course an armed UAV with penetrating audio capability might sort that out. Whether illegal pot grower, terrorist, teenage boyfriend, secret Christian prayer group, or someone wanting to get away from the spy machine– a drone can take them out with a variety of weapons from tear gas and tasters to live ammunition.
all-seeing eye
US Government seal

Posse Comitatus

Our military is not supposed to operate on US soil, but again, these fine points of the law have been swept under the carpet. Not counting a myriad of police agencies rushing to embrace these new gadgets, our own military has built 64 drone bases throughout our nation and the Pentagon plans to add 33% more in the next few months. Military bases, with drones, watching you.

And beware: Insect-sized nano-robots are presently flying in nano-technology laboratories. Leave a door or window open in the not-too-distant future, and they could be inside your house or your office. Singly, current weaponized capabilities are barely there, but en masse, the potential could be powerful like a swarm of bees. Recalling some of the sophisticated Soviet assassination techniques, might we some day encounter a nanobot that stings or drops a radioactive pellet in a cup of tea or glass of beer? (13:00 paragraph update to the original article)

We are supposed to have government oversight. The House Unmanned Systems Caucus, led by funded supporters of drone manufactures, doesn't view their rôle as defending individual rights. Instead, they promote "the overwhelming value of these systems." They clearly state their intent to "rapidly develop and deploy" more UAVs.
eyes
© FreeWorldAlliance

Drone of Another Sort

In other words, your congressmen have become a Chamber of Commerce for manufacturers who want to spy on you. Lobbyists forced through a law written by the industry instructing a reluctant FAA to speedily approve new drones– brainless machines sharing the same airspace as our passenger airliners. Experts calculate drones will outnumber airplanes almost five to one. If a seagull can bring down a passenger plane, what can an electronics-packed drone do?

On and On


When the misnamed US PATRIOT Acts I and II were implemented with barely a whimper within Congress, a colleague flummoxed me when he said he was happy to trade civil liberties for better security. It reminded of a line in the film Little Murders where barbed wire was going up around apartment buildings and a character approved. "We're talking about freedom," he cries.

Yes, we are, but I'm not sure our definitions are the same. I welcome other opinions.

09 February 2013

Chipping Away the Stone


by Elizabeth Zelvin

Everybody knows that Michelangelo, widely accepted as the greatest sculptor ever, explained how he created his magnificent marble statues, including the David and the Pietà, by chipping away the stone until only the form imprisoned within remained. Writers, at least those who know that every first draft needs some revision, go through a similar process.
Instead of quarrying the raw material, they create it by putting words together in a form determined by the mysterious process we call creativity. In fact, what writers initially do with words is much like what sculptors in clay do: building up one small bit at a time until a rough form is achieved.

After that, how sculptors revise a clay figure is a combination of of building, removing, and smoothing. We could say that writers do that too. But recently, after many years of writing, I think I’ve reached a new level of ability to critique my own work, and it feels more like chipping away the stone to reveal the story pared down to its essence, containing not one wasted word. At least, that’s the goal. Not being Michelangelo, I never achieve perfection. But the process feels much the same.

When I first joined Sisters in Crime’s Guppies chapter with the first draft of my first novel burning a hole in my computer, among the first pieces of advice I heard were these:
  • Don’t query agents or editors with a first draft.
  • Join a critique group.
  • Kill your darlings.
If I had followed all these dicta immediately, I might have sold my first mystery a lot sooner than I did. Or maybe it was meant to take the time it took to learn by my mistakes. I was so excited about my manuscript that I couldn’t wait to send it out, so I experienced many rejections—and got many good suggestions—before it got published in a form far different from that original first draft. I did join a critique group. I understood what “kill your darlings” meant. But for a long time, I couldn’t do it. Every clever phrase and carefully chosen word was so precious to me. How could I take any of them out, even in the interest of a tighter story? And not only my attachment to them, but also the fear that my creative well might run dry at any moment, prevented me from revising as ruthlessly as the material needed.

