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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Indian tech employee dies in fun team-building event

In one of the idiotic team-building exercises run by Western companies to foster fun and solidarity among their workers, Nokia-Siemens ran a pie-eating contest in their office in Guragon, India, leading to the choking death of a 22-year-old employee.

Such antics, and their unintended consequences, are the subject of the novel I'm just finishing up, Bangalored.

technorati: Bangalore, India, outsourcing

Labels: Bangalore novel project, geeks, India

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Writing report

I spent the day working on my Bangalore novel. By my count this is something like the fourth draft. As most writers know, writing is like playing the accordian: sometimes you're expanding what you have, sometimes you're contracting, or cutting. The idea is to write as much as you need to in order to fully express your theme and let your characters develop, then cut it down to essentials, and then give it more space in case something else new and beautiful pops up, then cut again. Do this until it's as good as you can possibly make it. I failed to make it as good as I possibly could, and gave it to my agent last year and she gave it right back, telling me to try again. This is trying again. It's difficult, though, because another thing that happens in the course of a long project like this is that you gain and lose enthusiasm as time goes on, and that too is a pendulum that swings back and forth. And now is a time when enthusiasm for the story and the characters is somewhat lacking. But you keep on, because writing is not just pure inspiration but also craft. And you learn that lesson over and over again.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Back to writing

I must be back in one of those periods where I have thoughts to spare only for my work. I can report that I'm finally back to actually writing on a new draft of my India novel, Bangalored, as opposed to just making notes for a new draft as I did throughout April and May -- or rather, the weekends of April and May.

I thought that rewriting would involve rewriting from scratch, but so far I've just been reworking the novel's first section, which is set in San Francisco before my protagonist goes to Bangalore. When I get this nailed down, I really will start rewriting the Bangalore section, which is 80% of the book.

Labels: Bangalore novel project

Friday, May 09, 2008

I'll be back again

I'm taking a long weekend to work on my India book, and following my usual pattern, I took a nap about 45 minutes after starting to work, then walked to a nearby cafe. The girl behind the counter couldn't have been more than 24, but she was playing an early Beatles album on the stereo, and I found it impossible to resist quietly chiming in on the harmony line of "I'll Be Back."

"That's a great album, isn't it?" the girl smiled.

"The best," I nodded. But then I couldn't remember what album it was on. ("A Hard Day's Night" is the answer. I was confused because "If I Fell" was playing when I walked into the cafe, followed by "I'll Be Back," and I couldn't figure out what album that might be. She must have had "A Hard Day's Night" on shuffle.) Anyway, it always does my heart good when I see kids in their 20s appreciating the Beatles; I want to give them a certificate of appreciation or something. Then I realize it would be as creepy as one of my parents' friends patting me on the head when I was 8 just because I liked "Sing Sing Sing."

technorati: Beatles, San Francisco cafes,

Labels: Bangalore novel project, San Francisco

Saturday, April 26, 2008

From my notes

Here are the notes I wrote today as I try to figure out how to rewrite my Bangalore novel. There's 150 pages of this stuff, going babck to November 2004 when I started the book.

I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.

On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.

Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.

Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.

I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)

... thinking ...

Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:
His history with Betsy and with Stella
His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic
I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella.

Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.

Q.
What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.
He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.
When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.
No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.
Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.
No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.
What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.
By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.
What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.
When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.
But still, she is resentful.
A.
Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.
How does this affect Doug?
A.
He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.
Don't they ever talk about it?
A.
No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.
So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.
It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.
All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.
On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.
What about his sexual attitudes?
A.
These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.
That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.
Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.

technorati: writing novels, notes, characters

Labels: Bangalore novel project, characterization, novel writing, writing techniques

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Right, that's done

This just in: The NYT raises the possibility that Gawker is over. Me, I stopped reading it sometime in 2005. And I stopped reading Wonkette after the original editor left it. Blogs are not about the subjects they cover or their material. They're about voice. A consistent voice.

I've been spending more time lately filing posts on SF Metroblog, becoming its most consistent poster, though I'm not sure anyone really cares or is reading. I was cheered, however, when a local more famous blogger told me she thought that SF Metroblog did get attention; she was even surprised its writers aren't paid, but that might be because she just got a paid blogging gig. Anyway, I'm posting more there than here, these days, mostly because it's possible to do one or two good posts a day about San Francisco topics but hard to find time to surf around and post the stuff I really like to post about.

However, this is priceless. Some geek wandered the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show -- with a TV B Gone. Now that's anti-entertainment.

In personal news, today I have officially, and for about the fourth time, declared work on my novel How They Scored done, printed it out, and tomorrow I'm mailing it to my publisher. Which means they should be sending my agent a check within a month or so.

