I noticed tonight that the packets of instant Taster's Choice coffee in MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, the de facto comestible of choice for soldiers in the field) have microwave instructions printed on the back.

I would've liked to be a fly on the wall in the meeting between the CFO and the guy who had to justify that particular waste of ink.

In other news, my laptop now has a functioning Slackware Linux partition. Woohoo! Next step: hacking the kernel to include apms support.

Why can't I fall asleep?

I actually went to the trouble of finding an icon related to the novel, so I think I'll talk about it.

Things progress; if not exactly apace, well, at least they progress. Chapter 2 is 10 pages and getting longer, at about a third of the way done. I kind of expected this, though. It chunks, but I'm having trouble feeling the scene breaks, and that's slowing me down.

What's interesting is that I find myself refining the outline as I go -- not changing it per se, in that everything still goes in the direction in which it was originally intended, but beefing it up, rooting the supernatural stuff more thoroughly (and in a novel where your narrator is dead from word one, this is a Good Idea; I find that I am taking a way different tack from Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones, and of this I am glad, for they are way different books) and, much more importantly, expanding the main characters' lives and foregrounding the world they live in much, much more clearly.

It's funny, too, because I know the world they live in -- erm, inhabit -- pretty well. I mean, I lived there for 24 years. But while Houston informs the story, it isn't a story about Houston, not the way that Space City is. The world I'm getting into is the world inside the characters themselves, an exanimate artist junkie and a couple of vulgarly-nicknamed yuppies and a secretive girl with a dead-end job and a double life and a cancer patient and a frightened drug dealer and a dead wallflower who can't bring herself to rest. With every secret I tease out, the details shift a little: new things become important, old details become unworkable or less necessary and fade into the background or are replaced.

Short stories do this too, but it still feels weird to watch where the dominoes are going to fall if I line them up this way instead of that way. Which is part of why I'm writing this novel and not another one; it's small enough that I can see where they're going to fall. I think once I get used to this perspective, I can tackle something larger, and then something larger. It may never get comfortable, but at least it'll get feasible.

And, hee, this one actually works kinda well with the tombstone game: Meredith L. Patterson's Disintegration.

In a discussion with little_teacup, I remarked:

OTOH, there are a lot of writers on the mailing lists I'm on who complain that if they know what's going to happen, it ruins the surprise for them and they're not interested any more."

You don't really even have to know me that well to have an idea what I think of that notion.

I mean, imagine if you went to the movies and paid $7 for some guy to stand there and tell you:

"See, there's this guy named Rick, and he owns this bar, and it's in Morocco, and this is in the middle of World War 2. There's Nazis all over the city and everyone wants to leave, but nobody can get visas. This weaselly black market guy manages to get a couple of passports, which he wants to sell for a pile of money, and there's this Czechoslovakian refugee named Victor and his wife Ilsa who are willing to pay anything for them. It turns out that Rick and Ilsa were lovers a long time ago, when Ilsa thought Victor had been killed, and the sparks are still there. In the end, although Rick and Ilsa still love each other, he sends Ilsa and Victor away with the exit visas, and Rick plans to escape deeper into Africa."

Sure, it contains the high points of the story, but in no way can a quick summary ever manage to capture the brilliance that is Casablanca. Sure, movies have more in the way of production values than fiction does -- when was the last time you read a novel with its own soundtrack? -- but there's still a lot more to a story than just the what of the telling.

How a story is told is crucial. I've probably read three dozen different tellings of "Cinderella" or "Beauty and the Beast" in my life, and I'm only counting the traditional Western versions (not refigurings or cultural analogues). Some are great. Some suck. It's not just the what of the telling, it's the how of the telling that makes the story great, okay or lousy.

The assumptions these writers are making are the same kind of assumptions made by the assholes who, on learning that you're a writer, exclaim "Hey, I've got this great idea for a novel! How about you write it and we split the profits?" (Funny how the same people don't go up to architects and say "Hey, I've got this great idea for a house! How about you design and build it, and we split the profits?")

This shit is hard, and the hard part isn't the ideas; the hard part is transforming the ideas from raw idea-stuff into the kind of prose that people want to come back and read again and again. Admittedly, the fewer people who realise that, the less competition there'll be for me. But Christ, I wish the people who don't know any better would shut the fuck up about it. I know they don't shut up precisely because they don't know any better.

But I'm really starting to dread the Semiannual Discussion of Outlining for precisely this reason.