I know exactly when the shift took place: in 2006, during a three-week writers’ residency with Edgar-winning author SJ Rozan, who builds rather than chips (she used to be an architect) but doesn’t waste a single word. (I’ve said before that her prose is built like a brick you-know-what. Read her novels, and you’ll see.) Some time during the second week, she said, “Liz, you need to give us less, not more. Two clever lines in a paragraph are enough—three or four are too many.” I went back to my room and took another look at the manuscript I was working on. What I needed to cut leaped off the page before my eyes. I could suddenly see the difference between the shape of the story and the bits of literary marble I could chip away.

Writing short stories has accelerated my ability to chip. As a rule, the first draft is the story I need to tell, which I write without thinking about how long it’s going to be or leaving out anything that needs putting in, whether it’s plot, characterization, dialogue, or setting. Sometimes they need a lot of revision, sometimes not so much. And depending on my motivation for writing the story, eg for submission to a particular market, I may need to abbreviate a particular story. Seldom do I have to extend it. The most recent story I’ve written was on the way to becoming a first draft of 2,800 words when I realized I needed between 3,500 and 7,000 words to submit to the anthology I meant it for. But rather than continuing on and then padding, I thought through a structural improvement—three encounters between the protagonist and the antagonist instead of just one, building tension with each one—that made the story organically longer.

So just as I’m an into-the-mist writer (I hate the term “pantser”) rather than an outliner, I’m a chipper rather than a padder. I’m particularly proud of a recently published work that started life as a substandard 70,000-word novel and ended up as a tight, funny 20,000-word novella from which a lot of the adverbs and, I hope, all the preachiness had been purged. If I say so myself, that’s some chippin’!

08 February 2013

The Reins of Narration


Perhaps you’re like me, and you sometimes find yourself wrestling with a story or novel that has developed an explosive side-tension which threatens to derail your plotline. Sometimes, this is a good thing. On other occasions, however, you may want to continue to explore the plotline you’ve already established, but can’t quite figure out how to quell the raging tension you’ve stirred up in the wrong location. If you’re like me in this way, and you’ll bear with me through what may at first appear to be a bit of meandering, I believe you’ll appreciate and enjoy learning about a discovery I recently made, which may help to address this specific type of problem.

When I think of “Narration” my mind usually leaps to two recollections before all others.

The first thing I tend to recall is the voice of John Huston when he narrated the 1982 film Cannery Row, based on John Steinbeck’s books Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. I wasn’t a Steinbeck lover back then. I’d read some of his stuff, but couldn’t seem to gain any traction. John Huston’s film narration changed all that.

Suddenly, within the deep timber of Huston’s voice, I heard what I’d been missing -- that little “twisted-lemon rind” of humor that tinges so much of Steinbeck’s work. It renders his prose in a tart life-giving flavor, the way a bit of rind or an olive enlivens certain cocktails. Thanks to John Huston, I learned to love Steinbeck, and -- odd as this may seem -- through this experience, I also came to love Hemingway.

And, for some reason, recalling John Huston’s narration always conjures memories of The Hobbit in my mind. The Hobbit is a novel written in a format that clearly mirrors the inflections of an ancient oral tradition. Read aloud, it sounds like the sort of story that’s been verbally passed from one generation to another, verbatim, so that a storyteller many generations down the line recites the words as if s/he were present and personally saw the events described as they happened.

Yes, the voice of the narrator can have a great impact on a story: setting the tone, establishing a cadence, pulling a reader in deep, or serving to hold the reader at arms length if needed.

I knew the power that a narrator can have. I believed I understood that power. As, I suspect, we all do.

However, prior to two days ago, I’d never realized how the age of a narrating character might permit a fiction author to rein-in extremely powerful – or even potentially overpowering -- aspects of a storyline.

The Lone Rider

As I’ve noted before, here, many mysteries -- both stand alone and series -- contain an element we might call the “Lone Rider”: a person (usually male) who roams the countryside seeking solace for a yearning heart.

The Lone Rider is a searcher. His past has left him emotionally scarred, or perhaps with a psychological void that he longs to fill. He’s like an anthropomorphized puzzle-piece doomed to wander about the table, looking for the spot in the puzzle where he fits -- the piece he’s designed to click into. The forever-missing piece, which could fill that hole gaping in his side.