Barring any protests from How They Scored's publisher, I'll now go back to work on my India book, which is now titled "Bangalored".

technorati: How They Scored, novel writing, blogging

Labels: Bangalore novel project, blogging, Gawker, How They Scored, novel writing

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Keepin' on

According to my little chart over there on the right, I'm halfway through the first draft of my new novel after 8 weeks (really 8 weekends). My goal is really more like 90K words, not 75K, because it will allow me to cut, so I'm not celebrating yet. But it's good to make constant progress.

One of the little jokes I'm playing on myself is taking a character and situation from my recently completed (yet still to be rewritten one more time) novel about an American girl in India and using them in the new book, which has a completely different focus and setting. One of the minor characters in the India book appears in the new one. This would be a sort of shared joke with readers, except that the India novel has no readers yet.

Speaking of the India novel, it was called Dear Prudence. But my agent -- who has asked for a rewrite with a certain focus -- said the title didn't do anything for her, and she got the reference, too. So the title of that book, which I will rewrite next spring after I finish the current project, shall henceforth be Bangalored.

Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing, Sundays

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Third draft done

I finished the third and, I hope, final draft of my novel Dear Prudence, which I started in November 2004. It's off to my agent with it, and it's on to the next project.

Update: To celebrate finishing the book, I'm doing something a little counter-intuitive -- I'm posting some chapters that I cut from the first part of the book. I think they're kind of funny. If you're a fan of my writing, maybe you'll enjoy them, even out of context.

Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing

Friday, June 29, 2007

Everybody's a critic

I found this little "blog rating" tool on Badger's site. Clearly I have not been doing my job.

What's new? Still plinking at my India novel, preparing to send it to my agent, for whom it will, I hope, be a welcome surprise. I've been mentioning it to her every few months for the last year and she may have permanently put it on the back burner of her expectations, so I hope she'll enjoy getting it.

Then I'm going to start a new project pronto-tonto. The publisher of my books of sex stories asked me earlier this year to submit a proposal for a novel, and I'm just about to sign a contract (one reason my agent has not completely forgotten me). I'll be talking more about this book in the next few months, but the operative thing is that the deadline is the first of the year. Yes, I have to write a whole novel of at least 200 pages in six months.

That shouldn't be too horribly challenging, because genre writers do it all the time. In fact, many writers of romance or crime books, both fiction and non-fiction, polish off three or four books a year. They would not be impressed with the deadline of 200 pages in 6 months. So I'm not going to complain.

Still, it should be interesting. My India novel (I'm still shilly-shallying about the title, but for now it is Dear Prudence), started as a NaNo -- a project for National Novel Writing Month. That's where you're supposed to churn out 50,000 words in the month of November. And I did get a good start -- in November, 2004. I managed to do about 20,000 words that month, but then it took me two years to work out the rest of the book, the first draft of which I finished on 28 December 2006.

I did, however, keep almost all of those first 20,000 words, which makes me think that it's not a bad idea to give people an excuse to start a novel with an artificial deadline, just to see what they turn out. But it really should be called National Novel Starting Month, because only Georges Simenon could write a novel in less than a month.

But the first of the year is now a real, not arbitrary deadline for me. I'll let you know how it goes.

Labels: Bangalore novel project, novel writing

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Clawing my way back

I've been back home for... what... about 36 hours now. I felt pretty good the first day, a little worse yesterday, and today I woke up with a headache. So all reports I'm entirely chipper and am not experiencing jet lag are probably exaggerations.

I sure can't complain about the weather. Yesterday was stunning here -- sunny, cool, just beautiful. The kind of day tourists curse because they thought it would be nice and warm in California, and they go out and buy cheap fleecewear with SAN FRANCISCO printed on it in a bad font.

The trip was excellent for my book. Not only did I answer most of the research questions I needed to investigate, but I was able to do some thinking about several problems, unrelated to setting, which I have been struggling with for most of the project -- things about character, motivation, structure. (You'd think that almost two and a half years into the project I would have figured that stuff out, but I'm unusually dumb about many of the basic conventions of literature. Maybe I should have gotten a lit degree instead of a film criticism degree.) Now what I need to do is continue the momentum. I'm going to work all day Saturday, assuming I'm coherent by then.

Thanks to all friends and readers who followed my posts, commented, linked, and generally supported me.

Labels: Bangalore novel project

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Only 25 months later

Hurrah for me, for I have finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on for the last two years, "Dear Prudence." It's about an American girl who is sent by her employer to open up a customer service call center in Bangalore. Comic cultural collisions ensue, and she learns a lot about independence and being her own person.

Read an excerpt (8 page PDF file).

The book was begun in November 2004 for National Novel Writing Month.

I'll spend the next couple of weeks making little adjustments, then send it to my agent, who to her credit has not been holding her breath.

Labels: Bangalore novel project

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