When well-handled, the Lone Rider plotline introduces an instant sense of mystery (Who is this person and where did he come from?), a tingle of danger (Is s/he bad or good?), and an inverse sense of the “Call of the Wild” (inverse, because the protagonist is usually led by a call from his Wild or lonely existence, into Civilization and connection with fellow wo/men). In the very best case, the story achieves a transference of this “yearning feeling” from the protagonist’s heart into the reader’s.

In the series format, we usually follow the Lone Rider. Every time he spots somewhere he might fit, he stops and tries to click-in-place, but something prevents him from achieving success. These attempted fittings, and the obstacles overcome during the resulting course of events, comprise the episodes of the series. They make mighty fine reading, at times, and -- when handled well -- can result in major authorial success, such as the Reacher series.

In the stand-alone version, the reader usually meets the missing puzzle-piece element (the “set piece”) first, then the Lone Rider appears and the plot kicks-in in earnest. Because the reader often encounters the people and place where the Lone Rider is going to try to fit in, before encountering the rider himself, additional tension can be garnered -- such as sexual tension, when the reader wonders if the rider will become romantically entangled with a certain set-piece character. Overall tension may be greatly increased, as the reader tries to forecast the incoming rider’s impact on the carefully balanced little “ecosystem” already established.

I’ve read quite a few Lone Rider-type books and stories, both stand-alone and series versions, because I tend to enjoy them. But, I’d have to say that few could match, and none exceed, the one I read earlier this week: Jack Schaefer’s Shane, first published in 1949.

Shane

This is the Lone Rider’s name.

He arrives in a Wyoming valley in the summer of 1889, a valley in which farmers have staked-out and homesteaded on land claims where a large rancher used to run his cattle. The rancher has obtained a contract that will require the use of the land now occupied by the homesteaders, who don’t want to move.

This much of the plot was probably well-worn, or even worn out, by the time the novel was written.

Schaefer introduces an element, however, that charges the novel with a power surge on the quantum level. That is to say, it infuses the novel with a force that is not immediately apparent to the eye, but is none-the-less all-pervasive and even subtly dictatorial in nature.

Early on, when Shane reins-in at the Starrett homestead, to wash the trail dust of a long ride off his skin, he’s invited to stay for supper by Joe Starrett and his wife, Marian. But, the story is told neither through the voice of Joe Starrett, nor Marian -- nor even through the voice of their young son, Bob Starrett.

Instead, the narrator’s voice is that of Bob Starrett -- after he’s grown, and (one gets the idea) is perhaps now an old man -- telling us how he saw things transpire when he was a young boy. That’s important. The narrator is not a young boy, incapable of understanding why certain elements he doesn’t understand need to be brought to light, which can lead to confusion on a reader’s part. Nor is he just an adult, fully versed in the nuances of sexual desire, human greed or lust.

The genius of Schaefer’s narration, is that the old man tells us the story as he saw it, through the eyes of a young boy. This permits him to sometimes let the reader know that he, as a boy, knew there were undercurrents going on that he didn’t understand, but it relieves Schaefer of having to explain those undercurrents -- without ignoring them.

What do I mean?

Well, for one thing, this odd narrative juxtaposition results in one of the most fascinating literary experiences I’ve ever encountered: when love blossoms between two heterosexual men as they work in concert to pull a large tree stump.

Described directly, like this, it sounds ridiculous perhaps, certainly somewhat melodramatic. Yet, the scene, as written, is vital, virile, beautiful – full of sound and fury, and signifying EVERYTHING. The two men grow to love each other in the bond of friendship, as Shane comes to a personal understanding that farm work can actually provide the sort of challenge he knows that he needs in life, if he’s to enjoy living.

The scene lasts for thirteen pages. In the beginning, Shane works alone, feverishly chopping at the stump’s roots with an axe. But, soon, Joe Starrett works with him, chopping at the roots on the other side of the stump. Neither of them speaks. They just keep working like fury, sweat pouring out, axes ringing against ironwood, stopping only to sharpen their blades or to eat.

During all this, the boy, Bob, watches for awhile, then tries to go play, because – on the surface, at least – watching two men spend hours pulling a stump is tedious and boring. So, Bob wanders off. He tries pitching stones across a nearby stream, he tries to do other things. But, the hidden undercurrent of what’s taking place at the stump keeps drawing him back, magnet-like. He can’t stay away, but as a boy he can’t understand why he’s so fascinated by what’s transpiring.

The adult, narrating what he saw as a boy, however, can deftly tell us: “I simply could not grasp how they could stick at it hour after hour. It made no sense to me, why they should work so when routing out that old stump was not really so important.” And, he can describe finding his mother spying on the two men through a barn window, displaying behavior that clearly indicates she has become excited by watching them -- very probably sexually excited. And, when he describes helping his mother in the kitchen as “the steady rhythm of double blows” carries clearly to where mother and son sit, we realize her libido is very definitely aroused by the mysterious and exciting stranger who only recently appeared at their doorstep.

The boy understands none of this. The adult he has grown into, however, understands it all. And, telling the story through the eyes and ears he had as a young boy, he can render the story in a manner that makes it very clear to the reader that Mrs. Starrett is smitten with Shane, and later becomes torn between her passion for the mysterious and exciting stranger, and her love for her steadfast husband and young son -- all the while using the boy’s perception to keep a firm lid on the burgeoning psycho-sexual tension, as well as the fear and jealousy of potential cuckoldry.

And, the reader understands, as the boy does not, that it’s the love between the two men, which holds Shane in check. Shane’s philia (as the Greeks might put it) for Joe Starrett is what keeps the love triangle from possibly morphing into another dimension -- a dimension with the potential to destroy everyone involved.

All of this creates a tension so great, it could hijack the plotline, if the narrator weren’t relating the story as he experienced it when he was a young boy.

And, this is what I learned by reading Shane. Which, by the way, is a darn good story!

See you in two weeks!

--Dixon

07 February 2013

Why Can’t I Listen To Audio Books?


Back in the days of cassette tapes, I experimented with the idea that listening to audio books would help me get through my growing to-be-read list. To get started, I bought the novel  A Dark-Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara, with Sophie Ward doing the reading. The total listening time of the two cassettes was three hours. I wish I could tell you how much I enjoyed the novel, but I don’t remember whether I enjoyed it or not. I don’t even remember what it was about.
The problem was as I sat in my easy chair listening to the book, I couldn’t keep my mind on what the reader was saying because I kept nodding off. I think, but I’m not sure, that I finally fell asleep. No, it wasn’t the voice of the reader. Later that same year, I bought a CD about ancient cultures and, as with the novel, I don’t remember finishing it because I believe I fell asleep again.
I can listen to old radio programs like “The Shadow,” “The Green Hornet” or “Inner Sanctum” without dozing off because I hear the different voices of the different characters. Listening to the single voice reading a book on a cassette or CD, however, seems to put me to sleep no matter how good the reader is.
No matter how much I think about it, I can’t solve the puzzle of why I can’t listen to audio books. So, I’ve decided not to try to listen to War and Peace on an audio book. 
Any method that encourages people to read should not be dismissed. Audio books are not only good for readers with poor eye sight but also for readers who, provided they can stay awake, want to reduce that pile of to-be-read books or reread the classics.

06 February 2013

Invitation to a dinner party


by Robert Lopresti

Gyles Brandreth is an Englishman who writes mystery novels featuring real-life Victorians.  He recently pointed out this interesting group. Ponder if you will:

J.M. Barrie
Arthur Conan Doyle
E.W. Hornung
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Oscar Wilde

What do these six men have in common, besides being famous British authors? 

They made up the roster at a single dinner party.  That's right, the creators of Dracula, Dorian Gray, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jeckyl, Peter Pan, and A.J. Raffles once sat down for a festive meal together.

The only one of these who may not be instantly familiar is Raffles, the creation of Doyle's brother-in-law Hornung.  Raffles was a "gentleman thief," an early example of a rogue hero, and deliberately intended as a sort of anti-Holmes.








Imagine for one horrible second how literature would have changed if, say, a boiler had blown up the restaurant that night.  My word, for one thing, cyberpunk might have died before being born.









And don't you wish we had a recording of what these six gentlemen discussed that night?  And would anyone bet against me if I guessed it was taxes and the weather?







For more thoughts on that very subject, read the Mary Killen column in which Brandreth brought up the dinner party.  Bon appetit!